coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 dedicated to: pam’s children: cass, dance, keera and tamlin. and grandchildren: vashti, amalia, sienna, ziggy, tempest, samanya, hero, cassius and mia acknowledgements this special edition of coolabah could not have come together without the assistance of the following people. many thanks to keera dahl-helm for her patience and careful attention to the details of her mother’s life and for helping us get the facts right about the mother she loves so much. also to james (butch) singleton hooper, pam’s partner, for his ongoing support and for providing essential background stories, images and writings. many thanks to the contributors: professor diana wood conroy for her support and assistance in the early stages of the project as well as her writing; trevor avery for bringing to light the importance of pam’s work in a global sense; pauline mitchell for bringing us together as family and for her continuing support of pam and her work; c.moore hardy for articulating the importance of a woman’s life in pam’s work and adding a strong feminist perspective plus continuing support to honouring pam; cate mccarthy, for her ongoing friendship and support in getting this special edition for pam together plus the many invaluable talks we have had by phone on email and for being a perfect host at fat wombat farm as well as providing much of the background information and images from pam’s archives. to doctor sue ballyn of the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona, for suggesting we could publish a special edition for pam in the first place and to doctor maarten renes for special insights and assistance as executive editor on the project. to fellow artists, colleagues and friends of pam, josie kim and amalina wallace for providing much needed missing pieces. to artist and educator elizabeth day for her invaluable perspectives on the importance of art in prisons. to the school of arts and social sciences southern cross university for their ongoing support of my eclectic research. thank you to the numerous others i have spoken to who have helped honour the life and times of this remarkable woman. janie conway-herron guest editor of this issue microsoft word article doireann macdermott coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 bruce bennett doireann macdermott “like wine, australian studies overseas can be said to have travelled well only if they are imbibed with pleasure by their hosts” so said bruce when he and i travelled with a small group of european and australian academics to hungary in the spring of 1992. what better ambassador could australia have than this quietly elegant, modest and courteous man who travelled so widely in the far corners of the world to extend australian studies? a great wanderer who was at the same time profoundly rooted in his own native western australia. a first meeting in perth in 1980 and a last meeting in barcelona in 2007. a wonderful day spent alone with him and trish at their weekend hide-out in york, w.a. in between many others in different countries always imbibed with pleasure and admiration. his many friends in many places will never forget him. to have known him was a privilege. trish and bruce bennet with doireann macdermott at york w.a. 1992 copyright © doireann macdermott 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 trish and bruce bennett with richard nile barcelona 2007. imbibing in the barceloneta bruce bennett with doireann macdermott, richard nile and peter kuch barcelona 2007 microsoft word introduction coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction sue ballyn it has been a sad pleasure to put together this volume in memory of a dear friend and colleague to many across the world; bruce bennett, who died on 14 april 2012 after several years of fighting cancer. it seemed only fitting that a volume dedicated to him should appear in a european journal given his constant support for australian studies in europe. bruce, however, with his encyclopaedic knowledge was open to all areas of study and thus helped and took great interest in scholars working in other fields of postcolonial studies, such was his nature. as guest editor of this edition of coolabah, run from the australian studies centre at barcelona university, i have decided to divide the contributions into three sections; memoirs with bruce as protagonist or mentioned, articles written specifically for bruce and creative writing in his honour. i am most grateful to all the contributors for making my task as editor easy given their close adherence to guidelines and deadlines. to all of you i want to express my thanks for your work and for helping to make this volume a memorable one which, i think, bruce would have enjoyed. it is a sign of our joint appreciation of bruce bennett: loyal friend, generous colleague and great scholar. barcelona, november 2012 copyright © sue ballyn 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 dr pam johnston my big ‘blister’ sister pauline mitchell and family copyright© pauline mitchell 2014. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. red shoes. retrieved from pam dahl-helm johnston’s facebook page pam came into our lives back in the mid 1980’s. she came with two beautiful children, dance and keera. over the years pammy was a rock to everyone. if you had a problem then ring big sis, aye, as she knew how to listen and help so many people. pam devoted so much time to our mum, the late great doctor ruby langford ginibi. she would chuck mum in the car and say, ‘come on we’re going away for a bit to get out of the city’. pam also put together a beautiful photo display of mum’s last living relatives at casino and box ridge mission, coraki, which was proudly exhibited by the two of them at the historical society in lismore many years ago. one of the best times we all had together was mum’s birthday in 1990 when pam picked her up and drove out to my sister aileen`s house in bidwell, mount druitt, for the party we put on. all the families were there having a great time. i made mum a big fat chocolate cake too. it was a stinking hot day and aileen didn’t have any air con. at the party mum started tearing up, as she always did, over our deceased siblings pearly, billy and david. that was it. when someone threw water over mum it was on for young and old, aye. i remember pam running everywhere to hide but we all ganged up on her and dragged her into the tub and soaked her big time. we all got cooled off that’s for sure and i can still hear the laughter today. we called pam ‘miss prissy’ because she always looked amazing. even walking to the shop to get a bottle of milk was a red shoes and red lipstick moment. i’m crying writing this but i want the world to know how much we love and miss her still. love always, pauline mitchell and all of our families. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 biographical note. pauline mitchell is a proud aboriginal woman from bundjalung country north coast of new south wales, australia. after having her first daughter roberta when she was fifteen she handed her baby to her mum doctor ruby langford ginibi so she could work to make a living. she had second daughter, kylie, who was born twenty-two months later and her third and last daughter, tenneil, who was born five years on. pauline has worked as a caterer for the royal easter show, football events and cricket. she began to work for aboriginal home care looking after elders where she was poached in 1989 and became an aboriginal education assistant supporting and looking after the aboriginal students and the wider aboriginal community. pauline began to attend guest speaker conferences with her mum which empowered her to move to the forefront in education where she became the regional aboriginal community liaison officer for metropolitan west region. pauline spent eleven years in education before moving to the gold coast where she became a cook in retirement villages. pauline is currently working back in education as a community liaison officer. pamela dahl-helm johnston, 2009 retrieved from pam dahl-helm johnston’s facebook page coolabah revision per proposal 181215 final mr 2 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 editorial note cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu catalina ribas segura cesag, mallorca catymallorca@yahoo.com the following monographic study evolved from a paper given at the watershed cultural studies congress held at the university of barcelona, spain, 13-17 january in 2014. there, in a panel on the changing character of higher education, david hoffman addressed the issue of abandonment amongst immigrant scholars attempting to get a foothold in finnish academia. while finland is, in theory, a top performer in the education sector and the envy of many a country for its high standard of welfare, democracy, freedom and equality, hoffman argued that immigrant mobility within finnish academia actually pointed into an opposing direction, refuting the reputation of equal opportunity that the country had forged for itself over a long period of time. hoffman’s team’s research laid bare an emergent hierarchisation and stratification in finnish academia identifiable as ‘methodological nationalism’, which responds to the transnational character of capitalism and aims to contain the forces of globalisation within finnish academia inasmuch that access to, and mobility of immigrant scholars within the tertiary educational system are complicated precisely on the assumption that there is no competitive difference between national and foreign candidates for posts. in other words, there is a wishful thinking that in its assumption of equality and equity in fact obscures the very inequality that and informs permeates the career opportunities generated by the system. hoffman, of north-american origins, forms part of the finnish institute for educational research (fier) as a senior researcher and works together with a group of immigrant scholars in the research group education and social change, whose members had all signed the text that was submitted to the editors of the coolabah post-conference issue “after the water has been shed” in response to a call for papers. upon reading the essay, it became immediately clear that the topic addressed needed more space and attention than a mere article in a journal volume. the proposed essay was already 15,000 words long, and still felt it could do with more detail, development and clarification. the editors therefore contacted hoffman and his team and proposed the possibility of publishing a monographic issue of coolabah, entirely dedicated to their study. it would offer a springboard for a novel approach copyright© cornelis martin renes & catalina ribas segura, 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 to research in the tertiary educational sector by introducing auto-ethnography as the prevalent critical approach to tackle the problematics of researching a framework of which the researchers themselves form part, or from within. it would also offer a group of wellinformed young-career academics an opportunity to voice a set of controversial ideas in a larger, international arena and so find transcultural and transnational support for their analysis. in these times of increasingly precarious academic work, which affects our younger generations of scholars, one cannot offer less. cornelis martin renes, co-editor catalina ribas segura, guest-editor barcelona, 21 december 2015 microsoft word sethkeen6.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 purrumbete verandah, 2008 1 seth keen copyright©2013 seth keen. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: in describing his 2008 digital video installation, a continuous 3 minute five second loop, seth keen introduces a contemporary engagement with the historic landscape of rural victoria witnessed by von guérard in his paintings of the 1850s. bringing together a background in documentary practice and graphic design, seth is interested, as a media artist, in using digital technologies to explore forms of environmental portraiture that document relationships between people and place. in this video work, he revisits the location and landscape painting, from the verandah of purrumbete, 18582 by eugene von guérard. purrumbete verandah, 2008 documents the landscape and location that von guérard painted in 1858. video is used to record the view across lake purrumbete from the verandah of the purrumbete homestead. edited into this shot, are shots of local fishermen and a view of the purrumbete homestead recorded from picnic point on lake purrumbete. caught up in the tranquillity of this location, i slipped into the pace of the fishermen and their interaction with lake purrumbete. they become a pivot for differing viewpoints on the verandah location. the video work can be viewed on the web at http://www.sethkeen.net/portfolio/purrumbete-verandah/. these shots originated from the locative painting3 research project, which records the numerous locations von guérard painted in the corangamite shire. each of the locations depicted in the paintings are recorded with video and geotagged photos. this data is being used in the development of a prototype online video website, that integrates google maps4. part of continuing research into the design and development 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. 2 guérard, ev 1858, from the verandah of purrumbete [from the verandah of "purrumbete" looking towards the old woolshed on picnic point], 51.4 h x 86.3 w, national gallery of australia, melbourne, victoria, australia, painting, oil on canvas. 3 geoplaced knowledge and the design research institute at rmit university are supporting locative painting (2008-10), a collaborative research project between a media artist, a web developer, interaction designer and corangamite arts, a local volunteer community organisation. 4 google inc. make the google maps application programme interface (api) available for the non-commercial development of websites. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 of an online video website as a type of ‘combinatory engine’5. a key objective of this website is to create a narrative structure, which provides multiple perspectives on this subject. in the locative painting website6, i focus specifically on the visual representation of maps and how they can be used to provide a geographical viewpoint on locations within a documentary narrative. purrumbete verandah, 2008 (video still by seth keen). video stills from the purrumbete verandah, 2008 video: boat and fishermen; the purrumbete homestead (video stills by seth keen). 5 miles, a 2008, 'programmatic statements for a facetted videography', in g lovink & s niederer (eds), video vortex reader: responses to youtube, xs4all, amsterdam. p. 226 6 http://www.sethkeen.net/portfolio/locative-painting/ coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 locations painted by von guérard in the corangamite shire: (top to bottom) larra, lake bullen merri, and lake gnotuk (video stills by seth keen). each painting is used as a focal point to generate media content on the relationship between the painting and the location it records. for example, a number of interviews have been conducted with local people, who have connections to these locations, some have ancestors who settled the land and commissioned the paintings. this interview material is being used in combination with the recorded video, photos and associated maps. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 interviewees in the locative painting research project project: (top left) sue cole 2009; (top right) joan mahony, 2009; (bottom left) the late josie black, 2009; and (bottom right) jock mcarthur, 2009 (video stills by seth keen). i am certainly not the first person to retrace the footsteps of von guérard in this region. dacre smyth documented each of the locations that von guérard recorded in his paintings, in views of victoria in the steps of von guérard (1984). as smythe points out, the original verandah that von guérard painted in from the verandah of purrumbete, 1858, ‘no longer exists’7, being replaced when the homestead was rebuilt in 1883 and again in 1902. hence the different building facade in the video recording compared to the original painting. the commission from the manifold family who settled the land and built the homestead also included the painting, purrumbete from across the lake, 18588. i pay homage to this painting with a closer framed shot of the current purrumbete homestead, recorded from picnic point. i had to record the shot from nearby, due to the growth of trees on the original painting location. following the historical theme, some of the original moving panoramas and dioramas staged in melbourne around the time that von guérard completed his paintings, influenced this video work. documented by mimi colligan, in canvas documentaries9, these moving landscapes demonstrate a fascination with providing a sense of place, in a manner similar to my project. 7 smyth, d & von guérard, e 1984, views of victoria in the steps of von guérard: a fifth book of paintings, poetry and prose, d. smyth, toorak. p. 48 8 guérard, ev 1858, purrumbete from across the lake [manifold homestead, purrumbete view of purrumbete station], 51.0 h x 85.5 w, national gallery of australia, melbourne, victoria, australia, painting, oil on canvas. 9 colligan, m 2002, canvas documentaries : panoramic entertainments in nineteenth-century australia and new zealand, melbourne university press, carlton south, vic. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 locative painting prototype: gnotuk_tags-tocative 2010 (lmaqery © 2010 digital globe cnes/spot lmage, geoeye website screencast; created by seth keen in collaboration with the web developer, daniel pettet, and interaction designer, michael dunbar). links this article links to web sites containing further materials. the video work described in this article can be viewed at http://www.sethkeen.net/portfolio/purrumbete-verandah/, while further project documentation and other images can be viewed at http://www.sethkeen.net/portfolio/locative-painting/. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge the support of josie black (oam) and corangamite arts. thank you to the owners of purrumbete homestead max and ann magilton for their generous support of this project, and the editors lisa byrne, harriet edquist and laurene vaughan for supporting the publication of this work adapted from the book designing place: an archaeology of the western district, melbourne books, melbourne, 2010.     coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 seth keen teaches new media at rmit university in melbourne. he holds a ma (by research) and is currently in candidature on a practice based phd (communication). seth works with video to explore the nexus between documentary practice and new media technologies. his practice is interdisciplinary across media, art and design. he produces video works for exhibition, broadcast, screening and online publication. interested in social and environmental change, seth collaborates with organisations on the design of frameworks to create web interactive documentaries, audio-visual archives and tools. in collaboration with the institute of network cultures in amsterdam, seth helped facilitate and research the video vortex conference series, a critical forum on online video. http://www.sethkeen.net/ (school of media and communication, school of media and communication, rmit university, australia. email: seth.keen@rmit.edu.au) microsoft word final anne holden coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 bruce bennett: an appreciation anne holden rønning president easa 2001-2005 with his characteristic and warm smile bruce was nearly always part of the australian contingent attending easa (european association for studies on australia) conferences, most recently at palma in 2009. he was a kind man sharing his knowledge and encouraging other scholars, especially younger ones. i should like to pay tribute to him by some words on australian short fiction: a history, one of the many scholarly works written by bruce, yet one that to the best of my knowledge is unique. he illustrates the breadth of short fiction in australia using an encyclopaedic approach and introducing us to many writers, some little known, some forgotten, some well-known. referring to christina stead’s oceans of story bruce writes that he wants to give us a few dips into those oceans. the pure beauty of his language in describing his purpose is also indicative of bruce himself: in the swirling seas of contemporary storytelling it is the literary historian’s task to restore some meaning and context to those small imprints in the kerosene shale. […] the stories of a culture can be thought of also in a popular image of bottles washed up on a shore. (2002: 1) this is a seminal work, not least for us europeans, giving us the opportunity to get a broad overview of australian short fiction, for, as he writes, “the literary historian is a beachcomber, a bottle opener, a translator” (1). as a beachcomber he has provided fascinating reading not least because bruce writes in a manner that whets the ordinary reader’s interest, followed by more detailed comment on some stories. for me another important feature of this book is the inclusion of so many women writers, from the “unquiet spirits” of 1825 – 1880, such as the moralistic tales for the bush by mary theresa vidal, and ellen augusta clacy’s tales and novellas about the goldfields. we are introduced to mary fortune the first australian woman detective writer, and the alternative tradition of women’s writing between 1880-1930: women who did not write of the bush and mateship, but, more in line with their sisters in england and america, on social issues and aspects of emancipation at all levels, as we see in the work of catherine helen spence. bruce gives us an excellent introduction to all these women writers, most of whom are forgotten and unavailable today. and so the text continues through the contending forces of realism and romance to modernism and urban realism copyright © anne holden rønning 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 in twentieth century writing. thank you, bruce, for helping us to get to know all these writers male and female. as a former president of easa it is a great pleasure to contribute a little to this edition of coolabah in memory of bruce bennett. i first met bruce through easa. his kindness on my first research trip australia researching christina stead in canberra, and on later occasions, will always be remembered. it was a pleasure to know him. anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. her research interests and fields of publication are women’s studies, and postcolonial literatures and cultures, especially from australia and new zealand. she was co-editor of identities and masks :colonial and postcolonial studies (2001); and readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007); and author of “for was i not born here?” identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne (2010). in 2012 she was visiting professor at the university of barcelona and gave a masters course on cultural identities microsoft word final vincent o'sullivan coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 a selection from us vincent o'sullivan first time, about easter there was a donkey inside a wire fence where the road begins its first climb to the rimutakas. we passed it on friday late afternoon for years, passed it again coming back on sundays, or thought so in winter, when the dark was already down. it was more grey than not, though children reasonably argued the toss, but its muzzle this frosty white, without question. you could not of course hear from inside the car, but once we saw its neck extended, its teeth displayed, without doubt it was braying, and looked hurt: our driver said no, it was nothing like it, yet thought of the horse with the spiked tongue in guernica, the blue-grey horse, or paler even , imagine the glare of a search-light picking it out in a show called ‘war arriving’. then one day it is gone, the donkey on the first incline towards the rimutaka hill. a dozen reasons. i forgot, says another driver, a long time later, to ever mention, did i, the one time it snowed that far down the hill, the donkey copyright © vincent o'sullivan 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 standing in the white paddock brought tears to my eyes? its head hung forward as though too heavy for its body. as though, finally and forever, that bit too much. a donkey in a snowed-in paddock, under trees black as its hooves. on the rimutaka road. one friday. three’s a crowd we’ve looked together – what, three, four, times? at manet’s barmaid. insolent? not quite. nor melancholy either, with her canny eye for fetching decent tips from handsome cads. ‘you’d have done it with like composure,’ i tell the woman i’d rather see there, pouring thimbled absinthe, than cleopatra talking barge-talk, gold-hulled as you like. ‘i rather fancy strolling in and simply ordering.’ a touch of boredom, an obliging nod. we both, as it happens, are wearing black. we look at the painting i love as much as any. ‘this is as good as it gets,’ isn’t that also what she thinks, that marvellous unflinching gaze? she may well be thinking of children, some impending grief. or joy, don’t leave that out, joy’s in there too. i want to touch her hand. taste the glimpse of her throat. hit the phrase to set her smiling. ‘imagine being at that bar,’ the woman i stand with tells me. ‘ such loneliness surrounds her. all those mirrors reflecting, both the world, and not.’ and her curious judgement: ‘wish i’d known manet.’ coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 love, assuming nothing when she decided, ‘all right then, that’s what you want,’ left her jandals at the screen door, hooked her bra on the doorknob as she walked into the bunk-room, the rest of whatever she’d been wearing out there still on the verandah, he quoted a poem that said,’ every gift i ever imagined comes to me, love, on these naked feet,’ so that ‘smooth bastard,’ she responded, but being as good as her word, the dawn’s there in no time. then asked, ‘that french poet, right?’, and he said, ‘it was.’ ‘then don’t,’ she told him. ‘next time you come at that caper, the show’s called off. say it like is or i’ll stone you.’ he’d seldom thrilled at anything so direct. he shoved the collected valery beneath the mattress. believe it not, it lasted: as did ‘every gift’. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 come again? i’ve watched again a movie i saw when i was seven. the same trees thrashed, the same moon glinted too brightly, the wrong people kissed, a fat nurse with a nice voice turned out to be german. i sat in an auckland theatre, i think the st james. i chewed a hole in a white silk scarf in special wartime terror. there were wry british jokes that went over my head. i think i remembered the bit about the postman, but forgot two doctors thumping each other because a nurse couldn’t quite decide. the hole in the gnawed scarf is the taste frightening my mouth. when the trees pelt because that is what studios knew scared everyone awfully, especially ladies starting to run back home in the dark, and the moon glitters so everything is knife-edge, i am there in the dark as well, i am still not sure who is really bad when everyone seems nice. i watch the eyes slide above surgical masks. i remember the balloon that goes limp when someone’s dead. all this time the detective’s been looking after my scarf. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 any heart would give a leap on meeting, as i do, a woman whose calling is to discourse in the cleverest way on theoretical approaches to biographical texts – a chair being the diamond in her sights, who regards the common reader pretty much as a terrier assesses rodents from the perspective of how necks are best snapped: then to hear she jumps from aircraft at 10,000 feet, that her hobby is precisely that, to step from a rushing door into pure speculation, to drop for the thrill of both utter and dangerous freedoms: that she grips for the hands of other jumpers, forms one of those famous descending circles photographers die for, a human plunging stonehenge you might think as gravity occurs: to hear that, to meet her, to walk with this woman who hates it that a sliver of discourse might drift away, a tessera make off without standing to account, yet has – i hear too from a colleague – a special emergency chute she has hand-embroidered with conventional prayer, a ‘lord be with me’ reminder should the ground sprawl sudden and quicker than expected, oh unravelling text. . . . this is a puzzle i’m ill at ease with. this is ‘a self constructed from diverse fields of semantic force.’ there, i quote her, granting gouged respect. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 nothing truer, mind remember the frenchman who said philosophy or one philosopher, at least – had cut poetry’s throat? the man casually beneath the blue tree holding the white book doesn’t mind that the frenchman said so. he as casually liked it that he did. he liked it, the featured poet’s throat a child might gruesomely draw so it seemed a red ship sailing from ear to ear, or a skipping-rope dipped in paint and cleverly caught at the very grinningest part of its swing in the shouting playground. yes, he liked it, the reading man with the white book in the yellow field. unless the frenchman had told us you’d fancy philosophy had so little to offer poetry, philosophers solemnly stropping razors for pure fun. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 after that, to begin with the wind has talked through most of what we have said together, the wind has cleared its throat as though doing us a favour. we wait the streaming of leaves to pile the corners of the veranda, before we say ‘the wind we never would have believed could last so long, has scarcely begun.’ then proving us wrong, there is stillness the shape of crystal slipped over the hollow of the wind, a new fear, a different fear, making us stand and look to trees carved from something darker than darkness, and we say, ‘at least a few stars have made it,’ surprising us, the stars, our being able to say, ‘for certain,’ an exhilaration which after all is our simply observing distance, and giving it a name, and saying ‘there are seven now that we count, seven, which seems an extraordinary thing to say, ‘seven stars after so much wind,’ the silence no longer laid like a scythe against a wall for wind to dry. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 sight unseen a famous foreign poet came to the farm i lived on in pukeroro. he liked the name ‘morepork’ when it narrowed the night to one complaining repetition, he said – it was february – this was the perfect place, surely, for fireflies, which at that time i had never seen, not even in poetry. a friend, a clever attractive woman, drove him back to town. he said as they turned to the main road near the enormous norfolk pine, ‘do you mind if we drive in silence? i wish to untangle what the stars down here are up to.’ he wrote perhaps a poem which may or may not be about his visit, the wine we drank together, the feeling i had as he stood at the back door and looked intently as far as a field of corn where, if you waited with utter patience, you could hear the army worm’s destructive rustling, which i told him of, and he smiled, but it was like a smile in a bergman movie, you needed critics to explain. the poem speaks of how light is best loved in tiny fragments, how stars disappoint when sky sprawls so many, how an owl is a hooded pinprick at the world’s end. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 skol a man i talked with in a bar in berlin once read poetry, he said, with passion, served with distinction in an army he loathed. beyond which he said little. he drank schnapps. he advised, as we parted, to avoid epiphanies as i would gunfire. he phrase for ordering a schnapps was ‘to dim the lights.’ vincent o'sullivan who lives in dunedin, new zealand, is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and biographer, and is professor emeritus, victoria university, wellington. his two volume edition of the collected fiction of katherine mansfield, co-edited with gerri kimber, has just been published by edinburgh university press. new volumes of stories and poetry will appear next year. the poems printed here are from that next collection, us.' microsoft word final john barnes coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 an honorary west australian remembers bruce bennett john barnes the news of bruce bennett’s death brought back memories of over half a century ago, when i first met him. i was a temporary lecturer in english at the university of western australia for two years at the end of the 1950s. like all other members of the small department i tutored in first year. classes were small and relations between staff and students were close. one group that i used to look forward to meeting contained three young men of outstanding promise, who were to have distinguished careers. malcolm treadgold and bruce bennett both went on to oxford as rhodes scholars and then became academics. the third was alan fels who was, like treadgold, majoring in economics: he was to become, not only an authority in his field of study, but also one of the best known figures in australian public life and a television identity. bruce’s major study was in english, but i seem to recall that he also had a liking for history. what i do remember clearly to this day is his enthusiastic enjoyment of the literature we were reading, and his determination to do well at his studies. he was an ideal student. in the late 1960s when bruce came back to perth from oxford (bringing home a delightful english wife as well as an english degree), he was appointed to the english staff. as he had been during his student days, he was wholly committed to the task in hand, and no-one could have asked for a colleague more conscientious and co-operative – or, for that matter, more agreeable. i was back in perth from 1963 to 1970, and so got to know him during this time when he began to develop an interest in australian literature, which was to become so central to his later career. courses in australian literature had not yet been established when i left perth, and bruce was to play a leading role in their establishment soon afterwards. those who worked with him in those days will be able to testify to his leadership in this area and his later efforts to promote australian studies. from my perspective, in his early years there are two activities – which might be regarded as marginal by others – that ought to be emphasised: his editorship of westerly; and his promotion of the writing of his colleague, short story writer peter cowan. in 1964, while bruce was at oxford, peter had been appointed as a permanent senior tutor in english. this enlightened appointment, very much to the credit of the english department, had significant consequences when a few years later it appeared that westerly would collapse. the magazine, which had begun as a student publication of the arts union, had in 1963, thanks to a grant from the commonwealth literary fund, burgeoned into a quarterly published by the university of western australia press. anyone who has been involved copyright © john barnes 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 in editing a periodical in their spare time knows how hard it is to keep such publications going. in 1966 peter, who felt the isolation of western australia keenly, took the initiative that saved the magazine. an editorial committee, three of whom were in the english department, became responsible for the publication; although never named as editor or chairman, it was peter who made the final decisions and dealt with the printers. in 1968 bruce joined the committee, and was already immersed in the work of editing when i left. he and peter became joint editors in 1975, and in 1978 they had the satisfaction of compiling westerly 21: an anniversary selection, which was published by fremantle arts centre press. before the electronic revolution, when the phrase ‘the tyranny of distance’ was all too relevant, printed periodicals contributed to cultural life in a way that may be hard to comprehend today. that was especially so in western australia, and that is why i draw attention to bruce’s editorship, which continued until he moved to canberra in 1993. when i had first arrived in perth i had been surprised that peter, whom i consider to be the most talented prose writer associated with the angry penguins group, was not more highly regarded on the local scene, and i tried to make his stories better known. bruce formed a close relationship with peter, and shared my view of his distinction. in 1986 he edited for penguin a selection of peter’s stories under the title, a window in mrs x’s place; and in 1992, with susan miller he edited peter cowan: new critical essays, which was published by the university of western australia press, in conjunction with the centre for studies in australian literature which had been created within the english department. both of us contributed to this collection, and our essays revealed an interesting difference in our approaches: i situated cowan as a modernist while bruce saw him as a regional writer. perhaps because i was an ‘eastern stater’ (though i had married a west australian and had even been the vice-president of the local fellowship of australian writers, i could never be more than an ‘honorary west australian’), i was less receptive to the claims for a regional literature, which so attracted bruce. his view of the power of place in australian writing is a central theme of a collection of his essays and reviews, published by fremantle arts centre press under the title an australian compass (1991). after leaving perth, i saw bruce only occasionally, usually at conferences; and in recent years hardly at all, as age and infirmity have put me out of action. my general impression is that he was happy and fulfilled, and genuinely enjoyed the life he had chosen. he lectured and wrote extensively; but the long list of his academic appointments and publications is far from the whole story. he had a strong sense of public responsibility, willingly served on committees, took executive positions in organisations, and was always prepared to roll up his sleeves and tackle the administrative tasks that most of us try to avoid. bruce was a west australian, through and through, but he travelled widely, was responsive to other cultures, and relished networking. at the back of my mind is a notion that he once considered becoming a diplomat before deciding to opt for the academic life. certainly, he had all the skills needed for a diplomat; and, in a way, he did become an ambassador for australian literature. his friendliness and sincerity made him welcome everywhere he went; and his open and sympathetic approach to the study of literature appealed to those at home and abroad who heard him lecture or read his coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 writing. he leaves behind many friends in many places, as this issue of coolabah bears witness. microsoft word article eggert coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 bruce be nne tt ao face fah a 1941–2012 paul eggert the obituary first appeared in the australian academy of the humanities annual report 2011-12 at http://www.humanities.org.au when bruce bennett died on 14 april 2012 an extraordinarily productive career in australian literary studies came to an end. born on 23 march 1941, bennett grew up in perth, western australia. a scholarship got him into hale school, where he shone both at his studies and, in the eyes of younger boys, as novelist robert drewe remembers, as leader of the school’s air force cadets, deftly wielding a well-polished regimental sword on parade. a second anecdote captures a more enduring aspect of his personality. it is one of his own, first revealed in his book on spy literature, the spying game, published just a month after his early death at the age of 71. it appears that he was interviewed for the australian foreign service, and thus potentially a spy, immediately before accepting, instead, a position as a lecturer at the university of western australia in 1968. already, it seems, someone in authority had guessed that he might be an intelligent young man who knew how to keep his own counsel, who could be trusted, and who, as a good literary critic, could read human situations, whether in literature or in life, for intention, tone, colour and contexts. this interview occurred immediately after bennett’s return from oxford, where a rhodes scholarship had taken him during 1964–67 for a second ba – an educational route chosen by many bright australians at the time – at pembroke college. there he met and in 1967 married a local schoolteacher, patricia staples, who bravely returned with him to the large country town that perth must have seemed at the time, in the underpopulated western third of a very large continent. their twin children michael and catherine were born in 1970. at first bruce bennett’s energies at uwa were divided between the disciplinary cluster of education and english. he had taken a diploma of education from claremont teachers college after his first ba; and in 1974 he gained a ma in education from the university of london. he became actively involved in curriculum setting for the secondary school system in wa and would be elected a fellow of the australian college of education in 1990. as a young australian in oxford struggling to come to terms with what was perceived, there, as a colonial identity, he had gradually realised it was necessary to affirm through one’s reading and commitment that one’s identity is copyright © paul eggert 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 indelibly coloured by where one lives. this would gradually have impact on his thinking about literary curricula after his return home. english studies would have to change. the role of place, then of region and ultimately of nation, would be central. for him, this inevitably implied, first, western australian and then australian literature, and ultimately the literature in english of australia’s near neighbours, especially malaysia, singapore and the philippines – a rare interest in australian english departments of the 1970s and 80s. his first article ‘australian literature and the universities’ (in melbourne studies in education in 1976) was prescient, and an essay on poetry from malaysia and singapore appeared as early as 1978. essays mainly from the 1980s, revised for his book australian compass (1991), show the imprint of region and nation. the one on les murray’s and peter porter’s responses to european culture is memorable, and its ideas were further developed in his biography of porter, spirit in exile (1991). in that book, which won the wa premier’s award, porter’s quintessentialising of european culture as an eternal present is portrayed as the intellectual condition of an australian in exile. this portrayal was in some a ways a generational disagreement about australian identity while also being a generous acknowledgement of porter’s high poetic skill. by 1973 bruce bennett and veronica brady had convinced their colleagues to allow a full-year subject in australian literature, the first such offering at uwa. in 1975 he was appointed co-editor with peter cowan of westerly, and in 1982 bennett became the foundation director of the centre for studies in australian literature. by 1985 he had risen to associate professor in english and was appointed commissioner in that year for the federal government report, windows onto worlds: studying australia at tertiary level. co-written with kay daniels and humphrey mcqueen, it appeared in 1987 in the lead-up to the australian bicentenary celebrations. there was a surge of interest in things australian in that decade, but its history needs to be appreciated. bruce bennett was a half-generation younger than the pioneers in the field of australian literary studies such as harry heseltine, bruce’s predecessor and later rector of unsw at adfa, gerry wilkes, laurie hergenhan and john barnes, amongst others. they had to address the slow-burning cultural battle of the 1950s that extended through the 1960s when bennett was doing his undergraduate studies in australia. on one side of the fence were the cultural nationalists, many of whom were journalists, who emphasised that the importance of australian literature stemmed from the fact that it was australian. on the other side was the new professoriate whose members appealed to broader international standards and who tended to accept that literature courses ought to be restricted to the great works of the english (and later, american) tradition, works which dealt with the larger themes of the human condition as it was then understood. if by extreme good fortune some few australian works measured up to those standards then they might be admitted. bruce bennett sought a medial position in this debate, valuing the aesthetic qualities of important literature, preserving tradition but energetically insisting on the need to cherish and teach the literature that had sprung out of or reflected on australian conditions. in judging worthwhile literature in terms of its capacity to stimulate readers to discoveries about themselves and their place in the world, bennett gave a productive inflection to what had become, by the 1970s, a stymied debate. hence the emphasis in coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 his early writing on the theme of literature, region and place, a theme that would be reclaimed by others in environmental criticism, somewhat to his surprise, late in his career. in 1993 bruce bennett took up the chair in english at the university of new south wales at adfa in canberra. he delivered an encouragingly inclusive inaugural address (published as professing english today), which showed that the postwar divisiveness in english departments between literary criticism on the one hand and scholarship (bibliography, scholarly editing, literary history, biography) on the other had no attraction for him. he had arrived in the right place. though entirely without pompousness or self-importance, he was nevertheless a man on a mission. he convinced his new colleagues to further australianise their syllabus, and he took up the cudgels within adfa to maintain funding and to extend the coverage of the online austlit bibliographic database. it had been initiated by harry heseltine in 1985 and launched in the adfa library in 1988 by gough whitlam. after 2001 when the database became a cooperative one shared, and contributed to, by a number of universities, bennett remained its enthusiastic advocate and for some years co-chaired its board with john hay. though in extremis only a fortnight before his death from lung cancer when i visited him at home, he nevertheless wanted to know how things were going with it. i was able to reassure him, and in fact 2013 will see its silver anniversary with the number of entries approaching one million. a tireless conscience for the good of the field characterised bruce bennett’s career, whether organising from 1982 with edwin thumboo of singapore the biennial series of invitational symposia on asia-pacific literatures, serving as president of the association for the study of australian literature for 1983–85, editing or co-editing nearly a score of conference proceedings volumes and other collections, serving on committees of review of other universities’ english programs and, notably, on the australia-india council from 2002. scholars responded well to bruce. his winning smile with a characteristically wry edge helped put people at their ease. he was a naturally gregarious and very modest man. yet, beneath the modesty, he was quietly passionate about what he believed in. when the interests of colleagues or others with whom he was dealing overlapped with his, he would often be successful in marshalling their energies to work towards a shared goal or ideal. they sensed his enthusiasm for the common cause and many trusted to it. he had great patience in pursuing those causes. if they were to materialise in tangible results, then recruiting institutional or government support of one kind or another – whether through subtly shifting the teaching of his own department or by affecting government policy – would be necessary. bruce instinctively distrusted knee-jerk reactions. he would read the local or the wider scene almost as if it were a play on the stage, a play of conflicting agendas whose as-yet-unknown outcome could go one way or another. he was a good reader because he had the capacity, not always but usually, to put himself outside the conflict. this capacity became more habitual and assured as he grew older. in intellectual or institutional life one encounters opposition from time to time. i noticed that when bruce encountered it himself, he went out of his way to try to look at the situation from the other person’s point of view, to try to articulate the grounds of it so coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 that he could understand it before he acted. in private conversation i found that he was most reluctant to criticise others. he kept his head. it was a caution born of a shrewd instinct, i think, that generosity, or if generosity was impossible then at least neutrality, gave the other person room to move and the chance to reassess things. perhaps something better would come of not crystallising the disagreement rather than trying to dictate the outcome. dictating outcomes by playing the role of the old-fashioned god professor was something bruce hated the very idea of. this instinct lent bruce a balance in his assessments and judgements of how things were going institutionally or culturally or nationally, and of what could, in the prevailing circumstances, be done. the desirable agenda might at least be inched along in the right direction. so it was that people sensed he was a safe pair of hands and thus often turned to him for high-level committee work, such as those noted above. there were many other such roles in his career. so it is not surprising that bruce’s blend of willingness and capacity to contribute effectively as a champion of literature, and of australian literature especially, was recognised in 1993 with the award of an ao. he was elected a fellow of the australian academy of the humanities in 1995, received the centenary medal in 2003, and was, upon his retirement, appointed group of eight professor of australian studies for 2005–06 at georgetown university in washington. on the basis of his published work, the university of new south wales awarded him the doctor of letters in 2004 and appointed him emeritus professor in 2006. bruce spoke at countless international conferences. his speaking and his writing were typically light in touch, humane in spirit and readily accessible. not for him were the abstractions of high theory nor the hammer blows of strenuous literary criticism. the encyclopaedic coverage in his book australian short fiction: a history (2002) was a perfect vehicle for his learning and balance, as was the oxford literary history of australia, which he co-edited with jennifer strauss in 1998. homing in: essays on australian literature and selfhood, a collection of some of his essays from earlier years, followed in 2006. after his retirement in 2005, bruce went on contributing as an active and productive researcher for another half-dozen years. he saw proofs of the spying game shortly before he died; his final book with ann pender, a history of australian expatriate writing in britain, is in production. truly bruce died in the way that mary gilmore described her writer-mother’s own death, ‘with the ink still wet on the page’. bruce bennett was a scholar until the very end. paul eggert is an australian research council professorial fellow, based at the university of new south wales, canberra. his book securing the past: conservation in art, architecture and literature was published by cambridge university press in 2009 and won the society for textual scholarship’s finneran award for 2009–2010. he is an editorial theorist and book historian, and has prepared scholarly editions of works by d. h. lawrence (the boy in the bush and twilight in italy and other essays), henry kingsley and rolf boldrewood, and has two others – by joseph conrad and the australian short-story writer of the 1890s henry lawson – appearing in 2013, as well as a title called biography of a book. it traces the life of lawson’s iconic collection while the billy boils across a hundred years of australian culture. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 we shimmer we shine trevor avery copyright© trevor avery 2014. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. johnston p., 1993, shimmer – 6 coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 shimmer yinar dhenewan i walk along the beach right where the sand meets the ocean. the sun beats down on my body as i listen to the waves ebb and flow. the water is cold as it flows around my feet. i lave the water line and walk a little way up the sand. the sand is hot under my feet. almost too hot. my body shies away from the heat of the sand. i lie my body down on the sand. the sun beats hot on the top of my body. the sand beats hot underneath of my body. my body fights the heat. slowly the temperature adjusts. the sun is no longer hot on my body. my body and the sun are the same heat. the sand is no longer hot under my body. my body and the sand are the same heat. the sun, my body and the sand are one. we shimmer. we shine my body lies merged with the sun and the sand as i listen to the ebb and flow of the ocean. the sound takes over my whole body changing from a soft whisper to a booming and raging. the noise is too much and i listen inwards to the blood in my body. i think of the times that, as a child, i held a shell to my ear to listen to the whispering secrets of the ocean. as an adult i am told that this swishing sound the shell offers is the sound of the flow of my own blood in my body. i listen now to this sound. i know it is the blood inside my body now. i no longer need the shell of my childhood to listen to the secrets of the ocean. my own blood can tell me that. i listen as the blood in my body ebbs and flow. the whoosh and the rush is all that i hear. the external sound and the internal sound conjoin. is it the waves or is it my blood? the sound of my blood flowing through my body and the sound of the ebb and flow of the ocean merge into one sound. the ocean and my blood are one. we shimmer. we shine the waves of the ocean crash to the shore with a regular beat. the ocean swirls and whirls around, pushing the waves up and forward. crash! crash! crash! now i hear the beat of my heart. my heart beats to the crashing of the waves. is it my heart or is it the waves? my heart and the waves are one. we shimmer. we shine another time i walk on this land that holds the body of my mother and my grandmother. i walk on this land in my body. my body and this land are warmed by the sun. the sun beats on my body. the sun beats on this land. this body, this land, my mother, my grandmother sweat in the sun we merge. my body, this land, my mother, my grandmother are one in the sun. we shimmer. we shine my eyes walk in the darkness of the night beside the gravestones of my dead friends. gone to their dreaming my eyes see them no more. my grief erupts like the black of the night and overflows. my love, my grief and the night are one in the coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 darkness that creeps over my eyes like the death and genocide that lives in the land. my love and my grief, the darkness and death become one in the night. we shimmer. we shine i went on a journey to walgett and to lightning ridge desert country gomileroi country. the heat was intense it was the hottest recorded temperature in the state. it hit my gut when i observed the poverty and despair of the aboriginal people in walgett. the clothes on the children were ragged as they were on the adults too. the houses were rundown. the place had a desolate and hopeless feel to it. the dust, the dogs and the drunkenness told me that hope was running short. the despair could be held in the hand like a solid object. as i live in the city, remote from walgett, i do not see it daily. i hear about it so of course i know. seeing the direct results of australian history on aboriginal people is a shock when you have not been to the country for a while. how do my people bear this day to day despair and hopelessness? we drove from walgett to lightning ridge along that highway shimmering in the heat. the emu chicks with their mothers were plentiful along the road. i told my friend that gomileroi women are emu women and gomileroi men are sand goanna men. the elders who had told me this were explaining why gomileroi look and act the way we do. “they knew you were coming,” my friend said. “yes” i said, “my sisters here are putting out the welcoming mat”. the kangaroos and the cockatoos were plentiful in that grey-green landscape. the red-grey dust of the country permeated my nostrils and dried my throat. the country, the heat and the fauna took over my whole body, although i was definitely in a very modern car. i opened the car window. was it beautiful? of course it was beautiful, my european eye said. it held my mind, my body, my spirit just as despair had held my mind, my body and my spirit when i saw how my people were in that town less than an hour away. this, i understood, is what sustained them in this country. the land is important. as beautiful landscape it is important, but the priority is the identity it offers. the sense of belonging is physical as well as spiritual. it inhabits skin, bone, heart and mind in the most elemental way. the land becomes almost beyond thought and awareness. without it these people truly have nothing. to somehow immerse oneself with the land becomes, then, a primary way of filling oneself with life, in a world that offers less than nothing to an aboriginal person i remind myself of this fact often. this is necessary because one of the problems of aboriginality is that of over-romanticisation which in turn denies the realities of history, a perpetuation of a spiritual genocide that continues yet. those people in walgett had no money, no food, no education, no hope, and unless something is done, no future – land alone does not package the essential human needs that they lack. by the same token it is important for me to both define and remind myself in terms of this incredible relationship to land because it is the most elemental of aboriginal identities – it rules all else. the balance between this important reality and the genocidal romanticism i mention is very delicate. it is in a sense a viewing of a balance between the metaphysical and the physical worlds, and there is a point where it meets, or merges. i remind the reader that this is where my visual works intention is focussed (pam johnston, 1999: 10-11). coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 this is a rare outing for a piece written by pam johnston that was originally composed to be shown alongside her exhibition titled “shimmer yinar dhenewan”, which has been with me in the uk since 1998. the exhibition was sent to me, and was placed in my care, from that time and is still with me now. it has been an ever evolving and adaptable installation in spaces across the country from the north of scotland to places far and near. pam and i agreed that the works would be shown whenever i felt it appropriate to do so, leaving me with nothing more than the burden of trust between pam and myself. this is an understanding that i have always treated with enormous care. in its essentials “shimmer yinar dhenewan” is a large body of work focusing on life, death and rebirth. it is composed of a number of very large shimmering golden painted pieces on paper, each one well over two meters tall and a metre or so wide. it is also made up of many smaller golden painted pieces and a good number of black and white drawings. if i say that these drawings were the “death” part of the cycle and were titled “genocide” then i am sure that you can see what territory we are in. my contacts with pam johnston began in 1997. it was during the time that i had moved from london and was living in the highlands of scotland. those contacts with pam became more established over the years and would have continued to the present day, with new ideas and the work still being developed in 2013, had fate not intervened and taken her from us prematurely. it is striking how persistently the artistic relationship between pam and myself has endured. the story began through a mutual artist friend, mary rosengren. it was 1997 and mary had returned to the uk from a residency at lake mungo in australia. she suggested that i contacted pam, one of the artists that she had met at lake mungo. mary felt that there was a kind of synergy between pam’s work and the type of projects that i was developing. it was an instinctive call on mary’s part, and because she and i had a very similar critical outlook i made contact with pam. there then began a conversation that was to last over fifteen years with pam visiting both the highlands of scotland and later the lake district of england, home of beatrix potter and william wordsworth. so just what was the context for the “synergy” that mary detected between pam's work and mine? what was it that drew our two apparently diverse cultural arenas together? i had curated and organised an exhibition called “river deep, mountain high” that included the hugely important artist jimmie durham. jimmie agreed to take part as i had inadvertently stumbled across that fact that one of his ancestors was from the north of england (avery, trevor: 1997). the exhibition that finally emerged as “river deep, mountain high” was not the exhibition that had been first intended. the highlands had developed a benign mythology that related to its part in the colonisation of north america. the fact that an element of the extremist survivalist movement in the us was also re-imagining scotland as the mythical home of white purity gave the project a certain frisson. although a new generation of highlanders saw themselves as somehow spiritually related to the native american peoples it was pretty clear that this was at best a kind of wishful thinking. the exhibition had to reflect this in some way, and had to include some of the complexities of these relationships. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 gerald mcmaster, curator of canadian art at the art gallery of ontario, suggested that the europeans who colonised north america had a peculiarly intense dream of possession and plundered the land feverishly whilst being blissfully blind to the native peoples who lived there. it was a comment that still has great relevance today and can clearly be equally applied to situations across the globe (1995). i have always maintained that this blindness to the ‘other’ continues and indigenous peoples are denied a voice. i have also always maintained that their voices should be heard above those of the mainly white administrators who exhibit their work in, and through, those hallowed galleries where voices are filtered and nuanced, even neutered. pam was intrigued by my involvement with jimmie durham and with first nations artists and communities in north america. i think she approached me with a large amount of curiosity and not a little trepidation. given her background and experiences with the art world (and i experience it) she had every right to be cautious. for myself, i felt it was important for artists such as pam to be given an unconditional platform to speak. whatever text and words i produced in relation to her work were always carefully crafted and previewed by pam before being published or shown. as a mutual colleague and friend john holt, senior lecturer in art history, bretton hall college, university of leeds, wrote for the catalogue: we white westerners have much to learn, and the irony is that those who were defined by us as primitive seem to have assumed, or have had the responsibility thrust upon them, to make the lost connections, defining a holistic view of the world from which we have strayed. it is no consolation however to be an aboriginal artist, to be seen as the connecting dimension for a colonial oppressor. pam johnston may not have the shifting of the western model in mind, but her work, in all its facets, challenges the unstable and unbalanced system of western culture, thought and values. but the work of pam and other indigenous artists like cherokee jimmie durham, ask the questions that have to be asked, confront the issues that need to be addressed (1999: 4). the text i have included in this contribution comes from the original copy of the same catalogue published in the highlands that pam and i "worked up" together in 1997. it accompanied the original "shimmer yinar dhenewan" exhibition that toured to inverness museum and art gallery, kingussie folk museum, and in galleries located in wick, thurso and dumfries. it has never been seen outside the uk, and even here its appearance is rare. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 johnston p., 1993, shimmer – 4 welcome to shimmer introduction by trevor avery 1999 welcome to this exhibition by dr pam johnston or pam johnston dahlhelm or murai tighara or, to me, simply pam. this exhibition has arrived here by the wonders of modern electronic communication. we have come a long way since the initial, tentative communications via e-mail over two years ago. pam, john and myself have had a lot of fun, plus not a little pain, in putting this exhibition together. how do you describe the show? the discomfort is with me. i am acutely aware of the pitfalls of working with words like ‘indigenousness’ and ‘aboriginality’. i prefer to let people like pam speak for themselves. i was flattered to be asked by her if i would get involved in putting this project together but felt awkward, and still do, to speak on her behalf. i have no right whatsoever to speak on the behalf of communities such as those who pam belongs to. those communities and peoples have the right to speak for themselves in their own terms and within their own frame of reference. more, they should be accorded that right. as you walk around the exhibition it is worth remembering what you know, or think you know of the history of ‘australia’. me? i almost emigrated there when i was ten years old as part of the emigration programme in the mid to late sixties. white, working class families applied coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 eagerly to fly off to a new life. illness in my family prevented us from going but i know for sure that the rights and status of the first nations australians never entered the equation of the pros and cons of emigration. these people were to all intents and purposes invisible. this exhibition represents a journey for my family, for me as well as for pam (1999). i moved from the highlands in 2001 and exhibited "shimmer yinar dhenewan" again but this time at the brewery arts centre in kendal. set against the backdrop of the lake district, home of english romanticism, and "shimmer" evolved and became hugely successful in cumbria. pam visited the brewery arts centre exhibition in 2004 and became a magnet for artists, writers and most especially women's groups. she was provided with a studio on the top floor of the art centre but found it was not frequented too much by visitors and so she decamped to work in public view in the reception area where everyone had to pass through. her presence proved to be a magnet for all kinds of people. the strength and depth of her skills, knowledge, experience and wisdom captivated all those who met her. more than this, she had a rare quality of being able to communicate in a way that was compelling. she was the inspiration for the women's arts international festival held in kendal in 2007. she came over for the launch event and stayed in kendal. she met with patti smith, for instance, in the bar of the art centre and was a constant presence at the festival throughout. her refusal to be typecast as one kind of person or another was a pleasure to behold, and all those who met with her were constantly challenged about stereotypes and ‘otherness’. the challenges were always delivered with great thoughtfulness and often with a tremendous sense of fun. i am now director of another space, an education charity based in the lake district, and have become deeply involved with, and instigated what has become, the lake district holocaust project. a permanent base, exhibition, oral and documentary archive in windermere now tells the story of the three hundred child holocaust survivors who came to the lakes directly from eastern europe in 1945. it tells a remarkable story of children who had lived through unimaginable horror to begin new lives in the uk in what they describe as the ‘paradise’ of wordsworth's lake district. pam was to have come to be with us again and ‘shimmer’ was the opening exhibition in the gallery space alongside the permanent exhibition ‘from auschwitz to ambleside’. this showing was within a short time of her passing, w hich gave the showing an added poignancy john holt has had a commitment to first nations peoples that in many ways mirrored mine. his text for the catalogue is illuminating in the way that it is both ‘about’ pam and ‘of’ pam. you can hear a conversation that has taken place behind the written words, and this is indicative of the kind of legacy that pam left behind in the uk. it is now for us to speak on her behalf but only in the spirit of trust, a trust that she laid at our door without a price tag. as john states once again: pam johnston, dr. pam johnston, dahl helm, murai tighara, all are manifestations of one remarkable woman. these are not contradictory alter egos, but indications of a woman between two cultures, a “culture bearer” for her people, and artist, teacher, activist and elder on the council of elders for her coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 people the gomileroi. she has status and respect in both worlds and is an acknowledged interpreter between the two. pam johnston is significant in all that she does, not least in her work as an artist. but she does not need or want to be defined as an aboriginal artist, more as an aboriginal woman who makes art. she is proud of her identity but does not need to be defined by it. her intelligence, her vision and her spirit define her. her work embraces the seemingly incompatible aspects of the spiritual and the political. pam would not separate the two, indeed this separation of the political and the spiritual has concurred to compound the dualities of western culture that has desensitised and severed us from the consequences of our relationship with the earth and with our communities (1999: 5). i must leave the last word to pam and these words are indicative of a unique sense of responsibility and common humanity that she carried with her no matter what the situation: i have had to explain why i think indigenousness is important to the world and needs looking after – we all, all humankind, comes from something somewhere. and we all have to come from a holistic life where everything was included. so the sacred and healing and eating and nurturing and everything were part of the worldview. but for many this has gone and as a result there are many fractured people in the world looking for their whole selves. the few indigenous people left are the root of what is left of what everyone used to be. and we are living, breathing and adapting cultures, dealing with the same problems and so on. we are all that is left now. if we are lost, then everything is lost because nothing is whole anymore. i can tell that this is not understood either but you have to try, don’t you? (1999: 5) pam johnston checking photographic record of visit to long meg stone circle during women’s arts international festival, held in kendal in 2007 photo trevor avery coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 references avery, trevor. 1997. “river deep mountain high”. touring exhibition of highlands and islands curated by trevor avery and produced by highland regional council. exhibited at inverness museum and art gallery, kingussie folk museum, st fergus gallery, wick, swanson art gallery, thurso, an tuireann arts centre, portree, an tobar arts centre, tobermory. -----. john holt and pam johnston (eds.). 1999. “shimmer yinar dhenewan” catalogue for a touring exhibition curated by another space and produced by highland regional council. holt, john. 1999. “shimmer yinar dhenewan”. exhibition catalogue “shimmer yinar dhenewan”. johnston, pam. 1999. “shimmer yinar dhenewan”. exhibition catalogue “shimmer yinar dhenewan”. mcmaster, gerald. 1995. exhibition catalogue “edward poitras: canada xlvi biennale di venezia”. canadian museum of civilization. other recommended reading durham, jimmie. 1993. a certain lack of coherence. ed. jean fisher. third text publication. lippard, lucy. 1997. “the lure of the local”. new york: new york press. evilly, thomas. 1998. art and otherness: crisis in cultural identity. mcpherson & co publishers, u.s. biographical note. trevor avery is director of another space/lake district holocaust project (ldhp) based in the lake district of england. he graduated in 1984 with a ba (hons) degree in fine art and has lived and worked as an artist, curator and exhibition organiser in london, the highlands of scotland and currently cumbria, which is the border country between england and scotland. his recent work has taken him to poland, czech republic, germany, holland, and many places in between, and he has been involved as advisor on three recent bbc television programmes related to aspects of his work with ldhp. microsoft word article alejandra formatted coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 mapping a memoir within australian landscapes: shirley walker alejandra moreno álvarez 1 shirley walker (1927), retired senior lecturer in english from the university of new england at armidale, where she taught australian literature, decided to try her own hand at writing a memoir. the result is roundabout at bangalow: an intimate chronicle (2001), which is her account of growing up in the northern rivers area of new south wales in australia. the author has also published numerous critical articles on australian literature, commenting thoroughly on the work of mary gilmore (18651962), judith wright (1915-2000) and dorothy hewett (1923-2002). walker has also published the ghost at the wedding (2009) based on the life of walker’s mother in law, a woman whose life was largely shaped by war, and who, in 1918 near the end of ww1, married a returned soldier. this biography, which was awarded the asher literary prize (2009) and the nita b kibble award (2010), australia’s premier award for women’s writing, has been described as a major work of australian literature and a major contribution to australian history. the present article focuses on roundabout at bangalow: an intimate chronicle, where walker narrates the complicated and, sometimes, blurred resonances of her “half-a-lifetime” memoir. this work exemplifies how walker is deeply concerned with the unreliability of memory and the way it can exaggerate grievances or distort past perceptions, unloosing itself from historical and geographical truth and adopting first and foremost a primal function in the formation of identities. walker initiates her memoir in the channon, a small rain-forest village, and from there she takes us, in chronological order, to wallangarra, on the queensland border, byron bay (nsw), south grafton (nsw), armidale (nsw), rita island (north qld), back to south grafton and byron bay and closes her life journey in bangalow (nsw). when walker begins her story in the channon she is seven years old, but her voice and experiences are of a woman in her seventies who feels the need to go back to her roots to understand the youthful “i” she once inhabited. the novel ends in 1997 at a roundabout at bangalow on her way to byron bay but this time she is in her seventies and her companions are her grand-daughter and, in the car ahead of her, her son and her other grand-daughter. walker herself wonders if this encounter at the roundabout is a mere coincidence or a demonstration of ‘the mysterious and invisible lines of memory and desire’ (p. 228) which intersects at that precise moment and space in her life. thus, roundabout at bangalow is all about crossroads which interconnect through memory and which walker analyzes in order to decipher them. copyright © alejandra moreno álvarez 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 the titles of the chapters walker uses to divide the different stages of her life, which she also tells the reader in chronological order, are important in order to understand that the inner life embedded in roundabout at bangalow is at once a “variety of qualities, continuity of progress, and unity of direction” (bergson 2007, p. 10, the emphasis is mine). the first chapter is entitled “the clover chain” followed by “i always was lucky”; luck which is also shown in the first chapter, thus, the clover is metaphorically indicating us the luck walker is accompanied by along her life. the third chapter is “maps of memory” which describes how memory follows a path which is interrupted at certain points by impulses which show the different lived experiences. this chapter is followed by “night thoughts” since it is at night when the unconscious “i” wanders around unloosing itself from the socially constructed being. “the flame” is the following chapter, which could be compared to the bliss that non-western metaphysics insists upon, that is, a way to leave our bodies behind in order for us to reconcile with our real “i”. then walker entitles the following chapter “an island too far” to then go back to the “peninsula” and to then end up with “the roundabout at bangalow”. these three last titles describe how walker’s “i” feels the need to move away from home, from what is known to her, and then, once she is ready, to go back to her hometown and end the memoir at a roundabout. this ending highlights the incompleteness of her being since the longer she lives, the longer her “i” will be altered. as there will always be new experiences to live, looking back at her “i” she will always see a different one depending on the experiences she has had until that moment. the idea of her being always in process is also mentioned by walker when describing her granny’s garden that the author recalls as a projection of her extravagant nature. the garden is a “profusion of climbing roses, wisteria, plumbago, may bushes, lasiandra, honeysuckle” (p. 26) and jasmine. the jasmine is an example of the being in process we are referring to as it originates from arabia and spain, is grown in the south of france, common in old gardens in the colonial cities of the far north coast of new south wales and haunts the australian night with its fragrance (p. 26). the garden is then an emblem of continuity as it carries the genes of the old garden favorites down through time. walker tells us how her granny’s household does not only exist in that present moment but is a continuum with the past. that is, past and present meet, in this particular point, at a roundabout of memory. walker metaphorically joins the garden and memory along the whole novel and we find the first example at the beginning of the memoir: i am seven. i live in a valley in the rainforest. […] beneath the tangle of giant softwoods, cedar, rosewood and teak, […] is a warm maze of fern and lawyer vine. the smell of cut timber permeates the air as the massive trees are felled with the logs hauled to the mill. (p. 3) sixty years later, placing herself in that same place, walker describes this space as her home, “the place of birth, of birth into consciousness” (p. 3) and realizes the difficulties in recalling the dawn of consciousness. she returned to that place as she feels the need to distil the beauty and the bitterness of the place and, thus, of her consciousness. walker sees the difficulty in reconstructing the past in a present so different and questions the authenticity of memories, deciding then to concentrate on facts. moving, within her “i”, from the periphery to the center she wanders around issues that she coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 learnt, later on, through experience; an example is her own birth which, as she discovered in her adulthood, was a dramatic occasion (p. 8). within this wandering, walker tells us about her mother eileen alannah and her father joseph; how they met, how they had to marry, as if her mother were hester prynne in hawthorne’s the scarlett letter, since she became pregnant and how they lived. through them we are told of the great war, of the great depression, the second world war, the society of the time, the education system, the aborigines, and so on. walker’s aim is to clear the ghosts of old memories and make way for new representations and new suggestive images. one example is her mother’s continuous breakdowns which seem incomprehensible to walker who later on discovers that they were due to child abuse: i visit her one day about a year before she dies. i’m bored, the day is hot and i’m trying not to look at my watch. she’s shuffling through old photos. i pick up a portrait of her grandparents, her mother’s parents. her grandfather, that soldier of the empire, veteran of the crimea, the indian mutiny and the maori wars, is standing straight, a gold albert chain looped across his chest. his long-suffering wife is seated, composed, her face as yet untouched by cancer. i comment that he seems to have been a fine upstanding man. he was nothing of the sort, she says, and tells me matter-of-factly how, when she was four, and a number of times after that, he looked carefully around to make sure no adult was watching, took her by the hand and led her away… (p. 219) in the same way we learn about her mother, we also learn about the different historical events that australia went through. walker describes how reminders of the great war are everywhere, from the captured german guns in the park in lismore to the roll of honor in the local hall of her school, not to forget king george v’s head and the coat of arms, crossed flags and pictures of the great generals of the war, all arranged on the schoolroom wall (p. 18). the great war and gallipoli become a tragic myth which haunts the consciousness of children, particularly walker’s. this tragic myth is entrenched years later with her in laws since her father in law’s brothers lose their lives in the great war and her father-in-law’s face becomes disfigured by a burst of shrapnel in his face at the somme (p. 164) 2 . also through walker’s intimate memoir we get to know about the depression that affected australia following the wall street crash which signaled the beginning of a severe depression for the whole industrialized world. her maternal grandparents came to stay with them since her grandfather, who had been a blacksmith at goolmangar and bangalow, had to, in his fifties, break stones on the road for the relief, “the equivalent of work-for-dole today” (p. 23). later on, in the autumn of 1936, walker’s family moves to wallangarra in an old motor lorry with all their possessions. as a child, walker is wild with excitement not realizing that her life is about to change completely as they are “flotsam on the dark tide of the depression, as helpless as all the other human debris of the thirties” (p. 67). from 1936 and until the war breaks out in 1939 the family becomes nomadic, settling wherever her father’s job took them; a job which is unsettled due to the depression. her father is at one stage, when the depression is biting hard and work is closing down, on six pounds a week and made part time: coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 on this they have no chance of paying the rent, let alone feeding their families. meals of rabbit, stewed pigeons or wild duck becomes more regular. sometimes there is casual work, when a wheat train pulls into the new south wales platform and the heavy bags have to be transshipped. one evening at dusk, crossing the railway platform, i catch sight of my father bent over like a hunchback, lumping heavy bags of wheat from one side of the platform to the other. he has been doing this all day, and on many other days. i avert my eyes, but this brief glimpse stays in my mind forever. hard toil, hard yakka is to be his lot for life, and if you add to this an unquiet home, you can see what his life was like. he actually dies of hard work of an enlarged heart, six weeks before he is eligible for the pension. (p. 72-73) once the war starts there is more than enough overtime, saving many people from the depression (p. 90). walker describes the effects of the second world war all through the novel, starting on page thirteen and giving the last reference on page 154. during the war walker is in her adolescence and copes with a dangerous world. she is usually “self-absorbed, drifting, dreaming, reading and escaping into unreal worlds” (p. 99). the war discussions she hears at home, but which she does not dare to join, are always from the point of view of the working man. the author is saturated with the newsreels and their versions of events, with world figures such as the prince of wales, mrs. simpson, hitler, mussolini, haile selassie, neville chamberlain and general macarthur. she witnesses chamberlain “looking like a scrawny old rabbit” promising peace and giving in to hitler for which the australians were disgusted (p. 100). australia is automatically at war because the mother country is and at first hitler and mussolini are to walker figures of fun and subjects of songs of ridicule. battles are broadcast as if they were a cricket match but when japan bombs pearl harbour everything changes: slit trenches are dug in the school grounds and we have air-raid practice. we dive chattering and laughing into the rough trenches, skinning our knees. we knit scarves and socks, hundreds of them, as if this war is, as it was last time, in the frozen trenches of northern france. we practice with gas masks. we learn morse code and flag drill. each child has a flag and we practise semaphore, as if our faltering dots and dashes, fluttering from hilltop to hilltop, will save us from the enemy, who are shown daily in cartoons as degenerates, bow-legged and short-sighted and obviously no match for white men. (p. 101) the author recalls that after the fall of singapore, an impregnable fortress for australia, australians were terrified, and it is because of the war, the battle of britain (p. 102), that australians gained a new purpose, a cause. the photographer’s shop window in prince street does not show any more pictures of wedding-cake brides but smiling faces in uniform, either of the aif or the raaf. glamorous pictures are sent home of the crew who bombed the rhine, berlin, stuttgart, dresden, bremen, and so on. defeat will be tasted in greece and crete and winston churchill will be blamed “as the architect of yet one more australian disaster, and australians will curse him as their fathers did at gallipoli” (p. 102). prime minister curtin insisted that the sixth division return to defend australia against all churchill’s arguments for them to stay in the middle east. the sixth division is at sea without escort, the eighth is lost in singapore and the ninth is left behind to face rommel at the battle of el alamein (105). meanwhile, inland, coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 planes fill the skies and crash around. boyfriends, husbands and fathers come back home on leave from new guinea and the pacific island and their children do not recognize them because of the war as some have been in the war far too long and others, if came back at all, were totally changed by it. the peace will be very difficult because society has been irretrievably altered (p. 108). it is when the atomic bombs are dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki that the war comes to an end and australian minds turn immediately to the post-war world: we are selfish and see things only in relation to ourselves. we imagine that with victory and peace all problems will disappear. the men will all come home; we will no longer go to dances where the only partners are seventeenyear-old beardless boys or ancient dodderers; we will meet all those soldiers and airmen we have been sending love and kisses to, we will find romance. (p. 141) before coming to terms with the post-war world society we need to follow walker’s description of australian society in general. the author gives a broad picture of australian society at the time, when street names such as prince street, victorian street or queen street “tell their own story of colonial reverence for the british establishment” (p. 88). the map or the world at walker’s first school shows patches of deep pink which belong to the british empire “on which the sun never sets” (p. 17). every year empire day and the old queen’s birthday are celebrated with speeches, sports and lollies. imported comics tell of, for walker and her sister, “mad foreign rituals such as pancake day, bank holidays and trips to brighton” (p. 20). both are interested in royalty and the school magazine fosters articles of the royal family, thus, these sixth generation australians are attached to the british kings, queens and princesses. as an example, walker found herself profoundly affected when the northern star announced that king george v was dying (p. 22). this means that the education walker received was anglocentric and its aim was “to impress on the colonials as much as possible of the customs and values of the motherland” (p. 91). even when she was trained to become a teacher, she had to work on her accent, and had to eradicate the supposed australian failings “slovenly vowels and nasal diction” (p. 139); ideals which persisted until the early seventies. having this picture in mind we perceive how society was constructed by the british empire and the usa, projecting western movies which came out of hollywood and where people learnt every detail of the stars and their lives in an environment quite different from the australian landscapes (p. 68). through her memory we see how, in the first village they lived in, the values embedded by them were those of anglicanism, patriotism and mateship, the last two excluding foreigners and blacks. walker highlights the way that the aborigines were rarely seen as they were isolated on islands in the richmond and clarence rivers and at other missions. hindus grew and sold vegetables in the area and the italian families with banana plantations were up in the hills (p. 13). these two nationalities rarely mixed. it is after the war when society turns into a volatile mixture of chinese, italians and spanish. italians are not considered “to be white although a clear distinction is drawn between northern italians, closer to the european races, and the southerners, closer to the africans” (p. 169). with the post war boom spanish families also migrate to australia, most of them refugees from franco. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 with roundabout at bangalow, walker denounces discrimination and claims a space for minorities; that is aborigines, migrants and women. the first time the author talks about an aborigine is to recall the story of richard graig, the first white man who happened to be an escaped convict and who lived for years with the aborigines and was eventually pardoned on account of his discovery of the big river, the clarence (p. 86). later on walker wonders why the aborigines are invisible, out of sight and “out of mind” (p. 95). it is at grafton, and still a child, when she comes across a shocking sight. she sees her father’s former workmate on leave from the aif who celebrates being at home by bashing every aborigine in town. she will preserve this image in her mind, which becomes one of the experiences which will be awakened by intuition at college, where she realizes that there is no study of aboriginal life and culture: memories of the aboriginal massacres on the tablelands have been repressed, to be revealed later in r. b. walker’s old new england and judith wright’s moving poem “nigger’s leap, new england”. both deal with an aboriginal tribe driven like cattle over a precipice in the new england ranges, simply because they are a nuisance to some of the squatters. this is the dark side of the pioneering heritage of new england, but we don’t acknowledge it at this time. (p. 133) at one point in her memoir walker reflects on the fact that she could have lived a good life as a contented farmer’s wife, making jams and preserving fruit. but she is aware of herself as a “parody of a fifties wife and mother” (p. 206) which prompts her to leave this role aside and become a teacher while starting her studies at the university of new england. her choice for her phd is an australian topic which at that time was considered “wantonly self-destructive” (p. 222). once she finishes her phd she obtains a lectureship in australian literature and, by then, australian literature had begun to flourish in europe as well as in australia (p. 222). with this work walker revisits an australian landscape which dissolves itself in diverse roundabouts that we readers take in order to understand australia in the twentieth century. walker is able to provide in this work open questions which she sometimes answers ironically. she tells us about herself, a subject in process who, thanks to literature, has cleared the grounds for solutions aimed at reconciliation. it was henri bergson who in 1913 argued in his introduction to metaphysics that “if there is anything eternal, then it is the living eternal, the eternity of change” (bergson 2007, p. xxvi). in roundabout at bangalow: an intimate chronicle we face a continuity of changes modified by the impulses which walker somehow recalls and which memory alters. this is what bergson calls the “reality” or the “real”, which he defines as essential becoming, mobility, variability, movement, in short, processes over being (2007, p. xxix). walker draws herself from the periphery towards the centre; she is searching, in the depth of her being, for that which is most uniform, most constant and most enduring, and she finds, as a result, an altogether different thing (bergson 2007, p. 7). walker is making an effort to bend thought backwards towards its object, which is her inner i, deconstructing the “i” she has lived with in order to understand herself. she tells us about memories and by doing so she modifies them as she is seeing them from an “i” who has experienced different things during the course of her life. as andreas huyssen highlights, “memory always walks hand in hand with oblivion. oblivion is always the memory’s shadow” (as cited in jarque, 2011, p. 18). coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 alejandra moreno álvarez , holds a phd in women’s studies from the university of oviedo. she has been a research fellow at rutgers university, cornell university and the university of york, among others. currently, she is a lecturer in the english department of the university of oviedo. her teaching and research are centered in literatures in english language, feminist and postcolonial theory and in the subject of body politics in literature and cinema. she is the author of lenguajes comestibles: anorexia, bulimia y su descodificación en la ficción de margaret atwood y fay weldon (edicions uib, 2009); el lenguaje trasgresor de las ciborgs literarias (arcibel editores, 2011) and ambai: un movimiento, una carpeta, algunas lágrimas / a movement, a folder, some tears (krk, 2011). works cited bergson, henri; mullarkey, john, kolkman, michael, pearson, keith ansell (eds.) 2007: an introduction to metaphysics. new york: palgrave. jarque, fiotta 2011: “andreas huyssen”. babelia, el país, 22-23.04.2011 (p. 18) walker, shirley 2009: the ghost at the wedding. australia: penguin group. walker, shirley 2001: an intimate chronicle. roundabout at bangalow. queensland: university of queensland press. walker, shirley 1992: vanishing edens. responses to australia in the works of mary gilmore, judith wright and dorothy hewett. james cook university of north queensland. 1 proyecto i+d ffi2010-17296, la ciudad fluida: representaciones literarias de la ciudad transnacional. 2 for a full account see the ghost at the wedding (2009) where readers also come around roundabouts although this time walker goes back further in time taking us into the nineteenth century when jessie, walker’s mother in law, was born. with this work walker does not rely on her own memory but establishes the literal truth of events through letters, diaries, service records and family documents. the author has to imagine the inner life of each character, especially that of jessie. microsoft word sallybrownetal.24.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       305  reflections: remade, reworked, reimagined: sally brown talks about place 1 sally brown, ray norman and bill boyd copyright©2013 sally brown, ray norman and bill boyd. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the authors and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: for quite a long time it has been claimed that cultural production in tasmania has an inimitable and idiosyncratic place within the scheme of things. sally brown, a young tasmanian designer, maker, artist, is unlikely to make this kind of claim for her work. nonetheless, there is a particular sensibility evident in her work that it is doubtful that one might find anywhere other than in tasmania – or made by someone of an older generation. this paper attempts to unpick, through four reflections upon sally’s work, some of the thinking to do with the placedness, the vernacular social paradigm, the subliminal politics, the ‘crafting’ and the cultural savvy that gives sally brown’s work its presence. the questions that hang in the air around a collection of sally brown’s work are those to do with the ways local cultural imperatives might shape and make places they are found in, and in what ways might places shape the cultural realities that inhabit them. the following reflections on sally’s work are distilled from email and blog conversations.                                                               1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       306  reflection 1 – ray norman in many ways when you think about the work that you make, and you start rifling through the catalogues of your work, there is quite a bit there that is counter intuitive there in regard to your materials and their ‘placedness’. one supposes in tasmania that ‘wood’ might form an important part of the materials larder for a ‘maker’ like yourself. instead, we find that you are an eclectic maker who uses a lot of different material and not so often wood. in fact there seems to be some kind of antithesis here. is there? since we are talking about the place of ‘place’ in cultural production, and the making of things, your use of metal seems to pose a few questions. for instance, for whatever reason, and it is refreshing to see, you do not seem to pay homage to a particular metal technology, say like one of the ‘smithings’ – black, tin, copper, whatever. from the little you tell us about your childhood visiting relatives living in isolation from town, does metal, or any other material figure in those kind of memories. that is, the kind of memories that subliminally pop up from memory, and that provide solutions, or perhaps even giving a permission to do things in some way. traditions are often ‘place centred’. for instance, maker in a particular place traditionally, or is it habitually, use particular material in particular ways. you seem to be inventing or invoking you own kind of traditions and technologies. reflection 2 – sally brown tasmania is well and truly branded and perceived as an island of wood and woodworkers. when i am introduced to someone as a tasmanian designer-maker, there is an immediate assumption that i make lots of tables and chairs out of native special timbers. i have hardly made any tables or chairs and very rarely use special timbers, or much timber at all. i was surprised and pleased recently to be invited to take part in an exhibition which will focus on tasmanian metalworkers for a change. of course woodworking is perfectly valid and it stands to reason that a place renowned for this beautiful natural resource would produce craftspeople skilled in using it. indeed tasmania seems to attract fine woodworkers in a kind of cultural exchange, replacing those interested in industrial or product design who leave for mainland cities. when i began my studies in furniture design at university i suppose i too assumed i would pop out the other end of the course and become another woodworking designermaker. the truth is, i really don’t like woodwork. i also don’t like the look of the special timbers; i find a lot if it far too gaudy, especially highly figured and coloured timber. i also happen to really, really like working with metal. i love the strength, durability and coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       307  malleability of metal. i love the way it feels to work with and the enormous creative potential it offers. i have used a lot of different materials in my practice but looking back i can see it has been a process of elimination; a search for the right medium. i have fiddled about with wood, plastics, fibreglass and lots of fibre and fabric before realising that my passion is for metal. i still incorporate other materials into my work, but usually in a supporting role, as a means to an end, such as the ‘stone’ bowls shown above; there is a wooden substrate to give the bowls a nice solid feel, and to provide something to nail into. i also ‘borrow’ techniques and ideas from other disciplines. i have come to realise that my long held passion for fibre and textiles is about technique, not material. i frequently use these and other techniques, unconventionally, with metal. gradually, over about 10 years, i have more or less abandoned woodwork and now define myself as a metalworker. antithesis? not on any deliberate, conscious level. it is simply a matter of preference. but why? why would someone from the land of wood have a preference for metal? i suspect it does come ultimately from my upbringing and family. tasmania (indeed australia), is also the land of two other things of significance; mining, and ‘making do’. ingenuity and the ability to ‘make do’ with whatever is to hand is seen as a quintessentially australian trait; ingenuity born of necessity. these days we call it ‘thinking outside the square’, and mostly leave it to ‘designers’, probably because the essential ingredient of necessity has been more or less removed. my grandfather was an engineer, and operated a small alluvial tin mine in a remote part of tasmania. he often worked alone. he had to rely on his ingenuity, making do with whatever was available for repairs and maintenance both of the mining equipment and general requirements of a remote existence. i greatly admire this particular brand of ingenuity/problem solving, and i guess it was significant in my upbringing. i have never been formally trained in any specific technical discipline, which is perhaps why i don’t adhere to one. i have never learnt the ‘rules’ so i don’t feel bound to follow them. i learn various techniques as i need them or as they interest me, and add them to my eclectic set of skills. i experiment. i use a variety of metals in a lot of different forms, often salvaged. an array of materials demands an array of techniques. i invent my own way of doing things, with whatever materials i have to hand and whatever skills i have, just like my grandfather did. it seems to me that in a way i am following place centred traditions, just not the woodworking tradition that is apparently expected of me. rather, i follow a family tradition, or a rural and remote tradition, of working creatively with the materials that are available. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       308  reflection 3 – ray norman in the discussions leading up to this interview you question the notion that your work's ‘placedness’ is clear for all to see. from the inside looking out that is a reasonable question to posit. after all there are no unambiguous 'signposts' the place/s that inform it. yet somehow the proposition that it 'belongs' to a place in some ways is almost inescapable. if one didn't know your background, then maybe they would not know that you work in south east tasmania. nor perhaps, would they detect an hint of your family background or your family's connections to remote places that few, very few, people visit. but it is quite likely that they would very soon start asking themselves questions like, "what kind of place do these objects spring from?" clearly, this work is not made in a big city – say like new york, paris, london .... hobart even – nor informed by any kind of ‘international metropolitan’ sensibility. so, as soon as one says that to oneself, the next question in line to be answered is ever likely to be something link what kind of place would spawn such work – and it looks as much like it has been ‘spawned’ as it has been made. in a way, in this day and age, it is very likely that with the maker's name in hand a curious observer would very soon be able to answer such questions at some level. so from your perspective, in the making of the work, how much are you are conscious of the place/s that it seems are subliminally – perhaps overtly even – informing the work and the ‘making’? reflection 4 – sally brown from my perspective, i don’t feel at all conscious of the place that is informing the work. there is no deliberate attempt on my part to make my work look as though it comes from somewhere, or belongs to a particular place. in fact, there is no attempt to make my work look like it was made by sally brown, and yet it seems that i have a coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       309  quite distinctive style. i don't deny though that it does come from and belong to a place – tasmania, or southern tasmania evenhowever it is not at all contrived to be that way; rather, it happens organically. it seems to me to be a simple matter of having spent 30 years growing up surrounded by the particular brand of nature that this part of the world has to offer. i make my art objects in a way that looks pleasing to me; my idea of what is aesthetically pleasing comes from an appreciation of my natural surroundings, and thus the place is expressed through the art. when i spoke about my work last year (in a floor talk/discussion about my exhibition remade) i was asked that if i were to be plonked into a totally different environment say, new york city, would my work change to reflect those surroundings. the answer is no, my art making is not such an immediate response as that (some of my pieces have had a gestation of up to 10 years) and more importantly, if i were ‘transplanted’ my 30 years of tasmanian influence would still form the basis of my aesthetic sensibility. if i’d lived all my life in new york city, however, i suspect i'd be quite a different person and who knows what i'd be doing. this raises the question then, not whether or not the environment (or place) influences my work, but how. when i am making art, the thing i am conscious of is the material i’m using; what i can and can’t do, how i can manipulate/transform it. all the while i am making unconscious decisions about form/colour/scale/composition etc. which arise naturally and automatically from my personal aesthetic preferences. while i am making a piece, or often not until it’s made, i'll look at it and recognise something familiar, maybe there’s a pattern like sand ripples, or lichen, or a geological formation. sometimes it’s bleedingly obvious and i can't believe i hadn’t noticed earlier. sometimes it’s more ambiguous, or it might be reminiscent of two or three things simultaneously. these natural similes provide the titles for my art pieces, and sometimes influence the way the piece is finished, but they are not the starting point for my work. rather, they are my interpretation of the object i have made. i believe it is human nature to recognise, or even to seek out, something familiar in an unfamiliar or seemingly abstract object. we search our internal catalogue of imagery for a good match, and say “oh! it looks like ...”. other people, therefore, can (and do) interpret my work quite differently, drawing on their own experiences. i have sometimes been quite taken aback by others' interpretations. here are some examples. this 3 panel, hanging organza and pebble screen is titled ‘lapping screen’, partly because the panels pivot and overlap, and because the stitched pockets which contain the pebbles look to me like lines left in the pebbly sand by a receding tide. imagine my surprise to hear someone interpret it as towering office blocks in a city, with each pocket an office and each pebble an office worker! coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       310  reflection 5 – ray norman if you have spent any time at all in southern tasmania, and outside urban hobart, when you enter sally brown’s exhibition at launceston’s design centre you might well sense a hint of, a memory of, reminiscences of a southern tasmanian placescape. its presence is implanted in the objects. however, there’re no taswegian clichés, there’s no huon pine, there’re no tassie devils, no apples nor anything of that ilk. so, just what is it that invokes this placidness and that seems to have scorched itself into these objects? sally brown says that her work, her style, her practice, is informed by her ‘natural’ environment but somehow one senses that there is something more to it than that. there seems to be a kind of zen sensibility and a spareness that suggests that her practice is more than ‘informed’ by her placedness – its embedded in it perhaps. in a way the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       311  ‘wabi-sabi’ idea comes to mind but as convenient as it may be to settle there for an allegory, somehow that’s not quite it or even enough. the japanese architect tadao ando says, “wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not pergo; rice paper, not glass. it celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. it reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came … pared down to its barest essence, [its] the japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death.” yes, yes, sally brown’s brand of placedness is not a million miles away from wabi-sabi yet it has a kind of hereness, a nowness, and a smell of rawness about it that sets it apart somehow. there are vernacular hallmarks that announce a distinctive and idiosyncratic authenticity. the sensibility is insightful, more than it might be romantic; its intuitive and reflective; and it comes across as being instinctive. it is far away from being slick, chic or trendy – yet it is nonetheless elegant and quite polished in its own way. these ‘tasmanian’ objects pose questions to do with the making of place and ‘things’. questions like, do cultures shape and make the places you find them in? do places shape the cultures that inhabit them? what makes a homeplace? ‘place’ is an illusive and intangible idea. its especially so when ‘place’ and ‘home’ come together as ‘homeplaces’ are imagined and deeply rooted in inherited perceptions – the kind of insight that is quiet, private and instinctive. interestingly, this exhibition is entitled “remade,” that is remade rather than recycled or reused. sally brown says that there are “no rules” yet somehow there seems to be some even if they may not be sacrosanct – or anything that would disallow play. there is a contemporaneous sensibility at work here that draws on the ‘scrap yard’, the ‘opshop’ or the back shed rather than ‘the bush’, ‘the forest’ and clearly not a warehouse. this ‘remade’ sensibility here seems to bring with it a narrative of a kind but not one that is by necessity overtly fettered to, or adherent to, some political dogma. it is often said that tasmania’s landscapes are being exploited – mined? – but there is a different kind of ‘mining’ going on here that is intelligent – conceivably something that’s gentle, insightful and sensible. rather than some hardnosed pragmatism and the uniformity of the international disconnect that ‘dislocates’ much current cultural production – there is space in this work for poignancy ambiguity and private contemplation. rather than being invited to look at blended, and blanded, panoramas we are invited to spend some time looking at the world through that lens that the mathematician benoit mandelbrot’s fractals alerted us to – the part, the fraction, the place(?), that represents, embodies and invokes the whole. sally brown’s work is spare, pared back and ‘crafted’. the playful and often poetic conversations she had with herself, and that went on between her head and her hands, and that you find in her ‘drawing’ and journal, is audible in every piece. sally brown and the late rosalie gascoigne seem to share not only an explicit connectedness to place that is intensely local but also a vernacular and colloquial sense of materiality. rosalie gascoigne said of her materials that she liked “getting things in from the paddock. they've had the sun, they've had the rain, it's real stuff, it's not like stuff you buy from a hardware shop, i find that very inert and i remember rauschenberg said once, it's been somewhere, it's done something, you know when he gathered in all coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       312  his rubbish and did things. and it's got life essence in it, vitality even and dead stuff looks very dead to me.” while rosalie gascoigne described herself as ”an assembler” rather than as a ‘maker’, sally brown seems to be right at home in her studio; in her workshop; or at her workbench; or wherever it is that she does her making. like rosalie gascoigne’s “stuff” sally brown’s materials arrive invested with histories. sally brown says she thinks of herself as an artist cum designer who creates and makes “objects that are both functional and sculptural.” however one suspects that imaging her simply as a maker might not be at all insulting. one suspects that in those private conversations that one has with oneself away from the artworld, sally brown might be rather careless about artworld labels. sally brown’s attentiveness to materiality gives her work substance – as do the processes that are informed by her sense of materiality. likewise, the patterns, textures and colours that inhabit her ‘objects’ nurture her apparent bonds to ‘her place’– and it shines through in its omnipresence. there are stories and histories invested in these objects. there are narratives there too but like all good narratives they’re the ones we construct in front of the kind of object sally brown makes and with our memories and consciousness in top gear. we are all inveterate storytellers and we need very little prompting to get us going. while we can sense that sally brown is talking about her homeplace, in doing so, as often as not, she invokes our own places in the world, wherever they may be. there are layers to sally brown’s narratives. some are ubiquitous and to some extent are not so place specific. even though they may be constructed in another ‘homeplace’ many of these stories land right on our own doorstep. in the end, confronted by one of sally brown’s ‘objects’ we are almost unavoidably engaged with its placedness and perhaps thinking about the ways objects invoke such cultural memories and underpin our placedness. reflection 6 – bill boyd i have just had a run through sally's web sites, and this isn't the usual chuck-it-together stuff, is it? the word ‘crafted’ comes to mind. i get overwhelmed by a sense of respect of the sources and of the source materials in her objects. maybe this – respect – is an angle on understanding the links to place. places are not just thrown together, they grow and they mature and, in doing so, they necessarily eschew stereotype. except, of course, if they are designed as tourism fun parks or shopping malls or theme retirement residential estates or ... (all the things absent in tasmania??). likewise, place art (is there is such a thing?) can't just be thrown together, it can't be given instant age or the patina of ageing, despite the plethora of old fencepost touristic ticky-tack that mascarades as rural/bucholic/pastoral art/souvenirs, supposedly evoking the lost world of a tasmanian (insert any other rural place) past or present other-worldliness. there's no blithe pre-stressed weathering in sally’s work either, but a depth and honesty of texture and colour that evokes the true weathering (sensu maturing, rather than washing out) of an ancient land. sally’s tables and chairs could sit on a weathered cobble beach and be comfortably at home, respected by the cobbles as one of them, and respected by beach visitors as being of them. this is rich weathering, not wearing-away coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       313  weathering; it adds to the objects rather than removes from the objects, it is not erosion but accretion. sally’s creations seem to me to reflect a rich maturing thoughtful land, not a washed out or worn out land. it reminds me of the leathered skins of the bog people of europe ... you can almost hear them – both her objects and the bog people – still smiling. links http://www.sallybrown.com.au/ http://www.designcentre.com.au/exhibitions.php?exhibition_id=64 http://www.designcentreshop.com.au/2011/08/12/sally-brown/ this continuing discussion can be followed at the coolabahplacedness blog spot (http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au/) acknowledgments all the images are © sally brown. tasmanian-born artist sally brown lives and works in cygnet, in the huon/channel region of the state. sally has a bachelor of fine arts with honours from the university of tasmania, where she studied furniture design between 2000 and 2004. since 2000 sally has participated in numerous group exhibitions both in tasmania and nationally. sally’s work is represented in collections including the tasmanian museum and art gallery (tmag), the museum of old and new art (mona), and the tasmanian wood design collection (twdc). her work can be seen at her web site. (independent object artist. email: http://www.sallybrown.com.au) ray norman is a tasmanian-based artist, blogger, researcher, community networker and cultural jammer, with a background in studio jewelry and metalsmithing. he has been involved in the initiation of speculative community placemaking-cumcoolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       314  placemarking projects through interventionist cultural production. (zinghouseunlimited, trevallyn, australia. email: thezinghouse@7250.net) bill boyd is the professor of geography at southern cross university, and researches place, environment and landscape from several different perspectives – biophysical through to cultural. while he has spent many years examining long-term environmental change from both geological and archaeological perspectives, he is also inherently interested in cultural heritage and its construction, social relationships with landscape, and the arts. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, australia. email: william.boyd@scu.edu.au) microsoft word article jose dalisay coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 bali story jose dalisay the brochures said it was paradise on earth and i was eager to believe them. months before the bali trip i’d heard nothing but “paradise” from the blessed few who had actually been there, whom i learned to single out in manila’s cafes by the clove-laced kretek they puffed on with conspicuous economy. it was all right to believe in paradise, but with the right sort of savvy. everyone maintained, after duly rhapsodizing, that the whole routine had been done to death and that, objectively speaking, bali was third world after all—in per capita income, infrastructure, urban sleaze, et cetera. “you’ll feel right at home,” a friend assured me. i had to beware of kitsch, bargain bronzes, aussie rednecks, and resentful natives. aquavit and lomotil would be sensible precautions. i listened politely but i had my own ideas. no one was going to spoil bali for me. i would discover my own bali, which surely was large and complicated enough to afford a fresh surprise for just one more adventurer. i looked forward to scaling temples, to sniffing orchids, to choosing fabrics, to miming shiva before a nikon with a hibiscus in my ear, and i didn’t care if a million other guests had gone to the same party. i would seek out the ineffable and, proclaiming it my subject, i would emerge with my own special bali to go with the kretek. i was going to bali for a conference of writers. we had been invited from all over asia to devote a week’s wisdom to “literature, freedom, and the twenty-first century.” i met some of my fellow delegates on the plane ride from jakarta. “awful waste of money,” said one of them, a large man who introduced himself as aram. dark, robust, and with locks flowing down to his collar, he was standing in the aisle with a drink in hand, fresh from the galley where he had been chatting up the garuda ladies. i hated cynics. i was editing my little speech, tweaking up the irony here and there. “what do you mean?” “it’s all been done before, the arguments, the resolutions. i can summarize the conference for you, right now. i can assure you with absolute confidence that we will uncover nothing new about literature, freedom, and the twenty-first century.” “then why are you going?” “to have fun, of course, as long as i’m not paying. i say let’s drop the charade and enjoy the view. toyabungkah should be quite a sight.” “have you been there?” “heavens, no. truth is, my last time in indonesia was in ‘72. mostly i’ve been in london these past ten years.” “i thought you were indonesian, or indian.” copyright © jose dalisay 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 “malaysian, actually. it’s hard to tell, isn’t it?” “very.” “but you’re filipino.” i sincerely began to dislike aram. “yes. how did you know?” “it says so right there. that is your paper, isn’t it?” he had been reading it upside down. “yes,” i said, checking quickly for typos. “well, we’re supposed to play good-neighborly all-asians for a week, mix-mix. it won’t work, but there’s someone i wouldn’t mind trying a little mixing with.” he raised his cup to a woman three seats ahead. i’d noticed her too in the departure lounge at soekarno hatta. she’d had a huge apple-green floppy hat on, which was interesting enough, but beneath it was an oriental audrey hepburnish face which, i was instantly convinced, had sent unrepentant men to prison. i’d dredged up some excuse to chat her up—the flight schedule, i think it was—and her response had transported me. “oh, lovely, i’m going to that meeting, too.” i was married, of course— i am married—but then this was, i told myself, bali. in good time i established that she was thai and that she worked as a correspondent for a hong kong women’s weekly, and discovered that she, too, was married, to a briton she’d met at school in england. i had the sinking feeling that she was a novel with a great plot that i was never going to get to write, but all the same i drafted short-story scenarios in my head. it was preeya whom i was toning up my language for, but now aram had obviously seen her, too. “do you have a paper to present?” i asked aram. “no,” he said, and i was happy. “i can speak on anything right off the top of my head. i was a barrister in london, when i wasn’t being a poet. remind me to give you a copy of my new book of poems, all of them inspired by—well, the sheer marvel of the moment, if you know what i mean. it’s a waste of time, drafting—for some of us, anyway.” then he marched up the aisle and, to my amazement, faced preeya squarely and began reciting a poem: “how often have i said before/that no soft ‘if’, no ‘eitheror’/can keep my obdurate male mind/from loving true, and flying blind?...” to my even greater amazement preeya giggled and clapped as aram bowed to her and to the rest of the economy class. two muslim delegates seated across the aisle made sighing noises and shook their fezzes. still flushed with surplus passion, aram trundled back to his seat behind me, grinning sweetly at the muslims along the way. “did you write that?” he leaned close to me and brushed my nape with a blast of his nutty breath. “no, of course not, that’s too good for me.” “so much for the marvelous moment,” i said. “hmm, well, the poem was there, but i created the event. that’s wha—” the plane hit and air pocket and lurched. a shard of peanut stung me in the ear. “hey, look, there’s bali,” he said remorselessly. “bali, just from the brochure, i love you! “i’d die for you, and you for me/so furious is our jealousy/and if you doubt this to be true/kill me outright, lest i kill you!” three hours out of denpasar airport, travelling inland by bus past the tourist hotels and the shops with the hideous monster-masks, past terraced fields and hillsides thick with cinnamon and clove, we arrived at danao batur. and seeing danao batur we surrendered haplessly to all that had gone before us—to geology, to fable, to custom, and to aram’s moment, a painful one, a stillness awesome to endure. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 out of bali’s cheek, prehistoric violence had gouged an immense caldera, on the lip of which we paused. hundreds of feet below lay danao batur, which may once have been a sprawling crater lake but which had been reduced to a silver crescent running along the deepest bend at the base of the vestigial crater-mountain. lean dugouts were scattered like hyphens about the water. toyabungkah, the village itself, rested along batur’s inner shore. it was a loose throw of houses with roofs of straw and iron. bright green strips in boxy brown patches marked gardens in the rich volcanic earth. everything else was lake, mountain, and sky. the sky was wide and hovered low, skimming the tooth-edge of the crater across the gulf and softening it with fog—a strange effect, because everything else bristled smartly in the sun. we rode down to toyabungkah on a narrow asphalt road which curved and heaved and dropped with the terrain, the roughness of which evoked the memory, frozen underfoot, of great uneven surges of lava welling up onto the topsoil eons ago until the earth had choked and relented for the time being. huge black boulders, pitted and mottled, sat on either side of the road. and everywhere, on the open land, in gashes on the rockface and straining from beneath the boulders, the grass grew, fat-bladed. it had been warm up on the rim but it was cool down in toyabungkah. we were close to the equator but we had been warned to bring sweaters for toyabungkah’s evenings. i thought that perhaps the coolness collected in pools, like water, with water. it was a sticky coolness, the kind most western people hate when it afflicts them in their home countries. but we were to discover that toyabungkah had a balm for this distress, and i fancied that the annoyance had been designed by some balinese water-sprite so that remedy might be administered and the guest indebted further. i can say even today that having visited there, one will never sweat again, whether in new york or in stuttgart or manila (where it is always humid), without dipping one’s soul back into the bracing chill of danao batur. we were billeted in a small resort built into a hillside overlooking the water. i realized over the first few days that aram had been right on the plane about the conference: the true wonders of the occasion lay outside the meeting hall, and outside was where, by tacit agreement, most of us soon found ourselves spending more of our time. and we got to know each other, like boccaccio’s wantons, by telling stories, the more outrageous the better, over the mellow bintang beer in marini’s place. marini was a local girl in her late teens who ran a store by the lakefront. under the influence of bintang and the crush of starlight, many a colleague promised marini a sonnet cycle and left a tip of a thousand rupiahs. it was some menagerie. nirman was one happy sikh whom we induced to reveal to us what went on beneath a turban. his fellow singaporeans included a ph.d. in comparative religion from emory and a critic with a portuguese past. the thais loved elvis presley. ignored by his more abstemious muslim compatriots, aram continued plundering his store of graves and yeats for any and all ladies in present company, especially marini who spoke very little english and for whom aram therefore reserved his choicest doggerel. we were shortly joined by the inevitable stray american and by a fragile australian doing her master’s at wollongong. the american, a thirtyish embassy man, had served in vietnam with the medevac crews and liked to sit back and sip his bintang and gaze sagely across the water, while the rest of us argued fiercely about the politics of pen. i sustained my half-hearted courtship of my favorite thai and told her that she looked a lot like my wife. but preeya, who bore the unlikely surname of fitzroy and whose speech was full of h’s and cute diminutives, seemed more amused by a local lad ten years her junior who brought her flowers and massaged her neck. this squire, coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 whose name was subur, followed preeya like a puppy. “he says he adores my collarbone, he really does,” preeya told me, and i was glad to annoy her by laughing. the australian girl confessed to me that a countryman of mine had once proposed to her and that it had frightened her so much that she had burst out crying. it was much like that for the week we spent there. we made our speeches in the mornings and rewarded ourselves with luncheons of steaming rice and the lake’s own fish—gourami broiled with cloves—with krupuk, watermelon, and snakefruit on the side. the afternoon papers were dispensed with more quickly. then, about half past four and after a short siesta, we put on our jackets and marched down to marini’s, while the older people strolled elsewhere to sip tea and to watch the sunset from the hilltop behind us. we brought flashlights with us, because the days were short, the beer was cheap, and the footpath was tricky for the homebound reveler. i usually carried a stick to ward off the dogs. aram on the other hand took a large bath towel along. marini’s was near the hot springs, and there was always the chance that marini would lose her senses and go down to the hot springs with him. that was the balm i spoke of earlier. toyabungkah was famous in the district for its hot springs and we had learned about them practically as soon as we arrived. the morning right after, just before daybreak, aram and i followed a balinese boy down to the lake to investigate. it was true: the community did bathe there—grown men and women, boys and girls—without a stitch on and without being embarrassed in the least at the sight of us. apparently we were neither the first nor the last alien visitors to the place and i simply presumed that all the locals had tired of protecting their modesty. aram and i persuaded each other to strip down to our shorts—but no further—and to soak ourselves in the steaming black pool, which was actually a crook in the lake marked off from the main body by a ring of stones. i ventured beyond the stones and discovered that the water on the other side was suddenly deep and cold. within our nook we could lean on a rock and let the water lap at our armpits. i caught a whiff of foul air and i thought that the place had gone fetid from all the waste, but aram assured me that it was simply sulfur or ammonia, that it came from sterile furnaces underground, and that it was a cheap price to pay for such a glorious bathtub. “i’m told,” aram said as a full-breasted maiden poured water on her head before us, “that at least once a year the people sacrifice an animal to the gods of the lake. they rowed a buffalo out to the middle last week and drowned it there.” it sounded too quaint to be true. “where did you hear that?” “from the bus driver, yesterday.” “do you speak bahasa indonesia?” “not really. i used bahasa malaysia, but you see we have a lot of words in common.” “i spoke with the driver, too,” i said. “he didn’t tell me anything about animal sacrifice.” now aram seemed surprised. “do you speak bahasa?” “no, english. the driver spoke english.” we stared at each other and broke out laughing. the balinese girl left our side of the ring of stones and stepped over to the deep. she swam out and her glistening hair and powerful shoulders taunted me. two younger boys who may have been her brothers chased after her with gleeful splashes. far across on the other side of the lake, the inner rim of the caldera bared its tooth-edge in the sunrise, the cloud foam that would sheath it having yet to gather. i cursed myself for having left my camera up in my room. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 “damnedest place i’ve ever been,” aram said. “can you tell me where we are?” “paradise, of course.” “you know, my filipino friend, we belong here, you and i. just look at us, look at our faces, our bodies, look at theirs. who’s to say we’re not balinese?” “we’re too fat. and we keep our shorts on.” “not next time, i won’t.” “let’s ask preeya out here.” “yes, let’s,” aram agreed, grinning. “do you think she will?” “no, i said, immediately despondent. i’d tried in vain to find her after dinner the night before, and i imagined that she was cruelly avoiding me. “actually she strikes me as the stuffy type, you know what i mean?” “come on, you’re just put off by her last name and her accent, admit it.” around us the haze had lifted completely. the girl was swimming back to us. dogs were yapping up the footpath. “you also went to school there, you don’t have an accent.” “i didn’t stay there long enough, and i already have an accent. comes from all the curry i eat.” “why did you leave england?” i had read on the back cover of his book that he was now handling shipping and labor cases in penang. he thought about that for a while and picked out a pebble that had lodged between his toes. “it was too bloody cold.” he threw the pebble into the rocks. we sat there quietly, savoring the caustic action of the steam and the scouring our backs got from the sand. in the distance from across danao batur a boat came into view—a covered, flat-bottomed one, the type that carried people and livestock. a stiff wind suddenly blew down the mountain and i ducked into the water, rolling on my belly. when i arose i saw aram wading over to the deep side, an orange starburst perching on his right shoulder. i saw more orange starbursts floating on the water, blossoms of a kind shaken loose from a nearby tree. then i heard music and nearly fainted from the aggravation of the moment. i thought i was hallucinating, perhaps through the agency of some sweet vapor in the pool, but it was true: a gamelan orchestra was playing in the wind, casting a fine mesh of tinkles into the lake. then i saw preeya in a purple caftan, jaunting down the footpath, toting red field glasses. a young man whom i was later to know as subur carried her stereo cassette player and had turned it on full blast. she greeted us brightly, bending over a ledge above me. aram was far away so only i was able to respond. “you look smashing,” i said. she looked totally out of context but it was an easy lie. “thank you,” she said. “what’s it like down there?” “come and see for yourself,” i said. “no, thank you,” she said, bringing the glasses up to her eyes. “i’m waiting for that boat. i want to talk to the boatman. will you come with me?” “why, yes, of course,” i said, happy to help anyone, anytime. “what do you want to see him for?” “i want to arrange a trip, a boat ride across the lake. come along, if you like. we can bring aram, too.” “uhrm. what’s there to see?” “the strangest thing i’d ever heard of. a cemetery village called trunpa, trunni, something. they leave their dead people under trees by the lakeshore, rolled up in mats. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 a family of thieves runs the place, can you believe it? i learned about it from subur. have you met subur, by the way? he’s marini’s cousin.” “no.” subur stood behind preeya, looking extremely uncomfortable. i caught him glancing at preeya and at the stereo in his hands. “charming young fellow. it’s wicked but i think i’ve acquired an escort. he assures me this thing about the graveyard’s quite true.” “what do you want to go there for?” “nothing. just to see. take a picture, maybe. write a story, maybe. who knows.” i looked behind me to where she had trained her glasses. the village, if it existed, was too far for me to see. there was only the boat, which was getting bigger, and aram who seemed to be swimming toward it. i had stood up in the shallow water without realizing it and i felt a very slight swirl grabbing at my shins like hands. i hopped out of the lake and covered myself with a towel. subur began to fidget and to look at his toes. “well, will you help me?” i nodded at subur. “why don’t you ask him?” preeya curled an arm around the boy. “he refuses to discuss it any further. he refuses to go over. it’s true, he says, but he doesn’t want to see it. oh, subur.” i looked at aram, who was keeping his dot of a head just above the wavelet raised by the passing boat. “some other time,” i found myself saying. “we’ll see it some other time.” in the week that was to follow, the subject of trunyan, which was the name of the place, would come up once or twice again in the conversation at marini’s. we walked along the lakeshore and threw pebbles into the water but no one made the crossing. my interest in preeya perked up anew and i kept devising fiendish ways to bump off subur, but nothing happened. when the conference was over we spent a free day at denpasar, where we bought souvenir t-shirts and ogled the topless sheilas pinking in the sun along kuta beach. “damnedest thing i’ve ever seen,” aram said. jose dalisay has published over 25 books of fiction and nonfiction and is a professor of english and creative writing at the university of the philippines,where he serves as director of the institute of creative writing. he has been a fulbright, hawthornden, rockefeller, david tk wong, and civitella ranieri fellow.his second novel, soledad's sister, was shortlisted for the inaugural man asian literary prize. he was a guest of bruce bennett at adfa and participated in the sydney writers festival in 2008. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 editorial: when time stands still cornelis martin renes copyright© cornelis martin renes 2014. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. “when i’m actually developing my imagery, time stands still, i truly exist in that moment” (pamela johnston in caroline ambrus’s book the unseen art scene: 32 australian women artists (irrepressible press, 1995). my friend and colleague dr janie conway-herron had an intimate and long-standing relationship with dr pamela dahl-helm johnston, i so close that elaborating this commemorative issue was both a necessary and taxing task for her. pam and janie became sisters by adoption at their acceptance into ruby langford-ginibi’s kinship circle. they also shared a deeply-felt friendship and a commitment with feminism and indigenous australia which they expressed foremost through their professional and creative activity: pamela in her visual art initiatives, exhibitions and academic performance in the field of aboriginal studies and the creative arts; janie in her involvement with music, rock against racism and in her practice as a novelist and university lecturer in creative writing. for personal and professional reasons, janie was keen for me to meet pam. it was never to happen. when ruby langford ginibi passed away in 2011, janie was invited by dr sue ballyn, coolabah editor, founder and co-director of the university of barcelona australian studies centre and good friend of ruby’s, to work on a special edition to commemorate ruby’s life and work. janie gracefully accepted and naturally turned to pamela to co-write a monographic piece in dialogic form. this structure intimately reflected the border-crossing nature of their contact, which had already delivered other pieces of a similar collaborative shape in their academic life and attended to the issues of indigeneity and australianness, which also included contributions by the late dr lorraine johnson riordan. as various writers and artists dwelling in the less traditional margins of indigenous australian identity have experienced, both janie’s and pamela’s identities (as well as their adoptive mother’s, ruby langford ginibi’s) have been the object of public scrutiny over the years and affirmed by some and questioned by others. whereas janie’s family history nevertheless appears to point towards a connection with the roma people in the uk as she describes in her novel beneath the grace of clouds (cockatoo books 2010) and a recent text journal interview (april 2014), pamela’s origins have always been located in suburban aboriginality. pamela’s art work and academic writing have been an ongoing comment on the nettly ins and outs of non-traditional indigenous australian belonging (see conway’s, conroy-wood’s and c.moore’s pieces in this coolabah issue in particular). her work makes an eloquent claim, be coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 it in image or word, for in-between spaces of identity which acknowledge the multi-faceted character of any sense of home in contemporary australia. many observers would concur that any kind of belonging is much more complex than black and white definitions of identity can encompass. when pamela herself died unexpectedly and prematurely in february last year, once again sue ballyn asked janie conway if she were interested in preparing a memorial issue, now for her deceased friend and sister in arms. after due contemplation janie decided to accept and found several members from pam’s circle of family, friends and colleagues willing to contribute to this volume. the result is an eclectic variet y of pieces, representative of pam’s complex, inspiring personality, which left no-one indifferent. pamela dahl-helm johnston passed away as the consequence of a motorcycle accident while she was enjoying a hobby she had taken increasing pleasure in with her partner, james singleton hooper, and which had occupied an ever-growing space in her life. thus, “she went down in a blaze of glory,” her obituary in the sydney morning herald of 28 february 2013 read. although her time may stand still, we hope that this tribute will contribute to keeping her fire alive. cornelis martin renes coolabah co-editor co-director of the university of barcelona centre of australian studies may 2014 i pam was known variously as pam johnston dahl helm, pam dal-helm johnston and just pam johnston. for general usage we have used the name she commonly used which was pam dahl-helm johnston but at other times when artworks and publications are attributed to either johnston or johnston dahl helm we have used that nomenclature. microsoft word annablagrove2.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     19  red dog: the pilbara wanderer1 anna blagrove copyright©2013 anna blagrove. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this article seeks to provide an overview and analysis of the 2011 australian film, red dog as a popular cultural product from western australia. set in a working class mining community in the 1970s, i argue that it provides a new outback legend in the form of red dog. this article stems from a review of red dog as film of the year written for the forthcoming directory of world cinema: australian and new zealand second edition from intellect books. red dog is an australian film released in 2011 based on the many stories of a real-life red kelpie dog that lived in northern west australia in the 1970s. the location of the story in the red pilbara desert is integral, as red dog is presented intrinsically as an australian legend about loyalty and belonging to a place as well as, in red dog’s case, a person. the film was a surprise commercial and critical success, taking large profits at the australian box office and garnering numerous awards. in this article, i shall assess the success of the film, attempting to explain some of the appeal to audiences. in the film, truck driver thomas, (luke ford), enters a roadhouse in western australia as the locals and workers from a nearby mine debate how to euthanize a dog. seizing on the diversion, publican jack collins (noah taylor) tells thomas the story of red dog (koko), who has brought the disparate people of the mining town of dampier together as a community. in flashback, red dog befriends many locals, including the mining company immigrant employees, but stays with no single master – he is a ‘dog for everyone’. this changes when american traveller, john grant (josh lucas), takes a job as the mine’s bus driver. red dog develops a strong bond with grant, who becomes his ‘true master’. grant begins a romance with sassy secretary nancy grey (rachael taylor), but after proposing to nancy, grant is killed in a road accident. red dog is left to pine and wander all over the pilbara desert and beyond in a search of his absent master. some time later, he returns to the town where he fights his archenemy, red cat. after eating poisoned                                                          1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     20  meat left by red cat’s owners, red dog is taken to the roadhouse, where he lies when thomas arrives. one of the miners proposes that they erect a statue of red dog. as they celebrate the idea, red dog leaves unnoticed. he is later found lying dead on john grant’s grave. a year later, thomas returns with a puppy, as the statue of the original red dog is unveiled. the real red dog was renowned for his loyalty to his master, and his habit of roaming the desert in the 1970s. in 2001, british author louis de bernières (best known for captain corelli’s mandolin) visited dampier, heard the story and published a novella based on the legend, also called red dog. it was from this book that daniel taplitz adapted his screenplay. the film’s producer, nelson woss, bought a red kelpie named koko from a dog breeder two years before filming began and trained him to star as red dog. australian rising star, rachael taylor (transformers, 2007) plays nancy, and american, josh lucas (sweet home alabama, 2002) is john grant. director, kriv stenders, previously worked on little-known, hard-hitting, urban drama boxing day (2007) and heritage thriller lucky country (2009) among other titles. other collaborators were cinematographer, geoffrey hall (chopper, 2000, dirty deeds, 2002) and baz luhrmann’s long-time editor jill bilcock (strictly ballroom, 1992, moulin rouge!, 2001). prolific screen composer cezary skubiszewski (two hands, 1999, bran nue dae, 2009, the sapphires, 2012) provided the score. the film won seven if awards from nine nominations, and two aacta awards (formerly the afi awards) including best film from eight nominations in 2011. red dog and john grant in the pilbara desert © david darcy 1 the film had an estimated $8.5 million production budget and on release in 2011 made $21.3 million at the australian box office (screen australia 2012), rendering the film a massive commercial success. it was the highest grossing coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     21  domestic film of that year, and sits eighth on screen australia’s 2012 list of top australian films at the australian box office. red dog is also the first australian film, not backed by a hollywood studio, to pass $20 million gross since strictly ballroom in 1992. it has since sold millions of copies on dvd, and is the third biggest selling dvd of all time in australia, behind only avatar (2009) and finding nemo (2003) (bodey 2012). what is it that struck a chord with australian audiences? in this article, i suggest that a number of different factors combined to create this runaway hit, including the setting, the comedic script, nostalgic elements, the love story and the pure ‘australianness’ of the story and its characters. the backdrop for the story is the vast, red pilbara desert with its immense iron-ore mines and its beaches and turquoise indian ocean off the attractive western australian coast. the film showcases the natural beauty of the region that serves as a scenic background for the representation of close friendship in rural, working communities. however, the use of the landscape operates as more than just a scenic backdrop. in his seminal essay on the australian environment on film, ross gibson describes landscape as ‘a leitmotif and a ubiquitous character’ (gibson, 1992). often the function of this ‘leitmotif’ is to highlight issues of the very real threat of isolation, starvation and eventual death in the vast dry landscape, the rural versus urban idyll/nightmare dichotomy and the romance of the outback. in red dog, the danger of the outback is demonstrated by john grant’s premature and sudden death on the desert road. the familiar australian bush-story theme of mateship, loyalty and respect between man and dog; a staple element of australian working life, is highlighted in red dog. there is also a distinct element of nostalgia for the 1970s exemplified by the selection of ‘oz rock’ songs on the soundtrack, the type of ‘utes’ the men drive and the beer they drink in the pub. the theme of belonging is also explored via the only real villains in the film, a cantankerous, dog-hating couple, the cribbages, who deny the existence of any kind of community in dampier. in mr cribbage’s words, “there’s just a bunch of dirty miners working, drinking and whoring”. this provides an opportunity for the townsfolk to rally in solidarity against the couple in support of red dog. red dog has an inter-generational appeal, with animal action for young people (including the cartoon-like scraps between red cat and red dog), and nostalgic elements for older audiences who lived through the 1970s. comedy generally has wide and broad appeal; the number one run-away australian film success of all time, crocodile dundee (1986), was also a comedy about ‘australianness’ set partly in stunning outback locations. the irreverent humour of the ‘ocker’ working-men is certainly one of red dog’s attractions, along with the romance and pathos. red dog can be viewed as a much lighter version of wake in fright (1971), a cult, outback-set film that both red dog’s producer, nelson woss, and director, kriv stenders, have referenced as an influence (barkham 2012). this homage is most recognizable in a gambling scene in the pub. at first glance it evokes the game of ‘two-up’, that features so ominously in wake in fright, but is comically revealed to be the men of dampier betting on how quickly red can eat a bowl of dog food. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     22  the supporting cast are mostly mining company employees ranging from good old ‘ocker aussie’, peeto (john batchelor), and depressive jocko (rohan nichol) to italian immigrant vanno (arthur angel) and chuposki and dzambaski (the eastern european ‘ski patrol’, played by radek jonak and costa ronin). it is these characters that provide representations of nationalities that some audiences may see as affectionately comic, and some as shallow stereotypes. a comedic subversion of the tough, masculine working-class australian stereotype is seen in peeto, the burly, bearded bloke from melbourne. this plays out it in a scene in which peeto is exposed as having a penchant for relaxing in his donga (a portable housing unit, typically for rural workers), with some knitting while listening to jaunty jazz records. the supporting cast also features prolific character-actor, noah taylor, as the town publican and a memorable cameo from australian national treasure, bill hunter as a quint-from-jaws type, in the last role he filmed before his death in 2011. new zealand’s keisha castle-hughes (whale-rider, 2002) also makes an appearance in a small role as a veterinary assistant and loveinterest for the italian romantic, vanno. red dog was released the same year as steven spielberg’s war horse, a similar tale that centred on an animal’s heroic loyalty to its master, but manages to avoid that film’s overt sentimentality and earnest tone. red dog received mostly positive reviews, exemplified by the declaration by a critic from the age of it as an ‘instant aussie classic’ (schembri 2011). however, other critics denounced its lack of indigenous characters and its sentimentalising of the lucrative, but environmentally destructive, mining industry (burnside 2011). defending the film, director stenders argues that red dog is not a documentary and is instead intended as a feel-good ‘celebration’ of the birth of the modern mining boom, upon which australia’s latter-day economic success is based (barkham 2012). collins and davis state a theory that “genre films (this including comedy) function for their generic audience as either mythic or ideological solutions to ongoing unreconciled social conflicts”. in this way, they claim the appeal of australian cinema to audiences can be the tendency for some of the films to “backtrack over the dilemmas of a minor english-speaking nation negotiating a place for itself in global politics” (collins & davis, 2004). red dog can be viewed as a popular new outback legend that australia has welcomed to its canon, along with those of ‘waltzing matilda’, ned kelly and the fictitious crocodile dundee. it features the universal narrative theme of a dog’s loyalty for its master, in the style of scotland’s greyfriar’s bobby or japan’s hachikō. it also has a post-colonial theme of ‘damn the british’ as exemplified in the key motivational speech that jocko delivers to the community in the pub at the film’s conclusion. he denounces the town’s namesake, seventeenth century english explorer william dampier, whose written account of their part of the country amounts to “too many flies”. a statue of william dampier is about to be erected in the town and jocko exclaims, “well i say, to hell with all that! why should we have a statue honouring a poncey, pommie, fly-hating aristocrat? or for that matter a fat general or, god help us, a stinking politician?” the mythic australian distrust of authority is also demonstrated here. jocko instead suggests that they erect a statue to “somebody who lives and breathes this vastness and coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     23  desolation. somebody that has red dust stuck up their nose, and in their eyes and in their ears and up their arses!” he goes on to highlight the australian notion of mateship, delineating it from a british militaristic camaraderie: “mates who are loyal by nature not design”. jocko concludes by suggesting to unanimous approval that they should be honouring, “somebody that represents the pilbara in all of us and i say that somebody, dammit, is a dog!” the legacy of the film’s success is already in evidence, as demonstrated by reports that a stage musical of red dog is in development – aligning red dog with priscilla: queen of the desert (1994), another australian film comedy success that was adapted into a stage musical to great acclaim. the use of the australian landscape in both of these films is vital to expressing their otherness, in comparison to the cinematic dominance of hollywood’s representation of american landscapes. they also illustrate a shared experience of the impact of the harsh and vast but beautiful environment in character-formation for all australians. red dog credits year of release: 2011 country of origin: australia studio: endymion films, the woss group director: kriv stenders producers: julie ryan, nelson woss screenwriter: daniel taplitz, based on the novel by louis de bernières cinematographer: geoffrey hall editor: jill bilcock production designer: ian gracie duration: 92 minutes genre: comedy drama cast: koko, rachael taylor, josh lucas, noah taylor, luke ford, rohan nichol, john batchelor, arthur angel references barkham, patrick, ‘red dog: an audience with australia’s best friend’, the guardian online, 9 february 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/feb/09/red-dog-australia-bestfriend. bodey, michael, 8 february 2012, ‘local hit reigns again as top selling dvd’, the australian. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/localhit-reigns-again-as-top-selling-dvd/story-e6frg9sx-1226265114081. accessed 12 november 2012. burnside, sarah, 16 august 2011, ‘red dog whitewashes the pilbara’, http://newmatilda.com. accessed 12 november 2012. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     24  collins, felicity and therese davis, australian cinema after mabo, cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 2004. ross gibson, south of the west: postcolonialism and the narrative construction of australia, bloomington: indiana university press, 1992. schembri, jim, 5 august 2011, the age, http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/red-dog-201108041id0c.html. accessed 25 november 2011. footnote 1. red dog and john grant in the pilbara desert © david darcy http://blogafi.org/2011/08/04/the-chance-to-work-on-a-broad-canvas-krivstenders-on-directing-red-dog/david-darcy_8688/ anna blagrove is a ph.d. researcher at the university of east anglia in the united kingdom. her ma film studies dissertation was entitled ‘dreamtime to screen-time: an exploration of the representation of aborigines in contemporary australian road movies’ and her ph.d. thesis is an audience study of youth engagement with non-mainstream cinema in the uk. she is also employed as film education officer at cinema city in norfolk. (school of film, tv & media, university of east anglia, united kingdom. email a.blagrove@uea.ac.uk) microsoft word annadorrington4.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 my immigrant plight or the question of 49/51 1 anna dorrington copyright©2013 anna dorrington. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. introduction i have decided to approach this essay from a personal point of view. would it help to read up about how other people did it, what were their coping mechanisms? would it help if i could quote the statistics of how many elderly people emigrate back to their country of origin. maybe, i say, but i am not in the business of statistics or politics. i am driven by emotions and my way of making sense of those is through my art practise. in fact, i tend to stay away from artists that line up too much with my work. the german artist martin honert comes to mind, but i will not look at more of his art, i want to find my own way within myself. context what makes art interesting for me can be measured at how long i want to engage with the consumption of it, seconds, minutes? if it is very relevant to me, then it will come back into my present mind again and again, and will have a long-lasting effect. why is that so? david lewis-william, in his book the mind in the cave, commented in what the art historian ernst gombrich has pointed out, pictures have the power to move, but they in fact convey very little information. because people read pictures in different ways images always remain semantically equivocal. the best that can be said for pictures is that they trigger memories of information that has to be absorbed in different ways, that is, by experience and verbally. this is exactly what a picture, or art in all its manifestations, can do for me. the meaning hidden in the artwork will align itself with my story and make the experience worthwhile. so it is not the obvious that attracts me but its power of engaging me that makes me linger. in my art practice, i follow this inner story. it is akin to the literary practice of writing in the way of stream of consciousness. i admit, my studio is a mess, it is filled with objects that i have picked up somewhere, and which are pushing themselves forward at the right moment. barbara stafford, in her book echo objects, writes on this subject. what is that particular line, colour or combination of any number of marks reminding 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 us? is it in our dna, our subconscious, or our memory? i love the surprises my way of making art throws at me, it is an indulgence that gives me great pleasure and satisfaction. i am an immigrant, i am happy here now, or so i tell myself. so why is it that i have to go back to the old country once a year in order to cleanse my sentimental blockages? i am always glad to come back to australia, after a month or so in the old country. i am thoroughly sick of the old ways by then. i have come to accept that i am somewhat stuck in the middle, and that i might as well make the best of it. after the packed years of running a business and bringing up children, both of which brought with them a lack of thinking time and a crash course in the australian way of life, i am now finding that i have time to contemplate what it means to be me. life in australia goes on in a somewhat steady flow. here in australia i experience a smooth way through life, the days go by, the differences in the mirror are tiny. the yearly visits to germany are different though, the reality of time passing is more obvious. relatives and friends are one year older, and this brings back to me the urgency of having to see them again. another old relative has died, i knew it was getting bad when the bathrooms were fitted with new gadgets. my hesitancy grows when i go there, but i feel the need to build up a store of memories, getting ready for the time when another one has gone, and when i have to sustain myself through memories alone. as i get older, the cracks in my understanding of place and identity are getting deeper and more obvious. the cultural fault lines that had been covered up by work and family duties are now very visible and are getting noisier in my head. i find myself lucky though to be able to express these emotions in my work as a visual artist. place and identity, almost lost, find new ways to form in order to survive, a new hybrid personal understanding and production of culture is being formed out of necessity. when floating between my memories some echoes are stronger. i do not know why. i just work with what goes on in my head, the progress of work is determined by the sensitivities that are formed by my memories. my sense of place is often more disturbed when it is time to change from one season to another. it is as if the years of my early youth in northern europe have imprinted a rhythm that i find hard to change. alienation with the landscape and place happens when what is going on around me does not tally up with what my body has seemingly stored in every fibre that it should be different. i deal with this mal-alignment in my first image. my art practice image number one is an intaglio print with some collage added to it. it shows the outlines of a group of rocks from the australian bush in the hinterland of brisbane. i have throughly arranged the images in a multiple way till it sat well with my inner visual eye. reminding me about familiar landscapes from my youth, some outlines are repeated, and others are only used once. to make it complete i inhabited the landscape with my own family, some buildings, and animals from my ‘other landscape’. it pleases me now. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 as my studies at university progressed, i acquired more skills and tools for the expression of my cultural needs, and i am now in a place where i find that the materiality of the object tells me a story and vice versa. my work might start with an idea, an image a story, in the above image a landscape, but it might also be that some object grabs my attention and starts telling me what to use it for. barbara stafford, in her book echo objects, writes: “… sometimes visual perception does not produce an optical image at all. instead, it re-enacts a memory from the past stimulated by touch or gesture. or occasionally, it might present us simply with the jigsaw puzzle of raw sensations.” this often forms the beginning of my works of art, a seed has been sown and from it my artwork will evolve. image number one: altered landscape having started as a print maker, i soon found it necessary to find other ways to express myself. i am a scavenger of techniques now. anything that i need to express myself with i will use. i find this liberating and exciting. on a deeper level it allows me to access memories that were until now inaccessible. my foray into found objects have at times found me near tears when realising where i had seen this object before. now i cannot make art without going into assemblage and collage and whatever else is necessary for my cultural production. for the second images i used the tool of breakage. i break things up in order to show the state of mind that i am in when i think about an image or a feeling, is it anger or despair? going to germany only once a year, i am not privy to the build-up of situations, i am confronted with the story, i am not part of it. some part of my history has been broken or changed. the image is not complete, i have to make sense of it, or at least try to. these porcelain bowls (image number three) represent my family. they were all made from the same mould, the same parents. i have broken some of them in order to experience the feeling of fracture. i have then tried to ‘put it back together again’, yet the scars are visible. the passage of time is included in the image. i find this a universal coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 image, we can all relate to the time that stands between the first image of a bowl and the second image. like bookmarks, the story is contained in-between the two pieces. how did i get from one to the other? for immigrants it will quite often be putting your identity back together again, yet with some cracks only barely mended. image number two: fractured image multiple layers of print on collected images are also a technique that i use for expressing what i have to say. rules and expectations are expressed in image and literature. in image number four, the combination of the book cover of an edition of heidi (johanna spyri) overprinted with the well-known image of botticelli’s venus, is a way for me to show the heartache and uncertainties that a young girl has to go through in order to fit into the pre-ordained role that has been allotted to her. heidi’s story of a wholesome girl living in the swiss alps was, when i was growing up, the pin-up girl of all well-behaving girls. a sequel to heidi, written by pelagie doane, called heidi grows up, is a testament to its popularity. i have overprinted the book cover with an image of botticelli’s venus, which shows the young adult face of a virgin. the painting stems from a time when allegory in painting was rife, and i argue that it lines up well with the story of heidi, hence my tool of overprinting one image with another. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 image number 3: no title coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 identity is multi-layered. in image number five, i try to represent that through layering several images within the one image. the image above is assembled from an aquatint overlayed with a screen print; it also includes a double page from the novel the swiss family robinson. the noble image of a german heroine on a banknote is broken by the page of the novel, a novel that is based on the trials and tribulations of a family. image number four: mixed feelings image number five: who’s story is it anyway coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 for image number six, i used the tool of altering books, it is put together from a magazine on art. the woman is shown reading a book, but the image is changed by the overprint of the german old-style writing and the screen-printing on the left showing a group of people watching. we don’t know who the people are who are watching, are they victims of what is going on, or are they complicit? both images question the initial impression that one can have when thinking about place and identity. the story is so much longer and assembled from so many different parts that the viewer is forced to not only see the image but also read it. image number six: contemplation the image number seven is an example of my work where i use the tool of using found objects in order to build up a scene that, in this case, shows a scene that is assembled from three parts. two young women with a happy, toy-like landscape in front of them and the weight of history behind them; the image used is the same as the print used for the altered book in the image above. again place and identity are questioned. coloured by the past, it is almost impossible to approach the present and the future with a new mind. a conclusion my work is very much governed by the question of place and identity, we are so much a product of both. it is also a feeling of loss and being left out. my ownership of what happens with my family in the old country is somewhat questioned, not necessarily by my family members, but also by myself. questions of guilt are formed, and it is this that also informs my work. the death of my mother was one great impetus in my work practise during the following years. i am glad that i had the tools of making art in order to deal with this loss. the feeling of guilt, for not having been there for her, was paid of with an offering of art. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 cultural fault lines lead to contextual explanations and possibilities of a deeper understanding of cultures old and new, the one you left behind left behind and new. place and identity find new ways to form in order to survive; a new hybrid culture is produced out of necessity. my art helps me to find parallels in the old and the new place. story-telling is the most important here. image number seven: what to do paul carter writes his book material thinking about weaving process that constitutes creative culture: “… and the warp of material thinking. the warp is composed of the threads extended lengthwise in the loom. these can be thought of the culture’s myth lines, the grand narratives in terms of which it defines its sense of place and identity. but these linear narratives can neither cohere to form a pattern nor be subverted and overturned, unless the shuttle of local invention is at work, casting its woof-thread back and forth.” i find this warp and weft analogy a pleasing way to look at my engagement with the old and the new. art allows me to understand the pattern and in some way even take part in the creation of a new fabric. bibliography carter p. 2004. material thinking, melbourne: melbourne university press, p.11. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 lewis-williams d. 2002. the mind in the cave, london: thames & hudson, p.67. stafford b. m. 2007. echo objects: the cognitive work of images, chicago: university of chicago press, p.108. acknowledgements all the images are © anna dorrington anna dorrington is an immigrant from germany to australia, and after having spent her adult life working and caring for a family, it was time to attend to her great love, art. working in the fashion industry gave her a ‘light’ start into visual art, but now, in her mid-life, it was time to combine her interest of creating with what was going on in her head. step one was to give herself grounding by attending university and achieving an honours degree in visual art, with a major in printing. however, her interests soon shifted to incorporating printing and screen-printing into installation work. she is currently working on an exhibition for the regional gallery, work that deals with the interaction of puberty and the “60s”. when she started primary school, she was writing on a framed piece of slate with sticks of chalk; now she is writing this biography on her computer – long way in-between with many changes, that make her re-think of how she coped with all these changes. it is this going back to her past and trying to connect it with what is going on now that informs her work. ageing, cultural changes, relationships are all part of her work, they are all components that throw up surprises to the image she has of herself. anna now works as an independent artist. (email: badgf@bigpond.com) quote: coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 pacific solutions for the environment: a personal journey david fulton abstract: this paper addresses david fulton’s career as a documentary filmmaker. in his own words, fulton explains how his sense of responsibility for the natural environment and its interplay with human presence was established. his is a story of personal involvement and an emotional journey into a pacific solution for the meeting of man and nature. key words: documentary-filming; environmental protection; personal engagement. recently, i was given a small book on documentary film by patricia aufderheide entitled “documentary film a very short introduction” and i would like to quote: “a shared convention of most documentaries is the narrative structure. they’re stories, they have beginnings, middles and ends…they take viewers on emotional journeys.” i was once contracted by the canadian broadcasting corporation to make a film about alcoholism among elderly people. i soon recognized that i had a difficult story on my hands. my subjects were totally cut off from family and friends. they were completely and utterly alone. and that’s what i called my film: alone. nobody wanted to have anything to do with them because they were “impossible” people who had brought nothing but disappointment after disappointment. filming these troubled people posed a lot of problems because i insisted on filming them exactly as they were. often this meant we had to film among the squalor in which many of them dragged out their lives. i wanted to show how the society dealt with these lost elderly people. i was taking viewers on an emotional journey. it was in documentary film that i first became interested in the natural world and how essential it was for us all to play our part in preserving it. a number of our films have dealt with fresh water resources. in one film involving the great lakes that divide canada and the united states we looked at the accumulation of pcb’s and the effect of this on herring gulls nesting on copyright©2013 david fulton. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 some of the islands. scientists studying the gulls had found alarmingly high levels of pcb (polychlorinated biphenyls) resulting in thin egg-shells. they also found that females were laying their eggs but often the chicks inside were dead. even more alarming was the discovery that parent gulls were not taking normal care of their nests. now, during my years as a filmmaker i have seen only a few examples of ordinary people becoming actively involved in the broad process of “taking care of the environment”. we have seen a lot of activity by a few large organizations in taking bold initiatives, often on an impressive scale, to draw public attention to specific situations – like saving the whales. all of this work has its positive side but it also has a negative aspect. it relieves the ordinary citizen of feeling any need to become personally involved. today, the electrical companies, the banks and even the oil and gas companies seem to have become the guardians of “our” environment. they are doing the job so we do not have to think about things at all. personally, i am in favour of more “people involvement”. the big question is how to develop this in today’s world where the polluters are so big and so powerful. one of my most memorable experiences of “people involvement” showed up in the city of caceres in extremadura when i was working with a british television group on a film about the white stork. according to legend, it is the white stork that brings the babies from france. these big birds are part of the urban scene in caceres and scarcely a tall building is without its stork nest. the storks return from northern climes every february without fail and it is not uncommon for people to help things along by providing what we might call a “starter nest” to attract a new pair of storks to settle on top of a building. while we were filming there we heard that a class of schoolchildren was preparing to place a new “starter nest” on yet another building. we asked if we might film the event. the great day arrived and the class had everything arranged. they had ropes and pulleys to raise the starter nest and leave it ready for its new tenants. the children pulled mightily on the ropes and they soon had the new nest in place. this brought shouts of delight from one and all. we filmed the entire operation. on the other hand, my involvement with a film on lake baikal was by no means casual. i had met a finnish producer, erkki kivi, and a filmmaker from st. petersburg, yuri klimov, who had already created a fine series on russian wildlife and this set me thinking. i had the idea of involving klimov and kivi in making a series of nature films on wildlife all the way from the urals to kamchatka. i would write the scripts and klimov would do the filming right across siberia. our project got off to a good start and our first film looked at lake baikal, one of the world’s biggest reserves of fresh water. we anticipated jacques cousteau, who turned up while kilmov was filming the lake in winter when it looks like the other side of the moon. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 klimov filmed the fresh-water seals that live in the lake and he went underwater to show whole regions of fresh-water sponges. klimov brought back film of a wide range of wildlife and recorded many aspects of lake baikal totally unknown in the west. i had a large part in final editing of all this material. our film editor was mexican so the work took on a truly international feeling. here i must note that, while our original plan was to make a seven-part series on siberia and its wildlife, our russian cinematographer had a fatal heart attack and left us and our project forever bereft. we decided to stop things right there and so what we ended up with was a fine one-hour film: lake baikal: the world’s deepest lake. the film was shown on television in various countries including finland, russia and spain. i should like to mention a film made for the ontario ministry of the environment by our production company, montero-fulton productions, started up by my wife gloria and myself. we were small but we had a lot of energy and ideas. that film was called crisis in the rain. i this was an informational film about the problem of acid rain. this problem had its origins in coal-fired power stations in the usa from which air-borne pollution moved across the border into canada. the acidic pollution was finally deposited on many of the small lakes of great importance to canada’s tourist industry. these lakes attracted boaters and fishing enthusiasts (many from the united states), and it was found that a lot of the lakes were becoming denuded of sports fish. this set off the alarms. in the united states we filmed big power plants belching forth loads of dark pollution. in canada, we showed scientists studying some of the affected lakes. the film was widely shown and won us a first prize and a gold camera award at the us film festivals in chicago—in what we might dub “enemy territory”! of course, policies change depending on the level of government. canada’s federal government has just announced it is withdrawing from the kyoto agreement. my interest in water quality shows up in another film i made for the canadian broadcasting corporation about mercury poisoning in a river in northern ontario on which the native indian communities of white dog and grassy narrows depended for their living. i had been sent to look in on these communities, where a major paper mill had been dumping mercury into the river where they lived and there were fears of mercury poisoning such as had occurred at minamata in japan. what i found were two communities in a severe state of social disintegration. the government had banned commercial fishing and this had cut off the livelihood of both communities. the government sent out monthly support cheques but a lot of this money went into alcohol and the level of domestic violence was very high. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 i went back to the cbc to report on what i had seen and i fully expected to be sent back with a film crew right away. the answer from the producer was simple: “no budget”. i was so moved by what i had seen at white dog and grassy narrows that i blurted out that i would do the documentary even without getting my usual fee. of course, that did not fit into the corporate scheme. i went home very troubled. next day a miracle happened. i had a call from the cbc producer to say i would, in fact, have a film crew to tell the story of those communities and, what is more, i would be paid! nor was this was an easy assignment. i called the crew together and we agreed to take up residence for a week in the teacher’s house, vacant for the summer holidays. we would take food and prepare our own meals right there. everyone was in agreement so we loaded up and left for grassy narrows. of course, the best laid plans… we were made welcome by the indian chief of grassy narrows and settled into the absent teacher’s house. first problem: the water pump was not working so there was no running water to wash dishes or to make the toilet work! we had a meal but there was no way of cleaning up afterwards. we had got off to a bad start. i had to work out a plan so that evening i took a walk along the river-bank to think things over. finally, i went back toward the teacher’s house. when i arrived there i found the crew sitting in their car so i stopped to talk. imagine my surprise when one of the crew began to explain their view of the situation. according to this view, we should film what was happening at grassy narrows in one solid day’s work and get out as fast as we could. this was a point of view i did not share. i bid the crew “goodnight” and retired to my room to work out a plan. i decided i would be ruthless. i would send home the lighting man who appeared to be the ring leader of the mutiny on the grounds of “unsafe health conditions”. then we would continue to work according to my plan. we worked hard all the next day and things were rather strained but gradually i found that another miracle was taking place. slowly the crew members, even the “mutiny leader”, had begun to see the terrible situation i was trying to show on film. the “mutiny” was over. there was no doubt in my mind that our film would take viewers on an emotional journey. one of the first things i did next day was to take the chief back to the old village on a nearby island from which the community had been wrested some years earlier to “make access easier for the teacher”. the old wooden church building was still there, sitting in a sea of long grass which came up to our ears. we filmed the chief walking coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 through the tall grass looking at the old wooden church that was now falling down. this was the beginning of the emotional journey that made this film really work. next day, back at the new community site, i sat the chief down on a big rock close by the edge of the river and asked him to tell us what life was like at the old village. i was always getting comments about the way i conducted my interviews. the fact is i seldom asked people direct questions. i simply asked them to tell me their story. and everyone has a story to tell. in the case of the grassy narrows chief, i did not need to ask him anything more. his story just poured out. i remember a tribe of small children sitting on top of a nearby rock listening quietly to what their chief had to say. this film told the stark truth about these indian communities and how the effects of dumping mercury or other dangerous chemicals into rivers and lakes can have devastating effects on the lives and well-being of ordinary people. the film was shown on national television and the children in the grassy narrows school were obliged to watch it and they were encouraged to write to me. their letters were devastating. one was very short and i shall never forget how it ended: “what will happen to us? who knows? god knows.” to end up, i should like to say that, in the course my work in documentary filmmaking, i have seen only a few isolated examples of citizens or groups of citizens taking a personal stand on environmental issues. does this mean that the ordinary citizen really has no voice? have we allowed ourselves to believe that all is well? are the new communications channels now opening up going to give ordinary people more of a say in what happens to their environment? i would like to think so. i will always remember the children in caceres who prepared a starter nest to attract a new family of storks, and the children of grassy narrows who inherited their chief’s concern for maintaining their way of life in spite of the actions of those who would thoughtlessly take away their livelihood and their sense of community. in my own work in documentary i’ve tried to use the medium to tell a story and to take viewers on emotional journeys. this has been part of my own personal search for pacific horizons in the environment we all share. david fulton was born in australia and lived many years in canada before moving to barcelona. he worked freelance as a documentary filmmaker, writing, directing and producing films on the natural world and environmental concerns, such as the effect of pcbs on herring gulls in the great lakes and the health and social effects of mercury pollution from a paper mill on the native community of grassy narrows. “to the beat of a different drummer” looked at the life and work of henry david thoreau and featured folk-singer pete seeger as narrator and performer. with gloria montero, he produced “crisis in the rain” showing the effects of acid rain from cross-border pollution produced by coal-burning power-plants in the united states. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 this film won a gold camera award from the us film festivals (chicago). with finnish and russian partners, he coproduced “baikal: the world’s deepest lake” filmed in siberia and shown widely on television. i i should like to mention that the film editor who worked with us on crisis in the rain—and many of our other films—was ronald sanders, editor of a dangerous method, a volume on jung and freud released only recently. working on documentary films sanders always would come up with editing alternatives that demanded creative decisions. sol coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 connections and integration: oral traditions/quantum paradigm dolors collellmir abstract: this paper begins by mentioning the deep connections between art and science and how these connections, which in certain periods of time had been practically ignored, have recently received much consideration. the present attention comes from specialists in different fields of science and humanities and the conclusions/solutions that they bring can be regarded as means of integrating. the paper briefly refers to examples in the visual arts which illustrate einstein’s discovery of the double nature of light. then it focuses on the possible relationships between literature and quantum mechanics. the novels potiki and benang, both from the pacific region, are good examples to help us realize that notions concerning space-time that had been part of indigenous knowledge for centuries are now validated by recent scientific discoveries: the uncertainty principle and the principle of no-locality among others. thus, native literatures that had been analysed in the frame of the traditions of their respective cultures, or even within the parameters of magic realism, can now acquire a new and stimulating dimension. keywords: native literatures, magic realism, quantum physics. both the perception of the nature of things and the apprehension of reality have varied through the centuries, but, in moments of fundamental revision, the poetic sight and the scientific approach to capture the essence of “being” have proved to be closely related. these connections between the artistic and the scientific avenues of knowledge are now studied with more interest than ever before. since the early twentieth century, with einstein’s discoveries regarding space, time, and light, and with the emergence of quantum mechanics, analysts from different fields have been attracted by the fascinating possibilities of the new findings. in the 1960s wylie sypher, after having explored in depth the connections between art and literature, disclosed his high regard for the theoretical physicist werner heisenberg, who had made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics. sypher expressed his appreciation of the fact that heisenberg had made reference to the “reciprocity between what scientists are thinking and what artists are doing” which had existed, as he said, in different stages of human evolution (qtd. in sypher, 4). 1 in this century, leonard shlain, copyright©2013 dolors collellmir. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 52 author of art and physics. parallel visions in space, time and light, expresses it in this way: “when the time comes to change a paradigm—to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another—the artist and the physicist are most likely to be in the forefront” (2007: 22). also, the astrophysicist margaret geller, in an interview in la vanguardia, in 2009, expressed her admiration towards the catalan painter joan miró and his vision of the patterns of the universe. geller, who was a pioneer in mapping the nearby universe, said “[miró] intuited the same geometry that i have demonstrated” (la contra la vanguardia 07/07/09). in the book poetry, physics, and painting in twentieth-century spain, candelas gala states that: “both artists and scientists investigate the existence of something beyond what can be seen, not transcendent to it but inscribed in the interstitial seams of apparent reality” (2011: 3). with respect to the complicity between artists and scientists, leonard shlain states that “the artist introduces a new way to see the world, [and] then the physicist formulates a new way to think about the world” (2007: 427). an outstanding example can be found in the case of leonardo da vinci and isaac newton. as shlain says, “newton repeatedly worked out with mathematical precision what leonardo had expressed in concise drawings” (2007: 78). among the numerous examples that prove that art pre-cognitively anticipates science, one finds the french painters georges-pierre seurat and claude monet, who experimented with the qualities of light, and changed the concept of its essence before albert einstein’s proposal of the existence of quanta of light. 2 for over two hundred years light had been experimentally proven to be a wave. in 1905, einstein proposed that light had two distinct and seemingly opposing natures: a wavelike aspect and a particle-like aspect. the australian visual artist wayne roberts, in his study of the parallels between art and science, reminds us that seurat, in 1885, had used a divisionist technique which separated light and colour into a pixelated array of particles. and that monet’s paintings, on the other hand, were more concerned with the wave-like properties of light—that is, the way light vibrates, the way it bends and diffracts around forms and edges. roberts states: “both monet’s ‘waves’ and seurat’s ‘particles’ showed that at small distances, edges break up and dissolve. matter is as ephemeral as light; light is as tangible as matter” (2003: 3). here, in these words, we find a correspondence with the first principle of quantum physics which established the equivalence between matter and energy (einstein, 1905). energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light. as the scientist and philosopher ervin laszlo said: “with the splitting of the atom in the late nineteenth century and of the atomic nucleus in the early twentieth, more had been fragmented than a physical entity. the very foundation of natural science was shaken: the experiments of early-twentieth-century physics demolished the prevailing view that all of reality is built of blocks that are themselves no further divisible…. the very notion of “matter” became problematic (27-28). here follows a summary of laszlo’s presentation of the characteristics of the “world of the quantum”:  in their pristine state, quanta are not just in one place at one time. [in this statement we recognize the “duality wave-particle”, louis de broglie, 1924]. 53  until they are observed or measured, quanta have no definite characteristics. they exist in several virtual states. these states are not “real” but “virtual”— they are the states the quanta can assume when they are observed or measured. [these statements explain the “superposition principle”, erwin schrödinger, 1935].  even when the quantum is in a real state, it does not allow us to observe and measure all the parameters of its state at the same time, for example, position and speed. [here we recognize the “uncertainty principle”, werner heisenberg, 1927].  quanta are highly sociable: once they share the same identical state, they remain linked no matter how far they travel from each other. when one of the pair of formerly connected quanta is subjected to an interaction (that is, when it is observed or measured), it chooses its own “real” state—and its twin also chooses its own state, but not freely. the second twin always chooses a complementary state, never the same as the first twin. [this is an explanation of the “non-locality principle” or “quantum entanglement”, alain aspect, 1982].  if we measure one of the quanta in a system, the others shift from a virtual to a real state as well. (this explanation contains the “duality wave-particle” and the “non-locality principle”). furthering einstein’s proposal concerning the opposing natures of light, in 1926, niels bohr developed his theory of complementarity. light, he said, is both a wave and a particle and whether it is perceived as one or the other depends on how the experiment is carried out. that conclusion implied that quantum reality was not objective, because it depends on the method of measurement used and, by extension, it could be said that it is influenced by the subjectivity of the observer. 3 the “observer effect” has profound implications because it means that before anything can manifest itself in the physical universe it must first be observed. as alex paterson says: “presumably observation cannot occur without the pre-existence of some sort of consciousness to do the observing”, and therefore the “observer effect” clearly implies that “the physical universe is the direct result of ‘consciousness’” (2008: 1). in other words, the mind, the thought, precedes matter. ross rhodes, a science writer specializing in the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, reminds us that newton’s principia represented the particular world view for many generations of europeans. it was a view in which the universe “once it had been wound up or otherwise set in motion, it continues according to the predictable effects of the forces at play” (rhodes: 1). the inadequacy of a world view based solely on newtonian principles had become obvious in the early part of this century. as rhodes says “observation did not agree with newtonian mechanics or predictions”. nevertheless, the world view of humanity has not changed yet in part because, according to rhodes, the concepts that need to be incorporated are difficult, the laboratory results are counter-intuitive, and there remain areas of physics which are not fully understood. fortunately, scientists continue searching in the hope of understanding more and providing us with new answers: 54 much of the effort in contemporary theoretical physics is directed to formulating a single description of nature that will encompass both quantum mechanics and relativity theory. such a “theory of everything” should be simpler and, therefore, more comprehensible than its predecessors and, accordingly, this quest is the current great hope for truly revolutionizing humanity’s world view. (rhodes: 2) at the beginning of this century, ervin laszlo highlighted what for him is a crucial feature of an emerging worldview, that is, “the revolutionary discovery that at the roots of reality there is not just matter and energy, but also a more subtle but equally fundamental factor, one that we can best describe as active and effective information: ‘in-formation’” (2007: 3). in-formation, 4 laszlo proclaims, “links all things in the universe” (2007: 3) because it is “subtly but effectively transmitted throughout the quantum world”, and “as this informational linking is both instant and enduring, it appears to be independent of space as well as of time” (2007: 142). more recently, the physicist vlatko vedral, considered a key researcher in quantum science, in his book decoding reality: the universe as quantum information (2010), also conveys the idea that “everything is information.” he considers that “it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena”. 5 the recent research of the russian biologist peter p. gariaev reinforces laszlo’s and vedral’s theories. gariaev, as a result of his study of genetics, postulates a new paradigm for life sciences because, he says, the existing western paradigm was incomplete. the first of his five postulates says that “all living organisms consist of two substances: the material substance and the energy-information (ei) (or subtle) substance.” the second postulate states that the energy-information substance is omnipresent, that is: it is present simultaneously at each point in the space of our three dimensional material world, which means that the distance between the energy-information substances of any two material objects on our three dimensional world is always zero, no matter how far they are located physically from each other. (2006: 8) these postulates directly relate to the quantum principle of non-locality and the superposition principle. and interestingly, these two principles of quantum mechanics resonate with some of the ancient traditions of the cultures of the pacific geographical area, and specifically with their stories and sets of beliefs. as has been said, the principle of non-locality tells us that two particles that are part of a single system continue to act in concert with one another no matter how far apart they appear to be separated by spacetime. 6 before einstein, time and space were considered as separate coordinates. after einstein, they are a complementary pair; as time dilates, space contracts; as time contracts, space dilates. in 1908 hermann minkowski (1864-1909), a german mathematician and former teacher of einstein, expressed in equations this reciprocal relationship and recognized that it comprised the forth dimension. he named it the spacetime continuum (a four-dimensional continuum where everything is defined by both its position in space and its position in time). 55 indeed, the notion of connectedness to anything and everything in the universe has been part of “indigenous knowledge” for centuries. shlain comments: “the shamans of the preliterate tribal cultures would be amused to discover that their ideas about reality have more in common with the new physics than does the view of a nineteenth-century scientist” (2007:158). now, physicists such as john bell and chris clarke suggest that non-locality “may be in fact the deeper reality” (qtd. in laszlo, 2007: 60). although our world view is demonstrably wrong, we have much difficulty in imagining how the universe actually works. vlatko vedral states that “quantum behaviour eludes visualization and common sense. it forces us to rethink how we look at the universe and accept a new and unfamiliar picture of the world” (2011: 40), and ross rhodes says: more than any of the bizarre phenomena previously observed, the demonstration of non-locality gave rise to a spate of serious speculations in the 1980s on the question, ‘what is reality?’… it was fair to ask whether the apparent separation in space and time were fundamentally ‘real’; or whether, instead, they were somehow an illusion, masking a deeper reality in which all things are one, sitting right on top of each other, always connected one to another and to all. (3-4) non-locality results from the existence of a quantum vacuum. according to quantum physics, “empty space isn’t actually empty”. it is in fact “a generator of everything that is observable and the explanation for connectedness”. laszlo adds: “what the new physics describes as the unified vacuum—the seat of all the fields and forces of the physical world—is in fact the most fundamentally real element of the universe” (2007: 105). the quantum physicist teresa versyp tells us that, in the first instants of our universe, this vacuum gave origin to the first particles of matter and light. for that reason matter is said to be a condensed structure of the energy that is inside the vacuum. thus, the primary reality is the quantum vacuum. 7 esoteric texts and myths of creation from different cultures refer to a vacuum, to the divine essence, where matter and spirit are found in a latent form. the vacuum contains the zero-point energy (a non-thermal radiation, a vibration, an energy generated by the swift appearance and disappearance of virtual particles). in the prologue of the novel potiki (1986), by patricia grace, we find an excellent example of a maori myth of origin starting with the zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum: from the centre, from the nothing, of not seen, of not heard, there comes a shifting, a stirring and a creeping forward, there comes 56 a standing, a springing to an outer circle, there comes an intake of breath – tihe mauriora. 8 by means of the different frequencies of the vibrations of shifting, stirring, creeping, standing, and springing the vacuum is filled with life. it is a life that originated at the beginning of time, and that passes from generation to generation moving forward, but not in a straight line, but rather connecting the future with the past and the present with eternity. as vlatko vedral says, space and time, two of the most fundamental classical concepts, according to quantum mechanics, are secondary, while the entanglements are primary because “they interconnect quantum systems without reference to space and time” (2011: 43). indeed, maoris also stress the relative and subjective aspects of time. for maori people, the physical representation of the connection between past and future is materialized in the whare tipuna/the ancestor’s house. for maoris the past is not dead and gone but very much alive and relevant to them where they stand in the present. roimata, one of the protagonists of potiki, tells us about stories which have been known “from before life and death”. these stories convey the idea that there is no past or future, “that all time is a now-time, centred in the being”. by telling and retelling these stories roimata came to realize that “the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named ‘past’ and ‘future’ only for our convenience” (39). significantly, they talk of their ancestors in the present tense, and they are “entirely real and supportive in present crises”. they describe the past as ‘nga ra o mua’, ‘the days in front’, and the future as ‘kei muri’, ‘behind’ (metge, 1976:70). according to maori tradition: one thing that has remained the same is the thought that the past [the ancestor] is in front of us but the future is behind us. this means in broad terms that we can learn from the past and it is in front of us to guide us but the future is behind us as we cannot see the future and what it means to us. 9 the meeting house is not only named after an important ancestor; it is symbolically his or her body. a carved representation (koruru) covers the junction of the two bargeboards (maihi) which are his or her arms. on the other hand, for the australian aborigines, “the present moment and eternity have been physicalized as place”—as a sacred feature in the landscape. aborigines do not perceive space as distance; space for them is “consciousness”. when they narrate, chronology is not important, what really matters is to be able to string meaningful moments. and those moments are always linked to a special site of ritual, and, consequently, to the dreamtime. the dreamtime represents the drama of creation, when the mythic beings emerged from the heavens or the underworld and moved across the land. the arrival and departure points of these beings became rivers, rocks, hills, mountains, and billabongs. according to the legends, it was these beings who created all the terrestrial animals, birds, fish, plants, and people. once they had shaped the 57 landscape, the creation beings left human children and laws for them to live by. although they disappeared into the sea or the heavens, the dreamtime creators, in the belief of the aborigines, never really left the land. they remained in the landscape, creating a life force for human kind that can be activated, through dances and rituals, whenever it is required. aboriginal people, in harmony with einstein’s theory of relativity, do not conceive space and time as absolute values. and it can be said that they are in agreement with the “theory of consciousness” that the theoretical physicist roger penrose, together with the anaesthesiologist stuart hameroff, have developed. the theory is based on quantum computation in microtubules within the neurons. ervin laszlo, referring to the transcendental and transpersonal capacity associated with consciousness, says: the connections that bind “my” consciousness to the consciousness of others, well known to traditional peoples, are rediscovered today in controlled experiments with thought and image transference, and the effect of the mind of one individual on the mind and body of another. (2007: 49) all these views are reflected in the australian novel benang, whose plot is structured in spatial rather than temporal terms, and whose subtitle, from the heart, provides a clue for a further step into the quantum world. at the onset of the novel, harley, the protagonist, tells us that people gather around him to hear him sing and that absolute silence is made when he, rising from the ground and “hovering in the campfire smoke, slowly [turns] to consider [the] small circle of which [he] is the centre”. within this magic atmosphere, he explains that in fact “what he does is not really singing”, and that “it is not he who sings”. these incongruities dissolve as soon as we understand that harley is, in fact, a ceremonial leader, “a song man”, the one who makes possible the continuance of the ceremonial cycle of his territory. this is his explanation: through me we hear the rhythm of many feet pounding the earth, and the strong pulse of countless hearts beating. together, we listen to the creek and rustle of various plants in various winds, the countless beatings of different wings, the many strange and musical calls of animals who have come from this place right here. (benang: 7-8) the time of dreaming, of creation, is brought to the present. what all of them are doing is tuning their hearts so that they can connect with their ancestors and with all the creatures from the past that give meaning to that place. harley can be regarded as “bringing a new awareness of the living, dynamic relatedness between humanity, nature and spirit” (qtd. in cutts: 4-5). non-locality is also at the basis of the research of the biologist rupert sheldrake interested in the signs of the past in the present. he explains that human societies have memories that are transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or myth. many of the so called “development biologists” have proposed that “biological organization depends on fields” and that “cells inherit fields of organization” (2005: 1). sheldrake calls these fields “morphic fields”. in the case of social groups, their morphic fields “connect together members of the group even when they are many miles apart, and provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance” (2005: 3). scientists now feel certain that space is not empty, and what is called the 58 quantum vacuum is in fact a cosmic plenum. it is a fundamental medium that recalls the ancient concept of akasha. ervin laszlo explains this concept. in the sanskrit and indian cultures, akasha is an all-encompassing medium that underlies all things and becomes all things. it is real, but so subtle that it cannot be perceived. the ancient rishis 10 reached it through a disciplined, spiritual way of life, and through yoga. they described their experience and made akasha an essential element of the philosophy and mythology of india. (2007:76) the australian aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a sea power deposited in the earth. in the aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event or life process that occurs at a particular place “leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds”. 11 another area of research in which scientists, applying quantum principles, are making new discoveries is in the functioning of the brain. within neurology, there is a relatively new field, that of neuro-cardiology. scientists talk of a heart brain whose “circuitry enables it to learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the cranial brain” (dominique surel, 2011: 6). 12 currently, at the heartmath research center, in california, scientists have found substantial evidence that the heart plays a unique synchronizing role in the body… “that [it] acts as the global coordinator in the body’s symphony of functions” (surel, 2011: 7). 13 rollin mccraty, in harmony with the principle of non-location, found proof that “the heart’s energy field (energetic heart) is coupled to a field of information that is not bound by the classical limits of time and space…that is entangled and interacts with the multiplicity of energetic fields in which the body is embedded—including the quantum vacuum (qtd. in surel, 2011: 7). the heart seems to receive the intuitive information before the brain, and this centrality of the heart is made clear in the life of the protagonist of benang. even though when we first meet harley, as has been said, he is acting as a ceremonial leader, he had lived for many years without knowing that he had aboriginal ancestry and, consequently, without being aware of the cultural and spiritual knowledge that he had inherited. hartley appears significantly feeling weightless, “bereft, bleached, all washed up”. but in his wanderings, he was guided by his heart; he was always moved by his intuition. through intuition he connects to far-reaching and intangible forms of nature. as maria caro and andrés monteagudo say in “estética cuántica. arte y física”: it [intuition] is a means to expand our way of thinking, our personal and collective being; it is the innate capacity to have access to the morphogenetic fields where the information remains stored that connects each individual to all the others of his species which had existed in the past. (2003: 152) 14 that insight led him to listen to family anecdotes and testimonies, to collect historical documents, and to share feelings and meanings with nature, all of which contributed to harley’s realization of his aboriginality. he eventually regains a world that gives substance to his life and allows him to tell his story “from the heart”, as the subtitle of the novel indicates. 59 readers have always appreciated the fact that literature deals with feelings and reaches parts of us that other types of writing do not. susan midalia, while interviewing scott, emphasized the power that his novel exerts over our emotions by “eliciting from us feelings of outrage, shame, sorrow, compassion” to which scott commented: “’i wanted the novel to be moving’” (3). but benang takes us beyond the world of feelings because we know that “speaking from the heart”, the narrator-protagonist has been able to connect with past and future, with the energy and in-formation of the dreamtime—of the vacuum and we, as readers, have participated. the impression that quantum mechanics is limited to the micro world still permeates the public understanding of sciences. this is probably because the quantum effects are harder to see in the macro world. however, as vedral asserts: “this convenient partitioning of the world is a myth”, which was not questioned until the past decade when “experimentalists confirmed that quantum behaviour persists on a macroscopic scale” (vedral, 2011: 38). in conclusion, it can be said that quantum entanglement, or non-locality, considered the quintessential quantum effect, is “knowledge”, knowledge that has always been integrated in the cosmic vision of aboriginal peoples, though not easily accepted by western cultures. the latest scientific discoveries, however, have caused a revision of established paradigms and have often led to questioning the validity of our perception of reality. at this point, we can corroborate shlain’s observation that “literature, like her sisters, music and the visual arts, also anticipated the major revolutions in the physicists’ worldview” (1991: 291). shlain mentioned how edgar allan poe, interested in the philosophical debates regarding the nature of reality, in 1846 wrote a metaphysical essay, eureka, where he said: “space and duration are one”. therefore, poe referred to the spacetime continuum sixty years before einstein (qtd. in shlain, 1991: 298-99). at this point in time we are experimenting how maori and aboriginal literatures, with their myths and poetic insight, are contributing extraordinarily to our comprehension of the quantum paradigm. this new state of awareness helps us visualize and accept that the quantum paradigm and ancient traditions are truly integrated and, as the closing words of benang indicate, they will stimulate our consciousness of being “part of a much older story… one billowing from the sea” (benang: 495). works cited caro, maría y andrés monteagudo. “estética cuántica: arte y física”. el mundo de la cultura cuántica. granada: port royal. conocimiento y divulgación, 2003: 147 166. gala, candelas. poetry, physics, and painting in twentieth-century spain. new york; palgrave macmillan, 2011. geller, margaret. interview. “la contra”. la vanguardia. 07/07/09. grace, patricia. potiki. london: the women’s press, 1987. laszlo, ervin. science and the akashic field. an integral theory of everything. 2 nd ed. rochester: inner traditions, 2007. metge, joan. the maoris of new zealand. rautahi. london: routledge & kegan paul, 1976. scott, kim. benang. from the heart. fremantle arts centre press, 1999. shlain, leonard. art & physics. parallel visions in space, time, and light. new york: 60 harper perennial, 2007. surel, dominique. “speaking from the heart”. edge science #6 january-march 2011: 5 9. sypher, wylie. loss of the self in modern literature and art. new york: vintage books, 1962. vlatko, vedral. decoding reality: the universe as quantum information. oup, 2010. cutts, sandra. “living the dreaming. the relationship to the land for aboriginal australians” http://www.bri.net.au/livingbysandra.html (17 july, 2011) “from the heart”: http://www.heartmath.org/templates/ihm/downloads/pdf/media/articles/edgesciencemagazine-speaking-from-the-heart.pdf (7 february, 2012) gariaev, p.p., m.j. friedman, and e.a. leonovagariaeva. “crisis in life sciences. the wave genetics response.” http://www.emergentmind.org/gariaev06.htm (7 february, 2012) midalia, susan. interview. http://www.facp.iinet.net.au/teachingnotes/benangnotes.php (7 february, 2012) paterson, alex. “the observer effect,” 2008: 1-4. http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/science/observer_effect.htm (24 may, 2012) rhodes, ross. “a world with a view,” 1-7 http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/worldview.html ( 24 may, 2012) roberts, w. “parallels between art and science,” 2003. http://www.principlesofnature.net/connections_between_art_and_science/seurateinstein_monet-maxwell_parallel_views_of_light.htm (17 july, 2011) sheldrake, rupert. “morphic resonance and morphic fields. an introduction,” 2005. http://www.sheldrake.org/articles&papers/papers/morphic/morphic_intro.html (7 february, 2012) “through the ages. maori customs” http://www.theinitialjourney.com/throughtheages/maoricustoms_01.html (7 february, 2012) vedral, vlatko. “living in a quantum world.” scientific american, june, 2011: 38-43. http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~chchang/notes10b/0611038.pdf (24 may, 2012) versyp, teresa: http://www.trans-personal.com/cien-cuant-txt5.htm#cosmos (7 february, 2012) dolors collellmir morales is a senior lecturer in commonwealth literatures and cultures at the university rovira i virgili, tarragona. she has published articles principally on australian, canadian, and caribbean authors and cultural issues. other http://www.bri.net.au/livingbysandra.html http://www.heartmath.org/templates/ihm/downloads/pdf/media/articles/edgescience-magazine-speaking-from-the-heart.pdf http://www.heartmath.org/templates/ihm/downloads/pdf/media/articles/edgescience-magazine-speaking-from-the-heart.pdf http://www.emergentmind.org/gariaev06.htm http://www.facp.iinet.net.au/teachingnotes/benangnotes.php http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/science/observer_effect.htm http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/worldview.html http://www.principlesofnature.net/connections_between_art_and_science/seurat-einstein_monet-maxwell_parallel_views_of_light.htm http://www.principlesofnature.net/connections_between_art_and_science/seurat-einstein_monet-maxwell_parallel_views_of_light.htm http://www.sheldrake.org/articles&papers/papers/morphic/morphic_intro.html http://www.theinitialjourney.com/throughtheages/maoricustoms_01.html http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~chchang/notes10b/0611038.pdf http://www.trans-personal.com/cien-cuant-txt5.htm#cosmos 61 publications relate to the south-african author j.m. coetzee and to indian theatre. at present her research interest is in the relations between literature and science. her book el corazón matemático de la literatura was published in 2012. 1 from werner heisenberg’s physics and philosophy. ny: harper & row, 1985. 2 in 1900 max planck demonstrated that energy is not transmitted continuously, but in blocks called “quanta”. “quanta” can be defined as the discontinuous aspect of physical reality. 3 “subjectivity – which before the twentieth century had been the bête noire of all science while revered as the inspiration of all art – crossed the great divide. with a sense of foreboding and unease, science was forced to admit this bastard child into its inner sanctum” (shlain, 2007: 136). 4 in-formation is a subtle, quasi instant, non-evanescent and non-energetic connection between things at different locations in space and events at different points in time (laszlo, 2007: 68). 5 http://www.kurzweilai.net/decoding-reality-the-universe-as-quantum-information. 6 “by the end of 1905 einstein had laid the basis of two totally new entities: the spacetime continuum and the energy-mass equivalence. within a few months he had linked space and time and yoked energy to matter. thus the original four corners of the impregnable fortress of newtonian physical reality—space, time, mass, and energy—were now combined into two new binary einsteinian entities, spacetime and mass-energy, each linked together by the paradoxical glue of the speed of a beam of light” (shlain, 2007: 326). 7 “the most fundamental element of reality is the quantum vacuum, the energyand in-formation-filled plenum that underlies, generates, and interacts with our universe, and with whatever universes that may exist in the metaverse” (a cyclically creative-destructive multiverse) (laszlo, 2007: 103). “most cosmologists agree that we live in a cyclically creative/destructive multiverse, a metauniverse or metaverse. one universe informs another; there is progress from universe to universe. each universe is more evolved than the one before … the cycle leads from physical to physical-biological to physicalbiological-psychological worlds” (laszlo, 2007: 93). 8 sneeze of love/call to claim the right to speak. 9 see: http://www.theinitialjourney.com/throughtheages/maoricustoms_01.html. 10 rishis are composers of vedic hymns. according to post-vedic tradition, the rishi is a “seer” to whom the vedas were “originally revealed” through states of higher consciousness. 11 http://www.crystalinks.com/dreamtime.html. 12 some of the most seminal work on the relationship between heart-brain interactions was conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s by the american physiologists john and beatrice lacey. the heart is said to have 50,000 neurons. 13 the following quote from the physiological coherence monograph captures the essence of our use of the term: "it is the harmonious flow of information, cooperation, and order among the subsystems of a larger system that allows for the emergence of more complex functions. this higher-order cooperation among the physical subsystems such as the heart, brain, glands, and organs as well as between the cognitive, emotional, and physical systems is an important aspect of what we call coherence. it is the rhythm of the heart that sets the beat for the entire system. the heart's rhythmic beat influences brain processes that control the autonomic nervous system, cognitive function, and emotions, thus leading us to propose that it is the primary conductor in the system. by changing the rhythm of the heart, system-wide dynamics can be quickly and dramatically changed”. see: http://www.heartrelease.com/coherence-3.html. 14 my translation. microsoft word final shirley walker coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 taking miles franklin to the voortrekkers: memoir shirley walker in the 1970s and ‘80s australian scholars began a serious movement to take their literature to the wider world, an attempt to convince the metropolitan cultures that exciting writing was happening, not just in the centre, but at the periphery as well. we early enthusiasts for the dissemination of australian literature were certainly evangelists, but we were serious critics as well, and the interchange which took place at a series of international conferences was at a seriously professional level. i was part of this movement, one which took us to many an unfamiliar and sometimes exotic place. with the help of asal (the association for the study of australian literature) and the australian foreign affairs department, our overseas literary colleagues visited australia and some of the consequent friendships have lasted for over forty years. following a conference at oviedo, spain, in the early ‘nineties i was invited by professor suárez lafuente to present a course on australian women writers there. we used the internet for the submission and marking of essays and i visited the students several times. thirty post-graduate students completed this course over the next six years and i like to think that many of them are now teaching, and perhaps teaching australian literature, in spanish universities. meanwhile we walked in the high mountains of the picos de europa where bears still roam, and visited the shrine at covadonga where the visigoths, under pelayo, defeated the moors for the first time on the iberian peninsula. cultural exchanges are, obviously, not just about great books. i knew this for sure when i heard a beautiful young spanish student − all but one were female − comment that my husband looked ‘just like bryan brown’! the relevance to this volume − in honour of professor bruce bennett − is that bruce was at the forefront of this literary diaspora. he was a familiar presence at overseas conferences and hosted a number of overseas colleagues at the australian defence force academy (adfa) in canberra. he too would have had many interesting memories of this period. * not all my memories, however, are as rosy as those of oviedo; memories of a lecture tour to south africa in 1984 still disturb me. copyright © shirley walker 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 my invitation to give a series of lectures on australian literature in several south african universities preceded the sanctions concerning apartheid. as i was unaware of the true state of affairs in that country, i saw no reason to decline. by the time i left south africa i had well and truly changed my mind. i had a personal motive for the journey: i had a small granddaughter in south africa; i had not yet seen her. as well, i had always known that my grandfather’s younger brother, a dashing young irishman, had fought in the boer war. he was obviously a tear-away, having previously absconded from the royal ulster constabulary. perhaps my uncle had, like breaker morant, joined the bushveldt carbineers. i hoped to find out more in pretoria, where the boer war records are kept. * i took lectures on three australian writers breaker morant, banjo paterson and miles franklin to the south african students. the writing skills of the three, obviously disproportionate, were not at issue here; all three were legendary australian figures who, i thought, would interest the students. as well, both breaker morant and banjo paterson had been to the boer war, the latter as a war correspondent, and miles franklin’s my brilliant career was set for the south african equivalent of the higher school certificate. 1 in retrospect i question whether literature which is so culturally specific is transferable to another, totally different context. also it’s probably a mistake to go anywhere near the breaker morant story on any continent, or indeed anywhere in the world. morant has always been a controversial figure, executed by firing squad for murdering boer prisoners and seen by many as a victim of the british under lord kitchener. he considered himself to have been, in the words of his final poem, ‘butchered to make a dutchman’s holiday’. 2 his status in australian folklore is equivalent to that of ned kelly: larrikin aussie, on the wrong side of the law, but definitely a victim of the british establishment or its colonial equivalent. the truth is that morant had a dubious reputation long before he left australia. he had lied about his supposedly aristocratic parentage. he presented as the son of a certain sir digby morant but was actually the son of the master and matron of the union workhouse at bridgewater in somerset. morant had also married and then deserted another well-known and controversial australian, daisy bates. known as kabbarli, she was later famous for her work among the aborigines on the nullarbor plains. despite his raunchy reputation for his skill as a horse breaker, his rough-riding in country shows and his cavalier attitude towards women morant’s poems, published in the bulletin and signed ‘the breaker’, were extremely popular. my lecture examined the way that the legend of the victimised morant had been built up during the course of no fewer than seven literary treatments, (there have been more since) as well as a successful play − kenneth ross’s breaker morant − and the even more successful bruce beresford film of the same name. australian historians, playwrights and filmmakers just can’t leave the breaker alone. the point is that, whether following secret orders from kitchener or not, morant certainly did kill a number of boers who were, in good faith, coming into the camp of the bushveldt carbineers to surrender. as well, in jail in pretoria, he confessed to having murdered a german missionary. 3 meanwhile there was undoubtedly some sort of cover-up by kitchener. the cabled report of the courts martial which kitchener sent coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 to the australian parliament contains so many factual errors that it suggests either gross inefficiency or a deliberate distortion of the truth. it’s doubtful whether historians will ever agree on the facts of the morant case. what is important is the way in which the story has been manipulated to form the familiar antiauthoritarian aussie myth. morant’s excuse for the brutal, face-to-face murder of boer prisoners − i was only following orders − is the nuremburg defence; it shouldn’t be accepted in any civilised society. that’s why i’m appalled when various factions in australia mount a campaign to have breaker morant either pardoned or re-tried, or when reveille, the veterans’ magazine in australia, allows an undertaker to advertise under the banner: give your veteran the funeral the breaker deserved. there was, however, one important historical consequence. because of the breaker morant affair, australian troops were never again, either in the first or the second world wars, sent into battle under the direct command of british generals. * it seems that the breaker was not the only australian to show his true colours in south africa. using his war despatches as evidence, i found it easy to make a case for banjo paterson, australia’s most popular bush poet, as both racist and politically naïve. despite his abiding image in australia as the overwhelmingly fair australian bushman, paterson was, sadly, just a man of his times. for instance he consistently referred to the african natives as ‘niggers’, and gave some stringent advice as to how the ‘kaffirs’ should be treated: the boer knows how to treat the kaffir. when the kaffir gets quarrelsome or insubordinate . . . the boer ties him to a wagon wheel and gives him a real good hiding with a sjambok – a very severe whip made of hippopotamus hide. this quietens the recipient in a marvellous way . . . 4 paterson was also politically naïve. he failed to appreciate that, by joining the british in their blood-thirsty campaign against the boers, the australians were destroying a people who were little different from their own compatriots: small farmers struggling in an often harsh environment. olive shreiner certainly appreciated this distinction and said so. her remarks, quoted by paterson in his despatches, appalled him: you australians . . . i cannot understand it at all, why you come here lightheartedly to shoot down other colonists of whom you know nothing – it is terrible. . . . you australians do not understand. this is a capitalists’ war! they want to get control of the rand and the mines. 5 paterson just didn’t, or couldn’t, make the connection the students at the university of the witwatersrand listened attentively and studiously took notes, yet seemed curiously unmoved by either controversy. perhaps they had no conception of the standing, as idealised australian bushman and poet, that paterson enjoyed at home, and the absolute disjunction between this and his racial and political comments in the despatches. perhaps they also wondered what the fuss was about with the breaker. what was an australian doing fighting in their country anyway? perhaps the myths of victimisation so prevalent in australia − think of ned kelly, moondyne joe, thunderbolt − don’t transplant well to another, completely different culture. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 we had one light moment in the residential college when i asked the domestic servants for an ironing board and iron so that my husband could iron his shirts. they were appalled. they had never seen a white woman ironing, let alone a white man. they brought the equipment and the crowd gathered to watch the amusing, to them, sight of a man ironing his own shirts! there was no such levity at the rand afrikaner university where i gave my lecture on miles franklin’s my brilliant career, a seminal australian novel dealing with the struggles of a young woman, convinced of her calling as a writer, and determined to escape the constrictions of a bush upbringing. 6 perhaps i was not at my best that day; i certainly didn’t get that point across. the whole concept of female literary aspirations seemed to puzzle the students and there were many questions about the bush. ‘was it like the veldt?’ they asked. ‘where were the wild animals, tigers, lions and savage natives?’ these would surely be a greater threat than the philistinism that franklin was writing about. the university itself turned out to be a strange place indeed, its architecture symbolic of the closed society of south africa at that time. it was built in a large circle, the buildings all facing inward, a conscious attempt, i was told, to emulate the defensive circling of the wagons of the early voortrekkers when under attack. by turning their backs to the world, the buildings signified, to me at least, the intransigence of this section of white south africa, defiantly rejecting international opinion. i found the whole experience − the grim architecture, the puzzlement of the students − to be quite chilling. however there were some optimistic moments. just south of pretoria we visited the monument to the voortrekkers and at paal, in the western cape province, the monument to the afrikaner language. we realised, for the first time, that there had been a proud and heroic (though tragically flawed) culture here, expressed in a language which mingled european and african tongues. at paal we caught a glimpse of what could be, in the post-apartheid south africa: the absorption of many disparate cultures into one nation. this struggle will obviously be a long and difficult one. * meanwhile the evidence of apartheid was all around us. the shopping malls in johannesburg were for whites only and all those designated as coloureds, or those from soweto (including servants in the homes of white families), had to be out of johannesburg by 6.00p.m. this included a group of literary women who had come into the city to meet me and discuss south african writing, including their own. clad in their national dress, gracious and dignified, still they were forced to cut short their meeting and scramble for the crowded trains in order to preserve the racial purity of the city after dark. the living conditions in the countryside were appalling. from the train as we made our way south we were able to see for ourselves the squalid and filthy conditions in which the non-white farm workers were living. children stood up to their ankles in mud in the yards of their ramshackle humpies to wave to the luxurious train as it passed and there were many stories of the low pay, shocking working conditions and lack of compensation for the farm workers if they were injured at work, as many were. the level of violence as outlined in the daily newspapers was appalling and drugs which were available by prescription only in australia were sold freely over the counter in south africa. it was suspected that this was to keep the non-white population apathetic. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 the small settlement we visited, at springs, east of johannesburg, was a gated community, the high barbed wire fence surrounding it locked at dusk as there had been so much ‘trouble with the blacks’, as our hosts put it. and the dogs − each family had several − were trained to attack only non-whites, including the servants, who seemed to be in a state of abject fear. meanwhile the white housewives, freed from their every household task by maids and gardeners, seemed bored and apathetic in comparison with the dedicated literary women from soweto. we met our granddaughter, which was a great joy to us, but our overall impression was of a community in stagnation, its white inhabitants, immensely privileged by the conditions of apartheid, yet still its victims. * one of the benefits of the enterprise − that is spreading the word on australian literature − was the chance to travel. in this case we caught the blue train from johannesburg to cape town, one of the great train journeys of the world. it was, of course, exclusively for whites, the only non-white south africans on board were the servants who pandered to our every wish − an uncomfortable experience, given the limited employment options available to these people. sitting in splendour, sipping champagne, we saw the wonderful scenery of the high veldt and the drakensberg mountains through windows sprayed with gold dust so that the glare would not disturb us. then, from the top of table mountain we saw the cape − appropriately called the cape of good hope − spread out before us. we thought, first of all, of the early dutch explorers who had come this way to australia. then, more importantly for us, we considered the many migrants, our ancestors, both convicts and free settlers, who had rounded the cape, and then sailed eastward before the roaring ‘forties to a new life in the great south land. all of our ancestors, unless we are lucky enough to carry some of the genes of the original australians, have been boat people. above all we thought, standing there on table mountain, of the soldiers of the first a.i.f. (the australian imperial force), young men longing for adventure, who had called in at durban then cape town on their way to the butchery of the somme. the casualties among the australian soldiers were horrendous. so many passed this way never to return, and those who did return were never the same again. meanwhile australian families treasured their postcards of zulu warriors in full regalia pulling uniformed members of the a.i.f. in rickshaws; culturally inappropriate but, knowing what was ahead of the australians, perhaps forgiveable. * this brings me to another memorable fragment, something that happened at an australian literature conference at berne in switzerland soon afterwards. an early paper was given by an earnest young academic bent on ‘proving’ that the anzacs at gallipoli and on the somme were not the heroes depicted in charles bean’s official history of australia in the war of 1914-1918. 7 nothing if not partisan, i rose to my feet, reminding him that any young australian who hadn’t run away from the somme or swum away from gallipoli was a hero in anyone’s terms. the speaker wasn’t deterred. in fact his future career would be based on the demolition of our country’s pride in the achievements, and the losses, of the young men of the a.i.f., the only volunteer army in either of the two major wars of the twentieth century. did i say that i was partisan? i certainly am. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 but there was a sequel. at the conclusion of the session i was approached by the australian ambassador to switzerland who was attending the conference. he reminded me that his christian name was pierre, even though he hailed from tasmania where a french name would have been quite a standout. his mother, he said, had been a french girl. she had seen the soldiers of the first a.i.f. march up into the trenches, and had never forgotten the sight. she swore, for the rest of her life, that they had all been seven feet tall. a memorable moment. * as for my fact-finding mission in south africa: my granddaughter now lives in australia. she is descended on her mother’s side from one of the old voortrekker families who circled their wagons on the high veldt, and rolled out their blankets under the african stars. now she can observe the evolution of the new south africa from the safety of ulladulla in new south wales. regarding the tearaway uncle, that story went west. since i was a child i had been told of this heroic irish uncle who had joined the northern rivers lancers and had left for the boer war, never to return. it was said that a witness had seen him, by then a lieutenant, shot from his horse in a cavalry charge at elands river in the transvaal. the details were precise, and a whole generation had mourned his loss. yet his name did not appear on any military roll either in in pretoria when i searched there, or back in australia. a search of the australian births, deaths and marriages records revealed the awful truth. he had not gone to the boer war but had, in fact, gone to queensland (in australia all male absconders go north). he had lived there for another 36 years without marrying or contacting his brother, my grandfather. he is buried in a lonely grave in a brisbane cemetery. the lesson: don’t believe everything you’re told, especially about horse breakers, bush poets or heroic irishmen! * having retired from the university of new england, shirley walker is now an honorary research fellow at that institution. her two most recent publications were roundabout at bangalow: an intimate chronicle. u.q.p., st lucia, 2001, and the ghost at the wedding: a true story. penguin, melbourne, 2009. notes 1 the lectures on breaker morant and banjo paterson were published as ‘”a man never knows his luck in south africa”: some australian literary myths from the boer war” in english in africa, xii, 2 ,1985. 2 ‘butchered to make a dutch man’s holiday’ (poem) is reprinted in david mcnicoll. the poetry of breaker morant. golden press, sydney, 1980, p.62. 3 see ‘some literary myths of the boer war’, pp. 13-14. 4 a.b. ‘banjo’ paterson, singer of the bush. ed. r campbell and r. harvie. lansdowne, sydney, 1983, p. 603 5 ibid., p. 523. 6 miles franklin, my brilliant career. angus & robertson, sydney, 1979. first published in 1901. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 7 charles bean, official history of australia in the war of 1914-1918. australian war memorial, canberra. australian art coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 202 indigenous australian art in practice and theory eleanor wildburger abstract: at the centre of this article lies the famous ngurrara canvas, a work of art that has supported land claims in a native title tribunal in the kimberley region (nt) in 1997. this artwork serves as model case for my discussion of the cross-cultural relevance of indigenous australian art. my concern is, in particular, the role european art museums play in representations of the ‘other’. a brief look at some sample exhibitions in europe supports my perspective on indigenous australian art in crosscultural contact zones. keywords: ngurrara canvas; cross-cultural (art) theory; non-western art exhibitions. introduction the development of indigenous australian art has been widely documented. (caruana, 1993; morhpy, 1998; kleinert & neale, 2000; myers, 2002). the ngurrara canvas, the sample painting in this article, plays a particular role in indigenous australian history, as the following paper shows. however, it is also an artwork in its own right. this twofold context of the piece in evidence makes it a useful device for my cross-cultural discussion of non-western art. the ngurrara canvas the ngurrara land claim was registered and lodged with the national native title tribunal in 1996. it covers an area of about 78,000 square kilometres in the great sandy desert in the southern kimberley region. some parts of the claim are located in the halls creek, derby west kimberley, broome, and east pilbara local government areas. the claim was lodged by the walmajarri, wangkajunga, mangala and juwaliny language groups. in the aftermath of european invasion, these people had left their copyright©2013 eleanor wildburger. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 203 country between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, yet had maintained ties with their country through ceremonies. in the 1980s they gradually started to travel back and revisit their homelands. (http://klc.org.au/native-title/ngurrara/) in accordance with the mabo high court decision, they claimed title to their land in 1996, and so in 1997 a session between the claimants and the native title tribunal was set up on the site of the homeland to collect information and data, in order to determine wether the claim would be dealt with at court later on. soon it became obvious that language differences made communication more or less impossible: the claimants spoke several indigenous languages, but were not fluent in english, not to mention, in 'high english', whereas the tribunal officials spoke english, but no aboriginal languages at all. pat lowe reports that "the land claimants held innumerable discussions with lawyers and anthropologists but they were faced with the perennial problem of how to bridge the gulf between two such different laws and world views." (2001: 29) finally they had a pathbreaking idea: instead of merely talking about their claims they would demonstrate it through a painting. the work would be a collaborative effort with each of the claimants painting his or her own piece of country, the area for which they have special responsibility. … they chose pirnini, a claypan surrounded by trees, on the edge of the desert and part of their claim. (lowe, 2001: 29) over a period of ten days, the claimants – established artists and new artists – produced a canvas that measured eight meters by ten metres. above left: hitler pamba and nada rawlins completing the warla section of the ngurrara canvas at pirnini, may 1997. photo: k. dayman. above right: nyirlpirr spider snell explaining the ngurrara canvas, 2005. photo: ngurrara artists group. http://klc.org.au/native-title/ngurrara/ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 204 http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ngurrara_the_great_sandy_desert_canvas_/ho me pat lowe recalls the native title tribunal, as follows: the ngurrarra plenary session of the native title tribunal was a smoothly orchestrated event. some middle-aged, some old, some eloquent and others shy, each claimant in turn stood on his or her section of country as represented on the canvas and spoke about it in their own language, pointing out different features or travel routes to illustrate what was being said. their words were interpreted for the tribunal members by one of the three interpreters. no one present could have doubted the truth and significance of these people's long and continuing association with their country. (lowe, 2001: 30) the significance of the ngurrarra canvas is threefold: it is a cultural artefact of immense importance; a political manifestation within postcolonial power factors; a major work of art in its own right: while the main intention behind the work was political, the aesthetic result of the work of so many different artists is extraordinary. there is no gridlike effect to demarcate separation of territories but a blending of adjacent areas, the flow of the painting imitating the flow of people's movement through the country and of family connections over space. (lowe, 2001: 30) i explained elsewhere in more detail the relevance of the indigenous law in regard to land ownership and artistic copyright. (2009; 2010) within the limitations of this article, suffice to cite ngarraljy tommy may, one of the artists: when i was a kid, if my father and my mother took me to someone else's country we couldn't mention the name of that waterhole. we used an indirect language which we call malkarniny. we couldn't mention the name of someone else's country because we come from another place, from different country. that is really the aboriginal way of respecting copyright. it means that you can't steal the stories or songs or dances from other places. this law is still valid and it is the same when we paint. we can't paint someone else's country. we can paint our own story, our own place, but not anyone else's country. (2001) in 2007, the state government of western australia accepted connection materials showing that the claimants were the rightful traditional owners for the area, and that they had maintained their connection to country. active mediation commenced in june 2007 and quickly progressed with an in-principle agreement reached in september before the federal court finalised a consent determination on november 9, 2007. the kimberley land council acted on behalf of these people “to negotiate the exclusive possession determination which covers crown land in the great sandy desert”. (http://klc.org.au/native-title/ngurrara/) immediately after traditional owners were awarded their native title rights, they declared a 16,430 square kilometre indigenous protected area or “aboriginal national park’’, in the north-east section of the claim. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ngurrara_the_great_sandy_desert_canvas_/home http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ngurrara_the_great_sandy_desert_canvas_/home http://klc.org.au/native-title/ngurrara/ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 205 wayne bergmann, the executive director of the kimberley land council, proposed that an indigenous protected area would assist traditional owners to look after country while generating employment opportunities. “being recognised as the rightful owners of our traditional lands means aboriginal communities can take control of our country and of our own futures. this is why traditional owners work so hard to secure native title,’’ he said (ibid). however, the ngurrara land claim has not yet been fully settled. sections of land including reserves excluded from the initial ngurrara claim are being recognised under a subsequent claim known as ngurrara b. the ngurrara b application was filed in december 2008. amendments to the claim were made in may 2009 and the claim is still being dealt with at court. another claim known as ngurrara #2 is being proposed to cover any remaining areas of ngurrara country not included in the original ngurrara claim and the ngurrara b claim. if this claim application should progress, it would cover country to the north and north-east of the existing ngurrara claim, to the borders of the kurungal claim and the tjurabalan native title determination area. the kimberley land council is currently conducting anthropological work in order to move this proposed application claim forward. (http://klc.org.au/native-title/ngurrara/) the ngurrara canvas demonstrates that indigenous australian artworks may contain a complex range of what we commonly call ‘stories’, yet what indigenous australians preferably call the law. the native title settlement confirms that the “stories”, implied in the artwork, are legal documents that proved and re-established land-ownership. this means that – under certain conditions – the indigenous law is valid to date, side by side with the common law. one may argue that the ngurrara canvas is a special artwork, produced in a special situation and not for the art market (even though it is treated as an artwork and has been successfully exhibited as such all over australia). the fact is that a substantial number of ‘classical’ indigenous artworks that have been produced for the art market, contain law narratives. some artists share particular narratives with art lovers and art buyers, some artists do not. and even if they do so, they will hold back deeper layers of the secret-sacred knowledge; however, the shared cultural texts will help outsiders, such as art lovers, cultural theorists, the art curators, to name a few, to get involved in cross-cultural learning and aesthetic pleasure. research matters ever since indigenous australian art has been produced for so-called western art markets, art curators (and cultural theorists) have been challenged to accommodate exhibits within (or beyond) the mainstream categories of ‘art’ and/or ‘culture’. the above-mentioned ngurrara canvas demonstrates that indigenous australian art does not comply with standardised western classification criteria. consequently, theorists call for defining a new art category that needs to take into account the diversity and specificity of non-western art production. (gigler, 2008; morphy, 2008; wildburger, 2010) i propose elsewhere (2010) to include what i term the ‘cultural design’ of artworks into the commonly practiced ethnographic assessment of non-western artworks. such an http://klc.org.au/native-title/ngurrara/ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 206 interdisciplinary approach certainly affects common curatorial exhibition concepts and offers new epistemological opportunities to a diverse group of people. it is not the concern of this article to discuss classification categories at great length. instead, my argumentation focuses on the cross-cultural learning potential of indigenous australian art. evidently, ‘art' and 'culture' are adequate categories for the analysis of visual cultural texts. it is commonly held that the terms 'art' and 'culture' are not interchangeable; this view, though, neither leads to the conclusion that the two terms are identical, nor that they are different, as i argue elsewhere (wildburger, 2010). art and culture are meaning-making practices that reflect social values and are also capable of establishing, confirming or challenging those values (schirato & webb, 2004: 116). indigenous australian art offers a complex field of inquiry that challenges researchers in their effort to transform practice into theory. in accordance with stuart hall (1997) i am aware that social practices result from relations between culture and power and so i propose that cultural theorists need to create their work within, and simultaneously, outside academia. in this sense, i agree with gary hall and clare birchall who argue that theory is … about interrogating … and acknowledging what remains unknown and unreadable, and thus resistant to any exhaustive or systematic interpretation; and which, in doing so, draws attention to the limits of our own theory and thinking, too. (2006: 13) any visual artwork is more than just a sum of its components. in a post-colonial context, in particular, also (research) power balance needs be taken into account (langton, 1993; smith, 1999; wildburger 2003; wildburger 2010). certainly, creative processes not only draw upon skill and agency; they also offer important insights into human understanding. however, the long-running academic conviction that ‘truth’ resides within matter does not provide the safety of a common agreement over codified practices any more. on the contrary, research practices are often exercised in spaces between disciplines (sullivan, 2005: 97-101). i argue elsewhere in detail (2003; 2010) that cross-culturally adequate cooperation is a pre-requisite condition for western theorists and (art museum) practitioners, when dealing with indigenous (australian) art. i also propose elsewhere in more detail a useful concept that confirms the researcher's necessity for paradigmatic terms, while also providing analytical space for definitions of individual perceptual experiences (2010). scholars commonly distinguish between scientific research as rationalistic process and art practice as expressive, subjective activity. by contrast, i argue in favour of cross-cultural research procedures that see ‘new’ knowledge as “a function of creating and critiquing human experience" (sullivan, 205: 181). my emphasis here is on the necessity to move in cognitive processes beyond existing boundaries. although there are, of course, accepted bodies of knowledge, it is important to clarify that meaning is constructed, rather than found; in addition, meaning is culturally mediated and transformed by different domains. researchers are challenged by the ongoing tension between established codes of (re)cognition and new (bodies of) knowledge; this is all the more so the case in cross-cultural encounters. the capacity to think in new ways is paramount for research into art practice, or qualitative, crosscultural research, for that matter (wildburger 2010). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 207 indigenous australian art holds a high potential for cross-cultural learning. the perception of visual elements is determined by our interests, tastes and individual preferences. the way we make sense of what we see is determined by what schirato and webb aptly call ‘cultural literacy’; they define this factor as “a general familiarity with, and an ability to use, the official and unofficial rules, values, genres, knowledge and discourses that characterise cultural fields” (schirato & webb, 2004: 18). artists operate within a social context, but "visual texts rarely provide a clear narrative, they certainly work as 'metaphorai' – providing vehicles that enable viewers to 'go somewhere else', or to craft a story" (schirato & webb, 2004: 82). in this sense, works of art reflect cultural codes within a complex system of meaning. readers (and viewers) are social creatures that make sense of their lives, and of images for that matter, in connection to narratives that are embedded in particular contexts of time, causality and place. hence, narratives of visual texts are sites of interaction that provide much space for communication and interpretation, as well as "a huge narrative potential and great expressive power: the ability to convey emotions, ideas and attitudes; and to direct readers [and viewers] to particular narratives" (schirato & webb, 2004: 104). learning in cross-cultural contact zones happens in diverse places. an important role in mediating and creating cultural imagery play certainly (art) museums: indigenous australian art in european museums the role (and epistemological importance) of museums (and art museums, for that matter) have been widely discussed (weil 1990; karp & levine 1991; coombes 1994; bennett 1995; bennett 2004; hakiwai 2005; sherman 2008). both art museums and art history are supposed to do the impossible: to form one whole out of very different perspectives on diverse, yet interrelated issues. art museums rely upon mechanisms of evidence and some causality. their effort also includes some sort of anachronism that aims at establishing and confirming their concepts of rationality. it is the aim of museums to construct evidence, yet they often transform contemporary artworks into historical monuments and deny the exhibits any contemporary context, by doing so (wildburger, 2010: 227). for european curators it seems to be problematic to stage exhibitions of non-western artworks. a look at the website of the international council of museums confirms my point and suggests that concepts of “difference” are not sufficiently integrated in western concepts of museum officials. the icom definition of “museum” reads as follows: a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. (http://icom.museum/who-we-are/the-vision/museumdefinition.html) http://icom.museum/who-we-are/the-vision/museum-definition.html http://icom.museum/who-we-are/the-vision/museum-definition.html coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 208 the website proudly confirms that icom regularly updates this definition “in accordance with the realities of the global museum community”, and that the latest version was adopted – in accordance with the icom statutes – during the 21st general conference in vienna, austria, in 2007 (ibid). over years, critique has been voiced that museums need to acknowledge and respect the nations whose cultural heritage they possess and exhibit (karp & levine, 1991; hakiwai, 2005); however, the international museum community still seems to be reluctant to add a respective passage into their statutory self-definition. evidently, museums still attract people by producing effects in regard to principles of difference and otherness. in this regard, i agree with karp and levine who are critical of the way how museums represent “otherness”: no genre of museum is able to escape the problem of representation inherent in exhibition other cultures. the two perils of exoticizing and assimilating can be found in the exhibitions of virtually every museum that devotes any part of itself to exhibiting culture. nor are museums that restrict themselves to examining diversity within their own societies able to escape the difficulties described above. (1991: 378) it is not surprising that cultural theorists widely comment on the role of the museum in creating a society’s mental imagery of the “other”. in the 1990s, scholars identified a crisis of the museum (weil, 1990; bennett, 1995); however, the points of critique are still on the agenda. stephen weil (1990) rightly claims that the ‘new’ museum is supposed to be about ideas, rather than about objects and artefacts. given the fact that museums not only represent an imagined past but also take part in creating an imagined future, it is problematic if museums take objects out of their temporal and local context, without taking this factor into adequate consideration (and documentation). museum visitors commonly have certain ideas of what they are going to see in an exhibition, and curators intend to meet these expectations accordingly (mason, 2005). this is all the more so the case with art exhibitions; an interpretation of an artwork never occurs neutrally (wildburger, 2010: 221-229). in the course of my research of many years i have been to numerous exhibitions of indigenous art in europe (and in australia) and i agree to concerns of indigenous artists who have occasionally voiced in personal communication that (mainstream) europe seems to be a difficult place for non-western art. for the sake of my argument, i will briefly comment on selected european art museums. a museum that attracts much attention (and that spreads its ‘message’ widely in media coverage) is the musée du quai branly in paris. the problematic curatorial concept of this institution has been commented on in detail (price, 2007) and cannot be dealt with in detail in this article. for the sake of my argument, i will focus on the museum’s self-definition (that obviously fully accords with the above-mentioned icom statute): the museum is conceived as an instrument, a tool that facilitates knowing and exploring, displaying and disseminating the resources in its care. this vision is founded on a strong consciousness of the institution’s responsibilities concerning heritage and culture and the people who will come into possession of those resources. it is connected to the notion of respect and sharing. this institution is part of the institutions of the republic, in its respect for law and laicité … it is an instrument of citizenship, for our coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 209 society among multiple components of the republic. (germain viatte, cited in dias, 2008: 141; translated into english by dias.) price (2007) has analysed at great length to which extent the concept of the musée is rooted in french nationalistic thinking; a lengthy discussion of this point is not the concern of this article. suffice to indicate that the musée shows “respect” for highlyesteemed national principles of the mother country; however, neither the (colonialist) acquisition history of exhibits is taken into account nor is the cultural diversity of the nations acknowledged whose heritage is on display. on the contrary, at the opening of the museum in 2006, indigenous australian art practice was (mis-)used as promotional highlight. under wide media coverage, famous indigenous australian artists were invited to produce artworks on site; it turned out, however, that these artworks were not produced in the main building of the museum and are not accessible for visitors, as i explain in more detail elsewhere (2010: 235-246). another european art museum that raised high expectations with its promotional activities is the collection essl in vienna/klosterneuburg. in 2001 and 2004 the museum staged two exhibitions of outstanding indigenous artworks; both shows are documented in two lengthy catalogues that are as problematic as the curatorial concept of the exhibitions themselves, which i comment on in detail elsewhere (2010). the curatorial concept of the museum is explained in the catalogue of the first show: in austria, as in most of the rest of europe, this [aboriginal] art is little known. … for this reason, in both this catalogue and the exhibition itself, large areas are dedicated to providing information about the cultural, social and spiritual background of aboriginal people. visitors need to be aware of this cultural background to be able to truly appreciate the profound nature and wide range of this art beyond the purely aesthetic pleasure it offers. (edition sammlung essl, 2001: 121; emphasis added) however, the information given in the show rooms, was incoherent, out of context, and in part incorrect. the same is true for the two catalogues, as i elaborate in detail elsewhere (2010: 246-254). in short, all the museum’s efforts ended in a concept that exoticized indigenous australian cultures rather than providing any adequate and correct information about the cultural background of the beautiful artworks on display. it is needless to mention that also the aesthetic qualities of the exhibits did not seem to be in focus of the curators. a completly different, and arguably innovative, exhibition concept was applied by curators in the museum albertina in vienna. the concern of the museum was the artistic quality of the artworks on display, rather than the cultural context. in 2007 the museum staged the outstanding donald kahn collection of classical indigenous paintings, produced by path-breaking artists of the western desert region. the artworks were presented as artworks in their own right. i have argued elsewhere (2010) in detail in which way this attempt did not fulfil its intention. in short, the exhibition did neither value the cultural context of the artworks (as was not the museum’s intention anyway), nor did the display of the paintings or the debatable catalogue take into account the high aesthetic-artistic quality of the 37 masterpieces: paintings of similar style, origin and narrative themes were displayed out of context in different rooms of the exhibition, and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 210 no aesthetic-artistic line through the show was discernable either. besides, the catalogue did not meet any contemporary standards; in fact, it was a re-edited version of an exhibition-catalogue of the same collection in munich in 1994, and it definitely showed its age. by contrast to the above-mentioned european museums, the aboriginal art museum in utrecht (the netherlands) has managed over years to meet cross-cultural criteria and art-market expectations with the curatorial concept of their art exhibitions. to my current knowledge, curators of the dutch museum co-operate closely with indigenous artists and curators, as well as with (mainstream) australian art experts that have successfully acted in the cross-cultural art domain for years. this approach is certainly a successful strategy for exhibitions of non-western art in europe. i propose that european art curators take also guidance from concepts of excellent cross-cultural art exhibitions in australia, such as the land marks exhibition of indigenous art (2006) in the ian potter centre of the national gallery in melbourne, or the exhibition origins of western desert art: tjukurrtjanu (sept. 2011-feb. 2012) in the same place. excellent catalogues of both exhibitions support my argument that non-western art exhibitions can attract (and educate) a diverse audience if two perspectives are adequately interwoven and properly taken into account: the appropriate cultural context of the artworks and the aesthetic-artistic features of the exhibits. if non-western art is exhibited in cross-cultural contact zones, it is paramount to take into account what i term the “cultural design” (2010) of artworks; such an approach will not only acknowledge the cultural relevance of works of art and will respect the cultural heritage of the artists’ environment, it will also give credit to the artistic peculiarity of the exhibits. conclusion there is no doubt that our views of art (and of the “other”) are socially constructed. this article supports my argument that art museums play an important role in the formation of a society’s mental imagery of the “other”. european museums are called upon to accord their curatorial concepts with cross-culturally adequate criteria, if nonwestern art is displayed. to my view, it is the task of art museums to foster crossculturally appropriate communication and understanding. artworks hold a high educational potential, and this is all the more so the case with artworks in cross-cultural contact zones. in cross-cultural art exhibitions we learn about ourselves through perceiving difference. in an effort to make sense of our experiences, we investigate thoughts and ideas that result from artworks that are not rooted in our own social and cultural environment. non-western artworks, in particular, may challenge our own established way of thinking and may teach us to acknowledge the limits of our mental constructs. in this sense, art museums play a substantial role as they hold the opportunity to teach their visitors aesthetic and cultural sensitivity, which in its turn may induce people to make sense of cultural difference and to acknowledge and respect human diversity in general. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 211 works cited bennett, tony. the birth of the museum: history, theory, politics. 1995. london: routledge. bennett, tony. pasts beyond memory: evolution, museums, colonialism. 2004. london: routledge. caruana, wally. aboriginal art. 1993. new york: thames and hudson, 1996. chance, ian ed. kaltja now: indigenous arts australia. 2000. adelaide: wakefield press. coolaba 3 (2009). web. http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/welcome.html coombes, annie. reinventing africa: museums, material culture, and popular imagination. 1994. new haven: yale university press. corsane, gerald. ed. heritage, museums and galleries: an introductory reader. 2005. london & new york: routledge. dias, nélia. “cultural difference and cultural diversity: the case of the musée du quai branly”: daniel sherman, ed. museums and difference. 2008. bloomington & indianapolis: indiana university press. edition sammlung essl. ed. dreamtime: zeitgenoessische aboriginal art / the dark and the light. 2001. klosterneuburg. edition sammlung essl. ed. spirit & vision: aboriginal art. 2004. klosterneuburg. gigler, elisabeth. indigenous australian art photography: an intercultural perspective. 2008. aachen: shaker verlag. hakiwai, arapata t. “the search for legitimacy: museums in aotearoa, new zealand – a maori viewpoint”. gerald corsane, ed. heritage, museums and galleries: an introductory reader. 2005. london & new york: routledge. 154-162. hall, stuart. “the centrality of culture”. kenneth thompson, ed. media and cultural regulations. 1997. london, thousand oakes, new delhi: sage. 208-238. hall, gary, clare birchall. “new cultural studies: adventures in theory (some comments, clarifications, explanations, observations, recommendations, remarks, statements and suggestions)”. gary hall, clare birchall, eds. new cultural studies: adventures in theory. 2006. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. 1-28. hall, gary, clare birchall, eds. new cultural studies: adventures in theory. 2006. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. karp, ian and st. d. levine eds. exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display. 1991. washington & london: smithsonian institution press. kleinert, sylvia, margo neale, eds. the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. 2000. oxford: oup. langton, marcia. ’well, i heard it on the radio and i saw it on television...’. an essay for the australian film commission on the politics and the aesthetics of filmmaking by and about aboriginal people and things. 1993. sydney: australian film commission. lowe, pat. “the proof is the painting”. ian chance, ed. kaltja now: indigenous arts australia. 2000. adelaide: wakefield press. mason, rhiannon. “museums, galleries and heritage: sites of meaning-making and communication”. gerald corsane, ed. heritage, museums and galleries: an introductory reader. 2005. london & new york: routledge. 200-214. morphy, howard. aboriginal art. 1998. london; phaidon. morphy, howard. becoming art: exploring cross-cultural categories. 2008. sydney: http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/welcome.html coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 212 unsw press. myers, fred r. the making of an aboriginal high art. 2002. durham and london: duke university press. price, sally. paris primitive: jaques chirac’s museum on the quai branly. 2007. chicago: university of chicago press. schirato, tony, jen webb eds. reading the visual. 2004. crows nest: allen & unwin. sherman, daniel j. ed. museums and difference. 2008. bloomington & indianapolis: indiana university press. smith, linda tuhiwai. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. 1999. london & new york: zed books ltd. sullivan, graeme. art practice as research: inquiry in the visual arts. 2005. thousand oaks, london, new delhi: sage publications. thompson, kenneth, ed. media and cultural regulations. 1997. london, thousand oakes, new delhi: sage weil, stephan e. rethinking the museum. 1990. washington: smithsonian institute. wildburger, eleonore. politics, power and poetry: am intercultural perspective on aboriginal identity in black australian poetry. 2003. stuttgart: stauffenburg verlag. wildburger, eleonore. “indigenous australian art in intercultural contact zones”. coolaba 3 (2009). web. wildburger, eleonore. the ‘cultural design’ of indigenous australia art: a cross cultural perspective. 2010. saarbruecken: svh. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ngurrara_the_great_sandy_desert_canvas_/home; accessed 23 april 2012. http://icom.museum/who-we-are/the-vision/museum-definition.html; accessed 25 april 2012. http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/welcome.html; accessed 1 feb 2012. eleonore wildburger recently retired from her position as senior lecturer in (indigenous) australian studies at the university of klagenfurt (austria), department of english and american studies. she was visiting professor at the university of innsbruck/austria 2011/2012. her main fields of research are indigenous australian art and cultures and cross-cultural methodology. she recently published the book the ‘cultural design’ of indigenous australian art: a cross-cultural perspective (saarbruecken: svh, 2012). http://eleonore.wildburger.com. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ngurrara_the_great_sandy_desert_canvas_/home http://icom.museum/who-we-are/the-vision/museum-definition.html http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/welcome.html https://correu.edau.ub.edu/owa/redir.aspx?c=d7645fd0020145db9cfdea58f353ac65&url=http%3a%2f%2feleonore.wildburger.com%2f coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 156 memory: the theatre of the past john ryan abstract: this paper explores curricula where a cultural study of texts offers opportunities for new south wales high school students to consider the discourses and stories that have continued to preoccupy and shape their own society and lives these last hundred and fifty years. walter benjamin’s astute observation that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre provides the starting point for the discussion. in particular, the paper will explore the praxis of cultural studies scholar and novelist gail jones whose interests in modernity, memory and image currently engage high school students in their final year of study. keywords: memory, australian literature, teaching curriculum, gail jones this paper is a discursive exploration of the idea of cultural literacy. that is, the notion that important cultural discourses can be accessed through texts students study, in particular in new south wales high schools. rather than presenting a dialectical argument, the first half of the paper is an exploration of the idea of cultural literacy through reference to several key authors in the european literary tradition. in the second part of the paper i focus specifically on australian author gail jones’ post-modern use of the bildungsroman form for a study of modernism. in a sense, the purpose of my paper is to pay homage to jones’ uniquely southern novel, a text embraced by the students who study it. sixty lights positive reception by students reminds us that the effect of novels is at times quite alchemical and like some kabalistic correspondence, when a text resonates with us, we become both its advocate as well as personally involved in a process of ongoing enrichment that continues to operate long after we have finished the book itself. a text can be both personally compelling as well as collectively significant. yet before the 19 th century standardization of english and the advent of the first lending libraries, acts of reading were accorded an elitist status that like their companion recordcopyright©2014 john ryan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 157 keeping, formed an alliance of hegemonic control of a mass population unable to read. this meant that for most of the world and much of history, literacy was a foreign country. even in 1929, after a century had passed, virginia woolf was to write a description of her own books on the shelves of the cambridge university library, a place where as a woman, she wasn·t allowed entry. at the recent australian english teachers association conference in sydney (2012), researcher and academic jackie manuel presented the findings of a range of studies of teenage reading habits that show how reading and the enjoyment of it is were adversely affected when teachers take away choices or teach to the test. the books young adults prefer are most often not those selected by teachers as worthy of study but the ones they read independently. manuel commented on the importance of these findings to educators, pointing out that there is, then, a relational nature between reading and the sense of being as an individual. on what basis then, she asked, should teachers select and arrange any group of texts so that they communicate significance and relevance to students. if this challenge can be met, can we then create learning communities that go far beyond the educational institution. bill green says that english is primarily concerned with “locating the self.” this language of place speaks to the idea of looking back to look forward and reminds us that important discourses of the past have never left us. they continue into the present and beyond. important revolutions in how we human beings see ourselves; how we define what it is to be human; our ontological and epistemological relationships, have taken place over the last several hundred years, and each of them simultaneously continues to exist in the modern world. the feudal, the renaissance, the enlightenment, the romantic revolution, modernity and post-modernity: all of them remain potent and affective. in terms of educational contexts then, forming a curricula that is built out of texts that embody and engage with the pivotal moments when such profound re-imaginings took place would seem a useful way of assisting high school students, those between twelve and eighteen years of age, to understand the discourses around them. such an approach would have a sense of relevance for students to locate themselves from the place where they are; thus looking back as well as forwards out of a sense of real cultural literacy. an example can be found in chaucer·s innovative writing of the canterbury tales. this song cycle, written in the english language at a time where latin & french were standard for publication, not only embodied a satiric critique of authority in the 1300·s but also connected english as a written form to a literary tradition whose origins were in the classical world. in the same act of writing chaucer not only gave authenticity to english as a medium for expression, he wrote to include a readership of the new middle classes who, through access to written story making and story sharing, formed part of a shift away from the fixed social positions everyone and thing was allocated in the great chain of being. the canterbury tales demonstrates the ways a text can exist in a paratactical relationship to its context. mirroring, critiquing and thereby intervening in a sort of post-feudal space, the written text not only reflects social change and concerns of the period but also is a kind of cultural artifact. for instance, in the pardoner·s tale, a satire of hypocrisies and abuses coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 158 of church personnel cuts close to the bone, chaucer’s audiences would be well aware of the association of rounceville with corrupt church officials. in the late 1960’s john berger famously said, “critique is always a form of intervention…” berger was referring to the role of critics in defense of art, however the statement can also be applied as a way of approaching our understanding of how to understand the social purposes of texts. when we study shakespeare’s 37 plays for example, we (like shakespeare) investigate the ideological world that straddles the 16 th and 17 th centuries. their engagement is with the issues of the elizabethan renaissance; a change in the monarchy, such as macbeth; colonization and the confrontation with the other in the tempest; the politics of court: the uses of ‘history’ in richard iii, or the then ‘new’ interest in the classical and contemporary worlds of greece and rome (a midsummer night·s dream, julius caesar and even romeo & juliet). in a sense, shakespeare embodies a postrenaissance commentary much as does chaucer for his own context. the renaissance spooled into the enlightenment where there was, arguably, a fundamental shift privileging reason over belief: from myth to rationality as explanation system of the human being and its place in the universe. i suggest that the post-enlightenment is represented through the work we associate with the romantic revolution where, out of a powerful politicized individualism, artists -poets and novelists in particularcritiqued the limitations of reason, science, exploration and indeed the pathology of categorization. no longer would shakespeare be spelt differently every time it was written. part of this process of categorization included the standardization of english and the mass-production and distribution of the novel: particularly the gothic romance. when wordsworth & coleridge prefaced lyrical ballads with a manifesto championing the culturally specific, they foreshadowed post-modern concerns with location and context and the importance of individual stories and voices. wordsworth & coleridge were among many romantics concerned that the triumph of narrative and the popularity of the lending libraries would be to the cost and disappearance of poetry. they feared that regional english myths and languages too would be lost and set about renewing them through their own work. keats’ sonnet “on looking into chapman·s homer” ignores accuracy when representing the ‘discovery’ of the pacific: cortez was not the person and darien was not the place. keats’ focus is that the discovery of the pacific; that the globe doubles one·s vision and halves one·s assumptions; is equal to the discovery of the imaginative breath of the ancient composer homer. the romantics championed freedom of speech, the end of slavery and the establishment of the american nation and french republic. forming a nexus between art and politics, these artists represent a social discourse that has been a powerful ongoing contributor to the way we continue to think of individual agency. but most of all, the romantic revolution established perhaps for the first time the idea that part of our humanity is evidenced through creating. peter watson says: this was a basic shift in the very meaning of individuality and was totally new. in the first instance and for the first time, it was realized that morality was a coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 159 creative process but in the second place, and no less important, it laid a new emphasis on creation, and this … elevates the artist alongside the scientist. it is the artist who creates, who expresses himself, who creates values… in creating, the artist invents his goal and then realizes his own path towards that goal. (watson 2005: 827-8) listening to this rendering of romanticism is like engaging in a futuristic archaeology of the sort ursula le guin describes in her novel always coming home. thus, when we “imagine and reach the people who might be going to have lived a long, long time from… [then]”, we may well find that the subjects the romantics chose were postmodern, existential, charting the unconscious: modern. crosshatched with romanticism in the shaping of contemporary consciousness is the advent of modernity. in the next part of this paper i focus on australian novelist and academic gail jones’ sixty lights, a text where modernism is made a subject and means for expression. in a new translation of rimbaud’s illuminations in the new york review of books, the translator john ashberry provides insights into modernism. in the preface to the book he says that “the crystalline jumble of rimbaud’s illuminations are like a disordered collection of magic lantern slides,” each “an intense and rapid dream”, that are, in ashberry’s words, “still emitting pulses.” if we are absolutely modern -and we areit is because rimbaud commanded us to be. these tropes of narrative order, the invention of the wondrous magic lantern show of the 1800’s and all its relations, photography in particular but film too, now pervade culture. and as ashberry says, they are “intense and of the order of a dreamscape.” ashberry defines rimbaud’s vision of just what modernity means as follows: “essentially, absolute modernity was for him (rimbaud) the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second” (ashberry 2011: 16). like rimbaud, many modernists articulated the ways theory and practice walked hand in hand; mostly, according to david trotter in his essay the modernist novel, in terms of what they were against. trotter says, “many, if not most plots, and certainly those favoured by the great nineteenth-century realists, turn on moments of revelation, recognition scenes, when the illusions nurtured by timidity, prejudice, or habit fall away, and a naked self confronts a naked world. these are moments when identity is begun, renewed or completed” (trotter 2011: 93). in contrast, modernist authors like henry james and joseph conrad and later, virginia woolf and james joyce established “centres of consciousness through which the apprehension of events were filtered” (70) and “were more interested in cumulative models of selfhood” (93). we need only to think of ulysses or the waves or much earlier than both of these, heart of darkness. the sense that experimentation in voice and form was taking place still strikes one in the pages of mrs dalloway for example. the modernists rejected the realism and the omniscient authority of the author as inadequate. quite often their focus was on the nature of a single moment, in elliptical narratives they layered in palimpsests of memory and place in a theatre made of consciousness. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 160 this exploration of the single moment, together with the sense of simultaneous rupture and loss, is at the heart of the changes that gave rise to the modern world in the nineteenth century, and is a preoccupation of novelist and academic gail jones whose novel sixty lights is currently set for study in the higher school certificate, the final year of study for high school students in new south wales. the protagonist in jones’ coming of age story is lucy strange who, we are told in the opening chapter of the novel, will “meet her death -in a few years time, at the age of twenty two” (jones: 2005. 4). this young woman is at various times in the novel referred to as an anachronistic character, a photographer who wishes to capture the maculate, the fleeting, shadows of her mother’s face which she can not recall. lucy strange exists in the middle of the nineteenth century: she and photography are born together. “error and chance,” she says of her own photographs, “these are beautiful things.” to lucy photographs were art-in-the-age-of-mechanicalproduction… “this one,” said lucy, pointing to a portrait of [her brother thomas’ wife] violet…sitting by a window with a book in her hand… “is special.” the right side of the print was overtaken by a circle of white light… “halation, this is called … a flooding of light. a perceptible halo.” “a technical mistake,” her lover jacob, a painter says. “yes, perhaps. the royal college of photographers would certainly deplore it. but to me it seems the loveliest accident. it shows us the force of radiance, its omnipresence.” (jones 2005: 239) it is lucy’s fascination with light -writing and the afterlife of the imagethat jones is exploring throughout the novel. in victorian babylon, author lynda nead represents the process of modernity as phoenixlike. arising out of the destruction of the old, the modern is a reminder of the old, the past, in the same way as a photograph, as roland barthes says, is the site where the modern and the unmodern meet: the making of ghosts of the uncapturable past forever with us. in the middle of the nineteenth century, the london lucy (though she was born in australia), comes ‘home’ to was in a more or less permanent dust haze as a new infrastructure, including the tube and sewers, projected out of the spaces where the old has been torn down. the project of modernising, says nead, is never ending: the modern is the ever new. thus we are always creating a sense of irreconcilable loss. jones may not be saying this is a bad thing either. in another novel, dreams of speaking, she represents hiroshima as a city of light where, like a photograph, the flash of the atomic bomb forever imprints on the retina of humanity. (roughley: 2007. 57) after lucy is diagnosed with consumption, she draws upon the lexicon and experience of modernity to imagine her body: “she saw, above all, a kind of city, all caves and pipelines and underground tubes, rather like the ones engineers were now creating under the streets of london the metropolitan, they called it, a dark new geography. one she had stumbled upon workers emerging from a gape in the street; they had skin made of earth and looked coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 161 like a fraternity of the underworld. she saw them blink and look lost. they wiped their faces with rags. bog men. lazarus men. creatures of sub-london dark” (189). a range of theorists inform gail jones’ work including roland barthes and susan sontag. in particular, eduado cadava’s brief essays collectively titled words of light, in which cadava explores walter benjamin·s ideas about photography, ‘light’ and ‘writing’ have helped give shape to sixty lights. and, unlike susan sontag, who in her famous essay on photography, sees photography as being associated with the spectacle of loss, grieving and melancholy, jones offers an insightful meditation on the contemporary through the trope of photography. she represents photography as life affirming and representative of time, “elongated … concertina shaped … pleated” (jones 2005: 242). for jones, there is something representational about photograph and sixty lights has been called “snapshots in prose” (dixon 2009: 39). there are perhaps two reasons why sixty lights is embraced and valued by the students who study the novel. one is their own contemporary and active engagement with photography, recording and storing the ephemeral; on i-phones, in clouds, on public media, in memory: the phenomena of photography is ubiquitous. the second reason concerns gail jones’ ability to represent modernity so that it makes meaningful our sense of the present. jones is thinking through and relocating the perceptions of european theorists such as maurice blanchott, walter benjamin and jaques derrida into her southern seeing of the mid-nineteenth century: “rehears[ing] a constellation of themes,” she has called it. what does it mean to her, a woman growing up “on a former quarantine station, a remote settlement of three buildings on a peninsula in the kimberleys” that she calls “a kind of emancipated space … deterritorialised, without markers of stable being, unbounded, ambiguous, indivisibly spacious and full” (jones 2006: 14)? in sixty lights, jones wanted to mimic a modernist text with its focus on subjectivity, memory and time through an elliptical and paratactical structure wherein the journeys characters take, from australia to england, chart the trade routes of empire from the south to the north following the “multidirectional flow of people, money and ideas…[which have shaped australia]” (roughley 2007: 57). so while lucy and thomas travel in a reverse journey of their mother’s voyage to australia, and which mirrors that of their parent’s honeymoon to florence, it is also one “that is shaped by the globalising forces of colonialism and modernity” (jones 2005: 57). jones has said that sixty lights is a backwards-looking text, a memory text, so it appears to be mimicking a victorian novel to have a solid plot that progresses from childhood to death, a bildungsroman, that kind of very traditional or conservative notion of how a text is shaped. i wanted [she says] to suggest that the experience of living, especially living with distress or with suffering of others that is not fully assimilated, does fracture or rupture the experience of time, so that i punctuate my book with images that stand alone …[and] cause a moment of stasis in the book. so the whole text, i hope, is anachronistic, it has a mimicry of victorian time but is in coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 162 fact a modernist text. it is about the time that comes into being with photographic meaning. (interview with koval 2005:1) this paper began with a consideration of the alchemical properties of texts and proceeded to consider shifts in culture that have been augmented through acts of reading and writing. to a contemporary australian reader, in particular students completing their final year of secondary schooling, sixty lights provides the opportunity to consider and reflect on the discourses and stories that have preoccupied and shaped their society and lives these last hundred and fifty years. it also provides a space to explore walter benjamin·s observation that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre… it is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred … the true picture of the past flits by. the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again. (benjamin 1979: 314) students are interested in reading, in learning. the freshness of looking backwards and witnessing the conceptual language of the contemporary being born makes keen sense of the present people that we are. works cited barthes, roland (1980). camera lucida: reflections on photography. london: jonathan cape. benjamin, walter (1979). one way streets and other writings. london: new left books. berger, john (1969). art and revolution: ernst neizvestny and the role of the artist in the ussr. harmonsworth: penguin. cadava, edward (1998). words of light. princeton: princeton up. dixon, mel (2009). “sixty lights: exploring ideas”. metaphor 2, 37-41. dixon, robert (2008). “ghosts in the machine: modernity and the unmodern in gail jones’ dreams of speaking.” journal of the association for the study of australian literature 8, 121-137. koval, ramona (2005). interview with gail jones. books and writing. abc radio national broadcasting corporation. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandwriting/gailjones/3630050#transcript. access 16 december 2013. jones, gail (2012). the thea astley lecture. byron bay writers festival. byron bay. ---(2006). “a dreaming, a sauntering: re-imagining critical paradigms” in the journal of the association for the study of australian literature 5, 11-24. ---(2005). sixty lights. london: vintage. manuel, jackie (2012). in praise of reading: a vignette of teenagers reading lives. a paper delivered at “five bells: the national conference of english teachers”. sydney. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandwriting/gail-jones/3630050#transcript http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandwriting/gail-jones/3630050#transcript coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 163 nead, linda (2000). victorian babylon: people, streets and images in nineteenth-century london. new haven: yale up. roughley, fiona (2007). “spatialising experience: gail jones·s black mirror and the contending of postmodern space”. the journal of australian literary studies 23, 58-73. trotter, david (2011). “the modernist novel” in marc levensen, ed. the cambridge companion to modernism. cambridge: cambridge up. 70-99. watson, peter (2005). ideas: a history from fire to freud. london: phoenix books. john ryan is head, english department, kingscliff high school and president of the north coast branch of the english teachers association of new south wales. he has published in the field of human rights and education and was awarded a nsw premiers· scholarship in 2002. in 2011 he was a member of the higher school certificate english exam committee which 70,000 students sat for. he has a commitment to curriculum innovation through combining human rights, cultural diversity and social justice with cultural studies perspectives. his recent work, “peacebuilding education: enabling human rights and social justice through cultural studies pedagogy,” with baden offord, appears in a new book, activating human rights and peace. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 244 travelling in lawson’s tracks, a review-essay paul eggert, biography of a book: henry lawson’s while the billy boils. sydney university press/pennsylvania state university press, 2013 henry lawson, while the billy boils. the original newspaper versions, edited by paul eggert, explanatory notes by elizabeth webby. sydney university press, 2013. john barnes you were quick to pick on a faulty line that i strove to put my soul in: your eyes were keen for a dash of mine in the place of a semi-colon— and blind to the rest. and is it for such as you i must brook restriction? ‘i was taught too little?’ i learnt too much to care for a pedant’s diction. must i turn aside from my destined way for a task your joss would find me? i come with the strength of the living day. and with half the world behind me; i leave you alone in your cultured halls to drivel and croak and cavil: till your voice goes further than college walls, keep out of the tracks we travel! henry lawson, ‘the uncultured rhymer to his cultured critics’ (1897) the well-known lines quoted above are the last two stanzas of a poem that henry lawson directed at his friend, john le gay brereton, a graduate of sydney university who had made a critical comment about his prosody. the hostility that lawson voices towards ‘cultured critics’ was certainly irrational and unjustified, but it was not a philistine reaction to learning. throughout his life he ‘longed for something better’, and in his youth he had wanted ‘higher education’ and ‘culture’. that lawson aspired to be copyright©2014 john barnes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 245 a university student will probably come as a surprise to many who know his writing and think that they know the man who produced it. as a youth in sydney, after working all day as a painter he went to evening classes, but twice failed to reach a high enough standard to matriculate. lawson’s creativity is more likely to have been stultified than stimulated by university studies, but this failure to realize what was probably an unrealistic ambition certainly made him extremely sensitive to criticism from someone who was regarded as better educated, even from a friend such as brereton. the lifelong friendship of the two men began in 1894 when brereton was an undergraduate at sydney university; and it was in an article, ‘poetry in australia’, in the undergraduate magazine hermes that he hailed the writer, not yet published in book form, as a poet ‘who has within him the elements of greatness’. brereton never followed up this early enthusiastic notice—the first appreciation of lawson’s writing to appear in print—with reviews or essays. he was to reminisce in later years about lawson as the ‘mate with whom i knocked around’, but he did not think of his writing as a subject for academic study. nor did any other australian academics until about the middle of the twentieth century, when universities started to include australian authors in their courses. in 1922 lawson, widely acclaimed as australia’s national writer, died in poverty. the previous year brereton, after working for some years as a librarian, was appointed to the chair of english literature at sydney university on the strength of his studies in elizabethan drama. his reputation as a scholar was established abroad by his editing of lust’s dominion; or the lascivious queen, an anonymous elizabethan play now thought to have been written mainly by thomas dekker. apart from his scholarly productions brereton tried his hand at poetry and prose, but it is probably safe to say that of all his published work it is what he wrote about henry lawson that is now most read. in 1931, with lawson’s daughter, bertha, he edited a volume of reminiscences entitled henry lawson by his mates. in his own affectionate recollection of his friend he wrote that ‘mateship became the lonely poet’s watchword, and he made it the watchword of australia’. that was the dominant note of the book, which promoted the interpretation of lawson as ‘the poet of mateship’, an interpretation that went largely uncontested until a generation later australian critics, mostly academics, began to pay sustained attention to his work, and serious critical discussion replaced tributes and rhetorical gestures. by 1960 sydney academic h. p. heseltine, the author of a monograph on brereton, could write that lawson was ‘the most monumentalized, the most memorialized, and the most popularly celebrated of our writers’. his essay, ‘saint henry—our apostle of mateship’, arguing that the legend of lawson was false to ‘his actual achievement in fiction’, pointed to the direction that criticism was taking. although lawson’s verse still had admirers, and was popular with a large reading public, critics generally began to concentrate on his short stories. the 1948 essay by the influential melbourne literary critic, a. a. phillips, which was reprinted in several collections over the years, had memorably argued the case for lawson as a prose craftsman. two years later new zealand-born canberra academic murray todd (whose essay was also reprinted in several places) had declared that lawson’s stories were ‘his great achievement’, and that he was ‘a great artist’. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 246 a generation like mine that had grown up knowing lawson through stories such as ‘the drover’s wife’ and ‘the loaded dog’ and ballads such as ‘andy’s gone with cattle’, which appeared in primary school readers, now started to look closely at his fiction. an increasing number of prose selections were published for use by students in senior school and college. the establishment of a chair of australian literature at sydney university, and the proliferation of courses as english departments found room for australian literature among their offerings, saw lawson firmly established as an academic subject. by the time that the copyright expired on lawson’s published writing in 1972, his fiction had become the focus of critical debate among academics, and colin roderick (publisher-cum-university professor) had produced seven volumes, collecting lawson’s verse prose and letters, and criticism of his work in what he called a memorial edition. the books on the university library shelves—in australia, at least—testified that lawson had, in one sense, been accepted into the academy. the critical and biographical studies over the forty years since then have revealed a much more complex figure than the simple, warm-hearted ‘poet of mateship’ of popular legend; but there are still important aspects of lawson’s life and writing that are not well documented or understood. such has been the mythologizing about the literary activity in sydney at the end of the nineteenth century that it has been difficult to get a clear perspective on lawson as a writer in his times. as well, confusion and glossing over of events in the accounts given of him by his contemporaries, along with the sometimes deliberate suppression of facts, has led to misconceptions about his life and misreadings of his work. even colin roderick’s henry lawson: a life (1991), the most substantial biographical account that has been published, leaves one feeling that the tragedy of this gifted writer is still to be written. roderick devoted many years of his life to researching and editing lawson’s work. the volumes he produced, while undoubtedly valuable, did have shortcomings, which have became more evident with the passing of time. my own research into lawson’s stay in england was prompted by the discovery that roderick’s henry lawson: letters did not include lawson’s letters to the three most important literary figures in that period of his life: publisher william blackwood; literary agent james b. pinker; and publisher’s reader and critic edward garnett. in editing the verse roderick arranged the texts chronologically, according to the date of composition, as far as he was able to establish it, with textual variants at the foot of each page, and notes gathered at the end of each of the three volumes. the notes were uneven and idiosyncratic, like all roderick’s comments, but generally helpful, and the organization was, one might say, ‘user-friendly’. the two volumes of ‘collected prose’--short stories and sketches 1888-1922 and autobiographical and other writings 1887-1922--that roderick included in his memorial edition had no notes, but a third volume of commentary was foreshadowed. henry lawson: commentaries on his prose writings did not appear until 1985. in the two volumes of ‘collected prose’ roderick had grouped the contents according to his own interpretation of lawson’s subject matter. the commentaries on the fiction followed the organization of a revised (1984) edition of volume 1 of the collected prose. (ignoring his own division of lawson’s prose into ‘stories and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 247 sketches’ and ‘autobiographical and other writings’, roderick transferred lawson’s bulletin article, ‘”pursuing literature” in australia’, to the new edition of the fiction.) in annotating lawson’s fiction roderick usefully notes textual variants, explains allusions and historical detail, and points to the changes that significantly alter a story; but the commentaries suffer from being too discursive and unfocussed. his attitude is fairly indicated by his claim in the introduction that in his commentaries he provided ‘chapter and verse for the finding, that essentially lawson was a student of the human mind’. roderick has a great deal to say about lawson’s personality and includes long quotations from lawson’s contemporaries; such material has an incidental interest but a more disciplined approach to the task of annotation would probably have produced a work of more value to readers of lawson’s stories. in recent years there have been many selections of lawson’s work, some with modest notes, but until this edition of while the billy boils, edited by paul eggert, with explanatory notes by elizabeth webby, there has been nothing comparable with roderick’s work. this new volume is the most sustained piece of scholarly editing of lawson that has been attempted. having known paul eggert since the beginning of his academic career, i am not surprised that the work has been done so meticulously. (once when i was in new york he asked me to check a d. h. lawrence manuscript for him, as he was not completely sure that the dot on the microfilm was a punctuation mark.) i have never seen john le gay brereton’s edition of lust’s dominion, but he could not have worked more closely over his text than paul eggert has done over the text of brereton’s ‘uncultured’ friend. it is an exemplary piece of academic work. in roderick’s commentaries the records of ‘textual variance’ were, as eggert says, ‘incomplete and unsystematic’. in his edition of while the billy boils eggert rejects roderick’s old-fashioned editorial practice of printing as the reading text ‘the lastauthorized version within lawson’s lifetime’, which had meant that the text given to the reader incorporated, ‘as well as lawson’s own revisions, all of the changes brought about by editors and typesetters that he had either not noticed or felt unable to oppose’ [p. xviii]. by contrast, eggert prints the earliest known version, noting what he calls ‘textual accretions’ at the foot of the page. although it is the book version that has been read and discussed for over a hundred years, one can see the logic of this from the point of view of the editor interested in the history of the text. strictly speaking, what eggert’s volume offers as a reading text is not while the billy boils but the stories out of which the book was fashioned. in most instances the changes, which are all scrupulously listed at the foot of the page, are not of major consequence; but where passages have been rewritten, deleted or added the reader has to struggle through a mass of minutiae and symbols (indicating who may have made the changes) in order to reconstruct the text that was published in the first edition of the book. while the billy boils is an uneven collection and is obviously the work of a young writer still finding his way. the additions and deletions in several stories are very interesting—more interesting to me than the details of the copy-editing which coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 248 preoccupy eggert. there are two stories where one can see lawson hesitating between possible narratives. ‘rats’, as originally published in the bulletin, is a story of an old man who appears to be ‘barmy’; when it was republished in lawson’s first collection, short stories in prose and verse, lawson added a paragraph, which revealed that the old man was merely pretending. when while the billy boils was being prepared for publication, lawson struck out the added paragraph, so that the story reverted to being a portrait of a bush eccentric (like ‘the bush undertaker’) rather than an account of a trick played by a shrewd bushman. as originally published in a new zealand paper, ‘that there dog o’ mine’. an australian sketch’ describes how an injured shearer refuses to enter hospital because he is told that his faithful dog, which has a broken leg, must be sent away; he collapses, and when he recovers consciousness, ‘comfortably fixed up’ on a hospital bed, he is told that the doctor is out in the hospital yard tending to the dog. in while the billy boils that is where the story ends; but in the original version the narrative continues: ‘the above story is true—all except the last paragraph’. the hospital does not allow the dog to stay, the injured man goes away; his body is found a week later, guarded by the dog, which is shot by the police. the ending of the story is a savage rejection of the sentimentalizing of bush life: there was a lot of sentiment about the faithfulness of the dog, and a howl of indignation against the cruelty of the police. the sentiment and indignation spilled over and got into the local papers, and thence into most of their contemporaries….but the dog was—well—it was eating the corpse. this deleted ending is especially fascinating, indicating as it does the potential for a darker, tougher representation of bush life than lawson developed. the different approaches of roderick and eggert are strikingly apparent in their handling of this major change to the story. roderick describes the deletion of the original ending as ‘a compromise to the spirit of the age’, and forthrightly judges it to be ‘disastrous’. eggert’s commentary is strictly confined to describing the state of the manuscript: ‘on ms, hl hesitated over the ending, crossing it out in pencil and writing “?hl” in the margin, and then confirming by crossing it out in red ink. there is no reply from aj [arthur jose] on ms, presumably he agreed’. again, the two editors follow different principles in dealing with additions to the original printed versions. eggert’s privileging of the first published version over all others means that there are no explanatory notes for what was added later. as a result significant alterations, which are sometimes very small but no less significant for that, go unremarked. to take an example: ‘the union buries its dead’ originally ended: i did hear lately what his real name was, but if i do chance to read the real name among the missing friends in some agony column i shall not be aware of it, and therefore not be able to give any information, for i have already forgotten the name. in while the billy boils it appears in a subtly altered form: coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 249 we did hear, later on, what his real name was; but, if we ever chance to read it in the ‘missing friends column,’ we shall not be able to give any information to heart-broken mother or sister or wife, nor to anyone who could let him hear something to his advantage—for we have already forgotten the name. the changes, including the switch from the singular to the plural which emphasizes the dead man’s isolation, have the effect of intensifying the emotional impact of the sketch. roderick quotes the two print versions and one in proof, commenting on the qualities of the writing, but sees no need for explanatory notes on the paragraph. eggert’s method provides for the annotation of the phrase, ‘agony column’ (which does not appear in while the billy boils) but not for any explanation of the added phrase—‘hear something to his advantage’ (the irony of which is probably lost on many, especially younger, readers who have never read the lawyers’ advertisements in newspapers). roderick remarks that ‘lawson sweated over this ending; and certainly the rephrasing suggests an author seeking for a precise emotional effect. ‘the sketch’, lawson once wrote, ‘to be really good, must be good in every line’; and this instance his revisions shows him striving after that ideal. the same may be said of lawson’s editing of ‘hungerford’, another sketch based on his outback experience and one that is far removed from the conventional notion of him as a simple bush story-teller. in his essay, ‘the craftsmanship of lawson’, arthur phillips writes of lawson having ‘to learn how to be successfully “slight”, to find just how little plot he could afford to use without risking the collapse of the structure’. that is exactly what is to be seen in ‘hungerford’. the ‘plot’ is the arrival of two swagmen at hungerford, a settlement divided by ‘an interprovincial rabbitproof fence—with rabbits on both sides of it’, which marks the boundary between two colonies; they camp one night there, and apart from their encounter with an old shepherd, nothing really happens. the whole point of the sketch is the narrator’s appalled reaction to the place. roderick notes that lawson’s ‘mockery’ is ‘intense’, but his commentary is rather hit and miss. he does, however, provide an explanation of an allusion which, i confess, puzzled me for a long time. when preparing the story for while the billy boils, lawson added a sardonic paragraph about the rabbits, beginning: ‘this fence is a standing joke with australian rabbits—about the only joke they have out there, except the memory of pasteur and poison and inoculation.’ until i read roderick’s commentary i did not realize how topical and local the allusion to pasteur was. by 1889 the rabbit plague was so serious, control methods such as the ‘rabbit-proof fence’ having failed, that the new south wales government offered a substantial prize for a biological method of exterminating them. pasteur, who believed that he had identified a virus that would kill rabbits, sent a team headed by his nephew to conduct tests in sydney, but the rabbit commission refused him the reward, and the vaccine was not adopted. pasteur died in september 1895, shortly before lawson and jose began preparing ‘hungerford’ (originally published in 1893) and other stories for what became while the billy boils, and about the same time there were further trials of the virus in queensland. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 250 eggert’s method precludes any notice of this pasteur allusion, but in his introduction to the volume he refers to the added passage as ‘tonally distinct from the broad anecdotal comedy of the early version’ [p. xliii]. i think this misses the way in which the added text strengthens the sardonic humour pervading the whole work. as i see it, the changes that lawson made in this story, as in ‘the union buries its dead’, intensity the feeling created in the narrative, and suggest a writer whose insight into his own work has developed between the two versions. ‘hungerford’ is the sort of work where explanatory notes can be of most help to the reader. throughout this volume one is grateful for elizabeth webby’s solidly factual notes, but ‘hungerford’ is a sketch in which a little more attention to what roderick calls ‘cultural references’ would have been worthwhile. today’s readers probably miss the literary echoes in ‘distant prospect’ and the ‘blasted, barren wilderness that doesn’t even howl’ (neither of which webby annotates) but don’t need a gloss on ‘recording angel’ (for which webby, surprisingly, finds it necessary to quote sterne). also, lawson’s use of the cretan paradox would have been worth a comment. as for clancy, webby provides a reference to the lawson-paterson exchange in the bulletin, but could have said more about lawson’s reaction to ‘ideal bush literature’, directing the reader to such lawson items as ‘some popular australian mistakes’ ‘the bush and the ideal’. a note on the responses in the bulletin to paterson’s ‘clancy of the overflow’ would have highlighted the significance of lawson’s use of the name. this edition encourages one to read the text closely, an approach that is critically rewarding, as so much of the power of while the billy boils lies in the management of small effects. it also prompts reflection on lawson’s development as a prose writer. the extraordinary creative stimulus of his experience of the ‘outback’ is most clearly apparent when one reads the stories in the order of publication. inevitably one is led to consider whether the editing (and revisions, such as those i have just mentioned) of the stories for book publication strengthened or weakened them. eggert regards the ‘aesthetic question’ of whether authorial additions to stories are improvements as ‘editorially irrelevant’—and, of course, the same applies to authorial deletions. his concern is the copy-editing, which he examines minutely. although he says that lawson and jose worked ‘collaboratively and closely’ [p. xxxvi], his account of the collaboration leaves the impression that it was an unequal relationship. roderick represents jose as, on the whole, a negative influence; but more recently, in a contribution to ken stewart’s anthology, the 1890s, teresa pagliaro, who has made a special study of jose, has described his editing as ‘conservative and non-interventionist and marked by a wish to favour the author’s intentions’. the desire of both publisher and author to succeed in the english as well as the small australian market was clearly an important concern. in his introduction paul eggert, having summarised jose’s corrections as imposing a form of ‘book decorum’, sees more loss than profit in the editing. having looked at and recorded every change, he concludes: ‘a myriad tiny touches of tonal subtlety were lost’ (p. xxxv). the editing of while the billy boils is described exhaustively in the volume accompanying the edition, which is entitled biography of a book. (it appears to be the fashion for the word ‘biography’ to be appropriated for all sorts of books where coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 251 ‘history’ would probably have been used in the past. in a recent list of academic remainders the qu’ran: a biography was cheek by jowl with the emperor of all maladies: a biography of cancer.) eggert makes it clear in his preface that he sees himself as offering a model of how to apply ‘book-historical methodologies’. he has been drawn to lawson’s work because it provides ‘a particularly demanding case—but quite fascinatingly so’ (p. x). his ambitions are large, extremely large, as he explains in his introduction: ‘some surprising reversals of the accepted wisdom occur, but it is the way of proceeding and the way of conceptualising the method that gives the book its broader relevance’ (p. 3). nevertheless, i think most readers of the book will, like me, be more interested in what he says about lawson rather than in the abstruse argument about literary study. he gives a blow-by-blow description of how while the billy boils was prepared for publication and marketed, and how it was received. the account of the making of a book can be fascinating, but in the amassing of information it is all too easy to lose a sense of what is important. the amount of detail given here is testimony to eggert’s dedication to the task of giving a full and accurate presentation, and book historians (book biographers!) will undoubtedly relish every fact, no matter how trivial it may seem to the rest of us. given lawson’s touchiness about his lack of education, one is especially keen to gain an insight into his relationship with jose. eggert is narrowly and intensely focused on documentation, and his account does not give much sense of the interaction of the two personalities. there is one little moment, however, when the text comes alive. it is an exchange several years after while the billy boils, when jose was involved in a revision of lawson’s first book of verse, in the days when the world was wide. jose asks lawson why ‘moustache’ is misspelt as ‘mustarsh’, and lawson replies: ‘i dunno hl’ [p. 92]. lawson was far from being the only author whose spelling was uncertain—think of w. b. yeats—and eggert quotes this as an example of lawson’s remaining attached to his idiosyncratic spellings: i am inclined to treasure it as an example of lawson’s sense of humour, and his comfortable relationship with jose. it is, perhaps, also a salutary reminder that the intentions of an author, especially one conscious of the formal limits of his education, may not always be steady and certain. although the blurb on eggert’s book asserts that the ‘the feel and nature of lawson’s writing’ were changed by the editing, design and production of while the billy boils, i don’t think that he explicitly makes such a bold claim anywhere in his text, nor do i think that that his painstaking work leads to such a conclusion. he does go so far as to write: ‘at best, the revision of the stories, their number and sequence seem to have been the outcome of a number of pressures of which lawson was only in partial control’ [p.145]. eggert wants to emphasize the significance of book production on what we read as ‘the author’s work’, but what does this amount to? was the collaboration/conflict between jose and lawson during the editing of while the billy boils out of the ordinary? after all, many writers have tales to tell of the failings of their editors: is this a special case? how does lawson’s experience of jose as editor compare with that of his contemporaries? teresa pagliaro lists brunton stephens, farrell, paterson, dyson and daley, whose work jose edited for angus and robertson in the 1890s, and says that their reactions were mainly favourable. some comparison of what happened coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 252 with the other authors would possibly have provided a perspective on the relationship of jose and lawson. one major claim that can most certainly be made for jose is that he provided an excellent title for lawson’s volume of stories. the inviting, evocative phrase, ‘while the billy boils’, must have helped to define lawson in the public mind as the master of the ‘bush yarn’. in his city bushman christopher lee explores the tension between the academic approaches to lawson and the popular response, pointing out that the ‘liberal nationalists’ as he calls them (palmer and phillips fit the bill) were able to acclaim lawson as an artist, while affirming his ‘social importance’. phillips makes the point effectively when he writes: ‘what lawson said, thousands of his contemporaries knew or felt to be the truth’. reviews of while the billy boils, reveal the extraordinary phenomenon of lawson’s popularity before the collection was published. eggert quotes a reviewer in a new zealand paper who writes that lawson’s name is ‘becoming a household word throughout australasia. he has touched our hearts through the pages of the sydney bulletin, the brisbane boomerang, and many another paper, north, south, east, and west’. in the light of this sort of evidence, one would expect much more than eggert offers on the way in which lawson’s reputation was established through periodical publication. it is a really serious weakness of this study that it does not include a fuller account of the bulletin and its influence—at the very least, some discussion of the range and extent of its circulation was needed. eggert has examined closely the texts of stories that appeared there, but he does not appear to have a close knowledge of the context in which they were published. in the pages of the bulletin there was a continuing conversation among the writers, of which the much-quoted ‘controversy in verse’ between lawson and paterson is only one example. lawson does not seem to have touched the heart of paul eggert, though he traces his biography up to 1902. in an elaborate chronology in biography of a book we can discover such facts about the production of while the billy boils as: ‘18 may 1896 payment for title page ‘vignette’ by frank mahony’, but of the crisis in lawson’s life, when he attempted suicide, the only reference in the whole book is the entry in the chronology: ‘december 1902 period in sydney hospital’. eggert is more concerned with what happened to lawson’s books than with what happened to the man himself. he may be justified in passing over the last twenty years of lawson’s life; but it could be argued that the years of sad decline, when lawson nevertheless retained a hold on the affections of the public, need to be taken into account in tracing the ‘afterlife’ of while the billy boils, to which a whole chapter is devoted. as for what eggert has to say about lawson as a writer, i found some of pronouncements hard to accept. for instance, in the introduction to while the billy boils [p. xx] he makes lawson sound like a travel writer: ‘in writing of the outback he was, in effect, a cultural traveller but one who had the flexibility to go native and the intelligence to write about the life he found, especially that of the men, sympathetically even plangently, but also critically and comically’. it is an extraordinary notion that in getting involved with union politics and journalism at bourke, and in working as a housepainter and as a rouseabout in a shearing shed lawson was ‘going native’. more than that, the implication that lawson is detached coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 253 from his subject matter is completely at odds with my understanding of the man and his work. i think that new zealand writer frank sargeson got it right when he wrote nearly half a century ago that lawson ‘looked at the desolation of the australian inland, and he saw his own interior desolation’. eggert starts with the assumption that while the billy boils is ‘an australian literary classic’, but it is not clear to me what this might mean to him. this comment in biography of a book after lawson returned from london hardly suggests work of classical status: ‘his best days as a writer of tonally balanced, democratically conditioned and finely perceptive short fiction were over’ [p. 248]. perhaps this is preferable to the rather empty rhetoric that brereton and so many others indulged in; and perhaps in feeling dissatisfied at this summation of lawson’s achievement i may be revealing how ‘un-academic’ my own feeling about lawson is. in writing about the cultural scene eggert is confident, but not always convincing. a deeper knowledge of the period would have saved him from such gaffes as his calling walter murdoch’s 1899 praise of lawson ‘a patrician melbourne comment about a sydney phenomenon’ and his labelling arthur phillips ‘a headmaster’. as a minor participant in the critical debate on lawson from the late 1970s, i find his account of the later lawson criticism tendentious, to say the least. and i have a bone to pick over one of his most confident assertions. at the opening of his final chapter, where he is intent upon pointing out a ‘future direction for literary study’, he refers to ‘the lawson prose drought of the later 1990s’, suggesting that the short stories had less ‘literary’ appeal ‘during that late postmodern period, with its conscious internationalising of taste’ [p. 312]. by way of documentation he lists in an appendix post world war ii publications of while the billy boils, lawson prose selections, and multiple author anthologies containing stories from while the billy boils. this claim is based on publication dates: between 1992 and 2001 there were no new selections of lawson’s stories. as a good book historian eggert should know that the dates do not tell the whole story. here i may be guilty of selfindulgence—no new thing for a reviewer. in 1986 the penguin henry lawson: short stories, which i edited, was published. in 2009 a second edition was published, with a new cover and a second introduction (by john kinsella, not john tranter, as eggert records) added, and it was included in the penguin classics series. eggert refers to this as ‘second printing’, which gives a false impression. the book had been reprinted many times—almost every year, i seem to recall, and sometimes more than once—and by the time of the second edition the total sales were over 80,000 copies, thanks to its use in schools and colleges in australia and abroad. i do not know the sales figures for other volumes of lawson’s prose that were available at the same time, but i doubt that there is any basis for the claim of a ‘lawson prose drought’. what is striking about the lists in appendix 3 is the number of publications. sales of lawson were probably greatest through the 1980s and 1990s, by which time he was firmly established as a fit subject for academic study. following on the work of roderick, younger university teachers like brian matthews and brian kiernan were making the running. (incidentally, i was surprised to read on page 322 that in 1982 kiernan, whom i have always found to be open-minded, ‘emerged from the new critical-cum-leavisite mindset that had been holding so many of his generation captive’. given what has happened in literary criticism over the past coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 254 half-century, one would not expect to find so much anxiety on eggert’s part about american new criticism and what he calls ‘leavisism’, two approaches of last century which he tends to treat as being the one and same.) over the past thirty years or so research, mainly by academics such as kiernan, has brought to light previously unknown items of lawson’s writing and filled in gaps in his biography; and that work has informed and helped to clarify critical readings of lawson’s texts. as we approach the centenary of lawson’s death, interest in him is likely to quicken, and we can expect more academic studies of various kinds. like paul eggert i think that book history can contribute to our understanding of a writer— the most striking example is how the prevailing view of lawson’s development was overturned when it was established that the joe wilson stories were written after lawson arrived in england and not before—but the need is always to determine what is relevant and how it is relevant. in biography of a book eggert claims that his work offers ‘a model for literary studies’, and reassures us that his ‘manifesto’ is ‘a modest one’; and that there is ‘no note of triumph on offer’ [p. 3]. however, for all his conviction that more book history can lead to ‘a new literary criticism of lawson’, eggert can hardly be said to demonstrate ‘a new appreciation of lawson’s writing’, as the blurb writer asserts. it seems to me that eggert himself concedes a great deal when he writes: ‘my hope is that we will be able to find conceptual room for the aesthetic so that book history can revive and refresh literary study and not just act as another escape route for lecturers in english or other literatures’ [p. 353]. his real achievement is in his editing of the stories in while the billy boils and his detailed account in biography of a book of how lawson’s book was produced and marketed. he has gone over ground much of which was previously traversed by colin roderick, and although what he has done does not wholly supersede roderick’s work, he has provided full and accurate documentation—for which future literary critics will be truly grateful. lawson, one is inclined to say, could not have objected to this traveller in his tracks. as for this example of book production by sydney university press, my judgement is that the volumes are well designed, with attractive print. both carry as a frontispiece of what purports to be a sketch of lawson, but it would not surprise me to learn that it is mislabelled. in biography of a book i would gladly have sacrificed many of the elaborate and extensive footnotes for a bibliography. john barnes, ma (melb), ma (cantab) is emeritus professor of english at la trobe university where he taught for many years before his retirement in 1996. his speciality is australian literature, on which he has published both articles and books. we are pleased to present here what we believe is an excellent collection of articles conceived and developed around the topic coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 an introduction to pacific solutions in hindsight isabel alonso & martin renes we are pleased to present what we believe is an excellent collection of articles conceived and developed around the theme of “pacific solutions”, a conference organised by the centre for australian studies at the university of barcelona (asc) and the centre for peace and social justice at southern cross university (cpsj), celebrated at the university of barcelona in december 2011. their yearly meetings have acquired and are characterized by a plural nature. the interand trans-disciplinary philosophy of both centres enables ways to create new forms of knowledge and, therefore, innovative and potentially empowering articulations of culture(s). we agree with eleanor wildburger in this collection when she claims the necessity “to move in cognitive processes beyond existing boundaries,” and also with her considerations that [a]lthough there are, of course, accepted bodies of knowledge, it is important to clarify that meaning is constructed, rather than found; in addition, meaning is culturally mediated and transformed by different domains. researchers are challenged by the ongoing tension between established codes of (re)cognition and new (bodies of) knowledge. (wildburger 2013: 206) in the cea-cpsj conferences, therefore, all types of approaches to a suggested topic are welcome, a politics which results in an impressive richness and variety of papers, itself resulting in an astonishing wealth of discussion and, especially, learning. the theme chosen for the 2011 conference was “pacific solutions.” the primary objective of the event was to exchange and share research by european and australian teams in the field of australian studies, especially from a postcolonial and cultural studies perspective, although theme-related contributions from outside these defining parameters were also accepted so as to cater for academic plurality. the theme pacific solutions read broadly as both pacific solutions and solutions from the pacific area to the cultural, socioeconomic and environmental problems that affect our world. the latter also called for critical thinking along with political engagement, and so the theme also harked back to, and took issue with, former pm john howard´s ‘pacific solution’ of offshore confinement for undesired immigration to australian territory—a painful reminder of the former, ignominious white australia policy. the range of interpretations of the catch phrase pacific solutions thus aimed to group together a variety of related lines of engaged research, and so emphasised the inevitable interdisciplinarity of cultural and postcolonial studies with other fields of research. so while at a literal level the “pacific solution” is a wealthy source of thought and deliberation, metaphorically, the “trending topic”—whose acronym, you will note, coincides copyright©2013 isabel alonso & martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 with that of postcolonial studies—lent itself to a wide range of scholarly outlets within the field of postcolonial studies and, more broadly, cultural studies. the articles compiled here are developments of the papers presented at that forum, often expanded after threads suggested in the discussions which followed the sessions—when the time constraints customary in conferences were not too pressing. all the papers are connected to the topic areas of cultural and postcolonial studies either directly or indirectly, as it will become apparent to the reader. cultural and postcolonial studies are understood in a very open way, and considered as, to quote bill ashcroft, “a centrifugal force” which can take us to places with unsuspected horizons. i many of the papers deal with literature, and all, in one way or another, with culture for that matter. as herrero, quoting ana aharoni, puts it beautifully in her paper, literature, and culture by extension, is a powerful constituent and vehicle at the core of possible transformations, given that it mediates and transfers ideas, values and intellectual refinement between generations and between civilizations. culture is, therefore, both a preserving and a transforming force. as ada aharoni stated: “culture is a key factor in promoting genuine peace” (herrero 2013: 114). although various intraand inter-disciplinary links can be established among the articles, grouping them together in different topic areas would be arbitrary and counterproductive to the aim for interdisciplinarity in the social sciences and humanities the asc and cpsj mean to imprint upon their joint output. most articles defy clear disciplinary boundaries and establish multiple links with each other. in the following, the editors therefore comment on the articles in alphabetical order, highlighting connections and common ground where they think fit. in “new possibilities of neighbouring: tim winton’s cloudstreet,” bárbara arizti analyzes the figure of the neighbour in this particular novel in the light of emmanuel levinas’s ethics of alterity and kenneth reinhard’s political theology, for both of whom the neighbour is somebody who should be loved in christian terms, and not, as it often happens in our world, ignored, diminished or even mistreated. the article provides a careful and theoretically sound reading in which cloudstreet’s ideology appears to have, as arizti concludes, “consequences for both the notion of the individual and the idea of the nation, since it discloses an appetite for a more inclusive and at the same time more respectful approach to alterity.” thus, in its metaphorical approximation to a post-second world war neighbourhood, this fiction encourages the construction of a more empathetic and encompassing, and therefore, more fair, version of contemporary australia. probably, the most literal approach to the idea of pacific solutions the collection includes we find in “the malvinas/falklands war (1982): pacific solutions for an atlantic conflict,” although unfortunately this type of solution was not achieved in the particular conflict under inspection here. in her article, andrea roxana bellot offers a detailed description of the armed confrontation which exploded at the beginning of the 1980s between the united kingdom and argentina, over a territory with an undeniable strategic value in terms of potential global trouble but which was turned, at the time, into a site of symbolic power, specifically in terms of the british lost empire and this nation’s decline as an international leading power. bellot’s article explains why soft politics failed repeatedly and why conflict resolution strategies did not apply before the use of raw force. bellot’s article may be read against bill phillip’s contribution on violence. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 in “current issues in environmental management in australia – what do people think?” bill boyd and co-signers kristin den exter, les christidis and david lloyd investigate the australian case regarding the international council for science (icsu) and international social science council (issc) 2010 report, a publication which sought to mobilise researchers in a 10-year scientific effort to address what these two organisations define as the “grand challenges in global sustainability”. addressing the australian case, boyd e.a. found that “specific responses” to environmental management “were context and scale-dependent, [and] highlight[-] the inherent tensions between maintaining production and consumption, and protection of resources and ecosystem services.” david lloyd provides a detailed case study, co-signed by bill boyd and hannabeth luke, to illustrate these findings. “community perspectives of natural resource extraction: coal-seam gas mining and social identity in eastern australia” analyses community reaction to proposed coal-seam gas mining in eastern australia. their study highlights the importance of scale and context in environmental management, the difficulties in making economic and environmental concerns match, as well as the importance of community views in issues of natural resource use, even if the debate in question has a strong national component. boyd e.a.’s two, well-documented articles illustrate in conjunction how pacific solutions for environmental-economic tension may only obtain when scholarly knowledge transfer and policy-making are geared towards, and respect the local community level of environmental and economic impact. in her original contribution, entitled “connections and integration: oral traditions/quantum paradigm,” dolors collellmir recuperates the organic link between science and art which was common in the past and which got lost to a great extent with the advent of modernity. collellmir, who signals that her paper is part of a recent trend following the same direction, argues that often artists have made findings that only later on have been incorporated to scientific discourse as “discoveries.” part of wider research which has resulted in the booklength work el corazón matemático de la literatura, ii this paper reads two novels from the pacific area, potiki and benang, to show how they illustrate some aspects of quantum mechanics, in particular the key principle of quantum entanglement, or non-locality. collellmir concludes that this type of “knowledge”, relatively new to the west, has always been present, in different ways, in aboriginal cultures in different parts of the world, a statement which opens a whole new set of possibilities for reading those cultures. collellmir’s article forms part of a whole set of contributions on literature from various angles, including arizti, ellis, herrero, renes, rønning, phillips, and if one considers the narrative structure of cinema, jones. japanese poetry written in the period of colonial expansion of the japanese nation is the subject matter explored by toshiko ellis in her work “the invisible other and symptomatic silences: japanese poetic visions of the colonial pacific in the 1920s.” through the analysis of several poems written by a group of japanese poets living in the port-city of dalian, in continental territory which had been gained to the russians in the russo-japanese war, ellis concludes that the imperial gaze of these poets, representative of the nation, was still in formation in this period. however, historians have observed a conscious attempt in the period to build a colonialist identity modelled on western models, which ellis traces in the suggestive medium of poetry. the article shows how the vision of the dalian poets contrasts with that of another writer, kaneko mitsuharu, whose poems about the places he visited around the pacific ocean were, by contrast, informed by a desire to know the other and to learn, rather than to possess. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 in “creating inter-cultural spaces for co-learning”, kristina everett and eloise hummell propose a pacific solution to the under-representation of indigenous students in higher education as a result of what they signal as the “attendant lower social indicators than those of the wider australian society,” which have turned into such a serious, long-standing concern for australian government and human rights advocates. although the 2007 unesco guidelines on inter-cultural education are inclusive and non-assimilationist, few effective classroom models have been developed from them. everett and hummell look at the so-called ‘daruganora’ program in the area of sydney as an example of the intercultural classroom as a space of joint analysis and dialogue surrounding self-representation of indigenous peoples by indigenous and non-indigenous peers. indigenous students lead the dialogue with nonindigenous classmates and teachers to co-create a new, inter-cultural representation through the setting up of an indigenous art exhibition. everett and hummell defend that this model may be instrumental in opening up spaces of “open, honest and respectful interaction between indigenous and non-indigenous people relating to indigenous representations of identity.” “pacific solutions for the environment: a personal journey” is david fulton’s personal account of his career as a documentary filmmaker. in plain, accessible language, fulton describes how his how his sense of responsibility for the natural environment and its interplay with human presence are part and parcel of a personal and professional commitment. his is a story of personal involvement, and therefore an “emotional journey” into a peaceful solution for the meeting of man and nature that denounces the devastating impact of the capitalist production system on our lives and natural environment. as he concludes himself: “this has been part of my own personal search for pacific horizons in the environment we all share.” fulton’s contribution may be read against boyd e.a.’s articles on environmental concerns, as well as llauradó’s exposé on industrial agriculture. lucy frost´s “protecting the children: early years of the king’s orphan schools in van diemen’s land” contests recent australian government policy towards asylum-seeking children, and places the public outrage against official refugee treatment in a historical perspective that aims to contribute to a truly pacific solution to the debate. her point of departure is the policy followed 200 years ago by george arthur, the first lieutenantgovernor of van diemen´s land, the present-day tasmania. frost shows in her welldocumented analysis, spiced with case studies, how the government´s first objective was to deal with socially-vulnerable children humanely and responsibly. as she suggests at the end of her paper, “in these days when we continue to confine children behind high fences, refugee children in detention centres and bewildered indonesian boys in our gaols, we might do well to remember that even in the fledgling penal colony of van diemen’s land, there was once another model for the care of children, a model based squarely on a commitment to protect.” : frost’s historical review chimes in with renes’s article on indigenous-australian writing and the stolen generations, and can also be read against phillips’ contribution on violence. in “merlinda bobis’s the solemn lantern maker: the ethics of traumatic cross-cultural encounters,” dolores herrero offers a seductive and thought-provoking reading of merlinda bobis’ novel, grounded on relevant elaborations of trauma theory but drawing as well on moving reflections about the important value of literature and culture—of which we ourselves disposed above. bobis’s novel, as herrero’s reading underscores, links personal with global politics, showing how one impinges on the other. the difficult lives of several characters set in contemporary manila are seen to be immersed in the maelstrom of developments of a world which, after 9/11, is affected by terror and mistrust of the other. in a nutshell, herrero reads their story as merlinda bobis’s suggestion that we see the world beyond harmful dichotomies. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 andrew jones’s “it’s not [just] cricket: the art and politics of the popular – cultural imperialism, ‘sly civility’ & postcolonial incorporation” makes an amazing contribution to several areas: postcolonial studies and cultural studies at large, but, more particularly, the study and story of cricket, the analysis of contemporary and colonial identities, the criticism(s) of contemporary australian policies, and the nuanced power (dis)equilibriums and (re)presentations of the colonial scene. appealingly framed in cricket language, jones’s analysis of the acclaimed film lagaan is a truly cross-disciplinary exercise in wise criticism, ambitious and full of eye-opening suggestions. his analysis of the film focuses on the charismatic character of bhuvan, lagaan’s protagonist, and on elizabeth, bhuvan’s antagonist/counterpart in a romantic and colonial sense. yet somehow jones’s disquisition spans more than merely these characters and topics. francesc llauradó i duran´s graphic representation on the role of bio-agriculture, “the target is food for all: what’s new in agriculture? a pacific army of farmers,” looks at environmental problems in relation to meeting current and future global food necessities from the point of agricultural production. his is an industrial view in tune with environmental concerns, and aims to show how an environmentally-friendly application of bio-chemical treatment of culture land can prevent a catastrophe caused by the world’s steadily-growing population, not least armed conflict over limited resources of first-need goods. in “the decline of violence is surely a good thing”, bill philips discusses steven pinker's 2011 volume the better angels of our nature, which argues against the common belief that the world is becoming increasingly violent. tracing the history of humanity from its origins to the present day, pinker shows how strong, stable government is the principal reason for the decline of violence. pinker briefly addresses how literature has influenced the reduction of violence through the transmission of empathy, and so serves pacific purposes. phillips expands on pinker's assertion on literature and gives a wealth of examples from texts from different periods to support the latter’s thesis. phillips concludes that “pinker is clear throughout the better angels of our nature, that hobbes's vision was always contentious that deferring to a strong and stable government must always be accompanied by the struggle to avoid tyranny. it is difficult not to sympathise with pinker who, after all, has statistics on his side. the world has become less violent and has achieved this, above all, through submission to those in power.” in “kim scott’s fiction within western australian life-writing: voicing the violence of removal and displacement,” martin renes looks at vulnerable child removal in australia through the optics of the stolen generations and indigenous-australian life-writing. the victims of forced separation and migration, they have suffered serious trans-generational problems of adaptation and alienation in australian society, which have been not only documented from the outside in official reports but also reflected in indigenous-australian literature over the last three decades. renes gives a short overview of some west-australian indigenous authors, but particularly deals with the semi-biographical fiction by the nyoongar author kim scott, which shows how a very liminal hybrid identity can be firmly written in place yet. according to renes, scott’s oeuvre advocates for pacific ways of co-existence by “un-writing past policies of physical and ‘epistemic’ violence on the indigenous australian population, […and…] approaching australianness from an indigenous perspective as inclusive, embracing transculturality within the nation-space.” an effective unravelling of the “strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation” in the pacific area, as she herself puts its quoting bill ashcroft, is what anne coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 holden rønning offers in “mismatching perspectives and pacific transculturality.” this unravelling is, to begin with, grounded on an effective revision of the contiguous yet different concepts of transculturation, transculturality and transliteracy, “border crossing” and “contact zone,” together with others, and then carried out through paying close attention to the notion of perspective. in the article, rønning makes major use of writings by alan duff and ania walwicz to illustrate her contention that transculturality is a major marker of the pacific region’s idiosyncrasy, but she also incorporates allusions to a myriad other cultural products from the area. the british-norwegian scholar explores a rich network of connections and proximities, and also, as her title advances, of mismatchings in different ways, eventually prompting a pertinent question, namely, “whether looking at literature from a transcultural perspective also expresses a resistance to the project of global modernization.” eleanor wildburger explores in indigenous australian art in practice and theory issues connected to the ngurrara canvas, the famous aboriginal australian cultural object which is both an art work and a legal document. in this connection, she refers to the need for nonaboriginal art and culture critics and pedagogues to transgress the epistemological and aesthetic boundaries of their immediate culture in their exploration of different weltanschauungen and forms of expression. in recognizing the experience of art as a means to learn about otherness and to expand our worldview, wildburger suggests that western museums, whose pedagogical function is undeniable, should be more careful in the presentation of exhibitions about australian aboriginal art. the cultural contexts in which objects are made possible and produced should be as relevant for museum curators as the very aesthetic features of the exhibits, something that, in wildburger’s analysis, fails to happen most of the time. collections are often presented in european museums, wildburger argues, as disconnected from their cultural reality and from among themselves. the critic has coined the term “cultural design” (2010) to refer to these connections, which could be understood as the dna of aboriginal artworks. european audiences, wildburger claims, should not be deprived of the “cultural design” of aboriginal artworks, in order to be able to truly acknowledge and celebrate cultural difference. wildburger’s concern with indigenousaustralian cultural expression can be read against everett and hummell’s essay. this coolabah issue rounds off with bill phillips’ review of error, a volume of verse written by the australian poet elizabeth campbell. we hope that pacific solutions in hindsight offers multiple perspectives on facing and improving our joint future. this volume is kindly dedicated to susan ballyn and kathleen firth, for their many years of generous dedication to postcolonial and cultural studies, in spain and abroad. isabel alonso-breto and martin renes barcelona, january 2013 i bill ashcroft, "introduction: a convivial democracy." in bill ashcroft et al., ed. literature for our times: postcolonial studies in the twenty first century. amsterdam: rodopi, 2012. p. xvii. ii dolors collellmir, el corazón matemático de la literatura. tarragona: universitat rovira i virgili, 2011. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 vested interests: the place of spanish in australian academia alfredo martínez-expósito abstract: the history of spanish departments in australian universities can be traced back to the 1960s, when a number of british hispanistas relocated to australia and created a small number of successful teaching programs that reproduced the british model. a second generation of spanish scholars arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly from latin american countries, in a migration wave that is still current. the transition from a british understanding of the spanish discipline, with a strong focus on (canonical) literary studies, to current curricula that emphasise communicative skills and a loose notion of cultural studies, is symptomatic of deeper changes in the way the discipline has sought to reposition itself in the context of the modern languages debate. keywords: spanish in australia, teaching of spanish, discipline of spanish languages in australia australia is a multicultural, migrant society where many languages are spoken in communities and at home. figures from the most recent census (2011) reveal that english is commonly spoken by 76.8% of the population, with mandarin (1.6%) and italian (1.4%) as the most widely used migrant languages. 1 migrant languages are taught in schools to both migrant and non-migrant children, together with other languages that have been part of the education system in english-speaking countries, such as french and latin. the role of foreign languages in australian society has been subject to controversy over the last three decades, with the replacement of the white australia policy with the multicultural policies that have defined contemporary australia. the many waves of migrants from all parts of the world brought their languages to australia. some language communities were soon assimilated into english, but many others successfully passed their languages on to the second and third generations, thus creating bilingual communities that proudly maintain and use languages other than english. copyright©2014 alfredo martínez expósito. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 homogenising ideologies have always favoured assimilationist policies. during the white australia era, english testing was used as a means to filter out undesirable migrants (mcnamara 2009). in multicultural australia, english instruction is used as a means to ensure a functional knowledge of the language. in this context, maintenance and use of foreign languages is often seen as an obstacle to achieve full english functionality. their use was actively discouraged in the past, and quietly tolerated in multicultural australia. state and commonwealth officials rarely promote them to the general population. the difficult articulation between the need to have one national language and the reality of a multilingual migrant society was encapsulated by michael clyne's expression “a multicultural society with a monolingual mindset” referring to multicultural australia (lasagabaster and clyne 2012). australian ideal monolingualism would place english at the centre of the language architecture of the country. english is the language of the first european settlers; the language of british colonial imperialism; the language of american global hegemony; and the global language of trade and diplomacy. for practical as well as symbolic reasons, english occupies a unique place in australia's linguistic ecosystem. other languages spoken in australia include migrant languages, often divided between the languages of post-war european migrant waves and more recent waves from asia and africa; and indigenous languages. migrant and indigenous languages are treated differently by legislation (leitner 2004): while migrant languages are passively tolerated, indigenous languages are used as vehicle languages in education in indigenous schools. debates about languages crystallise in education practices. the presence of languages in the national curriculum is indicative of the many tensions that exist in society around languages other than english. from a language perspective, the australian education system displays a number of salient peculiarities: english is compulsory for all; indigenous languages are compulsory in indigenous communities; foreign languages are compulsory only for three years at primary level but schools not always comply; the percentage of school-leavers who have studied a foreign language to year 12 is the lowest of any oecd country. 2 excuses abound for the extremely low presence of foreign language education in australian schools: it is difficult to find suitable teachers; the curriculum is overcrowded; students and parents dislike foreign languages; language efforts should focus on improving english. this monolingual mindset was challenged by the 2008-2012 national asian languages and studies in schools program (nalssp), a commonwealth initiative to foster the teaching of asian languages in schools by making compulsory for schools to offer at least one of four strategic asian languages (mandarin, japanese, indonesian, korean ), regardless of any other language offering. the 2012 australia in the asian century white paper maintains this policy with a slightly different choice of languages (mandarin, japanese, indonesian, hindi). 3 coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 the spanish language in australia spanish is an important community language in australia. with 117,498 speakers according to the 2011 census (compared to 90,477 in 1991), spanish is the 7th most commonly used language in australia after english. spanish was brought in during the post-war period by a wave of immigration from southern europe that included several thousands of spaniards; by the latin american wave of the 1970s; and by more recent waves of skilled migrants from europe and the americas. spanish is also seen as an international language spoken in several continents, with a growing presence in the united states and brazil and historical links to south east asia through the spanish colonial presence in the philippines and the pacific. perceptions of spanish in australia are strongly influenced by its international reach. spanish overtaking of english as the world’s second largest language by number of native speakers in 2005 was registered by the media. spanish impact on us media and entertainment industries does not pass unnoticed in australia. spanish is also seen as the language of the growing economies of latin america despite the fact that much of that growth is due to brazil. perceptions of spanish are also grounded in the growing presence of spanish speakers in australia. the opening in 2009 of a cervantes institute in sydney was symbolic of the robustness of these perceptions. spanish makes itself present through cultural events of all kinds; through growing trade and commerce with spanish-speaking countries; and through education. for several decades spain has maintained a strong program of language support in australia that includes a spanish language teaching scheme aimed at second generation migrants (alce); a network of language advisors who seek to collaborate with australian education officers in resourcing and training; a network of university lectors funded by the spanish cooperation agency (aecid). the spanish embassy in canberra is one of only a few that has an education attaché in the country. since 2009 spain is one of a small number of countries that has its own language and culture institute (instituto cervantes) in australia. the group of latin american embassies in canberra (grula) actively lobby in canberra for an enhanced visibility of the spanish and portuguese languages at all levels. as from 2013 a total of fifteen latin american countries have permanent embassies in canberra: argentina, brazil, chile, colombia, cuba, dominican republic, ecuador, el salvador, guatemala, mexico, panama, paraguay, peru, uruguay and venezuela. spanish is offered in a small number of australian schools. data provided by the spanish embassy education office show that in late 2012 only 258 of the 9,529 primary and secondary schools in the country offered spanish in some form. accordingly, the number of students who complete spanish to year 12 is very small compared to other languages. as an example, official 2010 figures reveal that in victoria 4,151 students studied spanish at primary or secondary level in public schools, compared to 74,421 that studied italian, 62,221 japanese, 56,057 indonesian, 39,474 coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 french, 26,287 german, and 22,460 mandarin (state of victoria department of education and early childhood development 2011). while the new national curriculum includes spanish as one of eight modern languages to be offered, 4 comparison with the presence of other languages in australian schools reveals that spanish enrolments are lower than any of the nalssp languages; spanish enrolments are lower than french, german and italian; noticeable differences exist in spanish enrolments between different states, due to the fragmentation of the system into states and territories, with relatively large numbers in south australia and zero numbers in the northern territory. at tertiary level, spanish has a growing presence in australian universities. first introduced to australia in the 1960s, spanish is nowadays taught at undergraduate level in 19 universities, including seven of the group of eight research intensive universities. according to data provided by the spanish embassy education office, in 2011 the largest cohorts were located at the universities of melbourne (1,282 students), sydney (1,114) and queensland (716). spanish in academia as an academic discipline at tertiary level, spanish is growing both in popularity and in visible outcomes. growing numbers of undergraduate language enrolments – in particular at beginners’ level – guarantee the viability of the discipline. according to figures provided by the spanish embassy’s education office, the number of higher degree enrolments continues to grow, from 6,341 in 2007 to 9,173 in 2010. research projects on spanish language and culture funded by the australian research council remain scarce but growing. the discipline enjoys a professional association that brings together academics from language and social science departments, the association for iberian and latin american studies of australasia (ailasa), and its associated scholarly journal, the journal of iberian and latin american research (jilar). in sydney and melbourne, clusters of universities collaborate on research seminars and projects: the sydney university research community for latin america (surcla) and the wally thompson seminar series co-organised by the universities of melbourne, monash, la trobe and rmit. as an academic discipline, spanish has a relatively short history in australia. its introduction in the 1960s did not follow the introduction pattern for other languages. french and classics, for instance, were core disciplines of the british-inspired curriculum that was taught in australian colonial universities since the mid nineteenth century. the introduction of german and russian in the post-war period was motivated by geopolitical reasons. italian and modern greek were introduced as a consequence of the southern european immigration waves of the 1950s and 1960s. economic agendas and the repositioning of australia in the asian region led to the introduction of japanese and chinese, and later indonesian and korean. the introduction of spanish at monash and la trobe universities in melbourne, unsw in sydney and flinders university in adelaide was not directly related to economic or geopolitical reasons. the spanish migration wave of the 1960s was not sufficiently large to warrant it either. the reasons seem to be related to the financial coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 crisis of british universities that caused numbers of academics to migrate to australia and other english-speaking countries (boland and kenwood 1993). immigration waves from latin america (from chile, argentina and uruguay in the 1970s, from el salvador in the 1980s) took the spanish-speaking population in australia to record numbers by the early 1990s. in 1992 spain was starting a twodecade cycle of economic expansion and direct foreign investment that allowed the country to invest in overseas cultural actions. with the support of the spanish embassy and lured by the growing presence of latinos in the country, a number of universities introduced spanish in the 1990s and the 2000s (queensland and griffith in brisbane, sydney, melbourne, anu). in 2013, all go8 universities except uwa have an academic spanish program. in nearly all universities where it is offered, spanish is taught within the bachelor of arts as a major or as an independent study path. the flexibility of the australian system allows students to study spanish in a number of ways: as a three-year study pathway within a bachelor's degree, which in some cases can be extended to a fourth year (a bachelor with honours degree that usually includes a one-semester research component), or as a shorter study path of one or two years leading to a minor within the ba. in most cases, students can also take one or two single spanish subjects as electives within their undergraduate degrees. some universities offer spanish and other languages as concurrent diploma options, allowing students who have all their major and elective subjects in other disciplines to study some extra-curricular spanish. in addition, a small number of universities offer non-credit bearing spanish classes through communityoriented language institutes and centres. in 200, the university of melbourne introduced an innovative degree structure that allows students from any undergraduate degree to enrol in any other subject. known as the melbourne model, this system has resulted in a dramatic increase in language enrolments as “breadth” options. a similar result has been observed more recently at the university of western australia following the adoption of a similar structure. spanish majors are typically structured around a core set of language acquisition subjects that follow a progression from absolute beginners to roughly b2 or c1 european framework levels. non-core options include subjects that present cultural, literary or historical contents. the latter are often taught in spanish and play a languageacquisition role although they are sometimes offered in english in an attempt to open up the spanish major to non-language students. the research component of the fourth year (honours) degree takes the form of a long essay (in the range of 8,000 to 15,000 words). most universities give students the choice to write this essay either in english or in spanish. the main focus of the exercise is on developing research and academic writing skills; when the essay is written in spanish the language-acquisition component becomes assessable. at postgraduate level, spanish has a very small presence in australian universities. professional master degrees in areas such as spanish and latin american literature or hispanic studies, which are fairly common in north american universities, do not exist in australia. education master degrees, addressed at future school teachers, include a language component, but due to the negligible presence of spanish in primary and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 secondary schools nationwide, spanish subjects are rare. education master programs focus on policy and pedagogy and are taught by schools and departments of education, with minimal or no input from language academics. the same can be said of master programs in areas such as applied linguistics, linguistics and the very few cultural studies master programs that exist in australia. in sharp contrast to other humanities disciplines, such as history and english, research higher degrees attract very small numbers in spanish and in all other language disciplines. reasons for the low uptake of research degrees in languages remain unclear and require further investigation. anecdotal observation suggests that a perceived lack of professional career opportunities and low levels of second-language proficiency may be factors at stake. doctoral programs in spanish are currently offered at a small number of universities. with relatively low levels of research activity and large enrolment figures in undergraduate language-acquisition subjects across the country, it comes as no surprise that spanish is perceived by many as a teaching discipline with only a marginal interest in research. this perception is supported by the extremely low success rates of spanish in national competitive grant schemes such as the australian research council discovery and linkage schemes. in a laudable attempt to foster research, research training, and visibility, a learned association was launched in 1992 with the name of association for iberian and latin american studies of australasia. with some 100-150 paid members, ailasa has served as a discussion forum and gathering point for spanish researchers for more than two decades, using biannual conferences, an academic journal and distribution email lists as its main means. the journal of iberian and latin american research (formerly journal of iberian and latin american studies, a title that created confusion with its british homonymous) was managed until 2010 by the institute for latin american studies at la trobe university. since that date the journal is managed by the taylor and francis group. in 2010 the excellence for research in australia rated jilar as a b journal on a 4-point scale (a*, a, b, c) for quality. spanish as an academic discipline the building of the spanish discipline in australia has taken the form of a gradual aggregation of similar block units. with small variations, each university has decided to do exactly the same: hiring a small number of permanent academic staff at career-entry levels (academic level a or b on a 5-point scale that places full professors at level e) and a contingent of casual and sessional tutors, language departments have been introducing popular spanish programs in an attempt to offset enrolment declines in established languages. this pattern, which is observable in most of the universities that introduced spanish since the 1980s (brotherton 1998: 40), is undoubtedly linked to the financial difficulties of many language departments as commonwealth funding for universities was dramatically reduced in the 1990s. the pattern is also revealing of the hardly academic (in some cases blatantly anti-academic) agendas that drove language departments in that period, that led to large numbers of very junior, relatively inexpensive appointments, often with no research training nor interest on a research coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 career. while in new zealand the prince of asturias chair of spanish has existed since the early 1990s, no australian university has ever created a named chair of spanish; currently personal professorships in the discipline exist at melbourne university and the anu only. exceptions to the described pattern include early adopters (universities that introduced spanish in the 1960s) and high flyers (research intensive universities). the early adopters enjoyed a period of expansion for languages in australia that led to senior appointments and low student ratios. la trobe university, for instance, sustained at its peak an 11-strong spanish department that offered spanish, portuguese, galician and catalan, as well as a world-class institute for latin american studies that worked closely with history and social sciences departments. la trobe, as all the other early adopters, entered a period of decline in the 1990s that resulted in diminished enrolments and staff redundancies. research intensive universities in the group of eight, such as anu, sydney, melbourne and queensland introduced their undergraduate spanish programs along the lines of the financially-driven pattern described above, but an emphasis on research productivity led them to make some senior appointments and to invest in research training for staff at more junior levels. increased competition for national competitive research funds, an increased awareness of international university rankings strongly biased towards research performance and reputation, and the introduction of a national ranking league system in 2010 (excellence in research for australia) combined to lead the elite group of research intensive universities to invest in research in all disciplines, including spanish and other modern languages. to a large degree, the definition of the spanish discipline in australia has been the responsibility of senior academics in two groups of universities: scholars educated in the post-war british university system, on the one hand, that favoured a strong division between language acquisition and properly academic endeavours – the latter defined mainly by high literary studies of the spanish canon; and, on the other hand, academics with post-structural, post-modern and post-colonial backgrounds, together with linguists, second language experts, historians and social scientists. the replacement of the former by the latter occurred roughly in the mid to late 1990s. the most notable consequence of the change was the introduction of research areas and methods that had been traditionally neglected. in particular, research on the cultures of latin america and methods associated to the new humanities contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the discipline. in addition, language acquisition was turned into a legitimate scholarly field that allowed many language teachers to undertake research projects. unlike other language disciplines that are closely associated to a national language (e.g. japanese, italian) or to a canonical set of well-established academic discourses (e.g. french, classics), spanish has often been hard to define in australian higher education. the model supplied by other languages does not seem to fit spanish well, for two main reasons: firstly, spanish is by no means a national language only; secondly, spanish departments tend to incubate non-language, social-science disciplines in addition to language and culture. spanish is increasingly defined primarily as the regional language of the south american or latin american geopolitical block, but also as a global language with actual and historical presence in five continents. the role of spain in the multi-centre spanish-speaking world is very different to the role that, for instance, france plays in the highly centralised francophonie. using the label spanish to name coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 departments that do more than just teach the spanish language feels increasingly inaccurate or incomplete. as a result, some universities are renaming their spanish programs as “spanish and latin american” and some initiatives use denominations such as “latino” and “hispanic”. on the other hand, while many universities offer area studies courses related to european and asian countries (e.g. french history, chinese economy, japanese politics), courses related to spain and latin america are very rare. this institutional deficit has led some spanish departments to absorb the demand for such courses and to try to establish collaboration partnerships with other departments or, in some cases, to offer cultural studies options that somehow include historical and social sciences components. this tends to further open up the discipline, making the traditional labels spanish language and spanish language and literature look very inappropriate. current demographics of spanish departments reveal an overwhelming presence of early-career academics who are supported by large numbers of casual and sessional tutors. areas of research specialisation include linguistics, applied linguistics, second language acquisition and spanish as a second language, language policy, the history of spanish in australia, multilingualism and multiculturalism, migrant and diasporic communities, a wide range of spanish-language literature, film studies, post-colonial studies, gender and sexuality, comparative literature, us latino studies, and cultural studies focused on specific countries of the spanish-speaking world. in some universities, spanish departments attract researchers from closely related areas such as music, history, politics, art history, philosophy, etc. the tendency to hire spanish academics with a broadly-defined specialisation in latin america became clearly visible in the 1990s. it could be argued that the desire of language departments to focus on latin america was prompted by two concurring factors: the perception that latin america was a demographically and economically growing region that in time could become a significant trade partner for australia; and the perception that declining enrolments in european languages was related to australia's repositioning as an asian country and its consequent distancing from its european partners. both assumptions proved to be only partially correct. the widespread belief that spanish is a useful language because of its latin american dimension did not stop universities from forging links with spain in terms of student exchange programs, research projects funded by spanish agencies (such as the cultural cooperation program between the spanish ministry of culture and the anu, and the 2013 education ministry’s hispanex program for cultural promotion), and language lectors fully or partially funded by the spanish cooperation agency aecid. while it would be exaggerated to affirm that australia's departments of spanish reproduce the trans-atlantic divide that has marred us departments for decades, the fact remains that such divide exists to some extent. some positive consequences of such divide is that spanish departments can play equally well on european and american studies, thus forging inter-disciplinary teaching and research projects with academics in both hemispheres. a hypothetical rekindling of interest in the spanish-heritage countries in the asia pacific region would have great potential as well. specific foci on latin america have resulted in the creation of active debating forums, prominent among which are the australian national centre for latin american studies at the anu, the coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 institute of latin american studies at la trobe university, and surcla research community at the university of sydney. spanish, as nearly all the other language disciplines, has become an increasingly polymorphous discipline whose goals, objects of study, epistemology and research methods are as diverse as its institutional presence, professional associations, journals and leadership. gone are the days when languages disciplines were defined by the usinspired notion of ‘language and literature’ or by the french ‘langue et civilisation’. gone are the days also when academic hierarchy ensured that deans and chairs had the power to define methods and goals. the most external description of spanish departments in australia reveals a huge variety of methods and epistemologies, of research agendas and ultimately of academic goals. it also reveals a common trait in languages disciplines in the country: relative low levels of activity in research training, research funding, and research collaboration. challenges for the spanish discipline according to the preceding notes, the discipline of spanish in australian academia is characterised by the following traits: noticeable popularity as an undergraduate elective; a short institutional history; low visibility; strongly skewed towards teaching; unremarkable research achievements; negligible presence in schools; useful internationalisation tool; strong regional identification with latin america; gathering point for area studies; loose disciplinary definition. the place of spanish seems to be therefore a combination of low level academic pursuits and higher level soft power interests, a contested space that migrant and nomadic academics have carved within universities that is being used by international and exchange offices to suit their own agendas and by diplomatic agencies to create spaces of local interaction. compared with the size of the discipline in europe or north america, spanish in australia displays a tendency to suffer from three reductionist strategies. firstly, spanish is often described as a language discipline strongly associated to one of the regions where the language is spoken, latin america, with growing disregard for others. secondly, the discipline is often described as a training ground where undergraduate students can acquire useful communicative skills, sometimes with the added value of some cultural awareness. thirdly, spanish popularity is currently seen at universities but not in schools, with no signs that this situation will change in the short term. the three combined challenges (regionalisation, reduction to communicative skills and minimal presence in schools) do have consequences for the discipline of spanish and latin american studies and university departments of spanish. in the first place, the discipline itself is no longer seen as a unified set of epistemological practices around the key notion of knowledge about the spanish language and its social and literary manifestations. increasingly, spanish programs are repositioning themselves as internal service providers to universities that require them to focus on language acquisition, exchange programs with latin america and engagement activities with local latin american stakeholders. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 the key notion of literary canon, which articulated the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, is no longer active. it was first questioned in the 1980s, when the cultural studies turn in the humanities prompted a redefinition of english and language programs nationwide and favoured the fragmentation of the canon in a multiplicity of traditions based on national, ethnic and sexual paradigms. current trends are prompting the abandonment of the very idea of the canon in favour of a loose approach to individualised texts. the emphasis that many universities place on latin america as the defining element of spanish programs is prompting a gradual marginalisation of expertise in non-latin american studies including peninsular, latino us, philippine and african literatures. spanish programs are now working more actively with latin american centres (at the anu and la trobe), which in turn are prompting the introduction of area studies in language programs. the displacement of a linguistic notion (spanish as a defining driver of the discipline) in favour of a geopolitical concept (latin america) does not seem to bother academics in language departments. low demand for spanish teachers at schools has an impact on interdisciplinary relations between spanish and education departments. secondary schools' virtual inability to feed advanced spanish students to universities places spanish at odds with other languages mainly french, german, italian, chinese and japanese. forced to focus on absolute beginners, spanish departments perform less well at honours and postgraduate levels. in fact, only a handful of spanish departments offer phd degrees. low activity at postgraduate level is also related to the poor record of spanish departments in securing national competitive research grants. ideology of spanish the place of spanish in universities around the english-speaking world is quite unique amongst the field of modern languages. spanish is commonly classified as a european language despite its overwhelming geographical and geopolitical presence in noneuropean regions. amongst the so-called european languages spanish is the discipline that has undergone a less traumatic downsize in terms of enrolments and staff in the last two decades. in the australian case, the relatively late arrival of spanish to schools and universities has resulted in a lower level of presence and penetration in the education industry at large, with better established disciplines acting as ‘gatekeepers’. research productivity in the discipline is commensurate with the relatively junior profile of staff in spanish programs. all these peculiarities make spanish a very unique language discipline in australian universities: a truly international language with a global presence and strong academic credentials around the world whose potential in research, internationalisation and teaching above the undergraduate curriculum is far from realised. educational managers such as humanities deans and state education coordinators acknowledge the importance of spanish but consistently fail to strategize accordingly. at both pre-tertiary and tertiary levels the pressures that budget holders receive from a deficit-shy system are huge – and this is one of the reasons most often mentioned to keep spanish, together with all the other languages, as a low maintenance, low investment, low return academic coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 operation. the triple potential of spanish as a global language, an australian community language and an intellectually rich language has never been fully developed in australia. this situation reveals a poor understanding of the role of languages in modern education – an understanding that is consistent with the monolingual mindset mentioned earlier in this paper. it also reveals the inability of educational leaders to think of languages beyond and above the narrow margins of the ‘nice but non-essential’ model that has been favoured by an infantilising set of multicultural policies and by a de-facto englishonly approach to education in general and higher education in particular. of course, nothing in the australian case is exclusive of australia. a disdainful, almost disrespectful attitude towards foreign languages and cultures is prevalent in many education systems around the anglosphere. funding for research in language disciplines and the humanities in general is chronically low in many ocde countries. and the late arrival of spanish into many universities in asia and the asia-pacific region disadvantages the discipline at institutional level. the discipline has been forced to reposition itself in this new world. the history of the modern “spanish and latin american” programme in australia is quite different from the history of the “spanish language and literature” department in the us and the uk. the academic branding of the discipline in australia relies heavily on its undergraduate teaching performance, which in turn is measured in terms of student popularity (martínez-expósito 2010). concurrently, the undergraduate teaching of spanish relies heavily on the branding of the spanish-speaking world through the spanish curriculum and the thematic choices each individual program makes in relation to countries/regions, historical periods, genres, and language registers/dialects. the modern repositioning of the discipline could be described through a number of departures from the normative tradition of pre-1970 spanish departments:  the teaching of historical continuities that defined the spanish-speaking world since the formation of the language until the present day has been reduced to introductory survey subjects or abandoned altogether.  the privileged position of literature as the finest expression of language and as epiphenomenon of the entire cultural field has been deeply contested and, as a first consequence, the literary canon has been abandoned.  the cultural field has been the subject of several redefinitions (from postcolonial, post-modern, political, economic and other discourses), none of which has received unanimous approval.  while the discipline continues to be defined overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, in relation to spain and latin america, the balance between those two key players has been redressed in favour of the latter.  cultural definitions of geo-political entities such as spain and latin america have become extremely vague in the discipline and have favoured the inclusion of other cultural domains, such as lusophone cultures and local and indigenous languages from all around the spanish-speaking world.  language acquisition has replaced literary and cultural studies as the disciplinary core. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85  language competence has been redefined as language acquisition in terms of communicative skills.  ancillary disciplines such as history and politics are no longer available to spanish students in the majority of australian universities; others, such as linguistics, education, literary theory and art history, remain generally available and play an important role in providing spanish students with academic tools beyond the means of spanish programs. the ideology of spanish in australia has been deeply affected by the repositioning and the rebranding of the discipline. internally, the discipline has become a richer, more diverse and more curious locus of enquiry, which nowadays is home to researchers in a wide range of geographical and cultural domains and themes that include women studies and masculinities and lgtbi studies, subaltern and postcolonial studies, studies in race and ethnicity, linguistic and cultural minorities, aesthetics and politics, and so on. from an external point of view, the discipline remains the focus of attention from spanish-language countries with interests in australia, but the interest of diplomatic representatives has gradually changed from a general promotion of foreign cultures to the fostering of educational ties such as student and staff exchange programs and study abroad options. spain and, increasingly, mexico, chile and argentina, see the discipline as an opportunity for cultural diplomacy and soft-power exercises, the most polished example of which is the sydney cervantes institute. works cited boland, r and a. kenwood (1993) “perfil del hispanismo en las universidades de australia y nueva zelanda”. monclús, a. (ed.), la enseñanza de la lengua y cultura españolas en australia y nueva zelanda. consejería de educación, canberra; iberediciones, madrid, 29-40. brotherton, john (1998) “algunas reflexiones sobre el desarrollo del español en australia.” consulate general of spain in sydney, towards sydney 2000: a spanish perspective, 37-42. mcnamara, tim (2009) “australia: the dictation test redux?” language assessment quarterly, 6:1, 106-111. lasagabaster, d. and m. clyne (2012) “some good practices aimed at bolstering multilingualism in australia.” revista de educación, 358, 563-582. leitner, gerhard (2004) australia’s many voices: ethnic englishes, indigenous and migrant languages: policy and education. mouton de gruyter, new york. state of victoria department of education and early childhood development (2011) languages in victorian government schools 2010, melbourne. martínez-expósito, alfredo (2010). el español como marca: el curriculum de ele como imagen cultural y su dimensión afectiva. el currículo de e/le in asiapacifico. i congreso de español como lengua extranjera en asia-pacifico (ce/leap), manila, 74-89. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 1 the 2011 census data can be accessed at http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au. 2 according to the discussion paper released in 2011 by the australian curriculum, assessment and reporting authority (acara) shape of the australian curriculum: languages, access to foreign language teaching varies considerably amongst different states, and it is mandatory in queensland, victoria, south australia and the act only. acara’s paper can be accessed at http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/languages_-_shape_of_the_australian_curriculum.pdf 3 the 2012 australia in the asian century white paper can be accessed at http://asiancentury.dpmc.gov.au/white-paper 4 according to the acara published discussion paper (http://www.acara.edu.au/languages.html), languages for which an australian curriculum will be developed by the end of 2013 are: aboriginal languages and torres strait islander languages (a framework); arabic and vietnamese (pitched to learners who have some background in the language); french, german, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, modern greek and spanish (pitched to second language learners); chinese (three learner pathways to be developed to cater specifically for second language learners across f-10, background language learners across f-10 and first language learners in years 7-10). alfredo martinez-exposito is professor of hispanic studies and head of the school of languages and linguistics at the university of melbourne, australia. he obtained a phd in hispanic literatures at universidad de oviedo, spain. between 1993 and 2010 he lectured in spanish at the university of queensland, australia. he is past president of the association for iberian and latin american studies of australasia and fellow of the australian academy of the humanities. he has published extensively on contemporary spanish literature and film, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, and on the geopolitics of the spanish language. he is currently researching cinema as a vehicle for brand spain. http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/ http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/languages_-_shape_of_the_australian_curriculum.pdf http://asiancentury.dpmc.gov.au/white-paper http://www.acara.edu.au/languages.html microsoft word darrenjorgensen8.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 art history in remote aboriginal art centres 1 darren jorgensen copyright©2013 darren jorgensen. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the 2008 congress of the international committee of the history of art in melbourne suggested in its theme of 'crossing cultures' that art history must revise its nationalistic methodologies to construct more international histories of art. this essay addresses the legacy of different eras and methods of writing the art history of remote aboriginal artists. it argues that colonialism has structured many of the ways in which this art history has been written, and that the globalisation of art history does little to rectify these structures. instead, art history must turn to institutions that are less implicated in the legacy of colonialism to frame its work. rather than turning to the museums and art galleries who have provided much of the material for the art histories of the twentieth century, this essay suggests that remote art centres offer dynamic opportunities for doing twenty-first century art history. founded in an era of political self-determination for remote aboriginal people, these centres aspire to create an opportunity for the expression of a cultural difference whose origins precede the invasion and colonisation of australia. art centres and their archives present an opportunity to work through the legacies of colonialism in the art history of remote australian aboriginal artists. art history in remote aboriginal art centres the theme of the 2008 congress of the international committee of the history of art (ciha) in melbourne, 'crossing cultures: conflict, migration, convergence', was informed by postcolonial history and theory. yet the structure of this conference, the first of its kind to be held in the southern hemisphere, closed on a distinctly colonial note. a final speech by the director of the british museum, neil mcgregor, proclaimed the role of his institution in helping global culture along. one of his examples was a sudanese festival hosted by the museum, aiming to bring people from all factions of the country together. mcgregor's speech went on to declare his museum's role in leading the world on such global matters. the uncanny effect of mcgregor's talk, 'global collections for global cities', was to reintroduce the colonial paradigms that the conference theme wanted to overcome. if 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 the legacies of colonialism are the unspoken traumas upon which 'crossing cultures' was written, the final drinks in the ball room at government house in victoria made these legacies all too visible once more. between towering gilded walls, the governor himself mingled with guests, dressed in a uniform handed down directly from the colonial era. in its final afternoon, the cross-cultural focus of the conference gave way to the colonial ideology that it was supposed to overcome, the institutional ideology taking back what it had initially given in its gesture toward an equitable globalism. while colonialism is something of a catchall term that postcolonial history and theory has used to identify the power of nation-states in indigenous societies. the term is not an unproblematic one, as it tends to generalise the very different histories of indigenous peoples. yet colonisation also remains a useful way of identifying the operation of power within the cities of the west. aboriginal australian art was a major theme of the conference, with the influential australian anthropologist howard morphy a featured speaker. this paper suggests, through some of morphy's scholarship in the area, that art history should not be tied to major institutions that collect and exhibit aboriginal art. instead its location can be re-placed in remote australia, where the art is actually made. a more radical place for art history? the failure of this major european conference, ciha, to shift out of the model of eurocentric art history while in the southern hemisphere establishes the need for the discipline look at a more radical place to base its activity. the notion of 'crossing cultures' makes macgregor's mistake in replacing one universal for another, as it substitutes globalism for british imperialism. it is to the difference of the art of remote australian aboriginal communities that we can turn in order to unpack this problematic return. for the art history of these communities configures the contradiction between the institutional and the global. the former is wrapped up in a state power founded on colonial violence, while the latter's claims for an equitable world art history creates a space in which this power all too easily reasserts itself. remote aboriginal art offers a new set of problems for art historians by resituating this conflict, to re-place it in the communities where the art is made. arguments for disciplinary renewal are not particular to art history. anthropology, inflected with the ideologies of social darwinism, its ideas implicated in the ethnocide of indigenous peoples, was forced to undergo a major, self-reflexive revisionism as it confronted the agency of its subjects. indigenous people themselves forced this revision, and they have also forced art historians to afford a foundational place to a genre of art that has appeared in spite of them. anthropology has dominated much of the discourse around remote aboriginal artists, yet their work is responsible for cultural survival rather than for art practice and proliferation. for while anthropologists have largely been interested in the way that aboriginal art represents country, in dreaming stories and sites, or in the flora, fauna, geographic and seasonal detail of country, art history's basic premise is that knowledge lies within the visual object. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 art history attempts to tackle matters of form and style that are not necessarily tied to country, yet that remain the distinct property of aboriginal artists. it is this figural distinction, its distinct and recognisable difference, that struck the eyes of international delegates to ciha, and whose materiality forms a distinct subject for art history. as a new generation of painters emerges from remote australia, the dynamic shifts in the visual identity of art from different remote communities will constitute a large body of material that art history is uniquely placed to think about. these tendencies to enshrine the european patronage of art and culture can also be seen in the musée de quai branly, an attempt by the french government to create a world art museum. the musée is another example of the colonial drama replaying itself out, as the significant collection of aboriginal australian art on show here recreates the problem it wants to resolve. this is the problem of primitivism, in 2006, the then french president jacques chriac opened the museum by declaring its difference from primitivisms of the past, but the museum itself only shows third and fourth world arts, returning to the historical distinction of colonised from coloniser. for what the third and fourth worlds have in common is an experience of being at the wrong end of colonialism, of being at the bottom of global power relations .the architecture of the new museum betrays the presumptions of its designers. for while across the river the pompidu stands as a monument to post-industrialism and contemporary art, the architecture of the musée wants to simulate the darkness and depth of a forest while its visitors peer at the works through dimly lit display cases (ruiz-gomez 2006). the interest of the musée in exhibiting aboriginal australian art here thus carries with it the paradox of an equitable globalisation that reconstructs the colonial. how to establish a more postcolonial art history? recently, aboriginal australian art has found its place within a trend to construct contemporary, global or world art histories. terry smith includes a chapter on aboriginal australian art in his what is contemporary art? (2009), while elizabeth grosz turns to aboriginal desert painting as her final example of an art of the world (grosz 2008). these art histories and theories represent the most recent phase of scholarship since the emergence of papunya tula artists through the 1980s and 1990s as a force in the australian artworld. this artists co-operative resituated the place of aboriginal australian art from an ethnographic context to one in which installations, paintings and sculptures by remote artists began to be exhibited in art galleries. anthropologists and other people with local knowledge of different regions of art production have been the principal scholars on remote artists (french 2002; johnson 1994; johnson 1997; morphy 1998; morphy 2008; taylor 1996). a second site for the production of knowledge about remote artists lies in the work of state sponsored galleries and their agents, and publications that accompany their exhibitions (bowdler 2009; perkins and fink 2000; perkins 2004; perkins 2007 ryan 1993; ryan 2004; ryan 2008). there is, however, a third source for the production of scholarship on this art movement. these are remote art centres themselves, modelled on the success of papunya tula artists. many such centres, including papunya tula artists, have such archives, particularly since around 2000 when digital repositories were introduced around the country have made archiving easier for overworked mangers. many centres coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 use the artist management system (ams), which documents work and sales, produces certificates of authenticity, tracks consignments and manages financial transactions. originally developed at warlayirti artists in balgo hills in the late 1990s to run through microsoft access, this database incidentally constructs a consistent archiving system across different centres. significantly, these archives are managed by the centres themselves, which are, in turn, managed by the artists. now is an opportune time for research on aboriginal art that aims to have an international impact, while art history moves towards constructing methodologies for thinking about cross-cultural and world arts (elkins 2006; miller 2008; summers 2003: 661-663). it is, then, to art centres and their archives that scholars might turn for another institutional basis from which to construct art histories of aboriginal art. these institutions are not necessarily beyond being implicated in colonial regimes of power. the politics that surrounds them is that of aboriginal self-determination, that includes such accomplishments as land rights, the establishment of outstations and a degree of economic independence. yet self-determination is as much a product of government policy as it is aboriginal political struggle. while outstations were established by aboriginal people walking back into their country, to settle in camps on bores and waterholes, their development into settlements was only enabled with the economic support of a succession of governments. with the exception of papunya tula artists, whose market success enabled its economic independence, art centres have been established with government funding. they also receive on-going funding, frequently for one staff member. at present, these centres are under-resourced, as the documentation of artwork is often stored on a single hard drive, and the stories that accompany paintings are often recycled over and over again, dependent upon work that took place in the early years of the art centre. due to limited staffing, and despite the ageing of some of the first generations of their artists, many art centres are unable to continue the process of researching the practices of their own artists. art centre managers are kept busy undertaking general management, balancing the demands of the market with the personal needs of their artists, negotiating with funding bodies, and advocating for communities, artists and their families. there are strong arguments to be made for increasing the resource base, including the staffing, of these remote centres. in economic terms, these centres have facilitated much of the boom in the aboriginal art industry, whose sales value has increased from an estimated $2.5 million in the period 1979-80 to $100 million in 2003 (australian government 2007; altman 2005). despite this increase, estimates as to the number of artists working in remote australia have changed little. in 1980, this estimate was 5,000 artists, while in 1998 the australian bureau of statistics estimated that there were 4,500 artists selling work through businesses and at auction (australian government 2007). a more recent estimate put the number of artists at 7,000 (gough henly 2005). such figures suggest the significance of these individuals to the aboriginal art industry as a whole, and some contours for doing art history in remote australia. issues complaints about the lack of substantial analysis of aboriginal art are not new. as long ago as 2004 the australian's darwin correspondent nicolas rothwell complained about coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 it, writing that 'the absence of constructive criticism leaves these works of splendour to speak and fend for themselves in a strange world'. anthropologist howard morphy (2007) also notes 'the moderate state of aboriginal art journalism and the low level of writing about aboriginal art in general.' the lack of scholarship in the area is so pronounced that much of the informed and sophisticated commentary in the area takes place in art magazines and newspaper reviews. yet this is not been a problem particular to aboriginal art. other avant-garde movements, such as those from paris and new york from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century, were not adequately historicised until decades after their most significant artworks were made. only a process of revisionism brought their significance into being. this shift to focus upon aboriginal australian art centres will not, however, capture the entirety of remote art production. the aboriginal art economy also functions outside the art centre model. in regions such as the sandover, for instance, that lies in and around the utopia community north of alice springs, art centres have rarely operated with any effect. in the absence of such, numerous private dealers have facilitated art production and sale in this region (green 2003). the sandover is the region that hosted australia's most successful remote artist. emily kame kngwarreye makes a good test case for the art history of remote australian aboriginal artists, since despite her success, kngwarreye's history of production has been overwhelmed and obscured by a complexity of economic, social, cultural and institutional relations. what drove the dynamic changes in style, the incredible pace of her change, which so captured the attention of art critics, collectors and curators? it has been all too easy to attribute the movement of her work to the enigmatic notion of the artist, to the romantic conception of an innate genius at work. a recent retrospective premiering in japan and again shown in canberra was called 'utopia: the genius of emily kame kngwarreye', and japanese critics were quick to buy into this notion of a woman from the desert spontaneously producing abstract art, as if from nowhere (kazue 2008-9). the equivalent mythology in western art history is that of pablo picasso, whose shifts from the 'blue period' to the 'rose period', from african influences to cubism, classicism and surrealism, has been cloaked in the myth of an intense personal vision. the difference between kngwareye and picasso for art history lies in the extent of documentation that is available to researchers. subsequent, deconstructive interpretations of picasso have been enabled only by immense attention given to each period of his work (berger 1965). equivalent attention to minute parts of kngwarreye's career would prove difficult, because so much of her work was distributed through and among different agents, making it difficult to reconstruct its place in her oeuvre. even in the fragmented situation of kngwarreye's working life, and the subsequent distribution of her work, art history remains possible. jenny green's familiarity with the sandover and its economies enables her to estimate how the art economy works there. in a footnote accompanying an earlier version of her essay, 'holding the country: art from utopia and the sandover', she estimates that in 2003 there were around seven major representatives of the sandover artists. this implies that the actual economy of art distribution is to some degree estimable, and even that the work's content could well be documented, at least in large part, by these seven. where information gaps exist, anecdotal evidence may be able to estimate the size of these gaps. again, anthropology has taken the lead here, by turning to strategies for estimating extra-legal economies, to indices of flow and turbulence (nordstrom 2007). artist marina strocchi suggests researching the importation of belgian linen into australia, the media used by many art coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 centers and private operators (private conversation, 2011). the quantity and value of paintings by individual artists may also be tracked through the registration of vehicles; through the estimates of casual workers in alice springs who are employed to stretch canvases for visiting artists; or through people close to the artists themselves. it is the quality of such alternative methodologies that they are adaptable to opportunities and flexibly oriented toward information gaps. these kinds of methodologies offer a fourth source of information for art historians attempting to construct the art histories of remote australian aboriginal artists. to write a comprehensive monograph on kngwarreye may well require co-ordinating information from many different sources. crucially, this spread of information makes up a different kind of art history to the kind of art historical work that has been undertaken thus far on remote australian aboriginal artists. these histories have largely focused on the cultural origins of the art without looking at its function and impact in the artworld, in the economy, or the place of the art centre in facilitating its development. let the problematic situation of researching kngwarreye, this most successful of remote artists, stand for the problems of researching remote artists working within the boom of the aboriginal art industry, during the 1980s and 1990s. researchers wanting to reconstruct the situation of many artists of this time, even those working consistently through art centres, will confront similar problems. archives at these centres were rarely maintained in this period, with some very notable exceptions. many centres in arnhem land have maintained long running records, as have papunya tula artists, the spinifex arts project, walayirti artists and warlukurlangu artists. the latter has gone so far as to archive their artist's records with the south australian museum. such archives offer opportunities for future art historians to track the development of an atist's work. conclusions the contradictions of the 2008 ciha conference, as well as that of the musée de quai branly, lie in their attempt to take stock of remote aboriginal australian art with deference to institutions structured by colonialism. for the ciha conference, these institutions were the british museum and government house in victoria. for the french government, this deference is to the musée that is structured by colonial legacies of discrimination. these contradictions animate the opportunities that historians of art have for changing the institutional basis for the art history of remote aboriginal art. for while remote art centres are remote and their records difficult to access, they remain managed by the communities where they are located. remote art centres, and even the communities that host them, are certainly a part of the legacies of colonialism. yet their management by local aboriginal people, and their role in situating a renaissance of classical knowledge in contemporary media, also ties them to a longer history of indigenous knowledge. these institutions are postcolonial in the sense that they create have created opportunities for self-determination for aboriginal people. a comprehensive postcolonial history of remote art, however, could not rely on these centres alone. for art centres have operated amidst a set of other historical conditions that have also been crucial for the rise of the aboriginal art movement. these include the role of private dealers, who have also facilitated the development and success of coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 remote artists. theirs is one part of a complex history that has taken place in remote places, far from the cities of the world. to begin to develop an aboriginal art history, rather than one dependent on institutions that carry with them the legacies of colonialism, is to look to these remote communities, their art centres and their archives. bibliography altman, jon. 2005 'brokering aboriginal art: a critical perspective on marketing, institutions and the state', deakin university, <www.deakin.edu.au/buslaw/bowater/clmr/fellows/kennethmyerlecture2005.php > accessed 3 september 2007. australian government. 2007 senate report, 'indigenous art: securing the future', australian government, <www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/ecita_ctte/completed_inquiries/200407/indigenous_arts/report/report.pdf> accessed 10 april 2009. berger, john. 1965 the success and failure of picasso. new york: pantheon, 1980. biddle, jennifer. 2007 breasts, bodies, canvas: central desert art as experience, sydney: unsw press. bowdler, cath. 2009. colour country: art from roper river. wagga wagga: wagga wagga art gallery. elkins, james, et al. 2006 is art history global, london: routledge. french, alison. 2002. seeing the centre: the art of albert namatjira, 1902-1959. canberra: national gallery of australia. green, jenny. 2007 'holding the country—art from utopia and the sandover' in hetti perkins (ed.) one sun one moon. sydney: art gallery of new south wales. 203-209. grosz, elizabeth. 2008 chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. new york: columbia university press. henly, susan gough. 2005 'powerful growth of aboriginal art: all about earth and the people on it', international herald tribune, <www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/06/opinion/aborigine.php> accessed 15 october 2007. johnson, vivien. 1994. the art of clifford possum tjapaltjarri. east roseville, n.s.w.: gordon and breach arts international. johnson, vivien. 1997. michael jagamara nelson. sydney, craftsman house. kazue, nakamura 2008-9 'a dialogue to find ourselves and others: the reception of emily kame kngwarreye in japan.' australian and new zealand journal of art 9: 23-27. miller, partha et al. 2008 'decentering modernism: art history and avant-garde art from the periphery', art bulletin, 90(4): 531-574. morphy, howard. 2007 'creating value, adding value and maintaining value: the complexity of aboriginal art as an industry', desart, <www.desart.com.au/documents/morphy_creatingvalue.pdf> accessed 10 april 2009. morphy, howard. 2008 becoming art: exploring cross-cultural categories, sydney: unsw press. morphy, howard. 1991 ancestral connections: art and an aboriginal system of knowledge. chicago: university of chicago press. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 nordstrom, carolyn 2007 global outlaws: crime, money and power in the contemporary world, berkeley: university of california press. perkins, hetti and hannah fik. 2000 papunya tula: genesis and genius. sydney: art gallery of new south wales in association with papunya tula artists, 2000. perkins, hetti. 2004 crossing country: the alchemy of western arnhem land art. sydney: art gallery of new south wales. perkins, hetti, ed. 2007 one sun one moon: aboriginal art in australia sydney: art gallery of new south wales. rothwell, nicolas. 2004 'crossing the divide', the australian, 3 april: b18. ruiz-gomez, natasha. 2006 'the (jean) nouvel other: primitivism and the musee du quai branly.' modern and contemporary france 14(4): 417-432. ryan, judith, ed. 1993 images of power: aboriginal art of the kimberley melbourne: national gallery of victoria. ryan, judith. 2004 colour power: aboriginal art post 1984: in the collection of the national gallery of victoria melbourne: national gallery of victoria. ryan, judith. 2008 across the desert: aboriginal batik from central australia melbourne: national gallery of victoria. smith, terry. 2009 what is contemporary art? chicago: university of chicago press. summers, david. 2003 real spaces: world art history and the rise of western modernism, london: phaidon. taylor, luke. 1996 seeing the inside: bark painting in western arnhem land, oxford: clarendon press. darren  jorgensen  is  an  associate  professor  of  art  history  and  theory  in  the  faculty of architecture, landscape and visual arts at  the university of western  australia. he is also an art critic for his local newspaper, the west australian, and  publishes  essays  on  science  fiction.  he  is  currently  working  on  an  australian  research council  funded project  to co‐ordinate and compare art centre records  with a view to producing contemporary art history. (architecture, landscape and  visual  arts,  university  of  western  australia,  australia.  email:  darren.jorgensen@uwa.edu.au)  coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 173 colonialism’s past and present: performing history at a gold rush theme park virginia watson abstract: the urge to seize, to claim the past in order to experience the truth of history is a powerful impulse one full of desire for a time apart from the here and now. conceiving and sustaining an experience of the past is today very big business. the on going development of the heritage, tourism and re-enactment industries inter-link with popular historical perception in ways that raise multiple questions about the relationship between popular and academic accounts of the past and the many other ways of performing history (dening 1996). this paper takes as its starting point a gold rush theme park, old mogo town in nsw australia, and in particular, its erasure of all evidence of the indigenous past. from here, it is my aim to develop a revised performance of that pastone that interrogates the catastrophe of colonialism and the fate of history currently expunged from the gold rush theme park of old mogo town. keywords: australian mining history, theme parks, australian indigenous history introduction in the winter of 1860 four aborigines died of cold and exposure on mount jillamatong just outside braidwood in southern nsw. the fact was summarily reported in the local press and was accompanied only by a comment that the deceased were ‘buried by their tribesmen’. readers of the article were not told which aboriginal ‘tribe’ the four dead belonged to but it is likely that they were walbunja people, members of the yuin nation. one hundred and fifty two years later, the winter deaths of the four yuin people in 1860 is recorded on a small laminated information sheet nailed to the wattle and daub wall of one of the heritage buildings that form part of old mogo town, a gold rush theme park on the south west coast of nsw. it appears on the sheet under the skeptical heading, ‘not interested in gold!?’ copyright©2014 virginia watson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 174 the idea that interest in gold or more particularly, interest in the history of gold and representations of gold rushes past might be regarded as a discrete endeavour, an effort quite separate from indigenous dispossession and survival is a well established historiographic assumption characterizing much goldfields history (mccalman, cork and reeves 2001). it is an assumption that has led some historians and others to comment that goldfields history today continues to suffer from the same ‘cult of forgetfulness’ that was characteristic of all australian history until at least the late 1960s (clark and cahir 2003). yet, the suggestion underlying the question on the little information sheet at old mogo town that not being interested in gold might mean that you may be interested to learn of the fate of four aboriginal people during that first gold rush era hints, i think, at a phenomenon rather more complex than the straightforward one of ‘forgetfulness’ that the current critique of gold fields history allows. remembering and forgetting, making absent and present, silencing and articulating are entangled processes. the act of remembering can produce absence; writing and speech acts can at once articulate and silence. as the historian greg dening has shown, remembering and forgetting are acts of performance; they refer to a past in making a present. in this article i take as my starting point two assertions embedded in my introduction this far. first, the dictum that remembering is a performative practice one that that is constitutive of our present as much as of any past, and second, the premise that a gold rush theme park can be taken seriously as history. building upon these claims it is my intention to develop an account of the ways in which indigenous pasts are at once remembered and forgotten, made absent and present at old mogo town: a gold rush theme park. of course, to frame an article on gold rush history and indigenous peoples around the representations of the past found at a heritage gold rush theme park is perhaps to invite dismissive comment. as many professional historians have argued, theme parks are hardly history, nor are they really heritage (prentice 2005). they are ‘themed landscapes’ which are ‘themed in order to give form to narrative, myth and ideology (gapps 2009; see also lukas 2007). to this extent they ‘rely on easily understood narrative structures that tap into myths and visual imagery generated and sustained by popular culture’ (van eeden 2007: 114). furthermore, the claim that all histories are performative transformations of pasts that constitute a present is, as dening has written, surely to ‘mock the seriousness or good intentions of the pursuit of meaning in disciplinary ways’ (dening 1996:55; see also smith 2006; jackson and kidd 2011). debates about what is history and what is heritage are (probably) irresolvable but they nevertheless go to the historiographic heart of any discussion of the ways in which the past is represented and expressed. at old mogo town as i show, quite different conceptions of the represented past are produced according to the understanding of history and heritage invoked. what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is made present and what is left absent in this way i argue, appears as an artifact of historiography. however, to discern the more fundamental entanglements between those processes of remembering and forgetting, making absent and present so central to these performances of the past is not as i then suggest, so much a question of what might be regarded as history or heritage so much as it is a question as to how these non-indigenous processes of remembering and forgetting play out in the contemporary legacy of aboriginal presence and absence (healy 2008:14). as i aim to show, it is the very mutability, constantly unsettled nature of these processes of remembering and forgetting that are central to understanding the ways in which history and heritage expressively, performatively transform the past to constitute the present (dening 1996; smith 2006). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 175 this article begins with some of my own impressions of old mogo town, which i recorded during a visit there earlier this year. it then moves on to reflect on the representations of the past produced at this history theme park (at least as i experienced and understood these), and particularly to reflect on these in relation to published histories of the region, mining history, and indigenous histories of the south coast. my article then turns to consider the underlying questions, which enervate the different understandings of the past produced by these different histories and in particular, of the ways in which these inform performances of the past produced at old mogo town. the more or less irresolvable (and arguably unproductive) debate thus generated points to my conclusion, and finally a postscript. old mogo town: impressions: january, 2012 old mogo town, gold rush theme park is situated just off the highway from the centre of mogo town near bateman’s bay on the nsw south coast. the town and the theme park are both surrounded by the mogo state forest, tall timbered bush land of temperate rainforest. the buildings of the theme park are set amongst this bush and are a mixture of those erected over the years since the 1970s to house visitors to the park and buildings erected (and since restored) in the 1850s by miners and others who came to the mogo gold fields. the cabin that we stay in here for two days and two nights has a small timbered veranda, and from here we can look out across a grassy hill and dam to the tall surrounding forest. it’s very quiet, and very beautiful. this is not at all what i had expected. the website for old mogo town gold rush theme park seemed to promise a disney world simulacrum of mid 19th century diggings. ‘enter a time warp’ it claims, ‘capture the true essence of history’, and ‘experience the living conditions of miners and early settlers as it was in the south coast area of nsw, australia’. instead of these promised projections of authenticity i am reassured by the reserved almost modest attempts to recreate a landscape and built environment. there are small miners’ humpies, some made from sawn timber, some made out of bark. there is a small pub, a miners’ inn again made out of timber, wattle saplings and daub; there is a single-room timbered church which also apparently functioned as a school and then there’s a chinese temple. there is a police station; it’s the only building that is made out of stone – large bricks made from crushed oyster shells and lime, and a prison cell next door. and this evocation of life on the diggings is further elaborated through the reconstruction of mine shafts and mining machinery such as a stamping battery and alluvial mining equipment. when i take one of the guided tours our group of fifteen adults and children are shown how to pan for gold in a small creek. we are then led around the theme park to each of the sites as our guide describes life on the diggings. it’s a life characterised by desperately hard labour, much violence between miners and bitter resentment amongst the european miners of their chinese compatriots. the chinese miners, we are told, were prepared to work harder than most european miners, to eke out a living and often get rich on the slurry heaps abandoned by others. we are also told of the bitter resentment of authority amongst all miners especially, of the hated officials who issued the miners licenses. and our guide also describes the high cost of gold mining on health; the health of the miners and of the environment. mercury and cyanide were constantly used by miners to extract coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 176 maximum amounts of gold from water and river sediment and so, in turn, the rivers, creeks and flood plains were horribly contaminated by both these toxic compounds. our guided tour of old mogo town ends casually: our group of local holiday-makers and their children has developed a relaxed question-answer-comment dialogue with our guide, and talk only finally finishes some time after our guide has announced the tour over. no one had mentioned the aboriginal societies dispossessed to make way for mining (and other european economic activities), nor was there any mention of the possible presence of aboriginal people as miners or workers engaged in other activities on or around the gold fields. after the tour and over the following couple of days i spend more time wandering around old mogo town. there is a barbeque area that i’d not noticed the first day. it has roof posts that are painted with what are recognisably aboriginal motifs and designs. there’s also a swimming pool nearby, and the retaining wall around the garden that surrounds the pool is painted with similar designs and imagery. at one point i wander into a large, open shed containing an enormous piece of machinery that i can’t identify, and a smaller one being worked on by one of the theme park staff. the walls of this shed are covered in small pieces of aboriginal art and some photocopies of photos from what look like very old newspapers. i strike up a conversation with the staff member. he’s a volunteer he tells me, and so are most of the staff who work at old mogo town. for him, and his colleagues it’s a labour of love, helping to restore old buildings and machinery, he says. i ask him about the machine he’s working on and he tells me it’s a printing press, and so too is the over-size piece. ‘and this is also an art gallery too’, i ask? ‘yes’, he says, ‘they were done by the mum of a young koori fellow who works here. she’s a local artist, you know’. he tells me about other galleries where you can find her work and mentions the local aboriginal land council on the corner of the highway turn-off into old mogo town. ‘she did all the art work in the playground of the pre-school centre at the back of the land council, with the kids too’. we chat on: later, i ask him about the photographs. ‘do you know where they might come from?’ at that point another staff member/volunteer walks in and hearing our conversation joins in. ‘oh, i got those out of a book, a local history book’, he says. he then tells me what some of the subjects of the photos are. one of them he tells me, ‘is of mount dromedary: but it’s called by its koori name now, gulaga, it means ‘sacred mountain’. making history and heritage on the south coast. the urge to seize, to claim the past in order to experience the ‘truth’ of history is a powerful impulse – one full of desire for a time apart from the here and now. indeed, conceiving and sustaining an experience of the past is today very big business. the ongoing development and inter-linkage of the heritage, tourism and reenactment industries increasingly ties a growing popular enthusiasm for the recovery of a national past (samuel 1994: 139) to consumer contexts (lukas 2007; urry and larsen 2011). theme parks like old mogo town, which offer a ‘living history’ experience— now often referred to as histo-tainment—are a global phenomenon and have become a dominant business practice in the service and leisure sectors of many national economies. and although some academic historians and other professionals worry about the blurring of boundaries between ‘heritage’ and ‘history’ (lowenthal 1998), and the relationship between these two sets of practices and national identity, an already extensive interdisciplinary literature on these issues continues to expand (crang and toila-kelly 2010). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 177 what then might we make of the history and heritage constructed in the tourist experience at old mogo town? and what can we make of the relationship between this ‘popular’ almost amnesic history and heritage created for commercial and educational purposes, and ‘professional’, academic history and heritage studies of the south coast produced with scholarly intent and also for educational purposes that are perhaps not so ‘forgetful’? and what if anything might this very local and small-scale example of the now global phenomenon that is the theme park be able tell us about australian heritage, history and national identity? the little information sheet that notes the deaths of the four members of the yuin nation tells us that this event took place in 1860, in other words, almost a decade after the rush to the mogo and southern nsw goldfields began. when the rush to these fields started in 1851 we know, from sources written at the time as well as more recent work produced by professional historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and others that the first peoples of the south coast and hinterland had been subjected to european contact for almost eight decades. the first encounter – if you could call it that – was a sighting in 1770 by captain james cook of local budawang people on koorbrua beach at murramarang. the sighting is recorded in cook’s journal, which, in recent times has been subjected to detailed scrutiny by academic historians concerned to recover ‘aboriginal remembrance in the place of white forgetting’ (nugent 2005; mckenna 2002; rose 2004). the first recorded contact, however, took place nine years later in 1797 when just three survivors of the ‘sydney cove’ shipwreck walked from gippsland to sydney (mckenna 2002). this ‘historic’ event has also been analysed by historians to the point that it has now been explicitly committed to a wider public memory. the nsw department of environment and conservation cites this moment in its brochures and information posters for the south coast region. also in an attempt to remember what for so long had been forgotten by white australians is the recovery of histories of ‘invasion’ specifically as these either occurred on the south coast of nsw or effected indigenous peoples of the south coast. it is now widely known that after the endeavour’s journey, and the establishment of the colony at sydney cove in 1788 successive waves of invaders moved into the south coast region and hinterland. the first of these was the smallpox epidemic of 1789. according to sources written at the time together with the later work of historians, epidemiologists and other experts the disease is understood to have broken out in the colony round sydney cove and port jackson and rapidly spread to the other indigenous populations of the sydney basin and south coast. the effect on yuin people various experts argue was catastrophic, killing nearly 90% of the population. the second wave of invasion documented to have hit the peoples of the south coast and their lands then came in the early 1800s in the form of whalers and sealers who worked the coast down to tasmania. gangs of men carrying guns, knives and clubs, often accompanied by packs of dogs, would come ashore sometimes for weeks on end. violent confrontation with aboriginal people we now know was common as was the rape and abduction of aboriginal women (mckenna 2002: 33). sexual violence against aboriginal women and children and physical violence against aboriginal men is said by researchers to have further decimated much of the population that had survived the small pox epidemic as well as their descendants. a third wave of invasion then came in the 1820s in the form of squatters who seized for themselves vast tracts of aboriginal land. we know too from sources written at the time how destructive of indigenous land and life this invading wave of europeans was across coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 178 the entire continent. ‘the squatter’, a source from the 1840s writes, ‘takes possession of the native country…without permission and without compensation, and calling it his run, orders the native off, because…his cattle…do not like black men’. then come ‘disease’, ‘vice’ and a ‘war of extermination’, as the blacks fall ‘like… leaves in autumn’ before the dogs and guns’ (lang 1847: 267-74). then in the 1840s another invasion of europeans onto yuin country began as timber cutters moved into the tall forests of the region. by the 1860s we know, sawmills were proliferating throughout the area (mckenna 2002). by the time the first major european discovery of gold on the south coast had taken place (at eden in 1852) a palimpsest of colonial invasions — each catastrophic in their own ways — was laid across the country of the yuin and other aboriginal peoples of the south coast. gold and the gold rushes like the previous invasions, however, had their own specifically destructive effects on aboriginal land and people. in the first instance the rush of european workers from pastoral and other properties and industries created an opportunity for aboriginal workers to obtain employment where this had previously been denied them. in relation to pastoral leases in particular aboriginal people were able to reoccupy their traditional lands (goodall 1996: 57-61). in the second instance however, the gold rushes led to an increased demand for agricultural products (particularly meat and grain) to feed the dramatically increased population. these developments in turn all contributed to increasing mobility within the region and to the growth of european settlement with its concomitant alienation of more land from its aboriginal owners. gold essentially drove the locking out of aboriginal people from their lands and began the imposition of small-scale european land use patterns. (goulding heritage consulting 2005: 48-9) in other words, gold mining in nsw in the mid nineteenth century drew a large population to previously sparsely populated areas which, in turn led to long-term population growth. furthermore, in the years following the gold rushes of the 1850s as is widely reported by historians of the nsw colony, the issue of access to land rapidly came to dominate the political landscape in nsw and resulted in the passage of legislation colloquially known as the ‘selectors acts’ (karskins 2010; cochrane 2008; goodall 1996). on the south coast this legislation began the break-up of large pastoral properties into small allotments and a shift from pastoralism to agriculture involving intensive grazing and cropping. in the period from 1860-1900 the intensification of land use and the increase in land enclosure in the region resulted in a raft of legislative and administrative restrictions on aboriginal peoples capacity to reside on, travel over, and utilise the resources of the country. these restrictions were increasingly forcefully implemented by the statutory body created in the 1880s with the purpose of relocating from their lands and small reserve holdings those remaining aboriginal people on the south coast. that body, as is known in popular and professional history and heritage, was the aborigines protection board. this is not the place for me to continue narrating a history of the ways in which aboriginal people’s lives and land on the south coast came to be governed in the most draconian ways by the aborigines protection board; by the ways in which those aboriginal people who managed to avoid the board’s reach into their daily lives had to endure the racism of white townspeople –whites who were intent on preventing aboriginal children from attending school, from adults obtaining housing and employment and medical care (see coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 179 rowley 1971; goodall 1996; mckenna 2002). nor is this the place to tell of how all this only changed as a result of aboriginal people requesting, demanding and cajoling whites into recognising their rights – initially, their civil and political rights and later their social rights and rights to land – a struggle only partially abated by land rights and corporate association legislation in the 1970s and native title legislation in the 1990s. my point here more generally, is that this history, this past is now widely ‘remembered’ by academic historians and other professionals. the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ that characterised all australian history until the 1960s has to this extent, in relation to the south coast been at least partially challenged. at the same time, however, most gold rush histories and histories of mining in nsw more specifically hardly mention the presence of aboriginal people (goodman 2001; 1994; blainey 1978). the work of the historian barry mcgowan, particularly in his 2010 monograph, dust and dreams: mining communities in south east nsw, is an exception. in dust and dreams mcgowan draws on research into the victorian gold fields that has shown that aboriginal people mined for gold and other minerals, and also often acted as guides or sources of local knowledge to european prospectors to argue that the case for aboriginal involvement in the nsw gold fields can be similarly made (mcgowan 2010: 92). as mcgowan tells us, several individual aboriginal miners acquired legendary status on some southern nsw gold fields. what’s more, today the recorded oral histories of aboriginal families and individuals in the mogo and wider south coast area are replete with knowledge and memories of aboriginal forbears’ lives. much of this knowledge is on now on the public record. a website produced by the australian national university named, koori coast narrates a rich and continuous history of the lives of the yuin peoples from pre-european contact to the present (koori coast 2012). in 2005, the local government authority, the eurobodalla shire commissioned a multi-stage aboriginal cultural history and heritage study (goulding and waters 1995; feary and donaldson 2010). although this particular study focuses on sites of cultural heritage significance and not more recent sites of european making such as old mining towns and fields it is equally clear from this study that local aboriginal cultural memory and connections with country in this region of the south coast are historically continuous to the present day. yet, if this history is now well known – and to this extent ‘remembered’ — amongst professional historians and others what might the neglect, the ‘forgetting’ of this say about the history and heritage of gold and gold mining at old mogo town: a theme park? after all, much of this historical research and writing has been both productive of and produced by significant shifts in national understandings of the legacies of indigenous dispossession and a revised narrative concerning national foundations and identity (goot and rowse 2007). commercially-run history theme parks like old mogo town may not be based on the very specific work of professional historians but more generally, as a representation of australian colonial history developed for educational purposes they too raise the issue of the indigenous past and present; the ways in which it is remembered and forgotten, made present and absent. in this regard then, in the case of old mogo town there were (as far as i could tell), only three material reminders of an indigenous past and presence there – the little information sheet, the shed containing the printing presses and art works, and the paintings on the barbeque area and swimming pool. these small but significant signifiers seem to at once represent both the marginalized status of aboriginality as well as the enduring pervasiveness of indigenous identity. what is history and what is heritage are questions that have fired both public and professional debates in almost every country where concern about the past and its coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 180 relationship to the present is an issue. the debate is an inescapable feature of settlercolonial societies such as australia where continuing indigenous presence requires the settler colonial state and society to confront the multiple legacies in the present of indigenous dispossession and historic injustice, and to address these. it is also a complex and ongoing debate. on the one hand, according to these debates, the exemplary history of ‘remembering’ understood as that practice which seeks to recover the past that was, chronicled in primary sources, oral histories, and which develops and draws upon critiques of historiographic methods that have erased and silenced the colonised confronts a less exemplary popular conception of history that tends to reproduce those silencing, erasing effects. ‘history explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque with time’ we are told, while popular imagination and all those popular practices associated with the past such as heritage are understood only to ‘clarify pasts as a way of infusing them with present purposes’ (lowenthal 1998: xiv). in this way, heritage sites function as conduits between the past and the present. the past is experienced as a function of the present’ (rickly-boyd 2012: 129). historical theme parks in particular, are in this way guilty of playing the politics of the present for they are said to ‘rely on easily understood narrative structures that tap into myths and visual imagery generated and sustained by popular culture’ (van eeden 2007: 114). to this extent, theme parks work to reinforce dominant discourses and practices associated with nationalist ideologies and the forms of politics they constitute. according to this analysis then, we have an understanding of the work of professional historians as involving detailed, scholarly research, the careful examination of archival and other primary sources and their interpretation in the light of debates about the nature and practice of history, all with a view to correcting and completing the historical record. by contrast, popular practices of history are seen to give form to current, ideologically driven social agendas, many of them anchored in the reproduction of jingoistic foundational myths of the pioneering white settler whose efforts alone are responsible for the development of the nation. on this reading, old mogo town: a theme park is a clear example of the latter version of history. the pioneering efforts of mostly white, male miners are enshrined in the carefully preserved and faithfully re-created buildings and landscape of the theme park. a narrative of hardship and personal cost told by the guides and recorded on all the printed information shapes the visitor’s encounter with this past. this is history made commercially successful: there are four tours every day of the year with the exception of christmas and easter public holidays. schools send busloads of children to stay at the theme park and experience this version of the past. parents clearly love this place as a school holiday destination if the numbers of people visiting the park during my stay there is anything to go by. the past in these terms is clearly infused as the critics of popular history and heritage would have it, with a range of ‘present purposes’. on the other hand, however, there are those who argue for a far more pluralistic reading of history and heritage. on this view, we are told, ‘history can take many forms’: it can be constructed at the dinner table, over the back fence, in parliament in the streets, and not just in the tutorial room or at the scholars desk. it can be represented through museums, historical societies, universities, books, films recordings, monuments, reenactments, commemorations, conversations, collections, historic sites and places. (griffiths 1996: 1) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 181 history and heritage, popular and professional by this reading are one and the same. heritage and popular history practices can therefore, be ‘acquitted of deforming history’. professional history particularly that which seeks to ‘remember’ forgotten ‘authentic’ pasts are, in these terms understood to be ‘riddled with most of the same defects that critics think peculiar to heritage and popular history’ (lowenthal 1998: 106). the ‘actual past’ according to these readings can never be retrieved. ‘all we have left are much eroded traces and partial records filtered through diverse eyes and minds.’ according to this analysis, i would understand old mogo town not as a populist version of history and heritage intent on reproducing nationalist myths of the country’s pioneering foundations thereby erasing some truer version/s of the past. rather, i would understand the theme park as just one more example of some of the very many ways in which the past is performed and discursively constituted. from this perspective, old mogo town is indeed still ‘riddled with defects’ but these are not failings in historical verisimilitude. history is not the past. history and heritage may constitute ‘expressed knowledge of the past but this does not mean that history and the past are the same (dening 1996: 39). old mogo town on this reading is certainly a flawed expression of the past – forgetful of so many other historical expressions of aboriginal peoples’ presence in that past. but this is only an argument about the plural nature of history: were the theme park to remember and incorporate those aboriginal histories now well known we still would not be any closer to ‘capturing the true essence of history’. singular or plural, forgetful or commemorative, these debates about the nature of history and heritage tend to lock us in either or arguments and in the process perhaps let us 'forget' that ‘remembering’ is likely to involve much more than these debates allow. as chris healy whose work i lastly turn to now has shown,' forgetting aborigines' involves entangled processes of remembering and forgetting. however, and most importantly for healy, these processes are not about the recovery or concealment of an actual past anymore than they are about the actual life circumstances of aboriginal people in the present. healy's analysis of the ways in which aboriginal people are at once both remembered and forgotten, made present and absent focuses specifically on the construction of the entire 'colonial archive'. for healy this archive containing as it does all those texts and cultural sites where non-aboriginal people have produced constructions of aboriginal presence and absence generates paradoxical effects. aboriginal people are at once remembered and forgotten through all the very many non-aboriginal textual, cultural, and communicative practices generated over time. a board game named ‘corroborree’, for example, healy shows, works to produce a specific construction of aboriginal people ('as semi-naked primitives who 'make fire' and 'dig for honey ants'). at the same time that corroborree does this essentialising, racist work, however, it is producing (in equal measure) utter forgetfulness about the actual lives and circumstances of aboriginal people at the time of the board's production. in other words, the remembering in this particular text that is the board game involves complete amnesia in relation to actual aboriginal people and their life circumstances. only by 'forgetting' the cultural constructions of 'aboriginality' found in the colonial archive, healy suggests, might we begin to 'remember' the corporeal, actual people who are aborigines in their actual life circumstances. i take healy's work as a prompt that might help me think somewhat differently about the past and the present, history and heritage of mining at old mogo town -differently that coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 182 is, to the ways in which i had initially thought about my visit to this south coast gold rush history theme park. what i take from healy's work is that the 'forgetfulness' that is said to be characteristic of one branch of history (in this case of gold rush histories and histories of mining more generally), and not another (those histories that have sought to remember an aboriginal presence in the past) is less a matter of any of us non-aboriginal history and heritage makers being either ‘forgetful’ or not. rather, that non-indigenous practices of history and heritage from history theme parks to academic texts are just that, exemplars of non-indigenous historical consciousness. those of us who are not aboriginal people can never 'remember' the histories and pasts remembered by aboriginal people. but we can, in healy’s terms, work towards a moment when we 'forget' the historical constructions of aborigines and instead try to remember real people in real situations. at old mogo town: a theme park, those markers of a historical and continuing yuin presence—the art works, the information sheet—they too refer to pasts in making a present: it is just that only the artworks, i think, are markers of a continuing corporeal aboriginal presence, one that asks us to remember real aboriginal people past and present on whose lands a settler-colonial society resides. postscript it is four months since i last visited old mogo town: a gold rush theme park, and the other day i looked again at the website. a new site has been constructed. the yuin peoples’ history on the south coast, their presence as labourers and miners on the gold fields, as well as their continuing ownership over their lands is now a featured link on the site. the theme park has made explicit the more implicit statements that i heard during my visit concerning the on-going, vital relationships that yuin people maintain to this place, their country. i have planned another visit there for the winter mid-year break. in the meantime, i wonder if this latest shift in the ways in which the past is represented might not be further evidence of the mutable, unsettled nature of those processes of remembering and forgetting so central (as healy has shown) to non-indigenous conceptions of the past? i believe that it might also be further evidence of dening’s original insight: all history/histories can in this way be understood to be performances that refer to a past in order to constitute a present. conclusion gold rush histories like mining histories more generally have often been said to be ‘forgetful’ of indigenous people and indigenous lands upon which mining takes place. in this article i have been concerned to reflect upon some of the ways in which we might understand processes of remembering and forgettting particularly, as these coalesce around representations of the past signified in practices of history and heritage. taking the gold rush theme park of old mogo town as the basis for my inquiry i have tried to show that practices of history and heritage tourism no less than processes of remembering and forgetting are mutable, entangled phenomena. in this way, whilst amateur heritage makers and professional historians alike may each claim to have produced authentic accounts of the past – and thus more accurate histories neither can really sustain the conceit that history is about the past. indeed, as i have tried to show, not only is history and heritage not about the past: the past isn’t about the past. the rather ‘forgetful’ heritage tourist experiences at old mogo town anchored as they are in the imagined industrial landscape of a mid ninetennth century goldfield and given form in the restorative practices coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 183 and narratives of heritage enthusiasts professionals are acts of performance. so too are the less forgetful histories of this region of the south coast of nsw authored by professional historians. although these histories certainly seek to recover the forgotten indigenous past both these professional histories and popular heritage practices are performances: they are performances of white historical consciousness concerned to make a present. seen this way, all these historical constructions, that is both those that make indigenous people absent and those that make the first peoples present ought to prompt us to ‘forget’ those constructions and instead, remember the continuing corporeal presence of yuin people on yuin land. it is the second decade of the twenty first century and the australian economy is dancing to the tune of the country’s third mining boom. what if, during this boom we nonindigenous australians were to begin the process of remembering the continuing corporeal presence of indigenous peoples on their lands? these indigenous lands are after all, the lands from which a settler colonial state and society extracts the vast wealth that has made and re-made this nation. might this remembering constitute a small prompt to non-indigenous australians to take seriously continuing indigenous presence? works cited clark, i.d. and cahir, d.a. 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(2007) ‘themeing mythical africa at the lost city’ in s. lukas (ed.) the themed space: locating culture, nation, and self. lanham: lexington books. virginia watson is a lecturer in the faculty of arts and social sciences at the university of technology, sydney. http://livingknowledge.anu.edu.au/learningsites/kooricoast/02_connections.htm coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 louisa lawson and the woman question anne holden rønning university of bergen, norway achrroen@online.no copyright©anne holden rønning 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the start of the women‘s press in britain in 1855 by emily faithfull was an important step on the path to emancipation – women had now a voice in the media. thirty-three years later louisa lawson, who has been called the first voice of australian feminism, published the first number of the dawn. this was a watershed in that it gave women a voice, marked women‘s political engagement in the public sphere, and employed women compositors, making available to a broader public issues which were politically relevant. in the first number lawson asks, ―where is the printing-ink champion of mankind‘s better half? there has hitherto been no trumpet through which the concentrated voices of womankind could publish their grievances and their opinions.‖ this article will look at some of the content in the journal during the seventeen years of its existence, 18881905. key words: louisa lawson, women‘s press in australia, the dawn cato via joseph addison (o. lawson 4) mailto:achrroen@online.no coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 the nineteenth century was remarkable for the numbers of watersheds, social, political and historical that took place. one of the most striking historical issues was the fight for women‘s independence and the vote, and the appearance of women as the catalysts for social change. in enabling women‘s voices to be heard in the public arena the press played a seminal role, marking a watershed in the dissemination of information about the situation under which many women were living in different parts of the world. in australia louisa lawson was a pioneer in promoting the women‘s cause, and in making writing and publishing for women accepted. however, we should be aware that though louisa lawson was a pioneer in australia, she was following in the footsteps of women in britain and the us. in 1855 emily faithfull started the victoria press in britain with all female compositors, an important step on the path to emancipation, since women now had their own media. from the 1860s onwards through to the early twentieth century, a plethora of women‘s newspapers and journals were published, especially in britain and america, promoting employment for women, education, suffrage in its widest terms, equality for men and women in marriage, the vote, etc. the dawn: a journal for australian women appeared on the australian newspaper scene in 1888. dale spender writes: the dawn helped to pave the way for women‘s magazines in australia, in part by demonstrating that women had need of a printed space of their own; in that printed space louisa lawson created a context for the exchange of ideas – and for the encouragement of women‘s writing (1985: 140). and as brian matthews writes, ―the dawn was no city cabaret, it was a road show!‖ (1987: 202), in other words it had far reaching tentacles into the australian landscape. a monthly publication from may 1888 to july 1905 the dawn campaigned for women‘s rights at all levels of society, as well as proving that women were no longer dependent on men to run their own business. like the victoria press, it employed women compositors, gave women a voice, and marked women‘s political engagement in the public sphere, making available to a broader public issues relating to women. like emily faithfull louisa was not only ―business manager, [but also] editor, printer and publisher‖ (lawson 1990: 3). as louisa writes in the editorial of may 1, 1889, as the dawn is the pioneer paper of its kind in australia, being edited, printed and published by women, in the interest of women. [sic] it has been looked upon by many, as an uncertain venture, and we have frequently been asked, by subscribers and advertisers, the question ‗will it live?‘, to all such we have but one reply. the dawn has been a success from its first issue, while a glance at our subscriber‘s list convinces the most sceptical. in the first number lawson starts by citing tennyson: ‗woman is not uncompleted man, but diverse,‘ says tennyson, and being diverse why should she not have her journal in which her divergent hopes, aims, and opinions may have representation. every eccentricity of belief, and coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 every variety of bias in mankind allies itself with a printing-machine, and gets its singularities bruited about in type, but where is the printing-ink champion of mankind‘s better half? there has hitherto been no trumpet through which the concentrated voices of womankind could publish their grievances and their opinions. (sydney, may 15, 1888 – published under the pseudonym dora falconer) according to olive lawson the journal had its greatest impact in the years 1888–1895, and louisa ―wrote over 200 of the journal‘s leading articles‖ (1990: 15). with a cover price of 3d per issue, or 3 shillings for an annual subscription it was otherwise financially supported by advertisements and sponsors, which were often, as in the british press, collected in the last pages of each issue. the advertisements, which often covered up to twenty of forty-four pages, provide a fascinating snapshot of the commercial activities of the time. louisa had various inventive ways of raising subscriptions such as selling off annually her family land in eurunderee ―to paid-up subscribers,‖ two acres at a time, after her husband peter lawson (a norwegian seaman turned gold prospector) died in 1888 (lawson 1990, 19). the journal also offered free courses in various subjects, provided you got twenty new subscribers. in these original ways of gaining paid-up subscriptions to the journal louisa lawson was in contrast to other women‘s newspapers of the time, which, though asking for subscriptions, were dominated by middle and upper-class women, and often had access to financial means, and politicians. louisa‘s background was very different from that of the more ladylike women supporting the cause, brought up as she was in the bush and with few economic means. the journal had a widespread readership, also in rural areas and abroad (lawson 1990:13). the typical reader according to sheridan was ―a woman for whom the improvement of domestic life and the affirmation of her rights as a wife and mother was at least as important as gaining equal rights with men in the public sphere‖ (1995: 77). she saw the vote as the answer to many of these issues, but considered it important that her journal addressed a wide variety of questions which involved the everyday life of women in australia at the time. she describes ―the colonial girl‖ thus: the typical bush girl early acquires a practical knowledge of house keeping, and generally excels in cookery, dairy and laundry work. she not only rides well, but she knows how to look after her horse, how to put the saddle on and mount him without help. […] no doubt the isolation of many families in our sparely-populated districts helps to develop the resources of the individuals composing them, and the difficulty of obtaining help of any kind makes our girls useful and self-reliant. (june 1, 1894 editorial) the social impact of the dawn seems to have been considerable. sheridan posits that the dawn was the first newspaper for women with ‗feminist principles‘. however, from my own study of other british newspapers of the period i would say that louisa lawson was feminist in principle but much more diverse in her approach to women‘s issues. of course, since she was more or less alone as a woman in australia promoting a journal for suffrage, she could take a freedom where women of other nations felt more constrained. but she did meet with opposition from male compositors who led an coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 unsuccessful campaign to close her journal in 1889-90. as she writes in ―boycotting the dawn‖: the dawn office gives whole or partial employment to about ten women, working either on this journal or in the printing business, and the fact that women are earning an honest living in a business hitherto monopolised by men, is the reason why the typographical association, and all the affiliated societies it can influence, have resolved to boycott the dawn. they have not said to the women ―we object to your working because women usually accept low wages and so injure the cause of labour elsewhere,‖ they simply object on selfish grounds to the competition of women at all. (october 5, 1889) her answer was to ask for support from women that they would only deal with tradesmen who would advertise with the dawn — a shrewd business woman and a salient comment on the power of advertisements in keeping a journal afloat. it is interesting to consider the content of the dawn in the light of matthew‘s biography of louisa. like many at the time it was written, he seems surprised that louisa covered such a vast range of topics. but this was the case with all the women‘s newspapers and journals. women had understood that purely feminist ideas and ideology would not reach out to the greater mass of women. they needed to be encouraged to see that the cause embraced all aspects of women‘s lives, and of course they were dependent on the advertising subscriptions to keep going. women editors and those fighting for the vote in the late nineteenth century saw the need to make clear that women‘s rights included far more than the vote. this diversity of approach is something we appreciate today when we talk of human rights. critical reception of the dawn is varied. whereas brian matthews considered the dawn radical, penny johnson calls it typical of the ―reformist bourgeois feminism of its period,‖ and judith allen terms it ―expediency feminism‖ which she considers was ―dominant in the australian women‘s movement‖ (cited in sheridan 1995: 79). but given her background lawson can hardly be called ‗bourgeois‘. sheridan and oldfield draw distinctions between feminism as woman-centred, and that which targeted and aimed at reforming men and patriarchal attitudes, and campaigning for equal rights. oldfield considers that ―louisa lawson‘s analysis of cultural attitudes was radical in the context of her time‖ (1992: 4), and suggests that many were shocked by louisa‘s iconoclastic views on women. louisa was active in making speeches and promoting the cause, but very outspoken. for example in one speech she comments on how women‘s lives are ruled by men in every circumstance ending ―and she goes to a heaven ruled by a male god or a hell managed by a male devil. isn‘t it a wonder men didn‘t make the devil a woman?‖ (matthews 1987: 259). the linking of twentieth century theoretical ideas of feminism and louisa lawson‘s attitudes is, in my opinion, problematic as to lawson the plight of women and fundamental human rights were all important. target group coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 it has been said that the dawn was specifically targeted to the working class and ―designed to be a paper in which women may express their opinions on political and social questions which involve their interest (…) [and] was to be enthusiastically tutorial‖ (lawson 1990: 4-5). louisa attributes the journal‘s success to the fact that, ―the mass of women want to have themselves fairly represented, and the mass are made up of those who are not much in evidence, and who do not therefore figure as typical women‖ (―ourselves‖ may 5, 1890). sheridan states that like most of these newspapers pre-1905 it drew a fine line between politics and domesticity, with its ―dual focus on public and domestic concerns‖ (1995: 78-9). a point supported by the following extract from the first editorial: we wear no ready-made suit of opinions, nor stand on any platform of woman‘s rights which we have as yet seen erected. (…) for nothing concerning woman‘s life and interest lies outside our scope. it is not a new thing to say that there is no power in the world like that of women, for in their hand lie the plastic unformed characters of the coming generation to be moulded beyond alteration into what form they will. this most potent constituency we seek to represent, and for their suffrage we sue. (vol.1 no.1 sydney, may 15, 1888) in one of the many editorials entitled ―ourselves‖ she philosophizes as to why the dawn has prospered and survived in contrast to other similar projects. louisa maintains it is the result of the view that the paper has taken of women‘s interests –— one fundamentally different from the stereotypical notions of womanhood at the time. this is further illustrated by the change in subtitle in 1891 to ―a journal for the household.‖ lawson was in many ways attempting to achieve two things in her journal—to encourage women to demand their rights, not only political but also in the home, and at the same time, following the ―advice column‖ manner, throw light on issues specifically relevant for women in all walks of life, regardless of class, and how to deal with the ensuing problems. this is evident in editorials such as this: ―the dawn‖ has from the first identified itself with the cause of woman,—has striven to be her mouth-piece as well as her counsellor and supporter, and thus, in looking back upon the past six years we take fresh courage in view of the amazing progress in women‘s advancement made during that short period. six years ago questions relating to any improvement in the position of women were relegated to the most flippant of the australian comic papers, and the idea of a ―woman‘s paper‖ was viewed by some readers with contempt, by others with alarm. (…) but the line we had chosen was one in which no ―looking backward‖ was possible, and we struggled forward with what courage we might, hoping that the time would soon come when the truest and most earnest of our sex would be ready to take their stand beside us. (may 1, 1894, editorial ―our anniversary‖) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 content in the course of this article it is only possible to give some glimpses of the topics dealt with in the dawn. like other women‘s newspapers and journals in britain and america the dawn covered a wide variety of topics from ‗women in china‘, to ‗woman‘s suffrage in norway‘ (when women got the municipal vote in 1901); advice on many topics, such as support for widows, inequality of education; health; child abuse (oldfield 77); fancy work, 1896; and one on ‗a white australia,‘ feb.1 1904. other articles include dressmaking, ―a boy‘s velveteen suit‖; ―the correct way to play the piano‖; recipes; poonah painting and even a children‘s corner. as was customary the various women‘s journals and newspapers reprinted articles from each other. louisa borrowed quite considerably from british newspapers, for example, articles by keir hardie, june 1, 1902; and mona caird‘s discussion of marriage series ―does marriage hinder a woman‘s self-development?‖ were included in the dawn in july 1890. louisa attacked the picture of women portrayed in the press and elsewhere. she maintained that whatever a woman does she is framed in a negative context and treated with contempt, a comment still not uncommon in the twenty-first century. in the dawn february 1891 she complains of the constant belittlement of women in the press all over the world, and its concurrent effect of subjecting womankind to intolerable jests, and hindering belief in themselves (may 5, 1890). louisa considered male journalists should refocus their opinions away from ―disquisitions on woman, her weakness, inconstancy, vanity and little failings innumerable.‖ instead authors should turn ―the search light of genius‖ upon men and boys, because ―a serious examination of modern social affairs, renders apparent the significant fact that women and girls in the mass, have a higher standard of action, and a finer moral tone, than men and boys in the mass possess.‖ (―the man question, or, the woman question re-stated.‖ september 2, 1889) louisa is clear and unequivocal on what she considers typical attitudes to women in contemporary society. as oldfield points out succinctly, ―the best of lawson‘s writing is elegant, logical and fervent dialectic. the worst is trite and sentimental, or full of bitter invective‖ (1992: 77). some of lawson‘s articles are to put it mildly sentimental—praising women and their qualities. she exhibits her tendency to criticize men, and also to take a religious attitude to the moral superiority of women, the effect of which is lessened by linguistic excesses, such as: the time is coming when women will say to men, ‗come to me, undefiled, as i came to you,‘ and this is the basis of the so-called woman‘s rights. (…) it is to women the world must look for salvation, and before the ‗coming woman‘ the army of priests and clergy, the cranks – one and all – will give way, and men will see themselves as they are and be ashamed. (april 1, 1897) this is typical of many of the editorial comments where lawson combines a religious based morality with critique of men and their dissoluteness. it is, of course, related to the fact that the campaign for votes in australia was closely connected to that of the woman‘s christian temperance union against drunkenness. one wonders what impact this had on the readers as it is in marked contrast to british suffrage papers where there was less emphasis on the moral aspects, apart from prostitution, and more on the coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 potentialities which women had and could benefit society with, such as education and employment. she sometimes attacked vitriolically the newspapers‘ and journalists‘ way of reporting women. in ―unfair criticism‖ november 1893 she points out that more space is given in newspapers and journals to actresses who flaunt their abilities and sex, and ridicule those working for the vote. in 1890 she wrote, not one woman out of every hundred cares what is going on at the centres of fashionable society, and those who do, are proverbially known to be just those least likely to subscribe to a paper, hence the ignominious fate of every attempt to cater exclusively for them (―ourselves‖, editorial, may 5, 1890). in an article ―give women their due‖ on the conversation of men she writes: ―[v]ery few men think their mothers fools, or their sisters contemptible, yet it does not occur to them when they hear the whole sex belittled by a sneer, that their own women folk are involved.‖ she considers it remarkable that the typical picture of a woman has not reduced them to living ―down to the level of the witty obscenities and disdainful epigrams of these many centuries‖ (september 1, 1891, emphasis in the original). but lawson can also be amusing as in the editorial on the ―woman versus man question‖: from the time when adam made the first paltry charge against eve, men have been ever found ready to indulge in a querulous gerimede against the sex. eve got the apple, and woman-like, gave adam a bite, after which adam went and told, putting all the blame upon her. eve left eden and the apples (and went to look for oranges, perhaps) and, like a sensible woman, forgave her mate and let the matter drop. (october 1, 1904) this article continues in the same vein, showing how eve tells adam she can manage without him as he is ―an old hen-wife, and we don‘t want him as he is.‖ given her own background louisa was probably aware of more forms of discrimination against women than many of the other suffragists (oldfield 1992: 228). her own unhappy marriage to peter lawson no doubt contributed to her attitudes to romanticism and marriage, but it is noteworthy that she seldom shows bitterness or hatred in her writings. her views on marriage as a necessity to survive are similar to those found among other suffragists in the us and britain, though in the latter case the story was different as there the number of single women, estimated by some researchers as a surplus of up to one million, was a situation which was not paralleled in australia. louisa saw education as a catalyst for change. to her inequality of education was a key issue, having herself experienced what the lack of this meant. several important editorials are on ―the education of women‖ march 1, 1892 which according to lawson after a certain age seems to concentrate on marriage, and does not give food to the soul. health was also an important issue, not least as contemporary views on women, learning and physical exercise were a source of contention. the article ―muscular development of girls,‖ november 5, 1889 stressed the need for girls to have physical training, not just mental. ―muscular development not only conduces to healthfulness, but also to beauty of form.‖ she even goes as far as to say ―if a girl cannot have both muscular and mental development, then give her the most important, the muscular coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 development. good common sense will help the lack of mental training.‖ european suffragists laid emphasis on intellectual abilities as being those which would enable women to compete with men on an equal basis. this perhaps shows us one fundamental difference between europe and its old civilization, and a country like australia, where an immigrant population was struggling to establish themselves in a foreign country and where agriculture was an important, if not dominant, source of livelihood at that time. another example of health advice is the following: complete rest. ―if you cannot sleep during the day,‖ said a physician to a nervous tiredlooking little woman, ―try and get at least half an hour‘s absolute rest of mind and body in a darkened room. throw off all tight garments, and in a loose wrapper stretch yourself out on a couch, close your eyes and think of nothing.‖ even if one does not feel the need of this afternoon rest, it is an excellent plan to take it benefiting as it does the eyes, the mind and the whole body. thirty minutes complete rest every day will have a magical effect in relaxing the facial muscles and postponing wrinkles. (may 1, 1895) given that louisa aimed at working women and those with little money the inclusion of the above seems somewhat incongruous. lawson also wrote on one of the contemporary issues which was in all women‘s newspapers and journals: ―the coming woman‖ (april 1, 1893, june 1, 1894, april 1 1897, may 1, 1899, sept 1, 1900). to lawson the ‗coming woman‘ represented any aspect of women‘s lives, whereas in the english press the ‗coming woman‘ was mostly used for the feminist woman of the future—what she would become when given her rights and freedom—her behaviour was under scrutiny, and her way of dressing. votes for women/womanhood the first suffrage meeting in new south wales was held in 1889 may 23, ―when, at the invitation of louisa lawson, a number of women assembled for the purpose of establishing an association of women whose object would be to consider various questions of importance to the sex.‖ from its second year 1889-90 the dawn became the mouthpiece of the women‘s cause until the womanhood suffrage bill was passed in new south wales in 1902. but louisa lawson is pursuing another path than that in england, where it was not just the vote, but also the right to stand for office that was prominent. in the dawn of july 1, 1889, lawson published a paper she had read at the dawn club, beginning on a satirical note: the popular idea of an advocate of women‘s rights is this:—she is an angular hard-featured withered creature with a shrill, harsh voice, no pretence to comeliness, spectacles on nose, and the repulsive title, ‗bluestocking‘ visible all over her. metaphorically she is supposed to hang half way over the bar which separates the sexes, shaking her skinny fist at men and all their works. (may 23, 1889) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 she continues by taking up the traditional objections to women gaining the vote and describes how in other countries women have already proved their worth, using many of the same arguments that we find in the american and british press, echoing mary wollstonecraft‘s ideas, such as: the whole principle of the justice of the woman‘s vote agitation may be compressed into a question:— ―who ordained that men only should make the laws to which both men and women have to conform?‖ (july 1 1889) louisa takes up and answers many of the traditional objections to women getting the vote – such as lack of knowledge of politics and economics, a point equally relevant for many men. does housekeeping or any other woman‘s employment make any one more unfit to conscientiously and usefully record a vote than bricklaying or writing a ledger? it is not the right to rule that women want; they have no desire to change places with men; they only claim the right to record an opinion, a right difficult one would think to justly deny an intelligent creature. (july 1, 1899) she refers to england where women are already on school boards (examples are from 1885-8), managing trade unions, have access to higher education, and she notes their successes, especially in medicine and the sciences—the same in the us. however, though she supported the womanhood suffrage league in nsw, lawson did not make the vote the prime aim of her journal, as some critics have maintained. an excellent article on suffrage in the dawn is the one by mrs. orpha e. tousey ―a few of the reasons why woman should have the ballot‖ which takes up women‘s position in the past and counteracts these attitudes. it is a three page excellently written and very clear analysis of the situation, though at times rather overtly flowery as in the concluding sentence: the ballot is the fulcrum upon which laws, institutions and public policies rest —politics the lever which elevates or lowers the condition of races; and woman standing side by side with man—her intuitive perception combined with his executive force—is the only power that can conduct the ship of state safely over the shoals and sandbars of these perilous times (april 5, 1890). anti-suffrage arguments are the same as elsewhere, mainly that women do not know enough about politics to vote—to which the answer is of course that neither do most men. ―we are inclined to believe that a woman can form as good an idea as to the best man among parliamentary candidates as the average man voter,‖ a good example of the clarity of her writing at its best (june 5, 1890). the cartoons published in the dawn illustrating the fight for the vote are markedly similar to those in britain, but adjusted to local situations. what i find interesting is the use in australia of the term, votes for womanhood, rather than votes for women. this epitomizes louisa lawson‘s approach, and implies a much more embracing approach to women‘s rights issues, as the term ‗womanhood‘ is often used of women collectively. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 after the vote was finally won in new south wales in 1902 louisa concentrated on women‘s position in society. she talks of womanhood suffrage, and demands of women that they understand the duties that go with the vote, publishing articles instructing how to vote. ―if she fails in this, her sacred duty, she is unworthy the name of woman, and should never have been raised to a position for which she is not strong enough‖ (editorial june 1, 1903). this sudden change is remarkable, as it is not found elsewhere in the fight for the vote. maybe it indicates what sheridan and mathews posit, that basically louisa lawson was more interested in women‘s situation and her rights as an individual than the political battle. a point obvious even in her first editorial where she wrote ―nothing concerning woman's life and interest lies outside our scope‖ (―about ourselves‖, editorial, may 15, 1888). this attitude is further underlined in the editorial of november 1, 1903 where she writes, ―the redemption of the world is in the hands of women, and there is no power so potent for purification as the influence of woman! so let us be up and doing.‖ this was in relation to news from america where there was a debate going on as to the expediency of women in parliament, an issue taken up in ―sex in politics‖ and ―women as politicians‖ (november 1, 1903). having got the vote she considers women should ―turn her energies in the direction of compelling professional men, as well as civil servants and business men generally, to treat her with the respect that she is, as a citizen, entitled to‖ (march 1905). differences in approach between other journals and the dawn because the dawn was the primary mouthpiece of the suffrage campaign in australia its influence was considerable. however, other australian journals of the time such the worker and the brisbane based boomerang sometimes took up women‘s issues. they were not entirely anti-feminist, but confined their comments on women to the women‘s column which in fact ―referred to female suffrage as inevitable, and women‘s uses of it as an unknown potential‖ (sheridan 1995: 75). for example, the australian town and country journal hailed the dawn as a useful journal saying that ―purporting to be written by women for women (…) [it] is well and clearly printed, and contains a good deal of miscellaneous information and original articles which ought to recommend it to the favourable notice of its fair readers.‖ (http://kattekrab.net/digital-dawn) the use of the word ―purporting‖ raises some queries as though the town and country journal is doubtful as to whether the articles were actually written by women. the anti-suffrage bulletin, although an ―avowedly democratic and radical paper‖ according to sheridan, was hardly pro-feminist. in an editorial in late october 1887 on ―the great woman question‖ it stated that ―women‘s enfranchisement just now means man‘s enslavement‖ because ―the tendency of the feminine mind is almost invariably towards conservatism‖ (1995: 75). the australian women’s sphere published in melbourne was another women‘s paper, ―a monthly feminist journal‖ (trove.nla.gov.au). the sphere was clearly and purposefully political and even goes so far as to apologize in one editorial for the emphasis on politics (october 1900). this is hardly surprising as it was run by vida goldstien, a pioneer of australian suffrage. in 1903 she was the first woman in the http://kattekrab.net/digital-dawn coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 british empire to stand as an electoral candidate, for the australian senate, a position she stood for five times but was never elected. in 1905 she writes that she moves to a shorter edition of the journal, because ―the work of the women‘s political association for 1905 will absorb all my time.‖ thus the sphere was short-lived. the aim was to ―make the periodical a means of keeping the supporters of the woman suffrage movement in touch with its progress and informed of the ways in which they can advance it‖ (february, 1901). it had many articles similar to those in british suffrage papers eg. october 1900 ―how women can succeed in business‖ ―how to choose a career‖ (oct. 10, 1903), and illustrated interviews with women who have made it, the first being ―the proprietor of the book lover‘s library‖ (october 1900). the extracts i have seen from this paper show that it is very like the british suffrage papers of the 1880s -1890s. another journal was the woman’s voice (1895) started in 1894, six years after louisa lawson started the dawn. the editorial february 23, 1895 states the intentions of the paper: ―the paper is published especially in the interests of women, but it will exclude the opinion of no individual and no class, so long as the subject is treated with moderation and in a spirit of calm enquiry‖ (editor‘s note may 18, 1895). it also ran ―the history of the women‘s franchise movement‖ by stephen baker, j.p. vicepresident of the australian women‘s franchise society, victoria. the woman’s voice seems, from the few pages i have been able to access, to be much more concerned with the political aspects of the franchise and less concerned with women‘s position in life generally. given the above it is clear that the dawn with its wide readership and breadth of approach to women‘s issues was far more influential than the other journals for women, not least due to its tenacity in the market. the recent digitalization of the dawn: journal for the australian household, initiated by donna benjamin, who raised funding for the project, (first published on women‘s day march 8, 2012) marks yet again its importance. an article in connections: an online newsletter for school library staff, stresses the relevance of this digitalization as the new history curriculum in australia ―identifies federation and suffrage as key themes.‖ the last publication of the dawn was in 1905 after louisa had been through a terrible time when the post and telegraph department had taken her patent for closing mailbags and she had to fight through the courts to get it back. ill health, after a fall from a tram, and the physic stress of the long legal battle made her decide to stop the journal: as she knows none whom she could with confidence trust to continue this journal on the unbiased and independent lines which has characterised it in the past—the independent woman journalist being as scarce as the good man politician—she contemplates ending her paper as she started it, quite upon her own responsibility. and while earnestly thanking her many faithful supporters, she sincerely trusts they will not, either by letter or verbally, try to persuade her to alter this decision. in bidding one and all ―good-bye‖, her prayer to each is: ―wish me well.‖ (july 1905) this is interesting in that around the same time the women’s suffrage journal in britain closed down because of the death of lydia becker who had been its editor for 30 years. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 the reason for closure was totally different, as in britain it was felt that lydia becker had been so responsible for the content that any change would mean a different kind of journal, whereas louisa lawson personally decided to close her journal. conclusion i have in this short article tried to give some impressions of lawson‘s the dawn. it was undoubtedly a watershed in the fight for the vote and women‘s rights. researching this paper has opened up many avenues to follow. perhaps it is time for a good long look at the women‘s press of the nineteenth century and compare it to today‗s practice – what can we as women learn. that louisa lawson was a pioneer in women‘s writing and media participation in australia is beyond doubt. this was acknowledged by her contemporaries, for example in a note in the dawn stating that louisa lawson ―after fourteen years labor in the cause of suffrage by the voice of the people and press of new south wales, louisa lawson has been declared pioneer of this glorious cause recently brought to such a successful issue. she has been introduced to the heads of the government by leaders of the people as the mother of womanhood suffrage‖ (october 1, 1902). i end with the following tribute to her: ― to the women of australia december 1, 1902 article in the dawn i heartily join in conferring the honour of pioneer on louisa lawson, for she has nobly worked and won it, and her name will be handed down to the coming generations with pride and honour, too much honour cannot be bestowed on louisa lawson and her associates who have so nobly and strenuously worked to bring our right to its present standpoint. (signed 7. 7 7). works cited benjamin, donna. http://kattekrab.net/digital-dawn lawson, louisa. (1888 -1905) the dawn. sydney. lawson, olive, ed. (1990) the first voice of australian feminism: excerpts from louisa lawson’s the dawn 1888-1905. brookvale, nsw: simon schuster, matthews, brian. (1987) louisa. ringwood, victoria: penguin, 1998 oldfield, audrey. (1992) woman suffrage in australia: a gift or a struggle? cambridge: cup. sheridan, susan. (1995) along the faultlines: sex, race and nation in australian women’s writing 1880s – 1930s. st. leonards, nsw: allen & unwin. spender, dale. (1988) writing a new world: two centuries of australian women writers. london: pandora. the dawn digitized at the national library, canberra, australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-title252 http://kattekrab.net/digital-dawn http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-title252 coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. her research interests and fields of publication are women‘s studies and postcolonial literatures and cultures, especially from australia and new zealand. she was co-editor of identities and masks: colonial and postcolonial studies (2001); and readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007); and author of “for was i not born here?” identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne (2010). in 2012 she was visiting professor at the university of barcelona. microsoft word article sue ballyn coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 bruce and exploding coffee perculators sue ballyn anybody who met bruce would remark on his open frank smile which captivated both the person he met, the audiences he spoke to and which was, the hallmark of his openmindedness and generosity towards others. i will eventually get to the “exploding perculators”, but first i would like to back track to when i first met bruce. in 1984, doireann macdermott organised one of the triennal eaclals congresses1 in sitges, a beautiful town on the coast south of barcelona. bruce was there and i was introduced to him as i had just joined the english and german department at barcelona university. at that time i was in my final doctoral year writing my phd on australian literature. he immediately made me feel comfortable as somebody about to present her first ever paper at a congress and was most interested in my thesis, what i was doing and where i hoped to go with it. as a member of the organising committee i saw him only briefly after that at the congress and we were not to meet again until 1987. in 1987 shirely walker, to whom i owe so much, was looking for candidates to go out to australia on what was then known as an assimliation tour and to attend the asal conference at launceston, tasmania.2 julian croft had just returned from barcelona and put my name forward. to my amazement, sometime later, i received a letter of invitation from shirley walker and took no time at all in accepting. it was in launceston that i met bruce again. i had now completed my phd and was on the department staff fulltime waiting to go for a tenured position. i remember that i felt very over awed at being in tasmania and at such an exhilerating conference. the learning curve was huge and the ever present question was “how come australian studies in barcelona?” it was on one of these occasions that bruce was in the group i was with and he interjected that barcelona was a european hub for all things australian mentioning the work done by doireann macdermott, as was ärhus university in denmark with anna rutherford. bruce’s constant delight in promoting australian studies became evident to me then. he had a huge network of contacts at his fingertips and he was ever generous in putting people into contact with each other. i left tasmania with bruce’s list of people to contact and things that were a “must” for me to see on the rest of my trip. over the years we met at conferences around the world and in australia and it was always a delight to catch up, exchange news and, in my case, learn. i have many 1 eaclals acronym for the european association for commonwealth language and literature studies 2 asal acronym for association for the study of australian literature,australia copyright © sue ballyn 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 memories of conference outings, papers, dinners and his many visits to spain. one abiding memory is that of us meeting in ärhus. it was at the time when the steering committee for setting up a european association for studies on australia (easa) was just beginning to lay down plans and meetings were underway in ärhus during a congress there. anna rutherford was somewhat worried about the consequences of such an association with regard to any impingement on eaclals. i well remember bruce, werner senn, later to be president of easa, and i walking in gentle autumn rain on one of the many campus lawns. our conversation inevitably turned to the possible clashes between easa and eaclals, and anna rutherford’s logical concerns with regard to the existence of easa. bruce, always able to see way down the track, was convinced that no such clash or overlapping would occur. he very wisely said that the co-existence of the two associations could only benefit many and if the conferences of each were never planned for the same year, all would be well. he was right; the two associations have thrived side by side and indeed have enriched each other. he was now to become a regular at easa conferences as well as those of eaclals! bruce visited spain on several occasions and his ports of call were usually barcelona and oviedo where he had firm friends in both universities. on one occasion he came to barcelona to give a lecture to the undergraduate students as did veronica brady. we had congregated in barcelona as we were all going to a congress in oviedo organised by socorro súarez lafuente. the night before we were due to leave, we invited bruce, veronica and doireann macdmerott to dinner at home. we had a great time with lots of lively discussion and laughter. at one stage doireann and i retired to the kitchen while i made coffee. this was long before the advent of anything remotely like nespresso and i was using my old italian perculator. standing chatting in the kitchen, doireann and i were talking about the long train journey ahead the next day when we heard a load hiss and then an explosion! the perculator had broken the safety valve and the kitchen was covered in coffee up to the ceiling and down the passage to the back door. as doireann and i recovered from our ducking positions i saw with horror that her lovely blond hair was now streaked with black! fortunately neither she nor i were burned and the perculator had remained intact rather than converting itself into shards of shrapnel. before i could recover everybody was in the kitchen! the next thing i saw was that bruce and veronica had got cloths and were busily engaged in clearing up the mess. veronica climbing onto a small ladder which appeared out of the blue was working on the tiles. there was a kind of stunned silence as we all mopped up and then quite suddenly bruce said: “i knew this would be a great dinner but never thought such domestic games were included” we all just fell about the kitchen laughing and needless to say that was the night i did not serve coffee! i am grateful to have met and be befriended by bruce. over the years he was a stalwart champion for anything we attempted to do at the university including the founding of the australian studies centre. his advice was always sound and he never failed to help any student i asked to contact him. people around the world will miss bruce’s presence both in their academic and personal lives. he leaves us with a wealth of work which will form the backbone of reading for generations of young and not so young scholars. his contrbution to academic literature will always be of great value to us all. vale bruce! microsoft word final antonellateresa coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 that picture of us together on the castle bridge in verona. bruce bennett in italy antonella riem natale (udine university) maria teresa bindella (verona university) do you remember, bruce, that picture teresa took of the two of us on the bridge of the castle upon the adige in verona? we were both smiling, and teresa too, a sort of breeze in the air, sunshine, silver clouds passing. i have been looking for it… sure you have it… can you please have a look too? i’m sure we can find it. you know how things tend to be submerged in houses… it is like thoughts and memories, you know how sometimes one international conference we went to together gets confused with another; one place that saw us together lecturing, discussing, meditating on australian literature gets mixed with another: lecce with verona or udine, klagenfurt with trento or debrecen (we really loved your red socks there!), copenhagen with venice or barcelona remember how teresa and i got tanned in sitges? we liked to escape sessions sometimes and you joined for a cup of coffee, a chat and a good laugh. searching our minds we find you there always, not blurred by time, but firmly present, a cherished friend. your open smile the first thing, like a welcoming and a homecoming, an embrace in itself, a recognition of a friendship long cultivated and always new, a readiness to include, enthusiasm always in the making. yes this is the quality we mostly see in you, dear mate, the capacity to let the other enter your space and share his or her ideas and feelings, in an exchange that always left us all enriched. you are curious and warm, open and friendly, generous and full of care and good humour, ready to communicate to others your deep knowledge unpretentiously, in spite of your status as an acclaimed academic and scholar who received wide international recognition and honour. your penguin literature of australia gave a stunning and innovative reading of our beloved australian literature we and our students always treasure it. teresa remembers how you used to run in your desert boots around the verona stadium, near her place, were you were hosted during your visiting professorship at her faculty of foreign languages. and you didn’t wear a coat but only big jumpers in the cold weather in trento where you held your first visiting professorship in italy, when teresa was at that university. when you came to lecture my students in udine you were wiser (or more experienced) and had a warmer longer jacket, fitter for the cold of the italian north-east. of course lecce was better climate wise, with bernard and maria copyright © antonella riem natale and maria teresa bindella 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 renata holding the reins of australian scholarship in southern italy. you were generous in coming, you liked lecturing our students and sharing ideas on our research and telling about yours. i think italy was a good place for you, and you for italy, for us. we miss you, that’s all. please think of us, and come and visit when you can. love, antonella and maria teresa (and all of your many italian friends) maria teresa bindella, now happily retired, is full professor of english literature at the universities of udine, trento, milano cattolica and verona. she wrote relevant studies on scott, hardy and stevenson, and has also explored colonial and post-colonial literatures in english, organizing meetings with writers and critics from australia, africa, the caribbean, the south pacific, and international conferences, among which memorable are one held at the university of udine on australian literature in 1987 and one in trento in 1991. as a founding member she was on the committee of easa (european association for the study of australia) and wrote articles for various international literary magazines on malouf, christina stead and epeli hau’ofa. maria teresa bindella also acted as pro-vice-chancellor at the university of verona, with full responsibility for international relations – showing that research, teaching, and institutional commitments can be fruitfully balanced and combined. email: mtbindella@alice.it. antonella riem natale is full professor of english literature and language, former dean of the faculty of modern languages, university of udine, president of the italian conference of foreign languages, president of all (http://all.uniud.it). she is the founder of the partnership studies group (http://all.uniud.it/?page_id=195), editor in chief of the series all (udine, forum: http://www.forumeditrice.it/percorsi/lingua-eletteratura/all) and of the online journal on the literatures in english le simplegadi http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi. she coordinates internationally and nationally funded research projects on the partnership model in the literatures in english: http://www.sciencesystemfvg.it/index.php?page=ricadute&id=72&open=2009#vedi_co ntenuto former member of the easa board, she promotes and coordinates cultural events and international conferences on the literatures in english. among her significant monographic studies and collections of essays: the art of partnership. essays on literature, culture, language and education towards a cooperative paradigm (udine: forum, 2003), the one life: coleridge and hinduism (jaipur: rawat 2005), the goddess awakened. partnership studies in literatures, language and education (udine: forum, 2007) and partnership id-entities: cultural and literary reinscription/s of the feminine (udine: forum, 2010). for the all series , riane eisler’s the chalice and the blade (udine: forum, 2011) and sacred pleasure (udine, forum 2012) were published in italian, with a special prologue by eisler (http://www.forumeditrice.it/percorsi/lingua-e-letteratura/all/?text=all-english). at the moment she is working on a volume on the figure of the goddess in the literatures in english, both within the ‘canon’ and indigenous ‘minorities’ microsoft word tessachudy16.doc coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 177 heaven and hell at the paradise motel 1 tessa chudy copyright©2013 tessa chudy. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this piece is taken from the novel “heaven and hell at the paradise motel” and the exegesis that together forms my phd thesis. the three main strands of this thesis are gothic, noir and sense of place. the novel, ‘‘heaven and hell at the paradise motel”, is preoccupied with the natural environment, its subtle seasonal changes and the way the environment impacts on its human inhabitants and how they in turn affect it. the novel is, in a very gothic sense, haunted by dreams, apparitions and narratives – specifically mini-narratives that reflect the nature of fairy tales, horror stories and urban myths. it contains elements of melodrama, horror, romance. the story follows a deeply dysfunctional family through a seasonal cycle: beginning in spring and ending once again in spring. a key focus for both the creative and the theoretical work was the everyday application of the gothic and noir – for example a house doesn’t have to be a castle to be haunted; people don’t have to be monsters to be monstrous. the dark, the strange, the sinister and the perverse lurk in the shadows of everyday reality, but also how these elements intertwined within the landscape. introduction the novel that the following extract is taken from “heaven and hell at the paradise motel” is a gothic noir work which grew out of a distinct place and sense of that place. i found myself writing from a powerful feeling of loss and displacement, writing a landscape that i had grown up with and perhaps most crucially – in. but i was writing from an urban setting and i was no longer ‘in’ that landscape (the sound of running water had been replaced by the steady stream of passing traffic) however that landscape still remained an important force within me and the novel. this sense of displacement and disassociation from the natural environment served to raise questions about the influence of the landscape on its inhabitants. the subtle changes and the dramatic changes within the landscape all create an impact, a mood, perhaps even a state of mind akin to an affect of the landscape where the landscape emotionally and psychologically acts on those who come in contact with it. 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 178 for the purposes of my thesis, i settled on the definition of the gothic as something that constitutes a kind of dark zone that exists beyond the structures of normality and as such it is marked by its excesses. the gothic is filled with too much of everything – fear, violence, sexuality, monstrosity; it is playful and particularly fluid; it is also fearful (although even this fearfulness is strangely playful, toying with the desire to be frightened, to be horrified). the gothic has crossed both generic and national boundaries. the gothic is as much at home in contemporary australia as it was in colonial australia, in early and contemporary america, and in just about any landscape you can name the gothic can easily adapt − from frozen sublime to hot deserts, to simple suburban streets. because of my interest in exploring the landscape i knew, my work was informed both by the broader australian landscape as well as the subtropical one i was writing from and by the fictional gothic landscape. the concept and construction of the gothic landscape emerges as a powerful theme in both the creative work and the exegesis. noir is perhaps most essentially a way of seeing: it is a dark vision. it is bound not by time or medium or genre or national borders. noir is a complex and mutable construct that explores the very nature of the truth and the viewing of that truth. it is not bound by time or medium or genre or national borders. i attempted to tap into the psychological mood of noir, the tone, state of mind, and the complex relationship with place and truth, minus the conventional detective/crime story with particular emphasis on the regional australian context of both the story and its noir elements. the use of the landscape implies the natural and the human-made landscape – but also the broader implications and applications of genre, and, specifically, the historical construction of the australian landscape as harsh and inhospitable by colonial settlers. i do not deal with the more extreme landscape of the interior or the outback or explore the landscape as alien and inhospitable as did many of the colonial gothic writers − such as barbara baynton in bush studies (1902) and marcus clarke’s for the term of his natural life (1874). later writers like kenneth cook in wake in fright (1961) and patrick white in voss (1957) explored similar perceptions of the landscape. the landscape that i write is the subtropical zone, not on the coast, but near to it – part of the coastal strip, but not actually coastal, a landlocked, hilly area; it is an area of subtle extremes, strange, creeping beauty and the destructive omnipresent traces of settlement – soil erosion, noxious weeds, pollution etc. having lived a large part of my life within the natural/rural landscape, i had become attuned to the way that the landscape changes – in different weather, light, seasons etc. the changes in appearance of the landscape can be subtle or, as after a bushfire, they can be dramatic. however, they are all relevant to my project, part of which has been to explore the impact of the landscape on the people who inhabit it. people can change a landscape but a landscape can also change people. people can chop down trees and change the surface of the landscape, while the landscape, through the sound (or sight) of running water or falling branches, can create feelings of calm or unease, and these feelings can become pervasive and overwhelming over time. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 179 genre and the landscape have a fraught relationship, i found myself increasingly frustrated by eco-criticism’s seeming reluctance to engage with the landscape within generic fiction, and its insistence on poetry as the true medium for exploring the environment. richard kerridge (1998:5) notes that ‘eccocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis’. this is difficult to apply to writing that deals not with the radical face of environmental trauma, but, rather, its subtle repercussions, that become evident only over time spent in place. i found my research repeatedly grinding to a halt in the face of eco-critical impenetrability. laurence buell (2005) devised a series of guidelines for how to classify an environmental text. the first of these was: that the nonhuman environment must be envisaged not merely as a framing device, but as an active presence, suggesting human history’s implication in natural history. (buell 2005: 25) taking buell’s outline as a guide i shifted my focus to the concept of the gothic landscape as a potent and potentially sublime but also elusive force, and to its construction within the subtropical australian landscape. i decided to attempt to explore the landscape expressively as a powerful force that acts on and is acted upon by its inhabitants. extract spring hell heaven is an illusion, a vague romantic ideal, straight off the cover of watchtower magazine or those illustrated children’s bibles that made you think happy endings just required a little faith, before you were old enough to know better. in truth you can never quite be sure, like that exact spot where the rainbow ends. maybe it exists. then again maybe it doesn’t. hell though. hell is real. not the red flaming place they tell you about, populated by ugly demons with pitchforks. no, it’s compact, portable. a heavy, corrosive, inescapable, darkness – black, not red − that we all carry around inside that is as much a part of us as our fingerprints. maybe even more so. just as one, tragically, does not get to choose one’s name, one does not – and cannot − choose one’s relatives: nor does one always get to choose one’s own private, personal hell. so my name is not nobody. i would prefer no family to the one that i have. and i know that hell exists. some days i feel it stirring deep inside me. hell may be the most real thing in this world. most days i find it hard enough just living with myself, let alone my family, and hell. if i were american i would be mistaken for one of those murdering terrorist types. all the time so quiet, reserved and unassuming on the surface, while underneath they are coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 180 someone else altogether – their hell boiling quietly, biding its time before erupting violently. i’m someone else too – trouble is i don’t have a clue who or what i really am underneath. at times i do harbor thoughts of anarchy and mass murder, but my problem is different again. i carry a curse, a terrible, unnamed, undefined curse. i inherited the curse from my parents; they got it from the paradise. part of the curse is the dreams about death, another part that these dreams always come true. then there are the spirits that are real and visible, and the paradise is full of spirits. then there is the terrible weight that i carry around with me, a kind of excessive awareness of gravity, but that too is only part of the curse. it doesn’t really matter though, i suppose, when you get down to it – nothing does. i have my part and i play it – when the curse doesn’t weigh too heavily on me. i don’t quite know how my relatives really feel about me, but, i am necessary – a scapegoat – the one who carries the curse for them. the curse is never spoken about. not even by me. it is ignored in the hope that it will just go away. but it never goes anywhere. *** one heartless spring morning with new life barely distinguishable from new death the harsh sunlight sucking the colour and life from the growth spurt that had flushed the hillside green, a breath of air half-heartedly ruffled my dusty lace curtains. i was twenty-seven and a bit, my life was going, as it had always been, nowhere. and i had what could have been a revelation, even though it was not accompanied by a blinding flash of light, or a general shaking of the earth. i was going to do something. i wasn’t going to die under this curse. i didn’t know what i was going to do, when, or how. but i knew i’d do it or die trying. it’d take some time, i knew that. but i’d figure it out. it wasn’t then that i decided to write. but it wasn’t long after. three days later to be precise. i got out of bed at two in the morning and began to tear my room apart – the contents of drawers went flying – until i found an empty exercise book and a pen (both turned up under the bed, not that i could remember ever putting them there). i didn’t want to write − i had to. i had to get the words swirling around inside my head out onto a page. i got back into bed and started to write – nothing in particular, just whatever chose to come out on the page. but i discovered something wonderful – while i was writing i didn’t feel the awful weight of being myself. *** this place gets to everyone eventually. not so much the paradise which has a bitter, slow-acting poison all its own, but the place itself – the landscape, for want of a better coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 181 word – which lives and breathes and seeps into the bloodstream. it’s like a little selfcontained pocket, separated from everywhere else and hemmed in by a fluid line of blue-green hills − the landscape is a succession of hills. bigger hills slip almost imperceptibly into smaller hills which in turn slope down into steep-sided gullies and the winding, occasionally intersecting lines of the road and the creek, which flows lazy and cold, from its not-too-distant source. the paradise is surrounded by bladey grass. i have always loved bladey grass, the way it whispers and shivers on the faintest breeze, the way it changes colour with the season from green to brown, even its ability to draw blood. there is nothing really remarkable about bladey grass to look at it, clumps of long sharply pointed leaves with razor edges. beyond the bladey grass are the carpet grasses which trap the unsuspecting in a tightly interwoven tangle. the carpet grasses come up to dense seed which sticks to anything that passes through it. they quiver in the breeze and change colour with the season, but lack the fascination, the seductive charm of the bladey grass. in the patches not totally consumed by the carpet grasses, fireweed pokes its way to the surface, with its bright yellow, toxic but happy-looking flowers. it isn’t so much the isolation, because town is only half an hour away, but this is a different world to the world in town. and it isn’t so much the physicality of the landscape which is subtle, rather than dramatic. it is truly beautiful, though in a wounded, wasted, timeless way, with its ever-changing sameness that burns in through susceptible eyeballs to leave indelible scars on the consciousness. no, it’s something else that i’ve long since given up trying to define. it is. and it must be. the only way to live with it is to accept it, and to surrender – completely. this is a place of subtle extremes. the landscape shifts from tamed to wild. in a wet year everything is green; in a dry year everything is brown; and some years it is both, moving fluidly from one to the other – soft to hard, living to dead. technically, i think we are in the subtropics, or where the subtropics meet the temperate zone. when it’s hot it’s very hot, humid and exhausting. now it rains in summer, but i remember when summers were dry for days and weeks and months. when it’s cold, it’s very cold, or at least it seems very cold. the rest of the time it is in-between. perhaps the paradise truly exists in a half world of in-between. perhaps it has always been like this or perhaps the paradise generates its own climate – filled with humidity and discontent. the land around the paradise hill is cleared, but unused, preyed upon by weeds and haunted by wallabies and foxes. there is the odd scrawny cow belonging to one or other of the locals, but the land isn’t rich enough to support many cows, scrawny or otherwise. the few cows it does support wander around indifferent to the subtleties of fences and property boundaries. deeper into the hills, deer run wild, and dingoes howl in the darkness of long primal nights, on hillsides strangely close to the moon. the locals are few and far between. i never managed to figure out if they don’t say much generally or just don’t say much to us on principle. across the road is the tin shed where water and his parents lived. back along the road is a little house that is empty now and falling down, or more exactly sinking into the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 182 ground. away over the other side of the creek, some old local families live with their scrawny cows, brown horses and dusty utes, but they keep away from us and we keep away from them. the paradise, though, is another story. closer to the coast it was a hotel in its previous incarnation (admittedly, it is supposed to be one still, but, once upon a time it actually functioned and, hard as it is to believe, had paying guests). it’s an old, ugly, sprawling, depressing mess. but it is home. grandfather got it cheap. or maybe he just got it – when i say got, i mean just that, because one day he didn’t have it and the next day he did. the same thing with the land. grandfather was always acquiring things – places, people, and objects like the books in the library he never read, or the four pale, shimmering landscapes by a semi-famous local artist, that one day appeared on the walls. most things he acquired disappeared over time, except for the paradise, and the family. he had the paradise bought here in fragments. it was reassembled, on the top of this rocky hill, curving, along the crest of the hill. bare to the four winds – with a view to die for, the hills seem to stretch out around the paradise, fading into the distance, blue, green, beautiful and impossibly solid. he was convinced – by exactly what remains unknown – that this would be an ideal tourist retreat. so he sat on his balcony and waited. but he forgot that tourists need enticing; they need to be hit over the head with reasons to visit a place. more than twenty years later he was still waiting. no one ever came. nobody other than us and the locals has any idea that it even exists now, and most of the locals give it a wide berth. the sign fell down a month after it went up. it’s still there, lying on the ground, rusty and overgrown with weeds – a tangle of grasses, thistles and morning glory. only just readable – welcome to the paradise. it’s still in the white pages under paradise h 6565 6565. it’s paradise alright, but with a twist, and a hollow, dark heart. if it weren’t for the fact that my family lived here, it could be perfect. i was five when i came here and i can’t imagine living anywhere else, my family notwithstanding. i remember we used to live near the beach before the paradise, but, for me, the constant washing of the ocean could never compare to the haunted beauty of these hills that seem to hold up the sky, and the whispering of the bladey grass. like the paradise, we came here in fragments, installments. grandfather had us bought here in pieces, but, unlike the paradise, he never bothered to put us together properly. i seem to be the only one who loves the bladey grass that surrounds the paradise like a body of water. grandfather declared war on it after he arrived. he would attack it with a whippersnipper and poison, but it always came back, whispering knowingly. in the end grandfather retreated to his balcony, glaring at the sea of grass shimmering down the hillside, leaving the war against it to uncle wes and his bladeless ride-on mower. he coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 183 went out every day to mow the bladey grass that grew taller than a man in places. but his mowing never had any effect. the paradise has a flat roof and three floors. inside it is a dimly lit maze of twisted hallways and too many stairs. the walls are all a strange greyish colour. there are twenty-four bedrooms in the paradise, each with ensuites, stovetops and un-stocked bar fridges, a front desk, a proper kitchen (that everyone uses though not usually at the same time; family meals are reserved for christmas, new year and the occasional birthday), a pantry, a bar, two dining rooms (one somewhat more pretentious than the other which is called the formal dining room and has never, as far as i can remember, been used), one lounge, four storage rooms, an extra bathroom (for when all the on suites are busy), a library and one room that apparently has no purpose at all. looking at it from the outside the paradise appears to be crouching on the hillside, like a dinosaur waiting for the inevitable arrival of extinction, with its tragic little balconies hanging off the bedrooms, grubby windows like so many sightless eyes, and peeling, once-green paint, revealing streaks of faded timber. wild ferns and clumps of grass have sprung up in the gutters, as if nature were attempting to re-establish itself. think of all those desperate jokes about families, and you would just about have my family, only worse. over time they have converged and congealed into place. all in all there are about fifteen of us living here – my grandparents; uncle wes and his wife jane; uncle nick, whose daughter died and whose wife left, and who now never speaks; aunts vicki, imogen, and sarah; my four female cousins – the alphabet – abi (vicki’s daughter), beck (wes and jane’s daughter), crystal (imogen’s daughter) and dee (also vicki’s daughter); myself; and spidey (sarah’s son, a five-year-old reincarnation of spiderman). grandfather started life with a plan. no one knows exactly what this plan was, mainly because he didn’t believe in sharing things like that. but i think that i have figured it out. grandfather’s plan was to build an empire, with himself at the head, and everything and everyone in the empire under his control. i don’t think it really mattered to grandfather what sort of empire he started or why he thought the paradise would be a part of it. the main part was doing it, having it and being in charge of it even if it didn’t mean anything. before the paradise grandfather did something else, but i don’t remember what − i was just a baby before the paradise. *** once upon a time my grandfather was the kind of man you wouldn’t look sideways at. he was a man who got things his own way − what they call a self-made man, everything he had he got himself, and, i suppose in many ways he was successful for quite a while. although, in truth i never actually figured out what is was that grandfather did when he was a successful, self-made man. he was always busy doing ‘something’ serious and consuming, but now he just waits for the tourists. over time he has faded to the point that he takes no notice of anyone and they take even less of him, all he has now is the paradise and the family, both of which have been crumbling coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 184 around him for as long as i can remember. he wanders around in his own little world and what he says or does has little or no bearing on anyone else any more. gran would look at him, shake her head and wonder what she ever saw in him. she never left him, but i think from time to time she wished she had. gran spends all her time cleaning and polishing the floor. i think perhaps it’s her way of blocking out the way her life has turned out − the disappointments and disillusionment don’t seem so important when you are doing something else that takes all your time and energy. my parents jumped off the roof of the paradise once; they never told me why. i think they just wanted to get away from the echoes and the ghosts that swirl around inside the paradise and invade the quiet spaces in any head they can get into. but that didn’t kill them. a drunk driver did that when i was twelve. they still talk to me. so i know i’m not alone and in a way they never did leave me. i just wish that once in a while they’d tell me something useful instead of going on about clouds and spider webs. not that i have anything against clouds or spider webs, but, when you’re trying to make sense of things, they aren’t exactly what you want to hear about. when my parents jumped off the roof they said that they expected to die – my father cracked his skull, which is where all the blood came from – but when they didn’t die they said it was like getting a second chance at life. every breath they took became precious. so when they did die in the accident, they weren’t ready for death. their bodies were gone but a part of them remained, here at the paradise. the garden of unearthly delights the paradise was supposed to have a swimming pool. the hole was dug but the pool never arrived. the paradise was also supposed to have a garden, a leisure garden that meandered casually around the paradise. the garden that over time became ironically referred to as the pleasure garden is still there in fits and starts. the beds and paths are overgrown and the most delicate plants rapidly succumbed to the harsh conditions on the top of the hill – the dry, hard soil, the heat and the cold. however, here and there the odd plant has taken root despite the odds and clung doggedly to life, like the gardenia and the candy-striped rose, clumps of natives − pink-tipped lillipillis, wirey bottlebrushes, unassuming wattles that explode into dense yellow bloom, and rampant native violets. as it was grandfather’s garden, no one else was allowed to work on it. the garden was supposed to stretch right around the paradise, but only the back half was ever finished. a rotting wooden bench almost hidden by bladey grass sits contemplating the scrubfilled hole that was to have been the swimming pool. when the hole was first dug, dee had jumped down into it and thrown handfuls of dirt into the air, laughing. back then her laughter was pure and unaffected. it has been a long time since i have heard her laughing for the sake of it, for joy and not for pain. dee lost a lot in the transition process of growing up, but i think we all did. and it wasn’t trivial stuff. it was stuff that coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 185 really mattered like hope and those other good, important things that help you function without dying a little inside every day. for a while, grandfather used to lurk in his garden, contemplating things – usually the empty swimming pool – with a floppy straw hat on his head. but then the novelty seemed to wear off and he retreated to his balcony. gran thought aloud from time to time that she might take up gardening as a hobby, but she always seemed too busy scrubbing and polishing the floor. the birds and snakes and lizards and occasionally a hyper-vigilant wallaby haunted the garden, and if anyone got any pleasure out of the garden it was them. bloody fingers bladey grass grows all over the paradise hill, where it grows the individual plants spread to form patches where nothing else can grow, in the gullies and down the sides of the surrounding hills are these patches of bladey grass. some of the areas are quite small – just a few feet, others are much larger. long quivering clumps of slender, seductive leaves. there are areas of carpet grass, but overall the bladey grass rules. it is, i know, a weed. but, somehow, i find it very beautiful. bladey grass reflects the changes of the seasons, as it changes colour – from bright green, to dark green, to gold and finally brown – is beautiful. i even find its sharp teeth, the razor like silica threads, beautiful. bladey grass looks after itself. it is a wise plant, a dangerous plant, but in some way it is also a very useful plant. bladey grass is so strong that in new guinea they make roofs out of it. other places people make paper and fabric from its fibers. where bladey grass grows the erosion that washes out so much of the sides of these hills, stripping them of their natural vegetation – seems to stop. the chinese use bladey grass in medicine. it is an astringent and a tonic. but we don’t use bladey grass for anything. it surrounds us like a quivering sharptoothed sea, it whispers seductively and moves almost liquid in its own breezes. but no one here gets it, not even the locals. the one real weakness of bladey grass is that it is extremely flammable. a tiny spark and a whole hillside of bladey grass can explode, and if one hillside goes, then the next one goes, and the next and the next until there isn’t anything left, but it always grows back. vibrantly green against the blackened surface. try to kill bladey grass, and it won’t die. learn to live with it, and, the world becomes a better, more beautiful, place where a misplaced finger is quickly bloodied. conclusion genre, in the form of the gothic and noir formed an important part of my writing, but place, its construction and an understanding of it as a living breathing entity is possibly coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 186 the most important factor in the story. i wanted to re-create in my writing what it felt like to be ‘in’ the landscape i was writing about, to be surrounded by it, immersed in it. perhaps the closest description of what i am trying to achieve is lucy lippard (1997:33): ‘every landscape is a hermetic narrative ... the story is composed of mythologies, histories, ideologies – the stuff of identity and representation’. it is this sense of the landscape as ongoing, self-contained narrative that i am trying to tap into. a gothic or noir landscape is the projection of human concepts, fears and desires onto it. can the landscape be considered a counterpoint or complicit character in the processes of gothic-ization or noir-ization? ross gibson (2002: 50) notes that history is real in a landscape; ‘history lives as a presence in the landscape ... this history is facts made by people into stories, rendering events as interpretations, reasons and predictions’. i suspect that the landscape absorbs the history and stories that are laid over it, and, in much the same way, genre and its archetypes and narratives are absorbed into the landscape. bibliography baynton, barbara (1902/2001) bush studies, harper collins: australia. buell, lawrence (2005) the future of environmental criticism, blackwell publishing: malden. clarke, marcus (1874) for the term of his natural life, macmillan: london. cook, kenneth (1961/2009) wake in fright, text publishing co: melbourne. gibson, ross (2002) seven versions of an australian badland, university of queensland press: st lucia. kerridge, richard & sammells, neil (eds) (1998) writing the environment: ecocriticism and literature, zed books: london. lippard, lucy (1997) the lure of the local, the new press: ny. white, patrick (1957) voss, viking press: new york. tessa chudy is currently completing a phd in creative writing at southern cross university. i am especially interested in the intersection of gothic and noir and the role of the landscape in fiction and the idea of creating an internal reality in my work. i am also a visual artist and have lived on the mid north coast of nsw all my life. my artwork can be viewed at http://www.redbubble.com/people/curly9/art. (email: frenzy81@tpg.com.au) microsoft word article oliver haag coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 transcending the national in australian studies bruce bennett’s influence on a discipline oliver haag there was something peculiar about meeting bruce bennett. chances to see bruce in europe were much higher than getting hold of him in australia. the first time we met was neither in australia nor in europe, but in kolkata, india. this was at the 2008 iasa conference, one of the biennial meetings of the indian association for the study of australia. bruce was surrounded by a bevy of indian scholars, especially students, eager to ask for his advice or simply having a chat about their papers over coffee. bruce had always had an open ear for everyone. he was interested in talking to students and emerging scholars alike. an eminent authority on australian literature and culture, bruce was not only preoccupied with ‘big’ names. he also engaged with young scholars of australian studies. when i first met bruce, i remember, we both wore flower wreaths that student helpers had put over our shoulders. mesmerised by the warm welcome of our hosts, i smiled at bruce who was about to give his keynote address. ‘i think we don’t know each other yet’, he replied to my smile. i wished him good luck—as if he needed any luck. he confessed that, for all his experience, he was still nervous before delivering his presentations; a good dose of stage fright that everyone should have, he explained. in hindsight, i think it was his modest and gentle attitude which made me instantly comfortable—a not so frequent attitude among senior academics in his position. bruce was amazed to meet an austrian australian studies scholar in india. surprising as my position might have been, he never treated me as something less ‘important’ or ‘exotic’. the more australian studies scholars the world has, the better, seemed to be his stance. bruce really listened to us ‘overseas australianists’, i had the feeling. australian studies is still often conceived of as a field of national research; this affects not only scholarly methods and theories but also the position of researchers. transnational approaches to australian studies are relatively rare and australia—unlike canada, the united states and latin america—is far less an established part of european research (stilz 9-13). this parochial tendency in scholarship is problematic, for it tends to suppress scholarly diversity and creativity. it is after all not easy for european researchers to gain a foothold in australia, especially so when it comes to national subjects, such as australian literature and history. the tendency to take ‘foreign’ scholars less seriously, to be sure, is not a particularly australian phenomenon. in australia, however, it has a special connotation: europeans, it is my experience, are copyright © oliver haag 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 often considered uninformed, lacking basic knowledge, and thought to be unconsciously influenced by an exotic and romantic view of australia. partly because australian studies constitutes a niche in international scholarship, the weight of the national origin of its practitioners might be stronger than in more globally researched fields, such as french or german studies. bruce’s unbiased stance towards my origin did not reflect mere kindness but needs to be understood within the problematic weight of the ‘national’ in australian studies. bruce was aware of this problem. he was actively supportive of australian studies scholars from overseas. he was keen to hear different perspectives because he knew they could only add to the intellectual diversity of a discipline. good scholars do not uphold, let alone establish, national boundaries in their respective fields. good scholars understand the need to transcend and demolish national boundaries. intellectually inspiring work deconstructs nationalist practices of exclusion by highlighting the mechanisms abetting the processes of nation formation. scholarship, especially so in relation to history and literary studies, has been an integral part of nation building and nationalism (anderson 198, 201; walter 13). as nira yuval-davis argues, nations depend on a history and literature that imagine their origin, existence and destiny as unique and different from one another (19, 27). australian historians, for one, have played a constituent part in construing the australian nation, especially by practices of inclusion and exclusion. one of the most obvious forms of the very practices was the different modes of placing indigenous australians within the narratives of national history (rolls 7-10). the national background of scholars exerts a substantial influence on this narrative. european scholars are certainly no less prone to engage in processes of exclusion and inclusion than their australian colleagues. but they do so differently, with distinct aims and effects on construing the nation. indigenous australia, for example, constitutes a firm part of australian studies in the german-speaking countries, mirroring the selfconception of the german and austrian nation respectively. considering the germanspeaking practices of australian studies is thus a good approach to illuminate the very practices within australia. it is worthwhile to look at australia from a distance in order to understand its construction at home. not only did bruce know the importance of international perspectives on australian studies but lived up to this awareness. he tirelessly promoted international research on australia. after india, we met in several european countries, including spain and the united kingdom. only once did our paths cross in australia, at the 2009 asal conference in canberra. bruce was perceived by many as a quasi ambassador of australian studies. he was not naive, trying to expunge the ‘nation’ from australian literary studies. the nation exerts a considerable influence on authors and publishers, playing out its formative effect on literature production. questioning the nation is thus a very different endeavour from rendering it invisible. for all its global influence, australian literature and culture need to be understood primarily within their local dimensions not least because the nation determines their place and confines in global contexts. to increase the understanding of this literature and culture, in all its pluralism, researchers on their part need to be as pluralistic as possible. they need to transcend the nation, recognising it as an important analytical category without homogenising intellectual work with reference to national divides. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 bruce was such a researcher: open-minded and supportive of emerging scholars from around the world. next to his critical work, the active support of international scholars is one of the indelible legacies that bruce has bequeathed to generations of future australianists: australian studies cannot have enough scholars and diverse perspectives. bruce showed us how to achieve this goal. hopefully his ambitions continue to serve as an incentive for australian studies scholars. oliver haag is a research fellow at the austrian center for transcultural studies, vienna, and is also affiliated with the university of edinburgh where he is teaching european history. his research interests are in the areas of german reception of indigenous cultures, the history of publishing, and indigenous autobiography. his current research project is entitled ‘indigenous people and national socialism’. contact: ohaag@staffmail.ed.ac.uk bibliography anderson, benedict. imagined communities. reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso, 2006. rolls, mitchell. ‘the “great australian silence”, the “cult of forgetfulness” and the hegemony of memory’. zeitschrift für australienstudien 25 (2011): 7-26. stilz, gerhard. ‘”australian studies”: modelle und orientierungspunkte für interdisziplinäre regionalstudien’. australienstudien in deutschland. grundlagen und perspektiven. eds. gerhard stilz and heinrich lamping. bern: peter lang, 1990. 1-21. walter, james. ‘studying australia: reasons and approaches’. australian studies. a survey. ed. james walter. melbourne: oxford up, 1989. 1-43. yuval-davis, nira. gender & nation. london: sage, 2006. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 the rhetoric of inferiority of african slaves in john fawcett’s obi; or, three-fingered jack (1800) re-evaluated in charlie haffner’s amistad kata-kata (1987) ulrich pallua abstract: john fawcett’s obi; or, three-finger’d jack (1800) draws a distorted picture of the life of slaves in jamaica. this paper investigates the ambivalence in this distortion as fawcett creates two kinds of slaves by pitting them against each other: the loyal and obedient slaves (but still inferior) vs. the superstitious-ridden and rebellious slaves deeply rooted in old traditions, thus considered inferior, uneducated, immoral and dangerous. the juxtaposition of what i call ‘anglicised’ slaves instrumentalised by the coloniser and the heathen ‘savages’ that are beyond the reach of the imperial ideology enables fawcett to substantiate the claim that christianity successfully promotes slaves to ‘anglicised’ mimic men/women who are then able to carry out its mission: to eradicate the pagan practice of obeah, three-finger’d jack, and all those slaves that threaten the stability of the coloniser’s superiority. charlie haffner’s play amistad kata-kata (1987) is about the heroism of shengbe pieh and his fellow slaves on board the la amistad: on their way to the colonies they revolted, were sent to prison, tried, finally freed, and taken back home after 3 years. the paper shows how haffner repositions the ‘amistad trope’ in the 20 th century by effacing the materiality of the body of the african slaves, thus re-evaluating the corporeality of the colonised slave in the 19 th -century post-abolition debate by coming to terms with the cultural trauma postindependent african collective identity has been experiencing. the re-staging of the play by the ‘freetong players’ in 2007/8 commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of the atlantic slave trade, a unique opportunity to direct the attention to asserting the identity of ‘post-european’ africa. keywords: slavery studies, post-european identity, body, materiality, ideology the 18 th century: the self-appointed image of britain as an idealized nation identity as a marker distinguishing different european nations/rivals from each other was particularly relevant when applied to the contact with non-european countries/colonies. according to greene, the english “had retained their identity as a copyright©2014 ulrich pallua. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 free people by safeguarding their liberty through their laws.” i the acquisition of colonies and the trade in people around the globe catapulted the concept of british identity to a whole new level as “… liberty…not only remained the ‘hallmark of englishness’ but rapidly became the emblem of britishness.” ii british identity not only connoted liberty but also “protestantism, social openness, intellectual and scientific achievement, and a prosperity based upon trade,” iii a combination that corroborated the image of great britain as the leading nation in the civilizing mission of ‘other’, noneuropean countries. scrutinizing images of african slaves created by the imperial ideology in the contact zone is most essential to understand how they came into being and, most importantly, how they influence modern thinking in terms of national/cultural/ethnic differences and divergence. particular emphasis in the analysis of the plays featuring african slaves is laid on the national identity of the british empire in creating ‘auto’ and ‘hetero’ images, whose frequent reiteration successfully familiarized the british public with the character of the ‘non-familiar.’ when attempting to come to terms with european/british attitudes towards the ‘other’, it is thus of vital importance to subject the “negative connotations surrounding black and blackness” iv in the images of african slaves to close scrutiny. the(se) attitude(s) towards “black bodies” provided the foundation for the categorization of a black african identity, an identity divergent from what was perceived as the white european norm. sanchez-eppler avers “if the body is an inescapable sign of identity, it is also an insecure and often illegible sign.” v taking this assumption as a starting point, it is crucial to shed light on how british playwrights instrumentalised the insecurity and illegibility of the black body and forged a rhetoric of its inferiority, which obstructed “the inscription of black…bodies into the discourses of personhood.” vi denying black bodies the status of a person led to the strengthening of the mastery of the european over the african body as being “annihilated…a person is owned, absorbed, and un-named.” vii the absorption of the body leads to the absorption and dissolution of an old and the creation of a new identity. kathleen wilson defines identity as “a historical process, rather than an outcome, a negotiation between individual conceptions of self and collectivity and their social valence.” viii the soformed collective identity of britons was made to contrast markedly with the collective identity of africans. britain thus provided the cultural benchmark against which african identity was assessed. the problem with the conviction that britain “stood high for liberty” is that “national characteristics…function as commonplaces – utterances that have obtained a ring of familiarity through frequent reiteration” rather than through its “empirical truth value.” ix this high regard for liberty, that is the empathy towards africans who enslaved by the british empire were manumitted by britannia sailing across the atlantic to unfetter the poor slaves, was ultimately embedded in the territorial control of colonies and their subjects. the image of the free slave thus served the purpose of advancing ameliorist tendencies rather than true emancipatory interests. nussbaum calls it a “manipulation of abolitionist impulses to advance imperialism…sub-saharan africans become more clearly recognizable as prototypical subjects of slavery through the process necessary to identify them as eligible for freedom, a process that also, ironically, increasingly racialises them.” x the communicative strategies used to spread britain’s love for liberty and thus her contempt for tyranny and violence were “an important propagandistic means of nurturing the culture’s dominant fictions.” distancing britishness from the ‘otherness’ of noncoolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 european nations “strengthened a sense of britain’s superiority that was based on the principle of inequality.” xi this paper analyses john fawcett’s xii (1768-1837) famous obi; or three-fingered jack, a pantomime that deals with the rebellion of jack and his followers involved in the magic of obi. the discussion of the play will reveal the range of interpretative possibilities regarding the ‘cultivation’ of images: even if the theatre “became a vehicle for abolitionist sentiment”, they still served as a vehicle to reinforce or harden images of african slaves people had in mind. it was not only “a sentimentalized site for resistance to the evils of slavery” xiii but also a site for the confirmation of already existing biased views of non-european people, a justification for the evils of slavery, and thus an approval to the british civilizing ‘mission’. in a second step, charlie haffner, playwright, songwriter, and oral historian, xiv repositions the ‘amistad trope’ in the 20 th century by ‘re-semanticising’ the materiality of the body of the african slaves and their leader shengbe pieh in particular. amistad kata-kata re-evaluates the corporeality of the colonised slave in the 19 th -century post-abolition debate by coming to terms with the cultural trauma post-independent african collective identity has been experiencing. the recuperation of their own (african) history during the colonial period comprises commemorating the effacement of the african body by the european coloniser and confirming the african body in establishing a ‘modern’, 20 th -century/21 st -century ‘us’. haffner makes sure that the national identity of sierra leone ‘witnesses’ the “’rememory’ of the past as well as the validation of the past.” xv a rhetoric of inferiority: the anglicised slave(s) vs. native barbarism john fawcett’s obi; or, three-fingered jack (1800) opened at colman’s haymarket on 2 july 1800. it is based on “jack mansong in benjamin moseley’s treatise on sugar” (1799) but also echoes “the maroon communities of jamaica…with whom the british authorities had been forced to sign a peace treaty in 1739, and who had gone to war against the british in 1795-6.” xvi an immediate hit, the pantomime was running “for 39 performances that summer; it played 20 times the next year and 15 times in 1802.” xvii set on a plantation/montego bay in jamaica in 1780/1 the story opens with the arrival of the english captain orford who has come to visit his father’s best friend, the planter. he is introduced to the planter’s daughter rosa who is celebrating her birthday with the slaves. after the captain has retired, the celebration is spoilt by the announcement that he has been shot at by three-fingered jack, who got his name after a fight with quashee where he lost two fingers. convalescing in the planter’s house captain orford vows eternal love to rosa. later while on a hunting expedition with the planter, captain orford is attacked by jack and abducted into a cave. a declaration offering “one hundred guineas, and freedom to any slave who brings in the head of three-finger’d jack” xviii induces the slaves quashee and sam to go in search of jack and captain orford, but not without quashee being christened before – changing his name to james reeder. rosa, who accompanies them, finds captain orford in the cave and rescues him. a fight ensues between quashee, sam, and tuckey, captain orford’s slave, and jack who is eventually stabbed and decapitated by quashee xix . the pantomime closes with a sweeping march and procession celebrating jack’s death and britain’s victory over the villainy of obi. xx coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 obi; or, three-finger’d jack is an excellent example of how the imperial ideology forged a rhetoric of the inferiority of african natives by drawing a distorted picture of the life of slaves in jamaica. by denying jack and his followers the status of persons within the ideological discourse fawcett creates a hetero-image that stresses their inferiority in contrast not only to the white europeans but also to the ‘anglicised’ natives that once converted are misused to hunt down their own people. fawcett pits the slaves against each other and creates two groups, the loyal and obedient (but still inferior) vs. the superstitious-ridden and rebellious slaves deeply rooted in old traditions, and thus considered inferior. in the opening scene the cruel fate of being enslaved is decried, the white man comes, and brings his gold the slaver meet him on the bay and, oh, poor negro then be sold, from home poor negro sails away. oh, it be very very sad to see poor negro child and father part only to then add, but if white man kind massa be, he heal the wound in negro’s heart. (obi 204) the benevolent and feeling master who refrains from punitive measures turns into the authority that protects the obedient slaves from their rebellious counterpart, slaves branded as the enemy not just by the white man but also their own ‘europeanised’ brothers and sisters. we love massa we love massa, when he good, no lay stick on negro’s back … and save us from three-finger’d jack. (obi 204) jack is therefore identified as the common enemy of both the master and his slaves. jack is not just an individual character they intend to wreak revenge on, but the embodiment of obi xxi , of the evil wretchedness of the slaves rebelling against white civilization. waters identifies jack as being the cause for white fear “with his continuation of african cultural practices and traditional religion,” a fear that induces white vengeance, “the riposte to black revolt.” xxii but before this evil world of ‘savages’ living in the wood is introduced, it is the happiness and frolicking of the planter’s slaves that the pantomime focuses on, in particular when describing the march and procession of the slaves: “eight negro boys, in pairs, with triangles – six dancing girls, in pairs, with bells” when rosa “distributes presents to the slaves of ribbons, handkerchiefs.” (obi 206) this rough sketch of the slaves’ life on the plantation, that is obedient slaves working for a benevolent master whose attitude towards the slaves abounds with empathy, is somehow blurred by the fact that the moment jack comes into play, the planter reprimands the slaves for their “cowardice“ and “temerity.“ (obi 207) it is neither the planter nor the overseer who are supposed to hunt jack down, but the coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 obedient slaves. the overseer reminisces about their past days in africa and appeals to their sense of duty: swear by the silver crescent of the night, beneath whose beams the negro breathes his pray’r swear by your fathers slaughtered in the fight, by your dear native land and children swear. by doing so, he apportions the blame for the ‘miserable’ condition of the slaves on jack and the ritual of obi rather than on the fact that, even if treated ‘humanely’, they are still exposed to the malice of the planter. swear to pursue this traitor, and annoy him this jack, who daily works your harm, with obi and with magic charm swear, swear you will destroy him! (obi 207-8) they are thus instrumentalised to denounce the magic of obi and jack’s resistance to conform to european oppression. the outsiders within the slave community, jack, the obi woman and the “negro robbers”, are therefore characterised as most despicable creatures endangering the supposedly peaceful slave community. the cave of the obi woman is described as “covered with rushes and straw. the whole of the walls are entirely covered with feathers, rags, bones, teeth, catskin, broken glass, parrots’ beaks;” the obi woman is described as “an old decrepit negress, dressed very grotesquely” (obi 209). the ostensible inferiority and baseness of jack, his followers, and the obi woman, the lack of anything remotely resembling western culture, religion, experience, moral values stands in stark contrast to white society, which is not the planter, the overseer or captain orford but the ‘whitened’ devotees, that is the slaves quashee, sam, and tuckey. the image of the savage ‘obi-ridden negroes’ posing a threat to ‘white society’, which also comprises the obedient slaves, runs counter to the image of the aforementioned ‘civilized/christened’ slaves. when jack finally wounds captain orford, drags him into the cave, and lets out a yell of triumph, it is as if a ferocious animal retreated to the cave with its prey. this ‘monster’ in human form can only be overpowered by a christian act: empowered by christianity the newly converted quashee “crosses his jack’s forehead, and tells him he has been christened;” jack is literally disarmed and lets his gun fall. wounded by tuckey’s gun, quashee stabs and decapitates him. the baptism empowers him to free his fellow slaves as well as the europeans from the constraints of obi. the pantomime closes with a “grand march and procession” (obi 218) which displays the “obi woman” and “jack’s head and hand” being successfully subdued by superior colonial ‘morality’ and conduct. the slaves have been instrumentalised in overcoming their traditions and cultural heritage, here stigmatized as a threatening force to the order of society. eventually, order has been restored, bring good news to kingston town, o. o no fear jack’s obi bag, quashee knock him down, o, … coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 the negro now may go for charm he broke, and jack he kill ‘twas quashee give the blow, … here we see villainy brought by law to short duration and may all traitors fall by british proclamation (obi 219) it is the british moral imperative for liberty that not only saves the loyal slaves from morally degenerating, but also elevates them to a higher status by bestowing on them the christian doctrine of justice in combatting heathenism and the culture of the ‘other’, that is their very own culture. amistad kata-kata: a ‘post-european’ re-evaluation xxiii amistad kata-kata premiered at the british council in freetown, may 1988. it recounts the amistad event of 1839-42 where a group of sierra leonean slaves led by shengbe pieh mutinied and killed captain ferrer and his cook celestino on the la amistad (‘friendship’ in english) bound for puerto principe. horrified by the prospect of being chopped to pieces and eaten by the white man, they took charge of the ship and forced the two spanish seamen ruiz and montez to take them back to sierra leone. misled by the two spaniards into believing that they were sailing back to africa, they were actually sailing westward. they were finally captured by an american ship, charged with murder and jailed in new haven, usa. when the case went to the supreme court, former president john quincy adams assumed the africans’ defence and won the case, with the slaves eventually boarding the gentleman for freetown, sierra leone. haffner’s play features a second narrative plot with “grandma” who is upset about the “student’s” ignorance of the story of shengbe pieh as part of the national history of the country. grandma represents the oral tradition passed on to the younger generations with the student who “[...] relies on the usual western representations in books rather than on the cultural reality around him as the validating source of his own cultural experience.” xxiv grandma reminds the student of pieh’s importance for the country, “our people have still not seen the importance of using him as a symbol of national pride.” xxv when summoned by the chief priest, the ghost of pieh appears and retells his story of his being captured and sold into slavery. haffner instrumentalises the amistad trope to make africans aware of the postcolonial gaze on their own identity by “[...] recuperat[ing] marginalised subjects, or, alternatively, [by] dismantl[ing] all racial categories by showing their constructedness.” xxvi he recuperates marginalised characters like three-finger’d jack, and de-silences the past by re-evaluating the history of african(s). he gives a voice not only to shengbe pieh and the other slaves but also to sierra leoneans so that they can look back at the past and come to terms the “constructedness” of the imperial story, a single story xxvii that after being continuously repeated had and still has a profound impact on how autoand hetero-images influence intercultural relationships. in amistad kata-kata haffner uses arguments most slave trade/slavery supporters fell back on in their argumentation: the fact that the inner-african slave trade played an essential part in the actual selling of slaves and the superstitiousness of the african slaves. celestino’s joke of the cannibalistic devouring of the black man by the white coloniser unleashes coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 the mutiny and shengbe’s determination to free his brothers from slavery: “i swear that i will never surrender to the white man. none of us will be left in slavery. we rather die fighting. god be with us” (akk 10). the act of regaining their freedom means that the body acquires new significations as “[t]he body which has been violated, degraded, maimed, imprisoned, viewed with disgust, or otherwise compromised [...]” xxviii is viewed from a different perspective, transforming the trope of africans destined to be enslaved into the postcolonial agent of his/her own identity: part of the project of redefining staged identity is to affix the colonised’s choice of signification to the body rather than to maintain the limited tropes traditionally assigned to it. this oppositional process of embodiment whereby the colonised creates his/her own subjectivity ascribes more flexible, culturally laden, and multivalent delineations to the body, rather than circumscribing it within an imposed, imperialist calculation of otherness. xxix the recuperation and ‘re-semanticisation’ of the past therefore allows for the resurrection of a national/cultural african identity long forgotten, suppressed or simply neglected. one might ask why haffner is commemorating the amistad revolt. it is because the “use of historical knowledge in interpreting the present” xxx does not only ‘interpret’ but also ‘re-define’ identity in the sense of redressing wrongs and ‘refocalising’ the frozen and distorted vision colonial history had turned into reality. “so whether the past is mythical or implied objective, its validity lies in the position it occupies in society’s shared consciousness or collective memory.” xxxi haffner for instance uses the colonial trope of cannibalism to show how it was instrumentalised to emphasise the alleged inferiority of the slaves. it exposes not only the slaves’ superstitious belief in the cannibalistic rite of whites enslaving, killing, and eating slaves, but it also illustrates that africans are allocated a place low on the ladder of civilisation. when the crowd in new haven yells, “stop the pirates!! capture the cannibals!! save the white race!! down with savagery!! we are not safe!! our life is threatened!! we can’t sail our own ships!! we can’t go fishing!!” (akk 13), haffner alludes to the general absurdity of the situation, highlighting the mutual manipulation of the two bodies – black/white, colonised/coloniser, black cannibals/white cannibals – thus ridiculing the semanticisation of europeans/americans vs. africans. matthew j. christensen interprets the trope of cannibalism as a “symbol for the economic exploitation, material accumulation, and violent coercion carried out by postcolonial elites”. xxxii akk is haffner’s revolt against the west “project[ing] the label of cannibalism onto those africans it wants to subordinate, thereby disavowing the cannibalistic underpinnings of its own racially stratified economic organization.” xxxiii haffner thus uses shengbe to determine the postcolonial gaze that is (supposed) to ‘rewrite’ colonial history and to amend this otherness, for instance when adams compares him to a hero of “ancient greece and rome”, the “black prince” (akk 17). [...] had he lived in the days of greece and rome, his name would have been handed down to posterity as one who has practiced the most sublime of all virtues – disinterested patriotism and un-shrinking courage. had a white man done it, they would have immortalized him. his name would have been made glorious...africans...are entitled to their liberty...africans coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 were born free and are entitled to their freedom...it demands, from a humanly civilized nation as ours, compassion. it demands, from the brotherly love of a christian land, sympathy. it demands, from a republic professing reverence for the rights of man, justice. (akk 22) it is this ‘civilizational’ aspect of the west supposed to instruct the poor africans that the three abolitionists in the play, tappan, leavitt, and joselyn, capitalise on when they claim that [t]hey are ignorant of our language – of the uses of civilized society and the obligations of christianity. it is under these circumstances, that several friends of human rights and abolition of slave trade have met to consult upon the case of these unfortunate africans and appointed a committee to employ all the necessary means to secure the rights of the accused. (akk 16) the abolitionists have faith in jones as they want to see “[...] if a man, although he is black, cannot have justice done him here in the united states of america” (akk 16). they hand over a letter to jones, declaring that “[m]any of the africans can, now, read and write...this has been part of the committee’s effort – to provide for their physical well being and their intellectual and religious instruction” (akk 17). that is when shengbe and his fellow slaves submissively declare that “[...] he [mr. james covey] teach us to sing christian songs in mende language” (akk 17). here we are provided with the confirmation of the coloniser’s attempt at justifying the enslavement of africans: being enslaved and transported to the colonies implies effacing their identity by reproducing their ‘bodies’ and turning them into ‘european’ bodies. their accusation of the inhumane treatment of the african peoples is combined with the belief in god’s punishment of such an immoral behaviour. we all born in mende country...some people say, mende people crazy. mende people dolt, because we don’t talk america language. america people don’t talk mende language. america people dolt? dear mr. adams, you have children. you have friends. you love them. you feel sorry if mende people come and carry them all to africa...we sorry for america people great deal, because god punish liars...mende people have got souls. all we want is make us free. (akk 17) the accusation of the immoral behaviour of the coloniser in treating the colonised is encapsulated in president adams’s question “[...] what can [he] do for the cause of god and man – for the progress of human emancipation – for the suppression of the african slave trade?” (akk 18). the recuperation and ‘re-semanticisation’ of the past is a process that implies resurrecting a national/cultural african identity long forgotten, suppressed, or just simply neglected but at the same time “interpreting the present” xxxiv by ‘re-defining’ identity in the sense of redressing wrongs and ‘focalising’ the distorted vision colonial history turned into reality. according to osagie, “so whether the past is mythical or implied objective, its validity lies in the position it occupies in society’s shared consciousness or collective memory.” xxxv the past is therefore ‘re-semanticised’ in order to define ‘us’ and not ‘us’ vs. ‘them.’ coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 summing up, john fawcett’s obi; or, three-finger’d jack helped forge a rhetoric of inferiority by corroborating the fact that ‘black bodies’ would only be considered worthy of attention if servile to the imperial dogma of white english superiority. it denied black bodies who were still deeply entrenched in the practice of obeah and thus running counter to the christian principle of the superior british caucasian `race` the status of a person. the strengthening of the mastery of the european over the african body led to the creation of a new colonial identity: ‘europeanised’ slaves who eradicate the pagan practice of obeah, three-finger’d jack, and all those who threaten the stability of the coloniser’s superiority. charlie haffner’s amistad kata-kata challenges this rhetoric of inferiority by rewriting the story of the amistad revolt from an african 20 th century perspective. the play deconstructs the process of assigning a preconceived meaning to the african body: it is the “fundamental rights to freedom” that africans are entitled to in the “name of humanity and justice” (akk 22). shengbe, representing sierra leonean identity, undergoes a ‘re-semanticisation’ that re-evaluates (his) african identity which was erased a long time ago by colonial history. ”i was not born to be a slave. so, it is better for me to die fighting than to live many moons in misery. and if i am hanged, i will be happy if by dying, i will save my black race from bondage” (akk 21). amistad kata-kata generates “a new sense of national and historical belonging,” confronting people with an “’available past’, a commemorative event belonging to the people of sierra leone [...]”. xxxvi i jack p. greene, “empire and identity from the glorious revolution to the american revolution,” the oxford history oft he british empire, vol. ii, the eighteenth century, ed. p.j. marshall (oxford: oxford university press, 1998) 208-230. 209. ii greene, “empire and identity from the glorious revolution to the american revolution” 212. iii greene, “empire and identity from the glorious revolution to the american revolution” 208. iv j.r. oldfield, “transatlanticism, slavery, and race,“ american literary review 14.1 (spring 2002): 131-140. 133. v karen sanchez-eppler, “bodily bonds: the intersecting rhetorics of feminism and abolition,” representations 24, america reconstructed, 1840-1940 (autumn 1988): 28-59. 29. vi sanchez-eppler, “bodily bonds: the intersecting rhetorics of feminism and abolition” 29. vii sanchez-eppler, “bodily bonds: the intersecting rhetorics of feminism and abolition” 31. viii kathleen wilson, introduction, a new imperial history. culture, identity and modernity in britain and the empire, 1660-1840, ed. kathleen wilson (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004) 6. ix joep leerssen, “the rhetoric of national character: a programmatic survey,” poetics today 21.2 (summer 2000): 267-92. 280. x felicity a. nussbaum, “between ’oriental’ and ’blacks so called’, 1688-1788,” the postcolonial enlightenment. eighteenth-century colonialism and postcolonial theory, coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 ed. daniel carey, and lynn festa (oxford: oxford university press, 2009) 137-166. 165, 166. xi ansgar nünning, “historicizing british cultural studies: patriotic xenophobia and the rhetoric of national character in eighteenth-century british literature, ” journal for the study of british cultures 9.1 (2002): 69-93. 83, 84. xii for a detailed account of fawcett’s life see slavery, abolition and emancipation. writings in the british romantic period, vol. 5, drama, ed. jeffrey n. cox (london: pickering & chatto, 1999) 201-202. xiii virginia mason vaughan, performing blackness on english stages, 1500-1800 (cambridge: cambridge up, 2005) 17. xiv for more information about charlie haffner go to the homepage of the freetong players international: http://freetongplayersinternational.org xv iyunolu folayan osagie, the amistad revolt: memory, slavery, and the politics of identity in the united states and sierra leone (athens and london: university of georgia press, 2000) 110. xvi hazel waters, racism on the victorian stage. representation of slavery and the black character (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007) 26. xvii jeffrey n. cox, introduction, john fawcett, “obi; or, three-finger’d jack,” 1800, slavery, abolition and emancipation. writings in the british romantic period, vol. 5, drama, ed. jeffrey n. cox (london: pickering & chatto, 1999) 201-202. 202. xviii john fawcett, “obi; or, three-finger’d jack,“ 1800, slavery, abolition and emancipation. writings in the british romantic period, vol. 5, drama, ed. jeffrey n. cox (london: pickering & chatto, 1999) 203-219. 211. xix in “songs, duets, & choruses, in the pantomimical drama of obi, or, three-finger’s jack” it is mentioned that jack’s three-fingered hand is also cut off. xx according to john o’brien, “pantomimes were typically referred to as ‘entertainments’”, understood as a form of entertainment rather than a process of moral education, hence “a form of entertainment that was taken by many to constitute a threat to the integrity of the english stage.” (harlequin britain. pantomime and entertainment, 1690-1760 (baltimore & london: the johns hopkins university press, 2004) xv, 36.)) the reason why it was perceived as a threat was that the characters were mute, a fact that “enabled the audience to more easily encode onto the role their preexisting racial perspective, arguably reproducing race within their pre-conceived stereotypes […].” (david worrall, the politics of romantic theatricality, 1787-1832: the road to the stage (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007) 98.) xxi “this obi...has its origin, like many customs among the africans, from the ancient egyptians. obi for the purpose of bewitching people, or consuming them by lingering illness, is made of grave dirt, hair, teeth of sharks, and other animals.” (john fawcett, “songs, duets, & choruses, in the pantomimical drama of obi, or, three-finger’s jack“, 3rd ed. (london: woodfall, 1800) 2. ecco. university of munich lib. web. 6 april 2011. xxii waters, racism on the victorian stage. representation of slavery and the black character 26. xxiii passages of this section have been published in ulrich pallua, “amistad kata-kata: a re-evaluation of the materiality of the body,” afrika – kontinent der extreme? edition weltordnung religion – gewalt, vol. 9 (innsbruck: iup, 2011) 245-258. xxiv osagie, the amistad revolt 107. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 xxv charlie haffner, amistad kata-kata (based on the true story of the amistad revolt). a play in three acts (freetown: sierra leone, 1987) unpublished. 1. hereafter referred to as akk in parenthetical documentation. xxvi helen gilbert, and joanne tompkins, post-colonial drama: theory, practice, politics (london and new york: routledge, 1996) 206. xxvii i am here referring to chimamanda adichie’s definition of a single story and the dangers associated with it: http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html xxviii gilbert and tompkins, post-colonial drama 222. xxix gilbert and tompkins, post-colonial drama 205. xxx osagie, “historical memory and a new national consciousness” 65. xxxi osagie, “historical memory and a new national consciousness” 66. xxxii matthew j. christensen, “cannibals in the postcolony: sierra leone’s intersecting hegemonies in charlie haffner’s slave revolt drama ‘amistad kata-kata,’” research in african literature 36.1 (spring 2005): 1-19. 3. xxxiii christensen, “cannibals in the postcolony” 11. xxxiv iyunolu folayan osagie, “historical memory and a new national consciousness: the amistad revolt revisited in sierra leone,” the massachusetts review 38.1 (spring 1997): 63-83. 65. xxxv osagie, “historical memory and a new national consciousness” 66. xxxvi osagie, “historical memory and a new national consciousness” 77. ulrich pallua is assistant professor at innsbruck university, austria. he completed his ph.d. on eurocentrism, racism, colonialism in the victorian and edwardian age in 2005. he worked on a project entitled “slavery and english literature: 1772-1834” funded by the austrian research council focussing on the image of african slaves in different literary genres. his publications include the acceptance of the evils of slavery as a social phenomenon: an indicator of a pro-slavery approach (2007), images of africans in british slavery discourse: proand anti-slave trade/slavery voices in the gentlemans magazine and the monthly review, 1772-1833 (2009), (re)figuring human enslavement: images of power, violence and resistance (2009), the ambiguity of europe’s colonizing mission. the subservient slave in james miller’s play art and nature, 1738 (2010), and racism, slavery, and literature co-edited with wolfgang zach (2010), amistad kata-kata: a re-evaluation of the materiality of the body (2011), anti-slave trade propaganda in 1788: the african’s complaint in contrast to britain’s vision of liberty? (2011). contrasting group identities: africa and corrupted europe vs. britain as the pioneer of human rights in paul and virginia (2012). his habilitation research is entitled images of africa(ns): the character of the african slave in selected plays from the abolition period: 1772-1838. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 exhibitions and publications: pam dahl-helm johnston pam at exhibition long gallery, university of wollongong, september 1997 from left to right prof anna goebel (poznzn, poland) liz jeneid, pam, sue blanchfield image in the background is pam’s solo exhibitions 2014 ‘shimmer yinar dhenewan’ exhibition that has toured to inverness museum and art gallery, kingussie folk museum, and in galleries located in wick, thurso and dumfries is a continuing travelling exhibition. 2009/10 ‘reprise: a journey into bundjalung country’, lismore regional gallery new south wales 2007 ‘heartlands: anatomy of the human heart’ exhibition at kendal gallery for women’s arts international festival, kendal cumbria, england. ‘heartlands’ christchurch contemporary art space. 2006 ‘fish and rain 2’ james harvey gallery, clovelly, new south wales. 2005 ‘fish and rain 1’ brewery arts centre, kendal, england. 2003 ‘ripple’ brewery arts centre, kendal, england. 2001 ripples and whisperings, mahoney’s galleries, melbourne, victoria. 2000 ‘song cycle’ travelling throughout uk february – september. ‘ripple’ james harvey gallery balmain. 1999/2000 ‘shimmer, yinar dhenewan’, travelling throughout u.k. 1998 ‘yinar dhenewan, aberdeen women’s centre aberdeen, scotland. 1997 ‘shimmer’ james harvey gallery, balmain. ‘conception (birth) transition (life) transformation(death), tap gallery, darlinghurst. 1996 conception (birth) long gallery university of wollongong, wollongong. transition (life) project space keira lane wollongong. transformation (death) project keira lane wollongong. 1995 ‘heartsbloodbreathespirit, james harvey gallery, balmain. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 1994 p. johnston womenstories, the university centre, sydney and james harvey gallery, balmain. 1993 womenstories – pam johnston, king street gallery on burton, paddington. 1992 ‘a song circle for clelia’, gallery 1a, potts point, sydney. ‘a journey into bundjalung country’, grafton regional gallery, grafton. 1991 ‘a journey into bundjalung country’, lismore regional gallery and travelling throughout new south wales, through new south wales ministry for the arts. ‘installation’ perspecta satellite shows, w.i.n.d.o.w. gallery erskine st, sydney cbd. portia geach memorial exhibition, s.h. ervin gallery observatory hill. ‘windows to infinity’ argyle gallery, argyle centre the rocks, sydney. genocide, cbd gallery, sydney. 1990 ‘the woman spirit journey’, the works gallery, paddington. 1998 ‘ripple yinar dhenewan 6, exhibited aberdeen women’s centre aberdeen, scotland and travelling throughout uk. ‘pam johnston at boomalli’, boomalli aboriginal artists co-operative, chippendale, 1989, ‘pam johnston – recent works’, the works gallery, city art institute paddington. 1988, ‘one land, one law, one people’ balmain loft gallery, balmain. ‘pam johnston at boomalli, boomalli aboriginal artists co-operative gallery, chippendale. 1987 ‘one woman show’ kelly street kolektiv gallery, ultimo. group exhibitions. 2003 through australian women’s eyes, travelling through regional galleries new south wales. 1998 2+2=5 womenhousespace, spark gallery, wollongong. ‘artists and cartoonists in black and white (the most public art) s.h ervin gallery, sydney. 1997 ‘response to lake mungo’ a meeting of thirty artists, from australia, usa, canada, poland, france, curator liz jeneid, long gallery, university of wollongong. 1996/97 ‘finger in the pie, international women’s week exhibition, bondi pavilion, bondi. ‘through women’s eyes, arc chicago, united states of america, http://www.mandala.com.au/art/women. 1995 40 women artists, women’s arts resource, tap gallery darlinghurst and re-public, women’s gallery, melbourne victoria. 1994 artspace open artspace, cowper wharf road, woolloomooloo. 1993 2+2=5 womanstories, first draft west, annandale and travelling to melbourne. 1992 ‘aboriginality’ – national aboriginal week, long gallery wollongong. ‘do something with a blundstone show’, chaneleon gallery hobart. 1991 ‘alius aliud’, performance space, redfern, group show for dissonance festival and conference on feminism and the visual arts. ‘womanhousespace’ selenium gallery redfern, group show for dissonance conference. ‘skinned’ network gallery, byron bay ‘factionation’ bondi pavilion gallery, as part of international woman’s week celebrations, bondi ‘2+2=5, the second show’, tin sheds gallery, darlington ‘spiritus terra australia’ the rotunda gallery, 1001 pennsylvania avenue, washington d,c., usa. sir hermann black gallery university of sydney collection. 1990 ‘contemporary fair’, exhibition buildings, melbourne. ‘all about eve’ women’s show, cell block theatre, national arts school, darlinghurst. http://www.mandala.com.au/art/women coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 1989 ‘aboriginal woman’s artwork’, boomalli aboriginal artists’ co-operative gallery, chippendale. ‘40,000 = 4, continuing the koori story, bondi pavilion gallery, bondi. ‘perspecta ’89: a koori perspective’, new south wales arts gallery, artspace, surry hills. ‘2+2=5, women’s stories’, tin sheds gallery, darlington. belvoir street theatre aboriginal exhibition, chippendale. masters students of the city art institute exhibition, the works gallery, paddington. 1988 ‘imprison’ kelly street kolektiv, ultimo. sydney university members club, darlington. ‘unearthing the goddess,’ kelly street kolektiv gallery ultimo. bay street theatre exhibition, ultimo. women’s show, cell block theatre, darlinghurst. aboriginals from north and central australia artists association (ancaa) and boomalli aboriginal artists’ co-operative exhibition, boomalli aboriginal artists cooperative gallery, chippendale. 1987 women’s war and peace exhibition, walsh bay. ‘spiritus kolektivi’, artzone gallery, adelaide south australia. women artists exhibition, cell block theatre, darlinghurst. belvoir street theatre exhibition chippendale. seymour centre exhibition, darlington. 1986 expo i, ii, iii, cell block theatre, east sydney technical college, darlinghurst. ‘cool, calm and kolektiv’ inaugural exhibition, kelly street kolektiv, ultimo. community arts 1996 makaling, goulburn regional gallery, goulburn. 1993 liverpool city council macquarie street mosaic. 1989 member of artists for the finger wharf, a conservation minded group of artists dedicated to saving the woolloomooloo fingerwharf for a contemporary arts centre. 1988/9 boomalli artists cooperative member, secretary in 1989. founding member of 2+2=5, contemporary women artists group. 1988 plunkett street school assembly mural, funded by education department. streetwize comics, funded by department of education employments and training. 1986 founding member of kelly street art kolektiv which established an artist run exhibition space in ultimo and raised many artist related issues to the general public, liaised with artists and arts related organizations and artist run initiatives. student peace mural, student house, east sydney technical college, funded by student association. 1984 women’s activity and self help house (w.a.s.h.) mural, bidwill, funded by aboriginal arts board. 1982 marrickville women’s refuge mural tempe, funded by marrickville women’s refuge and marrickville council. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 publications langford ginibi, r., and johnston, p., 1997, a journey into bundjalung country, kempsey: argus print, with australian geographic and new south wales ministry for the arts. johnson-riordan l., conway herron, j., johnston, p., 2002, decolonising the ‘white’ nation: ‘white’ psychology’ political subjects issue 6 critical psychology, the international journal of critical psychology, ed. valerie walkerdine, london: lawrence and wishart. johnston pam, 2001 ‘talking you talking me talking aborigine’ published conference paper for the international forum on education in correctional systems in australia: learning life – not just doing time, australian corrections education association, http://www.acea.org.au/content/2001%20papers/dr%20pam%20johnston%20%20paper.pdf johnston, p., and conway-herron, j., 2012. “remembering ruby”, coolabah, no.8, issn 1988-5946, martin renés, coolabah guest editor, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona, 1-29. johnston p., 2012, ‘i hate to talk about her as if she wasn’t here. oh she isn’t’, a life for the truth: a tribute to ruby langford ginibi, the journal of european association of studies on australia, vol.3. no a 2012, issn2013-6897 under the auspices of coolabah observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona pp 12-18. johnston p., 2005, ‘over here’ gerardo mosquera and jean fisher (eds.) in series, documentary sources in contemporary arts johnston, pam (ed) and epilogue, 1996, free spirit, anthology from aboriginal students at the norma parker centre and the mulawa women’s detention centre, sydney: contemporary women’s artists gallery press. johnston, p., 1995, in caroline ambrus (ed.), the unseen art scene: 32 australian women artists. woden, act: irrepressible press, 88-91. johnston p., 1994, foreword to my bundjalung people, st lucia queensland: university of queensland press. johnston p., 1991, windows to infinity, grosvenor place, new south wales: sydney cove authority and contemporary women artists’ gallery. awards 2007 inaugural hildegard art award, gosford, christ church contemporary art, gosford. 2001 edna ryan award, new south wales department for women and women’s electoral lobby. 1990 women in arts fellowship, new south wales ministry for the arts. 1986 lucienne mochowski bequest, national arts school. engagements 2007 keynote speaker, kendal cumbria, international women’s art festival, england. 2006 invited guest speaker, drawing the line conference, tate gallery, london, uk. http://www.acea.org.au/content/2001%20papers/dr%20pam%20johnston%20-%20paper.pdf http://www.acea.org.au/content/2001%20papers/dr%20pam%20johnston%20-%20paper.pdf coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 2005 invited guest speaker, arco fair, hosted by madrid government, madrid spain. invited guest speaker, visual representations of violence, trauma in genocide, hosted by flemish government, brussels, belgium. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 editorial: after the water has been shed martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu catalina ribas segura university college alberta giménez cesag palma de mallorca, spain catymallorca@yahoo.com copyright©martin renes & catalina ribas segura 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. the present coolabah volume, nr 15, flows from the january 2014 watershed congress at the university of barcelona, organized by the philology faculty‟s centre for australian studies (asc) in collaboration with the centre for peace and social justice (cpsj) at the university of southern cross, australia. a call was put out to delegates to elaborate conference presentations into full-fledged essays of academic length (5,000 to 8,000 words), and a select number of scholars has contributed to the making of this collection of blind-peer-reviewed essays. the resulting volume, as is usual with our post-congress issues, covers a wide range of topics relating to the congress theme—watershed—and so offers an eclectic, yet therefore challenging mix of papers within the field of postcolonial and cultural studies. part of what is left after the water has been shed and the streams of conversation have settled down becomes visible in this compilation. the following will lay out some of the strands occurring and concurring in these pieces, which each in one way or another address the trope of watershed. in “pedagogical change at times of change in the higher education system: an exploration of early career mentoring, co-publication and teaching and learning insights”, bill boyd locates his discursive strand of analysis within the rapidly changing university environment and the deluge of social, political, economic and technological pressures on teachers/researchers this generates. boyd has been engaged in developing tailor-made programmes to help earlyand midcareer academics cope with these new demands, and reflects on this research and practice in his paper. his “essay provides examples of activities that, on the one hand, assist academics to develop the tools they need to navigate the new and evolving environment of higher education, while on the other hand directly addresses key pedagogical issues and provides new insight into teaching and learning in higher education”. boyd‟s opting for “human-scale … small team-based research and writing projects” is also patent in jeanti st clair‟s “doing it for real: designing experiential journalism curricula that prepare students for the new and uncertain world of journalism work”. her essay centres on the creative adjustments in journalism studies to the array of pressures that boyd detects. through “a learning-centred curriculum anchored in mailto:mrenes@ub.edu mailto:catymallorca@yahoo.com coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 authentic and experiential activities and settings”, she finds ways for students to ready themselves for, and stay afloat in, the sometimes rough waters of the new university as well as future work environments. in “on matteo ricci‟s interpretations of chinese culture”, chen hong takes a different tack on education by delving into the rich cultural exchange between european missionaries and chinese society in centuries past and by investigating its reciprocal character, claiming a more integrated and balanced approximation to the establishment of academic knowledge. hong‟s essay endeavours to fill a gap in the knowledge about matteo ricci (1552-1610), the 16 th -century italian jesuit missionary to the ming dynasty who introduced western learning into china, by looking at how ricci also intensely participated in the reverse stream of knowledge. she points out that ricci, in fact, is at the origins of the study of sinology as we now know it in the west, the fountain from which oriental knowledge first started flowing in europe. in “transnationalism and the decentralization of the global film industry”, jordi codó martínez looks at recent shifts in the film industry in which the point of gravity in production and consumption is swinging transatlantically and transpacifically to asia and, especially china. codó martínez points out that, while eastern cinema themes, genres and techniques have flooded western cinema to cater for the asian market, the western consumer resists watching asian cinema. this is on a par with the unidirectional flow detected by hong in the way matteo ricci has been studied up to now. in “louisa lawson and the woman question”, anne holden rønning looks at yet another pioneering figure and a different facet of mass media culture through louisa lawson‟s involvement in the dawn, the first australian magazine in which women‟s voice was to be heard on the continent. published on the wave of the first emancipatory british women‟s press in 1855, the dawn “gave women a voice, marked women‟s political engagement in the public sphere, and employed women compositors, making available to a broader public issues which were politically relevant” in the period of its existence, 1888-1905. by studying its content over these seventeen years, holden highlights the magazine and lawson‟s pioneering role and importance in the struggle for women‟s vote and rights. in “developing a connective feminine discourse: drusilla modjeska on women‟s lives, love and art”, ulla rahbek also explores the current of women‟s emancipation in writing by offering an analysis of the australian author and historian drusilla modjeska‟s fiction on the intersection of women‟s lives, love and art, which she posits as the bedrock of modjeska‟s oeuvre. by addressing a series of connective images which refer to such womanly activities as weaving, folding and talking, rahbek reveals modjeska‟s idiosyncratic feminism in the strong current of what she terms “connective feminine discourse” in her fiction. in “identity and friendship in hsu-ming teo´s behind the moon (2000)”, catalina ribas segura takes us back to the asian strand with her discussion of identity issues in the novel behind the moon (2000) by the chinese australian author hsu-ming teo. in her analysis, ribas segura questions the notion of “australianness” and addresses the concepts of belonging and identity in the development of some youths of different ethnic backgrounds in the western suburbs of sydney in the 1990s. in her article on the western-australian story-teller and poet alf taylor, “literature as protest and solace: the verse of alf taylor”, danica čerče aims for a more expansive definition of indigenous-australian poetry than is traditionally managed. rather than inscribing taylor‟s poetry, collected in singer songwriter (1992) and winds (1994), within a narrow politicized framework that drowns out the literary qualities of his writing, čerče takes taylor‟s oeuvre as coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 the example that indigenous poets fuse community responsibility and identity with a rich exploration of the inner self, “urg[ing] us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than that of social chroniclers and rebels”. in “negotiating „negative capability‟: the role of place in writing”, the non-indigenous poets lynda hawryluk and leni shilton look at the issue of australian belonging and place by applying john keats‟s notion of „negative capability‟ (1891, p. 48) to their writing. theirs is a call for writing the australian self into belonging by shunning rational approaches to explain the mystery of (belonging to) place; rather the impact of negative capability, which stands for the poet‟s sensory and intuitive openness to the mystery, doubt and uncertainty the australian landscape may inspire, enables the poet to „glimpse‟ a mystic connection to the local that goes “beyond the notion of specific place”. as is habitual in our editions and despite the previous presentation, these articles are listed according to their author´s last name in alphabetical order on the contents page so as not to predetermine the scope of interconnections these papers may generate. we hope these generous contributions will prevent the streams of conversation opened up in our watershed congress from drying up. martin renes and catalina ribas segura barcelona, march 2015 microsoft word final julian croft coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 for bruce bennett julian croft for bruce bennett that conference at our last time together was of peace and war at gallipoli. we climbed the nek in cold autumnal weather, stood at lone pine, took in the holy sights of futile sacrifice and wondered, as thousands have before and will again, those balaclava words ‘someone had blundered’, and youth and hope was once more lost in vain. we’re told that anzac made our nation, that we’re the proud inheritors of loss, and each step we’ve made is one more station of its apotheosis on the southern cross. one thing you’ve done, despite our constant wars, is open windows to a peace, not theirs, but yours. julian croft (born 31 may 1941) is an australian poet and emeritus professor of english, university of new england. he was a founder of the association for the study of australian literature and co-edited its journal, notes and furphies for many years. in addition to gathering prizes for his published poems he has writtenwidely aross genres and academic themes copyright © julian croft 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 creating inter-cultural spaces for co-learning kristina everett & eloise hummell abstract: among the many inhibitors to social inclusion and mobility faced by indigenous peoples in australia, under-representation of indigenous students in higher education has long featured as a concern for government and human rights advocates. this is due to the attendant lower social indicators than those of the wider australian society which characterise indigenous peoples’ life experience. unesco’s guidelines on inter-cultural education published in 2007 provide some principles for groundwork to develop classrooms which are inclusive but not assimilationist. models of how this might be done in practice, however, are scarce. in this paper we consider a model for inter-cultural education which uses joint analysis and dialogue surrounding self-representation of indigenous peoples by indigenous and non-indigenous peers to then co-create a new, inter-cultural representation. the ‘daruganora’ program involves indigenous students leading dialogue with nonindigenous peers and teachers to jointly interpret a purpose-built indigenous art exhibition. we explain in this paper how spaces created by this dialogue can allow open, honest and respectful interaction between indigenous and non-indigenous people relating to indigenous representations of identity. we argue that daruganora provides a model for inter-cultural classrooms. keywords: daruganora, inter-cultural, research led learning and teaching. ‘daruganora’ is an educational experience program, conducted during 2010-2011 which was designed and implemented by a multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural team at macquarie university with the aim of developing a model for inter-cultural classrooms. we say more about inter-cultural classrooms below, but here it is important to stress that our understanding of inter-cultural classrooms is not simply a “place where teachers and students from different nationalities and cultures meet and interact” (kerdchoochuen, 2010), but a place which needs to be intentionally constructed through careful design by teachers from different cultural backgrounds to facilitate interaction and generation of relationships and knowledge by a group of co-learners copyright©2013 kristina everett&eloise hummell. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 (including teachers as well as students) from different cultural backgrounds. in other words, it is not enough to call a multi-cultural classroom inter-cultural unless productive inter-relationships are facilitated and supported. daruganora is centred upon a purpose-built art exhibition showcasing diverse examples of indigenous artworks by various artists from vastly different geographic areas ranging from the central desert region of australia to the western suburbs of sydney. these works feature different media including ochre, bark, canvas, paper and acrylic paint and are also from various eras ranging from the early 20 th century until the present. the exhibition is designed to represent the diversity of indigenous identities and their dynamic natures. daruganora creates spaces for misconceptions to be revealed, explored and revised. we call these spaces ‘inter-cultural classrooms’. this paper presents some of the theoretical foundations, key strategies, and inspirations which have shaped the formation of daruganora. we argue that through respectful, indigenous led learning which generates a representation which is jointly produced by indigenous and non-indigenous participants, daruganora provides a model for inter-cultural classrooms. why we need daruganora macquarie university is situated on the traditional aboriginal country of darug people. the word ‘daruganora’ is darug language for darug land. the choice of title for the program is a highly political one which represents recognition of the prior indigenous inhabitants of the country and signals an engagement with particular issues around indigenous identity, culture, representation and land. below we present a brief summary of key literature identifying the need to develop new and improved strategies for indigenous peoples to access and participate in higher education in australia. the ways in which daruganora has been attentive to various issues raised in the literature is outlined as is the structure and activities incorporated into the program design. we then concentrate on the conceptual focus of the program – indigenous art – as the method for engaging students in exploring the central topics of indigenous identity, culture and diversity. representation and outreach programs australia has not provided equal access to all groups from society. people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, those from regional and remote australia as well as indigenous australians are under-represented in higher education compared to their incidence in the general population. improving access and equity in higher education for these groups is a difficult task and the solutions that will help to solve this challenge are not immediately obvious. (bradley et al, 2008:27) coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 the australian government’s review of australian higher education (final report presented in december 2008 by bradley et al.) recommended widespread reforms across the higher education sector in order to remain globally competitive and continue to contribute to the legal, economic, social and cultural capital and strength of the country. one of the main findings was that significant progress is urgently needed to increase enrolment, retention and degree attainment rates of indigenous people and people from low socio-economic backgrounds i . little improvement in participation rates of these groups has been made over the last two decades resulting in serious implications for, and detrimental impacts on, social inclusion, social justice and equality. action by providers is crucial, and “addressing access, success and retention problems for indigenous students is a matter of the highest priority” (bradley et al.,2008:32) ii . research commissioned by the department of education, employment and workplace relations (deewr) and conducted by trevor gale et al. (2009), interventions early in school as a means to improve higher education outcomes for disadvantaged (particularly low socio-economic) students, agreed that this long-term under-representation is unacceptable iii . the deewr project focused on “early interventions by universities in schools, with ‘early’ defined as pre-year 11”(gale et al., 2009b:4), and reviewed literature and evaluated case studies from australia, canada, the united states, the united kingdom and new zealand iv . it was found that “while much good work has been done in the sector to establish outreach programs, they have largely been focused on year 11 or 12 students” (38). if the australian sector is going to be successful in affecting positive change “interventions to redress this inequality need to be implemented earlier rather than later in schooling”(ibid.) and be sustained long-term. the results of case studies undertaken by the deewr project stressed the benefits of engaging students earlier than the final two years of schooling because, as gale (2009a:71) insists: it is too late in the last two years of schooling to maximise the effects of an intervention. by then academic achievement patterns are harder to turn around, aspirations are likely to be well established …. drawing from current research and literature, the daruganora team—including members from various disciplines including indigenous studies, education, museum studies, visual arts, and anthropology and from various cultural backgrounds including indigenous, migrant and ‘settler’—designed the program to target students in years 8, 9 and 10. the program was aligned with key learning outcomes in the new south wales board of studies aboriginal studies years 7-10 syllabus. the team agreed that the maintenance of academic rigor is essential and concurred with the literature which stressed that such intervention programs must “present opportunities for learning that involve high intellectual challenge, high expectations of students producing high‐quality products (artefacts of learning), and high‐motivation projects and events” (gale et al., 2009b:11). promoting self-esteem, academic self-concept and confidence through rigorous and rewarding learning activities with high expectations positions students as capable and university as attainable (craven & marsh, 2004; craven et al., 2005; gale et al., 2009). daruganora’s holistic approach to student engagement aims at honouring and respecting indigenous cultures and their representations on campus and aims to coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 increase indigenous school students’ sense that they can belong at university. it is grounded on the conviction that the university is an environment which welcomes and values indigenous peoples and cultures. achieving this in an academically rigorous way using the rich resources available within the university, the three-hour daruganora learning and teaching program introduces students (both indigenous and non-indigenous) to some of the key issues in indigenous studies. the program does not give indigenous students ‘special’ treatment, but draws on their strengths, thus demonstrating to their peers and teachers the enrichment that inter-cultural exchange of knowledge can foster. daruganora prioritises the participation of indigenous students but it is essential that non-indigenous students also participate. gale et al. (2009:6) argue that a key element for outreach programs that aim to address inequality is that they engage beyond the isolated individual and involve the students’ peers by being cohort-based, thereby engaging whole classes of students rather than one group or another. it is vital for effective engagement in daruganora that both indigenous and nonindigenous students and their teachers participate together. the program’s theoretical framework allows for indigenous and non-indigenous knowledge to be equally acknowledged, respected and shared between students from diverse cultural backgrounds. in addition to the important need to recognise and incorporate the values that students (and teachers) from different backgrounds and situations bring to formal education, other key findings from gale et al.’s (2009:6) research which identified elements constituting successful outreach programs included “building confidence” through methods of “communication and information”, and “familiarisation/site experiences”. it is important to provide students with information about university life via a variety of modes, including the opportunity to visit campuses to gain an understanding of what it means to be a student in that context. thus, one of the program’s key goals was to support macquarie university to become a more welcoming and inclusive culture for under-represented students, increasing their sense of belonging and engagement through research-led outreach activities involving interaction with university staff, university students, the campus environment, and the university’s indigenous art collection. macquarie university undergraduate indigenous studies students have been a crucial element in the success of the program by acting as research facilitators and mentors. these indigenous and non-indigenous university students are essential for relating to school students on a more familiar and less intimidating student-to-student level. as well as modelling inclusive social behaviour, the assisting macquarie university students invariably provide advice and information about attending university to the visiting school students. it has been evident, from observing interactions during the program, that the established research activities are interspersed with discussions about degree opportunities, students’ ambitions, subject diversity, transport issues, extra-curricular activities, teachers and timetables. participation in daruganora evidently addresses some misconceptions about university and being a university student thereby alleviating some important anxieties and doubts. school students can start to familiarise themselves with the university and what it means to be a student in this context. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 the program daruganora is structured into three different activities. the first activity is a half-hour multi-media lecture which introduces aboriginal art and identity as areas of inquiry. students are shown a short film clip featuring the diversity of indigenous australian identity, a powerpoint presentation, and overheads with different examples of aboriginal artworks. program staff gradually introduce students to the lexicon for talking about and identifying different aspects and ideas within art. during the lecture students are introduced to the fundamental ideas of research and ethics. research is presented as something in which we are all engaged in our everyday lives. we all ask questions, seek opinions, gather information from various sources, find solutions by weighing up different options, and make informed choices. in this way research is demystified and made less intimidating for students. students are presented with two research questions they explore during the course of the program: • why is art important to aboriginal culture? • what does aboriginal art tell us about the identities of aboriginal peoples? the lecture is deliberately convened in a tiered lecture theatre with material delivered in multi-media to show-case the wide variety of learning modes available at university, but also to highlight to students that university is different to school and that it offers opportunities to learn in ways that may not be offered at school. the program always begins with a short video clip presented in the darkened theatre which is reminiscent of a cinema. this seems to calm the students who are inevitably excited and restless when they first enter the theatre. students are then involved in various inter-active learning and teaching strategies such as ‘think, pair, share’ where they are asked a question relating to a key concept from the video clip, given a few moments to think about the answer, share it with the person next to them, and then report it back to the whole group. the key concepts embedded in the video are ones which have been chosen because of their familiarity to indigenous students. they are thus advantaged in being able to know the answer to the question, and even if they do not voice their response at this early stage in the program, their confidence that they are on familiar intellectual territory is boosted. as it happens, often indigenous students are some of the first to speak at this stage of the program surprising their teachers and peers who have often reported never having heard particular individuals ever speak in class at school. following the lecture the students are divided into smaller groups, led by program staff, school teachers and, importantly, the undergraduate macquarie university indigenous studies students to whom we previously referred. the groups embark on a research adventure around the macquarie university campus which is richly endowed with indigenous signs, symbols and representations including sculpture, other art works, plants and animals. this stage of the program also includes a guided tour of coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 the artworks in the exhibition further exploring diverse artistic techniques, modes of expression, changing styles, and narratives. leading questions engage and encourage students to share their own interpretations of the art works, how they think they were made, what they convey to the viewer. hands start shooting up as questions are asked, with students eager to express their ideas. following the tour, students are divided into smaller groups (of 3 to 5 students), each group is given a question sheet and a specific artwork to probe. program staff ‘float’ between groups to facilitate discussion as required, but invariably students are not short of thoughts to discuss in answering the questions together. as everyone joins together for student groups to present their answers, the levels of animation and liveliness are in clear contrast to the hesitance shown in the opening lecture activities. students often express disappointment when time runs short and not all groups are able to contribute their answers. finally, the small groups join together in a large classroom to disseminate their learning amongst all participants. students are evenly divided among six tables, with a macquarie university undergraduate student as a ‘scribe’ at each. they brainstorm answers to the research questions, after which they all participate to disseminate ideas and demonstrate complex understandings. this activity is called a ‘world café’ (brown and issacs, 2005). it is a team-based, generative research dissemination strategy which visually produces an expression (on posters and a whiteboard) of the dialogue generated by the whole group of culturally diverse students. no matter how often we have witnessed this part of the program, it is always inspirational to us. without exception indigenous students have ‘stolen the show’. their voices dominate. their superior knowledge and visual literacy in relation to the material is evident and their non-indigenous peers and teachers are often silenced creating a reversal of the social dynamics often experienced by all participants at school. inter-cultural education according to the unesco guidelines on inter-cultural education (unesco 2007: 17), inter-culturality is a changing concept relating to the varied nature of society. it presupposes multiculturalism and is a result of dialogue, exchange and intercommunication between groups at the local, regional, national or international levels (ibid.). it is especially supported by education programs that encourage dialogue between students of different cultural backgrounds including religious, linguistic and belief systems (unesco, 2007:8). inter-cultural education, using the unesco framework, is set within a perspective as articulated in the universal declaration of human rights (1948, art. 26.2): education shall be directed to the full development of human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. it shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial and religious groups, and shall further the activities of the united nations for the maintenance of peace. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 unesco’s framework for inter-cultural education is one which involves multiperspective approaches to knowledge, learning and teaching, as well as recognition and respect for different views on religion, culture, language and the world in general. it is inclusive, but not absorbing or assimilating. set against the unesco framework is noam chomsky’s (2010) critique of western education arguing that education ‘kills culture’ for minority groups. unesco (1995:57) define the term ‘minority’ to mean: four different categories of groups: (1) autochthonous or indigenous peoples, whose line of descent can be traced to the aboriginal inhabitants of the country … (2) territorial minorities, groups with a long cultural tradition … (3) non-territorial minorities or nomads, groups with no particular attachment to a territory … (4) immigrants … education systems which can be characterised as ‘non inter-cultural’, that is, ones which are imposed on minority peoples by majority populations with different and dominant cultural ideologies, clearly can and do have devastating effects on the experience, self-esteem, success, retention and ultimately the ability of minority peoples to survive and thrive in the world. minority peoples, as chomsky (2010:23) argues, are often faced with the choice of relinquishing their cultures and participating as members of the dominant society, or relinquishing their education and resigning themselves to lives of poverty and non-participation in relation to dominant groups. unesco (2007:32) presents three principles of inter-cultural education which are intentionally embedded in the design of the daruganora program. they are: principle i: inter-cultural education respects the cultural identity of the learner through the provision of culturally appropriate and responsive quality education for all. principle ii: inter-cultural education provides every learner with the cultural knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to achieve active and full participation in society. principle iii: inter-cultural education provides all learners with cultural knowledge, attitudes and skills that enable them to contribute to respect, understanding and solidarity among individuals, ethnic, social, cultural and religious groups and nations. after considering various models of inter-culturality from various disciplines and areas of study including education (c.f. onate and gruber, 2008:373-381), business studies (c.f. johnson, lenartowicz, and apud, 2006:530-539) and international communications (c.f. fox, 1997:88-100; min-sun kim and hubbard, 2007), it was film theory that most excited the daruganora team with some new ideas and models for making the classroom an innovative, open and fun inter-cultural space and also provided us with some tried and true tools for thinking about ways in which more than one culture can be equally and respectfully represented in the same production. film theorist, laura marks (2000:1), in her book the skin of the film, identifies ‘inter-cultural cinema’ as “an international phenomenon, produced wherever people coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 of different cultural backgrounds live together in the power-inflected spaces of diaspora, (postor neo-) colonialism, and cultural apartheid.” ‘inter-cultural cinema’ is “characterised by experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge” and offers “a variety of ways of knowing and representing the world”. this ‘inter-cultural’ theory and practice informed the development of the daruganora program. by implementing marks’ (2000: 6-7) notion of ‘inter-cultural’, it: … means that a work is not the property of any single culture, but mediates in at least two directions. it accounts for the encounter between different cultural organisations of knowledge, which is one of the sources of … new forms of expression and new kinds of knowledge. the highly interactive, inter-cultural nature of daruganora and the relationships of colearning that it fosters invite students to critically reflect on socially constructed ‘reality’ and be open to expressing and listening to different interpretations and dissonant voices. supporting a diversity of understandings and knowledges in intercultural classrooms works against the educational homogenisation and standardisation that chomsky (2010) argues pervades western education. a culmination of thoughts and ideas over the period of the viewing time gathers momentum which creates an ideal space for interaction and exchange as participants move through the art exhibition and into the world café. stories that define identity and cultures begin to emerge throughout the program, creating inter-cultural spaces where all participants can respectfully exchange ideas, views and opinions. the learning and teaching approach used in the daruganora program was framed to create a space that might respectfully include the cultural backgrounds of all students and teachers so that they might negotiate understandings about each other and learn together. inter-cultural representations depend on multiple cultures participating in a single representation, so for daruganora to be successful, it is crucial to have indigenous and non-indigenous students engaging together. intricate power relations are always operating in processes of exchange, the formation of knowledges and the construction of ‘truth’. the term ‘inter-cultural’ also faces the problem that it could be interpreted as being a benign neutralisation of political struggles. as it is played out during the daruganora program, and as marks theorises it, ‘inter-culturality’ can involve a dynamic shift in power relations between the dominant cultural group and the minority group which acknowledges that power and control are contextual and are never static. inter-cultural interfaces expose and revalue the interactive and creative effects of multi-vocal discourses as fundamental to cultural innovation (crinson, 2006). in a supported learning environment students are enabled to effectively communicate their knowledge, sharing their ideas and stories. students become the teachers and teachers become co-learners. students generate their own learning and disseminate it to each other. the ‘world café’ provides a practical way for the school students to demonstrate their abilities to reflect on and disseminate their research findings. all who participate in the daruganora project become part of the group of learners, learning from each other, to increase their knowledge and understandings of each other as well as themselves to challenge previously-held views. this general approach coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 of privileging learning over teaching, becoming co-learners with our students and recognising the knowledge and often superior visual literacy of indigenous students has often meant that teachers have seen their students in a totally new light. students express interesting and often astounding insights, thoughts, deep reflections, and share these with the group. an attentiveness to and respect for diversity, an openness to dialogue, a willingness to learn from others, and recognition of the enhancement that diverse groups of people bring to the learning experience results in successful and meaningful inter-cultural relations (deifelt, 2007). a transformative exhibition aboriginal art is the conceptual focus of the program and the means through which daruganora engages students in thinking about important issues including indigenous identity, diversity, culture, belonging and respect. as we mentioned in the introduction to this article, to successfully address and creatively engage students with these topics, an indigenous art exhibition was specifically designed, curated and installed. the expertise of daruganora team members and macquarie university’s senior art curator were utilised to develop the permanent art display. works in the exhibition were specifically selected from the university’s extensive collection to illuminate the diversity of indigenous cultures and identities. according to hoopergreenhill (1999a:4), advancements in museum practice have meant re-evaluations of their learning and teaching role, whereby: [c]urrent emphasis within museums on access, on public value and on audience consultation, offer opportunities to work to address longestablished relations of advantage and disadvantage, to enable new voices to be heard, and critically to review existing historical (and other) narratives. the art exhibition for daruganora steered away from the traditional gallery environment and was instead installed within a faculty building placing the exhibition in the halls of an everyday learning and teaching building. seating areas, stairwells, classrooms, offices, a café, students and staff moving around the campus create a busy, dynamic and vibrant setting for the art. the art installation was curated to transform the space so that the art experience is not viewed as a separate entity, but becomes integral to our daily working and learning spaces and becomes a space which “emphasises the nexus between art, space, place and people” (everett et al., 2010:73-74). conversations introduced during daruganora stimulate interest, demonstrate relevance and invite the students to use existing information and experiences. lord (2007:17) argues that, “a successful museum exhibition is one that offers a transformative learning experience, sparking a new interest or appreciation that was not there before”. the innovative and creative design of the art exhibition for the daruganora program additionally incorporated this heightened interest and appreciation into the life of the university. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 an exhibition tour led by a guide assists students in understanding and interpreting the various meanings of the works. in examining and discussing styles, techniques and associated stories, including biographical stories of indigenous students themselves in relation to the art, they illustrate views of life and conceptions of the works. students are not left to flounder with a bewildering array of starting points for contemplating the ‘meaning’ of the artworks, but are guided by questions and ideas for group analysis as well as by insights and evaluations by indigenous students which help to direct the inquiry process and build confidence. all the images (including sculptures and canvases, as well as reproduced artwork shown through digital media) are incorporated into a strategy for engagement, thus helping to facilitate a space for inter-cultural dialogue and the generation of stories about the diversity of indigenous peoples. images are a catalyst for discussions and fun. exploding misconceptions daruganora is designed to challenge the category of ‘aboriginal’ and understandings about who aboriginal people are, where they come from and how they represent themselves (as opposed to how they are represented by non-indigenous people). the dominant australian discourse continues to perpetuate a unified aboriginal culture and makes judgments about what is and is not ‘authentic’. little consideration is given to varied and contrary ways of being indigenous and relating to the category of ‘aboriginal’ (cowlishaw, 2008). wanda deifelt (2007:116) discusses gilles deleuze’s critique on … the tendency, particularly in western philosophy, to prioritise unity over multiplicity (the one over the many) and sameness over difference. the search for the abstract “essences” of things falsifies the nature of experience, which consists of multiplicities rather than unities. visiting macquarie university in the middle of sydney a major urban centre and seeing indigenous art from all over the country and from local darug people provides students with the tools with which they can challenge their own understandings and explode misconceptions about indigenous culture and identity. expressing and demonstrating the diversity of indigenous peoples via indigenous art—itself a selfexpression of indigenous identity—challenges the belief that aboriginal peoples and indigeneity are a single category. the non-indigenous students’ openness and receptiveness to the artworks and to their indigenous peers’ interpretations of the artworks allow them to revise conceptions and misconceptions about aboriginal peoples and cultures. it also enables indigenous students to re-evaluate their own relationships with knowledge, learning and institutions and to reassess their sense of belonging in places of learning. students are also introduced to the notion that all artworks, and all aboriginal artworks, in some way and to different degrees of explicitness, make political, social and cultural statements. in the contemporary australian context all aboriginal artwork is necessarily highly politicised because it makes explicit claims to land, belonging, identity and history. as coleman (2009:2) argues: coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 not only does the aboriginal arts movement challenge the legitimacy of australia’s sovereignty through its legal claim to and spiritual connection with the land, but it challenges broader historical and art historical myths – the inevitability of the demise of aboriginal cultures, and artistic myths about the ‘universality’ of art. the daruganora program demonstrates and analyses the ways in which aboriginal art is created using different materials, for different purposes, with different intentions, in different locations, and across different time periods. the realisation of these dynamics unsettle participants’ understandings about categories of ‘indigenous’, as well as ‘non-indigenous’, sameness and otherness, ‘us’ and ‘them’. in dominant australian discourse indigenous and non-indigenous are habitually presented as two internally homogenous and bounded identities. this represents a common perception of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples as clearly divided groups with clearly different experiences. we do need to acknowledge the divide that many individuals experience due to past violence and continued inequality and discrimination, but we can simultaneously consider that “the lives of many of us are enmeshed in tangled webs of interconnection” (rose, 2004:185). this notion of inter-connectedness undermines the division that has become normalised in everyday language and discourses with categories of ‘our’ (non-indigenous) own devising, including traditional and modern, rural and urban, full-blood and half-caste (read, 1999). these dichotomies serve to minimise the ways in which we are connected, interact together, and have mutual commitments and obligations. by challenging the singular concept of ‘aboriginal’ and problematising the entire notion of ‘difference’, daruganora implicitly highlights for students the need to reflect on the category of ‘non-indigenous’. as deifelt (2007:114-115) articulates: ultimately, cultural awareness is not simply about mapping differences and similarities among ethical actors, but it also raises consciousness about our own cultural location. challenging the existence of categories, the processes of categorisation, and the false organisation of people into mutually exclusive groups is vital to encourage students to re-formulate understandings of identity and culture. by asking indigenous and nonindigenous students to reflect on their own lives and their own experiences assists them to identify the ‘un-truths’ in these constructions and enhances respectful intercultural interaction. conclusion the ‘shared space’ of inter-cultural interaction and learning which takes place during daruganora is facilitated through images that engage students’ imaginations, encourage dissonant voices and generate narratives. deeper understandings about the diverse perspectives and practices of aboriginal cultures and identities facilitate more coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 than mere ‘tolerance of the other’, they involve and inform new modes of expression and respectful exchanges. challenging understandings that cultures are tightly bounded and homogenous groups with one social ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ allows for the incorporation of alternative stories and experiences, new possibilities for reflexivity, and opportunities for co-learning. this approach of encouraging inter-cultural engagement in a creative learning atmosphere actively challenges the smothering of culturally diverse ways of learning and knowing within western education. film theory (intercultural cinema) and museum practice have been valuable in informing the design of daruganora. inter-cultural engagement is always inflected with different levels of power. daruganora promotes interpretation, imagination and creativity that is vital in breaking down barriers and forming new possibilities for respectful inter-cultural relations. i we acknowledge the term ‘low socio-economic’ is problematic. however we employ it here with the awareness that there is, as yet, no commonly-accepted alternative and it therefore remains the most accessible term for readers to engage with the topics and situation it implies. recommendation 3 in the bradley et al. (2008) review of australian higher education states: “that the australian government commission work on the measurement of the socio-economic status of students in higher education with a view to moving from the current postcode methodology to one based on the individual circumstances of each student.”(xvii). ii it is important to note that indigenous peoples are highly represented in ‘low socioeconomic’ groups. iii bradley et al. (2008:xiv) recommended a re-allocation of institutional funding to increase that “directed to the support of outreach activities in communities with poor higher education participation rates.” iv gale et al. (2009b) developed a design and evaluation matrix for outreach (demo) to support universities in the creation and implementation of interventions by identifying key characteristics, strategies and equity perspectives. references bradley, d., p. noonan, h. nugent, & b. scales. 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(2008) submission to the review of australian higher education, australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations. this paper can also be accessed via: http://www.deewr.gov.au/indigenous/highereducation/programs/iheac/pages/hom e.aspx#sub2 johnson, james p., tomasz lenartowicz, & salvador apud (2006). cross-cultural competence in international business: toward a definition and a model, journal of international business studies, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 525-543. kerdchoochuen, j (2010). ‘dialectical tensions in intercultural classrooms: when differences meet.’ conference proceedings iadis international conference on international higher education. www.iadisportal.org/silectical tensions in intercultural classrooms.htm. lecouteur, amanda and martha augoustinos. (2001) ‘apologising to the stolen generations: argument, rhetoric, and identity in public reasoning’, in australian psychologist, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 51-61. lord, barry. (2007) ‘what is museum-based learning?’ in barry lord (ed.) the manual of museum learning, altamira press, lanham:usa, pp. 13-20. marks, laura. (2000) the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses, durham and london: duke university press. min-sun kim & amy s. ebesu hubbard (2007). intercultural communication in the global village: how to understand ‘‘the other’’, journal of intercultural communication research, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 223–235. onate, c.m. and gruber, r.s (2008). ‘access to education and equity in plural societies’ in intercultural education vol. 19 issue 5, pp 373-381. read, peter. (1999) a rape of the soul so profound: the return of the stolen generations, st leonards, n.s.w.: allen & unwin. . http://www.deewr.gov.au/indigenous/highereducation/programs/iheac/pages/home.aspx#sub2 http://www.deewr.gov.au/indigenous/highereducation/programs/iheac/pages/home.aspx#sub2 http://www.iadisportal.org/silectical coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 rose, deborah bird. (2004) reports from a wild country: ethics for decolonisation, sydney: university of new south wales press. unesco convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions (2005), article 8. unesco (1995). our creative diversity: report of the world commission on culture and development, p.57. universal declaration of human rights (1948). article 26.2. kristina everett worked many years as an anthropologist specialising in indigenous studies kristina, and now focuses on aspects of education which she believes can make significant impacts on global inter-cultural relations more broadly. kristina’s background in learning and teaching in australian and overseas universities include curriculum renewal, developing and reviewing assessment policy, engaging in learning and teaching research around research led assessment, and assessment of group and team work. she also contributes to a large australian learning and teaching council funded project developing a standards framework for sessional staff. kristina is passionate about the possibilities of developing creative, interesting, ethical and enjoyable inter-cultural programs which enrich the learning experiences of students and teachers alike. (australian catholic university, australia, kristina.everett@acu.edu.au) eloise hummell is a current phd candidate in the department of sociology, macquarie university. graduating from macquarie university in 2008 with a social science degree and honours in indigenous studies, eloise has since enjoyed working as a research assistant on a number of different projects. these projects have ranged from recording and presenting alternate expressions of aboriginal history, enhancing intercultural education, and exploring students’ perceptions on the importance of outdoor spaces for learning. eloise worked as a member of the daruganora project team for almost 2 years. as a phd candidate, her project seeks to investigate emerging cultural relations and ethnic formation of catalan identity within catalonia. comparing this catalan case-study with some other recent cases from the literature will inform a broader analysis of ethnicity and identity formation within modern nation states. eloise’s interests include cultural minorities, power and politics, and documentary. (macquarie university, sydney, australia, eloise.hummell@students.mq.edu.au) mailto:kristina.everett@acu.edu.au mailto:eloise.hummell@students.mq.edu.au microsoft word emilybullock19.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 227 snapshots from a west coast death trip 1 emily bullock copyright©2013 emily bullock. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: tasmania’s west coast carries the memory of multiple colonial traumas – traumas associated with the violence and uprooting of an indigenous population and the punishment of convicts on the carceral sarah island in macquarie harbour. this paper performs a ‘death trip’ through the west coast, a term borrowed from michael lesy’s classic country noir book, wisconsin death trip, providing a psychogeographic tour through the material traces of what peter read calls ‘lost places’. presenting an eclectic and fragmented collection of quotations, images, and impressions recorded of these places so as to communicate something of their broken texture, this paper also charts the multitude of affective encounters with these bad and lost places and traumatised ecologies. by tracking, in kathleen stewart’s words, ‘the traces of impacts’, this paper demonstrates not only the powerful material form that traumatic pasts take but also their displaced effects in a marginalised region which is continually overlooked in mainstream historical narratives. *** strange that these places so devastated by history retain the marks and memories of the past … strange how things seem to proliferate and amass themselves in the margins. – kathleen stewart tasmania’s west coast carries the memory of multiple colonial traumas – traumas associated with the violence and uprooting of an indigenous population and the punishment of convicts on the carceral sarah island in macquarie harbour. the mining ventures that followed from the 1880s were seemingly a path out of the murk of colonialism, a forgetting of the past in its modern industrialism. but this linear trajectory doesn’t follow; on the west coast, a tract of land remembers and repeats and endures badness, releasing it, nervously, in fits and starts. this rough country constitutes one of the state’s most convincing ‘badlands’. like ross gibson’s account of the stretch of land in southern queensland, 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacedness-images.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 228 tasmania’s west coast is ‘an immense, historical crime scene’, where the clues to a ravaged history everywhere continue to disturb the present. in this place, this ‘aftermath culture’, the effects of traumatic pasts are ongoing. it is in the encounter with the derelict country grotesquely disfigured by mining, with places that are subject to the full, violent forces of history, that this badness is most palpable. plundered for its natural wealth, this desolate, semi-evacuated region is defined by topographies of strangeness forged through industrialism. here, narratives and memories of furious booms and dismal busts, of violence, of treachery and crime – materialise in, cling to and resonate through a desolate and habitually wet country. in every sense a moving terrain, the blighted region shifts with the cadences of roving populations of itinerant workers, of fugitives running from the law, of landscapes of ruin – all of which pull on, trigger, and mobilise dense networks of affects. *** driving the notoriously winding lyell highway to the west coast from hobart, my mobile phone reception drops out and the car radio searches for a frequency. it picks up a station broadcasting in a foreign language, and this glossolalia soundtracks my journey through a landscape that becomes increasingly desolate. the wilderness landscape starts to peter out to dry moon rock as the highway passes by the remains of the subsidiary mining towns of gormanston and linda, where only a few derelict houses remain, and continues up mount lyell. the spectacular devastation of queenstown’s wasted ecology is just around the corner. then, after more twists and turns, there is zeehan, its streets silent and empty. amidst the abandoned buildings that line the main street here, one houses ghostly mannequins made up in dated attire, making it difficult to ascertain whether it’s a museum of dead styles or another charity clothes shop which would add to the town’s strange surplus of op-shops displaying colourful knitted jumpers and stuffed toys. then, passing through the back streets where front yards resemble backyards – littered with empty inflatable pools at the end of summer – you get the feeling that you’re ‘somewhere else’. and in this open valley, the satellite dishes and aerials that attach themselves to every house somehow appear more prominent, and more prodigious, acting as portentous bowls serving up encounters with the otherworldly. tasmania’s west presents a disquieting picture, with its abundance of decrepit drive-by places. once the pioneering province of mining and hydro development in the midst of an intractable wilderness, it is now crowded with ghost towns and graveyards, and you’re left with a sense of abiding emptiness. for me, as for many tasmanians, the west is a part of the state rarely visited, ghosted, as it is, by the sunny east coast. as a child, family holidays were almost always spent on the east coast, and perhaps because of this i always had a hankering for the west. popularly cast as a weird aberration, the west sits in contrast to the calm, pastoral scenes in most of the remainder of the state, with its wild, rugged terrain and relentless harsh weather, which is increasingly packaged for tourists as ‘pure wilderness’. but this touristic experience is a strange one, for in order to get to those places deemed coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 229 ‘pure’, one must pass through at least one of the many of the west’s derelict mining towns, places contaminated with and corrupted by the wastes of history. known locally and colloquially as the ‘wild west’, the west is tasmania’s frontier territory. the tract of land west of the central highlands carries the memory of colonial traumas – traumas associated with the violence and uprooting of an indigenous population and the punishment of convicts on the carceral sarah island in macquarie harbour. the mining ventures that followed from the 1880s were seemingly a path out of the murk of colonialism, a forgetting of the past in its modern industrialism. but this linear trajectory doesn’t follow; in the west, a tract of land remembers and repeats and endures badness, releasing it, nervously, in fits and starts. the rough country of tasmania’s west constitutes the state’s most convincing render of what the writer ross gibson calls ‘badlands’ in his discussion of southern queensland in his seven versions of an australian badland. gibson says badlands are disturbing places made by imaginations. even a fleeting glimpse from the car window seems to yield the sense of this place being an immense, historical crime scene.1 this is a place where the effects of the past are ongoing. this is a place where the clues to a ravaged history everywhere continue to disturb the present. it is in the encounter with this derelict country grotesquely disfigured by mining, with places that are subject to the full, violent forces of history, that this badness is most palpable. plundered for its natural wealth, this desolate, semi-evacuated region is defined by topographies of strangeness forged through industrialism. here, narratives and memories of furious booms and dismal busts, of violence, of treachery and crime – materialise in, cling to and resonate through a desolate and habitually wet country. in every sense this is a moving terrain: the blighted region shifts with the cadences of roving populations of itinerant workers, of fugitives running from the law, of landscapes of ruin. this is more than a place, if what is meant by that is a stable piece of land through which we form an attachment to; the west coast would seem to be an arrangement of scenes and events – temporalities – which everywhere evidence the effects of currents of disruption and displacement – from its forceful weather to its chronic poverty, unemployment and population loss, poor health and addiction, its drugs, alcohol, and other illegal vices. it is a place which is ‘got down’, as kathleen stewart would say, a tract of ‘land gone wrong’ as ross gibson would say.2 the impacts of histories are everywhere apparent in this place – in the textures of mining houses lined up row upon row, or the landscapes pock-marked by mines since abandoned – the bruised skin of this place demands to be read in all its coarseness. things remain in this place. here, rumours and half-said histories come to stick together in clumps and cling to the place so you can’t make out one from the other. here, death appears to brim with a kind of magic, to generate immense forces of atmosphere. this piece performs a ‘death trip’ through the west coast – a term borrowed from michael lesy’s classic country noir book, wisconsin death trip – providing a psychogeographic tour through the material traces of what peter read calls ‘lost places’3. presenting an eclectic and fragmented collection of quotations, images, and impressions recorded of these coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 230 places so as to communicate something of their broken texture, this piece also charts the multitude of affective encounters with these bad, lost places and traumatised ecologies4. by tracking, in kathleen stewart’s words, ‘the traces of impacts,’5 this paper demonstrates not only the powerful material form that traumatic pasts take but also their displaced effects in a marginalised region which is continually overlooked in mainstream historical narratives. *** rumours i am about half way to the west coast when, on the highway just out of ouse, a sign announces black bob’s creek. from the lyell highway, a two-lane road slashing through dark wilderness and hence deemed worthy of an ex-premier’s name, i see a black vertical board hut by a creek. but it’s gone in a flash; drive-by disappearance. the image remains with me though, like a bruise. here, small things generate big stories. here is a pocket of rumours. here are stories endlessly repeated, circulating. legendary tasmanian clans, strange families eking out secluded lives on the back roads of geography and time. freakish, two-headed descendants of convicts, lost miners, products of inbreeding, intimate encounters with animals: inheritors of ‘bad blood’ and myth. threshold to the west. sedan it is these endlessly winding roads that make up my childhood memory of the west coast. driving the dizzying 99 curves of blacktop over mountain passes (‘1, 2, 3…’) round blind corners, made for restless, skewed perspectives, a spiralling out of control, sickness. the stuff of memory: a truck hurtling round a corner, brazenly taking over the road, and a trail of black-clad bikies following behind our family sedan as i waved at them, for thrills, out our car’s back window. (they shook their fearsome fists, overtook us, and later pissed on the roadside against the guardrail.) effervescence the prospector – pioneer of the wildest wastes – is still pushing on…the rough places he makes smooth, and into the dismal dens he lets light, till the beaten demons of the mine fly affrighted and yield him their long-guarded treasures. – 1890 report on the state of the mining industry on the west coast. there is an effervescent throb of life which rouses the blood…you feel you are in at the birth of a district or town and you wonder how it will grow. everyone assures you that this is the coming district of the mining field until you really begin to feel and think it must be so. – rev. fg copeland, twenty-eight articles on life on the west coast, 1899-1901. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 231 anson bros., frank long, pioneer of zeehan silver fields, 18 – (image courtesy of allport library and museum of fine arts, tasmanian archive and heritage office) empire the empire hotel in the mining town of queenstown is a tasmanian icon. built in 1901 it dates back to the wealth of the mining era at the turn of the 20th century….it is the grand old lady of the west coast and has a prominent facade in the town streetscape. inside is a national trust listed staircase made from tasmanian blackwood. the raw timber was shipped to england, carved and sent back to queenstown where it has enjoyed a rich history and is admired by all. – http://www.view.com.au/empirehotel ros has her back to me as she types out the day’s dinner specials on an old computer behind the reception counter. as i wait, i read the plaque by the staircase that gives brief details of the staircase’s distinguished journey across the world. ros hears me, swings around, is startled by my presence. she says the staircase was built to impress mining investors stepping off the train back in the town’s hey-day. as i ascend the dark carpeted staircase, room key in hand, a passing tourist whispers that it’s like the hotel in the shining. every day of my stay i traipse these stairs, to-ing and fro-ing this restless, haunted space between empire and metropole, hotel and town, to the sour scents of roast meat and beer. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 232 evacuations looking for renison bell: on the highway outside zeehan, a sign for metals x up ahead on the left, and i realise i must have passed the old town. u-turn, drive back, i’m scouring roadsides for signs. i spot a plaque on the right, pull over to a forest of sassafrass growing out from the remains of a hotel. out of the car, i read the plaque, but feel nothing but my own footsteps cushioned by grass tumuli grown over glass bottles and rubble. fuzz driving over to gormanston, the radio drops out to crackle and fuzz. the hills are strange, bald – pinks, purples, and greys altogether, rough with alien white rocks and giant boulders. i take a right off the highway. game rabbits bound among the ruins. grid-iron streets hold fragments of stuff, a mess of detail. houses of rusted corrugated tin, peeling paint, built across hollows amidst rubble. in a roadside gully, a dumped mass of broken things – i can’t make out what – and the skeleton of a ute, insides torn out. i walk up main street to the top of a hill where a basketball court overlooks the town, ruined, without hoops, poles drooping like the weeds surrounding it. beyond, a lone caravan floats amidst a backdrop of a dull, purple hill. it recalls the weirdly desolate wisconsin landscapes in herzog’s stroszek, and i expect the absurd twinkling of its accompanying soundtrack. down the road, a suburban styled house of orange brick – glamour of the town – is boarded up with its rafters exposed, as if from a violent storm, owners uprooted and gone. a revving motor sounds across the valley and an old red datsun tears down the hill, thuds of a sub-woofer, heading for queenstown. this was a place, said the tasmanian mail in 1896, of a ‘substantial and permanent appearance’. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 233 pining a roadside junction triggers a flashback: a visit to my aunt and uncle who lived for a time in a caravan up in the bush behind gormanston, with a contract to gather up fallen huon pine. so much fuss was made of huon pine in my childhood – its longevity, rarity, hardiness, ancientness, and most of all, its great monetary value – that i thought of it as a magical material. that our family was connected to this rich wood, i thought, meant that we were somehow touched by fame. but it was a dismal encampment they lived in, a lonely caravan in a clearing of wet scrub, and their revulsion toward it was equal to mine. after a year or so, my uncle’s back gave out and he joined the growing west coast trade in drugs. the marriage broke up and they scattered throughout the state. trips a religious maniac (by telegraph) (from our own correspondent) hobart, friday alfred luckstone, a boatmaker, appeared before the police court to-day with a cross painted on his forehead. he was sent to new norfolk, as he was suffering from religious mania. – the mount lyell standard, 13 november, 1897. outside the iga in queenstown, amongst ads for rental properties, ironing services, and washing machines and dogs for sale, is a newspaper clipping from five years earlier. a man from new south wales is missing, his mum says he could be on a fugue. he loved rafting in the wilderness, she says. refuge for the mad and the missing. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 234 shaken if i had two properties, and one was in linda and one was in hell and i decided to live in one, it wouldn’t be linda! – king o’malley, federal politician, circa 1897, paraphrasing us general philip henry sheridan’s celebrated comment in 1866, ‘if i owned texas and hell, i would rent texas and live in hell.’ blasting explosives, used to break up the material in the open cuts, often shook the town…when we had a north west wind, which blew down between the two mountains … it seemed to make the sound of the shots louder. – edward john [‘rocky’] wedd, linda: ghost town of mt. lyell. the shell of linda’s royal hotel looms over the highway. a decaying edifice of grey concrete, it is linda’s haunting icon, barren and vacant like the hills around it. over the road, the orange light of the telstra phone box pulsates with the luminous promise of connection. the town, it seems, never lived up to its pretty, feminine name since being established as a railway terminus and miners’ settlement for the now-redundant north mount lyell co; in its few short years, it became notorious for its excessively ribald residents: rough boxers and hard drinkers. so much so that, in 1920, linda received a final blow: a rehousing program implemented by an image-conscious manager of mt lyell mining and railway co. shifted the residents to gormanston. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 235 fire there are concerns a fire that burned about 30 hectares of bushland on tasmania's west coast yesterday may have been deliberately lit…”there has been a pattern of deliberate fires being lit on the west coast in the last few years …” – ‘queenstown fire “suspicious”’, abc radio, 3 december, 2007. dundas dundas. – this forsaken township is about 5 miles from zeehan, with which it is connected by rail and road. it had a population of 1,080 in 1891, but has gradually declined to a couple of families and a few of the ancients who always seem to linger about decayed mining camps. – charles whitham, western tasmania: a land of riches and beauty, 1924. restlessness strange that these rovers settle down in the most outlandish spots! many a similar one have i met in the wilds. johnny had been in every continent as a sailor before the mast, had traversed the trackless wilds of western tasmania in quest of gold and silver and tin, roystered in the hectic mining towns of the heyday of the coast … he had been poor and rich and poor again. – et emmett, tasmania by road and track, 1952. hallucination i can’t sleep. the walls are banging with bodies fucking on the other side. it lasts for days. the chamber maid leaves clean towels outside their door every morning. driven to insomnia, i wonder at the wildness of it. i conjure scenarios, scenes, actors, celluloid fantasies, expecting one of mrs miller’s jezebels to emerge from the room for towels. boundaries pierced to thresholds. in their hammering, badness engulfs me: rhythmic gunshots that pierce skin and walls, sounding out death in heavy blows. in this frontier territory, badness is etched into walls, streets, lands, beds. visions are blurred, hallucinogenic, the wicked after-life of years of drinking ‘sassy tea’ – brewed sassafrass leaf, highs bigger than ecstasy. and the ecstasies of stories – told, remembered, lived, fabled, fibbed, bold and bolder. a storied place made bold then bitter, then more bold to cover over bitterness. but from the start, afflicted by the mania of booms and busts, wild mood swings of people ‘there’, the far away vendors; and ‘here’, the ecstasy of violence and treachery lived out in filthy encampments. a wild region turned desperate; the grafting of great western scenes to this soppy ground didn’t hold right. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 236 phlem wheezing coughs sound through the robert sticht memorial library, queenstown’s public library. elderly men, come to read the daily paper, bark with bronchial catarrh and eye me, surrounded by books. axe a man who stabbed another man with a 41 centimetre knife has been found guilty of murder. after deliberating for 15 hours, the jury in the burnie criminal court found david john wright murdered nigel david bigwood at zeehan last year. wright maintained he killed mr bigwood in self-defence after he came to his home with an axe. wright will be sentenced in two weeks. – ‘jury finds man guilty of zeehan stabbing murder’, abc radio, 13 may, 2005. firewood crotty was abandoned before it boomed. when the two rival mines at mount lyell amalgamated, smelting was transferred from crotty to queenstown, and the population followed. houses were chopped down for firewood. the hotel was deserted before it sold a pint of beer and then submerged by the hydro dam, lake burbury. enjoy just below the highway at gormanston, down in a gully, is what looks to be a dismal clay football ground, and a faded sign gestures to a miniature mountain railway a portable home, only partly visible from the road, reveals itself to house a derelict tourist venture. on its corrugated tin shell is painted amateur scenes of mountains and the sea, and to the side, in block capitals, a rippling check out inside coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 237 giant truck tyres painted white, weeds sprouting through, surround the place. by the entrance is an introductory welcome blurb written directly on the wall in red marker pen unsteadily along ruled lines – seemingly the efforts of a child. in the latter years of the 19th century, the west coast of tasmania was remote, rugged, had dense vegetation and very inhospitable climate. the mount lyell copper mine was formed in 1892 after a decade of scratchings along the king river, lynch’s diggings, and the linda valley. large deposits were discovered neccessitating a huge problem to overcome. a transport system welcome. please close this door behind you to keep the warm in on chilly days. remember admission is only $2 per person. please enjoy yourselves. devastation strong winds on tasmania's west coast overnight have ripped the roofs off several buildings. a side wall and the roof of the old rsl club at gormanston collapsed. the roof of a house at queenstown was also ripped coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 238 off. – roofs lost as winds whip west coast’ abc radio, 28 december, 2005. in the galley museum, queenstown, a series of snapshots of devastation, 1918: the wall of a house ripped off by a ‘tornado’, with the bedroom inside exposed, the owner poses, staid, by a bedpost against printed floral wallpaper; two men replacing the tin roof on a nurse robert’s house; a mr b bird frozen in the doorway of his butchery, a heap of scrap metal at his feet. these, are the freezes of a trembling, traumatised place, the arrest of the sheer flow of time in a lyrical image. down the street, something similar. the frontage ripped from a transportable house, revealing a wallpaper of yellow vertical stripes, insides exposed like a flimsy stage set. but perhaps it is on its way to somewhere else, such is the unsettling and strangely standard lightness of these towns – their ceaseless movement and recycling. places where memories, desires, dreams, sadness are unlocked, unleashed, unhoused. unknown photographer, 'damaged by tornado', queenstown, 1918 (image courtesy of the galley museum) *** these are the things that constitute the broken and lumpy cultural life of this place that clings to the under-side of the world. at the edge of things, stuff gathers up and stories thicken. in the west, the full force of history is apprehended not directly, but is gathered only through its displaced effects, as history appears to heap up, as walter benjamin once said, ‘wreckage upon wreckage’.6 from the rubbish dump of history, this place is scavenged and its skin – however fragile – is illuminated. *** coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 239 acknowledgements the author thanks caitlin sutton, tasmanian archive and heritage office, for permission to reproduce the image of frank long, and margaret deacon, the galley museum, queenstown, for permission to reproduce the black and while image of the tornado damaged house. emily bullock emily bullock’s phd thesis (macquarie, 2009) examined the cultural poetics of contemporary tasmania. her creative non-fiction studies the poetic intertwinings of culture and place and has been published in cultural studies review, island, and studies in australasian cinema. (school of english, journalism and european languages, university of tasmania, australia. email: emilyjbullock@gmail.com) 1 ross gibson, seven versions of an australian badland, st lucia:  uqp, 2002. p. 14-15 2 kathleen stewart, a space on the side of the road: cultural poetics in an “other” america, princeton:   princeton up, 1996. p. 11. 3 peter read, returning to nothing: the meaning of lost places. melbourne: cambridge, 1996. 4 all the photographs are by emily bullock, except where their source is acknowledged. 5 kathleen stewart, a space on the side of the road: cultural poetics in an “other” america, princeton:   princeton up, 1996. p. 56. 6 walter benjamin, illuminations.  trans. harry zohn.  new york:  schocken, 1968. p. 259. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 177 kim scott’s fiction within western australian life-writing: voicing the violence of removal and displacement cornelis martin renes abstract. it is nowadays evident that the west’s civilising, eugenic zeal have had a devastating impact on all aspects of the indigenous-australian community tissue, not least the lasting trauma of the stolen generations. the latter was the result of the institutionalisation, adoption, fostering, virtual slavery and sexual abuse of thousands of mixed-descent children, who were separated at great physical and emotional distances from their indigenous kin, often never to see them again. the object of state and federal policies of removal and mainstream absorption and assimilation between 1930 and 1970, these lost children only saw their plight officially recognised in 1997, when the bringing them home report was published by the federal government. the victims of forced separation and migration, they have suffered serious trans-generational problems of adaptation and alienation in australian society, which have been not only documented from the outside in the aforementioned report but also given shape from the inside of and to indigenous-australian literature over the last three decades. the following addresses four indigenous western-australian writers within the context of the stolen generations, and deals particularly with the semi-biographical fiction by the nyoongar author kim scott, which shows how a very liminal hybrid identity can be firmly written in place yet. un-writing past policies of physical and ‘epistemic’ violence on the indigenous australian population, his fiction addresses a way of approaching australianness from an indigenous perspective as inclusive, embracing transculturality within the nation-space. key words: stolen generations; absorption; assimilation; eugenics; indigenous literature; life-writing; kim scott; trauma; displacement; identity formation. 1. the stolen generations aboriginal child removal has played a crucial role in the mainstream management of australian indigeneity, taking the indigenous diaspora to its furthest extremes. it formalised the frontier practice of indigenous child abduction for exploitative purposes into the copyright©2013 cornelis matin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 178 cornerstone of genocidal practices against the aboriginal ‘race’. the direct and crossgenerational trauma caused by dispossession and dislocation, resulting in a drastic reduction of absolute aboriginal numbers, loss of kinship structures and detribalisation is emblematically reflected in the plight of the stolen generations, laid bare in the 1997 bringing them home report. this large population of mixed descent formed the core of governmental action in the institutional effort to exterminate the aboriginal community by their biological absorption and social assimilation into the white mainstream between 1930 and 1970 (haebich 2000: 272). absorption into the white race through removal, fostering, adoption and interracial marriage revealed itself as a breeding-out policy in which mission reserves, children’s homes and white families all played their role. up until the 1970s, australian states had the exclusive power to legislate in aboriginal affairs. western australia applied policies of biological absorption, social assimilation and segregation to manage its aboriginal population, nominally but not proportionally one of the largest of all states—a total of 24,000 so-called ‘full-bloods’ and a 1,000 ‘half-castes’ only made up only 1% of the state’s overall population in the early 20 th century (haebich 2000: 161-2). as of 1905 (aborigines act 1905), western australian legislation gave the state almost absolute powers in child removal,these the notorious western-australian chief protector of the aborigines, a. o. neville, active between 1915 and 1940, used to implant a system of institutional child removal to special reserve locations at great distances from children’s families. after wwii, the new policy of social assimilation failed to produce the westernised aboriginal family unit due to continued under-funding and lack of political commitment. ongoing administrative control curbed indigenous initiative, unemployment soared, race barriers were kept in place, and the destruction of kinship and cultural networks through child removal etc. continued (haebich 2000: 420) and arguably still inform mainstream policy. while much restrictive and punitive western-australian legislation was repealed in the third quarter of the 20 th century (native welfare act 1954 and 1963), the state powers to intervene families considered of aboriginal descent were retained (haebich 2000: 523-7). 2. western-australian life-writing indigenous australian literature has both reflected on and evolved from the trauma of separation and removal, describing an acute sense of physical and emotional displacement, but also resilience in giving voice to this experience. an important means of articulating the silenced life experience of the stolen generations, it voices an ongoing struggle against assimilative policies and their effect on identity formation. as michelle grossman writes, it re-interprets the western autobiography as indigenous life-writing: “a genre more willing to engage with representational métissage across cultural and language traditions and communities than conventional literary western paradigms [for] those … formerly excluded or marginalised” (grossman 2006). yet, life-writing has also been for a presumed lack of historical exactness and indigenous ‘authenticity’ (kurtzer 2003: 183). thus, more recent indigenous writing, such as kim scott’s, has resorted to creative fiction as a freer means to approximate indigenous reality and identity with a picture “more true than the truth” (kim scott in kunhikrishnan 2003). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 179 this trend is salient in life-writing by part-indigenous western-australians, which engages with the local context of absorption, assimilation and multicultural integration in various modes. the next four sub-sections address the novelistic work of doris pilkington, glenyse ward, sally morgan and kim scott. figuring as representative indigenous authors in the new macquairie pen anthology of aboriginal literature (heiss & minter 2008), these four authors are dealt with in order of their work’s narrative complexity, which also overlaps with a generational issue. other western-australian writers listed in the pen publication are not considered here, either because their indigenous status is dubious (mudrooroo, archie weller i ) or their writing takes place in other literary fields (jack davies, alf taylor, jimmy chi, pat torres, jimmy pike). kim scott is awarded special attention for having obtained the prestigious miles franklin literary award for benang in 2000 and that deadman dance in 2010, two monumental novels that, though clearly standing out as complex fictional constructs, are indebted to, and engage in a dialogue with the indigenous genre of lifewriting. 2.1. glenyse ward a short, straightforward example of indigenous life-writing is provided by glenyse ward, who was born in perth on the watershed of the absorptionist and assimilationist period, 1949. in simple prose she gives account of her life after removal in her best-known autobiographical volume wandering girl, first published in 1987. still a baby, she was taken from her nyoongar parents to st. john of god’s orphanage in rivervale, perth. at the age of three she was moved to wandering, short for st francis xavier native mission at wandering brook, a catholic institution eighty miles south-east of perth, where she starts her testimony. after basic formal education, she was employed as a domestic at the mission and, once sixteen, farmed out to a wealthy white family. tired of their exploitative, racist attitude, she soon absconded to start working in a hospital kitchen in busselton, 150 km south of perth. in this sense the book’s title, wandering girl, deserves a double reading honouring her favourite song “i love to go a ‘wandering, along the mountain track” (ward 1995: 96), but the prose does not go into further complexities than this, delivering a humble, straightforward description of indigenous resilience and survival during her time working for the white bigelow family, who captain the local town of ridgeway and its ingrained racism. thus, while the i-persona of this aboriginal bildungsroman is forgiving towards the “earnest” though “misguided” settler australians that severely affected her life, the text works up to the act of indigenous resilience in glenyse’s elopement; it addresses her upbringing and survival outside her cultural environment up to the moment she is old and experienced enough to take life in her own hands. while she does not recover the link with her aboriginal parents, her father having died and her mother being refused contact with her (126), glenyse’s autobiography finishes on an optimistic note as she runs away from the white family that exploits her: she was “thrilled … there was no looking back for me” (157). the epilogue’s poem and biographical note follow this up by explaining she made a career as a nursing assistant, joined the community health service, got married to “the private barber for the governor of western australia” in 1975 and continues writing, publishing unna you fullas, coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 180 about her mission life, in 1991 (169-71). despite this account of indigenous resilience, there is an arguable element of accommodation in her autobiography in that it speaks out to understanding and reconciliation with the mainstream, thus projecting a “non-threatening” image of aboriginality (kurtzer 2003: 184-7); this is especially so in the epilogue, which expresses a hope for future equality and equal opportunities that still has not materialised. 2.2. doris pilkington garimara belonging to the western-desert tribe of the mardu, doris pilkington was born in 1937 as nugi garimara on balfour down station forty km northwest of jigalong, in the east pilbara region of north-west western australia. at the age of three, she was removed together with her ‘half-caste’ mother and younger sister to moore river native settlement just north of perth, an institution for part-aboriginal children with white fathers. her ‘half-caste’ mother molly had already spent some time there ten years earlier but escaped and managed to return home. at eighteen doris was released from roelands mission just south of perth and to become the first ex-mission ward to enter and complete a nursing aide training programme at royal perth’s hospital. after raising a large family, she completed a journalism degree at perth’s curtin university and became involved in film and video production, and writing. her first novel, caprice: a stockman’s daughter (1991), won the 1990 david unaipon national award for unpublished indigenous writers. using first and third person narrative and straightforward prose, it is a dramatic account of cross-generational displacement and trauma told from the perspective of an indigenous granddaughter. after spending her youth in an orphanage and being confronted with the subaltern role laid out for her by a deeply racist society, kate undertakes a healing journey into traditional land to recover her lost indigenous heritage. caprice, necessarily a fictional account reflecting the fragmentary initial stages of garimara’s search for her origins, prepares the ground for the auto/biographical follow the rabbit-proof fence (pilkington 2002: 206). first published in 1996, this text was turned into an internationally successful film by the mainstream director philip noyce. garimara’s second novel recounts her mother’s remarkable two-month journey from moore river native settlement which started in august 1931 and took the fourteen-year-old molly and her two younger kin sisters (cousins) gracie and daisy home to jigalong by walking 1,600 km north along the so-called rabbit-proof fence. successfully coping with unfamiliar landscapes, climatic conditions and pursuing indigenous trackers and police officers, they outwitted the chief protector of the western-australian aborigines, a.o. neville, who ardently sought their re-institutionalisation. confiding in nothing more than her quick wits and bush skills, molly managed to complete “what was, without a doubt, one of the longest walks in the history of the australian outback” (129) and lead her cousin daisy back to jigalong—her cousin gracie separated from them to go and meet her mother at wiluna, but was caught and returned to moore river and never saw her cousins again. not surprisingly, the girls’ 1,600 km journey on foot has become a symbol for the diaspora and mistreatment of the stolen generations and a remarkable homage to their resilience and resistance to policies of absorption and assimilation. its successful completion coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 181 also brings into relief the systematic under-funding of neville’s department of native affairs, which eventually backfires on his efforts to retrieve molly and daisy and blemishes his prestige. neville signs his defeat in the official correspondence retrieved by garimara: “it’s a pity that those youngsters have gone ‘native’ … but it cannot be helped” (129). nugi garimara completes the trilogy with her autobiography under the wintamarra tree (2002). this starts out with a brief history of mardu dispossession and dispersal as they trek from the western desert to the white cattle stations, pushed south by the diminution of their natural resources. the text then narrows its focus to nugi’s own life at balfour downs station, her early removal to moore river, institutional life, and training and work as a nurse in perth. her married life in the 1960s moves from dire circumstances of exploitation at a farm in arid mukinbudin to the suburban pleasures of geraldton, 400 km north of perth. yet, this idyllic picture is broken by the aboriginal “rape of the soul” (gilbert 1984 [1978]: 3) as entrenched racism and male chauvinism take their toll from unsuspected corners: her ‘octoroon’ aboriginal husband’s family are exempt from the 1936 act—in eugenics, an ‘octoroon’ is of ‘one-eighth’ aboriginal descent—and therefore reject nugi as gerry pilkington’s wife (pilkington 2002: 163-4); meanwhile gerry resorts to alcohol, verbal and physical abuse to cope with the ‘humiliation’ of being “dependent on a woman’s income for financial support” (198). the latter prompts her decision to locate her parents after 20 years and recover her indigenous heritage. in 1962 nugi undertakes her first trip to meekatharra, a reserve of “stony, treeless, government-allocated land” 700 km north of perth (182), where she reestablishes contact with kin and culture and recovers her sense of home. as if to mark the emotional distance between the text’s protagonist and the reborn author, in the epigraph garimara switches from third-person to first-person narrative to criticise the policies of removal, dispersal and mainstream conditioning in settlements, missions etc. which affected the stolen generations: so you can imagine the trauma i went through as an adult meeting my mother and dad. it took me ten years to actually sit down and start my journey of healing, which was necessary for me to reconnect to my land and to reclaim my language and culture. it took ten years, because the conditioning was so strong that i had to metaphorically go through it al again, undo all that conditioning and come back (206). garimara deeply deplores the loss of her younger sister anna, who was removed to sister kate’s children’s home in perth and never re-established contact with her indigenous family: “i’ve met her once … there was no embrace, nothing. we were miles apart, her attitude was different to mine, i suppose because of the environment she grew up in. she was given an altered vision of her history and i think she prefers that” (207). 2.3. sally morgan coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 182 the visual artist and writer sally morgan, born in 1951 in perth, produced a landmark text in aboriginal literature one year before the bicentenary of 1988. her novel found a niche in this official celebration of two centuries of white colonisation due to the budding feelings of guilt over the dispossession, loss and destruction this process had wreaked upon the indigenous australians. morgan’s instance of indigenous life-writing spoke out to a nation which was becoming increasingly aware of the fatal implication of the mainstream in their destruction and their survivors’ deplorable state of living conditions, due to growing aboriginal and international protest and vindications. while a much more complex and sophisticated literary artefact, my place subscribes to wandering girl’s textual politics in that it takes a mild, almost forgiving stance towards the mainstream for the wrongs committed in the past, and arguably works towards the 1990s mainstream effort to recognise the destructive impact of the colonial past on the aborigines and their special place in (the definition of) the nation, known as ‘reconciliation’. the supposedly reconciliatory drift of the text has made it the object of mainstream praise (brett 1987; gare 1987) as well as the target of aboriginal criticism (huggins 2003; langton 2003). morgan addresses the process of finding this repressed identity in a complex, communal way, and the recovery of her aboriginal heritage takes the shape of a bildungsroman, psychodrama, detective story, mystery and choral novel. whereas the first section of the auto/biography arguably reads as a white middle-class woman’s story (huggins 2003: 62), the acceptance of her own indigeneity is the sign for her voice to fade out and introduce her direct forebears’ in the oral tradition’s way: her uncle’s, her mother’s, and most importantly, her grandmother’s. these voices trace a critical path back into a past that should never be forgotten and needs to be addressed if australia is to come to terms with itself as the democratic nation of the ‘fair go’. they tell a story of traumatic removal and displacement fed by racial policies with additional gender and class connotations. her ‘half-caste’ uncle’s life is the australian battler’s but compounded by his blackness, which makes it virtually impossible for him to make a fair living in rural australia, although/because he is the unacknowledged son of a wealthy white station owner. sally’s mother’s life is conditioned by the early separation from her grandmother and placement into parkerville’s children’s home near perth under the 1936 act, by their troubles to re-unite, and by the fear that they will be separated once again by official policy. her grandmother’s life is severely affected by the sexual abuse committed by the wealthy white station owner alfred howden brockman, who is also her and arthur’s father. working as a domestic for him after she is separated from her indigenous family, she is the object of repeated incest, giving rise to multiple offspring which is later removed (laurie 1999). this incest secret is arduously guarded, indicating the amount of racial-sexual trauma involved in sally’s origins (pulitano 2007: 43; kennedy 1997: 23560). despite its ambiguous nature and inevitable failure to forge morgan’s recovered indigeneity beyond textual inscription and mere biological roots (newman 1992: 73-4), in recovering her family’s past her contrived instance of life-writing remains a powerful statement of cultural resilience in the face of genocidal policy and an unveiled critique of the sexual politics that accompany it. morgan later published wanamuraganya, the story of her mixed-descent uncle jack mcphee (1989) and co-edited the compilation of indigenous testimonies speaking from the heart (2007). her involvement in aboriginal studies, theatre, writing and painting have coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 183 only reinforced her commitment with the indigenous cause after the publication of my place, and nowadays inscribe her indigeneity as lived experience as well as genetic heritage. 2.4. kim scott the poet and novelist kim scott was born of mixed european-nyoongar descent in perth in 1957. his writing analyses his own marginal position in australian indigeneity as an assimilated urban aborigine and the consequences this has for identity formation. thus, he advocates for a pluralistic, inclusive sense of indigeneity catering for marginal cases as his own. kim scott boasts and boosts an uncanny fringe indigenous-australian identity encroaching upon whiteness. he vaunts his own idiosyncratic case to break down static, engrained definitions of indigeneity and whiteness, putting his identity on the line to confront the mainstream in a ‘patriotic’ act as the indigenous writer philip mclaren told me, in which indigeneity and australianness hook up and reinforce each other. his writing is instrumental in playing out the latter discursive tension. scott’s first two novels, true country 1993 and benang 1999 (shared miles franklin 2000), are semi-autobiographical; then follows a non-fictional biographical incursion, kayang and me (2005), and his third novel that deadman dance 2010 (sole miles franklin 2011), is set in the post-contact past and moves out of the autobiographical. scott employs fiction as a space where an indigenous truth can be told that official history denies or questions, as well as a space of reflection and indigenous recovery. it aims to accommodate a vast array of australians who would not easily be considered aboriginal on the authenticity count, himself emphatically included: i make myself vulnerable and open to rejection. i’m not a traditional man, i’m disconnected from all sorts of traditional practices, i don’t live on my traditional country—and there are lots of people like that … i believe that politically, we need to promote pluralities and diverse ways of being aboriginal. like—what about the man who writes literary novels? you’re an anomaly, because of our damaged history, but that’s who you are (scott 2000, my emphasis). his own “damaged history” ambivalently locates him as a “quite white” suburban professional, whose life experience is not typically indigenous. as he says, “as an individual i don’t share the immediate experience of oppression and racism that the majority of nyoongars do, and which is therefore probably an important part of their sense of identity” (kunhikrishnan 2003b). this notwithstanding, he has managed to firmly anchor himself to an aboriginal identity through his literary work and personal commitment with the aboriginal cause from a liminal location which defies binary understandings of indigeneity, most notably and crucially addressed in his second novel, benang. on the one hand, this recovery of indigeneity is made possible by the modesty and humility with which he envisages his literary project, which is never conceived of as normative; scott does not “like the idea of speaking for anyone else” (guy 1996: 14) and emphasises that such authority is seated in his nyoongar community (kunhikrishnan 2003b). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 184 on the other hand, while his aboriginal ancestry is not spelt out on his body, turning him into a ‘white’ aborigine of sorts, scott comments in an interview on benang that he is reluctant “of being niched in the mainstream … and it seemed to me to start off as ‘here i am, the first white man born in the family line’ was to avoid that pigeonhole, and to be very provocative” (scott 2000). as well as to physical appearance, being the first white man refers to the legal definition of indigeneity under eugenic policy—halfcast, quadroon, octoroon etc.—and the point or moment the ‘dilution of the blood’ changes into whiteness under the law, which is where the battle for indigenous empowerment has been arguably fought out (native title etc.). scott addresses this problem, experienced by his own father, in benang through the figure of harley scatt’s father, who falls outside the eugenic definition of indigeneity due to changes in legislation in 1934, which amplify its reach. yet, the nyoongar line through scott’s paternal grandmother was never hidden to him by his father but rather highlighted as something to be proud of (buck 2001), which propelled scott’s search for an indigenous identity ‘hidden’ under a european appearance and lifestyle. thus, the protagonist of benang’s struggle with his inscription as the ‘first white man born’ in the family is modelled on scott’s personal experience but proffered as a fictional model within which the author investigates his hybrid identity, by “[p]romoting a sense of diversity and escaping the constraints that so many of us have been put into because of the oppression of our history … offer[ing] some more space into which people can move” (buck 2001). kim scott’s carefully self-reflexive art configures an embracing sense of subjectivity within the possibilities of a strategic employment of identity—scott’s “own position is that once that aboriginality is expressed you can be inclusive” (scott 2000). to use homi bhabha’s words, scott’s work may be seen to circulate publicly as a token of “strange cultural survival” (bhabha 1990: 320) within the historical, linguistic, racial and gendered margins of the australian land and text-scape; as such, it is instrumental in addressing australians with a silenced past of oppression but also forges a notion of solidarity. scott explains this postcolonial agenda of reconciliation-through-confrontation as follows: … i think what’s required is non-aboriginal australia looking to itself[,] what its relationship to aboriginal australia tells it about itself[:] … a sort of psychosis … [t]he business of being protector of aboriginal people, that notion, and the falsity and the self-deception in that is part of it. so ... thinking, reflecting … upon the nature of mainstream australia’s psyche in terms of its relationship with aboriginal australia is an important part of reconciliation. that gets shied away from a lot (buck 2001). yet, he also insists on the indigenous communities using what he calls their “compassion, spiritual generosity, bravery and inclusiveness” while being confrontational (buck 2001). not surprisingly, in such a project he understands “the return and consolidation to the nyoongar community of what should be our cultural heritage as a priority” (kunhikrishnan 2003a). in line with such a recovery, scott has managed to trace his indigenous origins to the land on western australia’s south coast, and has been accepted into its local nyoongar mob. this is reflected in and given shape through his writing, which is autobiographical in tone, focus and localisation; it fastens itself onto the area of his wider family’s homeland while maintaining a notable, groundbreaking effort in experimentation with content, style and genre. thus, his coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 185 first novel, true country (1993), is a “semi-autobiographical work” (rai 2007: 43) of fiction loosely inspired in his teaching experience in the kimberley; it addresses the politics of identity formation by using a polyphonic narrative perspective which interrogates the genre of aboriginal life-writing, western auto/biography and the realist novel. his second novel, benang (1999), investigates, fictionalises and re-assesses his family history by critically reworking “the hostile nature” of archival material from the assimilationist period and “[u]s[ing] it[s language] back on itself” (scott quoted in fielder 2006). benang also works with multiple shifts of perspective and polyphony, but adds fragmentary and nonlinear storytelling techniques as narrative devices as well, equally breaking away from realist formulations of the autobiography and novel. his third publication, kayang and me (2005), situates itself in the realm of non-fiction and represents an important parenthesis in his novelistic production which put his projected third novel naatj/that deadman dance, “on the backburner” (fielder 2006: 8).the reason for this excursion into non-fiction is easily understood as the ongoing need for scott to “explor[e his own] sense of place, more specifically, of the south-west of western australia—noongar country,” to which his extended family belongs (fielder 2006: 8). thus, scott’s third longer prose project, a joint narrative with a native elder/aunt of his, veers away from fiction to bear critically on local fact as recorded by the indigenous oral tradition as well as western written sources. it poises the family stories and personal recollections of his aboriginal relative and elder, hazel brown, against a larger framework of reflections within a socio-political and historic context elaborated from personal memories and archival material by scott himself. as such, it plots a productive dialogue revising mainstream’s renderings of local history from an aboriginal perspective, and constitutes a local micro-narrative that unmasks the uncanny gaps and silences in western “grand narrative” of benign settlement (lyotard 1984: xxiii-iv), which lays the basis for his third novel which has now won the miles franklin, no doubt to the subtle ways it addresses the indigenous/non-indigenous interface in a first-contact context. scott “recognises” that he wrote benang “at a time when authors were having their indigenous identities challenged—colin ‘mudrooroo’ johnson, archie weller, ‘wanda koolmatrie’” (scott 2007: 5). he also addresses mudrooroo’s plight in kayang and me, pointing out that his aboriginal identity is still a matter of debate amongst nyoongars. scott understands indigenous writers who “advocate … exclud[ing non-natives] back—to show them how it feels” and thus create an exclusionary sense of indigenous solidarity; yet, he does not sympathise with this stance in view of his own experience as an “anomalous”, white-skinned, urban professional aborigine (scott & brown 2005: 204-5). intent upon creating inclusive forms of aboriginality—which, all must be said, are needed to accommodate his own identity—scott rather believes that an exclusionary politics of the indigenous body would be counterproductive in the face of the inevitability of hybridisation and the redefinition of australianness at large. as he is aware that he writes “for a predominantly white, educated audience” (midalia 2005), benang participates in a kind of national corroboree, “a meeting place … in which australians can begin to rearticulate the country and themselves, in … a dialogic style of writing” (slater 2005: 157), in which his third novel, that deadman dance, can be placed. naturally, scott wants “to acknowledge coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 186 and celebrate [his] non-indigenous family and, by extension, all aspects of australian heritage.” however, he does not: … see how this can be justly done without the primacy of indigenous culture and society being properly established … unfortunately our shared history has demonstrated that the alternative—accommodating noongar society within ‘white’ society—has proved impossible, to the detriment of what we all might be. as i see it, this is reason enough to offer those who insist on asking why a small amount of noongar blood can make you a noongar, while any amount of white blood needn’t make you white. it’s considered a political position, intended to foreground inequalities in our society, and particularly in our history (scott & brown 2005: 207, my emphasis). 3. indigenous and indigenised australianness the indigenous-australian plight has been the result of the massive invasive thrust of a large group of new settlers which disowned the original owners of, and expelled them from their land in a process that has been both diasporic and genocidal. the indigenous-australian case strongly appeals for the universal application of human rights inasmuch this acknowledges the existence of, and right to cultural difference within the nation-space on the basis of respect for, and acceptance of the host culture. in australia, european settlers have long ignored these basic rules of conduct, and the long indigenous history of ethnic displacement, destruction and yet, survival and resilience as uncovered and recorded in recent reports, essays, articles and budding indigenous arts and literature forward the message that (the will to impose) unilateral definitions of identity do little good in a world where cultures are bound to meet and share across difference. while embedded in a wider, engaged literary tradition which also embraces the work of glenyse ward, doris pilkington and sally morgan, kim scott forges a uniquely liminal but firm sense of indigenous-australianness in his fiction, making him probably the best example of a transcultural, inclusionary sense of self in contemporary indigenous australian literature. scott’s words on inclusiveness are tantamount to saying that any adherence to the blood question is not a biological but political issue embedded within a context of unequal access to australia’s physical and moral economy, regulated by politics and legislation—but has this ever been otherwise? thus, the fiction of authenticity may be strategically employed to recover the indigenous heritage for the greater good of the australian nation. therefore, the uncanny turbulences of, and ripples in the authenticity debate, which determine whether australians can partake of indigeneity or not, should be taken as discursive rather than essentialist stages in the performative unfolding of the script that endlessly re/writes identity into place. as a local story about “place, and what has grown from it,” benang’s life-writing refuses to acknowledge an overarching white patriarchal narrative that organises kinship relations according to the hierarchical rigidities and sequencing of oedipal conflict; instead, it simultaneously speaks to the past, present and future of aboriginality from a hybrid site that coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 187 is meant to be enabling, inclusive, nurturing and regenerative, in ways that true country already rehearsed some years earlier. scott has now moved from semi-autobiography in true country and benang to full-fledged fiction in his last, award-winning novel, that deadman dance, after a strategic stopover in tribal community to address local history in kayang and me. his last novel is an account set in the ‘friendly frontier’ of the early 1800s, a piece of australia where, significantly, interracial relationships are positively inscribed and do not lead to war and bloodshed. it marks a significant move in the completion of his process of self-definition as an indigenous person, but also in the formulation of his fiction as an aesthetic as well as political expression of an indigenous and indigenised australianness open to all. works cited australian bureau of statistics. “population distribution, aboriginal and torres strait islander australians.” www.abs.gov.au 2006. web. 30 july 2009. <http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/377284127f903297ca257337 00241ac0/$file/47050_2006.pdf> bhabha, homi k. “dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation.” nation and narration. ed. homi k. bhabha. london: routledge, 1990. 291-322. print. brett, judith. “breaking the silence: a gift to the reader.” australian book review august 1987: 9-11. print. buck, joseph. “trees that belong here: an interview with award-winning australian author, kim scott.” boomtown magazine 1.3 (2001): n. pag. web. 16 feb. 2005 <www.boomtownmag.com/articles/200101/benang.htm> fielder, john. “country and connections: an overview of the writing of kim scott.” altitude 6 (2005): n. pag. web. 10 june 2009. <http://www.api-network.com/cgibin/altitude21c/fly?page=issue6&n=1> gare, nene. “review of my place.” westerly 3 (1987): 80-1. print gilbert, kevin. living black: blacks talk to kevin gilbert. victoria: penguin, 1978. print. grossman, michelle. “when they write what we read: unsettling indigenous australian lifewriting.” ahr 39-40 (september 2006): n. pag. web. <http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-september2006/grossman.html> guy, elizabeth. “kim scott in conversation with elizabeth guy.” westerly 41.3 (spring 1996): 9-14. print. haebich, anna. broken circles: fragmenting indigenous families 1800-2000. fremantle, australia. fremantle arts centre press, 2000. print. heiss, anita & peter minter. macquarie pen anthology of aboriginal literature. crows nest nsw: allen & unwin, 2008. print. http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/377284127f903297ca25733700241ac0/$file/47050_2006.pdf http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/377284127f903297ca25733700241ac0/$file/47050_2006.pdf http://www.boomtownmag.com/articles/200101/benang.htm http://www.api-network.com/cgi-bin/altitude21c/fly?page=issue6&n=1 http://www.api-network.com/cgi-bin/altitude21c/fly?page=issue6&n=1 http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-september-2006/grossman.html http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-september-2006/grossman.html coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 188 huggins, jackie. “always was always will be”. blacklines. contemporary critical writing by indigenous australians. ed. michelle grosman. carlton, victoria: mup, 2003. 60-5. print. human rights and equal opportunities commission (hreoc). “bringing them home”: report of the national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and torres strait islander children from their families. australian human rights commission. web. 10 oct 2009. <http://www.hreoc.gov.au/pdf/social_justice/bringing_them_home_report.pdf> kennedy, roseanne. “autobiography. the narrator as witness. testimony, trauma and narrative form in my place.” meridian 16.2 (1997): 235-60. print. kunhikrishnan, k. “identity narratives.” the hindu, 06 april 2003a: n. pag. web. 3 may 2008. <http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/lr/2003/04/06/stories/2003040600180300.htm> ---. “reclaiming a heritage.” the hindu, 06 april 2003b: n. pag. web. 3 may 2008. <http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/lr/2003/04/06/stories/2003040600180300.htm> kurtzer, sonja. “wandering girl: who defines “authenticity” in aboriginal literature?” blacklines. contemporary critical writing by indigenous australians. ed. michelle grossman. carlton, victoria: mup, 2003. 181-88. print. langton. marcia. “trapped in the aboriginal reality show.” griffith review 19 (autumn 2008): 145-62. print. laurie, victoria. “an interview with sally morgan.” www.unionsverlag.com 23 october 1999: n. pag. web. june 2005. <http://www.unionsverlag.com/info/link.asp?link_id=6000&pers_id=91&pic=../portrait/ morgansally.jpg&tit=sally%20morgan> lyotard, françois. the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. minneapolis: university of minnesota press 1979, 1984. print. midalia, susan. “benang by kim scott.” freemantle press. www.fremantlepress.com.au, 1 may 2005: n. pag. web. access 2 may 2008. <http://www.facp.iinet.net.au/teachingnotes/benangnotes.php> morgan, sally. my place. london: virago 1988, 1997. print. ---. wanamurraganya. the story of jack mcphee. fremantle wa: fremantle arts centre press, 1989. print. morgan, sally, tjalaminu mia, blaze kwaymullina, eds. speaking from the heart. stories of life, family and country. fremantle wa: fremantle arts centre press, 2007. print. newman, joan. “race, gender and identity: my place as autobiography.” whose place? a study of sally morgan’s my place. eds. delys bird & dennis haskell. sydney: angus & robertson, 1992. 66-74. print. pilkington, doris. caprice, a stockman’s daughter. st lucia, queensland: uqp 1991. print. ---. rabbit-proof fence. new york: hyperion, 1996, 2002. print. ---. under the wintamarra tree. st lucia, queensland: uqp 2002. print. http://www.hreoc.gov.au/pdf/social_justice/bringing_them_home_report.pdf http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/lr/2003/04/06/stories/2003040600180300.htm http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/lr/2003/04/06/stories/2003040600180300.htm http://www.unionsverlag.com/info/link.asp?link_id=6000&pers_id=91&pic=../portrait/morgansally.jpg&tit=sally%20morgan http://www.unionsverlag.com/info/link.asp?link_id=6000&pers_id=91&pic=../portrait/morgansally.jpg&tit=sally%20morgan http://www.facp.iinet.net.au/teachingnotes/benangnotes.php coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 189 pulitano, elvira. “‘one more story to tell’ diasporic articulations in sally morgan’s my place.” the pain of unbelonging. ed. sheila collingwood whittick. amsterdam/new york: rodopi, 2007. 37-55. print. rai, sudha. “singing the world anew: learning, narration and collaborative culture in kim scott”s true country”. caring cultures: sharing imaginations. australia and india. eds. anraag sharma & pradee`trikha. sarup & sons: new delhi. 42-52: 2007. print. scott, kim. true country. fremantle (western australia): fremantle arts centre press, 1993. print. ---. benang. new delhi: penguin books india 1999, 2003. print. ---. “what does it mean to be aboriginal” (interview). atsic publications, 2000: n. pag. web. 7 may 2008. <http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/41037/200505160000/www.atsic.gov.au/news_room/atsic_news/february_2000/what_does_it_mean_to _be.html> ---. “australia’s continuing neurosis: identity, race and history. the alfred deakin lectures: building the nation, embracing the world.” radio national 15 may 2001: n. pag. web. 9 march 2008. <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/deakin/stories/s291485.htm ---. “strangers at home.” translating lives. living with two languages and cultures. eds. mary besemeres & anna wierzbicka. st lucia, queensland: uqp, 2007. 1-11. print. ---. that deadman dance. sydney. picador 2010. scott, kim & hazel brown. kayang and me. fremantle wa: fremantle arts centre press, 2005. print. slater, lisa. “kim scott’s benang: monstrous (textual) bodies.” southerly: a review of australian literature, 65.1 (2005): 63-73. print. ward, glenyse. wandering girl. broome wa: magabala books, 1995 (1987). print. martin renes is an expatriate dutchman who has lived and worked in barcelona since 1987. he holds a phd in english by the university of barcelona and is adjunct lecturer for the literature section of its department of english. his main area of interest is the study of film and novels from a postcolonial point of view. he dedicated his minor thesis to contemporary mainstream fiction dealing with the cultural interface of indigenous and non-indigenous australia, and his doctoral thesis explored the uncanny aspects of rewriting australianness through indigenous literature. he is vice-director of the university of barcelona’s interdisciplinary observatory: australian studies centre. i archie weller and mudrooroo have also used an indigenous australian paradigm in writing but, while having had an aboriginal life experience, their indigeneity has been questioned on genetic grounds, so they are generally not considered aboriginal (writers). http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/41037/20050516-0000/www.atsic.gov.au/news_room/atsic_news/february_2000/what_does_it_mean_to_be.html http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/41037/20050516-0000/www.atsic.gov.au/news_room/atsic_news/february_2000/what_does_it_mean_to_be.html http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/41037/20050516-0000/www.atsic.gov.au/news_room/atsic_news/february_2000/what_does_it_mean_to_be.html http://www.abc.net.au/rn/deakin/stories/s291485.htm it’s not [just] cricket: the art and politics of the popular – cultural imperialism, ‘sly civility’ & postcolonial incorporati coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 it’s not [just] cricket: the art and politics of the popular – cultural imperialism, ‘sly civility’ & postcolonial incorporation andrew jones abstract: ashutosh gowariker’s critically acclaimed lagaan (2001), is a marvellous piece of cinematic troubling, which, via an astute use of allegory, reflects upon identity politics and power relations in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. bringing two cornerstones of indian popular culture together, namely cricket and hindi formulae films, gowariker produces an engagingly, affective alchemy of image and sound, which intervenes critically in the discourses of british colonial rule. this article’s intention is to demonstrate the mimetic devices inherent in lagaan’s narrative, and how they mirror the regional resilience evident in the global success of both popular indian cinema and the indian performance of cricket. the sport of cricket and its role and effectiveness within a larger colonial project, is contextualized and reconsidered by tracing some resistant tangents in the sports evolution and performance in the asia pacific region. making the most of the south asian diaspora, which has exploited the networks and routes of the former british empire, indian popular cinema, likewise, serves to illustrate the point that local cultural dynamics can add their own nuances to global media flows. interdisciplinary approaches are required to traverse within and between cultures, and to underscore the deep currents of contestation, as well as the radical and often surprising politics that characterise popular culture. in this respect, a range of scholars from different fields of study are consulted; ashis nandy, arjun appadurai, chandrima chakraborty and homi bhabha amongst them. their voices will help to open up uncertainties in the conventional discourses, and to articulate some of the cultural politics and poetics at play in lagaan specifically and the performance of cricket more generally. keywords: postcolonial identity politics, popular culture, cricket, lagaan. copyright©2013 andrew jones. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 the image, the imagined, the imaginary these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. arjun appadurai cricket is as an indian game accidently discovered by the english. ashis nandy preamble: winning the toss i have taken the liberty of inserting asia in the pacific geographical focus of this collection of papers, but also am amplifying more pacific regional reflections and insights. this is an article that ruminates on the civilizing imperatives of the very peculiar sport of cricket, and the way that unruly colonial subjects have embraced the game and made it their own. i also have focused on the pax in the pacific label, telling a tale of creative, (mostly) non-violent resistance to colonial authority – enacted through the cultural incorporation and appropriation of the game of cricket. it also affords me the opportunity to deliberate upon, and fashion a plausible absolution to vindicate the enjoyment of a game that has been an integral part of my own upbringing. limbering up: pacific experience i have lived more than half my life on the shores and hinterland of the pacific, and i was born in a city whose harbour embraces the ebb and flow of the great southern ocean’s tides. australia is an island in its wake – a feature that geographically imprints certain characteristics upon its inhabitants. however, lest i be lampooned for dabbling with a saccharine romanticism, i should like to garnish this with a bitter caveat. contemporary australia is not kind to the pacific; we mine it, we pollute it, we allow too much heavy traffic through even the world heritage barrier reef. along the more populated areas of the eastern seaboard, we expel our waste and excrement into it, and when the tides conspire the ocean has its revenge upon us; floating our unsavoury offerings back upon our beaches. perhaps this give and take is the origin of the bronzed aussie icon. the pacific is also the principal site of australia’s own colonising practices. not only has australia been subjected to the ravages of english colonialism – it has, since federation, and before, practiced its own colonising tendencies in the pacific region – papua, timor sea and so on. one of the more recent manifestations of these imperial tendencies was the abhorrent pacific solution that the howard government enforced upon refugees seeking asylum in australia. to australians eternal shame, this was a political regime that was then re-elected not once, but twice, wearing such a criminally inhumane policy as a badge of honour. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 in this paper, however, i want to spin a narrative that goes beyond the pale i ; a yarn whose protagonists lampoon, mimic and subvert eurocentric notions of civilisation. a tale that celebrates the playfulness, and simultaneously the gravitas, of the postcolonial condition; a condition beautifully articulated in pau fernandez pitarch’s etymological slide from civilisation to syphilis-ation. ii my muse for this yarning is cricket, a sport that can wonderfully illustrate the idiosyncrasies, contradictions and ever-shifting power plays of colonial and postcolonial experience. cricket was deployed as a civilising mission of the colonial project, but in the best traditions of what de certeau describes as the ‘ingenious’ ‘practices of everyday life’ (de certeau 1984); it became a site of struggle and something more than what was intended by the colonial authorities. poignant examples in the pacific region include; the incorporation of cricket into the ritual practices of the trobriand islanders, and the very first australian cricket tour to england, the home of cricket. pacific cricket and ‘pommy bastards’: encountering the colonial project and contesting colonial legitimacy in the trobriand islands, cricket has undergone a remarkable cultural transformation; the locals have forged the game into an “outlet for tribal rivalry, mock warfare, [and] community interchange” (kray 2009: 1), replete with songs and dances specifically crafted for this manifestation of cricket. the missionaries introduced cricket to the trobriand islanders as an 11-a-side game, but this did not suit trobriand traditions, and before long numbers on the pitch began to swell. so long as the sides are even, any number of players from the community can partake. in the custom of trobriand kayasa (kray 2009: 3) the game is a performance of ritual display with gifts of food at its core. trobriand cricket represents a clear example of the incorporation of colonial practice into the local culture, rather than the other way around, nothing short of an indigenization of the game itself. as arjun appadurai has articulated in a different context, …indigenisation is often a product of collective and spectacular experiments with modernity and not necessarily of the subsurface affinity of new cultural forms with existing patterns in the cultural repertoire (appadurai 1997: 90). the australia versus england rivalry on the cricket field continues to this day, to be a stage where a fiercely contested colonial/postcolonial struggle is played out. the history of this cricketing challenge is riddled with a folklore of heroic deeds against the odds; and underhand, win-at-all-costs instalments. the ashes test match series between coloniser and colonised has traced expressions of national pride and international relations between the old country and the antipodean upstarts since 1882, when australia beat england at the oval, and a satirical obituary was placed in a british newspaper to mark the event. the announcement declared that english cricket had perished, and gave notice that its: “body will be cremated and the ashes taken to australia” (). a lesser known, but perhaps more extraordinary, game took place at the same kensington oval some 14 years earlier, when the first australian cricket tour to england coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 kicked off its punishing schedule of 47 matches in 6 months. some 20,000 spectators turned out in may 1868 at the oval to witness the all-indigenous australian cricket team take on the local surrey club (mallett 2002). the tour was part curio-exhibit, (replete with tragic deaths due to the strain of long-distant travel and exposure to new diseases), but also part triumph of the first australians beating their colonisers at their own game in their homeland. during their time in england, they won as many games as they lost iii and secured many admirers amongst a disbelieving british public. amongst the touring squad were such stellar cricketers as unaarrimin, bullchanach, jungunjinanuke, zellanach, bripumyarrimin (who died of tuberculosis whilst in england), murrumgunarriman and grougarrong. murrumgunarriman and unaarrimin, known to anglo australians as twopenny and mullagh respectively, continued to play representative cricket upon their return to the colonies, mullagh becoming a professional cricketer with the melbourne cricket club (mallett 2002). two days after their first match the tourists were also engaged to: “go through a series of athletic exercises on the surrey ground” (the sporting life, 16 may 1868). postmatch demonstrations of spear and boomerang throwing were a common feature of the tour, which gained considerable attention amongst the british public (ibidem). the popular fascination witnessed was undoubtedly tinged with racist undertones of a eurocentric sense of cultural superiority, not uncommon with the curio and exotic exhibitions of the age. this was further fuelled by the fact that the indigenous team arrived in the wake of the evolutionary debates, sparked by the publication of charles darwin’s thesis the origin of the species less than a decade earlier. aboriginal cricket team at the mcg: from left to right, back row: bripumyarrimin (king cole), tarpot, tom wills, unaarrimin (johnny mullagh) , jungunjinanuke (dick-a-dick). seated: jellico, peter, red cap, harry rose, bullchanach (bullocky), zellanach (johnny cuzens). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/australian_aboriginal_cricket_team_in_england_in_ 1868 accessed 6 /6/ 12 a review of the touring cricketers in the daily telegraph exemplifies this mindset well: it is highly interesting and curious to see mixed in a friendly game on the most historically saxon part of our island, representatives of two races so far removed from each other as the modern englishman and the aboriginal australian. although several of them are native bushmen, and all are as black as night, these indian fellows are to all intents and purposes, clothed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/australian_aboriginal_cricket_team_in_england_in_1868 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/australian_aboriginal_cricket_team_in_england_in_1868 coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 and in their right minds (the daily telegraph, 27 may 1868, cited in stradling 2009: 16). both these australasian stories are fine exemplars of resistance to, and troubling of, colonial power relations. they are distinct expressions of a negotiation of the cultural imperialism that accompanies the experience of colonialism. each displays something about the way that cultural differences inflect the colonial systems that have been imposed around the globe. these differences need to be considered in both coloniser and colonised, as they each nuance the dynamics of the power relations of encounter. don’t mention the war: discourses of denial it is not my intention to soften the critique of colonialism wherever it has been enacted, but i would like to make an observation about the spanish colonial encounters in the americas. spanish approaches to race and identity have a very different experiential compass to the australian experience. in the spanish speaking americas, for instance mexico, there is recognition and a scholarly engagement with the practical aspects and theoretical potentialities of miscegenation, both physical and cultural. as the official policies employed by colonial administrations with regard to miscegenation were often negative, the term mestizaje is more often employed in academic circles, in order to refer to the mixing of cultures and races in a more affirming fashion. confronting, and often embracing, notions of contradiction and ambiguity; mestizaje has articulated strategies of cultural resistance to systematic, hegemonic racism (roger hutchinson cited in palusci 2006: 126). by contradistinction, the official australian discourses are characterised by denial in this regard. despite the fact that the english were themselves a mongrel race (and i do not use that term pejoratively), the administration clung to a ludicrous sense of blood purity and a heinous policy to try to preserve it. one of the determining factors in this difference is the specific era in which the respective colonial projects emerged. british 18 th and 19 th century colonialism was framed through the cold, reductionist lens of late protestantism; an entirely different beast to the baroque extravagances of the catholic traditions of christianity. at its heart, the british colonial enterprise was an empiric expression of english superiority and enlightenment xenophobia. taking pleasure in subverting missions so now i have set the scene, i want to make a turn towards pleasure; the pleasure of a game that, despite its initial colonial imperative, has harboured a wonderful capacity for local cultural expression, subversion and the demonstration of skill and strategy. cricket was employed as part of the colonial project. although the colonial regimes of the empire never adopted a deliberate policy, cricket gradually evolved into an unofficial instrument of state policy, which contributed to the formation of a complex system of colonial values. as hutchinson explains, “cricket was quintessentially the imperial sport. british colonialists [. . .] carried cricket before them as (with the english language coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 and christianity) one of the three great imperial totems” (roger hutchinson cited in palusci 2006: 126). for victorians, cricket represented englishness and christian morality and thus lent itself well to the colonial mission. “cricket was seen as an ideal way to socialize natives [who were perceived as lazy, enervated, and effete] into new modes of intergroup conduct and new standards of public behavior” (appadurai 1996: 93). however, the cricket field simultaneously became a space where such imposed values and power structures could be challenged, where a different way could be imagined, without recourse to armed conflict. as farred explains, “cricket is the repository of overburdened cultural links. it is the defining cultural practice, the indian national obsession, the indian national pathology that contains within it the indian poetic” (farred 2004: 94). in the same vein, majumdar contests the conventional cultural imperialist comprehension of the place and performance of cricket in relations between the british colonials and indian nationals. instead, he claims “that turning the colonial ideology on its head, resistance and subversion were often dominant in the second phase of the histories of british games in the colonies, especially cricket and soccer” (majumdar 2004: 16). the ideological contours of the game were not lost on the maverick politician, author, and broadcaster woodrow lyle wyatt, who proclaimed, “no country, which has cricket as one of its national games has yet gone communist” (wyatt 2012). however, this is only to tell some of the story of cricket. the indian encounter with, experience and negotiation of, the game of cricket provides a wonderful exemplar of pleasures and politics that inhabit popular culture, “[f]or the cricket field was both a theatre of imperial power and of indian resistance” (guha 2009: 494). the historian ramachandra guha emphasised the extraordinary popularity of the game in the subcontinent when he wrote, “when sachin tendulka is batting against the pakistani swing bowler wasim akramr, the television audience exceeds the entire population of europe” (guha 2002: xiii). lagaan: aligning pillars of popular culture. cricket and popular hindi cinema (two of the great pillars of indian contemporary culture) converged in a marvellous manner with the release of ashutosh gowariker's film lagaan. as anand commented, “for a subcontinent that so obsessively watches cricket & hindi cinema, lagaan offered cinema as cricket & cricket as cinema” (anand 2002)). as with imposed language, the colonial symbolic system gets bent out of shape to accommodate the local culture; and cricket is no different. as majumdar comments in his appraisal of the extended coverage of the cricket match in lagaan: the 100-minute match becomes the site of an assertion of racial superiority. as guran, the village godman, plays an impossible shot hitting the ball over the wicketkeeper, the audience erupts with joy. this shot can easily be perceived as that ‘moment of departure’ when an indigenous coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 brand of indian nationalism takes off … the colonial mission of importing sport as a civilizing tool, is successfully turned on its head. a non-violent arena of assertion, cricket is successfully transformed into a tool to subvert colonial rule (majumdar 2001). at the heart of lagaan’s late 19th century narrative is a cricketing challenge; the british colonials against the small village of champaner; and the prize for the locals is an exemption from the punishing taxes (lagaan) imposed by the colonial authorities. the team assembled by the village is a motley one, but one that nevertheless hints at the ethnic diversity and the collaborative practices evident in india, something not always apparent in hindi blockbuster films. beside its widespread and entrenched popularity, hindi cinema shares another attribute with cricket and that is duration. the film lagaan runs a standard 3 and ¾ hour journey, replete with copious song and dance routines. local audiences feel they have been short-changed if their entertainment is any shorter. cricket has an uncanny medieval temporality; it is wonderful that, in the 21st century, a test match can still go for 5 days and end in a draw. it perverts modern productive time, which is part of its enigma, and, for some at least, part of its appeal. lagaan: closer analysis i wish to concentrate on two aspects of the film lagaan: bhuvan, the films main protagonist, who represents a kind of reincarnation of gandhi merged with the little master sachin tendulka; and elizabeth, the sister of the (total cad) british officer captain russell; and her ‘going beyond (the rules of) the pale’ in siding with the other. her actions are a race betrayal to some, and a significant moment of cross cultural empathy and collaboration to others. mukul kesavan writes, “as a totem of india's pluralism, cricket does its job admirably” (kesavan 2007), and this is born out in the narrative arc of lagaan, as well as its popular reception in and outside india’s borders. in lagaan, the stakes are much higher than the wager over tax. if our buff protagonist bhuvan can bring the disparate ethnic and religious strands of his community together, then he can demonstrate a defiance of british colonial rule that may well nourish a kernel of national independence. the film is set in the high-raj period of the late-19th century, but is an allegory of india’s past and concurrently, a vision of where it could and may be heading. dressed in stick pads and using bats they carved by hand, they appear at first no match for the pristinely decked out colonials. however, cricket is a funny game; and, in true cinematic form, this game meanders to a thrilling last-ball climax. together the champaner village people iv embody a sort of gandhian ideal of inter-communal cooperation. this then is forwarded as the best means, not only to beat the british at their own game (which thereinafter would become almost an article of faith for indians when they engaged the brits – australians know all about that) but, to establish an inclusive, postcolonial indian nation. when you consider the rise of hindu fundamentalism, which coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 is anything but inclusive of other ethnicities, lagaan makes quite a bold statement about contemporary indian politics. 1. invoking the spirit of indian colonial resistance: cricket and politics in bhuvan’s gandhian-tendulka performance bhuvan’s character draws on enormous reserves of integrity, charisma and iconicity. he is played by aamir khan, a huge indian film star. onto his character, khan then projects the iconic cricket ‘god’ sachin tendulka. bhuvan also invokes the spirit of mahatma gandhi – the greatest indian icon of the 20th century; thus steering the films’ ideological concerns with anti-colonialism, nationalism, intercommunal cooperation. the brew of sub-continental symbolism manifested in the incorporation of the ideals and attributes of gandhi and tendulka is a palpably potent one. in lagaan, there are echoes of the indian nationalist cinema in the period leading up to independence from british rule. during the 1940’s, gandhian motifs were sprinkled generously through popular indian film narratives; and their inclusion was met with rapturous applause from local audiences across the country. so much so that at the height of the peaceful insurgence, all gandhian representations were banned from the cinema in india, even the most seemingly benign references ended up on the censor’s cutting room floor (vasudev 1978; doraiswamy 1995; kasbekar 1995; barnouw and krishwamy 1980). lagaan was a smash hit with audiences in india, but also importantly, internationally. the film made around $900,000 domestically and $2.5 million internationally at the box office (box office mojo 2001). lagaan also received a lot of critical attention, intensified no doubt by its academy award nomination (tsering 2005; elley 2001; sengupta 2002; ebert 2002; bradshaw 2001; singh 2001). its release coincided with a noticeable shift in audience demographics for hindi cinema outside of india. traditionally well supported by sizeable diasporic communities fanned across the british commonwealth; the last decade has seen a number of popular indian films crossover to mainstream audiences in locales such as canada, australia, south africa, and of course (with the most delicious irony) britain itself. lagaan is one such film, and stands as something of a marker to question any absolute assertions about globalisation and western cultural imperialism. the heady alchemy of cricket, celebrity and popular narrative formulas, is central to the way lagaan has captivated domestic and international imaginations. as appadurai explains: the image, the imagined, the imaginary these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. no longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people) … the imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order (appadurai 1996: 31). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 cricket and cinema have come together in a very potent blend in lagaan. box-office success, and the currency the film has inspired in important public discourses around nationalism, identity and postcolonial politics, demonstrates the way that regional and local cultural dynamics can, and do, resist homogenising forces and add their own inflections to global media flows. as chakraborty suggests, “popular indian cinema, with its wide appeal and huge audiences can be a space where the indian mind and imagination might be decolonised” (chakraborty 2011). the process of indigenisation operates on a number of levels in lagaan. bhuvan manages to put together a team composed of eleven villagers of diverse religious and class origins. the local team is (with liberal cinematic license) also multi-ethnically and multi-religiously constituted, thereby crossing the boundaries of india’s sectarianism and rigid caste system. it includes hindus, a muslim, and, after a long and heated debate, also a dalit, a member of the untouchable outcastes. the cricket players actively engage in what homi bhabha calls ‘projective disincorporation’ as they seek an in-betweenness, between the colonially determined axes of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in order to develop an identity in response to british colonialism. this is also achieved through various acts of mimicry, a process that homi bhabha describes as sly civility (bhabha 1994: 93), which operates to surreptitiously oppose british colonial rule. the sly civility bhabha invokes, subverts the colonial relations of power; it is a form of refusal or disobedience disguised under the veneer of an accommodating civility. wielding ambiguity, sly civility undermines colonial authority by reconfiguring the relations of power between coloniser and colonised. interestingly, thanks to the rules of cricket, the villagers pull victory from the cinders of defeat. just when all seems lost, there is an additional ball due to the bowler’s foot being over the bowling crease. this no ball affords one more opportunity to score an unlikely victory. with six runs required bhuvan, who had crossed during the previous illicit delivery and now has the strike, summons up all his reserves and pride and majestically strikes the ball high in the air towards the boundary. in true dramatic fashion, it is captain russell who happens to be positioned under the ball’s trajectory, and it takes an eternity to return to ground level; the suspense is palpable. russell catches the ball, but his conceited joy turns to dismay, as it is evident that he has stepped over the boundary line to secure the catch. the six runs is signalled by the umpire, and russell and his cronies are inconsolable; but the villagers flood onto the pitch to celebrate, and just to underscore the significance of the moment the heavens suddenly open and the overdue rains provide a further dimension to their unbridled celebrations. the final ball victory provides the catalyst for the british to dissolve their encampment in champaner, they are tripped up by their own rules; cricket becomes then an act of decolonisation, a peaceful form of resistance. bhuvan, the captain marvel of the indian villagers, makes the observation that the british game of cricket resembles gilli danda, played with sticks and a ball, which he played as a child. in the tao of cricket, ashis nandy adds further weight to indian claims over the coloniser’s game: cricket is an indian game accidentally discovered by the english. like chilly, which was discovered in south america and came to india only in medieval times to become an inescapable part of indian cuisine, cricket, too, is now foreign to india only according to the historians and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 indologists. to most indians the game now looks more indian than english (nandy 1989: 1) 2. elizabeth’s cultural crossing over lagaan sets up a passionate desire to see the cad russell defeated. when the officer’s own sister, elizabeth, takes the dangerous decision to assist the villagers in comprehending this strange game, she goes ‘out of bounds’ … beyond the pale; and has to arrange clandestine coaching sessions away from the prying eyes of her kinsfolk. in doing so, elizabeth is displaying empathy and an ethical friendship that transgresses the code of her racial order. it also complicates the picture of the colonial master, by underscoring the patriarchal foundations of that project and nuances the gendered politics at play within the dominant order. in friendship and postmodern utopianism, leela gandhi asks, “does loyalty to my own liberate me of ethical obligations to all those who are not of my nation, family, community, republic, revolution?” (gandhi 2003: 15). elizabeth answers this conundrum in a generous fashion: she sides with the strangers, against her own (brother, race) – partly because of an infatuation with bhuvan, but also because she recognises that it is the right thing to do – that it is just. this is perhaps easier to incorporate for indian audiences, but for an english or perhaps even by extension western audience, this requires an unsettling self-consciousness. certainly the task is made easier because russell is such a one-dimensionally nasty man, but it still entails a kind of national or ethnic betrayal that demands a certain courage and moral fortitude. in the aristotelian tradition, (and perhaps the dominant western model), friendship is aligned with the polis (aristotle 1999: 3) and is at the service of the state. we gravitate towards sameness, and by extension exclude difference. a different cultural tradition of friendship can be found in epicurean ideals and is based on philoxenia: a love for & sheltering of guests, strangers & foreigners (gandhi 2006: 26). such epicurean traditions could not abide the racial exclusivity that characterises recent australian immigration policies, and indeed the nation’s chequered history of white australia policy, both official and unofficial. it stands, for instance, in contradistinction to the pacific solutions policy of the howard era. elizabeth, by befriending and empathising with the villagers, is betraying the aristotelian tradition of racial and even class allegiance; and it is perhaps her own position as a female in a patriarchal structure that gives her the capacity for empathy. there is, in her actions, recognition of difference that enables an ethics of hospitality; a quality seemingly beyond her brothers pale politics. conclusion: somewhere over the boundary this allegorical, postcolonial text pitches itself across different temporalities to forge an imagined indian utopia; what could have, and with faith, what might still become an indian reality. what if gandhian ideals of multi-ethnic and multi-faith harmony had coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 taken deeper root? what if the trauma of partition had been avoided, or might still be overcome? this is the big picture at the core of lagaan’s moral storytelling. still today then, it is not [just] cricket. a cricket match against the ex-coloniser is also a reenactment of the colonial struggle. by means of systematically re-membering the rules of the game from a minority perspective, the former colonies altered the shape of cricket and exposed its inherent fissures, thereby also unhinging the sport from its englishness. thus, the game of cricket as practised in india and elsewhere across the globe, most evidently in the british commonwealth, provides a counter narrative, it employs the art of mimicry, which simultaneously critiques and celebrates. as bhabha, eloquently explicates: the ambivalence of mimicry – almost but not quite – suggests that the fetishised colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter appeal. what i have called its ‘identity effects’ are always crucially split. under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. for the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it de-authorises them (bhabha 1994: 90). works cited alarcón, norma. 1998. “chicana feminism: in the tracks of 'the' native woman.” in, carla trujillo, ed. living chicana theory. berkeley: third woman press, 371–382. anand, siriyavan. 2002. “eating with our fingers, watching hindi cinema and consuming cricket.” dalat forum website at http://jan.ucc.nua.edu/sj6/eatingwith.html. retrieved 25/10/2008. anzaldúa, gloria. 1987. borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. san francisco: spinsters/aunt lute. appadurai, arjun. 1997. “playing with modernity: the decolonization of indian cricket.” modernity at large cultural dimensions of globalisation. oxford university press: new delhi. aristotle. 1999. politics. trans. benjamin jowett. batoche books: 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coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 ebert, roger. 2002. “reviews: lagaan – once upon a time in india.” chicago suntimes, 7/6/2002. retrieved 29/11/2012. elizondo, virgilio. 2000. the future is mestizo: life where cultures meet. university press of colorado. elley, derek. 2001. “lagaan: once upon a time in india review.” variety 19/7/2001. retrieved 29/11/2012. farred, grant. 2004. “the double temporality of lagaan: cultural struggle and postcolonialism.” journal of sport and social issues vol. 28, 93-114. gandhi, leela. 2003. “friendship and postmodern utopianism.” cultural studies review. 9 (1), 12-22. gandhi, leela. 2006. affective communities. durham: duke university press. gonzales, rodolfo “corky.” 2003. “i am joaquin.” in francisco h. vázquez and rodolfo d. torres, ed. latino/a thought: culture, politics, and society. lanham, md. rowman and littlefield, 75–87. guha, ramachandra. 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29/11/2012. shah, panna. 1981. the indian film. westport, conn: greenwood press. singh, kuljinder. 2001. “film review: lagaan (2001).” bbc 18/6/2001. retrieved 29/11/2012. stradling, jan. 2009. more than a game: when sport and history collide. sydney: murdoch books. ‘the arrival of the australian aboriginal cricket team in england’. the sporting life, 16 may 1868. london . tsering, lisa. 2005. “spidey neighbourhood asks for lagaan.” the times of india 31/5/2005. retrieved 29/11/2012. vasudev, aruna. 1978. liberty and licence in indian cinema, vikas publishing house, new delhi. vasconcelos, josé. 1997. the cosmic race: a bilingual edition. trans. didier t. jaén. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. wyatt, woodrow lyle, cited in wisden: the official website of the cricketers’ almanac “a few samples of what the butchers are for?” 2012, http://www.wisden.com/default.aspx?id=32. accessed 6/6/2012. box office india. “top earners 2000-2009.” boxofficeindia.com. retrieved 29/11/2012. lagaan. ‘international box-office results’. box office mojo. 2001. retrieved 29/11/2012. [the] sporting life, ‘the arrival of the australian aboriginal cricket team in england’. london. 16 may 1868. andrew jones teaches media studies at southern cross university. his research interests include: film, latin american studies, the politics and uses of popular culture, and postcolonial studies. i baden offord used this phrase, beyond the pale, as the centrepiece of his plenary kathleen firth lecture pacific solutions beyond the pale at the barcelona australian studies centre conference pacific solutions, december 2011. ii pau pitarch fernández plays with this connection between european notions of civilizing mission, and the rather less than holy reality and devastating repercussions for indigenous peoples, and syphilis. the barcelona australian studies centre conference pacific solutions, december 2011. iii they had 19 draws, 14 losses and 14 wins on tour in 1868 as cited in the cricket archive: http://cricketarchive.com accessed 27/5/2012. http://www.wisden.com/default.aspx?id=32 http://cricketarchive.com/ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 iv i had to say that at least once – it seems so fitting given the musical attributes of the film and some of the moustaches that are an integral part of the films mise-en-scene. the malvinas/falklands war (1982): pacific solutions for an atlantic conflict coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 the malvinas/falklands war (1982): pacific solutions for an atlantic conflict andrea roxana bellot abstract: although the malvinas/falklands war (1982) was relatively short and did not involve a great number of losses, it stands as an important blow in the collective memory of the two nations involved: great britain and argentina. for the british, it was the last “colonial” war and one which allowed margaret thatcher to stay in power for almost a decade after the british victory. for the argentine, it was the only war fought and lost in the twentieth century and it brought about the fall of the dictatorship. this paper will summarise the course of events related to the war, showing how the war implied a major nationalist project for both nations since national honour and national dignity were at stake. by making use of historical publications, this paper will also explore how and why some pacific solutions were ignored before the war broke out, as well as the failure of diplomatic negotiations in putting an end to the conflict. keywords: malvinas/falklands war, pacific solutions, diplomatic failure, history introduction the malvinas /falklands war was fought in 1982 between the united kingdom and argentina. the reason for battle was the claim to sovereignty over the falkland islands. even though the islands have formed part of the british overseas territories since the eighteenth century, argentina has always alleged that they belong to her national territory. this small archipelago in the south atlantic has a reduced surface of 12.000 km 2 with lands that stay frozen 8 months of the year and winds that blow at 130 km/h. the total population reached the 1,800 inhabitants at the time of the war with 360 sheep per capita. how could such an insignificant place bring two nations to war and cause so many years of controversy? this paper aims to summarise the main events that led to copyright ©2013 andrea roxana bellot. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 the war as well as analyse the failure in the diplomatic negotiations in preventing and stopping the armed conflict. historical background and sovereignty the dispute over the islands certainly has a long and complicated history. the controversy, which has been going on for almost two centuries now, goes back to the discovery of the islands themselves. according to the british, captain john davis was the one who first sighted the islands. the argentines tend to favour the argument that the islands were discovered by a portuguese named alvaro de mesquita. other sailors, such as vespucci, magellan, sebald de weert and hawkins, have also been mentioned as being the first to sight the islands. there is, however, no real evidence for prioritizing one claim over another and thus, the issue is still unresolved. consequently, spaniards, britons, dutchmen and portuguese are all possible candidates. in 1690 captain john strong was on an expedition to chile when he had to stop on the islands due to a fierce storm at sea. on landing, he named the islands after the first lord of the admiralty, lord falkland (hastings and jenkins 1983: 1). other names given to the islands were: the sansons, the sebaldes, hawkins land, the malouines and the malvinas (ibid.). the first settlements on the islands were french in 1764, followed by the spanish and thereafter the british. around the year 1828 the argentines established a penal colony on the islands but the british forces imposed their control over the area. the islands became a strategic point for navigation and the royal navy set up a base there shortly after the first colony settled. in 1829 there was an attempt to recover the islands by the government of buenos aires, which was easily and quickly repelled by the british. the british settled down on the islands permanently in 1833. this high interest in the possession of the islands makes sense when considering the key role islands have played in the formation of empires for international geopolitical reasons. as h. e. chehabi argues “in the era of classical imperialism the big powers had to possess as many islands as possible, so as to control the great shipping lanes and to supply routes of their fleets” (1985: 215). according to hastings and jenkins, the falkland islands have never been of any great strategic importance, yet, “from the moment of their discovery they seem to have embodied the national pride of whoever held them” (hastings and jenkins 1983: 6). the argentines are convinced that the “malvinas” belong to their nation, but they were taken by force by the british colonialists in 1833. in the same way, many britons are assertive about the sovereignty of the islands. this argument is combined with the principle of self-determination: the majority of the islanders are of british descent and they passionately desire to remain british. as margaret thatcher declared during the war: argentina has, of course, long disputed british sovereignty over the islands. we have absolutely no doubt about our sovereignty, which has been continuous since 1833. nor have we any doubt about the unequivocal wishes of the falkland islanders, who are british in stock and tradition, and they wish to remain british in allegiance. we cannot allow the democratic coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 rights of the islanders to be denied by the territorial ambitions of argentina (quoted in barnett 1982: 28). ironic as it may sound, great britain, the former colonial power, engages in war in order to defend the self-determination of the islanders. those critical of the prime minister, such as anthony barnett, claim that margaret thatcher was demagogically using the wishes of the islanders for her own benefit (ibid.) the argument of self-determination is disclaimed by the argentines, who argue that any nation can set up a colony in a foreign land and later on claim that territory. the intricacies in the discussion of sovereignty may be put aside but the fact is that, from the moment the british colonists settled on the islands in 1833, the argentine government has made several attempts to regain the archipelago, all of them unsuccessful. in the second half of the twentieth century argentina submitted an official report to the united nations in which they laid claim to the islands. this led to resolution number 2065 (xx) from 16 december 1965 titled “question of the falkland islands (malvinas)”. it “invites the governments of argentina and the united kingdom to proceed without delay with the negotiations […] bearing in mind […] the interests of the population of the falkland islands”. this suggestion was ignored by both nations. further mediation from the un followed, such as resolution 3160 (xxviii) and 31/49, which acknowledged the need to “concede due attention to the interests of the inhabitants of the islands” (cardoso et al. 1983: 33). this is a key point since the un has always considered the falklands’ case as a colonial situation, which needs to be solved with the participation of the local population. however, this has never been accepted by argentina which wants government-level discussions with a commission formed by international members. further debate took place in the 1960s and 1970s between the foreign missions of the two nations, but again this failed to come to any meaningful conclusion. going to war just before the breakout of war, argentina sent the un subtle hints of a possible invasion of the islands. the british ignored these threats and did not react as they thought that the argentine would never dare to confront them directly. to complicate things even further, the argentine government wrongly assumed that the british would not go to war because they inferred that britain had lost interest in the islands. this mistaken assumption derived from two facts that had occurred during the previous years. on the one hand, the british nationality act was reformed in 1981, reducing considerably british citizenship rights to the inhabitants of the falklands. on the other hand, the hms endurance, which delivered supplies to the islands, was withdrawn from service in january 1982, a few months before the beginning of the war. london did not hear the voices that warned the foreign office against that course of action which could lead to the interpretation that the british commitment to the kelpers (as the islanders call themselves) was weakening. for instance, in january 1982 admiral sir edmund irving published an article titled “does withdrawal of endurance signal a falkland islands desertion?” in which he predicts the risks of the operation (quoted in coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 chehabi 1985: 220). h. e. chehabi blames the successive british governments for not giving top priority to the interests of the population of the islands and, as a consequence of that neglect, little was done for the development of the colony, thereby letting the infrastructure deteriorate. in 1978 he suggested a course of action for britain’s smaller possession, in which the falkland islands, together with other overseas dependencies, would be transformed into “overseas counties”. that would have meant that the kelpers could have gained their own representatives at westminster, receiving the same rights as citizens of the united kingdom. according to him, this would have put an end to colonialism, legally speaking (chehabi 1985: 219-220). moreover, and following the same line of thought, geoffrey regan believes that the war could have been avoided if the british government had sent clear signals of a commitment with the islands. instead, it sent ambiguous messages giving the impression that it did not care about the fate of the falklands (regan 1987: 172-177; cardoso et al. 1983: 37). the following quote summarizes the thought of the argentine politicians: the problem has no political importance for the united kingdom. england does not know what to do with the falklands. they find them expensive and far away. those 1,800 inhabitants give them endless trouble. [consequently,] there will be no british counterattack if the [argentine] military action is carried out ‘cleanly’ (cardoso et al. 1983: 31-32; 54). rosana guber points out that the military regime governing the country at the time did not really intend to go to war. this theory, shared by guber and others, sustains that the invasion of the islands was designed to put pressure on the british government since that would have enabled the argentine to raise the discussion entailing international organizations (guber 2001: 29). the absence of serious, constant and effective diplomatic talks increased the tension among the two nations and gave way to misleading presuppositions. on 19 march 1982, the argentine flag was raised at south georgia (a falklands dependency) by a group of argentines who were sent to work on the islands, in a somewhat confusing incident that was interpreted by the british authorities as a hostile move. the junta ordered the invasion of the islands on 2 april. the operation was quick and the british garrison surrendered the same day. along with an early british military reaction of making the decision of sending a task force alongside a submarine to the south atlantic, in the following weeks there was intense diplomatic activity while the main expeditionary force assembled and sailed towards the area of conflict. in the meantime, argentine forces on the islands were being reinforced, reaching a total number of 10.000 troops. the british counterattack began with the retaking of south georgia (21-26 april) and the bombing of the local airport at stanley, followed by the crucial sinking of the ara general belgrano (2 may). argentine air attacks hit and sunk british destroyers hms sheffield (4 may), ardent (21 may), coventry and atlantic conveyor (25 may). british forces advanced eastwards across the island while the argentines prepared to defend stanley, the falklands’ capital city. the final serious land battle took place between 11 and 13 june around the mountains surrounding the capital. on 14 june, british forces reached the outskirts of stanley. the argentines still had some 8.000 troops and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 supplies there, but their morale was diminishing. as a consequence, argentine commanders agreed to negotiate the surrender on the evening of the 15 june. repeated mistakes due to disorganisation, poor military strategy together with a severe lack of training and weapons made argentina lose the war (regan 1987: 172-173; guber 2001: 112). reasons for war as regards the reasons for going to war, the official version given by both nations was that it was a “just cause”. that is to say, both countries affirmed to have right over the possession of the islands since they believed the islands formed part of their national territory. the argentines have always claimed that the islands were inherited from spain after the independence of 1816 but were taken from them by the british who, on the other hand, felt obliged to defend their colonial subjects from any outside aggression. moreover, the british could not allow themselves to be threatened by a dictatorial regime, since that would have made thatcher’s government look weak and therefore lose ground in international politics. as barnett claims, “her political image had been constructed around the projection of determination, resolution and iron fidelity to national defence” (1982: 29). argentine leaders also considered geopolitical reasons. in 1980, chile had won the dispute over the beagle channel, so there was a growing concern about the strategic position of argentina in south america. besides, some members of the argentine government believed that there was a big potential for exploiting the natural resources on the area, such as krill fishing and oil (linford 2005: 3). another important factor to take into account is that both countries had been going through severe crises by the time war broke out and there was a great deal of public unhappiness, unrest and censorship. margaret thatcher, leader of the conservative party, was british prime minister from 1979 to 1990. she had been preceded by james callaghan from the labour party, whose government had been extremely unpopular resulting in the union strikes of 1978-1979, which forced him to call for general elections in 1979. when thatcher took power, she was determined to counteract what she perceived as the national decline: social unrest, high inflation and unemployment. she believed that “the years of managed decline were the real testament to the ills of the british economy and the necessity to try a new approach” (pearce & stewart 1992:522). besides, she wanted the nation to recover leadership in international affairs. the main policies implemented in her presidency were deregulation of the financial sector, privatization of national companies, flexible labour markets, and a reduction of the budget for social services and education. all these measurements brought about a deep recession of the economy; “the tight fiscal policies and very high interest rates were maintained through the period 1979-82 and britain experienced its fiercest recession since 1931” (ibid.:523). unemployment stood as one of the main consequences of this recession. by 1982, it had risen to three million, the highest number since the 1930s, affecting especially the manufacturing sector and the mining industry, which was the initial cause of the many confrontations between the trade unions and the prime minister. at the same time, social unrest was growing and there was a new outbreak of violence in some of the major cities around britain. examples were the brixton riots in april 1981 and the toxteth riots in july 1981. to make matters coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 worse, margaret thatcher was rather intolerant with the complaints of the population, and ordered police repression for public demonstrations. due to these measures she became famous for her resolute approach which later on gave her the nickname “iron lady”. as a consequence of all this, margaret thatcher reached the lowest rates of popularity at that time. by the time of the war the leader of the military government ruling argentina was general galtieri, who could only manage to stay in power for one year. this national reorganization process, an umbrella term by which the dictators called themselves, came to power in 1976 by a military coup deposing president isabel martínez de perón. she was the widow of the former president juan domingo perón, leader of the popular “peronist” political and social movement, who inherited the presidency once her husband had passed away in office. the junta immediately abolished the national constitution, depriving the citizens of most of their fundamental civil rights: soon it was also announced that the death penalty was to be re-established. although argentina had already suffered under other military regimes, this was considered to be the worst dictatorship in argentina (corradi 1996: 92), a dirty war that violated human rights and which resulted in thirty thousand political activists “disappearing”, according to the conadep (comisión nacional sobre la desaparición de personas). apart from the atrocities to human rights that were being committed and the corruption that invaded even the highest ranks of the government, the country was going through a devastating economic crisis. by 1981 the inflation rate rose to 100 per cent, foreign debt climbed to its highest records, deindustrialization rate reached 22.9 per cent, net salaries decreased by 19.2 per cent, gdp (gross domestic product) fell by 11.4 per cent and the national currency collapsed at rates of 600 per cent (floria 1988: 245-252; rock 1988: 459-461; romero 2001: 212-216). moreover, popular opposition was at its peak and civil rights movements, such as the madres de plaza de mayo, were managing to claim international attention. the recovery of the malvinas islands was a good card for the president to play at that moment. on the one hand, an eventual argentine victory would help to counteract the national chaos. on the other hand, it would somehow legitimize the military government (canelo 2004: 304-305; guber 2001: 19). so, in a way, both nations needed the war to mask the troubles at home. consequently, the war was used to raise nationalist feelings and thus unite public opinion against a common outside enemy by creating an “us/them” dichotomy. the two governments, led by thatcher and galtieri, used this dichotomy to displace the attention of those who were unhappy, unemployed, discriminated against or repressed. the war lasted 74 days and left behind a total of 907 dead. after the war, the british presence on the islands was reinforced and some important british figures, such as the prince of wales and thatcher herself, visited the islands. in 1983, the british nationality falkland islands act was passed, giving back full citizenship rights to the inhabitants of the islands. thatcher’s popularity rose after the british victory: from being considered the most unpopular of british prime ministers, she managed to become the most popular one (marr 2010). she was re-elected in 1983 by a huge majority, successfully channelling the high public support of this reawakened nationalist mood into the polls. the conservatives were 188 seats ahead of labour and had an overall majority of 144 constituencies. the labour party recorded its worst performance since 1918, obtaining only 27.6% of the popular vote (pearce and stewart 1992: 526). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 as malcolm pearce and geoffrey stewart said: “the dark days of the falkland war were over and the country could rejoice in its recent victory, and feel that britain’s prestige had risen under the stern and unyielding leadership of mrs. thatcher” (pearce and stewart 1992: 525). in argentina, general galtieri resigned shortly after the war, on 17 june 1982, and he was also forced to leave his position of commander-in-chief of the army. in the following year, 1983, the dictatorship collapsed and democracy was restored. the fall of galtieri and, in consequence, the fall of the military government, was not only because the war had been lost but also because the people of argentina realised the serious mistakes committed by the regime and its incapacity to solve the internal and external conflicts. the armed forces had lost all credibility and the fall of the military junta was inevitable. failure of diplomatic negotiations there were several attempts to try and reach a peaceful solution after the invasion and just before the british counterattack. the first intervention came from the usa by president reagan and his secretary of state, general alexander haig. reagan’s intervention was well received in the uk and in argentina. on 7 april 1982 the national newspaper, the clarín, welcomed the news and published the following in its editorial: la propuesta del presidente norteamericano ronald reagan de interponer sus buenos oficios a fin de lograr una solución pacífica en el pleito que la argentina sostiene con el reino unido por la reconquista de las islas malvinas […] constituye una novedad de sumo interés […] (clarín, 7/4/1982). [u.s. president ronald reagan’s proposal to make good use of his office in order to obtain a peaceful settlement of the dispute that argentina maintains with the united kingdom over the control of the falkland islands […] is very interesting and is to be welcomed.] president reagan’s proposal to put his good skills to work to find a peaceful solution to the lawsuit between argentina and the uk for the recovery of the malvinas islands is of great interest. however, haig’s peace plans were rejected by argentina because they failed to guarantee that sovereignty was to be eventually granted. on the 30 th of april, haig declared: we had reasons to believe that the united kingdom would consider an agreement along the lines of our proposal, but argentina informed us yesterday that she could not accept it. the position of argentina continues to be that she must receive present assurances of her eventual sovereignty, or else an extension of the de facto role concerning the government of the islands (cardoso et al 1983: 245). he recalled the “extraordinary effort” made by the united states in their role of mediators in trying to reach a peaceful agreement in an attempt to preserve “human coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 lives and international order”. he also warned that the crisis was about to “enter a new and dangerous phase during which it [was] probable that military action on a large scale [would] take place” (ibid.). the argentine refusal moved the usa to abandon their neutral stance and take sides with the british, announcing economic and military sanctions on argentina. president reagan went even further when, from the white house, he told reporters that he considered argentina to be the “true aggressor” (ibid: 217). the second international intervention came along with the initiative of the president of peru, fernando belaunde terry. he set out a seven point peace plan, point one and two being the immediate cessation of hostilities and mutual withdrawal of forces (cardoso et al 1983: 219-220). although there were some initial disagreements, both nations were about to accept it. however, the controversial sinking of the belgrano, torpedoed by the british navy when it was outside the war zone (2 may), caused the peace proposal to backfire. there has been some speculation as to whether the belgrano was then a military or a political target. by 8 may the war became the only alternative as negotiations were going through a weak phase. at this point, britain sent reinforcements to the south atlantic. two factors contributed to the strengthening of the british position. on the one hand, the international support the uk received from the nato and the usa. on the other hand, the internal support the conservative party obtained due to the victory in the town council elections on 7 may in england (la vanguardia, 8 may 1982). thereafter came the intervention of the un, led by its secretary general, the peruvian javier pérez de cuéllar. he collected the points for discussion that both nations were willing to offer in order to negotiate an agreement, while battle continued on the islands. the uk demanded the creation of a local council on the islands, accepted to withdraw the troops in a fortnight (providing that argentina did the same), but refused to talk about sovereignty. argentina, aware of the fact that most falklanders wished to remain british, responded that the council should be formed by members of the un and not by local people. it also asked for free access to settle on the islands (la vanguardia, 19 may 1982). britain rejected argentine claims, broke off negotiations and commenced its final attack towards the end of may: that is, on 21 may 1982. a recent un resolution adopted by the special committee at its ninth meeting on 18 june 2004 “requests the governments of argentina and the uk to consolidate the current process of dialogue and cooperation through the resumption of negotiations in order to find, as soon as possible, a peaceful solution”. now (december 2011), 29 years after the war, there is still confrontation between the two nations over the same issues and the basis of the conflict remains substantially unsolved. the claims presented by argentina are based on the concept of territorial integrity while britain focuses on the islanders’ wishes and vigorously proclaims her commitment to defend them against any aggression. this is shown by the continuous presence of a combined naval, air force and army deployment on the islands. in 2010, the british government threatened to use military force if needed to protect the search for oil reservoir around the islands. this prompted a hostile argentine reaction in the form of transit restrictions for the ships involved (el país, 28/2/2010). even more recently, in june 2011, the conservative government declared that there was no possibility for negotiations as long as the will of the islanders was to remain british. president cristina fernández responded by calling coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 david cameron "arrogant" and qualifying his words as "mediocre and stupid" (el país, 17/6/2011; el periódico, 18/6/2011). conclusion the central problem of the whole conflict revolves around the notion of sovereignty. in his article “sovereignty and the falklands crisis” (1983), peter calvert analyses the complexity of the legal issues connected to the sovereignty of the islands. he concludes that “the claims on both sides are based on historical facts that are by turn vague, confused and disputed, and if there is to be any resolution of the question a great deal of homework will have to be done first by both parties” (calvert 1983: 405). moreover, the several peace plans proposed by international mediation failed due to the fact that they were unable to bring a solution to the issue of sovereignty. argentina rejected the pacific solutions proposed at the time of war because they failed to grant the discussion about the dominion of the territory. britain keeps avoiding this issue and insists that the power to decide should be given to the inhabitants of the islands. all in all, this old dispute for the malvinas/falkland islands has become utterly symbolic for both nations. although the probabilities of a solution in the near future are doubtful, the possibility of another war is also unlikely. works cited aznárez, juan jesús. “oro negro en las malvinas”. el país 28 february 2010. online edition: http://elpais.com/diario/2010/02/28/domingo/1267332756_850215.html (accessed november 2011). barnett, anthony, iron britannia. why parliament waged its falklands war. london: allison & busby, 1982. british army website. http://www.army.mod.uk/operations-deployments/22731.aspx (accessed november 2011). calvert, peter, “sovereignty and the falklands crisis” in international affairs (royal institute of international affairs 1944), vol. 59, no. 3 (summer, 1983), pp. 405413. online edition: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2618794 (accessed march 2012). canelo, paula, “la política contra la economía: los elencos militares frente al plan económico de martínez de hoz durante el proceso de reorganización nacional (1976-1981)” in alfredo pucciarelli (ed.), empresarios, tecnócratas y militares. la trama corporativa de la última dictadura. buenos aires: siglo veintiuno editores, 2004. cardoso, oscar raul et al., falklands: the secret plot, trans. bernard ethell. surrey: preston editions, 1983. chehabi, houchang esfandiar, “self-determination, territorial integrity, and the falkland islands” in political science quarterly, vol. 100, no. 2 (summer, 1985), pp. 215-225). online edition: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150653 (accessed march 2012). http://elpais.com/diario/2010/02/28/domingo/1267332756_850215.html http://www.jstor.org/stable/2618794 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150653 coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 conadep, nunca más. buenos aires: eudeba, 1984. http://www.desaparecidos.org/arg/conadep/nuncamas/nuncamas.html (october 2011). corradi, juan e., “el método de destrucción. el terror en la argentina”, in ricardo sidicaro et al. (eds), a veinte años del golpe. con memoria democrática. rosario: homo sapiens, 1996. falkland islands information portal. http://www.falklands.info/index.html (accessed october 2011). floria, carlos a. and garcía belsunce, césar a., historia política de la argentina contemporánea 1880-1983. madrid: alianza editorial, 1988. gilbert, abel. “kirchner insulta cameron per no voler negociar per les malvines”. el periódico 18 june 2011: 17. print. guber, rosana, ¿por qué malvinas? de la causa nacional a la guerra absurda. buenos aires: fondo de cultura económica, 2001. hastings, max and jenkins, simon, the battle for the falklands. suffolk: richard clay, 1983. “kirchner acusa a cameron de arrogante y mediocre por negarse a negociar la soberanía de las malvinas”. el país 17 june 2011. online edition: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2011/06/17/actualidad/1308261604_8 50215.html (accessed november 2011). linford williams, laura. malvinas myths, falklands fictions. college of arts and sciences, the florida state university, florida, 2005. “londres amplía hasta el límite la zona de guerra”. la vanguardia 8 may 1982: 13. online edition: http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1982/05/07/pagina13/32940479/pdf.html?search=malvinas (accessed october 2011). margaret thatcher foundation. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104923 (accessed november 2011). marr, andrew, “british nationalism and the falkland war”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1tehq2ofza&feature=related (accessed october 2011). “onu: argentina pide una tregua de 24 horas”. la vanguardia 19 may 1982: 15. online edition: http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1982/05/18/pagina15/32943591/pdf.html?search=malvinas (accessed october 2011). pearce, malcolm and stewart, geoffrey, british political history (london: routledge, 1992). regan, geoffrey, historia de la incompetencia militar, trans. rafael grasa. barcelona: editorial crítica, 1987. rock, david, argentina 1516-1987, trans. néstor míguez. madrid: alianza editorial, 1988. romero, luis alberto, breve historia contemporánea de la argentina. buenos aires: fondo de cultura económica de argentina, 2001. troncoso, oscar, el proceso de reorganización nacional. buenos aires: centro editor de américa latina, 1984. “una novedad importante”. clarín 7 april 1982: 12. print. united nations resolution of the decolonisation committee, question of the falkland islands (malvinas). 18 june 2004. http://www.falklands.info/history/undecolinisation2004.html (accessed october 2011). http://www.desaparecidos.org/arg/conadep/nuncamas/nuncamas.html http://www.falklands.info/index.html http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2011/06/17/actualidad/1308261604_850215.html http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2011/06/17/actualidad/1308261604_850215.html http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1982/05/07/pagina-13/32940479/pdf.html?search=malvinas http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1982/05/07/pagina-13/32940479/pdf.html?search=malvinas http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104923 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1tehq2ofza&feature=related http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1982/05/18/pagina-15/32943591/pdf.html?search=malvinas http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1982/05/18/pagina-15/32943591/pdf.html?search=malvinas coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 united nation resolution 2065 (xx), question of the falkland islands (malvinas). 16 december 1965. http://www.falklands.info/history/resolution2065.html (accessed november 2011). andrea roxana bellot is working on her doctoral thesis at the universitat rovira i virgili, tarragona. she holds a degree in english philology from the university of barcelona and completed the masters’ programme “cultural studies: texts & contexts” in the urv. her interests are mainly in cultural studies, war studies, national identity and the media. andrea was born in argentina, but lives in catalonia since 2005. http://www.falklands.info/history/resolution2065.html coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 developing a connective feminine discourse: drusilla modjeska on women’s lives, love and art ulla rahbek copenhagen university denmark ulla@hum.ku.dk copyright©ulla rahbek 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this paper discusses the work of the australian writer and historian drusilla modjeska through a focus on the intersections between women‟s lives, love and art, which constitute the central triptych of modjeska‟s writing. it argues that modjeska‟s oeuvre unfolds a connective feminine discourse through a development of what the paper calls hinging tropes, discursive connectors that join life, love and art, such as weaving, folding and talking. that connective feminine discourse is indeed central to modjeska‟s personal and sometimes idiosyncratic feminism. keywords: drusilla modjeska, art, femininity, feminism, discourse, life, love, women “[f]or „life‟ and „art‟ – those two huge categories – rarely sit comfortably together; men and women almost invariably take different positions and get angry.” (stravinsky’s lunch, 17) “„with art,‟ rika said. „that can be a love affair, yes?‟ „oh, yes,‟ gina said. „the greatest of love affairs.‟ she paused for a moment, looked at rika, smiled. „but not necessarily the best‟” (the mountain, 68). this piece of conversation between protagonist rika, a budding photographer, and the librarian gina, from drusilla modjeska‟s 2012 novel the mountain, highlights a central concern in modjeska‟s work – the roles of love and art in women‟s lives. in all of her generically varied and experimental writing, modjeska‟s enduring interest is in the complexity of women‟s mailto:ulla@hum.ku.dk coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 lives, love and art. her research on women writers and artists is partly instinctive, she explains, “as if i knew without knowing that they had something to teach me” (timepieces, 6). in stravinsky’s lunch she tells stories about women‟s love lives and artistic lives, in order “to understand” (stravinsky’s lunch, 22). that personal and instinctive engagement is present in all of modjeska‟s books – fictional and nonfictional. indeed, she enfolds her own life, love and art into her writing in an organic and highly seductive way. her use of the tricky first person is evident in this connection: “„i‟ is a slippery creature, much given to ambiguity and prone to an almost chronic state of contingency. this too is the nature of secrets, and increasingly suits me well,” she admits in the author‟s note attached to her contribution to the collection secrets (secrets, 171-2). and it is the richness of what i call her central triptych – women‟s life, love and art – that i want to explore in this article. i am using the trope of a triptych for several reasons. a triptych is a work of art that consists of three panels that are hinged together and that can typically be folded together too. life, love and art form just such a triptych in modjeska‟s feminine and feminist writing. what i am particularly interested in exploring, however, are the hinges, the joints, the devices on which these three phenomena turn. in order to do so, i need to reflect on modjeska fondness for the word “feminine”, but also on how she ponders what the huge categories of art, love and life might be in the first place. i there is no doubt that modjeska writes from a feminist perspective, albeit a highly personal and sometimes idiosyncratic one. it is common in feminist scholarship to distinguish between female, feminine and feminist, where female is biological sex, feminine socially or culturally constructed gender, and feminist a political position not attached to sex (or gender). ii drusilla modjeska deliberately, i think, uses the label “feminine” in her work to cover both female and feminine, and sometimes even feminist – an approach i adopt in this article. feminine, then, does the work of all three categories in modjeska‟s work; it weaves biological sex together with socially constructed gender to compose a highly personal feminist project. this project is not traditionally feminist in the sense that it is primarily focused on critiquing the ideology and effect of patriarchal power and what kate millett famously called sexual politics back in 1971. modjeska‟s focus lies elsewhere, though no less feminist for it. her concern is with female-centred – feminine if you like – sustaining friendships, conversations and artistic and amorous experiences linked to that central triptych of her oeuvre: women‟s life, love, art. it seems to me that modjeska‟s use of the term feminine has little to do with critiquing social or cultural constructs, but rather with a form of positioning. and by positioning i mean a gendered perspective from which to explore and experience the interwoven nature of the triptych. she is developing an unashamedly feminine and female aesthetics, indeed a highly recognisable discourse that draws out the connectivity at the heart of what she describes as the feminine, in her sustaining focus on women‟s life, love and art. in stravinsky’s lunch she asks “what feminine inheritance?” (stravinsky’s lunch, 112) is it that she sees in the work of australian painter and memoir-writer stella bowen? is it the “feminine underbelly” of modernist painters? what is the connection, what hinges these women artists? how do they join life, love and art in the harmonic unity that bowen was dreaming of? where are the connections? what exactly hinges, or joins, love, life and art? how is life united with love and with art? in her work, modjeska coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 makes use of several ideas to suggest hinging, notions that are at the same time literal and metaphorical, and that develop into her own discourse of feminine connectivity. in “living on a corner”, modjeska ponders the “strange freedom of women artists in this country [i.e. australia], working in the spaces they could make their own, in gaps and fissures.” interpolating herself in the narrative, she goes on to reflect on life in sydney in the 1970s, and wonders how to tell that particular story: “there‟s no single line to that story, or from that time. i pull a thread called place” (inner cities, 64-5). fissures and gaps are the in-between areas where women‟s artistic and amorous lives are lived and they act as hinging tropes in a sense, illustrating the contingency of notions such as life, love and art. these are emphatically not discrete units in modjeska‟s universe. and typically, we are also introduced through meta-reflectional comments on how to narrate the tale. she pulls a thread called place in order to find a focus for the story she aims to tell in this particular essay – on inner cities, meaning, literally, cities, but also cities of the mind, products of the imagination. however, the word thread recurs again and again in her stories, made to do different things in different contexts, while all the time uniting disparate elements especially in storytelling. in “the cuckoo clock”, for example, we are presented with the art of storytelling and how storytelling functions as glue that holds family life together. the narrator comments that the sister aggie wants to hear the same story she‟s heard many times before “as if the repetition itself will stitch her into the fabric of a family in which strains and separations are part of her woven birthright of love” (sisters, 117). here notions of stitching on fabric suggest the craft of uniting or hinging, in this case the life of the sister to the art of storytelling, that is to the central family story narrated in the familial story of the cuckoo clock. in “writing poppy” modjeska uses other such sartorial metaphors that recur in her writing and that help us understand the hinges between life, love and art: i pulled at the threads of memory until i found the life, or maybe only the tension in them. i began the work of remembering, weaving thoughts and feelings onto a loom strung with something (i‟m not sure what) hard and inescapable. i used the shards of memory as a way back to the world and the life lived there (timepieces, 73-4). pulling at threads suggests a method of finding focus for a story, of joining elements together, through notions of place, as above, or memory. the metaphor of the loom enlarges the threading and stitching on fabric metaphor and allows us to consider modjeska‟s art of storytelling as a kind of textual tapestry that pulls threads and stitches together in what will become networks or webs of women‟s lives, loves and arts. in this connection, it is relevant to remember that the words text, texture and textile share the same etymology, from the latin texere, meaning to compose and to weave. iii her mother comments on the young drusilla‟s stories that they are “dru‟s embroidery” and modjeska herself insists that “[e]mbroidery was deep in my soul” (timepieces, 79). the art of storytelling is here tellingly compared to the traditionally female art of embroidery. thus it is not too farfetched to suggest that modjeska‟s generically very varied work from exiles at home, first published in 1981, to the mountain (2012) be seen as her gigantic tapestry where the notions of thread pulling, stitching, interlacing, and interweaving can be understood as a way to hinge that thematic triptych of life, love and art both in a synchronic and diachronic manner. as far as art is concerned, coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 modjeska is particularly attracted to the experimental and daring aspects of modernist women writers and painters. in these artists she learns how to gather together ideas, how to arrange words, how to order and link past and present. how to hinge, we might say: “what i wanted to capture in writing was the spreading, weaving talk that happens with an intimate friend” (timepieces, 85), modjeska writes, again using that metaphor of weaving that becomes her way of talking about female lives, friendships and conversations. in another essay from timepieces, “on not owning a grace cossington smith” modjeska reflects on the art that hangs on her own walls. she could not afford the cossington smith that she coveted, so instead she finds solace in the paintings by people she knows and that she has collected for years: “i like living alongside images made by people painting in the same environment in which i write. i like the interconnection of work and friendship and the art that comes from it. i like the traces of struggle and change and development” (timepieces, 131). here modjeska develops another way of considering hinges – embodied this time in notions of interconnections and friendship and work and art – that she first introduced towards the end of poppy, when musing on the “excellence of friendship” and “the connections between women” (poppy, 309). interestingly, the extract from “on not owning a grace cossington smith” is noticeable for its repetition of the initial “i like” – the subjective, emotional and private is a characteristic feature of modjeska‟s own method of engaging in an intimate conversation, as it were, with the reader. it also characterises what i call her feminine positioning, her own powerful brand of feminism, where the personal is political, yet in a muted and understated manner. the notion of conversation as a hinging idea is more fully developed in stravinsky’s lunch, especially in modjeska‟s typical fashion of interpolating herself into the lives of her subjects: “the notion of conversation, as stella bowen was using it, and as i do, can be seen as both a feminine and a modern phenomenon”. conversation is linked to love (bowen fell in love with ford madox ford‟s talk) and intimacy: “conversation was for her the basis for intimacy: the real exchange that occurs between people who are open to each other in feeling and ideas” (stravinsky’s lunch, 141). even stella bowen‟s memoir, drawn from life (1940), is described by modjeska as a conversation piece (stravinsky’s lunch, 150), where the reader is drawn into the other‟s intimate musings, not unlike the ways in which the reader is drawn into modjeska‟s own conversation pieces, with women of the past and with (female) readers of the present. conversat ion here becomes a linking device that operates synchronically and diachronically simultaneously. the art of conversation is a means to unite life, love and art but also a way for modjeska to literally stage the feminine inheritance, the links between the women who people her books. it is also contingent on the notions of seeing and recognition, as we shall see. another manner in which modjeska expands upon the connective hinges between women‟s life, love and art is through more traditional narrative epiphanies, where women characters suddenly experience profoundly their intimate connection with that feminine inheritance discussed above. protagonist of the mountain, dutch-born rika travels to papua new guinea and finds herself in the secret, female world of bark cloth artists. here she experiences something akin to an epiphany as she contemplates the coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 location of the spirit and the spiritual, drawing on her own art of photography. maybe it does not exist in material objects or in people, she muses: “maybe it was more like negative space in photography, the connective tissue that joins the things that are seen, bringing them together through angle and light” (the mountain, 139). connective tissue names another method of hinging and it links rika‟s western self with the oceanic bark cloth artists in a female – feminine perhaps – sphere of creativity, that transcends “race”, class and age. rika‟s epiphany here echoes the first person narrator lalage‟s (or drusilla modjeska‟s?) central epiphany in poppy, a “triptychonic” moment that unites women, life and art. the narrator visits crete for the first time and even though she has read much about the minoan matriarchy, she is bowled over when she comes face to face with the figures that poppy had already described to her before she died: “[t]he agile, the squat, the working women of minoa: mothers, priests, animal handlers, acrobats, preparers of food. where do such women come from, poppy had written” (poppy, 115, italics in the original). this powerful moment of cross-generational recognition yokes together mother with daughter and with representations of past women “still singing with life three or four thousand years later” (poppy, 116). it is in crete, contemplating women‟s lives, loves and art, that mother and daughter are so powerfully moved, where poppy, the thread maker, adopts ariadne‟s story – of art, love and life – as her own. but of course in reality life, love and art rarely hinge unproblematically. in stravinsky’s lunch modjeska cogitates thus about stella bowen: “love and art became united as her hopes for one folded into the other. and like [modernist painter] paula modersohnbecker she discovered that there is an uneasy rub, a chafing line, between these two desires” (stravinsky’s lunch, 14). folding is yet another manner of depicting the hinges between love and art, and what is interesting here is how the hinges are not always smooth and well-oiled, as it were. it is precisely because the hinges are rusty, that they in reality chafe and rub uneasily against each other, that the triptych of life, love and art makes for such a fascinating and cornucopious thematics to explore for modjeska. the chafing line between life, love and art, however, grows into a creative and productive rub from which much great feminine, as it were, art is produced, as modjeska goes on to explore in her chapter on stella bowen and her complicated life with ford madox ford. bowen‟s longing was for harmony between life, love and art, as we have seen: “her hope was for a shared life of love and work” (stravinsky’s lunch, 78), but this dream evolves into “their love, and his art” (stravinsky’s lunch, 64, italics in the original). that harmony between life, love and art that bowen desired is presented as a feminine attempt to speak “against the split” (stravinsky’s lunch, 337). the split is modjeska‟s personal counter-metaphor, her imaginative description of what she sees as the traditionally masculine and patriarchal division between thinking (figured as a male activity) and feeling (considered a female weakness), public and private etc. patriarchally speaking, life, love and art are discrete categories, split from each other in a way that is foreign to the female world of modjeska‟s textual tapestry, where contingency and connections reign supreme. masculinity, she suggests, relies on binary divisions that cannot be accommodated in the framework of that female triptych at the heart of modjeska‟s distinctive connective feminine discourse. in the introduction to the edited volume inner cities, modjeska, writes: coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 women are practised on the peripheries. our memories, our stories, like the ways we live, are formed in movement between inner and outer, past and future, centre and margin, between the physical environment and the social world. we shape our cities, and re-shape them from the edge, we always have; just as our cities shape us. we live in houses that weren‟t built for our dreams, in suburbs connected by transport systems we can‟t control. we fit our stories to the world we inherit. or do we? (inner cities, 2). while harriet/harry burden, siri hustvedt‟s contemporary, female artist in the blazing world takes the 17 th century writer margaret cavendish as her guardian angel and soul mate, modjeska draws on christine de pizan (1364-c.1430) in her rumination on female inheritance in connection with the role of the imagination, dreaming and place. her essay in this volume is called “living on a corner”, probably in homage to gaston bachelard‟s suggestion that “our house is our corner of the world […] it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (the poetics of space, 4). however, although she clearly draws on bachelard‟s oneiric exploration of houses as containers of the imagination and (day) dreams – described thus in the foreword to the 1994 edition of the poetics of space by john r. stilgoe: “his insistence that people need houses in order to dream, in order to imagine, remains one of the most unnerving, most convincing arguments in western philosophy” iv – she also critiques this insistence. contrary to bachelard‟s claim that “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (poetics of space, 6), modjeska suggests from her gendered positioning that houses are not built for women’s dreams, since in her textual universe women‟s lives are not split between outside and inside, but rather lived in-between outside and inside. consequently women‟s dreams are not contained by houses, but rather more elastic and contingent, both inside and outside cities and houses in an organic connection that is simultaneously and ambiguously both vulnerable and strong. and what is more, many of the women modjeska depicts do not have the time nor the luxury to inhabit a house where they can dream in peace. we have seen that art is central in modjeska‟s writing. all art is provisional and contingent, modjeska tells us in the conclusion to the orchard: “art is created in the tension between that contingency, a necessary instability, and the order, the meaning, the pattern, that graces it. as is a garden. or a well-lived life” (the orchard, 257). art is indeed linked to life and love – and such contingency can create tensions that upset “well-lived lives”. art as such can also be many things: it can be the balsa wood models that the first person narrator of “ripe to tell” (in secrets) first makes of european cathedrals and later, having discovered oceania, of the cathedrals of papua new guinea. poppy, in the matremoir v of the same name, has a habit “of plaiting scraps of wool, cotton, thin strips of material, hair ribbon, crêpe paper and anything else at hand, into a thick multi-coloured twine” (poppy, 15). poppy‟s “braided twine” (poppy, 16) is a kind of bricolage, a craft or, as we are encouraged to consider it in the book, a kind of art. vi importantly it also doubles as a way of holding onto love and life. it functions as kind of ariadne‟s thread and precipitates the following reflection in the narrator: “is that the feminine condition, always a life-line to other people‟s lives and therefore split from our own? who holds the thread for us? who held it for her [i.e. poppy]?” (poppy, 16). this solid string is thus both a creative and a relational phenomena – like storytelling, it makes use of scraps to create something new and in the process of braiding poppy also coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 tries to interlace, or hinge, her family in what is her life-line. later in the book the narrator explains in one of the many powerful moments of recognition that hinge the daughter‟s story to that of the mother‟s that she sees her mother‟s work echoed in hers: “sometimes i think it is in work that we live most deeply. worklines, lifelines. the lines of a map, the lines on our skin” (poppy, 139). such lines function as connective tissue, linking life, love and art across generations of women, and they inscribe the feminine inheritance around which modjeska‟s work is fashioned. the epiphanies discussed above have profound effects on the lives of the women who experience them. these moments of spiritual awakening are linked to notions of recognition and of sight in modjeska‟s writing. recognition has to do with seeing and being seen – with the links between a subject and an object. in this way, recognition is contingent and relies on connectivity. the narrator of “the adultery factor”, the first essay of the triptych of essays that makes up the orchard, comments thus on life, happiness and being oneself: happiness is perhaps the wrong word. it is the quality of being fully oneself, not at rest so much as defining one‟s own terms, not to impose them on others but as a basis of mutual connection – and not only with a spouse. individuation is close to the quality i mean, a more hardly wrought and painful process than the rose-covered cottage the word happiness conjures up […] though to achieve it, even to begin to achieve it is, surely, a source of the fullest pleasure. it requires the ability to see others as sovereign as oneself […] (the orchard, 85). the connection between “sovereign selves” relies on mutual acceptance and recognition of the other‟s sense of selfhood, of human worth and dignity. women, of course, have traditionally been seen in patriarchal discourses as a relative creature, as the second sex, the object, the other to the male subject. vii we could perhaps in this connection draw a parallel to frantz fanon‟s plea for recognition of that other so-called other, the black man, without implying that these two others are the same, that they represent homogenous groups or that their experiences are similar. viii in the conclusion to black skin, white masks, fanon makes a heartfelt claim for what he calls “reciprocal recognitions” (black skin, 218): man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. as long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. it is on the other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. it is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed (black skin, 216-7). reciprocal recognition is thus the basis for full humanity, and for attaching meaning to one‟s life. lack of mutual recognition is an abridgment of humanity. for traditionally marginalised groups – and again i am fully aware of differences between and diversity within these groups – such as women and non-white people in eurocentric discourses, pleas for mutual recognition are linked to acknowledging not only the so-called others‟ humanity, but also their lives. indeed, as sara ahmed reminds us: “to recognise means: coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 to know again, to acknowledge and to admit” (strange encounters, 22). the moments of recognition that stand out in modjeska‟s writing are instances when the female characters – and by extension, perhaps, female readers – acknowledge, know again, greet and admit the feminine tradition modjeska weaves and embroiders in her textual tapestries. thus women‟s lives and their art are seen again – in the sense of noticed and paid attention to as meaningful and valuable, and integral to the history of art. the notion of sight is inextricably linked to modjeska‟s recognition of women‟s life and art. reflecting on one of cossington smith‟s rare self-portraits in “sight and solitude” modjeska insists that the painting has “everything to do with sight: with seeing, with being seen, wanting to be seen; and with not being seen. and there is nothing straightforward about any of that if you are a woman and an artist” (the orchard, 135). seeing and being seen thus have everything to do with recognition in the broadest sense of the term. furthermore, this links up with modjeska‟s own recognition and rediscovery of women artists whose lives, love and art have not been seen, admitted or greeted. modjeska‟s penchant for the first person pronoun is also relevant here – hear me and see me it says, as does a self-portrait. furthermore, mutual recognition is a sign of mutual agency. thus, sight is profoundly central in modjeska‟s reflections especially on women artists: “in writing about women and their art, this question of vision and visibility, of seeing and being seen, presents itself in many forms” (stravinsky’s lunch, 194). it is tempting to connect these reflections on recognition to the kinds of confessional art introduced by louise bourgeois – an artist who is constantly enfolded in modjeska‟s own work – and popularised by many other women artists, such as frieda kahlo and tracey emin. throughout modjeska‟s writings, then, there is a recognition of what we might call a network of women, of women‟s lives linked as in a piece of embroidery – textual or otherwise. in “the adultery factory”, modjeska considers these women lives and is struck by the women who break free from patriarchy: “behind all these women, or alongside and beneath, inside and beyond them, is an unnameable sense of herself” (the orchard, 95). that sovereign sense of (her) self is what modjeska wants us to recognise in her delineation of a feminine tradition. towards the end of poppy modjeska writes about her own work, not only poppy but also exiles at home, that she gradually realised that her search for a way of writing, for a way of creating art, also entailed “the discovery of a feminine history of writing and art” (poppy, 260). and not only that, writing about poppy, the mother, the woman, the life, her art and her love, what she discovers “is that everything is fundamentally related” (poppy, 291). that is why modjeska weaves her own life, and incorporates readers‟ responses, into her characters‟ lives, so that all our lives become part of the same (feminine) textual tapestry. modjeska weaves with words – and the notions of weaving and threading suggest something ongoing, organic and living associated with women‟s craft. it also suggests a way of hinging love, life and art. it becomes a kind of network where the experimental and the daring add frisson and interest to the traditional. and it is a recognisable feature of modjeska‟s own discourse. by creating an embroidered network in language of women artists and writers – and by folding those writers and artists into her own life and her own (semi) fictional characters, modjeska creates her own feminine tradition that is often found in “silent, forgotten stories, in the everyday, the ordinary, the unsystematic and unrecorded, the omissions and slippages, the ways of living that affected us quietly, coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 their meanings accruing over years, not exposed in a single, masculine climax” (poppy, p. 26). in this way modjeska creates a perhaps idiosyncratic discourse characterised by her exploration of the uniquely and trans-generational feminine. again modjeska contrasts her creative act of hinging life, love and art in a feminine tradition with what she sees as the splitting of the ordered masculine from the slow-paced messy everyday. ix this is what modjeska instinctively learns from women writers and artists, and what she wants to teach us, so that we also become folded into this conversation. this kind of baton passing is vividly expressed in poppy, where we learn that poppy reads books by women writers given to her by women friends, and she reads the most unexpected text – such as translations of the not-much-read norwegian writer cora sandel (1880-1974) (poppy, 24). in her writing, then, modjeska stages conversations that did not take place in real life – for example in the intercourse, as it were, between bowen and cossington smith which happens in modjeska‟s embroidery on female modernists. this conversation develops and extends the conversation that began in exiles at home in 1981 where modjeska poses questions that “are woven with many threads. they are questions that can only be answered in the interconnecting histories of the writers, the fiction and the political struggles of the period [i.e. the 1930s]” (exiles at home, 3). x the stories about women‟s lives, love, and art that modjeska wants us to understand and learn from frustratingly remain what she calls a koan (stravinsky’s lunch, 22 and 338), a problem or a riddle that admits no logical solution. perhaps because the stories are simultaneously similar and different? perhaps because the stories are messy and on-going and resist climatic closure? perhaps because the stories form part of a larger network of unceasing conversation? in her idiosyncratic connective feminine discourse, images of hinging love, life and art are celebrated as female acts that counter the male tendency towards what modjeska calls splitting. writing and reading about these women is “joining a conversation” (stravinsky’s lunch, 337). or in the words of modjeska in the conclusion to stravinsky’s lunch, which also conclude this article, “when it comes to a subject like love and art, or daily life and the great work, there are no answers, no conclusions, only conversations, meditations – and the shining work” (stravinsky’s lunch, 337). references ahmed, sara: strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality (london: routledge, 2000). bachelard, gaston: the poetics of space [1958], trans. maria jolas (boston: beacon press, 1994). fanon, frantz: black skin, white masks [1952/67], trans. charles lam markmann (london: pluto press, 1986). hustvedt, siri: the blazing world (london: sceptre, 2014). coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 modjeska, drusilla: “introduction” and “living on a corner”, inner cities: australian women’s memory of place, ed. drusilla modjeska (ringwood, vic.: penguin, 1989) 1-3 and 55-69. modjeska, drusilla: poppy (ringwood, vic.: mcphee gribble, 1990). modjeska, drusilla: exiles at home: australian women writers 1925-1945 [1981], (sydney: collins angus & robertson/imprint, 1991). modjeska, drusilla: the orchard (sydney: pan macmillan/picador, 1995). modjeska, drusilla: “”the cuckoo clock”, sisters, ed. drusilla modjeska (sydney: harper collins/flamingo, 1996) 111-44. modjeska, drusilla: “ripe to tell”, secrets, d. modjeska, a. lohrey and r. dessaix (sydney: macmillan, 1997) 1-172. modjeska, drusilla: stravinsky’s lunch (sydney: pan macmillan/picador, 2000). modjeska, drusilla: timepieces (sydney: pan macmillan/picador, 2002). modjeska, drusilla: the mountain (sydney: vintage, 2012). moi, toril: ”feminist, female, feminine”, the feminist reader, eds. catherine belsey and jane moore (london: macmillan, 1989) 117-32. vreeland, susan: the passion of artemisia (ny: penguin books, 2003). ulla rahbek is associate professor of postcolonial studies at copenhagen university, denmark. she holds a dr art. degree in black british literature from the university of bergen, norway. her research and publications are primarily concerned with black british literature and culture, contemporary multicultural british literature and australian literature. recent publications include the co-authored modern britain: developments in contemporary british society (2012) and new reflections (2013). i as i have been writing this essay, and rereading modjeska‟s work, i have been seduced by siri hustvedt‟s recent novel, the blazing world (2014). this text also treats women‟s lives, love and art. hustvedt strikes a claim for the female dialogic tradition too, embodied in particular in the cross-generational relationship between margaret cavendish, the duchess of newcastle (1623-73) and harriet (also known as harry) burden, the contemporary (fictional) artist at the heart of hustvedt‟s narrative. furthermore, hustvedt shares modjeska‟s fascination with the first person pronoun, with notions of seeing and being seen, and with sustaining female artistic traditions. indeed, it is tempting to say that the novel is “modjeskan” in its thematics. the same can be said for susan vreeland‟s the passion of artemisia (2003). vreeland‟s artemisia ruminates thus on the intertwined relationship between women‟s lives, love coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 and art: “the two things i wanted most in life – painting and love – and one had killed any chance of the other. why was life so perverse that it couldn‟t or wouldn‟t give me one shred of good without an equal amount of bad?” after she has achieved success, she insists on the intimate connection between life, love and art: “„we‟ve been lucky,‟ i said. „we‟ve been able to live by what we love. and to live painting, as we have, wherever we have, is to live passion and imagination and connection and adoration, all the best of life – to be more alive than the rest.‟” (ny: penguin books, 2003), 111 and 308. ii see for example toril moi, “feminist, female, feminine” in the feminist reader, eds., catherine belsey and jane moore (london: macmillan, 1989), 117-32. iii thank you to martin renes for drawing attention to the “positively dazzling” associations such a train of though sets in motion. iv see john r. stilgoe‟s foreword to gaston bachelard, the poetics of space [1958], translated by maria jolas (boston: beacon press, 1994), viii. v matremoir is a memoir about the mother, a term coined by andre gerard. vi fascinatingly, harriet/harry burden‟s daughter maisie, in hustvedt‟s the blazing world, is a film maker, and in one of her films a woman is depicted making twine: “the woman had also gathered bits and pieces of twine, ribbon, string, and wire on her journeys around the city and knotted the pieces together in a gigantic hairy, multicolored ball. she told me she just liked to do it. „it‟s my way, that‟s all‟” (the blazing world, 91). thus women‟s lives, love and art are connected across contemporary writers too. vii famously discussed at length by simone de beauvior in the second sex, first published in french in 1949. viii drawing on fanon here is not so farfetched as it may seem. in ”living on a corner” modjeska describes what she read during her sojourn in papua new guinea in the late 1960s. sitting on a ”dusty veranda” her reading alternates between the australian novelists she would go on to write about in exiles at home and the works of lenin and frantz fanon. this reading turns her intellectual world, her inner city, upside down (inner cities, 62). ix in poppy the mother describes just such an unsystematic and unrecorded everyday family life for women in the 1950s: “maybe there were moments of insight, i don‟t know. mostly we lived by moving from one thing to another, children, daily chores, vegetables to be prepared, small repetitions. i lived by them. i had to. they sustained me. and brought me down” (poppy, 73). x exiles at home describes the watershed period of the 1930s in australian fiction in a book that in itself marked a watershed moment in the reception and recognition of australian women writers. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 mapping our heartlands: in memory of doctor pam dahl-helm johnston janie conway-herron copyright© janie conway-herron 2014. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. johnston p., 2007. heartlands: anatomy of the human heart exhibition, kendal gallery in conjunction with women’s arts international festival, kendal cumbria my relationship with my heart is close; intimate. i heard it beating before i was born. i have heard it beating all my life. i will hear my last heartbeat as i die. it is what i share with all in the family of humanity (johnston, p., 2007). when pam and i finished writing remembering ruby – a tribute to author and bundjalung elder doctor ruby langford ginibi for a special edition of coolabah journal – i had little idea that within six months i would also be mourning my dear friend, fellow academic, artistic colleague and sister in arms, doctor pam johnston. now, just over a year after her death, i am grateful to have been given the opportunity by coolabah to edit this special collection of pieces commemorating the extraordinary life and times of pam dahl-helm johnston. pam’s life is remarkable for any number of reasons: her inimitable spirit and remarkable resilience in the face of many difficulties is a quality that those close to her will remember well. however it is her achievements as an activist and artist that give us an opportunity to show how the life of this remarkable woman was shaped by the context of her times and the changing discourses of representation, identity and gender politics in the peripatetic cultural landscape of australia coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. this edition of coolabah commemorates pam in terms of her contribution to the world of art through her expansive oeuvre of exhibitions, two doctoral degrees and numerous publications as well as her great achievements as an artist in that world. pam was also a tireless worker for the broad range of communities she was a part of and in her promotion of understanding between cultures as well as between genders and their attendant sexual proclivities. pam identified as a gamileroi i person from around the tamworth area and her art and life has comprised an ongoing journey of understanding of what that means in terms of her own and others’ lives and her interaction with community as a result of this understanding. as a consequence of this she became an active member of the burgeoning indigenous art movement of the late twentieth century and part of what henry reynolds describes as ‘the sudden and brilliant efflorescence of traditional painting in all its regional diversity [that] mirrored the dramatic emergence of land rights on centre stage in national politics’ (2013, p. 24). in an article by the art editor for independent aboriginal weekly newspaper tunggare news, coming out of redfern sydney, she is described as having ‘attained seniority as an elder of the gamileroi (kamileroi) people whose women identify with the long-legged emu … from around werris creek, south west of tamworth in the direction of moree’ (desovski m., 2002, p. 17). the article goes on to quote pam as expressing her love for and identification with the land through the notion of being in the land rather than on it, a concept that has been explored by many other indigenous australian, artists, writers and philosophers. when i’m actually developing my imagery, time stands still. i truly exist in that moment. there is nothing else. for me the process of painting and drawing has a sense of religiousness about it … it is the creative process itself that has most significance for me. it is the time when i understand the nature of universal religion and truth as an elemental balance. the exploration of that thing inside myself that comes out of my complete solitude and undergoes a metamorphosis into a complete visual work, be it a sand painting, an installation, a musical work, a drawing, a painting, a photograph (johnston p., in desovski m., 2002, p. 17). the contributors to this edition of coolabah have all known pam in a number of different ways but what links them, apart from their relationships with pam, is their interest in art and representation and so too, this edition explores how one woman managed to define herself through the world of visual representation and, in so-doing, articulate something of what it has meant to be woman and indigenous in a life spanning the 20th and 21 st centuries, a time of great ferment and change in the world of art itself and in particular the ways in which indigenous people have articulated multiple identifications through that same world. pam was an activist and so her personal identifications are also political in the sense that all her art contained a philosophical engagement with her life as a community worker in women’s refuges, jails and other places where her values in relation to human rights and equality were put into action. at times these identifications were controversial and called into question the very manner in which we identify ourselves. as a long-time friend and fellow academic we had numerous discussions about the ways in which we could incorporate multiple ident ities (rather than one fixed identity) within ourselves. what we have here in this collection of remembrances and tributes is a monument to the capacity of one person to contain multiple identities and to show how in the global context of the 21 st century this is a necessary aspect to the spiritual and emotional survival of the contemporary artist. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 in the work of diana wood conroy, emeritus professor, visual arts, university of wollongong, who was pam’s supervisor for her first doctorate, the doctor of creative arts degree (dca) for practice-based research, we have an insightful meditation on the ways in which pam interacted with others as a student and as a lecturer and tutor for “the first introduction to aboriginal arts and society subject at the then school of creative arts at the university of wollongong,” that brought “aboriginal artists, writers and thinkers into the lecture room.” this paper raises important points around contemporary issues of identity and its impact on the visual arts in the 21st century particularly for countries like australia that have built a national identity around a denial of a violent historical past and dispersal of the traditional values of the cultures that were here prior to colonization. she places pam’s work in an ongoing and necessary conversation that needs to be had around these issues as well as highlighting pam’s artistic focus on ‘mother genealogy’ and foregrounding her involvement in the feminism of the 1980s and 90s, which also provided a means for pam to explore the disjuncture between western feminism and aboriginal ideas of women’s relationship to family and community. trevor avery, director of ‘another space/lake district holocaust project’ in the lake district of the united kingdom, discusses his ongoing custodianship of pam’s exhibition titled “shimmer yinar dhenewan” a wiradjuri phrase meaning ‘emu woman’ that mirrors diana wood-conroy’s memories of pam at a ten-day artists workshop at lake mungo in western new south wales, doing an “emu walk – stretching out her spine and walking on tip toe.” a quote at the beginning of this piece that pam wrote as part of the exhibition describes the road from walgett to lightning ridge as “shimmering in the heat” where “emu chicks with their mothers were plentiful along the road.” it is interesting to reflect on the way that the wiradjuri and gamileroi languages intertwine, sharing much of the same vocabulary. tamsin donaldson writing for the macquarie dictionary of aboriginal words describes how: … speakers of a group of languages to the west of the great dividing range, for roughly its whole length of new south wales distinguish themselves from one another. each of these names starts with the word ‘no’ in the language concerned, followed by its suffix meaning ‘with’ or ‘having’ (2007, p. 2). thus gamil–araay are the people who use gamil for ‘no’ and wiradjuri are the people who use wirray for ‘no’. it is hard, in the light of the history of relations between indigenous and non-indigenous in australia, not to feel the language of resistance between the lines of identification here and to relate this to pam’s constant awareness of the need to resist the status quo on her own terms. in pam’s relationship with trevor and what trevor describes as the “ever-evolving and adaptable installation” that was pam’s work pam was able to extend the boundaries of the dialogue around her creative ideas to the north of scotland and to widen the parameters of conversations re the notion of holocaust and genocide as it might apply to indigenous australians. for trevor the conversations with pam were “to last over fifteen years with pam visiting both the highlands of scotland and later the lake district of england, home of beatrix potter and william wordsworth,” where they drew on the apparently diverse cultural worlds that they encompassed together as well as incorporating and drawing a more general postcolonial impetus in their work together. pauline mitchell, ruby langford ginibi’s daughter, writes about the close relationship pam has had to her family through pam’s work with her mother, and through ruby’s adoption of pam into their family. pam won the portia geach memorial award in 1991 for her portrait of ruby and it was exhibited at the sh ervin gallery in august/september of that year. it is my coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 view that pam’s relationship with ruby and in particular her work as her driver, companion, sound recordist and photographer on my bundjalung people (1994) consolidated her sense of identity and belonging. i met ruby for the first time, along with pauline and her sister aileen, when they all came to stay at my house in the northern rivers, bundjalung country. in our commemorative piece to ruby pam describes how our relationship has broader connections to indigenous ways of relating to an extended family network: years ago when ruby and i were visiting up at cabbage tree island in the northern rivers region of new south wales, aunty eileen morgan asked about janie. i’d talked about going to see her before we left to go back to sydney. i explained that she was my stepson’s mother but when i introduced her i always said, “this is my son’s mother”. aunty eileen morgan and old mrs. kelly said, “in our way she is your sister. so if you just say ‘sister’ then we know who you are talking about”. from then on janie became my tribal sister. i’ve been her son’s stepmother since he was three years old so we go back a long way. i suppose, unusually, we share many other lives as well. intellectually, academically and politically our roads have gone along similar paths so we met and talked frequently about things... it has been an interesting and challenging journey for both of us. ruby wove into both of our lives in the late eighties and has been an equal part of us since then, the third leg of that road to firming up and contextualizing understandings about a society that we all wanted to challenge. ruby was bundjalung, i am gomileroi and janie descendent from romani people. we all had big lives and our connection was immediate. we became a mighty family of women, each of us an important part of a triangle of love and support (johnston, p., and conway-herron, j., 2012, p. 4). in the foreword to my bundjalung people pam writes: ruby langford ginibi tells us that there are three types of koori people in australia. they are, she says, the traditional tribal people, the mission bred ones, as she is, and the urban koori. she emphasizes that we are “all one mob”. the culture ruby writes of is a living culture rooted in the very landmass we call australia, and stretching its fingers from the beginning of time to live and breathe today (1994, p. xi). through her relationship with ruby, pam found the more steadfast sense of belonging that i believe she longed for all of her life. the tension of growing up as ‘urban koori’ meant that early on in her life pam’s aboriginality was a hidden part of her identity. this was a strategic form of survival for many indigenous australians of pam’s generation. growing up in the 1950s and identifying as aboriginal meant the full weight of australian mainstream prejudice both social and judicial could be thrust upon a family so that you were not seen as a citizen of your own country. pam describes the effect of this as creat ing a “dichotomy between the outside world (the european world) and the inside world (the aboriginal world) and understanding this gave me my knowledge of the world and my compassion” (johnston p., in johnson riordan, l., conway herron, j., and johnston, p., 2002, p. 41). later in this same paper, co-written by our colleague and cultural theorist the late doctor lorraine johnson riordan, pam and myself, pam writes about the way that: my extended family has spent most of its life hiding its aboriginality for a number of reasons. this meant that i have been rejected by aboriginal and noncoolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 aboriginal people when trying to claim my identity. without those cornerstones of “self” that are linked with identity and hope, i was very vulnerable in a number of ways (johnston p., in johnson riordan, l., conway herron, j., and johnston, p., 2002, p. 42). like other writers and artists who grew up in the urban environment of 1950s assimilation pam’s identification as indigenous has been fraught and at times contentious. in the era post mabo with its consequential rejection of australia as terra nullius and the passing of the 1992 native title act the world of identification as indigenous – after a decade or more of embracing many people who had previously not identified as indigenous – became increasingly stringent. the australia council definition of aboriginal and torres strait islander identity combines three elements: descent, identification and acceptance. an aboriginal person or torres strait islander is defined as someone who is of aboriginal or torres strait islander descent, identifies as an aboriginal person or torres strait islander and is accepted as such in the community where he or she lives or comes from (australia council for the arts, 2014, online). in 1989 – after being a founding member of the boomalli aboriginal art collective and exhibiting as an aboriginal artist at the works gallery, paddington, boomalli artists ko operative chippendale, and the bondi pavilion – pam’s indigenous identity was questioned by some of her colleagues. the new parameters of identification that the government had adapted from recommendations of pan-indigenous definitions in un reports required aboriginal artists at the time to provide proof of their aboriginality. in henry reynold’s, nowhere people, he quotes an informant from the bringing them home inquiry as saying: “you hear white fellas tell you you’re a black fella. but black fellas tell you you’re a white fella so you’re caught in a half-caste world” (2005, p. 225). at this time even ruby was being asked to provide proof of her identity and the distancing between pam and sections of the indigenous art world was exacerbated by the fact that in the 1980s, when pam was only just discovering herself as an indigenous person, she painted some wandjina images traditionally from the kimberley region and thus iconic images for people of that culture, which, as someone outside of that culture, she was seen as appropriating. i remember agreeing with pam and ruby in discussions with the two of them about the absurdity of people like themselves having to prove indigenous heritage via a birth certificate. in the light of the ‘stolen children’s report’ and the extreme dislocation and discrimination that had ensued from generations of assimilation policies it did seem absurd and cruel that this tight framing of identity was now being asked of indigenous australians by the australian government. also, in the light of the kind of pan-aboriginal discourses that proliferated in 1970s and 80s, how was someone like pam, of aboriginal descent but whose family had felt the need to distance themselves from their aboriginality, supposed to understand the particularities of her own culture let alone the people from the kimberleys? as a nonindigenous person it is not appropriate for me to provide the answers here but the questions still remain poignant ones for me. while i understand that traditional cultural parameters have to be protected and respected and cultural sustainability maintained, many light-skinned people like pam and her family were caught between the lines of assimilationist, social policies developed in the 20 th century that henry reynolds describes as follows: “politicians and officials began to implement policies that cut through the web of kinship that linked indigenous people regardless of colour or blood” (2005, p. 9). these divisions between coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 indigenous peoples familiar with the values of their traditional cultures and those who at best have only an assimilated cultural awareness due to suffering the prevarications of decades of colonial dislocation and cultural disruption are difficult ones to navigate and, in my opinion, part of the ongoing effects of decades of governmental paternalism. for pam one of the solutions to this dilemma was what she termed building her own song cycle: to reclaim my right to define myself and my right to confirm and document my own history in relation to both my internal and external life. by asserting both my right to my own story and embedding it into history as a subjective/objective narrative, i became the expert of myself – i owned myself (johnston p., in johnson riordan, l., conway herron, j., and johnston, p., 2002, p. 43). for c.moore hardy and cate mccarthy, two members of the 2+2=5 art collective, their friendship with pam was integrally interwoven with the notion of themselves as artists and the development of the collective around the need to redress what they describe as “the competition, lack of support and the myopia of the art market they were entering” and a perceived need to support one another and to document each others’ lives, through consistent, supportive, yet critical analysis of their work. many of the members, including pam, met at the national art school in sydney in the 1980s, a time of high ferment in both the art world and in second wave feminist politics with its emphasis on the relationship between art, gender and representation. both writers emphasise the importance of community to pam be it the 2+2=5 collective or her work at the local plunkett street school in ultimo or the years she worked with aboriginal students in long bay and mullawa prisons. as artist and colleague elizabeth day writes: i was aware of the work that dr pam johnston was doing in her art classes with the department of corrections for a number of years as i also worked in various institutions between the 1980s and 1990s, and 2000s. pam was a highly committed teacher and always had large classes of students keen to learn through her enthusiastic support of their aboriginality and constructive determination to empower inmates not only in the reclaiming of their culture through art-making but also in literacy in relation to their culture. she gave her students a lot to work with in the prison environment where there is a vastly disproportionate number of aboriginal inmates. pam johnston was, like many of the staff in education, herself a practising artist. she had often talked about the important place of artists within that often arid environment, and bemoaned the fact that as employees of the department we were unable to take on exhibitions that would air our views in relation to the correctional environment. she had talked to me about her desire to bring about an exhibition of staff members to complete the circle of what she saw as (as i understood it) our work in the prison system. i think it is a great loss for our centres not to have someone with the sense of purpose that she had as an artist, a researcher and a teacher. we live now in an era where education is being dramatically ‘dumbed down’. there is a diminished number of aboriginal teachers in the centre at long bay where she worked. i think it takes someone with her energy and idealism to work with institutionalised aboriginal inmates. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 art and especially aboriginal art classes in prisons have done much to re-ignite a sense of direction in the lives of young aboriginal people and it is a great loss that pam johnston is no longer with us (personal correspondence elizabeth day, march 16, 2014). johnston p., 1998, ripple yinar dhenewan 6 exhibited aberdeen women’s centre aberdeen , scotland and travelling throughout uk. i first met pam in 1975 when she was introduced to me as the new girl friend of my ex husband and my son tamlin’s father, carrl. i remember sensing it was go ing to be a serious relationship and thinking, well, if this stunning looking woman was going play a big part in my son’s life then i had better get to know her. i do not think at that point i could have imagined how close a friendship we would have and the length or breadth of it. before too long we were sharing parenting. my son tamlin had his longed for relationship with an older brother in pam’s son cass and they were both enrolled in the same alternative school in melbourne so we would take the kids to and from school. we found that we both enjoyed a similar sense of politics, activism, feminism, music and an intellectual life that had very much to do with our interests in identity and belonging and the way that art, writing and music comes out of a shared sense of place and identity. in the very early years of pam’s relationship with carrl we actually lived next door to each other in neighbouring apartment blocks on st kilda road in melbourne. not long afterwards pam and carrl moved to goonoo goonoo – an old cattle and sheep station just outside of tamworth in pam’s beloved gamileroi country – where carrl’s music career boomed and pam was able to reconnect with her aboriginal heritage. our friendship was consolidated when pam and carrl moved to coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 sydney in the early 1980s with their baby son, dance. i had already moved to inner city sydney from melbourne with tamlin when pam and carrl moved in to a housing commission house in woolloomooloo where keera was born. i still remember coming to visit pam in the back bedroom when she was nursing her tiny baby daughter, keera. pam was living in the heart of an inner-city art world and became a founding member of the kelly street kollective gallery ultimo, “a democratic artists’ space with a broad community access philosophy,” and had started working in women’s refuges and housing co-ops where she “initiated and established aboriginal support groups in women’s refuges and … worked as an organizer with the marrickville women’s refuge in sydney” (isaacs j., 1989, p. 99). her knowledge of what to do when needing housing came in very handy a few years later when tamlin and i were on the verge of being without a home on the streets of sydney. apply for emergency housing pam advised me, adding: … and when you go see them – i know what you’re like – don’t you go underselling your situation and saying you’ll be all right. make sure they know you’re in dire straits, tell them you’re living on the streets, don’t make light of it whatever you do. i took her advice. i don’t remember what i said, but it worked and i ended up in government housing. at the same time i applied for university and was accepted into a communications degree at uts. this was at a time, thanks to gough whitlam, when you could get a combination of austudy and the sole supporting parent benefit, so with that and good housing i was in a more secure position than i had been in years, and i have pam’s sage advice to thank for that. the last year of my undergraduate degree was 1988, an auspicious year for those like pam and me who had been involved long term in the struggle for land rights. for my final essay in literary studies at uts i decided to write about aboriginal australian women writers. a new book came out that year called don’t take your love to town by the then ruby langford and i went to everything i could where she was speaking. over the years to follow i came to know ruby and her family well through pam and her friendship with us all. after graduating with a masters degree in creative writing from uts and starting a phd, i moved to byron bay in 1995 where i eventually started work at southern cross university as a tutor/lecturer in creative writing. pam came up north in 2001 for my wedding to my long time friend and special companion peter herron just one week after my father had died. she organized a special women’s ceremony on the beach at byron bay with permission from bundjalung elder auntie eileen morgan, the night before our wedding. so while the men were all bonding down at the pub in lennox head the women were lining up for a blessing in the water at belongil beach. i remember getting up at dawn next morning to go down to the beach, drawing love hearts in the sand and saying prayers for my father at the very same place where we had had the ceremony the previous night. that beach will always be special to me and now that pam is no longer with us it will be even more so. pam’s son cass had also died only a couple of months before my father and i had sung with a number of other women singers at his funeral in her house in woolloomooloo. we were all there for pam and her family. i will never forget cass lying in state in an open coffin and having the realization, as i watched tamlin, keera and dance interacting together, how my coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 life had become inextricably bound up with pam’s. it was at this moment that what aunty eileen morgan had said about pam and me being sisters became viscerally true for me. pam studied for her first phd at wollongong university at the same time as i was studying for mine at the university of western sydney and we began to do a lot of intellectual work together on identity and representation. along with our colleague, another dear departed friend, doctor lorraine johnson riordan, we appeared at a number of conferences with a panel that resulted in the paper ‘decolonising the ‘white’ nation: ‘white’ psychology’ published in political subjects, issue 6 of the international journal of critical psychology (2002). in this panel we each told our life stories from the point of view of growing up in the 1950s. lorraine’s section focused on whiteness and growing up with text books that marginalized aboriginal people to the edges of the page. we asked our audience to: imagine the dislocation for a “white” girl in the 1950s class room, living in australia learning english history, learning mythological stories of australian white male heroes, and limited racialised notions of white women’s time/place … and only racist ideas about aborigines, ‘the dying race’. imagine the dislocations for an aboriginal girl … a child who must repress her aboriginal identity and that her people are a ‘dying race’ … and that she must be ‘white’ to live free (johnston p., in johnson riordan, l., conway herron, j., and johnston, p., 2002, p. 43). into this oppositional trope we wove our three stories where lorraine personified growing up white, pam growing up black (‘blak’ as we termed it) and me somewhere in between, for as i was finding out, although my family passed for a white, christian nuclear family this was not quite so. the success of our panel and the premise of the paper itself lay in the contextualization of the small stories of our lives and the silences that surrounded them within the larger context of a decolonizing methodology where the interpolation of these small stories became a strategy for the re-representation of the dominant white cultural imaginary. the purpose was to open up dialogic possibilities through reframing the cultural narratives we had grown up with. we were interested in the small stories and the way they spoke back to a dominant all-pervasive history via a critical demythologizing process that had a postcolonial impetus at its heart. writing in 1984 (a year ominously intertwined with orwellian prophecy) french cultural theorist michel de certeau writes about the view of manhattan from the 110th floor of the world trade centre. for certeau, it is ‘the most monumental figure of western development’ (1984: 93) facilitating the eye of a removed spectator who looks down on the city. in may 2002, i flew over new york city and as the plane passed those majestic architectural monuments of which the twin towers of the world trade centre had once been part, i imagined the narrator of certeau’s text being annihilated by those apocalyptic planes disappearing into the towers. the subsequent crumbling of the buildings into a mass of rubble and human remains is a vision whose frightful reverberations were broadcast live around the world. but, to those watching outside and above the panoptic vision of the tower itself, the images of those fateful planes seemed so like the films made by the seers of post-millennium chaos that it was hard to believe they were real. certeau was arguing against totalising visions that depend on disentangling the voyeur like viewer from the daily happenings of the city and promoting the smaller stories of the ordinary person on the street. ironically, it’s the telling of these stories that have played an enormous part in coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 the restoration of manhattan in the aftermath of the events of september eleven (conway-herron j., 2003, online). in may 2002, the same demythologizing process that we had used in our work was at t he centre of our consciences as we travelled to new york for the 12th berkshire conference on the history of women. pam’s son dance travelled with us and pam, dance and i ended up sharing a tiny room in the ymca on 42 nd street. it was the first summer after september 11 and sweltering hot. for all of us the timing of our arrival was very important and we were filled with awe about the importance of the small stories of ordinary people in the aftermath of the falling of the twin towers. but i also had something else on my mind. on the day i had left, sydney my mother had been taken to hospital. at eighty-six she was frail and forgetful. since my father had died she was simply fading away. this was before everyone had mobile phones so late at night and in the early hours of the morning i would struggle with my glasses and the tiny numbers on the phone cards and try to dial home from new york. each time i connected, the voices on the other end of the line were reassuring. mum was all right; she would last until i got home they said. when i finally got through to the sister in charge of mum’s ward, they told me that mum had a bad heart and could go at any time. pam took me by the hand and led me outside. it was the middle of the night but we walked, for hours, up fifth avenue to central park and back again, down all the small alleyways, and side streets past people and buildings, talking and talking. in the morning, sleepless, but resolved, i made my booking for the next flight home and pam took me to the airport and put me on the plane with promises to read my paper at the conference my mother passed away while i was flying home. as the map on the back of the seat in front of me showed the plane turning south and heading down the east coast of australia, i thought: it doesn’t matter what happens now, i am in my home country. we were flying over the place where two days later i would bury my mother. this was my belonging place. the space between being and longing was finally closed, if not forever at least for the time being (see also conway herron, 2003). while doing research for my bundjalung people i got permission for my adopted daughter, pam johnston, to document my research with photographs of my people including the three elders of box ridge mission: my auntie eileen morgan, gummy mary and emily wilson – my extended family grandmothers. we chose sixty photos of people on six missions up home: box ridge, muli muli, baryugil, cabbage tree island, boonalbo and goonellabah. the research ended in the first aboriginal photographic exhibition at lismore regional gallery on the 5 th of july 1991… it was my and pammy’s way of knocking down the racial barriers up home, as we could see there was nothing to show that bundjalung people were there no bundjalung art forms anywhere. my first impressions of when i went home after 48 years was that my people and the white people still lived in a divided society, and never had any social interactions whatsoever (langford ginibi, r., 2003, p. 14)! in the years since i have been living in the northern rivers area pam has been a frequent visitor coming more often than not with ruby and her daughters pauline and aileen. we have had some great times yarning and laughing around our kitchen table. ruby was often doing research for my bundjalung people, a book that documents four journeys to her beloved bundjalung country. pam described herself as the photographer, driver and recordist and general dog’s body on these journeys but she actually received a 1990 new south wales women and arts fellowship for this work and to assist in an exhibition of photographs. ruby was also working with elders on native title matters, gathering stories and evidence of the coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 continuous existence on bundjalung land so necessary for the recently successful native title claims of the bandjalang people (a clan of the larger bundjalung group) of evans head. sometimes i would go with them and ruby would be laughing and talking all the time. you had to be watchful of what she was saying though because often there were snippets of advice about protocol on land such as nimbin rocks, the burial place for tribal elders where the spirit man nymbunji lives, or wollumbin, that landmark cloud catcher mountain that some people still call mount warning because of the way it warned captain cook there was land there. one memorable afternoon i went with pam and ruby to box ridge mission and on the way back we stopped at the cemetery in coraki. the aboriginal section of the cemetery had been left in a state of disrepair while the rest of it had been cared for well until some concerned aboriginal people from the mission decided to clean it up. now it looked great with a red, black and yellow fence surrounding it and making it distinctive from the ghubba cemetery with its angels and crosses protecting loved ones in graves surrounded by neat paths and manicured lawns. in the stillness of the afternoon ruby sat down next to the headstone for her grandfather sam anderson, the great cricketer who bowled don bradman out, and began to talk in language to him. as she spoke, patting the wall beside her, i could almost see him sitting beside her having a chat. in my bundjalung people ruby describes the exhibition at the lismore regional gallery of pam’s photos from the book and a speech that she gave at the opening after elder mick walker had opened it. she quotes pam as saying: i wanted to show the love and warmth that i found everywhere i travelled with ma ruby doing research for her book, a history of the bundjalung people. i also wanted to show that aboriginal culture is a living, surviving and spiritual culture, not some forgotten event. i hope you enjoy the exhibition. it will be handed back to the elders of this bundjalung country after it’s been taken around the state. it’s never to be broken up, and it will be stored here in bundjalung country. thank you (johnston p., in langford ginibi r., 1994, p. 208). pam also came up north by herself and a few years ago she arrived with her new partner butch (james singleton hooper) on her way to her friend from tamworth days, singer clelia adams, who was giving a birthday party in mullumbimby. she had told me about this new man in her life that she had met at the canberra folk festival and i had the feeling that this trip was a kind of meet-the-extended family opportunity for us all. it was clear that they were very much in love. over the next few years they travelled overseas together while pam attended conferences as keynote speaker and exhibited at kendal and other galleries in the uk. butch was also a keen biking enthusiast and they began to go on bike trips into the country around canberra and sydney on a regular basis as well as to participate in the annual bike races at phillip island. pam took to this biking life with her usual enthusiasm and in january 2012 she bought her own sparkling red honda cbr250r to ride and started keeping a journal as preparation for writing a book about her bike experiences. i still have the text that she sent me with a photo of her honda proudly proclaiming “my new bike”. people have told me since her death that this writing (which i did not get to read) charted the ever-increasing risks she was taking on that bike and the exhilaration this gave her. a photo on pam’s face book page still shows pam on the bike, visor down, and ready to take off on the road. when ruby passed away in 2011 it was devastating for everyone including pam. one of the last things pam and i did together was write a monograph on ruby for coolabah to commemorate the first anniversary of her death. the piece called “remembering ruby” was coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 written as a dialogue in two voices and in it we tried to explain the nature of our relationship, not only to ruby, but also to each other. on my first trip to sydney after my retirement in 2013 i was looking forward to seeing pam again but only hours after our arrival in sydney the phone rang and it was clelia adams calling to say pam had died after coming off her bike on her way to the phillip island races. sudden death like this is so shocking that the mind races with reasons why it happened and how. all i know is that this big-hearted woman is no longer with us and that the world is a great deal poorer for her absence. an email from butch to me about her bike riding gives an inkling of the enthusiasm pam had for life and the way she used all of her life experiences in a creative way: pam felt that riding a motorbike well was an art and it surprised her that it didn't come naturally to her whereas all her other endeavours did. this failure at first raised a fear in her that she was not used to but was determined to overcome. this was a fear of failure as much as a fear of the bike and could at times be crippling and she would talk with other bike riders, especially beginners, on how they overcame that fear. in her usual way pam researched motorbike riding as she would any other subject and she was determined to become a good rider. pam’s mantra was ‘i don't want to be a fast rider, i want to be a good rider’. pam’s joy and elation after a ride was not from cheating death, because she had no intention of dying, but of the freedom of being in the moment during the ride and expression and dissection after a good ride. pam said to me once after we had ridden from sydney to canberra, a ride i found boring but she didn't, 'you know what i feel when we're out riding? it's me and butch out on our bikes and i love that!’ i knew what she meant! being who she was pam recognised the tribalism of motorcycle community and was keen to explore the relationship between riders and their bikes and the cultural differences between the different motorbike groups (tribes). this relationship was the inspiration behind the journal she was writing called "love, sex and a motorbike". pam wasn't courting death, she was courting life and was adamant that we would live to together to a hundred and that she was taken so cruelly from not only me but all of us when she was will leave an emptiness in my heart and in my soul that will never leave me (personal correspondence james singleton hooper april 28, 2014). in the catalogue for an exhibition in 2007 titled heartland: anatomy of the human heart, for the inaugural women’s arts international festival in kendal cumbria, which also featured artists such as patti smith, marianne faithful and germaine greer, pam is described as “one of the most significant aboriginal australian contemporary artists”. a quote of pam’s from the dissertation for the exhibition reads: death is, as is life, elemental and defining with the heart at its centre. the heart has always been part of human belonging and human connection. the heart is part of a spiritual landscape that beats its connectedness to all things living. the heart has a land that it wanders, that it occupies, that it claims. that land, heartland, makes us human (personal correspondence butch singleton hooper, may 10, 2013). coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 pam and i have had a unique relationship, starting off as young women who loved and had children with the same man. but our relationship became so much more than that. when i think about our family now it is large and extended and encompasses a whole lot of love. now, all these years later, we have nine beautiful grandchildren between us too. the activism we have shared over the years is also based in that all-encompassing and interconnecting love that we have shared for life and for family. i cannot imagine how i am going to carry this work on now that my sister has gone but i know she would want me to. love you, pammy; here’s a favourite song for both of us: sweet sister life is just a journey, we’re tossed from side to side. you know sweet sister that you can’t be satisfied till you find the answers hidden in the word and you find the glory that lay hidden and unheard. it’s only when you see and hear the message in your heart and realize the truth within that can’t be torn apart. i know that the searching ends when you have realised that the truth remains within and cannot be denied. wo ho … sweet sister, see you standing down the line. you’ve had your troubles but you’ve left them all behind. i feel a strange contentment when you’re standing here by me. the boat keeps rocking tossing turning on the sea. i can feel the strength within, the fire deep inside. that knowledge keeps you buoyed against the surging tide wo ho … sweet sister, see you standing down the line. you’ve had your troubles but you’ve left them all behind. (chi jimmy & kuckles, 2001, from the musical bran nue dae) coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 johnston p., 2010. not memory, not history, not longing, not regret … just time... https://www.facebook.com/docpamj/media_set?set=a.400280599614. 184151.739779614&type=1&l=9e5bf8a626 (accessed 12/03/2014) references australia council for the arts, 2014, aboriginal and torres strait islander arts, http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about/structure/aboriginal_and_torres_strait_islande r_arts_panel, (accessed 05/03/2014). chi jimmy& kuckles, 2001, ‘bran nue dae’, post colonial plays: an anthology ed. helen gilbert, new york: routledge, pp. 340-341. conway herron j., 2003, ‘walking manhattan: mapping the heart’, australian humanities review, issue 29 may-june, ed. elizabeth mcmahon http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-may-2003/conway.html (accessed february 27 2014). day, e., 2014, personal correspondence march 16, 2014. desovski, m., 2002, tunggare news: independent aboriginal weekly newspaper, vol.1 issue 1 newtown: tunggare news. donaldson t., ngiyampa, macquarie aboriginal words: words from australian aboriginal and torres strait islander languages, eds. nick thieberger and william mcgregor, university of sydney: macquarie publishers. isaacs j., 1989, aboriginality: contemporary aboriginal painting & prints, st lucia queensland: university of queensland press. https://www.facebook.com/docpamj/media_set?set=a.400280599614.184151.739779614&type=1&l=9e5bf8a626 https://www.facebook.com/docpamj/media_set?set=a.400280599614.184151.739779614&type=1&l=9e5bf8a626 http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about/structure/aboriginal_and_torres_strait_islander_arts_panel http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about/structure/aboriginal_and_torres_strait_islander_arts_panel http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-may-2003/conway.html coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 johnson-riordan l., conway herron, j., johnston, p., 2002, decolonising the ‘white’ nation: ‘white’ psychology’ political subjects issue 6 critical psychology, the international journal of critical psychology, ed. valerie walkerdine, london: lawrence and wishart. johnston p., 2007, heartland: anatomy of the human heart, catalogue for exhibition at kendal gallery for women’ s arts international festival, kendal cumbria, (personal correspondence james singleton hooper may 10, 2013). johnston, p., and conway-herron, j., 2012. “remembering ruby”, coolabah, no.8, issn 1988-5946, martin renes, coolabah guest editor, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona, 1-29. johnston p., 1994, foreword to my bundjalung people, st lucia queensland: university of queensland press. langford ginibi. r. 1994, my bundjalung people, st. lucia queensland: university of queensland press. langford ginibi. r. 2003, ‘my belongin’ place’, belonging in the rainbow region, ed. helen wilson, lismore: southern cross university press. reynolds, h., 2005, nowhere people, london: viking. reynolds, h., 2013, forgotten war, university of new south wales: newsouth. biographical note. janie conway-herron is an adjunct senior lecturer at southern cross university, lismore, where she has taught creative writing since 1997. her work has been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals, anthologies and conference proceedings. her novel, beneath the grace of clouds, was published by cockatoo books in 2010. in another life she worked as a musician and singer–songwriter, recording and touring australia for over two decades. janie is passionate about human rights and travels regularly to the thai/burma border to run creative writing workshops with burmese women refugees. i some aboriginal names are spelled in several different ways when translated from the original language to english usage. for instance gamileroi, the name of the aboriginal people from north western new south wales, has been spelled in several different ways such as kamileroi and gomileroi. when quoting other texts we have used the spelling used in that text and this has led to several conflicting versions of the word throughout the publication rather than one generic spelling. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 transnationalism and the decentralization of the global film industry jordi codó martínez universitat ramon llull escac, universitat de barcelona jordicodo@gmail.com copyright©jordi codó martínez 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: as in other aspects of society (politics, economics), the film industry appears to be undergoing a process of decentralization (still in its infancy) by which asia is, if not overtaking, at least matching its level of influence with that of european and american powers. much of the impetus shifting this balance corresponds to china. the spectacular growth of china‟s domestic market is concentrating a substantial part of the global film business within this asian giant, resulting in the still sector leader, the united states, conditioning its production in order to maximize profits in that territory. resolute internationalization policies are also helping chinese companies gain a foothold in western countries conditioning film content there, although paradoxically their audiences remain unwilling to consume cinema that is culturally foreign. this essay will attempt to explain how all this has occurred. keywords: cinema, asia, transnational economists tell us (and it can be seen in our everyday lives) that the “globalization of production processes is turning the world into a single global market where the capital, technologies, workers and products jump from one country to another, and apparently it is not possible to stop them”. [1] (sala i martín, 2009: 91) the film industry is no stranger to this economic context. its worldwide reach, interwoven from the close relationships between many sector companies located around the globe (through alliances, purchases, acquisition of shares, etc.), has facilitated the exchange of films between countries. moreover, co-productions between geographically and culturally distant countries are constant, often resulting in an exchange of not only money but also cultural references. the cultural spaces of cinematic production, distribution and consumption become “contact zones”, “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination”. (mary louise pratt, in chan, 2009: 11) this occurs mainly through the movement of cinema professionals. during the last fifteen years several asian filmmakers and actors have found success in america: john woo, lee ang and nakata hideo have all directed films in hollywood, yuen woo-ping mailto:jordicodo@gmail.com coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 has choreographed action scenes and zhang ziyi, watanabe ken or lee byung-hun have starred in american films. but there are also those moving from the western world to asia: the best known case is that of the renowned australian cinematographer christopher doyle, who has long been based in hong kong, or directors such as gareth evans and michael arias (the former welsh, the latter american), who have worked in indonesia and japan, respectively, and also the spanish cinematographer carlos catalán, who recently won an award in india for his work on a bollywood film. in such cases, the contents of the cultural goods are negotiated to suit the sensibilities of a variety of audiences, thereby facilitating the opening of markets around the world and increasing business opportunities. this transnational cinema “lives in a permanent tension between hybridization of cultures and the emergence of the hyperlocal” (quintana, 2008: 6), meaning that local expressions are not lost in the maelstrom of globalization, but find a space within it and are conveyed. lipovetsky and serroy (2009: 24) talk about a “global screen”: because globalized cinema is made with “blockbuster”, transnational parameters, but are also hotchpotches and mishmashes, with increasingly scrambled, more multicultural elements. this cinema, arising from increasing trade liberalization, continues to highlight new themes or raise awareness of new problems. a deregulation of global markets is matched by a global cinema that increasingly assimilates new tracts of meaning, constantly expanding its old boundaries, deregulating the models of story and love, ages and genres, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. [...] cinema is [no] longer closed to any identity, any experience. this is sometimes the product of a well-studied and well-designed strategy. hollywood studios, for example, are interested in increasing their presence in relevant territories to capture a larger share of local entertainment consumption in various markets. as a result, they have started to engage in coproduction in foreign languages and with foreign entities. “the end products adapt on the one hand to local cultures while on the other they rely on the existing global structures of distribution of entertainment content.” (sigismondi, 2012: 22) audiences multiply and what becomes interesting is the creation of fictions that can accommodate the largest possible number of (heterogeneous) spectators. the deterritorialization of people, which accompanies globalization and social inequalities, “creates new markets for film companies, […] which thrive on the need of the relocated population for contact with its homeland”. (appadurai, 1996: 49) interculturality in film is not a new phenomenon, but goes back to the origins of cinema. “[w]hat is new are the conditions of financing, production, distribution and reception of cinema today. the global circulation of money, commodities, information and human beings is giving rise to films whose aesthetic and narrative dynamics and even the modes of emotional identification they elicit, reflect the impact of advanced capitalism and new media technologies as components of an increasingly interconnected worldsystem.” (ezra; rowden, 2006: 1) thus, economic globalization fosters its cultural equivalent [2], which “entails the possibility that it may also be an international market for domestic cinemas”. (lee, coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 2004: 73) apparently, cinema‟s transnationality is no longer unidirectional (from north to south, from west to east) (if it has ever been so), because “the cultural traffic has if not reversed then at least become more a two-way street”. (roberts, 1998: 63) it must be admitted, though, that the flow of trade is greater in some directions than others. the us entertainment industry, providing leisure time products and services for audiences around the globe, is the global leader in financing, producing, and distributing entertainment content. the six hollywood studios consistently rank at the top of worldwide charts. (sigismondi, 2012: 18-20) the dominant position of us production and distribution companies (whose branches operate in multiple countries) largely determines the type of product consumed in most of the world‟s cinemas. not only in those that do not enjoy a sufficiently developed local industry, but even in those that do (in spain, one of the world‟s main producers, 40% of films premiered in theatres come from the us, accounting for 70% of spectators, according to 2013 data). [3] moreover, not all foreign films reaching the large markets of europe and north america are considered acceptable for exhibitors. filters exist based on certain criteria of taste. “western institutions (film critics, festivals, governments...) not only seem willing to determine what type of peripheral cinema is permissible, but they reveal themselves willing to define the criteria and conditions of authenticity” (elena, 1999: 43) of those cinematographies. a good example is the limits imposed on those fictions coming from so-called third world countries, which antonio weinrichter (1995: 31) precisely identified: what is expected of a third world filmmaker? what is admitted, what is required? his films can be militant or tackle themes of social justice [...], or can be an eyewitness to the crisis his country is surely undergoing, or be indigenist, or at least have something in common with realism. alternatively, they can be aestheticizing (best if their imagery is also exotic) or inscrutable (tarkovsky in the dunes), although a serene contemplative gaze is also accepted (if there is just one filmmaker per country, he had better be a poet). third world fiction, therefore, should fall on the side of neorealism (and even the naturalism of misery) or “magical realism”. we also tolerate well melodrama, which has fallen into disuse in the west: a historical setting and a backward society justify both the intensity and the “naiveté” of dramaturgy [...]. [4] this point reveals the long shadow of prejudices, “mostly in the case of eastern cinema, which is denied, sometimes unfairly, the possibility of offering a cinema of consumption, popular and well filmed, in favor of works of „authorship‟ supposedly imbued with transcendence”. (navarro, 2005: 29). this changed very little even after some asian companies acquired several major us film studios. in 1990, the japanese electronics company matsushita (panasonic) bought mca/universal, although five years later, due to disagreements with its american managers and the absence of tangible results, matsushita decided to withdraw from hollywood and sold eighty percent of mca/universal to the seagram group. (augros, 2000: 27) meanwhile, another japanese multinational, sony, bought columbia from coca-cola in 1989. nowadays, besides owning columbia, which has been integrated into its sony pictures entertainment subsidiary, sony exerts control over mgm, thereby coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 increasing its dominance and influence in the us and (consequently) international market. (it must be said that not only asian companies have taken control of american studios: capital from australia, canada, germany, uk or france also finances them.) these companies sought profits and did not introduce any changes into a tried and tested business model. they hired american executives for their studios and used their experience to maintain the line of development that had brought success to these entertainment giants. curiously enough, however, it was under the ownership of an asian company that columbia believed it could introduce asian films into mainstream markets worldwide, and thus in 1998 it launched a division called columbia pictures film production asia, based in hong kong, with the aim of producing asian films and distributing them internationally. this built a bridge to north america by creating a direct link between asian producers and effective american systems of funding, distribution and exhibition. its aim was to adapt the product to new target markets, but without losing its distinctive touch. it was, therefore, necessary to avoid localisms (which had kept this cinema regional) and adopt a transcultural sensibility that could satisfy everybody. one of the first products of this initiative was the film crouching tiger, hidden dragon, which we will discuss later. but asian film industries are also becoming important global players in their own right, due to the growth of the production and markets of specific countries, especially china. just as china has become a dominant international player in many other industries, it has also captured a steadily increasing share of the global theatrical revenue pie, mainly through the rapid growth of its domestic box office. the chinese market is challenging the us as the premier film market in terms of box office. [5] by 2012 china became the second largest consumer of feature films in the world in terms of box office (overtaking japan). pushed by the fast growth of its economy and the prosperity of its middle classes, cinema admissions rose sharply. because of this (and a dramatic increase in ticket prices), box office in china between 2005 and 2013 grew on average by 40% per year. meanwhile, the us market is facing stagnation (since 2009 it has grown on average by just 0.28% annually). the power of asian film industries can also be found in the dominance that local productions enjoy within their huge regional markets. in south korea and japan, local cinema has maintained a fifty percent audience share (and often exceeding this) over the last decade; while in china, the government has imposed limits on the entry of foreign productions in order to protect chinese cinema from the “threat” of hollywood movies. the case of india is also well known, as it is the country with the world‟s most productive film industry, controlling some ninety-five percent of the national box office. all of these countries are also major exporters to other countries in the region. the consumption of local cultural products in asia, claims shin (2005), is the result of cultural affinity, national awareness and an idea of patriotism that aims to promote a sense of asian modernity, linked to the hybridization of culture: “like their own domestic audiences, young [cinema] directors have been deeply influenced by foreign, particularly western, cultures and media, while they are also responsive to contemporary domestic affairs and politics. […] these hybrid cultural forms provide an important means for their selfdefinition; a self-definition that not only distances itself from a xenophobic coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 and moralizing adherence to local cultural „tradition‟ but also challenges western cultural hegemony.” (shin, 2005: 57) and of course, the stunning technical and technological development of these products cannot be ignored, having matched the level of production with that of the most advanced countries in this regard. therefore, the cinema industries of asia are a real challenge to hollywood domination in many parts of the world and an alternative to its model. we cannot speak of global cinemas because (despite changes in the way we see movies) “a truly global cinema is one that claims significant space on theatre screens throughout developed and developing countries” (bordwell, 2000: 82), and hollywood remains the only industry capable of doing this. but it is clear that cinema audiences around the world now have access to a greater range of films than ever before, and this has been partly due to the growth of asian cinema. although its presence is limited in commercial theatres, it is more prominent at the household level, which is increasingly becoming the new hub of audiovisual consumption. in fact, it could be said that “to some degree the advent of video has brought us world film”. (bordwell, 2000: 96) releasing a film in a domestic format (dvd or blu-ray) is much cheaper than importing cans of film for projection in film theatres (dcps and satellite distribution have only recently reduced the cost of public screenings), and this has decisively facilitated the spread of cinema worldwide. consequently, “new technologies and modes of domestic consumption, e.g. specially imported videos, alternatively sourced dvds, and internet (including broadband) downloads, are crucial in facilitating some overseas‟ audiences sense that they have a stake and emotional investment” (stringer, 2005: 105) in asian cinemas, as well as an unprecedented autonomy when forming their own tastes and canons. [6] film festivals too “are important to considerations of „world cinema‟, as they facilitate cultural exchange between different „national‟ cinemas and provide an alternative global distribution network” (chaudhuri, 2005: 5), thanks to the “global cohort of spectators” (bill nichols dixit) they generate. little by little, more peripheral filmmakers are being canonized in these temples of taste. festivals, however, select films from each country based on a restrictive set of criteria, as we have seen, thus a complete overview (and in most cases, not even a meaningful one) of a film industry is never really obtained. festivals are most interesting when accompanied by a market, as is the case in cannes, delivering a larger and more varied range of films. the bulk of business and agreements that move the film industry are carried out in these markets, especially in terms of (re)distribution. this is how asian cinema has ceased to be a regional product to become a global phenomenon. does this imply some kind of asianization of the world? yes and no. “in the information society, all those elements that can be considered in themselves as informational –and by definition, all culture is information– are designed for global consumption. in this sense, oriental things are and are not oriental at the same time. they are oriental since they appear in the orient, but at the same time they are born in an already globalized culture, a culture in need for expansion.” (aguirre, 2009: 10) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 (some) asian influence in western cinema despite the increasing focus on asian films in the west for over a decade (their presence is now common in international film festivals and it is not unusual to find some of them acquiring commercial release), they are not yet (and probably never will be) a mass phenomenon. in fact, most of their audience has come to them in the form of remakes, filtered through hollywood eyes. these movies have been adapted by hollywood and have thus widened their reach. asian cinema‟s influence on western filmmaking has been particularly noticeable in the genre of action films, in which there has been a major exchange between east and west and an obvious stylistic shift. asian action movies “have not only become the most popular and influential in the world, but have had a serious impact on the look, the sound, the feel, the aesthetics of hollywood filmmaking. several times over the last four decades […] asian action/adventure films have prompted hollywood to virtually rewrite its rules on storytelling.” (donovan, 2008: 1) think of films such as blade (stephen norrington, 1998), the matrix (andy & larry wachowski, 1999) or kill bill (quentin tarantino, 2003 and 2004), all influential and popular films that use techniques and themes taken from their asian counterparts –each with its own style– in the form of a resource, tribute or parody (and sometimes all three, as in the case of quentin tarantino). this can be traced back to kurosawa akira (and his influence on spaghetti westerns) and bruce lee (an idol for blaxploitation cinema), but it was mostly the migration of asian filmmakers and stars in the 1990s, particularly from hong kong, that created “one of the biggest stylistic overhauls of american cinema”. (donovan, 2008: 5) nowadays, hollywood and its acolytes in the rest of the world (e.g., specific european genre films with commercial aims, such as french filmmaker luc besson‟s international productions) have adopted the same stylized gunfights and martial arts battles that characterize asian action, gangster and thriller films. (donovan, 2008: 14) this is why bordwell dares to speak of a “hong konification of american cinema” (2000: 19). (oddly enough, however, asian filmmakers claim they find inspiration for their films in western directors. “[they] sing the praises and reference the works of such hollywood legends as john ford, howard hawks and, specially, sam peckinpah.” (donovan, 2008: 14)) transnational maneuvers this model of cinematographic transnationality has a lot to do with the “integral link between high budgets and the need for maximal reach and appeal” (hjort, 2010: 22), and it is oriented to the kind of global spectator that charles acland (2005: 11) associates with the idea that there are points of commonality across national boundaries. “the international and intermedia tendencies of entertainment corporations have altered conceptions of their markets and audiences. […] there exists the idea about an international cinemagoer, one whose cinematic interests are not bound by local or national limits, and who looks instead to a globally circulating popular culture.” (acland, 2005: 11) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 one consequence of globalization processes (in the film industry and at a broader social and cultural level) has been “the emergence of a global imaginary within euroamerican film” (roberts, 1998: 66). “as the world has become the global village, so it seems, euro-american mass culture has sought not just to capture but also to commoditize it. advertisers have been quick to recognize that not just global markets but the concept of global itself can be a powerful marketing tool.” (roberts, 1998: 66) the clearest examples are perhaps those hollywood blockbusters (usually action, adventure and/or fantasy genres) that feature characters and settings from east asia, especially china, and also use some of the techniques present in films from these countries. in the fourth installment of the lethal weapon series (1987-1998), the protagonists are faced with the dangerous leader of a chinese criminal group, played by jet li, whose martial arts skills have made him famous in his country. the stylized choreography of the fights between the characters, similar in style to the action movies of hong kong and china, introduces an aesthetic variation in the saga with cruder violence. the mummy (1999-2008) series of films also decided to rejuvenate itself by incorporating asian iconography, and so in its third installment, the mummy: tomb of the dragon emperor (rob cohen, 2008), it leaves egypt (location of the first two films) and travels to china to see the return to life of the mummy of the first qin emperor (jet li again). alternatively, rush hour (another film series, with three films made between 1998 and 2007) was conceived from the beginning as a mix of us buddy movies (of the lethal weapon type) and hong kong thrillers. chris rock and jackie chan (both from ethnic minorities in the us) are an unlikely pair of cops fighting criminals in los angeles (rush hour), hong kong (rush hour 2) and... paris (rush hour 3)! the emergence of these and other similar films (japan has also been featured recently in movies such as the last samurai by edward zwick, 2003; the wolverine by james mangold, 2013; 47 ronin by carl rinsch, 2013) responds partly to the will of the american film industry to gain a share in the largest market available outside its borders: east asia. “industry observers have long been talking of the day when [...] hollywood blockbusters can no longer succeed by solely catering to american audience's tastes” (james marsh, 2013), and that is happening right now (last year the monster-movie –inspired by the japanese kaiju eiga genre– pacific rim by guillermo del toro, obtained more money at the chinese box office than back on home soil). not only hollywood has this expansionist ambition. asian film industries, especially in china, are becoming aware of their power, and are also thinking globally, although their strategies are different. more than a decade ago, the release of crouching tiger, hidden dragon (lee ang, 2000) attempted to popularize kung-fu movies around the world, and indeed the film introduced this classic genre of asian entertainment to a massive international audience. crouching tiger was the second production from the columbia pictures film production asia (see above) initiative and it meant the introduction of an autochthonous genre such as “wuxia pian” (chinese martial arts movies) to an international mainstream audience (mainly western). cheng shao-chung (2004) claims the film is an example of “national transnational cinema”, “a particular national/local cinema in global mass culture”. the formula, he says, goes as follows: you choose a chinese director with experience in hollywood cinema and international films, such as lee ang, who is familiar with the modus operandi of both the american and chinese films coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 industries (although lee is from taiwan) and also understands the different sensibilities of these diverse audiences; then, you choose the martial arts genre because of its appeal to both western (who are familiar with it thanks to bruce lee, japanese cartoons and video games) and chinese (for whom it is the quintessential popular culture genre) audiences. moreover, as cheng shao-chung points out, chinese essence can be found everywhere in the film. as a martial arts period drama, the film contains all that is exotic and chinese. this has a lot to do with the desire on the part of the creators of producing a successful product in the international market, but also with domestic policy issues: this chinese essence is used as a form of consensus and national cohesion, since this appeal to common culture is a way of softening the effects of a discriminatory society in transformation. the result is a product that despite its cultural peculiarities (or thanks to them) satisfies the expectations and tastes of (culturally) diverse audiences and, therefore, allows chinese cinema to break through to the lucrative global market. profits and visibility are the arguments made by proponents of the commodification of chinese culture for consumption by non-chinese audiences (such as van ziegert, 2006), although many chinese writers and spectators criticized films such as those directed by zhang yimou (i.e. the spectacular hero or house of flying daggers) for exoticizing chinese culture to suit western tastes. [7] kenneth chan (2009) indicates that the uneven cultural, financial, and political power dynamics in the chinese-hollywood relation “engage an overlapping of hollywood's projection (on behalf of mainstream america) of an ethnic otherness of the chinese, and of the latter‟s „autoethnography‟ of chineseness, a mode of self-representation to suit and engage hollywood‟s ideological and cultural conditions”. (11) first wave this is not the first time that chinese cinema has sought to break through to the west. hong kong‟s film industry had already become prominent in the early 1970s, when kung-fu movies could be seen at underground markets and alternative venues (following the success of, first, bruce lee and, later, jackie chan), influencing a certain type of american cult cinema and b-movies and establishing a new model for action scenes in hollywood. meaghan morris (2004) explains how these films (such as lo wei‟s fist of fury) did not emerge in a vacuum. “something new was happening in hong kong cinema and its energy carried across a number of the increasingly diversified audience formations taking shape in western cities. the „bruce lee moment‟ in the west coincides with a multiplication of sub-cultural modes of affirming ethnic or other group identity.” (244). but their obvious commercial spirit closed the doors to critical recognition and attention from the most prestigious media. “[t]he coverage was almost always condescending […] then as now, most western journalists treated hong kong productions as vulgar and stupid” (bordwell, 2000: 87-8). nonetheless, “by the early 1990s, despite having been almost completely ignored by the mainstream press, hong kong cinema attracted a cult following. […] a popular cinema gave birth to a populist fan culture. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 subterranean taste helped push hong kong cinema into the mainstream”. (bordwell, 2000: 87) production declined later, but its legacy remains alive. “a glance at almost any popular cinema shows that the asian cinema exercising most influence on western culture is hong kong‟s.” (bordwell, 2000: 86) as we have seen, this is particularly clear in the genre of martial arts. in addition, sword fighting movies, which chinese cinema is producing in their most bombastic versions recently, “would not have had the same impact on the west had it not been for the contribution of hong kong‟s tradition, based on more popular roots”. (sala, 2003: 81) the key element here is that hong kong cinema created a receptive audience for east asian cultural products, and in particular, for its genre cinema. how the west is won returning to crouching tiger, the film made an impressive and unprecedented $128 million in the us (more than $200 million worldwide) and was nominated for 10 oscars (winning four). its experience and success encouraged chinese producers and lee‟s film was followed by hero (ying xoing, by zhang yimou, 2002), house of flying daggers (shi mian mai fu, by zhang yimou, 2004), the promise (wu ji, by chen kaige, 2005), the curse of the golden flower (man cheng jin dai huang jin jia, by zhang yimou, 2006) or red cliff (chi bi, by john woo, 2008), all of which were sumptuous recreations of a mythical past, packed with action and stunning photography. the chinese film industry is at its peak (as are japan‟s and south korea‟s) and it is not hesitating in investing in blockbusters. but success has not been repeated: hero still found some success, but the others have performed poorly in international markets [8], even though they were successful in china. films with chinese themes and allusions often fail with western audiences, partly because of the strangeness that certain cultural archetypes produce (and also because the public in some countries, such as the us or spain, are unwilling to watch films in their original version [9], as asian movies are usually distributed). antonio weinrichter (2002) proposed the “kimono-effect” concept to describe the following phenomenon: “the western viewer reacts better to a eastern historical film than to a film set in the present […]. contemporary characters make identification more difficult for a western spectator, tending rather to activate rejection when trying to identify with those who are not white; however, this rejection is neutralized by the stylization of a period film, in which the cultural distance merges with the temporal one under the mantle of the exotic.” (17) some are trying to reduce cultural distance through the system of coproductions, with china and hollywood gearing up to make more films together. hollywood wants access to a rapidly growing foreign market, while china wants local studios to pair up hollywood companies and duplicate the success of big-budget movies in order to boost china‟s name and culture overseas. (michelle kung, 2012) but the formula faces some difficulties. a good example is the film the flowers of war (2011), directed by zhang yimou and starring the english actor christian bale, with coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 dialogue in both chinese and english. the film tells the story of the nanjing massacre during the japanese occupation of china. the result: it was the highest-grossing local movie in china in 2011 (approximately $95 million), but in the us the film grossed roughly $300,000. the reasons given for this were the falloff to piracy, mixed reviews, the film‟s intense –often nationalistic– violence, its historical focus and the fact that much of it was in chinese. also the 2011 film snow flower and the secret fan, by wayne wang, a co-production between idg china media of shanghai and fox searchlight, fell flat in both the us and china‟s box offices. another major problem is that any coproduction (or any film that hopes to play commercially in china) must be approved by the state administration of radio, film and television. committees from this body oversee all films shot in china at multiple steps of the production process, and then screen them for content –typically political– that they consider harmful to the chinese people. this limits not only the freedom of creators, but also their ability to make attractive products for a western audience, and often for a chinese audience too. this is probably why the producers of iron man 3 (shane black, 2013), a film produced by marvel studios in association with the chinese based dmg entertainment, were not too keen on obtaining official co-production status from the chinese government. they had to decide whether to comply with strict coproduction rules (basically, that any coproduction must share copyrights, investment and returns with a chinese partner and have chinese elements integrated into the story in order to qualify), or sacrifice some of the benefits of official coproduction status and instead optimize iron man‟s potential for the global market. not surprisingly, they decided on the latter approach, creating a film broadly aimed at a global audience and only making a few concessions to the chinese authorities (a few days of shooting in china, the use of some chinese stars and some exclusive “chinese oriented” extra scenes for the local version). (michelle kung, 2012) the chinese government tolerates this (iron man was promoted in china for one year, while typically foreign studios are only allowed to advertise their films a few weeks prior to their release) because it will ultimately benefit from it through revenue and the growth of local companies. apparently, some chinese companies have decided that it is now no longer necessary (nor it is fruitful) to try and conquer the world with culturally specific films. dmg entertainment ceo dan mintz admits that they “want to do some more domestic chinese films, but growing that global film base is what we‟re after. as far as an international chinese language film, i think that‟s still a tough one. not that it will never work, but for now it‟s going to be a rarity. it‟s still a ways off. what we really want to do are global, large-scale films that have some very interesting chinese elements.” it is this kind of realistic approach that is allowing the chinese film industry to assume a leading role in the global film business, and to definitively decentralize it, at least in financial terms. considering its current growth, china is expected to become the leading film market by 2020, and with this its influence will continue to grow. this does not necessarily mean that cinemas in europe and north america will be inundated by chinese films, but it will nonetheless lead to changes in the consumer products that we are offered. an increase of chinese elements in hollywood films (as is coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 already happening), or a boost in the production of the kind of films that work well in china [10] will be the consequences. the chinese market has just awoken and is still being tested. let us simply wait and see. endnotes [1] translations of texts originally written in a language different from english are mine. [2] this means that globalization processes (such as frequent and massive displacements from one side of the planet to the other, and the explosion of media, both based on technological development) have produced “a new kind of culture in which it is possible to identify yourself despite the diversity and distance of geographical spaces. culture today is global. [...] quotidian things have replaced the exotic.” (aguirre, 2009: 10) carlos monsiváis (in cabo; rábade, 2006: 123) calls it “cultural migrations”, referring to permanent and fast mutations of tastes, sociological patterns, behaviours, family structures, and ways of structuring and validating social identity. of course, economy is culture, but i use the term “culture” here not in an anthropological sense, but in the sense of “the behaviours and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic or age group”. [3] we will not delve now into the causes of this situation. let us just say that it is a mix of industrial position, economic power and audience tastes. [4] it is also a plus for any film coming from the third world if it has been censored or banned in its country of origin. [5] thanks largely to the success of films from the us (half of the top ten highest grossing films in 2014 are american), even though chinese law allows hollywood to take just 25% of the total box office generated. [6] every form of consumption corresponds to a particular type of audience, not just because of the products they consume, but also because of the way they ritualize their consumption. [7] zhang‟s work, evolving from rural and political films of a calm beauty (red sorghum or raise the red lantern) to bombastic and melodramatic period films with martial arts, proves how “more diversified themes and aesthetic models [became more evident] as film-makers partially discarded the didactic model predominant in the 1960s in favour of postmodern „politics of pleasure‟, incorporating music, humour and sexuality”. (shohat; stam, 2002: 49) [8] hero earned a solid $54 million in the us and $124 million worldwide. figures then drop dramatically for the house of flying daggers ($11 million in the us, $81 million worldwide), the promise ($0,7 million in the us, $31 million worldwide) and the curse of the golden flower ($6 million in the us, $78 million worldwide). [9] dubbing in spain is a legacy of general franco‟s dictatorship, which for four coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 decades employed this technique to exercise control over those foreign films that were released in the country. the result has been a powerful dubbing industry and, above all, a social habit that is difficult to break. in the us, where the percentage of imported foreign language films is very low, audiences are not accustomed to reading subtitles, and these are therefore viewed as a handicap for a film. [10] despite the disappointing results of pacific rim (guillermo del toro, 2013) in the domestic market, a sequel is being prepared for 2017. the film was a resounding success in china. references acland, charles r. 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(comp.): nuevos cines, nueva crítica. el cine en la era de la globalización. barcelona: paidós, 17-25 quintana, àngel (2008): “un cine en tierra de nadie”. cahiers du cinéma. españa, núm. 10, 6-8 roberts, martin (1998): “baraka: world cinema and the global culture industry”. cinema journal, vol. 37, 3, 62-82 sala i martín, xavier (2009): economia liberal per a no economistes i no liberals. barcelona: edicions 62 sala, ángel (2003): “entre sables y catanas”. imágenes de actualidad, 230, 80-83 shin, jeeyoung (2005): “globalisation and new korean cinema”, in shin, c.; http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/sp04/graduatesp04/gmj-sp04gradref-chun.htm coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 stringer, j. (eds.): new korean cinema. edinburgh: edinburgh university, 51-62 sigismondi, paolo (2012): the digital glocalization of entertainment. new paradigms in the 21st century global mediascape. new york, ny: springer stringer, julian (2005): “putting korean cinema in its place: genre classifications and the contexts of reception”, in shin, c.; stringer, j. (eds.): new korean cinema. edinburgh: edinburgh university, 95-105 van ziegert, sylvia (2006): global spaces of chinese culture: diasporic chinese communities in the united states and germany. new york & london: routledge weinrichter, antonio (2002): pantalla amarilla. el cine japonés. las palmas de gran canaria: t & b editores jordi codó martínez has a degree in audiovisual comunication at universitat ramon llull (url) and a degree in east asian studies at universitat oberta de catalunya (uoc), and is m.a in film business at escac–universitat de barcelona. recently he has obtained a phd in audiovisual comunication at universitat ramon llull. his research focuses on transnational cinema, east asian cinematographies, and film form. he has published a few articles on these topics, such as “arrival and consumption of asian cinemas in the west” (inter asia papers, 2009) or “«asian cinema» as a genre” (ceiap, 2010), and is writing a book on korean cinema. he teaches masters classes at url, and is currently coordinating a subject on film business at escac while working in the communication and marketing department of this cinema school. microsoft word marygardner21.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 266 a short historical investigation into cross-cultural australian ideas about the marine animal group teredinidae, their socioecological consequences and some options 1 mary gardner copyright©2013 mary gardner. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: how are contemporary multicultural coastal australians, aboriginals and settlers alike, to develop wiser ideas and practices towards marine animals as well as each other? to illustrate the importance and complexity of this question, i offer a short historical investigation of some contrasting ideas and practices held by australian aboriginal and settler cultures about marine animals of the group teredinidae. i present two “screenshots”: one from the period 1798-1826 and another from 1970-2012. the first period examines a negative but influential interpretation by thomas malthus of a cross cultural encounter featuring australian aboriginal consumption of local teredinidae known as “cobra”. while this cultural tone remains largely unchanged in the second period, the biological understanding of the marine animals has developed greatly. so has awareness of the socioecology of teredinidae: their estuarine habitats and cultural significance. their potential role as subjects of community based monitoring is undeveloped but could serve overlapping concerns of environmental justice as well as the restoration and “future proofing” of habitats. such a new composite of ideas and practices will rely on better integration of biology with community based social innovations. a symbolic beginning would be a change in australian english colloquialisms for teredinidae, from the erroneous “shipworm” or “mangrove worm” to the more accurate “burrowing clam”. 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 267 (photograph by mary gardner) introduction intimate knowledge of wild estuarine and marine animals, their lifecycles and their interrelationships has been a vital part of the culture and sustenance of every coastal human society for millennia (roberts, 2012). archaeologists are now re-evaluating the importance of coastal areas over inland ones as preferred habitats for anatomically modern humans. early humans may have grown in numbers due to a good diet which relied on seafood, not only terrestrial meat. they may have migrated throughout the world along the coasts while exploring new sources of seafood. they may even have made their first adverse ecological impacts by over-harvesting coastal species such as shellfish (mannino and thomas, 2002). then, as now, humans mix lore with data to create guides for their practices in gathering, hunting, cultivating and interacting with aquatic animals, much the same as they do with terrestrial animals. these guides, bound together with a society’s ethics and economics, become powerful with tradition, custom, taboo, law, science and religion. they are specific to places, helping create what swyngedouw calls “socionature”. he sees the result as “landscapes that are simultaneously physical and social…a restless ‘hybrid’ quasi-object in which material, representational and symbolic practices are welded together” (swyngedouw, 1999). more recently, gu and subramanian identify socio ecological production landscapes (selps), a term which also includes waterscapes. selps are centuries in the making, involve plant, animal and other species, and support local communities’ material, social and spiritual needs. in their review, they explain they are not promoting “nostalgic traditionalism” but rather “innovative resource management … that respects the needs and rights of local communities” (gu and subramanian, 2012). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 268 the guides informing selps or other productions of socionature are based on what a group of humans hold as available facts. these in themselves are composites of observation and theory (fleck, 1935). some are apropos and others outmoded. in the present world of human migration and resettlement, of ecosystem degradation and collapse, of transition and reorganization, how to refresh and update the multicultural collection of guides held by humans currently residing in any locale? this urgent openended question relies on renewed and updated understanding of not only humans but animals. also required is a living sense of the place itself, that unique awareness offered by geographic and biological context to illustrate some of the complexity and importance in addressing this question, i offer a short historical investigation of some contrasting ideas and practices held by australian aboriginal and settler cultures about one group of marine animals, the teredinidae. i present two “screenshots”: one from the period 1798 to 1826 and another from 1970 to 2012. screenshot 1798 to 1826 the contrasting ideas and practices held by australian aboriginal and british settler cultures about teredinidae are vividly depicted in the written report by david collins, published 1798. collins was the judge advocate and secretary of the british colony known as port jackson, new south wales, set in the aboriginal land of eora (now sydney). as a member of a party exploring the hawkesbury river, he meets with a “native and child” who flees, leaving “behind him a specimen of his food and the delicacy of his stomach; a piece of water-soken wood (part of the branch of a tree) full of holes, the lodgment of a large worm, named by them cah-bro, and which they extract and eat; but nothing could be more offensive than the smell of both the worm and its habitation. there is a tribe of natives dwelling inland, who, from the circumstance of their eating these loathsome worms, are named cah-bro-gal” (collins, 1798). this same passage was cited by thomas malthus in 1826. the third chapter of his sixth and final edition of “an essay on the principle of population or a view of its past and present effects on human happiness” is a survey of reports from around the world titled “the lowest stage of human society”. he ranks the “inhabitants of new holland” (now australia) as third from the bottom, barely above the “natives of van diemen’s land” (now tasmania) and the “wretched inhabitants of tierra del feugo”. he reconstructs the original passage from collins. he includes the sketch of the incident and observations, using again key phrases such as “the delicacy of his stomach” and “a large worm”. he declares that the smell of the marine animal and its waterlogged habitation “was in the highest degree offensive.” finally, he explains that this country is of such poor quality that its inhabitants are “driven to such resources for subsistence” (malthus, 1826). concurrently, a scientific taxonomy of life was being developed by european scholars. the relationships among plants and animals were slowly clarified using observations and theories creating a tradition of taxonomy, which continues to the present day. in 1809, the french biologist lamarck built on the groundbreaking work of the swedish coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 269 taxonomist linneaus with a more detailed classification of the latter’s group bivalvia, of the larger group mollusca. his observations of his own dissections convinced him to support the theories about bivalve family groupings as proposed by sellius, rather than linneaus. this explained what were colloquially called “shipworms” were instead “burrowing clams” (sigerfoos, 1897). lamarck suggested a grouping titled pholodoidea. by 1815, another french biologist, rafinesque, further refined understanding of this group and proposed the term teredinidae. this is the label still in use at the level of family (itis, 2012). since 1733, these “shipworms” were the centre of european scandal, when they were blamed for the catastrophic collapse of dykes in holland. they were considered to be invasive species, brought by wooden dutch ships returning from india (sigerfoos, 1897). differentiating all the species in the waters of northern europe was a painstaking task. the animals can be several millimeters to a metre in length. juveniles must be distinguished from adults. the principal identifying characteristics include variations of small calcareous plates known as pallets and features of the calcium tubes lining the tunnels formed as the animals burrow through wet wood (encyclopedia britannica, 1911). by 1928, a summary of teredinidae off the british coast recognizes eleven species (russell and yonge, 1928). this fact would be the result of several generations of work by taxonomists and could not be known in the timeframe of this screenshot 1798-1826. nor was it known that some species are global oceanic travelers while others are regional inhabitants or even more tightly restricted geographically. even by 1962, the global distribution of all species is still under investigation. the species teredo navalis, once labeled the foreign invader of holland, is considered widespread in northern europe, north america, japan, india and philippines (edmonson, 1962). by 2012, the australian national system for the prevention and management of marine pest incursions (nimpis) labels this particular species as invasive. a leading international species register states its origin as northeast atlantic (harms, 1993). t. navalis may simply have taken advantage of the bonanza of wood used in 16th-17th century dutch reclamation projects. they proliferated and then went globetrotting as stowaways in the hulls of the ships leaving the north atlantic for other oceans. although the turn of 18th century teredinidae taxonomy was nascent, collins or malthus do not indicate in their works any familiarity with these natural history issues of their day. they could not improve their understanding of their observations of australian aboriginals and this food item. perhaps they avoided french authors as a matter of rivalry and patriotism. at the time, the new french consulate was establishing itself after the french revolution and reign of terror. maybe the works were difficult to locate. but english specialists had access, as is illustrated by the reading lists of charles darwin, included recent french works and also works by malthus himself (darwin correspondence project, 2012). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 270 while collins and malthus mislabeled these unusual clams as worms, they also expressed a disgust that may well have been influenced by their christian religion. at the time, common practice considered insects and worms as prohibited foods. they may not refer to the exact passages of the bible (lev. 11:42, the king james bible), but their strong judgmental responses could be considered in keeping with this precept. bivalves were also prohibited (lev 11:10) but this restraint was not generally practiced at the time. for many reasons synergistic and untraceable, collins and malthus relied on only part of their culture’s knowledge to frame their understanding of novel marine animals. consequently, they missed opportunities both practical and theoretical. collins writes that the colony experienced severe food shortages and relied on imported food from overseas. even so, he rejects investigating this native foodstuff (collins, 1798). malthus was developing an argument that the foodstuff of the aborigine “is so extremely scanty and the labour necessary to procure it so severe … the population must be thinly scattered.” (malthus, 1826). but his portrayal of the aboriginal socio ecological production landand water-scapes is based on an uncritical acceptance of reports which, even by the state of knowledge at the time, were inaccurate and incomplete. screenshot 1970s to 2012 in australia, during the 1970s, the commonwealth scientific and industrial research organizaton (csiro) hosted ruth dixon turner, from harvard, whose primary specialty is teredinidae. she worked as a team member surveying dozens of coastal sites around the country. they examined the colonization of artificial substrates the team had set in place as test plates for a certain period of time (csiro, 1972). the team did not record information about any investigations of specimens in “wild” settings or abundances “in situ” occupying substrates such as logs or trees. although the investigative format of the report may have precluded wider discussion, there is no consideration of the species as a foodstuff. about the same time, turner wrote australian shipworms for australian natural history. in this review, she reveals the impetus for the csiro study as the “unexpected failures of wharves” in bowen, queensland and port huon, tasmania. she also describes the delight of northern australian aboriginals in response to her search for specimens. this time, the horror is expressed by australian aboriginals who are dismayed that their best offerings were not eaten but pickled in preservatives (turner, 1971). turner went on to become the first woman professor to receive tenure at harvard. on her webpage, the colloquialism for the teredinidae is “termites of the sea” (early, 2012). although teredinidae eat wood and could be considered to function in the aquatic ecosystem as do termites on land, this comparison is with the animal group arthropoda, not mollusca. it speaks of turner’s professional interest in the impact these marine animals have on boats, docks and other wooden structures. among her extensive coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 271 publications, she lists a number of works identifying several new species and groups of teredinidae unique to both new zealand and australia. in 2011, margaret somerville, an academic researcher, and tony perkins, aboriginal community activist, published singing the coast. this bicultural study shared knowledge used by the gumbaynggir, the coastal aboriginal group in which perkins was raised during 1950s-70s. the group lived in an area called “no man’s land” (near corindi lake and red rocks, new south wales). for food, they relied heavily on harvesting local marine and freshwater animals and plants. cash for supplemental goods such as flour, sugar and tea was sometimes raised by seasonal work and small enterprises such as selling beach worms to tourists (somerville and perkins, 2010). teredinidae feature in the section river of chapter four, eating place. they are called “cobra or sea worm”. the reported oral histories describe in great detail the practices of “the old people” in locating and harvesting these marine animals. although highly prized, they are not often found in recent times because the best locations are now private property, fenced off from “no man’s land”. procedures are given for their preparation and use “raw or cooked or used as medicine” (somerville and perkins, 2010). the detailed descriptions of variations in cobra habitats, appearance and taste, may be indicative of age, condition, water pollution or even different species. but these distinctions cannot be drawn from the text. given turner’s identification of several species unique to australia, there may be a correlation with certain species, environmental conditions, seasons and taste. somerville notes that that the gumbaynggir have a special affection for cobra as a cultural food “because whites do not eat it”. she writes, “i can’t even imagine eating them, let alone the taste” and asks one of her interviewees for a description. he says, “no taste for it really – you can taste a little bit of salt in ‘em, not that much though, gotta little bit o’ wood taste in ‘em, in the woods all that time you can taste that bit of wood in ‘em” (somerville and perkins, 2010). in 2012, i was a member of a predominantly australian settler audience at a screening of the film our generation. this documentary film by sinem saban & damien curtis is described on the website with urgent words: “australia’s first peoples are fighting for freedom. ‘our generation’ is their call to the nation, a fresh and unflinching look at unresolved issues, driven by the yolngu of northeast arnhem land” (our generation, 2010). in one scene, a yolngu woman harvests from a log a “mangrove worm” and eats it raw. suddenly, the silence in the hall was broken by groans, gasps and nervous laughter from a large proportion of the audience. the film is now being promoted for use in schools. both curriculum study guides available on the website makes special mention of that same scene in the film. in the text, the marine animal is described as a “mangrove worm” (lewis, 2011). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 272 discussion the more recent screenshot echoes key features of the historical one. then, social commentators who were specialists in law (as was collins) and in mathematics (as was malthus) assessed humans, animals and place without drawing on any contributions from biology. in the past few years, social commentators in the roles of academic writer and documentary filmmaker, observe the longstanding practices of australian aboriginals yet again without the insights of basic taxonomy. the yolngu and gumbaynggir involved with the commentators use colloquial english terms such as “mangrove worm” and “sea worm”. no one is using the label “burrowing clam”. teredinidae and social justice the contrasting visceral reactions of australian aboriginal and australian settler cultures are surprisingly consistent over time. set in the 21st century contexts of both “australia’s first peoples fight for freedom” and australian reconciliation, the continued use of an inaccurate colloquial english phrase for teredinidae may be an unexpected issue involving social justice. in australia, cultural diversity is celebrated nationally by sharing different foods during a festival day called “a taste of harmony”. although recipes on the official website are public contributions rather than representative selections, there are two recipes for seafood curries. they suggest fish or different shellfish such as pipi (donax species) may be used (a taste of harmony, 2012). pipi are well known to be clams. cobra, sea worm or mangrove worm are not mentioned as alternatives, although australian aboriginals do use them for curries. somerville and perkins record such a recipe (somerville and perkins, 2010). perhaps this omission represents a genuine gap in the understanding of multiculturalism. this could be addressed by replacing a colloquialism. such a change in language is an exercise in re-framing that is used by many social justice campaigns throughout the world. teredinidae and environmental justice the abundance and health of teredinidae as well as free access by australian aboriginals and others to populations unaffected by pollution may also be seen as an issue of environmental justice. now, the anglican church, (of which collins and malthus were members), and many other protestant religious organizations discuss ethical eating and environmental justice. of special interest is a study guide produced by the unitarian universalists association. environmental justice is said to be “like other social justice movements … that focus on structural oppression”. in the section trade and neocolonialism, this religious group explains links between globalization and poor health of “indigenous and poor populations who lack access to traditional hunting, gathering and farming lands ... [who] must resort to foreign diets … [which] lead to nutrition related diseases” (unitarian universalist association, 2010). this may be a coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 273 contributing factor to the poor health of australian aboriginals, who are still the least healthy sub-population in the country (thomson, 2012). teredinidae and uncultivated biodiversity the teredinidae could be seen as members of a range of uncultivated biodiversity, a term introduced by mazhar et al. this phrase describes “uncultivated plants and animals [that] constitute a prominent place in local food systems” such as those they studied in bangladesh and india. these supply 65% of the food weight for the landless very poor and 34% for better-off landed households. through use, harvest and translocation, these foods may be tended in ways that so contrast with agricultural management that they are altogether overlooked as a practice (mazhar et al., 2007). turner reports a reference from 1866 by n. taylor, describing “an incident of acclimatization by natives” in which a colony of temperate burrowing clams called “warragara” was translocated from genoa to grow as new source of food in the snowy river (turner, 1971). more written information about care of teredinidae by australian aboriginals across the country is hard to find. gammage has published an extensive work cataloguing the many ways aboriginal society deliberately managed the entire australian landscape as a selp. he lists many examples in which landscapes were modified to enhance the habitats of selected species and meet their special requirements (gammage, 2011). but he admits locating historical information about coastal and marine practices is difficult (gammage, 16 july 2012, personal communication). perhaps there is time to collate this practical knowledge that may still be held and used by different groups of australian aboriginals who still eat teredinidae. somerville and perkins describe the loss felt by gumbaynggir when australian settlers’ fences were erected along “no man’s land”, closing waterways to foraging walks. (somerville and perkins, 2010). this notion of private property together with practices of clearing of logs from waterways and draining wastes into estuaries, work against this specific australian aboriginal use and maintenance of uncultivated biodiversity. these same practices are also increasingly understood as environmental degradation, detrimental to the geographic and biological place itself. these australian settler ideas and practices are working against the basic interests of both australian aboriginals and settlers themselves. teredinidae, food security and future proofing in the 1970s, biological research of teredinidae was framed as investigations leading to control of a major marine pest or at least mitigation of its impacts. when turner wrote about their populations, abundance and lifecycles, she recommended periodic sampling of the plankton so as to achieve an “estimate of ‘spat-fall’”, helping “sound prediction “ in advance of an ‘attack in an area’”. she speculates about the role of marine bacteria or coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 274 fungi. she wonders if they hinder larval settlement as test plates frequently held few specimens even though nearby wharf pilings were inhabited by adults of various species. perhaps the “ultimate control” may be possible by preventing “the attachment of certain bacteria to the wood surface” (turner, 1971). was she advocating for a future bio-control rather than more use of toxic chemicals that kill indiscriminately? but if biological research is framed as investigations in a “wild fishery”, the conservation of “ecosystem engineers”, or the monitoring of “indicator species”, more than simply language changes. a species is described as more or less productive, succeeding or failing in colonizing new areas. it is seen as efficient or disabled in delivering ecosystem services. it acts as an alert to dangers or a signal of wellbeing. these heroic tones influence researchers, funders, legislators, industry and the general public. they set into motion different types of investigations and actions that have ripple effects throughout the socionature. the local selps can be influenced, revived or created anew. in coastal contexts, this has the potential to rework relationships among humans and marine animals. consider turner’s suggestions about monitoring inshore zooplankton. australian scientists contributing to the government’s marine climate change 2009 report card explained the urgency of long-term marine plankton monitoring (richardson et al., 2009). by the next report card in 2012, a national coastal plankton monitoring programme utilizing a network of survey stations was underway and planned for perpetuity (richardson, 2012). important as is this development, there is still a need for small scale inshore and estuary monitoring. the distribution and abundance of teredinidae would be only one of a number of species that could be better understood with such localized long term monitoring. teredinidae could be seen as one foodstuff in a wider network of food security or as part of future proofing coastal areas. this view could spark a new line of not only academic or government research but community based citizen science which meets traditional aboriginal practice as equals. field identification might include matching species and habitats with tastes. practices that encourage larval settlement, establish species in waterways, easily evaluate spat-fall and track the ranges of species over seasons would become useful local knowledge. the creation and maintenance of this knowledge could also be new employment in communities, in partnership with universities or with stand-alone independent organizations. of course, damage by teredinidae to wooden coastal structures will still be a concern. but the monitoring that turner proposed could perhaps inform opportunities for enhancement as well as signal attacks. it could also distinguish between the species, which may not all equally destructive. to be able to target local knowledge and actions as required for multiple uses and concerns would be a wiser practice. developing new guides to practices about teredinidae must also account for presently unrealized ecological and symbolic uses as well as nutritional ones. another species of bivalve, lithophaga lithophaga, also known as date shells, range throughout the coastal mediterranean. they also look like long worms, living as they do by boring tunnels into coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 275 coastal rocks. years of over-harvesting damaged the physical shore as well as the local ecologies to such an extent that the species are now under eu protection (appendix ll, 1979). nostalgic recipes describe cooking them in a broth of white wine, garlic and parsley. more about the socio-ecology and history of this species is beyond the scope of this paper. but every example of the changing significance of marine species is both a caution and an encouragement as multicultural settlers revamp their guides and practices in new places. valuing the teredinidae as sources of uncultivated biodiversity, famine foods or ritual meals is a small socio-natural change. but in synergy with other new perceptions of local ecologies, more australians across all groups in society may act on improving water quality and flow. they may also adjust riparian and in-stream management to leave wood in the water and remove fencing. conclusion the current global transitions of climate and shifts in the ranges of many species including humans are creating a new socionature. recognizing the histories of multicultural guides and adding multigenerational aims such as future proofing are a challenge. considering the past, gammage describes some australian aboriginal corroborrees as collective environmental management decision-making forums. roles and responsibilities were not simply based on personal gain. for instance, caretakers of certain species were not to eat them (gammage, 2012). looking to the future, daniel pauly, a marine fisheries biologist with a long experience in artisanal and industrial fishing, speaks of the need for humans to create a third “operating system”. by analogy with computer programming, he suggests the third way can supercede both an earlier magical thinking system as well as the later overly arrogant industrial one (pauly, 2009). this new way may be a path humans “lay down in walking” (machado, 1987). the vital contribution that biology offers needs to be integrated in practical communitybased social innovations. such creation of knowledge and action must stay close to ethics informed by environmental justice. in many places of coastal australia this would be an important change, however radical at first glance. singing the coast concludes with a chapter spirits in places. tony recalls how his elders let their traditional initiation ceremonies lapse. as a young man, he undertook a different “process of initiation in the ways of the contemporary world” and finally “came back and gave birth to new forms of cultural transmission” (somerville and perkins, 2010). his group’s experience of resurgence after collapse may be a model for australian multicultural coastal people. mindful of both past and future, including a wider range of facts as knowledge, both australian aboriginals and australian settlers may yet develop wiser ideas and practices towards marine animals as well as each other. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 276 references appendix ll strictly protected fauna species (1979). convention on the conservation of european wildlife and natural habitats. council of europe. 2002-03-01. retrieved 25 oct 2012 from 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(1897). the natural history, organization and late development of the teredinidae (unpublished phd thesis). john hopkins university, baltimore, maryland. retrieved 25 october, 2012 from http://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryor00sige. somerville, m and perkins, t. (2010). singing the coast. canberra, aboriginal studies press. swyngedouw, e. (1999). modernity and hybridity: nature, regeneracionismo, and the production of the spanish waterscape 1890-1930. annals of the association of american geographers, 89(3), 443-465. teridinidae rafinesque, 1815. (2012). report by integrated taxonomic information system (itis). retrieved 25 october, 2012 from http://www.itis.gov/servlet/singlerpt/singlerpt?search_topic=tsn&search_val ue=81832. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 278 thomson n., macrae a., brankovich j., burns j., catto m., gray c., levitan l., maling c., potter c., ride k., stumpers s. and urquhart b. (2012). overview of australian indigenous health status, 2011. retrieved 25 october, 2012 from http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/health-facts/overviews. turner, r. (1971). australian shipworms in australian natural history (imprint 1971) vol 17 issue 4,139-145 unitarian universalist association of congregations (2010). ethical eating: food and environmental justice. retrieved 25 october 2012 from http://www.uua.org/environment/eating/121903.shtml. appendix: an observation on the availability of images and other taxonomic information about teredinidae on the world wide web traditionally, taxonomic work of marine animals prepared for publication would include a detailed drawing of the species(s), highlighting the identifying characteristics, a view “in situ” and/or in lab and a labeled dissection. a less technical paper would include a photograph of the animals. sometimes drawings or photographs of the habitat are also included. further the purposes of this paper, i experimented accessing the world wide web for images and information by using the most popular search engine (google) and three key words (“teredinidae”, “australia” and “cobra” in various combinations). information suitable for understanding local species of burrowing clams, their ecology and monitoring is not easily available. in addition to sites mentioned in the references, some information and trustworthy images are found at the following three websites. • encyclopedia of life: http://eol.org/pages/2233/overview • man and mollusc: http://www.manandmollusc.net/advanced_introduction/moll101pelecypoda.html • atlas of living australia: http://bie.ala.org.au/species/teredinidae this quick check-up highlights the great potential of the internet as a resource and nexus for institutional specialists and community-based science workers. but it also presents the limitations of material online to date. in particular, the atlas of living australia is a foundation which could be important nationwide but it requires adaptions and participation from science workers, specialists or citizens, who live in specific places. one such example is the bermagui nsw project atlas of life in the coastal wilderness www.alcw.org.au/. the community group is at the start of a ten-year programme. at this stage, the emphasis is on identification rather than monitoring. mary gardner is a biologist and writer living in byron bay, new south wales, australia. she has over twenty years experience in community-based science work in both aotearoa/new zealand and australia. since 2007, she writes regularly to the regional independent newspaper the byron shire echo www.echo.net.au/. collations of newspaper writings are available as ebooks from her personal website www.mgardner.info. additional writings are online at her website tangle of life www.tangleoflife.org, which was one of the australian sites selected by the un for the international year of biodiversity 2010. gardner is presently undertaking phd studies coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 279 at southern cross university. her topic relates to the historical marine ecology of the byron/tweed east marine bioregion. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, australia. email: mgardner@mgardner.info) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 standing the test of time – barth and ethnicity eloise hummell abstract: ethnicity remains an essential theory for understanding societies in the 21st century. this paper focuses on how well fredrik barth’s 1969 analyses and insights in ethnic groups and boundaries have ‘stood the test of time’. barth’s theoretical framework sets out the subtle and sinuous frontiers of ethnic boundaries, the interconnectedness of ethnic identities and the continuity of ethnic groups. the messianic nature of this work will be explored by closely reviewing some of his less well cited assertions, including those regarding stigmatized identities, increasing structural similarities and the political organisation of ethnic groups. considering the applicability of his theory in current times necessitates reflecting on what barth may have omitted, oversimplified or exaggerated, such as the potential for multiple ethnic identities; the importance of the content of cultural practices, symbols and ‘traditions’; conflict and power plays within nation-states. ‘looking back’ at barth’s work on ethnicity assists in enhancing understandings of current social spheres and reconsidering the world around us. it also contributes to the early stages of the author’s current phd research which includes a focus on catalan ethnic identity. keywords: barth; ethnicity; catalan ethnic identity as a theory for understanding the dynamics, complexities and ambiguities of group identity and social organisation, ‘ethnicity’ retains its relevance for making sense of societies in the 21st century. arguably, some of the most influential works on ethnicity are over three decades old (barth, 1969; leach, 1954; moerman, 1965), and one of the most seminal of these works is that of fredrik barth as editor of the 1969 ethnic groups and boundaries. barth and his collaborators rejected the then prevailing notion that ethnic groups were rigid and bounded entities formed through responses to ecological factors, ascribed via primordialist bonds (biologically determined), and defined by territorial boundaries and objective cultural traits. instead, barth’s theoretical framework set out the subtle and sinuous frontiers of ethnic boundaries, the interconnectedness of ethnic identities and the continuity and transformation of ethnic groups. copyright©2014 eloise hummell. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 this theoretical paper presents an outline of the work of barth in ethnic groups and boundaries in order to consider how messianic this work has been and in what ways it has ‘stood the test of time’: do the insights on ethnicity from 1969 still assist in enhancing our understandings of social worlds today? in keeping with the theme of the 2012 congress held at the university of barcelona, looking back to look forwards (in which the skeleton of this paper was presented), this article revisits the work of barth in order to explore contemporary relevance and future applicability. the author acknowledges that barth’s chapters are not independent from the other substantive essays in ethnic groups and boundaries, yet a primary focus on barth’s ‘introduction’ is justified in that it sets up the theoretical overview that is explored in further detail and different contexts throughout the book. engaging with barth’s work informs the emerging and preliminary theoretical framework of the author’s phd research which is focused on contemporary surges of ethnicity, transformations of ethnic identity and cultural revivals. situated within the discipline of sociology, the project is particularly investigating the various limits of ethnicity through an exploration of catalan identity within catalunya, spain. although the bulk of work on ethnic groups has been situated in anthropology the use of theories of ethnicity is not restricted to this discipline. the main reason for ‘ethnicity’ being primarily deployed within anthropology is the discipline’s long-standing focus on the ‘other’ and indigenous peoples in the non-western world. sociology is particularly apt for exploring how people/s who are part of the western world delineate ethnicity from other aspects of identity, and critiquing the usefulness of theories of ethnicity in relation to and in combination with a variety of other cross disciplinary frameworks. the current transformations, tensions and ambiguity of catalan ethnic identity provide a ‘cauldron’ (to use nash’s (1989) description) to explore some existing ethnic processes. catalan identity is intensely debated and multi-layered, it is multi-faceted and a prime example of the ‘messiness’ barth described. catalan identity provides a rich terrain for observing the interplay between the nation and state, cultural resurgences and repressions over time, the politicization of language, nationalist agendas and political legitimacy, inter-ethnic tolerance, opposition and accommodation, claims to cultural uniqueness and debates on traditions and authenticity. to borrow barth’s (2007:15) words (used originally to describe balinese ethnicity), catalan ethnicity “is a cornucopia of diversity and creativity”. beginning with a brief outline of the main points elucidated in the general theory of ethnicity espoused in ethnic groups and boundaries this paper will then review some of barth’s more progressive ideas that have been arguably undervalued. the following section locates some caveats to barth’s central framework and the significant developments made since. the paper concludes with suggestions regarding the continued usefulness of barth and the sustained utility of ethnicity in a case study of catalan ethnic identity. changing the course of ethnic studies barth and his collaborators changed the course of modern works on ethnicity. ethnic groups and boundaries challenged the foundations of anthropology, and the social sciences more generally, providing the groundwork for what would later become the ‘constructivist’ approach (verdery, 1994; wimmer, 2008). at the time of the book’s coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 release, the prevailing assumption was that ethnicity is culture, and culture is shared, however barth’s critical focus for better understanding ethnicity was on “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses” (barth, 1969:15, emphasis in original). his rich analyses, deep insights and acute perceptions advanced understandings of the complex social mechanisms that create and shape ethnic communities, as well as the emergence, constitution and persistence of ethnic groups. although literature on ethnicity certainly did not start and finish with ethnic groups and boundaries, this axial work is deserving of continued attention and critical reflection. it is important to note that following wwii many liberals predicted that ethnicity and nationalism would decline in personal significance and political importance, as they anticipated that greater global flows of people, money, ideas and practices, would result in a situation in which the boundaries between each ethnic group, their distinctions, identities and uniqueness would fade and decrease, and eventually distinct cultural entities would disappear. although it is true that some ethnic groups have disappeared due primarily to colonisation and modern institutions, the long-term liberal forecast has proved incorrect as ethnic groups have not only endured, but proliferated. ethnic groups can, as barth (1969:9) wrote, “promote their own, new cultural identity, even as their old identity is eroded.” ethnic groups have come to assert and affirm themselves more commonly in recent decades, especially utilising an international discourse of human rights (bretons, basque, tamils, palestinians, sikhs, quebequois, and the list goes on). rather than groups disappearing into one big indistinct ‘pot’ of muddled and diluted traditions, symbols, practices, languages, and so on, ethnic groups spring forth, are revived and created (as well as selectively destroyed (roosens, 1989)), and ethnic identities are asserted and maintained all over the world. literature from the 1970s, 80s and 90s that built on and critiqued barth’s work included, but was not limited to, smith’s (1981; 1986) ‘ethnic revival’; roosens’ (1989) ‘ethnogenesis’; linnekin and poyer’s (1990) identity, nationalism and ethnicity in the pacific islands; and nash’s (1989) charting the course of ethnicity in the modern world. this literature, based on extensive and diverse fieldwork case studies, continued with gusto into the late 20th century whilst simultaneously another theoretical trajectory became fashionable: multiculturalism (kymlicka, 1995; bennett, 1998; taylor, 1994). theorists taking this trajectory began developing critical new ways of understanding the mechanisms of the social ‘melting pot’, ‘salad bowl’ and ‘cultural mosaic’ of nations (to use some of the popular analogies that have fallen in and out of favour at different times). more recent works in the early 21st century, by sider (2003), brubaker (2004), kaufmann (2004), castells (2004), eriksen (2010), and many others on ‘rethinking ethnicity’ have further expanded and advanced on the influence and importance of politics, economics and the nation-state, and considered the impacts of globalisation and modernity on ethnic identities. the launchpad for understanding ethnic processes in ethnic groups and boundaries attention was paid to people who changed their ethnic identity, enabling the authors to give priority to the processes involved in generating, reproducing and maintaining ethnic groups. the authors elucidated this global phenomenon via comparative case studies rather than starting with an all-encompassing grand theory and rigid typologies. processes foregrounded the flux and non-linear development of the social organisation of groups, and shifted the investigative gaze away coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 from aiming to categorize contained and isolated social units. this approach informed generative models seeking to explain the often elusive frontiers of ethnic boundaries. the three fundamental assertions barth elucidated which fundamentally challenged the established anthropological conceptions of ethnicity were: 1. ethnicity is not defined by culture but by social organisation. 2. ethnic identifications are based on ascription and self-identification. they are situationally dependent and can change. 3. the roots of this social organisation are not cultural content but dichotomization, so that the ethnic boundary is a social boundary formed through interaction with ‘others’. 1. ethnicity is not culture the dominant anthropological perspective encountered in the 1960s was one where the problem of how to identify and define ethnic groups was predominately addressed by attempting to locate ‘objective’ cultural traits. barth and his collaborators disagreed, and sought to explicate that although ethnic categories incorporate ‘culture’ this is not a simple one-to-one relationship. barth described diverse and varied pathan communities, living across wide geographical areas and political borders in afghanistan and west pakistan, as exhibiting cultural practices that would seem to objectively indicate belonging to completely different ethnic groups. however, even though one pathan community’s ‘observable’ culture may appear objectively indistinguishable from a non-pathan neighbour, this does not actually locate ethnic membership, nor an ethnic boundary. if a pathan woman changes her clothing and begins to dress in the baluch embroidered tunics fronts, this does not mean that she ‘becomes’ baluch (barth, 1969:132). cultural materials, such as clothing, are not necessarily deployed as signifying group membership. language, another critical cultural feature, provides a revealing example that culture and ethnicity are interrelated but not interchangeable concepts. pashto language is a necessary attribute of being pathan, but language alone is not sufficient to establish ethnic membership. multiple ethnic groups can and do exist within the same linguistic category. conducting fieldwork with southern norwegian mountain peasantry, blom (1969:83) found that differences in speech are not sufficient for ascertaining ethnic identities, nor are they “responsible for the establishment and maintenance of social boundaries”. the differences in language “reflect features of social organisation through a process of social codification, and thus serve as idioms of identification with particular group values” (blom, 1969:83; emphasis not in original). according to barth, cultural traits are the means by which an ethnic group asserts and defines itself, but only a selection of the entire cache of cultural elements available are deployed as denoting membership of the ethnic group. features and characteristics that groups use and regard as significant cultural symbols and emblems of their ethnic identity change over time, place and situation. some of these traits are given primacy or are overcommunicated while others are understated, denied or replaced, and perhaps reinterpreted and reintroduced at another time. the history of an ethnic group cannot be wholly understood by following the trail of cultural practices across time. current ‘objective’ cultural traits may show little, or indeed no, similarity to cultural practices exhibited in the past distant or recent (barth, 1969:13-16). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 barth also drew our attention to the falsity of equating an ethnicity directly with a political-territorial border. ethnicity ‘spills over’ the frontiers and borders that contain a territory or nation-state. ethnic groups can and often do have territorial counterparts, but they need not, nor does the territory determine the group’s social boundaries. not all people within a geographical border belong to the same ethnic group, nor is everyone within a physical boundary ethnically homogenous. 2. ascription and identification two seminal works that barth drew on regarding the ambiguity of ethnic boundaries were michael moerman’s (1965) work with the lue in northern thailand, and edmund leach’s (1954) work with the kachin in burma. moerman (1965:1222) found it near impossible to accurately and stably define the group boundary, finally concluding that: “someone is lue by virtue of believing and calling himself lue and of acting in ways that validate his lueness”. not a fieldwork defeat, this lack of being able to identify distinct boundaries was extremely instructive and informative, demonstrating clearly the ambiguities of the boundaries and the centrality of social relations. therefore, for barth ethnicity was continually negotiated and renegotiated by both external ascription and internal identification. ethnic identity is a matter of both self-ascription (i am ‘a’), and ascription by others (recognised as ‘a’) via interaction informing cultural standards which signal how to judge ethnic co-members and outsiders (barth, 1969:15). ethnic groups are socially determined, they are social constructions, and the ethnic boundary is a social boundary. specific cultural features may be important in some contexts and not others, they may guide behaviour for one activity but not another (barth, 1969:14). there are criteria for evaluation, “standards for judging the behaviour of self and others” (blom, 1969:84) based on particular and restricted meanings attached to specific cultural acts and symbols. ethnic identities are relative and situational, dependent on different spheres of interaction and behavioural management. in the case of eidheim’s (1969) research with the coastal sami (known as lapp when eidheim was conducting his fieldwork in the 1960s) and northern norwegians, interaction occurred in three distinct spheres, each with their own accepted behaviours, codes, characteristics and values: public; private sami; and private norwegian. illustrating the inter-relationship across two of these spheres and the self-checking constantly being managed, eidheim (1969:51) gave the example of language use by sami workers, “on the quay among themselves and in direct interaction with the [norwegian] crew on the quay edge, the local [lap/sami] men used norwegian, inside the storehouse they used lappish; they switched every time they passed the door”. eidheim observed that within the community everybody knew who was and who was not sami, yet the persistence of over-acting in public continued. eidheim (1969:55) referred to this as a “shadow play” because although ethnic status was not directly referenced in interactions between sami and norwegians, it nonetheless was all-pervasive in structuring these interactions. individuals, whole households, or whole groups can change their ethnic identity, and this change can involve physical relocation, different modes of subsistence and economic resources, altered political allegiances and varied family arrangements (barth, 1969:24). but there are also limits to the alternative identities available to people (barth, 1969:25) and membership change is not always two-way or reciprocal, or obviously advantageous. although it is rare for someone to change their identity under adverse circumstances it does appear that identity change will occur in adverse conditions if there are large coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 numbers of people maintaining the particular identity, when another one is not available to them, or “when failure is a common and not very costly one” (barth, 1969:134). 3. social boundary and dichotomization ethnicity is the product of specific kinds of inter-group relations. an ethnic group cannot exist in isolation, its formation and continuation is dependent upon interaction with ‘others’ (barth, 1969). barth focused on ethnic boundary maintenance, interaction and identity change across the boundaries, stating that: categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories.(1969:9-10; emphasis not in original). even as cultural features change and individuals transfer their ethnic membership, the ethnic group continues and is maintained via the “continuing dichotomization between members and outsiders”(barth, 1969:14). what matters for the establishment of ethnic boundaries is “the assignment of particular social meanings to a limited set of acts” (blom, 1969:74), social controls and sanctions, the construction of which is dependent on relationships with other ethnic groups ‘us’ and ‘them’ categories of inclusion and exclusion. the ‘us’ and ‘them’ exists by degrees, not necessarily in conflict and total opposition. the ‘us and ‘them’ dichotomy is not solely produced by one ethnic group, “the sanctions producing adherence to group-specific values are not only exercised by those who share the identity” (barth, 1969:18; emphasis not in original). groups are mutually influencing and work to maintain their differences through this dialogue. interrelationships however are not always balanced and even. especially in terms of the control of resources and assets there can indeed be inequality and stratification (barth, 1969:27). drawing again on eidheim (1969), the main reason for sami identity being under-communicated in public life while their ‘norewegianness’ was deliberately projected was a persistent social stigma of sami inferiority, perpetuated by the majority norwegians. ethnic identities are relative, situational and dependent on different spheres of interaction. both context and interconnections remain crucial for the development and maintenance of groups and their boundaries. indeed it is this interweaving that gives ethnic groups their capacities for reinvigoration and regeneration. advanced insights and barth’s impetus many of the insights put forward by barth and his collaborators remain current and progressive, and some are reborn as ground-breaking today. below is a brief selection of such insights. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 stigmatized identities eidheim’s ethnographic fieldwork demonstrated how an ethnic group is socially articulated across contested social arenas and the ways in which a stigmatized ethnic identity is constituted and manifested in daily interactions. hindered by the imposed stigma, it was near impossible for a sami to permanently change his/her ethnic identity, even though there were few objective cultural differences. sami identity was stigmatized and seen as inferior to norwegian identity, with stereotypes of sami as backward, dirty and stupid. norwegian’s stigma against sami played a defining role in the behavioural standards of sami in different situations, including school board meetings, travel on the coastal steamer, at the merchant’s shop or work on the quay. sami identity was expressed covertly and only amongst other sami. eidheim also observed that many sami had internalised their inferiority and refused to ‘handicap’ their children by teaching them sami language. the stigma of sami inferiority compared with norwegians was the main reason for “their miserable self image” (eidheim,1969:44) and ethnic undercommunication. political organisation barth observed that the increasing political organisation of ethnic groups does not decrease ethnic identity, stating that: the fact that contemporary forms are prominently political does not make them any less ethnic in character. such political movements constitute new ways of making cultural difference organisationally relevant (kleivan 1967), and new ways of articulating the dichotomized ethnic groups. the proliferation of ethnically based pressure groups, political parties, and visions of independent statehood, as well as the multitude of sub-political advancement associations (sommerfelt 1967) show the importance of these new forms. (barth, 1969:34) this observation is particularly salient given the scholarly attention shown to nationalist discourses and politics over the decades since ethnic groups and boundaries was first published. as opposed to some theories which subsume ethnicity into nationalism, barth believed that new forms of political organisation can be indicative of the processes and changes of ethnicity, rather than signalling a move away from ethnicity. barth cautioned that nationalism does not replace or override ethnicity, and such a view can limit our understandings of the complexity of various social situations. structural similarities countering the post wwii liberal belief that ethnic groups in greater global contact would eventually meld, barth (1969:32-33) asserted that “a drastic reduction of cultural differences between ethnic groups does not correlate in any simple way with a reduction in the organisational relevance of ethnic identities”. barth did concede that cultural differences between ethnic groups can and do reduce (especially through, for example, national institutions that regulate and ‘normalise’ especially educational institutions and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 economic systems) and that politically opposed groups become structurally similar. as political groups must engage within the same institutions, discourses and terms for their confrontation to be intelligible to each other, this “can only be implemented by making the groups similar and thereby comparable” (barth, 1969:35). political ‘innovators’ as politically divergent groups are mutually limiting in the cultural forms they can assert as their own ethnic hallmarks, for the political ‘innovators’ the selection of a few clear idioms is of serious importance (barth, 1969:35). the assigning of hierarchy and values to certain identity signifiers necessarily requires the dual action of strategic suppression of other cultural diacritica. those that can be glorified the most, especially via connection to historical ‘traditions’, stand the best chance of being exalted and demonstrating undeniable uniqueness. the impact and importance of selecting what traits to emphasize is key to mobilizing support, and is also the site for manipulation. barth (1969:35) reminds us “there is no simple connection between the ideological basis of a movement and the idioms chosen; yet both have implications for subsequent boundary maintenance, and the course of further change”. a caveat to barth barth’s work has deficiencies and has been critiqued in various ways over the years. the accomplishments and developments in the study of ethnicity since 1969 and the limitations of ethnic groups and boundaries inform this section, highlighting some of the cracks and flaws identified in the foundational understandings laid by barth. some of the limits include not thoroughly considering multiple ethnic identities; power relations; and the importance of what barth (1969:15) dismissed as “cultural stuff”, that is the content of cultural practices, symbols and traditions. an area where barth’s conceptualisations are particularly lacklustre is the consideration that ethnic identity can be multiple. in regard to his account of pathan and baluch, their ethnic identities seem to be able to transition and for a period operate as either depending on the context of the social interaction, yet the primary emphasis and assumption is on the permanent shift from one to the other rather than having or assuming a second, or multiple, ethnic identity. barth acknowledges that we can have multiple general identities – such as gender and occupational role but only one ethnic identity, which generally trumps the other identities in a hierarchy. what is lacking here is the in-between-ness, the partial belonging and partial ethnic identification (bhabha, 1998). individuals possess multiple identities, ethnic and otherwise, and it is problematic and reductive to limit the individual to having one superordinate ethnic identity. interrelated factors in identity construction including class, ideology, money, language, locality, sexuality, gender, generation, religion, ‘race’, nation cannot be passed over in studies of ethnicity. there is struggle, antagonism and anxiety in figuring out the ‘fit’ between one’s several components of identity, how it works to be several different things, a multi-faceted self (fischer, 1986). by reducing these pluralities we in turn risk reducing the dynamics, potential for creativity and future transformation and emergence of ethnic groups and identities. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 migrants, foreigners and strangers help to mark and explore “the outer limits of group experience; they provide a point of contrast which gives the norm some scope and dimension”(sarup, 1996:12). explorations of the migrant experience represent a significant and important turn in understanding ethnicity. gilroy (1993) uses the work of de bois to explore ‘double consciousness’, the state of being both within and without, inside and outside. focused on the experiences (his own included) of african diaspora communities in britain as they strive to be both black and european, gilroy particularly explores black nationalism, ethnic absolutism, and the politics of ‘race’. the interrelations between ‘race’, class, memory, culture and ethnicity are critical considerations (fischer, 1986; verdery, 1994; gilroy, 1993; sarup, 1996). gilroy (1993:1) explores the persistence of biology, whereby “the ideal of racial purity, the appeal of phenotypical symmetry and the comfort of cultural sameness have never been more highly prized as attributes of black social life than they are today.” the overarching popular metaphor for ethnic identity remains genealogical and the enduring concern with one’s ancestry. barth (1969) left forms of descent in the background, yet ‘origins’ are not separate or independent from boundary construction or destruction, they too are built. ‘race’, like ethnicity and culture, is a social construction but is presented as natural and inevitable, not chosen and malleable (sarup, 1996). state organizations and institutions can be especially complicit in promoting rigid conceptions of identity based on biology. linnekin and poyer (1990:153-154) show that being able to determine your ‘hawaiianess’ enables (or disables) claims for land, access to resources, group autonomy and self-determination: “who i am now determines what i can and cannot do, can and cannot have, can and cannot be” (linnekin & poyer, 1990:13). however, identities are not unlimited combinations, nor are they free-floating (sarup, 1996), able to be transplanted from place to place. using the work of stuart hall, appadurai proposes that seeing ethnic identity as a project, and projected, enables us to view that identity as having “a future, without entirely giving up the idea that it is produced by historians that are marked, and that identities are particular, and cannot therefore be completely expansive” (appadurai quoted in bell, 1999:26-27). this view promotes the notion that groups are constructed, history and traditions are manufactured, and authenticity should be questioned, but also that ethnic identities are performed, projected and consumed and are future orientated, they have aspirations and goals. multiple ethnic loyalties can indicate inventiveness and ingenuity, and also potential conflict, antagonisms, and contradiction. a realisation of this allows for analyses of the hegemonic power of majority discourses, relations of control, as well as the subversion of alternative perspectives and politics within the domain of dominant ideologies. if internal social pluralism is denied, theory risks becoming complicit in overarching hegemonic control, and the processes of closure and reduction. thus engagement with theories of power, especially via the work of foucault (1980) (as well as bennett (1998) and bhabha (1998) just to name a few), promotes understanding power not just as crushing and dominating but as creative, enacting alternatives and often resulting in unintended consequences. barth leaned towards viewing ethnic identity as always positive, self-affirming and fulfilling which, as history in places such as the former yugoslavia, cambodia, fiji and ruanda for example has shown, is certainly not always the case. nash (1989) does not think that ethnicity itself is a reason for various conflicts that occur around the world: “the problem lies not in ethnicity but in the political, economic, and human worth conflicts that get entangled with or use ethnicity as a rallying point.”(8) however, barth’s failure coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 to adequately account for social closure and exclusion, coexistence and conflict parameters (wimmer, 2008) restricted posing questions and considerations of the potential negative and regressive aspects of ethnic identity (sarup, 1996). ethnic groups and boundaries considered ‘the social organisation of culture difference’ (the extended title of the book) and was deliberately not a summary of cultures in terms of their content but rather social mechanisms. but in 1969 did barth limit the significance of cultural content too much? culture (both material and intangible) is embedded in social organizations, political structures, cosmologies and moralities, and they are mutually influential (sarup, 1996; barth, 2007). the assertion that ethnic identity was not determined by shared culture or human biology, but by social organisation undoubtedly enabled more freedom and creativity in studying and analysing the processes of group formation and continuation (verdery, 1994). however, as barth’s work ‘released’ the bind between ethnicity and culture and enabled theorists to “problematize the cultural side of ethnic identities instead of taking it for granted” (verdery, 1994:41) what in some ways failed to come across in the 1969 text was that culture does indeed matter. culture, ethnicity and politics are intimately entwined, evident is the persistent emphasis on “flags, symbols and rituals; there are parades, plays, and operas, music, films…through art and ritual, memories are evoked and aspirations organised” (sarup, 1996:178). just because ethnicity is not defined by culture does not downgrade the importance of cultural forms, their vitality and variation, and how culture and ethnicity mutually stimulate identities and actions. using barth’s work today – a case study the previous section does not obviate barth’s theoretical approach. rather, a close reading of barth’s work has the potential to assist in questioning and further engaging with issues around ethnic organisation as they currently appear. his work incites questioning and deeper reflections beyond the ‘objective’ and ‘observable’ and into generative theory building. therefore, this final section briefly suggests ways in which engagement with barth’s theoretical framework can be both instructive as well as limiting in the 21st century by integrating it to this author’s own early stage phd research, which includes a case study of catalan ethnic identity. catalan ethnic identity is evolving, politically charged, emotionally invested, as well as taken-for-granted. it has ebbed and flowed for centuries, changing methods, agendas, composition and cultural hallmarks. the author’s initial fieldwork in catalunya has provided a rich domain for observing the interplay between the nation and state; autonomy and secessionist agendas; the politicization of language; the performance of traditions and claims to cultural uniqueness; issues regarding fiscal responsibility and perceptions of economic security; immigration and inter-group relations. not only are these abstract theoretical issues, but more critically ethnicity is created and recreated in everyday interactions which have both perceived outcomes and real consequences. being sensitized to some of the risks, passions, and emotional investment involved in ethnic identities better informs understandings of the complexity and volatility of catalan ethnicity and groups relations in catalunya. ethnic identity in catalunya frequently exists in multiplicities, as multiple crisscrossing and conflicting ethnic identities interact, as a person can identify as and ‘feel’ both catalan and spanish, as well as many other intersecting identities. catalan is an excellent example of internal ethnic variation, as coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 centuries of human movement inside spain and decades of global immigration have and continue to both alter and solidify how catalan identity is asserted. the current continuing catalan ‘revival’ is not an entirely unique experience or an episode in the history of this ethnic group. the renaixença was an important and well-organised catalan movement in the early 1800s which attempted to define, select and create a surge in specifically (selected) catalan culture, values and traditions. the renaixença demonstrates an earlier catalan re-emergence and the broader trend of ethnic revival that existed prior to the two world wars and the spanish civil war (1936-1939). catalan ethnicity also once represented the antithesis of ‘francoism’ and catalan people and culture became an international symbol of anti-fascism. catalan identity has moved beyond being a reaction to repression and is now responding in novel ways to unprecedented demands of the present, including the european union and the continuing global economic crisis. specific catalan idioms chosen (ie not ‘natural’) for accentuation have transformed at different rates in response to various internal and external factors and triggers. current modes and expressions of catalan ‘revival’ are a focus of the author’s phd research, but they are also a gateway to comparison, to ‘look back’ and consider the subtle shifts in and across self and group consciousness and perception. broader and longer-term considerations place more subtle social and cultural changes and formations at the centre of the analysis. in many contexts the success or failure of ethnic groups to gain recognition and levels of autonomy continues to hinge on the ability to assert ‘authenticity’ as it is prescribed and understood within the terms set by the dominant group as well as the discourses of international human rights. the ability to authenticate current ‘traditions’ requires imbuing them with symbols and values that demonstrate continuity or links with past practices (hobsbawm and ranger, 1983). ethnic groups can articulate a ‘transformation’ of their identity while often using ‘the past’ as an underlying claim to their legitimacy and validity: “a great amount of attention may be paid to the revival of select traditions to justify and glorify the idioms and the identity”(barth, 1969:35). catalan’s general ‘uniqueness’ (from spain) is organised around language, cultural heritage and territorial continuity (castells, 2004). attending a late night pessebre (‘live’ nativity scene) in a small country town on 26th december 2012 popular signs and symbols of catalan traditions were situated throughout the entire performative space. the purpose and use of the pessebre was not solely about the telling of a religious story, but the telling of a selective story of catalan people, specifically aspects of peasant society. among other things, the highly distinctive and recognizable wearing of red felt hats and woven rope sandals showed a particular kind of ‘catalan’ by harking back to a romanticised era of a unique and ‘authentic’ catalan, further glorified through the (comm)union with the story of christianity (drawn from author’s fieldwork). catalan language is a diacritical feature of catalan ethnicity, but it has not continued unbroken and unchanged over time. during the spanish civil war (1936-1939) and franco dictatorship (1939-1975) catalan language and culture were repressed in official life, in schools, in public spaces and literature. catalan people who were children during the franco dictatorship did not officially learn catalan (some were taught subversively at home), and it is common to hear it said that there is a whole generation who cannot write in catalan. in 1979, following the transition from dictatorship to fledgling democracy, the statute of autonomy was reinstated and catalunya became officially bilingual with catalan as catalunya’s own official language and subsequently the implementation of the ‘law of linguistic normalisation’. language is a fundamental strategy, cultural and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 political, in maintaining catalan identity. common rhetoric around language includes assertions that its persistence and contemporary widespread use is against all odds, “language is non negotiable” (a recent phrase used by the catalan education minister), as well as the trend of ‘catalanizing’ people’s names. as a “trench of cultural resistance” (castells, 2004:56), catalan language is predominately distinguished against spanish. language perpetuates the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy at play between catalan and spanish ethnicities. the spanish nation-state dominated by madrid and castilian spanish is the ‘other’. catalan in many ways, especially in current political terms, is a reaction against dominant cultural values and power relations. ‘madrid’ is commonly personified, and given the characteristics of being conservative, regressive and retaining ideology from the franco era. barth (1969) reminds us however that ‘dichotomy’ is not just in opposition, but in degrees. as such, the complex ‘language debate’ is not simply catalan versus spanish. the languages do co-exist, and an exploration of the different contexts for the use as well as the different values attached to each is an important area for investigation (woolard, 1989). in some situations it is a radical binary opposite, as in common street graffiti, ‘catalonia is not spain’, and in other situations there is strong complementarity and shifting. thus the catalan-spanish ‘boundary’ is fluid and flexible in some contexts and rigid in others. current and passionate debates around nationalism, autonomy and separatism are frequent in many forms in catalunya. however, just as barth (1969) warned, a focus on nationalism as the essence of catalan identity is misleading in understanding its social identity and current articulations. there is little doubt that catalan nationalism and the nation of catalunya play critical roles, and it is vital to look at the popularization of politics, changing political allegiances and the consumerism surrounding the independence movement. many towns within the region of catalunya have symbolically (the legality is still being debated in courts) cut ties from spain and declared their support for catalan independence by removing the spanish flag from their town halls and replacing them with the catalan independence flag, the estelada. at many public events attended by a variety of people, including at football club barcelona (fcb, barça) games and various cultural events, the call for independence is inserted via chants, banners, flags and street stalls selling all types of independence merchandise. barth’s cautioning in 1969 does seem to advise that the loudest ‘voice’ is not necessarily representative, and current debates around nationalism and independence, although definitely not to be ignored, risk overshadowing or blinding us to other important social issues. conclusion ethnic groups and boundaries marked an epic shift in the study of ethnicity. the insights, necessarily critiqued, have by no means been exhausted over the past 40 years and still hold strong potential for enhancing our understandings of contemporary social worlds. ‘ethnicity’ remains current in the social sciences and healthy debate on the concept, theoretical framework and application of the term continues as advances are made and new conceptual models developed. one of the main reasons why ethnicity remains such an exciting and fascinating field of study is both its elusiveness and durability. barth’s work was seminal in promoting the view that ethnic groups and their boundaries are blurry, uncertain and problematic, and that scrutinizing the complexity and fluctuations involved in group practices, stereotypes, motivations, competition and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 maintenance provided insights into intercultural engagement, social organisation, individual and group identities. however barth’s theory was not faultless, there were issues that were neglected, underexplored and overemphasised, and some of these, including multiple identities and power relations, have been highlighted by later authors. an exploration of catalan ethnicity as it is experienced, performed and challenged in catalunya, spain can expand on notions around both the applicability and the limits of barth’s theory. using barth’s (2007:15) recent reflections, “the task is endless and ever self-transforming” and so it is a stimulating process of “watching and wondering”, writing and discussing. works cited anderson, benedict (1991) imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, 2nd edition, london: verso. barth, fredrik (1969) ‘introduction’ and ‘pathan identity and its maintenance’, in fredrik barth (ed) ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organisation of culture difference, bergen: universitetsforlaget; london: allen & unwin, pp. 9-38; 117134. barth, fredrik (2007) ‘overview: sixty years in anthropology’ in annual review of anthropology, vol. 36, p 1-16. bell, vikki (1999) ‘historical memory, global movements and violence: paul gilroy and arjun appadurai in conversation’ in theory, culture & society, vol. 16 (2): pp 21-40. bennett, david (ed) (1998) multicultural states: rethinking difference and identity, london; new york: routledge. bhabha, homi (1998) ‘culture’s in between’ in david bennett (ed) multicultural states: rethinking difference and identity, london; new york: routledge. blom, jan-petter (1969) ‘ethnic and cultural differentiation’, in fredrik barth (ed) ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organisation of culture difference, bergen: universitetsforlaget; london: allen & unwin, pp. 74-85. brubaker, rogers (2004) ethnicity without groups, cambridge, mass: harvard university press. castells, manuel (2004) the power of identity, 2nd edition, malden, ma: wileyblackwell. eidheim, harald (1969) ‘when ethnic identity is a social stigma’, in fredrik barth (ed) ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organisation of culture difference, bergen: universitetsforlaget; london: allen & unwin, pp. 39-57. eriksen, thomas hylland (2010) ethnicity and nationalism: anthropological perspectives, 3rd edition, london: pluto press. fischer, michael m.j. (1986) ‘ethnicity and the post-modern arts of memory’, in james clifford and george e. marcus (eds) writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, berkeley, los angeles: university of california press, pp. 194-233. foucault, michel (1980) ‘truth and power’ – an interview with michel foucault, alessandro fontana and pasquale pasquino, in colin gordon (ed.), power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977/ michel foucault, brighton: harvester press, pp. 109-133. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 gilroy, paul (1993) small acts: thoughts on the politics of black cultures, london, new york: serpent’s tail. haarland, gunnar (1969) ‘economic determinants in ethnic processes’, in fredrik barth (ed) ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organisation of culture difference, bergen: universitetsforlaget; london: allen & unwin, pp. 58-73. hobsbawm, eric and ranger, terence (eds) (1983) the invention of tradition, cambridge: cambridge university press. kaufmann, eric (ed) (2004) rethinking ethnicity: majority groups and dominant minorities, london: routledge. kymlicka, will (1995) multicultural citizenship, oxford: oxford university press. leach, edmund roland (1954) political systems of highland burma: a study of kachin social structure, london: athlone press. linnekin, jocelyn and poyer, lin (eds) (1990) cultural identity and ethnicity in the pacific, honolulu: university of hawaii press. moerman, michael (1965) ‘ethnic identification in a complex civilization: who are the lue?’ in american anthropologist, vol. 67, no. 5, pp. 1215-1230. nash, manning (1989) the cauldron of ethnicity in the modern world, chicago: university of chicago press. roosens, eugeen (1989) creating ethnicity: the process of ethnogenesis, london: sage. sarup, madan (1996) identity, culture and the postmodern world, edinburgh: edinburgh university press. sider, gerald (2003) living indian histories: lumbee and tuscarora people in northern carolina, chapel hill: university of north carolina press. smith, anthony d. (1981) the ethnic revival, cambridge; new york: cambridge university press smith, anthony d. (1986) the ethnic origins of nations, oxford: blackwell. smith, anthony d. (1995) nations and nationalism in a global era, cambridge: polity. taylor, charles (1994) multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. verdery, katherine (1994) ‘ethnicity, nationalism and state-making: ethnic groups and boundaries: past and future’ in hans vermeulen and cora govers (eds) the anthropology of ethnicity: beyond ‘ethnic groups and boundaries’, amsterdam: het spinhuis, pp 33-58. wimmer, andreas (2008) ‘the making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: a multilevel process theory’, in american journal of sociology, vol. 113, no. 4, pp. 970-1022. woolard, kathryn a. (1989) double talk: bilingualism and the politics of ethnicity in catalonia, stanford university press: stanford, california. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 eloise hummell is a current phd candidate in the department of sociology, macquarie university. graduating from macquarie university in 2008 with a social science degree and honours in indigenous studies, eloise subsequently worked as a research assistant on a number of projects. these projects ranged from recording and presenting alternate expressions of aboriginal history, enhancing intercultural education, and exploring students’ perceptions on the importance of outdoor spaces for learning. as a phd candidate, her project is exploring ethnicity and identity formation within modern nation states. with an investigative focus on emerging cultural relations and ethnic formation of catalan identity within catalunya, other recent cases from literature will also inform a broader analysis of this critical theory. eloise’s interests include minorities groups and memory, power and politics, documentary film and photography. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 pacific studies: quo vadis? anne holden rønning abstract: looking back to the past this paper discusses why pacific studies and in particular australasian studies became an area of interest in tertiary education in europe. what subject areas initiated these studies, and how do past legacies shape the present? with cutbacks in higher education over the past two decades the future of interdisciplinary studies and the humanities looks bleak. at the same time due to global business and increased political communication across borders there is a vibrant interest in and need for such studies among businesses and students. for most europeans the literature of settler countries, with their european legacy, makes access to ways of thought and culture easier than studies of countries with other mythological backgrounds. in today’s multicultural environment such studies can provide knowledge for an understanding of other cultures and increase tolerance of the ‘other’. area studies have relevance to our situation in europe with increased migrancy, not least as a result of schengen and eu regulations. keywords: area studies, australia, new zealand based on ideas and realities of contemporary globalization, and political and economic facts many critics, not least the media, consider the twenty-first century as that of the asian-pacific area. the theme of this conference, looking back to looking forwards, is, therefore, particularly apt. since it is organised by the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona, it is timely to reflect on the status of studies from the pacific area, and possible ways of ensuring their survival. the latter part of the twentieth century witnessed a surge in interest in world literature with postcolonialism as a common theoretical feature, following seminal works by critics such as gayatri chakravorty spivak, edward said and homi bhabha, and books such as ashcroft et al. the empire writes back (1989/2002), as well as a wealth of other theoretical studies of literature, and the sociological consequences of the postcolonial era. now in the twenty-first century much of the binarism of such studies is felt to be passé and there is a move to transculturation, and globalization. in this paper i will discuss why pacific studies are an area of interest in copyright©2014 anne holden rønning. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 tertiary education in europe; what subject areas initiated these studies, and how past legacies shape the present. are asian-pacific area studies in europe today a move forward or merely a looking back? looking back following independence in former colonies an increasing interest was shown in the 60s and 70s in commonwealth literature, and courses were taught in many countries in europe. in norway, where i reside, such courses were started in 1976. however, courses in commonwealth literatures in english were often dominantly on african literature, (the heinemann publications making these texts readily available), or canadian, with the link to native americans/indians, and american studies generally. only later, in the 80s, did australia and the pacific area become a centre of interest in literary studies, though the area had long been a focus of social and anthropological studies. studies of maori culture and language, and of aborigine life and culture, had grown in strength from the 1920s onwards, as numerous research publications indicate. one of the first courses on australian literature in europe was given as early as 1958 by greta hort in aarhus, denmark and in barcelona, spain, doireann macdermott started courses on australian literature in the 1970s. the appointment of bruce clunies ross to copenhagen, and anna rutherford to aarhus in the sixties put such studies firmly on the map. although anna rutherford herself was adamantly australian as lars jensen describes: “[she had] a never wavering sense of being an ex-pat australian in denmark, complete with kangaroo bumper sticker on the four wheel drive, which was an identity marker and a necessity in order to negotiate the muddy track to her cottage in outback denmark” (2009: 3), she was a staunch supporter of commonwealth studies, and not special australian studies courses. from a european perspective the diversity of commonwealth literature and its links to empires was important to her. the economic support given by the australia council for the establishment of the menzies centre in london in the 1980s, as well as various scholarships for study in and on australia led to an increasing interest in australian studies in europe. several of the first presidents and members of the board of easa (european association for studies of australia) had such scholarships, and in the early stages the australia council did give some funding towards conferences, as i understand. these scholars returned to europe and promoted australian studies, whether in literature, film or other subject areas, especially in the humanities. in the wake of various european conferences dealing with aspects of australian studies, the european association for studies of australia (easa), to promote the teaching of, and research in, australian culture and studies at european tertiary institutions, was founded at a meeting in 1989 at the sir robert menzies centre for australian studies in london. from the start the association and its conferences have aimed at interdisciplinarity, and members have covered a wide range of subject areas across the disciplines, though the consistent element has always been literature. this legacy presents a problem when trying to encourage interdisciplinary area studies in europe, which was the coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 idea behind the formation of easa. within europe some countries such as britain and germany have their own associations for australian studies, and the former has published the journal of australian studies since 1988. easa now has its own publication, jeasa, under the auspices of coolabah at the university of barcelona. new zealand studies, on the other hand, though it does have an organization, leads a vicarious life, lacks funding and is often person-oriented, though two journals are published and conferences held. in other words there is not, as far as i am aware, any joint organization promoting asian-pacific or pacific area studies as of today. of the many universities where australian studies courses have been taught there is a dominance of such courses in germany, france, italy, spain and the uk, where a full undergraduate degree programme in australian studies was launched in 1997 at the university of wales, lampeter, drawing on staff expertise in the areas of geography, history, anthropology, archaeology and english. however, with amalgamation of universities this course seems to have disappeared. i one of the hindrances facing pacific area studies is that so far many courses in area studies do not necessarily give credits, and seldom can australian or new zealand topics be taught as separate courses. in literature texts by australian and new zealand authors are often included in courses with their base in theories of transculturation, multiculturalism, or postcolonialism where the luxury of having a course only with texts from the one country is often not possible within the european university system. a concentration on pacific studies rather than separate australian or new zealand studies, since they have much in common, would make this area stronger and more viable. such is the situation today, where the lack of interdisciplinarity is a key problem in furthering area studies. in bergen, norway, for instance, most of the books about australia are in the social sciences library because of anthropological research, and attempts at cooperation, as in many other universities, and in easa, have failed. lars jensen has suggested that one of the causes is in part “an at least partially inflated provincial cringe” in australian studies in europe, a sort of inverted cultural cringe, a feeling that australian studies must be done according to what is relevant in australia rather than how australian literature and research is interpreted from a european point of view (jensen 4 and 6). one example is the pauline hanson dominance at one easa conference—of relatively little interest to european scholars other than as yet another example of right wing fanaticism. should we, as jensen suggests, rather concentrate on “the reflective european scholar reflecting on his/her engagement with australian material”? (4) if so then it must be from a wider perspective than that of the humanities. but this raises a very salient problem that we need to discuss—what is the justification for pacific area studies? an important element in keeping studies of the pacific area on the map has been the establishment of australian studies centres, at the university of barcelona, at copenhagen, and in 2007 the institute for english and american studies, at the university of debrecen, hungary became a designated australian studies centre and part of the australian studies regional network (asrn). the aim: “we envisage our role as a disseminator of information for academic research, coordinator of joint projects in study, teaching and research, and facilitator of an increased awareness of australia and the asia-pacific in our coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 region.” for the first time the link between australian studies and asia-pacific has been made specific. looking forward given the legacy outlined above what is the future for pacific studies in europe today? the asia-pacific area is seen as the centre of global economy in the 21 st century, and to cope with this australian universities have been increasing their cooperation with china according to forskerforum (december 2012). this raises numerous problems since, whereas english is the common language, in the pacific area there is no common heritage, nor language in the asia region. in europe, australian and new zealand studies have benefited from the fact that english is the first foreign language in continental europe, hence knowledge and research is readily available. this raises the question of whether a european approach to pacific studies must distinguish between the pacific area, and the asian-pacific area with a concentration on china. it seems to me this is the case. this could be a useful starting point for relooking at how we do pacific area studies. in his book unsettling australia lars jensen takes up the need to expand the concept of australian studies to fit the reality of society in australia today, including a strong asian perspective. wenche ommundsen links such thoughts to the concept of multiculturalism. she posited in 1996 that the imagined peaceful model of cohabitation in australia should be the source of debate (153), and cites brian castro: far from seeing multiculturalism as a set of humanistic platitudes concerning culturebridging […] i see it as an idealisation of pluralism. and the ideal pluralism is when everybody exists on the margins, because the centre, which is like the centre of writing itself, is an absence. ii (cited in ommundsen 154) we need to look at literature, history, geography and culture in a wider perspective, as since the 1980s debates on national and cultural identities have been key issues in contemporary literature and politics (cf. hall). since the dominant migration to the pacific area was from europe, pacific studies can be a tool in the understanding of identities, our own and those of others, in contemporary society. the migration of many peoples to a country results in a mixing of heritages and cultures, and marginalization, whether of theme, or because of race and ethnic origins, is a prime area for study. the role of literature as a dissemination of values and knowledge of other peoples and cultures is increasingly important, both as a portrayal of contemporary cultural identities and issues which are dominant in the global discourse, but also as a source of debate on these issues within society. as ashcroft writes: “the concept of the border is disrupted in many ways in postcolonial literatures, but most powerfully in the relationship between memory and place: memory rather than nostalgia and place rather than nation” (jeasa 1: 2009). we need to ask questions such as: why are people marginalized? what effect do transcultural border-crossings have? how does any form of ‘cultural cringe’ affect our view of our own culture? what is the importance of transcultural aesthetics in such writing? coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 comparative criticism, postcolonialism and, more recently, transculturation have highlighted theoretical ways of looking at the aesthetics of literature. not least seminal works such as those by tiffin, ashcroft and griffiths have made theoretical understanding more accessible, and put australia on the map as a source of postcolonial theory—a position it has maintained to a great extent. to illustrate one way of looking forward i shall, therefore, briefly give some examples from literary studies. the european cultural and historical legacy in the pacific area provides easier access for european students to ways of thought and culture in settler literature than studies of countries with other mythological backgrounds, such as texts from india, and africa where most students do not have the necessary con-text required, and need far more background reading and secondary research. since australia and new zealand are countries with indigenous populations, a study of the two countries’ literature provides a varied perspective on cultural identities and understanding. the families of most peoples in these countries have at some time moved from one place and culture to another with the consequent border-crossings and adaptations that evolve from such a situation. australian and new zealand immigrants, however, were far from a homogenous group, socially and culturally—even more so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. in australia many of the early settlers were forced immigrants originally mainly from one culture, (except for the chinese miners) and of the lower classes bringing with them their own regional and local subcultures and languages, as is illustrated by the scholarly interest in convict studies. late twentieth century immigrants arriving from europe and asia are all reflected in the wealth of multicultural writing, and the attempt to express what it means to be an australian, new zealander or polynesian. the ensuant diversity (some would say multiculturality) gives to pacific literature an element of the transcultural, crossing borders back and forth, writers expressing their heritage through a fictional presentation of cultural difference. this approach can be linked to that of considering the global ‘glocal’. priscilla ringrose uses this term when investigating the clash of identities in literature (in her case beur literature,) when the protagonist or author has a bi– or multicultural background (rønning and johannessen, 2007: 22-23). through an understanding of the differing facets of the glocal we can more readily comprehend the influence of the global. transcultural literature in settler countries is also often marked by texts taking the past and applying it to the present, or through an investigation of the past coming to an understanding of present issues and situations by examining the ‘routes’ that have led from ‘roots’ to quote stuart hall (1996: 4). thus literature is particularly useful as a teaching tool when approaching issues of ethnicity, race, and cultural difference. the transcultural nature of pacific writing can be summed up in the words of albert wendt in nuana: pacific writing in english since 1980: “[a]ll cultures are becoming, changing in order to survive, absorbing foreign influences, continuing, growing. (…) for me the post in post-colonial does not mean just after, it also means around, through, out of, alongside, and against” (3, emphasis in the original). many of the extracts from longer texts and poems in nuana illustrate clearly wendt’s point, for example, the ironic poem by jon jonassen “saved” (48) and the sarcastic “darkness within the light” by kauraka kauraka from the cook islands. wendt’s ideas could be linked to the concept of a ‘cultural cringe’, the feeling that your coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 inherited culture is inferior in some ways to that of the dominant group. since new zealand has not suffered from a ‘cultural cringe’, and relationships with maori, although troubled at times, have never been as negative as australian attitudes to aborigine, studies of these differences could yield some interesting results. the reasons for the difference in new zealand are many—maori are today over 12% of the population, teaching nest programmes have raised awareness of education and there are an increasing number of maori in tertiary education; maori have positions of importance politically and socially. not least the maori renaissance in writing, culminating one might say so far in the te ao marama five volume maori writing, edited among others by witi ihimaera, including texts in maori by young writers, texts in english, criticism and even a children’s literature volume, has raised awareness of cultural heritage. a comparative studies approach in cooperation with anthropologists would have an added dimension since, whereas indigenous peoples have been in australia for centuries, everyone has come to new zealand, from the moriori (the original polynesian inhabitants of chatham island) and maori to the scots, irish, english, and chinese. whaling and sealing brought many europeans to these waters in the nineteenth century, some staying on as is seen in the book old new zealand: a tale of the good old days by a pakeha maori, by fredrick edward maning 1863, who was born in 1811 in dublin and emigrated with his parents to hobart in 1824. iii the full title of this book was a tale of the good old time, together with a history of the war in the north of new zealand against the chief heke in the year 1845 as told by an old chief of the ngapuhi tribe, also maori traditions. interestingly, this book was obviously very popular. there are australian editions in 1876 and 1893, and even a colonial edition in 1900! maning, who was very anti-colonialist and defied british law as having rights in new zealand, would hardly have approved. this text is in contrast to early australian texts in that it has a strong focus on maori customs, whereas early australian texts largely ignored the aborigine as savages. the hierarchy system in maori culture and their ownership of land was more comprehensible to europeans than was the case with the aborigine in australia. today there is an increasing interest in the ‘storying’ of other identities, whether expatriate, immigrant or migrant writing. this can be seen as a continuation of a long tradition in british literature, if we bear in mind travel writing by men and women in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. mary louise pratt’s use of the term ‘contact zones’ emphasizes bordercrossings but may also be linked to ‘migration memory’, and its unreliability despite its informative nature. these ‘contact zones’ are diverse, ranging from early australian writers who wrote to bring australia to the eyes of the british as illustrated so clearly in from a distant shore, the book published recently by bruce bennett and anne pender, to contemporary writers of various ethnic origins. bennett and pender’s book attempts to answer questions such as why did these writers leave and when did they leave—the importance of the age of leaving; but it also raises the question of patriotism in expatriate writers (24), and issues of assimilation, since many of these writers become ‘insiders’ rather than ‘outsiders’. it raises a seminal contemporary question as to what constitutes belonging to any one nation—childhood, language, topic? for the older generation of writers leaving their country had a finality because of distance, yet they retained a kind of coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 loyalty to the place of their birth. katherine mansfield, for instance, felt the need, despite spending her adulthood in britain, and being critical of the colonial life back home, “to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world.” one of the interesting points which comes out in this book is to what extent writers feel attached in some way to the country which they have left. bennett and pender make a clear distinction between those of the late nineteenth century such as catherine helen spence, miles franklin, and rosa praed, who wrote, “always have i had the sensation of being an alien in london crowds whether fashionable or vulgar, and have in my fancy borne the stamp of the bush” (16). bennett and pender contrast these early writers with such as james turner and peter porter who do not see the necessity of keeping in touch with their origins, as they do not see that as an essential part of their creativity. this raises a salient issue: to what extent does the place you are born and spend your childhood influence the rest of your life? do you need to return to the centre to understand the periphery? i would posit that late twentieth and early twenty-first century europeans look to literature from elsewhere as a way of understanding cultural aspects of migrant and immigrant life in their own country. the interest in migration stories has been strong in the pacific area. an aspect of settler literature that is relevant to contemporary global debates is the change from settlement to migration (see lars jensen unsettling australia 2005). in earlier times, border-crossing, moving from one place to another with a slight chance of return, had a finality. the socialhistorical views presented in migrant and exile literature open up the possibility of crossing and re-crossing those boundaries, and give fluidity to the topic/theme. examples of authors who take up issues of migrancy and it consequences are yvonne du fresne, amelia batitsch, brian castro, even beverly farmer in the seal woman –with its emphasis on why the norwegian protagonist never manages to settle in australia. to exemplify such discussions i shall refer to some few texts that i consider especially helpful in presenting pacific area studies. my starting point would be thematic. take david malouf’s remembering babylon, and especially the character of gemmy. he provides us with the debate on the issue mentioned above: to what extent upbringing influences the rest of your life, and the question of cultural identities. at the same time the text illustrates ‘migration memory’ in the description janet’s mother has given of their life back in scotland: she [janet] was in love with this other life her parents had lived; with scotland and a time before they came to australia, before she was born, that was her time too, extending her life back beyond the few years she could actually recall, and giving reality to a world she had need of; more alive and interesting, more crowded with things, with people too, than the one she was in. (49) castro has observed that “writing […] always involves displacement—of voice, experience and identity” (cited in ommundsen 1996: 149). this is clearly seen in castro’s birds of passage, where the protagonist is confused about his identity, being an abc and blue eyed chinese person. castro elaborates on these attitudes in “writing asia”. marion halligan is an author who has spent much time in france. in the living hothouse the stories coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 frequently juxtapose australian and french cultural differences, and are a wonderful source for discussions on european versus australian customs. in “trespassers or guests?” halligan displays a cultural misunderstanding which only those in the know could avoid, when the protagonist purchases a bunch of chrysanthemums as a house-warming present, because she likes them and always gets a bunch on her birthday in australia. on reaching their destination she notes that they did not seem to be appreciated (58). later she discovers that in this village chrysanthemums are flowers for the dead and to put on graves (64). what a faux pas! halligan’s french stories could also be compared to kathleen mansfield’s stories set in france. a writer whose texts deal with displacement and the emigrant and immigrant experience is yvonne du fresne, especially in her trilogy the book of ester, frédérique and motherland. here du fresne fictionalises her danish-huguenot ancestors who went to new zealand in 1860 and 1890, flitting in and out of the past to illustrate the complexities of migration, cultural identities and the feeling of expatriation. the use of danish words in yvonne du fresne’s texts can be seen as a wresting of power and a restoring of identity and purpose. the ‘insider’ ‘outsider’ concept becomes central here. that johanna’s world, a translation of øystein molstad andresen’s book uredd ferd til ukjent land about the journey of a poor norwegian emigrant family via south america to new zealand and their life in new zealand in the 1870s, topped the best seller list in new zealand in 2001 for many weeks is illustrative of the current interest in migration and immigration history and life. environmental issues are frequently the theme of texts from this area, not surprisingly since in particular new zealand is very active in this global debate. such a theme also lends itself to interdisciplinarity, not least given the extensive anthropological studies done on the pacific. in literature texts such as patricia grace’s potiki is an obvious choice with its emphasis on the conflict between developers and locals, a highly topical issue all over the world, and only one of many dealing with cultural displacement. oodgeroo’s poetry would come into the same category, a critique of the establishment and of what it does to the environment physically and psychologically, and how both parties can learn from each other. the future cutbacks in higher education over the past two decades make the future of interdisciplinary studies look bleak. and this at a time when young people are increasingly taking part of their studies in australia or new zealand. many of those teaching australian and new zealand studies are retiring or have retired, and are not being replaced, confirming yet again that research in specific areas is often person-oriented. at the same time, due to global business and increased political communication across borders, and given the importance of economic growth in the pacific-asian area, there is a vibrant need for, and interest in, such studies among business people and students. ahistoricism and lack of cultural knowledge, for example, has led to many unnecessary failed business and diplomatic negotiations, so the socio-cultural value of area studies should not be underestimated in a transcultural world. what is needed is an active website for pacific area coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 studies, and the creation of networks. research possibilities which are either ongoing or could be the basis for further research are european reactions to australian films and television series, the treatment of refugees, environmental studies, especially in new zealand, or gender relations within indigenous peoples. much research can be done to highlight how often it is the women who are the guardians of culture, and the ones who save the family and the tribe. for example, alan duff’s book once were warriors is usually interpreted as about cultural loss, crime and disillusion, but from another point of view it is the women who are the strong ones. the same applies in several books about and by maori. yet another method of critical approach would be an investigation of whether the triple bind, that is, being a writer, a third world person (or indigenous) and a woman (trinh minh-ha woman, native, other 4), often seen in other asian countries, also applies in the pacific area. in conclusion, we live in a multicultural world, and we need to come to grips with this and instil in younger generations ideas of harmonious cohabitation with other groups. no society is exempt from facing its cultural diversity, and area studies, especially of the pacific, which has faced such issues for over 100 years, is a fruitful source of study for the next generation of leaders. to europeans such literary texts open up for a more objective point of view—we are not socially nor politically directly involved in the identities/culture debates presented, so it becomes a useful stepping-stone to a discussion of our own local or national situation in connection with immigrants and refugees. spivak’s discussion of the subaltern and the issue of “who can speak for the other?” is also related to that of who can speak about the other, and issues of authenticity. this article has attempted to shed a little light on the situation for studies of this area and on possible ways forward. since this paper was part of a debate panel, the lack of a conclusion is deliberate as it is up to us as critics and scholars to take these threads and weave them into something bigger and greater on the cultural cost of immigrants and emigrants. to quote the epigraph to wenche ommundsen’s enlightening essay in from a distance where she cites castro: “language marks the spot where the self loses its prison bars—where the border crossing takes place, traversing the spaces of others” (149). works cited andresen, øystein molstad. (2001) johanna’s world. auckland: harpercollins. translation by johan bonnevie of uredd ferd til ukjent land: en dramatisk fortelling om den norske utvandring til new zealand. (1999) oslo: genesis. ashcroft, bill, helen tiffin and gareth griffiths. ([1989] 2002) the empire writes back. london: routledge. ashcroft, bill. (2009a) “beyond the nation: post-colonial hope,” journal of the european association of studies of australia. ed. anne holden rønning and martin leer. observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona. jeasa 1: www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/jeasamainpage.html http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/jeasamainpage.html coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 bennett, bruce and anne pender. (2013) from a distant shore: australian writers in britain 1820-2012. clayton: monash university publishing. castro, brian. (1983) birds of passage. north ryde: n.s.w. sirius. ——. (1996) “writing asia.” australian humanities review. http://www.australianhumanities review.org/archive/issues-april-1996/castro.html dasenbrock, reed way. (1987) “ intelligibility and meaningfulness in multicultural literature in english” pmla 102:10-19. duff, alan. 1990 once were warriors. auckland: tandem press. du fresne, yvonne. 1982 the book of ester. auckland: longman paul. ——. 1987 frédérique. auckland: penguin. ——. 1996 motherland. auckland: penguin. forskerforum 2012. oslo: forskerforbund. grace, patricia. ([1986] 1987) potiki. london: women’s press. hall, stuart and paul du gay. ([1996] 1997). questions of cultural identity. london/new delhi: sage publications. halligan, marion. 1988 the living hothouse. st. lucia: university of queensland press. ihimaera, witi et al. 1993 te ao marama: contemporary maori writing 5 vols. auckland: reed publishing. jensen, lars. 2005 unsettling australia: readings on australian cultural history. new delhi: atlantic. ———. 2009 “australian studies in europe and the omnipresent elephant.” journal of the european association of studies of australia. ed. anne holden rønning and martin leer. observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona. 1: 2-8. www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/jeasamainpage.html malouf, david. ([1993] 1994] remembering babylon. london: vintage. maning, fredrick edward. 1863 old new zealand: a tale of the good old days by a pakeha maori. a tale of the good old time, together with a history of the war in the north of new zealand against the chief heke in the year 1845 as told by an old chief of the ngapuhi tribe, also maori traditions. auckland: whitcombe & tombs ltd. minh-ha, trinh. 1989 woman, native, other. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana up. ommundsen, wenche and hazel rowley, eds. 1996 from a distance: australian writers and cultural displacement. geelong: deakin university press. ————. 1996 “multiculturalism, identity, displacement”. from a distance: australian writers and cultural displacement. geelong: deakin university press.149-158. pratt, mary louise. (1992) imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. london & new york: routledge. ringrose, priscilla. 2007 “‘beur’ narratives of self-identity: beyond boundaries and binaries.” readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational. ed. anne holden rønning and lene johannessen, amsterdam & new york: rodopi. 21-37. wendt, albert. 1995 nuana: pacific writing in english since 1980. auckland: auckland up. http://www.llas.ac.uk/. accessed15.11.12. http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/jeasamainpage.html coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 i http://www.llas.ac.uk. ii castro “necessary idiocy and the idea of freedom” in sneja gunew and kateryna o. longley (eds.) striking chords: multicultural literary interpretations, sydney: allen & unwin, 1992. 7. iii maning’s work is a classic of new zealand literature as it is one of early accounts of life in new zealand by someone who after settling on the hokianga river, the chief place of european settlement at the time, become in reality a pakeha maori. anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. her research interests and fields of publication are women’s studies and postcolonial literatures and cultures, especially from australia and new zealand. she was co-editor of identities and masks: colonial and postcolonial studies (2001); and readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007); and author of “for was i not born here?” identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne (2010). in 2012 she was visiting professor at the university of barcelona. microsoft word tomdrahos14.doc coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   148  the imagined desert 1 tom drahos copyright©2013 tom drahos. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the following analysis of the australian outback as an imagined space is informed by theories describing a separation from the objective physical world and the mapping of its representative double through language, and draws upon a reading of the function of landscape in three fictions; joseph conrad’s novella heart of darkness (1899), greg mclean’s 2005 horror film wolf creek and ted kotcheff’s 1971 cinematic adaptation of kenneth cook’s novel wake in fright2. i would like to consider the outback as a culturally produced text, and compare the function of this landscape as a cultural ‘reality’ to the function of landscape in literary and cinematic fiction. the outback is hardly a place, but a narrative. an imagined realm, it exists against a backdrop of cultural memories and horror stories; ironically it is itself the backdrop to these accounts. in this sense, the outback is at once a textual space and a text, a site of myth making and the product of myth. ross gibson defines landscape as a place where nature and culture combine in history: ‘as soon as you experience thoughts, emotions or actions in a tract of land, you find you’re in a landscape’3. edward w. said uses the term ‘imaginative geography’ to describe spaces and landscapes that have been in some way contrived; he writes of ‘the invention and construction of a geographical space called the orient, for instance, with scant attention paid to the actuality of the geography and its inhabitants’4. the subjective meanings of place and space are supplied through the narrative power of collective imagination, cultural perception and history, often even when there is ample evidence to the contrary. whether culturally or historically constructed, landscapes exist to supply systems of order and meaning about the world, so that in place of the unknown comes a structure of knowledge, a land schema that is ‘a mental construct as much as a physical reality’5. from this construction rises a                                                               1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacedness-images.blogspot.com.au/. 2 conrad, joseph, heart of darkness, ed. by paul b armstrong, a norton critical edition, 4th edn. (new york: norton and company, inc. 2006); wolf creek. dir. greg mclean. roadshow films. 2005; wake in fright. dir. ted kotcheff. united artists. 1971 3 ross gibson, seven versions of an australian badland (st lucia: university of queensland press, 2002) p. 2  4 edward w. said, ‘invention, memory, and place’, critical inquiry, vol. 26, no. 2 (winter, 2000) p. 181  5 richard baker, ‘land is life: a cultural geography of australian contact history’ in australian cultural geographies, ed. by elaine stratford (melbourne: oxford university press, 1999) p. 32-33  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   149  distinction between spaces of order and spaces of chaos, and by extension the people that dwell in these respective spaces. landscape is not the land, it is an impression of the land, and what is impressed on to it; it refers to the mapping of space through language and ideas. for a space to be mapped in this manner, according to paul carter, is for it to undergo a transformation: the cultural place where spatial history begins: not in a particular year, but in the act of naming. for by the act of place-naming, space is transformed symbolically into a place, that is, a space with a history.6 in the nineteenth century, the vast space of central australia was given significance and cast in australia’s colonial narrative as the ‘outback’. in total disregard to the presence of what is now recognised as the world’s most ancient continuing culture, the creation of the ‘outback’ and its immanent myth of emptiness became central to european constructions of the central australian landscape7. even before europeans had confirmed the existence of a southern continent, it had already been created, envisioned as a ‘grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters’8. for britain, a symbol of civilisation and expansion, terra australis was not only a distant land, but a moral and spiritual antithesis. as the british empire began to include australia’s eastern shores and elsewhere along the coast, ‘outback’ was invented as the opposite space to settled areas: first recorded in print in 1869, the term “outback” referred to the country west of wagga wagga. previously anything beyond the settlements was classed as “back” country, so “outback” probably started as slang, short for “out in the back country” but it became a sacred word.9 outback represents a space away from settlement, a wilderness. its own terminology, the ‘back’, a space ‘outside’, defines it as ‘other’. an ‘intrinsically colonial’ term, it is a measurement of space in terms of european appropriation10. european settlers constructed the australian desert landscape as a space outside of development and outside of history. its conception as an unchanging wilderness is a european fabrication, the notion of wilderness intimating a land unchanged by a human population and thus ‘failing to recognise aboriginal occupation and land-use’11. european settlers imagined an empty space, a rich and virgin territory, a prize for the conquerors, awaiting development and industrialisation. conveniently, this ‘accorded with and embellished                                                               6 paul carter, the road to botany bay: an essay in spatial history (london: faber and faber ltd, 1987) p. xxiv  7 roslynn d. haynes, seeking the centre: the australian desert in literature, art and film (melbourne: cambridge university press, 1998) p. 6  8 gerry turcotte, ‘australian gothic’ in the handbook to gothic literature, ed. by marie mulvey roberts (london: macmillan, 1998) p. 10  9 ann mcgrath, ‘travels to a distant past: the mythology of the outback’, australian cultural history no. 10, (1991), p. 117  10 mcgrath, 1991, 114  11 mcgrath, 1991, 118  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   150  the british political myth of terra nullius: before 1788 australia had been not only a land of no people but a place where nothing of significance had happened’12. for most of the nineteenth century, maps of continental australia portrayed a ‘hideous blank’13. a desire to map this ‘blank’ space and fill it with the comforting sight of european names was paramount in colonial society. before explorers penetrated into the continent’s interior the central australian space was imagined as a fertile heartland awaiting conquest, sustained by an inland sea. an early and ill-informed published map of australia exemplified this want, depicting an arterial river running conveniently from the continent’s south-east to north-west14. however, to the disappointment of white australians: in the 19th century, australia’s outback was the backdrop to heroic exploration and bitter pastoral disappointment. … [deserts were] defined as the places where there was no prospect of an agricultural economy. they were also the places where brave explorers regularly died.15 unable to be assimilated into the growing industry and pastoralism of settlement the outback remained a site of ‘other’, defined in opposition to the stability and comfort of the colonies. the only redeeming feature of the outback was its convenience as a national foe; ‘myths of national heroism demand an enemy and the land was readily sacrificed to that end’16. the more horrible the circumstances surrounding the demise of white explorers in the ‘dead heart’, the greater the honour accorded them, and by extension to the entire colonial population17. fear of a silent interior produced a greater satisfaction with the terrain that had been settled; gibson writes that a ‘badland’ can ‘appear encouraging to the extent that it shows that savagery can be encysted even if it cannot be eliminated’18. as desolate as the outback was imagined to be, areas of settlement were antithetical in every conceivable sense; civilised, comfortable, places of which to be proud. the outback is still positioned in the contemporary cultural imaginary as being the ‘other’ place, in opposition to the heavily developed coast, and pastoral areas. despite this the ‘centre is now the most exported image of australia’19. paradoxically it is viewed as an iconic national landscape as well as a space of the ‘other’, both a ‘rural heartland and wilderness’20. this comparatively recent exportation of images of the ‘red centre’ embraces the outback’s ‘otherness’, offering a site of unchanged ancient                                                               12 haynes, 1998, 5  13 haynes, 1998, 36  14 haynes, 1998, 38  15 libby robin, how a continent created a nation (sydney: university of new south wales press ltd, 2007) pp. 100-101  16 haynes, 1998, 33 17 haynes, 1998, 33  18 gibson, 2002, 15  19 haynes, 1998, 3  20 nicholas gill, ‘life and death in australian “heartlands”: pastoralism, ecology and rethinking the outback’, journal of rural studies, 21, (2005), p. 39  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   151  beauty. h.h. finlayson, a zoologist, was the first to enthusiastically describe in print the colours of the interior, suggesting that ‘it might well be known as a red centre’21. opposing the popular view of the desert as flat and unending with detailed accounts of his travels through a vibrant space, finlayson posited the central australian desert as radiant and memorable. his view of the inland was reinforced by ernestine hill, a travelling journalist writing in 1937; ‘i found that the supposed “dead heart of australia” was vitally alive’22. if the ‘dead heart’ is a colonial vision, then ‘red centre’ certainly functions as a nationalist construction, the outback space as iconic. ‘red centre’ is a term utilised by tourism australia in campaigns seeking to market the northern territory23. the wilderness ideal is consumed, rather than the wilderness itself; the outback landscape’s otherness is embodied in marketable and packaged tourist ideals of remoteness and emptiness: in an age of sensitivity to over-population and urban over-crowding, the immensity of space that so terrified british colonists has become an enviable asset. silence, immensity, and ancientness, the characteristics of the desert, are now eminently marketable.24 ‘red centre’ suggests a welcoming heart of the nation, the place of cultural significance, the site of the ‘real’ australia. however, its status as ‘other’ remains, regardless of marketing intent. over the last several decades the outback has received attention as the site of isolated and infrequent horror stories. these narratives feature societal outsiders attacking passive agents seeking to consume the space, in the case of bradley john murdoch attacking british tourists peter falconio and joanne lees in 2001, or in the case of azaria chamberlain’s death in 1980, describe attacks from the landscape’s fauna. such horror stories, while rare are ubiquitous; they are part of the fabric of the myth that is intrinsic to the outback. travellers in the ‘dead heart’ are likely to come under attack, from the landscape, from its creatures, from the ‘other’. when travellers go missing, or tourists are shot at, old narratives receive offerings of fresh blood. these violent happenings are in keeping with the outback narrative’s tradition and reinforce its imagined reality. the inversion of the triumphant colonial narrative is one of invasion, genocide and dispossession; the outback has always been a space of violence. maria tumarkin refers to ‘traumascapes’ as being ‘a distinctive category of place, transformed physically and psychically by suffering, part of a scar tissue that now stretches across the world’25. the troubled past of a landscape affects its conception today, manifesting not just in how an environment is treated physically but also in how it functions in our minds. landscapes with a history of violence are construed as being intertwined with such destructive forces, even when that is not necessarily the case. as will be observed in the latter half of this discussion, both wolf                                                               21 h.h. finlayson, the red centre: man and beast in the heart of australia (sydney: halstead printing company ltd., 1935) p. 22  22 ernestine hill, australian frontier (new york: doubleday, doran and company, inc., 1942) p. 237  23 ‘red centre, northern territory’, tourism australia, <www.australia.com> [accessed 4 october 2010]  24 haynes, 1998, 6  25 maria tumarkin, traumascapes: the power and fate of places transformed by tragedy (melbourne: melbourne university press: 2005) p. 13  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   152  creek and wake in fright explore the construction of the outback as a fearful and dangerous space. in the context of colonial australia, the conceptual outback clearly demarcated areas of settlement from the untamed desert and scrub. landscape demarcation confers significance, structure. ultimately, the formation of a significant and familiar landscape from a nameless and unknown space designates the placement of a representation, a simulacrum. landscape is its own map of reality. ironically to map landscape is to represent a representation. in dealing with a representation that is predominantly taken to be reality itself, social philosopher and behavioural scientist alfred korzybski observes the following: a map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory… if we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. a word is not the object it represents…26 korzybski identifies language as the means through which we map the surrounding world and knowledge in its entirety. no matter which sensory organ registers a perception, it is language that relates the experience or provides a mode through which to consciously draw conclusions from an incident. korzybski advises that language is an abstraction contrived to make sense of abstractions, that is, our experiences in the world. these experiences are always mediated through human faculties of awareness; they are only ever the experiences of experiences, never an objective reality; “objective levels are not words”27. language as a map serves a function, but ultimately can only ever provide representations, impressions, understandings, abstractions. landscape is a creation devised to impose meaning on an inherently meaningless environment. landscape ceases to exist outside the mind. in ‘simulacra and simulations’ jean baudrillard cites the borges’ short story ‘on exactitude in science’ as an ‘allegory of simulation’ except that for baudrillard it is the territory that has perished, the map that has survived, even proliferated28. baudrillard inverts the borges fable, referring instead to a ‘desert of the real’. if it is the map that has survived then it is the map that we engage with, never the territory. hyperreality, ‘a generation by models of a real without origin or reality’ is the fabric of existence that we interact with29. to speak of landscape is to speak of the hyperreal reading of space, as though it were text. interpreting landscape or making reference to space and place are processes tied up in systems of signification. for roland barthes, in the process of signification, signs are enmeshed simultaneously in the processes of denotation and connotation30. denotation ‘describes the relationship between the signifier and the signified within the sign, and of the sign with its referent in external reality’; it is the                                                               26 alfred korzybski, science and sanity, 4th edn., (clinton: the colonial press inc, 1958) p. 58  27 korzybski, 1958, 754  28 jean baudrillard, ‘simulacra and simulations’ in selected writings, ed. by mark poster, trans. by paul foss, paul patton and phillip beitchman (cambridge: polity: 1988) p. 166  29 baudrillard, 1988, 166  30 roland barthes, s/z, trans. by farrar, straus and girouz, inc. (london: jonathan cape ltd, 1975) pp. 316  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   153  direct reference of the signifier to the signified31. connotation refers to any association likely to be made with the signifier; largely influenced by cultural bias, connotations are ‘meanings which are neither in the dictionary nor in the grammar of the language in which a text is written’32. connotation is closely linked with the concept of myth, in the sense of the word as used by barthes33. for barthes, a myth is a concatenation of related ideas: ...a story by which a culture explains or understands some aspect of reality or nature... a culture’s way of thinking about something, a way of conceptualising or understanding it.34 connotation refers to a body of ideas connected to or implied by the signifier; myth refers to the ideas attached to the signified. as a semiotic construction, landscape carries both denotation and connotation. said writes that spaces can never be ‘coterminous with some stable reality out there that identifies and gives them permanence’ because space and landscape stimulate ‘not only memory but dreams and fantasies’35. baudrillard argues that it is impossible to sever denotation from connotation: we can return to the process of denotation in order to show that it differs in no way from connotation: the denoted [signifier], this objective “reality”, is itself nothing more than a coded form... in other words, ideology is as rife with the denotative as with the connotative process and, in sum, denotation is never really anything more than the most attractive and subtle of connotations.36 while the name of a place might denote a specific locality, its significance is forever enmeshed within the weight of connotation. a denoted landscape is inseparable from its connoted meanings. the signifier ‘outback’ denotes the actual physical space of land that takes up much of the australian interior; in the same instant, the outback is never simply a physical environment. ‘outback’ connotes a colonial history and a subsequent demarcation of terrain; implicit in this is the separation between the familiar and the other. the outback connotes constructions as simultaneously a ‘dead heart’ and a ‘red centre’; both labels denote a single space, but are unrelated in their connotations. these are versions of a fabrication; like any landscape the outback is an invention, a map that has supplanted reality. the outback is a canvas for myth, a space mapped through cultural                                                               31 john fiske, introduction to communication studies, 2nd edn. (london and new york: routledge: 1990) p. 85  32 barthes, 1975, 8  33 roland barthes, mythologies, ed. and trans. by annette lavers (new york: hill and wang, 1972) pp. 109-159  34 fiske, 1990, 88  35 said, 2000, 81  36 jean baudrillard, ‘for a critique of the political economy of the sign’, in selected writings, ed. by mark poster, trans. by charles levin, p.89  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   154  perception. the outback setting offers a selection of fictions as models or maps of space, in the same manner that fiction presents an account of reality; reality itself is mapped using the same linguistic and semiotic markers as a text. landscape as a semiotic construction is paramount in heart of darkness, the title of which insinuates an imperial cultural construction of the african continent as a barbaric location, as well as the metaphysical journey experienced by both kurtz and marlow37. the term ‘heart of darkness’ both denotes and implies, but the landscape that it denotes is not the actual physical space of the congo interior, but a racist conception. conrad depicts the jungle as a setting designed to tie in with his novella’s key themes. similarly, directors mclean and kotcheff utilise the setting of the australian outback in an unambiguous context, as the ideal setting for their respective films. the outback is represented unequivocally as dry, barren, inhospitable. in wolf creek it is an abstract space where one encounters decaying symbols of a failed attempt to civilise the land, a land that is utterly devoid of signs of indigenous culture. in wake in fright the outback is a vast and open space that causes an overpowering sensation of isolation, threatening to drive the individual within it mad. conrad’s vision of the congo interior serves an important narrative function as the ideal setting for a tale of human madness. conrad’s jungle is reminiscent of gothic generic tropes, presenting a space that isolates through immensity rather than enclosure; in the gothic tradition, empty space is ‘always threatening’38. the ‘arbitrary terrors of the gothic’ are given form in conrad’s narrative through the obliteration of the visual landscape by a smothering fog, and its reduction to abstraction through marlow’s narration39. these qualities are easily applicable to historic constructions of the outback landscape as a ‘hideous blank’ or a ‘dead heart’; haynes notes that ‘through [the] loss of its specific geographical identity [the desert landscape] takes on a wider significance as the epitome of absence, of the metaphysical void’40. in heart of darkness this isolating landscape produces kurtz, and threatens to overwhelm marlow. these two characters typify certain archetypal roles in narratives of space; those that are comfortable living in spaces of chaos, wilderness, outside of civilisation; and those who come from spaces of order and travel into the untamed space. heart of darkness is concerned with a hierarchy of places. marlow makes reference very early in the narrative to ‘the dark places of the earth’41. london, in being settled and subsequently named, ceases to be a dark place of the earth. in opposition to this hub of civilisation, and in opposition to europe at large, there is africa. conrad portrays africa as a space populated and dominated by ‘the other’42. conrad’s is an imperial vision of africa; a savage antithesis to europe and ‘therefore of civilisation’43.                                                               37 benita parry, conrad and imperialism: ideological boundaries and visionary frontiers (london: macmillan press ltd, 1983) p. 20 38 george e. haggerty, gothic fiction/gothic form (london: the pennsylvania state university press, 1989) p. 20 39 haynes, 1998, 184 40 haynes, 1998, 185 41 conrad, 2006, p. 5 42 chinua achebe, ‘an image of africa: racism in conrad’s heart of darkness’ in heart of darkness, ed. by paul a. armstrong, a norton critical edition, 4th ed, p. 338 43 achebe, 2006, 338 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   155  marlow’s initial experience of africa is as a boy, pointing at a map; this signals the nature of conrad’s setting as imaginary, a construction; africa is a ‘blank [space] on the earth’44. marlow tells us that travelling up the congo river was like ‘travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’45. conrad’s vision of the jungle landscape is abstracted, a nightmarish milieu, doubly distorted through the framed narrative of marlow as speaker rather than narrator. heart of darkness perfectly illustrates our concerns with landscape as a subjective creation. the congo setting is very far from reality, it is a european construction of space belonging to the ‘other’. evoking comparisons to conrad’s distinction between the ‘dark places of the earth’ and the ‘civilised’ opposites, wolf creek and wake in fright present the outback as a veritable ‘dead heart’ in total opposition to broome and sydney, respectively. both films depict a vast and empty expanse of sand and rock, a space that isolates and imprisons. in this version of the outback there is no water, and the desert is replete with madmen. like conrad’s jungle, it is an inhospitable and dangerous space that attracts the insane, or breaks people, and gives them cause to find the worst in themselves. both films introduce characters similar to kurtz and marlow; these characters either inhabit the landscape and embody its threat, or are displaced and trying to find their way back to spaces of order. in its opening sequences wolf creek establishes a dichotomy of space. over the course of the film two landscape images are predominant, the beach and the desert. these two separate landscapes become emblematic of a binary that is well established in the national imaginary; ‘the coast as civilised and populated versus the outback as uncivilised, indeed lawless and empty’46. according to stratton, for australians water connotes civilisation. within the first several minutes of wolf creek we see kristy and liz, two british backpackers, frolicking by the beach near broome; shortly afterwards the two are joined by ben, a young man from sydney, and the three attend a poolside party. the following morning liz takes a dawn swim; even though the ocean seems foreboding in this scene, she is safe and returns from her dip unharmed. the water in wolf creek is harmless, devoid of real-world threats such as sharks or riptides, because it is coupled with the city landscape. certainly cities can be dangerous places also, but in this hierarchy landscapes of civilisation are familiar, secure. it is when the water starts to dry up, as the trio travel inland, that danger lurks. besides ominous and sporadic rains, the desert of wolf creek is completely dry, suggesting real danger. stratton observes that in ‘australian mythography the drier the outback, the more lawless and threatening it is’47. the outback of wolf creek is flat and featureless. it is devoid of any signs of development beyond bullet riddled road signs and rusting iron sheds. it represents the ultimate conception of the outback landscape as lawless and inhospitable, ever resistant to any attempts to appropriate its space. the desert found in wolf creek seems to                                                               44 conrad, 2006, 8 45 conrad, 2006, 33 46 jon stratton, ‘dying to come to australia: asylum seekers, tourists and death’ in imagined australia: receptions around the reciprocal construction of identity between australia and europe, ed. by renata summo-o’connell (bern: international academic publishers, 2009) p. 80 47 stratton, 2009, 80 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   156  possess an eerie power to erode the structures of humans, to break down vehicles and stop watches. for the three urbanite backpackers, it is an unknown and threatening space; before the arrival of mick taylor, the film’s antagonist, the danger comes from the silence and isolation of the landscape. without vehicles or technology, the backpackers are helpless against an overwhelming landscape; they are directionless, until seemingly help is offered. that same helping hand leads them further into a space of danger. as taylor tows the three backpackers’ car we see both vehicles turn off of a bitumen road and on to a dirt track; the backpackers have made the final transition from the known and the mapped into an abstracted space. the exact location of mick taylor’s camp is unknown, effectively a mythic setting. past and futile attempts to subdue the landscape are represented through the presence of abandoned and now decaying mining machinery. when the backpackers ask about the nature of his camp, taylor responds that there are plenty of similar locations dotting the outback, ‘places people have forgotten about’. once (and if) one leaves taylor’s camp, it can never be found again. listening to the bushman’s fireside banter one wonders whether the miners left or simply vanished into the landscape, consumed by the very space that they had attempted to usurp. there is a divide between the mapped and hence the known, and the unfamiliar space that taylor inhabits. he functions as an agent of the landscape; indeed, if the landscape connotes harshness and inhospitality mick taylor is its personification. he possesses the ability to vanish into the milieu, reappearing at will to the detriment of his prey, those who are not of the space and find it unfamiliar and overwhelming. in the film’s final shot taylor literally fades into the landscape; he is not a product of the landscape but ‘in a sense, the landscape itself’48. taylor as an embodiment of the landscape’s threat suggests also that the landscape is solely a site of death and peril. the threat embodied in taylor is implicit in the landscape, and vice versa. at various points during the film, both ben and kristy escape taylor’s clutches, but find that they are no safer, still trapped as they are by the landscape. taylor is the film’s equivalent of conrad’s kurtz. like kurtz, taylor is comfortable existing in a space of isolation, and has no qualms about resorting to violence to achieve his goals. having travelled the same highways as the three protagonists as part of the research for this project, i recognise that the film’s treatment of these spaces differs greatly from how they had appeared to me. this is in part due to the film’s production in the south australian desert rather than western australia where it is set, but it is also an indication of the nature of the wolf creek setting, that it is a heightened representation of the most desolate and macabre constructions of the outback. as scott and biron note, ‘wolf creek skilfully plays on popular conceptions of inland australia as empty and harsh’49. there are no indigenous australian characters in the film, nor any signs of aboriginal culture; with their absence goes the outback’s colonial past and construction, so that the landscape of wolf creek is not only threatening and lawless, but outside history and realism. it is the outback as an alienating and abstracted space, the sum total of related fears toward empty space, isolation and silence. it is the desert of nightmares and horror stories, real and imagined.                                                               48 john scott and dean biron, ‘wolf creek, rurality and the australian gothic’, continuum, 24:2, (2010), p. 319 49 scott and biron, 2010, 317 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   157  similarly wake in fright establishes the outback as an opposite to sydney. for the protagonist john grant and for the film’s audience sydney is represented as a place of cool colours and relief from the heat. grant’s girlfriend lives in sydney; sydney is the site of comforting human contact as opposed to the human contact of bundanyabba, which is either depraved or violent. in kenneth cook’s original novel, the outback is represented as the absence of a specific landscape feature. it is described through heat, silence and emptiness, rather than through any concrete element; ‘farther out in the heat was the silent centre of australia, the dead heart’50. director ted kotcheff adapts this sense of abstraction well to the screen, emphasising the emptiness of the space, the inescapable heat, the constant sheen of sweat glistening on every actor’s body and ubiquitous dust and flies hanging in the air. kotcheff’s insistence on hot colours at all times in the mise en scene is overwhelming for the film’s audience51; the only relief is grant’s fantasy of lying on a beach, drinking beer and seducing his girlfriend, dripping wet from the ocean. sydney, a city and hence a space of order, is portrayed as the unattainable goal for grant. it is the destination of escape from the outback and from barbarism; it is the antithesis to the drunken, violent and secular society of the ‘yabba, a town ‘so isolated there’s nowhere to go’. of the film’s opening shot, a 360 degree pan of an empty expanse of golden outback, kotcheff comments that it is an empty space that ‘doesn’t liberate you, but is claustrophobic and traps you’52. he observes that a certain kind of person is ‘attracted to these empty spaces and being imprisoned by them’53. if mick taylor represents the life ending qualities of the landscape in wolf creek, the drunken hyper-masculine models of wake in fright represent its maddening effect. in wake in fright, grant is trapped by the sheer enormity of the space, and by the aggressively reinforced social order. in place of conrad’s kurtz, wake in fright has doc tydon. an educated man and an alcoholic, tydon is content to live out his years in the vastness of the outback where his penchants for depravity, sexual assault and addiction remain unchecked. he is the truest appropriation of kurtz. because ‘all europe contributed to the making of kurtz’54 we are to understand that kurtz is the european everyman, educated and sophisticated, a man of society. tydon too, is sophisticated. a doctor by profession he wears a suit jacket and listens to opera, discussing contemporary philosophy while the other men fight. but, like kurtz, he departs from society, choosing to exist in comparative isolation. he chooses a sordid existence but as he informs grant, at least he knows who he is. viewed through the frame of fiction, landscape can be read as a text fulfilling a role in fiction as a constructed space, embodying narrative concerns. in heart of darkness it is the prehistoric and pre-civilised jungle, the antithesis to europe. in wolf creek and wake in fright the outback is a violent and chaotic space, defined predominantly                                                               50 kenneth cook, wake in fright (ringwood: penguin books, 1980) p.6 51 ‘interview with director ted kotcheff’, wake in fright. dvd. madman. 2009 52 ‘audio commentary with director ted kotcheff and editor anthony buckley’, wake in fright. dvd. madman. 2009 53 ted kotcheff in not quite hollywood: the wild, untold story of ozploitation!. dir. mark huntley. city films worldwide. 2008 54 conrad, 2006, 49 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   158  through its opposition to the coast and the comforts available there, not the least of which is civilisation and order. outside of fiction, landscape performs an identical function in the regulation and demarcation of spaces of order from spaces of chaos, when in reality, both order and chaos are abstractions, constructs. the separation between these two types of space is a human drawn line in the dirt, a pattern in the dust; landscape is a cultural fiction produced and substituted in place of ‘the real’. what makes the outback vital to history and to culture is not its construction as the space of the ‘other’, but the necessity for this space, fulfilling a narrative function in the colonial ‘fiction’. the construction of the outback space was necessary for colonial australia to establish the boundary between the subdued wilderness and the frightful unknown, the ‘hideous blank’. solace could be taken in the sight of the blank map; the emptiness it depicts helps to emphasise the comparative success of colonisation and the comfort of the familiar. ‘otherness’ is banished to the far corners of the map, or the most isolated interiors. in fictions both textual and symbolic, that is to say, in ‘stories’ as well as ‘real life’, the australian desert exists as the space of ‘otherness’. the ‘outback’ is the hyperreal label that has replaced the denoted physical tract of land in central australia. it is an invented space against which the progress of coastal australia is measured. bibliography achebe, chinua, ‘an image of africa: racism in conrad’s heart of darkness’ in heart of darkness, ed. by paul a. armstrong, a norton critical edition, 4th edn., pp. 336-349 ‘audio commentary with director ted kotcheff and editor anthony buckley’, wake in fright. dvd. madman. 2009 ‘audio commentary with greg mclean, matt hearn, cassandra magrath and kestie morassi’, wolf creek. dvd. roadshow entertainment. 2006 baker, richard, ‘land is life: a cultural geography of australian contact history’ in australian cultural geographies, ed. by elaine stratford (melbourne: oxford university press, 1999) pp. 25-47 barcan, ruth and ian buchanan, ed., imagining australian space: cultural studies and spatial inquiry (nedlands: university of western australia press, 1999) barthes, roland, mythologies, ed. and trans. by annette lavers (new york: hill and wang, 1972) barthes, roland, ‘the photographic message’, ‘rhetoric of the image’, in image music text, ed. and trans. by stephen heath (london: fontana press, 1977) pp. 15-31, pp. 32-51 barthes, roland, s/z, trans. by farrar, straus and girouz, inc. 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(london and new york: routledge, 1990) gibson, ross, ‘formative landscapes’ in back of beyond: discovering australian film and television, ed. by scott murray (nth sydney: australian film commission, 1988) pp. 20-33 gibson, ross, seven versions of an australian badland (st lucia: university of queensland press, 2002) gill, nicholas, ‘the ambiguities of wilderness’ in australian cultural geographies, ed. by stratford, pp. 48-68 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   160  gill, nicholas, ‘life and death in australian ‘heartlands’: pastoralism, ecology and rethinking the outback’, journal of rural studies, 21, (2005), pp. 39-53 gillon, adam, the eternal solitary: a study of joseph conrad, 2nd edn. 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(clinton: the colonial press inc, 1958) kristeva, julia, powers of horror: an essay on abjection, trans. by leon s roudiez (new york: columbia university press, 1982) lipka, jennifer, "'the horror! the horror!”: joseph conrad's heart of darkness as a gothic novel’, conradiana, 40.1, (2008), p.25 mcgrath, ann, ‘travels to a distant past: the mythology of the outback’, australian cultural history no. 10, (1991), pp. 113-124 ‘meet mick taylor: an interview with john jarratt’, wolf creek. dvd. roadshow entertainment. 2006 morgan, james, ‘harlequin in hell: marlow and the russian sailor in conrad's heart of darkness’, conradiana, 33.1, (2001), p.40 not quite hollywood: the wild, untold story of ozploitation!. dir. mark huntley. city films worldwide. 2008 parker, derek, outback: the discovery of australia’s interior (gloucestershire: sutton publishing ltd, 2007) parry, benita, conrad and imperialism: ideological boundaries and visionary frontiers (london: macmillan press ltd, 1983) picnic at hanging rock. dir. peter weir. shock. 1975 ‘red centre, northern territory’, tourism australia, <www.australia.com> [accessed 4 october, 2010] reynolds, henry, the other side of the frontier: aboriginal resistance to the european invasion of australia (ringwood: penguin books australia ltd, 1988) robin, libby, how a continent created a nation (sydney: university of new south wales press ltd, 2007) said, edward w., ‘invention, memory, and place’, critical inquiry, vol. 26, no. 2 (winter, 2000) pp. 175-192 schama, simon, landscape and memory (london: harpercollins publishers, 1995) coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   161  scott, john and dean biron, ‘wolf creek, rurality and the australian gothic’, continuum, 24:2, (2010), pp. 307-322 sparrow, jeff, killing: misadventures in violence (melbourne: university of melbourne press, 2009) stewart, garrett. ‘lying as dying in heart of darkness’, pmla vol 95, no. 3, (may, 1980) pp. 319331 stratton, jon, ‘dying to come to australia: asylum seekers, tourists and death’ in imagined australia: receptions around the reciprocal construction of identity between australia and europe, ed. by renata summo-o’connell (bern: international academic publishers, 2009) pp. 57 -58 tumarkin, maria. traumascapes: the power and fate of places transformed by tragedy (melbourne: melbourne university press: 2005) turcotte, gerry, ‘australian gothic’ in the handbook to gothic literature, ed. by marie mulvey roberts (london: macmillan, 1998) pp. 10-19 wake in fright. dir. ted kotcheff. united artists. 1971 wolf creek. dir. greg mclean. roadshow films. 2005 tom drahos is a phd candidate in creative writing at flinders university, south australia. his research interests include the performance theory of antonin artaud, the analytical strategies of slavoj žižek and the work of slovenian entity laibach. (flinders university, australia. email: tom.drahos@flinders.edu.au) microsoft word janieconwayherron12.doc coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     118  in your dreams: travelling the road to mandalay i janie conway herron copyright©2013 janie conway herron. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: since 2007, i have been travelling regularly to the thai /burma border to run creative writing workshops with burmese women refugees. the stories that eventuate from the workshops are published and distributed internationally. i have never been inside burma so my knowledge of the country has come to me via other peoples’ stories. recent changes that have taken place in burma give glimpses of hope for a democratic future and yet i remain on the edges of this country i feel i know intimately. in his memoir from the land of green ghosts (2004) pascal khoo thwe writes about the layers of distinctly different cultures that make up the country of burma. after attending university in mandalay pascal was forced to flee after the arrest of his activist girlfriend. he joined the guerilla forces on the border and then through a chance encounter with academic, john casey, finally made his way across the border into thailand then on to england. this extraordinary story is more common than many people realize. when one considers the more than half a million refugees who have fled across the burmese borders into neighboring thailand over the last decade it is easy to see the tremendous ramifications that the political situation has had on the people of burma. this paper is a meditation on the burma of my imagination and the many permutations of country, culture and landscape that i have come to know through the people of burma and their relationship to the lands of their birth. as a facilitator of other people’s stories i reflect on the ways in which the personal stories of lives lived inside burma and on the borders of the country as refugees have helped me understand the situation there. the paper also explores the way narrative and advocacy, storytelling and capacity building have played a part in the democratic changes that are now taking place after more than sixty years of civil war inside burma. keywords: imagining burma, freedom and democracy, landscapes of exile                                                          i this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacedness-images.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     119  in your dreams, the words slip out between the straight iron bars and over the barb-wired prison walls. passing machine-gunned sentinels in lofty turrets, they tumble into narrow streets and gather in town squares. ‘listen, listen!’ the words say to anyone with half an ear for freedom ‘look, look’ they cry, pointing at the prison wall, that towers before them. ‘there are innocents in there, guilty of nothing but dreams of peace and hope and harmony’. but life in a crowded cell with nothing but the cloying closeness of cell mates and the stench of bucket toilets requires more than dreams. so you conjure whispered words into the late-night pinpricking of plastic bags, while you plan a stealthy exchange, with visitors and family who bring food, laughter, comfort and news of an outside world. as you clutch your pinpricked words and the rustling plastic bag in the sweaty palms of your deception, a profusion of goodbyes hides the rushing of your heart’s blood. then the words pass unwary guards. a smile, a nod, a clicking of stiff, leathered heels and they are on the streets. running down laneways, past brightly lit market stalls brimming with exotic fruit and salty fish, and beggar children with pining eyes. past the tea shop on the corner, and the secret garden of delights, where the scent of steel flowers from prison sways under a wretched darkening moon there, under a harsh neon light, ink turns pinpricked plastic coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     120  into words on a naked page. and suddenly you are free. like the stars that sparkle in a moonless sky. like the dawn that wakes the fighting peacock. like the sleeping citizens of the world as they greet the coming of a brand new day. (conway herron, 2012). the poem above, titled ‘in your dreams’, is inspired by a story i heard while working on the thai/burma border with burmese refugees. it concerns a group of women who submitted a collection of poems, ‘scent of steel flowers from prison’ to an anthology of short stories and poems by burmese women titled, burma women’s voices together (2003). a small caption explains this as a collection of poems by women political prisoners, with ‘special thanks and appreciation … to the authors and those who helped smuggle their works from prison’ (2003, p.69). i first heard about these women in 2007 when i travelled to the thai/ burma border to run creative writing workshops for ngo, altsean burma who also published the anthology that featured the poems. when will be the day of freedom? hey listen new century, century anew repeating changing eras though the evil system stays smoke of wars stretched out century long machinery of our country will be reversed in full fuelled by proclamations written with the hearts blood in the darkness of prison (scent of steel flowers from prison, 2003, p. 65) the women in prison that featured in the ‘scent of steel flowers’ collection having had all their writing implements taken away were so determined to express their feelings about what had happened to them and get their poems out into the world that they worked out a plan. families and friends visiting the women would bring in plastic bags with food in it. the women would keep the plastic bags and then at night, in their prison cells, they’d ‘prick holes’ into the bags making the letters of the words of the poems. the families and friends visiting would then exchange old bags for new ones full of food and smuggle the poems past the unsuspecting prison guards. at home families and friends would spread the plastic bags out on cloth and use ink to transfer the words. then they smuggled the poems over the border into thailand where they were published in the burma women’s voices coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     121  anthology. this smuggling of words and the ingenuity behind it provides a powerful trope for any writer. in september 2012, i was invited to read some poems, at an event called ‘wear the wild words’ combining the work of costumier denise n rall and three other local poets besides myself; stefanie petrik, virginia barratt and moya costello. the organisers asked me if i would like to focus my performance on the work i had been doing on the thai/burma border. i decided to read from the collection of poems by the women in prison and write my own poem, inspired by the story i had heard. one of the concepts behind the event was that the poets would wear clothing designed by denise when they performed and so i worked in collaboration with denise on the content of the costume, sorting through some of the materials worn by the ethnic peoples i had been working with that i had collected on my travels – traditional weaving from the karen, karenni, the shan, the mon and other ethnic groups. denise then designed a jacket made from these materials. on the night we explained to the audience how the jacket had come together. few of the people gathered there would have known about the make up of the various ethnic groups on the thai/burma border but for me the symbolism of wearing the jacket was profound, honouring the women i had worked with as well as helping tell the story of their ongoing struggle for democracy. when i sat down to write the poem ‘in your dreams’ i was surprised at how easily the poem flowed out of me. but poems are like that and this story had been part of my consciousness for a long time. the surprise was not at the ease of writing but in how much i could see the landscape and how firmly the terrain of burma was fixed in my imagination. often people mistake my trips to the border as actually travelling to burma and being in that place the refugees describe as ‘the inside’ as if the country of burma is a prison in itself– and it is for many. recent changes that have taken place in burma give glimpses of hope for a democratic future and yet i prefer to remain on the edges of this country i feel i know intimately. what i say to people who ask me if i’ve been to burma is; no i’ve never been inside burma because i don’t want to support the military regime. but i have been there in my own dreams; not in physical actuality but via the many stories i have heard and read over the time between 2007 and the present and from my experience of being in towns like mae sot, so close to the border that it feels like the country is the same, and so filled with burmese refugees that people actually call it ‘little burma’. i have always thought that orwell’s time in burma marks a key turning point in his life. it was those years when he was transformed from a snobbish public-school boy to a writer of social conscience who sought out the underdogs of society. as a policeman in burma, orwell saw the underbelly of the empire; not the triumphant bugles or bejeweled maharajas, but the drunken sahibs pickled by heat in mildewed clubs, the scarred and screaming burmese in the prison cells. he witnessed first hand the devastating effects of repressive governance and it troubled him deeply. (larkin, e., 2009, p.vi) since independence in 1948 and then the beginning of a brutal civil war in 1962 the people of burma have been struggling for the right to democratic freedoms we in the west take for granted. for anyone encountering the story of burma it’s difficult to ignore the brutal coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     122  history and not to come face-to-face with the dilemma that emma larkin describes waiting for orwell in his encounter with burma in the early twentieth century. through the workshops i have been running i have gained intimate knowledge of the different cultures and the political situation through the women’s stories. but my knowledge of the country, its peoples and its terrain, have come to me second hand through stories from the women i work with and from texts written by other writers that i have read. in exploring the burma of my imagination i also tell the stories of the burmese people for whom these stories are personal negotiations with a country they love and know far more intimately than i but one where that love brings them into a vexed relationship with the country itself. mandalay is one of the few place names in burma that has not been changed by the burmese military government. in 1989 the regime renamed streets, towns and cities across burma. maynmyo the old british hill station that orwell visited became pyin-oo-lwin, and fraser street in rangoon became anawwrahta lan in yangon. most of the old names were anglicized burmese names that had been used by the british colonial government, and the regime claimed that the changes were a long-overdue move to discard these colonial tags. but there was a deeper rooted motive, the generals were rewriting history. (larkin e., 2004, p.11) the 2008 uprising where students launched a national demonstration they called shiq laylone or four eights was an auspicious date and time for buddhists of eight minutes past eight in the morning on the eighth day of the eighth month of the year. after these demonstrations and the massive crackdown that ensued following the spread of unrest across the nation, the junta decided to change the name of burma to myanmar in a bid to seize control of the spaces where people lived. as emma larkin writes: ‘when a place is renamed, the old name disappears from maps and, eventually, from human memory. if that is possible then perhaps the memories of past events can be erased’ (2004, p.11). i use the name burma rather than myanmar in order to refuse the legitimacy of the renaming of the country and to acknowledge the long history of the fight for democracy by the peoples of that country. i am a 20-year-old shan woman and a citizen of burma. i love my country, my people and my religion. however, now i am staying in another country that has a different culture. … i wish i could say i’m proud of my nation, but people inside burma face many difficulties in their lives as ruling generals … ignore the hardships that people are facing. living in other countries people are sometimes treated badly and discriminated against because they are from burma. therefore, while i am in exile, i avoid telling others that i am originally from burma. (laminlay, 2010, p.29) the workshops i run are held in a number of townships that figure significantly in the ongoing struggle of the ethnic groups of burma to gain recognition for the inequities of their treatment under the auspices of the military junta. mae sot, chiang mai, mae hong coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     123  son and sangkhlaburi are all towns along the border between burma and thailand. individually the groups that make up the people of the border, have a history of their own, like the shan who were a separate kingdom, now called shan state situated on the northern border with thailand but also bordering laos and china. the quote above comes from laminlay in a story from burma women’s voices for peace. she identifies firstly as a shan woman and then as person living in burma. ‘in may 1886 the shan states were declared part of british india’ (elliott 2006, p.39) along with others such as kachin, karen and mon states when the british declared burma a province of india. in 1947 aung san suu kyi’s father, aung san, seen by many as the architect of burmese independence, managed to broker an agreement called the panglong agreement between the ethnic minority groups that enabled the foundation of a unified burma. then his assassination and the subsequent declaration of independence in 1948 marked the beginnings of a long-running civil war with devastating consequences that have continued to resonate into the present day. when i first visited the thai/burma border i knew very little about the political situation or the configuration of different ethnic groups that go to make up burma. over the years since then i have come to understand much more and the history of burma and the people in it has come to mean a great deal to me. the women who attend the creative writing workshops have often been part of organisations on the border and have spent much time gathering statistics on human rights abuses but have trouble describing their personal experiences in a visceral sense. as a shan woman recently said to me: ‘ah the stories you hear are all the same – the soldiers came to my village and burnt it down, i fled with my family into the mountains, we only had rice and bamboo shoots to eat, i made it to the border and now i long to go back but i can’t.’ i was shocked at her seeming indifference, but then she started to tell her own story and i understood that this was just to give herself the courage to tell it. she grew up in a shan village that the burmese military came to regularly looking for guerrilla forces meant to be hiding there amongst the villagers. while they were there the military would abduct young fit people to be human porters forcing them to carry heavy supplies through the jungle and walk ahead so that they’d be the first to tread on the landmines that proliferate around the villages. if the guerrilla forces were there, there would be heavy fighting with bullets flying through the thin walls of the village huts and as children she and her siblings would have to hide under the beds for fear of being shot. ‘they found a man next door who was hiding from the military, they shot him in front of us’, she said matter-of-factly, ‘then they raised our village to the ground. that’s when we had to leave. i spent a year in the refugee camp near mae hong son. now i am here.’ at the time of hearing this story i had just returned to bangkok from mae hong son having run a workshop there a week earlier. it’s a short plane trip straight up the side of the mountains that circle chiang mai and the border to burma. if you drive from chiang mai to mae hong son by car it takes seven hours due to the steep winding roads that take you up the hill to the summit of the mountain range and tablelands beyond where mae hong son is tucked away. to walk from burma on the other side to the refugee camp near there would entail a climb of similar proportions. to get to the workshops i would be driven on the back of a truck from the township of mae hong son to the village where the workshops took place. this village has been built by refugees close to where the refugee camp is. it’s the closest i have been to an actual burmese village. the villagers proudly took me round coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     124  the small group of thatched roofed houses set high on wooden stilts with wide shady verandas around them and chickens running wild underneath. my workshops were run in a large open walled area with a cement floor and thatched walls and roof. but there was electricity, a computer and a large screen i could run a power point presentation on. the students who came in to the workshop from the refugee camp walked for an hour there and back each day. the car that i drove in with some of the participants from mae hong son is a luxury few can afford making walking an essential aspect of survival there. as we drove along the winding dirt road through the forest each morning we would pass other trucks going to and from villages scattered round the area taking itinerant workers to various places where they could earn just enough money to keep their families. many of the workers are stateless people, refugees without permits hiding amongst the thousands that have fled across the border that stretches along the northern and eastern borders of burma to the far reaches of the irrawaddy delta. over 3000 villages have been destroyed or forcibly abandoned in the past decade an average of almost one a day. over half a million people have been compelled to leave their homes and become internally displaced persons (idps), living homeless in forests, temporary settlements, or government-controlled relocation sites after attacks by the military. lacking anything but the most minimal humanitarian aid, denied the stability of a home and livelihood (not to mention essential services like medical facilities and education), they are never at peace. a million more people live as refugees and undocumented migrants in neighboring countries. (witness, 2012, online) in his memoir from the land of green ghosts (2004) pascal khoo thwe writes about the layers of distinctly different cultures that make up the country of burma. pascal is paduang, one of the clans from the border of shan and karrenni states. his memoir starts with his grandmother mu tha, telling a paduang creation story while her ‘brass neck rings gleam in the candlelight’ (2004, p.7). but mu tha is also catholic. her religious duality stems from the early 20th century when italian missionary priests brought the alphabet to a largely oral culture. as koo thwe writes: ‘there are at least ten major ethnic groups and a hundred sub-tribes’ (2004, p.11) living alongside indians, europeans, chinese and other groups in burma. burmese is the official language and english is spoken by an educated few, while the many ethnic groups speak numerous other languages situated along the borders to thailand, india and china. the main religion practiced in burma is buddhism, but hinduism and islam also have many followers, as well as christianity; while a strong sense of pre buddhist animism continues as an undercurrent to daily life. khoo thwe writes about his life as young child growing up in a remote area of a shan state then becoming a student in rangoon in 1988 and having to flee back home and then on to the thai/burma border after the arrest of his girlfriend who was raped and beaten by the military and then disappeared after taking part in the 1988 uprisings. from here he eventually made it to the uk to study at cambridge. his early innocence and then politicization and the poignancy of what happened is made startlingly apparent when he writes: for me using words like ‘boycott’, ‘strike’, ‘demonstration’, ‘human coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     125  rights’, ‘democracy’, ‘student union’, and the like was like learning a new language – or perhaps like learning a long forgotten one. it was astounding and unthinkable, that the students were actually going to defy authorities. (2004, p.157) after realizing he has to flee he makes the long trek from his village to the border with the military following closely behind, ending up in a karenni camp that was an eight hour walk to mae hong son where he would regularly go for supplies. it’s at the house of a friend in mae hong son that he finally makes contact with academic, doctor john casey, who helps him get to the uk. on the day of his leaving he says goodbye to the friends he has made on the border and walks back from the camp to mae hong son: … i could see the lights of maehongson i glanced back: the jungle and the mountains had disappeared completely under the blanket of darkness topped with a blue-black sky strewn with stars. my imagination was running wild, and i felt myself suspended as in a trance between a grim past and a future that had no features i could discern. (2004, p.257) in restless souls, australian journalist phil thornton writes about the town of mae sot, dedicating his book, to the karen people. mae sot is three miles from the moei river that separates karen state burma from thailand. its geographic location makes it a central contact point for karen activities with their freedom fighters hidden in the surrounding hills, making the town ‘unofficial headquarters for burmese opposition groups and activists’ (thornton, 2006, p.3). these refugee camps are set up by the karen leaders to keep in place a government apparatus and to maintain a strong sense of community in order to ‘look after the needs of women, youth, health, agriculture, law and order, defence, religion and education, and have working structures to defend and maintain the morale and welfare of their people. most importantly, they give their people hope’ (2006, p.3). this kind of political/ geographical arrangement is repeated in many towns along the thai/ burma border and again along burma’s other borders with china, india, bangladesh and laos (see conway herron, 2007b). in spite of the obvious poverty in mae sot there is something magic in the way the muslim call to prayer in the morning and evening rings out over the town while saffron-robed monks walk streets teaming with motorbikes stacked with families and tuk-tuks filled with passengers wend their way around each other. in the evenings after the workshops i often walk through the markets to the town, stopping at the stalls while young children follow pleading for money. not far from the town of mae sot is dr cynthia maung’s hospital; a famous clinic that people trek to from burma risking their lives to cross the border because there are no decent health services where they live. the staff in the hospital deal daily with landmine victims, starvation, malaria, dengue fever and the myriad repercussions of the burma situation. in 2010 i arrived in mae sot just as the elections were being called and just before aung san suu kyi was freed. there had been trouble over the border from mae sot between the burmese military and ethnic border groups and more than thirty thousand refugees had fled coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     126  into mae sot within a couple of days. late in the evening, after the first day of workshops, we rode down to the border to see where the refugees were being housed. i stood up on the back of the motorbike as we drove past the oval and peered over the high white-plastered walls topped with barbed wire that separated those of us on the highway game enough to risk police checks, from the refugees camped on the other side. flickering campfires and the shadows of those who had fled with whatever they could grab before crossing the bridge just a few metres away from us was all i could see beside the uniformed figures of the thai police. “we’d better turn round we’re almost at the border and one bomb has already exploded on the thai side this afternoon”, my companion warned and we sped back down the highway to the safety of our motel rooms and television newscasts (see conwayherron, 2010, online). it was one of the hottest days in january though it was still winter time. under the hot shining sun a group of people were travelling full of energy and joy. they were heading to participate in the 60th anniversary of the karen revolutionary day and i was travelling with them. we left mae sot in thailand. along the way there were green trees on each side of the road and they made me feel calm and excited at the same time. (zin lin, 2010, p.33) the quote above is from a story, ‘my motherland and me’ in burma women’s voices for peace by kay zin lin. she was born before the 1988 uprising or (“8888”) as she writes it. the feeling of joy she has in attending the anniversary of karen revolutionary day, starts her thinking about the past and the difficulty she has had in getting a quality education in a country where ‘the universities are often closed by the junta’ (2010, p.34). kay zin lin did not have to flee burma but decided to go with a friend of hers whose family had to flee after being sought by the military. she wanted to ‘find a job or an opportunity to keep studying’ (2010, p.35). she found out a lot more about the democracy movement in burma and the situation for refugees and migrant workers after leaving burma. in spite of feeling as if the plight of the people of burma in neighbouring countries is beyond words, at the end of her story she writes: i started writing poems, short novels and articles reflecting the lives of refugees. although i am away from my hometown, i am happy that i can help my people that escaped to neighbouring countries for different reasons. even though my help is only a small part compared to the democracy movement i am glad that i can work for my own people who are in need. (zin lin, 2010, p.36) in 2010 while on the thai/burma border i watched aung san suu kyi addressing the crowds that flocked to see her at the gate of her villa in the city of rangoon where she had been under house arrest for fifteen of the last 21 years. ‘if we work in unity, we will achieve our goal. we have a lot of things to do’ she told the people that crowded around her (ctv 2010: online). with a conservative estimate of more than 2,000 political activists still in prison and a growing refugee population worldwide at the time of her speech, this was an understatement. since the elections aung san suu kyi and members of her party have won coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     127  a place in the burmese parliament and she has been able to travel overseas for the first time. but, in spite of her travelling to the united states and the uk and the lifting of sanctions there is still a lot that needs to be done before full democracy is restored in burma. recent fighting in kachin state has forced at least 10,000 people to flee their homes and there have been problems in arakan state where conflict between the rakhine and the rohingya peoples have lead to soldiers, and police in maungdaw township, northern arakan state, ‘to arbitrarily arrest local rohingya for their alleged involvement in the june riots’ (burma bulletin, 2012, pp.4-5). while the military still dominate the parliament resolution to these and other conflicts inside burma will be slow to come to resolution. still the hope that lies in the freeing of aung san suu kyi, giving her an opportunity to call for compliance with the rule of law and respect for international standards of human rights in burma, keeps the military in check in many regards. when i think of aung san suu kyi i also i think of the women i have met, on the border and the amazing mix of gentleness and strength combined with extraordinary courage they all have. this reminds of the passage at the beginning of daniel mason’s novel, the piano tuner, (2004): in the fleeting seconds of final memory the images that will become burma are the sun and a woman’s parasol … the sun which rose in burma was different to the sun that rose in the rest of the world. he only needed to look at the sky to know this. … now this sun hangs above a dry road. beneath it a lone woman walks under a parasol, her thin cotton dress trembling in the breeze, her bare feet carrying her away towards the edge of perception. … the woman walks into a mirage, into a ghost reflection of light and water the burmese call than hlat. around her the air waivers, splitting her body, separating, spinning. and then she too disappears. now only the sun and the parasol remain. (mason, 2004, pp.1-2) there was so much hope in aung san suu kyi’s speech and this hope is one of the core factors to burmese resilience. the women on the border are part of a large network of refugees who are being trained for leadership roles through ngos such as altsean burma; groups such as the karen women’s organisation (kwo), shan women’s action network (swan) and overseas support groups such as burma campaign uk and burma campaign australia. these organisations are actively campaigning alongside other prodemocracy movements inside and outside burma. an essential part of their campaign is the connection between narrative and advocacy, the way in which giving voice to the experiences of exile and oppression gives strength and empowerment and brings attention to the issue of true democracy in burma. i returned to the thai/burma border at the end of 2012 and when i told my local federal mp janelle saffin that i was going back again she smiled and asked, “have you thought of going inside burma?” janelle and i have discussed the situation in burma a lot and she is well versed in what happens there having spent a long time working on the border herself. it was from her that i first gleaned a glimmer of the changes that have happened since 2010 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     128  and the freeing of aung san suu kyi. “do you think i should? i replied and she nodded. i thought of my students and the words of yue ka lit when she writes in the conclusion of her story: i was born in burma, which is full of natural beauty, has a wealth of precious jewels, and diverse and beautiful ethnic groups. i believe that people from burma would remain in their beautiful country if they could. if the government changed and forced labour, intimidation, ands economic crisis no longer existed, how beautiful would it be in our motherland? (ka lit, 2007, p. 20) talks continue between the burmese regime and thai authorities about the repatriation of burmese refugees along the border with the announcement that perhaps upwards of 120,000 refugees might be returned within the year. but the general consensus is that, due to ongoing instability in the ethnic areas in burma and a lack of safeguards in place for returning refugees, this is not wise. i wonder how the women i know on the border are feeling. do they feel safe enough to return? perhaps some of them already have. perhaps i will get to burma and travel the road to mandalay in the near future but, in the meantime, i am content with the burma of my imagination brought to me by the wealth of stories available to me from those women on the border still waiting to make the journey across the border and into their beloved motherland. postscript the beginning of 2013, like any new year, brings an element of hope for what the future may bring. having returned to the thai/burma border running workshops in chiang mai and also my beloved mae sot i have met a new bunch of students as well as some old friends from previous years. the feeling amongst them is cautious optimism. many of them would love to go back home but they are unable to trust what might be in store for them there. the thai government seems determined to send refugees back while western business people and tourists are queuing up to make the most of the new ‘openness’ in the country. this ambivalence about the future is well warranted and epitomized to me by the following story i heard while there. when aung san suu kyi was scheduled to visit thailand people were told she was going to visit doctor cynthia maung’s hospital, the mae tao clinic. hundreds of refugees gathered there to meet her, some of them walking more than three days to mae sot to see her. doctor maung has won numerous human rights awards, for the work at the hospital and she is recognised internationally yet the visit to the hospital by was deemed too political by the thai authorities at the last minute and all those people were left waiting without even catching a glimpse of her. while i was on the border debbie asked me if i wanted to run the writing workshops inside burma next time. my heart lurched with pleasure and anxiety at the thought of it. but yes that would be one excellent way of being inside and supporting the movement towards democracy in burma as well as realizing my dream of riding the road to mandalay. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     129  tomorrow sharpness of a needle a pinprick of sacrifice cruelty of the oppressor unable to dull the sparkling stars confronted with wisdom and awareness the rocky monolith will quake gather strength end the mourning days of ceased longing day of celebration, day of remembrance on this golden day the sound of the young peacock’sii greeting will resound in the sky my friend … listen for it (scent of steel flowers from prison, 2003, p. 67). references altsean burma, 2012, burma bulletin, issue 69, september 2012, http://www.altsean.org/docs/pdf%20format/burma%20bulletin/september%2020 12%20burma%20bulletin.pdf (accessed october 30, 2012) ctv television 2010, ‘burma's military junta releases aung san suu kyi’ ctv news 13 novembers, at http://www.ctv.ca/ctvnews/world/20101113/burma-kyi-release-101113 (accessed april 30 2011). conway herron, j., 2012, ‘in your dreams’ performed at wear the wild words, gollan hotel, september 21, 2012. conway-herron, j., 2011, 'freedom to lead: narrative and advocacy among burmese women refugees on the thai/burma border', text, vol. 12, special issue, pp1-13. conway-herron, j., 2007a, 'the importance of thanaka: narrative and human rights in burma', in j webb & j williams (eds), and is papers: proceedings of the 12th conference of the aawp, canberra, act, pp. 0-14. conway-herron, j., 2007b ‘narrative and advocacy: burma’s identity through its women’s voices’ australian folklore 22, pp.57-72. elliott p.w., 2006, the white umbrella: a woman’s struggle for freedom in burma, friends books, bangkok. laminlay, 2010, ‘forced to choose’ burma woman’s voices for peace, thanaka team                                                          ii the fighting peacock is a symbol used by the democracy movement  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     130  (eds) altsean burma, bangkok, pp. 29-32. larkin e., 2009, ‘introduction’ orwell, g., burmese days penguin classics, london. larkin e., 2004, secret histories: finding george orwell in a burmese teashop, john murray, great britain. mason d., 2004, the piano tuner, picador, london, basingstoke and oxford. khoo thwe, p., 2004 from the land of green ghosts: a burmese odyssey, harper perennial, hammersmith london. rall, denise n. (2011), ‘imagining burma’, lismore, nsw. artwork held in the private collection of janie conway herron. scent of steel flowers from prison, 2003, burma women’s voices together, thanaka team (eds) altsean burma, bangkok, pp. 65 and 67. thornton, p., 2006, restless souls, asia books, bangkok. witness, 2012, http://witness.org/campaigns/case-studies/idps-burma, (accessed october 26 2012). zin lin k., 2010, ‘my motherland and me’ burma woman’s voices for peace, thanaka team (eds) altsean burma, bangkok, pp 33-36. janie conway herron is a senior lecturer in creative writing at southern cross university, lismore where she has taught creative writing since 1997. she is passionate about human rights and travels regularly to the thai/burma border to run creative writing workshops with burmese women refugees. she has been published in a number of journals and anthologies and has been editor of three collections of work from creative writing students. her novel, beneath the grace of clouds, was published in july 2010. (school of arts and social sciences, southern cross university, australia. email: janie.conway@scu.edu.au) microsoft word final adrian caesar coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 bruce bennett – colleague and scholar adrian caesar bruce was a good man and a good friend. i had the pleasure and privilege of working with him for many years at the unsw campus at the australian defence force academy. that experience together with my reading of his scholarly work forms the basis of this short essay about bruce as colleague and scholar. i’d like to begin with an anecdote. soon after bruce arrived to take up the chair at unsw@adfa, i was involved in a grand final soccer match. there wasn’t much grand about it– state league division 4, i think. anyway, bruce came to watch and after he’d seen us beaten, he was on the touch line with claire, my wife, and our kids, ellen and damian. in my clumsy way, no doubt wanting to alert the children to be on their best behaviour, i introduced bruce to them as ‘my boss from work’. bruce immediately riposted, ‘not his boss, his colleague.’ the firmness with which this was said is the measure of the man and forms a neat introduction to his leadership style. bruce wasn’t interested in the role of the god-professor, which i’ve no doubt he felt was out-moded, inappropriate and anti-democratic. rather he wished to lead by example, by discussion and through negotiation. he liked to work co-operatively at every level. team –teaching was encouraged, joint research projects fostered and management decisions the result of extensive consultation and where appropriate, committee work. if not all members of the department were always amenable to this style, it says more about them than it does about bruce. and, it should be said, whatever opposition he encountered, bruce always tried to encourage colleagues in all aspects of their work. he did not harbour grudges or play favourites. in the seventeen years i worked with him, i never heard him raise his voice in anger once. he wasn’t inclined to be combative. he remained a calm and steady presence under the various pressures that were brought to bear upon the department with monotonous regularity from both the military and the university. like my other colleagues, i was the beneficiary of bruce’s help and encouragement. i particularly appreciated the way this was delivered. there was never any question of bruce saying ‘i think you should’, or ‘you must’ or even ‘i think it would be advisable’. rather he would listen to what you were planning and then offer helpful advice and/or encouragement. when i decided to shift the focus of my writing from the strictly academic to a more experimental genre, there was no attempt to persuade me otherwise. similarly, when i was disinclined to take over the headship of the department, though i copyright © adrian caesar 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 think my decision disappointed him, bruce did not put me under pressure to change my mind. for this, and much more i’m very grateful. but i want to spend the rest of the time available to me in saying something about bruce’s written scholarly work, which i think shares many of the virtues he displayed as a leader and colleague. re-reading the thirty-eight essays, in his two collections, an australian compass and homing in, thinking again of his books about peter porter and the australian short story, contemplating his contributions to the penguin literary history of australia and the oxford literary history of australia, reading for the first time his latest book, the spying game: an australian angle, i’m struck not only by the remarkable unity of purpose driving the work but also by its very distinctive (and distinguished) manner. the tone of bruce’s work is contemplative; he isn’t interested in tendentious polemic or assertive argument. his is the art of meditation leading towards gentle persuasion. there is nothing loud or hectoring about his work and nothing remotely self-congratulatory. in my obituary and eulogy for bruce, i remarked that he was in some ways the least critical of literary critics in the sense that he wasn’t interested in easy judgements, literary league tables or wielding literary battle-axes. this does not, however, mean he lacked discernment. i was amused, for instance, in an essay about clive james, by bruce’s comparison of that writer with gore vidal. bruce writes, ‘that he [vidal] is far more politically savvy than clive james is not to james’s detriment: few could match vidal’s political knowledge and insight.’ 1 there are other such telling judgements scattered through the prose, in which the writer in question is both judged and simultaneously forgiven or understood. this is criticism at its kindest. obviously in the short space at my disposal here, i can’t hope to do justice to the massive body of bruce’s work, which includes at least twenty-eight books edited, or sole authored and a further 150 articles essays and reports. but what i would like to do is suggest something of the contours of the work its historical breadth and geographical reach and what i take to be the remarkable unity of theme and purpose that may be discerned in the work. for although bruce wrote about aspects of australian literature from the earliest convict writings to the most contemporary spy novels and extended his interests to writers from singapore, malaysia, indonesia, japan, fiji and india, not to mention various european and north american authors, there is, i think, through all the work a fascination with the personal and political implications of literary representations of place and space. in more than one essay, bruce recalls with nicely poised irony the way as an undergraduate he wrote his honours thesis in the library at the university of western australia, alternating that endeavour with other less academic pursuits: ‘the thesis topic i chose was “images of the city in the poetry of t.s. eliot and baudelaire”. in the mornings, i taught life-saving classes on the swan river and saw the world through sun-glasses across a zinc-creamed nose. in the afternoons and evenings i was able to indulge in dreams of foggy london and paris. in t-shirt and thongs, i identified with baudelaire’s flaneur chasing the phantasms of fallen women through paris’s gas-lit boulevards. i was a mind traveller.’ 2 1 ‘clive james: humour and empire’, homing in, p.83. 2 ‘a west-side story’, homing in, pp.220-1 coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 the recognition of literature’s ability to make mind travellers of us all and to aid in the difficult process of cross-cultural exchange and understanding is central to bruce’s work. that this recognition proceeded from biographical experience seems clear. in the same essay, i’ve just quoted, bruce goes on to record travelling to england for the first time on a rhodes scholarship and the fact that while he was in england he first began to discover the literature of his own country and his own state. much of the rest of his life’s work was engaged in teasing out the full dimensions of this paradox: that while he was at home he wanted to imagine away; and when he was away he was led to imagine home. when he returned from oxford and took up a post at uwa, bruce devoted a considerable amount of time to the study and promotion of western australian writers and writing. he had at this time he says, ‘a strong sense of home in a conventional sense, as house and family, and more broadly as western australia or ‘the west’ 3 but he tellingly notes that he was also interested in ‘imaginative expansion’ which took him away from the familiar: ‘in retrospect,’ he writes, ‘i was looking for unsettling experience as much as a settled sense of identity. i became fascinated with an anticipatory – or almost already experienced – sense of expatriotism and exile; and it is a theme which i still find compelling.’ 4 in his critical biography of peter porter, spirit in exile, we find bruce teasing out the ramifications of porter’s ambivalent attitude to ideas of home and exile and although he doesn’t always agree with porter’s views, there is evidently a strongly empathetic relationship between the poet and his biographer. as many reading this will be aware, bruce widened the scope of his interest from west australian writing to australian literature more generally and from there to the literatures of what he sometimes designates the indo-asia-pacific. in this latter work, bruce adopted the role of a literary diplomat interested at once to introduce australian writing and culture to our neighbours and to further our understanding of their politics and culture through an analysis and appreciation of the new literatures written in english in south east asia, india and the south pacific. it comes as no surprise to learn that after arriving back from his rhodes scholarship in england, bruce was interviewed and accepted for a job in the department of external affairs. 5 though he chose a university career instead, politics and diplomacy remained of great interest to him through out his career and, of course, that interest culminated in his most recent book, the spying game: an australian angle, which he completed in february of this year. in all his work with its expanding focus from regional to national to international literatures, bruce tests the power of literature to provide insights and make connections between people and cultures. though he was aware of critical theory, he was intellectually and temperamentally sceptical towards totalising ideas and grand designs. his prose is clear, concise and elegant, uncluttered by jargon or pretentious neologism. his aim is to communicate with as wide an audience as possible. he is less interested in what literature might mean in theory as to what role it might play, both personally and politically, in practice. 3 ‘home and away: reconciling the local and the global’, homing in, p.137 4 ibid., 5 ibid., p.136 coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 towards the conclusion of one of his richest essays entitled, home and away: reconciling the local and global, bruce refers to benjamin barber’s book, jihad vs mcworld. in his refusal of the binary offered by barber’s title, bruce shows himself to be thoroughly aware of the legacy of deconstruction and in his deployment and advocacy of hybridity he owes a debt to post-colonial theory. but the way in which the argument is couched is all bennett: ‘clearly,’ he writes, ‘there is a need for hybrid versions of these too stark alternatives, including a kind of international regionalism which incorporates the benefits of global communications with those of primary identification with a place, region and community. there should be room in this dynamic too, for an ‘enlightened nationalism’ . . .a little later, he goes on, ‘in this new cultural dynamic which we, in australia as in india and elsewhere, are working out in our different ways, literature may play a substantial but not a dominant role.’ 6 both the subtle navigation between antinomies and the qualification here is typical of bruce’s careful avoidance of grandiose claims; his desire to maintain perspective, his interest in what can be legitimately claimed for literature. there is in such essays and in a great deal of bruce’s writing a refreshing tendency towards the multi-disciplinary. he is interested in the way a study of literature might usefully combine with other disciplines, history, geography, political science to provide new insights. his invocation of david suzuki’s injunction to ‘think globally and act locally’ is not only an example of cross-disciplinary thinking but also an indicator of another original strand that runs through much of bruce’s work: an interest in green politics and ideas. i think here, in particular, of his very fine essay on judith wright entitled: an ecological vision 7 and his inaugural professorial public lecture delivered at unsw@adfa in 1993 when he likened literary critics to the green movement in their desire to conserve the best of the past, while wishing to change the future for the better. bruce’s latest book, the spying game: an australian angle has the same multidisciplinary approach and brings together various of his previous interests. it is, after all, perhaps only a small step from the imaginary flaneur to the imaginary spy. the interest in politics, diplomacy, national and international allegiances are all foregrounded as are tensions between private and public life and problems of selfhood in relation to place and politics. bruce explains the fact that several of his students at adfa were destined for careers in military intelligence also sparked his interest in this subject matter. there was a typically practical dimension to researching the part imaginative literature might have to play in understanding the spying game. the final paragraph of the book is telling and, it seems to me, points us towards the importance of bruce’s work: ‘without detriment to their core mission in the humanities, it seems to me that literary studies can give richness and depth to a range of trans-disciplinary fields that include international relations, terrorism history and cross-cultural studies. the study of literature can build bridges of understanding into foreign territory. hearts and minds tire quickly of propaganda and seek richer imaginative fare. literature can thus properly be enlisted to fight terror with the ‘soft weapons’ of words and ideas.’ 6 ibid. p.144 7 an australian compass, pp. 149-175 coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 bruce’s work, i’d like to suggest, was dedicated to building those bridges of understanding between people and cultures. the number of tributes to bruce i know trish received from all over the world suggests his success in this endeavour on a personal level. in his writing, he has left a rich and lasting legacy. in touching upon matters autobiographical in his essay ‘home and away’, bruce remarks with typical modesty that he is ‘not by any means an extraordinary australian.’ 8 i beg to differ. we might be beguiled by his self-description in the same essay as ‘a local boy who likes to travel’ 9 but we should not, i think, ignore the fact that he was an extraordinary australian who made and will continue to make through his writing an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the literature of australia and the indo-asia-pacific region. adrian caesar until 2004, adrian caesar was associate professor of english at unsw@adfa. more recently, he has had spells teaching creative writing part-time at anu while concentrating on his own writing. he is the author of several books of literary criticism and his non-fiction novel, the white (picador, 1999) won the victorian premier’s award for non-fiction and the a.c.t. book of the year in 2000. his poetry has been published widely in periodicals and anthologies in australia and overseas. he has published four books of poetry, including his latest publication high wire (pandanus press, 2005). 8 ‘home and away’, homing in, p.135 9 ibid. p. 137 coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 2+2=5: a collective inspiration c. moore hardy & cate mccarthy copyright© c. moore hardy & cate mccarthy 2014. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. johnston, p., 1989. my mother earth sand painting from exhibition titled delineation at ivan dougherty gallery, cofa unsw. the following works by c. moore hardy and cate mccarthy document a particular facet of their relationship with dr pam johnston focussing on the time she was a member of the artist collective 2+2=5, a collaboration of artists that began in the 1980s and continues today. pam was a central person in the collective and so these two writers not only celebrate the larger arena of pam’s life as well as her involvement in 2+2=5 but also document the interconnectedness of community to the world of art and the importance of this to pam’s artistic practice as well her personal life. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 dr pam dahl-helm johnston was a maverick (by c. moore hardy) not only was pam dahl-helm johnston an inspiration to me but she was a close friend, collaborator and a prolific artist. we met at the national art school, in 1987, where doing the foundation course in those days meant that older students could get a foot in the door with a portfolio. pam was already accomplished in painting and drawing but was after more skills and knowledge. josie newtown was also at the national art school at this time, along with louanne mitchelmore and deborah young, the first group to form the 2+2=5 art collective. 2+2=5 was instigated and inspired by that group of women, who, having completed art school, recognised the competition, lack of support and myopia of the art market that they were all entering. the decision was made to document our lives, regularly exhibit our works and somehow support each other through life. the intention to document and record was to preserve our voices in a sea of competition. the guerrilla girls, a subversive new york group of women artists who would turn up at important art events wearing gorilla masks, inspired pam. at a time when women, particularly women artists were underrepresented in major galleries and collections, she believed it was important to write ourselves into history and encouraged us to document everything. it was pam’s intention that we document our lives so that those records would remain a testament to our achievements. we were to be the women who celebrated our feminist manifesto. the desire for a consistent, supportive yet critical analysis of our work was the aim; all this when feminism was still a ‘popular’ concept. this utopian dream resulted in a collection of works, numerous exhibitions in a variety of formats, documentation, long conversations and great friendships. pam was the one who again and again ensured we committed to another exhibition to discuss what had happened in our lives and as women and practising artists where we were now. we brought together our accumulated, collected histories ready to be unpacked, examined and discussed for the next phase. apart from being in the group, we examined why we were going to do another show, how that could come about (as we all had different practises now) and how it would work. we began a number of collaborative pieces that we passed around to each other, making marks that attempted to work with one another. we enjoyed some subversive moments along with praise for collaborative exhibitions at the women's gallery in melbourne (1989); the tin sheds gallery at the university of sydney (1990); the sparks gallery at wollongong university (1991); and the dissonance festival at selenium gallery in redfern–(1992). womenhousespace was painted onto numerous buildings around sydney in the late 1980's. sydney college of the arts was fortunate enough to be blessed with one, along with university of technology in ultimo. creative subversion was part of an art’s student guidance in those days. pam always pulled together the texts that supported the 2+2=5 exhibitions. she was our writer and most prolific storyteller. she pulled together our words, works and made the exhibitions events to celebrate our collective passions. her special aunty was ruby langford ginibi, who came along to early exhibitions to see our work. 2+2=5 had a few collaborators in its incarnations, including deborah foletti, rox de luca, cate mccarthy and rita georgiardis. pam was mischievous, driven, highly creative and in possession of great wisdom mixed with vulnerability. around the same time that website names were being sold for millions, pam coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 registered the name sydney biennale at the office of fair trading, when she realised she could. she settled the matter amicably, but she relished the possibility of being able to hijack one of the sydney art world’s sacred organisations. she also spoke of her being persecuted by a ‘black watch’ indigenous group, who had a self-styled evangelic determination to cast doubts on her identity. i have seen the documentation that described on her birth certificate that she was born with the label ‘half-caste’, but, through this group’s actions, pam was ostracised and many galleries refused to show her work although she exhibited for many years with james harvey gallery. harvey was supportive and refused to be influenced by the gossip. in spite of this pam managed to find success outside of her comfort zone in europe and particularly in the uk, and she spoke at many conferences and exhibited widely. however, she always came back to sydney to reunite with family and friends and continue her painting and writing. 2+2=5 was a means to create, support, collaborate and question issues that we all experienced: the challenges of being an artist in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century, the maintenance of relationships, the content of the work and convictions that were the core of our individual and sometimes collective beliefs. the national art school brought us into contact, developed and nurtured our skills, and then propelled us into working together. pam’s legacy will be that 2+2=5 has remained a collaborative working group of artists. it was last year (2013), just prior to pam's sudden death that pam, josie kim, cate mccarthy, deborah young and i had reunited at cate’s fat wombat farm to discuss the next phase of our collaboration and the future documentation of our lives. 2 + 2 = 5 were planning another show before pam died and we still hope to exhibit her and our last work in the future, which will include pieces about our relationship to her and to each other. the fact that she succeeded in gaining a phd in philosophy of education and a doctorate in creative arts puts her achievements way ahead of the combined efforts of 2+2=5. doctor pam johnston was an inspiration, a testament to how much can be achieved despite adversity. the exhibition will be our tribute to an extraordinary woman. pam with josie kim (newton) at fat wombat farm photo by c. moore hardy, 2013 coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 johnston, p. 1996, transition [life] mixed media work on archival paper exhibited at project space keira lane wollongong (1996) and tap gallery darlinghurst sydney (1997) a big life (by cate mccarthy) pam was a stubborn mix of intelligence, politics, fashion, creativity, thrill seeking, activism, strong social and community conscience, bigheartedness and extreme tenderness. doctor pam dahl-helm johnston was my dear friend. our relationship was not always an easy one; we discussed and argued on many occasions about every topic under the sun from postcolonialism and children to art and politics, often at her home in woolloomooloo. there were times when we would be interrupted by a local community member knocking on the door and pam would come back with a pile of legal papers or fines that she would put aside to write a letter on behalf of this person. she was a strong advocate for her community and always agreed to help in any way possible. woolloomooloo is a mix of community housing interspersed with the more recent gentrification of the area that has taken place in and around the wharves and the base of kings coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 cross. pam lived there with her children for around 34 years and was an integral part of the community. her daughter, keera, was born in that house and her eldest son cass’s funeral service was there, as was her own wake. that house holds many memories. for many years pam worked as an advocate for women victims of domestic violence at women’s place, kings cross and the marrickville women’s refuge. in more recent times she held art groups at the juanita neilson community centre at woolloomooloo and mentored many young people from the area. she was an active volunteer at plunkett st school and the nearby n.a.v.a. (national advocacy for visual arts). we met in tamworth in western new south wales in 1977 when many of us had fled the cities in search of a different life. it was there i discovered music and many other young like minded people. along with friends jacqui glynn and clelia adams we became ensconced in the local country music scene. pam and her new partner carrl arrived in town fresh from melbourne when pam was searching for her roots in gamileroi country. they cut a grand couple as they strode into the various venues: carrl was tall and a known musician and pam had such flair and style. she made her own clothes and was always so glamorous. tamworth at that time was an incubator for music and the establishment of long and enduring friendships. for many of the musicians of that time pam was a catalyst for bringing us all together over many years. music had always been one of her great loves. one night in sydney i remember her calling with a request for my daughter billie and me to come and sing a song she had written at a vigil for the family of an unarmed young woolloomooloo man who had been shot by police. pam had written the words and billie and i sang a tune and played as the whole community walked from the wharf with candles to the place in the city where young edison had been gunned down. she had a big heart and we shared many such joyous and sad times. pam and i exhibited together at byron bay, in sydney and in melbourne. in 1991 i was asked to join 2+2 =5, a group of 4 artists. this group of women artists from sydney had been together for some time and i had previously known them only socially. the underlying aim of the group was to document our own and each other’s lives. we came together to discuss philosophy, ideas, formats and venues for exhibitions. pam was always the driver in this group. she was adamant that we write ourselves into history, to tell our own stories as artists and as women. pam, along with writer and adoptive mum, ruby langford ginibi, visited billie and me several times in lismore new south wales when ruby was researching her book, my bundjalung people. pam had been awarded the women and arts fellowship for that year to document ruby’s journey back to bundjalung country photographically, which included cabbage tree island, box ridge, mulli mulli and baryugil indigenous communities. the images from cabbage tree island were exhibited at lismore regional gallery and given back to the community afterwards. i was fortunate to spend days with pam, ruby and aunty eileen morgan at evans head and “cabbo”, listening to stories and witnessing first-hand the generosity of the people even though i was dismayed at the level of poverty still existing at the community. after a dreadful car accident in 1996 pam needed to take a break from the work she was doing at mulawa women’s correctional centre. she had been teaching art and indigenous coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 studies there for some years and had mentored many women both in and out of prison. i took over her classes and stayed for seven years. pam was held in great esteem by the staff and inmates at mulawa and emu plains women’s correctional centres, having initiated a number of innovative programs in arts and education; she advocated for the rights of indigenous women and the right to be educated both in and out of prison. pam was very philosophical about the accident as the time now allowed her to concentrate fully on her art and writing. she then completed her first doctorate, exhibited and had a number of papers published. after a five year absence she returned to teach at mulawa and and emu plains women’s correctional centres and she also worked at long bay men’s correctional centre, always encouraging and setting new benchmarks for indigenous education and mentoring many aspiring artists. her family and friends were everything to her. they inspired and supported her as she did them. pam searched for herself through a difficult upbringing fraught with abuse and dysfunction. she had her own mentors in her life including her eldest son cass’s grandmother, her dear phyllis. her grandchildren were a constant joy, her women friends were friends for life and she was the centre around whom many of us gathered. she taught me to value my women friends and to never be afraid to love. in recent years loss, transformation and death had been a constant theme in her life and her artwork. i clutched my heart despairingly as i grieved for my first-born son and i clutched my heart in pride at the achievements of my daughter. i clutched my heart as i cried with happiness at the birth of my grandchildren. without my heart i am not living. without my heart i cannot connect, cannot feel, cannot love, cannot understand the meaning or the connection to life. yet my heart is a pump medically and legally, that can stop, or not, at death (johnston, p., 2007, p. 3). dr pam johnston has had a big life, an extraordinary life, where she has made us think differently about many things. i won’t say encouraged us as she often rammed it down our throats. she was confronting and loving, a paradox really, capable of extreme sensitivity, love and loyalty mixed with in-your-face opposition to many issues. she was a wise woman who earned all of that wisdom through tenacity and compassion. pam was loved dearly by all of her friends and family, revered and admired by many others. she took up riding a motorbike when 65 years old. i miss her terribly. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 2+2=5 at their last meeting at fat wombat farm, bathurst left to right cate mccarthy, deb young, pam johnston, josie kim (newton) (photo by c.moore hardy 2013) references johnston, p., 2007. heartland: anatomy of the human heart. catalogue for exhibition at kendal gallery for women’s arts international festival, kendal, cumbria. biographical notes c. moore hardy studied at national art school, sydney college of the arts and cofa. she has documented the gay, lesbian, bi transgender, intersex & queer sydney community for over 30 years, and her documentary photographs are available for research online at the city of sydney, archive pix. the exhibition she curated, we are family, is currently on at the australian centre for photography, until 18th may 2014. her works are in numerous state & private collections and she remains an activist and a feminist (with a sense of humour). cate mccarthy, m phil (fine arts) newcastle university, is a freelance artist, arts worker and musician who has taught in prisons, tafe, with regional communities and in schools. she has exhibited widely in australia and overseas. her life as a community artist has seen her work with indigenous australians, refugees, art and health programs, youth and people with a disability. she has been a working musician, vocalist and songwriter since the 70’s touring nationally and playing at festivals. cate has a strong interest in performance theatre and politics and is an advocate for social justice. her most recent exhibition was at newcastle university in 2013, titled dig a bit deeper connection and contemporary landscape art. 213 coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona error by elizabeth campbell (review) bill phillips there is something about the poetry of elizabeth campbell that syncopates like an idling harley davidson. in the poem “destiny”, written mainly in lines of fourteen to sixteen syllables, the urge to settle into a steady iambic rhythm is constantly frustrated, only to return again to its regular beat before once again hopping sideways in distinctive fitfulness: she wrote a poem too, my grandmother, years before she gassed herself like sylvia plath. she was a teacher as well but lost it and went into a ward. left a small boy and girl. with the fourth line the poem itself slips away, jumping two generations, to a poem “printed in the school magazine in year ten,” a poem “about hope and spring.” is this preoccupation with the past the “error” which provides the title of both the volume’s first section, and of the collection itself? in the previous poem the reader is asked: what part of your mind should you give to the past – a third? half? more as you grow older?” many of the poems in this section rest upon memories: of childhood, of family history, and of regret. perhaps the burden of the past is best set aside and ignored in favour of a new, fresher present and future, but it is clearly also useful to carry such baggage around, if only as a store for poetic inspiration. but life demands a price be paid, perhaps in madness. the moving, untitled poem which begins “what is madness and can horses have it?” describes the tortured life of a gelding with a brain tumour, while “the mad, unseen, are nuns to us” (the second of two poems about the old testament figure, job), with its reference to convents and mental hospitals, suggests that life itself is a total institution of the kind described by copyright©2013 bill phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 214 erving goffman in his 1957 paper "on the characteristics of total institutions". according to goffman, the inmate of a total institution “begins a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self. his self is systematically, if often unintentionally mortified” (24). is it, then, worth it? is life nothing but a big mistake? a drawn-out melodrama of pain and humiliation? the final poem of the section, “happiness”, is a précis of negative utilitarianism which begins, grudgingly, in favour of existence: you decide, on balance, you are happy to exist. because the balance of happiness is relief – but having analysed the nature of this relief, the poem concludes, inevitably, that “you are surprised now you ever agreed.” life is a mistake and if we were consulted, before it began, why on earth would anyone bother? the consequence of life, the corollary of error, is fear, the theme of the volume’s second section. in an explicit nod to the creation and the fall of man (“beyond snakes’ silent innocence of symbol”) the first poem describes the children’s fear of the snake-man’s annual visit – a fear that is ultimately and intimately tethered to life’s transience. the children huddle together, their knees touching, as if the naked waiting ankle were portal to the death-world, the death-life: where we live within fear of death as in a room. this idea of the death-life is continued in “the diving bell” about a visit to the cinema to see the film about the man trapped in a paralysed body (presumably julian schnabel’s 2007 film the diving bell and the butterfly – incidentally, this theme has become something of a genre in its own right. consider dalton trumbo’s 1971 film johnny got his gun and alejandro amenábar’s 2004 mar adentro/the sea inside). despite the horror of the “man-metaphor” on screen, the overwhelming self intrudes and the poet is “distracted by the pain in my leg”. which is fortunate; stricken reality imposes itself on the questionable message of the film: “why should brokenness be truth?” does suffering bring wisdom? if so, it is yet another of god’s cruel tricks: diminished to be magnified, pure mind locked in pure body summarises the poet, only to immediately conclude, somewhat dismissively, that “he dies in the final scene:” these doubts about the merits of corporeal purity arise again, obliquely, in the last section of the collection with reference to the cathars, a gnostic religious sect which flourished in the french pyrenees from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. the cathars believed that salvation could only be obtained through an ascetic purification of the body, but as the poem “sirventes” wryly remarks 215 the cathars came, like flies, and now are gone: these pyrenees remain. the idea that life is to be enjoyed, that life itself is all we have, is central to the fourth section. the first poem, “ithaka”, is inspired by constantine p. cavafy’s poem of the same name. for cavafy, it is the journey of life which counts, an assertion that cambell would like to share but which fear can all too easily undermine (as cavafy also understood). campbell responds uncertainly to the greek poet’s inducement to make the most of the hedonistic pleasures to be found on the shores of the eastern mediterranean sea: if fear is your waiting wife, you’ll count all night the alexandrias burned, isles bounded, stars fixed, and rise to a self as settled as a curse. we are warned of the error inherent in thinking too much, in acquiring “knowledge of my own soul”. the final section is devoted to the six fifteenth century franco-flemish tapestries known as the “dame à la licorne”. the poems are concerned with love and its redemptive power; its ability to reconcile the world and the soul: was this the only way to love the earth: to love you in it? but love can also be treacherous: i chose a lover who loved death and feared it and found it in me. there seems to be an incompatibility between love of life and concern for the soul. the choice must be made: this life or the next. in the poem, “planh: mon seul desir”, life is chosen and the lover, who put me gently away with all the other death loving things of the world is abandoned: “i left him to it”. the last poem of the collection: “canso: a mon seul desir” is inconclusive, an ending forewarned in the earlier poem “ithaka”: an old respectable trick, i’ve done it, this making a perfectly ended poem that tells the reader ‘don’t waste your time on endings’ 216 “canso: a mon seul desir” links, gnostic-like, the lower, material world with the higher, spiritual plane but, in the final lines of the book, offers only an open-ended question: the emptied, the beseeching gaze of a heart whose eyes are cast down. she grows the question up out of her head like a ladder. perhaps the greatest error is to try and resolve questions of a metaphysical nature, questions which are, by definition, unanswerable. other errors are submission to fear and egocentricity, a concentration on self, including an obsession with the past. yet life cannot avoid these traps, or it would not be life. perhaps the greatest error is to assume that there are any answers. works cited campbell, elizabeth. error. st. kilda: john leonard press, 2010. goffman e. "on the characteristics of total institutions." asylums. essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. penguin: harmondsworth, 1961. bill phillips is a senior lecturer in literatures in english at the university of barcelona. he has published on poetry, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, gender studies and crime fiction. microsoft word stephencopland5.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   45  border protection 1 stephen copland copyright©2013 stephen copland. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this paper investigates an installation of paintings exhibited at macquarie university gallery in 2009 in the exhibition called raft – the drifting border (20022004). the installation comprises of 147 miniature paintings depicting ever lighthouse in australia. the title of the work, border protection is assembled to form the map of australia. borders like maps are a form of communication and information about places at different times and different situations. the installation identifies how the function of a lighthouse has changed as well as attitudes to the australian coast with the division surrounding the asylum seeker debate. introduction copland has an eye on history and our habits of forgetfulness about the past. he is also shaping a response to one of the formative debates of our present moment. from the horizon of the past to the horizon of the future, this is a large gesture of making meaning in the complex and murky waters of present day events. in particular, copland is concerned to address, in visual terms, how australians fixate their hopes and fears on the watery border of the ocean, this wavering line that defines our cultural identity as an island surrounded by the teeming difference of asia. (curator of raft-the drifting border, dr rod pattenden 2009) the exhibition raft-the drifting border, curated by dr rod pattenden, was exhibited at macquarie university art gallery in 2009. in this exhibition, i used a variety of mediums including bronze sculpture, digital film, wood, wax, painting, animation and drawing to explore how our ideas of borders affect our notion of ourselves as australians and influence our views of others. the concept of migration and the australian idea of the coast changed forever when the mv tampa rescued 433 asylum seekers. during an election year in 2001, the australian immigration minister made a statement that asylum seekers had thrown children overboard in an attempt to force their way into australia.                                                          1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   46  it was a vicious ploy to demonise refugees, and to glorify the government’s handling of “intruders” for an election based on “border protection”. (tello. 3: 2008) raft – the drifting border developed as a protest, a letter, a plea and a visual reminder. installation view macquarie university art gallery (photograph by stephen copland) borders in our globalised world of shifting borders, the physical and cultural map of nations open up new debates and transcultural dialogues. the border is an unseen geography and academic dr susan ball suggests the following: in terms of the landscape, seascape or air, borders are often not very visible, except in small areas around official [border]-crossing points. yet people know they are there: sometimes, they make themselves more present in cities and the places where undocumented workers congregate than they do at the geographical areas where borders exist. (ball 2012) debates about borders are important in describing how a place can change and our idea of place is measured in feelings and how these feelings are expressed. borders like maps are a form of communication and information about places at different times and different situations. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   47  as an artist and a coastal dweller, my sense of place is closely tied to the ocean. artistically, i identify with the imagery of the australian coast with its changing skies and tides and the great sense of space that is australia as a continent suggests. in the 1998 abc boyer lecture, a spirit of play the making of australian consciousness, novelist and poet david malouf describes this spatial relationship with the country we inhabit and share with others as a “spirit of play”. the idea of play malouf argues is related to climate and the coast. his essay investigates a society living in one hemisphere while our heritage is far away in the other. as a second generation australian of scottish, cuban and lebanese background, i understand this concept physically and mentally, playing in this island surrounded by water, a continent of open space, open skies and spatial freedom to play and dream. malouf suggests: looking down the long line of coast this morning as i begin these lectures. i see the first rays of the sun strike mount warning and am aware, as the light floods west, what a distance it is to the far side of our country-two time zones and more than three thousand kilometers away, yet how easily the whole landmass sits in my head-as an island. the original idea behind the installation border protection came from a series of sketches of lighthouses. the nearest lighthouse to my home is norah head, north of sydney, and after a visit to the site i considered how lighthouses frame and shape the australian coast. in 2009 i created a painting titled border protection that included an installation of 147 miniature paintings – every lighthouse in australia. the miniature images formed an abstract map that assisted to suggest a map of australia and on close inspection reveal what is constructed on its coastline. installation border protection, oil on board on canvas 280.0 cm (h) x 340.0 cm (w) 2004-5 (photograph by stephen copland). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   48  installation border protection, new south wales, detail (photograph by stephen copland). installation border protection, south australia, detail (photograph by stephen copland). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   49  installation border protection, victoria, detail (photograph by stephen copland). installation border protection, detail: currie lighthouse tasmania (left), and cape du covedic south australia (right) (photograph by stephen copland). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   50  installation border protection, detail: western australia (left), and queenscliff white, port phillip bay melbourne (right) (photograph by stephen copland). historically, lighthouses have operated as a symbol of hope and salvation positioned along coasts defining the offer of protection. the construction of 147 lighthouses on the coast around australia verify to the danger posed by boats as vessels navigate the seas in attempts to land safely. the lighthouses have always interested me as a coastal dweller and surfer too for a variety of reasons. firstly the iconic nature as well as the stories attached to them, and secondly how their function has changed as they have lost their original purpose becoming hotels, abandoned icons and museums. the miniature paintings form a suggested map of australia as the lighthouses offer a metaphor for a coast that is in a state of flux and change and a destabilising and blurring what the notion of our relationship and sense of place to an island continent. german artist thomas kilpper’s work investigates borders and the exploding migration of thousands of refugees from africa to the small island of lampedusa in italy. his installation of video, large linocuts and drawings document his reactions to living on lampedusa in 2008, where he attempts to develop a social dialogue with people. in the video work a lighthouse for lampedusa kilpper creates a lighthouse out of fragments of the boats that could send out light signals, a form of navigational structure to collaborate with the community. kilpper lived on the island, interviewed the migrants and citizens of lampedusa attempting to humanise the “new” migration and concepts of integration. kippler’s use of the lighthouse has a double function, firstly to assist with navigation of refugee boats and secondly he wants the lighthouse to function as a cultural centre and host a variety of communicative and interactive events. the artist acknowledges the refugee dilemma cannot be solved with military intervention or other forms of border protection. a lighthouse for lampedusa asks that integration and immigration policy consider refugee human rights. the installation border protection reflects kippler’s use of the lighthouse as a metaphor to ask the audience to consider human rights. raft-the drifting border was opened by journalist and author david marr to emphasis the political nature of the work. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   51  thomas kilpper – a lighthouse for lampedusa! – on-going project since 2007, naples – lanificio, 2010 – (photograph by thomas kilpper). thomas kilpper – a lighthouse for lampedusa! – ongoing project since 2007, dispari&dispari project, regio emilia, 2008 (photograph by dispari&dispari). david marr and marian wilkinson, two of australia’s most accomplished investigative journalists wrote dark victory in 2004. the authors reveal the secret history of the campaign by government against boat people coming to australia coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   52  seeking asylum and making our border protection an issue that distorted humanitarian issues. author david marr opening the border protection exhibition, 2009 (photograph by effy alexakis) curator of the exhibition, dr rod pattenden, wrote of the work border protection: such architectural forms on the edge of the continent are strong reminders of safety and physical haven. but in this context they also echo aspects of surveillance and the fluid anxiety that needs to fix a clear line of demarcation when faced with issues of difference. in this case questions arise about who is in and who is out, and in turn how this very fluid border will be negotiated for those wanting to pass through to safety. (pattenden. 2009, p.12) references ball. s. 2012, http://www.eastbordnet.org/photography/ pattenden. r, 2009, raft-the drifting border catalogue 12. malouf, d 1998, a spirit of play the making of the australian consciousness boyer lectures abc books. tello. v, 2009 monument to memory: woomera in australian contemporary art, art monthly, issue april, 2008. image: thomas kilpper a lighthouse for lampedusa!ongoing project since 2007 naples lanificio 2010 –photo: the artist. image courtesy of the artist coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   53  acknowledgements the author thanks thomas kilpper and the dispari&dispari project (reggio emilia, italy) for permission to use the images of a lighthouse for lampedusa! in this article, and effy alexakis for the use the photograph of david marr opening stephen’s exhibition in 2009. stephen copland studied at the national art school, sydney (astc, 1969-1972) in 1988 he was awarded a graduate diploma in education (university of technology sydney) and a masters of fine art, university of new south wales (1995). he is currently doctor of creative arts candidate at university of wollongong. he has been visiting lecturer at darwin university, northern territory and assistant professor university of sharjah, college of fine art and design, united arab emirates and has conducted workshops/lectures at vermont state college, usa, universite saint espirt de kaslik, lebanon and onsekiz mart university, turkey. his research as an artist is interdisciplinary using painting, drawing, sculpture and film to interpret themes migration, heritage and human rights. since 1986 he has had 30 solo exhibitions including exhibitions in cuba, new zealand, slovakia, austria, lebanon and turkey. the migration series 1992-2002, a project of international exhibitions earned him a commendation award from the consulate general of lebanon (1999). he is the recipient of a number of awards and cultural grants including a migration heritage grant, an international programs grant nsw ministry for the arts and in 2011 the moya dyring studio, cite internationale, paris from the art gallery of new south wales. www.stephencopland.com.au. (25 newell rd, macmasters beach, new south wales 2251, australia. email: three-7-50@hotmail.com) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 nation, identity, and subjectivity in globalizing literature yasue arimitsu abstract: since the end of the 20 th century, particularly after the cold war ended, national borderlines have been redrawn many times in the areas of the eastern europe, the middle east, and a wide range of asia, and people started crossing national borderlines to immigrate to other countries. as a result, the definition of a modern nation with one ethnicity, one language, and one culture collapsed. under the policy of multiculturalism, australia accepts immigrants from all over the world, and australian literature at present is characterized as being ethnically, culturally, and linguistically hybrid. in this paper i look at australian writers such as brian castro and nam le and compare them with other writers who are considered post-colonial writers, such as salman rushdie, v.s. naipaul and kazuo ishiguro. i focus on how these writers attempt to present their identities along with their subjectivities. i also compare them with a japanese writer, haruki murakami, whose literary works are widely read throughout the world, crossing cultural, ethnic, and language barriers, even though he writes in japanese and has a mono-cultural background. i investigate the reason why murakami’s works are accepted by many contemporary readers worldwide. i finally explore the meaning of national identity and subjectivity in the globalizing world, and clarify the transformation of modern literature. keywords: nation, subjectivity, globalizing literature in the autumn of 2012, we heard that the nobel prize in literature 2012 had been awarded to a chinese writer, mo yan. the swedish academy introduced mo yan and his life, and praised his writing: mo yan’s imagination soars across the entire human existence. he is a wonderful portrayer of nature; he knows virtually all there is to know about hunger, and the brutality of china’s 20th century has probably never been described so nakedly, with heroes, lovers, torturers, bandits – and especially, strong, indomitable mothers. 1 it is clear that mo yan portrayed chinese people and their life, particularly life in the countryside about which non-chinese people know little. it is always very difficult to copyright©2014 yasue arimitsu. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 predict the winner of the nobel prize in literature as its criteria are not always as clear as those in the fields of sociology, economics, mathematics or sciences, although its laureates are always distinguished writers. there have been two nobel prize winners for literature from japan so far. the first was yasunari kawabata (1972) and the other was kenzaburo oe (1994). when kawabata was awarded the nobel prize, i was a postgraduate student in tokyo, majoring in english and american literature. i was taking a lecture by the japanese poet junzaburo nishiwaki, a professor of english. professor nishiwaki was a very distinguished poet and professor in japan, but maybe more famous outside japan. the students at that time knew that professor nishiwaki was expected to receive a nobel prize, as it had been said that the worldfamous american poet, ezra pound recommended him. however, the prize went to kawabata. 2 after this incident, the professor said in class that “kawabata was awarded the nobel prize because he is a writer who reflects specific japanese features well in his works.” his remarks seemed to me very significant because, being westernized as a writer as well as an academic, nishiwaki’s literary works were far from japanese; rather, they were western. his works might have been considered as too western and this may have been one of the reasons why he was not awarded a nobel prize. in the early nineteen-seventies, literature was supposed to represent the nation to which a writer belongs. works by yasunari kawabata, junichiro tanizaki, and yukio mishima were widely read outside japan through translations mainly because these writers reflected japanese culture, society, tradition as well as a japanese sense of beauty. the readers of these writers outside japan probably read their works in order to learn about the japanese people, culture, tradition, and sense of beauty, which were very foreign to them. their works attracted a great number of non-japanese readers and a lot of researchers have continued to study them. from the nineteen-sixties to eighties, the japanese economy developed greatly so that japan became one of the economically strongest countries in the world, and the function of japanese literature for foreign readers changed. japan became more westernized and academics as well as business people went to europe, america and asian countries and stayed there for some years. many also studied for several years at universities overseas. the images of japanese people and culture became less foreign to non-japanese people, and some works by writers such as kenzaburo oe or kobo abe began to be understood by western readers through a philosophical knowledge shared with oe or abe, who were very familiar with western literatures, philosophies and cultures. their works reflect western influences and this trend demonstrated the development or transformation of japanese literature towards westernization. the functions of japanese literature had been transformed from those of kawabata, tanizaki, and mishima. though non-japanese readers came to share something with japanese writers, they still seemed to read these writers’ works as representing japanese literature which definitely reflected japanese people, society, culture and tradition. in haruki murakami’s case, however, something is very different from his predecessors, who clearly represent japanese literature. murakami’s works are now read on a worldwide scale, and his books have been translated in more than 30 languages and in more than 40 countries. none of his predecessors had shown such a trend, which suggested that something new, something different was happening to japanese coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 literature. the definitions of nation and culture, as well as this change, are directly connected to the trend of literature in the globalizing world. it has been quite common in english speaking countries that writers published their works outside their own countries, but usually only in other english speaking countries. however, these days, it is not so unusual for writers to cross national, ethnic, cultural and even language borders. the works of haruki murakami, for example, cross language borders, as they are sometimes read more widely than works by writers of their own countries, even though murakami’s works are read in translation. some writers even write in languages which are not their ethnic languages and they are highly rated where they are published. 3 it has become quite difficult for readers to identify writers’ nationalities or ethnicities only by reading their works. this is a trend of the globalization of literature which has been progressing since the late twentieth century, and in this paper, i would like to discuss the worldwide trend of literature, in relation to nation, ethnicity, and language, and think about the issue of subjectivity which is a key word for literature. a literary work reflects a country’s culture, history, and social ethos inherent to the time and place to which its author belongs. modern literature, born in europe, has thus continued to play an important role in unifying a nation on the basis of a common language, culture and ethnicity. the author was the central figure, being privileged with subjectivity and controlling power of national, cultural and social consciousness, and literature became an institution supporting a nation. however, in the mid-twentieth century, roland barthes argued in his “death of the author” that the idea of the author was “the invention of authorship in the cultural history of the west, of europe”(barthes 142-148), and as andrew bennett says in his book the author, “the modernist aesthetic, developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, … offers a model of the text that resists the capitalist insistence on individuality, and then on the “tyranny” of the author”(bennett 16-17). michel foucault then developed the idea of authorship in his “what is an author?”(foucault: 141-160). the question of “authorship” has become, indeed, very complicated since the midtwentieth century, as the definition of a nation began to be transformed at the end of world war ii. after the ideological framework in eastern europe changed at the same time as many countries in asia were decolonized, political, ideological, and ethnic frameworks also changed, and the map of the world was greatly altered. along with this, a large number of displaced people or refugees moved or migrated to other countries, giving rise to a fusion of ethnicities, cultures, and sometimes languages, and because of this, the definition of a modern nation drastically changed. in the mid twentieth century, literatures in australia, canada, south africa, and india, and other former european colonies attracted a great deal of attention in the english speaking world, and literary interests among readers or academics shifted from english/american literature, which had been the centre of modern english literature, to postcolonial literature. postcolonial writers were colonized or displaced people or sometimes immigrants who had left their home countries. salman rushdie and v.s. naipaul, for example, are widely known as representatives of postcolonial literature, both having been displaced: rushdie from india, naipaul from trinidad. after decolonization, they restored their subjectivity and attempted to write works which came to be treated as a new form of literature―postcolonial literature. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 as exiles without roots, postcolonial writers such as rushdie or naipaul are in between two perspectives: hope for the future and memory from the past. they “want to be like the people of their host country; they want to be singular and complete,” as cristina emanula dascalu, argues in her imaginary homeland of writers in exile (dascalu 42). they seek to become part of the mainstream or seek to transform into being british, but in so doing, they experience some problems. in order to restore their own identities, which are supposed to be firmly supported by their own nation, culture and language, they have to restore their own home, culture and language. rushdie, for example, attempts to write the previous thirty years of indian history as his grand subject in order to establish his own indian identity, but it is “bottled in thirty jars, preserved in the aromatic oils and spices of his memory”(desai xii) as anita desai argues in her introduction to rushdie’s midnight’s children. she also remarks: what rushdie tapped into, in midnight’s children, was that unquenchable vitality and fecundity created by just such fluidity and interconnectedness. refusing to see the english language as a barrier, he used it instead for its pan-indian, inter-regional versatility so as to plunge into and plunder what lay in so many different areas of indian society and reveal the essential commonality described by jawaharlal nehru, in the ‘high’ style of political oratory, as ‘a noble mansion of free india, where all her children may dwell’ and, in the ‘low’ style adopted by rushdie’s hero saleem sinai, as ‘black and brown and white, leaking into each other…like flavours when you cook’. (desai x-xi) rushdie’s novel shows that “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world,” because what he wants to restore is not only his own home, but also for it to take him into its mainstream just like his host country. he tries to find a home to return to, but in reality he cannot. exiles are not, as people of the modern era are, “safe in understanding that their home is singular and their identity safely anchored to the ground, that they are guaranteed by the land in which they live” as dascalu also argues (dascalu 37). their home is not stationary, but floating in their memories and imagination, only appearing in more fantastical forms that illustrate the author’s dreams, nightmares and delirium as much as his country’s history. rushdie is physically alienated from india, which means that he will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost. therefore, he says in imaginary homelands that “[he] creates fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, indias of the mind” (rushdie 10). this means that he writes novels in his search for an identity, not in his actual homeland, which does not exist in reality, but in a home created in his fiction. v.s. naipaul, another well-known postcolonial writer, began his life in exile by doing the same thing as rushdie, but in naipaul’s case, his identity is more complicated: he is a trinidadian-british writer of indo-trinidadian heritage. he was born in trinidad but his grandfather had been taken there as an indian labourer for the sugar plantations. naipaul left trinidad and went to london to look for his identity as he had wanted since he was only eleven. he wanted to be a writer, and to write “in english” to become a central figure in the 20 th century literary world, just as rushdie wanted to become british. however, in london, he got lost; he underwent a kind of culture shock: coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 i came to london. it had become the centre of my world and i had worked hard to come to it. and i was lost. london was not the centre of my world. i had been misled; but there was nowhere else to go. it was a good place for getting lost in … here i became not more than an inhabitant of a big city, robbed of loyalties, time passing, taking me away from what i was, thrown more and more into myself, fighting to keep my balance and to keep alive the thought of the clear world beyond the brick and asphalt and the chaos of railway lines. (naipaul 42) as an exile, naipaul wanted to become english, the identity of his host country, and went to london. however, he could not find his place in london, which instead took him away from what he himself was, rather than giving him a sense of his own identity. he was not successful in his attempt to become english and, as a result, his portrayal of the characters in his novels was constructed entirely out of “a montage of fictional representations of an imaginary concept of england.” in his attempt to restore his other home, india, which no longer actually existed, he collected a pile of his dreams and nightmares and transformed his writings into fragmentary memories from the past to show that his past cannot construct any stories, that is to say that there is no identity in the past. the explorations of both india and england lead naipaul nowhere (gurr 83). most of his works, therefore, appeared to be “a struggle to face the new identity he then had to aquire, of permanent exile”(gurr 9). as exiles, salman rushdie and v.s. naipaul were in the postcolonial framework－that is in the binary system between the two opposites: english and indian or trinidadian; the colonizer and the colonized; the west and the east. displaced from their geographical home, they went in search of a cultural home and chose to become english, the identity of the colonizer, to retrieve “subjectivity” by obtaining an english identity, which was firmly based on a language, an ethnicity and a culture. although they use english, their identities are suspended; they become neither english nor indian/trinidadian, just floating between the two. their “subjectivity” is in between the two opposites, and split into many selves instead of a unified, whole or inviolate “subjectivity,” and eventually it becomes ambivalent, a hybrid of the two opposites. the framework of postcolonial literature is thus binary, having two centres of equal value: the colonizer and the colonized, while colonial literature has only one centre with a single unified value which controls the marginal. exiled writers, who are homeless and borderless, tend to present their “subjectivity” or identity in the act of writing literary works. their works are not based on the concept of modern literature as in the cases of english, french or german literature, which were individually unified as national literatures, based on one culture, one language, and one ethnicity. postcolonial literature thus became somewhat different from modern literature in that postcolonial writers assert their cultural and ethnic identities against their colonizers by using their “colonizer’s” language. this is the state of the exile: “an ambivalent hybrid of these two different lands” (rushdie 45). the postcolonial subject or “subjectivity” is represented as being split in their dreams or illusions. the question “is the novel dead?” had been repeatedly asked in the west. it is noteworthy that edward said refers to the change of literary concept in his reflection on exile and other essays. 4 in this work, said argues that the concept of literary theory is changing in relation to anthropology as well as cultural politics and his remarks seem to coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 be based on the literary theory of postmodernism, but they are perhaps closely related to nation and exile. what postcolonial writers who left their countries such as rushdie and naipaul did was to open up possibilities in cross-fertilization and revitalizing what had seemed faded, dormant and close to decay. they definitely changed modern literature as they changed the notion of literature through the loss of the notions of subjectivity or identity. as the age of post-colonialism proceeded, there appeared quite a few countries which became “multicultural societies” such as the united states, canada, and australia, leading to drastic changes in the literary situation. as these countries accepted many of the displaced or refugees, as well as immigrants from other countries, the nation became ethnically and culturally mixed and, as a result, literary works born in these countries are very complex and certainly do not come under the notion of modern literature. in a multicultural society like australia, all kinds of cultures and ethnicities are equally treated and there are no cultural or ethnic centres as in the cases of colonial and postcolonial societies. in contrast to colonial and postcolonial literatures which were written against the background of the “others,” there can be no “others” in multicultural literature, if there are no cultural and ethnic borders. in a multicultural society, there is no central figure which represents cultural and ethnic identity and therefore there is no “subjectivity” to assert against the “others.” this situation is the “melancholia” of postcolonial criticism as eli park sorensen calls it: in a world after the so-called ‘revolution’, the occurrence of melancholia as a symptom in postcolonial studies may be linked to the current status of the literary, given the fact that literature still occupies a substantial part of postcoloniality’s objects of study, yet for reasons that are highly ambiguous. as i noted earlier, postcolonial literary criticism seems to be characterized by what one may see as a kind schizophrenia; the literary constitutes a problematic (sic) within postcolonial studies－a problematic to which the discipline has responded either through an unbalanced emphasis on allegedly radical textual modalities, or by ignoring literary form entirely. (sorensen 18-19) if cultural or ethnic boundaries disappear, the issue of “subjectivity” disappears; if there is no subjectivity, the issue of identity disappears; if the identity issue disappears, then the concept of modern literature disappears or becomes something different. in order to verify this issue, i would like to examine the cases of two writers who left their home countries. one is brian castro, an australian writer, who came from hong kong, and the other is kazuo ishiguro, a japanese-born writer who became a naturalized british citizen. they were neither “refugees” nor “exiles,” but they could be called “diasporic,” that is, immigrants and others who have left their homelands permanently. brian castro was born in 1950 in hong kong and at the age of sixteen was sent to high school in australia. since then, he has continued to live in australia and write novels as a self-professed australian writer. castro’s father was of portuguese, spanish, and english descent, and his mother, english and chinese. as a result, castro has a multiracial origin that is composed of a mixture of two oppositional others, the occident coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 and the orient. when castro went to australia in the 1960s, australians of anglo-celtic origin clearly comprised the mainstream of australian society, and castro recalls that he felt overwhelmed and even assaulted by the word “identity” (castro 10). being “hybrid,” he was never going to be valorized as “authentically” anything. for castro as for rushdie, identity does not have its foundation in the nation. rather, “identity” as it appears in castro’s writing is constructed by a “multiplicity of selves,” selves who lie between a variety of different identities and cultures. these multiple identities cross borders without being hindered or assimilated by one particular nation or traditional culture. for castro, home is hong kong, a place which, since its restoration to china, no longer exists in the form he knew. for him home became surreal, a place which existed temporarily, but which now merely remains in the form of memories. castro believes that there should be no boundaries in writing, and that the concept of nation puts too much pressure upon the writing process. castro even argues that if writers start to write about identity, they destroy the activity of creative writing. that he belonged to nowhere and was therefore released from that form of identity gave him the impetus to write and make discoveries and this became the source of his creativity (arimitsu 137-138). kazuo ishiguro lives outside his family homeland and writes novels. he moved to england when he was five years old because of his father’s occupation and has lived there since. ishiguro’s situation is similar to that of castro in that he is neither an exile nor a refugee, but unlike castro, ishiguro is not of mixed heritage, but ethnically “pure” japanese. ishiguro was naturalized as a british citizen in 1983 and has become a successful british writer. he spent his early childhood in japan, and considers japan, rather than england, to be his home, despite having lived longer in the latter. he says that memories of his childhood remain in his mind, and that these nurture him both as a person and a writer, and influence his whole life (ozaki 6). this statement echoes brian castro’s sense of home: just as castro’s home is in his inner self, so is ishiguro’s in his memories or subconscious, and to recover these memories, he too writes novels. in ishiguro’s novel when we were orphans, the central character lived in shanghai with his parents as a child, but at the age of ten, his parents disappeared. he returned to england, where he was raised as an orphan. he visits shanghai again to investigate the truth about his missing parents as well as to recover the landscape of his childhood “home” but the city of shanghai is not what he retains in his mind. he can visit shanghai in a physical sense, but the shanghai he visits now is no longer his home; there is a gap between the real shanghai and that of his memory. the experience of real shanghai leads him to find his place, the “home” of his essential self. his “home,” “his original being” is in his memory, in his fantasy, or in his subconscious. the super-realistic world －a world whose boundaries are uncertain and unknowable－ is real for him, and this is the way to construct his identity as a person who has lost his own home. in this, ishiguro is similar to brian castro, who has lost his home and searches for the reality of his own being in his memories or subconscious. while castro deconstructs the old and solid view of history, ishiguro severs the continuity or succession of culture, tradition, and family ties. both have lost their lineage and heritage, and therefore are orphans who have lost their parents or homelands. they symbolize the discontinuity of family, history or tradition and the ongoing ramifications of “diasporas.” they are “diasporic” writers, and “diasporic” writers who leave their coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 home countries and have multiple cultural or ethnic backgrounds which deny their original cultural or ethnic identity which was based on such notions of history or tradition. for them, historical facts or truth are composed of multiple memories and “truth is available only in the telling and has no privileged existence in real life beyond human language” (castro 116). ishiguro belonged to nowhere and therefore being released from such a form of identity gave him the impetus to write and make discoveries. from the post colonial age onwards, the issue of identity has thus been disappearing, and the concept of modern literature has been evolving into something different. identity of authorship, the central tenet of literary texts, has been disappearing as, to quote roland barthes again: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. (barthes 148) this remark brings to mind an author who is attempting something very new, something very different from modern national fiction, reflecting multiple selves. nam le, a vietnamese-australian, is another writer who opened a new possibility in modern literature. he was born in vietnam in 1978, and his parents escaped from there after the vietnam war ended in the 1970s. his family stayed in a refugee camp in malaysia for a while and then arrived in australia as boat people and made their home there. he could be considered as a postcolonial writer as his background shows, but his writing does not reflect the framework of the postcolonial binary. nam le made his debut and his collection of short stories, the boat, was published. his name had a strong impact on the publisher as it reminds readers of the vietnamese, and the title of the book particularly reminded them of boat people. his book was a great success (arimitsu 399). nam le’s success, however, was not because he was an ethnic writer or because his writing was about his experiences as a refugee. his seven short stories neither reflect the author’s ethnicity nor are they about the author’s experiences, although the settings of two stories are in vietnam or about vietnamese people. the remaining five stories have nothing to do with the author’s ethnicity, personal experiences or even his times. the characters in the stories do not have anything at all in common with the author himself. ironically, this is one of the important reasons why his book attracted the attention of so many readers as well as critics. what nam le was interested in was to write something which transcended the national, ethnic, cultural as well as religious boundaries, instead of writing something reflecting his own background. he wrote stories with settings all over the world. nam le attempted to write from various viewpoints, transcending a single focused viewpoint, and to look at others through “other eyes” (cunningham 134). if he is trying to do something new in his fiction, he is trying to transcend his own “subjectivity.” nam le has multiple identities within himself; his ethnicity is vietnamese, his nationality is australian, and it is difficult for him to tell which his actual identity is. for coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 him, there is no clear border between “self” and “others” in the framework of postcolonialism. in nam le’s case, no national, ethnic and cultural identities hinder him from writing fiction. it might be said that he became interested in a totally different way to write. in his collection of short stories, the author wrote about several characters of different national, ethnic, cultural as well as religious backgrounds crossing all these borders. however, for the author, crossing borders does not simply mean to present multiple identities or to fuse them but to remove “subjectivity” from himself as well as his characters. the author could be anybody else other than himself and could create any characters disconnected from his own identity. most of his characters, therefore, do not act of their own accord because they are not based on a national, ethnic and cultural background. as a result, the author lets the characters float in their memories, illusions, and dreams as well as sub-consciousness. the author tends to keep a distance between himself and his characters. nam le thus writes about these characters not from his own viewpoint, but from their viewpoints. nam le simply narrates a human reality unenclosed by the limits of national, ethnic and cultural identities. he creates characters with various identities without reflecting his own identities but depending on something else, something beyond national, ethnic and cultural identities. he uses memories, fantasies, dreams and sub-consciousness, which are not solid or stable, but changeable, floating and ambiguous. while castro or ishiguro attempt to sever themselves from the past, nam le attempts to remove his “subjectivity,” and is able to create characters disconnected from the author’s identity. in his first collection of short stories, nam le fully removed “subjectivity” from his characters and created characters with multiple selves, locating them in any place or time by using his imagination. for him, transcending “nationality,” “ethnicity” and “cultural identity” is to remove “subjectivity,” and he thus took on the challenge to write fiction in a totally different style. it was necessary for him to do so, as the world is so rapidly globalizing that a single focused self is now disappearing and multiple selves are observed in many ways. finally, i would like to go back to haruki murakami. as i mentioned at the beginning of this paper, murakami’s works are read on worldwide scale, although they were originally written in japanese. his readers outside japan, therefore, have to read his works in translation but they are still well understood and evoke readers’ sympathy and affinity. his works thus transcend national, ethnic, and particularly linguistic boundaries. the reasons why murakami is accepted by many non-japanese readers could be that his works have something in common with contemporary readers, something to do with losing their “subjectivities” in this globalizing age. in murakami’s works, the character’s mind is usually floating just as if it were blown by the wind, difficult to understand, difficult to grasp. his central character usually chases his dreams but the fragments of the dreams are not linked to each other and never seem to create any story. the character does not usually concern himself with others at a deep level, just as he does not concern with himself at a deep level either. as masashi miura argues, murakami’s character behaves just as if he were air; as if his body did not exist, even did not belong to himself (miura 235-238). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 murakami is asking the question, what is “subjectivity” or “identity” in the present time, as one of the characters in his novel the end of the world and hard boiled wonderland asks: what is identity? it is the system of thought which is brought about by the accumulation of one’s past and memories. you could call it mind. everybody’s mind is all different from each other but almost nobody has not yet grasped most of your system of thought. i have not grasped it yet, nor have you. (murakami 79) according to this passage, murakami seems to believe that your mind is limitless and if you concentrate on the relation between literature and nation, you yourself set the limit to your literature. if you practice your literary study in your relation to the modern nation-state, that study ought to concentrate on realism in historical and materialist terms. paul jay argues that we need to continue to reorganize the study of literature in ways that move us beyond one outmoded nationalist paradigm in which we still operate and that highlight how during various periods literature has been caught up in the multi-directional flows friedman identifies. (jay 107) for murakami, concentrating on the relation between literature and nation was not his way to write a novel. this is the major reason why he goes beyond japanese literary lineage; he has not been directly influenced by his predecessors. it is often said that his creativity was not greatly supported by historical or conventional japanese literature, but rather influenced by american contemporary writers such as scott fitzgerald, truman capote, raymond carver, raymond chandler, kurt vonnegut, and richard brautigan, etc. he is a contemporary novelist as well as a good translator of these writers’ works. murakami himself has crossed national, cultural and linguistic borders. junzaburo nishiwaki, the japanese poet i mentioned at the beginning of this paper, was not successful in being awarded the nobel prize in the 1970s, since he was far from being “a typical japanese poet.” this was at a time when literature was supported by “national frameworks.” murakami’s success makes it possible to say that the definition of modern literature has thus drastically changed in this globalizing age. as i mentioned previously, not only murakami but also many writers from other countries cross national, cultural, and language barriers. this is a worldwide trend of contemporary literature, and this trend verifies a drastic change in modern literature, based on one nation, one culture and one language, and this eventually leads to the transformation or collapse of “subjectivity,” which had been an essential prerequisite for the development of modern literature. works cited arimitsu, yasue . “diaspora and identity.” eds. dennis haskell, megan mckinlay, and pamina rich, beyond good and evil? essays on the literature and culture of the asia-pacific region. crawley, western australia: university of western australia press, 2005. 137-138. print. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 arimitsu, yasue. “nam le’s the boat: a reflection of multiple selves.” eds.michael kenneally, rhona richman kenneally, and wolfgang zach. literatures in english: new ethical, cultural, and transnational perspectives. tuebingen: stauffenburg publ., 2013. 399. print. barthes, roland. “the death of the author.” roland barthes: image, music, text. new york: hill and wang, 1977. 142-148. bennett, andrew. the author. abingdon: routledge, 2005. print. castro, brian. looking for estrellita. st lucia: university of queensland press, 1999. print. cunningham, sophie. “the friction zone: sophie cunningham talks to nam le.” meanjin quarterly. autumn 2009: 134. print. desai, anita. “introduction.” salman rushdie. midnight’s children. london: random house, 1995. print. dascalu, cristina emanula. imaginary homeland of writers in exile: salman rushdie, bharati mukherjee, and v.s. naipaul. new york: cambria press, 2007. print. foucault, michel. “what is an author?” in j. harari, ed. textual strategies: perspectives in post-structuralist criticism. london: methuen & co. ltd. 1980. 141-160. print. gurr, andrew. writers in exile: the identity of home in modern literature. atlantic highlands, new jersey: humanities press, 1981. print. jay, paul. “beyond discipline?: globalization and the future of english.” liam connell, and nicky marsh, ed. literature and globalization: a reader. london: routledge, 2011. print. machida, shinya. “tanizaki, a candidate for nobel prize four times.” the yomiuri shinbun. 14 january 2013. 1-2. print. miura, masashi. shutai no henyo, gendai bungaku nohto. tokyo: chuoh kouronsha. 1988. print. murakami, haruki. sekai no owari to hardboiled wonderland vol. 2. tokyo: shincho bunko, 1985. print. naipaul, v.s. an area of darkness: an experience of india. harmondsworth: penguin, 1964. print. ozaki, mariko. “conscious of himself as an individual who is away from home.” the yomiuri shinbun. 5 november 2001, evening: 6. print. rushdie, salman. imaginary homelands. london: vintage books, 2010. print. said, edward. reflection on exile and other essays. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press, 2002. print. sorensen, eli park. postcolonial studies and the literary theory, interpretation and the novel, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. print. spivak, gayatri. death of a discipline. new york: columbia university press, 2003. print. i. the nobel prize in literature 2012, award ceremony speech, presentation speech by per wästberg, writer, member of the swedish academy, chairman of the nobel committee, 10 december 2012, nobelprize.org, the official web site of the nobel prizeonline posting, n.p. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/presentation-speech.html> ii. in january 2013, it was made public that nishiwaki, together with tanizaki junichiro and kawabata yasunari, had been one of the candidates for the nobel prize four times from 1958 to 1962. machida shinya, “tanizaki, a candidate for nobel prize four times,” the yomiuri shinbun, 2013, january 14, 12. http://www.amazon.co.jp/postcolonial-studies-literary-theory-interpretation/dp/0230252621/ref=la_b003aasxom_1_1?ie=utf8&qid=1366769745&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.co.jp/postcolonial-studies-literary-theory-interpretation/dp/0230252621/ref=la_b003aasxom_1_1?ie=utf8&qid=1366769745&sr=1-1 http://nobelprize.org/redirect/links_out/prizeawarder.php?from=/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2009/presentation-speech.html&object=svenskaakademien&to=http://www.svenskaakademien.se/en http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/presentation-speech.html coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 iii. the chinese writer yang yi was awarded the akutagawa prize, a japanese literary prize for promising writers, in 2008 for toki ga nijimu asa; david zopety was awarded the subaru literary award in 1996 for ichigen san; ian hideo levy was awarded several prestigious literary awards such as the noma literary award (1992), the osaragi jiro award (2005), and the itoh sei award (2009). these writers write in japanese. iv. edward w. said, reflection on exile and other essays (cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press, 2002), 269; gayatri spivak declares the death of comparative literature in the era of globalization in her death of a discipline (new york: columbia university press, 2003); the japanese critic karatani koujin remarks that japanese modern literature is coming to an end, although literature itself will continue, and says that the literature of the future will be unrecognizable. karatani kojin, kindai bungaku no shuen (tokyo: inscript, 2005), 30-31. acknowledgements: this paper is based on my research supported by the grants-in-aid for scientific research of the japanese government. i would like to express my sincere appreciation to all those concerned. yasue arimitsu is professor of english and australian studies, doshisha university, kyoto, japan. she is the author of finding a place: landscape and the search for identity in the early novels of patrick white (1986) and australian identity: struggle and transformation in australian literature (2003). she co-authored an introduction to australian studies, 2nd edition (2007). she has also edited and contributed to translating diamond dog: an anthology of contemporary australian short stories ― reflections on multicultural society (2008). microsoft word margarettrail25docx.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       315  ‘and she flies! beautiful’: the dislocating geography of football sound 1 margaret trail copyright©2013 margaret trail. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the overarching interest of this paper is in articulating the affective conditions of football’s play. it undertakes this through a consideration of the sonorous dimension of football, mapping its sounds across a framework borrowed from recent writings on sound-art and sonic geography. specifically it considers a continuum articulated by will scrimshaw (in relation to sound art exploring spatial notions), between sounds-of-place and sound-as-a-place. it then places sounds produced in football-play across this continuum, to see whether football’s sonic practices can be more finely articulated through doing so, and might in turn shed light on its affective conditions. keywords: sonic geography, sound art, football sound a sonic geography the notion of a sonic geography has been investigated over recent decades by both theorists and artists; in her editorial for a recent issue of interference, rachel o’dwyer connects this emergence with that general epistemological shift that has challenged the notion of cartesian space: ‘audio spatial practices … implicitly challenge the concept that a terrain is somehow comprised of elements that are straightforwardly empirical, objective and mappable’ (o’dwyer 2011, 1). against this has arisen the idea, and possibility, of spaces that are built from an interrelation with perception, subjective and contingent, structured by virtuality and so on. more specifically, the articulation of a sonic geography is inseparably connected with the development of recording technologies and phonography over the last century or so. phonography is seen to have inaugurated the conceptual field and acoustic palette of all sound (kahn 1999, 9). all sound is an audible event that not only includes every sound but also beyond-sound: ‘phonography did not simply produce sounds or ideas about                                                          1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       316  sounds but produced audibility, it heard past physiological constraints to the imaginary realms of conceptual sounds, ancient and future sounds, voices of inner speech and the dead, subatomic vibrations and so on …’ (kahn 1999, 9). this all sound – audibility itself – with its character of dislocating liquidity, is part of what has moved against the notion of stable cartesian space over the past century or so, assisting in the articulation of different notions of space: dislocating and liquid space, sonic geography. part of what has been brought into being by phonography and all sound is a tension between what we might call sounds-of-place, and sound-as-a-place. as recording technologies have become more portable and inexpensive, artists have been drawn to explore the sounds of particular places – soundscapes, sound marks – most notably in the practices of acoustic ecology (see schafer’s seminal the tuning of the world (1977)). however, also of course, artists have departed from the project of collecting sounds-of-place, using phonographic techniques to adventure in the ungrounded geography of sound itself. we might think of john cage’s imaginary landscapes, compositions that use amplification effects, not to produce recordings of the world, but rather sounds of the imaginary, invoking ‘not a physical landscape [but] a landscape in the future … as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like alice through the looking glass’ (cage 2011; dyson 1992, 378–382). we might say that the tension between these two poles, sounds-of-place, and sound-asa-place (sounds through the looking-glass) is a characteristic of the sonic geography that has emerged with the advent of all sound. in a recent article, will scrimshaw teases out this relation, focussing on sound-art compositions that occupy both poles, and the interzone between them (scrimshaw 2011). the grounded and the ungrounded scrimshaw writes about (indeed, as a sound artist himself, makes: scrimshaw 2012) sound-art compositions that combine an interest in site-specificity – their contextual dependence on specific locations, and the acoustic properties of these – with a sonority that moves ‘away from the specific through a practice of abstraction or schizophonic dislocation … towards the ambiguous spatial productivity of sonic energy in general’ (scrimshaw 2011, 5). he offers the example of airport symphony, a cd collection of compositions by different artists based on field recordings made at brisbane airport. scrimshaw notes how these works make ‘use of sounds occupying spaces between the specific, generic and general’ (scrimshaw 2011, 2). they are not merely field recordings of brisbane airport (specific), neither reflections on the environment of an airport (generic), nor sonic compositions that gesture beyond the airport (general). rather the works play across these possibilities, resulting in ‘the composition of something often beautiful and singular, if unspecific’ (scrimshaw 2011, 2). in this and other examples he explores ways in which phonography produces an interconnected condition between the specific or grounded, and ‘the more ambiguous notion of a site of sound in general’ (scrimshaw 2012, 7). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       317  his perspective amounts to an assertion that all sound – that audibility arising from phonographic technology – inevitably comprises contextual and symbolic dimensions, as well as a dislocating property that tips it away from the identifiable towards abstraction. thus, that the geography of sound always, to some degree, exceeds its groundedness in specific locations, opening towards ‘that which ceaselessly ungrounds and undermines place in the ceaseless production of space’ (scrimshaw 2011, 6). the geography of football scrimshaw’s articulation of this relation between the grounded and the ungrounded in sound art, has particular interest for me, a writer preoccupied with the sounds of football, which at first glance seems a most grounded, and identifiable phenomenon (trail 2009). the sounds of football are striking in part because of their exciting specificity, their relation with particular events – football games. however they seem also to possess a wide range of affects that depart these events, but which are less easy to articulate than the identifiable sound markers that saturate games. the opportunity arising here is to map some of football’s distinct sonic properties across scrimshaw’s continuum, to see if this might help articulate these affects, and to flesh out a dimension of football that is not bound to the site of its games, but perhaps exceeds them in inventive and productive ways. it will assist at the outset to describe football in a way that allows us to think of it as something more than its grounded specificity in football games. i would like to make use of a description made by the wonderful philosopher of movement and virtuality, brian massumi. massumi describes football games as an intertwined relation between an event-space, and an event-dimension. the event-space is empirical space, the grounded and particular site in which play occurs (for instance, the football oval), ‘in which the substantial terms in play intermix’ (bodies, ball, boundaries). on the other hand, and entwined with this, is the event-dimension or field of play ‘through which the substantial elements interrelate’ (massumi 2002, 76). this is an invisible but still real field of becoming, through which play occurs. it enables the interrelation and belonging-together of all of the things in play, ‘it is more fundamentally a field of potential than a substantial thing or object … the play in itself is groundless and limitless’ (massumi 2002, 72). massumi’s description advances the possibility that it is the event-dimension, or field of play, that defines football, rather than the rule-bound program of professional games we are all familiar with, and if this is so, well then football occurs not only on football ovals, but in back yards, and streets, in cars and living rooms, in all sites where play emerges, drawing bodies, and objects into relation together. furthermore, when we think of the space/s that football occupies, we can now think of this both as empirical space/s, and invisible space/s of emerging potential, a combination of concrete spaces and objects, and abstract spaces that are nevertheless real. now, with this expanded understanding of what football is and where it takes place, we can return to our thinking about football sound; wondering about the nature of its geography, and how sounds work there. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       318  referential sound in football’s play taking this opportunity to map (or perhaps scribble, since the technique will be playful and speculative, rather than bound to a precise model of representation) some of football’s distinct sonic properties across scrimshaw’s continuum, i will begin by considering certain identifiable sounds – sounds that are referential and/or symbolic – then i will speculate about what happens to them, in relation to displacement towards abstraction. thwock! the sound of the boot on the ball is a sound mark in football. scrimshaw borrows this term from the acoustic ecologists, to refer to ‘recurrent sound events considered characteristic of a locale’ (scrimshaw 2011, 3). in football the particular place in which the sound mark is originally made is not so important. for the sound mark/s of football can appear in the car (we hear them on the radio), drift through the window when we are sick in bed, call to us when we are walking down the street, or picnicking at the beach. football sounds travel. the sound mark boot-on-ball is not native to a place. rather it marks football in whatever place it is heard, where football is that expanded dimension of play described above. the locale that the sound of boot-on-ball refers to, is football’s event-dimension: play. boot-on-ball is a sound that seems almost inevitably produced whenever football’s play dimension is activated – even if we are listening to a game in the car, feet may twitch, and sound of impact be reproduced in slapping the steering wheel or armrest. i contend, this sound – thwock – and certain other sounds of impact: bodies colliding, sound of footfall/running, and the calls of players on-ground, all serve in some fundamental way to mark football. they can be thought of as occupying the epicentre of the referential sound dimension of football’s play. expanding our understanding of this referential dimension we might then consider those linguistic versions of games that attend football games, such as media commentary and barracking. whilst these may not be fundamental to it, nevertheless they are commonplace sonic practices that refer to football in particular. ball! commentary’s referentiality is obvious. it has the function of communicating the unfolding drama of a game to a remote audience. barracking – the cries and commands of the spectators – is also a sonic practice that refers to a particular game. furthermore both of these refer to football’s play dimension in general. consider how players in scratch football games or in practice forms like kick-to-kick or wall-ball, often provide playful commentary for themselves: she lines it up … oh, that is beautiful! this is not ‘real’ commentary, with intent to communicate the action of a game to remote audiences, but rather refers to football’s field of play. phrases from barracking are used in the same way. calls that might be heard in the crowd on match day, reappear in informal play contexts: ball! we might cry, or in the back! once again, this is not coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       319  refereed play, the phrases do not mean what they do in formal games. rather, they conjure the event-dimension of football, they refer to football’s play. following scrimshaw’s notion of a continuum between sounds-of-place and sound-asa-place, our next question should be: but does football sound depart this referentiality, this pointing back to itself? does its sonic geography ever open onto the other affects that scrimshaw is interested in, that opposite pole: ‘moving … towards the ambiguous spatial productivity of sonic energy in general’ (scrimshaw 2011, 5)? while there may be no aesthetician at work in it, no singular composer, i think we can nevertheless advance the possibility that a kind of embedded practice exists in the sonic geography of football that does approach this other pole of the continuum. beyond referentiality … we have noted above the incorporation of referential signs of commentary and barracking in informal versions of football play, and said that they no longer ‘mean’ when they pop up in these new sites, or not what they did before. they still refer (to football) but there has been a dislocation. this dislocation is a fundamental condition of sounding. sound is nimble, it moves from the site of its production, whether simply through the air, or by means of recording and transmission, or via chains of messagegiving, word-of-mouth. in the case of self-commentary during a round of kick-to-kick, however, the dislocation is not simply translocation in space and time, but also a shift of registers from the serious to the playful: language moves from the task of communication to the play of joking. haha! this dislocation of serious language is a distinctive feature of the sonic geography of football. for all its seriousness, football is thick with joking. banter, wit, ribaldry are all styles of joke-language that pervade it. they swirl through it on ground, in the crowd, throughout sports media, and in the practice of making wry asides relating to football in social settings that are not football (known colloquially as ‘taking your boots along’). it is my contention that these practices of joking are a feature of football’s sonic geography in which sound makes a move from referentiality towards abstraction. paolo virno has written about the abstraction of jokes. of particular interest his view that ‘jokes are well defined linguistic games, equipped with unique techniques whose remarkable function consists … in exhibiting the transformability of all linguistic games’ (virno 2008, 72–73, his emphasis). which is to say, jokes refer, but what they refer to is the potential undoing of all language, the contingency of representation. this is why i claim them for sonic abstraction within football. the work they do is to unsettle groundedness and particularity, countering serious language – commands, judgement calls and analysis – with irreverence, evasiveness, ungrounded assertions and laughter. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       320  roar! the other strand of football sound that tends towards abstraction, away from referential sound marks, is the practice of noise. football noise is produced most obviously by large crowds in football stadiums, during football games. of course this noise, the roar of the football crowd, is made up of words; commands and chants that refer explicitly to play. however, when produced by a crowd, these words develop an additional power, that of noise, which shifts or doubles the work of words with a non-referential dimension. noise is non-referential in the sense that it disturbs perception, it does not ‘mean’. paul hegarty: ‘noise [blocks] thought, blocks attempts to structure meaning and coherence’ (hegarty 2007, 145). the gigantic sound mustered by crowds in stadiums surpasses the work of shouting directions to players that the crowd is nevertheless involved in. as it gathers volume, crowd-sound gathers intent to wound and confuse, to rupture and sweep away possibility of composure in the opponent. this perceptiondisturbing power of noise is deployed in football as a combative weapon. hiss … furthermore noise-weaponry is not only made from high-volume crowd-sound, but appears in other, quieter, ways as well. for instance in the use of sledging, or vile language, that opponents direct at each other during play (see trail 2010 for a discussion of this in relation to racial vilification). sledging aims to ‘psych out’ or disturb the concentration of the opponent. following hegarty again, noise is understood here as an excess, a too-muchness, that ‘happens to “me”, is beyond my control … threatens me, is part of the other i define myself against’ (hegarty 2007, 4). while sledging is referential and symbolic, it nevertheless partakes of the logic of noise. excess to normal conversation, it is too much, uninvited, it threatens, and seeks to scramble meaning and coherence through verbal assault. in both of these examples, noise is at work in football’s play, as a sonic phenomenon mustered to attack the referential and symbolic, opening a dimension of sound production that is not for communication, but rather to shut it down. conclusion to gather. we have been speculating about the geography of football sound, placing its sounds on a continuum that extends from sounds-of-place through to sound-as-a-place; where sounds-of-place are markers, referential and/or symbolic, and sound-as-a-place is a more abstract destination containing an obscure sonic productivity that has real affects, even though neither referential nor symbolic. certain sounds – boot-on-ball, bodies colliding, whistles, the calls of players – we have proposed lie at the epicentre of football referentiality. then we have traced outwards (towards abstraction) through language-versions of play – commentary and barracking – that are adapted in informal play variations of the game, and on to the ungrounded and disjunctive language practices of jokes. at the pole position of football-sound abstraction we have placed noise, in which language-sounds gather force sufficient to undo thinking and coherence, seeking to wound through disturbing power. no doubt these abstractions – jokes, noise – still lie close to the referential, and for all their disruptiveness, still draw upon coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       321  football’s event-dimension for their affective power (in other words, they need football to exist at all). nevertheless they do also indicate how even a sport as obsessed with concrete effects as football is, produces in its sounding, a range of effects and affects that are in excess of the empirical spaces and substantial terms we usually think of in defining it. this style of speculation has the potential to bring detail to our understandings of what football is, or might be. sound is at work in football throughout a geography – tacitly understood by its participants – that exceeds the empirical sites of football games. football-dislocated-in-sound migrates across a set of sites whose boundaries are indistinct but which are nevertheless marked, by sonic and speech signs, and practices of wit and noise that have real effects. this way of perceiving and thinking about football enables a shift, a lift-off, from conceiving of it always as bounded by empirical space/s. it presents instead the opportunity to see how its play articulates across this range of interconnecting sites: concrete and invisible, referential and abstract. this in turn has the potential to extend our knowledge of football’s affects … if we have the patience to listen. references cage j. (2011) the works for percussion1, mode records, new york, cd booklet. dyson, f. (1992) ‘the ear that would hear sounds in themselves: john cage 19351965’, in kahn, d and whitehead, g (eds) wireless imagination: sound radio and the avant garde, mit press, cambridge, massachusetts and london, england. hegarty, p. (2007) noise/music: a history, continuum, new york and london. kahn, d. (1999) noise water meat: a history of sound in the arts, mit press, cambridge, massachusetts and london, england. massumi b. (2002) parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation, duke university press, durham & london. o’dwyer, r. (2011) ‘editorial: a sonic geography: rethinking auditory spatial practices’, interference: a journal of audio culture, issue 2 < http://www.interferencejournal.com> accessed 1st october, 2012. schafer, r. m. (1994) [1977] the soundscape: and the tuning of the world, destiny books, vermont. scrimshaw, w. (2011) ‘any place whatever: schizophonic dislocation and the sound of space in general’, interference: a journal of audio culture, issue 2 < http://www. interferencejournal.com> accessed 1st october, 2012 scrimshaw, w. (2012) works <http://willschrimshaw.net/category/work/> accessed 1st october, 2012. trail, m. (2009) ‘“there’s the siren!” aurality and representation of the sounds of (australian) football’, unpublished doctoral thesis, school of communication and the arts, victoria university. trail. m. m. (2010) ‘sonic trickery in swarming play: football’s dangerous fun’ double dialogues, issue 13, summer < http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue _thirteen/trail.html> accessed 15th october, 2012. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       322  virno, p. (2008) multitude: between innovation and negation, semiotext(e), los angeles. margaret meran trail is a senior lecturer in performance studies at victoria university, melbourne. a graduate of the victorian college of the arts, school of drama, she has many years experience as a performance maker, and a special interest in the effects and affects of sound in theatre. her phd thesis, ‘“there’s the siren!” aurality and representation of the sounds of australian football’, was completed in 2009, and won the vice chancellors peak award for research excellence in that year. she continues her research into sonic affect through writing, composition and performance. (college of arts, victoria university, melbourne, victoria, australia. email: margaret.trail@vu.edu.au) microsoft word in memoriam list coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 bruce bennett 1941–2012 coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 in memoriam: bruce bennett anne holden ronning, bergan university brian worsfold, lleida university britta olinder, gothenburg university catalina ribas, barcelona university david callahan, universidade de aveiro delys bird, university of western australia dieter riemenschneider dolores herrero, zaragoza university donna coates, universit of calgary elisa morera de la vall, barcelona university geoffrey davis, aachen university john c. hawley,president of the us chapter of aclals jose dalisay jr., university of the philippines marc delrez, university of liège maria vidal grau, lleida university paul eggert, university of new south wales ranjan goonetilleke, santosh sareen, jawaharlal nehru university sissy helff, technische universitaet darmstadt sue ballyn barcelona university werner senn, berne university wolfgang zach, innsbruck university microsoft word billboyd10.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   97 (hardly) anyone listening? writing silent geography 1 bill boyd copyright©2013 bill boyd. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: in 1984, j. douglas porteous challenged the geography world to silence. true geographical appreciation cannot be expressed in prose; the logical conclusion is for geographers to be silent. given that they cannot be silent, porteous advocated nontraditional writing, such as poetry. in 1994, paul cloke illustrated the power of reflective narrative for a geographer grappling to understand the world. in 1998, i started writing geographic poetry. in 2012, i draw these strands together in this reflective essay, drawing on a poetic journey over a decade old now. can i reflect a sense of place or place-making that transcends traditional geographical expression? did porteous truly open a geographic window otherwise closed to me? i conclude the poetry does create geographical sense and sensibility, but more as constructed possibilities than as objective realities. the poetry provides glimpses into the experiences of geographical displacement encountered by many new australians, and thus may best be considered as metageographical expressions. key words: experiential geography, geographical poetry, j. douglas porteous, geographical displacement, metageography introduction “the publication of geographical insights in nontraditional forms could be the first step towards the goal of silent place appreciation”. thus, in 1984 (p.373), the experientialist geographer, j. douglas porteous, challenged the then rather staid discipline of geography to break out of the “dull prose of academe” (porteous, 1984: 372). for a young geographer making his tentative way into a career of physical geography, but even then with inclinations towards the cultural end of geography, this was simultaneously exhilarating and daunting. i read, with delight, porteous’ four geographic poems, ‘ionnina’, ‘new delhi, 1976’, ‘rangoon, 1976’ and ‘bangladesh, 1976’, but could see no way to harness their power in my own geographic writing at the time.                                                          1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   98 the next year, porteous (1985) expanded the theme with structure: a home/away – inside/outside model. my scholarly challenge was now, how to use this? in 1994, porteous responded to marcus doel’s ‘proverbs for paranoids: writing geography on hallowed ground’ with two poems – the entire text of the paper – ‘narrative: pornographic voyeurism’ and ‘metanarrative: bodies without organs”. the challenge was truly set. the opportunity for me, however, only crystallized with the publication of paul cloke’s 1994 ‘(en)culturing political geography: a life in the day of a ‘rural geographer’. this extended essay, born out of “something happening on the way” during a conventional research project on the nature of english rurality, tackled the implicitly poetic nature of the ‘rural’, its multiplicity and ambiguity: the authors found that the ‘rural’ became the sticking point. respondents used it in different ways – as a bludgeon, as a badge, as a barometer – to signify many different things – security, identity, community, domesticity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity – nearly always drawing on many different sources – the media, the landscape, friends and kin, animals. it became abundantly clear that the ‘rural’, whatever chameleon form it took, was a prime and deeply-felt determinant in the actions of many respondents. yet it was also clear to the authors that they possessed no theoretical framework that could allow them to negotiate the ‘rural’ to deconstruct its diverse nature as a category. rather, each of the extended essays in this book [there are five] is an attempt by each author to draw out one aspect of the rural by drawing on different traditions in social and cultural theory. (cloke et al., 1994, back cover) reflective narrative, poetry, and a research question the links between porteous and cloke are not immediately evident. they, however, lie in my personal response: cloke validated the practice of self-reflection and reflective narrative as legitimate, indeed essential, scholarly activities. i now, for example, regularly ask students to read cloke as part of their professional and academic development, and thereafter to write an equivalent, if somewhat shorter, account of their own relationship to their academic experience. the focus is predominantly on selfawareness. for me, however, cloke's reflections on his academic journey were more important: they clearly shaped his approach to the theories of in his discipline; they can influence my own. he represents a 1990s acceptance of the utility of biographical reflection, not only for theory but also as methodological pursuit in its own right. inspired, i experimented with writing styles, trying to break from the strictures of ‘scientific’ writing (boyd, 1996, 1999, 2001). this culminated in the successful submission of a narrative doctoral thesis (boyd, 2005a). i even attempted to write in a self-consciously ‘post-modern’ style: i think my extended essay – ‘rigidity and a changing order ... disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition: fluidity of cultural values and cultural heritage management’ (boyd et al., 2005) – got away with it! one of cloke’s lessons was that of the importance of serendipity. significant career events may be the seemingly least important: the formative role of a fellow student rather than the great professor, for example. my serendipitous event was a 1998 field trip to vietnam, where, cushioned by tropical humidity and the vitality of hanoi, in coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   99 spare moments between geological site visits, i started writing poetry. i had now come full circle: porteous 1984 – cloke 1996 – boyd in 1998. i was, at least, responding to porteous’ 1984 lament that “hardly anyone listens”. my challenge now is to publish that, and subsequent, geographic poetry, in scholarly journals: will anyone listen? that is my humanist aim, my research agenda: to take the reality of geographical observation and experience, to break the silence that otherwise persists, to move beyond a personal reflection, and to inform the scholarly domain. can i capture the essence of the places and landscapes i visit? can i reflect a sense of place that transcends traditional geographical data? did porteous truly open a geographic window otherwise closed to me? these are my research questions. drawing on all the components of porteous’ conceptual framework for humanist literary geography (‘sense of place’, ‘entrapment’, ‘the traveler’, ‘journey, exile, yearning’; porteous, 1985), my answers follow in this poetic essay. to explore this landscape, i draw on chapter 4: reconciliation, a chapter in a selfpublished book of poetry (boyd, 2005b), the opening chapter of a part entitled ‘resolution: exploring new land’. in doing so, i recognise now that i was seeking to engage porteous’ (2005) conceptual frameworks of ‘sense of place’, ‘entrapment’, ‘the traveler’, and ‘journey, exile, yearning’. the chapter was originally composed of four parts: ‘opening the borders’, ‘vitalis verdant’, ‘crossing the language lines’, and ‘reconciliation’. i recognise now, in retrospect, that these sought to place me in historic places and landscape, in my then current fluid place in the world as a global traveler and as a migrant, and, finally, as a new australian. on the border crossing to the land of reconciliation   an abstract as such: a travel guide to the land of reconciliation crusty old servitor, man of words with tales to stir the imagination toothlessly smiling the possibilities hissing the awfulness of the past the unacceptabilities making them seem quite reasonable bringing to life the shackles, the forced marches, the stolen children, the virtues of transporting men to hell, the massacred people for simply being people. keen young student summer vacationer liberal with the truth telling other people’s stories with authority commanded of youth unconditionally correct, no questions asked, the book says so the book says so. past employee reincarnated with tales of glory shedding years of dead end jobs low pay compromised health to glorify the mine, the prison, the workhouse, the dust cloud, the asbestos, the poison the days and the weeks and the months and the years of poverty of unemployment of underemployment of being used the rural, the ideal, sunset reflecting in the clouds of despair all repackaged as a glorious past, a national identity only hundreds died, you know, more (proudly he said) than in the official records. the volunteer, end of life, deprived of other meaning, coming alive in the past the local knowledge holder, more tales than you could poke a stick at, more than you need the volunteer who won’t go home: the tour is home, the museum the abandoned factory, the water wheel that sticks, replete in moss, dribbling water coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   100 hinting at his past. travel guides to entertain, to illuminate, to impress, the stay alive, to revive where are we going? what are we doing? did you know? did you know? did you know? gory pasts, glory pasts, significant people, kings queens peasants, landlords, governors, rebels, sailors, bush rangers discovery, uprising, war, massacres, farming, settling and and and. travel guides: the front line troops of reconciliation taking sides in the culture wars re-writing the history again again again until the laughs and the gasps and the photostops are just right right, history has arrived at its correct shape or perhaps until someone understands what it was really like and says sorry. my tour guide will be less grand, desires to be less grand, is designed to be less grand will it end up just a slippery, just a politically (in)correct, just a historically re-written as any other journey to reconciliation? i am a teacher teaching science students about culture whose many words are just not enough a writer of science who wants to touch the soul a traveller of countries, a stranger in every land, slight familiarity, relatively at ease a familiar with airport lounges, local transport, hotels small and large an eater of everything, a brave stomach, a walker and pillion rider of asian streets an unfamiliar with languages, snippets of many but lost to hand waves and smiles in most others a traveller in the mind the soul the words the flesh inner journey traveller outer journey traveller whose travelling started before time in a fractured europe in times less fair than now, in societies less forgiving, less able to forgive travelling to a rosy future society to the land of reconciliation. kiss – reconciliation, a start it started with a kiss so the song goes it started with a kiss in a real life, more valuable than any pop hit it started with a kiss a mother’s kiss to be precise a kiss at the threshold of a life, a new life, all new lives old and new a mother’s kiss for a mother’s child a mother’s kiss of a child of the changing world a mother’s kiss for her child in a new world for her, her first contribution to a new world a mother’s kiss for a child who would travel unrestricted where generations had feared to go a child whose rules would move and flow, would be made anew whose life would slip between the crack of liberal acceptance so long denied others coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   101 a mother’s kiss stretching across the fractured lines of a europe finding itself again a mother’s kiss patching war torn refuge, the refugee’s kiss of hope a kiss promising no more lost childhoods, no more threatened youth, no more dangerous futures a kiss of stability, future, friendship across the barriers a kiss where a new language was being learnt, new habits that may never quite work a kiss nevertheless, meaning as much as the foreign tongue forced on the runaway, on the new start a kiss attached by threads to country now erased from the global map, wiped out from being country assigned to history, reassigned in the future country of distant dreams of innocence, stolen in a moment closed to all but the imagination, ghosts whispering of what may be, may have been a country hinted at in the kiss, the kiss tied to the web of history the last kiss of centuries and communities wiped out with a single stroke country, dreams, community to be reconciled half a century later, reconciliation started with the mother’s kiss perhaps it started with a kiss speaking of travel, always travel running away from the destruction, running towards a rebuilding travelling to flee, travelling to seek something the mother running to live, running to escape time and again i can never tell, but must assume, i assume the traveller’s habit borne of that kiss my traveller’s eyes seeking something, an understanding possibly witnessing, if lucky confirming, the differences and the similarities thrilling in the uncertainty, perhaps seeking it in safer ways than the mother had to finding the reasons for intolerance, for misunderstanding, for non-understanding seeking the reconciliation needed to tie the threads, to patch the cracks, to solve the historical riddle, seeking seeking. it started with a kiss, a mother’s kiss to be precise and ended with this, my footloose search and may end in a reconciliation. vitalis verdant preface i write responding to a good friend’s challenge you, j. douglas, old friend who provoked the world to write geographic poetry we never met save through words yours, to be precise, have remained my companion and at last i try geographic poetry coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   102 to silence! your clarion call you geographers who deign to understand place who profane to speak upon it and if not, silence! otherwise, geographic poetry hanoi, may 2001 dark sticky room inhabited by streetscapes of sound in tropical distraction i think upon geographic poetry how, jd? do i distil the poetry of place? the essence of being in someone else’s land? humid words seep into my consciousness vibrant city enveloping my mind thickness of approaching tropical rain whispering: vital, verdant vital … constant motion movement forever vital pulsing: people people people cities, towns, villages vitality springs from excited tongues bus horns, street-side stalls, badminton in streets, tai chi in parks shared action, experience common to the crowd doing, simply doing rural trucks, spluttering overloaded honda dreams escape faltering simsons black soviet limousines, green government jeeps coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   103 geriatric buses skewed, sporting trophies of roadside close encounters still alive alive alive windshields boasting: who loves ya, baby? blackened coal towns dusted beyond belief every coal dust grain alive vital blackness … verdant verdant indochin: french colonial legacy what else defines? overgrowth tropical vines rice forest even imported gums are verdant! their antipodean cousins barely green verdant eucalyptus! swaying competing with bamboo for airspace thick with tropical promise verdant! the european word could hardly have imagined lush vital energy hardly imagined tropical verdant verdant memory: celtic dreaming celtic greenness creeps into my hanoi room decades gone my tropical mind soggy, trying to recall geographical origins how far have i come? celtic verdant at the other end of this continent? i wade through tropical downpours and think: driech the word means nothing to most of the world but everything to the poor wee souls trudging through porridge scotch mist coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   104 tramping through puddles of misery tropical wet but cold cold cold and dark dark glasgow streets 4pm shimmering sleet, engine oil illuminating nothing but scowls driech memories like snot verdant from perpetual cold noses tropical joy: celtic memory vita vitalis: vita verdant so, jd, are you satisfied? i say nothing of populations, maps, landforms of areas, elevations, gdps, latitudes/longitudes … are you satisfied? if i was older a medieval scholar, an enlightened mind, a modernist, i might classify my visions in frantic science envy varieties of national spirit, natural species as vita vitalis as vita verdant vitalis verdant byron bay 2004 – bad poetry and the great poet did i tell you that i once met a chinese poet? at a poetryreading it was, vicariously he was on the stage, and i was not but i did met him, i say, although he met the air above our heads gazing across a sea of eager ears he was ears glazed by the doldrums of clever poetrytalk. yes, i once met a chinese poet. he was waving words at us, shockwaves of anger and frustration of inbetweenness, of needing to be placed and needing to be placeless words, perhaps, if he could admit it, of regret. but he was too clever for that. he was a poet, after all, trading on words of cleverness turning the light off to make things clearer and revelling in his smug multilingual skills, dipping and slipping between words coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   105 eloquently fluent in his almost broken english eloquently fluent in his almost broken command of language eloquently fluent, as a poet should be parading his designer chinglish, challenging us with an intellectual orientalism forcing our interstitial cross-cultural senses, bhabhaesque playing with an exotic, invented, pictographic language englese teasing us willing recipients. chinese and english and english and chinese and chinese and english and english and chinese extolling the advantage, indeed virtue, of being between, within, outside, inside, nowhere, and everywhere translating, transposing inventing and growling and yapping and laughing at the world discussing the unknowable, the incomprehensible, and being articulately incomprehensible he tells us how important it is to be unpublishable. he took a breath and then asked us: bad poetry, can you write bad poetry? so bad that it is truly awful, for that is the only really good poetry why be good? why be average? why say nothing worth saying? but before our collective minds could answer, he declared: fuck you australia!! yes!! fuck you australia!! as never before declared in australia a poem for australia, a poem of australia, a poem in australia a poem never to be recited in australia. we all nodded, wisely yes, we were probably all thinking and yes, we were probably all reacting (inwardly, for it does not do for a poetryaudience to be outwardly shocked) just as he probably wanted us to think and just as he probably wanted us to react. but this is poetry so, sagely we all clapped, laughing with nervous edge, feeling just a little bit clever our middle class minds patting our middle class backs our middle class intellects congratulating our middle class abilities to be daring to accept profanities, and rudeness, and shocking and seemingly anti-australianness as something rather clever. our collective in-breaths applauded the audacity, accepted the audacity how clever!! nodding in silent australian agreement, a conformity of recognition how clever indeed!! for he is a great poet. picture this – hong kong august 2004 picture this a bar with abba playing and english oaks and special heineken on special in tropical airconditioned airconditioning except when it doesn’t work international hotel coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   106 and forget the rest the trickity trackity trams and the mtr and the smog and the bits and the pieces spilling onto street side from shops bigger than a postage stamp but not much more and a million times livelier the highrise rise rise rise everywhere everywhere walls of protection high high into the smog and the disappearing into the sky such as it is and the boats floating on nothing the tide floating and the stillness of polluted water in the bay tide swallowing when i read the tourist brochures i realize this is hong kong wonders never cease hong kong wonders on tour highlights highlights highlights highlighs ever highlights except for the one million the two million the three million and the more who live a million feet above the street and ignore the hong kong dolphin watching morning tea and tai chi tour the heritage the heritage the heritage heritage tour horse racing happy valley lantau island monastery (full day tour with vegetarian lunch) da da da da here come the busses double decker double decker double decker double back back wheel in imitation of the old country but only in hong kong could these dinosaurs look just as they should and i don’t mean china me old china voices english voices china china china american voices dutch german china scottish lost in translation chinese chinese chinese it’s all chinese to me but no one really cares do they notice the tourists there’s no bumping in crowds there’s no threat bugger them all ‘cos no-one knows what they’re doing here least of all them let’s get back to that tourist trail the real hong kong harbour tour by night when all decent people are scurry scurry scrurrying shopping when the heat’s not too hot and the life’s the street spilling cheap clothes and plumbing and colours and and and and and and on the street medicines and magazines jackhammers by night and it’s down there on the java street and it’s out there on the electricity street and the king’s road and the causeway bay and the north point and kowloon and it’s hong kong island and it’s places and it’s places and it’s places and it’s people and it’s people and it’s people the great history of street names ignore the business and walk all over them the buses keep rumbling and the trams keep rumbling and the mrt just smoothes along gliding ferries ferries ferries trams and people so picture this lost in translation with abba and tom jones and the sixties crooning to a drum machine coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   107 romantic ballads bold as cher white chiffon and amazing cover stuff just as well we came to hong kong for the genuine cover young singers too young to know and from the other end of the world ageing tourists nod sad memories you’ve come all this way for sad memories from seventies midwest for recognition for a lost youth beyond the ken of hong kong business men white shirt black slacks lost from the west and happy from the east consuming the abba the whiskey the flushing flushing and flushing drunk in a way the strutting white fellow business men cannot lost tourists sitting upstairs lost lost and lost foreign land in the foreign bar foreign land in the foreign street the guide it not here for the real hong kong picture this. my words must be careful – ngurrara my words must be careful i must be careful how i craft my words for my words must be careful they must care how they craft my voice my words your words are spirits and the spirits are everywhere not the ghostly passages of european tales although they are here too whispering regret not the angry spirits of protestant repression of catholic beatification although they are here too in glorious redemption falling over but the spirits of the soul of the earth of the air of the existential now the spirits beyond my words the spirits who so carefully crafted this earth and gave us what we call with hesitation law yes i must be careful how i craft my words for they will also be hesitant inadequate too shallow too deep too other world to other history to touch the meaning but they are what i have and they are what i must use they are the reality readily labelled words just words embedded in my vision of the world as entity idea physical visual sensual conceived in my present and past experienced deeper karma nirvana heaven holy ghost intrudes reminders of other worlds not mere spiritual trinkets faeries playing dancing teasing or leprechauns prodding kicking biting stealing with malevolent joy but deeper the joy of existence i feel it in my words words stumbling over ripples of other worldliness a heartbeat missed the deja vu of coincidence the crying country weeping in pain ageing before its time sad to see the passing of old friends by chance my words crawling limping falling over meet an old unknown a new friend ngurrara coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   108 i have to talk of my words for this is all i have words is all it is the flow of words like water over stones hiding mirroring shaping reshaping speaking of the riverbed the catchment sheep grazing trees murdered water running away words words words water words shapeless in themselves yet shaping and shaping and shaping our futures formed in reflected depth formed of a history and forming the history the flow of words is all i have your flow is ngurrara and i hear a glimpse of ngurrara the ngurrara the country that speaks of love and being and creation ngurrara listen to the ngurrara ngurrara i and ngurrara ii if you listen close still and shut eyed if you listen to the words rippling across country you will hear ngurrara and you will see ngurrara and you will listen for the wangarr and you will listen for the mangi rumbles of the tongue foreign to mine rumbles so slight you may miss them if you do not listen rumble of the fundamentals the wangarr and the mangi if you do not listen you will walk blind across wangarr mangi and that would be wrong the ghost spirits the spirit ghosts the images of the soul the soul of the image of the reality the images remain forever listen to the ngurrara echoing through the earth the gentle feet the voices the gentle shoosh the rumble of stories telling the ever present past and present the very being echo across the years and through the years and against the years through the forever timelessly alive a law a spirit a spirit law and yet with this help my mind and my voice are stumping settler blind through the dust my feet stumble blind tripping blind over mangi mangi of the earth of the place of all the ancestral beings who wince at my clumsiness if i am lucky they pity me here and now my feet and my mind stranger blind to the soil the dust the ochre to the air to the water to the beings alive alive alive the desert is in my mind the desert is alive and wakening to the wangarr and to the mangi to the wangarr words to the wangarr for it is there for all to see if we tread lightly listening sightening but ngurrara also made me cry for it is not mine and i am sad to loose something i never had i read of auctions of sales of money of masterpieces and i sense the loss the value so much greater than the money the mangi is enduring i must believe so much more enduring than the money and the moneyed lives but my sadness must pass for the gift of the ngurrara is so much greater thank you thank you thank you thank you skipper and chuguna and all the others whose names i do not know thank you thank you geraldine who opened the window to let me meet ngurrara coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   109 thank you all for telling your stories for sharing the ngurrara for lifting my eyes my words for lightening my step for opening the way to ngurrara and wangarr and mangi to ngurrara the country the language the law the story the everything the flow though i will never really know it to wangarr the ghost image as best as a white fellow can translate the ghost image englishword that i can imagine all things remain memories alive although i can never really know walmajarriwords walmajarri wangarr i am sorry and to mangi the spirit the soul the reality the discernable after the departure the discernable long after the person has gone the englishwords failing again but i can imagine lover’s memories palpable real enabling in their certainty but not the walmajarriwords the walmajarriimages my words mere dotes and strokes infant fumblings of language white imagining walmajarri reality i am sorry but thankful for the glimpse. a discussion – so what? given this poetic, geographical and, admittedly, personal journey, i now return to my original research questions. have i captured the essence of the places and landscapes i have visited? do these expressions reflect a sense of place that transcends traditional geographical data? and did porteous truly open a geographic window otherwise closed to me? i would argue that the answers are yes; part of the evidence lies in a growing sense of my own global place in the world, of a clearer sense of the groundedness of here and now, and of my emerging acceptance with being, as a new australian, displaced and placeless. however, is better to characterise this affirmative as being not only (or rather than) capturing the essence of the places and landscapes i have visited, but i have captured my essence of these places and landscapes. clearly the poems simply represent my own personal and subjective understandings, a given that the reader will have to take as given. however, returning to porteous’ (1985) conceptual framework for humanist literary geography, it is possible to claim that these poetic essays genuinely depict a ‘sense of place’ – albeit couched in terms of overlapping senses of many places – in ways that other media, more objective geographical writing, for example, may find harder to. the great travel writers – the eric newbys of the world – also create poetries of place, drawing on their ease of language to create prose grounded in the personal experience. other themes from porteous, furthermore, abound in these poems. while they are all explicitly about the ‘traveler’ – that was, at that time, my sense of self-being – they all, as i re-read them, more strongly capture a sensibility of ‘entrapment’. the places are inhabited by people struggling to belong or to escape; the places are entrapped by externalities other than what might be considered to be their objective realities, the impacts of war, the clashes of east and west, the weight of history, the shackles of cultural stereotypes … we could equally identify (porteus’) elements of ‘journey, exile, yearning’. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   110 the opening poems – ‘on the border crossing to the land of reconciliation’ and ‘kiss – reconciliation, a start’ – represent a self-reflection during the few years that had past since i first visited my mother’s homeland in central europe. she was a refugee after the war, and had not had the opportunity to return to her home in half a century. i was returning to stories and pictures; she was returning to her life. it took fifty years for her to return to her village, for her to meet the people now living normal lives in her home – not her home now, it was then; it will always be her home but never can be. i had lived long enough in australia to be aware of the importance of reconciliation. in a village a million cultural miles away, i first plumbed greater depths of reconciliation – not just the worries and uncertainties of the displaced and the replaced, the refugees and the incomers, the former and the new citizens, the march of history and re-history, the writing and the re-writing, the marks it these all leave on all involved. but how was i to write about it? i gifted myself a set chronicle of pre-war memoirs from the village – several volumes is what might be taken as objective writing about this complex place – and almost wept when i saw the faces in the photographs, faces of comfortable lives, normal lives, lives with futures, faces with the innocence that only comes with having no idea what can possibly come, what can possibly destroy everyone’s future. i cannot tell these stories; they are part of me, but are not mine. can i really write about them? how do they tie into my own story? i did tell stories on my return, but who can really appreciate my faltering sense of history? my accent is wrong, it comes from the other half of my history, and my displaced history remains hidden: school in post-war britain taught me that much. hidden histories. aboriginal friends became my best listeners. one in particular is most articulate about his family’s disarticulation, disruption, forced moves, loss of country, constant reassertion of being. sharing personal histories one day, he heard me out, remaining silent and thoughtful. his comment, finally: we are all the same really. i thank him. in the meantime, i traveled: was that the ghost of my history? denied the forced displacement of my forbearers, i seem to have sought voluntary displacement. in review, many years later, i ask whether this the fate of the new australian? in an untroubled life, travel provides a modicum of anxiety, tension, uncertainty. it also opens a small window on difference, a possible reconciliatory window. i see much and forget more; snippets end up as words in letters, notebooks, scribbles on maps, book margins; poems trickle out. they guide me across the world to a reconciliation. and in this travel, i wrote, in bits – because it was only bits of the world that i would visit – the poem ‘vitalis verdant’. this poem contained a poetic footnote 2. that footnote explains                                                          2 footnote  j. douglas porteous  this is your vitalis verdant  thank you:  your arctic canoe: white life  your indian poetry: brown life  your sacred spaces: life beyond life  your environmental aesthetics: beautiful life  transcendental geography  thank you:  your braveness a shot of human vitality  as brave as   speeding bareheaded pillion riders  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   111 the convergence of geography and art, validating my efforts at writing geographical poetry. ‘vitalis verdant’ won a prize somewhere for its capture of sense of place(s). this is evidence that porteous can open a geographic window otherwise closed to writers. the next step looks to other poets for validation. opening with ‘byron bay 2004 – bad poetry and the great poet’, it gave license for the more frenetic ‘picture this – hong kong august 2004’, another attempt to capture the vitality of place. bad poetry emerged after a day at the byron bay writers festival, an indulgence of listening to those who do the writing better or more successfully or more self-effacingly than i do. words rattled around the mind, refusing to go away. amongst these is a reaction to a great poet, whose name i have long forgotten, entering the consciousness in the car on the way home, nagging away, itching, annoying and laughing at me: can you write bad poetry, my subconscious is asking? bah humbug, i’ll show you. let’s forget the folly, but the great poet refuses to vacate his lodging in my mind. i gave in, and wrote the words a couple of weeks later. he will not go away, so here he is on paper. and in the end, i thanked him for the entertainment, education, a refreshing view on multiculturalism, cross-culturalism. i don’t know if i am any the wiser, but it was fun. and it had given me license (again). not long afterwards, it is 34 degrees, humid, and i am in hong kong. what can i write, objectively? it must be the most amazing city in the world! and i am scurrying around the streets, under the ground, through the lobbies of hotels, the street side shops, overpasses, along with everyone else. and i mean everyone else. there must be nobody at home, because they are all out here in the street. except for the lost tourists, whose entrapment i share: this is my view of hong kong, at least it was for one evening. next day it would be different. in rising to the challenge of geographic poetry (porteous) and bad poetry (the great poet), i sense a convergence of porteous’ humanist literary geography framework elements: i am, explicitly now, a traveler rather than just an observer, seeking to capture some sense of place, equally explicit in my own entrappedness and that of those i chose to write about. it is now clear that this is writing about people rather than place per se. the geography was becoming more complete. to close my poetic journey, my exploration of porteous’ opening of the door, the poem ‘my words must be careful – ngurrara’ provides an attempt at resolution. bringing me explicitly back to australia, and, importantly, to australian place-making, i sought them to find a place as a new australian in this continent. the poem, however, remains as exotic and not-mine as anything i had written previously. i stumbled across this one, global jet-setting, an accidental find at 35,000 feet, a gem that sparked an “ah ha!” moment. but it was a tricky one. the ideas are rich, but they are not mine; they can never be mine, not anywhere near mine. but they resonate, and so i worried about the words – ngurrara, wangarr, mangi. could i use them? they spoke something to me, they meant something ... they sparked an agreement, a sense of how it is. but was i just another word thief? was i just another land taker, another country taker? could i use the walmajarri words without cultural rape? could i pretend to even part understand? did they really talk to me or was this just an imagination?                                                                                                                                                                    green city/red river hanoi rush hour  still alive   vitalis verdant  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   112 and there was worse. i entered this walmajarri world second hand. i was standing outside, on the edge of this walmajarri world, perhaps a mere speck of dust on the edge of the walmajarri country, courtesy of a second hand experience. my entry was through a whitefellow’s writing – another edge of country – that were the writings of a journalist (geraldine brooks) who told another story, not really the story of the country, the ngurrara. the real writing, however, was the work of pijaju peter skipper, jukuna mona chuguna and the many other residents of fitzroy crossing who painted ngurrara i and ngurrara ii. i was mediating several times over; was i also compromising several times over? and yet as i read about ngarrara, about wangarr and about mangi, something stirred in my heart – or was it just a romantic tear? i thought it might be something deeper. i did feel moved, i have to say, if ambiguously moved. i felt moved to explore further, walk into the country. was i no better than the rest of them? maybe so, but i explored anyway. i explored the borderlands, the only lands i could explore, the borderlands between me and the walmajarri, the borderlands between whitefellow and ngurrara, the borderlands between many different realities. my apologies if my explorations were blind. my apologies if my feet were not as kind to the soil as they could have been. my apologies if my words were uncrafted. my apologies for all the sins of the past, the sins that i may commit again. but apologies are no bad thing these days, so please accept them as the best words i can find. conclusion this essay charts a personal literary journey, grounded in fluidity of time and place that might be claimed to be typical of the place-making nature of geographical thought. reflecting on poetry written nearly a decade ago, it provides an opportunity to reflect on whether porteous’ (1984) call for silence, and if not that, then poetry, can be true expression of geographical understanding place. it acknowledges the pragmatic in porteous (1984: 373): “the publication of geographical insights in nontraditional forms could be the first step towards the goal of silent place appreciation”. the geographies described above are non-conventional, subjective and personal. they are filtered geographies that could be emerging from the interstitial spaces that inhabit the place of interaction between cultural meanings (bhabha, 1994). as such, they are constructed possibilities, rather than objective realities, and so reflect well porteous’ desire for an experiential geography. as a reality, however, they provide glimpses into the experiences of geographical displacement, that are probably encountered by many new australians, and may, on reflection, be better described as expressions of metageographies, the “enunciative space(s) … that ironizes the notion of geographical space itself … the framework that presents the condition of possibility for geography, the architecture within which various geographies are housed” (hegglund, 2012: 6). references cited bhabha, h.k. 1994. the location of culture. london: routledge. boyd, w.e. 1996. the significance of significance in cultural heritage studies: a role for cultural analogues in applied geography teaching. journal of geography in higher education, 20, 295-304. boyd, w.e. 1999. teaching cultural diversity to environmental science university students: humanities-science culture clash and the relative effectiveness of three coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona   113 exercises confronting socio-cultural images and values. pp. 213-223 in kesby, j.a., stanley, j.m., mclean, r.f. & olive, l.j. (eds) geodiversity: readings in australian geography at the close of the 20th century. canberra: school of geography & oceanography, australian defence force academy. boyd, b. 2001. is my teaching and learning practice in environmental education action research? pp. 269-282 in sankaran, s., dick, b., passfield, r. & swepson, p. (eds) effective change management using action learning and action research. lismore: southern cross university press. boyd, w.e. 2005a. geographies of time: explorations of landscapes past and  present. unpublished d.sc. thesis, st andrews university, scotland. 2  volumes.  boyd, b. 2005b. bouncing off walls. alstonville: bill boyd. boyd, w.e., cotter, m.m., gardiner, j. & taylor, g. 2005. rigidity and a changing order ... disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition: fluidity of cultural values and cultural heritage management. pp. 89-113 in darvill, t., mathers, c. & little, b. (eds) heritage of value, archaeology of renown: reshaping archaeological assessment and significance. florida: university press of florida. brooks, g. 2005. the painted desert. griffith review, 2, 3pp. cloke, p. 1994. (en)culturing political geography: a life in the day of a ‘rural geographer. pp. 149 – 190 in cloke, p., doel, m., matless, d., phillips, m. & thrift, n. 1994 writing the rural: five cultural geographies. london: chapman. cloke, p., doel, m., matless, d., phillips, m. & thrift, n. 1994. writing the rural: five cultural geographies. london: chapman. hegglund, j. 2012. world views: metageographies of modernist literature. oxford: oxford university press. porteous, j.d. 1984, putting descartes before dehors. transactions of the institute of british geographers, n.s.9, 372-373. porteous, j.d. 1985. ‘literature and humanist geography’, area, 17(2), 117-122. porteous, j.d. 1994. ‘not saussure’. transactions of the institute of british geographers, n.s.19, 239. bill boyd is the professor of geography at southern cross university, and researches place, environment and landscape from several different perspectives – biophysical through to cultural. while he has spent many years examining long-term environmental change from both geological and archaeological perspectives, he is also inherently interested in cultural heritage and its construction, social relationships with landscape, and the arts. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, australia. email: william.boyd@scu.edu.au) microsoft word article socorro suarez coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 the hedge and the labyrinth. a holistic vision of dorothy hewett´s poetry m.s. suárez lafuente dorothy hewett´s poetry follows a complex architecture, a structure which encompasses her personal beliefs and the guiding lights that consciously and unconsciously led her life, while it also draws and deploys core elements from the literary tradition of western culture. the primary image that pervades her poems is the garden, which is either the place where many of her poems occur or a significant component in others. hewett´s garden retains several of the characteristics of the primordial garden, such as innocence, abundance and placid solitude, but it also partakes of its romantic nuances, which, after all, are the same as in eden but enhanced by feeling and intensity. the garden as literary locus sets the pace of hewett´s poetry in that it links myth-making with literary tradition, the pillars that sustain the body of her poetic reality. this triangle, myth, tradition and reality, incorporates the main topics that the australian writer inscribes in her work, and, while each corner retains its thematic substance, it also reflects the other two, thus giving unity to the whole poetic process. as bruce bennett pointed out as early as 1995, "place, appropriately conceived, is a meeting ground of mental, emotional and physical states and as such is a suitable focus for the literary imagination" (bennett: 19). the joint development of these structural components trace a complex path both for readers and writers, which can be described graphycally as a labyrinth, a world of possible paths leading ultimately, and hopefully, to a meaningful centre. but in hewett´s labyrinth the progress is rough, full of dead ends and traps: distorting mirrors, imaginary monsters and a stubborn "reality" composed of family, work and the unavoidable facts of birth and death. to some extent, we all share, in different measures, in this labyrinthine nature of life which is why it also runs into our notion of history and into any attempt writers make to explain humankind to humankind. those attempts are expressed in different literary genres, fall into various cultural definitions and, ultimately, defy the affectations of biography or autobiography, problematizing objectiveness as such and enforcing their own meaning. but they can only be "attempts", truthful or imaginative accounts of what we perceive as our immediate reality. life in the labyrinth, human life, is a terrifying experience for the individual mind, with too many sides to it, and, therefore, a challenging path to follow. the best equipment for that journey is to assimilate jacques derrida´s notion of dissemination: "language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing" (peter dews, new statesman: 1981). since we deal with language in order to express our knowledge of knowledge, to understand copyright © m.s. suárez lafuente 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 ourselves, we might as well recognize that it is illusory to pretend that we are clearly defined or that we have the ultimate reason in rendering our own personal routes. especially when we write, we are disembodied, we become a multiple subject a reflection of all we have read, heard or said, a reflection of everybody we have met, we have loved or hated. hewett knows that, as human beings, we need to put some order in our personal chaos, we need to find some means of delimiting our fiction and our reality, to differentiate what we think we are from what we might or might not be and that is what she attempts to explore through her poetry. in the fourth part of her poem "the last peninsula" dorothy hewett inscribed two lines that define, in my opinion, the core of her poetry: there is a hedge between this garden and the world "hedge" stands here for a not-so-clear-cut line dividing the garden, a space that has been amply connoted by the poet as the locus for myth making from the beginning of literature, and the world, meaning reality, everyday individual life, family and community. the hedge is a very appropriate symbol because it partakes of both sides: it is both natural and artificial, grown from the earth, but the result of careful planting and clipping. it separates but it also connects, stating a boundary, a frontier, and, therefore, conferring meaning to what lies here and beyond. the image of the hedge recalls j.l. borges´s idea of the labyrinth it is a contradictory space, because it defends and imprisons at the same time (rodríguez monegal). whatever has to be preserved or taken into account acquires its meaning from the yearnings on the other side, but that "other side" will not be such without a reference to what is expected here thus making a thematic unity that needs both parts to exist. as mentioned above, hewett bases her poetic vision of myth and life, the garden and the world, on a third component present throughout her poems, that is, her recourse to previous literary works, which link her to a historical chain that expands the here and beyond towards an atemporal realm. to resort to the labyrinth image, we could say that in hewett´s poetry we are enmenshed in a rite of passage which will take us to a centre of sacrality, immortality and absolute reality (mircea eliade). yet this reality is contradicted by the poems themselves, so that we are overturned from history to myth and from myth to history that is, continuously crossing the hedge forth and back. songs, stories, family history, literary quotations, previous symbols, nostalgia and remembrances make of hewett´s collected poems a cosmology of her own; as critic katharine brisbane asserts, hewett "is possessed of the need for creative freedom and self-knowledge; like patrick white she ranges through the poetic, lyric and symbolic" (brisbane: 272). this creative force is made manifest in a literary voice that becomes multiple in the process of writing down the poem. as the first person singular pronoun, i, becomes a graphic symbol on the page, it immediately takes on all the characteristics of fiction, its signifying multiplies and the singular form becomes generic and genesic, with the strength to move freely between myth and immediate history. this force is embedded in the eternal development of literature, it is embodied in the play and interplay of mirrors, coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 which echo and reflect the many personae, the many characters that hewett inscribes up and down her poetic labyrinth: i carry the mirror into the labyrinth ("the labyrinth: 205) when the space of this vital labyrinth permeates the garden, or viceversa, the i used by hewett becomes that of eve, our primordial mother, by virtue of the christian legend, "i am eve, spitting the pips in the eye of the myth-makers" ("legend of the green country", part i). thus, the poet assimilates the western heritage while she also inscribes an eve in the full force of active decision taking. not in vain, the poet admits to her being like eve "[i]n the garden, in the morning" before the sun comes up and while the children are still asleep ("this time", part iii) that is, before everyday routine encroaches her in. the i in the garden may designate safo, or the lady of shallott, or, even, impersonate hewett´s own grandmother, but often, the referential i is so wide-reaching, so pervasive, that it implies no one in particular and everybody at the same time: i can´t write autobiography because there is no me me is not a stable reality / the collective me... ("creeley in sydney": 156) this collective i, as the poem suggest, dissolves notions of reality, because it is neither the voice of the poet nor the voice of any particular character, but a mixture of both and a development in time of all the previous literary is. this stretching of the subject from all to no one and from nothing to everything follows suit with the modernist playing with time: it´s a quick now, here now, always, moment ("quick now": 140) this line accumulates so many contradictory manifestations of time that it disseminates its meaning in all directions: "now" is "always", it is a fleating "quick" "moment", but it is also eternal, to be inscribed in cultural history, in our collective unconcious, to remind readers that we are only meaningful dust, as t.s. eliot said in the waste land (1922): "i will show you fear in a handful of dust". it is no wonder that hewett wrote a caution after the title, that "quick now" was written after re-reading t.s. eliot´s four quartets (1943), a book where time and space lose the characteristics that define them. neither time nor space are any longer apt for measure. because they are now a homogeneous one within the labyrinth, they simultaneously embody the personal and the historical, the mythical and the factual, thus, allowing us to understand and to admit that the more we know we know that we know nothing which renders positive knowledge as intrinsically impossible. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 this is the backbone of hewett´s poetry: sitting us in front of the mirror and forcing us to accept our heritage and leave a testament, while realizing how transient life is for us all: all this has gone ... nothing remains but a kind of peace grown out of all you were. ("requiescat": 30) and, all the while, we / hewett / the collective i should allow for new beginnings, for a second coming, for an embodiment of the renewal of desires. even at forty, when we are halfway our span of life, yearnings and delights can be renewed, our mirror become clear again, but poetic experience informs us that while there are flowers, there are also corpses under those flowers. we may have been bred upon our ancestors but we are also doomed to leave our mortal flesh behind bearing knowledge and experience with us into the grave of history, as expressed in hewett´s play the chapel perilous (1972), “i had a tremendous world in my head and three-quarters of it will be buried with me." "the legend of the green country" is a good use of tradition in her poetry. it sets her heritage from the very beginning, from the first line: "september is the spring month bringing tides [...] / a dangerous month". on the one hand, its concomitance with chaucer famous first line in the canterbury tales establishes the epic character of the vital journey that is under way, while hewett´s end of the sentence points clearly to t.s. eliot's the waste land, which fuses (and opens up) literary tradition in his "april is the cruelest month". april with its showers is the beginning of a fertile trip for literature, in the case of chaucer, while it is cruel for eliot because he feels he lives in times of spiritual sterility where fertility is only a painful tale. hewett marks her field from the outset, she substitutes april for september, the beginning of spring in the antipodean western world, and brings the meaning to physical levels closer to australian life in the outback in the first part of the 20th century. she does maintain many of the symbols present in her literary predecessors water in full force, as a terrifying and plentiful parent and water creatures as icons of myth or reality but, suddenly, in the fifth line, hewett dissolves the magic with a down to earth "the ring of the till / is profit and loss", which introduces the poet´s genealogy and its importance in the construction of australia as an independent country. dorothy hewett might have been a romantic at heart, but her genealogy is pure dirty realism (if not magic realism!), and her garden of eden is peopled with very practical characters who have a clarivident idea of where the good of this world lies. the poet has no qualms in depicting the shortcomings of eve´s immediate family: my grandmother had a bite like a sour green apple, ... she bought the shops and the farms, ... while the only child wept for love she could argue like a man, politics, finance, banking. ("legend of the green country", part ii, p.73) coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 the weeping child, the poet´s mother, or, should we say, the poetic i´s mother, is still "demanding love" in her deathbed ("death of my mad mother"), but since love was not hers to transmit, the chain of hatred continues and from "mother to daughter the curse drops like a stone" ("legend of the green country", part viii). the celestial punishment obviously runs on, and crystalizes in "calling on mother", a postmodern poem that blends love and fear, blessings and chasticement, monsters and the practicalities of life. the sequence of "the garden" in four poems summarizes in its last stanza the frame of mind we need to survive in its equivalent vale of tears: time runs out & all is pardoned betrayal & and joy together grow the paradox is to accept & know the calm & tender secret of the garden. ("the garden", part 4, p.204) but before we acquire that fundamental knowledge, before we grow old enough to find the calm to decipher the secret of the garden that will deliver us from the cloister of the labyrinth, the impulse is to cross to the other side of the hedge wake me from my dream & hand in hand like the first children we will steal out of the garden ("the labyrinth", part 2, p.207) love seeked and not found, riches and adventures tasted to no satifaction, the poet comes back to the same garden "timidly / pushing open the door" ("the labyrinth", part 3) and finds there a wealth of names, of deeds and works of art enough to make her want to remain part of it: "when i die will you make a flute out of my bones?" ("the labyrinth, part 4). in this line we find, once more, the need of the individual to be heard, to become part of the cultural imaginary, to have an echo in future generations and to belong to the tradition that is sung in folk tales that make the ground solid and fertile for literary heritage. to this effect, the last line of the labyrinth series is, again, a standing point to appreciate hewett´s cosmogony: "i stand in a planetarium whirling with stars". in an interview with nicole moore, given in 1999, hewett proposes what may be taken as a glosse to the previous quotation, she defines the "whirling stars": when a poem "turns out well, there is nothing like that feeling of triumph [...] to be able to say so much in such a contained form and with such intensity" (moore, 1999: 14). so that, to enjoy to the full the craft of poetry writing, hewett lets herself be influenced by the world around while joining her voices to those writers that preceded her. thus, she, once more, explicitly accepts the dissemination of culture: i get a lot of ideas from novels or poetry or plays or whatever, autobiographies of other people, biographies, i even get stuff from off the tv sometimes, anywhere, from conversations, or just somewhere out of your head, from god knows where. such influences come together in the titles of some of her collections of poems, such as coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 rapunzel in suburbia (1976) or alice in wormland (1987), but also in series of poems like "memoirs of a protestant girlhood", an obvious reference to mary mccarthy´s memories of a catholic girlhood (1957). the second poem in this series starts with the line "under a bell jar ...", taking readers to the frame of mind explicit in sylvia plath´s novel the bell jar (1963). actually, hewett´s collected poems.1940-1995 includes two pages of literary references, the poet´s "own original acknowledgements and comments" (409-410). hewett uses quotations from other poets as headings to her own from tennyson, from t.s. eliot, from robert duncan, from walter de la mare, from anaïs nin, from coleridge, from robert creeley, russell hoban, j.m. barrie, dylan thomas, gwen harwood, randolph stow, william blake, virginia woolf, robert browning or frances webb, to name but the best known ones. this wealth of intertextuality enriches not only hewett´s own work but that of the writers she quotes, creating a web of knowledge that expands meanings, renews concepts and opens up spaces for other voices to be heard. as far as readers are concerned, we are also invited into that web of knowledge. "my fortieth year", a poem that rounds up previous experience ("full circle goes my life") and marks the renewal of life ("now i grow"), ends with a stanza that expresses in full clarity my own feelings in reading dorothy hewett´s poems: i gather at my knee the children of my spirit, old as a legend, new as milk from heaven, in the round green wood of the world. (67) maría socorro suárez lafuente is professor of literature at the university of oviedo, spain. her interests lie in the field of contemporary literature, both in english and spanish, in feminist and postcolonial culture and literature and the development of the faust theme. she has published extensively on those fields, and has been co-editor of several volumes of essays, such as translating cultures (dangaroo press/krk, 1999). she has published articles about the work of elizabeth jolley, jennifer strauss, olga master, judy duffy and about joseph furphy and cervantes, peter carey´s the unusual life of tristan smith and early 20th century australian literature. note all references and quotations to dorothy hewett´s poems in this essay are from the following edition: hewett, dorothy: collected poems.1940-1995. ed. by william grono. fremantle arts centre press, western australia: 1995. works cited bennett, bruce: "dorothy hewett´s garden and city". dorothy hewett: selected critical essays, ed. by b. bennett. fremantle arts centre press, pp. 19-31: 1995. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 brisbane, katherine: "australian drama". the literature of australia, ed. by geoffrey dutton. penguin books australia, pp. 248-289: 1964. dews, peter: review of jacques derrida´s dissemination (1981) in new statesman. http://books.google.es/books/about/dissemination.html id=n4saqaamaaj&redir_esc=y (last consulted: 14.09.2012) mircea eliade: tratado de historia de las religiones. ed. cristiandad, madrid: 1981. moore, nicole: "dorothy hewett in conversation with nicole moore". jacket magazine, # 9, pp. 1-15: 1999. http://jacketmagazine.com/09/moor-iv-hewe.html (last consulted: 08.09.2012) noguera vivancos, isabel: "aproximación al laberinto en algunos cuentos de jorge luis borges". http://oyeborges.blogspot.com.es/2011/05/borges-un-laberinto-clave-de-su-obra.html (last consulted: 08.09.2012) rodríguez monegal, e.: borges por él mismo. monte ávila, caracas: 1980. microsoft word article satendra nandan coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 notes towards an autobiography 1 patrick white-writing, politics and the australia-fiji experience satendra nandan for bruce bennett, friend and fellow traveller i’m grateful to the nla, so full of wonders and treasures, for generously awarding me this fellowship. for the last three months, i’ve been able to read and research, write and reflect, and meet a variety of scholars, staff and friends, with the feeling that how one’s life intersects with so many other lives: that, i think, is one’s real autobiography. happy valley, patrick white’s first published novel in 1939, has that as a theme and its epigraph is from mahatma gandhi. but more on these men later. in march this year jyoti and i returned from fiji after six eventful years. we’d gone there in february 2006, from the anu and the university of canberra, to help establish the first university of fiji. of course, there was usp, established in 1968, which i joined as one of the first local lecturers in 1969 and resigned to take up a ministry in the bavadra cabinet in 1987: i resigned on monday; the colonel staged his coup on thursday. to lose two jobs in two days is sheer carelessness. we’d gone back to fiji after 18 years in this lovely, open city of transplanted trees, lakes and gardens. on the eve of my departure from fiji on march 11, my name was announced as one of the three commissioners to the fiji constitutional commission. i’ll be there at the end of the month to begin the work of the commission. that should form a chapter in my autobiography. before i left fiji, three months ago, i’d completed the draft of a book: nadi: memories of a river, a childhood remembered. i’ve written this specifically for students in fiji: we now have three universities including the new fiji national university. nadi, in hindi, my mother tongue, means a river. but more importantly, for me, nadi is a small town next to the nadi international airport. the town gets submerged in virtually every flood: but it is the only town i knew before i flew to new delhi in my teens, on a government of india scholarship valued at $8 per month – quite a fortune for someone 1 a harold white fellow presentation at the national library of australia on tuesday june 19th 2012. copyright © satendra nandan 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 who had acquired his first pair of shoes at the age of 18, when he completed the senior cambridge examination. and going to india, the mulk of my grandparents was for me a revelation. i’d not understood what migration or exile must have meant to them for they had arrived in fiji in their teens—i’d always seen them as old men and women— girmityas we called them without any sense of historical irony hidden in that distorted english word “agreement”. they had sealed it with their indelible left thumb mark. i was born in the village of maiganyah, about six miles from nadi town – three miles from nadi airport. it is only recently that i discovered that maiganyah is not the native name of the place of my birth. in fact, i was told, the name was given to the place by an australian overseer who looked after the sugar plantations owned by the csr company of sydney. my grandparents, both maternal and paternal, worked for the csr company of australia: indenture, as you know, was a new system of slavery with an expiry date. after 10 years, they were given 10-acre farms – one in maigainia; the other in lega lega, next to the airport across the nadi river adjacent to the shores of the pacific ocean. so while my grandparents spent their childhood on the foothills of the himalayas doubtless many of their shipmates walked on the banks of the ganges i played on the shores of the pacific. indentured indians were transported to fiji from 1879, soon after fiji was ceded to great britain in 1874. the first secondary school for the children of farmers and grandchildren of indentured labourers was established in 1949 on the banks of the nadi river, next to a temple and a koro. i studied in that school for the ubiquitous senior cambridge examination. the colonel, with his sense of history divinely inspired, he claimed, destroyed the parliament of fiji in 14 may 1987, exactly 108 years after the arrival of the so-called coolies. for some reason the hindus consider 108 a lucky number: what luck you may well ask! i was, on that fateful day, a cabinet minister and have the last legitimate words recorded in fiji hansard. so the narrative i’m contemplating to create is a complex one – at least, to me. by sheer chance the other day i came across ben yagoda’s account of autobiographies and memoirs entitled memoir: a history (2009) in the book grocer in kingston. it is engrossing to read the stories of others, some genuine, some fraudulent. my attempt is a much more modest one but i hope, an important one: hardly anyone in fiji has written an autobiography: there are a few examples of memoirs and fragments of life writing but they seem to have been done by editors. certainly no one has written about his or her fijian-australian-indian experience, particularly through literature and politics. i did attempt a piece in 1990-91: it came out as requiem for a rainbow and was launched in 2001 at the 13th aclals conference in canberra by bob mcmullen. but my new work, while taking account of my life until i left fiji on xmas eve 1987, revisits fiji, delhi, canberra: places in my heart, not so much through the prism of a single life, but through the lives i’ve admired, the many books i have read, studied and in places i’ve loved and lived. for instance, most studies of autobiographies scarcely mention that of gandhi or nehru or nirad chaudhuri or dom moraes four outstanding autobiographers. nehru’s an autobiography helped changed british opinion towards coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 india; gandhi’s autobiography, my experiments with truth, of course, is possibly the world’s best-selling life-writing of all time. the last three i have met as a student. but, alas, not gandhi. in any book on writing, vidia naipaul, whose grandparents were indentured indian labourers taken to trinidad, hardly any mention is ever made of this most accomplished writer of the english sentence. finding the centre (1989) has a piece entitled ‘prologue to an autobiography’. it is some of these writers and their journeys into themselves and into other worlds that i wish to introduce to australasian readers. in that sense my work will be a literary-political journey into myself, my distinctive subjectivity, shaped by an archipelago, an island-continent and a subcontinent, and subterraneously by literatures in english. and there’s no better place to do this than canberra: the man who designed this city is buried in lucknow. my grandparents migrated to fiji from a little village not far from that antique city, with mutinous echoes. it is, of course, my intention to write about this connection. more than 60,000 indentured indians were taken to fiji; we lost 60,000 diggers at gallipoli; many indian soldiers died there too, but there’s always a blank page at every commemoration. one of the ways of exploring this experience can be imaginative literature. i was hoping to do precisely this after writing my personal story for in the process i’d have done a lot of research and reading on the history of fiji, on the history of indenture, on the new freedom of india and my own affections and connections to australia through the works of my favourite novelist: patrick white. it’s my good fortune that i got this fellowship in the year when we are celebrating the centenary of his birth. next year is the centenary of our city itself. both white and canberra mean a lot to me, almost like the indian and pacific oceans touching australia, so to speak. but there’s another sense in which white is important to me: patrick white is often portrayed as a great spiritual writer. i recall asking david marr once whether he thought white was an equally important political writer. his reply was: no, he was a spiritual artist. but i think he was a profoundly political writer in a colonialpostcolonial island continent. i know he didn’t quite like bob hawke’s cockatoo hairstyle but the level of his response to political issues remains inspiring and resonant in today’s world. literature as resistance is a force. white understood it intuitively and creatively. if i hadn’t read vidia naipaul in leeds, white in london, i don’t think i’d have ventured into politics. i went into politics through literature; i came back to writing through politics. and this interconnection forms part of my autobiography. it has certainly deepened my life and relationships. and made me feel that fiji is just another four-letter word for hope, and yet unexamined, unimagined through words. it was while baby-sitting in london that i first came across two remaindered novels of patrick white in a special bin at foyles. the two novels i read in 1971 were the tree of man and voss. the 1970s were the paki-bashing season in london. i stayed in a hostel owned by a pakistani and he warned me not to go out at night: you look like a pakistani, he said, with fearful pride. i followed his advice: he was, in fact, a pathan, i was a fiji indian. i sat and read and fed myself on kfc—another colonel’s chickens, or parts thereof. my children relished colonel sanders’ finger-lickin pieces. the book that moved me most deeply was not voss but the tree of man. stan and amy parker reminded me of my own grandparents. it was in london that i decided that coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 if ever i were given a scholarship to do a phd, i’d come to australia and work on white. in 1974, i got that opportunity: the rest is not history but my roller-coaster life. what gives me immense joy is that three of us –jyoti, kavita and i--did our phd in literature almost in the same room in the ad hope building. i read everything white had written from happy valley (1939) to the eye of the storm (1973). and australia became dear to me because of a writer. a couple of years ago, my daughter, kavita from canberra, sent me a book titled literary activists: writer-intellectuals and australian public life. it is written by brigid rooney and published by uqp. seven australian writers are discussed. there’s no asian-pacific-australian writer on the list. kavita’s inscription in part reads: ‘someone who made that bridge between literature and politics a long time ago!’ the australia-fiji tangled relationships have existed for almost two centuries. this year, on 15 may, we commemorated the 133 anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured migrants in fiji from india via calcutta to serve primarily british, australian and chiefly interests. it is a unique fragment of history of both exile and freedom. to appreciate the uniqueness, you’ll have to read my book. fiji, through the mischief of many, had become a crown colony by the deed of cession in 1874. all of fiji by then had been evangelized. in the past 25 years fiji has been through a series of crises, triggered by the first fijian coup in may 1987. one would have expected an old friend like australia, with so many bonds and human bondages with the people of fiji, to come to the rescue in the wreck. early sea-farers, explorers, beachcombers, missionaries, businessmen and women, overseers, experts and consultants, the csr company harvesting the profits of a slave crop, indenture and blackbirding victims, tourists and teachers, preachers and profiteers became part of the fiji archipelago. in the 1982 fiji elections we also learnt a thing or two about aussie toe-cutters and digital amputation through the carroll report, devised by not a few eminent australians, partially revealed by abc’s ‘four corners’. there are connections, historical and contemporary. and i’ve just read mr malcolm fraser’s whitlam oration, given on 6 june. it makes interesting reading – mr fraser exhorts australia to become a genuinely independent and sovereign state. when fiji is asserting its independence after the tragedies of at least three coups, there’s this lack of understanding and an historical generosity of mind in our most generous neighbour. often we fail to imagine the other, our close neighbour. the world is what it is. fiji has remained excluded without much understanding or knowledge of a small but complex, colonially-created society, perhaps more than any other in the south pacific, paying the price of brutalities against native peoples on islands and continents, including this one. racism in fiji was acceptable because so much in our largest neighbour was determined by its historical policies based on racial considerations. the indentured and their descendants were children of the lesser gods. the vast majority of these peasants resisted conversion to christianity. and the fig leaf of fijian-styled democracy hid a multitude of sins. there was a worm at the heart of paradise: political racism in a communally-oriented garb of venal democracy. we didn’t even have a common name. a whole community was excluded from the nation’s imagination. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 only now, from january 1, 2012, all the citizens of fiji are called fijians after the name of the nation: fiji. how does one begin to comprehend the fiji-australia enigma? for many of us today, australia is home – in the past twenty odd years more fiji people have come to australia than those transported from india to fiji in 40 years from 1879-1920. our ancestors came in 87 different boats; the journey took weeks and months; today fijians come to sydney in less than four hours. distances have coalesced; dislocations have deepened; deceptions have multiplied. our journeys have become manifold. and the return flights to paradise are now quite cheap. but there’s a deep lack of insight into fiji’s problems – and that is proving very costly. the waves of significant change are lapping the fijian shores and we, in landlocked canberra, ought to appreciate this. but it is a personal journey that i wish to talk about. patrick white had travelled in the 1940s to london by the p & o liner, strathmore, but had returned to sydney at the age of 46 to write fiction. in april 1958, white published his remarkably personal and passionate essay ‘the prodigal son’. white had written: ‘the reasons why anybody is an expatriate, or why another chooses to return home, are such personal ones that the question can only be answered in a personal way.’ white had returned, with the thought of a full belly, to the scenes of his childhood, to the stimulus of time remembered. by 1958 he’d crafted, in australia, two classic novels: the tree of man and voss. in december 1987, aged around 46, with jyoti, i was leaving fiji for canberra with two coups behind me, two suitcases in front, and 200 dollars in my pocket, having lost two jobs in two days! my two daughters were with me. i was coming to see rohan, my son, at the anu. white says he was brought up on the maxim: ‘only the british can be right’. i grew up on the dictum: fiji was our one and only home. then to suddenly become homeless, in your homeland. i spent 18 years in canberra, our often derided national capital. there was the great emptiness in my heart, not in the landscape which white had made me love despite the sometimes sordid and cruel experiences of white australia written on the bark of the ghostly gum trees and between the blue waves of the pacific. i had two extraordinary advantages: i’d spent my most formative student years in delhi. i’d fallen in love and married my college sweet-heart. two of my children were born in new delhi. i’d taught in two famous public schools: the delhi public and doon. vikram seth survived my teaching during 1963-64. a brief stint as a traineejournalist on the statesman in new delhi gave me a life-long desire to be a scribe of sorts. and, of course, i’d been lucky enough to study for my doctoral degree patrick white’s fiction in canberra, from may 19741977. the vivisector remains my favourite fiction on the life of an artist and the joys of the then english department are unforgettable. because of these two experiences in new delhi and canberra, i was able to survive the holocaust of my heart in may 1987. the fall of island politicians is rather compellingly described in v s naipaul’s the mimic men. i could have gone to new delhi and become, as white says of london, an intellectual, that most sterile of beings, leading a coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 parasitic and pointless existence: or like ralph singh, in his forties living in a quaint hotel in a london suburb, hiding behind a pillar to look at lady stella. the politics of a country can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships, i’d believed, of which naipaul had written in that splendid work of truthful fiction. during the blitz white experienced the first sensations of rootlessness. i was born around the time of the london blitz. but i’d no idea of the banality of evil. the two fijian coups in 1987 almost 50 years later were, for me, the first signs of ethnic evil. i was deeply, deeply affected by this betrayal by more than the colonel of the royal fiji military forces of fiji, with special connections at duntroon. even the queen of fiji didn’t care for us – she was persuaded not to see the ousted prime minister, dr timoci bavadra. and he had taken his oath of allegiance in her majesty’s name. my friend, the vuniwai-healer, died betrayed and broken. the colonel, who had destroyed the fiji parliament with 10 masked gunmen, got the 21gun salute in our federal parliament and a round of golf with our gareth. gareth also got the gong recently from her majesty. but i wish to write more about bavadra buried in the village of veiseisei by the sea. luckily i came to canberra. the city gave me a new life – the life of the mind – teaching and talking, reading and writing, and hoeing my own garden. my family grew up; often i walked by lake burley griffin, thinking could this be my walden? griffin is buried in lucknow, the capital of up; from the ancient vicinity of that most multicultural city, my maternal and paternal grandparents had migrated to the fiji islands. they had never seen a sea-wave or a ship. for generations they had not gone beyond a few miles from their habitus of mud and mythology. they had not known an island let alone a sea of islands; their bones are buried in the largest ocean. today my son is married to a woman from near tamworth – her ancestors came in the first fleet. jyoti and i have three grandchildren: hannah maya, arjun sebastian, and kallan akash. what would their identities be? their destinations? their transit visas? what roots will clutch at their hearts? what fragments will they shore against their sorrows? i wish to explore these themes through the prism of my life. and see its many colours. but the longing to return to days of adolescence persisted: the nostalgia of seascape, the brooding volcanic mountains’ lengthening shadows looming over our little village within the green seas of sugarcane, the swaying palm siblings, the storm-tossed bures and lean-tos; the cows and bullocks, the fishermen fishing on horsebacks, the two rainbows over the mystic hills; and the lights of nadi airport where the drone of small planes is lost in the landing of a 747 from sydney every evening around 7pm as farmers graze their cows; the smell of food, the sounds of fijian hindi in the streets and on the radio; the bula smile, and the five-petalled frangipani in the left ear; the greenness of life in grass, the colourful leaves and flowers, the spirit of play in the muddy fields of rugby and soccer, and the soft rain falling across my childhood river. there’s also the mutilated remains of frogs and stray dogs on the pot-holed roads from the airport to hotels. one’s fate can be mirrored in a myriad images; one’s history refracted in the puddles of a broken road. you’ll not see it in fiji hotels or aussie ads for a holiday in fiji. in fact you’d have scarcely seen any fiji indian faces in aircoolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 pacific-qantas magazines or ads. but today fiji’s face is changing – and i believe for a better and fairer fiji. my village home is now deserted. the leased native land we grew up on has a few years to go before it is ‘reserved’ – 90% of all land is communally native-owned. many farms lie fallow; many farmers, descendants of the indentured, were evicted during the tenure of the former government. one would have thought the csr of australia or the british and australian governments would have taken a little more care of the migrants who were brought to fiji as labourers, and who served their ‘girmits’ – indenture agreements to these governments with their lives. only pm bainimarama’s government has now given a new sense of belongingness to all fiji citizens without the terrible discrimination of race and religion, colour or communal creed and global greed. it is a season of hope in fiji after several seasons of anomy. some years ago i was invited to the nsw parliament to a dinner to raise funds for the brutally deposed flp’s people’s government. that evening i did say that when this parliament was being built, doubtless with some money from csr company’s exploitations in fiji, the children of the farmers, labourers, small shopkeepers in fiji didn’t have a single secondary school in the sugarcane growing areas. it was only in 1949 – 70 years after the arrival of first indian workers – that an indian mission, run by vedantic monks, started a secondary school named after the most famous of them all: swami vivekananda. i studied in that school under a tin shed, by the nandi river, across a koro. we were 88 in the class and spent our days playing cards on the back benches. levuka, the first colonial capital of fiji, celebrated the founding of its first public school for privileged children in 1879, 133 years ago, built just before the arrival of the indentured. it’s not only the tyranny of distance but the tyranny of difference. senator bob carr, our new foreign minister, is a well–read person, especially in history. his thoughtlines may help us start a new and fresh era of meaningful relationships with fiji. i am, like many others in australia and fiji, quite hopeful that bob will initiate more imaginative policies and good politics towards fiji. my autobiography will, i hope, give the ideas of how writing can make injustices visible and audible. it may suggest ways of creating a sense of home for a nameless and countryless people. to me that is our one immense challenge to let thinking people in australia know the truth on the streets of suva away from the island hotels. we cannot be tourists: we’ve to remap the world with words and images in our stories, in our writings. we’re a pacific people; as are australians and new zealanders, among others. we cannot be defined constantly by others and bear the brutalities of the colonial experience for imperial crimes. i wrote a few years ago that the noblest epic from india really is this unique diaspora of the twice-banished people found from the south pacific to south africa. it is in their diaspora that gandhi was shaped and sharpened. the ‘coolie barrister’ became a coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 mahatma in south africa: the revolution that he started with a turban in durban! much more potent and protean than imperial armies. patrick white’s first published novel happy valley in 1939 has an epigraph from gandhi’s essay on suffering. and gandhi was killed in new delhi, ten years before i arrived in that most palimpsest of cities. and how deeply white must have read gandhi in the 1930s, when gandhi was dismantling the largest empire with his lathi. the astonishing thing was that an australian of genius was reading and thinking the thoughts of this half-naked fakir. only now i’m beginning to understand the significance of that first epigraph, not in the portrayal of the megalomaniac in voss but in the shadow and understanding of the tree of man. stan and amy parker remind me of my indentured grandparents. and their great silence must find breath and voice in our words, in our lives, in between the lines. i wish to write about that too. for as patrick white wrote 50 years ago: there is the possibility that one may be helping to people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding. it is this quality of understanding we seek for our islandcountry, too. it is through literature that i went into politics, and it is to literature i’ve come back from politics with some sense of wholeness. i wish to interweave the resistance of literature and its healing power in the many journeys i’ve made, of love, politics and life generally. literature can work; let me give a brief example: i met colonel rabuka after 21 years in my office three years ago. i gave him four books, three of mine and one by kavita entitled stolen worlds. a few days later mr rabuka wrote a remarkable piece in the fiji times asking for the nation’s forgiveness for his unnecessary coups and their tragic consequences. he said he was affected by three lines in a poem of mine entitled “easter’ 88”and dedicated to timoci bavadra. that – a dictator’s extraordinary response to an ordinary poem – alone is a compelling reason to write my story. i know nothing straight was ever made from the crooked branches of the tree of man; but i also know that i can continue to write in that tree’s shade. fruitfully, i hope. vinaka , as we say in fiji in fijian! satendra nandan born in nadi, satendra nandan studied under various scholarships and fellowships, at the universities of delhi, leeds, london and the australia national university (anu), canberra. he joined the university of the south pacific in 1969 and resigned in may 1987 to join the bavadra cabinet in the labour-nfp coalition government of fiji. he was elected to fiji parliament in 1982 and 1987. professor nandan left fiji in december 1987 to take up a fellowship at the humanities research centre, anu. subsequently he joined the university of canberra, act, and resigned in december 2005 to return to fiji with his wife dr jyoti nandan to help coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 establish the university of fiji in lautoka and became the foundation dean and professor in the school of humanities and arts. in march 2012 he was awarded the prestigious harold white fellowship of the national library of australia for writing his autobiography. soon after he was appointed to the constitution commission to help draft a new constitution for fiji. he returned to fiji in july 2012. satendra nandan is an award-winning writer and has authored and edited more than a dozen books and numerous articles and papers on a variety of subjects including literature and politics. he has been an adjunct professor at the humanities research centre, anu, and the centre for applied philosophy and professional ethics at the csu, anu, and melbourne. satendra was made a professor emeritus of the university of canberra in 2005, for his scholarship, writing and service to the university. he was the elected international chair of the association of commonwealth literature and language studies (aclals) and the foundation president of pen international, act. he is also the foundation chair of the fijian writers association. satendra lives in suva with his wife, dr jyoti nandan, currently at usp. they have three children rohan, gitanjali and kavita. microsoft word garbutt&costello7.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     60  wood for the trees 1 rob garbutt and moya costello copyright©2013 rob garbutt and moya costello. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the authors and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: our paper focuses on the materiality, cultural history and cultural relations of selected artworks in the exhibition wood for the trees (lismore regional gallery, new south wales, australia, 10 june – 17 july 2011). the title of the exhibition, intentionally misreading the aphorism “can’t see the wood for the trees”, by reading the wood for the resource rather than the collective wood[s], implies conservation, preservation, and the need for sustaining the originating resource. these ideas have particular resonance on the nsw far north coast, a region once rich in rainforest. while the indigenous population had sustainable practices of forest and land management, the colonists deployed felling and harvesting in order to convert the value of the local, abundant rainforest trees into high-value timber. by the late twentieth century, however, a new wave of settlers launched a protest movements against the proposed logging of remnant rainforest at terania creek and elsewhere in the region. wood for the trees, curated by gallery director brett adlington, plays on this dynamic relationship between wood, trees and people. we discuss the way selected artworks give expression to the themes or concepts of productive labour, nature and culture, conservation and sustainability, and memory. the artworks include watjinbuy marrawilil’s (1980) carved ancestral figure ceremonial pole, elizabeth stops’ (2009/10) explorations into colonisation, hossein valamanesh’s (2008) memory stick, and aña wojak’s (2008) unread book (in a forgotten language). our art writing on the works, a practice informed by bal (2002), muecke (2008) and papastergiadis (2004), becomes a conversation between the works and the themes or concepts. as a form of material excess of the most productive kind (grosz, 2008, p. 7), art seeds a response to that which is in the air waiting to be said of the past, present and future. keywords: wood, trees, lismore regional gallery, artworks, colonisation introduction wood for the trees was an exhibition at lismore regional gallery (lrg), on the farnorth coast of new south wales, australia, in june–july 2011, curated by brett adlington, the gallery’s director. can’t see the wood for the trees is a familiar                                                          1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     61  aphorism meaning one can miss the big picture (wood[s]) by being caught up in the details (trees). the title of the exhibition intentionally misreads the aphorism by reading the wood for the resource, rather than the collective wood[s]. it implies conservation, preservation, the need for sustaining the originating resource: the resource and its product are connected rather than in opposition. furthermore, in australia we don’t say woods, we use forest or bush. this aphorism of british origin has been transplanted onto a country that once had over two hundred and fifty languages other than english, and with practices of forest and land management other than felling and harvesting. on the australian east coast, for example, it was the colonists who thought of red cedar (toona ciliata) as a wood rather than as a tree – many timber getters were people who could only see trees for the wood (figure 1). one of the works in the wood for the trees exhibition, hossein valamanesh’s (2008) memory stick (figure 2), could function as an exemplary object for this paper, an object that talks to our writing (muecke, 2008, p. 293) and our concepts associated with trees and wood, which travel in unexpected directions (bal, 2002). memory stick: the memory of the tree in timber and wood; the memory of practices of landscape and agricultural production transplanted from imperial britain to australia; and the memory of wood in the english language – book, beam, tall timber, having a wooden expression, ashen, stumped, a cut above the rest, plank, dead wood, not out of the woods yet. then, of course, memory stick, as a name for a usb-connected source of portable computer memory, attributes animate properties to a small piece of solid-state technology. memory stick is a spelling-out of the word memory formed, in bronze, to mimic a thin stick with dormant buds, pruned from a deciduous tree in winter. the wood of tree trunks carries memory, or history, in its growth rings, and the future in its buds, with the present written out on the gallery wall (schatzki, 2011, p. 76). this stick, moreover, implies walking – the out-of-proportion long downward stroke of the y does this symbolic work. walking is about memory-gathering. when you have walked regularly in a place, you begin to carry that place, its map, in your body. figure 1 lismore and the big scrub where large quantities of red cedar were once located (map by rob garbutt).       coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     62  just as we have done here with memory stick, in this paper we want to discuss the way artworks give expression to themes, or concepts, which resonate with structures of feeling in the present, themes we have alluded to already: productive labour; nature and culture; conservation and sustainability; and memory. before doing so, however, we will briefly outline some of the ideas informing our writing on art. next we sketch out the genesis of the wood for the trees exhibition as well as locate it geographically and historically. then we offer a discussion of a selection of works from the exhibition, based in a conversation between these objects and the themes we have outlined above. this conversation is one expression of the relationship of affordance between artworks and us (wheeler, 2006, p. 135). as a form of material excess of the most productive kind (grosz, 2008, p. 7) art seeds a response to that which is in the air waiting to be said of the past, of the present and of the future.   figure 2: hossein valamanesh (2008) memory stick (bronze, 71 × 54 × 1.5 cm) (photograph by rob garbutt).   a dialogue with the objects in wood for the trees we approach this discussion using a set of mutually resonant ideas from a number of theorists about writing, analysis and objects. mieke bal, in travelling concepts in the humanities, takes both a concept and an object (a work of art), in order to read both together. for artworks are “always-already engaged, as interlocutors, within the larger culture from which they have emerged”, and analysis “looks to issues of cultural relevance, and aims to articulate how the object contributes to cultural debates” (bal, 2002, p 9). bal’s (2002) positioning is not too different to papastergiadis (2004, p.160) who writes that an artwork contributes to “the construction of a field of […] social meanings”. when we write about artworks, we participate in their contextualisation, in a dialogue on the same idea/s, and we, as writers, develop “parallel and complementary trajectories of thought” (papastergiadis, 2004, p.161). stephen muecke (2008) refers to this as momentum: a meld, an assemblage that moves somewhere else. muecke (2008, p. 294) calls for a post-representational writing practice which avoids the relegation of “noncoolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     63  human things to the status of mere backdrop to human dramas”. wendy wheeler agrees: the “objects” that we meet, and which afford us possible actions, are poorly understood when only understood as separate “objects” along the lines of the old cartesian divide. what the “object” affords us [… is] the responsibility of responsiveness. (wheeler, 2006, p.135) because objects carry “emotions and ideas of startling intensity” (turkle, 2007, p.6), “we need to think in terms of […] co-constitutive relationships across objects and subjects” (askins and pain, 2011, p. 814). likewise, the cultural geographer, david crouch (2012), in discussing the work of deleuze and guttari, refers to their term spacing as occurring “in the gaps of energies amongst and between things; in their comingling” (p.239). bal (2002) notes a series of characteristics of this mutuality: detailed analysis is followed by suspending of certainties, resisting reduction, respecting “irreducible complexity and unyielding muteness”, checking the thrust of and allowing for the diversion and complication of interpretation (p.4), and the liberation and release of the object’s potential located in its resistance to translation (p.58). crouch (2012) agrees with this: representations, “borne of the performativity of living”, have “liveliness” which remains uncertain, “available, open and flexible, with a permanent possibility of re-inscription” (p.240). our dialogue with the objects in wood for the trees is in the context of the exhibition as a gathering of artworks and people, and the geographical locale in which the exhibition “took” place. the genesis of wood for the trees has a circuitous narrative. in 2009, adlington curated an exhibition called family guy at lake macquarie city art gallery, new south wales, which brought together “the work of 14 contemporary male artists who question[ed] the male position within the family across the generations” (adlington, 2009). this led adlington to consider exhibition themes that would explore masculinity and that had the potential to build an audience of males for the lrg. one inspiration was family guy artist roderick sprigg’s project occasional tables, in which the artist invited five father and son pairs to each construct a coffee table for a group exhibition (sprigg, 2008). in a similar manner, adlington’s initial impulse was to work with one or a number of men’s sheds – community owned sheds for men in which arts, crafts and technical activities can be completed while also breaking down social isolation – to develop an exhibition by men’s shed participants. the concept did not attract any partnerships, so adlington parked that exhibition idea for a time. in late 2009, adlington took the role of director at lismore regional gallery (figure 3) and noted the success of an exhibition featuring the hannah cabinet (hannah, 2009) at attracting a male audience to the gallery, eliciting strongly positive responses from men in the gallery visitors’ book. the hannah cabinet is an intricately crafted, large-scale furniture piece with highly detailed marquetry created over seven years by well-known and locally renowned lismore craftsman geoff hannah. perhaps, adlington thought, there is an implicit association between timber, wood-working, “masculine” activity and the large number of men who felt drawn to this exhibition; thus, with the men’s shed idea in abeyance, an exhibition broadly based on wood started to take shape (personal communication, july 4, 2011). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     64  figure 3: lismore regional gallery and brett adlington (inset) (photograph of brett and the gallery logo courtesy of lismore regional gallery; photograph of the lismore regional gallery building by rob garbutt). the role of a regional gallery director is diverse and very much hands-on, leaving little time for focused curatorial activity. adlington recalls that while the genesis of wood for the trees occurred over a period of three or more years, and was in the gallery program for eighteen months prior to the exhibition, the actual task of sourcing work for the exhibition occurred over a two-month period. initially, the exhibition was just called the wood show with the title wood for the trees emerging as works for the exhibition were identified and themes cohered. because timber and trees were so closely connected with the settler history of the northern rivers region, from the initial colonisation to the present, through phases of large-scale extraction of timber to vigorous and successful rainforest conservation actions, adlington wanted the exhibition “to be about the tree as well as well as the timber […with] elements of traditional wood work in the exhibition, […] the type of show that [would be] accessible to [non-gallery-going] male audiences and [which] would draw people in” (personal communication, july 4, 2011). this theme of australian cultural connections to wood and trees was a productive element in the exhibition, with specific local meanings. in the spring of october 1842, rainforest trees, and red cedar (toona ciliata) especially, called timber getters on the clarence river north to the lismore region (jarrett, 1894). these mostly english, scottish and irish settlers named the 700 square kilometre area of dense rainforest in which the trees grew, the big scrub (stubbs, 2001, p.296), and sometimes, simply, the scrub. the relationship with wood and trees wasn’t only a local one, but was part of colonial trade to sydney and then to london and the rest of the empire. red cedars just happened to be trees containing wood for which there was a lusty imperial appetite. initially there was little large-scale destruction of the scrub. the loggers worked by picking out high-value trees one by one. in fact, it was usually bundjalung assistants who did the work of spotting trees and guiding the cedar getters to them. this situation changed with the passing of the robertson land acts of 1861 when crown land was coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     65  made available to selectors as freehold property. in 1862 selectors started to take up selections, or small farms, in the big scrub for intensive agriculture, mistakenly believing that the luxuriant growth of the rainforest was evidence of rich soil beneath. selectors depended on creating pasture and crop land in order to make a return and pay off their three-year government loans, and government surveyors made regular journeys to determine the extent of holdings and the “improvements” made before tallying up the bill (harrison, 2004, pp.35-38). today, the clearing of the underbrush, vines, dead wood and timber of the big scrub has become the stuff of local history and legend. the clearing of the bundjalung people from that same land is the stuff of silence. in an ecological lament, harry frith states that “[u]ntil 1842 no white man had penetrated [the big scrub] and, until 1862 no farmer had dug in its soil. but by 1900 the forest was gone and its ashes, washed into the deep red soil had left not even a black stain on the surface” (frith, 1977, p.7). we could reinterpret frith’s last sentence as a statement of aboriginal and settler contact history, though such an interpretation overstates colonial effectiveness and ignores aboriginal resilience and resistance. while settlers may behave as though the colonial project of clearing had been taken through to completion, this was never achieved. aborigines have always been present, yet in the colonial imagination settlers steadfastly resist seeing the cleared area of the big scrub as a “shared landscape” (harrison, 2004). in the lismore region, clearing connects with past and present physical and psychical practices of identity formation through labour, place-making and dwelling. local identity emerges from colonial practices of clearing land that made it available for agriculture and remade it into a more familiar landscape comparable to received images of english rurality. this is a landscape that is not dominated by the flat plains of outback australia coloured in yellows, browns and reds beneath depthless blue, but instead is comprised of rolling green hills beneath cumulus skies (figure 4) reminiscent of constable. in this sense, the clearing of the scrub was a labour that was simultaneously a clearing of the mind in which a british colonial imagination and aesthetic could be installed and developed (garbutt, 2010). these local historical narratives of clearing and cultivation connect to others to weave national stories. since the 1800s the colonists, and, later, the citizens of australia, have imagined the “progress of civilisation” in forested areas to commence with clearing, and from south of sydney to north of brisbane the historical progression from cedar getting via clearing to intensive agriculture is a common storyline. contemporary environmental and economic debates over the practice of clearing continue throughout australia. to stop clearing is, many believe, to retard progress. decade-long protests over the new south wales state government’s restrictions on land clearing as a result of the native vegetation act illustrate this, as farmers demand “the freedom to work our land” and “the right of farmers to farm” (archibald, 2003; feain, 2010). since the 1970s, “new settlers” in the lismore region have challenged this dominant narrative of progress. this influx of internal migrants was part of the nation-wide phenomenon of counter-urbanisation that began in the 1970s, and which, in the northern rivers region, was culturally dominated by the alternative counter-culture movement, by “hippies” (kijas, 2003, p.33). because of the decline in the dairy industry, many counter-cultural new settlers were able to buy cheap, cleared land, often coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     66  in idyllic surrounds bordering remnant big scrub rainforest. one piece of rainforest, known locally as terania creek, came to define the cultural gap between how the old and new settlers valued wood and trees. in 1979 a protest movement developed around the proposed logging of this forest. on one side were the police who were protecting the loggers and bulldozer crews of what is now the hurford group who were after the wood, and on the other a counter-culture-infused camp of activists who used a combination of media-savvy direct action, political lobbying and legal nous to stall and eventually win the battle for the trees (kelly, 2003). the tactics used by the activists became the template in other environmental campaigns. while still a contentious issue locally, the terania creek protest is also a source of local pride as “the first [successful] battleground to save old growth rainforests” in australia and possibly in the world (lismore regional gallery, 2011a). a popular site in the terania creek forest, now part of the world-heritage-listed nightcap national park, is protestors falls named in honour of those people who took part in the campaign. figure 4: "rolling green hills beneath cumulus skies" (photograph by rob garbutt). it is against this local and historical background that the selection of works began for wood for the trees. the exhibition’s purpose was to showcase “[w]orks reflecting on the tree and the adaptability of wood” (lismore regional gallery, 2011b). but a fundamental consideration is the regional location of the gallery; not only are there clear budget constraints limiting the types of works which can be transported to the gallery, but the politics of wood required deft handling. a member of the hurford group, hurford building supplies, was a major sponsor of the gallery during the exhibition. this caused some concern for adlington when a contributing artist raised the issue. the curator was adamant, however, that the exhibition would be nuanced by articulating the need for conservation and timber production, given the many ways australian society, including artists, depends on wood and wood products. as adlington wrote: [i]t is indisputable that timber has played a central role in the history of art. it has been used as a sculptural material across all cultures, not to mention its use in the production of paper; […] and as a vital ingredient in the firing of ceramics. then of course there is timber used in the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     67  construction of furniture, houses and later ships that sailed to claim new lands. […] acknowledging our place in a region that was the first battleground to save old growth rainforests, the exhibition includes some documentation of people active in this fight. this successful action led to world first legislation to stop logging rainforests, and in turn led to a more sustainable logging industry. (lismore regional gallery, 2011a) the exhibits themselves were primarily created from wood. the exhibition was housed in the gallery building that dates from the 1920s and which incorporates local rainforest timber in its construction. and art exhibitions, in this instance in regional australia, exist “at an environmental cost”, says adlington, because artworks have to be transported across the country (personal communication, july 4, 2011). the process of identifying works for the exhibition combined adlington’s knowledge of established australian artists working with wood and with wood-related themes, and the lrg’s aim of incorporating local artists and items from the gallery’s permanent collection. setting works from local artists, interstate artists and from the permanent collection together enabled all the works, in these new and varied contexts, to gain increased depth of meaning and complexity of resonance. what, then, was the experience of engaging with the exhibition as a viewer? how did the works call to us, communicate to us, and how did we respond to them? in the next section, we walk through the exhibition, selecting pieces and pieces selecting us. the relationships that form are not only dyadic – at times a piece resonates for both authors, and at other times pieces connect through resonances and resistances with each other and us as well. the prose is not solely generated from within us as authors but from a space between us all, just as feelings of various kinds seemingly emerge within us during a walk along a bush track. so, here, is one walk along a track in the scrub, through wood for the trees. walking into the gallery, was, for us, to enter a familiar space. the current logo for the gallery is an abstract geometrical representation of the region’s geographical boundaries within the nsw northern rivers (figure 3), from north woodburn in the south to nimbin in the north and from clunes in the east to just west of goolmangar. further, seeing this particular woodwork-based exhibition was to immediately sense light and warmth. (the northern rivers is a subtropical region.) blonde was the colour that sprang to mind. blonde or pale wood is the visible entrapment of sunshine, the capturing of light, a solar flare. so our affective response – the impression of light and warmth experienced as jouissance – came from our sense of “belonging to” the gallery, as local residents, as well as taking pride in, because of “ownership”, the gallery presenting such an affecting, aesthetically pleasing, historically resonant exhibition. in fact, after adlington curated the exhibition, he realised colour was absent. the exhibition was predominantly muted in tone (figure 5). however, it is difficult to conceive of timber as failing to be gorgeous or vital. it has texture; if it lacks colour, it has light; and if in tone it is muted, it is not muted in emotion – in this exhibition, the articulation of loss through melancholy or sadness as well as playfulness through connecting forms and titles was also fulsome. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     68  we chose to respond to what generated an affective response in us – so, in that sense we mentioned previously, these pieces of work chose us. as kathleen stewart (2010, p.339), a theorist of affect, describes it, we “burrow[ed] into the generativity of what [took] form, [hit] the senses, shimmer[ed]”. we aren’t trained in art theory or art criticism specifically. and in australia, responses to regional gallery exhibitions don’t usually get into a wider media conversation. so we approach this writing practice as experimentation, the rider being that the world can be depicted as amorphous, as in the artwork of lionel bawden (2009), and in the australian writer, murray bail’s (1998) eucalyptus (ackland 2012, p.180), a novel about a forest of that australian native forming a landscape that expresses the “poetics of potentiality”, of “becoming” (crouch 2012, p. 239). there were many strands in the conversation already generated by the eclectic artworks in the exhibition, about nature, culture, history, geography and gender. in relation to gender, although we have emphasised a masculine structure of feeling above, women as woodworkers were also well represented. figure 5: wood for the trees, installation view, detail (photograph by rob garbutt).   elizabeth stops (2010, p.93) wanted to work with media “imbued with references to local occupation and land use”. grouped standing pieces of wood, charcoal and porcelain in stops’ (2009/2010) explorations into colonisation (figure 6) are in conversation with each other and with the viewer. the holes in the wood and the limited apertures in the porcelain are places for flow (of conversation, for example) or fastening (barbed wire, in particular). the colonial practice of chaining aborigines is implicated in the tracing of barbed wire around the porcelain which is primarily about fencing off and stamping on/e’s ownership, with “no regard for sustainability or prior habitation” (stops, 2010, p.37). explorations was also a quest for stops “to maintain an art practice that […] remained environmentally sustainable” (2010, p.1). she used discarded then salvaged materials in a recycling practice, including fence posts and charcoal from the burning of wood in the kiln. the porcelain pieces (three) in their white, flawless, coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     69  elongated, cool smoothness could be feminine, ethereal, even nunor angel-like in identity, except for that image of barbed wire which circles them. the utter darkness and seeming impenetrability of the charcoal in its blackness, its thick, squat shape and compressed texture make for solidity, but also, uncannily, infinity. the charcoal – and even the wood – appears both gravity-bound and flight-full; it has an earth-bound heaviness, yet a central thrust: momentum and mobility. qualities are in a constant dialogue in explorations: the vulnerable and violent, the immanent and transcendent, the solid and ethereal, guilt and innocence, orderliness and mess. here there is history, an australian text about black and white relations.   figure 6: elizabeth stops (2009/2010) explorations into colonisation (wood, charcoal, porcelain, ash, sap, binder; 55 cm high) (photograph by rob garbutt). rosalie gascoigne’s banner (1986) (figure 7) is made of the sides of old drink crates in blue, red and yellow – primary colours of sky, soil and sun in central new south wales where the artist worked. as so often in gascoigne’s artworks, the materials used are “things that have been somewhere, done something” (gascoigne, 1997, p. 7). the slats, though placed vertically as well as horizontally, suggest the usual flatness of the ancient yet reworked australian landscape that lies beyond the coastal ranges of the east coast. overlaying these fields of colour, the words crystal, swing and sharpe’s suggest the warmth and piercing light of the sun on paddocks extending into the distance, repeating, repeating. perhaps, too, through this scene, a river or creek flows, with shards of light reflected from its surface: a rope for a swing hanging, waiting for the leisure-inclined to disrupt the hot silence. we could be drinking that heat and light. away from banner, at one end of the exhibition, stand two tutini – two-metre high grave posts from the tiwi islands – that feature in the pukumani ceremony and honour the dead. one of the poles is by watjinbuy marrawilil (carved ancestral figure ceremorial pole, 1980), the other by artist unknown (ceremonial pukamani burial pole, 1988), indigenous and anonymous in the bicentennial year of australia’s invasion (figure 8). we could also see this latter piece as a memorial to the relationship between colonisation and unacknowledged indigenous labour. the grave posts haunt the room with their presence, seemingly out of place, and certainly out of context, yet they feel like a necessary inclusion for an exhibition that will draw a predominantly white coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     70  audience into the white space of the gallery. the works – tall, thin, painted in ochre, echoing the combination of wood, land and light in gascoigne’s banner – are easy to pass by, albeit anxiously, but remain impossible to ignore through an autochthonous relationship that, in our non-indigenous postcolonial state, we crave (see garbutt 2006). figure 7: rosalie gascoigne (1986) banner (timber) (photograph by rob garbutt).   figure 8: watjinbuy marrawilil (1980) carved ancestral figure ceremorial pole (natural ochres on iron wood, 246 x 20 x 21 cm [left]; artist unknown (1988) ceremonial pukamani burial pole (natural ochres on ironwood, 202 x 28 x 28 cm) [right] (photograph courtesy of brett adlington). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     71  the door of paul roguska’s (n.d.) waterfall cabinet (figure 9) is comprised of finelysawn, evenly-spaced cascades of brown salwood. the organic form together with the geometric repetition of the cascades initially draws one’s eye. it is a paradoxical work. the woodwork restates the beauty of nature – yet does so in a finely worked and carefully measured piece of furniture made from a tree often found on the banks of rocky creeks in tropical australia (hyland et al., 2010). nature and culture are represented simultaneously, with the half-seen space behind the cabinet door hinting at the void that often occurs at the base of a waterfall, dark and private behind the watery veil. the cabinet connects us to the sublime cascades of protestors falls, and the ribbons of falling timber/water flow out to those protestors at terania creek who are represented in images in another room in the exhibition. figure 9: paul roguska (n.d.) waterfall (brown salwood, 150 x 44 x 18 cm) (photograph by rob garbutt). gina fairley (2008) has characterised lionel bawden’s (2008) the amorphous ones (the insatiable, unquantifiable longing) (figure 10) as “laborious ‘shaping’” yet also as “erosive narrative”. in his own art writing, bawden (2009) has settled on tropes such as “displaced species”, “shadow-land”, “a fractured utopia” and “lost histories”. within wood for trees, then, bawden’s work may appropriately join the conversation about de/colonisation and de/forestation. the amorphous ones is made up of white staedtler coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     72  pencils carved, cut, sliced, fused and sanded, with their leads exposed on the surface. the organic shapes could be rocks, anemones or jelly fish, a “carved sea-shelf or perforated coral” (fairley, 2008), or forest mushrooms or fungi. the inside of the pencils laid bare could be the cellular core of a tree: evolutionary and technological and cultural histories are, then, laid bare too. the work reminds us that wood – through pencil, paper, the wooden desk and the original rubber eraser – is enmeshed with the technology of writing. but if we think of marks on a surface, in different colours, as communication, white on white reminds us of the invisibility of some forms of communication and power in intercultural and interspecies contexts (garbutt, 2011, pp.159-173). the whiteness also functions as a reminder of coral bleaching driven by global warming. so longing and amorphousness align conceptually with the loss of forests, races, species, histories and languages. figure 10: lionel bawden (2008) the amorphous ones (the insatiable, unquantifiable longing) (white staedtler pencils, epoxy and incralac on paper stack; 40 x 90 x 50 cm) (photograph by rob garbutt). aña wojak’s (2008) unread book (in a forgotten language) (figure 11) is a devastating piece if one links it to disappearing forests. the artwork’s wooden component came from a 300-year old remnant forest red gum (blake society, 2010) which lived at the time of colonisation at sydney cove. here is a book that doesn’t open, but nevertheless is falling apart. yet its chamfer is embellished with precious and incorruptible gold leaf and its binding is made of long-lasting metal. the unread book’s gold-leaf papering and metallic binding sit in mournful contrast to the decay of the wooden covers. the unopened book (moreover, one “in a forgotten language”) mimics silence in a forest free of human language and, in its gravitas, it potentially mimics imperial logos. the sadness is doubled, tripled and more, by the hundreds of lost australian aboriginal languages, and further, perhaps, by the lost but unspeaking, or variously speaking, animal, plant and bird life now gone because of destruction of habitat in a cut-down forest. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     73  figure 11: aña wojak (2000) unread book (in a forgotten language) (redgum, gold leaf, tin, steel 115 x 55 x 50 cm) (photograph by rob garbutt). a conclusion in the word tree we might be drawn towards nature, and the word wood to the product of our labour. karl marx said that material production is something every culture of human beings has in common (1990, p.286, n.6). we labour and our labour alters nature to create an environment around us, and that environment in turn influences our culture and us as individuals as part of that culture. work – including cultural production or artwork – is what we do to survive. ecocritic, lawrence buell (2005, p.5), describes the imagination as “at least as fundamental as scientific research, technological know-how and legislative regulation” as a key to today’s environmental crises which include climate change; loss of species, homes and habitats; food security; poverty; and peak oil. moreover through theoretical imaginings, neo-materialists, amongst others, have pointed to the inherent anthropocentrism of marx’s economic view, a view that discounts and erases the labour of the non-human world for human-centred and for more-than-human ends (delanda in dolphijn and van der tuin, 2012, p.41). artistic practice, and engaging with art, enables experimenting with imagination in relationship with others of all kinds, and in relation with a range of senses that is not afforded through abstract and disembodied experimentation and theorising. if our writing has a tone of circumspection, of hesitancy, if it is not fulsome, that’s because we are sensitive to crouch’s (2012, p.240) understanding that representations are not “fixed or closed to change”, to bal’s dictum to be alive to irreducibility and resistance, and to welcome suspension and potential, and to stewart’s (2005, p.1027) request that we stay with the resonance of things rather than heading for “finished representations”. attending to, writes stewart (2007, p.129), “gestures not toward the clarity of answers but toward the texture of knowing”. we note, as well, anna gibbs’ (2005) discussions about affect and ficotcritical practice: “that writing may be driven as much by the body as by thought: it partakes not simply of ideas, but of sensory and affective knowledges”. we chose to write about this exhibition because it so affected us. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     74  we were disposed “to communicate something of … [our] affective experience” (gibbs 2005) with these artworks. we were affected by their aliveness, by the way we entered into conversations already in progress, initiated by the liveliness of the artworks, and continued by adlington as curator. we were affected by the exhibition’s locale, but also its global relevance, given this particular locale’s geography, history and culture. we are expecting the conversations to carry on, to be sustainable and sustained – because – such conversations are sustaining. the artworks afford us this “responsibility of responsiveness”. references adlington, b. (2009). family guy: curatorial essay. in lake macquarie city art gallery gallery (ed.), family guy: education resource kit. booragul, nsw: city of lake macquarie council. archibald, r. (2003, 12 november). freedom to work land, letter to the editor, northern star, p. 10. ackland, m. (2012). the experimental fiction of murray bail. new york: cambria press. askins, k., & pain, r. (2011). contact zones: participation, materiality, and the messiness of interaction. environment and planning d: society and space, 29(5), 803-821. bail, m. (1998) eucalyptus. melbourne: text. bal, m. (2002). travelling concepts in the humanities: a rough guide. toronto: university of toronto press. bawden, l. (2008). the amorphous ones (the insatiable, unquantifiable longing) (white staedtler pencils, epoxy and incralac [and paper stack]). sydney: courtesy grantpirrie gallery. bawden, l. (2009). exhibition review – caroline rothwell “exotopos” grantpirrie, sydney 2009. lionel bawden: published writing. retreived october 15, 2012 from http://www.lionelbawden.com/published-rothwell.html. blake society. (2010) unread book (in a forgotten language). retrieved october 15, 2012 from http://www.blakeprize.com/images/367.jpg. buell, l. (2005). the future of environmental criticism: environmental crisis and literary imagination. malden, ma: blackwell. crouch, d. (2012). afterword. in h. andrews and l roberts (eds.), liminal landscapes: travel, experience and spaces in-between (pp. 234-241). london: routledge. dolphijn, r., & van der tuin, i. (2012). new materialism: interviews & cartographies. ann arbor: open humanities press. fairley, g. (2009) lionel bawden at grantpirrie gallery. world sculpture news: world sculpture news, 15(1), 58. feain, d. (2010, 20 january). local farmers clear the air, norther star, p. 8. frith, h. (1977). the destruction of the big scrub. in w. goldstein (ed.), rain forests (pp. 7-12). sydney: national parks and wildlife service. garbutt, r. (2006). white “autochthony”. critical race and whiteness studies, 2(1). retrieved from http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/88robgarbutt.pdf garbutt, r. (2010). the clearing: heidegger’s lichtung and the big scrub. cultural studies review, 16(1), 28-42. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     75  garbutt, r. (2011). the locals: identity, place and belonging in australia and beyond. bern: peter lang. gascoigne, r. (1986) banner (timber). private collection. gascoigne, r. (1997). rosalie gascoigne: material as landscape. sydney: art gallery of new south wales. gibbs, a. (2005). fictocriticism, affect, mimesis: engendering differences. text, 9(1). retrieved october 15, 2012 from http://www.textjournal.com.au/april05/gibbs.htm grosz, e. (2008). chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. new york: columbia university press. hannah, g. (2009). hannah cabinet (34 fine timbers and veneers, 17 types of stone, 4 types of shell, 23ct gold leaf). lismore: collection of the artist. harrison, r. (2004). shared landscapes: archaeologies of attachment and the pastoral industry in nsw. sydney: unsw press. hyland, b., whiffin, t., zich, f., duffy, s., gray, b., elick, r., veter, f. and christophel, d. (2010). acacia aulacocarpa. australian tropical rainforest plants 6. retrieved 21 march 2012, from http://keys.trin.org.au:8080/keyserver/data/0e0f0504-0103-430d-8004060d07080d04/media/html/taxon/acacia_aulacocarpa.htm jarrett, c. (1894). tales of the richmond. lismore: richmond river historical society. kelly, r. 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(2008). momentum. in n. anderson & k. schlunke (eds.), cultural theory in everyday practice (pp. 287-295). south melbourne: oxford university press. papastergiadis, n. (2004). creative practice and creative thinking. in r. wissler, b. haseman, s.-a. wallace & m. keane (eds.), innovation in australian arts, media, design: fresh challenges for the tertiary sector (pp. 159-170). flaxton: post pressed. roguska, p. (n.d.). waterfall (cabinet, brown salwood). lismore: private collection. schatzki, t. (2011). landscapes as temporalspatial phenomena. in j. malpas (ed.), the place of landscape: concepts, contexts, studies (pp. 65-89). cambridge: mit press. sprigg, r. (2008). occasional tables. retrieved june 12, 2012, from http://www.rodericksprigg.com/gallery_items/display/3 stewart, k. (2005). cultural poesis: the generativity of emergent things. in norman k. denzin and yvonna s. lincoln (eds), the sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 1027-42), thousand oaks: sage. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     76  stewart, k. (2007). ordinary affects. durham: duke university press. stewart, k. (2010), worlding refrains. in g. seigworth and m. gregg (eds), the affect theory reader (pp. 339–53). durham: duke university press. stops, e. 2010, carbon credits (phd thesis). southern cross university, lismore, nsw. retrieved october 15, 2012 from http://epubs.scu.edu.au/theses/172/. stops, e. (2009/10). explorations into colonisation (wood, charcoal, porcelain, ash, sap, binder). lismore: courtesy of the artist. stubbs, b. (2001). the “grasses” of the big scrub district, north-eastern new south wales. australian geographer, 32(3), 295-319. turkle, s. (2007). introduction: the things that matter. in sherry turkle (ed.), evocative objects: things we think with (pp. 1–10) . cambridge, ma: mit press. unknown artist. (1998). pukamani ceremonial pole (natural ochres on iron wood). lismore: lismore regional gallery permanent collection. valamanesh h. (2008) memory stick (bronze). sydney: courtesy artist and grantpirrie gallery. wheeler, w. (2006). the whole creature: complexity, biosemiotics and the evolution of culture. london: lawrence and wishart. wojak, a. (2008). unread book (in a forgotten language) (red gum, gold leaf, steel). lismore: courtesy of the artist. acknowledgements we wish to thank brett adlington, director of the lismore regional gallery for his support during the writing of this paper. we also wish to acknowledge the work of the artists reviewed in this paper. the authors take responsibility for the use of images of their artworks under the "fair dealing for criticism or review" provisions of the copyright act 1968 (cth) [australia]. rob garbutt is lecturer in cultural studies and written communication, school of arts and social sciences, southern cross university, australia. rob’s research interests include the interconnections between place, identity and belonging; and the relationships between the local and larger scales. in 2011 he published his first book, the locals, with peter lang. (school of arts and social sciences, southern cross university. rob.garbutt@scu.edu.au) moya costello is a lecturer in writing, school of arts and social sciences, southern cross university, australia. she has two collections of short creative prose and one novella published. her work has been published in anthologies and literary and scholarly journals. she has co-edited a number of literary anthologies. (school of arts and social sciences, southern cross university. moya.costello@scu.edu.au) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 239 “for was i not born here?” identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne. anne holden rønning (2010). cross cultures 124. readings in post/colonial literatures and cultures in english. amsterdam and new york: rodopi. isbn: 978-90-420-2957-6. 187 pp. paloma fresno calleja we wouldn’t know that we are a multicultural society by looking at our literature. maori writing has gained much more focus now, but there is still a lot missing from people of other backgrounds. i think it would be good to be more proactive about encouraging writers from all sorts of backgrounds as new zealanders, because until that happens, our literature is not showing fully who we are in this country. (patricia grace, in fresno 2003: 115) as patricia grace argues above, new zealand literature has not fully managed to reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity that has characterized its society from the beginning of the colonial period. although, as she points out, maori literature is now firmly established and has been subject to numerous critical studies, the same does not apply to the literature produced by writers of other backgrounds, whose works have tended to be ignored as constitutive of the body of new zealand literature (nola 1999). the tendency to present debates on new zealand national identity as exclusively affecting pakeha and maori derives from the official bicultural policy established in the 1980s and has resulted not only in the homogenization of these two communities ─in themselves internally diverse─ but also in the exclusion of other ethnic groups as alien to this dichotomy and apparently unrelated to these national debates. this has had a direct reflection in literature, affecting writers of asian and pacific backgrounds, but also of european but non-anglo-celtic origin. holden rønning’s monograph engages in this neglected area of study by looking at the works of yvonne du fresne, a new zealand novelist and short story writer of danish and danish-huguenot descent whose literary production had not previously been the object of such a detailed study, with the exception of nina nola’s phd thesis (2000a). copyright©2014 paloma fresno calleja. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 240 in this sense, holden rønning’s book has come to fill an important gap and will hopefully pave the way for subsequent studies on writers like du fresne who, as nola argues, “have been relegated […] to a marginal position in new zealand literature, [although they] have enjoyed a considerable degree of reader support and popularity” (2000b: 204). holden rønning’s work attempts to solve some of these deficiencies by focusing on du fresne’s complete literary output with a double purpose in mind: to fill existing gaps in critical studies of what we might call new zealand’s multicultural literature and to illuminate the use of du fresne’s postcolonial narrative strategies; although not all chapters are equally successful, the book will nevertheless be of interest to scholars working in the field of new zealand studies, as well as to researchers of postcolonial or diasporic literatures. chapter 1, “identities in dialogue in the work of yvonne du fresne”, traces the main aspects and preoccupations of du fresne’s work by establishing a basic division between her short stories, mainly concerned with “depicting identities in dialogue” (1) and her novels, centered on issues of memory, history and mythology. as the author explains, du fresne’s work contributes both to a discussion of new zealand’s national identity and to more general debates about multicultural and hybrid identities in this age of global movement and of national uncertainties. the author discusses these aspects drawing from a number of well-known postcolonial critics, like stuart hall, homi bhabha or helen tiffin, to analyze ‒in a perhaps insufficient way‒ the most relevant building blocks of du fresne’s project of social reconstruction as well as the narrative strategies employed by the author to develop this project. she considers, for example, du fresne’s need to secure a sense of belonging, inscribing the self “in place”, and her simultaneous search for roots in her past. although the theoretical and critical sources employed in this chapter are suitable for the further commentary on du fresne’s work, my impression is that some of the points are merely hinted at, but not fully developed. considering that this introductory chapter is meant to position du fresne’s work within contemporary debates on identity, i miss, for instance, a more detailed discussion of the development of new zealand’s bicultural policy in the 1980s and of how these official measures intervened in du fresne’s own conception of biculturalism. likewise, i would have liked to read a more pertinent contextualization of her latest works as related to the events that, from the mid 1990s, have resulted in a growing multicultural awareness and prompted official measures to finally acknowledge and recognize the multiethnic makeup of new zealand’s society. a more detailed and pertinent contextualization is nevertheless found in chapter 2, where holden rønning offers an interesting historical exploration of the danish settlement in new zealand. this is a necessary introduction to du fresne’s work, in particular to her novels, where she fictionally reworks some of this historical material. the chapter begins with an account of the first danish migrations and engages in details related to the settlers’ lives in the manawatu and dannervirke regions. this chapter also coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 241 considers the relevance of the church in the process of settlement and the role played by the monrad family, 19 th century migrants who joined a small but well-established community of danes and struggled to make a living while keeping the cultural links with their homeland. the chapter concludes with a section on danish books and collections kept in new zealand as evidence of that effort to maintain those cultural and linguistic connections, a constant preoccupation in du fresne’s works, as the author explains in subsequent chapters. the rest of the book is devoted to the discussion of these individual works, starting with her first two novels the book of esther (1982) and frédérique (1987). the book of esther, discussed in chapter 3, tells the story of a middle-aged woman who tries to make sense of her life by looking back at her family history and tracing the lives of her migrant ancestors. du fresne thus reshapes and fictionalizes the historical material to illustrate esther’s personal and contemporary predicaments. the novel reflects some of the most common features of exilic and diasporic writing in its investigation of “intergroup relations and the concomitant conflict of values and customs, as well as the balancing of confusing and clashing emotions, resultant on a transference from one culture to another” (58). among these features, holden rønning comments on the problematic view of the often idealized exilic memory, the temporal and spatial shifts in the narrative, or the relevance of the new zealand land/scape to illustrate esther’s sense of dis/placement. chapter 4 moves on to consider du fresne’s second novel, frédérique, about a 19 th century danish woman who is forced to migrate to new zealand with her huguenot father, leaving her childhood love behind. the novel thus explores the more historical dimensions of the exilic experience, employing narrative strategies inspired by victorian literature and engaging, as holden rønning effectively demonstrates, in interesting linguistic games to reflect social and cultural diversity and to explore how identity and biculturalism are negotiated through language. du fresne also articulates these issues through the use of folklore and mythology, in particular through the legend of the snaveskind, used to illustrate the separation of frédérique from her danish fiancé and operating at a symbolic level to show “how the protagonist if entrapped between and imprisoned by conflicting cultures” (107). the chapter ends with a reflection on how the very specific cultural predicaments of the protagonist can refer to contemporary conflicts of un/belonging common in our globalized world. chapters 5 and 6 deal with du fresne’s short stories, compiled in the volumes the growing of astrid westergaard (1985), farvel and other stories (1980) and the bear from the north: tales of a new zealand childhood (1988). holden rønning departs from the assumption that the short fiction genre serves the author to employ the form as vehicle for a distinctively female expression and a useful way to “reverse and subvert traditional stereotyping, not only of nationality but also of gender” (111). chapter 5, in my view the most comprehensive and interesting, starts by briefly outlining the defining features of the short story form, and then moves on to look in more detail at the new coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 242 zealand short story, a format that seems to be specially suitable for a country with a small population and little resources for the full time writer, but also one where the short story tradition has allowed aspiring authors ‒of pakeha, maori and other ethnicities‒ to forge a specific new zealand style which consists in “the presentation of a situation, interwoven with comments on identity problems and cultural difference […] expressive of the relation between textual space and topographical space, as brief impressions of an emotional response to what is strange, exotic, foreign” (116). holden rønning considers du fresne’s childhood tales as sketches rather than conventional short stories which differ from her novels in that “they are not concerned with the problem of cultural identity as such directly […] but instead deal with the child’s positioning of the ‘self’ in a semi-hostile world” (128). the author then comments on du fresne’s use of interior monologue, humour, strategies of narrative delay and mix of thoughts to reflect astrid’s way of thinking and the personal dilemmas she faces. although issues dealing with cultural identity are important in her childhood stories, it is in the adult stories, discussed in chapter 6, where these aspects acquire a greater relevance. with their focus on women, these stories “foreshadow the themes in her later novels [and] illustrate the feminist issues in du fresne’s work” (140). holden rønning classifies these stories into two groups, those dealing with the older generation of danes, and those dealing mostly with second generation female characters who are “highly conscious of their biculturalism” (140), a situation reflected in recurrent topics like intermarriage, the pain of un/belonging, the sadness of ageing and death, and the exploration of grief as a result of different personal and social conflicts. after the analysis of du fresne’s short stories, the book concludes with a study of her last novel, motherland (1996), a fictional autobiography in which the episodic structure of earlier works gives way to a more conventional chronological narrative. the novel is narrated by an adult astrid who returns to denmark and tries to reconcile herself with the state of cultural ambiguity in which she lives; as holden rønning concludes, the novel eventually demonstrates “her ability to come to terms with this sense of the incompatibility of her two worlds and to find coherence in her life” (158). the novel reiterates some of du fresne’s preoccupations and creative choices, such as the focus on female characters, the exploration of cultural differences between denmark and new zealand, and the topic of teaching as constitutive of her characters’ experiences and personalities. this last novel “represents the culmination of the themes taken up in [du fresne’s] writing about the danish immigrants, at the same time as it poses salient questions about aspects of life at the end of the twentieth century” (153). holden rønning concludes her analysis by pointing at some of these salient questions, thus reinforcing the multiple reasons that justify the relevance of her study: the need to start looking at new zealand as a country that “has been multicultural for over a hundred years” (175), although this is a point that evidently needs further elaboration; the urge to increase scholarly work on authors who have been neglected by the critics coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 243 until recently, and the necessity to incorporate the works of writers like du fresne in courses on postcolonial and diasporic literatures. holden rønning’s monograph undoubtedly contributes to all three aspects in an appropriate manner. works cited fresno calleja, paloma 2003: “an interview with patricia grace”. atlantis 16.1: 109120. nola, nina 2000a: “my two countries firmly under my feet”: explorations of multicultural identity in the fiction of amelia batistich and yvonne du fresne. phd thesis, university of auckland. -----------------2000b: “exploring disallowed territory: introducing the multicultural subject into new zealand literature”. docker, john and gerard fischer eds: race, colour and identity in australian and new zealand. sydney: university of new south wales press, 203-217. -----------------1997: “ethnic minority writing in multicultural aotearoa/new zealand”. triln, a.d. and paul spoonley eds: new zealand and international migration. palmerston north: massey university, 60-74. paloma fresno calleja paloma fresno-calleja is senior lecturer in english literature at the university of the balearic islands (spain). her current research interests are multiculturalism, identity politics, gender and diaspora in new zealand and pacific literature and film. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 pedagogical change at times of change in the higher education system: an exploration of early career mentoring, co-publication and teaching & learning insights bill boyd university of southern cross, australia william.boyd@scu.edu.au copyright© bill boyd 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: universities are at a time of change. their social, political and economic conditions are under challenge, while technological change challenges curriculum design and implementation, requiring reconsiderations of teaching and learning practices. in this context, and as part of the conference session on higher education in 2014: threshold, watershed or business as usual?, i reviewed an approach i have been trialing to supporting earlyand mid-career academics to navigate through this changing environment. this paper presents an illustrated essay on a human-scale approach to earlyand mid-career mentoring through the establishment of small team-based research and writing projects. the essay provides examples of activities that, on the one hand, assist academics to develop the tools they need to navigate the new and evolving environment of higher education, while on the other hand directly addresses key pedagogical issues and provides new insight into teaching and learning in higher education. keywords: change in higher education, scholarly culture, career mentoring, research, scholarship of teaching & learning, team-based research. introduction – a journey through higher education universities are at a time of change. their social, political and economic conditions are under challenge while technological change is seriously challenging curriculum design and implementation. such changes require reconsiderations of teaching and learning practices. there are many critiques of the sources and effects of and of the potential solutions to concerns raised by many academics regarding such wide-scale and seemingly pervasive change. this essay canvasses one perspective on the matter, drawing on a human-scale approach to earlyand mid-career mentoring. that approach mailto:william.boyd@scu.edu.au coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 is one that, on the one hand, assists academics in developing the tools they require to navigate the new and evolving environment of higher education, while on the other hand directly addresses key pedagogical issues and provide insights into the processes of teaching and learning in higher education. while the professoriate may be unable to directly tackle the malaise that some (see below) ascribe to what are unsustainable staffing conditions in the universities, it has, i believe, a duty of care to earlyand mid-career academics. that duty of care can be articulated through active mentoring and should result in such academics being better able to navigate the new, emerging and evolving university environment. my work has commenced with an acknowledgement that there is a growing group of academics recruited from the professions and/or specifically for teaching, who are now increasingly required to meet broader scholarly research performance targets. their professional background, however, limits the cultural experience they require to survive as research, rather than teaching, scholars. it has, however, been assumed that they, on appointment, come with the requisite cultural knowledge. this is not necessarily so, and such new academics require to be mentored or in some other way supported into their new roles. this essay illustrates some examples of such support. opening with a description of my approach to guided and mentored team-based, multiauthored research, this essay describes the alignment of experienced and inexperienced researchers into small project teams. using a scholarship of teaching and learning focus, earlyand mid-career academics can be better inducted into the world of academe, start to be research-productive, and thus be acknowledged, validated and rewarded as wellrounded academics and scholars. the paper will describe a number of recent projects, exploring issues as diverse as engaging web 2.0 technology in teaching and learning, building engagement with research ethics and the teaching-research nexus, developing innovative pedagogical approaches, addressing student anxieties, and integrating scholarship into teaching and learning. the journey will travel over diverse terrain: research mentoring as professional development for early career academics; where are we going? … and how do we get there?; changing scholarly cultures: role of reflection, sotl & publication. it will draw on specific examples of projects: teaching-research nexus; research ethics writing project; research pedagogy in osteopathy practitioner training; curriculum intervention in mathematics teacher training; and itc intervention – wikis & web 2.0 design, citizen science, google mashup. all address issues of cultural change in the academy. i close in asking the question whether, in seeking to assess whether the approach works, if this represents the ‗hero‘s journey‘. research mentoring as professional development one beginning to the journey is an article in the journal australian universities’ review, by eva bendix peterson (2011). she recounts a tale of malaise in the universities, one in which she records a sad story of early career academics expressing concern over the choices they feel they have in terms of developing their careers and of aspirations they feel the system will not allow them to achieve. peterson describes a coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 situation in which a significant number of, especially, earlyand mid-career academics express their feelings of being overworked and undervalued. in seeking originally to record the strategies that such academics were harnessing to progress their careers as university academics, peterson discovered an array of coping and (potential) exiting strategies, ways in which academics were envisioning their exit from their career early, rather than working towards life-long career pathways. this, peterson asserts, stems from the growing corporatisation and bureaucratisation of higher education of the universities, at least in australia. one suspects that this is a global phenomenon. peterson (2011:41) concludes that policy makers and university managers should listen to the staff narratives she is recording, although she notes that such narratives ―continue to be dismissed and even denigrated by those who should be listening extra carefully‖. my response (boyd & horstmanshof, 2013; figure 2) was to acknowledge that while the system requires addressing, the university is only as good as its people; indeed it is fundamentally about people and its community, and one path towards addressing the malaise that peterson describes is by focusing on the people first (figure 3). the professoriate has a duty both to the institution to lead institutional change and the community of that institution, and to provide intellectual and scholarly leadership to its colleagues. in this regard we suggested that one response was to provide mentoring and support for earlyand mid-career colleagues through the practical experience of developing, implementing and writing up small team-based research projects. building on their day-to-day work and acknowledging the importance of developing an appropriate intellectual culture, small projects of the type described in this paper have emerged. foundations the intellectual basis of these small projects lies in the realisation that many earlyand mid-career academics in the new university system have a professional rather than scholarly background. that is, their understanding of the cultural behaviours of being an academic is shaped by different cultural milieu from that of the university. i have described this elsewhere (boyd et al., 2012:14, emphasis added) thus: while academics with scholarly apprenticeships … may intuitively understand ‗research‘ and ‗university teaching and learning‘, for academics with professional backgrounds or later-in-life academic career starts (i.e. whose apprenticeship and culture is professional rather than academic), such intuitive understanding may be less tangible. their professional cultural background is different. while such academics want to be good university teachers, they question what is required as an academic researcher. while there may be other organisational impediments to a university promoting the nexus, the professional cultural apprenticeship may be the crucial personal epistemological and ontological impediment to engaging the nexus. several other matters have also been important influences in the development of this approach. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 first is the growth and acceptance of a relatively new discipline, the scholarship of teaching & learning (often short-handed as sotl). gilpin (2007, 2001) notes that sotl reconceptualises teaching as an ongoing and scholarly process with an emphasis on improving student learning. it is distinguished by four characteristics: it treats teaching as a form of inquiry into student learning; it views teaching as a public and community, rather than private, practice; its outcomes should be subject to review and evaluation; and it should be accessible to others in one‘s field. it differs, according to gilpin, from other disciplines in its locus of origin and practice. sotl is initiated by academics to improve their own teaching and their students' learning. in this way, it relies on individual and collective desire to improve student learning and thus focuses on the contexts of teaching and learning and assessment and evaluation of the impact of an academic‘s teaching on student learning. ―part of sotl‘s appeal,‖ gilpin suggests, ―is that it functions as a rich text forum through which works from different fields, interests, philosophical orientations, and methodologies find space and thrive. these works converge in their focus on improved student learning. embedded within sotl, the ethic of reflexivity asserts that we are responsible for the applications and ramifications of our works in both our specific context and in society.‖ (gilpin, 2014). defined thus, sotl provides an entirely suitable foundation for mentoring teaching academics into broadening this scholarship to include research. it does so by engaging the very professional activity that consumes much of their working day – teaching. secondly, boyer‘s model of four integrated scholarships (boyer, 1990, 1996), bringing together the scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching, provides a valuable foundation to consider an academic‘s scholarship as a unified and integrated whole, rather than an assemblage of unrelated activities. elsewhere (boyd, 2013), i have discussed the interest and impact of boyer on those concerned about the scholarship of teaching and learning, especially in higher education and noted the growing literature on the adoption of boyer‘s model and its principles and practices across the disciplines and in expanding the scope of sotl-informed teaching and learning. many writers focus on the advantages to curriculum development and the improvement and increasing effectiveness of teaching. however, a close nexus between scholars‘ sense of professional identity and what they see to be their enhanced capacity to deliver good teaching and learning is becoming clear. i previously noted that the role of boyer‘s model appears to play a ―significant part in the (implicit) professional development of individual scholars, as much as in the (explicit) enhancement of pedagogical practice‖ (boyd, 2013:2), even if this remains unor under-stated. thirdly, the teaching-research nexus (often short-handed as trn) provides yet another focus for scholarship mentoring. university education can be distinguished from other higher education in that the teaching and learning is closely related to other scholarship, including research (boyd et al., 2010). this is the relationship that is referred to as the teaching-research nexus and is a relationship that boyer (1990) considers a fundamental characteristic of academic work. research and teaching have been described as being ―mutually reinforcing endeavours‖ (anon, 2003), while researchers such as krause et al. (2007, 2008) articulate the diversity of relationships possible between teaching and research. whichever way the trn is articulated, it provides valuable opportunity for professional development for both teaching and research academics. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 the final influencing matter is the spectacular growth in journal publication over the recent years, notably with online journals making the results of research increasingly accessible. in particular, open source publication ensures that publications are readily available for all to use. pulling this together, my approach has been to harness these contexts. my choice to do this has, in part, reflected my role as chair of my university‘s research ethics committee. in that capacity, i offer training for researchers wishing to engage the research ethics processes. i also promote research ethics and its processes. this amounts to a role in which i encounter and support researchers across the university. in many cases, in conversing about a research ethics matter, it becomes apparent that there is a more fundamental issue at hand, one of understanding of or at least developing a nuanced engagement with the culture and practices of research. the resonance with earlier work of mine in mentoring students and colleagues through a reflective practice model (boyd et al., 2013; figure 1) is palpable: this was an experiment in a collective reflective interview in which we explored our intellectual foundations. the resulting paper was entitled ―finding a home: …‖, a title that emphasized the importance of scholars reflecting on their professional activity in order to understand it more fully and to thus find their cultural home. as noted above in the quote above from boyd et al. (2012:14) (―while academics with scholarly apprenticeships …‖), this need to understand oneself is not uncommon. indeed, i suggest, understanding oneself is an essential element of professional development. what boyd et al. have shown in the context of academics aspiring to engage the teaching-research nexus is that there are critical gaps in professional development. these can be filled, but this needs to be a conscious activity. adopting sotl as a development focus allows this to be managed with the day-to-day activity of most academics, and from a practical perspective, i have chosen the use of small team projects. this allows individuals to invest a suitable amount of time and energy in a project without feeling, as many earlyand mid-career academics feel, overwhelmed. finally, the practical matter is one of focusing on project identification, planning, implementation and publication, i.e. running a small project from go to woe. the choice of project rests with the group and usually emerges following discussion about teaching and learning: every academic, i find, has a question, and usually several questions, about the teaching they are doing, the learning their students are doing, the curriculum, the syllabus, teaching devices, assessment, evaluation, organizational matters, and so on. finding an issue to research is not difficult. examples of the projects several projects will be briefly described to demonstrate the diversity, role and effect of earlyand mid-career mentoring through team research and writing. these brief descriptions will also illustrate the types of educational insights that may emerge from such an approach to the scholarship of teaching and learning. the projects are: (i) a teaching research nexus project; (ii) a research ethics-writing project; (iii) a project around the adoption of research pedagogy in practitioner training; (iv) a project focusing on curriculum intervention in a pre-service teacher-training course; and (v) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 three projects exploring aspects of information and communication technology (ict) in teaching, with specific interest in the use of wikis in teaching, the adoption of citizen science in environmental data collection and the use of google mashup in student exercises. (i) the teaching research nexus project building on previous work with experienced teaching-research nexus practitioners (boyd et al., 2010), it became apparent that the conventional language of professional development concerning the teaching-research nexus was not useful. indeed, in working with academics who considered themselves experienced and skilled in drawing together their teaching and their research, it became clear that their conceptions of the nexus was usually rather limited, often reduced to a single articulation of it. despite good evidence (krause et al., 2007, 2008) that there are at least five dimensions of the nexus – learning through research, research-led teaching, researching teaching, teaching informed research, and learning how to do research – most academics tend to use only one version of it explicitly, and perhaps a couple more implicitly. when asked to define the nexus, few academics are likely to be able to go beyond a superficial definition. in discussing the potential for earlyand mid-career academics to engage in the nexus, it was clear that such a definitional foundation was lacking. both the formal expression of the nexus and the formal language used in scholarly development, it turns out, means little to this group. rather than head down traditional training paths, it was decided by a small (but growing) group to use a reflective model to explore this issue. this involved several rounds of experiential narrative writing – participants were asked to draft a short (one page or so) account of what they thought the nexus was, why they were interested in engaging it, how they thought they could engage with it, what they perceived the impediments to be, and so on. form and content was not prescribed. this group had read the accounts of experienced practitioners (boyd et al., 2010). their own accounts were extremely varied. they all highlighted their inexperience and thus gaps in their understanding. yet, on a most positive side, they all identified sources of inspiration as need and desire. in short, all knew that they should engage the nexus, and all wished to. the reflective narrative project commenced with the explicit intention that a publication would be prepared and published. this eventuated, providing many of the participants their first scholarship of teaching and learning paper (boyd et al., 2012; figure 1). recording the very different stimuli and strategies adopted by the participants (the title of the paper, ―friday is my research day‖, was drawn from one participant‘s strategy of setting aside one day to ‗do‘ research), the paper concluded thus (boyd et al., 2012:13, emphasis added): changing circumstances [in universities] imply that conventional academic development needs to be adapted to harness the opportunities offered by [the] focus on teaching and learning, the pragmatic day-to-day demands of teaching academics and the serendipity so influential in any career … mentoring … needs to rely less on formal expressions of the nexus and more on adaptive strategies based on the daily experience of academics. the institutional response – the method to lead the novice to the threshold – needs to realistically reflect coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 the diverse, troublesome and contingent contexts of academics‘ desires to engage the teaching-research nexus. figure 1. “friday is my research day”: writing about the teaching-research nexus. publishing reflective narratives provided both experienced and inexperienced scholars the opportunity to consider their adoption or desired adoption of the nexus as a frame to align their activities as teaching and research scholars. for many of the authors, this was their first venture in scholarship of teaching and learning publication. (ii) the research ethics-writing project this project commenced from a similar base as the one described above, and reflects an equivalent issue to the teaching-research nexus project. in my role as chair of the research ethics committee, i was frequently asked functional questions about completing the ethics application form. there was an expectation that there are mandatory responses (―all consent must be written‖, for example), most of which represents a mythical understanding of the research ethics system. the important aspect of writing for ethics approval, and of course prior to that for planning for ethical research, is that decisions about what, who, how and why are guided by a set of principles. discussions of the type i was engaging in reflected a tendency towards considering the ethics application process as an operational rather than cultural one. what i considered was required was an increasing cultural understanding of research ethics processes. it became apparent that questions about writing for ethics approval were often really questions about conceptualising and planning for research (boyd, 2009). the writing of a research ethics application is closely related to, but different from, the writing of a coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 research proposal. however, this dichotomy presents a challenge to earlyand (often) midcareer academics. their diligence in writing the ethics proposal, thus, often results in dismay when their application is criticised by an ethics review committee. that criticism often reflects the inexperience of planning for research rather than any ethically-problematic matter. a research ethics proposal needs to take a research proposal as its basis, but is modified to demonstrate that the research, as planned, will (as best as possible) meet the principles of ethical research. in australia, human research must reflect four defined principles – merit and integrity, justice, beneficence, and respect – and must address issues of risk (anon. 2007). in doing so, the researcher often finds that their research design and method requires modification. writing the research ethics proposal often acts, therefore, as a trigger for early reflection – reflection even before the research has started – on the researcher‘s research practice. to address such matters, a team comprising two experienced researchers, two early career academics and two tutoring postgraduate students was assembled. the team operated a self-mentoring process over several months, mentoring through group discussions, iterative writing, and mutual storytelling. in a similar manner to the teaching-research nexus project, the shared process of reflection allowed each member to find ways of exploring and expressing their relationships with the act of writing for ethics approval. likewise, the project recorded a diversity of inceptive, desires, approaches and inspirations. as with the trn project, the work was explicitly designed for publication. the resulting paper (boyd et al., 2013; figure 2) highlighted several important points. figure 2: writing for ethical research: the publication that gives … not only the first publication on research ethics for most the authors, but the first on teaching and learning. while it was being composed, it was a learning exercise and mentoring journey for all the team members. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 first, it recorded the participants‘ self-awareness and empowerment at all levels of the process. this included, very usefully, the experiences of the established researchers in the team. secondly, it resulted in improved research ethics writing and applications. and thirdly, it assisted the participants to let go of both academic anxieties and cherished models. the paper concluded with a positive affirmation of the role of writing in mentoring academic careers: ―the very bureaucratic writing embedded in the research ethics proposal can be harnessed to mentor early career – and later career – writing and scholarly development‖ (boyd et al., 2013:37). (iii) adoption of research pedagogy in practitioner training this project, while also engaging a reflective mode of enquiry, extended the data collection to include student survey and observation. the basis of the study is the adoption of a research methodology – that is the planning, execution and write-up of small, usually group, research projects by final year masters students in an osteopathy course. the important aspect of this is that the course‘s primary purpose is to provide training for future osteopathy practitioners rather than for future osteopathy academics. the choice of a research methodology is, therefore, something that needs to be carefully considered in terms of its seeming relevance to the course objectives. while the staff members running this course have no doubts as to its relevance, there was some reluctance amongst students to accept this as a valid form of training for their future needs as practitioners. part of this, it appears, stemmed from a lack of familiarity with research processes, a lack of familiarity that expressed itself especially at the stage of seeking human research ethics approval. the human research ethics processes are core to this pedagogical experience, and to this end i, as chair of the university‘s human research ethics committee, became involved in the teaching. my role as a teacher involved providing an introductory lecture on research ethics to the students and providing individual assistance in how they engaged research ethics principles in their project planning stage. in this way i contributed to efforts to assist students in developing an understanding of the value of research – and research ethics – in a clinical setting. in terms of the research, the team, based on the core teaching team, comprised two experienced researchers, one mid-career and three early-career academics. they devised an evaluative project that involved two principle activities. first, they sought to test students‘ acceptance of the research-practitioner crossover, students‘ comfort with the research mode, and the role of research ethics in the project. secondly, they undertook self-reflection on their own roles and perceptions of the situation. the senior staff members mentored the research project planning and implementation that included encouraging the less experienced staff to make a conference presentation and to develop a publication (figure 3). the former went well and helped validate views amongst the team regarding the utility of research pedagogy in a practitioner-training course. in particular, the team now understands both the student and their own relationships with the activity better. from a student perspective, the team has a record of initial reticence by some students to accept research in clinical practice training programs. however, they also record evidence that the research projects contributed positively to student ethical clinical practice learning. the student engagement with ethics was, nevertheless, coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 variable in both depth and form. from the point of view of validating and enhancing the use of research as a pedagogical tool for ethical clinical practice, the team now understands the need to make explicit the connections between research and clinical ethical behaviour, to provide projects that are clinically relevant, and to provide opportunities for student reflection on research experience. the adaptation of research ethics principles and practices in this clinical training setting has therefore demonstrated the value of research as professional training pedagogy. it expanded students‘ understanding of engagement with enquiry. it also evolved into a professional mentoring project with teaching staff through this scholarship of teaching and learning research project. publishing these results, however, has gone more slowly than expected, as the team discovers the joys of team writing (grace et al., in draft). the theme of the publication does not sit well, it seems, with mainstream health education journals. in a broader sense, this example is important because it demonstrates potential for cross-over education with students whose primary focus is on professional or clinical training and qualification, and who are not initially or primarily interested in developing research or scholarly careers (boyd, 2014). although this seeming disjunction – the introduction of material that may be unfamiliar or exotic to students – first worked as a limiting factor in uptake and interest, it later became an empowering factor in student understanding. boyd (2014), in a review of similar work in another context, has identified three points that are key to successful adoption of such an approach. first, the use of unfamiliar or exotic content to stimulate student insight and learning is realistic and practical. its primary value lies in its unfamiliarity to the student, and therefore its capacity to stimulate the enquiring mind. secondly, allowing students enough time to process new and unfamiliar ideas – content, technical terms, relevance – is important. thirdly, from a teaching perspective, clarity of purpose is essential. (iv) curriculum intervention in a pre-service teacher-training course research into pre-service teachers‘ attitudes towards teaching mathematics shows that many pre-service teachers experience high levels of mathematics anxiety about both learning and teaching mathematics. this is especially important for pre-service primary school teachers who will go on to provide children with their foundation of mathematics for high school. addressing this anxiety at pre-service training could effectively eliminate later problems in both teaching and learning. in recognising this, a team preservice teacher-training lecturers developed a research project that moved beyond the usual student survey. while an original curiosity regarding actual (rather than assumed) levels of student anxiety about maths (cf. boyd et al., 1998) could have been satisfied through a standard student survey, the team recognised the need for the students to benefit directly from any enquiry. the team thus devised a project involving curriculum interventions comprising startand end-of-session surveys, content development and student engagement and analysis of grades and other data. in doing so, this was a good opportunity to introduce education early-career staff to scholarship of teaching and learning. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 the study has run for over a year, and is being extended to future years, including a potential longitudinal study. logistical outcomes include a successful application for funding, a paper published (boyd et al., 2014), the development of phd studies, improved teaching, and recorded morale boost (figure 4). in educational terms the study has identified three important findings. first, students‘ memories of mathematics were either overwhelmingly positive (40%) or negative (60%), and students understood these to determine how they now feel about mathematics. secondly, 40% of students are now anxious about teaching mathematics. and thirdly, students‘ considered their mathematical ability to be influenced by two factors: external, i.e. the impact of past teachers (47% of respondents: 35% positive, 65% negative); and internal, i.e. that one is either good at mathematics or not (57% of respondents: 43% positive, 57% negative). importantly, many students remember finding primary school mathematics difficult and may pass this anxiety on to their pupils. such evidence of intergenerational effect emphasises the importance of making issues and processes of discipline anxiety explicit in the current teacher-training curriculum. although the current project did not, by introducing new syllabus content on mathematics anxiety, reduce the incidence of anxiety, students reported improved understanding of and attitude towards mathematical concepts at the end of term. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 figure 3: reporting on an evaluation of the adoption of a research pedagogical approach to osteopathy practitioner training. while presentation as a workshop provides valuable opportunity for academics with relatively little sotl experience to reflect on their sotl project – the coloured diagram depicted the relationships between key elements of osteopathy training – publishing the results has proved, at this stage, a little slower than anticipated figure 4: addressing mathematics anxiety amongst pre-service teacher: academics now better understand the incidence and sources of anxiety, and can introduce this information to students to counteract the effects of previous negative experience and help them become more confident mathematics teachers. this scholarship of teaching and learning activity also boosted lecturer confidence: the image reflects how one, previously research-inexperienced team member, responded. (v) exploration of ict in teaching … wikis, citizen science, and google mashup the final example comprises three independent studies. these were opportunistic projects stimulated by a call for papers for a special issue on wikis for the journal future internet. it was opportunistic because the call for papers for a themed issue of the journal provided the stimulus for gathering the project teams together to reflect on and write about work that was already being done, but for which there was no prior plan coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 to publish. two ended up being published there (den exter et al., 2012; newell et al., 2012) and one elsewhere (boyd & ellis, 2013). the unifying characteristic of these papers is that the writing teams comprised experts in ict (information and communication technology) in education, these team members being the earlyto midcareer academics, whereas my role was to encourage and mentor experts in their fields to research and write about something that they take for granted in their daily work. the study by den exter et al. concerned the use of wikis and blogs in teaching large classes. the team included two very experienced on-line teachers, people known as technology early adopters and advocates. for them, teaching engaging web 2.0 technology is straightforward, but they had no prior inclination to write and publish about their daily activities, hence the need for encouragement. the paper reviewed and analysed their approaches to large class teaching using web 2.0 technology and described two approaches to using such technology, emergent and structured. the paper provided rich descriptions of the teaching circumstances, drawing on student feedback, data on student engagement, website data trawling, and analysis, to provide detailed records of class and teacher performance. this resulted in a model of teaching as learning dynamics (figure 5). the paper concluded in considering the needs and opportunities for designing an integrated web 2.0 community of inquiry on six points.  web 2.0 provides significant learning opportunities for distance education students.  system design depends on time available for teacher and student, clarity of pedagogical goals, and appropriate curriculum.  important matters comprise: teacher guidance; clear instruction; and matching design with pedagogical goals and the student-teacher context.  there is a gradient between structured and emergent uses of web 2.0 techniques; the adoption of these, or their balance, in any particular situation, depends on pedagogical goals, class size, and teacher time.  for a successful emergent approach, the teacher needs to be present throughout, the web 2.0 tools need to be tightly integrated, and initial guidance activities are essential.  for a successful structured approach, there is need for initial use of a tight structure, and for model wikis for student guidance. while den exter et al.‘s study primarily focussed on successful in-class implementation of web 2.0 technology, the studies by newell et al. and boyd & ellis, while superficially appearing to be about technology per se, were about itc and culture change. newell et al. discussed a form of citizen science, and boyd & ellis considered the use of the shared (online) resources of google mashup for teaching (figure 6). both concluded, however, on the need for cultural change in relation to attitudes towards technology, knowledge and authority/authorship. both papers, perhaps unsurprisingly, concluded in a similar manner. in particular, concerns around ownership of the application, the tool and the data, stemming from the public nature of the technology and the role of nonspecialist data collectors – the community-based collaborative providers of data – require us to consider the role of culture change. in parallel to the coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 technological development, there needs to be consideration of the potentially significant shifts in attitude towards knowledge, authority and ownership required for a profession to adopt such tools with comfort. (newell et al., 2012:559). social issues around the ownership and authorship of knowledge, and therefore the creation of original outputs by students, are challenged by such collaborative and open-source technology. the challenge is to our cultural understanding of the ownership and expression of knowledge. the paper ends in supporting other authors calling for the development of appropriate social systems, dynamics and cultures that allow for the acknowledgment and validity of shared knowledge and, thus, shared output generation as valid, honest and unproblematic. (boyd & ellis, 2013:412) figure 5: designing an integrated web 2.0 community of inquiry: a conceptual model, illustrating relationships between teacher, student and the integrated use of web 2.0 tools, and outlining the essential elements of teaching with web 2.0 technology (den exter et al., 2012, figure 1). coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 figure 6: web 2.0 tools at work: upper image: newell et al. harnessed the power of citizen science using a web app to record the presence of the noxious cane toad in eastern australia – a screen shot of the toad tracker interface. lower image: boyd & ellis reflected on the use of the shared resources of google mashup as sources of learning activities for students (google, 2011). the benefits of small project team mentoring while each of these studies has yielded interesting insights into various processes of education, the primary purpose was to provide mentoring to earlyand mid-career academic staff who find themselves in a position of requiring to develop research skills and a research profile. the question now is whether this has worked. there is a quote from j.r.r. tolkien‘s novel, the hobbit, which seems rather apposite in the circumstances: this is a story of how a baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. he may have lost the neighbours‘ respect, but he gained – well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 the question is whether the team members have gained anything in the end (figure 7). for each project publication has been or will be a tangible outcome. in the emerging academic world of (at least) australian universities, tangible and measurable published outputs are important. this is especially so for early-career academics. furthermore, given a gradual acknowledgement in the sector that scholarship of teaching (and for some learning) is important, and thus needs to be considered and assessed in recruitment, performance evaluation and promotion. figure 7: the hero’s journey – a popular device used to assist students to critique bilbo baggins’ journey in the hobbit is the hero’s journey. there are many depictions and expressions of the journey, but this one, as illustrated on the teaching support web site teacher anthony http://www.teacheranthoney.com/7t h-grade-ela-novels.html), seems to provide all the elements of the journeys undertaken by the early and mid-career participants in the projects described in this paper. further analysis could be enlightening i . perhaps a stronger indicator of whether individuals have gained anything in the end is whether they continue to publish in the field. while it is early days to judge this, at least some are doing so. ellis has one more item recently published (ellis & boyd, 2014), in which he explores another adaption of web 2.0 technology, the use of vodcasting (the video equivalent of podcasting), in teaching and learning. the mathematics anxiety team are actively planning continuing projects, and discussing future publications. furthermore, additional projects are emerging related to the mathematics anxiety project in other disciplines. on another front, it is important to note that at least one of the authors described above has acknowledged the utility of their paper in supporting their successful application for promotion. another approach to considering whether the team members have gained anything in the end may be to consider how the teams worked. there are many frames for such a consideration. at this stage i have not conducted the evaluation of team processes within each project so can only outline possibilities at this stage, with a view to more detailed examination in due course. coutu (2013:29) summarises ―five basic conditions that leaders … must fulfil in order to create and maintain effective teams‖ thus: teams must be real; teams must need a compelling direction; teams need enabling structures; teams need a supportive organisation; and teams need expert coaching. while it may be argued that the teams http://www.teacheranthoney.com/7th-grade-ela-novels.html http://www.teacheranthoney.com/7th-grade-ela-novels.html coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 described here are real, had compelling direction and expert coaching, the definition of enabling structures and supportive organisation may need further examination. katzenbach & smith (20134:38-39) cast these ideas slightly differently, identifying five characteristics of a team‘s ―essential discipline‖: a meaningful purpose that the team has helped to shape; specific performance goals that flow from the common purpose; as mix of complementary skills; a strong commitment to how the work gets done; and mutual accountability. while this essay has not addressed the internal dynamics of the teams, it should be noted that all the projects arose out of team discussions regarding desired outcome. performance goals were perhaps less explicitly defined, other than to aim for publication. the teams are generally diverse, bringing together different, and possibly complementary, skills, although where accountability for these lay often remained implicit rather than explicit. authors such as katzenbach & smith (2013) and gratton & erickson (2013) also provide operational advice on building team performance, while concepts of collaborations (e.g. anon, 2013) provide fertile ground for enhancing the experience of earlyand mid-career academics embarking on team-based research and writing mentoring projects. finally, and returning to my opening assertions regarding the need for mentoring to assist in provide earlyand mid-career academics with the skills development required to navigate the new and emerging higher education system in australia – in effect, to provide a meaningful scholarly education – i reflect on some research done on an equivalent experience, the introduction of research into undergraduate curricula. at the core of the experiences described in this paper lies an assumption that active engagement in research – learning about research by doing research – is a most effective way to develop scholarly skills. ―one realistic way of bringing teaching and research together in learning environments‖, claims willison, ―is for academics to explicitly develop student research skills in regular semester-length courses …, immersing students in the discipline, not only for its content, but also for its knowledgemaking practices‖ (willison, 2012:906). willison‘s work has focused on introducing research into undergraduate courses, based on the premise that ―in order to engage in meaningful research, students would benefit from the explicit development of their research skill, as would the staff guiding that development‖ (willison & o‘regan, 2007:234). this paper shares that premise, albeit as a foundation for supporting early and mid-career academics‘ development. in an early paper developing their ‗research skill development framework‘, willison & o‘regan (2007:407) concluded thus: [there are ―pockets of realization‖] where undergraduate research involvement has contributed significantly to enhanced experience of programs, graduate employment outcomes and postgraduate research experience. … conceptualising student research skill development and actualizing it in the early years of undergraduate studies is critical if our global society is to provide quality researchers to deal with the challenges of the early, middle and late twenty-first century. moreover … there are numerous skill and satisfaction gains …: research skill development, from low degree of autonomy to high degree of autonomy, is relevant for all undergraduate students. replace the words ‗undergraduate‘ and ‗undergraduate students‘ with the term, ‗earl and mid-career academic(s)‘, and the sentiment remains. continuing research (willison, 2012) has identified a number of important processes that reflect on the experiences coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 described here. from the learner perspective, mentees understood they had developed discipline-specific skills that are useful for current or future employment; this has occurred in the described examples, although to what extent still needs to be tested. importantly, development is recognised to occur best early in a degree program (read career). from the mentor perspective, most factors that facilitated or impeded research skill development are noted to be within the control of the person coordinating the process; this reflects the role of the team leader. willison, furthermore, argues that the process helped academics involved as mentors to reconsider the nature of their disciplinary research and, on occasions, find new research directions. several of the project described above involved reflective practices in which the senior members of the teams were expected to contribute as much as the earlyand mid-career members, and although the outcomes of that reflection have not been made explicit in this paper, they often did provide a point of re-evaluation of the senior members‘ views of their scholarship and relationships in academe. certainly the very process of teams defining their research projects has opened up new research possibilities for all participants. finally, however, willison found that explicit research skill development has the capacity to be more effective than mentored research, for undergraduate students; it would be interesting to see if this transfers to career academics. a conclusion how to conclude what is clearly a continuing journey? perhaps with a quote that, in some way, brings together the diverse experiences described in this essay that somehow encapsulates the successes of the individual projects and, especially, for this is what underlies all of this work, the progress of the individual involved in each project. in the spirit of mentoring, the reader is asked to read into these what he or she will. how about benjamin franklin‘s well-worn ―tell me and i forget, teach me and i may remember, involve me and i learn‖? perhaps, in a more absolute mode, we should listen to albert schweitzer‘s assertion that, ―example is not the main thing in influencing others. it is the only thing.‖ however, in due acknowledgement to all my colleagues, co-researchers and co-authors, i close on this offering from the educator james bryant conant. he asked us simply to ―behold the turtle: he only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.‖ references anon. 2003. the teaching-research nexus: a discussion paper. monash university. anon. 2007. national statement on ethical conduct in human research. canberra: national health and medical research council, australian government. anon. 2013. on collaboration. boston: harvard business school publishing corporation. boyd, b. 2009. developing the research proposal and formulating and conceptualizing the research problem. pp. 93-120 & 121-144pp in baban, s.m.j. (ed.) research: the journey from pondering to publishing. canoe press, kingston, jamaica. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 boyd, b. 2009. in baban, s.m.j. (ed.) research: the journey from pondering to publishing. canoe press, kingston, jamaica. boyd, w.e. 2013. does boyer‘s integrated scholarships model work on the ground? an adaption of boyer‘s model for scholarly professional development. international journal for the scholarship of teaching & learning, 5(2), 14 pp, http://w3.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v7n2.html. boyd, b. 2014. adapting research ethics principles and practices to enhance professional coursework education in universities. journal of the european higher education area, 2014(2), 1-20. www.ehea-journal.eu. boyd, w.e., cullen, m., bass, d., pittman, j. & regan, j. 1998. a response to apparently-low levels of numeracy and literacy amongst first year university environmental science students: a numeracy and literacy skills survey. international research in geographical and environmental education, 7.2, 106-121. boyd, w.e. & ellis, d. 2013. sketching up new geographies: open sourcing and curriculum development. australasian journal of educational technology, 29(3), 403-415. boyd, w., foster, a., smith, j. & boyd, w.e. 2014. feeling good about teaching mathematics: addressing anxiety amongst pre-service teachers. creative education, 5(4), 207-217. http://www.scirp.org/journal/ce, http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2014.54030 boyd, w. & horstmanshof, l. 2013. response to petersen on ‗staying or going?‘ australian early career researchers‘ narratives. australian universities’ review, 55(1), 74-79. boyd, w.e., o‘reilly, m., bucher, d., fisher, k., morton, a., harrison, p.l., nuske, e. coyle, r. & rendall, k. 2010. activating the teaching-research nexus in smaller universities: case studies highlighting diversity of practice. journal of university teaching & learning practice, 7/2, 19pp. http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol7/iss2/9 boyd, w.e., o‘reilly, m., rendall, r., rowe, s., wilson, e., dimmock, k., boyd, w., nuske, e., edelheim, j., bucher, d. & fisher, k. 2012. ―friday is my research day‖: chance, time and desire in the search for the teaching-research nexus in the life of a university teacher. journal of university teaching & learning practice, 9(2), 19pp. http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol9/iss2/2 boyd, w.e., parry, s., burger, n., kelly, j, boyd, w. & smith, j. 2013. writing for ethical research: novice researchers, writing, and the experience of experiential narrative. creative education, 4(12a), 30-39. http://www.scirp.org/journal/ce; http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2013.412a1005 boyd, b., rall, d., ashley, p., laird, w. & lloyd. 2013. finding a home: harnessing biographical narrative in teaching and learning in cultural geography. coolabah, 11, 187-204. boyer, e.l. 1990. scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. princeton, nj: carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. boyer, e. 1996. the scholarship of engagement. journal of public service and outreach, 1(1), 11-20. http://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/index.php/jheoe/article/view/253/238 (accessed 7th march 2013). coutu, d. 2013. why teams don‘t work. pp.21-34 in anon. 2013. on teams. boston: harvard business school publishing corporation. http://w3.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v7n2.html http://www.scirp.org/journal/ce http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2014.54030 http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol7/iss2/9 http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol9/iss2/2 http://www.scirp.org/journal/ce http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2013.412a1005 http://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/index.php/jheoe/article/view/253/238 coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 den exter, k., rowe, s., boyd, w. & lloyd, d. 2012. using web 2.0 technologies for collaborative learning in distance education—case studies from an australian university. future internet, 4(1), 216-237; doi:10.3390/fi4010216 ellis, d. & boyd, w.e. 2014. procedural skills, sketchup and vodcasting: distance teaching of design drawing skills and student learning autonomy. creative education, 5(12), 1106-1117. doi:10.4236/ce.2014.512125. gilpin, l.s. 2011. scholarship of teaching and learning trades. international journal for the scholarship of teaching and learning, 5(2). gilpin, l.s. 2007. unearthing the scholarship of teaching and learning in self and practice. international journal for the scholarship of teaching and learning, 2(1). gilpin, l.s. 2014. thoughts on sotl. http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/scholarship.html (accessed 13th june 2014). google. 2011. finn house 3d view geolocated. google sketchup. grace, s., mcleod, g., orrock, p., boyd, w.e., blaich, r. & streckfuss, j. in draft. ―above all, do no harm‖: educating the ethical practitioner using research pedagogy in an osteopathic masters course. gratton, l. & erickson, t.l. 2013. eight ways to build collaborative teams. pp.21-34 in anon. 2013. on teams. boston: harvard business school publishing corporation. katzenbach, j.r. & smith, d.k. 2013. the discipline of teams. pp.35-53 in anon. 2013. on teams. boston: harvard business school publishing corporation. krause, k., arkoudis, s., & green, a. (2007). teaching-research linkages: opportunities and challenges for practice and policy. stimulus paper: carrick trn forum 2007. canberra: carrick institute. http://trnexus.edu.au/uploads/presentations/krausetrn.pdf (accessed 28th july 2010) krause, k., arkoudis, s., james, r., mcculloch, r., jennings, c., & green, a. (2008). the academic‘s and policy-maker‘s guides to the teaching-research nexus: a suite of resources for enhancing reflective practice. final project report. canberra: australian learning & teaching council. http://trnexus.edu.au/uploads/presentations/altc%20trn%20final%20report %20cg%20635.pdf (accessed 28 th july 2010) newell, d.a., pembroke, m.m. & boyd, w.e. 2012. crowd sourcing for conservation: web 2.0 a powerful tool for biologists. future internet, 4, 551-562; doi:10.3390/fi4020551. petersen, e.b. 2011. staying or going? australian early career researchers‘ narratives of academic work, exit options and coping strategies. australian universities’ review, 53(2), 34-42. willison, j.w. 2012. when academics integrate research skill development in the curriculum. higher education research & development, 31(6), 905-919, doi: 10.1080/07294360.2012.658760. willison, j. & o‘regan, k. 2007. commonly known, commonly not known, totally unknown: a framework for students becoming researchers. higher education research & development, 26(4), 393-409. doi:10.1080/07294360701658609. bill boyd is the professor of geography at southern cross university and a visiting professor at the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona. he has an http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2014.512125 http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/scholarship.html http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/scholarship.html http://trnexus.edu.au/uploads/presentations/krausetrn.pdf http://trnexus.edu.au/uploads/presentations/altc%20trn%20final coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 abiding interest in place, environment and landscape, which he has, over the years, investigated from biophysical, historical, archaeological and cultural perspectives. working across the disciplines, and more recently as the chair of his university‘s research ethics committees, has provided bill the opportunities to expand his interests in teaching and learning in higher education to work with many earlyand mid-career academics in mentoring them towards being increasingly research active and scholarly integrated. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, australia. email: william.boyd@scu.edu.au) i i acknowledge one of the referees of an earlier version of this paper who drew to my attention the notion that the heroes journey is a model for narrative initially adopted from jung’s notion of the monomyth and popularised by joseph campbell in the hero with a thousand faces. it is a device for structuring particularly quest stories: hence (i) the image here attached represents the stages of the quest, and (ii) the attractiveness for this model as a device for examining the progress of the early career academics i have been working with. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 164 beyond nation? ludwig leichhardt’s transnationalism katrina schlunke abstract: inspired by the conference theme of ‘looking back to look forward’ this paper examines the multiple ways in which the prussian explorer of northern australia, ludwig leichhardt, provides possible new directions for rethinking contemporary concepts such as transnationalism and nationalism. while the paper in its genealogical fashion assumes that the past is not simply available to us to be looked upon but rather is made to appear to us through various, material and ideological productions; it is still inspired by the possibility that re-imagining the past in the present can produce alternative and better futures. keywords: ludwig leichhardt, transnationalism, nationalism the disappearance of leichhardt in 1848 and failure to ever find his body (or those of his final party) has produced not a stable historical figure easily folded into continuing national mythologies but an indeterminate subject. a subject produced through the discourses of imperialism and nationalism but also exceeding them. that absent body is a sustaining provocation to confirm both the 'unsettled' state of australia and the indigenous presence that leichhardt overwrote in his so called 'discoveries'. it is also a provocation to go on looking at the ways in which leichhardt as a non-britisher in a british colony may offer challenges to the ways we imagine both colonialism and nationalism in relation to australia. in the first instance it is leichhardt himself who challenges any straightforward idea of himself as only and ever prussian or ‘german’i and that imagining was clearly supported by a culture of transnational scientific communication and support produced by a belief in the transcendence of science itself. science, squatters and transnationalism leichhardt was a poor but talented student. his university education was marked by poverty and a need to rely upon the gifts of friends and a small trickle of support from his family (cotton, 1938:34). the first letter collected by aurousseau is from leichhardt to the crown prince of prussia in 1832 when leichhardt was attending the friedrich wilhelms universität, berlin. leichhardt the following appeal: ‘since, sir, through your copyright©2014 katrina schlunke. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 165 position you are concerned with the protection and advancement of the sciences, could you possibly come to consider taking into your special care a young beginner, who elected for this course of study because of its irresistible appeal?’ (aurousseau, 1968:4). arrouseau records this petition being rejected but ‘with gentle courtesy’ (1968:406). the letter is however indicative of the ways in which patronage was one assumed path for help for poor but motivated students. it also establishes the ground upon which leichhardt makes his claim— not only as an impassioned student but a person driven by his passion for science. but his most significant patronage was to come from his friend and fellow scientist william nicholson, who shared his allowance with leichhardt for many years and who would eventually in 1841 supply the funds necessary to enable leichhardt to travel to australia. once in australia leichhardt was eventually supplied with accommodation by another follower of natural science, robert lynd, and was able to put together his first expedition through a mixture of nicholson’s money and materials supplied by friends he had made either among the squatters or among fellow scientists. in exchange for this order of patronage there were usually gifts of exotica, newly discovered plants and animals and often acknowledgements of these patrons in the names given to many new discoveries. in a world that did not produce a clear paper trail of financial exchanges the traces of them can be read off the explored country and through the botanical listings. forever in australia we have the nicholson river and for his australian supporters the robinson river, the lynd ranges, the lynd river, the mackenzie river and so on. this system of support from the wealthy was a key part of the reproduction and expansion of the rising culture of science that was slowly moving from small, elite enclaves in the royal societies to more popular and domestic (and so gender inclusive) forms. in australia that science brotherhood was complemented by the support offered to leichhardt by the squatter community, who were restless for the land mass to be further mapped and opened up to their interests. assistance was initially given to leichhardt by individual large landowners, mostly in the form of equipment and hospitality while he developed his bush know-how in the two years before he set off on his first and most successful exploration from moreton bay to port essington. but many of those big landowners also provided money and equipment for his later expedition when the colonial government refused to. their interests were in both finding a faster route for produce to get to a port for shipment to india and the discovery of further valuable grazing land that they could take up. leichhardt was deeply valued by this community because he could supply intelligence about the country that included details about the presence of minerals, quality of soil and existing pasture. the descriptions of the country he passed through that were subsequently published in the newspapers reflect that mixture of natural science and eye to development: this creek comes from a hilly country, which, more to the north-west, rises into ranges of considerable elevation, giving rise to a great number of water courses, creeks, and gullies, all collecting into robinson's creek. the whole country is openly timbered, the ridges at the upper part of it in part covered with silverleaved ironbark, well adapted for sheep. fine flats extend along its banks, where i first met it in lat. 2528. (sydney morning herald thurs 26th march 1846) this combination of scientific knowledge and the further colonial possibility that he enabled through it was well appreciated by the community. as the australian editorializes: coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 166 considering the rich fields of agricultural speculation his journey opens to the colonists, the modesty of the traveller is as conspicuous in this outline of his labours, as his indomitable perseverance in accomplishing an enterprise, which, under all circumstances, borders, in its conception and execution, on the sublime. (tuesday 30th dec1845) the taking up of land and further expansion of the colony quickly followed the intelligence and markers that ludwig leichhardt had left in the landscape and some of those remain still. one example (very pertinent to this journal!) is the marked coolabah tree in the main street of taroom which leichhardt used to mark a territory he considered of high quality. his writings then drew william turner who was licensed in 1845 to hold the taroom pastoral run to the district and the marked coolabah tree has in turn been added to the queensland heritage list.ii on his eventual return from the port essington expedition, having travelled almost 5000km and for over a year, public meetings were called to provide him with adequate testimonials which would include amounts of money from individuals and the colony itself. in new world colonialism, sustained patronage had shifted from the monarch to the community and the popularity, and perhaps perceived usefulness of the exploring figure, was important in garnering this support. the newspapers therefore played a vital role in both calling for support and reporting the progress of that support. in the second call for a meeting to establish a testimony for leichhart (the first meeting was to establish the committee) the newspaper announcement was followed by a list of all of those individuals who had already paid a subscription to his testimonial. this reads like a who’s who of the colony starting with the governor, george gipps, and followed by some of the wealthiest landowners including benjamin boyd, robinson, macarthur, denison and so on. in this way a mixture of public proclamation and proof of one’s social connections and civilized interests, plus an exciting tale of extraordinary travels led to strong public and popular support for leichhardt. after this first expedition he was also recognised by france, england and germany including a pardon for his avoidance of prussian military service. in australia or rather the british colony that would become australia –support for leichhardt was gained through a strong call for deserved funds and a negotiation of leichhardt’s imperial transnationalism. immediately upon his return the sydney morning herald (smh) editorialized: dr. leichardt has done that which must cause his name to be enrolled among the benefactors of australia, and we are sure that the colonists will not he backwards in showing that they appreciate the value of his services. he ought to be rewarded both privately and publicly. the smh then reports sir evan mckenzie (who had already been publicly recorded as having given 5.5 pounds —a fifth of the governors contribution) as saying: …he trusted that the people of new south wales would show to england and to europe and to the world what a community of britons would do when any individual stepped forth from europe to extend the glory of the british name. true, dr leichhardt was a foreigner, but his exploits had been achieved in a british territory, and the british empire would have the benefit. when the news reached him that dr. leichhardt coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 167 had returned to sydney —successful —a friend and countryman of leichhardt's was under his roof —and at once he congratulated him on the honour which dr leichhardt had conferred on the german name. (sydney morning herald, monday 30th march 1846) it doesn’t seem quite right to say that mckenzie’s call was a transnational appeal when it is the britishness of his audience he is calling upon. but it is a very particular kind of britishness. it is a sense of being britons in new south wales where nsw will show england and europe and the world what being a briton really means. what it seems to mean here is a call to actively support a man who is ‘german’ but gives great honour to the british empire. in this mixture of colonial pride and imperial measure i sense the beginnings of the strange settler colonial nationhood that australia will eventually, anxiously, arrive at. it is simultaneously expansive, looking forwards perhaps to a more ‘multicultural’ colony and careful; revealing a sense of the pervasive anxiety as to how much of the land of the colony could be ‘claimed’ when it was so little known and the indigenous owners so overtly present. this meeting ends with a call for legislative and regal support as well as individual subscribers and so support for leichhardt shifts from individual wealthy supporters to the colonial community, to developing state assistance and british royal support. the scientist explorer is an international member of the scientific caste, a contributor to a colonial landowning class and a receiver of regal honours in the name of empire. leichhardt perhaps recognises something of this coming hybrid position when he notes in his journal as he sets out on his expedition: october 1st many a man’s heart would have thrilled like our own, had he seen us winding our way round the first rise beyond the station, with a full chorus of “god save the queen” which has inspired many a british soldier,-aye, and many a prussian too—with courage in the time of danger’ (journal,1847:5) the tune of the british anthem, god save the queen being the same as that used for the prussian anthem ‘heil di im siegerkranz’. leichhardt however would remain committed to a larger enterprise than even bilateral nationhood or empire — his final letter to his brother-in law in 1848 reports the following: i was pleased to hear that the geographical society in london has honoured me with one of its medals, and that the geographical society of paris has conferred a similar honour on me. naturally, i am pleased that such learned men find me worthy of such honour, but i have never worked for anything but for science and for science alone… he continues: …should my dried plants be unsuitable for the determination of new species, they will at least be interesting and useful for the plant geography of new holland. i have been very unfortunate with my seeds because local institutions are not suited to the culture of tropical plants. you may ask why i did not send these collections to our home museums. the answer is that i have carried out my studies of nature chiefly in english and french museums: that during my youth, i never stood in friendly connection with my countrymen, who naturally should coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 168 have had preference. durandoiii was a botanist and my intimate friend. he had a hard battle for existence: i wished to give him the opportunity to distinguish himself if my collection was of any value at all. (aurousseau, 1968: 993-4) but lest we think leichhardt’s international sense of himself as scientist and a friend precluded a sense of home belonging, towards the end of this same letter he writes with an amended quote from schiller: …i intend to go back to europe for two years and to pay you all a long visit. you shall trust and you shall venture; pledges to the gods are banned; nought but wonder’s wings can bear you to the far-off wonderland (i ought to say motherland) (aurousseau, 1968:995) so when we think of colonialism eventually producing ‘nation’ we need also to think about the inter-imperial, the transcultural scientificism and the proto-nationalisms at work long before 1901. leichhardt in his time in australia was able to appeal to all of these as proven in the concrete support that flowed to him from the colony en masse, via individuals and in the various awards given to him from the scientific worlds. but the relative transnationalism of that period shifted over time and shifted seemingly with the emergence of a more strident australian sense of national character and endeavor and so the depiction of leichhardt suffered correspondingly. emerging australia and being a real bushman others have traced the fall of leichhardt’s popularity and most account for it through the influence of alec of chisholm’s ‘strange new world’ in 1941 — a virulently antigerman tract where leichhardt’s abilities and achievements are belittled to raise the contribution of gilbert, an englishman who travelled with leichhardt and who had worked as a collector for gould, another naturalist most famous for his ‘the birds of australia’. most blame the mood of this book on the surrounding anti-german sentiment in australia brought on by the second world war, including the resultant confinement in detention centres or house arrest that many german and german associated australians suffered. but i would like to suggest an earlier book, a work of fiction, ernst favenc’s ‘the secret of the australian desert’, had an equally powerful role in the downgrading of leichhardt’s popularity and (in terms of the concerns of this paper) mostly it played specifically upon the idea of leichhardt as a failed bushman and therefore failed ‘real’ australian.the secret of the australian desert is a mad romantic, racist romp that was a popular work aimed at a young male readership when written in 1896. it is concerned with a group of white settlers who decide as it is the quiet season to go off exploring. they find along the way the lost journals and one remaining member of the leichhardt party who subsequently dies, a group of aboriginal cannibals who are the remnant of a lost civilization and a fabulously rich gold reef. the language in the book is of ‘niggers’ and a country free for the taking up amid the infinite possibilities of modern development. the hero of the leichhardt party, according to the journals they find, is a man called stuart who keeps himself decent through forty years with aboriginal people who he coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 169 teaches the art of the bow and arrow and who he defends against the cannibalistic clans. stuart finishes his diary thus: i thank god that though i have lived so long amongst these savages, i have not sunk down to be one of them in their habits, but rather have taught them many things. to the white man that finds this i leave the greeting and blessing i would have given him in life’. (p.66) compare this with the account of leichhardt’s or the doctor’s fictional demise in the same journal: ever since the doctor injured his hand through the musket bursting he has been subject to attacks of feverishness and temporary madness, and this has greatly added to the hopelessness of our position. i have often asked him for some definite statement of his intentions, but he seems quite unable to go into details, and i am afraid we are fearfully out in our reckoning’. ….and then finally: we took it in turns to hold the doctor on his horse, but he got very bad a few hours after we started, and when the sun grew hot he begged us to lift him off the horse for a little while. we had all the canteens full and kelly had made a bag of calico and rubbed it outside with goats fat, and it held water tolerably well. so we gave the doctor plenty to drink, but he got no better, and about noon he died. he talked a great deal to himself in german, but had lost all knowledge of us or where he was, and a good thing too. we could not stop to bury him, for we had to push on, so we left him there on the big plain, where i think no living thing ever comes or ever will come since we were there’. so here we have leichhardt reduced to the doctor (a title surely delivered with all the looming anti-intellectualism that would mark an emerging australian mythology of valuing practical skills over any book learning), out of his mind, mumbling in his foreign tongue, responsible for the losing of the way of the whole party and with his corpse left exposed in the forever unknown desert. the party who read this account are of course the australian heirs to the stalwart stuart. they ride and adapt and know how to treat aboriginal workers to get the most out of them including beatings and tricks that will stop their superstitions. and finally they name the gold reef they find stuart reef — no greater honour then to name the thing that will bring wealth and people (but not learning) to this place. this book may have been simply a popular but clearly fictional pleasure —as dismissible as any other colonial pot boiler which it clearly bases itself on (for example king solomons mines et al) but favenc had greater reach. favenc was also a journalist, a known explorer and a writer of non-fictional accounts of other explorers including leichhardt. the quotes below come from a review of his: ‘the explorers of australia and their lifework’ published in 1908. and here i am interested in the ways in which leichhardt’s by now well worn disappearance produces the silent and potent stage for the production by favenc of leichhardt as a very particular kind of failure. [leichhardt] appears to have been a man whose character, to judge from his short career, was largely composed of contradictions and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 170 inconsistencies. eager for personal distinction, with high and noble aims, he yet lacked that ready sympathy and feeling of comradeship that attract men. leichhart’s followers never desired to accompany him on a second expedition. and: as the man of science in a party under a capable leader, leichhardt would have achieved greater success than many men who have filled that position; as a leader himself he was, of necessity, an absolute failure. (‘explorers of australia and their lifework’, queenslander, sept 5, 1908) the damming of leichhardt here is complete in terms of the emergent nationalist mythologies developing in the newly federated nation of australia. leichhardt was no bushman, leichhardt was a ‘man of science’ but not of the people and he blamed others for his failures. in the hard-core homo-social world of the bush that australia was rapidly building its modern nationhood upon, to be considered a failure at comradeship (read mateship) was as bitter as it could be. add to this the ready alternative favenc had already presented in his fiction of bush savvy men who bravely develop the white nation and leichhardt becomes the near abject of ‘australian man’. favenc seemingly built his picture of leichhardt on the writings of, and conversations with stuart russelliv. in genesis of queensland russell wrote: i run the risk of provoking the apellean censure: ne sutor supra crepidam, when i tread upon the toes of popular and unqualified approbation by venturing to question ludwig leichhardt's fitness for the leadership of men (in the bush sense, with no doubting as to his scientific qualification) in the undertaking to which he bound himself in 1844, and persisted in until he passed out of sight’ (1888:359). russell should perhaps have heeded his latin warning and avoided passing judgment beyond his expertise but his description circulated widely and certainly widely enough to be worked upon by favenc. leichhardt becomes available through russell’s writings as a german figure of fun, a dotty professor wearing a hat surrounded by creepers and with beetles coming out the brim. as cotton writes of russell’s description of leichhardt; “that is a pretty little picture of an entirely mythical german scientist” (1938:163). the infectiousness of this caricature of leichhardt may also have rested in russell putting the final judgement of leichhardt in the mouth of his stockman william ortan: mark my words, sir, dr. leichhardt hasn't got it in him, and never will get it. i don't mean to be disrespectful: and i don't mean to say he can't and won't get there: he's a brave gentleman, i don't want to be told that: but how he'll get there in his way, i can't guess, and don't like thinking about: he's no bushman, and i say again sir, if you go you'll be sorry for it. then again, what does he know about the darkies? (1888: 362) and so the real bushman speaks some forty years after the event in supposedly perfectly remembered sentences and has his sentiments ‘fictionalised’ by favenc. in this way a kind of truth and a kind of fantasy come together, marked as they both are by an emerging national mythology that the bushman knows best. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 171 it is hard not to see the treatment of leichhardt in the first instance as a movement from a transnational colonial world to a more insular national one. the first able to hold a multiidentified figure driven by a transcendent romantic scientism but the second deciding who was worthy or not on the basis of bushmanship alone. but culture is never so simple. in his dismissal of science and its transnational traditions favenc simultaneously evokes another australia which was at this time taking up science as evidence of our modernity and progress. in depicting leichhardt as a blamer of others he suggests something that anne curthoys sees as national trope where australia is always the victim and never the perpetrator (curthoys, 2006). and finally in his dragging down of leichhardt’s reputation we see favenc energetically participating in the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ where great deeds are made small and manageable by the ‘ordinary australian’. perhaps in this way favenc thoroughly installs leichhardt in the national imaginary albeit negatively. there is so much more that can be said about the ways in which entanglement of fictional and non-fictional accounts, authorial projections and textual desires have produced our leichhartian imaginings. in this present moment of an assumed, if sometimes fragile multiculturalism leichhart’s original transnationalism looks fresh and even familiar in a way that the bush centred national descriptions do not. could it be that we moving backwards to a transculturalism we will only meet in the future? looking carefully at the ways in which leichhardt imagined himself and was seen by others in australia’s colonial period and then how he was depicted by others as australia reached federation and a distinct nationalism creates an expanded picture of what ‘australian’ means now and could mean in the future. works cited aurousseau, marcel (ed) (1968) the letters of f.w. ludwig leichhardt, vols 1-3, london: cambridge university press chisholm, alec (1941) strange new world; the adventures of john gilbert and ludwig leichhardt, sydney: angus and robertson. clark, manning (1968) ludwig leichhardt’s letters in meanjin quarterly, december, 405-08. cotton, catherine (1938) ludwig leichhardt and the great south land, sydney: angus and robertson curthoys, ann (2006) ‘fear and desire; history and national consciousness in australia, psychoanalysis downunder, issue 7b http://www.psychoanalysisdownunder.com.au/downunder/backissues/696/747/750 favenc, ernest (2009){1896} the secret of the australian desert, general books (print on demand) leichhardt, ludwig (1847) journal of an overland expedition in australia from moreton bay to port essington, london: t&w boone (british library historical print collections) sydney morning herald, newspaper the australian, newspaper (1842+) evening news, newspaper coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 172 i the german realm not being established until 1871. ii see http://queenslandplaces.com.au/node/822 for more detail. iii durando was (according to aurosseau p.442) ‘gaetano durando a sardinian officer who preferred natural science to soldiering so he opened a ‘comptoir botanique’ near the jardin des plantes, paris. iv see evening news (sydney, nsw : 1869 1931), saturday 11 november 1899, page 4 where favenc is reported as responding to a correction by mann that the second leichhardt party were not in enmity with each other, by saying he had drawn his conclusions from several conversations with the late mr stuart russell, author of the genesis of queensland’ katrina schlunke teaches cultural studies at the university of technology sydney and is a member of the cultural materialities and intimacies research programs within the transforming cultures research centre. she is an editor of cultural studies review and is currently completing a monograph on the cultural history of captain cook tentatively titled 'discovering possession island: captain cook and the first theft'. 8,500-10,000 words coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 language and bilingualism in antigone kefala’s alexia (1995) and the island (2002) catalina ribas segura abstract: migrants modify the spaces around them: not only by leaving one territory but also by occupying another one. in fact, their physical appearance, their behaviour, their clothing, their preferences and/or their language may be factors used both by locals to pinpoint them and by immigrants themselves as identity markers. greek-australian antigone kefala explores the significance and uses of language in her tale alexia: a tale for advanced children (1995) and in her novella the island (2002). in these texts, alexia and melina –the main characters, respectivelyuse language as a central tool in their struggle to make sense of the world they live in. being migrants and bilingual, alexia and melina have a relation with language that is not understood by many, mainly locals. kefala uses language as a marker of difference, but, as shown by jane warren (1999), this difference can also be a sign of ethnic pride. consequently, this article not only explores the relation between language and the main characters in alexia and in the island but it also introduces other strategies migrants may use to approach languages. the questions to be answered are the following: “what is the relation of migrant characters with their mother tongue? and with the new language, culture, territory and space?” and “are there alternative strategies?” the expected conclusions are that language can be understood as the ‘enemy’ and ‘friend’ (kefala 1995: 104) which can both empower and disempower migrants, but which relates them to the space and people around them. given the fact that language is a live entity, the strategies may be numerous and may vary in time. keywords: language, bilingualism, “wogspeak”, hybridity, greek-australian literature, antigone kefala. words have wings they´re always on the move they make it their business to travel back and forth between sexes between races words are out of business copyright©2014 catalina ribas segura. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 without these spaces they steal upon the stricken soul and rob her of her rage by earning it on their shoulders and laying it on the page. words. maria preethi srinivasan (2012) maria preethi srinivasan dedicates this poem to the memory of indigenous australian writer and academic dr ruby langford ginibi and explains that, “though a writer may look for words, in reality it is the words which find the writer and give him/her that much needed feeling of liberation that comes through self-expression” (58). words help people verbalise their feelings, their understanding of the world and their interaction with others. this article explores the relation of bilingual or multilingual speakers with words and languages. in order to reach this goal, the following pages introduce the relation between language and bilingualism and language and hybridity. then, they present greek-australian writer antigone kefala and analyse the use of language in her works alexia: a tale for advanced children (1995) and the island (2002). language and bilingualism the benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism in all stages of life have been proved by many researchers. marian and shook (2012) recall that the advantages of bilingualism not only affect childhood, as bilingual children adjust better to environmental changes, but also to adults, whose brains develop a better cognitive control. what's more, marian and shook claim that elderly people benefit from speaking more than one language because those who show symptoms of developing alzheimer’s disease do so five years later than monolingual elders and, even when the brains of bilinguals are more damaged, the patients perform better than monolingual ones (7-8). consequently, some of the advantages of bilingualism, marian and shook summarize, are related to “better attention and task-switching capacities than the monolingual brain” (1) as well as “improved metalinguistic awareness”, “better memory, visual-spatial skills, and even creativity”(8). in spite of all these positive effects, some consider bilingualism and linguistic diversity a menace and demand that bilinguals use only the official language of the country. this demand is especially targeted at immigrants who use different languages as they are considered outsiders and, consequently, potential enemies. sociologist madan sarup (1996) explains that enemies are “associated with struggle” (10), while friends are related to cooperation. strangers, on the other hand, are placed in an in-between position as they are “neither friend nor enemy” (10), but certainly “not ‘one of them’” (7). migrants are persons who have “crossed the border”, who seek a place to make ʻa new beginningʼ, to start again, to make a better life. the newly arrived have to learn the new language and culture. they have to cope not only with the pain of separation but often also with the resentments of a hostile population. (sarup 1) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 if identity is “the story we tell of ourselves and which is also the story that others tell of us” (sarup 3), the language/s people use not only determine their way of relating to others, but also the form of understanding and approaching the world. thus, speaking a language is an intimate process, as maria preethi srinivasan implied in her poem. as zhengdao ye (2007) also explains: the sounds of our mother tongue are like no other sounds. they are the first sounds coming from within ourselves, giving tangible forms to our thoughts and feelings, which put us in touch with the outside world and with the people around us. they are the sounds that are most dear to us. of all the sounds that we can hear, they are the most meaningful to us. they are in fact internal to ourselves. (66) being a migrant implies facing many challenges, one of which can be a limited knowledge of the language of the country or of the nuances in meaning of some words and expressions. as françoise král defends in critical identities in contemporary anglophone diasporic literature (2009), the reasons may relate to the asymmetry of the bilingual subject [which] is the reflection of a more general asymmetry linked to the power struggle of the two countries whose languages are spoken by the diasporic subject (mignolo, 2000) [as well as to the fact that] the diasporic subject, for personal or historical reasons, assigns each language to a specific task for the simple reason that he cannot relate to the two languages in the same way. (136) migrants also need to translate their social values into the host culture, a process which král calls “transvalence”. in her opinion, this course of action “requires that one not only acts the way one used to in one’s home culture but succeeds in translating one’s social status in accordance with the process of validation of the host culture” (115-6). this process implies the “translation” of cultural capital, a concept coined by ghassan hage (1998) following pierre bourdieu (1986). cultural capital not only implies mastering a language but it “represents the sum of valued knowledge, styles, social and physical (bodily) characteristics and practical behavioural dispositions within a given field” (hage 53). this capital is not cumulative, each characteristic has a different fluctuating value and migrants will never be able to obtain the total capital. in fact, by trying to master as much cultural capital as possible, migrants emphasise their position as outsiders who do not belong because they were not born with it. language is one of these values. as françoise král explains, bilingual subjects can have a different relation towards the languages spoken. král comments that for those who live in a country where their mother tongue is not the official language nor the most used, the relation towards the second language can be similar to that of a father or a step-mother. according to král’s terminology, a mother tongue is the language of affect, a father tongue is the language of domination and cognitive development and a stepmother tongue is more distant and less threatening than a father tongue (131-42). the relation between migration and translation is also studied by fiona allon (2002). she argues that “migration is directly and inevitably a process of cross-cultural translation, a passage of movement between different languages, cultures and worlds” (107). however, this translation not only is a change of words with the same meaning, coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 but also “a dynamic articulation of in-betweenness” (allon 107). the nuances of words may not be grasped by the speakers, either children or adults, and they may make the speaker feel out of place and, sometimes, an observer rather than a participant. occasionally, as irene ulman (2007) indicates, there can be moments of uncertainty when using a colloquial expression in the language which is not one’s mother tongue because the speaker may not sound ‘authentic’. ullman affirms her familiarity with the following situation: using a colloquial phrase which you didn’t grow up with and which doesn’t really belong to you because you don’t come from the culture that produced it. questions rush through your mind. is it an authentic thing to say? will you look and sound authentic? you are not sure you can pull it off, you want to try it on for size, and there’s a moment of uncertainty. (51) this example emphasises král’s argument that “the language used by the immigrant is never used in the exact same way as his [or her] mother tongue” (157): not only because the migrant has to learn the language, but also because using specific expressions may highlight the foreignness of the speaker. unfortunately, migrants’ speech is considered to be more authentic if the language produced is disordered and grammatically incorrect because this implies that the migrant has not assimilated (gunew 1986 and 1990) and is still otherised. in fact, no matter how hard the migrant tries to earn this characteristic of cultural capital, she/he will always be perceived as an outsider because that person was not born with such capital and is trying to acquire its traits. in australia, migrants of southern-european origin developed a way of talking known as ‘ethnic australian english’. jane warren (1999) argues that it is spoken by firstgeneration migrants, who tend to employ their native language with members of their communities. logically, their proficiency in english depends on different factors, such as their knowledge of english before their arrival in australia or their contact with native speakers of english. on the other hand, 1.5-generation migrants, that is, those who were born in one country but schooled in australia, and second-generation migrants, or those who were born in australia of at least one migrant parent, are proficient in english, because they learn this language at school, and may also learn their parents’ language/s at home. during adolescence, children’s relationship with their parents’ culture usually varies and young adults tend to have three attitudes. first, they can stop speaking the language of their parents and reject their culture, that is, total absorption into english. second, they can choose to maintain the family’s culture and immerse in it, that is, total engagement with the parents’ culture. third, they can manage to reconcile both cultures. their proficiency in english allows 1.5 and secondgeneration migrants to “shape and transform the english language to create a new linguistic and social space of its own” (warren 87). consequently, they can use the strategy of changing accents and speech patterns depending on the situation. that is to say, second and 1.5-generation speakers can use either ‘standard australian english’ or ‘ethnic australian english’ if they want to differentiate themselves from their parents or the host culture. this strategy is called ‘wogspeak’. thus, depending on the circumstances, those 1.5 and second-generation migrants can choose to speak english with either accent and mark their close or distant relationship with english and what it represents. being able to understand and relate in two cultures implies being able to subvert the languages and play with them, to create new linguistic coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 strategies and variations. regarding their role as translators for their parents and elders, speaking english “can lead [these children to develop] an ability to act as bridges between parents and the wider society, or to a deep understanding of the position of the outsider” (bottomley 133). therefore, 1.5 and second-generation migrants may see and understand language as a tool of domination. accordingly, speaking english can be perceived as a dominant cultural capital needed to succeed in the host country. language and hybridity the concepts of in-betweenness and hybridity were developed by homi bhabha in the location of culture (1994). bhabha explains that there exists a system of binary forces which have shaped the contemporary world: certain cohesive groups dominate or have dominated others, such as the coloniser over the colonised, white over black and man over woman. these groups express such dominance through a discourse supported by historical events and facts. postcolonial studies, among other disciplines, aim to explore the identities of these groups and to determine the process of identity construction. nevertheless, bhabha disagrees with the idea of fixed mutually-exclusive binary identities, and suggests the concept of the fluidity of identities. as a consequence, there are not just two identities, but a myriad of them which are placed in between these two opposites. as bhabha states in the introduction to the location of culture (1994), these “in-between” spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood –singular or communalthat initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sides of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of denying the idea of society itself. (1-2) that is to say, the two opposites share some commonalities which bhabha names a “third space” because it is not just one or the other, but an interstice where, for example, “colonizer and colonized negotiate their cultural difference and create a culture that is a hybrid” (ramos 3). the culture in this “third space” is a hybrid of the other two because it does not destroy any of them. post-world war ii migrants have certainly modified australian society to the extent that in the 2011 census 46% of the population was firstor second-generation migrant. critic sneja gunew (1990) explains that “by definition, to be a new australian was to be a boundary crosser, a transgressor, in the eyes of those who like to think that they had already been t/here” (111). consequently, for a significant number of australians, english may not be their mother tongue. therefore, the high linguistic variety existent in australia modifies the way english is spoken: not only with “broken english” and “ethnic english”, but also with vocabulary that is incorporated into australian english. françoise král (2009) indicates that language serves two purposes: integration, as it permits communication, and resistance, as “the immigrant affects the language and to a certain extent works on it when using it” (156). speaking a language does not only imply using some words and expressions to convey a message, but also knowing the tone, the nuance in meaning of the words implied as well as understanding humour, sarcasm, silences and cultural references. as a result, the immigrant may have to translate a concept, express one that does not exist in the host culture, or learn new notions. besides linguistic conversion, migrants also need to translate their social values coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 into the host culture in order to get social recognition. král refers to emmanuel renault’s idea of the three spheres of social recognition: that of one’s family and friends, of one’s workplace, and of the nation where one lives. with the aim of social recognition in mind, migrants may use different strategies to achieve it, one of which can be using linguistic varieties for one’s purposes. in the case of greek migrants to australia, speaking english can be a liberating experience as the language feels more distant and less embedded with cultural expectations on roles and patterns of behaviour. for many, speaking english represents a new beginning, a new chapter in their lives which they embrace in order to leave bad memories behind and/or to explore the opportunities australia offers. on the other hand, english can also represent a barrier that limits a migrant’s ability to communicate with those who do not speak their mother tongue and, consequently, makes this person dependant on other people’s will and time to help and translate. this frequently is a source of frustration and disempowerment as adults are made to feel inadequate and many turn to children or grandchildren for help to do the activities they aim to. some of the texts children translate include a wide spectrum of registers: from school notes, to visits to the doctor, or bureaucratic information. community languages, then, are taught in saturday classes at state schools so children learn to value the language of their parents and grandparents. however, because community languages are not taught during the regular academic timetable, these may be considered to have an academically inferior status to that of english (as bottomley (1992) recalls, french, latin and german are the traditional foreign languages studied at school). as a result, language can be perceived as an instrument of liberation or of domination. the relation that migrants have with language and the host culture is often explored by antigone kefala in her texts. this paper aims to analyse two of her works in prose: alexia: a tale for advanced children (1995) and the island (2002), along with investigating the characters’ relationship with the new language, culture, territory and space and the strategies used to overcome linguistic and cultural difficulties. in order to fulfil these goals, the following pages present the writer, antigone kefala, then analyse the tale and the novella mentioned. antigone kefala: multilingual migrant, monolingual writer antigone kefala was born in braila (romania) in 1935. her parents were of greek origin and, in 1949, after world war ii, the family was forced to leave their home and go to greece as refugees. at that time, antigone kefala spoke romanian and french, but had forgotten the greek her grandmother had taught her as a child. once in greece, she went to high school and had to learn the national language. in 1951 the family migrated to new zealand, also as refugees. while in this third country, she learnt her fourth language, english, and graduated with a masters of arts degree from victoria university in wellington. in december 1959 she migrated to sydney, australia, where she has since lived. kefala is part of a generation who experienced the beginnings of the policy of multiculturalism in australia. as a consequence of the attacks australia suffered during world war ii, the white australia policy (1901-1975) began to be lessened. this coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 restrictive law did not welcome immigrants from countries other than the united kingdom and the republic of ireland and the majority of the population of the country was white and of european ancestry. in fact, those who did not speak english as a mother tongue were otherised: indigenous australians were forced to learn english and children of the stolen generations were forbidden to speak their mother tongues. also, those inhabitants of non-british ancestry did not enjoy the same rights as the majority and were effectively discriminated by legislation (1901 immigration restriction act, the dictation test and the certificate exempting from dictation test, 1901 pacific islanders labourers act, 1902 franchise act, 1903 naturalisation act, 1908 old age and invalid pensions act, 1914 war precautions act). at the end of world war ii, almost 100% of the population in australia was white (indigenous australians were still not counted in the census) and 98% of british descent. after the attacks, the countryʼs new motto became “populate or perish” and the number of inhabitants in australia trebled in sixty years: in 1944 australia had 7 million inhabitants and in 2011 the number of citizens surpassed 22 millions (abs). the government established some programs to help migrants assimilate to the australian ways, such as the adult migrant education program (1947) (later called the adult migrant english program) and the ʻgood neighbour movementʼ (1949). the 1958 migration act regulated the changes, effectively lessened the white australian policy and allowed the arrival of thousands of migrants from many european countries (mainly between the 1950s and 1970s), asian countries (especially after the mid-1970s), and african and middle eastern countries (largely after the 1990s). consequently, kefala arrived in australia during a period of time when the country welcomed certain migrants, but received others with hostility: as first-generation migrants were foreigners, they were often considered ‘the other’. similarly, many second-generation migrants felt discriminated against because, to a greater or lesser extent, they were influenced by the culture of the migrant parent/s. despite the fact that australia is one of the most multicultural and multilingual countries in the world where more than 200 languages are spoken, bilingualism and multilingualism are not enhanced and author eva sallis (2007) considers it “a linguistic third world, a land in which languages are threats and too often stamped out and forgotten” (151). thanks to the increase in population, new areas of academic disciplines appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, such as greek-australian or asian australian studies. according to auslit: the australian literature resource, antigone kefala taught english as a second language, worked in a library and served as an arts administrator with the australian council. kefala read extracts from her work on abc radio national and gave numerous readings around australia and abroad. she edited ethnic arts directory (1978) and multiculturalism and the arts (1986) and has participated in many anthologies, such as re-telling the tale: poetry and prose by greek-australian women writers (1994, edited by helen nickas and konstandina dounis) or mothers from the edge: an anthology (2006, edited by helen nickas). her main poetry publications consist of the alien (1973), thirsty weather (1978), european notebook (1988), absence: new and selected poems (1992) and poems: a selection (2000). kefala also published prose fiction, such as, the first journey (1975), the island (1984), alexia: a tale of two cultures (1984), summer visit: three novellas (2003) and sydney journals (2008). kefala’s love for language and detail was also explored in the edition of her published texts. owl publishing house issued a bilingual englishcoolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 greek edition of alexia under the title alexia: a tale for advanced children (1995) and a trilingual english-french-greek version of the island (2002). antigone kefala writes in english because this is the only language she knew as an adult (nickas 226). however, her style is influenced by the other cultures and languages she experienced and learnt. when she first submitted her works to publishers, some of their responses “hinted vaguely at the artificiality of [her] language, its exaggerated tone, an english with which they could not identify in linguistic or any other terms” (nikro 153). thus, her language changed and became more subdued or denser (nickas 227). kefala’s style is poetic even in the way she writes prose and she uses figures of speech. in alexia, for example, she uses the literary figure of personification in the description of “the instruments” (38-42). kefala experiments with language and its boundaries, and the type of imagery, vocabulary and texture she uses are not quite english. for kefala, language is an important issue, although her approach to this language “is not quite an english approach” (nickas 227). the author explains that her language is “foreign to australian “mainstream” readers” as well as to greek readers (nickas 228) as it has influences of the four languages she studied (romanian, french, greek and english). besides, her writing style has been defined as modernist and kefala, together with dimitris tsaloumas, is considered the main example of modernist writing in greekaustralian literature. kefala’s style is characterized by a quiet tone and a number of subtle implications and suggestions in the thoughts and dialogues of the characters. kefala does not explore all the topics in depth but leaves them for the reader to develop and wonder about them. kefala is a delicate writer who demands an active attitude from the reader in order to grasp the topics she suggests. the following sections analyse kefalaʼs use of language in alexia and in the island. the use of language in alexia alexia is a fairy-tale for adults. despite the fact that the main character is a child, the wittiness and irony of her comments denote that it is a “more mature narrator who guides our response to the story”, as helen nickas points out (kefala 1995: 17). alexia, her father, her mother and her elder brother nicolas are “refugees from the latest great war”, who “had been forced to leave their old country” and move to “a large island in the south pacific, south west of pago pago” (alexia 1 32). this island could be new zealand, but this is not stated anywhere in the tale. hers is a middle class family who have a passion for playing musical instruments and reading books. however, due to the war, the family could not save their library, nor the icons and chalices of alexia’s grandmother, but only their musical instruments (two violins, two violas and two cellos). these are played by father and nicolas and are considered part of the family. in order to make her point, alexia describes the distinct personality of each instrument. in alexia´s family, music is a language shared by all the members: either as players or as listeners. in the new country, father, mother and nicolas are only allowed to do manual labour, but alexia can go to school. the different sounds, noises and language in the new country cause uneasiness in each member. in the old country, father and nicolas used to rely on music to express their feelings and to relate with others. in the new country, music is not an asset and, consequently, father and nicolas face more difficulties than mother and alexia. one of the struggles the two men encounter relates to their new coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 relation with music. father turns to it as an escape from the dullness of his job: he continues to play his violins, composes a piece and even writes his memoirs (alexia 48). however, nicolas’ use of a driller to dig roads, which implies making noise, blocks his ability to play his instruments at home and he comes to understand music as “a miracle that belonged to the old country, but which was not considered of great importance here” (alexia 70). another difficulty lies in the different meanings a word can have according to their grammatical category. for example, father, who works in a factory making matches, knows the meaning of the noun “fire”, but not that of the verb “to fire”, and he is puzzled when his boss tells him that he is going to fire him for finishing five minutes early. one of meanings he may guess is that his boss is threatening to set him on fire. on the other hand, nicolas’ workmates call him “bill” and he mistakes the proper noun with the common noun. while his colleagues just use a general noun for males to address him, nicolas states that he does not own money to anyone. the two women (mother and alexia) seem to adapt better. mother works in a pyjama factory and she is also surrounded by the noise made by the sewing machines, but she can listen to the radio. she also talks with other co-workers in the ladies room and makes some friends. one of them, eva, enjoys literature and, since her arrival in the island, she has started to read local narrative. eva finds out that “the myths of the original people resembled myths everywhere: men belonged to a superior club –the heavens, and women belonged to an inferior club –the earth” (alexia 63). the local mythology, thus establishes and defends a patriarchal system, the social model eva had in her homeland and, probably, the one alexia’s family also had in their country of birth. antigone kefala challenges this notion in this tale as, in spite of the public and “superior” role of men, women are those depicted as more resourceful. men are supposed to enjoy social prestige, but father and nicolas do not feel comfortable at work and they are not popular. the women, on the other hand, have friends at work or at school and they seem more cooperative. women have often been considered the guardians of culture, not only in the home country but also in migration. sometimes, first-generation migrants need to adapt to the host country in order to find strategies to teach their own culture to their children. the female characters in alexia are depicted as those who make the most of their opportunities. mother had read lots of novels in the old country and uses the gained knowledge to deal with her present uneasiness in a more collaborative way. alexia is sent to school and is thus given the opportunity to learn the language and traditions of the new country. although she is sad, she tries to hide her feelings and be quite talkative because “mother had taught her that it is not very polite to be sad in the presence of other people” (alexia 64). however, the way her classmates and teachers talk is different: “with their lips only, not with their eyes, their faces or their hands” (alexia 68). a refugee friend of hers explains that the reason why islanders use minimum expressions and sounds and why they try to exclude “foreigners, intellects, conversation, artists, emotions, laughter, volubility and so on” (alexia 82) is because they had been forced to swear an oath of silence (alexia 68) and an oath of hate (alexia 82). this seems an effective strategy for the girls to make sense of the different patterns of behaviour in the new country, which deeply troubles them and make them feel excluded and inadequate. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 nicolas and alexia also feel uneasy trying to comprehend the nuances in meaning of some concepts, such as “relax” and “happy”. nicolas does not understand the usage of the words “relax”, “relaxation” or “being good at relaxing” (alexia 72) as he cannot find a similar notion in his mother tongue. he is confused and, when he looks for the definition in the dictionary, its explanation seems extremely vague for him to relate to: “relax – cause or allow to become loose or slack or limp, enfeeble, mitigate, abate…” (alexia 72). the new culture appears to be impenetrable and it highlights nicolas’ condition as outsider. on the other hand, alexia is puzzled by the broad connotations of the concepts of “happiness” and of being “happy” and by the way islanders often enquire about her personal happiness. in her perception, these feelings are “the ‘apotheosis’” (alexia 98) and they lie “totally outside her life” (alexia 98). nevertheless, she cannot share these thoughts and she does not reply when she is asked whether she is happy: was she happy eating her [miss prudence, the teacher’s] mashed potatoes? being in her house with the grandfather clock chiming? happy living on the island? or happy living in the world? (alexia 100) kefala uses these two examples of the inexistence of a concept in a given language and of lack of correlation between the meanings of a word in two languages to stress the struggle lived by migrants, regardless of their education and age, in order to acquire cultural capital. nicolas and alexia know that language is a necessary tool in order to adjust to the new country and this is the reason why they feel confused with some concepts: had they no interest in relating with islanders, they would ignore linguistic gaps. another cultural problem alexia and nicolas face is the issue of time. nicolas explains that the islanders have forgotten how to invent it. antigone kefala remarks the absurdity of this behaviour by using the exaggeration technique, the same that 1972 nobel prize of literature heinrich böll explored in his short story translated as “algo pasará” (1954) in spanish or “action will be taken” (1954) in english. the main character enjoys thinking and resting, but he needs to earn some money and goes to a factory to pass an aptitude test. there, he realises that even the breakfast provided is part of the test and, consequently, he does what is expected from him: continuous movement and consciousness on every single action taken, even when eating. he gets the job and works there until his boss dies of a heart attack. at the wake, the main character looks so sad and upset that he is offered a job as a mourner walking behind coffins. he readily accepts the new job as it gives him time for thinking and being idle, his favourite activities. böll critiques a society full of automatons, people who do not live but just work to improve their cvs, who do not know the difference between working and the actions needed by the human body, people for whom everything holds the same importance and who have no values. antigone kefala makes the same point in her tale alexia. nicolas explains the following idea to his sister: islanders do not differentiate between work and free time, everything holds the same importance and, by doing so, they are forgetting how to live. in nicolas’ words: he felt that time had been taken out of music, and out of them too, and that they were losing the knack of inventing it, day by day, naturally, effortlessly. and once one became aware of the process, so intimately aware, it was a coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 wonder that they were still alive, they could all die, anytime, he thought, forgetting how to invent time. (alexia 76) understanding time is another cultural concept which also refers to cultural values, just as “relaxing” and “happiness”. by not differentiating work and free time, interpersonal relations hold the same importance, and colleagues and workmates can be as close as family and friends. thus, social networks and the importance of blood relations and family ties are not distinguished. this has implications on their identities: nicolas and alexia seem to come from a culture that prioritizes group relations, kinship and forging bonds, while society in the new country seems to encourage individuality. nicolas seems to be troubled about and paralyzed by this change while for alexia language represents the key she can use to adapt and have a future she can enjoy. alexia considers that islanders lack creativity and use sounds more often than words. if she manages to differentiate these sounds and master the language and its nuances, she will be able to understand the world that surrounds her. nicolas seems to face a harder struggle and gives the impression of being in distress. alexia also realises that language and space are interwoven in the new country and that the greatest topics of conversation are the weather and the grass. language not only determines the perception of one’s surroundings but also of other people. alexia perceives the landscape as vast and empty, which can be extrapolated to her perception of islanders as people who do not show their emotions. the fact that the two main topics of conversation are the weather and the grass indicate two neutral topics which do not enquiry about personal wellbeing and are not polemic. alexia’s perception of the landscape as void is emphasized by the views out of the windows in her school, as it reminds her of the war in the old country: everything looked very pretty, but empty, as if all the people had deserted the place, had gone underground, waiting for a major bombardment. the eerie silence was like the one she remembered after the sirens had stopped and before the planes had arrived. (alexia 66) in her eagerness to make sense of the actions of the islanders, alexia comes up with the idea that locals may perceive landscape as a threatening presence which needs to be dominated, or colonised: the grass grew so high that the island people had posted sentries everywhere to watch its advance, so that the country could be put on the alert in case of invasion, and expeditions were carried against it as a matter of routine, week after week. (alexia 84) alexia is amused by the playfulness of language, especially with names such as milk bar, that is, a bar of milk, “a ‘darling’ bus, a suburb called ‘bonny rock’, a ‘cabbage tree lane’, in a place called ‘summer fields’” (alexia 90). in the third part of this tale –the first one being the departure from the old country and the second one the experience as a migrant(tsianikas 2002), alexia uses the knowledge she has gained so far and decides to study hard to scrutinize the language and its nuances, so as to understand the way islanders communicate. thus, she decides to study language at university level. for her, language represents the means which gives sense to the world. as kefala writes: coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 alexia was sure that one could prove the existence of god without a tree or a quadrangle. language, she felt was more potent, inventive and durable than people imagined, and produced daily miracles that no one noticed any longer and everyone took for granted. (alexia 108) language and literature, then, prove to be useful tools to understand the new society and adjust to life in the new country. language in the island kefala’s novella the island can be considered the continuation of alexia (hawke 2010). in this work the main character is melina pappas, who is a refined young woman pursuing her university studies. she likes the arts and she can sing, dance and play a part in plays. melina lives in an island whose landscape and people resemble those in alexia, and which could be new zealand. there is also a minor character named babis, who is analogous with nicolas: babis claims that he cannot play the guitar because the guitar cannot speak anymore and all resonance is gone (the island 144). in the island, kefala focuses on perceptions and the consequences of interaction as well as on verbal and non-verbal communication. already on the third page of the novella the reader knows that the protagonist is considered an outsider, a displaced person: melina was born abroad, arrived as a child and was schooled on the island, that is, she is a 1.5 generation-migrant (ommundsen 2012). this in-between position affects the way she is perceived. she is passionate and shows it in her mannerisms and speech. however, islanders are defined as cold and indifferent as their body language is subdued to their detached speech. one of such occasions is the tutorial she has with ashton, a classmate and friend, and dr jackson, their professor. this is how melina perceives the tutorial: i spoke. i could see from his face that he had not the faintest idea what i was saying, the meaning stopped somewhere mid-air between us, he incredulous that he will ever understand me, i incredulous that he will ever understand me … i could see in his whole attitude the immense surprise at being confronted, here in his own room, at the university, by something as foreign as myself. the implied extravagance of my voice, the rapid nervousness of my movements, my eyes that looked too directly at him. he made social concessions outwardly, but inwardly he kept repeating to himself –why the hell do i have to put up with this in my everyday life, one is not safe anywhere these days. the intensity of the preoccupation absorbed his concentration. he turned to ashton for relief, ashton who was waiting indifferent, his hands motionless. (the island 60-62) melina appreciates classical music and literature and she also sings solos. she is interested in languages, feelings and emotions and the way they are expressed in different cultures. while ashton, the ultimate islander, reads hardy, an example of the literature he can relate to, melina quotes baudelaire. thanks to her first affair, melina realises how many sweet expressions are used in the greek language to talk to beloved coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 130 ones -such as a mother to her daughter or a man to his lover-, but also about concepts dear to one -such as an archimandrite talking about the church as if it were a bride(the island 112). melina notices these words as if she were studying the language, thus, as an outsider. despite the fact that melina was schooled in the island, she feels she is constantly crossing cultures: in the way she notices language, her non-verbal communication, or even the sophisticated clothes of her aunt, which she sometimes wears. as fiona allon (2002) argues: migration is directly and inevitably a process of cross-cultural translation, a passage of movement between different languages, cultures and worlds [and this translation] is not a simple and straightforward trajectory from ‘here’ to ‘there’; it is a dynamic articulation of in-betweenness. (107) in the third part of the novella, melina feels foreign, beautiful and exotic in several situations and she thinks she is perceived in these positive terms. at the end of the text, melina seems to finally accept –not happily embrace–her position as an in-between person: able to understand how islanders act but also strong in her own perception as different and not fully understood. these two years in her life are determinant in her process of becoming a young adult: she explores her identity as a woman, as a migrant and her thirst for knowledge and understanding. the novella finishes when melina reaches a coherent discourse she perceives as her own. melina’s position in society is explored in depth. at the beginning of the novella, which expands over a two-year period, melina is working on her first holiday job in an office. this may be at a university department since her boss, erik gosse, is doing research on the first inhabitants of the island and aims to revolutionise the attitude of the country to its past. he claim[s] that in order to understand history, one need[s] a type of vision that only people placed at the crossroads [can] provide. that is, people who [live] between cultures, who [are] forced to live double lives, belonging to no group. (the island 36. melina’s boss aims to show the existence of this space and to focus on the hybrid perspective of this part of society, which, he hopes, will help overcome differences and improve relations among the first inhabitants and the colonisers of the island. as melina is neither a coloniser nor a colonised, but a person who migrated from another country, erik gosse considers her a hybrid, a person “in between” (the island 36) who can build bridges between the other two groups. in order to fulfil his research, gosse and melina meet a friend of his: “a young man that belong[s] to the mythical race that [erik] was trying to write about” (the island 42). melina feels empathy with erik’s friend due to the way he talks about his family, his ancestors and the past of his people. he refers to his family members as “his bones” (the island 44) and explains that each person has an individual perspective which is magic. he talks about the past as if it were “immediate to him, that belonged to him, to his family, to his parents, to the great grandmother he spoke about” (the island 44). melina thinks that she “and all the people in the narrow colony [she] seemed to move in” (the island 44) relate to their past in the same way: all transplanted people who talked constantly of the past, that dashing figure with hot blood in its veins, and a warm skin, always rushing into some adventure … a part that was given to us children with the air and the coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 seasons, as an everyday diet, till it became a sort of breath that moulded us and which we could no longer escape. and we began to talk of it as ours, unsure at the same time, while we performed the rituals, trying to place ourselves in a stream of time in which everything had meaning, hoping that we would suddenly acquire a value and a weight that nothing around was capable of giving us. (the island 44) melina perceives the past as erik’s friend does, which is contrary to the approach of most islanders, who do not talk “about it in their everyday lives” (the island 36). past and present go hand in hand in melina’s life in the way she speaks and relates to others. melina often remembers past experiences, such as when her mother took her as a child to the salt lake spa in summer (the island 46-52). nonetheless, she considers that “all the exciting things had happened before i was born, or when i was too little to remember” (the island 56). melina was born when the war began, so the exciting things took place in a past which did not include the horrors of war and the difficulties and challenges of migration, and in a territory –greece–she hardly remembers. besides, for melina’s mother, “the past [is] here to torture us all the time” (the island 56). the relation of melina with other times is also present in the oneiric world. in each part of the novel, the main character describes a nightmare she has. only the first one receives the comments and interpretation of melina’s mother. although the nightmares are different, they all include animals and running, either chasing someone or escaping from a threat. past and present also influence the way melina perceives the landscape and the language she uses to describe it. melina feels restricted in this country, she is not at ease. the island is not a place where she senses the elements caress individuals with the warmth of the sun and a soft breeze. on the contrary, she says: we were trapped again. there was no future here. we had no future. who could imagine a future in this mean, cold, grass-trimmed country. i hated it. i hated the whole place, the green hills and the sheep permanently grazing the same spots, as if they had been painted there, and the wind going through you, coming at you out of corners, chilling the surface of the sea, bleached dark green like dying leaves. (the island 72) kefala uses the figure of speech of personification to explain melina’s relation to the territory as melina wonders whether the harshness of the territory and of the weather is a strategy of the land to oust humans: the secret heart of the land seemed to be yearning for that uninterrupted silence free of humans that had been there before, the presence of that time still in the land’s memory. (the island 70) the relation between the land and islanders has a subdued tension. on the one hand, as in alexia, islanders feel threatened by the nature that surrounds them, mainly by the grass, and try to dominate it. in melinaʼs description: on sunday gardeners were out in force again, cutting the grass, trimming it, shearing it, with machines, by hand, stubbornly trying to keep it to that fanatic short-haired green carpet. a consistent war was being waged, a war coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 to the death, this desperation in their hearts not to be annihilated by the grass. (the island 68) on the other hand, islanders are able to perceive the beauty of the landscape and to enjoy it while ignoring its inconveniences. melina treats islanders with sarcasm as they “stoically” go to the beach on a picnic while the day is rainy and windy (the island 70). this depreciation of the comfort is present in their urge to save material effects rather than take care of their own bodies because they consider “the human [to be] incidental and dispensable [whose] needs were only physical” (the island 70). in these lines antigone kefala recalls the absurdity of some human attitudes, just as she did in alexia with the islanders’ inability to invent time. verbal and non-verbal communication, people’s attitudes and being aware of how one is perceived by others are central topics to the island. in this novella, antigone kefala explores language, migration and identity creation, as she did in alexia. conclusions as seen in the analyses of alexia and the island, the relation of migrants with their mother tongue changes when there is a second language they need to use in their everyday lives. some strategies may be avoiding the learning and the socializing with speakers of the second language as a way to maintain their self-assurance in their identities, or accepting the need to learn this language and to enhance meeting others who speak the second language. in alexia, the main characters show different approaches to the experience of migration. while the father hardly relates with others who are not his own family, nicola feels puzzled by the experience of migration, the mother befriends other migrants and speaks the second language with them and alexia goes to school and socializes with migrants and settlers. their different levels of socialization affect their perception of the territory and the culture: the more a character relates to settlers, the more this character analyses patterns of behaviour. in the island, melina realises that, in spite of her time on the island, she still struggles with the phlegmatic behaviour of the settlers and the different verbal and non-verbal communication techniques used. her perception of settlers is extrapolated to that of the landscape and their lifestyle. however, her relation with other migrants is not always smooth and she approaches languages, including her mother tongue, as a curiosity to be studied. for kefala, language is a signifier of difference: in alexia it means high culture and education, and in the island it is the eagerness to appreciate other cultures. antigone kefala explained that “learning a foreign language involves a growing ability to sense its depths and shallows, its variable resonances, its evocative reverberations, its verbal chiaroscuro” (nikro 151). kefala uses the perceptions of alexia and melina to elaborate on the development of their identities, on their strategies to construct their selfhoods. kefala does not focus on the moment or causes of migration, but on the role that the new language –both verbal and non-verbalplays in the understanding of the new coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 culture, their inhabitants and in the identity formation processes of the two main characters. migrants may consciously decide to transform the learnt language and use it as a tool for their own benefit. the technique of speaking either ʻethnic australian englishʼ or ʻstandard australian englishʼ depending on the circumstances or the aim of the speaker is a valid strategy which tries to achieve the visualisation, and maybe also the acceptance, of hybridity. second and 1.5-generation migrants’ use of language transforms their perception of their own bodies and of the spaces around them. they may feel as in-between people, to use the term coined by melina´s boss in the island and also by homi k. bhabha (1994). kefala “think[s] beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and […] focus[es] on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences” (bhabha 2). the migrant characters in kefala’s texts push their displacement to the limit as their means to accept their daily lives (nikro 158). consequently, as alexia says, language can be an enemy or a friend: a language is like a human being, diffident at first and distant, difficult to approach, to understand. it has a resistance that goes with its instinct for survival. yet there is a lot of sympathy in a language, and a willingness to co-operate, to allow newcomers to its secrets, and to its kingdom, which for every language is a different one. (alexia 104) works cited abs (australian bureau of statistics). cultural diversity in australia. reflecting a nation: stories from the 2011 census. abs. 21 june 2012. web. 7 august 2012. allon, fiona. “translated spaces/translated identities: the production of place, culture and memory in an australian suburb”. journal of australian studies. 26: 72 (2002): 99-110. print. auslit. the australian literature resource. arc and a consortium of australian universities. web. 2 may 2013. bhabha, homi k. the location of culture. london, ny: routledge, 1994. print. böll, heinrich. “algo pasará. una historia de acción [1954]”. la aventura y otros relatos. barcelona: bruguera, 1981. 143-148. print. ----. “action will be taken”. the collected stories. trans. leila vennewick and breon mitchell. ny: melville house, 2011. 444-448. print. bottomley, gillian. from another place: migration and the politics of culture. ambridge: press syndicate of the u of cambridge, 1992. print. bourdieu, pierre. “the forms of capital”. j. g. richardson (ed). handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. new york: greenwood p, 1986. 241-58. print. gunew, sneja. “ania walwicz and antigone kefala: varieties of migrant dreaming”. arena, 76 (1986): 65-80. print. -----. “denaturalizing cultural nationalisms: multicultural readings of ʻaustraliaʼ”. bhabha, homi (ed). nation and narration. london and new york: routledge, 1990. print. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 hage, ghassan. white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. annandale: pluto p, 1998. print. hawke, shé m. “the ship goes both ways: cross-cultural writing by joy damousi, antigone kefala, eleni nickas and beverley farmer”. modern greek studies: pages on the crisis of representation: nostalgia for being otherwise. 14 (2010): 75-91. print. kefala, antigone. alexia: a tale for advanced children. bilingual ed. melbourne: owl publishing, 1995. print. ----. the island. trilingual ed. melbourne: owl publishing, 2002. print. král, françoise. critical identities in contemporary anglophone diasporic literature. hampshire: palgrave macmillan, 2009. print. marian, viorica and anthony shook. “the cognitive benefits of being bilingual”. cerebrum. the dana foundation. 31 oct. 2012. web. 17 may 2013. nickas, helen. migrant daughters. the female voice in greek-australian prose fiction. melbourne: owl publishing, 1992. print. nikro, saadi. “antigone kefala: transforming the migratory self”. southerly, 58.1(1998): 151-158. print. ommundsen, wenche. “transnational imaginaries: reading asian australian writing. introduction”. jasal 12.2 (2012): 1-8. web. 27 feb 2013. ramos, rufel f. “homi bhabha: the process of creating culture from the interstitial, hybrid perspective”. rowena´s world. rufel. f. ramos. november 2000. web. 13 may 2013. sallis, eva. “foster mother tongue”. besemeres, mary and anna wierzbicka (eds) translating lives: living with two languages and cultures. st lucia: uqp, 2007. 150-159. print. sarup, madan and tasneem raja. identity, culture and the postmodern world. edinburgh: edinburgh up, 1996. ebook collection (ebscohost). web. 30 nov. 2011. srinivasan, maria preethi. “my page in ginibi´s book”. jeasa 3.1 (2012): 58. web. 10 october 2013. tsianikas, michael. “alexia: antigone kefala´s overdue fairytale”. flinders university languages group online review, 1.1 (2002). web. 11 october 2012. ulman, irene. “playgrounds and battlegrounds: a child’s experience of migration”. besemeres, mary and anna wierzbicka (eds) translating lives: living with two languages and cultures. st lucia: uqp, 2007. 45-55. print. warren, jane. “`wogspeak´: transformations of australian english”. journal of australian studies. 23: 62 (1999). 85-94. print. ye, zhengdao (veronica). “returning to my mother tongue: veronica’s journey continues”. besemeres, mary and anna wierzbicka (eds) translating lives: living with two languages and cultures. st lucia: uqp, 2007. 56-69. print. 1 hereafter, the title “alexia” or “the island” will be used in the quotations when stating a direct reference from the novels alexia: a tale for advanced children (1995) and the island (2002). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 catalina ribas segura is a lecturer in the english department at the university college alberta giménez (cesag, palma de mallorca). she wrote her ma thesis on greek-australian literature and her phd thesis on greek-australian and chinese australian literatures. she has taught a number of courses on language and cultures in english-speaking countries. her main interests include migration, identity and contemporary australian literature. she is a member of the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 144 community perspectives of natural resource extraction: coal-seam gas mining and social identity in eastern australia d. lloyd 1 , h. luke 2 & w.e. boyd 3 abstract: using a recent case study of community reaction to proposed coal-seam gas mining in eastern australia, we illustrate the role of community views in issues of natural resource use. drawing on interviews, observations and workshops, the paper explores the anti-coal-seam gas social movement from its stages of infancy through to being a national debate linking community groups across and beyond australia. primary community concerns of inadequate community consultation translate into fears regarding potential impacts on farmland and cumulative impacts on aquifers and future water supply, and questions regarding economic, social and environmental benefits. many of the community activists had not previously been involved in such social action. a recurring message from affected communities is concern around perceived insufficient research and legislation for such rapid industrial expansion. a common citizen demand is the cessation of the industry until there is better understanding of underground water system interconnectivity and the methane extraction and processing life cycle. improved scientific knowledge of the industry and its potential impacts will, in the popular view, enable better comparison of power generation efficiency with coal and renewable energy sources and better comprehension of the industry as a transition energy industry. it will also enable elected representatives and policy makers to make more informed decisions while developing appropriate legislation to ensure a sustainable future. keywords: community engagement, natural resource extraction, coal-seam gas, sustainable energy source introduction society faces many grand challenges for sustainability within a world in transition. there is an urgent call for research and development towards mechanisms that allow science and society to address decision making and the needs of citizens at global, regional, national, and copyright©2013 d. lloyd, h. luke & w.e. boyd. his text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 145 local scales (reid et al. 2010). this paper explores community perspectives of the coal-seam gas industry in affected communities of northeast new south wales and southeast queensland, australia, as a case study of society-wide decision-making in the context of natural resource extraction. this case study focuses on a situation where public engagement is high, and is heightened through the contentious nature of the proposed resource extraction. as easily accessible sources of hydrocarbons have been exploited, the exploration industry has been forced to target unconventional reserves of oil and gas. in australia the gas mining industry is mostly dependent upon the extraction of coal seam gas. gas reserves are being developed in every state, with government estimates of a projected 40,000 gas wells in queensland alone by 2030, and gas facilities approved for construction at regional ports. the industry is drawing billions of dollars into regional areas, creating new jobs and swelling state and national coffers as export contracts are signed and sealed. the industry has faced criticism from various stakeholder groups. concerns have arisen due to fears of the potential environmental impacts of mining processes, and of impacts on the great barrier reef from export facilities being developed on curtis island. unesco is currently re-evaluating the great barrier reef’s world heritage status as a result. environmental concerns relate to high water consumption, groundwater contamination, salt production and air pollution, with a particular concern relating to the long-term nature of potential impacts. in addition, there is concern as to whether there may also be knock-on social and economic impacts associated with the industry. environmental advocacy groups have also stated that they do not see gas production as a solution to decreasing carbon emissions. this is often claimed to be the critical decade. it is understood that human society needs to be able to adapt quickly to rapidly changing global social and environmental conditions, and that a community that lacks adaptability to its changing environment can compromise its own viable existence (lebel et al., 2010). however, there is growing concern that the current capitalist system does not address long-term environmental or social issues easily or well (guptara, 2010; reid et al., 2010; dunstan, 2011; irvine, 2011). there is pressure for governments to come up with new energy solutions. mineral-rich australia, therefore, is facing mining development on an unprecedented scale (irvine, 2011). while the national focus on resource extraction has tended to be economic, coal-seam gas mining has brought together economic, social and environmental issues – mineral resources, water resource management, agriculture and environment – into the australian public debate (brown, 2011; duddy, 2011; rbs-morgans, 2011): “the explosion in coal-seam gas extraction has concerned farmers and green activist groups locked in fierce debate with cashed-up extraction companies and governments with dollar signs in their eyes” (klan, 2011: 13). communication failures and social impacts inadequate community engagement is viewed by many researchers as the primary governance problem contributing to social conflict around land and resource management issues (pullin and knight, 2003; hindmarsh, 2010). during coal-seam gas exploration in australia, it has become clear that there have been key communication failures between coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 146 industry and community. in western new south wales, for example, one company was reported to employ the strategy, considered to be intimidating, of taking community members out of a meeting to question them individually (pers. comm., ian gaillard 23/07/11). company representatives have been accused of continually failing to adequately answer community concerns, and of systematically withholding relevant information when answering questions (pers. comm., garry gilliland 13/09/11). it has been reported that large sectors of the community consider they have been insufficiently notified of planned exploration, or consider they have been provided with biased information, rendering them unable to take what they consider to be an informed view of mining developments (leser, 2011). reed (2008) argues that stakeholder participation needs to be underpinned by a philosophy that enables empowerment, equity, trust and learning to take place. in order to empower individuals and groups in the community to make informed choices, to steer governmental decision making processes, the community has to be brought to science, and vice versa (greenwood and levin, 1998; reed, 2008). one way to examine the impacts of community engagement and communication success and/or failure is through the lens of social identity theory (spears, 2011). social identity theory argues that individuals define themselves largely according to their group involvement and memberships. in social identity theory, sociologists explain the levels of social analysis along an interpersonal to intergroup continuum, creating an important bridge between the concept of self, group membership and intergroup behaviour (spears, 2011). achieving a positive distinction between one’s own and another group leads to inter-group behaviours, where any perception, cognition or behaviour is influenced by the individual’s recognition that they and others are members of a distinct social group (turner, 1975). as individuals seek to maintain their group identity, this can lead to the development of stereotypical and conformist behaviours within a group and stereotypical perceptions of other groups. this relative homogeneity effect leads to the increased likelihood of stereotyping of other groups and their members. discrimination and categorisation of other groups and their members may become a feedback loop that can lead to a distancing from other social groups, accentuation of intergroup differences and even polarization of a community. in-group identification with a particular social group may also not be at the will of the group member, and can lead members from other groups to categorise or label them as a part of a group that they may not necessarily value or wish to be associated with, for example a ‘hippy’, ‘greenie’ or ‘red neck’. in turn, this particular group may be stigmatised or regarded as a group of lower status in society and, therefore, undesirable to be associated with (turner and giles, 1984). social schemata are the assumptions that we make of a person or a group of people based on their dress and appearance (kleine et al., 1993; de weaver and lloyd, 2005). social stratification is associated with gradients of perceived status differences that can create socialpsychological pressures for social change. methods here we present of a case study to examine community reactions to a politically-charged and emerging environmental issue – coal-seam gas mining – and gain insight to the processes of community engagement with a natural resource management matter that has landscape-wide coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 147 implications. case study methodology is a integrated approach of enquiry that uses unique examples of social situations as the basis of deep description and analysis to gain insight into questions of how and why a social process or phenomenon works. it is, according to yin (2009:2), the “preferred method where (a) “how” and “why” questions are being posed, (b) the investigator has little control over events, and (c) the focus is on contemporary phenomenon within real-life context”. it is typically used where there are more variables – often many more – than data points, and insight into complex social processes is sought, rather than simply describing pattern or seeking a simple cause-and-effect relationship. it is perfectly suited to the examination of issues of social concern. case study methodology relies on multiple evidence sources, and thus legitimately works with diverse, and often very different, data gathering techniques. case study analysis provides results that are validated through triangulation, the convergence of insights from independent or unrelated evidence and/or cases. it is the independent origins of such insights, especially where they converge to a common answer, that provides the validity of the emerging understanding of the how and why of the social process. in developing this case study, we focussed on describing the various social constructions of the issue of coal-seam gas mining, based on people’s expression of these constructed ideas, through interviews, and their behaviour reflecting the ideas through observations at key events (jackson and penrose, 1993). this allowed us to examine interactions not readily distinguishable from their context the case study builds on interviews with key informants from key social action groups engaged in this issue, and observations at key events:  the western downs alliance  lock the gate  the basin sustainability alliance  kyogle group against gas  keerong gas squad  the ngaraakwal indigenous association  the tara blockade and the may day chinchilla parade (may)  the murwillumbah protest rally (may)  9 th annual australian coal-seam gas conference, brisbane (june)  lock the gate annual general meeting (june)  casino environmental defenders office public meeting (august)  arrow energy public consultation, lismore (september) action research was used as a basis for engaging with this study, taking a systemic thinking perspective to describe and understand the social interactions within the communities in each case study (flood, 2010). action research allows the researcher to gain a rich, contextual understanding of social processes, and to see beyond group discourse, to identify greater concerns and themes reflecting peoples’ values, sense of community and local environment (greenwood, 1999; dick, 2000). the processes of action research and action learning can be used effectively to empower individuals, groups and organisations, and to help them change and develop relevant skills (swepson et al., 2003). this paper describes the early stages of this action research project, focussing on the richness of evidence and contextual understanding obtained from several data sources, primarily interviews and observations coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 148 (gladstein, 1984; reason and bradbury, 2001; yin, 2003). as an early stage in a proposed action research program, informants from six coal-seam gas community groups were interviewed in order to identify their understandings, positions, key concerns and desired outcomes. this provided insight into the various forms of social engagement being expressed through these groups. interviews were recorded digitally or by note taking, and transcriptions and notes were examined using an on-line data analysis tool, wordle (feinberg, 2011), to identify recurring or dominant themes. interpretation focussed on elements of social identity theory and group dynamics (figure 1). figure 1: the role of schema and social identification in the participation process. groups form when groups of individuals have shared concerns and goals that cannot be accomplished individually. as social bonds form with members of their ‘in group’, in-group favouritism can occur (tajfel and turner 1979). achieving a positive distinction between your own and another group leads to inter-group behaviours where any perception, cognition or behaviour is influenced by people’s recognition that they and others are members of a distinct social group (turner 1975). in-group identification with a particular group may also not be at the will of the group member, and can lead members from other groups to categorise or label them as a part of a group that they may not necessarily value or wish to be associated with (for example a ‘hippy’ or ‘greenie’). in turn, this particular group may be stigmatised in society and, therefore, seen as undesirable to be associated with (turner and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 149 giles 1984). social schemata are the assumptions that we make of a person or a group of people based on their dress and appearance (kleine iii, kleine et al. 1993; de weaver and lloyd 2005). the framework of social identity theory was, therefore, used in this study to provide a perspective of the social interactions taking place in relation to an issue. cultural rules provide a structure for people’s behaviour, effectively channeling behaviour in some ways but not others. schemata define similarities shared by individuals that enable them to identify as members of a culture, community or group. cultural identity results from and is influenced by shared schemata and is reinforced by peer group socialisation (de weaver & lloyd, 2005). social identity theory was first defined by henri tajfel as “an individual’s knowledge of his or her membership in various social groups together with the emotional significance of that knowledge” (tajfel, 1974). social identity theory argues that individuals define themselves largely according to their group involvement and memberships. in social identification theory, sociologists explain the levels of social analysis along an interpersonal to intergroup continuum, creating an important bridge between the concept of self, group membership and inter-group behaviour (spears, 2011). there may be a price to pay for group cohesiveness, as individuals minimise their differences. as individuals seek to maintain their group identity, this can lead to the development of stereotypical and conformist behaviours within a group, and to stereotypical perceptions of other groups. individual identity is now defined more by the shared values and purpose of the group with which they are associated, hence these become determining characteristics of group behaviour (turner & giles, 1984). this ‘relative homogeneity effect’ leads to the increased likelihood of stereotyping of other groups and their members. discrimination and categorisation of other groups and their members may become a feedback loop that can lead to a distancing from other social groups, accentuation of intergroup differences and even polarization. this occurs especially where there may be inter-group competition, or when a group feels threatened by another group, yet ironically often leads to greater cohesiveness of those members within the in-group. the theory of realistic group conflict was based on a social experiment carried out by sheriff (1966) that determined the key factors in inter and intra-group relations as the cooperative relationship between group members and the alignment of group goals. in-group’s goals and objectives will lead directly to intergroup attitudes and behaviour. mutually exclusive goals within a group are likely to create divides that can lead to the failing and or division of the group if they fail to be resolved. if this is at an intergroup level, conflict is likely to occur between groups. turner & giles (1984) see cohesiveness as depending directly upon motivational interdependence and mutual need-satisfaction, therefore those groups which are reaching set goals are going to be more cohesive than those who do not. from this, it can be concluded where there is a clear understanding of the alignment of group goals, interand intra-group conflict is less likely to occur and a collaborative relationship is able to form. it is also important to note that a pre-existing social identification with members of other groups is also an important factor in the development of inter-group relations (spears, 2011). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 150 results: (i) key informant views western downs alliance & lock the gate the western downs alliance began as a collection of half a dozen landholders on what is known as the tara estate. the key informant for this case study is a local landholder. his involvement began in 2009, when he received a letter offering him a sum of money for a number of coal-seam gas wells to be drilled on his land. he reported immediately carrying out internet research, and found information and sites describing what had already happened in the unites states from coal-seam gas mining. twenty minutes later, he reports, he was on the phone to his neighbours. he worked with them to involve the media, and within six weeks they had gained the interest of channel nine’s 60 minutes television program, who broadcast the issue. this was shortly followed by an abc four corners television program, exposing the issue to the wider australian public. with the help of the international environmental campaign lobby group, friends of the earth, the group researched the extent of coal-seam gas developments, and started screenings around the country, with the key informant travelling across australia to present screenings of the american film gasland (fox, 2010), to tell the story of what was happening in his area, and to expose plans for coalseam gas mining developments across the country. key concerns raised by the key informant in the interviews were: environmental damage; the impact on water and air quality; and lack of landholder rights. he described what he saw to be the inadequate regulation of the industry and the coal-seam gas mining company’s general lack of engagement with the public, including what he described as an often confrontational approach. he was concerned about what he considered to be the enormous impact on his life from the industry: the drilling rigs; holding ponds filled with produced water; truck convoys; and the compressor station that continually disturbed his sleep. he reported physical symptoms arising from the stress created, a serious headache that only stopped when he was away from his home for a period of weeks – “i’ve had a constant headache for months now”. his land, he claimed, had lost all value, and he was now behind on his mortgage repayments due to devoting all of his time campaigning on this issue. in his words: when i’m at home it’s never silent, just this constant vibration all night long from the compressor station, and with heavy vehicles going past all day. i can’t sleep. i go away and spend all this time campaigning, and i come home and get this sinking feeling as my reality sets in. and now my land is worth nothing. one morning i was so exhausted and frustrated that i just went out on the road and stopped the traffic for an hour. just sat in the road and stopped the trucks, cost them some money. working with the western downs alliance, the key informant and other members were shocked to discover “…our total lack of rights and power to stop the drilling on our land”: “we barely own our own topsoil!”. also, while researching the industry, they discovered plans for coal-seam gas mining in every state and territory of australia, with 40,000 gas wells to be drilled in queensland alone. they were concerned about the leaking methane coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 151 from the well heads, and had been examining the wells for leaks in light of company claims that the wells were not leaking. “we’ve tested about thirty-eight wells ourselves and have found a huge percentage to be leaking, in fact thirty-two out of the thirty-eight we tested were leaking methane.” to form alliances with community groups concerned with gas and coal developments, a lock the gate website was developed – the lock the gate group is a national alliance, formed due to concerns of coal-seam gas and coal mining, with a very active website providing information and a point of contact for over a hundred community groups campaigning on these issues across australia. the alliance saw what they saw as wedge politics being run locally, dividing residents over the coal-seam gas industry. some members of the community benefitted financially through the provision of accommodation and services for the rapidly developing industry, whilst others claimed to be suffering from the effects of the industry. whilst other concerned farmers in the region formed a group called the basin sustainability alliance, they were not willing to associate themselves with the western downs alliance or with lock the gate at this point, apparently for fear of compromising their perceived social status as farmers by their association with so-called radical groups (turner & giles, 1984). there has been long held mistrust between rural and green groups, largely stemming from the time of the bjelke-petersen premiership (bjelke-peterson was the powerful conservative premier of queensland from 1968 to 1987, who sought political stability through suppression of political dissent), when the premier himself saw street marchers as a “menace who clogged up traffic”, and treated them as such (alvey & ryan 2006). the key informant’s perspective was that the farmers were worried about their respectability in associating themselves with environmental activists (‘greenies’). this is a clear example of social identity theory and stereotypical intergroup perceptions, as described by tajfel (1974). the informant, however, did not see himself as a ‘greenie’, but as a landholder who wished to enjoy the peace for which he purchased his block of land. he dressed accordingly with what was to become his trademark red flannelette shirt, pair of smart jeans and truckies cap. stigmatization as a greenie is common in contentious environmental issues, and can often be seen as a significant barrier to acceptance of such matters by the wider public and hence to community cohesion (turner & giles, 1984). the basin sustainability alliance the key concerns of the basin sustainability alliance were: impacts over-extraction and groundwater contamination; lack of sufficient research; australian assets being sold off too cheaply; and the behaviour of the gas mining companies being too confrontational. the key informant argued that there are better methods for coal-seam gas mining, and was convinced that if gas wells could be properly lined then separate aquifers would not be linked or contaminated. the alliance’s approach was to secure meetings with government officials to ensure that the coal-seam gas industry became sustainable, requiring an industry moratorium until further studies had taken place. the key informant’s views differ markedly from that of western downs alliance, in that he believed that the companies should offer more money as compensation; the western downs alliance does not believe that financial compensation at any scale is adequate. despite this, his central concerns are aligned very closely with those of key informants from other groups. he brought up the point that the group could achieve more coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 152 without being aligned with other groups. this latter point aligns with concepts of social identity theory: the existence of bias, perceived differences and stereotypical assumptions of the different groups can raise concerns over associations in regards to perceived status differences, and therefore influence people’s choice of group allegiance. kyogle group against gas the kyogle group against gas group is situated west of lismore, and has approximately fifteen regular members. the key informant for this group held a remarkably different perspective of the issues and what he wished to see happen. he had heard of the locally-based organisation, group against gas through word of mouth, joining it in early 2011 due to his mounting concerns of coal-seam gas mining. he is now working with, and supporting, the group against gas to prepare submissions and organise events, and to work with politicians by providing his property for meetings. the group against gas is also seeking improved regulations, specifically a moratorium on coal-seam gas mining prior to thorough research into potential impacts and the entire cessation of the industry in their area. his approach seems more moderate than that of some other members of the group, in that he supports the use of onand off-shore gas reserves in australia. however, he also holds grave concerns regarding the coal-seam gas industry: you can’t eat gas, it’s that simple. they want to put the pipeline right through our most productive country … this is all about water: our head waters are just up the road here at lynches creek, and we depend upon these aquifers for the farms and for the towns. he stated that there had been claims by the companies that there would be no pumping stations precisely where his neighbours had already been approached: “the boring rigs follow the pipelines: that is what has happened in queensland. it is inevitable … the mining companies are lying.” a second key informant for group against gas had kept horses and lived on his property for thirty-one years before a gas well was placed on the other side of the creek from his property. his experience, and, he claims, that of his neighbours, was that there was no requirement for the companies to notify occupants of neighbouring properties. for thirty-one years, if i wish to build anything on my own land i have to put in a da [development application] which includes a notification to my neighbours. no-body was notified at all until the well was put there. i can see it from my deck in plain view: it’s about 500 metres from my house. he explained how he had visited thirty properties along the road towards a neighbouring town, and twenty-nine residents had taken yellow ‘lock the gate’ triangles to put on their front gates (figure 2). one property owner had made his money from mining, so was supportive of the industry. he had tried to explain the impact of having thirty wells on your property was not the same as conventional mining techniques. the informant, however, explained that although the wells do not directly use bore water, they use the spring-fed water from a nearby dam. they depend on this water for themselves and their horses. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 153 this issue is going to divide communities a lot more yet, as one neighbour can let them on and then you have a gas well on your boundary. in the early stages there was no education, people did not know what they were letting themselves in for. when you go out and educate yourself it is quite terrifying. the informant warned of individuals who may not seek peaceful means to stop the gas drilling: after our protests, to council, the well was blocked off, but we received notification [at a public meeting] that they would be returning in 2013 for the next phase of production. they said to us, “we’re not breaking the law, this is the law.” … one chap up the road says he will shoot them if they try to come on his property, and the scary thing is that he might! figure 2: the lock the gate triangle, symbol of community protest against coal seam gas exploration and mining, along with related messages made available to the public for posting on property entrances. (source: http://www.keepthescenicrimscenic.com/signs-and-stickers.php) the keerong gas squad the keerong gas squad was formed in 2010, following the commencement of coal-seam gas drilling in keerong valley, and has approximately twenty members. the key informant for the keerong gas squad is a member not only of the this group and a regular attendee of the http://www.keepthescenicrimscenic.com/signs-and-stickers.php coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 154 meetings at byron, but also of the ngaraakwal indigenous association. he expressed his concerns in terms of his daily life. the women in keerong were sitting in their garden having afternoon tea and the drilling rig turned up to drill an exploration well. they thought, we’d better do something about this and called in some experienced campaigners. the scary thing is that we’ve had millions of years of the earth forming and now we’re pulling it all up to the surface, what is going to be the impact of that? i’m worried that if we keep digging up, drilling and injecting the earth, everything is going to die. i’ve got kids, i basically work for the future, that’s what i do. i’m working for the animals too, and the trees. the ngaraakwal association the ngaraakwal indigenous association is based in nimbin, and has a key focus towards achieving sovereignty for australian indigenous people. the key informants clearly have strongly-held views that relate closely to land rights issues brought to the fore by the coalseam gas mining companies. in particular they express dissatisfaction with government handling of indigenous affairs. the concerns about land rights are linked to the informants’ cultural understanding of the land and landscape (figure 3). an exchange between two key informants during the interview illustrates this point: “with the concept of land-rights in tatters, we can unite together and treaty. we are the original owners of this land, we are the custodians of the land, this is the most legal standpoint by international law. this is a time when the elders can stand up and say, yes we do have a legal right but it’s a matter of moving quickly on this before the irreversible damage is done. this is a multicultural concern, as far as we are concerned they are not allowed to get through the top 8 inches of soil.” “that’s right. the basic thing is that if you look after country, country will look after you.” “nine tenths of the law is possession, and we have the greater heritage here. this is still sovereign land, the people can look after this better, we don’t need this government. the land council are the frauds, like the pimps of our people … they don’t speak for us. no-one has the right to diminish our responsibility towards the land.” there was an overall feeling by the interviewees that there was a significant ‘selling out’ by many indigenous peoples in this region, and in many others. as a result, they felt disempowered to manage the land within which their cultural heritage exists (kerr, 2011). its communication (about the land) that gets everything confused. it all comes back to communication between people, and from the government. the coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 155 government does not care at all, they just care about money. we need to hold the government accountable and ensure that there is increased transparency. figure 3: uncle harry's ancient knowledge of aquifer interconnectivity: ngaraakwal bulbe ancient knowledge australia’s aquifer system sacred water. (image by uncle harry roberts, and reproduced with his permission.) results: (ii) observations of key events the tara blockade and the may day chinchilla parade (may) chinchilla and tara are small towns situated four hours drive from the coast in southeast queensland, in an area subject to rapid coal-seam gas mining development. the annual may day parade is organised by the local rotary club. the western downs alliance had gained last minute permission to follow the parade in may 2011 with a protest march. the protest march provided an opportunity to observe interactions between protesters and members of the chinchilla community. the local police were present, and appeared relaxed and friendly, interacting easily with the protesters. there was a stark difference in appearance between the protesters and the chinchilla public, with the bright colours and ‘hippy’ dress and hair styles of the protesters contrasting with the quiet, conservative public that looked on. many local men watched from the pub as the protesters followed the annual parade. as part of the research observations, community members were asked what their thoughts were on coal-seam gas mining. comments were recorded, reflecting a diversity views, with evidence for growing sense of a community divided on this issue. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 156 one father watching with his young family said, “i have no faith in the mining companies, or in their providing locals with jobs, or any long-term economic benefits for our town”. he used to work for a mining company, but now felt cynical about whether their actions were for the good of the community. a young man of about 20 said that they were using a hydraulic fracturing process [known popularly as ‘fraccing’] to extract gas from the coal seam beneath his land, and that, “nothing’s happened yet, so why should we think anything’s gonna happen to our water?”. a representative from chinchilla rotary club stated that his view that coal-seam gas mining is in “a constant state of re-evaluation”. several residents clearly in supported the protesters; a local resident cried out, “keep it up, please!”, whilst covering up her work badge. she described that her family land had been “devastated by coal and gas mining”, some 70 km westwards, describing virgin timber including 2 m-wide iron-bark trees that had been bulldozed against her family’s wishes, while they had been powerless to stop any of the developments. “i want people to open their eyes,” she said. when the parade reached the town fete, the gates were closed to the protesters, with two mounted police behind the gate. in front of them were rotary club members, some holding the gate closed (figure 4). at this time there was significant verbal conflict between the protesters and the fete volunteers. the protesters wanted to go in, and the volunteers said that they could not unless they left their banners outside. there was about a half-hour stand-off between the protesters, the police and the fete volunteers, until finally the protesters dispersed. some remained engaged in heated discussions with the police and the rotary club chairman. there was a significant amount of discussion on whether the rotary club received any funds from the gas companies, as a prominent marquee boldly advertised, “origin, coalseam gas”. figure 4: locked gates at chinchilla fete (photograph, hanabeth luke) coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 157 what had been a cheerful protest grew sombre and confrontational as protesters were denied entrance to the fete. the presence of the mounted police and the closed body language of the fete volunteers members led to a mirroring of this behaviour by the protesters, and a feedback loop of conflict, as group goals became mutually exclusive: the protesters felt they had a right to peacefully enter, and the fete volunteers members felt they had a right to a nonconfrontational fete (sheriff, 1966). inside the fete, rotary club members were happy to talk, including the manager of the local coal power-station. he was supportive of the coal-seam gas industry, and described plans for renewable infrastructure that was also to be developed in the region. a local businessman, who makes what he described as a comfortable living providing accommodation and building infrastructure for the mines, said, “we just go with the flow”. the rotary club members and their associates mostly believed gas mining to be a sustainable industry, with many ways to manage the produced water; to “turn chinchilla green, to become a salad bowl for farming … they just need to get the processes right”, as one member stated. they were, however, concerned about the lack of clarity of how the salt brought to the surface with the produced water would be dealt with. public coal-seam gas meetings  the murwillumbah protest rally (may) murwillumbah is a town in northeastern new south wales, close to the queensland border. the murwillumbah rally took place in mid-may 2011, and was a gathering of approximately 2,500 people from communities around the northern rivers region of new south wales. this contrasted the smaller crowd (400 people) marching in a similar protest rally earlier in the year (february) in lismore.  9 th annual australian coal-seam gas conference, brisbane (june) an anti-coalseam gas demonstration, drawing around 200 protesters, at the hotel location of the annual coal-seam gas conference received significant and national press coverage. there was also a protest in the evening outside a conference dinner at customs house. figure 5 shows some of the images and messages that were projected onto the wall of the building from one of the two projectors. very few brisbane residents were present.  lock the gate annual general meeting lock the gate president, in his address, clearly understood the social and cultural divides that they faced within society (figure 6). he spoke of the interactions that were needed with communities across australia: “people like being a part of our law abiding communities and we are asking them to make a huge choice, we need to treat them with respect and humility.”  casino environmental defenders office public meeting (august) the meeting at casino, northeastern new south wales, was organised by the environmental defenders office, with speakers from the national toxics network, the environmental defenders office and the gas company metgasco (figure 7). this event was a chilling testimony to the divisions being experienced within society, most notably in this case between the company ceo, and the overwhelming majority of the coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 158 approximately 150 community members and group representatives. there was heckling from the moment the metgasco ceo spoke, which resulted in full-scale shouting, most notably by some of the kyogle group against gas.  arrow energy public consultation, lismore (september) this consultation meeting only allowed a selection of approximately seven community members, mostly from the kyogle group against gas, to attend. invitations to attend an open public meeting had been rejected by arrow in favour of this style of selective consultation. there was a noisy demonstration outside for the entirety of the meeting. one of the arrow representatives stated, “we hear the sentiments of the public outside, it has not escaped our attention”. there were more arrow representatives present than community representatives. the meeting was tense, although maintained a respectful tone for most of the meeting. the community representatives were smartly dressed for the occasion, yet still contrasting with the eight arrow employees. early on, when asked to keep questions until the end, a keerong gas squad member stated, “we will ask questions when we want, this consultation is for our benefit. we are here to educate you as much as you are here to educate us.”. towards the end, the community became more emotional, unconvinced by assurances by arrow regarding the safety of the industry. there was strong evidence of development into an even more polarised relationship. this consultation did not achieve placation of community concerns, nor provide the communication hoped for by the community members. one member of the kyogle group against gas later commented, “i couldn’t believe that scientist, she just sat there sneering at us like we were stupid. i feel like calling up arrow and complaining. it’s just downright disrespectful, this is our lives we’re talking about here!” figure 5: the customs house protest, brisbane. (photography, hanabeth luke) coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 159 figure 6: lock the gate president, drew hutton, speaking at the lock the gate annual general meeting. (photograph, hanabeth luke) figure 7: fifth generation farmer, lesley mcqueenaddressing henderson in casino. (photograph, hanabeth luke) discussion despite the wide diversity of views recorded by groups and individuals regarding the issue of coal-seam gas (figure 8), over the course of the research it become apparent that different sectors of the community were increasingly aligning over a unifying issue of water. it seems there has been some significant developments in chinchilla since may day. in august, there was a court case for the lock the gate president, following his arrest at the tara blockade. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 160 at the court house, “ordinary australians are banding together in the quest to save our best prime agricultural land … farmers, doctors, greenies, urbans and blockies gathered to cheer [the president], wave placards and sing along to john gordon’s version of this land is your land.” (brown, 2011). the lock the gate group has the potential to become a considerable organisation, if it is able to successfully work with a wide variety of groups and share its skills and strategies. what remains to be seen is how the well the groups will work together, and how much the planned actions will manifest in reality. figure 8: summary of interviewee concerns, based on a wordle analysis of the interview transcripts (friedman, 2011), in which the larger the word, the more times that the word was used by interviewees. this illustrates the common themes of concern expressed in the interviews. the issue that surrounds the focus of this study spans the rights to land and water, an issue that appears to reach from the heart of communities towards questioning the foundation and nature of the capitalist system. this focus appears, however, to draw of other more tangible and directly relevant internal and external factors, such as social disadvantage of the region, tensions between what is acceptable resource use, land tenure and access, environmental awareness and patterns in the region, and dynamics between different local and regional social groups. such external factors need to be considered in contextualising the complex views, beliefs and emotions expressed by the participants in this study. the concerns recorded here, and expressed in various ways, appear to reflect people’s fears that their basic human needs – whether expressed in terms of social capital, a future for their children, land rights or environmental quality – may not being met in the future. while the evidence records immediate responses, and may be considered to represent short-term reactions of people (on all sides of the issue) on the run in the immediacy of an event, they provide an interesting example of how social tensions can readily rise, be reinforced, and become drivers of behaviour. nevertheless, the evidence for public expression of emotion and conflict indicates the potentially significant psychological and social effects emerging from this issue. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 161 there are already clear divisions in affected communities, as those who either support the industry or who are financially benefitting become polarised from those who do not wish to see the industry develop. key concerns expressed relate to power gradients between industry, government and community. common themes in the interviews were mistrust of mining companies and governmental bodies. people are scared of not having access to clean water now and in the future, as they understand corporations and governments to be making decisions that can affect australia’s water supply indefinitely. for this reason, a wide range of disgruntled individuals are uniting on this issue. large sections of communities are coming together to protect what they consider to be their basic human right to safe food and water. in doing so, this protest movement appears also to be reacting against what it sees as the status quo – the socio-political view that privileges the supply of jobs and financial benefits over care of the environment that supports human populations. in questioning a view that is often termed ‘realist’, those who are standing up as protesters, to protect their community, groundwater and environment, become regarded as ‘idealists’ under the current dominant paradigm. this appears to provide an empowerment for community members. yet, here a city-bush divide developed. for isolated rural communities (and city dwellers that identified with them), coal seam gas appeared to provide a rallying standard in the minds of rural constituents, to protect the rural idyll and their way of life. ‘tree changers’ and families with multi-generational connections to the land were concerned with maintenance of the status quo. conversely, for city-based decision-makers, investment and resource access became a major driver. while this debate raged, many rural communities (based in small towns) were concerned with issues of employment, housing, health and equity, and began feeling increasingly marginalised from having missed the benefits of the mining boom. the result was growing inter-group identity confusion in rural communities. a real issue for researchers and policy makers is to define the concept of how to identify rural australia. is it defined by an economic dependence on agricultural production? is it a physical manifestation driven by proximity to centres of certain population sizes or a division into four broad categories: urban, regional, rural and remote (cameroon-jackson 1995)? or is there a strong parallel with the more esoteric concept of how, and with whom, groups define their identities. the paradox is that the same debates occur with regard to the concept of how individuals and groups define their aboriginality (lloyd, 2005; libesman, 1995), and the answer is probably the same: it is multi-dimensional and depends on context. farmers in the new south wales hunter region, for example, quickly aligned with the conservation movement to battle the coal seam gas exploration and coal industry expansion. on the other hand, farmers in queensland, who identified as traditional farmers aligned with traditional animosities in discourse between the old national party of bjelke-petersen and the political left, rejected collaboration in favour of direct lobbying of parliamentarians. the individuals and groups involved in this study appear to be reflecting growing concerns of, on the one hand, an australian public rapidly losing its faith in its governing structure (irvine, 2011), and, on the other hand, a fragile dependence of our capitalist system, a system dependent on already strained natural resource base (dunstan, 2011; roubini, 2011). the concerns broached in this study highlight questions of the principles, foundations and perceptions of science and research as is applies to industrial extraction of natural resources. our record also illustrates the potential independent community groups to question the role of scientific enquiry in a society where governmental decision-making tends to lean towards coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 162 economic outcomes (klan, 2011). the coal-seam gas industry is a most obvious symptom a malaise many people see in australian society today, and the public concerns – expressed in all their diversity – reflect a healthy social response to environmentally damaging industrial activity. references abc (2011). coal seam gas by the numbers http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/coalseam-gas-by-the-numbers/ retrieved 4/12/2011 althusser, l. 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(2003). applications of case study research. thousand oaks, sage. acknowledgements: thanks to all of the study participants and interviewees. bill boyd is a geographer and landscape scientist, with research interests in environmental change, human-landscape interactions and environmental and cultural heritage management. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 164 he has recently been working on problems of the management of environmental and cultural heritage places and landscapes, and of communityengagement with environmental management. he has published extensively in the scientific literature, and co-authored several books. bill is the chair of his university’s human research ethics committee and animal care & ethics committee. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, p.o. box 157, lismore, new south wales australia. email: william.boyd@scu.edu.au) david lloyd lectures in protected area, cultural and coastal management. his research focuses on the incorporation of local or indigenous knowledge into natural area management. he wrote and produced a “saltwater people” for sbs, a documentary depicting the relationship of coastal indigenous communities with their environment, and has a weekly science and environment segment on abc radio. his ongoing projects include work in a number of pacific nations working on environmental management capacity building in tonga, natural resource management research and training in east and west timor, and png. in particular he is working on community based projects to provide value adding for coffee in east timor and curriculum development for the east timor coffee academy. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, p.o. box 157, lismore, new south wales australia. email: david.lloyd@scu.edu.au) hannabeth luke is a phd candidate at southern cross university, working working on a research study to design a framework that can be used to foster improved communication between natural reosurce policy makers, environmental scientists and the community, with the aim of developing moreholistic planning practices in natural resource management than are used at present. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, p.o. box 157, lismore, new south wales australia. email: hanabethluke@gmail.com) mailto:william.boyd@scu.edu.au mailto:david.lloyd@scu.edu.au mailto:hanabethluke@gmail.com community matters: ‘small’ stories/ ‘big’ politics coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 the invisible other and symptomatic silences: japanese poetic visions of the colonial pacific in the 1920s toshiko ellis abstract: in the 1920s when the japanese empire was pushing its borders outwards, a significant number of japanese civilians moved out of the japanese archipelago to settle in or travel through its newly acquired territories. the encounter with the foreign landscape and the people who lived there took various forms. through the analysis of poetic images characterizing the poets’ vision of “the other”, this article examines the ambivalent nature of the experience shared by young japanese poets as they faced the realities of japanese colonialism. i focus particularly on the poetic works by anzai fuyue and his fellow poets in a journal called a, published in dalian, a port city at the tip of liaotung peninsula, which had been handed over by russia in 1905 following the russo-japanese war. the vision of these settler poets is then briefly compared with that of another poet, kaneko mitsuharu, who traveled through the port cities in the southern pacific. the stark contrast in their respective visions of the local cultures suggests the strong self-colonizing motive on the part of the settler poets, who were struggling to acquire a colonialist perspective while concealing their own colonial unconsciousness. keywords: modern japanese poetry, colonial/colonialist vision, dalian japan is a country surrounded by oceans and seas. since ancient times, the sea served the function of connecting and separating japan from its surrounding lands. in this article i will focus on the 1920s and the 1930s, when the japanese state was embarking on the attempt to advance into, acquire and control neighboring lands. as the state pushed its borders outwards, a significant number of japanese civilians sailed out of the japanese archipelago to settle in or travel through the newly acquired territories. they encountered new landscapes, and different peoples. some went westwards to settle in the newly seized city of dalian at the tip of liaotung peninsula, a port of entry into manchuria (the puppet state copyright ©2013 toshiko ellis. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 of manchukuo was founded in 1932); others sailed southwards, to shanghai, amoi, hong kong, to the tropical regions of singapore, and further. from the perspective of the japanese empire, the sea served to connect the “mainland” (“inland”) japan with its settler outposts, that is, the occupation of the sea routes signified the expansion of its dominance in the region. from the perspective of those who actually traveled across the waters, the sea signified something quite different. for some, especially for those who went to settle abroad, it was a reminder of the distance from their place of origin, which gave them a deep sense of alienation. this was not only because they felt distant from their home but also distant from the land, which had supposedly become their new “home”. for others, however, such distance gave a fresh vision of freedom; away from the bindings of the nation state and its principal forces, a premonition of encounters with the new and the unknown. i will examine the poetic representations of these varying visions: what the japanese settlers and travelers saw, or perhaps neglected to see, beyond the sea, when they encountered foreign landscapes and its peoples. the main focus of discussion will be the works of anzai fuyue and his fellow poets in a poetic journal called a, published in dalian in the late 1920s. these works are characterized by a paralytic vision of the surrounding landscape, which reflects a sense of bewilderment and disorientation in the newly settled land. in comparison, i will briefly refer to some works by kaneko mitsuharu, who traveled through the southern seas and produced poems centering on the themes of rebellion against the growing empire and fascination with the local culture. i wish to explore the reasons behind the differences in their poetic representations, and extend the discussion further to examine the limitations and possibilities of cross-cultural encounters in a colonial or semicolonial context. i anzai fuyue moved to dalian in 1920 when his father started a business in dalian. he was twenty-two. dalian, originally a small chinese fishing village, was first occupied (as “leased territory”) by russia in 1898. here, the russians embarked on a project to build a modern port city, planning the city based on the parisian model. in 1905, following the japanese victory in the russo-japanese war, this “leased territory” was handed over to the japanese, who took over the building of the city, with the intention of developing this city to function as the entryway into the continent. this location marked the eastern end of a railway line that extended into the continent, formerly named the “east-qing railway”, and renamed the “south manchurian railway” by the japanese when they took over its control from russia. anzai, together with a few other young japanese poets, published a journal called a, the thirty-five issues of which came out between 1924 and 1927. this journal is known to have played a significant role in starting the modernist movement in japanese poetry in the nonlyrical, non-traditional style of the works published in them, characterized by the unconventional combination of images, somewhat resembling imagist poetry. what i wish to highlight here is the way in which dalian and its surrounding landscapes are represented in these texts. what are the characteristics of the poetic gaze? what are they looking at, and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 what are they not seeing? and how are the poets positioning themselves in relation to the landscape? let us look at some examples. here are some short poems by anzai and his fellow editor/poet, takeshi takiguchi, which include images of dalian. there is no museum in this city. it is like a man without lungs. (“dalian” [dairen], a, no.16, anzai) ii the photo studio that hastily brought in civilization is looking decrepit in the landscape. (the “street improvement” has already been launched in this toffee-coloured city.) iii (“the congested cityscape and civilization” [shippi suru gaikei to bunmei], a, no.5, anzai) the message in “dalian”, the first poem is straightforward. a city without a museum is a city without history, like a human being without internal organs. similarly, the next poem, “the congested cityscape and civilization”, stresses how quickly the city has come into being, and is transforming, the new taking over the old. what we notice, here, is that this is not a lively new city, bubbling with energy. the city is folded up banks go bankrupt, the canal is turning pale. (“a cat” [neko], a, no.16, anzai) clouds many walls the city, packed with dusty buildings coming upwards from the shore (…) (“a slope” [saka], a, no.5, takiguchi) the city is ailing with fever pagoda how far do i have to walk to get there? (“spring” [haru], a, 4, anzai) as we read through the texts, we find countless images of things that are “pale”, or “dusty”. or, as in “spring”, it is sick and “ailing”. the weather, too, is almost always cloudy, with the sky looking dim and heavy. in short, the cityscape is dominantly pale, dusty and grey. this is quite contradictory to the image of dalian promoted by the japanese state, as the coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 symbol of japan’s advancement into the continent and a model city of japan’s modernization project. the reason for this, we can perhaps find, in the first line of “a cat”, quoted above: “the city is folded up”. in fact, we find numerous expressions suggesting that the city is “tucked away”, “pressed” and “folded up”, which are an unusual way to describe a newly burgeoning modern city. the suggestion here is that something is hidden, which you are not supposed to see. this sense of suppression, inhibition and the resulting image of the city being pale, dominates the landscape of the poems included in a. who, then, do we see in these poems? and how are they portrayed? a city reflecting a mirage. the lady disappears into the stone garden (“the park” [koen], a, no.18, takiguchi) new moon a widow going down towards the subterranean railway (“postwar” [sengo], a, no.15, anzai) an old woman holding a stuffy looking parasol. a distorted city spreading below her eccentric skirt. (…) (“city with an overpass” [rikkyo no aru machi], a, no.10, anzai) gas lights floating in the autumn wind – an old woman walking along the overpass. (“autumn” [aki], a, no.22, takiguchi) a girl with a light make-up is coming out from the basement – looking up into the rainy sky. (“marsh” [numabe], a, 19, takiguchi) a city embroidered with new green trees a girl holding a cat comes out from the church (“canal” [unga], a, 19, takiguchi) strikingly, all we see are women. and we notice that they are consistently seen at a distance, in an “untouchable” distance, so to speak. in “the park” the woman “disappears” into the garden, and in “postwar” the widow goes down underground (this mention of the subway is interesting as there were no subways in dalian at the time). the next two poems focus on a woman walking along the overpass. as suggested in “a city with an overpass” with the woman holding a “parasol” wearing an “eccentric skirt”, they are not japanese, nor chinese. this is clearly an image of a russian woman. the demographic composition of dalian at the time was approximately 77,000 japanese, 123,000 chinese and about 1,000 russians (nishizawa 1999, 47). the “widow” is probably the widow of the russo-japanese war. strangely enough, there are no chinese on the scene, though we know that the chinese were the major labor force. it is said that there were approximately 20,000 chinese, called “coolies”, working in the port areas. (nishizawa 1999, 75) and the women – why are they coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 all so distant? and the girls, too, as we see in the last two poems, are not talking. it is only the poet’s gaze that is inscribed, but the poet is not able to approach them, talk to them or touch them. before we conjecture the reasons behind the limited way in which people are depicted in these poems, let us look at a few more poems that look at the city from a distance. it is lightly cloudy in the heights in march the city in tiers, with its hills (…) from this city near the sea, looking like a box a spring train is approaching, whistling a tune (“heights in march” [sangatsu takadai], a, no.6, takiguchi) (…) it is a rectangular city. (“a slope” [saka], a, no.18, anzai) there is a port sending off raw silk. the city is damply coming together, condensing. (“a port sending off raw silk” [kiito wo tsumidasu minato], a, no.4, takiguchi) behind the windows up high at the hotel, is always the pale sea, a beautiful old woman, having been forced a lengthy stay, looking out at the sea, was enjoying her afternoon sea dish. the sea was neatly fixed, in the bowls, in her lonely fingernails, and behind the glass frame. (…) (“the sea” [umi], a, no.7, takiguchi) thunder a cat comes in the ladies’ room the city’s pale roofs, roofs, and more roofs (“twilight” [hakubo], a, 9, takiguchi) what characterizes these poems is, once again, distance and detachment. in “heights in march” – though in this poem it is unusually sunny – the city lies in the distance, “like a box”. in “a slope” the city is referred to as being “rectangular”. and in “a port sending off raw silk” the poet positions himself high above the city, looking down at the city’s formation. in the last poem, too, the poet is seeing “roofs, roofs, and more roofs”. commonly, in these poems the poetic self is looking down over the city from a point in the heights. what happens under the “roofs” is, apparently, irrelevant, marginal and inaccessible. in short, these are the views of a non-committal observer. furthermore, the vision from the above typically suggests a sense of superiority. “the sea” focuses on a woman in a hotel room, once again, located somewhere in the hills. whether this woman, who is forced a lengthy stay, is russian, we cannot tell, but what is worth noting here is coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 that the sea is “neatly fixed” within the glass frame of the window, and distanced. this is symbolic of the nature of vision shared by the poets of the “a” journal. regardless of whether there is a window or not, their vision is typically “framed”, as though someone is observing the outside scenery through a window. in other words, the views are regarded and invoked by viewers from the safety of their room. filtered through the window, the scenes lose their vividness. they are predominantly still and static, and we hear little sound coming from these landscapes. the sea as viewed from the window of the hotel is absolutely quiet, or dead; it is deprived of the power to generate life. that this is a projection of the state of mind of those who are viewing the scene is clear. this paralytic vision is no other than the psychological representation of the viewer, who is observing the scene from high above, or peeking through a window, unwilling to, or unable to venture out onto the scene and to become part of it. the sea is there, not to immerse oneself and to swim in, but to evoke in the mind of the poet a decisive sense of distance; that you are cut off from the world outside. and the sea is there also to remind them that they are somehow cut off from their original place of belonging. in the late 1920s when these poems were written, the japanese living in dalian did not regard themselves so much as intruders, invaders or even colonizers; but rather, at least in their consciousness, they believed themselves to be “settlers” living in the land which had supposedly become an extension of japan. the right to lease the land had been handed over from the russians to the japanese as a trophy of the russo-japanese war. what made it difficult for them to relate themselves to the land, however, was the fact that the land had been under the russian rule for only so briefly, for a mere seven years or so, and that, it was originally a part of china, and that there were many chinese, who demographically outnumbered japanese residents. the japanese “settlers” were willing to accept russian heritage, including the use of european-style governmental buildings, many of which were still under construction, access to the railway and other facilities, but they were not equipped with the psychological means to deal with the chinese locals. at least the fact that there is virtually no reference to the daily lives of the local chinese people in these poems suggest that there was a psychological force at work to somehow “erase” them from the landscape. interestingly, the russians, despite the smallness of the number who stayed on in dalian after the handover, are given relatively frequent appearances. such inclination to “not look” at certain aspects of their everyday life explains the selectiveness of the images we find in these poems. there is another dimension to the characteristic imagery of these poetic works related to the formation of the colonial/colonialist discourse of the time, against which japan struggled to define itself. japan embarked on its modernization project under the threat of being colonized by the west. in order to avoid colonization, it acquired and absorbed the principles of western modernity, and through the process of avidly learning from the west and westernizing/modernizing itself, internalized the ideology that justified the western imperialist expansion. this process is commonly referred to as japan’s “self-colonization”. japan aimed to “mimic” the west, not only physically but also mentally, incorporating the logic of modernization, and acting, as if by its own will, like a western state. this was a way to conceal its own incompleteness in its modernizing project, hence, the “colonial coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 unconsciousness” urging japan to self-colonize, was tactfully concealed by the “colonialist consciousness” that urged itself to act in accordance with the norms of a western imperialist state (komori, 8-11). the justification for becoming “colonialist” assumes the existence of the other upon which one could exert power. thus, in order to uphold such colonialist consciousness japan had to “discover” those who could be labeled as being “less civilized”. the first colonialist intervention took place in the northern island of hokkaido, where japan “discovered” the indigenous ainu people as “barbarians”. as it incorporated these people into its own state system, it had to continue to “discover” further in order to maintain its presence as a modern power and to keep its colonialist consciousness alive (komori, 19). this process intrinsically accompanied a sense of anxiety and an ambivalent sentiment towards the colonized, as in principle the process could not achieve completion but was put under constant pressure to continue “discovering” . what we have seen in the poetic representations of the dalian landscape is interesting in that they suggest an early stage of the making of this colonialist self and how it is underpinned by the self-colonizing motive. it suggests the kind of bewilderment experienced by these early “settlers”, who had not yet thoroughly internalized the colonialist logic of identifying and incorporating the other. the sense of uneasiness in finding their place in the landscape, and the resulting distancing of the objects of gaze are illustrative of the struggle experienced by the poets to define their relationship with the land. the fascination with the exotic russia, which we find in many of these poems, is also suggestive of the self-colonizing uncertainty of these poets. initially, for russia, the building of this city in a european style meant exhibiting its linkage to the european civilization: the development of dalian was directly connected to the acquisition of the economic hegemony in east asia (nishizawa 1996, 46-50). even though the city was still under construction when the russians retreated, the basic plan of the city had already been laid out, with a circular plaza at its center and the wide roads leading outwards radially like the spokes of a wheel. when the japanese took over the city, they were keen to keep its european appearance. they prohibited the residents’ dwellings to be built in wood and promoted the construction of brick buildings (nishizawa 1996, 56). eventually, dalian developed into a city that looked, almost deceptively, european. to ensure the japanese possession of the city, all the streets were renamed in japanese, and every district, too, and all the transport and other facilities were given japanese names. this entire process of building a city of european appearance and giving japanese names to its infrastructure can be seen as a typical manifestation of a self-colonizing process. such fervent desire to acquire a western identity suggests, in turn, that such identity was yet to be sought; and yet, it was through upholding the pretense and façade of western civilization that the japanese sought to secure their place in this foreign land, which, in fact was neither russian nor japanese in its origin. this was a particular characteristic of settler japanese at this time. we can thus conjecture the reason for the recurring images of the russian heritage in the poetic works of “a”. the russian heritage played a significant role in the founding of the coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 colonialist subject. having no resemblance to any other city in “inland” japan, the physical european appearance of dalian provided an environment that facilitated the japanese settlers to assume a modern, colonialist identity. at the same time, it was a reminder of the artificial, almost fantastic, nature of this assumed identity. exoticism features in these poems. the sense of distance as we have seen in the previous poems is suggestive of the uneasiness on the part of the poetic subject in identifying themselves with the object of gaze. the virtual absence of the chinese people in these poems can also be explained in this context. as mentioned previously, in the 1920s, before the manchurian incident, the position of japanese “settlers”, particularly in relation to the land and its indigenous people, was only vaguely defined. the above poems reveal the poetic subject’s fascination towards this city abounding in european stylishness and its eagerness to establish himself as a modern subject. there was no room, then, for them to acknowledge the presence of those that did not fit into their imagery of this idealized modern city, the local chinese, who, in fact, constituted the base layer of the life in this city. the living quarters of the chinese were “tucked away” from their vision, hence references to the city as being “folded up”. lastly, then, why do we find only women in these landscapes? and why are these women predominantly “old”, or “girls”, who are potentially inadequate for having a productive, sexual relationship? focusing on female characters is a typical mode of representation in genderized, colonialist writing: the presence of women is an immediate projection of the desire to possess the other. the characteristic images of women in the poems of a, who are either too “old” or too “young” – often widows or virgins – symbolically suggests that the desire is potentially there but that there is still a sense of uncertainty as to how to advance further, to “possess” them. there are numerous references, particularly with “girls”, of them being evasive, sometimes cunning, and expressions of a sense of bewilderment and hesitation on the part of the observer, who are not quite equipped with a means to approach them. the colonialist gaze is still in the process of being established (ellis, 126-127). in comparison, i will briefly touch on a japanese poet, kaneko mitsuharu, who sailed out of japan several times between 1918 and 1932, spending much of his time in the pacific; in shanghai, hong kong, singapore, jakarta, java and other places, on route to europe. he produced a number of poems set against the background of the port cities in the southern pacific. unlike those who left “inland” japan to settle in the colonies, kaneko expressed a willingness to embrace the identity of a cosmopolitan individual who was no longer bound by the constrictions of the nation state. here is a poem written in 1925. on the back of her hand a number is tattooed. through the holes of her earlobes hang stones in the shape of a penis. eyelashes like ripe papayas around her sweaty body, the flies buzz around, or swarm. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 i wish to be reborn, bathed in her desire, like the pouring tropical showers. (…) (“to a southern woman”[minami no onna ni okuru], in lover at the roadside, kaneko mitsuharu, 1925) in contrast to the potentially colonialist approach we have seen in the a poems, kaneko characterizes his relationship with the indigenous through a discourse of “love” and affection. he overlaps this with an anti-conquest discourse, and proclaiming and trumpeting freedom from the imperialist regime, openly hugs the woman, touches her skin and asserts the joy of achieving an erotic relationship. though acknowledging that this kind of an illusion of cosmopolitanism, covered up by the discourse of love, is heavily orientalist in itself – as it is nothing but a self-complacent construction of the other – such approach taken by kaneko and other japanese traveler poets has a potential to agitate and disturb the colonialist discourse. let us look at one more example of kaneko’s work, which demonstrates a stark contrast in the way the poetic subject relates himself to his surroundings. here, the poetic subject is floating in the sea water, amidst the corpses that have become what they are through fighting in the ruthless battles for no one knows what reason. (…) piercing pain like mustard, confronting war that was hissing hot, they pulled the trigger. they were born to live, and had to do it all to live. but, they died so easily, ‘twas almost funny. (…) their bodies, too, used to feel cold, and hot, but now they are all full of holes, like lotus root, bits of flesh here and there, the intestines flowing about, faces completely crushed. it was so unexpected, they tilt their heads, the arm asks the elbow, the elbow asks the next elbow, all so confused, “why did we become corpses, like this?” but no matter how hard they think, it’s no use. through their skulls, making an empty sound, the muddy water flows. the overflowing water says, -“forget it”. (…) big bubbles that come up through their noses. small bubbles that come up through their ears. (“bubbles”[awa], in shark, kaneko mitsuharu, 1937) this is one of the few examples of a poetic rebellion against the imperialist regime, written at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to critique the state of the nation, its coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 culture and the way in which language, including literature, came under the control of the japanese imperialist state. one point i wish to note at the end, however, is that there is a decisive absence in these poetic expressions, that is, the voice of those who were intruded, conquered and violated. the japanese traveler poets were no doubt much freer in their frame of mind, to embrace the locals with affection, asserting their freedom to be what they wished to be, and content in their attempt to break away from the control of the imperialist ideology. we do not yet, however, hear the voice of the woman whom kaneko yearned to “love”. how can we hear her voice, and the voice of all those who were gazed upon these settlers and travelers? to conclude, i will quote a poem by a korean poet, yi sang, the verbal construction of which is characterized by an overwhelming kind of intensity, suggesting tension and fear we have not observed in the works by japanese poets of the same period. the following piece is entitled “crow’s-eye view”, not “bird’s-eye view”, the title itself suggesting the distinct darkness that dominates the text. 13 children rush down a street. (a dead-end alley will suffice.) the 1 st child says it is terrifying. the 2 nd child also says it is terrifying. the 3rd child also says it is terrifying. the 4th child also says it is terrifying. the 5 th child also says it is terrifying. the 6 th child also says it is terrifying. the 7 th child also says it is terrifying. the 8 th child also says it is terrifying. the 9 th child also says it is terrifying. the 10 th child also says it is terrifying. the 11 th child says it is terrifying. the 12 th child also says it is terrifying. the 13 th child also says it is terrifying. 13 children have come together and are terrifying or terrified. (the absence of any other condition would have been preferred.) if one child amongst them is a terrifying child it’s all right. if two children amongst them are terrifying children it’s all right. if two children amongst them are terrified children it’s all right. if one child amongst them is a terrified child it’s all right. (an open alley will suffice.) though 13 children do not rush down the street everything is all right. (“crow’s-eye view poem no.1”, 1934) (transl. by yu and kimball, 5) coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 i will not go into a detailed analysis of this poem. i wish only to highlight the extent of tenseness filling this poetic space, the premonition of threat, the overwhelming “closedness” and desperateness as expressed in this piece, where the children, deprived of all that makes them human, and simply numbered, are running all in one direction towards a deadend, or not running, or running to nowhere – or perhaps no longer there at all. works cited a. vol.1-vol.35, reprint of the original by beppu daigaku bungakubu kokubunka kenkyushitsu, 1981. ellis, toshiko. “tatamareru fukei to todokooru manazashi.” gengo bunka kenkyu. vol.22, no.4. kyoto: international institute of language and cultures studies, ritsumeikan university, march, 2011. 119-129. kaneko, mitsuharu. kaneko mitsuharu shishu, ed. takayuki kiyooka. tokyo, iwanami shoten, 1991. komori, yoichi. posuto koloniaru. tokyo: iwanami shoten, 2001. nishizawa, yasuhiko. dairen toshi monogatari. tokyo: kawade shobo shinsha, 1999. nishizawa, yasuhiko. manshu toshi monogatari. tokyo: kawade shobo shinsha, 2006. yu, jung-yul, and james kimbrell. three poets of modern korea: yi-sang, hahm dongseon and choi young-mi. louisville, kentucky: sarabande books, 2002. toshiko ellis is professor in the graduate department of language and information sciences at the university of tokyo. she studied comparative literature at the university of tokyo where she received her ma. from 1986 to 1992 she taught japanese literature and culture at monash university, australia, where she received her ph.d. she has been teaching at the university of tokyo since 1992 and offers courses in comparative literature, japanese poetry, translation studies and others. she specializes in modern japanese poetry and has published extensively on japan’s poetic modernism, and more broadly on issues related to modernism and postmodernism in japanese literature. her publications include hagiwara sakutaro: shiteki imeeji no kosei (the poetic imagery of hagiwara sakutaro) (chusekisha, 1986), “questioning modernism and postmodernism in japanese literature” in japanese encounters with postmodernity (kegan paul international, 1995), and “literary culture” in the cambridge companion to modern japanese culture (cambridge university press, 2009). i japanese names are written with the surname first, followed by the given name in accordance with the japanese convention. ii all the translations of the poetic texts cited are mine except for the translation from korean into english of yi-sang’s text. iii this second line is written in small letters, in brackets. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 doing it for real: designing experiential journalism curricula that prepare students for the new and uncertain world of journalism work jeanti st clair university of southern cross, nsw jeanti.stclair@scu.edu.au copyright© jeanti st clair 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the world of journalism in the digital age is changing faster than university curricula can keep up. news is now produced in forms and on platforms that were nonexistent 10 years ago. journalists may increasingly generate their own work opportunities in entrepreneurial news outlets and start-ups, rather than as employees in legacy newsprint and broadcast media. substantial workforce contraction has also occurred since 2012 as revenue in print and other traditional media has found new homes in social media and search engines, and over 1000 journalists (or 15 percent of the journalism workforce) were made redundant. journalism graduates therefore need to be flexible, innovative and enterprising to survive professionally in this evolving setting. additionally, financial and funding pressures on universities are leading them to reduce course costs and deliver more courses online. elongated unpaid internships provide real world experience but access to these will likely reduce as workforces continue to contract. this article considers student feedback from three authentic experiential journalism projects in light of these changing times in journalism. it explores how the performative and very practical nature of traditional and digital journalism skills may be developed through a learning-centred curriculum anchored in authentic and experiential activities and settings. the article briefly considers some of the challenges facing journalism educators in delivering such a curriculum in e-learning settings, and sets out a simple framework for supporting the development of digital media workforce readiness. keywords: journalism education, curriculum design, journalism 2.0 mailto:jeanti.stclair@scu.edu.au coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 introduction the world of journalism in the digital age is changing faster than university curricula can keep up. traditionally, news media production was an industrialised practice and journalists produced a news story in standardised format for print, radio or television. but, as journalism academic eric newton (2012) reminds us, the digital age operates on a different set of “technology, techniques and principles”, and has “disrupted traditional media economics”. but the “body of practices” simply known as journalism, is adapting to these new conditions (picard, 2010). news is now produced in forms and on platforms that were non-existent 10 years ago (este, warren, connor, brown, pollard & o‟connor, 2010). the part of the media industry that is struggling is the economic model upon which media is built. in many developed economies where digital media has made significant in-roads, thousands of editorial and production positions in news organisations have been shed as revenue streams have dropped away (pew research center, 2014; midgley, 2014; bittner, 2014; beecher, 2013; christensen, 2013; kidd, 2014). at the same time, digital technology integration in news media has broadened the range of skills needed by journalists and redefined concepts of professional identity and news production, as mensing (2010), picard (2010), kanigel (2014), o‟donnell and mcknight (2012) and others argue. change is now a given in the digital era. journalism graduates wishing to work in the media therefore need to be flexible, innovative and enterprising to survive professionally in this evolving setting. yet journalism educators and industry have struggled to reach a consensus on what contemporary journalism curricula should deliver (tanner, 2014). additional financial and funding pressures on universities are leading to pressures to reduce course costs (universities australia, 2014). one response is to deliver more courses online. elongated unpaid internships provide real world experience and are one of the clearest pathways to employment, tanner (2014, p.105) notes, but access to these will likely reduce and become more competitive as workforces contract. already, the contemporary internship model has been criticised for using the interns as unpaid labour, replacing paid positions (hope & figiel, 2012; perlin, 2012; stewart & owens, 2013. this article critically reflects on student feedback from three authentic experiential journalism projects, managed by this article‟s author, in light of these changing times in journalism as part of a broader project of journalism curriculum renewal at the author‟s university. it explores how the performative and very practical nature of traditional and digital journalism skills may be developed through a learning-centred curriculum anchored in authentic and experiential activities and settings. the article briefly considers some of the challenges facing journalism educators in delivering such a curriculum in e-learning settings, and sets out a simple curriculum framework for supporting the development of digital media workforce readiness. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 what makes an ideal journalism 2.0 graduate? news creation in the digital era, in the maturing digital media markets discussed below, is seen as an open-ended process, a two-way conversation between journalist and reader that is facilitated through story comments and social media. increasingly referred to as journalism 2.0., such news creation can be defined as decentralised, media convergent and collaborative news making practices that draw on web 2.0 technologies that allow "user-generated content and user-to-user interaction" and as a consequence is more “user-focused" (abdul-mageed, 2008, p.61). journalism academic jeff jarvis labelled this “journalism as beta” involving “collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don‟t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections” (jarvis, 2009). as guardian australia‟s then-editor-inchief, katharine viner (2013) noted in giving the annual an smith lecture at melbourne university‟s centre for advancing journalism that journalists take a curatorial role in bringing the most relevant information to audiences. in this era of news creation, she says, content will target niche audiences, providing opportunities for journalists to fill the gaps in news coverage and dig deeper into content and analysis. journalists may increasingly generate their own work opportunities in entrepreneurial news outlets and start-ups, rather than in legacy newsprint and broadcast media. journalism 2.0 technology has rewritten journalist role specifications and altered journalistic processes in innovative ways. journalists must be able to produce news across all media including text, audio, photographic and video formats. they must be publishers as well as producers, and report and publish from the field using mobile technology. journalists may have specialist skills in data visualisation. they will be social media savvy and will engage with audiences who expect to contribute content and be free to engage in debate on the day‟s topics. news content is published online first, either to a news website or blog, or even straight to twitter and other social media outlets before appearing later in traditional media outlets. this is the digital age newton writes of when he calls on journalism courses to embrace “continuous change” (2012), echoing quinn‟s warning about the “glacial speed at which curricula change proceeds” and the need to “update journalism education to prepare for a future that is rapidly becoming the present” (2010, p.78). graduates need to not only know what news is and be multi-skilled for the digital news age, but they must also be comfortable with changing technologies, innovative story forms and workflows, and comfortable with uncertainty, for careers in near-future newsrooms yet to be imagined. yet, university journalism education has struggled with the process of curricula reinvention. in part, deuze (2006) suggests this is due to a shortage of structural, systematic and collaborative research between journalism academics on the question of „what should journalism education do?‟. despite this, deuze says journalism programs globally have many challenges in common, although perhaps not concurrently. this would be the case in countries where digital news platforms have yet to seriously impact legacy media models (discussed below), and where the pressures on journalism training to respond to the altered news production environment have yet to fully exert themselves. but where digital media has had that impact, change is underway (picard, 2014). as mensing notes (2010), educators initially responded to the digital era by expanding technology training and tweaking course sequences and emphases. but it can be argued that what is demanded is not a new skill set. the digital shift requires a new coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 mindset, one that emphasises entrepreneurialism, innovation and collaboration. vázquez schaich and klein (2013) note that this has led to a new field of “entrepreneurial journalism” courses, particularly in the unite states. according to educators behind this new field, these courses were established to develop an innovative and “entrepreneurial mindset” and digitally relevant skills among journalists, and to help them create their own employment opportunities or innovate within established media organisations during such uncertain and disrupted times (p.207). but picard (2014), while in agreement about the need for increased emphasis on analytic thinking, innovation and problem-solving skills, is critical of many attempts at curriculum renewal as not trying hard enough to break away from training students in twentieth century production mode silos or from normative views of what journalism‟s role in society is. vázquez schaich and klein (2013) similarly found that despite the arrival in the us of specialist “entrepreneurial journalism” courses, the traditional mindset of „journalism as product‟ is probably still dominant. this is “because journalism schools are in the earliest stages of the transformation of their programs, the introduction of the new skills and the redefinition of the professional profile of the digital age journalist” (vázquez schaich & klein, 2013, p.207). indeed, results from tanner‟s (2014) australian survey on journalism curriculum renewal indicated attitudes that showed educators and industry seemed unable to develop a common definition of what journalism in the digital age entailed, echoing deuze‟s (2006) earlier warning. few australian journalism courses teach students to take an entrepreneurial or experimental approach to journalism, or teach business skills to support students in creating media start-ups (tanner, 2014, p.84). this is unfortunate. such a mindset could be beneficial for today‟s graduates as employment security is expected to be tenuous and only those graduates who can cope with such disruption will make a living as a journalist. tenuous times for media workers but is this tenuousness global? digital technology and social changes in society are indeed affecting the economic viability of the media industry and forcing media organisations born from last century‟s technologies to “restructure and reduce their organisation, making journalists and other employees redundant, and reducing the scale and scope of many news-gathering and dissemination activities” (picard, 2010, p.365). print newspaper circulation has been on the slide for more than a decade and has fallen in most first world economies (wan 2014). talk of the death of newspapers, in print form at least, has been rife for much of that time (see dawson, 2010; newspaper death watch, 2007; beecher, 2013). but the picture is more complicated than framing a grand extinction of newspapers. globally over the past five years, print newspaper circulation has only secured increases in regions (asia, latin america and africa) where smartphones, digital media players or high-speed internet access is not yet widespread. however, this increase in newsprint consumption is marginal compared to the larger losses over the same timeframe in europe, north america and australia (wan-ifra, 2014). broadcast media has been impacted with the arrival of digital media, but not as deeply.. in these developed econmoies, consumers have so far been prepared to consume both legacy media formats and digital models to varying degrees, and with varying levels of commitment to paying for digital content. but it is perhaps only now that we see digital coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 media consumption reaching a “tipping point”, as research from deloitte (2014) found in australia. australian consumers are embracing digital media consumption at levels that indicate audiences will fully migrate to digital platforms, perhaps within the timeframe dawson (2010) suggested in his newspaper extinction timelines. (for australia, this is 2022; the united states, 2017 and the uk, 2019). however, the key issue for the media sector, and therefore its workers who expect a pay cheque, has been whether consumers will pay for digital content. revenue from digital news media is building slowly in many markets (and new models for paid content are developing with this) but not enough to fill the gap left by disappeared legacy media advertising revenue, which has found new homes in social media, search engines and digital native media start-ups (pew research center, 2014; reuters institute, 2014; wan-ifra, 2014). the workforce contraction in the legacy print media that has followed the fall in revenue over the past decade has been substantial. newsrooms and journalists have been key targets of cost-cutting exercises across the media industries where digital news platforms have disrupted legacy print and broadcast models. in particular, the united states (pew research center, 2014), united kingdom (midgley, 2014) europe (bittner, 2014), and australia (beecher, 2013; christensen, 2013; kidd, 2014) have seen workforces shrink. in australia during 2012, over 1000 journalists (or 15 percent of the journalism workforce) were made redundant (zion, 2013; o‟donnell & mcknight, 2012). more lost their jobs in 2013 and 2014. the cost-cutting has not only affected print and commercial broadcast newsrooms. journalists working for public broadcasters, including the bbc, cbc and the abc, have fallen under the axe as well (cbc news, 2014; kidd, 2014, midgley, 2014) this workforce contraction appears to reflect a shift away legacy media field hiring into digital media roles, as well as a flattening out of newsroom hierarchy (fuller, 2014). the pew center (2014) in the united states surveyed digital media outlets and found that while many were hiring legacy journalists, they were hired predominantly for their investigative skills. otherwise, there was a key preference for younger employees, with and without journalism degrees, who are “adaptable”, “multi-platform” and who had an “intuitive sense of the media world” and voices that were “nurtured online” (pew center, 2014, pp.24-25). this indicates a purposeful shift in the types of skills valued in digital news media. in australia, data from the australian government job outlook suggested that while job openings for journalists are expected to be below average over the period to november 2017, this slowing had come off the back of strong employment growth in the previous five years (australian government, 2012). in late 2014, the abc in announcing that 100 out of 400 job cuts would go from its news division, said that it would also be hiring 70 new staff with a “focus on digital skills, meaning an overall reduction of 30 jobs” (kidd, 2014). so, perhaps there is room for a little optimism. this suggests that the shift from running two separate newsrooms (print or broadcast and digital) is being completed and the new „digital first‟ newsroom models are reaching maturity. but despite this open talk of the death of newspapers, journalism is not dead. nor is the journalism degree: in 2013, australian universities offered more than 70 journalism, media and communications courses (tanner, 2014, p.59). statistics suggest there were more journalism students in 2012 (4077) than there were newspaper journalists, with the journalist‟s union, the meaa, estimating just 3500 to 4000 (buchanan, 2013). coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 while not all journalism students want to work as journalists, those who do appear cautiously optimistic about their job prospects and are keen to enter what would be considered traditional journalism roles – as reporters and producers. students also believe new opportunities will have emerged by the time they graduate (finlayson & fox, 2013). bringing the real world of journalism work to students so, how can we best prepare journalism graduates for an uncertain but possibly rewarding media career? firstly, we could structure courses and our teaching and learning environment to better replicate the realities of newsroom work in this digital age. educators might avoid teaching in production silos of print, audio and video and instead embrace digital-first, cross-media production that engages with audiences and publishes user-generated content as part of news production; journalism that is processand not product-oriented, and which links out to the best content online. educators need to teach students underlying process skills of problem-solving, critical analysis, self-learning and collaboration, to help them innovate around the professional practices and standards (oliver & herrington, 2001). secondly, educators need to help students get up to speed on production outputs. discussions at the 2013 journalism education association australia conference suggested a substantial proportion of australian journalism educators have professional journalism experience. such perspectives, as well as recent newsroom experience, are valued by the media industry (tanner, 2014, p.97). journalism educators clearly have some understanding, on a personal level, of the stress and anxiety that can come with the pressures of newsroom production, and the gap between journalism classroom outcomes and what is expected of graduates in the newsroom. where the classroom might expect the student to produce three assessment items across a semester, the newsroom will expect the graduate to quickly get up to speed and produce three or more news items a day, as well as stay abreast of social media and audience interactions. educators therefore have a responsibility to help students learn “how to cope in a fastchanging environment” (quinn, 2010, p.75). this includes a requirement that students be self-supporting and adaptable when encountering new technology (software and equipment) in news practice (tanner, 2014, p.21, p.88). an australian study into workintegrated internship placements for journalism students found that media employers generally had high expectations of the level of skills that students should present during placement. these included “practical expertise alongside students‟ development of „self‟ – personal confidence, initiative, problem-solving, office communication and general cooperativeness and teamwork” (forde & meadows, 2012, p.23). finally, educators must design learning around experiential activities in authentic settings to ensure students have experience in the unpredictable task of reporting. there would be little surprise that journalism educators in this field already emphasise experiential learning as a grounded means of developing practice and mindset and see its value as professionalising tool. however, unless the experience is anchored authentically in terms of location or outcome, such learning activities are bemoaned by coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 industry as a “poor substitute for the reality of working in the daily newsroom and producing content to „real‟ deadlines” (tanner, 2014, p.99). interestingly, these complaints were made despite a general lack of specific awareness among industry respondents of the types of „real‟ content delivered by „real‟ deadlines being produced in australian journalism courses (ibid, p. 97). the performative and very practical nature of journalism work suggests that journalism skills development is most effective when approached through a learning-centred approach to curriculum (kartveit, 2009; segrave & holt, 2003) this engages the learner actively in the learning process and supports “deep knowledge construction rather than surface learning” (o‟brien, millis & cohen, 2009, p.11-12). it enables experiential learning, which as kolb (1984) formulates, allows learners to engage in reflective observation about their experiences. learners then assimilate the impact of those experiences into abstract concepts, which they then actively test, experiment with or innovate around. such an “integrative strategy …emphasiz[es] the dynamic interactions between experience, theory and enhanced practice” and best reflects the “shifting, indeterminate and complex” world of professional practice (segrave & holt, 2003, pp.11 & 10). students participate actively and make choices in the learning experience, collaborate and support other students, and reflect on and articulate what they learn with others. additionally, learner-centred design that can “foster a project or problem-based approach and the ability to work in multi-function teams” is more crucial in times of disrupted economics, globalisation and workplace structure, where high value workers are those who are multi-skilled and flexible in an interdisciplinary environment (beetham, 2013, p.541). anchoring experiential learning in authentic settings or around authentic activities further supports relevant and deep learning, helps journalism students develop skills and mindsets they can draw upon during internships and their first professional roles. research shows that students feel more confident about their journalism practice after engaging in authentic experiential activities (baines, 2012; tanner et al, 2012). but what do „authentic‟ activities or settings look like? while acknowledging the term „authentic‟ in the educational context is open to interpretation, herrington, oliver and reeves (2003) outline ten defining characteristics, based on a broad literature review. applied to journalism education, authentic learning activities can be seen as those that closely match real world professional practice, and provide opportunities for collaboration and critical reflection. while the assessment is integrated seamlessly into the authentic activity, the resulting news publication can be valued in its own right, rather than only as activity or assessment. authentic activities reflect the interdisciplinary, ill-defined, multi-modal and multiple-choice world of journalism work and require students to make a substantial investment of time and critical resources. rebuilding journalism education in face of the e-learning challenge considering the benefits to students of authentic experiential activities, educators could do more to embed them in journalism courses. however, authentic and experiential learning activities are time and resource-intensive and do not always fit neatly into allocated teaching schedules, timeframes and workloads. but then, news production does not fit easily into a two-hour workshop. authentic, experiential journalism coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 activities are also constrained on two fronts: they frequently require off-site „residential‟ participation by students which can disrupt student schedules, and delivery is challenged by shifts from face-to-face or blended classes to courses delivered entirely online. while the numbers of students studying by online appears stable (norton, sonnemann & mcgannon, 2013, p.16), there is pressure at my university to „externalise‟ all courses, including highly practical and technology-based subject areas. this allows the university flexibility in scheduling a course as a purely online offering. this transition from face-to-face teaching or blended learning may be the greatest challenge facing the pedagogical design of experiential learning. one possible approach to enriching computer-based experiential learning in journalism education is the e-simulation. deakin university introduced an e-simulation in 2003 to provide an experiential cd-rom/computer-based learning activity in a blended course delivery for its journalism students. hotcopy‟s newsroom, e-simulation newsroom workplace, and news stories were grounded in journalism curriculum priorities and provided interaction with digital scenarios and characters within the framework of a news deadline. students completed written reporting tasks, participated in simulated reflective debriefings in the „pub‟ and between other students and staff. the simulations were linked to follow-up internships and face-to-face scenario work and reflections in class (segrave & holt, 2003, p 13). while the simulated activities had no real world outcomes for students, they did provide students with a “low-risk environment” where students could practice “„being‟ a journalist to develop the contextual knowledge that guides professionals to know when and how to act effectively” (ibid, p.16). hotcopy was a rare e-simulation in journalism education, and was retired in 2011. aayeshah (2012) has found “very few” examples of digital games being used for journalism skill development, particularly since 2010. the “best” example uncovered by aayeshah, the global conflict series, allows students to “think in situations where they cannot visit in person, due to expenses as well as associated dangers” (p.9). but games and e-simulations have limited value to journalism education pedagogically. they might be valuable in developing very basic reporting and newswriting skills; however e-simulations cannot, for example, teach the core journalistic craft of interviewing (p. 13). herrington (2006) warns that e-simulations, when measured against authentic task criteria, fail to provide “genuine productivity” (p. 3168). furthermore, simulations require a substantial investment of inter-disciplinary resources and time to develop, which various australian and new zealand academics in aayeshah‟s (2012) survey noted. maintaining the currency of reporting practices and tools used in an e-simulation would be challenging and, in the fast-changing and uncertain world of journalism 2.0, betting on the future direction of journalism practice is risky when journalists are unsure of it is heading. like the „teaching hospital‟ model of journalism schools, simulations risk reinforcing the „journalism as product‟ model rather than encouraging students to innovate around existing practices, and collaborate with community and audience by working authentically in real world settings (mensing & ryfe, 2013; robinson, 2013). capturing the organic uncertainty that comes with the „journalism as process‟ model of news production would be challenging to create. how, for example, would the conversations between audience and journalist be incorporated in an e-simulation? journalism 2.0 technologies may have circumvented the need for e-simulations, beyond the very foundational level of journalism skills development such as basic newswriting coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 130 tasks. the barriers to entry for news production and publication have fallen dramatically. free websites, editing software and cloud hosting services (for example youtube, vimeo, soundcloud) as well as social media, smartphone cameras and recorders have made it easy for anyone to publish media-rich, audience-engaged online content. aayeshah‟s survey found some academics noted a preference for having students write “real stories”, and collaborate on proven platforms like facebook (aayeshah, 2012, p.12). social media can be utilised particularly well in journalism education because it can fulfil not only a role as a discourse facilitation tool, but builds competency in a suite of tools used increasingly by journalists. cochrane, sissons and mulrennan (2012) found the use of twitter as a discourse platform can “bridge the classroom environment with students‟ informal learning experiences in the real world, … enriching their learning experiences, and enabling student-generated content and student-generated learning contexts” (p.170). there remains limited scope for esimulations in specialist reporting where reporters engage in personally risky activities, such as investigative reporting on corruption, or reporting on traumatic events. but the academy must invest the resources and headspace to collaborate on such projects. however, for general reporting tasks, and to facilitate innovation, authentic experiential activities may be more beneficial for students and will provide publication outcomes, which can form part of a student‟s digital reputation and portfolio. in 2014, southern cross university launched its news site, mediadrive (mediadrive.net.au), as the learning and publication space for its online journalism students and to provide real publication opportunities for students and academics in the school of arts and social sciences. it joins other australian university hosted news sites specifically developed to publish journalism students‟ work including reportage online (university of technology, sydney) and upstart (latrobe university). such websites and collaborations with professional journalism websites such as the brumby and bailleau dumps, undertaken by swinburne university with crikey website (dodd & green, 2011), represent opportunities for powerful authentic and experiential learning experiences. students’ feedback shows authenticity especially valued in 2013, i supervised ten undergraduate journalism students as they reported from the bluesfest, a music festival held at byron bay. students received backstage passes and were excited to be reporting as part of the rhythms magazine media team at the festival. the student festival reports were published on the rhythms magazine blog (https://rhythms.com.au/reviews/southern-cross-university-byron-bluesfest-reports). students produced text-based news articles and performance reviews, and posted photographic galleries and audio podcasts of the live „question and answer‟ (q&a) sessions with festival performers. as well as excited, they were nervous because for many this was their first opportunity to be a reporter, a journalist, in a real world setting. over the five-day festival, students built a public portfolio of journalism work and they did it all on very tight deadlines. the bluesfest reporting team is one of three experiential learning activities, associated with the journalism major in the bachelor of media that i have delivered over the past five years. each experiential activity involves either an authentic setting or a real world https://rhythms.com.au/reviews/southern-cross-university-byron-bluesfest-reports coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 publication outcome. with all three projects, students work with me as their editor and mentor, and must rework their stories after editorial feedback is given until the work is ready for publication. the second project invites students to report from the three-day byron bay writers‟ festival. reports and audio recordings are published on the official festival blog http://www.byronbaywritersfestival.com.au/v2/index.php. students publish work alongside the festival‟s official blogger. the third experiential project is the pulse project, where a small focussed team of five to seven student journalists is mentored across a semester through an intense writing-for-publication activity. each week, students must produce music journalism articles and reviews for the region‟s main newspaper, the northern star. students participate for one or two semesters. the project is an excellent portfolio-builder and many students in the pulse team have gone on to work in the media industry as journalists. from my observations as supervisor and editor, i could see students were benefitting, from their involvement in these projects, with increased confidence and greater task mastery. however to gain a more subjective perspective from the students on what they most valued in these projects, i implemented an extended online survey for participants to complete and present some initial analysis from that study in this article. such systematic and critical reflections assist educators to avoid the risk of introspection and self-justification. developing a reflective teaching practice is beneficial for educators (schön, 1983), especially when undertaking curriculum design and renewal projects as i have been pursuing at southern cross university. brookfield‟s four lenses concept (1995) extends on schön and advises educators to view their teaching through multiple perspectives: (1) the autobiographical, (2) the students' eyes, (3) colleagues' experiences, and (4) theoretical literature. this survey was undertaken with this intent. method and sample between july 2012 and october 2013, i surveyed students about their experiences with these authentic experiential projects, and the intention is to continue this study as the numbers that participate each year are limited by the capacity of the reporting activities. approximately, 10 students can be accommodated with each of the blogging projects and between 5-7 students are involved in writing for pulse. as some students participate in more than one project, students were limited to providing feedback on one project, usually the first they were involved with. the sample for this analysis includes 14 students across the three projects. while the sample is small, the qualitative and reflective nature of the data is indicative for the projects, and is not intended for statistical generalisation. following the experiential learning project, the journalism students were invited to debrief via an extended online exit survey. students were asked to respond to 38 questions, which included ratings questions and open-ended questions that were designed to draw out individual reflections into their experiences. participation was optional. the survey received ethics clearance through southern cross university. data analysis for this article is limited to the following questions: http://www.byronbaywritersfestival.com.au/v2/index.php coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 q1. list the three greatest challenges, placing one in each box and then think about how you felt about these challenges at the start of the project. q2. compare how you felt about each challenge after the project and rate your success at tackling each challenge, where 1 is feeling no success and 9 is very successful. q3. how valuable overall did you find the learning project in the following? [1 9 where 1 is no value and 9 is extremely valuable.]: 1. developing confidence 2. learning new skills 3. refining existing skills 4. developing the capacity to work to short deadlines 5. building a portfolio 6. preparing me to enter the workforce as a journalist q4. think back to how you felt after the reporting project finished. consider and describe whether your skills and experience, and your level of skill, as a journalist has changed. q5. what challenges did you face and how you did you overcome them? q6. what were the personal benefits from setting the project in a community or industry environment? responses from q1, q4, q5 and q6 were classified into themes and examples of typical responses are included in table 3. other informative, but uncommon responses are noted in the discussion. answers to the ratings questions (q2 and q3) are presented in tables 1 and 2. results and discussion each student was asked to freely nominate what he or she felt were the three main personal challenges he or she faced going in to the reporting project. the students‟ answers were then reviewed and classified into 4 broad categories. these reflect activities common in the production of news media content:  facing novel situations or tasks  meeting deadlines  self-confidence (skills/capacity)  self-management (time/tasks) the students then rated how successfully they personally felt at tackling each challenge, where 1 was no success and 9 was very successful. the two short-run festival projects ranked 7/9 overall. the pulse project which runs for a 12-week semester rated more highly 7.75/9. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 table 1: students rate levels of success tackling challenges survey data: southern cross university experiential journalism projects 2012-2013 q2: compare how you felt about each challenge after the project and rate your success at tackling each challenge, where 1 is feeling no success and 9 is very successful. the students were also asked to rate the value of a range of specified skill development and professionalization outcomes that arose from participating in the reporting projects on the same scale from 1 to 9. the outcomes rated most valuable included developing self-confidence and the capacity to work to short deadlines, building portfolio, and preparing self to enter workforce. learning or refining skills rated slightly lower. these results were affirmed in qualitative responses, and a selection of typical comments is included in table 3. table 2: student rate value of skills development and professionalization benefits survey data: southern cross university experiential journalism projects 2012-2013 q3: how valuable overall did you find the community-engaged learning project in the following? [1 9 where 1 is no value and 9 is extremely valuable.] coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 in responses to qualitative questions on personal benefits and highlights, students universally reported their participation in the experiential learning projects as positive: “immensely positive” “valuable”, “authentic” and “motivated and engaged” were terms used. an overarching theme from this survey data was the high value students placed on the opportunity to test-run their skills in a supported environment, as a precursor to independently applying their skills in a workplace. this came through clearly in the comments from students, as presented in table 3. table 3: representative examples of student feedback on personal benefits and highlights from participation in experiential learning projects, southern cross university, 2012-2013 i learnt some new and important lessons in journalism and [was] reassured that the things i've been taught in class have sunk in. i am published, under my own name, for anyone to read... i feel more focused, work ready and have started to build a little network within this field. i now feel confident if i was asked to do this type of work again. i think all experience in the field always makes you a stronger journalist. in particular after this weekend, i feel i'm a stronger online writer, and i have a more hands-on, in-depth understanding of exactly how quick the turnaround for content can be in an 'on-site' reporting situation. i feel like my skill level as a journalist has improved and that i now know what it's like to work as a journalist. [b]ecause of these newly acquired skills i feel more confident in my abilities as a journalist. my skill in photographing musical performances has increased dramatically. the project felt like an internship, and my skills reflected my development. my skills in writing and communication have developed and grown, and these will benefit me immensely in a future career. after finishing pulse for the year i feel that my skills as a journalist are on a completely different level to what they were when i began. the experience allowed me to steadily improve at my own pace and grow into a more experienced journalist, rather than being forced to rapidly improve. other key learning outcomes from participation by students included a sense of „workreadiness‟, a developed contextual understanding of journalism practice in the field, and portfolio development. students appreciated the opportunity to network with professional journalists, being part of and observing a real working environment, working in a team, thinking on your feet, having access to an editor and mentor and the challenge of meeting tight deadlines for content delivery, which were described by one student as “sometimes a bit daunting”. the student added: coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 having a team around you who were supportive and having access to an editor right then and there was very helpful, and i don't think anyone ever failed to turn out a quality piece of writing. (student h) in particular, one student made special note of the impact that the authenticity and collaborative nature of the reporting project on that student‟s own commitment: obviously there is a big difference between the structured lessons of a quiet classroom compared to the controlled chaos of the bluesfest. personally, the benefit of a real world environment as opposed to assessment pieces is the gravity of the situation. as i have demonstrated in many assessments, i struggle to complete tasks on time, which can cast doubt on one‟s ability and career goals. given a team and a real responsibility to perform, my work ethic changes immensely. it forced me to take note of my surroundings, to learn from experience, and take action. when i succeeded in tasks, i felt empowered, and when i failed at something, i would try harder. a classroom cannot provide this situation or environment, and so where i have had doubts about my credibility as a student, i now know i can succeed in my chosen industry. (student c) the southern cross university journalism students‟ feedback is on par with student feedback from authentic experiential projects at other universities in australia and overseas. these studies found that the placement of journalism students in learning environments that replicate the pressures of reporting in real-world settings contributes positively to students‟ work-readiness and confidence. for example, tanner, green and burns (2012), in leading a team of university student journalists reporting for community television channel 31 from the ixth national special olympics in 2010 in adelaide, australia, found student feedback repeatedly emphasised increased confidence in journalism skills as a result of putting skills learnt in the classroom into practice in the „real-world‟. baines (2012) operated a hyper-local website out of newcastle university in the united kingdom as a “laboratory of inquiry” (mensing, 2010) where students were able to develop traditional journalism skills, as well as innovate and be entrepreneurial in how publications were conceptualised. baines notes that student feedback was positive and emphasised particularly the experience of being involved in a collaborative community, enhanced employability and entrepreneurialism. earlier in 2007, steel, carmichael, holmes, kinse, and sanders, ran a cross-disciplinary project with journalism and politics students during the 2005 uk election, at the university of sheffield. over the three-day reporting period of the project, 58 students produced “two newspapers, a website, 11 radio news bulletins, a three-hour "as live" radio programme and two television news magazine programmes” (steel et al, 2007, p.325). students noted that they felt anxious at the start of the program but developed confidence as it progressed, growing more accustomed to working under pressure. in the southern cross university study, all students felt the projects had assisted their professional development as a journalist or writer, and they felt more prepared to enter the workforce as a result. students said they were more engaged, and some noted in comments that they gained greater benefits from such activities than by only learning in the classroom, or that it helped make sense of the classroom teachings. while beneficial to students, such learning projects are not without their challenges. often these experiential activities are conducted extra-curricularly (run outside of specific units of coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 study) and, due to the intensity of event-based reporting, require staff to supervise students outside of general workload allocations. tanner et al (2012) and steel et al (2007) note in particular that more preparatory time with students within study programmes would have helped iron out production challenges encountered during the events. despite these demands and difficulties, journalism educators appear generally supportive of experiential learning activities and look for ways and means to further incorporate them into renewed curricula (mensing, 2010). building graduates today for tomorrow the case for journalism educational renewal is clear in the literature, but what approach could journalism educators take to achieve this goal? this ought not simply be a matter of content revision or the integration of new graduate attributes. journalism educators need to step away from thinking of curriculum as a product, and remake it in the spirit of journalism 2.0, as curriculum-as-process (doll, 1993). this organic approach demands educators enter into a partnership with students in designing learning activities and assessment in order to encourage the development of the innovation and resilience that journalism graduates will need to thrive in journalism 2.0 and beyond. by engaging educators and students as curriculum co-designers, it is possible to create an environment of on-going reflection and dialogue around discipline content, learning activities and assessment design. such a post-modern reconceptualization of curriculum design, one that is dynamic with the capacity to transform students through reflective engagement, “cultivates new ideas and novel ways of dealing with them” (hunkins & hammill, 2005, p.43). this encourages students to become more proactive, curious and imaginative by providing them with a degree of control and choice in their assessment and learning activities. a journalism curriculum-as-process would ask students to negotiate with educators around which media technologies to use, what forms and platforms to publish in, and which audiences to target. this process can also introduce authenticity to students‟ critical decision-making, by bringing in aspects of newsroom negotiations, where journalists must consult with editors over reporting tasks and story angles. more group assessment projects would encourage collaboration, and build capacity to work in multiskilled teams, a requirement which is more common in cross-media reporting and data journalism projects. setting authentic experiential learning and assessment activities in the community supports the development of networking and client management skills. students would be encouraged to uncover problems and find solutions. such a socially constructed design invokes doll‟s four criteria for curriculum-as-process (richness, relations, recursion and rigor) (hunkins and hammill, 2005, p42-43), while engaging journalism students in news production that is being shaped by the unpredictability of the real world of journalism production. curriculum, of course, must continue to teach foundational practices in newswriting, reporting and media production, but it could also focus on the development of innovation, flexibility, critical evaluation, continued self-learning in students throughout the journalism course sequence. students, write mensing and ryfe (2012), should be able to meet new technologies and practices without flinching, because they have learnt to critically assess what is good and bad practice, and can choose to use or change those coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 practices. while supporting the development of these skills in students, a curriculum-as-process approach also encourages flexibility in the design of curriculum frameworks. the aim is to build resilience, not only in students, but also into journalism degrees, as insurance against the uncertain direction of future journalism practice. such uncertainty could be mitigated by the creation of themed „shell units‟, for example „practice issues in journalism 2.0‟ and „innovation in journalism 2.0‟. this improves the currency of curriculum content by providing educators with the opportunity to respond efficiently to evolving issues and practices. students can be engaged, for example, in the collation of learning materials and uncovering emergent practices and issues through case study research. opportunities also exist to align units across cross-media lines, satisfying the relational criteria of curriculum-as-process (doll, 1993). kanigel (2014) has experimented with the structure and alignment of a journalism 2.0 course at the foundation level. she and a colleague have paired an introductory multimedia unit with the basic reporting skills unit, and set experiential learning activities in authentic settings, that of students‟ local neighbourhoods. this ensures students are engaging in cross-media production and collaboration early in their course, and learning actively and authentically, while building community networks. an alternative approach is to design, at the capstone level, practice-based units that are technologically generic to allow students the opportunity to innovate around narrative and decide on publication forms. while a curriculum-as-process approach to journalism education sees the course design as a joint venture between educators and students, the level of collaboration would vary during the degree. considering dron‟s (2007) concept of transactional control, it is important students are “sufficiently knowledgeable” of discipline content and the process skills that support such critical and collaborative decision-making before learner autonomy is significantly engaged (dron, 2007, p.61). therefore at the foundation level, educators would provide more learning support and structure for students than in advanced course levels, where journalism educators would increasingly negotiate with students around the topic, method, location and level of collaboration involved in learning and assessment activities. educators can increase student engagement through matching experiential activities to student special interest, such as arts, sports or environmental journalism. by these 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a changing environment (phd thesis, edith cowan university). the australian 2013. „journalist jobs drop 16pc in a year‟, the australian, viewed 12 january 2015, <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/media/journalist-jobs-drop-16pc-inyear/story-e6frg996-1226752338552&memtype=anonymous>. universities australia, 2014, „media release: budget drives sweeping changes to higher education‟, (may 13), viewed 12 november 2013 <https://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/news/media-releases/budget-drivessweeping-changes-to-higher-education#.u3hpgviswmw>. vázquez schaich, m j, & klein, j s 2013, „entrepreneurial journalism education: where are we now?‟, observatorio (obs*), vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 185-211. viner, k 2013, „the rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web‟, the guardian, viewed 12 november 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/the-rise-of-the-readerkatharine-viner-an-smith-lecture>. zion, l 2013, „where do redundant journalists go?‟, new beats survey, viewed 12 november 2013, <http://newbeatsblog.com/2013/12/05/where-do-redundantjournalists-go>. jeanti st clair is an award-winning journalism lecturer at southern cross university in lismore, australia with interests in work-integrated journalism learning projects and applied journalism ethics in the foreign correspondent field. she has over 20 years‟ experience in radio, print and online journalist and has worked with in the australian media the abc, news limited and fairfax. microsoft word jytteholmqvist3.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       25  contrasting cultural landscapes and spaces in peter weir’s film picnic at hanging rock (1975), based on joan lindsay’s 1967 novel with the same title 1 jytte holmqvist copyright©2013 jytte holmqvist. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the following essay explores the relationship between contrasting cultures and cultural spaces within a rural australian, victorian, context, with reference to the narrated cultural landscape in joan lindsay’s novel picnic at hanging rock (1967) and in the film based on the novel, by peter weir (1975). in the analysis of the five first scenes of the film, the focus will be on the notion of scenicand humanbeauty that is at once arresting and foreboding, and the various contrasting and parallel spaces that characterise the structure of book and film. the article will draw from a number of additional secondary sources, including various cultural readings which offer alternative methodological approaches to the works analysed, and recorded 1970s interviews with the author and the filmmaker. *** this essay explores the relationship between contrasting cultural spaces within a rural australian context, with reference to joan lindsay’s 1967 novel picnic at hanging rock and in peter weir’s film based on the novel (1975). the original novel may or may not be based on the real disappearance of three young girls in the macedon area in 1867. in the analysis of the five first scenes of the film, the focus will be on the notion of scenicand humanbeauty that is at once arresting and foreboding, and the various contrasting and parallel spaces that characterise the structure of book and film. in a recorded interview from 1974, joan lindsay likened the experience of writing picnic at hanging rock to that of mentally constructing scenes for a film, i.e. a very “visual experience” (weir 2004).2 in a similar fashion, cultural geographer chris lukinbeal argues that:                                                               1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. 2 lindsay claimed that “the story came to her like a film” … and indeed, “picnic at hanging rock has the otherworldliness of a dream and the rich symbolic play of images, the plasticity of time and space, of film” (gleeson-white 2010, 131). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       26  [f]ilm is … a cultural construct that is intertextually related to other systems of cultural tradition and reproduction such as landscape. the textual metaphor points to an understanding of cinematic space as it relates to narration, voyeurism and the gaze (lukinbeal 2004, 249). weir’s screen adaptation of the book shares similarities with lukinbeal’s statement in the sense that landscape in the film is both culturally constructed and naturally untamed, creating a contrast between white civilisation and the primitive prehistoric nature previously inhabited by the aborigine and now regarded as a type of empty terra nullius which members of the white upper class in the film (who could be viewed as representatives of the british colonizers of australia in the late 1800s to mid-1900s) wish to control and possess, however fruitlessly. the film was part of the so-called australian “new wave” cinema in the 1970s, when a number of australian filmmakers broke through to both a national and an international market with films that celebrated the australian nation and reflected a pride in the australian heritage. the main feat of these filmmakers – peter weir, ken hannam, gillian armstrong, and fred schepisi being some of them – was their ability to portray australia in its own right, as a place worthy of attention and about which narratives were constructed that featured also the spiritual and mythical elements of a still not wholly readable continent. as declared by robin wright: [w]ithin the context of australia’s struggle to establish a national identity, these films point to the australian landscape as one of the primary determining features of ‘australianness’ in cultural products of the 1970s. for the predominantly white, anglo-saxon, urban australian cultural elite at the time of production of these films there was no alternative culture, lifestyle, ritual, history or society which could be used to delineate their ‘difference’ from their british colonial ancestry other than the ‘idea’ of the australian bush. the only element with which white australians could draw upon to explain their ‘difference’ from other world cultures was their environment, and the short span of history and myth which this had engendered (wright 1993, 88). in its parallel focus on the “new australians” making up the privileged white cultural “elite” and the darker, spiritual and (to the white man) mysterious elements of aboriginal beliefs (all part of the multifaceted australian nation) the film picnic at hanging rock introduces the interlinked concepts of voyeurism and the gaze, or the “look”. this too triggers a notion of foreign yet australian eyes observing the raw landscape of a place not entirely mapped or controlled. the look, as highlighted by various critics, is in the centre of attention in weir’s film and reminds of foucault’s concept of dual mirror images that are at the same mythical and real: he suggests that by ultimately observing himself, the observer can “reconstitute” himself and be connected with “all the” surrounding space (foucault 1986, 24). in the case of the australian nation, had the original british settlers been more open-minded towards the native inhabitants and their culture, this may have fostered a better understanding between indigenous australians and the foreigner, and as part of this also between the foreign settler and the surrounding native landscape. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       27  faithful to the original book, the cinematic plot of picnic at hanging rock unfolds in the screened state of victoria, near mount macedon, both in the vicinity of and on the very peaks of the prehistoric outcrops called hanging rock, a sacred place for aboriginal people. taking as its starting point saint valentine’s day 1900, i.e. one year prior to the death of the british commonwealth monarch queen victoria of england, the narrative focusses on a group of female students attending appleyard college in rural south melbourne, an academic institution fabricated by joan lindsay.3 this “college for young ladies” (lindsay 2009 (1967), 7) houses young women whom weir, in a 1975 interview, referred to as “an elite, … which is gone” (weir 2004). their organised picnic excursion to the volcanic rock formation on that very day has dire consequences as some of the college visitorstwo students and one female teacherare never to return to the world of the living, or so it seems. a week later, a third missing student, irma leopold, is discovered still alive on the rock, by a young british aristocrat, michael fitzhubert, and is later rescued and brought back to civilization by an all the more self-made man, down-to-earth coachman albert crundall (these are the only male characters given any major space in a novel otherwise mainly concerned with the representation of the female and her relationship with the, indeed, generally male symbol of the rock). the nature around appleyard college is controlled and tamed in a rigid colonial manner and the freer nature serving as a visual backdrop in aboriginal mythology, is almost completely absent. as has been noted by critics analysing both book and film from a feminist perspective, the budding sexuality of the young and generally well-mannered female borders (partly revealed in excited comments and suppressed giggles at a college whose motto is “silence” is “golden” (lindsay 2009 (1967), 15)) on st valentine’s day – a day charged with sensual and erotic symbolism – is repressed along the taming of the budding floral beauty, seen e.g. in the main protagonist miranda’s pinning of “a bunch of wildflowers into her coat with as much pleasure as a breath-taking diamond brooch” (lindsay 2009 (1967), 10). a similarly controlled landscape is seen in the very painting from which the book lends its name: at the hanging rock, by william ford (1875) and where the image is that of a peaceful and accommodating rural landscape, one that is welcoming and appealing to the humans resting in it (in light of the above, kenneth i. helphand has highlighted that “[l]andscape studies take for granted the symbiotic relationship between the physical environment and landscape painting, poetry, and literature” (helphand 1986, 1)). the headmistress mrs appleyard, in charge of the rigid academic establishment, is symbolic of a repressive british authority. she commands respect and the obeying of rules and her college depends on the support of fee-paying affluent parents or sponsors to survive. come saint valentine’s day, mrs appleyard allows a group of white-clad students to leave on a picnic excursion to hanging rock (the single young orphan of the academic establishment, sara waybourne, is penalised by having to stay behind something that, ironically, turns out to be her – temporary4 – salvation). accompanying the touring students as teachers and guardians are the french teacher mademoiselle dianne de poitiers and the scientifically apt mathematics teacher miss greta mccraw.                                                               3 martindale hall, in the clare valley, served as an important location for the scenes shot at the fictitious appleyard college. 4 i use the word “temporary” given that sara waybourne is found dead towards the end of the literary and visual narratives. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       28  the only man to partake on the “covered drag from hussey’s livery stables” (lindsay 2009 (1967), 13) is the driving coachman mr hussey. a sense of melancholia has already been achieved through the introduction of haunting pan flute music composed by gheorge zamfir, in the opening sequence of the film, and this instrument repeatedly underscores the visual narrative. the same premonition is sensed when reading the novel: evocative imagery and descriptions of safe, happy moments are paralleled by references to uncertain territories and a dangerous atmosphere around the rock. as the horse carriage leaves the known and safe college grounds behind5 and gradually approaches the area of hanging rock, the haunting sound of the pan flute again highlights the departure from the known and the subsequent entry into the unknown. this also creates a double sense of parallel spaces: a musical score that is at once beautifully melancholic and foreboding of tragedy to come and that evokes conflicting sentiments in the viewer, and the visual transition from controlled, civilised landscapes reflective of the british colonisation of the australian outback to a still pastoral yet freer landscape overshadowed by the all the more ominous dark rock above. miss mccraw’s scientifically astute comment as the drag approaches the picnic grounds, that the rock is “quite young geologically speaking – barely a million years” (weir 1975), added by weir for extra effect but not part of the original novel, is echoed in irma leopold’s subsequent exclamation – also a verbal addition by weir: “waiting a million years, just for us!” (weir 1975). their words seem to reflect mixed feelings of awe and estrangement – cultural and spiritual – among descendants of european settlers with reference to the untamed, raw natural element symbolised by a rock charged with aboriginal imagery and mythology. a number of critics have provided a cultural reading of book and film. thus, pablo armellino has said that lindsay’s book “perfectly embodies the anxieties of the victorian age” and “presents an alternative perception of the outback” (armellino 2009, 77), while victoria bladen notes the pastoral aspects of the australian landscape, stressing that it is “only superficially and temporarily idyllic, not the nurturing landscapes of virgilian pastoral” (bladen 2012, 164). annabel carr in turn likens the rock and its surrounding areas to sacral places and spaces; however similar to bladen, carr too senses the lurking dangers in the apparently peaceful landscape. she talks of a “[v]ibration of sacrality” and places the film “somewhere between metaphysical horror and lush victorian melodrama” (carr 2008, 123). expanding on the concept of horror, kathleen steele is concerned with the gothic landscapes in picnic at hanging rock which are beautiful and appealing yet deeply unsettling (steele 2010). providing a brief historical flashback, steele also reflects on the first contact between aborigines and white settlers through the arrival of the first fleet to australia in 1788 and the troubled relationship between settler and native. this eventually resulted in a reluctance or refusal by the new european settlers to accept the aboriginal culture and way of life. the natives were “denied” their existence by being textually stripped of their past: “by the late 1890s... aborigines all but disappeared from literature” (steele 2010, 36). finally, rex ingamells also refers to the mysterious australian landscape that awaited european settlers. having a “darker spiritual aura, a resonant pathetic fallacy”                                                               5 miranda has previously expressed a desire to visit the countryside, seemingly forgetting that the college is already situated in the rural area. she seems to equal the australian countryside to a more untamed rural landscape than the one surrounding the college grounds. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       29  (ingamells 1969, 245), the australian outback came across as strange and hostile to british settlers. this is interesting in a gothic sense since that very ghostly or eerie aspect of the australian cultural landscape may have stemmed from a lack of acknowledgement of the aborigines and their culture despite the fact that aboriginal beliefs were still very much present and influencing the mythical character of the rural australian landscape. steele talks of “gothic landscapes of settler imaginations” as “landscapes where time and people disappear” (steele 2010, 44) and later refers to paul ricoeur’s notion of the “uncanny”, with reference to the historical past: “the feeling of uneasiness – unheimlichkeit – joined to the feeling of not being in one’s place, of not feeling at home, haunts us and this would be the realm of emptiness” (ricoeur 2006, 146). these observations resonate with weir’s own “unease” when reading the book, “directly linked to something which doesn’t have all the answers supplied”, as highlighted in the same 1975 recorded interview with the adelaide filmmaker (weir 2004). the film, which is apparently partly influenced by bo widerberg’s award-winning 1967 film elvira madigan (bennett, strauss, and wallace-crabbe 1998, 356-358), has a vivid visual imagery and is charged with cultural and sexual symbolism. there is also a strong sense of temporal displacement created by the sudden stalling of time. both mr hussey’s and miss mccraw’s watches mysteriously stop working at the picnic grounds: “stopped at 12. never stopped before, must be something magnetic” (weir 1975) concludes the ever lucid and rational miss mccraw. this creates a sensation of time standing still and a notion of time not being relevant anymore; “[e]vents are being shaped outside the ordinary structure of time” (dutton 1985, 316). the sophisticated college students and their guardians have now left their own artificially constructed milieu behind and entered wilder territory, where a raw landscape embraces them for better or worse and aboriginal dreamtime, steeped in creation stories, seemingly takes over and replaces white man’s fanatical obsession with time. the non-functioning watches could also symbolise british colonial decay or, as alex tate would have it, “the loss of another historical time: specifically that of colonial power” (tate 2006). anne crittenden has reflected extensively on clocks in the film and she too views “clocktime … as a symbol of destructive, unnatural order because true time is natural time” (crittenden 1976, 168). and, interestingly, in the 1974 interview referred to earlier, joan lindsay herself stated that she viewed time as something “that was all around one; not just in a long line in a calendar. i feel that one’s in the middle of time, and past, present and future is really all around and i’m in the middle of it” (weir 2004). the fluid notion of time in the film is, in a way, the first sign of the turn of events to come. from noon onwards, the appleyard college members seemingly enter a different dimension of time and space and they interact in a relaxed and carefree manner, some of the students reciting love poems in honour of saint valentine (curiously, throughout most of the film, the majority of the articulate young women speak softly and in subdued voices, as if almost whispering. in the context of the picnic excursion, it is as if they were aware of being constantly observed, even by the stony “male” monolith of hanging rock).6 three senior students lead by “botticelli-faced” miranda – a sudden aesthetic revelation that comes to mademoiselle de poitiers – and accompanied by one                                                               6 alex tate makes the interesting observation that the volcanic rock formation called mamelon means “nipple” in french; thus the rock holds both male and female connotations (tate 2006). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       30  junior student, the down-to-earth and rather lethargic edith horton, are surprisingly granted permission to explore the rock for amateurish scientific purposes. their supposedly brief exploration of the minerals of the area is at odds with mrs appleyard’s prior warnings or rather prohibition to do so: once again, let me remind you that the rock itself is extremely dangerous and you are therefore forbidden to engage in any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lower slopes (lindsay 2009 (1967), 13). the low voices and carefully premeditated utterances of the young female academics who set out to explore the area and the seemingly effortless manner in which they slide across the lush and sunny landscape down below the rock create a timeless and surreal atmosphere (also achieved through the initial cinematic voiceover: “what we see and what we seem is but a dream – a dream within a dream”(weir 1975)) and transport the viewer even further from the rigid academic establishment back at appleyard college. it is as if the exploring students had already entered a different dimension of time and space, one more in line with aboriginal dreamtime than with conventional time as it is recorded by the colonial white settler. the landscape that the young women almost glide through seems to open up a path for them to tread on and it takes on maternal aspects in its welcoming, warm and sunlit, yet also ominous characteras noted and expanded on by armellino who compares australia to a “nurturing/castrating mother” (armellino 2009, 77). tussocks move softly in the light breeze, the grass that the girls step on resembles a smooth carpet, and the atmosphere is light, hopeful and happy. miranda, whose name “stands for beauty and grace” (armellino 2009, 78) and whose inner goodness and all-forgiving personality and empathy for those around her – including those physically and intellectually “inferior” to her – has been analysed from a religious perspective, as mirrored in anne crittenden’s claim that miranda embodies higher spiritual values that contrast with the material values of the college, and which makes hanging rock a “stepping ground to heaven” (crittenden 1976, 170). the physical and inner beauty of miranda not only grants her natural access to the wild nature around her but also makes her the natural leader of the four-girl troop which, apart from miranda, consists of irma leopold, marion quade, and the previously mentioned younger adept, plump “college dunce” (lindsay 2009 (1967), 5) edith horton. the girl tags along first without objections then gradually all the more reluctantly and keeps staring doggedly into the ground the closer they get to the rocka tendency which mirrors her more earthly, less divine, and also less inquisitive personality compared to the other females whose steadfast gazes are fixed either ahead or upward. the generally aesthetically pleasing images, matched during the female stroll through the pastoral landscape by the quintessential beauty of miranda (and also partly by the more sensual beauty of her friend irma whose apparent hourglass figure is admired by male onlookers), have been defined as part of a “romanticized visual imagery”: dressed in white petticoats, the girls are visually paralleled with swans, botticelli angels and pre-raphaelite beauties. depicted languorously reclining, narcissistically gazing in mirrors and orating love sonnets, an coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       31  illusory aesthetic inflects the girls and heightens their presence as enigmatic others (tate 2006). having already had a premonition of radical changes to come, envisaged through her comment to her roommate sara prior to the rock excursion – “you must learn to love someone else apart from me, sara. i won’t be here much longer” (weir 1975) – miranda is seemingly subconsciously aware that their ascent to the rock through the waist-high grass of a welcoming maternal summer landscape, may be a trip from which there is no earthly return but instead a surreal divine ascension awaits once they have entered the very core of the monolith. as they gradually ascend the rocky formation, the young women move through open, sunny spaces and the warm, stony surface comes across as inviting. the binary structure of a narrative which moves from light to darkness, from maternal warmth to phallic roughness, is quite obvious yet the symbolic interpretations of the narrative vary and differ, reflecting a dilemma faced by critics to separate a clear “right” from “wrong.” that is to say that even though the rock comes across as raw, hostile and unwelcoming, even sinister – an element that “originates from the silence of the hanging rock, and the … oppressive accusation the europeans feel pressing upon them whenever they confront the reality of the australian landscape” (steele 2010, 44) – it seems as if ultimately the female sacrifice to a “male” monolith is essential for at least two of these young women to reach a higher spiritual level, which could not have been achieved under more conventional circumstances. by becoming one with the rock, miranda is accepted into its innermost circle and may reach divine catharsis – if one chooses to read the narrative from a religious angle – and the word “catharsis” may be replaced by “climax” if the analysis is made from a sexuality and gender perspective. in the case of the latter alternative, the female entry into darker crevasses and passageways of the phallic rock prior to the four students lying down at the foot of the monolith (each of the three rocky outcrops an apparent “partner” to be matched up with each senior student) adds an erotic undertone to the scene but the narrow entrance into the rock also resembles a dark birth canal and the image is that of a daughter returning to her mother’s womb. thus, the rock again takes on both male and female connotations. this has also been highlighted by crittenden who argues that “[l]ike the earth mother, the rock is both womb and tomb, life and death” (crittenden 1976, 146). the voyeuristic camera eye now shifts its focus from female wanderers observing the rock in mutual silence, to a bird perspective of the females seen from above. this creates a disconcerting sensation of a rock gazing down on the students as they feel their way through the damp and cold inner regions of this “geological marvel” (lindsay 2009 (1967), 13), a stony corridor which may symbolise a rite of passage for the young women before they deliver themselves to the rock (alternatively the rock could be seen as claiming them as a dominating man would a woman). there is a sudden lack of music which adds to the eerie atmosphere inside the stony crevasses and passageways but once the girls are back in the sun the haunting sound of the pan flute again makes itself noticeable, and later organ music will also be heard. a superimposed image of miranda’s face visualised against the rock as she turns and gazes up at it adds to her otherworldliness and appears to be a premonition of her imminent symbiosis with the rock through her disappearance from the world beneath – and the humans that inhabit it. the subsequent interaction between humans and animals, the merging of rock and humans, and the replacement of a very much younger european culture by an older, more primitive, and perhaps as such also more multi-layered and coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       32  secretive culture, are also reflected in the ancient-looking lizard that slides along miranda’s outstretched arm (in the original text it is not miranda but marion who is accompanied by the lizard) and in “queer looking beetles in bronze armour” that make a “leisurely crossing of miranda’s ankle” (lindsay 2009 (1967), 35). this contact between humans and animals seems like a logical transition from conventional human interaction to a more spiritual state of being. it also puts into perspective marion’s prior pondering on the purpose of humans as she gazes down on the picnic party below: “a surprising number of human beings are without purpose though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves” (weir 1975). the ever good-hearted miranda, whose intelligence, compassion and empathy for others are equalled by her physical beauty, is granted final entrance to a world which other students are (seemingly) not worthy of discovering. and so, “everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place” (weir 1975). edith horton, who has repeatedly insulted the rock, watches as her female companions hypnotically rise to their feet, start walking, then disappear and “become one” with the beckoning rock, and she lets out a shrill, almost primeval scream. the musical score has now been replaced by a dark murmur of collective whispers which serves to further heighten the dramatic image of vanishing individuals and a horrified fellow student who hurriedly returns to her companions on the picnic area beneath. as edith stumbles across a suddenly hostile landscape, the sky turns violently red (crittenden has interpreted this scene as saturn; “the death planet” devouring his children on the very day dedicated to saturn; i.e. saturday, “the day of the picnic” (crittenden 1976, 168-169)). it is as if nature takes revenge on edith (but perhaps especially on the three others given that edith manages to “escape” from the rock) for her disrespect towards the monolith and the inner secrets that it holds. the rock proceeds to devour its new “willing victims” – or is it really so? again, the mystery is left intact. in a 1975 on-set interview by hanging rock, joan lindsay declared that: … everyone who has enjoyed my book or read it, they really have to work it out for themselves. i know it’s a mystery but i hope it’s a bit more than a whodunit … i feel that this is something, that it was a sort of a mysterious thing that could have only happened where i write of it and i can’t really and wouldn’t wish to try and explain it anymore fully than that; you’ll all have to work out what you think is true for you, because truth is everything to me (weir 2004). it is this feeling of “uncanny uncertainty” prevalent throughout most of the film (and in the book, especially prior to the posthumous publication of an 18th and final chapter) that is so captivating and enthralling. there is a contradictory beauty in this gothic horror which attracts readers, viewers and visitors to revisit the text, film and physical site of hanging rock time and again. to conclude with a finishing remark from annabel carr: [i]t can be confidently concluded that the most regnant theme of weir’s piece is intrusion into an unfamiliar environment which manifests its nuances across physical, spiritual and symbolic gradients (carr 2008, 131). coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       33  in summary, both joan lindsay and peter weir have shown an astonishing ability to include a number of elements into textual and visual narratives which draw us in both mentally and physically and stay with us well beyond the last read page and viewed scene. martindale hall, clare valley (south australia), was an important location for the scenes shot at the fictitious appleyard college of picnic at hanging rock (photographs by jytte holmqvist).   coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       34  works cited armellino, paul. 2009. ob-scene spaces in australian narrative: an account of the socio-topographic construction of space in australian literature. stuttgart: ibidem-verlag. bennett, bruce, jennifer strauss, and chris wallace-crabbe, eds. 1998. the oxford literary history of australia. melbourne: oxford university press. bladen, victoria. 2012. "the rock and the void: pastoral and loss in joan lindsay's picnic at hanging rock and peter weir's film adaptation." colloquy text theory critique 23: 159-184. carr, annabel. 2008. "beauty, myth and monolith: picnic at hanging rock and the vibration of sacrality." sydney studies in religion: 123-131. crittenden, anne. 1976. "picnic at hanging rock: a myth and its symbols." meanjin quarterly 35 (2): 167-181. dutton, geoffrey. 1985. the australian collection: australia's greatest books. north ryde, nsw, australia: angus & robertson publishers. foucault, michel, and jay miskowiec. 1986. "of other spaces." diacritics 16 (1): 2227. gleeson-white, jane. 2010 (2007). australian classics: 50 great writers and their celebrated work. australia: alllen & unwin. helphand, kenneth i. 1986. "landscape films." landscape journal 5 (1): 1-8. ingamells, rex. 1969. "conditional culture." in the writer in australia: a collection of literary documents 1856 to 1964, edited by john barnes. 245-265. melbourne: oxford university press. lindsay, joan. 2009 (1967). picnic at hanging rock. australia: penguin books. lukinbeal, chris. 2004. "the map that precedes the territory: an introduction to essays in cinematic geography." geojournal 59 (4): 247-251. ricoeur, paul. 2006. memory, history, forgetting. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. steele, kathleen. 2010. "fear and loathing in the australian bush: gothic landscapes in bush studies and picnic at hanging rock." colloquy text theory critique 20: 3356. tate, alex. 2006. "a million years… just for us: subversive fixity in peter weir’s picnic at hanging rock." forum: university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture and the arts. http://www.forumjournal.org/site/issue/special/evolutions/alex-tate weir, peter. 1975. picnic at hanging rock: australia: the south australian film corporation and b.e.f distributors. weir, peter. 2004. picnic at hanging rock: director’s cut. australia: picnic productions pty. wright, robin. "metaphors of femininity and the australian landscape: two "new wave" films.” in screening the past: papers from the 6th australian history and film conference. melbourne: 30 november-04 december 1993. john benson, ken berryman and wayne levy (eds.), 1993. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona       35  a native swede, jytte holmqvist has lived, worked or studied in six countries and speaks several languages fluently. she is particularly passionate about spanish, italian and other romance languages. jytte is a qualified teacher, translator, interpreter and editor and has worked in the fields of translation and education for a number of years. she holds double masters degrees in spanish from lund university in sweden and auckland university in new zealand and is currently pursuing a doctorate degree in spanish film at melbourne university (where she takes a special interest in the cinema of pedro almodóvar and ventura pons) while providing tertiary spanish tuition concurrently. a keen traveller, jytte enjoys meeting people from all walks of life and is also fascinated by the visual and performing arts, art house films, photography, poetry and literature. she finds life in melbourne very rewarding given the many multicultural aspects of this city, its thriving universities and its vibrant arts scene. (email: kastanjett@gmail.com) merlinda bobis was born in the philippines but now lives in australia, which turns her into a “translated” woman, carried across different cultures and consequently endowed with a privileged perspective coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 merlinda bobis’s the solemn lantern maker: the ethics of traumatic cross-cultural encounters dolores herrero abstract: merlinda bobis’s second novel is an interesting combination of opposites: of the powerless and the powerful, the holy and the profane, the magical and the seedy, third-world asian poverty and white western affluence. the solemn lantern maker is a traumatized mute 10-year-old boy who lives with his crippled mother in the slums of manila. one day, when trying to sell his colourful wares, he becomes involved in the life of a grieved american tourist who is caught up in a murder of a controversial journalist. in this post-9/11 climate, this event will soon be wrongly interpreted as a terrorist conspiracy. my paper will rely on some of the most relevant assumptions put forward by ethical criticism and trauma studies to show that bobis’s novel succeeds in illustrating how the powerful world of international politics can inadvertently impinge on the small world of an insignificant third-world child, and how the love and care that this child offers to an unknown distressed westerner eventually manages to play the miracle of transforming the latter’s life, thus making it clear that bobis’s allegory of traumatic cross-cultural encounters testifies to the power of the (un)common to render the invisible visible, and of the unselfish circulation of affect to effect unexpected changes in an apparently indifferent globalized world. keywords: merlinda bobis, ethical criticism, trauma studies, post-9/11 novels. merlinda bobis was born in the philippines but now lives in australia. she has been carried across different cultures, and is consequently endowed with a multiple and privileged perspective which allows her to bridge the gap, or else bring to the fore, the discontinuities that separate one world from another. her second novel, the solemn lantern maker, is an interesting combination of opposites. it portrays the powerless and the powerful, third-world poverty and white western affluence, the holy and the profane. the magical and the seedy come into collision but also become one: twinkling lanterns and poverty, christmas carols and prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global war on terror, utmost generosity and rampant political corruption. copyright©2013 dolores herrero. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 the title refers to a traumatized mute 10-year-old boy called noland, who lives with his crippled mother in the slums of manila. one day, when trying to sell his colourful wares with the help of his older friend elvis, noland accidentally becomes involved in the life of cate burns, a grieving american tourist caught up in the murder of germinio de vera, a controversial filipino journalist “famous for his daring exposés on corruption and extra-judicial killings” (2008: 32). 1 cate gets out of her taxi in order to see the boys’ lanterns better, and noland is fascinated by this american woman, whom he immediately identifies with an angel, similar to the ones he found in the public dump, and with which he has decorated the ceiling and walls of the tiny hut in which he and his mother are now living. suddenly, a pizza hut motorcycle approaches the journalist’s car, shoots him dead and quickly revs past, hitting the woman, who collapses. noland’s reaction is immediate and unpremeditated. he will do anything to save her. the lack of commas and full stops in the excerpt that tries to reproduce noland’s thoughts while trying to rescue his blonde angel clearly points to his agitated state of panic and confusion. she’s shot too she’s shot and noland is rushing to her rushing with his cart of lanterns picking her up where did he get his strength lifting her into the cart with elvis pushing her from the screaming the shocked ‘jingle bells’ the silenced cars the halted buying and selling and the man bleeding at the wheel wondering why the star is growing smaller dimmer and where does this thought come from? (14) the tv newsreel city flash takes it for granted that this journalist has been killed for exposing the links and friendship of an influential senator, senator gb (“good boy” buracher), with a famous jueteng king, the godfather of illegal gambling. germinio de vera was trying to find out whether the senator’s latest election campaign had been funded by this personage, and had even considered the possibility that the senator might be jueteng king himself. the euphemism used on the media to mean “killed” is “salvaged”. here lies the terrible paradox: “salvaged doesn’t mean ‘saved’ in this part of the world, which has turned an english work inside out to reveal the dark interior, the deadly heart” (52), in other words, “the political machinations of a rotten system” (137). however, as soon as the news spread that an american tourist who happened to be on the scene of the crime is missing, the journalist’s murder is all of a sudden sidelined by an obsessive fixation on that american and on the spectre of terrorism against the us. in a post-9/11 climate, the american woman’s disappearance is soon wrongly interpreted as a terrorist conspiracy. as is stated in the novel, “after 9/11 any american gets hurt or gets sneezed at in a foreign country and ‘terrorism’ rears its ugly head” (76). the previous american hostage crises in mindanao bring about all kinds of terrorist speculations about the abduction and possible shooting of this american woman by members of the dreaded kidnap-extortionists known as abu sayyaf. abu sayyaf is regarded as the enemy to fight because they are said to have strong links with several alqaeda cells, whose main target is to carve out an islamic state from the predominantly catholic philippines. this would do away with the american supremacy and control in this strategic region. this foreboding, together with the traumatic memories of the 9/11 attacks, have led the american authorities to grow “acutely sensitive to any untoward actions against [their] citizens” (138), and to demand unconditional support on the part of the philippine government which, in order to ingratiate themselves with the americans, don’t hesitate to insist on the long history of friendship between the two coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 governments, their current bilateral relations, and the joint exercises of the philippine and the united states military in their common fight against terrorism. 2 to put it differently, the philippine authorities are most willing to give priority to a lost american, more than its own citizens. that is why they take a combat helicopter on a city tour, and even think of effecting what they euphemistically name as “relocation,” which broadly speaking means getting rid of “the pests who clog traffic and make manila dirty” for the benefit of “the eyes of city folk and tourists” (39) and, in this particular case, demolishing the poor intersection where, they suspect, the potential kidnappers might be hiding. 3 the solemn lantern maker can therefore be seen as a denunciation of the pernicious impact that 11 september 2001 is having on global politics and the world’s collective unconscious, which at present seems to revolve around one single but crucial idea: we cannot control our lives, nor the obscure mechanisms that rule the complex world we live in, and there is no escape from the caprice of injustice and death. whereas many authors have written about the feeling that the big shock given by the events of 11 september 2001 has rendered literary productions futile, others, such as merlinda bobis, have felt compelled to respond precisely because of the events’ symbolic nature and tragic dimension and consequences, both on a global and on a local scale. neocolonial interests, information technology and widespread mechanization have led to a blurring of boundaries between east and west, the private and the public, the physical and the psychological, perception and representation. the result is, according to mark seltzer, a traumatic space of socialization, a pathological public sphere, which is “everywhere crossed by the vague and shifting lines between the singularity of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing, on the other” (1998: 17-18). my main contention is that bobis’s novel succeeds in illustrating how, in spite of this dark scenario, the small story of an insignificant filipino child can impinge on the powerful world of international politics. the love and care that this child, and subsequently also nena, his mother, offer to an unknown westerner will eventually make the american tourist forget about her own problems for a while so as to worry about the future of the two dispossessed and helpless people who rescued her. cate burns’s post-traumatic stress disorder is not only due to the shooting that she witnessed, but also to the miscarriage that this assault inevitably brought about and, over and above everything, to her american partner’s selfishness and unwillingness to let her have that baby, which led her to fly to the philippines on her own in a desperate attempt to keep some distance between them. noland’s affection and generosity eventually bring about the miracle of getting together people who, although belonging in different and apparently confronted worlds, can nonetheless transcend all their differences in order to care for one another. although nena is at first most reluctant to have cate with them, (as she rightly sees it, keeping this american woman in their hut will get them into trouble), she eventually feels sorry for her and lovingly tends her wounds. nena becomes “the tender hand wiping her aching belly, making her less sad about something that she’s now forgetting” (18), to the point that they become so close that they cannot help “clinging to each other” (48) and feeling the other woman’s suffering as their own: “nena stares into the blue eyes welling with tears. her own fill too; the tug of grief runs between them, and much more. pasts so estranged and futures that will never touch again. but here, they are irrevocably bound” (134). physical contact allows for mutual understanding, empathy, and affection. it is the sense of touch that ultimately makes this coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 possible for, as edith wyschogrod affirms, “there is a chiasmatic or crossover effect of touching and touched when, for example, one hand touches the other” (1998: 107). this is the soothing effect that can alone help people to better cope with their pain, like when noland “lays his hand on [cate’s] brow to check for fever and, in a bold impulse, his head on her chest to check for life”, and she then “dreams of a heaviness. she knows the weight of all the sobs of her life, but this is different. she wants it to stay, please stay,” because this is “the one speech that truly gratifies” (65), the one and only way to love what, according to germinio de vera, “makes us human” (181), namely, the capacity to open ourselves up to the other and to “fabricate stories” (182) that can help us to face up to the hardships of life and make communication possible. as literary critic and philosopher george steiner argues: there is language, there is art, because there is ‘the other.’ […] the meaning, the existential modes of art, music and literature are functional within the experience of our meeting the other. all aesthetics, all critical and hermeneutic discourse, is an attempt to clarify the paradox and opaqueness of that meeting as well as its felicities. (1991: 137-38) after all, we are all human. as filipino journalist eugene costa retorts to his american counterpart: “there are good and bad catholics, or christians if you will, and there are good and bad muslims. there’s violence and kindness on both sides, on any side –it’s just people” (168). it is only when we become aware of this fundamental fact that peaceful cooperation and a better world can somehow be possible. on the contrary, widespread refusal to see things with the eyes of the others can only lead to blind confrontation, injustice, and unjustified violence. this negative disposition, amin maalouf has argued, encourages people to adopt an attitude that is partial, sectarian, intolerant, domineering, sometimes suicidal, and frequently even changes them into killers or supporters of killers. their view of the world is biased and distorted. those who belong to the same community as we do are ‘ours’ [...]. as for the others, those on the opposite side, we never try to put ourselves in their place, we take good care not to ask ourselves whether on some point or other they might not be entirely in the wrong, and we won’t let our hearts be softened by their complaints, their sufferings or the injustices that have been inflicted on them. the only thing that counts is the point of view of ‘our’ side; a point of view that is often that of the most militant, the most demagogic and the most fanatical members of the community. (2000: 30-31) this is, no doubt, the attitude shown by the american authorities as represented by the american consul in manila and, by extension, by the philippine government, which has chosen to overrule all kinds of local protests in order to uphold at all costs the philippine-american friendship and the drawdown of ten million us dollars for military assistance. it might therefore be argued that one of the issues that the solemn lantern maker puts forward is that no excuse whatsoever can free individuals of their obligation to be ethical, that is, to engage in an open-ended dialogue with the world and the others, to open themselves to the experience of alterity that will let them cling to love and make the most of the redemptive resilience of their spiritual dimension. by inviting readers to meditate on the experience of otherness and the need to endorse a coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 dialogical ethical model, the novel subtly echoes some of the most well-known current discourses on narrative ethics. emmanuel levinas is, without doubt, one of the main philosophical figures of the turn to ethics that has characterized literary criticism for the last two decades. his theories, mainly as put forward in totality and infinity (1961) and otherwise than being or beyond essence (1974), have time and again been used by critics concerned with defining and advocating a postmodern post-foundational ethics. this ethics clearly asserts that it is possible to make ethical claims without relying on normative codes, categorical imperatives or universal moral principles because “there are no categories or concepts knowable prior to what becomes the decisive ethical moment in levinas’ philosophy: the encounter with the singular, irreducible other” (kotte 2001: 71). as levinas argues in his seminal work otherwise than being, ethical responsibility is prompted by the encounter with the other, or the face, as he also names it, and responsibility “goes beyond being” (2004: 15); it means being open up to vulnerability, not only to the other’s happiness, but also to the other’s pain (49). moreover, for levinas, the other is always radically different and resists being transformed or appropriated. yet, our encounters with the other are often ruled by our attempts to assimilate it and transform it in terms of our categories of understanding. to put it differently, we strive to reduce the other to the same, which turns this ethical moment par excellence into a rather unethical imposition. this has been, according to andrew gibson, the characteristic mode and ultimate sin of western philosophy and politics, which have systematically tried to “speak of and therefore master the other as whole, to reduce the other to the terms of the same” (1999: 65). change and modernity have systematically been associated with the west. this has led most westerners, and americans in particular, this novel seems to claim, to regard their civilization as ultimately superior, and thus wholly entitled to preserve itself, even at the cost of destroying the others, and to impose its own norms and categories upon all the other cultures, which cannot in turn help experiencing ambivalent feelings towards this imposed and ever-growing westernization/ modernization process. as amin maalouf has put it: for the rest of the world’s inhabitants, all those born in the failed cultures […]. for the chinese, africans, japanese, indians and american indians, as for greeks, russians, iranians, arabs, jews and turks, modernization has constantly meant the abandoning of part of themselves. even though it has sometimes been embraced with enthusiasm, is has never been adopted without a certain bitterness, without a feeling of humiliation and defection. without a piercing doubt about the dangers of assimilation. without a profound identity crisis. (2000: 72) maalouf’s words can be said to wonderfully illustrate and testify to the philippine government’s servile attitude. just as tslm abounds in characters who refuse to open themselves up to the other (the blind american and philippine authorities, corrupted senator gb who only thinks of making money at the expense of the poor and dispossessed), bobis’s novel is also full of destitute characters who, like noland, his mother nena, and his friend elvis, desperately try to cope with exploitation, sadness, absences, loneliness, bad memories, humiliation, and silences. they all share the same difficulty to remember their traumatic past, cope with their heart-breaking present, and hope for a better future. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 noland has remained mute for six years, and it is only right at the end of the novel that the reason for this is revealed. his muteness is the outcome of the trauma that he suffered when he saw how his parents were brutally subdued by the military. his father had hacked his landlord to death for having mercilessly evicted and erased him and his family from the land that they had been cultivating for generations (the name he chose for his son paradoxically prophesied their dark fate: noland/ no-land), and was shot dead while escaping. when the fields turn gold, the boy finds himself crouched in the bushes, shivering. earlier, he stumbled over a body with red all over it. it looked familiar but not quite. the face was also covered in red and dirt; it felt sticky. the eyes were looking up, trying not to forget the sky. when he comes out of hiding, he’s still afraid but he must look again before night falls. he must not let his eyes play tricks on him. so he looks and looks. this is how a neighbour finds him. squatting in the dark, silent at his father’s feet. (203) this is noland’s trauma: his eyes cannot recognize his father’s face because his mind refuses to actually see and acknowledge what has happened. as is well known, trauma has often been described as an impossible gateway between the walls of the past and the present. cathy caruth, one of the most outstanding trauma critics, relies on the concepts of “latency” and “belatedness” in her well-known volume trauma: explorations in memory to define trauma as the successive movement from an event to its repression to its return (1995: 6-7). caruth explains how traumatic experiences produce: [...] a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event. (4) in other words, caruth makes it clear that the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only later on, in its repeated possession and haunting of the one who experiences it. noland’s incapacity for speaking, together with his obsession with angels, testifies to this trauma. noland’s muteness could also be taken as the symbolic representation of the discourse of silence that the military imposed on the poor and helpless for decades. all of these massacres were seldom denounced by the mass media, which clearly contributed to relegating them to oblivion, or even worse, to turning them into an insignificant event. to rely on the terms put forward by other well-known trauma critics such as dori laub and dominick lacapra, in bobis’s novel, noland’s speechlessness might account for the turning of an individual loss (noland could speak before) into a structural absence (nobody talks about these massacres so nothing ever happened). this absence, as laub (1992: 81) and lacapra (2001: 45-6) go on to explain, imposes a discourse of melancholia that blocks mourning and working through this individual, but also collective, trauma, problematizes the possibility of finding any outside witness/ listener, and thus frustrates any ethically responsible socio-political response. if nobody talks, nobody will listen and react accordingly. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 nena, noland’s mother, is another trauma victim. the night “the uniforms” came to their home looking for her husband, they brutally hit her in the legs, turning her into a lame and crippled woman for the rest of her life. noland could only cover his ears, pretending he was not there: “his mother is crying louder, pleading, no, please, no [...] then the crashing and thumping and she’s shrieking, ‘my legs, my legs,’ the pitch so sharp it cuts through his chest. then silence” (200). and silent she remains, for she will never again utter her husband’s name to noland: “for years, she has told stories about the hill, the stars there, the angels, but never uttering the name that long ago drove the boy whimpering to the wall for days” (191). nena’s silence is noland’s silence, just as their two bodies often look as if they were one single entity, as formless and dishevelled as their own traumatized psyches: [nena] is holding her son like a baby. his head is buried on his mother’s breast, his body curled. her head is burrowed between her knees, her legs drawn in to shield him. in the dim light they look like one body, not human, just limbs bound together. (150) as regards elvis, he is a street boy condemned to work for bobby cool, the pimp who taught him how to prostitute himself in exchange for some money, clothes and food. elvis treats and protects noland as if he were his own brother. he cares for him so much that he offers his pimp to do double jobs on the condition that he leaves noland in peace: “bobby, i’m game, but not noland, he’s not in this […], i’ll do all jobs […], i promise, but not noland” (110). when bobby ‘hires’ noland for a dirty photograph session, elvis is “all vulnerable rage, his skin burning, his heart cold” (129), and does not hesitate to hit his pimp right on the mouth, notwithstanding the fact that this will condemn him to utter helplessness and destitution on the streets. elvis’s eventual death at the hands of the police, who want to believe that he was the mastermind behind the american woman’s abduction and kidnapping, cannot but be taken by most readers, not only as a tragedy, but also as a relief. death puts an end to the violence and sexual vexations that he would have had to keep on suffering, and also prevents bobby from abusing noland in a similar way. last but not least, it is after elvis is shot dead that noland all of a sudden remembers his father’s death. significantly enough, from that moment onwards, noland will no longer whimper, will no longer weep: “the mother wonders why he’s silent, no sound of distress at all. he is silent because he knows. he is sure now. that stick figure, that body on the hill. his father” (205). it might be argued that noland can at last begin to work through his trauma. paralyzing melancholia has turned into healing mourning. as is often the case, trauma here implies the interplay between two moments, the second of which suddenly brings to mind and retrospectively determines the meaning of the first. it is elvis’s death that makes noland remember his father’s. furthermore, it might be no exaggeration to affirm that noland’s act of remembrance is his ultimate tribute to elvis’s friendship, his compulsive need to obey derrida’s “law of friendship,” that is, “proleptic mourning,” according to which, it is grief, and more specifically, the individual’s responsibility for “prescient grieving” of his/her friend’s loss and death, that lays at the heart of friendships. friends cannot possibly escape this predated responsibility (in dalziell 2012: 54). it is this responsibility, and ultimately love, that make noland’s mind connect the losses of two of the people he mostly cared for. merlinda bobis’s novel becomes a valid means for bringing to the fore many thorny questions. in a time in which the mass media seem to be omnipresent, it is ironic that a coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 form as old as the novel is the one medium that can best make us imagine what it might be like to live as another does. literature, and culture by extension, is a powerful constituent and vehicle at the core of possible transformations, given that it mediates and transfers ideas, values and intellectual refinement between generations and between civilizations. culture is, therefore, both a preserving and a transforming force. as ada aharoni stated: culture is a key factor in promoting genuine peace. if a peace culture system instils recognition of the ‘other,’ respect for its identity and culture, as well as a commitment to solving conflicts and differences by peaceful means, then the chances for peace will be greatly enhanced. by contrast, if the cultural and educational system instils self-centeredness, rejection and hatred of the ‘other,’ of its identity and of its culture, and calls for and justifies the resort to violence to solve conflict –then sustainability may be endangered. […] there is therefore a crucial need for reform at an international scale, concerning culture, literature and the arts, that can undermine and replace the culture of violence terror and crime. (2002: unnumbered pages) just as noland’s humble artistic production, his first hand-made lantern, made him come alive again after having been whimpering into space and wetting his pants for years, his drawings of angels allow him to tell what he cannot possibly say: “what he can’t say, he thinks hard. what he thinks hard, he tells in comic strips: stars and angels framed in hundreds of little story boxes strung together since he found his first angel, four years after he lost his speech” (25). yet, no matter how many different drawings he may produce, “[i]t’s really only one story” (25): the silent story of his belated trauma and desperate need to believe in angels, in salvation. noland’s silence, however, could also be interpreted in a rather more positive way. silence might also be understood as a sign of respect. however necessary mourning may be, it can also run the risk of illegitimately appropriating the other’s voice. to quote dalziell’s words, “it runs the risk of ventriloquizing the other, of speaking on their behalf, of reducing the alterity of the subject to the same, to the self” (2005: 53). tslm seems to be aware of this problem. this may be the reason why successful and conclusive mourning is avoided. the novel’s open ending (will noland manage to speak again? will he and his mother be able to return to their motherland some day?) leaves some space for uncertainty, which allows for the other’s alterity to be respected. bobis’s novel can therefore be said to resist foreclosure and testify to the magnitude of traumatic experience through the use of metaphor. in this way, the other’s pain is denounced and brought to the fore but without actually appropriating his/her voice. for noland, a star has, will always have, five lights. that is why his main star has five points. each of the star’s points is encircled, and in each circle is a pasted figure: his mother, his father, elvis, the american woman, and noland himself. in other words, the people who make up what he regards as his family, his main source of happiness and affection. the fact that, for noland, the presence of the dead is just as strongly felt as that of the living, if not more, might be said to corroborate, as gail jones argues, derrida’s insistence “on our responsibility to consider those beyond the living in the radical formation of ideas of justice,” in such a way that mourning should be reformulated “as a necessary, interminable, and ethically demanding haunting” (jones coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 2004: 159). derrida’s idea of haunting, however, should not be confused with lacapra’s use of the term as ‘acting-out’ or paralyzing melancholia. as gail jones goes on to explain (2004: 167-68), the haunted subject should not be mistaken for the melancholic person who cannot work through his/her trauma and consequently remains pathologically obsessed, and possessed, by his/her identification with the lost loved object. on the contrary, derrida sees the figure of the ghost as the ungraspable figure whose insurrection brings to life and into the present the claims of the repressed and the dead, in their unavoidable demand for justice. as tanya dalziell puts it (2005: 55), while successful mourning may stand for premature celebration and offer a hegemonic and partial version of what happened in the past, which inevitably enforces forgetfulness, this type of mourning allows for remembrance and keeps responsibility alive. in bobis’s novel, the mystery and silence that enshroud noland, together with his constant drawing of angels, not only contribute to maintaining the tension throughout the narrative, but also play a fundamental role in this ethical fight against forgetfulness. noland may remain a mystery till the very end, but most readers cannot ignore his presence, while also feeling inexorably bound to him. by focusing on the figure of the mute child and his obsession with angels/ghosts, tslm pushes this individual and, by extension, collective trauma to a spectral position, which demands that these unheard voices should be listened to. to quote gail jones’s words once again, “an aspiration to justice is an aspiration to full responsiveness to those forms of address that remind us that we exist in a ‘community of the question’” (2008: 82). justice can only be achieved through a discourse that “speaks shadows,” that is, through “a mouth that will go on shaping meaning in the face of senseless annihilation” (2008 83). a discourse of uncertainty is good in so far as it allows for the constant questioning of established ideas, which can alone pave the way for “the full responsiveness” to those uncertainties and, ultimately, for the search for, and defence of, justice. the novel under analysis creates a narrative world that resists fixed definitions and foreclosure. it is a narrative that, to use jones’s expression once again, “speaks shadows” or, to put it differently, that encourages remembrance and does away with forgetfulness. the repetitive allusions to symbolic figures such as angels undoubtedly work to this effect. in short, tslm keeps some ethical distance from the victim, while insistently claiming that the victim is there, and must always be borne in mind. the ending of the novel is a desperate call for hope. how to draw a christmas fairy tale? it’s time to help. we begin right here. we look closely at the boy and the mother. we draw wings on him, on her, we let them fly through the locked window, to the canopy of fairy light, to a woman on a hospital bed. we make sure she too sprouts wings, make sure they fly together, glide over bodies in a morgue to finally find the other boy who needs his own pair. we make him test them, make him join the flight back to that hill where the man with open eyes sees four winged creatures descending –we hesitate, but we take our chance and draw his own pair, flawed but taking off with them back to the sky, all five points of light. (207) the solemn lantern maker, merlinda bobis’s allegory of traumatic cross-cultural encounters, testifies to the power of the (un)common to render the invisible visible, the power of the unselfish circulation of affect to effect unexpected changes in an apparently indifferent globalized world and, most important of all, claims for an coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 ethically demanding mourning that can alone urge limitless recognition and responsibility upon all human beings, without exceptions. works cited aharoni, ada. 2002. “peace culture, literature and media required for sustainable global development.” plenary lecture at the ipra general conference, held in south korea, kyung hee university, july 1-5, 2002. bobis, merlinda. 2008. the solemn lantern maker. pier: murdoch books. caruth, cathy, ed. 1995. trauma. explorations in memory. baltimore and london: the john hopkins up. dalziell, tanya. 2005. “an ethics of mourning: gail jones’s black mirror.” jasal (journal of the association for the study of australian literature) 4 (2005): 4961. de guzman, arnel and tito craige. 1991. “counter-insurgency war in the philippines and the role of the us.” bulleting of concerned asian scholars 23: 38-47. gibson, andrew. 1999. postmodernity, ethics and the novel: from leavis to levinas. london: routledge. jones, gail. 2004. “sorry-in-the-sky: empathetic unsettlement, mourning, and the stolen generation.” in imagining australia: literature and culture in the new new world. eds. judith ryan and chris wallace-crabbe. cambridge, massachusetts, and london, england: harvard university committee on australian studies. distributed by harvard up: 159-71. ---. 2008. “speaking shadows: justice and the poetic.” in just words?: australian authors writing for justice. ed. bernnan bernadette. st lucia: university of queensland p: 76-86. kotte, christina. 2001. ethical dimensions in british historiographic metafiction: julian barnes, graham swift, penelope lively. trier: wissenschaflicher verlag trier. lacapra, dominick. 2001. writing history, writing trauma. baltimore and london: johns hopkins up. laub, dori. 1992. “an event without a witness: truth, testimony and survival.” in testimony: crisis of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. eds. shoshana felman and dori laub. new york and london: routledge: 75-92. levinas, emmanuel. (1961) 1969. totality and infinity. trans. a. lingis. pittsburg, pa: duquesne up. ---. (2004) 1974. otherwise than being: or beyond essence. trans. a. lingis. pittsburg, pa: duquesne up. maalouf, amin. (1996) 2000. in the name of identity: violence and the need to belong. harmondsworth: penguin books. seltzer, mark. 1998. serial killers: death and life in america’s wound culture. routledge, new york. steiner, george. 1991. real presences. chicago and london: the university of chicago p. wyschogrod, edith. 1998. an ethics of remembering. chicago and london: the university of chicago p. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 dolores herrero is senior lecturer of english literature at the department of english and german philology of the university of zaragoza. she is a member of a competitive research team currently working on ethics and trauma in contemporary fiction in english. she has published numerous articles and book chapters on victorian and postcolonial literature –in particular australian and indian authors such as mudrooroo, david malouf, peter carey, merlinda bobis, roberta sykes, j. turner hospital and satendra nandan, to name but a few– and film and cultural studies. she has co-edited, together with marita nadal, the book margins in british and american literature, film and culture (1997). she was also the editor of miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies from 1998 till 2006. _________________________ 1 further page references from the novel will appear in between brackets and without the date of publication. 2 this common fight against terrorism brings to mind the collaboration and military help that the us offered the philippine government presided by corazon aquino in the 1987-1989 total war waged against the communist insurgency, which brought about the militarization and destruction of so many villages in the country. 3 relocation was a military strategy very similar to the lambat bitag (fishnet-trap) tactics used in the 1987-89 total war, which, as human rights advocate arnel de guzman explains, was not at all new: “it was used by the united states in the philippine-american war, was used to crush the huk [peasant] rebellion in the 1950s, and was the mainstay of marcos-directed counter-insurgency warfare in the 1970s and 1980s. the victims of the tightening noose are of course meant to be insurgents, especially the leaders, but since they are so elusive, a broad net with small openings is needed. casting such a net risks catching innocent fish, but this, reasons the military, would be an acceptable by-product of war. in regions where the net fails, the entire population (the water) may have to be removed in order to starve the fish” (1991: 40). microsoft word final anne pender coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 kerry walker, patrick white and the faces of australian modernism anne pender the paper brings together two of bruce bennett’s enduring interests: australian modernist drama, and the life and work of patrick white abstract this essay considers the work of australian actor kerry walker (b. 1948) in the years 1977-1989. it focuses on walker’s acting style in the roles she played in a variety of works by patrick white, her approach to acting and her enduring friendship with white. it seeks to document the specific qualities walker brought to her performances in white’s plays and to explain her distinctive understanding of white’s drama. kerry walker has been described as a ‘theatre animal with a seemingly effortless knack of drawing the audience’s gaze to her’ (2009). yet when she graduated from nida in 1974 she was told she would not succeed as an actor because of her looks. it is almost impossible to imagine this comment from the distance of 2012, especially given the transformations she produces as an actor within one role, as well as the range of roles she has essayed over her long career. in spite of the discouraging comment about her looks upon finishing her studies, walker has had an extraordinary career and is one of the most interesting actors to have contributed to australian theatre, film and television over the last forty years. walker has worked in regional theatre in new south wales and in south australia as well as on mainstages in sydney, melbourne and adelaide. her dark hair, dark heavy-lidded eyes, pale skin and restrained intensity mark her unique physical presence. in fact she capitalised on her exceptional facial flexibility and her own writing talent in her one-woman play knuckledusters: the jewels of edith sitwell in 1989 when she portrayed the modernist poet and critic. it is significant that walker was identified by playwright, nick enright in 1994 as ‘an actor’s actor’, someone whose work is never motivated by the desire to please, and who always has a strong sense of what her role is (barrowclough 1994, 36). enright is regarded as an actor’s playwright and so his comments are significant. at the same time walker is regarded as a maverick actor ‘with a very good line to people on the edge’ (barrowclough 1994, 36). enright also observed that walker’s most successful roles were when she played ‘marginal people’. geoffrey milne refers to her (among others) as versatile and eccentric (milne 2008, 54). perhaps her ‘eccentric’ qualities are critical to her capacity to play roles in which comedy and satire blend with more esoteric copyright © anne pender 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 spiritual quests. one of the key features of walker’s early career, 1974-1989, is her versatility and intelligence in so many varied roles: mother courage in mother courage and her children (1982), feste in twelfth night (1984) alice dalton in bliss (1984) and mrs lusty in the ham funeral (1989). as a young actor she did not shy away from older roles: mother courage in 1978 and 1982, the nurse in romeo and juliet (1978), isabella in measure for measure (1980) and ivy vokes in signal driver (1982). walker has not resisted difficult parts: irene harding in john romeril’s the floating world (1976) and mog figg in netherwood (1983). walker’s name is inscribed in australian theatre history because of her achievements in creating new roles in the film adaptation of patrick white’s story the night the prowler (1978) and white’s stage plays signal driver (1982), netherwood (1983) and shepherd on the rocks (1987). in spite of this association with white and her many other achievements however, little is known about walker’s life or her attitude to her profession. walker’s view of the actor’s job is unequivocal. she believes the actor is ‘an instrument for serving the text’ and that the actor is his or her own ‘laboratory’ (barrowclough 1994, 36). walker says that after the death of a friend in the early 1990’s she found herself crying, screaming and banging her head on the bed. she caught herself amidst her grief and thought about how ‘extreme grief’ causes extreme behaviour. yet she wondered whether she would be brave enough ‘on stage to go that far’ (barrowclough 1994, 36). walker learned from her own experience of profound grief and observed her own behaviour, and that is critical for an actor. but walker is clear that an actor must ‘never sit in judgement on a character’ because that is for the audience, whereas the actor needs to understand the reasons for their character’s behaviour and ‘forget moral judgement’ (barrowclough 1994, 36). elizabeth schafer observes that the work of directors, performers and designers has a great deal to contribute to the understanding of patrick white’s plays (2011). schafer does not focus on actors in her analysis of armfield’s productions of the ham funeral, a cheery soul and night on bald mountain, but does acknowledge that all practitioners preparing for a production know a text intimately and that they must ‘examine it, and then own it, inhabit it, and embody it, more fully than even the most scrupulous of scholarly readers or editors’ (schafer 2011, 1). schafer quotes the english actor simon russell beale who stated that in acting ‘every part is an exercise in three-dimensional literary criticism’ (bedell 2003). beale’s idea is not at odds with kerry walker’s view of the actor ‘serving the text’, given that the text must be interpreted by both the director and the actor in order to be served. beale’s understanding of the role of the actor is critical and goes a long way to identifying the significance of the actor in ‘playmaking’. the actor is as important, if not more important than the director in ‘serving’ the text. yet scholars and theatre critics continue to focus on the director’s vision, rarely noticing the way in which an actor offers literary criticism. walker’s style of acting is restrained and pared back and with this she has a talent for the highly comic. enright though of it as a withholding quality in her acting. on and off the stage she is often described as ‘enigmatic’ ‘private’, ‘secretive’, even ‘inscrutable’. walker’s manner is serious and quiet and she is known for her dry wit and devilish sense of humour. like many other actors, she has gone to great lengths to protect her privacy, dislikes interviews, and is retiring by nature. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 walker’s reticence, savage sense of humour, reserved personality and propensity for harsh self-criticism may have contributed to her understanding of patrick white, with whom she enjoyed a close friendship over thirteen years, after she played the lead role in white’s film adaptation of his story the night the prowler (1978), directed by jim sharman. her understanding of white’s personality as a friend may also have given her some insight into what elizabeth schafer identifies as the ‘theatricality’ of white’s plays (2011, 2). white’s attraction to walker as an actor may have been partly to do with her pliable face, her ability to convey a range of emotions facially. in his fiction and in his stage directions white gives attention to faces. one reviewer of the sydney theatre company production of the ham funeral in 1989 noted this point and referred to walker’s facial versatility (carmody 1989). there are numerous instances in which white focuses on faces. for example in riders in the chariot white wrote of ‘… miss hare, whose eyes were always probing … (white 1961, 12), and in the tree of man of stan: ‘already, as a boy, his face had been a convinced face. some said stony. if he was not exactly closed, certainly he opened with difficulty’ (white 1956 , 29). in a cheery soul there are frequent stage directions for facial expressions: ‘frowning’, ‘squinting’ ‘staring’. walker and white spoke almost every day on the phone, wrote letters and cards to one another and saw one another every week except when walker was working away from sydney. white was extremely fond of walker whom he called affectionately ‘kerro’ and their correspondence reveals his high regard for her and his delight in her sense of humour. one post card he wrote to her shows a black and white photograph of the head and shoulders of a dancer in berlin taken in 1929. white wrote ‘saw you staring out of the post card rack’. he frequently sent her cards of film stars with pithy comments on them: buddy holly, judy garland and one of mae west smiling seductively and wearing a massive broad-brimmed hat with huge feathers shooting up from it. white wrote on this card: ‘if i ever get into drag it will be in this hat.’ (12 april 1982; walker papers). of all the actors white ‘took’ up, walker remained close to him until the end of his life, did not fall out or disappoint him as others did, and seemed to give him great pleasure as a friend and as a performer. white wrote several parts for walker, including the female being or second being in signal driver, mog figg in netherwood and elizabeth in shepherd on the rocks. walker and white first met after jim sharman cast her for the role of the strange and frumpy felicity bannister in the night the prowler. sharman had suggested that white adapt the short story for film. it was the first time white had written a screenplay. sharman found it difficult to cast the role. he said that he required ‘an actress who could dominate the screen for two hours … and switch from a repressed, stay-at-home daughter to a wildcat, roaming the streets and scaling walls – all with a minimum of dialogue’ (sykes 1977). walker auditioned for roles in white’s a cheery soul and louis nowra’s visions, two plays sharman was casting for productions at the old tote. on the basis of her auditions sharman invited walker to do a screen test for the role of felicity bannister and quickly observed her ability to meet the demands of the part. sharman showed white the screen tests of various actresses without mentioning his own preference and white was unequivocal in his choice: kerry walker. (sykes 1977). the role of felicity bannister was complex, largely physical, and kerry walker was only three years out from her final year at nida. like so many of white’s stage plays, the night the prowler is a tragi-comedy, and is overlaid with expressionist elements, coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 grotesque images, satirical comment and epic themes. walker mastered the surly and spoiled adolescent, transforming into a sinister and violent leather-clad prowler herself, before discovering a dying tramp in a derelict house. felicity’s encounter with the naked putrefying man allows her to break through to a new realisation of her true self and a liberating understanding of life. the combination of satire with existential and spiritual questing posed a challenge that seemed to suit walker as an actor, and prepared her for other roles in white’s plays. jim sharman explains that ‘a very australian understanding of tragi-comedy’ was the element that connected white’s writing to his realisation of it on stage and screen (2008, 268). walker too seems to have a connection to that understanding of tragi-comedy, and an unusual capacity to embody it in character. lighthouse in 1982 walker signed a two-year contract with the state theatre company of south australia, joining an ensemble of actors under a new name: lighthouse, the artistic director was jim sharman, with louis nowra as associate director and dramatist in residence. sharman appointed neil armfield as a guest director; he also approached his chosen actors to join the company and envisaged it as working from a german model rather than those found in the west end or on broadway (sharman 2008, 318). lighthouse presented fourteen new productions over a two-year period under sharman’s artistic direction, including two new plays by patrick white. geoffrey milne has shown how lighthouse achieved a highly successful ensemble theatre company and suggested that it ‘seeded’ various partnerships that came together in later years (milne 2008, 42-3). katherine brisbane and philip parsons were invited to the productions, as milne reports, in the interests of promoting the work of the company nationally. in 1982 brisbane wrote about the rise in actors’ theatre, quoting sharman: we have gone through a period of having a director’s theatre, a writer’s theatre … now i think we are in a transition period and the actor is very important … i think i can say that the most striking aspect of lighthouse is the actors. they have a strongly individual approach. (brisbane 1982). walker and another of the ensemble members of lighthouse, russell kiefel, had studied at nida together. the other actors were: robyn bourne, peter cummins, robert grubb, melissa jaffer, alan john, gillian jones, melita jurisic, stuart mccreery, robert menzies, jackie phillips, geoffrey rush and john wood. geoffrey milne spent a year with lighthouse as a writer and researcher for magpie and recalls that the strength of the company was both in the powerful work they created but more importantly in the responsibility the actors took for the whole company, from decision making to entertaining at first night parties. sharman’s success therefore was not only in presenting innovative theatre but in developing an enterprise in which the actors were central (milne 2008, 53). in spite of sharman’s achievements and hopes, and the magnificent work of his ensemble during the lighthouse years, it would appear that an actors’ theatre is still not evident in australia and that a director’s theatre is very much in the ascendant. the lighthouse season in 1982 opened with white’s signal driver, a play for just four actors; the first full ensemble production, staged later that year was a midsummer coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 night’s dream in which walker played one of the mechanicals tom snout and also one of the fairies, moth, with sharman’s ‘electric actors’ geoffrey rush and gillian jones appearing as the ‘boss fairies oberon and titania’ (sharman 2008, 316). signal driver the first lighthouse production was patrick white’s three-act play signal driver which had its premiere on 5 march 1982 at the playhouse, adelaide. sharman had requested that white write the play for the 1982 adelaide festival of which he was artistic director. according to walker one of the interesting aspects of working on a play written by patrick white was that the scripts were ready to be performed and did not require changes or cuts to scenes. white worked hard to make the scripts as ready as they could be for the actors and had already done some rewriting of act one of signal driver (marr 1991, 609). also white was involved in rehearsals for the plays. (walker 2001, 8). previous directors of white’s plays had not allowed him such access (marr 1991, 609). walker found neil armfield’s ‘rigorous, academic approach’ to directing, to be a highly effective one for her as an actor. she appreciated the time spent on a first reading followed by discussion, then a line by line reading followed by lengthy discussion of the play by the whole cast. by the end of the first week of rehearsals the actors would then read the play together again, sometimes in a ‘moved reading’ but not always. for her this careful process led to a sense amongst the cast of ‘collective understanding and ownership’ of the work which provides a ‘strong foundation for the rehearsal period’ (walker 2001, 9). during the first week of rehearsals for the premiere production of signal driver white stayed with walker in adelaide and attended rehearsals daily. he did not say much during the discussions because in walker’s view he did not like ‘having to explain the work’ and preferred the actors to discover it for themselves. walker recalls that he ‘listened intently to the discussion’ and ‘enjoyed these days immensely’ because he ‘valued the company of actors and relished their humour’ (walker 2001, 8). he had spent hours with armfield before rehearsals reading him the play aloud and showing him the bus stop he and his partner, manoly lascaris, frequented for their regular trips to taylor square. the bus stop was also the place patrick would escape to after arguments with manoly. white cried all the way through the rehearsals of act 3, and told his friend, the writer elizabeth harrower, that ‘it tears me to bits, so much of our life in it’ (28 february 1982; marr 1994, 554). white had always enjoyed theatre and the company of actors. he kept dozens of old theatre programs and notes about actors and plays covering many countries and many years (marr 2008, 8). his friend from his london days, the actor ronald waters, believed that white wanted to write ‘one great play’ more than all the novels (marr 1991, 385). yet initially writing was something he felt that he settled for because he could not do what he would have liked to do and that was to act. he recognised that he did not have the confidence to pursue acting and described his situation in flaws in the glass: coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 lacking flamboyance, cursed with reserve, i chose fiction, or more likely it was chosen for me, as the means of introducing to a disbelieving audience the cast of contradictory characters of which i am composed (white 1981, 19-20). according to walker the play had its origins in new york in 1940. white’s friend peggy stewart, who was an actress but retired by then, would often quarrel with her husband and pack up her suitcase and leave him. he would chase her and find her at grand central station and then ‘coax her home again’ (walker 2001, 1). one of white’s specific loves was music hall and vaudeville. walker speculates that white’s experience of revue early on in his career had given him ‘a distaste for naturalism in the theatre’ (walker 2001, 7). he wrote the part of the female being, a kind of supernatural, music hall chorus figure for kerry walker, and told gus worby in an interview for theatre australia before the play premiered that he found it easy to write for her because he knew her well and knew her voice well (worby 1982, 15). white returned to sydney after the first week of rehearsals but kept in touch with walker and armfield by telephone before coming back to adelaide for the production week of rehearsals. walker recalls that white was pleased with what he saw in that week. however there was one element that he did not like. at the end of the play the aurora australis becomes visible. to create the effect of the dazzling southern lights a massive painted silk cloth floated out from the back of the stage covering the audience and the stage, as walker suggests, to provide a symbol of the joining of ‘characters, actors and audience’. for white and indeed for armfield and possibly for walker too, it was perhaps ‘too literal an interpretation’ and the decision was made to dispense with the silk cloth and create the effect of aurora in lighting (walker 2001, 10; armfield 1983, ix). in retrospect it may have been a case of white over-stepping his role because the description of the massive silk cloth enfolding the audience and the players, sounds innovative and spectacular. in 1985 walker appeared in another production of signal driver at the newly established belvoir street theatre in surry hills, sydney. it was the inaugural production of the infant company b and was directed once more by neil armfield, his third production of the play. although white had written the part of the female being or second being for walker, both armfield and white wanted her to play the part of ivy vokes. john gaden played theo, pleasing white very much because he had long admired gaden as an actor. a black and white photograph by regis lansac of walker as ivy and gaden as theo in middle age, their arms linked, facing straight out to the auditorium, reveals ivy looking strong, solemn and proprietorial in a silk taffeta fullskirted 1950’s dress with gloves and pearls. according to walker the intimate space at the belvoir street theatre was perfect for signal driver and much more appropriate than the playhouse in adelaide where the play premiered. the stage at belvoir was kept bare with only ‘a long bench, a wind machine, a barrel full of pebbles and a sheet of metal – devices operated in full view of the audience by the beings to create various effects. even the proscenium arch of the shelter had become redundant in such an intimate space’ (walker 2001, 12). it would seem that the stage setting was explicitly referencing beckett. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 white’s health was poor during the rehearsal period and so he attended sporadically, and according to walker, still found it difficult to sit through act 3 without experiencing ‘distress’ (walker 2001, 12). on opening night white sent kerry flowers and a note with the words: ‘kerry age beautifully – love patrick’ (walker papers). walker’s ability to play the role of ivy and her transformations over a fifty-year period was remarkable. she recalls that the opening night applause were ‘rapturous’ and that white appeared on stage at the curtain call, standing in his beret and scarf beside john gaden ‘who was still dressed as old theo, with a beret and scarf’. the image of the frail white standing next to gaden is etched in walker’s memory. their resemblance was ‘striking’ (walker 2001, 12). white was delighted with the production but in the days that followed he was appalled with the critical response to the play itself. harry kippax praised walker and gaden for their ‘sensitive explorations of character’ but declared that ‘[t]he play is slight.’ (kippax 1985, 10) in a luke-warm review in the daily mirror frank gauntlett wrote that one moment at the end of the play stayed with him: ‘the chorus of two dragging open the back wall of the belvoir street theatre and dancing into the grotty night of clisdell street, surry hills …. a wonderful and strangely shocking exit for two irksome characters’ (1985). walker describes the writing in signal driver as ‘fugue-like’ and that having played both female roles she discovered a ‘wholeness’ and ‘completeness’ in the play (walker 2001, 13). in her view any production of the play should recognise the nuclear threat that hangs over the action and that the bus shelter is a symbol of a ‘place to hide’ as well as a little theatre where ivy and theo ‘act out their lives’ (walker 2001, 5). the play offers a grim analysis of marriage and of materialism in australia and white called it in his sub-title ‘a morality play for the times’. in this work white laments what he saw as ‘the decay of australian society as reflected in two characters’ (worby 1982, 13). the relationship between the married couple ivy and theo is at the centre of the play, portraying three distinct phases of their lives from their early married days right through to their old age. the characters never manage to escape one another, in spite of attempts to do so at the tram/bus stop. in addition to the symbolism offered by the bus stop as a place of refuge and escape, another key symbol of the play is the kitchen table that theo made himself. walker sees it as a representation of ‘honest, domestic truth versus the vanity and barbarism’ of the nuclear threat that haunts the play (walker 2001, 6). theo is a cabinet-maker and at the end when he and ivy are old it is still there, scarred, just like the two characters. in 1983 neil armfield described the play in relation to this symbol, calling the work ‘strong, solid and simple’ just like the table (armfield 1983, vii). netherwood in 1983 walker created the role of a retarded young woman called mog figg in white’s next play, also commissioned from white, and produced by lighthouse under the direction of jim sharman. the play is set in an old house somewhere outside sydney in the moss vale area, where a couple look after some mentally ill people. white was horrified at the new government policy of releasing mentally ill people into the community to fend for themselves. moggy figg is a 25-year old child murderer and a ‘wise fool’ character (milne 2008, 52). it was another challenging role and demonstrated walker’s fearlessness at 35, and her ability to play characters from all classes of society. white wrote the play especially for the lighthouse ensemble of actors. geoffrey rush played dr eberhard, a psychiatrist the play explored one of coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 white’s life-long interests: the masculine qualities of women and the feminine qualities of men. walker talked at the time about the rendering in the play of ‘the fear of these qualities in ourselves’ (o’brien 1984, 8). white flew to adelaide for the opening night and was pleased with the play. once more though, he was infuriated by the critical response: harry kippax damned the play and thought it ‘did not work’ but he praised walker in her role as ‘a waif, but aggressive, with a dead baby in her past’ (kippax 1983). peter ward’s review in the australian was not as vociferous: ‘with these characters, white has created a world in which the notionally insane are finally seen to have the greater grasp of what is true in heart and mind. pitted against them is a curious “reality” (ward 1983). walker was philosophical and said that ‘to present the fears and neuroses of a society, we’re not always thanked’ (o’brien 1984, 8). with a season of twelfth night behind her, in which she played the clown-fool feste as an ‘androgynous figure’ (o’brien 1984, 8) recalled by geoffrey milne as ‘lugubrious’ (2008, 52) the lighthouse company disbanded and walker returned to sydney in 1984. it had been an intense and productive two years for walker, and the end of what is sometimes called the ‘lighthouse legend’ (sharman 2008, 319). sharman’s decision to leave came after the board rejected his plan to stage seven new australian plays for the 1984 season (milne 2008, 52). in his own memoir sharman recalls some of the pain of the period at lighthouse where the reception to plays was ‘often hostile’. he once daringly attempted to explain the philosophy of the company during a season launch, drawing on a rolling stones song: ‘you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes – you get what you need …’ (sharman 2008, 319). walker seems not to have regretted the break-up of lighthouse. she told a reporter at the time that the: ‘worst thing for an actor is sinecure. you need constant change’ (o’brien 1984, 8). amongst her possessions were 240 unread books, casualties of her extremely busy life in adelaide where she spent all of her time in the theatre with other actors. walker has always worked hard to maintain friendships with people outside the theatre, fearing that staleness, insularity and lack of understanding of life would stifle her work if she did not maintain strong connections beyond the world in which she works. shepherd on the rocks during the period of their friendship, between 1977 and 1990, when white died, walker offered white creative ideas. during the sydney season of signal driver at belvoir in 1985, she read him out aloud an extract of a book by alan jenkins entitled the thirties (1976), recounting the disgrace and defrocking of the vicar of stiffkey in norfolk, for his immoral relationships with prostitutes in london. after his fall reverend harold davidson took a job performing with lions in a sideshow. he was eventually eaten by one. on hearing this part of the story, white declared ‘oh, i know all about that. i was at cambridge with his son.’ (marr 1991, 626). according to david marr, that very night patrick white began writing a play based on the story of davidson but set in australia. he called the play ‘the budgiwank experiment’ but later changed it to shepherd on the rocks and presented the reverend davidson’s story: a disgraced minister called daniel shepherd, living in a suburb of sydney in a parish called budgiwank, finishes his days in an act performed at the jerusalem easter show. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 kerry walker played a prostitute called queenie and neil armfield directed the premiere production of the play. john gaden created the lead male role of the minister. white had envisaged gaden and walker in the lead roles of danny and his wife elizabeth, but walker recalls that armfield had difficulties casting the role of queenie and so she took it on because the role of elizabeth was easier to cast. wendy harmer played elizabeth in what walker recalls in a file note was ‘an unusual choice’ (because harmer had little stage acting experience) and that patrick was delighted with her in the role (walker papers). geoffrey rush played archbishop wilfred bigge and henri szeps played another bishop. walker looked into the etymology of the word ‘queen’ and noted down on her script copy its dutch origins in ‘kween’ meaning a barron cow. she noted that it was a disparaging term for a ‘bold or ill-behaved woman; a jade and a harlot, strumpet’ (walker papers). the play has some 30 parts and 14 scenes and was not easy to stage. patrick white had drawn his own set design but brian thomson’s design bore no resemblance to the way in which white had imagined it. thomson’s design highlighted the circus elements of the play, something white found troubling (marr 1991, 631). white told david marr that he had found it necessary to ‘remind them that the play was about the varieties of religious experience’ (marr 1991, 631). both patrick and manoly flew to adelaide for the opening night. the critical response was mixed. ken healey praised the ‘boyishly enthusiastic’ john gaden for his ‘brave and cleansing performance’ as danny shepherd. he described the character of queenie as a ‘streetwalker who saw shepherd as a stairway to paradise’ and a ‘genuinely touching’ grotesque (healey 1987). barry oakley’s review was harsh: ‘white gives us a pair of clergymen so cardboard even such talented actors as geoffrey rush and henri szeps can’t fill them out’ (oakley 1987, 33). however oakley referred to walker’s performance warmly. peter ward in a relatively sympathetic review, described walker’s queenie as ‘a classic bump-and-grind hooker, all glitzed over’ but found the play ‘not well made’ (ward 1987, 6). walker’s role as queenie marked the end of her creation of new roles in plays by patrick white. he did begin writing an additional four pieces for her under the title ‘four love songs’ but concerns about defamation of the politician-lovers in one of them entitled ‘the whore’s cat’ prevented development of this piece. another of the pieces featured a satire of the life of mary mckillop, but this was never finished because white found himself more and more admiring of this saintly figure and unable to make her a satirical target (marr 1991, 632). the ham funeral walker appeared in new production of white’s play the ham funeral in 1989. white had written the play in 1947 but it was not staged until 1961, by the adelaide university theatre guild, in a production directed by john tasker. white’s friend frederic glover had encouraged him to ‘re-furbish’ the play rather than consign it to the rubbish, and he took this advice and worked on it during a visit to athens in 1958. the royal court in london considered the play, new yorkers zachary scott and ruth ford took an option on it, and the elizabethan trust in australia also expressed interest but nobody was game enough to stage it in this period. in fact the play was rejected by the board of governors of the adelaide festival of arts for the festival program of 1962, on the coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 grounds that it was ‘offensive’. the discovery of a dead human foetus in a garbage bin and the dance of copulation in the play may have been the cause. understandably the decision was a blow to white and aroused considerable bitterness. the ham funeral is a complex, radically modernist play, drawing on many theatrical traditions and styles, with few naturalistic elements and an inward looking main character. as akerholt says it anticipates beckett and ionescu (akerholt 1988, 9). waiting for godot was first performed in 1953, six years after white’s play was written in 1953. had white’s play been performed closer to the date of its composition the history of modernist theatre might inscribe white rather than ionescu and beckett as its ‘father figure.’ as barry oakley stated the play ‘was ahead of its time in europe as well as in australia. its boldness lies in its attempt to project dramatically the deeper states of the psyche’ (oakley 1989). john mccallum states that white was ‘the first successful modernist dramatist – in the special australian sense of the word, meaning nonnaturalistic’ (mccallum 2010, 140). walker herself notes the ‘expressionistic, surrealistic, poetic and vaudevillian’ elements of the play (walker 2001, 7). these elements are found in all of white’s plays and create enormous challenges for actors, directors and audiences. the action in the play is based on a story told to white by the painter william dobell in 1946 in london, and informed by white’s own experiences as a lodger in a house in ebury street london when he first lived in london in the 1930’s and during the first months of the blitz. dobell told white about the background to his painting ‘the dead landlord’. dobell lived in a house in which ‘the landlord had died and his landlady had taken down her hair, announcing there would be a ham funeral, and that he must go and fetch the relatives’ (white 1961, reproduced in the program for the ham funeral, 1989). from this anecdote white wrote his play, which was eventually set in the postfirst world war period. white recalls agreeing to this suggested change by director, john tasker, because he believed that ‘it might increase the air of surrealism and timelessness which i had been aiming at’ (white program). in the program notes for the premiere white talked of the ‘courage’ of the cast and the ‘skill’ of john tasker who ‘will have dissolved my stubborn groups of statuary into the fluid lines of workable theatre’ (white 1961; 1989). may brit akerholt served as dramaturg on the stc production and summed up the strangeness, excess and comic brilliance of the play in the program: who would have thought of putting together in the melting pot of a play an embryonic poet, his anima or ‘soul mate’, a raucous and randy landlady, a silent, monumental landlord, two scavenging ladies of the dilapidated music-hall variety, and four mourning relatives … as mrs goosgog puts it: ‘it takes all kinds to make a tasty dust-bin.’ (akerholt 1989) kerry walker played mrs alma lusty. the play had not been staged in sydney for some twenty-eight years and white named actors he thought suited the parts. max cullen played the landlord, robyn nevin and maggie kirkpatrick played the vaudevillian scavenger ladies, mrs goosgog and mrs fauburgus who the young man encounters on his way to fetch the rather grotesque relatives for the funeral. the young poet was played by tyler coppin and the girl by pamela rabe. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 the play presents a young and at first rather withdrawn lodger, who wants to be a poet, and who discovers what it means to be part of the lives of other people and to engage with the messy, vulgar, fleshy experiences in the kitchen and basement of his landlord and landlady’s house, and through the strange celebrations of a life after it has passed. like felicity bannister he confronts the physical realities of the death of a man as he helps alma move his body. in the course of the drama he faces the nourishing, earthy ribaldry, and vulnerability of the man’s widow, bringing him to a new state of human understanding in the ‘luminous night’ (white 1967, 74). white attended the rehearsals, which according to walker, followed armfield’s meticulous approach that had worked so effectively for the adelaide ensemble. walker’s script copy is covered in her pencilled notes, with detailed instructions to herself on how to deliver lines: ‘recitative’, ‘ heated’, ‘quickening pace’, all her actions, gestures and movements including yawns, are recorded on it and armfield’s comments on her tone and delivery are also noted on the script. there is no indication from the script copy of any determination on accent but walker’s australian accent was criticised by bob evans in an otherwise positive review of the production, who found it perplexing because ‘her role seems so painstakenly [sic] written in a working-class english dialect’. evans found coppin’s american accent equally puzzling. by contrast ken healey interpreted the diversity of accents as indicative of each character being ‘rooted in a reality far more universal than any accent’ (healey 1989). he also criticised the way in which walker’s mrs lusty and coppin’s young man interacted, complaining that it lacked ‘the visceral connection that can inspire the pathos white intended’ (evans 1989). most of the critics praised walker’s performance as mrs lusty and applauded many dimensions of the production, though some expressed reservations about the play itself, finding it static, limited and dramatically deficient, in spite of its exuberant theatricality (mcgillick 1989; oakley 1989; neill 1989). paul le petit found walker’s performance compelling, speaking of her ‘magnetism’ (1989). another reviewer described her as ‘one of our most creative actresses’ (mcgillick 1989). one critic noticed what i believe to be one of walker’s most significant qualities as an actor. john carmody talked about ‘the flexibility’ of walker’s face as she played the landlady. he observed her in these terms: ‘sensual and ribald, sensitive and uncouth, assured and vulnerable, vigorous and lethargic, poised and clumsy’ (carmody 1989). barry oakley noted that walker first brought the character to ‘realistic life’ and then took her ‘into the power of archetype …. instinct insensate’ (oakley 1989). these comments reflect walker’s transformative power as an actor and her distinctive achievement in this modernist play. patrick white and manoly lascaris came to see the production on opening night. white told an abc television journalist ‘i can’t hope for a better production than this. it is the great night of my life’ (marr 1991, 641). it was to be his last time at the theatre. kerry walker, perhaps more than any other actor, has inhabited and embodied the difficult roles white created, with passion and understanding. her friendship with white brought him great pleasure and inspired his writing. like him she understood the arts as ‘a concrete reflection of our lives’ (walker 1993). walker’s performances of felicity bannister, the second being, ivy vokes, queenie, mog and mrs lusty reveal her mastery of white’s ideas about human behaviour and demonstrate her capacity for coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 experimentation. in these roles she offered ‘three-dimensional literary criticism’ and revealed the enigmatic faces of australian modernism. kerry walker’s papers are held in the state library of nsw. anne pender is associate professor in english and theatre studies and arc future fellow at the university of new england. anne and bruce co-authored a book from a distant shore: australian writers in britain 1820-2012 (2012). works cited akerholt, may-brit. 1988. patrick white. amsterdam: rodopi. armfield, neil. 1983. ‘aurora australis’, introduction to patrick white’s signal driver, sydney: currency press, vii-ix barrowclough, nikki. 1994. ‘kerry walker goes back to reality.’ good weekend, august 6, 34-36. bedell, geraldine. 2003. ‘national treasure.’ observer, november 16. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/nov/16/theatre carmody, john. 1989. review of the ham funeral. sun herald, november 19. brisbane, katharine. 1982. ‘rise of the new actor’, national times, may 16-22. evans, bob. 1989. review of the ham funeral, sydney morning herald, november 16. gauntlett, frank. 1989. review of the ham funeral, daily mirror, november 16. gauntlett, frank. 1985. review of signal driver, daily mirror, may 29.. healey, ken. 1989. review of the ham funeral, sydney review, december. healey, ken. 1987. review of shepherd on the rocks, sydney morning herald, may 12. kippax, harry. 1985. review of signal driver, sydney morning herald, may 27, 10. kippax, harry. 1983. review of netherwood, sydney morning herald, june 14. le petit. paul. 1989. review of the ham funeral, sunday telegraph, november 19. marr. david. 2008. ‘patrick white.’ the monthly 33: 1-18. http://www.themonthly.com.au marr. david 1994. patrick white letters. sydney: random house australia. marr. david. 1991. patrick white: a life. sydney: random century australia. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 mccallum, john. 2010. ‘the late crazy plays.’ in remembering patrick white: contemporary critical essays, edited by elizabeth mcmahon and brigitta olubas, 139148. amsterdam: rodopi. mc gillick, paul. 1989. review of the ham funeral, financial review, november 24. milne. geoffrey. 2008. ‘lighthouse: a ‘mainstage’ ensemble experience.’ australasian drama studies 53: 42-57. neill, rosemary. 1989. review of the ham funeral, australian, november 16. oakley, barry. 1989. review of the ham funeral, independent monthly december. oakley, barry. 1987. review of shepherd on the rocks, times on sunday may 17, 33. o’brien, geraldine. 1984. ‘kerry keeps in touch with the real world.’ sydney morning herald, january 4, 8. schafer, elizabeth. 2011. ‘a ham funeral: patrick white, collaboration and neil armfield.’ australian studies 3: 1-24. http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/australian-studies/article/view/2227/2641 sharman, jim. 2008. blood and tinsel: a memoir. melbourne: the miegunyah press. sydney morning herald. 2009. ‘never far from home.’ march 21. sykes, jill. 1977. sydney morning herald, october 8. walker, kerry. 2001. unpublished essay ‘two stops on the journey: patrick white’s signal driver.’ kerry walker papers relating to patrick white, state library of nsw, mlmss 7566, 1-15. walker, kerry. 1993. australian, march 5. ward, peter. 1987. review of shepherd on the rocks, australian, may 11, 6. ward. peter. 1983. review of netherwood, australian, june 13. white, patrick. 2001. a cheery soul. sydney: currency press. white, patrick. 1981. flaws in the glass.: a self portrait. london: jonathan cape. white, patrick. 1967. four plays by patrick white. south melbourne: sun books. white, patrick. 1961. riders in the chariot. london: eyre & spottiswoode. white, patrick. 1956. the tree of man. london: eyre & spottiswoode. worby, gus. 1982. ‘signal driver: interview with patrick white and neil armfield.’ theatre magazine, 12-15, march. microsoft word coola6introduction coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction jaime de córdoba benedicto in tom wolfe’s problematic article “the painted world”, he considers the great value that is awarded to words so as to justify the unjustifiable in art which, at the time, nobody understood. it is likely that he would have been unable to develop his brilliant sarcastic discourse if his book had been titled the sculpted word. it is a known fact that sculpture is one of the arts that people from outside the field are less inclined to talk about. however, while being a misunderstood “food”, it generates respect for the “cooking” that takes long hours to emerge in its final maturity. “digesting” a sculpture is a slow process and involves the onlooker a mobile participation which does not happen with painting. the aura of strangeness combined with admiration has, most probably, come down to us from time of cathedral loggias food for thought were the words around which twelve sculptors of entirely differing styles had to create their work. the different “ingredients” used offered visual “tastes” such as stone, ceramics, cast iron, wood, glass or the the lightest of video art. the congress offered various reflections based on the fundamental question: how do we feed thought? the difficulty lay in how to explain the transformation of our ideas into objects. young rodriguez built a tower of wood before our eyes. cami offered a mysterious visual aperitif in a column of strange molten metal inside a glass capsule. itabashie presented the motor of our survival in a magnificent alabaster mouth. françesc ruestes. barretina. 2010. ferro forjat cast iron 29 x 23 x 5,5 cm copyright © 2011 jaime de córdoba benedicto this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 metaphors, symbols and forms which demanded the congress delegates’ interpretation. no sculptor represented food itself. some presented the body stuffed with paper as an image of thought within the human being. ruestes represented the “nation in thought” with his barratina ( the traditional catalan hat) accompanied by the only real food in the exhibition: a star shaped biscuit which fitted the cut out star in the hat. lúa coderch showed her slow video “shelling a nut” in reference to kafka, a resource also used by luis cera who covered his sculpture with innumerable words. these were ways of thinking or rather an exhibition on “ways of thinking” which attempted to materialize an international congress on how one should fight against intellectual starvation. we hope to continue to transform words into the material realm and, to pacify wolfe, we hope that words will not flood the material. it is a great pleasure to be able to present this number of coolabah in a bilingual edition. jaime de córdoba benedicto. escultor. sculptor universitat de barcelona. tom wolfe en su polémico reportaje “the painted world” habría algunas consideraciones sobre el valor extremo que la palabra había adquirido para justificar lo injustificable en la pintura que entonces nadie entendía. seguramente no hubiese podido desarrollar su brillante sarcasmo si su libro se hubiese titulado la palabra esculpida. de hecho la escultura es una de las artes sobre las que menos se atreven a hablar las” gentes de a pie”, las gentes de fuera del mundo artístico. pero aún siendo un manjar incomprendido genera el respeto de la cocina que precisa muchas horas para su maduración. su presencia física requiere una digestión paulatina y el entendimiento de una participación móvil del espectador que no surge en la pintura. y probablemente conservó, desde las logias de las catedrales, un aura de extrañeza y a la vez admiración que ha perdurado hasta nuestros dias. food for thought fueron las palabras a las que debíamos dar forma entre 12 escultores bien distintos. se presentaron ingredientes tan diferentes en su sabor visual como la piedra, la cerámica, el hierro fundido, la madera el cristal o el más liviano video arte. el conjunto en el congreso ofreció reflexiones sobre la gran pregunta de ¿cómo alimentar nuestro pensamiento? l a dificultad estaba servida si entendemos que sólo la presencia de los objetos iba a explicar la transformación de nuestras ideas. el adolescente de rodriguez hacia crecer ante nuestros ojos una torre de madera; en una columna camí exponía un misterioso aperitivo visual en un extraño metal fundido encerrado en una cúpula de cristal, itabashie nos presentaba el verdadero motor de nuestra supervivencia en una magnífica boca de alabastro. françesc ruestes. barretina. 2010. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 ferro forjat 29 x 23 x 5,5 cm metáforas, símbolos y formas que llamaban a la interpretación de los congresistas. no hubo ningún escultor que representase directamente la comida. otros mostraron el cuerpo rellenado de papeles como imagen del pensamiento dentro del hombre, ruestes expusó la idea de “nación pensada” en su barratina ( gorro tradicional catalán) acompañada del único alimento real: una galleta con la misma forma que faltaba en su escultura. y lúa coderch nos mostraba su lentísimo video”cascar una nuez” en referencia a la literatura de kafka , recurso que usó, igualmente lluís cera al grabar infinitas palabras en su piedra. fueron formas para pensar o más bien una exposición de “formas de pensar” que intentó materializar el esfuerzo de un congreso internacional sobre como debemos luchar contra la desnutrición intelectual. esperamos seguir convirtiendo el verbo en materia y, tranquilizando a wolfe, esperamos que el verbo no inunde en exceso a la materia. jaime de córdoba benedicto. escultor. universitat de barcelona. microsoft word coola6luacoderch coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 shelling a nut is not art lúa coderch shelling a nut is not art lúa coderch | shelling a nut is not art| 2010 | vídeo (4’54” continuous reproduction), digital frame, wood | variable dimensions a computer printed text appears on a blank white screen. the time taken for the writing to appear is excessively long, far surpassing the time needed to read it thus causing slight tension during the pauses and in the spectator as well. the text talks about the possibility of bringing together an audience with a view to entertaining them by “shelling nuts”, stating at the beginning that “shelling nuts is not art”. the quotation comes from kafka’s story “josephine the singer” or “the mouse copyright © 2011 lúa coderch this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 folk”. the result of the piece is one of severe comedy, with black on white and the sound of the key pad, in fact, there is practically nothing. a little joke, just a little less innocent than it seems. a reading exercise on the projector screen and the spectator’s experience of the work. lúa coderch. iquitos (perú, 1982) lúa coderch lives and works in barcelona. she has had exhibitions in espai cub (solo, bcn producció, la capella, barcelona 2011), ikas-art (bilbao, 2010), patrim’10 (fundació vila-casas, barcelona, 2010), “han vingut uns amics” (espai barra de ferro, together with lluís nacenta y martí ruiz, barcelona, 2010), “the weight of the words” (stuffinablank, 2010) among her most recent exhibitions was “enfilar identitats” (kkkb, barcelona, 2010), among others both as a solo exhibition or in conjunction with the colectivo turismo. together with dario reina she was commisioned to contribute to the exhibition “el model absent” (cercle artístic de sant lluc, barcelona, 2009), together with works from the macba collection.. www.luacoderch.com cascar una nuez no es ningún arte lúa coderch | cascar una nuez no es ningún arte | 2010 | vídeo (4’54” en reproducción continua), marco digital, madera | dimensiones variables sobre un fondo de pantalla blanco va apareciendo un texto tecleado en el ordenador. el tiempo de escritura se hace excesivamente largo, excediendo en mucho el tiempo de coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 lectura y tensando ligeramente los momentos de espera, y con ello la paciencia del espectador. el texto habla de la posibilidad de reunir a un público para entretenerlo "cascando nueces", habiendo constatado en primer lugar que "cascar nueces no es ningún arte". se ha extraído del cuento de kafka titulado josefina la cantora o el pueblo de los ratones, uno de sus últimos relatos. el conjunto resultante es de una cómica severidad, con el negro sobre blanco y el sonido del teclado, prácticamente nada. una pequeña broma, sólo un poco menos inocente de lo que parece. un ejercicio de lectura, en el plano de la proyección y en el plano de la vivencia misma de la obra. lúa coderch. iquitos (perú, 1982) actualmente vive y trabaja en barcelona. recientemente ha expuesto en espai cub (individual, bcn producció, la capella, barcelona 2011), ikas-art (bilbao, 2010), patrim’10 (fundació vila-casas, barcelona, 2010), “han vingut uns amics” (espai barra de ferro, en colaboración con lluís nacenta y martí ruiz, barcelona, 2010), “the weight of the words” (stuffinablank, 2010) y “enfilar identitats” (kkkb, barcelona, 2010), entre otras, tanto individualmente como con el colectivo turismo. asimismo, conjuntamente con dario reina ha comisariado la exposición “el model absent” (cercle artístic de sant lluc, barcelona, 2009), con obras de la colección del macba. www.luacoderch.com memory revisited in julian barnes's the sense of an ending coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 memory revisited in julian barnes's the sense of an ending maricel oró piqueras abstract: an accumulation of years brings with it an accumulation of experiences. the revision of such experiences usually becomes more recurrent after retirement, a transition time from one period of life to another and, as such, a time in which we, human beings, have a tendency to take stock of our lives. this is actually one of the main issues present in julian barnes's last novel the sense of an ending (2011). when the main protagonist, a retired man quite comfortable and contented with his present life, receives an unexpected inheritance from the mother of a girlfriend from his university years, he is forced to track down a part of his life that he had left at the back of his mind a long time ago. as he explains his story, the protagonist and narrator of the novel raises a number of questions related to the quality and function of memory as one gets into old age. he experiments the unreliability of memory and questions to what extent memory is constructed through the remembered emotions that invaded him over that episode of his life rather than through the events as they actually took place. on the other hand, the act of revisiting and revising that specific episode, brings with it feelings of guilt and remorse as the protagonist realises that his past acts were not as noble as he remembered them to be. however, these acts are part of the past and they cannot be changed; thus, another question that the novel raises is how to account for those actions of which one does not feel proud and, more importantly, how to manage those bad memories as one gets older. keywords: the ageing process, memory, narrative the increasing interest in the study of ageing and old age has brought with it the emergence of two disciplines known as narrative gerontology and literary gerontology. both disciplines intend to provide insight in the study of the ageing process by studying and analysing cultural images transmitted through narrative, either coming from autobiography or biography, self-narratives and life-writing by ageing and older citizens when referring to narrative gerontology, and from literary works when referring to literary gerontology. the word narrative has actually become key in ageing studies, as heike hartung and roberta copyright©2014 maricel oró piqueras. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 maierhofer state in the introduction to their edited volume narrative of life: mediating age, “[t]he concern with the analysis of narrative structures has become a focus in both the humanities and the life sciences after the narrative turn has drawn attention to the ways in which narrative shapes knowledge across disciplinary boundaries” (2009: 5). in fact, researchers from different fields of study point out to the fact that the study of human ageing requires the combination of traditional disciplines such as gerontology and sociology with disciplines closer to the humanities. in that sense, gerontologists jan-erik ruth and gary kenyon in their article “biography in adult development and aging” acknowledge the need to deepen the understanding of the ageing process moving forward from more traditional disciplines. for ruth and kenyon, “many studies in gerontology view aging from the “outside,” analyzing, for example, changes in health in aging organisms, or appropriate roles for the retired in society. the “inside” of aging has largely been forgotten” (1996: 1). thus, they analyse biographical and autobiographical narratives as rich sources to obtain insight into the manifold aspects that take place in the ageing process, the physical and biological aspects but also the sociocultural and experiential ones. ruth and kenyon acknowledge that academic as well as professional communities are interested in understanding the ageing process since “[t]he way people perceive their lives is of vital importance, not only as a means of exploring the aging process, but also as a guideline for social policy and the delivery of care in an aging society” (1996: 2). moreover, by getting closer to the lived experience of old citizens through biographical and autobiographical narratives, ruth and kenyon have been able to approach ageing, both as an individual and as a social process, from a more comprehensive perspective and to observe to what extent “cultures, subcultures, or family patterns” (1996: 2) influence individual lives either because those patterns are challenged and expanded or, contrarily, they are seen as immovable and kept so. in their study aging and identity. a humanities perspective, lagretta talent lenker and sarah munson deats go one step further when considering the importance of resourcing to narrative and the humanities in order to understand the human ageing process and to challenge limiting cultural pre-conceptions attached to old age. according to lenker and deats, “cultural forms construct as well as encode the conventional perceptions on individuals in a given society; they intervene in history as they reflect history” (1999: 19). thus, for lenker and deats, “literature, the arts, and the media not only mirror society’s conventions, but also create them” (1999: 19). it is in that sense that lenker and deats consider that by analysing the images created through fictional narratives and by challenging them, negative stereotypes in regard to the ageing process can be modelled and reconstructed. in 2000, gerontologist mike hepworth resources to literary works in order to analyse contemporary conceptions in relation to the ageing process in his study stories of ageing. for hepworth, contemporary fiction is a valuable resource to understand conceptions and dynamics related to contemporary ageing because “it allows the writer, through the exercise of imagination, access to the personal variations and ambiguities underlying the common condition of growing older” (2000: 4). hannah zeilig establishes a difference between narrative gerontology and literary gerontology by pointing out that whereas in narrative gerontology real-life informants retell their life stories as they perceive them, the stories in literary gerontology are works of art that directly or indirectly seek to coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 “appeal to our minds” (2011: 22). still, literary narratives in which the process of ageing and old age are addressed are based on the writers’ individual experience as well as on their social and cultural backgrounds. despite the fact that literary works usually part from everyday experience, they tend to reflect on the multiple and diverse aspects that make a human life. one of the words associated with narrative is memory; using one’s memory, narrative is constructed and, as narrative progresses, identity is built. the postmodern turn which was deeply rooted around the seventies and eighties and which helps find a meaning to a fastchanging contemporary society has contributed to the present conception of identity as a fluid entity which is constructed and negotiated through the life span. within this context, life narratives have the function of providing a sense of continuity and logical meaning to a long life trajectory. in “identity construction in the third age: the role of selfnarratives”, gerben j. westerhof analyses the role of self-narrative in identity development between the ages of sixty and seventy-five by interviewing one informant. westerhof reaches the conclusion that narratives are used “to create unity and purpose in the manifold experiences occurring across the course of one’s life and thereby to find meaning in life” (2009: 56), especially after retirement. in fact, westerhof goes one step further and acknowledges that the construction of an ongoing life narrative is specially needed to keep a “healthy identity development” because it guarantees a balance between “maintenance of structures and openness to new experiences” and thus, “self-narratives can be seen as important means to coordinate existing identities with changing situations” (2009: 57). this is precisely what tony webster, the narrator and protagonist of julian barnes’ last novel, the sense of an ending (2011), is forced to do when he receives a small inheritance from someone he knew in his university years. the sense of an ending is the story of a man who has crossed the line of retirement and who is quite contented both with his present life and with his life trajectory up until the moment in which something forces him to review his life narrative. this is how the narrator and protagonist, tony webster, takes stock of his present life: i’m retired now. i have my flat with my possessions. i keep up with a few drinking pals, and have some women friends – platonic, of course. (and they’re not part of the story either.) i’m a member of the local history society, though less excited than some about what metal detectors unearth. a while ago, i volunteered to run the library at the local hospital; i go round the ward delivering, collecting, recommending. it gets me out, and it’s good to do something useful; also, i meet some new people. sick people, of course; dying people as well. but at least i shall know my way around the hospital when my turn comes. (2012: 56) by using the first person, webster rewrites his life narrative speaking directly to the readers. as he rewrites a specific episode from his own life story, he reflects on the deceitfulness of memory driven by human beings’ need to go on with their lives despite having gone through negative episodes. however, as memory is revisited and revised in his last life stage, the protagonist also rediscovers a remorse that was hidden deep inside himself and that he had managed to ignore by modifying what he remembered from that episode of his life. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 daniel l. schacter has researched and published on memory over the life span and defines memory as intrinsic to human beings but volatile at the same time: “sometimes we forget the past and at other times we distort it; some disturbing memories haunt us for years. yet we also rely on memory to perform an astonishing variety of tasks in our everyday lives” (2001: 1). however, “[m]emory plays such a pervasive role in our daily lives that we often take it for granted until an incident of forgetting or distortion demands our attention” (2001: 1). and memory will be a pervasive element in tony webster’s narrative as he recounts an episode from his life story. when revising his memory, webster realises that time as well as a superposition of feelings he had felt at the time had seasoned his remembrance of what happened in that specific episode in his life. as he revises it, as well as the consequences derived from it, webster realises that, contrarily to what he thought, memory is not a reliable scrapbook of the most relevant moments of his life. in that sense, daniel l. schacter explains that our memories are strongly influenced by our feelings, beliefs and the knowledge obtained after living a specific experience. as schacter explains, “[w]e extract key elements from our experiences and store them. we then recreate or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them […]. in other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event” (2001: 9). the novel starts during the university years of the protagonist and narrator when he meets a girl named veronica and they start a relationship which lasts around two years. tony webster visits veronica’s family in kent and veronica also visits the protagonist’s friends in london. however, at one point over their second year together, veronica tells the protagonist she feels their relationship is at a stagnant point and they decide to split up and follow different paths. veronica tries to recover their relationship by seducing webster but he neither understands veronica’s complaints regarding their relationship nor shows any sign of intending to amend them. they finally decide to follow their own ways and the protagonist never feels guilt or remorse for not having taken more care of the relationship. over this period, webster remembers himself as a carefree young man interested in discovering the intricacies of sex more than in understanding relationships or in analysing the behaviour of his peers: “the more you liked a girl, and the better matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed” (2012: 23). some time later, webster receives a letter from one of his best friends, adrian, in which he asks for his permission to go out with veronica. in the protagonist’s memory, his reaction at the time was to write a short letter to adrian in which, half-jokingly, he expressed his lack of interest in veronica and in their relationship. after this episode, the narrator goes on with his life without news from either veronica or adrian until they finish their degrees. the first part of the novel finishes when the narrator is informed about adrian’s death. after having graduated, adrian commits suicide for no apparent reason, apart from the fact that he was of above average intelligence. as webster retells this first part of the story, he keeps referring to the deceitfulness of memory as a new discovery in his life: “again, i must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time” (2012: 41). webster is reorganising his particular scrapbook and, with it, he is becoming aware that every decision one makes, coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 even if insignificant, may mean a different turn in one’s life. in the second part of the novel, the reasons that make tony webster wonder about the truth of memory and to revise his life story are clearly stated. the narrator receives a letter from a solicitor in which he is informed of the fact that he has received an inheritance from veronica’s mother, a person he only saw once in his life. the inheritance consists of five hundred pounds and a personal diary, adrian’s personal diary, which has been safeguarded by veronica. without understanding, the perplexed narrator tries to contact veronica. from veronica he only gets the letter he had sent to adrian when webster finds out that adrian and veronica had started a relationship. to his surprise, the letter is not jokey or brief at all as he remembered it to be. in it, the narrator had poured out his anger and disillusionment against both veronica and adrian, accusing veronica of having been damaged in her childhood and of having a domineering and uncontrollable character and asking adrian never to get in touch with him again. after reading the letter, the protagonist finds himself at a crossroads forty years after that episode of his life had taken place: at first, i thought mainly about me, and how – what – i’d been: chippy, jealous and malign. also about my attempt to undermine their relationship. at least i’d failed in this, since veronica’s mother had assured me the last months of adrian’s life had been happy. not that this let me off the hook. my younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. and only recently i’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. (2012: 98) that carefree young webster who had inhabited the protagonist’s memory for many years had turned into someone he found difficult to recognise. in his personal narration, webster had constructed his younger self as not far removed from the boys of his age at that specific time and place, mid-twentieth century england. thus, as he reconsiders his relationship with veronica, he compares its innocence and lack of sexual intercourse with a sexuallyloaded story he had recently heard from one of his friends whose daughters is at university. in his mind as well as in his personal narration, the relationship he had had with veronica would respond to a common and harmless relationship for their age at that time. in narrative and identity: studies in autobiography, self and culture, jens brockmeier and donal carbaugh explain how we construct our lives as well as create them through narration and, as we do so, we mould our identity as individuals but also as cultural beings (2001: 1, 2). in webster’s memory, veronica’s relationship as well as her starting an affair with his best friend had been an insignificant episode which did not have any negative consequence in his carefully-woven life narrative. as he is forced to revise his life narrative at sixty-five, webster realises that the number of people who were around him when this episode of his life took place is decreasing in number, either because they have died – which is the case with his parents and adrian –, or because they have followed different paths in life – which is the case with his close friends at college. after receiving part of adrian’s diary from veronica, tony webster is left alone reconstructing his memories as well as his own identity. moreover, he has to come to terms with a number of emotions he thought would be well under control in his old age and which he finds flourishing and floating at ease. tony webster feels remorse because his viperous letter was the last contact he had with coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 adrian. but more importantly, he feels remorse because he had treated veronica in a very unfair way. the narrator decides to keep on investigating about the months before adrian’s death; he tries to get some information from veronica but failing to do so, he decides to follow her. by the end of the novel, he discovers that adrian had had an affair with veronica’s mother which resulted in pregnancy and, to make things more complicated, the baby was born disabled. webster imagines that the pressure caused by this situation had brought adrian, a twenty-two year old man, young and brilliant, to commit suicide. moreover, veronica had been the person who had taken care of her brother after her mother’s death and realises that by simplifying veronica’s character as selfish and domineering and erasing her from his mind and his life narrative as he had done, he had manipulated both his memory and his life story. the narrator, tony webster, realises that the emotions triggered by the fact that he and veronica had split up and she had started going out with his best friend had had a negative effect on the memorised episode in his life narrative and he is aware that, at the present time, when his feelings are completely different, the plot of that episode will be changed in his memory too. as he puts it: i think – i theorise – that something – something else – happens to the memory over time. for years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. i press a button marked adrian and veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. […] but what if, ever at a late stage, our emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? that ugly letter of mine provoked remorse in me. […] then, not long afterwards, i began remembering forgotten things. i don’t know if there’s a scientific explanation for this – to do with new affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways. all i can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me. (2012: 120) tony webster imagined the beginning of his old age as a quiet period in which he would suffer the pains of biological ageing and the deserved emotional tranquillity of lived and past experiences: “later in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? you think you deserve it. i did, anyway. but then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business” (2012: 59). instead, he realises that his life narrative is a never-ending narrative until death and that remorse and guilt are two emotions one has to come to terms with whether one is ready to do so or not: “what you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. learning the new emotions that time brings. discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been” (2012: 59). instead, as he points out in other passages of his narration, he realises that getting into old age makes your memories less reliable due to the accumulation of years and experiences but also because those who had been acquainted with your life trajectory are gradually disappearing. thus, tony webster, the narrator and protagonist of the story, goes from a state of accepting the beginning of his old age with its expected nuances, to a deep revision of his remembered young self and the realisation that memory is deceitful and remorse is a feeling that can emerge at any time over a human life. once he accepts all this, he realises he has to find a solution so that his life narrative can continue. the first step is to come to terms with coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 the fact that memory and reality do not always match and that memory is strongly influenced by the feelings that invaded someone regarding a specific event. secondly, the narrator has to admit and include the changes in his life narrative. the following logical step is to try to find a way to come to terms with the reality of the facts as well as his feelings of remorse and guilt since change is impossible at this stage. being aware that veronica will not accept seeing him again, webster decides to send her an email in which he expresses his apologies for his negative interference between her and adrian as well as for having erased her from his life altogether. despite this, the narrator has become aware of a new reality he never considered before. in other words, getting into old age does not always mean to have come to terms with the past as it does not mean that a quiet path will lead the old person towards the end. old age, as a part of life, requires readjustments as well as an ongoing narrative, which will be told with more experience, but also with unrest. as the narrator explains: “you get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. you are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have i done wrong? […] there is accumulation. there is responsibility. and beyond these, there is unrest. there is great unrest” (2012: 150). he has to rewrite his life narrative by taking remorse into account. as gerben j. westerhof points out when analysing the healing role of life narratives in old age, it is not only necessary for the narrator and protagonist of the novel to go on rewriting his life narrative but also a sign of healthiness since when one’s life narrative is reconstructed and adjusted new experiences can be fitted into it. by presenting a specific episode of the life narrative of a retired character, julian barnes allows the reader into the growing character’s awareness of the fact that when entering into old age one is not automatically freed from the same feelings and emotions that have invaded him or her in their previous life stages. on the contrary, the fact of having more free time to review one’s memories together with the deceitful quality of memory may force those in old age to come to terms with negative memories and to absorb remorse and guilt as feelings which need to be integrated in order to go on writing one’s life narrative. in fact, tony webster himself acknowledges the fact that it was actually easier for him to manage memories when he was a young man. as he explains: “when you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. later…later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches” (2012: 105). at the age of sixty-five, webster did not expect to find himself in this position because he had interiorised the message that old age was a time of peace and quietness in which one had to wait for the end without making much fuss about it. in one of the first studies on literary gerontology, safe at last in the middle years: the invention of the midlife progress narrative, margaret moganroth gullette analyses the emergence of a new kind of novel she names “the progress narrative of the middle years” (1988: xi). gullette is aware of a number of contemporary angloamerican authors who, instead of depicting middle age and the entering into old age as a time of constant loss and decline which will lead to social oblivion, they present ageing heroines and heroes entangled in “new plots of recovery and development in those years” (1988: xii). in that sense, as time cannot be defined in a straight line, the entering into old coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 age is not a continuum through which one can go quietly; instead, crisis and coming to terms with them are also part of the game, as they are in the other life stages. as tony webster points out, “[we] live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? for instance, that memory equals events plus time. but it’s all much odder than this. who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? and it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent” (2012: 63). literary gerontology helps understand the process of ageing in a more comprehensive way in the sense that it allows the reader to go into mental processes which are quite difficult to express and define in scientific terms. by getting into the life narrative of tony webster who addresses us as if we were listening to him, we side with him in the fact that memory is a double-edged weapon. it is the door towards our past and the construction of a logical life narrative but it is also the reminder that everything we did in the past and will do in the future is seasoned by feelings and emotions which give subjectivity to our memories and which require constant reconsideration and rewriting of who we are, whatever the age. works cited barnes, julian. (2011) the sense of an ending. london: vintage books, 2012. brockmeier, jens and donal carbaugh eds. narrative and identity: studies in autobiography, self and culture. amsterdam: john benjamins, 2001. deats, sara munson and lagretta tallent lenker eds. aging and identity. a humanities perspective. westport ct: praeger publishers, 1990. gullette, margaret moganroth. safe at last in the middle years: the invention of the midlife progress novel. university of california press, 1988. hartung, heike and roberta maierhofer. “introduction”. narratives of life: mediating age. berlin: lit verlag, 2009. hepworth, mike. stories of ageing. open university press, 2000. ruth, jan erik and gary kenyon. “biography in adult development and aging” in birren, james e. et alii. aging and biography. explorations in adult development. new york: springer publishing company, 1996. schacter, daniel l. the seven sins of memory. new york: houghton hifflin company, 2001. westerhof, gerben j. “identity construction in the third age: the role of self-narratives” in hartung, heike and roberta maierhofer. narratives of life: mediating age. berlin: lit verlag, 2009. zeilig, hannah. “the critical use of narrative of literary gerontology”. international journal of ageing and later life, 2001. 6 (2): 7-37. maricel oró-piqueras graduated in english philology at the university of lleida in 1999. she also holds a ba in english from the university of surrey at roehampton. she started her phd studies after having been awarded a government research scholarship in 2002 and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 became part of the literature research group grup dedal-lit in the department of english and linguistics at the university of lleida. in 2003, she completed her minor thesis on angela carter and magical realism. in 2007, she defended her phd thesis which has recently been published by lap lambert academic publishing (saarbrücken, germany) with the title ageing corporealities in contemporary british fiction: redefining stereotypes (april, 2011). maricel oró-piqueras is currently working at the official school of languages (escola oficial d’idiomes) in vendrell (tarragona) and she collaborates with the department english and linguistics at the university of lleida as a part-time lecturer. she also participates actively with the literature research group grup dedal-lit, contributing with her research on ageing in contemporary british fiction. community matters: ‘small’ stories/ ‘big’ politics coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona new possibilities of neighbouring: tim winton’s cloudstreet bárbara arizti martín abstract: i intend to revisit winton’s popular family saga in the light of emmanuel levinas’s ethics of alterity and kenneth reinhard’s political theology, both built upon the christian principle of loving thy neighbour. the story of two families, the pickles and the lambs, sharing house in post-world war ii perth, proves fertile ground for the analysis of the encounter with the face of the other, the founding principle of levinasian philosophy. in his political theology of the neighbour, which aims at breaking the traditional dichotomy friend/enemy, reinhard draws on badiou’s conception of love as a truth procedure, capable of creating universality in a particular place. thus, the vicissitudes of the two families in coming to terms with each other in their “great continent of a house” invite a metaphorical reading and echo winton’s interest in promoting a sense of community in australia. keywords: levinas’s ethics of alterity, reinhard’s political theology of the neighbour, community in australia. the english word “neighbour” comprises two meanings that are conveyed by different words in other languages. a neighbour is someone who lives close to you (vecino in spanish; voisin in french). the neighbour is also a more elusive concept that, according to some dictionaries, is somewhat outdated. the collins cobuild defines it simply as “a person who you have dealings with”. the oxford english reference dictionary, more comprehensively, provides two complementary definitions for what the spanish call el prójimo and the french le prochain: “a person regarded as having the duties or claims of friendliness, consideration, etc., of a neighbour” and “a fellow human being, esp[ecially] as having claims on friendship”. the longman dictionary of english language and culture does not include a definition for this second meaning but offers instead the expression “love thy neighbour” with the following explanation: “a phrase from the bible, often used humorously or with irony”. copyright©2013 barbara arizti. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona the philosopher emmanuel levinas approached the summons to love thy neighbour in leviticus with anything but irony or humour —there is, in fact, little of either in his writings. eons before our conception and birth we are all branded by this massive ethical demand, since ethics precedes not only philosophy but also being. levinas’s ethics of alterity is founded on our infinite responsibility for the neighbour, or the face of the other, as he usually puts it. “a neighbor concerns me outside of any a priori”, he says (2004: 192). this does not come from an altruistic will, but from something that exceeds my will. in totality and infinity (1969) and otherwise than being (1974), he elaborates on this extreme form of relationship, which many a philosopher has found excessive and selfdestructive: the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face. […] it is here that the transcendent, infinitely other, solicits us and appeals to us. the proximity of the other, the proximity of the neighbor, is in being an ineluctable moment of the revelation of an absolute presence (that is, disengaged from every relation), which expresses itself. his very epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the stranger, the widow and the orphan. (levinas, 1991: 78) responsibility for the neighbour is inescapable and has no measure (2004: 47). i am the servant of my neighbour (87). i have been taken hostage by the needs of the other (11). the vulnerability of the neighbour awakens my compassion and i respond to the call with abnegation. “the exposure to another is disinterestedness, proximity, obsession by the neighbor, an obsession despite oneself, that is, a pain” (55), states levinas. the command is made all the more difficult by the fact that the other, or the neighbour, should always already remain radically other, as reducing the other to the same —a common tendency in western philosophy— would invalidate the encounter. more recently, the neighbour was the topic of a series of intense conversations between three leading thinkers working in the field of psychoanalysis. in 2005 these conversations were made into a book, the neighbor: three inquiries in political theology, by slavoj žižek, eric l. santner and kenneth reinhard. taking as a starting point freud’s bewilderment at the biblical injunction to love one’s neighbour as oneself, they undertake “the project of rethinking the notion of neighbor in light of the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century” (2005:3). the concept of neighbour has lost its innocence, they say. however, “the call to neighbor-love […] remains always in the imperative and presses on us with an urgency that seems to go beyond both its religious origins and its modern appropriations as universal reason” (3). it is an enigma, they add, “that calls us to rethink the very nature of subjectivity, responsibility and community” (3): is the neighbor understood as an extension of the category of the self, the familial, and the friend, that is, as someone like me whom i am obligated to give preferential treatment to; or does it imply the inclusion of the other into my circle of responsibility, extending to the stranger, even the enemy? coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona […] does the commandment call us to expand the range of our identifications or does it urge us to come closer, become answerable to, an alterity that remains radically inassimilable? (6-7) the first to tackle the question is kenneth reinhard in his essay “towards a political theology of the neighbour”. drawing on freud and lacan, he sets out to revise the two central categories of carl schmitt’s political theology: the sovereign and the friend/enemy divide. unlike contemporary liberal thinkers, who have altogether abandoned the idea of political theology, reinhard puts forward an alternative political theology of the neighbour (7). the key is to be found in lacan’s logic for feminine sexuation, built around what he called the pas-tout, the not-all, which opens up the field totalized by a sovereign exception to “an infinite series of possible encounters, one without limit and without totalization, a field without the stability of margins” (8). the second essay of the volume, by eric santner, is entitled “miracles happen: benjamin, rosenzweig, freud, and the matter of the neighbor”. taking as his point of departure the concept of miracle as theorised by the german-jewish philosopher franz rosenzweig in the star of redemption, santner defends that it is precisely the miracle that allows fidelity to the commandment of neighbour-love, since it implies a “capacity to intervene into [the] dimension of creaturely life”. the miracle is “the possibility of releasing the energies contained there, opening them to genuinely new destinies” (9). finally, slavoj žižek in “neighbors and other monsters: a plea for ethical violence” turns the injunction to love one’s neighbour against itself and challenges “the so-called ethical turn in contemporary thought”, associated with the philosophy of emmanuel levinas (9). readers of tim winton’s cloudstreet (1991) are aware of the centrality of miracles and neighbours. it is precisely a failed miracle that brings the two protagonist families together in the same house, the lambs and the pickles becoming neighbours in both senses of the word. winton’s novel was instantly popular, with its first edition selling out within a few days of publication (mcgirr, 1999: 81). in the year 2003, the novel was chosen “australia’s favourite australian book” in a poll carried out by the australian society of authors in celebration of its 40 th anniversary (http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/media/s1001783.htm). cloudstreet, winton states (in wachtel, 1997:72), is a homage to the city of perth, where the novel is set for the most part, and a lament for the changes it underwent in the decades of rampant development. he dedicates it to his grandparents, on which some of the main characters are modelled. being a family saga, the theme of interpersonal relations features prominently. but families in winton, as salhia ben-messahel reminds us (2006:30), are also “an opening into history”, since their experiences transcend the local and “construct a social tale about australia”. in “nostalgia for community: tim winton’s essays and stories”, bruce bennet reads cloudstreet as “a pointer to the powerful need […] for the rediscovery of the sources of community in australia” (1994: 72). similarly, stuart murray analyses how the novel renegotiates personal and communal identity against “the standard markers of australian nationalist orthodoxy” that consolidated in the myths produced by gallipoli (2003:84). the novel, murray states, promotes a form of “new tribalism” characterised by the need to understand “the nature of the everyday and the mundane, by the fraught nature of fate and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona faith, and by an acceptance of versions of family and humanity that refigure an idea of community” (84). in what follows, i intend to read cloudstreet against reinhard’s essay to analyse up to what point the novel predates the author in his re-founding of political theology upon the concept of the neighbour. it is my contention that cloudstreet, borrowing from žižek, santner and reinhard, not only invites an expansion of “the range of our identifications” but also urges us, in line with the ethical philosophy of emmanuel levinas, to move towards “an alterity that remains radically inassimilable”, combining a desire to converge with the realisation of the need for separation and respect. my reading hinges on reinhard’s revaluation of the figure of the neighbour, which aims at breaking the dichotomy friend/enemy on which traditional political theology is built. since reinhard draws on badiou’s conception of love as a truth procedure, capable of creating universality in a particular place, the vicissitudes of the two families in coming to terms with each other in their “great continent of a house” invite a metaphorical reading and echo winton’s interest in promoting a new sense of community in australia. during a family outing by the river, samson lamb —known as fish— is trapped in the net his father and brother have cast to catch prawns. when they pull him out of the water he is dead. his mother oriel attempts resuscitation: quick heard her shouting at the lord jesus. blessed blessed saviour, bring him back. show us all thy tender mercy and bring this boy back. ah, gawd jesus almighty, raise him up! now, you raise him up! […] lord jesus whump! saviour jesus… whump! and she made sounds on him you only got from cold pastry. (30) fish is brought back to life, and the lambs, “god-fearing people”, take him into town to the church of christ, “singing and wildeyed” (31): “fish lamb is back! praise the lord!/ but quick held his brother’s head in his hands and knew it wasn’t quite right. because not all of fish lamb had come back” (32). fish suffers from brain damage and never forgives his mother for not letting him die. the family lose their faith. after the accident and failed miracle the lambs leave their farm and settle in perth. they rent half a house at number 1 cloud street. this big old house is owned by sam pickles, a compulsive gambler, who lost part his right hand in an accident at work. the pickles do not believe in god, but on his shifty shadow. lady luck rules over the moods of sam pickles and decides the fate of his family. the house is the only thing they own, since sam has gambled away all their money and can no longer work. it was left to him in a relative’s will on condition that he did not sell it for a period of twenty years. sam puts up a fence in the middle of the garden and rents the sunny side of the house out to the lambs. the novel focuses on the twenty years —from the early forties to the early sixties— in which the two families live under the same roof. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona the narrative sets in contrast two very different lifestyles: the lambs are thrifty and hardworking, while the pickles, with the exception of rose, the daughter, are idlers. this is metonymically expressed by the house, which “seemed to have taken on an unbalanced life with all that activity and foment on the lamb side, as though the place was an old stroke survivor paralysed down one side” (59). the garden is “wild on the pickles side of the tin fence” and “bountiful on the lamb side” (293). their kids are described as “opposing platoons” (51) and the parents either ignore each other or give vent to their mutual dislike. the most striking contrast is that between the two mothers. oriel is masculine both in physique and in character. she is described as plain and bossy. dolly, as her name suggests, is feminine and attractive. unlike oriel, who denies herself any kind of pleasure and is always on the go, dolly has frequent marital and extramarital sex, neglects her family and spends her days in the pub, drinking away her disappointment with life. borrowing lacan’s comment on moses reincarnated as father-god in freud’s moses and monotheism (reinhard: 42), we can say that oriel is all will and no jouissance, while her neighbour is all jouissance and no will. the subject of the political theology reinhard propounds is woman, who in her uniqueness “opens up the space of the neighbor” (59). he draws on badiou’s argument about how love creates humanity through the agency of women. for a woman, reinhard puts it, the human world (made up by the truth procedures of science, art, love and politics) is only valuable insofar as there is love; when love is present, it infuses itself throughout the field of humanity, linking and correlating its elements. for the man, this is not the case; the truth procedures of life are independent of each other, love is only one field among four in which life unfolds. […] for women the elements of life are threads that are meaningless in isolation and that only love can tie into a knot. (61, 62) however, neither oriel nor dolly seems in a position to promote this new form of political theology. dolly, born to one of her sisters and raised by her grandmother as her own, is unable to love herself, let alone her family and neighbours. oriel’s case is more complex. despite having lost her faith, her life still revolves around the christian tenet of neighbour love. “oriel could spot weakness and need a mile off”, says the narrator (183). at some point in the narrative she invites a widow to move in and offers her a job (186). she also insists on helping the pickles even if her help is unwanted. she nurses dolly back to health when she is brought home half dead with alcohol poisoning and tidies up their part of the house. but her kindness scalds (391). she imposes her views and cares on others and believes in just one way of doing things —her own (400). she is bent on fixing people’s lives and this brings about resentment rather than gratitude. in the light of levinasian philosophy, her problem is that she does not respect the alterity of the other but considers the other an extension of the self. totalitarianism, asserts hanna arendt (reinhard, 2005: 25), stems from the overwhelming presence of the neighbour, “whose unbearable closeness makes the self ‘equivocal’”. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona oriel can be read as a personification of one of the three pillars of traditional political theology, the sovereign. as salhia ben-messahel puts it (2006: 35), she is “‘the man of the house’ —a female patriarch rather than a matriarch”. like the sovereign, oriel dictates the law and decrees the exception to the law. it is she that decides to set up shop in cloud street (55). opening and closing times and holidays are also decided by her. she even declares war on g.m. clay, their most direct competitor, and victory over him —he closes his shop down in the end— is celebrated as their private victory day (vd), in an allusion to the end of the second world war earlier in the novel. she runs “the best shop this side of the river” and the trams even stop for her (230). on new year’s day, 1949, oriel moves out of the house and into a tent in the garden, where she will live for the following twenty years. the reason for her moving remains a mystery even to her (133). according to schmitt, “sovereignty is a borderline concept”, both inside and outside the law (reinhard: 15). oriel’s liminal position is also that of god and the father in lacan’s theory, existing “at the limit of the worlds they orchestrate” (reinhard: 54). oriel is both feared and admired by friends and enemies alike. in fact, it is she that decides who is friend and who is enemy, “us” and “them”. the difference between good and evil is crystal clear to her: “we make good, lester”, she tells her husband. “we make war on the bad and don’t surrender” (230). conscious of her strength, she takes the weak under her protection (269). she is said to be “prouder than the british empire” (28) and the idea of the nation and its glorious memories are sacred to her and her family, who help at the local anzac club (144). the lambs seem to be carrying the nation upon their backs, thinks sam pickles, and he describes them at work in the following terms: “all that scrubbing and sweeping, tacking up shelves and blackboards, arguing over the situation of jars, tubs, scales and till. stinking dull work, the labour of sheilas at best” (76). the reference to gender is not gratuitous, as tim winton is known for his atypical portrayals of masculinity. “others have written about men in a traditional way and i guess i’m writing about it from an orthodox female point of view”, he tells elizabeth guy at an interview (1996-1997: 129). some of his novels and short stories challenge hegemonic masculinity in featuring soft males versus strong female characters. those who care in winton’s fiction, are more often than not men. “it is precisely their ‘feminine’ qualities that winton highlights in his male characters —their abilities to love, to relate emotionally, to be intuitive, to nurture, to cry, to be hurt— to the detriment of other typically masculine qualities like the desire to dominate of to be competitive” (arizti martín, 2006: 280-281). winton’s unconventional approach to masculinity opens up the possibility of studying the male characters in cloudstreet as the promoters of reinhard’s political theology of the neighbour, a theology that he sees as supplementing, rather than eradicating the politics of sovereignty. the neighbour, as a “third term”, inaugurates a form of political relation not based on the traditional dichotomy friend/enemy (reinhard: 13). sam and lester are in fact the first to start a more friendly relationship. in contrast to dolly, who decides never to speak to oriel after being looked after by her, sam donates a pig to the lambs to show his gratitude. lester offers his neighbours help in a less intrusive way than his wife, and his help is gladly welcomed, especially when he pays off sam’s debts and finds a hiding place for him when his creditors threaten to beat him up. they both weep and are capable of showing emotions and their approach to the other is more in line with levinas’s theory of alterity. “people are coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona … who they are”, says sam (169), the dots at the heart of the sentence reproducing the distance —the breathing space— necessary for respect. but the definite boost to the political theology of the neighbour in cloudstreet comes from the younger generation of males. it is quick and fish lamb that challenge duality in all its forms, including the traditional opposition between friends and enemies, interiority and exteriority, the rational and the irrational. the key is to be found not in the strong and mighty but in the weak and inarticulate. early in the novel, mason lamb, known as quick “because he is as unquick as his father” (27), expands the concept of the neighbour through what the narrator refers to as “the gallery of the miserable”, a collection of pictures he cuts out from the newspapers and pins to the wall, including a “blinded prisoner of war”, “a crying baby” and “some poor fleeing reffo running with a mattress across his back” (61). he has, the narrator says, “a sadness radar” (89) which makes him sensitive to both close and distant suffering. it is true, however, that he keeps the pictures there “to remind him of fish, how fish had been broken and not him” (140), as he blames himself for his brother’s accident. the reduction of the public and the political to the private and the personal seems to detract from quick’s more universal concern for the other. however, the novel presents this as a first step in a quest for a more comprehensive approach to the neighbour. the pictures and reports on hiroshima and the holocaust that his history teacher shows him to make up for his biased approach to the japanese in an essay represent a further stage: “now he sat with pictures in his lap that were beyond sadness and misery. this was evil […]. here were all those words like sin and corruption and damnation” (140). as an adolescent, quick goes bush and severs all links with his family. in the outback he undergoes a profound transformation through some sporadic encounters with an aboriginal, a recurrent dream, and a sort of mystical experience after a car accident in which he nearly kills himself. the aboriginal, who urges him to return to his family, bears many connections with the figure of christ. the wine and bread he shares with quick seem inexhaustible (209) and he walks upon the water (217). the terms in which quick’s enlightenment is described also defy the natural laws: “quick was lit up like a sixty watt globe and he wouldn’t stop crying. they brought him inside, bathed him and made him drink iced water, hoping the fluorescence would ease off. but by evening [… he] was giving off a light all the more clear in the dusk and he wouldn’t say a word” (219). in the end, he is taken to his family and goes back to normal after being nursed for seven days. the story of the nedlands monster, a serial killer that terrorised perth from 1959 to 1963, is another milestone in his development. a kid drowns in the river and quick, now a policeman, is called to lift his body: “that’s the sight of the world ending, someone’s son dead. then it hits him. that’s my brother. this is my life over again. this will always be happening” (398). he is even more affected when it turns out that the kid is the monster’s son. it is then that quick becomes painfully aware of our common humanity: “a man. with evil in him. and tears, and children, and old twisted hopes. a man” (399); “it’s not us and them anymore, it’s us and us and us” (402). the encounter with the monster is also the encounter with the face of the neighbour, who summons me from his utter otherness. “for levinas”, summarises reinhard (48), “ethics is based on my radically asymmetrical and nonreciprocal relationship to the other as the ‘neighbor’”. the policeman and the killer represent extremes of unbridgeable difference, but in quick’s new perspective, binary polarisation gives way to the simultaneous acceptance of heterogeneity and sameness. far coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona from collapsing the other into the same for instrumental reasons, quick’s “us and us” resonates with levinas’s form of radical humanism. the evolution from duality to nonduality that takes place in cloudstreet has been investigated by george watt (2004: 59), who affirms that quick’s idea that “we all join up somewhere in the end” (402) partakes of the core of zen buddhism and aboriginal spirituality, both professing the belief in the interrelatedness of existence. cloudstreet begins and ends with fish’s second drowning. its circular plot is just one of the many ways in which the novel points at how everything is connected. reinhard speaks of the dual axis that structures political theology: the horizontal axis “defined by the imperative to love the neighbor” (38) and the “vertical relationship implied by the commandment to love god” (39). the vertical and the horizontal converge in fish. his first partial drowning left him hanging in between two worlds: “it’s like fish is stuck somewhere. not the way all the living are stuck in time and space; he’s in another stuckness altogether. like he’s half in and half out” (69). throughout the novel we are told about his nostalgia for this supernatural world he just sampled in his first drowning: “fish’s pain stops, and suddenly it’s all haste and the darkness melts into something warm. hurrying down towards a big friendly wound in the gloom … but then slowing, slowing” (31). his physical side is this retarded boy wholly dependent on his family’s cares. the part of him that has direct access to the numinous can travel in time and space, knows what the other characters are thinking, communicates to them in dreams and worries and cares for them. like the aboriginal character, he can perform miracles. interestingly, fish also bridges the levels of story and text, as part of the novel is narrated by him: “the tarp flaps, the junk rattles, and it goes on and on, me in oriel’s arms, smelling her lemon scent, seeing the flickers in their heads, knowing them like the dead know the living, getting used to the idea, having the drool wiped from my lip” (47). in line with other novels by tim winton, like the riders and that eye, the sky, cloudstreet combines realism with other more experimental narrative forms that try to account for that part of the human experience that escapes reason and cannot be grasped by traditional modes of representation. the novel moves from the vernacular into the poetical and the fairy tale, and guides the reader through the intricacies of the plot by giving a heading to most of the fragments of which it is composed. although winton has repeatedly rejected the label “magical realism” (watzke, 1991:97), cloudstreet brims over with the tropes of this literary phenomenon: a house that breaths, a pig that speaks in tongues, a black angel, characters returning from the dead, flying and glowing like bulbs, etc. the novel also complies with some of its textual strategies, like the problematisation of the storyline and the use of a language that is “both lexically and syntactically inventive” (linguati, 1999: 6). magical realism seems, in fact, the most suitable form for winton’s purpose of unveiling the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary and the mundane. furthermore, elsa linguanti, writing about the use of the form in contemporary post-colonial literature, affirms that “these texts often embody their very own encounter with otherness; where the other is everything that is not at its ease within monolithic structures, everything outside the order, rules and logic of the west” (1999:3). for her, magical realism promotes “inclusiveness, the non-disjunction of contradictory elements” and a conception of the other in line with the philosophy of levinas (5). thus, the form of cloudstreet, despite the text’s apparent fragmentation, coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona conspires with its other aspects in its tendency to connect rather than separate and in reconciling modes of opposition that are regarded as somewhat outdated. in an australian context, the politics of the neighbour cannot obviate the country’s past history of colonisation and its everlasting impact upon the present. the house the two families inhabit is haunted by the ghost of its first owner, a nasty rich widow who, convinced by the priest, turns the house into an institution for native women: “she aimed to make ladies of them so they could set a standard for their sorry race” (36). the girls “had been taken from their families and were not happy”. one of them is found “dead on the floor of the library from drinking ant poison” (36). it is also in the library that, shortly after, the widow dies of a stroke while playing the piano: “she cried out in surprise, in outrage and her nose hit middle c hard enough to darken the room with sound” (36). since then, the library is haunted by the shadows of a grey old lady and a dark girl. no wonder nobody in the two families likes the room, which, significantly enough, occupies the centre of the old house: “[rose] came to a door right in the centre of the house but when she opened it the air went from her lungs and a hot, nasty feeling came over her. ugh. it smelled like an old meatsafe. there were no windows in the room, the walls were blotched with shadows” (38). fish is the only exception, as he loves playing the old piano. he knows the house is alive and is able to communicate with it, as he does with the family pig: “the house sad, lesteh. […] it talks” (166). he also fights with the shadows on the walls. stuart murray has noted that, “for the lambs and the pickles, although they do not realise it, the house is a palimpsest of the nation even as it is the domestic space that contains individual struggles”. “the note from the piano”, he adds, “rings throughout the house in an echo of the barbarity of racial prejudice” (2003: 87). aboriginality, nevertheless, is not confined to the past in cloudstreet. it also features in the present in the form of the black man who reaches out to some of the characters. the figure, part bird, part human, part angel, appears at climatic moments and gives advice mostly about preserving family bonds and connecting to place. the main characters, all white, experience different forms of unbelonging throughout the novel and it is the aboriginal that teaches them how to belong. the portrayal of the black man in these terms brings him closer to the divine and the sacred but at the same time precludes the hardships of the real and the contemporary. the only allusion to the actual situation of the aborigines at the time the novel is set comes through rose, who reminds her father that they did not have the right to vote in western australia in the 1961 federal election (411). the principle of neighbour love is explicitly mentioned by the characters in the last part of the novel: “mum’s principles are work, work and work”, says quick. […] lester took off his glasses a moment: you don’t understand what she works at, do you? […] then [he] pulled a little book out of his shirt pocket the size of a harmonica. he found a page and read: master, which is the great commandment in the law? jesus said unto him, thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. this is the first commandment. and the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona neighbour as thyself. on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (395) at this stage, several things have moved the politics of the novel in the direction of a theology of the neighbour. the relationship between the two families has definitely been transformed, especially through the marriage of rose and quick. their lovemaking in the library and the fact that their son is born there, free the house from its past and open it up to new forms of relating to the other. following the advice of the black angel, sam decides not to sell, and rose and quick, who had bought their own new house in the outskirts, decide in the end to move back to the old place. lester and oriel have regained their faith. the tin fence in the garden is brought down and celebrations are held. the last one, by the river, is the moment fish chooses for his second and definite drowning: “i’m fish lamb for those seconds it takes to die, as long as it takes to drink the river, as long as it took to tell you all this, and then my walls are tipping and i burst into the moon, sun and stars of who i really am. being fish lamb. perfectly. always. everyplace. me” (424). fish’s role as a narrator is asserted prior to the moment of dissolution. in fact, as mcgirr (1999: 87) points out, “the whole story is told in the split second in 1964” when the reunification of fish’s two halves takes place. george watt reads the second stage of this death as an expression of “the elusive concept of nirvana, which relies on the non-dual and the interrelatedness of existence” (2004: 61). besides, fish’s drowning is preceded by a magical moment in which he sees a crowd gathering around the two families —“i can see them in the shade of trees, the river of faces from before, the dark and the light, the forgotten, the silent, the missing” (422)— turning the family party into an all-embracing event. my reading of cloudstreet in the light of levinas and reinhard has consequences for both the notion of the individual and the idea of the nation, since it discloses an appetite for a more inclusive and at the same time more respectful approach to alterity. in the words of murray, “the ‘new tribalism’ of the cloud street house is, by implication, a reformed national space as well, a gesture towards a world that is more supportive and just”. in his opinion, winton’s “acknowledgement that he had to learn that australia contained ‘many ways and many wisdoms’ establishes a viewpoint that extends beyond european notions of the nation” (2003:88). as if to prove this point, the novel ends in a very short fragment by an external narrator that describes oriel folding down her tent with the help of dolly and taking it inside “the big old house whose door stood open, pressed back by the breeze they made in passing” (426; my emphasis), the ways of the sovereign outshone by those of the neighbour. works cited arizti martín, bárbara. 2006. “fathercare in tim winton’s fiction”. hjeas (hungarian journal of english and american studies), revisions of australia: histories, images, identities, 12, 1-2 (fall): 277-286. ben-messahel, salhia. 2006. mind the country: tim winton’s fiction. crawley, western australia: university of western australia press. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona bennet, bruce. 1994. “nostalgia for community: tim winton’s essays and stories”. in haskell, dennis (ed), tilting at matilda: literature, aborigines, women and the church in contemporary australia. south fremantle: fremantle arts centre: 6073. “cloudstreet announced as australia's favourite australian book”. 24 november 2003. at: <http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/media/s1001783.htm>. accessed: 29 april 2012. collins cobuild english language dictionary. 1992 (1987). ed. by john sinclair. london and glasgow: collins. guy, elizabeth. 1996-1997. “a conversation with tim winton”. southerly, 56.4 (summer): 127-33). levinas, emmanuel. 1991 (1969). totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority. the netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. —. 2004 (1974). otherwise than being or beyond essence. pittsburgh, pa: duquesne u.p. linguanti, elsa, francesco casotti and carmen concilio (eds). 1999. coterminous worlds: magical realism and contemporary post-colonial literature in english. amsterdam and atlanta: rodopi. longman dictionary of english language and culture. 1992. ed. by della summers. essex: longman. mcgirr, michael. 1999. tim winton: the writer and his work. south yarra: macmillan education australia. murray, stuart. 2003. “tim winton’s ‘new tribalism’: cloudstreet and community”. kunapipi: journal of post-colonial writing, xxv, 1: 83-93. oxford english reference dictionary. 2006 (1995). ed. by judy pearsall and bill trumble. oxford: oxford u.p. wachtel, eleanor. 1997. “eleanor wachtel with tim winton”. malahat review, 121 (winter): 63-81. watt, george. 2004. “shadows without light: zen and blackfellas in cloudstreet”. nucb jlcc, 6, 1:59-69. watzke, beth. 1991. “where pigs speak in tongues and angels come and go: a conversation with tim winton”. antipodes, 5, 2: 96-98. winton, tim. 1991. cloudstreet. carlton: mcphee gribble. žižek, slavoj, eric l. santner and kenneth reinhard. 2005. the neighbour: three inquiries into political theology. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. acknowledgements: the research carried out for the writing is part of a project financed by the spanish ministry of science and innovation (micinn) and the european regional development fund (erdf) (code hum2007-61035). the author is also thankful for the support of the government of aragón and the european social fund (esf) (code h05). bárbara arizti is senior lecturer at the university of zaragoza. she is the author of the book 'textuality as striptease': the discourses of intimacy in david lodge's changing places and small world, published by peter lang in 2002. in 2007, she edited together with silvia martínez-falquina, the collective volume on the turn: the ethics of fiction in coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona contemporary narrative in english (cambridge scholars publishing). she has also published several articles and book chapters on david lodge, doris lessing, ian mcewan, daniel berrigan, jean rhys, jamaica kincaid, and tim winton. her current field of research is postcolonial literature and criticism, with special emphasis on the relationship between literature and the intimate sphere. she is a member of the research group contemporary narrative in english, funded by the spanish government, and currently working on the literary representations of trauma. microsoft word coola6cami coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 reliquiarum josep m a camí reliquiarum i fou la llum ! quan la llum esvaí el misteri; es va fer el silenci. el silenci engendrà el pensar i el pensament devingué raó. de nou la llum, un segle de llum ! però quan la llum s’imposà desencadenà les tenebres. novament el silenci i amb el silenci el mirar. el mirar engendrà la tècnica que donà a llum a la electricitat. més enllà: la nit, el silenci. d’aquest silenci nasqué la ciència. la ciència cregué enllumenar el tot, però esclatà la desraó. buits ja de misteri, raó, tècnica i ciència, només ens queda el silenci. fou llum o miratge ? aquí el seu reliquiari. copyright © 2011 cami this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 reliquiarum y fue la luz! cuando la luz desvaneció el misterio; se hizo el silencio. el silencio engendró el pensar y el pensamiento devino razón. de nuevo la luz, un siglo de luz! pero cuando la luz se impuso, desencadenó las tinieblas. nuevamente el silencio y con el silencio el mirar. el mirar engendró la técnica que dio a luz a la electricidad. más allá: la noche, el silencio. de aquel silencio nació la ciencia. la ciencia creyó alumbrar el todo, pero estalló la sinrazón. vacios ya de misterio, razón, técnica y ciencia, solo nos queda el silencio. ¿fue luz o espejismo? aquí su relicario. reliquary and there was light! when light revealed the mystery; silence fell. silence gave birth to thought and from thought came reason. light again, a century of light! but when light imposed itself it released darkness. silence again and with silence came vision. vision engendered technology which in turn enabled electricity. but far beyond: night and silence this silence gave birth to science. science attempted to illuminate everything, but unreason broke out. now emptied of mystery, reason, technology and science, all we have left is silence. was it light or a mirage? coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 here is its reliquary. josep m a camí is a senior lecturer in the sculpture department at the escola massana de barcelona affiliated to to the universidad autónoma de barcelona. he has held thirty solo exhibitions and over a hundred collective exhibitions in the european union, the usa and japan. he has public space scultpures in badalona, batea tiene esculturas públicas en badalona, batea, portugal, ecuador, south korea, the lebanon, taiwan and puerto rico. his sculptures are made of stone, bronze, wood and above all wood and he has recently begun to incorporate organic materials. with regard to his personal work: he has worked on conceptual series; de natura mutante (mutant nature), letargies (lethargies), tylopsis (tylopsis),volaverunt (volaverunt), trobes (trobes) and memento (memento) have evolved from a geometrical symbolism to an inherent syntax which latches on to poetic resonances, formal austerity and expressive materials. with sybils’ time , involves a search to enable sculpture to be as diaphanous as prose. artist: camí date: 2004 material: iron, glass and bronze mesurements: 152 x 22 cm microsoft word marshaberry9.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     85  being there: poetic landscapes 1 marsha berry copyright©2013 marsha berry. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: in early 2012, i was invited by pilbara writers group in karratha to make a poetry map for the pilbara region when they saw the poetry 4 u website (http://poetry4u.org ) where poems are pinned to geographic locations. i visited the pilbara june 17 – 23, 2012 to commence the poetry mapping project with members of the pilbara writers group. by walking with video when writers took me to their favourite places i was able to document visceral intersubjective experiences of these places, of being there together, so that i could empathically share the writers’ sense of landscape. this paper discusses what happens when a hodological approach is taken to explore connections and flows between poetic expressions, places and landscapes. keywords: place, landscape, interactive media, digital media, poetry, ethnography, cultural geography, placemarking, placemaking an invitation … stories we can walk into bodily, stories we trace with our feet as well as our eyes. (solnit, 2002: 71) the poetry 4 u: pinning poetry to place project explores the implications of web 2.0, smart phones and location-based technologies such as like gps, google maps for creative writing and arts practices. like many creative projects, poetry 4 u started with an intuition – an impulse to add a poetic layer to a landscape using location based media technologies. in early 2012, i was invited by pilbara writers group in karratha to make a poetry map for the pilbara region when they saw the poetry 4 u website (http://poetry4u.org ) where poems are pinned to geographic locations. i visited the pilbara june 17 – 23, 2012 to commence the poetry mapping project with members of the pilbara writers                                                          1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     86  group. settings are integral to creative writing practices, for as krauth observes in his discussion of the importance of place to writing: we make places make meanings for us – we imbue them that way – yet some places we acknowledge to be already imbued with significance, and to many others, of course, we assign no significance at all. (krauth, 2003: np) the pilbara region comprises 505,000 km2 (abs, 2008). wikipedia describes the pilbara thus: “a large thinly populated region in the north west of western australia known for its aboriginal peoples, its stunning landscapes, the red earth and its vast mineral deposits”. the pilbara contains three distinct geographic formations – the immense coastal plain, mountain ranges inland and an arid desert stretching right to the northern territory border. its topography is characterised by gabbro and granophyte boulder piles ranging in colour from deep orange to purple, and spinifex grasslands. there is a diversity of habitats including snappy gums and hakea, which support various fauna and flora (burbridge et al., 2006). my research agenda on this fieldtrip was twofold: i wanted to document the process of selecting sites for the poetry map as well as to “activate a space and time within which i might engage with and explore issues of landscape” (wylie, 2005: 234) in terms of relationships for placemarking using networked technology and cultural production. this paper discusses what happens when a hodological approach (see argounova-low, 2012) is taken to explore connections and flows between poetic expressions, places and landscapes for as lee and ingold argue, “the locomotive (or getting around) aspect of walking allows for an understanding of places being created by routes” (lee and ingold, 2006: 68). hodology refers to the study of paths. it is a word that has its origins in greek, ‘hodos’, meaning way, road, and journey. argounova-low suggests, “the hodological approach underlines the very flow of both roads and narratives” (2012: 195). i am a native speaker of russian so the term deeply resonated with me because the word ‘hodos’ migrated to russian where it retains a similar meaning but also refers to the act of walking (‘khodit’). as a researcher i felt needed to ‘be there’ to gain and to “invoke the complexities implied by an anthropological use of the phrase – ‘a sense of place’ ” (pink, 2007: 240). furthermore, through ‘being there’ i was able to gain perceptions of place using all of our senses (feld and basso, 1996). pink (2007) suggests walking with video is a way of experiencing place through the sensorium as well as emplacing the senses in order to get an understanding what a place may mean. lee and ingold argue, “the locomotive (or getting around) aspect of walking allows for an understanding of places being created by routes” (lee and ingold, 2006: 68). by walking with video when writers took me to their favourite places i was able to document visceral intersubjective experiences of these places, of being there together, so that i could empathically share the writers’ sense of landscape, which inspires their writing. through walking i engaged with a hodological methodology to explore poetic and narrative connections to landscape. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     87  placing landscape the concepts ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ are conceptualised by and migrate across several disciplines including anthropology, archeology, architecture, fine arts, geography, and literary studies with each discipline adding their particular nuances. meike bal would describe them as travelling concepts because of their transdisciplinarity. according to her, the value of travelling concepts lies in their slipperiness so that “while groping to define, provisionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do” (bal, 2009: 17). (interestingly both landscape and place words can be used as either nouns or verbs.) rather than disambiguating these concepts, in this paper i shall embrace the richness, intersubjectivity and contradictions inherent in the words ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ and treat them as travelling concepts. lyotard, in his essay ‘scapeland’, invokes a notion of landscape that is embodied as well as experiential: landscape is a “vanishing of a standpoint” through “an excess of presence” (lyotard, 1989: 216). lyotard’s landscape is a moment of embodied presence, a state of mind where one is completely immersed in one’s surroundings so that the sense of place ordered by knowledge recedes. so clearly ‘being there’ as defined by anthropologists (geetz, 1988) is an important aspect of landscape. landscape is also constructed through social practices and dwelling whereby “environment manifests itself as landscape only when people create and experience space as a complex of places” (knapp and ashmore, 1999: 21). we construct landscapes, inscribing ourselves into landscapes so that landscape as practice or art practice is forwarded into process, as dynamic rather than either ‘outside’ experience or only focused through the physical character of encounters. (crouch, 2010: 14) being and walking in landscapes has an interior as well as an exterior dynamic so that a “landscape is situated in the expression and poetics of spacing: apprehended as constituted in a flirtatious mode: contingent, sensual, anxious, awkward” (crouch, 2010: 7), in short it is an experience that is mutable, complex and intangible, and it can inspire poeisis (heidegger, 1996). landscapes, then are not static, rather they are fluid constellations of meanings and knowings that shift as we move through them with our feet and eyes as well as our thoughts, worldviews and feelings. how we attribute meaning to landscapes depends on many factors including our cultural capital – our habitus (bourdieu, 1984). some physical environments present landscapes that may be confronting and difficult to make sense of pictorially for a nonindigenous australian gaze because they are situated outside of the day-to-day habitus. the pilbara contains many such landscapes where the horizons are seemingly endless and where there is an absence of verticals to serve as visual markers for orientation. in 2010, five artists, les walkling, tony hewitt, christian fletcher, michael fletcher and peter eastway undertook a project to portray the pilbara through photography and video. mags webster (2011) travelled with them. in order to make sense of her own responses to the landscapes she encountered, she speaks about her need as a writer to record her relationship with the land, to layer it with mythos by referring to fox’s observations about the nevada basin: coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     88  i can’t begin to inhabit the territory we circumscribed until i re-create it in the indefinite territory of my imagination through the act of writing it, relying upon memory and constructing a narrative (fox, 2005: 11). there is an impulse to cling to the familiar, to the already known in order to imagine, that which is before one’s eyes and beneath one’s feet. it is always tempting to create narratives about places we see for the first time in order to contain these newly encountered landscapes within our existing and often tacit epistemologies. landscapes thus are intertextual in that one landscape may evoke others for the beholder. the photograph of the geological formation along with its name presented in the plate below may be read as an example of the intertextuality of landscapes. the road between millstream-chichester national park and roebourne snakes along one of the world’s most ancient plateaus. the geology is breathtaking whereby subtle shifts in the light reveal spectacular new vistas of mesas. the locals know the formation the photograph above as pyramid hill (figure 1). when i was told this i could not help but think that the text of an alien ancient history with its echoes of pharaonic egyptian glory had been superimposed over this landscape and how such a naming of a specific geological formation on the pilbara plain could be interpreted as a remnant of the erroneous and damaging colonial notion of australia as terra nullius. the landscape of the pilbara is inundated with the flows of this colonial construction of the australian landscape. the number of contested land rights claims in the region is evidence of this. the narratives and imaginaries conjured in naming places (fox, 2005) may detract from the experience of a landscape with its multiplicies and connections yet paradoxically, these narratives also can add to the sense of being there in a specific space. figure 1: pyramid hill (photograph by marsha berry) coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     89  intangibles in place massey (2005) theorises space as interrelated flows, energies and things renders. she explores the multiplicity of space through the connectedness and dynamics of things so that it is impossible to ‘go back’ anywhere because of change to both the places and the people experiencing them so that “it is always in the process of being made. it is never finished; never closed” (massey, 2005: 9). this notion has kinship with ingold’s protest against the “anthropological cliché” (2010: s122) that the landscape is extrinsic “leaving individuals stranded in an unspecified ‘environment’ which is invoked merely for the purposes of allowing the body to have something material to interact with” (ingold, 2010: s123). the landscape instead is a “region of the body’s very existence, without which no knowing or remembering would be possible” (ingold, 2010: s122). so, what does being in landscapes mean and what role can poetic maps play in drawing attention to the landscape? the desert has been a rich site for poetic narratives and has been used as a trope for exile, self-discovery and alienation. many writers have constructed it as a character in its own right. the starkness of deserts is associated with abjuring the “normal human desire for ease an abundance” (tuan, 1974: 51) so that asceticism becomes a path to epiphanic encounters. the trope of the desert as a place that tests the purity of faith has a long history in western cosmologies based on the biblical tradition, which is a part of our cultural capital (bourdieu, 1984). these traditions migrated to australia and still play a significant role in the ways we imagine the outback, of which the pilbara is a part. haynes (1998) observes that in the 1930s and 40s, through the images of the desert painted by sidney nolan and russell drysdale, it became “a powerful local metaphor for existential angst and a modernist perception of spiritual poverty in both the individual and the nation” (haynes, 1998: 5). the themes of exile, self-discovery and epiphany figured prominently in the conversations i had with writers during the field trip, which suggests that the desert remains a powerful meme in the australian imagination. desert landscapes may also be places of hidden dangers for the uninitiated. when i walked towards the fortescue river i thought about how an unknowing traveller could stumble right over the edge and fall down the gorge (figure 2). it is almost invisible until you are almost upon it. i stood several metres back from the edge to film, hoping that my video would show at least a part of the river’s overwhelming beauty, its ability to reduce humans to awe. the fortescue river is a place that erases standpoints (lyotard, 1989), it is a poetic landscape imbued with a surfeit of presence that is also imbricated in the stories fundamental to australian indigenous law and culture for the gorge was made by the rainbow serpent. the story told by wimiya king explains: long ago, a sea serpent became angry with two boys. that was at millstream. the two boys had cooked and eaten a mulga parrot, which was forbidden. the rainbow serpent smelled the singed feathers of the burnt bird, and came out from the sea, travelling inland. he came from the north and made a deep trench in the land, cutting it in half, creating what is now the fortescue river. (juluwalu aboriginal corporation, 2007: vii) coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     90  i was walking in a landscape where indigenous stories are woven through the land. as i walked with my video camera, i recollected reading the account of a navajo poet driving through his land where “rocks are songs dappled with ancient starlight, suns, wind, and rain” (bitsui, 2011: 28). here too the rocks seemed imbued with so much history of human habitation – over 40,000 years. i stood in this spot with my guide who defined herself as a desert girl. she told me about her recent hobby of bird watching. she identified it as a way in which she could feel a sense of kinship with pilbara landscapes. as we stood together, she pointed out a whistling kite and asked me if that was the type of bird i had seen hovering in the sky that morning, just after dawn near her place. it was. she confided her ambition to capture each bird of the pilbara in a haiku. birds were an integral part of the landscape for her as well as a source of poetic inspiration. the sight of the whistling kite propelled us both right into the landscape, into its presence to exclusion of all other standpoints (lyotard, 1989). for me now, the fortescue river is overlaid not only with the yindjibarndi story of the rainbow serpent but also with a magical whistling kite hovering, scanning the ground below for a meal before flying towards the horizon and vanishing into the air. in that moment, the landscape of the fortescue river became vertical and timeless for us (tuan, 1974). figure 2: fortescue river (photograph by marsha berry) we continued our journey to millstream pool. through walking together along the tracks we were able to see place itself as a sensory phenomenon and i could empathically sense what was important to my guide (feld and basso, 1996; pink, 2007). sensory immersion in the landscape reminded me that it is never possible to describe an experience in its entirety (husserl 1932/52). we were both acutely aware that this landscape had aspects beyond our cognitive understanding. paul taçon (1999) has discussed the levels of sacredness layered over landscapes in australia whereby as people gain different levels of knowledge through initiation, they receive access to coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     91  sacred landscapes and sites. my guide was not indigenous but had a rich knowledge of the cultural significance of the landscape. we were walking through a storied or literary landscape where the traces of those who’ve walked here before remained. crang suggests, “literary landscapes are best thought of as a combination of literature and landscape”(crang, 1999: 57). the paths along which i was walking towards the pool with my video were “conduits along which narratives, memory and knowledge flow” (argounova-low, 2012: 191-2). the landscapes the paths traverse have immense spiritual significance for indigenous peoples in australia. many of these stories include the rainbow serpent (juluwarlu, 2007). the yindjibarndi name for millstream pool is chinderwarriner pool. the pool is described as an increase or rainmaking site: this increase site is in chinderwarriner pool, near millstream homestead. the actual site is a termite mound submerged near the small island in the middle of the pool. … because it’s underwater, you have to dive into the pool to work this site. to perform the ceremony that brings rain the yurala (rainmaker) puts their arms around the mound, takes some water from the pools in their mouth and spits it out again. they ask the site to bring rain, and tell it where and when they want it to fall. … this site is one of two rainmaking sites, and is connected to the rainmaking treeswhich are found near chinderwarriner pool. (juluwarlu aboriginal corporation, 2007: 38) later in the day i met with people at the juluwarlu aboriginal corporation in roebourne. i was there to conduct a poetry workshop for them and to talk about poetry maps. we had conversations about the yindjibarndi country encompassing the millstream-chichester national park. their delight in their ngurra (country) was obvious as we conversed about impressions of the millstream chichester national park. in the workshop, the yindjibarndi elder tootsie wrote the poem below to express her feelings about being in her country. dedication song he stands and looks as far as the eyes can see! the soft breeze of his country welcomes his presence, the soft gentle breeze and the tree and birds make joyful noise of his welcoming visit to the country. proudly he stands, sings his song, this is my country, the place i belong! (© tootsie 2012) coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     92  the juluwarlu people enjoyed the poetry workshop and the process of learning a form of poetry that engages with place (haiku). in the evening i conducted a workshop for the pilbara writers. there too, we engaged in lengthy dialogues about places in the pilbara and what they meant to each of the participants. they were excited about the poetry map where their poems would be pinned to a google map for the whole world to see and appreciate. i had memory cards filled with video footage i had shot while being shown special places and a notebook filled with observations. it was time to leave the pilbara due to other academic commitments. i bade the ancient plateau farewell. my next steps were to reflect upon and analyse the experience as well as the evidence in the form of video footage and interviews. i also had a poetry map to build for the pilbara writers. poetic placemarking later, when i had returned to melbourne, i began to transcribe the video and to think about how i could use the shaky handheld footage to create my own visual poetic expression of this unique landscape. my expressive aim was to convey a sense of the intangible magic of yindjibarndi country. i chose double exposures as a dominant compositing aesthetic and poetic device to suggest the dynamics of landscape as a series vanishing of standpoints (figure 3). ambient music provides a soundscape to invite the viewer to meditate on the images that unfold in the video. the full video may be viewed at https://vimeo.com/48191634. figure 3: still from the video place of increase (marsha berry) i have also commenced the process of pinning poems from the pilbara writers to a map. the map may be accessed at http://poetry4u.org/pilbara/ (figure 4) users can click on coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     93  the pins to see the poetry evoked by landscapes in the pilbara. below is an example of a short form poem exploring a specific geographic place. hodology or the study of paths (argounova-low, 2012) has proved to be a fruitful avenue to contemplate the relationships between landscapes, places and poetic expressions. it also provided a way to be there in place and ponder the intangibles of being there. it has resulted in a novel way of publishing poetry that is pinned to representations of physical geography that engages with cultural and spiritual geography. the ambiguities i commenced with remain yet i think that the gathering together poetic expressions of place add to the richness of understandings of landscape. i was in the pilbara with a visitor’s perspective, which gave me a simple and easily stated viewpoint that is “essentially aesthetic” (tuan, 1974: 64). it also enabled me to contribute a “fresh perspective” (tuan, 1974: 65). time was an issue for me during my sojourn because my hosts wanted to show me as much of their pilbara as they could during the limited time i was there. they wanted to know what i was making of what they could show me. i went along with their flow. if i were to do the project again, i would do it differently. i would slow down time so that i could stand longer with my camera to frame shots and simply sit with a camera perched on a tripod capturing a landscape over an extended time while we meditated and wrote poetry about a specific place. yet this is the nature of fieldwork undertaken in short bursts between teaching semester, and it is always impossible to express all of the phenomena observed, for as husserl so eloquently stated: even an experience (erlebnis) is not, and never is, perceived in its completeness, it cannot be grasped adequately in its full entirety. it is essentially something that flows, and starting from the present moment we swim after it, our gaze reflectively turning towards it, whilst the stretches we leave in our wake are lost to our perception. (husserl, 1932/52:140). now as i sit writing this, looking back over my experience, i reflect on the efficacy of my research agenda, which was to document the process of choosing sites for the digital map and to create a space for myself to explore landscape – materially and philosophically. i also reread the call that motivated me to write this essay. porteous issued a challenge in 1985, for geography to remain silent because prose cannot convey a true appreciation of geography; therefore, geography should use poetry and other forms of nontraditional writing to express itself. i chose to explore landscape, to express my appreciation of geography through a visual video poem of my own and by bringing together the poetry of others in a website dedicated to poetry about place. i am in the process of building the pilbara writers poetry map using google map pins and i am treating the poetry as evidence of people’s perceptions of place and the landscape in which they dwell (heidegger, 1996). this is an ongoing and open-ended project that will deepen knowledge about how people express their experiences of being in a place; about the dynamics of space; and, how they construct landscape. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     94  figure 4: screenshot of pilbara poetry map (project content by marsha berry; map © 2011 google) so, how can creative practice combined with ethnography contribute new knowledge to the field of cultural geography and vice versa? what new knowledge emerges from this approach? the evidence from the poems contributed to the website suggests that our understandings of place are temporal as well as spatial. i have found that by invoking the imagination through the use of poetic devices, spaces are created to increase the public’s engagement where perceptions and relationships to geographic environments may be altered. the evidence i have gathered so far in this research suggests that poetic expressions of place and landscape, particularly those that invoke landscape as a complex and dynamic system that is physical, cultural and spiritual, enable new ways of understanding the places we inhabit. the new knowledge that emerges from this approach is that creative practices and associated cultural production including poetry, photography and video art uncover intangible connections to landscape that often remain outside of scientific evidence based research paradigms. porteous (1985) was quite right in his intuition that geography should embrace nontraditional forms of writing in order to reflexively understand itself better. furthermore, by engaging with geographic ways of knowing, creative practice expands its fields to generate new expressions and artifacts that interrogate ways of being in the world. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     95  references argounova-low t (2012) narrating the road, landscape research, 37(2): 191 – 206. bal m (2009) working with concepts, european journal of english studies 13(1), 13 – 23. berry m, goodwin o and rendle-short f (2011) poetry 4 u http://poetry4u.org (accessed 18 january 2013). bitsui s (2011) converging wor[l]ds: nizhoni bridges and southwest native communities. in coles k (ed) blueprints: bring poetry into communities, salt lake city: university of utah press with poetry foundation. bourdieu p (1984) distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. burbridge a, mckenzie n, van leeuwen s, gibson l, doughty p, guthrie n, durrant b, and pearson d (2006) between rock and a hard place: rich biological patterns amongst ancient red rocks. landscope 21(3): 13–19. crang m (1998) cultural geography. london: routledge. crouch d (2010) flirting with space: thinking landscape relationally. cultural geographies 17(1): 5 – 18. feld s and basso k (eds) (1996) senses of place. santa fe: school of american research press. fox wl (2005) the void, the grid & the sign: traversing the great basin. reno: university of nevada (press paperback edition). geetz c (1988) works and lives: the anthropologist as author. stanford: stanford university press. haynes, rd (1998) seeking the centre: the australian desert in literature, art and film. cambridge: cambridge university press. heidegger m (1996) being and time. albany: state university of new york press. husserl e (1932/52) ideas: general introduction to pure phenomenology. london: allen & unwin. ingold t (2010) footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing, knowing. journal of the royal anthropological institute (n. s.): s121 – s139. juluwarlu aboriginal corporation (2007) ngurra warndurala buluyugayi: exploring yindjibarndi country. roeburne: juluwarlu aboriginal corporation. knapp ab and ashmore w (1999) archeology of landscape; constructed, conceptualized, ideational. in ashmore w and knapp ab (eds) archeology of landscape: contemporary perspectives. london: blackwell. krauth n (2003) four writers and their settings, text journal 7(1). lee j and ingold t (2006) fieldwork on foot: perceiving, routing, socializing. in coleman s and collins p (eds) locating the field. space, place and context in anthropology. oxford: berg. lyotard j-f (1989) the lyotard reader. oxford: basil blackwell massey d (2005) for space. london: sage pink s (2007) walking with video. visual studies, 22(3): 240 – 252. porteous jd (1985) literature and humanist geography. area, 17(2): 117 – 122. solnit r (2002) wanderlust: a history of walking. london: verso. taçon p (1999) identifying ancient sacred landscapes in australia: from physical to social. in ashmore w and knapp ab (eds) archeology of landscape: contemporary perspectives. london: blackwell. tuan yf (1974) topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes and values. new york: columbia press. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     96  webster m (2011) measuring the land: five days in the pilbara. http://www.thepilbaraproject.com/larry-mitchell-exhibition (accessed 30 august 2012) wylie j (2005) a single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the south west coast path. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 30(2): 234 – 247. acknowledgements the pilbara writers group provided invaluable assistance and was the catalyst for this project. special thanks go to delphine macfarlane and sharon payne. special thanks also go to lorraine coppin and michael woodley for inviting me to conduct a poetry workshop with the juluwarlu aboriginal corporation. funding support for the fieldtrip from the media and communication school, rmit university is gratefully acknowledged. i would also like to acknowledge bill boyd’s editorial support and insightful comments. marsha berry is a senior lecturer in the school of media and communication at  rmit  university  where  she  lectures  in  digital  media  and  creative  writing  for  undergraduate degrees. marsha supervises postgraduate research students across  a  range  of  topics  concerned  with  new  media  arts,  narrative,  design,  social  and  mobile media. she has numerous publications in highly regarded international and  national journals and has won international competitive research grants. her art  practice  includes  poetry,  video  art,  and  new  media.  recently  she  has  explored  notions of memory, place and displacement through video art, photography and  poetry. marsha’s current research investigates social media cultures, perceptions  of  place  and  landscape,  and  poetic  expressions.  her  approach  is  ethnographic.  (school  of  media  and  communication,  rmit  university,  australia.  email:  marsha.berry@rmit.edu.au)  microsoft word 1introduction.doc coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction to food for afterthought martin renes as the guest editor of the present issue of coolabah (no. 5, 2011), entitled food for afterthought, i have had the honour and pleasure of dealing with a series of challenging essays derived from the congress food for thought, held from 1st to 5th february 2010 at the university of barcelona. this event was organised by the australian studies centre of the university of barcelona, spain, together with the centre for peace and social justice of the university of southern cross, lismore, australia, directed by dr susan ballyn and dr baden offord respectively. their commitment and work front and backstage both in barcelona as well as in australia are responsible for the range and depth of this international conference. indeed, food for thought forms part of a cycle of congresses on australian studies that started out commuting between australia and spain, but since 2008 have had barcelona as their one and only venue, without losing their original international and interdisciplinary appeal and objective. in line with this broad focus, the 2010 edition of the cycle gathered an international group of scholars from different academic backgrounds who exchanged professional expertise and points of view on a great variety of topics, thematically linked as ‘food for thought’. nearly fifty papers were read in single panel sessions, of which nine were key notes by renowned intellectuals—bill ashcroft, john dowd, lucy frost, marcia langton, gloria montero, baden offord, cynthia vanden driesen, terri-ann white with joan london, and adrien wing. a special note should be made of the presence of indigenous-australian subject matter in the congress, addressed by 40% of the delegates as bill ashcroft calculated, showing that the field of indigenous studies is at the thriving centre of australian academic attention. therefore, i would especially like to acknowledge dr marcia langton’s presence at, and contribution to food for thought. all congress delegates received an invitation to rework their papers into journal-length articles incorporating the comments and feedback they had received during the event, and submit them for publication in a double-blind peer-reviewed volume. nearly half responded, and the result of their effort is the present coolabah issue, food for afterthought, which mostly elaborates on material presented at the congress, although two contributions (maccallum, offord) represent completely new material. to cater for this quantity and variety, the coolabah review board was expanded accordingly. i copyright©2011 martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 would like to thank all our contributors and peer reviewers for their time and effort to make the publication of this selection of essays possible. organising these essays into discrete blocks for publication proves delicate and somewhat at odds with the boundary-crossing spirit of the congress. ‘food for thought’ as a scholarly theme lends itself to literal as well as figurative interpretations, and contributions have played along this continuum. some contributions take food as their point of departure for academic research and assessment, be they reflections on agriculture, cooking, herbalism, political activism or philosophy (avila e.a., brien, camps & grau, llauradó, maccallum, serra, wessel). others consider food as a basic ingredient of the literary entourage, tracing and analysing the role it plays in different genres of fiction (alonso, holden, rahbek, morera de la vall, phillips). a last group uses the conference theme to produce food for thought in an abstract sense, provoking reflection on a variety of themes relating to the humanities; they address linguistics, music history, world literature, indigenous studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies and anthropology, and are not limited to australia’s geographical scope (baumer & van rensburg, bonastre, bosch, conway, everett, gibson, mallari, offord, seguro, vanden driesen). yet, connections among these three groups of texts are also easily established, be they geographical, cultural, political etc., which would justify any other kind of regrouping. following up on the interdisciplinary and transcultural character of the congress, it seems logical therefore to serve the articles written for this volume non-hierarchically as a kind of buffet in which each can make their own pick and enjoy those combinations of texts that result most nourishing to them. the essays come provided with abstracts, so that one can have a preliminary taste before reading, and make the most convenient choices so as to fill their plate with food for afterthought. please be our guest and savour the flavours and textures of rich thinking. march 2011 martin renes holds a phd in english by the university of barcelona and is assistant lecturer for the literature section of its department of english. his main area of interest is the study of film and novels from a postcolonial point of view. he dedicated his minor thesis to contemporary mainstream fiction dealing with the cultural interface of indigenous and non-indigenous australia, and his doctoral thesis explored the uncanny aspects of rewriting australianness through indigenous literature. he is vice-director of the university of barcelona’s interdisciplinary observatory: australian studies centre. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 reflections on an australian fantasy: constructing the impossible john ryan nsw english teachers association jnwlrn@gmail.com copyright©2016 john ryan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the following article explores the importance of fantasy as an important literary form. i specifically focus on the social function of fantasy genre texts produced in the australian context to address the following key questions. first, is there such a thing as australian fantasy? and second, what are the ethical considerations and issues around the use of aboriginal and european mythic systems to provide non-indigenous writers with their material for creating fantasy worlds? key words: australian fantasy, difference, ethics, eurocentric, genre, imagination as an educator in the new south wales secondary school system, i find the experience of teaching fantasy to be frequently problematic. in fact, catering to the extraordinary diversity of students i teach and trying to decide just what is it that characterises australian fantasy, given that australian culture is so diverse, is a challenge to any educator. there is also a third issue to be considered namely, in order to bring fantasy texts to my teaching practice, i also have to consider what is fantasy and what is it for? after all, when you assemble a body of texts into something as porous and osmotic as a genre, you have the opportunity to consider whether there is significance to the total works loosely bundled together by their emphatic focus on the imaginary. the students i teach are aged from 12 to 18 years and bring to the school context a diversity of cultural and literary repertoires, talents and gifts. class, colour, sexuality and gender all shape student’s engagement with formal education. in some cases students are isolated from their peers and the wider culture. they may live in remote places, located far from the metropole; and may not have access to effective internet connections. this means they are disenfranchised from engaging with wider world issues but also, they have not heard of interactive fantasy games like assassins creed or final fantasy. of the students i teach, a quarter are aboriginal australians who bring indigenous perspectives and experience to mailto:jnwlrn@gmail.com coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 their schooling. as well, there are many students whose identities are shaped by their multicultural backgrounds. some of these young people have broad and self-reflexive reading and viewing patterns; they know what they like and why, are capable if not always willing, to challenge themselves by reading outside their comfort zone and can articulate and share the value of texts in shaping their identities and indeed, they create their own imaginative works and worlds. for other students, the idea of quietly engaging in the meditation of reading and writing seems alien and pointless. in this diverse educational context the question, is there such as thing as australian fantasy, is both interesting and problematic because in one sense we are posing the question: is there a fantasy genre in australia that reflects the complexity of cultures and power structures that make up australian society? also, if there is, what does it offer to readers in australia, as well as beyond our borders? the notion of a genre as defined by nation or geography has been raised before and, as n. okarafor suggests when he asks, “‘can you define african science fiction?’ any definition that is imposed upon individuals is problematic: self-identification is really the only acceptable route” (2012: 180). in my own context, as a teenager, growing up in a small town in regional australia, the sense of isolation and disconnection from the landscape was powerful and existential. so too was the sense of a wider world. i recall that fantasy provided a promise of imaginative connection to nature and super-nature. it was a relief to discover divergences from the mundane world around me. fantasy intimated other ways of being and relating and gave me a sense there were rich alternatives to the straightjacket of ordinary life. one could see difference as both worthwhile and charming. i could create myself, look to the daring, courageous and brave characters in fantasy novels and, as socrates allegedly said, be who you want to seem. a further appeal in fantasy for readers such as myself is to be found in the moral lessons that the texts contain. the novels i read, however, were american rather than australian publications: ursula le guin’s, a wizard of earthsea, marion zimmer bradley, whose darkover novels blurred the generic borderland with science fiction, and andre norton’s witchworld series are some that come to mind. all of these inspired me to see the world i lived in as intricate and imbricated with meanings that i might one day experience more fully. in a sense one of the central ideas in fantasy is the sense of promise it evokes. a further underpinning value of the genre is the representation of the natural world as important and to be nurtured. my own attitude to the landscape around me, and the sense of personal dislocation i felt, was representative of a persistent colonial narrative in the national imaginary that has seen australia as a site of exile and punishment since the arrival of europeans on the continent; home was elsewhere, home was england. david malouf has referred to australian settler society as having an existential belonging with the landscape; our belonging is a notbelonging. by way of an example, malouf quotes poet judith wright: “except for the wattle … there is very little mention of australian trees, flowers or birds in australian verse in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.” malouf considers that “this is because there was as coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 yet no place for them in the world of verse. currawong and banksia carried no charge of emotion like ‘nightingale’ or ‘rose’” (1998). it is no surprise then that australian fantasy authors, like their readers, have looked to europe to inspire and shape their stories. in particular they have drawn their iconography from celtic mythologies to create rich fantasy worlds. fairy kingdoms, witches, feudal hierarchies, the power of iron, magic realms, oak, and silver birch trees; lore and discipline: all of them singularly non indigenous to australia, are a part of that ongoing colonial legacy. authors such as richard flanaghan and celia dart-thornton have based their original imaginative worlds in a mythos that is easily recognisable as european. indeed, one marker of an australian fantasy genre, is to be found in its implicit links to the colonial mind as if it were a psychic connection to ‘home’ and ameliorating the sense of exile felt by those first white settlers and internalised in national discourses. so, although the growing sense of a distinctive australian national identity needing to be debated — and problematized — by the complex cultural composition of our population — has characterised the final decades of the 20th century, the fantasy genre has remained largely a conservative enterprise; imperialistic and hegemonic. fantasy worlds are usually a mix of feudal and hetero-normative social structures and themes often simplistically representing good and evil as aligning with traditional concepts of unreflective family loyalty. the tendency to reproduce linear quest narrative structures is a further marker of the work generally produced and as i invite my own students to challenge eurocentric assumptions about the world, it seems to me that academic critique of australian fantasy is well overdue. a survey of fantasy titles, especially those aimed at young adults — and most fantasy is — seems to validate these generalisations about the genre. that fresh and innovative writing is possible and commercially viable is not a debate. british author patrick ness’s works, in particular a monster calls and his chaos walking trilogy reinscribe fantasy genre writing. ness walks away from simplistic models of heteronormativity and whiteness and tackles real world issues to ask powerful questions about the social function of fantasy. as ursula le guin says, “ right now i think we need writers who can see the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art” (2014). recently, australian author garth nix has attempted to do more than follow the conservative pattern of much australian fantasy. in his old kingdom series, nix has interpolated real world situations. on the border between two countries are asylum seekers. displaced and seeking refuge these people are manipulated by politicians and used as pawns in a dangerous international land grab. the two countries are ancelstierre, a nonmagical state whose name echoes of the angles and saxons; and the old kingdom, where the disturbance of other, magical boundaries — those between life and death — are the focus of the main plot. although nix’s inclusion of asylum seekers is at best a secondary plot, it does bring a significant contemporary debate to the attention of his teenage audience and provides an opportunity for meaningful reflection on displaced peoples around the globe as well as australia’s much criticised border control policies. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 there is an ethical enterprise in nix’s work here that is, according to le guin, the real function of fantasy. le guin characterises fantasy as a vital imaginative space for offering alternative ways of being to provide alternatives to the disquieting sense of inevitability and powerlessness many people and i think, young people in particular, feel about the future. she says: i think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives and who can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds of hope. we will need writers who can remember freedom, the realists of a larger reality. (2014) at a time when students often express their disenchantment with politics and business, le guin demonstrates her ongoing engagement with the enabling possibilities of the genre. in self-reflexive works such as the ones who walk away from omelas and always coming home, (itself a hybrid between several genres including fantasy), she disturbs passive readers’ acceptance of the ideology of texts — challenging them; “is this too good to be true, this ideal society…” in line with post-modern sensibilities that the reader is capable and should be encouraged to think and challenge what they are told, le guin asks us; “what stand will we take?” her texts are ecological, feminist, decolonising, philosophical, and above all, ethical: they remind us of the best that fantasy can offer — it is life-affirming, ethical and an immensely plastic medium for thoughtful investigation of, as le guin says, other ways of being. this is not to say there are no examples of such thoughtful work by australian authors. we have already mentioned garth nix’ old kingdom series. however it would be impossible to consider australian fantasy without referencing the work of patricia wrightson, a writer who has attempted to honour the continent and its indigenous traditions however complex the issues around this enterprise have been. in a sense this regional australian fantasy author from lismore in the north of nsw, not far from where i live and teach, has been singularly significant in her attempt to write uniquely australian fantasy: “patricia wrightson’s books, the nargun and the stars (1973) and the wirrun trilogy (1977-81) won numerous awards when first published…” (butler 226). indeed the trilogy “present[s] a fluctuant boundary between the magical and the ordinary, incorporating aboriginal lore into the story of a young person’s quest, with animated nature and indigenous creatures as helpers and adversaries” (nikolajeva 58). however wrightson’s incorporation of indigenous subjects and mythos in her work was seen as problematic; “…her use of aboriginal myth has since been criticised by those who see in it an appropriation of indigenous culture, and recent australian writers such as garth nix have found themselves warned off from using aboriginal material” (butler 226). at the forefront of the criticism are legitimate concerns around an ongoing experience by aboriginal australians of being ventriloquised by a paternalistic white culture. stolen generations, systematic and ongoing neo-colonial controls of aboriginal families, towns, coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 language, landscape and education are all part of the ongoing event of colonisation. and as such, settler society’s hijacking and reinscribing aboriginal cultural stories without negotiation or understanding has a context: it is another act of stealing. indigenous aboriginal author, yaritji green writes of “the complex negotiations with the elders over the ‘ownership’ of culture in a context in which stories belong to specific groups, and of the uneasiness over publishing even the results of these negotiations.” green has said that she is “still working on the differences between indigenous copyright (which, for her peoples, follows land boundaries) and general australian copyright (which follows date of publication and doesn’t give stories copyright, only the words of the telling)” (qtd in okarafor 180). in 1994, over two decades after her wirrun trilogy, wrightson returned to aboriginal australian subjects to negotiate the terrain between cultures in an inspired novel for young adults. titled shadows in time, the book creates a hybrid space for narrative when two children, an aboriginal boy and a colonial servant girl, both runaways from their cultures, journey together in the dreaming. as centuries pass, they are witnesses to the change that takes place on the east coast of the australian continent. it is a remarkable book that represents a narrative solution to mirror the author’s quest for an authentic outsider status. “the novel is … a coda to her major work, reasserting the mutability of cultures and her right as an artist to let her imagination flow where it will” (macleod in finch: 2010). wrightson’s approach, to generate characters, children, as witnesses to time, is a useful text to offer students. not only does it contextualise the movement of chronological, western time within the frame of the ontological space of the dreaming, it also acknowledges a spiritual displacement central to both aboriginal and settler communities since 1788. brian attebery observes of wrightson’s body of work that she cannot restore the original context for mythic stories, but she can create new contexts – as living cultures themselves do constantly… [wrightson’s] job, as a writer, is to work out in fictional form her own relationship with australia’s troubled history and haunted landscape. her strategy has been to bring wirrun and other characters to share the task, going where she cannot go. these fictional collaborators remind readers that we need to invite other collaborators, fictional and real, to help us extend the quest for understanding beyond the boundaries of the text itself. (attebery in finch: 2010) in the australian high school context, the encounter with wrightson’s work provides a useful teaching opportunity for deep discussions with my students about their own relationships to place and culture: australian fantasy provides the space for this conversation but wrightson’s text is also useful in considering the ethical questions around ownership of stories in the case of this person who is arguably australia’s most famous fantasy writer. this may act to dispel “‘the idea that she might have been just another one in a long line of exploiters of indigenous people’ while at the same time forcing us to consider the complex and uncomfortable connections between storytelling and the legacy of colonialism” (macleod in finch: 2010). coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 it is also interesting to consider wrightson’s pioneering role as a female author of fantasy in australia when such commercial successes by women have remained largely inspired by a europe-inspired fantasy landscape. one of the most unexpected developments of the last decade has been the domination of the popular fantasy genre by australian women (and some men). the first of these was sarah douglas, whose first novel, battleaxe (us: the wayfarer redemption) was published in 1995, and who has to date completed five fantasy trilogies. others include celia dart -thornton, whose novels make extensive use of english folklore; ian irvine, whose three worlds cycle is on the borderlands of science fiction; and glenda larke, whose well-imagined fantasy world is inspired by indonesia [and malaysia] where she worked and lived for some years. (james 76) larke’s work is reminiscent of iconic novels of encounter where the template of nonwestern cultures is used to evoke the fantastic. her series, the mirage makers and the forsaken lands resonate with the classic accounts of balinese culture, vicki baum’s love and death in bali (1937) and more recently, nigel barley’s island of dreams (2009). both of these novels represent the animistic cultural complexity of the island; it is a world inhabited by spirits and all human activities are shaped by the interrelationship with the spirit and natural worlds. larke’s landscapes draw on aspects of this south east asian iconography. her novels reference mangroves and tropical seas; architecture that opens onto gardens; bahasa vocabulary for names (honorifics such as rani, raja, and names, such as the word kris, a dagger, pisang, banana) and cultural practices all work to create a distinctly non-european form of fantasy. the controversy of appropriating another’s culture however, still carries with it questions around exoticising and orientalising that are no less ethically challenging than non aboriginal authors using aboriginal mythology to write their own fantasy stories. if there is a distinctive australian fantasy genre: that is, one that is charged with the same diversity that characterises my students, one would imagine it would do more than look to europe. i would like to think it would not simply borrow from aboriginal australia or our neighbours in other parts of the world. at present however, i only know of one australian writer whose imaginative writing creates hybrid worlds that defy location. in margo lanagan’s short story collection, black juice (2004) we encounter dangerous children in spaces that may be some version of present day prague or dalian; there is a story about cultural practice and musical instruments — we could, but may not be, in a drought-riven village in africa; or perhaps we are not far from the coast in papua new guinea. the angels in her work and those who meet with them are neither biblical nor babylonian. fairies and feudal hierarchies do exist in lanagan’s oeuvre, but they take their place in an authorial space for writing that seems both experimental and intuitive: a space where elephants, with long, tonal names that may or may not be thai or laotian or sri lankan, narrate liberation narratives. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 in lanagan’s case, the imaginary is a space for the practice of art to provide, re-iterating le guin, “other ways of being, and even imagine some grounds for hope … realists of a larger reality” (2014). when i was a teenager in country australia, i read fantasy as a place of possibility. if a distinctive australian fantasy genre is emergent in contemporary australia, lanagan’s black juice may be what it looks like. in it she offers a creative and evolving mirror inspired by the diverse worlds that reflect the multiplicity of traditions and perspectives in the australian population. bibliography butler, c. “modern children’s fantasy.” the cambridge companion to fantasy literature, eds. edward jones and farah mendlesohn. cambridge university press: cambridge, 2012. 224-235. finch, m. ‘patricia wrightson, part 4: shadows of time’. http://booksadventures.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/patricia-wrightson. 2010 james, e. “tolkien, lewis and the explosion of genre fantasy.” the cambridge companion to fantasy literature, eds. edward jones and farah mendlesohn. cambridge university press: cambridge, 2012. 62-78. james, e. & mendlesohn, f. “introduction.” the cambridge companion to fantasy literature, eds. edward jones and farah mendlesohn. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012. 1-4. lanagan, m. black juice. allen & unwin: sydney, 2004. larke, g. the forsaken lands: the dagger’s path. orbit books: london, 2015. larke, g. the mirage makers. harper-collins: sydney, 2006. le guin, u. “books are just commodities.” acceptance speech at the national book awards. new york city, 2014. malouf, d. “a spirit of play: the making of australian consciousness: a complex fate.” the boyer lectures. abc radio national. 1998. nikolajeva, m. “the development of children’s fantasy.” the cambridge companion to fantasy literature, eds edward jones and farah mendlesohn. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012. 50-61. nix, g. the old kingdom series. allen & unwin. sydney, 2003. okarafor, n. “writers of colour.” the cambridge companion to fantasy literature, eds edward jones and farah mendlesohn. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012. 179-189. wrightson, p. shadows of time. puffin books: london, 1995. john ryan is head of english at southern cross distance education school and president of the north coast branch of the nsw english teachers association. he has published widely in the field of human rights education, and most recently, “peacebuilding education: enabling human rights and social justice through cultural studies pedagogy” with baden offord. in 2011 he was a member of the nsw higher school certificate english exam committee. http://booksadventures.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/patricia-wrightson microsoft word coola6itabishi coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 caressing with the tongue 3. toshie itabashi on the one hand, the sculpture “caressing with the tongue” responds to my instinctive way of understanding form in its organic expression, originating from nature. on the other hand, it responds to a tactile understanding. touch in this case does not mean responding by physically touching but rather intuitively recognizing the shape with the tongue and teeth. my interest in the motif of teeth understood as a sculpted theme is closely related to the concept of family. family understood as an organic legacy which we cannot choose, every individual must inevitably have a family. using an number of molar and other teeth to represent the family refers us not only to the act of living together but also to hunger, chewing, biting … in short the dangerous equilibrium within family structures. toshie itabashi. born in japan, she studied sculpture at the llotja de barcelona graduating in 1995 she has held important solo exhibitions in barcelona and yokohama and has collaborated with the galería hartmann. her work has been shown in a number of cities among them madrid, lisbon and barcelona. she has taken part in international scultpure symposiums in france and spain. the renowned collection “nostromo” has one of her pieces in their permanent exhibition. copyright © 2011 toshie itabashi this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 acariciando con la lengua. caressing with the tongue 2010 madera y alabastro. wood and alabaster 80 x 70 x 70 cm. http://tallerbdn.cat/cat acariciant amb la llengua 3. toshie itabashi. la escultura “acariciando con la lengua” responde , en primer lugar, a mi manera instintiva de entender la forma en su expresión orgánica, originaria en la naturaleza, y en segundo lugar en su aprehensión a través del tacto. el tacto, en este caso, no pretende recurrir al acto de tocar a través de las manos sino a la intuición de reconocer la forma con la lengua, con los dientes. mi interés por el motivo de los dientes entendido como tema escultórico está estrechamente vinculado con el concepto de familia. la familia entendida como legado orgánico que no podemos elegir, a cada uno de nosotros le corresponde una familia indefectiblemente. utilizar una acumulación de muelas y dientes para hablar de la familia nos remite no sólo al acto de convivencia, sino al del hambre al masticado, al morder… es decir al peligroso equilibrio de la estructura familiar. toshie itabashi. nacida en japón estudió escultura en la llotja de barcelona finalizando sus estudios en 1995. ha realizado importantes exposiciones individuales en barcelona y yokohama destacando su colaboración con la galería hartmann. su obra ha podido contemplarse en numerosas ciudades como madrid , lisboa y barcelona. ha participado en symposiums internacionales de escultura en francia y españa y la pretigiosa colección “nostromo” coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 cuenta con obra en permanencia de la autora. acariciando con la lengua. 2010 madera y alabastro. 80 x 70 x 70 cm. http://tallerbdn.cat/cat microsoft word terimerlyn11.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     114  poems 1 teri merlyn copyright©2013 teri merlyn. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. narrabeen dreaming there’s a house somewhere in our collective memories, where white sails fletch a blue horizon, and washing flaps lazily on the hills against a priceless backdrop; of a time when endless days drip minutes like a leaky tap and the wash of waves sings a wombsong, lulling us into reverie of afternoon naps that make new days from old. they were once as young as we, our lives merging into this house as it lays alone on the dunes. neighbours all gone, ghosts of holiday’s past ululate in empty lots and we slip into its dreaming, of laughter for its own sake, skin peeling like paperbark, icecream melting on salty tongues time melts like dali’s clocks.                                                               1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacedness-images.blogspot.com.au/.  coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     115  a kite surfer-laden breeze brings croaks of boys, squeaks of girls interspersed with throbs from juke-box cars of another era to us, eternal now inhabitants, lost in the warp and weft of the house and its dreaming; salt-washed stone, silvered wood dead orange jessamin, live oleander. driftwood moments of lazy breakfasts meandering into daydream lunches, drifting into teas of various descriptions. small joys echo in odd corners of a kitchen that doesn’t work, spaces of mysterious purpose built by a man who liked to be handy. how many children, friends, cousins, aunties, uncles and ring-ins lay in the bath wondering why it was the wrong way around; went to open the side windows at the noreaster’s knock, found them fixed, and sighed minor irritations, soon forgot. this was the last of its kind. a mnemonic for missing kin. each floorboard trembling with long gone footsteps of an endless to-ing and fro-ing by husbands, wives, children, home from the sea, off to school, from the shop, to the factory windows waiting, watching, visitors, passers-by, anyone? now the house is gone and it’s memories are homeless. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     116  we drive past often, eyes straining, hearts yearning, longing for an evocation, some vestige to remind others of it’s passing; all those lives, stories, grassed over, as if they never were. it wasn’t a pretty house. no artist preserved its image, and when we are gone no one will know it was there. no one will care. *** christmas tree the stringy bark in my backyard is in a slow dance of deshabille, decorating all about with bronze streamers as it has, at this time, every year, here. in the fecund moistness of our northern origins life slumbers, sequestered beneath a chill cloak, and our ancestors celebrated the persistent evergreen of pine at its darkest moment, as the cycle turns towards the sun. two millennia past, in a distant, desert land, the dream of a kinder kind of human lifted roots in a dance of angels and air, with each spin spreading, taking us further from nature’s pattern, into the pulse of man. in the stringy bark’s home, ancient rhythms call seasons to us in a quieter, deeper note, in their gentle shedding, a stately waltz of renewal that has taken two centuries for us to recognize. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     117  teri merlyn (b. sydney 1949) is a creature of her own creation. a feral child, jettisoned into independent life at fifteen, she developed self-taught couturier skills by her early twenties, designing and making for private clients, including australia's first glitter band, hush, and in designer label partnerships until 1990, when she entered academe at une and fell in love with the life of the mind. however, the adage, ‘timing is everything' made its verity felt when she graduated with her phd (writing revolution, griffith university 2004) on the history of the british radical literary tradition, its nexus with working class literacy, and role in the development of australian culture, just in time to join the queue of left-wing intellectuals losing tenure with the rise of the vocationalist paradigm in universities. having long written poetry that received acclaim from the 'ff brigade' (friends & family), she has turned now to play that string on her bow as a third, and hopefully timely, career option, kick-starting with a masters (research) in english (poetry) book project with the university of sydney under the supervision of judith beveridge. (email: teri.merlyn@optusnet.com.au) microsoft word coola6efraim coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 building: food for thought efraïm rodríguez the sculpture presented by efraïm rodríguez for the conference is titled “pequeño arquitecto” (the little architect), a figure which represents a child building a tower with pieces of classical children’s block building toys; the child itself is built out of the same sculpted materials. the work concerns the development of ideas and thought taking as a departure point what one knows and has learnt and how, at the same time, what has been learnt constitutes the basis of growth. games, trials, errors are fundamental elements in growth; they are ‘food for thought’ this formula is repeated in much of the artist’s work given that two planes of reality coexist; the figure which is represented and the elements that constitute it. in this sculpture the elements are articulated in three ways. on the one hand, the molecular elements always have a particular entity, they are entities with either a large biography or none. on the other hand, these units are articulated among themselves within a conceptually and formally different plane, especially when one is dealing with more heterogeneous elements with regard to shape, composition and movement. on a third plane, the elements constitute units completing a whole, these molecular units and the figure speak to each other from different scales, and, like a giuseppe arcimboldo phantasy, we cannot see the individual elements and the whole at one and the same time; the spectator has to modify their attention and adapt to each of the scales and “moments” in order to see the whole and the parts. the relationship between them appears in a process of toing and froing. it is in the spectator’s mind where the game appears and the growth. in this particular case the elements, pieces of the game, are easily recognizable, they are almost iconic of the collective imaginary, they belong to a reputed childhood. on the other hand, they all share the same identity while articulation, fitting together form part of their nature. they already form a whole in themselves. this whole in the sculpture is copyright © 2011 efraïm rodríguez this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 duplicated, once on the outside in the tower and once on the “inside” in the child. the relationship between the elements and the figure is enacted in the theme, the motive and the action, where the child himself constructs his own self. efraïm rodríguez is an adjunct lecturer at barcelona university in the sculpture department. he has held solo exhibitions in barcelona and antwerp. he regularly takes part in collective exhibitions in galleries and national and european fairs. he has exhibited in various national collections and has also sculpted for public spaces. construint/ construyendo/ building, 2008. 108 x 87 x 43 cm madera de haya pintada. dos unidades painted beechwood. two units www.efraimrodriguez.net building: food for thought. la escultura presentada por efraïm rodríguez en este simposium se titula “pequeño arquitecto”, se trata de una figura que representa un niño construyendo una torre con piezas de juego de construcción clásicas, el niño a su vez está construido y tallado con estas mismas piezas. la obra trata el tema del desarrollo de las ideas y el pensamiento a partir de lo que se conoce, se ha aprendido y como a su vez lo aprendido constituye la base del crecimiento. el juego, el ensayo, el error, son elementos fundamentales del crecimiento, son food for thought. en muchas de las esculturas del autor se usa esta formula en que existen dos planos de realidad, la figura representada y los elementos que la constituyen. en estas esculturas los elementos se articulan de tres maneras. por una parte, los elementos moleculares que constituyen tienen siempre una cierta entidad, son entes con poca o mucho recorrido, biografía. por otra parte, estas unidades se articulan entre si en diferentes planos conceptuales y formales, especialmente cuando se trata de elementos más heterogéneos en su forma, su composición y su recorrido. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 en un tercer plano, los elementos constituyen unidades para un todo, estas unidades moleculares y la figura dialogan desde diferentes escalas, y como en una fantasía de giuseppe arcimboldo, no podemos ver al mismo tiempo los elementos individuales y el todo, el espectador tiene que modificar su atención y adaptarse a cada una de las escalas y “momentos” para ver ahora el todo, ahora las partes. es en este ir y venir donde aparece la relación entre ellos, es en la mente del espectador donde aparece el juego, el crecimiento. en el caso que nos ocupa los elementos, las piezas de juego, son muy reconocibles, son elementos casi icónicos pertenecientes al imaginario colectivo, son propias de una infancia supuesta. por el contra son todas de igual identidad y articularse, encajar, forma parte de su naturaleza, constituyen ya de por si, un todo. un todo que en esta escultura aparece por duplicado, una vez fuera, en la torre, y otra “dentro”, en el niño. la relación entre los elementos y la figura representada se produce en el tema, el motivo y la acción, donde el niño construye con su propio yo, su propio yo. efraïm rodríguez es profesor adjunto de la universitat de barcelona en el departamento de escultura. ha realizado exposiciones individualmente en barcelona y amberes, participa asiduamente en exposiciones colectivas en galerías y ferias nacionales i europeas. tiene participación en varias colecciones nacionales y ha realizado diversas obras para el espacio público. construint/ construyendo/ building, 2008. 108 x 87 x 43 cm madera de haya pintada. dos unidades painted beechwood. two units www.efraimrodriguez.net microsoft word coola7everett coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 urban aboriginal creation stories and history: contesting the past and the present kristina everett macquarie university, sydney this paper is based on the 11 th annual doireann macdermott public lecture presented at the universitat de barcelona in november, 2010. it is a critique of discourses and representations in australian society, and indeed, embedded in all western societies (and many non-western societies i suspect) which support and reinforce artificial binary oppositions which make up social structures and institutions. binary oppositions reinforce oppositional power dynamics, making one term positive and the other negative, not recognizing categories in-between. linguistically, for example, the terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ articulate a false dichotomy between people who, empirically, are not two discrete groups, but rather, multiple groups within each category which interact within and between groups in complex and fluid engagements. the discourses and representations i discuss in this paper articulate imaginary binary oppositions out of social processes and identities which are, in fact, very similar. however, because these discourses and representations are constructed by different social groups with unequal power relationships they are treated as opposites, one with a higher value than the other. in this paper i am primarily concerned with history and myth, and in two related ‘stories’, the lachlan macquarie story, classified as history because it is primarily written and ‘belongs’ to the dominant australian society, and the maria locke story, classified as myth because it is primarily oral, and explains the emergence and characteristics of a group of aboriginal people who claim traditional aboriginal ownership of a large part of what is today called sydney. my argument is that history and myth are not binary opposites, but that the two categories are inter-related and tell similar and different aspects of stories with different emphases and foci. i will support my argument by re-telling and analyzing the macquarie and the maria locke stories and demonstrating that unreflexive acceptance copyright © krstina everett 2011. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 and reproduction of binary thinking reproduces simplistic, one-sided out-comes which support bigotry and prejudice. historical myth and mythical history in the context of aboriginal australia theorists have regularly reignited debates around what, precisely, constitutes different types of narrative, and, of course, whether a story is classified as a ‘dreaming story’ or a historical narrative carries great weight in the practical context of land. this is because according to the aboriginal land rights nt act 1976, many other land rights legislation in various australian states, and, what is arguably the ultimate recognition of indigenous ‘authenticity’: a successful native title claim under the commonwealth native title act 1993, indigenous australians are only eligible to claim their traditional lands if they can prove that they are still ‘attached’ to a body of traditions, observances, customs and beliefs of aboriginal people or of a community or group of aboriginal people, including those traditions, observances, customs and beliefs as applied to particular persons, sites, areas of land, things or relationships. there are clearly many conceptual, practical and ethical problems with making it necessary for people to prove that they are still engaged, as a group, in practices in which their ancestors were engaged before the british invaded australia to substantiate their authenticity as traditional owners of the land. not the least of these problems is that no-one else in australia is asked to prove their on-going connection to any traditions for any purpose. to make this necessary for indigenous australians reinforces the primitive/modern binary. it means that for indigenous australians to prove they are ‘authentically’ indigenous they need to show that they are the opposite of other australians. that is, they need to demonstrate that they are still engaged in primitive practices. this situates indigenous australians against one of the most fundamental of modern australian values; progress. progress has such valency as an australian value that the two animals on the australian coat of arms, the kangaroo and the emu, were chosen because neither animal can walk backwards. before i go any further it is important, for the purposes of supporting my argument and to introduce the key issues in my examples, for us to consider some of the problems associated with conceptualising the term ‘tradition’ for indigenous australians. manning nash (1989:14) insists that although tradition is mostly concerned with the past and is hence fundamentally backward focussed, it does have a future dimension. this dimension involves the commitment of its carriers to preserve and continue traditional practices into the future. however, because of drastic social disruption due to colonisation, many groups of urban indigenous australians do not have common cultural traditions on which to draw, so they ‘invent’, ‘borrow’, develop and learn ‘new’ traditions based on fragments remembered and passed down from the past. but how are ‘we’ members of the broader australian society able to understand ‘invented’, ‘new’ cultural practices as traditional? many of ‘us’, especially federal court judges hearing native title claims cannot. as i have already said, because coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 successful native title claims are arguably the ultimate recognition of indigenous ‘authenticity’ by the australian state, many indigenous australians struggle to conform to its demand for cultural continuity. these demands, as beth povinelli (2002:39) argues, are very difficult to achieve for any indigenous community, but are virtually impossible for people who live in long colonised areas like new south wales. not only have peoples’ traditions changed to the point of being unrecognisable from the early records of colonists, but they have become ‘mixed up’ with the traditions of other indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. i say more about this below. francesca merlan (1995:65) explains how the incomparability of aboriginal land rights with other kinds of australian property rights is legislatively managed in the aboriginal land rights (nt) act of 1976. this is done by elaborate codification of what needs to be demonstrated to succeed as well as the creation of a new form of property title. the native title act of 1993, however, leaves what ‘counts’ as ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’ for determination by the court. this is necessary because whereas land rights are a new form of land title in australian law, native title is part of australia’s common law. from a legal point of view the basis for the existence of native title is the presentation of evidence that native title has always existed over a given place for specific people. indigenous australians can only demonstrate their continuing relationship with a specific place by demonstrating their association with that place in terms of the court’s understanding of tradition because it is on the very different traditions from those of other australians that their distinctiveness is grounded. indigenous peoples’ claims to prior occupation of australia are based on their difference and their difference is demonstrated in their traditions (merlan 2006:86). courts, as merlan demonstrates, have recognised sufficient evidence of on-going aboriginal tradition for the purposes of native title using highly ‘essentialized’ notions of the term. that is, courts have used either an immutable, static model of ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’ to demonstrate that claimants have always had a ‘connection’ to the place they claim under common law, or one that recognises some change in the nature of cultural objects but constancy in the underlying social processes associated with those objects: guns instead of spears, acrylic paint instead of ochre for example (merlan 2006:88). for native title to succeed, ‘authentic’ aboriginal tradition needs to consist in static essences and an ontology of fixed and unchanging meanings so as to demonstrate the immutable character of traditional aboriginal ownership. the trouble with this is that the character of tradition as lived by people in the here and now is not consistent with a model of tradition as fixed, immutable and situated in a primordial moment before the british invaded australia. indigenous australians are faced with an impossible double bind. on the one hand the courts require evidence of aboriginal tradition and custom as unchanging, on the other, forced and voluntary participation in modern australian life has required drastic and virtually total change from traditional (pre-contact) life ways. as kalpana ram (2000:259) insists, a metaphysics which understands all change as movement away from ‘truth’ gains calamitous potential when it is enforced by the same colonial regimes that concurrently inflict unprecedented change. on the one hand the courts demand demonstration of fixed and unchanging traditions being performed by specific people in relation to a particular place to allow native title, yet on the other, it is the australian state which is primarily responsible for the kinds of radical cleavages with tradition that are used as evidence of a group’s alienation from their traditional lands. ‘authenticity’ becomes virtually impossible to obtain in such circumstances but coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 because on-going connection to land is a state-imposed criterion for demonstrating collective identity, questions of ‘authenticity’ become impossible to avoid. indigenous australians who want to be recognised as ‘authentic’ traditional owners must therefore demonstrate evidence of continuing reproduction of traditions associated with the claimed land even if this means that such traditions could only have survived as a result of being subversively performed during eras when traditional aboriginal practices where prohibited by australian law. such traditions must also be demonstrated even if current social conditions make them passé or otherwise irrelevant. jeffrey sissons proposes the term ‘oppressive authenticity’ for this kind of enforced ‘tradition’. state regimes of ‘oppressive authenticity’ (sissons 2005:35) only recognise the native title claims of a shrinking category of indigenous peoples who are considered ‘authentic’ because they can demonstrate on-going traditional practices in relation to a place and deny the claims of an ever growing group judged ‘inauthentic’ because they cannot. as povinelli (2002) insists, as well as enforcing ‘oppressive authenticity’ courts rely largely on ‘our’ (the dominant australian society’s) documentation as the ultimate ‘proof’ of what constitutes a given peoples’ tradition before 1788. that is, it is ‘our’ historical records, ‘our’ ethnographies, ‘our’ reports based on ‘our’ interpretations of what we are told and what we observe of indigenous australians’ traditions and customs which mostly provide the evidence on which the claim is based. merlan (2006:93) argues that public and academic understandings of indigenous tradition do recognise that change in the form of adaptations, discontinuities and reconfigurations are inevitable, especially in colonial regimes which inflict unprecedented change 1 . clearly, ‘we’ (academics and general public) take a different view of the terms ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ from that of the courts but, as i argue below, ‘we’ still retain at the core of our understanding, a conceptualisation of tradition as a continuous link between past and present or the continuation of the past in the present 2 . earlier debates surrounding definition of myth, especially dreaming stories and history revolved around another binary; orality and literacy. the inevitable changes in indigenous cultures and society that intense colonisation has wrought and the imposition of english literacy on the vast majority of indigenous australians has made it inevitable, however, that the question of how to analyse and differentiate among forms of indigenous narrative is one that no longer depends on orality and pneumonic processes. terence turner (1988) argues that ‘myth’ can be understood as: the formulation of ‘essential’ properties of social experience in terms of ‘generic events’, while history is concerned with the level of ‘particular relations among particular events’, we 1 see merlan (2006) for an argument that a more reflexive view of indigenous tradition which recognises that indigenous cultures and social positions are informed by historic and contemporary understandings of accommodation and relationships with people and institutions of white society can provide a better model of tradition than those currently employed by courts. 2 see merlan (2006:86-88), nash (1989), williams (1977) and shils (1971:123) for some useful definitions. coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 need not restrict ourselves to seeing myth as charter for a social order distinct from western influence.’ hill (1988), beckett (1993,1996) and macdonald (1998,2003) among many others have contributed to a large literature which illuminates differences between the ways that indigenous peoples represent the colonial past and the ways in which that past is represented by the dominant culture. this work also serves to problematize the manner in which those differences have been represented and understood historically. these contributions have helped theorists to move on from conceptualizations of ‘real’ cultures as being rigidly bounded and ‘pure’. they have also allowed for the awareness that different peoples present different modes in which to represent the processes, interactions and negotiations of colonial power relations. so it seems that the binary of indigenous/non-indigenous may have been slightly ‘smudged’, at least in remote, ‘traditional’ aboriginal contexts, by a hard won and perhaps grudging recognition that traditional indigenous cultures can change and still be ‘authentic’. this is at least the case when indigenous stories can still be recognized as dreaming stories even when they include aspects concerning ‘us’ (non-indigenous australians) 3 . binaries, however, have a habit of reasserting themselves in different forms and contexts as the discourses and representations that carry them are supported and embedded in institutions and frameworks at every level of society. there is, of course, a binary that exists within the category ‘indigenous’ and that is the remote (authentic) and the urban (inauthentic). remote indigenous peoples’ stories are much more likely to be recognized as genuine dreaming stories than the stories that urban people tell, even if urban indigenous peoples’ stories are claimed to be origin myths. the examples i provide later in this paper compare and contrast a dominant australian ‘history narrative/creation myth’ with an urban aboriginal ‘creation myth/history narrative’ and demonstrate that there are not clear and concrete separations between categories. i will show that there is not a definite divide between the two stories as one being clearly myth and one obviously history, but that each contains elements of the other. it also demonstrates that urban aboriginal peoples’ cultural representations cannot be categorically separated from either the representations of non-indigenous people or from indigenous peoples living in remote, ‘traditional’ communities. story-telling as methodology my method here is rather academically unorthodox. rather than quote directly from documentary sources or from interview transcripts i take a story-telling approach which works as a kind of structural analysis. i have chosen, loosely following levi-strauss (1958), the main themes of each story, grouped them together and then recounted the secondary themes. this has the effect of making the form of the stories very similar allowing for the similarities and differences in the themes to be more visible. my re-telling of the stories cannot help but reflect my own biographical situation as a middle aged, educated, non-indigenous australian woman who has spent more than 15 3 see for example penny mcdonald’s (1986) film too many captain cooks coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 years living and working with an urban aboriginal community. this situation may not be unique, but it is certainly unusual and i doubt that many people would view the stories through my particular cultural lens. having said that, as a middle aged, middle class, non-indigenous australian woman i am very familiar with the ‘cult’ of lachlan macquarie and have spent long periods of my life living in sydney immersed in the signs and symbols of his veneration. i am also in the extraordinary position of not only being sociologically positioned within the dominant society as a certain target of narratives of progress, but i am also, as a result of long term immersion in an urban aboriginal society, able to externalize my position and view dominant discourses and representations somewhat from the ‘outside’. the very knowledge of the existence of the maria locke narrative is not usual among ‘mainstream’ australians, let alone familiarity with the details of it. in re-telling the maria locke story i mimic the many theatrical and story-telling performances of the maria locke story presented to me by darug people themselves over many years. it needs to be understood that most non-darug people do not tell this story and many may not even know this story, it is not part of the national narrative. there are few written records and the verbal story is almost exclusively told by darug people themselves. i take this approach in an attempt to, at least some extent, ‘even out’ the cultural biases that authoritative written sources evoke for western readers. rather than reinforce preconceived assumptions that because the macquarie story can be extensively and authoritatively referenced from ‘reliable sources’ it is more ‘true’, and the maria locke story, because it is largely orally reproduced is less ‘true’, i present both in my own invented form that i call ‘historymyth’. sydneysiders before i begin my version of the lachlan macquarie historymyth, it is vitally important that i describe some of the key features of modern ‘mainstream’ sydney society as they are represented in various ways. australia, as i argued earlier, is a progressive society and sydney embodies many of the symbolic and existential features of australian progress. sydney has a population of 4.5 million people (abs 2011) and is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world inhabited by more than 80 different ethnic groups, the most populous of those born overseas being from the united kingdom (175,166), china (106,142), new zealand (81,064) and vietnam (62,144) (abs 2011). 1.1% or about 40,000 people in sydney identify as indigenous. it is the largest city in australia and has a reputation as an international destination for commerce, arts, fashion, culture, entertainment, music, education and tourism. it is ranked by the globalization and world cities research network (gawc) as alpha + making it among the highest ranked cities for commerce and life style in the world. the city has undergone rapid urban development since the last quarter of the 19 th century until the present and, even during the devastating financial effects of the great depression finished the famous sydney harbour bridge in 1932. it is also the financial coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 and economic hub of australia and is now a wealthy and prosperous city boasting highly original postmodern architecture and open public spaces. it is also the site of the first british settlement in australia and this history is recorded on plaques, monuments and statues as well as in heritage architecture at significant places in the city. 30,000 years of aboriginal occupation of what is now the city, however, is arguably only nodded to in admittedly increasing numbers of appropriate signage, monuments and plaques. in short, sydney reflects social values which are related to economic and social progress. it embraces ethnic diversity in pragmatic ways which both celebrate diversity to further support economic and social progress, but also limits its official recognition so that expressions of difference are kept to benign forms such as food, dance and art, for example. to participate as an australian citizen all australians need to speak english, conform to the nation’s legal norms and be educated. in this way, even the recognition of ethnic and cultural difference is made to support the nation’s agenda of continuous progress. sydney is arguably the most progressive of all the progressive australian cities. the macquarie historymyth explains where sydney and, indeed, australian characteristics and values such as innovation, determination, overcoming of obstacles and economic management to achieve progress originated. the macquarie historymyth lachlan macquarie is often referred to as the ‘father of the nation’ for his ambitious programme of public works and for his extensive social reforms to what was no more than a penal settlement before his interventions. during his term huge public building programmes were carried out including new army barracks, three new barrack buildings for convicts, roads to parramatta and across the blue mountains, a hospital, stables and 5 planned towns built above the flood-line along the hawkesbury river. macquarie established the police fund as the basis of colonial revenue and introduced the colony’s first coinage. at the end of 1816, despite the opposition of the british government, he encouraged the creation of the colony's first bank. his most urgent problem, however, was to increase agricultural production and livestock. despite his efforts to encourage farmers to improve their properties alternate gluts and famines continued to threaten the economy during most of his administration. he encouraged and supported exploration over the blue mountains to promote pastoral expansion. no governor since phillip treated aboriginal people as humanely as macquarie. he established a school for aboriginal children at parramatta, a village at elizabeth bay and an aboriginal farm at george’s head. he also hosted an annual feast day at government house at parramatta where food and blankets were distributed. brass plaques were distributed among ‘well behaved’ aboriginal leaders as were cast-off military uniforms. unfortunately, these strategies did not completely fend off hostilities between aboriginal groups and settlers and macquarie responded to raids by ungrateful aboriginal warriors by sending military contingents to ‘pacify’ them. macquarie’s term as governor coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of convicts sent to the colony. macquarie used the convicts to build new buildings, towns and roads and encouraged well-behaved convicts to participate as community members coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 by introducing tickets-of-leave. this created enormous conflict between macquarie and an influential, conservative section of free settlers in the colony know as the ‘exclusives’ who were dedicated to restricting civil rights and judicial privileges to themselves. macquarie is today venerated as the symbolic father of modern australia and this historymyth is a primary creation story of australian civilization. darug before telling the maria locke historymyth, it is crucial that i expand on my description of darug as simply indigenous people who claim traditional aboriginal ownership of what is today called sydney. in fact, darug ownership of various parts of sydney is extremely contentious and strenuously contested by other aboriginal groups. it is broadly agreed that darug were a pre-contact language group of aboriginal people who inhabited parts of what is now sydney, but their claim to all the land from the blue mountains in the west to the sea in the east, and from the hawkesbury river in the north to appin in the south are tenuous and based on constantly shifting historico-political academic and popular debates. the people who identify as darug today have only emerged in the last thirty years or so as ‘a people’. it might be argued that their ‘ethnogenesis’, which i say more about below, was initially in response to land rights, native title, and other state policies concerning recognition of indigenous australians’ rights. people who claim darug heritage and identity today do so largely because of the genealogical research of biologist, dr. james kohen, in the early1980s. prior to kohen’s work some of these people lived lives as either unspecified aboriginal people on the fringes of suburban life, or some may have considered themselves members of a post-contact group of ‘local aboriginal people’. two or three hundred people identify as darug and continue to develop various ideas, values and philosophies about and expressions of their identity. their culture and society is, in short, fragile, marginalized and extremely difficult to sustain in the face of the over-whelming representations of the dominant society. they are all, however, passionately engaged in the various expressions of cultural renaissance and revival of aboriginal traditions that characterize darug (re)emergence. these include the telling and re-telling of their creation historymyth. according to barth, the creation of ethnic boundaries depends on the manipulation of cultural attributes. the psychosocial aspect of the emergence of ethnic groups, or ethnogenesis, the collective desire to be a ‘we’, however, cannot develop without some concrete foundations which are recognized by members of the group and the dominant culture when the group emerges within a nation-state. these foundations are usually determined, not by the group, but by the dominant culture and are often based on genetic descent as the accounts of blu (1989), sider (1979, 2003) and roosens (1989) demonstrate in north american contexts. the emergence of darug descendants also illustrate that the rules of the australian state concerning who counts as aboriginal coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 determine who is accepted as darug. these rules are both genetic and social. if one cannot substantiate one’s claims to darug descent genealogically one is not accepted as darug either by the australian state or by other darug descendants. the concept of ethnogenesis includes attempting to understand the relatively recent (re)emergence of ethnic minority groups that had previously been ‘absorbed’ into nation states (diamond 1974:9). manning nash (1989:1-9) provides an historical framework for such phenomena arguing that over the last 500 years the nation state has become the most potent, maximal and enduring form of social and political organisation. nation states, however, have grown from the wreckage of empires, blocks of cultures and ‘peoples’ which have been ‘absorbed’ into its borders. this means that nation states are often comprised of more than one ‘people’ and there is frequently much cultural diversity within one nation state. as roosens (1989:9) points out, until the early 1970s researchers on social change generally assumed that the kind of direct and continuous contact that different cultures sustain as part of the same nation would result in general acculturation, or more precisely, a ‘melding’ into the one culture of the nation state: the old ‘melting pot’ metaphor. the character of change has proven to be much more complex as researchers continue to report that although some cultural differences are, indeed, disappearing, some are persisting in new ways while new differences are emerging. very importantly for understanding the maria locke historymyth as a darug creation story that supports their ‘ethnogenesis’ is barth’s (1969) argument that ethnic groups are a form of social organization in which participants use particular cultural traits from their common past, their common descent, their tradition – which may or may not be historically verifiable – to assert their difference from a dominant group. he insists that ethnic self-affirmation or sometimes denial is always related to social and/or economic interests. that is, an ethnic group will only emerge or disappear if it is in the interests of the group to do so. ethnic groups are thus always, to some degree, oppositional to a dominant society or to competing groups because they do not identify as part of that society or group and usually have some kind of claim against it. the mobilisation of an ethnic group depends on the success of its leaders in drawing on affective elements related to descent and in being ‘carriers’ of a distinctive tradition or heritage to inspire the loyalty and the passions of members of the group. that is, the collective pride in ancestors and group responsibility to ‘carry on’ traditions of the ancestors are deployed in political ways. members of the group are ‘called to arms’ against the hegemony of the dominant society by appealing to their ‘common blood’ and ‘glorious traditions’. the maria locke historymyth, as i now demonstrate in the telling, not only explains the current condition of darug culture and the physical characteristics of darug people, but explains darug origins and affirms darug oppositional positioning to the dominant culture. the maria locke historymyth until and during macquarie’s governorship considerable hostilities raged between aboriginal warriors and the british invaders. the famous darug hero and aboriginal guerilla fighter, pemulwuy, had been killed and his head pickled and sent to england before macquarie arrived in new south wales. aboriginal raids by pemulwuy’s coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 survivors and british reprisals continued around parramatta until macquarie's time. macquarie initiated a range of strategies which dramatically affected local aboriginal people. parramatta and government house became the centre of aboriginal-british interactions until the end of macquarie’s term as governor. the parramatta native institution was established by macquarie to ‘civilise, christianise and educate’ darug children. another reason for establishing the school was clear when, in response to darug raids on farms, macquarie despatched a military detachment to kill as many darug people as could be found, and bring back darug children to be placed in the native institution. as well, he developed the strategy of identifying key leaders of aboriginal groups by forcing them to wear brass breast-plates engraved with their name. this reflected the actual status of certain elders and koradji or 'clever men' within each group which ensured their authority to control their relatives. to make sure that these ‘chiefs’ did the job he had in mind, macquarie asked each of them to give up one of their children to be placed in the native institution. maria locke’s father, yarramundi, was one such darug leader. maria, darug say, was the first graduate of macquarie’s native institution. this point is always emphasised in the telling of the historymyth. there is great community pride placed in maria’s status as an educated, literate aboriginal woman at a time when few people were educated in australia. it asserts the value of education, crucial to the ongoing survival of darug people today, as a characteristic of the ancestors and one to which today’s descendants need to exhibit. maria was married to dicky, one of bennelong’s (a darug man captured by governor phillip in 1788) sons. dicky had also been in the native institution but became ill and died only weeks after the marriage. two years later she married convict carpenter, robert locke, who was indentured to her. it was the first legal marriage between a convict and an aboriginal woman. this is another point of pride that is claimed as a characteristic of darug people today. darug, it is asserted, are light skinned aboriginal people not because they are ‘inauthentic’ but because the primary darug ancestor dominated a white man. it also explains why many darug leaders are old women rather than men 4 . in 1831 maria petitioned macquarie for thirty acres of land at liverpool that had been previously granted to her brother, colebee, in recognition of his service to the colony in leading the explorers, blaxland, lawson and wentworth over the blue mountains. she was eventually successful and was also granted another forty acres at blacktown. maria was not only a traditional aboriginal owner of land in what is now sydney, but a landowner under british law. analysis the two historymyths tell the creation stories of the ‘father of the australian nation’ and the ‘mother of the darug nation’. they are simultaneously complementary and contradictory. they depend on each other, and yet, are usually told in isolation from one 4 this is also a fact because darug men generally have very low life expectancy. coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 another. they are not opposite stories, but inter-related ones, each telling untold aspects of the other. the darug historymyth dovetails with the macquarie historymyth at the point where the civic and social reforms of macquarie are lauded by modern commentators (although we know that these were considered unacceptable, misguided, or at least ambiguous for many of his contemporaries). ambiguity associated with judging 18 th century practices with 21 st century values, however, is more pronounced when the historymyth turns to macquarie’s approach to ‘managing’ the local sydney aboriginal population. darug who tell the maria locke story today deal with this ambiguity by calling it murder and child abduction rather than ‘pacification’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘christianisation’. ambiguity is not present in the lachlan macquarie historymyth when economic aspects of his governorship are the focus of the story. as i have already said, the macquarie historymyth explains the origins of current australian traits. the focus on economic management and public works is the dominant feature of the historymyth. progress enabled by employing convicts in building public buildings, roads, hospitals and whole towns and successful economic control of these projects reflects the dominant australian value of progress. the maria locke historymyth hardly touches on this aspect of macquarie’s story. the only public work that is of interest in the darug story is the parramatta native institution because that is where maria became a modern darug woman by gaining an education. this ancestral characteristic is not made ambiguous by macquarie’s strategies of aboriginal ‘pacification’, however, because maria wins out as an ancestor who is educated, owns land, and whose white husband is indentured to her. the ‘control’ of local sydney aboriginal people is not a dominant theme in the macquarie historymyth. killing and child removal strategies embedded in the story are definitely not practices that would be condoned, let alone venerated by the ‘mainstream’ australian public today as public opinion against the stolen generations demonstrates. they are, however, recognized as practices that were common in the 19 th century colonial context and, perhaps, the domination of the original inhabitants of what are now nation states might be considered, at best, a necessary evil. no matter how they are judged, for better or worse, these strategies are the grounds for australian occupation of sydney today and as such are part of our origin historymyth. the maria locke historymyth, contrary to the macquarie historymyth, puts colonial violence towards darug ancestors at the centre of the narrative. it also puts ancestral resistance as warfare, first by pemulwuy and then by his survivors, as a major theme. after this maria’s education, then marriage and finally her landholding status situate darug resistance as more strategic and sustainable. darug ancestors, just like darug today, resist from within dominant australian institutions. the reference to maria’s brother, colebee, in the maria locke historymyth is an intriguing one. reference to aboriginal participation in the economic development of the colony is absent from the macquarie historymyth and darug leadership in the crossing of the blue mountains is omitted from the story. it is always noted in the retelling of the historymyth, however, that maria applied to have colebee’s land title transferred to her after his death even though it is often said that colebee was granted coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 the land in return for leading the first british explorers over the blue mountains. many non-darug aboriginal people argue that colebee was an aboriginal traitor to have led the british across the mountains where they could then concentrate on pastoral expansion and thereby consolidate their colonization of the land and other aboriginal peoples. the maria locke historymyth does not specifically address this issue, but rather, demonstrates that through both violent resistance and strategic accommodation of the overwhelming force of colonization of their country, they were able to achieve a new, albeit completely changed place for themselves in the new world order that was imposed on them. in fact, the maria locke historymyth shows that darug guerilla warfare resulted in death and pickled heads, accommodation resulted in a certain kind of triumph. conclusion the written/oral binary is supported by the true/untrue binary in situating history and myth as opposites. the logic that written history is true and oral myth is untrue can be demonstrated to be faulty in my analysis of the macquarie and maria locke historymyths. certainly, the macquarie story can be substantiated with colonial records, plaques, numerous re-written versions of events. these stories, however, vary in the retelling depending on the era and political imperatives of the time. the version i recount here is one which reflects recent revisions of the overall history of australia which acknowledges the (mis)treatment of aboriginal people by colonial policies to some extent. it is a version that australian school students might be taught today. earlier versions, however, including the one that i was taught at school, did not include any mention of aboriginal people at all. australia in the 1960s and 1970s (before the mabo decision of 1993) was still terra nullius before the british ‘arrived’ and the stories of interaction between settlers and aboriginal people were written out of dominant discourses. this makes the macquarie story, i argue, a historymyth. it is a story with a truth value that depends on political circumstances and relies on strategic omissions and inclusions. the maria locke story is no less a historymyth for being largely oral. it connects, through maria’s genealogy as yarramundi’s daughter, to a time prior to british invasion and claims an on-going connection to darug culture and ancestors. also, although most of the issues it raises are not re-told by non-darug people, many of the events and the names of people can be confirmed in british colonial records. my argument that myth and history are not binary opposites is clearly demonstrated in my analysis of the maria locke and the lachlan macquarie ‘stories’. both stories give inter-related accounts of inter-relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people, places and ‘things’. the analysis of the stories themselves, the different emphases, inclusions, omissions and foci of the stories also clearly demonstrate that the linguistic binary opposition ‘aboriginal’ and ‘non-aboriginal’ is a false one. we are not the opposite of each other, but on the contrary, co-contributors to pathways which have produced different yet inter-related identities. references australian bureau of statistics (2011). 31 march 2011. coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 barth, fredrik (1969). ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of cultural difference. boston. little brown books. beckett, jeremy (1993).‘walter newton’s history of the world – or australia’ ethnology 20, pp 675-695. beckett, jeremy (1996). ‘against nostalgia: place and memory in myles lalor’s ‘oral history’’ oceania 66 (4). p 312. blu, karen (1980).the lumbee problem: the making of an american indian people. london.new york. cambridge university press. collins, david (1788). an account of the british colony in new south wales. vol.1 london. ah amd aw reed. diamond, stanley (1974).in search of the primitive. new brunswick. transaction dutton. hill, jonathan (ed) (1988).rethinking history and myth: indigenous south american perspectives on the past. urbana and chicago. university of illinois press. kohen, james (1993).the darug and their neighbours: the traditional aboriginal owners of the sydney region. blacktown. darug link in association with blacktown and district historical society. levi strauss, claude (1978).structural anthropology 1.hammonsworth. penguin. macdonald, gaynor (1998).‘master narratives and the dispossession of the wiradjuri’ in aboriginal history 22 p 162. merlan, francesca (1995).‘the regimentation of customary practice: from northern territory land claims to mabo’ in the australian journal of anthropology 6 (1-2). merlan, francesca (2006).‘beyond tradition’ in the asia pacific journal of anthropology 7 (1). nash, manning (1989).the caldron of ethnicity. chicago. university of chicago press. povinelli, elizabeth (2002). the cunning of recognition: indigenous alterities and the making of australian multiculturalism. durham and london. duke university press. ram, kalpana (2000).‘listening to the call of dance: rethinking authenticity and ‘essentialism’ in the australian journal of anthropology 11 (3). p 261. roosens, eugeen (1989).creating ethnicity: the process of ethnogenesis. london. sage publications. shils, e (1971).‘tradition’ in comparative studies in society and history 13. coolabah, vol.7, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 sider, gerald (2003).living indian histories: lumbee and tuscarora people in north carolina. london. the university of north carolina press. sissons, jeffrey (2005).first peoples: indigenous peoples and their futures. london. reaktion books. turner, terence (1988).‘ethno-ethnohistory: myth and history in native south american representations of contact in western society’ in hill, d (ed) rethinking history and myth. chicago. university of illinois press. williams, raymond (1977).marxism and literature. oxford. oxford university press. on matteo ricci’s interpretations of chinese culture coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 on matteo ricci’s interpretations of chinese culture chen hong china jiliang university hongchen116@cjlu.edu.cn copyright©chen hong 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: on the contribution to introducing western learning to china by matteo ricci (1552-1610), the 16 th -century italian jesuit missionary to the ming dynasty, abundant research has been done; however, not so on his contribution to introducing chinese learning to the west, and if so, not profoundly. though ricci‟s understandings of chinese culture were found in every aspect of ming dynasty lives, this essay focuses on four important and representative aspects, and analyzes the political system of a government guided by philosophers, the confused outlooks of religious sects, chinese ethics compared to christian tenets, and the unique qualities of the chinese language. it discloses ricci‟s moderate (middle-of-the-road) attitude toward chinese culture, especially his efforts to reconcile confucianism and christianity as well as his prejudice against buddhism and taoism, which shows on the one hand his broad-mindedness as a humanistic missionary, and on the other the historical or rather religious limitations of his absolute faith as a pious catholic. narrow-minded or broad-minded, ricci‟s role as the first scholar who introduced chinese learning to the west should not be neglected. one should bear in mind that it is ricci who laid the foundation for european sinology. key words: matteo ricci; introducing chinese learning to the west; understandings of chinese culture mailto:hongchen116@cjlu.edu.cn coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 1.the first to introduce chinese learning to the west matteo ricci (1552-1610), the 16 th -century italian jesuit missionary, is generally known as the pioneer in introducing western learning to china. it is ricci (and his partners) who brought to the ming dynasty the scientific knowledge prevailing in renaissance europe, such as world geography, western astronomy, mathematics, and surveying and mapping. this knowledge broadened chinese people‟s horizons, challenging and correcting long-standing misconceptions such as regarding china as the centre of the world, considering the earth square and the heaven round and some superstitious beliefs on eclipses. the new learning helped a group of broadminded confucian scholars pursue new knowledge and construct new concepts in the sciences. ricci‟s contribution to introducing western learning to china has been widely acknowledged and praised by chinese and foreign scholars. however, his contribution to introducing chinese learning to the west must not be forgotten. some scholars have pointed out that ricci was the first person who introduced chinese learning to the west. for example, in the preface to the chinese version of matteo ricco’s reading notes about china, the translators he zaowu and he gaoji, stated that ricco had blazed a trail for spreading chinese learning. (ricci, 2010:18) in the preface to the chinese version of critical biography of matteo ricci written by the 19 th -century french jesuit missionary henri bernard, guan zhenhu also agreed that ricci was the first person who disseminated chinese culture in the west, if we do not take into consideration such technologies as paper-making taken abroad during the tang dynasty. (bernard, 1993:7) in the preface to the historical novel written by liu enming, matteo ricci—cross-cultural angel between china and the west, zhong linbing praised ricci as a great angel for his enabling of cultural communication between china and the west. (liu enming, 2000:1) though ricci‟s contribution to introducing chinese learning to the west has been acknowledged, commentaries are sporadic without profound research. in the following sections, we will survey how ricci introduced chinese learning to 16 th -century europe. or to put it more exactly, we will observe how ricci understood and interpreted chinese culture and we shall add our own commentaries on his understandings and interpretations. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 2. ricci’s interpretations of chinese culture matteo ricci arrived in macao in 1582 and began his missionary work from the next year on, moving from city to city, like shaozhou, nanchang, nanjing, and beijing and was finally buried in beijing in 1610. he spent nearly 30 years, the best time of his life, in his second homeland without leaving it halfway. his introduction to china and interpretations of chinese culture were found in his letters to his superiors and friends in europe, in his journals and translations. it is easily forgotten that at the early stage of his learning chinese, that is, during his stay in macao (1582-1583), ricci, together with priest michele ruggieri, helped priest alessandro valignano to finish st. francois xavier’s biography, the first three chapters of which being an independent booklet entitled on the wonders in china. (bernard, 1993: 62) and what is remembered is that in 1594 ricci interpreted and translated into latin four confucian classics, namely, the analects of confucius, mencius, great learning, and zhongyong 1 . what is more remarkable is his reading notes about china edited and translated into latin by the french missionary nicolas trigault and published in 1615 in europe. in book one of reading notes about china, ricci recorded extensively and minutely life in the ming dynasty, describing its geography, products, language, politics, customs, law and religion. in this essay, we will analyze four aspects of ricci‟s interpretation of chinese culture from the perspective of a „western confucian‟ and a humanistic theologian. 2.1 a state reigned by philosophers-platonic republic zhu yuan-zhang, the founder of the ming dynasty, established a new governing system through abolishing the zaixiang (prime minister) and setting up a neige (cabinet), known as “civil servant politics”, somehow similar to the western constitutional monarchy at present times. when ricci came to china, emperor wanli was on the throne and continued to adopt zhu yuan-zhang‟s governing system. with his sensitive mind, ricci observed that this system was comparable to the hereditary monarchy in his europe but was different in that it was “somewhat aristocratic”. (ricci, 2010: 48) instead of instating a tyranny, the emperor distributed his power to six cabinet ministries in the central government, namely, li, hu, li, bing, gong, xing (吏、户、礼、兵、工、刑). the imperial court reigned two imperial cities (beijing, nanjing) and 13 provinces, under which was established the hierarchy of administrative divisions of fu, zhou, xian (府、州、县). this system, with the help of imperial censors, who provided the emperor with faithful and beneficial suggestions, and jin yiwei (锦衣卫, the imperial guards), who were supposed to fight severely against corruption, contributed to the order and stability of the national coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 economy and politics. as a result, at first ricci was impressed by the social order, civil diligence and national peace in this land, though his missionary work was hindered by a lot of obstacles. no wonder ricci said with admiration that “china is superior to other countries in administration, politics and order.” (zhu, 2012:21) in his view, it was exactly a platonic republic, reigned by the brightest philosophers, all the classes working in close cooperation. in the concept of plato, the ancient greek philosopher, an ideal state is an aristocracy ruled by the best, which consists of three ranks of people—the upper class of “guardians” (the brightest philosophers), the middle class of “auxiliaries” (army and police) and the lowest class of “producers” (the majority). according to this framework, all the classes should work in close cooperation to contribute to the stable structure of the political system. the upper class governs the supporting and feeding majority; in return, it should do its best to manage good education, public security and state defense for the majority. (plato, 1986) 2.2 a confused religious outlook first and foremost, matteo ricci came to china as a missionary with his holy mission to save the fate of pagans, and with a religious superiority complex. he observed the religious status quo in this land with the views of a pious christian theologian—at first sight, there coexisted three religions, namely, confucianism, buddhism, and taoism, the first dominating and the other two at its flanks. all the educated chinese seemed to believe that all three religions had been integrated and people could embrace them together. yet, this confused religious outlook made people at a loss as to which course to take. people pretended that they believed in a certain religion, but in effect, they “did not follow any of the religions” and thus the majority of people “fell into the abyss of atheism”. (ricci, 2010: 113) chinese people “seemed to lack insightful religious life”. (bernard, 1993: 116) what kind of religious life did ricci witness at chinese homes? pictures of monstrous gods were hung high on the wall and down below was an altar-like table, on which memorial tablets of ancestors and an incense burner were displayed. with burned incense and candles, people bowed and kowtowed to worship, but without the christian meditation and prayer, nor regular divine service. on some occasions, for instance, on the anniversary of the death of a family member, monks were invited to do services. or when somebody suffered from lingering disease, the family would invite taoist priests to invoke evil spirits to leave the patient. chinese people worshiped all kinds of idols, such as the god of wealth, the kitchen god and eight immortals. many people believed in coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 fengshui, or geomancy, and the zodiac. others pursued longevity through alchemy. in the eyes of ricci, who regarded christianity as the only truth, all these practices were either insensible idolatry or superstitious beliefs. (bernard, 1993: 116-7) despite the fact that chinese history was not free of religious persecution (e.g. emperor wuzong in the tany dynansty preferred taoism, thus forbade buddhism and ordered the destruction of buddhist temples during 841 to 846), chinese people held tolerant attitudes toward religions. ricci drew the conclusion from his own experience. on his way to nanjing, he lodged at a taoist temple called “the iron column palace”. seeing that he did not worship the statues of gods, people threatened him that he would encounter demons and persuaded him to show respect to the gods. but the “chinese did not use force or arms to compel their fellowmen to believe in religions, let alone foreigners.” this kind of religious freedom, for ricci, came from the “extremely confused outlooks of religious sects”. (ricci, 2010: 284-5) 2.3 ethics on a par with christian tenets matteo ricci came to china to do his missionary work, but at the same time, his admiration of this empire was undeniable. “this ancient empire is worldly known as its people are polite and abide by codes of conduct. li is one of the five most precious virtues in this land.” (ricci, 2010: 63). the five virtues ricci referred to are li, yi, ren, zhi, xin (礼、义、仁、智、信, roughly equaling etiquette, righteousness, benevolence, wisdom, credibility) and what impressed him most was xiao, or filial piety to parents, respect for teachers and contentment of life. “no one can compare with chinese in xiao, or filial piety.” (ricci, 2010:76), “the chinese show more respect for teachers than we do.” (ricci, 2010:86), “they are content with what they have without any ambition of aggression.” (ricci, 2010:59) ricci read piles of confucian classics and clearly knew that the chinese ethic traditions stemmed from confucian mottoes of teaching, which were on a par with christian tenets. the ideal purpose of confucian teaching was to establish a stable and harmonious nation, families being economically safe, individuals being morally cultivated. this purpose, for ricci, was “compatible with the brightness of conscience and the truth of christianity.” (ricci, 2010:104) ricci not only found compatibility between confucian and christian teachings in his study, but let local people know about it in his missionary work. for example, he translated the holy commandments into chinese and printed them out as a booklet, which convinced the local people that “the holy commandments are really compatible with conscience and natural laws.” (ricci, 2010: 169) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 2.4 the uniqueness of the chinese language in addition to being a theologian (to a large degree considered a scientist, too), ricci was a linguist as well. in the beginning, learning chinese was the arrangement made by his superior, priest alessandro valignano, and ricci, as a disciplined missionary who vowed to obey the roman church, had no other choice but to learn since the language was a “clanking bell” at the door of a stranger‟s home. ricci worked hard and with his intelligence and diligence, after several years of learning, he could work without the aid of an interpreter. at the first stage of his learning, ricci keenly found and summarized the characteristics of this language in its pronunciation, writing and grammar. in the letter to his former teacher who taught him classical languages, ricci wrote: i can assure you that it is totally different from greek or german. oral chinese is always ambiguous. the same pronunciation may produce numerous meanings. sometimes, when you raise your voice or lower your voice, with four tones, you will produce different meanings…. as for the “square character”, when you‟ve never seen it or have personal experience, like me, it is incredible. a single word conveys one meaning, so how many you want to convey, how many words you need. thus there are more than 6000 words, which are totally different but very confusing.… all the words are monosyllable. (later ricci also found some disyllable words according to our standard—original note) they write a character in the way of drawing a picture, using a brush, similar to the brush our artists use…. there is, however, an easy thing, that is no article is needed and no inflection is found in tense, case, sex, and singular and plural forms. often adverbs are used to compensate the missing inflection. (bernard, 1993: 59-60) on the basis of his knowledge of the chinese language, ricci compiled, together with another priest, a chinese character table, standardizing the way of writing chinese pronunciation in latin, and distinguishing five tones and voiceless and voiced parts of speech. this chinese character table paved the way for europeans to learn chinese. (bernard, 1993: 248-9) language is an indispensable means to communicate with foreign people. his talent for languages helped ricci succeed in grasping this foreign language, and later in making friends with confucian scholars, in his missionary work, and in translating confucian coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 classics. 3. analyzing ricci’s interpretations of chinese culture coming from renaissance europe, ricci was well-educated in classical humanist science besides orthodox scholasticism, theology and natural sciences. thus he knew plato‟s idealism and aristotle‟s “golden mean” 2 well. during his study in rome, he had “experienced the whole process of saint ignatius‟s „mind work‟”, (bernard, 1993: 23) so it is reasonable to assume that ricci was influenced by the thoughts of saint ignatius. the latter “was able to find a middle way in the chaotic conflicts between humanists and theologians”, and, impartial towards both evangelism and erasmus, claimed that “it is unwise to sacrifice theology for science or to sacrifice science for theology”, and thought it was narrow-minded and anti-rational to deny absolutely either the achievements of the renaissance or the achievements of the medieval age. (bernard, 1993: 45-6) likewise, ricci in his tough missionary work found a middle way of preaching christianity through disseminating culture, making numerous friends and integrating confucianism while fighting against paganism. we will discuss his missionary strategy of long-term view elsewhere. here we analyze his interpretations of chinese culture. 3.1 on the state reigned by philosophers for confucian scholars (philosophers), the ideal of “self-cultivation, family harmony, country management and world peace” is what they pursue their whole life and it is considered “not righteous not to take office”; thus the ultimate purpose of studying hard for decades is to do civil service for the government. for ricci, the aristocracy of the ming imperial court might be more characteristic of humanism than the platonic hierarchical republic, since the ming aristocracy consisted of scholars (philosophers) who had been selected not hereditarily, but through all levels of tests and who were supposed to have genuine talents in management. for this reason, ricci appreciated the imperial examination system which ensured the appointment of real talents on their merits, learning and capability. (ricci, 2010: 38-42) he respected particularly those scholar officials of integrity who dared to risk their lives to offer the emperor advice to the interest of public and country. for example, noble scholar officials like feng yingjing and li zuowu became the subjects of his admiration, and some diligent and famous scholars like qu wensu and xu guangqu became his good friends 3 . in ricci‟s view, these humanistic philosophers in the far-east were the cornerstones of chinese empire. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 the appreciation of the “civil servant system” was one of the motivations driving ricci to transform into a „western confucian scholar‟, in addition to the practical need for his missionary work. his way of identifying himself with chinese scholar officials has been interpreted as doing as the romans do. however, this adaptation embodied ricci‟s flexible thoughts of “middle way”, free from established rules and practices. 3.2 on religions the careful observation of the religious status quo in china confirmed ricci‟s faith that it would be his mission to save the souls of the chinese. in his views, chinese people “have been trapped in the dark abyss of paganism for thousands of years” and they were worthy of compassion without blame, and his glorious mission was to bring them “christian brightness”. (ricci, 2010:87) the tactic of integrating confucianism and rejecting buddhism was, of course, to reach indirectly his end of preaching christianity. it has been interpreted as the end justifying the means, and so some scholars hold that ricci‟s tactic was unscrupulous and prompted his failure in his legal missionary work. (zhu, 2012: 28) however, it is undeniable that he did find “the uniformity between christian tenets and the chinese ancient sage‟s rationality and teachings.” (ricci, 2010: 662) ricci translated for the first time god into tianzhu (天主), the master of tian. in the confucian learning, tian, as an impersonalized god, runs everything in silence, ubiquitously and omnipotently. “only tian is great!” said confucius in awe. confucius claimed that it was at the age of fifty that he knew tian‟s mandate, whenever he came across adversities like the death of his family members or pupils he would appeal to tian, which was the source of his courage. (yan, 2011: 662) though the concept of tian in original confucianism was not totally compatible with the concept of tian held by the christianised confucian scholars in the late ming dynasty, it is easy for chinese people in awe of tian to accept this concept. on the other hand, christian tenets such as the precepts of the ten commandments--honoring one‟s father and mother, prohibition of murder, prohibition of adultery and prohibition of stealing—are compatible not only with confucian ethics teaching, but with people‟s psychological need to pursue good. when xu guangqu wrote the preface to ricci‟s twenty-five sayings, xu praised christian tenets highly: among millions of words there‟s no single word which is not compatible to the tenets of loyalty and filial piety, there‟s no single word which goes against the moral norms.” (zhu, 2012：135) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 however, ricci held deep prejudice against buddhism and taoism. he compared the taoist trinity (supreme laojun, primitive heaven senior, lingbao taoist) to a three-headed monster more horrible than the python in lane lake, which for thousands of years had reigned chinese people tyrannically. (bernard, 1993:9) he called buddhist monks “idolatrous priest-satans” (ricci, 2010:237) who notoriously led a corrupted dissolute and immoral life, so he would rather keep his distance from them. he adopted confucian clothing instead of the monk‟s gown dressed by the missionaries when they first came to china. what‟s more, when he baptized new believers, he liked them to throw away or burn their original idols. on the issue of religion, ricci displayed both mediocre and radical thoughts. on the one hand, he mixed confucian teachings and christian tenets in an innovative way, which showed that he was open, flexible and willing to find a balance, compatible to the zhongyong principle. on the other hand, he held a very radical bias against buddhism and taoism, which might be either out of his absolute adherence to christianity or out of his missionary purpose. whatever the reason, it is tell-tale evidence of his limitations as a christian missionary in the 16 th century. 3.3 on ethics in addition to the need of missionary work, ricci‟s tactic of integrating confucianism and rejecting buddhism was out of his preference of confucianism, especially the original confucianism based on his deep understanding of confucian ethics. though in confucian ethics there are no such teachings as in christianity on sin and salvation, for confucius, there exists another kind of salvation, that is, “heaven” in the present world. in this mundane heaven, “the aged live an easy life, friends have faith in me and the youth cherish the memory of me”. (the analects) in other words, heavenly reality, or ideal society is established through five harmonious relationships, namely, father and son, husband and wife, emperor and subjects, brother and brother, friend and friend. then how could harmonious relationships be achieved? only through benevolence and love, which lies in the golden rule: “do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” this principle of loyalty and forgiveness through putting oneself in another‟s place, in christian tenets, becomes the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. in his true meaning of christianity, ricci explained christian love in this way: christian love is the example the lord sets for us, that is, loving people sincerely. a benevolent person loves others truly. he will feed them when they are hungry, give them water when they are thirsty, clothe them when they are bare, house them when they are homeless, comfort them when they are suffering, enlighten them when they are ignorant, coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 admonish them when they are wrong, forgive them when they offend, bury them when they die, and most of all, pray for god‟s blessing for them. (zhu, 2012: 80) confucian benevolence stems from confucius‟s firm belief in the existence of dao (tao) as christians believe in the existence of the kingdom of heaven. in this sense, confucian benevolence is very close to christian love. (yan, 2011:65, 74) the core of confucian culture is “dao, de, li”. dao (the way) is the essence of the world. when tiandao (the way of heaven) comes down to a person‟s heart, that is, when a person senses tiandao, he or she has inserted de (virtue). when de is exteriorized into li (propriety), he or she has acquired the norm of conduct. (cheng, 2005: 568-9) for chinese people, “god” is not a necessary medium to self-cultivation and soul connection with tiandao. however, ricci found the integrating point of confucian and christian ethic teachings, incorporating the two cultures from different backgrounds and thus made chinese people accept the medium of “god” through reason. in this way, ricci accomplished the purpose of his christian mission of converting chinese people, and on the other hand helped them to observe their original confucian ethic morality to do good deeds. xu guangqu called catholicism “knowledge of heaven”. in his opinion, the jesuits‟ knowledge of heaven could “compensate the teachings of tianzi (the son of the heaven), influence confucianism, and redress buddhism,” and if ricci and his partners were allowed to do their converting job, then “in several years people‟s minds would be purified gradually.” (xu minglong, 1993: 65) 3.4 on the chinese language chinese is an ideo-phonographic language, different from any in the indo-european language family. the characteristics of chinese have been well recorded by sinologists in europe. however, in the 16 th century, ricci‟s knowledge of chinese and his summary of its characteristics and rules based on his learning experiences were groundbreaking. the chinese character table compiled by ricci and his partner laid a foundation for europeans to learn chinese. in addition, on the basis of careful reading of chinese classics, ricci translated and annotated for the first time in latin the confucian classics, including the analects, mengzi, great learning, and zhongyong. what is more, ricci wrote ancient chinese essays and booklets advancing his theory, such as the true meaning of catholicism, on friendship, ten chapters by a non-conformer, and translated into chinese, together with xu guangqu, euclid's elements. what ricci has contributed leaves precious spiritual wealth to both chinese and western scholars. for ricci, the chinese language became not only the communication tool in daily life, but the cultural medium linking up china and the west. in a word, ricci discriminated against buddhism and taoism. he also somehow noticed the corrupt customs of the ming dynasty, but did not go very far in revealing and criticizing them. however, on the whole, through analyzing ricci‟s interpretations of coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 chinese culture, we can see his attitude as a balancing out and going the middle way. because of this, he could successfully incorporate confucian and christian teachings, imbibe chinese culture, and thus be accepted by chinese people as a „western confucian‟ and so realize his missionary purpose. 4. an indelible contribution—the beginning of sinology in theological history, there is no european lack of depreciation of matteo ricci —some thought he just won favor by showing his queer gadgets, some blamed him for ignoring his missionary duties, others even suspected that he conspired to usurp the throne. however, impartial scholars have fully evaluated his contributions to introducing chinese learning to the west. in bernard‟s words, if marco polo is the first european who discovered china, then matteo ricci is surely the second, but he is the first who did scientific research on the chinese empire. (bernard, 1993: 105) ricci‟s studying of the chinese language and translating chinese classics “marked the beginning of sinology”. (bernard, 1993: 158) gallagher, the english translator of matteo ricco’s reading notes about china, regards him as a “philosopher excelling in both chinese and western theories” and an “excellent elucidator of confucianism”. (ricci, 2010:34) nigel cameron calls him a “half-chinese”, “truly respected by chinese for his talents in chinese language and literature”. (ouyang, 2011:34) when ricci finished his annotation of the four books, he had realized their significance for europe: “the annotation i‟ve done will help our work in china and japan, but will be well received in europe.” (bernard, 1993: 162) in addition, ricci‟s essay on verifying the name of “china” 4 is also regarded as “the beginning of sinology”. it is matteo ricco’s reading notes about china that brought europeans a more visualized china: “the far east, having been blocked for thousands of years by high mountains and lofty hills, by the impassable islamic barriers, is being unveiled gradually, with closer kinship to us than expected.” (bernard, 1993: 104-5) matteo ricco’s reading notes about china is spoken highly of by gallagher, who remarks that “its impact on european literature, science, philosophy, religion and life surpasses any of the other historical works in the 17 th century”. (ouyang, 2011: 34) the chinese empire described by ricci is not the 18 thcentury china fancied by philosophers like voltaire, nor the 19 th -century china admired but despised as well by europe. it is the personal memory of a christian humanist in the circle of eastern humanists. but no one could deny ricci‟s pioneering work and his influence on his followers. after ricci, none of the missionaries who made excellent contributions to coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 introducing chinese learning to the west, especially those who followed ricci‟s mission tactics during the “rites controversy”, such as nicolas trigault (金尼阁), martino martini (卫匡国), ferdinand verbiest (南怀仁) and joach bouvet (白晋), have not been influenced by ricci. as stated above, the french missionary nicolas trigault reorganized and translated ricco‟s reading notes about china, published in germany in 1615, with the title of jesuit matteo ricci's christian expedition to china. in the late 17th century, this book had been reprinted many times in different languages in europe, which triggered “sinomania” in various european countries. following ricci, trigault also translated the four books and had them published in europe, which comforted ricci‟s unrealized desire of publishing them. the italian missionary martino martini spent 10 years writing in latin on his ten volumes of chinese history, published in germany in 1658. this book, “based on chinese classics and in the form of chronicle, revealed fully and accurately to europe the reliable china‟s ancient history”. (xu minglong, 1993: 144) the french missionary joach bouvet, following his forerunner ricci, continued to probe into the integration of confucian and christian teachings and went still further. bouvet claimed, “the thoughts expressed in the chinese classics are not only totally consistent with christian teachings, but the earliest written records of christian teachings.” (xu minglong, 1993: 182) ricci‟s list of successors is very long as his influences are not just confined to his partners and successors. ricci‟s dedication to introducing chinese learning to the west is a valuable spiritual asset, deserving to be embraced and cherished. references bernard, r.p. henri, (translated into chinese by guan zhenhu), critical biography of matteo ricci. beijing: the commercial press, 1993. cheng yingcheng. cheng yingcheng collection. jinan: shandong education publishing house. 2005. liu enming, matteo ricco—cross-cultural angel of between china and the west. zhengzhou: henan literature and art publishing house. 2000. lin lechang. “reinterpretation of traditional views on tian by confucian christians in the end of ming dynasty”. christianity and chinese and western cultures in modern times. ed. luo bingxiang and zhao dunhua. beijing: beijing university press. 2000. 360-382. ouyang zhesheng, “beijing in the eyes of jesuits in 17 th century—discussion around matteo ricci, gabriel de magalhāes and louis le comte. history research, 2011/03. 26-47. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 plato, (translated into chinese by guo binghe and zhang zhuming). the republic. bejing: the commercial press, 1986. ricci, matteo, and nicolas trigault, (translated into chinese by he zaowu and he gaoji). matteo ricci‟s reading notes about china. beijing: zhonghua publishing house, 2010. xu minglong, ed. pioneers in chinese and western cultural communications. beijing: orient publishing house, 1993. xu ruzong, on zhongyong. hangzhou: zhejiang ancient works publishing house, 2004. yan, andrew zhonghu. an existential reading of the confucian analects. amherst, new york: cambria press, 2011. zhu weizheng, ed. collection of matteo ricci‟s works and translations. shanghai: fu dan university press, 2012. dr. chen hong is associate professor to, and the head of the department of international cultural communication, college of foreign languages, china jiliang university. her research interests are in english literature studies and cultural studies. she has published many papers on relevant issues. in 2010 she published a book (in english) go zhongyong--confucianism and reader-response criticism as basic directions for english literature teaching/learning in china (beijing: foreign language teaching and research press), and in 2011 she co-authored with xuyan and lufei the book (in chinese): small country big world: cultural studies on austria, switzerland and luxemburg. (hangzhou:zhejiang people's publishing house). she is now researching a comparative study on chinese and western cultures. she recently was a visiting scholar to the university of western australia (july to dec.2014). 1 zhongyong (中庸) has been translated into different versions, like the golden mean, the middle way, but i think the connotations of zhongyong will lose when thus translated, that‟s why i keep it in pinyin. referring to chen hong, 2010. going zhongyong: confucianism and reader-response criticism as basic directions for english literature teaching/learning in china. beijing: foreign language teaching and research press. 2 we should distinguish aristotle‟s golden means and confucian zhongyong, however, there‟s some similarity, since the middle way is part of zhongyong doctrine. 3 feng yingjing(冯应京) was wronged and put into prison due to his honest performance in duties and consideration for the public interest. li zuowu(李卓吾) was wronged and put into prison for his frank writing and later died in prison. qu wensu(瞿文素) was a famous scholar who learned from ricci western learning and who offered ricci much help in life. xu guangqu(徐光启) was a famous scholar who learned from ricci western learning and worked together in translating euclids elements. all of them were christianized. 4 it is ricci who made europeans know that “cathay” is “china”. (ricci, 2010: 541) however, some coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 scholars hold it is priest diego de pantoja (庞迪我) who first brought this judgment to europe, 11 years earlier than ricci. (xu minglong, 1993: 49) diapositiva 1 1/28/2013 1 coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona “the target is food for all: what’s new in agriculture? a pacific army of farmers” francesc llauradó i duran director nufarm españa s.a. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 1 copyright©2013 francesc llauradó. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. francesc llauradó duran francesc llauradó duran was born in barcelona in 1956. he holds a phd in sciences of soils from the university of strasbourg (1983), a specialist in marketing of food products (mba) in 1987. he has worked in south america, france, switzerland, and italy in the seeds and agrochemical industry and now in spain as managing director of nufarm (agrochemical company). coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 2 current situation: a complex world coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 3 food demand food supply the difficult balance coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 4 what´s our current situation? food demand side rising population rising incomes bio-fuel data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 5 food supply side climate change loss of land to non-farm use yields water deficits some information from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 6 http://www.betterphoto.com/gallery/dynogalldetail.asp?photoid=632086&catid=354&contestcatid=&rownumber=16&camid= http://www.freefoto.com/preview/108-28-6740/straw-bales 1/28/2013 2 demand side rising population rising incomes bio-fuel data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 7 rising population we are 7 billion ! and 80 more millions every year… most in developing countries with less agricultural resources—water, land, technology etc. however, the world population will go on rising, but less rapidly, growing at an average of 1.1 percent a year up to 2030, compared with 1.7 percent a year over the past 30 years coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 8 what was the population of the world in the past? coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 9 how fast is the world population growing right now? coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 10 coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 11 1.--.-%: population growth in the 2000-2010 decade (descending order) 2.#--: rank by population size 3.-------: continent/country name coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 12 //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/world_population_by_continent_and_10_most_populated_countries.png 1/28/2013 3 how is the population distributed around the world? refer to this population density map: coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 13 what´s our current situation? demand side rising population rising incomes bio-fuel data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 14 rising incomes developing countries with large and growing population are increasing food demand; principally eggs, meat and milk; poor converters of food (from cereals) adding pressure to the demand for staple foods, whereas countries with high income are cutting back in food consumption (obesity issues etc.). coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 15 increase of food demand income food eastern europe western europe japan north america surviving more staples variety quality high tech rice, bread, beans meat, dairy, oils, sugar diet food, ready to eat africa (subsahara) consumption stage latin america india china growth markets coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 16 however, future demand for agricultural products is expected to slow further—to 1.6 percent a year for the period 1997-99 to 2015 and to 1.4 percent for 2015 to 2030. in developing countries the slowdown will be more dramatic, from 3.7 percent for the past 30 years to an average 2 percent for the next 30 due to the less rapid growth of population. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 17 as income grows consumers eat more meats and processed foods 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 vegetables grain fruits and melons meat dairy k g /c a p it a 1990 2005 source: rabobank urban consumption in china coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 18 1/28/2013 4 country population consumption growth 2009/05 % p.a. millions annual growth % beef pork chicken wheat rice maize china 1338.6 0.66 2.4 0.5 6.6 0.1 -0.2 3.0 india 1166.1 1.55 3.9 n.a. 7.8 -0.7 2.7 3.2 japan 127.1 -0.19 0.1 -0.3 0.6 n.a. 0.2 -0.1 eu-27 491.6 0.11 -0.1 0.0 1.2 0.7 n.a. -0.5 united states 307.2 0.98 -0.3 -0.2 0.4 1.4 1.9 3.3 brazil 198.7 1.20 1.7 4.7 3.2 1.6 -0.6 2.9 world 6790.1 1.17 0.6 0.7 3.5 0.9 1.2 2.5 major country population and consumption statistics coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 19 world grain stocks to stay low through 2012-13 global grain stockpiles will remain low through the coming year on increased demand for crops to make fuels and foods… “this is the third year in a row that world grain demand was not met by production,” … “the agricultural bull market is still alive, but we’re at a crossroads. world grain demand is forecast to rise, which leaves little tolerance for adverse weather.” agresource (chicago nov. 16th 2011) coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 20 what´s our current situation? demand side rising population rising incomes bio-fuel data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 21 bio-fuel 28% of the grains production in usa is coming to bio-fuel production. this production represents a significant part of the demand for natural resources and some impact for the environment. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 22 biofuel demand – us ethanol impact doane market research, usda, proexporternetwork coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 23 growth drivers source: usda and goldman sachs commodities research estimates food, feed and fuel consumption have led to a trend increase in demand for agriculture commodities billion metric tons coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 24 1/28/2013 5 us ethanol production source : renewable fuels association. the slowdown in ethanol production in early 2009 is evident in the graph above, whilst it is apparent that production has continued to be sustained in the later half of 2010 and early 2011, despite high corn prices. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 25 supply side climate change loss of land to non-farm use yields water deficits data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 26 water deficits water is the key to food production. irrigation systems demand large investment and water availability. absence of water is causing starvation in some countries. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 27 supply side climate change loss of land to non-farm use yields water deficits data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 28 climate change there is no doubt the world climate is changing. we have enough evidence. change is affecting all the world but more strongly developing countries. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 29 supply side climate change loss of land to non-farm use yields water deficits data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 30 1/28/2013 6 loss of land to non-farm use the world population mainly grows in cities. urban and industrial activities are significant consumers of land that cannot be used to produce food. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 31 … more people, less land agricultural land per habitant coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 32 "if we can fight wars on oil we will fight much bigger wars over water and food". neither china nor india can possibly find sufficient arable land to satisfy their internal requirements for grains and will thus be net importers in the future. china is already importing significant amounts of soybeans and has recently become a net importer of corn and wheat. (sunny verghese, ceo of olam international) coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 33 supply side climate change loss of land to non-farm use yields water deficits data from: http://www.foodworks.ag/ coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 34 yield yields reach the limits of growth in some crops. the green revolution of the 60s and 70s, based on increases in land productivity, is obsolete. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 35 grain yield flattening and demand on the rise… (national geographic – 2009/06 cheap food: the end of plenty) coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 36 1/28/2013 7 flat flat coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 37 coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 38 we need a new green revolution to increase productivity… solutions? -irrigation -performing seeds + chemicals + fertilizers but environmentally friendly !!! (national geographic – 2009/06 cheap food: the end of plenty) irrigation fertilizers coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 39 yield conclusions coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 40 strong demand will require a substantial increase in acreage (or new technologies), which has been virtually unchanged for decades hungry drivers coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 41 the crisis of prices coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 42 1/28/2013 8 prices index annual variation coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 43 0,0 200,0 400,0 600,0 800,0 1000,0 1200,0 1400,0 1 9 9 0 1 9 9 1 1 9 9 2 1 9 9 3 1 9 9 4 1 9 9 5 1 9 9 6 1 9 9 7 1 9 9 8 1 9 9 9 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 1 2 0 0 2 2 0 0 3 2 0 0 4 2 0 0 5 2 0 0 6 2 0 0 7 2 0 0 8 2 0 0 9 2 0 1 0 2 0 1 1 food price index meat price index dairy price index cereals price index oils price index sugar price index http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/ annual real food price indices (2002-2004=100) coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 44 0,0 50,0 100,0 150,0 200,0 250,0 300,0 350,0 2002 2011 food price index meat price index dairy price index cereals price index oils price index sugar price index index evolution in 10 years coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 45 date food price index meat price index dairy price index cereals price index oils price index sugar price index 2002 96,6 96,2 88,4 101,5 93,5 105,1 2011 202,5 154,8 197,4 221,3 224,1 330,8 % 48% 62% 45% 46% 42% 32% this situation means that today we are having the most expensive breakfast in the history of humanity… and we will have the most expensive lunch ever… 48% more expensive than 10 years ago calculated with unchanging prices coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 46 impact for consumers is critical.... but different following the income situation staples = basic food: rice, maize, sugar, soybeans etc. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 47 the state of food insecurity in the world 2011 key messages of fao 2011 report coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 48 http://www.cedarkeybandb.com/welcome__about_cedar_key_b_b.htm 1/28/2013 9 small import-dependent countries, especially in africa, were deeply affected by the food and economic crises. some large countries were able to insulate themselves from the crisis through restrictive trade policies and functioning safety nets, but trade restrictions increased prices and volatility on international markets. high and volatile food prices are likely to continue. demand from consumers in rapidly growing economies will increase, population will continue to grow, and further growth in bio-fuels will place additional demands on the food system. on the supply side, there are challenges due to increasingly scarce natural resources in some regions, as well as declining rates of yield growth for some commodities. food price volatility may increase due to stronger linkages between agricultural and energy markets, as well as an increased frequency of weather shocks. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 49 price volatility makes both smallholder farmers and poor consumers increasingly vulnerable to poverty. because food represents a large share of farmer income and the budget of poor consumers, large price changes have large effects on real incomes. thus, even short episodes of high prices for consumers or low prices for farmers can cause productive assets – land and livestock, for example – to be sold at low prices, leading to potential poverty traps. in addition, smallholder farmers are less likely to invest in measures to raise productivity when price changes are unpredictable. large short-term price changes can have long-term impacts on development. changes in income due to price swings can reduce children’s consumption of key nutrients during the first 1 000 days of life from conception, leading to a permanent reduction of their future earning capacity, increasing the likelihood of future poverty and thus slowing the economic development process. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 50 high food prices worsen food insecurity in the short term. the benefits go primarily to farmers with access to sufficient land and other resources, while the poorest of the poor buy more food than they produce. in addition to harming the urban poor, high food prices also hurt many of the rural poor, who are typically net food buyers. the diversity of impacts within countries also points to a need for improved data and policy analysis. high food prices present incentives for increased long-term investment in the agriculture sector, which can contribute to improved food security in the longer term. domestic food prices increased substantially in most countries during the 2006–08 world food crisis at both retail and farmgate levels. despite higher fertilizer prices, this led to a strong supply response in many countries. it is essential to build upon this short-term supply response with increased investment in agriculture, including initiatives that target smallholder farmers and help them to access markets, such as purchase for progress (p4p). coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 51 safety nets are crucial for alleviating food insecurity in the short term, as well as for providing a foundation for long-term development. in order to be effective at reducing the negative consequences of price volatility, targeted safety-net mechanisms must be designed in advance and in consultation with the most vulnerable people. safety nets redistribute income to the poorest and most vulnerable, with an immediate impact on poverty and inequality a food-security strategy that relies on a combination of increased productivity in agriculture, greater policy predictability and general openness to trade will be more effective than other strategies. restrictive trade policies can protect domestic prices from world market volatility, but these policies can also result in increased domestic price volatility as a result of domestic supply shocks, especially if government policies are unpredictable and erratic. government policies that are more predictable and that promote participation by the private sector in trade will generally decrease price volatility. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 52 investment in agriculture remains critical to sustainable long-term food security. for example, costeffective irrigation and improved practices and seeds developed through agricultural research can reduce the production risks facing farmers, especially smallholders, and reduce price volatility. private investment will form the bulk of the needed investment, but public investment has a catalytic role to play in supplying public goods that the private sector will not provide. these investments should consider the rights of existing users of land and related natural resources. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 53 what’s new in agriculture? many challenges, many solutions… coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 54 1/28/2013 10 • declining stock-to-use ratios • rising crop prices • increased use of biofuels • declining availability of arable land • growing global population • urbanisation and increased wealth • emerging agricultural markets the broader picture…. agriculture remains a strong growth industry the battle for yield coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 55 • water management: better water management and increase of irrigation system will be key to increase efficiencies and efficacy. • soil management: new technologies to reduce the risk of erosion, increase the organic soil and protect the structure of soil to increase yield. • optimising inputs is key to maximising yield coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 56 • chemistry: protecting the seed/crop and securing increased efficiencies; efficacy; and safety  seeds: both conventional and gm breeding programs leading to a step-wise increase in a farmer's investment in seed coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 57 cap = common agricultural policy coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 58 new design of direct payments direct payments contribute to keeping farming in place throughout the eu territory by supporting and stabilizing farmers' income, thereby ensuring the longer term economic viability of farms and making them less vulnerable to fluctuations in prices. the new cap aims to move away from systems of the single payments scheme based on historical references, or a payment per hectare or combination of the two a new “basic payment scheme” will apply after 2013. this will be subject to “cross compliance” (respecting certain environmental, animal welfare & other rules like crops diversification) all member states will be obliged to move towards a uniform payment per hectare at national or regional level by the start of 2019. (until now it has been a diffrence between the eu-12 and the rest of the countries in the eu-27) coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 59 however, all farmers (and some states) are against because: • not always possible to diversify the crops. • not always possible to have permanent pastures. • not always possible to have “ecologic” areas representing at least 7% of total surface. = new concept of agriculture and the farmer coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 60 http://www.123rf.com/photo_9546574_green-seedling-illustrating-concept-of-new-life.html http://www.123rf.com/photo_5169037_dry-cracked-mud-natural-abstract-background.html 1/28/2013 11 application of nanotechnology in agriculture nanotechnology is the manipulation or self-assembly of individual atoms, molecules, or molecular clusters into structures to create materials and devices with new or vastly different properties. nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize the agricultural and food industry with new tools for the molecular treatment of diseases, rapid disease detection, enhancing the ability of plants to absorb nutrients etc. smart sensors and smart delivery systems will help the agricultural industry combat viruses and other crop pathogens. nanotechnology will also protect the environment indirectly through the use of alternative (renewable) energy supplies, and filters or catalysts to reduce pollution and clean-up existing pollutants. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 61 http://es.scribd.com/doc/29216598/nano-agriculture coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 62 coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 63 coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 64 coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 65 precision farming has been a longdesired goal to maximize output (i.e. crop yields) while minimizing input (i.e. fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc) through monitoring environmental variables and applying targeted action. precision farming coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 66 1/28/2013 12 precision farming makes use of computers, global satellite positioning systems, and remote sensing devices to measure highly localized environmental conditions thus determining whether crops are growing at maximum efficiency or precisely identifying the nature and location of problems. coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 67 a pacific army of farmers is working hard to permanently produce the food we need to cover the requirements of humanity. keeping the attractiveness of the rural life is a critical factor to produce food in the future. a combination of new technologies, investment in agriculture, fair trade and control of price volatility can assure the production of food for all. summary coolabah nr.9, pp.132-143 68 //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/yara_n-sensor_als.jpg coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona special monographic issue when “time stands still”: remembering pamela dahl-helm johnston, australian artist and academic pam dahl-helm johnston photograph c. moore hardy, 2013 my imagery is about those precious moments between life and death when we only have now … maybe a few weeks … maybe a few minutes. it’s like a leaf or a feather floating by. we can never quite hold it. just flutter it for a while, then, it inevitably falls. yet, how precious are those few moments we have. with the awareness comes the possibility that for the minimal time the feather or the leaf floats by, we can be as still as we can possibly be. for that millisecond we are sublime … (johnston, pamela; 1995, heartsbloodbreathespirit, exhibition catalogue, james harvey gallery). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 “the grass that they cut and trample and dig out and sprout roots again”: the spiritual baptist church in earl lovelace’s the wine of astonishment maria grau perejoan abstract: earl lovelace’s fiction can be said to, ultimately, work as a force to give validity to the creole culture created out of the coming together of many worlds in the caribbean. as in his novel the dragon can’t dance, which celebrated those creole art forms around carnival, in his next novel, the wine of astonishment (1982), i lovelace celebrates yet another creole institution, the trinidadian african-derived church of the spiritual baptists. in the novel the spiritual baptist church, made to be seen as the darkness from which natives needed to be weaned by colonial authorities, is celebrated and acknowledged as one of the basis that allowed for the creation of a new society away from the colonial narrowness. in the wine of astonishment, the resistance put up by spiritual baptist practitioners, in spite of the prohibition and violence endured, is acknowledged, celebrated and recognised as one of the milestones in caribbean history. this article will trace, as reflected in the novel, the evolution of the spiritual baptist church, and will analyse its symbolical relation to another art form created in the new world: the steel pan movement. all in all, this article will examine the survival of this trinidadian african-derived church together with the emergence of the steelpan as two of the most salient testimonies of cultural survival and creolisation of the nation. keywords: earl lovelace, creole art forms, spiritual baptist church, steel pan, resistance at the heart of earl lovelace’s works lies the assumption that fiction is an instrument of social transformation. lovelace’s works celebrate and give validity to those creole cultural forms born in the new world that survived years of disdain and banning by both colonial and postcolonial authorities. the author from the twin-island republic of trinidad and tobago acknowledges the liberating and restorative power of fiction and believes fiction can help achieve a sense of self that it is rooted in the culture of the ordinary people, ii in what people do to create culture and create a sense of belonging. thus, the aim of the wine of copyright©2014 maria grau perejoan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 astonishment is to contribute to a change in the region’s attitude towards the culture produced by the ordinary working people of the region, towards the still prevailing attitude that, as trinidadian writer and scholar merle hodge points out, associates culture with a capital c as “something other than whatever we actually practise every day of our lives” (hodge, 2004: 4). in fact, hodge describes the situation of the culture produced on caribbean soil by caribbean people in the following manner: the culture of the caribbean, the set of arrangements for survival developed by the people who have lived together in this environment over the past five centuries, remains an unrecognized, unavowed phenomenon, still largely proceeding as an underground movement. (hodge, 2004: 1) against this state of affairs, the novel intends to stress the necessity for west indian indigenous cultural forms and institutions to be recognized and valued, in particular as regards the spiritual baptist church. lovelace recognises the survival of the spiritual baptist church after years of struggling against disdain, police brutality and eventually its banning as one of the pillars that sustain west indian culture. african-based religions or creolized religious systems born in the new world were developed in secrecy and were at the heart of the resistance and rebellion against a plantation society founded on violence. they allowed the most oppressed sectors of colonial caribbean societies to manifest their spirituality as well as to express the cultural and political practices suppressed by colonial force, and thus protect the health of the community. in trinidad and tobago, the two most important expressions of african-based or african-derived religions are the spiritual baptists, also known as the shouter baptists, and the orisha or shango. both religions are based on syncretisms of west african and christian traditions. according to trinidadian scholar rhoda reddock, the spiritual baptist church, the most prevalent stream, “developed in the later days of the nineteenth century among the ex-enslaved who under the force of being christianised sought to reestablish and continue their west african religious traditions” (reddock, 2002: 122). set in the decade spanning world war two and the postwar period in the fictitious trinidadian village of bonasse, the wine of astonishment begins with a depiction of its spiritual baptist congregation. in their humble church, which is home to their ceremonies, they worship in the baptist way: we have this church in the village. we have this church. the walls make out of mud, the roof covered with carrat leaves: a simple hut with no steeple or cross or acolytes or white priests or latin ceremonies. but is our own. black people own it... we have this church where we gather to sing hymns and ring the bell and shout hallelujah and speak in tongues when the spirit come; and we carry the word to the downtrodden and the forgotten and the lame and the beaten, and we touch black people soul. (1982: 32) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 black-owned and independent from any european church hierarchy, spiritual baptist faith was outlawed from 1917 to 1951 by the british colonial government. in the shouters prohibition ordinance the church was outlawed on grounds of non-tolerable practices and its association with magic and sorcery. herskovits and herskovits, the famous united states africanists, explain the main reasons given by the trinidad’s attorney general of the time to justify the banning. first, it was argued that that spiritual baptist practices were deemed as non-tolerable in a well-conducted community, and secondly, it was also argued that the neighbourhood in which the spiritual baptists meeting took place was made almost impossible for residential occupation (herskovits, 1947: 330). once the ordinance was in force, as described in the novel, police could arrest practitioners of the spiritual baptist faith for practicing their religion: they pass the law against us that make it a crime on the whole island for people to worship god in the spiritual baptist religion. now if we ring the bell, that was against the law. if we clap we hands and catch the spirit, the police could arrest us. (lovelace, 1982: 34) among the spiritual baptists practices deemed as intolerable and indecent we find the ones aforementioned, such as handclapping, the ringing of the bell, dancing, shouting, chanting and what the colonial government would consider the most unacceptable practice of all: spirit possession. iii spirit possession, in trinidadian english creole catching the spirit or catching the power, is one of the fundamental features around which afro-caribbean religions are centred. in the ritual of spirit possession, people transcend their materiality by becoming spirits and the deities manifest themselves through the bodies of the initiated. in creole religions of the caribbean, fernández olmos and paravisini-gebert state that “spiritual power is internalised and mobilized in human beings who become, through the experience of possession, a real live altar in which the presence of the supernatural beings can be invoked” (fernández olmos and paravisini-genret, 2011: 120). it is significant to note how such central element of spirit possession has been one of the practices most targeted and misrepresented in a wide variety of textual and visual narratives. in particular, hollywood horror and non-horror productions have most frequently offered negative and diminishing images of african-derived religions. these disempowering visual narratives have mainly equated spirit possession to frantic unwanted crises. however, these crises so widely depicted in hollywood productions do rarely occur and when they do, gerdès fleurant states, these only occur to the noninitiates who “have not yet learned to sustain the weight of lwa…” iv (fleurant 1998: xxvii). these narratives failed to understand that spirit possession is one of the “significant aspects of religious rituals of africa [which] are generally opened to only the initiated” (ayiejina and gibbons, 1999: 42). thus, these crises together with voodoo dolls or zombies -other aspects belonging to african-derived religionsare marginal features that western productions have chosen to put the focus on in order to offer a diminishing picture and, thus, signal african-derived religions as a set of evil or black magic practices. importantly, spirit possession, apart from being described as a practice in the spiritual baptist church, takes on another dimension in the novel through the character of eva. the narrator of the wine of astonishment, eva, is the wife of coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 the spiritual baptist leader. eva is the character chosen as a narratora traditional afro-caribbean storytellerto retell what occurs to the almost one hundred community members mentioned in the novel. nonetheless in the same manner as the church is seen as communal property, so is the story, since it is not so much the individual creation of eva or the church leader, but it belongs to everyone. merle hodge asserts that eva’s is not a personal voice, but that at every turn the narrator acknowledges the community’s participation in the telling of the story. so eva “does not so much retell episodes told to her, as yield to the voices of those who witnessed the action” (hodge 2007: 276). this way, the narrative voice not only stresses the importance of community but it could be argued that it also highlights the phenomenon of spirit possession. uwi scholar and writer funso aiyejina has seen in eva’s role a reflection of the phenomenon of possession characteristic of the afro-caribbean religions. he likens the narrator to the medium in african-derived religions rituals “who loses his or her own voice and inherits the voice and manner of the possessing deity” (aiyejina 1996: 13). therefore, throughout the novel the character of eva becomes a multi-vocal narrator regularly possessed by the spirit of other characters. the novel also reflects the democratic dimension of the spiritual baptist church. in contrast to most mainstream belief systems, each congregation forms a democratic organization where the individual is not subjected to a monolithic structure, but one where, as lovelace states, “anyone can testify, anyone can dream, god can speak through anyone” (lovelace, 2003: 53). reddock also points out that one characteristic of all afro-christian religions in the caribbean has been the participation of women at levels that are not evident in other mainstream belief systems. this participation translates in that in the spiritual baptist church women, as the novel reflects, are not only restricted to being members and participants but also leaders (reddock: 2002, 123). as a consequence of the passing of the shouters prohibition ordinance, the congregation of shouter baptists in bonasse have to endure much suffering and hardship. first of all, the congregation is forced to move out of the village, “high up on a steep hill and hidden behind half-dead mango trees” (lovelace, 1982: 32). secondly, they are constrained to hold more subdued services characterised by quieter praying and singing instead of bell ringing and catching the power. moreover, the novel depicts how the numbers of spiritual baptist decreased dramatically. conversion to more accepted churches such as the roman catholic church or the methodist church brought many social and economic advantages to the convert, thus all throughout the banning, the congregation of bonasse witnesses how the number of devotees slowly diminishes. importantly, as regards their legal status, the banning made spiritual baptists practitioners criminals. thus, the novel illustrates how for the practitioner to be oneself and practice one’s own faith meant to be infringing the law. an integral part of your identity, the one that established a connection with your african heritage and provided, in barbadian writer and scholar, george lamming’s words, “a historical continuity” (quoted in pouchet paquet 1982: 3) was outlawed. eva recounts how bee, her husband and leader of the church, summons the community after the banning to decode for them the political agenda hidden behind the prohibition: coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 and bee talk, giving us the history of the trials and tribulations we go through in this babylon country, where no matter what we do to be ourselves they try to make us illegal, to cut us from our god and self and leave us naked without defence.” (lovelace 1982: 37) bee clearly recognises that these are the kind of measures that have unsuccessfully attempted, since their arrival at the new world, to erase the africa in them. colonial authorities in trinidad and tobago did not only ban africanderived religious worshipping but also any cultural art form whose roots were to be found in africa such as dancing, drumming, and stickfighting, all on the pretext that they were too noisy and their respective practices disturbed decent people. as was the regular pattern in colonial control, creole traditions that came out of the result of the interaction of the different cultures that were brought to the caribbean, were prohibited. for this reason, lovelace argues that the spiritual baptists, as all the other african institutions or art forms, were made to be seen as uncivilized, as the darkness from which natives needed to be weaned. to bring the light of their civilization, colonial authorities had to create a darkness in which their light could shine. in other words, for the colonizers to take control of the colonized, “the colonizers had to establish as darkness the culture of the african and to do so they had to legislate darkness” (lovelace 2003: 3). even the author himself recalls when as a child, growing up in tobago in his maternal grandparents methodist household, calypso, carnival, orisha and all the cultural aspects that were connected to africa, were viewed as instruments of the devil (lovelace 2003: 9). after the hard long thirty-five years of prohibition, when the congregation in the wine of astonishment reunites again, the numbers have decimated, but bee celebrates their survival. in the first sermon after the banning has been lifted, bee acknowledges the enduring force that has made the congregation resist. he defines their communal effort and the congregation itself with the words used for the title of this paper: “the grass that they cut and trample and dig out and sprout roots again” (lovelace 1982: 59). bee preaches about all the impeding circumstances which have not managed to tear down the community: and bee preach about the tribulation and about the running and dodging and hiding and he preach about the scattering of the people when we scatter like sparks from a fire to die, but we do not die, instead come back again to be here to praise the lord and to magnify his name. (lovelace, 1982: 144) although the congregation had to endure all kinds of difficulties, the fire of the community did not extinguish. instead, the fire -read the congregationis, thanks to the resistance offered, well alive. however, in this first service in the old spiritual way after the lifting of the ban, even though many members of the congregation try, no-one is successful at catching the fire and the spirit does not come: the spirit wouldn’t come, everything we try. it was sorrowful bad. and those of us like sister elaine and mother ruth and brother theophilus who wait all these years was confuse because the spirit coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 wouldn’t come; and bee was preaching, trying with his voice to call the spirit, trying with the incense, and the lighted candles and the bell and bowl of flowers and the holy water to bring the spirit in, but the spirit wouldn’t come that day. it wouldn’t come… wouldn’t come. (lovelace 1982: 144) thus, for the first time after the long years of banning, the congregation is able to worship the old way again, with handclapping, chanting, shouting and bell ringing but inexplicably the spirit would not come. on their way back home after the service, eva and bee reflect on the possible causes that could explain why the spirit did not come. amidst the disappointment, sadness and sense of guilt that the spirit’s non-appearance had brought to the whole community, bee, eva and their children come across a rehearsal session at the steelband tent. at that point they realize that the spirit has not, as the congregation feared, abandoned the community, instead it has been reassembled in the trinidadian musical percussion instrument made from a steel oil-drum: in the next yard there, with bamboo for posts and coconut branches for a roof, is a steelband tent, and in this tent is the steel pans, and playing these pans is some young fellows, bare-back and with tearup clothes … i listening to the music; for the music that those boys playing on the steelband have in it the same spirit that we miss in our church; the same spirit; and listening to them, my heart swell and it is like resurrection morning. i watch bee, bee watch me. i don’t say nothing to him and he don’t say nothing to me, the both of us bow, nod, as if, yes, god is great, and like if we passing in front of something holy. (lovelace, 1982: 146) this closing paragraph portraying this epiphanic moment opens a new window of hope for the community. the new circumstances fruit of a history of prohibition and resistance have now offered a new location in trinidadian culture where the spirit is also to be found. the novel is thus proposing that that same spirit the spiritual baptist worshippers have been catching is now also present in the steelpan movement. trinidadian culture has now further expanded and also embraces a new form of folk-based communion: the steelband. the steelpan, said to be the only instrument created in the 20 th century, was born in the 1930’s in trinidad. it was born precisely in laventille, a hill overlooking the capital of the country, port of spain, mainly populated by african-descended people at the bottom of the economic ladder. in laventille, after the banning of the african skin drum, people untrained in acoustic engineering, as trinidadian scholar anthony neil points out, were able to discover that it was possible to cause musical notes to emanate from a sunken oil drum (neil,1985:8). interestingly, the now national instrument of trinidad and tobago went through a parallel history to that of spiritual baptists. created and practised by the ordinary people, it also endured banning and persecution from the colonial government. that is why lovelace asserts that both the spiritual baptist church and the steelband have gone through similar experiences in their respective histories, and “now stand now and forever as the everlasting monument to human endurance and human dignity (lovelace, 2003: 37). thus, along with the spiritual baptist coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 church, the steelband movement that emerged in the 1930’s has empowered and continues to empower the ordinary people and it has helped overcome the negative self-image caused by the degradation and rejection they had been subjected to by the ruling and upper classes of the society. in this sense, earl lovelace can be said to fit george lamming’s definition of the caribbean writer. lamming sees the writer as engaged in the shaping of national consciousness and giving alternative directions to society. lamming lists the following set of functions for the caribbean writer to fulfil: throughout the literature of the caribbean, this theme of spiritual dispossession and self-mutilation remains central to the thought and perception of your writers... it is the function of the writer to return a society to itself; and in this respect, your writers have been the major historians of the feeling of your people. to separate them by open or hidden forms of censorship from a generation which needs to be provided with a firm sense of historical continuity would be to inflict upon us a second stage of isolation. (qted. in pouchet paquet 1982: 3) according to lamming, the writer records and interprets the new world created in the caribbean and provides a sense of historical continuity negated by the colonial mentality, and therefore liberates the younger generations from a cycle of spiritual dispossession and self-mutilation. therefore, lovelace is in line with lamming’s definition of the caribbean writer, since his endeavour all throug his works has been the examination and validation of what has been created by caribbean people on caribbean soil. all in all, the novel shows how the spiritual baptist church is a living proof of the caribbean people’s resistance to the colonial authorities’ attempt at erasing africa from the caribbean. it also proves the attempt at inflicting spiritual dispossession onto caribbean people unsuccessful, since as it happens in the novel both spirit and spiritual dispossession are unsuccessful. and finally it also refutes the famous statement by probably the best known trinidadian writer and recipient of the nobel prize for literature, v.s. naipaul, that “history is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the west indies” (v.s. naipaul 1962: 20). in contrast, lovelace proves that west indians have created a rich creole culture to be proud of that came out of the result of the interaction of the different cultures that were brought to the caribbean. lovelace asserts that west indians “must begin to focus on what we have done, created, achieved as we have confronted the experience of oppression in the caribbean and we need to examine our own creativity and achievements to value them” (lovelace 2003: 36). thus, in the wine of astonishment lovelace examines, acknowledges and celebrates what has been created in the west indies and stresses that for trinidadian society to further advance, it is a dire necessary to value all that has been created. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 works cited aiyejina, funso (1996). “salt: a complex tapestry.” trinidad and tobago review. vol. 181(0-12), 13-16. aiyejina, funso and gibbons, rawle (1999). “orisa (orisha) tradition in trinidad.” caribbean quarterly, vol. 45 (4), 35-50 fernández olmos, margarite and paravisini-gebert, lizabeth (2011). creole religions of the caribbean: an introduction from vodou and santeria to obeah and espiritismo. new york: new york university press. fleurant, gerdès (1998). “introduction” to phyllis galembo, vodou: visions and voices of haiti. berkeley: ten speed press. xiv-xxix. herskovits, melville j. and herskovits, frances s. (1947). trinidad village. new york: alfred a. knopf. hodge, merle (2004). “what’s the use of culture?” cross-culturalism and the caribbean canona cultural studies conference. university of the west indies, st. augustine. january 7-10, 2004. unpublished. --(2007). “earl lovelace and the evolution of voice in the history of the novel in trinidad and tobago.” diss. university of the west indies. unpublished. --(2011). “language use and west indian literary criticism.” the routledge companion to anglophone caribbean literature. ed. bucknor, michael a. and alison donnell. new york: routledge. 470-480. lovelace, earl (1982). the wine of astonishment. london: heinemann. --(2003). growing in the dark: selected essays. ed. funso aiyejina. port of spain: lexicon trinidad ltd. naipaul, v.s. (1962). the middle passage: impressions of five societies british, french and dutch in the west indies and south america. london: a. deutsch. neil, ancil anthony (1987). voices from the hills. despers & laventille: the steelband and its effects on poverty, stigma and violence in a community. port of spain: n.p. pouchet paquet, sandra (1982). the novels of gorge lamming. london: heinemann. reddock, rhoda (2002). “contestations over culture, class, gender and identity in trinidad and tobago: the little tradition.” questioning creole: creolisation discourses in caribbean culture. ed. shepherd, verne a. and glen l. richards. kingston: ian randle publishers. i although the wine of astonishment was published after the dragon can’t dance, it was, nonetheless, written before his most renowned novel the dragon can’t dance. ii “by ordinary people, i mean those who are not the elite by property, education or privilege and status… i mean, in fact, those who might be said to have struggled against colonialism, affirming themselves as people through maintaining and establishing religion, cultural practices and by warring against attempts to dehumanize them or place them as a lower order of human beings” (lovelace, 2003: 102). iii in 1883, long before the actual banning of the faith, reddock points out, the colonial government also introduced a “music bill” which was later codified into a law in which the playing of drums, tambours and chac chacs (rattles) was prohibited from 6:00 am to 10:00 pm. this forced the spiritual baptists to use other methods to compensate for the prohibited drums and rattles. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 iv even though fleurant makes reference to another caribbean african-derived religion, haitian vodou, i believe the practice is the same therefore it also applies to the spiritual baptist church. thus, he refers to the lwa, the term used to refer to the spirits that possess vodou practitioners. maria grau-perejoan is a lecturer of postcolonial literatures in english at the universitat de barcelona. she received an m. phil. in cultural studies from the university of the west indies, trinidad and tobago, where she also worked as a visiting lecturer in spanish from 2005 to 2008. a member of the executive committee of the ub centre for australian studies, she is currently finishing her phd on trinidadian writers merle hodge and earl lovelace. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 protecting the children: early years of the king’s orphan schools in van diemen’s land lucy frost abstract: in the second decade of the 21 st century, the australian government has encountered a barrage of criticism from people outraged by its treatment of refugees. the immigration minister, accused of failing in his obligation to act as guardian of asylum-seeking children, has talked ‘tough’. nearly two hundred years earlier, when lieutenant-governor george arthur confronted the problems of administering australia’s second colony, van diemen’s land (now tasmania), his approach was radically different. this paper considers how the colony under arthur struggled with the government’s responsibility to protect vulnerable children in its midst. keywords: orphan schools; female convicts; colonial australia source: w l crowther library, tasmanian archive and heritage office copyright©2013 lucy frost. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 one of australia’s oldest institutions for children still stands in a suburb of hobart, tasmania. buildings commonly known as the queen’s orphan schools are usually remembered—if they are remembered at all—as housing the children of convicts. there is about the queen’s orphan schools an aura of ‘the convict stain’. but in earlier days before victoria ascended her throne in 1837, the children in the king’s orphan schools came from very diverse backgrounds, and the institutions played a far more complex role in the frontier community because the emphasis was on protection rather than confinement. within twenty years of the colony’s founding (1804), it became clear that many children were not being well looked after. when george arthur became lieutenant governor in 1824, one of his top priorities was the care of children at risk. arthur, the colony’s first genuinely effective administrator, was a social reformer who wanted efficient institutions designed to implement a vision grounded in his own deeply held evangelical beliefs. he brought order into the running of the penal colony, and at the same time set about establishing institutions to meet the needs of a civil society. using the existing network of reporting, he asked each district across the colony for the names of children who might be ‘fit objects of admission into an orphan school’. i while these reports were coming in, a clergyman sent arthur a thoughtful letter based on his own experience ‘in similar institutions’. ii ‘i should suppose’, he wrote, ‘the object of the establishment is to afford protection & instruction to children who have not their parents, or whose parents are unable or unfit to take proper care of them’. iii this was indeed ‘the object’ arthur had in mind, as the surviving archive makes clear. no distinction was drawn between the children of convicts and of free parents. concern focused on the circumstances of the children, whoever their parents might be. initially the key institutional links were between the orphan schools and the church, not (as was the case a decade later) between the orphan schools and the convict department. when arthur appointed the first committee of management on 24 april 1828, two of its five members were clergyman: the venerable archdeacon thomas hobbes scott and the rev william bedford. scott was the highest-ranking anglican clergyman in the australian colonies. when the archdeaconry of new south wales was created in the diocese of calcutta, scott was appointed to the position, and according to his entry in the australian dictionary of biography, ‘was given almost complete control of ecclesiastical matters’ in new south wales and its dependencies—including van diemen’s land. iv the order establishing the orphan schools was promulgated while scott was on an extended visit to his island constituency, and according to historian peter chapman, it was on the archdeacon’s recommendation, ‘strongly endorsed by arthur, [that] the orphan schools were founded in 1828’. v scott, says chapman, was ‘exercised by the dubious “moral climate”’ of the colony. vi in scott’s words: ‘vice and immorality have extended widely…many native-born youths have been brought to an untimely end by justice, and it is known that seduction and prostitution have destroyed the happiness of nearly as many unfortunate girls’. vii even though scott would soon be returning to his base in sydney, the evangelical lieutenant governor appointed the crusading archdeacon to chair the new committee of management, and the minutebook bears his signature as chair for the initial meetings. viii the committee’s second clergyman, the rev william bedford, as senior chaplain was the highest-ranking clergyman resident in van diemen’s land. bedford had been in the colony only four years. when he took his wife and family away from their english home to his new colonial posting, bedford was already middle-aged, a clergyman who had not been ordained until he was forty years old. according to the australian dictionary of biography, he ‘was reputed to have been a staymaker’, ix a protégée of the quaker prison reformer elizabeth fry, and involved with her work at newgate prison. bedford also assisted in parishes in london’s east end, that impoverished area which had been home to many convict transportees, and as part of his invisible cultural baggage bedford brought to van diemen’s land his experience in coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 ministering to people just like the convicts. he and lieutenant governor arthur shared an evangelical vision, and although bedford’s drinking and financial pilfering would ultimately discredit him with arthur and with much of the community, in the early years of the orphan schools he was still a man of credibility, and the minutebook shows him energetically devoted to the project of protecting the colony’s children. the other three committee members also represented significant sectors of the community outside the convict department. major kirkwood was the colony’s senior military officer. affleck moodie, who like kirkwood was a veteran of the peninsular war, was in charge of the commissariat. joseph hone was master of the supreme court. being a member of the committee of management was a time-consuming task for those who attended the weekly meetings in the vestry of st david’s church. scott soon returned to sydney, and kirkwood seems to have attended no meetings before his regiment was transferred, so the workload was carried by bedford, hone, and affleck. in the early days, all expenditures, however minute, had to be approved and minuted. the committee members took their responsibilities seriously. as joan c brown, the historian of social services in tasmania, says in poverty is not a crime: ‘the members of the committee of management were an energetic and conscientious group of men’. x they devoted time and attention not only to weekly meetings which sometimes lasted for hours, but also to preparing for the meetings by investigating the circumstances of the applicants for admission—and there was a steady stream of applications. ‘twenty children’, according to brown, ‘were admitted in the first week, by the end of 1828 numbers had reached 133, and 235 by october 1833’. xi the powers of the committee, however, were limited. while they could recommend or not recommend admission, it was lieutenant governor arthur who made the final decision as he micro-managed his colony. the minutes were supposed to be written up immediately after the meeting and sent straight on to the lieutenant governor, but that did not always happen as quickly as arthur would have liked. in 1830 he decided to solve the problem by making the committee’s secretariat a paid position, and appointing the newly arrived auditor of civil accounts, g t w b boyes, another peninsular war veteran. boyes, who was keeping a diary, wrote on 5 june 1830 that he had received a letter from the colonial secretary telling him that he would be paid ‘a salary of £100’ per annum for this position. xii boyes also records a conversation with arthur on the subject, in which the lieutenant governor said ‘that though he should report one hundred i might probably be allowed to draw £150—or something to that effect’. xiii this new appointment of a salaried secretariat placed a volunteer committee on a more professional footing within the civil establishment. the king’s orphan schools were not convict institutions. it is true that the children of convicts were admitted but the practice was not institutionalised as a norm, and arthur was still trying to persuade the london authorities that the orphan schools could be useful as a tool within the convict system. ‘by receiving the children into them’, he wrote in a despatch dated 26 september 1828, ‘the [convict] mothers become at once disposable to settlers, or, can be kept at hard labour!’ xiv meantime, the admission of convicts’ children was scrutinised case by case, and staff at the cascades female factory had to apply for the admission of children from their nurseries. on 4 october 1832, the minutes record that: ‘the committee in consequence of the great number and crowded state of the children in the female factory beg leave to recommend to his excellency that eight of the eldest boys at present in that establishment be selected and transferred to the male orphan school’. xv because the orphan schools were not part of the convict system, the committee was incensed a few months later when children from the female factory simply arrived without warning. the secretary reported: … that he had late the previous day between the hours of 4 & 5 o’clock received an intimation from the master of the female orphan school that 41 boys & girls coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 in 4 carts with some bedding had arrived at the school from the female factory and that he wished to know if he was to admit them & that [the secretary] had by a note requested the master to receive them as they must have been sent by some authority however irregular. xvi the committee was clearly irritated to discover that ‘some authority’ was sending cartloads of children from the convict nursery without applying for their admission case by case. the children on the carts, like most children of convicts admitted to the orphan schools, had either arrived on the ships with their mothers or had been born in the convict nursery. other children of convicts were admitted after their parents were convicted in the local courts. on 7 march 1829, an eight-year-old girl, mary ann perkins, was admitted two days before her father was hung for the murder of her mother. xvii most local convictions were less sensational. on 16 may 1833, the committee considered the petition for a ‘distraught & destitute family’ whose father had been sent to port arthur after his conviction for receiving 614 pounds of barley, the property of the crown, knowing it to be stolen. xviii for this theft from ‘our sovereign lord the king’, vizenza buccheri was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. buccheri and his wife mary foley were among the colony’s earliest convicts. before female transports began sailing directly to van diemen’s land, mary had been sent from dublin to sydney and then on to hobart, arriving in 1817. sentenced to seven years’ transportation in 1815, she was free by 1824, two years before she married buccheri, with whom she had been living for most of her time as a prisoner. buccheri, a sicilian by birth, was illiterate and never learned to speak english very well, xix but in these years before arthur arrived to regulate the convict system, he managed to purchase a cart and four working bullocks, the source of support for his growing family—ten children were born to the convict couple, though three at least died quite early. buccheri had an unusual background. he had been a private in a sicilian regiment serving with the british when he deserted in malta, was caught, tried by a court martial in 1809, sentenced to transportation for life — and then sent to london to be put on the ship which would take him to the ends of the earth. in 1814 he participated in a bold attempt to escape the penal island, and might have succeeded in making it to south america with his co-conspirators if they had paid as much attention to their water casks as to the boat they built. xx almost twenty years later, his conviction for receiving the stolen barley looks like another wild scheme gone wrong. it certainly left his children unprotected. the committee of management recorded finding them‘in a most neglected state, some of the children almost blind’. xxi rev bedford had performed the marriage ceremony for the parents in 1826 after they had six children, only three of them living, xxii and had been concerned about the abject poverty of this family ever since. xxiii now that their father was locked up, he arranged for all the children to be removed from their home to the hospital. ‘the eldest a girl of 11 years of age of most abandoned habits has been sent to the female factory’. xxiv suddenly, by despatching an 11-year-old girl to a women’s prison, the concept of ‘protection’ turns darker. some sort of struggle may have ensued between the impoverished mother and the determined clergyman, because even though the committee agreed to admit 6-year-old harriet and 4-yearold thomas in may 1833, the children did not actually go on the record books until late november, six months later. their oldest sister, elizabeth, managed to get out of the female factory and into the orphan school the following february. at least two children were still at home, baby agnes and the blind mary ann; in june 1836 they also entered the orphan school. getting out was not easy. on 30 june 1838, after buccheri had returned from port arthur and was granted a ticket of leave to live in new norfolk, he retrieved his eldest daughter elizabeth who was now 16 and could be sent out to work. the next year, thomas, aged 10, absconded and never returned to the orphan school. in 1841, buccheri retrieved his youngest child, agnes, perhaps a sentimental favourite. in 1842 harriet, after almost nine years in the institution, was apprenticed. now all the siblings were gone except the blind mary ann, who faced another ten coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 years in the orphan schools before she was ‘removed to the infirmary, hobart’, aged almost 30. how did she feel about leaving a place full of children, almost the only place she could remember as home? protecting the children of free parents the committee of management, aiming to ‘afford protection’ rather than to service the convict department, admitted children from a diverse range of circumstances. at this stage, the king’s orphan schools were not restricted to orphans, children of convicts, and the poor. there was also a fee-paying class. the colony’s first clergyman, robert knopwood, agreed to pay the annual fee of £12 when he petitioned the committee on 10 october 1833 ‘on behalf of his god son robert morrisby aged 9 years, son of henry and elizabeth mary morrisby, stating that the mother is dead and the father a victualler [a publican] and not competent to take due care of the morals of his child’. xxv robert morrisby may have been knopwood’s grandson as well as his godson. the unmarried clergyman had adopted the boy’s mother, leaving people to wonder why he selected her from among the many other children in impoverished circumstances, and now, whatever the motivation of the 70-year-old clergyman, he was keen to take the boy from his father, and willing to pay the annual fee charged to maintain and educate children whose families did not claim charity. some fee-paying children came from districts where there was no school, and their parents looked to the orphan schools as the equivalent of boarding schools. another category of children, whose fathers belonged to the new south wales veteran corps, were admitted for half fees, £6 per year. the fee-paying children undoubtedly learned more than reading and writing from others their age whose circumstances were radically different from their own. what has been forgotten in the subsequent stigmatizing of the orphan schools, and what i find fascinating, is that children were coming from a wide range of backgrounds, bringing with them a diversity of experience unexpected in similar institutions either then or now. the second part of this discussion introduces a few children one might not expect to find in an orphanage. three of their fathers held official positions in the colony: joshua drabble was superintendent of the hobart female factory; roger henry woods was the principal superintendent of convicts; dr edward foord bromley was in effect the colonial treasurer. a fourth father, george espie, was a prosperous settler. the circumstances leading to the admission of their children is a reminder of how different australia’s colonial history might look if written from the perspective of children. on 29 may 1828, only a month after the committee of management began meeting, ann drabble petitioned on behalf of her two sons, george aged 8 and arthur aged 5½: ‘the father is deceased and i have nothing to keep the children with’. xxvi and nowhere to live, she might have added. an ‘apartment’ went with joshua drabble’s position as superintendent of the hobart town female factory, but with his sudden death three months earlier, the family lost their accommodation along with the superintendent’s measly salary of £50 per year. ann had five children to care for. in addition to the boys, she had two girls from a previous marriage, aged 11 and 14, and a baby six weeks old, born after her husband’s death. her oldest daughter had been married three years earlier, aged 13, after a sexual scandal involving a young society doctor, as a result of which he had to resign his position as a colonial surgeon and seems to have died not long afterwards. xxvii the small boys george and arthur drabble had grown up in very peculiar circumstances. their father, as hamish maxwell-stewart has said in his account of their sister’s scandal, ‘was forced to write petitions to the lieutenant governor seeking some improvement in the quarters that he and his family shared with the nearly “one hundred turbulent, depraved and diseased characters” coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 who inhabited the factory’. xxviii the dangers were physical as well as moral, the family subjected daily to contagion and disease. death stalked the children ann bore in the factory. in 1826 and 1827, she gave birth to children who died in the year they were born. the little girl born after her father died in 1828 would live only nine months. george, born in london before the family emigrated, and arthur, born perhaps before his mother grew less healthy in the factory environment, were the only survivors among the drabble children. how difficult their childhoods had already been before they were admitted to the orphan schools. i know nothing in detail about their time there, or even when they left, but after three and a half years, george ran away. his mother, reported the committee’s minutebook, ‘has promised to take him back [to the school] immediately’. xxix at the same time as the boys went into the orphan schools, ann drabble set herself up as a shopkeeper, advertising that she ‘has laid in a general assortment of groceries, of the very best quality’. xxx she also promised to clean leghorn and straw bonnets ‘in a superior manner … having had considerable experience in one of the first houses in london’. xxxi apparently the venture was not a success, because within eight months another hopeful businessman had ‘removed to the premises lately occupied by mrs drabble’, and was advertising comfortable accommodation for settlers. xxxii poor ann drabble was having a dreadful time, and matters did not improve when she married her third husband on 17 august 1830. his name was entered into the marriage register, william davis, and also the name of his ship, the asia. ann drabble was marrying a convict—not a convict emancipist or even a ticket-of-leave man, but a serving convict with a long record of offences, a record which just kept getting longer after his marriage. ann left him behind still serving his sentence when she sailed away from van diemen’s land on 29 april 1836, taking with her arthur and george, who at some stage she had retrieved from the orphan schools. the boys, now 14 and 16, were off to try their luck in another colony. on 14 june 1832, four years after the drabble brothers entered the orphan schools, the four children of roger henry woods were admitted, aged between 6 and 10. only two years earlier they had been severed from family and friends in england when their father was appointed principal superintendent of convicts in van diemen’s land, among the most powerful positions in the colony. unfortunately he was a noted drunkard, ‘undoubtedly one of the worst cases of patronage from downing street that arthur had to contend with’. xxxiii after a bitter battle, arthur suspended woods, who rushed back to london to complain, leaving his wife and children with no money. mrs woods got her children into the orphan schools, and then she eloped to sydney with an overseer. when the committee of management realised that her four children would be left as an expense on the colonial coffers, they wrote to warn the lieutenant governor that she was on a ship in the harbour and about to flit. should they stop her? no, replied arthur, it was his ‘express desire’ that they were ‘not to interfere’. xxxiv the children were to be protected from the outrageous behaviour of their feckless parents. and so it was that the state brought up two brothers and two sisters, and arranged their apprenticeships when they turned 14. the circumstances of the drabble and woods children seem straightforward in contrast to the saga of the bromley family. on 11 september 1835 the male orphan school admitted frederick bromley steele, aged 4, and lawrence george foord montmouth steele, confusingly known as ‘bromley’, aged 2. these brothers would spend the next nine years, most of their childhood, in the institution. on the 1 june 1837, some eighteen months after these little boys arrived, another set of brothers were entered into the register, sydney smith bromley, aged 11, and charles sussex bullen bromley, aged 8. these two sets of brothers, although near contemporaries in age, were the grandchildren and children of dr edward foord bromley. dr bromley was well-known in van diemen’s land. in 1829 the colonial times while commemorating the death of the police magistrate, remarked: ‘this gentleman came to the colony with the first fleet, which brought out lieutenant governor collins in 1804’, and his coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 death ‘leaves only three living of the first civil establishment which reached this colony, viz, the rev robert knopwood, m a, edward lord, esquire, and dr bromley’. xxxv these three survivors from the founding fathers all had family ties to boys in the king’s orphan schools. as we have already seen, knopwood arranged for the admission of his godson or grandson, robert morrisby. edward lord fry, the illegitimate son of the wealthy merchant edward lord and a convict woman, entered the orphan school in 1833 when he was 6, spent twelve years there, and at the age of 18 was apprenticed. and now here were the sons and grandsons of dr bromley. after dr bromley served as senior surgeon on what the newspaper called the colony’s ‘first fleet’, he made three more trips to australia as surgeon superintendent of convict transports, two male and one female. xxxvi on these three voyages only one convict died, compelling evidence that bromley was a competent and diligent surgeon superintendent. the same cannot be said of his role in hobart as naval officer and treasurer of the police fund—in effect, the colonial treasurer. not long after his appointment in 1820 bromley seems to have handed his responsibilities over to his clerk, bartholomew broughton, a ticket-of-leave convict. while the affable bromley spent his days as a leisured gentleman, his convict clerk, whose wages were a shilling a day, began ‘living a life of splendor in hobart’. xxxvii at the end of bromley’s first year in his new job, he married his housekeeper, sarah greenow, as he wrote to a friend in sydney: ‘it was doing no more than an act of common justice to a careful deserving young woman and i am much pleased with myself for having courage enough to brave the opinion of the world in so good a cause’. xxxviii sarah was the mother of the two bromley boys admitted to the orphan school, but the first child from this marriage had been a girl, sarah jane, born shortly before bromley’s two older daughters from another marriage or relationship arrived from england. the oldest of these girls, julia louisa, was about 21, a marriageable age, though for some reason she did not marry. perhaps the epileptic fits which were to blight her later life had already begun. twenty years after julia came to the colony, an application would be lodged for her admission to the new norfolk asylum. she had been living in launceston, and would have been utterly destitute if not for the charity of ‘a few ladies’. xxxix understandably, she grew severely depressed, ‘her mind being perpetually haunted with the prospect of ultimate want’. xl julia died in the asylum. her younger sister, elizabeth foord henrietta bromley, known as eliza, was about 13 when she arrived from england. as a daughter of the well-liked dr bromley she would have been welcomed into the social world of the town, but thanks to her father’s fecklessness, her comfortable life did not last long. when george arthur was appointed lieutenant governor in 1824 he found that money which should have been in the colonial treasury was not. the unpleasant discovery began to unfold when bromley reported that one of his assigned servants ‘had absconded after stealing money from the public chest, the strong-box in which all monies collected by the naval office were stored’. xli bromley kept the strong-box—the public chest— in his bedroom at home. he could not tell the lieutenant governor how much had been stolen because in the three years he had held the position of naval officer ‘he had never once’—as don bradmore exclaims—‘counted the money in the public chest!’ xlii after extensive investigation, it was estimated that a total of £8,269 was missing. bromley was not indicted for theft, but he was made responsible for the debt—and thus utterly ruined. all his assets were sold, and his family would have been left homeless if not for a group of friends ‘who clubbed together to purchase [at auction] one of his former properties, “montford farm” at hamilton’. xliii this was where bromley left his wife and children when he sailed for england in april 1829 in an unsuccessful attempt to raise funds to repay that enormous debt to the treasury of van diemen’s land. he would never live with his family again. before bromley left, he may have met his new neighbour henry boden torlesse, another retired naval officer turned farmer. torlesse in turn introduced the household at ‘montford cottage’ to george steele, whose father torlesse described as ‘a much respected friend’. xliv torlesse and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 steele had arrived from england on the same ship, and it was through torlesse that steele was appointed overseer at ‘montford’. on 27 july 1830, a year after bromley left for england, his 22-year-old daughter eliza married george steele, aged 20, though the marriage was not announced in the newspapers, nor was the birth of their son frederick five months later. i don’t know how large ‘montford’ cottage was, but given the name, i suspect it was not large, and probably felt crowded with the steeles and their baby son living there as well as eliza’s sister julia, her stepmother sarah, and sarah’s three young boys (her eldest child and only daughter had already died at the age of five). in november 1831, a year after the steeles’ first son was born, scandal enveloped the household. all assigned servants were removed from the house and farm after two female convicts gave sworn statements to the police magistrate at bothwell. one of these assigned servants presented a lurid account of life in the cottage, including seeing ‘mr steele in bed with mrs bromley, at the same time as mrs steele was in the next room’; the second assigned servant accused george steele ‘of assault with intent to commit a rape’. xlv left suddenly without any help on the farm, sarah bromley and george steele wrote lengthy letters to the colonial secretary, protesting that they were innocent, and their convict servants were malicious liars. in april 1832 a committee of enquiry was appointed to look into the matter. its members were local gentry—including henry torlesse, now a justice of the peace. the full weight of disgrace descended on the farm when the committee reported that ‘we are of opinion that as long as mr steel continues upon mrs bromley’s farm she ought not to have convict servants assigned to her’. xlvi their judgement, blunt and forthright, was that ‘mr steel is by no means a proper person to have any authority or control over convict servants’. xlvii two years later steele’s downward spiral again picked up momentum when he was arrested for cattle stealing, and taken to hobart for trial in the supreme court. he was convicted, sentenced to transportation for life, and shipped off to norfolk island, leaving forever his pregnant wife and their children. the next year, when her youngest son turned 2 and was old enough for the orphan school, eliza steele arranged for her sons to be admitted in the fee-paying category, agreeing to pay £7.10 annually for each, a reduced rate for two children from the same family. less than two years later, sarah bromley sent down her two youngest sons as well. were they relieved to get out of a house where the three adult women must have been deeply, bitterly unhappy, if not actually at each other’s throats? all we know for certain is that they were not having a secure and loving childhood. for the bromley and steele brothers, the orphan schools offered a kind of refuge. for the espie children admitted a month after the steeles, entering the orphanage probably felt like being abandoned. the four espies, all born in the colony, were described on orphan school records as having a father living, and ‘relatives rich’. xlviii when their parents and older brothers arrived as free settlers from northern ireland in 1820, their father george espie indicated on his application for a land grant that he had ‘at his disposal at least £1,600 from investments which he had brought with him’. xlix the espies came from a farming background, knew how to select land, and over the next fifteen years acquired thousands of acres in the midlands. as their landholdings grew, the family itself expanded to include ten children born over twenty years. eight of the children were sons—perfect for establishing a colonial dynasty. but things did not work out that way, and george espie’s building priorities may hold a clue to the family’s larger difficulties in sticking together. in 1826, six years after the espies arrived, a land commissioner on a routine inspection reported that george espie ‘has a bad house but has built a good brick granary, coach house and stable’. l two years later he added a substantial woolshed, still standing today, ‘built of stone with slits in the walls through which a rifle could be fired’, writes a descendant, a ‘place where the family went if under attack from aborigines or bushrangers’. li on the lintel above the door were carved george espie’s initials, and the date coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 1828. meanwhile, his wife margaret seems to have been looking after the family, and giving birth to more children in the ‘bad’ house. on 26 february 1835, margaret espie died suddenly in hobart, aged 44. she had been visiting her second son david, a 22-year-old who was running a pub instead of working on the properties with his father, a sign that this family was not pulling together as a prospective dynasty needed to do. when margaret died, her eldest children were young adults—or at least in their teens—but the last four, aged between 2 and 10, could not yet look after themselves. and so they were sent to the orphan schools, where the youngest, one of the two girls in the family, soon died. the three ‘orphaned’ brothers spent the rest of their childhood in the institution, and were then apprenticed. and where was their father? he had sold up and gone off to the newly opened district of port phillip across bass strait, abandoning his youngest children as he pursued his fortune elsewhere. even looking briefly at how a few boys and girls came to be in the king’s orphan schools suggests what a variety of stories the children must have told each other in an institution with very few staff and very large dormitories. recent arrivals from the british isles could conjure up industrial cities almost unimaginable to a boy or girl born in van diemen’s land during the frontier days of the 1820s. on the other hand, children from the convict transports or born in the convict nurseries knew virtually nothing of the colony in which they found themselves. isolated for years—sometimes for a decade or more—inside the fences of the orphan schools, they were woefully unprepared to understand how the colony functioned, even on a basic level. some of these children were physically or mentally disabled. some were the traumatised survivors of shipwrecks—eight came from the wreck of the hibernia in 1833. and then there were the aboriginal children, removed from country and kin during the years when george augustus robinson was rounding up the last of the tribes. how vulnerable children could be in van diemen’s land, part penal colony, part fledgling settlement. over time, however, the mix in the schools became less eclectic. on 6 january 1837, sir john franklin arrived in hobart to replace george arthur as lieutenant governor. franklin, no social reformer, began following money trails. within his first few months he set up a committee to enquire into the king’s orphan schools, and by 30 august was ready to implement changes. arthur had seen the schools as a charge upon the colony because their role was to ‘take proper care’ of the colony’s young, whoever their parents might be. franklin’s approach was tellingly different: he directed the colonial treasurer and the collector of internal revenues to ‘trace out from the commencement of the institution, the number of the children of convict parents who have been annually maintained in the establishment’ lii in order to ascertain ‘the debt due by the british to the colonial treasury on account of convict children maintained in the king’s orphan schools’. liii the british were to be billed for the children of convicts as if the children themselves were part of the convict system. because the schools had never previously differentiated among the children in this way, ‘there are no such records at the institution’, the head master told the investigating officers, and ‘the information can alone be gathered from the books & papers’ of the civilian committee of management which franklin had just disbanded. liv four months later, at the end of franklin’s first year in the colony, lists were submitted attempting (not always successfully) to sort convicts’ children from the free. the children of free parents were to be chased up for outstanding fees, and their children removed if the payments were not up to date. an era was coming to an end for the orphan schools, and for the british empire. this was the year that victoria ascended the throne, and on the edge of hobart the institution founded to protect was morphing into a place designed to confine, funded largely as a convict institution and covered with the stigma of a convict stain. in these days when we continue to confine children behind high fences, refugee children in detention centres and bewildered indonesian boys in our gaols, we might do well to remember that even in the fledgling penal colony of van coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 diemen’s land, there was once another model for the care of children, a model based squarely on a commitment to protect. i r robinson to colonial secretary, 17 jan 1826, cso 1/1/122/3073. ii r robinson to lieutenant governor, 19 dec 1825, cso 1/1/122/3073. iii r robinson to lieutenant governor, 19 dec 1825, cso 1/1/122/3073. iv ‘thomas hobbes scott’, australian dictionary of biography. v g t w b boyes, diaries and letters of g.t.w.b. boyes, p. 337 n. 15. vi g t w b boyes, diaries and letters of g.t.w.b. boyes, p. 337 n. 15. vii quoted in g t w b boyes, diaries and letters of g.t.w.b. boyes, p. 337 n. 15. viii minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1. ix ‘william bedford’, australian dictionary of biography. x joan c brown, ‘poverty is not a crime’, p. 27. xi joan c brown, ‘poverty is not a crime’, p. 27. xii g t w b boyes, diaries and letters of g.t.w.b. boyes, p. 333. xiii g t w b boyes, diaries and letters of g.t.w.b. boyes, p 334. xiv historical records of australia, series iii vol. vii (1828), p. 499. xv minutes for 4 oct 1832, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1. xvi minutes for 10 jan 1833, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1. xvii minutes for 7 mar 1829, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1; hobart town courier 21 feb 1829; social welfare department swd 24. xviii minutes for 16 may 1833, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1; hobart town courier, 5 april 1833. xix principal superintendent j lakeland to colonial secretary j burnett, cso 1/1/204/4845. xx lucy frost, ‘a “quixotic escapade”’, pp. 217-19. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 xxi minutes for 16 may 1833, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1. xxii j dean to lieutenant governor, cso 1/1/234/5671. xxiii principal superintendent j lakeland to colonial secretary, cso 1/1/204/4845. xxiv minutes for 16 may 1833, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1. xxv swd 24 p 457. xxvi correspondence re orphan schools 1825-31, colonial secretary’s office cso 1/1/122, p 144 aot. xxvii for a discussion of the scandal, see hamish maxwell-stewart, closing hell’s gates, pp. 98-104. xxviii hamish maxwell-stewart, hell’s gates, p 102. xxix minutes for 7 nov 1831, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1. xxx hobart town courier 12 july 1828. xxxi hobart town courier 12 july 1828. xxxii colonial times 27 march 1829. xxxiii j r morris, ‘roger henry woods’, australian dictionary of biography. xxxiv minutes for 12 june1833, minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, cso 24/1/1. xxxv colonial times, 15 may 1829. xxxvi the ocean arrived in sydney on 30 june 1816 with 220 male convicts; almorah arrived sydney 29 aug 1817 with 180 male convicts; lord wellington arrived sydney 20 jan 1820 with 121 female convicts. xxxvii don bradmore, ‘george steele’, p 91. xxxviii e. f. bromley to piper, 7 dec 1820, piper papers. xxxix ‘petition relative to admission of miss bromley into the new norfolk asylum’, colonial secretary’s correspondence, cso 8/16/527. xl ‘petition relative to admission of miss bromley into the new norfolk asylum’, colonial secretary’s correspondence, cso 8/16/527. xli bradmore, ‘bartholomew broughton’, p 89. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 xlii bradmore, ‘bartholomew broughton’, p 89. xliii bradmore, ‘bartholomew broughton’, p 91. xliv don bradmore, ‘george steele’, p. 178, n.5. xlv colonial secretary’s office, cso 1/1/298/7252. xlvi colonial secretary’s office, cso 1/1/298/7252. xlvii colonial secretary’s office, cso 1/1/298/7252. xlviii list of children in orphan schools (1837) whose parents came free, colonial secretary’s correspondence, cso 5/93/2074. xlix quoted in mary smith, the house of espie in australia and new zealand, p. 133. l quoted in mary smith, the house of espie in australia and new zealand, p. 134. li mary smith, the house of espie, p. 135. lii report of 1837 enquiry into king’s orphan schools, cso 5/1/60/1387. liii report of 1837 enquiry into king’s orphan schools, cso 5/1/60/1387. liv report of 1837 enquiry into king’s orphan schools, cso 5/1/60/1387. works cited australian dictionary of biography, on-line, http://adb.anu.edu.au. bradmore, don, ‘bartholomew broughton: a “remarkable convict” or simply a “rascal”’, tasmanian ancestry 32:2 (2011), pp. 87-93. bradmore, don, ‘george steele: “a man of bad character”’, tasmanian ancestry 32:3 (2011), pp. 178-181. boyes, g t w b, the diaries and letters of g.t.w.b. boyes, vol. 1: 1820-1832, ed. p. chapman. melbourne: oxford university press, 1985. brown, joan c, ‘poverty is not a crime’: social services in tasmanian 1803–1900. hobart: tasmanian historical research association, 1972. colonial times. historical records of australia, resumed series iii, vol. vii (1828), eds., p. chapman and t. jetson. canberra: australian government, 1997. hobart town courier. correspondence, colonial secretary’s office, cso 1, archives office of tasmania. frost, lucy, abandoned women: scottish convicts exiled beyond the seas. sydney: allen & unwin, 2012. frost, lucy, ‘a “quixotic escapade” at recherche bay’ in something rich and strange: sea changes, beaches and the littoral in the antipodes, ed. s. hosking, http://adb.anu.edu.au/ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 r. hosking, r. pannell, n. bierbaum. adelaide: wakefield press, 2009, pp 213223. minutebook, committee of management, king’s orphan schools, 26 april 1828-23 oct 1833. colonial secretary’s office, cso 24/1/1, archives office of tasmania. maxwell-stewart, closing hell’s gates: the death of a convict station. sydney: allen & unwin, 2008. piper, captain john, papers 1827-1838, mlmss 8098, vol. 1, mitchell library, state library of new south wales. report of 1837 enquiry into king’s orphan schools, colonial secretary’s office, cso 5/1/60/1387, archives office of tasmania. smith, mary. the house of espie in australia and new zealand. bowenville, queensland: m. smith, c1993. lucy frost is emeritus professor of english at the university of tasmania. her current research focuses on the experiences of the convict women and their children transported to van diemen’s land (tasmania) during the first half of the nineteenth century. she is the author most recently of abandoned women: scottish convicts exiled beyond the seas (allen & unwin 2012) and the editor of convict lives at the ross female factory (convict women’s press 2011). she is the president of the convict women’s research centre, and vice-president of convict women’s press. (l.frost@utas.edu.au) mailto:l.frost@utas.edu.au coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 into an age of cultural contagion: vampiric globalisation in mudrooroo’s master of the ghost dreaming series helle bildsøe, university of copenhagen hellebildsoe@yahoo.com copyright©2016 helle bildsøe. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this article revisit’s the work of mudrooroo in a new and timely framework of globalisation. i argue that mudrooroo’s master of the ghost dreaming series comprises a globalisation narrative. the series performs a transmutation of the conventional postcolonial narrative in which the forces of colonialism are made known and subverted. it identifies a novel power within the australian landscape. this new power, personified by the vampire amelia fraser, is more dangerous even than the white colonisers. whereas colonial forces operate through bounded orientalist discourses of self/other, civilised/uncivilised, white/black, amelia’s vampiric domination operates through, and is sustained by, a practice of uncontainability. mudrooroo’s vampire has previously been read as a metaphor for white predatorial colonialism. however, i propose that mudrooroo’s vampire amelia is more adequately understood as the epitome of boundless cultural contagion. i consider that when thus reassessed within a global rather than a postcolonial framework, the master of the ghost dreaming series provides an imaginative account of australia’s emergence as a space of (cultural) contamination. this space corrupts and collapses discourses of authenticity and purity, thereby engendering radically new visions of being-in-the-world as informed by multivalent experiential entanglements. through a fusion of fantastic genres that interweaves maban, mythic, and european gothic modes, the series explores the australian landscape as a site defined by (cultural) contagion. key words: mudrooroo, maban realism, gothic vampire, globalisation, cultural contagion mailto:hellebildsoe@yahoo.com coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 in this globalised era there are no more ’authentic’ texts, only pastiches that are named from subject matter rather than form. thus content determines form and this should be my final word on the authenticity of any text. (mudrooroo, 2010: 2) in 2011, mudrooroo published the autobiographical essay “portrait of the artist as a sick old villain”. this essay was mudrooroo’s first publication after more than ten years of silence since he left australia for nepal in 2000. the essay constitutes a personal account of mudrooroo’s life that seeks to “set the record straight” (mudrooroo 2011: 20). in it mudrooroo asserts his affiliation with multiple cultural traditions and his attachment to several geographical locations. he describes his own sense of identity as a pastiche informed by experiential attachments to culture and place, rather than racial or national genealogies. in australia mudrooroo achieved prominence as the first aboriginal writer to publish a novel; he became a central figure in establishing aboriginal writing. in time he came to occupy the position as head of aboriginal studies at murdoch university in perth and an established authority within the field of aboriginal writing and culture. however, in 1996 mudrooroo’s genealogy was called into question in victoria laurie’s article “identity crisis”. blacklisted as an alleged hoax, the validity of mudrooroo’s works was contested and he became a persona non grata in academic and in public life. in response to the heated debates that surrounded his person, mudrooroo wrote the essay “tell them you’re indian” (1996). here he presents his personal identity predicament as symptomatic of an anachronistic condition of stagnation in australia where identity debates in a global age continue to revolve around outmoded conceptions of cultural authenticity and racial genealogies. ‘authentic’ culture, he writes, has been obscured beyond recognition and “filled with contradictions” (mudrooroo, 1996: 265) as a result of globalisation as extensive cultural exchange. indeed, in his 2011 autobiographical essay, mudrooroo asserts that “[e]xistence is not singular (individual) and independent. any identity we have is made up of our intricate relationships with our families (society), nature and the whole universe. as an identity i engage in a plurality of realities and the transitory nature of things in a constant flux of cause and effect. everything is interdependent causally evolving and dynamic” (mudrooroo, 2011:1). if thus understood in terms of individual entanglement within multivalent local, global, and even universal networks, identity cannot be reduced to an unambiguous and inherent affiliation with clearly delineated cultural communities. the contemporary global age is characterised by contamination and uncontainability. thus, mudrooroo expresses a sensibility informed by connectivity, one which sees the contemporary subject not as firmly embedded within unchanging cultural communities, but rather, as a single node within intersecting and perpetually alternating networks. in a ‘globalised era’, the subjective experience of being-in-the-world is informed by an awareness of continuous and inevitable contagion and transmutation through ever-shifting points of attachment. adam shoemaker remarks that “what is often forgotten in the identity-driven debates about provenance is that mudrooroo is—and was always—an international writer, one who was directly addressing global audiences and issues […] there are no natural limits to this authorial strategy, nor to its representational potential” (shoemaker, 2011: 3). after ten years of silence, it is time to reassess mudrooroo’s writing within a framework coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 that is not limited by restrictive identity discourses; one that sounds its global scope and border-crossing potential. accordingly, this article rakes up shoemaker’s call to revisit mudrooroo’s work in a new, global framework. it engages with mudrooroo’s master of the ghost dreaming series, which is comprised of the four novels master of the ghost dreaming (1991), the undying (1998), underground (1999), and the promised land (2000). it offers a reading of the series as a globalisation narrative. the series constitutes a transmutation of the traditional postcolonial narrative within which the devastating forces of colonialism are made known and subverted. the series identifies a novel power within the australian landscape. this new power, personified by the vampire amelia fraser, is more dangerous and cunning than the white colonisers. whereas colonial forces operated through bounded orientalist discourses of self/other, civilised/uncivilised, white/black, amelia’s vampiric domination and control operates through, and is sustained by, a practice of uncontainability. mudrooroo’s vampire has previously been read as a metaphor for white predatorial colonialism. thus, maureen clark writes that amelia is “a cruel metaphor for colonial excess” and that “her acts of penetration act as metaphors for (dis)possession and cultural enfeeblement” (clark, 2006: 123). in a similar vein, gerry turcotte examines the figure of the vampire as a personification of “european culture” (turcotte, 2005: 9); a symbolic “comment on the way indigenous identity, mythology, spirituality and values have been fed on by european invaders” (turcotte, 2005: 5). however, i propose that mudrooroo’s vampire amelia is more adequately understood as an epitome of boundless cultural contagion. i consider that when thus reassessed within a global rather than a primarily postcolonial framework, the master of the ghost dreaming series provides an imaginative account of australia’s emergence as a space of (cultural) contamination. this space corrupts and collapses discourses of authenticity and purity, thereby engendering radically new visions of being-in-the-world as informed by multivalent experiential entanglements. through a con/fusion of fantastic genres that interweaves maban, mythic, and european gothic modes, the series explores the australian landscape as a site defined by (cultural) contagion. maban realism, as defined by mudrooroo, provides a counter-discourse to “the dominant natural reality” and it is characterised by “a firm grounding in the reality of the earth or country, together with an acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality” (mudrooroo, 1997: 100). this genre is anchored in “the complex system of mythologies which underpin indigenality” (ibid.) and is the employment of traditional storytelling content and structures. it is a genre informed by the dreaming, a term employed in aboriginal culture to refer to that sacred ‘once-upon-a-time’ in which totemic spirits created the world. traditionally, the texts of aboriginal culture are inscribed upon the landscape. according to aboriginal mythology, mythic beings, the deities and characters of the dreaming, who were the forerunners of human beings, emerged in the world through an act of self-creation. they moved all over the land and wherever they went they left physical reminders of their presence. their tracks are ‘songlines’ that criss-cross the australian landscape. these marks left by the dreaming ancestors are imbued with a spiritual and cultural essence which can be drawn upon for particular purposes by human beings. unsung land is dead land where the ancestors did not pass through, or where the dreaming tracks in the land have been forgotten or palimpsised. the aboriginal characters in the master of the ghost dreaming series, jangamuttuk, ludjee, wadawaka, and george, make use of this mythic force embedded coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 within the landscape to dispel the influence of the white colonisers. their resultant powers are anchored in land and in ceremony, their aboriginality a potent source of magic which rivals the destructive forces of empire. as meticulously described by eva rask knudsen, master of the ghost dreaming relates the history of european settlement in australia as experienced by these four shamanic characters, recounted through the genre of maban realism (knudsen, 2004). in master of the ghost dreaming, this colonial history is made known in aboriginal terms; it is incorporated into a dreaming reality, represented as the mythic tale of “morning star” which descends into a realm of darkness and despair: once, morning star had shifted from its course and had drifted far from the dawn. it continued to shine, continued to be a beacon, but became not the harbinger of the morning, of the light, but a marker of the density of the night which has overtaken us. it illuminates our misery and tugs our souls far from day. our spirits roam the realm of the ghosts –an unfriendly land where trees and plants, insects and serpents, animals and humans wither and suffer. (master of the ghost dreaming, 1) faced with the forces of european colonialism, the aborigines have created a dreaming myth in which the white colonisers figure as ghosts and europe appears as a cold forbidding realm filled with suffering (32). notably, the aborigines have been relocated from their originary home to a mission compound on an unnamed ‘island’. they do not know the dreamtime songlines of this new country and the mission compound becomes a resultantly uncanny and chaotic space, a dead or unsung land wholly under the destructive control of the ghost colonisers. harvey birenbaum contends that myth is a way of experiencing the world that expresses the nature of the mind experiencing it (birenbaum, 1988: 95). in other words, while myth cannot be understood in terms of linear logic and natural realism, the genre is nonetheless as real as any re-presentation of the world. myth does not belong to the realm of logic or rationality in ordinary terms. fantastical as it is, a realm of magic and miracle, gods and demons, it does not describe the world as we see it around us. however, myth reflects an alternative kind of realism: a “felt logic” and subjective reality of experience. in myth, the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ vanishes. myth does not reflect the world ‘as it is’ but as it is experienced. (birenbaum, 1988: 5-7) jangamuttuk’s dreaming story about morning star is created through this symbolic language of myth, which “makes reality look like what it feels like” (birenbaum, 1988: 91). this language makes colonialism known in aboriginal terms of maban realism, inscribing the history of colonialism into a dreamtime narrative about the ongoing creation and transmutation of the australian (cultural) landscape. jangamuttuk creates a ‘ghost dreaming’ ceremony which is carefully designed to render the ghost colonisers powerless and to dispel the destructive influence of european imperialism on aboriginal culture. like the myth of morning star, the ghost dreaming ceremony adapts and incorporates the european presence into a maban or dreaming reality. to enter the state of trance that is necessary for the ceremony to succeed, jangamuttuk must draw on the songlines within the land. however, because the songlines of the unfamiliar island are unknown to him, jangamuttuk appropriates and adapts the genre of convict ballads instead. he recognises these ballads as the first european songlines to inhabit the australian landscape. furthermore, he senses “that true ghost song. contain whole meaning of ghosts” (master of the ghost dreaming, coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 19). jangamuttuk’s use of convict ballads is a sly manoeuvre, as this particular genre often relates experiences of suffering, exile and dislocation. seemingly, imperialism emerges as an intrinsically soul-destroying venture, devastating to colonised and colonising peoples alike: feeling his consciousness begin to slip, feeling the night and the dancers begin to . . . [jangamuttuk] began the second stanza: ‘they made of me a ghost down under, gave me a dram, it tasted like cram; real as my dream, way, way under. under, plunder, thunder, way, may, nay, stay down, town, down, ghost ghost under, slam clam ram mam . . .’ (master of the ghost dreaming, 5) jangamuttuk’s chant allows him to enter the felt reality of the ghost dreaming; metaphorically to obtain a crucial insight into and intimate knowledge of the culture of the european colonisers. the content of the ballad echoes with the myth of morning star which also relates an experience of dislocation, thus linking european and aboriginal experiences of displacement and suffering. the colonisers, too, find themselves far from home and in an unfamiliar and unsettling land. through jangamuttuk’s appropriation of the european dreaming, the self/other dichotomy presented by orientalist discourses collapses, subverting the authoritative ‘realistic’ representations of the inferior aboriginal other that legitimate and perpetuate colonial rule. in myth, as in folktale, people, place and time are typically generic; events usually take place ‘once upon a time’ in a ‘far-away land’ and the characters tend to serve a particular function, to represent a single character trait rather than a multifaceted personality. thus, the ghost colonisers who run the mission compound carry only generic names that display their intended role in relation to their aboriginal charges. the aborigines know their oppressors only as ‘fada’ and ‘mada’. the names ‘father’ and ‘mother’ reflect the paternalism characteristic of the colonial master discourse. by referring to themselves as ‘fada’ and ‘mada’ the duo indicate their superior position as a kind of ‘foster parents’ to their charges: they will be guides, teachers and rolemodels to their colonial subjects. throughout the novel there is no specific reference to place. the land within which events are acted out is known to the reader and the aborigines only as ‘island’. however, in contrast to the tradition of western folktale, such laissezfaire attitude towards location is uncommon in aboriginal story-telling practices because myth is inextricably linked to country in aboriginal tradition. according to berndt, “no traditional aboriginal myth was told without reference to the land, or to a specific stretch of country where the incidents it narrates were believed to have taken place. no myth is free-floating, without some local identification” (berndt 1994: 5). in order to understand what is told, the audience must know the geographical origins of the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 characters in the story and the songlines they travelled by. arguably, “island” is so named in master of the ghost dreaming so as to emphasise that it is unsung, unknown land. jangamuttuk’s mob were not born in the mission compound; they know none of the songlines or dreaming ancestors of this stretch of country. island is unfamiliar and therefore un-homely to jangamuttuk’s people because its proper place within the dreaming is not known. though there are some places of “strong power” (master of the ghost dreaming, 21) to be located on the island, their origin and history remain obscure; island cannot be named. moreover, the timeframe of the novel remains unspecified. this is because time is not experienced as chronologically linear. from a mythic or maban perspective time is flexible and spirals in a holistic sense. perceived as an intrinsic criss-crossing network of stories, dreamtime has been known always by aborigines as the ‘natural’ perception of time. the experience of colonialism remembered in master of the ghost dreaming is not past but belongs to the present. when understood within the context of maban realism, the period of colonialism in australia becomes but another part of a forever expanding dreamtime scheme of events. the generic representation of people, place, and time in master of the ghost dreaming induces an aura of traditional storytelling practices. the novel effectively decolonises and re-activates the literary heritage of aboriginality. as a political statement, it poses a counter-narrative to the documents of the past, the records of the colonisers. western realism calls for linearity and chronology and therefore cannot effectively represent aboriginality which, according to mudrooroo, is informed by a holistic, non-linear ontology. the past is reclaimed—or ‘re-membered’ in postcolonial theoretical terms— in master of the ghost dreaming when mudrooroo resumes the indigenous right to establish master narratives. maban realism relies on the intertextuality of the landscape and the mythic narratives which are part of aboriginal literary heritage. master of the ghost dreaming integrates the european presence into aboriginal cosmology/mythology as it represents the ‘magic’ world of dreaming reality. incorporated into aboriginal practices is the experience of the fateful meeting with european culture and imperialism. in refusing to adhere to western genres, jangamuttuk (and mudrooroo) is able to express a maban perception of the world that reflects an aboriginal experience. fada’s natural ‘realist’ representations, his “strong paper” (master of the ghost dreaming, 67) a metaphor for the imperialist power of the white colonisers, are powerless against the mythic dreamtime sphere within which humans have the ability to metamorphose into animals, where time and space are nonlinear and there is no distinction between sacred and mundane, abstract and concrete. fada fails to properly comprehend the culture he observes. his representations of aboriginal culture are void of any real meaning. they have not captured the maban essence of aboriginality and therefore display nothing more than uninformed though imaginative interpretations of foreign practices. in a reversal of foucault’s power/knowledge paradigm, the shaman jangamuttuk appropriates western culture, learns its wiles and sheds european control. however, the three sequels to master of the ghost dreaming (the undying, underground, and the promised land) suggest a very different outcome of the clash between aboriginal and european cultures. the power of the colonisers over aborigines which was successfully annihilated by jangamuttuk’s maban prowess in master of the ghost dreaming takes a new form. in these three novels, dubbed ‘the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 vampire trilogy’ by gerry turcotte, a new and even more fatal danger has entered the australian landscape. the vampire trilogy chronicles the story of the further adventures of jangamuttuk’s mob. after fada and mada’s departure from island, jangamuttuk’s mob steals a schooner and by the seafaring skills of wadawaka they, too, leave the mission compound and travel westward to arrive on the mainland of australia. this place, jangamuttuk foretells, will be their promised land, a fresh land untouched by ‘ghosts’. however, his professed promised land turns out to be inhabited not only by thousands of ghost colonisers who arrive in australia in ever-rising numbers, but by an unknown presence deadlier than any dangers they have previously faced. in the vampire trilogy, the australian underground is filled with monsters, and the landscape is haunted by vampires and werebears who feed on aborigines and ‘settlers’ alike. in the vampire trilogy, european songlines have infiltrated the australian landscape. in his shamanic animal form as dingo, the young aborigine george embarks upon a journey through subterranean tunnels and caverns in the new promised land. the australian underground that he uncovers there bears a striking resemblance to the underworld of hades, realm of the dead, as it is known from greek mythology. hades is a misty and gloomy realm to which access is gained through so-called ‘hell-mouths’; caves, tunnels or lakes. in underground, a cave entrance leads george deep into “the bowels of the earth” (underground, 70). it is guarded by “a giant devil dingo” whose “slavering jaws as he poked his head out of the hole seemed wide enough to swallow [george] whole, either as human or dog” (underground, 77). once george slips past this cerberus-like watchdog, he finds himself on “the banks of a fast flowing dark river” underground from which he drinks a “slightly warm and sulphur-tasting fluid with rising bubbles” (underground, 84). a ferryman offers to sail him across the river that “goes round and round” in exchange for a “fare” (underground, 85). the scene recalls the ferryman cheron who sails the spirits of the dead across the river styx that encircles the realm of hades nine times. the australian underground, george observes, is illuminated “with a uniform light that lacked the dazzling brilliance of the sun, the gentle glow of the moon, or the shifting play of cloud shadows from the world above” (underground, 101): here, underground, the atmosphere was a clear, dry, whiteness, warm and humid. the origins of such illumination, which was both of greater intensity but also less than the sun, i was at a loss to understand [...] what might be termed the sky shifted and writhed like luminous fog. (underground, 101) the fog is really “the shades of the dead” which affect all around them with “their blank despair” and cause madness to the living that enter this realm (underground, 134). like hades, the subterranean space that george travels through is home to “the dead” (underground, 85), an ominous world inhabited by mournful spirits. george finds two pools which he hopes will slake his thirst: one is boiling hot, the other lukewarm. drinking from the latter, he slowly but surely begins to forget about his life above ground, his “remembrance of things past was becoming hazy, affected by the mists of light” (underground, 129). he gradually loses his memory of his life as an aboriginal man and, for a time, remains trapped within the earth as dingo. in the underworld of hades, existence is meaningless. death is a repetition of life; the dead spend their time as they did when they were alive, but their labours in death are without result or purpose. accordingly, when wadawaka, who like george has also become entrapped in coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 this foreboding realm, takes to cultivate the soil, his actions are but a string of meaningless repetitions: in the dead soil of the underground wadawaka “had planted mushrooms, each one spaced precisely apart” (underground, 105). moreover, he catches strange fish in the sulphurous waters of the river that courses through the underground in order to feed the hungry dingo. however, the mushrooms are poisonous and the fish are inedible. george and wadawaka both descend gradually into madness and apathy, until they become like living dead absorbed within the perilous australian depths. underground seems to function as a foundational myth of the australia that emerged after the clash between european and aboriginal cultures. the novel is an extension of traditional aboriginal mythology as it adds to the ever-expanding dreaming chronicle of the continual formation of the land. the dreaming tracks of the ancestors intersect with european songlines, represented by mudrooroo’s strategic use of greek mythological references. europe is inscribed into mudrooroo’s record of the conversion of australia into a contact zone that is the master of the ghost dreaming series. thus, the mainland emerges as “a new but ancient world” (underground, 101): europe has for all intents and purposes become an integral part of the aboriginal experience. the traditional dreaming landscape is overwritten with the story of two cultures clashing, each contaminating the other as a result. underground sounds the rhythms of contemporary songlines in the australian (cultural) landscape which are simultaneously aboriginal and european. aboriginal and greek mythic elements merge symbolically within the landscape, hinting at a final con/fusion of previously distinct cultures. during their first days on the mainland, jangamuttuk’s mob meet another band of aborigines, led by the shaman waai. waai offers to share with them a local ceremony as well as some of the songlines of the country. the ceremony is a new one fashioned to undo the disruptive presence of what waai calls the ‘moma’. waai informs jangamuttuk that the moma has attacked and killed several of his mob. moma, he explains, has a hunger for fresh meat and blood, human meat and blood, and when he is overcome by his urge, he roams about hunting his prey. it is easy to recognise his tracks, for they are of a foot without toes and close together. (the undying, 43) jangamuttuk initially believes that he recognises this danger, since the footprints of the moma are similar to the boot-imprints of his former ghost colonisers. he professes that he holds no real fear of this beast since his intimate knowledge of the ghost dreaming makes him immune to its attacks. he soon learns, however, that the perpetrator is something different altogether: moma is a vampire and therefore immune to jangamuttuk’s ghost dreaming ceremonies which subverted the oppressive forces of european imperialism in master of the ghost dreaming. in the vampire trilogy, the mythic, maban reality of master of the ghost dreaming is rivalled by another, competing narrative mode. while the first novel in the master of the ghost dreaming series is written within the context of maban or ‘mythic’ realism, the gothic genre of the late 19th century provides the framework for the three sequels. indeed, the heyday of the gothic mode and the height of european settlement on the australian continent coincide. as argued by turcotte, the gothic mode lends itself well to reflect the colonial experience of dislocation, isolation and self-estrangement, as it tends to deal with the uncanny; “the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space” (turcotte, 2005: 1). australia seemed particularly ‘gothic’ in the european imagination compared to the other coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 colonies. the continent was a place of reversals: trees shed their bark rather than their leaves, seasons were inverted and the land was inhabited by strange creatures and monstrous beings. more chilling yet, these features were considered to be metonymic of the kind of perversion that defined the “spiritual dis/ease” which pervaded the antipodes of europe (ibid.): long before the fact of australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled with monsters. the idea of its existence was disputed was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts its darkness seemed confirmed. the antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of britain. it was, for all intents and purposes, gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world. (ibid.) australia has invariably nurtured the dark imagination of the gothic genre. the ‘undiscovered’ spaces of australia were marked ‘transylvania’ by cartographers, carrying strong allusions to the fabled homeland of bram stoker’s count dracula. appropriately, therefore mudrooroo has written the three sequels to master of the ghost dreaming within the context of the gothic vampire novel. yet, the gothic genre serves an additional function to that of inducing a chilling atmosphere that might capture the shock and trauma of colonisation. jangamuttuk’s maban realism which overcame fada’s discursive power in master of the ghost dreaming is in the vampire trilogy contaminated by the european gothic. like maban realism, the gothic a genre akin to magic realism. it does not conform to a ‘realist’ understanding of the world. it delves into the realm of the subconscious –of the psyche– and therefore enters the same mythical space of “felt logic” as maban realism. the gothic, too, suspends the borders that separate the natural reality and the mythical experience. jangamuttuk’s primary weapon with which to combat europe has thus been appropriated by dangerous forces. like the shaman, mudrooroo’s vampire amelia is a shape-shifter and a reader of minds. she knows how to see the world ‘mythically’ and qualitatively. as waai suspects, “she sees things as shamans do” (the undying, 163) and is therefore able to resist shamanic magic. in the european gothic, the forces of empire have constructed a competing narrative that incapacitates the magic of the aboriginal shaman. the gothic abides by chronology and linearity while also appropriating the trick of “felt logic” that constituted the primary mode of aboriginal resistance in master of the ghost dreaming. amelia’s vampiric power is more dangerous and invasive than that of the ghost colonisers. indeed, the ghost colonisers appear in the vampire trilogy in a suggestively dishevelled state. thus, sir george, who was known as ‘fada’ in master of the ghost dreaming, finds that the linen of his dress suit “had lost the snowy whiteness befitted a gentleman of distinction and means. some sort of fungus had attacked the neat stitching and extended out to tinge the rest pale yellow” (the promised land, 186-187). in a similar manner, the governor of the settler colony “wore a semi-military jacket with tarnished buttons and, what was worse, let it gape open to reveal linen – no indian cotton decrepit with age, and was it dirt?” (the promised land, 187). the governor’s wife, mrs. crawley, dresses in attire that is “years out of fashion”, and which has become “rumpled and battered” by the australian “climate” (the promised land, 193). the colonists are far removed from the heart of empire and have been affected by their altered living conditions. the land and the climate have caused deterioration of their coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 imported finery. the wilds have symbolically breached the white defences, their pretence at civilisation, and taken up residence within the bounds of the colony. though aborigines and colonists attempt, each in their way, to create an unbreakable barrier around traditional culture, neither can be contained nor protected from the effects of cultural exchange. rather than policing the boundaries that supposedly protect and ensure cultural purity, mudrooroo’s vampire desires and consumes difference. thus, amelia prefers aboriginal blood because of its “wild taste” (the promised land, 97) and “eucalyptus tang” (the promised land, 115). she lives also pleasurably off the white population. among her victims are the white werebear captain torrens and russian jack, a white russian immigrant to the antipodes who is a “giant of a man” (the promised land, 50). her victims are meticulously selected: i exult in the savagery that is surging in [captain torrens’] blood. the potency of his vital fluid makes me squeak and i almost lose my shape [...] his entire frame is flooded with vitality which makes me long to sink my fangs into the heavy vein that pulsates at the side of the neck. [...] his blood is an elixir filled with power. i gulp down the rich bear essence while i exult in his attempts to get free of me. i suck away his strength and it is the most wonderful experience i have yet had. (the undying, 137149) whereas captain torrens meets his end because amelia desires the potent “bear essence” that resides in his blood, amelia longs to sample russian jack because of his superhuman size and enormous physical strength. by murdering the russian, it would seem, amelia hopes to absorb his immense vitality: how the blood rumbled through his veins [...] all too soon it was over, and she had gorged herself so much that she vomited up all over him. she lay there, feeling the last trembling as the spirit detached itself. as the final shudder began, she thrust her mouth hard against him, sucking up the remaining drops of fluid and, hopefully, his spirit. (the promised land, 125-126) like the aboriginal blood which carries an exotic a tang, the vampire samples the blood of captain torrens and russian jack with the deliberate purpose to consume their essence of otherness which distinguishes them from the ‘mainstream’. cornelis martin renes observes that “amelia indistinctly preys on all continental human life, no matter what social class, gender, race or creed” (renes, 2011: 51). amelia shows no sign of racial or cultural discrimination in her choice of victims; aborigines and settlers alike appeal to the vampire in their individuality and distinctiveness. thus, mudrooroo’s vampire cannot be understood merely as symbolic of european culture that feeds off indigenous peoples, as suggested by turcotte and clarke (turcotte; 2005: 9). she represents a new kind of danger that is similar to, yet essentially different from the imperialism and orientalism identified and challenged by postcolonialist theory and criticism. amelia conceives of otherness as providing an exotic flavour to the world within which she moves. the new vampiric danger carries numerous resemblances to european imperialism –this is why, when he first comes upon amelia’s footprints, jangamuttuk thinks to recognise the predator— but ultimately stands apart from it in her coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 consumption and absorption of otherness. if amelia represents the force of imperialism, as argued by clark and turcotte, she is imperialism in an altered form. significantly, mudrooroo’s female vampire looks remarkably like the simultaneously liberating and destructive forces of globalisation as conceptualised by michael hardt and anthony negri in empire (2000). hardt & negri use the concept of ‘empire’ as a trope for understanding an unprecedented form of sovereignty. while the sovereignty that emerged from the european imperialist project of the 16th century onward “conceived space as bounded”, policing its boundaries carefully by sovereign administration and orientalist discursive figurations, hardt & negri’s ‘empire’ presents a planetary order that accepts no boundaries or limits. they argue that “the fundamental characteristic of [the new] imperial sovereignty” is that “its space is always open” (hardt & negri, 2001: 167). european imperialism, “constructed a leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other” (hardt & negri, 2001: xii). ‘empire’ however, “establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers”. indeed, ‘empire’ is conceived as “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (ibid.). in contrast to european imperialism, ‘empire’ does not strive to reduce diversity to unity, but to consume and absorb it; to incorporate everything under its overarching rule and feed off of this diversity. amelia moves freely between the two factions of aborigines and colonists; attached to neither though highly implicated in the transformation and contamination of both. she is an epitome of uncontainability. free of conscience and bound to no one and no place in particular, she travels across oceans and over the vast australian landscape. she is able to manipulate and control most of the characters in the trilogy. in master of the ghost dreaming a perpetual “click-clicking” of jangamuttuk’s clapsticks signifies his maban control and manipulation of events. throughout the vampire trilogy, however, a constant “shook-shook of giant bat wings” implies that the vampire, who has the ability to transform into the animal form of a bat, has appropriated supreme control of the now gothic narrative. when amelia first enters australia in the undying, she retains a strange need for the solidity of earth and a longing for her native land: this earth, this ground is alien to me. it is not my earth and the ground here cannot be my resting place. i need my rich loam to survive [...] need my own earth, thick and loamy and extending down to the earth’s core. (the undying, 90-91) like the other characters in the series, amelia is bound by a strong connection to country, to the specific geographical context from which she originates. in the first novel of the vampire trilogy she always carries with her two bags of earth which she has brought with her to the antipodes from the mother country. yet, as she infects an ever increasing number of victims, consuming and absorbing their distinctive essence and powers, she experiences a gradual but radical transformation: ‘it is strange that i came here as a thing limited to my own patch of earth and the darkness of the night. within her, i gained the power to face the burning blast of the day and freedom from the tyranny of the sun. i was reborn in her depths.’ (the promised land, 226) coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 at the end of the promised land amelia has obtained an unlimited freedom of movement. unlike any of the other characters, the vampire is wholly unrestricted by geographical, cultural, and magical limitations or attachments. she therefore signifies the ultimate indeterminacy of origins. the vampire disrupts social organisation and transgresses accepted means of behaviour. she is beyond the judgement of the established order. amelia embodies the ultimate breakdown of dichotomies and, like the gothic genre, she transgresses the boundaries between morality and immorality, reason and emotion, order and disorder. she travels freely within the different (cultural) landscapes of australia and contains within her both indigenous and invader discourses. clark suggests that the ultimate breakdown of dichotomies represented by amelia is characteristic of franz fanon’s decolonisation concept. for fanon, clark explains, decolonisation is a historical process that sets out to change the order of the world. by its very nature, that process represents a programme of complete disorder – a painful unsettlement for coloniser and colonised alike. this is a process in which colonialism’s systems of reference – and the violence such ‘value’ systems perpetuate in whatever form of representation they take – are challenged and overcome (clark, 2006: 131). the chaos of decolonisation holds the promise of redemption in that it will bring about a new world order that cannot be contained within pre-existing modes of representation. clark’s argument is useful insofar as it asserts that amelia represents the breakdown of pre-existing systems of reference and meaning and therefore necessitates a re-evaluation and revision of those representational systems. however, i suggest that amelia does not contain the paradoxical combination of the roles of colonisation and decolonisation. rather, mudrooroo’s vampire may meaningfully be understood in more general terms as the uncanny personified. i refer here to samira kawash’s useful consideration of the figure of the vampire as “a threat to reality”: according to kawash, the vampire is a “spectral terrorist” whose presence “signals the possibility and the immanence of an epochal collapse of the law that constitutes this history and this reality, and an opening onto some otherwise and elsewhere” (kawash, 1999: 254). if thus understood as a symbolical manifestation of revolution and transformation, mudrooroo’s vampire amelia can be read as that which happens at the moment of culture contact, when familiar structures are challenged by an invasive, unknown presence. the clash between cultures means that traditional systems are challenged from the outside and inevitably metamorphose as a response to this intrusion. when the vampire bites, the victim is transformed by the attack. accordingly, kawash writes that “the vampire does not merely consume his victim”, but rather “transforms his living victim into an animate corpse, one who walks and breathes, but whose life is ‘ebbed away’” (kawash, 1999: 247). certainly, those of amelia’s victims who ‘live on’ after her bite are infected with an incurable and parasitic infection. this transformation is most potently exemplified by the experiences of george who, after amelia’s attack, has a thirst for human blood and is often subject to her powers of mind control. it remains uncertain, however, whether his blood thirst derives from his dreaming form as the predator dingo or is induced by amelia’s vampiric bite. his allegiances are further obscured by the fact that he is at once the australian dingo, native to the landscape, and amelia’s lapdog, a pet and servant of the undead invader. the reader is ever in doubt as to the extent of amelia’s power over the characters she contaminates. in metaphorical terms, amelia is the infectious virus that transforms traditional cultures and outlooks –aboriginal and european. amelia has consumed and now carries within her multiple subject positions, multiple ways of experiencing the world. she is able to freely enter the minds of her victims and of the shamanic characters in the vampire trilogy and see the world as they coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 do. the female vampire has access to the minds of the major characters, jangamuttuk, george and wadawaka. she possesses the ability to peer into other worlds and experience it through the eyes of the other: as she feeds off her victims, her own perspective expands and mutates. the end note of the promised land is a journal entry purportedly in the diary of queen victoria. it is revealed that the monarch has invited amelia to take tea with her at the palace, for as she notes, amelia is “a strong-willed woman of the empire” (ibid.). amelia’s presence at the very heart of empire is highly ambiguous. as we have seen, the female vampire may be read as an embodiment of the undecidable effects of culture contact and globalisation. when amelia returns to london these effects bounce back to resonate through the centre of the british empire. the vampire has returned to contaminate the centre and to further obscure the boundaries between inside and outside, centre and periphery. once set in motion, globalisation as cultural exchange will not be contained and makes impossible the policing of cultural and conceptual boundaries. the vampire has breached the defences of the centre. amelia is a virus that infects all within her vicinity. like jacques derria’s conception of the undecidable pharmakon she is simultaneously poison and remedy. –poison because culture contact has indeed been a juggernaut which trampled locality and infected ‘traditional’ culture; remedy because, as she wrecks havoc on the established order, she also personifies new possibilities. she facilitates de-territorialised and expansive ways of understanding being-in-the-world as manifested through experiential points of attachment rather than bounded and supposedly ‘authentic’ racial and cultural genealogies. the ‘truth’ of myth, as we have seen, is not confined to a long-gone past but relates to and seeks to explain present conditions. the master of the ghost dreaming series enters into the colonial past of australia in order to engage in contemporary globalisation debates. in the four novels the colonial period of australia signifies the earliest beginning of the rebirth of australia as a contact zone within which any claim to cultural authenticity has become obsolete. this period initiated australia into a new state of con/fused identities, as once separate cultures began to intermingle and leave their mark upon one another. the master of the ghost dreaming quartet does not suggest that cultural transformation was introduced at the moment of european contact. as implied by the cultural exchange of songlines between waai and jangamuttuk, such borrowings and appropriations of foreign elements are inherent in the dynamic nature of aboriginal culture itself. the pattern of songlines which traverse the landscape necessitated continual cultural exchange. the custodians of country were the ‘owners’ of valuable ancient knowledge about the natural surroundings of particular areas. some of this information was taboo and reserved for the initiated or the custodians of that area, but other information was passed on to visitors or travellers who needed to move through a particular stretch of country. by acquiring the proper knowledge, the right stories and songlines, it was possible to navigate immense distances throughout australia; separate stretches of country were interconnected by the immense system of intersecting stories. culture was fluid in that the vast mythic system which comprised the ‘texts’ of aboriginal culture, crossed the imagined, insubstantial geographical borders of otherwise separate lands. such a formation of the land not only invited but demanded cultural exchange. yet, in the master of the ghost dreaming series there is a difference, it seems, between cultural change as it happened during the pre-european and the colonial periods of australian history. a difference that is powerfully conveyed by jangamuttuk when he notes: coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 where once there was a unity and a wholeness, a going from one to another freely and easily, there has become a resistance and repulsion [...] it is the end of an age and the slow dawning of another. (master of the ghost dreaming, 87) when europe entered australia there was a true clash of cultures. change was radical, disruptive and instantaneous. cultural globalisation, or culture contact, in this sense trampled and altered locality in the form of aboriginal culture. the presence of a foreign body inevitably provoked a counter-response, an adaptation. the intensification of cultural flows across the globe resulted in unsettling local transformation. appropriately therefore, mudrooroo’s vision of culture contact is conveyed within the framework of the gothic and portrayed as the contaminating vampiric force of amelia who accepts no boundaries or limits. amelia—the epitome of uncontainability— undermines and infiltrates aboriginal and european dreamings. as renes argues, “her indiscriminate spilling of human blood crosses essentialist boundaries of hierarchical race, gender and class distinctions, announcing an uncanny new australianness that renders all identity fluid” (2011: 52). mudrooroo’s vampire thus unsettles and challenges pre-existing definitions of cultural identity. significantly, this is also a defining characteristic of cultural globalisation; the transformation of locality and the resultant emergence of new and unprecedented modes of identification. amelia is at once a dangerously soul-destroying force and the embodiment of a positive vision of unprecedented cultural fluidity. globalisation discourses have made numerous attempts at a classification of these changes as either positive or negative. mudrooroo’s master of the ghost dreaming quartet, however, does not pretend to pass this kind of judgement. the four novels compel the reader to acknowledge the fact of cultural transformation and amalgamation. the transformation itself is neither condemned, nor celebrated. certainly, the conflation of maban, mythic, and gothic modes obscure the boundaries between such unambiguous classifications. the series may be read as a meticulous undertaking to catalogue cultural change. thus, rather than providing a prescriptive mode of action in dealing with cultural diversity, the master of the ghost dreaming quartet can be seen as a descriptive project: a textual exploration of the gradual disruption and transformation of the australian (cultural) landscape and its emergence as a space characterised by contamination through exchange. references: berndt, ronald m. and catherine h. the speaking land – myth and story in aboriginal australia. rochester, vermont; inner traditions international ltd., 1994. birenbaum, harvey. myth and mind. lanham: university press of america, 1988. clark, maureen. “terror as white female in mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy.” the journal of commonwealth literature, vol. 41 (2006): 121-138. hardt, michael and antonio negri. empire. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2001. knudsen, eva rask. “the land as text – the text as land.” the circle and the spiral. amsterdam: rodopi, 2004: 223-268. kawash, samira. “terrorists and vampires – fanon’s spectral violence of decolonization.” frantz fanon: critical perspectives, anthony alessandrini (ed.). london and new york: routledge, 1999. laurie, victoria. “identity crisis.” the australian magazine, 20-21: 1996. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 mudrooroo; “maban reality and the indigenous novel from indigenous literature of australia.” milli milli wangka. victoria: hyland house publishing pty ltd., 1997. mudrooroo. master of the ghost dreaming. sydney: angus & robertson, 1991. ——. the promised land. sydney: angus & robertson, 2000. ——. underground. sydney: angus & robertson, 1999. ——. the undying. sydney: angus & robertson, 1998 ——. “me i am me. reflections on me in exile,” 2010. ——. “mudrooroo’s testament: or portrait of the artist as a sick old villain.” journal of the association for the study of australian literature, vol. 11, no. 2: 2011. ——. “tell them you’re indian.” gillian cowlishaw race matters. canberra: aboriginal studies press, 1997. renes, cornelis martin. “spectres of mudrooroo. a suspended corpo-reality that ‘matters.’” european journal of english studies, vol. 15: 1, april 2011: 45-56. shoemaker, adam. “mudrooroo: ‘waiting to be surprised’.” journal of the association for the study of australian literature, vol. 11, 2: 2011 turcotte, g. “vampiric decolonization: fanon, ‘terrorism’ and mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy.” faculty of arts – papers. university of wollongong, 2005. helle schulz bildsøe holds a ph.d. in literary and globalisation studies from the university of copenhagen in denmark. her ph.d. dissertation is centered on literary narratives of the world as a single, though never homogenous, space connected for better or for worse by a myriad of networks that cut across social and cultural boundaries and across geographic distances. bildsøe argues that the postcolonial model is being gradually superseded by a new global optics emerging in contemporary literature. bildsøe's research includes global and postcolonial studies, genre studies, utopian studies and eco-criticism. bildsøe is a member of the centre for genre studies and an affiliate with the centre for advanced migration studies (amis) at ucph. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 identity and friendship in hsu-ming teo´s behind the moon (2000) catalina ribas segura university college alberta giménez cesag palma de mallorca, spain catymallorca@yahoo.com copyright©catalina ribas segura 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: in her second novel, behind the moon (2000), hsu-ming teo explores the identity construction of three teenage friends and how they defy the notion of the „ideal‟ australian as a heterosexual, protestant, white, english-speaking, australian-born of british ancestry young adult person. set in the western suburbs of sydney in the 1990s, the three friends are an example of the multicultural society of the time: justin cheong, the son of a chinese-singaporean family who arrived in australia with the business migration programme; tien ho, a refugee girl of chinese-vietnamese and afro-cajuncreole-american ancestry; and nigel „gibbo‟ gibson, the son of an anglo-australian father and an english mother. the novel tackles different relations among these characters and their families during their teenage years and especially as young adults. this paper seeks to analyse the evolution of the identities of justin, tien and „gibbo‟ through the notions of belonging, gender construction and sexuality. in order to do so, the main theories applied will be the insights on homosexuality and on masculinities of maria pallotta-chiarolli (1995) and raewyn w. connell (1995) and manuel castellsʼ (2010) identity construction theory. keywords: chinese australian literature, identity, belonging introduction malaysian-born hsu-ming teo was raised in australia as she migrated with her family to this country in 1977, when she was 7 years old. behind the moon (2005) is her second novel and it was shortlisted for one of the new south wales (nsw) premier´s literary awards, which are given by the state library of nsw in association with arts nsw to “celebrat[e] achievement by australian writers and [help] to establish values and standards in australian literature” (nsw premier´s awards 2015). the novel is set in a middle-class suburb in sydney in the 1990s and it focuses on the topics of mailto:catymallorca@yahoo.com coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 friendship, family relations, adolescence and young adulthood. the novel spans over a period of several years: from the main characters´ early teens to their early twenties. behind the moon also explores their rites of passage, which include three phases: separation, transition and reincorporation. the following discussion is organised into two main sections. the first explores the notions of belonging, especially through ethnicity, gender construction and sexuality, and the second introduces manuel castells´ identity theory and analyses the identities of the three main characters with this framework. belonging behind the moon depicts a cosmos that moves around three main characters: justin cheong, the son of a chinese-singaporean family who arrived in australia with the business migration programme, a plan that started in 1976 and aimed to facilitate the entry of migrants who would become part of the internationalized australian ruling class; tien ho, a refugee girl of chinese-vietnamese and afro-cajun-creole-american ancestry; and nigel „gibbo‟ gibson, the son of an anglo-australian father and an english mother. the bonds among them are forged under different circumstances but gibbo is their nexus, just as the gibsons are the bond among the three families. the gibsons are friends with the cheongs because the piano teacher of their children is a family member of the gibsons. also, gibbo´s mother, gillian, feels more at ease with justin´s mother, annabelle, than with tien´s, lihn, because she has treated tien as her daughter until lihn arrives in australia, which happens years after tien does. lihn had to stay in vietnam because there were not enough seats for her on the boat that took the family away from the war, and tien resented not having her mother with her all the time. moreover, gibbo´s father, bob, also loves tien as if she were his own daughter because he had met tien´s mother and father during world war ii and feels loyal to the experiences lived during those months. the relation between the cheongs and the hos is not close but they care about each other and all the parents love the three kids. the fact that the anglo-australian family becomes the core one can be read as a metaphor for overall australian society: migrant families relate to each other through mainstream organisations, associations or organisms. nevertheless, rather than “reap[ing] the rewards of being an aussie male”, as tien puts it (teo 57), gibbo feels inferior to other anglo-australians and he leans on justin and tien for friendship and a feeling of belonging. justin and gibbo become friends at piano lessons, while tien and gibbo meet at school and become friends as a result of a survival strategy against their being constantly mocked by other students. then, justin is expelled from his school and sent to tien´s and gibbo´s class. once their friendship is established, they call themselves a “multicultural reject group” (teo 61) and gibbo feels part of a community because, as he says, “two could still be the class rejects; three were a gang!” (teo 54) (emphasis in the original). the construction of this small community is made in opposition to what others expect from them, thus, the characters question race relations and show alternative associations. in the case of justin, gibbo and tien, each of the characters tries to defy coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 the notion of “being” or “becoming” australian because they do not feel comfortable in it. the „ideal‟ australian, critics ghassan hage (1998 and 2003) and gillian whitlock and david carter (1992) state, is constructed as a heterosexual, protestant, white, english-speaking, australian-born of british ancestry young adult person who follows the concepts of „fair go‟ (that is, giving others equitable opportunities or reasonable chances) and „mateship‟ (that is, a way of relating to others based on friendship, loyalty and equality, usually applied to a bond created among males), and who is keen on sports, nature and barbeques. in the novel, justin is a homosexual chinese-australian teenager who excels at sports and at school. gibbo is a chubby, clumsy and bad-atsocializing heterosexual caucasian teenager who claims chinese ancestry. tien is a girl who arrived in australia as a refugee, who lived with her chinese-vietnamese family because her mother could not escape when she did and never met her afro-cajuncreole-american father. she cherishes the english lessons given by gibbo‟s mother, speaks with the strine, or broad australian, accent taught by gibbo´s father and yearns for an anglo-australian family. the three of them try to make themselves likeable and reach the expectations set on them by their families, society and by themselves. dislocation is, thus, one of the bonds among these friends. in the case of the adults, gibbo´s father instils the notion of “being australian” in gibbo, justin and tien and he questions his own father´s notion of “australianness”. as he considers, to the young bob, his father was a man´s man. every cliché in the book was true about gordon gibson. tough as old boots, he loved his country, did his stern duty in war and never failed to provide for his family. he was a man made for wearing an akubra… he was harsh but fair to his kids. he disciplined them and instilled in them the self-respect to transcend their working-class roots and scramble into the ranks of the professions. (teo 279) but gordon gibson had a “virulent antagonism towards asians” (teo 278). on the one hand, he often made racist comments about them and considered them to be “the yellow peril” (teo 279) while, on the other, he made his family visit the yipsoons “several times a year, particularly at chinese new year, and he had maintained a sullen respect towards old mrs yipsoon” because, as he explained to bob, “`they´ve been here since the gold rushes. they´re practically australian. they´re the exception that proves the rule´” (teo 279). bob gibson also had mixed feelings when he was a soldier in the vietnam war: he was surprised by the cleanliness in their homes, their hospitality and generosity, especially by that of lihn ho´s family. at the same time, he felt puzzled by their rudeness when they did not speak english in front of him and the dirtiness of streets, among other things. all in all, bob did not trust them while he was fighting in the war. once he was back in australia, he married gillian and had gibbo. some time later, he received a letter written by the hos asking for help to migrate to australia. he did everything he possibly could to make sure that they settled in good conditions. no one knew about it, neither his father nor gillian, because “he did not want his own father to know that he had gone soft where asians were concerned” (teo 282) and, later on, it “would only have made everybody uncomfortable, him most of all” (teo 282). bob gibson seems to coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 have broken with the racist discourse of his father. besides, the fact that his son´s two best friends are of chinese heritage seems to indicate that the idea of “australianness” that the grandfather tried to pass on to the following generations is no longer valuable. the novel reflects the change undergone by australian society: from the white australia policy and the narrow definition of being “australian” to the acknowledgement and celebration of australia´s multicultural society and the questioning of “australianness” in order to look for a more inclusive meaning. ethnicity and belonging as it can be seen, race relations are explored at personal and inter-personal levels. the three children are of different ethnicities and even gibbo claims he is a fourthgeneration chinese australian, although he looks caucasian. this situation leads to a paradox among these characters: while justin and tien would like to be angloaustralians, gibbo asserts his chinese ancestry in order to feel closer to his friends and their families. with their assimilatory intentions in mind, justin and tien take speech lessons from gibbo‟s mother and tien tries to imitate gibbo‟s father‟s strine accent, while gibbo copies justin‟s mother‟s singaporean expressions and learns how to cook and eat singaporean food. these three friends are trying to acquire what can be described as cultural capital. following pierre bourdieu (1986), ghassan hage (1998) explains that cultural capital “represents the sum of valued knowledge, styles, social and physical (bodily) characteristics and practical behavioural dispositions within a given field” (53). this capital is not cumulative, each characteristic has a different fluctuating value and a non-mainstream person will never get the total capital. by trying to master as much cultural capital as possible, migrants aim to accumulate national capital because it leads them to being “recognised as legitimately national by the dominant culture” (hage 53) and, thus, to national belonging. however, the fact that a person acquires cultural and national capital devalues the capital itself: because the migrant was not born with it, and does not have the „essence‟ that the national aristocracy possesses (hage 62). while justin and tien try to acquire “anglo-australian” cultural capital, gibbo tries to get “chinese” cultural capital. the three friends, then, have to develop their own identities based on another factor, and each one of them turns to their gender construction, sexuality and yearning to be loved. as a fourteen year-old boy, justin tries to negate and hide his homosexuality from his parents and friends, as he thinks they will stop loving him if they know. consequently, justin creates a façade of the perfect son, student and friend, and does not allow anyone to know his emotions, feelings and worries. years later, he makes himself vulnerable to gibbo during a camping excursion without tien. gibbo feels guilty because he does not know how to handle the situation and they become distant. when justin is twenty-one, gibbo‟s father exposes justin´s sexuality, and he does not deny it. justin decides to be open about it also with his extended family but he is mainly rejected, stereotyped and not understood. justin does not have role models or texts to learn about what he considers to be “practically an oxymoron” (teo 141): asian or asian-australian homosexuality. as maria pallotta-chiarolli (1995) explains in her “ʻa rainbow in my heartʼ: negotiating sexuality and ethnicity”, there exist a number of difficulties lesbian and bisexual women face. these difficulties, which have been listed by ruth baetz, can coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 be applied to gay and bisexual men of non-english speaking backgrounds, these so called “weapons” are silence, lies, isolation, intimidation and physical violence (pallotta-chiarolli 136). baetz also explains four difficult situations, which she names “cross-roads”: coming out to parents and siblings, religion, culture and therapy (pallotta-chiarolli 137). some of the items in these lists make reference to media distortions, to the lack of role models and of ethnic literature, to the difficulties in creating a community or in sharing one‟s feelings because of the fear of ostracism, physical and verbal abuse by/to one‟s family and to one self. these cross-roads shape the life of many migrants, some of whom decide not to tell their parents about their gayness, lesbianism or bisexuality in order to avoid hurting and disappointing them after all the sacrifices made for their beloved children. justin has clearly gone through this process and deciding not to negate his homosexuality and being open about it with his extended family is a turning point in his life. he starts to explore his identity as a young homosexual of asian origin and he has two main partners: one is a malaysian university classmate, and the second one is an anglo-australian divorced father of two teenage children, who loves him, understands him and gives him space to grow up and know what he really wants. in the last chapters, justin is intimidated, physically abused and sexually assaulted by strangers. he is left in a coma and suffers multiple external and internal injuries. the reader does not know whether justin will wake up from the coma and, if he does, under which conditions. nevertheless, this is the catastrophic event that leads his friends and families towards a reunion. this evolution in justin´s identity is logical: when he overcomes his fears, he starts to look for his niche in this new community. first, he tries to feel close with another asian university student so, at first sight, their identities have many commonalities (ethnicity, interests, hobbies, sexuality). when it does not work, he feels disappointed and turns to another stereotype, that is, older white men who fancy younger asian men. justin is trying to find his place in the homosexual community, without acknowledging his own prejudices and feeling of restlessness. gibbo has a different construction of masculinity. he is heterosexual and yearns to have a family of his own. however, he is not assertive, does not retaliate when he is bullied or insulted and lacks some interpersonal skills. raewyn w. connell labelled the different positions men could have while relating to others. in her well-cited text masculinities (1995), connell introduces four types of masculinities: hegemonic, complicit, marginalised and subordinated. following this systematization of masculine types, gibbo‟s masculinity is not hegemonic, as he is not a dominant man; neither is it complicit, because he does not take advantage of the benefits of his masculinity; nor is it marginalized, as he is a white middle-class member of the australian society and does not belong to a marginal group. in my opinion, when gibbo is a teenager, his masculinity is subordinated, not only to that of other men, but to women as well. however, as a young adult, he feels more comfortable with himself and moves towards a complicit masculinity, taking advantage of being a male. like justin, gibbo does not have a role model to follow, as his relationship with his father is almost non-existent until he turns 21. their approaches to masculinity seem to lack a common ground: gibbo is not good at sports and his father, stereotypical as he is, does not know how to communicate with another man directly, without playing with a ball or doing coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 something. after a series of unfortunate events when gibbo is 21, lihn decides to set an apprehended violence order (avo) against him, which she later discharges. gibbo realises he does not know how to convey his feelings, just as his father. during this process, gibbo and his father start having a healthy relationship and they realise they are not as different as they had previously thought. at this moment, gibbo starts to explore his identity and masculinity. he moves into a flat with other young people, creates his second “multicultural reject group” (teo 298), becomes a vegetarian, finishes his studies as an engineer (teo 110), starts working at a pub and he seriously considers becoming a chef. when justin is in hospital, gibbo supports the family by cooking for them or spending time with his friend so the cheongs can rest. gibbo also helps lihn and tien, as much as he can, just as his father did. the comparisons between gibbo and his father continue with their feelings of disloyalty. on the one hand, gibbo´s father felt betrayed by justin´s and tien´s distance from his son when they finished school and by lihn when she set the avo against him. on the other, gibbo felt deceived by justin´s and tien´s attitude towards him when they started university and by tien´s encouragement to lihn to set an avo against him. both anglo-australian men seem to have ambivalent feelings: on the one hand, they want to love their asian friends and feel accepted by them, but, on the other, there is a barrier they cannot overcome: the kids have become adults and their experiences and insecurities have led them away from one another. this development of the two main white anglo-australian men can be metaphorically read as the uneasiness that two generations of white males feel concerning asian migration. on the one hand, bob can be seen to represent the traditional white heroic anglo-australian who was raised during the white australia policy, with a clear mentality of the binaries “us vs. them”, which had been instilled in him by his father, who only considered the yipsoons to be the exception to the rule. however, during his time in the vietnam war, the limits of these binaries became blurred and bob does not know how to convey this situation. on the other hand, gibbo finds comfort in the idea of being a fifth-generation chinese australian as his identity as a white australian male does not correspond with that of his father and he tries to belong with his friends. gibbo is raised during the policy of multiculturalism but he is troubled because he is trying to come to terms with it and the personal implications it has for him. he has two “multicultural reject groups”, which implies that he has an inclusive mentality, not organised in binaries of “us vs. them”. nevertheless, he has to find his place in society as an individual, not as part of a group. as regards the third main character, tien is fond of her two friends but she has special feelings for justin. however, these feelings are not mutual and they become distant after the graduation ball. eventually tien starts going out with stan wong, a chineseaustralian medical student and artist. after getting married, they migrate to the united states of america so that stan can further his studies. tien tries to be compliant and behave as the obedient „asian‟ wife because not only does she understand the implication of filial piety expected by his family, but she is also eager to make the relationship work as stan is the first man who asked her out. tien is not happy but she hides her feelings and thoughts from both stan and her mother. however, she finally decides to divorce stan and, as soon as learns that justin is in hospital, she goes back to australia. she acknowledges the fact that she has always loved justin and that her coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 marriage was bound to fail because her friends and their families were not part of her life anymore. tien is uneasy with her body, her skin colour, her features and her sexuality. after justin‟s negative response, she felt unlovable, and hung onto stan for security, even if it meant negating her own identity. like justin and gibbo, tien does not have a suitable role model, in her case, of a secondor 1.5-generation i afro-asian-australian woman to be inspired by: gibbo‟s mother, gillian, who she calls mum and visits often until lihn arrives in australia, is english and arrived in australia “in the late 1950s as a ten-pound immigrant” (teo 114); lihn and her aunts are vietnamese, and arrived in australia in the 1980s as refugees, and justin‟s mother is singaporean and migrated to australia under the business migration plan in the 1970s. none of the female characters are born in australia, maybe as a means to emphasize the masculinity of the “ideal australian” and of the concept of “mateship” and to question the role, perception and position of australian women in society. while in the united states, tien looks for her father´s family and she finds them, but she does not have the courage to introduce herself to them. the character of tien represents a new generation of australians whose roots cannot be defined in traditional terms and who have to create their own place, maybe taking inspiration from strategies different peoples use in order to create their own. identity justin, gibbo and tien each try to belong to a community (homosexual, vegetarian, respectably married, respectively) and, in order to do so, they explore their ethnicities, their gender constructions and sexuality. in his the power of identity. the information age: economy, society and culture, manuel castells (2010) introduces three types of identity: legitimizing, resistance and project. castells defines legitimizing identity as the one “introduced by the dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize their domination vis à vis social actors” (8). this identity can be considered mainstream or normative, as it follows the processes imposed by the nation-state and it produces a civil society. the second type is resistance identity, which tries to resist mainstream organisations and coordinates its members in alternative communities, which may in turn resist other alternative communities. thus, this type of identity implies “the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded” (castells 9). the third form is project identity, which takes place “when social actors, on the basis of whatever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by doing so, seek the transformation of overall social structure” (castells 8). this third type is not a synthesis of the previous two categories. project identity aims to create a new society by negotiating its terms with others. therefore, castells explains that “new project identities do not seem to emerge from former identities of civil society of the industrial era, but from a development of current resistance identities” (422) (emphasis in the original). an analysis of the three main characters in behind the moon shows that during their teenage years justin and tien try to have a legitimizing identity while gibbo has a resistance identity. on the one hand, both justin and tien try to fulfil the expectations of their families and the wider society as they intend to behave as it is expected from them: coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 justin is the good, obedient and perfect son, whereas tien struggles to perform her filial obligations while craving for the love of a mother. on the other hand, gibbo is happy excluding those who exclude him as long as he has his two friends. as a young adult exploring his homosexuality, justin seems to have a resistance identity because he defies mainstream society, specially his closest acquaintances (family, friends), and tries to be part of another defined community: first, the asian gay community, and then the gay community in sydney. nevertheless, when he is being assaulted, he realises he is beyond the definition of “gay”, “asian” or “asian-australian” and, in my opinion, he begins to move towards a project identity: he no longer needed the external markers of identity, the first thing people saw or learned about him and judged him by. he was not reducible to his ethnicity or his sexuality or his occupation or geographical location or even his family. somewhere between the surface of his skin and the creases of his soul, in the interstice of mind and matter, there was a void in which he simply was (teo 333-4). however, the novel has an open ending as justin is still in a coma and the reader does not know whether or not justin will survive and, if so, under which conditions. the reader is told that justin is supported by his family and friends and that they have all accepted justin´s former partner, dirk merkel. as justin´s father says to tien: “they broke up, you know. but i tell you what. gay or not, he really loves my jay [justin]. he comes to visit every evening after work and stays for hours.” it was the only thing that he and anabelle [justin´s mother] could take comfort in just then. the fact that their son meant something to these people [the gibsons, the hos and dirk] who came day after day. all debts were cancelled, all offences forgiven, simply because justin was loved (teo 340). this implies that they have come to terms with justin´s sexuality and would not try to change him or judge him. consequently, justin has managed to create a new microcosmos where all-embracing love and support among its members seem to be its core characteristics. the character of tien also is open-ended. the young adult woman tries to equate her identity to her role as wife. tien‟s identity and conduct as an adult are not defined as she needs to get to know herself before she can have a pattern of behaviour that can be classified as legitimizing, resistance or project. tien loves her friends and tries to revenge justin. she finds one of his attackers and plans to poison him. however, lihn stops her. tien finally faces her anger and frustration and asks her mother for help. it is suggested that tien will try to face her fears, treat her mother and friends well, find a job and, probably, try to be part of the community. finally, the character of gibbo seems to be an example of resistance identity throughout the novel. he discards the anglo-australian aspect of his identity because he feels rejected by other anglo-australians and, as a defence technique, he tries to exclude all those who exclude him, that is, those who consider he is not good enough, fit enough and assertive enough. gibbo enjoys being part of “multicultural reject groups” and tries coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 to live in alternative communities, as a child and teenager with his asian-australian friends and families, and as a young adult by becoming vegetarian and following his wish of caring for others. while justin is in a comma, gibbo realises that tien‟s and justin‟s friendship will last as long as they do not have partners and that, despite the fact that they care for one another, their wishes to be loved are more alluring than the need for their friends. however, the reader is left unsure of his future: whether he will continue having a resistance identity or he will develop it into project identity. after the avo, it can be assumed that gibbo will not impose his identity or ideas on others by coercive means, but he will use negotiation as a tool to reach his dreams. conclusions hsu-ming teo´s behind the moon explores the notions of friendship, identity and the rites of passage of three friends. these personal journeys include justin´s acceptance of his homosexuality, gibbo´s development of emotional intelligence and tien´s acceptance of her ethnicity, origins and feelings. during their teenage years and early adulthood, these three characters learn to stop lying to themselves, accept their feelings and explore different lifestyles. manuel castell´s identity theory provides a theoretical context in which to analyse and compare the patterns of behaviour and construction of these characters´ selves. however, the novel can also be understood to question the definition and construct of “australianness”. the three young characters defy the idea of the heterosexual, protestant, white, english-speaking, australian-born of british ancestry person who follows the notions of “fair go” and “mateship”. belonging, ethnicity and sexuality are the key concepts analysed in this text. furthermore, the construction of the families follows some stereotypes: the cheongs want justin to excel in life by means of studies and a reputable career, the father is a businessman and the mother a housewife; the hos are thankful for the opportunity to live in australia, are middle-class workers who have a restaurant and cannot spend as much time with their children as if they were uppermiddle class; the gibsons are upper-middle class and have respectable professions: bob is a surgeon and gillian is a singing teacher and an elocutionist. under this apparent stereotype of middle-class families, teo also questions the notion of “australiannes”: no female character is born in australia and the three anglo-australian men (gordon, bob, gibbo) represent the country‟s ambivalent relation with “asia”. grandfather gordon gibson represents the white australia policy, as he understands chinese migrants as “the yellow peril” except families who arrived in australia in the 1850s1880s, who are “the exception that proves the rule” (teo 279). bob gibson participated in the vietnam war and questioned the stereotypes based on personal experience, which led him to help those he became close with. bob represents the lessening of the policy and the opening of the country. finally, gibbo represents the policy of multiculturalism, as he relates with non-anglo-australians on a daily basis, is close to them and feels eager to be accepted by them. the open ending of the novel provides room for the development of the characters, their relationships and that of the country. works cited coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 bourdieu, pierre. “the forms of capital”. j. g. richardson (ed). handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. new york: greenwood p, 1986. 241-58. print. castells, manuel. the power of identity. the information age: economy, society, and culture. volume ii. 2 nd ed. chichester: wiley-blackwell, 2010. print. connell, raewynw. masculinities. sydney: allen & unwin, 1995. 2 nd ed. print. hage, ghassan. white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. annandale: pluto press, 1998. print. hage, ghassan. against paranoid nationalism. annandale: pluto press, 2003. print. ommundsen, wenche. introduction: transnational imaginaries: reading asian australian writing. jasal 12.2 (2012). 1-8. web. 27 feb 2013. pallotta-chiarolli, maria. “„a rainbow in my heart‟: negotiating sexuality and ethnicity”. guerra, c. and white, r.d. ethnic minority youth in australia: challenges and myths. hobart: national clearing house for youth, 1995a. 133-144. print. pallotta-chiarolli, maria. “„mestizis‟: the multiple marginalities of living in/between social groups”. leonie rowan and jan mcnamee (eds). voices of a margin. speaking for yourself. rockhampton: central qup, 1995b. 78-93. print. nsw premier´s awards. 2015. state library of new south wales, sydney. web. 4 march 2015. http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about/awards/premiers_awards/ teo, hsu-ming. behind the moon. crows nest: allen & unwin, 2005. print. wagner, tamara s. “„after another round of tissues‟: „bad time‟ fiction and the amy tan-syndrome in recent singaporean novels”. the journal of commonwealth literature. 38. 2 (2003): 19-39. web. 3 march 2013. whitlock, gillian and david carter (eds). images of australia. an introductory reader in australian studies. st lucia: uqp, 1992. print. catalina ribas segura is a lecturer in the english department at the university college alberta giménez (cesag, palma de mallorca). she wrote her ma thesis on greek-australian literature and her phd thesis on greek-australian and chinese australian literatures. she has taught a number of courses on language and cultures in english-speaking countries. her main interests include migration, identity and contemporary australian literature. she is a member of the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona. i according to wenche ommundsen (2012), the migrant or refugee child who is schooled in the host country is termed “1.5 generation”. http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about/awards/premiers_awards/ migration assimilation, same as it ever was coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 canadian multiculturalism, same as it ever was? kathleen hoyos abstract: after the second world war ended, canada was no longer mainly composed of its two dominant ethnocultural groups, french and english, but rather constituted by polyethnicity; meaning, canadian culture was made up of many different ethnic groups. since then, canada has actively embraced multiculturalism and on 12 july 1988, the house of commons passed bill c-93, ‘an act for the preservation and enhancement of multiculturalism in canada’. the canadian multicultural experience has been much portrayed as a celebration of ethnicity where different cultural groups share their customs and learn from each other. however, it is recently being rumoured that the multiculturalism hype is not all it is cut out to be and segregates communities rather than integrate. according to canadian authors keith banting and will kymlicka, “in much of the world and particularly in europe, there is a widespread perception that multiculturalism has failed” (44). in this paper, i examine some recent common issues of concern, especially, racism and discrimination, through the literary expression of canadian playwrights and writers such as george f. walker, cecil foster, and mordecai richler. these writers are not meant to represent any ethnic group as a whole, but rather try to project a general feeling about the nation in individual ways. i will finally explore the idea of how perhaps multiculturalism in canada is evolving into another state since migratory patterns and the social circumstances that canada is facing in the 21 st century have changed. today, the idea of celebrating different ethnicities and customs is no longer as important as celebrating the transcultural or “transnational” aspects of relations between individuals and groups of immigrants. keywords: multiculturalism, transnationalism, transnational literature the use of multiculturalism, as a term, within the canadian perspective, is best stated by harold troper in the encyclopedia of canada’s peoples, where he acknowledges that multiculturalism has been used to: refer to several different, but related, phenomena: the demographic reality of a canadian population made up of peoples and groups representing a plurality of ethnocultural traditions and racial origins; a social ideal or value that accepts cultural pluralism as a positive and distinctive feature of copyright©2014 kathleen hoyos. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 canadian society; and government policy initiatives designed to recognize, support, and–some might argue –manage cultural and racial pluralism at federal, provincial, and municipal levels. i in looking at troper’s description of multiculturalism, the first point that is noted is canada’s pluralist society. but how diverse is canada’s society? and how has the present changed from the past? we seem to forget that even previous to european settlement, canada was already widely settled by various different aboriginal groups with cultural and linguistic differences: canada’s first nations. therefore canada’s pluralist society is not a present day phenomena, but rather an intrinsic characteristic to canadian lifestyle that only keeps expanding with time. polyethnicity holds an inherent value in canadian society and culture since canada proclaimed its own ‘multiculturalism policy’ in 1971, making canada the first country in the world to officially implement a legislative framework for multiculturalism. then, in 1982, the canadian charter of rights and freedoms included multiculturalism as an important part of the canadian identity, which meant that the charter specifically recognized multiculturalism as a canadian value. finally, in july 1988 the conservative government passed the canadian multiculturalism act, which formalized the government's multiculturalism policy "to recognize all canadians as full and equal participants in canadian society" by establishing legislation to protect ethnic, racial, linguistic and religious diversity within canadian society. ii thanks to this policy, today canadian society is widely known for its multicultural mosaic, consisting of different social communities who co-exist, regardless of differences in ethnic origin or religious belief. around the world, the canadian multicultural experience is much portrayed as a celebration of ethnicity where different cultural groups share their customs and learn from each other. however, according to some scholars, this heavenly state has presented “a major shift in the general trends regarding immigrant integration in the western democracies” (banting and kymlicka 44). canadian authors keith banting and will kymlicka argue that “the present trend stirs away from multiculturalism and towards social cohesion and integration. whereas the 1970s and 1980s exhibited growing support for, and experimentation with, multiculturalism, the 1990s and 2000s have witnessed a backlash against it, and a retreat from it” (banting and kymlicka 44). however, this global backlash and retreat is primarily promoted by european states. the dominant narrative about multiculturalism in europe blames multiculturalism for a variety of ills. some of these ills are “the residential ghettoisation and social isolation of immigrants, and the increased stereotyping, and hence prejudice and discrimination, between ethnic groups” (banting and kymlicka 45). the works of the canadian writers i examine here give us model examples of some issues of concern such as racism and discrimination that are very much present in canadian society. canadian playwright george f. walker critically challenges the concept of multiculturalism in his play heaven, where the interaction between various different ethnic groups has nothing to do with bliss, but rather turns out to be a bitter battle of long-held grudges and prejudices. walker himself has experienced some of these grudges and prejudices, as he comes from a working class family in east end coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 toronto. the play questions the concept of multiculturalism by making it apparently an ideology that could only be attainable in heaven. in the play there are five characters, each representative of a specific ethnic group, that coincide in a nearby park, on the outskirts of a city. the park which happens to be the stage for this canadian representative society is the perfect setting because it draws us away from an ethnic neighborhood or enclave, giving us an area where the characters are on neutral ground, therefore avoiding ghettoization and placing the real emphasis of the play on how these multi-cultural characters co-exist, interrelate and influence one another. critics argue that multiculturalism promotes ghettoization and balkanization, and encourages segregation and discrimination. it leads its members into a sole awareness of its own kind, highlighting ethnic, religious and cultural differences and in the end, distorting the view of a shared canadian identity. in the play heaven, walker shows us some of the typical problems that can arise between segregated cultures or cultures that do not accept intermarriages. in the following fragment of the play, david, a jewish rabbi, attributes the failure of jimmy’s marriage to the fact that he is not jewish. david: i never had anything against you…i was against your marriage that’s all. jimmy: against it? is that what you call it. you were a fucking pain in the ass. we loved each other [my wife and i]. get it? and all we heard was this crap coming from these two ancient tribes we were trying to escape. your fucking synagogue was almost vibrating with collective distaste. and my old man died well, basically in a bigoted rage. the catholic way. the jewish way. all the ways. fuck you. fuck your people. fuck your ways. my marriage isn’t fucked because of her career, or my callous ways, it’s from fifteen years of trying to keep all you assholes at arm’s length. (walker 47) jimmy, who is also the main character of the play, expresses his frustration with the restricting norms and conditions sometimes shown by ethnic groups, perhaps as a consequence of ethnic enclaves. jimmy ascribes the failure of his marriage to religious differences and the socially negative reception of intercultural relationships. banting and kymlicka declare that the debate over multiculturalism focuses “primarily on the social integration of newcomers into the mainstream of canadian life” (53) and two of the three traditional indicators they principally rely on to analyse this debate are residential location and intermarriage: there is (…) little evidence of entrenched racial concentration in poor ghettos. a study tracking residential patterns in toronto over time finds that black and south asian migrants follow a traditional assimilation model: initial settlement is in low-income enclaves shared by their own and other visible minority groups, but they disperse in the longer term to higher cost neighbourhoods dominated by white people (…). while rates of intermarriage vary significantly across immigrant minorities, the 2001 census revealed striking proportions of mixed couples among some coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 minority communities (…). hybridity is an increasing element of canadian multiculturalism. (banting and kymlicka 53-4) in his book essays on george f. walker: playing with anxiety, writer chris johnson closely studies walker’s work and critically analyses most of his plays. he explores the social and cultural contexts in which walker writes and acknowledges that a central aspect in his plays is his “compulsion to place his anxiety on the page and on the stage”. excessively uncontrolled anxiety is walker’s approach to denouncing all of society’s evils; racism, discrimination, and religious warfare. walker uses savage satire on religious affiliation of any sort and comments on how einstein called the dominant world religions the religions of fear. kymlicka (2010) confirms that, in canada, the place of religious diversity within multiculturalism has not yet been adequately debated or explored. in fact, he claims that “religion is now the most controversial domain of multiculturalism” (kymlicka 18). jimmy: speaking of pakies… the islamic faith. there are some pretty zany guys hiding out in that religion. the taliban…how many women can you kill in the name of allah. what’s the record so far. those thugs should be dragged into the new millennium no matter how much they kick and scream. you know einstein called the big three, the christian, jewish, islamic faiths. the religions of fear. they all gotta go. really…we can’t get anywhere holding on to them. they’re anti-evolutionary…i used to say that to judy…how can you be part of a faith that doesn’t like you…like my mother. and my sisters. good catholics…but their church despises them. on some fundamental level. it does. (walker 81) jimmy is a human rights lawyer, with working class roots, who turns cynic and launches a one-man crusade against the hypocrisies of racism, religion, and the politically correct. johnson refers to “walker’s working class roots as a central starting point for understanding…[his] point of view,” and the use of vulgar and coarse language in his plays to depict hypocrisies. walker also resorts to rushes of words, chopped chunks of language and exclamations to help get his point across. sometimes repetition and hyphenation does the trick as well: jimmy: i’m a government lawyer, judy. i’m a fucking dickless wonder. judy: who doesn’t listen, but i remember when you did. and to a whole lot of people, me included but immigrants mostly, you were some kind of hero. you helped those people when they couldn’t get help anywhere else. jimmy: yeah well…fuck them. judy: fuck them? why, jimmy. how did we get to fuck them. jimmy: mostly because of what they bring with them. their tribal conflicts. so fuck the vietnamese-hating cambodians. and the cambodian-hating koreans. and the jamaican-hating trinidadians. and the albanian-hating serbs…hating croats and whoever else…and yes while we’re at it, jude, fuck the white european male and everyone he hates. and all the christian-hating muslims and muslim-hating jews and jew-hating christians and gay-hating christians and muslim-hating christians. and black and white and yellow and red and so on and so on. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 fuck and double fuck them all. and if it disappoints you that i feel that way well…fuck you too i guess. (walker 58) at the end of the play, although jimmy is left confronting an afterlife that further defies his expectations of life, there is still a sense of reconciliation and an opportunity for multiculturalism. there is hope for a possible understanding of different cultural groups in a community or, as walker suggests, in one single ‘heaven’. surprisingly, walker is not the only canadian writer who uses the concept of ‘heaven’ sarcastically to describe canadian society in a book title. cecil foster, barbadiancanadian who immigrated to canada in 1979, has written a collection of essays entitled a place called heaven: the meaning of being black in canada (1996), which mainly explores why people of black origin feel alienated from canada’s multicultural policies and how they try to overcome this feeling. according to h. nigel thomas, the essays that comprise this book “document and analyse the various ways by which toronto’s blacks try to keep a step ahead of psychological and cultural death in the urban wilderness of hopelessness and contempt that the dream [of the promised land myth] has brought them to” (thomas 488). while thomas asserts that “there is no such body of people called a canadian black community nor for that matter any possibility of creating one, foster, … argues the reverse… [and claims] that blacks are linked into a community by the common experience of oppression” (thomas 486-487). foster also claims that canada’s racism against black people is due to the part it played during colonialization. he illustrates this process by referring to the “dehumanizing mythology euro-canadians invented to dispossess first nations.” iii however, he also admits that caribbean and african blacks are, to a degree, also at fault for the racism practiced against them because when they first arrive to canada they accept menial jobs and therefore also accept to be treated as menial or as the colonized. nevertheless, banting and kymlicka’s research seems to demonstrate exactly the opposite. they state that “critics of multiculturalism sometimes argue that canada’s record of integration [within immigrants] is explained by … the fact that canada’s immigrants tend to be more highly skilled than immigrants in other countries [and therefore] can more easily move into the labour market” (60). foster claims that no matter how [blacks] strut their perceived differences, most canadians see [them] as forming one homogenous group. and how [blacks] are seen and treated by canadians at large might, in the end, be the deciding factor. for how [they] are perceived will govern how [they] react to the wider community, determine whether [they] can ever become genuine canadians, [and] settle what conditions … [they] live [under] as individuals. in other words, this … implies how [blacks] are to survive collectively as a community … and [their] place … in canada. (foster 21) while banting and kymlicka concede the following: the fact that canada has officially defined itself as a multicultural nation means that immigrants are a constituent part of the nation that citizens feel coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 pride in; multiculturalism serves as a link for native-born citizens from national identity to solidarity with immigrants. conversely, multiculturalism provides a link by which immigrants come to identify with, and feel pride in, canada. (banting and kymlicka 60) mordecai richler was born in 1931 and raised on st urbain street in montreal. his grandfather immigrated to canada from a galician shtetl in 1904 to be a peddler on the main, which later became the jewish ghetto. richler’s grandparents immigrated to canada long before english-french bilingualism became an official federal policy. therefore, richler was educated in english, not french which is the first official language spoken in montreal, the second being english. this, along with the fact of being jewish, caused richler to experience double racism. however, in a fragment from his story “the street”, he says, “actually, it was only the wasps who were truly hated and feared. ‘among them,’ i heard it said, ‘with those porridge faces, who can tell what they’re thinking?’ it was, we felt, their country, and given sufficient liquor who knew when they would make trouble?” (hutcheon and richmond 36). richler expresses a view of multiculturalism as serving a political function. he claims that although “multiculturalism was a deliberate cover-up of earlier mistakes,” since canada was one of the countries that brought to safety the smallest number of jews during the nazi regime, only about 5000. iv this has slowly led canadians to “voluntarily support the myth”. in the 1950s canada opened its immigration policies to allow the entrance of less “preferred” immigrant groups. soon after, canada realised that, despite its tireless efforts to be a homogeneously wasp country with an adjacent french region, it could no longer deny its multiethnic population. subsequently, canada took the first step in expressing its multicultural identity and later on established its multiculturalism act. once it was decided to actively adopt multiculturalism as a policy, it was performed with the explicit assumption that cultural diversity is a good thing for the nation and needs to be actively promoted. migrants are encouraged—and to a certain extent, forced by the logic of discourse—to preserve their cultural heritage and the government provides support and facilities for them to do so; as a result, their place in the new society is sanctioned by their officially recognised ethnic identities. (lucking 243) for richler, the true ideology behind multiculturalism is the government’s intent of incorporating ethnic groups into the definition of canadian identity. however, he does admit that even though its purpose may not have been of pure good intentions, its outcome has certainly demonstrated welfare for canadians. there was a time in canada when not being of english or french descent meant being the other. hence minority groups had to choose which dominant ethnic culture they would abide by and this, for richler, depended on what was good for the jews: our parents used to apply a special standard to all men and events. ‘is it good for the jews?’ by this test they interpreted the policies of mackenzie king and the stanley cup play-offs and earthquakes in japan. to take one example – if the montreal canadiens won the stanley cup it would infuriate the wasps in toronto, and as long as the english and french coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 were going at each other they left us alone: ergo, it was good for the jews if the canadiens won the stanley cup. we were convinced that we gained from dissension between canada’s two cultures, the english and the french, and we looked neither to england nor france for guidance. we turned to the united states, the real america. (hutcheon and richmond 37-38). richler clearly describes how on special occasions minority groups identified themselves by either siding with the english or the french, depending on the circumstances and the events in play. on any other day, they just simply did not fit into the canadian identity and went back to the status of the other. some immigrants decided on not going back to the other status at all and opted for an in between, free flowing status, a neither here nor there status. in the article “neither here nor there: canadian fiction by the multicultural generation”, carolyn redl, makes a distinction between writers before the multiculturalism act of 1988 and writers after the act, naming them the writers of the ‘multicultural generation’. she explores whether fiction by transcultural writers of this generation differs from fiction written by earlier writers to determine if legislated multiculturalism has promoted increased tolerance of ethnic differences. redl concludes that “transcultural fiction written prior to the multicultural act depicts characters in the process of becoming canadians … [and fiction written since the act,] depicts characters who are physically present in canada and physically absent from another country. they are neither here nor there” (28), therefore lacking a sense of belonging to a single place, but rather belonging to more than one place at the same time. they are transnational migrants. transnational migrants are not expected to have a single identity or national allegiance. in fact, most canadians are “trapped on the cusp of two [or more] worlds, a fact symbolized by the hyphen [or set of hyphens] in their hyphenated ethnic labels” (23). redl claims that the multiculturalism act originated hyphenated canadians and now new canadians are “automatically labeled by their countries of origin, chinesecanadians, italian-canadians [or chinese-italian-canadians] and so forth, rather than simply canadians” (23). whether hyphenated or not, canadians and multiculturalism are represented by (in suwanda sugunasiri’s words) an “ocean fed by many a river in which flow the tears and joys of our 70 or so cultural groups, and the merging of those rivers has not left any of the waters unchanged. v in conclusion, whether or not the multiculturalism act of 1988 has moved beyond simple politics and into general practice in canadian society is very much debated by many people. even though canada has always been, since its origins, a polyethnic country, it has not always been the ideal model of immigrant integration or co-existing cultures. however, examining research and analyzing canadian fiction can give us a pretty good idea of the place that canada occupies in its aim for successful integration of immigrants. in this paper i have examined both research articles and literary works by canadian authors to try to determine whether multiculturalism plays any significant role in canada’s success or failure. canadian playwrights and writers such as george f. walker, cecil foster, and mordecai richler, address crucial issues inherent in a multicultural society, such as racism, cultural confusions and tensions, and project a general feeling about the nation in individual and pluralized ways. there is no doubt that canadian literature is becoming more globalized and this is precisely why it is coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 important not to make a rash decision on multiculturalism, with its various interpretations and wide variety of discourses. some critics claim that the only remedy is either the abolition of multiculturalism altogether, or perhaps a post-multiculturalism. i agree that perhaps multiculturalism in canada is evolving into another state. the migratory patterns and circumstances that canada is facing in the 21 st century have obviously changed. the idea of celebrating different ethnicities and customs is no longer as important as celebrating the transnational or “transcultural” aspects of relations between individuals and groups of immigrants. the voices and visions of canadians have pluralized into a transnational culture creating one single globalized culture. sociologist zygmunt bauman has expressed that living within multiple cultures is a reality of our times, but truly achieving the concept of a single human race is our purpose and destiny. vi works cited banting, keith and will kymlicka. “canadian multiculturalism: global anxieties and local debates.” british journal of canadian studies, 23.1 (2010). “canadian multiculturalism act.” justice laws website. canada.gc.ca. web. 5 dec. 2012. canada.gc.ca. 2 dec. 2012. encyclopedia of canada’s peoples. troper, harold. multiculturalism. ontario institute for studies in education, toronto, ontario, web. 2 dec. 2012 foster, c. sleep on, beloved. toronto, canada: random house, 1995. ----. a place called heaven: the meaning of being black in canada. toronto: harper collins, 1996. hutcheon, linda & marion richmond, eds.. other solitudes: canadian multicultural fictions. toronto: oxford u.p., 1990. johnson, chris. essays on george f. walker: playing with anxiety. ninnipeg, canada: blizzard publishing, 1999. kymlicka, will. “the current state of multiculturalism in canada and research temes on canadian multiculturalism 2008-2010” (a report biten for the departament of citi-les-hi and immigration canada, 2010). lucking, david. “between things: public mythology in the works of mordecai richler,” dalhousie review, 65, 1985. redl, carolyn. “neither here nor there: canadian fiction by the multicultural generation.” canadian ethnic studies. 28.1 (1996): 22-29. web. 24 nov. 2012. smith, c.. chris johnson. essays on george f. walker: playing with anxiety. theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada, north america, 21, jun. 2000. <http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/tric/article/view/12641/13528>. date accessed: 12 nov. 2012. thomas, h. nigel. "cecil fosters’ sleep on, beloved. a depiction of the consequences of racism in canadian immigration policy." journal of black studies. 38.3 (2008): 484-501. web. 24 nov. 2012. walker, george f. heaven. burnaby, british columbia: talonbooks, 2000. http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/tric/article/view/12641/13528 coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 i the encyclopedia of canada's peoples, ‘multiculturalism’. ii “the canadian multiculturalism act.” justice laws website. canada.gc.ca. iii foster fully elaborates on this concept in where race does not matter. iv in none is too many: canada and the jews of europe, 1933-1948; irving abella and harold troper, 1991. v toronto star, saturday magazine, 7 january 1989, p. m24. vi i have translated the original quote by zygmunt bauman. “muchas culturas: ésa es la realidad. una sola humanidad es un destino, un propósito o una tarea de ideales.” kathleen hoyos is a lecturer of postcolonial literatures in english at the university of barcelona. she holds an ma in construction and representation of cultural identities and is currently a phd candidate at the university of barcelona. she is member of the australian studies centre. her areas of interest and research are postcolonial literatures and cultures, diaspora and transnationalism. microsoft word coola6baya coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 mixed pau baya remenat (catalan) (mixed), "revoltillo" (scrambled) in spanish, is a dish which, in catalunya, consists of a beaten egg cooked with vegetables or other ingredients, normally prawns or asparagus. it is delicious. scrambled refers to the action of mixing the beaten egg with other ingredients in a pan, normally using a wooden spoon thought is frequently an amalgam of past ideas put through a spinner and rhythmically shaken around like a cocktail until a uniform and dense paste is made. this malleable product, rather like a cake mixture can be deformed pulling it out, rolling it around, adapting its shape to the commands of one’s hands or the tool which is being used on it. in the piece mixed, the contortion of the wood seeks to reproduce the plasticity of this slow heavy movement. each piece lays itself on the next piece consecutively like a tongue of incandescent lava slowly advancing but with unstoppable inertia. mixed ia a group of sculptures made out of carved wood. the wood is african cedar. copyright © 2011 pau baya this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 pau baya (barcelona, 1974) he studied at the university of barcelona, specialising in sculpture, finishing his degree in arts in 2000. he is an art teacher in a private secondary school in barcelona. he has won prizes for his work and has worked with italian architects as well as exhibiting his work in catalunya. “remenat” mixed african cedar 60x40x 20 cm coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 remenat. remenat, "revoltillo" en espanyol, és un plat de casa nostra que consisteix en ou batut i cuit amb verdures o altres ingredients. normalment amb gambes i espàrrecs. boníssim. remenat fa referència a l'acció de barrejar amb una cullera (normalment de fusta) l'ou liquat amb els ingredients dins d'una paella. el pensament a vegades, és una amalgama d'idees passades per la centrifugadora i sacsejades a ritme de còktel fins a assolir una pasta uniforme i densa. aquest producte maleable, com si fos la pasta per a un pastís es deforma estirant-se i arrontsant-se, adaptant la seva massa a la voluntat de les mans o de l'estri que la treballen. a l'obra remenat la contorsió de la fusta cerca aquest moviment de plasticitat lenta i feixuga. cada peça del conjunt s'abraona damunt la seva consecutiva com una llengua de lava incandescent que avança amb lentitud, amb inèrcia imparable. remenat és un grup escultòric realitzat amb talla de fusta. la fusta és cedre africà. “remenat” african cedar 60x40x 20 cm coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 the dead walk bill phillips marlene mendoza abstract: monsters have always enjoyed a significant presence in the human imagination, and religion was instrumental in replacing the physical horror they engendered with that of a moral threat. zombies, however, are amoral – their motivation purely instinctive and arbitrary, yet they are, perhaps, the most loathed of all contemporary monsters. one explanation for this lies in the theory of the uncanny valley, proposed by robotics engineer masahiro mori. according to the theory, we reserve our greatest fears for those things which seem most human, yet are not – such as dead bodies. such a reaction is most likely a survival mechanism to protect us from danger and disease – a mechanism even more essential when the dead rise up and walk. from their beginnings zombies have reflected western societies’ greatest fears – be they of revolutionary haitians, women, or communists. in recent years the rise in the popularity of the zombie in films, books and television series reflects our fears for the planet, the economy, and of death itself. keywords: cultural studies, zombies, horror, monsters, uncanny valley according to niall scott, "the monster is perhaps one of the most significant creations serving to reflect and critique human existence" (scott, 1). certainly its presence in world literature and culture is so ubiquitous that its importance cannot be underestimated. even the bible has hardly begun before we are told that "there were giants in the earth in those days" (genesis 6:4) while the presence of terrifying beings such as the cyclops, and scylla and charybdis abound in greek mythology. sara martín, in monstruos al final de milenio argues that the crucial moment in the story of the monster is the transformation of the animal predators of prehistory into the archetypal image of the imagined monster. this occurred when humanity succeeded in dominating the animal world to the extent that other species ceased to be a major threat to human survival. from this point onwards art and religion provide the “contexts in which the monster always symbolises the power of evil which must be controlled and defeated due to the moral rather than physical threat it offers the believer”i (martín, 16). copyright©2014 bill phillips and marlene mendoza. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 this moral dimension is clearly apparent in the mythology of monsters such as lamia, of greek mythology, who stole and devoured children (grant and hazel, 199); or the hindu goddess kali, associated with "death, sexuality and violence" (encyclopedia britannica); or the medieval incubi and succubi who took advantage of people sleeping to engage in sexual intercourse with them. one of the clearest modern examples of monstrous sexual depravity is the vampire whose portrayal in john polidori's 1819 eponymous narrative "the vampyre" touches on heterosexual rape and the then taboo subject of homosexual desire. according to mair rigby, "[w]hat is especially frightening in "the vampyre" is perhaps its insistence that norms, both heterosexual and homosocial, can be appropriated by a sexual monster who not only stands outside the forces of normative regulation, but also knows how to turn them to his advantage" (rigby, 11). given this brief introduction to monstrosity, and especially its religious and moral significance, the figure of the zombie stands out as unusual, even for a monster. firstly, zombies are not sexy, nor do they engage in any kind of sexual activity nor, one assumes, do they provoke erotic arousal. they have no super-human powers, indeed, they are seriously sub-human in ability (though max brooks, in the zombie survival guide claims that they have acute hearing and sense of smell. brooks, 7); they have no sense of personal identity and being very easy to kill, they are only dangerous in numbers. they have no supernatural, divine or diabolical origin, particularly in their twentieth century cinematic manifestations and, unlike many screen monsters, at least of the hollywood variety, they have no european origin at all. their violence is also totally arbitrary. they have no goal, no mission, no sense of hatred or desire for retribution. their victims could be anyone, from the most virtuous to the greatest of sinners; they act entirely from instinct – the religious, and particularly moral, significance of the zombie is almost entirely absent, especially once divorced from its voodoo origins. zombies are the most unsympathetic of all monsters, perhaps the worst of all monsters, whose destruction is not only to be sought, but to be celebrated in a gorefest of blood, body parts and twitching organs. indeed, the popularity of the genre may be partly related to the permissibility of violently exterminating them – there can be no moral qualms, no prick of the conscience when burying an axe in a zombie's head since it is already dead, and bent on the mindless destruction of the still living. none of this however, explains the particular horror that the zombie engenders, and there are a number of reasons for this. the monster represents "a boundary space between human and non-human (originally human and animal) the imaginary region between being and non-being, presence and absence" (boon, 33), and nothing, therefore, is more monstrous than a zombie since it has the form of a living being, yet has no identity; is both present and absent, physically active, yet intellectually and spiritually void. boon goes on to argue that the "zombie myth embodies the monstrous, inhuman other and rightly locates the human instinct for the survival of self in issues of mortality. in the zombie, death is given agency. fear of death is a primary human impulse, because death opposes the human instinct for survival, thus it is part of the survival instinct" (boon, 34). human instinct, especially for survival, is key in understanding the particular disgust and horror that zombies produce. a means of understanding the depth of this reaction may be provided by the theory of the 'uncanny valley' proposed by the robotics scientist masahiro mori. since the early stages of robotic science, one of the main challenges of the discipline has been to design and produce robots that look as similar to a living human being as possible in order to make them likable. however, there is an inflection point at which affinity towards imitation of human life becomes eeriness. it appears when non-human features coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 clash with those traits associated to healthy living bodies, as in the case of mannequins or prosthetic hands (mori, 2). prosthetic hands can resemble real hands in great detail but there are certain features that cannot be reproduced with absolute accuracy, such as skin texture and temperature. consequently, these artificial limbs elicit a high degree of rejection in those who, at a glance, believe the hand is real and then, after close examination, realise they are unnatural. intrigued by this reaction, masahiro mori theorised about the eeriness caused by artificial life. in his paper, published in 1970 in the japanese journal energy, mori hypothesised that every case of imitation of human life would elicit affinity until the non-human features of it render it unnatural and, therefore, eerie. mori's uncanny valley is a graph which shows peaks for affinity and a single trough for eeriness. at the very bottom of the negative curve, just below prosthetic hands, at the point of greatest eeriness and uncanniness, corpses are to be found. in a variation of the theory, shawn steckenfinger and asif ghazanfar suggest that the uncanny effect is triggered not by increasing realism alone, but rather because “increased realism lowers the tolerance for abnormalities” (steckenfinger; ghazanfar, 18364). fig. 1 the uncanny valley (mori, 1970) movement intensifies both affinity and eeriness, as represented by the discontinuous line on the graph. myoelectric hands, which function through the contraction of residual muscles that trigger a signal to a powered limb, are located on the graph below more conventional prosthetic hands. sick and diseased people are more disconcerting than the healthy, but even corpses, being immobile, are not as unsettling as zombies. the arrow, which marks the sudden death of a healthy person, does not fall all the way to the bottom: “we might be glad this arrow leads down into the still valley of the corpse and not the valley animated by the living dead!” exclaims mori (mori, 5). the abrupt fall into the coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 valley by means of death might be, in mori's words, the secret to the uncanny valley effect –the instinct for self-preservation. it has been suggested that aversion to humanlike robots might be the result of evolutionary contagion avoidance by rejecting human-looking entities or because this kind of robot casts doubt on human uniqueness (macdorman, 696-697). steckenfinger and ghazanfar tested the uncanny valley effect in macaque monkeys and concluded that they showed greater interest in unrealistic synthetic faces than realistic ones, thus suggesting the effect is also present in monkeys, supporting the idea that the uncanny valley is evolutionary, though whether the monkeys felt disgust or fear during the tests is unclear (steckenfinger; ghazanfar, 18364). the results from the tests carried out by david lewkowicz and asif ghazanfar with children from 6 to 12 months old suggest that even though previous studies have concluded that the uncanny valley is evolutive, the effect is initially developmental, not becoming visible until the second half of the first year of life (lewkowicz; ghazanfar, 128; 130). our response to zombies is related to our survival instinct: they make us feel uneasy in a similar way that humanlike robots do, because they trigger that feeling of revulsion related to the ambiguously (non)-living. the work that turned the classic zombie figure of a sleepwalker who happens to be dead into the flesh-eating, decaying walking corpse we know today is night of the living dead (1968), a horror film written and directed by george a. romero. for the first time in the history of horror fiction, the zombie is detached from voodoo imagery and is turned into a reanimated corpse with the sole purpose of preying on the living. this creature does not act at a master's command, does not offer the chance of dialogue nor can be scared away. in addition to these predatory features, the zombie presents evident signs of death that vary from mere pallor to severe decomposition or wounds that would have been fatal if inflicted on a living person. zombies differ from other popular monsters of horror fiction such as vampires, ghosts, werewolves, witches, aliens or psychopathic killers in that, among other characteristics, they are wandering reminders of what death can do to a human body. additionally, they eat and disembowel people alive, violating the body envelope, while remaining horrifyingly contagious. the organic matter transfer produced by the slightest scratch will lead the victim to days of fever, pain and delirium, with eventual death, subsequent reanimation and transformation into a mindless eating machine that will try to consume the victim's loved ones alive. however, this is just the beginning, because the greatest danger represented by zombies is their capacity to multiply through contagion and their tendency to crowd together in large swarms when following food. the apocalypse is thus unleashed by collapsing “societal infrastructures” (kyle bishop, 20) and exposing society to its greatest fear ---annihilation (22). john stratton argues that zombies are related to “displaced people... refugees, asylumseekers and illegal immigrants” (265). zombie crowds are usually referred to as swarms or herds, words that are semantically close to others used to name groups of “asylumseekers” (277). according to stratton, this can be read as a sign of the anxiety experienced by western civilisations when they face immigration flows of displaced people (278). in relation to this idea, jason faulkner, mark schaller et al. explore the mechanisms of disease avoidance in xenophobia. they claim that immigrants are often associated with the outbreak of disease as carriers and propagators (333) and that, consequently, evolutionary pathogen-avoidance mechanisms are triggered, thus eliciting disgust, which can lead to the rejection of the untrusted group of people (335). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 bearing in mind the main features of zombies previously described, it may be concluded that these creatures are so popular because they are reminders of death and, additionally, allow us to toy with the idea of the fall of civilisation, all from the safety and comfort of fiction: the rotting corpse moaning and tumbling towards us becomes a modern-day memento mori. beyond this, however, there are other more complex affective mechanisms by which zombies are reminders of death. one is that of disgust. disgust is a basic emotion, but unlike others such as anger or happiness, literature about disgust is less extensive. however, it has been suggested that disgust is an evolutionary defence from disease vectors because it prevents the body from coming into contact, mainly through the mouth (paul rozin and april fallon, 23-24), with potentially contagious elements, more particularly those which are undergoing a process of decay (28). jonathan haidt, clark mccauley and paul rozin developed a scale based on disgust domains obtained through the participation of diverse members of the university of pennsylvania. they observed that the most commonly mentioned source of disgust involved the breach of the body envelope (702). also, instances of contact with death produced surprisingly high frequency results, so much so that their disgust scale considered body envelope violations and death two distinguishable domains of disgust (707). they concluded that the prevalence of the disgust domains of body envelope breaching and death in experiments frighteningly revealed, in one case, our similarity to other mammals and, in the other, that contact with death reminds us of its inescapability, thus eliciting anxiety (712). disgust is a mechanism of defence against reminders of animality and, therefore, mortality (paul rozin, jonathan haidt; clark mccauley, 12) because animals die. the fear of death lurks behind most psychological anxieties in response to our self-preservation instinct (ernest becker, 16). in relation to this, the terror management theory proposes that we cope with the fear of death by avoiding reminders of mortality and by placing ourselves above animals in cultural environments that offer a symbolic perpetuation of life and values, with the consequence that when this position is destabilised, anxiety rises (jamie goldenberg; tom pyszczynski et al., 428). this explains the kind of disturbing feeling zombie hordes provoke. other studies on disgust suggest that this emotion is more related to the avoidance of disease rather than a manifestation of the fear of extinction; it is an adaptative mechanism to prevent contact with pathogens. disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism was proven to be more intense when exposed to an infectious-looking stimulus, cross-cultural, and more salient in women because they not only protect themselves but also their offspring. it becomes gradually less salient as reproductive potential declines and more noticeable when there is contact with strangers (val curtis, robert aunger, tamer rabie, 131). consequently, zombies would elicit rejection because they are potential disease carriers and not merely tokens of death. supporting the thesis that disgust is more related to disease avoidance than death, daniel fessler and david navarrete argue that disgust is not a cross-cultural response to exposure to mortality. their experiment with people from rural costa rica, where they used the same disgust scale created by haidt et al. (1993), showed that when the fear of death is not particularly high, sensitivity towards reminders of animality through expressions of disgust is also reduced (289). consequently, contrary to what the terror management theory proposes, they suggest that disgust as an expression of death avoidance is apparently not universal. however, as zombies are people that have come back from the dead, one could argue that disgust would be triggered cross-culturally as a disease-preventing and/or a mortality-avoidance mechanism because even though not all cultures consider death to be taboo, the fact that these creatures defy the natural cycle of life and death would be affectively disruptive. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 sheila woody and bethany teachman established a relationship between disgust and fear, although these two emotions work differently. the fact that disgust is a defensive response equates it to fear, and both disgust and fear can be triggered by the same stimulus; “(f)ear-motivated avoidance protects the person from perceived danger, while disgust-motivated avoidance may be more often linked to sensation or imagery.” (293) more specifically, they suggest that there are three types of threats that elicit both disgust and fear, namely bodily harm, social rejection and the possibility of losing control of one's mind (296). theoretically, zombies can produce bodily harm and uncontrolled panic, so it seems logical to believe that they provoke both disgust and fear, emotions related by some scholars to the avoidance of death. the inclusion of zombies in the uncanny valley chart inevitably gives rise to the question of why zombies have a more negative value than corpses or moving artificial hands in terms of affinity. it seems that zombies reminds us of death like no other creature in horror fiction because their ghastly appearance triggers disgust and fear, possible mechanisms for coping with death and for avoiding vectors of disease. additionally, the collapse of civilisation in zombie narratives plays to our deepest societal fears. in accordance with the terror management theory, it is civilisation which enables us to place ourselves over animality, and thus over death. given the especially horrific nature of the zombie as monster, it is not surprising that its representations have changed and adapted in line with the dominant fears of those societies which have adopted its allegorical significances. the zombie emerged in haiti in the 1790s although, like voodoo, it also contains elements which owe their origins to africa. 19th century reports on voodoo emphasised cannibalism (kee, 12), a practice commonly associated in the european mind with black, aboriginal and african people such as those to be found in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe. the first english language zombie story, " dead men working in the cane fields”, by william seabrook, was not published until 1929. seabrook's zombies were not cannibal, but harmless victims of unscrupulous farmers who had resurrected them to work like cattle as free labour. both cannibalism and seabrook's portrayal of the zombies as dumb animals reflect the fears and prejudices of many americans who perceived, on the one hand, the independent republic of haiti as a dangerous place ruled by savages, and on the other, coinciding with the united states occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934, of haitians as little more than slaves, capable only of hard, repetitive labour. the zombie is thus identified as the other by white america and europe. this othering of the zombie continues into world war two with the portrayal of women zombies resisting their masters. according to peter dendle, these "movies as a whole deny the possibility of complete containment; the repressed anima of the zombie woman surpasses its prescribed boundaries, just as women in society were surpassing traditional gender roles" (dendle, 49), a development which, to a large extent, was suppressed by the postwar return to the workplace of a male labour force and the banishment of women to the domestic sphere. as a consequence the female zombie largely disappeared. nevertheless, the cold war's inevitable representation of the zombie as a political other continues the trope of the living dead as the enemy within, intent on imposing "alien ideologies of homogeny (ideologies that are, not coincidentally, reminiscent of popular caricatures of communism)" (dendle, 49). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 a change occurred, however, with the publication of richard matheson's i am legend in 1954. the zombies (who, confusingly, are described as vampires) are infected by a contagious virus which, as well as converting them into the living dead, also gives them an insatiable taste for human blood. the significant moment, however, in the novel comes at the end when the sole surviving uninfected human being realises that it is not the zombies/vampires who are different: he is. he has become the other, and commits suicide. from being a clear reflection of a community's fears of an external threat, the zombie suddenly becomes a site of identity ambiguity. it is no longer clear who now is the zombie, nor if he/she is the enemy. this is consistent with the very nature of zombies, and the reason for their fearsomeness so neatly explained by mori's uncanny valley – they once were living people; they are not necessarily different in appearance from the living; they could, in fact, be a former friend or loved one. we do not know if the zombies are them, or us. i am legend was the inspiration for george romero’s aforementioned 1968 night of the living dead, the film which defined the characteristics of the zombie in the popular imagination from then on: the condition is caused by a virus, the zombies are driven to consume human flesh, and they are utterly without purpose or ambition beyond their cannibalistic instinct. they are not the puppets of an evil megalomaniac, nor do they have any specific plan to take over the world: they simply exist, mindless, amoral and deadly. romero's second zombie film, dawn of the dead (1978) narrates the struggles of a group of survivors taking shelter from the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall. the advantage of such a refuge is twofold: it is an enclosed space which can easily be fortified from attack, and it is full of everything needed to survive. once safely inside the survivors indulge in an orgy of consumption: food, clothes and sports equipment are all picked over, briefly consumed or used and then discarded. the survivors' behaviour is unambiguously compared to that of the zombies who obsessively seek out human flesh to consume: romero's film is an allegory of mindless twentieth century consumption. as the century progressed it became increasingly clear that the kind of human greed depicted by romero was actually putting at risk life on the planet itself. in max brooks's novel world war z, the zombie apocalypse renders much of the world uninhabitable and much of humanity is seeks refuge in the northern parts of canada, alaska and siberia where the cold freezes the zombies into inactivity. this scenario is extraordinarily similar to james lovelock's prediction of the future in the revenge of gaia, in which global warming will restrict human survival to the same northern latitudes. as a parasitic, destructive menace to the planet's thermal equilibrium, humanity is nothing more than a swiftly self-propagating disease which will die once its unwitting host becomes a less congenial environment to live in. but, as the uncanny valley demonstrates, it is death itself which provides the most chilling and unique characteristic of zombies. zombies are not only a threat to life: they are death itself. in an article published by the a.v. club (a media offshoot of the satirical magazine the onion), todd van der werff suggests that television series such as the walking dead have a similar effect as the memento mori of the middle ages: "the hope was to play up the ultimate emptiness of vanity, of living one's life to gain things rather than working towards the betterment of the everlasting soul … it stood, always, as a contemplation of the thing that unites every human being on this planet: death" (van der werff). the walking dead television series, about survival in a zombie post-apocalypse, began in 2010 and, according to the online showbiz and entertainment magazine digital spy, enjoys "cable's highest ever rating for a drama series in us tv history", suggesting coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 that interest in zombies, and death, is a serious preoccupation of our society, in van der werff's words, the walking dead "stands as a modern memento mori, an endless reminder that the cost of life, no matter one's station, is always the same." of course the walking dead isn't the only television series which pays particular attention to death. long-running series such as csi, which began in 2000, frequently dwell on dead bodies, how they died, and how they are cut up in autopsies. the fashion for stories centred on the graphic dissection of dead bodies began with patricia cornwell whose first novel about chief medical examiner, kay scarpetta, postmortem, was published in 1990. other authors, such as kathy reichs followed suit: déjà dead (1997), the first of a series of novels about forensic anthropologist temperance brennan, also dwells at length on autopsies. the bbc television series silent witness, with a female pathologist as protagonist, was first broadcast in 1996, and temperance brennan made the jump from novel to television in 2005 with the fox tv series bones. a possible argument for the growing interest in the exposure of dead bodies formerly a taboo area is related to the long term, ongoing secularization of much of western society since the nineteenth century. carole cusack, in a 2005 article on twentieth century detective fiction argues that "[a]s organized religion retreated, it became more difficult to believe the theologically-charged notion that good and evil do not go unpunished, and that human life is ultimately meaningful, even when random violence threatens to destabilize both individual and community" (cusack, 161). the role of the fictional detective (and perhaps the real life one) is to replace the priest. he, or she, tracks down and either punishes, or causes to be punished, the evil doer, in a similar way to the priest who once led the sinner through the shriving process of confession, penance, and absolution. just as the priest, or god, had access to the spiritual inner workings of the soul and thus divined its motivations, faults and failings, so the pathologist, by penetrating the body, weighing up the organs and screening for toxicity, learns much of the habits, behaviour and vices of the deceased. the detective who replaced the priest, has now been substituted, in turn, by the pathologist. this fascination with the corpse has a further link to secularization: our bodies are all we have. without them, in the absence of an after-life, we are truly dead. however, developments in medical care, particularly of people in the last stages of life, have made the definition of bodily death – once relatively simple – highly problematic. in a recent article about the walking dead in religion dispatches, ann neumann reminds us that “[d]ead used to mean three things: you weren’t breathing, your heart wasn’t beating, and your brain wasn’t working.” with respirators and defibrillators, and the ability to maintain life in a vegetative state, none of these definitions of death is any longer clear. the consequences are often to prolong the process of dying for many years, perhaps in pain and discomfort, and certainly at great financial cost. the ethical questions thrown up by medical technology are, neumann argues, similar to those faced by the protagonists of the walking dead – hence its unprecedented popularity as a television series. from the very first episode the morality of destroying zombies, who were, after all, once human, is questioned. this is soon resolved, of course, on the simple grounds of expediency: the zombies are a very serious threat to the still living, but such decisions are not easy to make, particularly if your loved ones number among the living dead. zombies (following romero’s model) can only be stopped by destroying the brain, they will not die if left to their own devices, but will continue in a slow process of decay until they become legless, limbless, even trunkless, but still alive while the brain remains. immediately, a further moral question arises: should they be put out of their misery? do coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 they feel pain? do they suffer? again, in episode one, this question arises, as rick, onetime lawman and the closest to a leader and moral conscience that the survivors have, shoots a struggling female zombie in the head as she pulls the remaining top half of her body along the ground with her arms. putting a bullet in a zombie’s brain becomes relatively simple: it is better for the survivors and preferable for the zombie; but what of life in a post-apocalyptic world which seems to offer nothing but hardship, fear, and the probability of becoming yet another of the walking dead? in the final episode of the first series one of the characters, andrea, chooses to commit suicide, but is tricked out of it by her friend, dale, who threatens to die with her. neither die, but both claim to have saved the life of the other. dale is initially triumphant at the success of his trick, but andrea reveals it was she, ultimately, who saved him, by agreeing to carry on living. the relevance to our contemporary debate about euthanasia is obvious and profound, questioning not only the right to life, but the right to death, and the need for comprehension and selflessness when someone asks to die. zombies remind us that the “living and the dead are sharing territory all the time” (neumann). it is a cliché that our society attempts to deny death, tidies it away to hospitals, hospices, the discreet premises of the undertaker and the muted crematorium, yet it is also true. death remains the one great certainty, but it is taking longer to get there, and all too often with indignity and discomfort, a situation which we have yet to adjust to. neumann concludes that“[c]ulturally, we’ve exhausted all of death’s chaperones: god, satan, science. we’re back to old goth death, in the form of zombies, resurrected to instruct us on how to die.” zombies are subliminal reminders – of our atavistic survival instinct, of our fear of the other, our fear that we might be the other, of the death of the planet, of our helplessness and unwillingness to act meaningfully, and of death itself. spain, where this article was written, seems to be heading for financial and social destruction. literally heading, since the heads of government, of commerce and banking can only address the problem by revealing their own responsibility for the situation, and thus of their corruption and culpability. the obsession with accruing money manifested by those who rule us in recent years has been as mindless and undeviating as the walking dead. yet the ease with which we allow those who decide for us to do as they wish is equally zombie-like. if we do not fight back, use our brains, assert the transcendence of ethical decision making over material gain, in short, if we do not take advantage of this pre-apocalyptic moment, we will, like zombies, be condemned to a lingering, living death. ironically, the zombie, the most amoral of monsters, provokes the profoundest of moral questions. works cited becker, e. (1973). the denial of death. new york. simon & schuster. bible. genesis 6.4. king james av. bishop, k. (2009). “dead man still walking. explaining the zombie renaissance”. journal of popular film and television (jpf&t). heldref publications. boon, kevin. (2007). "ontological anxiety made flesh: the zombie in literature, film and culture". monsters and the monstrous: myths and metaphors of enduring evil. niall scott, ed. amsterdam – new york: rodopi. brooks, max. the zombie survival guide. 2004. london: duckworth and co. 2011. --world war z. 2006. london: duckworth and co. 2011. cornwell, patricia. (1990). postmortem. new york: simon & schuster. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 curtis, v.; aunger, r.; rabie, t. (2003). “evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease”. proc. r. soc. lond. b 2004.271, s131-s133. cusack, carole m. (2005). 'scarlet and black: non-mainstream religion as ‘other’ in detective fiction'. editor not given. the buddha of suburbia: proceedings of the eighth australian and international religion, literature and the arts conference. sydney: rla press. 159-174. day of the dead. (1985). dir. george romero. perf. lori cardille, terry alexander, joseph pilato. united film distribution company (ufdc), laurel entertainment inc., dead films inc. dendle, peter. (2007). "the zombie as a barometer of cultural anxiety". monsters and the monstrous: myths and metaphors of enduring evil. niall scott, ed. amsterdam – new york: rodopi. faulkner, j.; schaller, m.; park, j.; duncan, l. (2004)."evolved disease-avoidance mechanisms and contemporary xenophobic attitudes“. group processes & intergroup relations. vol 7 (4) 333-353. sage publications. fessler, d.; navarrete, d. (2005). “the effect of age on death disgust: challenges to terror management perspectives”. evolutionary psychology, 3.279-296. goldenberg, j.; pyszczynski, t.; greenberg, j.; solomon, s.; kluck, b.; cornwell, r. (2001). “i am not an animal: mortality salience, disgust, and the denial of human creatureliness.” journal of experimental psychology: general. vol. 130 (3) 427-435. grant, michael and john hazel. (2002). who's who in classical mythology. london and new york: routledge. haidt, j.; mccauley, c.; rozin.p. (1993). “individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: a scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors.” personality and individual differences. vol. 16 (5) 701-713. elsevier science, ltd. 1994. "kali."encyclopædia britannica online. (2013) web. 02 apr. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/ebchecked/topic/310141/kali>. key, chera. (2011). "from cannibal to zombie and back again". better off dead. deborah christie and sarah juliet lauro (eds). new york: fordham university press. lewkowicz, d.; ghazanfar, a. (2011). “the development of the uncanny valley in infants”. wiley periodicals. wiley online library. macdorman, k.; green, r.; ho, c.; koch, c. (2009). “too real for comfort? uncanny responses to computer generated faces”. computers in human behavior. 25 695710. martín, sara. (2002). monstruos al final del milenio. madrid: imágica ediciones, s.l. millar, paul. digital spy. "'the walking dead' smashes audience record for season three premiere". digital spy. october 15, 2012. http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ustv/s135/the-walking-dead/news/a430909/thewalking-dead-smashes-audience-record-for-season-threepremiere.html#ixzz2tgectpyt mori, masahiro. (1970). “bukimi no tani”. “the uncanny valley”. energy. vol. 7 (4).in ieee spectrum.k. f. macdorman& t. minato, trans. 2012.http://beta.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/the-uncannyvalley?utm_source=internaltoggle&utm_medium=widget&utm_campaign=fromle gacy neumann, ann. “end-of-life lessons from the walking dead” religious dispatches. march 30th, 2013. evan derkacz and lisa webster, eds. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/6985/end_of_life_lessons_from __the_walking_dead_/ http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ustv/s135/the-walking-dead/news/a430909/thehttp://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ustv/s135/the-walking-dead/news/a430909/thecoolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 night of the living dead. (1968). dir. george romero. perf. duane jones, judith o'dea, karl hardman. image ten, laurel group, market square productions. reichs, kathy. (1997). déjà dead. new york: simon & schuster. rigby, mair. "'prey to some cureless disquiet': polidori’s queer vampyre at the margins of romanticism". romanticism on the net. michael eberle-sinatra ed. nº 36-37, november 2004, february 2005. issn : 14671255.http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n36-37/011135ar.html rozin, p.; fallon, a. (1987). “a perspective on disgust”. psychological review. vol. 94 (1) 23-41. american psychological association. rozin, p.; haidt.j.; mccauley, c. (2008). “disgust: the body and soul emotion in the 21st century”. in d. mckay & o. olatunji (eds.), disgust and its disorders. washington dc: american psychological association. 9-29 scott, niall. (2007). introduction. monsters and the monstrous: myths and metaphors of enduring evil. niall scott, ed. amsterdam – new york: rodopi. steckenfinger, s.; ghazanfar, a. (2009). “monkey visual behaviour falls into the uncanny valley”. proceedings of the national academy of sciences (pnas). 18362-18366. vol. 26 (43) stratton, j. (2011). “zombie trouble: zombie texts, bare life and displaced people”. european journal of cultural studies. 14 (3) 265-281. sage publications. the walking dead. by frank darabont. perf. andrew lincoln, steven yeun, sarah wayne callies. 6 episodes. amc. 31st october – 5th december 2010 van der werff, tod "the walking dead succeeds by making death a character". a.v. club. march 25, 2013. http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-walking-deadsucceeds-by-making-death-a-charac,94196/ woody, s.; teachman b. (2000). “intersection of disgust and fear: normative and pathological views. clinical psychology: science and practice, 7 291-311. american psychological association. bill phillips is a senior lecturer in english literature and culture at the university of barcelona. he has published widely on poetry, particularly of the romantic period, ecofeminism, gender studies, science fiction and crime fiction. he is also a member of the transport commission for sabadell town council, a district councillor and vice-chair of his 'barrio' association. marlene mendoza has a degree in english philology and a master’s degree in lexis and linguistic communication from the university of barcelona. she is currently a phd student in the lexis and linguistic communication doctoral programme at the ub. she works at the institute of advanced chemistry of catalonia (iqac-csic) and has a lifelong interest in horror literature and films. i "contextos para los cuales el monstruo simboliza siempre el poder del mal que debe ser controlado y derrotado a causa de la amenaza moral – más que física – que supone para el creyente" (martín 16). http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-walking-dead-succeeds-by-making-death-a-charac,94196/ http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-walking-dead-succeeds-by-making-death-a-charac,94196/ microsoft word kristina everett blue gum article coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 daruganora: a model for inclusive inter-cultural education kristina everett and trudy ambler, the australian catholic university this paper is an introduction to a new model for inclusive practice in education. it sprang from a 2010 learning and teaching fellowship which called for strategies to address the under representation of indigenous and other low socio economic status groups in higher education in australia. we have since realised that it can be adapted and developed in a wide range of other contexts and could be relevant in many other countries. we had piloted an innovative, research led learning and teaching programme for high school students in years 8-10 in 2009 and it was clear to us then that problems of under representation of particular socio economic groups at higher education level must begin much earlier than university entry stage. we decided to design a programme, again as a pilot, initially for indigenous school students in years 8-10 from schools designated ‘low ses’ by the nsw government in the western suburbs of sydney. we also conducted an associated research project to learn more about indigenous school students’ aspirations to attend university, what they, their non-indigenous peers, and their teachers knew about getting to university, and what value they place on a university education. we are currently in the process of publishing the results of the research. ©2014 coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 daruganora is an aboriginal term that means darug land. it was chosen as a name for the programme because macquarie university is situated on darug land and we wanted to acknowledge darug land and darug people as the literal and philosophical foundation of the project. the project is founded on a philosophy which values and respects diverse cultures and which recognises that current classrooms can be enhanced to create inter-cultural spaces of mutual respect and recognition. the pilot proceeded from a starting point of respect for indigenous knowledge and has developed from a theoretical framework that allows for indigenous and nonindigenous knowledge to be equally acknowledged, respected and shared between students from diverse cultural backgrounds. drawing from primary research conducted by everett over many years with aboriginal people in the western suburbs of sydney in collaboration with ambler using the latest in innovative, student-centred learning and teaching strategies, the daruganora programme was developed. our own experience as teachers taught us that students cannot be successful and will not continue their studies if they cannot identify with the institution and the community it produces. students need to see positive representations of their culture and of themselves, and these must also be recognised by others in their classrooms (including their peers and teachers) to be successful. fifteen years of experience as a supporter and researcher in aboriginal communities in the far western suburbs of sydney informs everett's knowledge of some urban aboriginal people’s attitudes towards learning and teaching. her research shows that of primary importance and interest to aboriginal peoples is their culture (everett, 2006, 2008, 2009a, 2009b). a poignant example was one young man who had very little formal education and who spent long periods of his life in gaol who indicated that ‘without my culture i am nothing’ (field notes 2003). elders in the community constantly ask everett if she is 'teaching culture’ as a vital part of the indigenous studies programme at macquarie. as everett’s research shows, although it may conflict with anthropological conceptualisations of culture, the meaning of ‘culture’ with the people she works with is: singing, dancing, ceremonies, art, storytelling, language, bush tucker and bush medicine. macquarie’s indigenous art collection and indigenous studies, which focuses on aboriginal art has demonstrated the power to engage both indigenous and non-indigenous students. iheac (2008) have pointed to a national failure to value and recognise indigenous knowledge systems and the coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 expertise of indigenous custodians and knowledge holders. this programme redresses this failure by making our commitment to indigenous culture and attainment highly visible and integral to our educational experience at macquarie. the theoretical frameworks which underpin our practice are drawn from theorists working in the areas of identity formation and transformation, cultural change, ethnicity and ‘intercultural’ representation. we recognise, following authors such as cowlishaw and morris (1997) that, borrowing the title of their book, ‘race matters’. conceptualisations of ‘race’, ethnicity and cultural diversity can and do translate to inequality, marginalisation and discrimination. barth’s (1969) seminal work, ‘ethnic groups and boundaries’ has never been surpassed as an account of processes involved in the emergence and development of groups of people who, for many political and cultural reasons, want to make and maintain their difference from other groups. barth demonstrates that in high modernity people, far from the common 1960s metaphor of becoming a cultural melting pot, are making more and more of often miniscule cultural differences to maintain, as hill (1996:1) argues, ‘simultaneously cultural and political struggles to create enduring identities in general contexts of radical change and discontinuity’. it would be naive, in short, to ignore or under-estimate the value and importance and the positives and negatives connected with the assertion and representation of cultural difference. it would be equally naive, we would argue, not to recognise that cultural difference, even if it is grounded on strategies to hierarchically elevate the status of a group of people who have been historically marginalised by a dominant society, remains situated on a level which is unequal to the dominant society. put simply, some group identities have greater access to resources and status than others, even if there is some upward movement in their social position as a result of their own cultural and political action. no matter how positively it is represented by different cultural groups themselves and by those who seek to aid and support them, cultural difference is often constructed systemically within western cultures as the binary opposite of ‘us’ (foucault 1980, derrida 1982). this results in alienation at every level of society. coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 it must be recognised that significant global, national and local forces 1 have and continue to work to somewhat alleviate conditions of poverty, bad health and lack of access to human rights and social justice for indigenous and other marginalised peoples. however, there remains huge disparity of life opportunities for those living ‘inside’ dominant social groups and those living outside or on the edges because they are constructed and represented as ‘them’ and not ‘us’(deleuze and guattari 1986; bhaba 1998, 1994; bennett 1998). initially filmmakers and film theorists provided us with some tools for thinking about ways in which more than one culture can be equally and respectfully represented in the same production. filmmakers including trihn mihn-ha, penny mcdonald , jennifer deger and david mcdougall to name a few, demonstrate how a filmmaker , using what is often considered the quintessentially western medium of film, can represent different cultural groups whilst problematising notions of difference. film theorist, laura marks (2000) calls this ‘intercultural cinema’. developing this ‘intercultural’ theory and practise to analyse various media including painting, literature and music has led to the development of the daruganora programme. ‘intercultural’ representation depends on multiple cultures participating in a single representation, therefore indigenous students’ non-indigenous classmates and teachers are an important inclusion in the programme by facilitating and supporting intercultural competencies and respect for indigenous cultures ─ they are key participants. their engagement and educational development in the area of indigenous studies is crucial. this potentially allows them to better engage with their indigenous peers and students by making them more aware of indigenous culture and representations which are all around them. this can potentially enrich all participants’ lives. the programme does not give indigenous students 'special' treatment so much as to draw on their strengths thus demonstrating to their peers and teachers the enrichment that intercultural exchange of knowledge can foster. this is done through a holistic approach to student engagement (coates, 2005) which honours indigenous cultures and their representations on the macquarie university campus. 1 including the un, who, some governments, charities and churches for exemple. coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 experience, relationships and formative assessment in the learning situation the daruganora programme provides a finely calibrated learning experience which draws on the macquarie university campus, students, resources and staff to honour indigenous peoples and culture ─ the macquarie university indigenous art collection represents the rich diversity of indigenous peoples and culture. it is also designed to encourage students’ aspirations to attend a tertiary education facility and to support teachers in being able to source accurate and timely information regarding access to universities. the view that experience, relationships and formative assessment are a valuable and necessary part of student learning is supported by learning theories found within the broad area of social constructivism. people are considered to be active participants in the creation of experiences, and the learning process requires that people search for meaning in their experiences (boghossian, 2006; bruner, 1990; kooy, 2006b; vygotsky, 1992). in the tradition of kolb (1984) daruganora manifests the belief that “learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (1984, p. 38). thus the experiences students’ bring to the learning context need to be drawn upon and acknowledged if further learning is to occur, and engaging students in a range of events and activities as part of the learning process paves the way for creating new experiences from which future learning might evolve. boud et al. (1993, p. 9) argue that learning starts to occur when individuals engage to “recapture, notice and re-evaluate their experience” of an activity or event and “work with their experience to turn it into learning.” dyke (2006, p. 116) supports this argument and states, “unless learners engage with and transform their experience, learning may not occur.” opportunities to study one’s experiences mean that it is possible to develop an understanding of those experiences, and this can then transform subsequent thoughts, actions and practice (dewey, 1938). nussbaum (1989) emphasises that to actively construct and make meaning from experiences people need to connect together. daruganora actively encourages inclusion by promoting student and teacher interaction and it is at that “interface” (nakata, 2008) that the socio-political, culturalhistorical aspects of experience are structured and re-structured; these essential features help to create an inter-cultural learning environment. students and teachers bring to the learning and teaching context ‘who’ and ‘what’ they are and this inevitably includes aspects of their cultural heritage. formative assessment activities enacted in the teaching situation in the form of both open and reflective questions, coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 discussions, modelling, and guided group work allow the teacher to observe what students bring to the learning context and then draw upon those experiences to respectfully nurture, guide and construct continued learning opportunities for all. this becomes both an inclusive and inter-cultural learning construction. the programme was initially adapted from macquarie’s indigenous studies curriculum and aligned with the new south wales aboriginal studies stages 4 and 5 syllabuses 2 . it is designed to support the learning of high school students in years 8, 9 and 10 in indigenous art and identity in australia. indigenous art and indigenous studies have proven to be subject areas which can provide an educational advantage to indigenous students which is not usual in their educational experience and allows them to 'shine' in front of their non-indigenous peers and teachers. indigenous studies, with a strong emphasis on key generic learning areas including literacy, research and writing skills provides an excellent model for how similar programmes could be developed in different contexts. this is achieved within a framework that acknowledges macquarie university as aboriginal country and darug as its traditional owners thus allowing for a politics which privileges indigenous knowledge, people and representations. it allows non-indigenous students to experience a positive, supported learning experience in a cultural context other than their own. this can be both challenging and exciting for them. evaluations of the programme demonstrate that it is an overwhelmingly positive experience for both indigenous and nonindigenous school students and their teachers. the 3-hour programme begins with a 30 minute interactive multi-media presentation in a tiered lecture theatre. this enables students to experience a ‘real’ university lecture and serves to introduce key issues in indigenous studies. the lecture incorporates diagnostic learning and teaching strategies which allow the daruganora facilitators to evaluate students’ prior knowledge. the next phase involves an authentic research task where students are divided into smaller groups and armed with two key research questions. they are then taken on a tour of identified spaces on campus to view examples of aboriginal art. students 2 the programme is currently being developed to align with the new south wales preliminary higher school certificate history curriculum so that it can be more readily developed into various cultural contexts and relevant to a wider group of students and teachers. coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 engage with representations of aboriginal identity while simultaneously experiencing the campus. the third phase involves a ‘world café where students engage in a group activity to reflect upon, self-assess, and disseminate their research findings (boud, 1995; biggs, 2007) which are focused on issues concerning aboriginal art and identity. macquarie university indigenous studies students act as scribes, discussion facilitators and mentors in each group and provide the opportunity for the school students to meet and talk to a diverse array of macquarie students. the programme is designed to be beneficial for both indigenous and non-indigenous students, and aims to facilitate a welcoming and inclusive environment as well as one that privileges australian indigenous cultures. students from diverse backgrounds bring different understandings and views to this programme and our experience has shown that indigenous students generally demonstrate highly developed visual literacy skills providing conceptual advantages to their non-indigenous peers. this is often a reversal of their usual educational experience and serves to support their selfconfidence and command the respect and recognition of their abilities from peers and teachers. teachers are provided with learning and teaching materials to support the programme in the school context and school student participants are provided with a ‘showbag’ of promotional, marketing and educational materials. evaluation surveys conducted after the event indicate that over 70% of respondents would like to find out more about the university and are interested in returning to the campus for open day. feedback from head teachers and school principals has shown that teachers are benefiting from the programme as much as students and there is now a call from schools to develop the programme for teacher education. teachers can use the daruganora model to develop their own learning and teaching and research skills, and adapt it to other contexts. importantly, the programme allows teachers to see aspects of their own students' learning processes that may not have been previously exhibited in a school classroom environment. this may be particularly noticeable in the case of indigenous students. the programme has also proven to be highly beneficial to undergraduate macquarie students who participate as mentors. macquarie students are given the opportunity to coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 reflect on their own learning in indigenous studies and to learn through sharing the experience of learning with the high school students. the programme was run in 2010 with 5 schools, which were selected from the nsw government’s list of ‘priority schools’ which are schools which, for various reasons, have been designated ‘low socio economic status’. schools on this list from sydney’s western suburbs were invited to participate stemming from the belief that these schools might not already be in contact with many (if any) universities, and that these schools potentially had higher populations of indigenous students than schools which are not on the list. each school provided between 15 and 30 students for the programme. some schools undertook the programme jointly with other schools. the students were from years 8, 9 and 10, with each school deciding the most appropriate students to invite. some students who attended were already enrolled in an aboriginal studies class. those from other classes (such as history) were considering choosing aboriginal studies as an elective. this experience has been enormously successful not only in establishing relationships with a number of schools in sydney’s western suburbs, but, through media attention and other marketing, in attracting the attention of untargeted sydney schools. some of these schools, including elite private schools with bursary programmes for indigenous students, have contacted us asking for the programme to be run for them. through our discussions with these schools we realise the benefit of extending our boundaries to include all schools in sydney. schools other than those in the outer suburbs of sydney and other than those in areas labelled ‘low ses’, ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘priority’, have indigenous populations. this includes some private schools which have specific scholarships or bursaries for indigenous students. in order for the programme to develop, we need to take into account that indigenous, ‘low ses’, ‘disadvantaged’ and discriminated against people live in all societies, geographical locations and socioeconomic groups across sydney, australia and the world. daruganora has not only excited and invigorated the lives of the 9 staff that made up the team in 2010, but has also elicited interest from many staff at macquarie university, other universities in australia and internationally as well as schools across sydney. we hope that in the years to come daruganora will be offered as part of the macquarie university curriculum disseminated in different forms and within different contexts across australia and the world. we envisage a flexible programme that can be coolabah, no.15, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 extended to include different versions for different year levels, an on-line programme for remote schools, a teacher education programme, and a suite of support programmes such as incursions, video-conferencing, workshops and conferences to be developed. it is proposed that, should the programme continue to be funded at macquarie, a longitudinal research project will be established to track the progress of students who participate in the programme. daruganora has the potential to enact positive and lasting change throughout the education sector. it is no exaggeration to say that daruganora could greatly influence positive cultural change in education in relation to the place of indigenous peoples, migrant groups and other marginalised social groups and representations in schools and universities. it may, indeed, prove to be a model in developing a new approach to learning and teaching in inter-cultural classrooms, which will have a global impact. the values that are aligned between daruganora, macquarie university and government imperatives relate to the need to address social justice, a sustainable social world and support the participation of students and staff in important network building as a community. it also aligns with values related to ethical practice, equity, valuing strengths in diversity, quality enhancement and personal, cultural and social development of students, teachers and the university community through local engagement. references barth, fredrik (1969). 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(1993). using experience for learning. buckingham: srhe open university press. boud, david(1995). enhancing learning through self-assessment. london. kogan page. bruner, j. (1990). acts of meaning (vol. harvard university press). cambridge, london. coates, h. (2005). the value of student engagement for higher education quality. quality in higher education, 11(1), 25-36. cowlishaw, gillian and morris, barry (1997). race matters. canberra. aboriginal studies press. deleuze, gilles and guattari, felix (1986). kafka: toward a minor literature. polan, d (trans.) minneapolis. university of minnesota press. derrida, jacques (1982). margins of philosophy. brighton. harvester press. dewey, j. (1938). john dewey experience and education. new york: touchstone. dyke, m. (2006). the role of the 'other' in reflection, knowledge formation and action in late modernity. international journal of lifelong education, 25(2), 105123. everett, k. 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(2008). submission to the review of australian higher education. retrieved 23 sept 2008 from http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/indigenous education/programmes funding/programme categories/support for education providers staff/indigenous higher education advisory council.htm kolb, david a. (1984). experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. prentice-hall, inc., englewood cliffs, n.j. kooy, m. (2006). the telling stories of novice teachers: constructing teacher knowledge in book clubs. teaching and teacher education, 22, 661-674. marks, laura (2000). the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses. durham and london. duke university press. boghossian, p. (2006). behaviourism, constructivism and socratic pedagogy. educational philosophy and theory, 38(6), 713-723. nakata, m. (2002). indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. ifla journal, 5(6), 281-291. nussbaum, j. (1989). classroom conceptual change: philosophical perspectives. international journal of science education, 11(5), 530-540. vygotsky, l. (1992). thought and language. cambridge: the massachusetts institute of technology press. microsoft word coola6garibay coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 everything, just to look at you mariela garibay ibargüen working in stone and particularly with calatorao marble is always a personal challenge given its quality and hardness. without a doubt to be able to work consistently in sculpture, in fine arts in general is a permanent challenge between continuing to work creatively or to withdraw given the number of daily adversities that confront those within the profession. so why continue if there are so many difficulties? why sculpt new works? i have often asked myself that and one of the answers that occurs to me is that when i see my work, or that of my colleagues, one often contributes to art for the “mere pleasure of contemplating it” all for the sake of contemplation. this idea which springs from the work often transfers itself to life itself. how many people around us carry out altruistic actions? perhaps one thinks that nobody does because they do not appear in the news and an altruistic action is often done in silence there are, however, people who are dedicated to altruistic work moved by love, by the desire to give, by the drive to be able to give pleasure to people other than themselves or merely to do what they do well. finally, we all know that such actions are those which give a sense of lasting wholeness far removed from that which may be achieved within the ambitious projects that motivate those that move the world everything , just to look at you, is meant to simply communicate something which is, perhaps, elemental but which i believe is important to remember: that in our society there are still many tough actions sweetened by altruism, and charged with love. copyright © 2011 mariela garibay ibargüen this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 i have chosen this sculpture to participate in the exhibition food for thought for me art is also a type of food, both necessary and primordial; the content conveyed by the sculptures can feed the soul, the intellect, the spirit and enable growth. todo sólo para contemplarte, 2009 everything , just to look at you calatorao y ónix calatorao marble and onyx 35 x 35 x 32 cm. mariela garibay ibargüen, a peruvian sculptor who began her training at the universidad católica del perú (pucp), holds a degree in fine arts with distinction in sculpture she did her ma at the universidad de barcelona (ub) she has held various individual and collective exhibitions in lima, mexico city, barcelona, zaragoza and madrid. she was commissioned by the huamanga, in ayacucho to design and execute work for public spaces. among the distinctions she has received are; first prize in the national design competition for peruvian artisan work, she has received the premio winternitz twice. in her work as a cultural disseminator, she is a member of the international council cultural south project and took part in the organization of the first international meeting: “nuestra américa en ayacucho” (our america in ayacucho) . she has lectured at both pucp and at the school of fine arts in ayacucho at present she is living and working in barcelona. www.marielagaribay.com http://marielag.webnode.com/ todo, sólo para contemplarte coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 el trabajar con piedras, en especial con el mármol de calatorao, siempre es un reto personal, por su calidad y dureza. en general tener una actividad constante en el trabajo escultórico, en el trabajo artístico es un reto permanente por la lucha entres seguir creando y dejarlo todo por la cantidad de motivos adversos que se pueden presentar en la cotidianidad de la vida de quien decide dedicarse a esta profesión. ¿por qué seguir entonces? si hay tantas dificultades, ¿para qué hacer más esculturas?, me lo he preguntado tantas veces, y una de las respuestas la encuentro cuando veo mis trabajos o los de mis compañeros, es que se hace arte muchas veces “solo para tener el placer de contemplarle”, todo, sólo para contemplarte. esta idea que nace de trabajo traslada muchas veces a la vida misma. ¿cuántas personas realizan acciones desinteresadas a nuestro alrededor? tal vez pareciera que nadie, porque no lo vemos en las noticias y porque una acción desinteresada suele ser también silenciosa. pero existe, existen personas entregadas a propósitos desinteresados impulsados por amor, por el deseo de entrega, por esas ganas de conseguir el placer de hacer feliz a alguien que no seamos nosotros mismos, o por simplemente hacer bien lo que se tiene que hacer. finalmente todos sabemos que estas acciones, son las que nos dan plenitud y un tipo de satisfacción duradera, muy lejana a la que se puede conseguir dentro de los ambiciosos propósitos en los que mueven el mundo. todo, solo para contemplarte, pretende comunicar de una manera sencilla, tal vez algo aparentemente elemental pero que igualmente me parece importante recordar: que en nuestra sociedad, siguen habiendo esfuerzos muy grandes dulcificados por el desinterés, cargados de amor. he escogido esta escultura para participar en food for thought. porque entiendo que el arte es también un tipo de alimento, necesario y primordial, y que el contenido de las esculturas puede alimentar el alma, el intelecto el espíritu y hasta hacernos crecer. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 todo sólo para contemplarte, 2009 calatorao y ónix 35 x 35 x 32 cm. mariela garibay ibargüen, escultora peruana que inicia su formación en la pontificia universidad católica del perú (pucp), es licenciada en artes con mención en escultura. master por la universidad de barcelona (ub) ha realizado diversas exposiciones individuales y colectivas en lima, ciudad de méxico, barcelona, zaragoza y madrid. ha realizado obras públicas por encargo del ayuntamiento de huamanga, en ayacucho. entre sus distinciones están primer puesto en el concurso nacional de diseño para la artesanía peruana y dos veces el permio winternitz . en su función de difusora cultural es miembro del consejo internacional del proyecto cultural sur, y participó en la organización del primero encuentro internacional “nuestra américa en ayacucho”. ha ejercido como docente tanto en la pucp como en la escuela superior de bellas artes de ayacucho. actualmente reside y trabaja en barcelona. www.marielagaribay.com http://marielag.webnode.com/ microsoft word coola6juannavarro coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 vol nocturn. (night flight) joan navarro i comas. “all profoundly eathly beings (…) hear the call of an aerial world, a celestial world” gaston bachelard. the poetics of space. there are two formal and conceptual elements which define the sculpture “night flight”: the object composed of modules which crowns the piece and the stool which integrates into the work without becoming a mere means of support the fusion of the two elements situates the sculpture in space, any space, making the work autonomous in place. this symbiosis between the two objects is strengthened by the choice of material and colour. the colour acts not only as an expressive exponent but also attempts to distort the optical perception of the volume. the spectator can never see the complete form. if in reality figures are distorted by their surroundings, in this case, it is the spectator’s angle of vision which creates the distortion. it is therefore the introduction of temporality – the same impossibility to enable points of view to coalesce on the work which is the “perverse” element, the mystery inherent in the conception of art and that which makes it distinctive. copyright © 2011 joan navarro i comas this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 joan navarro i comas ( barcelona, 1974)is a lecturer at the escola massana de barcelona, where he teaches a specialist university course on sculpting stone at the universidad autónoma in barcelona abd postgraduate courses at the same institution . he holds a degree in sculpture (1999) from the generalitat de catalunya’s escola superior de artes y oficios “llotja”. he has held solo exhibitions nin barcelona and yokohama, japan. he has received grants from the instituto ramon llull and also been successful in important open competitions in madrid and barcelona (macba) his participation in collective exhibitions includes galleries and cultural centers in asia and europe http://tallerbdn.cat/cat vol nocturn 2009 night flight carved and painted wood. 110 x 25 x 25 cm. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 vol nocturn. (night flight) ” todo ser profundamente terrestre (…) registra la llamada de un mundo aereo, de un mundo celeste” gaston bachelard. la poética del espacio. dos son los elementos que formal y conceptualmente definen la escultura “vol nocturn”: -el objeto de composición modular que corona la obra y -el taburete que se integra en el corpus de esta sin convertirse únicamente en un elemento de sujeción de la misma. la fusión entre los dos elementos ubica la escultura en el espacio, en cualquier espacio, haciendo a la obra autónoma del lugar. esta simbiosis entre los dos objetos se ve reforzada por la elección del material y el cromatismo. el color no sólo actúa como exponente expresivo sino con la vocación clara de distorsionar la percepción óptica del volumen. el espectador un puede ver nunca la forma completa. si en la realidad, las figuras son distorsionadas por el entorno, en este caso, es el punto de vista del que mira el que crea la distorsión. es, por tanto, la introducción de la temporalidad –la misma imposibilidad de hacer coincidir el punto de vista sobre la obrael elemento “perverso”, de misterio, inherente a la concepción de arte y distintivo propio del mismo. joan navarro i comas ( barcelona, 1974) es profesor de la escola massana de barcelona, donde imparte el curso d especialidad universitaria de talla de piedra de la uab i de asignaturas del grado superior de escultura del mismo centro. titulado superior de escultura en 1999 por la escola superior de artes y oficios “llotja” de la generalitat de catalunya. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 ha realizada exposiciones individuales en barcelona y en yokohama (japón). ha sido galardonado con becas de estudio por el instituto ramon llull y seleccionado en importantes concursos en madrid y barcelona (macba). su participación en exposiciones colectivas abarca galerias de arte y centros culturales institucionales de asia y europa. http://tallerbdn.cat/cat vol nocturn 2009 carved and painted wood. 110 x 25 x 25 cm. microsoft word 5bonastre coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 beyond rock. social commitment and political conscience through popular music in australia 1976 2002. the case of midnight oil roger bonastre abstract: the work and career of midnight oil illustrate a case of interaction between culture and politics in australia. furthermore they represent an example of social commitment from the sphere of urban popular culture. for a quarter of a century midnight oil offered a critical and ideological interpretation of the australian social and political evolution. aware of and sensitive to changes and events happening around them, five sydneysiders thought about australian identity in terms of what they considered to be their national challenges from a universal perspective. hence, they approached issues like pacifism, indigenous rights and environmentalism and developed a social and political discourse based on the defence of human rights and a condemnation of capitalist excesses. through more than a hundred songs and almost two thousand gigs the band urged politicians to reassess the institutions. at the same time they criticized people’s apathy asking them for a deeper engagement with the development of the country’s welfare. finally, in december 2002, peter garrett quit his singer-activist journey to launch a political career by joining the australian labor party, for which he is the current minister for school education, early childhood and youth in the julia gillard government. it is thus that now we can make sense of the extent to which the political and social message of a rock band can actually generate enough credibility to allow for the lead singer´s transition from the stage to parliament. keywords: midnight oil; peter garrett; ethnomusicology since emerging as a new urban expression of popular music, in the mid fifties of the last century, rock has become a cultural reality with a huge social and political dimension that should not be underestimated in order to explain and understand our society. there are plenty of examples throughout this period that allow the observation of rock’s political dimension and its participation in the construction of social realities. rock music, in the same manner as other artistic disciplines, has reflected the circumstances of its historical moment and it has taken an active part in the formation and articulation of both individual and collective identities and attitudes. it has been party to the ideological diffusion for contesting or legitimating the establishment and nowadays it is omnipresent in the so-called society of information (martí, 2000). over the last decades, popular music has been submitted to a series of industrial and commercial developments that have led it into an immense consumer goods market, but rock music copyright©2011 roger bonastre. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 has kept its cultural background and its communicative potential even when it has been trivialized and manipulated (hormigos, 2008). sydney’s rock band midnight oil is a paradigm of everything above stated. their work and career illustrate a case of interaction between culture and politics and represent an example of social commitment from the sphere of the urban popular culture. born in the fifties, the members of midnight oil grew up in the suburbs of sydney during the socalled golden age, the long period of economic prosperity and population growth that australia experienced after the second world war. as young students during the seventies, they shared the socio-political aspirations of their generation demonstrating against apartheid and the vietnam war, participating in early environmental campaigns and expressing their support for vindicating indigenous land rights. from a political point of view, this generational change-over resulted in labor’s gough whitlam’s access to government but late in 1975 his polemic dismissal frustrated the hopes of social change held by thousands of australians, among them the members of midnight oil: then malcolm fraser and the liberal party, with the aid of governorgeneral john kerr and maybe uncle sam, snatched back the power they had so steadfastly held in australia for the quarter of a century before whitlam. as far as midnight oil were concerned—and many progressive australians, too—the bad old days were with us again. fraser became the devil incarnate for those of us who had tasted the change and progress of the whitlam years and wanted more (dodshon, 2004: 29-30). in this context, the group was formed in late 1976 mustering the artistic concerns of five young musicians, whose career would last for more than a quarter of a century, until december 2002. during this time midnight oil wrote and recorded over 130 original songs published in sixteen albums with global sales exceeding twelve million copies, a quarter of them in australia. commercial success and critical acclaim were the propellers that carried them through local and international tours. at the end of their career they had appeared nearly two thousand times in concerts all over the world (mcfarlane, 1999: 410-412). on the whole, their biography can be divided into three periods: the most active took place from 1978 to 1986 during which they released seven albums and consolidated their social and political profile; between 1987 and 1993 the great success of the album diesel and dust in europe and north america boosted their popularity, which led to the completion of three long international tours; and finally, from the mid-nineties until 2002 the band reduced the number and frequency of their activities but managed to maintain—especially in australia—its prestige and artistic recognition until its dissolution. during the first of these periods the group raised progressively from the surfers’ bars and hotels at the northern beaches of sydney up to the largest concert halls in the country. urban frustration and alienation, themes of their early work, gave way to open ideological manifestations constantly sprinkled with both local and international social and political references. the great success of the album 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1—released in 1982—determined this leap forward opening up new horizons for the band. within months the album climbed into the list of best-selling albums in australia where it coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 remained for over two years. considering its content, the songs of 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1— and subsequent albums like red sails in the sunset and species deceases—offered a personal and critical interpretation of the historical moment: the rise of the cold war and the ongoing nuclear threat, the progressive americanization of australian society, the transition from consumption to consumerism and the growing destruction of the environment during the eighties midnight oil moved from songs to action, taking part in numerous charity and protest activities. after the release of their first album the band supported the australian antinuclear movement: they demonstrated against the exploitation of uranium mines, organized the stop the drop pacifist concerts to finance the activities of the people for nuclear disarmament organization and travelled to london to participate in the campaign of the british antinuclear movement. eventually, peter garrett, their lead singer, steered the pacifist nuclear disarmament party during 1984’s senate elections (burgman, 2003). within the conservationist struggle the band was involved in major environmental campaigns against the deforestation of australian rainforests offering their artistic and economic support to organizations such as the south east forests of nsw coalition, the wilderness society and the australian forest action network in addition to greenpeace and save the whales. in august 1987 the release of the diesel and dust album heralded the beginning of a new period characterized by the already mentioned international success. the album was preceded by the whitefella blackfella tour: after writing a song to celebrate the uluru monolith’s return to its indigenous owners, midnight oil was invited to tour central australian aboriginal settlements with the indigenous group the warumpi band. this was above all an unheard-of experience in australian music and in the process of reconciliation between indigenous and white australians. it confronted five young sydneysiders with the result of two hundred years of colonization, dispossession, discrimination and attempted genocide. it brought the band face to face with the tragic present and uncertain future of one of the oldest human communities on earth (mcmillan, 1988). the diesel and dust album focused on the crimes perpetrated against the indigenous australians and asked support for their demands. it rose strikingly in the sales charts of the united states, canada, the united kingdom, france and germany among others. in order to respond to the raise in demand the band dedicated two years to touring major cities throughout north america and europe, making the indigenous cause known to tens of thousands of people. although less successful, the next two albums of explicit social content—blue sky mining and earth and sun and moon—kept, nevertheless, international interest up in the band until 1994. meanwhile, backed by the prestige of the band, peter garrett was assuming new responsibilities: he became a member of greenpeace international board and chaired the australian conservation foundation, the most important environmental organization in the country (hutton; connors, 1999). entering the last stage of their career, during the second half of the nineties, midnight oil returned to the australian context and, through the album redneck wonderland published in 1998, expressed their concern and discontent with the ultra-liberal drift of john howard’s successive governments and the rise of the right-wing party one nation. soon after, due to howard's refusal to apologize for the atrocities committed against the indigenous people and with the reconciliation process in full involution, midnight oil coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 took another step forward during the closing ceremony of the sydney olympics. they appeared on stage, showing the word sorry printed in large white letters over their black suits. it took still eight years for the australian government to do the same officially. finally, in december 2002, after more than twenty years together, garrett left midnight oil in order to develop his political career fully. since then, the group has only met for two benefit concerts: in january 2005 to raise funds for the victims of the tsunami that devastated the coasts of southeast asia, and in march 2009 with the same goal for those affected by victoria’s bushfires and queensland’s floods. in perspective there are very few articles about the records and concerts of midnight oil that do not echo its social and political dimension. from a quantity, and even a quality point of view, we could consider this fact as an indicator of the recognition of the group’s extra-musical character. many indeed are the quotes that can be used to sustain this. a rather explicit one was made by jo roberts, journalist of the age. in may 2001, a little bit more than a year before peter garrett’s leave-taking and plunging into politics, roberts wrote: midnight oil have always been more than a band. they have become part of the social and political landscape, probably providing many australians with their first stirrings of political awareness. the music and, most pointedly, the words of singer peter garrett became, for many, a conduit for a nation's hopes and fears. true, midnight oil went beyond the boundaries of the activity of a rock group. but which are these boundaries? who or what marks them? the artist himself, the industry or the public? the work itself as an autonomous entity? or maybe all of it together? where exactly do we have to situate the works and the trajectory of midnight oil in order to visualize its social and political load? in the book from pop to punk to postmodernism simon steggels wrote that the songs and activism of midnight oil are located in the area where the interaction between politics and culture takes place, the space of social change (1992: 139-148). we could then consider its work as a source of renewal generating ideas and trends of thought, a process through which, thanks to their success, rob hirst, jim moginie, martin rotsey, peter garrett and bones hillman, would have brought politics closer to wide population sectors and thus participated in the formation of a critical social awareness. without any doubt the work and trajectory of midnight oil, their pacifist and environmental songs, their lyrics against the excesses of capitalism, their activism for indigenous rights calling for a true reconciliation, reflected the longings of a new generation of australians and, at the same time, were and still are an invitation to rethinking and reconsidering those realities and situations whose persistence confers them the apparent category of unquestionable truths. at this point one of the quotes that, in my opinion, defines the essence of midnight oil comes from dave curry, journalist of the canberra times. in march 2009, less than one year ago, he wrote: the oils were always described as a 'political' band, but to me their songs were powerful because they translated 'issues' into personal feelings: hope, desire, anger, and despair. it was always about passion and humanity, not coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 some dry polemic. mostly they threw uncomfortable truths at you and dared you to ignore them. therefore, beyond whether we can label a song as political protest, the matter remains in its communicative potential and its possibilities of reception. as said before, nowadays no one can ignore the capacity of popular music as a generator of opinion and knowledge. nobody would deny that plenty of songs by the beatles, bob dylan or bruce springsteen, not to mention madonna or michael jackson, have been more listened to and received more attention than the most eloquent political speeches of the twentieth century. in fact, bearing in mind that any presumably unpolitical music provokes reactions and behaviors of adherence or rejection, it is better not to underrate the extendibility of that other musical production, resulting from a deliberate will of interaction and of ideological transmission through references to circumstances, places, and events that may configure a common space for thousands of people. with regard to this, the midnight oil case illustrates the investigation of these common spaces. their work, their songs are based on establishing permanent connections between past, present and future, between individuals and collectivities, between indigenous australians and white australians, between the outback and the city, between australia and the rest of the world and between the same causes that determined their activism. the band´s faith in the possibilities of permanent interaction is the source of their confidence in social change. it is by no means a passive attitude waiting for things to happen, it is an active call for everybody’s accountability and commitment. this is when the group’s work becomes political and social: political because it positions itself explicitly on how to handle collective conflicts, and social because of its will of interpellation, the constant search for communal bonds. their sixteen records, all of them full of specific references and critical assessments, reflect 25 years of australian history, the last quarter of the twentieth century. from their frustration caused by gough whitlam’s resignation up to their call for an apology to the indigenous people during the closing ceremony of sydney’s olympic games, the career of midnight oil has become an alternative document for observing such processes as the consolidation of the australian environmental movement, antinuclear protests, the increasing north-americanization of the australian society and the first steps towards national reconciliation (bonastre, 2007: 139-211). all of those are characteristic elements of australia’s political and social challenges during last century’s eighties and nineties. as a matter of fact, theirs was a call aimed to rethink and redefine the country from new angles and perspectives throughout a period that the historian stuart macintyre named reinventing australia (2004: 242-289). in this sense, marcus breen, in his book rock dogs, politics and the australian music industry, considers midnight oil as identity agents, identity creators (2006: 54-74). this is a fact that the journalist mark dodshon highlights as the great difference between the sydney group and the vast majority of other rock bands, including those with an overt social conscience: there are still musicians expressing social opinions but very few of them exist as part of mainstream culture, and none are part of the public discourse of a country in the way that midnight oil were in australia (2004: 53). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 overall, this brings us to consider another element of the social and political dimension of midnight oil: its credibility, an attribute that can never be forced and that in order to be achieved needs something else than rhythms and attractive melodies. for midnight oil their credibility became a crucial factor for reaching an audience of millions, at local and international level, by means of songs with explicit political and social subjects, during more than two decades. many are the elements that have intervened in the process of conferring prestige and credibility to the group’s ideological message. amongst them we may consider the ideological coherence between the band’s songs and their extra-musical activism; another element is the transversality of their political message, clearly associated with the left ideological sphere but rather from a humanistic than a maximalistic perspective, sometimes belligerent but never dogmatic; and last but not least, the space and time connections with their followers—there are actually very few songs where the group does not address a reference frame common to all the population. obviously, we should not forget other factors as the natural independence of being a rock group; their genuine conviction for transmitting the message based on their charisma and especially on peter garrett’s speech ability; and finally their perseverance through time. from his uninhibited admiration of the group, tim winton went as far as setting them up against politicians when he wrote: i’m grateful midnight oil did become something of an institution as they raged against corporate greed and environmental vandalism. because so few of our public leaders represent us with any imagination or honesty. (...) and not only that they put their money where their mouth was. they did things, provided help and money to community causes while the political parties concentrated on maintaining power. while the suits were talking the talk, the oils were walking the walk. it’s wonderfully ironic that a rock n roll band should be such a civic light in the darkness (1997). when we then consider garrett’s political career it seems reasonable to assume that as well as his charisma, the recognition and credibility of the group were the elements that conferred him the necessary conditions for assuming commitments outside of the music sphere. in fact, without underestimating garrett’s contribution, we should be aware that most songs were written by rob hirst and jim moginie. thus, when in june 2004 garrett disclosed having joined the labor party and became shortly thereafter a member of parliament, we can assume that in the eyes of the population garrett’s biography was better known and transparent than the trajectory of most politicians. perhaps some australians already knew about him through his senate candidature while heading the nuclear disarmament party in late 1984, or through his presidency of the australian conservation foundation or even for his explicit positioning in favor of the indigenous australians. however as said by mark latham, who at that time was the opposition leader, the immense majority of people knew about him because of midnight oil. they knew that garrett came from a small collective that had dedicated a quarter of a century to express their longings, worries and aspirations for australia. in fact quite a few australians regretted garrett’s becoming a member of the labor party because they considered that his role in a political party weakened his value as a social activist. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 another element that highlights midnight oil’s extra-musical dimension can be found in the criticisms received: their albums were often examined under the harsh light of political terms and they were accused of exercising demagogy, of making profit through protest and of appropriating the indigenous tragedy. the criticisms were significant because they also showed up to which level the band was able to raise awareness in a society often branded as hedonistic and self-satisfied. in this sense midnight oil took risks and became polemic, sometimes due to a mixture of audacity and naivety, which some would call arrogance. in any case this is the path chosen by those that do not accept spaces with pre-determined borders, by those that believe in perseverance, in converting utopias into aspirations worth fighting for. backed by more than one hundred songs, nearly two thousand concerts and dozens of acts of vindication and solidarity, midnight oil offered a critical and ideological interpretation, at times even radical but rarely nihilistic, about the political and social evolution of australia. they addressed themselves to political representatives demanding a re-evaluation of the institutions. but at the same time they condemned the apathy and indifference of the ordinary citizen asking for a greater involvement in australia’s social and political life. put into perspective, the career of midnight oil throws light on the extent to which a social and political speech vertebrated from the sphere of urban popular culture in an advanced capitalist society. in fact, through a critical surveillance of public management, they visualized the possibilities of rock music as an instrument and a vehicle for participating in politics, as a means of resistance and dissidence. by summoning their fans to step ahead and become something more than an audience, midnight oil offered as much as it demanded, and more than most. works cited bonastre, roger. “un caso paradigmático de compromiso social y político en el rock: midnight oil”, in garcia lupiola, asier (dir.). economía y rock: la influencia de las relaciones internacionales y la economía mundial en el rock. bilbao: universidad del paísvasco, servicio de publicaciones, 2007, pp. 139-211. breen, marcus. rock dogs. politics and the australian music industry. maryland: university press of america, 2006. burgman, verity. power, profit and protest: australian social movements and globalisation. crows nest-sydney, allen & unwin, 2003. curry, dave. “it's midnight oil, nothing else matters”. canberra times, march 12, 2009. dodshon, mark. beds are burning: midnight oil the journey. sydney: penguin books, 2004. hormigos, jaime. música y sociedad, análisis sociológico de la cultura musical de la posmodernidad. madrid: fundación autor, 2008. hutton, drew; connors, libby. a history of the australian environment movement. melbourne, cambridge university press, 1999. macintyre, stuart. a concise history of australia. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004. martí, josep. más allá del arte. la música como generadora de realidades sociales. sant cugat del vallès: deriva editorial, 2000. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 mcfarlane, ian. encyclopedia of australian rock and pop. sydney, limelight press, 1999. mcmillan, andrew, strict rules. sydney, hodder & stoughton,1988. midnight oil. 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, cdcbs25314 – 1982. -----. red sails in the sunset, cdcbs26355, 1984. -----. species deceases, cdcbs655857, 1985. -----. diesel and dust, cdcbs460005, 1987. -----. blue sky mining, cdcbs465563, 1990. -----. earth and sun and moon, cdcbs473605, 1993. -----. redneck wonderland, cdcbs4899712, 1998. roberts, jo. “midnight oil continue to burn brightly”, the age, may 7, 2001. steggles, simon. “nothing ventured, nothing gained: midnight oil and the politics of rock”, in hayward, philip (ed.). from pop to punk to postmodernism: popular music and australian culture from the 1960s to the 1990s. sydney: allen & unwin, 1992, pp. 139-148. winton, tim. “kiss no burn, tug no forelock”, in midnight oil 20.000 watt rsl, cdcbs488866 2, 1997. roger bonastre was born in 1977 in barcelona. he obtained a degree in contemporary history by the universitat autònoma of barcelona (uab) in 2002 and is currently engaged in a doctorate programme in compared, political and social history at the uab. his research centres on the study of the social and political dimension of popular music. he teaches social science in secondary education and is a member of cea (centre of australian studies, u. of barcelona) and of sibe (ethnomusical society). microsoft word coola6lluiscera coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 the geometry of oblivion luís cera our brain is very complex yet it is really very simple: elementary, very elementary strengths have configured it. a team of neuroanatomists (nails sts. hilgetag and helen barbas, "morphology of the brain", research and science, april 2009) has shown that the rough landscapes of the bypasses of the cerebral crust are formed by the forces of tension which are also responsible for the folds; such as enfolding within the skull grey matter that would occupy a frying pan big enough for a dozen people. growth solves it: the neurons issue axons that to the the edges and keep on folding the crust, like inflating a balloon containing threads that clamp multiple points of its surface. the interesting thing is that these clamps are responsible for what we do and what we can do: they connect distant areas and while they permit creativity they limit what can and cannot be thought areas and are those that while they give creativity they limit the that is been able or cannot think, what we can and cannot feel. the topogenesis is elementary even if the result is so unlimitedly complex. it is beautiful and fascinating that our complexity is, in fact, so simple. i found this paradox in the animated film waltz with bashir, written and directed by israeli ari folmanin, in which an ex-soldier who took part in the 1982 lebanon war attempts to fill in the gaps in his memory that correspond to the killings fields of sabra and chatila. he thinks he was there but cannot remember. the film is fascinating given its discourse on memory and oblivion: a medical friend tells the soldier about experiments in which true and false images were presented to a group of patients. the false ones were a photo montage of places where they had not been. they all ended up creating a story that matched the pictures. the brain, says the psychiatrist, fills in the gaps where no data or information exists. the brain invents, it is like elementary geometry. it is a dynamic system that cannot survive without information. copyright © 2011 luís cera .this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 geometria de l'oblit, 2009 the geometry of oblivion pedra sénia, ferro stone cenia, iron 150 x 33 x 33 one thursday i attended a course that carlos thiebaut organizes on the politics of memory. he had been profoundly moved after seeing two documentaries by carmen castillo, the wife of miguel enríquez, leader of the mir who was murdered by pinochet’s dyne. carmen went back to chile on two occasions. on one occasion she talks to an ex militant, “thin alejandra”, who, unable to hold out under torture, became an informer. eventually she repents and in the 1990s tells her story. carmen castillo, who escaped having been tortured while pregnant and after seeing her husband murdered, listens impassively, to a semi protected ex-torturer who cynically asks her: aren’t you going to ask me about your husband? we, the public, were gripped by silence. a very young pupil, asked in a very diplomatic fashion --i simplify her question: why do we have to remember these things? we did not know, i did not know, what answer to give. to say that the victims have rights is far too simple. a daughter whose parents were murdered asked “thin alejandra” the same question to which she replied: because this society is full of fear. i thought that i could use the same reply to the student: because if we do not remember we cannot cure ourselves. after seeing waltz with bashir i replied to her in a more sophisticated way: because the geometry of oblivion is very elementary. is the elementary datum that we steal from memory enough to create a story? stories that we will end up believing true are generated in this manner. the post-modernists hold that this is what occurs and that all stories are of similar value. the political memory of democracy is and has to be a concurrence of stories. yes, clear. but sometimes nightmares do not cure us. the press and the bookshops are full of heroic stories of the 23-f (not to mention the tv series about the transition) and i remember the israeli psychiatrist’s experiment. lluís cera (barcelona, 1967) he studied at the university of barcelona, specialising in sculpture, finishing his degree in arts in 1993. he was an associate lecturer in fine arts at barcelona university. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 he has held numerous solo exhibitions in barcelona, madrid, switzerland and germany. he has also won important prizes in spain and has participated in exhibitions around the world including the united states, south korea, switzerland and germany. la geometria de l'oblit el nostre cervell és molt complex perquè en realitat és molt simple: l'han configurat forces elementals, molt elementals. un equip de neuroanatomistas (claus c. hilgetag i helen barbas, "morfologia del cervell", investigació i ciència, abril 2009) ha mostrat que els rugosos paisatges de les circumvolucions de la crosta cerebral es formen per forces de tensió que són les responsables dels plegaments: com tancar a un crani la superfície d'aproximadament una paella per a una dotzena de persones que ocuparia la substància grisa? el creixement el resol: les neurones emeten axones que tiren de les vores i van plegant la crosta, com si infléssim un globus que interiorment té fils que subjecten múltiples punts de la superfície. l'interessant és que aquestes subjeccions són les responsables del que fem i podem fer: connecten àrees allunyades i són les que alhora que donen creativitat limiten el que es pot o no es pot pensar, la qual cosa no es pot o pot sentir. la topogénesis és elemental encara que el resultat sigui tan il· limitadament complex. és bonic i fascinador que la nostra complexitat sigui tan simple. geometria de l'oblit, 2009 the geometry of oblivion pedra sénia, ferro stone cenia, iron 150 x 33 x 33 em vaig trobar amb aquesta paradoxa veient la pel· lícula vals amb bashir, escrita i dirigida per un israelià ari folman, en animació, en la qual un antic soldat de la guerra del líban de 1982 intenta omplir el buit de la seva memòria que correspon a les matances dels camps de sabra i chatila en què creu que va ser present però no recorda. la pel· lícula és fascinadora per la seva meditació sobre la memòria i l'oblit: un amic mèdic li explica uns experiments en els quals es van presentar imatges verdaderes i falses a un grup de pacients. les falses contenien les seves fotografies muntades en llocs on no havien estat. tots van acabar creant un relat que encaixava amb les fotografies. el cervell, diu el psiquiatre, quan no té dades, quan hi ha un forat informatiu, l'omple. l'inventa, vagi. és així: geometria elemental. és un sistema dinàmic que no sobreviu sense informació. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 dijous vaig assistir al curs que organitza carlos thiebaut sobre polítiques de la memòria. estava commocionat després de veure dos documentals de carmen castillo, la dona de miguel enríquez, dirigent del mir assassinat per la dina de pinochet. carmen torna a xile en dues ocasions: en una parla amb una antiga militant que no va suportar la tortura i es va convertir en delatora, la flaca alejandra. més tard es penedeix, compta la seva història a començaments dels noranta i carmen castillo, que va ser torturat embarassada, després de veure assassinar el seu marit i que va poder escapar, l'escolta impassible, escolta impassible a un torturador detingut i semiprotegit, que li pregunta cínic: no em preguntes pel teu marit?... en final|finalitat. el públic estàvem tenallats i en silenci. una alumna molt jove, amb molta delicadesa, va preguntar --simplifico la seva pregunta-: per què hem de recordar aquestes coses? no vam saber, no vaig saber, què es pot respondre. dir que és un dret de les víctimes és massa simple. a la flaca alejandra li havia fet la mateixa pregunta una filla d'uns pares assassinats, i ella va respondre: perquè aquesta societat és plena de por. vaig pensar que podia respondre així a l'alumna: perquè mentre no recordem no ens curem. després de veure vals amb bashir li respondria més sofisticadament: perquè la geometria de l'oblit és molt elemental. n'hi ha prou que li furtem les dades elementals que la memòria creï el seu propi relat i es generin contes que acabarem creient verdaders. els postmoderns sostenen que això és el que ocorre i que tots els relats valen el mateix, que la política de la memòria de la democràcia és i ha de ser una concurrència de contes. sí, clar. el que passa que de vegades no se'ns curen els malsons. veig aquests dies la premsa i les llibreries plenes de relats heroics del 23-f (per no dir res d'una sèrie de tv sobre la transició) i em ve en la memòria l'experiment del psiquiatre israelià. alf taylor as an engaged and lyric poet coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 literature as protest and solace: the verse of alf taylor danica čerče university of ljubljana, slovenia email: danica.cerce@ef.uni-lj.si copyright©danica čerče 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: although australian indigenous poetry is often overtly polemical and politically committed, any reading which analyzes it as mere propaganda is too narrow to do it justice. by presenting the verse of alf taylor collected in singer songwriter (1992) and winds (1994) and discussing it in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the author, my essay aims to show the thematic richness of indigenous poetic expression. indigenous poets have, on the one hand, undertaken the responsibility to strive for social and political equality and foster within their communities the very important concept that indigenous peoples can survive only as a community and a nation (mcguiness). on the other hand, they have produced powerful self-revelatory accounts of their own mental and emotional interior, which urges us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than that of social chroniclers and rebels. keywords: australian indigenous poetry, alf taylor, singer songwriter, winds since the 1970s, indigenous australian authors have steadily gained prominence in australia‟s mainstream (wheeler). books such as sally morgan‟s my place (1987), doris pilkington‟s follow the rabbit-proof fence (1996), kim scott‟s benang (1999) and that deadman dance (2010), alexis wright‟s carpentaria (2006), jeanine leane‟s purple threats (1011), and several others, have had wide public appeal and made a significant impact on the australian public. they all stem from the authors‟ heartfelt desire to illustrate the cataclysmic indigenous people‟s situation in australia during and after the era of colonisation, and function in a variety of ways; among the most important being an explicit call to the white populace in australia and worldwide to halt social injustice. poetry, too, has provided an important impetus for their cultural and political expression. adam shoemaker suggests that “if there is any „school of black australian poetry, it is one of social protest” (201), arguing that “most aboriginal poets reject the art for art‟s sake argument and feel that their work has at least some social utility” (180). indeed, much of contemporary indigenous poetry is characterized by political or social critique in objecting to the conditions of indigenous people‟s minoritisation. by considering verse as a “verbal discourse in which message is dominant and the aesthetic function is subordinate,” many poets (e.g. oodgeroo mailto:danica.cerce@ef.uni-lj.si coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 noonuccal, jack davis, kevin gilbert, mudrooroo narrogin, lionel fogarty, muk muk burke, romaine moreton, and others) have adopted this medium as a means to express collective grievances against the dominant socio-political agenda of more than two hundred years of colonisation and to attack government policies on the social ills within the black australian community (mudrooroo 35). however, this is by no means to suggest that australian indigenous poetry can be dismissed as merely engaged writing. whereas some poets indeed use their talent primarily as a political tool, others view this genre as a means of celebrating and preserving the beauty of nature; still others believe that poetry is an outlet for emotional release and concentrate on the exploration of more subjective topics of human existence. for the purposes of this discussion, the poetry of alf taylor will serve as the focus for my argument that australian indigenous poetry deals with an array of subjects, depending on the author‟s apprehension of the scope of literature, and that much contemporary indigenous verse demonstrates the dual role of the author: that of critical commentator and that of private expressionist. i met alf taylor, a western australian nyoongah poet and writer, at the university of western australia in 2007, while he was working on the manuscript of his life story, god, the devil and me. a gentle, warm, and very open-minded man, taylor was always in the mood to tell a joke or spin a yarn. his writing, too, the short fiction in particular, abounds with humour. “without humour, i would have been dead […]. laughter was my sunlight and roses while locked in new norcia,” he explained to anne brewster in an interview for the 2007 issue of aboriginal history (brewster 169). born in the late 1940s and growing up in the spanish benedictine mission at new norcia, taylor represents an older generation of writers, members of the so-called „stolen generation.‟ although he is reportedly one of the most productive contemporary indigenous authors and the only one to have published a substantial piece of writing about new norcia, he has not yet received much critical attention. as a poet, taylor has written two collections, both published by magabala books: singer songwriter (1992) and winds (1994). the former was republished in rimfire: poetry from aboriginal australia (2000), together with the callused stick of wanting and calling thought by romaine moreton and michael j. smith respectively. taylor‟s short fiction is collected in long time now, published by magabala books in 2001. taylor seems to have turned to poetry for various reasons, including his desire to cope with the traumas of racial suppression and his painful upbringing: “only love/ and/ the pen/ can quell/ this flame/ that/ burns within,” he writes in the poem „this flame‟ (winds 39). for him, writing has become a kind of sustaining addiction, a way of establishing his personal and economic identity and above all, a necessary condition of existence. “now i can talk about the life of the child, and i‟m free of hurt, free of resentments, regrets. in other words … bearing a grudge,” taylor reveals to brewster in 2007 (170). like many others, he was taken from his parents and put in a mission, where aboriginal culture and aboriginal language was “considered „a mortal sin‟” (brewster 2007, 166). although writing has made him comfortable in the social and emotional spheres of ordinary life, and provided therapeutic value, it would be wrong to believe that he deals only with the experiences of being aboriginal. like his companions in rimfire, romaine moreton and michael j. smith, taylor has developed an array of themes. by chronicling the ongoing suffering of his peoples and their capacity to survive in a hostile environment, his poems provide an invaluable insight into the socio-economic subordination of indigenous australians. on the other hand, they examine the omnipresent themes of love, friendship, human joy and anguish. as philip morrissey notes in his introduction to winds, “taylor presents us with an aboriginal subject […] bound coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 by a network of affective webs to family, lovers, places and strangers” (vii). in contrast with his short fiction, his verse is only rarely tinted with humour. rather, his meditations are often pervaded by a spirit of sadness and sometimes even despair. this is particularly true of poems in which he deals with such typical factors of aboriginal life as solitude, isolation and loss. in terms of style, because of taylor‟s highly accessible mode of writing, his lines often seem pedestrian, particularly if assessed by strict rules of formalism. admittedly, and as indigenous poets are often reprimanded, taylor indeed seems to feel comfortable in the short line lyric with a meter of four stresses or fewer, or in free verse which often lacks fluidity. his poems are penned in a colloquial language, and his evenly measured end-rhyming lines are sometimes hardly virtuosic, as in the following excerpt from the poem „pension day‟: food will be bought cheap clothes sought. better put money here gotta have a beer. (singer songwriter 95) 1 several critics concur with john beston that a failure to achieve high standard english, symptomatic of much indigenous writing, has to be attributed to the limited formal education of these authors and their lack of confidence when entering a field that was previously monopolised by the white elite. another aspect is political: for many indigenous australians the english language is still synonymous with colonial authority, so they are reluctant to purify it of tribal and colloquial speech patterns (maver). although taylor‟s writing varies in accomplishment, his reputation as a poet is decidedly not that of a technical perfectionist. his verse is impressive because of the directness and sincerity that springs from his deeply felt personal experience. in his poems, he returns to his painful childhood and adolescence, to his hard-won struggles with alcohol and an attempted suicide, reviving memories of his tribe, parents, friends, youthful love, and heartfelt yearnings. compared to moreton‟s poetry, which is by her own admission very often received as “confronting and challenging,” taylor‟s poems are more lyrical, generated by his urge to reach a significant metamorphosis in his psyche, and as a means of reconciliation with his own past (brewster 2008, 59). generally speaking, they are also less poignant. as he explains: “the pencil is my weapon […]. but i try to write from a neutral corner and go between the centre of that uneasiness, because i don‟t want my readers to be uncomfortable when they read” (brewster 2007, 175). however, as this discussion will show, and in line with nicholas coles‟s opinion that protest writing has the capacity “to offer revelations of social worlds […] to which readers respond with shock, concern, sometimes political questioning” (677), several of taylor‟s poems have elicited similar audience responses. one would search in vain to find any kind of arrangement or logical sequence of poems in taylor‟s collections. they follow each other like uncontrolled thoughts, moving back and forth from childhood to adulthood, and veering from public to private realms. both collections start in medias res, bluntly exposing the brutalising effects of indigenous socio-economic subordination in australia. singer songwriter opens with the poem „black skin,‟ an embittered voicing of the miseries suffered by the black community. the poem‟s tone oscillates between despair and anger. a sense of hopelessness is achieved by the overwhelming presence of the colour black, which has a negative connotation in colour symbolism and is linked with death and sorrow. the yoking of rhyming companions (tomorrow/sorrow, hope/rope) establishes a feeling of farce: coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 black skin see no tomorrow black skin head in sorrow black skin fight black skin see no right. black skin cry black skin die black skin no hope black skin grabs rope. (singer songwriter 79) „people of the park,‟ the opening poem in winds, begins and proceeds as an idyllic description of a tribal gathering “in the softness of the park/ [where] drinks/ circle the tribe/ laughter, music/” (1). it is not until the end of the poem that the poet overturns this cliché and surprises the reader with the heart-breaking claim: people outside the circle think the people of the park have got no tomorrow. (winds 1) several other poems included either in singer songwriter or winds also deal with the impact of racial exclusion. in „sniffin,‟ for example, taylor meditates on widespread drug use as a means “to get away/ from that shadow/ of pain” (singer songwriter 107). many indigenous people seek refuge in heavy drinking, taylor regretfully observes in poems such as „the trip,‟ „dole cheque,‟ „a price,‟ „last ride,‟ „hopeless case,‟ „ode to the drunken poet,‟ „horror,‟ and others. it must be also because drinking was once an escape for the poet from thoughts of his cruel upbringing that he writes, “these are the people/ of no life/ and no hope” („no hope,‟ singer songwriter 125), unreservedly taking the side of those who disapprove of this kind of escapism. that these poems are highly illustrative of the poet‟s own situation is also clearly evident from the following confession: “i was quite lucky to realize that alcohol does not solve any problems; it adds problems to problems” (brewster 2007, 174-6). similarly, taylor lists the effects of drinking in „gerbah‟: “the time he‟s forty body wrecked his life nearly done./ dead brain cells and a burnt out liver,/ lays in a cold sweat and starts to shiver” (singer songwriter 128). the poem proceeds as a deductively reasoned analysis, piling up argument after argument and closes with a final appeal to the youngsters to learn and obtain education: with no schoolin what have they got? a dole cheque and a bottle, that‟s what. schoolin is a must for today for the kids so that they can help pave the way. (singer songwriter 128) very much in the same vein regarding both theme and writing style, taylor reflects in „leave us alone.‟ thematically, as in „gerbah,‟ the poet stresses the importance of obtaining education; structurally, both poems are written in six evenly measured four-line stanzas, with coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 rhyming end-stressed syllables. in contrast to several of taylor‟s poems characterised by pessimistic tonalities, and despite an undercurrent of satirical bitterness, „leave us alone‟ offers an optimistic view and can be regarded as an exemplary instance of protest poetry, articulating an indictment of injustice and advocating change: challenge problems, not running away, forget about the booze and family fights, let‟s stand up as individuals and make it right. (singer songwriter 134) a rallying cry to his peoples to jointly strive for their rights, which underlies the recurrent themes of alcoholism, unemployment, poverty, and deaths in custody in taylor‟s verse, is also heard in „we blackfellas.‟ in this poem, structured as sustained argument and exposition, taylor criticises the debilitating role of the media in their portrayal of indigenous peoples and concludes with the conviction: we blackfellas must stand as one as the fight still goes on. (singer songwriter 129) different in form, but not in content, is „better tomorrow.‟ by presenting a contrastive picture of a mother struggling to cope with difficult circumstances and escape the inevitable “alcoholic tomb,” the poet works strategically to arouse the addressee (indigenous readers) towards action to change the situation: “let‟s/ get away/ from this/ sadness and sorrow/ let‟s look/ for a/ better tomorrow” (winds 27). in an accusatory and disconcertingly direct poem in clipped line lengths, „no names,‟ taylor reveals his deep concern about numerous deaths in custody. he is critical of non-indigenous australians, who are aware of the shocking statistics, but do not react to them. taylor hints at their unresponsiveness with a set of rhetorical questions underpinned with sardonic bitterness: “who is/ to blame?/ who is/ to blame?/ lots of questions/ but no names (singer songwriter 110). it has to be borne in mind that, despite the prime minister paul keating‟s articulation of injustices suffered by australia‟s indigenous peoples in his famous „redfern address‟ in 1992, it was not until february 2008 that prime minister kevin rudd opened a new chapter in australia‟s history by apologising to its indigenous peoples for the years of tyranny and suppression. the poet‟s experimentation with language‟s syntactic markers, such as direct address to the reader, rhetorical questions, satirical antithesis, etc. to establish the point of view and to evoke emotional and cognitive states in the readers, ensures his verse maximum participatory effect. in the poem „why,‟ for example, taylor employs rhetorical questions to lay bare different aspects of contemporary cultural and economic inequality: “why/ is he/ living/ in this room/ infested with/ alcohol, drugs/ and pills/ […] he just can‟t/ take it/ no more/ but why” (winds 20). taylor also deals with the theme of incarceration and deaths in custody in „alone in the cell‟ (singer songwriter 99), this time on a very personal level. the poem, taking a stanzaic pattern with regular end-syllable rhymes, is a first-person meditation on his experience of being imprisoned for not paying a parking fine. the reader learns of the author‟s despair, which led him to failed suicide attempt. despite its intimate character, the poem transcends the narrowness of the individual and takes on the quality of generic tragedy. „locked away‟ (winds 4), another poem generated out of his own experience of incarceration, is more lyrical coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 (“butterflies/ are free/ why/ can‟t we/ over/ the distant/ horizon/ tomorrow/ greets us/ with sorrow”), but no less effective in exposing the treacherousness of contemporary cultural politics in australia. the issue of „stolen generation‟ is touched upon particularly in „the mission‟ and „fair skin boy,‟ both published in singer songwriter. whereas the former takes the form of five stanzas, each with four end-rhyming lines, the latter is a short clipped line lyric, with occasional endsyllable rhyme. like taylor‟s writing in general, the form of the poems issues not from an ideal aesthetic blueprint, but from the generative urgency of the author to address his own and his peoples‟ experiences honestly and movingly. „the mission‟ opens thus: after prayers at night i go to bed lying awake with memories in my head. i can still see my mother kneeling on the ground sobbing, don‟t take my child, i want him around. and closes: i know one day i‟ll be free, free from religion and free from rules. free to make up my own mind and free to be cool but i know the damage has already been done as i see myself lying drunk in the hot morning sun. (singer songwriter 115) drawing on ghassan hage, anne brewster writes that in its function of social and political critique, indigenous protest writing plays “an ongoing role in interrogating and intervening the reproduction of the white nation” (2008, 57). similarly, with george levine, literary works can either reinforce the structures of domination or produce critical disruptions. reading this poem is certainly not a passive activity; despite its technical weaknesses, it deeply engages non-indigenous readers and raises a number of what gayatri spivak refers to as “constructive questions” and “corrective doubts” in non-indigenous readers (spivak 1987, 258). as if they were not written by the same author, poems such as „you are,‟ „moments of paradise,‟ „love,‟ and „a love affair,‟ celebrate love and devotion. stemming either from the poet‟s joyful longing for his beloved or nostalgic heartache, and characterised by a delightful lightness of verse or elegiac tone, they allow taylor to exchange his role as protest poet for that of intimate explorer of the conflicted labyrinth of heart. for example, the narrative lyric „you are,‟ proceeds beautifully as a sequence of romantic metaphors that reveal the poet‟s playful state of mind (“you are a/ cool gentle breeze/ on a/ hot summer day./ you are/ a warm fire/ in the/ freezing month/ of may./ a warm sun/ on a/ cool morn,/ a trickle/ of water/ to a/ parched throat”) and leaves the reader utterly unprepared for its dour conclusion that we are, in spite of everything, very lonely beings. in taylor‟s words: “it is/ only me/ who could see/ in my mind” (singer songwriter 80). the same holds true for „the petal,‟ a short melancholy piece that celebrates nature. inspired by its beauties, the poet reminds the reader of the inevitable passing of all living things − “bruised and battered/ it starts/ to cry./ caught in the brush/ it eventually/ dies” (singer songwriter 88). on the other hand, the poem with the indicative title „let‟s,‟ shows the poet‟s concern with the degradation of the environment. displaying some typical characteristics of coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 taylor‟s verse, such as irregularities in rhythm and rhyme, colloquialism, narrative diction, and his use of various syntactic devices, the latter takes the form of a series of imperatives that urge us to “look after/ mother earth/ […], so our children/ won‟t have to hide/ from the midday sun” (singer songwriter 136). like his poetry in general, the poem clearly demonstrates taylor‟s manner of writing, whereby the content determines the form, and not vice versa. apart from a few exceptions, taylor relies heavily on his aboriginality for texture, diction and rhythm so it is hard not to notice his indigenous sensibility even in poems that are acutely personal, like the love lyrics „her name‟ and „the shadows,‟ for example. intertwining joy with melancholy through variable refrains and metaphors, „her name‟ reads: the wind brought her name to me silently through the leaves ………………….. the grass tingled my body with her name as i picked up the spear and began to hunt game (winds 32) hinting at injustices endured in the past, „the shadows‟ (winds 40) celebrates the healing power of love (you/ will help/ to keep/ the shadows/ of sorrow/ nipping/ at the/ pores/ of my tomorrow). a survey of taylor‟s poetic achievements can perhaps best be completed by noting „makin it right,‟ where he writes: i‟ll try and make things right through writing and poetry i just might but we‟ll all have to pull together. never mind how far apart someone somewhere gotta make a start. (singer songwriter 112) indeed, by articulating the multiple forms of trauma within the indigenous community, and advocating the community‟s unconquerable spirit in the face of adversity and loss, taylor has had an important role in documenting the situation of the indigenous minority in contemporary australia. beyond that, destabilizing white readers‟ assumptions about the authority and entitlement of their race, taylor‟s poetry can be seen to contribute to what walter mignolo, among other postcolonial theorists, refers to as “a genealogy of de-colonial thought” and to the production of a de-colonial future. 2 in this sense, it has provided additional evidence that works of art are an important site for negotiating change (levine). coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 although taylor is generally more concerned with theme and content than with the nuances of structure, language and texture necessary for complex artistic expression, the two collections discussed in this article break new ground in our appreciation of australian indigenous verse. writing out of the intense presence of his whole self and embracing a poetic mode that allows an apprehension of, and participation in the quality of his experience, taylor has produced works that impress with their magnitude, compassion and power. as an intimate exploration of secret inner worlds, his poetry will continue to engage and delight our imagination; in its role of acute critical commentary, it is both challenging and compelling, ensuring maximum participatory aesthetic not only by soliciting personal and political responses in non-indigenous australian readers, but also by stimulating readers all over the world to draw parallels across national lines and consider taylor‟s social and political critique in the context of their own national traumas. 1 all quotations from singer songwriter refer to rimfire: poetry from aboriginal australia. 2 drawing on linda t. smith, mignolo defines decoloniality as “long term processes involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic, and psychological divesting of colonial power” (52). these processes, mignolo argues, should lead to the „new humanity‟ envisioned by frantz fanon. see also anne brewster's 'engaging the public intimacy of whiteness: the indigenous protest poetry of romaine moreton.' references beston, john. 1977. „the aboriginal poets in english: kath walker, jack davis, and kevin gilbert.‟ meanjin 36: 446-462. brewster, anne. „„that child is my hero‟: an interview with alf taylor.‟ aboriginal history 31 (2007): 165-177. ____. „engaging the public intimacy of whiteness: the indigenous protest poetry of romaine moreton.‟ journal of the association for the study of australian literature, special issue: the colonial present 8 (2008): 56-76. ____. „humour and the defamiliarization of whiteness in the short fiction of australian indigenous writer alf taylor.‟ journal of postcolonial writing 44 (december 2008): 429-440. coles, nicholas. democratizing literature. college english 48 (november 1986): 664-680. čerče, danica. „„makin‟ it right‟ through the poetry of alf taylor.‟ acta neophilologica 42/12 (2009): 83-91. hage, ghassan. white nation fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. sidney: pluto press, 1998. johnston, tim. „australia says „sorry‟ to aborigines for mistreatment.‟ the new york times (13 february 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/world/asia/13aborigine.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 18 october 2008). levine, george. „reclaiming the aesthetics.‟ falling into theory: conflicting views on reading literatures. ed. h. david richter. boston / new york: bedford / st. martin‟s, 2000. 378-391. maver, igor. „contemporary 'new' aboriginal poetry in english.‟ essays on australian and canadian literature. eds. mirko jurak and igor maver. ljubljana: znanstveni inštitut filozofske fakultete, 2000. 13-20. mcguiness, bruce. „the politics of aboriginal literature.‟ aboriginal writing today. jack davis and bob hodge, eds. canberra: aias, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/world/asia/13aborigine.html?_r=1&oref=slogin coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 mignolo, walter d. the darker side of western modernity: global futures, decolonial options. durham and london: duke university press, 2011. moreton, romaine, alf taylor, and michael j. smith. rimfire: poetry from aboriginal australia. broome: magabala books, 2000. morrissey, philip. „introduction.‟ winds. by alf taylor. broome: magabala books, 1994. mudrooroo, narogin. writing from the fringe: a study of modern aboriginal literature. hyland publishing house, 1990. shoemaker, adam. black words, white pages: aboriginal literature 1929-1988. queensland: university of queensland, 1989. 179-229. smith, linda tuhiwai. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london: zed books, 1999. spivak. gayatri chakravorty. in other worlds: essays in cultural politics. london, new york: methuen, 1987. taylor, alf. winds. broome: magabala books, 1994. ____. „singer songwriter.‟ rimfire: poetry from aboriginal australia. by romaine moreton, alf taylor and michael j. smith. broome: magabala books, 2000. ____. long time now. broome: magabala books, 2001. wheeler, belinda. „introduction: the emerging canon.‟ a companion to australian aboriginal literature. ed. belinda wheeler. rochester, new york: camden house, 2013. 1-13. danica čerče is an assistant professor of literatures in english, teaching at the university of ljubljana, slovenia. her field of research includes american and australian literature, and translation studies. she is the author of pripovedništvo johna steinbecka (2006) and reading steinbeck in eastern europe (2011) and nine book chapters, most recently in east of eden: new and recent essays (2013) and a companion to aboriginal literature (2013). her publications in academic journals include journal of language, literature and culture, antipodes, journal of the association for the study of australian literature, the comparatist, acta neophilologica, slavistična revija, elope, and others. she is on the editorial board of coolabah and steinbeck review. microsoft word tomdrahos15.doc coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 162 patterns in the dust 1 tom drahos copyright©2013 tom drahos. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. the point here is that i’m supposed to write a story. and i think the best way to do it is to re-write heart of darkness but set it in central australia. i see similarities between the congo interior and the outback, in their isolating immensity. there are parallels between kurtz’s inner station and the violence of colonial history. that violence, through various guises, has seeped into our present day narrative of space. stories of mad men hiding out in the vastness of the desert, real and filmic, add a contemporary flavour to conrad’s narrative of rogue agents operating beyond their company’s control. the outback is ripe with pickings for a young writer with a predilection for the uncanny and the bloody. the mythical fantasy outback even comes pre-equipped with equivalent antagonists. these characters are on par with kurtz, and there are also travelers who fit the mold of marlow. mick taylor from wolf creek is kurtz. doc tydon and john grant of wake in fright are kurtz and marlow respectively. douglas crabbe, a truck driver who deliberately crashed a semi-trailer through a crowded kiosk at yulara, is another kurtz. joseph schwab, the kimberly killer who shot dead five people without explanation and was later gunned down by police, makes me think of harlequin. what happened to harlequin? he kept heading upriver. made it a fair way, apparently. i am marlow. i’m casting myself as the traveler in this narrative, leaving my natural space and penetrating into the unknown, heading ‘up-river’, north along the beaten track. such thoughts do beg the question; is someone out there waiting for me? i’m just a strand in the larger fabric of 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacedness-images.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 163 myth, and as i write, so am i written. events may not be under my control, and i may yet gain the opportunity to have words with mr. kurtz. i remember the desert from a family trip many years previous. since then i’ve developed a fixation on australian serial killer folklore. stories of people committing murder in the outback. stories about people, killing people. people vanishing, being absorbed into the landscape. i don’t want to explain this fascination, and in fact i couldn’t. maybe it has something to do with living near the coast. against the comfortable grain of familiar existence in adelaide and coastal australia in general, the outback is the other place, a place i can see lurking beyond the city lights if i stand south of the city, somewhere elevated on the right kind of sultry summer night, with the right kind of eyes. i’m going to go into the desert to try and experience the isolation of the land. i want to understand the psyche of my characters. conrad had the jungle, and i will have the desert. marlow had a river, i will have a highway. *** to begin, i head north from adelaide up the stuart highway. i pass through the flinders ranges, where, incidentally, some of wolf creek was shot. into the outback proper. on to coober pedy. i cross the border into the northern territory. there’s something thrilling about borders. the sand on either side is the same shade, but there’s a moment of recognition: i’m here. where? uluru. alice springs. barrow creek. tennant creek. katherine. turn left. over the border into western australia. kununurra. wyndham. by now i’m very close to the region that schwab stalked, and it’s no longer safe to swim anywhere for fear of crocodiles. south to halls creek, then further south to wolfe creek meteorite crater. west to broome. eighty mile beach. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 164 port hedland. turning inland, newman. plunging into the desert again, kalgoorlie. norseman. the nullarbor. no trees. the road. bitumen. the sky. dust. ceduna. whyalla. adelaide. flinders university. this whole trip as scheduled amounts to 12 500 kilometres. i’ve allowed three weeks to pull it off. i estimate that i need to cover 625 km a day to make it home in time to attend semester two classes. i have that time to soak up the sun and sand and piece together some ideas. that i’m traveling into isolation to dream of madness is a fact that doesn’t escape me. some have joked, myself included, that i’ll never return, never be seen again. in fact, if it gave rise to some flinders university urban legend… well, it might have served a purpose. that would just be a fresh sacrifice to the outback myth. british tourists, infants and pretentious writers; no one is safe. there would, perhaps, be no better ending to this narrative than my own death or disappearance, the absorption of my ‘self’ into the landscape. maybe i am harlequin. after an evening spent ruining conversation by quoting richard milat’s chilling observation that ‘stabbing a woman is like cutting a loaf of bread’ my ever-tolerant friend coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 165 jo has kindly offered to drive me back to the car park where i left my car. when i reach my car something about the vehicle parked next to mine catches my attention and i stop to have a closer look. it’s a northern territory license plate. along its bottom edge it reads: ‘nt – outback’. even in the evening light i can see flecks of red sand on the edges of the plate. the vehicle itself is a ford truck. monstrous in size, it seems to loom over my sedan. i glance at the registration number, but can only make out half of it: 666 *** i flag down jo and point it out to her. “it’s happening,” she says. “it’s all connected.” she drives off, leaving me alone in front of the truck, under a nearly full moon. jo and i have spent the evening discussing my trip, my writing. the unexpected presence of the license plate is serendipitous. the desert i’ve been reading about over the last few months in news stories and history books suddenly seems like a real place. this truck has probably traveled, perhaps regularly, the same highways that i intend to. the license plate even has the word that has been hovering in my psyche since christmas when i decided i was taking this trip. ‘outback.’ this would be a far more poignant scene if, standing under the moonlight, in the presence of sighing eucalypts, i were immediately struck by the significance of the license plate; i actually only really understood what an important plot device it was later on, standing in my kitchen, preparing noodles. and so tonight i’m left with the image of the beast lurking far up the highway and waiting for me in the darkness. he is sharpening his claws and flexing his monstrous tail, breathing steam and chortling to himself. he knows i’m coming. my housemate suggested that seeing this car was the ‘gas-stop experience’. “what do you mean?” i asked. “well perhaps you see that car later on, and realise the killer’s been following you for longer than you realised.” indeed. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 166 our protagonist, hair closely cropped, is wearing a nin t-shirt that reads: ‘now i’m nothing’. he is silhouetted against the moon. reading the license plate over and over, he thinks of the journey ahead of him. he looks up from this omen to the city lights and beyond to a sprawling and impenetrable darkness. it rests over the land, seeming to trail away towards something unspeakable, something as ancient as the dust and the shadows that shroud it. a land beyond and outside of our names for it. fade out. ellipsis. *** … up along the edge of the nighttime desert highway, hundreds of kilometres north of alice springs, the motel’s air conditioning unit has had its last gasp for the evening, a thirty-three degree winter night. i’m naked, folded into a budget room the size of my car’s interior. sweat is collecting under my balls and is making them stick to a cheap plastic seat. an aggressive and unpleasant part of my being has crawled out from inside me and has clawed its way to my shoulder, a comfortable seat next to my ear, with a clear view of the keyboard and the screen. tired and cranky from long hours behind the wheel, his neck hurting from sleeping in the back seat of the statesman every night, lonely and irate, moping in self-absorption, this part of me wants to communicate. he whispers that i have nothing to say. yes, i do. he laughs and asks what it is. i open my mouth and he says: words? yes, i have words to say. silence, and then a low chuckle. what is outside the window? i hesitate. i speak. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 167 “the outback.” that, he caws, is just a word! i peel myself out of the chair and step away from the laptop. i begin to pace the room. the unpleasant part of my being flutters away from my shoulder and starts circling overhead, near the ceiling. he calls down to me, telling me that the outback is destroyed the second i bring my gaze to bear upon it. the carpet is prickly under my feet. the more i listen to him the more my blood boils and my skin starts to itch. he swoops low, reminding me in his throaty rasp that all my experiences are disfigured into words, fallible ciphers. he croaks: you’re trying to write about something real, but you’re using words. words come from me, not the outback. but i process the outback through words. cackling from above. if that is the case, you are definitely not engaging with anything real! there’s a sickening sensation inside me, and to my dismay everything suddenly has meaning. but meaning is constructed of words, so meaning too must originate from me. by implication i can’t discover anything other than what hides in me. there’s no outback, only a projection, an abstraction, and even if i could engage with anything resembling the ‘real’ thing, i couldn’t talk about it anyway. so i’m standing in a motel room, struggling with the revelation that i can’t see the sand for the desert, can’t quantify the sublime without crushing it under the banal, can only engage with a linguistic model of reality, its double; and i, a writer, am realising that my words only describe a hyperreality, a meta-experience, the intercession of myself between reality and my being, mediation, abstractions conveyed through abstractions, and of course this begs a certain question, but before i can articulate it the aggressive and unpleasant self settles back on my shoulder and rasps, hot breath in my ear, stinking of carrion: why bother? *** several minutes later i quit pacing and extinguish the light. i pull a curtain back. from my window i can see across a gravel driveway that separates the budget rooms from the open coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 168 camping space, where retired couples park their oversized caravans, or young families pitch tents. tonight, the camping space is filled with fifty identical, round brown tents. these are quite economical in that they seem easy to set up and take up very little space, despite fitting two or three campers. the tents have been erected to accommodate the several busloads of young tourists who have just arrived at the campsite, mostly english teenagers as far as i can tell. i watch as groups of them mill about, stumbling back and forth between friends, breaking off to bitch about tent partners. these young tourists are not an unfamiliar sight. i first spotted them at the king’s canyon tourist resort, and then a day later at alice springs and then again at an anonymous petrol stop between barrow creek and the devil’s marbles. even in such an enormous place as the outback, for the last week i have been unable to escape them, which leads me to consider that if i travel the same route as they, then i too may be a tourist. tonight, much further along the stuart highway, i’ve run into them once more at a town named dunmarra. let it be said that over half of the so-called ‘towns’ listed in touring atlases are not, strictly speaking, towns as such. they’re petrol stations with beds and showers and alcohol. at the time i paid for my room, several hours ago, dunmarra seemed like a distant frontier outpost, the last petrol stop on the edge of a wasteland. thirty minutes later and the arrival of the brit teens has transformed dunmarra’s ambiance into a high school party. some of the campers are carrying torches, the white beams of which wobble haphazardly between campfires. caught in the flare of a torch beam i see a group of three girls whose pale skin has never seen the sun properly and is now an angry red. they seem to be waving around mobile phones, perhaps hoping for service. even in the low light i see board shorts, novelty sunglasses, cans of energy drink, stuffed koalas, t-shirt signing. each of the young tourists wears a black t-shirt listing their tour’s stopover points, emblazoned with a sort of expeditionary catchphrase across the front, ‘central 2010’. in queue at a restaurant in alice springs several days previous: three of the young travelers, two girls and one boy. the girls are wearing denim jeans cut almost to bikini size, sleeves rolled up on their tour tees. their hair is coloured, their eyeliner making them look like raccoons. i realise how ludicrous it is that they would apply makeup in this heat. the boy is badly sunburned across his thin shoulders, and no wonder, his tour tee is cut into a singlet, exposing underdeveloped muscle tone. all three appear exhausted, pink skin and flushed faces, seemingly unaware of the writer lurking behind them, recording to memory his vivid and lasting impressions of them. the restaurant: plush toy equivalents of wildlife native to the northern territory, endless racks of postcards, bumper stickers, tea towels, place mats. all of these products are overpriced, aimed at tourists. novelty stubby holders. kangaroo and camel jerky. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 169 necklaces with crocodile teeth. hats with feathers. a placard over the bar, wedged between posters for australian breweries, promises ‘real’ outback hospitality, plus the best service in the territory. the ubiquitous map of the top end, with the equally ubiquitous ‘you are here’ arrow. distances from point to point. places of interest. none of it seems to appeal to them though. they are bleary eyed, especially the young man. i listen to them complain about one of their number: “… and you just realise it when you’re all together in a small space. i hate it.” tensions mount on central 2010. a cruel narrative takes form. i picture the interior of their bus during the day, bored and self-absorbed teenagers exchanging furtive glances, ignoring the red sand rushing by outside. i wonder if any of them have noticed the same unshaven, scruffy writer showing up at the same rest areas as them, checking his luggage while glancing furtively in their direction, always seeming to check one bag in particular, always seeming to fix his gaze on the same young tourists. i wonder if even under the desert sun some of them get cold chills when they notice the same silver statesman in every town they pass through. long miles talking to himself. to the horizon, black smoke; but never a report of fires. australia’s iconic fauna, kangaroos and emus, splattered, bloated and stiff along the highway’s edge. these events have taken their toll, and to look at him you could probably guess how many miles he’d come, and what he’d been thinking about. i’m tired and i’m stressed. i decide that it’s time to take a break from myself and my metawriting. i get dressed and step outside. it isn’t much warmer out here than in the motel. i walk towards the highway, past payphones and petrol pumps. petrol here is $1.83 a litre. while the campground buzzes with activity and the restaurant seems semi-active, the service station is deserted. there is no movement along the highway. cicadas chirp, mosquitoes whine, and a variety of nearly undetectable sounds, whispers, mark the transition from day to night. i approach the road and glance back towards the campgrounds; fires are lit and many of the camping brit boppers seem to be watching a movie on a large screen. i stand on the edge of the light thrown from their fire and from their projector screen, feeling as though i’m caught along the fault line between two realities. one of those realities is the isolating and nightmarish outback that i came out here to find. i get the impression that the reality my inadvertent companions are searching for is something else entirely, the paradisiacal desert of postcards and exotic holidays. we came to the same place to find two different things. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 170 to my left: screaming teens, a barbecue, even a dj armed with turntables and a top 40 playlist. flailing limbs and raucous, high pitched singing floating through the air: “…tonight’s gonna be a good, good night!” i turn my back to them and face a landscape already shrouded in darkness; the last washed out tones of purple and orange, and a faint gold light in the sky marking the sun’s descent. a pale disc of moon floats up from over the horizon, seemingly carried on the same breeze that brings the scent of the unknown, perfumed night. there’s something intangible giving off an intense energy just beyond the reach of my eyes, past the range of my hearing. i’m standing right along the highway’s edge, and the thin strip of bitumen acts as a marker, a border separating me from a landscape with its own immense power. it’s an energy that doesn’t clash with my preconceptions, my understandings of it. it simply is, and in the absence of the sun i find that easier to connect with. i can’t see it to ruin it with my gaze of understanding. perhaps the nighttime desert takes me back to my past life as a primeval being, slithering through the dust, before we had invented language. i wish that at this point i could successfully rip off conrad’s line about going up the congo river and its similitude to a journey back in time. i’m not sure i can properly assimilate it in this context. a highway isn’t quite a river. going up the river was like going back in time because it was a journey further and further away from familiarity. conrad construed history and the unfamiliar as being inextricably combined, both distancing that which he had become accustomed to. he saw the undeveloped jungle as a link to prehistory, pre-civilisation. the river was there long before marlow, conrad, or anyone. the highway on the other hand was built. a highway will never be like going back in time, not until post-civilisation. until then, a highway will remain an artery beating the pulse of the familiar through an unknown space. the highway is like stuart’s name and the line he drew across the map, trying to fill in the blank. i step over the road, towards the scrub, my shirt sticking to my body. the heat of the day is still rising from the bitumen and the sun baked dirt on either side. i look up the highway’s length. it is a grey line vanishing into a solid wall of darkness after less than a hundred metres. the light from the campfires is farther behind me and i turn back to the scrub, stepping away from the highway now, feeling the dirt give a little under my boots. if anyone were watching from the campground, they might see a tall figure disappearing into the night, as though being swallowed. the musky odour of some creature unseen mixes in with the dry scent of dirt and parched mulga and spinifex. dead leaves crunch underfoot and i’m treading very carefully, feeling each footstep, holding my hands out in front of me. my eyes adjust to the moonlight and a termite mound previously hidden in shadow gives the impression of having materialised in front of me. i step back, startled. it is several inches taller than me and now that i can see it, coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 171 it holds the moon’s light. it seems to glow softly. i feel as though i am standing before a monolith, omniscient and silent, unknowable. i try to imagine the early european invaders’ reactions to an unfamiliar land. the trees here shed their bark and shimmer in the heat, glowing white after dark, whispering like ghosts. the swans are black instead of white. the seasons are reversed. i must control this land. i will civilise this place. the outback came into being, a badland, a space where colonial fears were banished, the wild beyond settlement and outside appropriation. that which couldn’t be subdued was rejected. the outback’s the other place. it’s everywhere that we are not, always over the hill, beyond the horizon: a narrative, non-existent, myth. not a place, an idea. but the concept had its origin in the human mind. this is not uswe are civilised. but the other is a projection. the ‘outback’ slips away from me now; just a word, like any of the others i choose. this is a moment of recognition, but that description is inadequate for those are still only ‘words’. this is all still processed, revised, construed, represented, and then re-represented. everything i see, placed with intent; a map of reality. i peel the map back, a scab, but the thing underneath is without form, and cannot be described. i fall to my knees and slide my hands into the sand, marveling at its warmth. all around me the mulga sighs. a breeze touches my damp forehead and i look back up at the termite mound, now towering over me. in the moonlight i can make out the shapes of trees and other termite mounds, but their borders are hazy, and they seem little more than shadows. for a few moments all words taste alien and i have trouble wrapping my mouth or tongue around anything other than a grunt, a sigh, a howl. yes, i am just an animal in an environment. fucking and killing seem both rousing and banal in equal measures. traveling alone means that there is no one to snap me out of my thoughts, so each thought gains its own terrible strength. thoughts of violence become more potent, sickening in their intensity. kneeling in the nighttime desert an awareness blossoms inside of me, of my own appalling capacity for action, but after a few moments i start to think whimsically of past lovers and present fantasies before everything melds irrationally and with a terrifying suddenness, and i can no longer separate thoughts of desire from idle daydreams of cruelty. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 172 in the same instant that i’m fantasising about stroking a swedish backpacker’s naked shoulders, the ubiquitous sexual partner in any halfway exotic situation, i’m wondering how much resistance one gets from a bushman’s nicotine stained teeth when one taps them with a hammer. dental records are damning, so they’re the first to go. fingerprints and faces must be skinned, the flesh dried and burned. hair can blow away and leave a trail so it too goes on the flame. the wallet: each individual identifying card shredded and incinerated, the money pocketed, the leather added to the coals. the body stripped, the clothes torched. the fire must be kept burning high in the fragrant desert night, so that when i tear any tattooed lumps of flesh away from a broken, hemorrhaging corpse, they sizzle and burn quickly, and thoroughly. the recognisable symmetry of the human form must be destroyed, its distinguishing features obliterated. i’m not so naïve as to think that i could burn an entire body over a campfire, but i suspect that i could ensure that it would be unrecognisable to anyone passing by. the bones can be turned to paste with the same hammer that erased a dental history. the organs stamped into the desert soil and spread over a wide radius. the art of transfiguring a person into a stain. one must create the impression that a trail has been discovered, never the body. these thoughts blend into erotic images of the swede’s blonde hair trailing away over sweat soaked sheets, her blue eyes turned towards me, telling me to come away from the laptop, she’s lonely, she’s cold. i’m disgusted, but also kind of bored. i know there’s a resilient part of my mind conditioned to condemn such thoughts but it’s all just so meaningless at this point in time, and my mind feels hollow. yes, i’m aware that it’s immoral to be toying with these thoughts but i’m too tired to be bothered calling myself out on my depravity and i just roll with it. i stand. my knees protest and i realise i’ve been in the scrub for a while. i blink and get my bearings. turning, i start to backtrack to the highway. nearly blind in the darkness, i occasionally walk into spinifex spines and jump back, cursing. conrad was talking about two things, we presume, in his title; the heart of the so-called ‘dark continent’ and the dark heart of brutality beating a steady pulse beneath the ‘civilised’ exterior of the modern man. at this point of the narrative i’m supposed to start to become aware of my own heart of darkness, by ‘finding myself’ in the nighttime darkness of the central australian desert. heavy-handed metafictive techniques and bad similes abound in these parts, like crocodiles. i remember a postcard i drafted while i was still in adelaide. it’s more poetic than the desert inspires me to be, and it seems that the expectations were richer than the outcome. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 173 “hello! it's very warm here, and though i miss you, i'm comforted by the thought of lying face down in ancient sand, letting the sun brown the back of my neck and breathing in the scent of dried eucalypt and dry dirt. i dream fondly of nothingness. i'm alert to all possibilities. i feel on edge, but never better. touching the ground here is like running my hand over a live circuit. everything's alive. running low on bullets. they're closing in! i look forward to the return to clean sleeping conditions, just as i look forward to the approaching, utterly inevitable comedown, the rehabilitation to society. i'm out on a limb here. i like it. i don't want to return. but apparently i'm supposed to. do you believe in fate? i do. but i also believe we have to do our level best to achieve desired outcomes. but when you become aware of how blissful it can be, to do nothing, to feel yourself wasting away and not only enjoy it, but appreciate it entirely... all my worries evaporate. just like everything else i can see. no water out here. plenty of air though. shades of blue i didn't know about. and a grain of sand for every person in the world. i miss you. you're in my thoughts, and my dreams. i stopped having nightmares the second i exited the city. everything i believed is true. this is a journey of discovery, fulfillment, and affirmation. i'm alive. i'm walking along the surface of something that breathes, has an awareness. i'm running out of space on the back of this postcard. go check your inbox. i have plenty to say.” i have nothing to say. i reach the highway and glance back at the darkness, an invisible landscape. i hover over that line in the sand. high pitched shrieks from the campground; some of the girls running about in the shadows in between tents. orange light from the fires flicker and play through their swirling hair. as i walk back to my room i pass three of them, all gangly limbs and faceless in this light, hunched forward on their knees in the shadows, peering intently into a darkened space that i think leads to underneath the budget rooms. wanting to touch base with my human brothers and sisters i say conversationally: “hey are you guys looking for big moths?” as one they turn to look at me and i can’t see their expressions. i wonder how i appear to them; a tall figure emerging from the humid darkness without warning and standing above them. moments turn to dust and scatter in the heat of the night. after a lengthy silence one of them responds. “no. toads.” i don’t move. “oh.” coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 174 when i checked in i was tempted to use an alias. several nights in various budget motel rooms had alerted me to the fact that no one seemed to ask for identification. at one point i had misquoted the license plate numbers on my car to a clerk, without even meaning to, and nothing had come of it. perhaps i had entered some consequence-free realm. back in my room i’m pacing again, running one hand through my hair and scratching at my new beard. my laptop screen turns to a glowing screensaver and i flick a key irritably. before long, the screensaver comes on again and i ignore it this time. i kick my luggage around the room, trying to think of something to say. i come across some hastily scrawled notes from earlier in my travels. i grab one. ‘no sense of something gone wrong here. i’m struck by how not unsettling snowtown is. i felt that here was a town where we expect to find a trace of something eerie, but that expectation alone is all we find. the beast in snowtown rides shotgun with me down the main drag and then we play hide and seek. because i want snowtown to upset me. so i have to deposit that sensation myself. it’s nowhere in town. ‘which leads me to realise something about my journey into the outback. if i’m searching for the mythical outback, the outback of madmen, then i’m not going to find anything out there. i’m going to carry it with me.’ i put the note down, and glance back at the laptop, turn to see myself naked in the mirror, covered in scratches from the last couple of days. i think of the gun, buried in my luggage, and not for the first time i consider that tonight i’m probably the strangest and most dangerous person at the dunmarra wayside inn. dimly, i become aware that it’s in my power to take the map that you know, and re-arrange it. this is the map that has marginalia next to words like ‘snowtown’ and ‘port arthur’. i could create new territories of violence. i can take the name dunmarra and punch it into your psyche. this isn’t a compulsion to violence, rather a mundane comprehension, and one that makes my stomach turn but in a most un-dramatic fashion. i step outside into the still warm night and lean forward into a steady lope, disappearing from the halo of fluorescent light, becoming a shadow in a wall of shadow. i retreat across the highway and into the scrub. no, not really. as a writer i know that at this point i can do anything i please, safe in the knowledge that i’m secure. if i want to get away with murder, i can arrange it. idly, i toy with plot developments, and begin to contemplate unspeakable acts, even though none of it really coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 175 appeals to me in any way. right now, surrounded by young people, i find it distasteful. any fantasy is vaguely appealing from the safety of a comfort zone, but out here, thinking of murder, i feel ill. but i still think that i should probably end this a certain way, with a very specific image. i walk to the window and pull the curtain back once more, and stare up into the night sky. across from me all the fires burn low and it’s silent in the desert. light from the full moon bathes my face, and a restless backpacker dreams she sees a spectre. she blinks and the apparition vanishes. frowning she slides back into a broken sleep. a chill breeze strokes her cheek, reminding her where she is. the stars are fire in the sky and from somewhere unseen i hear a dingo howling, low and mournful. away from the roadhouse, beyond the highway lies a sprawling and impenetrable darkness, but i can’t tell if it’s conrad’s or my own, or maybe even just the absence of light. the outback is hiding in the darkness. it’s always been the other place; it belongs in the night, hidden, unseen and imagined. if i could dissect the space, i’d extract the labels and tear away the walls of comprehension, leaving only dust, atoms. but even these are still only words. i let the curtain fall in place and slide back into the shadows of the motel room, alone and uninspired. *** along the shore of a place called lake hart i came across finger drawn lines in the sand; someone had taken the time to leave traces on the landscape. i read messages like; ‘kerstin is in the outback’ and ‘manu davide and stefano stay in the outback’. i looked up, looked around. i had walked several hundred metres from my car and the parking rest area. across several sand dunes, past the burned out skeleton of a van and over a train line, swiping at flies the whole way, i set foot on the beach. if i squinted, i could see water off in the distance, but there seemed to be more shore than water and as if in a dream i was standing in a great empty space. the topography had been leveled and i faced a flat and open expanse of land. great clumps of desiccated salt all around, crunching underfoot. a dry heat, rising off the sand; painfully bright light reflecting from every surface and beads of sweat turning cold under several layers of clothing. a whisper or a sigh goes unheard in the soft desert wind; let it be said that these winds sting, even when they’re gentle. sand was everywhere but not to my surprise. beyond the lake the colour of the dirt wasn’t quite red, but it wasn’t brown. there were hues of orange, copper and bronze. sand scattered into the air, whirling briefly before coming to rest again, dry and warm. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 176 the road stretched out beyond the apex of the horizon and i saw a car, a rental van, travel up its length, glinting, receding until it was merely a point of light itself. it vanished, and everything was still. *** tom drahos is a phd candidate in creative writing at flinders university, south australia. his research interests include the performance theory of antonin artaud, the analytical strategies of slavoj žižek and the work of slovenian entity laibach. (flinders university australia. email: tom.drahos@flinders.edu.au) coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 the carnivalesque in george macdonald’s the light princess osama t. jarrar arab american university, jenin fairytales70@yahoo.com copyright©2016 osama t. jarrar. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: in this article, i apply mikhail bakhtin’s concept of carnival to an analysis of george macdonald’s the light princess (1864). first, i define the concept of ‘carnival’ as explained in bakhtin’s rabelais and his world (1965). the subversive characteristic of the carnival which bakhtin writes of is paramount in fantasy literature, of which the light princess exemplifies various elements. brian attebery says, “fantastic literature, as a literature that provokes reinterpretations of ‘reality’ and the boundaries of what is known and accepted, plays an important role in bakhtin’s criticism” (117). second, i provide an overview of various critical responses to the ideological function of carnival, applying a special focus on how children’s literature criticism benefits from carnival by referring to critics such as john stephens and maria nikolajeva. finally, i examine ways in which macdonald uses the carnivalesque mode to convey his ideas of social reform. key words: carnival, humour, parody, children’s literature. introduction george macdonald’s the light princess (1864) embodies a carnivalesque interrogative quality, in the sense that carnival creates space for macdonald to release the subversive potential of the story, his criticism of received paradigms of behaviour and morality. bakhtin’s concept of carnival, as expressed in rabelais and his world, incorporates various techniques and devices, such as laughter, punning, hyperbole, and humour, that have “a tremendous capacity for parody, debasing, and travesty” (gardiner 50) of official culture, providing conceptual bases for analysing the story’s carnivalesque quality. simon dentith defines carnivalised writing as “writing which has taken the carnival spirit into itself and mailto:fairytales70@yahoo.com coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 thus reproduces, within its own structures and by its own practice, the characteristic inversions, parodies and discrownings of carnival proper” (65). macdonald uses carnivalesque images and motifs that serve to blur the boundaries between seriousness and humour, and through which he provokes the reader’s mockery of the puerility, cruelty and inanity of the official cultures of adults. his carnivalesque attitude resonates with bakhtin’s thinking about official cultures: “the serious aspects of class structure are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation” (90). the temporality and spatiality of the mode of carnivalisation within the story express macdonald’s parody of the existing social order. at the same time, macdonald empowers the unofficial culture of children over the official culture of adults by creating for child-heroes a pastoral world in which they speak and behave in ways oppositional to normative expectations. by juxtaposing the pastoral world (freedom) with the courtly world (authority), macdonald’s aim is quintessentially carnivalistic. he makes topsy turvy parodies of the courtly world that function as a frontal assault on the centre of authority, employing the carnivalesque mode to express nonconformity with paradigms of middle-class socialisation. the moral force of the story’s ending, which is about the liberty of the child, is immanent within all of the earlier episodes, so that the moral liberty of the child becomes, retroactively, the motivating spirit of the mode of carnivalisation in the story. macdonald’s spiritual vision, however, is transformative (that is, redemptive). his views are grounded on individual moral reform, rather than on structural or institutional social reform. carnival and the carnivalesque in rabelais and his world, bakhtin traces the history of the popular cultural festivities of the middle ages and the impact of francois rabelais (1483–1553), a prominent french renaissance humanist scholar, upon that history. according to bakhtin, the medieval carnival facilitated a disruption of the normal social order and a temporary reversal of the power structure, since “in the world of the carnival all hierarchies are cancelled” (251). the carnival was revolutionary: “in the middle ages folk humor existed and developed outside the official sphere of high ideology and literature, but precisely because of its unofficial existence, it was marked by exceptional radicalism, freedom, and ruthlessness” (71). fools and clowns became powerful and important, and they mocked and challenged the dominant discourse of authorities through the traditional language of the carnival, including laughter which, according to bakhtin, “overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. its idiom is never used by violence and authority” (90). the carnival was about freedom. “as opposed to the official feast,” bakhtin argues, “carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. it was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. (10) coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 during the period of the carnival, the normal social order was suspended and people experienced a temporary liberation from established social hierarchies. carnival allows for a significant space of what bakhtin calls “the material bodily element” (79), celebrating the pleasures of the corporeal body by indulging excessively in sex, violence, food, and drink. it celebrates “exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness” (303) as expressions of freedom. the carnivalesque mode incorporates various images and techniques, including laughter which, according to bakhtin, serves to parody the existing social order: for the medieval parodist everything without exception was comic. laughter was as universal as seriousness: it was directed at the whole world, at history, at all societies, at ideology … this is why medieval parody played a completely unbridled game with all that is most sacred and important from the point of view of official ideology. (84) this kind of laughter starts with that which we all share, the body, and its force carries beyond the edges of what is commonly acceptable and permitted, potentially leading to a alteration (not necessarily permanent) in what is socially acceptable and/or valued: carnival laughter and mockeries are corporate play. carnival depends on common senses of the ridiculous, in-jokes, and knowledges. centrifugal language — that is, the everyday slangy language at the margins of the marketplace (and playground) — becomes part of a shared ‘laughing word,’ which may in turn initiate a moral reorganisation. (johnston 139) carnival therefore encompasses a “time-out” from the existing social order in which people enjoyed a momentary suspension of societal restrictions, subverting and liberating the assumptions of dominant discourses through using common ideas and expressions that are taken from everyday life but elevated to the status of official language. the ideological function of carnival the ideological function of carnival as bakhtin conceptualised it has provoked a variety of critical responses, which can be summarised in two major categories. first, carnival can have a transgressive potential, since it creates space for a disguised interrogation of authorities. michael gardiner, for example, locates bakhtin’s carnival within “an alternative ‘social space’ of freedom, abundance and equality” (45), arguing that carnival “transgresses the usual norms and rules that govern everyday life” (46). carnival for gardiner is antiauthoritarian, since it “effectively broke down the formalities of hierarchy and the inherited differences between different social classes, ages and castes, replacing established traditions and canons with a ‘free and familiar’ social interaction based on the principles of coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 mutual cooperation, solidarity and equality” (52). second, however, carnival can be viewed as an officially sanctioned relief during a limited period of misrule which effectively maintains the status quo rather than subverts it. m. keith booker argues that “despite the significance of the carnival as an arena for the staging of subversive energies, one must not forget that the carnival itself is in fact a sanctioned form of “subversion” whose very purpose is to sublimate and defuse the social tensions that might lead to genuine subversion — a sort of opiate of the masses” (5-6). simon dentith succinctly describes the predominant critique of the ideological function of carnival as anti-authoritarian: the most common objection to bakhtin’s view of carnival as an antiauthoritarian force that can be mobilized against the official culture of church and state, is that on the contrary it is part of that culture; in the typical metaphor of this line of argument, it is best seen as a safety-valve, which in some overall functional way reinforces the bonds of authority by allowing for their temporary suspension. (73) children’s literature criticism benefits from bakhtin’s concept of carnival as a means of critique or complicity. john stephens writes that the aspect of carnival in children’s literature includes, first, texts that “offer the characters ‘time-out’ from the habitual constraints of society but incorporate a safe return to social normality,” serving as a “safetyvalve” to the moral and didactic purposes of the status quo; and second, texts that are “endemically subversive of such things as social authority, received paradigms of behaviour and morality, and major literary genres associated with children’s literature” (121). stephens defines carnival in children’s literature as being “grounded in a playfulness which situates itself in positions of nonconformity. it expresses opposition to authoritarianism and seriousness, and is often manifested as parody of prevailing literary forms and genres, or as literature in non-canonical forms” (121). the carnivalesque mode, according to stephens, is intertextual since it “frequently takes the specific form of parody or travesty of a pretext, and its purpose often seems to be an iconoclastic gesture attempting to subvert what is perceived as a dominant discourse” (116). maria nikolajeva similarly argues that bakhtin “applies the concept of carnival to literature, viewing it as a narrative device used to describe reality in a distorting mirror, in a state of temporary deviation from the existing order, as well as total freedom from societal restrictions” (voice 10). she invites scholars of children’s literature to embrace “bakhtin’s overall view of literature as carnival, a symbolic representation of a socially liberating process, a subversive, that is, disguised, interrogation of authorities” (10). nikolajeva elsewhere writes that carnival is applicable to children’s literature and often takes the form of “time-out” from the restrictions of adult authority in which the return to normality serves either to enforce established values or to challenge the existing social order: “carnival theory enables us to see how power reversal works and decide whether return to order cancels the time-out or has some subversive effect” (aesthetic 90). for stephens and nikolajeva, carnival in children’s literature can therefore have a liberating effect, transgressing against established social practices; alternatively, it can be coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 conservative, complying with the status quo. mockery of the courtly world the light princess tells of a king and a queen who finally have a daughter after a long time without children. they invite everyone to attend the christening, but the king forgets to invite his ill-tempered sister princess makemnoit, who out of spite and revenge casts a spell over the newborn child to be “light of body,” leaving her floating and flying, and “light of spirit,” always “screeching with laughter” (9) even at serious issues. astonished at his daughter’s weightlessness and carefree disposition, the king restricts her freedom, putting her under constant surveillance. he expresses to his wife his concerns at the risk weightlessness may involve for their daughter when she gets married: “just think! if she were to have children! in the course of a hundred years the air might be as full of floating children as of gossamers in autumn” (12). the king seeks advice from philosophers, a spiritualist by the name of hum-drum who prescribes a mental cure, and a physician named kopy-keck who recommends a physical cure, but all their solutions are absurd and ineffectual. realising that the princess regains her gravity only while she is immersed in water, hum-drum and kopy-keck advise the king “to bury her alive for three years; in the hope that, as the water did her so much good, the earth would do her yet more” (22). frustrated in his efforts to find a cure for her weightlessness, the king gives the princess an “awful whipping” (23), on the theory that crying, as hum-drum and kopy-keck suggest, may bring back her lost gravity. the princess escapes the absurdities and restrictions of the adult world and finds refuge in the pastoral world of a lake, which provides her with a social space of freedom, devoid of the fear and repression represented by the king, humdrum and kopy-keck. a prince from a neighbouring country sets off in search of a wife. he comes upon the princess in the lake, and thinking that she is drowning, he rushes into the water and soon finds outs about her weightlessness. he falls in love with the princess, and their swimming together, expressed in a state of undress, suggests sexual connotations: the prince took off his scarf, then his sword-belt, then his tunic, and tied them all together, and let them down. but the line was far too short. he unwound his turban, and added it to the rest, when it was all but long enough; and his purse completed it. the princess just managed to lay hold of the knot of money, and was beside him in a moment. this rock was much higher than the other, and the splash and the dive were tremendous. the princess was in ecstasies of delight, and their swim was delicious. (32) upon learning that the prince has fallen in love with the princess, princess makemnoit deploys a slithering snake that drains the lake by creating a hole in its bottom. the prince sacrifices himself for the sake for the princess, using his body to block the hole through coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 which the remaining water is flowing. indifferent to his situation, the princess sits in a boat near the prince while the water rises, almost drowning him. realising at last the risk to which the prince is subjecting himself, the princess throws herself into the water and saves him. as a result, she regains her physical and emotional gravity. she changes from a conceited girl to a loving, compassionate woman. the king, however, “had already gone home to dinner” (44) during his daughter’s transformation. the story ends on a happy note: makemnoit drowns in the lake, the land becomes moist and fertile again, and the prince and the princess marry and have many children — a sign of fecundity, which the king and the queen lack. the content and style of the light princess annoyed some moralists of the age. not only did john ruskin, argues knoepflmacher, express serious misgivings about the story’s content as being inappropriate for young readers due to erotic encounters between characters, but he also disliked its style (ventures 138). macdonald sent an unpublished manuscript letter of the story to ruskin, who told macdonald “[you] cannot laugh in any exuberant or infectious manner — and the parts which are intended to be laughable are weak.” according to ruskin, macdonald’s insight allows him to “see too deeply” to function as a humorist (138). knoepflmacher remarks that ruskin wanted the story “to be refined into a more earnest narrative such as his own king of the golden river” (138) which attacks greed in the form of materialism, with magic as a liberating element that questions established moral values. the carnivalesque quality of the light princess allows macdonald to criticise received paradigms of behaviour and morality without being earnestly didactic. through punning and commentary, for example, macdonald contrasts the sober tone of the king with the playful tone of the queen to provoke the reader’s humour at an exalted authority and established patriarchal values that regard men as the epitome of rationality. peter stallybrass and allon white view punning as a form of “what bakhtin calls grammatica jocose whereby grammatical order is transgressed to reveal erotic and obscene or merely materially satisfying counter-meaning” (10-11). k. arthur similarly argues that the pun in bakhtinian carnival violates and so unveils the structure of prevailing (pre-vailing) convention; and it provokes laughter. samuel beckett’s punning pronouncement ‘in the beginning was the pun’ sets pun against official word and at the same time, as puns often do, sets free a chain of other puns. so, too, carnival sets itself up in a punning relationship with official culture and enables a plural, unfixed, comic view of the world. (qtd. in stallybrass and white 11) punning therefore has a transgressive function, and part of this is that in bakhtinian style punning serves to provoke humour at the official culture of adults, illuminating the relativity of the existing social order and its values. stephens similarly writes that the discourse of carnival in children’s literature “is often idiomatic, and rich in a play of signifiers which foregrounds the relativity of sign-thing relationships, and hence the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 relativity of prevailing ‘truths’ and ideologies” (121-2). the queen’s playful tone clearly demonstrates this feature. the king quarrels with his wife about her ambivalent use of the word “light” in “light-footed,” “light-fingered,” “light-haired” and “light-heired.” the narrator’s commentary mocks the intellectual capacity of the king and commends the intellectual intuition of the queen, and much of this is conveyed through punning to which the king is oblivious: “it is a good thing to be light-hearted, i am sure, whether she be ours or not.” “it is a bad thing to be light-headed,” answered the queen, looking with prophetic soul far into the future. “tis a good thing to be light-handed,” said the king. “tis a bad thing to be light-fingered,” answered the queen. “tis a good thing to be light-footed,” said the king. “tis a bad thing —” began the queen; but the king interrupted her. “in fact,” said he, with the tone of one who concludes an argument in which he has had only imaginary opponents, and in which, therefore, he has come off triumphant — “in fact, it is a good thing altogether to be light-bodied.” “but it is a bad thing altogether to be light-minded,” retorted the queen, who was beginning to lose her temper.” (10-11) here the linguistic playfulness, a common feature of carnivalesque interrogative texts, reveals macdonald’s transgression of the king’s dignity, in the sense that his inability to devise puns invites a carnivalesque humour of his puerility, which is made intelligible for the reader through narratorial commentary: “but it was not this reflection on his hair that arrested him; it was the double use of the word light. for the king hated all witticisms, and punning especially. and besides, he could not tell whether the queen meant light-haired or light-heired; for why might she not aspirate her vowels when she was exasperated herself?” (11). the story’s carnivalesque quality is pervasive; for instance, it undermines the dignity of the king even as he speaks: now the queen was much cleverer than the king, and had begun already to suspect that “this effect defective came by cause.” “i am sure she is ours,” answered she. “but we ought to have taken better care of her at the christening. people who were never invited ought not to have been present.” “oh, ho!” said the king, tapping his forehead with his forefinger, “i have it all. i’ve found her out. don’t you see it, queen? princess makemnoit has bewitched her.” “that’s just what i say,” answered the queen. “i beg your pardon, my love; i did not hear you. — john! bring the steps i get on my throne with.” for he was a little king with a great throne, like many other kings. (7) the narrator’s commentary here undermines the king’s sense of intuition and portrays his coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 behaviour in ludicrous terms. the episode closes off with a reminder of the king’s slight stature, which is clearly intended to dispel any regal dignity he might otherwise have. punning and commentary therefore serve a comic effect. since punning and humour serve to mock the courtly world, the carnivalesque is at play. macdonald uses the disguise motif, a common element of carnival, as a narrative strategy that interpellates readers to the ideology in the story, the writer’s empowerment of the unofficial culture of children over the official culture of adults. to be near the princess, the prince enters the king’s palace in “disguise” and requests to be made “shoeblack” (38) to the princess in order to offer himself to break makemnoit’s spell by using his body to block the hole from which the water is flowing. the narrator’s commentary, “it was rather cunning in the prince to request such an easy post, for the princess could not possibly soil as many shoes as other princesses” (38), serves to juxtapose the cunning of the prince with the simplemindedness of the king: so he knocked at the door of the king’s counting-house, where it was all but a capital crime to disturb him. when the king heard the knock he started up, and opened the door in a rage. seeing only the shoeblack, he drew his sword. this, i am sorry to say, was his usual mode of asserting his regality when he thought his dignity was in danger. but the prince was not in the least alarmed. “please your majesty, i’m your butler,” said he. “my butler! you lying rascal! what do you mean?” “i mean, i will cork your big bottle.” “is the fellow mad?” bawled the king, raising the point of his sword. “i will put a stopper — plug — what you call it, in your leaky lake, grand monarch,” said the prince. (41) disguise and figurative language have a liberating effect, since they provoke the reader’s laughter at the king’s incompetence. through disguise, macdonald assigns power to the prince rather than to the king, and part of this is portrayed by exposing the insecurity of the king when confronted with strangers. additionally, the king’s inability to understand a simple metaphor shows his simplemindedness. the threat to resort to violence makes him less frightening than ridiculous, especially since it is made against someone who has actually come to help him, a fact that he also fails to comprehend. the princess’s exuberant laughter is emancipatory, illuminating macdonald’s parody of middle-class values that enforce prohibition, fear and limitation. “when she heard that the enemy was on his way to besiege her papa’s capital, she laughed hugely; but when she was told that the city would certainly be abandoned to the mercy of the enemy’s soldiery — why, then she laughed immoderately” (12). her laughter has the liberating effect that bakhtin ascribes to carnival laughter, since it exposes the king’s liability in dealing with his daughter’s loss of gravity. for bakhtin, carnival laughter “is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. it asserts and denies, it buries and revives” (11-12). when the king and the queen converse about their daughter’s carefree coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 disposition, for instance, they meet “outbursts of laughter over their heads; and looking up with indignation, saw her floating at full length in the air above them, whence she regarded them with the most comical appreciation of the position” (13). the king’s resentment now changes into discipline against his daughter: “the king grew more apprehensive with increasing years, till at last he would not allow her to walk abroad at all without some twenty silken cords fastened to as many parts of her dress, and held by twenty noblemen” (22). cruelty and, as already mentioned, even violence follow. the narrator’s intrusions invite evaluation of macdonald’s deep distaste for middle-class values that enforced physical and mental punishment of children as a necessary condition for their reform. macdonald therefore makes a direct frontal engagement with the centre of authority through which he parodies received paradigms of behaviour and morality. as noted previously, the carnivalesque mode is hyperbolic, comic and parodic. by juxtaposing serious and comic narrative modes, macdonald parodies contemporary metaphysical and empirical modes of understanding the world. gisela kreglinger writes: “the contemporary victorian tendency to move from theology to metaphysics to empiricism, and thus a solely material and scientific understanding of reality, is inverted in this story” (95). a parody with a transgressive effect, j. g. riewald argues, “is neither mere simian imitation nor uncontrolled modulation. it is a form of humorous yet controlled exaggeration. and it is exactly that quality of controlled exaggeration of the salient characteristics of its subject in which lies the value of parody as criticism” (127). the comic, hyperbolic characterisation of hum-drum and kopy-keck demonstrates macdonald’s parody of entrenched ideologies of the age. hum-drum and kopy-keck diagnose the princess’s illness and prescribe ludicrous and absurd solutions that invite the reader’s mockery of their dogmatism. to regain her gravity, hum-drum, for example, believes that the princess must study every department of its history — its animal history; its vegetable history; its mineral history; its social history; its moral history; its political history, its scientific history; its literary history; its musical history; its artistical history; above all, its metaphysical history. she must begin with the chinese dynasty and end with japan. but first of all she must study geology, and especially the history of the extinct races of animals — their natures, their habits, their loves, their hates, their revenges. (18) kopy-keck’s diagnosis is as absurd and ineffectual as that of his friend: from some cause or other, of no importance to our inquiry, the motion of her heart has been reversed. that remarkable combination of the suction and the forcepump works the wrong way — i mean in the case of the unfortunate princess: it draws in where it should force out, and forces out where it should draw in. the offices of the auricles and the ventricles are subverted … my proposal for her cure is this: — “phlebotomize until she is reduced to the last point of safety … when she is coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 reduced to a state of perfect asphyxy, apply a ligature to the left ankle …” (19) through parody macdonald makes frontal assault on the courtly world as represented by the king, hum-drum and kopy-keck. macdonald also criticizes the power of institutionalized knowledge as well as nonsense masquerading as academic discourse. these figures of inversion and turning inside out and upside down are quintessentially carnivalesque. the pastoral world of the lake and the corporeal body macdonald transgresses against paradigms of middle-class socialisation by creating a pastoral world for the characters in which they may speak and behave in ways oppositional to normative social expectations. the prince’s and the princess’s pleasure in the corporeal body, for example, is no longer suppressed. carnival celebrated “the material body” in which people indulged in food and sex that freed them from restriction. the pastoral world of the lake clearly demonstrates this feature. sexuality, “generally displaced into the removal of clothing” in children’s literature (stephens 142), is a recurring motif in the story and its ideological function is expressed in the swimming episodes — mainly, the characters’ state of undress that invites transgressive connotations. the structure of the pastoral world of the lake has therefore an interrogative effect, since the lake provides the princess and the prince with a safe environment that frees them from any form of suppression: “the palace was built on the shores of the loveliest lake in the world; and the princess loved this lake more than father or mother” (20). as he approaches the lake the prince wonders about the strange sounds he hears in the direction of the water, rushes to help, and starts to undress looking over the lake, he saw something white in the water; and, in an instant, he had torn off his tunic, kicked off his sandals, and plunged in. he soon reached the white object, and found that it was a woman. there was not light enough to show that she was a princess, but quite enough to show that she was a lady, for it does not want much light to see that. (25, italics added) the italicised phrase illuminates a social habit of middle-class victorian women; that is, that “the princess lacks the elaborate swimming apparel with which victorian ladies conceal their bodies” (knoepflmacher, george 344). the princess accepts the prince’s request for a “fall” in the lake, but as she is undecided at first, “i do not know. perhaps it would not be proper,” she becomes defiant later, “but i don’t care. at all events, as we have fallen in, let us have a swim together” (27). the prince’s and the princess’s state of undress could thus be viewed as a condition of carnivalesque freedom from societal restrictions, or even a rebellion against them. the narrator’s commentary illuminates his untroubled view of the children’s liberating behaviour: “the condition of her dress, increasing her usual difficulty in walking, compelled her to cling to him; and he could hardly persuade himself coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 that he was not in a delightful dream, notwithstanding the torrent of musical abuse with which she overwhelmed him” (27). she instructs the prince: you see where that green light is burning? that is the window of my room. now if you would just swim there with me very quietly, and when we are all but under the balcony, give me such a push — up you call it — as you did a little while ago, i should be able to catch hold of the balcony, and get in at the window; and then they may look for me till to-morrow morning! (28) urging her to keep their encounters a secret, the prince cautions the princess: “don’t tell” (28), a narrative event of ideological significance. deborah gorham writes that “in polite victorian discourse, the idea that a young girl could have any sexual thoughts at all was simply bypassed. it was part of the victorian belief system that girls were not only innocent of sensuality, they were ignorant of it” (54). mostly expressed in secret, the children’s behaviour transgresses middle-class values. macdonald’s eroticisation of the swimming episodes annoyed some prudish moralists of the age. ruskin, as noted previously, criticised the story’s content as being detrimental to young readers, who, according to ruskin, should not be exposed to eroticism in the manner in which it is depicted in the story. comparing macdonald to ruskin, knoepflmacher argues that “on sexual matters,” macdonald was “the greater iconoclast” (ventures 140). this is partly due to his refusal to “desexualize” the story (139), overlooking ruskin’s criticism of the detrimental impact it could have upon children. knoepflmacher quotes ruskin’s 22 july 1863 letter to macdonald as evidence of this attitude toward the story: it is too amorous through out — and to some temperaments would be quite mischievous. you are too pure minded yourself to feel this — but i assure you the swimming scenes and love scenes would be to many children seriously harmful. — not that they would have to be cut out — but to be done in a simpler and less telling way. we will chat over this. pardon my positive way of stating these things — it is my inferiority to you in many noble things which enables me to feel them and prevents you. (qtd in knoepflmacher, ventures 140) the swimming episodes clearly express an ideological intent, macdonald’s interrogation of middle-class socialisation that enforces inhibition and fear. ruskin’s assumption that macdonald does not realise how erotic he is being (of course he does), misses the point that what macdonald is really doing is attacking what he sees as prurient oppression of sexuality in children, which happens in the context of a “time-out.” the constraints the characters are dealing with are the same as those in the readers’ real world. if anything, what seems significant is that nothing sexual actually happens in the erotic encounters between the characters. the prince and the princess remain chaste, both trusting and trustworthy of each other. as john patrick pazdziora writes: like [macdonald’s] ‘cross purposes’ or ‘the day boy and the night girl,’ the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 light princess might be best understood as the story of two individuals learning to love and respect one another by crossing into liminality and the borders of the otherworld. in this context, the true fairy-tale hero is not the prince at all; it is the princess. the story is hers. the prince’s sacrifice and courage serve only to awaken within her simultaneous knowledge of love and death. (269) for macdonald, all the constraints are therefore unnecessary, and get in the way of children’s natural development. intertextuality as parody of gender role as noted previously, macdonald employs parody as a carnivalesque strategy with an ideological function, in the sense that the carnivalesque mode, according to stephens, “is intertextual since it proceeds by parodying and mocking recognizable social forms and structures and literary genres and texts” (116-7). the story, jack zipes argues, “is a parody of “sleeping beauty” and “rapunzel,” and, for that matter, it reflects macdonald’s disrespectful attitude toward traditional folktales and fairy tales” (fairy tales 113). william raeper similarly writes that the story draws upon imagery and motifs of traditional narratives such the sleeping beauty (george 314). macdonald complicates the narrative structure of his story, creating space for thematic contrasts with the traditional narratives through which he parodies the middle-class victorian image of girls. carnivalesque texts, of which the light princess exemplifies various elements, frequently provoke a complex reader response, therefore inviting a variety of subject positions that “discourage simple identification with the subject position of one or more of the characters within the text” (stephens 124). the reader’s identification with the main character “may shift amongst such positions as empathy, delight, superiority, criticism, outrage, revulsion, and so on, and may even combine two or more in one response” (124). the ending of the light princess clearly demonstrates this “shift.” the narrator’s frequent comments on the princess being mistreated by her father, hum-drum and kopy-keck, for instance, evoke the reader’s “empathy” with her character and her action: but so anxious was the king that the suggestion [of burying the princess alive] should have a fair trial, that he put himself in a rage one day, and, rushing up to her room, gave her an awful whipping. yet not a tear would flow. she looked grave, and her laughing sounded uncommonly like screaming — that was all. the good old tyrant, though he put on his best gold spectacles to look, could not discover the smallest cloud in the serene blue of her eyes. (23) the reader, however, is displaced from a simple identification with the princess. during the prince’s sacrificial act the princess appears “apparently asleep” (45), indifferent and coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 unsympathetic to his situation, a narrative event that invites the reader to adopt a subject position of “outrage” and “revulsion” against her behaviour. while the water rises, almost drowning him, the prince asks the princess for a kiss, which she grants, but only as a “sweet, cold kiss” (46). knoepflmacher notes the importance of this characterisation and its effect on the reader: “when, with the water nearing his neck, he begs for a kiss, she grants one that is long and sweet but also very cold. the prince’s discomfort resembles the reader’s. what are we to make of the princess’s continued treatment of him, not as a type of christ, but as a silly sentimentalist who warbles an endless song before the rising waters finally cover his lips?” (144). the reader is an active producer of meaning: at last he could bear it no longer. “princess!” said he. but at the moment up started the princess, crying,— “i’m afloat! i’m afloat!” and the little boat bumped against the stone. “princess!” repeated the prince, encouraged by seeing her wide awake and looking eagerly at the water. “well?” said she, without looking round. “your papa promised that you should look at me, and you haven’t looked at me once.” “did he? then i suppose i must. but i am so sleepy!” “sleep then, darling, and don’t mind me,” said the poor prince. “really, you are very good,” replied the princess. “i think i will go to sleep again.” “just give me a glass of wine and a biscuit first,” said the prince, very humbly. “with all my heart,” said the princess, and gaped as she said it. she got the wine and the biscuit, however, and leaning over the side of the boat towards him, was compelled to look at him. (45) the princess’s cathartic transformation invites the readers to admire her act of heroism when she saves the prince. the water “rose and rose. it touched his chin. it touched his lower lip. it touched between his lips. he shut them hard to keep it out” (46-7). suspense here is evocative, inviting readers to infer what may happen next: “the princess began to feel strange. it touched his upper lip. he breathed through his nostrils. the princess looked wild. it covered his nostrils. her eyes looked scared, and shone strange in the moonlight” (47). narrative speed increases and duration approaches zero: “his head fell back; the water closed over it, and the bubbles of his last breath bubbled up through the water” (47). the narrative then loosens, “the princess gave a shriek, and sprang into the lake … she got hold of him, and held his head above the water” (47), symbolising a change in the princess’s emotional and physical states, and inviting the reader to adopt a different opinion from the one caused by the princess’s lack of compassion. nikolajeva argues that in this episode macdonald enforces middle-class gender stereotypes, remarking that the true hero is the prince, not the princess: coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 as the story progresses, the male rescuer — much like in traditional folktales — supersedes the female protagonist, sacrificing his life and becoming the hero. the christian connotations of the sacrifice are obvious and have been repeatedly observed; and while some elements of parody are evident as well, the story turns out as a conventional female coming-of-age narrative in which the bewitched female has only to wait for the right male to save her. (“voice” 98) the princess’s acts of heroism, however, transgress traditional gender roles. the princess feels repentant for her passivity and lack of compassion, a narrative event that allows for a carnivalesque space expressed through the parodic inversion of the sleeping beauty, in which the princess awaits the prince’s kiss to awaken her from a deep sleep. the light princess thus does not conform to traditional narrative conventions such as those in the sleeping beauty that underline the heroism of male characters. the reversal of roles here is constructed oppositionally, illuminating macdonald’s interrogation of middle-class image of girls as the epitome of passivity. the prince could have drowned had he not received help from the princess, whose self-discovery serves to position readers to the empowerment of the children over the king and queen, who were “fast asleep” (47) during their daughter’s transformation, failing to understand that the experience of love, kindness and social interaction can cure the princess of the loss of physicality and sensibility: love and water brought back all her strength. she got under the water, and pulled and pulled [the prince] with her whole might, till at last she got one leg out. the other easily followed … coming to herself, she seized the oars, kept herself steady as best she could, and rowed and rowed, though she had never rowed before. round rocks, and over shallows, and through mud she rowed, till she got to the landing stairs of the palace. by this time her people were on the shore, for they had heard her shriek. she made them carry the prince to her own room, and lay him in her bed, and light a fire, and send for the doctors. (47) this episode does not display the princess as an embodiment of traditional female passivity, as nikolajeva implies. rather, it is the princess’s cathartic transformation that macdonald wishes to portray, but one in which that the prince’s sacrifice and bravery, to use pazdziora’s phrase, “serve only to awaken within her simultaneous knowledge of love and death” (269). in brief, the relationship between narrative dynamics and affect in this episode creates space for a thematic difference with the sleeping beauty through which macdonald transgresses established values of gender roles in favour of complementarity between the sexes as a means of social reform. the return to normality: critique and complicity as noted previously, macdonald calls for moral and spiritual reform, but not structural or coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 institutional social reform. the prince and the princess return to normality outside the pastoral world of the lake. their return does not, however, cancel their carnival. rather, it expresses macdonald’s tendency to subvert, even invert, the official culture of adults and empower the unofficial culture of children. jordana hall argues that the return of the timeout carnivalesque in children’s literature is a necessary element of the carnival cycle as a temporary reprieve from the demands placed upon children by adults. yet this return often works against the subversive effects of the cycle. in a truly subversive text, the child hero or heroine remains empowered upon their return to the official order as a result of their experience, but the order of hierarchical authority remains unchanged. (82) the ending of the story demonstrates this feature. the children’s carnival achieves a transformative effect in their return-to-normality stage in such a way that it does not call for a radical change of the existing social structure, but rather suggests changes within the official culture of adults. macdonald uses carnivalesque strategies as a source of critique (and complicity) in three respects. first, the story constructs the children rather than the parents as a source of change. makemnoit’s revenge against the country and the people, for instance, causes degradation and decay of the natural cycle: “thereupon every spring in the country ceased to throb and bubble, dying away like the pulse of a dying man. the next day there was no sound of falling water to be heard along the borders of the lake” (37). the sacrifice of the prince and the purgative transformation of the princess subdue the witch’s gruesome scheme. at the end of the story, her house is flooded by the waters, drowning her. the land becomes moist and fertile, and the lake never sinks again. regeneration is therefore restored, offering a sense of a transformation — an expression of life and renewal: the sun shone all the time, and the great drops, which fell straight to the earth, shone likewise. the palace was in the heart of a rainbow. it was a rain of rubies, and sapphires, and emeralds, and topazes. the torrents poured from the mountains like molten gold; and if it had not been for its subterraneous outlet, the lake would have overflowed and inundated the country. it was full from shore to shore. (49) second, the children are no more subjected; rather, they are able to be self-regulating, in the sense of ceasing to be the objects of adult power, and become active agents of their own fates. the pastoral world of the lake frees them from the social constraints of the official culture in such a way that they are no longer hesitant to express their love openly in their return-to-normality stage. the prince’s and princess’s pleasure in the corporeal body is therefore no longer suppressed: “is this the gravity you used to make so much of?” said she one day to the prince, as he raised her from the floor. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 “for my part, i was a great deal more comfortable without it.” “no, no, that’s not it. this is it,” replied the prince, as he took her up, and carried her about like a baby, kissing her all the time. “this is gravity.” “that’s better,” said she. “i don’t mind that so much.” (50) the parents play a minor role at the end of the story, however. the king “divided the money in his box, and she the honey in her pot among all the children” when the land becomes fertile again and the princess and the prince are “betrothed” (50). such a role is suggestive, indicating that the king and queen accede to the children’s freedom of choice and of action. as a result of their experience, the prince and the princess are socially empowered, and their empowerment allows them to put their love into practice. finally, the ending can be viewed as a celebration of fecundity, of which the king and queen have been deprived. the prince and the princess “lived and were happy; and had crowns of gold, and clothes of cloth, and shoes of leather, and children of boys and girls” (50-1). macdonald thus gives power and fertility to the children in the return-to-normality stage. the prince and the princess are carnivalesque heroes whose time-out allows them to go through an initiatory process towards physical, sexual and emotional maturation. macdonald’s transformation of the existing power structure is liberating. this does not imply, however, that he wants to reverse such a structure, or to advocate children’s disobedience. rather, he keeps the hierarchical authority in the story unchanged. he was a reformist socialist, rather than a revolutionary one, as zipes asserts: of course, one can argue that macdonald leaves the aristocratic social structure unchanged — a system that harbors authoritarianism — and that the princess seems to achieve her gravity or identity through the male hero. these were clearly his ideological preferences and weaknesses from a political point of view. i should point out, however, that macdonald was more interested in the reformation of social character and was convinced that all social change emanated from the development of personal integrity not necessarily through political restructuring and upheaval. (fairy tales 114) macdonald wants to comply with the status-quo but in such a way as to suggest a gradual reform of society through cultivating the inner goodness of the individual by means of social interaction, kindness and compassion — qualities that the parents, hum-drum and kopy-keck fail to provide. macdonald’s vision of the moral liberty of the child drives or motivates the mode of carnivalisation. hayden white, in “the value of narrativity in the representation of reality,” speaks about “narrative immanence.” the end of a story, white asserts, inflects retrospectively every event within that story with the moral force of its finality (26-7). this assertion is similar to what paul ricoeur in time and narrative (1984) calls “retrodiction” — reading or projecting meaning backwards. the child’s point of view triumphant at the end of the light princess therefore informs the carnivalising vision of the whole. in other coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 words, the moral force of the story’s ending is immanent within all of the earlier episodes, so that the moral liberty of the child becomes, retroactively, the driver or motivating spirit of the mode of carnivalisation. conclusion the relationship between the story’s narrative dynamics, affect and macdonald’s ideas of social reform allows macdonald to convey his ideas in an imaginative tale without being didactic. macdonald uses carnivalesque motifs and images including punning, disguise, laughter and parody to challenge the existing social order and structure. he employs the princess’s levity, physical and emotional, for instance, as a narrative device through which he invites mockery of, or even provokes laughter at, existing norms and hierarchy. by directing laughter at an exalted authority and entrenched ideologies of the age, and by assigning power to the children rather than to the parents, the carnivalesque mode which bakhtin praises as liberating creates space for macdonald to parody social and religious beliefs in such a way as to suggest alternative ideals as a means of social reform. works cited attebery, brian. strategies of fantasy. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana up, 1992. bakhtin, mikhail. rabelais and his world. trans. helene iswolsky. cambridge: massachusetts institute of technology, 1965. booker, m. keith. techniques of subversion in modern literature: transgression, abjection, and the carnivalesque. gainesville: university of florida press, 1991. dentith, simon. bakhtinian thought: an introductory reader. london: routledge, 1995. gardiner, michael. the dialogics of critique: m.m. bakhtin and the theory of ideology. london and new york: routledge, 1992. gorham, deborah. the victorian girl and the feminine ideal. london: groom helm, c. 1982. hall, jordana. “embracing the abject other: the carnival imagery of harry potter.” children’s literature in education. 42 (2011): 70-89. johnston, rosemary ross. “carnivals, the carnivalesque, the magic puddin’, and david almond’s wild girl, wild boy: toward a theorizing of children’s plays.” children’s literature in education. 34, no. 2, (2003): 131-46. knoepflmacher, u.c. ed. george macdonald: the complete fairy tales. new york: penguin group, 1999. ________, ventures into childland: victorians, fairy tales, and femininity. chicago and london: university of chicago press, 1998. kreglinger, gisela. “reading scripture in crises: the victorian crises of faith and macdonald’s response to coleridge.” north wind: a journal of george macdonald studies. ed. john pennington. usa: st. norbert college, 2008. 79-103. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 macdonald, george. the light princess (1864). e-text: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/ faculty/ jmanis /gmacdonald/the-light princess6x9.pdf nikolajeva, maria. aesthetic approaches to children’s literature: an introduction. oxford: scarecrow press, 2005. ______, voice and subjectivity in literature for young readers. new york and london: routledge, 2010. _____, “voice, gender and alterity in george macdonald’s fairy tales.” “a noble unrest”: contemporary essays on the work of george macdonald. ed. jean webb. uk: cambridge scholars publishing, 2007. 85-103. pazdziora, john patrick. “how the fairies were not invited to court.” rethinking george macdonald: contexts and contemporaries. ed. christopher maclachlan, john p. pazdziora and ginger stelle. scottish literature international: university of glasgow, 2013. 254-72. raeper, william. george macdonald. england: lion publishing, 1987. ricoeur, paul time and narrative (temps et récit), 3 vols. trans. kathleen mclaughlin and david pellauer. chicago: university of chicago press, 1984. riewald, j. g. “parody as criticism.” neophilologus. 50, no. 1, (1964): 125-48. stallybrass, peter and white, allon. the politics and poetics of transgression. london: methuen, 1986. stephens, john. language and ideology in children’s fiction. london: longman, 1992. white, hyden. “the value of narrativity in the representation of reality.” critical inquiry. 7, no. 1 (1980): 5-27. zipes, jack. fairy tales and the art of subversion: the classical genre for children and the process of civilization. new york: routledge, 1991. osama t. jarrar is an assistant professor of english literature in the modern languages department at the arab american university, jenin, palestine. he has an mphil from the university of bergen, norway (2000) and a phd from the university of sydney, australia (2015). both degrees are in english literature. his research interest focuses on the nineteenth century fairytale and fantasy literature, science fiction, and literary theory and criticism. he has published widely on george macdonald’s (1824-1905) oeuvre. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/%20faculty/%20jmanis%20/gmacdonald/the-light http://www2.hn.psu.edu/%20faculty/%20jmanis%20/gmacdonald/the-light coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 the world of bullying: an overview and reflexion gerard martinez-criado abstract: the issue of bullying is of growing concern in developed countries. considerable effort has been carried out to understand the problem and implementation programs have been launched to deal with this issue. in this paper we aim to define the concept of bullying and to present some data in relation to causes of bullying which have been highlighted by different researchers around the world. we aim to shed some light on the question of how to fight against bullying. our conclusions stress the difficulties in conceptualising and researching bullying derived from cultural/social factors and from factors that relate to adolescence as a transitional and vulnerable period in life. keywords: bullying environment, resisting, bullying, adolescence 1. introduction there has been a considerable effort to understand and fight the phenomenon of bullying. the implementation of intervention programs has been a priority but there are still some questions that deserve to be discussed. the concept of bullying needs to be understood from the theoretical framework of social interaction and the many ways of relating within a social group. in this paper we focus on child and adolescent peer relationships but we also take into consideration adult society as a whole. indeed an adult society with some underlying aggressive behaviours is a behavioural model against intervention programs targeting bullying (farrington, 1991). for adolescents peer acceptance is crucial and they focus on being liked. failure to be accepted could have negatives consequences for their psychosocial development. this paper was originally conceived of as a comparison of international research contributions in the field of bullying, measuring coincidences and discordances in research outcomes. we discuss this research highlighting the importance of the social environment. 2. studying bullying copyright©2014 gerard martínez-criado. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 pioneering work on the topic of bullying was carried out in scandinavia by dan olweus, who is considered the most important authority on bullying worldwide (macklem, 2003). after the suicide of two young people in 1982, the social service specialist concluded that a longstanding situation of being bullied was the reason for their deaths. in february 1983, the first stage of his study started with the national survey and 80.000 boys and girls in grades 2nd to 9th answered a questionnaire. with the bullying prevention program, olweus assumed the responsibility of norway's national campaign against bullying. after a presentation of the statistics, the second stage of the study (the janus project) started, which tried to analyze behaviour problems, including bullying, and the connection between leaderships and the social structures in the classroom, with the aim to create a more positive atmosphere among students in schools (olweus and limber, 2003). research programs since then have followed the same model launched by olweus, and therefore they have looked for data on the magnitude of the problem as a justification for the intervention plan. however, countries may place different degrees of attention to certain aspects of bullying than others. for example in australia there is a tendency to focus on beliefs and attitudes linked to psychological health whereas in canada there is more emphasis on promoting sociocultural change to eliminate violence at school. 2.1. defining bullying we are talking about an important issue that has generated a lot of research. we present here some information to define bullying which comes primarily from two frameworks. the definitions proposed highlight some underlying issues that are not fully apparent in the first instance. “bullying is the abusive treatment of a person by means of force or coercion. it is aggressive behaviour repeated over time, is intentionally harmful and occurs without provocation” (pertersen, 2001). a governmental study adds other essential points for us: “bullying is unwanted, takes place commonly among school aged people and involves a power imbalance” (stopbullying, 2012). we will comment the main features identified. 2.1.1. bullying is considered aggressive behaviour. this notion includes many behaviours (fights, robbery, provocation, defiance, etc.) and targets (adults, facilities, furniture, etc.) the aim in this case is not only teasing or diminishing another person but acting in a deviant antisocial way. some bullying behaviours could be harassment or assault. although bullying behaviour can cross a legal line, it must not to be confused with overall criminal or illegal action. 2.1.2. this aggressive behaviour is abusive because it involves a real or perceived power imbalance. children get their power from a physical advantage such as size and strength or from a social advantage such as a higher social status in the peer group. the social status comes by the acceptation (e.g., popular versus rejected), number of peer and friend groups (e.g. group of children bullying a solitary child), knowledge about another's vulnerability (e.g. obesity, learning problems, sexual orientation, family background) and/or social conditions (e.g. racial or cultural groups, sexual minorities, economic disadvantage, disability). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 the potential bully has a higher social status in a peer group, which translates into acquiring a social strength not always easy to perceive. when the bully is older (e.g. a boy of a more advanced grade) bullying behaviours may be more easily identifiable, but most of these episodes happen among children within a similar age group. for diverse reasons it can be problematic to identify that bullying is occurring. for example, children are reluctant to report bullying and the adults in charge can mistake aggressive behaviour for rough play, or bullying for simpe fun. the key is to determine whether the aggressor aims to hurt, control, enjoy, make fun or threaten the victim. this is not always evident to the adult. 2.1.3. there is no provocation in a bullying episode and it is unwanted behaviour. the aggression is not reactive. the victim does not apparently incite the aggressor. however, following the theory of processing information, the aggressor could perceive certain social situations or scenarios as provocative or threatening and respond consequently (camodeca and goossens, 2005). the terms “unprovoked” and “unwanted” are ambiguous in an aggressor-victim situation. it is unlikely that victims provoke a challenging situation in the first place. it is almost certain that it is “unwanted” behaviour for the victim and in most cases the aggressor does want to hurt the victim. nevertheless, we would like to highlight that it is possible to try and explain the aggressor-victim relationship adopting a psycho-clinical approach. the bully act could be considered compulsive behaviour, that is, the bully acts irrationally doing something that he or she really does not want to do. 2.1.4. bullying is potentially repetitive. aggressor and victim maintain a dysfunctional relationship within the peer group. people not belonging to the group cannot be aware of this maladaptive situation. the social context consolidates a way of relating to each other and some specific roles of behaviour. a bully has more power than the children they victimize with each repeated incident. having identified the main features of bullying, it can be argued that bullying involves a destructive pattern of relating to one another (craig and pepler, 2007; lamb, pepler and craig, 2009). bullies learn to use power and aggression to control and distress others. victims become increasingly powerless and unable to defend themselves. taking the bullying act as a social situation with at least two characters playing opposites roles, we can conclude in a nutshell that bullies are aggressive, have an aim (harmful intention) and they have the strength (excess of power). victims do not provoke, are not aggressive, are weak and/or have a low social status. as has been proposed, those who are bullied and also those who bully others may have serious subsequent problems (campbell, 2005; ladd and sechler, 2013; rigby, 2000; stopbullying, 2012). coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 3. research findings what follows is an example of the information gathered over the last four decades in different countries. the research is presented with the aim of shedding light into the aggressor-victim relationship. research on victimization has found that both males and females who have been bullied can suffer from depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, sleep or feed problems) and have interpersonal difficulties, higher school absenteeism and lower academic competence (forero, mclellan, rissel and bauman, 1999). victims are more likely to harm themselves (hurt themselves without intending to die), have high levels of suicidal thoughts and attempt suicide. aggressors on the other hand tend to be involved in antisocial and problematic behaviour, delinquency, substance abuse, have a negative attitude towards school with higher dropout rates from school, hold beliefs supportive of violence that translate into behaviour such as bringing weapons to school, and have thoughts in relation to suicidal ideation or even attempt suicide. 3.1. types of bullying. to control and harm victims, bullies use many forms or strategies against the victimized children. some strategies are (i) physical: kicking, hitting, punching, shoving and spitting; (ii) verbal; gestural or written communication involving browbeating (intimidating) language such as teasing, ridicule, sarcasm, insults, threats (also gestural and verbal), name-calling, graffities, notes or drawing; (iii) social or relational behaviour to harm the reputation and relationships of a targeted child, such as rumour-spreading, social isolation of peers (or exclusion), actions against their properties such as damage, hide, theft or destruction of other property; (iv) cyberbullying or bullying using technology (computer or mobile phone), posting embarrassing images online, calls, smss. cyberbullying is intensively studied today, though the general concepts and behaviours common to bullying apply to this more modern way of victimization (campbell, 2005; limber, 2003; mora-merchan and ortega-ruiz, 2007). other times bullying is presented as two main types (nansel, et al., 2001). the first type is direct bullying, defined as an overt expression of power and can include physical and verbal aggression (insults, racial or sexual harassment, or threats). the second type is indirect bullying (or relational aggression), which is the covert manipulation of social relationships to hurt (gossiping, spreading rumours) or exclude the individual being victimized. this division allows the differentiation of specific bullying behaviours at school apart from the more usual behaviours including verbal assault, teasing, ridiculing, sarcasm (campbell, 2005; slee and rigby, 1993). table. 1. percentage for types of bullying at school (stopbullying, 2012) name calling/insults 80 % shoving/hitting 39 % threats/intimidation 38 % spreading rumours 29 % cyberbullying 27 % involving friends/peers 24 % coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 homophobic comments 20 % fighting 16 % sexual comments 16 % leaving out 14 % cell phone messages 13 % racist comments 11 % damaging property 9 % stealing 6 % weapon related 4 % n/a 4% it is worth mentioning that for a variety of reasons, the statistics published are not always consistent across research. 3.2. people implicated. if we focus on age, bullying increases during elementary grades, peaks in early adolescence, and decreases somewhat in high school grades. anonymous self-report surveys of children and youth indicate that the likelihood that they will be bullied decreases steadily through middle school and high school. from 11-12 to 14-15 years old is the age range when bullying can occur. in general statistics show a greater number of victims than aggressors. if we focus on gender, there are not vast differences in the percentages of boys and girls who are bullied. a recent analysis of 82 studies found that boys bully a proportion of 1.7% more than girls (lipsett, 1998; national crime victimization survey, 2009; stopabully, 2012). there are similarities and differences in the types of bullying that boys and girls experience: both genders show a similar engagement in verbal bullying, threats and damage of victim propriety but boys use more physical strength and girls more rumour-spreading, exclusion and cyberbullying (national crime victimization survey, 2009). using the bigger categorization (above exposed), direct bullying (threats, physical harm, rejection, name-calling and taking of personal belongings) happens more among boys, while indirect bullying (gossips, spreading rumours, excluding others) happens more among girls. it is considered that 2/3 of all students witness bullying. additional statistics confirm that over 70% of peers are aware of bullying taking place. according to stopbullying (2012) data, bullying acts are witnessed by few people; 44% of the time and many people 27% of the time. these witnesses (who are sometimes referred to as “bystanders”) may play a variety of roles as well. they may support the bullying that they observe through laughter or smiles, or body language; others may watch but feel disengaged; they may dislike the bullying that they observe but feel reluctant to take action against it; they may also try to help in some way. in a study by boulton and underwood (1992), middle-school students responded to the question, "what do you do when you see a child of your age being bullied?", in the following manner: 49% said they tried to help in some way; 29% said they did nothing, but thought that they should try to help, and 22% said they would not help because it was none of their business. in a more recent study, camorera and goossens (2005), inform about the percentage of bystanders in acts of bullying but without distinguishing between outsider and coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 defender. the percentages are as follow: bully (9.3%); victim (15.5%); follower (16.8%); outsider or defender (21.2%); and not involved (14.2%). the outsider and uninvolved person are important role figures in maintaining bullying in school. it seems reasonable, therefore to assume that bullying may perhaps cease to exist without audience. participants as an audience may not become involved because they are afraid of becoming the next victim. they often feel powerless and show a loss of self-respect and self-confidence, so even approximately 1 out of 3 bystanders could suffer some negative consequences such as personality problems due to being immersed in a bullying environment. (harris and petrie, 2002; cit.campbell 2005). 3.3. prevalence. the review of data shows that face-to-face bullying in school is a frequent experience. table. 2. percentage for prevalence (stopabully, 2012) 17% at least once 50% lasting only one week 40% at some time during their schooling 15% -17% longer term (bullying of 6 months or more) 20% of high school students aged 14-18 years old at least once in the previous 12 months 28% of high school students aged 12-18 years old had been bullied at school during one year (the 2008/2009 school year) the percentages for permanency or duration of bullying throughout time are the following: for years (11%); for months (41%); for weeks or days (18%); and only once (12%) (stopabully, 2012): data about prevalence is difficult to interpret due to lack of consistency across studies. sometimes they refer to participants: bully, victim or bully-victim. these are the main figures, whereas other participants do not usually score in statistics of prevalence. nevertheless, other variables such as definition of bullying, age of participants, research questions raised and time frame influence the data on prevalence obtained. it is very important to note if the study is based upon short-term estimation of the frequency (during a week or a month) rather than its chronicity (across a grade, levels or years) (juvonen and graham, 2001). the estimation of the duration of bullying practices throughout time is also important. these issues arevital because study results may not inform in detail about age, or time span, or type of behaviours and consequently can lead to having a rough and biased picture of the bullying phenomenon. therefore referring to time (last term, last month, and last days or weeks); and frequency of bullying (one or twice, more than twice, sometimes or repeatedly) is as important as the role figures (bully, victim, both, or others implicated in different ways). an observation of the results presented in various studies allows the identification of two bullying contexts. in the first context, there are usually more victims than bullies who pass unnoticed (devoe, bauer and hill, 2011; national day of action against bullying and violence, 2012; rigby and slee, 1991; slee and rigby, 1993; smith, 1997). in the second context, there are more bullies than victims (nansel et al., 2001). http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(rigby%2c+ken) http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(slee%2c+phillip+t.) http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(slee%2c+phillip+t.) http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(rigby%2c+ken) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 harassment situations like this should be easily detected by the adult and should not continue, however the influence of diverse cultural environments could affect the identification of bullying behaviours in this second context, which may lead to differences in bullying prevalence. 3.4 where does bullying occur? data from great britain (the national survey, 2006) show that these acts happen in the playground (30%); classroom (25%); corridors (21%); lunch queue (14%); or toilets (7%), these scenarios are ‘bully social contexts’ within which there are many players (victims, bullies, bully-victims and other students with various attitudes and roles, besides teachers and/or other adults in charge). the main find in other geographical areas such as europe, america, or australia is that bullying happens basically outside the classroom. japanese research on bullying started at the same time as the scandinavian pioneering research, but the results obtained are not the same. olweus (1983) argued: “it is the younger and weaker students who reported being most exposed” and “a considerable part of the bullying was carried out by older students”. however japanese researchers have their own diverging views based on where bullying occurs and who the bully is. table 3. where did you get bullied at school? (morita 2001) classroom corridors playground gymnasium somewhere japan 76.4 30.3 12.6 9.9 9.1 great britain 52.6 30.0 56.2 4.0 12.7 holland 52.9 39.8 41.5 18.1 16.8 norway 37.9 26.5 74.1 17.0 11.6 data from japan shows that both older and younger students are bullied by contemporaries in a shared classroom. as a consequence, reinforcing adult supervision during break periods would not be as important as olweus considers. taki (2001) also adds that there are differences even among european countries. taki suggests that bullying in the west is more widely-spread and more physical than that in japan. he looks at the relation among many different concepts of bullying such as aggressive behaviour (which includes differences in bullying behaviour for males and females), violence and japanese bullying (ijime) that differ from bullying behaviours in the west. according to their results, “ijime can happen at any time, at any school and among any children”. ijime does not consist of specific behaviours carried out perhaps by children with problematic backgrounds. typical ijime such as isolating, ignoring, calling names occurs constantly. only one in seven japanese children have never been bullied by others for three years; only one in four have never been bullied for three years, and one in two children have joined in bullying others at least once a year (n.i.e.r., 2001). research from japan, incorporates the cultural variable as essential in the study of bullying. 3.5. reasons to bully or to be bullied. at the top of this section, we have mentioned some consequences or symptoms in victims and aggressors. the causes of bullying are unclear. it might be interesting to look at what young children have said about bullying coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 (bullyingnoway, 2012): it's fun, it makes the bully popular or cool, a bully feels more powerful or important, a bully is trying to fit in with a group, it is a fearful reaction of other children’s differences, it comes from jealousy, unhappiness and, finally, it is an imitation or has occurred previously. these responses do not appear to reflect bullying as a non-desirable behaviour by children instead they tap into what some children could consider desirable. researchers (lippset, 1998) consider that bullying is linked to physical appearance (44%); student’s language difficulties (41%), clothes worn (41%), skin colour (31%); race (29%) or religion (27%). the three sets of influence are physical, psychological and social. children are often teased for deviant external characteristics (obesity, wearing glasses, speech problems, clumsiness, and obvious physical disabilities). personal attributes and/or external characteristics are a cause of bullying at school (olweus, 1978). children with special health needs and children with chronic behavioural, emotional, or developmental problems and/or with problematic relationships with peers and conflictive familiar experiences have been seen as targets of bullying. however, it is still unclear if these symptoms are antecedents or consequences of bullying. thus the direction of causality may be both ways, for example such features may cause low self-esteem in the victim leading to a behaviour that invites abuse. for some, physical weakness is less important, although physical strength gives confidence. from this point of view, influential factors in bullying are psychosocial aspects (self-concept, social skills, or reaction to teasing). we can conclude that there is not a single cause or factor that can explain bullying. it results from a complex interaction between individuals (health, physical, psychological, social attributes) and their broader social environment, including families (parental conflict, education, abuse) peers (acceptation, participation in group dynamics), school (climate, implication), and community (safe neighbourhoods, responses to bullying), besides the pointed cultural issues. nevertheless, it is essential to be aware of the risk profiles of becoming a bully or a victim. besides those commented, some groups of youth are at a particularly high risk of being bullied (socially isolated youth and the lgbt collective -lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgenderedcf. stopbullying, 2012). 3.6. how to fight against bullying? society is combating bullying through programs focusing on one or more of the following areas: helping victims, raising awareness among bystanders to not perpetuate the situation, ensuring that teachers, parents and other adults in charge are aware of the problem, boosting whole school policies and beyond the school, being aware of the use of technology and encouraging children to talk about any cyber bullying situation. this last point deserves special attention. children and youth tend not to report bullying behaviour, especially to adults. most studies suggest that 50 to 75% of children and youth who have been bullied have not told an adult at school. this means that only one in three children talk to adults about their problem. some may have told their parents, but many remain silent. rigby (1997) provides us with the following data: victims inform about being bullied to siblings/friends (52%); parent/guardian (28%); teacher (24%); and principal/counsellor (12%). the likelihood that a child will tell someone about their coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 bullying experiences varies by age and gender. older youth and boys are less likely than younger children and girls to report that they have been bullied. why children and youth are reluctant to report being bullied? some reasons given were: concern about retaliation; gender stereotypes and lack of confidence in adults’ actions. boys may feel pressure to try to deal with bullying on their own so as not to appear as ‘weak’, or vulnerable. different reasons have been pointed out to understand why young people do not tell adults (petersen and rigby, 1999). for example, they feel too humiliated and embarrassed and think that either their report will not be believed or that the incident will be trivialised by adults, or that they will be made to feel responsible for being bullied. they also do not have much faith that adults can solve the problem and fear that adults might make it worse. older students are less likely to perceive that adults can be helpful in stopping bullying. as a result, it is critical that adults respond quickly, effectively, and sensitively when bullying is reported to them and that they are vigilant to possible bullying that is not reported, particularly among older youth and boys. 3.7. intervention programs. although it is widely recognized that bullying in schools has long term negative consequences, many schools respond to incidents as they arise rather than taking a systematic approach. when this is the case, physical bullying may be addressed but indirect bullying may remain (soutter and mckenzie, 2000). intervention programs are crucial for preventing bullying behaviours. the final aim of research on bullying is intervention (craig and pepler, 2007; olweus, 1993; petersen and rigby, 1999). it is often mentioned that such behaviour has similar causes and consequently similar interventions would be effective. but social and cultural differences should be taken into consideration. three main points have been included in intervention plans in western countries: (i) increasing the awareness of bullying, (ii) school policies, and (iii) supervision. these are essential points but the main difficulty lies in implementing successful intervention programs for each culture, community or individual school. one of the first steps in any prevention program is to ensure that people are aware of the problem. a difficulty with preventing bullying in schools has been (and in some cases still is) that schools deny any incidence of bullying. teachers, parents and students need to be made aware of bullying, what bullying is, the methods used and the real consequences of severe and continuous bullying. the school must develop a policy of intervention itself depending on specific circumstances. it is known that adult supervision in the playground decreases the incidence of face-to-face bullying. schools that increase the number of adults who are watchful in the playground and who intervene on any suspicion of bullying reduce the incidents of bullying in their school. however, parents and other social agents need to be involved when facing bullying behaviours. in addition, the whole policy adopted at school must be tested regularly (limber and small, 2003). as we know, supervision in the playground or other spaces where bullying can occur could not be so important. but targeting bullying based on a specific cultural and social environment is also crucial. taki (2001) has developed a program that is best suited to japanese culture. the japanese peer support program (jpsp) is inspired by the coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 japanese tradition of group work activity and consists of two parts. the first part is basic social-skill training. the second one involves school activities for older children to help others, which is considered a main process to develop social ability. although there are many styles of peer support in the world, the jpsp is more available in asian countries with a tradition of collectivism rather than an individualistic tradition more prevalent in european or western countries. researchers from canada (craig and pepler, 2007; stopabully, 2012) have provided one of the more ambitious intervention proposals. they focus on the environment where behaviour happens. the most important factors are the scenario (institutions, situations, social beliefs and costumes) and the players (persons playing roles). the programme entitled “promoting relationships and eliminating violence” (prevnet, 2012) aims to provide tools to fight against bullying. it is addressed to all adults who interact with children and youth where they live, work, and play. adults are responsible for creating positive environments that promote children's capacity and competencies for healthy relationships. craig and pepler (2007) argue that the channels that researchers have used for disseminating this intervention programme have been inadequate for such a broad purpose and a novelty of work. the systemic perspective focuses on the social dynamics surrounding bullying. research has highlighted the central role of peers in bullying. the systemic perspective not only highlights the need to reshape the behaviours and attitudes of peers, but also sheds light on the need for change among adults, such as teachers and parents, who are essential in supporting children involved in bullying and/or victimization. 4. conclusions to conclude we want tohighlight and discuss some of the methodological and conceptual points previously mentioned. a) studies sponsored by major multinational organizations worldwide bring results that are sometimes surprising and somewhat inconsistent with other studies. we think that it is possible that depending on the countries, cultures, or social settings/environments, people may have different ideas about bullying which will be reflected in both qualitative and quantitative data obtained. cross-cultural comparison studies must therefore comply with clearly defined contexts in which the results are meaningful and applicable for intervention. when asked about a bullying episode, young adults and children from different cultural and social backgrounds may have a different view among themselves and future studies should take this into consideration addressing methodological issues to account for misunderstanding or ambiguity in instruments/measures employed. b) when researching bullying we focus on the transition period from childhood to adolescence (ages under observation are usually 8-9 to 16-17). pre-teenagers have an almost adult capacity to think in a rational-logical way. in some ways they are like adults but their responsibilities are less and they do not behave in the same way as an independent adult, although children and adolescentsalso imitate adult society. pre-teenagers are not only in a stage of intellectual changes. it is well-known that adolescents are looking for a personality, an identity. they exhibit deep and passionate positive emotions such as love, altruism or friendliness and cooperation but they also coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 exhibit negative emotions such as rage, envy or hate that can lead to bullying others. one interesting research question to address is how far the victim is hated by the bully or the bystander group (when they think “he/she can rot”); or plays the role of a scapegoat (which explains group behaviour in ancestral societies). c) likely, adolescents form a society not so different from the adult one at least in some aspects. in adult society there are myths about bullying that are perpetuated in school. for example, some people hold that bullying is a normal part of growing up (a ‘right of passage’) or that it is just teasing and play, or that bullying is in fact ‘characterbuilding’. limber and small (2003) remind us that historically bullying has not been seen as a problem that needed attention, but rather has been accepted as a fundamental and normal part of childhood. moreover many adults think that whatever happens within a group of children cannot be very serious. competitive behaviour (win at all costs) and contempt of a loser are current practices in adult society. most children and youngsters have negative feelings about bullying and feel sympathy for bullied peers. almost all primary children said they felt sorry for students who are bullied, but children at middle and high school expressed less sympathy for bullied students (olweus and limber, 2010), as we know, the acceptation ofviolent behaviour is not foreign to our society (adult and children society). as part of the conclusion we would like to highlight a series of studies carried out in australia that looked into engagement in bullying aggression and attitudes toward victims (rigby, 1997; rigby and slee, 1991; slee and rigby 1993). they found that girls tended to be more supportive but as age increased, attitudes toward victims became slightly but significantly less supportive. a last factor analysis yielded three factors that play a role in bullying situations: a) tendency to despise the victims of bullies; b) general admiration for school bullies; and c) avowed support for intervention to assist the victim. in sum, intensified efforts are needed to understand how children and adolescents think, behave and feel in front of bullying behaviours, and to explore to what extent such antisocial attitudes, feelings and behaviours are a replica of our adult society. bearing in mind different conceptualizations and attitudes towards bullying depending on the cultural and social environment is also a key factor to advance future research into bullying. works cited boulton, m. j. and underwood, k. (1992). bully/victim problems among middle school children. british journal of educational psycholology (62), 73–87. bullyingnoway (2012). national day of action against bullying and violence, 16th. march. (cf. www.bullyingnoway.gov.au). campbell, m. a. (2005). cyber bullying: an old problem in a new guise? australian journal of guidance and counselling 15 (1), 68-76. camodeca, m. & goossens, f.a. (2005). aggression, social cognitions, anger and sadness in bullies and victims. journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 46 (2), 186–197. http://www.bullyingnoway.gov.au/ coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 craig, w.m. & pepler, d.j. (2007). understanding bullying: from research to practice. canadian psychology, 48 (2), 86-93. devoe, j. f., bauer, l. & hill, m. r. (2011). student victimization in u.s. schools. school crime suplement. national crime victimization survey 2009. u.s. dept. of education. forero,r., mclellan,l., rissel, c. & bauman, a. (1999). bullying behaviour and psychosocial health among school students in new south wales. australia: cross sectional survey. bmj 319:344 farrington, d.p. (1991). childhood aggression and adult violence: early precursors and later-life outcomes. in d. j. pepler & k. h. rubin (eds.). the development and treatment of childhood aggression. hillsdale: lawrence erlbaum, 5-29. juvonen, j., & graham, s. (eds.). (2001). peer harassment in school: the plight of the vulnerable and victimized. new york: guilford press. ladd, g. w. & sechler, c. m. (2013). young childen’s peer relations and social competence. in o. n. sarancho & b. spodek (ed.) handbook of research on the education of young children. new york: ruledge (33-66) lamb, j., pepler, d. j. & craig, w. (2009). approach to bullying and victimization. canadian family physician, 55, 356-360. limber, s. p. (2003). efforts to address bullying in u.s. schools. journal of health education, 34, 23-29. limber, s. p. & small, m. a. (2003). state laws and policies to address bullying in schools. school psychology review, 32, 445-455. lipsett, a. (1998). a new british council survey. education guardian. 29/2/1998. macklem, g. l. (2003). bullying and teasing: social power in children’s groups. san francisco: springer. mora-merchán, j. a. & ortega-ruiz,r. (2007). las nuevas formas de bullying y violencia escolar. in r. ortega, j. a. mora-merchan & t. h. jäger, (eds.) actuando contra el bullying y la violencia escolar. el papel de los medios de comunicación, las autoridades locales y de internet. landau: verlag empi. pedag. (spanish version on line). morita, y. (2001). the comparative study on bullying in four countries (ijime no kokusai hikaku kenkyu). tokyo: kaneko shobo. nansel, t. r.; overpeck, m.; pillar. s.; ruan, w. j.; simons-morton, b.; & scheidt, p. (2001). bullying behaviors among us youth. prevalence and association with psychosocial adjustment. jama, 285(16), 2094-2100. national crime victimization survey (2009). (cf www.icpsr.umich.edu). national day of action against bullying and violence (2012). (cf. www.bullyingnoway.gov.au) . n.i.e.r (2001). the attempt for guidance and counselling with stress check list. tokyo: the national institute for educational policy research of japan. olweus, d. (1978). aggression in the schools: bullies and whipping boys, washington: hemisphere publ. olweus, d. (1993). bullying at school: what we know and what we can do. oxford, uk and cambridge, ma, usa: blackwell publishers. olweus, d & limber, s. p. (2003). the olweus bullying prevention program: implementation and evaluation over two decades. in s. r. jimerson, s. m.. swearer, & d. l. espelage (ed.). the international handbook of school bullying. new york: routledge. petersen, l. (2001). anti-bullying programs. avoiding bullying. promoting well being, agca conference proceedings. brisbane. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 petersen, l. & rigby, k. (1999). an evaluation of an anti-bullying intervention in toronto schools. canadian journal of community mental health, 13, 95-110. prevnet (2012). promoting relationships and eliminating violence (cf. www.prevnet.ca). rigby, k. (1997). bullying in schools: and what to do about it. london: jessica kingsley publ. rigby, k. (2000). effects of peer victimization in schools and perceived social support on adolescent well-being. journal of adolescence, 23 (1), 57–68. rigby, k & slee, p. h. (1991). bullying among australian school children: reported behavior and attitudes toward victims. the journal of social psychology, 131 (5), 615-627. slee, p. t. & rigby, k. (1993). dimensions of interpersonal relation among australian children and implications for psychological well-being. the journal of social psychology, 133 (1), 33-42. smith p. k. (1997). bullying in schools: the uk experience and the sheffield antibullying project. irish journal of psychology, 18, 191-201. soutter, a. & mckenzie, m. (2000). the use and effects of anti-bullying and antiharassment policies in australian schools. school psychology international, 21 (1), 96-105. stopabully (2012). canada’s anti-bullying reporting program. (cf. www.stopabully.ca). stopbullying (2012). u.s. department of health & human services. (cf. www. stopbullying.gov). taki, m. (2001). japanese school bullying: ijime. a survey analysis and an intervention program in school. understanding and preventing bullying. an international perspective. personal communication. queen’s university. canada. 19th october. the national survey (2006). (cf. www.bullying.co.uk). gerard martinez-criado has a phd in psychology. he has taught developmental psychology at the university of barcelona since the nineteen eighties and has researched on development and education. his approach is ecological, considering the situational and cultural variables that influence the development and behaviour. for years he has studied children's games and peer group relationships. for the last ten years he has coordinated the group for research in child and adolescents (gria) that has studied emotional and sexual practices of young people and, especially, antisocial behaviour in adolescence. he has published books for teaching and research mainly in catalan and spanish. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01401971 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01401971/23/1 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(rigby%2c+ken) http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(slee%2c+phillip+t.) http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsoc20?open=131#vol_131 http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vsoc20/131/5 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(slee%2c+phillip+t.) http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a(rigby%2c+ken) http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsoc20?open=133#vol_133 http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vsoc20/133/1 http://spi.sagepub.com/search?author1=alison+soutter&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://spi.sagepub.com/search?author1=anne+mckenzie&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.bullying.co.uk/ microsoft word 16morera coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 176 eat, my children, eat elisa morera de la vall abstract: food has many functions and meanings. it is, indeed, necessary for our nourishment but since human beings are related to one another, food is a symbolic form of communication, too. it can also play other roles. it can be a ritual, it can transmit values, norms of conduct and beliefs, it can trigger nostalgic childhood memories or, by recreating lost worlds, have a healing effect. keywords: food; nourishment; communication; memories; ritual; cultural and healing roles. as far back as 1989 “the australian jewish news” published a short article by the writer serge liberman under the title “eat, my children, eat.” it was a beautiful eulogy of his mother and, by extension, of mothers in general, suggesting that the food pressed by mothers on their children is a symbol of selflessness, “a surrogate for nourishment, for health, for life itself (...). perhaps [the writer added] there is something of the tribal and the atavistic in all this” (liberman 1989, n.p.). juan cruz, in his well documented book, alimentación y cultura (food and culture), comments on the subject of food as symbol. since people are social beings related to one another, he argues: food is a symbolic form of communication, be it from mother to child, be it from the individual to the community. through food a person channels patterns of behaviour, norms or religious prohibitions, hierarchical models and the limits of roles (cruz 1991, 13). cruz’s statement would then support the thesis that there is something atavistic in the eagerness of mothers to give everything to their offspring, including their own selves, and that food acts as the symbol of that eagerness. communication through food, however, would not be exclusive of mothers but could be from individual to individual or from individual to the community. cruz adds that: copyright©2011 elisa morera de la vall. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 177 an individual does not see in food just something nourishing that gives him pleasure, but something that has a symbolic meaning, too, the meaning conferred to it within the culture (customs and usage) where he lives and where he communicates with others (cruz 1991, 14). since food plays such a relevant symbolic, social and cultural role, it is, understandably, a repeated topic in literature. judging by the work of jewish immigrant writers in australia, it can be said that, in the case of migrant literature, this topic is strikingly recurrent. caught between a stern determination to remain faithful to their origins and identities and the pull of the new country to conform to it, immigrants tend initially to cling to the traditional food culture that travelled with them. some will never renounce it but others will eventually adopt the cuisine of their land of adoption, an easier step more frequently taken by the generation born or raised in the new land. in the literature of jewish immigrants in australia descriptions of food and meals abound. the work of judah waten, born in odessa and raised in australia, can be taken as an example. in his novel distant land, the traditional jewish food is profusely represented, sometimes with almost sensual overtones. the novel covers a long period, from the early twenties to past world war ii, beginning in a polish village and ending in the state of victoria. the two main characters are joshua and shoshanah kuperschmidt, later joshua and susan cooper. living his first years in europe, joshua’s first taste of food is that provided in the parental home: “on the table there were two sabbath loaves covered by a small napkin. the fragrant smell of freshly baked bread filled the room” (waten 1978, 13). as a young man, and in the course of a formal visit, he meets shoshanah and her food: “an aroma of cinnamon and raisins filled the dining room. the table was laden with freshly baked biscuits and cakes” (waten 1978, 31). they had all been baked by shoshanah and, inevitably, joshua falls in love with her and with her baking. further on waten provides a list of the dishes served at joshua’s and shoshanah’s wedding feast: “golden yellow broth, gefilte fish, stuffed spring chicken, roast duck, warm fresh rolls, home-made honey cake and strudel” (waten 1978, 35). the novelist will later give details of the rich food that shoshanah, “a versatile cook”, prepares for her husband: “roasts, stuffed goose neck, chopped chicken liver, gefilte fish, tsimiss, and chicken soup with kreplich” (waten 1978, 38). intent on winning her husband’s will to migrate to australia, she spares no efforts in the kitchen and even lapses into an atavistic pattern, “speaking to him like a mother to a child: ‘eat, eat, my dear’” (waten 1978, 39). on arrival in australia, some relatives give joshua and shoshanah a welcome dinner, which a son of the hosts promptly criticizes as not appropriate for the australian climate, thus providing a clue of the tendency of the young generation. the coopers will soon encounter a very different—and indifferent—kind of food, “the national food” (waten 1978, 67), then heavily indebted to british cuisine: grilled steak and onions with worcestershire sauce (waten 1978, 67), and alternatives of “steak and onions, steak and eggs, chops, sausages and fried whiting” (waten 1978, 68) or, for a change, mulligatawny soup and “roast mutton lying in thick brown gravy and steamed pudding covered in thin, yellow custard sauce” (waten 1978, 73). no wonder shoshanah’s food smelled like paradise to joshua (waten 1978, 88). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 178 food is a recurrent topic throughout the novel. waten takes occasion of a welcome party and of the celebration of the passover, to expand on the delicacies elaborated by shoshanah. the description of both occasions brings to mind cruz’s comments on food and its role. through the welcome party, offered to some jewish families newly-settled in the town where the coopers live, communication, cohesion and socialization are achieved. this is the function of shoshanah’s cooking efforts: “the chopped liver, the fried and gefilte fish, the blintzes, the little cheese pies that were eaten with sour cream” (waten 1978, 109), they all made up the welcome. later on, the celebration of the passover, which includes the ritual meal of the seder, will be an adequate occasion for transmitting norms, religious convictions, those patterns of behaviour that cruz speaks about. the transmitter is not just the seder food itself: the matzos, the celery and cucumber, chopped eggs, sliced apples and nuts, plus the glasses of wine that precede the feast proper. all this is just the stage, a fitting environment for the transmission of customs and beliefs. thus, we see how the eldest son, ezekiel, is prompted to ask the ‘four questions’ and how he is encouraged to take an active part in the religious service which is actually the reason for the celebration (waten 1978, 120-21). years go by and children become adults. after shoshanah’s death and the subsequent period of mourning, her youngest son, benjamin, expresses his intention to marry a non-jewish girl, thelma, much to the disapproval of his brother ezekiel and sister ruth, who are very much against inter-marriage. the tolerant joshua will accept the marriage, though he is somewhat apprehensive about thelma’s non-jewishness, as reflected in her cooking. before the couple marries, joshua visits them on a sunday: it was the sunday lunch of roast lamb with gravy and mint sauce and roast potatoes and pumpkin she had cooked that somehow emphasised she was not jewish. it was gentile food; it had an alien smell about it (waten 1978, 218). the medical advice given to joshua by his son-in-law, reuben, about following a diet to avoid overweight, leads to praise of the late shoshanah’s cooking. reuben laments that his wife ruth “can’t emulate her mother’s cooking. she cooks the australian way although she knows one or two dishes that her mother taught her” (waten 1978, 221). these words prompt joshua to reflect that most of the meals served at his daughter’s were: what he would have called gentile cooking -mostly grills, salads and cold roast meat. it was an ironical thought after his reflection on thelma’s cooking. jewish girls in australia did not cook the way they did back home, more was the pity, despite what reuben thought about overweight (waten 1978, 221). of the three coopers’ children, then, benjamin´s diet will not be jewish at all, ruth’s cuisine will be hardly jewish but rather plain australian, less appetizing than her mother’s, if maybe less fattening. as for ezekiel, his strict beliefs will influence his ideas on food, leading him to keep a strict kashrut. a surprised joshua asks his son: ‘“what do you do when you go on holidays? don’t you eat anything that hasn’t been stamped kosher?’ ‘no, i do not’, ezekiel said” (waten 1978, 223), and that sounded final. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 179 the passion and nostalgia felt by many immigrants for the food of their homeland is not exclusive of jews. another novel by waten, entitled so far no further, depicts the parallel lives of an italian immigrant family, the avanzos, and a jewish one, the falksteins. a sunday meal at the avanzos’ begins, inevitably, with spaghetti: maria placed the large bowl of steaming spaghetti in the middle of the table. giuseppe’s eyes glistened with pleasure. he loved spaghetti, religiously eating it every day. he preferred it with meat sauce and cheese sprinkled on top of the sauce (waten 1971, 128). not surprisingly, the house always reeked of “the same familiar smells of wine, spaghetti, cheese and meat sauce” (waten 1971, 103). the ‘petit madeleine’ in marcel proust’s a la recherche du temps perdu (in search of lost time) and the tea in which it is soaked have the most extraordinary, pleasurable effect on the narrator, triggering a childhood memory of the little crumb of madeleine dipped in tea that was given to him on sunday mornings. food can bring back buried memories, the nostalgia, the hurts or the delights of infancy, or of any time past. this idea has been cleverly used in recent times in an animated feature film, ratatouille (2007) produced by the disney-pixar factory, where a mr ego, a conceited, inflexible ‘critique culinaire’, on the verge of writing a scathing review on a haute cuisine restaurant, is given to taste a dish of ratatouille, a vegetable dish, a peasant dish—but superbly cooked. the minute the critic savours the first morsel, his eyes roll up, and he is transported back to a childhood episode when a tasty dish of ratatouille is offered to him by his mother. there is delight in the boy’s face; there is astonishment and delight in the face of the haughty man he has become. his opinion of the restaurant is reversed in an instant by a dish of ratatouille and his planned review will be reversed, too. the process of bringing back buried memories can be healing. this aspect is treated by arnold zable in his novel café scheherazade. the title of the novel corresponds to the name of a café-restaurant in acland street, melbourne, a real place in a real street with real owners, avram and masha, who talk in the novel to a fictitious journalist-narrator, the author, as they all eat chicken schnitzel and potato latkes, drink borsch and wine, and finish with cheese blintzes and cups of tea spiced with lemon (zable 2001, 4). the journalist notices how émigrés stroll in “for a bowl of apple compote, a bite of almond torte”, while they recall their past (zable 2001, 8). he will gradually become friendly with a group of jews, survivors of the holocaust, who exorcise the old demons of their past by the telling and re-telling of their stories. the food served at ‘scheherazade’ helps in the curative process by bringing back memories of the food at home and of the delicacies that could be found, in the old days and on the other side of the world, at wolfke’s, the most popular restaurant in vilna: in wolfke’s you could get the best sabbath cholent in vilna (…) such a mouthwatering stew! (…) and, for a snack, you could order a beautiful chopped liver. (…) a pure delight. with beaten onion and egg, floating in chicken fat (zable 2001, 30). these survivors show similar admiration for the food served in ‘scheherazade’, an admiration which they put in words as they savour a schnitzel: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 180 ‘scheherazade’ is a (…) schnitzel’s paradise. it has the best. and every variety (…) or you can order your own, the way you once had it, over there, home made, in der alter velt [in the old world] (zable 2001, 132). sitting to a bowl of steaming cabbage soup, in the course of his first visit to the establishment, the narrator had been informed that the soup was: based on a recipe masha gleaned from her mother. in poland [masha had confided] i would never have believed that one day i would be recreating my mother’s dishes (…). i always thought i would be a doctor (zable, 2001, 13). in friendly talks, night after night, the journalist will gradually learn how ‘scheherazade’ became what it became, the secret of its success: the clients were always met with friendliness; they could speak yiddish (the ‘mamma loschen’, the mother tongue), or russian, or polish… and the offer of food? a glass of borscht? some barley soup? (…)what do you want for the main course?: a plate of latkes? a chicken schnitzel or vegetable stew? (…) and (…) for dessert? an apple compote? a plate of cheese? a cup of coffee? a lemon tea? (zable 2001, 169-170). “this is how it started” explains masha, who remarks that she and her husband had no previous experience as restaurateurs. but they had met the need of solitary men, whose families had perished in the holocaust and needed the friendly atmosphere and food provided in ‘scheherazade’: they came in search of a yiddish word, a familiar smile (…) their longings determined masha’s cuisine. slowly it returned, her recall of recipes, the ingredients she had helped her mother prepare on a wood-fuelled fire in a siberian camp (zable 2001, 170). it had taken a long time to create the kind of restaurant that masha and avram had created—and where masha, perhaps not even aware of it, was actually fulfilling her ambition to be a doctor—but it was worth it, for: “in scheherazade survivors were regrouping, old worlds were being recreated, and festering wounds were being healed” (zable 2001, 171). works cited cruz cruz, j. (1991). alimentación y cultura: antropología de la conducta alimentaria. eunsa: pamplona. (trans. quotes e. morera de la vall) liberman, s. (1989). “eat, my children, eat”. australian jewish news (16 june, n.p.): melbourne. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 181 proust, m. (1915). “overture”: swann’s way (1915), vol. i of remembrance of things past [later in search of lost time (1915-1927)]. guttenberg e-book 2009. walt disney pictures—pixar animation (2007). ratatouille. walt disney studios: usa. waten, j. (1971). so far no further. wren publishing: mount eliza, vic. waten, j. (1978) (1964). distant land. angus & robertson: sydney. zable, a. (2001). café scheherazade. text publishing: melbourne. dr elisa morera de la vall is a former associate lecturer of the english department at the universitat de barcelona and currently the public relations officer and publications co-editor of its australian studies centre. her areas of interest and research are in the cultures and literatures of former british colonies and her main research area is jewish fiction writers in australia, which she formalised in her phd (2003) on this subject. she has taught history, culture and literature of nigeria, canada, india, australia, new zealand and the caribbean, and has presently taken an interest in afghanistan. she has presented papers at conferences both home and abroad, published articles and papers in various journals, and contributed a chapter to the book anglophone jewish literature (routledge 2007). microsoft word billboydetal.17.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 187 finding a home: harnessing biographical narrative in teaching and learning in cultural geography 1 bill boyd, denise rall, peter ashley, wendy laird & david lloyd copyright©2013 bill boyd, denise rall, peter ashley, wendy laird and david lloyd. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the authors and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this paper describes the use of reflective biographical narrative, in postgraduate research supervision, in helping students develop their sense of place – an intellectual place – within the scholarly landscape. the example provided centres on the work of students who have found an intellectual home in cultural geography. using planned and semi-formal conversation, a device emerging from the authors’ supervisory practices, this activity draws on the emerging tradition of reflective biographical narrative, in which biographical reflection is not merely reflection on knowledge, but a practical methodological approach to working with knowledge. we conclude that our approach provided positive learning outcomes for the students, all of who were better able to frame their research, using reflective biographical narrative, within a conscious sense of scholarly place, and to adopt such reflection as a key analytical tool in their respective research projects. keywords: biography, reflective practice, postgraduate learning, cultural geography, autobiography, narrative, scholarly landscape, intellectual place preface in april 2004, some of us presented a verbal version of the following reflective piece – a conversation between an academic supervisor (boyd) and three postgraduate research students (ashley, laird & lloyd) – to the annual conference of the institute of australian geographers in adelaide, australia, at a session of geographical education. originally intended as an example of the role of self-reflection and focused supervisory conversation amongst geography teachers and practitioners, it became apparent at the conference session, especially through discussion after the presentation, that there was an interest in this approach, especially from the perspective of postgraduate research 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 188 student supervision. it was felt, then, that a wider dissemination of this example would be of value to the geography community, and thus we present it here. subsequent to recording these experiences, a fourth postgraduate research student (rall) was working on the role of biography in the social sciences as part of her phd research. the observations she drew from the literature, while unrelated directly to the reflective activities of the other authors, provide a sound conceptual foundation to the empirical experiences recorded here. the paper, therefore, is something of a hybrid, drawing together several strands: ideas and literature concerning the idea of the use of biographical narrative – a constructed biographical story with elements of autobiography – as a mode of expressing reflection and its role in the social sciences (broadly defined); the intersection of biographical narrative and reflection in higher education teaching; and a description and illustration of our practice-based experiences of applying biographical narrative and reflection through the medium of recorded conversation used the enhance the research students’ (in particular) sense of their personal engagement with their research. opportunity to report this work is now afforded through the notion of place, placemaking and cultural production: what we were undertaking, we now recognise, is an exercise in which we, individually and collectively, sought to find an intellectual place of comfort within the scholarly landscapes we inhabit. this is the story of this search. biographical narrative and its role in social science in examining biographical narrative as a methodology in social science, it becomes immediately clear that the sources used for academic biographical narrative include the rich contributions of ancient scholars, religious thinkers, and philosophers. for example, the french philosopher michel de montaigne (1533-92) self-reflects on his studies in a manner that seems prescient to modern practices in scholarship (de santilla, 1956). while critics of montaigne’s essays note his contradictory views, the following extract shows how montaigne foreshadows current practices in scholarly self-review. every one, as pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself, provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand. here, this is not my doctrine, ’tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but my own; and if i communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that which is of use to one, may also, peradventure, be useful to another. . . ‘tis now many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than myself: or, if i study any other thing, ’tis to apply it to or rather, in myself … (excerpt from montaigne’s essays, chapter xii, book ii, “the apology of raymond de sebonde”, cited by de santilla (1956, p.171); emphasis added). from montaigne, the history of philosophy has highlighted the importance of the personal narrative – oft-cited examples include the meditations of st. thomas aquinas as well as the meditations of rene descartes (1596-1650). the tradition of pursuing knowledge through self-study peaked in the early enlightenment, but lost favor over the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 189 decades to other philosophical perspectives: logical, pragmatic, analytical, ethical, and so on (collins, 1998). while philosophical traditions move on, self-disclosure as a key practice in sociology, whether it is called the life story, auto/biography or lived experience has become increasingly popular, as the title of chamberlayne et al.’s, relatively recent (2000) book suggests, the turn to biographical methods in social science. soliciting what are often called life stories from others for research purposes is usually sourced from ethnography, a research method tied to anthropology and where methodological assumptions are driven by culture (geertz, 1973). scholars soon, however, problematised this process. the focus on biographical methods in the social sciences is strongly associated with practitioners at the university of chicago. from the late 1920s, this coalition of scholars (the chicago school) employed the study of a participant’s biography (often couched in terms of a life history) as a method to explore the life of an individual in order to detail the rich set of relationships between individuals and society (bulmer, 1984). these methods culminated in two groundbreaking texts: the story of a polish immigrant (thomas & znaniecki, 1958) and a story of juvenile delinquency in a large city (shaw, 1966). since their publication, both texts have come under severe scrutiny both for their methods and assumptions made about the participants by scholars in social science. this trend continued in the 1960s and 1970s, when the life story became suspect for its stance outside the current social scientific methods that tested narratives for validity, reliability and generalisability. the rise of social constructivism allowed the life story to be read as a constructed text, a text that resulted from a collaboration between the participant and researcher (silverman, 1997). also in the 1970s, karl weintraub opened a critical discussion of traditional auto/biography by charactering auto/biography as simply offering models of the “exemplary ways of being human” (weintraub, 1978: xv). the exemplary life has, thankfully, been dismissed in the last three decades. the contested ground, on the other hand, of life history, biography and autobiography was enriched by feminist, queer theory and refined practices such as ethnomethodology and auto/ethnography (roberts, 2002). likewise, recent advances in postmodern and postcolonial theory have developed complex theoretical configurations for the self, the other, and community that are complemented by critical methods and narrative analytical techniques, such as discourse analysis and deconstruction. all these questions in the so-called production of narratives can be employed to mark out the terrain of auto/biography from other forms of writing (marcus, 1998). today, the range of methods match the various theoretical perspectives suitable to the life story: personality theories, life cycle, script theory, metaphorical analysis, life course, narrative analysis, thematic field analysis and hermeneutical approaches can be considered in turn (atkinson, 1998: 67-68). currently, tom wengraf and other scholars seek to marry the relevance of biographical work within everyday life and the epistemology of social science research practices (chamberlayne et al., 1999). the rise of the academic biographical narrative sociologists who collected very personal stories were later viewed as forming inappropriate collusions with their research participants. some researchers associated coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 190 with the chicago school decided to publish details of their scholarship as means to publicly defend their work (horowitz, 1970). this form of specialised, academically focused storytelling offered scholars the chance to comment on influences, such as their professors or teachers, research projects, and their career paths. one tradition in academic biographies takes a narrow set of influences for scholarly work, circumscribed by the departmental demands such as teaching practices, research activities, publication and academic service (weiland, 1995). another example includes miller & morgan’s (1993) focus on the academic curriculum vitae as the evidential document for developing an academic’s biographical narrative. clandinin & connelly’s (2000) chapter, why narrative? also reviews a number of social scientists and their retrospectives that reflect the differing perspectives of scholars of education, anthropology, organisational theory, teaching and psychiatry. once the search begins for auto/biographical detail in academic life, many examples can be found. and there are significant differences amongst the accounts. for example, the subtitle of laurel richardson’s (1997) text (constructing an academic life) serves the purpose of an extended narrative on her career in sociology. in this personal account, she includes academic essays, journal writing, and even an extended prose play. some of the text details the machinations of american departmental life in a most unpleasant way. the point is that richardson takes a very long, but very focused retrospective of her life as an academic well outside of her life story. other academics have recounted their biographies to explain their commitment to a given set of theoretical perspectives. an excellent example here is paul cloke’s (1994) chapter entitled (en)culturing political economy: a day in the life of a ‘rural geographer’. here, cloke develops the view that it is his biographical life decisions that have shaped his theoretical perspectives. he details family life, professors, teachers and students as well as research projects that influenced his thinking about cultural geography, particularly the special problems of rural geography. details of his academic life are used as a springboard to examine how notions of ruralness are constrained within a cultural landscape that is increasingly dominated by images of urbanity presented in the british media. cloke’s example serves an important reminder that, for scholars, biographical details can inform their theoretical perspectives. equally, theoretical directions taken by academics can then inform particularities (research directions, job selection, choice of co-authors and research partners) of their lives. a parallel account of the appearance of berry & garrison’s seminal 1958 paper, “the functional basis of the central place theory”, claimed to be the starting point for geography’s quantitative revolution, reinforces the importance of life events and circumstances and the telling of these in understanding key scholarly and academic events and processes (barnes, 2001). some scholarly recollections focus more specifically on the type of academic tasks at hand. yvonna lincoln presents the solution of a methodological puzzle that is worked out in a biographical way in her 1990 chapter, called the making of a constructivist: a remembrance of transformations past. her biographical narrative contains life details that are strictly circumscribed by a nine-month period when she and her team worked through a problem in their methodological approach. lincoln describes in detail the various conferences, meetings, and debates she attends, which center on her interactions with students, colleagues and critics. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 191 there is one further example that must be considered. like richardson, many academics take the opportunity to tell their academic life story to preface other scholarly concerns. for example, the noted ethnographer clifford geertz details his academic career at the beginning of his book, available light: anthropological reflections on philosophical topics; it is worth recounting his reflections on how what and where he would study next (geertz, 2000: 7): the question was: where, elsewhere? with nothing substantial in the way of a job ... i thought it expedient to take shelter in graduate school, and my wife, hildred, another displaced english major unprepared ‘for the real world,’ thought she might do so as well. but, once again, ... i was – we were – without resources. so i ... asked another unstandard academic, a charismatic philosophy professor named george geiger, who had been lou gehrig’s backup on the columbia baseball team and john dewey’s last student, what i should do. he said [approximately]: ‘don’t go into philosophy; it has fallen into the hands of thomists and technicians. you should try anthropology’. geertz states later: “as improbably and casually as we had become anthropologists, and just about as innocently, we became indonesianists. and so it goes: the rest is postscript, the working out of happenstance fate” (2000: 9). however, this makes clear that careers also lie in the details of students’ lives (including their spouses, their families) – the economic factors that determine the nature and shape of their academic career tracks. this life-necessity leading to academic career plays out again in internet scholarship. the examples of self-reflective writings in the scholarly tradition of philosophers like michel de montaigne, richardson’s literary exercise in autobiography presenting her coming to knowledge in sociological theory, cloke’s biographical narrative developing and problematising his understanding of rural geography, lincoln’s (1990) personal recounting of how she and others solved a methodological puzzle in qualitative research theory, and the effects both economic necessities and opportunity that focused geertz’s field of study, provide ample evidence of the strength of biographical details of academic lives in understanding the dimensions of scholarly endeavor (weiland, 1994). harnessing biographical narrative in higher degree teaching and learning regardless of this rich vein of writing and thinking regarding biographical narrative, the reflective work illustrated towards the end of the paper arose specifically from the example of self-reflection by geographers so well illustrated by cloke et al. (1994). the role of self-reflection is becoming an increasingly accepted approach to supporting research in the humanities and social sciences (e.g. lincoln, 1994; maykut & morehouse, 1994; dunn, 1997; wengraf, 2001). jackson (2003: 223) usefully defines reflective practice (reflexivity) as: coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 192 … the critical thinking required to examine the interaction occurring between the researcher and the data during analysis. the researcher explores personal feelings that may influence the study and integrates her understanding of the feelings into the results of the study. the research needs to be reflective so that she can uncover and provide a full account of her deep-seated views, thinking, and conduct. this openness is necessary so that the readers of the research report are aware of how the researcher’s values, assumptions, and motivations may have influenced the framework, literature review, design, sampling, data collection, and interpretation of findings. being explicit about the participation of the researcher in the generation of knowledge adds to the relevance and accuracy of the results … cloke et al.’s (1994) exposition of this approach, with reflections and analyses of the authors’ careers, work and interactions with their material they work on, and especially cloke’s own reflections, in that volume, of the interactions between relationships with peers and teachers, personal views and philosophies, and the directions his academic and intellectual work over several decades, provides a useful and applied model and expands on jackson’s synthesis of reflexivity. one of us (boyd) had regularly asked students to read cloke and his co-authors as part of their professional and academic development, especially in relation to conducting academic project work. this predominantly took the approach of setting cloke’s chapter as a reading, to be followed by the student writing an equivalent, but considerably shorter, account of their own relationships to the academic project they were involved in. the focus was predominantly on self-awareness rather than any detailed critique of the influences a student’s biography might have on the specific analysis being undertaken within the project. it became apparent in subsequent supervisory discussions, however, that an extension of this activity would be of value. hence the conversation was born. as the conversation evolved, rather than exactly following cloke’s approach in this paper, the authors are merely following his lead and highlighted, through a our conversation, significant relationships and influences that have brought us to both the particular form of geographic enquiry and the specific relationships we have as research supervisor and research students. as will be apparent, this conversation formed the basis of a significant growth of self-awareness, especially amongst the students, of the place of their academic and scholarly endeavors in the wider geographical world. jackson (2003) and, to a lesser extent, cloke (1994) focus on the role of reflexivity on research. indeed many of the authors cited above are discussing biographical narrative in terms of their relationships between researcher and the research per se. it is noted here that reflexivity takes the reflective mode further, whether or not expressed through biographic narrative, in that it allows for both enhanced self-awareness (reflection may do this) and for changes in identity and process. for the authors, cloke's (1994) reflections on his academic journey were an important influence: they clearly shaped his approach to theory in his discipline. he represents the trend, during the 1990s, of sociologists beginning to see the usefulness of biographical reflection not only as a theoretical frame, but also method (wengraf, 2001). this biographical turn became an important approach to method (e.g. denzin & lincoln, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c) and has coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 193 encouraged us to try to understand our biographies as not just reflection on knowledge, but as an approach to working with knowledge, that is, as a form of reflexive action (e.g. roberts, 2002; greenwood & levin, 1998; sankaran et al., 2001; keen et al., 2005). however, our interests are wider, extending to the teaching and learning of research; while this paper focuses on the use of biographical narrative as a research method, it is considered to have further potential as a supervisory mode, both for research students and beyond into the larger arena of undergraduate teaching. it is interesting to note, therefore, academic staff at the university of leeds introducing the idea of self reflection to undergraduate students who are completing project work: “reflection skills essentially give you the mental time and space to consider what you have been doing, value it, place it into context and make mature decisions about what to do next. it does not necessarily involve change, although it may lead to development or change.” (bradford, 2000: 44). what is being articulated here is a broader educational principle, that is, that reflection plays a central role in student learning. such an approach has been extended to formalised reflection for students undertaking field trips and work experience activities (charlesworth, 2004; tomkins, 2004). this approach has been extended to the supervision of phd students, with hellawell (2006), for example, describing ways in which supervisors may assist their students to develop their abilities to become more reflexive of their own qualitative research; hellawell notes, importantly, that it cannot be assumed that students necessarily have the self reflexive skills or abilities, and therefore that they may need assistance. bradford’s book is one of a series on key skills in geography in higher education published in 2000 and which is largely based on the adoption of the kolb learning cycle (kolb, 1984), a model of learning that stresses the cyclical interrelationships between experience, reflection, conceptualisation and the testing of new ideas (boyd, 2002). while bradford’s advice was designed for undergraduate students, it is becoming increasingly apparent that reflection should become an important part of the postgraduate experience. the model of cyclical action and reflection has become more widely adopted, especially with a research focus, where it finds strong expression in action research/learning (boyd, 2001). action research/learning represents a practical, successful and disciplined version of the repeated cycles of testing the relationships between thought and action, and thus values reflection as well as action (greenwood & levin, 1998). this is a significant move from a situation where research has been governed by notions of objective realities, in which the researcher is merely a passive operator rather than, as is increasingly becoming apparent, an integral part of the research being conducted. more recently, such ideas have been integrated into ideas of social learning (keen et al., 2005), where social learning is defined as “a process of iterative reflection that occurs when we share our experiences, ideas and environments with others” (p. 9). keen et al. provide models of cyclical development of planning, action and reflection very similar to those advocated by action researchers. while they focus more closely on achieving the aims of a project, they do note that critical awareness and reflective practices are everyday activities, and that the “reflective practitioner” (schön, 1987) articulates reflective practice at personal, interpersonal, community and social levels. while keen et al.’s focus is on environmental management, their discussion of reflection – “taking coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 194 account of principles, place, potential and practice” (p. 266) applies more widely, as is evidenced by their own use of the reflective process in evaluating the effectiveness of workshops and writing project that resulted in the publication of their book. finding a home: using biographical narrative via structured conversation to enhance research student supervision with so many strands of thought leading to the point where biographical narrative and reflexivity in higher education and research merge, we now describe a practical example of the application of such approaches. we do this in the context of applied cultural geography. cultural geography is an inherently human discipline; here we describe an inherently human activity: a conversation. the conversation arose, through long periods of individual student-supervisor supervisory sessions, as a natural way to express the biographical information that helps us understand how we have developed particular scholarly activities and approaches to the work we undertake. the conversation was a natural successor to verbal debate and discussion already occurring between four academics who have gradually become cultural geographers (boyd, ashley, laird & lloyd). these four had reached a point where they were asking: why have we become cultural geographers? how does cultural geography affect our scholarship? in tying to answer such questions, we became aware that the core question – how does cultural geography affect our scholarship? – was the wrong question, and that what we needed to understand was what is was about ourselves that bought us to the point where we were becoming increasingly receptive the intellectual traditions and methodologies of cultural geography in providing appropriate frames to our research and scholarship. this edited conversation was held in late 2003. the conversation was held over a single session running for around an hour and a half, having been planned during several previous meetings. outline notes, taken by boyd, and a transcribed tape recording formed the basis of the text. we agreed that the conversation should not be reported simply as directly spoken; while this would record the content, it lacked the structure that might assist in identifying themes and issues. consequently, boyd drafted a first version of the conversation, restructuring the content to bring together common ideas; this represents an adaptation of the constant comparative method (maykut & morehouse, 1994). the draft was then circulated to the rest of the group, and was thus gradually refined to reflect a smoother flow of commentary. of course, the refining and redrafting was as much a reflective process for all of the group as was the original planning and conversation. what follows is the product of this iterative reflective process. who are we? bill boyd is an established academic, qualified as a geographer in the 1970s. his academic duties include supervising postgraduate students across the physical and human geographies. his cultural focus is the social construction of heritage and the past within contemporary landscapes. his students tend to be of his own age and life stage, hyper-enthusiastic and highly motivated, and mainly returning to academia after half a lifetime elsewhere. amongst these, peter ashley had just completed honours, and wendy laird, david lloyd and denise rall were then completing their phd research. the conversation was held in bill’s “outside office”, where we spend many supervisory hours (figure 1) coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 195 figure 1. doing cultural geography … some of the authors hard at work: left to right … david lloyd, bill boyd, wendy laird and peter ashley (photograph by max egan). the conversation bill as way of introduction, i will put on record that all of you have, through our various supervision sessions discussed aspects of the scholarly and academic context of your work. it is interesting that we have reached a point individually and communally, where we feel a need to draw together these various conversation, in part recognising that stage each of you has reached in your research and reflecting the convergence of your various study paths. we have all agreed that this is now the time and a good opportunity to draw together our previous discussions. you’ve all moved considerable intellectual distance over the last few years … and our supervision sessions invariably return to the importance of cultural perspectives on our research … my scholarship has largely been in physical geography and environmental science. … peter’s undergraduate study was in our environmental science and management course [more emphasis on science than management]. wendy’s background is in science and architecture, while david’s environmental science led him to a public service career … we’ve all had an inherently human interest in our work. my geography overlaps with archaeology and cultural heritage management, while peter increasingly explores human-environment relationships. as an architect and cultural heritage advisor, wendy coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 196 tended towards human rather than technical solutions, while david has spent half a career translating science into english, as a civil servant, lobbyist and radio announcer. i think of cultural geography … as providing ways of understanding the environment as socially constructed idea and behaviour. studying the humanity of peoples’ behaviour is critical in understanding people’s interactions with place. i have long worried that environment and heritage studies tend towards superficial understandings. cultural geography, by studying place, landscape and behaviour, is a valuable window into underlying beliefs and their behavioural effects. the geographical focus lets me address real questions about how real people behave in the real world … why do we have this need to research environment this way? peter i first noticed a desire to change in my second year … where i recognised my objection that taught science was oriented towards objective knowledge … the “countmeasure-name-define” mantra was disturbingly context-free … i puzzled over this during my undergraduate studies, and honours gave me the opportunity to confront my questions … it was a very steep learning curve … the revelation came two weeks before submitting the thesis: my intellectual home was in cultural geography! what a relief! this was really important: i was feeling more and more out of place in science … it just didn’t provide the fulfillment i was looking for. i was especially frustrated not being able to discuss my research with many of the other students; they simply didn’t understand. [wendy but you could discuss your work with some of the other mature age students, couldn’t you?] yes … it’s interesting all three of us are mature-age students. [wendy is our growing interest in humanity something to do with age or stage?] it might be. what i missed in the science course … were feelings about environment. … bill … are you are suggesting that science doesn’t answer all the questions, and doesn’t help the search for deeper meanings about people’s place in the environment? wendy, how did you get here? wendy how am i here? … ten years running an architecture practice … all my design work was based on listening to people. i was designing for them and their needs … i needed a good understanding of what people want for their environment. however, i was still frustrated, and chose cultural heritage management work, especially with communities … this brought me in touch with you, bill, opening up all the work we’re now doing. [wendy is working on an aboriginal housing project, on homelessness, crowding, emergency housing, and community capacity building.] … i’m now using the skills picked up over the years to help people manage their environment and improve health and wellbeing. this is enormously satisfying … is it an age thing? fixing buildings is dead easy, but getting the social and environmental mix right is harder. for example, at the recent national housing conference it was claimed that all we need to get aboriginal housing up to the standard of the rest of australia is seven billion dollars. that’s ok, but doesn’t address cultural impacts. it risks loss of cultural identity in communities by addressing the wrong questions. it is not about technical solutions … cultural and social processes are far more important. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 197 peter yes, science is objective: it can fix houses, but to really address issues … we need to be far more subjective . that’s a bit harder, isn’t it? i see cultural geography as letting us to do this. … it puts science into context. wendy i couldn’t agree more; context is so important. without context, we’ve no perspective, and always miss the richness of any social situation. something i’ve brought from architecture is the knowledge that unless we understand the context of any situation, we can’t design in any meaningful way. cultural geography lets me contextualise problems and situations beyond just describing the physical or social context. bill yes … depth of meaning is important … this differentiates the quantitative methods many of our colleagues use, and the qualitative approaches i’ve been introducing to you and other students … it’s so hard for the quantitative people to accept in-depth interviews and case studies as valid. they can’t see that the greater depth of understanding overcomes the apparent lack of rigour and reproducibility … cultural geography’s humanities approach was a revelation for me many years ago, validating my indulgence in thinking about meanings and culture. another boost was the realisation that it is intellectually possible to do both science and non-science … the new humanities allow diversity of scholarly approaches, and cultural geography provides the context for that diversity in my work. wendy yes, it lets us take on different knowledges, and we can talk about both the specific and the general … bill so, now that we want a deeper understanding of the world … and a more human approach to research, and are less inclined to be reductionist, how has each of you changed intellectually and methodologically? wendy doing cultural geography is a huge learning curve. i really appreciate the opportunity to read widely and to think across disciplines … i loved the opportunity for discussions, especially our long rambling discussions, when we’d start with one thing and end up who knows where … the excitement of working ideas out as pictures and scribbled diagrams. this mind-mapping appealed to me … to be able use graphics is very important … [it] lets me visualise ideas in a creative, aesthetic way. bill so cultural geography is about communication? our early discussions ranged widely … it was exciting to be able to draw ideas, metaphor, analogues or methods from across other disciplines … the scribble diagrams are very geographical … they really helped us find direction … and you still use them to frame your work. i know peter keeps all the diagrams … they make increasing sense as the work progresses. wendy … they’re certainly a valuable tool in my work with aboriginal communities. it seems easier to draw ideas rather than speak them. i also find it valuable for translating other peoples’ ideas … to create a shape of ideas that can be worked with. it is essential for my research. bill we’re talking about working outside the square, aren’t we? … being able to adopt other ideas … allowing us to play with ideas rather than just analyse things in a coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 198 formulaic manner. i still do this for other parts of my research, but for the cultural work, isn’t it great to be able to play with ideas? an important discovery for me was the distinction between science and humanities writing. science writing has to be good, but is essentially functional … reporting completed analyses. in the humanities, writing is part of the analysis … not constrained to reportage … playing with language to discover meaning in cultural observations. umberto eco is my mentor, although my early experiments are weak imitations of his style … not sure if i like the results, but it was fun! david and it’s not just the writing that’s liberated. i’m reminded of terry pratchett’s multiversity … i make use of his books for teaching science and management … great for telling stories about management. and you use winnie the pooh, bill, to help science students think about cultural perceptions of environment. i find wind in the willows great for creating/recreating the value of environment for students … cultural geography lets us to put literature in landscape … just look at simon sharma’s memory and landscape … peter working outside the square is important. even this conversation lets us to look more broadly than we would normally. who else in our school would even consider a reflective piece like this? you [bill] have helped us work on problems by taking information from many directions rather than working on one point at a time … lets me apply life experiences to solving research problems … i’m more inclined to take a holistic approach to encompass science and people … suits my character. being allowed to do this intellectually is really important. when i was doing [in-depth] interviews on old growth forest issues, i asked people why they did do what they did? [peter was interviewing people closely involved in issues of old growth forest management and conservation.] it’s really obvious that they had difficulty answering. could our colleagues answer the question? … i am greatly influenced by douglas porteous, who keeps asking, “why do we do what we do?” … and, importantly, “do people reflect on this?”. i obviously need this reflection … cultural geography provides the option, opportunity and validation to reflect on my scholarship. this is my research’s most important outcome so far … i now have more focus and direction in my work. bill … all your views and attitudes towards research have changed … you’ve all found a home in cultural geography, giving you space to expand and draw widely on ideas without disciplinary constraint. you’re all doing real-world research, and had to learn a lot of new methods … how hard it was to change methodologically? wendy you know, i can’t really recall … it’s has been a long slow evolution. i know i reflect very differently now than when i was 25. i thought a lot then, but the phd taught me the value and importance of active reflection … it allows me to pull a whole complex of things into my reflections … i can now reflect on 200 things rather than 20 …! really important … otherwise the research becomes shallow. bill … it seems we might be a special group … a subset of cultural geographers? are we talking about intellectual changes that reflect our age, maturity or experience? we each talk about cultural geography validating what we do … our breadth of sources, our reflection on the world. people considerably older than us tend to reflect on their lives, and some of our best research participants are older people. perhaps adopting cultural coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 199 geography is some bizarre way of scholastically acknowledging the value of aging and maturing! … perhaps we needed to reach a point where work and personality match … david yes, it’s part of maturing. i’m increasingly comfortable with not having absolutes. in my early career, i had a passion for wildlife, but could only see individual animals. i gradually learnt that animals are part of the landscape … so learnt about plants. by my mid-twenties, i realised that people are just as important. my passion about environment grew, and i could be passionate about people and plants and animals … but still wanted absolute answers. the older i am, the more comfortable i am with my own insecurities. i can’t know everything … the more i know, the more complicated the world is. i’m also more comfortable looking for patterns than absolutes. this has a huge effect on my methods, and why context is important. i want to take a helicopter view of the world rather than a myopic view. geography lets me do this. science is interested in replicates, but with time, i am more interested in exemplars … less worried about repeatability, and more fascinated by uniqueness. rather than controlling things as the same, i can work with the differences that make things special … [david was studying the integration of indigenous knowledges into protected area management.] i couldn’t have worked like this early in my career. the cultural geography label is useful because it lets me slip across boundaries. it forms a bridge, and lets others see value in the humanities. … is this possible because we’re working outside standard [university] departments? … outside disciplinary norms? we don’t have these in our multidisciplinary school. … the university is innovative in many ways [e.g. naturopathy] … accepting (almost expecting) different ways of doing things. or is it also to do with bill allowing this to happen? his status helps. bill yes, but remember, i have been allowed to go my own path, but not as a deliberate strategic choice by the school. … i don’t think they understand us, so they let us go our own way, because we get results and don’t make waves. wendy yes, real-world outcomes are important … and the multi-disciplinary context. we all need to be multi-disciplinary in our types of projects … looking for real solutions to real world problems … focusing on problem solving. i was taught architecture as problem solving; perhaps that’s the underlying discipline for our work. being outcome-focuses is really important … the importance of the applied influence. one of the really important things you [bill] introduced to us is action research [also called action learning]. finding action research was critical … i now know that’s what i’ve been doing throughout my life. cultural geography gives it a context. … coming from the cultural end of environmental science and management gives us the standing to do what we’re doing. david for me action research reflects the real way people make decisions. people don’t make rational decisions. they use the first behaviour they come across until the consequences don’t coincide with reality … they then pick the next one. i’ve been reading about how bush firefighters seem to get out of difficulty so often: do they have esp? … if a bushfire isn’t behaving as expected, the manager’s gut reaction – to pull firefighters out – is based on experience-based subliminal behaviour. action research allows us to pick up the subliminal patterns. for me this emphasises the humanity of behaviour: we’re not machines or computers, we don’t process information like a computer, so we need an intellectual ability to investigate that humanity … and it’s coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 200 important to understand context and scale, which is where i see geography being so useful. bill … we’re all moving from a model view of the world, social science as systems … to individualistic cultural perspectives … difference, individuality and humanity seem more important to you all. david yes, they are. exemplars let us examine the elements that make situations individual, and use abnormalities to look for rules. they give us a perspective of interconnectedness (endnote 1). culturally, people talk about interconnectedness through stories. cultural geography is so good at living the stories: i love doing the interviews and getting the stories. it is about interaction with people, something you just don’t get from questionnaires … and when you’re doing this, you’re effecting change, not by forcing people, but by getting them talk out their own change. wendy … i really enjoy the interactions with people, especially helping them effect change … not as authority, but as facilitator. … it’s great to encourage people to have a go. we’re trying to support change people are calling for. you too, bill, spend your time actively introducing change to students’ minds, for example, by encouraging undergrad science students to think about culture … bill interesting how the conversation strays, isn’t it … very human, very cultural … story telling … talking about change one moment and literature as a teaching tool the next … is this only possible because we have space to do it? could we do this in straight science? let’s round up. what does cultural geography mean for our scholarship and academic identity? … we’re probably an unusual group, coming to cultural geography late in our academic lives. we all want to solve real-world environmental problems … entering our version of cultural geography seems to be an aging or maturing process … finding a scholarly home that resonates with our personal inclinations. the cultural focus helps us contextualise the depths of understanding and uniqueness of the situations we study. real-world problems, facilitating change and multi-disciplinarity are important. cultural geography provides the opportunities to range widely across the disciplines, borrow ideas, constructs and methods, and broaden communication. it’s important to keep the thread … cultural models have helped us all to do this: peter’s use of porteous’ models of being-in-place, david’s people-living-stories, wendy’s helping people to have a go, my own use of social construction theory … in the end, the people-focus is all-important: it places our cultural geography at the core of environmental management … if only they knew! conclusions and there ends the conversation. naturally, this conversation has not, strictly ended there, but continues as an informal on-going reflection by us individually as in groups. while the authors have not reconvened as a group, all of us still consider the implications of our findings. no formal evaluation of the exercise has been run, although this could, no doubt, be done. in personal development terms (perhaps the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 201 most appropriate evaluation), it should be noted that peter, in particular, has found it especially useful in defining the direction he wishes to continue in academia. the conversation gave him the confidence to apply for a postgraduate scholarship at an institution he had previously considered he could not apply to; this was a direct outcome of the exercise. both david and wendy are more comfortable with the area of research they continued to work in, and both subsequently commented periodically that by opening up the ideas and expressing their practices, they find themselves in greater control of their research. both used the concepts they have discovered in the cultural geography literature in the writing of their phd research. these student-authors find, therefore, considerable agreement with hellawell’s (2006: 483) phd students, who comment that their “consideration of their own, sometimes shifting, positions on the insider–outsider continuum [has been] of considerable value in developing their reflexivity in relation to their own research”. in summary, we are all more aware of our place in the academic world. importantly, although rall was not involved in the recorded conversation, she went on to frame her phd thesis around biographical narrative; it became a central theme for her academic work (rall, 2006). in jackson’s (2003: 223) terms – that the research needs to be reflective so that the researcher “can uncover and provide a full account of [the researcher’s] deep-seated views, thinking, and conduct” and the reader can be aware of how the researchers values, assumptions, and motivations may have influenced the [research]” – we can point to the revelation ashley experienced in understanding his relationship to the research he wished to conduct, and to the central role of reflection that lloyd, in particular, has used in his thesis; lloyd’s (2005) thesis has frequent departures from the main text to reflect upon social processes both amongst the subjects of his research and within his own experience as the researcher. all the participants would agree with jackson’s (2003: 223) claim that “being explicit about the participation of the researcher in the generation of knowledge adds to the relevance and accuracy of the results”. endnote the conversation now took a short detour into the key formative events bringing us into cultural geography … another conversation. however it is worth noting some of our comments on predisposition towards cultural geography, and its relevance to interconnectedness: … all your work … reflects your tendencies towards a people-focus … the important predisposition? if doing cultural geography is part of our temperament, and thinking about us as a group, here’s an idea. is there something fundamentally buddhist about cultural geography? peter is attracted to zen, and both you, david and i [bill] are inclined towards buddhism. i have reflected elsewhere on parallels between the buddhist worldview and contemporary [western] perspectives on [e.g.] management, leadership, post-modernity … coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 202 references atkinson, r. 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(2001) qualitative research interviewing (london: sage). acknowledgements boyd wishes to thank the other authors involved in this experiment for their patience as they tried to work out what on earth it was he was up to. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 204 bill boyd is a geographer and landscape scientist, with research interests in environmental change, human-landscape interactions and environmental and cultural heritage management. he has recently been working on problems of the management of environmental and cultural heritage places and landscapes, and of community engagement with environmental management. he has published extensively in the scientific literature, and co-authored several books. bill is the chair of his university’s human research ethics committee and animal care & ethics committee. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, australia. email: william.boyd@scu.edu.au) denise n rall is an adjunct lecturer in the school of arts & social sciences, southern cross university. she holds a phd in internet studies, where she explored internet studies programs at the oxford internet institute, the university of minnesota, and curtin university in western australia. rall also holds an ma in comparative literature from the university of wisconsin, where her focus was the german romantic novel. recent publications include, ‘what would kant think?’ a study of search engine logics, included in the volume web search engine research (lewandowski, d., (ed.), 2012). her most recent project is a forthcoming book called the military in fashion. her current projects include exhibitions of her textile sculptures and further research on how the media penetrates current practices in costume, craft and protest. (email: denrall@yahoo.com) peter ashley has an honours degree in environmental science and management and a phd in environmental studies. he has research interests in human-environment relationships, especially people’s response to place, sustainability, and wildlife management. peter is an honorary research associate in the school of geography and environmental studies, university of tasmania. (school of geography and environmental studies, university of tasmania, australia. email: plashley@utas.edu.au) wendy laird is an architect and cultural heritage advisor. she is currently a senior conservation officer with the heritage at department of environment and resource management in rockhampton, queensland. her phd study at southern cross university focused on place and sense of loss, through a study of emergency aboriginal housing. (department of environment and resource management, queensland, australia. email: wlaird@nor.com.au) david lloyd lectures in protected area, cultural and coastal management. his research focuses on the incorporation of local or indigenous knowledge into natural area management. he wrote and produced a “saltwater people” for sbs, a documentary depicting the relationship of coastal indigenous communities with their environment, and has a weekly science and environment segment on abc radio. his ongoing projects include work in a number of pacific nations working on environmental management capacity building in tonga, natural resource management research and training in east and west timor, and png. in particular he is working on communitybased projects to provide value adding for coffee in east timor and curriculum development for the east timor coffee academy. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, australia. email: david.lloyd@scu.edu.au) microsoft word 14maccallum coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 157 suddenly cooking casera publications, barcelona, 2010 isbn 978-0-9807737-0-5 reviewed by mark maccallum imagine you suddenly have to administer first aid to a roadside traffic victim. you´re not a doctor. you´re not a nurse. and you´ve never done this before. you are on bended knees cradling the bloodied head of a stranger, watching his eyes drift between open and closed. you franticly look to your left for help. there´s nothing. to your right? nothing. only a light breeze across a deserted country road. moments earlier whilst driving you´d looked down to change a cd. in an instant, a loud thump was followed by a leather-clad body zipping past your side mirror in an upward direction. a motor bike followed likewise. the victim is now your responsibility. very much your responsibility. apart from the ability to turn back time, what do you most desperately want in this world right now? what would give you a chance at redemption, and some faint hope of saving this person´s life? exactly! an instruction manual. fortunately, cooking dinner isn´t normally a matter of life or death, unless you take the notion to its extreme if we don´t eat we die. however, if you are one of those people for whom entering the kitchen “feels” like a death sentence, suddenly cooking by sophie ruggles has arrived just in the nick of time. you´re saved. and so are your dinner guests. the title gives the game away: this book is primarily directed towards beginner cooks – such as divorcees, the recently bereaved and young people just starting out. but it will also have immense benefit for long time cooks who´ve been operating at an uncomplicated level: bachelors like me, cooking quite happily for myself and occasional copyright©2011 mark maccallum. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 158 guests over 25 years during which time my culinary repertoire reached the dizzy heights of three signature dishes, and the many holes in my knowledge base remained largely unknown – until i read suddenly cooking. so what does a new or amateur cook want in a cook book? what makes it a success? solutions. an easy way to overcome the barriers (fears) which stand between him and satisfying cooking. typical of the barriers which confront a hesitant cook are: cook books appear too complicated and mysterious; i don´t have all the utensils needed to cook well; cooking for one person is wasteful; i don´t know what ingredients i´ll need until the moment of cooking – and then i discover i don´t have them; i´ll need to buy lots of ingredients which i´ll hardly ever use, and they´ll go off; cooking takes too long. and so the list goes on… suddenly cooking answers and solves all these fears in a style which is neither condescending nor complicated. part of the secret to this book´s success is its folksy style. ruggles allows her laid-back australian manner of speaking to soften the instructions given on each page. readers are encouraged by the “no worries” aussie confidence she has in their ability to succeed – even if there are hiccups along the way. it´s only cooking, after all, and it´s meant to be fun. likewise, the line illustrations and hand-written chapter headings promote a sense of: we are serious but we aren´t pompous about all this. in the past 20 years ruggles has worked in a variety of commercial kitchens, run a small catering company and successfully operated her own restaurant, so she knows how to turn out a good meal. the first 50 pages of this 250 page manual are devoted to getting to know your new environment. we begin with equipment essentials where the author introduces newcomers to the basic range of utensils needed in a properly geared-up kitchen. pencil drawings accompany all the basic items such as pots, pans, a colander, baking tray and vegetable peeler. okay, nobody needs to be shown what a metal baking tray looks like. but the fact the diagram is included sets the tone for the remainder of the book. if everything you are discovering is above your current level of comprehension, you might think this cooking business is all too hard. superiority over something gives you comfort. and your comfort is what the author is trying to achieve. likewise, the following section, food dictionary. eighteen pages are devoted to various food types, with colour photographs of each and brief explanations of their use. for example, in the three-page meat section we see 25 different types of raw meat. for the rank beginner, seeing a photograph of a leg of lamb or a sausage gives comfort (in the manner described earlier), whereas contrasting a photo of a rump steak with that of a filet mignon steak is demystifying. perhaps seeing a chunk of minced meat is going a fraction too basic, but try telling minced meat it doesn´t deserve its place in the meat section! the vegetable section covers four pages and gets pretty basic. (here´s what a carrot looks like). but it also includes photos and principal uses of choy sum, shitake mushroom and french eschallots. previously, if i´d been sent to the supermarket to buy some french eschallots i wouldn´t have known what to look for. the quality of the photographs is just passable, but i thought it fell a fraction short in the dried herbs & coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 159 spices section where finer detail was required. same for the cheese section. but by the end of the chapter we are familiar with the appearance of all the seafood, poultry, fruit, vegetables, rice, pasta, oils, pastes and general pantry items that we´re likely to need. in reviewing this book i read the contents page thoroughly before anything else. so i was surprised to see a chapter up the back titled the basics in which techniques for cooking vegetables, potato mash, pasta and rice are explained. everything has to go somewhere and not everything can come at the beginning of a book, but the author might have done well to highlight this very useful section in her introduction. equally, the section following which explains cooking terminology might have been better placed before the beginner encountered the terminology. ultimately, however, the fundamental feature of a cook book is its recipes. all the sizzle in the world won´t sell the sausage if the sausage is no good. as such, my taste buds are diligently working their way through the book´s 120 recipes (all with colour photographs), and the early reports are good. in the egg section alone i encountered at least one tip in each of the poached, fried, scrambled and boiled egg recipes which rectified long term errors i´d been making. similarly, i would never have dreamed of attempting moroccan style baked eggs (actually, i´d never heard of them), but the recipe looked simple enough and the result was a triumph. the book has changed my approach to some of the simple things. previously, i could never get my roast potatoes to be crusty on the outside. now i can. i´ve changed the way i cook vegetables and i discovered how to improve my mashed potato (by including an egg instead of milk). the very first words in the salad stuff section impressed me. the dressings on offer will keep in the fridge for two weeks: which means i can make a normal sized amount and experiment with it on my next half a dozen different salads. hence, no wastage. the carnivore dinners section offered the predictable range of old favourites, but is presented in a very readable and logical manner. i´m a fan of beef stew but have been too hesitant to make it. however, the beef and red wine stew (page 150) was straight forward in the making and tasted as good as mum´s. emboldened, i went for broke: chicken and mushrooms in cream sauce. i´d been making a rough version of this for years, but it never seemed to be quite right. it is now. when i arrived at the simply soup section i put up my usual barrier: why make soup when you can simply buy it at the supermarket? but on reading the recipes i realized the only real barrier was my hesitancy i don´t have a blender – and if i were to gear up properly that fear would be instantly removed. the recipes themselves are simple. the just desserts section opens with one of my favourites, mixed berry fruit crumble, which i´ve never made of course. but it looked too easy to ignore, and tasted just like the photograph suggested. late in the book i arrived at the best section: leftover-makeovers. i don´t know if this is an invention of ruggles or not. and i don´t care. it´s an absolute god-send for single cooks. it shows how you can transform any excess of the principal part of one recipe into the principal part of another. for example, let´s assume you´ve made the bolognese sauce (on page 148) and you don´t want to eat spaghetti bolognese for the next five nights in a row. obviously, you can freeze some for later use. but leftover-makeovers coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 160 explains how to use the bolognese sauce as your base for chilli con carne. likewise, if you´ve cooked more filling for shepherd´s pie (page 155) than needed – as i did – turn to page 203 for the stuffed capsicum recipe. no prizes for guessing what you stuff them with! similarly, an excess of tomato pasta sauce from page 94 becomes the base for a tuna pasta bake on page 204. to me, leftover-makeovers was a revelation because it doubles and in some cases triples the use of a core ingredient, thus ensuring no wastage of ingredients and an increase in dish variety. criticisms? the author stressed – but i don´t think she stressed enough – the importance of gearing up. you need the complete set of kitchen tools, otherwise it´s a bit like an ordinary bloke trying to change the clutch on his car using only what he has in his home hardware drawer. also, i felt the reader needed to be more reassured early in the book that although the list of herbs, spices, rice, pasta and general pantry items might seem long, the sum total of their cost is not great and they are used so frequently they´ll never reach their use-by date. the subtitle for this book is “real food made real easy”. australians will recognize this vernacular, while newcomers will find that it´s simply true. thoroughly recommended. mark maccallum is an australian freelance journalist and television producer currently living in barcelona. although he began his working career as a sports magazine editor and later moved into current affairs radio in sydney, it has been television news which has dominated mark´s career. he was a television reporter in australia for many years before moving to london where he spent six years working as a news producer at the bbc. he occasionally makes corporate videos and recently made a documentary about a 4wd adventure to the centre of the sahara desert. he has just finished writing his first novel. in his spare time he coaches rugby union in barcelona to a team of totally mischievous adolescents. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 spanish zombie films: the cases of amando de ossorio and jorge grau alex del olmo ramón esup-universitat pompeu fabra aolmo@tecnocampus.cat copyright©2016 alex del olmo ramón. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: situated by many scholars in the lowest position of cinema monsters, the zombie has over recent years been erected into one of the main benchmarks of the current fantasy genre. from its roots located in the lush jungles of haiti until its arrival in the west, the figure of the zombie as embodied by the living dead has a unique place in 20th-century popular culture, especially at the beginning of the 21st century. this article discusses the unique phenomenon of spanish fantastique cinema during franco’s dictatorship. its historical overview explains the causes that have lead to the emergence of the spanish fantastique film genre, taking as example the film production of two of its most emblematic spanish film directors working in the zombie subgenre: amando de ossorio and jorge grau. this article investigates the complex relationship between fantastique films and history, based on the study of the zombie films of these two directors throughout a troubled period, with its accompanying interpretation of the evolution of the subgenre and its impact on society. keywords: spanish zombie films, amando de ossorio, jorge grau, fantastique. “zombies are the new vampires” was the eye-catching headline of an article published in 2009 in time magazine that concluded with the following thoughts: “down with vampires. long live (or is it die?) the zombie: the official monster of the recession.” and it is indeed true, for the zombie is currently enjoying a golden age that dates back to the time george a. romero brought them out for a stroll in 1968 with his postmodern reinterpretation of the classic film the last man on earth (1964), thus announcing american gothic to the world. since then, the cinema’s living dead have been travelling a tortuous path with their crude gait and eternal death rattles, a path that has shifted until it has been relegated to the limits of marginal culture. commenting on this, russell states: mailto:aolmo@tecnocampus.cat mailto:aolmo@tecnocampus.cat coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 given the lowly status of its monstrous stars, it is not surprising that the zombie movie has remained on the cultural margins. rejected by the academy –scholarly studies of horror movies generally prefer to discuss vampires, werewolves and even serial killers before the living dead – these films have been consigned to the graveyard of popular culture, and the zombie itself has become persona non grata with everyone except those horror fans who like their movies raw and bloody [...] the living dead are always found lurking in movies that are low on stars, short on cash and often hurried into the cinematic equivalent of a shotgun wedding. (russell, 7) perceptions have fortunately changed in recent years. critics and filmmakers from both spain and abroad have returned to the zombie in films that are far removed from the amateur-like productions that involved more eagerness than resources and have extolled the zombie as an element of pop culture reference. considering the moment in which we find ourselves, with the major box office success of films such as rec (balagueró and plaza, 2007) and other subsequent sequels, it is fair to take a retrospective look at and analyse the spanish zombie cinema. for just as we can speak of american or italian zombie films, so too spain has its own iconography and production that allows us to speak of spanish zombie films. not only was its production carried out by spanish directors, it also combined visual elements from other horror genres such as vampires, religion—with the knights templars—or alongside other elements of spanish folklore and folk tales such as gustavo adolfo becquer’s legends or stories about revenants appearing at night to terrorise the living. if we were to trace the beginning of this film genre we would have to travel back to the 1970s, during the final stages of the franco dictatorship. then spanish fantasy films, and hence the zombie subgenre, gave birth to two of its key figures, the writer –director from la coruña in spain amando de ossorio, and the catalan director jorge grau, who earned their reputation as cult directors in films about the undead in our country and partly abroad (germany, italy and japan are just three examples). nonetheless, they have often been forgotten by the critics or, in the best of cases, ostracised to exist in the shadows of other more widely known directors by the general public. amando de ossorio, filmed his tetralogy on the knights templar, which began in 1971 with tombs of the blind dead and, jorge grau, a director from barcelona was responsible for let sleeping corpses lie (1974), considered to be the best sequel of its predecessor, night of the living dead (george a. romero, 1968). both have to be considered true auteurs, in this film subgenre and above that of a number of directors such as león klimovsky (vengeance of the zombies, 1972), carlos aured (horror rises from the tomb, 1972), and one of the icons of spanish horror films jesús franco, or paul naschy (aka jacinto molina álvarez). all of them, enjoying relative success, were dedicated to working in the genre of the living dead on the coat tails of ossorio and grau, with the former’s films a breath of fresh air, as noted by russell, helping to dignify and create a body of work of this interesting subgenre of spanish horror beyond our borders. the main reason that spanish fantasy/horror films—and, therefore, spanish zombie coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 films—did not appear until the 1960s-70s was the repression that was still being meted out by the church, catholic power and the harsh dictatorship imposed by general franco. both the church and franco exercised tight state control, nipping in the bud and quelling any artistic expression associated with this genre. it is no wonder then that the main body of spanish horror films – and, therefore, zombie films – appears when the fantasy genre had already developed all its facets and even exhausted its cycles throughout most of the world. german expressionism, universal’s monster films and science fiction films from the 1950s had all passed away and hammer films, producing pastiches that combined martial arts, vampires and the living dead, such as the legend of the 7 golden vampires (1974), reflected the decline of an outdated genre in search of other formulas that would eventually convert it into a great example of post-modern cinema, denoting the end of a type of film that had seen better days. according to javier memba: having lost its way, market rules took precedence over those of fantasy films. among this confusion, vampirism is mixed with martial arts, which were all the rage in the 1970s. the legend of the 7 golden vampires [...] is more appreciated by fans of karate films than lovers of good horror. (memba, 105) by contrast, spanish fantasy films began to emerge in the 1960s for various reasons, one of which was the announcement of spain’s new standards for film development in 1964 (nuevas normas para el desarrollo de la cinematografía). this would end up encouraging co-productions and, consequently, the international growth of spanish cinema. the other reason was undoubtedly the economic crisis that threatened the future of filmmaking in the country in 1969 as a result of the so-called “matesa case”, in which the government was obliged to intervene against banco de crédito industrial, a local bank involved in a political corruption case, by blocking its activities while awaiting a solution to the problem. this meant that all credit from the bank remained frozen, including loans providing funding to spanish cinema. the film protection fund relied on this bank and yet payment of subsidies on box office control were frozen year after year, resulting in the subsequent desperation of producers. consequently, horror films had two trump cards to play when it came to attracting the interest of spanish producers. they were a safe investment, because they offered immediate profitability due to low production costs, and they were also easier to export, because of their co-production status. thanks to these two characteristics, as well as two box office successes that would mark the turning point of the fantasy genre in spain, the house that screamed (narciso ibáñez serrador, 1969) and the werewolf versus the vampire woman (león klimovsky, 1971, featuring a character who was similar to the templars, whom ossorio would represent a year later in the first film of his tetralogy), spain entered fully into the emergence of the fantasy genre. this reached its peak between 1969 and 1973 with the shooting of almost a hundred films in the genre in just over three years. this is an extremely high figure if one takes into account that the total number of spanish films in this genre is approximately three hundred during the 60s until the end of the 70s. this increase in just three years shows the importance and scope of these particular years, which also marked the beginning of zombie films, coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 crystallising in the film by amando de ossorio that dealt with this subject for the first time: tombs of the blind dead (1971). in his first film, ossorio introduced a new type of zombie hitherto unknown in the world: the “blind dead”, evil and terrifying mummified bodies, reanimated knights templar seeking out victims while riding on their cadaverous steeds, guided only by sound and drinking human blood to sustain their cursed existence. this was a new, purely iberian legendary figure that departed from classic vampires or werewolves, which were already known to the general public, and would be exploited by its director on four occasions: 1. tombs of the blind dead (1971), which was equally influenced by ec comics, gustavo adolfo bécquer’s legends of the knights templar, romero’s zombies, satanism and vampirism. 2. return of the evil dead (1973), with its veiled parody of politicians at the time. 3. horror of the zombies (1974), to which ossorio added the myth of the flying dutchman. 4. night of the death cult (1975), with its references to the stories of h. p. lovecraft, abominable beings emerging from the depths of the sea. a fifth instalment was left in the pipeline. if filmed it would have been titled the necronomicon of the templars and would have cited two of the three legendary figures of iberian horror: ossorio’s mummified, zombie templars and the werewolf named waldemar daninsky, played by paul naschy, omitting the abominable dr orloff created by jesús franco, the third legendary figure of spanish horror film. ossorio explained it as follows in an interview with josu olano and borja crespo: [the production company] profilmes thought that since ossorio and naschy were providing the money, why not a movie directed by amando de ossorio featuring the templars and the wolfman together? but it was impossible, because naschy was then beginning his career as director of his own projects and wasn’t very interested. (aguilar, 356) ultimately the film series of the templars did, however, make a brief comeback in the devil’s cross (john gilling, 1974). it is no coincidence that ossorio’s most important work came after 1971. as benedeti et al correctly point out: in july 1971, ossorio was moved from radio nacional to no-do, where he was much more qualified. this move gave him much more free time to shoot his own films, and it was precisely during this period that he produced most of his higher quality work. (benedeti, 11) coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 restrictions were always placed on ossorio’s natural talent. given that he was a man with truly original ideas for his time, he was already encountering problems on his first film in the templars’ film series. before he could bring them to life on film, he produced a series of paintings and masks in an attempt to convince the producers and prove to them the terrifying look they could have on the screen. having overcome his first hurdle, he was subsequently not able to shoot in his native galicia, as he had originally planned. the following was the reply he received when indicating his desire/wish to shoot the film in spain: they told me that if i made a film with the dead rising from the grave at night and all that, in an area that was at the time being promoted by fraga to attract tourism, they may have to ban it [...] and since it all sounded rather fishy to me, i went off and shot it in portugal. (aguilar, 356) and this indeed was how it occurred. five years earlier, spain had already witnessed a plane crash in the andalusian village of palomares in 1966, in which a american b-52 collided with a kc-135 refuelling aircraft, dropping four 1.5 megaton thermonuclear bombs, two of which crashed to the ground close to the town, triggering their conventional detonator but without producing a nuclear explosion. manuel fraga iribarne, spain’s minister of information and tourism at the time, went swimming on the beach at quitapellejos in palomares in a campaign to reassure the public about radioactivity levels in the area. under these circumstances and still with the fear of the “nuclear demon”, it was unlikely that the spanish government would have allowed a film to be made about the living dead arising from their graves in northern spain, with the collective memory of the almería radioactive incident still very much alive. with the road clear shooting in portugal, problems continued to hound ossorio. the reason was the emblem that the spectres bore on their chest in his films. initially, the emblems were very similar to the cross of the templar order of calatrava (the first military order founded in castilla). ossorio, frightened by the idea of possibly having to remove all the shots of the zombie knights because of the censors he replaced the original templars’ cross with an egyptian cross symbolising eternal life. regarding the legend of the knights templar, it has to be said that despite the tradition and conceptual charge of the story being handled by ossorio who referred it back to the iberian peninsula, their origins in fact date back to brittany in france. it was there that terrible stories were told of shroud covered skeletons riding on the bones of steeds chasing travellers or trapping young maidens, with the souls of the spectral riders damned for eternity. while ossorio’s templars are the product of the galician director’s imagination, one cannot forget the influence of some of the works of the sevillian poet gustavo adolfo bécquer in the tetralogy. in particular, two of his most famous legends: the mount of the souls and the miserere. ossorio’s film is adorned by a soundtrack by antón garcía abril, who did a brilliant job with limited resources, repeatedly recording the name of the production manager on the film tombs of the blind dead (1971), pérez giner, and then running the tape backwards to create a sound treatment with the addition of a chorus made up of only two people. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 another key element to highlight in ossorio’s work is his obsession with sex (soft-core because of his time). he himself stated in an interview about his fascination with the combination of love and death, eros and thanatos, beauty and the beast: i’ve always liked playing with the contrast of mixing the sexual with that of life beyond the grave [...] i don’t know if it’s effective in terms of the general public, but to me it’s fascinating. (aguilar, 359) it should be noted that european horror films in the 1970s were greatly affected by the porn industry boom during that decade. as soon as porn films such as deep throat (1972) and emmanuelle (1974) were released, the horror genre underwent a major transformation that blurred the line between horror and pornography. an example of this influence can be seen in french fantasy films, also know as the fantastique. the fantastique is dominated by sex, as defined by the horror film critics cathal tohill and pete tombs: [in the fantastique] linear narrative and logic are always ignored [and] the pictorial, the excessive are the privileged factors […] with logic and rationality out of the way, the repressed takes centre stage, and it is hardly surprising that the other guiding factor inside the fantastique film is a predilection towards the erotic. (russell, 88) the blind dead series attracted two types of very different generations of audiences. the first were hardline fascists and the second were young people who just wanted to have fun at the cinema. as nigel j. burrell noted, tombs of the blind dead can be read as an analogy of “the rising up of old spain against the permissive generation, the repressive fascism of the franco regime versus the youth of the day” (burrell, 5) burrell’s theory proved correct, given that barely a few years later, once franco’s dictatorship and repressive controls had disappeared, filmmakers and spanish youth gradually became interested in a much lighter, more permissive type of cinema –known locally as the el destape movement– in which actresses started appearing completely nude in films, and to a lesser extent actors, alongside spanish comedians, thus superseding the previous cinema productions approved by franco’s censors. nonetheless, amando de ossorio was always modest about his contribution to the zombie genre: “i had no intention of innovating the genre. i simply wanted to do something a little different,” he explained in interviews in 2001 (hodges, 19) but the reality was a far cry from the director’s viewpoint. although perhaps unintentionally, the fact of the matter is that ossorio’s zombies are the most original recreation of the iconic undead in 1970s spain. they avoided recycling the monster movies at universal from the 1930s and 1940s or the hammer films from the 1950s and 1960s by naschy, or even the experimental films that lie halfway between hardcore pornography and hardgore horror by jesús franco. amando de ossorio undoubtedly helped spanish cinema reconcile itself with its time, escaping the morals of franco’s censors and avoiding naschy’s far from terrifying films, thus creating his own world within the zombie genre as a recognised auteur. we can see his influence in films such as the devil’s cross (john gilling, 1975), the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 legend of the 7 golden vampires (roy ward baker, 1974), further than fear (tomás aznar, 1979), death ship (alvin rakoff, 1980), burial ground (andrea bianchi, 1980), mansion of the living dead (jesús franco, 1985) or even the recent film series of the lord of the rings (peter jackson, 2001) and, the fog (john carpenter, 1980). ossorio was misunderstood during his time. even though he lived under the difficulty of a dictatorship, producing low-budget films, in a spain without much imagination or many stars, ossorio almost managed to work with boris karloff in malenka, the niece of the vampire (1969). the producers vetoed the actor’s participation in the film as they were not willing to transfer all american rights to him, given that he had been one of the stars of universal’s horror films 30 years ago. nonetheless, the film was produced thanks to the interest of the actress who played the role of malenka, anita ekberg, and ossorio ended up directing her in spain. she was the star who symbolised one of europe’s legendary erotic moments, after she had filmed the famous sequence in the trevi fountain together with marcello mastroianni in la dolce vita (federico fellini, 1960). tired of battling with producers, disappointed to see how his scripts repeatedly ended up being a shadow of what he had originally imagined, and in frail health in his later years, a still lucid ossorio lamented: “i never left cinema, cinema left me.” but let us not leave him, and instead place his zombie film work where it deserves to be. for to do him justice it is obligatory to claim that his blind dead tetralogy is one of the best film series in the living dead genre and fantasy films in general in the spanish film industry, and that the figure of amando de ossorio was one of europe’s and spain’s cult directors during the 1970s working in the zombie film subgenre. jorge grau, a native of barcelona, embodies one of those rare cases in spanish cinema in the 1970s, combining auteurship, training, sensibility and craftsmanship. these characteristics were not lost on the critics at the time and allowed him to shoot let sleeping corpses lie (1974). it is undoubtedly one of the most important – and most unfairly forgotten – films in the history of spanish horror films. despite its clear mission to copy and look like romero’s original film, grau never hid this fact. he even claimed: “to make the film i analysed the night of the living dead frame by frame in order to work out how it was made” (herranz, 311). and it was precisely grau’s reliability as a director that made the film much more than a pale copy of the original. in fact, foreign critics list it as being the best successor of romero’s founding film. reviewing grau’s film code of hunting (1983), the film critic josé luís guarner described the catalan director as follows: grau is a model of tenacity. he displays a very rare quality in spanish cinema: like almost all responsible professionals, he attempts to salvage even the most dubious projects, not only putting his filmmaking skills on the line – which are many – but also seeking to bring them as closely as possible to his own personal feelings, even including autobiographical elements. i, for one, certainly doubt that there is another filmmaker in the world who is as emotionally engaged in their films to such an extent, so intensely and with such sincerity. (aguilar, 91) coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 he studied at barcelona’s institute of theatre, one of spain’s most prestigious acting training centres, and began his career as an actor, set designer and director of actors until a friend offered him the chance to direct an amateur short film, el don del mar (1957). after this experience, grau decided to further his education at rome’s centro sperimentale. on his return to spain, his filmmaking career proper began. among other films, he worked as an assistant director on the colossus of rhodes (sergio leone, 1961) or as second unit director on goliath against the giants (guido malatesta and gianfranco parolini, 1962). that same year he displayed his strong theoretical background for the publishers rialp by writing the first book of his career: el actor y el cine (1962), in which he analyses the different methods of interpretation and acting techniques from the stanislavsky method to the italian neorealism of roberto rossellini, or the foundations of a good performance based on gesture, voice, sensitivity and being photogenic, from which he would later claim: “the people whose faces don’t look good when photographed is not a result of their physical features, but their state of mind” (grau, 116) his outstanding direction of actors is one of the most striking features of his career, of which he himself looked for the rationale by stating: “i try to provide the secondary character in my films with a story that is either told or untold, or even hinted at. what i don’t like is that they are simply pawns in a game” (herranz, 39) this undoubtedly distances the director away from most spanish horror productions of the time. moreover, grau is the undisputed architect of a social realist style that was first seen in noche de verano (1962), developed in el espontáneo (1964) and culminated in una historia de amor (1966). as jordi batlle states: three titles that provide a breath of fresh air to our national cinema, the last of which was also eligible to be part of such a decisive movement as the school of barcelona. looked at in this way, grau would be much closer to arthur penn than george a. romero [...] let sleeping corpses lie (1974) closer to miguel picazo or basilio martín patino than carlos aured, enrique eguiluz, león klimovsky or amando de ossorio. (aguilar, 92) horror films play a vital role in that eclectic landscape that constitutes his filmography, in which “auteur” and “craftsman” go hand in hand and sometimes intermingle. his first attempt at this genre was conceived at the karlovy vary film festival in czechoslovakia when he first discovered the story of countess bathory, who eventually appeared in the film the legend of blood castle (1973), a complex and unique approach to the legendary figure of countess bathory, who bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth. grau wanted to shoot the story not as a horror film, but as something more human. but he was not able to do so because of the social climate that prevailed immediately before the death of general franco. grau himself expressed it this way in an interview with pablo herranz: what they wanted was anti-franco films that were in some way committed to the reality of the moment. i had always worked like this as a filmmaker committed to reality, but not to political reality [...] i wasn’t able to make the film until horror films became fashionable. so it was suggested that i rework it as a horror film. for me this meant surrendering some of the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 film’s tone to turn it into something different, but since there was a spectacular and exhilarating look about it, i accepted. (herranz, 39) a circumstance that could be extended to other spanish directors, as ossorio also expressed a similar tone of regret to that of grau: i wanted to make a more poetic art cinema, working on the cinematography, making it more glamorous, but i had to hold back. it wasn’t the right time. (aguilar, 351) this commitment to the reality of the moment became the leitmotif that could be found in his masterpiece let sleeping corpses lie (1974). it is not surprising, given that may 68 had burst onto the scene in france and the hippies had established themselves as a mass youth movement at the end of the 1960s in the usa. grau, committed to the events of his time, added an ecological touch to the film (an agricultural machine causes the zombies to appear). the ultrasound it produces drives insects crazy, causing them to devour each other by affecting their underdeveloped central nervous system, thus making the newly dead, whose nervous system still remains somewhat intact, rise from their eternal sleep. a different type of social criticism underlies romero’s film. russell defends it thus: with its insistent ecological message (“we’ve been poisoned by progress that is unconcerned about its consequences,” explained grau when he was asked about the political message of his film) and its cynical representation of the authorities as stupid, ineffective and ultrareactionary, let sleeping corpses lie clearly owes a considerable debt to romero. it is still a captivating film in its own right, offering an unforgettable and desolate vision of entropy and decay. (russell, 46) this ecological viewpoint was not the only change that could be seen in the film. the fact that grau’s film is considered to be one of the subgenre’s most influential is no coincidence. it was one of the first films in the 1970s in which innocent animals were transformed into terrible threats by man’s direct or indirect action—whether it was by radiation, chemical spills, animal experiments or simply aberrations of nature. this situation as an excuse for the plot was something certainly new at the time. another extremely important element in the film was its use of colour, which combined with the makeup effects of giannetto de rossi, who would later work under lucio fulci to create the makeup for zombie 2 (1979), represent an important innovation compared to romero’s very low-budget film, and at the same time anticipate the openly graphic and bloody tone that films about the living dead would adopt from dawn of the dead (1978), romero’s second foray into the subgenre, hugely popular in europe after the rapid release of the film’s (false) sequel, zombie 2: the dead area among us (lucio fulci, 1979). therefore, grau’s film is ahead of its time in terms of the highly famous gore effects that would become an indispensable element of any zombie film worth its salt after romero’s second film in his series, especially in italian zombie films. the physical appearance of the living dead, with their bloodshot eyes, gaunt face and sleepwalker yet unstoppable gait, provides the film with a touch of realism never before seen in any similar movie, not even in one of the first colour productions about the zombie legend: the plague of the zombies (john gilling, 1966). it achieves a surreal coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 and disturbing atmosphere of undeniable suggestive power, enhanced throughout by francisco sempere’s excellent cinematography, with its muted tones and eerie light. not surprisingly grau speaks of the treatment of colour in his film and the studies he made before portraying the undead in his film: another thing that we came up with was giving the dead the look they had when they died. and this also came about from a study i did based on a large book about forensic photography. [...] in which the corpses appeared before the autopsies were performed. tragic and dramatic accident victims [...] amazing stuff, and of course the common feature throughout was that the corpse prepared for an autopsy had the look of the moment when the person had died, so a person who had hanged himself had a blood red neck. [...] so fernando gil’s character, who had drowned, was always wet, and before shooting any shot, before rolling the film, a bucket of water was thrown over him. his clothes were soaked and water was always dripping from his face throughout the entire movie. (del olmo, 260) this was a truly new technique at the time. especially given that grau’s film, halfway between romero’s black-and-white film and his second foray into the genre four years after let sleeping corpses lie, was the first to create for spectators a modern, fullcolour imaginary zombie, which had not been represented in that way until then. sound is the final expressive resource that needs to be highlighted in grau’s film as it is of such vital importance. it was the first horror film to be shot in stereo. the sound editing itself took grau almost two months to complete, because according to the director himself “not even one sound is accidental” in his films. this led him to shoot with live sound, but only as a reference soundtrack. the film was subsequently dubbed, because grau thought it essential to use a musical concept that would serve as a leitmotif throughout the film’s entire soundtrack. the concept was marked by grau’s experience of his father passing away: what could a dead man’s voice sound like? i remember when my father died; he was lying in bed with two or three pillows behind him so that he was almost seated. we realised that he had stopped breathing, so we laid him out. during the movement from sitting to lying he made the noise: “ahhhhhh...”, and this was the beginning of the sounds of the living dead in the film. and from this sound came the music. [...] many of the sound effects in the film’s music are me blowing into a microphone and these sounds were then distorted from the mixing desk to give them more resonance. and that’s how we did the music. my voice is in the music, as well as the sound of very softly distorted frequency to create this atmosphere. i remember feeling pleased about having done something you feel satisfied with. (del olmo, 259) this analogous sound for the zombies’ voices, with that of his father’s death rattle, is diametrically opposed to the way romero uses sound in his film. romero opts for guttural sounds, grunts and silent screams, in clear reference to one of the archetypal figures of horror films, who was also resurrected and made up of corpses: the frankenstein monster in universal’s monster movies. conversely, grau delves deeper coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 into the physiological study of the dead and the characteristics of corpses, thus making them less histrionic and achieving a much more frightening, expressive and realistic tone than his predecessor. grau regained narrative momentum by creating a film that surpassed romero’s original in many aspects. he created trends that the subgenre would later acquire as its own and are now inseparable from the figure of the modern zombie, influencing directors such as jean rollin in the grapes of death (1978), lucio fulci in zombie 2: the dead area among us (1979), danny boyle in 28 days later (2002) and juan carlos fresnadillo in its sequel, 28 weeks later (2007), or even romero himself with his sequel dawn of the dead (1978). jorge grau was also not a prophet in his own land/country when he premiered his film (as occurred with amando de ossorio), but it seems that only recently is he beginning to enjoy deserved recognition for his not only european but also international horror film masterpiece, reaping the benefits that were denied to ossorio. an example of this is the catalogue of such varied titles given to the film throughout the world: don’t open the window, fin de semana para los muertos, let sleeping corpses lie, the living dead at manchester morgue, non si debe profanar il sonno dil morti... spain in the 1970s became the world’s greatest exponent in the subgenre of zombie films. david flint also attests to this when he writes: while britain and the rest of europe carried on making films about dracula, frankenstein, ghosts and deranged killers during the early seventies, spanish filmmakers gave the euro-zombie a new lease of life. some of their films were pretty poor, but a few pointed the way for euro horror in general – and the zombie in particular. (flint, 104) thanks to two directors such as amando de ossorio and jorge grau, whose paths coincided briefly a body of cinematographic work in this subgenre was created, although the concepts they based them on and their manner of working were diametrically opposed. their work not only produced a new truly original iconography that was groundbreaking and a breath of fresh air for the time, it also continued romero’s series by bringing a new vision that surpassed it. both approaches filtered down and influenced countless films and directors who followed in the wake of amando de ossorio and jorge grau and became true masters of this subgenre. once romero’s film had been released, english films ignored zombies, italian films failed to adopt them as an archetype of horror until the arrival of lucio fulci in the late 1970s, and the usa itself had to wait another eight years before it would see the second foray of george a. romero. spain, and its relatively competent series of directors, was the only country that carried on in this subgenre by constructing a stylistic and thematic bridge between the zombies of romero’s first film and the truly bloody zombies of lucio fulci, umberto lenzi, marino girolami, andrea bianchi or michele soavi who would come to dominate the 1980s. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 works cited aguilar, c. coord. cine fantástico y de terror español: 1900-1983. don ostia [san sebastián]: semana de cine fantástico y de terror de san sebastián, 2004. balagueró, j. p. rec. dvd. barcelona: filmax, 2007. benedeti, i. et al. amando de ossorio: un galego fantástico. a coruña, galicia: universidade da coruña. servicio de extensión universitaria, 1999. burrell, n. knights of the terror. inglaterra: midnight media publishing, 2005. del olmo, a. el eterno retorno del no-muerto como arquetipo fílmico: una aproximación a la figura del zombi en la cultura popular contemporánea. barcelona: facultat de ciències de la comunicació blanquerna, 2012. flint, d. zombie holocaust: how the living dead devoured the pop culture. london: plexus, 2009. grau, j. el actor y el cine. madrid: rialp, 1962. grossman, lev. zombies are the new vampires. amsterdam: time warner publishing. vol. 173: 16, april 2009: 47. herranz, p. “jorge grau: a vueltas con los muertos”. quatermass. vol. (2002), num 4-5: 38-43. hodges, m. amando de ossorio: farewell to spain’s knight of horror. [?]: shivers nº 88, april, 2001. let sleeping corpses lie. (1974). dir. jorge grau. star films, s.a. divisa home video. memba, j. el cine de terror de la universal. 2nd ed. madrid: t&b editores, 2006. memba, j. la hammer: su historia, sus películas, sus mitos. madrid: t&b editores, 2007. ossorio, amando de. night of the seagulls. (1976) victory films films s.a, blue underground inc. —— return of the evil dead. (1973). atlas international film, blue underground inc. ——.the ghost galleon. (1975) amando de ossorio. video mercury films s.a, blue underground inc. ossorio, amando de. (dir.) tombs of the blind dead. (1971). atlas international film, blue underground inc. russell, j. book of the dead. 3rd ed. uk: fab press, 2007. alex del olmo has a degree in audiovisual communication by the universitat ramon llull, an ma in documentary by the uab (universitat autònoma de barcelona), an ma in film and television fiction production, script writing and directing by the universitat rami llull, and a phd in horror cinema. his research focuses on horror cinema and postmodernism. he has published several articles on these topics and he is currently senior lecturer at esup-universitat pompeu fabra at the tecnocampus, teaching camera techniques and tv postproduction in the audiovisual media degree. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 monographic issue: the 2013 australian studies centre tricontinental lecture in postcolonial studies, university of barcelona, catalonia, monday 8 th april 2013 postcolonial times: lock the gate or pull down the fences? prof. bill boyd abstract the development of a rural coal seam gas industry in regional australia, together with its key technology, fracking, has been met by a very active, lively and vocal social protest movement. this 2013 tricontinental lecture in postcolonial studies reflects on this protest movement from two perspectives. first, it examines what a postcolonial studies perspective may bring to further understanding the relationships and dynamics between the industry and the protest movement. secondly, it considers what postcolonial scholars themselves may be able to bring to critiques of social issues such as this environmental contention. the example described in this lecture also reminds us that postcolonial studies concerns more than the three continents of the tricontinent, latin america, africa and asia, and that it is centrally concerned with access to environmental resources. building on the history of the 1966 tricontinental conference in havana, and the growth of postcolonial political philosophy and studies that focus on power, equity and access in postcolonial societies, this essay considers the power differentials between industry and government on the one hand, and the protest movement on the other. by examining the role of language and its control, a key social process in the wielding of power, it is shown that the coal seam gas development debate is couched in terms of industrial or governmental language, and not in the language of the community. this has three important consequences. first, opponents are forced to express concerns about technical matters or scientific matters, thus legitimising the proposed activity. secondly, opponents are not authorised, within the formal sphere, to express their own feelings through their language of social anxiety, of love of the country, of being in the community, of history. thirdly, both sides find themselves in a typical cross-cultural dilemma: either speak an inadequate form of language that the other party understands but that does not actually express what you mean, or speak your own language and risk the other party not understanding what you mean. copyright © bill boyd 2013. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 from a postcolonial studies perspective, this example reminds students of two key processes. first, students need to master the intellectual skills of the humanities in order to provide critical analysis of social situations. secondly, students need to know that, as western scholars, they are as much part of any postcolonial problem as those in power, and therefore need to develop good reflective skills and to learn to think ‘otherwise’. this invited monograph is the text of the lecture, supplemented with further comments and illustrations, delivered to second year humanities students at the university of barcelona, catalonia, on monday 8 th april 2013. key words: tricontinental conference, australia, coal seam gas, fracking, community protest, language, power, postcolonial studies, postcolonial scholarship introduction to the tricontinental lecture in postcolonial studies lecture series an initiative of the teachers of postcolonial studies in the english department at barcelona university, the university of barcelona tricontinental lectures series was created in 2011 to incorporate interventions by speakers of diverse academic and cultural backgrounds in the postcolonial studies courses offered at the department of english and german studies. the first tricontinental lecture was read by sudanesebritish writer, jamal mahjoub, in 2011, in an auspicious event co-organized with casa africa. the series title responds to the conviction that the interdisciplinary field of postcolonial studies has a social and political responsibility. it pays homage to the 20 th century anticolonial struggle. it was inspired by robert young’s precise reclamation of the key tenets of postcolonialism. in many ways, tricontinental is a more appropriate term to use than postcolonial. ... as terms, both "tricontinental" and "third world" retain their power because they suggest an alternative culture, an alternative 'epistemology' ... postcolonialism begins from its own knowledges, many of them more recently elaborated during the course of the anti-colonial movements, and starts from the premise that those in the west, both within and outside the academy, should take such other knowledges, other perspectives, as seriously as those of the west. postcolonialism, or tricontinentalism, is a general name for these insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms and values under which we all live. isabel alonso, university of barcelona, april 2013 coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 introduction postcolonial studies focus on the social struggles of people seeking to take control of their lives. in this lecture, i will explore an example of just one such struggle – the struggle by australian rural communities to stop the development of the coal seam gas industry in rural areas. the struggle for communities to access environmental resources has long been part of social struggle (hutton & connors, 1999; doyle, 2000). the anti coal seam gas campaigns in new south wales and queensland over the last few years continue that tradition. from a postcolonial studies point of view, there is much to learn about the processes of social protest from this example. in exploring this example of a social protest movement, i will do two things:  i will provide a brief critique of the anti coal seam gas campaign, and its inherent paradox. i will briefly introduce the coal seam gas industry in australia, and the opposition that has arisen against it. i will then present some ideas about what have, in my view, been the underlying driving values of the opposition.  i will offer some advice to you as postcolonial students and scholars regarding your contribution the critical debate surrounding such socioenvironment matters. in drafting this lecture, i explored further themes relating to the postcolonial perspective on social relations. these were not delivered in the lecture, but provide background and context to the body of the lecture. i include these as notes within the text at points of relevance. they should be read as part of my contribution to students’ understanding of the complexity, reach and global relevance of postcolonial studies. in delivering this lecture, i was particularly conscious of three important themes. first, tricontinental issues are not limited to latin america, africa and asia, but apply globally. secondly, postcolonial concern about the environment has become as strong a concern as that about social conditions. and thirdly, the institution – the university – in which we are considering such thoughts is very much part of the dominant system, and so we need to tread carefully. at the core of this lecture lies a paradox. the title – lock the gate or pull down the fences? – refers to an interesting phenomenon often seen in postcolonial struggles. this is the adoption, by protestors, of actions and values similar to those they wish to overthrow. in simple terms, the forces of authority often seek to exclude the public from its activities. in that way, authorities maintain control. protest movements seek to overturn this exclusion. regardless of the type of protest – national independence, environmental protection, minority group empowerment, etc. – exclusion often becomes the very tool used by the protest movement. the title of this lecture, therefore, refers to this tension. in particular, it references to the very successful campaign slogan of ‘lock the gate’, used by anti coal seam gas campaigners in australia to counter what they see as the industry’s tendency to put fences – real, imagined and virtual – around its activities (figure 1). coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 figure 1. both industry and protest movements can – and do – adopt policies and practices of exclusion. on the left are typical signs limiting access to a restricted area being used for an industrial or resource extraction purpose, and on the right is the lock the gate triangle, symbol of community protest against coal seam gas exploration and mining in australia (sources: csg free northern rivers, 2013; keep the scenic rim scenic, n.d.) the tricontinental conference and postcolonial studies let us step back a little for a moment. 2013 marks the 58 th anniversary of the bandung conference, a gathering of political activists from 29 then-newly-independent african and asian countries. the conference was to redefine the geography of global politics. thinking of themselves as a ‘third world’, separate from the first or western, and the second or soviet worlds, delegates sought to identify a new political order in which the newly-independent countries would thrive under neither colonial nor soviet rule and conditions. the focus of this movement gradually shifted to the problems of such new countries, the “poverty, famine, unrest: ‘the gap’”, as robert young (2003:17) describes it. postcolonial scholars consider the bandung conference to be the beginning of their discipline, and of the political philosophy now bearing the name ‘postcolonialism’. the conference marked the acknowledgement of the effects of colonial rule, empire and non-indigenous dominance on disempowering and defining the majority of the world’s people. by 1966, this movement had spread. leaders and activists meeting in havanna represented three continents, latin america, africa and asia – hence the ‘tricontinental conference’. this conference, rather than promoting a singular political or theoretical position on third world liberation, worked towards the empowerment of the dispossessed and the marginalised, the reduction of power differentials, and the establishment of systems of government and governance that allowed access, equality and equity (figure 2).   coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 figure 2. after a long armed struggle against indonesian government forces and the considerable power of the indonesian government, the community of east timor (timor l’este) gained political independence in 2002. the real struggle of gaining a true global economic, social and cultural independence is now underway. in these photographs, community members are engaged in training and development projects to identify innovative and sustainable agriculture for remote villages. (photograph: david lloyd). the 2013 tricontinental lecture: postcolonial times: lock the gate or pull down the fences? the 2013 tricontinental lecture series takes its name from that seminal 1966 event. however, while some of the original tricontinental issues have been resolved, others – many more – remain. new ones have become prominent. postcolonial debate and discussion remain necessary. regardless of global progress, it is without doubt that power differentials continue to impede the lives of many. the many now reside both in the third world and amongst the politically and economically marginalised of the west. the title of this lecture – postcolonial times: lock the gate or pull down the fences? – seeks to capture a key process globally, the locking in and the locking out of communities, regardless of location. a postcolonial view of the world sees those in power holding, building and securing their power by disempowering others. the ‘others’ are usually a majority, the community, the poor, the marginalised. they are locked out of the power structures, locked out of their rights to self-determination, and locked out of their own culture. furthermore, the locking out reinforces the position of both the powerful and the powerless (figure 3). boundaries, walls and fences, are important. robert young (2003:66) puts it this way: most nations rely on cohesive borders. if borders are open, permeable, then the nation’s peoples cannot be controlled. they may leave, others may enter illicitly: migrants, immigrants, undesirables. the modern state functions by means of a contradiction: a combination of strict border controls together with tolerance, even quiet encouragement, of illegal immigration – by workers who then have no rights. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 so, make a boundary, build a wall. we are always surrounded by walls. … some of us are walled in. walls around the cantonment, the prison compounds. ‘gated living’ in the us, or south africa: barricades. … some of us are walled out … walls that stretch through the countryside or zigzag across the city, built as border fences to keep people and things out. the limits of liberalism. to defend the state. figure 3. “… walls that stretch through the countryside or zigzag across the city, built as border fences to keep people and things out. the limits of liberalism. to defend the state.” top: the great wall of china, the archetypal exclusionary wall, designed to keep people in and out over great distances. the great wall of china is a powerful expression of imperial power, not only in including and excluding people, but also in terms of the central control over both the many hundreds of thousands of people required to build it and defend it, and the resources required to build it and maintain it in use over centuries. bottom: the remains of the berlin wall, another archetypal exclusionary wall, built to keep the west out of the soviet east europe, and to create a controlled enclosure of an undesirable people. as a powerful political statement, this wall served to keep both people and ideologies apart. while it has now been dismantled, and a unified germany now seeks a new identity, similar walls, such as that enclosing the palestinians in israel-occupied palestine, serving similar functions as statements of empower and the enforcement of that power on minority groups, continue to be built. (photographs: bill boyd) coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 yet, when we examine the opposition to colonial conditions, we find a paradox. processes of exclusion and power may also be adopted. a common theme in postcolonial studies is a critique of the adoption, as a rallying call for opposition, of traditional habits: conservative cultural nationalism, cultural tradition, and the traditions of power and conventional socio-cultural roles. colonial powers across the world during the mid 20 th c were relieved of their control over countries in latin america, africa and asia as a result of the power of such conservative nationalism. it seems that a call to tradition was necessary. however, what that call risks is replacing one restrictive power with another. the postcolonial agenda seeks something more independent, something more transformative, than a simple transfer of power from one elite to another. it seeks the development of empowered people, of a society in which egalitarianism is enacted, and communities in which all members have access to the resources they need to live comfortably and safely. robert young (2003:113) again helps us: postcolonialism as a political philosophy means first and foremost the right to autonomous self-government of those who still find themselves in a situation of being controlled politically and administratively by a foreign power. with sovereignty achieved, postcolonialism seeks to change the basis of the state itself, actively transforming the restrictive, centralizing hegemony of the cultural nationalism that may have been required for the struggle against colonialism. [emphases added.] so, let us return to the title of the lecture – postcolonial times: lock the gate or pull down the fences? the ‘lock the gate’ slogan is a specifically australian slogan, created and adopted by australian anti-mining campaigners. in order to remove constraints that rural and regional australian communities consider are being imposed upon them by government and mining industries, including the coal mining industry and the coal seam gas industry, the community created a campaign – ‘lock the gate’. the intent is to empower landowners and tenants to refuse entry to mining companies seeking to access their land for exploration and coal or gas extraction. that campaign champions exclusion and constraint. hence the paradox: locking the gate to remove other barriers. ‘tricontinental’ or ‘hexacontinental’? with this background to postcolonial studies and its fundamental link the tricontinental conference with its revolutionary latin american, african and asian foundation, you may well ask, “why are we talking about australia?” to answer this question, let us consider the first of the three themes i introduced earlier: tricontinental issues are not limited to latin america, africa and asia, but apply globally. should we be talking about ‘tricontinental’ or ‘hexacontinental’? you will notice that the case study i explore in this lecture comes not from latin america, africa or asia, but from australia. as an australian, i am conscious that the ‘tricontinental’ label is inadequate in expressing the true scale of the challenge to postcolonial studies. australia is an example par excellence of a colonised country. it is a country in which the original coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 people and their culture, the aboriginal people of the hundreds of kinship and language groups of the mainland of australia, and the torres straight islanders of the northernmost parts of the mainland and the islands to the north of the mainland, have been dispossessed of their land, their language, their kinship structures, their culture (figure 4). they now live in a perpetual state of enforced assimilation, expected to conform to a eurocentric, largely anglo-centric, form of social and cultural organisation. ironically, they are also expected now to be increasingly ‘indigenous’, to reassert their own culture … so long as that indigeniety does not seriously challenge the eurocentric ways of being australian. australia is the fourth continent. our neighbouring region, oceania, is characterised by different and diverse, but equally disempowering colonial histories: we must thus add a fifth continent, oceania. furthermore, i have lived for half my life in scotland; i am a scot. this part of me shares a form of history with many european minorities, including the catalan, basque and galician people here in spain (figure 5). it is a history of dominance of a larger, neighbouring power, in my case, england. there is a long history of dominance: the periodic outlawing of indigenous gaelic language, dress and kinship structures, the diminishing of another indigenous language, scots, in the schools and official circles, the continuing social construction of the scots as other in britain. minority groups, be they ethnic, cultural, or economic, within the west, represent the sixth continent. of course, i could go on. figure 4. australian aboriginal people have been dispossessed of their culture, their languages, kinship structures and links with land. australian aboriginal culture places reflect essential social and cultural relationships with land. only relatively recently have aboriginal people been, in general, allowed to resume some control of their important places. they are usually, however, still required to manage these places using non-aboriginal social and environmental management processes and structures. these information boards describe some aspects of the important ceremonial and ritual place of tooloom falls, known at bandahngan, in northern new south wales, where the githabul tribe is seeking to resume, from the government agencies managing it at present, its responsibilities for this important cultural place. (photograph: bill boyd) coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 figure 5. catalunya: expressions of desired autonomy. in seeking autonomy from a dominant power, people will develop and celebrate the signs and actions of a separate culture and politics. the public expression of identity, the re-assertion of language, culture and history, and the creation of a contemporary culture. this figure illustrates a few examples from catalunya; they include the public flying of flags, often a previously outlawed activity, the establishment of cultural institutes and the re-establishment of language and literature, and celebration of music. (photographs: bill boyd) the principal point here, however, is that the tricontinental conference and its successors, postcolonial philosophy, politics and studies, have often focused on conventional third world nations: issues of power and dispossession, minorities as other, and marginalisation. postcolonial studies, however, have a wider relevance throughout the world, whether you are working in africa or your own city. there are dispossessed, threatened and marginalised people within everyone’s own community, regardless of whether our country is considered to be a third world country or not. the third world is everywhere. coal seam gas exploration and mining in australia let us return now to coal seam gas and the social response to it. coal seam gas is a source of energy that has been mined for nearly 30 years in australia. the principle is relatively straightforward. hydrocarbon gasses are locked up in microscopic pores in certain rocks. conventional extraction cannot release these gasses. however, the technique of hydraulic cracking – known as ‘fracking’ – allows these inaccessible gasses to be removed. the technology uses wells drilled into the gas-bearing layers. this may not be enough to release the pressure on the rocks, and thus release the gas, as in conventional gas extraction. if this is the case, a mix of water, sand and chemicals is inserted to fracture the rocks and mobilise the gasses. this is known as ‘fracking’ (from fracturing + cracking). fracking has been used for over 60 years across the world, and for the last decade and a half in australia. the gasses are removed in water. extraction of the coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 gasses results in saline and toxic wastewater, which is then processed at the surface to yield clean water. the scale of the industry is important to understand. wells need to be localised, so a deposit of gas will need many, often hundreds, of individual wells. it has been estimated that in the state of queensland alone, for example, there could be as many as 40,000 wells by 2030. i do not wish to debate the pros and cons of the industry here. there is much technical literature – both scientific and industrial – that describes the industrial processes. for a good source of information, the australian broadcasting corporation web site provides a sound and broad synthetic review of the coal seam gas industry and technology (abc, 2013). (the abc is the government-run public broadcasting body in australia, generally regarded as a good and reliable media source.) however, i do note that the technology is established and continues to be developed. it has been used in gas extraction across the world. interestingly, when the industry was first expanded in australia, it was welcomed by most as being the new green and clean energy. however, in recent years, this view has changed considerably. what is important, now, is that public scrutiny of the industry has increased significantly. many concerns have now been raised, both by the public and by the scientific community, including:  effects of the fracking chemicals on ground water  effects of the fracking chemicals on river water  effects of the saline wastewater  ecological effects in mining areas  human and animal health issues  social issues of the impact of an industry on rural communities  economic issues affecting agricultural producers  amenity and quality of life issues  short-term and long-term impacts of the industry  geological stability of the wells and the rocks naturally, while there is a strong public outcry about these matters, there is not complete agreement on all of them. reports and publications reflect both the differing understanding of the effects of coal seam gas exploration and extraction, and the politcal context of the authors and agencies publishing the reports (e.g. lloyd-smith & senjen, 2011; clark et al., 2011; rural affairs and transport references committee, 2011; appea 2011; williams et al. 2012: figure 6). the industry and parts of the government have argued against many of the claims of negative impacts. parts of the industry have been proactive in seeking to manage the impacts. the mining companies themselves are taking different approaches. some are very public about their activities and, i believe, genuinely try to engage the public. others appear to be working more secretively. all the companies need to work within planning regulations. more recently, the government appears to be listening to the public. it is putting legislative and planning controls in place, and enforcing controls on mining company activities. some government, notably at the local government level, is taking a strong stand against coal seam gas. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 the scientific debate is growing, with scientific articles now being published in the international reviewed scientific literature (e.g. tait et al., 2013; figure 6). previously, supporters of the industry, in particular, sought to discredit scientists making comment on the issues, on the basis that there had not been any credible scientific research conducted. this is now changing. the emergence of the community-based protest movement from a social science point of view, the spectacular growth of large, vocal and very active community-based protest groups is most interesting. these are truly grass-roots groups, and have grown from within the various communities affected by the industry. an example is a group known as the ‘western downs alliance” (lloyd et al., 2013). it started in 2009 as a small group of farmers who were offered payment for gas wells to be drilled on their land. following an internet search, they found alarming information about coal seam gas mining in the usa. they started a media campaign, which brought the issue to the wider australian public. they have since toured the regions, talking about the industry, what its plans were for their land, and (in their own words) exposing plans for coal seam gas mining development elsewhere. this group is typical of the emerging coal seam gas protest groups. they are local, and they focus on local issues. they represent farmers, rural residents, and indigenous groups. they are all concerned about the negative impacts on social and environmental quality of life in the country. one local group member, for example, has commented (these quotes are from lloyd et al., 2013): you can’t eat gas, it’s that simple. they want to put the pipeline right through our most productive country … this is all about water: our head waters are just up the road here …, and we depend upon these aquifers for the farms and for the towns. these groups have been very successful at mobilising local concern. however, not all local people agreed. in some communities, the potential economic and employment benefits of the industry have been seen to be positive. some communities have become quite divided. one protester has acknowledged this thus: this issue is going to divide communities a lot more yet, as one neighbour can let them on and then you have a gas well on your boundary. in the early stages there was no education, people did not know what they were letting themselves in for. when you go out and educate yourself it is quite terrifying. nevertheless, a popular campaign has been very successfully mounted (figures 7).  protest marches have attracted thousands of participants. a march in the regional town of murwillumbah, in northeast new south wales, in may 2011 attracted some 2,500 people, building on a smaller protest of around 400 people the year before.  protestors have attended company shareholder and public meetings. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 figure 6. in every debate there will be a diversity of opinions and views, reflecting the authors’ beliefs, political position or view, official or professional obligations, etc. the response to the increasing public visibility of the coal seam gas industry in australia has been diverse, changing through time. here are examples of the many publications now available (sources: from top left to bottom right: lloyd-smith & senjen, 2011; rural affairs and transport references committee, 2011; clark et al., 2011; appea 2011; tait et al., 2013; email call for a special issue of the journal of economic and social policy; williams et al. 2012) coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 figure 7. the coal seam gas social protest movement in action: protest marches and gatherings in new south wales at byron bay (top left) and murwillumbah (middle, left), and in queensland at broadbeach (top right) and chinchilla (middle right). the lower middle images are from public meetings: the lock the gate annual general meeting (left) and a public meeting with one of the companies in the town of casino (right). the lower image is typical of the web presence of the protest movement; the web provided a powerful medium for dissemination of information and communication between groups and individuals. note the visually prominent yellow ‘lock the gate’ triangles, an image that has become synonymous with the protest campaign and movement. (photographs: hanabeth luke; lloyd et al., 2013; csg free northern rivers, 2013a)     coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14  widespread petitions have attracted thousands of signatures, and protest group surveys have engaged over a thousand people in one area.  a large community stage show, coal seam gas – the musical, has entertained thousands of people, and allowed a lively expression of the range of community concerns (documentary australia foundation, 2013) (figure 8).  an important part of the success of the campaign was the adoption of the ‘lock the gate’ slogan. this drew on a broader anti-mining campaign, which sought to have landowners lock their gates to mining exploration and extraction. figure 8. elements of the anti coal seam gas protest campaign. on the left is an advertisement for the coal seam gas – the musical show, a community created and performed musical show, used to present the protest movement’s views to the public. it also served as a rallying event, fund-raiser, powerful group building activity, and a movement-affirming activity. on the right, the lock the gate triangle and other related material. the adoption of the colour and lettering provides a powerful visual image for protest events, as illustrated in the protest group web site image at the bottom. (sources: northern rivers guardians, 2013; lock the gate alliance, n.d.) the campaign used a very simple and unambiguous slogan, ‘lock the gate’. it also used what i consider to be a very effective graphic, the yellow triangle. this is a very successful and powerful piece of advertising and sloganeering. it has, i believe, helped to mobilise large sections of the community against the coal seam gas industry. if a landowner agrees with the campaign, he or she ties a triangle to the gate of their coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 property. if every owner on a road has a lock the gate triangle on show, the entire road can be declared a coal seam gas free zone. a number of local government councils have strongly supported this campaign. one, in particular, chose to include a question on coal seam gas in its local elections last year. in response to the question “do you support coal seam gas exploration and production in the lismore city council area?” over 85% of voters voted ‘no’. the de-colonisation of environmental resources before we continue examining the australian coal seam gas protest issue, let us turn to the second of the three important themes introduced earlier: postcolonial concern about the environment has become as strong as any concern about social conditions. if postcolonial studies are about social issues, what is the relevance of environmental concerns? postcolonialism is a political philosophy underlying the right to sovereignty and the transformation of restrictive, centralizing hegemonic power. it stands for, in robert young’s words, “empowering the poor, the dispossessed, the disadvantaged, for tolerance of difference and diversity, for the establishment of minorities’ rights, women’s rights, and cultural rights within a broad framework of democratic egalitarianism that refuses to impose western ways of thinking on tricontinental societies” (2003:113). as such, it resists all forms of exploitation. this brings postcolonial thought into the environmental as well as social spheres. it opens the door to critiques of environmental resource extraction, of the corporate versus social use of, and access to, the environment and its resources. importantly, it challenges corporate capitalism’s commodification of environmental resources. it recognises that at the root of most poverty is inequitable access to the basic resources – food, water, shelter – let alone the basic environmental resources that may provide wealth, health and wellbeing. inequitable access may be for many reasons: the appropriation of natural resources by the powerful, unjust pricing of commodities and crops, control of distribution. social, cultural and environmental relationships are often intimately linked: dispossession of land usually equates with dispossession of culture. this concern is global. while the most spectacular examples may be found in the second and third worlds – the three gorges dams project in china, for example, the anti-mining movement in bougainville (melanesia), or the battles to protect forests in africa and india – such movements are also important in all societies (figures 9 and 10). it has become, therefore, an important task for postcolonial scholars to examine the social processes, and effects, of the colonisation and decolonisation of the environment and its resources. it is this theme – albeit only one aspect of it – that i explore in this lecture. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 figure 9. control and ownership of place and space is one of the fundamental environmental attributes of any society. this example is tempelhof airport, berlin, recently decommissioned as a public airport, and taken over by the people. the banner declares: to whom does the city belong? the berliners = all of us! conserve 100% of the tempelhof field! the airfield, formerly a central part of the power base of berlin, and the focus for the survival of west berlin as the berlin wall was being built, has now been taken over as a large recreation (middle) and bird conservation area, with community gardens (bottom) springing up at its edges. the citizens of berlin, however, still wait for the government to ratify this citizen resumption of public space. (photographs: bill boyd) coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 figure 10. concern for access to, and control of, environmental and natural resources is a global concern. the anti-fracking campaign in catalunya is but one example of community concern being voiced with regards to planned and implemented natural resource extraction. the photographs record graffiti in garrotxa (left) and a public meeting advertised in the eixample, barcelona. (photographs: bill boyd) underlying social concerns this issue is undoubtedly complex. it has given rise to a very vocal and passionate social protest movement. it has also given rise to an extremely acrimonious debate. what underlies such passion? in the lead up to the election poll, both sides presented their arguments to the public. towards the end of last year, a research team from southern cross university conducted surveys of voters exiting the voting stations, to find out the reasons behind their vote (luke et al., in prep.). the main arguments advertised before the election were repeated to the research team. however, there was some selection or prioritisation. this suggests that some issues are of greater concern than others to the public. there was, for example, a clear message of environmental concern. all the known and previously expressed issues were mentioned in the survey: groundwater extraction; water system contamination; health effects; noise and infrastructure impacts; impacts on employment in other industries, tourism and agriculture; and greenhouse gas emission impacts of methane leakage. however, the most widely commented concern was about water quality. regardless of the campaigning information, water quality was most important. this is a very similar outcome to those of surveys conducted elsewhere amongst various groups (boyd et al. 2013; ada, 2011; wvs, 2011; ipsos 2009). if, however, we dig deeper, we find some interesting results that suggest a more fundamental concern: the threat to sense of place, to community and to identity. there are several lines of evidence. first, in analysing interview transcripts, one of our students, hanabeth luke, identified the following terms to be most common (in order): gas, water, companies, mining, laws, environmental, groundwater, inadequate, chemicals, pipeline (figure 11; lloyd et al., coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 2013). the references to ‘companies’, ‘mining’ and ‘law’ are interesting. these reflect commonly made statements recorded in the post-election poll. these common statements were about people’s anxiety about power relationships with government, and about lack of access to decision makers. importantly, research across the world has shown that, in government to public discussions, the public’s sense of lack of representation and authority to make decisions are important reasons for the engagement failing, and for increasing public dissatisfaction (julian et al., 1997; smith & mcdonough, 2001; irvin & stansbury, 2004). our results provide evidence for such social dissatisfaction with government. figure 11. a depiction of the strength of ideas and themes extracted in interviews and surveys with coal seam gas protesters. in this image, the more prominent the word, the more commonly it appears in people’s responses. (image created by hanabeth luke using wordle©; lloyd et al., 2013). secondly, the stage show, coal seam gas – the musical, provides interesting insight (documentary australia foundation, 2013). the first half of the show focussed on the arguments about chemicals, water pollution, technological uncertainties, i.e. the technical or scientific reasons against coal seam gas. the second half, however, changed the focus. it presented a strong – in my view stronger – statement of people’s anxieties about losing their community and the environmental they live in. many people have moved to rural and regional areas in australia, certainly in our area, for the life style. in very simple terms, the message was clear: communities are happy as they are and simply do not want industrial development on their land and in their communities. thirdly, during 2012, the media published stories about mining exploration leases. they published government maps of the locations of these leases (figure 12). these have been part of the planning landscape since the 19 th century. the public, however, had not, it seems, been largely aware of this. the maps are alarming, and seem to suggest that no-one’s land is safe. the public outcry about this intrusion of government on people’s private lives was notable. this, i suggest, reflects an underlying social concern about big government, big industry.   coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 figure 12. maps of mining exploration leases in new south wales, part of the public management of land and environmental resources. the publication of such maps in the press represented the first time that many, if not most, members of the public were aware of such seemingly widespread control of land. in the eyes of citizens who do not understand, or have not been explained the land planning system, these maps appear to represent the removal of their own rights to land. in a country such as austalia, where land ownership is very important for almost all citizens, these maps presented an apparent threat to personal ownership of land. they served to increase people’s anxiety about the role of government, relationships between government and industry, and the possible loss of self-control of land. (sources: csg free northern rivers, 2013b; orange news now, 2013) what can we as scholars do about such situations? before i close on some comments on what i think this may all mean from a social process point of view, i will reflect on what you, as a postcolonial scholar, might be able to contribute. as public servants, academics – staff and students alike – have a duty to create and disseminate new knowledge about how the world works. this may or may not involve activism. we are different from political activists in that our job is to rigorously examine, analyse and critique situations. if possible, we add to the sum total of our society’s knowledge. we have a public duty to do this. how do we do this? first, we should note that we have data gathering and analysis tools available to undertake critique. i will not review the wide range of philosophies, methodologies or methods available to you as humanity students, suffice it to provide a few examples. porteous’s statement about how the social sciences work provides, for example, one frame for you to examine the roles of all the players in a situation (figure 13), whereas dilling & lemnos’ (2011) model of how scientific knowledge agendas are established may provide insight into the process of knowledge transfer and creation (figure 13). you could equally turn to social constructivism to allow you to accept the validity of all statements regardless of any factual truthfulness (jackson & penrose, 1993), a model that i have found very useful in analysing cultural heritage management issues (boyd, coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 2012). you could equally turn to other sources for your conceptual framework: homi bhabha, michel foucault, eduard said, and so on. there are so many intellectual tools we can use to analyse and critique our work: structuralist (quasi-scientific) to phenomenology and behavioural tools, the use of metaphors, culture as text.... in the humanities, we have access to multiple languages (art, poetry, prose, fiction, faction, performance and so on; see, for example, the most immediately previous issue of coolabah: boyd & norman, 2013). it is your task, as students, to learn about these methods, and to master the skills of applying them to analysing the real world. that is why you are at university. figure 13. top: a model depicting epistemological diversity in the social sciences. such a conceptual model could provide scholars with a frame in which to analyse, for example, the various roles of professional people within a social issue or action. bottom: setting scientific knowledge agendas. this model helps in understanding how the public may interact with the special process of adopting, using and applying science in issues such as environmental management. at the top, the science push depicts researchers and information providers as setting the agenda for what type of science is produced and disseminated, whereas in the middle, the demand pull allows for priorities in the generation of new knowledge being determined by those making decisions outside of the scientific community; the lowermost depiction illustrates the iterative co-production of knowledge between scientists and potential users and stakeholders. (top: adapted by bill boyd from porteous, 1996. bottom: adapted by hanabeth luke after dilling & lemnos, 2011) coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 secondly, we need to be conscious of the role of reflective practice. in contemporary scholarship, at least within the social sciences and humanities, reflective practice is important. this is the skill of acknowledging our own position in relation to the situation we are studying. we need to think about the situatedness of ourselves as scholars, and of the institution of the university. we are part of the system rather than separate from the system we are analysing (figure 14). indeed, we are usually part of the problem rather than of the victims of the problem. we need to understand this. john macleod (2000:22-23) has written eloquently about this. so, freedom from colonialism comes not just from the signing of declarations of independence and the lowering and raising of flags. there must also be a change in the minds, a challenge to the dominant ways of seeing. this is a challenge to those from both the colonised and colonising nations. people from all parts of the empire need to refuse the dominant languages of power that have divided them into master and slave, the ruler and the ruled, if progressive and lasting change is to be achieved. as fanon wrote, ‘[a] man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’ (black skin, white masks, p.18). the ability to read and write otherwise, to rethink our understanding of the order of things, contributes to the possibility of change. indeed, in order to challenge the colonial order of things, some of us may need to re-examine our received assumptions of what we have been taught as ‘natural’ and ‘true’. this is probably your greatest challenge, as students of postcolonial studies. despite social changes across the western world, scholars and academics tend to be middle class, professional people. they often have liberal views and a relatively strong sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong”, the rule of law, justice as defined within their middle class society. the laws and rules of a liberal state tend, after all, to be middle class rules, reflecting the mores and expectations of middle class people. postcolonial studies force middle class scholars to engage and confront ‘others’: the powerful, the despotic, and the wealthy, on the one hand, and the marginalised, the disempowered, and the invisible, on the other hand. the scholar generally belongs to neither group, and therefore does not share the cultural and social mores and understandings of either group. more importantly, these groups, if we accept the postcolonial views of early postcolonial scholars such as eduard said, hold views that are conditioned by the conditions of their own society. these are the very societies that marginalise others; they privilege the political and commercial systems in which the marginalised people must live. it is, therefore, a serious challenge to you as students of postcolonial studies, to reflect on your own sense of being, and on the constructedness of your own assumptions about how the world is. this is a challenge worth taking up. it will make demands on you intellectually. it does not mean that you simply deny your own culture and uncritically accept another’s. it demands, however, that you consciously examine assumptions behind your own views, you critically engage with ideas, observations and knowledge, and you try to develop a sense of awareness of difference, social construction, and context. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 buddhist thinking makes a distinction between ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’. consciousness means being in the present. awareness means you know you are in the present. this distinction may usefully be applied to your scholarly engagement with postcolonial issues. figure 14. universities have been part of the power base of western society since the middle ages, and the institution of the university has often been very closely associated with the church, another significant power base in european society since the middle ages. as such they have provided the intellectual basis for european thinking and, especially, politics. the urge for european powers to expand, explore and colonise came from intellectual curiosity as much as from economic and political desires. importantly, universities provided much of the intellectual justification for colonial power and its imposition on the colonised world, and provided the explanations for colonial thinking, especially with regards to the differences – especially hierarchical differences – between peoples. increasingly, however, universities now provide alternative forms of social critique, and can be powerful forces for change in society. the images here are of the university of barcelona, although images of almost any university would suffice. (photographs: bill boyd) the academy, the west and the third world: weird people this brings us to the third important theme introduced earlier, and an interesting little detour. the institution in which we are considering such thoughts is very much part of the dominant system, and so we need to tread carefully. the institution in which this lecture is being delivered – the academy and the university – has been part of, indeed right at the core of western thinking and society since its inception in late medieval times. it is fundamentally conservative, and while it may seem to provide a focus for liberal thinking, it is part of the status quo of a stable western society. just consider what happens when intellectuals, scholars and students coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 oppose a government in some countries: universities get closed, funding cut, academics censored, imprisoned and assassinated. a common shorthand for political dissidents by many unimpressed governments is ‘students’. the original tricontinental conference was not an academic or intellectual conference. its delegates were not from the academy, but were politicians and activists. they sought to liberate their societies from the west, not intellectualise the issues. they were fighters opposed to the effects of western colonialism in their countries. as a white, middle-class, educated man myself, i am as much part of the third world ‘problem’ as is the industrialists, multi-national corporations, political elites and foreign armies. the academy is part of the social system that validates such institutions, affirms the conventional values of the west, and creates the next generation of industrialists, politicians, etc. in psychology, a recent term has been coined to describe the tiny minority of people, globally, who define the rules we are all expected to live by: weird people – western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic. weird people comprise less than a single per cent of the global population (heinrich et al. 2010; waters, 2013). yet weird people dominate global intellectual thought and action, political thought and action, and economic thought and action. the world spins on the ideas and beliefs of a very small number of weird people. and very few of these weird people hold postcolonial perspectives on the fate of the vast majority. so, you and i, as weird people, educated in the academy, are privileged. that privilege comes with a responsibility. our responsibility is to engage intellectually with this large and very different world. we are obliged to use the tools of our trade, the intellectual tools of observation, data collection, analysis and critique. and what for? to contribute to a greater understanding of how the world works. for those of us with a postcolonial inclination, the responsibility is greater: not to serve the status quo but to constructively critique it. if you are lucky, you may also find clues to solutions, solve individual problems, find better ways for the world to work. and, for a few of us, we may discover a new way to understand, and be in, and to know we are in the world. and someone may hear us. and, very occasionally, someone may change their behaviour. as students, you are at the start of this path, learning the tools of your trade. your teachers are somewhere on that path, contributing little by little to a greater global understanding of power, inequity and social disadvantage, and your mentors are the books of the great thinkers and activists, the eduard saids, michel foucaults and homi bhabhas of the world. so … how to understand the coal seam gas issue? having said all this, you will understand that, as scholars, we have responsibility to engage issues, and that responsibility is, inevitably, coloured by the intellectual tradition that we adopt. regardless of which tradition you adopt, there will be many possibilities for analysis and critique. in this lecture i wish to illustrate how a postcolonial perspective may contribute to further understanding the processes of social protest in an environmental resource issue. in a single lecture, however, it is impossible to examine coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 any issue in depth, and so here i will provide the illustration of one specific postcolonial perspective that may be helpful, i believe, in understanding that has happened. there are, of course, others interested in the behavioural social, technological and governmental processes. examples of critical frames include recent discussions of social activism and engagement in the coal seam gas debate, examined from the perspectives of activism, social identity and risk scholarship, and of anthropology. jacques & galloway (2013), for example, discuss the dual identities of activist groups: the way they see themselves and the way others see them. to examine how effective such groups are, jacques & galloway apply activism, social identity and risk analysis, concluding that, “non-cooperation may limit activists’ capacity to achieve their objectives” (p.1). de rijke (2013) on the other hand, advocates an anthropological examination of the social engagement with unconventional gas and fracking, demonstrating the potential for analyses of materiality, politics, discourses, rights, risk and knowledge. other recent studies range from studies of the language and discourses being used amongst communities to recreate identity (mcmanus & connor, 2013), through understanding the history of the national agenda on resource extraction as a national necessity (duus, 2013), and studies of community perceptions and social processes (petrova & marinova 2013). these, and others, are equally valid analytical frames, and may all contribute to a greater understanding of such social protest. here, however, i want to focus on a typical postcolonial issue: language. robert young (2003) talks about the importance of language in colonial and postcolonial conditions. languages exist in a hierarchy. under colonialism, the colonising language becomes dominant, replacing and translating the indigenous language: “the colonial language becomes culturally more powerful, devaluing the native language as it is brought into its domain, domesticated, and accommodated” (p.140). the colonising language will reflect the values of the dominant power. in the west, this has come to mean the values of science and technology, of economy and progress, of capital, all over-shadowing the values of community, environment and culture. the latter are fine in a democratic society, but are still largely subordinate to the former. the implication is that official business must be done in the language of science and technology, economy and progress, etc. as with all dominant languages, access to limited technical, scientific and economic language, while superficially resembling everyday language, is specialist language. it is accessible only to those who are admitted to it, through education and validation by those with power in society. the adoption of such language by government and industry becomes part of the process of domination, and of achieving control over the general population. the case of the campaign by the government and industrial companies to develop coal seam gas as an extractive industry in the australian countryside is a good example of both the disempowering and empowering effects of language. mcmanus & connor’s (2013) study of the social marginalisation of communities in the coal mining district of the upper hunter region of new south wales, for example, demonstrated how communities use “new and reflexive constructions of ‘the rural’ that integrate traditional identity, discourses of sustainability and the re-centring of rural life” (p.166). coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 in the example i have been examining, i am interested in the broad forms of language evident in the argument between pro and anti coal seam gas lobbies. my interest lies in the ability of communities opposed to the development of such an industry to be able to engage it within the terms of the development itself. the language of the industrialisation of the countryside is the language of technology, of science, and of government. it is not the language of the community, of society and of culture. it is the language of resource extraction, and not the language of environmental custodianship. it is the language required to ensure successful industrial development in, and on the countryside. it would be remiss if it did not serve its purpose. the opponents of such industrialisation of the countryside seek to influence government and industry. they have, therefore, to speak the language of technology, of science, and of government. their objections need to express technological, scientific and governmental concerns, in the language that government understands. they are required by government to abide by certain rules of language, the rules of scientific argument, the rules of environmental impact assessment processes, the rule of technical logic. furthermore, opponents need to use this language within the communication structures established by the government. this further forces opponents to conform to the limited language of industrial development. that language is the language of successful industrialisation. formal expression of concerns, already limited by governmental rules regarding the nature of allowable concerns, is the preferred form of communication of government. there are three important consequences of this situation. first, opponents are forced to express concerns about technical matters or scientific matters. they are forced to speak a language that legitimises the proposed activity. their objections, in this language, are, at best, only likely to modify or limit, rather than negate, that activity in its final incarnation. any good technician or scientist should be able to ‘win’ a debate couched in such language. it is their language, after all, codifying their knowledge, culture and history. it is structured to, as all languages should be, meet their cultural needs. it is the language of achievement not denial, of development not status quo, of progress not non-progress. secondly, opponents are not authorised within the formal sphere to express their own feelings – the language of social anxiety, of love of the country, of being in the community, of history. these are core to a functioning social community. they are not, however, part of the lexicon of technical and scientific language essential for industrial development. since there is no room for emotion, community or culture in the technical and scientific language of development, opponents are not allowed to express their real anxieties about a proposed development. they simply do not want the development in their landscape or within their community. they simply don not need it as part of their functioning community. and they fear the threat to existing community values. they do not want to change the identity of their community. but they cannot speak this when the government wants to hear about water quality and soil erosion. water quality and soil erosion (and the rest) are important, but they are not at the heart of the language of the community. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 so, thirdly, despite scientific and technical assurances, and regardless of whether the science and technology are as correct as they can be, if the community does not want the development in the first place, it finds itself in a typical cross-cultural dilemma. either speak an inadequate form of language that the other party understands, but that does not actually express what you mean. or speak your own language, and take the risk that the other party does not understand what you mean. in either case, real communication has failed, as, indeed, it is likely to do where any two languages are spoken in one conversation. a conclusion in closing, i note that there have been some very recent developments in the issue of coal seam gas exploration in new south wales. in february this year, one of the major coal seam gas exploration companies, metgasco , suspended its operations in the region (figure 15). the stated reason was that the state government had brought in new regulations that made continuing operations unsustainable. the new regulations introduced a 2km exclusion zone around residential areas and banned coal seam gas operations in certain areas of viticulture and horse farming. the local media reported that, “in an announcement to the media and the australian stock exchange, metgasco ceo peter henderson cited ‘the uncertain operating environment’ created by state government regulations for their decision to suspend operations” (parks, 2013). the same article noted that peter henderson retained options for later exploration: he seems to have dismissed the idea of selling the company's exploration licences to another company, saying: “once csg investment regulations are firmly established and it once again becomes prudent to invest shareholder capital exploring and developing csg reserves in new south wales, metgasco will resume its operations”. and just this week (i.e. the week i delivered this lecture; second week of april), another company, dart energy, in a statement released to the australian stock exchange, announced major cutbacks in its australian operations, including a reduction in staff by 70% (marshall, 2013; broome, 2013b). the company’s chairman, nick davies, blamed the political environment for the decision, commenting: the board of dart is extremely disappointed with the uncertainty created by recent nsw and federal government decisions in relation to csg development in australia. the consequence is that investment is leaving the country, field operations are being suspended, australian jobs are being lost, and the impending energy crisis in new south wales is not being addressed, and indeed, will only get worse. coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 figure 15. local newspaper headlines announcing the cessation of coal seam gas exploration by two of the companies involved in the industry in the north coast region of new south wales. (sources: broome, 2013a, b; holt, 2013) both companies have sacked staff, and both have indicated that they will continue their activities elsewhere. neither acknowledged the role of the anti coal seam gas movement on their decision, commenting on the government’s role and effects on share values. it appears, therefore, that even when the companies withdraw, they are still working in the language of government and commerce, not the language of the community. returning to the view that the postcolonial agenda seeks something more independent, something more transformative, than a simple transfer of power from one elite to another – in this case, the apparent will of the community to not have an industrial development in its countryside – we need to consider whether such transformation has been achieved. as robert young (2003:113) reminded us, “with sovereignty achieved, postcolonialism seeks to change the basis of the state itself, actively transforming the restrictive, centralizing hegemony … that may have been required for the struggle against colonialism”. the companies may have removed themselves from the region, but it appears that they have not done so on a basis that suggests they understand the community’s real concerns, or if they do, they are not yet ready to acknowledge them. they have not undergone the transformation that would suggest the postcolonial agenda is complete. is the protestor’s celebration premature (figure 16)? while the protestors certainly appear to have successfully locked the gate to coal seam gas, they have yet to pull down the fences of language surrounding the industry in this rural setting yet. for postcolonial scholars, the need for critical engagement remains … coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 figure 16. jubilation amongst anti coal seam gas campaigners on the news that several exploration and mining companies had withdrawn from the region. the accompanying article opens with the words that the news “has been welcomed by those who have been campaigning against the development of the industry … lock the gate spokesperson, ian gillard said its “a great day for the northern rivers”.”. the campaign has locked the gate to coal seam gas mining, but has it pulled down the fences yet? (source: parks, 2013). acknowledgements i wish to acknowledge my friends and colleagues in the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona, sue ballyn, maarten renes, isabel alonso and marea grau, for inviting me to deliver this annual lecture, and for encouraging me to consider the theme of fracking and coal seam gas as an opening for my thoughts on postcolonial studies. i also wish to acknowledge the students of the university who have listened so patiently to my presentation, and who may have noticed the irony and paradox of a postcolonial lecture being delivered in a foreign language. i wrote and delivered this lecture as part of my study leave activities while resident as a visiting professor at the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona, and acknowledge both the centre for its award of this position, and my own university, southern cross university, for supporting my study leave in barcelona. i also wish to acknowledge my friend and colleague, david lloyd, southern cross university, for our discussions, debates and shared research, especially in the field of community engagement in environmental management: we may not always agree, but we are always both the richer for it. and last but not least, my wife, ruth henderson: your stories of being a scot in the catalan coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 institute back in the 70s remind me that we have been postcolonials long before we ever knew the word existed. references abc. 2013. coal seam gas by the numbers. http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/coalseam-gas-by-the-numbers/ (accessed 24.04.13). ada. 2011. australian survey of social attitudes 2007. australian data archive. http://ada.edu.au/ (accessed 24.04.13). appea. 2011. “we want csg”: mythbusting. australian petroleum production and exploration association. http://www.wewantcsg.com.au/coal-seamgas/mythbusting (accessed 27.03.13). boyd, w.e. 2012. ‘a frame to hang clouds on’: cognitive ownership, landscape and heritage management. pp. 172-198 in skeates, r., mcdavid, c. & carmen, j, (eds) the oxford handbook of public archaeology. oxford university press, oxford. boyd, w.e., den exter, k., christidis, l. & lloyd, d. 2013. current issues in environmental management in australia – what do people think? coolabah, 10, 31-50. boyd, b. & norman, r. 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(accessed 03.05.13). petrova, s. & marinova, d. 2013. social impacts of mining: changes within the local social landscape. rural society journal, 22(2), 153-165. http://www.echonews.com.au/news/arrow-backs-out-nsw-focus-csg-lng-projects/1798625/ http://www.echonews.com.au/news/arrow-backs-out-nsw-focus-csg-lng-projects/1798625/ http://www.keepthescenicrimscenic.com/signs-and-stickers.php http://www.lockthegate.org.au/ http://northernriversguardians.org/?tribe_events=csg-the-musical http://www.orangenewsnow.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/coal-seam-gas-map.jpg http://www.orangenewsnow.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/coal-seam-gas-map.jpg http://www.echonews.com.au/news/metgasgone-metgasco-set-to-go/1790422/ coolabah, no.12, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 porteous, j.d. (1996) environmental aesthetics: ideas, politics and planning. routledge, london. rural affairs and transport references committee. 2011. management of the murray darling basin – interim report: the impact of mining coal seam gas on the management of the murray darling basin. canberra: commonwealth of australia. 2011. smith, p.d. & mcdonough, m.h. 2001. beyond public participation: fairness in natural resource decision making. society and natural resources, 14(3). 239249. tait, d.r., santos, i.r., maher, d.t., cyronak, t.j. & davis, r.j. 2013. enrichment of radon and carbon dioxide in the open atmosphere of an australian coal seam gas field. environmental science & technology, 2013, 47(7), 3099–3104. young, r.j.c. 2003. postcolonialism: a very short introduction. oxford: oxford university press. waters, e. 2013. we aren’t the world. pacific standard http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrichweird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/ (accessed 02.05.13). williams j., stubbs t. & milligan a. 2012. some ways forward for coal seam gas and natural resource management in australia. an outline of the report ‘an analysis of coal seam gas production and natural resource management in australia: issues and ways forward’. report prepared for the australian council of environmental deans and directors by john williams scientific services pty ltd, canberra, australia. wvs. 2011. the world values survey. the world values survey association. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ (accessed 24.04.13). bill boyd is the professor of geography at scu and the chair of the university’s human research ethics and animal care & ethics committees. he is a geographer, archaeologist and landscape scientist. he has research interests in long-term environmental change, human-landscape interactions, environmental and cultural heritage management, and higher education. he draws on both the geosciences and the humanities to inform his research. he teaches in the fields of environmental management and cultural heritage. he has worked throughout australasia and southeast asia for the last two and a half decades, examining how ancient people interacted with, and modified their environments, and how the landscapes of this tropical region evolved over the long term. he also works in the fields of environmental management and higher education teaching & learning, focusing on the management of environmental and cultural heritage places and landscapes, and community engagement with environmental management. as an education researcher, he uses reflective narrative methods to examine issues of pedagogy, curriculum and teaching & learning practice. he has published extensively in the scientific literature in all these subject areas, and has co-authored several books. he holds doctorates from the universities of glasgow and st andrews, and is a life fellow of clare hall, university of cambridge. he is a fellow of the royal geographical society and of the institute of australian geographers. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, australia; http://works.bepress.com/bill_boyd/; william.boyd@scu.edu.au.) http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/ http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/ http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ http://works.bepress.com/bill_boyd/ mailto:william.boyd@scu.edu.au coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 pam johnston dahl helm: lost to our mothers diana wood conroy copyright© diana wood conroy 2014. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. “we saw that our own children were sometimes lost to us as we were lost to our mothers, and they to their mothers” (pam johnston, free spirit, 1996, n.p.) in the time i knew pam johnston i during her doctoral study at the university of wollongong (1995-1998) the search for mothers, the need for certain and indissoluble affections underpinned her art and writing. the father was lost and absent: there was a constant matrilineal momentum in her positioning of herself. “to explore mother daughter relationships, to examine oral histories as a way back to aboriginal connections to land”, she wrote, was pivotal to her work (johnston 1997, p.5). as a tribute to her, and because of my admiration for her courage and passion for justice i would like to tease out some of the complexities of her exploration by placing her in the context of her times. writing about the category “aboriginal art” the anthropologist howard morphy discussed in 1988 how the art of various regional aboriginal traditions, such as that of papunya or yirrkala, is now placed beside the work of individual artists of indigenous ancestry, such as gordon bennett, tracey moffatt or trevor nicholls, whose work could be classified as “contemporary world art”. the category ‘aboriginal art’ then, challenges the traditional boundaries of the western art world through its diversity. the global significance of ‘aboriginal art’ as presently constituted is that it includes in an ethnically defined category works that would equally fit into that dominant unmarked category – contemporary fine art. the very process, however, of incorporating some forms of contemporary art within the category of aboriginal art while excluding others in turn reproblematises it. for if aboriginal art is nothing other than art produced by aborigines, then some of the works in that category are most similar in format terms to works excluded from it. thus imants tillers’ nine shots, which provided the inspiration, or perhaps the irritation, for gordon bennett’s nine ricochets is excluded from aboriginal art. yet it is part of the history of bennett’s painting and therefore aboriginal art history (morphy 1988, pp.419-20, cited by mclean 2011, p.105). pam johnston’s body of work is associated closely with the rise of aboriginal urban art in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and in a parallel fashion to morphy’s examples, coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 forms part of the history of the interactive koori art movements of the east coast of australia at this time. in 2012 pam johnston described herself on social media as a “practicing visual artist, community worker and unattached scholar”, with no mention of aboriginal affiliations. like tracey moffat, destiny deacon or fiona foley she may have preferred to be an artist without the ‘a’ word slanting all interpretations of her work. i would argue in this essay that conclusive definitions of origin are not, in levi-strauss’s sense, “good tools” to think with. the scholar alison ravenscroft described the tumult of images and stories between black and white in alexis wright’s novel carpentaria as a “poetics of equivocality” and this is a much more useful approach in unlocking johnston’s imagery (ravenscroft 2012, p.71). i would like to consider pam johnston’s oeuvre as part of a great movement of the times to contest and revision canonical australian histories and invoke spiritualities of land. both aboriginal and european histories are relevant in considering her work. background and context between 1995 and 1998 i was officially pam johnston’s supervisor in the doctor of creative arts degree at the university of wollongong, although in many ways it was she who educated me. an exhibition and installation called indigenous women’s spirituality accompanied her thesis entitled transformation (death) appropriation, conception (birth) identity, transition (life) land. she extended and developed themes from her 1990 master of visual art thesis the woman spirit journey: a celebration of women’s spirituality from the college of fine arts, university of nsw. the unpublished thesis, with a video and slides, is held in the archive of the university of wollongong library and is a prime resource for untangling the contexts of her work. despite the controversies about identity and place that circulated around her, it was the community of marginal and dispossessed people that remained central. the quote leading this text came from an anthology of writing by women in mullawa women’s detention centre, put together by pam johnston, their teacher, in 1996. pam johnston’s 1997 doctoral thesis begins with the statement: my identity as an aboriginal person has been questioned by both aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. my identity as an aboriginal person has been rejected by both aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. my identity as an aboriginal person has been accepted by both aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. thus i have an ambivalence regarding aboriginality that needs to be explored (johnston 1997, p.3). in the late 1980s and 1990s ‘identity’ was a key word in australian arts. textile artists and craftspeople emerging from the hierarchies of modernism searched for identity. women in australia were freshly aware of new realms of equality under the sex discrimination act of 1986 and the equal opportunity legislation of 1987. in the 1970s aboriginal arts communities papunya in the central desert and yolngu regions in the north had become glowing centres of renaissance nationally and internationally. in the 1980s it was the turn of so-called urban aboriginal artists, often from the fringes of cities and towns, who had lost language and the freedom to inhabit land in the turmoil of colonisation, but had retained strong ties of kinship to each other and indefatigable ties to country. in 1984 indigenous curator djon mundine ii was appointed to the art gallery of nsw, and in the same year koori art 84 was the first urban art to be exhibited in the sydney public gallery artspace (mclean 2011, p.57). a group of ten urban artists came together to form the boomalli co-operative of aboriginal artists established coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 in redfern, sydney in 1987. iii pam johnston was invited to join them, although later she left the group through disputes about the appropriation of traditional and remote aboriginal imagery by urban artists, including herself (johnston 1997, p.44). the sydney writer jennifer isaacs published aboriginality in 1989, a book that explored “urban” artists of this time, many from boomalli, who expressed their edgy political and spiritual positions in the familiar techniques of oil painting, acrylic and printmaking. a quote of johnston’s appears on the cover: “our culture confirms that we exist through ritual, image and spirituality. it is us and our lives confirm it.” one of the painters in aboriginality, trevor nicholls, later represented australia at the venice biennale in 1990 and observed, “my work is not purely aboriginal art, it’s a mixture. my work is cross-cultural…” (mclean, p.102, citing nicholls in thompson p.104 -110). the powerful voice of these artists resonated for me at the power institute of fine arts forum on aboriginal arts at the art gallery of new south wales in 1991, with such artists as fiona foley and lin onus speaking of their formative experiences in political terms of the longstanding dispossession and demoralisation of aboriginal people since white settlement. in that same year 1991, as a visual arts lecturer, i became the co-ordinator of the first introduction to aboriginal arts and society subject at the then school of creative arts at the university of wollongong, and was able to bring aboriginal artists, writers and thinkers into the lecture room. when bill harrison, the indigenous director of the aboriginal education unit at the university gave the first lecture with authority and wide-ranging scholarship, i stood at the back with great emotion, remembering how the voice of aboriginal people had been absent in all my studies of anthropology at the university of sydney in the 1960s. it seemed a new beginning of agency and hope. over the next few years hetti perkins with her father the famous activist charles perkins, bronwyn bancroft, brenda croft, tracey moffat, ruby langford and others came down to wollongong from sydney to talk to the 50 or so students, who included kooris as well as international students from across asia and europe. banduk marika from yirrkala in the northern territory was artist-in-residence in 1991, beginning a long interaction with yolngu printmakers. as well, emerging local wadi wadi and thurrawal artists such as lorraine and narelle thomas, kevin butler and jeff timbery participated. the poet joy janaka wiradjuri williams (b. sydney1942d. wollongong 2006) was the indigenous tutor and lecturer ( see peter read, 2009.) pam johnston followed janaka as lecturer and tutor in the subject in 1996-97 and brought a fiery quality of immediacy and passion through her first-hand accounts of aboriginality in the city and country. she believed that “the personal narrative, the ‘telling’ became a validation of identity and of existence” (johnston, 1996, n.p.). a naturally engaging speaker who was involved in text and language as well as imagery, pam was keen to instruct on koori languages that formed a subtext to ordinary australian english, often racist in implication. she handed out a multi-choice “intelligence test” on koori semantics, satirising the notorious intelligence tests that had given aboriginal people low rankings, based on a white education system. her fluent writing accompanied her artwork and was parallel in significance. the intellectual fire she brought to language was countered by the feelings and intuitive acts that resulted in her constant visual imagery of women in a spiritual understanding of land. both text and image were narrative. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 fig.1. pam johnston, “test your own iq” handout to class introduction to aboriginal arts and society, 1995 journeys to country to understand pam johnston’s imagery it is relevant first to look at journeys she made back into country. accompanying ruby langford ginibi as her adopted daughter, pam drove through ruby’s bundjalung country in northern nsw. she photographed ruby’s relations at their invitation, and the series of black and white photos of people from the settlements at box ridge mission, coraki and tabulam were exhibited at lismore regional gallery as journey to bundjalung country around 1997, the first exhibition about the aboriginal people of the area. particular women, such as aunty eileen morgan made a deep impression. she quoted her at box ridge mission, coraki: “see that tree over there. i was born under that tree. that’s my born place.” she pointed to the tree, about one hundred yards from her verandah (a journey into bundjalung country c. 1996, n.p.) pam johnston joined a ten-day artist’s workshop, held july 6-16, 1997 to experience the environment, history, and cross cultural layers at the world heritage site of lake mungo in western nsw, which i organised with kay lawrence from adelaide. thirty-two artists from around australia, from uk, poland and america were invited to come to lake mungo in western nsw for ten days of intensive workshops. revolving around the broad field of textiles, with people involved in installation, photography, paper, surface design and coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 printmaking we hoped to establish collaborative networks and deepen the understanding of material processes in relation to the complex arid environment of lake mungo, with its many histories. iv i remember pam unrolling a scroll of paper on the veranda of her cabin and painting the long linear horizon dotted with clouds and trees for the whole length. i recorded her several times in my journal as fundamental to the strange euphoria of those days. july 1997, lake mungo. walked at dusk under an overcast sky to the labyrinthine gardens of spinifex just up the road. feet crunch because everything that drops on the ground remains entire through the extreme dryness turds, scats, burrs like tiny grenades, dry sticks, spinifex spines, feathers. the fire had burnt all day with pam looking after it, and people sitting around it stitching, drawing and plant dyeing pungent smells of cooking bush leaves. the tobacco bush with small yellow flowers was introduced here from europe with settler wheatbags, john handy the aboriginal guide said. it is not pulled out because the kangaroos like to eat it. saw a small flock of emus: how poised they are. pam did an emu walk stretching out her spine and walking on tip-toe. “you can get up really close if you walk like this.” “don’t the emus notice you’re not really an emu?” “no, they’re too polite.” silcrete is a very hard rock used for artefacts, often in crescents of stone. the fragments of giant emu egg genyornis are thicker and a different texture to modern emus, said the young non-aboriginal ranger. by comparison john handy the aboriginal ranger had seemed gently mocking, realising that information freely given is not valued, and facts have to be needed in advance rather than spoken to an unready audience. pam told a story about the ‘old girls’ competing with stories of being ‘deader’ through the number of children and grandchildren they’d had (conroy 2000, pp.25-30). fig.2. pam johnston written text for exhibition response to lake mungo long gallery, university of wollongong, 1997 17.5 x 16.5cm coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 transcription. one day two old ladies went walking. they weren’t walking together – they came from opposite directions. they were very old so they walked rickety and slow. they saw each other and propped. they said gooday. one said to the other; “you look pretty old. you must have been around for a while”. the other old lady said, “well i am pretty old. this country is my born country. i’ve seen everything that happened in this country.” “true,” says the first. “well i’ve had 12 kids 19 grandkids and 7 great grand kids in this country and all still living.” “deadly,” says the other old lady, “i’ve 15 kids, 39 grandkids and 45 great grand kids and am so old i can barely get around in this country.” “holy dooley,” says the first old lady, “i look death in the eye every morning when i rise and every evening when i rest”. “i live with death every minute of every day. i’m so old that me and death are one and the same”, says the second old lady. the first old lady says, i’m already dead” and drops down dead but not quick enough because the second old lady is already flat down dead on the road. they wave and continue their journeys. the mother genealogy the rules of kinship, wrote the classical scholar page dubois, separate nature from culture (dubois 2010, pp.175-176). kinship, that understanding of the intricate pattern of relationship is a primary mode of knowledge in aboriginal societies. by the late 1980s and early 1990s feminism had become a new way of thinking for western women, allowing an intoxicating sense that women could aim high, could have an uncontested voice in the workforce. every aspect of scholarship was changed by a fresh alignment of subject, by post-structuralist critiques of objectivity, by psychoanalytic approaches. ‘women’s studies’ appeared in the curriculum. in my first discipline, classical archaeology, scholars found previously invisible evidence of women and their lives in the archaeological record. this fervour for discovering lost or overlooked histories empowered pam johnston to concentrate her research on women, and particularly those women a generation older than she was, women in the classificatory mother relationship to her. the old women 1997 text quoted above demonstrated the disjunction between aboriginal ideas of women’s fertility and western feminism. she loved the bag-like shape of bodies worn by child rearing, the banter and dark humour as shown in that story and the fierce tenacity to hold on to the child, to not have another one taken. “the ‘old girls’ become shaped as a metaphor for a spirit of the land,” pam wrote (1997, p.5). yet in the western world of institutions, feminism as an individual empowerment was a great asset, as demonstrated for pam johnston in the support of women in the artist’s collective 2+2=5. she struggled as a young woman in the city to find her locus. in 1972 pam travelled to the tent embassy in canberra to protest for land rights but records, “my perception was that i was a ‘half-breed’, not black enough… the aboriginal people in canberra in the 1970s did not understand the emptiness of loss of identity and rejected the lighter skinned people who had only just started publicly identifying as aboriginal” (1997, pp.33-34). she continued: “we were not what was represented as aboriginal. we were somehow ‘other’ but where were we in the history and culture surrounding us? we were not full-blood and felt less than human” (1997, p.36). knowing very little about her mother, she did know that her “home place” was goonoo goonoo station, two kilometres from caroona mission where the gomileroi people were: coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 i walked the black soil plains up to moree and over to werris creek. i talked with the old people. i found my mother was not well known because she had not been raised in the area. my grandmother on the other hand, although not well known was well respected by those who knew her, including old mr french at moree and hector griffin at werris creek (1997, p.38). she had another encounter: one man now long dead showed me how to do the iron bark smokings to mingle the ancestors with the air we breathe and make us safe and strong. he gave me his memories of my grandmother as well. he described her physicality to me as a young woman… he described both her pain and the pain of my mother as women who were both light, beautiful, more skilled in the white ways and unable to sit easily with their people (1997, p.45). years later pam johnston added another memory: my mother met ruby long before i did, somewhere way back in the early ‘50’s. i didn’t know that until ruby told me and my mother was dead by then. ruby held something of my babyhood in her memory (johnston, pam and janie conwayherron 2012, p.14). were her mother and grandmother denied acceptance in both white and black communities, always walking a tightrope, coming from rural poverty and without security or education? there is no way of really knowing apart from these hints in johnston’s written work. as a child in the 1950s i remember the fearfulness among white people of english and scottish descent associated with people who were darker. having just a “touch of the tar-brush” was enough to be a social outcast, as was my own great uncle who had married a tongan and whose talented children were brown. years later, living in a northern aboriginal settlement, i observed the unconscious cruelty of people with gleaming black skins and secure in their land and language towards light skinned koori people who came north longing for community. conventions were strict, and the same outcast status would fall to any woman, white or black, who became pregnant out of wedlock. the lineage of marriage and generation, which established children’s paternity, had been a fundamental requirement for social status in the long histories of western societies. it meant great grief to transgress the iron rules. remote rural settlements and stations were often outside the law. the anthropologist tgh strehlow recorded the predations of white men on black women when he was chief protector in the 1930s: “the worst elements of white society were at liberty with aboriginal women and increasingly breeding a generation…about whom no one had a clear social policy” (hill, 2002, p.269). the light skinned offspring of these liaisons were ‘removed’ to orphanages or foster homes, for a ‘proper upbringing’ with no knowledge of or contact with their mothers. bringing them home: report of the national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and torres strait islanders was released in 1997 and the anguish suffered became public. this statement from pam johnston’s thesis was reiterated again and again: “knowledge of languages, customs, sacredness and tradition, even family itself was in many cases lost in the mire of a horrible history” (johnston 1997, p.45). the anger, and sadness, of aboriginal people brought up in european foster homes and institutions became a palpable driving force to a new generation of urban artists. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 traditional patterns: dreaming and re-dreaming in order to place pam johnston’s imagery, some understanding of the complex field of aboriginal religion is necessary. i will refer to two scholars whose work stood out in the 1990s and would have been known to her. professor of anthropology at the australian national university, w.e.h stanner (1905 – 1982), was renowned for his humane scholarship in this area and long work with people of the daly river in central australia. he posited that the encompassing idea of all aboriginal cultures is that “all living people, clan by clan, lineage by lineage were linked patrilineally with (totemic) ancestral beings by inherent and imperishable bonds.” these “imperishable bonds” were formed of living people, countries, and ancestors and this tetrad penetrated every facet of aboriginal life. the ancestors had left a world full of signs to the people they had brought into being, and these signs indicated the necessity of following perennial patterns. the discipline of religious rituals renewed and conserved all forms of life, including the life-force that kept animating the world to which people were bonded. stanner introduced the word “dreaming” to describe “an activity that represented a continuing highway between ancestral supermen and living men (sic)…” (stanner 1976, pp.1-2). he finds an implicit theory of something very like the unconscious where “elemental forces, antecedent to the formation of mature human beings operate below the level of waking or conscious mind by continuing perennially through sleep and dream, as major determinants of conscious human conduct” (7). stanner referred to the over-used word “spiritual” to mean a belief that at least one of the several elements in aboriginal thought which compose a person are “connected to clan through some incorporeal entity with everything in ‘his’ country” (9). he writes that according to the aboriginal theory of reality, living and dead, human and animal beings, persons and things, persons and environment can and do co-penetrate each other (18). the anthropologist diane bell, a younger colleague of stanner’s, produced a stirring book, daughters of the dreaming (1983), based on her immersion in central australian communities with warlpiri, warumungu, alyawarra, kaytej, warlmanpa and anmatjirra speakers, which painted a very different picture to women’s religious life to that of previous anthropologists (bell 1997, p.50). parallel to stanner’s patrilineal emphasis she found an equality of status for women’s religious ceremonies in the central desert with those of men, with a different focus. male anthropologists, including stanner, had not worked directly with women and had tended to see them in the light of their own (british) societies, where religions were patriarchal, and women had few ceremonial powers. bell pointed out that while the sacred knowledge of ancestral travels was shared jointly by men and women, the women’s major themes of land, love, and health highlighted their role as nurturers of people, land and relationships. “through ritual re-enactment women establish direct contact with the past, make manifest its meaning and thereby shape their worlds. the past is encapsulated in the present, the present permeates the past”. the common purpose of both men and women was to maintain their society according to the dreaming law (bell 1997, pp. 51-52). bell accentuated the fact that “ritual knowledge resides with the older women who, once freed from the immediate responsibilities of child care devote their time and energies to upholding and transmitting their spiritual heritage to successive generations” (54). coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 the continuity of colonialism what happens when that ancestral knowledge is lost, when the transmission is broken? this is the heartrending position that faces urban aboriginal people whose languages are forgotten and whose land is inaccessible. the anthropologist gillian cowlishaw was aware of the problem in 1992 in her essay studying aborigines: changing canons in anthropology and history. she described how anthropologists ignored what they considered “detribalised and dispossessed” people on the fringes of towns because their actual social lives were judged “uninteresting” (cowlishaw 1992, p.24). by contrast, jeff collman argued that living on the fringe of a town should rather be seen as “an important political act” rather than a “symptom of individual and group decay” (collmann 1988, p.236, cited by cowlishaw p.27). the urban artists made painting into another “important political act” and showed that culture was not static but changed with changing circumstances. the white insistence on an unchanging “traditional” aboriginal culture failed to see the actual changes in cities and towns all over australia where aboriginal people struggled to live. where can the dreaming be found? can it be rediscovered? appropriating central australian dotting or x-ray style figures from the north as a sign of “aboriginality” used to be falsely encouraged by white teachers as a sign of homogeneous aboriginality open to all. the fact is that patterns and motifs cannot be borrowed without permission because in each distinct northern and central australian group they are owned by specific groups. this has caused problems for urban artists: in turning away from copying traditional artforms each must find his or her permissible individual approach. in 1993 i addressed this issue in a letter to the innovative sydney curator and writer jo holder about some brightly coloured panels filled with animals by a group of emerging aboriginal artists in wollongong; trish woods, lorraine brown, narelle thomas and donna thomas. i feel that your doubts about the wollongong city gallery panels, so obviously decorative, fall into the category of our bias towards ‘high art’. we like art that is fractured, pared down, minimal, in series. yet these panels come from a group of women trying to repair enormous cultural damage: loss of language, loss of myth/history, loss of land – the colour and detail comes from a fierce desire to redress the cultural blankness to which their families had been relegated, to offer the next generation a new affirmation (conroy, letter to jo holder, 1993, p.1). trish woods, a koori woman from southern queensland, felt strongly that her forgotten stories could be re-envisioned and re-invented. the lost dreaming could be re-dreamed. this is what pam johnston set out to accomplish, with people, land and relationships at the centre of her concerns. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 considering the painting: shimmer vi, 1996. fig.3. pam johnston. shimmer vi gold leaf, acrylic and shellac on rag paper, 100cm x 50cm, 1996 collection diana wood conroy the red, gold and brown painting shows an iconic, stylized image of a woman with rounded body and long arms circling it. her legs are truncated points. her head is an egg-shaped oblong without facial features. the centre of her body is a dark circle containing shadowy small figures, and the darkness of this void is a dominant form in the composition. around her head, almost like a halo are two pale, leaping thin figures each diving in opposite directions. in the foreground at the bottom of the image are scalloped forms, possibly hills with a row of stick figures floating above them. a band of geometric ornament is layered in the imagery on the right side of the painting. all the figures are encompassed by a vast landscape, with rocky hills in the background, and scribbles of vegetation in the centre, represented much more naturalistically than the figures. this archetypal australian ‘landscape’, with distance and perspective is reminiscent of the stretching plains of western nsw, where johnston’s maternal site of moree exists, dotted with scrub and rimmed by distant hills. both figure and ground in johnston’s painting are gold in colour with the figures outlined in red. it is important that the gold substance of the figures is the same as the gold of the country. gold and red the materials used in shimmer vi were gold leaf, acrylic and shellac combining to form a very shiny reflective surface. the gold leaf has implacable associations in western art, referring to coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 byzantine and medieval religious imagery. the discovery of gold in australia in the mid nineteenth century propelled the population of the country into a major european colony. gold had been ignored, as far as can be known, throughout the vast timespans of aboriginal antiquity, indicating that the golden backgrounds of johnston’s women have a personal or wider art historical significance. the gold was based in her visionary experiences of the land as light, warmth and full of presence. in greek icons a golden ground signified “the uncreated light of god’s presence” (pearson 2005, p.28). johnston did not care that its use offended eyes preferring a secular minimalism, as it made her vision of the intense light of the bush real to her. i raised the issue with her, but she discounted any concerns. it is worth quoting her passion for the technique: gold leaf is so delicate, so fragile. i buy it by the book. each page of the book is a mixture of pure gold, brass and copper. this mixture suits me best as i like the lusciousness of the metal mix. i move the gold leaf around gently and wriggle it up and down so that it looks like old skin. it has taken me many years to be in control of the gold leaf and now it just seems to grow out of the ends of my fingers. i cover the gold leaf with shellac to give it extra texture and depth. i go to a place that is absolutely solitary in my mind…it is the creative process itself that has the most significance for me…. it is the time when i understand the nature of universal religion and truth as an elemental balance (johnston in ambrus 1995, p.88). the intense shininess quality of the golden paintings was intentional. writing about western desert painters at yuendumu in 1988, francoise dussart discussed the choice of luminescent colours that characterised women’s art. the shiny paint is similar to the oil and animal fat that is rubbed on the body before it is painted and similar to the shiny look of the best ochres…surface shininess in general is considered a sign of health, well-being and beauty, and recalls the ancestral beings completely beautified when they originally emerged from the ancestral ground (dussart in mclean 2011, p.192). the term “shimmer” was used by howard morphy referring to a particular quality of light evoked by intricate cross-hatching of yolngu bark painting that represented “the sensation of light… the shimmering effect of finely cross-hatched paintings which project a brightness … that endows the painting with ancestral power” (morphy 1991, p.194). morphy’s analysis was compelling and much discussed at the time, and it seems likely to me that in choosing the title shimmer vi johnston pointed to an analogy with yolngu connections to ancestral powers. on the back of the painting was pasted a page of text to explain the image. i walk on the land that holds the body of my mother and grandmother…. my body, this land, my mother, my grandmother are one in the sun. shimmer is about the subconscious merging of body with landscape. the visual works explore our relationship with the natural world through the effects of weather on our skin, the rain, the sun, the heat, the cold, the clinging of sand and soil. the landscape through its relationship claims us despite ourselves, simply because we are a living part of it…shimmer is ultimately a spiritual exploration. i would like to explore some of the ambivalence that the powerful painting shimmer vi arouses in me through searching its associations and connections. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 parallels amongst contemporaries the frieze of stick-like figures in shimmer, their reiteration and slender forms, has similarity to those of artists represented in the 1987 collection aboriginality. the symbolic use of imagery became a vital political subtext in urban aboriginal art. the waving attenuated forms of incised and painted rock art, such as mimi figures, predated living groups in northern australia, and because that imagery was not ‘owned’ it could be used and understood as almost generically ‘aboriginal’. for example, sally morgan’s acrylic paintings hold on to the dreaming and anxious angels, both painted in 1989, have clusters of highly stylized figures. judith warrie (jenuarrie) and heather walker also derive figure imagery from rock art in prints and paintings (isaacs 1987, p.63 and p.64). all these artists painted using western materials and processes and were discovering their aboriginality. karen casey from tasmania offers another comparison to johnston, with lithe figures painted expressionistically and “drawn from early rock art.” she commented: the label ‘aboriginal artist’ concerns me though partly because we are being pigeon-holed… to be an artist in any environment requires a pretty strong commitment…i’m an artist who happens to be aboriginal, not an ‘aboriginal artist’. i don’t feel i have to prove i’m a koori but i do have to prove to myself that i’m an artist in my own right and that my work can stand on its own merit. i believe that’s particularly important for all of us: that we are eventually accepted into the mainstream of contemporary australian art (thompson 1990, p.143, p.146). johnston explained her figures: i would like to draw…the women who took me to country where i discovered the same sense of belonging and where i met the ghosts of my mother and grandmother and their mothers before them. i would draw a circle in the centre of these women to represent the centre of self – the little child and grown-up women meeting (johnston 1997, p.91). the image of a figure with a central womb cavity can be found in two remarkable aboriginal artworks, both from postcolonial contexts. ten years after pam johnston’s painting, in 2006, the tiwi ceramicist cyril james kerinauia made a patterned earthenware form 600 mm high called bima and jinani, echoing the female figure with a hole in the centre of shimmer. poised in the centre of the empty oblong hole is a small black figure, the child jinani whom bima let die, by accident leaving him in the sun while she dallied with her lover tjappara the moon man. this potent story of how death came to humans is the central myth in tiwi funerary ceremonies. the woman bima becomes a wailing curlew, continually mourning her child (from the earth: contemporary indigenous ceramics p.34). the womb is a place of loss, as well as life, a void that resonates with johnston’s image. coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 fig.4. cyril james kerinauia, bima and jinani, 2006 earthenware with underglaze decoration, 60 x 32 x 8 cm fig.5. george mung mung, pregnant mary, c.1983 carved in wood with natural ochres, 64 cm high catholic art historian rosemary crumlin saw the powerful image by george mung mung of warmun in central australia, pregnant mary as “one of the great religious images of this century.” she describes the figure as that of a young unmarried warmun girl who “carries the child in her womb-shield beneath her heart” (crumlin 1993, p.101). like johnston’s image the arms encircle the womb, but in mung mung’s carving the womb is white, not dark. both the kerinauia and mung mung objects possess a centralized and symmetrical composition, typical of the stillness of an icon. a more distant comparison to shimmer vi is to an actual icon, a type of image that would have been known to pam johnston through her studies in art history. the twelfth century image of the virgin poised in the centre of the curved apse, between heaven and earth, places the christ child inside her in a circular space. her arms are raised, like the supplementary flying figures in johnston’s painting. this fresco in the apse of a church at trikomo in cyprus has a prayer painted beneath the virgin’s feet. “…pure virgin, mother of the lord, behold the desire of my miserable soul and become my intercessor at the time of judgement…” perhaps pam johnston, with her interest in many spiritual traditions had a faint memory of such a composite figure (common in byzantine art) and knew that the role of the “mother of god” was to be a mediator, to give nurture and help in a harsh society (maguire 1999, p.104). coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 fig.6. virgin with christ child, 12 th century detail of fresco in apse of church, trikomo, cyprus johnston quoted her friend, the remarkable ngaku artist robert campbell jnr (1944 1993), “he was very supportive of that idea of being yourself and painting your own truths as you experienced them. he wanted our people’s stories to be told in a hundred different ways” (johnston 1997, p. 44). in this sense, shimmer vi can be read as aboriginal in its different visual strategies that express yearning for ancestors and evocation of place. with its wider resonances, it is also “contemporary world art” in morphy’s phrase. conclusion pam johnston once told me how she met the dalai lama (then touring australia), while she was conducting troubled boys through the yiribana indigenous section of the art gallery of nsw. they had never been into an art gallery before; she was warning them not to touch the art. the dalai lama came up to talk to her and pam said they got on wonderfully. probably he recognised her vitality and warmth looking after the boys, and also that her energy overlaid other painful knowledge. in 1992 philip jones observed, “today there is a clearer recognition that the most inventive and exciting aspects of aboriginal material culture arise from the ground that lies between aboriginal and european society” (jones 1992, p.71). the intense debate about “what aboriginal art is, does and means” continues, wrote ian mclean in 2011 (p.94). the art does not exist without artists, who come from every kind of diverse aboriginality. unpredictable and with nothing to lose, they continue to astonish, using the full range of sources available to a contemporary person, inventing and re-inventing. pam johnston’s ability to take on daunting ontological issues in confronting the multiplicity of her identity is a large achievement. her personal history is reflected in many stories of those hoping for, suspecting, or finding aboriginal ancestry. she illuminated my understanding of the complexity of the loss, the terrible unknowing erasure of people’s identity with kin and land. like the longing for an unobtainable love, the paintings are rituals to bring certainty and closure. they speak of a vital era in the emergence of urban koori art. the edginess of such koori paintings received a strong emphasis in the 2013 australia exhibition at the royal coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 academy of arts in london (caruana and cubillo in australia, pp. 42-50). the same issues are still current in 2014. if in the end johnston’s paintings only authenticate the “poetics of uncertainty” as ravenscroft puts it (p.71), this is true to her understanding of herself and her history. references bell, diane, 1998, “aboriginal women and religious experience” in max charlesworth (ed), 1998, religious business: essays on aboriginal spirituality, cambridge, university of cambridge press, 46-71. caruana, wally and franchesca cubillo, 2013, “country: aboriginal art” in australia curated by anne gray, ron radford and kathleen soriano. exhibition catalogue. london, royal academy of arts, pp.42-50. collmann, j, 1988, fringe-dwellers and welfare: the aboriginal response to bureaucracy, brisbane, st lucia. conroy, diana wood, 2000, in lake mungo revisited, jennifer lamb (curator) goulburn nsw, goulburn regional gallery and the university of wollongong. conroy, diana wood, 1993, letter to jo holder, and essay for opening of wollongong city gallery aboriginal panels, with lorraine brown, narelle thomas, daniel thomas and trish woods, wollongong. cowlishaw, gillian, 1992, “studying aborigines: changing canons in anthropology and history”, in power, knowledge and aborigines, bain attwood and john arnold (eds), a special edition of the journal of australian studies, melbourne, la trobe university press in association with the national centre for australian studies, monash university, pp.20-31 crumlin, rosemary, 1993, “aboriginal spirituality: land as holder of story and myth in recent aboriginal art” in max charlesworth (ed), 1998, religious business: essays on aboriginal spirituality, cambridge, university of cambridge press, 94-102. dahlm-helm, p. johnston, 1997, transformation (death) appropriation, conception (birth) identity, transition (life) land. unpublished ms. wollongong, university of wollongong. from the earth: contemporary indigenous ceramics from alice springs pottery, ernabella, hermannsburg potters and tiwi islands, 2008, adelaide, jam0factory contemporary craft and design. ginibi, ruby langford and pam johnston, c.1997, a journey into bundjalung country. kempsey, argus print, with australian geographic and nsw ministry for the arts. head, lesley, jennifer lamb and diana wood conroy, catalogue essays, 2000. lake mungo revisited. goulburn: goulburn regional gallery nsw. hill, barry, 2002, broken song: tgh strehlow and aboriginal possession, milson’s point nsw, random house australia.isaacs, jennifer, 1989 aboriginality: contemporary aboriginal painting and prints. brisbane, university of queensland press. johnston, pam (ed) and epilogue, 1996, free spirit. anthology from aboriginal students at the norma parker centre and the mulawa women’s detention centre. sydney, contemporary women’s artists gallery press. johnston, pam. 1990. the woman spirit journey: a celebration of women’s spirituality. unpublished master of fine arts ms, college of fine arts, university of nsw. johnston, pam in caroline ambrus (ed.), 1995, the unseen art scene: 32 australian women artists. woden, act, irrepressible press, , 88-91. http://iii.library.uow.edu.au/search~s0?/adahlm-helm%2c+p.+johnston/adahlm+helm+p+johnston/-3,-1,0,b/browse coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 johnston, pam and janie conway-herron with martin renes, coolabah guest editor, 2012. “remembering ruby”, coolabah, no.8, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona, 1-29. jones, philip, 1992, “the boomerang’s erratic flight: the mutability of ethnographic objects”, in power, knowledge and aborigines, bain attwood and john arnold (eds), a special edition of the journal of australian studies, melbourne, la trobe university press in association with the national centre for australian studies, monash university, 59-71. maguire, henry, 1999, “abaton and oikonomia: st neophytos and the iconography of the presentation of the virgin”, in nancy paterson sevcenko and christopher moss (eds.), medieval cyprus: studies in art, architecture, and history in memory of doula mouriki. princeton, princeton university press, 96-103. morphy, howard, 1991, ancestral connections: art and the aboriginal system of knowledge, chicago and london, the university of chicago press. mclean, ian (ed). 2011, how aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art: writings on aboriginal contemporary art, brisbane, institute of modern art. national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and torres strait islander children from their families (australia) 1997. bringing them home: report of the national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and torres strait islanders sydney: human rights and equal opportunity commission. pearson, peter, 2005, a brush with god: an icon workbook, harrisburg pa, moorhouse publishing. ravenscroft, a., 2012, the postcolonial eye: white australian desire and the visual field of race, ashgate, surrey england, burlington usa. read, peter, 2009, tripping over feathers: scenes in the life of joy janaka wiradjuri williams. uwa publishing, crawley, western australia. stanner, w.e.h., 1976 “some aspects of aboriginal religion” in max charlesworth (ed), 1998, religious business: essays on aboriginal spirituality, cambridge, university of cambridge press, 1-23. thompson, liz, (compiled by) 1990, aboriginal voices: contemporary aboriginal artists, writers and performers, brookvale australia, simon and schuster. west, margie, 2000, “flash marks: a brief history of twentieth century queensland aboriginal art” in margo neale and sylvia kleinert, the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture, melbourne, oxford university press. biographical note. diana wood conroy (ba (hons) archaeology, university of sydney, doctor of creative arts (university of wollongong) became a tapestry weaver in the 1970s, and has research interests in archaeology and anthropology. her involvement with aboriginal communities began in 1974 when she was co-ordinator of tiwi designs, bathurst island, northern territory. she has published extensively on issues of contemporary textiles and visual arts. she is emeritus professor of visual arts, faculty of law, humanities and arts, university of wollongong. http://iii.library.uow.edu.au/search~s0?/anational+inquiry+into+the+separation+of+aboriginal+and+torres+strait+islander+children+from+their+families+%28australia%29/anational+inquiry+into+the+separation+of+aboriginal+and+torres+strait+islander+children+from+their+families+australia/-3,-1,0,b/browse http://iii.library.uow.edu.au/search~s0?/anational+inquiry+into+the+separation+of+aboriginal+and+torres+strait+islander+children+from+their+families+%28australia%29/anational+inquiry+into+the+separation+of+aboriginal+and+torres+strait+islander+children+from+their+families+australia/-3,-1,0,b/browse coolabah, no.14, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 i during this time she was known as pamela johnston dahl helm, and her doctor of creative arts thesis in the university of wollongong library appears under this name. ii “indigenous” has become a favoured term since about 2000, rather than “aboriginal” which has historical overtones of colonisation, while “indigenous” has a global scope. the actual name of the community is the preferred usage, e.g. koori (a generic title for urban people on the east coast of australia), tiwi or warlpiri. “non-aboriginal” may be used instead of “white”, because the general australian population is multi-ethnic, not just anglo-celtic. iii boomalli aboriginal artists co-operative was established by fiona foley after experience in central arnhem land community co-operatives. it included queenslanders avrill quaill, aarone raymond meeks (margie west “flash marks: a brief history of twentieth century queensland aboriginal art”, in neale and kleinert 2000, 188). euphemia bostock, jeffrey samuels were founding members, with bronwyn bancroft, brenda croft and hettie perkins. boomalli artists listed in 2014 on the aboriginal artists directory website were aarone meeks, adam hill, aroha groves, badger bates, elaine russell, euphemia bocstock, gordon hookey, jason groves, jeffrey samuels, joe hurst, khi-lee, leonie dennis, mervy bishop, michael riley, rea, roy kennedy (http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/shop/artist-association/boomalli-aboriginal-artists-cooperative.php, accessed 10.2.2014). iv lake mungo revisited curated by jennifer lamb of goulburn regional gallery nsw became a travelling exhibition 2000-2001. pam johnston did not participate, but did return to lake mungo taking groups of her own in workshops. http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/aarone%20meeks http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/adam%20hill http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/aroha%20groves http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/badger%20bates http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/elaine%20russell http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/euphemia%20bocstock http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/gordon%20hookey http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/jason%20groves http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/jeffrey%20samuels http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/joe%20hurst http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/khi-lee http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/leonie%20dennis http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/mervy%20bishop http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/michael%20riley http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/rea http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/artists/roy%20kennedy http://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/shop/artist-association/boomalli-aboriginal-artists-cooperative.php microsoft word coola6decordoba coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 food for thought. jaime de córdoba benedicto this sculpture came into being as a result of the magnificent painting by hieronimus bosch the garden of earthly delights held in the prado museum. the image of the torso of a man cut through at the waist allowing one to see the interior of a body which reveals narratives and which looks like an old cut up tree trunk took me back to the idea of accumulated knowledge. the idea of man as a coffer, as a baggage of thoughts, as a library seemed to be to be what i needed for the congress theme. my cast iron sculpture is, similarly, reminiscent of chimneys where everything is consumed. thoughts are consumed; ideas, like food, disappear leaving behind just their taste. in the open belly of my sculpture i have placed short phrases or single words like australia, spain, distance, food, city or other ideas present in the congress. the persona is unstable yet solid and strong like iron, as are our ideas from which we feed ourselves. we all need to reaffirm our ideas even when we are aware that they are doubtful. the drawings match the proportional size of the vanished body which constantly feeds itself on ideas in an exercise of “in put” and “out put”. thus our daily roles continuously enter and leave our bodies as a symbol of study, the only means by which we can feed our thoughts. copyright © 2011 jaime de córdoba benedicto this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 the sculpture, food for thought, is made of cast iron, expanded polystyrene and polyurethane foam. the paper that completes the sculpture contains drawings and writing which are replaceable and susceptible to varying changes in the order of reading. food for thought 2005/ 2010 cast iron and drawings on paper. 185 x 158 x 48 cm. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 jaime de córdoba benedicto (barcelona, 1961) is a senior lecturer in the department of drawing at barcelona university and also collaborates with the department of sculpture. he has held a number of solo exhibitions in, among other places, barcelona, the hague, madrid, girona, terrassa and reus. he has participated in international fairs and shows in amsterdam, brussels, toulouse, london and other european and spanish cities. he has also been commissioned to to do work for various public and private institutions in catalunya and throughout spain in conjunction with various teams of architects. “food with fire inside altar reading” food for thought. this sculpture came into being as a result of the magnificent painting by hieronimus bosch the garden of earthly delights held in the prado museum. the image of the torso of a man cut off at the waist allowing one to see the interior of a body which reveals narratives and which looks like an old cut up tree trunk took me back to the idea of accumulated knowledge. the idea of man as a coffer, as a baggage of thoughts, as a library seemed to be to be what i needed for the congress theme. my cast iron sculpture is, similarly, reminiscent of chimneys where everything is coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 consumed. thoughts are consumed; ideas, like food, disappear leaving behind just their taste. in the open belly of my sculpture i have placed short phrases or single words like australia, spain, distance, food, city or other ideas present in the congress. the persona is unstable yet solid and strong like iron, as are our ideas from which we feed ourselves. we all need to reaffirm our ideas even when we are aware that they are doubtful. the drawings match the proportional size of the vanished body which constantly feeds itself on ideas in an exercise of “in put” y “out put”. thus our daily roles continuously enter and leave our bodies as a symbol of study, the only means by which we can feed our thoughts. the sculpture, food for thought, is made of cast iron, expanded polystyrene and polyurethane foam. the paper that completes the sculpture contains drawings and writing which are replaceable and susceptible to varying changes in the order of reading. food for thought. esta escultura fue concebida siguiendo el referente magistral de hieronimus bosch en su famoso cuadro “el jardín de las delicias” del museo del prado. la imagen de un hombre cortado por la mitad dejando ver el interior de un cuerpo que muestra narraciones y que nos mira como un viejo tronco abierto me remitió a la idea de la sabiduría acumulada. el hombre como cofre, como equipaje de pensamientos, como cuerpo-biblioteca me pareció idóneo para el tema del congreso. mi escultura fundida en hierro colado es, igualmente, recuerdo de las chimeneas donde todo se consume. los pensamientos se consumen; las ideas, como los alimentos, desaparecen y dejan únicamente su sabor. en esa barriga abierta de mi escultura he dispuesto dibujos con breves frases o palabras sueltas como: australia, españa, lejanía, alimento, ciudad u otras ideas presentes en nuestros discursos durante el congreso. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 el personaje es inestable pero sólido y firme como el hierro, como nuestras propias ideas de las que nos nutrimos. todos necesitamos reafirmarlas aún sabiendo que son dudosas. los dibujos completan métricamente la proporción del cuerpo desaparecido que se alimenta constantemente de pensamientos en un ejercicio de “in put” y “aut put”. entonces, nuestros papeles diarios entran y salen constantemente de nuestro cuerpo como símbolo del estudio, única salida para alimentar nuestro pensamiento. la escultura food for thought fue realizada en hierro fundido a partir de poliestireno expandido y espumas de poliuretano. el papel que la completa contiene en ocasiones dibujos y escritos que son reemplazables y susceptibles de cambios en el orden de lectura. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 food for tohugt 2005/ 2010 cast iron and drawings on paper. 185 x 158 x 48 cm. jaime de córdoba benedicto es profesor titular de la universidad de barcelona en el departamento de dibujo y profesor colaborador del departamento de escultura. ha realizado numerosas exposiciones individuales en barcelona, la haya (den hague), madrid, girona, terrassa y reus. ha participado en ferias internacionales y expuesto colectivamente en: ámsterdam, bruselas, toulouse, londres y otras ciudades europesas y españolas. ha realizado trabajos escultóricos para diversas instituciones públicas en catalunya e instituciones privadas en toda españa conjuntamente con varios equipos de arquitectos. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 food for tohugt 2005/ 2010 cast iron and drawings on paper. 185 x 158 x 48 cm. jaime de córdoba benedicto es profesor titular de la universidad de barcelona en el departamento de dibujo y profesor colaborador del departamento de escultura. ha realizado numerosas exposiciones individuales en barcelona, la haya (den hague), madrid, girona, terrassa y reus. ha participado en ferias internacionales y expuesto colectivamente en: ámsterdam, bruselas, toulouse, londres y otras ciudades europesas y españolas. ha realizado trabajos escultóricos para diversas instituciones públicas en catalunya e instituciones privadas en toda españa conjuntamente con varios equipos de arquitectos. coolabah, vol.6, 2011, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 “food with fire inside altar reading” microsoft word 7brien coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 margaret fulton: a study of a 1960s australian food writer as an activist donna lee brien abstract: today, food writing makes up a significant proportion of the texts written, published, sold and read each year in australia. while the food writing published in magazines and cookbooks has often been thought of as providing useful, but relatively banal, practical skills-based information to its readers, relatively recent reassessments suggest that food writing is much more interesting and important than this. in the contemporary context, when the mere mention of food engenders considerable anxiety, food writers play a number of roles beyond providing information on how to buy, store, prepare and serve various provisions. instead, contemporary food writers engage with a range of important issues around food production and consumption including sustainable and ethical agriculture, biodiversity and genetic modification, food miles and fair trade, food safety and security, and obesity, diabetes and other health issues. in this, australian food writers not only provide comment on any important issues in progress, they are also, i suggest, forward-thinking activists, advocating and campaigning for change. this paper focuses on prominent australian food writer margaret fulton’s career in the 1960s to begin to investigate her work as an activist: that is, one who advocates and campaigns to bring about change. keywords: margaret fulton; australian food writing; food writers introduction: the complexities of thinking about eating current concerns about the environment and ethical/sustainable ways of living have ensured that contemporary eating and shopping practices are frequently imbued with complex moral choices. should we, as one example, be buying locally produced foods, with all the benefits for our own regions, local areas and our health that this may provide? or, should we be choosing fair trade branded and other such ethically produced goods, with all their benefits for producers in the developing world, but with a much larger carbon footprint in their transportation? the associated questions—of whether fair trade is ‘fair’ (moore 2004), and what exactly ‘local’ means—add more complexity to this discussion. copyright©2011 donna lee brien. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 in terms of how this complexity works in practice for consumers, the idea of ‘local’ in ‘local food’ provides a good example (see, for example, ostrom 2007, wilkins et al. 2002). ‘local’ in such a usage can refer to food grown from within a radius of as close as twenty to as distant as more than five hundred kilometres away, while others variously define ‘local food’ as that from a region, state or even an entire country (darby et al. 2008). while some have taken up sourcing all their food from within a certain distance as a project—as barbara kingsolver’s family did in the year of growing all their own food, supplemented with only organic, neighbourhood-grown produce, an undertaking she recounts in animal, vegetable, miracle (2007)—this definition more commonly changes in relation to individual products (durham, king and roheim 2009). if, for instance, living on the new england high plains of australia’s new south wales, i want to buy local trout, i need look no further than the farm business next door, but i would have to source local coffee from the byron bay area some four hundred kilometres to the north-east. this coffee would certainly be a more ‘local’ source, however, than purchasing indonesian, african or other developing-world grown product. this choice of ‘local to me’ coffee would, however, raise the issue of removing my sales support (and the funds this might bring into local communities) from farmers in these latter countries and reallocating it to those in australia. trying to make such a choice, as this example shows, quickly moves into the territory of food politics, concerned as this subject is with the ethical dimensions of food production and consumption and, in particular, the sustainability of food systems (see, for example, lien & nerlich 2004). choosing which coffee to buy, for instance, raises the question of whether (when much coffee is produced by those labouring in slave and slave-like conditions) (bales 1999)—and hence the advent of fair trade and other ethically based production and sales regimes—its producers are being employed in circumstances that i want to support with my purchase. this becomes an especially thorny question when the standard of living of these farmers/producers in developing countries is so much lower than mine as consumer. then, there is the environmental impact of the farming practices to consider, as well as the cost in resources in transporting that product from its place of production to my kitchen. this is often more complex than it at first seems when the real environmental costs at farm level of such elements as water and fertiliser are factored into these costs, and when food produced nearby to a consumer may be shipped to warehouses far away before being transported back to local supermarkets, and still labelled ‘local’ (see, for instance, pretty et al. 2005). additional complicating factors in making a purchase choice can include such factors such as whether the food product has been irradiated before packaging and sale (eyck 2002) and the amount and type of packaging itself (thøgersen 1999). the discussion below is not, however, focused on teasing out the complexities involved in sustainability or ethical eating, or in the ways these might be achieved. instead, it starts from this example of suggesting the complexity of each of our food choices in order to frame the central assertion that food writers play an important role in assisting consumers in making these food choices. the below discussion also, specifically, suggests that food writers have been doing so for decades and uses the example of one particular australian food writer, margaret fulton, and her writing in what many think of as the most banal of practical culinary literature: cookbooks and popular magazine writing, in order to explore a proposition that food writers not only are activists, but have been performing this role for many decades. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 in this, the term activist is used in its commonly accepted meaning: one who campaigns to bring about change. in many cases, the desired change is political, social or cultural, although the term is widely utilised in a range of contexts. food writing (as a sub-set of popular journalism) as a form of activism is significant to consider today both in and for itself, and especially because food writing makes up such a significant proportion of the texts written, published, sold and read in contemporary australia. tracing the background of this phenomenon, therefore, has value (see, for example, bannerman 1996, 1998, 2001). although the number of books sold each year in australia has remained relatively stable for the past decade, (see, for example, australian bureau of statistics reports on book publishing and sales), books on food have been selling in everincreasing numbers over the past decade. nielsen bookscan, which logs most australian retail book sales, reports that in 2006, two million food and drink books, worth almost a$60 million, were sold (dunstan & chaitman 2007, p. 334). food and drink titles make up a similarly considerable proportion of the australian magazine industry’s annual sales of more than a$1 billion. of the six thousand different magazine titles currently available in australia, many are from overseas but, in terms of circulation, most of those in the top hundred are australian (magazine publishers of australia n.d., more magazines n.d.). in 2007, there were four food magazines in the top-selling twenty titles. this is unlike many other popular culture products—such as popular music, movies, television programs and computer games—consumed in australia, most of which are designed and produced overseas. this level of purchase is also significantly ahead of some other western countries, with australian sales of food magazines six times higher per head of population than for the british (magazine publishers of australia n.d.). the flow-on effects for australian culture are significant: revenue from the sale of popular cookbooks, for instance, helping some publishing houses to subsidise the production of texts with smaller, and less profitable, levels of sales, such as some literary fiction, poetry and history. focusing on one food writer in the 1960s allows an initial reckoning of how the foodrelated issues that concern australian consumers now were prefigured and discussed by australian food writers then. a number of these are the issues animating our airwaves every day: around sustainable and ethical agriculture, water and other resource use, reducing food waste, and health issues such as obesity. moreover, flickers of urging towards intercultural understanding, as well as suggestions of how women could forge and sustain new roles in society, were social concerns that were apparent in some australian food writing in the 1960s. in considering this, the primary concern of food writers in the 1960s (as it is currently) was with food itself and how it could be prepared and eaten. in this, it is difficult today for many australians aged under fifty, and visitors to australia, to imagine the pervasiveness of the classic weekday ‘meat and three veg[etables]’ evening meal and roast lamb for sunday lunch regime of the 1950s/early 1960s that many angloaustralians regularly and repeatedly consumed. it was, indeed, really only in the 1960s that these domestically common dishes began to be significantly replaced by waves of what were radical innovations for this restricted palate—with new choices from pastas and fondue, to salmon and chocolate mousses, and american, european and asianinspired and fusion cuisine (see bannerman 2008). notably, also, although hotel closing time was extended in tasmania in 1937 and new south wales in 1955, six o’clock closing (and the notorious ‘six o’clock swill’—where hotel patrons attempted to coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 consume as much as possible before the premises closed) was only repealed in victoria in 1966 and south australia in 1967 (luckins 2007). in 1966, the editor of the first issue of the new food and wine magazine, australian gourmet magazine, indeed identified magazine writing as central to these changes towards a more sophisticated and international palate: the former traditional fare of australians of fish and chips, stews, pies and the ubiquitous pumpkin and steak and egg is now giving way, slowly but surely, to new dishes, cooked with ingenuity and understanding. women’s magazines vie with each other to portray new, existing and exotic foods in their pages, while weekend chefs compete in creating dishes par excellence and discuss wines with the authority of connoisseurs (geiringer 1966, p. 7). although other factors, such as the high level of non-british post-war immigration to australia, growing affluence, increasing travel outside australia and changes in the food industry itself (symons 1982), are widely acknowledged as important components of these changes to the national taste profile, magazine and other writers were instrumental in introducing and popularising these changes to a broad audience. however, as food writers did not use our current lexicon to discuss any of these issues, their interventions in these areas are not always immediately apparent. margaret fulton and 1960s food writing margaret fulton can formally be classed as a food writer from the time of her work on australian weekly magazine, woman, in 1954 and 1955. with over four decades of further work as food writer and editor of woman’s day (1960-79) and new idea (19792000), and still active in food publishing today, fulton has written many hundreds of articles supported by a long series of extremely popular cookbooks, in the process becoming trusted as a reliable source of food-related advice. this is principally in matters of food preparation, but includes many other areas related to food as well. in the last decades, moreover, fulton has attracted considerable public and institutional recognition for her work. in 1983, she was awarded the medal of the order of australia, and in 1997 she was inducted into the world food media awards hall of fame and named as one of the national trust’s original 100 living australian national treasures (negus 2004). in 2006, fulton was named by then-prominent current affairs magazine, the bulletin, as one of the 100 most influential australians ever (austin 2007). the next year, the national library of australia chose fulton for its annual ‘celebration’ of a leading australian. this event, which drew renewed attention to both fulton’s contribution to australian culinary heritage and the respect she has among peers and the reading public, drew what was stated to be ‘unprecedented’ interest (fnla 2007, p. 1, wright 2007). since then, recognition of fulton’s contribution has increased with similar events at major institutions, including at the national museum of australia. from 1960, when fulton commenced her twenty-year association with woman’s day as cookery writer and food editor, she quickly became established as an authority in this area in australia. her food writing in this serial, as later magazines, usually comprised an accessibly written, informative introduction followed by recipes comprising readily coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 available ingredients. these articles have consistently promoted the use of fresh, seasonal produce; methods for reducing waste by thrifty shopping and the creative use of leftovers; and, while at times promoting the use of timesaving ‘convenience foods’ and products, have also encouraged shoppers to resist the lure of the new supermarkets to some extent, and to continue purchasing from local purveyors such as greengrocers, butchers and fishmongers. she also began to expose her (mostly women) readers to revolutionary new ingredients and food preparation techniques from an increasingly broad range of international cookery alongside more traditional dishes. fulton, indeed, had the self-professed aim of exposing australian home cooks to a wide range of (largely then unknown) international cookery, and revealed later in her memoir how she was paid to travel all over the world in her role as food editor, learning about various cuisines, foods and preparation methods, information which she then translated into her articles and books (fulton 1999). this work provided a solid foundation for the ongoing development of today’s broad-based cosmopolitan food culture in australia. food historian barbara santich, who worked with fulton at woman’s day in 1973 (which then had a weekly circulation of 514,000), describes fulton as “the acknowledged leader/style-setter” in her introduction of the [then] “exotic cuisines of india, italy, france, scandinavia, south-east asia and the middle east” to australian readers (santich 2007, pp. 34, 38). moreover, fulton showed australians how to consume these exotic foods as well—with her line drawings for how to eat spaghetti in the margaret fulton cookbook, for example, remembered by many as enabling a new way of eating as well as cooking. an indication of her role in australian food history is provided by the success of her first cookbook, the margaret fulton cookbook, in 1968. fulton describes her own amazement at its popularity: [the publisher] said that 10,000 was a bestseller, so the print run was going to be 10,000. then the orders kept coming in and it went to 20,000 and then it went to 30,000 and then it went to 40,000. it ended up the first print run was 100,000, and when it came out it was just so exciting … [people] were queued for miles down and around the block to get this book (fulton 1997). the volume’s first print run was a record for any kind of book in australia, but the book also unexpectedly sold out and ran to another large second printing the next year (fulton 1999, p. 159). this level of sales was even more surprising in an australian publishing context wherein food writing played a much less significant part than it does today. women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers contained comparatively much smaller recipe sections, and cookery books were a quite insignificant segment of local and imported book publishing. food writing targeted at male readers formed an even smaller part of the market. as an (admittedly inexact) indication of this, there were only 178 locally and imported cookbooks collected by the national (deposit) library of australia for the four years of 1966 to 1969 inclusive. in comparison, it holds some 779 from the four-year period from 1996 to 1999, and some 1120 from 2005 to 2008 (nla 2009). in 1968, the year the margaret fulton cookbook was published, there were only 36 cookbooks deposited in the nla, one less volume than in 1966. six of these were imported, with two volumes from the thailand (in thai), one from indonesia (in indonesian), two from the usa (the presidents’ own white house cookbook and jim lee’s chinese cookbook), and a single volume from the uk (oysters with love). the remaining 30 were published in australia. these australian published volumes include coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 five community cookbooks, five volumes published under the auspices of popular magazine, the australian women’s weekly, as well as two featuring recipes from newspapers, the courier (brisbane) and daily telegraph (sydney), and a single textbook, day to day cookery for home craft students. two books could be said to reflect an interest in gourmet cookery: is there a chef in the kitchen? and the young gourmet’s cookbook. there were also what could be called two ‘general’ cookbooks by authors who went on to become very famous over the following decades: uk-based marguerite patten’s (with betty dunleavy) entertaining at home and margaret fulton’s the margaret fulton cookbook [1]. at this time, in the late 1960s, fulton also established the chicken and chablis club in sydney. this was a women’s gourmet club, in which she performed the role of ‘food mistress’, selecting the menu and providing information about the club’s meals for its female members. this group joined a number of other women’s gourmet clubs in other australian cities, including the chicken and chablis club in adelaide and the brides of bacchus club in melbourne, organisations that suggested the then quite revolutionary idea that women could participate in formal gourmet activities (evans 1966). the clubs’ activities included lectures on the ingredients and cooking methods, and related information about the wine served at its regular luncheons. this activity picks up on another activist thread in fulton’s writing, as her cookbook and magazine writing has, since the 1950s, not only affirmed the importance of creativity for personal fulfilment, but in encouraging the use of time-saving products, was early in recognising women’s changing roles and our increasing desire to work outside the home. fulton’s writing has, indeed, assisted in making women’s domestic work visible for at least the women involved. she has also actively encouraged other women to take up meaningful work (even if it meant less time in the kitchen), both by positing that other career paths were possible (including her own in journalism and advertising) and by her involvement in mentoring schemes. she encouraged her own daughter’s career in food preparation and writing, with the result that suzanne gibbs is now a popular australian magazine food writer and editor. gibbs has been the food director for australian good food, the local version of a popular british bbc magazine of the same name, since its launch in august 2008. in the later 1960s, fulton also began writing for one of the first post-war australian magazines dedicated to food and wine, marking a significant moment in the development of the australian gourmet magazine. established in 1966, the australian gourmet magazine was struggling to find a sustainable format and stable of writers. fulton brought a food information-driven inflection to the magazine, which until then had focused on elitist and male-identified concerns such as setting up a wine cellar, choosing cigars and fine restaurant (which was then french) dining. in her columns, fulton instead promoted the possibility of the act of home cooking as gourmet, as well as what australian fine dining outside the home might be; that is, as not necessarily french. susan sheridan has similarly discussed how the most popular australian women’s magazine from this period, the australian women’s weekly, similarly brought the domestic kitchen into focus as a site of ‘ethnic’ food preparation in the post-war period, but notes this took place in the home kitchen sometime after it was popularised in the pages of magazines and on the tables of fine restaurants (sheridan 2000, p. 322). fulton’s influence was so pervasive over the next decade of the 1970s that, by 1982, some three years after she had left woman’s day for the food editorship of rival coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 magazine new idea, fulton was judged to have had ‘more impact on the australian kitchen than any thing or person since the refrigerator’ (ward 1982, p. 16). although this discussion has focused on her work in the 1960s, throughout the entirety of her almost sixty year long career in food writing, fulton’s message has remained remarkably clear—buy fresh seasonal produce, support local producers and food businesses, reduce waste, be open to the cultures of others, drink responsibly, and respect the work-life choices we all make. this message has certainly resonated with readers. the margaret fulton cookbook, having largely been kept in print since 1968 to meet reader demand, has achieved lifetime sales of over 1.5 million copies and has contributed to the some four million copies of fulton’s twenty-four cookbooks that were estimated as having been purchased nationally and internationally by 2007 (gibbs et al. 2007). a new edition of the margaret fulton cookbook (rewritten with suzanne gibbs) was released in 2004 to excellent reviews and ongoing sales success. conclusion: beyond the ‘just academic’ in the conclusion of his analysis of the social dynamics of food security, johan pottier writes of the importance of food studies: studying food issues, whether within households or in the offices of policymakers, must not be “just academic”. the aim of such research must be to understand and to transform (1999, pp. 196-97). in the preceding, i suggest that food writer margaret fulton has long made australians think about what and why we eat, and how this affects our world. fulton has a long history of contributing to important discussions about and around food, as well as the positive transformations of public culinary and other habits. in a range of areas, from sustainable and ethical agriculture to the work-life balance and gender equality, using the diction and popular forms of the day, such australian food writers have been not only media commentators on contemporary concerns but also, at times, forwardthinking activists and campaigners for change. endnote [1] cookbooks published in 1968 catalogued by the national library of australia include: abbas, azhar ilias 1968, recipes of the orient, rigby, adelaide; ady, doris m 1968, curries from the sultan's kitchen: curries from india, pakistan, burma and ceylon, reed, sydney & wellington; allen, norma 1968, the courier cookbook, good cooking from the cookery pages of the courier, the courier, canberra; anon 1968, australian cheese and wine: 20 dinner & luncheon ideas, lansdowne, melbourne; anon 1968, australian cheese and wine: recipe cards – 20 party ideas, lansdowne, melbourne; anon 1968, australian cheese and wine: recipe cards – 20 cakes and dessert ideas, lansdowne, melbourne; australian women’s weekly 1968, canned foods and short cuts for easy winter meals: from our leila howard test kitchen, australian women’s weekly, sydney; australian women’s weekly 1968, the australian women’s coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 weekly presents – bench-top cookery, australian women’s weekly, sydney; australian women’s weekly 1968, the australian women’s weekly presents – the christmas party food and drink book, australian women’s weekly, sydney; australian women’s weekly 1968, the mini-work cook book: from our leila howard test kitchen, australian women’s weekly, sydney; australian pig society (sa branch), united farmers & graziers of sa 1968, delicious pork recipes, stock journal publishers, south australia; barnes, mary 1968, is there a chef in the kitchen?, murray, sydney & melbourne; committee of the barraba pre-school centre association 1968, gunyah gabba: an australian recipe book, barraba pre-school centre association, barraba; daily telegraph 1968, daily telegraph gas cook book, daily telegraph, sydney; downes, isla m 1968, day to day cookery for home craft students, brooks, brisbane; fulton, margaret 1968, the margaret fulton cookbook, hamlyn, london & sydney; hilbert, margaret clare 1968, dining with peter pan, peter pan kindergarten, sydney; jones, robert 1968, the presidents’ own white house cookbook, culinary arts institute, chicago; keyneton primary school welfare club 1968, keyneton recipe book, keyneton primary school welfare club, keyneton sa; la perouse public school 1968, la perouse public school centenary recipe book, la perouse nsw; lee, jim 1968, jim lee’s chinese cookbook, harper & row, new york; meat and allied trades federation of australia 1968, meat as a food: how to select, how to keep, how to cook, meat and allied trades federation of australia, sydney; moloney, ted 1968, the young gourmet’s cookbook, ure smith, sydney & london; mount gambier a & h society ladies committee 1968, recipe book, the committee, mount gambier, sa; oliver, helen 1968, cooking with herbs, rigby, adelaide; patten, marguerite & dunleavy, betty 1968, entertaining at home, hamlyn, sydney; pretorius, martin 1968, nutritious recipes and meals, pretorius school of natural nutrition, sydney; reid, wynwode 1968, australian fish cookery book, vol. 1, keith breusch, sydney; rydon, john 1968, oysters with love, owen, london; sherry, kate 1968, speciality cuts and how to cook them, flesch, melbourne; singh, jane nutta 1968, the australian women’s weekly presents – indian curry and rice book, australian women’s weekly, sydney; yep, yung hee 1968, chinese recipes for home cooking: complete recipes and methods of preparation for the most popular, famous and traditional chinese dishes, horwitz, sydney. works cited austin, k 2007, ‘how cooks can save the world’, sydney morning herald, 29 may, viewed 7 february 2010, <http://www.smh.com.au/news/good-living/how-cooks-cansave-the-world/2007/05/28/1180205137041.html?page=fullpage>, 100 most influential list at <http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-100-most-influential-australians/2006/06/ 26/1151174135442.html>. bales, kevin 1999, disposable people: new slavery in the global economy, university of california press, berkeley. bannerman, colin 1996, a friend in the kitchen: old australian cookery books, kangaroo press, sydney. bannerman, colin 1998, acquired tastes: celebrating australia’s culinary history, coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 national library of australia, canberra. bannerman, colin 2001, ‘print media and the development of an australian culture of food and eating c.1850 to c.1920: the evidence from newspapers, periodical journals and cookery literature’, phd thesis, university of canberra, canberra. bannerman, colin 2008, seed cake and honey prawns: fashion and fad in australian food, national library of australia, canberra. darby, k; batte, mt; ernst, s & roe, b 2008, 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australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 wilkins, jl; bowdish, e & sobal, j 2002, ‘consumer perceptions of seasonal and local foods: a study in a u.s. community’, ecology of food and nutrition, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 415-439. wright, j 2007, ‘simple food satisfies queen of kitchen’, canberra times, 19 november, viewed 17 february 2010, <http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/news/local/general/simple-food-satisfies-queen-ofkitchen/1088572.html>. acknowledgements the research reported in this paper was begun at the research school of humanities at the australian national university, under a humanities research centre research fellowship, and completed with a grant funded through the faculty of arts, business, informatics & education, cquniversity, australia. this paper was much improved by the astute and generous comments of delegates at the food for thought congress (presented by the australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona and the centre for peace and social justice, southern cross university), held at the universitat de barcelona, spain, 1-5 february 2010, and those of the peer reviewers. donna lee brien, bed (deakin), ma (uts), phd (qut), gradcert highed (une), is professor of creative industries at cquniversity, australia. widely published in the areas of writing praxis and pedogogy, creative nonfiction and collaborative practice, her biography john power 1881-1943 (sydney: 1991) is the standard work on this expatriate artist/benefactor. donna is co-author with tess brady of the girl’s guide to real estate: how to enjoy investing in property, 2002 and the girl’s guide to work and life: how to create the life you want, 2004 (both allen & unwin, sydney). founding editor of dotlit: online journal of creative writing (2000-2004), donna is currently special issues editor of text: journal of writers and writing programs, a founding editorial board member of locale: the australasian-pacific journal of regional food studies and past president of the australasian association of writing programs. donna has been writing about food writers and their influence in scholarly and popular publications since 2006. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 negotiating ‘negative capability’: the role of place in writing lynda hawryluk and leni shilton southern cross university lynda.hawryluk@scu.edu.au l.shilton.10@student.scu.edu.au copyright©lynda hawryluk and leni shilton 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: taking its lead from the poet john keats‟ notion of „negative capability‟ (1891, p. 48), this paper explores the methodology of representing landscapes in writing, specifically using place to effect the process of „…being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…‟ (ibid). keats refers to the poet as „taking part‟ in the life of the poem (1891, p. 48). being in the poem this way attempts to allow the reader to experience the emotion of the poem. mary oliver extrapolated this by referring to „the “mere” diction of the poem [being] the vehicle that holds then transfers from the page to the reader an absolutely essential quality of real feeling‟ (1994, p 84). this paper focuses on the work of two australian writers whose work captures in verse a sense of connection to rugged and remote terrains. to evoke this sense of connection, keats‟ negative capability comes into play. this moment is described here as a metaphysical space where a meditative state provides the writer with moments described in this paper as a „glimpse‟. the „glimpse‟ is a recognition of that moment of connection, without which „poetry cannot happen‟ (oliver, 1994 p. 84). for our purposes here, we read this as being about the connection to a place as written on the page and how that then broadens out upon reading to become a connection to something beyond the notion of specific place. keats own words speak to this possibility, of allowing uncertainty to provide a sense of meaning and connection. this paper demonstrates, via creative practice and the work of like-minded australian poets, the internal and external processes that take place to facilitate the „glimpse‟ and inform our own writing about landscapes. this writing is individually informed by knowledge about environment and notions of poetic space, where „aspects of the unconscious move into consciousness‟ (hetherington, 2012 p. 8). the authors will explore the commonalities and distinctions between their work, using brief examples. keywords: landscape, poetry, glimpse mailto:lynda.hawryluk@scu.edu.au mailto:l.shilton.10@student.scu.edu.au coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 introduction the role of place in writing, and specifically how place is both evoked and echoed in words providing a reader with insight to location and landscape is the focus of this paper. the moment of evocation and echo is described here as the „glimpse‟. this will be demonstrated by way of discussion, and examples from australian poetry to provide the reader with an evocation of this „glimpse‟. the discussion also explores notions of creativity that connect our individual creative practice, and how it attempts to capture moments of creativity. the writing is situated in the australian landscape, a place we describe as „edge country‟, but the ideas here might be applied to works in other languages and contexts with the purpose of affecting a similar evocative response. the experience of the „glimpse‟ could be seen to transcend language and culture, allowing for a unique insight into how place effects and informs writing and reading of poetry. this paper will provide some background to our work, beginning with situating the landscape that inspires it and us. through the discussion of our place/s, a sense of commonality and distinction can be established about our respective sense of place. the sub-tropics (lynda) my work is located in central queensland, australia, in a region known as capricornia – so named for its position on the tropic of capricorn. yeppoon is a town of some 20,000 people, eight hours drive north of the nearest capital city brisbane. it is perched on the edge of the pacific in keppel bay, the location of the keppel islands group, including the abandoned resort on great keppel is. and over one hundred other uninhabited small islands dotted along the great barrier reef. within this town is the community of cooee bay, where matthew flinders passed by in 1804 and a ship was dashed onto rocks in 1848 at a place now called wreck point. the place is the traditional home to the woppaburra people, on the islands, and the darumbal on the land, where important sites like gawula (mt wheeler) are recognized as sacred, but unfortunately also the location of great injustices, with forced removal of island dwellers from kanomi (north keppel island) and barbaric treatment of indigenous people around gawula (mt wheeler). the capricornia region is a place of harsh contrasts, both beautiful and brutal in equal measure. initially the seemingly limitless space and black darkness at night in central queensland intimidated me in a way the freeways and crowds of the city of my birth never had. the landscape of central queensland seems dry and unforgiving, but the sub-tropics on the coast are teeming with wildlife and rich with pockets of rainforest, broken only by dry sweltering scrub to the west and the iridescent pacific ocean to the coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 east. sitting in the middle of these two extremes provided an interesting contrast, one highlighted by the sometimes formidable weather: crushing humidity and the real threat of cyclones, floods and storm surges. life in capricornia is a negotiation between the expectations of human habitation and the realities of the landscape and ecology of the place. my writing in capricornia is all about the unstructured and unrestrained, and the inherent beauty of being in a place that consumes you in its vastness. the steel and concrete buildings, black streets and endless cars of the city are replaced with an entirely different population of subtropical plants and animals, and with the brilliant sky and sea. my reaction to this place and the negotiation of my relationship with it, as well as the longing for this place being as a site of querencia (a feeling like home) is the focus of my work. the centre (leni): the focus of my writing is based in central australia, where i have lived and worked for 27 years. over these years i have travelled widely throughout the region for my work and visiting friends who live in remote parts of central australia. alice springs is the main town in the area with a population of around 30,000 people; it is located at the southern end of the northern territory, more than 1600km to the nearest beach in any direction. the desert becomes part of you if you live in it long enough. this is what has happened to me. the desert has become the focus of my thoughts and thus my writing, a landscape that is so familiar to me it is just known. a journey along a certain bush road is important because of all the past journeys i have taken, as well as the current one. the landscape is recognisable and even with dramatic changes to the vegetation over many years, it is familiar, and as i travel through it, it is anticipated. a turn in the road, the spine of a mountain range, the rust colour at sunset, all known, like they are extensions of me and not me at the same time. alice springs is set in the desert country of the arrente people, called mparntwe in the arrente language. rivers only flow after rain. the stunning country is a physical representation of ancient dreaming stories. the country itself tells the story of creations and shows the journeys taken by creation beings as they travelled across the land making water holes, mountain ranges and rock formations (turner & mcdonald 2010; wallace 2009; rubuntja & green 2002; brookes 1991). many local aboriginal language speakers speak their mother tongue and an array of languages that surround them depending on where family movements take them and into which language group they marry. most of my aboriginal students were fluent in four aboriginal languages and could „hear‟ another three or four. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 my writing has its basis in the experiences and knowledge of this country, expressed in an understanding of the landscape and the people who inhabit it. recurrent in my writing are the themes of loss, isolation and transformation explored through place and history of place. this with knowledge is built on over many years through an experience of place drawn from living and working with traditional owners. in my phd project i am investigating these themes through history by exploring the life of an historical figure. bertha strehlow lived in central australia in the 1930s, and travelled by camel through the desert with her husband and three aboriginal camel handlers. she is thought to be the first white woman to see uluru and kata tjuta. using the device of the verse novel, i explore her growing sense of understanding of the landscape as she travels through it in the winter of 1936 and comes perilously close to death on the journey. i am interested in the contrasts i find in the experiences of the first white settlers to central australia, their sense of wonderment at the landscape and the people, and the stories of the traditional owners, which explain that wonderment in very practical terms of the storied landscape (san roque & santospirito 2013). through my poetry i explore the multiple layers of history of place. capturing place and belonging this paper examines how our work corresponds to our respective sense of place and belonging, and capturing that for the reader. we are attempting to explore and define our understanding of the glimpse; that moment of knowing and becoming. australian poet and academic martin harrison, in his analysis of this process, says: the eye and voice, which can invent such vision [in poetry] and invent it out of such a momentarily remembered fragment can only come from a poet operating on the boundary of known and unknown areas of awareness (2007 p. 59). for us, writing poetry is a distillation process. knowledge, experience and memory work together to produce a tone or thought for the poetry to work. poet and academic jay parini (2008) writes that to be a poet is to be mindful of the nature of the art „especially in terms of language [working ] as a kind of echo-chamber in which the origins of words enhance their...denotations and connotations‟ (pp. x-xi). understanding the gulf between „mental images and real images, between spirit and nature‟ (p. x), allows the poetry to have its own „inner logic, an inner necessity of its own‟ (pretty 2001, p. 3). les murray (2006) writes of the experience of writing about place from memory, „it was so when we were there‟ he says with confidence, an idea reiterated by harrison in his discussion on australian poetry; „it will derive from what is captured in the self coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 reflective, closely felt and technologically aware engagement… to place and environment‟ (2007 p. 55). a strong sense of place informs our work. the poems grow through knowledge and memory. academic tom lee talks about poetry as „the most direct way to account for the complexity of perceptual experiences‟ the sensory moments are „read‟ through our skin (2013), thus the poet can express what takes place in a moment. ‘negative capability’ john keats first posited the idea of being capable and open to the uncertainties of doubt in relation to the process of creativity. he called this „negative capability‟ in a letter to his brothers after a heated discussion with a friend (keats 1891 pp. 46-48). it may be seen that keats is referring to a kind of higher order experience than that of consciousness, something almost divine. this echoes the discussion of the origins of creativity by celebrated author elizabeth gilbert (ted, 2010). keats referred to coleridge‟s experience of being able to let go of what he might call „fact and reason‟ by resorting to a sense of beauty which substituted for explanation of experience. we take our lead from these concepts for the purposes of this paper and in relation to our work, extrapolating them to describe that place where the poet is putting themselves willingly into a space and place (both within and without) of doubt. it is an attempt to be in the moment, to be present and in a place of trust. this is a place of risk and for us it facilitates the act and practice of creativity. the negative element of this process of course is that it may not be an entirely comfortable one. the poet may not feel at ease with the process, with what they are seeing, going through and feeling. australian poet and academic kevin brophy discusses an acceptance of the moment, saying of this experience; „perhaps it is enough that the piece of writing disturbs the surface of our lives for a moment‟ (2003 p. 222). this period of discomfort is described by dominique hecq as a „disturbance‟ (2012). hecq describes walking around as she writes a poem, and being physically in the moment, but that moment being one of agitation, a feeling of imbalance. this walking around allows the process of creativity to be enacted. the lines come to her and she is able to let the poem arrive, the act of walking providing a rhythm for the line to rest in. being the recipient of words that arrive in a moment predicated to being accepting of imbalance, echoes elizabeth gilbert‟s description of the muse and the arrival of creative ideas (2010) and the sometimes active role the writer must play in being receptive to moments of doubt and imbalance. taking part in the life of the poem coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 we call this sense of being receptive „taking part in the life of the poem‟, that is, taking an active role in its creation. in relation to keats, this means being receptive to being in the moment, of existing in the poem and giving yourself up to it. this knowledge is informed by location, and influenced by the space and sense of belonging. les murray in the writing of his poetry has been described as „watching with his mouth‟, taking his poem three interiors as an example: „the books themselves, that vertical live leather brickwork/…have all turned their backs/ on the casual tourists and, clasped in mediation, they pray/in coined greek…‟ he „courts the senses, pointing as it does to sight, sound and touch‟ (steele 2002 p. 177). knowing the place intimately provides the poet with the opportunity to write into the moment. harrison calls this use of memory to enrich the writing „a sense of late light brought momentarily into consciousness‟ (2007 p. 59). by inhabiting the space of the poem and the landscape it is set in, there is a sense of being in it, which then opens up possibilities for revisiting this sense when reading and responding to the work. in effect, this sense of inhabiting the space of the poem can happen in the landscape it reflects, and can be evoked later at a distance from the landscape for the reader. feelings of imbalance and uncertainty are transferred to the reader, and a symbiotic connection is formed. it is a response to the particular physical space and place of the poem itself. the reader experiences a clear and essential vision of the poem rather than being conscious of how the poet arrived at that moment. thus they experience the distillation of what is at the very essence of the poem and the senses in the poem as if they themselves were in that place. much as the experience of the poet themselves, the reader then experiences this sense of not knowing, a disturbance imbued in not knowing what‟s going to come by being in the place, and exposing oneself to this possibility. this happens in a very physically embodying way, in a conscious act of enabling and allowing the moment to arrive. this process is expressed by keats in his letters (1891 p. 10) as he describes his agitation in the writing/creation of the poem, but in the poem itself the agitation is subtle, more like a tremor if felt at all, and lies in the symbols and metaphors within the poem. the methodology of representing landscapes understanding and knowledge about the history of place provides a point to write from with historians, anthropologists and creative writers contributing to the growing canon of post-colonial writing. jay arthur (2003) in her exploration of how language has historically influenced attitudes to place, documents that colonialists consistently viewed the landscape in terms of english perceptions of country and landscape (2003, pp. 1-3). the colours, vegetation and landscape of the english countryside were the default expectation in the thinking of settlers, explorers and visitors to central australia. the fertile green images of the english countryside were in stark contrast to the coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 australian landscape, which was viewed as dry, barren and empty. ross gibson, quoted in bird rose‟s nourishing terrains (1996, p. 18) comments on the „english‟ imaging of country. he says: „every old world hectare has been ridden over, written over, and inscribed into an elaborate and all engrossing national history.‟ further to this, o‟connor mirrors gibson‟s observations when speaking about the laying of history in ireland (1992): the landscape is thoroughly humanised. it is therefore imbued with cultural meaning, being the concrete expression of the states of mind, now and in the past, and just like a book or a parchment much written upon and written over, its interpretation awaits the discerning reader… (p. 8). in europe then, it might be considered that the country is written over by the people and in central australia the people are written over by the country. nicholson gill proposes that the early settler desire to change and mark the land comes from a wider assumption of colonialism, part of the late 19 th century „european expansionism‟ as he explains: the wilderness landscape is essentially unformed, chaotic, innocent and uninhabited. classically, the garden is a step towards culture. it is the crucible of domestic life and the active transformation of the earth for human ends… (2005, p. 79). the land was already and continues to be inscribed and mapped with the stories of the aboriginal owners. the texts which describe the dreaming stories and legends including tgh strehlow‟s work the songs of central australia (strehlow 1971), the arunta (spencer & gillen 1927) and more recently the arrernte landscape of alice springs (brooks 1991) speak of „knowing‟ and „being‟ with the land (gill 2005, p. 78). though writers of historical texts on language and culture until recent years have written as if looking through a „white lens‟, as observed by attwood: historians…have to rely on texts created by white people. we never have aboriginal voices [in history] unless white people recount (and invariably reformulate) these in their writings (2005, pp. 159-60). carter (1996, p. 25) writes of the process of writing history, place and exploring characters to make a new history: this process of bringing places „into being‟ dissolves the distinction between autobiography and history; to affiliate successfully to the new environment was to be initiated into a new history, but also envisage different ways of telling history. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 the enactment of the glimpse is about looking deeper than the surface of the landscape, the act of writing into it and acknowledging the history and how it informs our understanding of the place. the notion of the glimpse seeks to acknowledge the echoes of resonance in the landscape. this corresponds in particular to the work of dening (2006) and griffiths (1996) who describe history in a present sense, and depict history effecting place in an active way. oodgeroo noonuccal pointed to this in her landmark poem, the past: 'let no one say the past is dead. the past is about us and within us' (1966). poetry examples: australian poets capture the glimpse to better understand the evocation of the glimpse, it is helpful to look specifically at writers who respond to their environment and evoke a sense of belonging in their work. these first examples demonstrate this sense of becoming and being, with reference to australian poets whose work echoes the themes of our own. judith wright: from dust this sick dust, spiralling with the wind, is harsh as grief‟s taste in our mouths and has eclipsed the small sun. this remnant earth turns evil, the steel-shocked earth has turned against the plough and runs with wind all day, and all night sighs in our sleep against the windowpane. (wright 1995 p. 23-4) barry hill: from back returning inland seasons later a lizard waits for me. clatter in the kitchen. length across the frying pan. i thought it‟s thump and scuttle a bird on the roof it has striped rings runs of sand down its tail. eyes like ants. (hill 2001, p. 49) coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 bronwyn lee: from seven feet and where they’re from the aboriginal foot the woman‟s features are preserved on the eastern end of the gorge, and her story is preserved in a dance at the base of the red rock, her daughter‟s feet dragging through the sand to leave the meandering tracks of a snake. (lea 2001 p. 10) deb westbury from leaving wollongong harbour the trawlers are already parting the pink ripples of sunrise out beyond the breakwater. the black wharf glitters with great drifts of wet-silver scales. (westbury 2002 p. 18) the final two examples here are representative of the work that echoes our own, in terms of location and theme: in central australia, meg mooney: from christmas grey bead curtains of rain over the waterhole mud red water bubbling in our drains around the tarp. gums danced golden in fields of couch grass the rock wall beamed red as ininti seeds. (mooney 2005 p. 57) from central queensland, kristin hannaford: intertidal zone only the trace of clayed footprints wind through the mangroves. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 for here is the landscape full of bodily sounds, heaving itself fricative and hoarse reinventing terrain over and again with each shifting hour. scents of decay claw and rise quick with water when it comes (2004) mary oliver and the experience of the ‘glimpse’ the „glimpse‟ is a moment of distillation and inspiration that leads to the generation of a poem, achieved by complete absorption in the moment, observation of the senses and a deep awareness of the landscape. poets have described this moment of revelation as being in the physicality of moment immersed in the landscape, or spiritually, where a revelation takes place, for instance in a moment of meditation, or in a dream (magee 2009, gilbert 2010, lawrence 2012). but however the moment or glimpse may appear, it is not completely random. it presents as a result of intense knowledge and understanding of place through both the lived experience and through research. as poets we strive for this moment of capture and when it is achieved the glimpse evokes emotion and nostalgia. as we write this into the landscape, we are also writing about the past the history of place. this compels us to write of the troubled history as well as the beauty that rests in the land, thus the poems arise from an intuitive awareness as well as a deep consciousness. hirsch further describes this process: …the words [come] off the page into my own mouth – in transit, in action. i generate – i re-create – the words incantatory, the words liberated and self-reflexive…in poetry the words enact – they make manifest –what they describe (1999 p.p9-10). the glimpse may be related to the idea of the muse or the creative spark but in our understanding of it, it relates to the inner versus outer landscape. in this rendering, the outer is about the landscape that is known – what we have seen and read. to the point where… „a place has to become an inner landscape for imagination to start to inhabit [it]…‟ (calvino in gislason 2013 p. 16). to reach beyond this space, the writer or reader needs to bypass normal thought processes to access the richness of thought which will become a poem (dillard 1990 pp. 10-11). advice about turning off the editor comes into play. natalie goldberg suggests „let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper‟ (1990 p. 33) thus permission is given to get back to that moment and in doing so the reader can touch and reach that space and therefore that place. described by doris lessing as „wool-gathering‟, the process coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 requires switching off and entering an unconscious space of creativity, the „creative dark‟ (in brophy 2003 p. 220). for the writer, there is a need to go to that place / location to write about it, and once there, to let go of external influences, and accept being entirely influenced by the outer world and landscape the writer is connected to at that moment. the inner of this scenario is the writing and using external knowledge to create that moment. poet mary oliver says such poems: brim from the particular, the regional, the personal, and become – as all successful poems must –“parables” that say something finally about our own lives, as well as the lives of their authors… they glow with unmistakable universal meaning (1994 p. 80). the poems speak and allow a truth to arise, often in a moment that surprises the poet as well as the reader. poetry examples the evocation of the glimpse within our work demonstrates the focus of the discussion thus far. this is the glimpse in action, bringing the reader to the place the poetry derives from. each poem features an annotation to foreground the work in historical, cultural or personal frameworks. a tropical heart a tropical heart surrounds us like the layers of a sugary smoothie 1 warm wet tenderness, protecting us from harm a covering of rough spiked skin defends our inner territory from conquering armies of ants a crown of thorns signifies our stature reaching the heavens with upstretched fronds the monarch of all we survey my tropical heart beats softly encased in this deep cavern of flesh 1 a smoothie is a variety of pineapple. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 a strong and steady systole providing the backbeat for my very own one-man band the daytime drama of life drowns out the sound down below the drumbeat lost in a cacophony of chaos and chatter and cars it‟s only in the stillness of a stolen moment in the sun you‟ll remember to listen for the rhythm steady staccato sans stutter simple solitary sound a tropical heart hidden deep in a rainforest of lush undergrowth ferns like fingers reach around the trunk of a figure in celestial repose a canopy covers everything sheltering ventricle vegetation, and other organs with their particular sounds but they are quieter in deference to the steady thumping of a tropical heart keeping the beat for everyone in this tiny little town so, when the sky goes dark and the night is still and the midge‟s mania subsides in the background, underneath it all you‟ll hear a sound that surrounds us all from within deep down where no one goes lies a tropical heart, beating on annotation: the principle form of agriculture in yeppoon on the capricorn coast in queensland is pineapple growing, with the most common variety in australia smooth leaf cayenne, or „smoothies‟. the reliance of the local economy on this hardy tropical fruit is explored in this poem, captured in the underlying theme of the „steady staccato‟ of a strong heart. small towns and their industries are intertwined like blood vessels and ventricles around a major organ, and the language used to describe this relationship is often visceral: a small factory or plant can be referred to as the „lifeblood‟ of a town, and the townspeople come to depend on it, suffering as the industry might suffer various „health‟ setbacks. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 yeppoon celebrates the pineapple industry with an annual event called pinefest, with parade, fair and exhibitions drawing visitors since 1962 (queensland museum, 2013) from around the region and state, increasing tourism dollars, a newer source of income for the region. the eye of a needle the camels stride – a fine string through the trees. cliffs rise red over the gap and the line of camels, thread themselves through one, two, three until they are gone. voices echo from inside the gap: aranda men calling camel commands in arabic – the rocks speak as clouds lick at the cliff tops. the camels tread with ease through the country, and i am reminded strangely of rich men and the eye of a needle. annotation: this poem arose from a line written by bertha strehlow. she wrote a great deal about the camels as she travelled with her husband tgh strehlow across the desert, and as she got to know them wrote with increasing affection. „…a fine string through the trees‟ is from her article „through central australia‟ (1940 p. 10). but as suggested by gail jones, the generation of a work doesn‟t often arise from a clearly marked out plan. rather it comes instead „from the fragment, the trace, the vague or barest intuition. from scraps…‟ (1999 p. 314). this poem arose in such a way. the phrase „a fine string…‟ took my mind to the domestic and the possibility that bertha would have had to repair clothes (and their swag sheets when they got caught in coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 mulga) in the isolation of the desert. my thought process then took me to the biblical reference of the eye of a needle. central australia was being colonised at the time the story is set and aboriginal people were being actively encouraged to give up their language as well as their spiritual beliefs. the glimpse is attained as bertha hears aranda men calling to the camels in arabic. this moment has magic in its strangeness. echoing and evoking the sense of longing the themes of place evoked in these poems resonate with a sense of nostalgia using a „language of a condition of special use‟ (steiner, 2010 p.72). steiner‟s position on language and the use of words captures the sense of a place in the sound of the words, echoing perhaps the sound of the landscape. this specialised language triggers emotion, pointing towards the „glimpse‟ (heaney, 1995 p. xv). the glimpse provides moments of revelation in the inspiration for the work and the distillation of emotion released through the reading of the poem, somewhere between „the unconscious and the never-really-known‟ (hetherington, 2012). this is the poetry of „edge country‟, creating a sense of longing for what was, or what could be, within the place and the emotion of the place. we conclude this part of the discussion with a visual demonstration of paul hetherington‟s notions of poetic space using images of our respective places, and thus the focus of our work. kemp beach, central queensland – photo by lynda hawryluk coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 the fitzroy delta from the air, central queensland – photo by lynda hawryluk moon rise over creek, northern territory – photo by leni shilton on the crest of mt phillips, northern territory – photo by leni shilton coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 the glimpse as affective resonance what one might experience by viewing the images of the places referred to in the proceeding writing is affective resonance. the effects of the glimpse can be examined in terms of affect theory (tompkins, 1962) because the glimpse has a similar outcome of evoking response in the body, one experienced in its creation as well. in affect imagery consciousness (1962), tompkins describes nine discrete affects operating on a scale from positive to neutral to negative. the progression of these affects is seen bodily, often in facial expressions. much of the writing referred to here makes connections with the positive end of the affective response scale, and in a very subtle way. tompkins‟ affect theory acknowledged the innate nature of affect; our responses occur bodily, and often unconsciously. evoking a feeling, a sensation of place in the reader is so too an innate reaction but it comes with the permission of the reader who is seeking to feel that which the poet felt and experienced. the experience provides a moment where the reader “react[s] innately to the expressed affect of others as if it were our own, and therefore enabled to know a great deal about the inner world of those others” (nathanson 2008 p. 5). tompkins called this affective resonance – how humans respond to each other via the „transmission of affect‟ (brennan, 2004). in writing, the experience of this is exemplified in the glimpse, which echoes back in a bodily expression to the reader. the poetry resonates in the reader, who is provided with a sense of the location being coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 described; the scenery, atmosphere, the physical sensation of being there. resonance is responsiveness and this responsiveness is often physical. affect, tompkins said, “makes good things better and bad things worse” (p.2) this echoes back to the moment of the glimpse. the glimpse provides a sense of synchronicity for the poet and reader alike. this is evoked in the way a poet like vivian smith responds to place in his work about tasmania‟s rugged landscapes: water colour country. here the hills rot like rugs beneath enormous skies and all day long the shadows of the clouds stain the paddocks with their running dyes. … the hills breathing like a horse‟s flank with grasses combed and clean of snow. (smith 2011p. 594) in these words we see the evocation of the glimpse, written as a moment in time that echoes through the mind, resonates with the body and into memory. the language in smith‟s work here is sinister and evocative, beautiful yet alarming. in much the same way the discrete affects sit on a sliding scale, smith acknowledges the dichotomy of the landscape, provoking a sense of dis-ease and discomfort that affects the writer and the reader alike. the glimpse evokes a feeling in the reader in a similar way to the function of jacobson‟s organ, as explained by watson (1999). jacobson‟s organ is a little known cluster of cells in the nasal cavity, which acts as a kind of memory transmitter. this is what is working when an odour evokes powerful responses including associated memories. the effect can be a physical response such as retching or crying; involuntary actions that inhabit the body at an affective level. affect theory provides us with an understanding of innate responses to stimulus virtually out of our control. how a writer provokes and stimulates this is with language, and with the effectiveness of description that brings a scene to life in more than just words. stephen king explored this in the opening to his novella the body (1982): the most important things are the hardest things to say. these are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they‟re brought out (introduction, n.p). king describes here the frustration of not being able to capture something in words, or retell it to another so they have an understanding of its importance. the antithesis of this experience is the evocation of the glimpse. coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 as posited by tompkins, affective response is the innate reaction to an emotion, and in relation to our understanding of the glimpse, this can be evoked by a word or phrase. it is the job of the writer to provoke this response in the reader, to provide for them the sensation they experienced at the moment of realisation. to capture a scene and its physical presence is like watching a human face responding in the way it evokes an automatic and natural response, and our innate reflection of that back is the glimpse. so a place that makes a poet smile and pause, or take a deep sigh is captured in language that evokes those feelings in the reader. it allows them that glimpse of the moment in the reading of the work. the glimpse then is a bodily reaction to words as much as an evocation in words. it is a complementary relationship representing synchronicity with the poet and reader. emily dickinson describes this famously as equating to the most intense of physical sensations. she described it thus: „if i read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me i know that is poetry. i feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, i know that is poetry‟ (dickinson in hirsch 1999 p. 7). the australian poet deb westbury puts this in practical terms, explaining that „…the work is greater than its parts. ideally it will cause the reader to feel something, to touch you, so that the reader is changed permanently by his/her encounter with the work‟ (2013). this is then the ultimate goal of the writer; the process of allowing the reader to see and feel what they did at the moment of the glimpse: a permanent change enacted upon the body and expressed in language and description. poetry about place and landscape does this effectively, providing the words geographers couldn‟t find (porteous, 1984). this corresponds to the ideas expressed by our colleagues in the field, of „empathetically shar[ing] the writers‟ sense of landscape‟ (berry, 2013 p. 85) and „captur[ing] the essence of the places and landscapes‟ (boyd, 2013 p. 99) in verse. poetry examples: the culmination of ideas, exemplified in words evoking the sense of our respective places, our responses to them, and the sense of longing that the places evoke in us is demonstrated in a final selection of poems: the sky is darker at night. a balmy breeze blows through palm trees grounded deep in their natural environment half asleep watching faint lights flickering in the distance they might belong to a car, a house or something you don‟t want to think about every tree could be an abrupt ending to the journey home coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 and every shadow beckons you closer towards the dark a thousand eyes line the roadside watching and waiting for the next car to pass a kangaroo court of voyeurs, ready to pounce driving along through endless inky night belying a vast empty country; it‟s out there somewhere the car is cool and comfortable and gives a false sense of safety but it could all be over in seconds the sky is much darker at night without the benefit of the reflected light of a humming cityscape a different kind of city sits out there in the dark hiding behind bushes, away from the headlights of an oncoming car annotation: the night sky has long been a subject of wonder among poets and scientists alike. writers from such divergent backgrounds as lord byron („darkness‟, 1816), wordsworth („the sun has long been set‟, 1804), rilke („at the brink of night‟ trans. 1949), frost („acquainted with the night‟, 1928) and sexton (the starry night‟, 1981) have sought to capture the appearance and depth of darkness that night provides and inspires. dh lawrence‟s „grey evening‟ (1916) acknowledges what science knows: that the night sky is more complex a range of colours than simple darkness. far from there being an absolute shade of black to the human eye, the absence of light is in fact a shade known as eigengrau, or „intrinsic grey‟ (blom, 2010 p.170). the sky in outback australia looks darker at night due to the contrasting effect of stars, and the deeper one gets into isolated spaces, the darker this night becomes. the bortle dark-sky scale (2001) provides a range of locations and their suitability for dark sky viewing according to visibility of stars and interference from light pollution. a large city (inner city sky), full of reflected light and neon, will prevent the human eye from detecting stars and is considered the worst location for dark sky viewing. the best locations are of course far away from cities, with their floodlights and high-rise buildings. the further one gets, the better the opportunity to see colourful and clear zodiac symbols and constellations in full. of course, the perception of the australian outback is that is a place with a dark heart; a place to be fearful of. from early depictions of the bush we see a reliance on imagery creating a sense of fear and distrust, which correlates with a pathological fear of the dark, scotophobia, a word derived from the greek word for darkness. in pathological terms, lyons (1985) says fear of the dark may not arise from being afraid of the absence coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 of light but because „one does not know what may be out there in the dark‟ (p. 75). dream language the language felt in the rocks, on the air through grey leaves. a land language i hear on my skin as it moves like a veil over my face. sound that touches under skin like water seeping through sand, that birds know before it is sound. a scent cushioned on wind, on currents over hills, in cloud, in rain when it finds itself falling. the flick of a bird‟s wing, dust that falls as it turns. and light, ragged on the horizon brushed orange in the mountain‟s profile, a misted rainbow of colour; fading to dark, with dotted stars lanterns to guard the cold night. all sound, like a long held note. the language fades from my ears, but echoes loud in the land. i move through rock, creep in the dark, watch the night animals come. the dark a type of home, a tranquil breath of giving in, giving up, giving over. a small moment where all others wash off coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 into dreams and i stop worrying for the first time (shilton 2014). annotation: historian paul carter examines the association between „travelling and dreaming‟ as expressed by 20 th century explorers in central australia, in particular in the writing of ernest giles who named the petermann ranges. bertha‟s dream state is explored by investigating the parallels in this imagined dream poem of bertha‟s with giles‟ writing: „darkness began to creep over this solitary place…i coiled myself up under a bush and fell into one of those extraordinary waking dreams which occasionally descend upon imaginative mortals when we know that we are alive, and yet we think we are dead…at such a time the imagination can revel only in the marvelous, (sic) the mysterious, and the mythical.‟ in his discussion of giles‟ writing carter states: … [with this reverie] the writer seeks to persuade us of the universality of his experience. such transcendent moments are part of the explorer‟s credentials. they are an indispensable element, if the biography is to be complete (carter 1987 pp. 84-5). conclusion this paper has explored and described a relationship to and reading of the „glimpse‟, an evocation of place that provides an underlying philosophy inherent in the authors‟ work. it does this by way of example, through our own work and that of australian poets who take as their inspiration the australian landscape. our position is informed by this demonstration of our work and the work of other australian poets, who use the moment of becoming and knowing to better express their connection to place, and allow a reader this moment in their own space, obviating distance and location. in this way this paper and exercise demonstrates the experience keats famously described in his 1891 letter; the process of „negative capability‟ and its usefulness for poets seeking to capture in words and mood the very essence of a place. works cited arthur, j 2003 the default country – a lexical cartography of twentieth century australia, unsw press, pp. 1-3 attwood, b 2005 telling the truth about aboriginal history, a&u, melbourne, pp. 169-70 coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 bell, d 1993 daughter of the dreaming, a&u, melbourne berry, m 2013 being there: poetic landscapes in coolabah, vol. 11 www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/coola11marshaberry9.pdf blom, jd 2010 a dictionary of hallucinations, springer usa p. 170 bortle, j 2001 „the bortle dark-sky scale‟ in sky and telescope 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complete poems of anne sexton houghton mifflin, boston shilton, l 2014 „dream language‟, in „capturing the glimpse: revelations on creative manoeuvres‟, in the creative manoeuvres: making, saying, being papers – the refereed proceedings of the 18th conference of the australasian association of writing programs, 2013, l. hawryluk & l. shilton, university of canberra, 25-27 th november 2013 http://www.aawp.org.au/the_creative_manoeuvres_making_saying_being_paper s shilton, l 2013 „the eye of the needle‟, in swamp journal, edition 13 http://www.swampwriting.com october 2013 smith, v 2011 „tasmania‟, in australian poetry since 1788, eds geoffrey lehmann & robert gray, unsw press, sydney, p. 594 spencer, b & gillen fj 1927 the aranta, macmillan & co, london steel, p 2012 braiding the voices: essays in poetry, john leonard press, melbourne, p. 177 steiner, g 2010 language and silence, ebook (first published 1958), faber and faber, london, p. 72 http://www.qm.qld.gov.au/microsites/ http://www.qm.qld.gov.au/microsites/ http://www.blackcatpoems.com/r/at_the_brink_of_night.html http://www.aawp.org.au/the_creative_manoeuvres_making_saying_being_papers http://www.aawp.org.au/the_creative_manoeuvres_making_saying_being_papers http://www.swampwriting.com/ coolabah, no.16, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 strehlow, b 1940 „through central australia‟, in walkabout, vol. 6, no. 1, august 1940, p. 10 strehlow, tgh 1971 songs of central australia, angus & robertson, sydney nathanson, d in tomkins, s (1962, reprinted 2008) affect imagery consciousness: the positive affects: prologue (vol. 1), new york: springer tredinnick, m 2003 a place on earth, university of nebraska press, canada turner, m k & mcdonald, b 2010 iwenhe tyerrtye: what it means to be an aboriginal person, iad press, alice springs watkins, l 1999 jacobson‟s organ and the remarkable nature of smell w w norton & company incorporated new york westbury, d 2013 „report on publisher‟s fellowship for poetry at varuna 2013‟, http://www.varuna.com.au/varuna/images/pdfs/publishers%20fellowship%20p oetry%20report%202013%20public.pdf (viewed 2 nd december 2013) westbury, d 2002 flying blind, brandl & schlesinger, blackheath, p. 18 wordsworth, w 1888 the complete poetical works by william wordsworth, with an introduction by john morley, macmillan, london wright, j 1994 „dust‟, in judith wright collected poems, a&r, sydney, pp. 23-4 dr lynda hawryluk is a senior lecturer in writing at southern cross university where she is the course coordinator of the associate degree of creative writing. lynda has facilitated writing workshops in regional queensland and canada. she is the chair of the australasian association of writing programs aawp and has been published in a variety of academic and creative publications. leni shilton is an award winning poet and writer of short creative non-fiction. her work is published widely in anthologies and journals and broadcast on poetica. leni is a phd candidate at southern cross university. http://www.varuna.com.au/varuna/images/pdfs/publisher http://www.varuna.com.au/varuna/images/pdfs/publisher microsoft word coolabahstephanos coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 poetry by stephanos stephanides in translation stephanos stephanides visited the australian studies centre and gave a lecture and poetry reading to poetry undergraduate classes. the students were so impressed by his poetry that the idea of translating some of his work for this edition of coolabah. for both the students and the journal this has been a great priviledge. stephanos stephanides, himself a spanish speaker, worked with the students as they translated. a rare chance indeed to work with a poet while translating his work. we are grateful to stephanos stephanides for providing this wonderful opportunity for the students. copyright ©2010 stephanos stephanides. translation: giada cacciavillani and kathleen hoyos this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 augustan days the first goodbye for katerina (after derek walcott) days as august and as large as the sea and nights as wide as the rooftops here i lie no use for the shirt on my back nor the walls of my house spread before a relentless sky that will brood and puff up a tease or a promise of rain the lion raised to the stars a daze with a spray of fierce light as perseus climbs high, or hangs low in tears, for the days we will lose for the days sun burnt red with moon and the month passes by the cat slips away and the marigolds fade leaving only a touch like tender dust and a daughter ready to fly and with derek i sing days i have held days i have lost days that outgrow like daughters my harbouring arms stephanos stephanides august 2008 dias de agosto la primera despedida para katerina (según de derek walcott) días augustos y grandiosos como el mar y noches anchas como tejados yazgo aquí no sirve la camisa que llevo encima coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 ni sirven las paredes de mi casa tumbado ante un cielo implacable que se fruncirá y se hinchará con amago o promesa de lluvia el león se alzará a las estrellas alumbrantes con un rocío de luz feroz la de perseo que escala alto, o cae bajo con lágrimas por los días que perdemos por los días -quemados rojo de sol con luna y el mes huye el gato se escabulle y las caléndulas se apagan dejando solo un toque de polvo tierno y una hija a punto de volar y con derek canto: días que he tenido días que he perdido días que ya están grandes como hijas en mis brazos albergadores stephanos stephanides agosto 2008 jaya devi goddess, tonight you are dreadful last night you enticed me in your watery blue even the moon was blue. why tonight do you shake and pump my body until filth flows out from all my orifices on my knees i heave and puke and beg you wash me clean with warm liquids laced with tumeric and neem instead you shower me with a deluge harsh and cold i shiver and you throw me down an empty shell why devi? i know i am not your baby and don’t i know your pestilence and stench? and how often have i seen you dance in buriel grounds? i also know your lotus touch heal and let me sleep. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 tomorrow i will speak. if you want i change my voice don’t show me all my shit and muck just prod me a little more gently and again i’ll sing your praise jaya devi jaya delhi (after the blue moon) january 2004 jaya devi diosa, esta noche me aterras anoche me sedujiste en tu aguado azul, hasta la luna era azul. ¿por qué drenas y sacudes mí cuerpo esta noche hasta vaciar toda roña de mis orificios? de rodillas arqueo y vomito y te imploro que me purifiques con líquidos calidos calados de cúrcuma y nim, pero tú me bañas con un diluvio brutal y frío tiemblo y me arrojas cual concha vacía ¿por qué devi? se que soy tu niño y ¿no conozco tu pestilencia y hedor? ¿y cuantas veces te he visto danzar en campos santos? también conozco tu roce de loto cúrame y déjame dormir. mañana hablaré. si quieres cambiaré mi voz no me enseñes toda mi mierda y mugre sólo guíame más suavemente y de nuevo cantaré tus alabanzas jaya devi jaya. delhi (después de la luna azul) enero 2004 octobriana i will sing to you before the night is over month of dust and dirty sweetness mother of the rosary and red square time for papa benedictus to chant rosarium virginis mariae apologetica for the infidels coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 and for octobriana fucking vladimir in lenin square people’s popular party turning into progressive political pornography and i recall that indian summer when gurgench pissed in every river from rome to rimini leaving graffiti under every bridge tras tyberis erranti erecti erotici he hummed a feast for fellini’s eye my october tyrants iulius and augustus have turned you to the tenth month and now like you i find my days of the dog-star left behind so this year let us make a truce month and mother of calendula and tourmaline my brain has ost its sequence scorpius still chases my tail and i still ferry the stars into the sky do save my vitality for another indian summer lamenting a lack but daring to hope between a mountain too stolid and a sea too restless days are too brief we all shall be what this is now time is only in the heart in this time of my vintage so let me tell you iulius augustus vladimirus benedictus the world is still crazy and there is more to octobriana than i can still or ever imagine october eve, 2006 coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 octobriana te cantaré antes de que acabe la noche mes de polvo y sucia dulzura madre del rosario y de la plaza roja es hora de que el papa benedictus cante rosarium virginis mariae apologetica para los infieles y para octobriana follándose a vladimir en la plaza lenin el partido popular del pueblo convirtiéndose en pornografía política progresista y me acuerdo de ese veranillo de san martín gurgench meó en todos los ríos desde roma hasta rimini dejando graffiti bajo cada puente tras tyberis erranti eretici erotici canturreó un banquete para la vista de fellini mi octubre los tiranos iulius y augustus te han convertido al décimo mes y ahora como tú encuentro que los días de sirio he dejado atrás entonces este año hagamos un pacto mes y madre de caléndula y turmalina mi cerebro ha perdido su secuencia escorpio aún persigue mi cola y sigo llevando las estrellas al cielo salva mi vitalidad para otro veranillo de san martín lamentando un vacío pero esperanzado entre una montaña demasiado impasible y un mar demasiado inquieto los días son demasiado breves todos seremos lo que es ahora el tiempo solo está en el corazón en este mí tiempo de vendimia entonces déjame decirte coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 iulius augustus vladimirus benedictus el mundo aún está loco y hay más de octobriana de lo que puedo o he imaginado nunca víspera de octubre, 2006 spanish versions by giada cacciavillani and kathleen hoyos coolabah, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona the following people are thanked for their contribution in reviewing the manuscripts. marsha berry, royal melbourne institute of technology, australia anna blagrove, university of east anglia, united kingdom emily bullock, university of tasmania, australia tessa chudy, southern cross university, australia janie conway heron, southern cross university, australia stephen copland, independent artist moya costello, southern cross university, australia anna dorrington, independent artist tom drahos, flinders university, australia rob garbutt, southern cross university, australia jane gardiner, cultural heritage adviser mary gardner, southern cross university, australia jytte holmqvest, melbourne university, australia rob horne, university of adelaide, australia darren jorgensen, university of western australia, australia britta kuhlenbeck, south west aboriginal land and sea council, australia david lloyd, southern cross university, australia teri merlyn, independent writer maarten renes, university of barcelona, spain john smith, southern cross university, australia margaret trail, victoria university, australia microsoft word introduction4 coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 introduction i have been teaching in high schools for about eight years now, both in the united states and spain. when i ask myself what is the task of the teacher in general, i remember derrida’s words in the university without condition: “the profession of the professor is to devote himself to the truth, unconditionally”. i am quoting from memory. in that text derrida is talking about truth in both a theoretical and moral sense, in a theoretic-moral sense, if i remember correctly. at bottom i believe they are indistinguishable. i still remember the faces and names of my first students at my high school in salt lake city. there is something about beginnings that makes them unforgettable, especially when they have to do with your vocation, in my case teaching. i am saying this because this issue of coolabah is the result of my first experience teaching at university level, in 2008. i owe this first experience to susand ballyn. since then i have been collaborating with the australian studies centre, and it has always been and continues to be a great intellectual and personal experience. three contributors to this issue, giada cacciavilni, victoria dimitrova and pedro fernández were some of my students in that first class. a teacher who begins is a student of his pupils, he has a lot to learn from them. i have to thank them for bearing with me. so i was also present when stephanos stephanides and gloria montero came to talk about their work. susan was back to teaching again, but i continued attending the classes. stephanos stephanides mentioned something about heidegger i can’t remember, but i do remember that his words illuminated my mind and i felt elated (in a theoretic-moral sense). i felt i knew more than everybody else about whatever it was he was talking about. some people have that gift, they “touch” you. i have also met gloria montero several times since then. i like the way she calls everybody “darling” and her gypsy look. i always have the feeling that she can see inside things and people. i am also thankful to susan because that first class i taught at barcelona university will have a visual outcome with this issue, a “sign” that will always remind me of that beginning. i would like to thank all the contributors for their work, and also bill phillips, laura lópez, kate russell and maría isabel seguro. giada’s incisive article analyzes how katherine philips, aphra behn, and sylvia plath subvert the stereotypical role assigned to women in society, especially regarding marriage. my own contribution is on the role of writing in the constitution of culture. then follows lachalns brown and stephanos stephanides poetry, translated by bill phillips (catalan), laura lópez (spanish) and victoria dimitrova (bulgarian). lachaln brown’s and stephanos stephanides’ contributions were the result of their visit to the centre d’estudis australians in barcelona, and we are all very grateful to them for their generosity and contribution. next there comes an extensive interview with gloria montero, skilfully carried out by pedro fernández, where gloria montero talks about his autobiographical novel all these wars and also about his fictional novel villa marini. finally, there follow three book reviews: an exercise in google, by bill philips; australia and galicia: defeating the tyranny of distance/australia e galicia: vencendo a tiranía do afastamento, by kate russell; and joan london, the good parents, by maría isabel seguro. carles serra pagès, barcelona 2010 mismatching perspectives and pacific transculturality coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 190 mismatching perspectives and pacific transculturality anne holden rønning abstract: increased critical consciousness and awareness of interculturality in a global and glocal context at the beginning of the twenty-first century has increasingly used the concept of transculturation when discussing modernities. politically transculturation can be used to describe processes of negotiation in contemporary society that lead to social awareness and solidarity, as well as ensuring the continuity of societies. the fusing of cultural forms leads to a mismatching of perspectives, hence some critics have preferred to use the terms translation and/or transliteracy to describe this concept. transculturation is related to the “normal processes of artistic borrowing and influence, by which any culture makes part of its contribution to the conversation of mankind,” as les murray maintained, and “it engages multiple lines of difference simultaneously” with overlapping boundaries (rogers 491). referring to various authors and linking it to cultural appropriation and border crossings, this article examines how the narrative expression of both sides of the moon, to cite the title of alan duff’s book, is a key feature of pacific writing, in an area where centuries of migration from near and far have exposed different cultures to each other on social, political, linguistic and aesthetic levels. these ‘contact zones’, to use mary pratt’s words, provide the reader with constantly moving translated identities, cultural hybridity and a use of language that has a highly local significance in a global context. key words: transculturation, perspective, pacific area. transculturation both as a theoretical term and as an aesthetic concept is increasingly used to describe and discuss the complexity of the globalised world in which we live. the mix of cultural identities which ensues from increased mobility, past and present emigration and immigration, as well as the acknowledgment of diasporas, poses questions as to what really are the identities of groups and nations. the pacific area is particularly suitable for such an investigation since it has a variety of different ethnic groups, both indigenous and settler communities. unlike the us where the melting pot has been symbolic of national allegiance, or the mosaic of canada indicating multiculturalism, the pacific has not been labelled in terms of identities. as bill copyright©2013 anne holden rønning. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 191 ashcroft has written there is a ‘strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation that needs to be unravelled’ (2009a). this article will try and unravel some of these issues in relation to the pacific area. first a few words on what we mean by the concept of transculturation as a literary and global phenomenon. by looking at texts through transcultural eyes, or gazing at them in this way, we add a new dimension not only to the text itself as signifying worlds of subtext, but also enhance people’s understanding of global and glocal world views. i transculturation in literature does not necessarily evolve from colonial dominance of another language, but rather from literary processes and genres adapted to a new landscape and way of life. after all we define ourselves through language and the creation of sub-cultural fields. and, when we do so, we can ask whether the interference of the very form of the text may affect our view. literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century has laid great emphasis on this literary borrowing, and there is an increasing debate as to the transcultural nature of it. in many ways t.s.eliot summed this up when he wrote of the writer in “tradition and the individual talent”: he must be aware that the mind of europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either shakespeare, or homer, or the rock drawing of the magdalenian draughtsmen. (1953, 16 emphasis in the original) though thinking within a european context eliot’s words are equally applicable today in our global world. eliot speaks of the poet’s mind as being a catalyst for emotions and feelings, for “storing up numberless phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (1953, 16). the search for a suitable term to express this age has evoked various responses. as i have written of this elsewhere i shall not go into a detailed discussion of transculturation here, but refer the reader to my article in transnational literature (2011). however, it is appropriate to mention some of the terms used. petra rüdiger and konrad gross (2009) prefer the term ‘translation’ as more suited to express the processes which take place in transculturation. the problem with the use of this term is that translation does not allow for border-crossings in the same manner as transculturation, which is related to the “normal processes of artistic borrowing and influence, by which any culture makes part of its contribution to the conversation of mankind,” as les murray maintained (1984, 4) and “engages multiple lines of difference simultaneously” with overlapping boundaries (rogers 491). in an article entitled “transculturation, transliteracy and generative art” simon biggs (2008) discusses sue thomas’s term ‘transliteracy’ in relation to text and media, and ashcroft writing of the role of literature in expressing transculturation uses the term ‘transnation’ which he sees as “the fluid, migrating, outside of the state (conceptually and culturally as well as geographically) that begins within the nation” using india as his example (2009a). to ashcroft “[t]he transnation (…) represents the utopian idea that national borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian constructs of identity that they have become” (2009a). that is, the constant two-way interventions, a characteristic feature of transculturation, are non-static and undermine the authoritative power of the coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 192 colonial and postcolonial. this view is also supported by rogers who, using navajo weaving as his example, emphasizes “the influential role of (…) forms of power while also recognizing how cultural appropriation can be constitutive of cultural particularity and agency” (495). literature can express the dynamics of this interaction and the changing pattern of cultures linguistically and aesthetically. in a way homi bhabha sums this up in “the vernacular cosmopolitan” when he writes that “[a]mbivalence and antagonism accompanies any act of cultural translation, because negotiating with the ‘difference of the other’ reveals the radical insufficiency of sedimented, settled systems of meaning and signification” (2000: 141). all these concepts provide tools for analysis, not just of literature, but also of cultural and social aspects of contemporary life, and common to all is the feature of bordercrossings, back and forth, a constant mediation. texts of this kind are not looking back or answering as in much postcolonial writing, but rather expressing the complex nature of the globalized subject, the complexity of life for the individual, and are expressive of the inevitable influence of the many facets of life today. but often such fusing of cultural forms leads to a mismatching of perspectives. by this i mean the ambiguous duality of seeing and being seen at the same time, according to who is reading or viewing, and who is critiquing. due to their lack of authoritarianism, the mismatching of perspectives in such texts is emancipatory since they subvert the colonial and the postcolonial, not necessarily indicating a transformation into something new, but rather an acknowledgment of the ambiguity of bhabha’s third space. textual spaces become thus woven meeting places rather than points of clash, and critiquing mismatching perspectives can contribute to an understanding of the identities portrayed. one can hardly write of transculturation without mentioning mary louise pratt and her discussion of transculturation as a term used by ethnographers “to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from material transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (6), that is the selections made from the dominant culture are adjusted to suit the recipient’s purpose. settler literature and society is a prime example of this – some retaining more of the ‘mother’ country’s ideals and values, others absorbing new cultures through what david atwell describes as “multiple processes, a dialogue in both directions and, most importantly, processes of cultural destruction followed by reconstruction on entirely new terms” (18). such reconstructions may be hybrid, but are often ambiguously so. the ‘contact zones’ may be in theme or language, using the dominant culture’s language to portray cultural identities and phenomena which provide the reader with constantly changing translated identities. pratt uses the term ‘contact zones’ to examine how “metropolitan modes of representation [are] received and appropriated on the periphery” (6). she comments on how even what we understand as european culture is in part founded on the ‘other’, hence spivak’s subaltern may have more power than we realise. pratt defends her use of the term ‘contact’ from a linguistic point of view as that is the point where the trajectories of peoples, otherwise separated, now intersect (6-7). to her the “‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other (…) in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). this perspective can be harmonious but also mismatching depending on the origins of the various cultures, since contact zones are benchmarks and references against which we read or understand. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 193 settler literature, especially in australia and aotearoa, is an interesting example for studying these zones and their translated identities, for three major reasons. first both areas have indigenous populations, though their status has been very different historically. secondly, immigration brought a constant interchange of cultures, but also isolationism – the southern hemisphere – the finality of early settlement, and in some cases resistance to change. and third, the necessity for immigrants to adjust their original cultural belonging to another topographical and climatic environment, as well as forming new linguistic expressions to describe these phenomena. in the introduction to nuanua: pacific writing in english since 1980 (1994) an anthology of writing from the pacific islands, albert wendt states that the word ‘nuana’ meaning ‘rainbow’ is an apt expression to describe the “diversity of cultures and languages, of fauna and flora found in polynesia, melanesia and micronesia [as well as] the richness and variety of our literatures, both oral and written” (1). wendt defines “pacific literature [as] that written or composed by pacific islands peoples, especially the indigenous peoples.” (2). interestingly he maintains that though the missionaries introduced literacy, in fact it was the native speakers who did most of the converting to christianity and thus used their own languages in the process—as he says they “indigenised writing” (1). further he writes: we have indigenised and enriched the language of the colonisers and used it to declare our independence and uniqueness; to analyse colonialism itself and its effects upon us; to free ourselves of the mythologies created about us in colonial literature. (3) the transcultural nature of this writing is emphasised when he writes of how “[a]ll cultures are becoming, changing in order to survive, absorbing foreign influences, continuing, growing. (…) for me the post in post-colonial does not mean just after, it also means around, through, out of, alongside, and against”—all characteristics typical of the transcultural (3, emphasis in the original). many of the extracts from longer texts and poems in nuana illustrate clearly wendt’s point, for example, the ironic poem by jon jonassen “saved” (48) and the sarcastic “darkness within the light” by kauraka kauraka from the cook islands. as wendt himself writes in the poem “shaman of vision” “we measure ourselves against words” (324). since language is the most important feature of culture let us look at how this is affects transculturation in the pacific area. pacific writing, both in language, content and genre, is often characterized by a use of language that has highly local significance in a global context. by that i mean that cultural phenomena are expected to be understood by the reader, often making the potential ‘insider’ reader ‘strange,’ as reed way dasenbrock and peter simpson have commented. dasenbrock posits that texts in english which are interpolated with language other than english turn the reader from the dominant culture into the ‘other.’ this brings in the whole concept of register, that is the form of language that is particular to one individual or a group—a kind of code. expressions, which might be considered grammatically or politically incorrect elsewhere, are acceptable within this framework. as ashcroft points out “our identity, our subjectivity, is performed by, rather than embodied in language” (2009b :103, emphasis in the original). language coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 194 and use of the native language in a text otherwise in english can make the text exotic and emphasize the gap between global reader and local writer, or, we can ask, does it equate the cultures, since no translation is necessary for those living in the country. maori writing in english, in particular, exemplifies the use of linguistic expressions that are mutually understood by new zealanders of all cultural backgrounds, though not necessarily by others, for example, marae, whakapapa, whanui, and the names of flora and fauna. this marks one of the major differences between the narrative expression of transculturation and translated identities in australia and aotearoa new zealand. aotearoa is a country where all are immigrants and have come of their own accord—the maori coming first from polynesia and bringing with them polynesian culture with advanced cultural artefacts and its class distinctions, which alan duff has dealt with in once we were warriors (1990) where he criticizes the maori for forgetting their heritage, a theme also taken up in the matriarch (1986) where witi ihimaera relates the history of one of the noble maori families and the powerful women of the past. though fictional stories these texts are underscored by other historical documentary records in australia the situation was different as the immigrant population displaced the indigenous population in a typical colonial civilising mission, in addition to there being no one major indigenous language. as brian castro writes: australia has had a long history of confusing the racial with the geographic and the linguistic. given that nations emerge out of an ambivalence about themselves, as benedict anderson said, ‘they express an immemorial past and a limitless future, working alongside and against large cultural systems that preceded them’, australia has had to define itself against others. but the tendency has been that instead of defining itself, and realising itself as a continually changing society, it has nostalgically yearned for stasis, drawing on a large number of myths which, while uniting segments of its population, retards its overall ability to absorb newness and deal adequately with others. (“writing asia”, emphasis in the original) the role of language is at the core of mismatching. how often does a text mean something totally different to one person, due not only to his/her own use of language, or knowledge of the culture described, but it also varies according to the experience of the individual. a text read by a twenty-year old may be interpreted quite differently by the same person twenty or thirty years later. this aspect of perspective is often overlooked in literary critical commentaries, but it is just this which makes literature such a powerful tool for understanding of other cultures. as castro writes: language marks the spot where the self loses its prison bars--where the border crossing takes place, traversing the spaces of others. (…) when we translate from one language to another we not only reinvent ourselves but we free up the sclerotic restrictions of our own language. we feel free to transgress, to metamorphose, to experience the uncanny, where we are receiving what wilson harris has called the 'quantum immediacy' of another culture. other cultures and languages reinforce and enrich us by powerfully coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 195 affecting and destabilising our familial tongue. we gain by losing ourselves. (“writing asia”) this destabilizing process is frequently expressed and understood through the perspective of the narrative expression. perspective perspective is a dual phenomenon – the one who sees and is seen – highlighting the distance and gap between identities. jakob lothe sees perspective as the narrative agent that perceives that there are different forms and degrees of perception. in the paper “transculturation and perspective in modernism and postcolonialism: joseph conrad’s heart of darkness and assia djebar’s so vast the prison” given in 2011 he states that: “narrative perspective plays a key role in the author’s sustained attempts to identify and negotiate various kinds of linguistic disruption, suppression and marginalization,” and referring to mieke bal suggests that “perspective does not necessarily refer exclusively to the agent that perceives or focalizes, it can also be linked to the agent that is being focalized,” in other words the narrative perspective, too, is crossing borders. looked at in this way the short story especially those termed vignettes could be an example of such narrative expression. we look in through a window but know nothing of the before or after, and each character is observing the other. frank sargeson and katherine mansfield, (especially the perspective in her new zealand stories), are masters of this art. take, for example, frank sargeson’s “the making of a new zealander”: nick and i were sitting on a hillside and nick was saying he was a new zealander and he knew he wasn’t a new zealander. and he wasn’t a dalmatian any more. he knew he wasn’t anything any more. (manhire 107) the ‘i’ person sees potential for nick to be like any other new zealander, marry and settle down. but nick is conscious of his difference, or his perspective of himself as a person not really belonging anywhere. similarly in david ireland’s burn the gaze is clearly stated—jimmy’s son, gordon, although he has received an education and goes to the city to work, returns disillusioned as to his possibilities in the white man’s world. being aboriginal he has problems getting a job because the colour of his hands give him away as being aboriginal (132), so he is stereotyped. in other words he is judged by his appearance not his skills. the discussion of gordon’s situation in the text is of an attitude prevalent in much political and social debate today. other authors who spring to mind as illustrative of this mismatching of perspectives are david malouf, alan duff and ania walwicz. in remembering babylon, a kind of parallel to duff’s text, we have several examples of the mismatching of perspectives. the idea that gemmy fairley is a ‘white aborigine’ is basically a contradiction in terms, and the perspective on and glorification of the remembered life back in glasgow is also false. to mr. frazer gemmy is an object of study to prove what happens to a coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 196 person who “goes bush” – he does not really see him as a person, rather as a source of information. yet gemmy is portrayed as acutely conscious of fraser’s perspective on him. through the diverse responses to gemmy, and the aborigines who visit him, malouf allows us as readers to see gemmy, both as he sees himself and as others see him, and that the settlers’ perspectives on themselves are no longer the same. gemmy’s entry into their closed world breaks the artificial harmony which existed on the surface. if we think of this text in terms of mismatching perspectives we can see how many aspects of stereotyping become determinative of an understanding of the ‘other’. but to turn to duff and walwicz. alan duff’s both sides of the moon (1998) epitomizes the ambiguity of perspective. duff makes the protagonist, jimmy, who is conscious of his own mixed cultural identities, awaken to what his life is like. the narrator by retelling the ancestral history told to him is also an implied reader translating what he hears about family history to coincide with his own experience of life and the dual feeling of shame because he belongs nowhere. the opening pages of this text illustrate his confusion. i am torn; yet i am more whole, since i am of both understandings, though no singular one. i am two races, two cultures and, most of all, two different thinkings. i am in a way against myself. but i can speak for both. (7) i am born of each of these. a half-caste being of neither one nor the other. indigenous yet foreigner. coloniser and colonised. not brown; not white. thus i am everything of my country’s main racial origins and yet nothing. (8) here we are at the heart of the issue of mismatching perspectives and identities that many protagonists in australasian literature express, reader and writer viewing these situations from differing perspectives. in many ways jimmy, rather like gemmy in remembering babylon, is the ultimate transcultural person. not only are both seen as ethnically mixed, but their emotional and social lives may be seen as a cultural balancing act, much in the manner indicated by the protagonist in castro’s birds of passage. the difference lies in the fact that jimmy, an outsider and insider to himself, comes to a positive conclusion by accepting that his difference will never change, whereas gemmy takes the notes on which he thinks his identity is written and tries to escape back to his former life. i would suggest that the title of duff’s book, indicating both sides of the moon, the dark and the light, is symbolic of the issue of transculturation. just as the moon revolves, ever changing from day to day, so jimmy lives in a state of perpetual struggle to find his identity, or rather his compatible identities, that is who he is. the structure of the text, weaving in and out, and juxtaposing the past and the present, underscores jimmy’s search. his life is a journey along ‘routes’ to find his ‘roots’ to use stuart hall’s words. similar thoughts are expressed in two poems by maori writers, “the pakeha half” by pearl de vere boyed i will not let you take away that which is mine, coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 197 making me choose to be only one or the other; i also speak with other ancestors and share their pain and pride; sing their songs; pray their prayers; and hear their forebodings. look close upon my face and see me as i am. half and half. (te ao marama 3: 1993, 35) and rosemary kohu hinewirangi in one of her poems “i am maori” poses the question: am i maori? yes i am for i have brown skin. … am i maori? no. my language is english. and then concludes that she feels she is becoming maori as she learns more about her ancestors and culture, but still ends with the same question as she began, “am i maori?” it depends who is observing (te ao marama 3:1993, 51). again the ambiguity of perspective is expressed. by many regarded as the angry (though no longer so young) man of new zealand writing by maori duff has suffered from the interpretation of his works as autobiographical, or termed as autoethnography. pratt defines the use of this word as “instances in which the colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. (…) [and] construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (7). this is exactly what duff is doing in much of his work—taking contemporary situations and historical ideas of maori and juxtaposing them to throw light on issues, which though they can be seen as personal given his own background, are fiction. to me, looking at his fiction in relation to his non-fiction writing and articles in the media, he is critiquing culture that remains static. the maori warrior culture is portrayed as a binary world of black and white, either you are with us or against us, and at any moment losing a battle could turn you into a slave, or worse, a source of food. duff does not spare the reader details of cannibalism. whereas some critics have focused on the maori history described, to me this is a background for what duff really wants to say which is that we have to leave the old ways, acknowledge their existence, but belong in the present. the relating of the warrior past, not te amo whom jimmy thinks is his ancestor, but chief warrior te aranui kapi, who ran away from battle and caused the complete defeat and break up of his power and regime—the ultimate disgrace for a warrior, is juxtaposed to parental and social failure in jimmy’s life. te aranui kapi, the warrior, has an awakening when he coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 198 sees the consequences of all the fighting for a child swept down the river with its mother, who, though drowning, smiles at him in such a way that it haunts him permanently (182). he begins to reflect, something portrayed as a disaster for a warrior, who must never doubt that what he does is right. duff is asking us as readers to accept that people may change and can no longer adhere to the old ways—they become human. these two aspects of life are also paralleled in the text in the portrayal of two groups of outcasts, those with whom te aranui kapi seeks shelter, who are rejected by the clan because they are physically deformed, but are shown as intelligent and willing to encounter and mingle with the new white people who arrive. the other group remain in their old-fashioned ways continuing the old warrior regime but without any form for civilization, and finally go under. this interpretation is remarkably different from that of otto heim and others who see this book as one about shame, both on the part of the protagonist who is ashamed of his maori mother’s behaviour, and of his own sexual failings, and on the guilty conscience of the pakeha, and of duff himself. if both sides of the moon suggests that the image of the fierce maori, despite its long history, still has the power to shock, it also indicates that what makes this image still compelling is the residue of unacknowledged shame in the bicultural relationship of pakeha and maori. as jimmy’s story seeks to demonstrate, the confrontation of such shame can lead to the discovery of one’s ability to respond to how one is perceived by others and to imagine bicultural identities that acknowledge history without being trapped in it. responding to his own reception, duff’s shameful autoethnography seems to express his unease with his public perception by both defiantly stepping up his debunking rhetoric and gropingly searching for a more charitable attitude towards his enemies. if the former response appears to have exhausted itself in his latest novel, the latter still seems to leave room for imaginative exploration.” (heim 2007) the shame can be understood if we look at the other half of jimmy’s story, his teenage search for himself, corruption by a pedophile, and the perpetual state of being torn between loyalty to his mother who behaves like a slut, and his father who represents respectability. that critics such as heim see the text as one of shame is credible given that duff’s descriptions are graphically explicit, whether writing of the cannibalism of the warriors, paedophilia, or prostitution. he has been criticised for this—but what if we see the novel as of its time, where explicit references are common, and where duff has a purpose in trying to explain the uncertainty of a teenage boy—searching for himself and his identity in a world of mixed impressions. his is not a straightforward childhood, torn as he is between the two cultural backgrounds with which he has been brought up, and the incompatibility of his parents. the transculturality in the text lies in constant border-crossings in which jimmy moves back and forth between cultures, and not just ethnic ones, throughout the text which closes urging him “to come to this side of the moon. tell[ing] him that dark is only but a step away, though a big step, from here this other all covered in light. in light, e kare, child, children of my beloved people” (314). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 199 different interpretations of this text are also seen in the covers of the texts. i have picked out two, but there is at least one more. both sides of the moon as illustrated above clearly shows different western views of maori. one depicts a younger maori man with half his face tattooed in a fairly traditional pattern, indicating his maori ancestry; the other is to my mind more impressive and symbolic. it portrays an older maori peering out of the light side of the moon, but sitting on the dark side of it—the man in the moon—looking down on a fence. the covers invite different interpretations. though both men are maori they are basically different—the one with the tattoos is representative of a cultural heritage, in the other the fence indicates a border that has to be crossed and re-crossed or broken down while the older man represents the wisdom and knowledge of the elders and the heritage of maoridom. to me this is more symbolic of the theme of transculturation—the constant waning and waxing of the moon as symbolic of jimmy’s ambiguity in relation to his maori and pakeha ancestry. transculturality and the mismatching of perspectives also pervades the prose poetry of the australian writer of polish descent ania walwicz. her texts are spoken drama lending themselves to theatrical presentation, as she has said in interviews. she is voyeur and author, and her gaze, often ironic and satiric, encompasses her own cultural background as well as that of australia. writing is an act of exploration, whether of legend as in “fairytale” that has a traditional outline but with a twist, as well as humour and irony, or in her texts about everyday things, such as “white” about winter and snow or “travelling.” in “fairytale” the author starts in a traditional manner, the tale of a king with three daughters whom he wants to marry off. but these are no ordinary princesses, they have doctorates and high demands on their suitors, so much so that “the king suggested maybe you could marry two princes apiece a good looking for sleeping with and a clever one to talk to” (1992, 45) instead they use, like frankenstein, scientific methods to produce the perfect husband. even after marrying them they are no longer satisfied, so kill their husbands “because they enjoyed working in the laboratory more than marriage” (45). the anticipated perspective of the reader is mismatched by the characters in the tale and their views on male perfection. in her meditation on hope’s poem “australia” from 1939, about the country to which walwicz has emigrated, the inward looking gaze on the land is prominent and underscored by the repeated use of ‘you’ whether in descriptions of the natural: “you big ugly. you too empty. you desert with your nothing nothing nothing,” or in the ‘imagined’ gaze on walwicz herself, the foreigner: “you make me a dot in the nowhere. you never accept me. for your own (…) you tell me i look strange.” in these texts by walwicz traditional and contemporary attitudes are interwoven and combined in border-crossings that confront, even force, the reader (or listener) to take a new look at the ‘glocal.’ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 200 in conclusion, i have sketched above some ideas as to how we may approach the issue of transculturation in literature from the pacific. i have used the word mismatching of perspectives consciously as i see the gaze as manifold, the pacific reader, the indigenous reader, and the global reader. like much else in life, the very expressiveness of these texts adds a dimension to them providing both glocal and global readings. we can also ask whether looking at literature from a transcultural perspective also expresses a resistance to the project of global modernization, since the fictional characters are often portrayed as ambiguous in relation to who they are. an understanding of the complexity apparent in such literature can thus be contributive to racial and cultural understanding. works cited ashcroft, bill (2009a) “beyond the nation: post-colonial hope.” journal of the european association of studies on australia vol. 1. ed. anne holden rønning and martin leer. observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona. www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/jeasamainpage.html –––––––––––. (2009 b) caliban’s voice: the transformation of english in postcolonial literatures. london: routledge. attwell, david (2006) rewriting modernity: studies in black south african literary history. athens, ohio: ohio up. bhabha, homi k. (2000) “the vernacular cosmopolitan.” voices of the crossing ed. ferdinand dennis and nassem khan. london: serpent’s tail: 133-142. biggs, simon (2008) “transculturation, transliteracy and generative art.” edinburgh. http://www.slideshare.net/ixdasp/transculturation-transliteracy-and-generativepoetics accessed 17.4.2010. boyed, pearl de vere (1993) “the pakeha half.” te ao marama: contemporary maori writing. vol. 3 te puawatanga o te korero: the flowering. auckland: reed publishing. 35 castro, brian. (1996) “writing asia” australian humanities review. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-april-1996/castro.html dasenbrock, reed way (1987) “intelligibility and meaningfulness in multicultural literature in english.” pmla 102: 10-19. duff, alan ([1998], 2000) both sides of the moon. auckland: vintage. eliot, t.s. ([1932], 1953) “tradition and the individual talent.” selected essays, london: faber and faber. heim, otto (2007) “fall and response: alan duff’s shameful autoethnography.” postcolonial text, 3: 4. http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct hinewirangi, rosemary kohu. (1993) “i am maori.” te ao marama: contemporary maori writing. vol. 3 te puawatanga o te korero: the flowering. auckland: reed publishing. 51. ihimaera, witi ed. (1993) te ao marama: contemporary maori writing. vol. 3 te puawatanga o te korero: the flowering. auckland: reed publishing. –––––––. ([1986] 1988] the matriarch. auckland: picador. ireland, david. ([1974] 1989) burn. auckland: angus & robertson, sirius. lothe, jakob (2011) “transculturation and perspective in modernism and postcolonialism: joseph conrad’s heart of darkness and assia djebar’s so vast the http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/jeasamainpage.html http://www.slideshare.net/ixdasp/transculturation-transliteracy-and-generative-poetics http://www.slideshare.net/ixdasp/transculturation-transliteracy-and-generative-poetics http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-april-1996/castro.html http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 201 prison.” paper given at the nordic transcultural studies network symposium, helsinki, 2011. malouf, david ([1993] 1994) remembering babylon. london: vintage. manhire, bill ([1989] 1991) six by six. short stories by new zealand’s best writers. wellington: victoria university press. mansfield, katherine. undiscovered country: the new zealand stories. ed. ian a. gordon. london: longman, 1974. murray, les a. (1984) persistence in folly. london, sydney, melbourne: sirius. pratt, mary louise (1992) imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. london & ny: routledge. rogers, richard a. (2006) “from cultural exchange to transculturation: a review and reconceptualization of cultural appropriation communication.” communication theory 16: 474–503. rüdiger, petra and konrad gross, eds. (2009) translation of cultures. asnel papers 13. amsterdam & new york: rodopi. rønning, anne holden. (2011) “literary transculturations and modernity: some reflections.” transnational literature 4: 1. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/ sargeson, frank. (1936) “the making of a new zealander.” six by six (1991) ed. bill manhire. wellington: victoria university press. simpson, peter (1986) “what is it makes the stranger? making it strange in some new zealand texts.” untold 6. walwicz, ania ([1985], 1992) “fairytale”. a sense of difference. ed. marit berge and anne holden rønning. bergen: centre for feminist research in the humanities. series no. 8. 44-45. ———. “australia” (1981) island in the sun: anthology of recent australian prose. ed. damien white and anna couani, glebe: sea cruise books. 90-1. wendt, albert, ed. (1995) nuana: pacific writing in english since 1980. auckland: auckland up. anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. her research interests and fields of publication are women’s studies and postcolonial literatures and cultures, especially from australia and new zealand. she has published several articles in these fields. she was co-editor of identities and masks: colonial and postcolonial studies (2001); readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007); and author of “for was i not born here?” identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne (2010). in 2012 she was visiting professor and gave a masters course on cultural identities at the university of barcelona, spain. i the term ‘glocal’, an appropriation of the local into the global, which emphasises the influence of the local culture over the global, is particularly useful when writing of transcultural aesthetics since the two worlds are not exclusive of each other, but intertwined. in many texts an investigation of identity is typified by a clash between the self and these surrounding cultures. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 current issues in environmental management in australia – what do people think? w.e. boyd 1 , k. den exter 2 , l. christidis 3 & d. lloyd 4 abstract: in 2010, the international council for science (icsu) and the international social science council (issc) published their grand challenges in global sustainability research, seeking to mobilise researchers in a 10-year scientific effort to address what they call the “grand challenges in global sustainability”. in this paper, we ask whether these grand challenges are relevant to australian environmental management. we examine this from two angles, insights from public perception surveys, and our own survey data. public attitudes surveys indicate public ambiguity on the knowledge base, a finding that implies an immediate need for improved public communication of scientific knowledge. our on-line survey, attached to a conference, innovative solutions for environmental challenges, targeted australian environmental managers and scientists’ views on critical issues. the results mirrored global scientists’ views on the need to find ways for the scientific, social and political communities to work together to develop innovative approaches to solving future environmental concerns. importantly, we found that the specific responses were context and scale dependent, while highlighting the inherent tensions between maintaining production and consumption, and protection of resources and ecosystem services. key words: environmental management, environmental policy, sustainability research, attitude surveys the international council of science’s grand challenges in global sustainability research in 2010, the international council for science (icsu) and the international social science council (issc) published their grand challenges in global sustainability research icsu (2010). in seeking to mobilise researchers to address what they call the “grand challenges in global sustainability”, they advocate a ten-year scientific agenda. copyright©2013 w.e. boyd, k. den exter, l. christidis & d. lloyd. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 over the next decade the global scientific community must take on the challenge of delivering to society the knowledge and information necessary to assess the risks humanity is facing from global change and to understand how society can effectively mitigate dangerous changes and cope with the change that we cannot manage. [icsu, 2010:6] their case is based on a definition of global sustainability research that builds upon and integrates expertise within the sciences and humanities, and applies to social-environmental research questions of human interactions with the earth system. it is an important agenda in that, while it recognises the value of the natural sciences, it advocates that the lessons of such science have to be mediated through the social sciences to take effect; this is the challenge of delivering to society the knowledge and information. as in any good communication strategy, this is not simply a matter of talking more, but of fully engaging social processes. in this regard, the authors of the report argue that tackling the grand challenges requires a stronger involvement and greater integration of the social sciences, health sciences, engineering and humanities, along with the natural sciences, with disciplinary and interdisciplinary research providing the trans-disciplinary basis for effective use of scientific results by society and decision-makers. this is an agenda from the centre of science, but nevertheless serves as a useful reminder of the social context of environmental science. in rehearsing familiar mantras – that any research should be scientifically important; that there needs to be global coordination; that the science needs to be relevant to decision makers; and research should be capable of leverage – the authors settle on five specific, if still very broad, challenges. while reflecting a scientistic or reductionist approach to problem-solving, they nevertheless provide a process approach to expanding the import of science into the social realm. importantly, however, it may be relevant to question how relevant such an approach is to the environmental issues that the global community perceives.  challenge 1: forecasting. improve the usefulness of forecasts of future environmental conditions and their consequences for people.  challenge 2: observations. develop the observation systems needed to manage global and regional environmental change.  challenge 3: thresholds. determine how to anticipate, recognize, avoid and adapt to rapid global environmental change.  challenge 4: responses. determine what institutional, economic and behavioural changes can enable effective steps toward global sustainability.  challenge 5: innovation. encourage innovation (coupled with sound mechanisms for evaluation) in developing technological, policy, and social responses to achieve global sustainability. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 approaches to critique: are these grand challenges relevant to australian environmental management? we examine this issue from two perspectives, insights obtained from public perception surveys and our own data regarding environmental management concerns. our approach attempts to mirror the fundamental presumption of the icsu grand challenges that social engagement is critical. our paper reports on an early phase of research that examines the utility of this frame as a heuristic to better progressing scientific understanding into the sociopolitical domain. by engaging professional and practitioner environmental managers, specifically to seek information on their long-term (decadal) and professional environmental concerns and perceptions, we start to address the icsu grand challenge: how well does the forecasting-observations-thresholds-responses-innovation model align with practitioner perceptions of long-term issues and needs? the next phase will be an analysis of contemporary environmental management research publication patterns, again to examine the degree of alignment between the grand challenge and current practice. scientific background around the world, scientists are expressing their concerns about the ability of the earth system to sustain a growing population with an ever increasing demand for the earth’s resources. a stark example of such published concern is rockström et al.’s (2009) analysis of what they call the “safe operating space for humanity”, published in nature. rockström et al. (2009) developed a model of the safe operating space for nine environmental systems, contrasting what they considered to be the safe operating limits against the current position for those variables they consider measurable. in their analysis, the boundaries in three systems – climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, and human interference with the nitrogen cycle – have already been exceeded. importantly, they also argue that two others – chemical pollution and atmospheric aerosol loading – cannot yet be quantified. such studies reflect engagement with the forecasting-observations-thresholds aspects of the grand challenges model, and in doing so, draw attention to the need for social engagement through the responses-innovation component. in response to this latter need, bradshaw et al. (2010), for example, in describing the relative environmental impact of human activity across the globe, provide evidence-based modelling that contributes directly to response-innovations end of the grand challenges model, with clear implications on the setting of priorities. their modelling used available indicator data – measures of natural forest loss, habitat conversion, marine captures, fertilizer use, water pollution, carbon emissions and species threat – and concluded that suitable data is available for the majority of the 228 countries considered. their study demonstrates that environmental performance is complex, drivers of environmental impact are variable, and countries perform poorly for different reasons; increasing wealth was the most important driver of environmental impact. their study also draws attention to the science-society linkages in this matter, and supports calls to better integrate disciplinary and/or scientific paradigms for a coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 more holistic approach to understanding and social action. reid et al. (2010) argue that “progress in understanding and addressing both global environmental change and sustainable development requires better integration of social science research”. public environmental concerns and perceptions public attitudes research surveys provide insights into informed social views on environmental concerns. these vary in scale, which in itself is important, given the potential tensions between the daily and neighbourhood scale of individuals’ lived experiences, and the regional to global scale of many issues. importantly, these provide benchmark statement regarding the non-scientific community’s perspectives on environmental issues. understanding this perspective is important if the scientific community is to communicate itself to society and government better. to place australia in context, the global perspective of the world values survey provides interesting insights. it was a large-scale, cross-national and longitudinal survey research program, which included questions replicated since the early 1980s (wvs, 2011). the 20052008 survey indicated that the majority of respondents from 27 participating countries identify three serious global environmental problems: (i) greenhouse and/or global warming; (ii) biodiversity loss; and (iii) pollution of lakes, rivers and oceans. the parallels with rockström et al.’s conclusions are clear. within australia, the 2007 australian survey of social attitudes provides a more complex regional perspective with regards to attitudes towards environmental issues (ada, 2011). it is the third in a biennial series, and examines social attitudes and behaviour amongst australian citizens. the 2007 survey included questions on attitudes and behaviours regarding the environment. the most urgent environmental issue for australians in 2007, according to this survey, was drought (42%), followed by climate change (26%), pollution (11%), renewable energy (6%), logging of forests (4%), nuclear power and destruction of wildlife (3% each), waste disposal, loss of biodiversity and soil degradation (c.1% each). the closer alignment of respondent and issue scales is clear, although the meta-theme of climate and climate change echoes the global survey (wvs, 2011). the lower levels of concern regarding pollution and wildlife depletion perhaps reflect regional conditions, in which instances of pollution and human interference with natural chemical pathways and of wildlife depletion are relatively invisible in the australian environment (c.f. chang & kristiansen, 2004); this low concern contrasts the recognition of the key role that understanding and controlling global pollution in protecting against system collapse (turner, 2008). reflecting regional immediacy and visibility of issues, likewise, water was the number one environmental concern for most australians surveyed by ipsos eureka in 2008, with water health, wastage and storage topping the poll for the second year in a row; the drought was also highlighted, followed by renewable energy and illegal waste dumping (ipsos, 2008). all polled significantly higher than global warming and climate change. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 other australian community attitude surveys have, likewise, revealed mixed results with respect to environmental issues. according to the australian bureau of statistics, concern for the environment has been in steady decline, and had reached its lowest point since their survey’s 1992 start (abs, 2006). australian bureau of statistics data reveal that, in 1992, 75% of all australian adults stated that they were concerned about environmental problems; by 2004, this proportion had declined to 57%. this trend is mirrored in other, more recent surveys with regard to attitudes to climate change. when asked to select an issue that the australian respondents would take action on if they were in charge, 46% selected climate change in 2008, down from 55% the previous year (ipsos, 2009). importantly, the same survey revealed that almost one in ten australians question the validity of climate change. patterns of concern differ by age. a survey of young people in queensland revealed that the majority of 12 to 24 year old respondents were highly concerned about the environment (fielding, 2009), with nearly three-quarters of 18 to 24 year olds being quite a bit or very concerned about protecting the environment and just over half being equally concerned about climate change. protecting the environment was ranked second amongst all social issues, with availability of water, climate change and land clearing being, for younger people, the three most important environmental issues facing queensland and australia. the ipsos survey also revealed that, at least several years ago, nearly half of all australians believe the government was on the right track to prevent climate change (ipsos, 2009), although a reuters news poll conducted by ipsos indicates that only 35% of adults surveyed in 23 countries believe their own government and business leaders are taking the right steps and pace to prevent global climate change (ipsos, 2009). in their recent review of surveys of attitudes on climate change in australia, leviston et al. (2011) identified three important trends:  most respondents believe that climate is changing, but only a minority believe that the change is attributable to human activity.  beliefs about climate change are strongly related to political preferences, voting behaviours and gender, but there are no clear relationships between beliefs, location, age or income.  most respondents believe that australia should take action on climate change without waiting for global consensus, but there is no consensus on specific policy. in terms of the grand challenges forecasting-observations-thresholds-responsesinnovation model, it appears there is a mixed public view on the knowledge base. such ambivalent public views on what the scientists would argue are fundamental scientific concerns presents a potential impediment for the successful communication of scientific observation and forecasting, let alone prediction and acceptance of thresholds. in the immediate term, based on these survey results, a challenge remains to the successful communication of scientific knowledge, a challenge that has to be overcome before strong social and governmental response and innovation may be expected to become widely accepted. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 the australian environmental science and management community’s views on global environmental challenges in june 2011, southern cross university held a conference entitled innovative solutions for environmental challenges. the conference aim was two-fold: (i) to determine what the strategic needs and challenges for environmental management are over the next decade; and (ii) to identify the collaborations needed to define an integrated socio-environmental research agenda for 2011-2021. in tandem with this conference, an on-line survey was run in the leadup to the conference, and an environmental challenges workshop run during the conference. here we overview the results of these activities. innovative solutions for environmental challenges conference the conference brought together a range of environmental and social science experts from across the disciplines to discuss new and pioneering solutions to our greatest environmental challenges. participants talked about the challenges of: climate change adaptation in coastal australia; biodiversity loss; the effect of climate change on food security; wastewater management; and integrating environmental education into school curriculums. speakers addressed the matter of combining practical insights from the environmental and social sciences to develop social and ecological approaches to solving environmental problems. the conference, in a broad sense, reminded the delegates, in the words of one presenter, that “there is no planet b, just lots of plan bs”. key recurring issues amongst the papers and ensuing discussions included: the importance of process and knowledge, particularly systems thinking (c.f. harich 2010) and inter-disciplinarity (c.f. kastenhofer et al., 2011) ; the roles and strengths of modelling and sound methodology (c.f. vanclay et al., 2003; voinov & bousquet, 2010); and the importance of understanding and working within social processes (lee, 1999; reid et al., 2010). in terms of modelling and methodology, conference delegates highlighted the value of listening and paying attention to people, the role of engaging community in problem solving, and the use of scientific methodology as (in addition to conventional scientific data collection) an invaluable vehicle for dialogue and community engagement (cf. phillipson et al., 2012). with regards to working within social process, the conference delegates reflected on the importance of good public policy and governance, and of the role of culture, cultural understanding communication and education in achieving sound environmental management outcomes. while such conclusions are not novel, for many scientists they present a challenge in the way they work. examples of scientific data collection projects that engage community and create community empowerment before the data collection is completed provided examples to scientists of the value of community engagement. the greatest environmental challenges to 2021 workshop, run during the conference, and engaging around twenty delegates, focussed on what delegates perceived to be the key environmental challenges of our time across three scales – regional, national and global – and coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 their responses to each challenge. concern regarding climate change emerged as a key theme, particularly at the global scale, with concerns around pollution, waste, energy, biodiversity loss, water, and food security also featuring prominently. while these reflect concerns about natural or material resource use, abuse, supply or depletion, interest also focussed on several social processes. in particular, social apathy and self interest were raised as significant environmental challenges (cf. lorenzoni et al., 2007). the needs to address social apathy (c.f. fischer, 2010; heath & gifford, 2006; treanor, 2010), to integrate social values in natural resource management (c.f. reid et al., 2010), for sustainability education (australian government, 2009; australian government, 2010; jones et al., 2010), and for a re-think of economic and political structures (lee, 1999; speth, 2008), were all recognised as potential responses to environmental challenges. one participant’s response was apposite. in reflecting on the social response required in regards to key regional environmental challenge, the participant noted that “at present [key environmental challenges are] mainly left to the already over-committed and dedicated minority who care deeply and understand the issues and how to turn information into action … still only a small percentage of the population” (c.f. dono et al., 2010; fielding et al., 2008). these outcomes provided affirmation of the validity of the grand challenges forecastingobservations-thresholds-responses-innovation model. presenters provided a rich vein of evidence on the forecasting-observations-thresholds end of the model, while the conference discussions gravitated towards the need for social response and innovation. probably the most significant innovative idea was the notion that a scientific data collection project can be a powerful vehicle for community empowerment. indeed several delegates discussed the inherent tensions implicit in such a finding: that formal approval (funding) for a scientific study is more readily justified through a claim of the anticipated scientific rather than social outputs and outcomes, and that many projects have gained significant social outcomes long before the scientific analysis has been completed. the greatest environmental challenges to 2021 survey the greatest environmental challenges survey was an online survey run from march – may 2011, targeted at australian professional environmental managers and scientists from government and non-government agencies and institutions around the country. a request to participate was distributed by email through, and with the support of, professional and institutional email networks, and received 337 responses. the survey sought feedback on environmental scientists’ and managers’ views on what they thought are greatest regional, national and global environmental challenges facing australia over the next ten years. publication of the full analysis is currently in preparation (den exter et al., in prep); here we present a summary of the results (figures 1 to 3). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 figure 1 summary of the regional environmental challenges facing australia, as reported by australian environmental managers and scientists in the 2011 greatest environmental challenges to 2021 online survey. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 figure 2. summary of the national environmental challenges facing australia, as reported by australian environmental managers and scientists in the 2011 greatest environmental challenges to 2021 online survey. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 figure 3. summary of the global environmental challenges facing australia, as reported by australian environmental managers and scientists in the 2011 greatest environmental challenges to 2021 online survey. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 overall, climate change tops the list for the majority of respondents as the national and global issue of greatest concern and comes second as a regional concern. other high ranking concerns include population growth, energy, water, land degradation and loss of biodiversity. of interest is the differing perception of regional, national and global concerns. respondents identify a wide range of issues at the regional scale, including many individual issues. these loosely cluster under headings such as: habitat and biodiversity loss; land use (especially agriculture) and urban environments; landscape management; water; and population change. while this pattern may be understood in terms of the relative scales of such issues (c.f. kok & veldkamp, 2011) and the immediacy of their local and short-term affects – and thus visibility – there is one notable low concern, natural disasters. the pattern of concern is more focussed at the national scale, with climate change dominating concerns. interestingly, while this is an overwhelming response, it is often expressed in a generic way, only stated as “climate change”. other concerns focus around biodiversity and habitat (various specific concerns), as well as a range of issues about managing sustainability, articulated in terms of social, population, government and food supply issues. equally interestingly, given the national (federal government) political focus in 2011 on the carbon tax, issues of the carbon tax, emissions and related concerns are low on the lists, as was energy supply. finally, at the global scale, there are two big issues, climate change and population growth. a few respondents mentioned energy supply. while these results may be read to infer a prioritisation list of issues, there are two more important conclusions to be drawn from the data. first, the issue of scale and context is crucial. the immediate point of interest, reflecting the differences already noted above between the public perceptions identified in the world values survey and the australian survey of social attitudes (wvs, 2011; ada, 2011), is the role that scale has to play in people’s understandings and perceptions of critical issues (c.f. holling, 2004; kok & veldkamp, 2011; peterson, 2000). in the greatest environmental challenges survey, regional concerns focus on specific, local, on-the-ground issues, and hence there is a greater diversity in the issues of concern. at the national scale, while there is a significant concern about a generic “climate change”, there is also stronger focus on politics, bureaucracy, social process, and management. the global scale retains concern about climate change, but introduces population growth and related issues, reflecting a recognition that population pressure is probably not an issue of significant concern within australia, but recognised to be so more important globally. the second important conclusion lies in the survey highlighting the tensions between maintaining current levels of production and consumption, while protecting scarce resources and ecosystem services. by way of example, some survey responses express concern that australia does not have strategies to accommodate future energy needs while reducing our carbon footprint. concerns regarding food security as a national issue also reflect this tension. this survey also mirrors, at the australian scale, what global scientists are saying about the need to find ways for the scientific, social and political communities to work together to develop innovative approaches to solving future environmental concerns with scientists, governments and the community (c.f. gunderson & folke, 2011; lee, 1999; silvertown 2009). nearly three-quarters of the respondents indicated that they, or their organisation, have developed strategies or policies to address key environmental challenges, and around twothirds responded that their organisation had implemented such strategies. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 when asked about the relationship between science and governance, responses varied. 66% of respondents agreed that scientific researchers supply the information they need to implement their environmental policies or strategies; over 20% disagreed, while 10% were unable to comment. conversely, respondents, when asked if policy makers have adequate information for policy development and implementation, were more ambivalent: 12% strongly disagreed, 29% disagreed, 26% were neutral, 26% agreed, and 7% strongly agreed. likewise, responses regarding where scientific data is lacking were varied. a number of respondents suggested that the issue lay in the lack of political will rather than data. their list is telling: in assisting decision making for long term outcomes; in understanding fine scale impacts of climate change; in relation to the impacts of mining; in predicting the effects of land use change and development; in providing local baseline data on resource condition (soil, water, biodiversity, vegetation condition, invasive weeds, etc.); in the presentation of scientific data to managers who “don’t have time to read”; and in understanding and predicting cumulative change and impacts. discussion – so what? this review echoes bradshaw et al.’s (2010) conclusions that environmental performance is complex, and that the drivers of environmental impact are variable. if the scientific evidence, which seems to be largely accepted as crucial to appropriate social and political decisionmaking, is going to be accepted and acceptable, then an understanding of the complexity and diversity of public opinion and perception is vitally important (c.f. ter mors et al., 2010). while the icsu see their grand challenges in terms of five components – forecasting, observations, threshold, responses, innovation – the perspective taken here focuses on the fourth, the responses. indeed, the paper examines only part of the responses, the social understanding or perception of the challenges. while there is a scientific case to be made for the need to “improve the usefulness of forecasts of future environmental conditions and their consequences for people … [to] develop the observation systems needed to manage global and regional environmental change … [and to] determine how to anticipate, recognize, avoid and adapt to abrupt global environmental change”, our observations suggest there is a urgent need to work on the social response, that is, to “determine what institutional, economic and behavioural changes can enable effective steps toward global sustainability” (icsu, 2010:1014). three key factors from our review require further work. first, while politics and political inclination comprise a key factor (leviston et al., 2011), it is notable that politically-current environmental issues do not necessarily come to the fore in attitudes survey. our survey of professional environmental managers and scientists indicate a level of insulation against current debates, with the relative lack of concern regarding matters such as the carbon tax, a hot australian federal government political issue in 2011. the social context of the respondents – as professional people engaged in the management of natural resource – may also play a significant role, in that their engagement with the issues is probably more formalised, structured and bounded: they were responding, after all, as coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 professional people. in a similar vein, fielding’s (2009) data with younger people indicate a social construction of environment that appears to differ from the general public, a social construction that most likely reflects social processes such as recency of schooling, role of further studies, social networking, engagement with alternative and counter cultures (snow 1990), etc. this notion of social identity is important. crompton & kasser (2009) suggest that the environmental movement, in its efforts to change the policies and practices of governments and businesses, and to influence the behaviours of individuals, neglects an important third level of intervention: human identity. their focus was on three aspects of human identity: self-enhancing and materialistic values and goals; in-group/out-group dynamics; and responses to fear and threat. while arguing that these often contribute to environmentally problematic values and behaviours, their argument could be taken further to support a nuanced engagement of the official environmental science and management community with broader communities, based on understandings of the social identities of these communities. secondly, the issue of scale is important (c.f. holling, 2004; kok & veldkamp, 2011; peterson, 2000). the contrast between the outcomes of the world values survey and the australian survey of social attitudes (wvs, 2011; ada, 2011) reflects the role that scale has to play in people’s understandings and perceptions of critical issues. our survey also identifies this matter: it perhaps comes as little surprise that the greater the difference in scale between a respondent’s lived experience and the issue at hand, the less likely it is for a respondent to understand the issue or to engage with it in anything other than a conceptual or abstract sense (duerden & witt, 2010). the generic “climate change” concern amongst environmental managers is an example, where even amongst well-informed professionals, the generic concern is important. the third key factor is the tension inherent in the science-society relationship (c.f. gunderson & folke, 2011; kastenhofer et al., 2011; lee, 1999). it has been noted above that while the icsu grand challenges in global sustainability is of the global scientific community “delivering to society the knowledge and information necessary to assess the risks humanity is facing from global change …,” it is still a fundamentally scientific agenda, in its structure, organisation and language. it is predicated on science delivering, rather than society receiving, or, better, an integrated science-society dialogue. dilling & lemnos (2011), for example, describe the differences between the “science push”, where researchers and information providers determine what type of science is produced and disseminated, and the “demand pull”, where priorities in the generation of new knowledge are determined by those making decisions outside of the scientific community, and the iterative “co-production of knowledge between scientists …and stakeholders” (figure 4). much of what we describe here – the grand challenges model, rockström et al.’s (2009) and bradshaw et al.’s (2010) analysis, and the responses of both public attitude surveys and the greatest environmental challenges to 2021 survey – represent a primary focus on the science or, at least, the natural resources, rather than the social aspects of environmental issues. rockström et al.’s (2009) analysis primarily engages the forecasting-observations-thresholds component of the grand challenges model, while drawing attention to the need for social engagement with the responses-innovation component. bradshaw et al. (2010), likewise, draw their primary data from forecasting-observations-thresholds component of the grand challenges model, but of coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 necessity draw attention to the science-society linkages in this matter, supporting calls for better integration of disciplinary and/or scientific knowledge for social action. figure 4. setting scientific knowledge agendas (after dilling & lemnos, 2011). top: the science push – researchers and information providers set the agenda for what type of science is produced and disseminated. middle: the demand pull – priorities in the generation of new knowledge are set by those making decisions outside of the scientific community. bottom: iterative co-production of knowledge between scientists and potential users and stakeholders. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 figure 5. a depiciton of the interplay between science and other social uses of knowledge and information – and hence the essence of the iscu’s grand challenges – articulated through the interplay between rigour and relevance as a mediation between the epistemologies of science, social science, and the pragmatism of political action and public management (after porteus, 1996). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 this tendency of building on the material or scientific evidence – the forecastingobservations-thresholds end of the model, but drifting into the social implications, the responses-innovation end of the model – is reflected in both the australian survey of social attitudes (ada 2011) and the innovative solutions for environmental challenges conference and its greatest environmental challenges survey. the social attitudes survey reflects a mixed or ambivalent public view on the scientific knowledge base, and thus a challenge for the science of observation and forecasting, let alone prediction and acceptance of thresholds. while the scientific community may find this unpalatable (besley & nisbet, 2011), it remains faced with the challenge of communicating scientific knowledge to both the public and the government. for this reason, the icsu’s fourth grand challenge – the response – is so important. the ambivalence evident in the greatest environmental challenges survey respondents’ views – remembering that the respondents are professional environmental managers – on the role of science information and its communication into policy is important. they mostly agree that science provides the information needed to implement environmental policies or strategies, while mostly questioning whether policy makers have adequate scientific information for policy development and implementation (besley & nisbet, 2011). likewise, their commentary on where they consider scientific data to be lacking is telling, especially where their perceived gaps lie in informing fine scale climate impacts, managing land use change, development or local scale resource condition, or understanding the complexity of cumulative change and impact. these are important pragmatic limitations, emphasised by comments regarding presentation of scientific data to managers who “don’t have time to read”. their ambivalence regarding their relative confidence in science’s ability to deliver information, but management’s inability to receive it (cf. besley & nisbet, 2011) highlights the importance of understanding and mediating the cultures of parties in a communication relationship: this has little to do with the science per se, and much to do with group culture (cf. bendell, 2000). while such responses may be readily dismissed by scientists who defend their scientific data in terms of rigour against such social misuse or misunderstanding of the science (besley & nisbet, 2011), they reflect the social reality, indeed the critical essence, of the interplay between science and society (c.f. gunderson & folke, 2011; kastenhofer et al., 2011; scarlett, 2010; van wyk et al., 2008). this reality may be articulated in many ways; one useful model is the interplay between rigour and relevance as a mediation between the epistemologies of science, social science and the humanities on the one hand, and the pragmatism of political action and public management on the other (porteous, 1996). environmental science – the forecasting-observations-threshold component of the grand challenges – is represented in figure 5 at the lower right-hand area of the rigour-relevance field, implicitly informed conceptually from the lower left-hand area. the social responses, whether political bureaucratic or technocratic – the responses-innovation components – are situated in the upper part of the field. the essence of the iscu’s grand challenges lies in making the connections from the lower to the upper parts of this field, in other words in mediating between rigour and relevance. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 references abs. 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(2010). climate change effects: the intersection of science, policy, and resource management in the usa journal of the north american benthological society, 29(3):892-903. 2010.url: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1899/09-135.1 snow, c.p. (1990) the two cultures leonardo, 23, (2/3) new foundations: classroom lessons in art/science/technology for the 1990s: 169-173. speth, j.g. (2008) bridge at the end of the world: capitalism, the environment, and crossing from crisis to sustainability. yale university press, new haven and london. 319pp. ter mors, e., weenig, m.w.h., ellemers, n. & daamen, d.d.l (2010). effective communication about complex environmental issues: perceived quality of information about carbon dioxide capture and storage (ccs) depends on collaboration of stakeholders, journal of environmental psychology (2010), doi: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.06.001 treanor, b. (2010) environmentalism and public virtues. journal of agricultural environmental ethics, 23:9–28 turner, g. 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(2010) modelling with stakeholders. environmental modelling and software 25:1268-1281. wvs. (2011) the world values survey. the world values survey association. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/. bill boyd is a geographer and landscape scientist, with research interests in environmental change, human-landscape interactions and environmental and cultural heritage management. he has recently been working on problems of the management of environmental and cultural heritage places and landscapes, and of community engagement with environmental management. he has published extensively in the scientific literature, and co-authored several books. bill is the chair of his university’s human research ethics committee and animal care & ethics committee. (school of environment, science & engineering, http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1899/09-135.1 http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 southern cross university, p.o. box 157, lismore, new south wales australia. email: william.boyd@scu.edu.au) les christidis is an evolutionary and conservation geneticist. his research focuses on the evolution and diversification of the australasian bird and mammal fauna. he is director of southern cross university’s national marine science centre. school of environment, science & engineering and national marine science centre, southern cross university, p.o. box 4321,
coffs harbour, new south wales 2450, australia, email les.christidis@nmsc.edu.au kristin den exter teaches on environmental management. her research focuses on in adaptive management, environmental management decision making, group processes, participatory processes, knowledge sharing and knowledge creation, ecological assessment, ecologicalrestoration and monitoring. kristin has experience in working with the community, ngos, the public service and in private practice in environmental consulting across a range of ecological and institutional scales. school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, p.o. box 157, lismore, new south wales 2477, australia. email kristin.denexter@scu.edu.au david lloyd lectures in protected area, cultural and coastal management. his research focuses on the incorporation of local or indigenous knowledge into natural area management. he wrote and produced a “saltwater people” for sbs, a documentary depicting the relationship of coastal indigenous communities with their environment, and has a weekly science and environment segment on abc radio. his ongoing projects include work in a number of pacific nations working on environmental management capacity building in tonga, natural resource management research and training in east and west timor, and png. in particular he is working on community based projects to provide value adding for coffee in east timor and curriculum development for the east timor coffee academy. (school of environment, science & engineering, southern cross university, p.o. box 157, lismore, new south wales australia. email: david.lloyd@scu.edu.au) mailto:william.boyd@scu.edu.au mailto:les.christidis@nmsc.edu.au mailto:kristin.denexter@scu.edu.au mailto:david.lloyd@scu.edu.au microsoft word roberthorne13.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 aboriginal culturation of the environment in south australia and excerpts from the novel the glass harpoon 1 robert horne copyright©2013 robert horne. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. introduction the colony of south australia was unique among the colonies that were set up in australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in that it was established by an english company with significant capital and a unique plan for colonisation which would attract both capitalists and workers and which would attempt to replicate the class structure of england (pope, p.6). there were no convicts or transport ships, but free settlers, many seeking religious freedom, many with a hunger for land, many furthering the fortunes of large families in england. wheat and wool growing, as well as the securing of certain timber supplies, were primary concerns of settlers, and to justify incursion into aboriginal land the concept of ‘terra nullius’, empty or unoccupied land, was established and was well accepted by the time of the establishment of south australia in 1836. however, there were many early explorers, all over australia, who noticed that the land in many places had been cultured, that it even bore the appearance of a ‘gentleman’s park’ (gammage, pp.5-17) with large open areas placed within woods. adjacent these places, signs of permanent settlement were observed. major mitchell, exploring northern victoria in 1836, remarked upon the park-like arrangements; fields of millet were even observed (mitchell, p.85) first excerpt so the culturing of the environment had been occurring in australia for thousands of years before the arrival of european settlers (gammage, p.vii). the creative piece which follows is set in the early 1839, less than three years after the establishment of the colony of south australia. the central character, matthew larkin, had been sent to south australia in the company of his older brother who was responsible for establishing a land holding in the 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacedness-images.blogspot.com.au/. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 new colony. of an excitable and inconsistent temperament, matthew has been set to unsuitable work in the governor’s office copying documents. in the first excerpt, he witnesses the spearing of a swan by aboriginal people and comments on the attitude of species preservation shown in their hunting practices, comparing this to european methods. matthew then meets the man who is his counterpoint throughout the novel, the lower class artist cawthorne (jones, p.75-78). their shared enthusiasm for the natives and their culture brings them together, but ultimately tears them apart. in this excerpt the two men are establishing their connection and they go to an affray, which has been arranged between two native tribes, and which cawthorne has been invited to attend because of his rare friendship with the native people (hosking, p.172). cawthorne tells larkin tales of native burnings (gammage, p.3) and of almost comical settler misunderstandings. they walk through a landscape which in 1842 was a glorious wetland with an abundance of birdlife (harding, 173), but which in modern times is suburbs and roads. they go to the place of affray which is an open area within forest (and which is still called black forest), which has been procured by deliberate and consistent native burning. certain indigenous australian grasses respond positively to burning every three years or so (gammage, 14), and the fresh growth attracts game which can then be relatively easily speared by hunters waiting among the trees. the piece closes with cawthorne’s revelation over the reason for the affray itself (jones, 80); larkin is stunned and even more viscerally drawn to the native culture. diarium of matthew john larkin, 12th day of september 1839 dear diarium, since seeing the natives while out walking some three weeks past, i have been drawn to return there by a force within me which i myself do not fully understand. their village lies past the stern little gaol which is still being built and around the bend and out of sight of the town proper. dear diarium, with one’s back to the gaol and viewing the river as it meanders to the north and the west, it is the most beguiling aspect. the trees here afford not shade enough to block the light, but to simply make a filter of it, so that one is dappled by sun and shade in equal degrees and the effect is balmily pleasant. yesterday a swan as black as pitch was swimming on its own and this fact alone was enough to arrest my mind, as it is the trait of these swans to form a pen or gaggle out of some instinct of self-preservation. and then i noticed there was a mother with her babes in train moving away some twenty yards distant. in between the two a native man, his body was glistening and streaming with water as if he had recently emerged from it, with his hands thrust outwards in a shepherding gesture to drive the mother and her babes away. then from among the rushes that snuggle into the bend in the river emerged two shadows of figures. slowly, like wraiths in a dream, they stretched up to their height and as they did so an arm was raised and in each right hand there was a spear of more than two yards in length. the sight of them sent a wave of sensation through me such as i have never experienced before. their left legs barely broke the surface of the water as they leaned forward in perfect balance to prepare their spears for flight. the silence which hung over coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 the river was a thing of itself, so perfectly still that i could hear a bird cheep in an old gum tree on the hill one hundred yards to the north, as if impertinent, foolishly unaware of the silent drama that was played out in its neighbourhood. the arms of the spear-throwers loomed back and then silently forward and the spears, which had seemed until a moment before to be a fully attached part of the hand and arm, were now in flight and with a barely audible whoosh they both struck the swan, one in its breast beneath the neck and the other deep in its abdomen. both spearheads protruded clean through to the other side. the first sign of death or injury was the deep red blood that now oozed into the stream, and as the heavy, handled end of the spears sank slowly into the water the two barbed and sharpened heads rose like totems and the very sun seemed to salute them and to bounce its rays off their extraordinary crystal heads in triumph, as if the elements themselves proclaimed the righteousness of the deed of death. this all happened so quickly, my eyes were still adjusting from the half light of the trees to the brilliant sunlight of the glinting river and i could scarce believe that it had truly happened. but what spell had seemed to be cast over the river was suddenly broken by the cheery handclapping and jabbering of the natives who strode forward to collect their prey; they evinced the contented smiles of those who have well performed a task at which they should not fail but which, when done well enough, still is all the credit to them. i supposed that were one spear to strike the bird, then that would have been enough, but that both had made their deadly mark was credit indeed. the sudden change in their demeanour could scarcely be believed, so carefree and joyful of life did they seem, where they had been sombre and so full of purpose just one moment before. they were soon joined by the third, the shepherd, who had gently all the while been moving the mother and her three babes away toward the rest of the pen, to safety. never before have i seen such savagery displayed in the killing of the buck and at the same time such gentility of deference to the mother and her babes. in england would not a hunter have killed them both and thrown the cygnets to the dogs? the throwers pulled their spears all the way through the carcass for there was no pulling them back through the way they had entered. then one of them slung the swan by its neck over his own shoulder, and what a splendid sight it made; the barbed points, like harpoons, glinting curiously in the sun, the jet black swan, a trickle of red at its throat, against the dark brown body of the native as they waded off to throw the dead bird at the feet of their women for the plucking and the gutting. i have seen nature; i have seen the savage. i stood transfixed for several minutes after they had gone, wondering that there could ever be such completeness in an act or transaction that i would witness or take part in. but eventually i turned to make my way back up the river towards the settlement, for there was nothing left to do. and that was when i saw him, the man i now know as cawthorne. he was standing, like me, near river’s edge, facing the action i have just described, except that, unlike me, he appeared to have been watching with hands in pockets. his face was turned towards me, his coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 feet and whole body still facing the very recent action, as if he had not wanted to turn himself and risk the making of a sound, the better to summarise my character undetected. as i stood there he took his hands from his pockets and pulled a pipe from his coat then, with a conscious nonchalance, began to stuff it in preparation to lighting. i walked up the small slope towards him. ‘a pretty little show,’ was all he said. ‘i thought they were marvellous,’ i replied with my eager enthusiasm. he merely lit his pipe and nodded three times as if contented with my answer. ‘come, to my cottage. i will show you some of their weapons.’ his very abrupt way of speaking and the directness of his manner bespoke a man not cultured in the ways of society. his trousers and shirt were sound, befitting some form or shopkeeper or civil servant, but old, perhaps five years past their best. all of this did not shock but rather please me, for i had until this time been kept with only my brother and those such as were deemed suitable by my absent father who stayed in england. i had to tell him that there was nothing more i would delight in than to visit his place, but that i was bound to return to my employment and that i would spend the remainder of the day copying the governor’s dispatches to england. ‘you will come to me tomorrow then, at ten o’clock. i will show you my collection of native spears and things. and there is something else.’ ‘what is that?’ ‘there is to be an affray.’ diarium of matthew john larkin, 15th day of september 1839 an affray! an indeed what an affray it was, such that no human being besides a tribesman may behold. the sole exception to this rule until this day has been mr. cawthorne, who is protected by the natives from all violence. so much i have learnt these past three days. mr cawthorne does paint most proficiently an image upon canvas and the natives hold him in a position of respect for this power. that he would spend afternoons in his front parlour making images of them is a matter that makes them speak of him with reverence. his person is vouchsafed through the native communities and me, as his friend, along with him; to think that i, in as little time as three weeks in this colony, have become only the second white person to gain this honour. to meet the place appointed for the affray we walked away from the little town of adelaide along the rough and winding road to the bay, which it is said six years ago was traversed at the rate of one mile per hour, or six and a half hours for the trip. it is now smoothed in some parts, but still is just as quick to walk as drive. a horse would have been the soundest coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 way but of steed we had none and anyway it was said that a beast would frighten the natives and disturb the purity of the affray that was before us. after about a mile and a half we struck to the south away from the road and into the forest which was densely wooded and of dark grey peppermint box trees, rough of bark and standing nearly as high as a cricket pitch is long. mallee box there were about as well and everywhere were grass trees which are here called yakkas and which are best avoided because of their hard protruding flower spikes which can put out a man’s eye if he is not careful. black and white magpies warbled to us from their places in the branches and overhead flocks of cape barren geese passed over in profusion and, rushing in little gangs from tree to tree, were magnificently coloured parrots in red and green and blue and yellow which, when sighted on the wing and in a bunch made the most pleasing sight, as did the pink and grey galahs which flew fearless across our track. as we walked along cawthorne said to me, ‘you seem well pleased with the native.’ there was an upward inflection in his voice at the end of his sentence which made it more into a question that invited my response. ‘oh, indeed, sir. they are most extraordinary. i wish to learn so much more about them. i have watched them fashion weapons from wood, with their hands and what are seemingly the most ancient of tools.’ ‘stone tools, sir, which they have used for twenty thousand years, and now detest.’ ‘detest, sir?’ “hmm, i speak too strongly perhaps. they may seem untouched to you sir, these natives, but much has changed in the five few years since the arrival of our good colonists.’ ‘indeed, sir?’ ‘you wish to learn of the natives?’ ‘indeed, sir.’ ‘you can accompany me on some of my forays and you will learn a great many things, if you’ve a mind.’ i replied that i would indeed like to learn and experience whatever there was to know about these extraordinary natives. we walked on to the black forest of the plains, in which a clearing, i was told, had been set aside for this affray between the tribes, and cawthorne told me of a great many things. it seemed as if he was so glad to have an ear, the only people i had seen him with to this time had been his own mother and the natives themselves. ‘when the british peoples arrived in this place, dear larkin, there was a fear and a general commotion among all about the native. they were astounded to see the hills all alight with coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 flames and smoke; it was as if the holocaust were to be rained upon them. but it was nothing more than the native burning off to suppress the growth of trees and to create more grassland for their wildlife. but the goodly colonist saw this as a presage of evil. they had heard of the indians of the americas and knew that smoke signals meant a preparation for war. a stockpile of weapons was created and all were braced for attack, but of course the native was in the hills simply because it was high summer and they were not so foolish that they would sit in a daub hut in the middle of the plains now were they. ‘so when the season turned they appeared one day, in their normal camp by the river, where you saw them only yesterday. in april it would be, when the heat dies from the sun and the time is right for moving down from the hills, they simply walked down and set to collecting wood for their fires.’ i looked to my right from a hillock we were surmounting and there was a lagoon of fresh water several feet deep and on it a flock of wild ducks and some black swans too, with their tails up and beaks probing beneath the surface for greenery – pelicans sailed by in their never ending quest for small fish. ‘and made access of all this,’ i waved to the lagoon, one of many that stretched down from the reedbeds of the river torrens to the patawalonga creek near the bay. ‘aye, and there is less of it now than there was even five years ago.’ ‘there is not game for all, white man and native alike?’ “hah!’ he exclaimed again, ‘in twenty years the blacks will be the servants of the whites, who will be masters over all. but look, we are near.’ and indeed before us at two hundred yards a clearing was emerging to our sight as if by magic from the middle of the black forest. it was as large almost as the best cricket ground and surrounded on every side by trees, and covered with grass that would be a grazing animal’s delight. on the edge of this space a group of thirty or more native men were standing together and talking vehemently to each other. they were armed with shields and spears and their voices seemed to be rising in pitch; even in the two minutes or so it took us to traverse the distance did the clamour increase. more men were arriving, emerging from the forest and they filled me with fear as their faces were so serious and full of intent. cawthorne held his hand up for us to slow our pace, then stopped to think for a moment. ‘through here,’ he said, and quickly plunged back into the trees to skirt around to the other end of the clearing. the going was not difficult as the trees are never close together here and one needs only to avoid low hanging branches as there is no undergrowth of note such as one hears of in tropical places. the sun came through the trees in a pleasing way and our walk was not unpleasant. soon the trees thinned out and the clearing became apparent once more and we espied another group of men sitting together calmly with their shields and spears. some of these i recognised as men i had seen at the river camp. cawthorne approached them at once and commenced to engage them in conversation in their native tongue, a feat which astounded me, so little had i expected it. i had heard a few of the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 natives speak a word or two of broken english, but here was cawthorne passing the time of day with them! i was filled with admiration of his skill. when he returned he was excited. ‘let’s be taking the shelter of that tree,’ he said and indeed he directed us to a stout gum which had been selected for the very kind of lowhanging branch we had been avoiding on our walk around, and which afforded us an easy climb. no sooner had we been settled in our place than the group of shouting blacks we had avoided on our arrival drew together in a kind of broken, irregular line about one hundred yards away and facing the group of sitting men. they began to advance, making warlike motions of throwing and clubbing as they moved and contriving the most truculent faces also, rather as if a full-scale battle were already in progress and that imaginary assailants were before them. at this time the group of sitting men stood up to face them. then all at once the shouting men ran forward, their spears were elevated and their shields clattered together and then together they halted before the other group and began to make the wildest antics i have ever seen. they crouched then jumped into the air, they growled and screeched, their eyes bulging, their tongues hanging out. then of a sudden their spears were elevated together and they grouped themselves in a sort of phalanx of the kind one has read about in spartan or roman history. the shields were all held together above their heads in a tortoise shell effect and then deathly silence for a moment followed as if from nowhere by a sound not unlike the explosion of a small military shell, but of military shell they had none: the sound was the collected wind of each of one hundred warriors drawn in and expelled together. they did this six or seven times and at the last explosion, they all dispersed. it was with amazement that i saw them then, each gather about them their own shield and spear or club and turn their backs on the other watching group and return to the place from which they had come. at no moment had the standing group, whose men i had recognised, made a move to their spears and shields, but were only watching all the while. ‘and that,’ said cawthorne quietly but contentedly, ‘is our little show for today.’ the whole had taken only fifteen minutes to conclude, but was of the most transfixing nature throughout. every second i had expected a volley of spears to be hurled from the advancing group upon the other and for the sounds of screams to be on the air and for bloodshed to be all about the earth. but the affray, if that is what it was to be called, had ended with an astonishing abruptness and i was climbing down from our tree with a feeling incomplete, as if i had been cheated of some elemental experience. i felt as one does when tossed upon the seas in a small ship; a realisation that powers above us were at play, and that death and all human interest were as nothing. but here the calm that comes after the storm was curiously unwelcome, and i was as if robbed of something myself. ‘but why did they stop? what caused them to regale themselves so fierce and then to turn away. i have never seen the like.’ ‘they had made their point.’ i waited for him to go on. ‘the murray men had staked a claim.’ coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 138 ‘murray men?’ ‘from the river. they have come down here for a very special purpose, and that is to initiate their boys on this land, the land of the plains people my friends, your friends those they call the ghanaa.’ ‘the experience did not appear to have provoked enjoyment among the plainsmen.’ ‘it did not. they are very displeased with the murray.’ ‘why do they not do it near the river, on their own territory?’ ‘ah, can you not guess why they are here. matthew?’ i remained silent. ‘it is because of you.’ ‘me?’ ‘you and your like. our like. did you not see two days ago that pair of ghanaa men, fashioning out of wood their curved throwing stick.’ ‘i did, and speedy work they made of it too.’ ‘aye, sir, with a metal hatchet that fairly glinted in the sun if i do properly recall the words you used to describe it to me.’ he had recalled it well. ‘a white man’s tomahawk gained in exchange for services rendered to the white man: carrying goods, chopping wood and whatever it is that the white man wants. anything made of metal or of glass is the highest prize to them. what would the natives not do to obtain a metal axe? can you imagine the hours of labour entailed in cutting a boomerang with an axe of stone. or the infinite hours of grinding stone on stone to fashion the axe itself. no, the white man’s axes and tomahawks are very superior to their own. do you think these murray men do not want them? indeed each one of them would do anything in his power, take extraordinary risks, to be the man who brought one back to his tribe. they would risk a shot from a white man’s rifle to secure such a prize. why, to cut an opossum from a hollowed tree with a metal tomahawk is the work of a moment, sir.’ ‘i should say so. but glass?’ ‘indeed, sir, to be cut into spear tips. i would not want one of those stuck in my leg i can tell you now. and tobacco. they love to make mimicry of the white man and all his ways, with pipe and smoke no less, poor devils.’ ‘and if they have it, the murray men want it.’ coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 139 ‘and if the murray men initiate their boys on this patch of land that gives those and possibly their close relations the right to hunt on this patch of land. and to hunt means to gather too and to gather means to trade for goods with the white man, and if that means to be of service to the white man, then so be it.’ ‘they are fighting over us.’ ‘matthew, sir,’ and cawthorne laid his hand gently on my shoulder as we walked, ‘they are fighting over us.’ second excerpt in just three years of the colony of south australia laws have been made to outlaw the ringbarking of trees (for the purpose of making shields) as well as unnecessary congregation and fighting, not to mention another which required natives to wear clothing at all times (jones, p.79). this second excerpt comes a week after the first when relations between the two tribes, fighting essentially over access to white man’s bounty, have worsened further and a deadly affray is proposed. larkin is impressed at the gentlemanly nature of the arrangements between the tribes, and by the ceremonial pre-lethal part of the engagement; victory without deference to traditional customs would be a disgrace. cawthorne was a historical figure in the early days of adelaide (hosking, p.172) where he arrived at the age of nineteen. he was strongly attracted to the aboriginal people, befriended them personally and made collections of their artefacts. because of his low origins he could do this without incurring the rancour of polite society, but because of his ambitions to rise above his humble schoolteacher’s position he had also to make himself acceptable to adelaide’s bourgeois rectitude. he forever straddled the two worlds, but in his early years he did actually witness and make account of battles such as the one described here (jones, p.79). he painted the images of aborigines often in portrait and he also drew warriors dodging spears in affrays (jones, p.73). his experiences in africa had a profound influence on his attitude to the australian natives and he drew sardonic amusement from the fears of the white settlers. for larkin the experiences in this scene have a different meaning. they confirm his fascination and he plunges deeper and deeper into what he terms the ‘savagery’ of native life, but which only serves to draw out elemental forces within him, to his ultimate extreme detriment. diarium of matthew john larkin, 27th day of september 1839 cawthorne had no need to be warned by the blacks that an affray of proper and serious intent was near, for the evidence was all about. three afternoons ago we saw that bark had coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 140 been stripped in sheets of three foot by four foot from the largest white gum trees by the river. the natives cut these pieces into shields and fit them with little twine handles that they fix with resin from the extraordinary yacca trees that abound in the plains. these trees grow to three feet high, then sprout the most enormous spikey spears of leaves from which the sticky substance can be pressed. once each man has cut and fashioned his own shield it is daubed with a background of white and then, as if it were an image of the sun rising from each rounded end of the shield, there is added an arc of reddish ochre, which they make from the pulverisation of rocks. once this is done and all other spears and clubs are in their proper place, then the panoply is complete and they are ready for battle. these procedures are not unknown to the authorities of the town, as the events which i shall now relate will show. it has indeed become one of the white man’s laws, which is strongly resented by the blackfellow, that no trees shall be so cut, for the purpose of the cut is well known and disturbances to the productive peace of the colony have too been made unlawful. there is no such thing as ambush in the native set of mind. to surprise an enemy and to discharge spears without warning and preparation from both the sides would be a dishonour far worse than death: victory in these circumstances an insult to the great ancestors whom they venerate as gods. a date is set and a place agreed: it becomes the most civilised of arrangements, more like a duel between gentlemen; and more than that for, it seems, sometimes the outcome of the affray is set by elders before the skirmish even begins, and the whole is acted out as some kind of elaborate choreography, a deadly play within the greater play of life, which is itself but a touchstone to the greater world of spirit beings and dreaming songs. cawthorne and i left early and arrived at the pre-arranged clearing, further away from the town than the place of the ceremony we saw last week, to the south and west past the black forest, where the ground levels out and clears and space is there for an unimpeded run. this space has been burnt for hundreds of years, says cawthorne, to make it into a grassland, to attract game to the new grasses that grow after burning. it does make the most pleasant clear space, bounded by forest on all sides, more as one would have expected to see in an english gentleman’s park than here in the wild. we climbed a tree and each took boughs a foot thick if they were an inch, where we waited growing more uncomfortable with the minutes. the ghanaa blacks at length appeared and gathered in the distance to the north and on our right, while presently the murray men emerged from some distant camp and began to group themselves to our left as had no doubt been arranged between the tribes. after a considerable delay, during which there was much discussion among the men of each tribe, they began quite suddenly to form themselves into single lines and these faced up to each other at a distance of about a hundred yards. they then began to advance towards each other as if at some order or signal unseen to us. all at once they stopped and both sides began to shout and leap about as the murray men had done the week before and with such extraordinary antic capering as one has never seen before: mouths gurgling with spittle, they leapt up and down and flexed their thighs and made such horrid expressions on their faces as a gorgon on an ancient shield, as if the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 141 purpose was to frighten off their foe. a shout then suddenly emerged and this was the signal for battle as spears began to be discharged from both sides at the one time. a shiver went through my whole being as the rainbow of spears went up, forming pleasing arcs through the air so that for a moment there was a glistening dome of missiles producing an effect that was beyond reality. the idea that this opening salvo of spears had been for largely ceremonial effect was supported by the following more deadly action. men took one step forward and threw with a round arm style, the spears humming along much quicker, no more than the height of a human thigh at their arc. the result of all this throwing was the most extraordinary leaping about as the spears of assailants were dodged, some jumping as a spear flashed through the legs, some taking a spear on the shield while capering left and right to allow another past, some hopping as would a kangaroo and deflecting another missile with a downwards flourish of the shield. the sight of two hundred blacks all throwing and cavorting at once was the most single extraordinary sight i have ever witnessed and one that could have been most amusing had the lethal potentials not been so great. i declare that any white man would have been dead and lying on the ground in an instant, but the amazing judgement and athletic movement of these fellows made incisions to the flesh the exception rather than the rule. i glanced over at cawthorne and shouted out, ‘i say,’ in my excitement. but he gazed ahead of himself with that extraordinary fixed and melancholic expression. i expect he heard me, but he gave no sign of recognition. and still the spears came, it was difficult to see all in the dust, but possibly the women and children who had followed along behind were acting as collectors of some kind, and were passing a storehouse of spears to their men for second and third use. then a murray took a throw fair in the inner part of the thigh not eighty yards from our tree, and another man rushed forward to break the spear off so that it could be passed through. the face of the injured man was screwed in a torment of agony that i shall not forget. the ghanaa men began to press now upon the murray; their spears were coming still and it looked as if a slaughter may ensue. the feeling that was within my breast was of the greatest excitement i have ever felt. my body in the tree was so acutely aware of every sensation that i felt i had never been alive until that hour. the savagery of these acts was extreme and to think that it was somehow because of us, because of me, that this affray had occurred. and then, suddenly, without any expectation, adding to the clamour and with a great thundering of hooves, five of the police rode up together from the direction of the town, with captain harrison the first among them, mounted on one of the mightiest and most fearsome horses i have ever seen. he took a pistol from his holster and fired it once into the air, with a look which, even among the famous cavalcade of captain harrison’s looks, was the most ferocious of all. the effect was instantly galvanising on the black fellows. the throwing of spears ceased forthwith and they looked about themselves with blank expressions which turned in time to something surly or sulky in demeanour. with helpless looks the natives began to withdraw back into the lines in which they had been ranged some minutes before. those natives who, some say, have been in possession of this ground for as long as twenty thousands of years. and where they could have turned and buried a shower of spears into the newly arrived entourage and surely wiped them away with little loss to coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 142 themselves, they merely looked indignant, affronted by this unwanted intrusion. they gave each other looks such as would be seen among a bunch of errant schoolboys whose prime amusement has been taken from them by the master. the captain waved his pistol at them, and then motioned to a place before him, in signal that their weapons should be collected there. and what a piteous sight it was, the poor fellows broken hearted on both sides as they laid down their newly cut and carefully painted and anointed wocaltee shields, their uwinda and wirri, their midlah and cootpee. like poor mothers forced to give their babies away at the foundling house door, they stepped back and away with piteous looks at their shields and spears and then directed baleful glares in the direction of the police; looks that were reproachful and contemptuous in their countermanding sorrow. and then the captain motioned to his men and all together the deadly hooves of the horses thundered over the pile of implements and there was such a crackling sound of breaking bark and wood that was raised to the heavens as you would expect from a burning house fire. they trampled back and forth for a space of time that must have been several minutes until the job of destruction was completed to the captain’s satisfaction. as if to celebrate the end of this passage of action the captain fired one shot into the air from his pistol and waved it all about to the natives that they should disperse and as if to warn them of the consequences should they not. and so they turned their backs on the piteous scene of broken shields and of the diffusion of honour and nobility of purpose, and returned to their camps. satisfied that his purpose had been fully met captain harrison now wheeled around his horse and, having placed his revolver in the holster at his hip, with a gesture of his head he motioned to his men to return to the town with him. but as his mighty horse was gathering momentum his head turned to survey the scene about him one last time, and in this movement he caught sight of our two figures in the trees sixty yards or so from him. he pulled up his horse quite sharply and wheeled about and trotted up to face us from not more than twenty yards and close enough to be absolutely certain on whose visages he gazed. he was close enough to address us without raising his voice, but speak he did not. his look instead did return to that furious aspect he had shown when riding up. then he turned and, flanked by his men on every side, he rode away towards the town. when their exeunt was complete cawthorne and i clambered down from our tree and went rummaging through the mangled remains. he found a shield that was half intact, its one remaining orbing ochre stripe had had its matching partner broken off and now resembled more a red and orange sun descending into a sea of white. cawthorne regarded it for a moment then tossed it back into the rubble. ‘fit for the campfire and nothing more,’ he said sadly. i began collecting up some spear heads broken from their shafts by the horses’ hooves. the third i found was of a glass-like substance so sharp that when i touched it i received a cut so fine as a sheet of paper can occasionally impart. i much prized this object from that coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 143 moment and it glinted in the clear afternoon sun as i held it up to inspect. i was taken by the way the sun reflected from its sharpened edges and i wondered why such valuable stone should be allotted the task of taking life, and not treasured and kept for decades or even centuries. ‘a pretty little mess to be describing in your diarium, sir.’ ‘how did you know i was recording my experiences in the colony?’ ‘these habits of industry are what differ us from the native, sir. when they have enough, they have enough; when we have enough it is only the beginning.’ i began to understand something of the meaning behind his observations. ‘but surely we will live side by side with these marvellous creatures.’ ‘ha!’ cawthorne ejaculated in a sardonic, yet heartily amused manner. ‘chopping firewood in exchange for flour, and shaves. you may call it living.’ he watched me hold up my spearhead to the sunlight whence it glittered in all directions like a kaleidoscope. ‘and magical spearheads.’ ‘i say, cawthorne. from what substance would the natives fashion such a blade? this is surely as fine as glass.’ cawthorne took it from my hand. he did not hold it to the light but regarded it sadly then handed it back to me. ‘and glass it is, sir.’ ‘it is glass?’ i held it up again. ‘but how ...’ ‘dear larkin, when the natives come up to town to chop up firewood for the well-to-do they are paid in such kind as the rich can muster.’ i still was at a loss. ‘you have seen them smoking tobacco, like a white man does.’ i had. ‘you have seen their chieftain with freshly shaven face.’ i had wondered at this as well. ‘well, the white man’s glass is more prized by them than any other thing. they fashion it to the point that you see in your hand, and fix it to their spears with cotton from the looms of coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 144 birmingham. it gives them magic, or so they think. white man’s magic, which brings them closer to the land of their dream.’ i regarded the object once more. into each of the wings of the spear tip had been carved three devilish barbs as you might see upon a harpoon. and just as such barbs would bring a whale back towards its assailant when pulled upon, so they would inflict agony upon the wounded man who tried to extract one from himself by pulling it from the direction it had entered. i shuddered with the thought of such a wound. the agonied extraction; flesh pulling away from flesh, the glass barb concealing pockets of meat that would so quickly putrefy in the antipodean heat. the idea came to me of the frontier, of the wildness just out of my reach; the idea of the wildness just within my reach. it was here, in my hand. ‘they want to be near us, to take a part in our goods, perhaps to draw some kind of spirit from our strength.’ his voice was filled with disdain when he spoke of our strength. for cawthorne truly was torn between our world and theirs; and at that moment, that harpoon of glass in my fingers seemed to hold some special power that burnt into my flesh and which held me in its special thrall. and i knew that i too was somehow a part of this world and also as much a part of another. but which? the idea radiated from that glass object through my arm and up into my brain that from that moment onwards somehow my life would be enacted among these people. ‘keep it, mr larkin,’ said cawthorne. ‘you may just as well engage with their power, as they will engage with ours. you will now be the colony’s second best collector of native goods,’ he spoke this last with his most powerful bitterness and irony. cawthorne was ready to depart and so my rapture was abruptly ceased and i pocketed the glass spearhead, that i may resume my gaze the next morning and no doubt on many subsequent. that spearhead is before me now as i write and i do declare it to be the finest thing i ever saw, lest that finest of things be the fine red ochre and white painted shield that i glimpsed so briefly before it was trampled beneath the hooves of the captain’s giant steed. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 145 questions to consider • how does the white man’s commercial predilection directly affect the culture of the native in these pieces? • why should larkin be so much more impressed by the spearing of the swan than he would be by a shooting? • why was cawthorne so anxious to tell the story of the burning of the hills to larkin? would the author’s purpose in relating this story be different from cawthorne’s? • what evidence is there of social class in these excerpts? how could attitudes to class affect the physical environment? • how does the attitude of the natives to affray remind one of chivalrous knights? was there any other action in either of these pieces that could be seen as chivalrous, or which showed a selfless attitude to the environment? and one to speculate on ... • how might captain halloran’s fury affect the immediate life of matthew larkin? how and why would the effect on cawthorne’s life be different? conclusion these two extracts are ostensibly portraits of skirmishes between two native australian tribes, over access to the perceived benefits that come from association with european civilisation (jones, p.88). however there is much evidence of culturing of the land, in contradiction to the idea of ‘terra nullius’. in the first piece the confrontation takes place in a clearing within the black forest, which could only have occurred by systematic native burning. detailed knowledge of different trees and grasses was required to affect the comprehensive program of burning achieved by the natives. one grass may best be burnt every three years; another may shoot fresh growth for five (gammage, pp.6-8). further, the piece describes the wetlands which survived in adelaide well into the twentieth century; a band of lagoons stretched inland up to five kilometres from the coast from semaphore in the north-west to coastal glenelg eight kilometres south (carter, p.173). these habitats provided a fantastic array of fish and game for native hunters. it may have been that the murray men felt the plains could stand populating as well, as the population of the kaurna people, phonetically misspelt ghanaa by matthew larkin in his diary, had been decimated even before the arrival of white man by disease which came down the river murray from earlier settlements in new south wales. important among the physical culture coveted by the native groups was the tomahawk. possession of this prize meant the natives were now more quickly and effectively able to complete many domestic tasks, as well as fashion shields and spears etc. but to put these weapons to use in affray was now illegal. it was an inconvenience to white man’s industry to have natives at war with each other, even if this war was ironically over access to the coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 146 white man himself. native culture was further eroded, as laws were made against the practice of walking around unclothed. in the second piece the natives are likened to schoolboys who have had their favourite plaything taken away (jones, p.87). so it was with all of native culture. within twenty years of settlement native groups were almost completely absent from the city of adelaide, but at ceremonial occasions they would make a re-enactment of affrays of the bad old days (with blunted spears) just as a school pantomime would play amusing fairytales for teachers and parents. the dignity of the warrior was so quickly lost. one contemporary account records a native making the simple plea: when white man fight in adelaide, blackfellow say nothing. when blackfellow fight, policeman come break spears, break shields, break all no good. what for you not stop in england?’ (jones, p.88). such divine logic failed to convince white magistrates. by the early twenty-first century the wetlands are covered with tangible evidence of european cultural hegemony: an airport, a 50,000 seater football stadium, a golf course and a range of housing estates. the black forest is a suburb. the re-culturing of the place is complete. against this trend is the world’s biggest collection of aboriginal artefacts that resides in the south australian museum. the collection is in a prominent place, proudly displayed, and spreads over two floors of museum space. school groups visit daily and many kids display a kind of awe at the interactive displays, at the collections of spears and nets, poisons, glues and handmade bags the closeness of the natives to the earth, to their environment. something of the awe perhaps that matthew larkin felt that day at the spearing of the swan, or of the bemusement that the inscrutable and conflicted cawthorne felt at the restrained savagery of the affrays depicted in these pieces. such is the fascination that will live on in many of us. further reading baker, d.w.a., the civilised surveyor: thomas mitchell and the australian aborigines, melbourne, melbourne university press, 1997. carter, max, no convicts there: thomas harding’s colonial south australia, adelaide, trevaunance pty ltd, 1997 foster,r., hosking,r. and nettlebeck, a. (eds), fatal collisions: the south australian frontier and the violence of memory, adelaide, wakefield press, 2001 gammage, bill, the greatest estate on earth: how aborigines made australia, sydney, allen and unwin, 2011 hawker, james c., early experiences in south australia, e.s.wigg & son, adelaide, 1899 hawker, frankie and linn, rob, bungaree: land, stock and people, turnbull fox phillips, adelaide, 1992 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 147 hosking, richard, a critical edition of william cawthorne’s the kangaroo islanders, thesis phd, university of adelaide, school of humanities, discipline of english, 2003 jenkin, graham, conquest of the ngarrindjeri, adelaide, rigby ltd., 1979 jones, philip, ochre and rust: artefacts and encounters on australian frontiers, adelaide, wakefield press, 2007 mitchell, major t.l., three expeditions into the interior of eastern australia, vol 2, adelaide, libraries board of south australia, 1965 pope, alan, resistance and retaliation: aboriginal-european relations in early colonial south australia, bridgewater, s.a., heritage action woods, j.d. (ed), the native tribes of south australia, adelaide, friends of the state library of south australia, 1997. robert horne is a teacher, reviewer, and award-winning writer who completed a master of arts (creative writing) at the university of adelaide in 2012. he has been an english teacher, public servant, wine store salesman, and has also successfully stowed railway cars for a living. his second book of short stories, love the hurt, will be released in february 2013. his forthcoming historical novel the glass harpoon was inspired by reading first hand accounts of affrays between aboriginal groups in adelaide, south australia, and will focus on themes of early contact between settlers and aborigines. robert teaches classical studies at university senior college in adelaide and is particularly interested by the interaction of ancient and modern cultures. he plans a second novel set partly in cambodia, to be part of a phd in 2013. (university senior college, university of adelaide, australia. email: robert.horne@adelaide.edu.au) coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction anne holden rønning university of bergen, norway achrroen@online.no copyright©2016 anne holden rønning. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. this issue of coolabah presents some articles on fantasy and the fantastic. historically, as critics such as todorov, rosemary jackson, kathryn hume, w.p. irwin and colin manlove have pointed out, tales of fantasy date back to æsop’s fables and homer. in britain, malory’s morte d’arthur was an early key text with its legends of king arthur and the round table. ghosts, witches, and magic are integral elements in the plot of several plays by shakespeare — beings of the unreal world. the imaginary voyage and exploits in swift’s gulliver’s travels (1726) belong to the world of the fantastic, and yet it is a text with acknowledged political overtones, fantasy often being a guise for political and social critique, as we find later in george macdonald’s writing. modern day fantasy plays on these traditional themes, but also provides a more contemporary take on issues, especially when it comes to the media. the diversity of the genre is vast. the seventeenth and eighteenth century debate on the literature of the imagination and the contrast between the mimetic and realistic novel, then in its early beginnings, can be linked to coleridge’s discussion of ‘fancy’ and the ‘imagination’ in biographia literaria (1817). it was believed that the powers of the imagination led to a production of secondary worlds often based on ancient supernatural ballads and tales. joseph addison, for example, in “the fairy way of writing” (1712) comments on dryden’s use of the term and suggests such stories “entertain his reader’s imagination with the characters and actions of persons as have many of them no existence but what he bestows on them,” and since they bring back memories of childhood they “favor those secret terrors and apprehensions to which the mind of man is naturally subject” (cited in sandner 22). at the end of the nineteenth century fantasy literature is especially associated with the aesthetic movement, and the growth of children’s literature. a different world was opened up for the reader in texts such as lewis caroll’s alice in wonderland, charles kingsley’s the water babies, j. m. barrie’s peter pan, and in the stories and works of the scottish writer george macdonald. writing about fantasy worlds they mark an escape from the humdrum and tedium of everyday life to other worlds populated by other people and spirits, as well as animals who can talk. the turn of the twentieth century marked the publication of several critical works on this topic such as brian atterbery’s strategies of fantasy (1992), david sandner’s mailto:achrroen@online.no coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 fantastic literature: a critical reader (2004), the cambridge companion to fantasy literature (2012) and tabish khair and johannes høglund’s transnational and postcolonial vampires (2012). are we to make a distinction between fantasy, the fantastic and the gothic? some of the articles in this issue would suggest that is the case, though if we agree with sandner that “the fundamental characteristic of the fantastic is “displacement” forcing the reader “to experience a lack, a disruption, inviting (if not provoking) an interpretation” (2004: 9), then vampires are also fantasy. the articles in this issue illustrate many facets of the ambivalence of what we mean by fantasy and the fantastic both in australia and in a european context. matthias stephan provides us with a comprehensive critique of different approaches to and understanding of fantasy and the fantastic. john ryan discusses aspects of teaching texts of fantasy in australia and the problems that ensue with a multicultural group. he also queries whether there is such a thing as australian fantasy. articles by maarten renes and helle bildsøe in some ways provide one answer as they analyse mudrooroo’s use of vampires to exemplify the fantastic, based in part on indigenous myth and taking us to another world. taking a fairly recent text, legends of australian fantasy, anne holden rønning queries how australian these texts are, since as john ryan points out, they are largely based on a european heritage. critical theories such as magic realism and the carnivalesque are useful tools for interpreting fantasy and the fantastic. the article by osama jarrar on george macdonald’s fairytale, the light princess, illustrates how using the carnivalesque to critique victorian social norms and mores adds a new dimension to the interpretation of a fantasy text. today films, tv series and texts are full of zombies, gothic figures and extraterrestial worlds. janie conway herron shows the manner in which magic realism subverts the extraordinary in her article on the australian tv series the glitch (shown late 2015) as it confronts issues of colonial history through dead bodies resurrecting. alex del olmo ramon writes on spanish zombie films at the time of franco and the subversive political role they played. bill phillips also draws on zombie films in his discussion of max brook’s zombie wars, an ecocriticism of contemporary environmental issues. what role does and should fantasy play in contemporary life? maybe these articles will give us some indication. pornography – dworkin coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 165 the decline of violence is surely a good thing bill philips abstract: despite the widespread belief that the world grows increasingly violent, steven pinker's 2011 volume the better angels of our nature convincingly argues that the opposite is true. tracing the history of humanity from its origins to the present day, pinker shows how violence has declined, and that strong, stable government is the principal reason for this happening. the book briefly touches on the way literature may play a part in the reduction of violence through the transmission of empathy – the way in which stories about other people, even fictional people, teach us to comprehend more closely our fellow human beings. this article expands on pinker's assertion and suggests that violence has also declined in literature, or become increasingly unacceptable to the point of rejection. keywords: violence; steven pinker; history; literature “believe it or not – and i know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence” (pinker xxi). thus begins steven pinker’s massive 2011 study of declining violence. as pinker predicted, many people objected to it, including andrew brown in the guardian who, despite confessing to not having read the whole book, condemned it as “a comfort blanket for the smug.” timothy snyder, in foreign affairs takes exception to pinker’s assumption that violence should be perceived relatively rather than absolutely: yet even if pinker is right that the ratio of violent to peaceful deaths has improved over time (and he probably is), his metric of progress deserves a bit more attention than he gives it. his argument about decreasing violence is a relative one: not that more people were killed annually in the past than are killed in a given year of recent history but that more people were killed relative to the size of the overall human population, which is of course vastly larger today than in earlier eras. but ask yourself: is it preferable for ten people in a group of 1,000 to die violent deaths or for ten million in a group of one billion? for pinker, the two scenarios are exactly the same, since in both, an individual person has a 99 percent chance of dying copyright©2013 william charles phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 166 peacefully. yet in making a moral estimate about the two outcomes, one might also consider the extinction of more individual lives, one after another, and the grief of more families of mourners, one after another. snyder is a professor of history at yale university, and undoubtedly an intelligent man, but i find his argument less convincing than pinker’s. he suggests that simple numbers, rather than percentages, might have a greater significance, since in real terms, more people die, and more people suffer collaterally. but where does this argument end? to be absurdly reductive, does snyder’s argument still apply if, instead of ten million in a group of one billion it was ten thousand in a group of one billion? or two thousand? the extinction of individual lives is still greater. but anyway, snyder seriously misrepresents pinker’s argument. the latter’s point is that both scenarios do not have an equal 99 percent chance of dying peacefully; in the scenario set in the distant past the percentage of people dying peacefully would have been much lower, in the present, much higher. perhaps one of the reasons so many people are affronted by the idea that violence is historically decreasing is a continuing belief in the rousseauian idea of the noble savage. from the enlightenment onwards, there has been a tendency to use, generally for political purposes, the concept of an age of innocence, now lost in the mists of time, as a means of criticising centralised government and the rise of capitalism. aphra behn’s poem “the golden age,” set in a time in which “no rough sounds of wars alarms / had taught the world the needless use of arms” (2) is a good example; indeed, the myth of the golden age is dealt with at length by raymond williams in the country and the city, in which he describes the golden age myth as the “well-known habit of using the past, the ‘good old days’, as a stick to beat the present” (12). but rousseau has always had his supporters. in the nineteenth century, the anarchist prince petr kropotkin wrote that it is evident that it would be quite contrary to all that we know of nature if men were an exception to so general a rule [of peace and mutual support]: if a creature so defenceless as man was at his beginnings should have found his protection and his way to progress, not in mutual support, like other animals, but in a reckless competition for personal advantages, with no regard to the interest of the species. to a mind accustomed to the idea of unity in nature, such a proposition appears utterly indefensible (74). this appeal to nature (a sure sign that it is groundless), had become one of postcolonial guilt by the twentieth century: a modern concern with the dignity and rights of all peoples inhibits us from speaking too frankly about rates of violence in preliterate peoples and the “anthropologists of peace” have worked to give them a rousseauian image makeover (pinker 43). the mid-twentieth century anthropologist, lucy mair, for example, who carried out research into the sudanese dinka tribes, reported that when fights broke out […] only clubs were used. if a man was killed by someone belonging to another tribe, it was his kinsman’s duty to seek coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 167 vengeance. but it was thought right that between members of the same tribe redress for injuries should be sought by the peaceful process of mediation and the payment of compensation” (48). while of the neighbouring anuak people she explains that [t]he idea that revenge for killing could be pursued within the limits of so small a community as an anuak village is as unthinkable there as anywhere else, but the anuak way of preventing this is for the killer and his kin to leave the village till the anger of his victims has had time to cool” (49). among the anthropologists of peace specifically mentioned by pinker is margaret mead, who described warfare in samoa as “stylized as part of the inter-relationship between villages that were ceremonial rivals, and occasioned few casualties” (360-1). this is precisely the kind of warfare that pinker considers to be underestimated. basing his comments on recent research he argues that: [t]he actual death counts from primitive warfare show that the apparent harmlessness of a single battle is deceptive. for one thing, a skirmish may escalate into an all-out combat that leaves the battlefield strewn with bodies. also, when bands of a few dozen men confront each other on a regular basis, even one or two deaths per battle can add up to a rate of casualties that is high by any standard (43) lawrence h. keeley, an archaeologist, was one of the first scholars to overturn the prevalent academic belief that primitive societies were peaceful. in war before civilization he concluded that high death rates in non-state societies were due to: the prevalence of wars, the high proportion of tribesmen who face combat, the cumulative effects of frequent but low-casualty battles, the unmitigated deadliness and very high frequency of raids, the catastrophic mortalities inflicted in general massacres, the customary killing of all adult males, and the often atrocious treatment of women and children. for these reasons, a member of a typical tribal society, especially a male, had a far higher probability of dying “by the sword” than a citizen of an average modern state (93). having exploded the myth of peaceful primitive societies, pinker summarises a number of other factors that he considers do not contribute to violence, despite popular beliefs to the contrary. firstly, he argues that “it’s hard to find a correlation over history between the destructive power of weaponry and the human toll of deadly quarrels” (673) adding that access to arms has not pushed the murder rate in the northern states of the usa, despite the availability of firearms, much higher than that of europe, while it is significantly higher in the southern states (94). secondly, he claims that wars are not fought over resources but ideology: “the most destructive eruptions of the past half millennium were fuelled not by resources but by ideologies” (674). the war against iraq provides an interesting example. at the time it seemed clear that the attack on saddam hussein was to ensure access and control over coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 168 the country’s oil, particularly for the benefit of american oil companies, yet this no longer seems to be the case. despite the auction of production rights to a number of major international oil companies, “rising tensions between shia, kurdish and sunni factions in iraq since the us withdrawal do not bode well for a boost in oil production” (guardian, february 2012). as pinker puts it: “the costs of war have to be subtracted from the value of the plundered materials” (675) yet post-iraq, oil prices have risen and production, in iraq at least, has dropped. surely a reliance on trade, rather than war, would have been more beneficial all round. why, then, was the war fought? much of the arab world saw it as a continuation of the centuries-old struggle between christianity and islam, while western commentators saw it as george w. bush avenging his father’s failure to defeat saddam hussein in the first gulf war (which was actually the second, the first being the iraq-iran war of 1980-88) – “george bush's war of revenge against iraq” as andrew murray described it in the guardian in 2002. thirdly, pinker argues that violence is not related to poverty: “tight correlations between affluence and non-violence are hard to find” (675) while the “careenings of the american homicide rate in the 20 th century were largely uncorrelated with measures of prosperity” (675-6). in fact, violence and war in the modern age are fought largely for reasons that actually appear quite primitive. pinker’s conclusion is that “a lot of our violence comes from destructive ideologies rather than not enough wealth. for better or worse – usually worse – people are often willing to trade off material comfort for what they see as spiritual purity, communal glory, or perfect justice. but still, violence is historically decreasing. pinker considers thomas hobbes essential to our understanding of how, above all, the establishment of centralised state control led to an increase in peace and safety: in every act of violence, there are three interested parties: the aggressor, the victim, and a bystander. each has a motive for violence: the aggressor to prey upon the victim, the victim to retaliate, the bystander to minimize collateral damage from their fight. violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. the leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war (35). apart from state control, which is “the most consistent violence-reducer” (pinker 680), commerce, feminisation, the use of reason and increased empathy are also contributory factors. the last of these, empathy, is of particular interest to the humanities because it was, argues pinker, initially related to book reading and the rise of the novel: around the same time that uncle tom’s cabin mobilized abolitionist sentiment in the united states, charles dickens’s oliver twist (1838) and nicholas nickleby (1839) opened people’s eyes to the mistreatment of children in british workhouses and orphanages, and richard henry dana’s two years before the mast: a personal narrative of life at sea (1840) and herman melville’s white jacket helped end the flogging of sailors. in the past century erich maria remarque’s all quiet on the western front, george orwell’s 1984, arthur koestler’s darkness at noon, aleksander solzhenitsyn’s one day in the life of ivan denisovich, harper lee’s to kill a mockingbird, elie wiesel’s night, kurt vonnegut’s slaughterhousecoolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 169 five, alex haley’s roots, anchee min’s red azalea, azar nafisi’s reading lolita in tehran, and alice walker’s possessing the secret of joy (a novel that features genital mutilation) all raised public awareness of the suffering of people who might otherwise have been ignored. cinema and television reached even larger audiences and offered experiences that were even more immediate (177). there is evidence that exposure to other people’s point of view increases sympathy for them. this is not merely intuitive but has been demonstrated by anthropological study. the ethnographer gillian evans carried out fieldwork into relations between black and white youths in bermondsey, in the london borough of southwark. as expected, the young white men are abusively racist in their attitude to the non-white people living in their area but then, to her surprise, her interlocutors suddenly greet with warmth and respect a young black man who passes by. they explain that the black man is all right because they know him, and to illustrate what they mean they suggest that evans watch the film american history x in which a black and a white man, initially enemies, become friends. evans reports that: [w]atching american history x confirmed what i have come to understand through my own fieldwork: that getting to know people is all about learning how to enter into meaningful exchange relations with them. whether mediated or unmediated, exchange relations are always the form that participation takes. what makes those relations meaningful is the potential for the creation and transformation of value between persons and things. it is our capacity for the development of empathy that is the basis of an on-going inter-subjective, situational appraisal, which is what the evaluation of worth depends upon (252). what is interesting for pinker, however, is not only that meeting and getting to know people you would most likely initially dislike – people different from yourself, for example – that promotes empathy, but that “listening to his story while taking his perspective can genuinely expand [your] sympathy for him and for the group he represents, and not just during the few minutes after hearing the story” (588). it is the story telling which is decisive to the expansion of empathy. but does this empathy then extend to others of the same initially disliked group? and can the story-telling of literature have the same effect? “do readers sympathize just with uncle tom or with all african american slaves? with oliver twist or with orphaned children in general? with anne frank or with all victims of the holocaust?” (pinker 586). in other words, “[c]ould fiction be a stealthy way to expand people’s sympathy?” (589). the idea that literature has something virtuous about it, that it makes you a better person, has long fascinated literary critics. aristotle claimed that “poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history; for while poetry is concerned with universal truths, history treats of individual facts” (43-44) and horace advised writers to “blend profit with delight” in order to give pleasure along with instruction (91). a thousand or two years later little had changed. the nineteenth century poet and critic matthew arnold argued that the pursuit of culture “reminds us that the perfection of human nature is sweetness and light” (69), while leavis, in reference to the “great english novelists [–] are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity” (18). coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 170 terry eagleton, in line with contemporary literary critical thought, disagrees: the strength of leavisian criticism was that it was able to provide an answer […] to the question, why read literature? the answer, in a nutshell, was that it made you a better person. few reasons could have been more persuasive than that. when the allied troops moved into the concentration camps some years after the founding of scrutiny, to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do (30). eagleton’s dismissal of the leavisian argument by reference to the nazi concentration camps is surprisingly heavy-handed – perhaps in the knowledge that his orthodoxy is less universal than he would like to suggest. indeed, it may be an opinion confined to literary critics: today the historian lynn hurst, the philosopher martha nusbaum, and the psychologists raymond mar and keith oatley, among others, have championed the reading of fiction as an empathy expander and a force toward humanitarian progress. one might think that literary scholars would line up to join them, eager to show that their subject matter is a force for progress in an era in which students and funding are staying away in droves. but many literary scholars […] bristle at the suggestion that reading fiction can be morally uplifting (pinker 588-9). if pinker and the other experts that he mentions believe that reading fiction expands empathy, then – and this is the question a cynical academic of literature would instantly ask – would it not depend on the kind of literature read? leavis’s highly moral great english novelists might be all very well, but what if it was a novel of a particularly bloody and gruesome kind? pinker acknowledges that popular culture in a broad sense appears to be getting more violent: many of the popular musicians in recent genres such as punk, metal, goth, grunge, gangsta, and hip-hop make the rolling stones look like the women’s christian temperance union. hollywood movies are bloodier than ever, unlimited pornography is a mouse-click away, and an entirely new form of violent entertainment, video games, has become a major pastime. yet as these signs of decadence proliferated in the culture, violence went down in real life (128). however, the explanation for this is that people have simply become more sophisticated and are able to reflect consciously on those forms of social behaviour which are justifiably condemned and those which are not. our society has become so safe that we can afford to break certain conventions and defy taboos secure in the knowledge that we will not be attacked for doing so. just as an individual may now openly discuss his or her religious beliefs without fearing the attentions of the holy inquisition, he or she may also wear outrageous clothing, or virtually none, or swear, without concern for their safety (128). however, such an ability to distinguish between what is acceptable and what is not – and more importantly, to be able to register changes in acceptability – does not explain why there should be an interest in representations of violence at all. if real coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 171 violence has decreased, why should there be an interest in its portrayal? according to pinker “[a] likely explanation is that in evolutionary history, violence was not so improbable that people could afford not to understand how it works” (485). in other words, an interest in violence has been hard-wired into us as a means of improving our chances of survival in a dangerous world. it is no surprise then that a brief reflection on the history of the written word reveals that there was plenty of violence in the literary past as the following passage from the bible about the multiple rape and death of a young woman demonstrates: 22 now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him. 23 and the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, and said unto them, nay, my brethren, nay, i pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly. 24 behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them i will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. 25 but the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. 26 then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was, till it was light. 27 and her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. 28 and he said unto her, up, and let us be going. but none answered. then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place. 29 and when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of israel. judges 19: 22-29. king james authorised version. a moment’s thought will also remind us that homer, sophocles, shakespeare (think of oedipus and lear putting out their eyes) and the marquis de sade were as horrific as anything produced today. indeed, quite possibly more so: i would like to argue that despite appearances to the contrary, even representations of extreme violence are becoming less acceptable than they were – and not by government decree, but through a change in what society finds palatable. among the many ways in which pinker demonstrates how violence has decreased over the centuries is the treatment of children: since 1950, people have become increasingly loath to allow children to become the victims of any kind of violence. the violence people can most easily control, of course, is the violence they inflict themselves, namely by spanking, smacking, slapping, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and other forms of corporal punishment. elite opinion on corporal punishment changed dramatically during the 20 th century. other coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 172 than in fundamentalist christian groups, it’s rare today to hear people say that sparing the rod will spoil the child (435). this is clearly reflected in the australian novel the slap, a novel which was so successful it spawned an internationally broadcast television series of the same name. the premise of the novel is simple: at a suburban barbecue in melbourne a man publicly slaps someone else’s extremely badly behaved boy: ‘no!’ the same piercing scream. the boy looked as if he were going to hit his father with the bat. ‘put the bat down now.’ the boy did not move. ‘now!’ there was silence. hector realised that he was holding his breath. ‘you’re out, hugo, you bloody spoil-sport.’ rocco, at the end of his tether, went to grab the bat from the younger boy. with another scream hugo evaded the older boy’s hands, and then, leaning back, he lifted the bat. hector froze. he’s going to hit him. he’s going to belt rocco with that bat. in the second that it took hector to release his breath, he saw ravi jumping towards the boys, he heard gary’s furious curse and he saw harry push past all of them and grab at hugo. he lifted the boy up in the air, and in shock the boy dropped the bat. ‘let me go,’ hugo roared. harry set him on the ground. the boy’s face had gone dark with fury. he raised his foot and kicked wildly into harry’s shin. the speed was coursing through hector’s blood, the hairs on his neck were upright. he saw his cousin’s raised arm, it spliced the air, and then he saw the open palm descend and strike the boy. the slap seemed to echo. it cracked the twilight. the little boy looked up at the man in shock. there was a long silence. it was as if he could not comprehend what had just occurred, how the man’s action and the pain he was beginning to feel coincided. the silence broke, the boy’s face crumpled, and this time there was no wail: when the tears began to fall, they fell silently. ‘you fucking animal!’ gary pushed into harry and nearly knocked him over. there was a scream and rosie pushed past the men and scooped her child into her arms (40-1). many, if not most readers of the novel sympathise, at least in part, with harry; in similar circumstances they know they too would have liked to slap the revolting hugo. but they also know they probably wouldn’t, and they also most likely believe that hitting children is wrong and inexcusable. compare this incident with the infamous scene in tom brown’s schooldays (1856) in which the eponymous tom is tortured by the bully flashman: “very well then, let’s roast him,” cried flashman, and catches hold of tom by the collar; one or two boys hesitate, but the rest join in. east siezes tom’s arm and tries to pull him away, but is knocked back by one of the boys and tom is dragged along, struggling. his shoulders are coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 173 pushed against the mantlepiece, and he is held by main force before the fire, flashman drawing his trousers tight by way of extra torture (156). tom’s plight excites the sympathy of the school, but nothing is done to punish his tormentors, particularly flashman who “toadied himself back into favour again” (159). flashman, who is seventeen at the time of the attack on the much younger tom, is old enough both to know better, but not so old to be held to account for his misdeeds. but how about charlotte brontë’s jane eyre, and the imprisonment of the young jane at gateshead by her aunt? imprisoned in the room where her uncle died she becomes distraught and cries out desperately to be released: mrs reed, impatient of my now frantic anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked me in, without further parley. i heard her sweeping away; and soon after she was gone, i suppose i had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene (50). many such scenes of childhood beatings and torture may be found in the novels of the nineteenth century: dickens’s oliver twist immediately springs to mind in which barely has the novel begun before the tiny lad is set to pick oakum and, being hungry, notoriously asks for more gruel, at which “[t]he master aimed a blow at oliver’s head with the ladle, pinioned him in his arms, and shrieked aloud for the beadle” (24). one would like to see the master try the same thing at a barbecue in twenty-first century melbourne and see where it gets him. this is not to say that horrific cruelty to children does not occur in contemporary novels, as the following passage from don winslow’s magnum opus the power of the dog demonstrates. published in 2005, the novel describes in violent detail the mexican drug wars of the final quarter of the twentieth century, including the murder of two children: fabián throws the girl off the bridge. her hair lofts up like futile wings and she plummets as fabián grabs the little boy and in one easy swing tosses him over the railing. adán forces himself to look. the children’s bodies plunge seven hundred feet, then smash onto the rocks below. then he looks back at the orejuela brothers, whose faces are white with shock. gilberto’s hand shakes as he shuts the suitcase, picks it up and walks shakily back across the bridge. below, the río magdalena washes away the bodies and the blood (296). this act of unbelievable violence against children is quite different from that depicted in victorian novels. firstly, it is very brief, but secondly, and most importantly, it is included in the novel precisely for its exceptionality. winslow’s self-appointed task is to describe and condemn the horrors of the mexican narco war and the united states war on drugs, but not because such horrors have become established as normal practice. quite the opposite – the drug wars are a concatenation of factors that have led to unbelievable and unusual horrors that few would believe possible. dickens, on the other coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 174 hand, describes events that have become acceptable through their very familiarity and for this reason require exposure. a number of other writers of contemporary fiction are also quite extraordinarily violent in their work – very often for similar reasons to don winslow. south african crime writers such as deon meyer, mike nichol and roger smith depict in some detail the horror of everyday life for many of their compatriots. however, i would suggest that, like dickens, their work reflects the violence of the societies they are writing about and, crucially, that such violence is becoming increasingly infrequent, or confined to specific and increasingly fewer regions of the world. most of don winslow’s novels, for example, do not take place in mexico, or south america, but in the united states, and although he is a crime novelist, violence is rarely described in graphic detail. most contemporary fiction, including cinema is, in fact, relatively violence free. this is clearly illustrated by the public and critical reaction to works which are unacceptably or unusually violent. quentin tarantino’s reservoir dogs and pulp fiction, which are bloody rather than specifically violent, were precisely celebrated for their strangeness and peculiarity while – more pertinently, bret easton ellis’s american psycho was almost universally condemned. american psycho is an excellent example of a novel which, for most people, goes too far in its explicit and detailed descriptions of torture and mutilation. like tarantino’s films, american psycho has not led to countless popular imitations and copies. the kind of sadistic horror portrayed in the novel has remained underground as though having popped its head up once in the form of critically-acclaimed postmodern literature, it has realised that its day has not yet arrived, and has returned to its subterranean lair. contrary to popular belief, most people are not titillated by explicit violence but react with moral outrage if they consider that a work has overstepped the mark, especially if it belongs to a genre which has a broad public appeal. the slovenian philosopher slavoj žižek, in his volume violence, argues that such moral outrage plays directly into the hands of the enemies of progressive struggle. what pinker sees as empathy, žižek sees as collaboration with those in power. for pinker it is always better to have someone in power, for žižek it is not, since their only objective is the exploitation of the masses. he argues that it is [b]etter to do nothing than engage in localised acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly (acts such as providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities). the threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be ‘active’, to ‘participate’, to mask the nothingness of what goes on (183). it is undoubtedly true that all too often the kind of participation encouraged by the political authorities is a smokescreen, empty of meaning beyond that of pacifying the would-be socially active and aware. nevertheless, providing space for the multitude of new sensitivities sounds suspiciously like the promotion of empathy, a means by which violence may be reduced as we understand and sympathise with the plight and experiences of those unlike ourselves. in an apparent rejection of empathy žižek argues that coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 175 to chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad’, is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence (174). and he concludes violence with the outrageous assertion that [i]f one means by violence a radical upheaval of the basic social relations, then crazy and tasteless as it may sound, the problem with historical monsters who slaughtered millions was that they were not violent enough (183). according to žižek, the promotion of understanding between people and the condemnation of violence are simply ideological operations which render "invisible the fundamental forms of social violence" (174). "why," he asks "are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than problems of inequality, exploitation or injustice?" (119). indeed, as far as žižek is concerned, tolerance is one of many mechanisms "destined to render us insensitive to the most brutal forms of violence" (174). tolerance (a consequence, perhaps, of empathy), is merely the acceptance that nothing can be changed; that there can be no progress. presumably žižek agrees with robert a. heinlein's high school teacher in starship troopers, who tells his class that “[v]iolence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor” (heinlein 27); if you wish to change the world then you must literally fight for it. heinlein's lesson in his cold war analogy is that the enemy who is unquestionably and intolerably 'other', must be utterly wiped out. but pinker is clear throughout the better angels of our nature, that hobbes's vision was always contentious that deferring to a strong and stable government must always be accompanied by the struggle to avoid tyranny. it is difficult not to sympathise with pinker who, after all, has statistics on his side. the world has become less violent and has achieved this, above all, through submission to those in power. žižek finds this unacceptable and claims to prefer unimaginable violence to the perpetuation of our current inegalitarian regime. perhaps we have been tamed, perhaps our distaste for violence not only in its horrific reality, but in its representations on the page and screen, are indications of our pusillanimity. žižek’s stance is unquestionably ideological – of the kind abhorred by pinker for its terrible consequences – yet strangely žižek’s very last words in his book are “[s]ometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do” (183). we are left with an odd dichotomy – that of two intellectuals, one preaching peace, and the other violence. the former condemned for his enlightened disavowal of fashionable cynicism, the latter celebrated for his romantic, rebellious and contradictory spirit. žižek, it seems to me, is something of a trickster a charlatan even. at the beginning of violence he argues that he cannot directly confront his theme, that he must look at it "awry" (3). the dispassionate alternative that explored by pinker in the better angels of our nature both ignores "its traumatic impact" (3) while somehow reproducing and participating in its horror (3). it is not easy to understand what žižek is saying, and this would seem to be his intention. pinker, on the other hand is clear, comprehensive and credible. i know whose world i prefer to live in. coolabah, no.10, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 176 references aristotle. “on the art of poetry”. classical literary criticism, tr. t.s. dorsch. harmondsworth: penguin, 1979. arnold, matthew. culture and anarchy. 1869. london: cambridge up, 1969. behn, aphra. selected poems. ed. malcolm hicks. manchester: carcanet, 1993. brontë, charlotte. jane eyre. (1847). harmondsworth: penguin, 1966. brown, andrew. “steven pinker's book is a comfort blanket for the smug” the guardian. 8.11.11 dickens, charles. oliver twist. london & glasgow: collins, 1940. eagleton, terry. literary theory: an introduction. second edition. minneapolis: minnesota up, 1996. ellis, brett easton. american psycho. new york: vintage, 1991. evans, gillian. “learning, violence and the social structure of value” social anthropology (2006), 14, 2, 247–259. heinlein, robert a. starship troopers. 1959. london, new english library, 1970. hughes, thomas. tom brown’s schooldays. 1857. london: penguin, 1997. keeley, lawrence h. war before civilization. new york, oxford: oxford up, 1996. kropotkin, petr. mutual aid. harmondsworth: penguin, 1939. leavis, f.r. the great tradition. 1948. harmondsworth: penguin, 1983. mair, lucy. primitive government. harmondsworth: penguin, 1962. mead, margaret. male and female. 1950. harmondsworth: penguin, 1967. murray, andrew. “spinning to war on iraq” the guardian, 4.3.2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/mar/04/foreignpolicy.labour?intcmp =srch pinker, steven. the better angels of our nature: the decline of violence in history and its causes. london: penguin, 2011. quintus horatius flaccus. “on the art of poetry” classical literary criticism, tr. t.s. dorsch. harmondsworth: penguin, 1979. roubini, nouriel “reasons to be cheerful about the economy – but more to be cautious” the guardian. 6.2.2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economicsblog/2012/feb/16/reasons-cheerful-economy-cautious?intcmp=srch williams, raymond. the country and the city. 1973. london: the hogarth press, 1993. winslow, don. the power of the dog. 2005. london: arrow books, 2006. źiźek, slavoj. violence. london: profile books, 2009. bill phillips is a senior lecturer in literatures in english at the university of barcelona. he has published on poetry, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, gender studies and crime fiction. microsoft word coolabahreviewisabel coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 joan london, the good parents,vintage books,2008. isbn: 978 1 74166 793 6 maría isabel seguro universitat de barcelona copyright ©2010 maría isabel seguro . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. the good parents (2008) is joan london’s second novel. her published works include two collections of short stories, sister ship (1986) awarded with the age book of the year, and letter to constantine (1993), winner of the steele rudd award and western australian premier’s book award for fiction. her first novel, gilgamesh (2001), also won the age book of the year for fiction in 2002. with these credentials, one expects to find in the good parents a fine novel, and london does not disappoint us. in the first pages the author leads us to believe that the story is about a runaway eighteen-year-old country girl from the australian wheat-belt, maya, who has moved from her hometown to melbourne, and then leaves the city with her middle-aged boss and lover, just before her parents’ arrival on a visit. however, as the story unfolds, we see that the themes dealt with by london have more to do with our need to break with primordial ties and to establish other bonds [apparently] of our own choice in order to achieve self-knowledge, and acknowledge and accept part of our parents’ presence in ourselves. in fact, for the most part of the novel maya remains a ghostly figure; we hardly know anything about her until the final chapters, except that she is alive because she occasionally phones her younger brother marcus, who has stayed behind at home in western australia. maya’s absence haunts her parents, toni and jacob, while they are staying in melbourne with their daughter’s housemate, cecile, trying to find her as they wait for her return. they seem to be the good parents the title of the novel refers to: a liberal middle-aged couple, who still have an air of the 1960s utopia hanging about them, especially in the case of jacob. the unexpected absence of their daughter makes them ponder about their role as parents, wondering up to what extent they can actually foresee and prevent the trouble and pain of growing for their children. in london’s words, there comes a point when with older children ‘[t]here’s not much to do, except wait and be there’ when the moment arrives (sullivan 2008). maya’s disappearance, in turn, makes them wonder and look back from the perspective of time and middle age about their own relationships with their parents, and how these have affected their own attitudes towards their children. toni, for example, comes from a typical middle-class background, and her mother, beryl, is obsessed with keeping up appearances and good reputation. her father, nig, is typically aloof with toni and her coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 older sister karen, ‘never seemed to really look at his daughters, as if that was taboo. he treated them both with a distant, courteous affection’. expected to marry after obtaining her university degree, maya feels constrained and, inevitably, feels attracted to cy fisher, a mysterious, self-made man, involved in obscure business enterprises: there was something compelling about him. and that was the truth about cy fisher. he always did exactly what he wanted to. in him the channel between will and action ran unusually fast, unusually pure. he didn’t allow himself doubts our guilt. above all else he despised fear. fear was the only quality in others that he didn’t tolerate. although after marrying cy tony feels once again constrained due to the surveillance she is subjected to, his lessons teach her to take control of her life, escaping from him with jacob’s help. the issue is, obviously, if her daughter will have the same luck. as it turns out, it is cy who finds and brings maya back home after a chance encounter with toni many years after their last meeting. by contrast, jacob’s upbringing is haunted by an absent father, a sailor who is reported to have drowned and who only left behind as evidence of his existence an old photograph. jacob and his younger sister, kitty, are provided for by their mother arlene, who seems to be only interested in her clothes shop: arlene was a successful businesswoman who, as she said, always paid her bills. she’d never let her children prevent her from doing anything she wanted, and didn’t bother to conceal the fact that she couldn’t wait for them to leave. despite the fiasco of putting into practice his hippy ideals by living in a commune with toni right after their elopement, he nonetheless tries to live up to them at warton in western australia, blending in and finding out that the values he and toni had come to cherish so much, ‘sharing, hospitality, community, turned out to be country values, not radical at all’. and, ‘[a]part from his sporadic little trips to perth, he stuck around. his kids were going to know what it was to have a father’. but the issue of being a good parent is not only limited to jacob, toni and their children, and to jacob, toni and their parents. the concept of parent as a carer and nurturing figure is especially dealt with in relation to secondary characters, all depicted with psychological depth. for example, jacob’s sister, kitty, moves to warton to look after magnus. she not only feeds him with dishes from all over the world, but is also capable of recognising his restlessness and his talent through his ideas about music: kitty felt a prickle of professional excitement. she recognised talent when she saw it. a gifted child. her mind raced in the old way, with challenges, strategies, possibilities. he was one of the ones who were dying to leave, like his sister. where would be the best place for him to go? he had to consider the options. she took care to leave the guardian weekly on the kitchen table where magnus could read it. the shyness, the slovenliness of speech, would drop away by itself, as hers had. it was important to give him the right sort of support coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 now. so that he didn’t make some self-destructive decision like maya probably had’. it is also worth noting london’s dexterity in depicting atmospheres, particularly in melbourne and contrasting them with the sense of isolation, bareness and space in a town from the wheat-belt of western australia: the ‘silver-white expanse, edged with dead black stick-like trees. it stretched as far as the eye could see, like a russian snowfield’, near a town in which even in ‘mid-morning the main street looked uninhabited. the shops were vast barns half-lit by fluoro strips, the sparsely stocked shelves reminded her [kitty] of prague in ninety-one’ (192; 191). similarly, jacob, while moving about melbourne, also suffers a kind of culture shock like the one kitty experiences when she arrives at warton: ‘everything was thrown into the mix here. a broken-down worker’s cottage next to an up-to-the-minute converted warehouse, all weatherboard and corrugated iron. glimpses of old-time suburbia, front fences, roses, birdsong, then an apartment block with an asian look, tiled white balconies, wrought-iron screens. two shops side by side, one selling newspapers, ice creams and shampoo, like a shot at a beach, the other transformed into a hip little wine bar. a buddhist nun with a vivid homely face walked past, her burgundy robe not out of place here. in the distance were old brick factory chimneys, a spire, a civic clock, a fluttering australian flag. so this is what had happened to the rest of the country! overall, a highly recommended reading about the im/possibilities of living up to ideals, about choices and their consequences, and also about contemporary fin-de-siècle australia. microsoft word article antonella sola coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 the pleiades and the dreamtime: an aboriginal women's story and other ancient world traditions antonella riem natale for bruce i chose a story connected with stars, as his pure eyes always shone with crystal light and deep heartfelt welcoming. it is never simple to read sacred stories, narrations and belief systems of different cultures without running the risk of ‘appropriating’ and incorporating these stories and systems within your own, thus perpetrating a form of intellectual colonialism that has created and is still creating so much suffering (hodge & mishra 1991). one needs to be aware of many differences and nuances in meaning when handling myths, words, ideas, concepts, stories belonging to a different culture. on the other hand it would be wrong to follow the idea that certain subjects can be treated, read, analysed only by those who ‘belong’ to that culture. as raimon panikkar (2007: 80 ff.) says, interculturality is an imperative since monolingualism and monoculturalism (like globalism) are always instrument and ideology at the service of the dominant power in order to submit and exploit. whenever we lose touch with the depth and riches of other cultures, our own is impoverished, and the world at large too, for only in relationship and dialogue of word, poetry, myth and song can the world be. thus, following the (song) lines of the partnership literary theory as implemented by the partnership studies group (psg) at the university of udine 1 in order to treat all creative and literary material with attention, care, respect, in partnership and equality, we can notice how, according to eisler’s cultural transformation theory: underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society. the first, which i call dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy — the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. the second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking, may best be described as partnership model. in this model — beginning with the most fundamental differences in our species, between male and female — diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.” (eisler 2 1987: xvi, my italics). in our partnership line of interpretation, diversity is not equated with inferiority or superiority, nor is analogical thinking better or lesser than logical thinking, rather they are both necessary in order to fully comprehend the wholeness and complexity of reality, as is obvious in the most advanced fields of science, like quantum physics and non-linear or chaos theories (kellert 1993). aboriginal lore is very close to the copyright © antonella riem natale 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 interrelatedness of things purported by quantum physics, for their songlines interweave sky and earth along ancestral paths that are timeless and everpresent, creating a web of life (capra 1997). where everything is interconnected and has a ‘butterfly effect’ on everything else. this also happens in the case of many other world ancestral traditions that are connected to the aboriginal one, not as a way of omogenising and generalising, but rather as a clear stance of how everything is related to everything else in the sense of non linear theories. aboriginal texts embedded in ‘native’ oral traditions and narratives, as many other mythological traditions, work within an analogical rather than a predominantly logical framework. since our established western research methods tend to resist non-western or non-linear (or poetic and analogical) modes of knowledge, when reading a text from an-other culture, we need to find a language in order to ‘understand’ what is relevant and common to many different areas of the world, what is specific and local but at the same time finds many echoes somewhere else. therefore the knowledge of language studies, anthropology, history, mythology, cosmology, religious studies, and so on, needs to be re-located in a partnership relationship with the other that can produce a participatory research, able to cross thresholds and travel across geographical, time and cultural boundaries, in order to retrace the steps of us humans as all children of the same planet, swiftly spinning together with other stars and planets in our galaxy, within other galaxies and so on and on, back to the beginning of time, forward to the beginning of another time, so that we can recapture our own ‘dreaming’ (stanner 1979). myth is our sail across these worlds and words. in myths all ages, societies and cultures of the world, celestial bodies, with their movements, itineraries and transits are of fundamental importance for structuring beliefs and weaving meanings into our everyday life. this essay focuses on the symbolic and archetypal features of an ancestral aboriginal women’s story, as it was transcribed by katie langloh parker 3 , in order to study the symbolic relations and archetypal consonance and connections it has with analogous stories and myths of other traditions dealing with stars and constellations. in the aboriginal world there are many different narrations dealing with the pleiades, and “where the frost comes from” (lambert & parker 1993: 44-50) is an interesting example. we are told about the meamei, or pleiades, the seven beautiful sisters with long hair and resplendent bodies that shining with the many icicles that composed their bodies. a group of young men, the beraiberai used to follow the meamei everywhere, always leaving special gifts for them, they brought in particular honey, as they were experts in finding beehives. the meamei appreciated and ate the honey but resisted their courting. one day the old ancestor of fire wurrunnah kidnapped two of the beautiful girls, trying to “warm” (44) their icicles, but the only result was that his own fire was extinguished. the two were taken to the sky, but the intensity of their shining is less than that of the other sisters, who also have become stars in the meantime. the young men let themselves die for love and they too were turned into stars: we know it as orion’s belt (tilak 1955), but for the daens (aboriginals) it actually is the berai-berai brothers. in the sky the berai-berai continue to find honey for the meamei, and, in exchange, they sing for the brothers wonderful songs as sweet as honey. in order to remind the daens that in the dreamtime 4 they had originally lived on the earth, the meamei take off from their bodies some ice and let it fall upon the earth. thus, when they see the frost the daens celebrate the seven beautiful shining sisters and use the icicles to anesthetise young boys and girls whose nose has not been pierced yet. they use the ice and then insert a magic bone, as sign of initiation into adulthood. in the meantime wurrunnah is still running in a fury, in search coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 for the sisters, and this provokes the roaring laughter of daendee ghindamaylannah, the laughing star (venus), a relative of the meamei. according to the daens, when in winter thunder is heard, this indicates that there will be rain in three days’ time and that the meamei are playing and jumping clangorously in the water, like daens’ children do: the one who makes the most noisy dive wins. this is the aboriginal story. let us see how it its symbolism is related to other world traditions and in different epochs. human beings have always looked for a correspondence between micro and macrocosm in order to find spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, for the different dimensions of their earthly existence and its mystery, so that external and inner worlds could resonate in a unique galactic harmony (de santillana giorgio and hertha von dechend 1969). as for the noisy dives of the meamei, deities connected to thunder, rain and vegetation are tied to the symbolic lunar and feminine cycle and in many cosmogonies they are related to the moon; in australia the goddess of storms is often portrayed while she sails on a boat which is shaped like a crescent. in ancient times the thunder was connected to the rumblings of the earth’s bowels and only later it becomes the attribute of an irate male patriarchal god (javhé, zeus, etc.). ancient civilisations of all the world have analogous stories describing the origins of the pleiades; it seems that different and distant cultures have created similar motives in a similar and synchronic way, which also reminds us of the coincidence of constellations with climactic changes and seasons. the pleiades are the meeting place in the skies of mythology and science and most earth peoples consider them as centres of divine energy. from time immemorial this group of stars is associated with festivities, rites and solemn ceremonies, especially at midnight on 17 th november when the pleiades reach their culmination, many were the celebrations, in different parts of the world: at busiris in honour of isis; in ancient persia in that night no petition went unheard; druids and celtic goddess’s priestesses led midnight rites and auspices, in connection with the midnight rising of the pleaiades. in the tonga islands seasons run according to the rising and setting of the pleiades in connection to the sea: the matarii i nia, or season of the ‘pleiades above’ begins the night when the stars appear at the horizon, and it lasts as long as the stars stay above the line of the horizon; the matarii i raro, or season of the ‘pleiades below’, begins when they are no more visible after sunset. hindu imagined them as fire, connected to agni (staal 1983), and called their month (octobernovember) kartik, the month of the stars, celebrated in diwali, (or divali, or dibali), the feast of lights, with gratitude and joy for the arrival of the seven sisters marks the beautiful and dry season (waldherr 2006) 5 . according to the mahabharata, the great bear were originally seven rishi, or sages, married with seven sisters called krttika, who happily lived in the northern skies. one day agni, god of fire, emerged from the flames of a yajna (sacred fire ceremony where herbs and incense and petals are offered) performed by the seven rishi and he fell in love with the krttika. trying to forget his love for them, agni roamed in the forest, where he met svaha, the star zeta tauri. svaha, to conquer the god’s love transmuted herself in six of the seven krttika, since the seventh, arundhati, was so devoted to her husband that it was impossible to imitate her. son of this love is skanda, known in tamil as murugan. the rishi believed their wives had betrayed them and so six of the seven krttika were repudiated and fled away, becoming the pleiades. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 in another version of the mythical tale skanda, also called kumara, or subrahmanya, hindu god of war and first-born of siva, was born to eliminate the daemon taraka, who could be killed only by a son of siva. skanda was raised by the six wives of the rishi, the krttika, whence the name karttikeya (“son of the krttika”); he developed six faces to be able to drink the milk of his six wet-nurses. the maori called them matariki, and their rising marks the right moment to sow the crop and to instruct the young in their traditions. the matariki rise before sunrise at the end of may and at the beginning of june, and mark the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. the moment for celebration varies according to the different maori peoples, some celebrate immediately, others wait for the full moon or the dawn of the new moon. there are two possible etymologies of mata-riki, small eyes, or mataariki, god’s eyes; in both cases it means that sacred starry eyes observe and protect the maori from above. in new zealand there have been many attempts to render the matariki an official festivity and in 2001 the commission for the safeguard of maori culture stressed the fact that matariki is a fundamental event to preserve and give value to the different maori languages and traditions. at lewis, in the external hebrides, also the callanish stones circle seems to be connected to the seven sisters 6 . the circle is made of a hard rock, known as “lewisian gneiss”, that can be found almost exclusively in the island itself. a legend says that st. ciaran 7 tried to build a church in the place where the stone circle is situated asking for the help of some giants who refused; the saint transformed them in stones and called them “fir chreig” or “false men”. it is said that at midsummer sunrise the main callanish stone, known as “the shining one”, goes for a walk along the central alley, hailed by the cuckoo’s song. all the callanish could be defined “the shimmering ones”, since their crystalline and silver structure reflects the light in a special way, in particular at dawn and sunset, when the stones, protruding like long fingers pointing at the sun, seem to open a threshold between worlds; and the callanish stand there, the iridescent priestesses and custodians of the door between worlds. moreover and most importantly, the stones are connected to ancient goddess rites, in fact there is an remarkable mountain (called in gaelic 'na mointeach or the old woman of the moors) that forms the profile of a sleeping woman-goddess when viewed from the callanish stone circle. she is now called “sleeping beauty” or “sleeping mother” but the definition that most clearly explains its role in ancient rituals is “sleeping goddess”. here too we can experience the motion of stars and moon since at the major southern standstill of the moon, every 18.6 years (the last event was in 2006), the moon appears to rise out of the goddess’s legs, creep low along her body, silhouetting first one part and then another, hang low over her breasts, and then disappear behind a hillock, only to reappear inside the circle of stones at the foot of the tallest central one and at the head of the burial cairn. this spectacular sight is a perfect blending of magic, astronomy, ritual, landscape and megalithic goddess mythology. connected to the changing of seasons is the first cuckoo’s song that according to celtic folklore saluted the first sunrise of the first midsummer’s day. the cuckoo is considered as an emissary of “tir na nog”, the land of youth, which corresponds to many other worlds of ancient mythology: the greek elysium, the celtic avalon (the reign of the apple), the platonic atlantis, the biblical garden of eden. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 until recent times the “first cuckoo day” was celebrated in all of great britain on the first monday, eight days after easter. another legend says that jesus asked a disciple to fetch him some bread, but the baker refused to prepare it; on the advice of the baker’s wife, her daughter stole a loaf of bread from her father and gave it to jesus, who, as a reward transformed her into the pleiades; the baker became the cuckoo who is said to appear when the constellation shines in the sky. the cuckoo, like the pleiades, symbolises the arrival of spring and its disappearance during the winter months marks the absence of the sun for the northern peoples. many believed that the cuckoo disappeared in the “land of fairies”, or middle world, or became the falcon, solar bird associated to the egyptian god ra, and to the greek apollo. in greek mythology the pleiades are a group of virgins who flee from orion the hunter and are akin to the doves of the rock (péleiádes) into which they transformed in order to fly in the sky 8 . one of the pleiades’ function is that of taking the rejuvenating ambrosia to zeus. in more recent times the dove is emblem of feminine virtues, but in greece it was used to interpret the auguries and prophetise in dodona forest where the goddess dione was adored, successively displaced by zeus (durand 1963) 9 . the oracular responses were emanated listening to and interpreting the rustling of foliage in the oak where doves sacred to the goddess lived. the speaking plank of the ship argo came from a dodona oak 10 . in ancient times the dove was aphrodite’s bird and it was given as a gift to lovers, as a spiritual and sensual love token. some scholars derive the word pleiades from the greek peleiades, ‘flock of doves’, because of their mythological transformation; or from pleos, ‘full’, appropriate for the star cluster, or from pléion, ‘plus’, for they are numerous, like in the biblical kimah or in the arabic al thuruyya, the group 11 ; others think the name derives from or from pléin, to sail, for the heliac rising of the stars in may marked the beginning of the sailing season for the greek and its setting in late autumn (november) indicated its ending. moreover it is possible to connect their name to pleione, the nymph who was atlas’s bride and mother of the seven sisters, thus making pleione the ‘sailing queen’ and her daughters the ‘sailing ones’. the cluster’s conjunction with the sun in spring and opposition in fall marked the start and end of the summer sailing season in ancient greece. in ancient egypt the pleiades were the goddess net or neith, the divine mother or lady of the skies; in china they were the stars of blooming or the head of the white tiger; for the pitjantjatjara they are kungkarungkara, the ancestral women; for the adnyamathanha they are makara, the wives of stars; in japan it is subaru, collected together, or hoki boshi, gouts of paint in the sky, or brush stars; for the south african tribe khoikhoi they are khseti, the stars of rain; for the aztecs tianquiztli, marketplace or meeting place (carrasco 1999; 2002), for the incas it is the sower; the hens and chicks in ancient english and german, in russian, czech and hungarian; for the vikings they are freya’s hens; the greek astronomer eudoxus of cnidus (c. 400-350 bce 12 ) saw them as a true constellation (evans); the ancient paraguayan tribe of the abipones adored them as their ancestresses. in the jewish and in the hindu traditions the pleiades constitutes the central group of sidereal symbolism, they indicate the septenary, that is the image of space, sound and action (mertens 2000). for the celts their disappearance indicated the opening of the coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 threshold between worlds when the living could see and talk to their ancestors: it is all hallows eve, later christianised in all saints’ day (taraglio 1997; cattabiani 2002: 357-58). the seven sister is a very common definition and we find it in the aboriginal story and also in english poetry, from chaucer’s “atlantes doughtres seven” by, to milton’s “seven atlantic sisters” (remindful of the virgil’s “eoæ atlantides”), and keats’ “starry seven, old atlas’s children”. therefore, the antipodean story “where the frost comes from” is full of consonances with all the other myths dealing with the pleiades. in the aboriginal world view this is explained with the concept of songlines (bradley 2010, breen 1989, robinson 1970, ryan 1990, sutton 1988, watson 1989), lines or paths of the songs, that are intimately connected with the electromagnetic lines of the earth that cross and form a web of poetic meaning that also ties us to the cosmos. this because their ‘country’ is a multidimensional reality consisting of animals, peoples, minerals, plants, herbs, waters, earth, sea, air and sky: “if a sea country is an unexpected concept, ‘sky country’ may be even more so. for many people this is where the lightning men and women live, where their dead relations may be living, and where creative beings have travelled and stopped” (bird rose 1996: 8). fred briggs, a ngeamba man from what is now called new south wales describes the link between sky and earth country and the changing of seasons: the star tribes look, among the boughs. those stars are men. there’s nginty, with his dog, who guards the skins of everlasting water in the sky. and there is the crow-man, carrying on his back the wounded hawk-man. there’s kapeetah, the moon-man, sitting in his mia-mia. and there’s those seven sister, travelling across the sky. they make the real cold frost. you hear them when you’re camped out on the plains. they look down from the sky and see your fire and ‘mai, mai, mai,’ they’d sing out as they run across the sky. and, when you wake, you find your swag, the camp, the plains, all white with frost (robinson 970: 25). the events in the sky find consonances and harmonic correspondences with what happens on the earth; the world of the ancestors interweaves with the contemporary time. tracing the steps of their mythical ancestors, aboriginal peoples enter these stories through the telling and the singing in order to re-make the sacredness of their paths and the land they are custodian of. this ancient tradition was also alive for many peoples of ancient europe (gimbutas 1982, adams 1993, rigby 2001). in pre-vedic india (klostermaier 1998) the pleiades were also called the seven mothers of the sky and they were equanimous priestesses of justice. we find this equanimity and detachment in the meamei, who as priestesses of the goddess can accept human devotion and love, even the sexual love of the young berai-berai, but cannot accept to marry them, they need to stay ‘virgin’ that is totally free (bolen 1985). the young men offer them honey (symbol of sexual pleasure and joy), often assimilated to the divine ambrosia that in greek mythology the pleiades give to the child zeus, in a modern coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 patriarchal and androcratic (eisler, 1987) overturning of the ritual offering to the sacred feminine (metterei in nota alla fine for the symbolism of honey and bees see: cattabiani 2000: 49-61; cattabiani 2001: 157-64; chevalier and gheerbrandt 1969). honey is the symbol of feminine sensuality, of the physical and spiritual nourishment given by the goddess. virgil calls it the celestial gift of dew, since dew, like the frost of the aboriginal story indicates initiation, supreme spiritual bliss; it is a sacred contact, refreshing and rejuvenating between the sky and the earth, the god and goddess. for hindus it is soma, the drink of goddesses and gods that renders humans immortal; in the atharva veda (91) it is said: “oh, ashvin, pour on me the bees’ juice, o lords of splendor, so that i can address towards human beings a word full of light” (miller, 1974, 1985; panikkar, 1977; zimmer 1946). the role of honey is always connected to milk and both are gifts of the mother goddess (pattanaik 2000): milk is the essence of the intimacy created between mother and child, honey which can be found in the cavities of trees is, as the upanishad say, the symbol of the heart of things (radhakrishnan, 1952; raphael 1992). milk and honey belong to maternity, while wine is more connected to the dionysian principle. the queen bee represents both the luminous and tenebrous aspects of the goddess. cybele was depicted like a queen-bee (ferrari) because she enclosed her lover in heather, a favourite flower for bees, and also because her priests castrated themselves to become her bridegrooms, like the drone is castrated by the queen-bee after mating. the bee has a luminous aspect, for it travels among flowers following the position of the sun, it produces honey which has the same colour of the sun. for the celts bees are messengers travelling along the paths of sunlight towards the spiritual reigns; they are creatures associated to the knowledge of the future and to spiritual inspiration. symbol of regeneration and epiphany of the goddess of regeneration, according to porphyry, bees were the souls of priestesses who had served aphrodite (or venus) especially in the temple of erice, where she was represented by the honeycomb. according to bachofen (1988), the life of bees represents a gynaecocracy in its clearest and purest configuration: every hive has its queen; she is mother of the whole progeny, then there are the male drones, involved only in reproduction. therefore the bee appears like a representation of the natural feminine power, of terrestrial matter and of the laboriousness that artistically creates things. thence the importance of honey and its connection with maternity in different cultures: according to heraclides, the women of siracusa used to prepare bread with honey that had the form of female genitalia; indian women used to sprinkle honey on the genitals of the bride in occasion of her wedding; in germany the flower of melissa was called herb-mother and was considered particularly effective to cure the problems of the feminine genitalia; melissae, or bees, were the priestesses of the goddess artemis in the ephesus temple; they were accompanied in the ceremonies and rituals by eunuch priests called essenes, or drones (walker 1983; 1988: 414 and 488). the symbolism involving honey is subtle, complex and articulated. water can be blended with honey before consuming it and this is one of the reasons of its sacredness: it perfectly represents the marriage between dry and moist. honey often appears in myths as an alimentary metaphor for sexuality and being greedy for honey, like the meamei appear to be, corresponds on the nutritive plane to a great sexual desire, and may be the myth also indicates this meaning and is connected to and evokes the sacred sexuality of the goddess’s priestesses, who were totally free from marital ties, that is they were ‘virgin’ in the original sense (bolen 1985). also in italy there are young women who are ‘mad for honey’ and the ‘honeymoon’ is a happy period, associated with an intense and coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 joyous sexual activity. in primordial times, when a stable union between the dry and moist principles (or the sky and earth) governed the planet, human beings could count on an infinite supply of ‘honey’. honey, together with wine, is also used as an intoxicating and ecstatic substance, it is a ‘divine filter’ that had the faculty to reanimate, give enthusiasm and sexual power, warmth, and immortality. for the ancient peoples the process of wine production or whiskey or hydromel was so mysterious and the final product so sacred (like any other substance that could induce modified states of consciousness) that every phase was always preceded and accompanied with sacred rituals. for the ancients the fermentation process was similar to the spiritual transformation taking place during an initiation ceremony; fermentation seems to be a specular image of the transformation occurring in the participants to the sacred mysteries. for this reason alcohol is also called ‘spirit’. in different traditions a state of inebriation allowed the transition, it bridged the ecstatic conscience of the participant across the threshold between worlds (abraham; ferraro; gimbutas; markale). thus, the death of the young berai-berai in their pining love corresponds to this passage: it is the yearning of the human soul for the disembodied state, represented by the sister who have been transmuted into stars; in the end the young men join them, thanks to their intense devotion and love for the feminine principle. this sacred bond is contaminated by the attempt to rape two of the sisters by the old wurrunnah. the rape of young beautiful women/priestesses on the part of elderly ‘gods’ is often represented in myths and it represents the attempt on the part of ‘dominator’ or ‘androcratic’ (eilser 1987) religions to disparage, debase and vilify through physical violence the divine feminine power of ancient goddess priestesses. wurrunnah, like agni, tries to ‘heat’ the icicles of frost of the two sisters he kidnapped, succeeding only in extinguishing his own fire. like in tantra or tao, the heat and power of sacred sexuality can be activated only by the feminine principle, otherwise true initiation cannot happen. the true union is accomplished only through and in the physical body, in the sidereal and partnership conjunction of male and female, sky and earth. the frost composing the bodies of the seven sisters indicates the crystalline purity and energy of purifying water. stars and crystals are a concentration of celestial fire that has ‘crystallised’ in visible light, in extremely high temperatures and in unimaginable and remote times. frost too is in consonance with this cosmic harmony; it shows maximum purity and unity in its every molecule and atom, a mirable perfection that can reflect the purest white light. this scintillating beauty bedazzles human beings that feel ecstatic and in awe at the same time. like the sunflowers (heliantus annus), affable and smiling giants, turn towards the sun and are inundated and intoxicated with light, so the berai-berai carry honey and dance in their nightly ceremonies for the meamei, who correspond and sing in gratitude for the brothers, thus reawakening in us the memory, yearning and nostalgia for our stellar existence – crystal light and heartfelt welcome. antonella riem natale is full professor of english literature and language, former dean of the faculty of modern languages, university of udine, president of the italian conference of foreign languages, president of all (http://all.uniud.it). she is the founder of the partnership studies group (http://all.uniud.it/?page_id=195), editor in chief of the series all (udine, forum: http://www.forumeditrice.it/percorsi/lingua-ecoolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 letteratura/all) and of the online journal on the literatures in english le simplegadi http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi. she coordinates internationally and nationally funded research projects on the partnership model in the literatures in english: http://www.sciencesystemfvg.it/index.php?page=ricadute&id=72&open=2009#vedi_co ntenuto former member of the easa board, she promotes and coordinates cultural events and international conferences on the literatures in english. among her significant monographic studies and collections of essays: the art of partnership. essays on literature, culture, language and education towards a cooperative paradigm (udine: forum, 2003), the one life: coleridge and hinduism (jaipur: rawat 2005), the goddess awakened. partnership studies in literatures, language and education (udine: forum, 2007) and partnership id-entities: cultural and literary reinscription/s of the feminine (udine: forum, 2010). for the all series , riane eisler’s the chalice and the blade (udine: forum, 2011) and sacred pleasure (udine, forum 2012) were published in italian, with a special prologue by eisler (http://www.forumeditrice.it/percorsi/lingua-e-letteratura/all/?text=all-english). at the moment she is working on a volume on the figure of the goddess in the literatures in english, both within the ‘canon’ and indigenous ‘minorities’. works cited abraham, k. psicoanalisi del mito. roma: newton compton, 1971. adams, carol, ed. ecofeminism and the sacred. new york: continuum, 1993. bachofen, j.j. myth, religion, and mother-right [1967, original ed: das mutterrecht, 1861]. ed. ralph manheim. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. bell, diane. daughters of the dreaming. melbourne: mcphee gribble, 1983. bird rose, deborah. nourishing terrains. australian aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness. canberra: australian heritage commission, 1996. bolen, jean shinoda. goddesses in everywoman. a new psychology of women. new york: harpercollins, 1985. bradley, john and yanyuwa families. singing saltwater country: journey to the songlines of carpentaria. crows nest, allen and unwin, 2010. breen, m. ed. our place, our music, aboriginal music: australian popular music in perspective. volume 2. canberra: aboriginal studies press, 1989. capra, fritjof. the web of life. new york: doubleday,1997. carrasco david. aztec ceremonial landscapes. boulder: university press of colorado, 1999. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 carrasco david and eduardo matos moctezuma. moctezuma’s mexico. boulder: university press of colorado, 2002. cattabiani, alfredo. lunario. milano: mondatori, 2002. cattabiani, alfredo. planetario. simboli, miti e misteri di astri, pianeti e costellazioni. milano: mondadori, 1998. cattabiani, alfredo. volario. milano: mondadori, 2000. cattabiani, alfredo. zoario. milano: mondadori, 2001. chevalier, jean & gheerbrandt alain. eds. dictionnaire des symboles. paris: editions jupiter, 1969. cowan, james. mysteries of the dreaming. bridport: prism press, 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encyclopaedia of hinduism. london: oneworld, 1998. langloh parker, katie. australian legendary tales: folklore of the noongahburrahs as told to the piccannies. introduction by andrew lang. london: david butt; melbourne: melville, mullen & slade, 1898. langloh parker, katie. the euahlay tribe: a study of aboriginal life in australia. london: constable, 1905. langloh parker, katie. more australian legendary tales. collected from various tribes by katie langloh parker. london: david nutt; melbourne: melville, mullen & slade, 1898. langloh parker, katie. woggheeguy: australian aboriginal legends. adelaide: hassel, 1918. langloh parker, katie. “murgah muggui” in lambert johanna ed. wise women of the dreamtime. aboriginal tales of the ancestral powers. vermont: rochester, 1993, 5460. harding, m. esther. woman’s mysteries. a psychological interpretation of the feminine principle as portrayed in myth, story and dreams. new york: harper & row, 1971. hodge, bob & vijay, mishra. dark side of the dream. sydney: allen & unwin, 1991. miur marcia. ed. my bush book: katie langloh parker’s 1890’s story of the outback station life. sydney: rigby publishers, 1982. march, jenny. dictionary of classical mythology. london: cassel, 1998. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 markale, j. il druidismo religione e divinità dei celti. roma: mediterranee, 1991. mertens stienon m. l’occultisme du zodiaque. paris: adyar, 2000 [1st ed: 1939]. miller, j. the vedas: harmony, meditation and fulfilment. london: rider, 1974. miller, j. the vision of cosmic order in the vedas. london: routledge & kegan paul, 1985. muir marcie. ed. my bush biography: katie langloh parker’s 1890’s story of the outback station life. sydney: rigby, 1982. homer. the iliad. ed. peter jones. harmondsworth: penguin, 2003. homer. the odyssey. ed. bernard knox, translated by robert fagles. harmondsworth: penguin, 1997. panikkar, raimundo. the vedic experience. pondicherry: all india books, 1977. panikkar, raymon. lo spirito della parola. torino: bollati boringhieri, 2007. pattanaik, devadutt. devi the mother-goddess. an introduction. mumbai: vakis, feffer & simons, 2000. radhakrishnan, s. the principal upanishads. london: allen & unwin, 1952. raphael. ed. cinque upanishad. isa – kaivalya – sarvasara – amrtabindu – arharvasira. roma: ashram vidya, 1992. riem natale antonella. (2003) woman and sacred partnership in tales of the aboriginal dreamtime: “goonur the woman doctor”. the art of partnership. eds. antonella riem natale and roberto albarea. udine: forum, 47-65. riem natale antonella and albarea roberto (2003) the art of partnership. essays on literature, culture, language and education towards a cooperative paradigm. udine: forum. riem natale, antonella. “literary studies, postcolonial criticism and the partnership model”. the atlantic literary review. 4 (1-2) 2003a, 176-95. riem natale, antonella. “woman and sacred partnership in tales of the aboriginal dreamtime: ‘goonur the woman doctor’”. the art of partnership. eds. antonella riem natale and roberto albarea, 2003b, 47-65. riem natale, antonella. “partnership and literary research: a hypothesis for postcolonial criticism”. postcolonial subjects. canadian and australian perspectives. ed. miroslawa buchholtz. toruń: nicolaus copernicus university, 2004, 11-28. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 riem natale, antonella. “geografie, miti e percorsi della sapienza femminile: macbeth, baumgartner’s bombay, charades e goonur, the woman doctor”. attraversamenti. generi, saperi, geografie nella scrittura delle donne. ed. marisa sestito. udine: forum, 2006, 157-75. riem natale, antonella. “pluriversi e relazioni di partnership in ‘the wagtail and the rainbow’, una storia tradizionale aborigena”. oltreoceano. 1, 2007a, 177-82. riem natale, antonella. “il linguaggio dipinto” multiverso, 4, 2007b, 24-5. riem natale antonella, camaiora luisa, dolce maria renata. eds. the goddess awakened: partnership studies in education and world literatures in english. udine: forum, 2007. riem natale, antonella, luisa camaiora, renata maria dolce and stefano mercanti. eds. partnership id-entities. cultural and literary reinscriptions of the feminne. udine: forum, 2010. rigby, kate. the goddess returns. ecofeminist reconfigurations of gender, nature and the sacred. feminist poetics of the sacred. eds. devlin-glass, frances and lyn mccreddon, 2001. robinson, roland. altjeringa and other aboriginal poems. sydney: a.h. & a.w. reed, 1970. roy, jean-rené. “comments on the astronomical alignments at callanish, lewis”. the journal of the royal astronomical society of canada. 74, 1 (february: 1-9) 1980, 1-9. ryan, judith. spirit in land: bark paintings from arnhem land. victoria: national gallery of victoria, 1990. staal, j. f. agni: the vedic ritual of the fire altar. 2 vols. berkeley: university of california press, 1983. taraglio, riccardo. il vischio e la quercia. spiritualità celtica nell’europa druidica. grignasco (no): edizioni età dell’acquario, 1997. tilak, b.g. orion or researches into the antiquity of the veda. poona: tilak brothers, 1955 [1st ed. bombay: sagoon, 1893]. stanner, w. white man got no dreaming. canberra: australian national university press, 1979. sutton, p. ‘dreamings’. dreamings; the art of aboriginal australia and islander australia today. canberra: aboriginal studies press, 1988. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 waldherr, kris. the book of goddesses. a celebration of the divine feminine. new york: harry n. abrams, 2006. walker, barbara. the woman’s encyclopaedia of myths and secrets. san francisco: harper & row, 1983. walker, barbara. the woman’s dictionary of symbols and sacred objects. san francisco: harper & row, 1988. watson, helen. singing the land, signing the land. geelong: deakin university press, 1989. zimmer, heinrich. myths and symbols in indian art and civilization. new jersey: princeton university press, for the bollingen foundation, 1946. 1 for the psg: http://all.uniud.it/?page_id=195; for the book series: http://www.forumeditrice.it/percorsi/lingua-e-letteratura/all/?text=all-english. see also riem and albarea 2003, riem 2004, 2007b, riem et al. 2003, 2007, 2010. 2 riane eisler (1987, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2007) is a social scientist, attorney, and author whose work on cultural transformation has inspired both scholars and social activists. her research has impacted many fields, including history, economics, psychology, sociology, and education. she has been a leader in the movement for peace, sustainability, and economic equity, and her pioneering work in human rights has expanded the focus of international organizations to include the rights of women and children. riane eisler was born in vienna, fled from the nazis with her parents to cuba, and later emigrated to the united states. eisler is the only woman among 20 great thinkers including hegel, adam smith, marx, and toynbee selected for inclusion in macrohistory and macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. she has received many honours and is included in the award-winning book great peacemakers as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with mahatma gandhi, mother teresa, and martin luther king. see: http://www.rianeeisler.com/ and http://www.partnershipway.org/; see also: http://www.forumeditrice.it/percorsi/lingua-e-letteratura/all/ilcalice-e-la-spada/il-calice-e-la-spada/libro_view. 3 the version of the story used here is that collected by katie langloh parker in 1898. katie langloh parker was saved from drowning by an aboriginal girl and from then onwards kate took a deep interest in aboriginal culture. aboriginal women trusted her, thinking she was a curious and respectful friend; for this reason she was among the first among the whites to be able to hear and transmit in particular aboriginal women’s sacred and secret stories, that would have never been told to white male anthropologists as they were often secret even to aboriginal men of their tribes. johanna lambert (1993) collected, commented and published some of the stories transcribed by langloh parker, like the story “where the frost comes from” (44-50) which i use here. for the analysis of other stories from lambert’s coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 volume see: riem 2003a-b-c, 2006, 2007a. some other works by katie langloh parker 1905, 1896, 1918; on her life: muir 1982. 4 on the dreamtime see also: cowan 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994 (with a good bibliography on anthropological studies); on the‘feminine’ dreamtime see: bell 1983. 5 according to other traditions, divali is also the triune goddess’s festival: she is represented by sarasvati, brama’s sakti, laksmi, visnu’s sakti and kali, siva’s sakti. see on the subject: waldherr 2006. 6 for a discussion on astronomical alignments see: roy 1980, hawkins 1965. 7 christianity reached ireland some years before saint patrick and it is said that ciaran is one of the first irish saints. of royal birth, he was born on the island of clear, in the south of ireland. he had a special affinity with animals and the legend tells that he ciaran prayed for a little bird taken from its nest by a falcon. the falcon let the little bird that immediately revived at ciaran’s feet. after studying in rome, where he became bishop, ciaran choose the life of a hermit in the irish midlands, where animals were his only companions; it is said that a wild boar helped the saint to build a shelter for himself. ciaran later founded the monastery of saigher; he was a sort of shaman priest and could carry on miraculous healings and also throw spells: he showed his disapproval to king alill rendering him mute for a whole week. 8 the pleiades had the following epithets: atlantiades, as atlas’s daughters, and vergiliae, maybe from the latin. vergo, decline, swoop. among the many works where the pleiades are mentioned, we remember hesiod’s works, the fables and poeticon astronomicon by d. c. hyginus; the phenomena by aratus and the fasti by ovid. 9 according to durand, the dove is venus’s bird, and it is often found in ctonic and sexual contexts; at the same time it is the holy spirit, the mother of the word or sophia. in christian mythology the sexual role of the dove is totally sublimated. 10 see: homer, iliad 16.233-5, odissey 14.327-8; erodotus 2.55; apollonius of rhodi, argonautics 1.527; pausanias, description of greece, 8.23.5, 10.12.10. see: graves, march. 11 cattabiani, 1998: 63-66; on p. 65: “in realtà le sette sorelle […] sono oltre novecento, se ne vedono col binocolo alcune decine, ma a occhio nudo sei o al massimo sette […]”. “in reality the seven sisters […] are more than nine hundred; you can see some dickers with a binocular, but only six or maximum seven with the naked eye.” (my translation). 12 see stefano mercanti’s partnership glossary : http://www.partnershipway.org/aboutcps/foundational-concepts/the-challenge-oflanguage/sacred%20pleasure%20glossary%201oct.pdf/view: “bce: in order to promote partnership values, “bce,” “before the common era,” is used instead of the patronizing “bc” to respect all the world’s spiritual and religious beliefs. the same is true for “ce,” “common era,” instead of “ad.” microsoft word 9conway coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 what is happening is real janie conway-herron abstract: australia’s history parallels the movement of modernity towards neo-colonial enterprises encapsulated in globalisation, while australian identity lends itself to the fragmentation inherent in the conflicting discourses of national identification that make up its history. the psychology derived from this is startlingly apparent in our more recent history as we battle to come to terms with new and insidious incursions into indigenous human rights. the bicentenary year gave australia an opportunity to highlight the “coming of age” that emerged from being mature enough to admit that white australia has a black history. a tension between a utopian notion held by some that the celebrations marked a time when australia had reached a coming of age and others who were ambivalent about the nature of the celebrations has led to a reevaluation of australian ideas of nationhood. what is happening is real is an exploration of the tensions that gave rise to a continuing engagement in the ongoing challenges that 1988 presented to all australians. keywords: australian identity; indigenous human rights; cultural challenges on september 23rd 2009, patrick dodson, in his address at the opening of the indigenous policy dialogue and research unit at the university of nsw, discussed the need for a new national dialogue in australia that incorporated ritual and ceremony as a way of recognising indigenous people. he referred to prime minister rudd’s desire to ‘turn the page’ on the national narrative. for pat dodson it is not a matter of turning the page but of writing a trilogy. the first volume would focus on the occupation and use of the land by aboriginal people, beginning with their creation stories and tracing the thousands of years that aboriginal people have walked in their own country. the second book would describe two centuries of colonial engagement, dispute and conflict between people over occupation. the third book would focus on the social, economic and environmental concerns of australia; it would be a tale of taking up the challenge of a global economy and environmental sustainability and, at the same time, involve australians in regional reconstruction where standards of health and education would be equal for all. he described how the indigenous policy dialogue and research unit copyright©2011 janie conway-herron. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 aimed to construct a new national framework with a philosophical underpinning that would guide the development of a just relationship between indigenous and nonindigenous australians. the utopian trope that dodson’s literary metaphor of the trilogy provides, combined with the framework for creating a national dialogue that takes into account indigenous spirituality and creation stories, acknowledges that white australia has a black history and looks to a future where indigenous and non-indigenous australians engage in equal dialogue, is a compelling one. as i listened to patrick dodson speak, i began to feel the kind of hope that had not been in my heart for a long time. maryrose casey describes events such as the 1988 bicentenary celebrations and the 2000 ‘people’s walk for reconciliation’ as being moments ‘where australians performed their “values” and identity on national and international stages’ (2006, p 137). in this article i will explore the ways such events as these have provided an opportunity for the kind of dialogue i imagine dodson might be referring to in his speech. i will also draw on my personal experiences and involvement in reconciliation as a member of the rock against racism in the 1980s and my continuing engagement with issues of race and human rights over the last four decades to give a personal perspective of my involvement in the dialogue for indigenous rights in contemporary australia. as a musician in melbourne in 1979 i helped organise some gigs for two aboriginal bands, no fixed address and us mob, who had come over to melbourne from adelaide. the resulting friendship with these bands gave greater clarity to my awareness of indigenous australian life and my involvement in the growing movement for aboriginal land rights in australia. in 1980, after moving from melbourne to sydney, i became involved with the rock against racism movement. this was an inspirational time for me bringing my creativity and my ethical beliefs together in an exciting and empowering way. from 1980 to 1985 rock against racism concerts flourished in australia. styled after the movement of the same name in britain, large concerts were held in sydney, melbourne and brisbane, raising funds for particular causes as well as awareness of racism, and providing audiences for aboriginal bands such as no fixed address, us mob, black lace and coloured stone. in order to bring these issues to an international arena we contacted musicians like the clash, stevie wonder and ub40 when they toured australia. these meetings occasioned some memorable moments when these bands used their popularity to show their support for aboriginal australia. when the clash played at the capitol theatre in sydney they draped aboriginal flags over all the amplifiers. activist gary foley addressed the audience in a rousing political rap while the clash backed him up with a tough reggae beat, blending the brixton elements of the british rock against racism movement with specific australian concerns. * * * if we can survive, anyone can survive. and i think the way we carry through, particularly in this difficult social area, will determine the ‘grownup-ness’ of australians and the way australians as a people are capable of meeting the future (wilmot e. 1988, p 11). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 in the quote above, eric wilmot refers to the potential for australia’s bicentenary year, to highlight a coming of age; of being mature enough to admit we have a black history. this maturity is in a continuing state of evolution where the waxing and waning of ethical positioning on indigenous issues by contesting political parties has a long history that repeats itself in events that casey describes as holding ‘a powerful place in the social imaginary through the translation of events into the social memory as performative acts’ (op. cit., 2006, p 137) nations are ‘contested systems of cultural representation that limit and legitimise people’s access to the resources of the nation state’ (ibid, p 353). the lie of terra nullius enabled captain phillip and the officers of the first fleet to go against their own sovereign laws to draw up treaties with the indigenous peoples they encountered and to simply claim the lands they found for the british. the survival of aboriginal australians and the way they give voice to this survival is a constant reminder that this country was not a land without people in 1788 and is therefore to this day an occupied country. the declaration of terra nullius participates in this contested legitimisation of an imperial project that has been built on a denial of the existence of indigenous peoples. in her examination of global colonial practices annie mcclintock writes: nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind but are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed. nationalism becomes as a result, radically constitutive of people’s identities through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered (1995, p 352). this tension between historical practice and social difference is very apparent when examining the historical reinventions of january 26, 1788, the day the first fleet landed at sydney cove. while celebrated annually as the beginning of the nation we now call australia, it also marks the first day of a progressive invasion of aboriginal peoples. firstly the cadigal, wallamatagul, bidjigal and camaraigal peoples of the immediate area of what we now call sydney cove, then spreading further north, west and south, overwhelming other aboriginal nations everywhere they went. over the following two centuries this strategy of invasion and settlement was repeated throughout australia. for many, an awareness of this was anything but settling and in the build-up to the bicentennial year we struggled to find a way to express our discontent with the celebratory elements that this recognition of australia as a nation entailed. mcclintock describes the way any celebration of nation is achieved through a ‘capacity to organise a sense of popular collective unity through the management of mass national commodity spectacle’ (ibid, p 374). the collective engagement expressed in the moment of belonging to a nation’s beginnings is enabled through the denial and silencing of other narratives of nation that might contradict the sense of popular, collective unity that is the purpose of such celebration. questions of whose nation and whose stories of nation become integral, as well as contradictory to, that sense of unity. in 1888 the first centennial celebrations were held and a boycott of the celebrations by indigenous peoples went almost unnoticed by mainstream australia. by 1938 though, aboriginal people were becoming more organised in their political activities and in their preparation for the 150th anniversary of british arrival at sydney cove. the aborigines progress association declared the 26th of january a day of mourning and protest and a coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 conference was organised in sydney. anita heiss writes about the event being moved to the australia hall in elizabeth street after they had been refused use of the sydney town hall: the meeting was the first aboriginal civil rights gathering and was a major step towards redressing the wrongs of history against aboriginal people. it attracted some 1000 aboriginal men and women and was the culmination of ten years of action by aboriginal people against the policies of the nsw aborigines protection board (barani, history of sydney city, online). the success of the day of mourning and protest was offset by the awful contrast of the re-enactment. unable to get any aboriginal organisations in sydney to participate, aboriginal people had been brought in from outside of sydney. the aboriginal visitors were locked up in the redfern police barracks and members of the aboriginal community were not allowed to meet with them. after the official re-enactment the visiting group took part in a float parade along macquarie street. in 1967 a referendum provided a further catalyst for contemporary debates about the rights of aboriginal australians by changing two clauses in the australian constitution that improved the legal status of aboriginal people. one removed the need to make special laws for indigenous australians enabling ‘the commonwealth government to legislate in relation to aboriginal people’ (casey m. 2006, p 146) and the other making them part of the census collection and thus counting them as citizens of australia. this has become a turning point in the history of indigenous human rights, one that is emblematic of the acceptance of indigenous australians as citizens in their own country. but the optimism attached to the change in the constitution was short lived as the government of the day did not enact any legislative change that made a difference to the living conditions of the majority of indigenous australians. arguments continue to this day around the performative notion of goodwill as a ‘salve to white conscience’ (ibid, p 148) contrasted with the failure of successive australian governments to enact legislation that has benefitted indigenous australians in any tangible way. the tensions that arise between an indigenous need for social and political change and non indigenous australian notions of reconciliation as an expression of goodwill have continued to be exacerbated over time. a well-meaning non-indigenous performing of reconciliation where a show of goodwill is seen as a primary act of reconciliation stands in sharp contrast to the hopes of indigenous communities living the harsh realities of what it means to be aboriginal australian and their need for more concrete ‘social and political change brought about through legislative change’ (casey, m. 2006, p 146). this kind of paradox is epitomised by a common phrase i heard used by blackfellas in rock against racism back in the 1980s. when describing those whose commitment they thought was only skin-deep they would call them the “i’m alright, i’ve got the tshirt” brigade. the bicentenary celebrations of 1988 were fraught with such paradoxical concerns. even the bicentennial theme ‘living together’ with its gesture towards diversity and acknowledgement of difference begged the question of, ‘how’. the build-up to 1988 was steeped in debate about whether or not to celebrate, but what became obvious was that a visible and dissenting presence was still needed to counteract a mindless and uneducated celebration of an innocent, white australian history. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 how can we non-indigenous australians justify our continuous presence and our love for this country while the indigenous people remain dispossessed and their history unacknowledged (read, p. 2000, p1)? these words from peter read epitomise a central question that many non-indigenous peoples were asking in the lead up to 1988. to celebrate or not was also the question they asked. the debate that ensued revolved around two equally defining rubrics for january 26: invasion day and survival day. the notion of invasion turned the erstwhile celebration on its head by speaking directly to white australia and saying, this day you celebrate is contingent on the systematic invasion and genocide of indigenous peoples, while the notion of survival enabled indigenous australia to celebrate their endurance in the wake of the same systematic invasion and genocide. in addition the grief entailed in both invasion and survival made the declaration of 1988 as a year of mourning an equally defining aspect of indigenous expression. as graeme turner suggests, a project that attempts to ‘celebrate a nation which is united but diverse, on a day which is the moment of both settlement and invasion, through rhetoric which foregrounds difference and reconciliation over uniformity and assimilation’ (1994, p 70) involves a complex exercise in public relations. in the lead-up to 1988 the australian bicentenary authority’s ‘celebration of a nation’ theme relied on a collective nationalist spectacle that would make the nation visible; the waving of flags, the singing of anthems, the overt display of uniforms, logos and the organisation of what mcclintock terms ‘fetish spectacle’ (op.cit., p 374) alongside an array of other events that were designed to be representative of the layers of diverse culture brought about by progressive migrations to australia over the last 200 years. in a forum aired on the abc in 1985 and chaired by michael mansell, the focus was on the question, ‘is there anything to celebrate?’ a number of noted speakers gave diverse answers. pat dodson and the late neville bonner talked about the way that prior to 1788 indigenous people owned what we now call australia and called for 1988 to be a time when unceded sovereignty of the country by aboriginal people could be recognised. ‘aboriginal people have nothing to celebrate,’ gary foley declared, going on to discuss the way that in the ten years prior to 1988, numerous aboriginal groups had established contact with sympathetic groups overseas and started campaigning for international consciousness raising. as a member of rock against racism he had experienced the powerful feeling that comes from an international movement for change. ‘we are no longer the little isolated group we were in 1972,’ he proclaimed, then went on to predict that in1988 there was ‘going to be numerous progressive supporters throughout the western world’ marching alongside the ‘supporters of aboriginal people, progressive people within the australian community’ (foley in kavanagh, 1985). the organisation of indigenous events for 1988 produced an enormous cross– fertilisation of cultures and peoples all concerned that indigenous issues would be highlighted during 1988. the ‘long march for freedom justice and hope’ was to be an alternative celebration to mainstream bicentenary events. the build-up to the march was marked by a groundswell of support that grew exponentially as the dissemination of information about the importance of the event gathered momentum. through the resources of a combined network of people, from a broad spectrum of cultures, many alternative events began to take shape. the resources needed were enormous, but there was tremendous impetus borne out of an optimism that was epitomised in the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 possibilities promised in the three words, freedom, justice and hope. more than 20,000 indigenous australians, plus approximately 20,000 or more supporters from all over australia and from overseas took part in the march. the empathy and support for indigenous australians was absolutely evident in the sight of so many aboriginal participants gathering first in the redfern oval for ceremony, painting up and then marching to belmore park near central station where they were met by their supporters who marched with them to hyde park for an afternoon of speeches and entertainment. the sense of empowerment and the sheer joy of visibility were incredible to experience. the march could have been overwhelmed by the mainstream celebrations but the groundswell around the bicentennial protest ensured that a display of nationalist unity was well undermined. as gary foley writes ‘the aboriginal storm clouds that gathered’ made it ‘apparent that the major divisive issue … was to be the contest of spirit with the large numbers of kooris expected in sydney from all over the country’ (foley g. 1997, kooriweb, online). on the morning of january 27, 1988, gallarrwuy yunupingu, at the end of an all night ceremony at kurnell point, stood, arms akimbo, on the shores of botany bay and yelled, ‘what is happening is real,’ over and over again to the crowd making their way home. as i reluctantly walked up the hill away from the events i had just been involved in, i translated his plea about the reality of what we had just experienced, as being a reminder that the ceremony was just as real as any whitefella ritual we may have put our faith in. in my novel beneath the grace of clouds (2010) i have struggled to articulate this difference, this space between indigenous and non-indigenous realities, from my own point of view as a non-indigenous person who has had the privilege of close contact with aboriginal australians and my novel includes my experiences of that night, which, however difficult to express, were nonetheless real to me. over the years following 1988 the alternative celebrations to australia day have grown in strength. in january 1992 the first survival day concert featuring aboriginal bands and other supportive musicians was held at la perouse. the concerts became so popular that they had to be moved to waverley oval, bondi. then the 1997 release of the “bringing them home: the ‘stolen children’ report” from the national inquiry into the forcible removal of aboriginal and torres straight islander children from their parents, brought growing pressure on the howard government to say sorry to the stolen generation and to all those who had been affected by these policies. but, to no avail. things began to backslide once again. in 2000 the optimism generated by the new millennium brought more than a quarter of a million people to a march across the sydney harbour bridge in support and recognition of indigenous australia and reconciliation. the walk, led by aboriginal elders was a celebration of the national foundation for reconciliation and many other parallel marches were held in different regions around the country. the australians for native title and reconciliation’s organisation of the numerous sea of hands events that took place around the country also drew a lot of support. more than two-hundred-and-fifty thousand people signed their names on the back of plastic hands as a sign of support for both native title and reconciliation. * * * coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 the recent howard government’s take over of nt indigenous communities demonstrates the fundamental importance of a formal process that enshrines indigenous people and their ancient cultures into australian nation building, especially in the constitution (dodson p. 2007, p 21). in february 2007, i was invited to the thai/burma border to work with burmese women refugees to run writing workshops that would help them to tell their stories. these were collected and published in the anthology, burma women’s voices for hope (2007). women from a broad range of burmese ethnic groups attended the workshops. they wanted to write about what had happened to them under the jurisdiction of the burmese junta, who have waged a long war on their own people. it was my brief to help them. together we moved from difficult telling, to a type of writing that enabled the women to describe the visceral details of their stories. many had risked their lives going over the border to collect statistics on human rights abuses, now they were describing the details in a more in-depth way. the stories they wrote about rape and violence and abuse by the state are hard to comprehend for those of us not in the grip of a military regime. one affect of my involvement in their stories was to make me eternally grateful for my home in australia, so grateful, that in june 2007 when the military intervention into the lives of the northern territory remote aboriginal communities was announced by john howard and his minister for indigenous affairs, mal brough, i separated the two concepts, military intervention and aboriginal communities, into two different stories, thinking that there had been an intervention in some other country and there were some separate problems within remote communities. internal politics of the likes of burma did not happen in australia. but in the workshops i had also told the burmese women about what had happened to indigenous people in australia and watched their eyes widen in surprise and horror and then their mouths tighten in defensive anger? when the two concepts came together and i realised that military intervention was happening in australia to aboriginal people, anger and disbelief shot through me like a volcano. but it was also a wake-up call, i had lost my sense of vigilance around these issues, like my indigenous friends had so often pointed out, i had walked away from them because i could. but i was angry in that moment and frustrated that it had finally come to something like this, but as marcia langton and many others have said about the intervention, it has been obvious for decades that something needed to be done. but something like this? as patrick dodson writes: the tragedy of the howard government’s eleven-year hold on power is that indigenous policy has focused on destroying the potential for this nation to respect and nurture the cultural renaissance of traditional indigenous society. … the howard government’s intervention in the northern territory highlights the perennial crises that engulf this nation over its relationship with indigenous people (dodson p. 2007, pp 22 & 27). with a world focus on war, terrorism and global economic policies plus the rise of a new global conservatism, indigenous issues the world over have lost visibility once more. lorraine johnson riordan asks of the decolonising race struggles that address new forces of empire and globalisation: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 can postcolonial movements seeking to hold onto the unique position of difference of first nation peoples effectively negotiate with the state in the face of this latest imperial push to assimilation? does a raceless ‘rainbow coalition’ characterize (post) empire or cover over an assertion of white hegemony – indeed, white terror in new guises’ (2005, p 13)? since the advent of september eleven, the whole language of military intervention has contributed to a breaking down of the boundaries between civilian and military sectors of society adopting a crisis management rhetoric that too easily overrides notions of civil liberties. to enact military intervention requires a need to declare a national emergency. john sanderson in discussing the failure of neo-liberal globalisation sees ‘reconciliation as the foundation of all successful strategies’ and, ‘[e]nforcement as not’ (2007, p 35). he points out that any attempt at involving the military in assisting indigenous people has to be in the spirit of reconciliation. and i agree. what is wrong with the intervention is not that something is finally being done about the appalling living conditions for indigenous people in the nt, but what sort of action is being taken and the way it is being carried out. in an act of ultimate irony the federal government finally passed the 2007 northern territory national emergency response bill to supposedly do something about what they saw had become a state of emergency. the declaration of a state of emergency allowed for extraordinary measures to be taken. a team of doctors was sent in to do health checks on aboriginal communities. as professor larissa behrendt writes, it was a ‘text book example of why government policies continue to fail aboriginal people’. she describes the ‘spurious links to improving school attendance’ (2009, online) by quarantining welfare payments. this measure has done little to improve living standards for aboriginal people. as many indigenous australians attest to, a plastic card that will not work until its activated or where people have to travel two hundred kilometres to find a store that will take them, is not protecting anyone let alone the sacredness of children. while acknowledging that abuse and alcohol related violence is going on in aboriginal communities it is important to go back to the second volume of australian history that patrick dodson would have us write and acknowledge that more than two hundred years history of white on black violence has generated a particular set of experiences that are part of generational historical circumstances for all indigenous australians. it is also important to understand that even in contemporary times sexual abuse of indigenous women and children is often perpetrated by people outside of aboriginal communities. anyone who has watched warwick thornton’s awardwinning movie samson and delilah (2009) will have an idea of what i am talking about. in december 2007 when kevin rudd was sworn in as prime minister, hope for true dialogue between indigenous and non-indigenous australia returned. the flames of this hope were fanned in november 2009 when he took the step that howard could not and said sorry to the stolen generations. but the rhetoric of supposedly benign military intervention continues against a background of heartbreaking statistics on aboriginal people’s health, incarceration and general living conditions, while the rhetoric around the intervention policies seem to do little but further demonise indigenous australians. on february 13, 2010, a march was organised to mark the second anniversary of the apology where kevin rudd committed the government to ‘a future where this parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again’ (cited coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 in stop the intervention, online, 2010). the march from la perouse to redfern was organised by the stop the intervention collective of sydney and also served as a ‘walk against racism’. a statement from the group reads: racism is not a special measure. the demonisation of aboriginal people at the core of intervention is leading to increased racism across australia. indigenous incarceration rates have risen 10% in the past year. juvenile detention now stands at 30 times the national average. aboriginal organisations everywhere face aggressive mainstreaming. turning around the unacceptable disadvantage facing aboriginal people requires massive increases in resourcing of community controlled organisations – not mere racist laws. no more broken promises; it’s time to break the intervention (ibid). if we are to enact patrick dodson’s notion of a national framework that involves a just relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous australians then we need a dialogue that involves listening to indigenous people. like that night at kurnell point when the tables were turned and aboriginal people performed rituals to vanquish the spirits trapped by the violence of australia’s past, we need to understand the past inequities of white australia’s black history and incorporate indigenous knowledges, spirituality and ceremonial practice into our national infrastructure as well as acknowledging the influence of their cultural practices on the australian psyche. as a writer and long-time human rights activist i hope my own work will continue to play a role in an australian literature that alexis wright describes as one that explains ‘what is happening in the home of humanity, by speaking honestly to a world where those who represent us politically do not’ (2008, p 169). i imagine opening the next volume of patrick dodson’s trilogy and reading this tale where australia takes up the challenge of a global economy and environmental sustainability while at the same time involving itself in regional reconstruction where standards of health and education are equal for all. and i want it to feel real, not a metaphoric or idealist fiction; i want it to feel real, right down to the bottom of my soul. works cited casey m. 2006, ‘referendums & reconciliation marches: what bridges are we crossing? in ‘parading ourselves’, journal of australian studies 89,. 137 – 150. conway-herron j. 2010, beneath the grace of clouds, federal: cockatoo books. dodson p. 2007, ‘whatever happened to reconciliation?’ coercive reconciliation, altman j. & hinkson m. eds. north carlton: arena. 21-30. johnson-riordan l. 2005, ‘in the face of white terror/(post) empire’, international journal of critical psychology, riggs d. & johnson-riordan l eds. no 16 jan 2005. 9 31 kavanagh p. 1985, is there anything to celebrate?, sydney: abc aboriginal unit, corroboree films. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 mcclintock a. 1995, imperial leather: race gender and sexuality in the colonial conquest, routledge, new york: london. read p. 2000, belonging: australians, place and aboriginal ownership, cambridge, new york, oakleigh, madrid, capetown: cambridge university press. sanderson j. 2007, ‘reconciliation and the failure of neo-liberal globalisation’ coercive reconciliation, altman j. & hinkson m. eds. north carlton: arena. 3136. thanaka team 2007, burma women’s voices for hope, bangkok thailand: altsean burma. thornton w. 2009, samson and delilah, distributed surry hills, new south wales: footprint films. turner g. 1994, making it national: nationalism and australian popular culture, st leonards: allen & unwin. wilmot e. 1988, in aboriginal perspectives of the bicentenary: a collection of papers, canberra: act schools authority. wright a. 2008, ‘a question of fear’, tolerance, prejudice and fear, (sydney pen voices, the three writers project), crows nest nsw: allen and unwin. yunupingu g. 1988, in aboriginal perspectives of the bicentenary: a collection of papers, canberra: act schools authority. online sites behrendt l. 2009, ‘the nt intervention: an analysis by professor larissa behrendt’, http://vinnies.org.au/files/nat/publications/record-winter09-wr. barani indigenous history of sydney city, http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/, sponsored by city of sydney and cadigal information service, viewed december 7 2009. dodson pat 2009, abc program fora, ‘patrick dodson on reconciliation’, http://www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/09/23/2694610.htm down loaded january 18 2010. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/orgs/car/m2000/may28/walk.htm viewed december 17, 2009 http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essay/essay_11.html viewed december 7 2009. http://stoptheintervention.org/past-events/13-feb-13-2010-protest-sorry-means-youwont-do-it-again viewed december 17, 2009. dr janie conway-herron is a senior lecturer in creative writing at southern cross university. she regularly conducts writing workshops with burmese refugees on the thai/burma border and her own work reflects her passion for human rights and exploring landscapes of identity in an historical and contemporary context. her novel beneath the grace of clouds was published in july 2010. microsoft word raynorman22.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona necklace making and placedness in tasmania 1 ray norman copyright©2013 ray norman. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this paper has been written against the backdrop of john b. hawkins’ paper, a suggested history of tasmanian aboriginal kangaroo skin or sinew, human bone, shell, feather, apple seed & wombat necklaces, published in australiana, november 2008, and the research it sparked. hawkins proffered some contentious propositions concerning unlikely and speculative connections between tasmanian aboriginal shell necklace making and the making of so-called “tasmanian appleseed necklaces”. within the acknowledgements section of his paper hawkins said that he “[looked] forward to a response to [his] article by the museum authorities, for it is only by the cut and thrust of debate that knowledge can be further enhanced”. this paper takes up that challenge albeit from outside the tasmanian museum and art gallery and totally independent of any institutional sponsorship. introduction cultural production is at the nexus of different understandings of place and the cultural realities that belong there. it turns out that necklace making in tasmania has a resonance of a kind that might not be easily found elsewhere because of the complex relationships it exemplifies between settler, and indigenous trajectories. like a thread these necklaces join both sides of the colonial equation in revealing, ambivalent and contested stories that resonate with the new globalism that is shaping the 21st century 1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/. 281 and in which questions to do with place, ownership and memory have taken on a heightened urgency. these cultural landscapes come with an array of cultural and social subtexts that have their origins in the particular colonial history of the place. tasmania was separated from ‘mainland australia’ 10,000 years ago and it has been populated for at least 35,000 years. this makes indigenous tasmanians the descendants of the oldest and southernmost human population on the planet. its long isolation was broken when abel tasman2 sighted the island’s western coastline on november 24 1642, though from the indigenous perspective this isolation only ended from the 1770s when european explorers began regularly visiting the island.3 tasmania’s colonial history began in 1803 when a british penal colony was established on the island at the far edge of the european world. a cultural collision was almost inevitable. except for a few observers4, the colonial settlers did not draw a much more detailed picture of aboriginal cultural life than the explorers who preceded them. by-and-large tasmania’s aboriginal people were regarded as ‘primitive’, inconsequential and a part of the island’s fauna. in tasmania's non-aboriginal history, apple growing had an inter-colonial, colonial and international context. it has figured in cultural imaginings to do with tasmania since early colonial settlement until the present day. for the most part, the island’s colonisers/settlers/invaders were far too busy ‘cleansing’ the landscape of aboriginal people and clearing woodlands – and of course eradicating vermin like the thylacine because it attacked livestock.5 there was almost no ambition, nor any imperative, to understand these people or their cultural production. clearly tasmania’s aboriginal people were envisaged as being less deserving of the land than the colonisers. they were ‘in the way’ and the colonials simply wanted the land. after all, the colonisers had convinced themselves that they had a more useful or a superior purpose for the landscape and all it contained. in just over 40 years of colonisation, it is thought that there were less than 50 indigenous people who had survived colonial dispossession. in 1859 it was estimated that their numbers had dwindled to around a dozen. with the death of truganini in 1876 it was claimed that with her “the last true tasmanian”6 had died. within a generation this was openly ‘celebrated’ in tasmania. all of this ignored the many women and their children living on tasmania’s offshore islands and elsewhere and, no doubt, others not caught up in the great ‘cleansing’. for much of the 20th century european commentators assumed that these indigenous survivors had been absorbed into the colonial project that dispossessed them. yet they had retained, and continued to identify with and celebrate, their indigenous cultural life, of which shell necklaces were an important signifier. to the colonisers they were, along 2 able tasman celebrated for his ‘discovery’ of tasmania – reference link 3 fresne (1772), cook, furneaux (1773), cook (1777), bligh (1788 & 1792), bass & flinders (1798-99), bruny d’entrecasteaux (1793) and baudin (1802). 4 most notably george augustus robinson – the conciliator – who in the 1830s did document some important firsthand observations of aboriginal life. 5 thylacine (tasmanian tiger) reference #1 • #2 dec 09 6 truganini died in 1876 and was described as being the “last full blood tasmanian aboriginal”. this is a proposition fiercely challenged by tasmanian contemporary aboriginal community – reference link dec 09 282 with the skeleton and the name truganini, about the only signifier. given this and the particularly violent colonial history, it ought not be seen as remarkable that necklace making in tasmania should turn out to be loaded with histories and cultural cargo. in two centuries much has changed in tasmania. yet a great deal in regard to understanding the placedness of tasmania’s cultural production is shaped by very early perceptions – aboriginal and settler. one way or another necklace making is firmly rooted in tasmanian placedness and tasmania’s colonial histories. it occupies a significant if not the most significant place in politics and the aesthetic of nostalgia for both contemporary indigenous and non-indigenous tasmanians. collecting tasmanianness in tasmania there are a number of collectors who have put together substantial collections of ‘tasmanian necklaces.’ prominent among them is the collector and dealer, j.b. hawkins. he has published a paper in the australian collectors magazine, ‘australiana’7 in which he introduces a number of propositions to do with necklace making in tasmania – shell and apple seed necklaces in particular. paraphrased, hawkins speculates that with these necklaces there are aboriginal and colonial cultural crossovers to be found. he also suggests that this can be traced back to aboriginal people’s earliest contacts with european explorers – and in particular james cook. that this might be fiercely contested from within the aboriginal community is unsurprising given tasmania’s colonial history. in the 21st century, aboriginal people are not predisposed to letting speculative ponderings about their cultural production go unchallenged. when a collector takes an interest in cultural production that has stories deeply enmeshed in it, and a contested colonial history to do with place, sometimes it is difficult to make out whether it is the object or it’s cultural cargo that is being collected. much more is at stake than the provenance of some necklaces. in tasmania any object that has tasmanian aboriginality linked to it routinely comes with a contentious cargo on board that will almost automatically have links to australia‘s ‘history wars8’. in australia/tasmania there is an ongoing public debate to do with how british colonisation has, and arguably continues to, impact upon the development of a multidimensional contemporary australian society that is inclusive of its indigenous people. boiled down, the debate is largely about the extent to which british colonisation – post1788 – can be understood as being: • humane, by-and-large peaceful and benign with occurrences of violent conflict between ‘settlers’ and aboriginal peoples being merely aberrations; or 7 paper published in australiana november 2008 vol. 30 no. 4: reference link – australiana link dec 09 8 the ‘history wars’ is a shorthand term for the debate between various prominent historians, (such as clark, blainey reynolds, whinshuttle et al.) politicians (such as paul keating and john howard) and social commentators reference link 283 • stained by imperialism, exploitation, cruelty, neglect, dispossession, sanctioned violence and cultural genocide; or • resulting in a social cum political condition somewhere in between. bound up in all this are ideas to do with identity – national and personal – and the reliability of official and unofficial written histories alongside the oral traditions of indigenous australians plus the ideological biases of those who interpret these histories. therefore, when something’s tasmanianness is spotlighted, immediately there is a confluence of ideas to do with ‘place’, identity, history and heritage that come into play. in recent times two kinds of necklaces seemed to be quintessentially tasmanian – one linked to aboriginal culture and the other attributed to apple growing in tasmania ‘spiced up’ by presumed aboriginal connections. interestingly, tasmanian aboriginal shell necklaces are arguably ‘the place’s’ most powerful cultural emblems and identifiers of a kind of tasmanianness. it was not for nothing that in the 20th century tasmania came to be known as the “the apple isle”. however, the shells are indigenous and apples are quintessentially european – british even. ironically, in 1788, over a decade before the island’s colonisation, william bligh9, of bounty fame, planted australia’s first apple trees at adventure bay on bruny island off tasmania's southeast coastline and within ‘cooee’ of truganini’s birthplace. if shell and apple seed necklaces might carry cultural cargo to do with the island’s distinct colonial histories this is unsurprising. hawkins and others have collected both kinds and for their tasmanianness – and in the case of appleseed necklaces, contentious tasmanianness. collecting is a contentious business if for no other reason than it involves shifts in ownerships – real, emotional and cultural. collecting also transforms the ways things are understood and imagined or re-imagined. anecdotally, within anthropology’s mythology it is sometimes said that “museums are full of lies, and there are lies about the lies and what’s more, lies about the lying”. delving into the stories that underpin cultural production and collecting quickly leads to the social histories and cultural circumstances that lend meaning to an object or artefact. invariably there is something to be contested, not to mention room for constructed memories and self-serving histories. given tasmania’s colonial histories, it is almost inevitable that any investigation of shell and apple seed necklace making will turn up stories with contestable interpretations that echo, or even go the heart of, the colonial question, and related questions of identity and ownership. collectors like j.b. hawkins seem to find all this, for whatever reason, all too enticing not to speculate upon assumed hidden histories. the closer a cultural product is scrutinised the nearer it seems to be like unscrambling an omelette. perhaps the ingredients might be guessed at, but a more sensible approach is to appreciate the omelette for what it is now – not what it was once. 9 william bligh, prominent british explorer and australian colonial administrator – reference link 284 first, the notion that a necklace is just a necklace can be put to one side. second, the stories and cultural connotations associated with it need to be put into play, even if the result looks like an omelette and the initial ingredients lost sight of. this may well be difficult, but in the end it is compelling storytelling. australian jeweller, barbara heath10, says “a jewel without a story is no jewel at all”11. unavoidably, necklace making in tasmania is story laden. necklace makers absent and present the story of tasmanian aboriginal shell necklaces made a sharp turn following the craft movement’s emergence from post war internationalism. designers and craftspeople received more personal acknowledgement than they had ever enjoyed. little by little, they achieved equal billing alongside their fellow cultural producers – artmakers. there have been named makers and designers of high profile objects for centuries but generally it was uncommon. contemporary tasmanian aboriginal shell necklaces also became part of this story. for two decades now it has been very important to name the makers. since about 1990, when the tasmanian aboriginal community began to focus on the revitalisation of their necklace making, named makers emerged from their anonymity and questioned authenticity. they are now acclaimed. as cultural heroes of a kind, they have a newfound status outside their communities. in 2009 tasmania’s national trust awarded aboriginal shell necklaces’ ‘cultural heritage icon’ status12 albeit somewhat late and tasmanian aboriginal elder, lola greeno, being identified as a ‘living cultural treasure’13. if these indigenous shell necklaces thus became contemporary craft, their ‘contemporary status’ is like no other. while very little of tasmanian indigenous cultural life was documented or studied in any depth in pre and early colonial times, it is clear that contemporary aboriginal shell necklace making in tasmania is part of a cultural continuum that reaches back millennia. thus the shell necklace is a potent signifier of indigenous culture and identity as well as tasmanianness. the two are not the same. indeed, tasmanian aboriginal necklace makers occupy a curious space in australia’s cultural imagination evidenced by the high prices their necklaces fetch due to their ‘aboriginality’, and their contemporaneousness in concert.14 this is further evidence by one maker, and community elder, lola greeno being awarded the somewhat coveted ‘living cultural treasure’ status within the australian contemporary arts community. since the 19th century shell necklaces have also been emblems of another side of tasmanianness – its place in the british empire. older tasmanian shell necklaces are 10 barbara heath, ‘jeweller to the lost’ brisbane aust. reference link: dec 09 11 pers. com. barbara heath dec 09 12 2009 tasmanian heritage icons announced reference link: nov. 09 13 object magazine 62, may 2012 reference link jan 2013 14 hobart’s dick bett gallery listings http://www.bettgallery.com.au/aboriginal/tasshells/index.htm? jan 2013 285 typically attributed to nameless ‘unknown’ aboriginal makers. however, to europeans in the 19th century and much of the 20th, their ‘value’ lay largely in the context of being exotic, other, a curiosity and ‘trophies of empire’. indeed, there is increasing evidence that not all the ‘postcolonial’ necklaces were made by aboriginal makers. yet all have currency in the ‘tasmanian story’ and are exemplars of ‘tasmaniana’. without doubt, shell necklaces – original aboriginal necklaces and their commercialised colonial mimics – have been significant souvenirs carrying tasmaniana narratives since early colonial times. however, as tasmania’s colonial history is re-examined, as stories and objects are recontextualised, and as cultural memories steadily reveal themselves, new tensions to do with authenticity and reliability arise. the stories linked to tasmanian shell necklace making carry these tensions in abundance albeit sometimes in unexpected ways. in terms of what we know, the story begins at least one thousand years ago. interestingly, j.b. hawkins contests this in his paper.15 in spite of some claims to the contrary, there is archaeology done in the 1970s by rhys jones16 where a burial pit was studied and found to contain a significant number of “pierced shells.” the site has been dated at least 1,000 years pre-contact and the shells are now a part of the tasmanian museum and art gallery’s collection in hobart. this seems to provide enough evidence that shells were strung pre-european contact. it may not be possible to say whether or not these shells formed a necklace or were related to some other body site. nonetheless, there are strong indications that they were strung together for some purpose. indeed, there is very strong circumstantial evidence for the proposition that it was for a ‘necklace’. since it was found in a burial pit, it probably also had an important ritual purpose. this is supported in george augustus robinson’s journal. robinson, who had the most extensive first contact experiences with indigenous tasmanians, described an aboriginal mourning ritual where the mourners “broke their spears and necklaces, throw away kangaroo skins, cut their baskets, don't red ochre themselves” 17. the oldest intact necklaces are from colonial times and have indigenous provenance. generally the aboriginal makers of 19th century shell necklaces are unknown, but two iconic makers, truganini18 and fanny cochrane smith19, standout as exceptions. then, sometime in the 19th century, the shell necklace became an artefact of tasmanianness and empire. by the end of the century non-indigenous entrepreneurs were 15 ‘a suggested history of tasmanian aboriginal kangaroo skin or sinew, human bone, shell, feather, apple seed & wombat necklaces’ 16 rhys maengwyn jones (1941–2001) described as 'the australian archaeologist' reference link: dec 09 17 plomley, n.j.b. 1966, the friendly mission; the tasmanian journals and papers of george augustus robinson, sydney, p. 892. 18 truganini (trugernanner, trukanini, trucanini) (1812?–76), aboriginal woman, was the daughter of mangana, leader of a band of the south-east tribe. in her youth she took part in her people's traditional culture, but aboriginal life was disrupted by european invasion. when truganini met g.a. robinson in 1829, her mother had been killed by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers, and her fiancé murdered by timber-getters: reference link dec 09 19 smith, fanny cochrane (1834-1905), tasmanian aboriginal, was born in early december 1834 at the wybalenna aboriginal establishment, flinders island, tasmania, daughter of tanganuturra (sarah), father unknown. reference link 286 manufacturing them on an industrial scale. just what form this ‘industry’ took is unclear but the evidence seems to point to it being something more than a ‘cottage industry’ albeit that there must have been an element of this. in the early 20th century mrs m.m. martin regularly advertised her shell necklaces in the hobart mercury. she advertised the foundation date for her “factory” on the then outskirts of hobart as 1975. she also advertised that there was a “branch factory” in honolulu. the establishment date of the honolulu operation is uncertain but it is perhaps unlikely to have been before the turn of the century. the martin family business clearly survived until the late 1930s.20 the extent of this manufacture is evident in a court case. in hobart on may 20 1908 john ward, a hobart wharf labourer, was found guilty for having: “stolen, or otherwise [receiving], a large quantity of shell necklaces [100 dozen], consigned to a wholesale firm in sydney by mr. paget, fur dealer, elizabeth street. at [his] previous trial the prisoner pleaded not guilty, and the jury failed to agree as to a verdict, whereupon the accused was remanded on bail, to be retried. on this occasion john [ward] again pleaded not guilty, and was defended by mr. harold crisp, the solicitor general (mr. e.d. dobbie) prosecuting for the crown21. – hobart mercury, 20.05.1908. in 1908 tasmania's population was less than 200,000 and hobart's was less than 40,000. given that small communities thrive on gossip mongering, this ‘robbery’ has all the makings of being “the talk of the town” – it’s a story with so many threads to unpick. at his first trial in february 1908, ward failed to offer a plausible defence, in particular a witness who could testify that the necklaces were not in fact paget’s22 as paget claimed. neither did paget offer any evidence to prove that the necklaces were indeed his. the jury could not agree on ward’s guilt but at the second trial in may, the prosecution presented three ‘reputable’ witnesses, variously hobart shell dealers, furriers and taxidermists, – martin, barker and owens23 – who identified the necklaces as paget’s. the four dealers – curio merchants – involved here give us insights into the size and nature of tasmania’s shell necklace trade at the time. interestingly, there would have been more than a few hobartians at that time who would have had living memories of truganini out and about – and her wearing necklaces. however, indigenous tasmanians had not forsaken the shell necklace. research undertaken in the early to mid 1990s revealed that within aboriginal culture on the bass strait islands shell necklaces were common gifts given to celebrate rites of passage such as the birth of a child, the coming of age, betrothal and marriage. they also seem to retain a place in the rituals of welcome and farewell, as well as the bestowal of honour 20 pers. com. with a martin family member and descendant august 2008 21 hobart mercury, wednesday 20 may 1908 – full transcript – dec 09 22 paget’s enterprise, established in 1860, was “under royal patronage” – see sample advertisement hobart mercury february 2,1903 transcribed 23 pers. com. with marin family member who understood/speculated that this “martin” was quite possibly m.m. martin’s son, august 2008 287 and respect. there is contemporary anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to support this, as the necklaces are common gifts to important visitors to the aboriginal community.24 the tasmanian indigenous community frequently presents various visiting public figures and first nation elders from elsewhere have been presented with shell necklaces. for example, the dali lama received a maireener25 shell necklace as a welcoming gift in 1992, and two senior tiwi26 artists from melville island received a maireener shell necklace as a farewell gift after an artist-in-residency in launceston also in 1992. more recently, a member of the aboriginal community presented a shell necklace to the tasmanian born princess mary of denmark on a visit ‘home’ to hobart. these are but three examples of a frequent occurrence27. rituals reinforce social cohesion across cultural divides. it follows that shell necklaces, or strung shells, may well have had a role in pre-colonial aboriginal culture as visual expressions of met obligations or the reinforcement of these relationships. as is the case in other cultures, they may have served as a kind of ‘wealth object’’ and secondarily, as adornment of a kind. the shell necklaces’ reported use as 'rites of passage,' plus welcoming and farewell gifts in contemporary aboriginal culture, seems to be strong evidence for the necklaces’ ongoing and evolving cultural purpose. given this history, no reading of the history related to shell necklaces, and the cultural associations related to necklace making, could realistically dismiss the thread of continuity that links contemporary tasmanian aboriginal necklace making with the cultural expression of the people’s ancestors. however, the rich cultural cargo of the shell necklaces combined with their ambivalent history, is ripe for speculation. the most interesting speculation has been by the collector, j.b. hawkins. firstly, he has offered an interesting variation on the known if sketchy history of the tasmanian shell necklace that has enormous consequences for the signifying symbolism of the necklaces. secondly, for whatever reason, hawkins’ speculation seems to be driven by something other than postcolonial research. notwithstanding its contentiousness, arguably hawkins’ paper is important in tasmania in two ways. firstly it reflects, and has crystallised to some extent, two centuries of settlers’ accumulated subliminal perceptions of, and understandings of, tasmanianness and indigenousness. secondly, it seems to have opened up a new critical discourse with opportunities to include tasmania’s aboriginal community more actively in discussions concerning their cultural realities, and their histories, in a contemporary context – and a contemporaneous critical discourse. paraphrased, in respect to shell necklaces, hawkins says that james cook presented the people he encountered at adventure bay with glass bead necklaces and circumstantially these gifts introduced the idea of shell necklace wearing to them28. not surprisingly, the ‘speculation’ that cook introduced necklace wearing to aboriginal 24 patsy cameron tasmanian aboriginal elder reference link: dec.09 25 “maireener” the tasmanian aboriginal word for shells (rainbow kelp shells et al.) prized for necklace making and sometimes used for the necklace as well reference link: dec 09 26 tiwi islands – melville and bathurst island – the home of the tiwi people and a vibrant aboriginal art community reference link dec 09 27 pers. com. cameron, patsy november 1992, lehman, greg october 1993 and greeno, lola january 2009 28 j.b. hawkins – australiana magazine, november 2008 vol. 30 no. 4 288 people is regarded as audacious, and impertinent. given the cultural dispossession the tasmanian aboriginal people have experienced, such speculations are ever likely to bring on emotionally charged responses – and especially so if aboriginal people are not part of the conversation. hawkins’ suggestion is pure speculation. what we don’t know and can never know is how these cook glass bead necklaces were received. what we do know, however, is that glass beads do not seem to have won much favour as ‘gems’ or as barter currency in the pacific region, even though they were highly regarded in africa and north america.29. for example, glass beads are almost ubiquitous in north american postcolonial cultural production. likewise and by way of example, in africa, glass beads enjoyed a ‘currency value’ that had its foundation in slave trading prior to european colonisation. nonetheless, european colonisers exploited glass beads’ various currency values as can be evidenced in african material culture in its various contexts – southern africa, kwazulu-natal and the eastern province of south africa, being a good case in point.30 bead historians have charted the ways beads reflect the progress of civilization31. oceania is virtually absent from this history but lois sherr dubin says: [beads] made from shell, teeth and fibre … [were] worn during feasts, weddings and other special events to display wealth and social position. glass beads introduced through that late eighteenth century explorers were never as coveted as those of locally made shell. the reason may have been that pacific cultures had access to some of the most aesthetically attractive shells on the planet and so did tasmania’s aboriginal people. therefore, the glass beads of the time may well have been seen as poor counterparts and thus relatively valueless. aside from that, glass beads may not have carried any ‘totemic’ significance either. hawkins has also speculated that tasmanian ‘apple seed necklaces’32 found in tasmania in estate sales, clearance auctions and antiques shops represented a kind of crossover cultural product. speculatively, this is designed to add weight to his first speculation that the shell necklaces are a postcolonial artefact, as it links both types of necklaces to the same postcolonial source. he suggests that they are the outcome of some kind of cultural crossover involving tasmania’s colonists and the tasmanian aboriginal community. it turns out that hawkins’ speculation lacks the evidence to support its veracity. 29 prior to european contact native american peoples did not possess glass technologies but had beads made of antler, bone, shell, stone and wood. spanish explorers, jesuit priests and ‘traders’ used glass beads for trade with the american first nation people. ‘bead prices’ varied according to location and the desirability of the beads by colour translucency etc. – e.g. the hudson's bay company used a standard value for a beaver pelt: six hudson's bay beads; three light blue padre beads; two larger transparent blue beads. reference link 30 the zulu are best known for their intricate and often spectacular beadwork that dates from ancient times reference link 31 timeline chart for the history of beads page 328 – 343, the history of beads– louse sherr dubin, thames & hudson ltd. london 1987 32 j.b. hawkins – australiana magazine, november 2008 vol. 30 no. 4 289 according to hawkins two things come together to provide the circumstance for apple seed necklace making in tasmania. first with the industrialisation of apple drying in tasmania in 1908, large quantities of seeds were made available. the huon valley is tasmania’s southern apple growing district. it’s also is the home of tasmania’s southern aboriginal community, many of whom are the descents fanny cochrane smith – now known to be an aboriginal tasmanian who outlived truganini. then he speculated that there was a coinciding lack of access to the shells required for necklace making in the huon region.33 this last point is easily dismissed – there is now clear evidence that the kind of shells needed for shell necklaces were anything but scarce in the early 1900s in the region34. while hawkins’ apple seed speculation can be categorically dismissed, without doubt the ‘apple seed’ necklace has entered the tasmanian imagination as a kind of classic tasmanian souvenir. j.b. hawkins has amassed a significant collection of over 200 necklaces that he acquired exclusively in tasmania. it is very important that hawkins collected in this disciplined way. nonetheless hawkins could equally have purchased a great many of his necklaces on ebay.35 all the apple seed necklaces hawkins collected were described to him, and were understood by him, as exemplars of “apple seed craft” and by implication here, with a speculative aboriginal connection. there are also mats, belts and purses in his collection. more than interesting, is the fact that hawkins is not tasmania’s sole “apple seed collector” – there are several. it seems that not only tourists from elsewhere but tasmanians also – auctioneers, antique dealers, collectors, et al – seem very ready to adopt these souvenirs as tasmania’s ‘very own’ cultural production. these necklaces have been promoted as tasmaniana too, and in good faith, without looking too hard for the social and oral histories to support it. on ebay.com – the ubiquitous global market place for disparate cultural production – these necklaces turn up and are described almost exclusively as apple seed necklaces. a few tasmanian antique dealers seem happy enough to embrace hawkins’ speculative latent aboriginal ‘cultural cargo’ and find the contrary evidence something of a bitter pill to swallow. anecdotally, there are references suggesting that these apple seed necklaces were being made “in the huon valley sometime in the 1970s”. there is also credible ‘huon folklore’36 of feeding substandard apples to a tethered cow and recovering the seeds from the manure. this is the traditional way of collecting large quantities of apple seeds for propagation – though it discounts the need for the industrialisation of apple processing to create a bountiful seed source. all of this suggests that there must be firsthand observers around if one looked hard enough. 33 the huon river, in the southeast of tasmania, australia. it lies 38 km south of hobart on the huon highway. reference link: dec 09 34 there is a report of 100 doz shell necklaces being stolen from the hobart wharf in 1907, which in turn suggests that many more such necklaces were produced in hobart at that time reference link: dec 09 35 personal note: as a part of the research for this paper i have indeed done so in 2008 and they are regularly listed on ebay to the present; see: http://www.tasmanianappleseedresearch.blogspot.com/ jan 2013 36 pers. com. bob magnus, houn district fruit orchardist and nurseryman – april 09 290 in order to locate them, in 2009, i established the tasmanian apple seed research network37. the research was premised on the idea that it was unlikely that the stories about “apple seed makers” were indeed lost. if the people were there, so too would be their family histories or other stories in a relatively small community like tasmania. however, ebay proved to be the most valuable information source. ebay is a very useful research tool as it is a kind of ‘digital museum’ for the ‘exotic and other’ plus the mundane and mis-described – though there is a need to take account of the global cultural homogenisation made possible by internet sites in general. tasmania is a small enough community for such stories to be kept alive. typically, in small communities, once the questions are asked, it is possible to find out something about the people about whom the stories are told. in places like tasmania the speculated “six degrees of separation” turns out to be more likely two degrees. here the search was for necklace makers who were making these ‘tasmanian folk craft’ objects between ww1 and the 1970s – during the great depression in particular. however, firsthand or even secondhand, witnesses have proven impossible to find. nonetheless, one first-hand observer of another kind was located. she reported selling ‘apple seed’ necklaces in her souvenir shop which she operated during the 1970s. she discovered back then that these necklaces were not in fact “apple seed necklaces” made in tasmania but “ipil seed necklaces”38 – leucaena leucocephala seeds – most likely made in the philippines.39 they were imported into, not made in, tasmania.40 the ‘apple-ipil’ phonic slip is somewhat understandable. given that ‘ipil seeds’ so easily pass for ‘apple seeds’, in tasmania, ‘the apple isle’, souvenir sellers might have found the confusion convenient. tasmania is not alone in this misreading, as the seeds have been described as apple seeds elsewhere in the world – the usa in particular. somewhat curiously, hawkins in here, and apparently egged on by fellow ‘dealers’, readily accepted the myth promulgated by tasmania’s trinketeers of the 1970s. “scientific testing” quickly verified the botanical origin of the seeds. it was established that all the necklaces to hand were not in fact made using “apple seeds.” in fact they were a kind of tropical acacia seed,41 the seeds of: … the plant leucaena leucocephala (lam.) de wit of which the names mimosa glauca l., acacia glauca willd. and leucaena glauca l. are all synonymous, all of course belonging to the family fabaceae and therefore nothing to do with 37 http://www.tasmanianappleseedresearch.blogspot.com/ 38 pers. com. ruth clarke, a launceston antique collector reported this story plus the fact that her ‘”gran, lotti woollard who died in1969 had a purse made of these seeds that clarke saw in the 1950s and played with. she understood that her gran had this purse since before ww2, probably 1930s” dec 09 39 leucaena leucocephala (lam.) de wit (leucaena) a member of the acacia family and endemic to central america. it has naturalised widely throughout the pacific in tropical regions reference link: dec 09. 40 pers. com. peter sandor of sim crawcour pty ltd launceston souvenir suppliers & manufacturer’s agents, march 09 41 pers. com. alan gray tasmanian museum & art gallery herbarium march 09 reference links – #1 , #2 291 "apple" – alan m. gray tasmanian herbarium, tasmanian museum & art gallery, march 3 2009. not only can tasmanian folklore be discounted in regard to apple seed necklace making, but tasmanian aboriginal community involvement in the practice can be discounted as well. curiously, the necklaces adopted as “apple seed necklaces” in tasmania are indeed an indigenous cultural product. it is just the case that they were most probably made by the tagbanua who live in the philippines – other filipino indigenous groups made such ‘seed craft’ also. the necklaces are a part of a rich cultural tradition that has been ‘blanded out’ in the globalised lowest common denominator nick-knack market. they provide yet another exemplar of the place specific cultural wealth that is transformed through globalisation.42 tasmanian necklace making: plunder, appropriation and theft tasmania’s two major museums, the tasmanian museum and art gallery in hobart and the queen victoria museum and art gallery in launceston, are custodians of ‘the official view’ of tasmania’s heritage. in these ‘antipodean wunderkammers’ the tasmanian aboriginal people’s shell necklaces figure large. deep in the museum memory banks, and in their exhibition spaces, the museums have catalogued the shifting paradigms within which these ‘loaded artifacts’ are, and have been, imagined. it is important to note here that until the present day launceston’s queen victoria museum and art gallery has no dedicated aboriginal gallery to tell tasmania’s aboriginal story. somehow these tasmanian aboriginal necklaces seem omnipresent in tasmania along with the truganini story,43 the thylacine44 extinction story, apple anecdotes, convict tales, huon piners’ legends and much more. any ‘new tasmanian’ would need to have these things explained in order to begin to make sense of their new home. inevitably these iconic shell necklaces will be quietly explained in the induction process. these are stories that one needs to know about on an island with histories and their subtexts under almost every rock. the iconic status of these ‘placemarking stories’ comes with the implication that tasmanian stories generally come in a form that is beyond critique – even if there is more than a touch of ‘the gothic’ about them. it is as true of necklace making as it is of other stories like reynolds and windschuttle history wars debacle45. equally well known at the time, the late 19th century, would have been the royal society’s implication in the robbery of truganini’s grave. in fact, four years before the 42 there is a certain irony to the fact that these “apple/ipil seed necklaces” served a purpose as ‘love beads’ in the western world’s hippy subcultures during the 1960s and 1970s. 43 cite truganin’s necklaces: paper, oceanic passages conference, ray norman, hobart, june 2010, organisation: caia – university of tasmania 44 the thylacine (thylacinus cynocephalus: dog-headed pouched-dog) is a large carnivorous marsupial now believed to be extinct. it was the only member of the family thylacinidae to survive into modern times. it is also known as the tasmanian tiger or tasmanian wolf. reference link: dec 09 45 reference: henry reynolds vs. keith windschuttle on aboriginal history debate at gould's book arcade, newtown, sydney 12 november 2000 … http://www.sydneyline.com/gould's book arcade debate.htm jan 2013 292 ward trials, just a generation after truganini’s death the tasmanian museum put on exhibition a perplexing and somewhat macabre tableau that included truganini’s46 skeleton, her death mask, various photographs of her, shell necklaces and ironically one of lieutenant-governor george arthur’s famous ‘proclamation boards’47 plus other aboriginal artefacts. in retrospect, if not at the time, the potency of these shell necklaces famously worn by truganini48 is palpable. for the colonials cum settlers cum ‘invaders’ there is almost no escaping these necklaces’ ‘trophy of empire’ cultural cargo. for tasmania’s aboriginal community, clearly the necklaces are cultural property and treasures invested with the continuum of their being; charged with connections to place; and endowed with linkages to elders and ancestors. in tasmania there is nothing ordinary about shell necklaces – they are evidence of aboriginal tasmanians’ continuing presence and identity. unraveling the narratives that attach themselves to necklace making in tasmania is an exercise full of irony and there is no comfort whatsoever to be found in the postmodern proposition that truth is myth, and myth, truth. mixed up within the social darwinian idea of “survival of the fittest” is the need to identify and to be identifiable. body ‘adornment’ can be a sophisticated identity tool and a ’necklace’ can be many things – souvenir, token or simple adornment. but ‘necklaces’ often wait to be given meaning, a social function or perhaps some personal significance. as ‘jewels’, necklaces are something precious – a gem, a treasure – that carries cultural values and stories. in the end, it is the ideas – identities – invested in jewels that are the most precious. but identity is not an idea that is readily transferable. for instance, a crown of ephemeral flowers, or precious gems and gold, without a monarch, and realm over which to reign, is no crown at all. likewise, wedding rings without two people ‘to be wed’ are empty of meaning. essentially, “necklace” is a generic european cum globalised idea. it’s not an idea that fits at all well within local or indigenous peoples’ naming and belief systems. ‘necklace’ is a kind of generic term that best fits the circumstances of the industrial era. it’s a catchall term, a lowest common denominator, something that comes to a wearer via ‘commercial’ production ready for it to be invested with meaning. in a postcolonial cum ‘global’ paradigm, various kinds of ‘necklaces’ – rosaries, chains of office etc. – carry subtexts that typically emerge from the ether to haunt us in various ways. interestingly, they are rarely referred to as "necklaces." hawaii's queen liliuokalani, the last of the hawaiian monarchs, owned a number of tasmanian kelp – maireener –shell necklaces that seem to have come to her via a retail sale in honolulu – and possibly understood by her as lei49. they are now in the collection of the bishops museum in honolulu. 46 pers, com. david hansen, southebys melb. image link 47 image of the ‘proclamation boards’ and context information online 48 truganini was typically depicted wearing shell necklaces – image link 49 lei – a customary polynesian gift reference link 293 queen liliuokalini lived until 1917, and thus it’s most likely that she would have either bought them at a store, or perhaps someone might have given them to her, but probably (again) just by having purchased them commercially. by the time she was an adult, hawaii had a completely westernized economy, particularly in honolulu. 50 clearly, these 'shell necklaces/lei' originated in tasmania. most likely they found their way to honolulu via the m.m. martin51 enterprise of hobart and honolulu to be recontextualised as, and marketed as, lei – and ultimately accepted by a polynesian monarch as such. in a postcolonial context this is no small thing. there is also a kind of shell necklace production that is coming to light via oral histories in tasmania. albeit a somewhat romantic aberration, ‘native settler’ tasmanians talk about making shell necklace along the lines of those made by indigenous tasmanians and the colonial commercial necklaces that mimicked them. by-and-large they were made by this relatively small group of tasmanians from childhood, and aided by various family members, while “holidaying at the beach”52. seemingly this activity was prevalent post ww2 when beachside holidaying and recreational day tripping became more possible due to greater access to motor transport and more workers in australia having statutory holidays. nonetheless these oral histories go back much further to the early 20th century, and earlier, for one location in northern tasmania where some families that were able to travel with relative ease to a remote beach location by boat53. by necessity these holidays were somewhat rustic affairs that involved, necessitated even, a certain amount of ‘hunting and gathering’ given the relative remoteness. apparently this seemed to evoke an atmosphere of ‘going native’. if the shell necklace making mimicked indigenous necklace making and at the same time provided a diversion on “wet and windy days”, this is not particularly surprising. in its romanticism, this activity is relatively innocent and benign. these necklaces were never ‘up for sale’ but interestingly it seems making them is indeed tied up with the idea of connection to place – tasmania and tasmanian beaches in a european cum settler context. yet, these necklaces still seem to carry colonial subtexts to do with aboriginal dispossession while reflecting settlers’ yearnings to be connected to place. it’s a very local story with a colonial flipside of a kind. in the cut and thrust of the antique trade in tasmania all this is grist for the mill. attempts have been made to homoginise language and use more general, more inclusive and global terms, such as “neckpiece” and “body adornment”, but they all fail in their hollowness. in the end these words fail because they lack cultural value; they simulate authenticity but ultimately lack meaning. when tasmanian aboriginal shell necklaces – maireeners – are claimed as “necklaces,” or ‘lei’ even, it says nothing at all about their ‘original’ cultural context. it is an act of cultural homogenisation. moreover, it is more 50 pers. com. desoto brown, curator bishops museum honolulu, reference link oct 09 51 m.m. martin shell necklace manufacturers reference link: 52 pers. com. artists lindsay broughton report making such necklaces with his mother on beach holidays in southern tasmania ,and tim smith similar reports of northern tasmania, of the 1950s. nov 09 53 pers. com. jean cooke, born 1910 and now living at the holiday location of her youth reports on the collection of shells from the beach in ww1 era, their ‘cleaning’ and their stringing. feb 2010 294 to do with "blanding’ than it might have anything to do with blending." – dr. rod ewins paraphrased.54 what is missing is the accommodation of differing cultural sensibilities in a global context. ultimately, all this is to do with colonising ‘identity’. on ebay at least, it seems that the tasmanian aboriginal language word ‘maireener’ has been added to the lexicon when it is necessary to distinguish one shell necklace from another. 'the word' has currency when it comes to asserting a 'necklace's' tasmanian aboriginal bona fides. indeed, ‘maireener’ has come to carry layers of meaning to do with identifying a class of personal adornment cum cultural identifier. in the aboriginal community, it is also the word used to describe the kinds of shells55 used to make necklaces. in its aboriginal context, it seems that a maireener is not by necessity a necklace any more than a lei is a necklace a lei is a lei. a maireener is a maireener. like a lei, a maireener has cultural functions and cultural significance. firstly it seems, it is itself, a maireener, and almost coincidentally a necklace. but a maireener is something more than a necklace – at the very least quite different. they seem to embody a bond with place and carry the imprimatur of cultural continuum. possibly, a maireener might be a necklace of a kind sometimes. in a way a maireener cum necklace may be significant as a kind of cultural crossover when it is used as a memento of ‘place’ – a souvenir. arguably the ‘maireener idea’ is somewhat ‘liquid’. in the end, however, the maireener continues to be what it has probably always been: a 'connector'; a bonding agent; a ‘gift’ that connects people. the making of one clearly seems to connect people to place. likewise, the receiving of one seems to connect people to a set of beliefs and imaginings to do with a place and its stories. in so many ways a maireener seems to be something like a symbolic umbilical cord that connects people to both place and culture – ways of believing and being. as for appleseed necklaces, rather ipil seed necklaces from the philippines, their tenuousness, and contentiousness, as 1970s tasmanian ‘tourism currency’ offer a poignant exemplar evidencing the cultural branding that goes on under international cultural imperialism and globalisation. that too was going on in tasmania with shell necklaces since the late 19th century at the very least and there are place specific resonances to tune into if we look and listen as closely as we might. there is something primordial about a tasmanian aboriginal maireener. there’s something there that refuses to be diluted by colonialism, golobalisim or cultural imperialism. is the colonial appropriation of, the sanctioned plunder of, and the global commodification of these so-called ‘necklaces’, and by the thousands it now seems56, tantamount to the theft of identity and innocence? on the one hand, appropriated tasmanian shell necklaces are exactly what they are, mere shadows of the maireeners they mimic. they are simply a ‘commodity’ analogous to grain before it becomes bread – cake even. you cannot steal, subsume or overtake history – written or oral. then 54 dr. rod ewins, artist and anthropologist, paper “fijian art” presented to the oceanic art society, sydney, march 17, 1999 reference link: dec 09 55 king maireener, phasianotrochus eximius, maireener (pink-tipped kelp shell) phasianotrochus apicinus, maireener (rainbow kelp shell) .phasianotrochus irisodontes reference link: dec 09 56 ward trial hobart 1908, 100 doz necklaces stolen from a dealer hobart mercury, wednesday 20 may 1908 – full transcript – dec 2009 … s. jacobs advertisement hobart mercury january 1882 “18 gross” of necklaces advertised as being in stock reference link jan 2010 295 again, when a shell necklace is understood as “a flapper’s art deco necklace” on ebay, somehow in that naivety there may be a glimmer of innocence. yet, despite this destiny as cliché, the presence of the maireener remains. certainly, its present indigenous makers aim to take back this presence from its colonial commodification as a necklace and an artefact of tasmania. reference research websites appleseed research http://tasmanianappleseedresearch.blogspot.com.au/ tasmanian shell necklace research http://tasmanianshellnecklaceresearch.blogspot.com/ http://shellnecklacefile.blogspot.com http://qvmagstrunghistories.blogspot.com/ http://truganininecklaces.blogspot.com/ http://themawlereport.blogspot.com/ http://www.shellnecklacerobbery.blogspot.com/ coolabahplacedness blog http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au/ the research web sites contain an archive of images and document links that support this paper, including images, recovered from ebay sites, of necklaces offered for sale. acknowledgements this paper draws upon, and depends upon, the collaborative support and research of a network of people with an interest in the topic. without this support and interest the project would have almost certainly faltered. the project began against the backdrop of john hawkins’ paper a suggested history of tasmanian aboriginal kangaroo skin or sinew, human bone, shell, feather, apple seed & wombat. without this paper, and the ground it covered, the research for this project is unlikely to have been as sharply focused or have led to the information that has ultimately been uncovered. any attempt to name everyone in the network would mean that many would inadvertently go unnamed yet they all know who they are. all have given so generously of their time, knowledge and expertise. i am indebted to all who assisted and provided the encouragement needed to keep moving forward. ray norman is a tasmanian-based artist, blogger, researcher, community networker and cultural jammer, with a background in studio jewelry and metalsmithing. he has been involved in the initiation of speculative community placemaking-cumplacemarking projects through interventionist cultural production. (zinghouseunlimited, trevallyn, australia. email: thezinghouse@7250.net) microsoft word 11gibson coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 politics, pain and pleasure: the art of art-making for ‘settled’ aboriginal australians lorraine gibson abstract: since the emergence of the ‘acrylic art movement’ which came out of papunya in the western desert of australia in the 1970s, aboriginal art and cultures have become intertwined in public discourse, through government policy, and in visual art worlds. it is arguably through their artworks that australian aboriginal people have become increasingly known both within australia and overseas (merlan 2001; cf. fourmille 1994).i indeed, in many ways, aboriginal art has come to represent aboriginal people and their culture (myers 2002). but what kind of art is acceptably deemed aboriginal in mainstream art worlds, by australian aboriginal people, and why? what does this mean personally, socially and economically for those aboriginal artists who are located in the south-eastern parts of australia which were first colonised? for the most part these people are deemed by the mainstream population to have ‘lost their culture’. more than this, they are spoken of by some other aboriginal people from the more remote and later colonised parts of the continent in similar terms. based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the barkindji people of wilcannia, a small country town in the south-east of australia, this paper explores the role of art making and art talk and the ways in which these are implicated in the politics of culture, in cultural subjectivity, and in the consolidation and (re)creation of cultural identity. keywords: aboriginal australians; aboriginal art; wilcannia. wilcannia is found wanting within the australian national imaginary, aboriginal australians are widely figured and represented. one overarching representation focuses on aboriginal people’s perceived spiritual connection and relationship to the land and its animals. many non-aboriginal copyright©2011 lorraine gibson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 people express a longing for what they see to be these kinds of strong connections and some seek to vicariously enter into this perceived state and adopt it for their own (lattas 2000; nicholls 2000). australian aboriginal artworks and, to a lesser extent, the people who make them are most readily taken up as a kind of mediating vehicle to accessing a particular and often generically imagined ‘spirituality’ which modernity is seen to have lost (myers 1991: 38; lattas 2000). this can, and indeed has, encouraged the view that one can enter into, share in, or draw on spiritual meaning through owning or indeed viewing a painting which is thought to have been painted by a ‘real’ aboriginal person. these points of possession and appropriation, and the discourses and practices they engender, as with other longed-for imaginaries, requires a clarification of mythologies. here, aboriginal culture is made over to ‘one’s own cultural truths’ (lattas: 2000: 267). in these imaginings, the romantic notion of ‘authentic’, ‘real’, ‘traditional’, ‘tribal’ aboriginal people living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is set against its opposite, that is, those aboriginal people who are seen not to live in this way. the ethnography on which this paper is based is located in the space of the conjured opposite in a small south-eastern australian country town called wilcannia in new south wales. this is home to the barkindji people, the traditional owners of the land on which wilcannia stands. the barkindji, together with a smaller number of other south-eastern aboriginal groups who call wilcannia home are not those who have been the focus of australian and indeed international admiration. the town of wilcannia is best known in the public sphere as a place to avoid. when i travelled there to undertake fieldwork in 2002, friends, family and some colleagues were concerned for my safety. they had heard, read and repeated the media view of the town as a place of violence and disorder with drunkenness and physical abuse being presented as the order of the day. this view was again reinforced as i drove towards wilcannia through cobar, the nearest town to wilcannia lying 280 kilometres eastward. there, accounts i had previously heard and read about travellers being warned by whites not to stop in wilcannia, but to ‘drive straight through’ were voiced to me by cobar residents as i gathered supplies for my onward journey (cf. myers 1988). a few days after arriving in wilcannia and in response to questions from both ‘black’ and ‘white’ about what i was doing there, divergent views of what constituted aboriginal cultures began to emerge. my assertions to whites that i was here to study aboriginal culture were met with derision and mirth. ‘what culture’, they asked, a culture of drinking or of violence perhaps? i was told that i would not find aboriginal culture here, that there were no ‘real’ aboriginal people here as could be found in the northern, central, and more remote parts of the continent where the ‘traditional people’, ‘full bloods’ are seen to live as their ancestors had done. for the most part, i was told to expect a culture of loss and degradation. yet, the aboriginal people i spoke with saw nothing untoward in my asking if i could learn about their culture and happily directed me to people they felt could be of assistance. this differing approach to the presence or absence of culture raises many questions. if culture is a way of life then why was i being directed by aboriginal people to other particular aboriginal individuals who were said to ‘know all about culture’? as to the white assertions that there was no aboriginal culture to be found here, where, if not in a coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 town of 600 or so people of whom the overall majority were aboriginal was aboriginal culture to be found? these are not straightforward questions with clear arguments and sides. many aboriginal people in wilcannia also refer to aboriginal people from the north and centre of the continent as ‘tribal people’, ‘traditional people’ and ‘full bloods’ and repeat the view that they are somehow more aboriginal than others. this reinforces the view of settler society that what constitutes aboriginality can be lost incrementally through time and white contact, but that it cannot be added to, and, that aboriginality is something which can be had by degrees (byrne 1996: 91 &100). issues such as native title and the legal requirements and measures to aboriginal people gaining rights in this domain direct the need for aboriginal people to demonstrate continuity of traditional culture. the forms that this should take in order to be found worthy of ‘public sympathy and state resources’ are also prescribed (povinelli 2002: 33). because of these requirements in these and other fields such as tourism, aboriginal people are called upon to reflect on culture and bring this to a level of consciousness not required of their non-aboriginal counterparts. here, aboriginal culture in the sense of everyday life – as this is lived – bleeds into culture as a response to local and wider australian (and indeed international) public demands of what aboriginal culture is. this paper discusses how art, artists and art-making transform into decisions of authenticating (or not) aboriginal artworks; and how people of wilcannia who, at times, echo this view of loss and lack intend to change these implications (cf. gibson 2008). in the beginning in 1971 a young australian art teacher called geoffrey bardon moved to papunya in the western desert of australia to take up a teaching position at the community school. papunya, a small aboriginal settlement 250 kilometres to the west of alice springs was created as a government reserve in the 1950s for aboriginal people who had been displaced from their traditional homelands. at the time of bardon’s arrival, papunya comprised around 1000 people from the pintupi, warlpiri, luritja and anmatyerre language groups (ryan 1991). shortly after his arrival, and having observed something of the storied designs that children drew in the sand, bardon encouraged the transfer of these into paint. senior aboriginal men seeing this interest began working with bardon to paint their dreaming or (jukurrpa) in mural form on the school walls. the concept of the dreaming resonates with stories of eternally present ancestral beings that travelled across the land leaving traces, making marks and creating and becoming topographical features. beyond this, these ancestral beings defined the ‘meaningful order of being’, leaving behind the ‘essence of all future beings’ (myers 2002:18). from these beginnings, the aboriginal ‘acrylic art movement’, or ‘western desert art movement’ was born. from this point, designs and stories, some of which were sacred and had hitherto been shared within a strong tradition of rights to make, to trace, to know, to sing, to see and to hear, began to be sent into the world as commodities. the abstract imagery and iconography, much of which had previously coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 been ephemerally reproduced on bodies, in sand and performance as part of initiation ritual and other ceremony, was by the late 1980s exciting art worlds across australia and internationally in paris and new york. the dreamings exhibition held at the asia society galleries in new york in 1988 is perhaps something of a watershed for the way in which its choice of aboriginal art works as representations of aboriginal culture were heavily biased towards those from the remote areas of australia which are thought ‘traditional’. the choice of works was influenced and indeed circumscribed by political struggles between those aboriginal people thought to be either urban or traditional, the preference of funding bodies, interests of corporations and individuals, and the gallery director andrew pekarik’s feeling that people did not want to see the accusations and pain which was perceived to be the hallmark of urban art (myers 202: 242). pekarik, as with others, sought the spiritual content of the ‘traditionals’ and their dreaming. this sacred knowledge and way of being are qualities thought lost to contemporary western art and, indeed, to wilcannia aboriginal people and their art. this notion of loss has had much impact on people in wilcannia: ]they take on board] the insufficiency with which they are credited and articulate the notion of loss attributed to ‘settled’, ‘south eastern’ or ‘urban’ aborigines’. this sense of loss – quite apart from its often keenly felt actuality – has shaped much of the public discourse about aborigines among anthropologists as well as historians, despite some academic assertions and intended goodwill to the contrary (morris 1989; beckett 1994; macdonald 2000; cowlishaw 2004; in the visual arts see sutton and anderson 1988: johnson 1990; kleinert 1994; morphy 2001). this sense of loss and idea of loss has been overlaid on the aboriginal visual arts arena in ways which continue to intimate a hierarchy of aboriginality (gibson 2008: 297). murray butcher is a barkindji artist, and one of the individuals that people directed me to as someone who ‘knows about culture’. murray comments that painting about culture gives people a ‘feelin’ of empowerment within themselves that they can do things an achieve things’. he told me he saw art as a way to: give outsiders insight into our culture, where they can see we have stories an’ art an’ stuff. and, whether it’s…whatever influence it come from… it’s still us an’, i don’t know, try to bring our culture alive in a medium what’s available to us (pers comm., wilcannia, 11 december 2003). art objects are seen by many barkindji as a medium that will perform culture for other barkindji and wider society. it is a form through which culture, as this is imagined by murray and others, can be concretised, made solid, made visible, and which can be sold. the content, the styles used, and the care with which a painting is rendered are important aspects to those local aboriginal people who have a keen interest in knowing about their cultural history and in, as many put it, keeping their culture ‘alive’. these people, who are referred to as elders, are for the most part over 40 years of age but some, like murray who have learned from older relations the cultural designs that ‘belong to us’ are in their thirties. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 knowing what belongs to barkindji refers to the designs, animals, food, important sites, travels and stories of ancestral beings; this is knowledge which has been handed down through family. the darling river, which the barkindji know as barka and which flows through wilcannia, is a primary source for much of the art content. fresh-water turtles, cod, catfish and ngatji the rainbow serpent (the ancestral being that created the darling river) are features of the art-work produced. since the 1970s, when aboriginal people in south-eastern australia began to mobilise politically, they have increasingly gained access to archaeological and anthropological writings and other ancestral material held in museum collections. a great deal of barkindji material and objects are held in the australian museum in sydney. this primarily includes carved and incised wooden weapons such as boomerangs, spears and clubs which bear the distinctive geometric and linear design elements such as oblongs, squares, cross-hatching, zig-zags, herring-bone, diamonds, rhomboids, chevrons, together with figurative imagery; these designs are shared by much of the south-east (morphy 2001; kleinert 2000: 241). there are also several emu eggs that are carved with these designs. some of these depict scenes form the pastoral era such as bucking broncos with others depicting native animals and aboriginal figures. these artefacts have been accessed by several barkindji men since the late 1970s and have provided additional source material to draw on. it would be incorrect however to suggest that the barkindji did not know of these designs prior to this access. the rich painted, stencilled and incised rock art sites with their geometric designs are a hallmark of south-eastern australia (morphy 2001; cooper 1994). they abound at mutawintji national park which sits 130 kilometres north-east of broken hill and 180 kilometres further west of wilcannia in far western new south wales. barkindi people, as joint managers of mutawintji, work as tourist guides and cultural site officers. there is, however, much debate as to the historical extent of cultural knowledge and continuous production of these designs (kleinert 2000; cooper 1994; sutton and anderson 1988; morphy 2001). some barkindji people claim that there has been a continuous production of these designs on weapons, emu eggs and other artifacts within the changed context of ‘black’ and ‘white’ settler relations and economies. others are happy to consider that these designs are being relearned and revitalised. given the fraught social, cultural and economic nature of identity and recognition, and its consequences in many arenas, there is much at stake here; this is a matter i address elsewhere (gibson 2008a). the mantra ‘ours is lines’ is common parlance in wilcannia and refers to the linear designs and elements shared by the south-east. it is used to assert a unique barkindji identity to other barkindji and to the wider public, as art-making has increased in production due to both demand and a more permissible and shared (at times appropriated) public pride in aboriginal identity. it is a mantra also repeated by barkindi people who do not paint. ‘ours is lines, unna [isn’t it]?’ is both statement and question. it is one repeated back by barkindji to those barkindji who are recognised as culturally knowledgeable and who have taught this mantra. it is a way of demonstrating knowledge and a shared identity and of respect for the teaching of elders as it shows that one is listening the sale of art is also one way in which people living in the welfare economy of wilcannia can hope to increase their income. some people, mostly younger, take up painting in order coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 to earn some money. many seem either not concerned or unaware of the importance of design and content. however, in many ways, it is economically wise as well as more culturally acceptable to be willing to take instruction from someone viewed as having cultural knowledge and authority. most of the buying public are non-aboriginal and have clear ideas reaped from the media, other publications and an abundance of documentaries as to what constitutes a worthy, real authentic aboriginal identity from that which does not. the painting of a walt disney cartoon irrespective of how well rendered (as done by one particular barkindji man) is neither desired nor going to sell as aboriginal art. advice from elders that dolphins or salt water turtles rendered in the dotting style of the central and western desert are not suitable subjects for painting and that freshwater turtles rendered with ‘lines’ flowing around the figure are, is not only good economic advice but a way to ensure that ‘what belong to us’ is consolidated, made meaningful and carried forward. what is painted and the way it is painted in terms of the care taken matters to those who are held to be cultural teachers. i asked murray butcher what he thought constituted a ‘good’ painting and whether he though it was alright to rush a painting out for money. he said that a rushed painting showed up in the work but his main concern was that ‘it doesn’t sorta bring the quality out what the person’s capable of, ya know?’ he went on to say that some of the people are ‘searchin’ inside theirself for stories or meanings to their paintings’. he was pleased that some of the younger ones were ‘progressing over time from when they first started… they didn’t know what to paint’: an’ then, i sat down an’ i suppose i’ve influenced them in some ways in what to paint an’ stuff. you know, think of the things around like the landscape of the animals the food the animals eat (murray butcher pers.comm). a good painting for this artist is one with ‘some kind of story put there. some kind of their history or their people’s history into their paintin’ instead of just all the aesthetic value’. the stress on doing what you know in art is valued, as is doing what belongs to you. art, for most barkindji is best when it is a visual representation of one’s life and its connection to important others and events. the importance of these aspects is echoed by other barkindji authorities who garner community respect (cf. gibson 2008: 307). the dreaming and cultural resilience painting on canvas and board is a more recent and contemporary form, which is used to teach children. this aspect is emphasised by phillip bates, another barkindji artist. he says he paints for the children, so that they see that our culture not dyin’ ya know? it’s still alive. cos it’s drummed into everyone’s head everyday that, ah, this mob losing their culture or whatever, you know”? but me out here in the west [western new south wales] you know. our people learning our culture again, you know? (pers. comm. 8 december 2003). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 murray and phillip, as with many aboriginal people, know that a history of colonisation has seen changes to the lives and cultural knowledge of his people. in making reference to an unspecified historical past he says that: families would have had their own [dreaming] stories an’ everything. but because of the effects of colonisation and various other things through history, lot of the knowledges and that have been broken down and shattered all over the place. so, what we got is, we haven’t got, i suppose we gotta strong culture but not a complete culture… like it’s fragmented (pers. comm. wilcannia, 11 december, 2003). the fragmentation murray speaks of, together with the demands of native title and the wider australian public means that in order for ‘aboriginal culture’ to be recognised it must be demonstrated according to mainstream understandings which are embedded in notions of tradition and continuity. holding one’s dreaming, hunting and gathering of food, ceremony, language, these are the practices which demonstrate culture. in the absence of their everyday lived coherency in wilcannia, people now talk in terms of taking children out to the bush to ‘teach’ them about culture. culture of the kind which is valued by outsiders is, for wilcannia people, more often something one talks about, or engages with through activities as opposed to life as lived. people such as murray, fortunate enough to have been reared by grandparents or other members of older generations who retained language and practised activities of a more ‘traditional’ kind, have become the ‘go to’ people for those wanting to ‘learn’ about culture. this includes government agencies and so on but people like murray are also, in essence, cultural brokers for their own people. whilst murray is proud that barkindji people come to him seeking advice about what can and what cannot be represented in an art work, this responsibility sits heavily. there is tension in wanting to share what he knows of his culture and his expressed assertion that what he knows has been changed through history. whilst murray on the one hand, as with others, asserts the presence of his culture, on the other he compares this presence on a proportional sliding scale which is set against historical time and geographic proximity to white settlement. his culture as articulated is a fought-for and reduced presence which sits in contrast against that of the ‘full bloods’ up north and in the centre. the notion that aboriginal people from the south-east have seen a lack and loss of culture is one also expressed by aboriginal people from the more remote parts of australia. fred myers tells us that michael nelson tjakamarra, a pintupi man and artist from the centre of australia, ‘believes that people are really interested in his work and the work of traditional people because it derives from the dreaming, the source of value from which most urban people have been separated’ (1994: 690). myers quotes tjakamarra as saying that whites ‘want to see [art] from the center…urban aboriginal people ngurrpaya nyinanyi (‘they are ignorant’ [of aboriginal law])’ (1994: 689-690). this is not an isolated view, but we might consider that tjakamarra may himself in some way ‘be responding to a specific parochialism itself driven by art-world demands’ (gibson 2008: 306). an important measure of tradition is the practice of ‘the dreaming’ or ‘aboriginal law’;ii indeed most ‘traditional’ aboriginal art makes claims through ‘traditional artists’, curators, exhibitions, art dealers and many anthropological texts in terms of the artworks being coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 grounded in the ceremonies, stories and other elements of the dreaming. the dreaming is closely tied to required patterns of behaviour and the authority of the elders as these pertain to land and ceremony (meggitt 1962; tonkinson 1974; williams 1988). it is not surprising therefore that association with this concept was central to the valorisation of aboriginal art and a key trope of wilcannia assertions that they have not lost their culture and that, ‘our dreaming still alive’. the centrality of the dreaming as a settler culture authenticator of ‘real’, ‘traditional’ aboriginal culture has been internalised by many aboriginal people from the south-east. this emphasis is problematic on many fronts. barkindji people argue that their dreaming is ‘still alive’ whilst, at the same time, expressing sadness that they do not know and cannot or experience the dreaming as their ancestors may have done. young, mostly troubled men express that the spiritual aspects of the dreaming are what is missing in their lives. if only they could get a hold of this dreaming thing which they are seen to lack by settler society then there is a sense that everything would right itself; that there would be no problems w. ith alcohol, or domestic abuse or the difficulties of an imposed lifestyle. people have internalised the myth of tradition and seek solace in asking those with cultural authority to ‘tell us some stories bro’ and ask to be cut in the ways of now unknown initiation rites in the hope that this will offer meaning. people long to possess the kind of dreaming and life that resonates ‘most closely with anthropological and popular portrayals of traditional aboriginal society’ (morton in charlesworth et al. 2005: 196). when it comes to art, it is the perceived presence of the dreaming that is most readily sought and understood to validate aboriginal culture (myers 2002). in talking of the difference between ‘traditional’ aboriginal artists thought to be ‘authentic and those of the south-east, roberta sykes asks ‘[w]hat uniquely aboriginal theme, then, is left for urban blacks whose dreaming has largely been obliterated by the white people?’ (1990:6). whilst the barkindji people are not ‘urban’, neither are they considered to be ‘traditional’. they stand in something of a no-man’s land between this dyad which categorises them and their art. just as ‘traditional’ artists such as tjakamarra assert the urban loss of culture, so too do many barkindji. barkindji say they would like to learn from the ‘real tribal people’ but they also assert that they, in turn, have much they could teach urban aboriginal people about culture. within art worlds barkindji and their art are located ambiguously within structures and discourses which are not of their making. conclusion barkindji people in wilcannia assert that their art work reflects ‘our tradition’ and ‘our culture’. however, they also, at times (paradoxically), repeat and internalise the settler discourse that they have lost their culture. art making offers a space where these competing discourses can be worked through and re-considered. the act of thinking about, talking about and physically making a painting becomes an avenue through which group discussion can take place. the art work as such also plays a role as a tangible reminder of culture and a tool of cultural pedagogy. because this cultural field has no precedent for coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 aboriginal people in wilcannia it offers a new mode of expressing culture for the artists and communities concerned. the roles of artists and art works provide new possibilities for mediating and creating individual and group identity which is not limited by pre-european or pre-acrylic art movement cultural practices and norms. the non-aboriginal cultural affirmation, offered to artists of the later-settled and more remote centres of the continent, is not available to wilcannia aboriginal people. whilst this is limiting and problematic in the ways outlined in this paper, it also provides possibilities for avoiding constraining effects of, arguably, axiomatic aboriginal traditions. works cited beckett, j. 1994. ‘kinship, mobility and community in rural new south wales’. being black, aboriginal cultures in 'settled' australia edited by i. keen. canberra: aboriginal studies press. pp. 98-117. byrne, d. 1996. ‘deep nation: australia’s acquisition of an indigenous past’. aboriginal history 20: 82-107. cooper, c. 1994. ‘traditional visual culture in south-east australia’. a. sayers. (ed). aboriginal; artists of the nineteenth century. melbourne: oxford university press. pp. 91-109. cowlishaw, g. 2004. blackfellas whitefellas and the hidden injuries of race. malden, oxford, victoria, australia: blackwell publishing. fourmille, h. 1994. ‘aboriginal arts in relation to multiculturalism’. culture difference and the arts. s. gunew and f. rizvi (eds.). australia: allen and unwin. pp. 69-85. gibson, l. 2008. ‘art, culture and ambiguity in wilcannia, new southwales’. the australian journal of anthropology vol 19:3. pp. 294-313. gibson, l. 2008a. ‘‘we don’t do dots – ours is lines’: asserting a barkindji style’. oceania vol 78:3. pp.280-298. johnson, v. 1990. ‘into the urbane: urban aboriginal art in the australian art context’. art monthly australia (supplement), w. caruana and j. isaacs. (eds.). canberra: art monthly australia. pp. 20-23. kleinert, s. 1994. ‘jacky jacky was a smart young fella: a study of art and aboriginality in south east australia 1900 – 1980’. unpublished phd. the australian national university, canberra. kleinert, s. 2000. ‘art and aboriginality in the south-east’. the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. s. kleinert., and m. neale. (eds.). oxford: university press. pp. 240-246. lattas, a. 2000. ‘colonising the other: dreaming, aboriginal painting and white man’s search for a soul. marcus’. j. (ed). picturing the primitif, images of race in daily life. lhr press: australia. pp. 240-265. macdonald, g. 2000. ‘economies and personhood: demand sharing among the wiradjuri of new south wales’. the social economy of sharing: resource allocation and modern hunter-gatherers. g. w. wenzel., g. hovelsrud-broda and n. kishigami (eds.). osaka: national museum of ethnology. pp. 87-111. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 meggitt, m. j. 1962. desert people: a study of the walbiri aborigines of central australia. sydney: angus and robertson. merlan, f. 2001. ‘aboriginal cultural production into art: the complexity of redress’. beyond aesthetics, art and the technologies of enchantment. c. pinney., and n. thomas (eds.). oxford, new york: berg. pp.201.234. morphy, h. 2001. aboriginal art london: phaidon. morris, b. 1989. domesticating resistance: the dhan-gadi aborigines and the australian state. oxford, new york, munich: berg. morton, j. 2005. ‘aboriginal religion today’. m. charlesworth., f. dussart and h. morphy (eds.). aboriginal religions in australia: an anthology of recent writings, pp.195-203. aldershot: ashgate. pp. 195-224. myers, p. 1988. ‘on 'housing' aborigines; the case of wilcannia, 1974’. island in the stream, myths of place in australian culture. p. foss. (ed). new south wales: pluto press. pp. 139-159. myers, f. 1991. ‘representing culture: the production of discourse(s) for aboriginal acrylic paintings’. cultural anthropology 6: 26-62. myers, f. 1994. ‘culture-making: performing aboriginality at the asia society gallery’. american ethnologist 21: 679-699. myers, f. 2002. painting culture. duke university press: durham and london. povinelli, e. 2002. the cunning of recognition. duke university press: durham and london. nicholls, c. 2000. from appreciation to appropriation: indigenous influences and images in australian visual art. exhibition art catalogue, flinders university art museum, australia. ryan, j. 1991. ‘foreword’. bardon g. papunya tula, art of the western desert. j. b. books: australia. pp. vii-xvii. stanner, w. e. h. 1979. white man got no dreaming: essays 1938-1973. australian national university press: canberra. sutton, p. 1988. dreamings: the art of aboriginal australia. viking in association with the asia society galleries: new york. sutton, p., and c. anderson. 1988. ‘introduction’. dreamings: the art of aboriginal australia. p. sutton. (ed). new york: viking in association with the asia society galleries. pp. 1-12. sykes, r. 1990. ‘non-citizens in our own country? the social and cultural back-ground of rural and urban aboriginal artists’. the land, the city, the emergence of aboriginal art. (supplement). w. caruana and j. isaacs (eds.). art monthly australia: canberra. pp. 4-6. tonkinson, r. 1974. the jigalong mob: aboriginal victors of the desert crusade. menlo park: cummings publishing. williams, n. 1988. ‘studies in australian aboriginal law 1961 – 1986’. social anthropology and australian aboriginal studies. r. m. berndt and r. tonkinson (eds.). canberra: aboriginal studies press. pp. 189-238. acknowledgements ethnographic research such as this could not be undertaken without the assistance and interest of participants. as such, i would like to thank the aboriginal people of wilcannia coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 and broken hill for their contribution to this research. in particular, badger bates, murray butcher, phillip bates, willie don hunter and paul brown. the australian museum also deserves special mention as my time there as a postdoctoral fellow and subsequent research associate has provided me the opportunity to study the ethnographic material from new south wales which is held in their collections. dr lorraine gibson currently holds the position of vice chancellor’s innovation fellow at macquarie university in sydney, australia. as a social anthropologist her work is ethnographic and based on long-term, in-depth field research. lorraine has worked with the aboriginal people of wilcannia for over eight years and with other new south wales aboriginal language groups since 2008. her interests are around questions of aboriginal identity, diversity and experience in the areas of the visual arts, race relations, work and employment, comparative economies, the emotions, and the cultural meanings of water. she has just completed a longitudinal study which explored comparative aboriginal and non-aboriginal experiences and interpretations of work, employment and productivity across remote, rural and urban australia. i the terms aboriginal and indigenous are often used interchangeably and are politically fraught. while the term ‘indigenous’ includes aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples, ‘aboriginal’ refers to mainland first peoples and not those of the torres strait. i use the term aboriginal as this is the term preferred and used by the majority of the aboriginal people i work with on mainland australia. ii for international readers unfamiliar with the concept of the the dreaming, the work of stanner is instructive and i provide here a limited but nonetheless informative excerpt from this work: ‘a central meaning of the dreaming is that of a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning … we shall not understand the dreaming fully except as a complex of meanings’ (1979: 23). microsoft word coolabahreviewphillips coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 book reviews an exercise in googling bill phillips unversitat de barcelona lk holt. man wolf man elwood (victoria): john leonard press, 2007. isbn: 978 0 9775787 7 1 copyright ©2010 bill phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. l.k. holt does not wear her learning lightly, and unless her intention is simply to impress with evocative terms and exotic references, she presumably expects her readers to do some heavy duty investigative work on google. the first poem in the collection, “man is wolf to man” depicts man’s bestial violence, a violence that seems biologically determined, or divinely ordained: “a man hangs / like an amulet. his death to counter/ weight the deaths by his hand, / assuming god has a sense of balance.” the enjambment of counter/ weight dividing his death from deaths by his hand, although predictable, is nonetheless effective, but the following line, “the skeleton in the sand of ash sham” sends us scurrying to discover that ash sham is another name for damascus. further enquiry reveals that in the twelfth century there was indeed a man of violence, reginald of chatillon-sur-marne, a frankish crusader, known as “the wolf” by the afflicted damascenes. is this what she is referring to? but surely a crusader would not have worn a “shirt unbuttoned / to show a cage of sand, the blindfold / blown off his three eyeholes.” no, she must be referring to the murder of a hostage by terrorists, or perhaps the victim of a cia operation. who knows? is this our task as readers, to try and find out? the second and final verse paragraph of the poem moves to the other end of the mediterranean, to spain, the peninsular war, napoleon and the “guerilla”. we learn that “napoleon loves his soldiers, as do / the ravens” both sharing, presumably, an appetite for seeing the hapless combatants dead. but is the reference to the raven a link to the crusader in the first half of the poem through the ballad “the three ravens” and its story of the dead knight? no, it can’t be, didn’t we decide the dead man was killed by the sas, or delta force, or someone? i think we should be told. fortunately there is coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 a page devoted to “notes and sources” at the end of the book, but sadly “man is wolf to man” does not appear there, and we are left unenlightened. but then, again, the poem serves its purpose; man is indeed, wolf to man, and perhaps the killing fields of history do not need precise depiction, there being so very many of them. ash sham the obscure is analgous, perhaps, to the unknown soldier – representative of them all – but if this is the case it is too obscure. coleridge’s “in xanadu did kubla khan / a stately pleasure dome decree” works because everyone has heard of xanadu, but has no idea where it is. this is not true of ash sham: we’ve never heard of it at all. the love of obscure words, names and places is evident throughout the collection, and although this may be at times irritating (perhaps because the reader’s ignorance is all too uncomfortably revealed), it is almost always rewarding to discover, once googled, what the terms mean. “[q]uincunx”, for example, from the first of the “long sonnets of leocadia” is a marvellous word referring to the pattern that 5 makes on dice and playing cards: . the word “foramens” is, though, a little forced. it means “a small opening, perforation or orifice” according to the merriam-webster online dictionary, and it appears in the lines “i must be content to find him through the cramped / foramens of his work” from “last communion”, also one of the “long sonnets of leocadia”. in what way is foramens preferable, in this poem, to a more familiar word? there seems to be little reason for its use, other than in helping we lesser mortals improve our vocabularies. having once started, it is difficult to stop: the compulsion to google that this collection imposes can reveal, at times, information that distracts us from the very words on the page. take “fountain with five kneeling boys”, a poem quite disturbing in its hints of incestuous violence and drunken abuse. the title, and much of the poem, refer to a sculpture by georges minne (we are told by the notes) and a desire to see this is rapidly fulfilled by recourse to google images. except it turns out that the sculpture is actually called spring of the bereaved and not “fountain with five kneeling boys”. does this matter for the purposes of the poem? perhaps not, but once the need for more information has been awoken, there is no turning back, and no matter how intrigued we are by the final line of the poem: “to wrench the little fuckers off” (original italics), it is the image of the sculpture, and the poem’s delightfully precise description of the five boys, that remains. technical skill, or at least a thorough knowledge of traditional poetical tructures, is evident throughout the collection. sometimes we are told which form is being used, as with the poem “half sestina” or the “long sonnets of leocadia” with their extra quatrain, but sometimes we are not. perhaps we are being tested. “pompeii” is an elizabethan sonnet, “the flowers in the vase clench into a gang of fists in the night” is a villanelle, while “violets” with an echo of a clue in the title, is a triolet. “the head” seems to be a kind of pantoum, and undoubtedly there are others, the result, perhaps, of a creative writing course. or of a very professional poet, seriously interested in and concerned for her craft. not, of course, that the rhythm and rhyme schemes are strictly regular, indeed, at first glance, or to unwary readers unprepared for the structural games being played, the coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 poems might well appear to be written in free verse. the blurb on the back of the collection gives us a hint: “a feeling for the formality of language guides us through a music of rhyme, half-rhyme (and quarter rhyme),” we are told. quarter rhyme. whatever that is. assonance, perhaps. so what is the collection about? the afore-mentioned obscurity is something of an obstacle when it comes to answering this question. the blurb, again, is of some assistance: “[t]here is an unblinking amazement at violence; and a lively vein of the erotic” seems to be a reasonable summary of the themes explored. the eroticism, though lively, is not necessarily improved by facetiousness. take “sedimentary layers”: “if a geologist were to wander in / and see us lying here / − my head on your chest but / your legs on top of mine − / he’d certainly be a little perplexed / over whether you or i came first”. no, i’m sorry, he wouldn’t. but “a problem of filing”, which is neither erotic nor violent, is touching in its portrayal of a small girl putting on her father’s shoes: “i could not find the saint or sentiment / for the time when i put on my shoes / then put on my father’s over the top / and i just stood there, my tiny ankles / just holding me up, my love enclosed / in formality, my heart lost in a heart.” yet, after all this carping, after all these complaints about obscurity, formality, distraction and difficult words, and the often impenetrable but nevertheless vivid explorations of gender, sexuality, creativity and hurt, this small but provocative volume proves to be rich in ideas and feelings. a single reading is rarely sufficient and a bit of work is required if any sustenance is to be obtained. so, is the effort worth it? is the investment repaid? yes, i think it is. microsoft word coolabahcarles coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 why should aboriginal peoples learn to write? carles serra pagès copyright ©2010 carles serra pagès . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: cultures and worldviews are inscribed by means of ‘writing’, or what derrida calls ‘the perdurable inscription of a sign’ (of grammatology). a sign is the union between signifier and signified. the signifier may be natural (clouds indicate that it is going to rain) or artificial. all cultures are made up of relations that stay at the level of signs, that is, everything that belongs to culture is empirical and conventional. in this regard, both aboriginal and western culture remain at the same level. moreover, both cultures produce objectivity by means of contrast and experimentation, in the design of a sharp object, for example an arrow or a knife. in ancient greece, havelock contends that the invention of writing dramatically increased the possibilities of objective thought (the muse learns to write), but it also created a logic of binaries that transcended the objectivity of science and transpired into the ideology behind colonialism. in this context, the role of writing is analyzed in david malouf’s remembering babylon. how does writing affect gemmy all throughout the book? already in the first chapter, the teacher and the minister of the colony analyze gemmy ‘in writing’. gemmy knows what writing is but hasn’t learnt its ‘trick’: he does not know how to read or write. all he can see is that what he tells about his life, all his pain and suffering, is translated into marks and magic squiggles on the paper: only the spirit of the story he tells is captured. but little by little, the cognitive effects of writing get hold of gemmy, until he starts to understand his life within the framework of the logic of binaries and identity upon which all reflective thought and science rest. all in all, this deconstructive reading can be seen as a critique of europe’s modern idea of the autonomy of reason, in the name of a heteronymous rationality in the form of writing. in this text we analyze the leap that goes from orality to writing in the context of postcolonial aboriginal australia. the thesis is that the transformation that goes from myth to logos, or from primitive to civilized cultures is a linguistic revolution: the discovery of writing and, more particularly, of alphabetic writing. the theoretical standpoint from which we are going to carry out this analysis revolves around havelock’s the muse learns to write, which is a study of the role of writing at the origin of western philosophy and science, and derrida’s of grammatology and speech and phenomena. in the light of these authors, we are going to analyze some passages that deal with writing in david malouf’s remembering babylon. in the course of our analysis, we are going to ask ourselves some questions about the essence of language and about the role it plays in the construction of the physiognomy of cultural identity. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 the special theory of orality by havelock revolves around the idea that philosophy and sciences were born in greece between the 8 th and 4 th century b.c. and thanks to the greek discovery of phonetic writing. the phoenicians already had a sort of alphabet, but it was the greeks who introduced what havelock calls “the pure consonant”, by adding a vocalic sound in the formation of the consonant (which literally means to “sound-with”, sum-phona). this discovery allowed the greeks to use a form of writing that represented oral discourse, the alphabet, which could be universally applied to represent all natural languages. the use of phonetic writing brought about a gradual change in greek thought and culture. before the appearance of writing, greek culture and tradition were guarded and transmitted by means of what havelock calls “primary orality”. the function of “primary orality” was to unite society, to guarantee its laws and customs, and to transmit valuable information regarding agriculture, important dates, festivities, tactics of war, the land, etc. an oral culture relied on particular mechanisms of memorization, such as rhythm, synonymy and antonyms, and it required the audience to assimilate the information by means of mimicry and identification. the troubadour, to whom the task of keeping up with the oral tradition was explicitly assigned, would set the facts of his account in a mythical time, and would prioritize the account of concrete actions over abstract thought in order to make memorization easier. the advent of writing liberated living memory from the effort of investing most of its psychic potential in retaining the information that was being transmitted. there was a scission between the person that used language and language itself. language appeared as visual and exterior to consciousness in the physical medium of writing. in the same way, there appeared a distance between what is known and the knower, and the term logos came to mean that through which it is possible to have access to knowledge and truth. two heterogeneous and contradictory types of discourse appeared: an oral one and a theoretical one, which was born with writing. “primary orality” is characterized by its liveliness, transitory nature, richness of images and it is a language of action, and it opposes itself to a philosophical language that pays more attention to what is permanent, stable, and true. there also increasingly appears the use of the third person singular of the present simple, which allows for analyses of essence, of what “is”. in a single stroke, writing marks the birth of science, philosophy, literature and history because writing allows the difference between what “is”, in a universal and necessary ideal cosmos (cosmos means “order”), and mere appearance bound to worldliness, to the earthly and to historicity. in his redefinition of the concept of writing, derrida retains the nucleus of essence of havelock’s concept of “primary orality”. we will recall that the main function of “primary orality” is to retain in the living memory of the community its culture and traditions, and to guarantee social unity. in of grammatology, derrida defines writing in the same terms, as “the durable inscription of a sign”, the unity of a sign and a meaning: if “writing” signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs (of grammatology 44) since both oral culture and written culture (in the form of libraries, law, etc.) are inscribed by means of signs, that is, since both of them ‘make present’ what makes up a coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 culture, oral culture by means of living memory and written culture by means of linguistic signs, both cultures share a unity of essence. (obviously, we are not saying that oral cultures have no writing. they have no phonetic writing, but they have other forms of inscription, other forms of writing: marks, drawings, etc.) whereas havelock is more interested in the cognitive change implied by the advent of a culture of writing in the classical period, derrida discovers in the notion of writing the condition of possibility of all the discourses of culture: philosophy, religions, science, literature, poetry, etc. consequently, writing is a mere technique, something worldly and exterior, it does not belong to a particular nation or people. it is a structural possibility inscribed in every culture, before it can be labeled oral or civilized, and its de facto existence depends on contingent factors. even if phonetic writing and, consequently, philosophy and science were historically born in europe, the possibility for a nation or a particular people of freely choosing its own destiny, unbiased by prejudice and oppression, that is, the ideal of a rational culture is a possibility that is not essentially european. in remembering babylon, malouf tells the story of gemmy, a man of british descent who spends 16 years among aboriginals, and then joins a white settlement near brisbane. in the book, there are several examples of what havelock calls “primary orality”: gemmy’s bold assessment “i am a british object”, which he utters at the very instant he is exposed to the white settlement for the first time (p. 3); the words he proffers to get rid of the impressions caused by his nightmares (“… out of habit muttered syllables that were a formula against bad magic…”, p. 28) ; what gemmy calls “the language of the land” (“there was no way of existing in this land, or of making your way through it, unless you took into yourself, discovered on your breath, the sounds that linked up all the various parts of it and made them one”, p. 58); etc. but we are going to focus on the specific role that phonetic writing plays in the book. when gemmy arrives in the colony, we will recall that the first thing that the minister and the young schoolteacher do is to “examine” him “in writing”: it was the minister, mr. frazer, who examined him, in the hot little one-roomed schoolhouse, and the schoolmaster, george abbot, who did the writing up (p. 14) we are told that gemmy, for his part, knows what writing is but has never learnt how it works: he does not know how to read or write. after a long and theatrical session where mr. frazer and mr. abbot try to interpret the half-words, signs and gestures that gemmy acts in answer to their questions about his life, mr frazer handles gemmy the seven written pages for him to see. at this point, gemmy believes his life has been written down and has no doubt that “magic has been the essence of the occasion”, and that the smell of earth of the black ink contains his own blood: was that the smell of his life, his spirit, the black blood they had drained out of him? no wonder he felt so weak. (18) but most importantly, even though gemmy knew what writing is, until then he had not closely experienced its cognitive effects. we are told that gemmy is not able to properly coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 learn the language of the settlers, beyond the few words he already knew. the fact that he is aware that they have been writing down his life does not familiarize him with the technique of writing, only with its psychological effects, which he labels as “magic”. how else can you put the essence of life in a physical domain, in the form of a book or else? before answering the questions about his life, gemmy has to divide himself as subject who narrates from himself as an object about whom he is talking about and, when mr. frazer gives gemmy his written life for him to “see”, he is as shocked as we would be if we were told that the marks on the page contain indeed the essence of our own lives. this first encounter with writing brings about the beginning of a reflective attitude upon gemmy, which i would doubt in labeling “epistemic” at this point. this is how malouf tells us about the cognitive effects of writing in gemmy. there is quite an explicit and classic biblical reference as well: all the events of his life, all that he had told and not told, and more, much more, now that it had begun to stir and move, which he was just beginning to recall, had been curled up in him like an old-man carpet snake. it was awake now. lifting its blind head it was emerging coil on coil into the sun (19) gemmy’s experience with writing deepens as he helps mr. frazer in his botanical studies. on these occasions the experience is more lenient, perhaps because the object of study is not his own self. as he sees it, writing, or, in this case, drawing is a matter of undressing reality from mere appearance, of dispossessing the world of its materiality and gently laying “these outlines on the page that were all pure spirit, the product of stillness and silent concentration” (60). and a little latter, malouf describes the meaning that mr. frazer’s drawings have for gemmy in the following terms: the drawings for him have a mystical significance. they are proof that mr. frazer, this odd whitefeller, has grasped, beyond colour or weight or smell, the spirit of what he has been shown (p. 118). in analyzing the role of writing and its cognitive effects upon gemmy, one is led to ponder whether the crisis that takes hold of him is not the result of that first contact with writing. the gesture of giving gemmy the seven papers where mr. frazer and mr. abbot had written down his own life for him to see initiated a slow but irreversible process of self-reflection which was to inevitable end in a break down. the episodes of bullying and his nightmares at mrs. hutchence’s house were only to speed the process. this is a final quote from remembering babylon: he began to sicken, and saw at last that what he was suffering here had to do with the sheets of paper where, months ago, mr. frazer and the schoolmaster had set down his life. it was from there that the events of his former existence came and demanded to be turned back again from magic squiggles into the pain, joy, grief he was torn by, and which his present body was too weak to endure. more and more now he was haunted by those sheets, seven in all, he had not forgotten the number, that mr. frazer had folded and put into his pocket, and which he had never seen again; till he was convinced that the only way to save himself from so much racking, and despair and sweat, was to get them back coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 again. they would be in one place or the other, those sheets; either at mr. frazer’s or at the schoolhouse. all he needed was the strength to get there. but that was just what their magic had drawn from him (p. 140-141). the question which we leave for everyone to answer for him or herself is whether in the light of these analyses, one can conclude that writing in general is at the origin of rationality and science, as havelock and derrida contend, or whether it has been the result of an autonomous rational process of emancipation and rational deliberation, as we contended in a paper that was delivered in barcelona last july and in the light of husserl’s krisis and life-world phenomenology. has writing objectified gemmy’s life in a reflective way? in conclusion, when we consider the experiences of gemmy with writing in the light of david malouf’s account and the theories of havelock and derrida we are enlightened as to what makes writing work in the constitution of alphabetic societies, which today are hegemonic. on the one hand, in front of a piece of writing, we never deem what is being communicated as exterior to consciousness. we do not believe that a biography contains the true essence of the life of a man out there, in the physicality of the book. on the contrary, the comprehension is within us, in our understanding of what his life was. this privilege of inner consciousness and of the understanding is what derrida labels as “metaphysics of presence”. the function of writing is not completely exterior, as gemmy believes, but neither is it completely interior as western thought only too readily tends to assume. on the other hand, we may add that the problem is that gemmy has not incorporated the essence of writing within himself: the recipient of essence, of what is, remains exterior. he is not aware that even though he gets at essence thanks to the technique of writing, which is exterior, this technique just activates a mental process by means of which essence is constructed. bibliography: derrida, j. speech and phenomena and other essays on husserl’s theory of signs, northwestern university press, evanston, 1973. derrida, j. of grammatology, john hopkins university press, baltimore, 1997. havelock, e.a. the muse learns to write. reflexions on orality and literacy from antiquity to the preset, barcelona, 2008. malouf, d. remembering babylon, vintage, london, 1994. microsoft word raynorman20.docx coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     240  interrogating placedness: tasmanian disconnections 1 ray norman copyright©2013 ray norman. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this paper sets out to interrogate tasmanianness and its placemaking. the cultural landscape and social realities lived out in tasmania are constructed around contested and contentious imaginings of place and the histories, the stories, that belong to it. in the end the question hanging in the air is to do with place and culture and ‘culture’s role’ in shaping ‘place’ – landscapes, artmaking, museums, etc. tasmania, ringed as it is with water offers a model of containment that allows for the kind of prodding and poking not easily done elsewhere. also, it has a history of a kind that is not easily found elsewhere. nonetheless, like places elsewhere tasmania has idiosyncratic stories that seem to wet everything all at once and all the time. vdl: an island at the edge tasmania (van dieman’s land, vdl) is one of those places that, in a global context, holds pretty much a back-of-mind status, if it ranks at all. on the other hand ‘taswegians’, from inside the shoreline, imagine ‘their place’ as a vernacular exemplar of the part that represents the whole – however that is variously understood and contested. given the place’s histories it more or less carries multiple layers of taswegian cultural cargo that in a kind of way infects many things ‘tasmanian’ with a kind of gothic darkness. in many ways the very notion of imagining the place as van diemen’s land (vdl) – ‘tasmania’ now – is something of a disengagement with its layered histories – not to mention its ‘geoplacedness’ at world’s end. when abel tasman happened upon what he imagined to be van diemen’s land in 1642, unbeknown to the world, the island’s landmass had been continuously inhabited by aboriginal people for approximately 40 thousand years – coincidently about the time that current research now suggests there is evidence for modern humans in europe2.                                                          1 this paper is a contribution to the placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production special issue of coolabah, edited by bill boyd & ray norman. the special issue is supported by two websites: http://coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au and http://coolabahplacednessimages.blogspot.com.au/.  2 “earliest evidence for modern humans in europe identified” … 3 november 2011, by tamera jones – http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1087&cookieconsent=a coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     241  moreover, it had been isolated from, and insulated from, the australian continental landmass and the social-cum-cultural dynamics in play there for eons. it is believed that the island was joined to the mainland of australia until the end of the last glacial period approximately 10,000 years ago. these are time continuums well beyond the imaginings of the likes of abel tasman and those who followed him to this island at the edge of the world over the next century or so. anthony van diemen, the governor-general of the dutch east indies, who had sent tasman on his mission of discovery, surely could not have imagined the kind of timelessness that preceded their enterprise. neither could the flow of european adventurers, whalers and sealers for the most part, who followed him in dribs and drabs for another century or so. the colonial disconnect between aboriginal ‘placedness’ and european understandings/imaginings of place and time, and european connections to, and the possession of, place, unavoidably set up contentions that have shaped, and underlined, tasmanian sensibilities up until the present. in so many ways, tasman’s vdl can be imagined as a paradise of a kind and one that tasmanian aboriginal people had existed within in splendid isolation for eons. conversely, life on the island can be imagined as brutish and hellish place with the people in decline – genetic, cultural, whatever. whatever the imaging’s, in the end they are all speculative – and eurocentric. tasman hardly spent any quality time ashore but he was around long enough to make the judgment that the island was not so ripe for colonisation. indeed, it was not quite like the east indies and the americas, filled as they were with the kinds of ‘treasures’ coveted by european sensibilities and value systems. this place vdl was nonetheless a ‘treasure island’ of a kind that was not visibly overflowing with the kind of treasures tasman’s patrons were seeking – at least not immediately. the ‘discoveries’ of far-flung terra australis’s southern extremities (thence forth no longer incognita) plus new zealand and the fiji islands were somewhat disappointing for tasman’s patrons and their entrepreneurial-cum-colonial aspirations. propelled towards the island by the roaring forties, tasman named the ‘place’ and planted the dutch flag ashore and moved on. he did so just in case it turned out that his masters ultimately saw a value in the place he couldn’t. it was an arrogant assumption that by simply planting a flag a place could be possessed. what the arrogance depended upon the inhabitants, such as they may have been, comprehending, and understanding without negotiation, the veracity of his symbolic actions. the irony of it all being that the place was almost as far away from the netherlands – home (!) – as you can go before getting closer. somewhat curiously, the irony persists, given that in so many ways as ‘the place’ embodies a kind of persistent disconnect to the world – a dislocation(?). currently, this has much to do with the rather naïve mindset, but nevertheless steadfast, ongoing reliance upon natural resource extraction coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     242  and exploitation – a kind of economic ‘detachment’ that inevitably confronts ideas of inclusiveness and the sensibilities of belonging here … not elsewhere. postcolonial tasmania in so many ways owes its placedness to its elsewhereness. indeed it can be argued that it was its elsewhereness that made the island a somewhat ideal prospect for british colonisation, given the need at home to mitigate the increasingly undesirable consequences and outcomes of the industrial revolution. here was a place that the social dross of this social revolution could be profitably dispatched to, in order to make way for the more useful emerging middleclass and its willing underlings. it offered both a threat to discourage delinquency and a place to deposit irredeemable souls out of sight, out of the way and perhaps most importantly, out of mind – yet replete with resources useful at home. as it has turned out, vdl was also a likely place for those with dickensian ‘micawberish’ aspirations to make good and start anew. for the most part they were the down trodden, and the over looked, who along with various outsiders were attracted to the possibilities of exploiting the opportunities this antipodean outpost seemed to offer. dickens’s micawber3 and family emmigrated to australia where he fulfills his middleclass destiny as manager of the port middlebay bank and wins his social standing as a successful government magistrate. some of these micawberish souls, notably george augustus robinson among them, returned home triumphantly wealthy on the island’s bounty, to live out the quasi-gentlemanly lifestyle they aspired towards when they left. others remained to live out their good fortune – albeit that all too often it was ill gotten and won in ways hardly spoken of. putting aside the millennia of aboriginal presence on the island for a minute, the european "age of discovery", catapulted tasmania into a eurocentric timeframe that was to cast a bleak shadow over this antipodean outpost. the end of the 18th and early 19th century saw the first era of decolonisation when most of the european colonies in the americas gained their independence from their respective ‘capitals’. however, the industrialisation of the 19th century united kingdom led to a new wave of imperialism. colonisation accelerated but by the end of the 20th century six hundred years of colonial aspiration gave way to globalisation. in large measure, ‘placescaped’ by its colonial histories, tasmania finds itself at the vanguard of 21st century contests that aim to redefine the ways places are understood. likewise, the people with attachments to these places are having their rights to enjoy these place’s treasures, and equitably, are also being redefined. placescaping a vdl paradise paradise is an imagined place and universally imagined as the place of eternal bliss. when vdl is retrospectively imagined in such a way, the flipside of such imaginings is not all that far away. paradise, in religious belief systems, is a place that holds the promise of exponential positivity and eternity in all its expressions. conceptually it is                                                          3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wilkins_micawber – 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     243  the flipside to the wretchedness of civilisation. in paradise there is only happiness. paradise is a place of contentment, but not by necessity a place where luxury and idleness might prevail. in a eurocentric-cum-abrahamic context, paradise is a "higher place" and the inverse to the diabolical hellishness promised as the ’wages of sin’. most interpretations of religious belief systems are likely to suggest that paradisiacal visions seem to traverse cultural divides and do so across time. if they do, they are bound to be loaded with cosmological imaginings. typically, the paradise idea is projected as the abode of the virtuous dead. in ancient egypt the ‘otherworld‘ is aaru, the ideal hunting grounds where the worthy dead live after judgment for an eternity. for some celtic belief systems, paradise was a fortunate isle where heroes and other favoured mortals were received by the gods into a winterless blissful paradise. little wonder that the south pacific was so readily imagined as paradise. in verdic india, the physical body is destroyed by fire but recreated and reunited in the third heaven in a state of bliss. given the subcontinent’s ‘wealth’, little wonder that this place was to become “the jewel in the british imperial crown”. in a cosmological context, 'paradise' describes a world before it was tainted by evil. looking back with privileged knowledge vdl might well be imagined in this kind of way – as a kind of eden before adam. in the abrahamic faiths, the garden of eden is a metaphor used in imaginings of paradise. it’s the perfect state of things before the fall from grace – the perfect state that will be restored in the ‘world to come’. again, looking back tasmania might well be envisaged as such a garden – a kind of aaru even. the concept of paradise traditionally turns up in the manifestations of cultural production – the art and literature and particularly so in the pre-enlightenment era. for instance, john milton's paradise lost, is an epic poem concerned with the fall of man, the temptation of adam and eve and their expulsion from the garden of eden. pre-contact (pre-colonial) tasmania is sometimes discussed in terms of its being a paradise of a kind. indeed, the terra nullius idea, the idea that translated/interpreted tasmania/australia as 'empty land', ‘an unowned place’ or 'nobody's place' might, by extension, be imagined as ‘paradise’ of a kind – otherworldly in a way, ripe for exploitation, somewhat like egypt’s aaru, a place out of the reach of judgment etc. etc. in 1770 when captain james cook planted the union jack on the shores of botany bay, he declared that ‘this new southern continent’ was ‘terra nullius',4 even though it was a bountiful place and apparently envisioned as being ripe for colonisation. somewhat arrogantly, the land’s presumed ‘emptiness’ – empty of a familiar social order – enabled cook to proclaim british sovereignty over this ‘new land’. this was to have diabolical consequences for australia’s/tasmania’s aboriginal people. by-and-large, tasmania’s aboriginal people were conveniently regarded as ‘primitive’, inconsequential and a part of the island’s fauna. this was an idea that lingered on into the 1960s in australia. it was the 1967 referendum that allowed for the counting of aboriginal people in censuses and the government making laws for aboriginal people. in tasmania this had a particular resonance. the truganini myth held that the people                                                          4 http://www.nfsa.gov.au/digitallearning/mabo/tn_01.shtml coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     244  “were not there” – and at times somewhat triumphantly. truganini was imagined as “the last tasmanian aboriginal” even though there are thousands of people currently celebrating their tasmanian aboriginality. likewise, terra nullius was an idea that was to persist virtually unchallengeable in australian law until 1992 when one eddie koiki mabo5, an indigenous landowner, turned the legal doctrine of terra nullius on its head in australia’s high court. an idea that was incomprehensible for a large part of the body politic in australia right up to the handing down of the judgment. the paradise idea ought not be confused with utopia here. typically, utopia is an imagined ‘ideal community’-cum-social order possessing all manner of desirable things. coined by sir thomas more in the 16th c for his book ‘utopia’, the word has entered the english lexicon to describe a fictional island/place in the atlantic ocean – a place to muse upon. if vdl’s explorers and adventurers had looked deeply enough into what was around them, they might well have come to see the people they encountered as living out a kind of utopian existence. by and large they simply didn’t look, nor it seems, might they have been open to such a proposition. the utopia idea lauds the principle of communal ownership. something like communal ownership is quite likely to have been the case in vdl as it is in many ‘first people’s’ social structures. given similar manifestations on continental australia, and the pacific region, it is not such an outrageous notion. nevertheless, virtually no anthropology was undertaken in vdl. quite simply, the discipline was yet to emerge. as a consequence, for the lack of first hand witness reports, little is known of pre-colonial tasmanian aboriginal social structures or the cultural imperatives in operation. on the evidence currently available, it is reasonable to speculate that there was a sophisticated social structure in operation – and based on its own idiosyncratic knowledge and belief systems. the speculation that ’the culture’ was one that had found a kind of equilibrium in relation to the landscape has some credibility. this might be so, albeit that it is an idea that is in stark contrast to the eurocentric cultural standpoint from which it is often made – and its presumed pre-eminence. a contemporary tasmanian aboriginal academic, greg lehman, writing on palawa6 (tasmanian aboriginal) cultural identity says: for palawa the world is substantially tasmania, which is considered home. palawa identity is predicated on this. palawa identity also has a supernatural origin, referring to the powers of animals, plants, rivers, mountains, spirits and ancestors, which often blur into one another. 7 since humanity’s primordial roots, it seems that home is typically somewhat paradisiacal in human imaginings of it across a myriad of cultural expressions. it’s the place humanity tends to defend and retreat to. in contrast, it seems that captains cook’s                                                          5 eddie koiki mabo – http://icarusfilms.com/new98/mabo.html 6 http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/p/palawa%20voice.htm 15/12/12 7 http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/p/palawa%20voice.htm 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     245  and bligh’s sailors in polynesia imagined the life they found on these tropical isles, to some extent ‘utopian’ even if well away from ‘home’ – perhaps even paradise of a kind. collectively, much of the european colonial imperative was arguably founded upon the realisation that ‘at home’, with the rise of industrialisation, opportunities were depleting in the context of social change and intensifying competition, thus causing social distress. for many, comfortable imaginings of home were diminishing and being challenged by apparent opportunities elsewhere. curiously, just short of two centuries later than britain’s colonisation of the australian continent, and offshore vdl, a group of about 200 disaffected australians set sail for postcolonial paraguay to set up a utopian colony, colonia nueva australia8. in a postcolonial society, they were looking to establish a different kind of colony, founded upon socialist principles somewhat like their forebears in north america. perhaps not so surprisingly, the idea of paradise and elsewhere, and in a colony of a kind, was never far away from this venture. even if it was to flounder, in so many ways vestiges of this ‘colony’ persists – and somewhat curiously, as a kind of australian cultural enclave. unlike the utopian impossible promise of something paradisiacal, the flipside, dystopia, speculates upon an uninviting future. while utopia remains out of reach, the promise of dystopia seems eminently achievable. that is, a dystopian future that posits the negativity that society might present in regard to the environment, politics, religion, psychology, spirituality, technology etc. for this reason, dystopia takes the form of a plethora of speculations – pollution, poverty, the collapse of society, political repression and totalitarianism. we have come to know dystopian societies via orwell’s totalitarian invasive super state depicted in nineteen eighty-four9, and huxley’s brave new world10, where ‘humanity’ is scientifically controlled by all manner of social devices. back to the paradise idea and farming. interestingly, palawa people via their ‘firestick farming’, had presented their colonial invaders with a pastoral paradise of a kind, a gloveresk kind of arcadia11, and one that eventually proved to be well enough suited for the livestock of the old world. albeit a ‘placescape’ the colonisers made little attempt to understand the ways it had been purposefully managed to be, they readily ‘appropriated’ it for their eurocentric purpose. even so, as greg lehman tells us, the land was ‘farmed’ for kangaroo and wallaby and as it turned out vdl colonials exploited this, somewhat in oblivion, reinforced by the terra nullius idea. lehman says: the kangaroo was also essential to the survival of the first british beach-heads. in early years, european crops failed and livestock did not prosper. the british hunted kangaroo for food, and aborigines defended it, not just as a food source, but as they would their own kin.                                                          8 http://www.argentinaindependent.com/travel/travelfeature/new-australia-the-australian-colonyin-paraguay/ 15/12/12 9 george orwell, nineteen eighty-four. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/10/1984george-orwell 15/12/12 10 brave new world: a defence of paradise-engineering http://www.huxley.net/ 11 “the subject of [glover’] painting the river nile, van diemens land, from mr glover’s farm 1837 is the landscape of tasmania as it appeared before european settlement. glover depicts it as an arcadia, an ideal rather than an actual world.” ang reference link coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     246  the british failed to establish a partnership with natural resources such as the kangaroo, but exploited these when they needed them, then disregarded them when they lost their commodity value. the kangaroo afforded the british not a place in nature, but a place for capitalism in the colony. other native foods and technologies were treated in this way, at the same time as aborigines were alienated from a land with which they had the most intimate of connections. this threatened their culture and identity. aboriginal people were transformed; no longer noble savages, we became denigrated as the enemy of prosperity and, at the conclusion of government-sanctioned genocidal practices, pronounced extinct. yet, like the kangaroo, aboriginal communities did survive, albeit changed. 12 if an imagining persists for millennia, as likely as not a kind of balance between bliss and wretchedness can also be imagined. in this far-flung place, disconnected from the colonising imperative – intercontinental and mainland – as it was, there might not have been a need to fear death even if life was valued. and, as likely as not, these imaginings would be for the palawa universally imagined not so much as a ‘place’ but as somewhere placescaped by them, their ‘closed loop’ arcadia13 perhaps. it was their place and somewhere they belonged to – somewhere they were a part of and likewise a place that was part of them. yet, when vdl became the subject of european colonial imaginings hell was not all that far away, even if at times vdl was imagined as a kind of antipodean arcadia. the subliminal hellishness came by the hands of vdl’s colonists, bringing with them their ‘sinfulness’, their fears of death and their disconnections to the ‘elsewhere places’ they imagined they could possess – and that must serve them far from home. ann curthoys, writing on ‘weh stanner and the historians’, noted the impact of stanner’s words on the writing of australian history generally. she talks about the tasmanian historian, henry reynolds’ work and quotes him: henry reynolds tells us that he read [stanner’s 1968 boyer lectures: after the dreaming14] some time late in 1969. the lecture on ‘the great australian silence’, he writes, ‘helped strengthen my disquiet about mainstream historical writing’ (reynolds 1999, p. 91). he was especially struck by the remark that the inattention was not simply absent-mindedness but a structural matter. in 1984, reynolds declared that the work on aboriginal history had been so extensive since stanner’s lecture 16 years earlier that one could now say that ‘the great australian silence’ has been shattered, the cult of forgetfulness abandoned. slowly, unevenly, often with difficulty, white australians are incorporating the black experience into their image of the national                                                          12http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/p/palawa%20voice.htm 15/12/12 13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/arcadia_(utopia) 15/12/12 14 w.e.h. stanner (1991) [1968]. after the dreaming. boyer lecture series. abc. isbn 0-73330199-1. retrieved 17 august 2010. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     247  past’ (reynolds 1984, p. 19). 15 yet somehow, despite the shattering of the silence in an ‘australian’ context, in tasmania the silence persisted more stubbornly. the tasmanian ‘disconnect’ in all too many of its manifestations carried on in obstinate defiance, despite increasing political acknowledgement of tasmanian aboriginal culture and presence.16 tasmania and exploitation between 1772 and 1802, eleven expeditions explored and mapped the southeastern tasmanian coastline, with french landing parties spending lengthy periods onshore. the search for new land to colonise was, arguably, always on the agenda albeit that these expeditions were often charactorised as being scientific – nonetheless expeditions with colonial expansion were on the agenda. ostensibly, the british settlement of vdl in 1803, on the banks of what is now known as the derwent estuary, was to head off any french claims to the island. the british sent a small party from their sydney colony in order to stifle any french claim. in 1800, the french had sent an expedition led by commander baudin to explore the south seas, ostensibly a scientific venture, but nonetheless one suspected to be part of an attempt to establish a french colony on the coast of new holland. eight years on in 1811 when lachlan macquarie17 traversed the vdl midlands as a tour of familiarisation with the colony he had been appointed to govern, he tended to imagine the land’s elsewhereness as a somewhat perverse kind of otherness. he named places after members of his party, homeplaces in scotland, his wife and himself. a random selection from his journal gives us an insight into his imaginings of the placescapes he was traversing – and the implications of the terra nullius idea deeply embedded in colonial sensibilities. friday 6th. decr. 1811 … at 6 a.m. set out from macquarie river - travel for 3 miles through argyle plains -which contains good pasturage; thence through hills & vallies for 3 miles more -poor soil -to "mount campbell" (named after d. campbell by me -and formerly called mount augustus) leaving it on our left; then enter "maclaine plains" and travel through them for 2 miles to a rising ground covered with wood, which separate them from the next plains. thence travel two miles over "antill plains" (so named by me after capt. antill), which are beautifully interspersed with trees and contain good pasturage for cattle. ---at 10 a.m. halted on the left bank of                                                          15 weh stanner and the historian – ann curthoys – http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/asp/docs/contents%20sample%20chaps%20index/hinkson/hinkson samplechapter.pdf 16 tac backflip on mundine –matt maloney, the examiner oct. 21, 2012, – http://www.examiner.com.au/story/410131/tac-backflip-on-mundine/?cs=94 & mundine's cheap shot below belt – martin flanagan, the age oct. 19, 2012 – http://www.examiner.com.au/story/408166/mundines-cheap-shot-below-belt/?cs=12 17 http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/macquarie-lachlan-2419 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     248  elizabeth river (so named now by me in honor of mrs. m. being formerly called the relief creek) in antill plains; disce. from last ground being 10 miles.” – journal to and from van diemen's land to sydney in n.s.wales. 18 sheep arrived in vdl soon after the island was colonised in 1803 and by 1828, there were 680 thousand sheep on the island. sheep numbers continued to grow and by 1840 sheep numbers had exceeded a million. wool offered a durable product that could be transported ‘home’ for processing and to feed the increasing industrialization of europe.towards the end of the century wool prices plunged during a deep economic depression. the wheel turned and sheep were slaughtered in large numbers and rendered into tallow – the only durable, useful and profitable product they were fit for once wool was removed from the equation. post ww2, australia was said to be 'riding on the sheep's back'. by the 1950s the gross value of wool production had increased to in excess of 50% of the total value of all agricultural production, compared to less than 20% at war’s end. the increase in the price of wool during this period led to a sharp increase in sheep numbers, and fine wool production in tasmania made tasmania’s midland graziers wealthy and important contributors to the states economy. the promise lachlan macquarie detected in the placescaped terrain he encountered in 1811 was fulfilled, despite the blight of encroaching desertification that sheep herding brings with it. macquarie‘s assumed ‘emptiness’ of the land was something of a selfserving myth. quite simply, the kangaroos and wallabies had been exchanged for sheep – and to a lesser extent cattle. the land was re-placescaped to fit the imperatives of a new open loop ecology where the greater part of the nutrients produced were destined for elsewhere. a not so dissimilar story has been played out with tasmania’s forest resources. forest conservation and reservation was, in the 19th century, tasmania ‘managed’ under the curious title of the waste lands act. this act was founded upon the imperial government’s 1842 act when the van diemen's land governor was able to grant licences for the felling, removal and sale of timber from such lands. this ‘waste land act’ made possible the licensing of forestry activities after van dieman's land become tasmania in 1856. the waste lands act divides [tasmanian] lands into three classes, that is to say :-town lands, agricultural lands, and pastoral lands. the unsettled lands act, as its name implies, treats only of such lands as lie beyond the boundaries of land at present located. with reference to the alienation of settled lands, or those which come under the operation of the waste lands act, the system of sale by auction has been retained, although that system has only been made imperative with regard to the alienation of the lands comprised in the first class, that is                                                          18 journal to and from van diemen's land to sydney in n.s.wales http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/all/journeys/1811/1811.html coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     249  to say, town lands …” 19 in the waste lands act of 1881, provision was made for land reservation for the preservation of timber. the state forests act preservation and the policing of the act were not well organised. the management of forest resources was chaotic with the imperative being more to do with exploitation than management – and with preservation being postponed to another time. this has been an argument that has persisted into the 21st century in tasmania and evidenced in the so-called, and widely reported, ‘tasmanian forest wars.’ this protracted and largely ‘ideological conflict’ perpetrated between ‘the exploiters’ – the true inheritors of the tasmanian colonial imperative – and the radical conservationists-cum-environmental activists – the true believers in climate change and the degradation of the planet. the idea that a “real peace deal” might be brokered between these protagonists seems to be a folly, given the perceived risks and what both sides perceive to be at stake. federal environment minister tony burke said his “honest judgment” was that the signatories to the peace deal would not reach a final agreement. “now people have to look down the barrel of being without an agreement,” he said. “let market forces run their course without a higher level of support than was on the table.” tasmanian deputy premier bryan green said the two governments saw no prospect of a fundamental shift in the two sides’ thinking. “we understand each side's argument,” mr green said. “there's no way we can shoehorn them into an agreement. that is never what it's been about.” of an original 572,000 ha. claim, the conservation groups are understood to have reduced their bid to around 475,000 ha. but they refused to compromise on high conservation value old growth forests, some of them bordering the existing world heritage area. a demand by the timber industry to keep access to 160,000 cubic metres of sawlog annually is understood to have been reduced to about 120,000 cubic metres. green groups say the break point came when the industry refused to allow sawlog quota to be retired, but instead wanted it redistributed.” 20 yet late in 2012 the promise of a ‘deal’ hung in the air:                                                          19 the hobart town daily mercury wednesday 10 march 1858 p.2. 20 sydney morning herald oct 28 2012 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     250  while deal to end tasmania’s ‘forest wars’ imminent: while there has been no official announcement on a deal to preserve large areas of native forests, insiders say the deal is very close to agreement. 21 1890 saw the crown lands act repealed and consolidated, along with the waste lands act, and state forests act of 1885. 2012 witnessed ongoing tensions to do with place and just who it was that should be exploiting the resources imagined as belonging to the place – not to mention the contested ‘rights’ to do so. getup22, the australian community based non-profit activist group, was launched in 2005. it set out to be an independent political movement focused upon building a progressive australia that in turn focuses upon social justice, economic fairness and environmental sustainability. unsurprisingly getup took up the tasmanian ‘forestry debate’. similarly, richard flanagan’s 2007 article “out of control: the tragedy of tasmania’s forest” flanagan proffered the idea that as a consequence of the forestry debate, tasmania is an increasingly oppressive place to live. his story began with: … a story about a tasmanian man fern (dicksonia antarctica) for sale in a london nursery. along with the healthy price tag, some £160, is a note: “this tree fern has been salvage harvested in accordance with a management plan approved by the governments of tasmania and the commonwealth of australia.” if you were to believe both governments, that plan ensures that tasmania has a sustainable logging industry one which, according to the [then] federal minister responsible for forests, eric abetz, is “the best managed in the world”. the truth is otherwise. the man fern possibly several centuries old comes from native forests destroyed by a logging industry that was recently found to be illegal by the federal court of australia. it comes either from primeval rainforest that has been evolving for millennia or from wet eucalypt forests, some of which contain the mighty eucalyptus regnans. these aptly named kings of trees are the tallest hardwood trees and flowering plants on earth; some are more than 20 metres in girth and 90 metres in height. the forests are being destroyed in tasmania, in spite of widespread community opposition and increasing international concern. clearfelling, as the name suggests, first involves the complete felling of a forest by chainsaws and skidders. then, the whole area is torched, the firing started by helicopters dropping incendiary devices made of jellied petroleum, commonly known as napalm. the resultant fire is of such ferocity it produces mushroom clouds visible from considerable distances … [consequently] tasmanians will be condemned to endure the final humiliation: bearing dumb witness to the great lie that delivers wealth to a handful elsewhere, poverty to many of them, and death to their future as the last of these extraordinary places is sacrificed to the woodchippers'                                                          21 abc news thu nov 22, 2012 10:46am aedt 22 http://www.getup.org.au/about 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     251  greed. beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them but to the world, forever. and in a world where it seems everything can be bought, all that will remain are ghosts briefly mocking memory: a ream of copying paper in a japanese office and a man fern in an english garden. and then they too will be gone.” that the debate persists, and is ever likely to, should be no surprise at all to anyone alert to the cultural and social dynamics at play in tasmania – a place that has been perpetually imagined as being at the edge, disconnected from the realities of ‘elsewhere’ in various contexts. indeed, at almost the eleventh hour of the latest round of the forestry debate, and just before christmas closed down thinking for the year, getup was using social media to get the message out that there was a forest to be saved and a petition that needed to be signed online and that: “next week the legislative council will vote on the tasmanian forest agreement. if passed, over half a million hectares of tasmania’s most precious native forests will be protected. but right now it is unclear whether the members of the legislative council will support or scuttle the agreement. there’s an official online petition, and mlcs are paying close attention to it because you have to verify that you’re a local voter to participate. we know they're checking the results carefully, so it's a really great chance to have your say. even in the apparent ‘defense of home’ that consistently appears in the discourses that surround resource exploitation in tasmania, is the demand for resources from elsewhere – with timber and wood fiber, japan, china and asia generally. the disconnect between the imperatives of home and the ‘needs’ of elsewhere drive the contention. the history of postcolonial mining in tasmania is one laced with all the tensions in attendance in the other layers of resource exploitation. long before european settlement in 1803, tasmanian aborigines were engaged in the mining of flints, salt and ochre. typically this activity is disregarded as trivial, albeit it was almost the only mining activity centered on local imperatives – and for millennia. nonetheless, the early settlers had need of building materials and began quarrying sandstone, limestone and clay for brick making. they also began extracting coal for fuel up to 1820, as coal was found at several locations. the first successful coal mine was opened in 1834 with convicts from port arthur23 providing labour – the douglas river coal company's mine opened in 1849, and the mersey coalfield near latrobe in 1850.24                                                          23 http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/p/port%20arthur.htm 15/12/12 24 tasmanian history: mining: http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/m/mining.htm 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     252  however, it was the discovery of a rich tin deposit in 1871 that changed the mining imperative as tin had an ‘elsewhere value’. with this discovery, western tasmania became the focus for prospectors. the first western deposit of tin was found in 1876. extensive alluvial gold deposits were found in 1879, followed by a reef of gold in 1881. by the turn of the 20th century with the mineralisation of tasmania’s rugged and somewhat inhospitable western region being exploited, along with the rich tin resources of the island’s north east, a century of colonisation had delivered the colonisers a suite of resources – mineral, agricultural and timber – to fuel the aspirations of empire albeit that powerful globalising forces were emerging and taking root. the imperatives of elsewhere: home; the metropolis; somehow have taken precedence over local necessities in tasmania. albeit disconnected from the ‘mainland’ and ‘colonial metropolises’, colonial, and postcolonial, tasmania nonetheless felt the lustful magnetism brought on by the island’s mineralisation – gold, copper and tin in particular. far flung as tasmania/vdl seemed to be, it was a convenient enough treasure chest as any colonial may wish for, contained as it was within a defining coastline. that tasmania/vdl might be imagined as a kind of antipodean arcadia is unsurprising. that such ideas might be nurtured into a future, and become a corner post in the arena where a ‘history war’25 might be fought out in public, and fueled by the daily press and a ‘footnote’ laced with political agendas, it is an idea that one way or another defies credibility in a 21st century context. in the sydney morning herald in 2003 helen irving had this to say: what is a footnote worth? a great deal, says keith windschuttle in his critique of the work of historians lyndall ryan and henry reynolds. details in their footnotes about the numbers and nature of aboriginal deaths in colonial tasmania are, he finds, false or misleading. some include inaccurate figures; others list primary sources that cannot be located. the claim that there were "massacres" of aborigines is not supported by the evidence. their history is, therefore, distorted and their conclusions wrong. tu quoque (you too?), writes robert manne in the introduction to his edited collection, whitewash, finding inaccuracies in windschuttle's own work. is this what the history wars boil down to? a matter of footnotes? on the surface it may look like this. the conclusion may be simply that historians should take more care in checking their sources. there is, however, more to writing history than getting the facts right. 26                                                          25 sydney morning herald – footnotes to a war, helen irving december 13, 2003 – http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/15/1071336875054.html 15/12/12 26 sydney morning herald, footnotes to a war, december 13, 2003, historical research , helen irving – http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/15/1071336875054.html 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     253  the insidious ‘truganini myth’27 had insulated colonisers against any idea of a responsibility to share, in any way, the wealth they may extract from this island. geographically remote, somewhat out of reach of the likelihood of moral scrutiny of any colonial metropolitan ‘authority’ as it was (is?) and freed from any ‘obligation’ to the people who had occupied the island for millennia, the plunderers seemed to be licensed to pillage. conveniently, the aboriginal people were imagined as ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘devolving’ and ‘doomed to die out’ and the invaders, with their diseases and guns, had merely hastened the inevitable. there seemed to be little need for remorse. unraveling the narratives that attach themselves to postcolonial story telling in tasmania is an exercise full of irony and there is no comfort whatsoever to be found in the postmodern proposition that “truth is myth, and myth, truth” (dr. david hansen28 in his 2010 award winning essay ‘seeing truganini’). the need to continue the unraveling persists; truths are known but not quite outed. curiously, the ghosts of a time that fewer and fewer wish to know about, or take into account, are as restless as ever. on an island of ironies, where leading aboriginal activists can have fair skin and blue eyes, the question becomes more perplexing. even to tasmanian aborigines, some of whom are predicting bloodshed, the answer is divisive. to the rest of the world it is just baffling, for tasmania is still frequently and wrongly cited as the site of the only successful genocide in history … yet while european notions of blood are not as catholic in their liberating possibilities for identity as initiation into aboriginal law, it is in these notions of blood which denied tasmanians their identity for so long that aboriginal tasmanians now find themselves writhing in a new torment … a people who suffered so completely from a racist ideology, and whose very existence was denied for over a century, now have to face once more their recurrent, mocking fate: the derision of a world that, in the end, still thinks they don't exist … 29                                                          27 trugernanner (truganini) (1812?-1876), tasmanian aboriginal, was born in van diemen's land on the western side of the d'entrecasteaux channel, in the territory of the southeast tribe. her father was mangerner, leader of one of the tribe's bands, and in her adolescence she was associated with its traditional culture, making occasional visits to port davey. the tribe was disrupted by european sealers, whalers and timber-getters; by march 1829, when she and her father met g. a. robinson at bruny island, her mother had been killed by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers, and paraweena, a young man who was to have been her husband, murdered by timber-getters. at bruny island mission in 1829 she 'married' woorraddy, from bruny. they were associated with all the missions that robinson and his sons conducted around tasmania in 1830-35; they acted as guides and as instructors in their languages and customs, which were recorded by robinson in his journal, the best ethnographic record now available of traditional tasmanian aboriginal society. source – http://trove.nla.gov.au/people/750074?c=people … despite being labeled as such for many years, truganini was not the 'last tasmanian aborigine', as the population of mixed descent aboriginal people living in tasmania readily attests to. nevertheless, the story of her life and death remains immensely important, not only as a symbol of the plight of indigenous australians, but as an example of the insensitivity of museum practices. – http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/awe1098b.htm 15/12/12 28 david hansen – http://wheelercentre.com/calendar/presenter/david-hansen/ 15/12/12 29 richard flanagan, tension in tasmania over who is an aborigine, sydney morning herald – october 17 2002 – http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/16/1034561211169.html 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     254  taswegian communities of ownership and interest communities of people have many things in which they share a cogitative sense of ownership for example roads, schools, a health service, even a landscape. those with such an interest form the community of ownership and interest – its coi – for such things. all too often a coi's shared and layered ownerships and interests are down played and may even be belittled or denied –particularly when contentious or complex issues are involved, such as the rights to the wealth invested in landscapes, communities, etc. however, recognising the layerings of ownerships and interests, and the social-cumcultural dynamics involved, can offer a way forward in dispute resolution plus better, and more inclusive, understandings of 'place'. if we listed items that had a coi, we would include items and locations that were owned by the public – public places and spaces – such as a park, or a river, a monument, a memorial; an institution and/or a heritage building; a museum; a water supply; a forest; a festival; a ritual; clearly the list is as endless as the kinds of attachments people have for places, things and events. and the there is the issue of 'cultural property' and 'cultural knowledge' where there are subliminal layers of 'cognitive ownerships'30 that increasingly come into play with the changing ways indigenous cultural material – australian and other – is currently being understood. indeed, individuals within a place’s – and an event's, space's, knowledge system's – coi will almost certainly have multiple layers of ownership and interest in it. the ‘truth’ in the ownership and interest here is ‘cognitive,’ a matter of ‘lore’ rather than ‘law’ – that which is taught; hence to do with wisdom; concerning cultural knowledge, traditions and beliefs. it pertains to cognition, the process of knowing, being aware, the acts of thinking, learning and judging. if we take a museum as an exemplar, museums are to do with cognition – musing; the contemplative; the meditative. in a 21st century context, public museums hold collections of cultural and intellectual ‘property’ held in ‘trust’, and under the stewardship of trustees, on behalf of a coi with an inclusive membership. if, on the other hand we look at ‘courts’, then they are to do with power over conduct; enforcement and authority; control and regulation, guilt and innocence – none of which have a place in musing places, nor much to do with musing. by way of example, criminal justice is to do with the system of practices, and the institutions of government, directed towards the upholding of authority and social control. likewise it is to do with deterring and mitigating crime, or sanctioning those who violate laws with penalties and efforts to rehabilitate the outcomes of a crime – antisocial conduct. courts also offer those accused of a crime protection against abuse of investigatory and prosecution powers.                                                          30 boyd, w.e. 2012. ‘a frame to hang clouds on’: cognitive ownership, landscape and heritage management. pp. 172-198 in skeates, r., mcdavid, c. & carmen, j, (eds) the oxford handbook of public archaeology. oxford university press, oxford. coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     255  members of an inclusive coi should be understood as having both rights and obligations commensurate with their claimed ownership, expressed interest and their relationship to say, ‘cultural property’ or some resource or other – or a public institution and its overall enterprise. a member of the coi may also be referred to as a “stakeholder” but stakeholdership in its current usage has generally come to mean an ‘exclusive’ group of people – a person, group, business or organisation that has some kind vested or pecuniary interest in something or a place. typically, 'stakeholders' assert their rights when there is a contentious decision to be made. however, 'stakeholders' are rarely called upon to meet or acknowledge an obligation. conversely, members of a coi will have innate understandings of the obligations that are expected of them and the rights they expect to enjoy – indeed, there are likely to be stakeholders in the coi mix. it is just the case that for an institution say, the coi mix, when assessed from outside, is intentionally, functionally and socially more inclusive. that is more inclusive than say a list of stakeholders drawn up in respect to a development project that governments – local, state and federal – typically make decisions about. stakeholder groups and communities of ownership and interest are concepts with kindred sensibilities – law and lore, the former reinforcing the latter. nonetheless, these kindred concepts engage with different community sensibilities; with different expectations and different relationships – even if sometimes many of the same people have a ‘stake’ in something as well as other relationships as a member of a coi. also, a coi member may have multiple, and sometimes conflicting, layers of ownership and/or interest. in tasmania, the disconnect between the understanding of an inclusive community of ownership and interest and those with pecuniary and economic interests in resources – almost anything of ‘value’ – is both palpable and polarising as has been evidenced by the 40-year forest debate. more recently, there has been over eight years of strident community dissention that has surrounded, and has impacted upon, the failed tasmanian forestry company, gunns ltd. – and in particular the company’s $2.3 billion pulp mill proposal31. mechanisms for musing, remembering and forgetting museums are interesting places, not so much for the interesting things they collect, loaded as they are with our cultural memories, but for the ‘officialness’ of the stories they tell, and have been allowed to tell – or commissioned, entrusted or signed up to tell. tasmanian museums, the musing places of tasmanianness, come replete with multifarious loads of tasmanian imaginings. the promulgation of the ‘truganini story’ in various ways, in tasmania’s public museums, is an exemplar of an apparently                                                          31 pers. com. bob mcmahon tasmanian community activist – http://www.smh.com.au/national/the-man-who-pulped-the-pulp-mill-20120927-26nwk.html … http://bobmcmahon.blogspot.com.au/ … profile… http://www.wild.com.au/feature/article/bobmcmahon … 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     256  stubborn disconnect between scholarship and the social-cum-cultural realities lived out in the wider tasmanian community. large sections of the two museums’ collections and exhibits celebrate the island’s colonial ‘heritage.’ they do so in ways that privilege somewhat benign or toned-down constructs of colonial memories, which selective and polite remembering allows for. for a prime example, there are contentious stories that surround the hobart royal society’s32, the tasmanian museum and art gallery’s33 founders, implication in the robbery of truganini’s grave. even if spoken of in hushed whispers now, the ‘material’ gleaned found its way into ‘the museum’ for purposes of contemplation – and for decades. the skeleton was included in the now infamous ‘crowther collection’ 34 at the tmag, which included a display that consisted of 33 skulls and three skeletons. just a generation after her death, the museum put on exhibition that perplexing montage which included truganini’s skeleton, her death mask, various photographs of her, bundles of her shell necklaces – euphemistically hers if not hers in fact – and ironically one of lieutenant-governor george arthur’s famous ‘proclamation boards’ plus other aboriginal artifacts. interestingly, it was reported in the hobart mercury, sometime in may 1945, that four shell necklaces were stolen from “the tasmanian room” at the tasmanian museum and art gallery. somewhat bizarrely, this was while truganini’s skeleton was in ‘safe keeping’ elsewhere for the duration of the war and just three years before its removal from public exhibition altogether. the potency of these shell necklaces famously worn by truganini is palpable. for the colonials-cum-settlers-cum-‘invaders’ there is almost no escaping these necklaces’ ‘trophy of empire’ status nor the bleak cultural cargo that comes with them. likewise, truganini’s skeleton carried a deeper and more malignant story that resonates still, decades after her remains were cremated on april 30 1976, a century after her death, and finally laid to rest as truganini herself wished.35 as for the necklaces, for tasmania’s aboriginal community, clearly the necklaces are cultural property and cultural treasures invested with the continuum of their being; charged with connections to place; and endowed with linkages to elders and ancestors. in tasmania there is nothing that is ordinary about a maireener shell necklace36.                                                          32 http://www.rst.org.au/history.html 15/12/12 33 http://www.tmag.tas.gov.au/visitor_information/about_us 15/12/12 34 http://www.tasmaniaforums.com.au/content.php?230-skulls 15/12/12 35 pioneering journey home for truganini, the age may 30 2002 … in february this year, norman palmer, the chairman of a house of commons working group inquiring into human remains held by british institutions, made a trip to tasmania's bruny island. the island was the ancestral home of truganini, the so-called last tasmanian aborigine. truganini died in hobart in 1876; her skeleton was displayed in the tasmanian museum until 1947. in 1976 her remains were cremated, and her ashes were scattered on bruny island's waters. but the matter did not end there. last year britain's college of surgeons revealed that it held samples of truganini's skin and hair in its collection. under tasmanian law the first of its kind in the world indigenous tasmanian remains must be returned to tasmania. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/05/29/1022569791663.html 15/12/12 36 how truganini is envisioned seems to be in a state of flux. likewise, there has been something of a paradigm shift in the ways in which we might envision “truganini’s necklaces”. that is the maireener shell necklaces truganini is typically depicted wearing along with those coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     257  together these maireener necklaces evidence the continuity of aboriginal tasmanians’ presence and identity. this is a story the museum now tells, yet the memories of its role in the promulgation of the convenient story that truganini was the last of her people, echoes in the galleries still. in the tmag there was also a diorama that depicted a palawa family (father, mother child) that was a profound example of a conveniently constructed imagining of tasmanian aboriginal life prior to colonial contact. it depicted palawa people as being naked and in a vacant wilderness landscape. in the 1930s, when it was assembled, there was sufficient anthropological evidence available for the preparator of this diorama to know that a group engaging in ‘domestic’ activity would almost certainly include a greater number of people. the depiction in the diorama drew on a romantic, convenient and yet erroneous, parallel between the non-aboriginal family unit (mid 20th century) and the palawa ‘family’ unit before colonisation. aboriginal diorama, tasmanian museum & art gallery, hobart, installed circa 1930, and de-installed c. 1995 (photograph by ray norman). as a device installed to ‘edify’, arguably the diorama was set up to give credibility to the implication that the palawa culture was/is of a lower order and comparatively valueless. it makes an unfavourable comparison, by implication, between palawa culture’s lack of possessions and non-indigenous culture’s relative wealth and                                                                                                                                                                    attributed to her – plus those named after her http://truganininecklaces.blogspot.com.au/ 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     258  ‘sophistication’, using the nuclear family as a tool for direct and inappropriate comparison. in recognition of this, the tmag added a ‘dilemma label’37 to the diorama in december 1992, which read: 1730 ?1930? what can we see in this diorama? the nuclear family was not a traditional aboriginal arrangement. day-to-day family life included aunts, uncles grandparents and other relatives. a man and women working ... but how? in traditional aboriginal society women provided much of the food and gathered firewood. child rearing was shared. who is the boss? the man stands facing the viewer, and makes eye contact with us. the women sits tending the fire and she and the child look down and away. in this arrangement it seems clear that the man is dominant, the woman is docile and passive. in traditional aboriginal society women were partners with men. so who is in this diorama? the image of the family, work and power was seen as in 'normal' white australia in the 1930s, when this was made. it is still a nostalgic ideal for some but it was never part of aboriginal life. if this is so misleading why is it still here? ... it can show us how ignorant white australia was sixty years ago about aboriginal society. it can also show us how dominant groups have tried to remake other groups in their own image, to make them share alien values and beliefs. ... 38 the label went some way in addressing the issues of racial prejudice and ‘governmental’ misinformation. given that the label was placed where it could have been easily overlooked, it was a feeble effort – and in the end a compounding and illconsidered initiative. from the perspective of prominent tasmanian aboriginal activist, greg lehman,39 the ‘dilemma label’ devise was: not acceptable to the tasmanian aboriginal community as a response, rather it has been presented to them yet another example of postmodern bullshit to deal with. however, decades of activism on the part of the tasmanian aboriginal community have brought about significant changes to the presentation of tasmanian aboriginal culture.                                                          37 at the national museum of natural history, "dilemma labels" intended to point out the stereotypes inherent in the wildlife displays and ethnographic halls brought out a controversy that eventually led to the closing of the africa hall. the labels, a long-term initiative begun this year, were eventually removed. http://australianmuseum.net.au/controversy-in-museums-atimeline/  38 pers. com. julia clarke, curator, tasmanian museum and art gallery 1994 39 greg lehman: greg is descended from the trawulwuy people of north east tasmania. he graduated from the university of tasmania in 1986 with a bsc in life sciences and geography and completed a thesis on narrative identity and its role in co-operative land management in 1996. greg worked as a research officer for the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody and was the inaugural secretary of the tasmanian aboriginal land council and as part of the premier’s working group, negotiated the tasmanian government’s aboriginal lands act 1995. … http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research/people/lehman.html 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     259  indeed, scholarship in regard to tasmania’s colonial and aboriginal histories has moved on with the appointment of an aboriginal curator, the installation of a tasmanian aboriginal gallery and the appointment of a tasmanian aboriginal advisory council. all this is yet to be mirrored, in any substantial way, in the story telling in tmag’s sister institution in launceston with 121 years of history, the queen victoria museum and art gallery40 (qvmag). the qvmag is ‘auspiced’ and managed (owned?) by launceston city council. arguably, it is more politicised than the tmag in that it does not have an independent standalone board of trustees – the city’s aldermen are functionally the institution’s ‘trustees’. when this has been contested various ‘defenders’ of the institution and the status quo of its modus operandi have made the claim that it has “the most democratic trusteeship in australia”41. in one sense it may be true, yet in another, best practice in regard to contemporary museum administration has been somewhat discretionary at the qvmag – and to various extents this can be attributed to the politicisation of public collections in tasmania. for example, it wasn’t until 2011 that, as an institution, the qvmag had anything that resembled a constitution or charter – contrary to museums australia’s code of ethics42. rather it operated as a division of council under tasmania’s local government act. and, it wasn’t until 2012 that it had a benchmarked strategic plan. given that the institution is generously funded by the city’s ratepayers, tasmanian taxpayers plus private and corporate donors, this is a rather extraordinary circumstance in regard to accountability – and quite probably a unique exemplar in australian public administration. the qvmag has its own set of cultural constructs promulgated via its collections and the manner in which they have been acquired, researched, curated and presented over time. while it must be said that this would be true of almost every public collection funded by ‘government’, it is just the case that the ‘political imperative’ which comes with the funding over time is more discernable than it may be in like institutions elsewhere – and in some more than others. an example of the kind of ‘political critique’ proffered by politicians in power is easily found. riling against ‘inconvenient’ commentary in the cultural arena, australia’s prime minister howard invoked the ''black-armband view of history” as a ‘defense’. it was a ‘politically loaded suggestion’ he ran with when rationalising why he did not believe in issuing an apology to the stolen generations in the aboriginal community, and indeed a range of contentious issues with negative ‘baggage’ to do with australia’s                                                          40 http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/qvmag/ 15/12/12 41 the tasmanian museum & art gallery is a tasmanian state institution and its trustees are appointed by the state government via the mechanism of the governor & council. the institution is directly accountable to the government via it board of trustees. 42 institutional ethics: “minimum essential requirements for museums, regardless of size: a constitution, clear aims, written policies and procedures; sufficient funds to operate ; a collection of high quality objects, which are properly housed, preserved, documented and displayed; premises adequate for all aspects of museum work … etc. http://www.history.sa.gov.au/chu/downloads/cmp_help_sheets/code%20of%20ethics%20(mus eums%20australia)%20a%20summary.pdf coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     260  colonial histories43. politics serially, and sometimes surreally, touches upon cultural sensitivities and sensibilities – and sometimes it touches public collections. interestingly, within the qvmag, tasmanian aboriginal stories are currently noticeably down played and virtually absent in the institution’s public galleries. somewhat curiously, on the institution’s art gallery campus only five objects – maireener shell necklaces – of tasmanian aboriginal cultural production are on exhibition. however, it must be noted that after the refurbishment of the royal park campus, and its reopening, there was a temporary exhibition, robinson’s cup44, that presented the work of five contemporary tasmanian aboriginal cultural producers. despite the promise of continued engagement with these and others ‘artists’ in the community, it’s a promise yet to be fulfilled. even if it is said to be early days, is it really? similarly, on the qvmag’s inveresk campus, where the focus is upon social history(ies?) and the natural sciences, there are no examples of tasmanian aboriginal relationships to ‘place’ on exhibition. that is, aboriginal storytelling that would help make sense of tasmania as place – placescaped as it was for 40,000 years by aboriginal people. this has not always been so evident. like it was with its sister institution in hobart, the tmag, in the qvmag tasmanian aboriginal histories and cultural production have not been proactively included in, and celebrated as an integral part of, tasmanian storytelling. that is currently so, despite two important colonial objects, the euphemistic “bothwell cup” and an example of governor arthur’s ‘proclamation boards’ being on exhibition. these objects are included in an exhibit entitled “tasmanian connections”. these two objects together, in the context of this exhibit, can be read as pertaining to the colonial displacement and decimation of tasmanian aboriginal people – and by extension, read as colonial trophies of a kind. they are there at the expense of any other representations being opened up to be considered, or that might advance a more inclusive (reconciliatory?) discourse – therefore tending to underline the misconstructions of the truganini myth given their cultural baggage. in the absence of other visions of tasmanian aboriginal storytelling elsewhere in the museum, except for the many hundreds of objects in its ‘reserve collections’, from a 21st century perspective this can be read as a disconnect with large slabs of the storytelling that might help make sense of ‘place’. reportedly, visitors to tasmania, and the qvmag, looking to explore aboriginal people’s place within the tasmanian story, find the absence of aboriginal cultural on exhibit disappointing – and for some,                                                          43 http://www.smh.com.au/national/rudd-squirmishes-with-howard-over-the-history-wars20090827-f18h.html#ixzz2eybgofv9; http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/pu bs/rp/rp9798/98rp05 15/12/12 44 robinson’s cup exhibition: september 2011 >february 2012 … http://147.109.236.45/bloogoocms/uploads/files/redevelopment/qvmag_on-show_art-gallery.pdf 15/12/12; http://www.bothwell.com.au/index.php?p=1_37&_liveedit=preview 20/12/12; http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/27233580?searchterm=robinson%20cup%201835%20bot hwell&searchlimits=; http://www.jbhawkinsantiques.com/uploads/articles/garobinsoncup.pdf. nb correction: pers. com. : j.b. hawkins “the article mis-attributes the cup to the tmag collection but it is in fact held in the qvmag collection.” 21.12.2012   coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     261  insulting45. that the wider tasmanian aboriginal community might also feel slighted is quite understandable. given that these two objects, presented in the way, and in the context, they have been, does raise issues to do with aboriginal sensibilities and sensitivities that are seemingly downplayed – ignored even. viewing the exhibit and informed by the background of comfortable tasmanian colonial histories that prevailed until the late 20th century, some viewers might well feel comfortable enough in front of this exhibit. yet they might well see that aboriginal culture is by-and-large being represented by two objects – the proclamation board and the bothwell cup – that speak rather loudly of the tasmania’s aboriginal people’s decimation in a way and still feel comfortable enough with what is before them. the apparent inertia, and the visible lack of critical enquiry and engagement with the issues that are apparent here, appears and reads as being something less than reconciliatory. it is especially so in this museum, given its claimed ‘status’ and claimed connectivity to place that’s proclaimed, and celebrated even, in the exhibit’s marketing and title – “tasmanian connections”. the exhibit presents, and arguably privileges, a eurocentric colonial representation of the island’s histories. anything approaching a postcolonial sensibility seems far far away. indeed, the convict exhibit here provides a somewhat interesting counterpoint to the kind of treatment the tasmanian aboriginal has received in the exhibit’s curation. the institution contests this critique, asserting that the “exhibition was developed to include the six key themes of dinosaurs, geology, tasmanian fauna, sydney cove shipwreck, convicts (the jw beattie collection) and transport. it was not intended to be a chronological social history of tasmania.”46 in effect, and by extension, the aboriginal story was quite deliberately excluded. why might this have been? to include aboriginal tasmania in this exhibit, with this brief, might have been seen as being inappropriate – possibly even insensitive. however, would this automatically be the case? arguably not, but clearly there was/is some kind of institutional inhibition at work here. it is an open question as to just what the inhibition(s?) is to do with. if there is a problem here, it appears to be that any contentiousness to do with proactively including a tasmanian aboriginal discourse in ‘the musing’ is perceived to be intrinsically difficult, or, is it to do with the kind of awkwardness that comes with acknowledgement, truth telling and reconciliation? truth and musing in the end, stepping back from actively engaging with contentiousness simply brings about even more layers of contestable imaginings. undeniably, it merely adds yet another layer to the contentiousness to the musings invited in museums. interestingly, pablo picasso had something to say about museums and truth that has a particular resonance here:                                                          45 pers. comm.: lola greeno, september 2012 46 pers. comm.: qvmag director, october 2012 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     262  museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly impostors ... we have infected the pictures in our museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. we have turned them into petty and ridiculous things. 47 modern politics contains many examples of proof by assertion. this practice may also be observed occasionally in museums somewhat like it is with the use of political slogans. in museums, collections of ‘ideas’ are presented as narratives in order to provide easily digested take away messages. the technique is also sometimes found in advertising. vladimir ilyich lenin said, "a lie told often enough becomes the truth." supposedly, joseph goebbels embroided that idea somewhat when he is often quoted as saying: if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. the lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. it thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state. 48 standing in the exhibit ‘tasmanian connections’, in a defunct and repurposed railway workshop in tasmania, musing upon tasmanianness can be perplexing – and more so from the vantage point of a 21st century understanding of ‘place.’ that is, musing on a ‘placedness’ that vibrates with echoes of the past, and hearing picasso’s insights resonate in the musing, and thinking about lenin and goebbels too … well the disconnections before you become positively boisterous. rainbow tinting in rear vision mirrors the trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking about yesterday, not tomorrow. it's like driving a car using a rearview mirror. 49 research that is viewed through rainbow-tinted rear view mirrors is doubly troublesome. collections come with multifarious agendas and the truth, however that might be interpreted and understood, is at best illusive. public patronage is the support, encouragement, or financial aid that ‘the public’ bestows upon the keepers of public collections – and typically via government and taxes. in the history of museums, patronage was typically the province of the noble                                                          47 the museum as a site of contest: the bilbao guggenheim, jeremy macclancy reprinted from focaal, no. 29, 1997, pp. 91—100 (pablo picasso quoted in barr 1946: 274). http://www.scholars-onbilbao.info/fichas/macclancyfocaal1997.pdf 48 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/holocaust/goebbelslie.html 15/12/12 49 bernard loomis – 1923 2006 – american cultural producer, toy developer and marketer coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     263  class, monarchs, popes and the captains of industry, all of whom have provided aid to underlings towards demonstrating their wealth, power and authority. it also refers to the right to bestow authority to the benefices of office – and sometimes the guardianship of saints. most public institutions (museum?) depend upon political patronage. it grants the beneficiaries with the use of resources – public monies – to reward institutions, and in the end individuals, for their ‘support’. some patronage systems may be benign, yet the term may refer to a type of corruption, or favouritism, where power brokers reward groups, institutions, ethnicities, etc. for their support using various manifestations of ‘largess’ – legally and illegally. storytellers need sustenance and thus are vulnerable to persuasion. if the demand is for a ‘smoothed over history’ so be it. but what is the purpose of the museum? people hold strong opinions about museums. some assert that their primary function should be scholarship, others insist that it’s more important to communicate with a wide audience. in pursuing either of these goals, should museums focus on exploring objects or investigating their contexts—are they about looking at things or telling stories? adding to the debate, there’s lingering anxiety about relativism; some commentators (and probably many visitors) think museums should strive to be objective, others relish a variety of views. it has become a cliché to say that museums are today’s churches—special places for contemplation, separate from day-to-day concerns; conversely, there’s an argument that museums should aim to be commonplace, part of normal life. it is intriguing that museums were once talked of as places that reinforced cultural hegemonies, but now they are more often seen as democratising access to [cultural production], and even as politically correct when they attempt to include groups formerly omitted from history. while some believe museums have changed far too much, others think they haven’t been transformed enough … tiffany jenkins believes museums are suffering from “a crisis of cultural authority” because of unremitting questioning of their “foundational purpose”, which she isolates as “the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge”. she wishes museums were still seen “as a distinct realm, removed from social and political forces”. she seems to want museums to separate themselves from a world changed by postmodern relativism, cultural theory and postcolonialism, to rediscover their earlier “implicit universalism” and to ditch today’s “explicit subjectivism”… she’s quite wrong to say museums no longer value knowledge. they continue to be highly didactic institutions and … remain passionately committed to promoting understanding, and to rather old-fashioned ideas such as truth and beauty. long may museums continue to change to find new and more effective ways to share collections and expertise with ever coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     264  wider audiences. 50 as picasso insinuates, absolute truth as inflexible reality is unlikely to be found in a museum. nonetheless, we might expect to find some placedness if the institution is interrogating its purpose – and the realities within which it exists. there are absolutely no square circles, and there are absolutely no round squares, although there is likely to be an awful lot of fussiness when you step upon contested ground searching for meaning. reconstructing somewhere fundamentally the tasmanian cultural landscape has been, and is being, reconstructed via the agencies of hegemonic imperialism and globalism. the placescaping that has gone on within its shoreline, and the cultural realities lived out there, have undergone the kind of modification that might be put side by side with say, climate change. yet this transformation is at once contested and endorsed back and forth across numerous lines in the sand. ‘taswegians’, imagine their sometimes bleak, sometimes paradisiacal, inheritance as a fraction, a disconnected fraction, that represents a whole – albeit one that might be an elsewhere place. in so many ways, the island’s stories have had layer upon layer of imaginings from elsewhere imprinted upon the cultural landscape and the lives lived out within it. so many things ‘tasmanian’ come into view wearing a dismal gothic veil. in its original state, the island can be imagined as an unknown ‘elsewhere place’, a disconnected place at the edge of the world, existing in splendid isolation with a closed ecosystem. it’s a place that might have been imagined as being oblivious to, and unbothered by, the constancy of the warfare elsewhere. each hunt was as successful as the last. it was a place where death needn’t be feared in a kind of oblivion where unknown neighbours, somewhere far away, poked each other in the eye. it’s the kind of place hollywood might imagine and one where every ending might be a happy one. but no, a rational muser could not sustain such imaginings – such placemaking – any more than they might willingly entertain a nightmare that trawls the depths of our subconscious fears, our uncertainties, our feebleness, and our contemplations of our sinfulness perhaps. the museums of old were full of plunder, the spoils of war and cultural trophies transmogrified into curiosities and the symbols of power. in scandinavian museums the plunder is acknowledged for, and celebrated as, the viking booty and the treasure that it is. in the museums of later colonial enterprises the collected plunder masquerades as a kind of quasi-universal knowledge bank. yet, ‘elgin’s marbles’ are uncomfortably detached from their place despite their ‘keepers’ assertions that “they are best cared for here” even if disconnected from home.                                                          50 the art newspaper: what are museums for?... maurice davies. books, issue 224, may 2011 reviewing ‘contesting human remains in museum collections: the crisis of cultural authority’, tiffany jenkins, routledge; the best art you’ve never seen: 101 hidden treasures from around the world, julian spalding; ‘under the hammer: iconoclasm in the anglo-american tradition, james simpson – http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/what-are-museumsfor/23597 15/12/12 coolabah, no.11, 2013, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona     265  who owns these places of the muse and “all this stuff”? in the 21st century it is an open question, even if in the 19th and 20th centuries there may have been a carnivalesque conga line of claimants deeming for themselves privileged access, if not ownership. their music lingers but the dance has changed. somewhat like the bolsheviks for whom killing off private property was never enough – money needed to be abolished. neomusers need to rummage among the skeletons, the backroom detritus, the dross – and freely. these neo-musers (neo-owners!) are an ever growing legion, armed with insights and apparatus never before contemplated, looking to reconfigure the ivory towers of yesterday. social scientists tell us that the physicality of places shapes the cultures that inhabit them. in a desert life will be competitive, there will be fewer resources and war gods kind of make sense. in the mountains you will have different sets of imperatives. still, the question hanging in the air is, does place shape culture or is it culture that shapes its place? quite possibly it is a matter of memory. *** ray norman is a tasmanian-based artist, blogger, researcher, community networker and cultural jammer, with a background in studio jewelry and metalsmithing. he has been involved in the initiation of speculative community placemaking-cumplacemarking projects through interventionist cultural production. (zinghouseunlimited, tasmania, australia. email thezinghouse@7250.net) microsoft word terri-ann white 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 the country and the city terri-ann white abstract: this is an unorthodox presentation, but one i hope that goes to the heart of some of the larger myths of contemporary australia and the appeal still found in its pioneering spirit. it was inspired, after reading joan london’s new novel the good parents and thinking back to my own experiences of country towns in australia, and my recent encounters with towns in transition. keywords: fiction, literature, mythology. we’d drive for the three hours to get to the town for every school holiday, leaving behind the city and its range of distractions. it seemed the country cousins would always have preferred to come to stay rather than us invade the more contained spaces and their delicate friendship circles of childhood. we leave the city by mid-morning. i steadfastly disobey my mother’s instructions. she has bought me three pairs of new sandals the day before, to last the summer and beyond. this spirit of extravagance and abundance is new to us. red, white, blue; in an identical style. the problem is that i am easily influenced, and my two cousins closest in age are both older than me and they saw the sandals when they arrived last night for our journey to their home. they saw an opportunity. we could wear a pair each during my two weeks in dalwallinu. they’ve never seen such attractive footwear. they help me to conceal the sandals in my little bag, at the last moment. we ruin all three pairs in the dusty stretched-out town as we parade around, the talk of the town. we’d travelled the 250 kilometres to dalwallinu, my aunt at the wheel. the three of us in the back seat are 8, 9 and 10. this may be my first time away from my mother with this family; something is amiss and i’m struck by nausea. it might be the fifty baby chicks in a box in the front seat being transported back to the town house with a huge backyard. it’s just a barely-there smell and a constant and soothing, fluttering sound. in retrospect my nausea may have been a guilt reaction. at one stage around lunchtime, the halfway point, i request from my aunt the option of running behind the car for the rest of the journey. my understanding formed by my suburban streets, this anecdote becomes an entrenched charming story of childhood for the extended family. copyright ©2009 terri-ann white. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 the holiday is a bonding time with the set of cousins. not much different to daily life in the suburbs, really, although there is less to do: no beach, no movie screenings, no television or circus. the town is small, and the curious addition for me is the separate community of plymouth brethren who are visible but segregate from their fellow citizens. their demeanour on the streets, and the headscarves the women and girls wear, may be my first observation of the idea of counterpoint—working together despite extreme differences of the two strands. when i return home for the start of school my mother is angry, then dismayed at the start of my wilful behaviour. the girls of dalwallinu dream of the manifold riches available in the city. they will not taste them until they are grown-up, if they are lucky. ~ strangeness used to come from somewhere else: the cities hold the aberrant people; country folk can be known and, generally, trusted within local codes. that is why he needs to go to perth as soon as he finishes his junior certificate— sixteen and ready for a life of his own choosing. in the next nine years, the rest of his life, the toll of death in his generation is unprecedented. car accidents, gunshot wounds, accidental overdoses, suicides. he is the only one who dies of that new disease, the socalled lifestyle pandemic of aids. but hardly anyone finds out the grim story; cancer is a much easier descriptor. community leaders warn weekly on the dangers of too much freedom. this is a tight little community. it only just makes the abs definition of small town population of 1500 people. there are no young people in his generation, or the one that follows, who recognize their future in their hometown. part of the fatalities list holds that terrible tension of expectations of parents and anxiety of the community about its future. it is a kick in the teeth to say, to declare, that you wish to leave now. and yet what is to be done in a life in narrogin, wagin, coolgardie, dumbleyung, or kondinin? he couldn’t believe the people he met in perth—his parents had warned him about what city folk got away with, and how they had a different moral code to those he knew. in the city there are crowds and people take risks, allow eccentric tics to unfurl onto the footpath. no shame. his father used to say every weird person is from somewhere else. on his first day in the hay street mall he stopped and listened to a woman playing guitar and singing a song about her warts. on his first night out he met a couple—a rather flamboyant man and woman—in leathers with a hint of a bondage fetish—who took him home with them and unfurled all of his expectations. ~ impossible not to think about civic status and investments when we stay in three of the goldfields grand hotels in our long weekend away to, as the title describes it, inside australia, in a salt lake 800 kilometres from perth. each of them—in kalgoorlie, southern cross and menzies—anticipate large crowds of drinkers, diners, and overnight guests in their original design, and have modified to smaller spaces with masonite room divisions and other makeshift measures. wide hallways and verandahs, industrial kitchens that rival later professional layouts in global hotel chains, and vast bedrooms still with some of the trappings of a boomtown grandeur now shabbily affordable at less than $50 per night. these hotels are falling coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 apart through neglect and their redundancy. in the wake of recent tourism interest and a new mining boom this is only now being tended to. they won’t fall down—they are too solidly built for that, but are used by sturdy owners to service short-term needs with little thought for the future. one of the hotels offers the little touches a traveler might need after driving all day, in cleanliness and comfort, but has no food left for dinner service and sends us out to a rival hotel bar to be fed. another gives me a serious infestation of fleas, which leaves my legs a red mess for the next week. the wealth attached to towns in the past—those goldfields hotels, and even some wheat belt towns have them. once, these towns paid serious attention to visitors, to their status; they had money and they invested it. that is no longer the case—money is in the domain of the individual now and rarely benefits town or region. the salt-lake is one of those implausible sights: a vast landscape changed by the placement of things that don’t belong there. paradoxically, the things are sculptures made by antony gormley, the british artist, using magnetic resonance imaging and other measuring and interpretative tools, of local residents of the area around lake ballard and menzies. we walk around this huge salt lake—ten square kilometres— to meet each figure. the ground is a squelch—it has rained in the last week in a massive tropical downpour and the formerly dried-out lake is sparkling silver mud. the 51 figures are responsible for thousands of new tourists visiting this isolation. the mud only becomes mud in our walking of it, though; the sun had caked it up and we can tell there have been no visitors for days. this vast space is silvery with a pink hue, and the silver-tinged leaves of the eucalyptus striaticalyx trees growing out of the dunes and islands of the lake offer a surprise to what we—australians and tourists alike—expect to see in the outback. it is a trick of the imagination, this; the red earth and the stringy spinifex have us remember a sharper image, and easily forget that softness. ~ my goal in this article is to offer a fleeting impression of the country, a city-centric one, to my european colleagues especially, who may never have traveled to australia but have a strong interest in the continent and may not realize—if they were to visit a country town—how much many of them now are tourist copies of what they once were, or an extension of our system of suburbs. that seems an interesting idea, if troubling, trying to keep a semblance of authenticity, the core of the original, as if our image depends upon it. it is a marker of the value attached to this aspect of australian life. the idea of the pioneer is such a defining story, and we are in a transition time about our country and our city. in san francisco recently i was struck again by this powerful and ongoing myth of the tough, physical australian when i found the obligatory australian fair shop filled with the items of clothing we are so well known for: the drizabone raincoat, the akubra hat, belts and buckles and cowboy clothes. memories of past times or circumstances always carry some danger of a simplified response, of the thrill of nostalgia and how it can butter you up to imagine you were present for the best or worst experiences. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 i’m imagining australia through the story it still tells itself, its strong mythology of an agricultural base, a veritable food bowl, and think about what happens in this coastclinging continent when its food sources change, when diminishing water finally forces changes in agricultural practices. when country towns become as sophisticated as the city and suburbs, become a place to escape to rather than establishing yourself in: financially, setting up a family—when towns were service centres with a mobile population of doctors, nurses, schoolteachers, bank clerks and police. this is as it was for most of the twentieth century, when training in some fields came with an obligation to serve outside the city. staffing of service industries are now in crisis outside the cities, and english and american policemen, as an example, have recently been vigorously recruited, as have indian doctors and dentists, to take up positions in corrigin, eucla, yarloop, gnowangerup, and tambellup. what happens to our sense of australian-ness: we still appear so anxious about such a concept: those battlers on the land, the wide open plain and cleared paddock, the community rallying around the coop, the main street, the pub, the coming and going of people of all generations who cannot cope here or elsewhere. that huge myth, the idea of a national character—the pioneer-spirited man of the soil, industrious, tough, is mostly the image that we are defined by. in the san francisco store they present the full package, in and of itself, entirely self-referring and marked out as different to the american tough guy; yet when we make wine or literature they can, blessedly, be judged in their own terms. we allow the urbanity in. how does this image ever alter, or be addressed? as the sprawl of suburbia reaches more than 100 kilometres of uninterrupted settlement there are fewer people working the land and more making what is referred to as a tree-change—the foregoing of the city life and the pressured job for something more truncated—less work and pressure, more space, a back-to-nature without having to do the backbreaking labour of breaking in the land—this dream is conducted in 4 x 3 modern houses (that is 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, the latest fashion). it is the convenient light aircraft from the nearest town’s airstrip, the interconnectivity of the home office. this can only happen in or after an economic boom, but the way it has changed the landscape in a place like western australia over the past 5 years is profound. the hundreds of city apartments in large cities like sydney and melbourne, too, only occasionally used by their owners who live in the country, is staggering to a small city girl like me. i’m not making judgements here, just observing. once, when you lived in the country you were obliged to maintain a firm focus on the topics that interest you. you’ll have fewer chances to be able to compare. it is a paucity of choice, but only if you already know about choice. that paucity of experience—and choice—makes for the need of a definitive stance. if you only see, for instance, one theatrical play every two or so years, there is no point for comparative appreciation. if you’ve only read one newspaper in your life, the same applies. one of two judgements can come out of this, neither of them that useful: outright acclaim, unconditional approval of the experience, or a cynicism borne out of idealizing the genre and a lack of opportunities to learn the vocabulary. ~ coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 the food bowl. i recall in all of those holiday periods on wheatbelt farms when uncles and cousins tended to the annual cycle of wheat and sheep harvesting: planting, growing, shearing, harvesting, slaughtering. it was all very serious business, and enabled the seven children in the family to board at exclusive city schools. most of the family is still on the land, but their children are not. the future of australia’s growth does not remain in this form of agriculture, in the small to medium sized family-based enterprise, managing all required duties and outsourcing the others to locals. the automation and rationalizing of the industry means that this repertoire of skills and knowledge changes, that city cousins don’t get a chance to handle animals, know where food comes from, ramble widely and take physical risks. an understanding of food and its production was one of the important revelations of my childhood holidays on farms, giving me the grounds to decide what i was prepared to eat, if somewhat precociously. and the more widespread the depletion of people farming the land the fewer citizens there will be in country towns in service industries. while all of these changes take place, though, there is the parallel movement of food fetishism: the micro-world that obsesses about food requires to know information at such a specialist level that it can pinpoint the name of the goat or cow that produced the milk; the paddock—identified on google earth, where daisy grazed. at dreamworld amusement park on the gold coast of queensland i watched a performance in a faux bush camp with fire roaring, billy boiling, whips cracking, animals lined up for tricks. it was a poignant collecting up of a world past, much more realistic than steve irwin the crocodile hunter, by a man in full cowboy gear with numerous dirty jokes and racist slurs all disguised with good-humour. i’ve seen performers like this since my childhood; the template hasn’t changed at all. that the aussie cowboy now lived without a horse, the ultimate live flesh show, and made a living amongst fabrications and wild whirring amusement park rides seemed lost on most of the audience. ~ at the age of 32, with her three children aged 9,7 and 5 safely in their classrooms for the day and her husband miles away in a far paddock, she jumped out of the window of their rambling homestead farmhouse, lovingly restored by her to its great glory with help from her husband and some of his farm labourers, and ran away with the visiting art teacher she’d met the week before who was returning to perth that morning. it was, as such events often are, fueled by passion, it was spur of the moment, and entirely constructed out of their first afternoon together. the idea was simply novel, created from their heat that day. all she knew was that it would be impossible to come back if she carried out her departure plan. she’d seen people—not just women—try and return from grand gestures and it had never worked. from her childhood years in a country town she had encountered the walking dead: people in families or alone who’d tried out one too many transgressions and now had no place—travelling the country trying to find one. but the stink was always palpable and locals always sorted them out— sometimes too late— or tripped them up. shysters. people with secrets earnestly demonstrating trustworthiness; their children necessarily complicit to confect a history to tell their new friends. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 she hadn’t grown up in this town, but her husband had. she’d been born in the city and spent some years in an atypical country town—broome, in the kimberley region of western australia. it couldn’t have been more different from her marriage home: broome was a town with an historical multiculturalism, one of the few not dominated by white europeans with an indigenous population largely on the fringes, present but not players in the social and economic play. it was differently formed in the nineteenth century through a pearling industry that included japanese, malays, aboriginal, and chinese workers and this mix meant that generations later it was harder to categorize people through race or ethnicity. her parents were the managers of one of the hotels in town, and her musical appreciation started with wednesday night entertainment. broome became part of the circuit for revival tours of groups such as the platters, usually a little past their prime. at the same time, her father employed the broome beats—a group of young men who could only get one weekly gig, but became distinguished musicians and composers before the end of the century. jimmy chi was the core of this group, along with the pigram brothers and others. being in the hotel meant meeting all of the fakes who flew through town, as the hotelier was an essential contact in the life of the town. our young girl watched the shysters and took notes for how she wanted to be as an adult. she couldn’t ever compare wyalkatchem with broome—they were in different parallel worlds. she knew that the sweat she produced with her young lover in this most surprising tryst, the first since her marriage, was more than a physical response and she should consider, again, what she was doing here, in a town of a little more than 600, a town where volunteering is the norm rather than the exception, and lodged as the first daughter-in-law in the patrician family. they weren’t the salt of the earth, but they had an ongoing obligation to the town’s workers; that mostly meant for her no chance of her husband ever wanting to change where they lived, or how. she’d probably made a mistake. the obsolete farm machinery sits in a field on the edge of the town looking like a sculpture park or a cemetery. in all shapes and scales, rusted from years of sitting exposed. the hallmark of the town carries a tidy ethos—there are citizens who desire a cleanup of this field of dead objects, but most of them are not farmers. the farmers know the worth of this capital investment, and the long associations within the town. but the question still needs to be asked: what is it doing out in this gateway to the town, and what should be done with it? part of the ethos of that pioneering phase of australian settlement was prudence. the balance is now shifted: smaller farming enterprises are beyond prudence and usually at the whim banks towards foreclosure. the conglomerate farming businesses, known as agrochemical industries by those opposed to their methods of maximum yield at whatever cost, operate with the machinery of the corporation. the tree-changers are usually cashed up, bringing a fresh new way of shopping to their town, a novelty, and encouraging retailers to stock imported and artisanal goods. ~ coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 for context: joan london’s characters in the good parents, jacob and toni, leave the city of perth in a hurry. the imperative is toni’s escape from an oppressive marriage, but jacob has been privately planning for years to join a commune and explore an alternative life in that region. their commune experience, short lived and unsatisfying, catapults them into a nearby country town and into that option of the service industry— jacob becomes a schoolteacher. at some point, with two children and a happy life, they forget that the threat of the vindictive ex-husband has expired and just settle into life in their town. terri-ann white is a writer (night and day; finding theodore and brina), publisher (uwa press) and directs a cross-disciplinary centre (institute of advanced studies) at the university of western australia in perth. microsoft word 18phillips coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 195 the sharpest knives in the drawer bill phillips abstract. cooking is a gender marker. just as the best chefs in the world are traditionally men, post-hard-boiled literary detectives such as vázquez montalban’s carvalho, or robert b. parker’s spenser are gourmet cooks, while george pelecanos’s sleuthing protagonists were as often as not brought up in short order greek diners and know their way around a kitchen. walter mosley’s easy rawlins is quite capable of putting together a nutritious meal for his family, as is james lee burke’s dave robicheaux. sadly, in confirmation of the gender divide, the same cannot be said for women detectives. while sara paretsky’s v.i. warshawski will reluctantly and with much griping put a simple meal on the table if absolutely forced to, sue grafton’s kinsey millhone and linda barnes’s carlotta carlyle would not be seen dead slaving over a hot stove and subsist mainly on takeaway pizzas and hamburgers. indeed, kinsey millhone would probably have died of malnutrition halfway through the alphabet if it were not for her neighbour, henry, a retired baker, who regularly supplies her with decent home-cooked meals. authors such as vázquez montalban and robert b. parker delight in providing recipes for their readers which are lovingly put together by their protagonists (especially in spenser’s case whose culinary prowess is consistently contrasted to his girlfriend’s utter inability even to slice an onion), or by their male friends. in 1999 vázquez montalban published las recetas de carvalho which achieved such popularity it was reissued in 2004 by planeta. it is not known whether any women detectives or their authors might claim as much. clearly something is afoot. the sharpest knives in the detectives’ kitchen drawers are wielded by men, their traditional solitary nature ensuring the broth remains unspoiled and the villains well grilled. overcompensation for gender stereotyping by both sides would seem an easy, half-baked explanation. is it really that simple? key words: detective fiction; cookery; gender copyright©2011 bill phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 196 “cookery is become an art, a noble science: cooks are gentlemen.” (robert burton, english scholar and vicar, 1577-1640, the anatomy of melancholy) among the many peculiarities attributable to the traditional hard-boiled detective is an apparent disinclination for cooking. philip marlowe, mike hammer or lew archer are far more likely to be found in a diner or bar than in a kitchen, indeed were it not for these convivial places of nourishment and drinking they would not only starve but also fail to meet the various villains, clients, contacts, stool pigeons and low-lifes so necessary for the furtherment of their careers and the novels’ plots. around about the 1970s a number of crime writers began to challenge the hard-boiled genre. in the novels of robert b. parker the sexism, racism and homophobia inherent to the detectives’ composition is slowly deconstructed, joseph hansen provocatively created the gay detective dave branstetter, best-selling fictional women detectives returned to the scene after a long miss marple-less interregnum, and black detectives reemerged from the long shadow cast by the great chester himes. it is not just sexism, racism and homophobia which are challenged by these new writers but the model of masculinity itself that the hard-boiled detective represents. a model that can trace its roots back to the mythical medieval knight of courtly love and dragon slaying and beyond, and is shared by the gigantically influential figure of the cowboy and the far west; indeed the hard-boiled detective and the cowboy merely differ in setting, the former being urban and the latter rural, even pastoral. such a model is familiar: the public domain belongs to the man, and the private to the woman – at least, if she is at all respectable. housecare and the upbringing of children are alien to the hard-boiled detective, whose accommodation is almost always in the form of lonely dusty lodgings and whose food is obtained, i repeat, in diners and bars. consequently those writers who choose to challenge the genre will almost inevitably ensconce their male protagonists in the kitchen and, conversely, expel the women and send them out into the street. men, of course, are irretrievably competitive and by bedecking them in an apron and placing them in front of the stove is merely to ensure that they will become obsessed with out-cooking everyone else, and before you know it the gourmet chef pi is born. the king of the culinary sleuths is undoubtedly barcelona’s own pepe carvalho, first created by manuel vázquez montalbán in 1970. carvalho’s association with food and its preparation culminated in 1989 with the publication of las recetas de carvalho, a compilation of recipes which, according to vázquez montalbán in the book’s introduction, “are his [carvalho’s] and others’, though when he appropriates recipes from elsewhere he customarily introduces some kind of modification” (vázquez montalbán 1989, 8. all translations of vázquez montalbán’s work in this essay are by bill phillips). vázquez montalbán also, kindly, explains the significance of cooking both in relation to his novels and to civilisation as a whole. it is, he says: a metaphor for culture. eating means killing and swallowing a being which has been alive, whether animal or plant. if we directly devour the dead animal or the uprooted lettuce, one would say that we were savages. however, if we marinade the beast in order to later cook it with the aid of aromatic provençal herbs and a coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 197 glass of rancio wine, then we have effected an exquisite cultural operation, equally based on brutality and death. cooking is a metaphor for culture and its hypocritical content (vázquez montalbán 1989, 7). carvalho is both an artist and an obsessive when it comes to cooking and since food is so prevalent in the novels i shall limit myself to examples from only one: tatuaje (tattoo): he cleaned the fish of bones and the prawns of their armour. he boiled the bones and the red armour in the company of an onion, a tomato, garlic, a small red pepper and a bunch of celery and leeks. the fish broth was essential for pepe carvalho’s particular fish stew. while the broth was slowly boiling, carvalho slowly fried tomato, onion and red pepper. when it was sufficiently thick he browned some potatoes. then he threw the prawns in the pot, the monkfish and finally the hake. the fish coloured, they lost the water which had mixed with the fried tomato, onion and red pepper. then carvalho added a ladleful of strong fish broth. in ten minutes the fish stew was ready (vázquez montalban 1986, 2021). the fish stew was for carvalho’s consumption alone, eaten directly from the pot, and accompanied by the appropriate wine drunk from “a tall glass of fine crystal” (vázquez montalban 1986, 21). as often as possible, though, carvalho will cook for others, especially his girlfriend charo, who works as a prostitute. for her, he prepares rice with cod, and as a starter, canapés: “[h]e chopped onion, gherkins and capers. he made a paste from the mixture with butter and spread it on some slices of black bread. he cut some slices of salmon and distributed them over the canapés” (vázquez montalban 1986, 119). charo is delighted and carvalho detects “a certain erotic amiability” in her response and feels, in turn, his own “erotic tam tam” (vázquez montalban 1986, 120), as he puts it, “[b]ut he coldly analysed the fatal consequences that awaited his rice casserole should the erotic action advance sufficiently to postpone supper. it would simply have to be speeded up” (vázquez montalban 1986, 20-21). sadly, not everyone is as appreciative of good food as charo. as he pursues his enquiries he meets teresa marsé, a spoilt member of the bourgeoisie dedicated to shopping. inevitably such a woman is not to carvalho’s taste. on inviting her out to lunch she asks to be taken “somewhere where we can just eat anything” (vázquez montalban 1986, 125), just anything being, precisely, what carvalho “never wanted to eat” (vázquez montalban 1986, 125). indeed, carvalho spends as much time complaining about bad food as he does cooking and eating gastronomic delicacies. later in the novel he arranges to meet charo and her friend la andaluza (the andalusian) in a restaurant in sant cugat, but he has his reservations about the chosen establishment: the place’s gastronomic specialities concerned him: bread with tomato, sausage and beans, barbecued meat, rabbit with all-i-oli. within ten years more than ten thousand such establishments had sprung up in catalonia with the intention of supplying their clientele with these marvels of simplified rural catalan cooking. but at the moment of truth the bread with tomato, an imaginative wonder that transcends in simplicity and flavour pizza and tomato, was reduced to a dough of badly cooked flour, soggy, its sogginess increased by tinned tomato puré. and coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 198 as for the all-i-oli, made without the patience of the hand, and with the frenchification, or mallorcification of egg yolk, it was yellow enough to paint the temple. carvalho caught himself in the act of giving a lecture to the openmouthed ladies accompanying him on the gastronomic roots of humanity (vázquez montalban 1986, 133). later, once again in the company of teresa marsé, he launches a tirade against the eating habits of the bourgeoisie: “i still haven’t overcome a distant respect for the bourgeoisie, and i still believe they know how to live.” “who denies it?” “eighty nine percent of the bourgeoisie of this city have rehashed spinach and whitebait that bites its own tail for supper.” “it’s healthy.” “if they ate the spinach with sultanas and pinenuts and instead of whitebait a gilthead with herbs, wrapped in aluminium foil and baked in the oven, it would be an equally healthy supper, not much more expensive and more imaginative.” “and the strangest thing is that you’re quite serious.” “totally. sex and gastronomy are the two most serious things there are” (vázquez montalban 1986, 147). and in both things carvalho is transgressive. a proletarian gourmet chastising the middle classes for their culinary dullness, vázquez montalbán’s hero’s greatest triumph, from the point of view at least of deconstructing the hard-boiled genre, is to have a whore as a girlfriend and for that iconoclasm alone, vázquez montalbán surely deserves the crown as the greatest postmodern detective writer of the last forty years. the godwulf manuscript, robert b. parker’s first spenser novel, was published in 1973. it begins modestly enough with spenser making himself “hash and eggs for supper” (parker 1973, 23), but as the series progresses the cooking becomes ever more elaborate and carvalho-esque. in crimson joy, published in 1988, spenser is entertaining his girlfriend, the renowned psychotherapist susan silverman: i came around the counter and put a small silver tray on the coffee table in front of her. there was beluga caviar on the tray and a small spoon and some bremner wafers and six wedges of lemon. “yum yum,” susan said. she moved the champagne glass away from her mouth and tipped her head up at me and i kissed her on the mouth. “no french kissing,” i said. “it muddles the palate.” susan sipped another gram of champagne and looked at me without comment. i went back to the kitchen and began to pound a couple of boneless chicken thighs with a heavy knife … i sprinkled some rosemary on the flattened chicken thighs and put them in olive oil and lemon juice to marinate [they converse]. the timer rang in my kitchen and i got up and went and took the rice out of the oven. i cracked the cover on the casserole so steam could escape, and shut off the oven and turned toward susan across the counter. “we are faced with a decision,” i said. “i can have supper on the table in ten minutes and we could eat heartily and then fall into bed. but knowing how, as coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 199 you age, you are inclined toward torpor after a meal, i was wondering how you wished to deal with the question of me jumping on your bones.” … “what’s for supper?” she said. “grilled lemon and rosemary chicken, brown rice with pignolias, assorted fresh vegetables lightly steamed and dressed with spenser’s famous honey-mustard splash, blue corn bread, and a bottle of iron horse chardonnay” (parker 1988, 10-15). this scene is extraordinarily similar to the one enacted between carvalho and charo in tatuaje, with the former’s canapés replaced by spenser’s rather vulgar beluga caviar amounting to the only, insignificant, difference. well, and the fact that susan and spenser choose not to eat first. although carvalho and spenser represent the very cream of fictional detective gastronomy, their male counterparts in crime novels are more than capable of keeping their end up in the kitchen too. james lee burke’s louisiana detective, dave robicheaux (who is in fact, in most of the novels, a policeman rather than a private eye, though the distinction is blurred in many crime novels) is perhaps rather less willing than most to get his hands floury, but is still capable of helping his wife. in burning angel, from 1995 he and his wife “boiled crayfish in a big black pot on the kitched stove and shelled and ate them on the picnic table in the backyard with our adopted daughter, alafair (burke 1995, 23) and later on, again with his wife, “fixed deviled eggs and ham and onion sandwiches (burke 1995, 346). in the same novel, and this time entirely on his own, he fixes “coffee and hot milk and bowls of grape nuts and blueberries” (burke 1995 276) for his police partner, helen soileau; simple stuff perhaps, but undoubtedly beyond the abilities of sam spade or philip marlowe. in cadillac jukebox, from 1996, he has progressed to making his sandwiches on his own, mainly because his wife and daughter are not at home, and he “fixed a ham and onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea and heated a bowl of dirty rice” (burke 1996, 261). the novels of george pelecanos, which are set in washington and revolve around the unofficial investigations of nick stefanos and dimitri karras, are usually based on families of greek americans whose livelihood is obtained from running diners; they are, consequently, competent short order cooks. walter mosley’s los angeles based private detective easy rawlins, meanwhile, is a single father of two children who regularly supplies them with grits, eggs and bacon for breakfast (mosley 1994, 10), or “hamburgers and an avocado salad with tomatoes, onion, and minced garlic for dinner” (mosley 1994, 46). somewhat more sophisticated than robicheaux he can do mexican too and, as has become traditional in the genre by now, we are given the recipe: i put the tray of enchiladas in the refrigerator to keep until dinnertime. then i chopped tomatoes, bermuda onions, and a little green pepper together with ripe avocado to make a light relish-like salad. i laced it with lime and a touch of cayenne… the rice i baked in a tomato sauce mixed with minced garlic and two hot peppers. i sprinkled in a handful of tiny dried shrimps to give my kids a treat (mosley 1996, 138). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 200 such culinary competence on the part of male detectives is surely to be celebrated but there is, unfortunately, quite a serious downside. when women are portrayed cooking it is almost always done so with a sarcasm that can only be described as misogynistic. one of the running jokes throughout parker’s spenser novels is girlfriend susan’s utter hopelessness as a cook. perhaps the most blatant example is to be found in pastime. susan has invited not just spenser for lunch but their unofficially adopted now grown up son paul and over the length of a chapter, as they converse, the incompetence of her cooking is exposed: “couscous,” she said. “with chicken and vegetables.” “sounds great,” paul said. susan cleared a space among the pans and put some chicken breasts down on the marble counter and began to cut them into cubes... “doesn’t that tend to beat the hell out of the knife blade?” paul said. susan looked at him as if he’d espoused pedophilia. “no,” said paul quickly. “no, of course it doesn’t.” i sipped my beer. susan continued to hack up the chicken. she had her lower lip caught in her teeth, as she always did when she was concentrating… susan got the box of couscous open and dumped it in another bowl and added some water… she transferred the refreshed couscous from the bowl to a cook pot. neither i nor paul asked her why she had not refreshed it in the cook pot in the first place. she put the cook pot on the stove and put a lid on it and turned the flame on low (parker 1991, 72-77). shortly after this the chapter ends, and we are not told if the food was eaten. perhaps it never was, perhaps it was inedible. anyway, at the beginning of the chapter we are told that “most of the time she had it delivered from the harvest express” (parker 1991, 72). it is significant that paul is present: although grown up susan seems to believe that as a mother figure she has a duty to cook for her son despite the fact that all three of them know that spenser, the father figure, is by far the more capable. in case there was any doubt in the reader’s mind parker lovingly spins out the pantomime for the length of an entire chapter in a blatant reaffirmation of the binary opposition represented by spenser and susan, man and woman, competent superhero and inadequate mother. in always outnumbered, always outgunned by walter mosley, we are introduced to socrates fortlow, a black ex-convict who, like so many contemporary detective writers’ detectives is not really a detective at all, but spends his time, unofficially, on precisely the same kind of cases that his more orthodox colleagues have traditionally pursued, such as looking for lost people, supporting friends or neighbours threatened with violence and even, on occasion, dealing with murderers. at the beginning of the book socrates does his best to help a local tearaway whose incarcerated future is all too clearly mapped out. he does so by showing him how to cook and, as ever, the details of the cooking and its consumption (chicken, dirty rice and green beans) are lovingly detailed with the young boy working “under the older man’s supervision” (mosley 1997, 16). despite his efforts socrates remains pessimistic about the boy’s future and finally asks him: “yo’ momma cook at home, darryl?” “sometimes. not too much.” coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 201 “you come over here anytime an’ i teach ya how to cook. we eat pretty good too” (mosley 1997, 23). the implication is clear: if darryl’s mother had only cooked for him more regularly her boy would have stayed out of trouble. given the obsession of male crime writers for rice and chicken, and their frequent depiction of women as useless we might expect that female writers would redress the balance, but they do not. if there are any fictional women detectives created by women who enjoy cooking i do not know of them. not one. val mcdermid is one of britain’s most acclaimed crime writers and her work has been adapted for television under the title wire in the blood. the television series is about a male profiler called tony hill, but her novels mainly follow the adventures of manchester based private eye kate brannigan who never cooks, not even badly, and eats either in restaurants or shares the chinese takeaway meals ordered by her partner who lives, for reasons it is unnecessary to explain, in the house next door. in the light of mosley’s and parker’s association of maternity with cooking it might be sufficient to quote from clean break, in which she declares that she has “the maternal instincts of a liquorice allsort” (mcdermid 1997, 29) but in fact there is one example of brannigan at work in the kitchen, in the novel star struck. taken by her client, a spoilt actress named gloria kendal, to her country home, brannigan is ordered to grab a couple of ready meals from the freezer and “stick them in the microwave” (mcdermid 1998, 26), a task which she carries out with aplomb, though is rather taken aback when, having eaten, she is ordered to put the dirty plates into the dishwasher. sara paretsky’s pi, v.i. warshawski, is something of an exception to the rule of noncooking, and indeed, in killing orders we are told that “[c]hicken, garlic, mushrooms, and onions sauteed in olive oil then flamed with brandy made an easy attractive stew. the point is, perhaps, that warshawski never willingly cooks if she can help it – in killing orders it is to provide supper for an over-worked friend – but in order to begin she must first clean up “the worst ravages in [her] living room and kitchen” (paretsky 1986, 52). furthermore, none of the loving details of the cooking process, so comprehensively provided by the men, are in evidence, the only qualities required of the dish being its easiness and appearance. later on in the same novel her friend returns the favour and makes her soup: “[s]he put on lentils with carrots and onions and the rich smell filled the kitchen…” (paretsky 1986, 90). it is hard to believe how such a combination might be termed ‘rich’. carvalho would undoubtedly have added the requisite number of herbs, some salt and pepper, and perhaps a few fatty chunks of pungent chorizo, just for starters. warshawski is clearly no gourmet. at the same time as the warshawski novels became popular, so did a number of other, similar novels about women detectives by women writers, and none of them like cooking. linda barnes’s carlotta carlyle is a typical example. on the very first page of the snake tattoo we are introduced to her eating habits: “i was eating dinner – leftover takeout pizza i’d revived with a can of anchovies” (barnes 1989, 9). a friend turns up and she offers to share: “‘pepperoni, too,’ he said, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head. ‘you must have technicolor nightmares’” (barnes 1989, 11). nonplussed, carlotta continues eating on the grounds that “i never miss a meal if i can help it. of course my definition of meal is loose” (barnes 1989, 13). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 202 but perhaps the best example of them all is sue grafton’s detective kinsey millhone, protagonist of the alphabet detective series who subsists entirely on takeout junk food consumed at frequent intervals throughout the novels. in r is for ricochet we find her “feasting on an olive-and-pimiento-cheese sandwich on wheat bread, cut in quarters, my third favourite sandwich in the whole wide world” (grafton 2004, 2) and when, later in the novel, she is asked whether she can cook, she says “peanut butter and pickle sandwiches” (grafton 2004, 147). grafton clearly has something of an axe to grind when it comes to food. later on in r is for ricochet we find kinsey and her friend reba at a drive in burger takeaway: “i know it’s only ten forty-five, but i wouldn’t object to another qp with cheese.” we ordered from the drive-through window, found a space in the parking lot, and ate in the car. we’d opted for two large cokes, two quarter pounders apiece, and a large order of fries, which we doused in ketchup and ate as fast as we could. i said, “i had a friend regained his health eating shit like this.” “i’m not surprised. i like how flat the pickles are, all mooshed in there. pop’s got a personal chef who’s really great, but she’s never been able to duplicate this. i can’t figure it out, how they do it. doesn’t matter where you are, a qp with cheese tastes exactly the same and so does everything else. big macs, fries.” “nice to have something you can count on” (grafton 2004, 88). this paean to mcdonalds is heavily satirical: it includes an attack on those who consider it to be unhealthy, praise for the industrial easy-to-eat pickles and gratitude for the predictability of the taste. our society’s gastronomic arbiters, among whom we might include spenser, but especially carvalho, are advocates of difference, of the regional, of freshness and unique flavour. is grafton poking fun at their pomposity? she certainly seems to take exception to the modern obsession with healthy eating. “for supper,” she tells us, “i fixed myself a hot hard-boiled-egg sandwich slathered with mayo and heavy on the salt, vowing in a vague and insincere way to rectify my diet, which is woefully short of fruits, vegetables, fiber, grain, and nutrition of any sort” (grafton 2004, 97). the advantage of being a fictional character is that you don’t come out in spots, get fat, clog up your arteries and die of a coronary unless your author wishes you to, and so kinsey can afford to eat as she chooses in deliberate defiance of the health fanatics and the epicures. come breakfast she’s back at mcdonald’s with reba again: we ordered from the take-out window and then sat in the parking lot with two enormous coffees and four egg mcmuffins with extra packets of salt. like me, reba ate like she was competing for the land speed record. “they don’t call this fast food for nuttin’,” she remarked, her mouth full. there were a scant few minutes when we sank into quiet, focused on our food (grafton 2004, 242). again, there seems to be a satirical motive here for grafton’s insistence on fast food, particularly since the name vázquez montalbán is intimately connected to the slow food movement whose branch in barcelona is, in fact, named after him. when breakfast rolls around again kinsey reports that she: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 203 crossed the motel parking lot to mcdonald’s, where i ordered three large coffees, three ojs, three hash browns, and three egg mcmuffins to go. according to my calculations, misty, reba, and i – assuming we cleaned our plates – would each be supplied with 680 calories, 85 grams of carbohydrate, and 20 grams of fat. i amended my order, adding three cinnamon buns just to round things out (grafton 2004, 343). by this point in the novel it is difficult to take kinsey’s eating habits seriously. to pile on the irony, one of the regular characters in the alphabet novels, kinsey’s 87-year-old landlord henry, is a retired baker who spends his time cooking and baking, and is effectively her only source of healthy, balanced meals. in r is for ricochet henry is preparing a meal for a lady friend: while i watched, he opened the oven door and checked his crock of soldier beans bubbling away with molasses, mustard, and a chunk of salt pork. i could see two loaves of freshly baked bread resting on a rack on the counter. a chocolate layer cake sat in the middle of the kitchen table with a glass dome over it (grafton 2004, 16-17). were a martian anthropologist to base his researches on humanity solely on detective fiction of the last forty years it would have no alternative but to conclude that we were a dimorphous species consisting of one half which cooked and ate well, and another half which lived off of the junk food it picked up on the street. no doubt it would also conclude that the apparent superior physical size and strength of the average kitchen dweller was attributable to his better diet, a difference he might well use to his advantage by keeping the weaker sex outside where she belonged. in reality, however, most cooking is done by women. according to the 1992 british social attitudes survey “in 70 percent of households women prepare the evening meal, in 20 percent it is shared, while in 9 percent it is prepared by the man. there are few differences by class” (dixey 1996, 38). and in a paper presented to the american agricultural economics association annual meeting, in 2006, its authors concluded that “women are estimated to spend more time in food preparation than men” (mancino and newman 2006, 13), though they did find that class, or income made some difference: [t]he most pronounced gender difference is between men and women who are non-working and who fall into either the lower or middle income categories; these women are estimated to spend about 44 more minutes a day in food prep than men. the gender difference is least between men and women in higher income households; high income working women are estimated to spend about 22 more minutes in food preparation than high income working men (mancino and newman 2006, 13). nevertheless, they also found that “single adult women ... spent less time in food preparation than their married counterparts” (mancino and newman 2006, 13), which helps to explain, partly, our women detectives’ absence from the kitchen. the fact remains, however, that the cookery habits of both male and female fictional detectives do not reflect reality. perhaps, it might be argued, the male authors of male fictional detectives are anxious to make a contribution to gender politics by offering an coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 204 alternative, more politically acceptable, model of masculinity to the traditional mysoginist version, though their depiction of non-cooking unnaturally non-maternal women would suggest otherwise. the women writers, meanwhile, anxious to show that women do not have to be chained to the kitchen stove, perhaps eschew all contact with the domestic sphere in a sad attempt to be just like men. however, i do not believe this to be the case. it should be noted that the gourmet detectives spend a great deal of time over the absorbing and satisfying creative process of cooking, but do not mention the washing up or, indeed, any other of the household chores. it is left to val mcdermid to show kate brannigan reluctantly putting the dirty plates into the dishwasher, and for sara paretsky to acknowledge that the kitchen must be cleaned and tidied before any cooking can be done. cookery, for those who enjoy it, is an interesting hobby, a passion even. washing up is not. ever. perhaps the women authors’ familiarity with the full significance of housework is behind their reluctance to turn the kitchen into a gourmet’s filthy, chaotic delight, while the male authors, it appears, lack any familiarity with the full consequences of their culinary enthusiasm. given that vázquez montalbán was cheerfully rotund, and robert b. parker’s appearance in a cameo role in the film adaptation of his parker novel small vices suggests that he suffers from problems of obesity, it is women who are under the most pressure to conform to prescribed models of beauty and size. rachel dixey, in the british food journal, argues that: the widespread presence of obsession with food and not-eating, dieting and weight loss [...] typify the experience of many – perhaps the majority – of women in western industrialized countries. a large number of studies now show that dieting is a ‘normal’ eating style for women, if this means restricting the total amount eaten, avoiding certain types of food, and going without food for periods of time (dixey 1996, 36). carlotta carlyle, remember, says “i never miss a meal if i can help it” (barnes 1989, 13). kinsey millhone, does not restrict the total amount eaten, nor does she avoid certain types of food such as carbohydrates, fats or salt. she consumes them all in excess and with gusto and in doing so is making a deliberate and specific political statement. there is, according to dixey, “a widespread dissatisfaction with body shape and weight among women in western countries” (dixey 1996, 36). this dissatisfaction does not seem to be shared by the men, though perhaps it should: vázquez montalbán died at the early age of 64 in 2003 from a heart attack. detectives and their cooking skills then, i would argue, remain divided on gender lines not in accordance to statistics, but in accordance to perceptions of male power and female beauty. inevitably, such perceptions remain as disadvantageous to women as ever. when you next read of a woman eating a cheeseburger remember; she is not a sad degenerate, she is telling you, mouth stuffed with fibreless dough, just where you can stick your fancy book of recipes, your size 0 dress and your monthly gym subscription. works cited barnes, linda. the snake tattoo 1989. london: coronet, 1990. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 205 burke, james lee. burning ange. 1995. london: orion, 2004. --cadillac jukebox 1996. london: orion, 2005. dixey, rachel 1996. “gender perspectives on food and cooking skills” british food journal. volume 98, nº 10. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/insight/viewcontentservlet?filename=published/ emeraldfulltextarticle/articles/0700981005.html grafton, sue. r is for ricochet 2004. london: pan, 2005. mcdermid, val. clean break 1995. london: harpercollins, 1997. --star struck 1998. london: harpercollins, 1999. mancino, lisa and constance newman 2006. “who's cooking? time spent preparing food by gender, income and household composition.” american agricultural economics association, 2006 annual meeting, july 23-26, long beach, ca. http://purl.umn.edu/21456 mosley, walter. black betty 1994. london: pan, 1995. --a little yellow dog 1996. london: picador, 1997. --always outnumbered, always outgunned 1997. london: serpent’s tail, 1998. paretsky, sara. killing orders 1985. london: penguin, 1987. parker, robert b. the godwulf manuscript 1973. harmondsworth: pengion, 1974. --crimson joy 1988. london: penguin, 1989. --pastime 1991. london: penguin, 1992. vázquez montalbán, manuel. las recetas de carvalho 1988. barcelona : ediciones b. --tatuaje 1986. barcelona: planeta, 1992. bill phillips is a senior lecturer in the english and german studies department at the university of barcelona. he has taught a number of courses on british poetry over the years, as well as more general courses on british, canadian, caribbean and other postcolonial literatures. his research and publication interests include ecocriticism, popular fiction (particularly detective and science fiction) and gender studies. microsoft word jaime coolabah introduction coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction jaime de cordoba last july 2008, we were able to organise a particularly special event: the myth, history and memory sculpture show for the centre d’ estudis australians (australian studies centre) international congress with the same title. in this volume of coolabah we are able to offer the reader a closer understanding of the process of how the exhibition came about, how each artist approached the subject and the end result. the ten sculptors that contributed to this exhibition came from different backgrounds but all had the same purpose in mind: to translate the idea of myth, history and memory into three dimensional structures. the exhibition brought together teachers of fine arts at the university of barcelona, special students selected from the same university and special guest artists. as the coordinator of the exhibition, it was my pleasure to take part in its inauguration, in the course of which i pointed out: sculpture is both the noisiest of culture’s children but also the quietest. it is born breaking mountains, striking metal and chipping our trees. when it is brought into disrepute by political or social changes it immediately becomes the main archaeological witness of historical facts. in its creation, thought must work next to all the strident sounds of the technique. our workshops are the opposite pole to libraries. dust, fire and noise are welcome. however, once the sculptures are concluded, they move into a different realm: the mythical silence of their result. now readers will be able to look at some pictures of the exhibition and texts by the sculptors explaining their leitmotivs behind the making of the sculptures for the congress. microsoft word jaime coolabah lluis cera coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 lluís cera barcelona, 1967 he studied at the university of barcelona, specialising in sculpture, finishing his degree in arts in 1993. he is an associate lecturer in fine arts at barcelona university. he has held numerous solo exhibitions in barcelona, madrid, switzerland and germany. he has also won important prizes in spain and has participated in exhibitions around the world including the united states, south korea, switzerland and germany. stone language when sculpting the piece for the exhibition i thought about embraces as fundamental tools of non verbal language. this wonderful language that does not know about languages, which communicates from diversity and without distinctions, the emotions that our body experiences and, that our feelings want to transmit. “a hug expresses more than 1.000 words ". embraces have proven their use in all those situations in which they exceed words or we do not manage to find the suitable ones. embraces know the limits of time and space. they do not have a “use by date”, since it is enough to close one’s eyes and to look into the “boot” of memory, to evoke "that" wonderful moment, and to be able, like that, to fully re-live through the sensation of the authentic hug. microsoft word 20seguro coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 215 redeeming american democracy in sayonara maría isabel seguro abstract: affection is perceived as something natural, pre-existing culture and, therefore, free form discursive constructions. however, insofar as reality is mediated, if not given existence by language, human relationships are inevitably fashioned by narratives. romance fictions and in particular heterosexual, interracial love stories have been used in u.s. popular culture as a means of promoting american democratic values of racial harmony at home and abroad. this will be exemplified by analyzing james a. michener’s 1953 novel sayonara together with joshua logan’s 1957 film adaptation. key words: sayonara; u.s. cold war foreign policy; interracial love politics. to the degree that the postmodern condition implies an unbridled consumerism, the cultural logic of late capitalism, pleasure for cash, and a product to gratify every possible impulse—if not, indeed, to construct the impulse in the first place—love is a value that remains beyond the market. while sex is a commodity, love becomes the condition of a happiness that cannot be bought, the one remaining object of a desire that cannot be sure of purchasing fulfilment. love thus becomes more precious than before because it is beyond price, and in consequence its metaphysical character is intensified (belsey 1994: 683). it can be deduced from belsey’s words above that in the contemporary, postmodern world love, desire and passion occupy a paradoxical space. traditionally understood as emotions inherent to human nature and, therefore, pre-existing and transcending culture, it is also widely considered within literary criticism and cultural studies that these emotions are contextually ‘fashioned’, if not constructed as befitting the western heterosexual concept of an affective relationship. particularly in u.s. popular culture or, as american scholar christina klein defines it, the ‘middlebrow imagination’ (2003), depictions of emotion have been used as vehicles not only to reflect, but also to support or even attempt to subvert cultural constructions related to social class, race, ethnicity and sexuality. so it follows, then, that romance fictions have been politicized for promoting certain ideologies related to marriage and the family, both as a metaphor for the nation and the political values it was founded on copyright©2011 maría isabel seguro. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 216 and claims to sustain. such connections between romance fictions and politics are intrinsically related to raymond williams’ concept of ‘structures of feeling’, by which the ideology/ies upholding power structures are re-enacted as regularized or normative patterns of feeling, most notably through normative affective relationships (klein 2003: 7). this paper will focus on the attempt to use an interracial fiction of love, passion and desire in the context of the cold war to promote the united states in non-communist asia as the defender of democracy, understood as a universal, political concept to be applied to all peoples regardless of their race and culture. this process, according to klein, helped to promote a mainstreamized image the united states as ‘a harmonious nation made up of people from diverse ethnic, racial, national, and religious backgrounds’ (11). in other words, romantic fictions, amongst other middlebrow cultural artifacts, were an ideology of ethnic/racial harmony in the wake of the civil rights movement. this, in turn, was linked to the nation’s promotion abroad as the guarantor of world democracy. in fact, the aim was, as stated by caroline chung simpson, an attempt to redeem u.s. democracy (1998: 51). for my purpose, i will focus on two typical middlebrow cultural artifacts: james a. michener’s 1953 novel sayonara together with its film adaptation directed by joshua logan in 1957 starring marlon brando, the hollywood icon of american masculinity at the time. in her seminal work romance and the “yellow peril”: race, sex, and discursive strategies in hollywood fiction (1993) gina marchetti succinctly describes how asia was represented in hollywood film (and, overall in american popular culture): hollywood has long been fascinated by asia, asians, and asian themes. mysterious and exotic, hollywood’s asia promises adventure and forbidden pleasures. whether in a chinatown opium den, a geisha house in japan, or a café in saigon, romantic involvements and sexual liaisons unacceptable in mainstream anglo-american society become possible. erotic fantasies can be indulged, sexual taboos broken. however, any radical deviation from the mainstream is unlikely to be voiced openly because of the possibility of a poor box-office showing. therefore, hollywood’s romance with asia tends to be a flirtation with the exotic rather than an attempt at any genuine cultural understanding (1993: 3). the characteristics mentioned by marchetti are to be identified in both michener’s novel and logan’s film although both seem to reveal sympathetic attitudes towards the asian other and firm statements ‘against racial intolerance’ in the context of u.s.japanese relations in the immediate postwar period (125). this is rather ironic bearing in mind that, barely a decade before, the japanese were the nation’s archenemy to be exterminated as proclaimed by war propaganda. such a contradiction is handled via a device typically used in hollywood cinema which is also to be found in other popular cultural works: the depiction of parallel love relationships. while one of these liaisons particularly enhances the stereotypical image of the japanese woman as the madame butterfly geisha willing to sacrifice herself for the love of a white man, the other may not have such a tragic end as puccini’s opera; it may even end happily (as is the case of logan’s film, unlike the novel). in these cases, the romance is usually depicted as a successful assimilation story of the other: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 217 hollywood has often used the device of parallel love stories to achieve similar ends. in the case of the interracial romance, the two couples provide the tragic “punishment” for those who cross racial barriers as well as the liberal “happy ending” for those who can be assimilated into the american mainstream. the tragic couple acts ambivalently as both the voice of social critique and as confirmation of the racial status quo. the couple that transcends the social taboo against miscegenation usually provides a weaker indictment of racism, since their union, at the conclusion of the film, confirms that american society is the tolerant melting pot it claims to be (marchetti 1993: 125-126). the main plot of both the novel and film revolves around a love relationship between a u.s. air force major, lloyd ‘ace’ gruver, and hana-ogi, a japanese celebrity from a very popular all-female theatre revue, the takarakuza—referred to as the matsubayashi in the cinematic text. this relationship runs parallel to that of airman joe kelly, a man from gruver’s unit, and the conventional japanese woman whom he marries, katsumi. the kellys end up playing the role of the tragic lovers and, consequently, of the irremediable doom of interracial love, undermining the message provided by the gruver / hana-ogi romance, especially in the 1957 film. the story takes place at the time of the korean war, coinciding with the last stages of the american occupation of japan. however, as both marchetti and robert g. lee point out, neither world war ii nor the korean conflict occupy a central space in the texts. the film adaptation, in particular, is far more concerned with issues related to the civil rights movement. the impact of civil rights upon u.s. society and the image of the nation projected abroad accounts for the different ending in the film, in which gruver and hana-ogi, albeit all kind of obstacles, stay together. in michener’s text gruver finally submits to the demands of his family and returns to the u.s. and to his american fiancée, eileen webster. interestingly, when michener was researching for his novel he was also working for the state department supporting its policy of discouraging u.s. servicemen from marrying japanese women. the changes in plot introduced by the film adaptation reflect not only the changes in u.s. policy towards these marriages, but also michener’s own attitude: in 1955 he was to marry a japanese american, mari yoriko sabusawa, whom he had met in japan (chung simpson 1998: 71). as caroline chung simpson underlines, it was during the 1950s that ‘the supreme court was increasingly asked to recognize and correct the injustices of black segregation in a democratic nation’, as exemplified by the 1954 brown v. the board of topeka decisive resolution (1998: 53). issues concerning black desegregation caused anxiety regarding racial inequality and its contradictions with democratic values, a point in question to be used by america’s communist enemies. as far as other racial groups were concerned, the civil rights movement was to be a troubled reminder of the recent history of japanese americans who, at the outbreak of war in the pacific, were classified as potential enemies and relocated in internment camps. stories of interracial romance were therefore useful means of conveying that, precisely because america was the guarantor of democracy, such relations could be possible—when mainstreamized. if the 1957 film sayonara mirrors the impact of civil rights and the subsequent change of policy towards interracial marriages, the novel, in turn, is also concerned with such issues in relation to a very specific case: the war brides. the war brides act of 1945 allowed u.s. military personnel to bring their european wives (mostly french and german) with their children to the united states as non-quota immigrants. the act was coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 218 amended in 1946 and 1947 by the soldiers bride acts. the latter amendment allowed asian american servicemen to bring over their asian-born spouses. however, it was not until 1952 with the mccarran-walter immigration and nationality act that nonquota visas were provided to wives and children of u.s. citizens and allowed the naturalization of asian immigrants. it was precisely via this legislation that japanese wives of u.s. servicemen began to establish themselves in american soil. in fact, their numbers increased from less than 900 before 1952 to 4,220 the same year the mccarran-walter act was passed (chung simpson 1998: 51; lee 1999: 163; klein 2003: 225). consequently, it was not until 1952 that: […] for the first time in u.s. history, all asians were allowed to become immigrants, and all asian immigrants inside the u.s. were allowed to become naturalized citizens. together, these reforms had as their ultimate goal the integration of asian[s] […] into the political and social mainstream of american life (klein 2003: 225). bearing in mind the socio-political context of the time, sayonara, the written and cinematic texts, aim to provide a ‘structure of feeling’ by which female asian immigration was to be accepted and mainstreamized mirroring, thus, american liberal, democratic values while promoting the united states as the ‘protector of the postwar global order’ and the so-called free world (lee 1999: 162). the novel and film begin with major gruver, a highly considered u.s. air force pilot fighting in the korean war, being sent to kobe in japan for a break as a result of stress provoked by flying. gruver is a west point man, a southerner and a son of a four-star general—a hero of guadalcanal. he is, therefore, a representative of conservative american values that were reinforced after world war ii, placing at the centre the heterosexual nuclear family. what both texts do is follow gruver’s transformation into what lee defines as a ‘national racial liberal’ (1999: 170), reflecting, in a way, the transformation that the nation was to accomplish according to the socio-political and economic needs of the cold war era. initially, gruver is against interracial marriages and is unable to understand why american men would want to marry, as he says in the novel, ‘dumpy and round-faced’ japanese women. ‘how can our men—good average guys—how can they marry these yellow girls? in ’45 i was fighting the japs. now my men are marrying them’ (michener 1983: 11). his attitude is made even clearer when he is asked by chaplain feeney to persuade one of his men, private joe kelly, from marrying his japanese girlfriend. the means by which he tries this is by showing kelly the photograph of his fiancée, eileen webster, a vassar girl and a daughter’s general—the representative of the ideal american woman, especially for a military man. kelly’s reaction is to show gruver, in turn, a picture of his own fiancée katsumi: he produced a small p.x. picture of his girl. i was embarrassed because this katsumi was certainly no madame butterfly. she had a big round face, prominent cheeks and what looked like oil-black hair. if you’d never been in japan you’d probably have taken her for an indian or an eskimo maybe. but if you’ve ever seen tokyo, you’d recognize katsumi at once. she was one of the millions of girls who could never be pretty, who did the heavy work and who dressed as if the only clothes in japan were made from old flour sacks (16). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 219 ironically, katsumi does end up playing the role of a madame butterfly in the novel and film. she is the epitome of femininity: submissive and completely devoted to her husband. both commit suicide when the u.s. authorities order private kelly back to the united states without his wife. this takes place, as befits melodrama, just before the law is amended. not all american gi’s shared gruver’s initial view of japanese women. as he is driving into kobe with his future in-laws, the websters, he is aghast to see a number of american servicemen in the company of japanese women, until he spots a marine lieutenant with a beautiful japanese girl coming out of an underwear shop: she was slim and black haired and her eyes didn’t slant. and she laughed. somehow i had never thought of japanese girls as laughing. but this extraordinarily beautiful girl laughed and tucked her parcel of nylon underwear beneath her left arm. then, like any american wife at a busy corner, she grasped her marine’s hand and warmly smiled up at him (23-24, emphasis added). what is revealed in comparing and contrasting these two passages from the novel is the transition of the japanese nation through the depiction of its women. the country is transformed via the democratization of its institutions under the guidance of the american occupation, in the same way that its people, in particular the women, are transformed in the manner of ‘any american wife’ due to the influence of american men. as chung simpson explains, the growing interest in the phenomenon of the japanese war bride is, in fact, ‘rooted in the late-1940s rhetoric of partnership between japan and the united states, in which japan was viewed as the passive recipient of american guidance and good will’ (1998: 51). moreover, the u.s-japan postwar political alliance was metaphorically described in terms of ‘a domestic heterosexual arrangement’ and of an ‘ideological “romance”’ which, subsequently, ‘had the added benefit of naturalizing the dominant role of the american presence in asia as a whole’ (52). as mrs. webster, the wife of a general and gruver’s future mother-in-law aptly says, “japan is now a free country. we must woo them to our side but we must also remember our position. and be firm’ (michener 1983: 34). gruver’s initial opposition to private kelly’s marriage gradually wears down when he sees how katsumi turns out to be the perfect wife for him. being the feminine archetype, she is submissive, obedient and meek, willing to sacrifice herself for the physical and emotional well-being of her husband to the point of self-effacement. this is exemplified when katsumi undergoes eye surgery in order to look more american. gruver is horrified with the result of the operation: i gasped and hana-ogi looked away. but joe just stood there. he was about six feet from her when she turned to face him and he could see that what had been a glorious and typical japanese face was now a conglomeration (172, emphasis added). despite gruver’s sympathy for the kelly couple and particularly for mrs. kelly at this stage of the novel and film, the fear of america’s hybridization is revealed in the ‘conglomeration’ of asian and western features that katsumi’s face has become. interestingly enough, in the film katsumi does not undergo surgery since she is coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 220 discovered in time by her husband who violently reprimands her for wanting to change her japanese face. this is a clear indication of kelly’s obsession with the stereotypical image of asian femininity his wife embodies. moreover, the fear of hybridization is further highlighted by katsumi’s pregnancy when she commits suicide. thus, katsumi’s femininity is a foil to that of american women, in particular gruver’s fiancée eileen. it is at this point where the liberal discourse both in the written and cinematic texts is especially contained. eileen, as an american, speaks her mind and her outspokenness represents the threat of western female sexuality. eileen, as a surprise organized by her parents, travels with them to japan to meet gruver. they have not seen each other for over a year, and at one point in the narrative gruver admits that he has been avoiding marriage: ‘with jet airplanes i was comfortable. with women i wasn’t (39). when eileen and gruver are together, she tells him that she is not prepared to be the kind of wife his mother is, left alone because his father solely lives for one thing, the u.s. army: ‘no woman wants to live anyway but body and soul with the man she loves’, she argues, aware of gruver’s attitude (43). although eileen’s reasoning is encapsulated within the discourse of romance—she is claiming that as a wife she wants always to be close to him—nevertheless it is an instance in which she asserts herself. as from this event, gruver begins to feel more strongly that western femininity is, in fact, a threat to his masculinity and, equally important, to the essence of a nuclear family which, ideally, should have at its head the husband and not the wife. gruver’s fears are underscored when he perceives the similarities between eileen and her mother. certainly in the novel, gruver continuously compares his own father—a four-star general—to eileen’s, reasserting his father’s manhood in opposition to that of general webster. in gruver’s own words: […] it was widely understood in army circles that mark webster owed most of his success to this brilliant and energetic woman. i once heard my father say, when some of his classmates from ’22 were visiting, “mark webster at the point was the inevitable colonel. absolutely impossible for him to go further. but a first-class wife came along and made him a general” (21). that is, due to mrs. webster’s bossiness (far more emphasized in the written text than in the film), her husband has achieved professional success. although in the quote above mrs. webster is apparently described in positive terms, her femininity is a means by which her husband is emasculated. this is perceived by the gis who are well aware that general webster’s memorandum forbidding them to bring in ‘japanese nationals’ to the kobe officers club has been prompted by his wife’s anger at having to share the same space with japanese women who have ‘stolen’ american men from her fellow female citizens: […] when we returned to the club and entered the elevator, the general noted with satisfaction that his memorandum had been posted, but when he read to the bottom of the typed sheet he turned a bright purple, for someone had scrawled in pencil, “signed, mrs. mark webster” (31). gruver, on his part, is unwilling to become a “mrs. lloyd gruver.” coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 221 consequently, western/american affective relationships are contrasted to those between japanese women and american men. gruver begins to compare his parents’ marriage and the websters’ with those of american gis and their japanese wives. when he visits the kelly household waiting for hana-ogi to appear, he reaches the conclusion that japanese women simply loved their husbands for what they are, not for achieving certain purposes such as social and economic status. his observations reinforce the fears of american men towards american liberal women versus their japanese counterparts who seem more than willing to fulfill their role as perfect housewives—the one women were supposed to adopt according to postwar ideology: they [the kellys] told me to sit on the floor and from that position i watched this couple in love and it occurred to me that i myself had never lived in a house where love was. my parents loved each other in the required way and i am quite sure that general and mrs. webster loved each other, but it was always love for some ultimate purpose: army advancement, social position in lancaster, children. here i was visiting the house of love itself (91, emphasis added). the irony of gruver’s comment should not escape us. michener’s interracial love story does have an ultimate purpose: it advocates for an understanding between races and cultures as a means to perpetuate a particular image of the u.s. as the guarantor of democratic values, a nation where the process of racial tolerance is under way due to the incipient civil rights movement. in the novel, the link between racial tolerance and democracy is further underlined by a particular incident. when gruver’s and hana-ogi’s liaison is discovered, gruver is placed under house arrest by the u.s. military authorities. despite surveillance, the lovers arrange a meeting in the typical japanese restaurant where they first met. mps burst in searching for them and gruver shamefully hides in a cupboard, ‘the heavy tread … of polished boots’ making him understand at that moment ‘what an ugly thing fear was and why we had fought the last war against the germans: we were fighting against the tread of heavy boots’ (134). in other words, gruver’s and hana-ogi’s love affair is a vindication of the ideals for which world war ii had been fought on the part of the u.s.: the free world and the self-determination of peoples, a world in which the horrors of ethnic cleansing perpetuated by the nazi regime would never again take place. for obvious reasons, the war crimes perpetuated by the japanese imperial forces, particularly in china, are obliterated (although it is mentioned that hana-ogi’s brother was condemned as a war criminal and, consequently, hung). in the film version, where gruver and hana-ogi end up together, interracial romances serve another ideological purpose: katsumi’s and eventually hana-ogi’s representation of femininity upholds the roles women were ascribed to in cold war america. after all, these two women manage to keep their men unlike their american counterpart, eileen (marchetti 1993: 134). as chung simpson explains, by 1957 when the film was released: japanese war brides were perhaps the most visible representatives of japanese american life in the postwar period, although they did not always self-identify as japanese americans. still they were often presented as emergent members of a new kind of japanese american community, which was primarily attractive because the war brides were seen solely as compliant wives and mothers unfettered by the disturbing public history of internment. setting into domestic life in the 1950s, with little fanfare, as unfamiliar national subjects who had formerly been citizens of an enemy nation, japanese war brides soon became coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 222 meaningful figures in the discourse on racial integration and cultural pluralism. […] the 1950s transformation of the japanese war bride from an opportunistic and ignorant alien seeking to penetrate the suburban affluence of white america to the gracious and hard working middle-class housewife was an early exemplar for achieving the integrated future in america, a halcyon story of domestic bliss and economic mobility difficult to extract from the stories of long-time racialized subjects (1998: 49-50). that is, the image of the japanese war bride served as a warning to american women who had benefited from the legacies of first wave feminism and who, as a direct result of the war effort, knew the significance of economic independence. the troubled transition from the public sphere to the confinement of the suburban household is reflected in their depiction, particularly in the novel, as ‘less feminine’ in their assertiveness than japanese women. although femininity as represented by katsumi is regarded in far more positive terms than its western/american counterpart, it is still too alien to be acceptable for gruver. it is hana-ogi’s role to enhance his manhood both in the written and cinematic texts. only in the film adaptation, however, are there indications that hana-ogi will be mainstreamized, mirroring the transcendence of cultural and racial barriers that can be accomplished, supposedly, in american society. as marchetti explains, hana-ogi is initially placed ‘between the active eileen and the passive katsumi’ (1993: 135). she is the star of the matsubayashi/takarazuka theatre company, an all-female theatre revue, in which she is renowned for personifying male characters. indeed, the first time that gruver sees her she is in drag. initially, then, she is introduced as a transgressive figure: a woman who is able to transcend gender boundaries—basically onstage—and, despite the strict rules she is submitted to by the matusbayashi (the actresses are forbidden to date or marry ) she is economically independent and holds a certain social status. hana-ogi could be considered is an all-representation of japan, ranging from its most belligerent male-like image to the domesticated one of a defeated, occupied japan, eventually seduced by the american way. in this respect, gruver’s comment on hanaogi’s performance at the matsubayashi/takarazuka is quite significant: ‘she was a spanish bullfighter, a venetian gondolier, a broadway playboy and a japanese samurai. she was always the man and she always looked devastatingly feminine’ (michener 1983: 85-86). it is interesting to notice that in the actual takarazuka revue, founded 1913, the performers specialized in men’s roles—the otokoyaku—were to study males and thus: […] learn to understand and appreciate the masculine psyche. consequently, when they retired from the stage and married […] they would be better able to perform as “good wives, wise mothers,” knowing exactly what their husbands expected of them (robertson 1992: 49). that is, despite their apparent subversion, otokoyaku like hana-ogi were to know men in order to please them so as to fulfill the japanese ideal of womanhood of ‘good wife, wise mother’ (ryosai kenbo) established in the meiji period (1868-1913). taking this into account, hana-ogi’s transformation in the novel and film into the traditional image of asian femininity is hardly surprising, and particularly convenient for gruver as representative of american masculinity and the united states in the far east. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 223 moreover, dressed in drag, hana-ogi shows contempt for gruver, the kind that a wounded, defeated and, consequently, feminized nation would reveal. when, finally, the major has managed to persuade her to meet, she appears before him as ultimately feminine in a kimono. hana-ogi is therefore the vehicle by which gruver satisfies his homoerotic desires, as reflected in his preference for male company in the army quarters rather than eileen’s when he sees her more and more as a younger version of mrs. webster. in fact, gruver’s friend, mike bailey—a marine lieutenant— finds such an object of desire strange: ‘i’d never have picked hana-ogi. she’s always so mannish’ (107). gruver’s manhood is also re-established as he manages to strain his japanese lover from her all-female environment, making her take the role of wife in their relationship. following marchetti, in the film adaptation gruver ‘puts her in touch with her “true” nature, that is, her desire for a “normal” domestic life and children’ (1993: 135). in other words, through gruver’s/america’s influence hana-ogi’s/japan’s femininity flourishes and, consequently, her qualities as a ‘good wife’/ideal political partner in the pacific. this aspect is somewhat problematic in the novel where, in the end, both lovers separate and gruver finally returns to the united states, following the desires of his father and the military establishment. the parallel love stories of kelly and katsumi on the one hand, and gruver and hanaogi on the other, function differently in both texts due primarily to differing endings. in both the novel and film kelly and katsumi commit suicide as a result of pressures from the army; when kelly is ordered to return to the united states without his pregnant wife, the only solution they see is love after death. in the novel, hana-ogi, being made aware far more than ever of the difficulties to be encountered after the kellys’suicide, leaves with the takarazauka/matsubayashi troupe to tokyo, never to meet gruver again. the liberal discourse is thus far more contained in the written text, although it does have the effect of sympathizing with the lovers’ suffering so as to persuade the readership about the cruelty of racism, particularly when japanese women are domesticated and willing to americanize if conditions are propitious. the film, released once the immigration and naturalization laws had been amended and five years after the end of the occupation, allows the pair of lovers to transcend bigotry. as robert g. lee has pointed out: it is the kellys’ suicide and the subsequent recognition of the political significance of their own relationship that finally brings gruver and hana ogi together permanently. […] having become a true woman via this transformative love, she becomes a candidate for the motherhood of the new nation. […] hana ogi saves gruver from himself, from his own exhaustion, self-doubt, and “southern” racism, and from his crisis of masculinity through his heterosexual affair with her (1999: 171). the film also includes an interesting subplot absent from michener’s original text related to eileen which actually enhances the socio-political reading of the gruverhana-ogi romance story. eileen, who is interested in japanese culture, becomes acquainted with nakamura, a kabuki actor. it is evident that both are attracted to each other, but there is no indication whatsoever that this will culminate in a romantic relationship. except for a couple of handshakes, there is barely physical contact between them. as marchetti very well explains: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 224 in and of itself, any relationship between a man of color and an anglo-saxon woman is more threatening to the status quo than the obverse relationship. within american popular thought, the anglo-american female represents hearth and home, the continuation of white-defined and dominated culture. if stolen or seduced away from white men, she represents a challenge to white male identity and authority. not only does she question the truism that white american culture is superior to all others, she also challenges male authority by asserting herself as a woman who chooses to look outside the confines of her own culture for sexual expression. thus, this relationship makes problematic both the racial and gender hierarchy within american culture (1993: 140-142). asian masculinity, thus, is still poised as a threat as a result of the war experience and of contemporary political events in the far east at the time, such as the expansion of communist china’s influence which led to american military intervention in the korean peninsula. interestingly, nakamura as a kabuki actor specialized in female roles (onnagata) is in this manner not merely emasculated but effaced as a male since the role was played by a cuban-american actor, ricardo montalban, in yellowface. to sum up, home politics and the international geopolitical picture enabled a change of attitude towards interracial romances between caucasian american men and asian women in barely the four-year span between the novel’s publication and the film’s release. ultimately, the politics of gruver’s and hana-ogi’s love is exemplified in the film’s final scene when both stage their union before the japanese and american military press, as well as hana-ogi’s fans. despite the difficulties, the public display of their affair reveals the possibilities offered by american society. this is achieved while maintaining, simultaneously, the status quo of the american, white, heterosexual male, ideally embodied onscreen by marlon brando. as robert lee underlines: in this tale of americanization, the oriental woman was transformed from dangerously transgressive into a symbol of domesticity and a stalwart of restored postwar patriarchy. meanwhile asian men remained outside the american family, marginalized, invisible, and racially other (1999: 162). works cited belsey, catherine. 1994. ‘postmodern love: questioning the metaphysics of desire’, new literary history 25: 3, 683-705. chung simpson, caroline. 1999. ‘“out of an obscure place”: japanese war brides and cultural pluralism in the 1950s”, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 10: 3, 47-81. klein, christina. 2003. cold war orientalism. asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961. berkeley, los angeles and london: university of california press. lee, robert g. 1999: orientals. asian americans in popular culture. philadelphia: temple univesity press. logan, joshua. 1957. sayonara. metro goldwyn mayer. marchetti, gina. 1993. romance and the “yellow peril”. race, sex and discursive strategies in hollywood fiction. berkeley, los angeles and london: university of california press. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 225 michener, james a. 1983 [1953]: sayonara. fawcett books: new york. robertson, jennifer. 1992. ‘the “magic if”: conflicting performances of gender in the takarazuka revue of japan’, in selenick, laurence selenick (ed.), gender in performance. the representation of difference in the performing arts. hanover and london: university press of new england, 46-67. maría isabel seguro is a lecturer in the english and german department at the university of barcelona. her main fields of interest are asian american and angloirish literature, focusing specifically on theatre. she has published pieces on lillian hellman, david henry hwang, wakako yamauchi, mitsuye yamada and joy kogawa. her current research is on contemporary anglo-irish theatre. microsoft word 3avila ea coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 herbal wisdom: memory and migration cathy avila, sue evans & annette morgan abstract: within contemporary western herbal medicine, traditional knowledge and modern science are combined to provide a unique meeting of patient, practitioner and plant. in the australian context, herbalists have based their practice on knowledge which originates from the traditions of europe, and has more recently been influenced by traditional medicine from asia. the combination of these diverse ways of knowing—traditional and modern, eastern and western—means herbal practitioners are influenced by ancient philosophy alongside phytochemistry and biomedical sciences. the challenge for herbal medicine today is that faced by all living (as opposed to ossified) traditions: how is a practice forged which retains what is valuable from the past while establishing relevance to the 21st century? we illustrate these issues in the context of the conference theme of ‘food for thought’ and consider medicinal plants which are used for the improvement of cognition. we focus on the therapeutic use of common herbs from the eastern and western traditions and present the scientific research which shows their ability to facilitate cognitive function and the laying down of memory. we also tell their traditional stories which indicate that these actions have been recognised and utilised for centuries. we go on to demonstrate, via case studies, the clinical application of this knowledge and in particular the importance of ancient practice of synergistic prescribing which occurs when a number of herbs are prescribed together in a formula. scientific understanding of the basis of this practice is being developed which further complements and validates traditional herbal wisdom. keywords: complementary medicine; herbal medicine; memory performance introduction in this paper, we use the conference theme ‘food for thought’ as an opportunity to describe the practice of western herbal medicine in australia, interpreting it literally, in order to allow consideration of the use of medicinal plants in the enhancement of cognition. we locate this discussion in the context of professional herbal practice, describing its origins, challenges and current practices. this is a paper about western copyright ©2011 cathy avila, sue evans & annette morgan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 (european) herbal medicine, and highlights its history, its knowledge base and the clinical approach of its practitioners. these are complementary ‘lenses’ through which to describe australian herbal practice. the first section of the paper deals with the cultural and political origins of western herbal medicine in australia, and outlines the challenges faced by the profession as it attempts to take its place within the healthcare system after a period of isolation. the second section illustrates the traditional and scientific basis of usage underpinning two cognitive enhancing herbs—one from the european tradition and one from the ayurvedic tradition and both widely used in australia today. and the third section contrasts the philosophy of the biomedical paradigm with the philosophy underpinning western herbal medicine through an exploration of contemporary clinical practice. part 1 – western herbalists in australia there are around 2000 practitioners of western herbal medicine and naturopathyi in australia. while these practices are largely outside state systems of healthcare, they are practiced legally, under common law. this is private medicine: there is no state funding. further, despite long campaigns to introduce statutory regulation for practitioners, as occurs with other healthcare workers, this has not occurred. when lin, bensoussan et al. (2005) documented these practices (western herbal medicine and naturopathy), they found that most practitioners are women who work in private clinical practice, as sole practitioners and in clinics with other healthcare practitioners. they utilise both conventional western medical diagnoses and nonconventional diagnoses, and often explain ill-health in terms of functional disorders. non-conventional diagnoses may arise from unconventional diagnostic tools such as iridology. practitioners typically conduct a one-to-one, private consultation with clients, and provide advice regarding diet and lifestyle, and dispense an individually prescribed mix of either dried or encapsulated herbs or more commonly, herbal extracts (casey, adams et al. 2007). origins of western herbal medicine in australia the thousand or so souls of the first fleet who arrived at botany bay in january 1788 were equipped with a wide range of supplies to enable settlement. these supplies included plants, chosen by botanist explorer sir joseph banks, which would be used for food, medicines, shelter and for aesthetic purposes (frost 1993). among them were a number of medicinal plants, which were then included in a herb garden that was established by early march 1788 in the rocks area of sydney ‘to provide the needs of sydney general hospital’ (1990). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 the medical practices of the colonists covered a number of modalities, and medicinal plants were part of medical treatment. according to martyr, australia was … founded in the heyday of unrestricted medical practice in britain. british healers were a diverse lot: the physician, the surgeon, the barber, the bonesetter, the empiric, the midwife and the apothecary were some of the more common categories (martyr 2002 p 18). contrary to the situation in other colonies, including the us and many parts of south america, there is little evidence of systematic transfer of medicinal plant knowledge between indigenous australians and early european settlers. the limited surviving documentation of exploration into medical botany and interest in indigenous medicinal plants in the early years of settlement (macphersson 1927) suggests that the utilisation of these plants was restricted and localised. as a result, today there is little use of indigenous plants by australian herbalists. the reasons for this have not been widely discussed within herbal medicine, but may include the lack of agricultural expertise of many of the earliest settlers, the dissimilarity of the australian flora with that of europe, and the sparse population which was a disincentive to the commercialising of herbal products and the development of a medicinal plant industry. in any event, from the beginnings of european settlement, western herbal medicine in australia has been almost exclusively dependent on non-native plants, whether locally grown or imported. early practice in the early 19th century, australian herbalists were one of a number of groups of medical practitioners practising without restriction. moves to regulate medical practice began in the mid 19th century (willis 1989)—an early example being the 1856 medical practitioners bill in victoria which was rejected because of the detrimental effect it would have on ‘free trade in physic’ (1858 p 434). this bill was the first of a series of bills aimed at restricting medical practice to the professional advantage of one group of practitioners-doctors. herbalists responded to these attempts by their rivals to secure medical authority by starting up their own professional associations, which in turn organised a range of activities including distributing newsletters, organising petitions and lobbying politicians and state officials. a petition of 5000 signatures was presented to victorian state parliament in 1894 to object to the increasing power of medicine and to the ‘state support of one system over another’. while medical practitioners were eventually successful in gaining regulation, parliamentary debates which accompanied these bills regularly referred to the disadvantage which would be suffered by herbalists and homeopaths as the individual pieces of legislation were introduced (evans 2009). although early attempts to establish a system of state-endorsed medicine was vigorously contested, by the early decades of the 20th century, the fortunes of the herbalists were beginning to fade as those of medical practitioners and the pharmaceutical companies rose. the golden years of biomedicine were the dark years for herbal medicine. herbalists in australia, like their colleagues in the us and the uk (saks 2003), experienced sustained professional marginalisation and harassment. their methods were vilified in the press and in professional journals, medical practitioners were banned by their associations from working with them, and their professional coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 survival was threatened as numbers of practitioners fell. yet, these difficulties were never translated into legislation and the practice of herbal medicine remained legal, however tenuous the position became for practitioners (evans 2009). the situation remained difficult for practitioners of natural medicine for most of the 20th century. by the closing years of the 20th century, medical preferences of the australian public had changed, and individuals began to demand more choices and increased participation in decisions about their healthcare—and in particular they demanded increased access to natural medicine. they were not abandoning mainstream medicine, but rather requesting additional interventions, in what can be understood as a form of medical pluralism (siahpush 1998; sharma 2000; lyng 2010). and they were prepared to pay out-of-pocket to receive these treatments, which were (and are) rarely available within the state-supported health system. the steady increase in public acceptance and utilisation of natural medicine is reflected in the language used to refer to it—prior to the 1970s it was ‘quackery’, before it became ‘alternative medicine’. in the 1980s it became ‘complementary medicine’ before the introduction of ‘integrative medicine’ in the 1990s. current herbal practice recent figures suggest that 68.5% of australians use natural and complementary medicine, and for most of these individuals their use of these therapies complements rather than replaces their use of pharmaceuticals and biomedical approaches (xue, zhang et al. 2007). as well as western herbal medicine, popular interventions include nutrition, massage, meditation, chiropractic and aromatherapy, and the provision of products related to these therapies has led to the development of a lucrative natural products industry. as we move into the second decade of the 21st century, the popularity of natural medicine shows no signs of abating. this change in position, from virtual exclusion from the delivery of mainstream healthcare to such a popular status over a few short decades, inevitably brings its own tensions. the period of marginalisation for herbal medicine went on for most of the 20th century: an era which was one of immense change for all other healthcare professions. massive resources were invested in the development of a complex healthcare infrastructure, which enabled extensive training of professionals, funded delivery of services, and state-supported research into treatment. most importantly, during the 20th century medicine was underpinned by science. in all of these areas, the exclusion of herbal medicine meant that, by the end of the 20th century, it had been left far behind. as it regained popularity, herbal medicine needed to play catch-up. issues requiring the profession’s attention included addressing safety and risk of products and practices, engaging with the changing regulatory landscape (saks 2002; bensoussan, myers et al. 2005; lin, bensoussan et al. 2005; o'sullivan 2005) and establishing relationships with a now active and powerful industry group—the manufacturers of herbal products (jagtenberg and evans 2003) . to this end, investment in appropriate educational and research programs is a priority. in turn, this cannot be done without the development of appropriate career paths for practitioners, and capacity building for the leaders of the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 profession (mccabe 2005). there is still a level at which herbal medicine can be seen as pulling itself up by its bootstraps. a further, and possibly greater, challenge for contemporary herbalists, whose understanding of medicinal plants is based on traditional knowledge, is to incorporate and reconcile modern scientific understandings into their knowledge base and practice. phytochemistry and biomedical sciences, like all sciences, are based on observable facts, formalised as scientific statements, and tested systematically by observation and experiment (dunbar 1995). in contrast, traditional knowledge is based on narrative, and transmits a broad range of information (lyotard 1997). further, ‘science has always been in conflict with narratives. judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables’ (lyotard 1997). the two systems—tradition and science—provide very different perspectives on medicinal plants, and require a different focus. traditional knowledge about medicinal plants can be understood as ‘folk knowledge’. as such, it is based on oral communication with an emphasis on practical application rather than theoretical consistency. thus recipes and household hints, references to myths, literature and popular culture, information about habitat, cultivation and harvesting are all included in the development of an understanding the plant. this information can appear unreliable when compared with a specific phytochemical analysis, or the reports of a clinical trial which has tested one particular preparation of a plant within the context of a doubleblind placebo-controlled clinical trial. in contrast, scientific knowledge is unable to maintain the breadth of folk understanding, and the strong connection with the natural world—the understanding of the plant as a plant, rather than as a pill or an extract— with which traditional herbal knowledge is imbued. while claims have been made that ‘contemporary herbal medicine combines scientific and traditional understanding’, the profound differences between these two ways of knowing have been rarely articulated within australian herbal medicine. these issues are best demonstrated through example. in keeping with the conference theme of ‘food for thought’ two herbs used for cognitive enhancement which can be understood both in terms of science and tradition are discussed below. the herbs are bacopa monnieri and rosemarinus officinalis. part 2: herbs for cognition: the science, the tradition in this section, the traditional understanding and usage of two herbs widely prescribed for memory and cognitive function in current australian herbal medicine practice is described in the context of recent scientific investigations into constituents and efficacy. the two herbs are bacopa monnieri (bacopa) which originates from the ayurvedic tradition and rosemarinus officinalis (rosemary) which is part of the european herbal tradition. research carried out by the author (morgan) contributes to this scientific evidence. memory impairment and dementia are increasingly prevalent in the current demographic climate of an ageing population (australian institute of health and welfare 2010). as well as the pathological cognitive loss of neurodegenerative disease, coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 many older persons are experiencing memory loss as part of the physiological process of ageing (kawas 2003). as shall be illustrated in the discussion below, botanical approaches have much to offer in the improvement of cognitive function, including modulation of factors such as oxidative stress, inflammation and neurotransmission. brahmi bacopa monnieri bacopa monnieri is a herbal medicine used since antiquity in the traditional ayurvedic medical system of india for its cognitive enhancing effects. the herb was first described in 800 bc and indications for its medicinal use recorded in one of the three earliest ayurvedic medical treatises the ‘carak samhita’ in the third century bc (singh & dhawan 1997; singh & dhawan 1982). its common name brahmi derives from the name of the hindu creator brahma and reflects the herb’s reputation as a brain tonic because the brain is seen as the creative force within humans. within the ancient ayurvedic texts the herb is classified as ‘medhya rasayana’ which pertains to it possessing mental/intellectual enhancement properties (medhya) as well as to its capacity to foster longevity (rasayana). a number of pre-clinical and clinical studies support this traditional understanding and usage of bacopa. laboratory studies have demonstrated antioxidant (tripathi et al. 1996; bhattacharya et al. 2000; sairam et al. 2001; sumathy et al. 2001; sumathy et al. 2002; russo et al. 2003ª; russo et al. 2003b) and cholinergic (das et al. 2002; bhattacharya et al. 1999; dey et al. 1964) actions in the brain as well as improved memory and cognitive performance in animal models (singh & dhawan 1997; singh & dhawan 1982; kishore & singh 2005). human clinical trials of bacopa have also demonstrated improved memory performance. some of these trials are limited by methodological flaws such as lack of blinding, small sample sizes, or use of outcome measurements which are not well validated. a study carried out by the author (morgan) assessed the efficacy and safety of bacopa. this investigation focused on people over 55 years of age, since this is the population in which memory impairment becomes apparent. the study was carried out at southern cross university, lismore, australia in 2005 (morgan & stevens 2010). clinical trial a 12-week, randomised double-blind placebo-controlled, parallel group clinical trial was carried out to assess the efficacy of bacopa for the improvement in memory performance and for the occurrence of side effects. participants were self-selected from the general population. they were aged 55 years or over at the commencement of the trial. participants were without dementia, depression or other serious health conditions and did not use psychotropic medications. they were randomised to one of two treatment conditions, either a tableted extract of bacopa monnieri called bacomind™ (300mg/day, standardised to contain at least 40% bacosides), or an identical placebo. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 participants attended three clinical evaluations. the first was an initial screening session (prior to the commencement of the study) designed to ensure that volunteers were eligible for enrolment in the study. the second evaluation occurred at the start of the study when neuropsychological function and subjective memory performance were assessed. this provided the baseline data. the third evaluation was held at the end of the trial, some 12 weeks later, when the neuropsychological function and subjective memory performance assessment was repeated. side-effects and study compliance were also recorded. the outcome measures used were four well validated neuropsychological tests: the rey auditory verbal learning test (avlt) (rey 1964), the rey-osterrieth complex figure test (cft) (osterrieth 1944), the trail making test (tmt) (reitan 1958) and the memory complaint questionnaire (mac-q) (crook et al. 1992). the results of the study were as follows. from 136 people who elected to participate, 103 people met study entry criteria and 98 of these commenced the trial. of these, 81 participants completed the trial and provided useable data for the end point analysis. the active group who took bacopa monnieri had significantly improved verbal learning (memory acquisition) as well as delayed recall (retention) as measured by the avlt (p<.05) compared to the group taking the placebo tablets. in contrast to the positive findings in the avlt, improvements were noted in both groups in the cft, mac-q and tmt, but there were no statistically significant differences between groups for these tests. the bacopa group reported a higher incidence of gastro-intestinal (git) side-effects than the placebo group, these predominantly being increased stool frequency, abdominal cramps and nausea. no other significant adverse effects were found. these results demonstrated that bacopa significantly improved memory acquisition and retention in older australians. five other ‘gold standard’ (well designed, randomised, placebo-controlled and doubleblind) clinical trials provide evidence for efficacy in cognitive and memory performance improvement for this plant (calabrese et al. 2008; raghav et al. 2006; roodenrys et al. 2002; stough et al. 2001; negi et al. 2000). the clinical trial findings concur with previous human and animal studies, as well as the traditional ayurvedic understanding of the herb and its use in clinical practice. the beneficial effects on memory observed may be due to previously demonstrated antioxidant and cholinergic effects of the herb on the central nervous system. the side-effects observed lend support for a cholinergic effect, or may have been due to saponin-mediated irritation of the git. rosemary rosemarinus officinalis rosemary has a long history. it is native to southern europe, widely used as a symbol of remembrance in war memorials, funerals and weddings (grieve 1931). in shakespeare's hamlet, ophelia says: ‘here's rosemary, that's for remembrance’. it was an important constituent in hungary water, dating from the 1300s, which culpeper (1638) suggested for use in nervous afflictions. ancient greek scholars are said to have worn garlands while studying, while modern ones burn its oil when studying for exams. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 compounds from rosemary have been shown to be potent antioxidants containing both water soluble rosmarinic acid, which is found in the mint family and is similar to vitamin c and lipid soluble carnisol, which has stronger antioxidant properties than vitamin e. (gordon & kourimska 1995; richheimer et al. 1996). lipid soluble antioxidants are especially useful in brain tissue which is very rich in polyunsaturated fat. it is interesting to note that rosemary is historically cooked with fatty meat. rosemary’s marked antioxidant properties have lead to its use as a replacement for synthetic preservatives in food and cosmetics (etter 2004). furthermore, rosemary also shows potent anti-carcinogenic action: applied to cooked hamburger meat it reduced heterocyclic amine content by 30-100% (university of arkansas 2008). exciting recent in vitro research which led to two expedited publications in neuroscience journals showed that rosemary’s constituents carnosic acid and carnosol are potent enhancers of nerve growth factor synthesis in human nerve cells (lipton, 2007). nerve growth factor is essential for health, growth and repair of nerve tissue. this research supports the clinical use of rosemary in stroke recovery and cognitive degeneration (ibid; satoh et al. 2008; burnham institute 2007). one randomised, controlled clinical study with 140 healthy volunteers compared the effects of inhalation of either the essential oil of lavender or rosemary oil or a placebo inhalation, on cognitive performance and mood. rosemary lead to significant enhancement of memory quality and secondary memory factors, though a decreased performance speed was noted compared to the placebo group (moss et al. 2003). as with bacopa, the scientific research supports the traditional knowledge and usage of rosemary. this demonstrates that modern scientific research validates the traditional usage of two ancient herbs from eastern and western herbal medicine traditions—bacopa and rosemary. both plants are currently used in western herbal medicine in australia and both hold great promise in the promotion of healthy cognitive function and neuroprotection. the ways in which these and other herbs are utilised in clinical practice is the focus of part 3. part 3: herbal wisdom: the paradigm of clinical practice in part 1 we established that herbal practice pre-dates contemporary biomedicine and in part 2, we demonstrated the ways in which modern herbal practice embraces the gold standard methodology of biomedical science. in this final section we consider the clinical practice of western herbal medicine and describe a case history to illustrate how herbal practice incorporates the insights of biomedicine without adopting its paradigm as a driving philosophy. australian graduates of courses in herbal medicine and naturopathy study anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology and clinical diagnosis using texts published for the biomedical market. we therefore need to ask: is then the reductionist philosophy of the biomedical paradigm that sees health in terms of the absence of disease, the philosophy that guides the therapeutic decisions of herbalists? is contemporary western herbal medicine simply biomedicine without pharmaceuticals? given that at least 120 coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 prescription medications are extracted from some 90 different plants (cordell 2004), is this a significant difference? determinants of health the biomedical paradigm, medicine underpinned by science, is the backdrop of 21st century healthcare and ingrained in our culture. the story of louis pasteur, the germ theory of disease and the role of antibiotics in the treatment of infections are taught in primary school. historically the application of this theory has produced great benefits. an understanding of the role of micro-organisms in disease was the driver for improvements in medical and personal hygiene as well as the implementation of social reforms including sanitation and clean water (rosner 2010).the aim of this section is not to trivialise these benefits, but rather to draw attention to the concepts of health that this entrains. central to the biomedical view is the hypothesis that disease, whether due to microorganisms, poisons or stressors, can be explained entirely in terms of defective physiological and biochemical processes, which often give rise to symptoms. the changes in biochemical parameters, together with associated symptoms, can be classified into diagnostic categories. once a diagnosis is made, treatment is directed at resolving the biochemical defect, by removal of the micro-organism, toxin or defective cells or by the addition of pharmaceuticals that modify biochemistry resulting in the removal of symptoms and the return to ‘normal’ biomedically-defined parameters. thus health becomes the absence of disease. in this mechanistic and reductionist view, the disease rather than the patient is the focus. was your last visit to a doctor about you or your disease? if contemporary australian western herbal medicine operates under different assumptions about health, then this should be reflected in practice, and we argue that it does. an initial herbal consultation lasts around forty-five minutes and starts in the familiar manner, with inquires about the presenting complaint. patients are encouraged to describe what they experience, and what it means to them. as the consultation continues detailed questioning focuses systematically on mental and emotional health and then on each major organ or system. information about diet, lifestyle and any occupational hazards are also gathered, along with descriptions of important relationships, family medical history and personal medical history. a physical examination is carried out and where available blood chemistry, cytology, haematology and other laboratory investigations such as blood glucose and urine analysis may also be taken into account. this wide range of inquiry indicates that health as defined in western herbal medicine goes beyond immediately concerning symptoms. the determinants of health are seen in the function of every system of the body and beyond, extending to relationships with family, community, environment and work. an individual is seen as a complex living system, at once a single entity and a part of other complex systems (woodhouse 1997). while a mechanistic analogy helps us to understand some of the subsystems, and the laws of physics, chemistry and biochemistry can be seen to operate within these, they cannot account for all the observed phenomena of health or healing. in models used in coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 western herbalism individuals are conceived of as living systems; self-healing, constantly self-renewing and adaptable (millenson 1995). for the herbalist, this holistic model has its roots in humoral medicine and dates back to the fourth and fifth centuries bc when hippocrates, among others, conceived of health as a dynamic balance or blend of four humors that enervated the body. sickness was conceived of as a state of imbalance and the physician’s duty was to aid the restoration of balance by aiding the healing powers of nature, vis medicatrix naturae (sigerist 1961). this vitalistic theory guided not only herbal medicine, but all medicine into the middle ages and beyond. cognitive decline: a case history the following case history, chosen because the patient presented with concerns about her memory, demonstrates the approach of western herbal medicine. jane, a 54 year old primary school teacher, has been experiencing symptoms associated with menopause: hot flushes, restless sleep, night sweats, anxiety, poor memory and fatigue. she discussed her symptoms with her gp who suggested hormone replacement therapy (hrt), but acknowledged that this was unlikely to improve her memory. jane had heard that herbal medicines can be useful in menopause and wondered if this approach would be more helpful. in the consultation that followed, jane revealed that her mother suffers from dementia and that this family history is the reason that her forgetfulness upsets her so much. every time she finds herself hunting for the right word or has misplaced the car keys, she feels a spike of anxiety and dread. loss of sleep from night sweats is really taking its toll and jane feels she is only just coping with her work load. jane is passionate about her art and has exhibited annually for over 20 years; but not this year. she hasn’t had the energy to produce any artwork. nor has she time or inclination to exercise. jane acknowledges that she feels quite depressed. her most troubling additional symptoms are digestive, including bloating and flatulence. jane’s hormone studies are consistent with menopause. no abnormalities are revealed by her other blood tests, so anaemia and thyroid problems are excluded as a cause for her tiredness. on the plus side, jane eats well, including a plentiful variety of high quality food, mainly organic whole foods with lots of fruit and vegetables. relations with her husband and adult children are good, she likes teaching and has supportive friends. as illustrated in this case history, herbalists takes the time to explore a wide spectrum of factors that may predispose to ill health and look for evidence of functional strengths as well as weakness, even when this information bears no direct relationship to the medical diagnosis. the aim is to strengthen the body from within so that healing can occur and this means paying attention to which organs, systems and even which types of tissue are showing signs of dysfunction and supporting them. this concentration on the promotion of health from within makes sense. consider the spanish influenza pandemic (1918-1920), which is estimated to have killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide (murray, lopez, chin, feehan, & hill 2006). despite this appalling loss of life, most people survived and still more never displayed symptoms. murray et al. compared average annual death rate during the pandemic with the average annual death rate in the years both before and after it (murray et al. 2006). this research found that all cause mortality was increased by 0.29% in australia, while coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 spain suffered a 1.49% increase in annual mortality in those two years. clearly, microorganisms, while necessary for infection, are not sufficient on their own. murray and colleagues noted a 30-fold variation in mortality across communities during the pandemic which they attribute to ‘individual and host community factors’ (murray et al. 2006). with this in mind, it is time to return to jane and the consideration of the aims of her treatment which are:  to reduce her anxiety and improve cognitive function.  to facilitate natural transition through menopause so that associated symptoms are removed.  to ensure that jane is aware of the increased risk of osteoporosis and of cardiovascular problems in post-menopausal women and to provide dietary and life-style advice to help to compensate for the increased risk.  to provide relief from a range of distressing symptoms such as night sweats and indigestion. jane’s treatment consisted of advice on nutrition and life style and a combination of herbs which are the focus of the discussion that follows. the herbal treatment involved two preparations containing a total of nine herbs (see table below). these herbs were chosen to because they combined to strengthen her nervous system, reduce her anxiety, improve cognitive function while improving her hormonal balance and alleviating her menopausal and digestive symptoms. each individual herb has several therapeutic actions. these therapeutic effects have been observed and documented in traditional literature. many, but not all, of these effects have been validated using scientific methodology either in vitro (in a test tube), in vivo (in animal studies), in clinical trials, or in a combination of all three. preparation botanical name common name english/spanish therapeutic actions include: tincture 7ml morning and night in a little water cimicfuga racemosa black cohosh/cimicfuga hormone balancing leonurus cardiaca motherwort/ agripalma female tonic, anxiolytic bacopa monieria bacopa cognition enhancer, anxiolytic rosemarianus officinalis rosemary/ romero cognition enhancer, circulatory stimulant, hepatic zizyphus spinosa zizyphus/azufaito perspiration control, anxiolytic tea one cup to be brewed after each mean melissa officinalis lemon balm/melisa tarungina nervous system tonic, carminative, cognition enhancer menthe piperita peppermint/mente antispasmodic, carminative glycyrrhiza glabra liquorice/regalis anti inflammatory, adrenal tonic avena sativa avena/cirada nervous system tonic, soothing effect on the digestive tract table 1. herbal treatment after initial consultation coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 after 1 month of treatment jane reported that she felt ‘so much better’. she rarely experienced hot flushes by day and was waking less often due to night sweats. the quality of her sleep was improved and she felt more alert and less exhausted and anxious. in addition her bloating and flatulence had resolved. jane was advised to maintain her herbal regime for the next 3 months and then have another review. her life-style, diet and herbal prescriptions were modified over the ensuing 12 months. after one year of treatment jane reported herself to be well and happy. she had established a regular exercise routine and seen a counsellor to work through some issues around her mother. her herbal tincture had been simplified and the dose lowered. jane occasionally used the herb tea in response to stress or if her digestive symptoms occurred. she felt her memory had improved and experienced no menopausal symptoms while she continued on the herbs, although occasional mild hot flushes did return if she stopped the herbs completely. jane had also contributed several works to a regional art gallery. synergy: more than the sum of its parts while the restoration of vitality remains as central to herbal philosophy as in previous eras, the materia medica available to herbalists in australia has changed. the addition of herbs from other therapeutic systems was discussed in the previous sections. it is interesting to note that the majority of the herbs in the above prescription have been used in europe for centuries, others have joined the western herbal materia medica more recently: black cohosh used therapeutically by indigenous north americans, zizyphus from traditional chinese medicine and bacopa from ayurveda. the content of the materia medica used in western herbalism has also changed due to government regulations, although the specifics vary with jurisdiction. many of the toxic plants used in traditional herbal medicine are no longer legally available to practitioners of western herbal medicine. on many occasions the powerful constituents that caused their toxicity have been extracted and developed into pharmaceutical preparations, where accurately metered doses allow are required for their safer use. one of the distinctions between pharmaceutical medicines and herbs is that pharmaceuticals typically contain just one physiologically-active chemical, frequently a synthetic version of an original plant constituent (griffin & o'grady 2006). herbal medicines, in contrast, have enormous intrinsic biological and pharmacological complexity. hypericum perforatum (st john’s wort or hipérico/hierba de san juan) is one of the best studied herbs in western herbal medicine. numerous clinical trials have demonstrated that st john’s wort is as effective as several classes of pharmaceutical antidepressants for mild and moderate depression and produces fewer side effects (linde, berner, & kriston 2008). analysis of the herb has so far revealed nine plant constituents each contributing to the therapeutic effect; seven constituents having antidepressant actions and two improving the uptake of the other seven (butterweck et al. 2003). herbalists view this as an example of the synergy of constituents. synergy is a term used to describe aspects of complex changing relationships in physics, biology, economics and epistemology and is variously defined according to the discipline in which the synergy is postulated or observed. each definition identifies three components; firstly a dynamic state, secondly, many elements whose action can be coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 individually described and finally, the observation that the system involving all these well described elements produces different and greater effects then could be predicted by the understanding of the elements (corning 1998). herbalists argue that a judiciously selected combination of herbs will act to restore health more effectively than would be predicted from the individual herbs acting alone. the truth of this assertion cannot be tested using the biomedical approach in the case of an individual patient and individual treatment; however simplified versions have been explored using clinical trial methodology. for example, koetter et al. investigated the effect of two well known herbs on insomnia (koetter, schrader, käufeler, & brattström 2007). the herbs were valeriana officinalis (valerian, valeriana) and humulus lupulus (hops, lupulo). the sedative action of both is well described in traditional herbal literature, observed in contemporary clinical experience and supported by some biochemical evidence (schellenberg, sauer, abourashed, koettter, & brattström 2004). in this study participating insomniacs were divided into three groups and given either valerian alone, or valerian combined with hops or a placebo. only the group taking the combination of both herbs reported significantly improved sleep. this surprising result was investigated further and in vitro studies demonstrated that hops improved the biochemical effect of valerian at two receptor sites known to mediate sleep induction (koetter et al. 2007). this study is significant since it provides proof of the concept of synergy between herbs. this is particularly important since as clinical trials prove the efficacy of individual herbs in the treatment of specific conditions there is a tendency to apply the reductionist logic of biomedicine to herbal prescribing (saw palmeto for benign prostatic enlargement, st john’s wort for depression, black cohosh for menopause etc). the strengths of the biomedical model can be witnessed in emergency medicine, acute infectious conditions and traumatic injuries. the emergence of new infections (hiv/aids, legionnaires etc.), the rise and re-emergence of old infections (tuberculosis) together with the alarming incidence of iatrogenic illness (that is sicknesses resulting from pharmaceutical medications) and the lack of substantial progress in chronic disease suggest that ‘the magic bullet’ does not meet all targets (ech, 2004; kohn, corrigan, & donaldson 2001). many advocate a more comprehensive approach to health (ech 2004; foladori 2005; kohn et al. 2001). the philosophy of herbalism and the knowledge of the therapeutic potential of individual plants derive from a strong connection with the natural world. no matter where or how we live, we are still of that world. the assumptions about health and healing that acknowledge the complexity of human systems placing health in a broad and dynamic context reflect individual experience of health and of disease more accurately then the biomedical model. the scientific method provides extremely valuable information, not least in the validation of the traditional usage of many herbs. however the philosophy that drives western herbal medicine, in the view of the authors—all herbalists themselves—offers something different, something more. by utilising complex systems found within each individual herb as well as the synergy that occurs between herbs in therapeutic formulae, herbalists trained in western herbal medicine retain their holistic philosophy and view health and sickness as an individual dynamic response to stressors whether pathogenic, environmental or emotional, determined in part by constitutional strengths and susceptibilities, and influenced by multiple psychosocial factors. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 conclusion there are currently attempts, particularly by those who promote integrative medicine, to bring herbal medicine and biomedicine together to facilitate optimal patient outcomes. the challenge here is to use the tension between biomedicine and herbal medicine, and between science and tradition, creatively. western science has developed a sophisticated analytic perspective, which may be wonderfully complemented by traditional knowledge with its holistic viewpoint and focus on connections and synergies. however, the politics of healthcare cannot be ignored: the west has valorised science over tradition since the enlightenment, and power and influence remains associated with the former rather than the latter. there is no denying the eclipse of herbal medicine during much of the 20th century, nor its more recent popularity which shows no sign of abating. however, the form of its future within australian healthcare is unclear—will individual herbs be incorporated into the armoury of biomedicine, appropriated by medical doctors, and traditional approaches and perspectives on patients disappear? or will herbalists achieve their longstanding goal of statutory regulation and use this to establish a thriving profession 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(1989). medical dominance. sydney, allen and unwin. woodhouse, m. b. (1997). “the concept of disease in alternative medicine”. j. m. humber & r. f. almeder (eds.) what is disease? biomedical ethics reviews totowa, new jersey usa: human press. xue, c., a. zhang, et al. (2007). “complementary and alternative medicine use in australia: a national population-based survey”. journal of alternative and complementary medicine 13(6): 643-650. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 cathy avila: phd (scu) bsc (hons) exeter, nd. cathy lectures in homeopathy and research methodology in the school of health and human science of southern cross university in australia. she is a member of a team investigating the effect of herbal and nutritional formulas on pain and quality of life in people suffering from osteoarthritis. her doctoral research included clinical trials investigating nutritional supplementation as a method of reducing premenstrual symptoms. cathy’s current research interests focus on the assessment of clinical naturopathic outcomes from mixed modality treatments. sue evans: phd (scu), ba (latrobe), dip ed (latrobe). in both her teaching and research through the school of health and human sciences, southern cross university, sue’s particular interest is to articulate the contemporary relevance of herbal medicine’s long history and rich philosophy to clinical practice. her phd considered the complex nature of contemporary western herbal practice, and the professional challenges faced by australian herbalists. recent publications have concerned the changes to the knowledge base of western herbal medicine, and the problems associated with the globalisation of herbal medicine. annette morgan: msc (scu), bn (scu), nd, dbm. annette lectures in clinical units at the school of health and human sciences, southern cross university, and holds qualifications in naturopathy and herbal medicine, as well as bachelor of nursing and master of science degrees. she has worked in the naturopathic profession in various contexts for over twenty years: in private naturopathic clinical practice; in the natural medicine industry; and in naturopathic education. her msc thesis, published in 2006, investigated the effects of bacopa monnieri on memory performance in older persons. she has a particular interest in the application of botanical and nutritional approaches to optimising the integrity and function of the brain and nervous system. i naturopathy in australia includes the disciplines of western herbal medicine, nutrition, homeopathy and tactile therapies (massage). thus herbal medicine in australia may be practiced as a stand-alone therapy, or as part of naturopathy. microsoft word jaime coolabah mariella gabay coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 mariela garibay lima, 1976 she is currently engaged in completing her ph.d.at barcelona university, spain, and will complete by fall 2009 doctoral program in public space and urban regeneration. b.f.a. (bachelor in fine arts), pontific catholic university of peru, 2004 she has held solo exhibitions in catalunya, zaragoza and peru. she has won prizes for her sculptures and drawings in peru. sacred time in stone history is imbued with the cultural significance of stone which are charged with meaning because they are witnesses to and participants in the physical construction of history itself. time is represented in my work in the idea of one stone superimposing itself on another. stone has been used to build sacred sites in different societies because they allow for the imbrication of the sacred and the worldly within each culture .my work always has a spiritual depth which evokes the transcendental. the timelessness of stone and the forms i choose as well as the vertical lines recurrent in my work, are intimately linked to the idea of the relationship between the worldly and the spiritual. in using stone i take as my reference the andean sacred towers known as “apachetas” which unite both sky and earth in my work stone is not an object of worship but i am aware of the sacred value that it has for some andean societies and hence my deep respect for those beliefs and traditions which are still alive today. microsoft word aricle werner senn coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 “around the world each needful product flies:” england's global expansion and the poets' trade 1 werner senn along with the british nation-state the british empire constituted itself largely in the course of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries from the almost continuous wars against holland, france, spain and the american colonists (brantlinger 6). in response to, and indeed in complicity with, this expansion, many poetic texts up to the end of the eighteenth century actively promoted this hegemonic and colonial project by participating in a nationalist and colonialist discourse, but above all by insisting on the country's leading role in expanding overseas trade. this paper sets out to address the question of how english poetry has engaged with this historical phenomenon of england's global commercial expansion and its establishment of a colonial empire. in particular, it will explore the arguments put forward in these texts in support of england's drive to control worldwide trade, and the legitimizing strategies they developed. in “poeticizing” england's global trade, poets in different ways endorsed the building of the mythology of the british empire, the specific british myth of hegemonic rule through securing international trade and thus liberty and peace. as howard d. weinbrot has amply demonstrated, one of the essential movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “was replacement of the destructive pax romana of war by the constructive pax britannica of trade” (weinbrot 250). a crucial modern improvement over the ancients in the neoclassical period was thus “a preference, if not achievement, of peace to war,” and this was “epitomized in the progress of trade” (weinbrot 249-50). as defoe wrote in the history of the principal discoveries and improvements (1727), the romans “planted [colonies] for conquest, we planted for commerce; they planted to extend their dominion, we to extend our trade” (history 169, quoted in weinbrot 257). defoe is of course a key figure in the consolidation of this discourse of british commercial expansion, but few poets at the time could have escaped the intimate connection of literature and politics that existed during much of the period we are concerned with. against the wide-ranging poetic valorization of britain's global commercial and economic expansion, a poetic counter-discourse that stresses the local perspective, the diversity of economies and cultures and the need for resistance to this globalisation was slow to develop. a somewhat ambiguously phrased counterpoint tentatively emerged in goldsmith's “the deserted village:” “around the world each needful product flies,/ for all the luxuries the world supplies” (lines 283-4). where indeed is the line to be drawn copyright © werner senn 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 between need and luxury? as will be seen, goldsmith was somewhat ambivalent in this respect. while humanitarian moral objections to colonialism are as old as european colonialism itself, a strong anti-colonialist tradition did not come into being before the eighteenth century (young 74-75) and did not often find a reflection in poetry. in a postcolonial perspective, the circulation of goods could be refigured as that of cultural capital, as a dialogical exchange in literary communication. but postcolonialism, as robert young has pointed out again recently, is a dialectical concept, in that it marks decolonization and the achievement of sovereignty but also the emergence into a new imperialistic context of economic (and often political) domination (57). hence the difficulties of theorizing postcolonial literature merely in terms of discursive and cultural agency are considerable. the danger of failing to take into account the central problem, that of the asymmetry of economic and political power, is obvious. 1 one might wish to argue that cultural critique as a challenge to culture’s determinants has always been a central preoccupation in antiand postcolonial theory (young 65), and that for a postcolonial writer to participate in a cultural discourse that had previously been the prerogative of the colonial ruling class constitutes in itself a major political breakthough. however, as san juan warns, “when the discourse/practice of exchange constitutes individuals as equal subjects, it also generates the illusion of freedom, as in ‘free competition,’ relative to the preceding stage” (146). moreover, its very success might make the work liable to being incorporated in the global cultural market whose power it sets out to challenge. the present paper, while largely focussing on the colonial poetic discourse, will confine itself, therefore, to a brief consideration of one single but outstanding instance of postcolonial poetic practice, that of derek walcott. the need for gold, as robert young maintains, was a primary motive of the remarkable maritime expansion eastwards and westwards in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. “for the british, the possibility of appropriating some of the booty was one reason for establishing an effective navy. [. . .] once a single colony had been established, then it could always be argued that strategic interests required more” (21). predating by several years such texts as michael drayton’s “to the virginian voyage” or samuel daniel’s “epistle: to prince henrie,” george chapman's “de guiana” (1596) is one of the first poems in english dealing with the theme of colonial expansion and appropriation. as its subtitle, “carmen epicum,” suggests, chapman thought the epic genre appropriate for such a theme, although his text is in fact no more than 184 lines long. but it is the context which matters: the poem is a preface to laurence keymis's a relation of the second voyage to guiana and actually addressed to keymis's master, sir walter raleigh, though ultimately intended for raleigh's patron, the queen. accordingly, the poem urges clio, here called “honors muse,” to sing and “prophecie th'exploit/of his [i.e. raleigh's] eliza-consecrated sworde” (the poems of george chapman 353). chapman's poem is remarkable above all for the boldness of his figurative language, which defies logic but makes for impressive forceful colonial propaganda. the speaker blithely envisages “riches with honour, conquest without bloud” (l. 15) to be the result of raleigh's exploit. this can only be achieved through peaceful trade. guiana is personified as bowing in willing submission to her big sister england, and to england's mother, “our most sacred maide,” which makes queen elizabeth a virgin mother. by an extraordinary leap of the imagination, chapman turns 1 the question has been lucidly expounded by epifanio san juan jr. in beyond postcolonial theory, 1998. cf. also arif dirlik. “the postcolonial aura: third world criticism in the age of global capitalism.” coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 the queen's “barrenness” not only into an asset, but constructs it as combining origin and descent: “her barrenness,” therefore, is the true fruite of vertue, that may get, beare and bring foorth anew in all perfection, what heretofore sauage corruption held in barbarous chaos; and in this affaire become her father, mother, and her heire. (ll. 25-29) by virtue of this miraculous trinity, the queen would thus be securing all legal, hereditary rights over the future colony as perfectly natural ones. the boldness of this construction is only surpassed by that of investing the queen with god's creative power: then most admired soueraigne, let your breath goe forth vpon the waters, and create a golden world in this our yron age, and be the prosperous forewind to a fleet, that seconding your last, may goe before it in all successe of profite and renowme (ll. 30-35) thus chapman's text intervenes explicitly in the political debate about colonial expansion, seeking to secure her majesty's support for raleigh's commercial venture. chapman's utopian vision of a “conquest without blood” culminates in a description that minimizes the violence and idealizes the beneficial effects both for raleigh's band and the colonized. 2 this notion is pervasive and still informs john stuart mill’s observation, in his principles of political economy, that “commercial adventurers from more advanced countries have generally been the first civilizers of barbarians” (394). in a telling move, chapman’s text displaces the aggression and violence of the colonizers’ physical conquest with the overwhelming but peaceful and civilizing power of orpheus's voice and thus makes the poetic discourse complicitous with the colonial enterprise of raleigh’s men: and now a wind as forward as their spirits, sets their glad feet on smooth guiana's breast, where (as if ech man were an orpheus) a world of sauadges fall tame before them, storing their theft-free treasuries with golde. (ll. 163-67) this is the golden age to be created by the queen's divine “fiat;” despite the image of forceful subjugation in line 164, what the text propounds is a peaceful racial harmony figured finally not even in barter or trade but in a sexual image, the honourable copulation of conquerors and natives: “[. . .] all our youth take hymens lightes in hand,/ and fill each roofe with honor'd progenie” (173-4). the image of interracial marriage here is certainly not to be read as a social ideal but rather as a political allegory. yet chapman's vision of social harmony can ultimately be conveyed only in a paradox: the mutual economic gain of both sides, as the immediately succeeding lines put it: “there 2 millar maclure grants the poem an utopian vision yet sees it as “little more than a hymn to free enterprise and a promised paradise for younger sons” (15). coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 makes societie adamantine chaines,/ and ioins their harts with wealth, whom wealth disioyn'd” (175-6). it is not easy to imagine this paradoxical union, or to see what exactly the colonized stand to gain in this “exchange” though it seems that chapman is thinking of the creation of some sort of surplus value. to naturalize these aggressive imperialist moves was one of the main poetic strategies poets engaged in throughout the period. thus in 1655 edmund waller, addressing cromwell, could proudly declare: our little world, the image of the great, like that, amidst the boundless ocean set, of her own growth has all that nature craves, and all that's rare as tribute from the waves. [. . .] to dig for wealth we weary not our limbs: gold, though the heaviest metal, hither swims. ours is the harvest where the indians mow: we plough the deep and reap what others sow. (“panegyrick to my lord protector,” ll. 49-52, 61-65) in the second half of the seventeenth century, “the commercial basis of english expansion depended in large part on replacing holland as the leading european economic power” (brooks/faulkner 63). at the time of the dutch wars, john dryden in his “annus mirabilis” (1667) saw this hegemony threatened by holland's aggressive economic policy. but dryden disguised england's own hegemonic claim in an organic image of free trade, which he compared with the circulation of blood in the body as hobbes had done in leviathan a few years earlier (foucault 179), an image that remained popular at least up to edward young (weinbrot 264): trade, which like bloud should circularly flow, stop'd in their channels, found its freedom lost: thither the wealth of all the world did go, and seem'd but shipwrack'd on so base a coast. (59-60: 5-8) the requirement of circularity of exchange, however, is negated by dryden's comparison of the second dutch war with the second punic war, in which the commercial ascendancy of carthage was overthrown by the imperial power of rome: 3 thus mighty in her ships, stood carthage long, and swept the riches of the world from far; yet stoop'd to rome, less wealthy, but more strong: and this may prove our second punick war. (60: 17-20) dryden, deeply ambivalent as he was towards classical achievements, here advocates the roman principle of applying military force in the service of empire-building if britain’s commercial hegemony is threatened. 3 the parallel between these two historical conflicts of empires over maritime predominance recurs in richard glover's poem london a few decades later. (see below, p. 000) coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 alexander pope's celebration of a pax britannica in windsor forest is too well known to need quoting here. while poetically it is indebted to the classics, its emphasis on commercial peace is decidedly modern. but like his fellow-poets, pope seems fascinated by the “glitt'ring spoil” miraculously brought home from the four corners of the world (rape of the lock, i.132). thus belinda in the rape of the lock is “decked with all that land and sea afford” (v.11). pope's contemporary, sir richard blackmore, in creation (1712) promotes the widespread view of the benevolence of trade by insisting on its benefit for all concerned: thus mutual traffic sever’d realms maintain and manufactures change to mutual gain; each other’s growth and arts they sell and buy, ease their redundance, and their wants supply. (bk ii: 756-59) but blackmore, too, depersonalises the commercial enterprise, allowing mere abstractions like “realms” and “manufactures” to be involved. apart from one bare mention of “th’adventurous merchant” who is a passive object of the capricious winds, he too figures the economic and physical process of trading as entirely natural, deletes all traces of the actual negotiation and acquisition of commodities and totally suppresses human agency. in what amounts to a kind of “commodity fetishism,” britons “find” the fruit of commerce blown to london by the friendly wind: 4 ye britons, who the fruit of commerce find, how is your isle a debtor to the wind, which thither wafts arabia's fragrant spoils, gemms, pearls and spices from the indian isles, from persia silks, wines from iberia's shore, peruvian drugs and guinea's golden oar? delights and wealth to fair augusta flow from ev'ry region whence the winds can blow. (bk ii:760-67) while in dryden's time it was the dutch, in the earlier eighteenth century it was the french navy that posed a threat to britain's global expansion. in 1727 james thomson, “chief poetic exponent of the whig commercial ideology” (brooks/faulkner 75) made his poem “britannia” a rousing appeal to britain's “thoughtless sons” to “keep [their] trade intire, intire the force,/ and honour of [their] fleets” (476, ll. 174-5). for thomson, a most eloquent spokesman for the ideology of pax britannica, britain is the firmest state that e'er was seated on the subject sea; a state, alone, where liberty should live, in these late times, this evening of mankind, when athens, rome, and carthage are no more. (477, ll. 193-7) the teleological view of britain as the belated but greatest of the world's empires and keeper of the world's peace and freedom is one of thomson's favourite topics, and he 4 the term “commodity fetishism” is used in this context by laura brown (13). coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 does not shy away from celebrating the imperial makers. in his view it is britain's invaluable asset and ideological advantage to be, unlike other nations or empires, “unencumber'd with the bulk immense/ of conquest” (ll. 208-9), since its power is merely based on its peaceful commercial navy. the genius of the deep (in his poem “liberty”) pays tribute to the men whose heroic efforts and endurance have set britain up as the leading commercial nation and whose merit it is, instead of treasure robb'd by ruffian war, round social earth to circle fair exchange, and bind the nations in a golden chain. (brooks/faulkner 77) like chapman, thomson does not seem to be troubled by the contradictions inherent in his images. this blind complicity is even more striking at the end of the thomsonmallet masque alfred, in the vision of the hermit who spurs alfred on to great deeds of empire, who explicitly enlists “bards to sing them in immortal verse” (brooks/faulkner 80) and who celebrates british supremacy, as alfred himself has just done in his song “rule britannia.” but – the question may well be asked if britons “never will be slaves,” do they have to go to the other extreme and subject the entire world? this is exactly what the hermit proudly prophecies: i see thy commerce, britain, grasp the world: all nations serve thee; every foreign flood, subjected, pays its tribute to the thames. (brooks/faulkner 80) and thus the moral he proclaims is clear: “they rule the balanc'd world, who rule the main” (80). thomson's liberalism is at the same time also a fervent nationalism and a strident globalism. it is obvious that the individual freedom and equality he postulates is contradicted by the reality of an economic system of circulation in which only a few profit from the commodities exchanged, or the money that represents their value. 5 the central topos of the civilizing benevolence of trade also informs richard glover's london, or the progress of commerce. the poem was written at another critical moment in britain's history, the war with spain in 1739, and makes the nexus between poetry and commerce explicit. the self-conscious speaker of this poem is a merchant who implores the winds to guide his vessels home safely so that his muse is at liberty to devote herself whole-heartedly to the real business, i.e. the praise of london, “albion's pride, /fair seat of wealth and freedom, . . . /lov'd abode of commerce” (17). in making britain the heir of the phoenicians, “the originators of trade” (weinbrot 262), glover, son of a merchant and a merchant himself, is echoing defoe in the history and repeating a widely current view. in glover’s mythical version neptune has fathered a child called “commerce” on a phoenician virgin. in a progress that takes her to greece, sicily, portugal, marseilles, the hanseatic league, and venice, commerce ends up in “northern albion's tin-embowel'd fields” (l. 190). 6 that the goddess chooses to make england her ultimate residence is due to the decrees of fate, which coincide with a historical telos: it means “perfecting at once/ what by eliza was so well begun” (ll. 4067); but above all it is the beauty of the thames valley and the virtue of its inhabitants, 5 cf. san juan 146. 6 this trajectory of economic history more or less anticipates that of karl marx in das kapital. see brantlinger 37. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 their “candid manners,” their “free/ sagacious converse” and their “zeal for knowledge” (ll. 416-18) that determine the choice, make it seem inevitable and natural. the poem's immediate occasion, the spanish challenge to british naval supremacy, arouses the speaker's patriotic and nationalistic spirit but at the same time makes him selfconsciously doubt whether, as a poet, he will be able to rise to the occasion: thy votary, o commerce! gracious power, continue still to hear my vows, and bless my honourable industry, which courts no other smile but thine. (ll. 436-39) nowhere else in the corpus of texts discussed here are the poet's and the merchant's trade conflated with such naivity as in these lines, which leave it entirely open whether the “honourable industry” is that of trading or versifying. like dryden, glover explicitly evokes the second punic war as he calls for military action to defend britain's mercantile empire: her head commercial carthage bow'd at last to military rome: th' unaltered will of heaven in every climate hath ordain'd, and every age, that empire shall attend the sword, and steel shall ever conquer gold. (ll. 481-85) the war propaganda and the anti-spanish polemics are unusually loud and crass in a text ostensibly written in praise of global commerce; but then glover does not seem to subscribe to the “theology of trade” that weinbrot has traced in so many of his contemporaries, i.e. the commercial vision of britain “heading a divinely ordained, mutually enriching mission of union among nations helping one another” (147). as late as 1782 william cowper could celebrate commerce as the “band” designed t’associate all the branches of mankind, and if a boundless plenty be the robe, trade is the golden girdle of the globe; wise to promote whatever end he means, god opens fruitful nature’s various scenes, each climate needs what other climes produce, and offers something to the gen’ral use; no land but listens to the common call, and in return receives supply from all. (“charity,” ll. 83-92) in glover’s poem, by contrast, the roman imperial spirit does not yet seem to have been completely subdued by the benevolence of trade. what is equally remarkable in london is the nationalist claim made for britain: as the seat of the goddess commerce, the british nation is “the joy of freedom, dread of treacherous kings,/ the destin'd mistress of the subject main/and arbitress of europe” (ll. 388-90), while commerce herself commands even vaster powers, the gifts of civilization which she bestows on the englishman: coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 thou gav'st him letters; there imparting all, which lifts the noble spirit near to heaven, laws, learning, wisdom, nature's works reveal'd by godlike ages, all minerva's arts, apollo's music, and th' eternal voice of virtue sounding from the historic roll, the philosophic page, and poet's song. (ll. 197-206) global trade is propagated here – as it still is in cowper’s “charity” (“art thrives most/ where commerce has enrich’d the busy coast,” ll. 113-14) as the source and origin of all civilisatory and cultural agency and achievement including glover's own. when nationalism and globalism join forces, britain's superior status in the world would seem assured. while chapman saw imperial expansion mainly as inaugurating a new golden age, with gold bullion as england's main profit, the rev. richard jago, in his short epic poem edge-hill (1767), celebrates the literal return of the iron age, the emergence of the steel industry of birmingham. its manufactured goods represent what the poem's speaker sees as england's most important export commodity. in economic terms, it seems infinitely superior to the silver and gold imported from abroad, from “golconda's sparkling mines,” or “motezuma's (sic!) palaces.” he rhetorically asks britannia's sons whether instead of iron they would rather have silver ploughshares and golden horseshoes: the answer, obviously, is no: “then grateful own/ [. . .] heav'n's providential love,/ that gave you real wealth, not wealth in show,/ [. . .]. thankful ply/ your iron arts, and rule the vanquish'd world” (302). jago is in fact rehearsing an argument often made, e.g. by adam smith, in favour of expanding foreign markets to increase production at home (young 82). book iii of edge-hill concludes with a grand peroration on the real and the exchange value of the products of the british steel industry and their global marketing: hail, native british ore! for thine is trade, that with its various stores sails round the world, and visits ev'ry clime, and makes the treasures of each clime her own, by gainful commerce of her woolly vests, wrought by the spiky comb; or steely wares, from the coarse mass, by stubborn toil, refin'd. such are thy peaceful gifts! (302) in spite of this apparent liberalism, jago is not above propagating autocratic, “roman” measures when it comes to exploiting raw materials that would otherwise be left unused. jago’s text thus unwittingly reveals a feature more typical of the heyday of british imperialism in the nineteenth century, “the contradictions [. . .] between the ostensibly liberal values of the empire and the practice of its autocratic rule” (young 40) as it goes on to admit an almost natural connection between economic and military power. if “gainful commerce” should not succeed in securing “the treasures of each clime,” england's steel-based military power will help out. jago's speaker concludes his address to “native british ore” with these words: and war to thee coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 its best support, and deadliest horrour owes, the glitt'ring falchion, and the thund'ring tube! at whose tremendous gleam, and volley'd fire, barbarian kings fly from their useless hoards, and yield them all to thy superior pow'r. (302) no ethical problem seems to arise for jago from this conjunction of trade and military power. since the barbarian owners do not know how to put their natural resources to commercial and thus civilizing use, these remain “useless hoards.” savage fetishism seems contrasted here with british “economic rationality” (brantlinger 186). the superior state of civilization brought about in britain by industry and trade legitimizes the forceful appropriation of those “useless hoards” because britain can process and insert them into the global economic system which it controls and can thus generate additional wealth. what seems tacitly understood here is the mercantilist position that gold and silver achieve their utility only as minted coinage (foucault 175). 7 as we have already seen, a tentative counterpoint to this commercial optimism emerges in oliver goldsmith's “the deserted village.” in its rousing appeal to the “statesmen” to “count [their] gains” and to consider the difference “between a splendid and an happy land” (ll. 273, 268), it marks a critical point in the poets’ engagement with england's global commercial expansion. though it may be said to endorse the critical counterdiscourse to the poetic glorification of english economic supremacy, it does so from a conservative-nationalist position. the text engages briefly but trenchantly with the issue of global trade and its boosting of consumerism, in lines that seem to echo jago: proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore, and shouting folly hails them from her shore; hoards, even beyond the miser's wish, abound, and rich men flock from all the world around. (529, ll. 269-72) it is not so much the massive increase in wealth by means of the global trade in “useful products” (l. 274) that is deplored, let alone colonial exploitation, but rather the pernicious social consequences at home: the unequal distribution of wealth and the craving it induces for luxury, for conspicuous consumption. around the world each needful product flies, for all the luxuries the world supplies: while thus the land, adorned for pleasure all, in barren splendour feebly waits the fall. (ll. 283-6) in a manner typical of the eighteenth century, goldsmith interweaves economic theory with philosophical discourse (brantlinger 33). while apparently favouring a socially progressive view of a fairer distribution of wealth resulting from global trade, he seems to hold on to an outdated theory of political economy: as foucault has demonstrated, theorists in the eighteenth century favoured the view that it is not production but consumption which generates or increases wealth (194). 7 cf. also brantlinger 42-43. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 the texts we have been looking at so far are all implicated in a discourse that built up a mythology of empire, the specific british myth of pax britannica, hegemonic rule by securing international trade and thus liberty and peace. the myth was empowered by its link with the “imperatives of capitalist free enterprise” (brooks/faulkner 21), which in the nineteenth century promoted the idea of international free trade on a truly global scale, with beneficial effects for mankind at large. thus john stuart mill, in his principles of political economy, could claim in 1848 that commerce established “a sense of community of interest” between peoples, and conclude his chapter xvii, “of international trade:” [i]t may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race. (395) such ideas of economic imperialism seem to have attracted only few poets in the culminating period of the british empire. in his study of alfred tennyson, alan sinfield has interestingly linked the themes of poetry and commerce. in tracing an unease about england's global expansion even in tennyson's earlier poetry, as e.g. in “you ask me, why, though ill at ease,” sinfield relates this unease to the poet's anxiety about “the tendency of trade to intrude upon the poetic margins” (38). in his view, “the threat of destruction hanging over tennyson's remote places is perhaps related to his sense of the vulnerability of the marginal space allowed to poetry because the governing centre, impelled in particular by the doctrine of free trade, was pressing continually out into the margins” (44-45). “hail briton!” also written in the early thirties, is openly hostile to imperial expansion, and the speaker of “locksley hall” (1837-38) declares that he must wander where “never comes the trader, never floats an european flag” (l. 161). some decades later, as poet laureate, tennyson apparently felt it his duty to adopt a less individualist, more political perspective on the imperial enterprise. he did this e.g. in “to the queen,” the poem he placed as epilogue to idylls of the king in 1873. it invokes the loyalty demonstrated in public by the people of england to the queen and her son on the occasion of the prince of wales's recovery from a dangerous illness, when “london rolled one tide of joy through all/ her trebled millions” (the poems of tennyson,1755, ll. 8-9). what the speaker insists on is that this common voice of the people united in their loyalty to the royal family is the voice that spoke at waterloo and “[l]eft [the english] mightiest of all peoples under heaven” (l. 21). this historical continuity is sharply contrasted in the text with the suggestion made in a recent issue of the times to get rid of canada for financial reasons (cf. brantlinger 185; young 91). for tennyson this is a betrayal of the “tone of empire” (l. 18) and worse, a loss of “imperial self-awareness” (brooks/faulkner 22). the speaker asks himself whether the voice that made the suggestion was “the voice of britain, or a sinking land,/ some thirdrate isle half-lost among her seas” (ll. 24-25), a possibility he immediately rejects. loyalty to the queen, to whom tennyson offers the idylls, affords in this poem the symbolic link between britain and its empire. without any specification of its basis, an unquestioning “secular faith in imperial destiny” (brooks/faulkner 22) is called for, “the faith/ that made us rulers” (l. 18-19). at the same time, tennyson’s text reflects current debates about colonial reform which saw a solution to britain’s problem of surplus capital and population in the creation of new markets for british goods “by coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 planting population and capital in the vast untenanted regions of our colonies,” as e.g. wakefield put it in 1849 (young 92): the loyal to their crown are loyal to their own far sons, who love our ocean-empire with her boundless homes for ever-broadening england, and her throne in our vast orient, and one isle, one isle, that knows not her own greatness: if she knows and dreads it we are fallen. (1755, ll. 27-33) the idea of “a constantly expanding, larger anglo-saxon federation encompassing the globe” (young 35) continued to be developed in the later decades of the century; james anthony froude’s oceana: or, england and her colonies (1886) envisaged an empire held together by “common blood, common interest, and common pride” (young 37). another poem, “opening of the indian and colonial exhibition by the queen,” was written by tennyson in 1886 at the request of the prince of wales, for an event designed to promote the idea of empire in public. the poem makes an even more fervent assertion of the one voice that holds the empire together, and of which the poet makes himself the mouthpiece. his praise of empire is figured in a commercial image, the rich display of products gathered from “every british zone:” welcome, welcome with one voice! in your welfare we rejoice, sons and brothers that have sent, from isle and cape and continent, produce of your field and flood, mount and mine, and primal wood; works of subtle brain and hand, and splendours of the morning land, gifts from every british zone; britons, hold your own! (1357) the commodities here accumulated are transformed into gifts (just as jago had represented the products of the british steel industry as “peaceful gifts”); their true function as commodities in the market is thus obscured. after celebrating the productive efforts of the “family,” the poem goes on to deplore former family quarrels, especially that which “[d]rove from out the mother’s nest/ that young eagle of the west,” thereby echoing current ideas that the u.s. “might in some way re-enter the fold” (young 38). the poem concludes with a rallying call by “britain's myriad voices” to be 'welded each and all, into one imperial whole, one with britain, heart and soul! one life, one flag, one fleet, one throne!' britons, hold your own! (1358) coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 the very stridency of the tone here may make us wonder how much faith the poet himself could still muster up for this ideal of unified strength, and whether to invoke it in this impassioned rhetorical manner was not in fact to cover up his doubts and anxieties. what it does succeed in covering up once again is the material basis of commerce and exploitation on which this construct of empire as a global family is founded. the poetic counter-discourse against the global expansion of british trade began to emerge in the eighteenth century. it is expressed somewhat obliquely and ambivalently, as we have seen, in a passage of “the deserted village.” two further examples, about a hundred years apart, must suffice here. william shepherd's “ode on lord macartney's embassy to china, 1797” constitutes a far more outspoken instance of anti-colonial discourse, in which goldsmith’s poem is obviously a subtext. not only does shepherd deplore the military expansion of the east india company in the 1790s and the slave trade in west africa, but he also warns against the attempts “to force the opening of china to british commerce” which he sees in macartney's diplomatic mission to peking in 1792-4 (brooks/faulkner 126). in its most incisive passage the poem has the “genius of cathay” regard the approaching sons of albion as “slaves of gold” with “bloodstained hands” (127). in obvious allusion to some of goldsmith's most famous lines, the speaker addresses these “insatiate spoilers” in profound dismay: 8 “ill fare the tribes, unconscious of your wiles,/ whose honest candour trusts your plighted word” (127). british traders are nothing if not treacherous conquerors, it seems. for the next hundred years other critical voices made use of images of free trade and global commerce in order to denounce what they saw as the growing imperialism and aggressiveness of britain's foreign policy, and for which trade was merely an excuse. the notion of british commerce as a free exchange of goods circulating among free owners of commodities was thoroughly exploded by wilfred scawen blunt in his dramatic poem satan absolved (1899), a vehement polemics against the devastation wrought by imperialist politics. the main speaker here is satan, who dismisses the ideology of the white man's burden in telling god that the englishman has utterly plundered his creation in the very name of christianity. satan complains bitterly about the “huge impudent imposture” of the english colonialist going out there, to teach them happiness, to civilise, to save, to smite down the oppressor and make free the slave. to bear the “white man's burden,” which he yearns to take on his white saxon back for his white conscience' sake. satan's denunciation of british imperialists culminates in his scathing mockery of “[t]heir poets who write big of the 'white burden.' trash!/ the white man's burden, lord, is the burden of his cash” (burdens 321). in conclusion we now turn to derek walcott's engagement with the poet's trade in a truly globalised world. with english as a world language, english cultural values are naturally drawn into global circulation, and a postcolonial writer is inevitably forced to cope with a multiple cultural heritage, perhaps more so in the caribbean than anywhere 8 goldsmith’s lines read:”ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,/ where wealth accumulates and men decay” (ll. 51-2). coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 else. john thieme has carefully shown walcott’s attempts, from early on, to “create his own caribbean tradition, drawing on an eclectic assortment of elements inside and outside the region” (2). 9 a line in “roots” (in a green night, 1962: 60) states the insight that “when they conquer you, you have to read their books;” but even in his first volume of poems walcott committed himself to an act of constructive resistance to the debris of colonialism, in a poem significantly entitled “call for breakers and builders,” which states the situation of the budding postcolonial poet bluntly: “there are no worlds to conquer, but worlds to recreate” (25 poems, 1949: 19). as thieme has pointed out, “walcott’s emphasis on adamic naming as a strategy for (re)claiming one’s world from the colonizer, his career-long concern with eroding manichean binaries and his development of a poetics of migration all strikingly anticipate subsequent developments in post-colonial theory” (198-199). from the start, walcott indeed seems to illustrate that “in-betweenness” of the postcolonial subject which, as dirlik argues, “is not to be contained within fixed categories or binary oppositions” (336) when he portrays himself as a poet “divided to the vein,” at a loss how to “choose/ between this africa and the english tongue i love:” “betray them both, or give back what they give?” (“a far cry from africa,” collected poems 18). the former rulers' global linguistic dominance is felt to be a very powerful one, and the poet’s divided, profoundly uneasy attitude to it persists. in “north and south,” the speaker, who characterises himself as “a colonial upstart at the end of an empire,” captures the dilemma neatly in the remark: “it's good that everything's gone, except their language,/ which is everything.” but at once he tries to get his own back by expressing a self-conscious “schadenfreude” at the decay of empires: and it may be a childish revenge at the presumption of empires to hear the worm gnawing their solemn columns into coral, to snorkel over atlantis, to see, through a mask, sidon up to its windows in sand, tyre, alexandria, with their wavering seaweed spires through a glass-bottom boat, and to buy porous fragments of the parthenon from a fisherman in tobago . . . (405) it is a small but obviously not insignificant consolation to see the shards of former empires thus recirculated globally, even traded to tourists by the formerly colonized subjects. if english poets from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century were instrumental in shaping the myth of britain's global rule through peaceful trade, walcott's view of the poet's trade seems to be that of dismantling and deconstructing such myths of empire and the european master narratives that helped to construct them. to this task he brings a vast knowledge of both european and american literary cultures, which allows him to develop what thieme has called a “poetics of migration.” thus “new world” (sea grapes 1976) offers a rewriting of the myth of creation and man's fall from the perspective of the “other,” the colonized subaltern, which implicitly answers myths of the conquest of the new world as a return to the golden age such as that promoted in chapman's “de guiana.” if, as weinbrot maintains, “the theology of trade begins with the fallen nature of man,” which makes man aware of the importance of effort, industry 9 cf. bruce king’s view of walcott as a poet “who survived by creating a caribbean culture for himself in a british colony from imported and local materials” (vii). coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 and energy for survival (265), then walcott’s poem has a specific relevance to our topic. in “new world” the snake from its “forked tree” loves to watch adam digging the earth in the sweat of his brow and admires his labour. but then adam and the snake discover they have an interest in common: and both would watch the leaves silver the alder, oaks yellowing october, everything turning money. so when adam was exiled to our new eden, in the ark's gut, the coined snake coiled there for good fellowship also; that was willed. adam had an idea. he and the snake would share the loss of eden for a profit. so both made the new world. and it looked good. (300-301) this first-world adam colludes with the snake coined/coiled for good fellowship to make the new world in man's image, to turn loss into profit, which sounds like a good commercial idea and “looks good,” too, but is of course both financial and verbal sleight of hand. the biblical myth is overlaid with the renaissance myth of the golden age returned, the colonist's work ethics is revealed as based on pure greed, and money as the global signifier of debt that commodifies the world, a turn that is identified as an originary moment of rupture. the figure of adam, however, is more complex than this in walcott’s poetry, at times also “possessed of a curious kind of innocence” (thieme 96). the poet himself repeatedly assumes the adamic privilege of naming the new world, “the role which walcott himself had taken upon himself as an artist committed to making the st. lucian landscape possible” (thieme 79). another early poem with the obviously symbolic title “ruins of a great house” describes a planter’s stately home on a caribbean island, in a subtle interweaving of local and european elements. this decaying cultural transplant smells of “the leprosy of empire” and shows traces of hybridity, of “[m]arble like greece, like faulkner's south in stone.” the “imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone.” the house is indeed a figure of decayed empire, as the text makes explicit: 10 and when a wind shook in the limes i heard what kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse of ignorance by bible and by sword. (20) the speaker's historical perspective is taken back further to men like hawkins, raleigh, and drake, “ancestral murderers and poets,” and to their legacy of “ulcerous crime:” 10 the poem’s epigraph, moreover (from thomas browne’s urn burial), spells out the theme of mutability and decay : “. . . it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes . . .” (19). coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 the rot remains with us, the men are gone. but, as dead ash is lifted in a wind that fans the blackening ember of the mind, my eyes burned from the ashen prose of donne. (20) in a bold and at the same time subtle intertextual move, walcott shows his mastery in appropriating the text of donne's devotions (no. 17) to his own postcolonial discourse, as the speaker recalls that albion too was once a colony like ours, “part of the continent, piece of the main,” nook-shotten, rook o'erblown, deranged by foaming channels and the vain expense of bitter faction. (20) in allusion to john donne's famous global image (“no man is an island”) mighty britain is displaced from its sovereign status and dominant role and reduced to a part of a larger whole, a part, moreover, that is far from impressive or admirable. it seems that in the different temporal and spatial perspective that the speaking subject adopts here, the local view is firmly privileged over the global. yet he does not seek to establish a new nationalism and thus continue the binary opposition of first and third world. on the contrary: anger at the colonial oppression is balanced with compassion (thieme 40), as the poem in its last line invokes donne’s text again by quoting another phrase from it: 11 all in compassion ends so differently from what the heart arranged: “as well as if a manor of thy friend’s . . .”. (21). it may well be claimed that this poem, in its very refusal to attack europe, expresses a new sense of power and constitutes a striking instance of postcolonial critique by challenging the limits of western ethnocentricity from the perspective of what young calls the “cultures of the tricontinental world” (66). a final example may serve to suggest walcott’s commitment to a belief in the power of poetic discourse to span the world and bring home to individual subjects everywhere the cultural values it is able to circulate and to communicate, and thus to foster resistance to global hegemony, whether cultural or political. the poem “forest of europe” (the starapple kingdom, 1979) enters into a dialogical exchange with its dedicatee, joseph brodsky. in 1978, during a common period of “exile” in the u.s., as the poem puts it, the two poets found they had much in common and became friends. 12 among other things, brodsky recited mandelstam to walcott and talked about him and the situation in russia. “forest of europe” is “about exile, friendship and writing poetry during a time of evil” (king 357) and reflects significantly on various issues of imperial power, 11 the passage from donne’s text reads: “no man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the sea, europe is the lesse, as well as if a promontorie were, as well as if a mannor of thy friends, or of thine owne were (87). 12 in bruce king’s own somewhat hegemonic discourse, “both were exceptionally talented outsiders from opposite extremes of western culture, with local cultures of their own behind them, who were now at the centre of the new western empire. both would see themselves as the new barbarians who had conquered the new rome by having excelled the inhabitants in mastery of their literary craft” (359). coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 oppression and displacement, the fate of caribbeans as well as native americans and gulag prisoners. but it also reflects on the poet’s arduous task and its result, the powerful poetic discourse he succeeds in producing: the tourist archipelagoes of my south are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing, what's poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth? from hand to mouth, across the centuries, the bread that lasts when systems have decayed, when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches, a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase whose music will last longer than the leaves, whose condensation is the marble sweat of angels' foreheads, which will never dry till borealis shuts the peacock lights of its slow fan from l.a. to archangel, and memory needs nothing to repeat. (377) the visual perspective evoked here is an undeniably global one but the poetic discourse figured in the metaphors of bread and music is far from totalising, on the contrary, it seems rather precarious though also sustaining. but the assertion of the enduring worth of this discourse is classical, and walcott’s self-aware participation in it is a measure of the poetic sovereignty he has achieved. it may be fair to say that he is in accord with some of those theorists who, like dirlik, call for a shift of attention “from national origin to subject position” (335) and for the constitution of a “postcolonial subject that is not to be contained within fixed categories or binary oppositions” (336). against the poetic valorisation of britain’s commercial hegemony which this paper has tried to trace and assess, it may appear as no more than a symbolic gesture to insist on the importance of circulating cultural capital instead. yet the assumption of cultural agency by those formerly deprived of it must on no account be underestimated since it may significantly diversify the perspectives in which global networks are viewed today. in this context, walcott's endeavour to establish a different view of the poet’s trade and role is of relevance, and his specific poetic strategies of coping with the dominant heritage of english culture and the rhetoric of empire need to be studied in greater depth. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 werner senn was professor of english at the university of berne from 1984 until his retirement in 2007. he taught modern english literature and a wide range of postcolonial literatures. his has published books on elizabethan drama and joseph conrad's fiction and numerous articles on australian poetry and fiction. he is also editor and co-editor of several collections of essays on australian literature as well as a founding member and former president of the european association of studies on australia. bibliography primary texts blackmore, richard. the creation, in the works of the english poets from chaucer to cowper, ed. alexander chalmers. london, 1810, vol. x. blunt, wilfred scawen. satan absolved: a victorian mystery. london, 1899. brooks, chris, and peter faulkner, eds. the white man's burdens: an anthology of british poetry of the empire. exeter: university of exeter press, 1996. chapman, george. the poems of george chapman. ed. phyllis brooks bartlett. new york: mla, 1941. cowper, william. the poems of william cowper. eds. john d. baird and charles ryskamp. vol. i: 1748-1782. oxford: clarendon press, 1980. defoe, daniel. the history of the principal discoveries and improvements, in the several arts and sciences: particularly the great branches of commerce, navigation and plantation, in all parts of the known world. london, 1727. donne, john. devotions upon emergent occasions. ed. anthony raspa. montreal, london: mcgill-queen’s up, 1975. dryden, john. the works of john dryden. vol. i: poems 1649-1680. eds. e.n. hooker and h.t. swedenberg, jr. berkeley, los angeles: university of california press, 1956. glover, richard. london, or the progress of commerce, in the works of the english poets from chaucer to cowper, ed. alexander chalmers. london, 1810, vol. xvii. goldsmith, oliver. “the deserted village,” the new oxford book of eighteenthcentury verse, ed. r. lonsdale. oxford: oup, 1984. jago, richard. edge-hill, or the rural prospect delineated and moralised, in the works of the english poets from chaucer to cowper, ed. alexander chalmers. london, 1810. vol. xvii. mill, john stuart. principles of political economy. london: george routledge [n.d.]. shepherd, william. “ode on lord macartney’s embassy to china, 1797” in brooks/faulkner, eds. the white man’s burdens (pp. 126-27). tennyson, alfred. the poems of tennyson. ed. christopher ricks. london: longmans, 1969. thomson, james. poetical works. ed. j. logie robertson. 1908. london: oup, 1965. walcott, derek. collected poems 1948-1984. london: faber, 1992. walcott, derek. in a green night: poems 1948-1960. london: jonathan cape, 1962. waller, edmund. “a panegyrick to my lord protector,” seventeenth-century poetry: an annotated anthology. ed. robert cummings. oxford: blackwell, 2000. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 secondary texts brantlinger, patrick. fictions of state: culture and credit in britain, 1694-1994. ithaca: cornell up, 1996. brown, laura. alexander pope. oxford: blackwell, 1985. dirlik, arif. "the postcolonial aura: third world criticism in the age of global capitalism." critical inquiry 20 (winter 1994): 328-56. foucault, michel. the order of things. 1970. new york: vintage, 1994. hanford, h. robin. “derek walcott’s ‘forest of europe’.” commonwealth essays and studies 20:2 (1998): 1-8. king, bruce. derek walcott: a caribbean life. oxford: oup, 2000. maclure, millar. george chapman: a critical study. toronto: university of toronto press, 1966. san juan, jr., e. beyond postcolonial theory. new york: st. martin's press,1998. sinfield, alan. alfred tennyson. oxford: blackwell, 1986. thieme, john. derek walcott. manchester: manchester up, 1999. weinbrot, howard d. britannia’s issue: the rise of british literature from dryden to ossian. cambridge: cup, 1993. young, robert j.c. postcolonialism: an historical introduction. oxford: blackwell, 2001. 1 this article "around the world each needful product flies" england's global expansion and the poets' trade.' in vol. 15 of the series swiss papers in english language and literature (spell), globalisation, vol. 15 an annual publication of the swiss association of university teachers of english, edited by frances ilmberger and alan robinson tübingen: gunter narr verlag,2002 isbn: 3-8233-4690-3. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 do you believe in magic? the potency of the fantasy genre matthias stephan aarhus university engms@dac.au.dk copyright©2016 matthias stephan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this article explores the popularity of the fantasy genre in the recent decades. in so doing, it seeks to provide a definition of the genre, claiming that fantasy literature is fiction that offers the reader a world estranged from their own, separated by nova that are supernatural or otherwise consistent with the marvelous, and which has as its dominant tone a sense of wonder. it does this through a discussion of previous definitions of fantasy, the fantastic, science fiction and supernatural horror. furthermore, through a consideration of texts by tolkien, and an exploration of contemporary novels (kazuo ishiguro’s the buried giant; terry brooks the sword of shannara trilogy) and other franchises (star wars), it demonstrates how the generic boundaries should be read outside of the traditional limitations, and how these texts, coupled with contemporary technology, offer a freer range to imagination and make fantasy a potent critical force. key words: fantasy, science fiction, genre, the buried giant, the sword of shannara trilogy, star wars, tolkien i know what you are all thinking, that what you are hearing is too incredible to be true, but magic and demons are real. wil olmsford – shannara chronicles the fantasy genre is enjoying enormous popularity with readers and audiences worldwide. this is not solely built on the adaptation of tolkien’s epic fantasy series, lord of the rings, into three award-winning films by peter jackson, followed by the expansion of the prequel, the hobbit, into an additional three films with the promise of an expansion of the universe within that medium. it is additionally augmented by j.k. rowling’s resounding success with the harry potter series both in book and film versions. in fact, fantasy has been on mailto:engms@dac.au.dk coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 the rise since the mid-seventies with the publication of the first shannara trilogy by terry brooks, and interest has hardly waned. that series, in a new adaptation into television by mtv, is counting on the continued interest demonstrated with game of thrones in television, and the hunger games in film. as edward james argues, “fantasy has become big business, for better or worse” (james 76). while the genre is enjoying a period of popularity it is also seeing a rise in scholarly interest, with critical volumes studying many of the more popular franchises coming out in the past few years.1 so, though fantasy is gaining official recognition, and increasing popularity, it does not have an accepted critical definition. alec worley, in empires of the imagination argues that “most detailed studies either qualify fantasy as the illegitimate offspring of science fiction or horror (its cousins in the triumvirate of the fantastique),” and goes on to claim that “unlike horror and sci-fi, fantasy has no unifying definition to call its own” (worley 3). this article seeks to provide such a definition, claiming that fantasy literature is fiction that offers the reader a world estranged from their own, separated by nova2 that are supernatural or otherwise consistent with the marvelous, and which has as its dominant tone a sense of wonder. through a discussion of previous definitions of fantasy, the fantastic, science fiction and supernatural horror, a sense of the genre’s potential will be illuminated. rosemary jackson, in her volume on fantasy, argues that “as a critical term, ‘fantasy’ has been applied rather indiscriminately to any literature which does not give priority to realistic interpretation: myths, legends, folk and fairy tales, utopian allegories, dream visions, surrealist texts, science fiction, horror stories, all presenting realms ‘other’ than the human” (jackson 13-14). while such an inclusive definition is tempting, the genre would then need to be further delineated. furthermore, genres such as science fiction, gothic and horror already have a rich critical tradition which does not include or account for all of the categories here identified as fantasy. in fact, jackson’s project includes a specification of fantasy to relate more closely to todorov’s fantastic, and considers a separation of different modes key to her critical project. this article also seeks to differentiate generic categories, doing so through several key factors including narrative position, verisimilitude, plot structure, and world-building. fantasy is often paired with science fiction in terms of publication, distribution and award consideration, using the convenient moniker of sff. orbit, daw, del rey and tor all explicitly publish both genres and market them together. barnes and noble and amazon both have sections dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, grouping them as a single category. although issued through the auspices of the world science fiction society, the hugo awards, which has awarded top writers in the genre since 1955, explicitly considers works of both science fiction and fantasy in their constitution. the nebula awards, issued by the science fiction and fantasy writers of america, similarly consider works in both genres simultaneously. the genre of fantasy, critically and in award consideration, emerged from science fiction in the 1970s and 80s, and it was the addition of more and more self-proclaimed fantasy writers that prompted the official recognition of fantasy writers in the name of the guild, formerly known (until 1992) as the science fiction writers of america (with the same coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 acronym). prior to the change, fantasy writers were an assumed category, as they remain in the hugo awards. so, if the genres are so tied together, how does one differentiate the genres of science fiction and fantasy into tangible and delineated categories? as science fiction already has a critical apparatus defining itself, we can use that a model for how fantasy can thus be delineated. using science fiction’s means of defining itself as a genre for a basepoint i will interrogate those definitions in arguing for the definition of fantasy i have presented. brian stableford, in the encyclopedia of science fiction, presents the cynical view on genre in sf, stating that “unfortunately, the clearest (or most aggressive) definitions are often the least definitive, although many sceptics have been attracted to damon knight’s ‘science fiction is what we point to when we say it’ or norman spinrad’s ‘science fiction is anything published as science fiction’ ” (stableford). while this can certainly also be applied to fantasy, it is not a satisfactory academic definition in either field. both definitions both contain circular reasoning, and leave the text, author, and even the reader, out of the process of determining the genre of the text. furthermore, specifically in consideration of fantasy, there does not seem to be a concurrence between the use of the term fantasy, colloquially, and the sense provided by the literary, filmic and televisual genres in question, as well as the confusion with the term fantastic, which has its own complications. damien broderick provides a technical definition of science fiction that could be used as a parallel. he states: sf is that species of storytelling native to a culture undergoing the epistemic changes implicated in the rise and supercession of technical-industrial modes of production, distribution, consumption and disposal. it is marked by (i) metaphoric strategies and metonymic tactics (ii) the foregrounding of icons and interpretative schemata from a collectively constituted generic ‘megatext’ and the concomitant de-emphasis of ‘fine writing’ and characterisation, and (iii) certain priorities more often found in scientific and postmodern texts than in literary models: specifically, attention to the object in preference to the subject. (broderick 155) while this definition is multi-faceted, one could make the case that some of those characteristics could be found in parallel in fantasy. both, indeed, are genres based on storytelling, invoke metaphor and metonym as basic building blocks of their world construction, and, often, deemphasize ‘fine writing’ in favor of plot development and world-building.3 however, they differ on the type of world constructed, the characteristics of their mega-text, and most specifically on the relationship with technology and science (which is deprioritized if not absent in fantasy texts as a rule). the mega-text is here understood in science fiction as the intertexual features and tropes that are accepted as common in various sf universes, and i argue that fantasy has a similar mega-text component, as a genre, which fantasy authors mine at will, using those features as common as a way of creating generic intertext as well as aiding the reader understand their universe more quickly. thus, the invocation of elves with pointy ears in texts from tolkien carried over to more contemporary series, video games, novels, such as those by cassandra clare, coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 terry brooks and j.k. rowling. as those features of world-building and mega-text are common, even if they have different specific referents, i would argue that they cannot constitute the differentiating feature between science fiction and fantasy. thus, the distinction must be based on the use of science and technology specifically, the other features being common. perhaps the most widely cited theorist of science fiction is darko suvin. he provides two key concepts to the theory of science fiction, cognitive estrangement and the novum. suvin’s definition of science fiction is as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (suvin 7-8). in suvin’s conception, estrangement is a feature common to both fantasy and science fiction, and is the condition that separates these genres from realistic fiction or realism. by cognitive, suvin indicates a belief in science, not in its particulars but in its essence. he argues that “typical sf methodology … is a critical one … combining a belief in the potentialities of reason with methodical doubt in the most significant cases. the kinship of this cognitive critique with the philosophical fundaments of modern science is evident” (suvin 10). for suvin, the progressive nature of science and cognition imbues the science fiction story with a certain critical potential, one which is grounded in its ability to comment upon the world of realism, what he calls the “zero world of empirically verifiable properties around the author” (suvin 11), (though i would suggest that a concurrence with the world of the reader, rather than the author, is a better indicator of keeping with the tone of this aspect). consequently, suvin has a less positive view of tales that are not grounded in technological progress. estrangement is also one of the features most pointed to in terms of the potency of science fiction by figures like adam roberts who focus on the element of otherness as a means for science fiction to postulate difference that could not otherwise be meaningfully approached. he argues that “reading sf, in other words, is about reading the marginal experience coded through the discourses of material symbolism; which is to say, it allows the symbolic expression of what it is to be female, or black, or otherwise marginalized” (roberts 30). that feature, a critical feature of the argument for reading science fiction in an academic context and for its academic potency is premised on solely the estrangement aspect of suvin’s definition, and is thus equally applicable to fantasy, perhaps in a more substantial way as the coding can be even less tied to direct socio-cultural examples and give freer rein to the imagination. tolkien, in his short treatise on fairy stories, discusses the means by which a story of fantasy is constructed. he uses the concept of enchantment in describing the different levels of narrative construction, and magic as the element of differentiation. “enchantment produces a secondary world into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside” (tolkien 48). this world-building aspect is critical to almost any fictional endeavor, but is perhaps more critical in fantasy. fantasy is the genre which leaves the most scope for imagination, and tolkien’s enchantment is a means of describing (using fantasy’s own terminology) the suspension of disbelief required to let us ‘escape’ into the diegetic level of the story. there are key differences between the ‘primary world’ and this created ‘secondary world’ that tolkien identifies. tolkien explains coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 this as the power of magic. “magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the primary world. it does not matter by whom it is said to be practiced, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills” (48). the secondary world is that world created by the introduction of magic, essentially (supernatural) nova, and then added to a verisimilar world that the reader is familiar with. this allows the writer to not create everything, and instead rely on some aspects familiar to the reader (and also limit the amount of estrangement to those aspects critical to the story/plot/narrative or interesting for the explication and creation of the nova). such verisimilar instruments could be the use of forests, deserts, oceans with similar tropes and stereotypes to those we are familiar with in ‘realist’ texts, to methods of transportation, weapons, and even physical laws and principles. the violations (the nova) of the familiar (verisimilar) are those things that require explanation (supernatural in fantasy, pseudo-scientific in sci-fi). magic is the change within the secondary world, thus like the novum, a term taken from suvin as a key defining concept of science fiction. enchantment is the creation of the secondary world (by the author, film maker, artist, etc), through this use of novum, into which both the reader and author can visit. suvin argues that supernatural stories, with an affinity to myth, lay out stories that have a static background, and thus without the power of science fiction. “cognition differentiates it not only from myth, but also from the folk (fairy) tale and the fantasy” (suvin 8). it is t he novum which provides the means by which one identifies the difference between the newly created world, the estranged reality, and the world of realism. thus, in a science fiction tale, the possibility of man having developed interplanetary travel represents both a scientifically plausible novum but is also in keeping with plausible scientific progress. furthermore, this type of story keeps the spirit of scientific discovery and the optimism implicit in the early days of the science fiction genre, the positive future worlds presented in amazing stories as envisioned by authors like robert heinlein. a fantasy story need not have a plausible scientific rationale, but does still have a novum, features that allow one to feel the sense of estrangement from the ‘zero world’ mentioned above. adam roberts, in his new critical idiom entry science fiction, explains the distinction with reference to the story of gregory samsa in kafka’s metamorphosis, who wakes up as a bug one day without textual explanation. this can be contrasted with a story, such as william gibson’s johnny mnemonic, which contains a dolphin that can communicate his thoughts through a lightboard, connected neutrally and which has been installed by the us navy. roberts argues, convincingly, for the inclusion of a story like gibson’s into science fiction because of the explanation of the phenomenon, whereas kafka gives no plausible explanation for the change (presumably if he had explained the connection, it would fall under science fiction). thus, he claims, the transformation in kafka’s story is a “physical impossibility” (roberts 4). through this example, we can see how science fiction uses the novum as a feature in its definition, and i argue that fantasy does something similar. the example from kafka, however, would not be significant enough of a feature, as the majority of the world coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 constructed remains the same; the story focuses on the alienation of samsa through this direct contrast with an otherwise realistic world. fantasy’s nova are more wide-reaching, postulating an alternative world with its own boundaries, separate from the world of the reader. the fantasy nova, as edward james and farah mendelsohn indicate in the introduction to the cambridge companion to fantasy literature, concentrate on the construction of a world that is “impossible whereas science fiction may be about the unlikely, but is grounded in the scientifically possible” (1). fantasy, thus, posits a world that can contain features sparked by pure imagination, giving it a broader scope to investigate estrangement than its more grounded cousin. while suvin argues that this disconnect leads fantasy to be a literature of pure escapism, without relevance to human development (because of its lack of grounding in anything earthbound), i will argue that this freedom offered by fantasy is actually of benefit. tzvetan todorov explores the potential of a genre he calls the fantastic in his seminal work. the fantastic, according to todorov, is that point in a novel or story in which the reader is confronted with an aspect or characteristic which does not conform to the reader’s reality, “either he is a victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and the laws of the world remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us” (todorov 25). while this period of hesitation can be extended, in novels and stories todorov classifies as truly fantastic (such as henry james’ the turn of the screw), what is more common is a resolution of this fantastic hesitation, pushing the text into a related genre. if he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. if, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous. (todorov 41) this is best explained using the case of the literary gothic, separating novels by ann radcliffe where everything is provided a logical rationale as uncanny (supernatural explained) and those in which one must accept otherworldly intervention, as in horace walpole, as marvelous (supernatural accepted). fantasy novels conform, and in fact revel in, the idea of the supernatural, and the nova offered is precisely the intervention of the new laws of nature, whether that is different races, diminished or enhanced size, or, most prominently, the inclusion of magic, into the reality of the created world. fantasy need not have a moment of hesitation, although there are examples of universes that do, for example the recent television adaptation the shannara chronicles, kazuo ishiguro’s the buried giant, and even, at least for the protagonist, the latest installment of the star wars franchise, the force awakens. thus, i contend that the fantasy genre can be defined, in todorov’s terms, as marvelous, through its acceptance of the supernatural. furthermore, one can separate the tone of texts, and thus i would separate texts which have fear as their underlying motif from those of fantasy. todorov argues that “fear is often linked to the fantastic, but it is not a necessary condition coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 of the genre” (35), but i would argue that the resolution of stories that have fear as its base tone, texts of the literary gothic and contemporary horror, resolve differently, notwithstanding if they are tales of terror (radcliffe) or supernatural horror (lovecraft), and thus can be separated from those texts with a more optimistic mindset. fantasy, as a genre, does not revel in the hesitation, or the fantastic, but rather operates with the dominant of the marvelous. its distinction from horror and specifically supernatural horror (lovecraft, et al.) is in tone, with horror having fear as its overarching model, and fantasy embracing wonder and enchantment. while todorov classifies science fictional texts as marvelous (specifically the instrumental marvelous, or scientific marvelous (56)), he does so under a very specific understanding of science fiction. rosemary jackson picks up on that explanation in her own classification of science fiction as marvelous, maintaining that “much science fiction” belongs to the realm of the “pure marvelous” (jackson 32) presumably on the same account as todorov. this reading implies that the main features of science fiction belong to a fiction of pure imagination, and not one further connected to the spectrum of the “scientific and rationalistic world view” (32). neither todorov nor jackson have as their purpose to clearly delineate either fantasy or science fiction, so the conflation of their characteristics and the different emphases and points of view are both reasonable and telling. both argue that both science fiction and fantasy do not belong to the realm of the fantastic, as the question as to their association with the verisimilar is not in question. like suvin, i would, however, argue that science fiction belongs to the realm of the mimetic (on jackson’s revised scale, noting that the uncanny is not strictly a generic category and that todorov’s line is better served by this term), as it focuses on a plausible future based on developments in technology (hard sf) or social constructions (soft sf). the fundamental difference between jackson and suvin in this regard seems to be the assumption that science fiction predominantly rests not only on scientific progress and optimism but on the ‘supernatural’ features of sf (aliens, etc), as opposed to realistic fiction (uncanny/mimetic). fantasy, on the other hand, does not have the same relationship to the progress that science fiction brings to the fore, to the optimism in technology and development and progress for an earth-bound (or derived) species. “a fantasy is a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility” (irwin 4). for irwin, and many scholars, fantasy stories are tales of the impossible, not connected to plausible future or past scenarios. as such, the estrangement is greater, and yet the tone is optimistic and wondrous (unlike horror and the gothic), while the parallel to our own scenario is created more through analogy than conceptual future construction, as it is in science fiction. fantasy is freer than science fiction in its world-building conceptions because it does not need to be grounded in the plausible or the possible, thus fantasy is the genre that can most powerfully utilize the potency of estrangement to discuss issues of race, gender, sex, politics, which are critical in our own contemporary society. this is particularly true in light of postmodernism in which those grounded features which we could attach to a science fiction scenario are already exposed as unlinked, and thus maximizing the estrangement allows us the freedom to explore all possible speculative coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 alternatives, in the past, present, and future, and on this world and on others, without the cognitive constraints that suvin advocates. in categorizing fantasy as a genre, the question is not just of a firm definition, but also a period in which to identify the genre’s constraints. so, what is the origin of fantasy? one could point to some of the oldest literature, the epic of gilgamesh and the incident of humbaba, as adam roberts, for other reasons, does in the consideration of science fiction. in the english tradition, canonical texts like that of beowulf and sir gawain and the green knight both invoke supernatural beings. the former presents the cain-descended grendel, his ‘hell-bride’ mother, and the final encounter with the dragon, as well as the beowulf’s recollections of fighting sea monsters off the coast of present day sweden. the latter text uses the romance tradition, and the encounter with the mysterious, and magical, green knight. however, i would argue that while those stories conform to what we now consider fantasy, fantasy as an independent definable genre does not emerge until more recently. william irwin argues that the modern concept of fantasy is relatively recent. he catalogues a period of fantasy literature in the period from 1880-1950, but includes many authors who produced works which, although taking up themes consistent with the modern understanding of fantasy, do so prior to the development of the independent genre. the modern conception of the genre stems not from this prolific period, but from the period after what irwin points to as a pause in the popularity of the genre, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. writing in 1976, and referring to the period mentioned, he states: “these authors and others brought fantasy to its highest execution and left us with a body of fiction that deserves to be known and understood, even though its kind has all but disappeared from the literature in the past eighteen years” (irwin 5). from roughly the publication of tolkien’s trilogy in 1954-5, until the revival (triggered in part by fans of tolkien’s trilogy), as irwin argues, little ‘fantasy’ is published, and it is only in this later period in which fantasy is thought of and delineated as a separate definable genre. one could argue that even in pulp fiction there was a turn towards science fiction in the intervening period and the run up to the space race, at least in the west, as well as a proliferation of alien encounters and horror associated with the soviet threat, and the concurrent red scare in the us. the genre, however, goes beyond the concept of the ‘high fantasy’ texts (trilogies, primarily) that descend from the tradition of the lord of the rings. so, while it includes the highly popular harry potter series, which explores the concept of a parallel world of magic, and c.s. lewis’ influential christian inspired narnia series, i will focus on more contemporary texts to show the range of the fantasy genre, and then discuss why it is so popular in today’s pop cultural society. terry brooks’ the sword of shannara trilogy (exacerbated by the mtv adaptation), presents a world of magic and supernatural beings in earth’s future (as opposed to an alternative world or distant past), ishiguro’s the buried giant, which evokes a world of supernatural creatures in a medieval setting using a highly literary language, and the space opera star wars series, which similarly evokes a world of magic even in an atypical setting for the genre, each challenge certain preconceptions of fantasy and allow us to explore the reaches of the genre as currently understood. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 the shannara series allows us to consider the evolution of the fantasy elements. as tolkien argues, “fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness” (tolkien 44). in this series, brooks sets out to use the intertextual references found in his fan-based love for the tolkien series, but alter the origins of the supernatural creatures to a time thousands of years in the future. this reversal allows us to be estranged even from those verisimilar elements that brooks does present, while making the supernatural nova seem more natural — and they are familiar due to the consistency in characteristics from the popularity of tolkien’s own universe. it also plays on the traditional quest motif, and thus harkens back to the medieval romance tradition that is often evoked in this genre. in this sense, it presents certain differences, the supernatural nova, but calcifies the differences. this is a contrast to science fiction, in which the progress inherent in that genre often leads to developments in technology being evoked as a progressive means of solving the conflict. in fantasy, the magic is inherent in the universe, and thus, as long as one accepts the premises, the crises are averted through the natural development of the plot and characters. tolkien also emphasizes the importance of taking the secondary world seriously. “[magic] must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at or explained away. of this seriousness the medieval sir gawain and the green knight is an admirable example” (tolkien 16). this is important because if the story is presented as a story within the diagesis, it removes the fantasy element from the text, essentially ascribing it not as an alternative universe in which magic is real, and the supernatural is commonplace, but presents it as a fiction, something which can be dismissed. the prime example of this is the story of sir gawain, in which the green knight of the title is beheaded and survives early on in the romance. this tale is taken up in kazuo ishiguro’s recent novel the buried giant. while ishiguro is a well-known literary writer, praised not only for his ideas but for the quality of his writing, with this novel he moves into unknown territory. in an interview for the new york times, he provides this quote on the novel: “i don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “will readers follow me into this? will they understand what i’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? are they going to say this is fantasy?” (alter, np). with this quote ishiguro sparked a bit of controversy, as if he were dismissing so-called genre fiction, which includes both science fiction and fantasy, and he was specifically criticized by author ursula le guin. the question is whether writing literary fiction can be separated from genre fiction. ishiguro has already produced a wellreceived novel which does fall into a genre fiction category, the 2005 booker nominated never let me go, and i argue that he has done so again here. by using the fine writing associated with literary fiction, combined with elements of the fantasy genre, specifically the use of ogres and dragons in a verisimilar setting of medieval england at the time of sir gawain, ishiguro here challenges the notion that genre fiction is predicated on the idea of a focus on generic conformity at the expense of the quality of the writing. despite its pulp origins, the genre does not dictate a specific quality line below which genre fiction must fall. i read ishiguro’s concern as whether the reading public is willing to accept fantasy into literary fiction, not an assertion that the ascription is unwarranted. (le guin might also be additionally motivated by the controversy of science fiction’s literary status and the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 positions taken by margaret atwood and speculative fiction, detailed in the 2012 in other worlds.) if we accept the premise of shannara, then the setting in the distant past is not a requirement for a fantasy text. ishiguro’s novel challenges the notion that a specific type of language is warranted, suggesting that literary language and conceits can also be used in a fantasy novel, which embraces the supernatural. the star wars sagas demonstrate yet another important concept, namely that there is not a particular setting that is inherent to the genre. i argue that star wars, rather than a science fictional tale, is actually a fantasy text. science fiction has sometimes been defined by a checklist of items, with space travel and spaceships prominent on the list. fantasy has been similarly defined, with many of tolkien’s own prominent supernatural creatures featuring highly such as elves, orcs, and wizards. yet, the mere presence of any one of those elements doesn’t define the text as fantasy (or science fiction), and as i argued earlier, i contend that it is estrangement, supernatural nova, the evocation of the marvelous and sense of wonder that define the genre. each of those elements are present in the star wars series, and it lacks particular elements that are characteristic of science fiction, the genre that it is otherwise most associated with. star wars does, as both shannara and buried giant do, demonstrate a strong faith in magic. in lucas’s film franchise, that magical element is the force, the unexplained phenomenon that binds the universe and provides the jedi, the mystical monk-like order that serves the federation, with their historic power. despite assertions by fans, and a mention in the prequel series of the concept of midi-chlorians4, star wars does not provide a technological or other scientific explanation for this force. rather, what the franchise presents is the mystical and religious associations of the jedi. even as ships travel to other stars, the essential element is the wonder associated with the jedi, a feature highlighted in the most recent addition to the franchise, in which the jedi have become the stuff of legends and lore. this franchise also demonstrates the optimistic tone that is essential to the fantasy genre. tolkien describes it as a ‘eucatastrophe.’ but the ‘consolation’ of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. far more important is the consolation of the happy ending. almost i would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. at least i would say that tragedy is the true form of drama, its highest function, but the opposite is true of the fairy-story. since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses the opposite – i will call it the eucatastrophe. the eucatastrophic tale is the true form of the fairy-tale, and its highest function. (tolkien 60) this term of tolkien’s is useful in separating the tone of the gothic and horror, from that of sci-fi and in particular fantasy. sci-fi presents a positivistic outlook at its core, especially for those practitioners of hard sf and its derivatives. one could even argue that cyberpunk, coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 perhaps the most pessimistic of the sci-fi sub-genres, does not produce texts in which the interconnection of technology and the future end more dystopically than they start (and in postcyberpunk this becomes slightly optimistic about positive change). this is contrasted with the typical tone of fantasy, which i have argued is one of wonder. falling on the side of the marvelous is not sufficient to arrive at this positive outlook, but it is a characteristic of fantasy which is not simply the mirror of the gothic, and does not follow directly in separation from science fiction. “the joy of the happy ending, or more correctly the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale) this joy which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’ or ‘fugitive.’ in its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur” (tolkien 60). yet, while any specific point of grace, such as luke’s ability to launch a missile at the precise moment to destroy the death star, seems miraculous, the genre itself provides the optimism that the protagonists will prevail, and the right will be achieved in the universe, by then end of any given cycle (often in trilogies, since tolkien). what these franchises further explore is a development from the above quote from to lkien, in which he claims that “there is no true end to any fairy-tale.” that concept leads to some of the most potent explanations for the contemporary popularity of the genre in the internet age. as far back as the end of the nineteenth century (with sherlock holmes) fans have been exerting influence over various franchises (such as leading to the return of holmes from the dead). yet, it is in science fiction fandom where we see the building blocks of contemporary fan culture developing, and from that origin where we see the developing of the first fan societies around tolkien and other fantasy franchises emerging. along with the commercial benefits to publishers and movie studios, fans also produced many original works which expanded the science fictional and fantasy universes they so appreciated. and since the advent of the internet, that tendency has exploded to epic proportions. the rise in popularity of fantasy since the late 1990s can be traced to the developments of a convergence culture around popular fantasy franchises like harry potter, lord of the rings (especially the jackson adaptations), and game of thrones and which have pushed producers to look for more and more franchises to develop in this vein (like the recent shadowhunters and shannara chronicles). this is due to the world-building inherent in these franchises and the space this opens up for the reader to develop the story as he sees fit, a form of textual poaching as jenkins argues in his 1992 book but augmented for the digital age. while it was controversial twenty years ago during the potter wars (jenkins 175), the concept of fans writing text which fill in the gaps of a franchise or universe, exploring the minor characters, undeveloped plot points, or continuing the story both within the original framework as well as beyond, has become an essential part of engaging the twenty first century audience. fantasy is particularly adept at giving space to this exploration because it is founded in the freest expression of imagination, and thus the novel elements of each franchise give the most play for the reader-authors that participate in this contemporary form of expression. this in turn leads to the ongoing popularity of the series and franchises, and pushes the studios, and in particular today with the turn to television as the prime medium, to the development of more and more fantasy series and franchises. tolkien argued that “fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature” (45) arguing for coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 literature over drama due to the technical limitations of depicting the alternative or secondary world as something other than farcical. this is ameliorated to a degree by the developments in film and television storytelling, which allow a more serious depiction of the fantasy realm, and which is sufficiently immersive to meet his requirements (although written text is still arguably a better medium as it gives more space to the story and more freedom of imagination to the reader). in fact, it may be this particular historic moment that has the most need for fantasy. it is part of the essential malady of such days – producing the desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self made misery – that we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil. so that to use evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. we find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. (tolkien 57) tolkien makes this comment about his own age, the 1950s, an age that seems ugly and evil and provides fantasy as the escape to a world in which good overcomes, and wonder is the dominant tone. a case can be made, especially in this arguably post postmodern condition, that this condition has grown rather than dissipated. by allowing for unlimited imagination, we are freeing the mind from the search for grounding and truth, by providing the possibility of exploring alternatives in the ‘safe’ environment of fiction. in fantasy, the rules are laid out, and then adhered to. by ‘arresting’ the strangeness, it limits its impact and, perhaps counterintuitively, gives us grounding in a world in which the rules are less certain, and less universal, than they ever have been before. this is what makes fantasy powerful, and why we all want to believe in magic. bibliography alter, alexandra. “for kazuo ishiguro, ‘the buried giant’ is a departure.” new york times. feb 19, 2015. web. jan 19, 2016. broderick, damien. reading by starlight. london: routledge, 1995. brooks, terry. the sword of shannara trilogy. london: orbit, 2004. ishiguro, kazuo. the buried giant. london: faber and faber, 2015. irwin, w.r. the game of the impossible. urbana: u of illinois p, 1976. jackson, rosemary. fantasy: the literature of subversion. london: routledge, 1981. james, edward. “tolkien, lewis and the explosion of genre fantasy.” the cambridge companion to fantasy literature. ed by edward james and farah mendlesohn. cambridge: cambridge up, 2012. cambridge companions online. accessed jan 16, 2016. james, edward and farah mendlesohn. “introduction.” the cambridge companion to fantasy literature. ed by edward james and farah mendlesohn. cambridge: cambridge up, 2012. cambridge companions online. accessed jan 16, 2016. jenkins, henry. convergence culture. new york: nyu press, 2006. ---. (1992). textual poachers. london: routledge, 2013. roberts, adam. science fiction. london: routledge, 2000. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 stableford, brian m, john clute and peter nicholls. “definitions of sf.” the encyclopedia of science fiction. eds. john clute, david langford, peter nicholls and graham sleight. gollancz, 2 apr. 2015. web. 16 jan. 2016. suvin, darko. metamorphoses of science fiction. london: yale up, 1979. todorov, tzvetan. the fantastic. ithaca: cornell up, 1975. tolkien, j.r.r. “on fairy stories” tree and leaf. london: unwin books, 1964. 11-70. worley, alec. empires of the imagination. london: mcfarland, 2005. matthias stephan lectures in the english department at aarhus university, where he serves as a research assistant. he has recently completed his phd at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign in comparative and world literature, with his dissertation the postmodern structure of consciousness, which uses the genres of science fiction and detective fiction (in literature, film and television) to define postmodernism. he has presented conference papers and lectures on postmodernism, detective fiction, science fiction and romanticism in the united states and across europe. he was one of the coordinators of the successful international conference otherness and transgression in celebrity and fan cultures in 2014. he serves as co-editor of otherness: essays and studies, and coordinator of the centre for studies in otherness. 1 mcfarland, for example, has collections of essays on game of thrones, tolkien, the hunger games, and harry potter, among others. 2 explicating darko suvin’s term, adam roberts defines the novum as “this ‘point of difference,’ the thing or things that differentiate the world portrayed in science fiction from the world we recognized around us” (roberts 6), which i argue can been found equally in fantasy. 3 i will argue that while a de-emphasis on fine writing is typical of both fantasy and science fiction, and indeed all ’genre fiction’ which have as their dominant concept conformity to the genre and generic conventions rather than literature or literary language in general, a lack of ‘fine writing,’ here understood as a poetic use of language, is not eschewed necessarily as a generic condition. there are numerous examples of finely written texts of fantasy and science fiction, such as kazuo ishiguro who has books which fall into each genre (the buried giant and never let me go, respectively). 4 midi-chlorians react to the presence of the force, which also flows through them, so cannot be evoked as a scientific or technological cause or explanation for this mystical presence. microsoft word article sissy helf et al coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 and she wrote backwards: same-sex love, gender and identity in shani mootoo’s work and her recent valmiki’s daughter sissy helff and sanghamitra dalal a b s t r a c t : t h i s a r t i c l e t r a c e s t h e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f l o v e , g e n d e r a n d n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y i n s h a n i m o o t o o ’ s c r e a t i v e w o r k i n g e n e r a l a n d h e r m o s t r e c e n t n o v e l v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r ( 2 0 0 8 ) i n p a r t i c u l a r . in a l l h e r w o r k , m o o t o o d e s c r i b e s t h e p h e n o m e n o n o f o t h e r n e s s a s a p a r t o f t h e n e g o t i a t i n g p r o c e s s o f t h e p r o t a g o n i s t s ' s e l v e s . c h a l l e n g i n g x e n o p h o b i a , h o m o p h o b i a a n d a l l f o r m s o f p r e j u d i c e s t h e a u t h o r w o r k s w i t h t h e c o n c e p t o f l e s b i a n a n d b i s e x u a l l o v e , c r o s s r a c i a l r e l a t i o n s h i p s i n o r d e r t o w r i t e i d e n t i t y a n d t o c r e a t e a h o m e . k e y w o r d s : v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r , p o e t r y, v i d e o , s t o r yt e l l i n g , i d e n t i t y, c o s m o p o l i t a n i s m , l e s b i a n i s m , b e l o n gi n g e v e r s i n c e h e r f i r s t n o v e l c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t ( 1 9 9 6 ) w a s p u b l i s h e d t h e c a n a d i a n a u t h o r c u m m u l t i m e d i a a r t i s t s h a n i m o o t o o h a s b e c o m e a p o w e r f u l v o i c e i n t h e p o s t c o l o n i a l l i t e r a r y s c e n e . h a v i n g s t a r t e d o u t w i t h t h e c o l l e c t i o n o f s h o r t s t o r i e s o u t o n m a i n s t r e e t & o t h e r s t o r i e s ( 1 9 9 3 ) , m o o t o o a l s o p r o d u c e d a v o l u m e o f p o e t r y ( 2 0 0 1 ) a s w e l l a s a n u m b e r o f v i d e o s a n d p a i n t i n g s w h i c h h a v e b e e n s h o w n a n d e x h i b i t e d i n t e r n a t i o n a l l y. h e r v i d e o w o r k i n c l u d e s e x p e r i m e n t a l f i l m s s u c h a s e n g l i s h l e s s o n ( 1 9 9 1 ) , t h e wi l d wo m e n i n t h e wo o d s ( 1 9 9 3 ) , g u e r i t a a n d p r i e t i t i a ( 1 9 9 5 , w i t h k a t h y h i gh ) a n d v i e w ( 2 0 0 0 ) . m o r e r e c e n t l y h e r l a t e s t n o v e l v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r ( 2 0 0 8 ) s t i r s g r e a t i n t e r e s t i n l i t e r a r y c i r c l e s t r a n s p o r t i n g t h e r e a d e r o n a j o u r n e y t h r o u g h t r i n i d a d a n d c a n a d a . h a v i n g l e f t ir e l a n d w h e n s h e w a s o n l y t h r e e m o n t h s o l d a n d t r i n i d a d a t t h e a g e o f 1 9 , m o o t o o h e r s e l f f e e l s m o s t c o m f o r t a b l e b e i n g l a b e l l e d c a n a d i a n a r t i s t , b e c a u s e t o h e r c a n a d i a n n e s s i s o p e n t o m a n y i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s . w h e r e a s c o m m o n l y c a n a d i a n n e s s c o n n o t e s m a i n l y n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y i t s e e m s a s i f m o o t o o r e a d s m o r e i n t o t h i s c a t e g o r y o f n a t i o n a l b e l o n g i n g . t o h e r c a n a d i a n n e s s s e e m s t o o f f e r a g r e a t e r f r e e d o m t o s u c c e s s f u l l y i m a gi n e h o m o s e x u a l l i f e w o r l d s i n g e n e r a l a n d l e s b i a n l o v e i n p a r t i c u l a r . t h e v e r y i d e a t o s t e p o u t o f o n e ’ s f a m i l i a l a n d c u l t u r a l b a c k g r o u n d w i t h o u t l o s i n g o n e ’ s s e l f i s c e n t r a l t o t h e a u t h o r a n d h e r u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f i n d i v i d u a l i t y, g e n d e r a n d s e l f h o o d . c o n s e q u e n t l y, copyright © sissy helff and sanghamitra dalal 2012 this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 t h e q u e s t f o r a t r a n s c u l t u r a l i d e n t i t y h a s b e c o m e a r e c u r r i n g m o t i f i n a l l h e r c r e a t i v e w o r k . in t h e p r e d i c a m e n t o f o r , h e r c o l l e c t i o n o f p o e t r y, t h i s c o s m o p o l i t a n , l e s b i a n s t a n c e i s p r o b a b l y a f t e r a l l m o s t p a l p a b l y f e l t . h e n c e h e r p o e m “ a r e c o g n i t i o n ” p o e t i c a l l y c i r c u m s c r i b e s h o w h o m o s e x u a l i d e n t i t y o r b e t t e r l e s b i a n s e l f h o o d i s s o m e t i m e s p a i n f u l l y n e g o t i a t e d a g a i n s t t h e b a c k d r o p o f n a t i o n a l i t y: “ y o u ’ r e t r i n i d a d i a n ! ” i b l u r t o u t l o u d l y, s m u gl y, a c c u s a t i o n n o t , o f c o u r s e , i n t e n d e d . “ i r e c o g n i z e t h e a c c e n t ! ” [ . . . ] b e f o r e i h a v e t i m e t o a s k “ s o w h e r e a r e yo u f r o m ? ” “ w h a t ’ s yo u r n a m e ? ” “ w h o ’ s o u r m o t h e r , w h e r e ’ s yo u r f a t h e r ? ” s h e h a s t u r n e d , b u t i h e a r h e r s a y, “ i a m c a n a d i a n , ” t h e r e p l y d r o p p e d f l a t , m e r c i l e s s l y t e r s e t h e s e a r e t h e t h i n gs i k n o w : a n o n ym i t y, a u t o n o m y f r e e d o m t o s e l f d e f i n e t o f o r g e t t o c o m e o u t t o e s c a p e s o m e t i m e s t h e r e i s ( s o m e t h i n g i u n d e r s t a n d ) n o r o o m t o n e go t i a t e ( p r e d i c a m e n t o f o r , 8 4 8 4 ) h e r e a s e l s e w h e r e i n h e r w o r k , s h a n i m o o t o o u n t i r i n g l y c o n n e c t s q u e s t i o n s c o n c e r n i n g g e n d e r i d e n t i t y w i t h i n q u i r i e s o f b e l o n gi n g a n d n a t i o n a l i t y i n o r d e r t o e m p h a s i s e a f e l t n e e d t o o p e n u p a m o r e a u t o n o m o u s s p a c e w h i c h o f t e n c o n s c i o u s l y d e p a r t s f r o m t h a t o f t h e f a m i l y a n d t h e c o m m u n i t y. in h e r m a g i c r e a l i s t n o v e l c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t , o n e o f t h e m a i n c h a r a c t e r s , t yl e r , s u m m a r i z e s h i s l o n gi n g f o r a u t o n o m y a n d i n t h e f o l l o w i n g w a y: coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 o v e r t h e ye a r s i p o n d e r e d t h e g e n d e r a n d s e x r o l e s t h a t s e e m e d a v a i l a b l e t o p e o p l e , a n d t h e r u l e s t h a t w e n t w i t h t h e m . a f t e r m u c h r e f l e c t i o n i h a v e c o m e t o d i s c e r n t h a t m y d e s i r e t o l e a v e t h e s h o r e s o f la n t a n a c a m a r a h a d m u c h t o d o w i t h w a n t i n g t o s t u d y a b r o a d , b u t f a r m o r e w i t h w a n t i n g t o b e s o m e w h e r e w h e r e m y “ p e r v e r s i o n , ” w h i c h i t r i e d d i l i g e n t l y a s i c o u l d t o s h a k e , m i g h t b e e i t h e r i n v i s i b l e o r o f n o c o n s e q u e n c e t o p e o p l e t o w h o m m y f o r e i g n n e s s w a s w h a t w o u l d b e s t r a n g e . i w a s p r e o c c u p i e d w i t h t r yi n g t o u n d e r s t a n d w h a t w a s n a t u r a l a n d w h a t p e r v e r s e , a n d w h o s a i d s o a n d w h y. ( 4 7 4 8 ) fo r h o m o s e x u a l s m i g r a n c y a t t i m e s c a n b e c o m e a p o w e r f u l s o u r c e o f c r e a t i v i t y, a s a l r e a d y s o i n t e n s e l y e x p r e s s e d i n g l o r i a a n z a l d ú a ’ s i n f l u e n t i a l s t u d y b o r d e r l a n d s / l a f r o n t e r a : t h e n e w m e s t i z a , 1 t o f a c i l i t a t e c h a r a c t e r s t o t r a n s g r e s s c u l t u r a l a n d s o c i a l c o n v e n t i o n s . y e t , s u c h r e p r e s e n t e d b o r d e r c r o s s i n g w i t h i n a n y p i e c e o f l i t e r a t u r e n e e d s t o b e w e l l b a l a n c e d i n o r d e r t o a v o i d i n c r e d i b i l i t y o f c h a r a c t e r s . t h i s e x p l a i n s w h y a l l n a r r a t i v e g e s t u r e s a d d r e s s i n g m o d e r n s e l f h o o d r e q u i r e a u t h o r s t o e q u i p t h e i r c h a r a c t e r s v e r y c a r e f u l l y. s h a n i m o o t o o ’ s b e i n g i n t h e w o r l d a l s o c o m e s v i v i d l y a l i v e w h e n h e r p o e t i c i s t r i k e s t h e r e a d e r s w i t h “ a l l t h e ir i s h i k n o w ” o r “ a l l t h e h i n d i i k n o w ” . in t e r e s t i n g l y e n o u gh , b o t h p o e m s u t i l i z e a v e r y b a s i c l a n g u a g e r e g i s t e r w h i c h i m p l i e s a l i m i t a t i o n w i t h r e f e r e n c e t o b o t h l a n g u a g e s , ir i s h a n d h i n d i . m o o t o o ’ s p o e t i c o r c h e s t r a t i o n o f c o s m o p o l i t a n l i f e w o r l d p r e s s e s f o r a r e t h i n k i n g o f i d e n t i t y a n d c i t i z e n s h i p . it i s a c l a i m f o r t h e p o l i t i c a l a n d s o c i a l i n t e g r a t i o n o f m i gr a n t s a s m e m b e r s o f a gl o b a l c o m m u n i t y. a l l i n a l l , m o o t o o ’ s p o e m s p r e s e n t a d i a s p o r i c c o n d i t i o n a n d m i g r a n t f e e l i n g w h e r e o n e s i t u a t e s t h e p o e t i c i n o t o n l y i n o n e b u t i n m u l t i p l e w o r l d s h e n c e c e a s e l e s s l y s t r i v i n g f o r p l e d gi n g “ c i t i z e n s h i p , u n e r r i n g / lo ya l t y, t o t h i s s t a t e o f m i g r a n c y” ( p r e d i c a m e n t o f o r , 8 1 ) . m o o t o o ’ s p r e v i o u s n o v e l s a l w a ys f a b r i c a t e d i m a gi n a r y i s l a n d s s u c h a s la n t a n a c a m e r a i n c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t o r g u a n a g a s p a r i n h e d r o w n s h e i n t h e s e a a s f i c t i o n a l b a c k d r o p s a g a i n s t w h i c h t h e r e s p e c t i v e s t o r y u n f o l d e d . t h e s e n o n s p e c i f i c l o c a t i o n s , a s t h e l i t e r a r y c r i t i c v i v i a n m . m a y s u g g e s t s , a r e “ p a r t i c u l a r l y u s e f u l w h e n w r i t i n g a b o u t t h e c o n j o i n e d h i s t o r i e s o f t r a u m a a n d e x i l e i n d i a s p o r i c c o n t e x t s ” . 2 t h e r e i s n o d o u b t t h a t s u c h i m a gi n a r y g e o g r a p h i e s o f f e r a g r e a t p o t e n t i a l t o i n v e n t n e w l i t e r a r y w o r l d , n o n e t h e l e s s , m o o t o o l a t e s t f a m i l y s a g a v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r i s s e t i n s a n f e r n a n d o a n d t r i n i d a d . c h o o s i n g t h e u r b a n , a f f l u e n t in d o t r i n i d a d i a n m i d d l e c l a s s a s a n a r r a t i v e b a c k b o n e , w i t h a p a r t i c u l a r n a r r a t i v e f o c u s o n a g e n e r a t i o n w h o s e l i f e h a s s t i l l b e e n 1 gloria anzaldúa, borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. san francisco: spinsters/aunt lute, 1987. 2 vivian m. may, “dislocation and desire in shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night,” studies in the literary imagination 37,2 fall (2004): 98. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 a f f e c t e d b y t h e b l e a k h o r r o r s o f i n d e n t u r e d l a b o u r , 3 a d e n i a l o f i n t i m a c y b e t w e e n p a r t n e r s 4 a n d n e g a t i n g o f h o m o s e x u a l i t y, 5 i t d o e s n o t c o m e a s a g r e a t s u r p r i s e t h a t t h i s g e n e r a t i o n r e a d i l y s a c r i f i c e s p r i v a t e h a p p i n e s s o n l y t o u p h o l d a n e l i t e s t a t u s . t h i s c e r t a i n l y h o l d s t r u e f o r o n e o f t h e m a i n p r o t a g o n i s t s , d r v a l m i k i k r i s h n u , a r e s p e c t e d p h ys i c i a n , w h o , d e s p i t e h i s f l i n g s w i t h n u m e r o u s w o m e n , d e s p e r a t e l y s e e k s t o h i d e t h a t h e i s i n f a c t a c l o s e t e d h o m o s e x u a l . t o h i m a f u l f i l l i n g l o v e l i f e s e e m s f a r b e yo n d h i s r e a c h . t h e s i t u a t i o n g e t s i n t e n s e w h e n h i s t w o d a u gh t e r s s t a r t g r o w i n g u p a n d h e r e a l i s e s t h a t h i s e l d e s t d a u gh t e r v i v e k a a l s o s u f f e r s f r o m t h e s u p p r e s s i o n o f h e r h o m o s e x u a l o r i e n t a t i o n i n t h e c l o s e l yk n i t in d o t r i n i d a d i a n c o m m u n i t y. a s v i v e k a s t r u g g l e s t o b r e a k f r e e t h e n o v e l d e a l s w i t h t h e i s s u e s o f r a c e , ge n d e r a n d c l a s s . t h i s s t r u g g l e i s w e l l r e p r e s e n t e d i n a n i n n e r m o n o l o gu e i n w h i c h v i v e k a r e f l e c t s o n h e r f a t h e r ’ s r e l a t i o n s h i p t o h i s f r i e n d c u m l o v e r s a u l w h o u s u a l l y a c c o m p a n i e s v a l m i k i w h i l e go i n g h u n t i n g i n t h e w o o d s : w h a t a w e i r d m a n h e [ v a l m i k i ] w a s , s h e [ v i v e k a ] t h o u gh t , k i l l i n g t h i n g s f o r s p o r t . h e w a s s o r t o f b r a v e , s h e s u p p o s e d , go i n g i n t o t h e f o r e s t a s h e d i d . s h e h a d m e t h i s f r i e n d s a u l , a n d o f a l l h e r p a r e n t ’ s f r i e n d s s h e w a s m o s t d r a w n t o h i m . w e l l , h e w a s n ’ t h e r m o t h e r ’ s f r i e n d . w h y h e r f a t h e r d i d n ’ t b r i n g h i m a r o u n d t o t h e h o u s e s h e c o u l d n ’ t u n d e r s t a n d . s h e c o u l d o n l y p u t i t d o w n t o t h e f a c t s o f s a u l ’ s r a c e a n d c l a s s . s a u l s e e m e d s o u n a s s u m i n g , s o u n l i k e m o s t o f t h e m e n i n t h e i r m o r e r e g u l a r s o c i a l c i r c l e s . h e r f a t h e r r e a l l y w a s w e i r d . b r a v e o n t h e o n e h a n d , a c o w a r d o n t h e o t h e r . ( 8 6 ) in t h e c o n t e x t o f s o u t h a s i a n ( d i a s p o r i c ) l i t e r a t u r e , t h e n o v e l ’ s t i t l e s e e m s p a r t i c u l a r l y s t r i k i n g p r o b a b l y b e c a u s e i t e v o k e s t h e i n d i a n e p i c r a m a y a n a o f w h i c h t h e m yt h i c a l f i g u r e o f v a l m i k i i s t h e a u t h o r , w h o b e c a m e a l s o k n o w n a s t h e f i r s t p o e t , o r a d i k a v i . in t h e e p i c v a l m i k i ’ s s t o r y t e l l s u s a b o u t a p e r s o n a l t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f a n i n f a m o u s a n d n a m e l e s s b a n d i t w h o r o b s p e o p l e t o m a i n t a i n h i s f a m i l y. h o w e v e r , a f t e r h i s f a m i l y r e f u s e s t o c o l l e c t i v e l y c a r r y t h e b u r d e n o f h i s c o m m i t t e d s i n s , h e w i t h d r a w s i n t h e w o o d s t o s e e k r e c o n c i l i a t i o n a n d e n g a g e i n a l o n g m e d i t a t i o n i n o r d e r t o p u r i f y h i s s o u l . w h e n a d i v i n e v o i c e d e c l a r e s h i s p e n a n c e s u c c e s s f u l , h e i s n a m e d “ v a l m i k i : o n e b o r n o u t o f a n t h i l l s ” . 6 o n e d a y w h e n h i s t r a n s f o r m e d s o u l i s l a c e r a t e d a t t h e s i g h t o f a w o u n d e d b i r d , h i t b y a h u n t e r ’ s a r r o w , t r i g g e r i n g a s p o n t a n e o u s u t t e r a n c e w h i c h e v e n t u a l l y b e c o m e s t h e f i r s t śl o k a i n s a n s k r i t l i t e r a t u r e . a s t h e s t o r y g o e s t h e s a m e m e t e r w a s l a t e r u s e d t o c o m p o s e t h e e p i c r a m a ya n a . 3 for a discussion of south asian indenture labour and its representation in literature in light of diaspora see vijay mishra’s “the diasporic imaginary: theorizing the indian diaspora.” textual practice 10. 3 (1996): 421–447. 4 brinda metha, diasporic (dis)locations: indo-caribbean women writers negotiate the kali pani (jamaica: u. of the west indies p, 2004), 186. 5 brinda metha makes the following observation concerning homosexuality in general and lesbian love in particular in indo-caribbean political discourse “lesbian love constitutes a thorny issue in discussions of sexual morality, by either remaining invisible in official discourses or by being openly criminalized by oppressive sexual legislation, in the form, for example, of the 1986 sexual offence bill in trinidad and tobago.” diasporic (dis)locations, 202. 6 suresh chandra, encyclopaedia of hindu gods and goddesses. (new delhi: saruo & sons, 1998), 262– 263. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 w i t h o u t d o u b t , s h a n i m o o t o o i s a w a r e o f v a l m i k i a n d w h a t h e s t a n d s i n f o r i n a n in d i a n s u b c o n t i n e n t a l c o n t e x t , h o w e v e r , t h e a u t h o r s u g g e s t s t h a t t o h e r t h e n a m e i s n o t r e v e r b e r a t i n g t h i s s p e c i f i c in d i a n e p i c b u t r a t h e r t r a n s p o r t s a p a r t i c u l a r l y t r i n i d a d i a n c o n n o t a t i o n : “ t o m e v a l m i k i i s a b i g n a m e , a f u l l n a m e w i t h r i g h t a m o u n t o f s yl l a b l e s ; t h e v a l m i k i i k n o w i s a b i g f e l l o w , a b i g , s t r o n g , p o w e r f u l w e a l t h y f e l l o w a n d t h e n a m e h a s a n u p p e r c l a s s s o u n d i n t r i n i d a d , s o i t i s t h e s o u n d , t h e r i g h t s o u n d f o r h i m . b u t i t d o e s n o t h a v e a n yt h i n g t o d o w i t h t h e go d v a l m i k i . im a g i n e i f i h a d t h a t l a ye r o n t o p o f t h e t i t l e , h o w p e d a n t i c t h a t w o u l d b e . v a l m i k i i s a g o o d s o u n d i n g n a m e . s o w h e n i s u g g e s t e d v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r t o m y p u b l i s h e r i t m a d e t o t a l s e n s e . in f a c t t o w a r d s t h e e n d o f w r i t i n g t h e b o o k i w a s a b l e t o go b a c k a n d l o o k a t t h e s t o r y f r o m b o t h v a l m i k i ’ s a n d v i v e k a ’ s p e r s p e c t i v e . t h e s t o r y i s n o t m e r e l y a b o u t v i v e k a b u t v i v e k a a s v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r , a n d w h a t i t m e a n s t o b e a d a u g h t e r . ” 7 t h u s m o o t o o i s e s p e c i a l l y i n t e r e s t e d i n s i l e n c e d f a m i l y s t r u c t u r e s w h i c h d e e p l y i m p i n g e o n t h e c h a r a c t e r ’ s f i c t i o n a l l i v e s . t h i s a l s o s h o w s i n t h e f a c t t h a t t h e n o v e l i n i t i a l l y g r e w o u t o f o n l y o n e s e n t e n c e w h i c h i s n o w p l a c e d i n t h e f i n a l p a r t , b e f o r e t h e e p i l o gu e ( s e e v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r , p a g e 3 8 7 ) , a s m o o t o o h e r s e l f s t a t e s : “ [ … ] i t w a s o n t h e n o r t h c o a s t o f t h e i s l a n d , o n a s t r i p o f s a n d t o o s l i m t o l a b e l a b e a c h , t h a t h e l a y o n t o p o f h e r ” . “ s o ” c a m e a f t e r w a r d s . t h e w o r d ‘ s o ’ i s a b r i d g e b e t w e e n t h i s p a r t a n d t h e e a r l i e r o n e . ” m o r e o v e r , t h e p r e v i o u s l i n e i n t r o d u c e s t h e r e a d e r s t o t h e s c e n e w h e r e v i v e k a a n d t r e v o r h a v e s e x o n t h e b e a c h f o r t h e f i r s t t i m e : “ fi r s t t i m e ? w i t h a m a n , i m e a n ? ” s h e n o d d e d , e m b a r r a s s e d . a g a i n s t s u c h m a l o d o r o u s a i r i t w a s i m p o s s i b l e t o m o d e r a t e h e r b r e a t h i n g – o n e p a n a c e a , s h e t h o u g h t , t o t h e r e l e n t l e s s p u s h p u s h p u s h i n g. w h e n t r e v o r a c c i d e n t l y s l i p p e d o u t o f t h e s m a l l p r o g r e s s h e h a d m a d e – h e a s s u r e d h e r i t w a s n ’ t h e r f a u l t – h e h a d t o s t a r t a l l o v e r a g a i n . s h e d i d a s s h e w a s t o l d – r a i s e d h e r b u t t o c k s o f f t h e s a n d – a n d h e s l i d o n e a r m u n d e r h e r a n d b r o u g h t h e r u p ye t h i gh e r . ( 3 9 0 ) h e r s e x u a l e x p e r i e n c e s h a p e s i n v i v e k a t h e d e c i s i o n t o e v e n t u a l l y m a r r y t r e v o r . v i v e k a ’ s d e c i s i o n t h u s m a r k s a n e n d i n i t s o w n r i g h t a n d i t w a s a t t h i s p o i n t o f t h e s t o r y t h a t m o o t o o h e r s e l f b e c a m e m o r e i n t e r e s t e d i n t r a c i n g t h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s t h a t l e a d t o v i v e k a ’ s f i n a l d e c i s i o n . t h e a u t h o r w a s t h u s m o r e c o n c e r n e d t o f l e s h o u t w h a t h e r c h a r a c t e r h a d t o l e a v e b e h i n d t h a n g o i n g o n f o r w a r d s i m a gi n i n g a l i f e a f t e r m a r r i a g e : “ s o i w r o t e b a c k w a r d s . i t h o u g h t t h i s i s g o i n g t o b e a s t o r y w h i c h i s n o t j u s t a b o u t t h e s o c i e t y, b u t a b o u t p a r e n t s a n d f a m i l y l i f e . it 7 shani mootoo’s quotes are extracted from an interview conducted by the authors in frankfurt, germany on may 20 th 2010. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 w o u l d b e m u c h m o r e i n t e r e s t i n g i f s h e w a s b r o u gh t u p i n a f a m i l y w h e r e o n e o f t h e p a r e n t s f a c e d a s i m i l a r d i l e m m a ” t h i s i d e a o f f i c t i o n a l l y r e t r a c i n g t h e s t e p s i n a c h a r a c t e r ’ s l i f e e n a b l e s s h a n i m o o t o o t o i n t e r r o g a t e v a r i o u s p e r s o n a l t r u t h s a n d e n l a r g e t h e m t o a b r o a d e r p e r s p e c t i v e i n o r d e r t o e x c a v a t e a l a r g e r p a t t e r n o f t r u t h w h i c h c a n n o t b e i n t e r r o g a t e d b y h e r m i n d . i n t h i s w a y t h e t e x t d r a w s o u r a t t e n t i o n t o r e a l i s e a h u m a n s p a c e f o r s o c i a l i n t e r a c t i o n w h i c h i s d e v o i d o f a n y p r e j u d i c e . t h i s u t o p i a n w o r l d t o s o m e d e g r e e c a m e i n t o e x i s t e n c e a l r e a d y m u c h e a r l i e r , a s f o r i n s t a n c e i n c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t 8 , a n d r e p r e s e n t s m o o t o o ’ s o n g o i n g d e e p n e g o t i a t i o n w i t h d i s c o u r s e s o f h u m a n r i gh t s a n d j u s t i c e . w h a t w e a r e l e f t w i t h t h e n , i s a g e n u i n e p l e d g e f o r u n i v e r s a l h u m a n i t y, w h i c h l i e s a t t h e h e a r t o f a l l o f m o o t o o ’ s c r e a t i v e p r o j e c t s . in o n e o f h e r e a r l y e x p e r i m e n t a l v i d e o ’ s wi l d wo m a n i n t h e wo o d s ( 1 9 9 3 ) m o o t o o c e l e b r a t e s t h e u n u s u a l h o m e c o m i n g o f p r i a , a n o b v i o u s l y s o u t h a s i a n b u t c h c h a r a c t e r , p l a ye d b y m o o t o o , w h o e v e n t u a l l y f i n d s a h o m e i n a s o m e w h a t u t o p i a n c o m m u n i t y o f o u t s i d e r s i n t h e c a n a d i a n r o c k y m o u n t a i n s . t h e v i d e o o p e n s w i t h a c l o s e u p o n a b o w l o f f r u i t s w h i c h i s t h e o v e r t u r e t o a c e r e m o n i a l s c e n e i n w h i c h p r i a w o r s h i p s h e r g o d s b e f o r e s h e l e a v e s t h e h o u s e t o v i s i t a s o u t h a s i a n l o v e i n t e r e s t i n t h e n e i gh b o u r h o o d . w h i l s t p r i a f i r s t p l a n s t a k e a b u n c h o f f l o w e r s t o h e r f r i e n d ’ s h o u s e , p r o b a b l y i m p l yi n g a w e s t e r n e r ’ s g e s t u r e , s h e e v e n t u a l l y d e c i d e s t o t h r o w t h e f l o w e r s a w a y b e f o r e s h e e n t e r s h e r f r i e n d ’ s h o m e . t h i s d e c i s i o n i s u n d e r l i n e d w i t h a n a r t i f i c i a l d r o p p i n g s o u n d a n d a c h a n g e i n t h e v i s u a l f r a m e b y m e a n s o f f a d i n g c o l o u r s . s o o n a f t e r p r i a h a s a r r i v e d a t h e r b e a u t i f u l f r i e n d ’ s h o m e , t h e l a t t e r t e l l s h e r a b o u t h e r r e c e n t e n g a g e m e n t g a i l y s h o w i n g o f f t h e s p a r k l y d i a m a n t e r i n g o n h e r f i n g e r . d e e p l y d i s a p p o i n t e d p r i a l e a v e s t h e p l a c e . in t h e n e x t s e q u e n c e , t h e c a m e r a f o l l o w s p r i a o n h e r s t r o l l i n t o t h e s n o w y c a n a d i a n w o o d s w h e r e t h e yo u n g w o m a n a c c i d e n t l y m e e t s a n o t h e r a c q u a i n t a n c e w h o p l a n s t o go s k i i n g i n t h e m o u n t a i n s . w h i l s t t h e w h i t e b u t c h s ym b o l i s e s t h e w h i t e l e s b i a n c o m m u n i t y, p r i a , a g a i n r e m a i n s a n o u t s i d e r . p r o b a b l y, b e c a u s e o f t h e i r d i f f e r i n g e t h n i c b a c k g r o u n d s , p r o b a b l y b e c a u s e s h e b e l i e v e s t h a t s h e c a n n o t i n t e r a c t o n e ye l e v e l w i t h t h e b u t c h , s ym b o l i s e d t h r o u gh h e r n o t b e i n g a n e x p e r i e n c e d s k i e r . in t e r e s t i n g l y e n o u g h , t h i s u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f s e l f i s s o o n c o n t e s t e d w h e n p r i a e x p e r i e n c e s a n e p i p h a n y w h i c h c o m e s i n t h e gu i s e o f s a r i d r e s s e d in d i a n go d d e s s , p l a ye d b y r i t u a l p e r f o r m a n c e a r t i s t s h a u n a b e h a r r y, w h o w e a r s w o o l l e n s o c k s a n d m o u n t a i n b o o t s . w h i l e t h e p r o t a g o n i s t s t r u g g l e s t o g e t c l o s e r t o t h e “ c r o s s c o u n t r ys k i i n g t r i c k s t e r ” 9 , w h o a s s h a n i m o o t o o s t a t e d , r e p r e s e n t s d u r g a , t h e s ym b o l o f f e m i n i n e p o w e r , t h e yo u n g w o m a n u l t i m a t e l y s k i s a l o n g s i d e h e r w h i t e f r i e n d . in t h i s s o m e w h a t u n r e a l a n d 8 for a discussion of cereus blooms at night, see, for instance, heather smyth’s “sexual citizenship and caribbean-canadian fiction: dionne brand’s in another place, not here and shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night,” coral ann howell’s “a shared queerness: liminal identities in shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night”, mary condé’s “the flight from certainty in shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night” as well as roberto strongman,’s “development of same-sex desire in caribbean allegorical autobiography: shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night and jamaica kincaid’s annie john and lucy”. 9 richard fung’s term, 167. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 d r e a m l i k e s e q u e n c e , p r i a i n d u e c o u r s e m a n a g e s t o o v e r c o m e h e r p e r c e p t i o n o f t h e c a n a d i a n w i l d e r n e s s i n g e n e r a l a n d t h e s n o w y m o u n t a i n s i n p a r t i c u l a r a s f o r b i d d e n t e r r i t o r y. 10 h e r j o u r n e y, h o w e v e r , t a k e s p r i a e v e n d e e p e r i n t o t h e w o o d s a n d h i g h e r i n t o t h e m o u n t a i n s u n t i l s h e u n e x p e c t e d l y r e a c h e s t h e m o u n t a i n ’ s t o p w h e r e s h e j o i n s a c o m m u n i t y o f b e a u t i f u l s t r a n g e r s w h o s e e m t o c e l e b r a t e a c u l t o f o u t d o o r d a n c i n g. in wi l d wo m a n t h i s c u l t m i g h t b e r e a d a s s y m b o l i s i n g a c e l e b r a t i o n o f h yb r i d i t y a n d m u l t i c u l t u r a l i s m a s w e l l a s a c e l e b r a t i o n o f t h e n a t u r a l w o r l d a n d u n p e o p l e d w i l d e r n e s s ( s e e fu n g, 1 6 9 ) . it i s h e r e , a t t h i s p a r t i c u l a r m o m e n t a n d i n t h i s u n i q u e p l a c e , t h a t t h e p r o t a g o n i s t f e e l s f u l l y a c c e p t e d a n d l o v e d f o r w h a t s h e r e a l l y i s . t h i s s o m e w h a t u t o p i a n e n d i n g e m p h a s i s e s m o o t o o ’ s a p p r o a c h w h i c h o p e n s u p a n a u t o n o m o u s s p a c e f o r i n d i v i d u a l s a s w e l l a s o p t s t o t h i n k c o m m u n i t y d i f f e r e n t l y. r i c h a r d f u n g c o n c l u d e s h i s a n a l ys i s o f wi l d wo m a n a s f o l l o w s : t h e i m a g e o f p r i a i n t h e s n o w y r o c k i e s h a s m o r e t h a n a p s yc h o l o gi c a l r e s o n a n c e [ . . . ] b y i n s e r t i n g p r i a ’ s q u e e r , b r o w n , f e m a l e b o d y i n t o t h e i c o n i c n a t i o n a l l a n d s c a p e , [ t h e v i d e o ] d i s t u r b s t h e h e g e m o n i c c o n s t r u c t i o n o f c a n a d a . a n d i n i t s r e a l i z a t i o n o f d u r g a a s a s p o r t y d i v a , t h e t a p e gi v e s u s a p o r t a b l e , a d a p t a b l e m yt h o l o g y t h a t c h a l l e n g e s e s s e n t i a l i s t n o t i o n s o f c u l t u r e a n d i d e n t i t y. ” ( 1 6 8 ) d e s p i t e t h e o b v i o u s s i m i l a r i t i e s c o n c e r n i n g t h e m o u l d i n g o f t o p i c s , m o o t o o ’ s l a t e s t w o r k s e e k s t o a p p r o a c h t h e s e t h e m e s i n a m o r e r e a l i s t i c t o n e : “ i t h i n k v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r h a s g o t i t q u i t e a l o t p l a i n e r , i t i s m u c h m o r e t o t h e p o i n t , s t i l l a b i t t o o l yr i c a l f o r m e , w h e n i s a y t o o l yr i c a l i w a n t t o g e t i t e v e n p l a i n e r ” . w h i l e s t o r yt e l l i n g i s o f t e n c o n n e c t e d t o r i c h a n d f l o w e r y i m a g i n a r y w o r l d s , m o r e r e c e n t l y m o o t o o f o r m u l a t e s a c r e a t i v e e n d e a v o u r t o t h i n k i n p l a i n a n d s i m p l e t e r m s i n o r d e r t o g e t c l o s e r t o t h e ‘ r e a l w o r l d ’ . s h e a t t e m p t s t o f i n d a m o r e r e d u c e d l a n g u a g e w h i c h a l r e a d y s h o w s n o t o n l y i n t h e o v e r a l l c r e a t i o n o f t h e p l o t o f v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r b u t i n p a r t i c u l a r t h e f a b r i c a t i o n o f t h e f i c t i o n a l s e t t i n g i n s a n f e r n a n d o : if yo u s t a n d o n o n e o f t h e t r i a n gu l a r t r a f f i c i s l a n d s a t t h e t o p o f c h a n c e r y la n e j u s t i n f r o n t o f t h e s a n f e r n a n d o g e n e r a l h o s p i t a l ( w h e r e t h e s o u t h e r n a r m o f t h e l a n e b e c o m e s b r o a d w a y a v e n u e , a n d h a r r i s p r o m e n a d e , w i t h i t s o f f i c i a l a n d p u b l i c b u i l d i n g s , a n d c o m m e m o r a t i v e s t a t u e s , s h o o t s e a s t w a r d ) , yo u w o u l d ge t t h e b e s t , m o s t a l l e n c o m p a s s i n g v i e w s o f t h e t o w n . y o u w o u l d s e e t h a t n a r r o w e r s e c o n d a r y s t r e e t s e m a n a t e f r o m t h e c e n t r a l h u b . n i t o n e i s e v e r s t r a i gh t f o r l o n g . t h e y a n g l e , c u r v e t h i s w a y t h e n t h a t , d i p o r r i s e , a n d o f f t h e m s h o o t a m a z e o f s m a l l e r s i d e s t r e e t s . ( 7 ) m o o t o o ’ s m a p p i n g o f s a n f e r n a n d o a n d h e r d e t a i l e d d e s c r i p t i o n o f t r i n i d a d i a n l a n d s c a p e d r a w s o u t h e r i n t e n s e l o n gi n g t o p r e s e n t h e r n o t i o n o f t h e i s l a n d a s s h e c o n s t a n t l y r e v i s i t s i t i n h e r m i n d : 10 see also richard fung’s reading of this sequence in his essay “bodies out of place: the videotapes of shani mootoo”, 166. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 “ t h e l a n d s c a p e p a r t s w h e r e t h e e v e n t s a r e h a p p e n i n g l i k e t h e s a n f e r n a n d o l a n d s c a p e i s e x t r e m e l y b l a t a n t , t o t h e p o i n t o f m e a l m o s t b e i n g t e d i o u s . i h o p e t h a t t h e o r d i n a r y r e a d e r w i l l p i c k i t u p a n d i n q u i r e , w h y s h e i s d o i n g t h i s , w h y s h e i s go i n g o n a n d o n a n d o n a b o u t t h i s . t h e y r e a d b e c a u s e t h e y w a n t t h a t q u e s t i o n a n s w e r e d , t h e y k n o w i t w i l l b e a n s w e r e d ” . w h i l s t m o o t o o i s w i t h o u t d o u b t a c o s m o p o l i t a n a u t h o r , h e r c r e a t i v e i m p u l s e t o p i c t u r e w h a t h e r c h a r a c t e r s h a d t o l e a v e b e h i n d m i gh t r e p r e s e n t a d i a s p o r i c l o n gi n g . n o n e t h e l e s s , i t w o u l d b e w r o n g t o r e a d h e r n o v e l a s d w e l l i n g i n n o s t a l g i a , r a t h e r h e r w r i t i n g d e p a r t s f r o m t h e p a s t t a k i n g i t s c h a r a c t e r s t o t h e p r e s e n t i n o r d e r t o p r e p a r e t h e g r o u n d f o r a c r i t i c a l n e g o t i a t i o n o f t h e s e l f i n t h e l i g h t o f m e m o r i e s a n d v a r i o u s t r u t h s . in a n i n t e r v i e w w i t h l yn d a h a l l , s h a n i m o o t o o d e s c r i b e s h e r p l e a s u r e g a i n e d t h r o u gh w r i t i n g a s f o l l o w s : “ t h e f i r s t d e l i gh t i n w r i t i n g , f o r m e , i s t h e i n v e n t i o n o f s t o r i e s , s i t u a t i o n s , e v e n t s , w h e r e i c a n i m p o s e m y o w n v i s i o n o f h o w t h i n g s w o u l d b e i n m y i d e a l w o r l d . m y i d e a l w o r l d i s n o t v o i d o f t h e l o w e r s t a t e s o f e x i s t e n c e , t h a t i s , o f a n g e r , h e l l i s h n e s s , h a t r e d , g r e e d , e t c e t e r a . b u t i n m y i d e a l w o r l d t h e s e s t a t e s a r e o u t s m a r t e d , o r gi v e n t h e s l i p b y g o o d , t r u t h , b e a u t y a n d i n n o c e n c e . w r i t i n g i t s e l f i s a w a y o f gi v i n g t h e s l i p t o t h e t r a u m a t i c a s p e c t s o f m y o w n l i f e e x p e r i e n c e . it i s a w a y o f r e o r d e r i n g a w o r l d i n w h i c h m a n y a s p e c t s o f m y o w n s e l f h a v e b e e n d e n i e d o r i n j u r e d . ” ( 1 1 0 ) b y h i g h l i g h t i n g t h e f a c t t h a t s t o r i e s , e v e n t s , e v e n t h e p a s t a n d t h e m e m o r i e s c a n b e r e m e m b e r e d a n d r e i n v e n t e d , m o o t o o u n d e r l i n e s t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f s t o r y t e l l i n g a s a r e c o n c i l i a t o r y p r o c e s s . t h e c a n a d i a n s o c i o l o g i s t a r t h u r w . f r a n k p r o p o s e d , “ s t o r i e s d o n o t s i m p l y d e s c r i b e t h e s e l f ; t h e y a r e t h e s e l f ’ s m e d i u m o f b e i n g ” 11 . f r a n k c r e a t e d t h e m e t a p h o r i c a l f i gu r e o f ‘ w o u n d e d s t o r yt e l l e r ’ w h o s e s t o r i e s o f t h e i r o w n p h ys i c a l i l l n e s s a n d s u f f e r i n g h a v e a h e a l i n g e f f e c t f o r b o t h t h e s t o r yt e l l e r a n d t h e l i s t e n e r . in f r a n k ’ s o p i n i o n , “ a s w o u n d e d , p e o p l e m a y b e c a r e d f o r , b u t a s s t o r yt e l l e r s , t h e y c a r e f o r o t h e r s . t h e i l l , a n d a l l t h o s e w h o s u f f e r , c a n a l s o b e h e a l e r s . t h e i r i n j u r i e s b e c o m e t h e s o u r c e o f t h e p o t e n c y o f t h e i r s t o r i e s [ … ] be c a u s e s t o r i e s c a n h e a l , t h e w o u n d e d h e a l e r a n d w o u n d e d s t o r yt e l l e r a r e n o t s e p a r a t e , b u t a r e d i f f e r e n t a s p e c t s o f t h e s a m e f i g u r e ” ( x i i ) . c e r t a i n l y, a l s o w i t h i n t h e p l o t m o o t o o ’ s n o v e l s i n t r o d u c e n a r r a t o r s w h o c o m e w i t h t h e q u a l i t i e s o f s u c h a w o u n d e d h e a l e r o r a w o u n d e d s t o r yt e l l e r w h o w i t h i n t h e s t o r y w o r l d m i gh t e v e n w o r k a s a n u r s e o r a d o c t o r . a s a l s o c a r t o g r a p h i e s a n d l a n d s c a p e s a r e c o n s t a n t l y i n v e n t e d a n d r e i n v e n t e d a n d t h e r e f o r e n o t s t a b l e b u t i n p r o c e s s , t h e n o v e l b r i n g s h o m e t o i t s r e a d e r t h a t t h e m a p p i n g s t r a t e g y d e p l o ye d i n t h e t e x t i s a v e r b a l a n d a n i m a g i n a t i v e o n e . y e t , t h e n a r r a t i v e m a p p i n g o f w e l l k n o w n p l a c e s a s w e l l a s t h e b u s t l i n g s t r e e t s o f s a n f e r n a n d o t r i g g e r s c h a i n s o f 11 frank, arthur w. the wounded storyteller: body, illness and ethics. chicago and london: the university of chicago press, 1997, 53. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 t h o u g h t s a n d i m a g e s . it i s t h i s m i m e t i c c o n c o c t i o n o f ‘ r e a l l o c a t i o n s ’ a n d s o m e w h a t ‘ e x o t i c p l a c e s ’ t h a t f u e l s t h e r e a d e r ’ s i m a g i n a t i o n . a s t h e b r i t i s h p o s t c o l o n i a l s c h o l a r g r a h a m h u g g a n h a s a r g u e d , “ t h e p r o c e s s o f m a t c h i n g m a p t o t e x t , o r t e x t t o m a p , i n v o l v e s t h e r e a d e r i n a c o m p a r a t i v e t h a t m a y b r i n g t o t h e s u r f a c e f l a w s o r d i s c r e p a n c i e s i n t h e p r o c e s s o f m i m e t i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . ” 12 t h i s i s h o w a c r e a t i v e f r i c t i o n e m e r g e s e m p h a s i s i n g t h e g a p b e t w e e n a m i m e t i c a p p r o a c h t o l a n d s c a p e a n d a f i c t i o n a l r e a l i t y w h i c h d o n o t a l w a ys f u l l y c o r r e s p o n d t o e a c h o t h e r . y e t , m o o t o o f e e l s c o m f o r t a b l e e v o k i n g a c e r t a i n u n c e r t a i n t y o n t h e s i d e o f t h e r e a d e r s b e c a u s e s u c h n a r r a t i v e m a n o e u v r e s e n a b l e a u t h o r s t o i m a gi n e a n d s h o w c a s e u n c o m p r o m i s e d v e r s i o n s o f t r u t h . w h i l e s o m e a r t i s t s m i gh t s h y a w a y f r o m b e i n g i n s u c h u n c o m f o r t a b l e p o s i t i o n s , m o o t o o f e e l s “ c o m f o r t a b l e b e i n g u n c o m f o r t a b l e ” 13 . r e i n v e n t i o n a n d r e w r i t i n g s t r a t e g i e s a r e t h u s o f t e n u t i l i z e d n a r r a t i v e t o o l s b y m o o t o o , h o w e v e r , s h e d o e s n o t u n d e r s t a n d h e r s e l f a s b e i n g a g e n d a d r i v e n , o r a n a c t i v i s t f i gh t i n g f o r s p e c i f i c s o c i e t a l g o a l . t h r o u g h h e r w r i t i n g a s t h r o u gh a n y o t h e r f o r m o f c r e a t i v e e x p r e s s i o n m o o t o o i n f a c t s e e k s t o i n v e n t a n a l t e r n a t i v e w o r l d : “ i a m i n t e r e s t e d i n f i x i n g t h i n gs a n d m a k i n g t h e m b e a u t i f u l . s u d d e n l y i c a n s e e t h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s i n h o w yo u c a n u s e w o r d s a n d i g e t t r a p p e d i n t h a t . i c a n s e e t h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s o f f i x i n g t h e l a n d s c a p e t h a t n o l o n ge r b e l o n gs t o m e b u t i t i s m y l a n d s c a p e a n d i a m s o s u r p r i s e d w h e n i g o b a c k t o t r i n i d a d s i n c e t h e l a n d s c a p e h a s c h a n g e d s o m u c h . i c a n f i x i t a n d i f a l l i n t o t h e t r a p o f e x o t i c i s i n g m y o w n l a n d s c a p e ” . m o o t o o ’ s a p p r o a c h t o t h e e x o t i c d e p a r t s f r o m t h e c o m m o n n o t i o n o f a p o s t c o l o n i a l e x o t i c , a s i n t r o d u c e d b y g r a h a m h u g g a n , 14 b e c a u s e h e r n a r r a t i v e s a s w e l l a s t h e r e p r e s e n t e d s t o r y w o r l d s e a s i l y s l i p t h r o u gh a n y gi v e n c a t e go r i e s a s w e l l a s n o t o r i o u s c e n t r e p e r i p h e r y f r a m e w o r k s . r a t h e r , i t m i gh t b e s a i d t h a t m o o t o o ’ s c r e a t i v i t y i s r o o t e d i n t r a n s c u l t u r a l i m a gi n a t i o n . 15 m o o t o o ’ s w o r k i s c o n f i d e n t e n o u g h t o c h a l l e n g e g i v e n n o r m s a n d s o c i a l c o n s t r u c t s . t h r o u g h h e r w o r k s h e s e e k s t o c r a f t o u t a s p a c e t o b e l o n g, b e l o n g i n g i n t h e s e n s e o f a w h o l e h e a r t e d e m b r a c i n g o f h u m a n i t y w h i c h i s c o m m o n l y d e n i e d t o n o n n o r m a t i v e i n d i v i d u a l s . a l l h e r w o r k i s i n d u l g e d i n a s e n s u o u s n e s s w h i c h e v o k e s m yr i a d t a s t e s , s m e l l s , c o l o u r s , t e x t u r e s a n d v o i c e s . it i s h e r w a y t o f i x t h e i m p e r f e c t i o n s o f e v e r yd a y l i f e , t o b e a u t i f y t h e p r i m n e s s o f s o c i a l c o n s t r u c t i o n s , a n d t o r e j o i c e i n o n e ’ s b e i n g i n t h e w o r l d . 12 graham huggan, territorial disputes: maps and mapping strategies in contemporary canadian and australian fiction (toronto: u of toronto p, 1994), 22. 13 see shana l calixte and tumelo e. phali’s essay “i’m comfortable being uncomfortable”... shani mootoo, our storyteller of the month”, caribbean tales: a people’s history of the caribbean interactive website, http://www.caribbeantales.ca/ct_newsletter/archives/featured_storyteller/1/im_comfortable_being_uncom fortable/ [accessed 28 may 2010] 14 graham huggan, the postcolonial exotic: marketing the margins (london: routledge, 2001) 15 for a discussion of the postcolonial exotic in shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night see sissy helff, “desired exotica: gendered spaces in queer west indian diasporic fiction”. coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 d r . s i s s y h e l f f t e a c h e s p o s t c o l o n i a l a n d t r a n s c u l t u r a l l i t e r a t u r e , c u l t u r e , a n d f i l m a t t h e g o e t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f f r a n k f u r t . s h e i s e s p e c i a l l y i n t e r e s t e d i n t h e e n gl i s h li t e r a t u r e s o f s o u t h a s i a , a f r i c a , a n d a u s t r a l i a . s h e i s t h e a u t h o r o f u n r e l i a b l e t r u t h s : r e p r e s e n t i n g h o m e i n t r a n s c u l t u r a l wo m e n ’ s l i t e r a t u r e o f t h e i n d i a n d i a s p o r a ( a m s t e r d a m / n e w y o r k 2 0 1 0 , f o r t h c o m i n g ) a n d c o e d i t o r o f t r a n s c u l t u r a l m o d e r n i t i e s : n a r r a t i n g a f r i c a i n e u r o p e ( a m s t e r d a m / n e w y o r k 2 0 0 9 ) , t r a n s c u l t u r a l e n g l i s h s t u d i e s : t h e o r i e s , f i c t i o n s , r e a l i t i e s ( a m s t e r d a m / n e w y o r k 2 0 0 8 ) , f a c i n g t h e e a s t i n t h e we s t : i m a g e s o f e a s t e r n e u r o p e i n b r i t i s h l i t e r a t u r e , f i l m a n d c u l t u r e ( a m s t e r d a m / n e w y o r k 2 0 1 0 ) a n d t h e a r t o f m i g r a t i o n ( bi e l e f e l d , t r a n s c r i p t 2 0 1 1 ) . s h e c u r r e n t l y w o r k s o n a m o n o g r a p h a b o u t t h e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f t h e r e f u g e e i n t h e b r i t i s h l i t e r a t u r e . s a n g h a m i t r a d a l a l h a s c o m p l e t e d h e r m a s t e r s a n d m . p h i l i n e n gl i s h li t e r a t u r e f r o m t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f c a l c u t t a , in d i a . s h e i s c u r r e n t l y w r i t i n g h e r p h d t h e s i s t i t l e d “ j o u r n e ys i n s e l f f a s h i o n i n g: s o u t h a s i a n d i a s p o r i c fi c t i o n i n a u s t r a l i a ” a t c e n t r e f o r p o s t c o l o n i a l w r i t i n g i n m o n a s h u n i v e r s i t y, a u s t r a l i a . b i b l i o g r a p h y a n z a l d ú a , g l o r i a . b o r d e r l a n d s / l a f r o n t e r a : t h e n e w m e s t i z a . s a n f r a n c i s c o : s p i n s t e r s / a u n t lu t e , 1 9 8 7 . c a l i x t e , s h a n a l a n d t u m e l o e . p h a l i . “ i’ m c o m f o r t a b l e b e i n g u n c o m f o r t a b l e ” . . . s h a n i m o o t o o , o u r s t o r yt e l l e r o f t h e m o n t h ” , c a r i b b e a n t a l e s : a p e o p l e ’ s h i s t o r y o f t h e c a r i b b e a n in t e r a c t i v e w e b s i t e , h t t p : / / w w w . c a r i b b e a n t a l e s . c a / c t _ n e w s l e t t e r / a r c h i v e s / f e a t u r e d _ s t o r yt e l l e r / 1 / i m _ c o m f o r t a b l e _ b e i n g_ u n c o m f o r t a b l e / [ a c c e s s e d 2 8 m a y 2 0 1 0 ] c h a n d r a , s u r e s h . e n c y c l o p a e d i a o f h i n d u g o d s a n d g o d d e s s e s ( n e w d e l h i : s a r u o & s o n s , 1 9 9 8 ) c o n d é , m a r y. “ t h e fl i gh t f r o m c e r t a i n t y i n s h a n i m o o t o o ’ s c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t ” i n : a n n e lu ya t a n d f r a n c i n e t o l r o n e d s . t h e d i l e m m a o f i d e n t i t y a n d e x i l e ( a m s t e r d a m / n e w y o r k : r o d o p i , 2 0 0 1 ) , 6 3 7 0 . f r a n k , a r t h u r w . t h e wo u n d e d s t o r y t e l l e r : b o d y , i l l n e s s a n d e t h i c s . c h i c a g o a n d lo n d o n : t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f c h i c a g o p r e s s , 1 9 9 7 . fu n g, r i c h a r d . “ bo d i e s o u t o f p l a c e : t h e v i d e o t a p e s o f s h a n i m o o t o o , ” wo m e n & p e r f o r m a n c e : a j o u r n a l o f f e m i n i s t t h e o r y 8 : 2 ( 1 9 9 6 ) : 1 6 1 1 7 3 h e l f f , s i s s y. “ d e s i r e d e x o t i c a : g e n d e r e d s p a c e s i n q u e e r w e s t in d i a n d i a s p o r i c fi c t i o n , ” i n : d u n j a m . m o h r , e d . , e m b r a c i n g t h e o t h e r : coolabah, no.9, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 a d d r e s s i n g x e n o p h o b i a i n t h e n e w l i t e r a t u r e s i n e n g l i s h ( a m s t e r d a m / n e w y o r k : r o d o p i , 2 0 0 8 ) , 2 7 9 2 9 4 h o w e l l , c o r a l a n n . “ a s h a r e d q u e e r n e s s : li m i n a l id e n t i t i e s i n s h a n i m o o t o o ’ s c e r e u s bl o o m s a t n i g h t , ” i n : b h e l a n d e a n d p a n d u r a n g , e d s . , a r t i c u l a t i n g g e n d e r : a n a n t h o l o g y p r e s e n t e d t o p r o f e s s o r s h i r i n k u d c h e d k a r ( d e l h i : p e n c r a f t in t e r n a t i o n a l , 2 0 0 0 ) h u g g a n , g r a h a m . t e r r i t o r i a l d i s p u t e s : m a p s a n d m a p p i n g s t r a t e g i e s i n c o n t e m p o r a r y c a n a d i a n a n d a u s t r a l i a n f i c t i o n ( t o r o n t o : u o f t o r o n t o p , 1 9 9 4 ) m a y, v i v i a n m . “ d i s l o c a t i o n a n d d e s i r e i n s h a n i m o o t o o ’ s c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t , ” s t u d i e s i n t h e li t e r a r y im a gi n a t i o n 3 7 , 2 f a l l ( 2 0 0 4 ) : 9 7 1 2 1 m e t h a , b r i n d a . d i a s p o r i c ( d i s ) l o c a t i o n s : i n d o c a r i b b e a n wo m e n wr i t e r s n e g o t i a t e t h e k a l i p a n i ( j a m a i c a : u . o f t h e w e s t in d i e s p , 2 0 0 4 ) . m i s h r a , v i j a y. “ t h e d i a s p o r i c im a g i n a r y: t h e o r i z i n g t h e in d i a n d i a s p o r a . ” t e x t u a l p r a c t i c e 1 0 . 3 ( 1 9 9 6 ) : 4 2 1 – 4 4 7 . m o o t o o , s h a n i . o u t o n m a i n s t r e e t & o t h e r s t o r i e s ( v a n c o u v e r : p r e s s g a n g, 1 9 9 3 ) . wi l d wo m a n i n t h e wo o d s , ( 1 9 9 3 ) 1 4 : 0 0 m i n u t e s . c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t ( lo n d o n : g r a n t a bo o k s , 1 9 9 6 ) . “ s h a n i m o o t o o : a n in t e r v i e w w i t h l yn d a h a l l , ” j o u r n a l o f l e s b i a n s t u d i e s 4 : 4 ( 2 0 0 0 ) : 1 0 7 1 1 3 . . t h e p r e d i c a m e n t o f o r ( v a n c o u v e r : p o l e s t a r , 2 0 0 1 ) . h e d r o w n e d s h e i n t h e s e a ( n e w y o r k : g r o v e p . , 2 0 0 5 ) . v a l m i k i ’ s d a u g h t e r ( t o r o n t o : a n a n s i p . , 2 0 0 8 ) s m yt h , h e a t h e r . “ s e x u a l c i t i z e n s h i p a n d c a r i b b e a n c a n a d i a n fi c t i o n : d i o n n e b r a n d ’ s i n a n o t h e r p l a c e , n o t h e r e a n d s h a n i m o o t o o ’ s c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i g h t , ” a r i e l : a r e v i e w o f i n t e r n a t i o n a l e n g l i s h l i t e r a t u r e 3 0 . 2 a p r i l ( 1 9 9 9 ) : 1 4 3 1 6 0 . s t r o n g m a n , r o b e r t o . “ d e v e l o p m e n t o f s a m e s e x d e s i r e i n c a r i b b e a n a l l e go r i c a l a u t o b i o g r a p h y: s h a n i m o o t o o ’ s c e r e u s b l o o m s a t n i gh t a n d j a m a i c a k i n c a i d ’ s a n n i e j o h n a n d l u c y, ” k u n a p i p i 2 7 . 1 ( 2 0 0 5 ) : 2 6 3 9 . microsoft word 2alonso coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 eating one’s way through history: food and politics in manuka wijesinghe’s monsoons and potholes isabel alonso-breto abstract: this paper consists of an analysis of monsoons and potholes (2006), the first novel by sri lankan playwright manuka wijesinghe. attention is paid to the ways in which the text articulates relations between personal stories, food, history and politics. food plays a central role in some novels published in the last years by sri lankan authors, as is the case, for instance, with yasmine gooneratne’s a change of skies (1984) and mary ann mohanraj’s bodies in motion (2005). both these works elaborate metaphors of identity through the dominant trope of food-encompassing cooking and the rituals of consumption. in monsoons and potholes, food accompanies and illustrates the autobiographical account of a sri lankan youngster born in the early 1960s, and revisits the first twenty years in her life together with the socio-political up and downs in her country. while it is a novel which to a great extent draws on metaphors of myth and history, scenes of food and eating appear consistently throughout the narration, which contribute in providing a down-to-earth (and highly satirical) version of the life of the sinhala upper-middle classes during the period. these images of food (and the sets of rituals, beliefs and constrictions around it) are exploited by the author with the aim to explore, understand and denounce the historical process which precipitated sri lanka, at the beginning of the 1980s, “on the road to nowhere”. keywords: sri lankan literature; manuka wijesinghe; contemporary fiction manuka wikresinghe’s fiction has been compared to that of arundathi roy and salman rushdie (abeyratne 2009; perera 2008), and the quality of her writing is repeatedly noted in the reviews of her two novels published up to now: monsoons and potholes (2006) and theravada man (2009). a born sri lankan who lives in germany but travels constantly to her country of origin, before turning on to fiction wijesinghe had earned a name as a playwright (goonetilleke 2005:188). her first novel, monsoons and potholes, unanimously acclaimed, has been signalled as a “better text” of the times in a landscape of the contemporary sri lankan novel depicted as plagued by “the want in originality, the unwillingness/inability to experiment with art and creativity and the underemployment of imagination” (perera 2008). if there is consensus in considering copyright©2011 isabel alonso-breto. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 this novel both crafty and engaging, there is also a coincidence in accusing it of excessive density and length. it is my contention, though, that verbosity can be considered as an asset in this case, given the mythopeic quality of monsoons and potholes. on the other hand, the text reads as bildungsroman, a genre arguably prone to excess. suffice it to say that goethe’s canonical bildungsroman, founder of the genre, wilhelm meister's apprenticeship, comprises no less than eight volumes, while thomas mann’s tetralogy joseph and his brothers reaches the 2000 pages. monsoons and potholes, we are warned on the back cover, is “an auto biography,” a fact further evidenced by the coincidence of author and protagonist’s name, manuka, as well as the preliminary words: “when the past finally reached the present, it mutated. no longer what it had been; a structure of confabulation, the conditional having conquered the past participle. … it is my life. my story” (6).i her personal story will actually be used to accompany and illustrate the course of political events and configurations in sri lanka over a 20-year timespan, as while revisiting her own life the narrator revises what the decades of the 1960s and 1970s meant for the country in political terms, her account finishing in the early 1980s, after the breakout of the ethnic riots between the sinhala and tamil populations that marked the beginning of the civil war terminated in april 2009. in connecting individual narration with the construction of history, the coincidence between wijesinghe’s experience and the events she narrates would make this text “eligible” in the sense signalled (not without a critical squint) by graham huggan, which is explained by minoli salgado as “the evaluation of a literary work ... mediated not only or always on the basis of discursive dynamics or textual considerations, but also on the basis of its perceived cultural legitimacy” (salgado 2007: 3). the singularity of wijesinghe’s fiction lies in her extraordinary ability for satire, a quality that has been noted: “manuka wisejinghe abounds in and revels in irreverence, ribald wit, humour, caprice, blasphemy, fabrication, eccentricity, lively fancy, [and] in a huge binge of creative imagination” (wanigasundara 2006). another critic remarks: “when it comes to satire, manuka is as deadly as a rattlesnake. her bite could even fell an elephant” (abyeratne 2009). indeed, in wijesinghe’s work satire becomes a weapon to criticize virtually everything in the world depicted, from the prejudices related to class, caste or skin colour, to the official versions of history elaborated by strongly chauvinistic sinhalese governments, or the mythological accounts of the creation and early times of the isle of lanka—fashioned by buddhist religious elites to marshal a version of the country fitting with their own interests. in wijesinghe’s “most exhilarating of biographies” (wanigasundara 2009) food plays a relevant if not crucial role. for obvious reasons, it is a more conspicuous presence in some parts of the text, for instance when narrating the period of mrs. bandanarayake’s “minimization”, as food then became a scarce commodity in the country even for upper middle class families like manuka’s. but i intend to show here how food remains an important motif throughout the story, contributing to keeping down to earth a narrative line which often veers towards the mythological, the philosophical, the religious, or the metaphysical. moreover, food works as a narrative thread which accompanies the everyday experiences of a community held together by the sense of belonging to a common political unit, sri lanka. importantly, this community is also held together through the common cultural values they attribute to food, as well as through the very rituals which involve its preparation, consumption and sharing. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 we cannot overestimate the importance of food and eating in culture. as juan cruz cruz remarks in his study food and culture (alimentación y cultura), food is a symbolic form of communication, either between mother and child, or between the individual and society. humans arrange conduct patterns, norms and religious prohibitions, hierarchical modes and functions distribution through food. (cruz cruz 1991: 13) and also: a culture is run by norms which provide acceptable ways to confront certain situations. these norms propose appropriate modes of behaviour, hierarchically arranged from the more to the less beneficial. in any case, modes of behaviour are put together in such a way that when an individual starts eating, this act is already impregnated of the global meaning of culture, of his or her normative system. (cruz cruz 1991: 15; my translation in both quotes) indeed, food plays an essential role in sri lankan culture, as works like yasmine gooneratne’s a change of skies (1984) and mary ann mohanraj’s bodies in motion (2005), among others, underscore. in these two diasporic novels food and cooking are treated in a fetishist manner, as the material means of sticking to a culture (sri lankan) which has been left behind and replaced by another (australian or american in either case). in a different way wijesinghe’s novel partakes of this weighty concern with food. oftentimes in monsoons and potholes, food not only accompanies and helps illustrate major themes in the novel such as politics, history or mythology, but it is also used as a motif to assist and enhance wijesinghe’s poignant social critique. textual evidence of how food accompanies every single aspect and moment of sri lankan life abounds in the text. key moments in the life of the protagonist and the rest of characters, as much as obscure or irrelevant ones, are narrated in ways that underscore the proximity between the world of social rituals and institutions and that of food. it is interesting to provide a few examples of how wittily the narrator uses an apparently harmless universe in order to criticise and denounce. an early example of this strategy can be found when the narrator recalls the predictions cast around her birth: let me talk about pathiraja first. his predictions were brilliant under the influence of alcohol and dull when sober. my grandmother, being a woman of great perception, had invited pathiraja for a dinner of fried rice, wild boar, mutton and chicken liver, given him half a bottle of arrack and somewhere along the post-dinner, nocturnal route to intoxication, made him predict the otherwise unpredictable. my birth. (11) the paragraph reads as a critique, recurrent in the story, of the corruption of the buddhist church. nonetheless, this model of buddhist priest is contrasted with a more restrained one, in the figure of the priest come home some years later to cast predictions at the birth of manuka’s younger brother, later affectionately called by her “tm mozart”: the following sunday, the new astrologer who cast my new brother’s horoscope came for lunch. he was young, vegetarian and a teetotaller. achi, assuming all astrologers were like pathiraja, prepared chicken curry, sausage coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 curry, wild boar, and beef curry. lalith the astrologer ate only vegetables. (314) the scene here does not completely redeem the image of buddhist monks as presented throughout, as too much sarcasm has been poured on institutional buddhism at this point in the narration for redemption to happen so easily, but it manages to convey another humorous example of manuka’s familiy’s tendency to preposterousness in their social demeanours, well exploited in the text. as regards the above mentioned irreverence, noted by some critics as we saw, remarks like the following may illustrate it: “on the other hand i had absolutely no intention of going to nirvana. nirvana was vegetarian. i wanted pastries” (82); “nirvana had the appeal of a plate of unsalted rice with neither pol sambol nor curry” (88). “during sil, one wore white and ate a vegetarian meal before noon. sat on the ground and meditated in order to prevent the mind from wandering into the territories of bad thoughts. no dinner was permitted. this was classical sil. i never observed sil” (83). economic privilege will be another target of the narrator’s irony. a good example is to be found in the character of marshmallow, a classmate of manuka’s whose parents own a familiar business which turns their child into a very tempting friendship for anyone else in the class—especially when the times become harsh and the food scarce for the majority: “marshmallow. an only female child, an only fair skinned female child in a family of dark skinned pastry shop owners. she had been fed with butter and pastries; we had been fed rice and vegetables” (47). marshmallow enjoys singular privileges made possible by her family’s business, and whenever she causes problems the teachers do not intervene to condemn her, “bribed for the day with a sumptuous breakfast of chinese rolls, prawn pies and cutlets” (47). in the end, the ever resourceful manuka consents to marshmallow’s friendship intimations, consent being prompted by and fuelled through nutritional matters: ‘what are you eating?’ ‘none of your business’ ‘it looks horrid’ … ‘…if you are my friend, i will give you a bite of my chinese roll.’ … …perhaps i would end up dead like snow white, biting into a poisoned chinese roll instead of an apple? but i didn’t care. the months of bandanarayake minimization was [sic.] giving birth to its own kind of slit eyed wisdom. i bit into that chinese roll and became marshmallow’s friend. (81) gender roles in sri lankan society are also explored in relation to food. in the following passage, the critique is addressed to the subservient role the wife is expected to play in sri lankan society, which demands from her to do the cooking for her husband yet refuses to grant her the social recognition and financial independence which would come with being hired as a cook: without a wife, uncle buddhi did not get proper food, so, he was losing weight. that was a logical conclusion to a man’s misery even though hired cooks cook in our country and not wives. but when a husband loses weight when his wife is away, it is not the cook’s fault, it is the wife’s. (260) it is to be noted that in spite of the narrator’s remark that it is hired cooks who cook in sri lanka, indeed not all the families can afford what for them would be luxury. we coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 thus get attestation that the story we are being told narrates the experiences of a particular social stratum in sri lanka, that of the well-situated bourgeoisie, who nevertheless went through difficult times during the bandanaraike era. gender issues are also tackled in connection with food. in the passage i shall be quoting to illustrate this idea, two things are to be observed. for once, we see that the crucial moment in the life of the sri lankan female population which is the first menstruation is accompanied by rituals involving food. together with that, we are also made aware that individual freedom and autonomy are disregarded in favour of an obsessive focus on the need to fulfil the primordial end the physiology of a woman is made to serve in sri lanka: childbearing. the conversation is held between manuka, after she has had her first menstruation, and achi, grandmother and keeper of this kind of traditions: ‘ugh! what is that? are you trying to poison me?’ ‘that is milk coffee with egg.’ ‘i don’t drink coffee.’ ‘when you grow up you have to. for the next few days, until the astrologer gives an auspicious time for your bath, you will be drinking a coffee every morning with two raw eggs.’ ‘and i don’t eat raw eggs either.’ ‘you are a woman and soon you’ll be marrying and having children. in order to nourish a child in your womb you have to be healthy, and now itself start nurturing your organs towards childbirth.’ (231) cultural difference is also magnified through the lens of food, as found in the epistolary and telephonic exchanges between the different members of the family who remain in sri lanka and those migrated to the western world, particularly the united kingdom. and the same applies to religious difference. the following remarks are made on occasion of the celebration of manuka’s birthday, where she has exceptionally been allowed to invite boys. her friend sohani is in love with one of them, a muslim boy, whose virtues do not go unnoticed by the host, herself infatuated with a cricket bowler: sohani’s eyes kept leaping to the window. she had invited the muslim love letter writer to the party. i hoped magi had not cooked pork for dinner. (292) ‘oh, i’m sorry, i forgot to mention to you that there was pork served.’… ‘don’t worry girl, if i don’t know, and allah doesn’t know, there is nothing to worry about.’ i like[d] the muslim love letter writer. i wished my bowler had his sense of humour. (296) as it happens with food and social matters, also the nutritional and the political are deeply intertwined with each other. in monsoons and potholes, governmental policies clearly affect the everyday politics of food and eating, and, interestingly, food has a heavy influence on the country’s politics as well. the novel’s three parts coincide neatly with different periods of sri lankan political life. part one, “the anatomy of a pathological birth”, actually presents a double “pathological birth:” that of the protagonist’s, for one, but also the beginning of mrs. srimavo bandanarayake’s severe grip on the country. mrs. b (as she was popularly known) became sri lanka’s prime minister after her husband’s death in 1960: “she came like a seven-year itch. mrs. bandanarayake, the widow. a phoenix from her coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 husband’s funeral pyre. she held the nation and its people hostage for the termination of her husband’s life” (77).ii in political terms, this chapter conflates with the second one, “the road to the left”, which is set in the second period of mrs. b’s office as prime minister, 1970-1977.iii chapter three, “the road to the right”, covers the first half of j.r.jayawardene’s office (1977-1989), as prime minister first and then executive president after the constitutional change he effected in 1978. the following chart may be illustrative of these coincidences: monsoons and potholes sri lanka government chapter i the anatomy of a pathological birth srimavo bandaranayake, 1960-1965 (dudley senanayake, 1965-1970) chapter ii the road to the left srimavo bandaranayake, 1970-1977 chapter iii the road to the right j.r. jayawardene, 1977-1989 (1983) as regards the banadaranaikes period, historian k.m. de silva remarks that its primary features were “the acceptance of sinhala as the national language, buddhist predominance within the sri lankan polity and a sharp decline in the status of the ethnic and religious minorities” (de silva 2005: 644). in an atmosphere rarefied following the passing of the “sinhala only” act in 1956 by her husband in his pm capacity, throughout her first stint as primer minister mrs. b. earned the enmity of different groups in the country for acts of commission: native tamils for her immediate application of the “sinhala only” policies without any concessions to tamils (regardless of the fact that the tamil federal party had supported her in the election), plantation tamils for her agreement with india for their repatriation in 1964, muslims for her interference in the system of quasis or muslim domestic relations courts, and catholics for her nationalization of the education system, which had traditionally been in their hand (de silva 2005: 649 et passim). all the while she won recognition among non-aligned countries for her anti-american policies, such as the nationalization of the import and distribution of petroleum products in 1963—an initiative which resulted in the withdrawal of substantial financial aid previously sent by the usa. this cut in foreign aid in turn aggravated a severe economic crisis caused by the decrease in the price of exports. also, from 1960 staple foodstuffs like rice and sugar, and others like chocolate, were nationalised and started being distributed through state cooperatives—if at all. all these events are reproduced in the novel, of course tinted with irony, as in the following complaint by a manuka who, having a sweet tooth like any child, resents the scarcity of candy and is unable to find a surrogate pleasure like some members of her family: since the nationalization of the sugar and chocolate industries i had forgotten the sweet taste of sweet. aunty lydia [who was an anglican] had coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 found a compromise between minimized sweetness and the sweetness of the lord. i could not do so. i had not met her sweet lord. (114) indeed, and as de silva recalls, “all luxury goods, and then increasingly, more essential goods were eliminated from the country’s import bill in the early 60s” (de silva 2005: 654). while the prices of imports went up (especially rice, but also wheat) and those of exports (especially tea, but also coconut and rubber) went down (de silva 2005: 655), mrs. b. implemented a policy of “minimization” which the novel satirizes endlessly. the irony was that, while she preached and imposed socialism, mrs b. and her family enjoyed privileges no sri lankan could dream of: “in the meantime, her three children got fatter and fairier on baguettes, roquefort and brie” (78). for ordinary sri lankans, cooking started requiring miraculous skills, as denounced by the narrative voice: “[magi] is making the best christmas cake in the world, even when madam bandaranayake is eating all the necessary condiments alone” (109). the family cook, magi, is indeed no less important a character in the story than thati or ammi, the girl’s parents. not only does she have to bake cakes without any ingredients, but she has to cook rice which contains more stones than grains (“‘kkkrs…’ a typical sound at the dining table during meal times,” 79), or pol sambol seasoned with chilli powder that more often than not turns out to be red brick powder. minimization affects food but also other spheres of life. together with the bank of ceylon, the paper industry was also nationalized and minimized: “books were minimized since the book markets did not publish sinhala only. the books in english became too expensive…” (115), and thus new books were no more, while second-hand bookshops sprouted and thrived, and school materials as well as newspapers were reduced to a minimum size and amount (96). mrs. b.’s anti-american politics, combined with a policy of non-alignment and an intimate relationship with china which are referred to as her “red silk bed sheets” policy (89), had an effect on the country. manuka recounts how their weekend entertainments saw themselves reduced to regular visits to the airport, built with chinese aid, where they took up the habit of lunching together. once again, the passage combines narration and irony, politics and food: growing up in the middle of minimization on an island, our concept of the world was limited to our glorious airport. we were proud. of it, of us, of the chinese, of mrs. bandaranayake. …every saturday and sunday, …ammi, the servants, the boarders and i, visited the bandaranayake international airport and watched the air ceylon planes take off and land with the bandaranayake family onboard. soon uncle buddhi and his family joined us. then uncle roland and his family joined us. thereafter, uncle harry and his family. …each family brought their own tiffin carrier with one portion of rice and different curries, to share with each other. additionally there was cake for teatime; iced coffee… (90; my emphasis) emergency is the climactic closure of this calamitous first period of mrs. b.’s government and of the chapter. since her election, a state of emergency had been declared between april 1961 and april 1963 and was declared again between march and april 1964. emergency meant a halt to everyday activities and a frantic chase for food of any kind: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 we were at home. no school, no classes, no nothing. only two hours a day to run to the cooperative store with the ration cards and buy the rationed food for a week. ammi took care of the rice and dhal. siya hunted for maldive fish. achi palled up with the retailers and searched the cooperative stores for fresh coconuts and sugar in the lightest shade of brown. (124) one of the few not nationalised products was maldive fish. a routine delicacy in sri lankan cuisine, maldive fish is dried and smoked tuna fish, and a basic ingredient of traditional lankan dishes like the mentioned pol sambol. maldive fish becomes a motif that runs through the novel. siya, manuka’s grandfather, starts losing his composure due to the scarcity of this product, which “had the same importance of salt and chilli” (125), and will eventually disappear, literally, in “the maldive fish queue” (127). maldive fish thus becomes a national symbol for stability, something only attained by mrs. b. by force, at the expense of hampering the rights of minorities and, worse, at the price of general undernourishment. as the first chapter closes, the disappearance of manuka’s grandfather epitomizes and deprecates the literal banishment and probable assassinations of hundreds of people during mrs. b’s periods of emergency. the chapter ends with the question: “were we all about to disappear?” (127), which reads both nutritionally, as starvation means death, and politically, in the aforementioned emergency context. siya the grandfather reappears with no explanation somewhere in chapter two, but only to point out categorically that srimavo bandaranayake is “the worst ruler [the] country has ever seen. even worse than swrd” (221), and that under her government sri lanka is “sinking into hell” (221). maldive fish helps illustrating another feature of mrs. b.’s home politics. according to de silva, corruption and “a flagrant misuse of state resources” (de silva 2005: 672) was rife during the second period of mrs. b. prime ministry, begun in 1970: preferential treatment of supporters of the government in recruitment and promotion within the state service had always been a feature of the process of governance of sri lanka since independence, but now, for the fist time, preferential treatment of government supporters was ‘institutionalized.’ (de silva 2005: 672) it is more than likely that wijesinghe has documented herself through reading de silva’s notorious historical treaty, as in monsoons and potholes we read a repetition of these terms: “a new era in the left to the centre was ushered in. it was the era of nationalization and the institutionalization of preferential treatment of governmental supporters” (192). in her text, this policy materializes in the invitation to go on “a government sponsored congressional excursion to the republic of maldives” (189) received from mrs. b by thathi manuka’s father. in her inexhaustible irony, the narrator baptizes this new campaign of the prime minister as “the institutionalization of the partial implementation of minimization,” or “the non-minimization of a few, versus the minimization of the many” (189). with the only exception of thathi, an engineer employed as a civil servant, the whole family deplores mrs. b.’s ill government, and they are outraged by this invitation. his wife, referred to as ammi by manuka, will even end up leaving for england in a fit of resentment after a heavy argument on the matter with her husband. to add up to the discomfort, no one in the family understands why maldives is the chosen place, as it appears as rather drab in comparison to architecturally more glamorous places like egypt, greece, france, or closer india. but the republic of maldives testifies to the cleverness of the prime minister when thathi coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 returns from the trip “with two suitcases. one full of dirty clothes and the other full of maldive fish” (194). ammi, siya and all the family are mollified when given a chance to eat again pol sambol that does not taste “like tissue paper” (190). the formerly strict minimization of maldive fish becomes thus partial (as announced by the narrator) in that maldive fish becomes a more abundant commodity in some circles. in this way, even the impartial families of those partial “government supporters” like thathi may be led to feel some sympathy for bandaranayake, as “when the partial members had maldive fish, so did their impartial families” (194). with maldive fish back in pol sambol, the hitherto murky atmosphere of the family meals is lightened. so are the country’s spirits, as the maldive fish black market thrives and breathes new oxygen into many corroded domestic economies. i shall provide a last example of the intersection between food and politics in monsoons and potholes. we shall now move to the third chapter, “the road to the right.” although it goes on to denounce the continuation of strongly sinhala policies, the text is not so ruthlessly critical of j.r. jawardene’s government as it was of mrs. b.’s, and besides narrating manuka’s personal teenage struggles, it concentrates on accounting for the emergence of the tamil insurrection and the outbreak of the civil conflict—the suggestion always being that the tamil minority has been improperly cared for by successive sri lankan governments. we shall spare details of this progression and focus instead on the key figure of podian. podian is a plantation tamil who for a long time worked as a driver for the branch of the family living in mount lavinia, with whom manuka and her closest relatives had to live for some time while looking for a new house.iv later on, as the family in mount lavinia leave for england like so many others, podian will start working for the family branch in colombo. the tamil driver is characterized by his integrity and candour, and above all by his fidelity to his employers. as indicated above in this paper, in 1964 mrs. b. signed an agreement with lal bahadur sastri, prime minister of india, to repatriate around half a million tamils whose ancestors the english had taken from india to sri lanka to work in the tea plantations in the 19th century (see de silva 2005: 647-48). the concept of repatriation is of course inappropriate since the likes of podian, that is, sri lankan indian tamils, are born and bred in sri lanka, and feel this country as their one and only place in the world. the driver’s story is extremely moving, and provides a dramatic balance to the previous excess of parody—the term excess employed here as a positive attribution. podian is “repatriated” against his will, and once in india, where he has neither family nor friends, he just spends his time saving as much as possible— while forced to live in nearly infrahuman conditions—so as to be able to go back home. in his nine years there he will neither marry nor do anything that might distract him from fulfilling his utmost desire, that is, going back to sri lanka, which he over and over again keeps referring to as “my country.” unfortunately, podian goes back to his country when this is being ravaged by the grave inter-ethnic riots which arose in 1983, after the killing of 13 members of the sinhala army in the province of jaffna, and which marked the beginning of the civil conflict. podian does not feel concerned by this trouble.v when he appears back in the colombo household the whole of manuka’s family rejoices, especially magi, whose cooking had resented podian’s absence: “magi was … sad at podian’s departure and her food, needless to say, was the opposite of culinary delight!” (188). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 but at this point the whole country is on fire, and havoc reigns. while the text spares no criticism of institutional buddhism as the driving force behind the terrible attacks on tamils, muslims and the “odd christian” (341), somewhere in the midst of mayhem the family runs out of bread. podian volunteers to go outside and get some. when concerned for his security they refuse his offer, he decides to go out behind their backs. noticing his absence soon after, manuka and other members of the family start searching for podian, first at home and then out in the streets. the text will now slowly gain a tragic texture. a sense of doom which, come to think of it, is the only possible way to close a story that ends with the outbreak of a war: he did not return. magi did not cook. no one wanted to eat. neither rice nor bread. (353) when they finally find podian, it is at the police station: the face that stared at me with its dead vacant eyes and body covered with bruises and cigarette burns, was that of the little black man who returned to us after repatriation. he looked different. i suppose that was the difference death made. he stared at me. lifeless, rigid, empty, different. the stiffness of death had eliminated his vibrancy. … i hated that wretched man for returning after repatriation. why had he come? the police officer had been observing my face. ‘meya naeda (this is him, isn’t it?)?’ ... yes, that third dead body which revealed its dead face to me was podian. his dead right hand still clutching half the loaf of bread he had bought for me. the other half was missing. (354) while searching for some bread to feed the sinhala family he considers to be his own family, podian the tamil has been brutally tortured to death by sinhala extremists. a half loaf of bread clutched in the dead hand of an innocent victim can surely suggest a myriad of meanings. in the context of sri lankan history, this image amounts to a weeping for the immense loss of lives and illusions effected by inefficient policies, lack of understanding and concern for “the other self” (341), and an irrational civil war which, as we said, precisely began with these riots (nissan 1996; schwartz 1988). in conclusion, personal stories, food, history and politics are deeply intertwined in manuka wijesinghe’s monsoons and potholes. to begin with, food is used as a device to provide evidence of the existence of a sri lankan national culture, one which encompasses all sri lankans regardless of their ethnicity. in the text sri lankans are presented as solidly conscious of their unique mythical and historical baggage, and as being imbued with a heavy sense of political responsibility. in a complementary manner, sri lankan culture appears as suitably sensorial and physical, an effect achieved mostly through images of food and eating. food fulfils a second, all-important function in the novel: to enhance the criticism of governmental policies which have been inefficient and damaging for the population in several senses. the novel is a reminder that sinhala and tamil peoples have peacefully coexisted in the island of lanka for centuries, and that the trouble of recent decades is only the result of systematic divisive policies. thus, we cannot ignore the dire consequences of the terrible war between sinhalese and tamil groups which begins as the novel comes to an end; but the war was happily over last year, in 2009, and a note of hope for a better coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 future in sri lanka seems reasonable at this point. being sri lankan culture as rich and tasty as presented in monsoons and potholes, from now on the socio-political situation in the country can only change for the better. works cited abeyratne, seneka (2009). “dense, atmospheric and cerebral.” the sunday leader. 01/03/2009. http://www.thesundayleader.lk. access 14/10/2009. cruz cruz, juan (1991). alimentación y cultura: antropología de la conducta alimentaria. pamplona: ediciones universidad de navarra. de silva, k.m. (2005). a history of sri lanka. colombo: vijitha yapa. goonetilleke, d.c.r.a. (2005). sri lankan english literature and the sri lankan people 1917-2003. colombo: vijitha yapa. ---(2007). kaleidoscope: an anthology of sri lankan english literature. colombo: vijitha yapa publications. gooneratne, yasmine (1986). relative merits: a personal memoir of the bandanaraike family of sri lanka. london: c. hurst and company. ---(1991). a change of skies. sidney: picador. mohanraj, mary anne (2005). bodies in motion. new york: harper. nissan, elizabeth (1996). sri lanka: a bitter harvest. london: minority rights group international reports. perera, vihanga kusal (2008). “fossil crying out to be redeemed. a story about the sri lankan novel.” the nation on sunday. 28/09/2008. http://www.nation.lk. access 14/10/2009. perera, suvendrini (2000). “‘we can be killed but we can never be silenced’: narratives of coexistence in recent sri lankan fiction.” cnrle journal. special issue: sri lankan and indian diasporic writing. salgado, minoli (2007). writing sri lanka: literature, resistance and the politics of place. london: routledge. schwartz, walter (1988). the tamils of sri lanka. london: minority rights group international reports. wanigasundara, malllika (2006). “focus on flip side of people and events.” the daily news. 21/01/2006. http://www.dailynews.lk. access 14/10/2009. wijesinghe, manuka (2006). monsoons and potholes. colombo: perera hussein publishing house. ---(2009). theravada man. colombo: bay owl press. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 yogasundram, nath (2008). a comprehensive history of sri lanka from prehistory to tsunami. colombo: vijitha yapa. this paper has benefitted from micinn funding, ref. ffi2009-07711. isabel alonso-breto is a lecturer on postcolonial cultures and literatures in english at the university of barcelona. she has published articles on writing by women of canadian, caribbean, indian and sri lankan origin. she is a member of cea (the centre for australian studies at the university of barcelona) and of litpost, a research group devoted to the study of postcolonial literatures and emerging arts. i page numbers between brackets without author’s name will hereon refer to manuka wijesinghe, monsoons and potholes. ii for an account of the genealogy of the bandanaraike family and a personal approximation to these two great figures of sri lankan politics, see gooneratne 1986. iii in the text there is no allusion to the years of dudley senanayake’s prime ministry (1965-1970), as chapter one ends in a period of emergency declared by mrs. bandanarayake in her first stint as prime minister (the last emergency state she declared in this period was between march and april 1964), and chapter two begins with the country having its name changed from ceylon to “the socialist republic of sri lanka”, a change effected by mrs. bandanarayake after her reelection in 1970. see de silva 2005: 2005, yogasundram 2008. iv these are anglican aunt lydia and her catholic husband aunt rupert. their presence in the story illustrates the eclecticism of sri lankan religious life, in spite of the strong buddhist predicament of successive conservative sinhalese governments. the very figure of podian, a hindu tamil, as well as the muslim boy manuka is mesmerized by as a teenager, are other examples of this plurality. for this reason, although focusing on sinhala characters, wijesinghe’s narrative could be catalogued as a “narrative of coexistence.” these are narratives which contest the official “narratives of partition” or “of separation,” and which deploy “complex, intertwined histories and enmeshed, interlocking identities -a dense, untidy tapestry of interactions, peaceful and otherwise, of people in sri lanka” (perera 2000: 15). for a very condensed account of the ethnic distribution in contemporary sri lanka, see goonetilleke 2001: xviixviii. v “…that is problem with tamil man from jaffna, i’m poor tamil man from plantation, i have no problem” (346). plantation tamils had not the same political concerns and goals as sri lankan tamils from the north and east. let us also note that sri lankan tamils were not a homogenous group in terms of ideology, and that an extremist faction took the initiative over the more moderate tamils that had traditionally occupied power positions and institutional posts. the novel explores the origin of these extremists, mostly an educated unemployed youth which was not only tamil but also sinhala, and which was the product of the nationalization and universalization of education: “when all the rice farmers’ and coconut farmers’ sons and daughters study art history and philosophy and don’t want to work the fields, it was obvious … that they would have nothing to eat. … she understood the gravity of the problem and tucked them into prison cells and fed them. she neither offended karma nor did she give them undue hardship. she minimised their worries. they had a roof over their heads and food to eat.” (187-188) microsoft word coolabahcontributors coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 contributors giada cacciavillani was born in italy and discovered her love for writing at an early age. she studied piano as a child and wrote her first lyrics for a song when she was twelve. after high school, giada moved to barcelona, spain, to enroll at university of barcelona in the english philology department where she developed her skills as a writer, essayist, philologist, and teacher. during that time she also focused on postcolonial studies and feminist theory. after graduating in 2008, giada moved to pasadena, california, following her admission to the lla. music academy. she graduated in vocal performance in 2010 after studying under great musicians such as tierney sutton, thena dare, howie shear, aaron serfaty, kathleen grace...who helped her find her own voice as a songwriter. she is currently working on recording her own songs. pedro fernández dorado was born in 1981 in sant boi de llobregat, barcelona. he is currently finishing his degree in english philology at the universitat de barcelona. his field of interest has always been literature, being particulary iterested in the romantic period and postcolonial studies. he is also an amateur short story writer and a musician, former member of the catalan band tetsuo. kathleen hoyos was born in canada and has lived in the u.s, colombia and currently spain. she teaches english at the north american institute in barcelona and is an associate teacher for the english department at the universitat de barcelona. she holds a b.a in english philology from the university of barcelona and is currently completing her minor ma thesis in construcción y representación de identidades culturales (construction and representation of cultural identities) at the same university kate russell is an international student at the universitat pompeu fabra, barcelona. she is currently on exchange from the university of new south wales, sydney, where she studies a bachelor of international studies, majoring in global studies. she is currently employed by the department of foreign affairs and trade and is a collaborator for the australian studies centre in the universitat de barcelona. carles serra pagès is doing his phd in universitat pompeu fabra on the influence of husserl in the early work of jacques derrida. he is a member and collaborator of the australian studies centre at barcelona university, and is currently in charge of organising the next derrida today international conference in barcelona in 2012. maría isabel seguro is a lecturer in the english and german department at the university of barcelona. her main fields of interest are asian american and british east asian literature, focusing specifically on theatre. she has published pieces on lillian hellman, david henry hwang, wakako yamauchi, mitsuye yamada and joy kogawa. her current research is on contemporary british east asian theatre. laura lópez peña (barcelona, 1985) is a phd student at the university of barcelona. her research centers on the literature of the united states of the nineteenth century, and particularly, on the literary production of walt whitman and herman melville during and after the american civil war. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 dr. bill phillips is a senior lecturer in english literature and culture at the university of barcelona. he has published widely on poetry, particularly of the romantic period, ecofeminism, gender studies and detective fiction. having been head of department from february 2005 to july 2009, he is now enjoying a sabbatical year, much of which he is devoting to the study of turkish. microsoft word ma isabel seguro 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 ‘hawaii, hawaii/ like a dream/ so i came/ but my tears/ are flowing now/in the canefields’: beauty’s price in philip kan gotanda’s ballad of yachiyo maría isabel seguro abstract: oftentimes popular culture depicts hawaii as an ideal paradise, represented by images of ‘[p]alm trees, a distant mountain (frequently a smoking volcano), and a hula maiden, all surmounted by a splendid full moon’ (brown 1994). such a picture clearly contrasts with the labour song quoted in the title of this article, which reflects the exploitation, mainly of asian workers, in the sugar-cane plantation system—the original basis for (white) american prosperity in the islands since the mid-nineteenth century. philip kan gotanda’s play, ballad of yachiyo, which premièred at berkeley repertory theatre in 1995, takes place within a japanese community in early twentieth-century hawaii. it is loosely based on the silenced story of the playwright’s aunt who committed suicide for bringing shame to the family as a result of an extra-marital pregnancy. gotanda considers that this particular work is not so much about politics, but about ‘a tone’ and a ‘kind of beautiful sadness’ (1997). despite the author’s words, ballad of yachiyo inevitably has embedded within a political message insofar as it makes references, for example, to working conditions in the sugar plantations, the formation of the first inter-ethnic (japanese/filipino) trade unions and the expectations of japanese immigrants in search of the mythical paradise hawaii was meant to be. that is, by recovering what was once a lost voice, gotanda reconstructs part of his family’s memory as forming part of hawaii’s recent history. keywords: hawaii, american imperialism, ballad of yachiyo the title of this article cites a plantation work song of a japanese labourer in the sugar canefields of hawaii at the beginning of the twentieth century. this song, by itself, demystifies the dominant, conventional image of the hawaiian islands as a tropical eden, particularly in the u.s. imaginary. as crystal parikh points out: conceived of in tourist fantasy as america’s ‘first strange place’ and, alternatively, as a coordinate in the still-emergent asia-pacific marketplace, hawaii functions as an object of contestation between the discourses of transnational capitalism and globalization on the one hand and, on the other hand, as an ahistorical site for the recreational pleasures and military needs of the nation-state (2002). copyright ©2009 maría isabel seguro. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 the construction of hawaii’s myth as a paradise, in the western popular imaginary, contrasts clearly with the economic and political anglo-american domination of the islands prior to their annexation by the united states in 1898, becoming formally a u.s. territory two years later with the passing of the organic act in 1900. since the european discovery of the islands by captain cook in 1778, hawaii’s destiny inevitably was marked, firstly, by european colonial enterprises, and later, by u.s. imperial interests in the pacific basin due to the islands’ strategic geographical position. this is exemplified by debates in the u.s. congress on the nation’s interests over hawaii, such as the majority report of the house committee on ways and means which, in 1876, proclaimed the following: the pacific ocean is an american ocean, destined to hold a far higher place in the future history of the world than the atlantic. it is the future great highway between ourselves and the hundreds of millions of asiatics who look to us for commerce, civilization, and christianity. these islands rest midway between us and them as the necessary point provided by the great ruler of the universe as points of observation, rest, supply, military strategy, and command, to enable each other to unite in protecting both hemispheres from european assault, aggression, and avarice (quoted in la croix and grandy 1997). supplying ships travelling from america to the far east and the antipodes, especially whaling vessels, as well as hiring new crew, became the main source of income for businesses in hawaii (oliver 2003; la croix and grandy 1997). moreover, the discovery of sandalwood in the late eighteenth century gave rise to an important trading industry which ended around 1830 when supplies of the precious wood were practically exhausted. however, it was the sugar industry which was to cause the greatest and deepest transformation of the islands. from the mid 1830s, mostly u.s. and british settlers began to establish the first sugarcane plantations (oliver 2003). in fact, it was an american firm, ladd and company, the one to establish the first profitable sugar plantation on the island of kauai in 1835 (la croix and grandy 1997). part of the hawaiian landscape underwent great transformations as a result of the land reform and system of property based on the western model. unsurprisingly, the best agricultural, residential and profitable land ended up in the hands of caucasians. this meant that by the end of the nineteenth century westerners possessed four times as much land as native hawaiians (oliver 2003). sugarcane plantations required an amount of manual labour which native hawaiians were not particularly keen to provide. besides, its population, as a direct result of contact with europeans, had been drastically reduced. according to asian pacific american historian ronald takaki, in the mid-nineteenth century full-blooded and part hawaiians constituted 97 percent of the total population, whereas by the early 1920s it had dropped to only 16.3 percent. these demographic changes were also due to the introduction of asian indentured labour which would supply the necessary workforce coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 for making sugar production hawaii’s most important industry. it has been calculated that during the same period, about 300,000 asians arrived on the islands, a fact that accounts for hawaii’s particular ethnic diversity, up to the present day. by 1920, asians (mainly japanese, chinese, koreans and filipinos) constituted 62 percent of the population (1989). thus, hawaii’s demography is related to another prevailing image of the islands: a picture of racial and ethnic harmony, which has been incorporated into its world-wide idealized representation as a kind of ‘exotic/erotic fantasy’, an ‘eden space of escape’, to use parikh’s words (2002). however, this (supposedly) ethnic harmony was founded upon a strict hierarchical system of control according to race and, simultaneously, linking race to class. in the plantations, for example, jobs—and salaries—were structured according to ethnic origin. positions requiring specific skills or those of a supervisory nature (such as clerical work or lunas, the hawaiian term for foremen), were mainly taken up by caucasians. unsurprisingly, most of the field labourers were chinese, japanese and filipinos (takaki 1989). the sugar industry particularly flourished after the preferential trade agreement between the kingdom of hawaii and the united states in 1876 (the reciprocity treaty). the increased wealth of the sugar planters—hawaii’s new (white) aristocracy—the islands’ pleasant climate, the beauty of the landscape, together with improvements in transport, led to the birth of an incipient tourist industry at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. as a means of attracting visitors, the hawaiian promotion committee was founded in 1902. this committee, which became known as the tourist bureau during the 1920s and 1930s, contributed to the construction of hawaii as a pacific eden to which, at the time, was only accessible to a glamorous élite. thus, in a booklet published in 1938, the bureau provided the following description of the islands: hawaii is magic! just the name is “[open] sesame” to a vividly gorgeous kaleidoscope of thought. your mind drifts into gay imaginings...you seem to catch a whiff of fragrant jasmine, or ginger, swirling in sea-cooled zephyrs...mental vagabonding...cutting through the waves of an enchanted sea...gloriously emancipated from those old city-bred inhibitions...and there...just across that shimmering horizon...those fabulous islands of the south seas...yours for the taking. and why not take them? ...why those wistful fantasies when all things conspire to conjure fantasy into fact? surely, actual knowledge of the brief time required, the comfort, the luxury, and low cost of modern travel to the land of aloha...will bring hawaii temptingly near, nearer than ever before (quoted in brown 1994). this kind of imagery was also enhanced by visual artefacts highlighting the exotic and erotic aspects of the islands and its inhabitants, particularly women. as desoto brown points out, ‘artwork played a part in creating the public’s hawaiian image. palm trees, a distant mountain (frequently a smoking volcano), and a hula maiden, all surmounted by a splendid full moon, usually summed up the ideal’ (1994). these images of native hawaiian women, of the beaches and the volcanic landscape clearly contrast with the harsh reality of plantation life. as a former female korean labourer described: coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 the sugar cane fields were endless and the stalks were twice the height of myself. [...] now that i look back, i thank goodness for the height, for if i had seen how far the fields stretched, i probably would have fainted from knowing how much work was ahead. my waistline got slimmer and my back ached from bending over all the time to cut the sugar cane (quoted in takaki 1989). with the advancement of tourism and the direct and indirect support from advertising and other popular artefacts such as hollywood film and popular fiction, ‘hawaii’s fantasy image’ as ‘beautiful and romantic’, using brown’s words, became the dominant picture, obliterating the socio-economic exploitation and political invisibility of the greater part of the population upon which the wealth of the islands was sustained. scholars such as crystal parikh argue that contemporary asian pacific american literature is particularly interested in undermining such an ever-pervasive picture attempting, in such a manner, to ‘decreate’ the american pacific (2002). for the purpose i will refer to a play by the japanese american author philip kan gotanda, ballad of yachiyo, which premièred at berkeley repertory theatre in 1995. the story takes place in 1919 within a japanese community in hawaii. the play is loosely based on the silenced story of the playwright’s aunt, yachiyo, who committed suicide for bringing shame to the family as a result of a love affair with a married man and her subsequent out-of-wedlock pregnancy. gotanda considers that this particular work, unlike most of his theatrical production, is not so much a political statement but rather the expression of a ‘kind of beautiful sadness’ (1997). however, ballad of yachiyo has embedded within a political message insofar as it makes references to the working and living conditions in the sugar plantations, the formation of the first interethnic (japanese and filipino) trade unions and the expectations of japanese immigrants in search of the mythical paradise hawaii was meant to be. that is, by recovering what was once a lost voice, gotanda reconstructs part of his family’s memory and, in the process, part of hawaii’s history. the play opens with the projection on a screen upstage of photographs about life on kauai island at the beginning of the twentieth century. simultaneously, as indicated by the stage directions, ‘we hear the haunting strains of a japanese plantation work song’ (gotanda 1997). this series of projections ends up with a real photograph of yachiyo, and then ‘the actress playing yachiyo moves in front of the slide, the image’s large face superimposed on her body’ (1997). the actress, in fact, represents yachiyo’s ghost who, from the afterlife, begins to tell her story, her narration functioning as stage directions for the players who make their appearance on the boards. such an opening, with the image of the real yachiyo superimposing the body of the actress, and the yachiyo on stage directing the actions of the other actors, represents the interconnections between past and present, between the recovery of memory and history. as gotanda states: i’ve always felt people’s lives, no matter how brief, no matter how seemingly uneventful on the surface, make a kind of ripple in their historical coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 time, sending into motion a series of connected disturbances, interrelated emotions and intentions that seed the universe, eventually branching out to become its fruit—never lost, never really seen, but always present (1996). in connection to gotanda’s words, it is interesting to notice that ghosts or haunting figures in theatre play a particular role in relation to history and its implications in the present. as theatre scholar david savran proclaims: if history is understood as a chronicle of struggles among nations, peoples and classes, then the theatrical ghost is also a historical figure. for it is the product not only of personal memory, but also of an interplay of social, political and economic forces. the ghost may not be that of a celebrated public figure, but it nonetheless serves as a representative and reminder of the skirmishes that constitute history [...] (1999). sixteen-year-old yachiyo matsumoto moves to the takamura home, a childless couple, in order to acquire an education from mrs. takamura which, according to her mother, takayo, will enable her to make a good marriage. however, her mother’s idea of a proper education is inadequate for the life in the plantation camp since it consists of learning tea ceremony and, if possible, ikebana—flower arrangement—and koto—a traditional japanese string instrument. these are highly aestheticized activities which, back in japan, young women should be accomplished in so as to entertain their husbands and hosts. but these arts are unsuitable for life in the sugar plantation camps. as yachiyo’s father, hisao, says: ‘that’s all crap. you don’t need those kinds of things here. you have too much refinement here it makes you weak. people step all over you’ (gotanda 1997). with these words, hisao matsumoto is also referring to himself. having married against the will of his family, he decided to leave for hawaii to start anew, calling his wife to join him. a learned man who used to write tanka, a form of traditional japanese poetry, his body soon becomes unfit for work in the canefields. in a way, matsumoto foresees his daughter’s downfall for desiring beautiful objects and, above all, what they represent—a better life denied to non-caucasians. the possibility of creating and having access to beautiful artefacts is therefore linked to social class. hiro takamura, the man for whom yachiyo works in exchange for tea ceremony lessons given by his wife, is the son of a master of pottery in japan. forced to leave the family home due to his ill-behaviour, takamura is obsessed with living up to his father’s mastery, but constantly fails to produce the right mixture of clay or the right type of kiln for yunomi, the teacups for which his father is famous. his frustration is reflected in his contempt for is fellow countrymen and countrywomen, mostly from rural japan. when his wife places on the table before him a sake bottle and cups, he scornfully chides her. she then brings a wooden bowl, and takamura replies: there, that’s better. what really should be here is this...a crude wooden bowl. that’s what belongs on this table. it’s more in keeping with the aesthetics sense of the people here in this town. they don’t want fine coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 pottery in their everyday lives. they want wooden bowls that they can knock on the floor and not break when they’re screwing their wives on the kitchen table. [...] that’s what peasants like. not finite beauty with the inherent fragility of human nature... [...] but crude, pedestrian substitutions (gotanda 1997). takamura’s verbal abuse of his wife and, initially, of yachiyo, his infidelity, his love for alcohol and gambling reflect his sense of emasculation for having failed as a master of pottery, despite the price he had to pay: to become a yoshi. in japanese culture, a yoshi is a man who gives up his family name and adopts that of his wife. takamura’s purpose with such a move was to receive financial support from his father-in-law in his attempt to become an artist. in the long run, he succeeds. his appreciation of beauty attracts the young yachiyo, and he manipulates her enthusiasm and love for him as he manipulates the clay for producing, eventually, beautiful pots. part of his final success is the result of the young girl’s warmth and effort, working for him mixing the different clays and preparing the right fire for the kilns. in a way, takamura’s use of yachiyo parallels that of the sugar planters and businessmen in relation to the native hawaiian and immigrant population. ultimately, her suicide and her return as a ghost on stage represent, in david savran words: [t]he occasion for the transformation of memory into history, the individual into the collective and the particular into the universal. it demonstrates that what is memory for some is history for others. for as we watch other people remembering, the struggles in which they participate and the society in which they are forced to play their parts are illuminated and clarified. we see their defeats reimagined, if not exactly as victories, at least as spurs to rethink and reclaim their losses. we see memory itself become a kind of phantom, the illusion produced by individual consciousness in thrall to history (1999). references brown, d. ¨beautiful, romantic hawaii: how the fantasy image came to be.¨ the journal of decorative and propaganda arts, 20, 1994, pp. 252-271. gotanda, p. ballad of yachiyo. new york: theatre communications group, 1997. la croix, s. j. and grandy, c. ¨the political instability of reciprocal trade and the overthrow of the hawaiian kingdom.¨ the journal of economic history, 57:1, 1997, pp.161-189. oliver, d. l. las islas del pacífico. a. olga (trans). barcelona: editorial melusina, 2003. parikh, c. ¨blue hawaii: asian hawaiian cultural production and racial melancholia.¨ journal of asian american studies, 5:3, 2002, pp. 199-216. savran, d. ¨the haunted stage¨ the playwright’s voice. american dramatists on memory, writing and the politics of culture. new york: theatre communications group, 1999. takaki, ronald. strangers from a different shore. a history of asian americans. new york and london: penguin, 1989. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 acknowledgments this article has been published with the financial support of the departament d’universitats, recerca i societat de la informació of the generalitat of catalunya, and the european social fund. microsoft word isabelle august 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 on the significance of saying “sorry” – politics of memory and aboriginal reconciliation in australia isabelle auguste abstract: 2007 marked the 40 th anniversary of the 1967 referendum. back on may 27 th 1967, more than 90% of australian eligible voters said “yes’ to two changes of the australian constitution considered discriminatory to aboriginal people. this event is often considered as the first stage of reconciliation in australia. 2007 also marked the 10 th anniversary of the release of the bringing them home report that highlighted the forced removal of aboriginal children from their family as part of an assimilation policy. from 1997, the issue of an apology became a sine qua non condition to reconciliation. it was an important element of the recommendations the council for aboriginal reconciliation submitted to parliament in 2000. but, liberal prime minister john howard, in office for more than ten years, refused to say the word “sorry” on the basis that australians of today are not responsible for the actions of the past and that guilt is not hereditary. his focus was on what is called “practical reconciliation”. some changes are now on the way as labor leader, kevin rudd, who defeated him at the last federal election in november 24 th 2007, has promised to make a formal apology to the stolen generation. why is it important to say “sorry”? at a time of dramatic developments in indigenous affairs, this paper deals with the significance of an apology for reconciliation in australia. keywords: indigenous peoples ---australia; apology; reconciliation. introduction when i sent my abstract for this conference in january, i still had some doubts : will the government really say “sorry”? as an observer of aboriginal politics over the past nine years, i have followed closely the outcome of three federal elections, wondering if a change of leadership, will really result in an apology. i feel i was priviliged to be in canberra this year and share with other aboriginal and non-aboriginal people this long awaited moment of reconciliation. reconciliation, if we look at its core definition is derived from the latin word “conciliare” which means bringing together. the most basic meaning of the word is “restoring friendly relations between”. we can also summarize reconciliation as hamber and kelly have in their study of northern ireland as a “process of adressing conflictual and fractured relationship”. but what does reconciliation imply in the australian context? copyright ©2009 isabelle auguste. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 australia, as we all know, is the homeland of the aboriginal people. they have lived there since time immemorial, at least 40 000 years according to some scientific evidence, since the dreaming or dreamtime, that is the time of creation, according to their own mythologies. when the british arrived in 1788, they were dispossessed and then became subjected to discriminatory policies of segregation and assimilation. the colonization of the country is at the origin of the conflict which oppose the old australians to the new ones. the 1967 referendum is often referred to as the starting point of reconciliation – and we will have the opportunity to hear more about it tomorrow with frances peters-littlebut it is not until the 1990s that a formal process of reconciliation was established. the council for aboriginal reconciliation (car) had a ten-year mandate, until the centenary of federation to promote reconciliation in the country. today, what i would like to do is to provide some background on the origin of the apology and show how it became inextricably intertwined with the reconciliation process and offer an account of what happened on february 13 th , not to explain why it is significant to “say sorry” but why it was. i) some background on the apology in the words of the australian historian who coined the term with his wife dr jay arthur, and i am referring here of course to professor peter read we are honored to have here among us today : we stolen generations are the victims of australia-wide policies which aimed to separate us from our parents, our family, our neighbourhood, our community, our country and our rightful inheritance as aboriginal citizens of australia. we are the victims of a policy which –if it had been successfulwould have put an end to aboriginality forever. not just ours – everyone’s. and we are still hurting. (xi) this issue of forcible removal was not much talked about in the 1980s when the pamphlet the stolen generations was released and when its authors peter read and coral edwards set up link-up an association to help reunite families. but a growing awareness of it emerged. in presenting the policy of the hawke government in 1983, minister for aboriginal affairs clyde holding referred to this deliberate policy of governments to separate children from their families in view of assimilation and promised to “restore the rights of aboriginal families to raise and protect their own children” (3486). in 1991, the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody showed that among the 98 cases studied, 43 persons had been separated from their families. in 1995, the keating government finally set up an inquiry because an “increasing concern that the general public’s ignorance of the history of forcible removal was hinding the recognition of the needs of its victims and their families and provision of services ” (hreoc intro). the inquiry was conducted by human rights and equal opportunity commission president sir ronald wilson and by aboriginal and torres strait islander social justice coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 commissioner mick dodson whose mission was to trace the history of separation past and present, but also to examine principles for compensation. as the inquirers stated, it is “no ordinary report” (intro). it goes to the heart of personal stories, testimonies of separation, institutionalisation, abuses and denigration. 585 aboriginal persons courageously came forward to talk about their painful experience, a violation of their human rights that the inquirers compared to an act of genocide. it was not only established that this practice of forcible removal began with colonisation but that it was still happening in the 1970s. no indigenous family seems to have escaped from its effects. it is from the disturbing findings of this particular inquiry that a call for an apology emerged. an acknowledgement of the wrongs separation caused from the perpetrators and an apology to the victims and their families were seen central to a healing process. the commission received many submissions along that line. for the commission, “the first step in any compensation and healing for victims of gross violations of human rights must be an acknowledgement of the truth and the delivery of an apology”. this apology was also seen as an elementary condition and a first step to reconciliation (chapt 14). the bringing them home report was released in may 1997 while the council for aboriginal for reconciliation was holding a major convention in melbourne. the convention as sir ronald wilson stated had the effect of merging the two issues of reconciliation and the stolen generation into one. and from then the issue of an apology became inextricably linked to the reconciliation process. putting to light this hidden aspect of australia’s history caused dismay and there was a massive positive response from state parliaments, churches, community groups, ethnic organisations, local governments, that took the stance of apologising (dodson n.p.). and since the first sorry day in 1998, thousands of persons have signed sorry books across the country to express their grievances (national sorry day committee). in contrast, the howard government refused to formally apologised. it ignored the recommendations of excuses and compensation when it responded to the bringing them home report in december 1997 (herron n.p.). before the federal election of 1998, howard explained that his motives were not a fear of compensation but a belief that you express regrets for things “you are collectively and in a direct sense responsible” and he did not think “that applies to the current generation of australians” (qted in read ix). in that sense, he was faitfhful to a position he had taken on indigenous issues since he was leader of the opposition in the 1980s : “guilt is not hereditary”. in august 1999, he did move a motion in which he expressed his deep and sincere regret “that indigenous australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations”. but his motion and his speech did not even mention the stolen generations and it was not the awaited formal apology. in december 2000 when he received the final report of car, prime minister howard stated that he would consider the recommendations of the council but that his position on some points were unchanged. he did not have to be more precise and he was not. throughout his mandate, he had repeated at numerous occasion his commitment to genuine reconciliation. nevertheless, his government and the liberal party had a different vision of reconciliation from car. they made a distinction between the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 practical and what they referred to as the symbolic.the practical is about overcoming disadvantage and true reconciliation for them was limited to a socio-economic issue. the symbolic embraced anything to do with the recognition of the aboriginal as the indigenous component of australia –their unique status, their cultural identity, the necessity to sign a treaty, a recognition of past mistreatment, the right to selfdetermination within the life of the nation, in brief much of what the council for aboriginal reconciliation called for in its documents of reconciliation but not all as for for the council the practical and the symbolic were not separable. as a result, the reply of the government to the recommendations made by car was not surprising, even though it took two years to come. in the commonwealth response, all the recommendations dealing with special rights were not considered by the government. there is actually a sentence which is quite significant : the prime minister indicated at the time of release of the declaration, there were significant areas of agreement the government could not give its full support. consequently, on may 11 th 2000, the government presented a revised declaration to which it offered its full support. (recommendation 2) in other words, they were in favour of reconciliation but in their own terms and that did not imply an apology. the howard government never said sorry, leaving reconciliation off track to use the title of senate legal and constitutional reference committee inquiry, at least until febrauary 13 th 2008. ii) the “sorry day” 13th feb. 2008 alp candidate kevin rudd promised, like his predecessors, to apologise to the stolen generations if elected. on november 24 th 2007, he defeated john howard who not only lost the federal election after four successive mandates but also his parliamentary seat of bennelong he had held since the 1970s. right after the election, the new prime minister announced that an apology would be delivered at the next sitting of parliament. the official date was known at the end of january as well as the absence of compensation. on february 12 th , the 42 nd parliament was sworn in, after a magistral aboriginal ceremony. it was the first time in australian history that aboriginal people had taken part in the opening of parliament. the following day, the long-awaited sorry resonated throughout the country. thousands of people (1.3 million according to the abc), aboriginal and nonaboriginal, australians and non-australians had gathered in the main square of capital cities, in the outback, or on the lawns of parliament, others followed the event on television or on the radio. some even woke up in the middle of the night in europe to watch the apology on the internet. it was a really emotional moment. many had travelled as far away as the northern territory by bus to be in the capital city for the first time. many aboriginal persons thought this will never happen in their lifetime. some brought with them pictures of family members who did not have that chance. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 according to aaron lazare, american professor of psychiatry at the university of massachusset medical school, the success or failure of an apology depends on four major components : the acknowledgement of the offence, the explanation, the expression of shame and remorse and reparation. kevin rudd’s speech contains the ingredients of a good apology. rudd began his speech by a personal story, that of nana fejo, a member of the stolen generation. it was a way for him to put his words into context and explain that he was not talking about “intellectual curiosities” but human beings, human lives. he then explained the significance of the moment, why the parliament of australia had to apologise to the aboriginal people, for those who were still in doubts, for his opponents, for everyone. he acknowledged the responsibility of the governments, of the parliament of the nation in what had become one of the “darkest chapter of australia’s history : the forced removal of aboriginal children on racial grounds”. but he specified that those who implemented the laws were not responsible. in summary, here are the reasons why they apologised : therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear, and therefore, for our people, the course of action is clear : that is to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in australia’s history. in doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate. in doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul. this is not, as some would argue, a black-armband view of history; it is just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth – facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it. until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our futures as a fully united and fully reconciled people. it is time to reconcile. it is time to recognise the injustices of the past. it is time to say sorry. it is time to move forward together. a jubilant crowd applauded to the first sorry. it was amplified when in a powerful manner, the prime minister addressed his direct apologies to the stolen generations : to the stolen generations, i say the following : as prime minister of australia, i am sorry. on behalf of the government of australia, i am sorry. on behalf of the parliament of australia, i am sorry. i offer you this apology without qualification. we apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. we apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humilation these laws embodied. we offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments. in making this apology, i would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation – from yuendumu, in the central west of the northern territory, to yabara, in north queensland, and to pitjantjatjara in south australia. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 rudd recognised the difficulty of forgiveness but called for reconciliation and a new beginning, putting forward a number of proposals for the future, even taking the leader of the opposition by surprise in calling for a joint-policy commission. the sky which brightened up at rudd’s speech darkened when nelson intervened. the leader of the opposition was ofcourse in an uncomfortable position if we consider the line taken by his party the past ten years. he himself expressed his opposition to the apology at the time he was elected. nevertheless, despite some obvious dissensions, the coalition offered its in-principle support at the beginning of february and on february 13 th , brendan nelson stood up to “speak strongly in favor of the motion”. it was a good start. but his speech did no match his opponent’s. nelson, while trying to recognise the hurt suffered by the aboriginal people tried to justify the policies of the time. his choice of repeating numerous times “good intentions”, or “rescued,” as well as quoting a person not only without her consent but also out of context, was certainly inappropriate. it added to the pain of those who were listening to him. tears of joy were replaced by tears of sadness. in the crowd i was in i saw many aunties bursting into tears. anger also arose. talking to people afterwards, i realise that many who watched the event on television thought that the crowd turned their back to the opposition leader right from the start without even listening, and the news report left the doubt. everyone was interested in hearing what he had to say but after a while his speech became so unbearable for many that they turned their back to the screens like in canberra, others just left. in perth, they switched off the tv. nevertheless, on that historic day what is to be remembered as tom calma, aboriginal and torres strait islander social justice commissioner, said : it’s the day our leaders – across the political spectrumhave chosen dignity, hope and respect as the guiding principles for the relationship with our first nations’ peoples through one direct act, parliament has acknowledged the existence and the impacts of the past policies and practices of forcibly removing indigenous children from the families and by doing so, has paid respect to the stolen generations. for their suffering and their loss. for their resilience. and ultimately for their dignity. the image of the prime minister and the leader of the opposition walking hand in hand towards the members of the stolen generations is the image which will remain. on one side, the parliament with bipartisan support apologised. on the other, the “thanks” and apology accepted that could be read on the shirts some members of the stolen generations were wearing. conclusion coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 eleven years after the bringing them home report, eight years after the abolition of the council for aboriginal reconciliation, the australian government has apologised to its indigenous population. “this example of reconciliation offers hope to peoples all over the world who long see their rights affirmed and their contributions to society acknowledged and promoted” said pope benedict who praised the australian apology ten days ago in sydney (maden). the australian apology has already paved the way for other significant gestures worlwide. those of you who were at the indigenous biography conference last year in canberra certainly remember the moving testimony of this young indigenous woman from japan, mina sakai. on june 6 th , the japanese parliament, in a bipartisan motion, recognised the ainou people as the indigenous peoples of japan and promised to improve their living conditions. a few days later, on june 11 th , in another part of the world, canadian prime minister stephen harper apologized to the aboriginal people of the country for canada’s role in the indian residential school system and the harm, the distrastrous effects it created. in australia, the apology is not ofcourse the panacea. sorry is meant to be the first step and we still have to see what will happen next. the alp has promised to consider the recommendations made by car in 2000. for now, another of the many electoral promises of the alp in indigenous affairs is already at work, establishing a new indigenous representative body. reconciliation seems to be back on track again. thank you. references calma, t. let the healing begin – response to government to the national apology to the stolen generations. members hall, parliament house canberra, 13 february, 2008. dodson, m. “we all bear the cost if apology is not paid” the age. 18 december, 1997. hamber, b. and kelly, g. reconciliation: a working definition. democratic dialogue, 2004 <http://www.democraticdialogue.org>. herron, j. “bringing them home”: commonwealth initiatives. press release minister for aboriginal and torres strait islander affairs, 16 february, 1997. holding, c. aboriginal affairs. commonwealth parliament debates, 1983, pp.3485-94. howard, j. motion of reconciliation. commonwealth parliamentary debates, 26 august, 1999, p.9205. howard, j. ¨address at the presentation of the final report to federal parliament by the council for aboriginal reconciliation,¨ canberra, 7 december, 2000. human rights and equal opportunity commission (hreoc). bringing them home: national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and torres strait islander children from their families. canberra: hreoc, 1997. lazare, a. on apology. oxford: oxford university press, 2005. maden, j. “pope praises rudd for saying sorry to aborigines” the australian. 17 july, 2008 <http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au>. national report. royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody. agps: canberra, 1991. national sorry day committee, 2008 <http://www.nsde.org.au>. nelson, b. “apology to australia’s indigenous peoples.” 13 february, 2008. <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/nelson_speech.pdf>. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 read, p. a rape of the soul so profound: the return of the stolen generations. sydney: allen and unwin, 1999. rudd, k. “apology to australia’s indigenous peoples.” 13 february, 2008. <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/rudd_speech.pdf>. senate legal and constitutional references committee. reconciliation : off track. canberra: the senate, 2003. wilson, r. sir. ¨native title and reconciliation : a people’s movement, an address to the nation¨. national press club canberra, 1998. acknowledgements i would like to express my gratitude to the organisers of the “myth, history and memory conference”. thank you for giving me the opportunity to present this paper at the university of barcelona in july 2008. i also wish to extend my acknowledgments to the french department of foreign and european affairs for the lavoisier award that enabled me to conduct some research on reconciliation in australia and to the australian centre for indigenous history (research school of social sciences, australian national university) that welcomed me as a visiting fellow during my time in canberra. dr isabelle auguste is a scholar from the french island of la réunion, author of l’administration des affaires aborigènes en australie : l’autodétermination en question, l’harmattan (collection lettres du pacifique), paris, 2008. microsoft word soriano medina 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 the body as language and expression of the indigenous australian cultural identity dra. dolors soriano & victòria medina abstract: in the indigenous australian oral culture, tradition and law are transmitted orally – through songs, tales, legends, etc. – and by visual expressions – engravings and drawings made on rocks, on the ground, on material objects, on bark and on the human body–. drawings and engravings transform the surface on which they are made from profane to sacred, since they are the transmitters of cultural myths and beliefs, generation after generation. the body, one of the supports of visual expression, actively participates in the transmission of myths, relegating the design to a secondary place. the most important thing is the transmission of the myth and not the way it is transmitted, or the result. the mythological narrative or legend surpasses the aesthetic line of vision. this paper intends to expose the primacy of the use of the body -human or not–, as a transmitter of the myths and history of the indigenous australian culture. in this way the body speaks a non-oral language full of symbolism and meaning. keywords: indigenous australian communities, body painting, oral tradition 1. presentation in the indigenous australian oral culture, tradition and law are transmitted by oral expressions –songs, tales, legends, etc.– and by visual expressions –engravings and drawings made on rocks, on the ground, on material objects, on bark and on the human body. art is a central and fundamental part of indigenous life and whatever its purposes: political, social, utilitarian or didactic –and these functions constantly overlap– art is inherently connected to the religious domain. art, visual imagery, is a means by which the present is connected with the past and human beings with the supernatural world. art activates the powers of the ancestral beings, expresses individual and group identities, and the relationship between people and the land. all early indigenous art was based on the various clans' and nations' ancestral dreamtime –the creation, the dreaming-when the earth's physical features took form through the struggles between powerful supernatural ancestors such as the rainbow serpent, the lightning men and the wandjina. codes of behaviour were also laid down in the dreamtime and these laws remain the foundation of most indigenous communities today, even those that have been most affected by colonisation. ceremonies, rituals and visual representation of specific totems and stories are interrelated elements of the indigenous australian culture, known as the dreaming or copyright ©2009 dolors soriano & victòria medina this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 the dreamtime. 2. objectives designs and religious images, when applied to any surface, whether it is the body of a participant in a ritual ceremony or the surface of a sculpture, have the power to transform the nature of the thing from the profane to the sacred and to evoke the radiant presence of a supernatural power. the body, one of the supports of the visual expression, actively participates in the transmission of myths relegating the design to a secondary place. the most important thing is the transmission of the myth and not the manner it is transmitted or the result. the mythological narrative or legend surpasses the aesthetic line of vision. such an extraordinary way to use the body as a visual expression of the aboriginal culture is beginning to be gradually recognized, valued and studied. every part of the body is used to express and say something. anthropologists call this art “living art”, an art that moves, acting and transmitting permanent messages. the signs and geometric figures are there to be interpreted, even by the profane or not initiated. a correct interpretation depends on the ritual knowledge of both the artist and the spectator, and on the knowledge of the ancestral mind. signs and geometric figures can only be fully appreciated and understood with an appropriate level of initiation. therefore, we would like to expose the primacy of the use of the body –human or not–, as a transmitter of the myths and history of the indigenous australian culture. in this culture the body has a non-oral language full of symbolism and meaning, whether it is used to express joy, pain, grief, a declaration of war, or whether it simply seeks to identify itself with the community. 3. the body as transmitter of oral culture 3.1 the human body the indigenous peoples have painted their bodies for many centuries. we have the evidence of explorers, pioneers and missionaries who were shown them: don rosendo salvado, a benedictine monk, saw them in 1852; phillips parker kink in 1837; james dawson in the colony of victoria in 1882; carl lumholtz saw body paintings in aranda in 1889, and spencer and guillen in 1898 and they also registered forms, contents, styles and techniques. (martin montenegro: 2006, chapter 9, 4). as far as they could, anthropologists documented and studied designs, structures, contents and symbolisms, especially in central and northern australia where they are still in use. 3.1.1. body painting 3.1.1.1. techniques the painting begins several hours before the ceremony and is accompanied by singing to call on the spiritual powers of the ancestral beings. first some grease is spread from head to legs; then, depending on the places, red ochre coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 or white as a base. decorations are applied to breasts, across the shoulders, the upper arms, stomach, and thighs. the designs are made with birds down, a stick of bamboo, the index finger, human hair, sticks bound with string at one end and also with a paint-brush. 3.1.1.2. materials the materials used are red and yellow ochre, white stone, charcoal, clay, and sometimes manganese. they also employ white bird and vegetable fluff (portulaca oleracea; portulaca pilosa) and human blood. each colour has a different symbolism: in the desert, red has a religious meaning; in arnhem land, white is associated with the ancestors. the shade of the colour is also important (in the north, for instance, red is mixed with bloodstone to make the skin shine). 3.1.1.3. style there are two styles of body painting, the figurative and the geometric. in the figurative style designs are realistic and spectacular; the objects and beings represented are easily identified (snakes, boomerangs, etc.). the geometric style, by means of lines and geometric designs, has a level of interpretation only for the initiated people. desert paintings present a close homogeneity using few elements: full or concentric circles, round or oval circles, dots, straight or uneven lines, arches and also animal footprints (strehlow, 1964). bird footprints are represented by arrows, tracks made by them on the sand; a tree by a circle, the diameter of a tree trunk on the surfaceof the soil. the paintings in the north, especially in arnhem land, are figurative (animal, human figures). the painted men wear bird feathers. each set of designs is interpreted according to the ritual, social and political situation in which it is presented. the levels of interpretation of an image or design depend on the ritual knowledge of both artist and viewer, and on an understanding of the ancestral landscape. generally artists provide a description of their work, and the many levels of interpretation permit them to present their art to an often culturally untutored public, to the public domain, without compromising its religious nature. in some ceremonies, the body and facial designs used in the dancing do not, apparently, depend on either patrilineal or matrilineal halves; and a variety of patterns is used at each performance. we have the descriptions of some anthropologists: 1) mccarthy (1967) says that, at the initiation ceremonies of central and northern australia: on the legs, arms, and body of the participant the designs are formed by the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 application of white feather-down along each side of the red or black lines or circles already traced out... often the decoration of the body is made continuous with the headdress by gumming the feather-down over the head, neck, and upper part of the body 2) catherine h. berndt (1950) says of the women's ceremonies in northern australia: these women, in their “tjarada”, use blood from their arms to fasten, on their bodies, patterns of “down” from a small “everlasting” variety of flower (…). the white clay is moistened in the mouth, and sometimes sprayed over the dancer during the preparations 3) roland m. and catherine h. berndt (1951), write of the ubar ceremony in western arnhem land: ...certain initiated young men retire to paint themselves in “waistcoat” fashion with uneven dots of white, red and black ochres 4) reed (1974) describes the paintings used by participants in a corroboree to ask for abundance and fertility and in the initiation rites: maybe the best known image of those participating in corroborees in northern, eastern and central australia is the skeleton painted on the body. the painted dancers must have a respectful attitude towards the spirits they represent. depending on the situations for which the corporal drawings are made (initiation, daily life, festivities), the attitude of respect, silence and care with which they are made varies and adapts to the situation. 3.1.1.4. symbolism in all the rituals, men taking part have their bodies decorated with sacred designs that symbolize the dreamtime person represented by the actors. the painting transforms men into dreamtime persons. they dance and imitate the behaviour of those beings as if they were actually in the dreamtime. music is provided by chanting or singing the myths or the songs connected with them, usually to the rhythm of clapping sticks and a didjeridu. throughout central australia, totemic ancestors are represented by graphic designs that have considerable importance in the visual symbol system focused on ancestral belief. among the walbiri, these designs are extensively elaborated, and are part of a wider graphic system with some of the structural characteristics of a “language”. each ancestor is associated with one or more designs that are regarded as surrogates for him (munn, 1973:32). dancing is very much part of the indigenous life and the corroboree is an important medium of expression, practised by all –men, women and children alike. indigenous australians use body decoration for other purposes: for camouflage in hunting, for protection in fights, for repelling mosquitoes in the tropical zones, for magical purposes, for attracting a woman or a man as a lover or, as used by the walbiri coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 men with the ilbindji designs, the body of the deceased is painted in red and the head in white as a sign of recognition and gratitude. 3.1.2. scarring indigenous australians did not practise tattooing but they used to carve scars as decoration of the body. but this could also be part of rituals of initiation (isaacs, 1984) or marriage. scarring began at puberty, continued for a year and the pain was acute. though this custom tends to disappear, there are parts of australia where people still practise scarring (kimberley, queensland, cap york and central australia). 3.1.2.1. techniques and material scars were produced by making cuts with a stone knife or with a shell and rubbing/putting in ashes, chalk or in some cases ants, in order to produce a swelling before the wound was dressed. scars were made on the chest, on thighs, arms and backs. men's scars were more elaborated than women's. women used to wear scars around the neck as a necklace, on the middle of the chest, or on the hip. 3.1.2.2. style seven or more parallel lines were usually made. 3.1.2.3. symbolism the yolngu people of northeast arnhem land perceive the land as the outcome of the transformation of ancestral bodies, and believe that the link between the ancestral land and people is expressed in terms of embodiment and the sharing of substance through conception and death signs. the significance of body scarring can thus be better understood (tamisari 1998: 255). on certain occasions scarring is performed mainly by women. usually at the circumcision and the funeral ceremony of a close relative, women cut or hit themselves on that part of their body which, in sign language, is associated with that particular relative. aborigines usually scar their bodies in marriage, too. scarring is also performed and shared between two people who, in spite of their kinship distance, have been particularly close during their lives. but, following geoff bardon’s thoughts on papua (1979), we can establish an analogy. indigenous australians identify the earth with the skin of their bodies and they cut their bodies in order to represent in them the natural and physical phenomenon of the landscape that surrounds them and in which they live. 3.1.3. adornment or personal objects indigenous australians usually wear ornaments. those for daily use are relatively few and simple, the more elaborate are those mostly worn in ritual contexts. 3.1.3.1. ceremonial ceremonial headdresses: large headdress-hats. made with bark hoop, some string and ending in a plume of emu feathers and thin human-hair plaits. they are worn in coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 totemic rites by the aranda in central australia. waninga: tread-cross. ceremonial emblem made of human hair, possum and bandicoot fur bound tightly so as to form a diamond-shape figure. it represents the animal totem of the clan in whose honour the ceremony is performed. it is widely distributed in central australia, the northern territory and the kimberleys. ceremonial arm-bands or bracelets: made of strips of bark, white feathers and wood, and decorated with red, white and ochre paint.worn by the tiwi women in the pukamani funerary ceremonies. marie ooroo: mourner’s hoop, plaited with the deceased’s hair, as well as wombat hair. ceremonial plumes: plumes made of yellow, red and black feathers spread like a fan, inserted in a piece of resin where some seeds have also been inserted. 3.1.3.2. personal ornaments hair ornaments: a bunch of cords bound together with vegetal fibres, painted in red and white. or it may be a piece of mother-of-pearl with resin at one of its ends. nose ornament: bone, wood or reed pins worn through the pierced nasal septum. necklaces: made of seeds, teeth, lengths of reed or fragments of quills threaded on a string. belts: made of several plaits of human hair, covered in red clay, and tied together with knotted cords. phalocrypts: as, for instance, a mother-of-pearl shell phallocrypt where the inner surface has been decorated with fringe designs in a reddish colour. in one of the ends there is a hole and through it a bunch of fibres have been threaded to fix a cord, made of human hair, to the shell. phallocrypts cannot be worn by the uninitiated and are highly valued by the indigenous aboriginal tribes in north, central and western australia, as well as by those in western queensland, with whom the former barter their goods (r.m.berndt, 1964:102). it is often difficult to distinguish between sacred and profane, for similar objects may have different connotations in neighbouring tribes. indigenous australians wear all kind of things as adornments, whatever they find in their land that is suitable. animal, vegetal and mineral elements are used to decorate their bodies. branches of eucalypts are also used as an important element before ceremonies or when people visit sacred places, to purify both people and places. 3.2 sculptures wooden sculptures are located in the north of australia, especially in north-east coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 arnhem land, barthurst and melville islands, the cape york peninsula and the northwest of western australia. they represent the dreamtime ancestors. many of these sculptures used to be stored and painted again with ochre colours and clay before rituals. they were often secret and could not be seen by non initiated people. (burt, 1977:75). 3.2.1. anthropomorphic sculptures anthropomorphic sculptures are made in western australia, central australia and in north-east arnhem land, bathurst and melville islands as well as in cape york. 3.2.1.1. material the most common material for the sculptures is wood, ironwood. but some are also made with beeswax covered with feather-down. to paint the sculptures they apply the same colours that they use for decorating their body or for their paintings: red and yellow ochre, charcoal black and white from kaolin or pipe clay. the sites at which ochre is quarried are often of important ritual and political significance. 3.2.1.2. style we will comment on two styles: the arnhem land style and the melville and bathurst islands style. 3.2.1.2.1. the arhnem land style the style of the arnhem land sculptures is stiff with straight bodies; a sculptural type distributed throughout indonesia and melanesia. after a figure is carved it is painted red to signify a spirit being in human form, and then a design is added which identifies it as an ancestral being. the paintings of the west tend towards the figurative, and as one moves eastwards, geometric designs become more prominent. the use of cross-hatched patterns is a feature of arnhem land which identifies clans. in the western half of arnhem land cross-hatching is referred to as rarrk, whereas towards the east the patterns are known as miny'tji and dhulang. 3.2.1.2.2. the art of the tiwi the result of isolation is evident in several cultural differences between the tiwi and the mainlanders, and in the development of a number of unique art forms, particularly in sculpture. spectacularly painted poles called tutuni are carved as replicas of the human form, since what the tiwi intend to do is to represent aspects or associations of the deceased around whose graves they are gathered. the tiwi painted figurative sculpture is a development from the pukumani pole tradition, with geometric designs. the ochre used is more friable than the ochre from arnhem land. 3.2.1.3. symbolism sculptured figures represent, as we have said before, the dreamtime people. they are coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 used in ceremonies, as the one to celebrate the birth of a male child called mamurrng. in the bathurst and melville islands the sculptures are used in the funeral rites of the pukumani.the wooden human sculptures of cape york were introduced as part of herocult rituals from the torres strait islands. the human figures, made of beeswax, represent a man or a woman whose death is to be brought about by sorcery. 3.2.2. zoomorphic scultures zoomorphic sculptures are made in the same places as the anthropomorphic sculptures: western australia, central australia and in north-east arnhem land, bathurst and melville islands and cape york. 3.2.2.1. material as in the case of the anthropomorphic sculptures, the material used is wood, ironwood (acacia estrophiolata in the south; erythrophleum chlorostachys in the north) (latz, 1995; v.v.a.a., 1993). some sculptures are also made of beeswax. to paint the sculptures, they apply the same colours that they use for decorating their bodies or for paintings: red and yellow ochre, charcoal black and white from kaolin or pipe clay. the sites where ochre is quarried are often of important ritual and political significance. 3.2.2.2. style it is the same as the style of the anthropomorphic sculptures in arnhem land and melville and bathurst islands. 3.2.2.2.1. the arhnem land style the style is the same as the style of the anthropomorphic sculptures. the paintings of the west tend towards the figurative and, as one moves eastwards, geometric designs become more prominent. the use of cross-hatched patterns is the same as in the case of the anthropomorphic sculptures. the artists represent: bandicoots, dugongs, pelicans, etc. 3.2.2.2.2. art of the tiwi the style is the same as the style of the anthropomorphic sculptures. the artists make sculptures of birds, especially of the jabiru, one of the birds found in water pools. a wide variety of geometric designs is used.the ochre employed is more friable than the one found in arhnem land. 3.2.2.3. symbolism as we have said before, most of the zoomorphic sculptures represent the dreamtime people. they are used in ceremonies, as the jabiru that is used as a ragga during funerary ceremonies called djalambu (allen, 1961:35). 4. conclusion designs are social forms external to the individual but that are in contact with the body. on the other hand, the dreamtime images from which the designs are believed to have originated are private experiences locked inside the body, inside individual consciousness. the designs contain the dreamtime potency in a social form that can also coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 channel it back into individual consciousness via direct sensory contact (munn, 1973:57). narrative, song, designs and storytellig are closely related and they are part of the ceremonies, a process of making visible and giving material embodiment to ancestral beings. as we have pointed out, visual art is one of the ways through which aborigines transmits their culture, law, tradition, ceremonies, generation after generation. body decoration has an important place in the transmission of the culture of the indigenous australians, which they live in the body and the land, not in books. the purpose of paintings is not so much representation but rather the fact of producing an effect, at the same time aesthetic and emotional, where the meaning –association of a totemic name, a mythical story and a reference place or itinerary-is but a moment of the vision in movement of the dreamtime’s space-time (munn, 1973:312). references berndt, catherine h. “women's changing ceremonies in northern australia”, 1, l'homme, cahiers d'etnologie, de geografie et de linguistique. paris: hermann et cia editors, 1950. berndt, ronal m and catherine h. sexual behavior in western arnhem land. new york: ralph linton editor, 1951. burt, ben. aborigines. london: museum of mankind. caruana, wallis. aboriginal art. thames and hudson, 1996. glowczewski, barbara. du revê à la loi chez les aborigènes. paris: presses universitaires de france, ethnologies, 1991. latz, meter. bushfires & bushtuker. aboriginal plant use in central australia. alice spings: iad press, 1995. lockwood, douglas. we, the aborigines. martin montenegro, gustavo. el arte visual de los aborígenes. sydney: photo cards, 1995. mccarthy, frederick d. australian aboriginal decoerative art. sydney: australian museum, v.c.n. blight, government printer, 1964. mountfort, charles p. mythes et rites des aborigines d’australie central. paris: payot, 1953. munn, nancy d. walbiri iconography. london: cornell university press, 1973. stokes, deirdre. desert dreamings, melbourne: rigby, 1993. tamisari, franca. “body, vision and moviment: in the footprints of the ancestors.” oceania, 68, 1998, pp. 249-270. v.v.a.a. tradicional aboriginal medicines in the northern territory of australia. darwin: conservation commission of the northern territory of australia, 1993. acknowledgements centre d’estudis australians/observatori austràlia teodora gambetta coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 dolors soriano, phd in ancient history, is the curator of the museu etnològic de barcelona where she has worked since 1972, classifying and studying the collections of material culture. she organizes exhibitions in the museum and other venues and she is in charge of the photographic archive of the museum. she is currently doing research and participating in projects about australia and about vegetal fibres and basketwork. she is a member of icme/icom (international council of ethnological museums), ica (catalan institute of anthropology) and cea (australian studies center). victòria medina is an archaeologist and phd student of the department of prehistory, ancient history and archaeology of the university of barcelona. she is currently completing her doctoral thesis on nutrition in the past; on the diet and feeding habits of the first hominids that lived during the plio-pleistocene in the archaeological site of peninj (lake natron, tanzania). for a number of years she has been doing research and fieldwork in africa and australia participating in projects of ethnoarchaeological research. she is a member of cea (australian studies center), seminari d’estudis i recerques prehistòriques (ub) and fent història. microsoft word jennifer wilson 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 176 the experience of being injured: an otherwise perspective jennifer wilson abstract: through myth, history and memory we strive to represent to ourselves humanity’s traumatic sufferings. myth, history and memory, personal and societal, are the storehouses for accounts of traumatic injury and its aftermath, and our efforts at redress and retribution through or outside of culturally determined juridico-political systems. thus stories are made that perpetuate and comply with established cultural norms, and our experiences of injury, retribution and forgiveness are contained within established frameworks, both secular and religious keywords: remembering trauma; the moral predicament of being injured; retribution and forgiveness. in this paper i would like to suggest an otherwise framing of accounts of traumatic injury, following judith butler’s identification of ‘…the moral predicament that emerges as a consequence of being injured’ (2003: 59). the moral predicament common to anyone who has ever been injured is the quite natural desire for redress and retribution, and the conflicting moral need, often unrecognised, to avoid exchanging the role of victim for that of perpetrator by acting on that retributive desire. as butler observes, the desire for retribution can be overwhelming, and thoroughly understandable, however, as the mahatma also observed, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. another way of dealing with the consequences of harm must be found if the cycle of injury is to be broken. perhaps our most powerful stories, the stories that are most frequently recorded and remembered by humanity, are stories of injury of some kind, and its consequences, individually, collectively and generationally. in this paper i would like to start a conversation about the perhaps unacknowledged and often only partially recognised circumstances in and from which myth, history and memory are constructed, circumstances that have a powerful influence upon the content of our rememberings, and our understanding and interpretation of them. butler’s moral predicament, then, is the tension and conflict between resentment and the desire for commensurate retribution on the one hand, and the moral need not to become a perpetrator of injury on the other. to accomplish revenge, the victim has no choice but to view the perpetrator as a means to an end, the end in this case being the satisfaction of the desire for revenge. this reduction of a human being to merely a means to an end is what has allowed the original injury to be inflicted. it is very difficult, as philosophers such as martha nussbaum and emmanuel levinas have frequently observed, to inflict injury on the other if we recognise the common vulnerability and humanity we share as copyright ©2009 jennifer wilson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 177 embodied beings. butler’s moral predicament reveals itself to be complex and challenging for a victim. as well as being harmed in the first place, the victim now has these ethical and moral matters to consider if an on-going cycle of violence is to be avoided. myth, history, and memory are bulging with sagas of on-going, cyclical violence in which the recognition of the humanity of the other is continually suspended, or entirely absent, in order that what is felt as justified revenge can be enacted. the urge to act and the urge to refrain from acting create a disturbing conflict between opposing desires. this tension creates a site of great intensity. it is the site butler calls ‘the region of the un-willed’ (2003: 58). that is, injury has come upon me against my own volition. through injury, i have been thrust into this region of the un-willed. it is from just this traumatic and unpromising site that butler argues ‘…a model of ethical capaciousness…’(2003: 60) might emerge. this model of ethical capaciousness, she continues: ‘…understands the pull of the claim, and resists the pull at the same time, providing a certain ambivalent gesture as the action of ethics itself’ (ibid: 60). that is, on the one hand we are experiencing the suffering that comes as a consequence of being harmed, and on the other, we are experiencing the tension of holding the opposing demands of revenge, and deciding not to act on that desire for revenge. the ensuing ambivalence is a signifier of the presence of the abject, for ambivalence is one of abjection’s characteristics. it is interesting to note that butler speaks of the ambivalent gesture being the action of ethics itself, and that ambivalence is one of the characteristics of kristeva’s theories of the abject. i will briefly explore this at first blush, unlikely connection between abjection and ethics. the experience of injury is always traumatic to some degree. it is an experience that catapults one out of the everyday, an experience that indeed ruptures the every day, breaking boundaries that have, up to the point of the trauma, been assumed to be inviolable, if indeed they have ever considered at all. ‘…the incandescent states of a boundary-subjectivity that i have called abjection, is the crying-out theme of suffering horror,’ kristeva writes (1982: 141). the abject is the place where meaning collapses, the abject ‘…disturbs identity, system and order…it does not respect borders, positions, rules…’ she explains (ibid: 5). the abject is experiential: it resists mediation. the abject, it can be argued, is untranslatable: one can know it only through feeling, physical and emotional. attempts at representation must always fall short. there’s a general acknowledgement that certain situations are beyond representation, that is, beyond the capacity of language and imagination to contain. how does one adequately represent the horror of mass murder and genocide; how does one adequately represent the terrible suffering of an abused infant? myth, history and memory are crammed with inadequately represented accounts of suffering and horror, of the abject, of un-willed injuries. the fact that horrors continue in the world, virtually unabated, is testament to our general inability to adequately represent them, and to resist retributive action, whether on the individual or the societal scale. however, the site of the un-willed and the abject is not the only site to which we gain entry through extraordinary events. the philosopher kant describes ‘…the awakening of a feeling of a super-sensible faculty within us…’(2008) that is brought about by tremendous upheaval, by coming face to face with events of such magnitude that our minds cannot fully comprehend them, and our imaginations quail in the face of them. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 178 this, i suggest, is the site of the sublime. it is generally assumed that the abject and the sublime are oppositional, the one having to do with horror, the other with joyous transcendence. but they have in common a quality that is beyond the human capacity for representation. both are approached through extraordinary, boundary transgressing events, both require of us a super-sensible faculty that is not required by the everyday, a faculty that by its very nature breaks us open to previously unknown experiences, for better or for worse. greatness and magnitude are characteristics of the sublime. great, not in the sense of terrific, or good, as we commonly use the word, but in the sense of being too massive to be contained within language, in the sense of an enormity that exceeds our ability to describe and portray. the sublime is, like the abject, a site of ambivalence and contains within it the conflicting feelings of joy and fear, delight and terror, creating, like the abject, a tension of opposites. like the abject, the sublime is unknowable. it is a place of previously unimagined and unimaginable possibility. it is the place where known meaning collapses, and as a consequence, the new may emerge, indeed must emerge if the experience is to be survived. for example, in contemporary myth, history and memory, the events of september 11, which involved the destruction of the twin towers of the world trade centre in new york and the loss of thousands of lives, was controversially represented by some commentators as horror pushed to the point of sublime beauty. karlheinz stockhausen famously, or infamously was reported in the new york times as having described 9/11 as …the greatest work of art there has ever been. that minds could achieve something in one act…there are people who are so concentrated on one performance, and then 5000 people are chased into the after-life…this is the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos (cited in tommasini, 2001). stockhausen was clearly approaching the events of 9/11 from an aesthetic, and not an ethical position. whether one agrees with, or is outraged by these sentiments that conflate art with terror, their expression can be attributed to the magnitude, the greatness, the enormity, of the event. it was, and remains, incomprehensible. no one has come anywhere near an adequate representation of it in any medium. the spectacle of such shocking and unexpected destruction, of skyscrapers brought to smoking rubble by aircraft flown by fanatical perpetrators exceeded anything thus far known in the american homeland. the magnitude of the event somehow took us beyond horror into a kind of super horror that defied our established boundaries of what we had understood as horror up to that day. (i wish to note here that i am in no way suggesting that the terrorist attacks on the usa are more tragic or worthy of our horrified response than attacks anywhere else in the world, no matter by whom or on whom they are perpetrated). it is just such an extremity of horror that can be considered artistically sublime, in the sense of the sublime as exceeding known representation. the sublime as transgressive of all known boundaries. the sublime as that terrifying tipping point when the magnitude of the event leaves us unable to accept the evidence of our senses. there is coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 179 an awe-full exhilaration, a terror that rises in us and carries us way beyond the everyday, that is evoked by a spectacle of horror on such a scale. people did attempt to find expression for these feelings: the destruction of the towers was described as visually stunning, awe-inspiring, and so on. there was a terrible beauty in the stark images of steel girders tilting in the smoke-filled air like the broken teeth of fallen giants. any representation of those events as beautiful was and remains deeply offensive to many people. the idea of finding beauty in images that signify mass slaughter is difficult to accept. it can be misunderstood as admiration, where decency and ethics demand that there can be none. and beauty is deeply linked with goodness and truth in western culture. and yet, as i watched over and over again the images from those events through the days and weeks that followed i felt, with a great deal of guilt and shame, shaken each time by their terrible beauty. stockhausen elaborated his perspective as follows: ‘…some artists also try to cross the boundaries of what could ever be possible or imagined, to wake us up, to open another world for us’ (tommasini, 2001). this observation is perhaps the crux of the matter. in the crossing of forbidden boundaries we gain entry into the country of the abject, and the land of the sublime. kant’s super-sensible faculty is awoken within us through such transgressions, and we enter an unimagined world. there was a sense in which many of us whose lives had so far been free of political terrorism, felt as if the world had been profoundly and irrevocably changed for us by the events of 9/11, and that we had entered an unimagined universe. the 9/11 terrorists thrust us into this other world, where we remain, and now we must dwell in it as best we can because there is no going back. this is how i understand stockhausen’s observations, though i am unable to replace the word terrorist with the word artist. in such a world, ethics can be and must be revisioned. butler suggests that ‘…it may be that the very way we respond to injury offers the chance we have to become human’ (2003: 58). that is, it is in the region of un-willed harm that we suffer that we might discover our humanity. perhaps our humanity resides in how we resolve the moral predicament that faces us as a consequence of being injured. perhaps in realising the ethical capaciousness that allows us to refuse to become retributive perpetrators, we make this new world into which we have been thrust by injury, a safer world. the discourses of trauma, which are inevitably abject, and the discourses of the sublime can be seen to intersect in these extreme events. it was not uncommon for those who had suffered injury, or lost loved ones through the events of 9/11 to say, when interviewed, that they did not wish to take revenge against the perpetrators, that the horror must stop. perhaps in doing so, they validated butler’s theory that the experience of injury can indeed catapult one into an entirely other level of experience from which a new ethical capaciousness may emerge. this is not to recommend the perpetrating and the suffering of trauma. however it is to observe that in our current evolution, trauma would seem to be a prime entry point into an intensified consciousness. therefore, how we represent trauma in myth, history and memory, can be seen as crucial to our continuing ethical development. for example, in australia there is an on-going history war, a battle as to the ‘truth’ of the circumstances of the first white settlement, or invasion, depending on your position. significant coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 180 histories have long been omitted from these accounts: the oral histories of indigenous australians, for example, and the experiences of women in those early days. there is a great deal of myth, history and the recorded memories of some of those who were present, but it is the voices that have been silenced by selective recording that speak most eloquently, most startlingly. in itself, this silencing is an unethical act with serious ramifications. to silence those who have endured traumatic injury is to further abuse and injure them: myth, history and memory all too frequently, in their silences, in their gaps and their avoidances, abuse and injure. the foucauldian question must always be asked: how did these accounts come to be written? under what conditions and circumstances were these myths, memories and histories constructed, and by whom? these are profoundly ethical questions about representation and who is making it. what for stockhausen is a sublime work of art, is for the families and friends who lost loved ones, and everyone who suffered trauma as a result of 9/11, an event that cannot be in any way regarded as sublime. but is stockhausen’s perspective less true? is there perhaps a great mystery at the heart of his observations, a transgressive mystery that it is important for us to come to grips with in our myths, histories and memories of the events of that day? i only raise these questions: i haven’t found the answers. cultural studies theorist joanna zylinska suggests that …the discourses of trauma and the sublime…come together in their attempt to describe the difficulty of, or struggle with, representation – a struggle that profoundly transforms the self’s experience of itself and opens it to ethics’ (2005: 68). this statement of zylinska’s seems to correspond with butler’s region of the un-willed, of unsought injury, a region where the discourse is necessarily traumatic, and from which can emerge an ethical capaciousness. what both writers seem to be suggesting is that it is from this site of the sublime, and the traumatic/abject, an ethics of responsibility to and for other might emerge. perhaps there is some connection between the awesome beauty stockhausen saw in the smoking ruins of the world trade centre, and the moral and ethical beauty of the emergence from traumatic injury of a kind of forgiveness that ends the cyclical violence that so much of our history, myth and memory consist of and perhaps, in some instances, perpetuate. such an ethics, if humanity was able to embrace them, might prevent the whole world being blinded. references kant, i. (1790) http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/part7.html rendered into html on sun apr 9 14:22:37 2000, by steve thomas for the university of adelaide library electronic texts collection. kristeva, j. the powers of horror: an essay on abjection. new york: columbia university press, 1982. tommasini, a. ¨the devil made him do it¨ new york times. september 30, 2001. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9b05e2d8123af933a0575ac0a96 79c8b63>. zylinska, j. the ethics of cultural studies. london: continuum, 2005. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 181 jennifer wilson recently submitted her phd thesis, entitled the practice of goodness. she has taught literary theory and creative writing at southern cross university, nsw australia. she has published short stories and poetry, and is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays on forgiveness, and domestic and political violence. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 the northern territory intervention: the symbolic value of ‘authentic’ indigeneity and impoverishment, and the interests of the (progressive) liberal left mitchell rolls abstract: in august 2007 the federal howard government announced the northern territory national emergency response, known more prosaically as ‘the intervention’. this initiative was hurriedly implemented to address a broad range of issues highlighted in ‘the report of the northern territory board of inquiry into the protection of aboriginal children from sexual abuse’. the report bore a title expressing a traditional yolngu belief (north east arnhem land) that for some unexplained reason had been translated into a language from the central desert. this was paraphrased in the emotive and cloying english subtitle ‘little children are sacred,’ and it is the latter by which the report is widely known. this paper does not canvass the ‘intervention’ itself, but a specific albeit long standing issue it brought to the fore. implicitly if not explicitly, many critics find in the ostensibly classical aboriginal cultures of remote and impoverished communities an authentic indigeneity. for a range of interests arising most often external to the communities concerned, there is a reluctance to countenance any prospective change that could stem the replenishing of these supposed wellsprings of originary authenticity. in this respect both settler and aboriginal critics have found common ground in arguing that they represent the interests of the communities on whose behalf they supposedly speak. in elaborating these issues the following paper discusses the divisions between opponents and supporters of the ‘emergency response’, the tension between those with investments in the issues of rights, racism, and identity, and the interests of those experiencing the impoverished conditions of so many remote and regional communities. central to these debates is the fraught issue of who can speak for whom, with an aboriginal elite finding their authority as spokespeople challenged by those whose interests they presume to represent. these issues help explain why so many of the aboriginal elite and the liberal left in general emphasise racism and discrimination over class, and why a politics of difference is privileged over culture. keywords: aborigines, culture, identity, tradition, race, symbolism, class copyright©2014 mitchell rolls. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 in the final lecture of the australian broadcasting commission’s 1968 boyer lectures, the anthropologist w.e.h. stanner related a poignant story concerning his seeing an ‘elderly widower … destroying something in a fire’. upon questioning the man advised stanner ‘he was “killing his dreaming.”’ explaining the gravity of this action stanner relates: there is nothing within our ken that remotely resembles it. he was destroying the symbol that linked him with his country, with the source of his own life, and with all the continuities of his people. it was a kind of personal suicide, an act of severance, before he came in to find a new life and a new identity amongst us.i a second man stanner knew, suffering the same losses of clan and country as the first, brought his family ‘in’ so that his children could go to school, so that they could ‘find a new life and a new identity.’ii stanner provides these accounts not to highlight profound loss, but as a way of illustrating two undervalued ‘aspects of the aboriginal struggle.’ these being: ‘[t]heir continued will to survive, the other their continued efforts to come to terms with us’.iii conspicuous in these descriptions is the sense of indigenous agency. notwithstanding the exigencies arising from dispossession and the typical destruction wrought by settler societies of the social, environmental and economic conditions that had long sustained indigenous life, these are not the stories of a people quietly acquiescing under the weight of an accepted fate, but instead of individuals exercising agency in the context of new challenges. whereas a short time following stanner’s lectures conventional schooling would be widely criticised for supposedly transmitting to aborigines specific values and knowledge alien and threatening to their cultures,iv there is recognition (and no doubt some hope) in the actions of the men as cited by stanner that education will equip children for a future beyond that experienced within the vestiges of classical aboriginal culture and that experienced within the dispossessed margins. if stanner’s account is correct, the individuals did not seek to deploy the status of victimhood by way of critique of their circumstances, nor was stanner tempted to attribute such status or to exploit glib sentiment.v the 2012 northern territory (nt) election (saturday 25 august) saw several aborigines contest and win seats for the conservative country-liberal party (clp). the contestants included former labor party supporters and members and one—alison nampitjinpa anderson—was a former labor minister. the labor party, both at the federal and state/territory level, was long regarded as the party that best represented indigenous interests. whilst generally true, support for labor in the northern territory was strongest in remote communities and regions, and electorally these were labor’s strongholds. yet in the 2012 elections it was these regions that delivered government to the clp. at the last clp victory in 1997 (labor held office from 2001 to 2012), of the seven seats labor retained five were in the remote and pastoral districts and two only were in darwin. of the eight seats won by labor in the 2012 clp victory, two are in the remote districts with the other six being darwin-based.vi that there are leaders and prominent members of remote aboriginal communities, comprising former labor party supporters and even a former labor member of the northern territory legislative assembly, seeking candidacy, winning seats and being instrumental in delivering office to a party long thought to be inimical to aboriginal interests, raises issues relevant not only to the actions of the men cited above, but also to the disputatious reaction to the ‘emergency response’ in the northern territory.vii coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 138 in a speech delivered in march 2006 the shadow minister for indigenous affairs, chris evans, reflected on the ideological convictions of the major australian political parties vis-à-vis indigenous policy. neither party’s stance, evans argued, effected the betterment of indigenous welfare. whereas the conservative coalition were pursuing practical measures as ameliorative redress, when in government labor had pursued an agenda that focused on rights, reconciliation and selfdetermination. we invested a great deal of energy and political capital into this agenda … but labor has been too complacent about our record, and self-satisfied with claims to moral superiority. we put too much faith in the capacity of the rights agenda, self-determination and reconciliation to overcome indigenous disadvantage.viii evans warned that both labor and the coalition should ‘be held to account and ideology removed as the driver of indigenous public policy’.ix when a little over 12 months later the coalition government announced the northern territory national emergency response, any hope of ideological convictions being shelved let alone softening were dashed. convictions instead hardened and became increasingly polarised. this was notwithstanding the fact that federally the ‘intervention’ enjoyed bi-partisan support, and that the subsequent labor government continued and extended many of its measures. it was beyond parliamentary cloisters where the clash of ideologies manifested. most shrill were the so-called ‘progressives’ on the left, charged with the fervour of their long unchallenged ‘self-satisfied … claims to moral superiority.’ but the clash of ideologies also emerged in other contexts. latent tensions erupted between the professional class of urban-based southern aborigines, many of whom are lightor white-skinned, and selfdescribed ‘bush blacks’, most of whom are dark-skinned. the capacity for (and propensity of) the former to speak for the latter came under increasing challenge. many whites too who for long thought they were at the vanguard of advocating for indigenous interests similarly found themselves the target of searing criticism. marcia langton, for example, accused the high profile members behind the women for wik group who campaign for aboriginal rights (and who are voluble in their opposition to the intervention) of peddling ‘failed sentimental policies … that utterly dehumanise’ those they are supposedly speaking up for.x writing of culture, identity and diversity, the princeton scholar k. anthony appiah notes how despite ‘the fact … that the black middle class’ in the united states is ‘larger and doing better than it ever has; … it is largely people from that class, not the poor, who have led the fight for the recognition of a distinctive african-american cultural heritage’.xi appiah wonders ‘whether there isn’t a connection between the thinning of the cultural content of identities and the rising stridency of their claims’.xii in part provoked by a ‘narcissism of minor differences’,xiii similarly strident claims—together with expressions of antipathy and sometimes explicit racism against ‘whites’—are commonplace on university campuses (and other institutions) in both the us and australia, despite universities having a suite of programmes and initiatives in place to address the needs and sensitivities of black (us) and aboriginal and torres strait islander students (australia), and despite providing one of the most racially and culturally tolerant institutional environments.xiv it was experience of indigenous-specific policies and initiatives like these and the manner in which they could be and are exploited that led kerryn pholi, who describes herself as ‘a person of aboriginal descent,’ to burn her ‘proof of aboriginality’ letter.xv she recalls working in identified positionsxvi in government jobs, where as: coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 139 a professional aborigine, i could harangue a room full of people with real qualifications and decades of experience with whatever selfserving, uninformed drivel that happened to pop into my head. for this nonsense i would be rapturously applauded, never questioned, and paid well above my qualifications and experience.xvii further, pholi knows she was ‘a party to unfairness, abuses of power’ and had ‘the power to ruin a career with an accusation of “insensitivity”’.xviii these are familiar issues to those working in the institutional settings of government and universities, where what has become known as the ‘race card’ can be and is often adroitly deployed in the self-serving (and often racist) manner described by pholi. the strident activism of the black middleclass and appiah’s discussion is pertinent to the heated debate concerning the ‘intervention’ or ‘stronger futures’ as it is now known. the schism between the (predominantly) urban black (though often lightor whiteskinned) middle class and spokespeople from remote constituencies—‘bush blacks as they call themselves’xix— manifests in language that is frequently intemperate, personal and malicious. somewhat ironically, many settler intellectuals and advocates for indigenous issues who are highly critical of white political elites and what they see as this class’s effacement of aboriginal interests enjoin with aboriginal elites in disparaging and dismissing so-called community voices (the ‘bush blacks’) who dare to articulate an opinion that differs from their own. their support for the marginalised and impoverished is only sustained insofar as there is convergence between their politics, a convergence forged through similar educational trajectories and the hegemony of specific discourses about human rights, minorities, and culture.xx in a searing rebuke to these aligned interests noel pearson, a prominent aboriginal leader, describes the constituency who holds them as being ‘morally vain about race and history’. ‘its members’ he says, largely come from the liberal left and are morally certain about right and wrong and ready to ascribe blame. for them, issues of race and history are a means of gaining the upper hand over their political and cultural opponents. the primary concern of the morally vain is not the plight or needs of those who suffer racism and oppression, but rather their view of themselves, their understanding of the world and belief in their superiority over their opponents.xxi a well publicised incident concerning professor larissa behrendt and comments she made on social media site twitter is illustrative. in april 2011 bess price, a central australian aboriginal leader and a partner with her husband in jajirdi consultants, which offers warlpiri language services and cross cultural training amongst other things, appeared on the abc television programme q&a.xxii asked by the host if she still supported the northern territory intervention price replied: i am for the intervention because i’ve seen progress. i’ve seen women who now have voices. they can speak for themselves and they are standing up for their rights. children are being fed and young people more or less know how to manage their lives. that’s what’s happened since the intervention.xxiii now living in alice springs, price is from yuendumu where she is variously described as having been born ‘under a tree’xxiv or ‘in a humpy’.xxv yuendumu is a community that frequently appears in the press for a range of incidents relating to dysfunction, the coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 140 precipitating factors for some of which the ‘intervention’ would supposedly address. as with many other grass roots remote community members, particularly the women, price is generally supportive of many of the measures of the intervention, though this support is by no means unqualified. nevertheless, price’s comments were sufficient to prompt behrendt to tweet that she ‘had watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and i’m sure it was less offensive than bess price’.xxvi on national abc radio the next morning a disappointed price said ‘i just want my kids to have the same opportunities that larissa has had’.xxvii behrendt, who has been admitted to practice as a solicitor and barrister (nsw & act) and who is currently professor of law and director of research at the jumbunna indigenous house of learning at the university of technology, sydney, holds degrees from the university of new south wales and a phd from harvard. growing up in sydney’s southern suburbs (cronulla), she is the beneficiary of education at leading institutions, and an outspoken critic of ‘the intervention’. professor marcia langton, an anthropologist, renowned scholar and prominent advocate for indigenous people, wrote a scathing response to behrendt’s comment for the australian newspaper. langton contrasted price’s experience in and knowledge of the poorest remote aboriginal communities, the conditions endured, the abuses suffered by the women and children, her long term advocacy for her people and work towards addressing these problems, with behrendt’s ignorance born out of privilege, tertiary education, and a cosseted city lifestyle. this incident, langton proclaimed, is an exemplar of the wide cultural, moral and increasingly political rift between urban, left-wing, activist aboriginal women and the bush women who witness the horrors of life in their communities, much of which is arrogantly denied by the former.xxviii it is here too where there is convergence between the progressive politics of predominantly urban-based, middleclass, educated black and white, and their respective interests in remote aboriginal communities. as pearson dryly observes, where behrendt ‘is coming from is where most black and white people of her inner-city intellectual milieu come from. she can hardly be condemned for holding views that are de rigeur in progressive society and politics’.xxix whilst on the one hand deploring the enduring and seemingly intractable conditions (housing, unemployment, educational standards, poverty, poor health, child sexual abuse, distress and so on), that is the lot of many on numerous indigenous communities, there is on the other a discernible interest in maintaining communities that are not only ostensibly traditional but also impoverished. this concern is primarily motivated by interests external to the communities themselves, as evident in the following exchange. the senior yolgnu (northern territory) leader galarrwuy yunupingu, for long a trenchant critic of ‘sit-down’ welfare, describes it as ‘a killer’ of his people. yunupingu regards welfare as one of the underlying factors precipitating community dysfunction. in its place he advocates ‘real education’ and full participation in the broader economy. yunupingu, like pearson, believes these are the avenues towards achieving the strength, resilience and independence necessary to sustain vibrant and enduring native cultures.xxx michael mansell, a lawyer and leader of the tasmanian aboriginal centre, responded to yunupingu in a letter to the australian newspaper: [w]elfare payments, [mansell wrote], is no more a killing of culture than are toyotas, rifles, jobs or tv. real education, as mr yunupingu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/university_of_technology,_sydney coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 141 puts it, is another form of killing a culture, not a saviour of it. white schools for aborigines has its value but can also lead to loss of language, religion and alienation from aboriginal values and authority.xxxi for activists like mansell, remote aboriginal communities are abstractions, idealised sites upon which various interests are grafted. one can sense in much advocacy reputedly on behalf of remote aborigines a palpable fear that these communities will seek—like the two aforementioned men cited by stanner—opportunities beyond that which they are currently afforded. in addition to tiring of being spoken for instead of listened to by southerners, the quest to secure the broader opportunities that education and skills provide was an impetus behind those aborigines like price who contested the 2012 northern territory election. the australian newspaper reported (albeit derivatively and in clichés) the tiwi islander candidate francis xavier maralampuwi, as having: a dream … that his people rise up from the plains of disadvantage and ascend the foothills of training and education to the top of the mountain—to the promised land where jobs and independence beckon.xxxii if this was to be realised change to the cultural fabric of the tiwi is inevitable. at the same time any such change would provide for the tiwi being better able to determine their futures (both as a community and as individuals), which is precisely the kind of empowerment sought by yunupingu, pearson, langton and many others, including those on remote communities and many supporters of the ‘intervention’. significantly, in the northern territory election in ‘each of the four seats where the clp fielded traditional, cultural and, above all, locally born and reared candidates, it won against less traditionalseeming aboriginal labor candidates or members, often without indigenous language’.xxxiii as aikman reports, the ‘significance of tradition, culture, language and local origins in each of these results cannot be underestimated’.xxxiv the etic interest in maintaining the ostensibly classical cultural forms still extant on remote and impoverished aboriginal communities predates the more recent criticism of the ‘intervention’. in an article for the age in 2001, and suspicious that assimilationist rhetoric was gaining a foothold, robert manne wrote of the possibility of remote communities being destroyed, and that ‘one distinctive expression of human life, with its own forms of language, culture, spirituality and sensibility, will simply become extinct’.xxxv in making this statement manne (probably unintentionally) casts doubt on the claims to distinctiveness made by many aborigines, including those living contemporary urban middleclass lives. manne’s concern locates authentic aboriginal culture in distant, relatively isolated communities. despite whatever claims are made for cultural distinctiveness—predominantly articulated as they are through the trope of identity politics and minority rights—manne is not according the urban-based black middle-class the substance of their claims. there are also traces in manne’s concern of the impetus behind so-called salvage anthropology, and the long dated notion of establishing reserves where aborigines could be spared the travails of alien contact so as to enjoy their ‘distinctive expression of human life’ free of corrosive influence. strehlow spoke in 1963 of ‘the old aboriginal world … now facing its final twilight’, and the notion that research had to be undertaken ‘before it was too late’ was for decades the catalyst for anthropological and ethnographic documentation.xxxvi already in 1899 baldwin spencer was of the belief that ‘the time in coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 142 which it will be possible to investigate the australian native tribes is rapidly drawing to a close’.xxxvii for early to mid-twentieth-century anthropologists the quest was to document what they believed were originary forms of indigenous social and cultural life. for today’s aborigines from urban environments and / or who are removed from more traditionallyoriented communities, remote groups still on their land and of recognisable phenotype and who are still in possession of an array of readily identifiable classical cultural markers (language, ceremony, land, community and so on) serve as the touchstone for their own sense of authenticity and identity. to take but one example, anita heiss, the aboriginal novelist, spokesperson and adept user of social mediaxxxviii defiantly proclaims on the opening page of her am i black enough for you? that ‘i am an urban, beachside blackfella, a concrete koori with westfield dreaming, and i apologise to no-one’.xxxix heiss makes much of her loathing of camping and the outdoors in general (if it involves ‘roughing’ it), and jests that ‘five stars are the only stars i want to sleep under’.xl her story as a ‘proud wiradjuri woman’ is one of ‘not being from the desert, not speaking my traditional language and not wearing ochre’.xli but ‘country’ is invoked as a signifier of unique indigenous place and heritage, and by extension, identity. whilst ‘greater sydney’ is her home, ‘it is not my country. my spirit belongs and will finally rest with those of my ancestors back in wiradjuri ngurumbang (country)’.xlii it is arguable that the sense of ‘country’ a reader is supposed to glean from mentions such as this is reliant upon readers ‘knowing’ of the ‘special relationship’ aborigines are said to enjoy with the country of their livelihoods (in the broadest sense) as experienced by pre-contact cultures, and as codified in land rights legislation and the native title act.xliii dallas scott notes how many aborigines distant from stereotypical cultural markers (and often those representing or speaking for aborigines in various institutional settings) ‘talk in circles, often spending an inordinate amount of time describing small, inconsequential things. like a shield they once saw, or an elder they spoke to. often, they’ll use a small smattering of an aboriginal language … to punctuate their speech with more credibility’.xliv having spoken with an ‘elder’, or having an ‘elder’s’ permission to utter something or perform an activity are typical statements of both cultural gravitas and authenticity.xlv so too is salting both speeches and text with words drawn from aboriginal languages (as instanced above). to cite another example, a flyer promoting an australian institute of aboriginal and torres strait islander studies seminar was titled ‘nayri kati: an indigenous quantitative methodology’. the presenter, who identifies as ‘a trawlwoolway woman of the pymmerrairrener nation of north east tasmania’, claimed in the abstract that ‘in this paper i outline nayri kati (good numbers in palawa kani tasmanian language) my quantitative methodology that constructs all stages of the research practice through an indigenous lens’.xlvi the evocative term ‘community’, like ‘country’ and claims to having spoken with an elder or sprinkling indigenous words throughout one’s work, is another of the devices deployed to invoke gravitas, authenticity and a sense of indigenous place. but as scott quips, the evocative invocation of ‘community’ often refers to a context far more familiar—canberra for instance— than the signifier conjures.xlvii the cultural imprimatur sought through invocations like these is not through the flesh and blood of an intimate connection with those still living a recognisably distinctive cultural life, or living such a life oneself, but rather through the weight of semiotic significance, the implicit pointers to a classical heritage that these signs evince: dark skin, language, ceremony, dance, coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 143 cicatrices, ochre, painting, community, land, spiritual depth, and culturally distinctive ways of apprehending the world and relating to it. aborigines who have no embrace of classical culture or indigenous language (but who enjoy the general lifestyle and full range of opportunities available to the middleclass), and who are often spokespeople on indigenous issues within universities and the public sector, rely on discourses on racism, human rights, minorities, culture and a suite of tropes gleaned from postcolonial scholarship and identity politics with which to forge and defend their identity, and voice their opinion. memories of being identified as indigenous in the schoolyard, classroom and when growing up and bearing the brunt of racist taunts come to the fore. on an sbs programme comprising an indigenous panel and a mostly indigenous participatory audience discussing the issue of skin colour, identity, and the divide between southern aborigines and those in remote australia the white-skinned aboriginal lawyer and university of melbourne academic mark mcmillan argued that aboriginality was not based on however one looked, but on ‘how they’ve lived their life’.xlviii however, it was experiences of racism that mcmillan emphasised, not cultural or ‘way of life’ markers: i have seen my family be spat at, i've been, when i grew up, i was the albino boong. there is absolutely a lived experience that comes with aboriginality and that is not predicated on skin colour and yet we are all out here saying, ‘but you, looking whiter than me, have had a more privileged existence than me.’ and i rally against that understanding because we are aboriginal by definition because of what’s been imposed but it is also because of the way other people have treated us and our families.xlix the power of the allegation of having experienced racism to provoke an empathetic response, and the difficulty in sensitively and compassionately unpacking and critiquing claims made contingent on that experience is perhaps one reason why as a device it is so often deployed. nevertheless dallas scott, an eloquent contributor to these debates through his blog ‘the black steam train’, and who like mcmillan was one of the indigenous panellists on the above sbs programme, puts such claims into sharp relief: overhearing a racist joke or comment is so far removed from being rejected dozens of times for rental properties or jobs for no other reason than the way you look … having two people in primary school call you a name after you told them you are aboriginal is a walk in the park compared to having that label applied to you almost every day, and that label sticking with you long past the days of the schoolyard, without having to utter a word about your heritage to anyone.l as scott is suggesting, for many the slights and discrimination of being othered is an experience reliant on those individuals othering themselves in order to construct and sustain an identity not otherwise apparent. critique of these proclaiming practices, no matter how rigorously objective and sensitively handled, invites strategic offence to be taken. the stanford university academic shelby steele discusses how blacks in the us in the 1960s would deploy ‘race’ in conventional settings almost as a parlour game: those were the days of flagellatory white guilt; it was such great fun to pinion some professor or housewife or, best of all, a large group of coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 144 remorseful whites, with the knowledge of both their racism and their denial of it.li these ‘power moves’, steele writes, ‘are the underdog’s bite’.lii however, for middleclass blacks (and australian aborigines of the middleclass) the complaint of discrimination and resultant disadvantage is harder to sustain, and the values peculiar to this class are at odds with ‘an emphasis on ethnic consciousness over individualism … [and] an implied separatism’.liii whereas class was in the heady days of the 1960s (us) and 1970s (australia) subjugated to the power inherent in racial unity in order to maximise political leverage, the transition of the black middleclass out of the very conditions that gave rise to the moral authority and political identity forged in the ‘common experience of oppression’ and victimisation,liv has also cleaved this group from a powerful source of their collective identity. as steele notes, ‘to overcome marginal status, the middle-class black had to identify with a degree of victimization that was beyond his [sic] actual experience’.lv this situation has led to some black intellectuals being nostalgic for jim crow: they’re nostalgic … not exactly for racism but for the distinctive social practices … that the resistance to racism helped create. on the one hand, jim crow impoverished and disempowered an entire community; on the other, it solidified that community’s identity as a community. the creation of a distinctive african american culture was thus both a consequence of racism and a kind of compensation for it.lvi this helps explain the propensity of predominantly middleclass southern-based aborigines to emphasise racism (over class) and their own experiences of discrimination (as noted above).lvii it also helps to explain why identity (if not race) is privileged over culture. although deploying notions of race and assertions of identity permit allusions to cultural distinctiveness, where such distinctiveness is not readily apparent (amongst the light-skinned urban-based middleclass for example), race and identity become the scaffolding upon which generalist cultural claims are supposed. the discourses and epithets of racism and discrimination are also more easily acquired. this is because of their ubiquitousness and the demotic ease with which these usually un-theorised terms superficially can be understood—and more powerfully deployed due to the inflammatory nature of the charge. cultural esotery is not so readily deployed, particularly if one’s class or distance from one’s supposed cultural base keeps one at a remove from the actual or putative sites of cultural production and learning. on the other hand, white professionals, academics, among others, who have profound knowledge of australian indigenous cultures—who often have long affiliation and intimacies with communities and individuals sometimes spanning decades, who sometimes themselves are the mothers and fathers of indigenous children, and some of whom are fluent in one or more native languages—are often treated with contempt or have their expertise dismissed. this is because they possess (or might do so) understandings that are contrary to the ‘cultural knowledge’ uttered by those aborigines at a distance or long removed from the source of the ‘traditional’ knowledge they propound.lviii remote aborigines stress the long, arduous and slow processes of cumulative instruction and passage through initiatory stages essential to acquiring the sort of knowledge now claimed by others.lix as argued by lynne hume, coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 145 [t]here is a shift from the acquisition of knowledge gained through complete immersion in aboriginal law pertaining to locale and ‘looking after country’ by being there, to a type of distanced affective intuitive knowledge. the connection, or spiritual continuity, is now being professed through blood links, intimating a kind of intuitive, or genetic, transmission of spiritual knowledge.lx although few ever point to the disparities between claims made and the actual contexts from which those claims are supposedly drawn—and it is certainly arguable that these disparities should be raised—the fear of the emperor’s expose remains. aborigines from remote australia, such as bess price, represent an even greater threat, for whereas whites can be dismissed with ready-to-hand pejoratives wrought from ideological conviction or political suasion—racist, ignorant, culturally insensitive and so onlxi—price, and not only in the popular imagination, speaks from a position grounded in the very conditions— cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, community, land—that ‘white’ aborigines ultimately draw upon to authenticate their identity. the late south australian aboriginal academic maria lane, in an unpublished paper— ‘two indigenous populations? two diverging paradigms?’—identified distinctive aboriginal groupings, ‘each operating on completely different, in fact antithetical, dynamics, ethics and paradigms’.lxii lane described these as the ‘welfare-embedded population’ and an ‘open society population’. although finding these populations mostly on former settlements and reserves and in cities respectively, these broad categories are useful for they are inclusive of constituencies beyond the generalised binaries of ‘bush blacks’ and an indigenous urban-based elite. members of the ‘open society’ category are also found in central, northern and remote australia, and there are many regional and urban-based indigenous communities who remain marginalised, voiceless and largely unrepresented. aboriginal intellectuals like marcia langton, noel pearson and warren mundine amongst others, who contest much of the progressive liberal left orthodoxy on indigenous issues, are themselves members of the political elite, but pearson from cape york is not southern or city-based. nevertheless, among more nuanced distinctions lane’s groupings account for the apparent division between the socalled ‘bush’ aborigines and the predominantly urban-based elite who often assume the right to speak on their behalf. lane recognised too the dependency of the latter on the former, who whilst in permanent employment and sending their own children to private schools and being the beneficiaries of all that contemporary society and culture has to offer, ‘often [see] themselves as spokespersons and champions of, [build] their secure careers on the backs of, and [gain] their kudos from, the embedded population’.lxiii whereas in the 1970s aborigines were demanding the right to represent themselves directly instead of through white intermediaries, more recently one particular indigenous constituency—the ‘open society population’—has seized suzerainty over that platform. the french anthropologist maïa ponsonnet, who in 2007 on the ‘women for wik’ website agreed with the description of the northern territory ‘intervention’ ‘as a form of cultural genocide’,lxiv wrote the same year how she finds: [the] lack of distinction between the southern rural context and the northern remote context to be a common mistake. it is the northern context that is often ignored, as the remote community voice is seldom relayed in the media, des-pite (sic) the attention these communities receive. … [further], [m]embers of remote communities are given few opportunities to speak in the media, while articulate representatives of coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 146 southern communities express themselves regularly. they create a stream of opinions which, while not necessarily reflecting the views of remote community members, tends to stand alone as the aboriginal voice.lxv besides the problem of the so-called ‘bush’ aborigines being spoken for—and in the instance of bess price (and others) being abused on the occasion when their distinctive voice has been heard—is that of the triumph of concern with diversity over inequality. tolerance for ‘difference’, rather than the need to address poverty or marginalisation, becomes the prominent issue. to this end—tolerance for difference—affirmative action policies have a tendency to focus attention on, exaggerate and concretise the hitherto fluid phenomena of identity, culture and consequentially, difference. writing of the situation on campuses in the us, steele observes how: [w]hen everyone is on the run from their anxieties about race, race relations on campus can be reduced to the negotiation of avoidances. a pattern of demand and concession develops in which both sides use the other to escape themselves. black studies departments, black deans of student affairs, black counselling programs, … black students and white administrators have slowly engineered a machinery of separatism that, in the name of sacred difference, redraws the ugly lines of separation.lxvi whilst separatism is not so pronounced on australian campuses, policies and administration based on a similar emphasis on a politics of difference wield considerable influence in the academies, and across a broad sweep of organisations and institutions. notwithstanding the complexities and sensitivities these issues can arouse, in the interests of being seen to be conciliatory and fearful of opportunistic backlash institutional management when confronted with day-to-day issues where the potential for ‘race’-based political conflict is sensed, often does nothing, or when it does, it seeks appeasement rather than address.lxvii as steele states apropos the us, university management tend ‘to go along with whatever blacks put on the table’lxviii and that ‘rather than negotiating and capitulating’ to all such demands, what is required is ‘leading’, ‘challenging’ and ‘inspiring [blacks] to achieve academic parity’ as well as ‘dismantling the machinery of separatism [and] breaking the link between difference and power …’.lxix in addition to the fear of being called on an expedient allegation of racism, and perhaps motivated by a belief that indulging aboriginal demands is necessary in order to help restore dignity to a people long stigmatised, vociferous exploiters of the politics of difference are rewarded with recognition that their claims to cultural competency on matters indigenous are sacrosanct and unproblematic. the experiences of pholilxx cited earlier are typical. this late settler-colonialism of the early twenty-first century, of ‘negative difference, vulnerability, protection and guardianship’, earnestly spruiked by aboriginal spokespeople and academics belonging to lane’s ‘open society population’, notwithstanding the few dissenting voices from within this same constituency, and more broadly by the liberal left, has more in common with ‘australian indigenous affairs in the first third of the twentieth century’, than either the 1960’s demand for equal legal rights or the following era of self-determination.lxxi besides the obvious condescension— aborigines are incapable of withstanding scrutiny, behaving professionally, or achieving academically without ‘indigenous-specific educational interventions’, or in pearson’s words, ‘indigenous people’s status as victims means they require protection from the real world.’lxxii—a consequence is the inevitable rise of powerful shibboleths founded on notions of identity and cultural competency. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 147 as in the united states vis-à-vis african americans, the issue of cultural competency ranges across various institutional settings, not just the academy or its representative union.lxxiii writing of child placement policies in the united states that prescribe the placing of black children with black families and where that is not possible assessment of the racial competency of prospective white adoptees, randall kennedy, a black professor of law at harvard, observes that: [p]lainly there is no proper authoritative criterion for grading the racial appropriateness of parenting—only the very real spectre of an imposition of orthodoxies that come innocuously packaged as ‘cultural competency.’ the chilling effect that religious or cultural or racial competency examinations create, the prejudices they elicit, and the tendency toward bullying that they encourage make them sources of unfairness and oppression that should be erased.lxxiv as steele notes also apropos the parallel situation in the us, ‘each group mythologises and mystifies its difference, puts it beyond the full comprehension of outsiders. difference becomes inaccessible preciousness toward which outsiders are expected to be simply and uncomprehendingly reverential’.lxxv furthermore, as noted above, the learning supposedly underpinning the expertise informing the assumed difference-based competency is innate and experiential; formal learning is eschewed. when a historian with a long record of advocacy for indigenous rights and who had done much work on various native title claims was appointed to the university of tasmania on a three year contract his employment was challenged by a former indigenous staff member. the grounds for the challenge were that he was non-indigenous. stating that he saw his role in part as assisting those without the necessary qualifications to obtain them so that they could take over his role and that few things would please him more, his interlocutor asserted that she ‘didn’t have to have a university degree to teach tasmanian aboriginal history, for as aborigines we just know it all already’.lxxvi such claims are more frequent than might be supposed. as already discussed, many on remote communities, such as price, are seeking for their children and communities the very education that those who are beneficiaries of promoting a politics of difference and who privilege ‘race’ and identity over inequality are contemptuous of. the american literary theorist walter benn michaels, professor of english at the university of illinois at chicago, argues in his the trouble with diversity: how we learned to love identity and ignore inequalitylxxvii that both the left and right of politics are committed to perpetuating inequality. he bases this on the investments that both sides have in the politics of difference. as a consequence, ‘the deepest respect for difference is a powerful management tool’.lxxviii this is because by focussing on difference, or more usually diversity, the structural issues underlying inequality can be ignored, and the conditions of inequality can be rationalised as a form of difference that needs respecting: greater indifference to inequality and ideology is happily accompanied by greater attachment to identity. in fact, this is what the commitment to diversity is all about, since a world of people who are different from us looks a lot more appealing than a world of people who are poorer than us or a world of people who think our fundamental beliefs are deeply mistaken.lxxix coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 148 those aborigines whose activism (and employment)lxxx centres on notions of identity and discrimination, and who mostly belong to the category that lane describes as the ‘open society population’, are of course worried about their material circumstances. this is not because of their own need, but because they are the beneficiaries of the discourses of diversity. remote impoverished aboriginal communities serve a dual role in this respect. they provide to aboriginal constituents of the ‘open society’ (and the broader population) evidence of originary cultural forms that can be and are (as discussed above) drawn on in order to authenticate themselves culturally. they also provide abundant evidence of enduring socioeconomic inequality that is drawn on to authenticate arguments of prevalent racism and discrimination. hence the pernicious investment that the ‘open society population’ has in the disadvantage—sometimes extreme— experienced by so many remote communities, and the hostility they visit on those seeking means of address. however, if they themselves are ‘authentically’ indigenous, then addressing the inequality beleaguering remote communities should not diminish the aboriginality or cultural distinctiveness of the members of those communities. the fear, it would seem, is one of losing the talisman for their own sense of self. as michaels argues, ‘it’s the culture, stupid—when the problem is inequality, the solution is identity’.lxxxi and this is precisely what price and the other three so-called ‘traditional’ aborigines understand who won seats for and helped deliver government to the clp in the 2012 northern territory election. while they want to address inequality, southern aborigines amongst some others and the liberal left in general worry about racism and identity. as michaels pithily puts it, ‘the diversity version of respect the poor is respect the other’.lxxxii in this way inequality is reconfigured as discrimination. the problem is not one of exploitation, but one of not respecting the cultures of remote communities. ‘the debate we might have about inequality thus becomes a debate instead about prejudice and respect …’.lxxxiii the response of the liberal left to the northern territory intervention is illustrative. in the introduction to the rushed-to-print coercive reconciliation,lxxxiv the anthropologist melinda hinkson lists the initiatives that she believes might ‘receive widespread support from the aboriginal residents’ of the communities concerned. she includes ‘increased police numbers, increased support for child and family health, improved housing and infrastructure, and improved quality of goods and management of community stores’. these ameliorative prospects, however, mask a more sinister objective: ‘a clear intent … to bring to an end the recognition of, and support for, aboriginal people living in remote communities pursuing culturally distinctive ways of life’.lxxxv pat turner and nicole watson, two of the ‘open society population’ indigenous contributors, describe the intervention as a ‘trojan horse’ designed to seize land granted under the northern territory land rights legislation. they express the hope that ‘our enemies … find the courage to come out of the trojan horse and offer friendship … from friendship comes understanding, respect and accommodation of difference’.lxxxvi the subtitle of the text, stabilise, normalise, exit aboriginal australialxxxvii points also to the privileging of difference, and an incapacity to imagine vibrant aboriginal cultures surviving redress of inequality. conclusion as with the broader community, with more aborigines entering the middleclass, political and ideological divisions not only within that class but also between the bush and the city, coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 149 are increasingly manifest. remote aboriginal communities retain rich symbolic value for those distant from ‘traditional’ cultural forms, whether through historical or other factors such as individual choice. their symbolic value is also recognised by settler australians, who like many of the aboriginal intellectual and political elite find in these communities semblances of what they believe to be originary cultural forms. the impoverishment and distress experienced by so many communities adds to the resonance of their symbolic value, for these conditions buttress assertions of enduring racism and discrimination against aborigines per se, not just those living in these situations. this too serves the interests of both the aboriginal political elite—who make mileage out of their own assumed victimhood and use this status to speak for all aborigines and to make demands upon the institutions in which they work—and white intellectuals whose righteousness is perversely rewarded by recognising aborigines as victims and themselves as the perpetrators of injustices. as described by thomas sowell, a black american economist and social theorist at stanford university: a pro-black stance by white intellectuals enhances the latter’s moral standing and self-esteem … by cheering on counterproductive attitudes, making excuses for self-defeating behaviour, and promoting the belief that ‘racism’ accounts for most of blacks’ problems, white intellectuals serve their own psychic, ideological, and political interests.lxxxviii australian intellectuals are no exception. sowell goes on to say that a ‘crucial fact about white liberals must be kept in mind: they are not simply in favour of blacks in general. their solicitude is poured out for blacks as victims … as well as those blacks who serve as general counter-cultural symbols against larger society’.lxxxix the aboriginal intellectual and political elite in australia direct their solicitudes similarly. the northern territory ‘intervention’ played into the hands of all of these interests. it enabled arguments to be made about victimhood and the usurpation of human rights, and remote impoverished communities are exemplary counter cultures. by seeking redress of some of the issues bedevilling the communities subject to the ‘intervention’ this initiative intersected with and potentially undercuts the considerable investments of both black and white in these communities. much of the heat generated in the debate about the potential efficacy of the ‘intervention’ and the manner of its implementation arises not out of concern for the subject communities themselves, but out of already extant ideological interests in the capacity for abstracted ideals about these communities to service concerns largely external to them. little wonder that ‘bush’ aborigines have found their voice, and the power of the ballot. i w.e.h. stanner, after the dreaming (crows nest: australian broadcasting corporation, 1991), p. 55. ii stanner, after, p. 55. iii stanner, after, p. 55. iv see elliott (commissioner) johnston, royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody, volume 4, (canberra: 1991), section 33.1.5; stephen harris, two-way aboriginal schooling: education and cultural survival (canberra: aboriginal studies press, 1990). in two-way aboriginal schooling harris argues that there are indigenous-specific learning styles and that pedagogical practices must accommodate these differences in order to provide both effective education and one that is less threatening to the cultural values of indigenous people. despite serious problems with harris’ analysis it proved widely influential. as noted coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 150 in one of the earlier critiques of harris, ‘“learning styles” theory is now thoroughly embedded into the pedagogical practices of almost every australian institution with a brief for aboriginal education—in fact, in all probability that means every educational institution of this nature.’ christine nicholls, vicki crowley, and ron watt, ‘theorising aboriginal education,’ education australia 33 (1996), p. 6. v see also w.e.h. stanner, white man got no dreaming (canberra: australian national university press, 1979), p. 24. vi anthony green, ‘final figures for 2012 northern territory election’, http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2012/09/northern-territory-election-updates.html, accessed 2 september 2012. vii whilst largely continuing with initiatives commenced under the northern territory national emergency response act 2007, on 16 july 2012 this act was replaced with the banally named stronger futures in the northern territory act 2012. viii chris evans, ‘the end of ideology in indigenous affairs,’ in john curtin institute of public policy conference (perth: curtin university of technology, 2006), p. 1, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4297, accessed 28 august 2012. ix evans, ‘the end of ideology’, p. 1. x marcia langton, ‘stop the abuse of children,’ the australian (12 december 2007), http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/yoursay/index.php/theaustralian/comments/stop_the_abuse_of_chi ldren/, accessed 12 december 2007. xi k. anthony appiah, ‘the multiculturalist misunderstanding’, new york review of books 44, 15 (1997), p. 32. xii appiah, ‘the multiculturalist’, p. 32. xiii see mitchell rolls, ‘the culture brand and racial alterities,’ journal of the european association of studies on australia 2, 1 (2011), p. 8. xiv see shelby steele, the content of our character: a new vision of race in america (new york: harperperennial, (1998 [1991]), pp. 111-48. xv kerryn pholi, ‘why i burned my “proof of aboriginality”’, the drum (abc, 2012), http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4281772.html, accessed 27 september 2012. in pholi’s case, this ‘proof’ was ‘a letter from the new south wales department of education acknowledging that i was aboriginal, on the basis that my local aboriginal lands council at that time, circa 1990, had said so’. for comment on the arbitrariness of these acknowledgments, see caroline overington, ‘not so black & white,’ the australian (24-25 march 2012), pp. 14-18; dallas scott, ‘the black steam train: wayne quilliam, you made the shit list,’ http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/search?updated-min=2011-0101t00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01t00:00:00-08:00&max-results=2, accessed 1 september 2012; scott, ‘the black steam train: insight— that aboriginality show’ (13 august 2012), http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/2012_08_01_archive.html, accessed 15 august 2012; and scott’s blog site the black steam train in toto: http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/. xvi identified positions are positions for which only aboriginal and torres strait islander people are eligible to apply for and occupy. xvii pholi, ‘why i burned’. xviii pholi, ‘why i burned’. xix gordon in amos aikman, ‘left sent message from the bush,’ the australian (27 august 2012), p. 6. xx on the influence of ‘emancipatory’, ‘minority’, ‘culture’ and ‘human rights’ discourses on the construction and defence of difference see jane k cowan, ‘ambiguities of an emancipatory discourse: http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2012/09/northern-territory-election-updates.html http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4297 http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/yoursay/index.php/theaustralian/comments/stop_the_abuse_of_children/ http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/yoursay/index.php/theaustralian/comments/stop_the_abuse_of_children/ http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4281772.html http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/search?updated-min=2011-01-01t00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01t00:00:00-08:00&max-results=2 http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/search?updated-min=2011-01-01t00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01t00:00:00-08:00&max-results=2 http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/2012_08_01_archive.html http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/ coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 151 the making of a macedonian minority in greece’, in jane k cowan, marie-benedicte dembour, and richard a wilson (eds) culture and rights: anthropological perspectives (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001), pp. 152-76. xxi noel pearson, ‘white guilt, victimhood and the quest for a radical centre’, griffith review 16, winter (2007), p. 30 (his emphasis). xxii price was also a candidate for the clp in the august 2012 northern territory election and won her seat. xxiii tony jones, ‘defence, discrimination and regrets’, q & a (australia: australian broadcasting corporation, 11 april 2011), http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3182043.htm, accessed 11 april 2011. xxiv stuart rintoul, ‘cry from the heart’, the australian (19 may 2012) http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/cry-from-the-heart/story-e6frg8h6-1226357817151, accessed 20 may 2012; bess price, ‘listen to our voices and address our real concerns’, the australian (12-13 december 2009), p. 4. xxv amos aikman, ‘voices of authenticity’, the australian (15 november 2012), p. 13. xxvi marcia langton, ‘aboriginal sophisticates betray bush sisters’, the australian (15 april 2011), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/aboriginal-sophisticates-betray-bushsisters/story-e6frgd0x-1226039349353, accessed 18 april 2011. xxvii on fran kelly, ‘breakfast’, breakfast (australia: abc, 12 march 2011) (broadcast). xxviii langton, ‘aboriginal sophisticates betray bush sisters’. see also patricia karvelas, ‘more offensive than “sex with a horse”: behrendt’s twitter slur against black leader’, the australian (14 april 2011), pp.1-2. xxix noel pearson, ‘education and aspiration keys to membership of an open society’, the australian (23 april 2011), p. 1. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/education-and-aspiration-keysto-membership-of-an-open-society/story-e6frgd0x-1226043501865, accessed 16 june 2011. xxx cited in noel pearson, ‘yolgnu inspire us to pursue all our ambitions’, the australian (13 august 2011), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/yolngu-inspire-us-to-pursue-all-our-ambitions/storye6frg6zo-1226114050741, accessed 13 august 2011. xxxi cited in pearson, ‘yolgnu inspire us’. in an unpublished paper the aboriginal academic maria lane points out that most of the current urban-based indigenous elite, of whom mansell is one—who occupy influential positions in government, academia, and so on—are the beneficiaries of education systems that did not provide ‘indigenous-specific educational interventions’. these measures, such as those advocated by stephen harris (see fn4), she described as ‘being preoccupied with questions of “relevance, cultural sensitivity, language, racist theories such as learning-styles theory, appropriate curriculum, role of elders or parents or community, self-esteem, cooperativeness, need for outdoor activity, focus on sport, love of art, remoteness, etc.”’ cited in noel pearson, ‘radical hope: education and equality in australia’, quarterly essay 35 (2009), p. 34. xxxii amos aikman, ‘indigenous leaders desert labor for clp’, the australian (6 august 2012), p. 5. xxxiii aikman, ‘voices of authenticity’, p. 13. xxxiv aikman, ‘voices of authenticity’, p. 13. the tiwi islander francis xavier maralampuwi, who is often described by others as being ‘traditional’ and who describes himself as ‘a cultural man,’ won the seat of arafura (which includes the tiwi islands) over the labor candidate and fellow tiwi islander, dean rioli, a former popular australian league football star. in the desert seat of stuart bess nungarrayi price deposed the incumbent labor minister and family relative karl hampton. the red centre seat of namatjira was won by alison anderson, who is described as ‘a traditional owner of haasts bluff and speaker of six native languages.’ her labor opponent, des rogers, is a businessman and former regional chairperson for the aboriginal and torres strait islander commission, but has fewer local connections than anderson. in the seat of arnhem, malarndirri (barbara) mccarthy, the labor minister and former abc news reader who http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3182043.htm http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/cry-from-the-heart/story-e6frg8h6-1226357817151 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/aboriginal-sophisticates-betray-bush-sisters/story-e6frgd0x-1226039349353 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/aboriginal-sophisticates-betray-bush-sisters/story-e6frgd0x-1226039349353 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/education-and-aspiration-keys-to-membership-of-an-open-society/story-e6frgd0x-1226043501865 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/education-and-aspiration-keys-to-membership-of-an-open-society/story-e6frgd0x-1226043501865 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/yolngu-inspire-us-to-pursue-all-our-ambitions/story-e6frg6zo-1226114050741 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/yolngu-inspire-us-to-pursue-all-our-ambitions/story-e6frg6zo-1226114050741 coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 152 was elected unopposed in the previous election (2008) was deposed by larisa lee, daughter of robert lee, a long time activist for aboriginal rights in northern australia. aikman, ‘voices of authenticity’, p. 13. on 13 march 2013, after a long factional dispute, the leader of the northern territory country liberal party was deposed. in his place the party installed adam giles who is also indigenous. giles’ elevation to the position of chief minister makes him the first australian indigenous head of government. whilst previously supporting giles’ immediate predecessor, it was the switch of support to giles by the four so-called ‘traditional’ members of parliament that enabled his elevation. amos aikman & rick wallace, ‘territory coup delivers indigenous history’, the australian (14 march 2013), p. 1,6. xxxv robert manne, ‘long may the flag fly’, the age (4 june 2001), p. 15. xxxvi t.g.h strehlow, ‘anthropological and ethnological research’, in h. shiels (ed) australian aboriginal studies, (melbourne: oxford university press, 1963), p. 456; ronald m berndt, ‘research demanding urgent attention’, in h. shiels (ed), australian aboriginal studies (melbourne: oxford university press, 1963), pp. 443-51; adolphus peter elkin, ‘before it is too late’, in ronald m berndt (ed) australian aboriginal anthropology (nedlands: university of western australia, 1970), pp. 19-23; marc augé, the anthropological circle, second ed. (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1982), p. 88. xxxvii baldwin spencer and francis james gillen, the native tribes of central australia (london: macmillan and co., 1899), p. ix. xxxviii see anita heiss, ‘anita heiss,’ http://www.anitaheiss.com/index.html, accessed 8 october 2012. xxxix anita heiss, am i black enough for you (north sydney: bantam, 2012), p.1. xl heiss, am i black enough, p. 242, (her emphasis). xli heiss, am i black enough, p. 2, (her emphasis). xlii heiss, am i black enough, p. 3, (her emphasis). xliii the native title act 1993 (cwlth) section 223 stipulates that native title in relation to land or waters can only be enjoyed by aborigines, where, amongst other issues, ‘i) the rights and interests are possessed under the traditional laws acknowledged, and the traditional customs observed, by the aboriginal peoples or torres strait islanders; and ii) the aboriginal peoples or torres strait islanders, by those laws and customs, have a connection with the land or waters.’ national native title tribunal, ‘exactly what is native title’, commonwealth of australia, http://www.nntt.gov.au/information-about-nativetitle/pages/nativetitlerightsandinterests.aspx, accessed 18 october 2012. section 3 (1) of the aboriginal land rights (northern territory) act (1976) (cth) defines ‘traditional aboriginal owners’, in relation to land, as being ‘a local descent group of aborigines who i) have common spiritual affiliations to a site on the land, being affiliations that place the group under a primary spiritual responsibility for that site and for that land; and ii) are entitled by aboriginal tradition to forage as of right over that land’. xliv dallas scott, ‘the black steam train: conflict of interest? only for the whites ...’, http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au, accessed 16 august 2012. xlv see for example tjanara goreng goreng in claudia doman, ‘a peek into the journey to become an aboriginal elder’, monitor online (university of canberra, 31 march 2011), http://www.canberra.edu.au/monitor/2011/march/31_aboriginal-eldership, accessed 25 august 2012. lehman in anton enus, ‘aboriginal or not’," insight (australia: sbs, 7 august 2012), transcript: http://www.sbs.com.au/insight/episode/transcript/490/aboriginal-or-not, accessed 8 august 2012. xlvi maggie walter, ‘nayri kati: an indigenous quantitative methodology’, aiatsis seminar series (canberra: aiatsis, 4 may 2009), http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research/docs/pdfs2009/walter040509.pdf, accessed 5 may 2009. xlvii scott, ‘the black steam train: insight—that aboriginality show’, p. 2. xlviii mcmillan in enus, ‘aboriginal or not’, p. 7. http://www.anitaheiss.com/index.html http://www.nntt.gov.au/information-about-native-title/pages/nativetitlerightsandinterests.aspx http://www.nntt.gov.au/information-about-native-title/pages/nativetitlerightsandinterests.aspx http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/ http://www.canberra.edu.au/monitor/2011/march/31_aboriginal-eldership http://www.sbs.com.au/insight/episode/transcript/490/aboriginal-or-not http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research/docs/pdfs2009/walter040509.pdf coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 153 xlix mcmillan in enus, ‘aboriginal or not’, p. 7. l dallas scott, ‘the black steam train: peddling the easy answers’, (3 june 2012), http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/2012_06_01_archive.html, accessed 12 september 2012. li steele, the content of our character, pp. 2-3. steele has won several awards for his work on race relations, including in 2004 the national humanities medal. the princeton scholar kwame anthony appiah, who is also cited in this paper, was one of the 2012 recipients for the medal. (a maximum of 12 are awarded annually, to either individuals or groups). thomas sowell, who is cited later in this paper, won this award in 2002. lii steele, the content of our character, p. 4, (his emphasis). liii steele, the content of our character, p. 96. liv see steele, the content of our character, pp. 100-01. lv steele, the content of our character, p. 102. lvi walter benn michaels, the trouble with diversity: how we learned to love identity and ignore inequality (new york: metropolitan books henry holt and company, 2006), p. 73. see also shelby steele, white guilt: how blacks and whites together destroyed the promise of the civil rights era (new york: harperperennial, 2007), pp. 25-6. lvii discourses of discrimination through fomenting notions of belonging to a collective identity can set individuals up for heart-rending rejection. one of our former students, an indigenous tasmanian, having embraced the notion of discrimination (and ironically, given his socioeconomic position), not the language of disadvantage except for sometimes laying the blame for the latter at the former, headed off on a trip round australia. he was certain that his aboriginality and newly forged sense of belonging to a collective would be clearly evident; that the full force of his felt identity would radiate from him and aborigines especially, australia-wide, would instantly recognise ‘a bro or cuz’ (his words). absolutely certain of this he approached an indigenous group drinking in a park in townsville expecting to be welcomed into the cosy embrace of a shared identity and its concomitant cultural dress. ‘fuck off you white cunt’, they demanded (pers. comm. 18 august 2004). this experience was relayed in tears and with genuine bewilderment. lviii for example, tjanara goreng goreng from the university of canberra, variously describes herself as a ‘traditional aboriginal healer dancer and songmaker’ who practices ‘breath healing, channelling’ (cited in lyne hume, ‘the dreaming in contemporary aboriginal australia’, in g. harvey (ed), indigenous religions: a companion (london: cassell, 2000), p. 131); a ‘spirit healer’ who summons up wandjina, ‘beautiful golden light beings’ to assist with healing (cited in katherine kizilos, ‘in the spirit of healing’, age (5 november 2005), p. 10); and more latterly, as being ‘on the road to eldership’ and of having ‘learnt the foundational laws of the tjurkurpa, one of which is the three laws of respect: respect and honour the self; respect and honour everyone else; respect and honour “ngungynateea”, our mother – the earth’ (cited in doman, ‘a peek into the journey’. goreng goreng has presented ‘healing’ workshops throughout australia, the us, and elsewhere. even the most casual acquaintance with classical aboriginal cultures or the relevant literature would reveal the vast gulf between the ‘traditional wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ goreng goreng purports to have learnt from ‘elders’ and that of the cultures she has supposedly learnt from. edmund carpenter, one of the first anthropologists to take an enduring interest in arctic peoples, noted with some alarm how those removed from their ancestral heritage so readily dismissed the knowledge, understanding and expertise learned by whites of ‘traditional’ cultural forms. the inuit, he observed, ‘takes his place on stage, side by side with the american indian whose headdress comes from a mail-order catalogue, who learned his dances at disneyland and picked up his philosophy from hippies. he knows no other identity, and when he is shown the real treasures of his culture, when he hears the old songs and reads the ancient words he aggressively says, “it’s a lie, a white man’s lie. don’t tell me who i am or who my http://theblacksteamtrain.blogspot.com.au/2012_06_01_archive.html coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 154 ancestors were. i know”’. edmund carpenter, oh, what a blow that phantom gave me! (st albans: granada, 1976), pp. 97-8. lix just to clarify, i’m not arguing here equivalence between the knowledge of white intimates of aboriginal societies and cultures and those aborigines who have undergone these processes of cumulative instruction. lx hume, ‘the dreaming in cotemporary aboriginal australia’, p. 129. lxi see pholi, ‘why i burned’. lxii cited in pearson, ‘radical hope: education and equality in australia’ pp. 32, and 31-4. lxiii cited in pearson, ‘education and aspiration keys to membership of an open society’, p. 3. lxiv maïa ponsonnet, ‘international support for women for wik’, women for wik (2007), http://www.whatsworking.com.au/womenforwik/international_support.html, accessed 11 october 2012. lxv maïa ponsonnet, ‘recognising victims without blaming them: a moral contest’, australian aboriginal studies 1 (2007), p. 44. lxvi steele, the content of our character, p. 146. see also pascal bruckner, the tyranny of guilt: an essay on western masochism (princeton: princeton university press, 2010), p. 86. lxvii the national tertiary education union (nteu) that represents staff across the tertiary sector and which boasts of being a ‘democratic member organisation run by your colleagues, for you!’ (see nteu, ‘membership’, http://www.nteu.org.au/join, accessed 16 october 2012), forcefully advocates ‘the ugly lines of separation’ through insisting that indigenous/aboriginal studies centres in australia be staffed only by aboriginal academics, and that non-aboriginal staff in the employ of such centres should be located in other disciplines / departments / schools. national and state-based nteu staff and elected representatives concede privately that the indigenous division of the nteu is very powerful in respect to influencing policy (see nteu, ‘my union: structure’, http://www.nteu.org.au/myunion/about/structure, accessed 15 october 2012), and of the difficulties in addressing its moral authority industrially on the occasions it is necessary to do so. like many organisations and institutions, the nteu is out of its depth in this area, fearful, and captive to the vested interests of those convinced of their own moral superiority. lxviii steele, the content of our character, p. 146. lxix steele, the content of our character, p. 147. lxx pholi, ‘why i burned’. lxxi will sanders, ‘ideology, evidence and competing principles in australian indigenous affairs: from brough to rudd via pearson and the nter’, australian journal of social issues 45, 3 (2010), p. 318. lxxii pearson, ‘white guilt, victimhood and the quest for a radical centre’, p. 30. lxxiii see endnote 68. lxxiv randall kennedy, interracial intimacies: sex, marriage, identity, and adoption (new york: pantheon books, 2003), p. 446. lxxv steele, the content of our character, pp. 141-42.; see also pholi, ‘why i burned’. lxxvi pers. comm. 26 march 2009. lxxvii michaels, the trouble with diversity. lxxviii michaels, the trouble with diversity, p. 158. lxxix michaels, the trouble with diversity, p.158; see also p. 160. http://www.whatsworking.com.au/womenforwik/international_support.html http://www.nteu.org.au/join http://www.nteu.org.au/myunion/about/structure coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 155 lxxx see pholi, ‘why i burned’. lxxxi michaels, the trouble with diversity, p. 161. michaels argues that this is a form of classism: ‘classism is what you’re a victim of not because you’re poor but because people aren’t nice to you because you’re poor. its origins are on the left, in the old academic trinity (race, gender, class), and it treats economic difference along the lines of racial and sexual difference, thus identifying the problem not as the difference but as the prejudice (racism, sexism) against the difference. so, just as to be opposed to racism is by no means to be opposed to racial difference, to be opposed to classism is by no means to oppose class difference’. michaels, the trouble with diversity, p. 106. lxxxii michaels, the trouble with diversity, p. 105. lxxxiii michaels, the trouble with diversity, p. 173. lxxxiv see jon c altman and melinda hinkson, ‘preface’, in jon c altman and melinda hinkson (eds), coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit aboriginal australia (north carlton: arena, 2007), p. viii. lxxxv melinda hinkson, ‘introduction: in the name of the child’, in jon c altman and melinda hinkson (eds), coercive reconciliation, p. 5. lxxxvi pat turner and nicole watson, ‘the trojan horse’, in jon c altman and melinda hinkson (eds), coercive reconciliation, p. 211. lxxxvii jon c altman and melinda hinkson, (eds), coercive reconciliation, cover. lxxxviii thomas sowell, black rednecks and white liberals (new york: encounter books, 2006), pp. 56-7. on the issue of the psychic investment western intellectuals have in asserting ‘the wretchedness’ of colonised peoples and the west’s complicity in that wretchedness, see also bruckner, the tyranny of guilt, pp. 3,34,36,39,101,15; pearson, ‘white guilt, victimhood and the quest for a radical centre’, p 30. the most egregious recent textual examples of these propensities are sarah maddison’s black politics (sarah maddison, black politics: inside the complexity of aboriginal political culture (crows nest: allen & unwin, 2009), and beyond white guilt (sarah maddison, beyond white guilt: the real challenge for black-white relations in australia (sydney: allen & unwin, 2011). for a brief review of each text see m rolls, ‘book review of black politics: inside the complexity of aboriginal political culture, by sarah maddison, allen & unwin, crows nest, 2009, 294pp., $35 (paperback), isbn 9781741756982’, journal of australian studies 35, 1 (2011), pp. 125-27; mitchell rolls, ‘book review of sarah maddison, beyond white guilt: the real challenge for black-white relations in australia, allen & unwin, 2011, 245, pb, aud $27.99. isbn 9781742373287’, journal of australian studies 36, 3 (2012), pp. 403-05. lxxxix sowell, black rednecks and white liberals, p. 57 (his emphasis). for recent ‘white liberal’ examples of this see maddison, black politics and maddison, beyond white guilt. mitchell rolls is programme director of aboriginal studies at the university of tasmania, president of the international australian studies association, and co-director of the interdisciplinary research centre the centre for colonialism and its aftermath (university of tasmania). he is currently co-authoring a book examining the popular mid-twentieth century australian magazine walkabout. he has published recently in the journal of the european association of studies on australia; australian cultural history; zeitschrift für australienstudien (zfa); and with dr murray johnson co-authored the historical dictionary of australian aborigines, scarecrow press, 2011. his co-edited reading robinson: companion essays to george augustus robinson’s friendly mission has just been republished by monash university publishing (2012). his research interests include race and representation, culture and cultural identity. microsoft word introduction coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction sue ballyn the papers collected in this volume are the result of the conference held in barcelona in july 2008 titled myth, history and memory. this volume, however, carries a slightly different title for two reasons. firstly, many authors have extended or rewritten their papers after the conference and thus various shifts have taken place. secondly, during the conference, the actual theme was taken up in so many different ways by people coming in from different perspectives that the collection needed to be re-titled. as a result this volume is now presented as perspectives: myth, history and memory which allows for the many and diverse papers and lines of thought that emerged during the conference and afterwards. coolabah, no.2, now online, is a witness to the sculpture exhibition which accompanied the conference. each sculptor has written about how he or she approached the theme and developed the sculptures for the exhibition. the refereeing of the papers also took a different form from the usual process used by the journal. first of all the chairs presiding sessions were asked to give their opinions regarding the papers they had heard. then further refereeing was done by the journal’s editorial board and in some cases the papers were sent to another member of the board for a third assessment. this volume therefore carries a list of those who acted as first “readers” during the conference itself. the names of all who gave their opinions on the papers they chaired thus appear as a separate special editorial board. myth history and memory was the last of five in a sequence of rolling conferences which began in barcelona in 2004 with landscapes of exile. the next convenor was terri-ann white at the university of western australia under the title landscapes and exiles: belonging and home held in 2005 at new norcia monastery. the third conference in 2006 took place at byron bay and was organised by baden offord at southern cross university and anna haebich from griffith university under the title landscapes of exile: australia once perilous, now safe. the fourth conference organised by peter read and frances peters little at the australian national university and anna haebich from griffith university was titled indigenous auto/biographies i owe a great debt of gratitude to the late prof. vin d’cruz. as i sat in the back row of baden offord’s splendid landscapes of exile conference: australia once perilous now safe, i found myself thrashing around for the title of what was to be the closing conference of the series. vin and i had already put our heads together over the matter but i continued to be confronted by a copyright ©2009 sue ballyn. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 dead-end. i could not find a title which would allow me to include everything from both humanities and sciences. vin passed across a note and there was the title: myth, history and memory. it was a gift, just what i was looking for. vin smiled and said “i think it will do”. it most certainly did, but vin, as always, was modest about his contribution to the conference. he was to have come to barcelona but, by then, his health had deteriorated considerably and i, personally, missed his presence enormously. however, he did send a paper which terri-ann white read for him. now, after his death, i feel that the inclusion of his article is an honour to his memory and to all who knew him and benefitted from his wisdom, generosity and on-going friendship. with regard to his article, i have refrained from formatting it or editing it in any way, preferring to leave it as he gave it to us. to tamper with the text would be to tamper with the powerful voice that came through to us all the day his paper was read. similarly, i have decided to place vin’s paper as the closing article in this volume because his paper sums up so many of the concerns of those of us working within the area of australian and south east asian studies and picks up many of the threads that wove themselves through the conference discussions. i am also grateful to john ryan who actually gave me the title for vin d’cuz’s paper as it came to us untitled. similarly i would like to acknowledge the unstinting work of kate russell as assistant editor. without kate’s input this volume would have taken much longer in appearing. as an editor, i do not believe in giving a breakdown of each paper. that, i believe, is the task of the reader; to dip into the volume at leisure and find their own discursive thread in the whole. the papers range over australian and american studies, aboriginal studies, museum curating, philippine myth, fine art, african archaeological studies, gay and lesbian studies, catalonian history, creative writing, the chilean “funa” and australia, trauma studies, migrant studies, climatic change, and others. each article is unique in its perspective and range and this is what gave the conference such depth and interest. for four days there was an ongoing conversation between paper readers and their audience, an enriching dialectic backtracking as themes developed and rolled through the four day event. such a dialogue was made possible given that the conference had no parallel sessions so no awkward choices had to be made and everyone went to the same conference but absorbed it in so many different ways. it is my firm belief that today academic conferences benefit from avoiding multiple sessions thus enabling a true engagement with subject matter under discussion. of interest is the fact that many readers started reworking their papers on sight in a clear activation of a continuum of thought. others picked a relevant phrase from somebody else’s presentation or coffee discussion and incorporated it immediately into their paper or afterwards in hindsight in this volume. the order of papers follows the order in which they were presented at the conference rather than alphabetically, in an attempt to show the discursive line which drove the event although not all papers are included. it only remains for me to thank everybody who came, the student team who helped so unstintingly throughout the conference and, indeed, for months before and our sponsors without whom the conference could not have taken place. microsoft word jamie de cordoba 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 207 drawing myth and history in visual art. jaime de córdoba. abstract: after the famous exhibition “copier créer” curated by jean pierre cuzin in the “musée du louvre” in 1993, the practice of drawing art has acquired a renovated interest. this exhibition revised the theoretical concepts introduced by bober and others in the second half of the xxth century and increased the value of the contribution of drawing in the study of art history instead of the idea of copying. an important catalog and essay by haverkamp, begemann and login, titled “creative copies”, appeared in 1988 and contained the best examples of the main collections. the last but not least important consequence was the collaboration between international museums, using their own spaces, with contemporary artists. the hermeneutic drawings and paintings by markus lüpertz in the munich glyptotheck and the exhibition of giacometti’s drawings shown in the ivam in 2000 are two excellent examples of the european relevance in this field. i want to analyze here twenty years of drawing done in different museums and institutions around the world and its close relationship with the process of recovering our historical memory by using visual art. key words: drawing, history of art, translation, interpretation, experimentation this article will attempt to review three key aspects regarding the role of the sketcher when confronted by both the questions history poses and the recovery of the memory: a/ translation the value of the translation: the historiographical contribution of the sketcher / artist. in the first place, one must accept the thesis of the different strategies deriving from a nonverbal knowledge of history. that is to say, the artist does not use words to explain facts and the processes that led to them. one of these nonverbal forms would be art itself as an instrument which enables the study of both the cultural and artistic object. b/ interpretation the hermeneutic value: manifestations and interpretation objectives. copyright ©2009 jaime de córdoba. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 208 secondly, one must review, through the image, the interpretative expression and the definition of the objectives. that is to say, to contribute to the already established thesis set up at the famous exhibition celebrated in the louvre museum which was coordinated by the historian jean pierre cuzin in 1993 “copier créer”. c/ experimentation experimentation: the drawing acts like both a bridge and dialogue. finally, i will attempt to briefly show the graphic work i have done over the last twenty-five years. these drawings follow the quiet current of study, historical referencing and current of thought that has come down the centuries that is; the hermeneutic work of the artist as conceptually different from the copy. this current of thought sought knowledge, the recovery of memory and to open a profound dialogue with other cultures, other myths and other times. the value of translation: jacques derrida has contributed, as is well-known, to a revisioning of the value of our reading of history and has shed doubt on the ability of language to become an objective instrument of analysis. his theories have had a very specific influence in the world of art world through the currents of thought that we have come to know as “postmodernity”. in fact, deconstruction proposes neither a criticism, nor a philosophy, but a practice of reading, a conjunction of diverse attitudes when confronted by a text or image. with regard to this post-structuralist idea, we can consider the thesis in which the reading of an art work must not solely be “thought” through the word or photography as a means of documentation. with the use of the image as a document of historical value as used by the french school of “histoire de la culture” and the contributions of peter burcke, nowadays nobody doubts the need to study the image in order to understand our past. however, it still remains to be proven that reproduction systems can be considered trustworthy. what is the value of the reproduction? what is the value of the reconstruction of the object through drawing? i do not believe that it is a unique and insignificant dilettante exercise. to translate a narrative or lyrical text in literature into another language has an undeniable academic value. the problem arises when this translation is artistic and metaphorical. however, according to derrida the same problem arises within historical analyses with the metaphorical accumulations of the historical processes and their conceptual paradoxes. the drawing drawn from a work of art is a new creation. it is a coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 209 translation of ideas contained in the original work. it helps us to include certain concepts in the selection process and reconstruction of the original master piece. therefore art translated by art would be another of the cumulative systems of approach to the analysis of a work. it is what in french terms is known as the “d'après” attitude. it’s something more than a version. it is a fact, however, that we cannot totally share the positions of deconstruction as absolutely true. the argentinean sociologist and philosopher juan jose sebreli recently indicated his discrepancies regarding postmodernism which he described as a” fraud” in his book the forgetfulness of reason a critical review of contemporary philosophy: el olvido de la razón. un recorrido crítico por la filosofía contemporánea. a recent exhibition was held at the picasso museum in barcelona under the title forgetting velasquez. it was a tribute to the influential inspirations (or rather transgressions) that picasso and others had exerted on the artist . has the artist forgotten logical reason? was truth only to be found in the works of the past? as well the great iconoclastic act of marcel duchamp: the moustaches on the gioconda can be seen today in barcelona where they have been brought from the pompidou center in paris. perhaps i share with sebreli certain aspects regarding the idea that postmodernism has not managed to disassemble reason and that the idea of progress has not been completely ousted. this concept, of course is clear in medicine or in legislation on human rights. does art progress? of course one tends to think it does not. its knowledge is cumulative and parallel, it is not axiomatic. however, drawing from a model has contributed to the growth and the formation of artists from the time of the first known sketchbook with the medieval drawings of villard de honnecourt. the more art history produces the greater the number of art works to translate, to comprehend and to incorporate into our knowledge. that is to say or means: greater information and analysis must be implemented in including our cultural objects. on the other hand globalization and multiculturalism, initiated by the impressionists in their gaze towards east, disrupted the vision of a unique western model. the files of art “scores” are becoming increasingly wider. one would hope that such an amount of translation will lead us to greater knowledge and progress. b/ the value of the hermeneutic: the version, d'après mentioned before, leads us forward to talk of interpretation: the translation previously mentioned. as an act of understanding art history and its objects acquire another unsuspected value as soon as the desire to interpret appears. drawing, in this context, establishes an a-temporal / a-spatial bridge. the point being to open a dialogue with the model, with the referent, so that master/maestro and translator talk about how the art work was created. the translator, now interpreter, looks for the essence and the perfume of the masterpiece. seurat searches for the light in the sculptures of puget, giacometti looks for the structure in the egyptian sculptures, carpeaux the movement, vuillard the atmosphere and waterhouse the myth. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 210 the idea of creation in the interpretation of art work has already had been studied by haverkamp and others in his “creative copies” catalogue and, after the exhibition at the louvre, the initiatives extended throughout europe. the interpretations of lüpertz at munich's glyptoteque, miquel barceló paintings at the louvre, the collaboration of anthony caro with the national gallery and the most recent anthology dedicated to copies of giacometti in the ivam of valencia is testimony to this activity. barceló in his african notebook writes: historians study the history of art, we use it. this idea of utility and not of art as an object of study is complementary to the translation concept. to this we must add the idea of admiration and tribute embraced by giacometti in his work. all his life he worked in the belief of the universality of art: all the models and subjects of culture were of his interest. it is well-known that both derain and picasso liked primitive art. what they considered primitive ranged from the iberian sculptures and the pre-roman to those of africa and polynesia. in short, when we talk about the opening towards the east in the xix century, we really must grant these artists the credit for having opened western eyes to the borders of the cultural object. new myths appear: the misunderstood past, the continents of africa and the australia. anyway it would be naive not to admit the destruction of myth in our time. the neo pop or warhol’s followers, to name one group, are one of the few currents that have generated a copyist school. we can truly say that they work as copiers because they greatly differ from the cultural attitude of the interpreters. the end of narrative and coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 211 shared legends are one of the effects of post modernity. it is remains paradoxical that in the era of information, major displacements of art works have been generated around the world and so few people draw art. to interpret drawing in our days does not necessarily imply the geographic displacement of the drawer. the drawings of the authors are carried out with well differentiated methods, both direct and indirect. the indirect ones, known in the past as stamp collecting by the artists, is a phenomenon widely used today. the artist studies, draws from books, cuts out reproductions from the specialized press, or even draws from dvd or the television. the drawing support for many artists in the xx century were the same art books with annotations in the margins. the privacy of these studies has meant that they are not all well known by the wider public the so called liber veritatis of the old workshops such as claude gellé’s (claudio de lorraine) will help his own disciples to interpret his work. when lorena allowed individuals to take notes from his drawings he knew that they weren't copying him, they where interpreting him with his absolute authorization. in our days, tracking by internet has opened our cultural patrimony to millions of viewers to. what we do not know is, if besides losing the shared myths, we will lose hermeneutical art. c/ experimentation i do not know if i can call the very diverse work i have done over the last twenty-five years “field research”. initially, towards the 80's, my drawings were works of translation of working methods, such as in my first drawings on rembrandt . later, the background, there was a dialogue with the authors that tried to interpret their thought: why did they paint or carve in such a way? lately, the sense is surprise and knowledge. these drawings, in their majority internal notebooks of my study, come from trips and direct notes on the original pieces. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 212 i often did them in the countries where they originated or in museum depositaries from the original works and, on other occasions, at temporary exhibitions. some of these studies have had direct consequences in my own work. in other cases it is the result of my need to search for a lost inheritance, to purchase knowledge from the praxis of art history. my graphical work has allowed me to debate formal knowledge with my students and my academic colleagues about the loss of our myths, our historical legacy and the difficulty of retention in terms of the observer. given the length restrictions of the article i am unable to use some two hundred drawings to illustrate my ideas and praxis. the pieces shown here are just a summary of twenty five years work. references crescenzo,c.di,;et alt.el diálogo con la historia del arte.alberto giacometti. valencia:ivam,2000. cuzin,j.p.(director) copier créer:de turner a picasso. parís:r.m.n.,1993. gachnang,.(director)markus lüpertz.retrospectiva. 1963-1990.madrid-centro de arte reina sofía:g.editoriale fabbri, 1991. haverkamp-begemann,e.; logan,c. creative copies.londres:philip wilson publishers,1998. pleynet,m. les modernes et la tradition. parís:gallimard,1990. sebreli, juan josé el olvido de la razón. un recorrido crítico por la filosofía contemporánea. barcelona: editorial debate, 2007 jaime de córdoba. is a professor in fine arts at the university of barcelona. as member of phd program in fine arts he has had exhibitions of his sculptures and drawings in barcelona, madrid, gerona, the hague, amsterdam and brussels. he currently works in public art projects for a several architectural firms in barcelona. his sculptures has been acquired by public and private collections in europe and usa. he is the guest editor of coolabah no.2 “myth history and sculpture show” microsoft word martin renes 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 echoes of a not so mythical past: memories of race in elizabeth jolley’s the well cornelis martin renes abstract: critical discussion of elizabeth jolley’s the well (1986) has largely focused on issues of gender, but little has been said about the racial inscription of the novel. this lack is especially relevant when criticism, despite praising the author’s experimentation with narrative technique and genre, tends to voice dissatisfaction with the novel’s conclusion in medias res, which never solves the tension between a presumed return to the patriarchal norm and the voicing of liberating alternatives. this paper proposes a postcolonial perspective so as to come to terms with this dilemma, and argues that the text signals the impossibility of suppressing the native from the contemporary australian land and textscape, whose gothic articulation in the uncanny shape of the male well-dweller haunts the novel’s engagement with female empowerment. the female protagonist may only start overcoming a crippling gender discourse in the white postcolonial pastoralist setting by inscribing herself into ‘australianness’. reconciling her body with the land is significantly staged in terms of an aboriginal cosmogony, as it is a ‘walkabout’ that allows hester to start controlling her body and story. thus, the well may be understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about nativenonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at ‘reconciliation’ by mainstream australia. keywords: postcolonial gothic, gender, race. introduction elizabeth jolley’s the well, first published in 1986, is set in postcolonial pastoralist australia and depicts the intense emotional relationship between the crippled, middleaged hester, heiress to a large agricultural estate, and young katherine, adopted by the former at the age of sixteen. hester’s ‘lovesick’ behaviour leads to the mismanagement and loss of her property, and relegates the couple to an old cottage on the margins of her former land. the resulting isolation from society gives free reign to the women’s nightmarish fantasies and emotional clashes, which convert the tale into an uncanny copyright ©2009 cornelis martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 experiment with the female gothic. all action eventually centres on the uncertain contents of the cottage well, which haunts the female protagonists until its covering up introduces a much discussed return to “normality”. critical interpretations most academic criticism of the novel takes a feminist tack, and praises the novel’s nonlinear structure for its opening up of textual spaces for female voices. however, it finds difficulty with its end, whose inconclusiveness ambiguously writes the female protagonist into and out of traditional conceptions of gender. thus, paul salzman argues: hester harper’s attempt to live outside society in her idyll with katherine is contrasted with the parodically fecund family of the [neighbouring] bordens … hester is finally an extremely ambiguous figure, who is simultaneously an independent and strong rebel against all the conventional forces of family life … and also a twisted and thwarted figure who is frustrated by her isolation and uncertain about the price she has paid (salzman 1993: 76-7). similarly, kerry goddard looks at the economics underlying gender in the novel. she blames class difference between the rich heiress and her poor, adopted daughter-cumlover for the novel’s presumed return to a heterosexual, patriarchal moral economy and speaks of no more than a ‘tenuous hope’ for the future: … while it seems that jolley has devised a narrative technique which allows her writing to exceed, and in so doing, deconstruct, patriarchal constraints, the same cannot be said for the two women in the text. hester and katherine face an uncertain future, one of isolation and loss. unless … in becoming an author/story-teller herself … hester will be able to find new kinds of power and free herself from the economy of property and possession (goddard 1993). gerry turcotte inscribes the well’s open-endedness into the gothic, a genre which ‘rarely moves to conclusions, or, if it does, it signals either overtly or covertly the failure of closure.’ thus, he signals that jolley employs the gothic ‘to celebrate female experience’ but ‘in decidedly negative terms’ (turcotte 1995: 83, 68-9). this is in line with the classic female-gothic agenda, which, as maggie kilgour claims, uses the return to the patriarchal norm as the solution to the horror experienced by its female protagonists (1995: 8-9). turcotte concludes that the gothic is ‘appealing’ in writing female strategies of subversion, as it ‘enables escape from confining strictures, deciphering … the female footnotes usually left unread so that they eventually come to overwhelm the master narrative’ (turcotte 1995: 88). his reading of the well connects to sue gillet’s claim that ‘[i]n giving a form of expression to the unconscious, the unspeakable, the repressed, jolley is also giving voice to the historically silenced woman: the well is a fissure through which trapped feminine streams/words/desires can flow’ (gillet 1992: 40). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 although elizabeth jolley always denied a feminist commitment in her writing (cf. joussen 1993: 40-1), the tentative ‘footnotes’ in, and intermittent ‘flows’ from the well may therefore well pave the way towards a redefinition of sexuality and gender. however, this leads adrienne kertzer to ask about the alternatives for ‘non-oedipal narrative’ hester might have, as ‘silence is so dominant in this text.’ in her view, this silence and inconclusiveness stand for ‘the unfulfilled nature of hester’s lesbian desire’ (kertzer 1992-3: 132). similarly, in drawing attention to the australian female-gothic’s ‘marked interest in expressing the physical side of feminine experience’, gerry turcotte reaches the conclusion that for hester control over her own body ultimately remains out of reach: ‘[t]he price for the denial of sexuality seems to be the gift of telling – the control of words’ (turcotte 1995: 65, 83). as gender is obviously such a vexed issue in the well, the question becomes what story hester might tell—how she might translate her gender trouble into the australian context. postcolonial inscriptions a postmodern re-appropriation of the gothic allows jolley’s novel to take issue with gender, which facilitates a reading of the well as the haunting locus of hester’s repressed sexuality. the very formal structure of the novel, its untrustworthy variability of meaning and an open-endedness ultimately controlled by the female protagonist would confirm the possibility to speak the unspeakable; but if a feminist, possibly lesbian interpretation is plausible, why is it that the well is stopped from speaking hester’s words and desires? why can’t they flesh out in a clear sense of freedom for the female protagonist? one could argue that this is so because both the well’s inconclusive plot (and academic criticism of the novel) is founded on an important and uncanny absence: a link between identity, body and the land that should be seen as specifically australian. it is the latter absence that haunts this gothic text, inspires the protagonist’s fear by making the familiar strange, and uncannily forestalls closure. a postcolonial inscription of the novel does not seem obvious. the text is largely symbolic, and, oddly, as a text strongly linking the body to land, little reference is made to australia at all. there are, of course, general colonial clues, such as hester’s graceful english-made walking cane, her german governess’s otherness, and the reference to the great distance that separates the setting from europe; but if we had not known jolley as an author who always linked her fiction to the stark landscape of her acquired homeland, western australia (cf. bird 1998: 242), little indicates that we are dealing with a novel that maps the female body as specifically australian territory. however, some interesting conclusions can be drawn by taking into account that, as baint attwood writes, before the age of mabo: aboriginality [was] probably always an element in the construction of australian identity, but whereas its role [had] previously [been] premised upon it being construed as a lack (vis-à-vis australia's 'whiteness', modernity, progress, etc), its significance [as of the early 1990s] derives coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 from it being imagined in positive terms, indeed upon it being idealised (1996: xxiii, my italics). although barely explicit, an aboriginal imaginary does inform the key episode of the accident and key location of the well, which determine the novel’s inscription into the gothic. one night, hester’s jeep catches ‘something’ on the roo bar, the very attribute which wards off that emblematic australian animal, the kangaroo. the clash is a crude metaphor for the violent invasion and colonisation of australia, and, significantly, the text immediately clarifies that not a kangaroo but a man is caught and killed, whose body hester unscrupulously dumps into the old, dry well shaft. from there on, both women significantly construe that which the text does not speak, i.e. the lack of the native element, into the symbolic and mythical: the voices from the well are initially interpreted as prince charming and a horrible troll, and eventually as the biblical jacob, whose story uncannily recalls aboriginal dispossession and foreshadows their repossession. in a birthright dispute with his twin brother, jacob had to leave his homeland (as most aborigines did), but was later appointed by god as the rightful heir to israel, with the promise that his offspring would people the territory. thus, hester’s fear can be likened to a general white postcolonial fear of what ien ang calls an ‘aboriginalised 1 ’ australia. this is the fear that ‘white australia would one day suffer the same fate as aboriginal australia’ (ang 2003: 60), an inversion of the terms of colonisation resulting from the native remapping of australia after the implementation of native title legislation and aboriginal-inclusive multiculturalism in the 1990s. jacob’s prophecy was revealed in his stairway-to-heaven dream, which is uncannily echoed in hester’s nightmares and fears of a man climbing out of the well on a series of broken rungs in its shaft. significantly, hester associates the well-dweller with a thieving intruder, which is a stock representation of the aborigine in pastoralist australia. read thus, her fears do not only centre on the repression of her own sexuality but also of the native other. delys bird, who sees the land as one of the major constitutive elements of western australian writing, points out that: [e]ven today in the west there is a sense that life has only a tenuous hold in these landscapes lodged between the desert and the sea, that european settlement here is vulnerable, chancy, and could easily disappear. this she opposes to the sense of place of the local aborigines (bird 1998: 244). in the well, there is a tenuous sense of a ‘healing’ incorporation of the native when hester imagines going on some kind of ‘walkabout’ 2 at different stages throughout the text: 1 ien ang coins this verb in a discussion of asian immigration into contemporary australia to indicate that ‘white australia would one day suffer the same fate as aboriginal australia’ by a massive influx of asian immigrants (ang 2003: 60). 2 although mainstream use of this term is rife with negative connotations, such as unexplained and unauthorised absence and mental disorder, to aborigines going walkabout means undertaking a spiritual journey to a belonging place in order to renew their relationship with their dreaming and the landscape. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 life would be changed completely if a person walked all the way … she would accept a different view of time and journey … she imagines the feeling of being unseen and not known about while standing in one isolated place. she would be small and safe walking … under the immense clear blue sky. perhaps … her fear might disappear (2). despite her lameness, towards the end of the novel she tentatively starts out on such a healing journey, which ends with the tentative start of the horror story she invents for her neighbour’s kids (169). hitherto, a sense of european vulnerability has haunted the novel in images of extreme drought and unemployment, which causes an immigrant family—significantly called ‘the whites’—to move back to england (9) and has translated into a repressed fear of the other. significantly, penny van toorn argues that: [a]mong the terrors of terra nullius enumerated in australian literature, the figure of the aborigine was perhaps the most feared. while sometimes presenting a real physical threat to the early settlers, aboriginal people invariably posed all sorts of imaginary threats’ (van toorn 1992-3: 87, my italics). this step from the physical to the imaginary is aptly staged as a lack, an absence in the well. the novel introduces an aboriginal stock character, and immediately suppresses him from the (textual) landscape, and not surprisingly this racial and sexual other haunts the remainder of the text. if one takes into account that the novel was written in 1986, it appears to reflect the absence of aborigine-inclusive multiculturalism in uncanny ways, so that both the community’s adverse reactions to the intruder and hester and kathy’s struggle over the male well-dweller may also be seen to acquire a racial implication. importantly, hester’s fears focus on a dry ‘waterhole’, which is not only a metaphor for her own sexuality—not least because of the etymological relationship of ‘well’ with ‘vulva’—but also a significant feature in the native experience of the australian land. as hester kills him in his intent to rise from the well, the male well-dweller’s release turns into a stillbirth that maps race across gender in a repressive movement, and hester eagerly accepts mr borden’s offer to cover up the well. in the end, both landowners may be seen to conspire so as to protect vested whiteaustralian pastoralist interests, but with unequal results. putting the lid on the racial element empowers mr borden, who takes over hester’s property, but it also condemns hester to a re-incorporation into a white heterosexual/patriarchal economy by having to give up both her land and katherine. ultimately, the loss of independence and control over property, financial means and sexuality becomes the price exacted for a white woman’s spiritual and physical survival in rural australia. thus, hester’s dispossession and concomitant identity problems uncannily foreshadow what ken gelder & jane jacobs called the ‘white moral panic’ (1998: 3) that was to come with the legal changes around native title. it expressed how (often pastoral) sections of white australia felt increasingly displaced from a land it had considered its own. if we take kathy as hester’s uncanny double—and there are ample indications in the text that both women function as such—one may establish a subtle, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 premonitory connection between kathy’s feelings of guilt towards the well-dweller and hester’s fear of loss of property and money to him. here these contradictory feelings are aptly separated out into two intimately linked characters who the psychological mechanics of the 1990s aborigine-inclusive multiculturalism would relocate into one and the same white person, becoming manifest as what gelders & jacobs aptly termed ‘postcolonial racism’ (1993: 17). conclusion fluctuating between hester’s return to the white patriarchal norm and her tentative appearance as an author, the well does not achieve an altogether liberating inscription of femininity. rather, it leaves off with an open-endedness that may be located in the absence of a vital australian link between land, race and gender. despite jolley’s claim for a positive conclusion (joussen 1993: 42), the proposal of a rural setting as the focus of an analysis of gender from which the aborigine is suppressed produces a strategy heading towards—at least partial—narrative failure. thus one can also read jolley’s reappropriation of the gothic as the uncanny staging of the absence of aboriginality, which, as it cannot be suppressed in an australian setting, causes the spectre of the colonial other to haunt the text. in other words, the ‘great-big-monster’ that hester will eventually tell us about on the last pages (174) may be demythified and brought back to familiar, human proportions if we draw attention to its specific australian qualities, but precisely an aborigine-inclusive redefinition of australianness has been the bone of contention in policies of multiculturalism over the last decades. extending sue gillett’s feminist analysis to the ethnic, one might interpret hester’s halting attempt to speak the unspeakable as an indication of her coming to terms with fears regarding not only gender but also race. thus, the end of the novel may suggest a tenuous attempt to anticipate the incorporation of the native in a definition of australian self. however, one may equally argue that hester’s relegation of the aboriginal universe to simplified ‘children’s stories’ and ‘monsters’ reinstates colonialist discourse and fears, a manoeuvre which would aim to master the native once again (cf. mudrooroo 1997: 98). ultimately, the novel does not reveal jolley’s intentions for hester but has both possibilities uncannily circulate through each other as echoes of scary myth and reality, so that the reader cannot find himself ‘at home’ in any reading. although hester eventually receives some control over the story and her life, the final outcome remains hidden. perhaps in 1986, no definitive end to the novel could be articulated; this would at least have to wait until australian society implemented a minimum set of changes that would tentatively allow the mapping of gender across race. it is in the turbulent realm of native title, aborigine-inclusive multiculturalism, reconciliation and, nowadays, apology that solutions for hester’s plight must be sought. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 references: ang, ien. “from white australia to fortress australia: the anxious nation in the new century” legacies of white australia: race, culture and nation. laksiri jayasuria, david walker and jan gothard (eds). crawley: u. of western australia press, 2003, pp. 51-69. attwood, bain (ed). in the age of mabo: history aborigines and australia. sydney: allen and unwin, 1996. bird, delys. “´the spirit of the place´: women writers of the west.¨ women’s writing, 5:2, 1998. pp. 241-251. gelder, kenneth douglas and jacobs, jane margaret. uncanny australia: sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation. melbourne: melbourne university press, 1998. gillett, sue. ¨the well: beyond representation, the active space of desire and creativity.¨ westerly, 1, 1992, pp. 33-41. goddard, kerry. ¨women off the market: possession and desire in elizabeth jolley’s ´the well´¨. span, 37, 23 february, 1993. murdoch university. <http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/readingroom/litserv/span/37/goddard.html> accessed 24 april, 2007 jolley, elizabeth. the well. victoria: penguin books australia, 1987. joussen, ulla. ¨an interview with elizabeth jolley.¨ kunapipi, 15:2, 1993, pp. 37-43. kertzer, adrienne. ¨voices in the well: elizabeth jolley and radclyffe hall.¨ world literature written in english, 32:2 & 33:1, 1992-3, pp. 122-132. kilgour, maggie. the rise of the gothic novel. london: routledge, 1995. mudrooroo. the indigenous literature of australia: milli milli wangka. melbourne: hyland house, 1997. salzman, paul. helplessly tangled in female arms and legs: elizabeth jolley’s fictions. queensland: uqp, 1993. turcotte, gerry. ¨sexual gothic: marian engel’s ´bear´ and elizabeth jolley’s ´the well.´” ariel, 26:2, 1995, pp. 65-91. van toorn, penny. ¨the terrors of terra nullius: gothicising and de-gothicising aboriginality.¨ world literature written in english, 32:2 & 33:1, 1992-3, pp. 87-97. martin renes took his english degree at the university of barcelona and now teaches literature for its department of english with a focus on poetry and postcolonial studies. he wrote his minor thesis on the uncanny interface between indigenous and nonindigenous australia as manifested in some contemporary mainstream fiction, and is currently finishing doctoral research into the links between the uncanny, the mainstream perception of recent indigenous australian literature, and postcolonial identity formation. microsoft word peter read 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 190 a “funa” in australia? peter read abstract: a funa in chile is a public denunciation of a person identified as associated with crimes against humanity during the pinochet regime. it begins as a web site notice of a planned procession, to be followed by a peaceful rally and demonstration, some involve no more than thirty people, others, particularly those directed at notorious figures, have attracted thousands. my questions are: what is the effect of funas in chile?could a funa occur in australia? against whom? who would organise it? for what reason? what would be the consequences? in discussing the question i will draw upon my recent work in reconciliation studies both in chile and aboriginal australia key words: funa, chile, australia, aboriginal reconciliation studies, chilean reconciliation studies while the chilean state declines to punish the murderers and torturers of the pinochet regime, runs the popular reasoning, then the people will have to do it. one form of punishment is the funa, a public denunciation of a former official of the regime who has so far remained unpunished. my paper asks: could such a public denunciation occur in australia? the funa occurs outside the home or workplace of the accused. in preparation for each such denunciation, the ‘funa commission of chile’ posts on the web the chosen starting-point, usually a street corner. the exact destination, however, is not divulged. the crowd – it may be fifty, it may be many hundreds assembles with placards, flags and loudhailers. at this point the destination, perhaps twenty minutes’ march away, is now revealed. the procession begins. marching, or ambling, to the dwelling or workplace, the leader shouts si no hay justicia…(if there is no justice…) and the crowd roars in response hay funa ! [there is funa] while the invocation literally translates ‘if there is no justice, there is funa’ it carries the deeper implication that ‘for as long as there is no justice carried out by the state, then there is the funa of the people’. arrived and assembled, the crowd joins together in the public denunciation of the named killer or torturer, whom the chileans call the ‘condenado’, the ‘condemned’. the funa concluded, the participants then disperse. copyright ©2009 peter read. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 191 such a conclusion may seem rather anti-climactic, but granted the limitations in which the chilean government moves (or chooses to move) the funa is grounded in a sound sense of the possible. only a handful of very senior pinochet officials have been prosecuted and imprisoned by a government whose formal investigations have worked very energetically to name the victims and their sufferings, but refused to move against all but a very few of the most infamous perpetrators. funas originated in argentina, and first were led by the survivors or close family of the disappeared. some lasted for a week, the ‘funistas’ camping outside the dwelling, argentinians sometimes describe the chilean version, some of which last not much more than an hour, as feeble in comparison. yet some funas are not without danger for the participants. any major funa in the santiago cbd will be closely observed by busloads of police, water-cannon and tear gas ready. in august 2007 an argentinian cameraman covering a funa was arrested for ‘public disorder’, and only released on condition that he return to his country immediately, while a chilean reporter received a death threat for his ‘dishonest’ reporting of the same funa. another funa crowd was attacked by neo-nazis but the police, allegedly under orders from a mayor unsympathetic to historical revisionism, failed to protect them. a funa that i attended took place in december 2007. the website began nelson edgardo haase mazzei is funa’d our organisation carried out a new action of denunciation, this time concerning a ‘prosperous entrepreneur’ whose curriculum [life history] follows: then followed the terms of denunciation: mazzei was chief of the operation group, dina (pinochet’s secret police), and participated in the repression of 11 september 1973, of the osorno region in the south of the country. five further paragraphs identified mazzei as within the circle of manuel contreras, the hated leader of dina, now in jail. prisoners remember him as arrogant, a man supreme in power and devoid of pity, who always carried an electric cattle prod in his car. the website predenunciation then shifted to the present: haase still carries, it claimed, the same attitudes as head of his export firm haase sa. an alcoholic, he maltreats and exploits his workers, harasses the women and denies permission to union activities we gathered as directed at a principal street corner of the industrial suburb of macul. an organizer distributed leaflets, containing the same web information to which now were added the address of his work premises in macul, his home address in the exclusive suburb of las condes, and the number plate of his mercedes. it was clear that we were to process not to his home but to the warehouse. someone handed me a couple of leaflets, the first the war cry, ‘si no hay justicia…. the second read se viene la funa!!! otro chancho muerde el polvo…nos juntamos en jose pedro alessandri (macul) con rodrigo de araya el viernes 30 de noviembre a las 17.30 horas coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 192 si no hay justicia hay funa here comes the funa another pig bites the dust… we gather on [the corners of] jose pedro alessandri (macul) and rodrigo de araya on friday 30 november at 5.30 the crowd numbered about fifty, mostly under twenty five years of age, dressed rather like australian students at a demonstration; but i noticed very few of the blue eyed and blond haired which signify chile’s upper classes. the group was probably all under forty years of age: perhaps none of the majority had clear memories even of the end of the pinochet era in 1989. two or three motor cycle police seemed to be watching from the other side of the road, to the evident satisfaction of some of the crowd who took their presence as a validation of what was to come. the mood was expectant rather than tense; neither sombre nor carnivalesque, affirming rather than defiant. one of two of the crowd looked familiar to me as members of the leftist collectives which take part in the weekly evening vigils outside several well known former torture and disappearance centres in the city. after twenty minutes the motorcycles drove off and did not return, to the disappointment of some. hundreds of leaflets whirled through the air like ticker tape. shortly afterwards the procession began. perhaps to avoid traffic congestion we turned right immediately off the main street, then left, and entered the domestic neighbourhood. the chants began si no hay justicia, the crowd knew all the responses by heart. they roared in response hay funa! many residents of the comfortable, gated houses, seeming more curious than threatened, came out to watch or take leaflets. one slammed the gate, but another, evidently the owner of a hair salon within, allowed herself to be photographed holding a leaflet as if in approval. to this neighbourhood, perhaps, the funa is yesterday’s politics. indeed, one has to have been born by about 1953 to hold the coup in adult memory. the cantor took up a new chant alerta/alerta/ alerta vecinos al lado de su casa / trabaja un asesino beware/beware beware neighbours beside your house works an assassin! the insistent rhythm brought to my mind the youthful quasi-orgasmic exhortations of castro’s twelve year old demagogues coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 193 abajo!abajo! abajo el fascism! round another corner and into the street containing haase’s warehouse. here the houses looked less prosperous, the people older. those who came outside these dwellings to watch the straggly procession seemed more apprehensive. was it because they once supported the left collectives, and paid the price, or simply because they remembered? a new chant, clearly directed at the government, in the same 4/4 time. el baile de los ministros/ lo bailan los asesinos the dance of the ministers is the dance of the murderers. and another directed at all those whom the chilean state refuses to pursue: como/los nazis los seguimos/ nos vamos a funar just like we pursued the nazis we’re going to funar (you) on each occasion the crowd, thoroughly familiar with the first line, shouted its response in the second. the analogy with a religious procession long familiar in catholic countries grew stronger as i watched the cars and pedestrians carefully negotiate our progress. no shouts of support or toots of disapprobation, this funa seemed just another peaceful procession to be avoided. the ritual continued as we arrived and the crowd spread out on the road in front of a high fence and its two locked wooden gates. two people unfurled the same banner which appeared in the web announcement. it read ‘el sueño del pueblo se hace a mano y sin permiso’, ‘this is the dream of the people made by hand and without permission’. the pointing hand accused both the criminal action and the government inaction. the leader mounted the small stepladder he had been carrying. he read out the whole 800-word denunciation while the crowd followed his reading aloud, sounding to me oddly like the recitation of the creed in the anglican holy communion liturgy, mumbling, straggling, and a second or two behind. the warehouse remained close and silent. someone threw a packet of leaflets over the wall. the litany continued with the mocking, rhythmic cry catamba! catamba! / hola. que tal/ aqui hay un milico/ que se va a funar hey! hey! how are you going here is a milico [in contemporary chilean, a military assassin] who is going to be funa’d coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 194 now the president of the agrupación de familiares de detenidos-desaparecidos, (group for the families of the detained disappeared) got on the ladder to put the event in the wider context of the failure of the government to prosecute the criminals of the past. ‘these things can’t be allowed to go on, it’s time they were brought to justice’. if this was people’s power, it was no lynch mob, more like a formal de-consecration of a wicked priest proceeding to its foregone conclusion. the speeches ended. no one had shouted out ‘are you inside you pig?’ or ‘why don’t you come out?’ the presence of the condemned seemed not even to be required and there would be no appeal. the sacrament was complete and the subject of the funa would carry the disgrace forever. the sense of a ritual ended was strengthened again for me when, as everyone was preparing to leave, the big gates unexpectedly suddenly swung open. i watched a little apprehensively. would haase emerge? would it be a bunch of thugs ready to beat us up? at first nobody came out. the widening gates revealed a few men standing around, some reading the leaflets. the workers were anything but angry, and the man who had opened the gate looked at us expectantly. yet none of the funa crowd took the slightest notice. the point at last clarified. this was no attempt to recruit support or even to discuss the current activities of the workers’ boss. funas are public performances. no one is to interfere with the liturgy. the role of the people, as in hindu ritual, is to strengthen the rite through mass participation. justice is ceremonially delivered and the people are its agents. later i asked several older members of the agrupación what they thought of the funa as a process. one or two disapproved: it’s rough justice, they said; there is a possibility of error; we did not fight against tyranny for 18 years in order to replace it with showtrials. but so far, i was assured, there have been no mistakes of identity, only one of a mistaken address. one funa’d official is said to have killed himself, but another retorted to the assembled crowd, ‘we should have killed the lot of you’. funas, perhaps, are useful for everyone, for the left, for the government, and for the armed forces of the right. the revolutionary chilean left, once so strong, is now disunited and has nowhere to go. peaceful vigils outside torture centres allow room for harmless condemnation of government inaction. so too do the large funas, at which the crowd sings the internationale, condemns the us government for its imprisonment of cuban political prisoners, and applauds speeches in praise of castro. much fury is expressed over the centre-left government’s social policies, its failure to name the perpetrators of state violence, and its handling of indigenous issues. another army coup remains a remote, but perpetual possibility. perhaps the funa is the unspoken agreement between government and the left: we each do what we can. condemn us if you must and within reason we, the state, will look the other way. the military itself may find the funa useful. since pinochet’s death, and as younger officers continue to assume the higher commands, an attitude may be developing that from now on the old guard will have to look after itself, provided that the army itself is not humiliated by state-driven public trials and prison sentences. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 195 the funa of the killer of victor jara, was of a quite a different order. a popular leftactivist entertainer enjoying something of the status of pete seeger, jara was killed in the first days after the coup. ignoring his family’s pleas, he insisted on attending what was to have been a function led by allende at the technological university of santiago on the 11 th of stepember. next day with hundreds of others he was arrested and taken to what is now the victor jara stadium where he was recognised by a tall, blond chilean known as ‘el principe’, the prince, who reportedly said, ‘this one’s for me’. jara was horribly tortured, especially by el principe for several days before being murdered. it was not until 2006 that el principe was identified as working as dimter bianchi, a senior bureaucrat of a government department working in the cbd of santiago. a massive funa was arranged. such were the passions, grief and fury of the funistas on that day that the video of the funa of victor jara, can still reduce an audience to shocked silence. early in the video we see the planning taking place, including the crucial question of who amongst the funistas will enter the building to ascend to the high level office where bianchi will be at work. the procession begins. camera following, some twenty people push their way through forming a crush so tight that neither the cantor nor his step ladder can squeeze in. he ascends his podium in the passage outside to begun the denunciation while those inside set about bianchi. amidst the uproar of shouts and execrations we see bianchi at his desk, trying to rise. perhaps in the commotion the camera was jostled or lost focus for a few seconds, for next we see him still in his neat trousers, white shirt and tie, but now lying on his back on his desk, legs waving in the air like a cockroach. everywhere the funistas are screaming or brandishing huge photographs of jara. bianchi tries to shield his face from the faces and the cameras with his arms and hands. in panic he seizes the nearest poster which a protester is pushing into his face. it is a photograph of victor centimetres from his nose. someone pushes open the window, possibly to allow the huge crowd waiting below to hear the commotion. above the tumult, outside in the passageway, another camera follows the cantor calmly reading the official denunciation. no one can hear a word. after twenty minutes the funistas leave the building and the cantor, now mounted on his ground-level ladder, repeats the denunciation through a megaphone to the crowd outside which now follows and recites the text word by word. in the widest sense funa may represent a trend in the western world towards civil governance, in which ‘the people’ act in the name of human rights wherever government is perceived to be quiescent or unwilling. whistle-blowers, local citizenry and investigative reporters converge on the belief that the defence of human rights is no longer a state responsibility alone. indeed, a democratic state may sometimes oppose the exercise of certain rights, and for a variety of reasons. the funa too is a recognition that in modern civil society justice must sometimes be administered in many forms and by several interest groups. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 196 australia has little equivalent to the latin american sense of public exposure. attempts to ‘out’ unpunished or former criminals in australia have been more ludicrous than useful. occasionally people may gather outside the homes of a convicted child molester to denounce him, but generally only to drive him out of the suburb. one or two former nazi death-squad officers have been bailed up at airports or outside their homes, but these too generally end in denials and farcical anticlimax. 1 clearly such attempted exposures of past crimes are not the place in which to find australian funa equivalents, for such issues do not morally touch the nation deeply enough. but while chileans since 1990 were confronting the executions, tortures and disappearances of the seventeen years of pinochet terror, australians were grappling with something much more relevant, the long persecution of indigenous australians. the equivalents of the rettig 2 and valech 3 reports were the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody, the enquiry into the stolen generations ‘bringing them home’ and the final report of the council for aboriginal reconciliation. 4 the fate of all three, so disappointing to the present author in terms of government response, were the nearest australia was able to come to a truth and reconciliation commission into the treatment of aboriginal australians. in truth the several analogous commissions in latin and central america have not been without their critics. the results, according to a recent analysis in radical history review, all showed an implied preference for catharsis and forgiveness over punishment. 5 the three best known of south america are those of argentina, chile and guatemala. like ‘bringing them home’, these enquiries tended towards the narrative rather than the forensic. they sided to with the collective truth of the victims, presenting history less as a collective conflict of interests or ideas, more as violations of individual human rights beyond the constitutional or legal rules of each country. resistance, especially collective resistance, was not a major theme of any of the reports. rather, the enquiries of both australia and latin americas tended to steer away from the deep structural, racist or economic issues which had led to the violence. privileging and validating the individual experience of trauma and healing turned the focus away from the inequities of the social structure. despite the comparative innocuousness of the recommendations, the guatemalan and argentinian governments distanced themselves from the final reports, while successive centre-left chilean governments have remained mindful that the national need for national unity might arguably be greater than natural or restorative justice. 1 ‘justice denied’ australia/israel and jewish affairs council, the review, jan 2000 2 the rettig report, or the national commission for truth and reconciliation report’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rettig_report 3 national commission on political imprisonment and torture report, 2004, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/valech_report 4 aboriginal deaths in custody. the royal commission and its records, http://www.naa.gov.au/naaresources/publications/research_guides/pdf/black_deaths.pdf; ‘bringing them home. the stolen children’s report (1997), ,http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/index.html 5 editorial introduction, radical history review. winter 2007 (#97), 3-7. the journal’s editorial criticized memory of silence, the twelve volume guatemalan report of 1991 which followed 34 years of internal conflict and 200,000 dead, for narrowing the narratives through which the past is understood. the editorial claimed that the report only merely individualized violations of human rights and neglected to identify victims also as social actors or activists for social change. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 197 the similarities between the history of these enquiries, and ‘bringing them home’, not least the responses of the respective governments, are intriguing. to the recommendations of the aboriginal deaths in custody commission’ the labor government’s response was sympathetic, but few of the recommendations were implemented. 6 the succeeding conservative government distanced itself decisively from bringing them home first by refusing to apologise to the stolen generations, then acceding to few of the bringing them home report’s 64 recommendations. prime minister howard stated ‘i do not believe, and have always strongly rejected, notions of intergenerational guilt’ 7 meanwhile the council for aboriginal reconciliation was moving towards its own conclusions, due ten years after its establishment in 1990. its 2000 its final declaration included the proposition ‘our nation must have the courage to own the truth, to heal the wounds of the past so that we can move on together with ourselves’. the recommendations included an agreement or treaty through which unresolved issues of reconciliation could be resolved’. 8 it also proposed, remarkably given the political climate, that one part of the nation should formally apologise and express ‘its sorrow and sincere regret for the injustices of the past’, while the other part accepts ‘the apologies and forgives’. 9 howard’s government rejected all of the six proposals except number five, which dealt with measures of ‘practical reconciliation’, claiming the government was already working hard on that. nor, it seemed, were any of the perpetrators of acts of inhumanity against aborigines to be punished, even after a 2007 australian court found for the first time that a removed aboriginal child was entitled to compensation. 10 such a comprehensive rejection of two major reports and their recommendations by a conservative government might have sponsored, as it did in chile, a series of funas directed against either individuals for committing acts of inhumanity or crimes, or for government ministers for failing to punish them. yet that seemed barely possible in an australian context. even if the aboriginal welfare department’s individuals had been named, it is hard to imagine a group of indigenous people gathering outside the home of a retired former reserve manager or inspector, however hated by the community. the deeply cultural aboriginal sympathy for the old or oppressed, i suspect, would weaken the proceedings. if a funa were directed against, say, a police officer associated with the killing of an aboriginal man, the australian version of the funa might be a noisy and hostile demonstration, but not the formal conviction that the funa implies. yet australians can and do react against governments which refuse to accept responsibility for acts of racist cruelty in the past, or continue to deny their existence. an uproar greeted the national government’s bowdlerized version of the history of the 6 c. cuneen, ‘assessing the outcomes of the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody http://hsr.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/10/issue/2/article/239/ 7 commonwealth parliamentary debates, house of representatives, 30 oct 1996, p. 6158; quoted murray goot and tim rowse, divided nation, mup melbourne 2007, p 141. 8 final report of the council for aboriginal reconciliation, recommendation 6; http://www.austlii.edu.au/other/indiglres/car/2000/16/text10/htm 9 australian declaration towards reconciliation; http://austlii.edu.au/au/other/indiglres/car/2000/12/pg3.htm 10 the bruce trevorrow case, august 2007, http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/stolen-generationpayout/2007/08/01/1185647978562.html coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 198 stolen generations in a planned memorial in reconciliation place in canberra. 11 the most spectacular expression of public disapproval of the government’s position in the decade occurred as the council of reconciliation presented its final report in sydney in may 2000. australia’s most senior aboriginal public servant, charles perkins, sacked some years earlier from the aboriginal affairs ministry, shouted at the prime minister in the packed sydney opera house, ‘say sorry you bastard!’. next day perhaps three hundred thousand people walked across the sydney harbour bridge as a declaration of support for the indigenous cause while a skywriter wrote the enormous letters of sorry across the stratosphere. 12 while the prime minister was not stretched on his back like a cockroach, there was no doubting the intention or the intensity of the public denunciation. perhaps australia had achieved its first funa. peter read is research professor, department of history, university of sydney. he has worked extensively as a historian of aboriginal australia, especially in the northern territory and nsw. in 1980 peter founded, with oomera (coral) edwards, the organisation linkup (now link-up stolen generations (nsw) ). he worked with the organisation as field-worker for three years, and since 1984 has been its public officer. he works with the aboriginal historian jackie huggins in the indigenous oral history project 'seven years on', sponsored by the oral history program of the national library of australia. from 1995 this project created a base-group of seventy five young aboriginal leaders to whom we return, every seven years, for a further interview. jackie and peter are also currently interviewing all the members of the reconciliation council 1990-2000. outside australia he has interests in cuba and in the mapuche indigenous people of chile 11 the design implied the removal of aboriginal children was merely another example of how children are socialised into an adult world. the memorial was constructed in defiance of strong aboriginal disapproval and stands today adjacent to a second, ‘counter-‘ stolen generations memorial quoting testimonies in strong condemnation of the policy of child removal. see p. read, ‘the truth that will set us all free: national reconciliation, oral history and the conspiracy of silence’,* oral history, 35/1 (spring 2007), 98-107. 12 see sydney morning herald and the australian, 27 may 2000; http://www.gadigal.org.au/gadigalinfo/bridge_walk.aspx?id=6 microsoft word jaime coolabah joan navarro coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 joan navarro barcelona, spain. may 20, 1974. he lives and works at barcelona. he is a professor at the escola massana de barcelona his work has been exhibited in renowned group exhibitions in spain and his work has been bought by private collectors in spain and japan. black marble. memory inside geometry the geometric form of the cylinder serves as a starting point for the arduous process of removal and elimination to arrive at a final form where the image is seen to be liberated from all symbolic elements. the act of carving, gradually permits a maximum simplification of the form. when you eat fruit: once its flesh has been cut up and eaten, take delight in the contemplation of its heart. microsoft word coolabahgiada coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 katherine philips, aphra behn, and sylvia plath: “a passionate journey” towards “a revolution in female manners” giada cacciavilni copyright ©2010 giada cacciavilni. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: katherine philips, aphra behn, and sylvia plath were artists who struggled during their lives to express their thoughts and ideas. in addition to this, being women, they found it hard to be recognised as writers and their fight against social conventions and norms is now considered of huge importance since they managed to open doors for women that came after them. katherine philips started a feminine revolution which was taken over by aphra behn, and by sylvia plath about three centuries later. the three authors rebelled against the feminine mystique of their time and the subsequent domestification of women. in addition to this, they refused to be men’s shadows and raised a new awareness of women as active subjects that could finally use their voices to express themselves. the aim of this essay is to explore and interpret the ways in which these three women managed to subvert the prescribed role that society had in store for them by touching on different topics related to gender and the relationship between men and women. i will focus on their outlook on marriage and on women’s roles in society. katherine philips: rejecting society's women. katherine philips (1632-64) certainly wished she had more control over her life. yet, by looking at her life, one may claim that she did pretty well considering the age she was living in and the harsh restrictions women were subjected to. needless to say, katherine could not choose her husband, but she managed to educate herself “at a time when women were the most illiterate group in society” (limbert, 30) and, most importantly, she fulfilled her dream to be a writer, in a period where women were expected to write for themselves and not to go beyond that. among her themes are friendship, marriage, and political issues, such as the state of england. she treated them with irony and, especially in the poems about friendship with other women, on the platonic level. the author often depicted herself as naive and her work as unimportant, and she treated her subjects “in a manner acceptable by her society” (limbert, 36). by doing all this, she protected herself on paper, and she built a space that was both within society and outside of it, allowing herself to be a woman author and to communicate what she felt. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 katherine philips can be considered one of the first feminist women poets since, among the topics of her lyrics, she strongly rejects the idea of marriage and claims it can correspond to segregation and repression. this can be seen in poems like “to one persuading a woman to marriage”, where the persona is addressing a man who wants to ‘trap’ a woman into marriage. the woman in question is someone who is not afraid to speak her mind and to express her will. the persona affirms she is a “public deity” (line 5) that is not likely to become “a petty household god” (line 8) and adjust to the man’s way of life and possible repression. the woman gives the impression of being an inspiring and strong being whose beams are “more bright and large than [the sun’s]” (line 16) and, as a consequence of this, difficult to shut in a cage and control. katherine philips is referring to those women who, against the will of society, are not afraid of having a will of their own and of going beyond those virtues so treasured by society as feminine and proper – such as silence, chastity, and obedience. these women will not be silenced, nor obey. katherine philips continues her personal outlook on marriage in “a marryd state affords but little ease” where the persona claims that being a wife is difficult, having to please her husband at all times. in addition to this, by not marrying, a woman would not regret choosing to remain single since she would avoid things such as violence from her husband, fear, pain as a consequence of childbirth, and distress as the effect of childcare. in other words, by choosing to be an “apostate” (line 12) and to forsake the social creed of repression, a woman would be free and able to rebel against the restrictions imposed by patriarchal society. in the final line of the poem, a reference is made to “leading apes in hell” (line 16), which was considered to be the main activity of maids and spinsters, who would play with men and drive them crazy – “to hell”. in “no blooming shall ever make me err”, the persona makes a list of those qualities she considers essential in a man in order for her to marry him. apart from claiming there are not many around, this man should own a “beauty of the mind” (line 2) and “sence” (line 4) rather than material possessions. in addition to this, he should be wise, faithful to both her and his country and he should somehow enjoy education. aphra behn: “my pen is a pistola”. considered the first woman to live by her pen, aphra behn (1640-89) supplied english literature with revolutionary concepts and works such as “the disappointment” and “the golden age”, allowing women to desire and highlighting how the repression of women can be compared to colonization. behn’s women are anything but modest; they are scandalous, active, and willing. the libertine made use of a masculine genre, the pastoral, and went so far as to question and subsequently destabilize the gender roles and sexuality of her time. the author, and women, are empowered as opposed to men, that are often depicted as impotent and passive. behn is forward-thinking and “a precursor of gender studies.” (crook) in “song from abdelazar”, behn refers to a masculine “thee” as opposed to a feminine “i” and focuses on how love has features characteristic of both men and women. “[love] took his sighs and tears” (line 9) and “his languishments and fears” (line 11) from the feminine i-persona and “pride and cruelty” (line 7) “and every killing dart” (line 12) from man. yet, behn implies that love is much more of a masculine nature: he coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 is powerful, a tyrant, and a sadist that causes pain and suffering. he corresponds to a destructive force, and to dantesque sceneries. the reader may understand that behn is playing the victim’s role, claiming her heart is alone and hurt, and the man’s triumphant and liberated; yet, she seems to be creating a subtext in which she is actually empowering and motivating women to fight against male rule. behn’s political agenda makes its appearance in this poem by showing that political gender has influenced something as emotional and gender-blind as love. in “to alexis in answer...”, aphra behn concentrates on how the slightest mistake in terms of sexual behaviour could cost a woman her entire reputation. as a matter of fact, no matter the amount of inner and outer beauty a woman has been graced with, as soon as she surrenders to desire and passion, she will turn into a “real ill” (line 14) and her man will not waste any more time with such a sinful being. behn criticizes the way in which men and society rule women’s lives by controlling their sexuality and gender behaviour and reinforces this idea in the fourth stanza when it is claimed that men can literally “fly if honour take [women’s] part” (line 21) but they will throw them out as soon as women “yeild” (line 24) to their own impulses. the persona in the poem affirms that man was born “with that inconstancy...to love the absent, and the present scorn” (lines 15, 16) so why should women hanker after something they know will end as soon as men say so? in the last few lines of the poem, aphra behn warns the young woman of men’s intentions as her lover may be “like alexis” (line 36). the persona addresses young women who are subjected to men’s courtship and advises them to take alexis as an instance of what may happen to them. a double interpretation arises from the last line of the poem where behn affirms that the lover “a fatal lesson…has learned/after fruition ne'er to be concerned” (lines 40, 41). as a matter of fact, firstly, a man may have learned to have sex just for the sake of it, without being too affected. secondly, the lover may have got used to not being interested in the consequences of having sex with a woman, such as pregnancy. in “song to a scottish tune”, the libertine author highlights how a woman loses her freedom and her independence when she gives in to a man’s proposals. the i-persona is a young woman who feels obliged to marry “jemmy”, a lovable, optimistic, and cheerful man, due to his constant happy mood, generosity, and good manners. the young woman describes how his “finding sweets in every smart” (line 7) made her say “yes” and, at the same time, lose her freedom. she describes how all his moves and actions were dedicated or directed to her but that in spite of all this, she could not do anything but blame herself for her loss of independence. another evidence of this can be found in lines 11 and 12, where the woman seems to be invoking help from heaven as she does not feel anything for him while she feels she should as jemmy is a respectable and respectful partner: “and every sigh a heart would move, gued faith, and why not mine?”. in the penultimate stanza, jemmy proves to be the perfect lover since “the gayest songs he would sing, on purpose to delight me” (lines 19, 20), “every grace displayed” (line 21) so much so that she feels obliged to “vow” (line 24). yet, the speaker expresses doubt and reads as if compelled by social patterns of marriage and traditions when, referring to all he has done for her, she states “which were enough i trow to conquer any princely maid” (lines 22, 23). indeed, her tone reinforces the idea that she is not really in love with him but rather agrees to marry him since that is what a coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 woman should do according to the mainstream and especially if the man appears to be so respectful and sweet as she describes him to be. in the last eight lines of the poem, behn depicts the i-persona as a lost woman, who will not be able to take care of herself without the protective presence of her husband – “then what becomes of me?” (line 32). yet, the author of oroonoko is making use of irony and she is actually showing that following social norms is not always a safe choice. indeed, by disregarding the rules, women are able to be alive, experiment, and bet on their future. however, by paying attention to what they should be or do may appear to give comfort and security, but in reality they are living a shallow existence behind a façade, dominated by a fake being. sylvia plath: a genius in a man’s world. sylvia plath (1932-63) shared with katherine philips and aphra behn an outstanding characteristic: they were all women “poet[s] who lived and wrote almost before what might have been [their] time.” (wagner, 17). plath lived in an age dominated by housewives, their electro domestics, and patriarchy’s expectation to see a woman at home and perpetuating the species rather than getting a phd. she was also a contemporary of betty friedan, who would write extensively on these topics in the feminist masterpiece the feminine mistique. plath died in 1963, the year in which the work was published but it is symptomatic how both women were determined “not to accept relief from any ready-made dogma” (wagner, 17). like philips and behn, plath struggled with “the anxiety of authorship” (gilbert and gubar as quoted in wagner, 16) but, like the two renaissance poets, she managed to create her own room and voice as a woman writer in a hostile environment; she became active, gained control and self-awareness for herself and the women of the future. all this came through pain, suffering, mental and marital breakdowns, and confrontations with the harsh issues of the past. the american author clearly saw how patriarchy defined two kinds of women according to whether they followed the norm or not. in “two sisters of persephone”, plath describes two girls: firstly, a woman who is a failure, and secondly, a woman in full bloom. the first one is depicted as a dark figure sitting inside the house without ever being in the light and working on brainy mathematical problems. she is “sallow” (line 25), bitter, as opposed to the second one, a free being living in nature, constantly touched by the sun and life. the persona implies that, being husband-less and “wry virgin to the last” (line 26), the first girl’s only partner will be those worms that will feed on her body. by contrary, her sister is considered a real woman since she has a husband and she “bears a king” (line 24). plath harshly criticizes how patriarchy judges women according to their status with respect to men and considers them able to “beam” only when they are by their men’s side and fulfilling their duties as wives and mothers. plath stresses this idea in “the applicant” where women are portrayed as obedient, a complement to men, who, “being wifeless, [are] missing something, some primary possession.” (dobbs, 18) women are depicted as a support to men’s existence so as to stress their presence as secondary characters in society. plath also highlights men’s coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 anxiety to form a family due to social expectations; she depicts them as “crying” and as having their “last resort” in marriage. the author stresses women who act like puppets: “a living doll, everywhere you look.” (line 33) that can “bring teacups and roll away headaches/and do whatever you tell it” (lines 12, 13). the use of “it” is symptomatic of women’s objectification throughout history. plath thus lays emphasis on a situation with which she herself was familiar depicting how women were considered machines rather than human beings: “it can sew, it can cook,/it can talk, talk, talk”, “it works, there is nothing wrong with it.” (lines 34, 35, 36) the poem is useful to see how the author considered marriage to be a kind of purdah and a mutilation for women as it meant their complete loss of will and identity. plath’s disappointment following her marriage is recurrent in her poetry and it shows the internal struggle she and many other women have always lived through, trying to choose between career or family. plath aimed to become an independent self throughout her life and poetry represented a means of relief from oppression. in “daddy”, she claims “every woman adores a fascist” (line 48) and that “[she] may well be a jew” (line 35), making a comparison between ethnic oppression and gender oppression and stressing the authoritarian nature of marriage. in the bell jar, esther greenwood also transmits a sense of fear towards marriage, described as a dictatorship and a means of enslavement, perhaps what plath herself possibly felt during her marriage with ted hughes: “so i began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.” (as quoted in dobbs, 20) through the poem, sylvia plath metaphorically kills her father, who died when she was only a child, and, by doing so, she liberates herself from her husband and all men. she makes reference to how she got married to find a new father figure – “a man in black with a meinkampf look” (line 65) – and how her partner stole her essence and put her in a cage – “the vampire who said he was you/and drank my blood for a year” (lines 72, 73). plath will later affirm: “living apart from ted is wonderful – i am no longer in his shadow”. (as quoted in wagner, 192) conclusion after analyzing a part of the poets’ work, it is possible to draw many conclusions as far as their commitment to their craft is concerned. firstly, the three poets showed women can write. in addition to this, they thought women could write while being active in terms of their position in society. they believed in women’s power to create their own path, let go of social patterns and transgress boundaries imposed by patriarchy. they thought that this was possible through writing and especially through poetry, an incomparable means of expression. indeed, poetry would give them the chance to let their sensitivity and deepest frustrations, joys, and thoughts flow on the page. moreover, it would allow them to build an intimate space, characterized by irony, challenge, intuition, experimentation. they definitely represent an inspiration for all women since their work and personalities were ground-breaking then as much as they are now. yet, and most importantly, they “redefine[d] woman’s position in poetry: to become the subject who desires and speaks” (mermin, 351). philips, behn, and plath taught women not to be afraid to express their beliefs and rebel against what is keeping them from the “light”. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 bibliography butscher, edward, ed. sylvia plath: the woman and the work. new york: dadd, mead & company, 1977. crook, david. “aphra behn and sexual identity: ambiguity and gender swapping in poetry” http://home.sport.rr.com/instantcomma/aphra%20behn.htm accessed: 27/08/2008 11:09 dobbs, jeannine. "viciousness in the kitchen": sylvia plath's domestic poetry” from modern language studies, vol. 7, no. 2, (autumn, 1977), pp. 11-25. modern language studies. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3194361 accessed: 20/05/2008 06:21 lant, kathleen margaret & sylvia plath. “the big strip tease: female bodies and male power in the poetry of sylvia plath” from contemporary literature, vol. 34, no. 4, (winter, 1993), pp. 620-669. university of wisconsin press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208804 accessed: 10/05/2008 12:53. limbert, claudia a. “katherine philips: controlling a life and reputation” from south atlantic review, vol. 56, no. 2, (may, 1991), pp. 27-42. south atlantic modern language associationhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3199957 accessed: 29/05/2008 04:11. mermin, dorothy. “women becoming poets: katherine philips, aphra behn, anne finch” elh, vol. 57, no. 2, (summer, 1990), pp. 335-355. the johns hopkins university press. "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873075" http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873075 accessed: 22/04/2008 03:46. philips, bill & susan ballyn, martin renes. an anthology of english poetry, 15501750. universitat de barcelona, 2007. plath, sylvia. ariel. london: faber and faber, 1965. plath, sylvia. crossing the water. new york: harper & row, 1971. wagner, linda w., ed. sylvia plath. the critical heritage. london: routledge, 1988. young, elizabeth v. “aphra behn, gender, and pastoral” from studies in english literature, 1500-1900, vol. 33, no. 3, restoration and eighteenth century, (summer, 1993), pp. 523-543. rice university. "http://www.jstor.org/stable/451012" accessed: 25/05/2008 08:12 microsoft word rosanna rion 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 164 translation and tradition: the translator as mediator between two literary systems rosanna rion abstract: this paper discusses the impact of translation on literary traditions and the sociological elements which contribute to the shift of the canon. the effort of translation to enlarge and enrich a literary system makes it a powerful tool for the introduction of new aesthetics and trends as well as the ideology implied in them. a translation of a literary work is, in fact, a criticism of that work, a point of view on the author and the text. poggioli’s idea that translation is an interpretative art, like music, half way between reproduction or craft and a complete original creation is vital for this approach. keywords: translated texts, literary canon, translation and ideology. translated texts translation studies today are concerned with the translated text and they no longer centred on the idea of faithfulness to the source text. a relevant issue is to know the fate of a literary work, what has been called the tt-orientated approach to translation, that is, the target text orientated approach to translation, which comes from a literary view of translations rather than a linguistic one. barthes gives us a semiotic approach to meaning: words, he said, are no longer the pure form through which we can get to meaning, but they are objects themselves, with the trace of all the possible meanings, and their relation to other kinds of discourse. meaning is, therefore, not something waiting to be expressed, but a horizon of semiotic production, as gadamer would also assert. the study of translated texts reveals that literatures which are stable tend to impose their own codes on the translated works, while those literary systems that are in crisis try to maintain the codes of the foreign texts to revitalize their culture and canon. but translators are always more worried about the trends and style in the language they are translating into, and therefore a translation can always tell us a lot about the receiving literature at a certain time. even though the idea of translation has changed a lot since cervantes’ times, his metaphor in el quixote is still worth remembering: in the second part of the book (ii, 62) he compares translating to observing a flemish tapestry from the other side,: although you can see the figures, they are full of threads which copyright ©2009 rosanna rion. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 165 darken them. this idea that translations let us see the weaving of styles is to be taken into account for a new idea of the history of literatures and their trends. in translation studies today, scholars compare texts and contexts, not languages, as it used to be done in the past, among other reasons, because linguists have failed to produce a general theory of translation. the discipline, from the linguistic point of view, is divided into two branches: one which is descriptive and theoretical and another one which is concerned with the teaching of translators. the descriptive studies included different fields of study: product-oriented, that is the description and comparison of different translations of the same text, functionorientated, studying the function of the translated text within the new literary context and process-orientated, concerned with the decision process on the part of the translator the shifting canon thinking about translation from the point of view of literary history, jackobson stated that the idea of a synchronic literary system does not coincide with the literary period because the books which count for the literary period are only those close in time, while if we talk about a synchronic literary system, books from other literatures and also those belonging to the past which can be read in translation are also part of it. this wide view of the literary world has been structured and analyzed by even-zohar in his polisystem theory, in which the idea of literary cannon acquires a complexity which gives us a more realistic idea of the life of literary products with the concepts of centre and periphery of the system, that is works with prestige and others which begin their life as part of the underground, among others. my experience with the translation of two plays by the eighteenth-century playwright sheridan into catalan, the rivals and the critic, has given me occasion to think about the gap filled by these translated texts because, on the one hand, they had not been translated before and, on the other, even though they are in modern catalan, they provide a greater understanding of a literary tradition inexistent in the receiving language, as catalan literature was in the 18 th century in decline and did not produce interesting literary works, much less in theatre. therefore, it is not enough to catalogue an existing creative literary production, but it is important to include all books published and available at a certain time to establish a hierarchy. this exercise leads us to the inevitable problem of what is and what is not literature. if jackobson says that for a verbal message to become a work of art the poetic function must be predominant, mukařovský perfects the thought saying that the aesthetic function in a work of art is determined by the social context and values in society and that the line between aesthetic and non-aesthetic objects is dynamic and what was not a work of art at a certain time can be appreciated as such later in history. a work of art stands between the past and the future, it breaks the rules of the past and is destined to be part of the future rules. tradition is the substitution of systems, and this process may take place at a different pace. it can be fast or slow, depending on social circumstances. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 166 there’s a constant need to reassess the past. john donne was recovered by t.s. eliot, góngora by dámaso alonso. and the selection of texts, the kind of edition or the textual models used give us also the clues to the literary trends of a certain period. when a literary work is included in a new context, there can be new qualities perceived which had not been seen before, and translation is the perfect example of this phenomenon. the prague school talked about translation as the clash between two different literary and linguistic systems. the philosophers from that school think that linguistic differences are not so important as the changes due to the literary and historical context. on the other hand, jauss, in his theory of reception, partly influenced by gadamer’s hermeneutics, says that a literary work is the text plus its reception, and this leads jauss to state that meaning can only be partial confronting subject the idea of an eternal and immutable meaning, because we can only understand it from our historical context and imagine the past, but we cannot conjecture about future interpretations. tamachevskij wrote an article in 1928 where he says that the thing which is interesting for the literary history is not the qualities of the original but the image we have of it and the way in which one literature interprets another. the case of pavese in spain, for example, is interesting, where he is much more well-known and valued than in italy due to the prestige of the translations and the critical literature about them. contact between traditions frederich schleiermacher in about the different methods of translation [1813] (2000, 111) appreciates the enrichment which translation means to a language: “we shouldn’t ignore the fact that in language there is so much beauty and strength that only due to translation have developed and been rescued from oblivion”. one of the first issues which arise when we think about translation is the fact that there have been texts describes as translatable and others as untranslatable, especially as far as poetry is concerned, with all the possibilities in between raging from a great acceptability and consent in meaning to great discussions about certain interpretations of famous texts. the reasons why some texts are considered untranslatable have to do with the historical and social circumstances not something inherent in the language. you need to have the same aesthetic movements to make a good translation feasible. symbolist poetry would not be so difficult to translate into a literature which also had a symbolist movement. when i undertook the translation of a play by carlo goldoni, the miser (1756), from the italian, i made some reflections on the place he occupied in his tradition and the impossibility of translating the complete meaning of his works. his plays represented a break with the commedia dell arte, where all was based on improvisation and some extremely simple plots called “lazzi” with very stereotyped characters, while his comedies produced humanized and complex psychological types and were rich in peripety which showed social behaviour. still, godoni used some of the characters from the commedia dell arte and changed them gradually, so the italian public and readers could understand different shades of meaning from their knowledge of comparison with the old tradition and the new uses. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 167 on the other hand, sometimes, we can adopt foreign genres as in the case of japanese poetry, for example. a literature has to adapt the style if it doesn’t have anything similar to a “haiku” in the target language, the three-line poems, but once there have been translations, the “haiku” technique may become a style in that language as has happened with catalan due to the translations from the beginning of the 20th century. the modern idea of untranslatable texts comes from croce’s aesthetics, where he says that it is impossible to give a new aesthetic form to something which already has one. but walter benjamin thinks that translation inevitably breaks the limits of language and literary traditions and that this is a very good thing for a language and literature and what really makes it interesting and worth the effort. the contact between traditions facilitates translation and a text which at a certain time is untranslatable may not be so in the future due, precisely, to translation and mutual interest as well as criticism between cultures. from that point of view, culture written in english has a serious problem: “in the uk the most optimistic statistics indicate that 6% of books are translations but these include technical and non-fiction translations. literary translation only makes up 2% of the total output.//in australia, things are even worse. barbara mcgilvray and collaborators in sydney indicate that fewer than half a dozen books are translated every year.” (skrabec, 38139). the slovene writer andrej blatnik made an interesting comment in a recent conference at an international pen gathering: ”where to export? only when the voice of someone else is heard can “free choice” begin. who loses from these statistics? those who do not have a choice or those who cannot be chosen?” (apud allen 2007, 22123). the introduction of new ideology the polisystem theory developed, among others, by even-zohar studies literary phenomena and the way in which literary works relate to each other. and it also studies the history of interpretation and the history of the different rules according to which texts have been written and interpreted. so the main point is not to study translations themselves but the discovery of the models which have produced them. the idea of canon, of centre and periphery, so important in the polisystem theory, includes ideology, economy and social status. sometimes social status is more important than the number of books sold; others it is the opposite. today, publishing houses and the state institutions are the new patrons of literature and the arts in general, and they are very important in the construction of aesthetic ideology. in the past it was not elegant to mix money and literature; in fact, money was not considered at all in literary studies, but today we know that the economic processes related to literary phenomena are fundamental for the understanding of the literary system. even-zohar talks about the importance of subcultures in the literary system, because they push towards the centre and keep the system dynamic and alive. he states that without the stimulation of a strong sub-culture, any canonized activity tends to gradually become petrified and that the first steps towards petrification manifest themselves in a high degree of boundness and growing stereotypization of the various repertoires. flaubert’s madame bovary or baudelaire’s le fleurs du mal had been on coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 168 trial before becoming part of the canon. these authors were accused of indecency because of their literary work, which was at the time on the periphery of the system. the stability of a literary system does not depend on the tendency to change, that is the more it changes the more unstable it is; it depends on its capacity for assimilating change. if it can assimilate change, it is stable. translation can either bring innovation or reinforce the established canon, depending on the place which the literary work occupies in the new literary system. pascale casanova, in her book la république mondiale des letres (2004) 1 , compares each language with a kind of currency: “and these currencies clearly have very different values on the global literary marketplace” (allen 22123). this dynamic view of languages comes mainly from the prestige of literary traditions and therefore it is important to understand their workings. today though, culture does not develop in the way it used to, through the discussions of scholars or the impulse by artists, but it is constructed to make money. we talk about the “cultural industry” and we see events such as anniversaries (either of someone’s death or birth or others) determining the “modernity” of literary works. these rather artificial events produce criticism, books on the market and prestige for an author and literature, and are very often sponsored by state institutions and, therefore, censured. regarding translation, it was lefevere, in his book manipulation of literature (1985), the scholar who studied translation as rewriting, and together with susan bassnett the ones who introduced ideology into the considerations about translation. from this point of view, the translated text can be seen either as a battlefield or a meeting place of two cultures, or both at the same time. we all have our own idiolect, our preference for certain vocabulary and structures, and our idea of register may vary slightly or dramatically according to our experiences and readings and we pour all that into our translations. feminist writers and translators are at the extreme in the range of changes in texts due to ideological reasons and they feel justified in changing syntax and contents in order to avoid reproducing patriarchal structures. this attitude, which has its powerful reasons to be followed, is not so clearly a good idea in translation such as to lead to a modification of the text which would be too different to what is expected, in fact, suzanne jill levine sees translation as an act of (sub)version 2 . translation as criticism the concept of faithfulness is a historical concept; the idea today is that there is a dynamic existence of literary works and that the survivable of a literary work implies its modification and evolution, through translation and also through criticism. 1 pascale casanova, la république mondiale des letres (2004). harvard university press. 2 “translaton as (sub) version: on translating infante’s inferno” (1992), in rethinking translation. discourse, subjectivity, ideology, 75-85. ed. lawrence venuti. routledge: london. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 169 taking again goldoni as an example, his plays were first seen as light comedies, but through a marxist analysis, they were considered as social criticism and read as a literary foreshadowing of the french revolution because in them the nobles were made fun of and women wanted to decide their own destiny. our idea of a text determines our translation. criticism and the status of a literary work are ideological filters which influence our interpretation. benjamin says that translations are half way between a literary work and literary theory because they imply a critical view of the text. the philosopher gadamer, in his hermeneutics, compares translation to a conversation to reach an agreement, trying to find what there is in common between the author and the translator. but poggioli, i think, is the one who came up with the best idea when he said that translation is neither a creative art, like painting, nor a reproductive art as most crafts, but an interpretative art, like music. i agree with the idea of the original text as a musical score which will inevitably be interpreted differently by each of the possible interpreters. going further, paul de man in 1986 3 wrote that translators, emphasising certain aspects of the original text and neglecting others, do away with the idea of “equivalence” and therefore translations are always new creations. even though there is truth in that remark, translation is always based on somebody else’s work and that should be respected. the task of the translator is a humble one, because he is a mediator he is not to be too present in the text; very often, when a great writer translates a literary work, one can find signs of his style, vocabulary or linguistic preferences in the text, then the author is not really a good translator. to translate one has to be chameleonic and respectful of the otherness of the text, conscious of the changes and aware that there has to be a reason for them, that they ought to come from a deliberate choice based on study and the reading of the classics as well as the innovative works in both traditions. references allen, e. “translation, globalization, and english” to be translated or not to be. a. allen (ed). pen/institut ramon llull report on the international situation of literary translation, 2007. <http://www.pen.org/downloads/documents/translationreport.pdf> gallego roca, m. traducción y literatura: los estudios literarios ante las obras traducidas. madrid: edicones jucar, 2004. moya, v. la selva de la traducción. teorías traductológicas contemporáneas. madrid: cátedra, 2004. schleiermacher, f. sobre los diferentes métodos de traducer, 1813. madrid: gredos, 2000. skrabec, s. “literary translation: the international panorama” to be translated or not to be. a. allen (ed). pen/institut ramon llull report on the international situation of literary translation. 2007. <http://www.pen.org/downloads/documents/translationreport.pdf> 3 la resistencia a la teoría (1990) [1986]. visor: madrid. microsoft word jaime coolabah francesc ruestes coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 francesc ruestes born in barcelona 1959. trained in the salvador dalí studio and that of the catalan sculptor josep granyer, he also established a close relationship with the poet joan brossa. he has participated in international art fairs and had important solo exhibitions in contemporary galleries in spain and france. he has won several sculpture prizes such as the vilacasas foundation in barcelona. his sculpture has been acquired by public and private collections such as the la caixa foundation iron. coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 myth, history and memory speaking of myth, history and memory, is to speak of the conjunction of the conscious essence of the soul, the soul as well as light, wisdom and intuition. art is the medium of immortality and a mirror of man in his full grace, creating an oracle of beauty. myth, history and memory, constitutes the order of the sculpture’s empirical manifesto, alchemical formula as an imperative for man, imbued with the intuition of his experience as a creator. these three virtues are those required for any work of art that transcends into a masterpiece. microsoft word kristina everett 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 traditional urban aboriginal religion kristina everett abstract: this paper represents a group of aboriginal people who claim traditional aboriginal ownership of a large australian metropolis. they have struggled for at least the last 25 to 30 years to articulate and represent their contemporary group identity to the wider australian society that very often does not take their expressions seriously. this is largely because dominant discourses claim that ‘authentic’ aboriginal culture only exists in remote, pristine areas far away from western society and that urban aboriginal traditions, especially urban religious traditions are, today, defunct. this paper is an account of one occasion on which such traditional aboriginal religious practice was performed before the eyes of a group of tourists. keywords: urban aboriginal religion, tradition, dendroglyph. this paper concerns a group of people who claim traditional aboriginal ownership of a large part of what is now a modern australian metropolis in the era and context of native title and land rights. i need to protect the group’s anonymity due to some complicated politics, so for now i will call them by the fictitious name ‘gwalan’. gwalan have only emerged in the last thirty years or so as ‘a people’. it might be argued that their ‘ethnogenesis’ was initially in response to land rights, native title, and other seemingly benevolent state policies concerning indigenous australians. people who claim gwalan heritage and identity today do so largely because of the genealogical research of biologist, dr. james kohen in the early1980s. prior to kohen’s work some of these people lived lives as either unspecified aboriginal people living on the fringes of suburban life, or some may have considered themselves members of a postcontact group of ‘local aboriginal people’. the vast majority of the people identified as gwalan descendants by kohen, however, did not identify as aboriginal at all before and choose not to since his research. two or three hundred people have identified as gwalan and continue to develop various ideas, values and philosophies about and expressions of their identity. for these people recent disappointments regarding most indigenous australians’ access to remediations for past injustices such as native title have not, however, resulted in the demise of the various types of cultural renaissance and revival of aboriginal traditions that characterise gwalan (re)emergence. copyright ©2009 kristina everett. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 but, as is common in such contexts, gwalan expressions of identity are not singular. there are at least two groups of gwalan. for the purposes of this paper i will call one group ‘gwalan custodians’ and they use ‘revived’ cultural performances including ceremonies of various kinds, dancing and painting to attract recognition of their difference by the dominant society. the other group of gwalan, who compete with custodians for the attention of white authorities (henceforth referred to as gwalan tribals), have based their claims to authentic gwalan identity and ownership on genealogies and on academic research on language, archaeological sites and historical documents. this research is used to make native title and other kinds of claims against the australian state: a very different form of identity making from custodians who make public spectacles of their cultural practices. these kinds of spectacles are not only not performed by tribals, but are publicly ridiculed by them. it is a fact that many gwalan custodian expressions of identity are judged inauthentic by tribals and the dominant society. before i go any further it is important that i explain what i mean by tradition as it is practised in a gwalan custodian context. manning nash (1989:14) insists that although tradition is mostly concerned with the past and is hence fundamentally backward focused, it does have a future dimension. this dimension involves the commitment of its carriers to preserve and continue traditional practices into the future. however, because of the radical, long term disruption of cultural practices as one of the first peoples to have contact with europeans and because they have inter-married with whites and many different groups of aboriginal peoples, gwalan custodians do not have one, common cultural tradition on which to draw. they consequently ‘shelve’ or ‘sideline’ all traditions other than their new gwalan custodian tradition. everyone in the community is made part of the project of producing this ‘new tradition’ and commit themselves to preserving and continuing these traditional gwalan custodian cultural practices. but how are ‘we’ members of the wider australian society able to understand gwalan custodian cultural practices as traditional? many of ‘us’, especially federal court judges hearing native title claims, cannot. because native title claims are arguably the ultimate recognition of indigenous ‘authenticity’ by the australian state, many indigenous australians struggle to conform to its demands. according to the native title act (clth) 1994, claimants must prove that they are still ‘attached’ to a ‘body of traditions, observances, customs and beliefs of aboriginal people or a community or group of aboriginal people, including those traditions, observances, customs and beliefs as applied to particular persons, sites, areas of land, things or relationships’. these demands, as beth povinelli (2002:39) argues, are difficult enough for any indigenous group to prove, but are virtually impossible for people who live in long colonized areas as gwalan do. not only have peoples’ traditions changed to the point of being unrecognizable from the early records of colonists, but they have become ‘mixed up’ with the traditions of other indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. many currently practised gwalan traditions bear strong resemblance to practices described in the so-called traditional aboriginal anthropological literature and belong to people other than gwalan. some are based on the memories, imaginings and dreams of older gwalan descendants. other gwalan traditions coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 might have their origins in indigenous cultures from other countries, reflecting a kind of global indigeneity. the trouble is that because these traditions do not originate, or cannot be proved to have originated with gwalan ancestors who lived in gwalan country before 1788 they do not conform to the demands of native title and consequently do not conform to dominant ideas concerning aboriginal ‘authenticity’. but, regardless of how ‘authentic’ these practices are deemed to be by non-gwalan, it seems these expressions of group identity that were adopted for whatever reasons in the past, have now become such values in themselves that they cannot and will not be relinquished. as well as public spectacles including dancing, ‘welcome to country’ speeches and art exhibitions, gwalan custodians conduct private ceremonies meant for the benefit of their own members. before i describe the burial tree ceremony, however, it is important that i provide some conceptual and historical background material to better explain the context of the ceremony and its significance to custodians. i would argue that the main reason for general reluctance to accept the ‘authenticity’ of gwalan custodian cultural practices is because it has been widely documented, represented and subsequently believed, in various discourses, that urban aboriginal traditions, especially urban religious traditions are, today, defunct. tench (1788) and collins (1788) began the depressing tale of the social and religious obliteration of south-eastern aboriginal societies which was picked up more recently by historians including reynolds (1998,1989), aplin (1988) and goodall (1995); by sociologists and political scientists including broome (1996), rowley (1972) and jacubowicz (1994); by linguists including eades (1976), troy (1990, 1993), and walsh and yallop (1993); by economists including altman and niewenhuysen (1979) and by anthropologists including stanner (1968), berndt (1962), barwick (1962), reay (1964), gale (1977), williams (1988), rumsey (1994) and sutton (2001) to name a few. until quite recently, accounts of urban aboriginal practices in every discipline associated with aboriginal studies discount the possibility of surviving aboriginal religious practices in cities or close to country towns. recently, however, due largely to the crucial importance of being able to demonstrate ‘tradition’ and ‘on-going connections to customs’ in land rights and native title claims, anthropologists have been testing the waters of exactly what counts as tradition and on-going connections showing that legislation leaves a great deal to interpretation when it comes to these terms. recent anthropological work in this area argues for ways to perceive culture and tradition by recognizing specific kinds of continuity in various urban and rural aboriginal cultural forms which may have been previously discounted because they have changed over time. among these new approaches are those of luke taylor (2005), the more recent work of jeremy beckett (1996), francesca merlan (2006), and gaynor macdonald(2004) as well as my own work. newer ethnographies are set against discourse which has allowed aboriginal tradition to be placed only in past practices which may only be continuous in areas remote from the polluting effects of western civilization and which are said not to exist in the modernity of western towns and cities. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 it is undeniable that all gwalan descendants are dislocated from their heritage. they are not, however, displaced from their traditional country and although they have been forcibly separated from religious systems which gave particular meanings to their connection to land, they claim today that some knowledge, rituals and stories have survived and are now being implemented in their contemporary quest to experiment with new ideas about spirituality and land. these ideas, as i will describe, are adaptations of past and present beliefs, histories, relationships and politics. do gwalan custodians have ‘dreaming’? in my opinion, what is important is that gwalan custodians themselves say that they do and that they perform ceremonies and tell stories which are connected with a spiritual world-view that draws from aboriginal heritage. ‘having’ ‘dreaming’ also produces particular effects for gwalan custodians. ceremonies associated with ‘dreaming’ effect particular transformations, transitions and confirmations and assert and support culturally binding beliefs as the ethnographic example i describe below demonstrates. but, perhaps as importantly as effecting ritual transformations and affirming identity within the group, ‘having’ ‘dreaming’ is also a primary marker of ‘authentic’ aboriginality according to dominant discourses concerning what constitutes ‘real’ aboriginal tradition. it cannot be a real aboriginal painting if it does not have a dreaming story. it cannot be a real aboriginal dance if it is not a dreaming dance. people are not really aboriginal unless they ‘have’ dreaming stories. so, if ‘having’ dreaming contributes to the ‘authenticity’ of a given group of aboriginal people, then the interpretation of what counts as dreaming becomes less an analytical problem than a political one. that is, academic arguments including those of rumsey (1994), merlan (1995), maddock (1988), turner (1988) and austin-broos (1994) among others, concerning what, precisely ‘counts’ as myth and what constitutes history are less important in the context of gwalan custodians than the political advantage that gwalan gain from calling their ‘stories’ dreaming stories. in other words, if aboriginal peoples can convince the wider australian society that they have dreaming,that is, that they are spiritual, they are thought to be ‘authentic’. this is because the wider australian society believe dominant discourses which ‘essentialise’ aboriginality and conceptualise it as the binary opposite of westernness. ‘we’ western thinkers cannot escape our own traditions of thought which place ‘real’ aboriginal people into the category of ‘primitive’. aboriginality is conceptualised as ‘spiritual’, while westernness is conceptualized as ‘material’ (or modern). this kind of binary opposition serves to substantiate the identity of aboriginal peoples for the purposes of native title. the irony of this is that the gwalan people i work with know that they cannot win a native title claim under current law because they have tried and failed. but ‘we’ whites can afford to believe in gwalan dreaming precisely because we are not threatened by it. the political advantage that gwalan custodians gain from ‘having’ dreaming is that it affirms their claims to identity as difference and allows them to symbolically make land claims. they are narratives supporting claims to distinctive identity because they articulate the difference between gwalan and non-gwalan. it is precisely in their very different traditions which are articulated in their different stories where the difference between aboriginal people and other australians is situated. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 the issue of what constitutes different types of narrative remains for academic debate, and of course, that does carry weight in the practical context of land for example. but, whether i call gwalan ‘stories’, ‘myths’, ‘narrative histories’ or dreaming stories does not analytically matter in this paper because they are both all of these things and none of them. these stories defy categorization. they do not fit into anthropological, historical or mythological analysis. they fail, necessarily, to live up to the criterion demanded to reach the status of ‘myth’ proper or dreaming story. yet they also, necessarily, perform the same kinds of effects. thus, what is important, in my view is that one group of gwalan call these stories dreaming stories. whether this is right or wrong from the point of view of anthropological theory, and whether anthropology can ever understand these stories better by calling them something else, does not affect the cultural and political power of these stories to articulate this particular gwalan group’s identity. according to gwalan custodians, their dreaming revolves around stories, beliefs and rituals concerning what is claimed to be a gwalan ancestor figure, baiame. the name biaiame is not arbitrary. the belief in an ‘all-father’ inhabiting the heavens by aboriginal peoples in south-eastern australia was first documented in 1875 at wellington valley mission. here, the reverend james gunther says (in swain 1993:127): there is no doubt in my mind that the name baia-mai … refers to the supreme being; and the ideas concerning him by some of the more thoughtful aborigines are a remnant of original traditions prevalent among the ancients of the deity. baiame and his cult as it was practiced late in the nineteenth and around the turn of the twentieth century is referred to in manning (1882: 160-170), cameron (1885:364-5), howitt (1904:440-504), mathews (1905) and lang (1899:53) with later authors including berndt (1947), elkin (1975:143), lane (1978:233), kolig (1989:255-6), maddock (1982:127) and swain (1997) also making reference to the cult. but, apart from using the name baiame there is only one current practice performed by the group i worked with that has any resemblance to those described in the literature. this practice is the carving of dendroglyphs: images or designs in the trunks of living trees. but although the group do carve images in trees, the form of the carvings and the rituals associated with them bear no resemblance to the cult of baiame as it is documented in the literature. dendroglyphs seem to have been carved exclusively in the south-east of the continent and are described by lane (1978:233) as highly abstract geometric designs although some depicted european things such as trains, ships, horses, cattle, pigs and effigies of europeans themselves. lane suggests that these carved trees may have served to represent baiame’s camp and gifts. regardless of conjecture about the form and significance of dendroglyphs in the past, those made by custodians are emblems for the group. all these dendroglyphs are images of turtles. this use of turtle emblems is not totemic by any definition because gwalan society is not segmented through a kinship system and relations between different groups of people are not represented by different emblems. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 the carving of the turtle image into the tree is part of a ceremony which is believed, community members tell me, to facilitate the transport of the spirit of a recently deceased community member from this earthly realm into the spiritual realm in the sky which is presided over by baiame. everyone i asked claimed that baiame and his cult belong to the group and that it is their dreaming. having dreaming and being catholic yet, when asked, the vast majority of community members say that they are roman catholic. there is a strong connection between the community and a catholic centre in an outer suburb of the city. this link is an extension of long term associations many people have through family histories involving catholic missionisation. of those who do not have a history of missionisation, many do have a history of intermarriage with english and irish catholic convicts and free settlers. however, i do not think that this history is all that makes gwalan custodians claim to be catholic now. the catholic centre has become very much a community focus because some important community ceremonies such as weddings, funerals and christenings are performed there. many custodians are recipients of catholic welfare through the centre. the centre also provides transport, a venue and programs which allow community members to engage in social interaction with each other and other local indigenous peoples. in other words, the centre and catholicism provide gwalan custodians with much valued resources. arguably, the most valuable of these resources are potential new members of the community. the centre is an important source of new membership because it facilitates contact between gwalan custodians and other indigenous people who now live on what is claimed as gwalan land. these indigenous people from other places may be searching for culturally appropriate ways to make more meaningful connections with that land. it may seem that being catholic and having dreaming might be an impossible contradiction. but clearly gwalan custodians do not recognize a contradiction. the group routinely include reference to baiame in their catholic rites. one example was a christening i attended at the centre, which, although presided over by a catholic priest, included ceremonies and prayers associated with baiame. it seems that the political and social value of having dreaming is equal to the political and social value of being catholic. both are indispensible to the survival of the community. having dreaming authenticates aboriginality and gwalan claims. it also provides important symbolism relating to gwalan custodian identity. being catholic provides valuable material resources, and arguably even more importantly, precious new members without whom the community would have a hard time reproducing itself over time due to its small numbers. the burial tree ceremony. it had been six weeks since uncle sam passed away and the community had done their crying. uncle sam had been a vietnam veteran and a high ranking police officer and a state funeral had been performed in the days after his death. the funeral had been attended by some community members, but their attempts to have in-put into ‘indigenising’ the event coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 had been thwarted by officialdom. the only signifier of the deceased’s aboriginal identity were the little ribbons of red, yellow and black that his sisters wore pinned to their jackets. there had been considerable disgruntlement in the community since that day. many people told me that they thought it was disrespectful that the deceased was not honoured with an ‘aboriginal funeral’. when i asked what constituted an aboriginal funeral people were quite confused, but the sentiment was perhaps most eloquently expressed by an old uncle when he said: well, we get to do it our own way. fieldnotes 04/05 ‘aboriginal funerals’ in the australian state are not autonomous affairs. ‘traditional’ funeral rites are only permitted in so far as they are legal. consequently, ‘aboriginal funerals’ are conducted within the parameters of legal requirements concerning the disposal of the body. ritual practices surrounding the burial or cremation, however, vary enormously according to the desires, beliefs and values of the people conducting the proceedings. some people in the community were upset that uncle sam’s funeral, although an honour bestowed by the state, was also a denial of his aboriginality and his contribution to the state as an aboriginal person was not recognized. the performance of a burial tree ceremony gave gwalan custodians the opportunity to redress what may have been considered, by some, to be state intervention in community business. it also had the effect of affirming group identity by articulating the aboriginal identity of the deceased. gwalan custodians can usually arrange an ‘aboriginal funeral’ for deceased community members, but burial tree ceremonies are performed in addition to other ceremonies. it was explained to me that uncle’s spirit had used the time between death and ceremony to revisit all of its favourite people and places. the ceremony would put an end to the spirit’s wandering this world and facilitate its movement into another realm. on a cold winter’s morning i was invited to euroka cleearing in glenbrook national park in the blue mountains, west of sydney, to participate in the burial tree ceremony, which, it was said, would send uncle’s spirit to the ‘sky people’. sky people, gwalan custodians tell me, are the spirits of ancestors who, before white people came to australia, would have inhabited sacred places in gwalan land. now that these sites have been colonized by white australia the spirits of gwalan ancestors have been forced to relocate to the sky. it is not possible to drive vehicles close to the site of the burial trees at euroka clearing. when i arrived at the closest car park, across a small dry creek bed from the site i had a clear view, however, of the six trees that, at that time, had already been scarred (sadly there are five many more scarred trees there now); of an open space (clearing) for camping; of the already burning fire in the middle of the clearing and of thirty or so gwalan custodian adults and about fifteen children. adults were engaged in making and drinking tea, preparing food, chatting with each other and generally milling around. many of the children coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 were busy chasing the numerous eastern grey kangaroos that have been introduced to the park and constantly haunt euroka clearing in the hope of finding food. as i approached the site i was warmly greeted with the usual jokes and teases that i habitually trade with appropriate people and the more respectful greetings that are reserved for senior people. the general ambience was far from the somber mood that might be expected of a funeral rite. there was a general air of anticipation if not excitement something was going to happen. gwalan custodians themselves refer to all of their more formal gatherings as ceremony including social gatherings and they also claim that the burial tree ceremony involves ritual acts. these acts include the carving and grouting of a tree trunk. the performance of these acts are considered essential so that the spirits of the recently dead can pass from the earthly realm into the spiritual realm of the ‘sky people’. ritual must surely be understood in essence to be a specifically communicative action – an action that affirms culturally binding meaning and emotion. these acts, as i recount below, are also said, by gwalan custodians to achieve other transformations, transitions and confirmations such as the transformation of the tree into an emblem of gwalan custodian identity as dendroglyph. the first ‘ritual act’ constituting the burial tree ceremony for uncle sam was the choosing of a tree which would serve as an appropriate focus for the ceremony by a group of elders, both men and women. burial trees are always estimated to be older than two hundred years and are species known for their longevity. the tree for this particular ceremony was chosen within a grove of trees which exhibit the re-worked scars of earlier burial tree ceremonies. the first gwalan custodian engraving ceremony occurred thirty years ago. this ritual, some people told me, should be repeated twice a year, but has occurred less frequently in my experience. this may be because there has been at least one death every year in recent years and ‘renewal’ rituals have been incorporated into ‘full blown’ ceremonies for new trees. never-the-less the designs are re-grooved and re-grouted with white ochre paste often enough so that the designs in the trees always look reasonably ‘fresh’. gwalan custodian’ men were busy removing a large, oval shaped piece of bark from the chosen tree so that the turtle design, which would be carved into the ‘flesh’ of the tree would have a ‘new’, ‘clean’ space. when i asked a senior man whether the bark’s removal would damage the tree he replied: we never hurt trees … jes’ look at hem other fullas [trees] what we done before. they’s all lookin’ good. i told ya before we choose these trees ‘cause they older’n two hundred years. more’n whitefullas bin ‘ere. they bin missin’ us them oldfellas [trees], they bin missin’. they bin cryin’ for us. ceremonies. i tell ya what really hurts these oldfella trees. they bin taken away frum us – frum their own real people. now we’re back an’ these oldfullas [trees] need to get that whitefulla stuff off them. we gotta clear a space for the old ways again. got to take off the whitefulla bark. it don’t hurt ‘em. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 vdo ec. it seems that by removing the bark that ‘belongs’ to whitefullas, gwalan custodians ‘open up’ the tree to make a space for their own stories to be told. they make a symbolic ‘clearing’ on the tree, in time, in space in which to put their own story. the national park where gwalan custodians perform the burial tree ceremony is regularly visited by groups of international tourists and their local guides who can be confident of sighting wild-life including many bird species, goannas and kangaroos. the burial tree ceremony was in progress when a group of about twenty tourists accompanied by a tour guide unexpectedly encroached on the proceedings. these unwanted and unexpected onlookers crowded about the tree as the men were carving. yet, no matter how unwelcome such intrusion on gwalan custodian practices may be, the tourists were ‘entitled’ to be there. as part of a national park, euroka clearing is ‘public place’, not gwalan custodian place. the tour guide, employee of a private tour company and unknown to gwalan custodians, proceeded to present an authoritative commentary to the tourists explaining (wrongly) that the carved trees delineated a prehistoric space for dance and claimed that aboriginal ceremony is no longer performed by urban people. in other words, the tour guide denied the existence of gwalan custodian ceremony at the very moment of its expression. the dismissive utterances of the tour guide, however, provided the opportunity for a senior gwalan descendant woman and sister of the deceased to exhibit the ways in which gwalan custodian performance and gwalan custodian identity exists as that which is negotiated between gwalan custodians and non-gwalan custodians as well as between gwalan custodians. the gwalan woman literally took the high ground by standing above the tourists on the high side of a slope. below is a transcript taken from a video of what she said: excuse me. this is not a dance ground. this is a ceremonial ground and you mob are standing in it and watching a burial tree ceremony. this is the place where our people are taken by baiame to be with the sky people. this is my brother. over there is my mother. that one up there is me. we are [gwalan] and we have always had ceremony here. it’s jest that yous don’t know about it. vdo ec03. the gwalan woman’s words are a political claim to country and to relationships with country and other gwalan custodians past and present. it was an explanation of the proceedings which included an explanation of beliefs associated with the cult of baiame which gwalan custodians call their dreaming. the use of baiame stories were revealed in this context, as political linkages to a tradition that is used as a claim to authentic aboriginal identity in relations with non-gwalan custodians. they are, of course, more than that, the link to the cult of baiame is inextricable from gwalan custodian ritual practice and from their emergent and emerging group identity. links between dreaming, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 land, and authentic identity are made explicit. as the woman’s final words reiterate: ‘we have always told our stories and performed our ceremonies. ‘yous fellas jes’ don’t know about them’. the gwalan woman’s claims were a demonstration of how emergent gwalan custodian identity must, necessarily take shape against and within the very terms of denial that ‘outsiders’ assert. but, gwalan custodians take opportunities to mitigate negative judgments by affirming their identity in response to those negative terms. this was done in this case by asserting the difference between aboriginal knowledge as dreaming and western knowledge as denial. when i asked a number of gwalan custodians what they thought about the tourists and their intrusion, however, their responses were mainly ambivalent. most people saw the political necessity of explaining their presence and practices to whites, but no-one i asked was happy about what was considered a rude intrusion. one old lady’s poignant response was: whitefellas never see what’s in front o’ their nose. they’s jes’ gotta be told. nothin’ else for it. jes’ gotta be told. but it’s exhaustin’. git tired o’ tellin’ ‘em. why can’t they jest leave us be? fieldnotes ec0703. conclusion gwalan custodians claim that the burial tree ceremony involves acts, such as the carving of the tree, which are considered essential for the spirits of the recently dead to pass from the earthly realm into the spiritual realm of their ancestors, the ‘sky people’. this enacts other transformations, transitions and confirmations including the transformation of the tree into an emblem of gwalan custodian identity as dendroglyph. practices and stories related to the cult of baiame invoke the ancestral spirits of gwalan land and relationships between gwalan and non-gwalan and facilitate the relationships between gwalan ancestors and gwalan custodians. as this paper demonstrates, this is sometimes done before the eyes of those who deny the authenticity of the acts and the reality of their effects. gwalan custodians are constantly reminded that they can only take their claims of custodianship of gwalan land and culture as far as the dominant culture will allow. references: altman, j. and niewenhuysen, j. the economic status of australian aborigines. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1979. aplin, g. a difficult infant: sydney before macquarie. sydney: unsw press, 1988. austin-broos, d. ¨narratives of the encounter at ntaria.¨ oceania, 65:2, 1994, pp.131-151. barwick, d. ¨the self conscious people of melbourne¨ aborigines now. reay, m. 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(eds). canberra: aboriginal studies press, 2005. tench, w. (1788/1996). 1788. flannery, t. (ed). melbourne: the text publishing company. troy, j. australian aboriginal contact with the english language in new south wales: 1788-1845. canberra: pacific linguistics (anu), 1990. troy, j. ¨language contact in early colonial new south wales¨ language and culture in aboriginal australia. walsh, m. and yallop, c. (eds). canberra: aboriginal studies press, 1993 walsh, m. and yallop, c. ¨introduction¨ language and culture in aboriginal australia. canberra: aboriginal studies press, 1993. kristina everett (phd. anthropology). macquarie university, sydney. kristina’s work is focused on the (re)emergence of traditional indigenous cultural practices in urban contexts. most of her work has been conducted in the western suburbs of sydney, but her interest in this phenomenon is global. kristina currently works as a lecturer in indigenous studies at macquarie university where she is keenly involved in supporting and encouraging indigenous and non-indigenous teachers and students in generative interactions to develop and define the emerging field of scholarship called indigenous studies microsoft word jaime coolabah pau baya coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 pau baya grass barcelona, 1974. he studied at the university of barcelona, specialising in sculpture, finishing his degree in arts in 2000. he is an art teacher in a private secondary school in barcelona. he has won prizes for his work and has worked with italian architects as well as exhibiting his work in catalunya. carving and living everything starts with a falling in love. in the stone quarry, you step on many stones, blocks of different shapes and sizes. and in that stony place, a shape and a colour seduce you. you approach it, touch it, walk around it and you say: this is the one! at the studio, at home, there is a new descovery. the stone outside of its own context stands out with renewed personality and glow. there is not a dialogue yet. silence and space are my allies in the new and pleasurable fight which is about to begin. the attentive, reflective and concentrated look are my weapons in front of an apparently silent, hermetic and barren block. hours go by and the dusty and chaotic emptiness of the studio overwhelm me. the enemy appears: the doubt and the fear. i ask myself: what if i chose the wrong block? is this my job? but experience tells me that time is another ally, and that you have to make it yours. finally, among the foggy screens of the studio, a beam of light appears, which penetrates the space and makes a constellation of particles dance in the air. i follow the trajectory of the beam and i observe, surprised, the slow awakening of the block, from a long winter lethargy. we start to talk. it talks to me about textures, caverns, heads, edges, plans, folds and tensed surfaces. i answer to it and explain to it things about architects, landscapes, contrasts, empty and full spaces, proportions, lights and shadows, memories and myths. it is a fluid dialogue, we are getting along well. coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 as if stricken by an intoxicating and lucid madness, my gesture is drawing, nervous and loquacious, filling virgin surfaces. everything is stain and lines. the graphite comes on stage and fills it with its peculiar elegant and dirty character. activity becomes compulsive and my head an incandescent pot. i am tired, but immensely happy. we have finally talked to each other and we are starting to know each other. i go home quiet. tomorrow i will start to carve. microsoft word lyn mccreddon 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 forms of memory in post-colonial australia lyn mccredden abstract: there are many forms of memory in post-colonial australia, and many kinds of haunting. this paper investigates the poetry of contemporary indigenous poets sam wagan watson and tony birch, and reads the script of the federal government’s february 2008 apology to the stolen generations, asking how and why the nation should be haunted – historically and imaginatively into the future. keywords: memory, haunting, poetry. the poetry of young queensland indigenous man sam wagan watson takes many approaches to memory. when we smoke the houses that our loved ones have lived in, and say ‘yenandi’ in the old tongue, we’re not evicting them ... we’re ensuring their whispers continue the journey.” (wagan watson, author’s notes). in contrast to this description, a ritual of respect conducted between his people, wagan watson’s poem “the dingo lounge” is full of grief and accusation, as he considers the degradation of contemporary indigenous beliefs : those of the brown-skin lycanthrope have merely become the forgotten offspring from the dark ages of the dreamtime the black man’s beliefs are being swallowed up and regurgitated in foreign lands for a dollar (wagan watson, smoke encrypted whispers, 52) wagan watson has a high suspicion here for the memorialising business, “the dreamtime can be resurrected anytime/and found on the video store shelves”. he laments the pastness of his culture: “the bonemen have performed their last dance/and the shrieks of the black dingo…unheard in the night.” (“the dingo lounge”, smoke, 52). in this haunted and angry poem his muse, morpheus “in his arduous attempts to dream/has taken to anti-depressants.” it’s a poem which lashes out at the commodification of memory by both indigenous and non-indigenous. most shockingly, the poem laments and castigates the state of those abject indigenous “shapeshifters [who] skulk around the dingo lounge/haunted by the screaming engines of the machines copyright ©2009 lyn mccredden . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 of consequence/...as their numbers dwindle”, ghosts of the early bonemen who lived differently. hauntings in a 2008 paper, post-colonial critic graham huggan describes what he sees as the current “gothic period” in cultural criticism, “characterised by an outpouring of often densely theoretical work on trauma, mourning, and various aspects of contemporary late capitalist ‘wound culture’”. (huggan, 1). this essay explores the tension, inherent in much personal, communal and national remembering, between such “gothic” responses to the very real wounds perpetrated by human upon human, and what i will be calling the haunted dimensions of remembering. in this way, the essay explores how the nation might move into the future: without forgetting the horrors of the past, but also restoratively, not forever dragging victimhood and horror behind it. one way of approaching this tension is to think about the ghosts that haunt both literature and memory. sometimes they are invited, and created, by the writers who refigure them. sometimes they come uninvited, psychically and historically impelled. derrida in spectres of marx speaks of the “untimeliness” of ghosts, and of the uncanniness and anxiety perpetrated by their non-appearance. huggan, drawing on derrida, describes such ghosts of memory as continuing …to haunt us despite the reparative work of mourning. in this last sense, they can be seen as anti-commemorative; for whereas mourning domesticates the past with a view toward eventually exorcising it, ghosts move freely between the past and the present, confronting us against our will.” (huggan, 1). i want to put some pressure here on huggan’s adverb, “despite” here, and his term “mourning”, in the light of freud’s early distinction between mourning and melancholy. in freud’s context, it is not strictly true that mourning is “anti-commemorative”, nor that it is necessarily simply domesticating of the past, in contrast to the hauntedness huggan prefers. in a personal letter to a colleague who had lost a son, freud wrote: although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. no matter what will fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. and actually this is how it should be. it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. (freud, letters, 386). the distinctive roles of mourning and melancholy, both debilitating and empowering, have of course been open to long debate. like his disciple lacan, freud claims a kind of rightness – “and actually this is how it should be” – in relation to remembering loss, “that love which we do not want to relinquish”. it is helpful here to remember freud’s distinction, that "in mourning the world has become impoverished and empty; during melancholia, it is the ego itself" (freud, “mourning”, 246). these are potentially helpful words in relation to communal and national remembering too. is the post-colonial nation at its very core of identity necessarily melancholic, depleted perpetually of coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 identity, stricken at its very root; or can we trace, rather, the processes of post-colonial mourning at work – ways of accepting and remembering loss and its impoverishment, but with the potential for future empowerment, a sense of the rightness of remembering? freud’s “how it should be” suggests processes which are linked to hope, of not merely remaining with “wound culture” and an eternally impoverished ego. if we are to address the hope entailed in remembering, it is necessary to examine what forms post-colonial remembering is taking in contemporary australia; remembering experienced differently by indigenous and non-indigenous australians, but also differently by individual writers. can memory take on the form of hope: hope as arguably itself an equally haunted process, one which is informed by intimate knowledge of the past and its impoverishments, but which threads towards a future not yet explicit? huggan suggests that the work of memory produces a mourning which domesticates the past, while the present needs to continue being haunted by ghosts “against our will”. however, is there a possibility of remembering which does not simply domesticate the past, but which continues to acknowledge the past’s potency and woundedness, and which simultaneously empowers us to imagine an unknown future? is this hopeful remembering possible as a communal – even national – form of remembering, or is it possible finally only at the personal, psychic level? we can see a similar conjunction of personal and institutional questions about memory and its consequences being asked so powerfully during the july 2008 papal visit to australia for world youth day by victims of sexual abuse by religious clergy. the apology and the future. the text of the australian federal government’s apology to the stolen generations was presented in federal parliament to a gathering of indigenous leaders, and via a media hook-up to the nation on february 12, 2008. what does it tell us about current forms of remembering in post-colonial australia? for instance, what do we make of the fact that the word “future” appears 13 times in this document of 360 words? the apology begins: today we honour the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. we reflect on their past mistreatment. we reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. the time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. (the apology). what can be made of the rhetoric – the metaphors, verbs and pronouns which construct this symbolic act of remembering? “we”, that ancient, homogenising collective noun, is used throughout. levinas would remind us that this collective pronoun automatically works its inclusiveness through excluding some; here the subject “we” immediately sets aside the other as the focus of the apology, all those others – “the indigenous peoples of this land”, the stolen generations, those victims of “past mistreatment”. this is not just carping on words. who is offering the apology? the agent who perpetrated the “mistreatment” and the blemishes of course: but then “we” becomes “the nation”, “the laws and policies of successive parliaments and coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 governments”, “we the parliament of australia”. powerful figures, and impersonal and invisible at best. this collective “we” is asked to “reflect” on the mistreatment, quiescent at best; but very soon, at line 4, “we” are asked to plunge into the future: “the time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.” some little space is left for mournful reflection, though hauntedness is not a metaphor here, being a more difficult public emotion. there seems arguably no longer any use, in the temporal framework of the apology, for freud’s inconsolability, the perpetual mourning/remembering of loss (though of course that does seem allowed in terms of white diggers remembered as part of the anzac mythologies). some would argue that this moving on is appropriate, that the long work of remembering and mourning has been done, and that, as the metaphor has it, a new page has to be turned. from the opening line of the apology, with its reference to “the oldest continuing cultures in human history”, memory is bound up with particular conceptions of time. the ghosts and traumas of the past are symbolically relegated to that past, as “the future” takes over: “moving forward with confidence to the future”, “for the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written”, “a future that embraces all australians”, “a future where this parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again”, “a future where we harness the determination of all australians, indigenous and non-indigenous, to close the gap”, a future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. a future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. a future where all australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners… simultaneously the problems are seen to be “enduring”, and to be levelled, all australians being equal partners. while there is much applause for change and renewal, from policy makers, pragmatists and those wanting social justice now, “the apology” has also been seen by some as a festival of white self-forgiveness which blots out the past and changes little; and by some as merely rhetorical, useless symbolism which changes little practically. from both ends of the spectrum comes a refuting of the apology, and doubt that the past can be rewritten, or overwritten in this way, let alone the future. what space is there in the rhetoric, and the still to be realised consequences of the apology, for derrida’s notion of the future, as necessarily haunted, as that place where “[a]t bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come, or come back” (derrida, specter, 39)? this essay is asking how hope can be constructed for the future if the past is held onto with unremitting woundedness and a concomitant refusal even to imagine possible futures. this unremitting referral back to the woundedness of the past would arguably hold us not in appropriate mourning, but in the realm of melancholy where the ego – an individual’s, a community’s or a nation’s – does not even desire its ghosts to haunt the future, but traps them in the past, or anxiously confronts them again and again in a present which can’t move forward. what might happen – imaginatively, ritually, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 politically if we seek ways of desiring and allowing such ghosts fully into the future? or perhaps we need to say finding ways of accepting that they will confront us, since it’s not a matter of agency and simple choice here, either for individuals or nations. this would be a way of remembering, of mourning and of orientation to the future simultaneously. it is comprehensively not a linear model of time, history or remembering. in an interview derrida speaks again of this specter of the future, of a future . . . which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. for me, that is the real future. that which is totally unpredictable. the other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. so if there is a real future behind this other known future, it’s l’avenir in that it’s the coming of the other. (derrida, in dick and kofman, film). relationship to the past, to the present, and to the future is, for derrida, anti-linear, full of traces which can never fully be recovered, nor eradicated: …the rhetoric of memory . . . recalls, recounts, forgets, recounts, and recalls forgetting, referring to the past only to efface what is essential to it: anteriority. (derrida, memoires, 82). the traces of the past are turned to, of course, but we cannot be gods in relation to the past, we cannot and should not invoke it as completely known. for derrida ‘limitless memory would…be not memory but infinite self-presence’.45 (derrida, dissemination, 109). we remember, we forget, we move into the future, we go on remembering. this is “how it should be”; and equally, we go on filling in, substituting, but at best opening ourselves to a hauntedness which is the trigger, the provocation for deeply imagining the future. indigenous poetry hauntedness as permeating any understanding of the future can be read in some of the best poetry by indigenous artists in australia. melbourne academic and poet tony birch has recently published a poem/prose sequence “the true history of beruk: [william barak] (archive box--no. 3)”, spanning the years 1835 to 2007, and invoking the presence of a ghost, the indigenous leader barak, who lived in the early 1800s, along the upper reaches of the yarra river with his people, the wurundjeri. in the opening lines it is the white men of history – cook, buckley, batman – and then a different kind of speaking by beruk. 'my words', beruk-ngamajet--1835 captain cook marched- in jacket and brass button buckley stood ragged in possum skin at muddy creek batman came looking with glass, beads, powder and mirrors in a wooden boat coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 around the sea buckley spoke his old tongue- the visitor is not ghost he is not ghost look at batman's face do not touch his skin his bread or his house do not touch his house beruk spoke the truth- whitefellow shoot us down like kangaroo whitefellow come by and by and shoot us shoot us down whitefellow come and shoot us down the whole poem, with its prose and verse sections alternating, moves from this section set in 1835 to 2005, and we find a surprising, ghostly and moving finale to the poem, as beruk’s spirit reinhabits the riverbed he once knew so well: beruk visits the riverbed--2005 beruk moves quietly through the canyons of the city--all is stone still now. he passes the winking lights--imitating fife. he listens for machines grinding to failure. beruk observes his reflection in the flaws of glass, now inhabited by the petrified few. women offer themselves. men spit abuse. while dead children drift silently by, on a journey from the river to the ocean. beruk slips into the water, beneath the heavy metals--the leaching arsenic, iron oxides, poisons and the death throes of toxic fish. below the monster hulls of ships the current carries beruk onward and down, to where the riverbed of the wurundjeri awaits his return. beruk calls into the darkness--singing his travels until his feet meet the floor of 100,000 lives once lived. in the beauty and blackness of the riverbed beruk greets his son, david. he then greets his father--the ngarnajet. they sing, feet raising a rhythm of shifting earth: we will be gone all gone soon we will be gone and we will come we will come and be coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 we will be is this simply nostalgia, memory struggling to hold on to what is passed, impossible, no longer potent? the fact is that in 2008 we do have the gritty persistence of this poem, with its images and multiple voices drawn up from the archives, and we have the contemporary indigenous poet’s will to “sing, feet raising a rhythm of shifting earth”, just as he represented ngarnajet and beruk and david did. in an essay reflecting on his own poem, birch writes about port phillip bay and melbourne, of … the recent dredging of the river the yarra river or the bay…commercial interest, globalisation means that we’re going to become a gateway city again in melbourne and that we need to have a deeper channel to get bigger tankers into the port so that we can ship more goods into the hinterland as we would have said in the 19th century. i was very interested when this dredging occurred, that in fact part of the exploration talked about the original pre-european wurundjeri river bed, which is in port philip bay and which exists today at about 115 metres in a ravine at the centre of port philip bay...that wurundjeri story which is deepest within the landscape...these stories reflecting contemporary landscapes…i do not want william barak’s story or the story of the wurundjeri people to be a historical story. i want it to be a story that resonates in melbourne today, so that we understand it today. (birch, “promise”) past, present and future are haunted, because individuals, communities and nations are memory animals. but memory does not offer stability and solidity. it cannot simply be relegated to a closed page or a dusty vault. memory works through a haunting, a melancholy which moves beyond merely “wound culture” it is an honouring of “that love which we do not want to relinquish”. the imagined/remembered figure of beruk is one which causes us to mourn for a past of destruction and deep woundedness; but it is also a spectral figure which finds shape into the future, “where the riverbed of the wurundjeri awaits his return”. in memory there is nostalgia, mourning, and loss, but not necessarily and finally the impoverishment of ego. rather, the post-colonial poetry of australian indigenous poets enables – and is the product of active, imaginative, historical remembering, and refiguring into the future. references the apology to the stolen generations. abc news website: <http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/apology/text.htm> accessed july 10, 2008. birch, tony. “the true history of beruk: [william barak] (archive box--no. 3)”. meanjin, 65:1, march, 2006, pp.72-75. birch, tony. “‘promise not to tell’: interrogating colonialism’s worst (or best) kept secrets,” transcript of paper presented at first person: international digital storytelling conference, acmi, 2006. <http://www.acmi.net.au/global/media/first_person_birch.pdf>. accessed june 14, 2008. derrida, dir dick, kirby and kofman, amy ziering, jane doe films, 2003. derrida, jacques. disseminations. barbara johnson (trans). chicago: university of chicago press, 1983. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 derrida, jacques. memoires. new york: columbia up, 1986. derrida, jacques. specters of marx, the state of the debt, the work of mourning, & the new international. peggy kamuf (trans). london: routledge, 1994. freud, ernst l. (ed.) the letters of sigmund freud. basic books: new york, 1960. freud, sigmund. “mourning and melancholia.” pelican freud (1979), 11, penguin: harmondsworth, 1917, pp. 245-68. huggan, graham. travel writing and the uncanny. borders and crossings conference, university of melbourne, july 16, 2008. personal correspondence, 2008. levinas, emmanuel. difficult freedom: essays on judaism. seán hand (trans). sander gilman and steven t. katz (eds). johns hopkins jewish studies. johns hopkins up: baltimore, md, 1990. watson, sam wagan. smoke encrypted whispers. st. lucia: uqp, 2004. watson, sam wagan. “author’s notes — conclusion.¨ this line is now connected, angela rockel, jacket 27, april 2005, cited at http://jacketmagazine.com/27/rockwaga.html). (accessed july 15, 2008), 2005. zehfuss, maja. “derrida’s memory, war and the politics of ethics” derrida: negotiating the legacy. madeleine fagan (ed). edinburgh: edinburgh up, 2007, pp. 97-111. lyn mccredden teaches australian literature and cultural studies at deakin university, melbourne, australia. she is the author of the critical monographs james mcauley (1992), and bridgings: readings in australian women’s poetry (1996, with rose lucas), as well as the volume intimate horizons: the sacred in australian literature (forthcoming, atf press, 2009, with bill ashcroft and frances devlinglass) microsoft word coolabahmontero coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 interview an interview with gloria montero interviewed by pedro fernández dorado coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 copyright ©2010 gloria montero and pedro fernández dorado . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. this is the transcription of an interview with gloria montero, recorded on may the 20 th , 2008, at gloria’s home in barcelona. i would like to thank gloria montero for her invaluable help and for the magic in her books, and sue ballyn for giving me the opportunity to meet gloria in person. the ramblas in barcelona are as lively and crowded as always on this warm tuesday, and as i arrive at gloria montero’s door, very close to the wonderful romea theatre, i wonder what her apartment will look like. all my expectations are accomplished when i enter gloria’s flat, where she receives me with a huge smile and invites me to enter. during the interview she will explain that the building dates from almost three hundred years ago, and it seems to me an ideal home for a writer. after following her through a long wide corridor we arrive at a beautiful room with light streaming through two high windows looking out toward the mediterranean sea. a few minutes later, after some jasmine tea, we are both ready to begin the interview. pedro: gloria, i would like to start this interview with a quote from your novel the villa marini, in which you depict the encounter of marini, the main character, with the spectacular australian landscape. the quote says the following: coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 “her eyes glitter over the familiar landscape. the mountains in the background, purple against the bruised colour of the tall sticks that rise straight from the red soil. she knows the smell of that earth, the texture of its dampness below the hot crust, the roots that grapple down into its dark, the creatures that live and forage there. she’s aware suddenly how much she belongs here. how much a part of it she has become. like the heat, the rain, the cane itself” (the villa marini, 103) gloria, i believe you were born in queensland and stayed there until the age of nineteen. how much has that land become a part of you? gloria: that's a difficult question to answer because i think that where you are born, the land, the place, everything abouit it, is a bit like your family. you don’t question it. it’s just there and becomes part of you. i’ve lived outside of australia longer than i ever lived there. but i suppose that particular landscape in australia had its importance. perhaps if it had been an urban landscape it might not have had the same impact, but the tropics are very special. and the landscape, right there on the coast of the great barrier reef with sugar plantations all around, is especially beautiful. local history accounts tell how many of the original european settlers in the area were irish. the catholic church had bought up large tracts of land to attract irish immigrants. pedro: yes, that comes through in the villa marini, there’s a catholic priest who plays an important role in the novel. but i guess that was not the only community living there when you were a child. can you recall what kind of community were you brought in? gloria: when i was growing up in innisfail, there was that tremendous mixture of people there. as well as the irish and the english and a few scots, there were a lot of italians, some yugoslavs, chinese, people from the pacific islands, lebanese, greeks, a few spaniards – you name an ethnic group and they were there! i think it comes out in the villa marini that it was the only place in australia at least at that time, perhaps even now, where the chinese had their own temple. pedro: but was it an important community? gloria: no, not especially important as a community, but they were there. the grocery stores at the town were usually either owned by the chinese or by the greeks. now when i think back, i'm aware how different ethnics groups each had their own business specialties, but when i was growing up there i never thought about it at all. it was just what was there. the landscape, as i have said, is very beautiful there: the pacific ocean, wild and rough, with spectacular beaches and sugarcane fields all around. even after all these years, it is still very vivid to me. the town where we lived survived on sugar cane. there was a sugar mill in the town and two or three other sugar mills in the small towns around. my godmother's family, who were catalan, had a large sugar plantation. i spent a lot of time on the farm there as a child and drew a great deal on those memories for the novel. pedro: i gather that paronella park was quite close to where you lived as a child. do you think that comparisons may be drawn between the house and grounds of the villa marini and the architecture of paronella park? coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 gloria: i used to go there with my family. the paronellas were friends of ours. but many people used to go there to picnic. there was a little waterfall and pools where you could swim. the park grounds were extensive. what i remember of it from when i was a child was half in ruins. an interesting thing is that way back then josé paronella had built a hydroelectric plant on the property, and a friend sent me a clipping recently from an australian newspaper that talked of this hydro plant now being rebuilt. however, you must remember that what happens to marini in the novel has nothing whatever to do with paronella park. the novel is entirely fictional. and most of the story takes place before i ever lived in the area. besides, in those days, what marked the area more than anything else was the cane season. gangs of cane cutters were employed. they came for the season and lived in barracks on the farms. at nights during the season there would be spectacular fires. just imagine a cane field, and more than one, on fire all around the town it was extraordinary! that doesn’t happen anymore because they no longer burn off the fields, and there are no gangs of cane cutters who come for the season either. now everything is mechanised. * * * * * * * * * * * pedro: in your novel we learn how mariano grau is very much concerned about the political situation in cuba. while being raised by spanish parents in australia, i suppose that you can remember how you and your family experienced franco’s dictatorship. you are very well known for your constant struggle in support of democracy in spain during franco’s dictatorship. how much did your family’s experience of the civil war influence you in taking up this struggle? also, i wonder how you felt when you returned to spain while franco was still alive. gloria: you know, i believe that each one of us inherits not just physical characteristics from our families, but that we also absorb a lot of dreams, a lot of ideas as well. pedro: political ideas also? gloria: also. for me, spain has always been present, although i was in my teens before i ever came to spain. and spain then wasn’t quite what spain is today. one particular detail sticks in my mind that perhaps makes this clear. when i first visited my family in asturias, they lived in turón, a coal mining town. we would go in a little train to mieras on the weekend where there was a market on sundays. we'd leave early in the morning when it was still dark, and i can remember clearly the profile of the mountains all around and also the profile of the tricornios 1 of the guardia civil patrolling the area. it seemed strange to me there should be so many of them in such a small town. but i learned then about the maquis 2 in the mountains. there was a great deal i had to learn. i've often thought that the reason i feel so completely at home in spain is because we 1 the tricornio was a three-cornered hat worn as a part of the uniform of the paramilitary civil guard during the franco’s dictatorship in spain. 2 the maquis were the members of the spanish guerrillas exiled in the mountains between france and spain, who fought against franco’s regime. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 were so much part of it not only during the transition back to democracy but also during the years of the dictatorship. pedro: when you were living in australia, you didn’t live through the kind of political problems such as we had here, did you? gloria: when i was growing up, politics were part of my life, too. my grandfather had decided very early in asturias that he was not going to work in the mines, the only work available there then, where miners very often lost their lives. so for a time as a young man he worked as a shepherd. then when he and my grandmother, the village school teacher, married, he followed a brother of hers to argentina. after a few months my grandmother and their first daughter joined him there and another daughter was born in argentina. after a couple of years they heard of two welsh brothers who were filling a ship with workers to go build a railroad in australia between alice springs and darwin. that was how the family got to australia. later on, when the spanish war started, my grandfather came back to fight in the war. he was already forty years old. i was very young then, but i can remember everybody at home sitting around the radio listening to the news from spain. when he was wounded in the war, my grandfather eventually got back home. however, he was indignant about what was happening in spain and would speak about the situation there whenever he could. i remember him being carried home covered in blood after being attacked by an italian fascist group in the area. another day we came home to find the house had been ransacked. papers and documents were spread all over the place, many of them destroyed. pedro: by the italian gang? gloria: this “black hand” gang, as they were known, had close ties to mussolini's italy. geographically, we were a long way away and yet, europe and the spanish war were always present and affected us. that comes out, i think, in all these wars, which is set in the same area as the villa marini. although all these wars is my story, whereas marini’s story is fictional. * * * * * * * * * * * pedro: you have said on several occasions that you wrote all these wars focusing on the reality from which you came, trying to put together the fragments of your identity. gloria: i wrote that book when we first came back to spain after franco's death. although i was living here as a spaniard, i was writing and publishing in english. i began to wonder who i was writing for. i realized that wherever i had lived i had accepted not only the geography of the place but also its history. i'd never lived anywhere as a foreigner an ex-patriot. my family in australia, for instance, were quite definitely spanish but they were australians, too; australians in the sense that they were part of everything that was going on. (it was exactly what we used to talk about in catalonia, how anyone who lived and worked here should be considered a catalan.) writing those stories in all those wars was really liberating for me because i accepted finally that my history was decidedly multicultural, that who i was encompassed much more than one culture and one language. many people in the world today have this experience. they emigrate from latin america, from africa, from asia, from other parts of europe, and that all remains part of them. but they go on to live new coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 experiences in a new culture, a new language. that’s the wonderful thing about immigrants. we have to accept that immigrants need to adapt to their new home when they arrive, but that doesn’t mean that they should have to forget where they came from. that’s part of them too, and we should always see it as an enriching element for their country of adoption, and for the people living there. pedro: it is curious that you came to understand this through writing. gloria: yes, it is curious that this coming to terms with my identity should have come to me in this way, because by then i had been writing for many years. but finally when i did accept that i had not only spain but australia and canada, too, where i lived for many years and where my children were born, it was an enriching experience. all of those countries, those cultures, those experiences are part of me. that background makes me different to other people, more different sometimes than what i might even want to be myself, but it is what i am, who i am. * * * * * * * * * * * pedro: my vision of marini in your novel is that of a strong woman tied to the land. it seems to me that the reasons why she stays are economic or personal reasons (i mean caused by her desire to finish what her father started), or even a kind of magic or magnetic force that australia uses against to prevent her leaving. were you aware of any of this as marini’s character developed? gloria: i don’t know or remember that i consciously wanted to show anything other than tell a story. if anything, the idea behind the book is that i believe we inherit a great many intangible things from our families, and what marini inherited from her father were those dreams of his. by the time he died, he had lost faith in his dreams. remember that question that someone asked in class about why he, who had always spoken in spanish to marini, speaks to her in english before he dies. when i was asked that question i didn’t remember that part of the book and had to think about it. it was a very valid question and gradually i realized the reason why. he'd become disenchanted as he grew older after so many problems. he had an affair with ena, the young girl who worked there. it was as if all the things he had ever been, all the dreams, had gone. and so then, without realizing it, he speaks to marini in english and she wonders why. and just a moment after that, he dies. remember the paragraph of the book that you read at the beginning of this interview when marini realises that the land has become part of her? when her father dies, she doesn't want to go anywhere else, that land, that plantation is her home. she wants to stay there and finish what they started to build. her father's dream has become her own. pedro: so it is like a mixture of continuing her father’s work. i think perhaps that people who work the land are more inclined to be involved with that feeling of belonging to the land. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 gloria: exactly, and also i imagine that it explains something of the feelings of the person in the family who is not the hereu 3 . catalan law at that time decreed that instead of being divided among all the children, a family property would be inherited by the eldest son. that explains something of the character of mariano, who feels very bitter about this and determines at all costs to have his own property, his own land. pedro: something similar happens to dom, but in his case, he had to leave because his family in ireland had no property. dom is a very interesting character. i interpreted dom’s final crisis as a direct consequence of his traumatic experience with aborigines. but i couldn’t avoid thinking of another novel we dealt with through the course called coonardoo. in this novel, susannah prichard depicts the rough conditions of the australian land, and shows us how two women fail in trying to live on those lands, having to come back to the commodities of the city. my question is: are there any other reasons that explain therefore dom’s depression and posterior addiction to opium that can be also related to the harsh nature of the land, or is his trauma the only explanation for it? gloria: i guess my feeling was that dom was a rather weak person. not necessarily because of his experience with cannibals, although that had obviously been traumatic for him, although when he finally explains what he remembers, it is unclear if it was a dream, or something that had really happened. i did a lot of research into this. there are a number of reports by people in the early days who had been in the north, in the bush, and of their experience of cannibalism among the aborigines. but what i felt about dom was not only to do with that experience. it was about the kind of person he was. he was a very different character from his brother michael who was full of energy, not only in the way he did things but also in the way he wanted to do things. dom was more prepared to take the easy way out. he was obviously an attractive man and when he and marini met it was at a moment when she needed someone with her, someone who would help her to keep the plantation going. pedro: she and dom are as different as night and day. gloria: exactly, and while marini was ultimately too much for dom, he was probably not enough for her, whereas michael fitted the bill exactly. he was gorgeous, robert redford right there on the plantation! (laughs) marini was young and dom was never around much anymore. so it was the most natural thing in the world they would fall in love. pedro: we get the feeling that michael not only handles the farm better than dom, but also that he acts as joel’s father better than dom does. gloria: dom’s depression because of the problems of the plantation, his inability to succeed, his early trauma it is all too much for him! pedro: opium makes him forget all his problems. 3 hereu is the catalan word for the english heir. according to the catalan tradition, it was only the oldest son who inherited the lands and possessions of their parents. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 gloria: i never had the opportunity to go into an opium den, but i remember those old chinese men, sitting on the street not far from where i lived, smoking their pipes. and in the early days there were places in the town where people would go to smoke opium. pedro: and do you think that the rough conditions of the land could also be a reason for dom's failure? gloria: you mentioned earlier the novel coonardoo, set in a part of australia where conditions were very hard and people had to homestead and move their cattle long distances. land like that might well be described as treacherous. in a similar way, the tropics, too, can be difficult. but i think that in writing the story i was thinking more about destiny. although marini does what she feels will be better for everyone, it all ends in tragedy. just when it seems nothing can go wrong, it all collapses. pedro: and it’s quite shocking, because i remember reading the novel in two parts. i first got to almost a hundred pages, and then read the rest of the novel in one night. and i started this second take from the moment they are starting to raise money and things seem to be getting better. i must say that when the disaster arrived, i wasn’t prepared for that, it was completely unexpected, and that’s maybe the reason why it shocked me so much. gloria: yes. it is interesting that both my children, who were quite grown up when the novel came out, said: how could you? (she laughs) how could you do that to the poor children? pedro: yes, because the end is completely devastating. gloria: i don’t believe i knew when i began to write the novel how it would all end, at least, not exactly. i knew that marini would do everything that she could to fulfil the dream, but that, life itself would take over. gradually, as the story took shape, there was no other way to go. it all just happened. * * * * * * * * * * * pedro: immigration plays an important role in the novel, and in fact, the main characters are immigrants working in australia. what is your own experience of immigration in australia at that time? how is it reflected in the villa marini? gloria: well, yes, immigration there was a reality. i suppose immigration has always been something very real to me. for example, my very first book written when i was in canada was, the immigrants, an oral history of immigrants. pedro: immigrants always bring new life and their specific cultural baggage with them when they arrive in new countries. gloria: i remember that a critic once said: there are three things that are always present in montero’s work: displaced people, the spanish civil war, and an absent father. i thought it curious at first, but then i started looking at all my work and i realised it was true! what you are, what is part of you, is the way you see the world. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 pedro: everyone is like a filter. gloria: even in my last novel, punto de fuga, which is a contemporary story about a war photographer, set around the war in bosnia-herzegovina, those three elements are present. as you say, one reflects the world through one's own filter. * * * * * * * * * * * pedro: from my point of view, the land and working on it is depicted as treacherous in the novel, and its dangers become evident in various parts of it. after mariano’s death while working out in the fields, there’s one moment where tension invades the reader, fearing that such an accident can happen again with dom. at the end of the novel the dramatic end is exactly at the same location. do you agree with this interpretation of the land being treacherous, or do you attribute this evilness to destiny itself? gloria: it is all part of life itself, although there’s no doubt that the land can be treacherous. natural events are often devastating for human beings. and in the tropics, everything seems bigger and more exuberant: flowers and birds are more colourful, trees are bigger, the climate is hotter, the sea is wilder; it’s like an exaggeration of the global environment. pedro: perhaps that very thing often makes the land itself seem legendary. i'm thinking now of the film “picnic at hanging rock” have you seen it? gloria: of course, that was a completely different part of australia. but those kinds of legends, of feelings, myths about the land, exist in part because there were huge areas that were inhabited. you get these enormous expansions of land, where the country itself is very beautiful, but there is something that we don’t understand about it, thus we attribute all kinds of things to the very land itself. the aborigines in australia live very much with an idea that the land itself is sacred. they are much more respectful than we are with the land. pedro: they believe the land rules their lives. gloria: yes, and they have their song lines which define their areas, and their totems for different animals. when i lived in australia you didn’t see a lot of aborigines in the area where i grew up. aborigines then weren’t integrated in any way into the population at large. there was one singer, harold blair, a tenor, i think he was, who was well known. the painter albert namatjira was also famous. but australian aboriginal art, the way we often see it now, was unknown. aboriginal art was traditionally ceremonial. there were, i believe, only certain people in a tribe who were allowed to paint these ceremonial objects. i think it was only in the sixties that people working with aboriginal artists began to get them to paint on canvas and sell their work. some of the big canvases that you see now are painted by two and sometimes by three people. imagine, they decide they want to paint the legend of the crocodile. so they simply start, without making any draft. someone asked an aborigine artist once, how can you coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 do this? aren't you afraid to make a mistake? and the artist answered: there are no mistakes. as a writer that impressed me enormously when i heard it: that idea of there not being anything good or bad, right or wrong, but that whatever we do living in the here and the now has its own validity. it is undoubtedly how we should consider whatever we do. pedro: now for one last question. there’s an old gramophone in mariano grau and his daughter’s first house. do you remember what music would be played on it while they dance together, their only company the wooden statue of guillermina? gloria: i always imagined they would waltz. he would hold up his hands and take her in his arms and they would waltz. i never thought much about it, but i'm certain the records for that old gramophone would be of something like machín, maybe angelitos negros. in any case, when they danced i'm certain they would have waltzed. the interview is about to end, and after the questions there’s still time to talk a bit about everything. we talk about music, the possible cinema adaptation of the villa marini, theatre, future dreams and projects and many other things. it’s time to go now, and i feel that i’ll be missing the magic feeling that gloria’s words have created in the apartment. as one last detail, she shows me her beautiful and unique unicorn collection. she explains to me that many of the different figures were presents from friends or family members. judging from the large number of unicorns all around it would seem that gloria must have very many loving people close to her. as i walk down the street, with my autographed copy of todas esas guerras, i hope that during my stay in ireland as an erasmus student next year, i will find a beautiful unicorn for gloria’s collection. as i walk down the street again, i realise how privileged i have been to meet such a special person as her. quote taken from the following edition of the villa marini: montero, gloria. the villa marini. the ecco press. usa. 1998. microsoft word anne holden ronning 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 143 some reflections on myth, history and memory as determinants of narrative anne holden rønning abstract: against a background of theoretical reflections on myth, history and memory this paper will discuss their use as narrative strategies in texts from australia and new zealand. scholars differ as to the meaning of myth whether it is formed by “contradictory narratives, which become involved in one another like threads of a tapestry, too intertwined to summarize adequately, and endless” as bidermann and scharfstein suggest (1993, 9); “a system of communication” (barthes 1972); or the expression of “man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives.” (bultman 1993). i shall argue that in malouf`s remembering babylon the myth of aborigine life is central to an understanding of gemmy, and memory gives a false almost mythical picture of life in the old country, a situation found in many postcolonial texts from settler countries. that myth is not only associated with the past is evident in oodgeroo´s stories from the old and new dreamtime which raises some interesting questions about the use of myth. the boundaries between history and memory are often blurred and fluid in fiction, as is evident in the work of the new zealand writer, yvonne du fresne. historical memory is a determining feature of her texts, where the boundaries between historical facts and memories of life in denmark haunt her protagonists. in frederique this intertwining becomes a strategy for investigating frédérique d’albert’s situation, a young woman of both french and danish origin whose memories, fictional and real, determine many of her actions and show the tenuous link between memory and dreams. keywords: myth and memory, history and memory, literature words mean exactly what you want them to mean, exactly what you see in them keri hulme (sarti1998:59) this quote from keri hulme illustrates clearly the links between myth, memory and history for as bo stråth writes, “myth and memory is history in ceaseless transformation and reconstruction” (2000:19). the link between history, memory and myth lies at the copyright ©2009 anne holden rønning. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 144 heart of much literature from homer right through to the twentieth century. all three concepts have been determining for narrative form. originally myth was closely linked to orality and often expressed in verse, spoken or written, as we see in beowulf, chaucer, milton and the romantic poets, and contemporary indigenous writing. history by and large has been in prose, though there are examples of its expression in verse in the middle ages. we can ask whether history is memory, or myth, or a combination of both. the ovidian and virgilian myths, for example, have often been the intertext in works by contemporary writers such as salman rushdie (satanic verses) or by david malouf (an imaginary life). ovid’s exile demonstrates the appropriation of narration and language in the child, and the myth of ovid’s exile is the determinant of the narrative. what is myth? the word ‘myth’ is derived from the greek word ‘mythos’ meaning fable, story-telling, or fictions to make sense of the world. it is as hayden white states “a mode of discourse” (2000: 149). the oxford illustrated dictionary defines myth as “a fictitious (primitive) tale usually involving supernatural persons, some popular idea or historical phenomena” (1965: 542). myth can, however, also be a distortion of memory. mythology is that which we do not think is necessarily true, whereas memory is thought to be more precise. according to graves myth has two main functions: the first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as ‘who made the world? how will it end? (...) the answers, necessarily graphic and positive, confer enormous power on the various deities credited with the creation and care of souls and incidentally on their priesthoods. the second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs. (1972: v) other scholars support both these views. according to white, “myth emplots stories about specific actions and sets of events as manifesting the consequences of violations or observances of the rule of propriety” (2000: 51). bultman defines myth as the expression of “man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives” (1961: 46). julie sanders has pointed out that a culture’s mythology is its body of traditional narratives appropriated to diverse circumstances. mythic paradigms provide the reader or spectator with a series of familiar reference points and a set of expectations which the novelist, artist, director, playwright, composer, or poet can rely upon as an instructive shorthand, while simultaneously, twisting, and relocating them in newly creative ways, and in newly resonant contexts. (2008: 81) keri hulme, too, says in an interview with antonella sarti we “accrue myths to make sense of things” (sarti 1998: 61), and bidermann and scharfstein suggest myth is formed by “contradictory narratives, which become involved in one another like threads of a tapestry, too intertwined to summarize adequately, and endless” (1993: 9). however, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 145 myth is also a metamorphosis of themes which are not limited by cultural or historical boundaries. our knowledge determines our understanding of mythological texts. thus, for some readers, texts take on other meanings, so that the old story is changed into a new one seemingly related and read as if it had not existed previously, a view endorsed by graves (1972: vii), and sanders (2008: 81). another aspect of this topic is the relation of myths to dreams. in an article entitled “mythic discourse” lenn goodman equates the logic of myth with that of dreams, suggesting it is therefore “[s]mall wonder that the aborigines of australia set their mythic tales in the dreamtime. for the logic of myths is the logic of dreams” (1993: 56). even in the dreamtime there is change. this we can see in oodgeroo’s dreamtime: aboriginal stories (1994), which raises some interesting questions about the use of myth, and is illustrative of luquet’s comment that in oceanic mythology in general each deity rules only over a part of nature where it habitually lives (1972: 430). in this text oodgeroo distinguishes between presenting traditional tales from the past, and then adding a section entitled “stories from the old and new dreamtime” (1994: 61-95). this acknowledges the non-static nature of the dreamtime, as of myths and dreams. can there be a new dreamtime and how does that differ from the old? celebration is more important than explanation, as oodgeroo’s work typifies. like dreams myths seldom mean exactly what they appear to say as “[they] characteristically license fusions of categories and identities normally held discrete” (goodman 1993: 56). to barthes “myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear” (2000: 124). in other words myths are never transferred identically, they always undergo some kind of metamorphosis, allowing an author to investigate the artistic process by transferring events from the everyday world to that of the supernatural. the creative function of such myths makes them a determinant of the narrative, for as goodman states: “myths are fictions and the men and women who make them know it. if this were not so, there would be no role for imagination in mythmaking and myths would be undistinguishable in idiom and setting from literal narratives, whether factual or erroneous” (1993:73). in other words myths are a narratalogical way of explaining the world around us, either celebratory or explanatory, also when retold to later generations. this can be linked to the second definition of graves that myth is sometimes used as a disguised political message or comment on the contemporary world. it is usually connected to a reality already familiar to people. a story by hyllus maris in paperbark could illustrate this, as it draws on traditional and universal legends of things coming out of the sea and changing society. in “the way forgotten” a strange thing appears in the sea and is brought ashore by kuringai and parramatta. days passed. the people still wondered about the strange thing that seemed to be growing, getting bigger day by day. the elders were concerned. ‘this thing has had a strange effect on kuringai and parramatta! look how they sit around, not wanting to join in the activities of the tribe. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 146 the rest of the tribe follow the example of kuringai and paramatta, and all become sick. this ‘thing’ can be construed as a western way of life, which (...) made them believe that the way that had been laid down for them by their ancestral heroes was stupid for children to follow, to play. and so the people turned their backs on the way and followed this thing. and it led them into confusion. (1990:123) here maris is commenting not just on the importance of retaining one’s culture, but also the danger inherent in thinking of oneself as inferior and marginalized. we should not believe that what comes from the outside must, per se, be better. another interesting example of such a comment is patricia grace’s story “sun’s marbles” in the sky people. earth and sky, one undivided unit, were pushed apart by their obstreperous children to become earth and sky as we know them. maui’s actions are attributed to the fact that “[he] must have learned irresponsibility from the human side of his genealogy” (grace 1994: 14), and the children’s separation of their parents is attributed to the parents lack of discipline. “they were indulgent parents inclined to put unacceptable behaviour down to teething problems, hyperactivity, high intelligence or precocity. but later they asked themselves where they had gone wrong” (grace 1994: 16). this story can, thus, be seen as a contemporary take on a maori legend interspersed with comments on twentieth century child upbringing. myth and history one commonly held view is that myth represents a past phase of history. this idea has been supported as a way of explaining why we no longer accept certain myths. but it is a fallacy. they are still with us, albeit often in a different form. to quote baudrillard: “history has transmuted into myth in the modern era. (...) history is our lost referential, that is to say our myth” (1982: 24). oodgeroo expresses a similar view in her poem “the past ” let no one say the past is dead. the past is all about us and within. haunted by tribal memories, i know this little now, this accidental present is not the all of me, whose long making is so much of the past. (1990: 86) mythological concepts are often confused and ambiguous. and “it is precisely because they are historical that history can very easily suppress them” (barthes 2000: 120) it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and death of mythical language. (...) ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 147 history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things. (barthes 2000: 110) that history has become myth in our ahistoric contemporary world is no doubt, in part, a result of increasing individualism, and the growth of global capitalism. in a globalized world does the history of a nation have significance? is it something we hold on to as proof of our existence as a nation and part of centuries of time? derek walcott in “writers in the ‘new world’ says we should “ reject the idea of history as time (...) for its original concept as myth (...) history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory” (1974: 64). the interaction of myth, memory and history is a key element in much of david malouf’s work, often closely linked to issues of identity. in remembering babylon the myth of aborigine life is central to an understanding of gemmy. gemmy is portrayed and spoken of as a ‘white’ aborigine – a non-existent identification – but he epitomizes the then current view of the aborigine. this is emphasized by the manner in which mr. fraser writes down what gemmy thinks is his life, using it as scholarly proof of darwinian theories. he is of scientific interest to the minister mr. frazer, both as an individual human being who has been influenced by his stay with indigenous peoples, and for his information about native plants, but to the other settlers gemmy is a threat. the myth of the black people in australia is very much alive to the scottish settlers. “from the beginning there were those among them, ned corcoran was the most vehement, for whom the only way of dealing with blacks was the one that had been given scope elsewhere,” that is to eliminate them once and for all. others saw this differently, “they had secretly, some of them, a vision of plantations with black figures moving in rows” (malouf 1994: 56). the myth of aborigine life is part of malouf’s narrative strategy to take gemmy back to his life with the tribe. he indicates in the text that gemmy has become so influenced by aboriginal life that he cannot live in a settler society, and his spirit is lost when trying to conform: gemmy – as he recognised one and then another feature of it, the site of old happenings, strange encounters, or stories, or lean feasts – felt the energy flow back into him, and saw, in the sudden access of it, how weak he had grown in these last months. (1994:107) the settlers’ view is a classic example of fear of the unknown, a fear underscored by the colonial attitude to people of colour, and the idea of an underclass of human beings. the issue comes to a head when andy, having seen the blacks visit gemmy, for personal gains exaggerates the story (1994: 88-92). but as malouf points out the members of the tribe had come to reclaim gemmy, suggesting gemmy’s only identity can be with the tribe, a point disproved in the text by the telling of gemmy’s past in london, yet reverted to at the end of the book. malouf thus takes an ambiguous stance. in remembering babylon memory gives a false, almost mythical, picture of life in the old country. the settlers, not just in this book, but in other australian texts as well, glorify the country from which they came. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 148 janet listened to all this in a kind of dream, (...) she was in love with this other life her parents had lived; with scotland and a time before they came to australia, before she was born, that was her time too, extending her life back beyond the few years she could actually recall, and giving reality to a world she had need of; more alive and interesting, more crowded with things, with people, too, than the one she was in. (malouf 1994: 49) this exaggeration of a world left behind is not unusual, but as a literary feature it is dominant in texts from settler countries rather than other texts of transculturalism, often in cases such as the above, where life in the home country was, in fact, one of poverty and servitude. in new zealand literature, the linking of myth and history with contemporary issues such as land, and the role of maori within new zealand society, illustrates barthes statement that myth is “a system of communication” though not necessarily limited to indigenous mythology (cf. barthes 2000: 109-159). such texts not only underline maori myth, but also illustrate how myth evolves into history, an understanding of which is essential for finding one’s own place in the contemporary world. in potiki (1987), grace uses the myth of the carver and its importance in understanding maori history to confirm maori identity. likewise the myth of the whale and the importance of traditional myths and ways of life is central in witi ihimaera’s the whale rider (1987). representations intertwining history and myth are frequent, from hogarth’s portraits of black servants so skilfully satirized by david dabydeen in a harlot’s progress (2000) to conrad’s portrayal of kurtz in heart of darkness. are authors in such texts attempting to indicate the need for racial groups to determine their own lives, and that attempts at assimilation are futile? or is it a broader comment on the problems of exile from one’s origins and the creation of subsequent myths? history and memory history and memory are, in my opinion, a different critical category, since all history is memory as perceived by the author, or, an interpretation of the past. there are many examples of the deliberate misinterpretation of history to satisfy certain political ends or used to change people’s memories. memory is only valid for the person who experiences the historical event, and is always a synthesis of facts. for example, after traumatic incidents there are often very different accounts of what happened. 1 1 these views came up in a discussion on the topic with dr. marion gibson consultant psychiatrist and trauma specialist, queen’s university, belfast. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 149 memory is a collective myth shared by a group and prevalent in postcolonial writing. these memories are not personal, but inherited through storytelling with its concomitant distortion of detail. memory and history are constructions of the past, though the factual elements of mythological memory are often difficult to identify. such myths, by a ‘glorification’ of the past, contribute to linking past and present in the formation of a contemporary stance, and can have a therapeutic effect. we can ask whether our identity is dependent on our history, tempered by memory and myth? hayden white has suggested there is a tension between what he defines as the two aspects of memory, the ‘traditionalised memory’ which is “information about, and accounts of the past that are latently stored in its corpus of traditional lore” and ‘rationalised memory’ which is about “the community’s past” written and accessible (2000: 53). both of these we find in australian literature, which often uses memory of the past in a rewriting of history or to fill in the gaps in previous historical fiction. two obvious examples are carey’s true history of the kelly gang (2000) and jack maggs (1997) as well as some of mudrooroo’s texts, such as master of the ghost dreaming (1991). the use of the word ‘true’ in the kelly text is significant as no history is really true, as carey knows, but always an assessment or interpretation of certain events. is carey questioning the mythology of australian history? in the author’s note to jack maggs, a palimpsest on dickens’ great expectations, peter carey writes: “the author willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends” (carey 2000). just as rhys in wide sargasso sea palimpsets jane eyre, carey here fills in the missing detail in dickens, yet knowledge of the text palimpsested is a prerequisite for interpretation of both texts. the blurred and fluid boundaries between history and memory are apparent in texts by the new zealand writer, yvonne du fresne, where historical facts and memories of life in denmark haunt her protagonists. most of them reveal an almost obsessive longing for home—home being denmark, but a denmark which exists largely only in the imagination. du fresne takes danish-huguenot history and uses it to alternate between the historical past and the fictional present. in the book of ester (1982) the protagonist, ester, dreams constantly of her namesake ancestor, ester, who lived in the seventeenth century during the franco-prussian wars, and the family history of the time as told by her grandparents. in frederique (1987) this intertwining becomes a strategy for investigating frédérique d’albert’s situation, a young woman of both french and danish origin whose memories, fictional and real, determine many of her actions, and also show the tenuous link between history, memory and dreams. as we see memory and history take very different forms in postcolonial writing. for countries and peoples exposed to violent and traumatic events such as slavery, displacement, representation necessitates a coming to terms with the trauma. particularly in the field of myth and memory we can thus ask whether memory is selective, leading to amnesia. do myths and memories become a symbol of subjugation, and a way of dealing with traumas of the past? for settler emigrants, on the other hand, memory and history become conflated, and the glorification of a former life, by oneself or one’s ancestors, is a key to present belonging. the act of remembering is positive for some, whereas for others it is traumatic, as we see in naipaul’s fiction which explores the complexities of truth. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 150 history, memory and myth are thus intertwined in various ways, yet at the same time they are independent concepts. the problematization of the links, however, is a fruitful contribution to postcolonial and transcultural studies. the link to a ‘lost’ home or culture may, i suggest, be determining for the narrative strategy chosen in such texts— a linking of myth with history or the present, and memory, with all its fallibility, with history. in the twentieth and twenty-first century’s search for cultural identities we do this by interpreting history, re-telling our myths and using our memory. references barthes, roland. 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(1993) jack davis, stephen muecke, mudrooroo narogin and adam shoemaker (eds.). university of queensland press: st lucia. mudrooroo (1991) master of the ghost dreaming. angus and robertson: sydney. oodgeroo. (1990) my people. jacaranda wiley ltd.: milton, queensland. oodgeroo. (1994) dreamtime: aboriginal stories. illustrated by bronwyn bancroft, lothrop, lee & shepherd books: new york. sanders, julie (2008) adaptation and appropriation. new critical idiom series, routledge: london. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 151 sarti, antonella. (1998) spirit carvers. interviews with eighteen writers from new zealand. cross/cultures 31. rodopi: amsterdam, atlanta. stråth, bo. (2000) “myth, memory and history in the construction of community.” in bo stråth (ed), myth and memory in the construction of community: historical patterns in europe and beyond. p.i.e.-peter lang s.a.: brussels. white, hayden. (2000) “catastrophe, communal memory and mythic discourse: the uses of myth in the reconstruction of society.” in bo stråth, (ed.), myth and memory in the construction of society. p.i.e. peter lang s.a.: brussels. walcott, derek. (1974) “the muse of history” in is massa dead? black moods in the caribbean. orde coombes (ed.). doubleday: new york. cited in justin e. edwards, (2008) postcolonial literature: a reader’s guide to essential criticism. routledge: london. anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. she is author of hidden and visible suffrage: emancipation and the edwardian woman in galsworthy, wells and forster (1995) and co-edited several books including dialoguing on genres (2001: with ulf lie), identities and masks: colonial and postcolonial studies (2001: with jakob lothe, and peter young) and readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007: with lene johannessen.) she has published on women’s literature and postcolonial writing especially from australia and new zealand. she has just completed a study of the new zealand writer, yvonne du fresne. microsoft word coolabah 1 melbourne in winter.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, p 6 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 melbourne in winter ruth sancho from melbourne. australia under the rain walking on a golden whale wandering among sweet streets of lollipops with lines he wraps me up in his web of trams the clock-moon of a church winks at me with each swift and wet minute. the damp pavement weeps green reflected steps on a small man’s light under the rain he protects me keeping six eyes on me at the corner of the scared metal he seduces me with poems and songs and makes me laugh. alleluia! on the peaceful park he pounces on my pure imagination with his potty possum’s passion! under the rain we love each other again and again and again and ... copyright ©2007 ruth sancho . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. microsoft word 22vandendriesen coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 236 sea-change or atrophy? the australian convict inheritance cynthia vanden driesen abstract: this paper is an offshoot of a larger project which explored the possibility for the erstwhile settler-colonizer undergoing the sea-change into settler-indigene emergent through a study of selected novels of patrick white. it became apparent to me that the convict figure, who played an ancillary role in these works, could lay claim to the status of white indigene well ahead of the main protagonist. robert hughes (in the fatal shore) discredits the idea of any bonding between the convict and the aborigine but acknowledges examples of “white blackfellas”—white men who had successfully been adopted into aboriginal societies. martin tucker’s nineteenth century work, ralph rashleigh, offers surprising testimony of a creative work which bears this out in a context where australian literature generally reflected the national amnesia with regard to the aborigine and barely accorded them human status. grenville’s the secret river (2005), based broadly on the history of her own ancestor, appears to support hughes’ original contention but is also replete with ambivalences that work against a simple resolution. this paper will explore some of the ambivalences, the ‘food for thought’ on aspects of the australian experience highlighted by these literary texts, and glances briefly also at variations on the theme in carey’s jack maggs and the the true story of the kelly gang. key words: convict; aborigine; settler culture interpreting the conference theme in its metaphoric sense as a playing with ideas that could stimulate new modes of thinking; of feeding the imagination and the intellect, this paper will highlight selected literary representations of the australian convict which suggest that the transportation into exile resulted, for some at least, not in atrophy and extinction but in a new transmutation, a re-birth and an attaining to a new status of belonging in the new land. james tucker’s ralph rashleigh provides an early (and utterly surprising) foreshadowing of this theme which could not be bypassed, but this study will focus mainly on the convict figure in contemporary works such as patrick copyright©2011 cynthia vanden driesen. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 237 white’s voss and a fringe of leaves and grenville’s convict protagonist in the secret river. peter carey’s jack maggs will provide additional piquancy to this idea as further provender on the menu, of ‘food for thought’. for decades of white australian history, the question of the ‘stain’ on the beginnings of the nation because of its connections with convictism has pre-occupied historians, sociologists, nationalist theorists of all kinds. hughes cites bentham’s comment that the thief-colony australia and the experiment of transportation of the criminal element out of the ‘civilised’ world is one extreme: “the subject matter of experiment was […] a sort of excrementitious mass, that could be projected and accordingly was projected […] as far out of sight as was possible.” (hughes, 1987: xi) at the height of the nationalism of the 1890´s, the bulletin’s definition of who was an australian, reads as follows: “every man who comes to this shore, with a clean record, no convict, no lascar, no kanaka [...is] an australian.” (white, 1981: 161) mary gilmore’s tribute marks the beginnings of a view that takes count of the ‘seachange’ in the role of convicts in australia, according them iconic status as the founding fathers of the colony: i’m old old botany bay stiff in the joints little to say... i am he who paved the way; that you may walk at your ease today: i was the conscript/sent to hell to make in the desert the living well; i bore the heat i blazed the track furrowed and bloody upon my back i split the rock i felled the tree: the nation was because of me! (gilmore, 1925: 9.) hughes feels that the marginalization of the convict figure in the narrative of the nation has continued into contemporary times: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 238 behind the bright diorama of australia felix lurked the convicts, some 160,000 of them, clanking their fetters in the penumbral darkness. but on the feelings and experiences of these men and women, little was written. they were statistics, absences and finally embarrassments. the convicts were the total outcasts from a british society which had transported them to the nethermost part of the world with the strictest prohibitions against return: regarded as virtually another species of humanity, – the otherness to which they were consigned could be held to be synonymous with that accorded the blacks. (1987: xi) in hughes’ view there was no possibility of a bonding between these outcasts and the indigenous people: the convict envied the ‘freedom’ of the indigene while the aborigines realized the convicts were outcasts of the white society and preferred to align with the officers and troops in helping to return runaway convicts to officialdom. nevertheless, hughes mentions immediately after, rather contradictorily, the famous case of william buckley who absconded in 1803, lived with the blacks for a period of over 30 years and returned to the colony in 1833. j.j. healy adds further detail to the story. it appears that while buckley had initially promised to share his knowledge of aborigines for commercial purposes, when once in possession of his ticket-of-leave, he refused to talk about his experiences. he is recorded to have wished the blacks could have their country back to themselves again and the whites be made to leave ‘no matter how.’ (healy, 1989: 11) stories of ‘white blackfellas’ (wild white men) who had lived amongst the blacks for long years are too numerous to ignore. healy mentions other ‘wild’ white men, such as james davis and james bracefield, escaped convicts who returned to brisbane (in 1842) after a period of 14 years amongst the blacks. like buckley, they remained uncommunicative about their experiences. davis is recorded as having suggested that anyone who wanted more information about the blacks should: “… take his clothes off, and go among them and live with them, as i did.” (healy, 1989: 11) what is being explored within this paper is something very different from the white man’s fear of “going troppo”—the nineteenth century belief of the inevitable degeneracy that threatened the white man who came into contact with savage peoples. this was the fate of kurtz in conrad’s classic work heart of darkness. my subject is more nearly an aspiration to indigeneity, a yearning for belonging in the land in the manner of its indigenous inhabitants. the jindyworobak poet roland robinson in a poem “would i might find my country,” conveys something of the settler’s yearning for belonging: would i might find my country as the blacks come in and lean their spears up in the scrub and crouch and light their flickering fires […]. would i might find my people as the blacks sit with their lubras, children and tired dogs their dilly bags […] and talk in quiet calling voices while the blood-deep crimson flower of sunset burns in smouldering ash and fume behind the trees, coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 239 behind the thin grassed ridges of their land (qtd. elliott, 1979: 27). terry goldie has defined the concept as follows: when the canadian looks at the indian, the indian is other and alien. but the indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien [...] the importance of the alien within cannot be overstated. in their need to become “native”, to belong here, whites in canada, new zealand and australia have adopted a process which i have termed “indigenization”. (1939: 12-13) my thesis in this paper finds some support in the fanonian concept of the sharp divide that demarcates the privileged dwellings of the white coloniser from the habitations of the colonized; it is a means of maintaining the coloniser’s hegemony over the despised lower breed of the colonized. (fanon, 2004: 6) while most of the chapter focuses on the vengeful dreams of the colonised to take over the privileged space, it is also possible to theorise that if/when the white man crosses over from that hegemonic space, the racial divide becomes elided. the convict, by his crossing over into the intimate dwelling space of the indigene, discovers it to be the ‘home’, a nurturant space he has never encountered in the space allowed him in the world of white power. in abandoning that world the convict is admitted into a space where he may experience his shared humanity with the blacks. i have, in a recent study, made a case for the recognition of the aboriginal presence as being a significant issue for australian writers probing the perennial questions relating to australian identity. i have invoked the arguments of j. j. healy, terry goldie and also the theorist alan lawson in support of this contention. (vanden driesen, 2009: 1-27) i will not rehearse these arguments again here but wish to emphasise, at the outset, the importance of the writer in the settler-culture context. as the theorists aver, it is the task of the settler-writer to assist in the forging of the new sense of identity, the yearning for belonging which is endemic in the psyche of the new settler in his adoptive land. slemon proffers the interesting speculation that it is the literary artist who can probe the subtleties of the issues of newly emergent identity in the complex context of the settler culture since the creative work can allow contradiction, conflict and doubleness in a mode that the demands on the critic for argumentative cohesiveness and intellectual coherence cannot accommodate. (slemon, 1990: 36-37) this is the importance of tucker’s novel ralph rashleigh (1845), which deals with an aboriginal theme in the nineteenth century australian context in which the indigene was still barely acknowledged as a human. an ex-convict himself, he was also an educated man with a wide experience of all classes of men in the colony. his eighteen years in the colony endowed him with “a historical imagination and a sense of place, which allowed him to penetrate the realities of colonial life more than most men.” (healy, 1989: 37) tucker re-creates, with considerable credibility in this novel, the experience of a white coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 240 man received into a black tribe and blest with privileges he had never experienced in the harshness of the white world. rashleigh’s experiences in the first two-thirds of the novel could be partly autobiographical and reflect tucker’s own life—first in england and later as a convict in australia—but the life amongst the aborigines is much more an imaginative creation marked with considerable vitality and showing awareness of varied and intimate knowledge of the blacks’ way of life. of the three worlds of ralph’s experience, the aboriginal world is shown to be the most nurturant: he is adopted as a son by the old carandje (medicine man) of the tribe; and only leaves it because of the death of the old man, and the jealousies of a rival. there is considerable feeling in the account of the love and fidelity of the woman lorra, who dies in order to save him, and of his own feelings for her: rashleigh decided he would not bury the body near the tribe, so he constructed a rough sort of hand-barrow into which he placed it. he then ordered the two djins to carry it northward […] he soon overtook the women, and lifting lorra’s body from the hand-cart […] he carried it in his arms, never stopping until night […] one of them (the djins), named enee, begged rashleigh to eat. his appetite however was lost in the grief he was feeling […] he spent the night in a melancholy vigil over the remains of the girl who had loved him so well that she had not hesitated to draw jumba’s attack upon herself […] he wrapped her in his best opossum-skin cloak and buried her in a deep grave with a thick layer of grasses to protect her body from the earth, under the shade of a hanging acacia tree growing beside a murmurous rivulet. as he shoveled the earth into the pit, tears ran down his cheeks, and a great sense of loss overwhelmed him. he lay mourning beside the grave all that day and the night that followed, watched secretly with awe and wonder by the two remaining djins. next day, they resumed their march, rashleigh turning often to look back towards the spot where he had left the remains of the only woman, outside his family, who had ever loved him. (rr.227-228) he is accompanied by the two other native women whom he has inherited and survives with great ease in the wilderness; long enough to rescue survivors from a shipwreck and return them (and himself) to civilization. during all this phase, he maintains the appearance of a black man—and when he does reveal his identity, his protégés find it difficult to accept this: “well, i suppose, we ought not to be surprised to see you in your natural colour,” said mrs. marby: “but i’m afraid i shall always think of our preserver as black, white though you are now. you are very welcome, black or white…” (rr.255). the two aboriginal women find it even more difficult to see him as a white man (he has had to apply chemicals on his skin to restore it to its former colour): […] he went to find enee and tita, and was surprised to find that they seemed quite unable to resume the old familiar relationship now that he was a white man. […] he coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 241 attempted to speak to them as usual in their native tongue, but was then and always repulsed by them as by a demeanour of distant respect. […] “you white gentleman now; no more blackfellow,” they would say and go about their work. (255). several decades were to elapse before a white writer would be daring enough to take up an allied theme. amnesia in relation to the indigenous presence in australia seemed to settle into the collective australian psyche and nowhere was it more apparent than in the australian literary scene. in white’s novel voss the links between the aborigine and the convict emerge early. the convict judd is chosen, by the local landowners, to accompany the expedition because of his knowledge of the country. like the aborigines, the very sound of whose bare feet upon the ground “suggested ownership” to voss (v.169), judd is enormously at ease in the country: casually breaking a knob of gum off a tree and offering it to the boy harry to masticate as the group ride through the desert, or scraping the maggots off the carcass of a sheep to prepare a christmas feast in the desert. at the crossing of the river, his awareness of the hazards saves the party from the disaster of losing all their supplies at the river crossing. when the party finally splits up, jackie the aboriginal boy remains as guide to voss’ party; the others return under the guidance of judd and the young landowner angus who had earlier objected to sitting at the same table with the convict now “gave his life into the keeping of judd.” (v.347) the aborigines’ alignment with the world of nature is apparent from their first appearance almost as emanations of the natural world: “as shadows first, followed by a suggestion of skin wedded to the trunk of a tree …” (v. 191) or as “shreds of shy bark, glimpsed between the trunks of the trees …” (v. 204) judd is represented as “a mass of limestone, broken by nature into forms that were almost human, and filled with a similar, slow brooding innocence.” (v.136) judd’s wife, his sons, his dwelling place seem similarly aligned to the natural world: “the woman stood watching after the manner of animals, like the horse which had come down from the mountain, and the herd of brown goats; his sons “had a smell upon them of young waxy lambs.” (v.147). his dwelling place is seamlessly embedded into the natural world: a house or hut of bleached slabs, that melted into the live trunks of the surrounding trees. the interstices of the slab hut had been daubed with yellow clay, but this too had weathered and formed part of a natural disguise. (v.145, italics mine) an instinctual being, he seeks solace in communion with the animal world: judd followed the tracks of the stock and there found them congregated along the banks of a river […] one or two surviving goats looked at the surviving newcomer without moving, admitting him temporarily into the fellowship of beasts. the mananimal joined them and sat for a while upon the scorching bank. it was possibly this communion with the beasts that did finally rouse his bemused human intellect, for in their company he sensed the threat of the knife never far distant from the animal throat. (v.345) coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 242 judd’s convict past has unshackled him from formal allegiance to the british crown. when needled by voss as to “the past injustices of the crown,” he carefully answers he avers that he still wishes to serve the colony. like the old aborigine dugald before him, who also simply announced his decision to return, judd is not intimidated by voss and the formal allegiances: ‘do you not realize you are under my leadership?’ ‘not any more, i am not.’ […] ‘it is not cowardice, if there is hell before and hell behind and nothing to choose between them,’ judd protested, ‘i will go home […].’ (v.345) jackie the black boy recalls him at the end after all the white men have perished through “the haze of memory, […] the back of his broad hand like the branches of a tree, his face a second copper sun.” (v.420) judd survives finally through living with a group of desert aborigines for several years after the loss of the expedition. in a sense he never really returns to the white world; he has lost his wife and sons during his years in the desert and has also suffered the loss of his wits; he remains forever suspended in his desert world, from within which he addresses the colonial world of sydney to which he is physically returned at the end of the novel, a shell of his former self but equipped now with a wisdom born of his experience in the desert. judd’s seemingly crazed responses encapsulate the novel’s larger theme: “voss did not die […] he is still there, it is said, in the country, and always will be.” (v.448) his answer to laura’s question as to how this could be is the answer that laura passes on to others as answer to the perennial question of belonging: “when one has lived and suffered long enough in a country then one can belong […] if you live and suffer long enough in a place, you do not leave it altogether. your spirit is still there.” (v.443) the convict is positioned in a particular space of belonging to which other whites have limited or no access. language and image also construct the convict woman rose as an autochthonous presence: she is associated with the colour brown, which in the taxonomy of white’s symbolism suggests the earth and strength of natural forces. like judd, rose has endured the suffering which is the common inheritance of all convicts. laura’s spiritual progress as well as her understanding of the country owe a particular debt to her convict maid, so she declares: finally, i believe i have begun to understand this great country, which we have been preposterous enough to call ours, and with which i shall be content to grow since the day we buried rose. for part of me has now gone into it. (v.239) in a fringe of leaves, jack chance erupts into the narrative as already a fully-fledged indigene, a participant in the blacks’ corroboree. ellen, the shipwrecked englishwoman, notes his presence: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 243 one giant of a fellow, a natural clown by any standards would twirl and leap in the air, slapping his heels and entertain those within earshot of his patter. she could tell that he was respected and envied. (fl.251) noting the “patternless welter of healed wounds” (fl.250) on his back, different and yet similar to the ceremonial incisions on the backs of the blacks, she realizes he must be a runaway convict. physically, he has all the appearance of an aborigine, he even has the same “stench” noted in their earliest appearance: “all sinew, stench and exultant in their m mastery” (fl.241). ellen notes, he brings with him “the now familiar stench” into the shelter. (fl.265) when he makes love, he handles her “as though she had been a wheelbarrow, or black woman, for she had seen the head of her adoptive family take possession of his wives after such a fashion.” ellen’s own continuing transformation into the indigene is underlined by the resemblances she now becomes conscious of between herself and the convict: “she sighed and snorted and thought how foolish she must look naked and filthy beside the naked filthy man.” (fl.298) he is supremely at home in the wilderness. at their very first halt, he quickly builds a shelter, “low and shapeless scarcely distinguishable from the living bushes […].” (fl.289) nakedness is the natural state of the aborigine and the first step in sharing the life of the indigene seems to be the ritual discarding of the garments of the white man; one recalls the suggestion mentioned earlier by the returned white blackfella to anyone who seeks knowledge of the blacks: “…let him take his clothes off, and go among them and live with them, as i did.” (healy, 1989: 11) ellen allows chance to “free her of the girdle of vines … which had been until now the only disguise of her nakedness (fl.268), but the very next morning she has ‘re-clothed’ herself and she notes “his sullen glance at her renewed girdle” (fl.301), a forewarning of her desire to return to the white world. for his part, he remains naked: he was carrying the spear and waddy and the cumbrous net he had retained from his life with the aborigines […]. he had made no attempt to cover his nakedness in any way since losing the strip of bark cloth. (fl.301) later, he picks up his spear and leaves their ‘camp’ in search of food, while she makes a fire “as she remembered seeing the black women, using sticks and fibre when he reappeared […] he had speared one of the giant birds […] so a feast was promised [...]. preparing for it they did not speak but communicated by grunts and sniffs […].” (fl.314) what follows is probably the most idyllic sequence in the entire narrative, where the two of them are represented as a pair of aboriginal lovers in an australian eden, the suggestions present also in the nolan painting used on the original cover of the novel. it is notable that the barred lines of sunlight falling across the naked body of the convict are suggestive of the convict garb he has worn in the white world and also suggest the merging of the convict into the naked indigene, an effect which invests the painting with a resonance that is central to the theme of this paper. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 244 his discarding of allegiance to his british origins is underlined by the fact he will not be drawn to take sides against the blacks in the recent conflict “i heard tell among the blacks.” he said, “they was provoked though by whites. so she did not know how she stood.” (fl.292) in fact when she first meets him, his loss of allegiance to his english inheritance is evocatively established by the fact that he can barely speak the english language. “men is unnatural and unjust” (fl.281), sums up his verdict on the colonial society from which he is a fugitive. his sufferings at the hands of brutal administrators of the convict system have permanently estranged him from his english heritage: […] they strip us naked and string us up at the triangles—for the good of our moral ‘ealth. i fell down once. the surgeon […] kicked me to see if i wasn’t dead. […] the bones was showin through me hide […] the flies got to work on the cuts. i was turned septic […]. i was deleerious at first […]. but now i can take notice and hate. (fl. 309) it is this hate that triggers his decision to return to the wilds just as he and ellen reach the outskirts of the white settlement: […] some demon had taken possession of him. “ah ellen, i can hear ‘em settin up the triangles in the gateway to the barracks! they’ll be waitin’ for me.!” immediately after he turned and went loping back into the bush, the strength restored to his skeleton. (fl 332). he chooses to return to the indigenous world which has proved to be, for him, the nurturant ‘home’ that the england of his past or the transplanted colonial society of sydney could never be. while the convict in the white novels is not the chief focus of the work, in grenville’s the secret river, he takes centre-stage. based on the figure of her own convict ancestor (thomas wiseman) he offers a contrast to the figures in the white novels that would almost seem to upend my thesis. thornhill’s mind-set is a classic example of the kind of “ambivalence of placement” which slemon has described as the natural condition of the settler, one to whom an absolute divide between colonised self and colonising other is simply not easily available. it is possible to argue however that here one observes that in this case, the allegiance to the colonising other has emerged dominant. (slemon, 1990: 36-37) thornhill has suffered the same experience of ostracism by the english ‘mother’ which was the fate of all convicts, but is unable to shuffle off his british allegiance. his youth in england is weighted down with the grinding poverty which drives him to the crime for which he is first sentenced to transportation, but he retains a value for the same gentrified social values which have made him a pariah in his native england. although, unlike his wife sal, he has no desire to return to england, he still wishes to recreate for himself the life of the english gentleman in australia, with all the privileges of wealth and social status which had been totally out of his grasp in england. the gaze he turns upon the land coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 245 is essentially that of the coloniser: “all a person needed to do was find a place no one had already taken. plant a crop, build a hut, call the place smith’s or flanagan’s, and outstare anyone who said otherwise.” (fl.121) once he gains his ticket of leave, and the right to possess land and own servants, the colonial greed takes over. soon after he has rowed out to what will be called thornhill’s place, he marks out the space in which he will plant his first crop: in the centre of the clearing he dragged his heel across the dirt four times, line to line. the straight line and the square they made was like nothing else there and changed everything. now there was a place where a man had laid his mark over the face of the land. it was astonishing how little it took to own a piece of the earth. (sr.134) he simply ignores the obvious signs of the presence of previous owners of the land. his son willy points out to him the moment they start scratching at the soil: “look da… some other bugger already digged it up.” (sr.140) soon after follows the altercation with the two black men: the man spoke loud and hard and gestured […]. in any language, anywhere that movement of the hand said, go away. even a dog understood go away when he said it. (sr.147) the opposition of the blacks to the taking over of their land and their periodic “depredations” lead finally to their wholesale massacre by the white settlers. thereafter as thornhill prospers and as his possessions grow he becomes transformed into the english gentleman of substance he has always wanted to be: the irishman devine had built a fine stone house for mr. thornhill […]. they had named it cobham hall […]. devine was full of ways to make the place a fortress. the eminence itself was the start of it. a hundred of the buggers could not cut you off here he had assured. the walls were to be of stone, half a yard thick… cobham hall was a gentleman’s residence.” (sr.316) it is a place that re-establishes and perpetuates the divide that fanon speaks of; the physical divide is the material reflection of the psychic divide between the coloniser and the colonised. does this then make nonsense of my thesis? no—for despite thornhill’s sense of achievement there is a deeper and continuing sense of loss. in the aftermath of the attack there still remains a lone black survivor, long jack, who returns to affirm his right of ownership. thornhill makes various reparatory gestures like setting aside a patch of land, a gift of clothes and even a hut, but long jack maintains his pride: no, he said. it was the first time thornhill had ever heard him use an english word. jack slapped his hand on the ground so hard a puff of dust flew up and wafted away. this me, he said, my place. he smoothed the dirt with his palm so it left a coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 246 patch iike the scar on his head. sit down hereabouts. his face closed down then and he stared into the fire. (sr.329) it is then the realisation strikes home to thornhill of the emptiness of his acquisitions: he would have said he had everything a man could want, but there was an emptiness as he watched jack’s hand caressing the dirt. this was something he did not have: a place that was part of his flesh and spirit. there was no part of the world he would keep coming back to, the way jack did, just to feel it under him. it was as if the very dirt were consolation. (sr.329) each day he sits with his spyglass in his hand—looking down on all his grand possessions, noting that “beyond the wall […] was another world where the cliffs waited and watched. above the roses and the rest of it was forest […] they were unchanged by the speck of nsw enclosed by william thornhill’s wall.” (sr.331) there is however the massive contrasting figure of another convict in this text, whose situation is more reflective of the sea-change from alien invader to a state of belonging in the land; a belonging which hinges on the bonding with the indigene: “blackwood was a big man, bigger even than thornhill with a lighterman’s brawny calves and arms. he had a kind of rough dignity about him, a closed-in quality […].” (sr.94) he has acquired his own piece of land—but with the recognition that there: “‘ain’t nothing in this world just” for the taking [ …]. a man got to pay a fair price for taking,’ he said, ‘matter of give a little, take a little.’” (sr.104) blackwood lives with a black woman by whom he has had a child. throughout the narrative, a strong antagonism subsists between him and the more brutal of the emancipists who see the blacks as little more than vermin to be eradicated. the aborigines are actually encamped on his land when the final massacre takes place, and blackwood loses his entire family. thereafter, he never speaks to thornhill though the latter makes the same placatory offerings to him as he does to long jack. it is the novelist grenville who offers blackwood recompense for the loss of his family: thornhill’s son has shown, from childhood, an affinity with the indigenous people playing amongst their children, running naked amongst them and learning from the elders. some days after the battle with the aborigines, dick thornhill leaves his own family and goes to live with blackwood. later, thornhill hears with considerable pain of his estranged son being referred to as dick blackwood. the reader is left feeling that blackwood is perhaps the ancestor grenville herself would rather have had. in her book about the writing of the novel searching for the secret river she writes of her horror at the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated on the blacks and her ancestor’s complicity in the displacement of the indigenous people: every rock. every stream. every tree would have carried the marks of people who inhabited the land: wiseman would have known that every acre of this place was as lived in as his own house. no wonder he thought he had to build a fortress. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 247 his descendant, grenville describes how she sits through the night listening to the wind, the trees, she has the feeling that “the place was speaking to me.” (sr.138-140) she knew she had to tell its story; the outcome is the novel dedicated “to the aboriginal people of australia, past present and future.” perhaps there has been no more significant a re-invention of the image of the convict than that accomplished by carey in making over the figure of the unfortunate magwitch in dickens’ great expectations. despite a degree of compassion for the convict’s lot, he is still cast as a creature to be shunned. in carey’s hands, the convict emerges as a man of strength and principle, more sinned against than sinning; indeed he is the only true gentleman in a group of men, some of whom may have the title but are, finally far more depraved and corrupt than the transported convict could ever be. the psyche of grenville’s convict remains interpellated with his british allegiances; so also is carey’s jack maggs, but the latter is able (even if only after years) to break the umbilical chord that still binds him to the original home. it is here that the need to re-write the manichean divide between the colonialist construct of europe as the one source of light, virtue and humanity as against the dark sub-human world of the non-west becomes a necessary project. the novel shows the difficulties attendant on such a project—even if the europe/britain of the convict’s experience has been the stuff of nightmare. abandoned as an infant, maggs is picked up by the riff-raff who live under london bridge and is given into the reluctant charge of “ma britten” by the thief and receiver silas. as a child he is inducted into a life of crime. the novel exposes the horrific underbelly of post-industrial england—the foundations on which the greatness of her empire was built: english society was violently changing, under the stresses of industrialization, the growth of towns, and a soaring birthrate […] between 1750 and 1770 the population of london doubled and by 1851 it stood at 18 million […]. no mechanisms existed for the effective relief of mass unemployment; it was not a problem that england had ever before had to contend with on this scale. the laws had been written for a different england. parish relief and the workhouse were the primitive devices of a pre-industrial society; now they were overwhelmed. (hughes, 1986: 25-26) what carey achieves in this text is a reconstruction of the despised figure of the banished convict as a far more impressive figure than the so-called english gentleman; dependent for his status on inherited wealth and no effort of his own. the reader is aware of the fragility of this status of the english gentleman, but for jack maggs the realization only arrives at the end of the narrative. while waiting for the ‘son’ he hopes has attained the status of gentleman by virtue of the money he has sent him from australia, he looks back at the price he has paid for this, his own sufferings as a convict: the flies might feast on his spattered back; the doublecat might carry away the third and fourth fingers of his hand; but his mind crawled forward, always, constructing […] a house in knightsbridge whose kind and beautiful interior he had entered by tumbling down a chimney […]. clearing the soot from his eyes he had seen that coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 248 which he later knew was meant by authors when they wrote of england and of englishmen. (jm.383-384) the ‘gentleman’ maggs has laboured to nurture through his years of hard work in australia is phipps, a sexual exploiter of his ‘servants, a liar, and finally even would-be murderer of the man who had been a foster father to him. carey’s text, jack maggs, is set mainly in the imperial space, to which the ex-convict has stubbornly yearned to return, and does so after years of ‘exile’ in australia. yet this england emerges as indeed “one of the dark places of the earth” that conrad speaks of in heart of darkness. (1988: 9) the wealthy homes with their riches of art, silver, books and their rituals of fine dining and cultured pursuits are set cheek by jowl with scenes of squalor and lives of abject and grinding poverty and it is the latter scenes that remain most deeply etched in the mind. he returns finally to australia—recognizing it as his true home, the place which has given him family, prosperity, status. carey’s convict is not brought into the contact with the aborigine which sparks the ‘sea-change’ of the convict of the other narratives explored—but it shows forth the breaking with the british allegiance as the crucial element in working the transformation of the figure of the monstrous convict of the dickens text into the new australian. carey’s ned kelly re-writes the bushranger’s life as a courageous protest against the persecution suffered at the hands of the instruments of british justice, the police. this text cannot be analysed here in any detail but must be cited as another work in which the convict, the outcast and rebel against the laws of imperial england is reconstructed as iconic australian hero. the legend of ned kelly (like the story of eliza fraser/ellen roxburgh in white’s a fringe of leaves) inspired a nolan painting which exudes resonances which harmonises with the theme of this study (similar to the resonances commented on in the discussion of the painting of jack chance and ellen together in the australian bush): the nolan painting of kelly in his black armour riding out into the red and gold of the desert landscape to defy the minions of british law, appears as a natural force allied with the australian world. the dominant red, black and gold colours of this painting are redolent with suggestive synergies, immediately recalling the dominant colours of the aboriginal flag. the juxtapositioning of these two images (which were easier to perceive perhaps in the power-point presentation of this paper) can still be alluded to in this discussion and should, hopefully, evoke more ‘food for thought’ on the themes pursued in this paper. to conclude, the ‘sea-change’ in the image of the australian convict from “excrementitious mass” to the iconic figure of founding father of the nation can be exemplified through citation of the following detail from contemporary australian life. numerous websites today attest the importance of the australian convict to australian notions of identity. one—retrieved on australia day just past (january 26, 2010)— announces information on 50,000 more convicts as a special incentive to patriotic australians: they are all invited to trace possible links to convict predecessors and indeed if they do not possess such a claim to privileged status, suggests that they set out to coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 249 acquire one even through a process of adoption. the ‘sea-change’ in the status of the australian convict in the story of the nation could not be better attested. works cited carey, peter (1997). jack maggs. st. lucia: university of queensland press. -----. the true history of the kelly gang (2000). st. lucia: university of queensland press. conrad, joseph (1988). heart of darkness. london: w.w. norton & co. elliott, brian (1979) ed. the jindyworobaks. st. lucia: university of queensland press. fanon, frantz. (1952, 2004). the wretched of the earth. new york: grove press. gilmore, mary (1963) ed. robert d. fitzgerald. sydney: angus & robertson. goldie, terry (1989). fear and temptation: the image of the indigene in canadian, australian and new zealand literatures. kingston, ontario: mcgill queen’s university press. grenville, kate (2005). the secret river. melbourne: text publishing. ----(2005, 2006). searching for the secret river. melbourne: text publishing. healy, j.j. (1989). literature and the aborigine in australia. st.lucia: university of queensland press. hughes, robert (1987). the fatal shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to australia, 1787 – 1868. london: collins harvill. lawson, alan (2000). “proximities: from asymptote to zeugma” in postcolonizing the commonwealth; studies in literature and culture. ed. rowland smith. waterloo: wilfrid laurier university press: 19–35. “new records of uk convicts sent to australia go online,”( b.b.c. news. accessed 24 jan 2010. <news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8477482.stm> slemon, stephen (1933). “unsettling the empire, resistance theory for the second world.” world literature written in english, 30.2 (1990): 30-41. tucker, martin (1933, 1953). the adventures of ralph rashleigh: a penal exile in australia, sydney,angus & robertson. (1933). vanden driesen, cynthia (2009). writing the nation, patrick white and the indigene. amsterdam, new york: rodopi. white, patrick voss (1957, 1974). ringwood, victoria: penguin. ----(1976). a fringe of leaves. london: jonathan cape. white, richard (1981). inventing australia images and identity 1688 – 1980. nsw: allen & unwin. cynthia vanden driesen teaches and researches in the fields of australian writing and other new literatures in english (indian, african and caribbean) at edith cowan university, perth, western australia. her publications, besides articles in a range of journals and presentations at international conferences, include eight books (four coedited), the last being writing the nation, patrick white and the indigene (2009), rodopi press, ny/amsterdam. her most recent project, change, conflict and convergence: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 250 australasian scenarios, the collection of papers from the 2009 conference of the association for the study of australasia in asia (asaa), co-edited with ian vanden driesen, is currently with publishers black swan, orient longmans india. microsoft word jaime coolabah toshi coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 toshie itabashi tokyo, 1974 she now lives in barcelona. she has held three solo exhibitions in barcelona her work has been shown in group exhibitions in spain and portugal: she has won several national prizes and her work has been bought by important private collectors in spain. mermaids “mermaids” is the title of one of the series which the japanese sculptor toshie itabashi has been working on over the last few years. the harmonic mixture contained in the stone forms invites the contemplation of the hypnotic miasmas which submerge us in something which seems like the very beginning of time itself. with the appropriation of the mermaid, perceived as a mythical being but without any ideological or cultural constraints, the artist doesn’t try to scare or blind us. at least, no more than we already are. rather, she tries to seduce us. as with the dissipation of liquids, the essence of each statue is contained within the boundaries of the figure and contaminates the space which surrounds it, expanding and contracting in a fluctuating manner. microsoft word 10everett coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 swallowed words: bringing up an aboriginal past in the city. kristina l everett abstract: many aboriginal stories have not been allowed to be told historically due to the over-whelming dominance of non-aboriginal stories. many aboriginal stories were once outlawed and so were forgotten, some only partially remembered, many now only told in the language of the invaders. there are other aboriginal stories, however, especially those of particular urban aboriginal peoples, which have lain ‘dormant’, protected by subversive family histories and embedded in objects claimed as the possessions of the aboriginal people concerned. some of these once ‘swallowed’ stories are now being regurgitated, re-emerging into a world that does not always recognise them as true. i am a non-indigenous woman anthropologist and in this paper i recount some different versions of a story ‘told’ in different ways; through the signs and symbols of the australian nation state, the movements of my aboriginal research collaborators through what is claimed as their country, through verbal storytelling, and through artefacts and paintings. keywords: urban aboriginal art production; storytelling; parramatta i am a non-indigenous woman anthropologist and i have been working with a group of urban aboriginal people in what we now call sydney for many years. due to some complex politics which i briefly explain below, it is necessary to use a pseudonym when writing about this group of people so for the purposes of this article i call them 'gwalan'. as well as being research participants many gwalan people have become close personal friends. my relationships with people as both a researcher and a friend make the texts that we jointly produce rich, nuanced and sophisticated ethnography. these texts are also problematic in that i am as much a productive agent in generating the contexts for their telling as gwalan are themselves. the subjectivity of the observer, as devereaux (in behar 1996:193) insists, always: influences the course of the observed event as radically as ‘inspection’ influences an electron. ‘the observer’ never observes the behavioural event which ‘would have taken place’ in his (sic) absence, nor hears an account identical with that which the same narrator would give to another person. copyright©2011 kristina everett. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 for better or worse, the stories i tell are not 'purely' gwalan stories, but always, also my own. before i say anything else, it is important that i explain that gwalan people have only recently (re)emerged as the traditional aboriginal owners of what is now a large part of modern sydney. it might be argued that gwalan ‘ethnogenesis’ was initially in response to land rights, native title, and other seemingly benevolent state policies concerning indigenous australians. yet there are also other forces at work. people who claim gwalan heritage and identity today do so largely because of the genealogical research of biologist, dr. james kohen in the early1980s. prior to kohen’s work some of these people lived lives as either unspecified aboriginal people living on the fringes of sydney suburban life, or some may have considered themselves members of a post-contact group of ‘sydney aboriginal people’. the vast majority of the approximately 6,000 people identified as gwalan descendants by kohen, however, did not identify as aboriginal at all before and choose not to since his research. two or three hundred people have now identified as gwalan and continue to develop various ideas, values and philosophies about and expressions of their identity. for these people recent disappointments regarding access to remediation for past injustices such as native title have not resulted in the demise of the various types of cultural renaissance that characterise gwalan (re)emergence. it seems that the expressions of group identity they have developed over some decades have now become such values in themselves that they cannot and will not be relinquished. art production is one such expression. gwalan art production, like all gwalan expressions of identity are, as this paper will detail below, intimately connected with gwalan country. like many aboriginal peoples, however, gwalan cultural identity is not expressed in the same way by all gwalan descendants. there is more than one group of gwalan and some gwalan express themselves very differently from the gwalan i represent here. other gwalan groups would be horrified to be identified with the practices of the gwalan i work with because their ideas, philosophies and representations are very different. this is why it is necessary for me to use a pseudonym. gwalan country, as well as being claimed as belonging to gwalan is always also claimed as australian state place and is represented as such in countless ways. gwalan can never express their identity outside of the terms already put in place by the identities and histories of the dominant society. yet, regardless of the overwhelmingly dominant discourses of modernity that the state makes of the city and discourses that place all aboriginal peoples somewhere other than the city, gwalan and the city go hand in hand. the city is gwalan land. the development, experience and living of relationships with gwalan land and gwalan people and the stories that represent, substantiate and reconstitute those relations are at the centre of gwalan identity. later in this paper i recount stories that are a product of the experience of interacting with gwalan people in a particular part of sydney with special significance for both gwalan and settler australians: parramatta. i say more about parramatta below. first i need to theorise how, specifically, people, like gwalan, who have been written out of state stories can tell their own stories. how can their life histories be told in their proper context when that context has been over-written by an alien and dominant society? to begin to address these questions it is necessary to think about the urban space in which these competing, contradictory stories are told and the secrets of aboriginal-non-aboriginal interaction which are kept in this place. the city, following de certeau (1984), simmel (1971), debord (1994) and morris (1998) can be understood as the quintessential site of the capitalist project and where state surveillance operates to its fullest potential. the city, however, is not only thought to be a site of high surveillance. the city also provides opportunities for various peoples to use spaces in their own ways. because it is always developing, always changing, always moving towards greater and coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 more efficient forms of consumption, the city may be understood as the ultimate sign of civilisation. considering that many discourses represent aboriginal peoples as the binary opposite of civilised, it might be said that the city could be thought to be the antithesis of aboriginal place. the city might be considered, by some, to be the last place to find ‘authentic’ aboriginal peoples reproducing ‘genuine’ aboriginal culture. yet, no matter how the city is theorised and represented by various strategies of state power, it is the way that people use spaces which make some places habitable in the ways that the state plans and represents, and allows other places to be used in secret ways which may be subversive or otherwise different to state plans and representations (de certeau 1984). the city may in fact be a most likely place for aboriginal peoples to practice ‘authentic’ forms of culture without constant surveillance. a walk through the streets of parramatta with gwalan can be a walking tour of gwalan history and an encounter with the secrets of gwalan identity. gwalan artists are enthusiastic participants in capitalism, both as consumers and producers. the ways in which they participate in capitalism as producers, however, is revealing of how they make parramatta their own place in ways quite different to non-indigenous australians. obtaining the necessary materials for the manufacture of gwalan artwork as consumer goods requires a walk into what is, for me, unfamiliar territory. that is, a walk with gwalan to collect materials for artwork requires the transformation of parramatta from a place which is variously represented as ‘colonial seat of power’, ‘modern shopping centre’ and ‘place of past significance to aboriginal people’ (among other things) to a place which is used to tell gwalan stories. a walk with gwalan, especially in what is claimed as gwalan country, very often includes foraging for materials for the manufacture of paintings, jewellery and other artefacts which are later sold as commodities. pieces of wood, gum nuts and ochre as well as broken pieces of coloured glass, chips from ceramic tiles and ‘convict bricks’ are collected along with a commentary on why these things are important for various tasks and how they will be used. these objects are used by gwalan to tell stories. not all of these objects are successfully connected to memory, however, and some things remain illegible – a trace or mark of forgotten or illegible histories. a walk with gwalan through parramatta produces countless examples of these ‘story objects’ which represent the unending struggle over meaning that characterises the (multi/inter) cultural space that all gwalan must always inhabit. old dirt tracks going nowhere, old tin cans, the remains of a fire, abandoned buildings, all these are silent objects which appear on our walks. they are simply there – traces of a secret history of contact between gwalan descendants and non-gwalan descendants – which has been forgotten by ‘us’ and may be appropriated by gwalan for their own purposes. these purposes may include constructing stories concerning the past and ongoing inter-relationships between gwalan descendants and non-gwalan descendants. as walter benjamin (1986) insists, it is the small, the frivolous, the wasted objects – the rubbish of western culture – that witness a history that is silent in dominant discourses. these pieces of ‘our’ rubbish have been theorised by gilles deleuze (1989), in a film context, as what he describes as ‘radioactive fossils’. these objects were ‘unearthed’ and explained to me by gwalan. our ‘rubbish’ is attributed gwalan meaning and is revealed to contain gwalan stories. i would argue that deleuze’s conceptualisation of these objects as ‘radioactive fossils’ is as fitting for these actual material things as it is for cinematic images. for deleuze, the fossil – an object from another time, another place, often another culture – embodies a history, but one that can never be completely revealed. the fossil is silent, dead, inert – yet radiates with meaning and history. it is dangerous and threatens to escape. it also threatens to tell stories that we may not want to hear, may not be ready to hear, or which may still be happening and are therefore evermore threatening. in short, radioactive fossils are dangerous and unpredictable. radioactive fossils embody a past which is incommensurable with the present that the object inhabits. according to deleuze, the important thing about these objects, these ‘radioactive fossils’, is that they contain history within themselves. they are excavated from another place and another culture disrupting the plane of the present time, place and culture. during our walks in parramatta the present culture is constituted by both the dominant australian and gwalan cultures. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 this became most pronounced when we (my gwalan friends and i) came to parramatta park. parramatta was selected in 1788 by the first governor of new south wales, arthur phillip, as the site for the new seat of british government of the new colony when it was apparent that sydney cove was not suitably fertile to sustain european farming practices after the first year of colonisation in 1789. governor phillip built a small house on the site which was improved by his successor, governor hunter and extended by governor lachlan macquarie in 1815 to much the same proportions as those seen today. parramatta park contains, and is itself, a monument to the first government house at parramatta and celebrates a colonial moment when the seat of colonial power was in parramatta. it is the oldest public building in australia and is saturated with different and competing significance for indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in australia. but this historical significance is secondary to parramatta park’s present significance as a state place which is represented as ‘place of past and on-going colonial government’. these representations take the form of signs and plaques commemorating various colonial figures and their deeds at particular times. they also take the form of formal roads; a weir on the river; highly decorative victorian cast iron gates; band rotundas; and of course, the georgian mansion known as old government house. however, it was a secret site in parramatta park that is not marked, does not have european signs or plaques, which gwalan pointed out to me as a gwalan ceremonial site. the grounds of old government house contain a site that before she died, a very senior gwalan descendant told me she remembered attending as a small child in the 1920s while gwalan men, including her father, engaged in ceremony. whilst walking around this place, with old government house looming nearby, gwalan kicked the earth turning up shards of glass, pieces of rock, fragments of tin using these pieces of ‘rubbish’ to tell stories of their life, their families and their ancestors. these were stories i had never heard before, stories i promised not to tell, and stories which might not be believed if i were to tell them now. the objects that gwalan unearthed on our walks around the ceremonial site were disconnected from their pasts yet radiated their power to affect the present. some of these fossils tell stories. one old gwalan lady pointed to what appeared to be a pile of stones, bricks and other ‘builders’ rubbish’ explaining: that there’s a cairn. that’s the spot where aunty saw them ancestors. them old fellas (ancestors) made them to show us the way to ceremony. (fieldnotes) as a member of the dominant ‘white’ australian society the kinds of stories i might have attributed to the pile of ‘rubbish’ would have been quite different. to me, these ‘fossils’ were telling stories of past industrialisation that has been superseded by new technologies. the ‘radioactive fossils’, recollection objects from a past that included interactions between aboriginal and non-aboriginal sydney peoples, disrupt the australian state narrative of parramatta park as site of uncontested and on-going colonialism because gwalan ascribe counter narratives concerning on-going gwalan presence and gwalan custodianship of country to them. whatever forgotten or partially remembered stories these objects contain, because of their presence at the site of what is claimed as a gwalan ceremonial ground, gwalan claim them as testament to the existence of a gwalan past in that place. a gwalan present was created on our walks in parramatta park by recognising parramatta park not only as ‘past seat of colonial government’, but as ‘site of gwalan ceremonial ground’. this gwalan present is disrupted by the appearance of ‘our stuff’. these objects appear, not just as possible witnesses to past gwalan ceremonies, but as ‘fossils’ of a history of contact which has been forgotten or suppressed by ‘us’. this history of contact is appropriated and given significance as current, dynamic and ongoing by gwalan. although these objects are the artefacts, the ruins, the rubbish left by ‘our’ wasted projects, gwalan gather them up and use them in different ways to tell their own stories. as a young gwalan woman turned a shard of old opalescent bottle over in her hands and looked through the swirling colours of the glass she asserted that white denial of gwalan survival and a history of contact between sydney aboriginal people and nonaboriginal peoples is disputed by the presence of the bottle in this place because: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 whitefellas say gwalan are all gone. they reckon that they was the first aboriginal people to go. this’s a old one this bottle. this bit o’ bottle was here at ceremony. maybe a whitefella brought it. maybe a gwalan man brought it from a whitefella. i dunno. but it had to come from a whitefella an’ it had ta have bin at ceremony. (fieldnotes) the shard of glass in question turned up unexpectedly a few weeks later when i happened to be at a gwalan art stall in parramatta. over the trestle tables that served as counters to sell gwalan art and crafts a colourful display of various works had been arranged. these works included small, framed ‘dot’ paintings mostly featuring the images of animals native to gwalan lands; fridge magnets in the shape of animals detailed in colourful dots and carved wooden artefacts including boomerangs and didgeridoos. some of the paint used in the manufacture of these objects contains white ochre from gwalan land. by extending (and somewhat adapting) deleuze’s theory i argue that the use of this paint transforms these objects into a kind of ‘radioactive fossil’. gwalan ochre is made from crushed pieces of white clay from river and creek beds on gwalan land. white ochre is quite literally gwalan land: it is material stuff of country. it is not a ‘radioactive fossil’ in the sense i have already described – it is not made from ‘our’ rubbish or waste, rather it is simply itself a fossil. it is a remnant, a material trace of gwalan ancestral land, literally. the significance of fossil traces of gwalan country in ‘storytelling objects’, that is, in artefacts and art works, is not, however, generally explained to the consumers of these items. that is, these stories about prior ownership of country are not articulated. they are rather almost ‘smuggled’ into the lives of consumers who then live with them as silent fossils of gwalan presence. early in my fieldwork gwalan more often attempted to explain the significance of the presence of some physical ‘storytelling object’ from gwalan land to potential consumers of their products. these were typically met with refusal to purchase the item. many potential purchasers appeared to be either unimpressed, or else just did not ‘get it’. purchasers who were attracted to the beauty of the objects were less enthusiastic it seems with a more complicated and political meaning attributed to the ‘thing’. on one occasion, for example, i witnessed an old gwalan lady proudly explain to a nonaboriginal potential buyer that a particular art work and its design came from gwalan country and is important to gwalan people. this ‘explanation’ was the story. it was an opportunity and an invitation for the woman to establish a relationship with a gwalan senior woman. it was most disappointing when the woman replaced the object and walked away. she apparently did not want to hear a story about prior aboriginal presence in sydney, and was not interested in establishing a relationship with an aboriginal woman. when i asked a senior man why gwalan have abandoned telling white consumers about such things he said: them fellas don’t believe us anyway. save ya breath i say. (fieldnotes) coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 in my experience the general response from potential consumers to explanations offered by gwalan is largely dismissive. there have always, however, been customers who demand another kind of narrative. while i was casually chatting with gwalan people at the stall, a number of customers browsed through the items on display. after a while a middle-aged woman approached a senior gwalan woman and myself holding a fridge magnet she had chosen with a ten dollar note, the price marked on the item. the magnet was made with the off-cuts of magnetised plastic used industrially by ‘us’. the scrap plastic was salvaged by gwalan and cut into the shape of a turtle which was ‘picked out’ in green and white dots. these magnets are ‘radioactive fossils’ proper in that they are made from ‘our’ industrial waste and transformed with white ochre to become significant gwalan objects. they embody a history of contact which continues into the present. to my surprise, rather than handing the money and the magnet to my friend to complete the transaction, the woman held onto both objects and asked: what is the story that goes with this? (fieldnotes) the senior gwalan woman patiently and politely told the customer that the object was significant as something important to gwalan people. the customer, however, was clearly not satisfied with that story. she asked: but what about the dreamtime story? doesn’t it have a dreamtime story? (fieldnotes) the gwalan woman tried to explain that the animals and other images on the gwalan consumer objects were just that, animals and other images. she showed the customer that the gwalan language name was printed on the object and told her that the objects were significant to gwalan people but were not dreaming stories.the gwalan woman knew from experience that she could not explain that as ‘radioactive fossils’ or recollection objects, these articles contained stories indexically, but not stories that are always capable of being told – especially in contexts like this. clearly, gwalan ideas about the meaning of the consumer objects they sell is somewhat different to consumer’s ideas about these things. the hugely successful aboriginal art market has quite ingeniously used assumptions about aboriginal spirituality to sell aboriginal art. many accounts of aboriginal art make reference to this history. it is well documented that prior to the early 1970s aboriginal art was almost completely ignored or undervalued. this was largely because, as peoples who were considered to be ‘primitive’, aboriginal artists were not considered capable of producing work with ‘meaning’. one of the primary marketing techniques of white art advisors was to promote aboriginal art as asserting a mystical significance documenting associated dreaming stories. in some ways these stories, as my example of the customer at cumberland state forest shows, have become almost more important to collectors than the paintings themselves. this has been a major contribution to the popularity of aboriginal art globally. it also, however, is misleading to consumers of aboriginal art and artefacts who seem now to think that all aboriginal cultural products should come with a dreaming story attached – even a fridge magnet.that consumers have been educated to expect all aboriginal art coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 to possess mystical qualities and be somehow connected to dreaming stories means that aboriginal artists who do not necessarily or always paint ‘story paintings’ are often put in positions, like that described above, where they need to defend the ‘authenticity’ of their work due to misinformed consumers. ‘radioactive fossils’ are not the same as dreaming stories. consumers appear to resist any explanations of the object’s significance offered by gwalan themselves, so the stories become again ‘swallowed’. conclusion the objects that gwalan sell are significant as vessels which embody unspoken histories of contact between gwalan and non-aboriginal peoples. these objects are material embodiments of gwalan place as it has been transformed from ‘state place’ through the acts involved in making the object and in being ‘radioactive fossils’. the acts involved in manufacturing these ‘recollection objects’ transform state place (as parramatta park) into space for the articulation of gwalan identity. these expressions are then represented in gwalan art objects as ‘radioactive fossils’, silent but certain witnesses to another version of history and identity. one that ‘we’ do not seem to be ready to hear. works cited behar, ruth 1996. the vulnerable observer: anthropology that breaks your heart. boston. beacon press. buchler, j (1955). the philosophical writings of peirce.new york. dover. debord, guy 1995. the society of the spectacle. new york. zone books. de certeau maurice 1984. the practice of everyday life. berkeley. university of california press. deleuze, gilles 1989. cinema 2: the time image. minneapolis. university of minnesota press. everett, kristina 2003. unpublished fieldnotes. may-august, 2003. morris, meaghan 1998. too soon too late. history in popular culture. indianapolis. indiana university press. simmel, georg 1969. conflict: the web of group affiliations. illinois. free press. kristina everett holds a phd in anthropology and her main research interests include (re)emergent traditional indigenous cultural practices in urban settings and the political, cultural and social effects of these practices. kristina teaches indigenous studies at macquarie university and is keenly interested in indigenous higher education. \(microsoft word roberta trap\\350 1\) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 from notebook to novel and from diary to dante: reading robert dessaix’s night letters roberta trapè abstract: this paper has developed out of a larger work in progress, which focuses on representations of italy in contemporary australian fiction and non-fiction prose. this larger project aims to add to an established body of work on travel writing by considering australian texts that describe australian travel in italy, italian people and italian places. in this paper, i will specifically focus on the representations of italy in robert dessaix’s novel night letters (1996). my paper will explore the relationship between the writer’s actual journey in italy and that of the creative work’s main character. the novel offers the protagonist’s account in the form of letters, which describe his travel from switzerland across northern italy to venice. i will begin by briefly outlining the italian itinerary followed by dessaix that would eventually inspire the novel. i will then explore the relationship between dessaix’s notebooks recording his two journeys in italy and the literary accomplishment of night letters. my aim is to show ways in which an itinerary becomes a story, a complex narrative. reference will be made to factual accounts and descriptions in the author’s own diaries with an analysis of their generative role as key sources for the fictional work. this will be done through a close reading of particular passages, in the diaries and in the novel, concerning the same event. a comparative analysis of the notebooks and night letters can show that dessaix’s diary entries relating to italian places are woven into the fictional fabric of the ‘night letters’ according to a unifying principle. keywords: australian travel in italy. the representations of italy in robert dessaix’s novel night letters (1996). the relationship between dessaix’s notebooks recording his two journeys in italy and the literary accomplishment of night letters. this paper has developed out of a larger work in progress, which focuses on representations of italy in contemporary australian fiction and non-fiction prose. the overall concern of my research consists in exploring australian ways of approaching and responding to italy in journeys made by a specific category of travellers: writers and artists who have left a record of their experience in creative works from the early 1990s. i have chosen to focus on the representations of italy in robert dessaix’s night letters (1996), an epistolary novel divided into three sections that mark the stages of the protagonist’s train journey from switzerland, across northern italy to venice. the narrator-protagonist is an australian man called r., who has recently been diagnosed with an incurable disease. every night for twenty consecutive nights, r. writes letters copyright ©2009 roberta trapè. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 130 home to a friend from a hotel room in venice. these letters encompass his whole journey. night letters presents two narrative levels: the first unfolds through the protagonist r.’s recollection of the journey from zurich to venice, through his nightly letter-writing. the second level consists in narrations by two other characters: rachel, an english woman in her sixties or seventies whom r. meets on a train, and, secondly, a german professor, eschenbaum, who is a guest in the same hotel as r. in venice. rachel and eschenbaum’s narrations can be defined as pure story-telling. 1 as it is appropriate to an epistolary novel, night letters has a fictive editor, igor miazmov, who provides a very brief preface to the letters as well as endnotes to each chapter. his derogatory evaluation of the letters stages dessaix’s wink at a postmodern, metafictional use of parody. in an interview dessaix kindly granted me in hobart in february 2007, he reviewed the autobiographical matrix of the novel: he had travelled to italy in 1991, while in europe for a series of interviews for a literature focused radio program on the australian broadcasting corporation. in 1994 he was diagnosed with a terminal disease, and six months later began writing night letters. in the novel the diagnosis of the illness precedes the narrator’s trip to italy, but in reality the trip that inspired the book had taken place three years before. when dessaix began writing the novel in 1995, he soon realized that he had to return to italy to check facts and names, and so he returned that very year, and kept a diary while he was writing the book. 2 in this paper, i intend to explore the relationship between dessaix’s notebooks recording his two journeys in italy and the literary accomplishment of night letters. my aim is to show ways in which an itinerary becomes a story, a multi-layered and complex narrative. reference will be made to factual accounts and descriptions in the author’s own diaries with an analysis of their generative role as key sources for the fictional work. this will be done through a close reading of particular passages, in the diaries and in the novel, concerning the same event. more specifically, i will quote first one of the entries from the 1995 journey notebook, introducing dessaix’s encounter with italy; i will then quote a passage from the 1991 notebook, that portrays the night dessaix spent in vicenza and at its railway station. the author obviously considered this event a crucial experience in his 1991 journey; he decided to clean it and type it up for possible future references. the entries of the 1991 diary allow to reconstruct dessaix’s journey to europe: he arrived in london on 16 september from australia. he went to amsterdam, to paris and then took trains to berne, zurich, geneva and back to zurich. the italian journey narrated in night letters starts from here. on 1 st october he took the train to locarno. the following days he visited ascona, and went to tegna. then he visited brissago islands and in the afternoon took the train to bologna, verona, vicenza. dessaix stayed in vicenza and took a train to venice the following day. from venice he visited padua and by train went to rome from where he flew back to melbourne. in 1995, back in europe while writing the novel, dessaix followed a similar itinerary. in april (it’s in april that the fictional journey in night letters take place) he flew melbourne to london and then to zurich. then he took trains to locarno (ascona, brissago islands) and, on the following day, to milan and venice. after side trips to padua, vicenza and verona, he left venice for barcelona, to take part as a speaker at the university of barcelona centre of australian studies 1995 conference. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 a comparative reading of the notebooks and night letters can show that dessaix’s diary entries relating to italian places are woven into the fictional fabric of the ‘night letters’ according to a unifying principle. i will try to define this principle through comparative analysis of the two passages from the 1995 and 1991 diaries respectively and the corresponding parts in the novel. dessaix’s 1995 notebook consists of daily entries; it is a diary mainly written in the form of brief factual accounts and epigrammatic descriptions. wed 12 th april 1995 (p. 24) northern italy is a disaster zone – factories, blocks of featureless flats, autostradas, smoky air, dilapidated farmhouses, nature extinguished completely, not a single forest or wood, people fishing at a commercial fishing pond. wearing and depressing. […] brown skies in northern italy. from here the author will derive the vividly effective presentation of contemporary italy, which represents one of the original qualities of night letters. the diary entry turns out as a much more complex description in the novel: venice, 9 th april the moment you cross the border into italy, you realize something is deeply wrong. you coast down into como on your expensive upholstered seat and suddenly, through the tinted glass, you see the first circle of hell. crowded around the lake in a brownish haze are scores of tower-blocks, pitted with tiny, box-like balconies like a pox. high up above the car-choked streets you can see women leaning out from amongst their washing, staring dismally down at the garish jumble of concrete and glass hemming them in. (nl, p. 118) [i]n its more primal form you soon discover that nature has virtually disappeared. as you roll down towards milan, an hour or so south of the border, the scene of devastation becomes almost overwhelming. […] the industrial parks, the shabby forests of high-rise apartments, the abandoned wrecks, the dilapidated farmsteads and stinking, steel-grey rivers. […] this land has been macadamised and concreted over, ploughed and cropped, built on, sprayed, polluted and poisoned to the point where nature has been entirely obliterated. (nl, p. 120) the brief diary entry rather compactly describes the ugliness of a flat, grey and polluted northern italy. there are evident analogies between the imagery used in the diary and that which appears in the novel, in some cases through the same words: diary novel disaster zone devastation factories industrial parks smoky air car-choked streets blocks of featureless flats scores of tower-blocks the shabby forests of high-rise apartments dilapidated farmhouses dilapidated farmsteads nature extinguished completely nature has virtually disappeared coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 nature has been entirely obliterated brown skies brownish haze dessaix used the materials from the notebooks imaginatively in his fiction-writing. he also used them as a kind of originary structuring device: it is interesting to notice that the letters in the novel resemble the diary form in the fact that the letters are supposed to have been written one after the other, every night, as a diary would be, and that there is no inscribed recipient with an active role. the letters are travel memoir of r.’s journey, told in the form of past experiences. how is the representation of italy in the novel constructed from the brief entry in the diary? the first representation of italy in night letters – corresponding to the diary entry quoted above – is the description of the area surrounding lake como. the perception of italian places is the exclusive prerogative of the fictive author of the letters, r., the protagonist of the journey, and takes place in those ‘interruptions in the syntagmatics of the narration’ which, as philippe hamon reminds us, are the descriptions.’ 3 introducing the descriptions through the protagonist’s eye, as a prolongation of his act of looking, dessaix uses the you-form, inviting the reader to share his character’s astonished and disappointed gazing at his surroundings. r. is moving – travelling on a train – and observes a complex scene. the verb of perception presenting the object described is introduced by an expression that identifies a transparent medium: ‘and suddenly, through the tinted glass, you see […].’ more precisely, this medium is transparent, but ‘tinted’, and the object is qualified through a revealing metaphor: ‘[t]hrough the tinted glass you see the first circle of hell.’ the coloured filter through which the images of italy are re-presented is made immediately explicit – r. is reading the divine comedy in an english translation while travelling. endless blocks of flats with tiny square holes crowd around the lake. in a ‘brownish haze’ women lean out from above as in a girone in dante’s inferno: they look down on tawdry heaps of concrete and glass, suffocated by the rising exhaust fumes, entrapped and imprisoned in this misery. from the moving train r.’s eyes continue gazing at the italian places: you pull into milano centrale in a state of shock, or at least i did. […] i hung over the lowered window in the corridor and stared out into the echoing gloom of the cavernous station. […] we started to slide out of milano centrale into the orange glow outside. the scabby, blighted buildings creaked past […] all bathed in a hellish red-yellow glare that seemed to leave no shadows […] the livid-looking sun set quickly in its sky of fiery chemicals and the world went dark. (nl, pp. 121-122) while in the first unit the inter-textual reference to dante is made explicit, here it is implicit, but visible in ‘the cavernous station,’ ‘the orange glow,’ ‘a hellish red-yellow glare’; in the third canto ‘[…] the gloomy plain shook/with such force […] from the weeping ground there sprang a wind/flaming with vermillion light’ (ll. 130-133). 4 in the novel the portrayal of italy’s devastation takes on all the details captured in the diary notes and amplifies them; the ugliness is intensified, yet simultaneously sublimated through explicit and implicit references to dante. the descriptions emphasize a certain kind of beauty, which emerges in striking ways. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 the second passage that i have chosen to analyze in this paper is taken from dessaix’s 1991 diary: october 1991 notes on vicenza […] at vicenza, a small station […] i was told to walk ‘just a few hundreds yards’ straight ahead and then turn right and there i’d find hotels. an hour later, almost in a state of collapse […] i arrived at the central square, all hotels having been fully booked […] i decided i just didn’t have the energy to walk back to the station, i’d just have to find a doorway and sit there all night. i found a shop entrance on the square and settled down. […]. i sat there for half an hour or so, barely able to think, and then took a decision: i had to go back to the station, where at least i’d be safer and warmer. […] it took me an hour to get back to the station. i found a waiting-room which was actually clean […]. the police arrested four people in the toilets during the night. so i stayed in the waiting-room where it seemed safer. (dessaix’s 1991 notebook) these notes from 1991 relate dessaix’s experiences during the ‘terrible night’ he spent looking for a hotel in the streets of vicenza, dragging his broken luggage, and then at the railway station. in the diary there are no detailed descriptions of places, only brief accounts of facts. for night letters dessaix relied on the 1991 notes, and elaborated upon them in recounting the facts; however, he added descriptions of vicenza railway station, mainly of the people crowded there; that is, of the setting for r.’s experiences and encounters. venice 12 th april i felt i’d entered the doleful city that night in vicenza […]. when you emerge from the passageway under the railway tracks, you find yourself in a sort of drafty vestibule […]. i was alone once more in the yellowish gloom amongst knots of smoking, staring men in windcheaters and jeans […]. pushing my case past the clumps of men, i reached the doorway onto the street and peered out. the next thing to do was to grab hold of the suitcase and drag it out into the night towards the city, and so i did it. (nl, pp. 179180) the description of the night r. spends in vicenza mirrors the night that dessaix reported in his diary: after about an hour of lurching forward with the case and stopping, lurching forward again and standing heaving while i regained my strength, i came to the hotel vicenza. […] no, no rooms. none in vicenza. another fair. the city was crammed with visitors. […] alright. i’d sleep in a doorway, curl up in a portico […] i curled up on the ground beside my suitcase in an alcove leading into a men’s clothing shop right on the square. hardly had i closed my eyes, though, when two policemen came and stood beside me. […] i explained there were no rooms to be had. ‘then you must go back to the railway station’ he said ‘you’ll be safer there than here […].’ so back i went […] after a very long time i came out of the gathering fog into the echoing vestibule of vicenza railway station. (nl, pp. 183-184) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 the first description introduces the city of vicenza through another revealing metaphor: ‘i felt i’d entered the doleful city that night in vicenza.’ the inter-textual reference to dante’s inferno is made explicit in ‘the doleful city.’ when r. arrives at vicenza railway station he describes it as ‘a sort of drafty vestibule,’ and again when he goes back there he enters ‘the echoing vestibule of vicenza railway station.’ in the third canto of the inferno the two poets, virgil and dante, enter the vestibule that leads to hell; this is what r. is reading at this point in his journey. the scene r. observes on his return to the station after his failed attempt to find a hotel bed in vicenza constitutes another vivid description. it is not transposed from the diaries, but freely invented according to the theme of the vestibule of hell and of the fifth canto: pandaemonium. in the middle of the hall two tall black women in red hotpants were screeching and clawing at each other. packs of smiling men were gathering around them, hands in pockets, tense and elated. […] a black wind from tracks billowed through the hall, sending grit and paper whirling. and circling through the mêlée, wheeling and turning, restless like panthers, were young men with shaven bullet-heads […]. they all had that night look in their eyes, eyeing, eyeing. […] three or four girls drifted over to me, coming at me in husky, faded voices. they clustered around me, soursmelling and breathy […]. on the corner of the vestibule opened out onto the platform was a glassed-box of a room. […] it was the first class waiting room. […] was i at the bottom yet? […] pressing myself against the glass i could see a figure in the far doorway, silhouetted against the reddish glow of the foggy city […]. (nl, pp. 185-186) again the comedy’s intense visual imagery colours the protagonist r.’s descriptions. the scenes portrayed at vicenza railway station have colours which seem to repeat those of dante’s inferno: grim red and dead black – ‘black wind’, ‘the reddish glow’. ‘[t]he reddish glow’ reiterates the imagery already introduced in r.’s first encounter with italy; the source is once again the above quoted third canto ‘[…] from the weeping ground there sprang a wind/flaming with vermillion light’ (ll. 132-133). ‘the black wind […] sending grit and paper whirling’ echoes ‘the black air’ of the second circle of hell in the fifth canto, where can be heard the wailing voices of the lustful, for ever whirled about in a black, stormy wind. (l. 50) dante asks his guide, virgilio: ‘master, who are these/whom the black air lashes?’; the damned are described by dante (lines 31-39): ‘the hellish squall, which never rests/sweeps spirits in its headlong rush/tormenting, whirls and strikes them/ caught in that path of violence/ they shriek, weep, and lament/[…] i understood that to such torment/the carnal sinners are condemned/they who make reason subject to desire.’ from a glass-box-like 1 st class waiting room where r. spends the night he observes the people outside; he is positioned within a safe place and examines the scene through a transparent medium, which protects him but allows him to see what is beyond. r. depicts the ambiguous, ‘sour-smelling women’ and sweating young men with the ‘night look in their eyes’ populating vicenza railway station, which is sexually charged. in this scene there is a strong emphasis on the possibility of sexual liaisons but also an increasing sense of anguish, intensified by the implicit and explicit references to dante’s fifth canto. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 in conclusion, i would like to suggest that a comparative reading of the diaries and night letters enriches an appreciation of dessaix’s deft layering and emotive projection of r.’s experience. the representations of r.’s first encounter with italy and of vicenza railway station are incorporated in the narrative of the larger textual ensemble through a unifying element: the reference to dante’s inferno. this reference represents a fundamental element of cohesion in the analysed descriptions portraying italy; it provides intense visual power and sublimates the ugliness and misery of these modern italian ruins. the notes from the diary give origin to the novel’s elaborate and sophisticated descriptions through dessaix’s gaudy imagination, enflamed by the visual strength of the inferno. in the divine comedy virgil is the guide to dante, in the representations of italy i have analysed here dante is the guide to dessaix. roberta trapè completed her studies at the university of florence (lingue e letterature straniere moderne e contemporanee). from jan 2000 to oct 2004 she worked as a lecturer at the university of melbourne (department of french, italian and spanish studies). she is currently working at the university of florence on the images of italy in contemporary australian fiction and non-fiction for her phd dissertation (scuola di dottorato di filologia moderna e letterature comparate, università degli studi di firenze). 1 rachel tells a long, captivating story of a baroness and her mysterious golden amulet, prof. eschenbaum narrates the story of a strikingly beautiful venetian courtesan. in a speech given in lyons in 2006, dessaix said: “i threw in dante’s divine comedy, casanova, lawrence sterne and marco polo, as well as characters i’d never met on my actual journey (an indian poet, a german professor, an italian waiter called emilio), i telescoped time, i told parts of the story back-to-front, created arabesques and spirals where in reality there had been just straight lines, concocted fantastic stories (one about a magical amulet, one about a venetian courtesan) in order to make the truth of what i was writing seem truer. what that truth was, it’s difficult to say.” 2 the author wishes to express her gratitude to dessaix for giving her portions of his diaries of his 1991 and 1995 travels to italy and the text of the lyons speech, given in may 2007. 3 hamon, p. what is a description? french literary theory today. t. todorov (ed), trans. by r. carter, new york: cambridge univ. press, pp. 147-178, 1982. 4 princeton dante project, princeton university, prof. robert hollander. microsoft word coolabahreviewkate coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 australia and galicia: defeating the tyranny of distance/australia e galicia: vencendo a tiranía do afastamento maría jesús lorenzo modia & roy c. boland osegueda. eds. 2008. isbn: 0-9775868-1-2; dlg: c 4397-2008. in collaboration with the xunta of galicia and the university of a coruña, a galician/english bilingual edition kate russell copyright ©2010 kate russell . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. ‘australia and galicia: defeating the tyranny of distance’ aims to fill a niche in scholarship of australian and galician relations. it includes contributions from authors from both antipodes, focusing on a variety of themes, in order to demonstrate their common past, present and future. the prologue, by secretary of immigration manuel luiz rodriguez gonzalez highlights a primary goal of the book, to inspire further conversation and knowledge. the historical and contemporary perspectives attempt to highlight the extensive relationship between galicia and australia, to demonstrate that despite great distances and differences, collaboration between cultures is possible. together with the literary views, they highlight common experiences, values and characters, despite their contradictory and shifting identities and contexts. historical boland’s historical contribution focuses on the expeditions to australia from spain through a 400 year period while emphasising their impact on modern australia. while an overview of shared commonalities such as the eucalypt tree highlights obscure facts and trivia, these connections are strained at best, particularly when their limited implications are viewed in respect to modern australia. despite lacking the fluidity and rhythm of words possessed by other contributions, osegueda effectively emphasizes the spanish presence and impact in australia, highlighting that it has not been a terra incognita for over 300 years. the most poignant element of the contribution is the insight into the reality of early australian immigration, women brought as potential wives and the struggles of individuals such as juan batista arrieta for whom which australia was not the ´lucky country´. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 central to australian galician relations is galician monk rosendo salvado. with three contributions dedicated to the monk, he is an integral character yet this attention is often misdirected or excessive. barry focuses on the unpublished correspondence, giving painfully meticulous attention to detail of salvado’s letters which are not likely to interest a general readership, especially as it is overshadowed by the following submissions. however, while attempting to demonstrate that new norcia remained in the hearts and minds of the spanish people, it best demonstrates the powerful relationship developed between men through their faith, in spite of a system of communication impossible to fathom in modern times. bouzon’s contribution is likely to be of more interest to a general readership as it gives a personalised view of salvado including his interests, experiences and views on colonial australia, creating almost an image of an early ‘aussie battler’. yet, to those with knowledge of australian history, this is unsavoury when considering his goal of evangelising the local indigenous community. a major flaw is that while salvado forms a central element in many historical perspectives, his evangelism is often looked upon sympathetically as a symptom of his context, despite the obvious cultural genocide. however, when speaking of his encounters with indigenous groups, salvado´s diary is refreshingly honest and humorous making it particularly appealing to both a specialised audience as well as those unfamiliar with such interactions. buzon succinctly summarises the integral elements of salvado’s personal and professional life making it a well rounded contribution that is not weighed down by the excessive detail found in many other contributions. esposto uses the unpublished diaries of dom rosendo to give insight into the personal and private lives of those living in new norcia, yet is overshadowed by buzon’s contribution, making it monotonous and unremarkable, particularly the time given to the original spanish version of diary entries which are likely to frustrate non spanish speakers. esposto focuses on the reconstruction of the old diaries and the modern technologies and processes used, therefore it is likely only to find readership in a very specific audience and very unappealing for general readership. although not intentional, his goal seems almost ridiculous in the wider scheme of historical scholarship due to its limited relevance, difficulty and time restraints. the second focal point of galician australian relations is based in commerce and seafaring. migues rodriguez begins this link by exploring the pacific sea routes used by the house of maluccas. the contribution highlights the futility of humanity in the disastrous attempts to secure new routes to the indias and spice islands, the danger faced and lives lost for an economic gain. it is a sobering reality and also an unintentionally humorous insight into the ludicrous and incredible journeys which were often abandoned or complete failures. langdon’s theory of spanish presence in polynesia presented by rodriguez, despite its dubious nature noted by the author, presents the thought provoking possibility of rewriting australian-spanish history. galdo and losada highlight a wider history of migrations and the peculiar presence of galician culture in australia until modern times. this is one of few contributions which is strongly focused on galicia or galician culture as opposed to general australian or spanish influence. contemporary views coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 with the exception of few contributions, the book loses both pace and focus in the final two sections. lamas’s contribution looses momentum with her bibliometric study of publication trends in the galician paper ‘la voz’. while attempting to highlight the evolution of productivity and interest in galician australian relations, the contribution has a narrow scope of interest and could have been addressed in a more appealing manner. it serves as an example of the exaggerated links between the antipodes. ballyn’s contribution is refreshing as it offers the first insight into an alternative view of salvado’s role in australia through the eyes of alf taylor, a poet who experienced new norcia first hand as a child. while the contribution is in the form of an interview, it is highly emotional while demonstrating the obligatory modern viewpoints of indigenous history. the interview presents the uncensored truth of the impact of salvado’s new norcia and contrasts the heroic and passionate character with which we have been presented, with a colourful yet burdened image of alf taylor. gerrand’s contribution has merit in its study of galician culture. this is one of few contributions with a focus on galician culture however it also features many elements of catalan nationalism, which while integral to understanding modern spain, should serve as a basis for a galician elaboration rather than a focus point in itself. while providing a roundabout example and explanation of galician cultural nationalism, it could no doubt be explored in a more direct way as the goal of a .gal domain is a weak example of galician nationalism and the importance of regional identities within spain. literary views the third section of the book is a literary comparison including various studies on contemporary australian novelists and poets. elements such as the sense of community, place, identity, colonisation and new identity form the basis for analysis. these contributions focus more on australian works, values and authors making the section unbalanced and distorted. the third section seems out of place with such a strong literary focus that only maintains relevance through the occasional reference to a common value or literary method. with the second section the book begins to lose pace and focus. it becomes increasingly unbalanced between australia and galicia and themes becoming more obscure such as the vazquez’s feminist approaches. the book remains unconvincing of the importance of galician australian relations both in modern times and throughout history. while the structure of the book – historical and contemporary perspectives, allows a smooth and gradual move between themes and periods, the final literary section seems out of place and comparatively, totally irrelevant. surprisingly, the lack of equilibrium combines with inconsequential facts to present the idea that despite an ever increasingly globalised world, the ties shared between galicia and australia were stronger in the past than in modern times. while many interesting facts are presented, in the scheme of australian or galician history, their relationship seems of increasing lesser importance. this is supported by the comparison of neighbours and mireas vivas in the coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 contemporary section which, compared to the historical perspective or immigration patterns, seems an inane cultural comparison. at 355 pages, the book is an extensive work yet it focuses more on quantity than quality. many contributions focus on themes or issues of little relevance to the study of australian galician relations. perhaps this is due to a lack of a real connection between the antipodes. while there is an evident link through characters such as salvado which continues into present times, many of the contemporary ‘links’ such as that of the eucalypt tree, are dubious at best. it appears as if the book is trying to accomplish too much from a limited subject, taking in contributions from all areas and times in an attempt to make a concise overview. microsoft word jaime coolabah jaime de cordoba coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 jaime de córdoba benedicto born in barcelona in 1961. he is a professor in fine arts, at the university of barcelona. member of the phd program in fine arts. he has held individual exhibitions of his sculptures and drawings in barcelona, madrid, gerona, the hague, amsterdam and brussels. he currently works on public art projects for a several architects in barcelona. his sculptures have been acquired by public and private collections in europe, south korea and the usa. achieving memory the word is silent and communication is ineffable , it is only visual and tactile. the vision of myth has always been locked up in the object , in the construction of what remains. extinguished cultures leave behind objects such as “mohicas huacos” of peru or the australian aboriginal barks with their famous “mimis”. stone sculpture is to be witnessed. it is not ephemeral. it does not need musical theory or the knowledge of any language to express itself. there is no digital innovation in the works that we build. its importance is contained with in its own myths. microsoft word 6bosch 62 coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona ‘in love, she remains whole’: heterosexual love in contemporary arab american poetry written by women marta bosch vilarrubias abstract: since the advent of arab american feminism in the 1990s, arab american women writers have become prominent figures in the field of arab american literature. at the same time, the victimization of arab women and the stereotyping of arab men have grown in the west. given this mainstream perception of arabs, this article aims at exploring the positioning of arab american women towards arab men, taking into account the feminist fight against sexism and racism. analyzing the articulations of heterosexual love made by arab american women in their poetry (including mohja kahf, suheir hammad and pauline kaldas), this article will examine the potential political use of poetry. keywords: arab american; feminism; masculinity you are my yemen and my damascus you are the goal of my winter journey and my summer you are my city and its streets you are my village and its fields mohja kahf, “you are my yemen” (1996) this arab american portrayal of love employs images of the arab world in an exercise of nostalgia for the middle east, putting together the affection for the loved one and for one’s origins. the arab american identity stems from this need for remembering one’s ancestry as well as a necessity for acceptance from mainstream america, who considers this cross-cultural identity a contradiction in terms. in the midst of this attempt to make sense of one’s identity, arab american women have found a sound space of resistance in their literary writings, particularly in their poetry. the women of this ethnic group are offering an ambivalent depiction of heterosexual love stemming from their feminist struggle against sexism and racism. in an effort to counter the stereotyping of both arab men and women, they take a stance against their double colonization as ethnic women, copyright©2011 marta bosch vilarrubias. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 63 but they continue to believe in the possibility of love. love towards one’s origins, towards arab men, and towards oneself are articulated in the poetry written by arab american women such as mohja kahf, suheir hammad and pauline kaldas. these are the writers that will be examined in this article, which will start by analyzing the influence of arab american feminism on contemporary arab american writers. afterward, an analysis of the main stereotypical discourses currently related to arab men will be contrasted to the nuanced articulation of heterosexual love provided by contemporary arab american women writers. arab american women writers are greatly indebted to arab american feminism, which has empowered them and enabled the voicing of their concerns through literature. arab american feminism started in 1983 with the creation of the feminist arab-american network, which appeared as a response to the refusal of the us national women studies association to condemn the israeli invasion of lebanon of 1982. feeling they were being treated as inferior by mainstream feminism, arab american women saw the need to set up a separate feminism that would tackle both ethnic and women’s issues. this feminism gained force during and after the first gulf war (august 1990 – march 1991), because as a consequence of it, the anti-arab discourse in the united states was exacerbated, reinforcing the need for arab american organizations to fight racism. however, the more racism was being fought, the more sexism was being silenced in the arab american community: the arab american organizations that appeared in response to racial discrimination were structured according to rigid traditional gender roles which denied a voice to arab american women, and so they put to the fore the need to reassert the arab american feminists’ claim against sexism. as a result, in the 1990s three main arab american feminist discourses appeared and circulated. firstly, there was arab american nationalist feminism, which promoted assimilation as a means to counteract racism and sexism. then, there was arab american liberal feminism, which advocated an individualistic fight against racism, celebrating heritage but denying racial classification. thirdly, and most significantly, there appeared arab american women-of-color feminism, which has been the most successful one among arab americans—and i would argue, the most fruitful one—and which aligns the experiences of arab american women with those of other minorities. this feminism stems from “[a] self-conscious definition [of arab american women] as members of an ethnic minority” (hatem 1998:382). one must bear in mind that arab americans had been considered white for a long time by american political institutions; the us census, for instance, did not acknowledge an arab ancestry until the year 2000. the identification of arab american women as women of color, then, stems from their self-perception as an oppressed group because of their gender and ethnicity. by putting themselves next to other people of color, there is the possibility for arab american women to explore the interaction and intersection between their two cultures, and between sexism and racism. michelle sharif makes clear, in her essay “global sisterhood: where do we fit in?”, that arab american feminists need to work together with other women of color. she points out, arab-americans belong to both cultures and therefore occupy a unique position. we can and must help this dialogue develop. our struggle, like all women of color, includes overcoming racism as well as sexism. by joining women’s groups in the united states, we can put issues such as anti-arab 64 racism on the agenda. our time for recognition and respect in western feminist movements has come (1994:159). arab american feminism has had a very important role in enabling arab american women to voice their concerns. however, this is not the only reason why women of arab descent have actively published in the last decades. nada elia argues in her article “islamophobia and the ‘privileging’ of arab american women” that arab american women are encountering fewer difficulties to publish than their male counterparts because they are seen as “harmless” in contrast to arab men, who are stereotypically related to terrorism and perceived as a political threat (2006:158). be it the reason or not, the truth is that arab american women have published more than men in these last two decades, and their accounts, mostly heterosexual, have been prominently focused on the figures of arab men. arab men have been looked at under a negative light in the united states particularly since the mid 1950s. as michael pickering argues, notions of orientalism rose with us colonialism and international politics in the middle east, that is, for example, in relation to the suez crisis of 1956 or the arab-israeli conflict (2001:164). as a consequence, negative discourses about arabs started to appear in popular representations, especially centering on the arab male. edward said talks about this pejorative depiction of arab masculinity, relating it to popular cultural artifacts: in the films and television the arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty. he appears as an oversexed degenerate, capable, it is true, of cleverly devious intrigues, but essentially sadistic, treacherous, low. slave trader, camel driver, moneychanger, colorful scoundrel: these are some traditional arab roles in the cinema (1995:286-7). furthermore, the arab american scholar jack shaheen has documented over a thousand hollywood films which portray arabs in an offensive manner in his books arab and muslim stereotyping in american popular culture (1997), reel bad arabs: how hollywood vilifies a people (2001), and guilty: hollywood’s verdict on arabs after 9/11 (2008). he talks about the “‘b’ factor”, arguing that arabs are always portrayed as billionaires, bombers, bedouin bandits, buffoons, or bargainers, and they are also related to four myths: being wealthy, barbarian and uncultured, sex maniacs, and terrorists. he thus concludes that these stereotypes are very rooted in america’s mind and that, as a result, there is racial discrimination. this vilification of the arab male has gone hand in hand in the western imaginary with the portrayal of arab women either as victims or as exotic belly dancers, part of a harem. in this respect, evelyn shakir writes: according to popular belief, all arab women can be divided into two categories. either they are shadowy nonentities, swathed in black from head to foot, or they are belly dancers – seductive, provocative, and privy to exotic secrets of lovemaking. the two images, of course, are finally identical, adding up to a statement that all arab women are, in one sense or another, men’s instruments or slaves (1988:39). 65 with their writings, arab american women prove these stereotypes to be wrong. influenced by feminism and therefore schooled in the analysis of gender, arab american women writers are aware of these images, and use them in their writings. they show a strong stance against the men’s projection of them as exotic, while, at the same time, they cannot avoid a certain ambivalence towards arab men. arab american feminism is known for its struggle against both sexism and racism. this joint fight places arab american women writers in a complex position when depicting men of arab origin, since they need to fight sexism without falling into racist stereotypes. mohja kahf’s poetry, for example, expresses feelings of love for arab men which are not exempt from nuances. in the different poems that are part of kahf’s volume e-mails from scheherazad (2003), she puts forward her affection for arab men, clinging on to their common origins, while at the same time she acknowledges the existence of sexism from her male counterparts. nathalie handal, when commenting on this anthology, explains, “all of kahf’s poems are love poems – we find joy and pain, trust and distrust, beauty and horror, pleasure and repugnance, peace and conflict, we find the world and the self” (2005:3); that is, we find the ambivalence kahf feels towards love and towards men. in her poem “you are my yemen” (1996), kahf makes her love for arab men and their shared culture evident. the poem starts with a reference to muhammad’s hadith “god bless our yemen and our damascus”, which appears quoted under the poem’s title, and is paralleled in the very poem, which starts: “you are my yemen and my damascus / you are the goal of my winter journey and my summer / you are my city and its streets / you are my village and its fields”. the poem continues providing a series of images that remind the reader of the middle east and that relate the feelings of love of the narrator to this specific geographical context. through a vivid imagery that involves sight, sound, and taste, kahf proclaims her love both for her significant other and her ancestry, with verses such as “i shimmy up palm trees to wait for you / to squint into the sun and watch for you / you are my caravan loaded with lentils and cracked wheat / snacking its way into town / we the city-dwellers trill with joy / layla and majnun will fry chopped onions tonight!”. these colorful and savory details are used by kahf to celebrate both her beloved and her syrian origins, which come together once again at the end of the poem through the equation of the lover’s face and the horizon: “here are the long-awaited evenings. / here you are. here am i. / your face / the horizon / i want to see”. nevertheless, this love for arab men is complicated in the rest of kahf’s poetry, where it appears imbued with an acknowledgement and questioning of the stereotyping of arab men in the west. in “i can scent an arab man a mile away” (1992), there is a humorous acceptance of the stereotypes attributed to arab masculinity, although ultimately, the “i” persona’s love for arab men remains unquestioned. the poem starts by referring to the looks traditionally associated with arab men (where darkness, hair, and traditional clothes are emphasized), and then ironically delves into the ideals they have (in relation to tradition, on the one hand, and to the israel-palestine conflict, on the other). the poem reads: “my stubbly-chinned, / black-haired, tawny-skinned / arab male kin, the white-robed / and the black-tied of them, / milling on the male side of a wedding, / can be counted on for many good things: / to be politicized about palestine / from the third grade, at the latest”. then, kahf takes a feminist stance and turns to 66 explore the stereotypes associated with arab men through an exhaustive enumeration, only to finish by asserting her love for them: they may be mustachio’d, macho, patriarchal, sexist, egoistical, parochial – they may, as men may, think themselves indomitable, being easily manipulable, but they’re mine, my sleek and swarthy, hairy-chested, curly-headed lovers of the prophet and lovers of the virgin, sons of the city street and village boys, wanderers tribal and global. her affection for arab men seems to come from their common ancestry, their common tradition, a fact which is further developed in the following part of the poem, where the “i” persona goes on to explain that she loves them because she knows them, that is, because of their shared origins and their shared language (making specific reference to the arabic letters ghayn, dad, and kha). as kahf puts it, i know them by the rims around their eyes i know them by the sheen upon their skin i know them by the growling ghayns and gnawling dads and hoarse hungry khas that rumble up from the hollow in their chests and fill the throat and swell the cheek, distend the lips and pearl off the tongue, and emerge, a language, theirs-ours-mine. once again, in this poem, kahf takes on the same idea that we have seen in “you are my yemen”, the intertwining of romantic love and love for one’s origins, to make evident the importance for arab americans of acknowledging their ancestry. at the same time, here in “i can scent an arab man a mile away”, the familiarity the “i” persona defends, is also used to make an ironic account of stereotypes about arab men, rendering them as untrue. this is done throughout the poem and is especially evident at the end, with the last verse, which reads: “(god, they look so sexy in those checkered scarves)”. the use of humorous irony in this poem becomes a strategy arab american women may use to be able to critique both sexism and racism. acknowledging stereotypes is a good means to proclaim love for arab men but making clear at the same time that sexism also needs to be fought. as a consequence, it can be argued that kahf’s declaration of love for arab men does not leave her powerless in front of them. in the poem “the woman dear to herself” (1996), love empowers women: the woman dear to herself lives in the heart alive to the everywhere presence of divinity the woman dear to herself does not lose herself 67 in the presence of a man woman or child. in love she remains whole. she knows the geography of her body and how to give good directions home. kahf refers to overall love, and especially, love for oneself, as women’s ultimate power. in the last two verses (“she knows the geography of her body / and how to give good directions home”), kahf also makes an erotic reference to the woman’s body, an image that is recurrent in her writings. these two verses convey the idea that not only do arab american women have power because of their knowledge of their own bodies, but also because of their origins. the images used to ascertain this knowledge and love for oneself come from the association made between romance and origin, body and geography, which can be taken as a feminist critique of the “double colonization” of women (that is, appropriation both through colonialist and sexist practices). in the poem, this link is subverted in giving the power over geography to the woman, thus breaking the connection between colonialism and patriarchy. furthermore, kahf also advocates love, female empowerment, and the female body in “my body is not your battleground” (1998), where she makes her powerful stance against war clear. as nathalie handal puts it, “in the poem […], she criticizes the nations and rulers, more specifically the u.s. government, whose arrogance seem limitless as they use god’s name to conquer, kill, to justify the unjustifiable” (2005:3). the first three stanzas of “my body is not your battleground” focus on different body parts, starting with breasts, continuing with hair, and finishing with torso. the first stanza puts together the woman’s ownership of her own body (her breasts in this case) with a pacifist stance towards the nationalistic view of land ownership (referring to the battles of badr and uhud, and rejecting any flags or banners). as kahf puts it, my body is not your battleground my breasts are neither wells not mountains, neither badr nor uhud my breasts do not want to lead revolutions nor to become prisoners of war my breasts seek amnesty; release them so i can glory in their milktipped fullness, so i can offer them to my sweet love without your flags and banners on them the second stanza uses the image of the hair (and the issue of whether having it covered or not) as a way to critique the notions of progress and tradition. it ends up advocating once again women’s ownership of their bodies, and their freedom to use them with their loved ones. it reads, my body is not your battleground my hair is neither sacred nor cheap, neither the cause of your disarray nor the path to your liberation my hair will not bring progress and clean water if it flies unbraided in the breeze 68 it will not save us from attackers if it is wrapped and shielded from the sun untangle your hands from my hair so i can comb and delight in it, so i can honor and anoint it, so i can spill it over the chest of my sweet love the third stanza, defends again women’s ownership of their own bodies, paralleling them to a besieged city and, thus reflecting, once more, the “double colonization” of women that has already been pointed out in “the woman dear to herself”. in this case the traditional images that link the colonized land and the female body are used to make a point against war, colonialism, and sexism: my body is not your battleground my private garden is not your tillage my thighs are not highways to your golden city my belly is not the store of your bushels of wheat my womb is not the cradle of your soldiers, not the ship of your journey to the homeland leave me to discover the lakes that glisten in my green forests and to understand the power of their waters the next stanza in the poem is full of eroticism, as kahf states that the female body is only hers: “leave me to fill or not fill my chalice / with the wine of my sweet love / is it your skin that will tear / when the head of the new world emerges?” finally, kahf finishes with a reflection on boundaries (both physical and political), reasserting her rejection of both male and colonial illegitimate appropriation: my body is not your battleground how dare you put your hand where i have not given permission has god, then, given you permission to put your hand there? my body is not your battleground withdraw from the eastern fronts and the western withdraw these armaments and this siege so that i may prepare the earth for the new age of lilac and clover, so that i may celebrate this spring the pageant beauty with my sweet love this reflection on the women’s body and the rejection of its appropriation is taken one step further in suheir hammad’s poem “exotic” (2002), which is a powerful standpoint against the exoticization of arab women. in this poem, hammad starts with the claim: “don’t wanna be your exotic”, which is followed by a powerful reasoning. she starts by rejecting the notion of arab women as vulnerable: “don't wanna be your exotic / some delicate fragile colorful bird / imprisoned caged / in a land foreign to the stretch of her wings”. then, she attempts an empowerment of arab women by using different arguments. first of all, she advocates for egalitarianism, stating that she is not different, 69 not foreign, not an “other”: “don't wanna be your exotic / women everywhere are just like me / some taller darker nicer than me / but like me just the same / women everywhere carry my nose on their faces / my name on their spirits”. secondly, there is a denial of the arab women’s provocative nature, as in the stanza which reads: “don't seduce yourself with / my otherness my hair / wasn't put on top of my head to entice / you into some mysterious black voodoo / the beat of my lashes against each other / ain't some dark desert beat / it's just a blink / get over it”. the whole poem makes reference to stereotypes about arab women such as vulnerability, foreignness, exoticism, lechery, but it ends up with an enumeration of other stereotypes about women related to different cultures, which serve as an epitome for the need for non-white women to overcome both sexism and racism, and thus make the poem representative of women of color feminism: not your harem girl geisha doll banana picker pom pom girl pum pum shorts coffee maker town whore belly dancer private dancer la malinche venus hottentot laundry girl your immaculate vessel emasculating princess don't wanna be your erotic not your exotic significantly enough, pauline kaldas also has a poem entitled “exotic” (1994), which refers to some of the same ideas as hammad’s poem, such as the emphasis on the exoticization men make of non-white women, and the subsequent advocacy of a feminism that encompasses all women of color. as kaldas puts it, dark your hair is the soil eyes lined with the dye of an olive and your walk is the wind that moves a palm tree here, dark woman i will leave my golden beauty and take you who are also permitted: “hey girl, how you doin?” “que pasa niña?” “hey baby!” “what are you – lebanese, armenian, spanish, puerto rican, italian, mexican in both hammad’s and kaldas’s “exotic”, the idea of the exoticization of black women is emphasized. men try to exert power over arab women by imagining them as exotic, that is, by projecting them as vulnerable but also seductive. putting together the stereotypical images of the arab woman as both submissive and provocative, men undertake an economy of appropriation and possession of the “othered” female body, epitomizing its colonization in the name of love. hammad and kaldas, but also kahf, informed by feminism and therefore aware of all this, attempt to fight these stereotypes in their poems. 70 this powerful stance against sexism is condensed in mohja kahf’s poem “men kill me” (1998), where the “i” persona calls out against men who try to exert their power over women, who try to subdue them. although in previous poems she had pronounced her love for arab men, her love does not overcome injustice, and so, in “men kill me”, kahf firmly advocates equality between men and women, saying that it kills her that men diminish women’s freedom and constrain them to keep their power. stanzas such as the one that follows illustrate this feminist viewpoint: “men kill me / how they think the sun is all for them / and the water is all for them / how they accept the wind at their backs / as if the wind was the handmaid of their father / and they inherited her without a murmur”. this strong stance for gender equality underlies all the aforementioned poems. they all sustain the arab american feminist claim against sexism and racism, resulting in an ambivalent portrayal of love, passion and desire. completely aware of the stereotypes about both arab men and women, contemporary arab american women writers are articulating a discourse of ownership of their own bodies (feminine and ethnic) that constitutes a very powerful tool against their “double colonization”, that is, against the sexism and racism that they are subject to. contemporary arab american women poets join forces with arab american women of color feminists, offering potential sites of resistance against sexism and racism. despite their ambivalent feelings towards traditional masculinities and their acknowledgement of both positive and negative aspects arab men may share, they present love for arab men as a desired possibility as long as women are aware of the need to love themselves first. as kahf puts it, “in love, she remains whole”. works cited elia, nada 2006: “islamophobia and the ‘privileging’ of arab american women”, nwsa journal, volume 18, number 3, indiana university press, 155-161. hammad, suheir 2002: “exotic”, middle east report online, <http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/hammad_poem.html>, last accessed: july 2010. handal, nathalie 2005: “review of kahf, mohja, e-mails from scheherazad”, hgender-mideast, h-net reviews, <http://www.hnet.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10594>, last accessed: july 2010. hatem, mervat f. 1998: “the invisible american half: arab american hybridity and feminist discourses in the 1990s”. talking visions: multicultural feminism in a transnational age. ella shohat (ed). new york: the mit press. 369390. kahf, mohja 2003: “i can scent an arab man a mile away”, e-mails from sheherazad, gainesville: university press of florida, 29-30. kahf, mohja 2003: “men kill me”, e-mails from sheherazad, gainesville: university press of florida, 61. kahf, mohja 2003: “my body is not your battleground”, e-mails from sheherazad, gainesville: university press of florida, 58-59. 71 kahf, mohja 2003: “the woman dear to herself”, e-mails from sheherazad, gainesville: university press of florida, 55-56. kahf, mohja 2003: “you are my yemen”, e-mails from sheherazad, gainesville: university press of florida, 48-49. kahf, mohja 2003: e-mails from sheherazad, gainesville: university press of florida. kaldas, pauline 1994: “exotic”, food for our grandmothers: writings by arabamerican and arab-canadian feminists. ed. joanna kadi. cambridge, ma: south end press. 168-169. pickering, michael 2001: stereotyping: the politics of representation. london: palgrave. said, edward w. 1995 (1978): orientalism. london: penguin books. shaheen, jack g. 1997: arab and muslim stereotyping in american popular culture. washington dc: georgetown university. shaheen, jack g. 2008: guilty: hollywood’s veredict on arabs after 9/11, massachusetts: olive branch press. shaheen, jack g. 2009: reel bad arabs: how hollywood vilifies a people, new york: olive branch press. shakir, evelyn 1988: “mother’s milk: women in arab-american autobiography”, melus, vol. 15, no. 4, of arabs and jews, 39-50. sharif, michelle 1994: “global sisterhood: where do we fit in?”. food for our grandmothers: writings by arab-american and arab-canadian feminists. ed. joanna kadi. cambridge, ma: south end press. 151-159. marta bosch teaches in the literature section of the english department at the university of barcelona. her research on the representation of masculinities in arab american literature written by women stems from her work on the project “constructing new masculinities: the representation of masculinity in literature and cinema in the united states”, directed by dr. àngels carabí. among her recent publications are the articles “the representation of fatherhood by the arab diaspora in the united states” (lectora 14, 2008), and “en el libro de la vida, cada página tiene dos caras: masculinidades árabo-americanas en arabian jazz, de diana abu-jaber” (hombres soñados por escritoras de hoy, àngels carabí, cristina alsina, rodrigo andrés (eds)). microsoft word anna cole 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 252 dancing with myth, memory and mimesis. anna cole abstract: the focus of this paper is on the mythical ‘first’ national aboriginal debutante ball, held in australia in 1968 in celebration of the successful referendum a year earlier. on the fortieth anniversary of the event this paper explores the memories and meanings of that time to those women who debuted in front of the prime minister on a balmy evening in july and the significance of that time today. key words: indigenous, debutante, mimesis. the ‘first’ national aboriginal debutante ball held in 1968, like a lot of ‘firsts’ in history had a number of historical precedents. prior to 1968 when this ball took place there were a number of small-scale local aboriginal debutante balls held in country towns around australia (cole, 2000). while significant locally and to those who participated, these events attracted little wider attention. but in 1968, a year after the ‘landslide’ referendum of the year before, the sydney-based foundation for aboriginal affairs, a non-government organisation managed by a young charles perkins, held the first largescale, national indigenous ball and attracted wide-spread attention. esther williams ran the dance classes leading up to the event, jimmy little’s band played on the night and the young indigenous debutantes and their partners were presented to the then prime minster john gorton. photographs and footage of the beautiful debutantes circulated on national television via the australian broadcasting commission. a japanese film crew turned up to film it and showed images of the ball back in japan. at that ball, held on an unseasonably warm evening in july 1968, twenty-five indigenous women aged between seventeen and twenty-one made their debut at that historical ball. ruby langford-ginibi who attended the dance with her daughter remembers: ‘pearl was twenty-second out of twenty-five debs…i saw a grey-haired man walk up to pearl and he clicked his heels in salute and took her hand. he led her to the middle of the floor and the band struck up and away they waltzed. i couldn’t see very well from my seat so i asked someone, ‘who’s that man dancing with pearl?’. next day it was all in the newspapers. pearl had made history being the first aboriginal ever to dance with the prime minister. i was so proud and later gorton wrote me a letter’ (langford-ginibi, 1989: 141). copyright ©2009 anna cole this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 253 today aboriginal debutante balls are held regularly around australia. in brisbane this year’s national aboriginal and islander day observance committee (naidoc) day debutante ball attracted so many participants the organisers were considering moving the venue from the smaller cultural center in musgrave park to the large brisbane convention centre. i originally became interested in debutante balls while researching ideas about gender and the cultural politics of assimilation in australia (cole 2000). the image of the indigenous debutante had smiled graciously out from the social pages of newspapers and the nsw state sponsored magazine dawn: a magazine for the aboriginal people of nsw, published from the late 1950s to the early 1970s in new south wales. perhaps ironically, initially it was indigenous critiques of white feminism that had made me interested in the aboriginal debutante balls. indigenous women writers and activists had challenged the assumptions of white feminists about an easily defined ‘shared sisterhood’ showing the ways that aboriginal women and non-indigenous women’s interests differed in significant ways. in particular differences existed around issues of family, sexuality and domestic violence (williams 1987:66-73; huggins 1987:77-83). for example, when white women called for abortion rights and liberation from being defined only by their maternal role, indigenous women were fighting enforced sterilisation in some parts of australia and the violent denigration and refusal of their maternal role through the wide-spread removal of indigenous children from their families. when white women fought for the right for sexual freedom, for example, aboriginal women fought derogatory stereotypes of ‘black velvet’ (see goodall & huggins 1992: 402). what would i learn if i listened to the women and men involved in these balls instead of reacting from my own feminist prejudices? as i began talking about the ball with those involved in the course of making a short documentary film about the ’68 ball for it’s fortieth anniversay, the photos and film footage triggered stories and associations that belied the stylised image of the assimilated debutante. the stories the women told complicated the image of white middle class respectability that the ball seemed to confer. alice hinton-bateup remembered the tiara she wore and how her father, who was broke at the time, had come by it after placing a bet on the horses that morning. ruby langford-ginibi remembers taking apart a dress she bought from a charity shop and sewing it back together to fit her daughter. shortly after the ball, pearl was killed in a hit and run car accident and ruby remembered how she buried her daughter in her father’s grave because she could not afford a plot of her own. ruby’s fourteen year old son, she remembered with both pain and anger, who had been arrested for playing with school cricket equipment and charged with petty theft, was kept handcuffed and supervised throughout pearl’s funeral. when the women involved in that ball began to talk about it a whole raft of memories and associations came up that were a long way from the image of the smiling and demure debutante. it was immediately obvious that stories of the pandemic of early deaths among aboriginal communities, the stolen generations, and other painful stories of everyday racism in country towns existed simultaneously for these women along with the white silk and satin dresses, the beehive hairdos and the curtsey to the prime minister. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 254 listening to the women talk we also realised, with enjoyment, how little impact the presence of the prime minister had left on them. while in the archival film footage of the night which you see in the film the debs seem excited to be ‘coming out’ to prime minister gorton, forty years down the track it was not his presence that left a lasting impression. more important was the memory of a cousin who had partnered a deb but since died, or the memory of how one deb’s boyfriend, now her husband of forty years, had been too shy and wary that night to come into the ball and had hung out in is car around the corner all evening! at the time we began to make the film, the federal government, the former howard government, had just passed emergency legislation to send troops into the northern territory on the pretext of reports of wide-spread sexual abuse of children in indigenous communities. for reasons that lay in mining and politics rather than authentic attempts to support indigenous communities, indigenous australians were being stereotyped as degenerate and dangerous in particular to their own children. amidst what noel pearson describes as ‘a crisis in remote aboriginal communities which the nation has so far failed to deal with’ (pearson 2007) it seemed a sickeningly familiar scenario when the government moved in to remove children ‘for their own good’ (see haebich 1988; link-up (nsw) & wilson 1997). this controversial and unresolved territory is part of the wider context in which planning and pre-production for the film took place. this contemporary context contrasts painfully with the words of ruby langford-ginibi who said reflecting on the ’68 ball ‘there was hope that we could be presented in a better way… and that things would get better for our people’ (langford-ginibi 2007) mimesis in engaging in the intersubjective dialogue necessary to make the documentary film we were called upon to understand the debutante balls and the women who had participated in them on their own terms rather than as mimicking ‘white society’ or as an assimilationist success story. we were influenced by a conceptual framework from postcolonial studies which sees how the ‘self’ and ‘other’ are always ‘solicited’ by each other (derrida 1981). an important stream of postcolonial critique that sees the coloniser/colonised dialectic as a process which changes the identity of both the colonised and the coloniser. one of the features of this kind of post-colonial work is the way it seeks to register the various ways in which colonised groups have subverted oppressive power, not simply through ‘stark opposition’ but also through what theorist jane jacobs has called ‘disruptive inhabitations of colonial constructs’ (jacobs 1996:13). postcolonial studies, as jacob argues, ‘reach into the ambivalent cultural politics of colonial domination so that the necessity of its tenacious and adaptive power can be better understood…[and] it is a revisionary form of imperialist nostalgia that defines the colonised as always engaged in conscious work against the core’ (jacobs 1996: 15). these ideas work against static notions of identity that say you can only be a ‘real’ aborigine if you conform to a stereotypical set of conditions, for example, you come from a remote, traditional community, or you can claim urban indigenous status if you identify as a black activist in a fairly limited stereotyped way. this model of aboriginal identity denied the realities and complexities of people’s lives and the many paths coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 255 walked by indigenous individuals and communities who keep themselves, their families and culture alive today. rather than a parody, or an assimilationist expression of desire to ‘be like the whites’ the 1968 ball as told through the women’s memories and stories was an act of crosscultural mimetic transformation. mimesis is the art of describing or copying something closely but in doing so transforming both the original and the copy. the idea of mimesis comes originally from the aesthetic theories of the frankfurt school and the influential cultural critic walter benjamin (1978) and later adorno (1997). more recently anthropologist michael taussig has applied the concept of mimesis to the colonial encounter noting that ‘writing itself is a mimetic exchange with the world…it involves the relatively unexplored but everyday capacity to imagine, if not become the other’. in his chapter entitled, ‘in some way or another one can protect oneself from the spirits by portraying them’, taussig, wonders about the ‘magical possibilities’ in the long history of image-making of europeans by colonised people and refers to images of white sailors carved in the shape of wooden healing figurines noted in the early twentieth century swedish ethnography of indians of the darien peninsual between the panama canal and colombia. (1993: xiii). the ‘mimetic faculty’ as michael taussig defines it is ‘the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become other’ (taussig 1993: ii). in an ‘older language’ writes taussig, this is ‘sympathetic magic’ and is as necessary to the very process of knowing as it is to ‘the construction and subsequent naturalisation of identities’ (taussig 1993” xix). to exercise the mimetic faculty is to practice an ‘everyday art of appearance, an art that…cultivates the insoluable paradox of the distinction between essence and appearance’ (taussig 1993: 176). when the young indigenous women dressed up in white silk or satin, combed their hair straight and up into a beehive style they did not want literally to ‘be’ white. they were exercising their mimetic faculty, playing with and transforming the power-relations of whiteness that oppressed then on a daily basis. by dressing up in the costume of the white debutante they took on the power of appearance, the power of image and took back some power over their image-making. as debutantes, for example, they were not the victim from the statistics of the time that said indigenous women were twice as likely to be the subject of violent sexual abuse as non-indigenous. by standing up and being counted as aboriginal debutantes they gracefully transformed the reality of the genocidal fantasy dressed up as ‘assimilation’ that wanted to eliminate the category ‘aboriginal’ from white australia. mimesis reminds us that appearance is power and that the ‘duplicating power’ of image as taussig calls it is also a self-transforming power and hence a power for healing: ‘[i]n imitating we will find some distance from the imitated’ (taussig 1993: 126). in their pretty shoes and carefully applied make-up the young women were not pretending to be white debutantes but self-consciously, proudly, if a little nervously, being aboriginal debutantes. the nervousness and the pride came from the same history and context which gives meaning to the symbolism of the ball. joyce davison remembers ‘i was a bit disappointed that mum never came, or dad. but they had their reasons. they never got into politics or anything but she had that much fear in her, they were frightened that coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 256 us three youngest kids would be taken…my mother had already lost seven of her kids taken away’ (davison 2007) while from the ‘outside’ it might seem bizarre that a very english upper class tradition became part of indigenous culture in australia their meaning comes from the historical and political context of the times and the impact of specific policies on indigenous communities, in particular the gendered policy of child removal. in britain debutante balls were a way of ensuring ‘suitable marriages’ among the elite classes. traditionally debs came out in front of the queen and once ‘out’ the debs were publicly sanctioned as sexually ready for marriage and procreation. in australia a sustained policy of removing indigenous children, specifically girl children, from families and communities made a public ceremony where indigenous women publicly announced their ‘coming of age’ sexually, in the presence of their own community elders a potent ritual of renewal of community and ‘right marriages’ among indigenous communities. over ten years ago i attended my first indigenous debutante ball, at sydney’s la perouse, thanks to my dear friend maria nugent, and began listening and talking to those involved in the balls today. a lot has changed in my life since then and i no longer only have an academic interest in the balls and the questions they raise for me about women, performance, mimesis and identity. as i learn to dance and often stumble between the states of motherhood and paid work i experience daily the difficult push and pull of different identities. as i learn slowly about how to keep the dance between my various parts alive, my desire to listen and learn, share with and honour other women who have juggled the demands of many roles and identities takes on a new urgency and meaning. ‘mimesis plays this trick of dancing between the same and the very different. an impossible but necessary, indeed an everyday affair. mimesis registers both sameness and difference, of being like and being other. creating stability from this instability is no small task, yet all identity formation is engaged in this habitually bracing activity’ (taussig 1993: 129). working on the debutante ball project today calls on me to practice what sara halprin calls ‘the delicate, difficult art of seeing myself in the other, seeing the other as a unique individual’ (halprin 2001: 15). biographical note: anna cole is a writer, sometimes film-maker and a post-doctoral research fellow at the centre for public culture and ideas, griffith university, queensland. she is currently a visiting fellow in the anthropology department at goldsmiths college, university of london. anna researches and publishes in the area of historical-anthropology, the body, and the gendered politics of colonialism. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 257 references adorno, t. aesthetic theory. robert hullot-kentor (trans). london: athlone press, 1997. benjamin, w. ¨on the mimetic faculty¨ reflections: essays aphorisms and autobiographical writing. e. jephcott (trans). new york: schocken, 1978, pp. 333-36. cole, a. ¨the glorified flower. race, gender and assimilation in australia.¨ phd thesis, sydney: university of technology, 2000. davison, j. dancing with the prime minister, dir lara cole, november films, 2007. derrida, j. dissemination. b. johnson (trans). chicago: university of chicago press, 1981. goodall, h. and huggins, j. ¨aboriginal women are everywhere. contemporary struggles¨ gender relations in australia. domination and negotiation. k. saunders & r. evans (eds). queensland: university of queensland press, 1992, pp. 398-424. haebich, a. for their own good. aborigines and government in the southwest of western australia, 1900-1940. western australia: university of western australia press, 1988. halprin, s. ¨so much depends on a red hook: the essence of writing.¨ the journal of process oriented psychology, 8:2, 2001, pp. 10-17. huggins, j. ¨black women and women’s liberation.¨ hecate, 13:1, 1987, pp. 77-83. jacobs, j. edge of empire. postcolonialism and the city. london & new york: routledge, 1996. jayamanne, l. toward cinema and its double. cross-cultural mimesis. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press, 2001. langford-ginibi, r. don’t take your love to town. australia: penguin books, 1989. langford-ginibi, r. dancing with the prime minister, dir lara cole, november films, 2007. langton, m. ¨well i heard it on the radio and i saw it on the television…¨ an essay for the australian film commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about aboriginal people and things. new south wales: australian film commission, 1993. link-up (nsw) & wilson, t. j. in the best interest of the child? stolen children: aboriginal pain/white shame, aboriginal history monograph 4, link-up nsw aboriginal corporation and aboriginal history inc, 1997. o’regan, t. australian national cinema. london and new york: routledge, 1996. pearson, n. ¨no more victims¨ the new statesman. 16 august, 2007 <www.thenewstatesman.com/200708160023>. accessed 10 may, 2008. taussig, m. mimesis and alterity. a particular history of the senses. london & new york: routledge, 1993. williams, e. ¨aboriginal first, women second¨ different lives: reflections on the women’s movement and visions of the future. jocelyn scutt (ed). ringwood: penguin, 1987. acknowledgements: many thanks to lara cole, rani chaleyer,anne delaney, janine matthews, and the former debs who appear in the documentary, joyce davison, ruby langford-ginibi, rayleen clarke, alice hinton-bateup. a better team you couldn’t hope for. and to vanessa castejon, ann curthoys, john docker, peter read, frances peters-little, terri-ann white and all those who attended, and sue ballyn who organised, the myth memory and history conference, barcelona, july 2008. some coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 258 material in this paper was first published in studies in australasian cinema (2.1, 2008, 5-13) anna is a post-doctoral research fellow at the centre for public culture and ideas, griffith university, queensland and currently a visiting fellow at goldsmiths college, university of london. anna publishes in the area of historical-anthropology, crosscultural exchange, embodiment and the sexual politics of colonialism coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 postcolonial rewritings of bram stoker´s dracula: mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu copyright©2016 cornelis martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract. indigenous-australian fiction has experimented with subgenres of the fantastic in various ways to secure an empowering location from which to address post/colonial dispossession. in the mid-1990s, the australian writer and critic mudrooroo, formerly known as colin johnson, proposed maban reality as a genre denomination for fiction which introduces the reader to the powerful and empowering universe of the aboriginal maban or shaman, also known as the dreaming. mudrooroo’s coining of maban reality was a way of establishing an australian variant of magic realism which defied a european epistemology of the universe, engaging and enabling dreamtime spirituality as a solid pillar of aboriginal reality. mudrooroo had already experimented with a postcolonial reversal of the gothic, a dark version of the fantastic, in the first of his tasmanian quintet, dr wooreddy’s prescription for enduring the ending of the world (1983), but left its gloomy resignation to a dire indigenous fate under colonial rule behind for the upbeat master of the ghost dreaming (1993). yet, as the result of a deep personal crisis— believed not to have an aboriginal bloodline, in the mid-1990s he was barred from the tribal affiliation he had long claimed—mudrooroo resorted to the gloominess of the postcolonial gothic again in a vampire trilogy to reflect on the devastating impact of colonisation on australian identity at large. this essay comments on the ways in which he has reflected on the present state of australianness by rewriting bram stoker’s dracula. key words: postcolonialism; indigeneity; mudrooroo; colin johnson; the fantastic; the gothic; vampire fiction. introduction: the fantastic, the gothic, the vampire postcolonial literatures have insistently attempted to come to grips with the uneasy coexistence of indigenous and settler/invader cultures and epistemologies, and writers have adapted western mailto:mrenes@ub.edu coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 form to create a critical literary interface adapting their own, often oral traditions. the genre of the fantastic, “a mode of fiction in which the possible and the impossible are confounded so as to leave the reader (and often the narrator and/or central character) with no consistent explanation for the story’s strange events” (see works cited: “fantastic”), has been receptive to postcolonial writers. they have often resorted to, and rewritten various subgenres of the fantastic, such as magic realism, the gothic and vampire fiction, to give voice to the confluence of two manifestly different realities. elleke boehmer points out that indigenous writers adapt white literary conventions with the purpose of alienating, othering, and displace mainstream readership, and so create space for indigenous cultures. in south-american literature, the incorporation of elements from a non-western universe into everyday reality coined the genre of magic realism. in an orientalist vein, the genre of magic realism takes over a colonial style of writing and “mimics the colonial’s explorer’s reliance on fantasy and exaggeration to describe new worlds,” but also uses the illusory to propose imaginary yet conceivable worlds that “expose the extremities of the neo-colonial condition” (1995: 242). not surprisingly, the term magic realism has also been applied to instances of indigenous australian fiction that mobilise the mythical aboriginal universe through so-called “dreamtime narrative” (ashcroft et.al. 2009), and authors such as alexis wright (plains of promise 1997; carpentaria 2006; the swan book 2013), kim scott (benang 1999; that deadman dance 2010) and sam watson (the kadaitcha sung 1990) have produced their own, particular modulations of it. the question whether magic realism is an appropriate label for contemporary indigenousaustralian fiction engaging with the fantastic is debatable inasmuch the use of the term ‘magic’ may point towards the indigenous re-incorporation of the dreaming into a western norm of objectified and quantifiable reality (renes 2002). recently, alexis wright spoke of aboriginal reality as an alternative denomination of genre.i but already in the mid-1990s the australian writer and critic colin johnson, writing as mudrooroo, proposed maban reality as a genre denomination for fiction which introduces the reader to the powerful and empowering universe of the aboriginal maban (shaman), so as to assert an enabling form of indigeneity (1997: 97-8). mudrooroo had already experimented with another form of the fantastic, a gloomy, postcolonial reversal of the gothic, in the first of his tasmanian quintet, dr wooreddy’s prescription for enduring the ending of the world (1983), which sees white colonisation as the invasion of ‘pale ghosts’ that take over and destroy indigenous society. yet, he traded its resignation to a dire indigenous fate under colonial rule for the upbeat master of the ghost dreaming (1993), whose optimism for an enfranchised indigenous future relies on pitting the dreaming universe against a vampiric manifestation of colonialism. at the turn of the century and in a deep personal crisis— believed not to have an indigenous bloodline, in the mid-1990s he had been refused belonging by the people he had claimed tribal affiliation to—mudrooroo returned to full-fledged gothic again in a vampire trilogy which reflected on the devastating impact of colonisation on australian identity from the vantage point of, and beyond his own, personal distress. the vampire is a literary figure that spoke intensely to the imperial-victorian mind by raising anxiety about the proliferation of racial impurity through the notion of vampiric contamination of the blood, and therefore a trope easily exportable and adaptable to the post/colonial context; in mudrooroo’s trilogy, the colonial vampire “bites back” at the imperial centre as well as the indigenous margins through the indiscriminate mingling of blood. this essay comments on the ways mudrooroo reflects on australianness by rewriting bram stoker’s dracula in a singular manifestation of the antipodean fantastic. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 vampiric fins-de-siècle mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy—the undying, 1998; underground, 1999; the promised land, 2000—describes the escape of a small fragmented mob of tasmanians from flinders island, the mission-reserve where they barely survived in the ‘care’ of the english parvenu sir george augustus robinson, a self-serving protector of the aborigines. their vexed journey, led by their chief and shaman jangamuttuk and piloted by the tribally-adopted african wadawaka, takes them into a hellish australian mainland haunted by a white female vampire who bodes a dire future for these disenfranchised survivors of tasmania’s colonisation. the trilogy undoes the traditional binary constructions that master simply reversed in the search for indigenous empowerment. rather than denoting an inversion of roles, the colonial vampiress haunts, terrorizes and destroys all identity, taking it into the realm of deconstruction and non-representation. this obviously harks back to the haunting destruction of mudrooroo’s identity in his own fin-de-siècle, the advent of the third millennium. indeed, it would be difficult to deny the author’s personal stake in the development of the vampire plot. but while this inscription could be taken as a mere misogynist reconfiguration of his postcolonising writing project (see maureen clark 2006), a more complex reading may reveal the vampire figure to push beyond class, race and gender binaries, which would allow taking aboriginality out of the reductive terms of biological determination. no doubt the figure of the trilogy’s female protagonist, the vampiress amelia, is a contemporary re-inscription of count dracula, who first came to life in bram stoker’s famous instance of victorian gothic. its first publication in 1897 coincided with the decline of empire at the end of the victorian era, and precedes mudrooroo’s first volume of his vampire trilogy by exactly a hundred years. not surprisingly, the sense of gothic doom that pervades the vampire set is the product of another disappointing fin-de-siècle which saw the reductive onslaught of conservative politics on aboriginal affairs and the concomitant personal attacks on, and disenfranchisement of indigenes of high public profile whose biological origins were considered unclear. thus, it is not surprising that, at exactly a century’s remove, mudrooroo should exploit the similarities between 19th century social darwinism and 20th century assimilation to configure an uncanny rewrite of the count. dracula is, after all, a character who exemplifies the victorian concern with the pureness of blood and biological origins, and amelia picks up on the infectious notion of colonising the land-as-body in stoker’s original from an antipodean mirror perspective which reinscribes the victorian purity-of-blood issue postcolonially as aboriginal ‘authenticity’. stephen arata describes count dracula’s invasion of london and its citizens as a gothic form of “reverse colonisation” by putting the novel into the historical context of victorian and imperial decline at the end of the 19th century. significantly, stoker locates the geographical setting of count dracula’s home, transylvania, in an inaccessible part of rumania, a country which embodied the meeting of east and west and materialised as the locus of imperial strife. here, western powers had long fought out their expansive impulses and rumania was known, therefore, “as part of the vexed ‘eastern question’” (1990: 627). this troubling issue also included the process of territorial disintegration known as balkanisation, and it is not coincidental that the origins of the vampire can be located in the balkan peninsula. from serbia disturbing tales reached western europe in the early 18th century that roused “widespread interest and coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 imaginative treatment of vampirism,” appealing intensely to the popular imagination (see works cited: “vampire”). balkanisation could not be contained, spilled over its own borders and led to the first world war, which was triggered off by the assassination of the heir to the austrohungarian kingdom by a serbian nationalist in sarajevo in 1914. the imperial-colonial aspect of the vampire is profiled in its origins in territorial loss and fragmentation, and the uncanny anxiety this generates is underlined in its necessity to rest in “native earth.” the impossible repression of the lasting trauma territorial loss and fragmentation generate can be understood to be reflected in the “undead” creature’s haunting powers (see works cited: “vampire”). stoker’s dracula emulates western invasive behaviour in the journey of the solicitor’s clerk jonathan harker to transylvania, but this consumed orientalist is soon at a loss by his penetration of the unknown, as arata argues. count dracula, however, is configured as his dark mirror image, a skilled “occidentalist” (arata plays on edward said’s definition of orientalism [1978] here) who does successfully invade britain, and invokes the distant brutality of colonial violence in the metropole. indeed, dracula’s gothic fantasy of reverse colonisation acts out geopolitical fears about the other’s capacity to strike back as well as cultural guilt for the annihilation of other civilisations: “in count dracula, victorian readers could recognize their culture’s imperial ideology mirrored back as a kind of monstrosity … as a form of bad faith” (arata 1990: 634). in wooreddy and master, this bad faith allows mudrooroo to script the act of imperial colonisation itself as monstrous from the perspective of the aborigines. such imperial haunting is taken to unsuspected gothic extremes in his vampire set. in stoker’s boundary-crossing travel narrative “[v]ampires are generated by racial enervation and the decline of empire, not vice versa [so that] the appearance of vampires becomes the sign of profound trouble,” stephen arata writes. “for stoker, the gothic and the travel narrative problematize, separately and together, the very boundaries on which british imperial hegemony depended: between civilised and primitive, colonizer and colonized, victimizer (either imperialist or vampire) and victim” (1990: 626-29). similarly, the trilogy’s indigenes are troubled by a white vampire who preferably haunts tenuous racial boundaries such as exemplified in wadawaka, an aboriginalised african expert sailor, and george, a european-indigenous half-caste. by using the vampire, mudrooroo’s trilogy depicts the continuation of the songline of the mob’s leader, jangamuttuk, as a gothic journey into the liminal area of the colonial uncanny, so as to interrogate imperial notions of race, class and gender in the crucible of life and death. the vampire trilogy and race george the half-caste is named after his biological father, the protector, but has been adopted by jangamuttuk. his hybrid status, youthful inexperience and lack of inscription into aboriginal manhood make him most susceptible to the transformative potential of amelia’s infectious bite— as he says in the undying, “worse, far worse, at least for me, an old granny ghost touched me with her teeth and followed after us. she gave me dreams that were not my dreams. and that is part of my story” (mudrooroo 1998: 2). thus, the vampiric infection that will change him physically and spiritually is a simple extension of the social-darwinist notion of stronger and weaker blood that translates the colonial condition of white domination into nature—genetics. in this view, george is lost for the indigenous cause because his biological father’s blood will take over his mother ludjee’s, wife to jangamuttuk; this is metaphorically represented by vampiric coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 contamination, which itself stands for colonisation as an infectious disease (cf. pearson 2003: 190). indeed, indigenes literally fell prey to imported european illnesses which often decimated populations, and this, together with the racist notion of weak blood, fed back into the “doomed race” paradigm which dictated that the aborigines were condemned to extinction in the face of western civilisation. nature’s immutable law of ‘survival of the fittest’ would then justify the policy of the stolen generations by which half-caste children were separated from their aboriginal kin and fostered out to white parents. this usually meant the traumatic and at times irreparable loss of their aboriginal identity, and from an indigenous point of view, these children were effectively ‘othered’ into specimens of white civilisation. in order to express how, in such an assimilative policy, cultural deracination is effected and justified along biological lines, mudrooroo inverts the vampiric metaphor: … if blood is a sign of racial identity, then dracula effectively deracinates his victims … in turn, they receive a new racial identity, one that marks them as literally ‘other’ … miscegenation leads, not to the mixing of races, but to the biological and political annihilation of the weaker race by the stronger. (arata 1990: 630) amelia acts similarly in imposing the scathing effects of white colonisation onto the indigenes, and not surprisingly, from a narrative perspective she takes over focalisation time and again in the trilogy. george’s story starts out as an indigenous yarn at a campfire (mudrooroo: 1998: 1), but as the vampiric infection progresses, amelia invades his mind and takes over the telling. thus, maureen clark observes that “the trilogy’s other first-person narrator, amelia ‘punctures’ george’s account at regular intervals” (2006: 129), and this effectively deflates/deconstructs the possibilities of the popular genre of indigenous auto/biography as a means to recover an ‘authentic’ sense of aboriginality. this is underscored by the fact that george is “the undying” (mudrooroo 1998: 1). as he “exists in the liminal space of the un-dead,” his inscription in the genre of ‘life-writing’ is therefore ambiguous, if not out of place (pearson 2003: 190). as if to underline the inexorability of white domination, throughout the trilogy george mostly appears in his dreamtime-animal shape, a dingo turned into amelia’s obedient, “faithful … doggy” (mudrooroo 1999: 103) and under whose psychic control he is unable to change back to his human shape. as colonial control is also configured through the sexual, amelia uses him as a toy in her sexual exploits: engaged in cunnilingus, he literally turns into her “lapdog” (mudrooroo 2000: 32) and symbolises amelia’s genital area. this also harks back to the “animal companion with open jaws and snapping teeth” of classical art, which might accompany a beautiful woman and “represented her deadly genital trap and evil intent” (creed 1993: 108). lastly, as ‘dingo’ he is made an obedient pet to the unlikely family unit of wadawaka and amelia, the moma/mummyii ghost, under the protection of a large womb-like cavern. the latter is, indeed, an australian realm of the dead that, with its immense guardian dog/dingo, underground river and ferryman, resembles the underworld of classical greek mythology. this underground family is yet another skilful instance of mudrooroo’s ever-shifting, promiscuous use of characters, plot and genre, in which the greek myth of the spring goddess persephone, a fertility symbol of sorts, is reconfigured so as to enact a warped story of female empowerment and to comment on the state of aboriginality. persephone was also known as the coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 earth goddess kore—indeed, the name of the vessel that carried amelia to australia and reminiscent of the earth amelia needs to rest in—and as such abducted by hades, the king of the underworld, to become his bride. the latter harks back to another lord of darkness, count dracula, who in mudrooroo’s trilogy weds amelia by vampirising her. it also connects to wadawaka, whose dark skin colour is subsumed under the darkness of her natural habitat and points towards a racial hybridising of sorts. in her unnatural underground madness, amelia controls wadawaka with sex and hallucinogenic mushrooms—perhaps a metaphor for the “numbing” (mudrooroo 1999: 104) effects of white civilisation—so as to replace her previous “dark lord”, dracula, and makes him the adoptive father to two aboriginal babies. belying the reproductive potential persephone represents, these “two tiny tykes” (mudrooroo 1999: 104) have been abducted to complete amelia’s nuclear family and feed on her blood. this introduces an anti-natural form of regeneration as they transform into vampires themselves. mudrooroo also emulates and rewrites the role of the upper gods zeus and demeter in the retrieval of their daughter from the underworld by scripting the magic intervention of the tribal leaders jangamuttuk and ludjee in amelia’s dark affairs. the loss of two important members of their clan—one their pilot and the other their only seed for the future—and the abduction of the two indigenous children propel them to a descent into the cavern and a confrontation with un/death. because their shamanic powers and firm identities make them more resistant to amelia’s wiles, their adoptive sons wadawaka and george are returned to the realm of the living. yet, a price is exacted for their aboriginal power play: ludjee and jangamuttuk disappear from the narrative only to reappear for display at the london world fair of 1850, and amelia boils her vampiric offspring to death in retaliation for wadawaka’s elopement. in a last promiscuous twist, mudrooroo produces amelia as an anagram of the mythological earth goddesses lamiae, who killed and sucked the blood of children and young men and lived in caves (clark 2006: 124). additionally, he draws on the greek myth of lamia, a dark queen of the classical lybia, which was a racially indeterminate area at the northern limits of the “dark continent.”iii lamia’s two children were taken away after having an extramarital affair with zeus, and in her maddening grief she turned into the child-killing monster that amelia re-enacts. thus, in a masterful stroke, mudrooroo denounces the unnatural perfidiousness of the stolen generation policy, which—metaphorically speaking—sucked away the lifeblood of indigenous australia and constituted yet another step in the social-darwinist genocidal policy that defined aboriginality in terms of biological authenticity. whereas wadawaka is under amelia’s spell, he is immune to her bite because his “blood is as sea water to a thirsty man” (mudrooroo 2000: 227), a quality shared with ludjee, whose “blood is too strong for [amelia]” (mudrooroo 1998: 121). as a vampire, amelia is connected to the earth and cannot overcome the freedom the sea represents for both. the power amelia wields over him is therefore of a different kind, and links back to the strong sexual undercurrents in vampire fiction as epitomised in count dracula’s tale. stephen arata holds that stoker’s fiction is concerned with imperial anxieties in which heroines represent the dangers that threaten modern life ( arata 1990: 625). in stoker’s original, once lady lucy is infected and transformed by the count, she takes a “phallic correction” (craft 1984: 124) by receiving a stake through her heart, from which, not surprisingly, she suffers an orgasmic death. this seems to suggest that no pleasure is greater than (little) death. in other words, the greatest pleasure of all is achieved in a coupling of the male and coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 female principle, the dissolution of the subject and the consequent deconstruction of identity. mudrooroo plays on the fear of postcolonial dissolution through a white female protagonist who threatens the community tissue of ‘primitive’ australians. amelia also receives a phallic correction, but of a different kind; in what starts out as a violent rape at the hands of wadawaka, mudrooroo configures a scene of pornografic thrust in which she loses her virginity, suffers proverbial little death, and claims him as her new dark/black “master”; yet he refuses: “i am no master nor will i have a master over me” (mudrooroo 1998: 187-9). this last comment causes amelia to identify wadawaka as john summers, the first free black englishman, whom her father counselled in the defence of his case; summers had rebelled against the british ‘philanthropists’ who had fraudulently pocketed money destined to the sierra leone colony, iv for which he was framed, convicted and sent off to australia (mudrooroo 1998: 190). wadawaka’s pledge to freedom prefigures the disastrous denouement of their underground family. however, it also points forward to a scene of subdued romanticism at the end of the promised land, which is juxtaposed to the extramarital, ‘illegitimate’ sex under way between sir george and the governor’s wife. the latter are, indeed, “two rogues that deserve each other,” finding each other in their scheming for maximum colonial gain from the imminent gold rush (mudrooroo 2000: 225). significantly, their coupling is staged against the backdrop of “the modern world symbolised by the monstrous ship in the harbour,” possibly port albert in victoria, where the gold rush started in 1851 (mudrooroo 2000: 200-22). the phallic “long bulk of the great britain, lamps gleaming … along her monstrous length” has penetrated the australian mainland” as great and as oppressive as the empire that built it” (mudrooroo 2000: 219). thus, the colonial project is explicitly configured as sexual exploit(ation): “great, great,” [sir george] groaned, his eyes clinging to the long length of the ship: he imagined the bows slicing through the waters and plunging deep within the waves. “all iron, all hard as iron and over three hundred and fifty feet in length,” he moaned, plunging hard into her. “deeper, deeper,” becky moaned in unison, bent over, and staring at the ship … . (mudrooroo 2000: 229) their fetishist fascination with the ‘great britain’ reveals their real obsession: the vessel is their means of visiting the london world fair of 1850, where sir george plans to display the handful of remaining tasmanians as well as an enormous gold slab. the latter should secure funding and protection for the exploitation of the rich gold find at a future mission compound under his and rebecca’s joint care. the luring gold nugget, an apt metaphor for the greed underlying the colonial project, has been baptised the golden fleece due to its uncommon resemblance to a sheepskin. this reference to classical myth inscribes the gold find into the issue of legitimacy, as the argonauts embarked on a quest for the golden fleece to place jason as the rightful king on the throne of iolcus in thessaly, which was in dispute due to the plotting of one of the former king’s wives. the claimants of the gold treasure are precisely two fraudulent parvenus who need the colonial enterprise to overcome class difference and enthrone themselves in the seat of empire: “sir george augustus was one of those self-made knights who, with the reform act of 1832, had risen from the enfranchised lower classes. though he had yet to create a suitably noble coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 genealogy to go with his advancement.” rebecca crawley, on the other hand, “using brazen invention together with her beauty and sharp intelligence, had glossed over her own origins, which were lower that [sic] those of the knight” (mudrooroo 2000: 10-11). this female trickster is suggestively reminiscent of the socially-upward mobile anti-heroine rebecca crawley in william thackeray´s vanity fair (1847-8), a satire set in the same period as mudrooroo’s trilogy which deals with the class stratification of victorian england. obviously not the rightful owners of the gold, these tricksters have dispossessed the indigenes of their natural resources. not surprisingly, sir george concocts a story to justify and file his exploitation claim after his police force has perpetrated some local ethnic cleansing: “there has already been a battle between two savage tribes, one of which held indigenous title to the land, and they have been so decimated that the area is as bare of inhabitants as it is of vegetation. it is truly a terra nullius and is under my control” (mudrooroo 2000: 197), which is indeed an argument with deep postcolonial resonances of illegitimacy. feminising the vampire, blurring gender sir george and rebecca jointly embark upon the project of furthering their advancement by returning to the metropole and displaying their newfound wealth. strategically located as a postscript, finalising the fictional tryptich, an extract from her majesty’s diary evidences that the queen is greatly attracted by the golden fleece, “which bodes well for the future of the colony” (mudrooroo 2000: 233). this interest raises doubts over the queen’s colonial authority, as the golden fleece is stolen property and the issue of paternal legitimacy embedded in the myth automatically disenfranchises a lady’s rule. furthermore, it conjures up an uncanny connection with amelia, whom the queen describes as a “strong wom[a]n of the empire” (mudrooroo 2000: 232). by placing these musings at the end of the promised land, mudrooroo suggests that as head of the british empire, queen victoria is the incarnation of victorious empire, the supreme v/empire or dominant dark lady who sucks the colonies dry from their wealth as she propagates white civilisation. thus, this textual manoeuvre, which harks back to harker’s celebratory afterword in dracula, apparently suggests amelia’s final victory/victoria over australia. the comparison has further uncanny connections which reach out from the past to the present, as mudrooroo also scripts amelia as eliza frazer’s sister, “a controversial figure in australia’s mythologies of nationhood” (clark 2006: 127). kay schaffer’s in-depth study of the character observes that she is believed to be “the first white female shipwreck victim facing ‘the indigenes’ in a remote and uncharted area of australia” (schaffer 1995: xiii), and was allegedly sexually abused by them. however, her biography is fraught with tantalising ambiguities, and, according to maureen clark, “conflicting and contradictory. some lean towards representing the aboriginal people as her rapists and enslavers. others see her in a much different light as a temptress and wanton colonial woman” (2006: 127). not surprisingly, amelia functions—more than a sister—as eliza’s empowered uncanny alter ego: i was amelia fraser and i had a sister, eliza. now that life is finished with and i have entered into some, far different state of existence. i am something else, and perhaps it is better than what i would have become. before i was as other girls. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 now i am perhaps far worse than females such as my sister eliza … . (mudrooroo 1998: 66) as naming and renaming play such an important role in mudrooroo’s fiction, the link between eliza and another, contemporary elizabeth should not be missed. thus, one might apply gerry turcotte’s words on eliza fraser to the present queen of britain and australia, “go[ing] from mother of empire to symbol of female moral degradation” (turcotte 2003: 143). if we may read elizabeth ii as a supreme female sign of postcolonial depravity, the v/empire is indeed no master but a mistress who obviously bodes no well for the colony’s future. throughout the trilogy amelia is projected as a depraved, shifty, uncanny character beyond the grasp of the ordinary, frightening and monstrous. mudrooroo’s configuration of amelia not only responds to the subliminal racial anxiety in stoker’s original but also the sexual ambiguities projected through the count, which thrive on trespassing the limits of victorian gender discourse. analysing the homoeroticism subjacent in dracula, christopher craft shows how the victorian obsession with blurring gender definitions is configured as a monstrous threat to the heterosexual norm. craft draws on 19th century theories of sexual inversion, which describe the homosexual as a male body with a female soul/desire, to analyse the specific casting of the vampire threat and the figure of woman as the mediator in male same-sex desire: this insistent ideology of heterosexual mediation and its corollary anxiety about independent female sexuality return us to dracula … where a mobile and hungering woman is represented as a monstrous usurper of masculine function, and where … all erotic contacts between males, whether directly libidinal or thoroughly sublimated, are fulfilled through a mediating female … sexual inversion and stoker’s account of vampirism … are symmetrical metaphors sharing a fundamental ambivalence. (1984: 115) foremost in this monstrous configuration of ambiguous sexuality—male/female, active/passive—is the: vampire mouth, the central and recurring image of the novel … as the primary site of erotic experience in dracula, this mouth equivocates, giving the lie to the easy separation of the masculine and feminine. luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness, but delivering instead a piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses … the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the receptive. (1984: 109) this soft yet toothed mouth invokes barbara creed’s description of “the mythical vagina dentata which threatens to devour, to castrate via incorporation” (1993: 157) and not surprisingly, count dracula engages in the “systematic creation of female surrogates who enact his will and desire” (1984: 109, my emphasis) and propagate the vampiric infection. in configuring amelia as dracula’s offspring, mudrooroo follows the misogynistic lines laid down in stoker’s original but also reworks this inscription of sexual ambivalence as the monstrous feminine with some significant twists; he configures a bisexual female vampire and coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 empowers her as the fundamental player on the colonial scene. drawing on what maureen clark calls a “gross, female stereotype mudrooroo reproduces in all manner of ways how men have authored the role of white women in the colonies and how well they have responded to the desires and ideals of the dominant group” (2006: 125). class difference being the general backdrop to australian colonisation, consisting of either deported convicts or impoverished british subjects in search of colonial gain, amelia’s lower-class origins—as opposed to dracula’s aristocratic origins—reveal a crushing connection between class and women’s oppression: in london we were poor, not as poor as poor, but my father was a wretched law clerk, who mulled over depositions for a pitiful wage in the law serjeant’s inn. his subservience stopped at day’s end when he came home to tyrannise us, his two daughters and our mother, a colourless woman who had had all the spunk driven out of her long ago by his cruelty, though i never saw him use his fists on her. he believed that he was a gentleman fallen on hard times and this prevented him, i suppose. (mudrooroo 1998: 68) male domestic violence decodes her depraved behaviour as a form of gendered retaliation, but her lower-class origins also explain why it is never covered up with the soothing cloak of the count’s aristocratic decorum, whose depravations remain elegantly implicit and undercoded in stoker’s original (pearson 2003: 195). whereas in the victorian original gothic fear and revulsion are grounded on not naming the sexual act, the vampire trilogy articulates them through sexual explicitness, verging on porn and gore; this is “in ways which both mock and ironize the very issues of unrepresentability that have made dracula so resonant for western culture and so productive of interpretation(s)” (pearson 2003: 195). amelia’s sexuality is depraved because of its ambivalence: she makes no distinction between young or old, white or black, rich or poor, man or woman, and confuses ‘little death’ all too often with death itself. her sex is overpowering and cannibalistic, and aligns the consumption of blood with semen, which she glosses as “white blood” (mudrooroo 1998: 68, 148). amelia shows herself to be a boundary crosser without any restrictions of class, race or gender to suit her predatory needs. indeed, not only does she invert stereotypes by cannibalizing civilised behaviour and bodies to feed and please herself, but also preys on the indigenes, whose eucalyptus-tanged blood and semen she prefers. many of these, whether young or old, she ‘sucks dry’ to death, and others she converts, such as george. if there were still any doubts about the all-consuming polyvalence of amelia’s sexuality, her relationship with lady lucy, sir george’s upper-middleclass wife, drives this fundamental ambivalence fully home: to emphasize her complete subjection, mrs fraser tied the girl’s hands and feet to the bedposts with scarves … [lucy] moaned as the woman’s lips and then other lips touched her skin. she had forgotten about the dingo. the imprisoned girl writhed, but not to be free. at the extent of her vision, at her loins, was the thin tawny animal lapping away with a long tong that, sweeping in and out of her, made her body squirm. the sensations were of such strength that she did not first cognise the lips at coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 her throat turning into hard teeth, two of which were as sharp as needles. this she knew suddenly, as they bit down. she felt the blood spurting from her into a mouth clamped about her wound just as her body spasmed and spasmed. she gave a piercing scream and then went limp, content only to be fed on. (mudrooroo 2000: 8, my emphasis) the latter scene (con)fuses penetration, reception and ejaculation completely. amelia’s fangs usurp the penile function in piercing lucy’s neck, but this is responded to by an ejaculatory spurt of blood into amelia’s vaginal mouth from lucy’s body, which is signified as the penis itself. the vampire kiss makes it impossible to separate male from female, which, indeed, in their uncanny circulation through each other come together as a frightening yet liberating (little) death: [amelia] lowered her lips to [lucy’s] neck and seemed to bestow a long lasting kiss on her throat. this revived the girl passionately. she writhed and a scream began to emerge from her throat. this was quickly stopped by the woman who transferred her lips from throat to mouth and sucked in the agitation of the girl so that she grew as still as death. (mudrooroo 2000: 213) for all the depraved undertones in amelia’s sexual-cannibalistic behaviour, an image of tenuous hope is offered on the final pages of the promised land, which announce some kind of bonding between wadawaka and amelia that would embrace the binary realms of life and death, male and female, and black and white. for better or for worse—as the white presence in australia cannot be undone—wadawaka and amelia’s hybrid (re)union suggests a possible future for australia: she turned around and wrapped her arms about him. she was a pale streak of loveliness across the dark length of his body, seemingly embedded in it as a streak of silver ore … “how could such as i imprison you with these thin bonds? the softness is in your mind and that is what appeals to me” “the whip hardens the body, but stripes the mind,” the man said bitterly. “to have been a slave is to be maimed.” “well, well, well, i’m as much a slave to you as you are to me, for we own each other … we are both free spirits and refuse to accept ownership of others.” “yes we have our liberty, though where we are going i will be below the white, and in other places my freedom would be a matter of documents. i have been owned and that is an experience not to be borne.” “no thoughts of what is past and what you have suffered. we are above them and their attempts to hurt. in your darkness i find myself and, and—” “in your whiteness, i tremble, knowing you for what you are,” he replied. “do so, for i have not forgiven you,” amelia rejoined tartly. “now, the night is passing and the land flows over us in all its glory. let us return to my chamber so that i might make you tremble in another and more satisfying way.” (mudrooroo 2000: 227-8) wadawaka is an uncanny hybrid whose identity has floated “from black slave to black gentleman to black savage to whaler to highwayman and then back to john summers.” this causes amelia to exclaim, “who, i wonder, must he think he is?” (mudrooroo 2000: 184) and indeed, coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 wadawaka’s blackness is inscribed in universalising terms. in a promiscuous literary cross-over to herman melville, at the end of underground wadawaka embarks on captain ahab’s hunt of moby dick, an immense white, phallic sperm whale which mudrooroo rewrites as a sexually ambiguous symbol of empire: such a strange vessel; such a strange skipper. a yankee who lived only to kill the white whale. they called her moby dick, believing that only a male could wreak such havoc, whereas i dubbed her the empire ... [m]y fellows regaled me with stories that refused to accept the monster as a blind force of nature, but one filled with all the cunning of the so-called civilised; in short, the empire which rules our lives as surely as that moby dick ruled ahab, sending him on a morbid chase across the seven seas. (mudrooroo 2000: 172-3) wadawaka’s chase exemplifies a solidary concept of black resistance reminiscent of master’s pan-aboriginality, as his fellow hunters are an indigenous-american indian, an african and a polynesian respectively. they are equally intent on “slaying that great white monster which mocked us with her invulnerability” (mudrooroo 2000: 174), which they eventually achieve at great cost. thus, the text seems to suggest that limit ing, biological definitions of blackness and aboriginality should be forsaken and exchanged for cultural inscriptions based on shared experience. wadawaka’s quest lasts until the end of the trilogy, when, with moby dick killed, he is ready to confront the luring enemy at home; this is amelia, “good and mad and just as bad a white beast” (mudrooroo 2000: 171). in apparent allusion to the terms of contemporary reconciliat ion—the official attempt to acknowledge australia’s genocidal past, rewrite australian history accordingly and overcome aboriginal/mainstream conflict—the prospect of wadawaka and amelia’s union seems fraught with difficulties due to amelia’s overpowering white presence. however, the land also becomes the unifying element between them, as “it flows over us in all its glory” and the bedroom awaits their love match. “[c]linging together so that they had to manoeuvre their united bulk through the narrow doorway,” they pass george, the last survivor of the tasmanian mob, who stays guard outside in his dingo shape (mudrooroo 2000: 228). thus, amelia and wadawaka’s shapeless, “united bulk” enters the narrow matrix of australia and rewrites the invasive phallic “long bulk of the great britain” (mudrooroo 2000: 219), moored in the harbour. one might ask if this finale implies some kind of r/reconciliation between the indigenous and the foreign element on australian soil in contemporary terms, although wadawaka’s status as indigenous australian is as uncertain as mudrooroo’s is contested. likewise, george’s future prospects as only survivor with aboriginal blood are befuddled by his inferior status as amelia’s lapdog (turcotte 2005: 115). then again, in the face of the contaminating, genocidal onslaught of white civilisation over the last two centuries, the blood question in indigeneity is riddled with problems, as many aborigines nowadays can only make tenuous claims to genetic ancestry and have to reformulate their indigenous identity through cultural, lived experience. it is in this uncanny space of uncertainty that mudrooroo inscribed his claim to indigenous identity in the 1960s, as much by choice and appropriation as by interpellation. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 conclusion: the postcolonial australian the fantastic offers good writerly opportunities to pit the indigenous world against that of the coloniser, and to tease out the epistemological incommensurabilities that come to the fore in their encounter. indigenous authors have engaged the fantastic in its various manifestations to carve out a space for cultural difference and write up a world that the settler-coloniser tends to ignore or reject. within this postcolonial agenda, mudrooroo occupies an idiosyncratic niche due to his contested indigenous identity, which informs his oeuvre. in his fictional reflections on indigeneity, mudrooroo has recurrently engaged the fantastic through the vampire figure, drawing on its instability and ambiguity as a sign of racial, gender and class identity and spinning out the gothic trope’s postmodern possibilities to unpack these underlying binaries. in master of the ghost dreaming, the character of mada, wife to the protector, is already introduced as a white predatory female symbolising the perfidious nature of the colonial project and the way the latter disfigures coloniser and colonised alike. similarly, in the vampire trilogy amelia is no clear-cut symbol of imperial oppression but ambiguously shaped, and the trope offers mudrooroo fertile ground to reflect on the volatile nature of identity at large. in this sense mudrooroo brings to the fore the race, gender and class tensions that are already prefigured but undercoded in stoker’s count dracula, and aptly writes them up to signify in the postcolonial context—in writing back the vampire bites back, not only to the imperial centre but also at those at its margins who keep applying essentialist notions of identity. as it turns out, amilia’s ‘native’ connection to antipodean soil, figured as feminine, changes/hybridises her as much as wadawaka: “within her, i gained the power to face the burning blast of the day and freedom from the tyranny of the sun. i was reborn in her depths” (mudrooroo 2000: 226). wadawaka’s troubled indigenous inscription—partly because it is ‘only’ cultural, partly due to the uncanny mirroring of the author in his character—is further motive to avoid reading amelia as a straightforward gothic metaphor of the pernicious impact of western civilisation on aboriginal australia. amelia’s fundamental race, gender and class ambivalence constitutes her as a highly complex character which reads into the issue of (post)colonial (dis)possession in uncanny ways: it borders on political incorrectness and harks back to the unsteady, contested status that the author himself has acquired in australia. although amelia does seem to acquire some acquiescence in her reconciliation with wadawaka—perhaps a metaphor for the author’s acceptance of his own, ‘muddled’ identity born out of the irreconcilable tensions of a postcolonising australia—her preying across racial, class and gender difference has been relentless, ruthless, and sparing no one. if it is possible to read amelia’s predatory obsession with (little) death as a postcolonial script for the birth of a new australia, such a reformulation of australianness is at least discomforting, if not harrowing. despite the sophistication of the vampire trilogy, mudrooroo’s adaptation of the fantastic to write about australian identity has apparently come full circle: from disempowering gothic to empowering maban reality and back—at least when it comes to writing about indigeneity. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 this paper was finished during a 2015 visiting fellowship at southern cross university, nsw. works cited arata, stephen d. “the occidental tourist: dracula and the anxiety of reverse colonisation.” victorian studies 33.4 (summer 1990): 621-45. ashcroft, bill, frances devlin-glass, lyn mccredden. intimate horizons. the postcolonial sacred in australian literature. atf press, 2009. boehmer, elleke. colonial and postcolonial literature. oxford: oup, 1995. clark, maureen. “terror as white female in mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy.” journal of commenwealth literature 41.2 (2006): 121-38. craft, christopher. ““kiss me with those red lips”: gender and inversion in bram stoker’s dracula.” representations 8 (autumn 1984): 107-33. creed, barbara. the monstrous feminine: film, feminism, psycholanalysis. routledge: ny, 1993. “dark continent.” international dictionary of psychoanalysis. the gale group, inc, 2005. answers.com 2008: n. pag. 02 feb. 2008. <http://www.answers.com/topic/dark-continentpsychoanalysis> “fantastic.” the concise oxford dictionary of literary terms. oxford university press, 2001, 2004. answers.com: n.pag. 02 nov. 2014. <http://www.answers.com/topic/fantastic> mudrooroo. (1983). doctor wooreddy’s prescription for enduring the ending of the world. melbourne: hyland house, 1996. ---. master of the ghost dreaming. north ryde (australia): collins/angus & robertson, 1991. ---. the indigenous literature of australia: milli milli wangka. melbourne: hyland house, 1997. ---. the undying. sydney: angus&robertson, 1998. print. ---. underground. sydney: angus&robertson, 1999. print. ---. the promised land. sydney: angus&robertson, 2000. print. pearson, wendy. “i, the undying.” mongrel signatures: reflections on the work of mudrooroo. ed. annalisa oboe. amsterdam-new york: rodopi, 2003. 185-202. print. pybus, cassandra. “from “black” caesar to mudrooroo: the african diaspora in australia.” mongrel signatures: reflections on the work of mudrooroo. ed. annalisa oboe. amsterdam-new york: rodopi, 2003. 25-42. print. renes, cornelis martin. “discomforting readings: uncanny perceptions of self in alexis wright’s plains of promise and david malouf’s remembering babylon.” eucalypt 2 (2002): 76-102. print. said, edward. (1978) orientalism. western conceptions of the orient. harmondsworth: penguin, 1995. print. schaffer, kay. in the wake of first contact: the eliza fraser stories. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1995. print. stoker, bram. (1897) dracula. london: penguin classics 1994. print. thackeray, william. vanity fair. ware, hertfordshire uk: wordsworth classics, 1998 (first published/serialised by punch magazine in 1847-8). http://www.answers.com/topic/dark-continent-psychoanalysis http://www.answers.com/topic/dark-continent-psychoanalysis http://www.answers.com/topic/fantastic coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 turcotte, gerry. “remastering the ghosts: mudrooroo and gothic refigurations”. mongrel signatures: reflections on the work of mudrooroo. ed. annalisa oboe. amsterdam-new york: rodopi, 2003. ---. “vampiric decolonization: fanon, ‘terrorism’ and mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy.” postcolonial whiteness: a critical reader on race and empire. ed. alfred j. lopez. albany: suny, 2005. 103-18. print. “vampire.” britannica concise encyclopedia. encyclopædia britannica, inc., 2006. answers.com, 2009: n. pag. 17 jul. 2009. <http://www.answers.com/topic/vampire> cornelis martin renes holds a phd in english literature from the university of barcelona and lectures at its department of english and german studies. his main area of interest is the study of film and novels from a postcolonial point of view within the larger framework of cultural and australian studies. he co-directs the university of barcelona’s interdisciplinary observatory: australian studies centre, through which he co-edits the journal coolabah and co-convenes a biannual congress on australian studies in collaboration with similar centres at southern cross university, curtin university and the university of tasmania: http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/. he is the current chair of the european association for studies of australia. i this was mentioned by the aboriginal author jeanine leane at the 2013 asal congress at wagga wagga, nsw. ii in the series, on the australian mainland the aboriginal communities speak of moma in reference to the white ‘ghostly’ settlers. the phonetics suggest a link with mother or ‘momma’/’mummy’. iii the dark continent was a term used in the 19th century to denote sub-saharian africa, whose interior was basically unknown and left dark by mapmakers. in freudian terms, it is also used to refer to a male perception of female sexuality. julia kristeva notes that freud borrowed the term from the colonial exploits in africa, and that “[h]is metaphor for the female sex turns it into an unrepresentable enigma, expressing the castration anxiety of the man who approaches it.” this neatly joins the racial to the sexual, and the colonial to gender (see “dark continent” in works cited). iv at the end of the 18 th century, there was a substantial black community of freed slaves in london, whose lack of means of support and involvement in petty crime raised concern among the authorities. a plan was conceived to relocate these people to the first free black colony in sierra leone on the african west coast. the colony also housed a convict population and functioned parallel to the australian penal colony to empty english prisons (pybus 2003: 26-8). http://www.answers.com/topic/vampire http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/ microsoft word remembering ruby coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction as guest editor of this coolabah issue i will be brief when introducing this monograph on the late, great indigenous-australian story teller, author and activist ruby langford-ginibi. the recollections gathered in the following pages should be left to speak for her by themselves. they honour, remember and assess ruby´s contribution to the indigenous australian cause and culture over the past decades, a commitment that, as a mother, was first and foremost born out of her own and family´s circumstances but, as an elder, also embedded in her awareness of community and her perception of the racism that continues to permeate settler australia. ruby´s work and activism speak for themselves, but have also been recognized institutionally, as in her honorary doctorate of letters by the university of southern cross, located in bundjalung country. the present monographic piece is written by two scholars who knew ruby very well and shared a wealth of experiences with her. while janie conway-herron met and became close to ruby through her academic work, pam johnston is, as an indigenous woman descended from the gomileroi nation, connected to ruby tribally through her mother, and was her adopted daughter. janie and pam have reflected in dialogic style on their relationship with, and perception of ruby as a socially and politically engaged person, and capture in their exchange the heritage her unique personality and wit have left us. they have made a generous, excellent joint effort at keeping the flame alive of an inspirational indigenousaustralian, using a narrative style that, appropriately, finds its roots in the oral tradition to forge a worthy homage to an exceptional bundjalung woman. martin renes, coolabah guest editor. copyright©2012 janie conway-herron, pam johnston. introduction martin renes photographs copyright© 2012 pam johnston. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 remembering ruby pam johnston and janie conway-herron ruby in front of long bay prison matraville, new south wales, where her son nobby spent many years (photo pam johnston). abstract: ‘remembering ruby’ is a tribute to doctor ruby langford ginibi, a remarkable woman and an important australian writer. winner of numerous awards for her contribution to literature, as well as to australian culture, ruby was an aboriginal elder of the bundjalung nation and a tireless campaigner for the rights of her people. ruby’s writing is passionate, sincere and heart-felt, as well as extraordinarily funny and articulate. she knew that getting people to listen to her story would be fundamental to naming the hidden history of indigenous australia and to changing cultural perceptions in a broader context. as an elder she took on the complex and demanding role of ‘edumacation’, as she called it, and her representations of life and culture continue to provide important reflections, from an indigenous perspective, on the effects of ignorance, racism and colonisation in an australian context. as aboriginal mother, aunty, teacher and scholar her writing represents a particular australian experience for a readership of people interested in human rights and equality the world over. this monograph, in honouring ruby langford ginibi, is the written expression of an ongoing dialogue between the two authors about their experiences living in australia and the way that ruby has interconnected with us and influenced our experiences of growing up in an australian cultural context. it also brings into focus the many ways that ruby langford ginibi’s writing has been central to challenging and changing prevailing perspectives on the lives of indigenous people over the last twenty-five years. an excellent communicator with a wicked sense of humour, ruby’s tireless telling of the truth about the impacts of invasion on coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 indigenous people makes her an important cultural ambassador for all australians. ruby’s totem, the willy wagtail, is connected to being a messenger for her people and in writing ‘remembering ruby’ we aim to contribute to keeping her message of hope and resilience alive and, on the anniversary of her passing, to continue to honour her inimitable and eternal spirit. dr janie conway-herron janie conway-herron is a senior lecturer in creative writing at southern cross university, lismore where she has taught creative writing since 1997. she is passionate about human rights and travels regularly to the thai/burma border to run creative writing workshops with burmese women refugees. she has been published in a number of journals and anthologies and has been editor of three collections of work from creative writing students. her novel, beneath the grace of clouds, was published in july 2010. dr. pam johnston dr. pam johnston is an established visual artist represented in collections in australian, united kingdom, belgium, spain, and united states of america. johnston has lectured in universities in australia and united kingdom. johnston has taught in prisons extensively since 1989. her teaching areas are those of indigenous culture, visual arts and art therapy. dr. johnston obtained her first phd at the university of wollongong, in new south wales, australia, the first aboriginal person to do so, and has completed her second phd through the university of technology in sydney, new south wales. dr. pam johnston sees herself primarily as a practicing professional visual artist with all her other ‘hats’ as it were, emanating from this central identity. coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 introduction: pam years ago when ruby and i were visiting up at cabbage tree island in the northern rivers region of new south wales, aunty eileen morgan asked about janie. i’d talked about going to see her before we left to go back to sydney. i explained that she was my stepson’s mother but when i introduced her i always said, “this is my son’s mother”. aunty eileen morgan and old mrs. kelly said, “in our way she is your sister. so if you just say ‘sister’ then we know who you are talking about”. from then on janie became my tribal sister. i’ve been her son’s stepmother since he was three years old so we go back a long way. i suppose, unusually, we share many other lives as well. intellectually, academically and politically our roads have gone along similar paths so we met and talked frequently about things other than the boy. it has been an interesting and challenging journey for both of us. ruby wove into both of our lives in the late eighties and has been an equal part of us since then, the third leg of that road to firming up and contextualizing understandings about a society that we all wanted to challenge. ruby was bundjalung, i am gomileroi and janie descendent from romani people. we all had big lives and our connection was immediate. we became a mighty family of women, each of us an important part of a triangle of love and support. now that ‘woman’ family is broken to a degree, ruby has gone and left us to go to her dreaming. we are left how we started, janie and i, with our boy, tamlin, but also with a burning desire to carry on the legacy that ruby has lovingly given us. that legacy is intellectual, spiritual, political, and most importantly, emotional. we both loved ruby dearly and her parting has left a lasting scar on our hearts – another thing we now share. we write of our shared memories and our shared understanding of the meaning of her work. ruby is not going to be forgotten. her work is not going to be forgotten. her two tribal ones left are going to make sure of that. ruby langford, as she was in 1988, not ginibi then, was first published in australian writing 1988, which was the bicentennial issue of outrider (jurgensen and adamson, eds., 1988). her first book, don’t take your love to town, was going to be published by penguin later that year. her excitement at the time is difficult to describe. as much as ruby dreamt of writing and promised us all that she would “write a book”, there was a little bit of “lovely dream” about the statement. now it was happening. she was going to be a published writer. robert adamson, the australian poet, and his wife juno gemes had been spending a bit of time with her and suggested that she write a piece for the upcoming bicentennial publication. ruby chose to write about her grandfather sam anderson and often talked about him, describing him as an amazingly knowledgeable man with a great intellect and a good heart. he had a way of saying ‘com’n, good fullah, com’n,’ (jurgensen & adamson, 1988, p.42) that was both gentle and encouraging. he was a man who was devoted to his family and his culture and who worked hard for his employers in the northern rivers area. he was a renowned cricketer and horseman, respected and valued within his community while regarded as a slave by his employers. he died at about 79 years old, all alone in a drovers hut. this bothered ruby for many years and she was pleased, as an author now, to remember him in a published form. for ruby this was a way of not only honoring her grandfather, but a way of inserting him into history; of ensuring that he would never be forgotten. one could be sure that he would have been supremely forgotten without her writing about him in this book. coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 when it came to writing a description of her as part of the contributors’ list in the back of the book ruby langford ginibi was quite lost as to what to write. she spoke to me about it and i just told her to write what came into her mind about who she was. she wrote: i am an australian aboriginal born on box ridge mission at coraki on the new south wales north cost in 1934. left school in second form, became a clothing machinist, raised 9 children of my own, worked at fencing and bush work burning off and ring barking, lived in tents and tin huts. also was a housing commission tenant for a while, after waiting ten years for a home. am now a part-time sewing teacher with the aboriginal medical services in redfern – been there 8 years this year and am now a tenant of allawah hostel, granville. this hostel is the first of its kind in new south wales – it’s for us parents who have raised our kids and don’t want to live with them, and want to do our own thing and be independent. i am the grandmother of 18 children and am an aboriginal achiever at 54 years of age. penguin is publishing my first book, don’t take your love to town. it will be out in september or october of this year – it’s my autobiography (jurgensen & adamson, 1988, p.465). pleasingly, the editors published her description just as she had written it. i say ‘pleasingly’ because one of the problems that ruby langford ginibi has had over the years of publishing is that of editing. she wrote quickly and in the same way that she spoke. her speech hesitations were not so much full stops as a series of commas to catch breath. one subject ran into another in what sounded like a confused outpouring for a minute. very quickly one realized that her way of speaking offered a number of related headings, which she always pulled together in a meaningful way. this was also the case with her writing. when i read her words, i very much hear her speaking, a great achievement for a writer. that her spoken communication sounded the same as her written words was both illuminating and comforting. what you saw and heard was indeed what you got. janie 1988, the year that ruby’s first book don’t take your love to town was published, was my final undergraduate year at the university of technology, sydney. it was also the year of the bicentenary, a time when it was important to ensure that indigenous australian people and their point of view about the invasion of their country was made more visible and so ruby’s first book was launched in the midst of a debate about this so-called celebration of the founding of the country we now call australia, which was deemed terra nullius (land without people) by the british colonial invaders. the bicentenary was an opportunity for a certain coming of age for australia in terms of being mature enough to acknowledge that white australia does have a black history. ruby’s book played an important part in the dialogue that was taking place around the ethical and cultural implications of such a celebration which, for indigenous people, was more about surviving and the generational consequences of such survival. i had chosen to write about aboriginal women’s writing for one of my final undergraduate essays at university. my choice of subject matter was a natural pathway in a learning journey coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 i had been on for many years prior to coming to university via my involvement in rock against racism having been a member of the australian women’s theatre group, as well as spending the previous two decades as a musician in a number of bands that focused on women’s and indigenous rights in their songs. i had many wonderful aboriginal teachers during that time, most of whom are no longer here to guide me and it is with the utmost respect for all of them that i write about ruby langford ginibi, the great ‘edumacator’, who gave so generously of her knowledge and wisdom and who touched so many people with her humour and her resilience in the face of so much personal tragedy. i have truly been blessed in having her and her family in my life. when i began researching my undergraduate essay on aboriginal women’s writing i remember wondering whether i’d be able to find enough material and asked my close friend and mentor, aboriginal activist and poet, maureen watson, what she thought. another great teacher, maureen just smiled and said, ‘if you go looking for them you’ll find them’. and of course i did. women like, oodgeroo noonuccal, elsie roughsey, glenys ward, ida west, marnie clare and eva johnson had begun paving the way for other indigenous writers with their stories of growing up black in a predominantly white society. they wrote of their lives and told stories of themselves and of other aboriginal people. for all of them i would imagine ida west’s reasons for writing her book, pride against prejudice (1987), would ring true. she writes: ‘we have had europeans writing about us for years. as a child i remember people writing about us. they called us half-castes they may as well have called us out castes’ (1987, p.1). i kept hearing about an autobiography by a bundjalung woman, ruby langford. don’t take your love to town wasn’t out yet, i was told, but it would be soon. i chuckled at the country music reference to the old kenny rogers song, the sense of humour it conveyed and the way the title captured some essence of an urban aboriginal reality while at the same time tilting its cap at the rural/city divide. as it happened ruby’s book didn’t come out in time for my essay deadline, but i still went to everything i could about the book. i marveled at the wonderful storyteller that ruby was, but felt too shy to actually introduce myself to her. i went to one talk at the harold park hotel in sydney, a bastion of the sydney writing scene at the time. ruby was unwell and unable to come to the event, but her editor spoke in her stead. she talked about the two voices of writer and editor producing the third voice of the book. i was intrigued by what she was saying but also uncomfortable. was she saying that they wrote the book together or claiming some writing credit? there was a paradox in this. i had read so much about postcolonial voices and the difficulty for a colonised people to write in their own voice when the recognised literary language was often that of the colonising culture. i was well aware of how sensitive an editor had to be when editing to keep the authenticity of the author’s voice in the text, especially when working with indigenous writers. it was important not to edit in terms of dominant cultural, literary expectations. if indigenous australians were to truly represent themselves then the language of their culture and the way they spoke or wrote english was an important factor in building an authentic sense of identity. paul memmott and robyn horsman, editors of elsie roughsey’s book, aboriginal mother tells tales of the old and new write in the foreword about having to work against the tendency to over-standardise the language in order to preserve elsie’s ‘unique aboriginal style’ while at the same time making sure of an ‘easy reading of the text for non aboriginal people’ (cited in roughsey, 1982, p. ii). obviously the editing process was an important factor in publishing coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 indigenous writing. but at every event that i’d been to ruby had spoken confidently and strongly about this book being her story. i couldn’t imagine that it would contain any other voice but her own. i wrote to ruby’s editor outlining my essay plan and my concerns about the editing process and asked her if i could use her paper from the harold park presentation as part of my essay. generously she sent me a copy of it. reflections of me what is all my laughter for? is it to hide the sadness in me or all the sorrow. in my sadness; must i forever feel so alone when i know i am not! sometimes i feel so alive and loved, and at other times, i'm lost in a wilderness of misery. what is love? is it meant to be only heartache? will i ever know? i did once a long time ago. so long, it seems like an eternity (jacklyn, 2011, p.17). pam in the poem above, ruby langford ginibi reflects on her private and public faces. in the world she was seen as a 'famous australian indigenous author' with all the expectations that went with that. ruby had also seriously taken on the role of 'edumacation'; of speaking for our people against the injustices that were a daily and unacknowledged wound in her life and in the lives of indigenous australians. through the telling of her own stories, and there were many, she knew she could draw a larger picture that could communicate. ruby knew that to get people listening was fundamental to a chance to naming a hidden history, that of indigenous australians, and also to make it more than a testimony to the moment. in an article by janine little nyoongah, ruby describes how laughter is a weapon, her tool, her protection from despair: ‘laughter is the only thing we’ve got left; we’ve been dispossessed of everything else. it’s the thing that elevates us above all else; it’s the thing that’s kept us going all our lives’ (cited in little nyoongah, 2002, online). little nyoongah also writes of ruby’s use of humour, ‘the museum mentality, the quest for enlightenment through acquiring knowledge-as-property, finally falls down when confronted with her humour’ (little nyoongah, 1998, p.38). it is true, as she says, ruby’s humour and its strategic use are part of the project of mobilizing spirituality, knowledge and education as political agency against readings that envisage only a sadder tale for an aboriginal woman writing and struggling. as ruby says, ‘aboriginal humour is our survival mechanism ... if you couldn’t laugh you’d spend a lot of time cryin’ (cited in van toorn, 2002, online). laughter, love, and good feelings, were essential to her own survival, and were also essential to her communication and story telling. from her early years storytelling mattered to ruby in equal proportion to her recognition that things had to change for indigenous australians. ruby did not so much rage in public as gently, lovingly, and inexorably throw out her storytelling web, then softly and firmly draw all the threads back in. her rage, anger and coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 sorrow became deeply private; her grief and fear were hidden in a warm smile, a gentle laugh, and the ability to envelope with her very real compassion for all humanity. happy ruby. a publicity shot that she particularly liked and used often (photo pam johnson). another poem that ruby langford ginibi wrote explaining laughter is ‘empty vessel’: my auntie nell told me a long time ago, that empty vessels make the most sounds. all my life humour is the only thing that’s always lifted me, when i’m down and nearly out. my laughter is what i’m famous for; i was told by a friend that my laughter is infectious. i do like to have a good belly laugh. now, all my family’s grown and gone their own way, auntie nell said, and i realize why i laugh a lot. it’s mostly because i’m empty inside. there’s no one any more to make my life full again, like it used to be. hence, i’m empty for me. ha! ha! haw! haw! haw! har! har! aaaghh (jacklyn, 2011, p.19) ruby langford ginibi wrote as much about her despair and emptiness as she did about humour. she realized quite early on that no one was interested in her despair. it upset them. humour was easy. she stuck with that. in remembering this aspect of ruby langford ginibi, i'm reminded of a recent article in the sydney morning herald by jane cadzow where noel pearson was singled out for his leadership qualities and charisma over the last decade or so. noel pearson has been in the forefront of institutional discussions in relation to indigenous welfare and social frameworks for some time and has managed the many contested sites he has had to navigate with a considered approach, a reasonable voice, and status and leadership within his own community. the article speaks of another side of him as if it is a shocking surprise. in cairns, where a queensland government delegation was meeting with noel pearson and other indigenous leaders, opening greetings were cordial as the government delegation waited for pearson to speak: what followed, according to former parliamentarian stephen robertson, was ''a tirade of expletives and abuse'', including, more than once, the phrase ''f…ing white c…s''. robertson, a minister in the state's then labor government, sat transfixed, coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 pinned to his seat, as pearson excoriated his visitors – ''starting very slowly, very deliberately, and speaking quite softly, then over the next 15 or 20 minutes reaching a crescendo''. among those present was state environment minister kate jones, whose female adviser was dismissed by pearson as an ''arse-wipe''. robertson says his own chiefof-staff, an indigenous man, was called a ''sell-out c…''. another member of the group sums up the rest of the diatribe: '' 'you f…ing white c…s', scream, scream, scream. full on, for half an hour. nobody could get a word in'' (cadzow, 2012), online). is noel pearson less credible because he shouts, swears, and loses his temper? it seems that australia wants that wise and knowing, universally cultured, educated and urbane noel pearson, the one that behaves like a ‘white’ man, not the raging, angry, demanding noel. in examining this article and applying it to ruby’s life i find the sad fact of the matter is that the answer could be ‘yes’. would she have been listened to, read, sought after, if she showed her rage, her anger, her grief and sorrow, her loneliness and fear? certainly it would have been a more challenging relationship for her non-indigenous audience. laughter, for ruby langford ginibi was as genuine as the morning and everyone was safe inside it. it was also one of her many tools towards being listened to. after the publication of that first book, ruby was in fear that people would cease to listen to her. her intelligence, and her understanding of politics allowed her to walk that careful road with honesty and integrity. however, sometimes it was hard. janie reading don’t take your love to town was a revelation to me, not because i didn’t expect that her life would have been so difficult but more because of the details and the very personal and descriptive way it had been written. as a single mother i knew just how hard it had been to bring up just one child and that was with his father being very present and involved in his life and with the help of my own family, particularly my parents, who would babysit their first grandson at every opportunity. but ruby’s stories which she describes in the acknowledgements at the front of don’t take your love to town as being ‘a true life story of an aboriginal woman’s struggle to raise a family of nine children in a society divided between black and white culture in australia’ (langford, 1988) was something else again. a quote from a review in the australian by billy marshall-stoneking and reprinted on the cover of ruby’s second book real deadly describes the narrative as ‘the ultimate battler’s tale … the life langford has lived in australia is as close to the eyes and ears as print on the pages makes it’. when janine little nyoongah asks ruby whether she thinks that the life she has led has all of a sudden transformed itself into this writing, that the reason why she’s such a successful writer is because she’s such a good story teller, ruby answers: ‘a true story teller! no, the truth. as i said, i’m not interested in fiction. don’t need to be because i’m too busy writing the truth about my people …’ (1994, p.109). don’t take your love to town opens with a chapter on names and is a synopsis of her early life growing up in bonalbo where aboriginal clever man uncle ernie ord took over looking coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 after her and her sisters after their mother left them when ruby was nine years old. uncle ernie gave ruby her totem, the willy wagtail advising her that she would ‘always know if there’s trouble because the willy wagtail will warn’ her (p.1). at the end of this chapter ruby writes in an intimate voice to the reader ‘you can think of me as ruby, wagtail big noise anderson rangi ando heifer andy langford. how i got to be ruby langford. originally from the bundjalung people’ (1988, p.2). this list of names serves as an introductory map for the many stages of ruby’s life covered in the rest of her autobiography in an intimate voice and humorous tone that i would become very familiar with both in the flesh and on the page in the ensuing years. i was cognisant of the lives that many of my aboriginal friends had lived and how different my own life had been growing up white in australia and i had been on a steep learning curve about these differences for nearly a decade after becoming involved with the two aboriginal bands, no fixed address and us mob, featured in the docudrama that had been made about their life as a touring band titled, wrong side of the road (1981). having also worked in rock against racism on aboriginal deaths in custody before the actual committee was set up, i knew about the stolen children, the prejudice, the over-incarceration of indigenous people and had been part of early calls for an inquiry. but in ruby’s personal story all the kernels of the situation are given such intimate detail and description that the reader is taken directly into a world that at the time was known by only a relative few non-indigenous australians. while the circumstances may have been familiar to me, to read about ruby’s life in such visceral detail gave extra life and body in an individual sense to the stories of aboriginal australia. as edward hills writes in his phd thesis on australian autobiography: langford’s story is political because it embodies the social and cultural dilemma of a people caught between two cultures. because she belongs to the margins, to a suppressed minority, her story assumes the status of a history that is, in spite of its deeply personal tone, politically critical of those mainstream forces that have produced the injustices. apart from its function as critique of mainstream social forces the book has a political agenda that gestures towards the collective future. the personal dimension – langford’s concern for her family – becomes a platform for reconciliation, which acknowledges the meaning of 1788 without bitterness or resentment (1997, p.147). pam in the postcolonial eye (2012), the particular focus of the subject matter allows author alison ravenscroft to deal with issues of postcolonial theory and race and ethnicity. this focus is seen in ravenscroft's treatment of the figuring of white desire in aboriginal fiction, film and life-stories, and in her treatment of contemporary indigenous cultural practices. alison ravenscroft describes ‘the postcolonial eye’ as referring to the 'eye' and the 'i' inside contemporary australian race. ravenscroft describes this focus as being about seeing, where vision is taken to be subjective and shaped by desire, and about knowing one another across the cultural divide between white and indigenous australia. the ‘voice’ of indigenous writers and the ‘ear’ of non indigenous readers is as important in the ‘hearing’ of the stories as it is in coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 the initial telling. ruby once read out a stanza poem ‘burnt norton’ from t.s. eliot’s, four quartets: time present and time past are both perhaps present in the future, and time future contained in the past. if all time is eternally present. (eliot, 1959, p.13) ruby said that if he’d just dropped the ‘perhaps’ he’d have got it right, but the ‘perhaps’ was the most important part, culturally, for t.s. eliot because that ‘perhaps’ covered his arse. we laughed because he was white and male and he would do that. the observation ruby made about how essential that ‘perhaps’ was to undermining actuality, that is, covering his arse in terms of literary responsibility – better to be more definitive and less waffly in order to assert a definite statement – was ruby’s way of explaining what she meant when she said she didn’t write fiction. in her writings one couldn’t abstract a life that was so definitively lived. what she wrote and what she talked about was a ‘story’ she was born to tell, she said. there was no ‘once upon a time’ about her stories. the start, middle and end of her stories were true. ruby was the authority. these stories were about the lives of our people, our culture; stories that had never been told before outside australia’s indigenous community. given this observation, it is interesting to note that, despite ruby’s awareness of how the white male culture works, negotiations with, what was for her, a foreign culture, meant her ignorance was exploited on a number of occasions particularly as a result of an assumption, on her part, of equality. an assumption, it must be said, that wasn’t clearly shared by a very small number who were engaged in the pre-publishing of that first book, don’t take your love to town. janine little nyoongah writes: in 1992, ginibi published her second book, real deadly, and won a legal battle with her first editor to reclaim full copyright on don’t take your love to town. ginibi was in the curious position of sharing copyright on this book with her editor, which meant that when she died her book would belong not to her family but to the editor. being new to the world of literary contacts and editing deals, ginibi could not imagine how her story would wind up being anyone else’s property (nyoongah, 1998, p.35). it was apparently very hard for a non-indigenous person to believe that someone like ruby, a so-called ‘uneducated’ indigenous person, could write a complete book by herself. there were a number of occasions when people did assert to me that she didn’t in fact write her own book. these insinuations were devastating to ruby and devastating to me. it was a shock that non-indigenous people could act this way. her words, her stories, were her life, her spirit, her gift to the nation, so far as ruby was concerned. she was very clear that she was part of the indigenous community; the one upon whose country she belonged, bundjalung, and also the bigger australian indigenous community. her story was all indigenous australians’ story and she was not going to be dispossessed of it. remembering indigenous australian author david unaipon and how anthropologist william ramsay smith stole his work from him she knew how easily she could lose everything she wrote. having to have this fight only confirmed this view. coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 janie there are two stories in don’t take your love to town that epitomise the continuing prejudice that existed against all aboriginal people at the time it was written. they are told in ruby’s inimitable style, one that makes you laugh at the same time as cringe. i have heard ruby tell this first story many times, accompanied by her distinctive chuckle as she watches her ‘ghubba’ friends’ mouths drop, but this is how she writes about coraki a town in bundjalung country, northern nsw, where many of her people still live: in the main street, which ran parallel to the river, was a baker with a crow in the cage on the counter. when the baker was out the back, the crow called out, ‘there’s blackfellers in the shop!’ further up the street was the masonic hall where we went to the pictures: hopalong cassidy, tom mix, charlie chaplin. only a few times we went in to the pictures – three miles – the adults piggybacking the kids home after. the pictures had segregated seating, one side for us, the other side for whites. at the hospital they had special wards for kooris, down the back (1988, p.9). much of the narrative of don’t take your love to town is situated outside sydney in the kind of rural environment that, before i moved to the new south wales north coast, i had known only at a distance through my own mother’s stories of growing up in country new south wales. my mother also suffered the prejudice of small town talk when her father went broke during the depression and was sent to jail for fraud. she was not enamoured of the country life at all, but even her struggles could not compare with the day-to-day life that ruby describes where with six children and pregnant with her seventh, after being deserted by her husband gordon, she took a job fencing and cutting stays for a coal mine with another man, peter, who was a friend of the husband who had deserted her: this job meant going through trees and marking the ones we would need, then felling them with axes. next we had to strip the limbs off and measure each stay which was six feet. we sat opposite each other and sawed through them one by one, hard, sweating, back-breaking work. every now and then peter signaled me to stop and he’d go and piss on his hands. it was an old remedy to stop the blisters becoming infected. when the stays were cut we loaded them onto a truck. i had blisters on my hands and we slept like dead at night (p.85) and between peter and me and the kids marking for us we did three miles of fencing in three weeks. i think it was a record. sometimes we started when it was still dark and worked by hurricane lamp and the headlights of the car. this was so we could escape the heat of the day and mostly we didn’t finish before nightfall (p.90). and then, after being paid, ruby goes to the queensland town of st george. this town was a mecca of civilisation to me, look, here was a dress shop – i went right in. i needed a new dress. halfway into the shop i saw myself in a mirror close coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 up. here was a pregnant woman with blistered hands like a man’s, her face peeling like flaky pastry and black, she started black, but her arms were black and the hair ginger. i stared at myself for a long time and then i bought a sleeveless cotton dress and went outside. i hadn’t been in town for so long i was lonely for another woman to talk to, so every woman i passed i said hello, hello, hello just to hear them talk to me (p.93). ruby’s writing here brings to life a distinctly australian experience. as many reviews have attested to, ruby’s memoir talks to both black and white readers but some of my friends who read the book were frustrated that ruby had had so many babies with so little means of support. i knew enough to understand that, while white european-style feminism was calling, quite rightly, for abortion to be every woman’s legal right it was also the case that, for many indigenous women the world over, access to suitable child care was equally important. after atrocious government policies had tried to ensure that white australia was ‘soothing the pillow of dying race’ as nineteenth century philosophy would have it, recreating family made childbearing an important part of indigenous women’s lives. my son, tamlin, is precious to me and many times i have imagined what it would be like to be an indigenous mother and to have been threatened with having your children taken away from you just because you were aboriginal. ruby had three children die and was in constant danger of authorities taking her children away but there was also another danger for ruby as an indigenous mother, which i was aware of in a political sense through my involvement with deaths in custody. that was the danger of her children being incarcerated. ruby’s 1999 book, haunted by the past, focuses on her son nobby’s story and in don’t take your love to town, ruby also writes about the incarceration of her teenage son after being unfairly charged with shooting at police in june 1983 and his subsequent escape. as a consequence nobby spent numerous years in and out of jail and was permanently emotionally scarred by his experiences there. pam my mother met ruby long before i did, somewhere way back in the early ‘50’s. i didn’t know that until ruby told me and my mother was dead by then. ruby held something of my babyhood in her memory. ruby was young, wild and free as was my mother when they met. i knew aileen, ruby’s daughter, from tempe and also from rescuing her from a crazy man that she’d escaped to the refuge to get away from. that was in the early ‘80’s. ruby was teaching sewing upstairs at the aboriginal medical centre in redfern in sydney. i had brought my youngest son there just after arriving in sydney and had wandered upstairs to catch up with someone else. she wasn’t there but ruby was. she knew alma, the person i was looking for, who lived out at allawah, as did ruby. we talked, at that time, for quite a while about this and that and she got me sewing with her. she looked after dance, my youngest at the time, while i went and got hot chips for us. i went out to allawah and started visiting not only alma, but ruby as well. much later ruby would get me to do the cover for don’t take your love to town. she described her experience of writing this book to me as causing her to have two near nervous breakdowns as she revisited and lived through much sorry business. what should have been a joy and a relief for her, the completion of this book and publication, turned into another area of sorry business as her copyright was nearly taken from her. ultimately the copyright was resolved through legal means but ruby learnt very quickly what coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 ownership is in the non-indigenous community. she already knew what ownership meant inside her own community. i was at art school at the time. postmodernism was the dominant theoretical discussion, and roland barthes´s observations in his famous essay, ‘death of the author’ (barthes, 1977, p.142-148). as an indigenous student with not much idea of indigenous culture i was caught up in a theoretical web of confusion. i was being encouraged on one hand, to ‘take’ indigenous imagery and use it in my own work as a ‘birthright’ because of my identity, while, on the other hand i had that inkling of knowledge that said not only is this wrong but both modernity and postmodernism weren’t dealing with this issue while indigenous engagement in this discourse was made difficult by the way that indigenous culture is structured. ruby already knew that in australia, indigenous heritage comprises all objects, sites and knowledge transmitted from generation to generation. indigenous people have a living heritage. their connection with the land, water, animals, plants and other people is an expression of cultural heritage. writing, music, performing arts, visual arts and media arts are some of the mediums for transmitting indigenous cultural heritage. as primary guardians and interpreters of their cultures, indigenous people have well-established protocols for interacting with their cultural material. new situations also require cultural protocols. while works by individual artists are protected by copyright, there are often no legal rights around the broader reproduction and use of indigenous cultural heritage material. australia does not yet have a law that prevents alteration, distortion or misuse of traditional symbols, songs, dances, performances or rituals that may be part of the heritage of particular indigenous language groups. any discussion about appropriation, then, leaves indigenous culture highly vulnerable, not just economically, but spiritually and culturally. i was surrounded by an education and culture that told me i didn’t exist outside their construction, while my own reality continued to be written into my life and confirmed every time i looked in the mirror. ruby became my oasis in a desert of negativity, my intellectual and cultural warrior in a war that took no prisoners. by this time ruby was at the end of writing don’t take your love to town. i was in my last year at art school and the bicentennial was everywhere. indigenous stories were being made to fit into a colonial construction. was it indeed ‘invasion’ as indigenous australians saw it, or was it ‘settlement’ as non-indigenous australians preferred to see it? this discussion was one of many that indicated the huge divide in perception between indigenous and non-indigenous australians at that time. it was an argument that i had every day at art school and a discussion i had at least once a week with ruby. her knowledge and intelligence were decisive on this matter. she always spoke, loudly and forcefully and from an indigenous perspective, aware, as she was, that the indigenous voice was denied on every level in australia. ruby, through her books and essays, was already on top of this argument and was voicing her concerns about the different sub-texts. janie storytelling as a struggle of memory against forgetting articulates the space between the opposition of right and wrong and forces us to look at humanity itself. in 1988 ruby won the human rights literary award from the human rights and equal opportunity commission coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 for don’t take your love to town alongside wiradjuri/gomileroi activist, playwright and poet kevin gilbert’s anthology of aboriginal poetry titled inside black australia. ruby’s storytelling is intrinsically tied up with human rights for her people and in the 1994 interview with janine little nyoongah, ruby discusses the importance of indigenous australian art and culture in terms of its ongoing contribution to human rights saying: we've got this whole wonderful human resource, our aboriginality, that this country has never ever used, to promote our stuff, to lift us up, but they've used it to their own advantage, for their own gain, and they've been taking from our culture ever since they colonized this land (langford cited in little, 1994, p.104). ruby was born on australia day 1934, a day that she and other indigenous people prefer to call shame day or survival day, indicating a vexed relationship with the day many australians celebrate as the birth of a nation. in 1988, fifty four years later in the bicentenary year of 1788, a year that is soaked in the ambivalence of nation making and resultant colonisation, ruby’s writing about her life is given the kind of recognition that will lay the foundations of her becoming one of the most significant australian writers of her time. the book is now distributed globally and is taught in schools and universities across australia. for me reading don’t take your love to town, back in 1988, marked a real turning point in my life and the beginning of a relationship with a truly visionary woman who knew the importance of the story she had to tell and who had the courage to tell it. pam while preparations for the re-enactment of captain cook’s landing were being rehearsed, indigenous australians had taken the bicentennial year in australia as a way of asserting a simple fact: we have survived. sydney harbor. tall ships. colonial songs. a convict past. and rum. all these things were being celebrated as a master theme while the indigenous story of australia was going to be asserted by us no matter what. if we didn’t assert ourselves, no one else was going to! indigenous survival became the subtext of the bicentennial celebrations in australia in 1988. the big, the official ceremony was going to happen on australia day, 26th. ironically january 26 was ruby’s birthday as well. she always loved the irony of ‘shame day’, australia day, and her birthday being on the same day. for weeks prior to 26th january 1988 indigenous mobs came in from all over australia. mostly these visitors were staying out at la perouse but mobs were also staying at redfern, at woolloomooloo and other places in inner sydney. as much as we were focused on the 26th january, lapa (la perouse) was the centre of all activities leading up to the actual day. as descendants of the traditional people of this land, for many of us exposure to traditional ceremonies, language and culture 24 hours a day for seven days a week was a unique and life-changing experience that we drank to exhaustion. the campfires glittered at la perouse as far as the eye could see. we all marked our faces and arms, with permission from the elders, with kaolin ochre. out there at la perouse, into redfern, woolloomooloo, balmain, and out in the western suburbs we were one. we had indeed survived. coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 at mrs. macquarie’s chair, near my place in woolloomooloo, more campfires were lit as the aboriginal flag was raised and a camp set up. our presence as indigenous people was everywhere. yes indeed. we had survived. ruby virtually moved into my place as we went up to this campsite at mrs. macquarie’s chair on sydney harbor. there are many pictures in existence which accidently and deliberately show ruby sitting on a chair under the flag. it was one of the many meetings places at that time for indigenous people. ruby and other elders talked about previous actions. ruby said that if they don’t keep remembering and telling, ‘edumacating’ (she already used that word way back then) it would all be ‘disremembered’. by that she meant that it would be documented by a non-indigenous person and therefore would be contextualized to a colonial culture whose interest in stories had a completely different perspective. at issue for ruby, was not only owning our own history and stories through our own voice and our own telling; ruby felt that a non-indigenous voice had no business representing or interpreting anything indigenous. we discussed barthes’s perspectives on the absence of author many times, concluding, for us, that his writings encapsulated another form of genocide – a cultural and spiritual one. is there such a thing? well, yes, if culture gives spirituality and both give life. indigenous culture recognizes through ancestry and therefore culture, an originator in community, an author as community if you like, who must be recognized not through production, but through connection, obligation, and right. this right is necessarily in opposition to a culture that recognizes knowledge as a democratic power; a right as an assertion of equality, whereas in indigenous culture knowledge is owned and looked after as a sacred obligation and passed on to certain individuals or groups who have a right through very complex kinship lines defined by connection or belonging to very specific ancestry and country. to dishonor or shame these obligations was so awful that the person that this happened to could become empty of spirit, or even dead. that’s how we recognize the notion of ‘author’ indigenous way. i could dwell on a vast number of events to illustrate ruby langford ginibi’s connection to both ancestral culture and contemporary political awareness but the lead up to the australian bicentennial celebrations and the actual australia day events seemed to me to be the best way to illustrate the place that indigenous australians were situated and how ruby and her writings were placed both inside and outside this huge event. one could say that it was luck that it was published. if ruby hadn’t had the ‘luck’ of meeting billy marshall stone king while on a journey to uluru with her mother the book may not have been published. one could say it was ‘luck’ that rosie creswell, as her agent, convinced penguin to publish the book. or maybe it could be said that australia was ready for such a story. however one chooses to understand the progression towards publication, the real story is so much greater. aboriginal australians have a very long and rich history of storytelling, mostly oral and pictorial. authors adopt a western mode of storytelling to speak to a non-indigenous audience, while infusing it with traditional aboriginal narrative styles. for example, in don’t take your love to town, the language is conversational and colloquial, and the structure is less linear and more fluid (often moving loosely between memories). ruby langford ginibi, born at box ridge mission, coraki, in the northern rivers region of new south wales, australia, had a specific life before she entered this world, almost a blueprint. that life was marked with ‘no hope’ because she was born aboriginal australian. many people since childhood have wanted to be writers, and ruby was no exception. things get in the way or coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 things become impossible. ruby langford ginibi wouldn’t even dream of becoming a writer because she was aboriginal. the stories she had to tell burnt into her heart for over fifty years with nowhere to go beyond an oral tradition that had impassable boundaries to their travelling. janie i didn’t actually meet ruby until a year or so after 1988 at the launch of an exhibition of pam’s. i remember ruby’s warmth at this occasion and her announcing that pam was her adopted daughter, having known pam’s mother from their youthful days in redfern. later pam introduced me to ruby and from then on i became, because of my relationship with pam, one of her extended family and so i came to know pauline, aileen, jeff and also nobby. pam was teaching art in the jails at this time and nobby was one of her students. in 1992 ruby’s second book real deadly was launched. it’s a collection of stories and poems and on the cover is a photograph of ruby taken by pam outside yabsley house, the homestead of the yabsley family for whom many of ruby’s family and other people from box ridge mission coraki had worked as labourers. in real deadly ruby writes: then again i thought to myself, those early pioneers were in the debt of the aboriginal labourers who helped build those big pioneer homesteads for little or next to no payment. i thought the whole of australia should appreciate the aborigines, cause the whole place was gotten on the blood sweat and tears of us blacks and we never did get any recognition for what we did, ever, in this country (1992, 64). ruby’s relationship to land is based on a strong spiritual connection and it is from her writings that readers learn the stories that go with an indigenous belonging to landscape that is deeply imbedded in an ancient history. in the opening piece in real deadly, she describes the richmond river as ‘being a source of abundant food for my people the bundjalung tribes. your shores, bungawalbyn, jackabulbyn, minumi, coraki, gibberagee, all surrounded by a place known as the big scrub – plenty bush tucker around, bunihny, binging, burbi’ (1992, p. 1). love of bundjalung country and the rainbow region marks another connection i have to ruby. in november 1974 i travelled with my two-year-old son tamlin on the rickety red overnight train. as the sun rose tamlin and i looked out of the train as it travelled through the most beautiful country i had ever seen. purple jacarandas dotted the hillsides, while red flame trees lined the streets of country towns nestled in the hills. the subtropical climate began to knock against my inner city sensibilities in a most exciting way as i marveled at the weatherboard houses high up on stilts, surrounded by wide verandahs, with people sunning themselves on the steep back stairs (conway herron, 2003, p.167). for the next twenty years i travelled north whenever possible and then in 1995 i moved there permanently to complete my phd. in 1996 i began teaching creative writing at southern cross university in lismore. it was natural with my interest in indigenous australian writing that i would use ruby’s work coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 as one of the foundation texts in my teaching and so her work became central to my own work over the next decade and a half. in 1997 and 1999 ruby, pam and ruby’s two daughters, aileen and pauline came to visit me in the house i shared with my husband peter in byron bay. they were memorable visits, ones that actually mark the beginning of a period of more intensive learning for me about the deeper layers of cultural belonging that are so important for indigenous australians. i am forever grateful for the visits she made to my home and for the doors of perception about bundjalung country in particular that were opened to me as a result. on her first two visits we were living in a town house in bundjalung country just across the road from the main beach at byron bay. pam and ruby were making a return visit to bundjalung country after the successful publication of my bundjalung people (1994). the stories in this book are based on memories and researched material generated via two road trips to bundjalung country that ruby and pam had undertaken in 1990. the book is filled with ruby’s stories of growing up in the area placed alongside photos, taken mainly by pam, but also including historical photos as well as others by friends such as rita georgiadis, judy anderson and rita bostock as well as a few shots by ruby herself. i would recommend this book to anyone interested in finding out more about the history of the northern rivers area and in particular bundjalung culture. central to it is ruby’s story of growing up firstly on box ridge mission, coraki, then bonalbo and later casino. like her previous works the stories and photos together make a narrative that serves as both a personal story and an historical document. in the foreword of my bundjalung people (1994) pam writes: i was ruby’s driver, companion, sound-recordist, photographer and general dogsbody on the many trips we took back to her “home” country. we travelled over 20,000 kilometres in the first half of 1990 alone and continue through to the present day … my bundjalung people leads the reader through many of the journeys of the bundjalung people and explains the tracks and roads and rivers of history that make ruby’s people “all one mob. … essentially, however this is the only documented history of the bundjalung people that is made up of their views, their feelings, their facts” (author’s emphasis). so it is true. it is a story of profound cruelty and injustice that begs for wrongs to be righted. it is also a story of hope and laughter and jokes, survival and love (johnson in langford ginibi 1994, pp xi-xii). pam margaret tucker, in her autobiography, if everyone cared (1977) describes a realization that she has rights as an aboriginal person: i had always said, especially when i had been trying to get a point across to a white person, ‘oh, you want to think like an aborigine if you want to help our people.’ then one day it hit me. heaven forbid! our people, the aborigines, are people, not separate specimens’ (1977, p.200). ruby langford ginibi argued frequently for the humanity of indigenous people in australia. while one part of her was thrilled with the opportunity to ‘edumacate’ another part of her was coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 always waiting for it all to be taken away. she was uncomfortable with accolades because she had been uplifted so many times, then landed smack on her bum, as she often said. her realization that she personally should not be judged outside her own life and culture came about after a shocking review by mary rose liverani of real deadly in the australian in 1992. it is a good example of how she could be dehumanized. as a scottish migrant, liverani writes: ginibi can’t write. lacking formal education, and a literary or social context within which to appraise her experiences, she has difficulty making sense of her life or offering insight into it. she seems to view herself and her family as characters in an american slapstick comedy or cheap romance…’ (liverani, 1992, p.6) liverani’s review suggests that images and representations of aboriginality are pervasive if constantly misrecognized or invisible in everyday australian culture; they are images that are often remade and repossessed in the daily transactions of urban indigenous living. where liverani sees the world of real deadly as one of unthinking and uncritical consumption – of everything from alcohol to take-away food to sitcoms – ruby’s writings represent an active process of negotiating with and surviving in a dominant culture that persistently devalues, degrades and disappears her history. despite liverani’s claim to some authority, for ruby the review highlighted all too clearly, the class, ethnic and national bias against her aboriginality and humanity. the communities that ruby was writing about are not incomplete or imperfect. urban indigenous people own a rich sociality and culture. the indigenous families and communities that ruby writes about maintain themselves despite a battery of assimilationist pressures. this is the world lovingly detailed in real deadly, a series of narratives, reflections and poems that takes up where don’t take your love to town leaves off. some of the stories represent private and happy moments within the family. ‘what gives them the goddam rights?’ ruby asked and was to ask often after this. this judgment of her life and her family was too much for ruby and she charged in fighting. in challenging liverani’s and others socalled authority she writes: they came with their godly marriages and paternalistic ways, and we were forced to assimilate… because our traditional practices were classified as ‘heathen’ and ‘vermin’ to be cleared off the face of the earth … and we were forced by governments to become like white people… we have never been one nation – ever! – because aboriginal people have always been excluded in white social enclaves in this country. even the people who migrate here are on a higher social level than we are. we are classified as the lowest of the low, and we are the first people of this land. (ginibi, 1994, pp.8-12) if they weren’t trying to take her copyright they were illegitimising her writing, her community, her life! ruby langford ginibi’s writing existed side by side with this sort of warfare where she had to fight to prevent her own invisibility. one way or another, for her, it seemed like a constant battle to stand up and insist that she could write and what she wrote was true. the significance of this is clear when we think that before the 1967 citizenship referendum. indigenous australians were not included in the australian census. our existence as individuals was not officially registered and there was no place in official historical records of the indigenous population. writing autobiographically had been a very effective tool for ruby in making non-indigenous australians aware of another history, the indigenous coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 australian history. ruby’s writing was also of great significance to indigenous australians as they could uniquely read their own experiences in a way that was both authentic and confirming. the written word does have its own authority, doesn’t it? ruby, through her writing, had an enormous audience both within, and outside australia. her writing ensured a changed perception of what ‘indigenous’ was from inside a lived life. she spoke the truth. she was the expert. it changed an understanding of the politics of nations and the spirit of the thing. in their interview with ruby, penny van toorn and christine watson observe: the advantage of autobiography as a historical genre is that it brings the past ‘up close and personal’. while an academic historical researcher might, for example, interpret historical records relating to governments’ ‘native policies’ the aboriginal autobiographer tells us what it was like to be on the receiving end of those policies. they can tell us at first hand how decisions made by politicians, bureaucrats, and social workers affected their day to day lives (van toorn, p., watson c., 1998, p. 83). ruby was subject to the all those policies and she wrote about them, not as an historian, deductive and distant, but as a truth-teller and eyewitness to an enormous part of australian history that would have remained invisible without her story telling. by writing her own life story, she tells how many indigenous women lived. through her own developing political awareness she is able to tell australia what is not palatable: that australia has a long history of racism and genocide towards its first people, the indigenous australians. ruby langford ginibi repeated until she died that “we have to stop the killings time”, a time that she says was not “in the past”, because the killings times still exist in our present, and she wrote of this in describing among many things the endless incarceration of indigenous people and the long and growing list of deaths in custody. even after death she continues to be at the forefront of that chorus of indigenous australians speaking and writing against whitewashed versions of australian history. janie in an analysis of alexis wright’s carpentaria (2006) alison ravenscroft (2012) writes about the way that: ‘in prevailing white australian discourses, indigenous law is still read as if it were a form of fiction holding no explanatory power’. she goes on to discuss how a white australian reader might read indigenous australian fiction as representing indigenous law as a ‘fantastic story of magic powers, a naive story of origin’ (2012 p.74). thus the indigenous writer is caught up in a process of legitimization in terms of european notions of lore and law of the real and not real where even contemporary categorizations of magic realism can serve to doubly dismiss indigenous ways of seeing. this observation also points, even if somewhat obliquely, to ruby’s anxiety about whether she’s a fiction writer or not and the way her insistence on notions of truth telling might arise out of a fear her stories and her culture are being what she called ‘disremembered’ as well as dismissed by dominant white cultural prerogatives. my memories of ruby’s visits to bundjalung country and to my home are peppered with events that were full of laughter and warmth as well as knowledge about new cultural ways of coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 seeing. i remember going with pam and ruby to the cemetery at coraki. on the way there ruby explained to me that the graves of the aboriginal people were separated from the graves of non-indigenous people and how, when no one looked after them, the aboriginal people from box ridge mission took it upon themselves to clean up the area. we drove into the cemetery and sure enough all the non-indigenous gravesites were well looked after and maintained. then ruby spied the indigenous area. “looky, look, over there. there it is!” ruby pointed at a fence painted in the distinctive red, yellow and black of the aboriginal flag. and there all cleaned up, all neat and tidy but without the larger monuments and plaster angels of the whitefella graveyard were the graves of the bundjalung and other aboriginal people buried there. i spent the next couple of hours in quiet contemplation as ruby visited her departed relatives. she sat for a long time by her grandfather sam anderson’s grave. as she spoke in bundjalung language to the renowned cricketer that she had written about so many times in her books, i was staggered at the depth of this down-town urban aboriginal woman’s knowledge of her traditional culture. the way she conjured him through gesture and voice i could almost see him sitting down next to her smiling, reaching out to hold her hand in comfort. from there we travelled back to byron via nimbin: as we drove towards the distinctive sentinels of the nimbin rocks, ruby warned, “don’t go there, baby girl, it’s not a place for women to go.” and when i asked what would happen if i did, she laughed as she replied, “that old nimbinji spirit man will come into your dreams and frighten you away, if you do that.” i remembered my friends who had lived directly under those rocks while they were trying to have a baby. they were there for two years without getting pregnant and had been so besieged by bad dreams that they left the area and went to the coast. within a very short time they got pregnant. something about the look on my face must have prompted ruby to reassure me because she leant forward and whispered conspiratorially: “i tell you what to do. every time you go past those rocks, you talk to that ol’ fella and tell him you’re just passing through, and you’re not staying. that way nothing can happen to you.” this is something i will continue to do for the rest of my life. in 1999 i interviewed ruby for the third byron bay writers festival when she came up with her daughters aileen, pauline as well as pam. she entertained a room full of enthusiastic readers all anxious to hear her speak about her work. at the end of the session the standing ovation she received was indicative not only of her popularity but also of her gift as an orator and cultural ambassador. in the following week she spoke to students at the gungil jindibah centre, southern cross university, and was received equally well by both indigenous and non-indigenous students from a wide range of backgrounds and ages. on my desk i still have a photo of aileen, pauline, ruby and myself taken at the festival just after the interview. ruby is sitting in a wheel chair, a bemused expression on her face, her walking stick by her side, her ubiquitous hat covered in landrights badges and the red, yellow, black of koori colours on her head and her glasses and a necklace with a boomerang on it around her neck. she has a bunch of tissues in her hand and a box of them is sitting at the foot of the chair. i’m kneeling by her side and pauline and aileen are standing behind her. it’s a black and white photo but it doesn’t take much to conjure up the colours, lots of red, black and yellow worn by all of us. on that same trip ruby requested that we take her to the beach. not just any beach, she wanted to go down south of broken head where there wouldn’t be too many people. we coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 drove through the countryside and along the winding dirt road that leads to the southern end of the bay where the car could drive closest to the beach so ruby wouldn’t have to walk to far on her ailing legs, as she called them. we helped her out of the car and down to the edge where water meets sand. she was so excited to be in her country and close to the sea. i will never forget the sight of her playing round in the shallows, gleefully rolling in the water with all her clothes on, like a child frolicking, happy to be fully in her country again. on the way down to the beach and back again we sighted lots of bush turkeys, in the bushes and on the road. ‘this is a bush turkey dreaming place,” ruby said, on the way back. “i’ve got to be careful round here.” the morning after ruby and the girls left to go back south to sydney i got up very early and went to make a cup of tea. there in the middle of the courtyard was the biggest bush turkey i’ve ever seen just standing there looking at me, it’s head on that distinctive red, yellow and black neck, jerking backwards and forwards as if looking for something or someone. when i called to pete the bird turned around and scrambled over the fence. i quickly ran to the fence and looked over but the bird had disappeared completely. but to where? in front of me was a giant open space and it hadn’t had time to fly anywhere. even if it had there was no way it wouldn’t have been seen in the sky. no. it had simply disappeared without a trace. that evening i called ruby to see if they had all got home safely and to tell her about the bird. “oh ho,” ruby chuckled. “that bird came to look for me ‘cause i was somewhere i shouldn’t have been.” a few weeks later a willy wagtail family came and nested in our roof and for the next few years we were there they returned every year. knowing ruby’s affiliation with the tiny, cheeky bird with the fast wagging tail, i always felt that those birds felt safe being there after ruby came to stay with us. pete and i were in the early days of our relationship then and not long afterwards we were walking through the scrubby park on the foreshore of the beach at suffolk park. out of the corner of my eye, when clutched in a passionate embrace, i saw a small bird flitting about. it was a willy wagtail standing on the path in front of us just staring at us with its keen eyes, its tail fanned out and wagging as it darted about. i know that the appearance of the wagtail was a warning for ruby and is for many other aboriginal people but because it’s her totem i always feel her close by me when one’s around. in an anthology titled belonging in the rainbow region (2003) i write about ruby coming to visit us in the house pete and i had bought in lismore. the chapter is titled ‘metaphoric landscapes: writing the rainbow region’ and is a review of writers’ work who have represented the north coast of new south wales in their writing. ruby also wrote the first story in the anthology and it’s called ‘my belonging place’. at the end of my chapter i describe our garden with ruby sitting in it: the garden in this place is already beautiful. two blooming jacarandas that frame our view of the golf course are filled with purple flowers and chattering multicoloured parrots. there’s azaleas here, frangipanis and camellias too and lots of flowers. every weekend i’m out in the garden with my husband planting natives; grevilleas, bottlebrush, eucalypts, even a grass tree. we imagine our house surrounded by a forest in years to come. we are trying to attract birds and make a place for the night-grunting koalas to rest. this is our place i say … it is strange that such ownership of land can make me feel so strong a sense of belonging. but i’m a whitefella and i need the strong sense of security that this kind of ownership can bring. recently ruby langford ginibi came to stay with me while on land coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 council business. we sat in the early morning on the front porch and she sighed as she looked up at the magnolias just beginning to bloom. “oh janie,” she said, “what a lovely place you got here, it makes me want to come home for good.” and i smiled back, thinking how wonderful that would truly be. (conway herron 2003, p.176) not long after that ruby rang us. “i was just wondering if pete could get me a couple of trees from up there to plant in my backyard,” she asked, and the following christmas we took a macadamia and a tippecanoe out to the house she was sharing with her son nobby. it was difficult not to notice how incapacitated she was, but her inimitable spirit was distracting as she proudly showed us the paintings nobby was working on. in 2006, when she made her final trip to bundjalung country for a reunion on cabbage tree island just south of us with ruby’s daughter dianne and her two children, they had to pack ‘a wheel chair, oxygen tank and pap machine’ (langford ginibi 2007, p.285). still they managed to cover an enormous amount of countryside exploring bundjalung country from grafton to the gold coast dropping in on her other daughter pauline at helensvale in queensland and then back south where they called in to coraki: we drove on into town then headed out to the mission, my birthplace. it was about ten hectares with nine houses built onto it in the shape of a square. there were a few jahjams (children) running around and i called out, “is gracie cowan here?” the teenagers said, “no she moved to casino.” then when i told them i was born here they recognised my face, “oh gee,” they said, “you’re that woman that wrote that book!” my family in the van started laughin’. “yes i’m that old black woman writer,” i told em, as we drove out of there (langford ginibi 2007, p.292). in 2001 i gained my doctorate from the university of western sydney but ruby beat both pam and me to our doctorates. this was something ruby was never going to let us forget and she teased me mercilessly at the party pam threw for me in sydney after the graduation ceremony. but i had always had the feeling that southern cross university, the university where i worked, being in bundjalung country, should also honour her. over quite a few years i put up this suggestion to the powers that be and in july 2010 my wishes came true when ruby gained an honorary doctorate of letters at the sydney graduation ceremony for southern cross university. i was really disappointed not to be able to attend but i know from what ruby, pam and several colleagues told me about the event it was an absolutely cheeky affair. ruby’s unmistakable sense of style and humour interrogated the pomp and splendour and the formality of the occasion, turning the solemnity on its head. but ruby is no stranger to pomp and ceremony, she has received plenty of accolades including an inaugural fellowship from the nsw ministry of the arts in 1994 and an inaugural honorary fellowship from the national museum of australia, canberra, in 1995. in 2005 she won the nsw premiers literature award and in 2007 she was named the elder of the year. in 2008, ruby was a don't dis my ability ambassador, the group’s stated aim being to change misconceptions about people with disabilities. 2010 was also the year that ruby launched my novel, beneath the grace of clouds. i had given it to both pam and ruby to read years before and ruby has sent the manuscript off to her publisher straight away with the admonishment that they “must publish this book.” sadly, coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 they didn’t, but when the novel finally came out and ruby agreed to launch it i was over the moon. in 2011, i convened an international conference on writing and ethics, titled ‘ethical imaginations: writing worlds’ for the australasian association of writing programs. the conference was in november and when ruby passed away on october 1st we decided to dedicate the conference to her. appropriately two strong aboriginal women, rhoda roberts and melissa lukashenko, were keynote speakers at the conference and bundjalung woman rhoda led the tribute to her at the opening ceremony. ruby had battled an enormous amount of physical problems that made the last years of her life extremely difficult for her. still, when she passed away, it was a shock and an enormous loss for so many people who continue to mourn her. when i sat down to write the dedication for the program i wasn’t sure how to write something that would seem adequate for such a great woman but reading it now the words still ring true: this conference is dedicated to aunty ruby: a bundjalung woman, multi awardwinning author, historian and cultural ambassador, who devoted her writing life to ‘edumacating others’ about the lives of indigenous australians. her humanity was all encompassing and amazing considering the pain and loss that walked side by side with her throughout her life. a prolific writer of nonfiction books, essays, poems and short stories, her contribution to the academy has been recognised by an inaugural doctorate of letters from latrobe university, victoria and a doctorate of letters from southern cross university, new south wales. ruby’s unique sense of humour, incisive yet compassionate view of the world and the sound of her infectious laughter will be missed by all who knew her (conway herron 2011). at the end of 2012 i will have been teaching at southern cross university for sixteen years. throughout this time ruby’s work has nurtured and nourished my own. ruby’s writing has always been passionate, sincere and heart-felt, as well as being extraordinarily well crafted. she articulates a particular experience as aboriginal mother, teacher and scholar for an australian readership in need of such material, not just at a university level, but readers of all ages and from all persuasions of life. pam ruby langford ginibi wrote and spoke of that ongoing war in australia that includes the ongoing fight to defend indigenous australian traditional lands, the fight to recognize that indigenous soldiers fought in all australia’s wars, which include the first and second world wars, korea, vietnam, and iraq. she wrote for recognition of those indigenous australians who built modern rural australia through their unpaid and unrecognized work. she wrote of terrible suffering and oppression. she also wrote of incredible heroism, sacrifice to family and community, and survival. for australia to go forward, her writing must continue to be recognized, read, and discussed. it would be shameful if her work, after her death, was put into the back of the cupboard of history, and she was disremembered and dehumanized. ruby refocused the literary community’s attention with the publication of don’t take your coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 love to town. with wry humour and raw emotion, ruby told of her struggle against the odds to keep her family together. the book was a joint recipient of the human rights commission award for literature and other writing and continues to be read as a hallmark text in australian literature. as a person and a writer ruby langford ginibi inspired admiration for her sharp intelligence and unrelenting energy. her awards and literary works, which included short stories and poetry, are evidence of a passionate individual who used humour and honesty to heal and reconnect individuals and communities. ginibi published many fulllength works following don’t take your love to town, including real deadly (1992), my bundjalung people (1994), haunted by the past (1999) and all my mob (2007). she received an honorary doctorate from la trobe university in 1998, a writers’ emeritus award from the australia council in 2005, and a special award from the nsw premier’s literary awards in 2005. one of her proudest achievements, though, was being named elder of the year (female) at the national naidoc awards in 2007. the literary legacy of ruby will continue to play a significant part in the shaping of australian literature. ruby almost single-handedly defined an entire generation of aboriginal literature. her works of fiction, poetry and autobiography will continue to inspire new generations of aboriginal writers. in a radio interview from 1992 (quoted in perera, 2011), when speaking about her second book, real deadly, ruby declared that: ‘it’s a good hope to educate people’. suvendrini perera, professor at curtin university, western australia said in her memorial to ruby, ‘those of us who had the benefit of her edu-ma-cation know just how much this hope governed her life. she spoke often of ‘bumping her gums’ to non-aboriginal people, particularly those in positions of power, and her message was clear: ‘don’t be gobbingh-miggingh [greedy guts] and take everything from us. you white people have to learn to give something back. you cannot take forever from us, because in the end, you’ll destroy yourselves too… ninginah! stop!’’ (perera, 2011, online). in statements like this ruby is asking australians to start rethinking – our collective history, our collective future, and ourselves. ruby langford ginibi’s research methods were as rigorous as any historian’s but it is the way she communicates this history that is significant. she related this history through dialogue, like a series of conversations with the people she was interviewing. rather than telling the history in chronological order, she related it as a story of each of the four research trips she made to northern new south wales. as she travels from place to place she tells us the story of the actual journey she is making and relates the history via the conversations she has at each stop on the way. this technique allowed her to easily share her research methodology throughout the book as well as relate what her sources were and the difficulties and frustrations in doing this work. ruby langford ginibi was always about sharing: about ‘edumacating’. aboriginal history has only recently and hesitatingly emerged into mainstream australian consciousness. in many cases the best sources of aboriginal history are the oral histories kept alive by the aboriginal people themselves. crimes were committed against aboriginal people. massacres did occur. aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their families. land was unjustly taken from aboriginal people. all these issues are included in my bundjalung people and referred to in most of her work. her body of work continually asks such questions as: if a crime or a morally reprehensible deed was committed, why would the coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 person who has got off with it provide evidence which could be used against them? if someone witnessed these cruel acts and benefited from them, why would they say anything? however, snippets of evidence have slipped into the archives. without the bigger picture and the inclusion of the full story as remembered by aboriginal people, a non-indigenous historian can easily overlook the significance of just a couple of sentences here and there. this is the value of aboriginal oral history. this is how aboriginal historians can help us gain a better understanding of our own history. for the interactions between aborigines and settlers in the past is a shared history – the bad as well as the good. while ruby’s stories are often personal life histories, they transcend the individual experience to tell the experience of aboriginal communities. they provide aboriginal and female perspectives on aboriginal experiences and culture. in this sense, the act of writing becomes a form of political consciousness and resistance. ruby langford ginibi has written herself, plus australian indigenous lives and communities, into the australian and international landscape and psyche. having written, ruby has started that change of perception of everything as she had always intended. that is her importance and will continue to be the significance of ruby langford ginibi. notes: allawah aboriginal hostel in granville, new south wales, part of the network of hostels established for older indigenous people to live. appropriation coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 a fundamental aspect in the history of the arts (literary, visual, musical) appropriation can be understood as the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work. in the visual arts, to appropriate means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects (or the entire form) of man-made visual culture. strategies include "re-vision, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel... pastiche, paraphrase, parody, homage, mimicry, shan-zhai, echo, allusion, intertextuality and karaoke." the term appropriation refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work (as in 'the artist uses appropriation') or refers to the new work itself (as in 'this is a piece of appropriation art'). inherent in our understanding of appropriation is the concept that the new work recontextualises whatever it borrows to create the new work. in most cases the original ‘thing’ remains accessible as the original, without change (see: 2007 protocols for producing indigenous australian visual arts, australia council for the arts, strawberry hills nsw . david unaipon (born david ngunaitponi) (28 september 1872 – 7 february 1967). david was an australian aboriginal of the ngarrindjeri people, a preacher, inventor and writer. he was the most widely known aboriginal in australia and broke stereotypes of aboriginals. unaipon is featured on the australian $50 note in commemoration. some of unaipon's traditional aboriginal stories were published in a 1930 book, myths and legends of the australian aboriginals, under the name of anthropologist william ramsay smith. they have recently been republished in their original form, under the author's name, as legendary tales of the australian aborigine. la perouse an historical aboriginal settlement. 1878 marked a change in the nature of the aboriginal community at la perouse. aboriginal people from the south coast moved to sydney to seek employment or government rations and some moved to la perouse, probably because it was a good fishing site. during the early 1880s, the parkes government was under increasing pressure to take action on aboriginal affairs and in 1882 sir henry parkes appointed george thornton as protector of aborigines. thornton believed that aboriginals should be removed from urban locations, yet he did honour the request of five aboriginal men and their families to be allowed to stay at la perouse. he justified his decision to parliament by arguing that the camp was economically viable, in contrast with other camps in sydney, which were seen as parasitic and a nuisance to society. thornton organised for huts to be built for people camped at la perouse. by 1881 there were approximately 50 aboriginal people living in two camps in the botany bay region, 35 at la perouse and the remainder at botany bay. the people were free to travel between the two camps. in 1985 yarra bay house was granted to la perouse local aboriginal land council. in 2008, there were about 420 people living in la perouse. over one-third of the population is aboriginal. in august 2005, the local aboriginal community signed a shared responsibility agreement which was intended to deliver housing improvements in return for residents paying rent to the la perouse land council and documenting their histories. the flag: the australian aboriginal flag was designed by indigenous artist harold thomas, from humpty doo in the northern territory as a way to bring all aboriginal nations together at the time of the tent embassy establishment in 1970. the flag has a black banner top representing the black history and a red banner bottom representing the sacred red ochre of coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 mother earth while central, and over the top of these two banners is a yellow circle representing the sun. referendum on may 27, 1967, 90.77% of australian voters recorded the largest ever ‘yes’ vote in a referendum to alter the australian constitution. this referendum finally enabled aboriginal people to be counted in the national census and to be subject to commonwealth laws, rather than just state laws. references australia council, 2007, protocols for producing indigenous australian visual arts, http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/32368/visual_arts_prot ocol_guide.pdf , australia council for the arts, strawberry hills nsw. barthes, r., 1977, ‘death of the author’, image music text, heath s., translator, fontana, london. cadzow, j., 2012, ‘cape crusader’, lifestyle magazine: sydney morning herald august 25th 2012, http://www.smh.com.au (accessed august 26 2012) conway-herron, j., 2003, metaphoric landscapes: writing the rainbow region’, belonging in the rainbow region, wilson h., (ed) southern cross university press, lismore. eliot,t.s., 1959, ‘burnt norton’ four quartets, published by faber & castle, london. hills e., 1997, ‘private lives: public voices: a study of australian autobiography’, a thesis submitted in the requirements for the degree of phd, dept of english, university of wollongong, wollongong. langford, r., 1998, ‘grandfather sam anderson’ australian writing now jurgensen, manfred. & adamson, robert (eds.) outrider and penguin, indooroopilly, qld. langford, r., 1988, don’t take your love town, penguin books, ringwood, australia. langford ginibi, r., 1992, real deadly, angus and robertson, sydney. langford ginibi, r., 1994, my bundjalung people, university of queensland press, st. lucia, queensland. langford ginibi, r., 1994, aboriginal traditional and customary law, law text culture, 1(1), 8-12. langford ginibi, r., 2007, all my mob, university of queensland press, st. lucia, queensland. langford ginibi, r., 2003 ‘my belonging place’, belonging in the rainbow region: cultural perspectives on the nsw north coast, wilson h. (ed) lismore: southern cross university press. langford ginibi, r., 2011, all ginibi's mob: all our voice, collected by ruby langford ginibi, jacklyn, m., (ed.) published in association with the riawunna centre at the university of tasmania, by ginninderra press, port adelaide, south australia. little, j., 1994, ‘talking with ruby langford ginibi’, hecate, vol. 20, no. 1, queensland coolabah, no.8, 2012, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 university press, brisbane. liverani, m. r., 1992, ‘from outside, without insight’, the weekend australian, news limited, sydney. mcdonnell, m., 2004, ‘protocols, political correctness and discomfort zones; indigenous life writing and non-indigenous editing’ hecate, vol 30 no. 1, brisbane, queensland. nyoongah, little j., 1998, ‘that’s doctor ginibi to you: hard lessons in the history and publication of ruby langford ginibi,’ southerly, winter 1998, published by the english association, sydney. little nyoongah, j., 2002, ‘talking with ruby langford ginibi’, approaches to don’t take your love to town, van toorn, p., (ed) http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr/publ_ruby/ruby.htm, australian women’s studies association, brisbane (accessed 12 august 2012). perera, s., 2011, ‘the passing of a great story teller’, www.indymedia.org.au, (accessed august 26 2012). ravenscroft, a., 2012, the postcolonial eye: white australian desire and the visual field of race, ashgate, surrey england, burlington usa. roughsey, e., 1984, aboriginal mother tells tales of old and new, mcphee gribble, australia. tucker, m., 1977, if everyone cared: autobiography of margaret tucker, ure smith, sydney. watson, c., 1999, ‘interview with ruby langford ginibi and penny van toorn’, hecate, vol 25 no. 2, brisbane, queensland. west, i., 1987, pride against prejudice: reminiscences of a tasmanian aboriginal, australian institute of aboriginal studies, canberra. microsoft word ommundsen 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 220 brave new world: myth and migration in recent asian-australian picture books wenche ommundsen abstract: from exodus to the american dream, from terra nullius to the yellow peril to multicultural harmony, migration has provided a rich source of myth throughout human history. it engenders dreams, fears and memories in both migrant and resident populations; giving rise to hope for a new start and a bright future, feelings of exile and alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction. it has inspired artists and writers from the time of the ancient testament to the contemporary age of globalisation and mass migration and it has exercised the minds of politicians from greek and roman times to our era of detention centres and temporary visas. this reading of asian-australian picture books will focus on immigrants’ perception of the ‘new worlds’ of america and australia. the peasant prince, a picture-book version of li cunxin’s best-selling autobiography mao’s last dancer, sets up tensions between individual ambition and belonging, illustrated by contrasts between the chinese story ‘the frog in the well’ and the western fairy-tale of cinderella, to which li cunxin’s own trajectory from poor peasant boy in a chinese village to international ballet star is explicitly related. shaun tan’s the lost thing and the arrival trace the journey from alienation to belonging by means of fantasy worlds encompassing both utopic and dystopic visions. by way of a conclusion, the paper considers the nature of myth as evoked and dramatised in these texts, contrasting the idea of myth as eternal truth with roland barthes’ insistence that myth is a mechanism which transforms history into nature. keywords: myths of migration, picture books, asian-australian writing from exodus to the american dream, from terra nullius to the yellow peril to multicultural harmony, migration has provided a rich source of myth throughout human history. it engenders dreams, fears and memories in both migrant and resident populations; giving rise to hope for a new start and a bright future, feelings of exile and alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction. it has inspired artists and writers from the time of the ancient testament to the age of globalisation and mass migration and it has exercised the minds of politicians from greek antiquity to our era of detention centres and temporary visas. to locate my reading of recent stories of migration by two asian-australian writers, i start by a reminder of one of the most influential myths of migration in modern times: copyright ©2009 wenche ommundsen. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 221 the new colossus not like the brazen giant of greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land; here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name mother of exiles. from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips. "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, i lift my lamp beside the golden door!" emma lazarus’ powerful statement, engraved at the base of the statue of liberty, offers the wretched of the earth new hopes of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. her vision of the new world as a refuge for the exiles the old has obtained mythic status as the american dream – a dream ritually evoked though not always confirmed by legislation and social practice. in australia, a pale and less poetically stirring echo of the new world’s pledge to its migrant arrivals has found its way into the national anthem: for those who’ve come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share as in the us, but with different inflections and different challenges, the australian national consciousness was originally conceived of, and remains, as a nation of migrants; the kind of migrant, and their mode of belonging, have been issues of debate and contestation throughout the nation’s short history. li cunxin, the peasant prince as suggested by the title of the picture-book version of li cunxin’s autobiography mao’s last dancer, his life reads like a fairytale. the story begins: some time ago, in a remote village in northern china, a small peasant boy lived with his parents and six brothers in a tiny brick house. they were very poor. (n.p.) born in 1961, li entered school at the time of the cultural revolution. at 11 he was selected as a peasant student to madame mao’s dance academy in beijing. initially showing little promise, he worked his way up to become the star student of the academy, and was selected for a scholarship to the us. he later returned to dance with the houston ballet and eventually defected, causing a diplomatic rift between china and the us. he went on to become an international ballet star, dancing with some of the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 222 world’s greatest companies. he married an australian ballerina, mary mckendry, and spent the final years of his dancing career as principal artist with the australian ballet. when he retired he became a stockbroker. his autobiography, published in 2003, was a best-seller. it has been rewritten in two different versions for children (li 2005 and 2007) and is currently being made into a film. li lives in melbourne and is in strong demand on the motivational speaker circuit. a central place in the account of the young boy’s growing consciousness of the world is the story of the frog in the well, told by his father. in the picture book it reads as follows: once upon a time, a little frog lived in a deep, dark well. it was its only home. one day, he met a frog from the world above. ’come down and play with me!’ begged the frog in the well. the frog from the world above laughed. ‘my world up here is much bigger!’ the frog in the well was very annoyed, so he told his father what he’d heard. ’my son,’ his father said with a sad heart, ‘i have heard there is a bigger and better world up there. but our life is here, in the well. there is no way we can get out.’ ’i want to see what is out there!’ cried the little frog. but even though he jumped and hopped, the well was just too deep. ’it is no use, my son,’ said his father. ’i have tried all my life to get out.’ still, he little frog kept on trying to escape from that deep, dark well… (n.p.) the tension between the desire to see the big world and resignation to one’s allotted smaller place structures the narrative throughout. in the adult version, the danger of wanting what one cannot have is given stronger emphasis by the father frog: ‘be satisfied with what you have, or it will cause you such misery in life.’ (53) this tension later echoes in the boy’s competing desires: to be with his family or to further his career away from them. he chooses his career, freedom, and america, but is tormented by longing for his family. their later reunions, both when his parents visit the us and during his later visits to china, are described as his happiest moments. the picture book omits another formative story from li’s childhood, that of brave hero the cricket, who sacrifices himself for the sake of his family. as it happens, li’s decision to defect to the us potentially means the sacrifice of his family, as they might have been punished in his stead. the narrator, instead, insists on the benefits his family derives from his success. the political dimension of his conflict is included in an appendix ‘about li’s china’ in the picture book, which tells of hardships and political repression under mao; in the adult version there are detailed descriptions of deprivation and political indoctrination. america is seemingly devoid of political agendas: mao’s last dancer makes frequent use of the word freedom but does not elaborate of what this freedom implies. li’s defection is presented as motivated by love for his first wife, and the intervention of barbara bush, mother of the current us president, as a personal favour rather than a political gesture. in the peasant prince, the migrant story is a cinderella-type, rags-to-riches account which confirms the american dream in an coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 223 almost feature-less america: in order to represent the land of freedom and opportunity it must be presented as a benevolent neutrality. shaun tan, the lost thing unlike li cunxin’s account of migration, shaun tan’s books focus primarily on the migrant’s encounter with a host society. the lost thing is not explicitly about migration at all, though it is about belonging and not belonging, and reading the lost thing of the title as a figure for the lonely, displaced and unwanted migrant is offered as a strong possibility (see dudek 2006). the story is about a young boy who, in a grim urbanindustrial landscape comes across a lost thing, an incongruous hybrid between a crab and a furnace, and tries to find out where it belongs. nobody claims it and he takes it home, but his parents tell him to get rid of it. he takes it to the government ‘department of odds and ends’ where a helpful worker suggests that he instead seek out a secret place marked by a squiggly arrow. identified as ut☼qia, this place contains large numbers of odd creatures going about their business undisturbed by the rest of the world. the lost thing seems to like the place and the boy leaves it there and returns to his own humdrum life a city populated by zombie-like people obsessed with order and bureaucratic obfuscation. the lost thing is a many-layered, visually and verbally inventive text which cannot be pinned down to a single reading. several visual clues point to australia as its primary referent: parodies of well-known australian paintings such as jeffrey smart’s cahill expressway, john brack’s collins street 5pm, or edward hopper’s early sunday morning. two alternative visions of australia are offered. one is clearly marked as dystopic: a grim, cheerless, uniform and unwelcoming cityscape. the other by contrast has utopian potential: ‘a delightfully implausible, otherworldly landscape, where all the elements appear to exist in a state of harmonious chaos.’ (mallan 2005) debra dudek (2006) reads this contrast as alternative models for australia’s treatment of racially different migrants. shaun tan, the arrival shan tan’s next book, the arrival is not so much a picture book as a graphic novel. it is wordless, telling the story by means of pictures in the form of a photo album, in which sepia tones, clothing and artefacts point to an early-20 th century setting. the photorealism of the character portrayal is in sharp contrast to the fantasy elements of the flora, fauna and cityscapes of the new world. the arrival, according to one reviewer, ‘tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story’ (yang 2007) – it is archetypal in its representation of loss, displacement, bewilderment and gradual accommodation within a new community. the main story depicts a man escaping an indefinite threat in the form of a dragon-like creature circling a bleak, forbidding city. he bids his wife and daughter farewell and travels by train and ship to a city of weird sky-scrapers, giant statues and incomprehensible signs. initially lonely and lost, he is eventually befriended and helped by other migrants, who tell their own stories of escape from war, persecution and deprivation. over time, he manages to save enough to bring his family out to join him, and the story ends on a family reunion, and on the image of his daughter helping another lost migrant find her way in the bewildering city. the universality of the migrant theme is underscored by the ethnic variety in the portrait gallery on the front and back inner covers. shaun tan has explained that he took his inspiration from coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 224 museums of immigration and the history of ellis island but also from the experience of his own father, who came to australia from malaysia in 1960 (tan 2008). some images clearly point to new york in the early years of the 20 th century, but there are also allusions to australia, particularly in tan’s reworking of the famous tom roberts painting coming south. the new world, as depicted in the arrival, is an altogether more welcoming place than the bleak city of the lost thing. because of the migrants’ baggage of suffering and loss, and the difficulty in finding their way in what seems a totally alien universe, migration is portrayed as a traumatic experience, but the overwhelming feeling is one of hope: there is genuine companionship between migrants of different backgrounds and even the bewildering cityscape and outlandish creatures turn out to be benevolent. once deciphered, this is a place where dreams can come true, whether american, australian or universal. myth and history to conclude, i want to take a closer look at the mythic dimension of the migrant stories considered here. according to one conception of myth, it is the domain of archetypal stories and eternal truths, the point where the particular and the universal come together to reveal deep knowledge about human life unchanged by culture and history. thus, the cinderella tale, which exists in practically every culture, is an expression of human longing for a better life, for fulfilment and happiness, and its enactment through the american dream or through numerous stories of migrant hardship, perseverance and success, strike deep chords in readerships across all age groups and historical circumstances. the problem with such readings of myth is what they tend to leave out. human suffering may be universal, but there is nothing ‘generic’ about the cultural revolution, and the migrant histories of america and australia are distinct and offer huge variations: ballet stars and boat people do not have the same experience, a malaysian chinese coming to australia today would encounter a society quite different from that of the 1960s. it is perhaps not so much the myths themselves, but the way they are read, that can lead to sweeping generalisations about matters that need to be understood in their historical specificities. in the case of children’s literature, often read, and taught, as valuable lessons about the real world, there is to my view a dangerous tendency to disregard the difference between myth and reality and to read the most distinctive feature of myth, its fantasy element, as transparent allegory or thinly disguised fact. in shaun tan’s the lost thing, the boy and his lost charge visit the marvellously depicted ‘department of odds and ends’, whose latin motto reads: ‘sweepus underum carpetae.’ this could also be the motto for another reading practice: what objects, facts, troublesome historical realities have been swept under the carpet in order for myths to be read as universally true? roland barthes’ very different conception of myth is a useful point of departure for such an analysis. ‘there are no eternal myths,’ he writes in his well-known essay ‘myth today’; myth is instead defined as a ‘type of speech’ or ‘second-order semiological system’ determined by history (barthes 1973). myth is depoliticised speech, transforming history into nature; it is precisely, it would seem, the mechanism by which the social, cultural and political processes which shape our reality are swept under the carpet to produce the orderly stories we tell about our world. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 225 reading the peasant prince with a view to the realities overshadowed by its mythic sweep, we may question its insistence on family values against evidence of overarching personal ambition. in particular we may wish to compare the account of political indoctrination in china with the total absence of any analysis of america’s political climate, or even take the liberty of highlighting li’s connection to the bush family to compare his use of the word ‘freedom’ to the rhetoric of the current us president when justifying, for example, the war in iraq. we may question his story’s legitimacy as a version of the american dream given his hugely privileged position as a migrant of exceptional talent. we may wonder at the near-total absence of any reference to his subsequent migration to australia. we may ask what role the preconceptions of the target (western) readership for li’s book played in shaping the story. shan tan’s work is more resistant to easy deconstruction of its messages. his texts delight in paradox and playful complexity: a later roland barthes would refer to them as writerly as opposed to li’s readerly narrative (barthes 1970). the question is more whether, and how, such books can teach young readers about the world. what ‘truths’, if any, do they have to offer about the life of migrants, in america, in australia, a century ago and today? there is no doubt about the explicit allusions: the barely readable ‘what about the howard government?’ as an illustration of ‘a perfect vacuum’ in the lost thing, and teasing reminders of john howard’s ideal a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ society. 1 but these allusions are often ambiguous. is ut☼qia really offered as a utopic alternative to the dystopic city in the lost thing, as both mallan and dudek suggest, or does the odd spelling also hint at other, less hopeful readings: if this is a vision of multicultural australia, could the refuge for misfits instead be read as a kind of ‘ethnic zoo’, or even a detention centre? in the arrival, a close look at tan’s version of coming south reveals that the migrants are different from those in tom roberts’ original: gone are the pastel colours, the bonnets, the elaborate gowns and the relaxed attitudes. tan’s ship is more crowded, his migrants are covering themselves in shawls, huddled against hostile elements. unlike roberts’ english settlers, they are poor: their search for a new life is motivated by desperation, not adventure. in this sense they are more truly like the ‘homeless, tempest-tost’ masses of lazarus’ poem. in fact, the inhabitants of the promised land in the arrival are all refugees of some kind, and tan’s migrant portrait gallery is dominated by ethnic minorities. representatives of dominant anglo mainstreams are nowhere to be found, nor are there any comfortable economic or business migrants of the kind that outnumber all other categories in the current migrant intake of both the us and australia. the new world of the arrival, for all its semblance of photo-realist characterisation, is offered as a migrant dream, a fantasy which, in my reading, is much more utopian than the secret refuge for misfits in the lost thing. it is a world dominated by cultural difference but socio-economic sameness and solidarity: a community of strangers bonding through shared experience of hardship. it is nothing like america, or australia, in the past or today. shaun tan’s verbal and visual heteroglossia reward sophisticated reading practices. tan has himself questioned the assumption that picture books are only for children. (tan n.d.), but they are also for children, which again raises the question of how they should be read. reading his utopic/dystopic fantasy worlds as allegories which can easily be translated into ideals for lived reality is a temptation i would prefer to avoid. learning to read myth as myth, gaining a deeper understanding of how myth informs the imagination which in turn underpins our construction of reality, is a greater challenge coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 226 but a much more productive practice if we want to teach ourselves, and younger readers, to read for cultural understanding as well as cultural difference. references barthes, r. mythologies. a. lavers (trans). new york: hill & wang, 1973. barthes, r. s/z. paris : editions du seuil, 1970 dudek, d. ¨desiring perception: finding utopian impulses in shaun tan’s ´the lost thing.´¨ papers, 15:2, pp.58-66, 2005. dudek, d. ¨dogboys and lost things; or anchoring a floating signifier: race and critical multiculturalism.¨ ariel, 37:4, pp.1-20, 2006. li, c. mao’s last dancer. camberwell: viking/penguin, 2003. li, c. mao’s last dancer. young readers’ edition. camberwell: puffin books, 2005. li, c. the peasant prince. camberwell: viking/penguin, 2007. mallan, k. m. ¨trash aesthetics and utopian memory: ´the tip at the end of the street´ and ´the lost thing.´¨ bookbird, 43 :1, pp.28-34, 2005. tan, s. the lost thing. south melbourne: lothian books, 2000. tan, s. the arrival. south melbourne: lothian books, 2006. tan, s. ¨strangers in strange lands.¨ viewpoint, 14:4, pp. 4-7, 2008. tan, s. (n.d.) ¨picture books: who are they for?¨ from shaun tan’s website http://www.shauntan.net/images/whypicbooks.pdf, accessed 22 september, 2008. yang, g. l. ¨stranger in a strange land.¨ review of shaun tan, ´the arrival´. new york times book review, nov. 11, p.21, 2007. wenche ommundsen is professor of english literatures and associate dean for research at the university of wollongong, australia. she has published widely on multicultural and diasporic literatures, with particular attention to writing from asian diasporas. her current research projects include a study of multiculturalism in children’s literature, a survey of asian-australian literary interactions and, in collaboration with the literature board of the australia council for the arts, the mapping of literary infrastructure in australia. 1 i owe some of these observations to the detective work of my colleague debra dudek (see dudek 2005 and 2006). microsoft word coolabahlachlan coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 poetry by lachlan brown in translation as a result of lachalns brown’s visit to the centre d’estudis australians – australian studies centre at the universitat de barcelona bill phillips translated some of his work into catalan, laura lópez into spanish and victoria dimitrova into bulgarian. as always the poetry is presented in bi-lingual format. the translators, guest editor carles serra and the centre would like to thank lachlan for his generosity to us all. copyright ©2010 lachlan brown. translation: bill phillips, victoria vladimirova dimitrova and laura lópez peña this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 disbelief listen, you sceptics! take heed before you crush the world with the cruel hammer of reason! there is a young child in paris who has remembered the city streets by heart. every evening he recites them in his father’s sushi-bar, holding only a small directory that is seldom opened. like a warlord he sends waves of delivery boys onto narrow laneways, taking routes that many have since declared to be impossible. i have seen this child, kneeling upon a chair, his small hands arranging a table, his lips murmuring directions that must be followed. he sits amidst steaming bowls of white rice, and his father’s quick knife slices through night and air. lachlan brown incredulitat escolteu-me, escèptics! vigileu abans d’aixafar el món amb el martell cruel de la raó! hi ha un nen petit de parís que sap els carrers de la ciutat de memòria. cada tarda els recita al bar de sushi del seu pare, a les mans només una guia petita que gairebé no obre mai. com un senyor de la guerra envia onades de nens repartidors als carrerons, fent servir rutes que molts han declarat, després, impossibles. he vist aquest nen, agenollat en una cadira, les seves manetes parant taula, els llavis xiuxiuejant instruccions que cal seguir. s’asseu entre tasses vaporoses d’arròs blanc mentre el ganivet ràpid del seu pare retalla la nit i l’aire. catalan version translated by bill phillips incredulidad ¡escuchad, escépticos! ¡prestad atención antes de que aplastéis el mundo con el cruel martillo de la razón! hay un niño en parís que conoce de memoria las calles de la ciudad. cada noche las recita en el sushi-bar de su padre, mientras sostiene un diminuto directorio que raramente abre. como un general, el chico envía a mareas de repartidores por estrechas callejuelas tomando rutas que coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 muchos creen intransitables. yo he visto a este niño, arrodillado sobre una silla, sus pequeñas manos preparando una mesa, sus labios murmurando direcciones que deben seguirse. él se sienta en medio de humeantes platos de arroz blanco, y el veloz cuchillo de su padre corta la noche y el aire. spanish version translated by laura lópez peña five stories i. a woman was irritated on a crowded metro. but she did not fully express her emotions. ii. workmen placed a scaffold over a laneway, so that metal rested alongside brown stone. i walked beneath and imagined the world collapsing. iii. there was a child who had grown too large for his pram. he wept into his father’s chest. perhaps he was spoilt. perhaps he had lost something he could not ever recover. iv. a famous man visited a hospital. a group of journalists and photographers followed him, claiming his steps with their black cameras. he walked and smiled and joked. his wisp of white hair shone in the afternoon sun. this man was not famous to me. v. we climbed a hill on the edge of the city. rooves tumbled into one another. the ocean made the distance seem very calm. turning, we discovered that we were not on the edge of the city. cinco historias i. una mujer viajaba irritada en un metro lleno de gente. pero no expresaba plenamente cómo se sentía. coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 ii. ciertos trabajadores colocaron un andamio en un callejón, de manera que el metal quedaba apoyado sobre la piedra marrón. yo caminaba por debajo e imaginaba que el mundo se derrumbaba. iii. había una vez un niño que había crecido demasiado para su cochecito. él lloraba en el pecho de su padre. quizás era un niño mimado. quizás había perdido algo que ya no podría recuperar nunca más. iv: un hombre famoso visitaba un hospital. un grupo de periodistas y de fotógrafos le seguían, capturando cada paso con sus cámaras negras. él caminaba y sonreía y bromeaba. el sol de la tarde iluminaba su mechón de pelo blanco. este hombre para mí no era famoso. v: subimos a una colina situada en las afueras de la ciudad. los tejados tropezaban los unos con los otros. el océano conseguía que la distancia pareciese muy tranquila. al girarnos, descubrimos que no estábamos en las afueras de la ciudad. translated by laura lópez peña response take care, or you will discover that you live for nothing at all, or else for small victories alone. so often we collect these and hold them against the world, until they become a seawall and all things must break upon their concrete edges. i urge you, yet again, as the light skims this quiet ocean, to let go of all these tiny towers, even now they are crumbling in your hands. i am answering a difficult question, what must i do within this darkness? an empty cart passes, rattling the night coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 отговор внимавай, или ще откриеш, че живееш напразно, или за малки победи само. толкова често ние ги събираме и ги държим срещу света, докато не се превърнат в морска стена и всичко което се случва се чупи пред нея. умолявам ви още веднъж, както светлината проблясва в този океан, да забравите тези малки кули, дори сега да се рушат във вашите ръце. отговарям на сложен въпрос, какво трябва да правя в тази тъмнина? празна каляска минава, озвучаваща нощта. translated by victoria vladimirova dimitrova coolabah, vol.4, 2010, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 searching for the fantastic: an australian case anne holden rønning university of bergen, norway achrroen@online.no copyright©2016 anne holden rønning. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: fantasy is the ability of the imagination to visualize and textualize nonexistent worlds as real. it is an escape to an imaginary present or past, but often expresses direct criticism of the real world or moral issues. the relation between fantasy literature and myth, the fairytale, and legends is highly complex. is fantasy and the fantastic just the strange and unknown, and what is its purpose? is it only imaginary worlds that can be defined as such and what is the role of the reader/listener in interpreting these texts as fantasy? this article will discuss what we mean by fantasy literature in relation to a recent collection of novellas, legends of australian fantasy, their use of myth and its literary expression. key words: fantasy, australia, myth, the fantastic. writers of the fantasy and the fantastic deal with other worlds, about people and places that do not exist and frequently have a subtext expressing critique of contemporary issues and attitudes. adult fantasies such as george orwell’s animal farm (1945) and richard adams’ watership down (1972) are examples of this. fantasy has always been closely linked to fairytales, myth and legend, and the creation of utopian and dystopian worlds. fantasy texts are thus not a contemporary phenomenon but have been written for over 200 years with differing foci, as sandner writes: fantastic literature emerges as a site for critical debate in the eighteenth century, partly as a result of an increasing disbelief in but continued fascination with the supernatural, partly as a negative by-product of arguments for the realistic novel and, perhaps most importantly, as a vital component of the emergent discourse of the sublime. (2004: 6) since the eighteenth century fantasy texts have developed to cover a vast range of aspects of life. according to the oxford dictionary of literary terms fantasy is “any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the mailto:achrroen@online.no 54 known world.” this, of course, covers several genres but one fundamental feature of fantasy texts is an imagined world where magic plays an important role. magic has its own code and redefines things in the world it writes of, disrupting time, resulting in a realistic framework with unrealistic events and people. the bedford glossary, quoting yeats’s a vision as an example, defines fantasy as the power to create out of nothing and therefore closely linked to myth — it is a mythopoeic force as a framework for a literary work (1997: 231). a text of fantasy has certain characteristic features: another world, and impossible, mysterious, supernatural primary events are central, as well as a willingness to reject the external world of realism and believe in the portrayal of the other world and its happenings. stereotypical characters rather than individuals, and intertextuality, questions of style, tropes, language and theme are all significant elements in fantasy writing. the ending is often contrived thus dragging us in on a round of implausible events. more than any other genre fantasy literature and films open up for various interpretations. the role of the reader is central in determining theme and social codes in fantasy texts — the known which is made unknown, recognizable yet strange — since fantasy plays on the imagination of the reader and his/her ability to visualize the setting, and thus feel involved in what is happening. in james and mendlesohn it is suggested that there are “four distinct modes of fantasy … the portal quest, (enters the world), the immersive (is part of the fantasy world), the intrusion (the fantastic breaks into the primary world) and the liminal (magic might or might not happen)” (2012: 2). a recipe for a fantasy story would go something like this: take a mediaeval world, a problem or prophecy, one ordinary, naïve hero/ine, and a very evil villain with a blind spot. add mythological creatures and nonhumans, and a wise old advisor to resolve the situation (see attebery 1992: 10). as attebery points out, “fantasy depends on mimesis for its effectiveness” (1992: 4). our infant sense of wonder is engendered by fantasy. we never really lose this, as any parent reading to children notices — the sense that in fantasy characters can do anything. man is by nature curious, and fairytales satisfy the role of curiosity in people of all ages, as well as the imagination of childhood, leading to what coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith.” in “the fantastic imagination” (1890) george macdonald wrote that his tales are not for children “but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five” (cited in sandner 2004: 67), a view also held by walter scott in “on the supernatural in fictitious composition” where he warns against overuse of the fantastic: “the marvellous, more than any other attribute of fictitious narrative, loses its effect by being brought too much into view. the imagination of the reader is to be excited if possible, without being gratified” (cited in sandner 2004: 53). one can ask whether this is what happens in some of the stories in legends, for example garth nix’s to hold the bridge: an old kingdom story which is about proving one’s worth as a soldier — an initiation story. the system in the old kingdom is hierarchical, and in this world of charter magic the protagonist is finally successful. by doing so he is accepted and guaranteed a life without problems. in several of the novellas in this collection the magic/fantastic element is either too repetitive or too well-known to inspire the reader’s imagination. reading these novellas i frequently felt that i had read the same story before — much of it presented nothing new or inventive. although we can say that an essential feature of fantasy is its repetition of the known, to awake interest it needs, as sandner and le guin have 55 pointed out, to have a different approach. the similarity of several of the novellas in this collection means the anthology as a whole lacks vibrancy. we can ask whether the fantasy character appeals to our sense of our own other — a being we would like to be or not. gaining a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ may be problematic for the modern reader with his/her scepticism, since fantasy requires readers to accept as fact what is not in fact real, but also to play on their own actual and fictive experiences. the visualization of fantasy in the social media in today’s world bridges a gap to the real, so the viewer is deprived of the ability to imagine freely what the scene and setting and characters look like. this might explain the editors’ standpoint in legends of australian fantasy — many of the novellas play into the hands of those brought up on star wars and other media rather than tales of old. in the introduction to his novella the spark (a romance in four acts): a tale of the change sean williams states his inspiration from star wars, clashes between magical worlds, and the misuse of power. the tale shows some semblance to the wicked queen or stepmother of fairy stories, and the effects of jealousy, but the ‘tricks’ are very modern such as balls of fire and things and people that explode, so it reads as a combination of star wars effects and settings, combined with traditional fantasy tales from earlier periods, portraying imaginary people and worlds with human frailties and feelings. the structure of the fantasy story has been the subject of much criticism. george macdonald compared it to a sonata, with differing parts, each with their own characteristics, the problem, the path to solving it, and the final solution. others, including tolkien, have underscored the structure of fantasy as essentially that of the fairy story, and for tolkien also the rhetoric of the same. tolkien saw the fantastic as a function of language, so the use of rhetoric becomes central, including the use of coincidence, repetition, foreshadowing, and variation between everyday speech and archaic forms. eric rabkin comments on an archetypal language that follows certain rules. “one of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted” (as when flowers talk) (sandner 2004: 168-170). this to me is very evident in the texts in legends, where the characters are given forms of speech inappropriate to the register of the rest of the text. both the above critics, as others, do not make a clear distinction between fantasy and the fantastic apart from indicating that the fantastic has its basis in language rather than content, an issue for discussion i have chosen not to include in this article. in her 1973 essay “from elfland to poughkeepsie” ursula le guin insisted on the importance of style. she suggests that at one level fantasy is a game and therefore has affinity with dreams (cf. freud), but at another level “[i]t is not antirational but pararational, not realistic, but surrealistic, a heightening of reality … a different approach to reality” (cited in sandner 2004: 145). attebery seems to agree with le guin when he writes that “[a]s a way of filling in the empty fictional space, narrators refer the reader to the european fairy tale and romance tradition” [but] “borrowing a milieu from old stories is likely to result in settings that seem flimsy and flat, like cardboard stage sets” as many writers lack an extensive knowledge of the mediaeval and ancient world. (132-133). le guin, too, is critical of the amount of imitation in fantasy writing, and authors’ lack of linguistic skill, an essential prerequisite for making the reader believe that what they are reading is impossible, yet credible. as she points out “a fantasy is a journey. it is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. like 56 psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous, and it will change you” (153). but this change will only take place if we believe somehow in the story told. the difference between the folktale and the ambiguous tale of fantasy lies in the fact that in the folktale everything fits together in the end whereas in the ambiguous tale “we are left with two or more mutually contradictory patterns, like puzzle pieces that can fit together to make a triangle, a circle, a star, but with a gap somewhere in each design” (sandner 2004: 24). both myths and legends are based on group interaction, a collective unconscious, even a collective memory — but modern fantasy does not do this, it is more an escape to another world, often without closure. as manlove has suggested, “modern fantasy tends to be far more self-conscious, ratiocinative, cultural, and descriptive than, say, the traditional fairy tale” (cited in schlobin 1982: 26). one of the issues when discussing fantasy is how far we should differentiate between that, gothic writing, and science fiction texts. there is a general consensus among many critics that “fantasy is about the construction of the impossible, whereas science fiction may be about the unlikely” (james and mendlesohn 2012: 1). some of the novellas in this anthology have a strong science fiction element, the theme being more unlikely than impossible. this may be one of the problems raised by this anthology given its title of legends since in other countries science fiction and fantasy are considered separate genres. it appears that in australia, fantasy and science fiction are grouped together as regards encyclopaedia inclusions, and in the many awards and meetings for writers of these genres.i i am aware that many critics would distinguish clearly between the gothic and fantasy, but in many texts the two overlap. gothic writing appeared in the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century as seen in the works of ann radcliffe such as the mysteries of udolpho (1794), and horace walpole’s the castle of otranto (1764), the same period that saw the first publication of grimm’s fairy tales in 1812. the gothic mode provided the language and setting, and discursive structures to represent the unrepresentable as turcotte says (2005: 3). in my opinion gothic writing plays on the reader’s sense of the abnormal and uncanny, also in freudian terms as in mary shelley’s frankenstein; in other words it is read in relation to a possible realistic situation, whereas fantasy has free limits to indulge in imaginary worlds of people, and, in some literature, talking animals. in the australian literature review rowena cory daniells writes on some of the reasons for the current popularity of the fantasy genre. she defines all such stories as “the exploration of the human condition” whether in ancient times, children’s literature, or contemporary fantasy. further she posits it as an escape from modern life issues and “an antidote to cynicism” (online). whilst i would agree with her, there is another aspect often overlooked by literary critics, especially in relation to contemporary society. in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century we need to see contemporary fantasy literature against the background of star wars films, ben 10, computer and digital games on which a whole generation has been brought up. the imaginary world is not just in the mind, but has been visualised by film directors and in tv programmes as well as in short videos in the social media to illustrate and advertise books, music etc. in a world where man has walked on the moon, built a space station to which astronauts can travel and live, the whole concept of escape to another unknown world is not as strange as for previous generations, as is well illustrated in the filmatization of lord of the rings, watership down and the hobbit, (filmatizations which put a different slant 57 on the original texts), as well as avatar and other similar films and tv series. this is one way of trying to understand the globalization of our world and disintegration of national identities, for as jane yolen has suggested in “fabling to the near night” (2000) “fantasy tales are as much of their time as beyond it“ (cited in sandner 2004: 328). the fantastic in australia in the literature being written in the late nineteenth century by australian authors fantasy does not play any significant part, if at all. we see a prevalence of works of social realism focusing on the search for an australian identity, and social issues of the time including women’s rights and heredity. writers such as catherine helen spence, miles franklin, the henry lawson stories and the creation of the concept of mateship dominate the literary scene. the colonial situation played a significant role at two levels. first, unlike other british colonies, there was no obvious mythology or folklore that could parallel or counteract that which the colonists brought with them. secondly, authors tended to concentrate on explaining what the country was like and living conditions for the people there. at that time australia was still seeking to find itself and its identity as a nation, with little or no room for imagined worlds of fantasy. though the landscape might have been seen as having strong elements of the fantastic, daily life trying to survive in a harsh and strange environment did not make it a source for writing about imaginary worlds. maybe fantasy is a luxury for an established literary audience or authorship. it is primarily around the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century that we find australian texts that can be termed fantasy, though labelling them thus is highly controversial. in 1896 k. langloh parker published australian legendary tales of “the legends of the narran tribe, known among themselves as noongahburrahs” (1998: x) with a very negative introduction by andrew lang. parker saw this as a way of presenting aboriginal tales for non-aboriginal children and preserving these tales from a ‘dying race,’ though lang’s introduction sees them as “a savage edition of the metamorphoses, …[which were] a very late and very artificial version of traditional tales as savage in origin as those of the noongaburrah” (xv). another text of the period that deals with the fantasy is g. firth’s the last lemurian (1898) about reincarnation, lost races and cities in north western australia. the collection of aboriginal tales by david unaipon in the 1920s legendary tales of the australian aborigines and the manner in which they were republished in the 1930s, the lack of recognition given to his work until late in the twentieth century, as well as political correctness, have also played a role in why australian writers have been reluctant to use indigenous legends in fantasy literature. australian texts of fantasy written for children have, however, existed throughout the twentieth century, such as patrick wrightson’s the nargun and the star (1972) and the trilogy the ice is coming (1977) which draws on aboriginal mythology. in 2010 jack dann and jonathan strahan published legends of australian fantasy, an anthology of novellas by the most prize-winning and applauded contemporary writers of fantasy in australia and who also have a good following abroad. several of the authors have also written fantasy series, and some of the texts are related directly or indirectly to those. these stories cover a wide range, from the more traditional quest romance to a 58 dark world of evil in an unresolved unhappy ending. they portray worlds that are not of today, but although bearing strong resemblances to the world of mediaeval literature they are quasi-mediaeval, especially those by garth nix, ian irvine and kim wilkins. those by isobelle carmody, jennifer fallon and trudi canavan deal with magic and magical persons, others with conflicts between religions, as that by d.m. cornish, and more than one has a strong irish folklore background. the relation of these novellas to australia is ambiguous, and raises a question of whether fantasy can be national, or is it always universal, especially in setting. most of the authors in legends of australian fantasy have also written for children, though these novellas are admittedly written more for adults given themes such as seduction, and the selling of body parts. in their introduction dann and strahan state that epic fantasy literature in australia first became a phenomenon in the 1980s. they distinguish between epic fantasy stories and ‘ordinary’ fantasy stories for children: “it took until 1995 for australia to produce its first bona fide bestselling fantasy writer. that year sara douglas’s battle axes came out.” she was the first australian author to be signed to the harpercollins fantasy list (x). the editors of this collection raise a problematic issue by using such a narrow definition of fantasy, linking it to epic works such as lord of the rings and harry potter. they suggest that donald wolheim’s unauthorized publication of the paperback edition of tolkien’s lord of the rings in 1964 in america marked a watershed in adult reader’s response to what they term “secondary-world fantasy” — a view british readers of fantasy literature would contest. further they maintain that tolkien “became the first-ever fantasy bestseller” (ix) — again a debatable view, given that authors such as h.g. wells and c.s. lewis had already published tales of fantasy, and the fact that tolkien was first published in the mid-1950s. since c.s. lewis and tolkien were good friends it is not surprising that they published fantasy tales around the same time. though it might be tempting to discuss these novellas in relation to the series the authors are known for, especially since many, such as jennifer fallon and garth nix, have written several series, i have chosen in this article to discuss them as independent pieces of fantasy prose not linked to the other books and not interpreted as part of a larger scheme. looking at how these novellas and the authors’ own afterwords fit into the genre ‘fantasy’ will elucidate at least some aspects of fantasy written by australians. folklore and myth as setting in australian fantasy stories as mentioned earlier there is a certain tradition in modern fantasy, following tolkien, to set the story in a quasi-mediaeval setting. this was tolkien’s scholarly world, the world of beowulf, and he had mastery of this in a way others do not. in this anthology irish folklore is one of the settings both juliet marillier and cecilia dart-thornton draw on. in an interview juliet marillier admits that her “novels are a blend of folkloric fantasy, history, romance and family saga”, and says she sees her books as appealing “not only to fantasy readers, but to readers of historical romance who like celtic settings and a touch of folklore magic” (online). when asked whether she creates the worlds herself marillier replied: i have used traditional stories a few times, though rewritten in my own words, but more often i have made up new stories in the mode of folklore. it’s not difficult for me to find appropriate stories or to write new ones, because i love folklore, mythology and fairytales and read them all the time. i’ve been doing 59 that since i was a very small girl! i do a lot of research for all my novels … [but] i don’t claim any great historical authenticity for the sevenwaters books. (online interview) here she touches on a seminal issue in fantasy, and a closer look at a couple of the novellas will throw some light on how folklore and myth are used. juliet marillier’s ’twixt firelight and water: a tale of sevenwaters is a good illustration of the use of folklore, but also of the quasi world it evokes. in the afterword marillier says it answers some of the questions she is frequently asked about the sevenwaters series that covers three generations; what happened to padriac and “what exactly is faicha?” told by a first person narrator, though two different people, this is a two-part story, the first on the subject of intermarriage between worlds and the treatment of children by their sorceress mother (the wicked stepmother trope); the second provides the fairytale element and the solution to the story when aisha saves conri/faicha, the raven, by marrying him. central throughout this story is a link between humans and people of the other world. the story opens at a meeting of druids with a discussion and description of the various groups who live on the island — humans being the last ones to come — and raises the question of whether leprechauns and other irish folklore creatures also count as inhabitants. one of the main themes is, thus, a classic of folklore: what happens when humans and people of the underworld and our world marry, to which the reply is “the bravest heroes and the darkest villains are oft products of such unsanctioned pairings” (legends 83). conri and his brother ciarán have a human father and a mother who has magical powers, and alternate between living in “the otherworld” and the human world (83). since they are half-human they will never grow old, and have magical powers of persuasion as conri says, like many folk of mixed heritage, i had the ability to turn the minds of human folk one way or another — charm, one might call it, though not a charm in the sense of a spell, more a gift for choosing the right tone, the right words, the right look of the eyes to persuade a person to a certain way of thinking. (89) the two brothers represent different aspects of the half-human, conri’s music is magic, and ciarán can work magic by singing to lure “a fox out of the bracken to lie down by him” (86). so far the story is typical of one kind of fantasy, which is set in a known world. it then moves to fairytale mode with a traditional tragic love element when conri falls in love with a human, lóch, and conri’s wicked sorceress mother turns him into a raven with a man’s mind, a state he will remain in for fifteen years, but only as long as no one calls him by name, in which case he will remain a raven until a woman agrees to marry him despite the fact he is a raven. there are several versions of this theme in folklore, the prince/lover turned into a bird or animal and only redeemed by love. conri is finally saved by aisha (padriac’s daughter) who is her father’s daughter in the metaphorical meaning of the word, and travels from galicia to sevenwaters, which is not far north of dublin, to find her family. the journey through the dark forest where she meets ciarán the raven, faicha neé conri, and where the eldritch people have made their homes is traditional in fairytales. ciarán tells the story of faicha which “begins between firelight and water” (119), the issue being whether aisha will release him from the spell by agreeing to marry him as a raven. in the afterword marillier says the title of 60 the story comes from a folksong “the tinkerman’s daughter” (legends130). this song was written by mickey macconnell about redheaded ann, a tinker’s daughter who is sold to a farmer who first sees her “twixt firelight and water.” this tale is traditional in theme and structure and has a happy ending. as a modern fantasy it links a real world of old ireland to a world of the imagination, a tone which is very prevalent in old irish folklore — people who were half-human and half-elf. the at times highly poetic descriptions of nature which form the backdrop for the story heighten the feeling of being in another world, and stylistically an effective alternation between tenses (past and present) and the viewpoints of conri and aisha add fluidity. if we use james and mendlesohn’s categories of fantasy then this novella is a combination of the immersive, that is part of a fantasy world, but also the intrusive in that fantasy becomes a part of the primary world. another writer in this collection who has a similar approach in her use of folklore is cecilia dart-thornton, the author of the bitterbynde series. the author says she wrote this story to answer some of the emails she received about what happened to some of her characters in the bitterbynde stories. the enchanted: a tale of erith supposedly taking place in the winter of 1038, has a celtic setting and includes some shetland folklore. in the afterword dart-thornton says “it was a joy to return to that fantastic yet familiar world” (545). she also says that the interpolated story of katherine fordyce is taken from country folklore vol. iii. playing on the known, it is reminiscent of celt ic stories and legends where the underworld has trows (from shetland and orkney folklore, a miniature version of the norwegian troll and more human) ii and wights,iii shag winds, and leprechaun-like figures, such as thrimby. the country estate “kelmscott hall is, of course, titled in honour of william morris” (545). in my opinion this story is not a fantasy in the critically assessed meaning of the term, but rather a classic tale, reminiscent of jane austen and the victorian mode. both the setting — where the text opens with mazarine, a young orphaned girl with a fortune, looking out from large country house across a large parkland with a delightful and poetic description of the view and the room — and the characters, the absent and cruel father who partially disowns his son, and who is mazarine’s guardian, are in classic mode. in addition we learn that mazarine has been brought up with tales of eldritch creatures. the love story between mazarine and hawksmoor and the interventions of the guardian, which result in a challenge to a duel, are conventional and not part of any fantasy genre. the fantasy element lies in comments on local superstitions here and in other parts of erith, and the many references to strange beings of folklore: “malicious being[s] such as the bocan or the dreadful waterhorses, or the emaciated drowners with weed-green hair, such as peg powler or jenny greenteeth or the fideal…” (454), and the fuathan (a malevolent highland gaelic mythological water spirit) who tries to kill the king, whom hawksmoor saves. creatures such as the fuathan are simply those superstitious creatures whom legend and folk belief have made up to account for incomprehensible and supernatural events. a central character and the pivot of the solution to all problems is thrimby, a reclusive servant who loves to make up verses and jingles and who speaks in an old dialectical manner, for example: “we knowed it would come off by end o’ day” (447) in response to the fact that a wheel has come off the earl’s coach. thrimby is reminiscent of the little people of irish folklore who, like him, clean houses at night 61 and are hardly seen during the day, a creature which has its parallel in the “nisse” in nordic mythology. “mazarine was almost certain he was no mortal creature, but a wight of eldritch, a beneficent domestic brownie” (448). another device used to add a fantasy element is the naming for feast days and months, for example new year is the midwinter imbrol festival. style is a fundamental criterion for that which makes a text fantasy, the creation of another world with other language and settings than those in everyday use. le guin comments on common faults of style in fantasy texts such as “archaicizing” (cited in sandner 2004: 149) meaning the use of archaic words as a symbol of fantasy without the prior in-depth knowledge of how, for example, elizabethan language was actually used. the use of forms such as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ does not make the language archaic, rather fake artificial. this type of language is evident in dart-thornton’s novella where she enhances the setting by using deliberately old-fashioned forms of language, for example: “on mornings when he lay abed, inconvenienced by overindulgence” (465), and the earl is referred to as “my sire” (466). and typical of thrimby are many statements such as this: “‘tis true enough that ye be not the jealous kind, young master, as blind, deaf and dumb as a mole wearing ear-muffs mayhap; as self effacin’ as a snowman jumping into a frying pan, maybe, but not the jealous kind. as sacrificial as a worm wot offers itself to a blackbird to save other worms …’.” (473) is this the language of fantasy? dart-thornton’s novella works at two levels and as such is typical of one kind of fantasy literature, one might say the intrusive. fantasy is not the dominant element in the story as the major theme is the love story, which follows a classic pattern of misunderstandings, complications and final resolution. the fantasy element is found in the interweaving of folklore beings with magical powers who demand their payment, and yet can be thwarted by their own, that is by thrimby. it is not coincidental that dart-thornton says in an interview that she has an interest in folklore, oral and rural, and was influenced by tolkien, but also the scottish writer george macdonald, e. nesbit and the irish musicians the chieftains.iv she wanted to create her own world like tolkien’s middle earth. dart-thornton has embraced another culture to tell her story/ies “i have, and i’ve done that from outside that culture which gives it another perspective, i suppose. why i chose that was because i was brought up in quite an anglophile household where ‘british was best’ and that has pervaded me. that has been my cultural influence from as far back as i remember” (legends 14) is then her novella really a legend of australian fantasy as the title of the volume suggests? other worlds and magic critical theories such as magic realism and the carnivalesque are useful tools in the analysis and discussion of fantasy texts, since magic and magical worlds have always been key tropes in fantasy writing. as yolen writes: “magic realism fantasies explore the inexplicable linking beneath the surface” (macrae 1998: 172-3). she too links 62 contemporary fantasy to role-playing games on social media, where one moves from a primary to a secondary world. in this anthology two of the stories have magic as their theme. the mad apprentice: a black magician story by trudi canavan, a novella told from the sister’s perspective, is about loyalty, the wrongful use of power, and black magic. the magician’s guild and the inability to understand reality are central. magic is a key concept in jenifer fallon’s highly topical text, the magic word. the major theme is the end of worlds, not just one, but several, old and new, because the creator has tired of them. all these worlds speak the same language because they have the same creator. the old worlds are breaking down: “that’s because ye are the old worlds. the creator is done with ye. … the old worlds will fade into nothingness as the creator forgets all about ye” (426). as dick provin says “don’t you ever get the feeling you’re just marking time? that nothing in your world is progressing the way it should?” (400) they are in a limbo where the separate worlds are all mixed up, symbolised by the fact that hythria’s baby never seems to be born — she has been pregnant for nine years (402): “we’re waiting for you to deliver my precious hythrun heir before we travel again” (390) to which hythria replies “i am damn sure i should have given birth ages ago” (405). however, these worlds are far from magical in the ordinary sense of the word as we never really get to know what they are like, just their existence. fantasy elements in this story are the fact that people, for example provin, cannot be killed and always comes back to life in any world other than their own, the explosions which happen at every key moment in the characters’ attempts to get through the veil (mist and fog) are symbolic of the confusion in our world and uncertainty as to what we want for it. these explosions throw adrina into abysses where she wakes in various contexts and out of which legendary figures emerge, such as brakandaran and the demon-child, who on one occasion comes back with a little man who says he is “ye worst nightmare!” (425). he is one of the lairds of leipreachán, and might be able to help them to find the creator — a woman. the author also indicates that many of these adventures may only be a dream. known for her complex characters and her concern with other worlds, fallon’s use of a typical fairytale structure of the repetition of part of the opening of the original chapter is effective. however, the narrative device of the high princess of hythria sprinkling crumbs for a little brown bird, then turning to her husband, damin, who is reading a scroll when a servant enters asking someone to talk to the prisoner, is too commonplace to excite any ‘willing suspension of belief.’ the second repeated pattern, falling into an abyss with, in each case, a different solution, has more elements of fantasy. the only solution to escaping from the world of limbo is to go through the veil, and to know the magic word (389-426) which is “sequel” (443). however, they do not know what to do with this word so closure is ambiguous. this novella is a good example of the fragmented form of fantasy since it includes elements of transcendence and the uncanny (see sandner 2004: 11). this story with its reliance on repetition lacks the structural progression we normally expect in a fantasy. what then makes this novella a legend of fantasy — the existence of other worlds and the use of leprechauns and helicopter crashes from another world — a sort of combination of folklore and star wars ideas? the introduction of the two americans, cayal lakesh (dorothy) and declan hawkes (rodent), also called tide lords, who, flying over the pacific, have crash-landed their helicopter (seen as a 63 metallic beast) in these strange other worlds, could be symbolic of the west invading the rest, but also the wish all have to regain their own world. the text can be interpreted as a comment on contemporary globalization, and the idea that in many ways we live on and in different worlds (if we include space travel), but have a sense of belonging that is common. as such this text is social fantasy used to comment on current issues and the uncertainties associated with them. the author expresses her own uncertainty about the meaning of her texts when she says in the afterword in response to “the countless emails asking me what happens to the characters in my books after they end, … : when i know that, i’ll write the sequel” (443) (emphasis in the original). another story that comments on the contemporary world is the dark road: an obernewtyn story by isobelle carmody. part of the obernewtyn series, it tells of how hannah and her mother come from antipoda to uropa and the way paranormality affects their lives. again strange unknown worlds and special powers are given to or held by individuals. as the author points out her writing is an exploration of every nook and cranny of the imagined world. today people are continually searching for something that they never find, and we can ask whether the author in this novella is suggesting that by going back to our roots we can discover the future. horror and gothic elements the link between fantasy and the gothic is seen again in modern epics which, when filmed, rely heavily on the element of horror in the gothic world. it is interesting, for example, that a new zealand landscape was felt most appropriate to represent tolkien’s world. in this anthology the corser’s hinge: a lamplighter’s tale by d. m. cornish has several gothic horror elements. it is a traditional story of rescuing the damsel in distress, in this case the rescue of viola grey by sprawle, wells and the two sisters, who are portrayed as women warriors, fighting valiantly against the fictlers who were worshippers of the false god sucoth, and who also engaged in human sacrifice. the story ends after a long and intricate path of traditional fairytale obstacles, dangers faced, and descriptions of rooms such as this: on the right of the door stood a monumental image carven in swartstone, yet another seven-mouths monstrosity formed with unnerving clarity, its oddly crooked arm holding aloft a tiny, clearly struggling figure dangled over a hungrily waiting maw. (311) but the ending has a clever twist. a distinctly gothic element is added to the tale as the person asked to return viola to her family is bunting, a corser, (someone who deals with corpses or bodyparts,) who has standing orders for body parts, often obtained through robbing graves. he has at present an order for 1 of the female kind, a child of elder years, scarce beddened. and here she is lying in his cart, asleep — the agonising choice and final decision are classic gothic. should he adhere to his ethical code (the hinge) or not? this novella does not really portray a fantasy underworld, but has like fallon’s the magic word 64 elements of the uncanny, as well as religious differences, issues of disability, and magical elements. closure is, however, unsolved and ambiguous. conflicts of faith or religion are central in two other novellas in legends of australian fantasy. tribute to hell: a tale of the tainted realm by ian irvine, which deals with the conflict between religions and the punishment for sin. this text has many classic aspects of fantasy including mediaeval features such as the search for the covenant, a casket, and false trails, and where the abbess and the daughter of the devil are central figures. the conflict between two faiths is also a theme in kim wilkins’ crown of rowan: a tale of thyrsland, set in anglo-saxon england about the eighth century, as well as being yet another fantasy text where women play a central role, this time five sisters. ash has visions, bluebell is the woman warrior, and the story portrays the duties of a king’s daughter. wilkins says, “the backdrop is meant to be vast and epic; but the stories are meant to be intimate, human, and draw very close to the five sisters at their centre” (204). but there is one novella that i find difficult to classify in any manner as fantasy. john birmingham’s a captain of the gate is, he says, an alternative ww2 tale. can there be such a thing as a fantasy about a real event? much of the text is so close to several factual details that this critic has difficulty in accepting its inclusion in an anthology of legends. it raises the issue of to what extent we can take modern history, or for that matter history in general, and turn it into fantasy. critics are increasingly querying the veracity of historical accounts and where we draw the line between how much of what we read is history and how much of it is some form of fantasy, imagined by the author as real. conclusion these are only some of the novellas in legends, but all the texts have their elements of fantasy, some more so than others, but their lack of an australian context and reliance on a heritage elsewhere may leave reader expectancy disappointed. the reason for calling them legends of australian fantasy seems to be largely because they are linked to fantasy series such as sevenwaters, obernewtyn, black magician and the old kingdom by the same australian authors. as the editors comment these authors are “australia’s own legends of fantasy” (2010: xi). are they indicating that the authors are legendary? how much more interesting would these novellas have been for nonaustralian readers had they added an element of the exotic and strange, of pacific legends and myths as background, and some semblance of an australian topography as setting. australian fantasy stories could have been taken to their culture, which is what european literature has done down through the ages. the setting has been recognizable as something known, such as the boarding school background for harry potter, yet transported to a fantasy world, or else things often feared, such as the forest on a dark night. fantasy has played on this fear. we can ask why the australians are still in the twenty-first century taking their cue from a british literary imaginative tradition instead of creating a fantasy of their own; and whether the use of the european heritage is the expression of a new kind of ‘cultural cringe.’ the answer may in part lie in the history 65 of the portrayal of aborigines in earlier literature as monstrous, following darwinian theories of the species, nineteenth century ideas of the savage and the black man, and australia as ‘down under’ — the underworld. schlobin postulates “fantasy lures its followers into an examination of their own natures, the seminal truths of their existences, and an extension of the frontiers of their futures” (1982: xx)? if we accept this then we could interpret these novellas as commentaries on a state of colonialism, on contemporary global society, marking an escape to a world where good still triumphs over evil, but where the author’s imagination can have unlimited scope. in conclusion there is one relevant, but problematic question i should like to raise: to what extent can indigenous texts be seen as fantasy? maori writers such as patricia grace and witi ihimaera have, for example, incorporated myth and legend in several of their texts, often giving them a contemporary twist. the question is whether the incorporation of myth and legend makes a text one of fantasy. if we define fantasy as the power of the imagination to find ways of describing cultural phenomena and practice without stating it specifically and clearly, then indigenous texts can also be classified in the fantasy genre. oodgeroo’s stories from the old and new dreamtime raises some interesting questions about the use of myth. here she relates some traditional tales that have a moral purpose, and then writes new stories in aboriginal manner for the present ‘dreaming.’ mudrooroo’s use of vampires in his trilogy the undying, underground and the promised land moves in the land of fantasy, but with strong gothic elements. george/dingo is an in-between figure, a hybrid, at times human, at times his dreaming self, much as the wights and trows of european folklore. following fanon’s critical approach turcotte has suggested that the vampire is used as a tool for decolonization, so these texts would also have a political connotation. although i am aware that there is a question of political correctness, two hundred years after colonization the potential is there for australian fantasy writers to use their national heritage, rather than relying on the european one, not just for entertaining reading, but also for making political statements as has also been one of the functions of fantasy writing in earlier times. indigenous myths and legends, also in the european tradition, are not in themselves fantasy but ways of explaining phenomena in the world. it should therefore be possible to draw on some aspects of indigenous myths and legends without denigrating their value to those for whom it is part of their tribal and/or religious belief. as for topography the vast continent of australia surely can provide unlimited settings for fantasy. adult fantasy demands an adult approach and it is time fantasy left the world of children and returned, as in the nineteenth century, to critique of political and social aims. works cited attebery, brian. strategies of fantasy. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana up, 1992. cornish, d.m. “the corser’s hinge: a lamplighter tale.” dann & strahan: 262-330. daniells, rowena cory. http://auslit.net/2010/06/17/fantasy-why-is-the-genre-so-popular-rowenacory-daniells/ http://auslit.net/2010/06/17/fantasy-why-is-the-genre-so-popular-rowena-cory-daniells/ http://auslit.net/2010/06/17/fantasy-why-is-the-genre-so-popular-rowena-cory-daniells/ 66 dann, jack and jonathan strahan eds. legends of australian fantasy. sydney: harpervoyager, 2010. dart-thornton, cecilia. “the enchanted: a tale of erith.” dann & strahan: 443-546. fallon, jennifer. ”the magic word.” dann & strahan: 389-443. james, edward and farah mendlesohn. the cambridge companion to fantasy literature. cambridge: cup, 2012. macrae, cathi dunn. presenting young adult fantasy fiction. new york: prentice hall international, 1998. marillier, juliet. “twixt firelight and water: a tale of sevenwaters.” dann & strahan: 81-130. ——. http://www.fantasy-news.com/2011/07/30/interview-with-juliet-marillier-on-heir-to-sevenwaters/ mudrooroo. underground. sydney: angus & robertson, 1999. murfin, ray and supryia m. ray. the bedford glossary of critical and literary terms. boston and new york: bedford books, 1997. oodgeroo. 1972. dreamtime: aboriginal stories. new york: lothrop, lee & shepard books, 1994. parker, k. langloh. 1896. australian legendary tales. middlesex: senate, 1998. sandner, david ed. fantastic literature: a critical reader. westport, connecticut, london: praeger, 2004. schlobin, roger ed. the aesthetics of fantasy literature and art. indiana and brighton: university of notre dame press & harvester, 1982. turcotte, gerry. “vampiric decolonization: fanon, ‘terrorism’ and mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy.” lopez. a. (ed.) postcolonial whiteness: a critical reader on race and empire. state university of new york, albany, 2005. 103-118. also in research online. university of wollongong. anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. she has published many articles on women’s literature and postcolonial writing especially from australia and new zealand. her publications include dialoguing on genres (2001: with ulf lie), identities and masks: colonial and postcolonial studies (2001: with jakob lothe, and peter young) and readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007: with lene johannessen), and a book on a new zealand writer “for was i not born here?” identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne (2010). i a quick survey of calls for papers, announcements for meetings on the web can verify this statement. ii see folklore myths and legends of britain, london: reader‘s digest association, 1977. 472. iii in its original usage the word wight described a living human being. more recently, the word has been used within the fantasy genre of literature to describe undead or wraith-like creatures: corpses with a part of their decayed soul still in residence, often draining life from their victims. (wikipedia) in this story it is the wraith-like creature which is used. iv see www.dartthorton.com dart-thornton speaking about her work and inspiration on youtube.com december 2009. (accessed 2015) http://www.fantasy-news.com/2011/07/30/interview-with-juliet-marillier-on-heir-to-sevenwaters/ http://www.dartthorton.com/ microsoft word coolabah 1 sancho2.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.36-38 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona ruth sancho (at the royal botanic gardens. melbourne) from: yahoo@yahoo.net to: houyhnhnms subject: ...but i travelled again… e-mail: gulliver surfs into alice’s virgin bay. it was a joy to us and not a penance i whisper: drink me eat me open your mouth and close your eyes. afterwards you will explore my fresh innocent fjord and you’ll find yourself snorkelling and surfing in my virgin bay, but first... you are going to strike with your smily cat’s tongue the syrupslime trail of my wet finger-snail which slices straight down from my spiral rabbit hole, and then, you will purr and then, i will moan. take my picture, honey. and you taste my pussy butter with an english cup of tea while your victorian gloves, which you never take off, spend our time together enjoying yourself in me on my non-birthday week. i kiss a caterpillar you smoke my childish love. suck me stronger, baby. “milmilng kang, dilebang, billabong, lony’tjung” copyright ©2007 ruth sancho.this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 37 i love to feel your white fire-works exploding in my lips this hot snow of your fingertips skating on my fairy tits. keep going on, going on. i’m creating as we go along. your passion asks for permission to cross my palace, and i’m already in flames, that’s why i pray in front of your knees and i receive your rain. you are so bitchy, darling. push me now. ...but suddenly… a deep bitter drop drips down from my milky teeth, and draws, on the fitted carpet, the new island where we’re called to live. excited, i look for my free lube, which was inside the kit of my detailed hunk vibe to capture every vein, bulge and crease of a real erect cock. glumdalclitch, stop it, please! glumdalclitch, teach me more. -get in your doggy style! so, after a minute, you begin to weep with pleasure, you move your bum in circles at the same rhythm of it, my seaweed-hair swims on your smelly back while i’m biting your neck, till your human entrails bleed. then, i lay quietly, my inexperienced belly is trembling with quick and small contractions, and my breath is faltering in short sighs and slow flutters you fasten my hips, firmly then, my legs themselves unfold the sheet of my pure doll’s cradle 38 and i’m inviting you to spy behinds the rule. your huge sword begins to fight with my pinkish jellyfish, i shout i cry “gulidjan, wembawemba, daung wurrung, mardidjali” my body writhes inside. shhh, my love, shhhh my dreaming is leaving. “maap, jodojoda, jabulajabula, buding, jardwadjali” i’m coming, love, i’m coming… the floor is full of blood. “ngurai-illam wurrung, dadidadi, boon wurrung” i’m hurted in my roots. then (pain) (silence) (time) kangaroo koala wombat boomerang dingo yabby microsoft word coolabah 1 sancho3.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, p.84 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona why do you have to own everything nice? ruth sancho i’ve got used to walking on st. kilda beach in the morning. i often find several starfishes of different colours and sizes. amazing. i didn’t know that there are violet starfishes. and some of them have four limbs, and others, five. they arrive at night, i suppose with the tide. they stay quiet on the sand, on the seashore’s line, covered with transparent water, pacific’s water, a mirror of the sky. now i am trying to identify which ones arrived before. i guess i’m close to the clue. yesterday i discovered a huge jellyfish, and its appearance was the mystery of the day. i wonder if one day, who knows?, i will see a sea winged dragon. this morning you have arrived with your boyfriend on one hand and chips from mac donalds on the other one. you have taken them. all of them. tonight you will throw them away in the airport because your suitcase weighs too much. copyright ©2007 ruth sancho. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. microsoft word juliette mallari 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 227 king sinukwan mythology and the kapampangan psyche julieta c. mallari, ph.d. abstract: this paper focuses on the metaphorical categories of the sinukwan legends that could account for the ethnocentric qualities of the kapampangans (people of pampanga, a province in the northern part of the philippines) and their behavioral patterns as a distinct race. according to oral accounts, sinukwan, supposedly the first inhabitant in pampanga, was a noble, gigantic being whose countenance reflected beautiful traits such as royalty, wisdom, faithfulness, ability and love. sinukwan is a product of the kapampangans’ primordial culture but, in many respects, he serves as a central image in the maintenance of their internal racial affinity as well as in the interaction of their past and present. on one hand, he may be perceived as an instrument of sentimental evocation. but on the other, sinukwan is an indispensable force in asserting and reasserting the kapampangan identity. the kapampangans still believe that their historical beginnings were woven into and their society constructed within the realm of a powerful cultural symbol. in the development of kapampangan civilization, sinukwan has become an established archetype in kapampangan arts and literature, a rallying point in the socio-political transformation of the kapampangan community, and the paradigmatic model that is constantly invoked in the unfolding events of kapampangan history. to be mentioned in particular is an aspect of a sinukwan legend that provides a colorful explanation of one of the worst calamities that struck pampanga: the eruption of mt. pinatubo. the story is, in a sense, an imaginative articulation of a historical phenomenon that pierced through the very heart of kapampangan civilization and altered the course of its development. keywords: sinukwan, kapampangan psyche, kapampangan history ...out of the whole symbol-building achievement of the past, what survives … is the tale of wonder. the tale survives … not simply as a quaint relic of days childlike in belief. its world of magic is symptomatic of fevers deeply burning in the psyche: permanent presences, desires, fears, ideals, potentialities that have glowed in the nerves, hummed in the blood, baffled the senses since the beginning. flight of the wild gander joseph campbell copyright ©2009 julieta c. mallari. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 228 king sinukwan: the essence of kapampangan culture and identity each culture springs “with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle...” (spengler 1932:21) like a tree planted in that soil, a culture grows and blossoms, having its own life, people, language, myths, passions and images. pampanga, a province in the northern philippines, had immense physical geography in its pre-colonial history and, even during the coming of the spaniards, it nurtured its selfcontained culture and civilization. the kapampangan ancestors established their roots quite extensively, reaching the end of a main river system flowing into three channels: rio grande, chico river and agno river. towering over the expansive landscape of pampanga, like a quiet but an imposing guard of its wealthy physical domain, is mt. arayat. this mountain, believed to be the legendary king sinukwan’s abode is the primary source of inspiration among the kapampangans. for the kapampangans, sinukwan of mt. arayat is the essence of their culture and identity: the powerful force lurking in their collective unconscious, the creative spirit hovering over their civilization, the inspiring “muse” impregnating their artistic imagination. sinukwan legends for some reasons, the traditions of explaining and understanding the ethnocentric qualities of the kapampangans and their behavioral patterns as a distinct race, including their propensities for certain endeavors, go back to the metaphorical categories of the sinukwan legends. suku (an older version of the name sinukwan) was supposedly the first inhabitant in pampanga. according to oral accounts, he was a noble, gigantic being whose countenance reflected beautiful traits such as royalty, wisdom, faithfulness, ability and love. he ruled over other creatures that, in a later period, began to populate the region. first were the black aytas (pygmies), then the straight-haired brown people. he became a model to all of them, even to the succeeding generations of his daughters who married mortal men. he was also noted for the splendid banquets he had in his palace – serving the most delicious dishes and using the finest dining sets. an important part of the legend refers to the origin of the name sinukwan. to begin with, suku’s subjects were as hard-working as he was, planting the sturdiest trees in their kingdom. but at one point in time, the taga-ilug, people living along the bank of ilug a maragul, cut down these big trees without suku’s permission, so they were chased by the kapampangans until they all reached suku’s kingdom. the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 229 kapampangans reported the misdeed to suku who immediately discerned the validity of his people’s contention. furious, the taga-ilug threatened to return together with their queen, makiling. and they did. countless people on speedy boats came back to attack later on. suku was alerted. soon, he brought with him two big rocks and he jumped into the river. his companions assisted him in filling up the river to reverse its flow. the enemies were helplessly driven back. makiling acknowledged their defeat and thought of surrendering to suku. thus, she changed the name suku to “sinukwan” which means “someone to whom others submit or surrender.” it should be noted that in the figure of sinukwan lies a mixture of imaginative and existential kapampangan conception of his own character. in the imaginative reflection of an apotheosized king, there evolves a distinctive mark of a superior being which he assumes as his own. the conventional qualities accorded sinukwan such as strength of character, bravery, love for beauty, etc. modulate into the human characteristics of the male kapampangan. there is a kind of identification between the mythical god and his ideal “descendant.” descriptions in terms of similes are not uncommon to emphasize the idealized attributes of sinukwan that cling to the romantic image of the male kapampangan. thus, the latter stands out wherever he is: attractive, dominant, strongwilled, artistic, refined with exquisite taste in food and in clothes. in the same manner, makiling, the love object of sinukwan who is herself a goddess, plays a significant role in the imagined world of the kapampangans. she is a paragon of beauty and strength as well as an embodiment of virtues. legendary accounts about the three children of sinukwan and makiling, who are all women, underscore the inherited traits associated with the goddess and, for that matter, the recognizably excellent qualities accorded to kapampangan women. malagu (“beautiful”), mahinhin (“modest”) and matimtiman (“charming”)—the names of the children—allegorically represent not only the inherent nature of makiling’s offspring but her own character as well. and, as hitherto understood, makiling’s womanhood is the central emblematic image that is to be projected by the ideal female kapampangan. a further expansion of the mythical conception of the origin of the race is the legendary account regarding the marriage of sinukwan’s daughters to mortal men whose names also suggest allegorical possibilities: masikan (“strong”) became malagu’s husband, matapang (“brave”) was mahinhin’s and masipag (“industrious”) was matimtiman’s. the natural consolidation of sinukwan’s traits and the corresponding qualities of his sons-in-law is reckoned as the final phase of the evolution of the kapampangan character. both male and female are supposed to exhibit the excellent and royal lineage of their legendary ancestors. sinukwan is a product of the kapampangans’ primordial culture but in many respects, he serves as a central image in the maintenance of their internal racial affinity as well as in the interaction of their past and present. on one hand, he may be perceived as an instrument of sentimental evocation. but on the other, sinukwan is an indispensable force in asserting and reasserting the kapampangan identity. the kapampangans still believe that their historical beginnings were woven and their society was constructed within the realm of a powerful cultural symbol. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 230 in the historical development of pampanga and its civilization, sinukwan has become an established archetype in kapampangan arts and literature, a rallying point in the socio-political transformation of the kapampangan community, and the paradigmatic model that is constantly invoked in the unfolding events of kapampangan history. another sinukwan legend provides a colorful explanation regarding one of the worst calamities that struck pampanga: the eruption of mt. pinatubo. the account is, in a sense, an imaginative articulation of a historical phenomenon that pierced through the very heart of kapampangan civilization and altered the course of its development. the story began with the locust infestation in the kingdom of makiling. malyari, the king of mt. pinatubo and makiling’s friend, tried to help by causing heavy rains to fall but the downpour was not enough. the remaining locusts were driven by strong winds to the mountain of sinukwan. to drive the insects away, sinukwan told one of his followers to blow them away towards the west (where the kingdom of malyari was). this led to a big fight between the two immortal kings–malyari and sinukwan. the former hurled a huge rock which hit and chipped off the peak of sinukwan’s mountain, forming a crater-shaped top. angered, sinukwan threw all the big rocks he could find without ceasing until malyari’s mountain was turned into very rugged mountain ranges. and the last object to be hurled by sinukwan was a huge grinder made of solid gold. the result was a most destructive eruption of malyari’s mountain: blinding lightning, deafening thunder, and terrifying fiery explosions dominated the entire atmosphere. what was even more horrifying was the echoing voice of derision and bitterness sounded by malyari and overheard by sinukwan. “from now on, my name is no longer malyari but punsalang -the chief of all your enemies”. the historical fact of the mt. pinatubo eruption remains a painful experience among the kapampangans but is continually being purged by the vestigial memory of the race. and the catharsis helps them transcend even the unbidden forces that may threaten their collective existence in their own province. like sinukwan, whose magnanimous reply to malyari’s anger was his determination to restore whatever got destroyed in his kingdom, they are, as it were, governed by the same principle of self-possession. the eruption of mt. pinatubo the ancestral origin of the aytas, the aborigines of certain portions of pampanga and neighboring provinces, may be traced to the foot of mt. pinatubo, which they believe to be the abode of their god, apo malyari. they have always feared this deity and paid him homage in the form of animal offerings embellished with ornate rituals. oral tradition underscores malyari’s intense character and his being pitted against sinukwan. the organic connection between these mythical figures and the mountains they inhabit is a pivotal factor in the weaving of legendary accounts. interestingly enough, mt. arayat and mt. pinatubo have been suddenly but mysteriously linked when the latter erupted—a historical event that made the stories come alive. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 231 the legendary fight between sinukwan and malyari reached its climax when the latter’s abode, mt. pinatubo, released its hellish fury, blowing turbulent fiery explosion. but this legendary episode surprisingly ceased to be simply confined within the primeval memory of the kapampangans. the marvelous tale became a reality. mt. pinatubo, hardly known as a volcano since it was inactive for five centuries, began stirring in april 1991. finally, on the 7 th of june, its phenomenal eruptions began—with its major blast happening on 15 th june. resembling a nuclear detonation, a giant mushroom of ashes and steam rose from the crater of the volcano, overspreading the entire atmosphere of central luzon. hours later, while a typhoon was entering the area, the volcano ejected blasts of incandescent rocks, sand, and ashes, turning day into night. what the aytas believed to be the wrath of their apo malyari was literally a curse visiting most specially the people of pampanga. buildings collapsed under the weight of a billion cubic meters of sand and ashes spewed by the volcano. rains combined with ash falls, turned the whole region 3 into an infernal maze where thousands of people, driven into fits of despair, either tried to escape in their vehicles or waded through knee-deep mud to reach safer grounds. this they did in pitch darkness while being jolted by recurrent earthquakes or shocked by the terrifying flashes of lightning. rivers swelled and the mudflows from the volcano destroyed flood control systems. the day after shutting off of the sun’s glowing presence (june 16), only ghost towns completely shrouded with tons of sand met the eyes of those who were unable to leave their places. major roads were blocked and a huge number of hectares of agricultural land were transformed into desert-like wastelands. rooftops were covered by thick layers of sand and ashes, and several buildings, including markets, schools and churches, caved in. water and electric supply systems, telecommunications, hospitals and other public facilities were rendered non-functional for weeks or even months. and later, because of monsoon rains, a worse aftermath of the eruptions was yet to come. lahar, a grayish mixture of sulfuric flakes, sand and even rocks, with consistency and properties similar to that of cement, came down from the slope of pinatubo rampaging like galloping horses whenever there was a typhoon. and the six-month long rainy season (june to november) sent these most destructive avalanches down to the different river channels. what used to be nature’s channels of blessing to the kapampangans became the natural pipelines for this steaming sulfuric mud which would soon erase major villages from the map. it was in those days of “the lahar season,” when thousands of people experienced the havoc of the deadly torrents, engulfing even the very ground their houses occupied. unable to escape the impending doom of the incinerating lahar, these victims had no choice but to seek higher elevation. the more fortunate ones found themselves on rooftops and stayed there either drinking rainwater to survive or, if the rain stopped suffering the scorching heat of the sun. their only hope was for rescue helicopters to spot them. as a consequence of the tempestuous eruptions, a massive population displacement as well as an irretrievable loss of cultural artifacts happened in the most notable places of coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 232 pampanga. bacolor, the “athens of pampanga” was tragically ravaged, with only few remaining villages; porac, famous for its class a sand, became desert-like; betis, known for its artisans, guagua, noted for its fishponds, and san fernando, the center of region 3 and capital town, would always be susceptible to flood waters; sta. rita, “the home of sweets and pastries,” was not spared by pinatubo’s awful fury. the eruption of mt. pinatubo, believed to be the “disaster of the century,” is a significant chapter in the history of pampanga and represents a compelling force —like the echoing voice of malyari who proclaimed himself an implacable enemy of sinukwan—that will have a prolonged impact and far-reaching effects. the tons of ash spewed by the volcano and the subsequent flow of steaming lahar may not only mean compounded misfortune but also indicate nature’s capacity to redirect what could have been considered a matter of course in kapampangan communities. the shifting geography of the province, the changing socio-demographic profile and the solving of the long-standing dilemma regarding the presence of clark air base (the biggest american base in the far east)—all these happened in so short a time because of what the aytas believe as their apo malyari’s wrath. by and large, it was a kind of subliminal victory for the indigenous aytas despite the fact that many of them suffered as well. they were also forced to leave the mountain, their habitat. as far as the contending forces of the two mythical gods are concerned, however, the power of malyari apparently brought the havoc that could not be thwarted by sinukuan. this gives an affirmative and empowering expression to those who have always been treated and considered “children of the lesser god”: the black, kinky haired, small people called aytas. at least, at one point in history, their god overpowered the mythical god of the lowlanders and straight-haired kapampangans. indomitable descendants of suku despite the still threatening shadow of mount pinatubo—the ten year lahar period, the unsafe atmosphere due to the ash falls plus all the other psychological pains that usually result from disconcerting memories -the kapampangan victims have remarkably exhibited the recuperative power of resiliency. and numerous possible reasons are suggested by such ability to transcend the disheartening reality. first, the kapampangans appear to be strongly attached to their province of birth. call this “clannishness” but they cannot help it: after all, their vast cultural heritage extends even beyond the dark smoke emitted by pinatubo. to move to another place might not only mean physical dislocation but cultural stripping as well. a naked race they become if uprooted from their native soil. in a very deep sense, they feel the tormenting effect of losing their ethnic identity. thus, the kapampangan victims’ decision to stay in pampanga, although in resettlement sites, reduces the “trauma” of carrying the burdensome yoke of alienation and rootlessness. second, the kapampangans are noted for their entrepreneurial spirit. their province has always been known as a leading growth center in region 3. this land of opportunities, therefore is difficult to abandon, more so by its own people who have cultivated it and coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 233 have been nourished by the fruit of their own labor, figuratively and otherwise. to the kapampangans, their pasture is never less green. oddly enough, in the face of pinatubo’s apocalyptic ire the kapampangans did not lose their composure. even in the most adverse circumstances, the inner impulsion of the kapampangans, as always, was to be firm and never to surrender. with the sinukwan strain prevailing upon them, they tenaciously clung to the supreme worth of their race. their remaining strength as a tribe was, once and for all, gathered to save their ancestral ground’s precious heritage. today, pampanga is back to its normal course. within the recesses of the kapampangans’ minds are painful memories of lost property and lives. ancestral homes and grounds were either buried or washed out by lahar but not erased from the memories of the people. at present each town has vivid and staggering stories to tell regarding such losses. what is significant, however, is the kapampangan way of stirring life and overcoming the menacing gloom of pinatubo eruption in less than a decade. the province is now as progressive as ever. in a sense, the wrath of malyari had its damaging consequences, but the restorative power of sinukuan proved to be stronger. conclusion the kapampangans cling to their primordial history, the childhood of their race, and their original traits. most of the time, they summon up remembrance of ancient accounts, whether in the spirit of nostalgia or in a deep conviction, to glimpse contemporary significance in the lingering sinukuan myth. deeply entwined in the realm of their collective consciousness is this mythical and racial association. historical events continually unfurl and lodge in their memory. as they go through their life’s episodes, they take refuge behind such saving power of their archaic base, possibly to overcome the temporal finiteness of their being, i.e., as individuals or as a tribe. despite the dynamic cultural changes and rapid emergence of scientific knowledge, therefore, the myth persists and resists even fatal forces that strike the race. it may also be pointed out that the presence of the past in the present provides transcendence (bloch 1977) is classically portrayed in the kapampangan survival mechanism during the mt. pinatubo eruption. the challenge of surmounting present events (e.g. the aforementioned eruption at that time), in which the past was represented in the myth of sinukuan, is likely to sustain the preservation of the race. references: bloch, m. "the past and the present in the present." journal of the royal anthropological institute, 12, 1977, pp. 278-292. spengler, o. the decline of the west. charles atkinson (trans). new york: a kroff, 1932. <www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/myth mineke defdefdef.pdf > julieta c. mallari is the present director of the university of the philippines extension program in pampanga. she holds a ph.d. in comparative literature. she is a literature coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 234 and an english professor at the university of the philippines. she is also a cultural worker in the province of pampanga. microsoft word coolabah 1 acknowledgments from the editor.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, p.1 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona acknowledgments from the editor coolabah 1 is a dream come true. when dr. susan ballyn invited me to be the guest editor of this volume, i accepted without hesitation: i felt honoured and wanted this issue to be special. susan explained the editing process and we started to work. during the process i had dr ballyn’s and dr. morera de la vall´s invaluable guidance and support, which i deeply appreciate: they read, commented and improved the final version of coolabah 1: this foreign country and allowed me the freedom to decide, organise and edit this publication. i would also like to thank dr. helen nickas for her works, which are a constant stimulation for me and have been an inspiration whilst editing this issue. i wish to thank all contributors to coolabah 1, former exchange students to australia from the universitat de barcelona, for their fabulous pieces of writing, generous time and enthusiasm in participating in this publication. the process of working with each one of you has been a pleasure. on a personal note, i thank my mother, mª josé, my father, rafael, my sister, bárbara, and my friends for their constant support and love throughout all the changes in my life: they give me the freedom to be myself and the space to grow. needless to say, the mistakes in the editing process are my entire responsibility and the copyright of each contribution remains with its author, unless otherwise stated. i hope all the contributors and readers enjoy the final version of coolabah 1: this foreign country and take pleasure in reading the different approaches to this “foreign country”. thank you. microsoft word jaime coolabah jaume vallverdu coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 jaume vallverdu. barcelona 1954. director of the sculpture department at the university of barcelona, he has been teaching fine arts since 1985. he won the city of martorrell ( barcelona)first prize for sculpture. he has had important solo exhibitions in barcelona, vitoria in spain and andorra. marble from macael. un bloc de memòria women represent the myth of creation, life and the permanence of the human being. the stone sculpture "un bloc de memòria” represents femininity transferred into the interior of earth through the material employed. thus, memory, myth and history become a work of art. microsoft word jaime coolabah lua ruiz coolabah, vol.2, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 lua ruiz –gimenez coderch born 1982 in iquitos, perú currently studying, b.a. fine arts , university of barcelona 2004 she obtained sculpture degree at the escola massana, barcelona she has exhibited her work in group exhibitions in barcelona, italy, and the netherlands. carrara marble mixed with white wax. remains of the lived. memory is some precious material we try to retain with fragile structures. on the ruins of all the rest, those provisional constructs of memory are to become true, are to become history. however, even history is a thought to be sustained throughout time. we must patiently work on it, even at the risk of eroding and blunting its scarce body. from wax to stone, that is the process when “that translucent alabaster of our memories”, in the words of the master of memory marcel proust, is to crystallize in a myth. so, as time passes by, myth is what is left standing, like a magnificent sacred relic, almost empty but sustaining the remains of the lived. barcelona, 1 de juny 2005 coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 “robbed of our confidence as the planet’s dominant life-form:” max brooks’s zombie wars. bill phillips universitat de barcelona billphillips@ub.edu copyright©2016 bill phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: according to the zombie survival guide, “extensive research has yet to find an isolated example of solanum [the virus which causes its victims to become zombies] in nature. water, air, and soil in all ecosystems, from all parts of the world, have turned up negative, as have their accompanying flora and fauna” (zsg 2-3). there is no evidence, then, that nature was directly responsible for “the creatures that almost caused our extinction” (world war z 1). nevertheless, apart from the facile assertion that everything that happens in the material world may be subsumed beneath the umbrella term ‘nature’, even a cursory meditation on the significance of the zombie war cannot fail to point an accusatory finger at the earth, at gaia, at pacha mama, however you wish to name her. the massive decline in human population, as well as the inevitable concomitant drop in consumption as the fabric of society collapsed, can only have brought relief to an endangered global ecosystem. but perhaps of greatest interest is the metaphorical significance of the zombies. they have an uncanny “ability to hunt, fight, and feed in total darkness” (zsg 7). their intelligence “ranks somewhere beneath that of an insect” (zsg 14), they have “no language skills” (zsg 16), while it is “instinct brought on by solanum [which] drives the undead to kill and devour” (zsg 18). these are the attributes — both strengths and weaknesses — that humanity habitually bestows on the natural world. this article will explore max brooks’s zombie fictions as ecocritical allegories of retaliatory nature. key words: zombies, ecocriticism, allegory mailto:billphillips@ub.edu 113 zombies were initially associated with voodoo which emerged in haiti in the 1790s when african slaves struggled for, and ultimately achieved, their independence (kee 10). despite the common and probably justifiable assumption that many elements of voodoo have their origin in africa, the practice itself in its new world manifestation, and in particular the figure of the zombie is, according to franck degoul, “strictly of a haitian nature” (17). early reports on voodoo tended to emphasise cannibalism (kee 12) — a common trope associated with black, aboriginal and african people by the european imagination as daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe most famously demonstrates. but the zombies in early stories such as william seabrook’s “dead men working in the cane fields” (1929) have quite specific, non-cannibalistic characteristics: they are “a band of ragged creatures, who shuffled ..., staring dumbly, like people walking in a daze ... vacant-eyed like cattle” (seabrook 6). this is the image of the zombie which crosses over to the united states as a “fantasy marking the entire country [of haiti] as a nation of eternal slaves” (kee 14). for the american public the zombie as haitian is yet another representation of black people as the other, incapable of thought, culture or initiative — a confirmation of their status as slaves or uncomplaining slave-like labourer and an implicit criticism of haiti itself which had dared to establish itself as a black republic — a project which white societies portrayed as doomed to failure. it is significant that as late as 1954, when representations of voodoo had changed markedly and its allegorical meaning had evolved along with the world’s changing power structures, ian fleming’s james bond, in the exercise of his ultimately doomed mission to save the british empire, is pitted against baron samedi in jamaica. independence for jamaica was not completely achieved until 1962 but less than a decade earlier fleming, in live and let die, was far from convinced of the islanders’ capacity to govern themselves, as their weakness for voodoo, which only a rational englishman could withstand, amply demonstrates. the transference of the zombie to the screen with white zombie in 1932 was an open proclamation that zombies were no longer necessarily and exclusively black; american workers suddenly wondered if they, too, were being alluded to, particularly if they were caught up in the vast yet troubled american industrial machine of the great depression. “thus,” suggests chera kee, “while zombies seem to represent a very real fear of the return of the colonial master, they also offer a critique of both slavery and the abuse of the worker under the capitalist system” (17). the zombies in seabrook’s “dead men working in the cane fields” are not in themselves dangerous, rather, they are victims of the evil masters of voodoo ritual. this changes most notably in richard matheson’s 1954 novel i am legend in which, as deborah christie points out, “[t]he living dead in question were not even zombies originally: matheson writes of vampires ... [r]egardless, the stiff shambling and insistent hunger of altered corpses stalking humans became an iconic representation of modern zombie fiction and film” (christie 67). their behaviour, and the fact that many (though not all) of them are living dead, is consistent with haitian zombies except for two crucial differences: their condition is caused by a virus rather than by voodoo, and they are, effectively, cannibalistic. i am legend was the inspiration for the most influential zombie film of all time, george romero’s 1968 night of the living dead in which the characteristics of the zombie as we know it in the 21st century were largely established. romero’s zombies are driven by instinct to seek out and consume human flesh. they 114 have no other criteria than their own mindless appetite, and as such the worthiness or not of their victims is irrelevant; as the virus spreads, no ‘normal’ human beings will be left. this was precisely matheson’s point, since i am legend tells the story of the last surviving ‘normal’ human being who, realising that his very uniqueness has transformed him into the other, commits suicide. romero’s night of the living dead, despite its gore, has a particularly subtle ending. in the film, a single house is attacked overnight with only one man left alive in the morning. as the authorities arrive, desperate to contain the situation, they shoot everything that moves, including, in an extraordinarily brief and downbeat final scene, the surviving man. to add to the irony the actor playing the last man is black, while the now destroyed zombies are white. who, here, is the other? and more to the point, does it make any difference? christie argues that the film resonated so powerfully with american audiences because they were no longer able to rely on the certainties of old: “humanity in night of the living dead ultimately disappoints the audience and shrinks the ideological gap between themselves and the instinct-driven corpses that plague them” (78). this, christie points out, is the decade when john f. kennedy and martin luther king were assassinated, and opposition to the vietnam war was fuelling the counter-culture. the values that america supposedly represented are thrown into doubt, the identification of the other becomes increasingly problematic, and the traditional values of family and moral standing are trampled on by the murderous zombie who could be your parent, your lover or your child. drew grant, writing in the new york observer argues that romero “managed to tie [the] two opposing post-war scares — conformity in capitalism and conformity in collectivism — together, revealing that they are one and the same” (grant). one of the characteristics, then, of the zombie is that it is not clear who is one, and who is not. a recent publication, zombies a cultural history, by roger luckhurst, claims that “[i]t was an accident ... that the main role of ben was played by black postgraduate student duane jones – he was simply the most accomplished actor among a bunch of mostly amateurs” (139). yet it is neither movie directors, nor fate, which decides a text’s meaning. luckhurst concludes that [t]he meaning of this closing scene therefore kept changing in lock step with the bitter end of the 1960s. by the time it was a midnight movie in greenwich vilage, these images now evoked the mass slaughter perpetrated by american troops in vietnam ... for every viewer since ... the last scenes of night rendered explicit the explosive allegorical potential of the zombie trope for commentary on the contemporary world. (146) this allegorical potential has increased extraordinarily over the intervening years. the current economic recession, which began in 2008 with the collapse of lehman brothers investment bank, inspired protesters against wall street traders to dress up as zombies. their reasons are various: either way, you are going to end up relinquishing your individual thoughts to a larger consensus mindset. either way, you are going to end up in a shopping mall (dawn of the dead): the epicenter of suburban complacency. whether you are the authoritarian automaton or the slogan-chanting 99 percenter, you are not you. you are them. (grant) 115 the wall street protesters who were encouraged to “dress up as what they called corporate zombies” (matthews) were attempting to show traders that they were mindlessly conforming to a financial model that was eating up the country’s resources without a thought for the consequences. yet the protesters resembled zombies too, and not just because of their fancy dress. the fears that zombies inspire are based, firstly, on their numbers — there are simply too many to kill — and secondly, their intractability — they cannot be swayed by threats, or emotional pleas or bribes because they have no need or understanding of any of these things. the growing numbers of homeless, jobless and dispossessed identify, then, with the zombie just as american workers did during the great depression. so huge are the consequences of the current economic crisis that its victims, though individually vulnerable, may prove collectively unstoppable. a demonstrator interviewed by the toronto star explained that “i like the fact that you can take it two ways: are we saying they are the zombies for serving corporate masters? or are we saying the rest of us — the 99 per cent — are the zombies for putting up with this mess we’re in?” (potter). the unusual and disproportionate response by the authorities to such demonstrations reveals how much fear the zombie-like protesters are provoking. from barcelona, to london, to washington, and at the 2012 bilderberg conference in chantilly, virginia, police tactics and their function as a political tool have been increasingly questioned — at times even by the police themselves, as the following lines from the guardian demonstrate: i was helping a cop move a security cordon near some trees, when he lowered his voice and casually let slip: “we don’t support bilderberg, trust me.” and there’s what a hotel employee told me as he drove through the gates of the hotel. he lowered his window and beckoned me over. “i want you to know that they call you people ‘cockroaches’. i work in the hotel and they asked me if those cockroaches were still out there. they meant you.” (skelton) cockroaches, like zombies, are inferior, disgusting and easily killed, at least as individuals. but they are also a cause for fear, rather than mere distaste, to the plutocrats. george romero’s second zombie film, dawn of the dead, released in 1978, supports an even greater allegorical freight than night of the living dead. it follows three men and a pregnant woman, who take refuge from the zombie plague in an abandoned shopping mall. this has two advantages: being an enclosed space it can be barricaded against the marauding zombies, and being a shopping mall it contains everything that the refugees need to survive indefinitely. the first task of the survivors is to expel the numerous zombies from the mall, but what are the zombies doing there anyway? “this was an important place in their lives” explains one of the characters, and for this reason, although virtually mindless, they have instinctively come back to the most significant location of their former existence. the suggestion that users of shopping malls are mindless consumers — romero’s zombies are driven solely by an urge to consume human flesh — is underscored by the behaviour of the survivors once they have successfully taken over the mall. in a long sequence they are shown to open, try and discard various kinds of food and drink, clothing, cosmetics and other consumer items. even the healthy activity of sport is portrayed as the consumption and waste of resources as one of the survivors plays tennis on the roof against a wall with boxes of tennis balls spilling open around him until one of them drops off the roof and onto the ground outside where it bounces unnoticed among the milling zombies. once again romero 116 emphasises the frightening similarity between zombies and the living. both are driven by want, in both cases it seems to be ultimately mindless, indeed, the thoughtless consumption of material goods by the survivors is seen to be far more exaggerated than that of the zombies whose needs are confined to human flesh, and who, anyway, are driven by nothing but instinct, and have no opportunity to reflect on and modify their behaviour. eventually the mall is attacked by lawless bikers who indulge in an even greater orgy of consumption and destruction than has yet occurred. romero’s film has an obvious ecological message: we are simply eating up the world’s resources as though we were zombies. we are the living dead. we live merely to consume, we have no other goal, no other motivation; our lives have no other meaning, and it will lead to our own destruction. dawn of the dead, unlike romero’s first zombie film, night of the living dead, has a quintessentially urban setting. shopping malls represent one of the greatest denials of the natural world that humanity has constructed. everything is artificial, from the floor, to the walls and the ceiling, the light, the temperature and the filtered and conditioned air which is breathed. jeff may argues that “[c]ontemporary zombie films mark a geographical move to large urban areas, bringing the zombie masses to the city” (285), and this is clearly the case with dawn of the dead, though not night of the living dead, which is set in an isolated house in rural pennsylvania. may’s reading of the zombie allegory is that of “foregrounding urban fears while containing implicit messages about social difference and otherness” (285). while this is true, it ignores the metaphor of the zombie as mindless consumer so vividly portrayed by romero. furthermore, many zombie films and stories are evidently rural, leading to an inevitable interrogation of humanity’s relationship with nature. zombies reduce humanity to mere neediness, a state, it might be argued, that cities have evolved to satisfy as completely and efficiently as possible. but the resources to do this are provided, ultimately, by nature, and they are finite. in her introduction to the ecocriticism reader (1996), cheryl glotfelty argues that “ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (xviii) before going on to ask “[i]n what ways and to what effect is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary literature and popular culture?” (xix). it is appropriate then to read max brooks’s best-selling 2006 novel world war z: an oral history of the zombie war as a fictional ecocritique of contemporary environmental issues. the novel begins in china, the country with the highest population on earth and one of the world’s fastest growing economies. here the first reported zombies appear, living (if that is the word) somewhere in the depths of the reservoir waters of the three gorges dam where they attack divers scavenging among the drowned villages. brooks’s choice of the dam region is deliberate. it is not only one of the world’s largest human engineering projects dedicated to providing water and power for human use, it is also one of the most ecologically controversial projects ever constructed, as even the chinese have come to realise. in 2008 scientific american published the following: for over three decades the chinese government dismissed warnings from scientists and environmentalists that its three gorges dam—the world’s largest—had the potential of becoming one of china’s biggest environmental nightmares. but last fall, denial suddenly gave way to reluctant acceptance that the naysayers were right. chinese officials staged a sudden about-face, acknowledging for the first time that the massive hydroelectric dam, 117 sandwiched between breathtaking cliffs on the yangtze river in central china, may be triggering landslides, altering entire ecosystems and causing other serious environmental problems—and, by extension, endangering the millions who live in its shadow. (hvistendahl) brooks was aware of this: in the novel we learn that by the end of the zombie war the population of greater chongqing region had been reduced from thirty five million to “barely fifty thousand” (brooks 2006: 4). this massive reduction is caused not through the spread of the zombie virus, but by the collapse of the dam itself: roughly ten trillion gallons of water, carrying debris, silt, rocks, trees, cars, houses and house-sized pieces of the dam itself! it was alive, a brown and white dragon racing to the east china sea … no-one knows how many people died that night. even today they’re still finding bodies. (brooks 2006: 261) having begun with the three gorges dam, it is technology and the consumption of resources, rather than zombies, which are highlighted throughout the novel as vectors of death and destruction. according to the zombie survival guide, brooks’s spoof survival manual which was published in 2004 two years before world war z, the walking dead are infected by a virus called solanum which is communicable “only through direct fluidic contact” (brooks 2004: 3). zombies seek out living flesh and can smell it, according to the guide “from a distance of more than a mile” (7). they will eat any kind of flesh, as long as it is alive, though they prefer human. only humans become zombies after being bitten — other animals simply die. despite their predatory nature the zombie’s walk, though tireless, is shambling and slow. how then, was the virus spread so quickly? as people became aware of the disease they fled, often aided by snakeheads: “[t]hey would step off the plane at london or rome, or even san francisco” (brooks 2006: 13) and thus the disease, which takes from 23 hours to an unspecified length of time to cause zombie reanimation (brooks 2004: 3), was carried by modern technology to every corner of the world. not surprisingly, it is the remoter, less populated regions which often (though not always) fare best. iran, until besieged by fleeing pakistanis, initially does well. according to a major in the revolutionary guard: “our land was very mountainous. transportation was difficult. our population was relatively small” (brooks 2006: 90). more significantly, lack of technology helps. the yanomami of the amazon rain forest “weather[ed] the crisis as well, if not better, than even the most industrialized nation” (brooks 2006: 21) while the safest areas, those to which refugees fled in their millions, were the coldest and most inhospitable parts of the world, particularly in the far north, in canada, alaska and siberia since, it turned out, zombies froze solid in low temperatures (though they woke up again in the spring thaw). the diversity of issues taken up by world war z includes the illegal trafficking of organs from poorer parts of the world, a trade which contributes to the ease with which the solanum virus is transmitted. in a footnote we are informed that “[i]t has been alleged that, before the war, the sexual organs of sudanese men convicted of adultery were severed and sold on the black market” (brooks 2006: 22). the main example given, though, is that of a brazilian transplant surgeon and a dextrocardiac chinese heart: 118 where else but china could we find that kind of luck? … and “political expediency.” i told my broker what i needed, gave him the specifics, and sure enough, three weeks later i received an e-mail simply titled “we have a match.” (brooks 2006: 23) the combination of technology, need (in the case of the patient) and greed (in the case of the surgeon and the organ trafficker) are responsible for the spread of the virus, the heart it turns out, of course, being infected with solanum. brooks condemns the mercenary attitude of the surgeon who, it transpires, is not only in cahoots with traffickers, but also with the police who both provide protection and “homegrown organs” presumably obtained among the favelas of são paolo; but it is technology itself, thoughout the novel, which is also constantly questioned. this is immediately apparent when the us authorities make their first major attempt to wipe out the threat with military hardware. unfortunately, zombies, who feel neither pain nor fear, are only terminated when their brains are destroyed, with the result that virtually all high-tech weaponry proves useless against them when they attack in large numbers. both the zombie survival guide and world war z go to great lengths to describe the kinds of weapons which are finally discovered to be effective — hunting rifles, with their great accuracy, being probably the most efficient means of splattering a zombie’s brains out. second only to a well-sighted rifle, however, are the kinds of weapons which would not have been out of place on a medieval battlefield — axes, swords and maces are all considered, as are the weapons used in hand to hand fighting during the first world war — the trench spike being deemed one of the most deadly weapons of all. brooks makes two points about the military’s failure here: firstly, that “armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one” (brooks 2006: 103), with the result that the overwhelming firepower brought to bear on the zombies would no doubt have stopped them in their tracks had they been freedom-hating commies, but is vastly inappropriate when dealing with the living dead. secondly, he insists (or rather the us infantryman who describes the first great battle against the zombies insists) that the zombies’ greatest weapon was the fear they instilled in the living. “what,” he asks, “if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed? not just won’t, but biologically can’t!” (brooks 2006: 104). the point is that the zombies are no longer human. they do not experience emotion of any kind, they barely, if at all, remember anything of their previous lives and they are driven purely by the most primitive of instincts. the most successful methods of countering them are also inhuman, and this is represented by the ‘redeker plan’. paul redeker, an afrikaaner, had come up with the idea during the apartheid years in south africa as a means of protecting a selected portion of the white population from the black. it consisted of withdrawing to safe zones — usually remote and protected by natural barriers — of eliminating all zombies (or blacks) to be found there, and living under a state of siege. this was not, however, the whole plan. the rest of the white population was also to be removed to protected, special zones but of a less isolated and less wellfortified nature. their task was to fight the zombies (or blacks) to the end, thus reducing their numbers and diverting attention from the more important protected areas. this plan was largely adopted throughout the world and was one of the means by which the zombie plague was initially checked, though not eliminated. it required, of course, the 119 deliberate sacrifice of millions of uninfected human beings. in russia, that most human of institutions, the church, was brought in to assist. it was discovered that the necessary killing by their comrades of soldiers who had become infected while fighting was bad for morale, and this task was taken on by the priesthood in recognition of their particular contiguity to matters of the afterlife. meanwhile, back in the real world, and coinciding with the ever-growing evidence of a global ecological crisis in the form of extreme weather, rising sea levels, famine and water shortages, the distribution of the world’s wealth has polarised sharply. according to jill treanor in the guardian newspaper, “[g]lobal inequality is growing, with half the world’s wealth now in the hands of just 1% of the population.” as climate change accelerates it is safe to assume that the very rich will use their wealth to secure the safest, most productive parts of the planet for their own, exclusive use while the remaining 99% will be left to manage as best they can. in world war z, humanity, then, is forced to regress as it attempts to deal with the zombie threat, both technologically and ethically: it must sacrifice two of its most defining characteristics and in doing so become ever more indistinguishable from the enemy. this is made clear at a number of points in the novel. commander song, captain of a chinese submarine, talks of “humanity’s great regression,” observing that “[w]e came from the sea … and now we’re running back” (brooks 2006: 242), while an american infantryman describes how their military doctrines had gone “back into the past like everything else” (brooks 2006, 277). by the time the zombies, which number two hundred million in the usa alone at the height of the war, are slowly destroyed one by one with rifle bullets and sharpened entrenching tools, the combatants become ever more alike in their single-minded urge to kill. a south african mercenary explains how he tried to settle back in to civilian life, but, he confesses, he missed the excitement so much he no longer felt alive: “not only was i dead,” he says, “i couldn’t think about anything else but killing” (brooks 2006: 332). a similar observation about the death of humanity is made by a german jew: i’ve heard it said that the holocaust has no survivors, that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was gone forever. i’d like to think that’s not true. but if it is, then no-one on earth survived this war. (brooks 2006: 340) this living death, this inhumanity, will be the fate of the one per cent. what, then, caused this catastrophe to occur? in the zombie survival guide we learn that “extensive research has yet to find an isolated example of solanum in nature. water, air, and soil in all ecosystems, from all parts of the world have turned up negative, as have their accompanying flora and fauna” (brooks 2004: 2-3). it seems to have emerged, as we have seen, in the reservoir waters of the three gorges dam, yet its origin has still to be traced. it could, indeed, be a man-made virus. but its effect on humanity is like that of any such contagious plague — highly populated areas are the most affected — human mobility provides the means for its expansion. in 1798 malthus argued that diseases “may more justly be considered as indications that we have offended against some of the laws of nature” (152) through “filth and torpor; and as dirt, squalid poverty and indolence” (152) and that this is nature’s way of telling us “to avoid splitting on the same rock” (153). there is plenty of evidence in world war z to suggest that brooks is 120 largely in agreement with malthus. in this case, the rock upon which humanity has split is not only that of over-population, but the unchecked consumption of the world’s resources: “every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on earth” (brooks 2006: 273) observes one of the survivors in an unintentionally ironic comment which once again draws our attention to the similarity between the living and the living dead. another witness of the war is an astronaut, trapped on an orbital platform. from it he observes the destruction of the world: to see the massive ecological devastation makes one understand how the modern environmental movement began with the american space program. there were so many fires, and i don’t just mean the buildings, or the forests, or the oil rigs blazing out of control – bleeding saudis actually went ahead and did it … it was equivalent to a low-grade nuclear exchange between the united states and the former soviet union, and that’s not including the actual nuclear exchange between iran and pakistan … nuclear autumn was already beginning to set in, the gray-brown shroud thickening each day. (brooks 2006: 260) ironically, autumn and winter become the seasons of hope, and spring the season of despair. in this world turned upside down, the zombies who have frozen into immobility with the cold weather, perhaps even buried deep in the winter snows, return to life with the spring thaw. thus, although by the novel’s end the zombie war is over, the zombie menace is not. each spring those northern territories which once provided refuge for millions of fleeing survivors, must be scoured for reanimating corpses. “spring’s like winter used to be,” we’re told, “nature letting us know the good life’s over for now” (brooks 2006: 320). by the close of the novel the world’s population has shrunk to a tiny fraction of what it once was. the war’s devastation has virtually wiped out the whales and most other sea life (brooks 2006: 341). rats and cats have evolved into ferocious beasts (brooks 2006: 318) and, above all, no-one knows when or where the next zombie outbreak will occur. margo collins and elson bond in their article “new millennium zombies” argue that “world war z, despite its often-unsettling scenes, ultimately offers a basically hopeful worldview … what might have appeared to be zombie-as-threat turned out to be not much threat at all” (194). one wonders what kind of threat these two critics would take seriously when two hundred million zombies in america alone — all of whom must be destroyed — is not much threat at all. they add that, in “brooks’s postapocalyptic world, humanity has ultimately prevailed and, in a nietzschean twist, is all the stronger for it” (194). i think they are wrong. although still surviving in vastly reduced numbers, humanity’s continuing existence is neither guaranteed nor secure. more to the point, it has been warned by nature, by the earth, by gaia, to behave itself. whether it heeds this warning is irrelevant from gaia’s point of view. if it does not, it dies. both possibilities are left open, as brooks’s shows. sensei tomonaga ijiro, a blind japanese martial arts specialist, learns to combat the zombies in a manner that is, quite literally, respectful to the earth. as he bashes or lures the enemy to its death he would “thank the spirit of each rock, or cliff, or waterfall that carried them over thousand-meter drops” before retrieving and beheading the corpses to avoid “desecrating the stream.” sometimes he throws them 121 “into the volcanic crater where oyamatsumi’s rage could purge their stench” (brooks 2006: 225) — oyamatsumi being the ruler of mountains and volcanoes. this, clearly, is appropriate behaviour. in russia, meanwhile, the country in which the priests became executioners, nothing seems to have been learnt. having rid itself of zombies, mother russia has now embarked on a campaign to restore its erstwhile imperial possessions such as belarus and the ukraine. maria zhuganova, a former combatant, is about to give birth to her eighth child “our leader says that the greatest weapon a russian woman can wield now is her uterus. if that means not knowing my children’s fathers, or… (her eyes momentarily hit the floor) …my children, so be it. i serve the motherland and i serve with all my heart” (brooks 2006: 330). unlike tomonaga ijiro, maria zhuganova does not behave with respect either towards her own nature, or to the environment which she is proceeding to overpopulate with dysfunctional children as fast as she can. moreover, her loyalty lies with the artificial, unnatural and voracious political entity known as mother russia rather than with her true mother, the earth . world war z is an ecological allegory in the same way that james lovelock’s concept of the earth as gaia, as a living organism, is a metaphor. lovelock defends his approach on the grounds that “metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead” (147). humankind is moving, zombie-like, towards the destruction, not of the planet, or of life on earth — for surely life will continue for many millions of years yet — but towards the destruction of human civilisation. lovelock says: we are tough and it would take more than the predicted climate catastrophe to eliminate all breeding pairs of humans; what is at risk is civilisation. as individual animals we are not so special, and in some ways the human species is like a planetary disease, but through civilisation we redeem ourselves and have become a precious asset for the earth. (10) the reason that civilisation is threatened is simple: it is because we “are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals ... we are taking so much that [the earth] is no longer able to sustain the familiar and comfortable world we have taken for granted” (7). lovelock is quite clear of the outcome: “if we fail to take care of the earth, it will surely take care of itself by making us no longer welcome” (2). as temperatures rise, human (and much other) life will no longer be viable. food will become impossible to grow and in many parts of the world it will simply be too hot for our species to survive. lovelock predicts that the planet will become “so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive” (147). there will still be a few places that humanity can cling on to: “the british isles, with its oceanic site and high latitude” (60) might be a refuge, though much diminished in size as a result of rises in sea level. similarly “the tundra wastelands of siberia and northern canada that remain above sea level will be rich with vegetation” (55). perhaps these places will become, in lovelock’s words, “the new arctic centres of civilization” (159). lovelock’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world is identical to brooks’s — it is merely the nature of the apocalypse that is different, but the results are the same: few human beings will survive, they will be forced to live in the higher northern latitudes and, despite the optimistic reading of world war z by critics margo collins and elson bond, it will be, as 122 lovelace says, “a stone age existence” (3): it will be, in brooks’s words, nature letting us know the good life’s over for now (2006: 320). lovelace describes the earth as being diseased, as suffering from a “fever brought on by a plague of people” (3): brooks narrates the history of a pandemic, a plague of the living dead. for both writers it is humanity which is the disease infecting the planet. in malthusian terms this is the result of over-population in relation to the availability of life-sustaining resources. ecologically it is the upsetting of the planet’s climatic equilibrium through misuse of the biosphere. lovelock is pessimistic and believes the only thing we can do now is attempt to slow down the effects of global warming in time to adapt our civilisation to it. even this is unlikely to occur. human beings are zombies — mindless consumers: it is too late to preserve an eco-system that will maintain human life on earth in the way that we enjoy it now: we are, truly, the living dead. works cited brooks, max. the zombie survival guide. complete protection from the living dead. 2004. london; duckworth, 2011. --world war z. an oral history of the zombie war. 2006. london; duckworth, 2011. christie, deborah. “a dead new world: richard matheson and the modern zombie.” better off dead: the evolution of the zombie as post-human. deborah christie and sarah juliet lauro (eds.). new york: fordham up, 2011. collins, margo and elson bond. “new millennium zombies.” better off dead: the evolution of the zombie as post-human. deborah christie and sarah juliet lauro (eds.). new york: fordham up, 2011. dawn of the dead. dir. george romero. perf. david emge, ken foree, scott h. reiniger, gaylen ross. laurel group, 1978. degoul, franck. “‘we are the mirror of your fears’: haitian identity and zombification.” tr. elisabeth m. lore. better off dead: the evolution of the zombie as posthuman. deborah christie and sarah juliet lauro (eds.). new york: fordham up, 2011. fleming, ian. live and let live. london: jonathan cape, 1954. glotfelty, cheryl and harold fromm (eds). the ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology. athens, georgia: the university of georgia press, 1996. grant, drew. “zombies occupy wall street.” the new york observer. 10.4.2011. http://observer.com/2011/10/do-zombies-capitalism-or-communism-in-occupy-wallstreet-protests-slideshow/ hvistendahl, mara. “china's three gorges dam: an environmental catastrophe?" scientific american. 25.3.2008. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chinas-three-gorges-dam-disaster kee, chera. “‘they are not men…they are dead bodies!’: from cannibal to zombie and back again.” better off dead: the evolution of the zombie as post-human. deborah christie and sarah juliet lauro (eds.). new york: fordham up, 2011. lovelock, james. the revenge of gaia. new york: basic books, 2006. luckhurst, roger. zombies a cultural history. london: reaktion books ltd, 2015. malthus, t.r. on the principle of population. vol. ii. london: j.m. dent (no date provided). matheson, richard. i am legend. new york: gold medal, 1954. 123 matthews, karen. “wall street protesters dress as zombies in nyc.” yahoo news. 4.10.2011. http://news.yahoo.com/wall-street-protesters-dress-zombies-nyc112007979.html may, jeff. “zombie geographies and the undead city.” social & cultural geography, 11:3, 2010. 285-298. night of the living dead. dir. george romero. perf. duane jones, judith o’dea, karl hardman, marilyn eastman. image ten, 1968. potter, mitch. “occupy wall street ‘zombies’ keep protest alive.” toronto star. 3.10.2011. http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1064174--occupy-wall-streetzombies-keep-protest-alive seabrook, william. 1929. “dead men working in the cane fields.” zombies! zombies! zombies! otto penzler (ed.). new york: vintage/black lizard, 2011. skelton, charlie. bilderberg 2012: “ken clarke’s drive of shame.” the guardian. 4.6.2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-news-blog/2012/jun/04/bilderberg2012-ken-s-drive-of-shame?intcmp=srch treanor, jill. “half of world's wealth now in hands of 1% of population – report.” the guardian. 13.10.2015. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-worldwealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report. bill phillips is senior lecturer in the english literature section of the department of english and german, university of barcelona. his research interests focus on poetry and other literature of the romantic period, ecocriticism and ecofeminism, gender studies, detective fiction and science fiction on all of which he has published widely. he is now head of the ministerio de ciencia y innovación research project postcolonial crime fiction: a global window into social realities. microsoft word 17offord coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 182 village in the jungle the eighth annual doireann macdermott lecture baden offord editor’s note. this paper is a slightly edited version of a keynote lecture, delivered at the aula magna of the university of barcelona as the eighth annual doireann macdermott lecture, organized by the university’s australian studies centre in december 2007. offord’s essay takes us from leonard woolf’s creative and ethical intervention in britain’s colonial project, forged through a transformative vision of the ‘spirit of place’ in his novel the village in the jungle (1931), to the australian specifics of colonialism and its aftermath. highly critical of the dominant power structures in australian society that keep sustaining the enlightenment discourse of an unfinished colonial project, offord delineates alternative strategies so as to deal with identity and belonging, arguing for a notion/nation of ‘cultural citizenship’, no longer based on exclusions. key words: leonard woolf; australian postcoloniality; cultural citizenship part one during my undergraduate student days of indian studies at the university of sydney i came across one of the most remarkable novels i have ever read, and which to me remains utterly compelling. the village in the jungle was written and published by leonard woolf (1931). the novel is set in what was then known as ceylon (now sri lanka) and is a gripping story surrounding the plight of husband and wife, silindu and dingihami, and their children. it traces their lives in a village known as beddagama, which means village in the jungle. woolf writes about this village: its beginning and its end was in the jungle, which stretched away from it on all sides unbroken, north and south and east and west, to the blue lines of the hills and to the sea… the spirit of the jungle is in the village and in the people who live in it. it was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; copyright©2011 baden offord. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 183 a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him. (1931: 1) the narrative of the village in the jungle is set against the tide of british civilisation, and its rendering deep into the heart of unknown territory an installation of british enlightenment values and thinking. these passages i’ve just read foreground the purpose of the civilising process, to bring rationality and the concept of justice into relief through their stark omission. the story follows the effects of imperial rule from the imagined desk of a colonial officer in london, and how, through the mechanism of governance, colonial power obliterates distance in its reach deep (and substantially) within the jungle of ceylon, into the village of beddagama, simultaneously beguiling and drawing the husband and wife out of their hut while altering their space forever. the long but palpable reach of the colonial touch (and psychological invasion) captures, to my mind, the complex interdependence of place that existed well before the instantaneous nature of the internet. the story raises the question, is it possible to be anywhere, go anywhere, without colonising, without touching and being touched by the colonial project? woolf’s story of the very disastrous effects of colonisation, both on the colonised and the coloniser, is one that resonates with many histories of cultural and civilisational conquest and exchange. in 1904 leonard woolf had joined the civil service in ceylon, and worked there for several years as a government officer. after returning to england in may 1911 he married virginia stephen who was, like her husband, a central figure in the bloomsbury group. woolf’s first novel, the village in the jungle, was published in 1913. although this novel has not attained a level of importance to place it prominently within the canon of postcolonial literature, it is a work that to my mind makes an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the architecture and effect of the act of colonialism. something of this novel’s nature evokes the immense and inexorable movement of the colonial mind. the earth, space, time itself – are all intrinsically altered through the impact and exchange that occurs between the colonizer and the colonized. a review in the chicago tribunei has noted that the village in the jungle ‘is not a work of art – it is a miracle in writing’. i agree. but, i would add it is a miracle of cultural translation, dealing with the transformation of culture through the effects of the colonialising process. when leonard woolf wrote the village in the jungle, he was articulating the moment of perception that his life journey led him to when, for those years at the beginning of the 20th century, he was a collector in sri lanka. this was also the moment when motorcars, airplanes, x rays, quantum theory, and picasso were changing the way we see ourselves, the way we live in the world. he was articulating what ashis nandy calls the forgotten double of history – not history at all as we define it, but a story that is about the spirit of place, which gives meaning to existence. in effect the great lesson of woolf's book is not about distance but space, not about journeys across continents between geographies or cultures but the active and timeless present. woolf’s vision is iconic, and so not surprisingly his novel has never been out of print in sri lanka – it gives recognition to the colonial encounter without the need of coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 184 cultural translation, which the catalan philosopher raimon pannikar has remarked is normally more difficult than doing a heart transplant (1982: 120). the village in the jungle has long inspired and sustained my curiosity about what happens in the meeting of cultures; of the question of the mutual dependence of cultures; of what we need to do to understand the cultural encounter and its implications. but, importantly, the novel presents a possible alternative future in the sense that it provides a conscious reckoning of the past in the present. there are several observations that arise from a study of this novel. the first concerns the movement of the western mind into the world, as it were, into the jungle and what happens when the jungle is brought into the heart of the colonizer. what nourished the colonial reach was the momentum of a framework of concepts such as progress, equality, justice, tolerance and so on – basically the western enlightenment legacy. the installation of the enlightenment and its values across the world has been regarded as a triumph of the western mind. its installation differed of course from place to place. thus, very particular aspects of the enlightenment were installed in australia, which in a way was a true child of the british enlightenment. the second observation i would like to make is that colonisation is ubiquitous to the human condition. it occurs as the basis of any form of power relation in which the distribution of that power is not negotiated with respect to and recognition of mutual dependence. in nandy’s account in his book the intimate enemy (1983), he persuasively outlines how colonialism is not just the conquest of space (terra firma or marine), but that it forms the content of cultures and societies, becoming indeed, a mindset. he writes: ‘this colonialism colonises the mind in addition to bodies and it releases forces within colonised societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all’ (1983: xi). the third observation is that in the very writing of the village of the jungle, woolf is both demonstrating the colonial mind, but more explicitly and consciously, he is bringing the other into relief and participating in their suffering. there is a conscious recognition, in other words, of the mutual dependence of humanity underlying the story, underscored by the tragedy of the civilising process of the coloniser. the village in the jungle also reminds me that in the end what we suffer from is a kind of cultural vertigo. this is where we become unconscious of the cultural priorities and imperatives of a society, when the values we have are fundamentally taken for granted. cultural vertigo is also the hallmark of the cultural encounter and what occurs in the meeting of minds. what woolf succeeded in accomplishing with his writing of this book was extraordinary. he demonstrated how to creatively and ethically intervene into the colonial project. for me, he has provided a template in the village in the jungle for being critically and culturally literate, being able to think of alternative futures. part two in this next part i want to contextualise my thoughts so far and extrapolate on the themes i have raised to examine the content of recent events in australian civil society. what i propose is that australia is an unfinished colonial project coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 185 characterised by enlightenment values that have become instrumental of pathologies of power, that is, where only specific epistemologies are given legitimation. these are evident in struggles within australian public culture where alternative futures emerge and take shape. thus, to understand how the colonial reach raised in the village in the jungle continues to inform contemporary australia – today – my purpose here is to introduce the usefulness of being culturally literate about australia. as defined by schirato and yell, ‘cultural literacy,’ is ‘both a knowledge of meaning systems and an ability to negotiate those systems within different cultural contexts’ (2000: 1). i hope that what i now offer is helpful in gaining a deeper appreciation of what characterises australia. contemporary australian values have been and continue to be sustained through a matrix of power relations that have been established through the installation of the western enlightenment project. values that underpin national discourse in australia have become pathologies in the way they have been invoked and applied through the dominant powers; the rationalisation of tolerance, justice and equality for all, for example – as bedrock australian values – have frequently produced their very antithesis, something that is resonant with the village in the jungle. the complexity of these power relations is expressed through a variety of social, political and cultural effects that are produced in the way australian civil society organises, interprets and understands itself. this occurs in significant symmetrical and asymmetrical conversations located within narratives, both formal and informal, of australian belonging. what characterises the substance of these conversations are contests and struggles about how australia is defined, by and for whom. in the wake of colonisation’s imperative – to alter and reject incommensurability – the mechanisms, strategies and negotiations that form the basis of the enlightenment society become crucial positions of national site hardening. that is, where structures and institutions are defined and codified. what informs and importantly acts as the decisive directive to the public sphere is an homogenous conglomerate of assumed (site-hardened) values that are at the core of contemporary australia. these have been and are resisted, however, through a plethora of responses created and circulated in the arena of public culture, now perhaps the most important place where pathologies of power are scrutinised and challenged. in this part of the paper i want to give an overview of the public sphere and its relationship to public culture. the public sphere we know is formed by and through the legitimated core institutions of a society. in australia, given its legacy as a colonial (unfinished)ii project of the british empire, the basic institutions that were installed into its (vacant assumed) landscape derive from a value-laden framework borne out of industrialisation, colonialism, the consolidation of the national statist system, and democracy, all imbued with western enlightenment principles and thinking. modernity in australia has thus been constituted by the importation, assumption and triumph of the western mind. the subsequent spatial enculturation of, and assimilation with this mind following european invasion and settlement upon the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 186 landscape of australia, (so named through the colonial conquest), has inscribed architectures of public and civic consciousness that have marked or site-hardened the public sphere in specific ways. traditions have been established over the past 218 years and more that support and perpetuate dominant ideas and histories of national belonging and who or what is a legitimate australian citizen. a dominant history and mythology has been installed that locates through the logic of identity essentialist notions of what constitutes australianness. this is problematic for the way the national culture survives as it is predicated on essentialist values that ultimately pathologise power through fixed notions of who should be granted legitimacy or not. in australia, the clearest evidence exists that demonstrates the effects of these power relations, particularly in relation to the indigenous population, their destruction through colonisation and their subsequent, systemic exclusion from the dominant narratives and institutions of belonging. core institutions include education, medicine, economy, religion (church), sport, the media and law. in australia, these institutions have derived their legitimation from the ongoing effects of enlightenment thinking, particularly ideas formed around the individual in relation to equality, freedom and tolerance. one particular principle – justice – became entrenched as an enlightenment orientation, derived from its inherent relationship to the powerful notion of civilisation, where the individual becomes the rational civic and civil subject. overarching these ideas are instrumental national and state pathologies of power that are expressed in ideas and policies deeply based on the supremacy of a white australian space. these have been realised through its culture and polity; a basic state heterosexism; patriarchal duty and obligation; preservation of judeo-christian epistemologies; all for the purpose of a general assimilation of the other – most frequently invoked in specific relation to, but by no means limited to, the aborigine, the migrant, or the refugee. twentieth century australia’s public sphere was driven by two contradictory imperatives. first, following the second world war, australia modelled and benchmarked its core institutions consonant with the establishment of international human rights treaties, declarations, values and language. the entrenchment of a rights consciousness in australia demonstrated the hallmarks of a rational, modern and civilised society. through much of the latter part of the century, australia prided itself as a beacon of human rights law and practice. the other contradictory imperative that emerged, and which complemented the human rights framework, was the entrenchment of the notions that australia was a tolerant, fair and just society. indeed, through political rhetoric, national celebrations and the creation of modern traditions such as anzac, these notions became mythologised and rationalised as australia formed and sitehardened the content of its consciousness. these imperatives have characterised australia’s development of its public sphere through the last hundred years and more. with the demise of the white australia policy in the 1970s, which followed as a direct response to the waves of migration from non-anglo european nations and increasingly from asia, australia became a nation in which there existed two dominant forms of belonging. the first was based on the maintenance of the monocultural traditions of the core institutions, which were primarily anglo, white and coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 187 christian. it was acceptable and indeed celebrated to honour anzac with the phrase ‘lest we forget’. this tradition had become a key site of australia’s civilising modus operandi. every statue and memorial across the nation dedicated to anzac became a site of national self-definition, a cultural, political and social marker that mythologised a specific narrative of memory, which more often than not spoke of only one legitimate form of belonging. this ritualised, cultural pedagogic and civic as well as civil act of belonging has stood in stark contradistinction to the maintenance of other institutionalised forms of forgetting. most significantly, the collective amnesia that existed regarding the effects of the colonial encounter upon aboriginal and torres strait islanders has been actively maintained through the australian lack of will to come to terms with that encounter. this frames what could be described as a shared indigenous and non-indigenous trauma of belonging. it is still hard to see the full effects of the apology to aboriginal and torres strait islanders that was given by former prime minister kevin rudd in 2008. the second form of belonging that occurred cohered around the everyday experience of the multicultural, where the everyday exchange and interaction of cultural diversity was evident. waves of migration from the outset of the formation of the australian state have demonstrated this cultural diversity. unacknowledged in the architecture of the public sphere is the fact that aboriginal society itself was and is characterised by the experience of diverse peoples, communities and cultures. there was and is no monolithic aboriginality. in relation to the remarkable demographic changes of the second part of the twentieth century, australian society became explicitly a national home of substantive, lived and expressed cultural diversity, layered onto a rich aboriginal cultural diversity that had been systematically reduced. this form of belonging was recognised to some extent within the public sphere through the adoption of multiculturalism as a policy in the early 1970s. however, the dominance of mono-cultural ideology within the australian political system was unable to alter the epistemological basis of the core institutions sufficiently enough so that by the end of the century multiculturalism became a suspect and diminished position. although the national imaginary had changed irrevocably, the project of modernity conspired with the establishment of mono-cultural borders, fixing the parameters of the public sphere. traditions such as anzac; nationalist jingoism such as ‘we will decide who will come here’; the government’s rejection of the notion of the public sphere endorsing an apology to indigenous australians for the wholesale effects of colonialism; and the legislation to entrench heterosexual marriage in 2004, were all signs of a retreat from the reality of cultural diversity. at the launch of the book, the conservative, in 2005, the prime minister, john howard, was able to say that he was a ‘profound opponent of changing the social context in which we live’ (quoted in wilson 2007). he even agreed with the australian historian, keith windshuttle that students were ‘grossly disadvantaged’ if they were forced to study subjects such as gender studies, media studies, ethnic studies, peace studies, genocide studies, ‘indeed anything ending with studies’. for howard, the viability of the conservative social context was through the maintenance of borders – physical, psychological, political, cultural – framed through specific (site-hardened) values based on a mono-cultural public sphere. it is interesting to note coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 188 that the highest rating television program in 2006 was called ‘border security’. the rationalisation of these borders was significantly legitimated simultaneously with enlightenment discourse on tolerance, a just society and ‘a fair go for all’. if the public sphere contains the legitimised core institutions of a society, the arena of public culture forms the unfixed and uncalculated content of that society’s consciousness. following donald horne’s seminal work (2006) on examining australian public culture, which highlighted the various cultural avenues of interpretation and self definition that a society engages in – through its myths, rituals, festivals, legends and so on – here the purpose of understanding the role of national public culture in relation to the enlightenment project and the production of values in contemporary australia comes into sharp relief. what characterises public culture at this time is that it provides the primary arena in civil society through which resistance and calls for reform can be expressed and where challenging pathologies of power is possible.iii this arena includes the broadest ambit of communication and expression about who belongs and who does not. public culture can be conceived of as the aggregate of mechanisms, contexts and spaces available to a society that provide the basis of communal self-understanding and self-definition. these mechanisms can be found within the core institutions but are not limited to them; in this sense, any cultural form, artefact or practice can constitute an element of the public culture. from graffiti to the lyrics of a song; in marketing as well as through community organizations; through journalism and letters to the editor; in narrative product found in film, television, song, book, blog, youtube, or even report; in everyday cultural sites such as cafes, sporting clubs, churches or mosques; with the ubiquitous mobile phone; on the beach; anywhere there is an expression and/or exchange of communication, it is evidence of the explicit and implicit consciousness of the public culture. following the definition frequently provided about the role of the media – that it is society talking to itself – the public culture is constituted by a matrix of conversations of society: interpreting, producing, regulating, representing and consuming the context of that society. this forms the consciousness of a society. in contemporary australia, the cultural arena is the civil space in which enlightenment values are both embraced and contested. this is where the complexity of belonging becomes apparent, that australia is an imbricated national culture: both a mono-cultural institutional society at the same time as being a multicultural reality where there are many diverse ways of knowing. in this space the dissonance of democracy can be heard and observed; it is also a space that both nourishes cultural amnesia as well as ethical acts of resistance and reform. in australian public culture, whiteness, heterosexism, patriarchy, capitalism and the mono-cultural are produced as well as resisted. but the hallmark of public culture is that it is a space where the other can also be represented and recognised. for example, while the public sphere may embed the instrumental nature of human rights through law and parliament, it is through public culture that human rights and their attached values and language about the vulnerability of being human are imagined, conceived and engaged with. although the white australia policy has not been extant as a legal and political instrument of site-hardening for over thirty years, its legacy coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 189 continues through the culture of the core institutions and therefore in public conversations. the debate over what constitutes australian values has become a fault-line in contemporary australian culture and society. events such as september 11, the bombings in bali and jakarta, and the ‘war on terror’ brought australian values powerfully into the purview of politicians, political cartoonists and media commentators. if, as john ralston saul suggested, september 11 brought god to every politician’s table in the united states (2005), it brought australian values to every politician’s table in australia. for the duration of the howard government, a deliberate focus was placed on proscribing values that are related to a values sensibility for australia. in 2006, this culminated in the release of a discussion paper, australian citizenship: much more than a ceremony, which outlined the basic tenets of what australian values were and meant. at the heart of this paper, andrew robb suggested that these values included: our respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, support for democracy, our commitment to the rule of law, the equality of men and women, the spirit of the fair go, of mutual respect and compassion for those in need (dimia 2006). this typology of values is self-evident in a society that embraces cultural diversity and wishes to sustain and enhance its multicultural reality. they are the building blocks of a liberal democratic society. however, the howard government, in contradistinction with these views, undermined their basis through support for a different set of values that were embedded within the australian public sphere and circulating in its public culture. this bi-polar approach to values continues to generate complex ramifications. on the one hand, howard valued equality between men and women, yet discriminated against homosexuals. he valued mutual respect and compassion, but did not recognise indigenous ontological belonging. this is where the enlightenment project is fraught, evident in the absence of substantive support for the other. to provide another example, the conservative journalist janet albrechtsen, who wages an ongoing fight against a culture of diversity in australia, maintained her ‘fortress australia’ during the howard era at the cost of understanding complexity. albrechtsen’s anxieties are derived from a mindset that clearly creates borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’; her views are rationalised again and again into the west and the rest. the intimate enemy for albrechtsen is, in fact, the cultural diversity of australian society, which disturbs and challenges her mono-cultural, mono-sexual and monochromatic worldview. in her world, there can be no borderland – and unfixed identities and undetermined allegiances, or ambivalence in other words – but only borders and site hardening, ‘set up to define the … safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them’ (anzaldua 1987: 3). in a story on how to tackle muslim extremists, she sees a ‘con job’ of a national canberra event that brought together muslim and non-muslim australians to deliberate on how to build bridges between cultures (2007). albrechtsen writes: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 190 ‘we’re fooling ourselves by imagining the problem will go away with a barbecue and a friendly chat over the fence’ (2006). for albrechtsen, the values that need to be boldly stated and defended, dressed in the parlance of western liberal democracy, are to be maintained through an attack on muslim extremism. for her, there are no protocols of engagement required. dialogue and notions of mutual dependence are redundant. in this sense, albrechtsen makes a tyranny of australian values. in her columns, the debate over australian values has been linked to the maintenance of a culture of whiteness, a culture of heterosexualism, therefore a culture of exclusion. she wishes to civilise australia, and to set forth a ‘we’ that shares certain beliefs, institutions, and values. this is resonant to john howard when he stated ‘australia’s core set of values flowed from its anglo-saxon identity’ (2006). albrechtsen has taken a strong position in defining australian values. in her ‘we’ the core common values of australia are conceptualised as heterosexual, and rationalised in terms of family and marriage. there is no place for a sexuality (or identity) that is fluid, or unfixed. she defends marriage as a heterosexual and a patriarchal institution, which is crucial to civilisation. for her, gay marriage would be an idealistic experiment set to fail just as she argues both multiculturalism and aboriginal rights have also failed (2006). these views provide some examples of how australian values have been essentialised and how the other has been brought into relief through their exclusion from the dominant narratives of belonging. underpinning the basis of these narratives has been the principle of tolerance, one of the key discourses of civilisation. in its rationalised application this principle has become a tool to manage and regulate aversion to the other. it both pathologises the other and normalises it at the same time. tolerance, for example, has been invoked and institutionalised as a means of dealing with the aboriginal and torres strait islanders as well as dealing with asia. in australia, tolerance has been and is frequently articulated as one of its most characteristic values. for example, prime minister john howard stated in 2006 that: in the 21st century, maintaining our social cohesion will remain the highest test of the australian achievement. it demands the best australian ideals of tolerance and decency, as well as the best australian traditions of realism and of balance (2006). the problem of tolerance as a value, however, is that in regulating aversion its realisation actually depoliticises those who are tolerated, and by its operation produces ‘us’ and ‘them’. as wendy brown has convincingly argued: despite its pacific demeanor, tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgment, and aversion (2006: 25). australia’s ideal of social cohesion as it has been conceived and practiced through most of the twentieth century and into the present century, has therefore been inherently narrow and based on profound anxiety about the other. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 191 part three let me now turn briefly to the pivotal intersection between the public sphere and public culture in contemporary australian society, which is the marker of citizenship. following a broad theory of citizenship that it is concerned with the relations between the state and citizen, and between subjects and citizens themselves, the concept can be educed as both a formal and informal process, which includes aspects of regulation, construction, negotiation and imagination. that is, in the public sphere citizenship is actively sitehardened – constructed through nationalist and statist discourse. in the arena of public culture, citizenship expands to mean that it is negotiated through, for example, cultural, social, political, religious, sexual alliances and identification, which are both fixed and fluid, thus context dependent. thus, the notion of cultural citizenship refers to the arena of culture as a primary field of citizenship production. this brings into focus a tension between the subject as citizen of the state (with the requisite paperwork) and subject as citizen of given cultural, global or social contexts. as noted earlier, embedded assumptions in narratives of belonging consist in what is decided, legitimated, ruled and regulated by the dominant powers in society. citizenships of belonging, both instrumentally and indirectly, are constituted through and against processes of hegemonic identity formation. for example, the essentialist ideas of who fulfilled the ideal of australianness explicated in the australian citizenship act of 1948 were based on patriarchal, heterosexist, anglo-saxon and racially embedded policies. john chesterman and brian galligan claim that ‘citizenship is at the heart of australian politics’ (1999: 1). the history of citizenship in australia has been one of exclusion(s). the primary conception of australian citizenship has been derived from anglo-saxon enlightenment models, which have resisted the changing nature of australia from a mono-cultural society into a multicultural one. having considered the above background to australia’s public culture and identified key features in the construction of contemporary australian values and citizenship, i would like to contextualise these concerns in relation to examples of narratives of belonging. first, a government text is presented that provides the institutionalised (public sphere) incorporation and dissemination of specific values to the australian polity, which appear stabilised, fixed and monolithic. second, three films are briefly referred to that demonstrate how the arena of public culture provides a crucial space in which communal conversations – collective, inter-collective, subjective and inter-subjective – can take place in relation to an ongoing negotiation of belonging. what it means to be an australian citizen was a formal document provided to new citizens between 1997 and 2006 (dimia 1997). published by the department of immigration, multicultural and indigenous affairs, the rubric of the booklet is ‘shared values for a shared future.’ the main purpose of this booklet was to introduce an understanding of ‘the meaning and value of australian citizenship.’ in it, the minister for citizenship coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 192 and multicultural affairs wrote: ‘australian citizenship, like our anzac tradition of mateship and commitment to a fair go, symbolises many of these values, including democracy, freedom and community harmony.’ throughout the booklet the construction of australian values is replete with images and symbols (both natural and human-made) that have become germane to the contemporary politics of belonging in australia. the flag, the national anthem, the colours of the country, the coat of arms, uluru, aboriginal dot paintings, cricket, kangaroos and emus, the queen; all these representations form a specific construct of australian identity and the dominant narrative of belonging. key values are underscored such as human rights, fairness and equality before the law. all in all, the booklet is an example of the instrumental values – those that have been legitimated by hegemonic interests in the public sphere. what is of specific interest to the conversation it provides in terms of australia’s self-definition is that it cogently highlights internal contradictions within the society. the booklet actively supports the collective amnesia about colonisation and its effects. for example, the only representation of indigenous australians is in a traditional primitivist format, but more poignantly, on pages 16-17 where ‘the first australians’ are introduced, the depiction of aboriginal society and culture is relegated to the past. laid in bold print upon a sepia-tone photograph of aboriginal men hunting, words are lifted from the national anthem: ‘in history’s page, let every stage advance australia fair…’ this stark and anthropological representation of indigenous australian society completely undermines their value in the formation and present participation within the nation. the embedded hierarchical, darwinist and racialised depiction of indigenous australians constructs a particular meaning of being australian, which suggests that the nation is now post indigenous. this booklet thus frames australian values through the pathologising of aborigines as the past, as history. that is, the aboriginal is other to the present. nothing needs to be reconciled. this example demonstrates the construction of values through a core institution – in this case government – where the very purpose of this document is to provide unambiguous, legitimised and stable content within australian nationalist narratives of belonging. in contrast, three films present ethical interventions. beneath clouds (sen 2002), floating life (law 1996), and head on (kokkinos 1998) are all examples of how citizenship and values are negotiated, fluid and unfixed – that is – ever-changing. these films each deal with specific contexts of identity and belonging and show that there are in fact alternative futures at work. beneath clouds is a poignant story of two indigenous teenagers, one visibly aboriginal, one not. using minimal dialogue, the film unpacks the presence of the colonial aftermath and its scars upon contemporary australia, cogently speaking to the audience that australia is not a post-colonial nation, but one that is caught in systemic colonialism and attempts at de-colonisation. floating life is about asian migrants to australia, encounters with a suburban landscape and the difficulties of cross-cultural and inter-cultural communication. australia is imagined through a negative plate, as it were, an inverted representation of migrant settlement and coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 193 negotiation of belonging in alien light and sound. the narrative unfolds from within the chinese family, an encounter with an australia that gradually comes into focus. head on, the story of a second generation greek-australian family in melbourne, focuses on the life of ari, the gay son, whose sense of belonging and identity is played out amidst contests between normative and unruly behaviour and subjectivity. an acutely urban film, almost universal in its scope, head on imagines an australia that is distinctly unfinished, unknown, resilient and deeply vulnerable. all three films, however, demonstrate the ambiguity and ambivalence at the heart of australian culture. the scars of racism, the attempts at connection and belonging, the pathos of inclusion and exclusion, are all present through the narratives. these film texts are therefore contemporary representations of how the arena of public culture provides a critical, creative and crucial space for negotiating how to belong; this is where complexity is not denied, but actively engaged. the films show how australian values are directly and indirectly formed, that there are possibilities to resist and challenge the dominant anglo-saxon, white, heterosexist and patriarchal legacies of enlightenment australia. these are attempts at recognition in the lineage of leonard woolf. so, these films and the citizenship booklet illustrate the challenges to belonging in contemporary australia. nationally imagined as a just, fair and tolerant society, one that has been built on a self-definition of specific events, myths, traditions and values, australia reflects inherent contradictions within the enlightenment project. madan sarup has argued that ‘tradition is always being made and remade,’ that significantly ‘tradition is about change – change that is not being acknowledged’ (1996: 5). this is at the heart of australia’s ambivalence towards itself, evidence of which can be located in the interaction, expression and exchange between the public sphere and the arena of public culture where values are made – and remade. we are at an interesting historical moment. in the last couple of years more people live in cities across the world than in the country. new jungles have emerged with their own consequences and implications. as i said at the beginning, the village in the jungle reminds me that in the end what we suffer from is a kind of cultural vertigo. this is where we become unconscious of the cultural priorities and imperatives of a society, when the values we have are fundamentally taken for granted. in relation to enlightenment australia, i suggest the imperative now is in recognising the necessary other like never before. the village in the jungle is very significant to me as a key narrative that helps me respond to and understand the implications that came with the installation of western, british enlightenment thinking into the landscape of australia. such powerful stories, which form part of the public culture, are tools for a better, more inclusive civilisation, one that values attempts at de-colonisation and presents alternative futures. works cited albrechsten, janet 2006. ‘the love we dare not let wed.’ the australian. 14 june albrechtsen, janet 2007. ‘group hugs can be dangerous.’ the australian. 7 march coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 194 anzaldua, gloria 1987. borderlands: the new mestiza. san francisco: spinsters/aunt lute foundation. brown, wendy 2006. regulating aversion: tolerance in the age of identity and empire. princeton, nj: princeton university press. chesterman, john and brian galligan (eds.) 1999. defining australian citizenship. dimia, department of immigration, multicultural and indigenous affairs. what it means to be an australian citizen. 1997, 2002. canberra: commonwealth government. dimia, dept. of immigration and multicultural and indigenous affairs 2006. australian citizenship, much more than a ceremony [electronic resource]: discussion paper, consideration of the merits of introducing a formal citizenship test. australia: http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-64133 hage, ghassan 2001. against paranoid nationalism. pluto press, sydney. horne, donald 1986. the public culture: an argument with the future. pluto press, london. howard, john 2006. ‘john howard’s australia day address to the national press club.’ available at http://australianpolitics.com/2006/01/25/john-howardaustralia-day-address.html accessed 1 december 2010 kokkinos, anna 1998. head on. law, clara 1996. floating life. macgregor, craig 1999. sydney morning herald. 23 october. melbourne: melbourne university press. nandy, ashis 1983. the intimate enemy. new delhi: oxford university press. pannikar, raimon 1982. “is the notion of human rights a western concept?” diogenes, 120. sarup, madan 1996. identity, culture and the postmodern world. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. saul, john ralston 2005. the collapse of globalism. london: viking. schirato, tony and susan yell 2000. communication and culture: an introduction. allen & unwin: sydney. sen, ivan 2002. beneath clouds. (2002). wilson, tim. 2007. ‘nothing radical about equal opportunities for all citizens.’ the australian. 7 march woolf, leonard 1931. the village in the jungle. london: hogarth press. dr baden offord is 2010-2011 chair (visiting professor) in australian studies, centre for pacific and american studies, institute of advanced global studies, university of tokyo, and associate professor in cultural studies, school of arts and social sciences, southern cross university, australia. his cultural and social research is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach to questions of identity, justice, culture and belonging. see: http://works.bepress.com/baden_offord/ i cited at eland books, available at http://www.travelbooks.co.uk/book_detail.asp?id=76. accessed 1 december 2010. ii following ghassan hage 2001. against paranoid nationalism (pluto press, sydney). the unfinished project of colonisation is not in itself continued by britain, but by the installed colonial consciousness and its effects, which is manifest through the collective amnesia of its core institutions and the ongoing suffering of the indigenous people. iii following an argument put forward by craig macgregor 1999, sydney morning herald, 23 october. microsoft word coolabah 1 gras.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.48-55 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona mama `poma´, dad `apple´: raising a child with catalan in australia victòria gras to the family of my own: ewan, amàlia and whoever is yet to come the decision to speak catalan to my daughter came naturally to me. how else would i tell a story, sing a lullaby or make her laugh but in the language i was told stories, sung lullabies to and made to laugh since i was a new-born! however, whereas the choice to speak one’s mother tongue to your children is not questioned anymore in spain, making this same choice when you live elsewhere seems to raise a lot of eyebrows. in this article i will reflect, from my own experience, on speaking a language of spain other than spanish in australia. catalan is one of 300 community languages in australia, and it’s spoken by a small and ageing population. keywords: catalan, bilingualism, australian community languages, first language, minority language, language policy. language decides the fate of many people around the world. it certainly decided mine. there was no way my australian monolingual 35 year-old boyfriend would move to catalonia, where not only spanish is spoken, but also catalan. the option of continuing a two year long-distance relationship from side to side of the world did not seem appealing either so i, like many other courageous women, said “yes” to becoming a migrant in australia. i left a fulltime permanent job in barcelona, an apartment near the mediterranean and all my relatives and friends, to build a family of my own with an aussie. to be honest, i didn’t fall in love with the country, in fact, i still think it’s too far, too big and too ahistorical, but after nearly four years, i’ve learnt to “call australia home”. there are a few things i loved about it, which helped make up my mind about moving, though. one was the different shapes, sizes and colours of the people who live here, and consequently, the number of languages you are likely to hear on a simple trip to the city by train. there is something fascinating about stepping into a local food market and being addressed in copyright ©2007 victòria gras . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 49 greek because of one’s appearance, or being the only non-chinese person at a neighbouring restaurant. around half the population currently living in the state of victoria were born overseas, meaning there is a huge amount of firstgeneration australians, and a lot of people who have gone through something similar to what i’m going through now. needless to say, it would be unfair and naïve to compare my motives to those of someone who has been forced to flee their country due to political or economic reasons. in the end, i’m a privileged lady who became australian for love. so, with the prospect of becoming a parent, at least my child wouldn’t be one poor bullied kid with a foreign mum. if i chose to speak my mother tongue to my children, they would just be part of the 26% of melbournians who speak a language other than english at home. another reason was the fascination australians have for authentic food. it was a revelation to me to walk down a supermarket aisle and be presented with a range of olive oils, carbonell amongst them. ok, i can live here, i thought. if there is a country where you can revive your favourite dishes, it is australia: even jamón de jabugo has recently been given the green light for importation (if you are ready to pay for it, of course). so far, we have access to a lot of other languages and to food. can these get you far to become a bilingual family? one thing that is certain is that households with two languages need what some call “a language contract”, i.e. some agreement on what language, when and for what functions is going to be used. the decision to speak catalan to my daughter came naturally to me: how else would i sing a lullaby, play with her or tell her stories but in the language i was sung to, played with and told stories? i have always been a staunch defender of the one-parent one-language option, especially when one of the parents does not speak much of the other parent’s language. so here we go, starting our own personal experiment: mama speaks catalan, dad speaks english. 50 but there is more to our language contract than this. where i come from, barcelona, it is just logical, protected by law even, to choose to speak catalan at home. it is just logical, protected by law as well, to learn spanish. as we regard catalan as a language spoken in spain, it has official status and has slowly become a language of reputation, of economic and political power, of the status quo. catalan is a minority language because it has no official state, but it is a major language of the catalan economy, culture and society in general. however, since i started answering the question of what language i was going to speak to my daughter, i found myself in an argument that led too much, to my taste, to a justification of why i had chosen catalan, even among catalan speakers. all of a sudden, spanish becomes just so much of a better choice: after all, it has so many more speakers, and what is she going to use catalan for, and you are making your husband learn it, too? as if i were not aware of the numerical difference myself. in australia, around 93,000 people speak spanish at home, as opposed to some appalling figures of 46 in melbourne and 20 odd people in sydney who speak catalan, according to the last published census. these numbers, and the fact that such a small minority of people speak it at home, is also reflected on the amount of resources you can find to support the learning process at home: books and videos, but also media coverage and presence in schools as a second language or in the form of bilingual programs, not to mention the possibility to create a net of relations who speak it. there is a lot of that in spanish, there is nothing of that in catalan. even when you look at the language’s maintenance -survival through generationsspanish scores very well, with a remarkable number of third generation australians who still speak it. catalan, on the other hand, has a less optimistic diagnosis: in general, the main flow of catalans arriving in australia in the 1940s and 1950s did not speak it to their children, so transmission has been cut fairly quickly. at present, there is only one catalan club in australia, the casal català de victoria, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in october 2006. 51 unfortunately, young members are scarce and there appears to be a great generational gap which will be hard to replace. having said all this, i am not here to whinge about how little support catalan speakers have in australia. after all, nobody expects to count on much support when you speak a minority stateless language. in fact, i can only feel lucky and grateful to have found a university where catalan is taught, a club, and, yes, some books in catalan at foreign-language book shops. in the end, the supremacy of spanish as an international language made the decision even easier, as i thought, well, we can find ways for her to learn spanish anywhere in the world, but if i don’t speak it to her she’ll never learn catalan. also, i strongly feel that my language is catalan and, hence, part of my vision of the world and that of my family and friends. catalan is nothing here, but is everything back in barcelona. so, i guess the clue lies here: the relationship between a person and his/her country of origin. in our case, a trip to barcelona a year was nearly an implied prenuptial agreement. we live in a small house, but we do get to travel every year, and i hope we can do it for as long as we have the energy. for the first couple of years in australia, my flight tickets were still processed in barcelona, so every time i left for that city, i was actually “returning”. at first, there is a sense of provisionality, as if being here is just a step to go somewhere else. i had a strong sense of displacement, just like the jigsaw puzzle pieces my 21 month-old daughter amàlia stubbornly tries to fit in the wrong place. then, i needed to go back for sanity, to feel adjusted again. after amàlia was born, going back to barcelona was more about sharing my world with her, the bonds i have with my nation, my friends and my family, ordinary things that other people take for granted. my ultimate aim is that my children feel adjusted both in barcelona and melbourne, they are able to speak to their grandparents, uncles and cousins with little interference, and that they 52 understand, respect and participate in australian and catalan cultures as bilingual and bicultural adults. however, other issues make this situation a bit more complex than choosing one or the other language. officially, catalonia enjoys a social bilingualism, where both languages are expected to be known by all members of society. in reality, there are different degrees of that in different areas of the principality. among them, its capital, barcelona, is an example of a highly bilingual society. opposite interpretations of the language situation in the city range from considering spanish speakers a discriminated minority, to considering the advance of spanish a threat to the survival of catalan. in my experience, the two languages were always heard and spoken in the streets of the city, more spanish in some areas, more catalan in others. as a young teenager, i recall having friends who spoke spanish, and friends who spoke catalan, maintaining conversations in one and the other language interchangeably, and even maintaining conversations in both languages. at home, we speak spanish to dad and catalan to mum, so language shift, codemixing and all other language contact phenomena were part of our daily lives. so, spanish has been part of my life and development as well. in catalonia, young children who are not exposed to spanish at home are exposed to the language from other environmental sources anyway: through television, speakers in the street, school, etc. in our case, there is no such environmental exposure. and the fact is that if i really want my children to feel adjusted when we travel to barcelona, they will probably need to at least understand spanish as well. in catalonia, there are no remaining catalan monolinguals, so there is no reason why one shouldn’t survive only with spanish, because everyone speaks and understands it. so, a person who speaks catalan but not spanish is by itself, an extremely rare case. my children would be in this situation in case i didn’t expose them to spanish. 53 so, i will try and find strategies for them to also learn spanish as they grow up. so far, we have been attending a spanish playgroup where we meet with other spanish-speaking families and sing, play games and interact in spanish for two hours a week. i say, at least her brain is opening up a new drawer where it says “spanish”. classes to toddlers aged more than 2 are offered around melbourne and we might join one sometime soon. spanish is my second language, and is also part of myself. now, as for amàlia´s language development, these are some of the things we have enjoyed at home. when i was pregnant with her, i chose a song that i would repeatedly sing to her in the shower, or in bed before falling asleep. i used this song, deu pometes, for many months to soothe her to go to sleep. she pronounced her first word when she was 12-13 months old, “no”, don’t they all? the second word was “dad”, which she pronounced with an elongated “a” of sheer pleasure. it wasn’t until she was 14 months old that she said “mama”, and since then she hasn’t stopped saying it some 2,000 times a day. around the same time she started nodding with the head and the words haven’t stopped appearing since then. at about 17 months old she was adding a new word to her vocabulary every day. at first, she would take the word in catalan or english, usually the easiest to pronounce, and would stick to it. so, if she said “aigua” she wouldn’t use “water”, or she said “door” but not “porta”. at about 18 and a half months, she started saying certain words in the two languages: poma-apple, gràcies-thank you, més-more. i was never very fond of using baby words, especially when she is not exposed to catalan but through one adult person. in catalonia you often hear people calling the dog “bup-bup”, which is really the sound the animal makes. however, the use of onomatopoeic sounds to describe animals and transports appeared spontaneously, and she used them until she could pronounce the words: train was “tu-tu”, cow was “muu”, etc. interestingly enough, these sounds were used by her as fully meaningful words, since she 54 distinguished between a catalan sheep, “beeeee”, and an english one “baaaaaa”, same as between a catalan bird, “piu-piu” and an english one “chirp-chirp”. at 19 months and a week, she started identifying herself by her name, and a few weeks later the first two-word sentences appeared, “amàlia hat”. at around 20 months she picked up on english possessives such as “dad’s” or, this one she absolutely loves, “amàlia´s”. she mixed this structure with catalan vocabulary for a while, so to say “the girl’s hat”, she would say “nena´s hat”. all in all, a normal language development in two languages, i would say. around the same time, she became aware of mama’s words, and dad’s words, as we call them. today, at 21 months, if you ask her “what does mama call `eye´?”, she will say “ull”, and she will say “thank you” to dad and “gràcies” to mama. she has also become very aware of her grandparents back in barcelona. the last time we were there she was 13 months old. one of the first words she started saying there was “avi”, the catalan word for granddad. since then, we have been connecting via web cam every week. at first she wouldn’t know much of what was going on, and she would only wave because she was told to. now, she recognizes her grandparents and gets very excited before every connection. photographs are a good resource to keep a toddler’s memories alive: through a personal small photo album, she has learnt to recognize and name all her cousins, uncles and grandparents. books and videos in catalan are part of our daily routine. we have managed to build a nice collection in our recent trips, despite the 20 kilo luggage limit, and have divided two areas on her bookshelf, with mama’s books and dad’s books. at home, the teletubbies speak catalan, and so do teo and les tres bessones; elmo, maisy and miffy speak english. catalan is obviously the language she identifies with me and àvia (grandma), so every time i speak this language on the phone she assumes i’m speaking to my mother. there are certainly very few young catalan speaking 55 people in melbourne, and most of them are just here for a short period of time, so it gets difficult to find a time to speak the language. even when you find a catalan family, they might speak spanish, because this is their mother-tongue, or because they have chosen to do so for the reasons i didn’t choose to. in a few years, i will be able to tell whether or not the effort to speak a minority language from spain to my children was a good choice for their development. for my part, i will continue to play with them in catalan, and try to expose them to this language and spanish as much as i can, so that, one day, when they want to travel to mama’s country, they don’t feel like foreigners. microsoft word 15mallari coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 161 indigenizing the zarzuela: kapampangan ethnocentric adoption of the foreign genre julieta c. mallari abstract: when the spanish colonizers reached pampanga, a province in the northern part of the philippines, the meeting between the east and the west meant an impact of the grafted civilization over the conquered people. religious and cultural hybridization (bhaba 1994) inevitably took place in pampanga. kapampangan verbal art modestly welcomed an alien counterpart and a cultural synthesis in a “liminal space” took place. what the spaniards introduced—religious literature, metrical romances and the zarzuela—to advance their imperialistic cause pressed on the folk and blended naturally with the kapampangan sensibility. kapampangan literature took on a hybrid form that came to be an incitement for the movement of the province’s literary history. mariano proceso pabalan byron, a kapampangan poet, was the first to domesticate the form and content of the zarzuela, a spanish literary genre. he, together with other writers such as crisostomo soto, established a zarzuela tradition and produced masterpieces. the enthusiasm for the zarzuela lasted for decades even after world war ii; poets like jose gallardo easily adopted the favorite literary genre of his predecessors. the genre was most welcome because its elements constituted their familiar world. the zarzuelas that were produced reveal the constant appropriation of the native values and beliefs in the foreign literary form. keywords: indigenizing; hybridity; zarzuela; kapampangan introduction pampanga is a province in the northern part of the philippines. the language used in the area is called kapampangan. fittingly, the choice of the metaphor amanung sisuan (the “language [they] sucked” instead of “mother tongue”) to describe the language is justified by the self-reliant and healthy culture nurtured by the kapampangan verbal artists. copyright©2011 julieta c. mallari. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 162 the kapampangan tone is loud, strong and emphatic. thus, in their pre-colonial era (before the 16th century), the people’s sensibility showed itself consistently in their creative affairs, with their imagination taking shape in its oral form. among the characteristics of orally based thought and expression exhibited by the kapampangans, starting with their folk literature, were: agonistically tuned; traditionalist; close to the human life world; participatory and empathetic rather than objectively distanced; homeostatic; and situational rather than abstract (ong 1982: 37-49). the people’s earliest civilization delighted in the highly rhythmic oral patterns of their folklore. for instance, their kasebyan (proverbs) and bugtong (riddles), both in versified forms, were the inherent aspect of their social life, the first being didactic and instructive, and the second recreational. values were encoded, preserved and transmitted by these linguistic constructs. folksongs, on the other hand, were plain and direct, communicating simple sentiment, thought and feeling. verbal jousts such as karagatan, an ancient poetic game and bulaklakan were performed during funeral wakes to offer prayers for the soul of the deceased and to comfort or mitigate the pain being experienced by the bereaved family. when the spaniards conquered pampanga during the 16th century, the kapampangans’ cultural transformation inevitably took place. the civilizing mission of the conquerors began its imposition of what was reckoned as cultural supremacy. thus began the cultural hybridization process as the kapampangans allowed their verbal art to have a simple-hearted welcome for an alien counterpart. given the linguistic-cultural matrix shaped by folk wisdom and mentality, the literature brought by the spaniards easily broke open the core of the native literary ground. thus, religious items, metrical romances, corrido, comedia, zarzuela, etc., were adopted and embodied into the natives own repertoire. as the native poets domesticated the form and content of the foreign texts, they experienced a kind of literary déjà vu: cultural synthesis happened. what the spaniards introduced blended naturally with the kapampangan sensibility. the literature they brought to advance their imperialistic cause pressed on the folk and meshed two levels of culture and two world-views. kapampangan literature took on a hybridized form that came to be an incitement for the movement of the province’s literary history. the colorful costumes and the good-looking actors and actresses particularly in the newly introduced spanish plays were relished by the kapampangan audience and became part of the tradition. furthermore, the fantastic, the romantic and the melodic animated even more the existing verbal art, copying or integrating the foreign elements into its own system. it may be emphasized that the writers’ mimicry of the literary forms and style of the foreign masters reached down to the deepest levels of the former’s being. thus, although written in kapampangan, their works were primarily products of colonialism: they are cultural documents that are at the same time records of spanish domination. on the other hand, it may also be conjectured that in the writers’ appropriation of their native talent to indigenize the foreign genres, an antithetical cultural subversion happened. as homi bhabha puts it, “the ambivalence of mimicry—almost but not quite—suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal” (1994:91). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 163 this paper analyzes selected kapampangan zarzuelas, using as reference point the aforementioned bhaba’s dictum and pointing out, as it were, the writers’ insistence on their identity even as they were conscious of their subjugation. in their mimicry of the zarzuela, they created an “ironic compromise”: their demand for identity involved what bhabha called the “counter pressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference.” as they indigenized the genre, they unwittingly emerged as a “recognizable other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (86), and subverted the colonizers’ strategy to dominate their culture. the kapampangan presence, so to speak, in the zarzuelas produced indicated their consciousness of their “otherness” that virtually liberated them from the colonizers—as the latter were definitely alienated from the indigenization pursued by the colonized. the writers’ cultural assertion was enjoyed by their audience who easily understood the different elements of the local zarzuelas, being oral and close to their “human world”. moreover, as audience and part of the community, they were, in a sense, “participatory and empathetic”. in the final analysis, the writing and watching of zarzuelas resulted in a kind of “collective catharsis,” to use fanon’s words (fanon in bhabha 1994:90). thus, the zarzuela introduced by the colonizers was subjected to colonial imitation and transformed into a “menace” that subtly led to the shattering of the foreign authority—a consciousness that was intensified at the turn of the century when writers caught the fire of nationalism. zarzuelas then became a cultural production testifying against the people’s colonial status. the introduction of the zarzuela in pampanga the spanish zarzuela, a musical theater genre with alternating sung and spoken text, created a most significant impact. it started to flourish in pampanga in the nineteenth century. when alejandro cubero’s troupe visited san fernando pampanga to introduce the zarzuela circa 1882, there was the “kindling of the youthful imagination” (javillonar 1961:40) of writers like juan crisostomo soto. thus, the golden age of kapampangan literature was spurred, in a sense, when zarzuela was localized in the province. a passionate theatrical group of writers, matchless in their talent, pursued their zarzuela writing career: the great triumvirate mariano proceso pabalan byron, juan crisostomo soto and felix galura became prolific and famous. zarzuela became a popular literary form. its being primarily a social performance and belonging to the genre of the spoken word would account for the ease with which it held the audience’s attention. the communal world of the kapampangans at the time it was introduced was enjoying the convention of recitation, singing and listening. zarzuela as a dramatic form was valued primarily because of its very nature—a ritual-like community affair. according to n. frye (1973), “drama, like music, is an ensemble performance for an audience, and music and drama are most likely to flourish in a society with a strong consciousness of itself as a society . . . . ” (249). and the zarzuela, being a musical drama, strengthened even more such collective consciousness among the kapampangans. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 164 at the root of the spanish zarzuela were didacticism and romanticism, the dynamics of which had long been internalized by the kapampangan verbal artists. thus, mimicry of the genre was most welcome because the latter constituted a familiar world. there was an apparent reciprocity and commonality in the spanish and kapampangan literary sense and sensibility. moreover, because zarzuela was oral in nature—being theatrical and therefore more ostentatious and grandiose—the foreign genre gave the kapampangans a profound sense of fulfillment, be it personal or tribal. it was a matter of transmuting the substance of their traditional literary postulates to enter into the sinews of the hybridized form. their previously cited literary world, deeply entrenched in their value system and basic folk beliefs, was of self-sustaining nature, underlying the creative act of the writers. with the introduction of catholicism, a further enhancement of such beliefs was borne on the zarzuelas: indigenous messages residing inside a foreign literary form, much like the indwelling of anitos (ancient filipino concept of spirits) in caucasian-looking statues of catholic santo and santa (saints). the zarzuela was adopted into kapampangan by then young writers such as mariano proceso pabalan byron (1862-1904), the first writer to filipinize the genre because he believed in the inherent musicality of his own language and, therefore, its imitative capacity. the first zarzuela in kapampangan was ing managpi (the patcher), which was shown at the sabina theatre in bacolor, pampanga on september 13, 1900. pabalan wrote about the manners and idiosyncrasies of the period in which he lived. wittingly or unwittingly, pabalan assumed the long-lasting effects of language on people’s consciousness, as though prophesying fanon’s concept that “to speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (fanon in poulos 1996). pabalan made an intuitive and decisive step in asserting the use of his own language in a moment of colonial confrontation between his culture and the foreign counterpart. he knew that the language of his people was their voice and their message. soto or crissot (1867-1918) was more prolific. he wrote approximately fifty plays, some of which were adaptations of foreign texts (manlapaz 1981:19). alang dios! (there is no god!), the most popular and acclaimed by many as most expressive of the beauty of kapampangan language, was first staged on november 16, 1902. felix galura napao (1866-1919) wrote several zarzuelas, too, but only one, ing mora (the moslem woman), is extant. according to manlapaz, two of his plays, o kasiran (o disgrace) and azucena, are adaptations of spanish works and one, ing singsing a bacal (an iron ring), is a translation done in collaboration with soto. in addition to the triumvirate, there were other zarzuelistas during their time such as aurelio tolentino (1875-1915), another famous and prolific writer who wrote in three languages—kapampangan, tagalog and spanish. his most celebrated drama, kahapon, ngayon at bukas (yesterday, today and tomorrow) is an important contribution to philippine drama. most of his zarzuelas range from lighthearted comedies to melodramatic tragedies (manlapaz 1981: 21). since then, zarzuela became an accepted literary tradition until the time of modern writers such as jose gallardo. in a characteristically kapampangan zarzuela reminiscent of its spanish origin, good looking actors and actresses were the main attractions. the underlying dictum of the zarzuela apparently was: the good must also be the beautiful. as expected, the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 165 hybridized spanish-kapampangan mestizo/a looks, the measure of beauty, drew crowds that made the genre stand at high noon during the first decades of the 20th century. it may also be pointed out that pampanga was among the first provinces to have theatres and theatre companies with resident playwrights, directors, and actors (cruz, cited by manlapaz 1981:23). foremost among the companies was the compania sabina, organized by then governor ceferino joven who also constructed the famous teatro sabina in bacolor. joven was an active patron of the zarzuelas. he appointed soto as resident playwright and director and placed the group of aficionados under the latter’s supervision (manlapaz 1981:23). joven was also a patron of a group of musicians, the orchestra palma, which composed and played the musical pieces for the zarzuelas. among the famous composers were amado gutierrez david, pablo cordero, pablo calma, and camilo dimson (lacson 1984:31) the zarzuela became popular, resulting in the organization of more local troupes in 1902 by jose carvajal, juan barbero, and carlos rodriguez (icban-castro 1981:7). there was also the construction of other theatres such as teatro trining in guagua where plays of aurelio and jacinto tolentino were performed. the historical moment of the flowering of kapampangan literature, particularly in the days of the zarzuela, is interesting to note. at the turn of the century, there was the rise of nationalism which paved the way for a most important literary tradition: the treatment of literary elements was notably indigenized. internalization in consciousness and in culture of the writers’ historical and political position became the inevitable trend. e. lacson notes the writers “took up the nationalistic tradition to heart: native setting, native characters, “komanggi” (brown complexion), with kapampangan speech and humor” (1984:30). furthermore, with the writing of ing managpi (the patcher), a new theme, according to javillornar, was introduced thereafter: the filipino family. “there were infinite variations,” she says, “…but always within the framework of family life” (ibid., 324). what was of utmost importance in pabalan’s initiative in domesticating the genre was his promotion of a kind of counter-culture: the kapampangan writers’ reorientation in terms of the content of their zarzuelas. the writers fully grasped the value of the inward shift of consciousness. they transcended, in a sense, the literary domain of the foreign conquerors and emancipated themselves from the compulsory homogenizing impact of the foreign genre. from this new self-definition sprang the creative wealth of their native sense which extended to the whole fabric of kapampangan sensibility. soto, the best known kapampangan dramatist, together with his contemporary writers responded enthusiastically to the spirit of the times by being productive. these writers produced works which remain unsurpassed—perhaps primarily because of their synchronicity with local culture and their relevance to the life of the consumers at that time. given their artistic achievements, therefore, the zarzuela writers largely determined the course of the province’s literary development. oddly enough, it was during that period when the best among the kapampangan writers became actively involved in the revolutionary movement. among the katipuneros (members of the revolutionary group called katipunan) were the pabalan brothers, proceso and cornelio, juan crisostomo soto, the tolentino brothers, aurelio and coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 166 jacinto. felix galura and paulino lirag led the voluntarios locales of bacolor and rose in revolt on june 4, 1898 (icban-castro 1981:414) pabalan was one of the thousands who hurled flaming coconut husks at the spanish garrison in bacolor and slaughtered the spanish soldiers there (javillonar 1961: n.p.). during the revolution, soto wrote for la independencia, joined the macabebe volunteers under col. eugenio blanco, and as a captain took part in raids to replenish the supply of arms of the revolucionarios from spanish arsenals (icban-castro 1981: 36). given the foregoing background of the writers, it may be worth speculating that nationalism opened the fertile ground to literary development and crystallized the writers’ promotion of the primacy of their cultural identity. the general terrain of kapampangan literature since then has been widely governed by the masters of zarzuela writing. although their products were imbued with spanish ingredients, the writers paradoxically subverted their colonizers by transforming and molding their borrowings unto the local image. in effect, these native producers of culture surmounted the otherwise disparaging effects of colonization. their worldview, although blurred by spanish domination, underwent a “process of disavowal,” to use bhaba’s term (1994:86), and their oral tradition was even enhanced. a cursory look at the themes and substance of the produced works will show their romantic and sociopolitical nature. the unbroken literary tradition of definite rhyme scheme and the underlying kapampangan pre-hispanic folk world-view, specifically articulate in the didactic, persisted and even intensified the conception of the heroic, the virtuous and the humane. the zarzuela was used to impress such ideals upon the members of kapampangan society. popular kapampangan zarzuelas to be highlighted are three of the most popular zarzuelas, namely, pabalan’s “ing managpi,” soto’s “alang dios” and gallardo’s “crucifijong pilak.” it may be pointed out that the assertion of the writers’ native values, ethnicity and language deflected the dominance of the colonizers even in the cultural hybridizing of the zarzuela. thus, in the kapampangan hybridization process and in the “ambivalent” site, an initiation of “new signs, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation” (bhabha 1994:1-2) happened, with the prevalence of the latter. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 167 a. ing managpi (the patcher) (ca.1900) by mariano proceso pabalan byron “ing managpi” heralded the beginning of the indigenized zarzuela and marked the endeavor of local artists to advance the literary form. pabalan succeeded in proving his claim regarding the musicality of kapampangan and in crystallizing the native sense in the foreign genre. his form of the zarzuela being mimicry is “like camouflage” (lacan in bhabha 1994:85) in the sense of being inconspicuous against the colonial background but really distinct with its “identity effects” (ibid) surfacing naturally. and pabalan’s attempt is an echo of fanon’s observation: “from being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism”(1959:n.p.). pabalan, an autochthonous kapampangan, knew that his language was part of his identity and only through his language could his particular culture be genuinely and meaningfully captured. thus, his “will to particularism” was the beginning of a tradition in the zarzuela production transforming it according to the image of the natives’ character. pabalan’s zarzuela apparently aligned domestic and social elements in the context of kapampangan affairs. its performance, meant for the local people, was already pabalan’s more progressive treatment of the genre. he skipped, as it were, certain stages in terms of fanon’s timetable: “while at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people” (1959: n.p.). pabalan did not make any bones about his determination to immediately address his own people, and he simply ignored the colonizers—neither charming nor denouncing them. recognizing the worthwhile quality of the zarzuela, he was more utilitarian in adopting it, and his mimicry was self-serving, besides being subversive. as cited, the genre appealed to the kapampangan sense and sensibility. pabalan therefore instinctively pursued its indigenization and spontaneously expressed the thoughts, feelings, experiences and idiosyncrasies of his people. the one-act comedy features domestic quarrel, and, as the title implies (“managpi” literally means “someone who patches or covers up”), the practice of patching up things. the happy resolution underscores the centrality of harmonious relationship in the family. dona juana is a jealous wife who accuses her husband, don diego, of womanizing. she threatens to leave him, especially when she finds a woman’s handkerchief under the sofa in the living room and after being told by the comical houseboy fermin that diego is calling her names. the housemaid sianang claims the handkerchief and tells her that her suspicion is unfounded. juana heeds the advice and decides not to leave. in another scene, sianang is with pablo, another helper who is shown to be her lover. while the two exchange sweet talk, diego is about to come in. sianang tells pablo to hide under the sofa. to dispel diego’s distrust, sianang tells him that the dog managpi makes the noise under the sofa. but pablo suddenly sneezes. diego reprimands the two when juana arrives. diego turns to her and scolds her for her irrational jealousy that results in her failure to look after her house. juana, together with the rest of the cast, apologizes to the audience. the zarzuela ends happily with the characters asking for “a little applause.” coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 168 the final words of diego and juana emphasize the moral of the story—a most common feature of kapampangan works. moreover, kapampangan humor is also an important facet of the zarzuela. the kapampangans’ penchant for humorous expressions ramifying into mingled tones of ridicule, criticism, sanguinity, etc. is remarkably revealed in the dialogues. in fact, the exchange of remarks between fermin and juana exudes shades of culturally fraught meanings; juana: you are another fool, another scoundrel, another cross on my shoulders. fermin: that’s what i get!…. juana: what? don’t you meddle? fermin: oh, i don’t know about that, maybe sometimes…. juana: so take care, you treacherous servant if you don’t want to get hurt. fermin: (thanks a lot.) scene 2 juana: did he come home, is diego here, where is he? fermin: right now he is not here. he stayed only awhile and left soon afterwards. juana: did he ask you to tell me? fermin: that if you returned ahead, to tell you…. juana: don’t lie! fermin: that he is out…. juana: nothing but that? fermin: he also said “you good for nothing” and “you beast.” juana: he asked you to tell me that? fermin: yes, ask him. scene 6 most noticeable in the lines is the verbal instigation leading to uncouth descriptions meant to elicit humor. hilarious verbal exchanges, in fact, enhance the plot by creating complication—as in the case of fermin’s provocation. it may be assumed that the kapampangan audience, having an oral culture, relished such verbal performance. for obvious reasons, the words—spoken or sung—in zarzuelas encouraged the oral tradition of the kapampangans. orality can transmit the signals of the inherent content of words in a fuller and more vivid manner. it may also be supposed that the crude language of fermin, the house help, illustrates the idea that “to the lower class, a speech is no less a weapon and a vengeance. words may be appropriated and suborned…by being given a clandestine significance…. (steiner 1977:32). the zarzuela becomes a representation of difference between the rich and the poor, the former being the representation of spanish influence and the latter being the product of the social stratification markedly established and perpetuated by the foreign masters. the form of discourse uttered by the house servant subtly ruptures the refined surface, as it were, of the ruling class as he launches his verbal agitation that causes the conflict between the couple. then a problematic situation ensues which, to a certain extent, puts the servant no longer at the periphery but at the center. fermin becomes the agitator such that marital disturbance results from petty and irrational jealousy of the wife. through his psychological manipulation, there is a reversal of role as he, in a sense, exercises psychological control over his masters. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 169 such ironic situation is a subtle subversion of the social positions defined by the colonizers even among the natives. the master-servant relationship is hitherto given a twist and might have been perceived as anomalous by the spaniards, who were inherently discriminatory against the lower class. to a great extent, authority is dislocated—a case that could have caused the colonial authority a parallel provocation, given the cheeky posture assumed by the servant. worth noting as well is the major role of the other servants, sianang and her lover pablo, in the unfolding of the plot, including its complication—such as their secret amorous relationship which, being discovered by their master, finally leads to the resolution of the conflict. the remarkable character portrayed by what was to be considered a lesser creature is another aspect of the indigenous presence affirming the “otherness” of the kapampangans. sianang, in fact, covers up the possible causes of conflict between her masters and becomes the real “patcher”. the word, whose double meaning (the name of the dog and sianang’s part in the story) indicates the theme, is peculiarly kapampangan and, therefore, can be understood only by the natives. it is this kind of difference that authenticates the people’s consciousness of their identity. presented are the common lot of people and the major role of the insignificant members of the household. this idea would have been taken as inappropriate by the foreign masters and is clearly discernible as an outright political avowal of a local writer. from the foregoing may be deduced that ing managpi (the patcher) illustrates “mimicry [that] is at once resemblance and menace” (bhabha 1994:91). what the spaniards introduced as part of their civilizing mission, i.e., a literary genre from the imperial country, was problematized: the result was only a partial resemblance of the literary form and more of a full-blown representation of the culture of the natives. instead of achieving a thorough cultural domination and reform or refine the literature of the colony, the spaniards had to come to terms with only their impartial presence in the zarzuelas produced but with the ample essence of the other. significantly, this “gaze of otherness… liberates marginal elements” and “menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority,” (ibid.) to use bhabha’s terms again. pabalan did a great service to his kabalen (province mates) through his indigenization of the spanish literary genre: he propagated the natural linguistic expression of the people that made them survive and stay alive in their cultural milieu as well as undermined the imperial power even through his own ambivalence in mimicking the zarzuela’s entirety. b. alang dios! (there is no god!)(ca. 1900) by juan crisostomo soto a kapampangan literary giant is crisostomo soto or crissot, a most versatile and prolific writer. his zarzuelas, particularly alang dios!, have unsurpassed popularity. the zarzuela was dedicated to his daughter, maria luz generosa. his note states: when you died, i involuntarily shouted the horrible exclamation: “there is no god!” because he had taken you away from us so soon. however, now i have come to realize that god, in his incomparable wisdom, had taken you away only to bring you to a place of infinite joy and happiness. (manlapaz 1981:56) coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 170 the same exclamation is shouted by the two characters in the zarzuela when their love interest dies. furthermore, the same moral principle uttered by soto is brought to mind in the zarzuela. the story line of alang dios! revolves around the love triangle of enrique, a poor painter, his sweetheart maria luz, and ramon, a rich man. enrique, who has been accused of stealing a diamond crucifix of maria luz, returns to his town upon his release from prison. he finds out that she is betrothed to ramon. maria luz explains that she is pressured by her stepmother, dona cucang. enrique refuses to believe maria luz despite her pleadings. when the wedding is about to take place, clara, maria luz’s maid, suffers from guilt and decides to reveal the truth: that enrique did not steal the diamond crucifix. clara makes it appear that enrique stole the crucifix to protect the reputation of maria luz who was having a secret date with her lover on the night of the supposedly theft incident. clara’s confession, however, is too late to prevent the wedding. the two men decide to have a duel, but don monico, a family friend, discloses that they are actually half-brothers. they reconcile and try to see maria luz, who dies brokenhearted. both exclaim “there is no god!” don monico rebukes them, saying, that “god has willed her death…that she should not stand between two brothers.” they repent and agree to the idea that there is a god “who rewards the good and punishes the bad.” being part of the tradition started by pabalan, soto’s zarzuela is also basically a hybrid, diluting the authorized version, so to speak, of the spanish literary genre. first, the linguistic difference is a foremost contagion: kapampangan, particularly soto’s beautiful prosody, reverberates, drawing attention to itself thus decentering the language of the colonizers. it should be emphasized that soto was never a second rate, trying hard copycat in his zarzuela writing. his adoption of the genre, which constituted his mimicry, may be perceived as a valuable cultural acquisition enhancing the use of his own language. in other words, the literary hybrid that he created actually engendered a fresh location of culture for his people in terms of savoring the “language [they] sucked”. second, didacticism, indicative of the kapampangan folk tradition, persists in the work of soto. the moralizing that runs through the zarzuela is of central inherence in the very notion of kapampangan literature. the ethic-aesthetic reciprocity affirms a deliberate conjunction between the moral and cultural values of the people which embody their own mechanism of self-definition. rather than destabilizing their identity, the foreign literary genre as hybridized by soto has, in fact, strengthened their sense of self, culture, and tradition. third, the kapampangan zarzuela, being transcultural, reinterprets the elements of the foreign genre and re-contextualizes them to such extent that estrangement from colonial power and its de-authorization result. thus, soto’s zarzuela has all the ingredients of the spanish original but with the kapampangan flavor. the characters, the setting, the theme and all the minutest details are expressing the essential being of the people. charged with such moralistic modes of perception, the zarzuela sustains the kapampangan conception of the good and the beautiful. fourth, a crucial aspect of the zarzuela is the title which is exclaimed by the main character, namely, “there is no god!” although the context provides a most plausible coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 171 justification for such an utterance, as a title it draws attention and interpretation as oppositional (being blasphemous) to the spanish religion. at first glance, it is an outright rebellious statement negating the colonial belief system. although infused with soto’s personal disappointment, the title nevertheless problematizes an important colonial domain and may be perceived as a direct assault on the imperial power. in the end, of course, an explanation is made by one of the characters, reverting to the common belief upheld by the people. soto’s zarzuela exhibits the linguistic and cultural values of the people being artistically enmeshed, making unbounded aesthetic explorations possible. his literary craftsmanship achieves hybridity that allows his people to relish their “otherness” and “difference” and be glad for having such an identity. significantly, “the presence of colonialist authority is no longer immediately visible…” (bhabha 1994:114). c. crusifijong pilak (silver crucifix) (ca. 1956) by jose gallardo the enthusiasm for the zarzuela lasted for decades even after world war ii, and jose gallardo, in his time, easily adopted the literary mannerism of his predecessors. although as a playwright he did not attain the stature of crisostomo soto, he, nevertheless, is an acclaimed zarzuelista in his own right. it is also interesting to note that the constant writing of zarzuelas until the modern period has “normalized” the genre: the liminal space, where cultural transmission happens, has generated texts, including gallardo’s, almost obliterating the colonial impression and authenticating the indigenous presence. crusifijong pilak (silver crucifix) is characteristically integral to the kapampangan literary ‘ethos’: sentimental, moralistic and romantic. its realistic elements reinforce the settling down of these literary sediments, so to speak, and illustrate the adaptive nature of the hybridized literary paradigm. the story is about fidel and laura who used to be sweethearts, both swearing their love for each other upon the silver crucifix of the latter. fidel, however, is seduced by his rich landlady, loida, whom he eventually marries. because of his infidelity, he is cursed by laura. all the attempts of fidel to ask for forgiveness are never heeded. elena, laura’s mother, tries to dissuade the daughter from cursing fidel. elena reveals that she also has once been betrayed by her lover and laura is the offspring of the affair but laura is unmoved by her mother’s plea. soon loida gives birth to a baby. her father, don miguel, and fidel at a certain point have a disagreement regarding the problem of the tenants. taking the side of the workers, fidel is driven away by his father-in-law. the curse apparently takes effect. fidel gets crippled after defending don miguel against robbers. loida is involved with another man, eddie. fidel suffers very much, particularly when he is not even allowed to see his child. he, therefore, decides to take the baby with him. they both disappear until one day, loida’s house helper finds out that they have become beggars. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 172 laura, on the other hand, takes a job in manila. at one point, she discovers that fidel is the father of the beggar girl to whom she offers help. repenting for the misfortune of fidel caused by her curse, laura runs away. meanwhile, don miguel and loida find out where fidel lives. they try to convince him to give them the custody of his daughter. at first fidel violently refuses. however, realizing his inability to provide for his daughter, he tries to appear harsh to her just so she will leave him and join her mother. the girl obeys her father but her affection for him prevails upon her, so she decides to leave her new home and go back to him. laura and elena follow her and then they find fidel almost dying. he asks laura for forgiveness and touches her crucifix, after which he is miraculously healed. don miguel comes to the scene and recognizes the crucifix; he remembers that it belongs to elena, the woman he betrayed. he asks for forgiveness and receives it. loida, who decides to separate from eddie, is now being forced by the latter to ask her father for money. when she refuses, eddie stabs her. despite her wound, she goes to see fidel who forgives her before she dies. gallardo’s crusifijong pilak, remains deeply rooted in the folk tradition despite its apparent realistic and modern dimension. in fact, it authenticates further the original nucleus of kapampangan values generated through literature. most obviously dramatized are the moral norms associated with relationships. any deviation from these norms would result in conflict and a catastrophic end. in gallardo’s zarzuela, infidelity is the thematic thread that has produced a sticky web, so to speak. those who are caught in the web suffer a great deal as they become subject to the complicated consequences of their undoing. fidel is cursed; loida is abused; don miguel is broken in the end. by and large, the basic folk beliefs of gallardo and his society are demonstrated. to begin with, the idea of cursing someone—believed to be a form of righteous indignation—is the key that opens the catastrophic door of fidel’s fate, and, consequently, the other characters’ as well. he gets physically disabled, loses his dignity and all, including his wife and becomes too helpless to raise his child. by the sheer act of fate or perhaps divine justice—associated with the crucifix—the curse brings about a morally intelligible downfall. suggestive of a strong sense of justice and moral principle, the world of gallardo’s drama manifests the consequences of any violation of such beliefs in the grim effects of the curse. in other words, the sinner deserves his fate, and he survives so that his action closes with an adjustment to a transforming experience. thus, fidel humbles himself and gets miraculously healed by the object upon which he commits his broken vow. the curse also takes effect in the life of loida who is instrumental in fidel’s sinning. being a temptress, she has sown havoc not only in the life of fidel but in her own life as well. she brings destruction upon herself because of her promiscuity. in the course of her adulterous relationship with eddie, she suffers from the very hands of her illicit partner. her death in the end is an expected final judgment of her immorality. the conventional dishonor accorded to an antagonist like loida may again be associated with the values of kapampangan society, at least at that time. for instance, loida’s house helpers are shown to be making fun of her being sensual. basiu: cang cong fidel? inta, ati-na-yo? coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 173 (to cong fidel? why, is he already here?) gari: nandin ya pa. (he has been here for quite sometime.) basiu: case mipaldan ne canian ing senioritang ma., ma., ma.. (then she will be satisfied the seniorita who is ma., ma., ma..) gari: nanung ma? (what is ma?) basiu: malambing (affectionate.) the sexual tone of basiu’s words describing loida is quite obvious. in the form of a joke, the indirect reference to her sensuality is given in basiu’s deliberate withholding of a derogatory word, and then uttering a positive description instead. hinted in the scene is the pungent smell of sexual promiscuity. the folk, in particular, are most sensitive and usually take a high moral line. here the helpers place themselves in a position of moral superiority as they comment on the weakness of their seniorita. similar to the peripheral-turned-central case of fermin in “ing managpi,” the polarity between master and servant is, at this point, blurred. it is also important to note that related to the belief about the curse is the folk’s religious association with objects such as the crucifix. the concept of hybridity is not just cultural but also religious. folk christianity, which involves the conversion of catholic icons into mystical talismans, has always been a prevailing system of belief in pampanga. in the zarzuela the crucifix is assumed to have a potent mystical force, besides being a holy object. thus, the vow of laura and fidel upon it is to be faithfully honored; otherwise, the guilty party is courting disaster since the vow is almost as sacred as the object. moreover, a divine energy is supposed to be the potent power of the icon, causing a great deal of affliction, similar to the ingkanto (talisman) effects, once provoked. laura’s curse, therefore, operates in the context of the violation of the sanctity of the vow. unless she decides to bestow her forgiveness upon fidel, he is likely to suffer to the end. like the legends and myths, this zarzuela contains the following motifs: the mythic symbol of the crucifix, breaking of a taboo, punishment inflicted upon the wrongdoers, restoration of order after the purging process. the crucifix is the unifying element as it provides a framework of symbolism, associations and correspondences that involve a whole range of religious beliefs, superstitions and magic—religious hybridization that happens in the kapampangan zarzuela meant to entertain and educate the audience; it was created out of a common desire to arrive at a “better” world. conclusion the zarzuela has given kapampangan literature a long-lasting tradition. embedded in the genre is the cultural memory of the people whose indigenous beliefs, traditions and worldview figure prominently as the recurring lead around which the stories develop. to a great extent, the nature of the kapampangan zarzuela brings out indigenizing and hybridizing explorations: creative endeavors that complement the richness of the foreign coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 174 genre as well as the native culture. moreover, as hybrid objects, kapampangan zarzuelas are documents of resistance against colonial power, whose presence is being displaced and deprived. works cited aguas, juan. juan crisostomo soto and pampangan drama. quezon city: university of the philippines press, 1963. bhaba, homi. the location of culture. london and new york: routledge, 1994. blair and robertson. the philippine islands, 1493-1898. 55 vols. cleveland: a.h. clark, 1903-1909. calixto, eufrosina. a criticism of pampango literature. n.d. castro-icban, rosalina. literature of the pampangos. philippines: university of the east press, 1981. fanon, franz. “speech to congress of black african writers.” wretched of the earth. pelican, 1959. retrieved december 6, 2010, from http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/national-culture.htm frye, northrop. anatomy of criticism. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press, 1973. . gallardo, jose. crusifijong pilak, circa 1956. javillonar, ely. “the significance of proceso pabalan in capampangan dramatic literature.” master’s thesis, university of the philippines, 1961. lacson, evangelina. kapampangan writing: a selected compendium and critique. manila: national historical institute, 1984. manlapaz-zapanta, edna. kapampangan literature: a historical survey and anthology. quezon city: ateneo university press. 1981. ong, walter. orality and literacy. new york: methuen co. ltd., 1982. poulos, jennifer. frantz fanon. 1996. retrieved december 7, 2010, from http://www.english.emory.edu/bahri/fanon.html steiner, george. after babel. oxford: oxford university press. 1977. webber, christopher. the zarzuela companion. lanham: scarecrow, 2002. presidential lectures: homi bhabha. 2004. retrieved december 7, 2010 from coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 175 http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/reviews.html. zarzuela. 2003. retrieved november 13, 2009 from http://www.seattleluxury.com/encyclopedia/entry/zarzuela. julieta c. mallari holds a ph.d. in comparative literature. she has been the director of the university of the philippines extension program in pampanga since 2000. besides being a professor in english and literature, she is also a cultural worker in pampanga, a province in the northern part of the philippines. she has written several articles on pampanga literature. she has also produced two coffee-table books. microsoft word 12holden coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 130 halligan’s love affair with food anne holden rønning abstract: marion halligan’s non-fiction eat my words, (1990), cockles of the heart (1996) and the taste of memory (2004) all have food as their main topic. travelling round europe on culinary journeys and staying in hotels and flats she provides us, as readers, with a wealth of recipes and reflections on the role food plays in people’s lives, socially and culturally. this article will discuss some few of the points halligan raises as she comments on the pleasure of food; on bricolage, both in the finished product and in cookery books; and the language we use to describe food and its processes. adopting a bicultural approach halligan compares australian foods of today with those of her childhood, thus turning these food books into a kind of autobiography. keywords: food; pleasure; bricolage and cookery books; naming. in eat my words marion halligan cites alexis soyer in his 1853 book the pantropheon as being “fond of saying that people only eat to live when they don’t know how to live to eat,” thus underscoring the importance of food culturally and historically. to these words halligan adds: “chefs, whose livelihood is other’s eating, know that the best food begins in the mind” (209). the phrase ‘food for thought’ has a multitude of meanings that provide mental stimulus for the intellect, but it also expresses the ambiguity of everything related to food. not only does it refer to real food, but it also has a metaphorical interpretation, as well as a symbolic and cultural context. food tells us much about the person who buys it, who eats it, and who cooks it. the ambiguity of the concept ‘food’ is well illustrated by the fact that food in one country or even part of a country is unthinkable in another, or may even be a delicacy elsewhere. examples are snails, dried mutton ribs (norwegian christmas dish), smoked sheep’s head (a speciality in the small town of voss, norway), offal, which as halligan points out is called ‘variety meats’ in america (emw 95, 98), the “throwaway bits and [yet] highly prized delicacies” (99). reasons for the choice of food vary from those based on religion, availability, and tradition (eg. meat v. fish) – you take what you can get. there is such a variety of topics one might discuss in relation to halligan and food that the copyright©2011 anne holden rønning. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 choice has to be limited. here i shall concentrate on three aspects of food that halligan takes up in her writing: food as pleasure, mental and physical; food as bricolage and cookery books as socio-cultural sources; and the naming of food. in one 2006 edition of kunapipi “the kookbook” anne collett sees food as “a barometer of well-being — of the body and the body politic;” and stresses “the place of food in literature and the literature of food, of which the recipe itself is a literary form in its own right” (viii). marion halligan’s texts, full of witty twists, are a brilliant source of literary references to food, demonstrate a vast knowledge of the historical aspects of food, and can be seen as examples interpolated into a discussion on food and travel otherwise more structurally coherent. food also provides her with the opportunity to give the reader a wealth of recipes, sometimes comparing australian ones with others; and to focus on particular foods, such as the section in cockles of the heart on chocophilia (171-5) where halligan describes chocolate as “a mind-bending substance so people get addicted to it” (170). she relates how chocolate was originally a drink for warriors and was brought to spain by the aztecs, for whom “cocoa beans were a unit of currency” (173), yet the beans were thrown overboard by dutch and english sailors since they resembled sheep shit! food is an essential aspect of any literature, especially in novels, where halligan sees its use as “never simply vicarious, [but] essential to the experience of the work of art” (tom 100). from the bible onwards, when eve ate the apple in the garden of eden, food has played a central role in texts, often illustrative of specific characteristics of an individual, for example falstaff and sir toby belch in shakespeare. the centrality of the madhatter’s tea-party in alice in wonderland and of honey in the pooh stories are other notable literary texts associated with food, as is the use of it as a leitmotif in fairytales, especially those connected to cruelty and death, for example, snow white, hansel and gretel and the gingerbread house, little red riding hood, just to mention some. katherine mansfield’s short story “bliss” has a meal as the structural framework of the story. bertha’s husband, harry, is described as loving “to talk about food and to glory in his ‘shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster’ and ‘the green of pistachio ices – green and cold like the eyelids of egyptian dancers’” (1974, 104). the colour of the pistachio ice is symbolic of the way bertha sees miss fulton and the pear-tree in the moonlight. one way of looking at halligan’s treatment of food is to see it as gastrocriticism. one of the pioneers of this field is the french critic ronald tobin. in november 2008 he gave a lecture at ucsb entitled “thought for food: literature and gastronomy” in which he discusses the term gastro-criticism. although anthropologists and sociologists have seen food as an interplay between cultures and people, says tobin, literary critics have devoted few pages to the study of self-nourishment in literature until recently. although tobin’s focus is on comedy in molière, he indicates the extensive use of food in literature from homer onwards and identifies the commonality of expressions related to food, but which have also other connotations such as hunger, desire, consummation. the sharing of a meal, biblical breaking of bread and communion, all typify the transformation of food into something else, and are frequently expressive of joy and pleasure. referring to 19th and 20th century novels he speaks of the language of cuisine as “a dossier of the age.” he cites rousseau; coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 “to read while eating was always my fantasy” – a form of etiquette considered socially unacceptable. gastrocriticism thus also brings to light the follies of etiquette. we can ask why halligan is so concerned with food in her writing. is she practising gastrocriticism, attempting to show the importance of food as a theme, a symbol, and a metaphor for aspects of society and social norms; the physical reality and mental stimulus? the answer may lie in the manner in which halligan portrays food as a thematic link between places, and expresses an obvious desire to inform her readers, as well as the conversational tone she adopts. for example, in eat my words, after a discussion on seafood, referring to the cockle shell worn by pilgrims to compostella, she suddenly concludes the paragraph with the following sentence relating to the nursery rhyme: “goodness knows what mary mary quite contrary was up to with her silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row” (98). such side remarks to an audience are almost theatrical, and illustrate what one might call the ‘chatty’ aspect of her writing, and the fun of reading it. it is as if she is talking to us directly. another example from the taste of memory is “take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake says the bible. and we do. not just for our stomachs but our arteries and our alzheimers” (209). the other answer is that to her food is such an essential part of her existence that the food eaten and the memories of that experience have autobiographical significance as is evident in her book written with lucy frost, those women who go to hotels (1997). as she herself says in a comment in the taste of memory: i knew i wanted eat my words to be a book about food, not just recipes but stories, the kind of thing readers could enjoy without feeling it was mainly a catalogue of recipes they were failing to cook; food as idea and history and above all words. but it wasn’t till it came back from the printer (…) that i realised it was also an autobiography. (10) the non-fiction texts make this aspect of her writing very apparent, in that they show the many places she has lived. the comparative approach introduces us to some of her childhood experiences, yet also illustrates how her life today has become so much more international and multicultural. food and pleasure philosophers have discussed food in relation to the terms of the pleasure derived, its temporality and value. much has been written on asceticism, fasting and the rejection of food to attain a higher mental state, and mastery of the self. in her book food for thought: philosophy and food (1996) elizabeth telfer discusses both the qualitative and quantitative views on the pleasure of food, as expressed, for example, by plato in gorgias: “plato claims that seeking pleasure from food is self-defeating: a person who does this is never satisfied, and gets less pleasure each time” (27, cf. plato gorgias 1979:491c-4c). in the republic plato expounds on the false pleasures of food which though satisfying hunger coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 does not necessarily give lasting pleasure. though we share with the animals the need for food, as humans we also have mental visions of food — colour, taste, smell — all of which are dominant features, contributive to our response, and often provide structure and symbolism in a text as, for example, in halligan’s spidercup (1990). the philosopher john stuart mill debated the pleasure of food in relation to ideas of higher (intellectual) and lower (physical) pleasure as expressed in theories of utilitarianism, where the moral worth of anything is determined by its outcome. what is the pleasure of food, the consequences of eating? the positive and negative aspects of food are often seen in the work of nineteenth century writers, especially dickens, with their detailed descriptions of feasts and banquets — the negative aspects being visible in a book such as a christmas carol. the sharing of a meal can be the cause of pleasure, may create a mood or convey an idea, but is also the site of disagreement as the number of scenes at table in many contemporary soap operas show. the pleasure of food also includes sexuality, food as a metaphor for desire and lust. as tobin comments, eating is often a substitute for sex in literature, especially in the theatre, (eg. shakespeare, molière). one example of this is the scene in fielding’s tom jones where mrs. waters and tom eat, literally gobble, chicken in a scene full of sexual innuendos, and brilliantly portrayed in the film of the book. eating practices are one aspect in the defining of identities, since food and memory are closely linked. as we all know the smell of food is associated with certain occasions, it brings back memories of pleasure or sadness, associates food with events. as halligan says, “food is so much about memory, about the past, and about happiness in the past – unless we were very unlucky” (tom 149) yet “i think that one doesn’t have a gastronomic memory (emw 11). this last point is debatable. what do we mean by a gastronomic memory? is it an exact recalling of something experienced, or is it, like all memory selective? the association of place and food is strong in most cultures, albeit the memory may be false, or more often glorified. stories of migrancy confirm this. food tells us much of the migrant’s personality, as merlinda bobis says “eating becomes a ritual of remembering (…) a symbolic homecoming” (kunapipi 28:2, 11). not only does the way food is prepared indicate our origins, but also the implements we use to consume that food, and the way in which we hold them, can be confirmation of belonging, displacement, or even difference. as jonathan highfield states “on a most basic level, (…), food has the ability to remember home, to reconstruct cultural memory from the integration of ingredients, seasonings, and preparations” (kunapipi 28:2, 43). people of bicultural backgrounds are particularly aware of these small differences which reveal that they belong to another culture than the one they are currently living in. this leitmotif in halligan’s work is frequently associated with travel and specific places or areas, particularly her beloved france, and is a central trope in the autobiographical aspect of her work. for example cockles of the heart, which halligan says is about “the two most important things (…): food and stories” (265), is a pilgrimage along the way to compostella, which they never reach. however rather than a religious one, it is a pilgrimage of “architecture and food” (9). after crossing the pyrenees marion and cosmo find not only the food (tapas) not to their liking (she prefers 3-course meals she says in cockles of the heart) but linguistic problems arise. since the only way to reach compostella in the time available would be by driving the motorway, thus thwarting their travelling aims which are to see and enjoy historical coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 places en route, and not least, sample the particular local food and wine, they return to france. the short story “the living hothouse” is a good example of halligan’s use of food. the epigraph from charles gérard’s l’ancienne alsace à table reads: the goose is nothing, but man has made of it an instrument for the output of a marvellous product, a kind of living hothouse in which grows the supreme fruit of gastronomy (198). this “supreme fruit” is foie gras, and it functions as the structural element in the story for “[as] usual with liz’s dinner parties the food was the conversation” (198), and it provided “much wit, much amusement” (207). foie gras is not exactly the most appetising dish to look at, pinkish grey as it is. halligan’s description of the conversation is full of irony, contrasting ingrid’s sympathy for the goose that was killed with simon’s reply: “‘this is the goose’s finest hour. this is what it lived for. it was never free until this moment’” (tlh 200). halligan uses the topic to criticize the cultural snobbery of australians. one of the australian women at the party, harriet, decides that she will keep a goose in their place outside canberra and feed it the right ingredients to make their own foie gras. however, she has second thoughts about the project when her husband, tony, finds an old nineteenth century book, le grand dictionaire de cuisine d’alexandre dumas, with sordid details of the torture of forced feeding implemented on the geese to gain the correct flavour: nuts, nothing to drink, feet nailed to the floor, etc. this book contains, halligan tells us, among other descriptions, a petition “on behalf of the geese of strasbourg to the chamber of peers” comparing their treatment with that given to british beasts and irish poultry (tlh 205). halligan thus satirizes the attitudes of those who think that european specialities are superior. of course after feeding it up, when it came to the issue no one could kill the goose, (who was named alexandra), and so “alexandra finally died of obesity,” — halligan having the last laugh (tlh 209). food as bricolage as tobin points out cooking is a process of metamorphosis and illusion, and the chef a kind of prometheus playing with fire. just as ragout is a hotchpotch of ingredients, so halligan posits that both the work of the cook and that of the poet/writer is bricolage – cooking too is a creative art. the very language of food indicates bricolage. we ‘dress’ a chicken, and a salad for example. in eat my words halligan has a whole chapter devoted to bricolage, which she calls do-it-yourself food, giving different recipes as examples, from yoghurt which, when used in various ways, becomes something quite different, to mulberries, plums and calamondin oranges, pickled onions and sorrel tart, interspersed with historical details of the flora and fauna of canberra, and literary references from the old testament onwards. this chapter is bricolage writ large. throughout eat my words she is playing on the idea that basic traditional foods such as a roast of beef, leg of lamb are a contrast to the many coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 contemporary dishes which are a mixture of many kinds of food, as well as colours. one of halligan’s witty examples of bricolage is food for great occasions and its historical traditions, such as the elaborate metamorphoses that occur to even simple food such as jelly, especially in nineteenth century england. wedding cakes, “at which australia is a world champion” (119), provide some of the most horrendous examples of bricolage that have been produced (71-75), as many of us have seen. the bricolage aspect of food is also seen in the artistic presentation of food in modern cookbooks, not least the illustrations, and in tv cookery competitions (cf. bbc masterchef goes large). roland barthes discusses the function of cookbooks as sociocultural sources, “pictures (…) are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, without analysing or diluting it” (1972, 110). cookery illustrations are a kind of metalanguage (114) creating a kind of myth as to what food should look like, since all pictures have an element of myth — something which we believe exists but seldom can be proved in the making (115). the pictures do not represent the reality of the food, but signify it (137). they are, he says, written for a particular group, such as to whet the appetite of the working class woman rather than produce a dish. halligan compares barthes’ ideas with her own and those in middleclass french magazines and weeklies. she agrees with barthes that recipe books are addressed to the mind, and elaborates on the appeal of cookery books to the mind and the vision in the chapter “given names” in eat my words, thus supporting barthes’ thesis that one of the aims of cookbooks is to present an ‘idea’. cookbooks are the history of cooking and housekeeping, the most renowned being mrs. beeton whose first edition was entitled household management. a change of title has not vastly changed the content over a seventy-year period, and we still have a section in the 1966 edition on, for example, “routine of the home.” the careful housewife will take the opportunity afforded by the annual turn-out to check over household equipment and stocks of all kinds, sorting out and setting aside articles which can be repaired or renovated, and arranging for the disposal of things no longer needed. (1966, 11) the chapters on “the housewife” (9-14), “kitchen craft: the cooking of food” (45-77) represent specific lifestyles, especially the first version of this classic text. but this was all part of a long tradition. when living in england in the 1970s halligan came across some old cookbooks from the seventeenth century onwards — all written by women “mrs. beeton everybody knows, but there’s also hannah glasse, maria rundell, elizabeth raffald, eliza acton” (emw 105). halligan tells us about elizabeth raffald: “an astonishing person” who had various careers, including establishing “manchester’s first post office”, but was well known for her recipes in the experienced english housekeeper (1769). mrs. e. smith’s the compleat housewife or accomplish’d gentlewoman’s companion (1729) has a wealth of herbal and other recipes which halligan tells us the facsimile publishers warn people to follow at their own risk. in the taste of memory she has an interesting discussion of jessie conrad’s a handbook of cookery for a small house (1923), which has a preface by her husband, coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 joseph conrad, and which halligan found in the national library in canberra. with only one servant jessie conrad “explains to us how it should not be necessary for a wife to spend more than one and a half to two hours preparing lunch, and another two and a half to three hours on dinner, and still eat well” (47). the presentation of food in cookbooks has advanced from basic national foods to elaborate illustrations, and at times ingredients not easily available. a more recent trend is using cookbooks to depict national romantic elements of a country. one example is from norway where arne brimi and ardis kaspersen’s book, norway’s national dishes: a food lover’s journey in our own country has gone through twelve reprints since it first came out in 2006. although some critics describe the book as a collection of ordinary, everyday recipes, the aim appears to be to underline the national romantic element by illustrations of food against a background of fjords and mountains. the division of the book into regions with a brief description of characteristic features, culinary and otherwise, of the area emphasizes the cultural aspect of food and adds an exotic element. marion halligan would approve of this combination of food and travel. such cookery books provide literally food for thought. cookbooks also reflect cultural trends in cooking, for example, preserving fruit and vegetables in the 1930s and 40s, freezer cooking in the 1960s and 70s. the wealth of cookery books available today also indicates our transport to a multicultural world. why do we buy cookery books, as food for thought, or an escape to another world, another ego? the naming of food to halligan “eating is a mental as well as a physical pleasure. i can feast on the history and derivations of words as well as the things they name” (emw 113). as an author she feels that words: tell me what i want to say (…) so i’m quite prepared to believe that there’s something atavistic about naming, that the words we associate with things, their being and their doing, have an essential rightness that is not just wisdom after the event, not just hindsight (113). as readers halligan makes us aware of an aspect of food we seldom reflect over — the naming of food, indicating nationality, class and identity, and its processes, the con-text. the naming of food processes is illustrative of a cruel streak in mankind. halligan quotes jean aron’s the art of eating in france: “‘culinary terminology is a mirror in which one sees accents of cruelty, an extraordinary lust and joy of possession,’” (118) and continues: look at this list of verbs associated with the preparation of food: pound, beat, strip, whip, boil, sear, grind, tear, crack, mince, mash, crush, stuff, chop. images of torture occur: sauteur is to make jump in the pan by applying heat, there is skinning and peeling and bleeding and hanging and binding, not to mention skewering and spitting, topping and tailing. mediaeval cookbooks say ‘smite them in pieces’, ‘hew them in gobbets’. (emw 118) coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 from mrs. beeton we can add words used in recipes; blanch, devil, dice, glaze for beautification, grate, knead, scald, rub in, steep, flatten, bind. so ”[w]ith the best will in the world the food preparer can’t avoid dealing in all those verbs of lust and anger and cruelty” (emw 124). we can ask whether there is a connection to the pleasure aspect of food, all the violent methods being conducive to relieving tension and aggression. but not only the processes of making food are the object of her criticism. how do we name the food we eat and the menus we make? halligan cites jean anthelme brillat savarin who in 1825 said: “tell me what man eats and i will tell you what he is” (emw 94). this is equally applicable today. we change ordinary everyday food into something more exotic merely by changing its name, sometimes simply transferring the name from the food to the dish in which it is cooked, as when stews become casseroles (emw 12). often the change from english to french in the naming of dishes, for example clear soup becoming consommé, automatically makes it more upmarket. she thus plays on the idea of the unknown, the superiority of french or other cuisine — linguistic illiteracy, and the notion that the foreign sounding is inevitably superior. halligan underscores the falsity of this view by commenting on how in fact the aristocracy refined the food and staple diet of the peasants. “french haute cuisine is really the working of the pig image on a grand scale. it’s like a noble pyramid, with a broad base of peasant eating habits supporting a pinnacle that is ever more delicate and refined” (emw 147). she satirizes this by pointing out the english adoption of the term gourmet, which in reality meant a wine taster’s assistant, and the play on that word and gourmand (emw 126). another more mundane example could be the use of the word ‘ambrosia’, the food of the gods, to denote a currant bun in some parts of southern norway, whereas elsewhere it is called a currant bun, an easter bun, but a fact that is also illustrative of the naming of food, since different foods often have a variety of local names. in conclusion, to halligan food is an indispensable aspect of her writing, as its many literary references show. “the kind of novels i write need food” and “it is a good way of expressing human relations” for better or for worse (tom 93). just as t.s. eliot’s alfred j. prufrock “measure[s] out [his] life with coffee spoons” (1957, 12) so halligan may be said in her non-fiction to measure out her life with meals, but there is never a question of “do i to eat a peach?” (15) or anything else! works cited aron, jean-paul. (1975). the art of eating in france. new york: harper and row. barthes, roland. (1972). mythologies. london: paladin/granada. beeton, mrs. (1962, 1966). mrs. beeton’s family cookery. london, melbourne and cape town: ward, lock &co. bobis, merlinda (2006). “food, precious food: migrating the palate.” kunapipi 28:2, “the kookbook”. 10-17. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 138 brimi, arne and ardis kaspersen (2006, 2009). norges nasjonalretter. en matglad reise i vårt eget land. (norwegain national dishes. a food lover’s journey in our own country). oslo: norsk fakta forlag. collett, anne (2006). editorial. kunapipi 28:2, “the kookbook”. vi-ix. eliot, t.s. (1936, 1957). collected poems. london: faber & faber. halligan, marion (1988). the living hothouse. st. lucia, london, new york: university of queensland press, ——. eat my words (1990). north ryde: angus & roberston. ——. spidercup (1990). ringwood, victoria: penguin books. ——. cockles of the heart (1996). melbourne: reed books. ——. the taste of memory (2004). crows nest nsw: allen & unwin. ——.(2006) “going back” kunapipi 28:2, “the kookbook”. 128-137. highfield, jonathan (2006). “refusing to be fat llamas: resisting violence through food in sozaboy and purple hibiscus,” kunapipi 28:2, “the kookbook”. 43-62. mansfield, katherine (1920, 1974). bliss and other stories. harmondsworth: penguin. telfer, elizabeth (1996). food for thought: philosophy and food. london: routledge. tobin, ronald (2010). “thought for food: literature and gastronomy.” lecture given at university of california santa barbara, november 2008. video: www.uctv.tv/schedule accessed 30.07.2010. also on www.youtube.com/watch?v=76zhtyq accessed 4.1.2010, 24.01.2010. anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. her research interests and fields of publication are women’s studies, and postcolonial literatures and cultures, especially from australia and new zealand. she is author of hidden and visible suffrage: emancipation and the edwardian woman in galsworthy, wells and forster (1995), and has co-edited several books including identities and masks: colonial and postcolonial studies (2001: jakob lothe and peter young) and readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007: with lene johannessen). her latest book “for was i not born here?” identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne came out in 2010. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction sue ballyn the australian studies centre universitat de barcelona susan.ballyn@gmail.com copyright©2016 sue ballyn. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. associate professor justin dabner spent part of the academic year 2014-2015 as a visiting fellow at the australian studies centre at barcelona university. the centre was enriched by his willingness to participate in the day to day work of the centre and in the many discussions that took place with members of the department staff who regularly drop in and out of the centre. typically, dabner accepted to bring out a monograph volume of coolabah on aspects of law. his idea in a first instance was to include other authors but this did not materialize as authors he approached were already committed and with a burden of deadlines, the bane of all academics. martin renes and i then floated the idea that he should be the sole author and we would send out the peer reference sheets. dabner agreed and thus this volume came into being. it is not atypical among the issues of coolabah as there have been other monograph issues with a single author. in this volume dabner deals with the complications that arise in a nation which takes the model of british common law for its judiciary, for both indigenous people and its multicultural society. as dabner posits, “taking the instances of indigenous and islamic law, it will be observed that legal plurality exists in australia but largely in the shadows where the vulnerable of society lack protection. it proposes an institutional response that might help shine a light on these shadows” in a second article, dabner moves into a totally different terrain, climate change, a subject of concern for every nation and one touched on by bill boyd in his monograph edition of coolabah: postcolonial times: lock the gate or pull down the fences? mailto:susan.ballyn@gmail.com coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/coolabah/issue/view/1328 dabner points out that climate change, responsible environmental politics and action are, perhaps, australia’s “greatest moral challenge” notwithstanding other moral challenges such as those represented by “(…) the treatment of the first australians, of refugees, of non-european immigrants, of same sex orientated individuals (…).” australia, like the rest of the world, must meet this challenge if the planet is to survive. sue ballyn 21st november 2016 http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/coolabah/issue/view/1328 microsoft word david serrat english 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 170 climatic change and humanity: a permanent conflict? david serrat abstract. climate change has occurred, whether due to human activity or not, throughout the history of the earth to a greater or lesser traumatic degree. we must use our great technological capacity to prevent its effects so as not to allow the change to lead to a catastrophe. the real problem derives from a social and consumeristic model which, given the current energy resources, can not be made sustainable for the world population. demographic control, hand in hand with research into and the use of new energy models are absolutely necessary if we are to avoid a final catastrophe. keywords: climate change, demography, energetic resources that human activity has influenced and continues to influence the climate today? i have no doubt about this at all. the evidence seems to be irrefutable. that human activity is able to modify climatic tendencies and oscillations in a “natural” way, without a significant human presence, and has been doing so throughout geological history? as a geologist, i will focus on this observation so as to analyse recent climatic changes such copyright ©2009 david serrat. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 171 as the present one, framing them within the context of the earth’s history and the mutual influences resulting from human activity. in fact, until recently, climatic determinism was consubstantial with human activity. as a result, until very recently, human activity had to adapt to the climatic conditions present in their geographical location. if adaptation was not possible then there would have to be a migration to another location or, on occasions, total extinction. the first example of the above would appear to be the origin of our species in east africa. monkeys which lived somewhere in the jungle, like contemporary gorillas or orangutangs, found themselves confronted by progressive desertification which converted the jungle into savannah. accustomed to having an abundance of fruit at hand, they had to adapt to the scarcity of food and found out how to use their hands to obtain fruit by breaking open the protective outer covering … and so they survived. in other places, such as vallès (catalonia, spain) it seems that the dryopithecus, apes which existed six million years ago 1 , were unable to adapt and there is no evidence of a continuing evolutionary line, thus we assume they simple ceased to exist. climatic changes, similar to those which occurred in the two places already mentioned, were traumatic: on the one hand provoking extinction and on the other an evolution towards a more viable form of life. in the main, such climatic changes were caused when, during the continental shift, the antarctic moved to occupy the south pole. over 3.000 meters of ice accumulated, and is still extant today, sea levels dropped around the planet and the circumpolar oceanic currents began to move. the climate in europe changed from the subtropical, with palm trees and coral reefs reaching as far paris, london and vienna, to that we have today. six million years ago we still had coral reefs in what today is penedès (sant pau d’ordal, catalonia, spain), with sharks in vallès (campins). 1 in pau, studied by s. moya and others at the paleontological museum in sabadell coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 172 this is the great geological cooling of the earth. to believe that human activity can change it, melting ice in the antarctic, is something of a contradiction, just like the belief that we are able to shift a continent to one side or the other. however, the earth does receive external and internal influences that can cause an oscillation in the geologic climate, provoking minor reactions which are, nonetheless, important regarding the activity and health of all living things. over the last two million years, there have been periods when the earth has warmed up and cooled down. these periods increasingly more intense and shorter, are known as glacial and interglacial periods caused by movements of the earth’s axis, solar radiation variances, and exceptional volcanic activity or also by the impact of meteorites. these oscillations, which have lasted for tens of thousands of years (two of inferior magnitude), have resulted in ice covering, for example, scandinavia to northern germany, poland to the netherlands, practically all canada to as far south as new york and the great lakes at the peak of the glacial period. this was when the pyrenean glaciers occupied the valleys with tongues that reached as far as puigcerdà, the river querol valley, down to rialb in noguera pallaresa and close to pont de suert in noguera ribagorçana. these oscillations brought about a lowering of the sea level, by one hundred of metres, at the peak of the cold period and a warmer climate than the present during the peak of the warm period, with only a few glaciers extant outside the antarctic. it could be said that the huge antarctic icecap was left almost untouched by these oscillations. the changes forced the fauna, including our ancestors, to migrate in search of better conditions in which to accommodate their habits and diet, in the course of which many species became extinct. it was during a period of lesser climatic change that, for example, in the throes of the last ice age, large tracts of north and east asia became climatically suitable for human occupation and, from there, taking advantage of the drop in sea level, japan was colonised and america via the bering straits and yukon region which, at that time, was free of ice. today, more than ten thousand years afterwards, we are clearly living in an interglacial period (one which is comparatively mild compared to that of 400.000 years ago), and in our period climatic oscillations of a minor coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 173 order are also being experienced. however, they affect the modern human species, homo sapiens sapiens, the neanderthals being extinct, and have conditioned a large part of the prehistoric period and all history from the end of the upper palaeolithic to contemporary times. i do not say up to “our times” because it would seem that during the last decades it is we who have wrought effects on the climate and at this moment in time i do not want to affirm or contradict anything until i have neared my conclusion. let me proceed, then, to analyse the effects of the current climate change from the geologist’s point of view in an attempt to discover what is specifically pertinent to the present change in comparison with those that have occurred over the last ten thousand years which are not the result of human activity, given that, even though there were humans, they were few in number and with little technology with which to modify the climate and were thus not responsible for any climatic catastrophe. a) the glaciers melt over the last ten thousand years the alpine glaciers have reduced ten times in size in comparison with those of today. tree trunks found in existing moraines reveal that the tree line was four hundred metres above the present level. the route that hannibal and his elephants took to rome across the alps would be impracticable today. in the pyrenees, the present day glaciers are the result of a little ice age between the xvi-xviii centuries. this cooling down period caused a severe socioeconomic crisis, hunger and misery in a large part of europe. from the point of view of a geologist who specialises in glaciers in the past, the present heating up of the planet and the consequent withdrawal of glaciers is by no means abnormal and, furthermore, in the past it has proved to be beneficial for human beings who de pended on climate more than we do today. b/ desertification it has not yet been proved that the warming up of the planet has brought about more arid zones than those already extant or in comparison with those in the past. what actually happens is that they move location. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 174 north africa itself, defined two thousand years ago as the grain basket of rome, became arid later in time, but there can be no doubt that the heating up of the planet will cause more rain. the relocation of arid and wet zones is by no means a phenomenon of our times. c/ the rise in sea level during the most recent and longer warm climatic period (climatic optimum), sea levels rose by approximately a metre. known as flandrian transgression, this is the maximum postglacial marine transgression ever known and took place 6.000 to 3.000 years before our era. while disregarding the catastrophic and rather doubtful predictions made by al gore with regard to rising sea levels, could the current climate change bring about a similar rise of up to one metre like that which affected the egyptian and mesopotamian civilisations? without a doubt. we should be prepared in the long term for such a phenomenon just as we are, in the short term, for the rise in river levels. the fundamental and most serious difference between ancient times and the present is that both marine and freshwater flood plains are inhabited by millions of sedentary people, while politico-administrative frontiers do not allow for human migration and relocation which will occur as a result. we could continue to analyse different climatic parameters and would arrive at the conclusion that, in geological terms, the climate has changed time and again, even recently, and our species has adapted itself with greater or lesser ease. so we could ask ourselves; maybe the problem of an imminent catastrophe is not the result of climate change? in 1810, 1.000 million people inhabited the planet. one hundred and fifteen years later, in 1925, there were twice that number. in the space of some forty years the figure had reached three to six thousand-million. in 1989 the un gave a rather optimistic figure of ten thousand-million inhabitants by 2050 but, at the present population growth rate it is more than likely that that figure will be reached well before then. in order to use the energy that each one thousand-million people require in the “first world”, an egyptian needed to have 120 slaves in his service. these one thousand-million people consider it both ethically reasonable (and coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 175 economically interesting!) that the remaining five thousand-million should reach our degree of comfort and, as a result, our energy consumption! should the species known as homo sapiens sapiens which has developed technology so as to live in the desert, the antarctic or in space in the most inhospitable conditions be afraid of climate change? is climate change not just a myth or a devil that we have constructed in order to hide our heads in the sand so as not to see the real problems that will face the planet in the future? overpopulation and the lack of energy resources to supply a social model that technological advances have made possible blind us to the real problems confronting us and which, i would like to believe, science will solve because if they remain unsolved then wars fought over space and energy resources will most certainly reduce the population or even extinguish the species regardless of whether it is cold or hot. other species on the planet, if we leave any alive, would doubtless benefit and, if they could, rejoice! david serrat holds a chair in geodinamics at the universitat de barcelona and is president of the science and technology section in the institut d’ estudis catalans (catalan academy of sciences) microsoft word caty ribas 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 did it really happen? memory, history and myth in eugenia tsoulis´ between the ceiling and the sky. catalina ribas segura abstract: world war ii, the nazi occupation and several dictatorships forced many greek men and women into migration. in 1952 greece signed an agreement on assisted migration to australia and more than “250 000 greek and cypriot migrants from greece (1952-74), rumania (1952-8), egypt and the middle east (1952-2) [sic], cyprus (1974-84) and other politically turbulent countries of eastern europe and latin america” moved to australia (tamis, anastasios m. the greeks in australia, 2005: 47). the lives of those migrants changed radically as they left home behind. some of them, or their children, wrote fictional texts explaining some of their experiences. an example of this is eugenia tsoulis´ behind the ceiling and the sky (1998), where the main characters live their lives between present and past and between memories and myths, on the one hand, and facts and the lifeworld that surround them, on the other. this paper will analyse this novel and the sometimes blurred boundaries between memory, history and myth. keywords: greek migration, memory, family secrets. this paper aims at explaining the sometimes blurred boundaries between memory, history and myth using as an example a novel written by a “hyphenated” australian, a woman whose identity is prejudged and considered blurred, from the fringe or in need of an explanation as her name is not “typical aussie”: eugenia tsoulis. she is the executive director of the migrant resource centre of south australia and one of her goals is to “promote the cultural expression of all new groups of migrants” (tsoulis 2006). eugenia was a migrant herself, as she moved to australia with her family in the 1950s. she decided to study visual arts and her ability is proved in her love for the arts in general: she is also “a printmaker whose work is held at the art gallery of south australia” (mickan et al. 2002), between the ceiling and the sky is her first novel, published in 1998 and again in 2000, and she has also written short-stories, such as “a place called melitsa” in helen nickas´ mothers from the edge. an anthology (2006). generally speaking, it can be said that her work deals with “forced migration and dislocation, crossing cultural boundaries and time” (nickas 2006: 263) and she understands “the need for artistic expression, whether it be through the written word, through painting, music, song, role play or dance (,) inherent in all of us”(tsoulis 2006). copyright ©2009 catalina ribas segura. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 if i had to name two keywords to designate between the ceiling and the sky, i would use memory and family secrets, as these words can be linked to myth and history, to present and past, to the lifeworld and the feelings. all these dichotomies are a significant part of this evocative and sensual novel: “evocative” because it remembers the past and “sensual” because it reminisces about feelings and places and the memories, traumas and experiences are very vivid. the author gets the reader to feel empathy with all the characters, even with those who caused suffering to others. let me explain the plot of the novel: diana is a second-generation greek-australian social worker who is doing a project on the former inmates in a mental hospital. in order to accomplish it, she has to read all the patients´ files, analyse them, make comparisons and write a final report. this project will make her come to terms with her childhood, her family and her origins. she is the main narrator. the main character in between the ceiling and the sky is antigone, a greek woman. the novel goes back and forth different moments in her life and the reader gets to know some of her experiences and traumas through (1) her thoughts and (2) through other characters. in fact, memory is the main realm of this novel as the reader only listens to antigone´s voice five times in the 300 pages of the novel: twice she is in australia and three times in greece 1 . some of the information the reader learns about antigone deals with some incidents during the nazi occupation (1941-44) and during the greek civil war (1946-49), the death of her lover, an imposed abortion, the acceptance of an arranged marriage in australia, the 36-day voyage to the new country, her arrival, the life in her new house, the arrangements before the wedding, the night after the wedding, the delivery of her daughter, her picture at the baby’s christening, her nervous breakdown, her stay in the mental hospital for seven years, how she is able to leave the hospital, and her life in greece when she is an old lady. this data is linear and follows a chronological order. however, the structure of the novel is very different: between the ceiling and the sky is a collage of information and characters, which demands an active attitude from the reader in order to decipher the information suggested. this writing technique maintains the blurred boundaries between memory and history and, by writing back-stories, the author provides a polyhedral perspective on the life of the main characters: antigone and diana. other men and women interact in their lives and the main ones are petro (antigone´s husband and diana´s father), vangelia (antigone´s best friend and diana´s godmother), stathi (vangelia´s husband, antigone´s best man and diana´s godfather) and sia (a girl antigone shared cabin with in her voyage to australia). there are more than thirty characters in the novel but these are the main six. the novel is also kaleidoscopic in the sense that all these six characters have a connection with antigone and diana, and each decision taken by each one of them affects the lives of the others in a very dramatic way: the consequences of their acts are so powerful that they become turning points in antigone and diana´s lives. 1 antigone´s voice is heard in the following moments: in australia, (1) to her future husband the first night she arrived (p. 87); (2) to thank vangelia for her help the first day she is in australia (p.93); in greece, she is older, (1) to thank toula, the girl who helps her (p.11), (2) to talk to her sister and laugh about their ages (p. 95) and (3) to joke about her fate with her friend, best man and vangelia´s husband, stathi (p.96) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 a very meaningful characteristic of the novel is that it does not provide dates and names of places, and, in fact, the reader can only deduce the decades of the setting of the novel with historical data and logic: if the nazi occupation of greece was between 1941 and 1944, the greek civil war lasted from 1946 to 1949, the migration agreement between greece and australia was signed in 1952, vangelia and stathi had been in australia for more than 2 years when antigone arrived and antigone had lived the war, this means that they arrived in australia in the late 1950s. antigone was 25 when she married petro and had the baby a year after her arrival, she spent seven years in the mental hospital, then, she was 33 when she left it. moreover, vangelia died after ten years in australia, after that stathi moved back to greece and diana was a 6 or 7 year-old child when aunt vangelia died, therefore, it was in the early-mid 1960s. diana is 40 when her father dies and almost 50 when she goes to greece and meets stathi again, so the novel is set in the 1980s-90s. this lack of dates gives a sense of immateriality, of uncertainty and, to a certain extent, of mythology, as the novel could be explained as a myth or a legend, for example, “once upon a time a beautiful lady was forced to leave her beloved and courageous mum and her idyllic village by her terrible brother-in-law. as all the women in her family, she was brave and determined and she crossed the oceans in order to accept her fate and start a new life in a far, far away country. however, her past haunted her. what terrible secret did she hide? what terrible sin had she committed?” this could be a chivalrous tale where antigone would have to suffer countless pains and go through a hazardous penance before being able to go back to her homeland. however, between the ceiling and the sky is not a chivalrous tale, it is a 21 st century novel that tries to bring to light the hardships of war, forced migration, dislocation and the difficulties in crossing boundaries, especially those of time and of culture. another significant aspect of this novel is the naming of the characters. names have a meaning and most greeks know them, especially if they bear mythological references. the name “antigone” refers to the myth of oedipus. in sophocles´ version, oedipus and his mother, jocasta, had two sons and two daughters. when oedipus had blinded himself as punishment and left into exile, his two daughters, antigone and ismene, helped him as guides. the two sons fought for the kingdom and both died. their uncle, creon, became the new king and he forbade the burial of the one he considered the aggressor. antigone refused to accept his orders and buried her brother. when creon found out, he ordered her to be walled up alive, however, she hanged herself and, creon´s son, who was in love with her, stabbed himself next to her body. therefore, the name “antigone” represents a stubborn and determined woman who will go against anyone´s will to follow her moral. this is a characteristic of the main character in between the ceiling and the sky as she defies the roles imposed on her as a virgin daughter, wife and patient in order to follow her feelings, thoughts and moral. “diana” is the roman equivalent of the greek goddess artemis, the goddess of woodland, nature and protector of women, who was also invoked for aid in conception and childbirth. on the one hand, these characteristics are true for the main narrator in the novel as her birth unleashes the dreams, fears and traumas of many inhabitants of the household. moreover, she rescues antigone´s story and gives voice to her and to the other inmates of the mental hospital. furthermore, she becomes the bridge between two coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 cultures and two ways of living. on the other hand, diana´s naming is special because she was christened with petro´s mother´s name: he [petro] had held her steady in his hands, trying to find traces of him in her face; if not him, perhaps his father or his mother. no matter she bore no resemblance, and had a face so like her mother´s –she would have his mother´s name. she had his grip and look of determination besides. (tsoulis 1998: 109) however her grade six teacher, miss dalesworth, “told her she would call her diana, much better than that long name that no one could pronounce. it would take up less space in her exercise book; and besides, it was the closest translation she could find” (139). miss dalesworth was her favourite teacher and she accepted her new name with pride and taught the correct pronunciation to all the members in the house. other meaningful names are petro, which means “stone”; vangelia, which comes from evangelia and means “one who brings good news”, stathi the shortened version of efstathios and means “well built, stable” and sia comes from theodosia and means “god-given”. all of them bear witness to their names. not only the structure of the novel and the names of the characters have a special meaning in between the ceiling and the sky, but also the presentation of the different settings, moments in time and characters. these are not described in relation to others but through scattered information that the reader has to collect and deduce. many people live in that household: antigone is very secretive and does not share her fears nor her traumas with anyone; petro is in love with her, thinks she is a queen and that only he can obtain her; vangelia is very generous, helps antigone as much as she can and tries to make her feel at home; stathi –vangelia´s husbandand antigone get on very well and he will be antigone´s best man; another couple, nikko and elli, also live in the house, elli and antigone spend most of the days at home as elli has a baby and antigone is pregnant and they get on well, however, nikko and elli have problems because he is tired when he gets home, the baby does not stop crying and elli does not pay him the attention he wants. the problems are shared in the house, for example: one night nikko and elli are in their bedroom, the baby doesn´t stop crying. nikko wants to have sex with elli but she doesn´t want so he tries to force her/ rape her, she screams, there´s a huge argument and everyone in the household enters the room to help her. he decides she has put shame on him and, soon after that, they leave to another city. antigone feels very lonely, takes care of the house mechanically, and hardly talks as she lives in the past and has noone to talk to or to take care of. vangelia is sick and, keeping it secret from everbody else in the house, she goes to the doctor, who says she just needs to rest and eat well. the following information the reader gets about her is that she has spent three months in hospital with blood transfusions. whilst in hospital, antigone delivers the baby, has a nervous breakdown and is taken to a mental hospital. in order to explain her antigone´s lack of visits, vangelia is told that antigone eloped leaving her baby behind and she insists petro on going after her, listening to her and solving their differences together.when she goes back home, she finds the clothes of another woman. petro decides vangelia has to know coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 what happened and the new woman tells vangelia petro´s point of view. petro and stathi make her promise she won´t visit antigone in the mental hospital because that will deeply upset her and her health is too weak. the clothes in the house belong to anna, a greek neighbour who will marry petro when he gets his marriage annulled and who takes care of diana as if she were her own mother. the facts are that antigone was going through the traumas of the war and the death of her lover, she had remembered the forced abortion while she was in hospital delivering the baby; and, once at home, she had not found vangelia, elli was not there and everyone was quite secretive; moreover, the baby did not want her milk and she thought she was a bad mother; finally, she did not want to be touched by petro. one night he wanted to take her, but she did not want him, he insisted, she had the visions of the war again and she spat at him, he slapped her mouth and tried again, she resisted and screamed, he threatened to kill her if she went near the baby again and told her she should go if that was how much he repulsed her. she left screaming for the baby. petro couldn´t understand her behaviour, he guessed she would be in elli´s old room crying and that she would come back, but she did not. when she left, she left the house, it was raining heavily, she was barefoot and she sang loudly for her baby, for herself, for the soldiers who had killed, for the men who had fought and lost, for the women who had mourned, for her husband who had wanted her, for vangelia in hospital, for elli who was far away, for the orange petals that were crushed under her body in that orchard, for the stars that didn´t shine here, for the horizon all distorted where no sea ever met the sky. (161) two policemen took her to the mental hospital. she mistook them for gunmen and she resisted as much as she could. as she did not speak english and did not want to help the enemy find her daughter, the police took a week to inform petro about antigone´s whereabouts. when petro entered the hospital, he decided he had to take her out of there but then he had stood there for a long time, calling this emaciated frame by his wife´s name, asking it to come back to their child. but all it did was to crawl even further back into the wall, singing louder, shaking its head from side to side. he didn´t know it, it didn´t know him, didn´t know itself, didn´t know where it was! his wife no longer lived in that body, she had gone! (210-211) (my italics) he visited her a few more times but then he determined he had to be practical: he talked to the priest and solved the matter because the baby needed a mother and he needed a wife. during those months, antigone lived her traumas 2 again, helped by the 2 some of these traumas are seeing the public execution of the men in her village, her father included; the strength of the barbatis´ women (the women in her family) who horse-rode in the night in order to take food and clothes to the young men who hid in the mountains; or how she fell in love with a young man from her village, how they both risked their lives to meet, how they made love on a bed of orange petals, how one night she went to take him food and found him and three other young men killed, how she held him, tried to warm him and sang and talked to him until their mothers found them; how she screamed in silence during his funeral; how her mother forced her to go to athens and have an abortion in order to give her and antigone´s sister some chance of a “normal” life in the future (that is, get married and have a coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 electroshock therapy which left her numb, and came to terms with her past. once she learned to live with her past experiences, she come up with a routine which helped her keep her sanity during the seven years she stayed in the mental hospital: in the morning she took a shower before all the other inmates and only then she sang and spoke, she also thought about her daughter and came to terms with her life and her fate; when she exited the shower, she stopped speaking, tried to become invisible and let the days go by. the myth of “the mad woman” has been studied in literature, especially in the late 19 th and 20 th c (perkins gubar 1899, 1913; gilbert & gubar 1979; kristeva 1986; pearce & mills 1989). regarding between the ceiling and the sky, antigone wanted to have her lover´s child and live her life as a widow, she wanted to keep something of him to remember he had loved her, that she had been loved, but that was not possible. her life stopped being hers when others took control and decided her fate. being with petro was not significant, she would not have loved any other man, but the fact that vangelia was not in the house and she could not talk to her and take care of her, the fact that both women were told false stories instead of the truth because the men around them thought they would not be able to cope with the news, these facts did mark their lives. how would antigone´s life have changed if she had been allowed to visit vangelia in hospital and then nurse her at home? how would vangelia´s life have changed if she had been told the truth and have received some support to visit antigone in the mental hospital? or if stathi had visited antigone? how would antigone and vangelia´s lives have been if elli´s husband had not tried to rape her or had not decided to move away to another city? the greek women in this novel who lived in the 1950s-60s were not allowed to have a life of their own and this is a very significant difference with diana´s life. diana was raised in the household by anna, petro, vangelia, stathi and vicky; her best friend until grade six was jeanette, it was then when she realised that they came from different worlds and that jeanette would not understand hers; that year, she met dimitra, a new-comer to the neighbourhood, who became her best friend. diana studied a degree, lived with a non-greek man and had children who were not baptised. petro never visited diana´s apartment, not because he was disappointed at her as she thinks, but because he felt lost: he was caught between his memories of greece and the reality of the country when he visited it and, in australia, he was in a country he couldn´t understand. at a certain point, petro stopped belonging to the present and found his homeland in his memories. as we can see, diana and petro´s relation was not very close and it did not get closer when anna died. moreover, diana had created a myth around a picture where she could see a woman with sad eyes who held her when she was a child. she was never told antigone´s story and, although she had wanted to ask questions, she had not found the convenient time. at petro´s funeral, she met sia, who told her she had known her mother and had stathi´s contact details in case she wanted to solve her doubts. diana was puzzled but thanked her. sia did not explain antigone´s story or how she had father for their kids instead of the family honour being broken); later on, how her sister´s husband, thanasi, found her a suitable husband in australia, how her uncle did not agree but accepted her leaving to australia; how the voyage was similar to a rite of passage but her conclusion was that she was repulsed by the life she was about to start. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 helped her leave the hospital, live in australia for some years and then go to greece. diana finished her report on the inmates in the mental hospital, learnt the situation of the woman who had held her when she was a child and realised not only that she was her biological mother but also that everyone in the house had kept that secret from her, that all of them had lied to her. ten years after petro´s death, she travelled to greece, met stathi and was given a shoe-box with the books antigone had written whilst in the mental hospital where she explained who she was, what had happened and how she felt. to conclude, between the ceiling and the sky is a polyhedral novel where memories, histories and myths are used to explain the feelings of forced migration, dislocation, cultural boundaries and time boundaries but also traumas and family secrets. most of the characters in the novel wonder whether certain facts really happened as reality is hard to believe, and, when found out, their past is shaken and questioned. references gilbert, s. and gubar, s. the mad woman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination. new haven: yale up, 1979. kristeva, j. the kristeva reader. tori moi (ed). new york: columbia up, 1986. mickan, p., edwards, a., haebich, e., rapajic-moran, i., hayes, a.m., alferink, d., colanero, r., giles, j., saunders, n., tsoulis, e. and aston, e. pcw members. premier´s council for women: government of south australia, 2002. <http://pcw.officeforwomen.sa.gov.au/index.php?section=977>. accessed 17 july, 2008. nickas, h. (ed) mothers from the edge. an anthology. melbourne: owl publishing, 2006. pearce, l. and mills, s. feminist readings/ feminist reading. new york: harvester wheatsheaf, 1989. perkins gilman, c. the yellow wallpaper and other stories. oxford: oxford up, 1995. tsoulis, e. between the ceiling and the sky. sydney: flamingo, 1998. tsoulis, e. “food feeds my body but only music and dance can calm my spirit.” synergy: creativity, culture and the arts, 2, 2006, pp. 12-13. <http://www.mmha.org.au/mmha-products/synergy/2006-no-2/2018food-feeds-mybody-but-only-music-and-dance-can-calm-my-spirit-2019/>. accessed 17 july, 2006. caty ribas has taught several courses on english language and cultural context of english-speaking countries for the department of languages and is now starting the international relations office at the tertiary institution alberta giménez. in 2005 she defended her minor thesis on “`we, who were born here, are quite another´: greek migrant writing in australia, 1977-1995” and is now working on her phd thesis, where she furthers her research on migrant literature in australia. she was the guest editor of the journal of the australian studies centre in 2007: coolabah 1: this foreign country. one of her aims is to widen knowledge about australia in spain. microsoft word 19rahbek coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 206 mythologizing food: marion halligan’s non-fiction ulla rahbek abstract: this paper discusses marion halligan’s non-fiction, particularly her writing on food: those women who go to hotels, eat my words, cockles of the heart, out of the picture, and the taste of memory. the focus is on how halligan deconstructs and reconstruct a mythology of food, in a barthesian sense, revealing the contradictions at the heart of food mythology. the texts lay bare halligan’s own personal and at times idiosyncratic mythology of food, where food is much more that just that. venturing into areas of autobiography, memory, travel, place and gardens, this paper discusses how halligan’s mythologizing of food doubles up, especially in her most recent food writing, as a rethinking and celebration of suburbia, which is figured as a site where nature and culture meet, and where paradise can be regained. keywords: marion halligan; roland barthes; mythology; non-fiction; food; memory; suburbia; paradise in the essay “the beach”, marion halligan describes merewether beach in newcastle, nsw, where she grew up. “sometimes i think people are born with a gene that makes them love the place they’re born in,” she initially muses and then continues: once the area behind the dunes [of the beach] blossomed with banksias and wattles, flannel flowers, coastal rosemary and ti-trees, while further inland were dense stands of eucalypts and the gullies harboured patches of rainforest. this makes me suspect that the loss of the garden of eden was not a single event but an ongoing story (halligan 1996b: 54-5). it is the ongoing story of the loss of the garden of eden that i want to use as my cue for a reflection on the significance of food in marion halligan’s non-fiction. the continuing loss of paradise is to all intents and purposes a poetic way of describing mankind’s gradual destruction of our natural surroundings in our greed for space and our disregard for the increasingly fragile state of our planet earth. so does marion halligan propose a copyright©2011 ulla rahbek. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 207 solution to this devastation? i think she does, but in a poetic and playfully humble way. i will argue in this paper that halligan uses food as a means of showing how we can slowly recreate the garden of eden in our own suburban backyards. she develops, i suggest, a personal and rich mythology of food in her non-fiction, which surprisingly evolves into a reconsideration and celebration of the much-maligned suburbia. the result is that suburbia becomes a site of creativity and happiness, and a natural habitat of man, flora and fauna – a paradisiacal marriage of nature and culture. in order to support my suggestion that halligan develops her own at times idiosyncratic mythology of food i want to draw on roland barthes’ deconstruction of all kinds of bourgeois myths in his 1957 mythologies, a book that halligan references in much of her non-fiction. in cockles of the heart, for example, halligan explains: “one of the things i like about barthes is the connection he made between language and gastronomy. between food and words. they both have the same organ, the tongue” (halligan 1996a: 19). barthes’ notion of the link between language and food is also illustrated in an unexpectedly amusing way in these women who go to hotels, cowritten with lucy frost, when frost admits stealing virginia woolf’s a room of one’s own in a parisian bookshop: “i stole a room of one’s own. like couscous, that book always reminds me of paris” (frost and halligan 1997: 186). this is a truly halliganian moment – even though it is frost’s recollection. it fuses food, with memory, language, cities and stories in a delightfully defamiliarising way, and halligan’s non-fiction writing is replete with such clusters.i after the barthesian appetiser, i want to explore how we may see halligan as a modern mythologist for whom food is, naturally enough, food, but also in a barthesian secondorder signification, autobiography,ii memory, storytelling, history, travel, tourism, art, gardening, as well as a sign of nationality and place. in connection with travelling, rebecca solnit’s thoughts on walking, in wanderlust: a history of walking (2000), could easily be applied to halligan’s thinking about food: “like eating or breathing, it [i.e. walking] can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. […] walking is a subject that is always straying” (solnit 2000: 3 and 8). food is also a subject that is always straying in halligan’s non-fiction. perhaps this is so because halligan’s mythologizing of food is elaborated along with what she calls a gastronomic memory which is part fictional, part real, and which has the alchemical knack of storing experiences in a “safely delicious” way (halligan 1991: 11). as halligan writes in the taste of memory: “food is so much about memory, about the past, and about happiness in the past – unless we are very unlucky. it is not often that the miserable moments are remembered in delicious food” (halligan 2004: 149). there is thus a continuous slipping and sliding between food as simply food and food as signifying something else. there are, as barthes would say in his description of the excess of myth, multiple contingencies between signifier and signified when it comes to decoding the halliganian sign food. and even when food is food, it is not really that simple: food is raw material, shopping for food, reading recipes, cooking, eating, talking, writing and dreaming about food. and all these second-order significations are again invested with mythologies of their own, in an ongoing and unfinished gastronomic story. this rich area of signifieds to the signifier food gives halligan ample scope to develop and play around with her mythology of food. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 208 in mythologies, roland barthes discusses how myths are created through an exploration of disparate mass culture phenomena such as wrestling, striptease and fashion magazines. his discussion leads to a gradual unmasking and demystification of myth since he time and again exposes the ideology behind such myths, and reveals what is considered natural. barthes describes contemporary myth in the chapter called “myth today” as “a type of speech […] a system of communication […] a message […] a mode of signification, a form” (barthes 2000: 109). in other words, myth is a truly variegated phenomenon, where the emphasis is always on its fluidity and movement, not the thing, object or concept itself. that instable flow is embodied in myth as a metalanguage (barthes 2000: 115) that constantly and self-consciously speaks about itself as language. it takes its starting point in a saussurian description of the sign as a component simultaneously consisting of signifier and signified whose link is arbitrary. yet since myth adds another layer to this dualism, the link is not quite as arbitrary in the language of myth, not least because the mythologist deciphers the myth for us (barthes 2000: 128). in this way myth has a double function, barthes suggests, “it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand and it imposes on us” (barthes 2000: 117). myth is thus speech “justified in excess”, the result, barthes claims, of myth as a type of “language robbery” (barthes 2000: 130-131). this linguistic excess coupled with the double function of myth also shows us that myths tend to develop along with an ulterior motive. barthes describes myths on both the right and the left of the political scene in france. in halligan’s case, however, there is nothing overtly political or sinister in her mythmaking – it is, as i argue, a method through which she can restore and elevate suburbia into paradise regained. like barthes, she is concerned with the image of food as myth, with the connotative meanings, the second-order signification food holds for her, and by implication, the readers, as they become seduced by the pleasure of reading halligan’s texts. there are some recurring references in halligan’s non-fiction writing to the method behind her mythologizing of food, behind the focus on the second-order cultural meaning of food: invention, experiment and bricolage being the foremost. there is a continuous sense of playful experimentation, a kind of post-modern willingness to mix the old and the new, the strange and the familiar, the foreign and the local. added to this is the specific use of words to evoke and provoke the senses: eating words, tasting memory, smelling garden produce, touching food and hearing fruit ripen. as in barthes’ exploration of our commonplace myths, the word is central. halligan’s self-proclaimed “desire for words” (halligan 2004: 52) is obvious in all of her writing. there is something hedonistic and blissful in halligan’s sensual yet practical evocation of food – like barthes pleasure and bodily joy are not considered unimportant areas in contemporary discourses. in her food books she explains that she prefers the oldfashioned cookery books with food history and recipes to the sumptuous coffee table books where the lavish pictures demand attention, not the words. such books are read primarily as art books (halligan 2004: 36), whereas the old, wordy cookbooks rely on the powers of the imagination and the willingness of the body to enjoy connotations and evocations of the apparent dullness of the printed words. or we can use an image from eat my words as a symbolic description of how food is mythologized in halligan’s writing – in her description of beating egg whites: the transformation of this small puddle of slimy eggwhite into clouds of white foam is one of the several mysteries of cooking (i mean mystery in the sense of a coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 209 skill and an art as well as hidden or secret thing and possibly even a rite requiring initiation) which are best performed by the right and proper tools (halligan 1991: 42). similarly halligan takes the on-the-surface simple signifier food and transforms it into a wonderfully rich mythology by continually juxtaposing the commonplace with the wonderful, the real with the fanciful. in this way she demystifies and defamiliarises the way we regard food, and at the same time encourages us to look at food again, taste food differently, with new eyes and awakened senses. the emphasis is on the transformation – the metamorphosis of cooking. she is fascinated by how the simple – slimy egg white – is by the alchemy of cooking transformed into something else all together – clouds of white foam. this metamorphosis is the only way to understand how, for example, “the monstrous purgative of porridge was transmogrified into a delicate dessert” (halligan 1991: 49) and a clue to halligan’s personal mythologizing of food. food, as i have already pointed out, is memory, autobiography and history. for halligan it is also intimately linked to place, specifically to australia in halligan’s edible universe, from eat my words to the taste of memory. in the latter book, halligan suggests that “[f]ood is a kind of carnal spirit of a place. it is where its most essential nature is to be found” (halligan 2004: 47). this is not an uncommon way of regarding the cultural meanings of food. in ugandan-born, british-based journalist yasmin alibhai-brown’s the settler’s cookbook: a memoir of love, migration and food (2010), the author shares many of halligan’s assumptions about food, though her prose is not as sensual and mouth-watering. for alibhai-brown, writing as an immigrant to britain, pinning down recipes is compared to a relay race, where recipes act as batons that you pass on to the next generation, passing on history and memory of places simultaneously: “the next generation picks up this baton at least. while they eat i reminisce, linking the dishes to time and places, so that when i am gone, my voice will echo in their heads to remind them who they are” (alibhai-brown 2010: 15). food thus becomes a discourse of personal identity and belonging, evoking as it does, a carnal spirit of place. that carnal spirit is evoked in barthes too, when he writes about the mythology of wine and how wine is the “totem-drink” of the french that “supports a varied mythology, which does not trouble about contradictions” (barthes 2000: 58). barthes elaborates on this conundrum: “[w]ine is objectively good, and at the same time, the goodness of wine is a myth: here is the aporia” (barthes 2000: 158)]. jonathan culler elucidates this “mythologist’s dilemma”: “though the ‘excellence of wine’ is a myth, it is not exactly a delusion […] the mythologist is concerned with the image of wine – not its properties and effects but the second-order meanings attached to it by social convention” (culler 2002: 24-5). those contradictions do not trouble halligan either, as she reflects on antipodean spins on food, on the image of food and fashionable food in particular: in australia in the 1950s, halligan writes, “spaghetti came, and we were proud we knew not to serve it with mashed potatoes, unlike some people, though i’m not sure we ever got the proportions of pasta to sauce right; we always piled up the meat” (halligan 1991: 6-7). with the benefit of gastronomic hindsight, we can giggle at the very thought of serving pasta and potatoes together (imagine all the starch and carbohydrates!), yet the anecdote also shows the fluidity of the second-order signification of, in this particular case, the once-exotic, now dreary and commonplace, food pasta. in this coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 210 particular case of “edible memory”, food for halligan is also intimately linked to being australian – there is even what we might call an australian sensibility attached to her mythologizing of food. australia is the new world in halligan’s universe, europe the old, seeped in history, legend and stories, there for the picking and tasting, and raw material for the bricoleur: “prawns and christmas pudding: the old world and the new. everybody’s allowed a bit of ethnic food for the festive season,” and “[t]he whole country i live in doesn’t care either. we live in a melting pot. things get mixed up,” halligan writes in cockles of the heart (halligan 1996a: 99 and 125). this idea is developed in these women who go to hotels, where halligan elaborates on the ways in which “australian food is inventing itself out of the melting pot of europe and asia,” (frost and halligan 1997: 137).iii the result of this gastronomic hodgepodge, this edible hybridity, is a worrying obsession with food purity and authenticity, with that “essential nature” as we saw above: “you can spend a lot of time wondering if we’ll ever have a genuine australian cuisine” (halligan 1991: 53 and again on page 126). but why worry? why not regard australian cuisine in a somewhat oxymoronic way as a genuine mixture of old and new? there is no choice for australia but to be eclectic in the construction of a true australian cuisine, halligan insists, as the result of its multicultural population (halligan 1991: 126). thus australians are: borrowers, bowerbirds, magpies. we make our own pretty glittering nests from whatever we can find that we like the look of, and this nest, this culinary habitat, is in its own way all our own work. maybe what is destined to become our great tradition is the art of borrowing (halligan 1991: 148). in that sense halligan the bricoleur and mythologist is genuinely australian, a human magpie moulding her suburban nest into a new paradise. halligan the traveller claims that she can borrow paris in these women who go to hotels (frost and halligan 1997: 9). halligan the food tourist concludes cockles of the heart, her pilgrimage story, which never takes her to santiago de compostela, because she would rather stay in france, with an interesting reflection on going home: to australia where we are inventing our way of life along with our cuisine, inventing as people always do, taking the works of others and adding that little fizz of genius that makes it our own […] knowing we need not choose, we can have both (halligan 1996a: 266) inventing a lifestyle along with cooking is the beginning of the long process of rebuilding the garden of eden literally closer to home. the little fizz of genius is halligan’s own personal contribution – both in the shape of her non-fiction but also through what she actually does in “real life” as described in the autobiographical elements of those texts – to that ongoing and pleasurable shaping of the edenic but, or rather, and suburban habitat. that garden is particularly well developed in the taste of memory, where gardens are figured as “nourishing spaces that we like to surround ourselves with” (halligan 2004: 10). in this book the autobiographical skeleton that halligan had used in her first nonfiction about food, eat my words, but not noticed until after the book’s publication, is here foregrounded, almost as a homage to her late husband, cosmo of the earlier texts, graham in this one. there is a sense of nostalgia and bittersweet regret in this book, a sense of loss, but also of restoration. we read about a gentleman caller now and again in coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 211 the text. we also read about the much-loved canberra house, its garden and about suburbia. in this latest book about food halligan is not ashamed to openly admit her “admiration for suburbia” (halligan 2004: 48). it is in this most recent of her food books that her own unique and at times private brand of food mythologizing doubles up as a celebration of suburbia, where she shows that just as you mix nature and culture in cooking, so too in suburbia. food and suburbia are both messy and fluid sites in this sense – a potent mixture of nature and culture, and both replete with second-order signification. halligan refers in that connection in the taste of memory to david malouf’s remark that “‘the real achievement’ of australian writers ‘might be in pioneering the experience of suburban man’ […] i entirely agree with him […] this is because i think suburbia a great achievement” (halligan 2004: 167). however, suburbia suffers from a rather bad reputation as alienating, homogenising and suffocating. halligan suggests that although she used to think the alienation of suburbia a “nourishing myth” she now celebrates “the fact of suburbia” as nourishing (halligan 2004: 166). the word nourishing is of course chosen deliberately here – halligan’s universe is constructed in a sensual way after all. and even more than that: in the process of rebuilding the paradise in your backyard, you also transform the suburban garden into art. again halligan draws on alchemical metamorphoses: “i like to think of suburbia as full of small republics of pleasure where words and food and the colour of the walls and the paintings on them and the crab apples in the spring and the bird feeder hanging in the tree are all part of the minor works of art we make of our lives” (halligan 2004: 167). we may fault halligan here for succumbing to a middle class fantasy, where the reality of hard work and busy lives is conveniently forgotten or swept aside. we could castigate halligan for being an apolitical liberal humanist, because liberal humanism is the ideology of suburbia, if we believe terry eagleton: “liberal humanism is a suburban moral ideology, limited in practice to largely interpersonal matters. it is stronger on adultery than on armaments, and its valuable concern with freedom, democracy and individual rights are simply not concrete enough” (eagleton 1990: 207). but that criticism seems beside the point. there is something sumptuous and appetizing, even something important, about refiguring suburbia as a republic of pleasure, that such reality-check criticism tends to be quickly forgotten, as we are drawn into and feed on halligan’s tempting vision. the suburban republic of pleasure is the site where halligan’s culinary hedonism and bliss is now anchored, homely, yet spiced with recollections of france in particular, in the shape of recipes and food paraphernalia. suburbia it is worth remembering is not pure either, but alive with multicultural second-order signification. halligan’s mythology of food is intimate, personal and autobiographical as such writing tends to be – it is “a whole life of food and conversation” (halligan 2004: 7). perhaps this intimacy is a result of the subject matter, food, as well as of the ways in which halligan treats food, as emblematic of so much more that just sustenance. the language of food is a kind of lingua franca, especially now when globalisation has us all eating ciabatta with mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes and drinking caffè lattes. halligan links the lingua franca of food also with human relations: “since food is something that we all know a good deal about, and indeed have an intimate relationship with several times a day, it’s a language we all speak, so it’s a good way of expressing human relations” (halligan 2004: 94). food as a language we speak is a very barthesian way of putting it – linking as it does food and words through the organ of the tongue. this common language makes possible an intimacy that deeply affects the reader. the reader is a coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 212 friend, a voyeur, somebody who eats her words, travels to hotels with her and enjoys the taste of memory with her – to cannibalise some of the titles of halligan’s non-fiction. and food is a noticeable presence in all of halligan’s writing, fiction and non-fiction alike. halligan explains her gastronomic obsession thus: “it [i.e. food] is where the real dramas of the human condition enact themselves” (halligan 2004: 97). the “real dramas of the human condition” is a way of expressing food’s second-order signification, the multiple functions of food for halligan, both complex and simple at the same time, as food can be. reading halligan’s non-fiction back-to-back is a good way of extracting halligan’s values, especially linked to her perceptions on food and to what will develop into what i like to think of as a suburban eden. she writes about a cumquat tree and making preserves thus: “it’s just that growing your own adds a comfortable sense of thrift to the already satisfying practice of bricolage. and the final pleasure is aesthetic” (halligan 1991: 60). here you have a summary of some of halligan’s central values: thrift, bricolage, pleasure, aesthetics – and again a wonderfully contrary mixture of what we might construe as the old and the new. i have already commented on pleasure: like barthes, halligan enjoys corporeal bliss, whether the result of food, language or conversation. the word “thrift” is also interesting here, and a notion halligan selfconsciously returns to in the taste of memory, where she admits that the idea of thrift delights her – but that it is a word you do not hear much nowadays (halligan 2004: 114). thrift lends halligan’s celebration of suburbia an interesting ambience of the old and the new: thrift is of course a well-known and slightly embarrassing victorian virtue. but it is also a self-consciously contemporary one, especially in green middle-class suburban households, that want to reduce their carbon footprint by being self-sufficient and growing their own garden produce. again it is in that suburban garden where thrift – and plenitude – can be enjoyed: put one humble potato in the soil and wait for the magical process of nature to take its turn before you begin to dig up great tasting homegrown potatoes. and in cockles of the heart halligan writes about floating island as a dish “traditionally made at home”, thus intimately connected to another one of her central values and, i would argue, a central building block in the reconstructing of the suburban eden: “the homely simple deliciousness” (halligan 1996a: 158-9). all three words are meaningful. the homely – both in a metaphorical and in a literal sense – is of pivotal importance, especially in her latest food book, the taste of memory, which has her canberra house at its centre. simple is a virtue characteristic in all of the food that halligan particularly cares for. and delicious – what is the point of food if it is not that? halligan is a gourmand after all – drawn towards the hedonistic pleasures of food, family and friends. halligan’s personal mythologizing of food is in many ways twofold: by exposing the accepted ideology of food, she demystifies and defamiliarises it for us, yet at the same time she also adds new idiosyncratic layers of cultural meaning. in her non-fiction food writing, this is an ongoing process, just like the loss and reconstruction of the garden of eden, and the emphasis on development is evident already in her early writing. the first chapter of eat my words sketches “a gastronomic education” focussing on the development “from castor oil to olive oil in one generation” (halligan 1991: 1). in this text halligan can “pinpoint her first olive” – which in her personal myth becomes elevated to a significant semiotic moment (halligan 10991: 27-28) – but, maddeningly, not when she first tasted garlic – these once-exotic gastronomic treats in the antipodes of her youth. in the end, and like barthes in his mythologies, who describes the weekly coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 213 magazine elle as a “real mythological treasure” (barthes 2000: 78), halligan mythologizes the everyday, the commonplace, the stuff of life. food is “giving pleasure to friends”, “food is love” and cooking is central because “i like to eat. well” (halligan 1991: 13, 50, 29). that is why suburbia – where most people live – is also where we can begin to recreate our own gardens of eden. works cited alibhai-brown, yasmin 2010: the settler’s cookbook: a memoir of love, migration and food, london: portobello books. barthes, roland 2000: mythologies [1957], translated by jonathan cape, london: vintage. culler, jonathan 2002: barthes: a very short introduction [1983], oxford: oxford university press. eagleton, terry 1990: literary theory: an introduction [1983], oxford: basil blackwell. frost, lucy and marion halligan 1997: those women who go to hotels, port melbourne, vic: minerva. halligan, marion 1991: eat my words [1990], nsw: angus & robertson. halligan, marion 1996a: cockles of the heart, port melbourne, vic: minerva. halligan, marion 1996b: out of the picture, canberra: national library of australia. halligan, marion 2004: the taste of memory, crows nest, nsw: allen & unwin. solnit, rebecca 2000: wanderlust: a history of walking, ny: viking. stanner, w.e.h. 1969: after the dreaming: black and white australians – an anthropologist’s view, sydney: the australian broadcasting commission. ulla rahbek is an assistant professor of postcolonial studies at copenhagen university. she wrote her ma thesis on christina stead and her doctoral dissertation on caryl phillips. her research and publications are primarily concerned with black british literature and culture, contemporary multicultural british literature and australian children’s literature. she teaches both postcolonial and british studies. i “food is memory; memory is food” halligan succinctly puts it in the taste of memory (halligan 2004: 223). ii “books like bodies, need skeletons. a skeleton might be a plot, or a theme, an idea. the writer might not always know what it is. eat my words was finished and between covers and out in the world before i realised that its skeleton was my autobiography.” thus halligan writes at the beginning of cockles of the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 214 heart (halligan 1996a: 8) – though for the reader the autobiographical aspect of eat my words is apparent from the very first page. see also these women who go to hotels, where halligan writes that eat my words “had my autobiography as its spine, its backbone, a fact i didn’t actually notice until after i’d written it” (frost and halligan 1997: 1). iii there is no mention of aboriginal food in halligan’s non-fiction. this is an interesting void in her food writing, a striking aporia in her texts that the reader cannot help but notice. it is tempting to critique halligan’s lack of curiosity and her silence in this respect. can we see halligan’s dearth of interest in aboriginal food as an example of what w.e.h. stanner long ago called australia’s “history of indifference”, its “cult of disremembering” which characterises “the great australian silence” in the nation’s attitude to the original inhabitants (stanner 1969: 9, 25)? halligan’s memorialising of australian food is skewed towards europe and france in particular, as we have seen. so much so that she forgets to incorporate what might indeed be uniquely australian. microsoft word vanden driesen 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 from “a shrew from the orkneys” to white indigene : re-inventions of eliza fraser. cynthia vanden driesen abstract: few episodes in postcolonial australian history have shown so remarkable a capacity to generate ever-increasing cross-fertilisations between myth, history and memory than the narratives centred on eliza fraser. the archive of materials surrounding the shipwreck of this british woman and her brief sojourn among the indigenous people of the badtjala community of fraser island in the nineteenth century continues to grow. kay schaffer’s impressive work overtook earlier studies of the phenomenon but concentrates mainly on the many european re-constructions of the episode .the fecundity of the materials is far from exhausted. this paper explores some of the aboriginal reactions to the tale but its main focus is patrick white’s novel a fringe of leaves, which grew out of his own research and constructs a new myth with implications for the nation. it is a work with the potential for developing (in jim davidson’s words) “a myth of reconciliation, and possibilities of growth.”this paper shows white’s melding of history, myth, memory and imagination in this novel is illustrative of the literary artist’s contribution to “writing the nation.” keywords: eliza fraser, indigene, myth, colonial. ‘myth, history, memory ’the themes of this conference are full of evocative suggestions and the catalyst between them is the creative imagination as the excerpts from their most significant essays included in the post-colonial studies reader, highlight, theorists like slemon and lawson have emphasized the importance of the work of the creative writer in a settler culture in assisting the development of a sense of belonging within the new regions to which they came originally as colonial invaders ( ashcroft et al.1995: 109 -110;168) in the transmutation of some historic events over time into myths of regeneration and growth, the creative imagination of literary and other artists is crucial; this paper traces the particular contribution of patrick white’s novel a fringe of leaves to the evolution of such a myth.(white:1976,77.) based on the historical episode of the shipwreck of an englishwoman eliza fraser off the coast of queensland and her sojourn amongst the aborigines, it probes the possibilities of a myth of indigenization for the erstwhile white invader. 1 1. eliza fraser was the wife of captain fraser, captain of the ‘stirling castle’ which was shipwrecked off the coast of queensland, australia on may 22, 1836.a boat was landed at copyright © 2009 cynthia vanden driesen. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged 36 the enormous archive generated by eliza’s shipwreck on the island has now reached such proportions, that, as those aboriginal voices now beginning to be heard protest, it has totally erased attention to the history of the people of the island themselves. as fiona foley, activist and artist, a descendant of the badtjala people has put it: in1836 she was marooned for five weeks on fraser island and her saga has been allowed to continue for throughout two centuries … the absence of a dialogue with the badtjala people has irrevocably damaged and put this people to rest. i often wonder when she will be put to rest (foley,1998: 165). the aboriginal peoples’ version of the tale of eliza frazer has been conspicuously absent. white’s novel is exceptional in that it tells the aboriginal story alongside of eliza’s. the nineteenth century accounts consisted of the official record: a statement supplied by eliza herself of her capture and the harsh treatment of herself and the ship’s crew. it also recorded her rescue by the official party assisted by the convict john graham. another, more sensationalised account attributed to mrs. fraser was circulated to the broadsheets the media outlets of the time both in england and the united states. john curtis’ the shipwreck of the stirling castle (1838) was designed to exonerate the lady when she fell under suspicion of attempting to extort public money for her advantage. she was depicted as a virtuous suffering woman. these accounts were essentially colonialist narratives designed to praise the virtues of the british race and to justify the colonial project as one designed to bring light to these benighted beings. it is interesting to juxtapose these accounts with those of aboriginal observers. in 1874 archibald meston spoke to old blacks at noosa and fraser island who had actually seen the party come ashore. they told a very different story of how the white people were received in a friendly manner and were passed on in canoes to the mainland ( evans & walter,1977: 39-105). information from the badtjala people also recorded that there was no attempt to keep the woman captive, that she had been despatched marked with ochre signs indicating that she was not to be harmed, to the groups further down the coast so she could be handed over to the official search party (miller,1998:34). another convict living amongst the blacks, who had been detailed to accompany her, denied accusations of rape that she had made against him. evans and walker (cited above) also refer to the story of the second convict in an account given by another white settler, henry stuart russell in his memoirs entitled genesis of queensland (1888). the twentieth -century versions of the events show a new twist being given the fraser saga, beginning with the sidney nolan paintings of the 1940’s. in these and in alexander’s mrs. fraser on the fatal shore (1976) the story of a second convict is retained. the woman is constructed as domineering and exploitative, yet also endowed with a sensual attraction. this sensuality and the salacious possibilities of the story are emphasized in the burstall /williamson film of (l976). kay schaeffer, commenting on these twentieth century versions enlarges on the nationalistic ambience surrounding the waddy point on fraser island where the captain and some of the crew were killed by aborigines. mrs. fraser was found later by an official search party assisted by a convict who had lived with the aborigines and returned to england. the mention of a second convict who, supposedly, escorted her through the bush before her rescue by the official party is not mentioned in the early records. 37 convict figure as an australian folk-hero and the positioning of eliza as the stereotypical exploitative female, the more reprehensible for being aligned also to the colonial power. while schaffer’s analyses of these varied renderings of eliza fraser are consistently insightful, her response to the white text bypasses its unique resonances . she allows that his treatment of eiza is more complex yet feels she remains little more than the stereotypical instinctual female. (schaeffer,melbourne :168). schaeffer’s discussions of the texts of the 1990’s comment on the new configurations emerging in the national context they seem to refract particularly an awareness of the significance of black/white relationships which perhaps had not emerged as significantly in the previous decade. allen marrett’s noh play in english performed in sydney and tokyo in 1989 and 1990 present two facets of eliza’s role: eliza as the victim of horrid savages in act 1, while act 2 presents her as a visionary with access to spiritual power granted her by the indigenous custodians of the country. gillian coote’s documentary island of lies (1991) records past massacres of aboriginal peoples and how white materialism has debased the land. the ghost of mrs. fraser is rejected by both descendants of both black and white people because of her lies about the people. none attempts the extent of the innovative re-telling of events that the white text accomplishes and which schaeffer’s reading certainly does not appear to appreciate sufficiently. white’s attention was first drawn to the fraser story by the painter sidney nolan but he also conducted his own research into these events. it is not widely known that he actually financed the earliest project looking into the anthropological artefacts of the island ( mcniven,1998:38).he also met with wilf reeves a descendant of the badtjala people. reeves warned him he needed to be sceptical of the whites’ account of the episode (marr,1991:542). nevertheless when he finally came to compose his work, white refused to be constricted by versions given by either group, shaping an imaginative reconstruction of his own, one which involved a radical re-shaping of the image of eliza. foley laments the fact that the role of indigenous women has been so completely ignored: “i cannot recall one aboriginal heroine ... yet in this landscape her skeletal remains at lake mungo have been carbon dated in the region 30,000 years ago.”(foley, 1998, 165).the badtjala woman does appear in the white text in the image of the young woman whom eliza glimpses in all her youthful beauty diving for lily roots and although she dies tragically ellen’s participation in her funeral ritual ensures her continuity. most important is the re-construction of the community life of the people and, most significant, the reinvention of eliza herself as a lubra of the tribe. eliza’s origins are changed: from” a shrew from the orkneys” to that of a wholesome farm girl from cornwall, who married into the english aristocracy. from her aristocratic home in cheltenham she is hurled across the world to australia and subjected to the experience of living among the australian aborigines. at the end of her sojourn in that world, she is not returned to england (as in the original story) but seems destined to make her home in sydney. the writer’s sleight of hand sets going a process that suggests eliza’s gradual and consistent transformation into white indigene. as a british ‘savage’, from the beginning it is suggested, ellen is closer to the australian indigene than to the british colonial aristocracy. miss scrimshaw comments on ellen’s dark appearance and that cornwall ( 38 her place of origin) is “a remote country.” in girlhood “rocks had been her altars and spring water her sacrament …”(248). most striking, is her effortless bonding with the australian landscape. almost immediately after ellen’s arrival in hobart town, the foreign place begins to be conflated with home: the scent of the cow’s breath, the thudding of her hooves, and the plop of falling dung, filled ellen with an immeasurable homesickness…she might have been driving gluyas’s cart to market. ( 83) when “a drizzle started blowing in their faces,” she declares, “i am used to it” ( 85). ellen frequently walks and rides into the countryside; deliberately choosing the less frequented scene to the more orderly and settled. at dulcet, her response to her surroundings is deeply sensual: fronds of giant ferns caressed her, and she in turn caressed the brown fur which clothed their formal crooks. she was so entranced she sat down in a small clearing … removing the superfluous bonnet and loosening her matted hair, she felt only remotely related to ellen roxburgh, or even ellen gluyas (92). even in the most traumatic moments following her husband’s death and her own enslavement: “despite her misery and the child in her arms mrs. roxburgh could not remain unmoved by the natural beauty surrounding her.” ( 247)..” her physical transformation is immediate and dramatic. stripped of her clothing, her skin is blackened, her hair chopped off, so “she had become a stubbled fright such as those around her or even worse.” (224.) the women, noting her body still bore the signs of recent childbirth compel her to suckle the sickly infant and she is later allotted a special role in the community as the children’s nurse. she participates fully in the corroboree: “she slapped and moaned, was carried away.” jack chance tells her when he discovers her diving for lily roots, i didn’t bargain for a lubra.’ as she herself admits to the commandant later, recalling her stay amongst the aborigines: “i was one of them.” white’s construction of the indigene avoids the customary colonialist dehumanising of the indigenous people evident in so many of the retellings of the fraser story. ellen observes the community as a group of individuals “the noble forms’ of the men, presented as ‘handsome’ even with a bone stuck through the cartilage of the nose:” they were none the less superb, as their women did not fail to recognize.”she vividly recalls the young girl in life: “her breasts so youthful and shapely as she rose laughing and spangled from beneath the quilt of lily pads”. later she recognises the grandmother of the girl, seated amongst the crowd at the corroboree. schaeffer’s discussion misses the subtleties of the novel’s construction of the aboriginal world. to her the aborigines appear ‘anonymous, a grovelling crowd of savages … “(schaefer, 1990:168). jack chance the convict is represented as already a fully-fledged indigene when he erupts onto the stage of the novel’s action: 39 one giant of a fellow … would twirl and leap in the air slapping his heels and entertain those within earshot of his patter. she could tell he was respected and envied. (279) besides his mastery of bush skills jack has all the appearance of an aborigine, even to the ‘stench’ noted in their first appearance. when he crawls into the shelter, he brings with him “the now familiar stench, a warmth which combined with her own as a comfort against the hostile night.”( 265) ironically, ellen’s escape from the aborigines does not end her induction into their world — rather it appears completed through her encounter with jack. ellen herself becomes aware of the resemblances between them: ‘she sighed and snorted and thought how foolish she must look naked and filthy beside the naked filthy man’(266).they are pictured as a pair of aborigines as “they lay thus in passive communion and snoozed and throbbed and groaned ... under a sifting of trees and ants crawling all over their all but unfeeling flesh. (331). their wandering through the bush is presented as an idyll suggestive of an indigenous adam and eve in an australian eden. he picks up his spear and leaves their ‘camp’ in search of food, while she makes a fire as she remembered seeing the black women do, using sticks and fibre, when he re-appeared ‘he had speared one of the giant birds, and while preparing the feast ‘they did not speak but communicated by grunts and sniffs. (282).when she encounters a lily-pond, she plunges in determined to make a contribution by bringing him a meal of lily roots. the white text also writes back to orientalist constructs of the aboriginal world as degenerate and innately inferior to the european. this represents a major re-invention of the historic representations of the fraser story and interrogates the nineteenth century accounts which represent the indigene as innately degenerate, savage, and in need of the saving influence of the white culture. in contrast, the indigenous world emerges here as one with its own established rituals and way of life, an autonomous order, a community which brushes off the white invasion as irrelevant to its own way of life. the initial clash with the whites is quickly over and the women of the tribe are left to deal with the female captive while the group returns to its customary activities. ellen observes the blacks were proceeding with their various duties, beneath a splendid sky, beside a lake the colour of raw cobalt shot with bronze. while dusk crept amongst them an elder rose and led the tribe in a kind of lament… the natives were at their prayers, for their wails sounded formal rather than spontaneously emotional (248). early the next morning, the tribe awakens, and repeat their incantations of the evening before. ellen observes that “the men were gathering up their spears, clubs, nets and ropes, the solemnity of the superior sex preparing for an expedition. the men did look superior.( 250).later, she observes that “the whole of life by now revolved round the search for food” ( 253). the black world has its own social protocols, and there are numerous occasions when ellen is reminded of some analogous ritual in the european world. for example, she recalls the labours of her mother-in-law and others who helped her make the transition from farm girl to lady when the women who dress her for her dual role as both slave and goddess in this society,“sighing with satisfaction” at the outcome. in the preparations for the corroboree, ellen is seated amongst the group of women, with as much decorum as she would have shown in attending any ceremony in her drawingroom in cheltenham:“to have started screaming in a drawingroom would not have 40 been worse than to return by the way she had come, between the rows of correctly seated black women (282). beyond the synergies, there are several aspects of this society which offer not only a contrast to, but even a critique of ,the white world. there is an underpinning of violence which characterizes the white world from the opening scenes of the novel which has to do with the endemic violence of colonialism as reflected in the reports of the atrocities committed in the remoter areas of the settlement, at the start of the narrative. this is reinforced by the extreme cruelty the europeans’ accord their own kind as seen in the treatment of the convicts. a remarkable aspect of the indigenous world is the mobility allowed the white initiate, who moves from captive slave to nurse and finally wife-to-be to the medicine-man of the clan. the ‘primitive’ indigene’s capacity to hold the slave and goddess-figure in the same gaze shows a capacity to avoid the simpler binary oppositions so characteristic of european attitudes in the colonial encounter. what of the practice of cannibalism possibly the most fear-inspiring of all the practices associated with the ‘heathen’ tribes encountered by the european? russell quotes local authorities to bear out her view that while the aborigines practised a degree of ritual cannibalism, they did not customarily consume human flesh for their physical survival(russell,1998:56). a careful distinction is drawn between the practice of cannibalism by the blacks and that observed by the whites in this novel. the blacks are shown to practise a form of ritual cannibalism (such as has been referred to in the studies of anthropologists); it is the whites who are shown to indulge in a form that is more nearly the ‘abomination’ of human behaviour. pilcher, at the end confesses that the survivors in his group have resorted to this desperate strategy in order to survive in the wilderness. in this representation the reader is presented with still another and possibly the most striking of the comparisons that recur between the so-called ‘savage’ world and the world of the european that calls in question the assumed superiority of the european. the colonialist belief in the hegemony of the white culture is dramatically undermined. from the first sighting of the blacks, the shipwrecked whites fear for their lives: the natives were armed besides with spears and other warlike implements ... their dark skins had the glint of ominous metal ...the two parties remained watching each other for an unconscionable time before the blacks silently melted away into the shadows. … (236) . shortly after, with barely a blow exchanged, the whites are captured.: the party of ineffectual whites was soon surrounded by the troop of blacks all sinew stench and exultant in their mastery … the blacks had begun stripping their captives garment by garment ... driving their white herd by thwacks and prodding into the hinterland. (241). shortly after, the english lady is reduced to being the slave of the black women. she is first assigned the task of caring for the sick child and is gradually allotted other tasks. she is even driven with a fire-stick held to her buttocks to climb trees to search for possum; the pangs of hunger drive her to fight off the native dogs for scraps of food. her return to the “civilised” world is marked with all the trauma of a re-birthing but she 41 carries within her psyche a new knowledge which is not to be forgotten .ellen, despite her many frailties, emerges as the archetypal hero of joseph campbell’s classic work bringing back from her sojourn in the strange world of the indigene lessons which have not only changed her spiritually and mentally but have positive implications for the wider world. jim davidson has articulated the potential of the fraser story as a myth of regeneration for the australian context: here the fraser myth as it is developing is important for three reasons. first, it involves acceptance of the land (together with a greater ease in it). as a corollary of that it encourages, second, an acceptance by whites of aboriginal people (and hopefully the reverse). these in turn entail not repatriation for us, but reparation for them. in short australia is in need of a reconciliation myth as much as south africa (more now) and eliza fraser seems best placed to provide it. (davidson 1990: 449-61) patrick white’s text has explored the heights and the depths of its rich potential. references campbell, joseph (1948,1968), the hero with a thousand faces. princeton n.j: princeton university press . curtis,john (1838), the shipwreck of the stirling castle. london: george virtue, ivy lane davidson, jim (1990),“beyond the fatal shore: the mythologization of mrs. fraser”, meanjin 3, 449 61. evans, raymond & walter, jan (1977).‘these strangers where are they going? occasional papers, uq, 339-105 foley, fiona (1998), constructions of colonialism, perspectives on eliza fraser’s shipwreck.eds..ian j.mcniven,lynette russell & kay schaffer. leicester & new york: leicester up, 157 -169. lawson, alan, (1995), “pattern,preferences and preoccupations:the discovery of nationality in australian and canadian literatures,” in bill ashcroft, helen tiffin and gareth griffiths eds. the post-colonial studies reader. london and new york: routledge,167 -169, marr, david (1991), patrick white a life. sydney: random house mcniven, ian j. (1998),‘shipwreck saga as archaeological text: reconstructing fraser island’s aboriginal past’, in constructions of colonialism, perspectives on eliza fraser’s shipwreck. eds.ian j.mcniven,lynette russell & kay schaffer. leicester & new york: leicester up 38 46 miller, olga (1998), “k’gari,mrs.fraser and butchulla oral tradition,” in constructions of colonialism, perspectives on eliza fraser’s shipwreck, eds. ian j.mcniven, lynette russell & kay schaffer leicester & new york:leicester up 28-36 russell, lynette (1998),“‘mere trifles and faint representations’, the representations of savage life offered by eliza fraser”, in constructions of colonialism perspectives on eliza fraser’s shipwreck, eds.ian j.mcniven,lynette russell & kay schaffer. leicester & new york: leicester up 157 -169 52-61 schaffer, kay (1990), in the wake of first contact. melbourne: cambridge university press. slemon stephen (1995), “unsettling the empire resistance theory for the second world,” in eds. bill ashcroft, helen tiffin and gareth griffiths, the post-colonial studies reader, london and new york:routledge, 105 110. white, patrick (1976), a fringe of leaves. london and new york: jonathan cape. 42 cynthia vanden driesen teaches and researches in the field of australian writing and other new literatures in english( indian, african and caribbean) at edith cowan university in perth, western australia.her publications, besides articles in a range of journals and presentations at international conferences, include eight books ( four co-edited) ; the last, writing the nation, patrick white and the indigene (2009) has just been released by rodopi press.ny. amsterdam. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 a glitch in the script: fantasy, realism and the australian imagination janie conway herron southern cross university lillypilly@linearg.com copyright©2016 janie conway herron. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the glitch is a six-part television series first aired on the australian public broadcast network, the abc, in july 2015. my interest is in ways that the series reflects certain aspects of australian culture and history and, in particular, how inclusive the series has been in representing indigenous australian ways of seeing this history. the glitch — set in a fictional australian outback town where a number of residents who have lived and died there return from the dead — holds great potential for critiquing the cultural and perceptual frameworks that have created what popular culture often describes as ‘quintessential australianness.’ narrative genres that have a particular relevance in framing australian identity within a postcolonial context are also important to my examination. they provide a way to explore the aesthetics of identity in the play between reality and unreality where an australian gothic sense of the uncanny is contrasted with the subversive way magic realism places the extraordinary within the same realm of the possible as the ordinary everyday event. this aligns with contemporary analyses of australian indigenous narratives where indigenous perceptions of reality question a western hegemonic view of what is magic and what is real and highlights the cultural origins of both. it is the mix of the mysterious and the mundane and the play between reality and fantasy that has enormous potential in the glitch. however, as i also discovered, maintaining the magic and the real in such a delicate and continuous balance is no easy task. key words: fantasy/reality in australian television drama, gothic, magic realism i am not a fan of the zombie genre, finding the horror those stories of voracious beasts (once living human beings who have returned from the dead) invite just too sad and too terrible to enjoy even the most compelling and well-written narrative within the genre. so, when i first saw the trailers for the australian television series the glitch, with mailto:lillypilly@linearg.com coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 muddied bodies crawling from their graves, my immediate reaction was that i was not interested in the series. however it was hard to ignore the advertisements for the series that ran nightly on the abc in the lead-up to the first episode and my interest began to grow. finally i watched the first episode just to see what it was like. soon i was looking forward to the regular weekly timeslot when the show would be screened. it is exactly in its movement between and across the fantastic and the realistic that magical realism (dis)locates itself, registering the determinate indeterminacy of interstitial cultures by its refusal to come down solely on one side or the other just like television, in its own move between fantasy and reality. both of these terms (fantasy and reality) designate tv genres and not just any tv genres, but ones that are especially significant to commercial television’s place (even continued survival) in today’s multichannel, multimedia, multinational, corporate universe. (joyrich 2009: online) there is potential for the various narratives that are played out in the glitch to explore what jonathan rayner terms ‘australasian gothicism’ a sense of the gothic that includes australia and new zealand and one that rayner asserts “assumes a new, particular and cultural importance” (2011: 91). susan dermody and liz jacka describe australian gothic as a genre where “the normal is revealed as having a stubborn bias towards the perverse, the grotesque, the malevolent” (cited in rayner: 91). most readings of australian gothic also reveal a sense of the uncanny and the corresponding alienation that occurs in the play between reality and unreality. for bennet and royle the uncanny is “an effect” and as such is reliant on the “effects of reading” and lies with “the experience of the reader” or what brecht describes as alienation effects in drama itself (bennett and royle 2004: 35). similarly television as a medium for story-telling also holds a particular mix of fantasy and reality both within the alienated medium of television itself, which can be seen as both magical and hyper-real, as well as through television’s ability to translate and moderate the ordinary and the magical in narrative itself. here the empathy associated with visual representation promotes a suspension of disbelief conducive to understanding both the magic and the virtual as belonging to the realm of the real. this also aligns with the way, in contemporary analyses of australian indigenous narratives, there has been a great deal of discussion around indigenous perceptions of the real that question the very heart of a western hegemonic view of what is magic and what is real and highlights the linguistic origins of both. that an aboriginal australian reality might be seen as fantasy to an australian framed by a european sensibility is important here. the scriptwriters for the glitch knew they were dealing with uncomfortable, if not alienating, subject matter. the series is daring in its confrontation of australia’s cultural history, whether it is actual humans returning from the dead, a man discovering that his wife has returned from the dead when he has remarried his wife’s best friend, or an irish drunk who was once the mayor of the town but who also has had children to a local aboriginal woman. journalist and critic walter marsh writes. one of the series strengths is how the back stories explore and challenge aspects of australian identity and history, from mythologised anzacs to relationships between early settlers and indigenous women. for some these themes might be confronting in their subversion of our comfortable cultural coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 outlook. (marsh 2015: online) director emma freeman gives credit to the writers of the series, saying “it was all in the script and it was all in the characters, so for us it was just being as truthful as we possibly could be in developing those characters” (freeman in marsh: 2015). freeman was also interested in introducing gothic elements to the series that captured a particular australian sensibility; one that she describes as being able to embrace “our ‘australian-ness’ while not being ashamed or trying to hide it, but also connecting to the truth, having a grounded-ness and naturalness to the environment” (cited in marsh: 2015). gelder and weaver write about the way an australian sense of the gothic evolves through the bush being a particularly alien place that is “invariably a place of settler disorientation and death, as if the promise of settlement can never be fully realized” (2007: 5). what better way to achieve a sense of the alienation and strangeness associated with the uncanny nature of australian colonial history than through a narrative about characters who return from the dead in an australian country town? the play between fantasy and reality in buying into the narrative tropes that the series provided, i believe that both viewers and those involved with the production of the glitch have become caught up in the play between fantasy and reality that lynne joyrich refers to in the quote that opens this essay. joyrich is concerned both with the content of television programs as well as the magical potential for television itself that has involved “a different kind of magic … as television has transformed itself within our media reality” (joyrich 2009: online). the kind of magic that may require: imaginative modes of thinking about television and the real within our mediaverse creative ways of talking about these appearing/disappearing acts that can account for both their prosaic and perplexing aspects, their ordinary and extraordinary elements. (joyrich 2009: online) joyrich refers to discussions about magic realism in television as being peculiarly absent in western cultures whilst still enjoying popularity as a literary genre within those same cultures. in western cultures the terms magic and real combined together more commonly imply a polarity of conceptions that define magic and real in an oppositional way. alternatively when interpreting narrative through the lens of magic realism, the supernatural and ordinary everyday-life come together to interrogate these perceived cultural notions of magic and real. magic realism as a genre has a way of framing narrative that holds a key to a particularly australian conceptual framework, one that may enable a greater understanding of an indigenous australian sense of reality, which, while i may have difficulty in knowing in a cultural sense, i have a deep respect for. i believe that the lack of understanding of this indigenous sense of the real by non-indigenous australians contributes to a sense of the uncanny central to many australian narratives. this turning away from an indigenous reality from the beginning of the colonial invasion of the country has had a huge effect on the way being coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 australian has been framed. that an aboriginal australian reality might be seen as fantasy to an australian framed by a european sensibility is important here. similarly television as a medium for story-telling also holds a particular mix of fantasy and reality both within the medium of television, which can be seen as both magical and hyper-real, as well as television’s ability to translate and moderate the ordinary and the magical in narrative itself. here the empathy associated with visual representation promotes a suspension of disbelief conducive to understanding both the magic and the virtual as belonging to the realm of the real. it was the potential in the glitch to explore indigenous and non-indigenous ways of knowing in new and exciting ways that drew me to this series. while it is a contested framework in terms of reading indigenous work, the play in magic realism between what joyrich describes as a mix of the mysterious and the mundane is exactly the play between reality and fantasy that i believe moves the narratives in the glitch along. the ‘how dunnit’ that applies to many murder mysteries applies in this series to the mix of reality and fantasy that any narrative predicated on the return of the dead to the town where they died requires. but in answering this question of how, or even why, these characters in the fictional town of yoorana have returned from the dead, one is immediately caught between a realistic expectation of narrative closure and a parallel and fantastical paradigm that these living breathing humans (not ghoulish dehumanized zombie beasts) are at once affected by and will affect other characters in a realistic way. it is both the strength and the weakness of the narrative arcs in the series that they can be read through both a realist lens, with its need for closure, as well as a more indeterminately gothic sense of narrative resolution. realism as a narrative concept involves a naming and recognition of objects, places, characters and ethereal emotions as if there is an externalized universal truth based on a consensus of recognition known by all. in philosophical terms this consensus of recognition gives realism a discursive quality while still insisting on an allencompassing notion that objects in the external world exist with a recognizable and independent internal logic of their own. as an attempt to deal with the world of the everyday, artists often work conceptually within realist paradigms by attempting to capture so-called universal concepts and apply this to their knowledge of objects in the world. most realist writers would also agree that the causal processes involved in setting up a realist narrative also mediates, or interprets, directly perceived appearances in the text. the paradox of realism as an art form then becomes the way that realist art is also an illusion; that realism can only ever achieve an affect of reality. for, like literature, television as an artistic medium utilises the formalist idea of defamiliarisation, or making the familiar strange, but reality is also made strange by the medium itself. this same paradoxical paradigm is at the centre of joyrich’s exploration of the magic in television and at the heart of my narrative explorations of the glitch series. like classic literary realism with an omniscient narrator, home grown australian reality television shows have their own particular sense of the real that relies on the eyewitness account where the audience becomes witness to events that appear to just happen, as if unmediated by the framing of a camera or a person behind that camera. rather than being constructed narratives with editors and producers these shows give the illusion that the audience is spying or eavesdropping on real life in a voyeuristic way. classic long-running australian soap operas like home and away and neighbours employ similar realist techniques, relying on a predetermined sense of the familiar in coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 the literal sense of family within an urban setting for an urban family viewer. in recent times a spate of series that relies on fantasy or a sense of the supernatural have been shown in australia. while shows like these are not new and television has a long history of developing the fantastic, these mostly apocalyptic shows like the walking dead, game of thrones and dr who are made overseas, while australian television drama has, until relatively recently, preferred to use realist frameworks for their drama. in recent years this has begun to change and shows like the glitch give evidence to a different direction being taken by australian production houses. however, even the most realist fictional narratives involve a degree of fantasy and the way we set up expectations within these narratives involves particular internal logics that operate culturally to extend our perceptions of the world around us. i am interested in the ways these internal logics operate in narrative, both consciously and unconsciously, to reinforce notions of reality and fantasy. magic realism and the gothic for wendy faris writing in her essay “scheherazade’s children,” magic realism has “a sense of magic that grows imperceptibly from the real” (1995: 174) and so we have a genre that plays between the natural and the supernatural, the explicable and the inexplicable, where the two contradictory terms magic and reality are freed from a linguistic and conceptual binary opposition to form a literature that is truly marvellous and of extreme ontological importance to a contemporary sense of every-day reality. the discursive strategies of this particular genre require us to engage actively in the text and piece its disparate parts together, sharing the confusion of the characters in the text as they attempt to find order in their chaotic existence. while the magic realist novel’s subversive capacities lie for many critics in the pressures brought to bear in a hegemonic, colonial reality on one hand, and on realism as a naturalised mode of representing it on the other, this hegemonic reality is once more reiterated in the very assurance with which the real and the fantastic are determined by white critics as being across two cultural locations. what would be more productive would be to return to the idea of the ‘magical’ and ‘reality’ as subjective experiences that are available in any cultural location. (ravenscroft 2012: 67) in magic realism the supernatural and ordinary, everyday-life come together in a way that gently interrogates perceived notions of both. the conventions of this type of writing draw upon a cultural system that is no less real than any of the other realist representations, but the subversive nature of the writing is dependent on the reader’s ability to suspend their disbelief in a much more rigorous way. in magical realism the reader or viewer is asked to place the extraordinary in the same realm of the possible as the ordinary everyday event. magic is real, and the real is magic and so the lines we draw to maintain perceptions of reality are put to the test. this has strong associations with bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque and the dialogical nature of all texts. within australia however discourses of realism have a strong association with postcolonial interrogations where questions can be raised about the cultural locatedness of a sense of reality, particularly in regards to the construction of notions of authentic australianness. questions of whose reality can be applied here go straight to the heart coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 of discussions about authorship, where what is seen as real and what is framed as fantastic depends on who is telling the story and who is receiving it. on the other hand, the ontological disruption in magic realism serves to create political and cultural uncertainties where the term magic creates a question mark around a rationality that relies on the very separation that the terms magic and real have previously engaged. magic realist artists accept the supernatural as part of their world, and this is integral to the way that magic realism might be applicable to both an australian indigenous reality whilst also being accepted by a wider australian audience. in his analysis of the films walkabout and long weekend jonathan rayner discusses the ways that the natural environment in australian films offers both “a miraculous salvation” and “a focus for revulsion” where “the purity of the continent’s emptiness is marked and its invasion lamented” in walkabout, while in the long weekend, “[t]he supposedly blank, innocuous or receiving land contains a monstrous and hostile fertility” (2011: 93). rebecca johinke writes that, “[a]ny postcolonial reading of australian texts starts with the acknowledgement that white ‘settlers’ are by definition dislocated and disorientated (unsettled) in a hostile foreign environment and this renders australia both terrible and sublime: an uncanny space” (2010: 111). with its gothic overtones or what katrina althans (2010) refers to as an interrogation of boundaries, the subversive capacity of magic realism to question the veracity of our perceptions by not privileging reality over magic is one of the important aspects of the series the glitch. our ability to suspend our disbelief that a person can actually return from the dead — not as a mindless zombie devouring all human beings it encounters and turning them into zombies too, but as fully formed versions of themselves as they were in the time just before their death — creates expectations of real human reactions to their situation. it seems that there are several genres at play in the variety of narratives that the series brings to life via the resurrection of a range of characters who each have a history with the township of yoorana. co-writer tony ayres is quoted as saying that the glitch is “not a vampire or a zombie movie.” he goes on to describe the series as “using genre to explore primal emotions” and describes it as supernatural drama (in knox 2014: online). the predominantly recognised genre in the series comes from the idea that the glitch is actually a rewrite of the american series, the returned, which was in itself a rewrite of the french series, les revenants. roger corser — who plays the enigmatic convict who has been resurrected from an unmarked grave and hence carries the name john doe — disputes this idea of the glitch being a conscious rewrite saying that the show had been pitched well before the returned had been broadcast, adding that he felt that the returned-from-the-dead narrative had become a television genre in itself. of course this is born out by the popularity of the american horror drama the walking dead with six series being produced between 2010 and 2015. this series, based on a popular comic series by robert kirkman, is set in a post-apocalyptic planet earth where people have been affected by an unknown disease that turns them into zombies. the main plot line involves survivors of this world, ordinary people struggling to stay alive against almost insurmountable odds and the way they interact with each other. in the early twenty-first century it is easy to see the resonances and the attendant anxieties that this dystopian narrative might produce for viewers embroiled in post 9/11 terror, post ebola fear of a deadly disease literally going viral, as well as the threat of global environmental disasters where the world has gone too far to turn back. the popularity of this series coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 points to a certain cultural sensibility that operates on a global level in the contemporary world, one that might point to a “postmodern incredulity,” that, “can be usefully fleshed out from postcolonial positions” (renes 2010: 8) while the popularity of these narratives point to cultural anxieties that have a long history of analysis within a european context. as maarten renes writes: australia, while seemingly on a far physical and spiritual remove from recent european turmoil, has long raised disturbing questions on national identity and a sense of home. as a settler nation of european stock, australia casts its postcolonial definition of self and foreigner/other in ways which puts western essentialist philosophies to the test and sounds an uncanny warning to current european positioning in multicultural matters. (renes 2010: 14-15) there is no doubt that a recognizable sense of the gothic has prevailed in australian literature and film for a long time now. oppositional to a european sense of the gothic, australia’s sense of it is deeply rooted in the colonial project that lies deep at the heart of australia’s becoming and is therefore intrinsic to an australian sense of identity. long before the fact of australia was ever conformed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque place, a land peopled by monsters. the idea of its existence was disputed, was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts its darkness seemed confirmed. the antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of britain. it was, for all intents and purposes, gothic par excellence, (author’s emphasis) the dungeon of the world. (turcotte 1998: 10) for gerry turcotte australian gothic is intensely connected to the colonial experience. he writes of the way that a sense of the uncanny, or what freud identified as the movement from heimlich to unheimlich, is directly connected to the way nature in australia posed difficult challenges for european immigrants. gothic with its emphasis on “horror, uncertainty and desperation of human experience” with “characters trapped in a hostile environment, or pursued by unspecified or unidentifiable danger” are for turcotte “fears and themes which are endemic in the colonial experience” (1998: 10). turcotte credits the gothic genre as helping to “establish a local australian voice” (1998: 19) while at the same time silencing aboriginal writers who found the genre a disabling one due to the way they themselves had been cast as “monstrous figures haunting the australian landscape … because they represented a physical threat to the white settlers” (1998: 20). also, because the presence of indigenous australians drew attention to the lie of terra nullius or the notion that australia was owned by no one, this “aboriginal presence in itself unsettled … the course of the empire” (turcotte 1998: 20). katrina althans (2010) on the other hand calls australian gothic, colonial gothic in that this epitomizes the antipodean nature of the european lens which then places australia far away from the imperial centre, while at the same time enabling a peculiarly australian sense of isolation that generates this gothic fear of the unknown. since turcotte’s insightful writing of 1998, australian art forms have come a long way and indigenous australian artists’ multifarious representations of what australia means coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 to them has become increasingly visible across multiple platforms such as writing, painting, film and song. in her reading of indigenous australian writer alexis wright’s extraordinary novel carpentaria alison ravenscroft discusses the problematic way in which the term magic realism has become a “recuperation of the binary that associates indigeneity with magic, irrationality, delusion and dream, and whiteness with realism, reality and rationality, with consciousness, a wakeful state” (ravenscroft 2012: 13). ravenscroft writes that when the genre of magic realism is read through an imperial anthropological lens, magic and dream are associated with the colonized other (in australia that being indigenous australians) in a way that refuses to allow for markers of difference that interrogate “[w]hat is magic and what is ‘reality’ where the western world reads the other’s reality as magic” (2012: 63). for ravenscroft magic realism’s subversive capacities lie in its ability to bring pressure “to bear on hegemonic, colonial reality on the one hand and on realism as a naturalized mode of representing it on the other” (2012: 67). turcotte’s notion of australian gothic articulates the colonial experience for european and british immigrants and he points out that, at the same time, it is a disabling genre for indigenous people who are attempting to articulate a reality that is already predicated on a different sense of what is real and what is magical. similarly, ravenscroft proposes different ways of reading texts that are more subjective where “questions might better be posed (as): whose magic and whose reality” (2012: 65). the potential the various narratives in the glitch hold to question both reality and magic in numerous ways is a fascinating one. it is a potential that might take up toni morrison’s claim — in answer to critics’ comments on her novel songs of solomon — that black people really can fly (morrison in ravenscroft 2010: 63-67). for morrison and ravenscroft they can. the potential of magic realism to depict this kind of cultural reality is one that i believe makes it an important genre for the medium of television with its roots in notions of the real. it is also important to recognise there are different ways of seeing the world; to understand that your fantasy might be my reality and visa versa, or an aboriginal australian reality might be fantasy to an urban dwelling australian framed by a european sensibility. when applied to the realm of television this recognition does, as joyrich also proposes, “speak to the very status of reality itself today – or more accurately, to realities (author’s emphasis) as it is precisely the coexistence of different levels of realness that marks our television universes” (2015: online). television, with its capacity for magic inherent in its very evolution, is a perfect medium for explorations of reality and fantasy and in australia the sense of uncanny invoked by the gothic genre is an important framing device in the development of narrative on screen as well as in literature. if the psychological thriller, wake in fright (1971) is a precursor to the way outback australia and the red dust of small country towns gave birth to a new wave of gothic in australian film, then making the setting for the glitch, the fictional town yoorana, is an ideal place to pursue this theme. as alex grieg writes in her review of the series, “glitch may have begun its own subgenre — a kind of australian gothic that works to great effect in the wide streets and abandoned pubs of our rural towns” (2015: online). for some the backdrop of the quintessential australian town has spurned a new subgenre of australian gothic called outback gothic whose evolution may be attributed to the country/city divide and the way we cling to the edges of this vast continent, turning our backs on the inland and looking out sea. in this kind of urban/country divide coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 the view from the city provides the central trope where the australian country town is rendered uncanny and the alienation of redneck country life and its discomforts loom high. films like walk about (1971), picnic at hanging rock (1975), shame (1988) and wolf creek (2005), continue themes generated by cultural constructions of the australian bush using alienation, isolation and fear as staple plot points for the evolution of the characters, and to express a peculiarly australian anxiety about time and place. for turcotte the gothic “suggests ways of interrogating the symbolic order, exposing the vulnerability of its systems of meaning, underlining the tenuousness of its power base and questioning the substratum upon which its laws, values and logic are predicated” (1995: 7). for renes a psychoanalytical reading of the gothic can be framed as a return of the repressed where “[m]ystic-spiritual views understand the gothic as ‘a sign of the resurrection of the sacred and transcendent in a modern enlightened secular world which denies the existence of supernatural forces”’(kilgour cited in renes, 2010: 12). for chudy, cook and costello the emergence of gothic in australian literature can be twofold: “one is subjective and affects a lament through the articulation of a gothic (sic) voice and the other is specific to an uncanny relationship to place” (2010:1). what they are proposing is a specific type of gothic text called gothic noir where there is “a pervasive presence of shadows which are both physical and psychological” and a “powerful sense of predetermination, a sense that the past is more real than the present or the future” (chudy, cook and costello 2010: 4). in gothic according to chudy, cook and costello, the dark and the sinister past often threatens to destroy the present but there is also a chance of redemption “once the past secrets are unravelled, revealed and exorcised” but in gothic noir “[t]here is no escape from the past which all but overwhelms the present and any hope for the future” (2010: 5). this is a core tension at the heart of the glitch series, one that is articulated very early on in the scene where a young indigenous boy, beau cooper, is riding by a graveyard on his bike and notices something strange. instead of riding away in fright he takes out his mobile phone and films as a number of strange, muddied bodies struggle to break free of the graves. it is an interesting gesture on behalf of the writers as it privileges the gaze of this young indigenous man as he witnesses the return of the undead to yoorana. this sets beau up as guardian of the country and eye-witness to the events, and encourages an expectation that this series is going to uncover a different kind of reality, one that renes describes as encompassing the way “[s]ilence, shame and fear all form part of a gothic return of the aboriginal sacred which inscribes ‘truth’ in the indigenous transmission and custodianship of sensitive knowledge” (2007: 17). each person struggling to break free of their grave in the glitch has a story, and each of the stories covers a different aspect of post-invasion history in the town. thus past and present intermingle as each character attempts to come to terms with the reasons why they have returned from the dead. alongside each of these stories the present plays itself out via characters such as sergeant james hayes, whose deceased wife kate is one of the undead who has just hauled herself out of her grave, and who is discovered by her husband when he is called to the cemetery to investigate the strange things happening there. in the time between kate’s death and the present sergeant hayes has remarried kate’s best friend sarah, setting up one of the more dramatic narrative arcs around the menage-a-trois between these three characters. young beau ends up assisting paddy, an almost clichéd irish drunk, who turns out to have been one of the first mayors of coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 yoorana in an intriguing narrative that encompasses and confronts the fact that beau’s and paddy’s stories are bound together in the colonial history of australia. there is a sense that all the characters in the glitch have unfinished business to resolve and this need for reckoning is what drives the various narratives forward. some of the unfinished business resolves more easily than others; like devout catholic maria who, having died in a car accident in the 1950s with her daughter, manages to go back and explain things to her now old and demented husband. young kirstie, on the other hand, has no idea how she has died and so her narrative trajectory is one of wondering why and how, with poignant and disastrous consequences. very early in the series we learn that each of ‘the returned’ characters can only stay alive within the parameters of the town, and a bridge out of town provides the limits of their existence. sergeant hayes and the local doctor elisha mckellar, who have become protectors of the undead characters, discover this when the sergeant tries driving one of the characters over the bridge and he disintegrates in front of his eyes. thus, in true gothic style, and one that also aligns closely with indigenous cultural beliefs, nature becomes a character in the story in that the environment itself has the power to both nurture and destroy the characters. into this intriguing mix of anxiety and alienation the sense of the conspiracy of big business and a concomitant medical research experiment adds to the fear elements of the narrative when it becomes clear that there is some connection between the return of these undead and a local medical research company that dr mckellar is associated with. all the various narrative arcs in the series have the potential to provide compelling television viewing but unfortunately they do not deliver in terms of narrative resolution; at least not for this viewer. but in calling for narrative closure am i forgetting the way both gothic and magic realist texts deliberately attempt to overturn as well as interrogate the symbolic order? to do what turcotte describes as gothic’s capacity “to question accepted positions in society,” by using “recurring motifs to destabilize a reader’s secure position” (1995: 17). when i began writing this essay the glitch had just begun its first airing, and i was excited to be writing about an australian television series that dared venture into a world that not only depicted different realities but through that expression of those different realities was able to contribute significantly to a conversation about australian identity, and to point to some of the inequities of our history. the series does point to inequities in our history and in its making it has definitely contributed to a conversation about what it is to be australian but ultimately the lack of narrative resolution was disappointing. bill phillips and marlene mendoza in their essay “the dead walk” discuss the way that monsters such as zombies provide a critique of human existence. for phillips and mendoza the imagined monster arrives at the same time as humans managed to dominate the animal kingdom and that of nature. it provides a moral dimension where the monster is othered, and symbolizes “our greatest fears for those things that seem most human but are not — such as dead bodies” (2014: 107). however they make a distinction between monsters such as the vampire or the medieval (sic) incubi and succubi and the zombie. “nothing … is more monstrous than a zombie since it has the form of a living being, yet has no identity; is both physically active, yet intellectually and spiritually void” (2014: 108). this is a stark contrast to the characters in the glitch who, while definitely being walking dead, display such human traits that they create a coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 narrative trope of human identification right from the beginning. it is in the gap between being human and being nonhuman that the distinction between fantasy, magic and reality begins to conflate. as phillips and mendoza write: zombies are subliminal reminders – of our atavistic survival instinct, of our fear of the other, our fear that we might be the other, of the death of the planet, of our helplessness and unwillingness to act meaningfully, and of death itself. (2004: 115) while my dislike of zombie narratives may simply come down to my horror of death, i believe that when the un-dead characters in the glitch become more human than zombies is when, in terms of writing strategies, the series moves out of magic realism and the sense of the uncanny so prevalent in australian gothic to become simply human drama albeit with a supernatural edge. to return to joyrich’s argument about the medium of television: while we exist within and across these realities, we don’t yet have a particularly effective language with which to discuss this, as attempts to analyze (sic) how the factual and the fantastical inform and intervene in one another tend to reiterate the very (il)logic of inadequate binaries a reiteration that, as justin lewis has noted, defines ‘the epistemological contradictions already involved in watching television.’ (joyrich 2009: online) and yet even the most basic questions that engender an empathetic response to a realist narrative in a television-viewing audience are never fulfilled in the first series of the glitch. hardly any of the characters resolve their unfinished business, nor do we find out why they cannot cross the bridge and leave town. the sinister presence of a medical research company is given greater weight when in the last moments of the last episode we find out that the good dr mckellar is herself one of the walking dead, but this is never given more than a shadowy presence in the six episodes and so does not gain any narrative agency. while this narrative non-closure may give the producers of the glitch an excellent segue into the next series where perhaps some of these questions may be answered, it was ultimately unsatisfying. the questions the narrative arcs in the series raised and the potential the series had to examine a particularly australian relationship to fantasy and reality were never realised. but, as turcotte writes, “the gothic rarely moves towards conclusions, or if it does, it signals the failure of closure either overtly or covertly” (1995: 19). while i am aware of this, what i was looking for in the series was not the kind of realist narrative closure that distracts from the subversive qualities of a gothic interrogation but something that leans more towards magic realism. there is a template for this in another australian television series. the gods of wheat street is a ten-part abc series written by indigenous writer jon bell, who is described as ‘creator, writer and co-producer’ of the series and quoted describing it as “not your typical indigenous drama … there’s some social realism stuff in there, but there’s magic realism, (sic) there’s a whole different vibe” (bell in barber 2015: online). the series is set in a fictional place based on the town of casino in northern new south wales where bell’s own family resides. the trials and tribulations of the freeburn family are central to the overall narrative trajectory in the series with coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 odin freeburn under enormous pressure as he desperately tries to keep his family together against enormous odds. there are three generations of the family in the show but the oldest family member is a spirit; odin’s mother died in a car accident when odin was just a small boy and she comes back in human form to advise and direct him, but only odin can see her. on a 2012, byron bay writers festival panel, jon bell describes the spirit of the mother as coming from another place and the family as “having a big destiny that only the mother is privy to” (online). on the same panel, coproducer of the series lois randall describes pitching the series to the abc as “realism meets magic realism.” while the gods of wheat street is not a million miles away from a quintessentially australian experience and is set in a country town, there is no sense of gothic alienation, not even a moment of strangeness, in the way the spirit of odin’s mother is introduced. bell describes the series as a “rough and tumble neighbours with a ghost.” in a gesture towards debunking the mythological readings of indigenous cultural stories he says (in another interview), “australian aboriginal stories and spirituality are not aesop’s fables, ... there’s not always a clear moral in the story. they can be a little inaccessible for western audiences. sometimes with indigenous (sic) cultures, the story is the thing that has value, not the moral framework” (quoted in barber 2014: online). in a move away from the unfamiliar sense of the uncanny central to an australian, colonial gothic sensibility and a return to the familiarity of family ties both the real and magical are blended in the gods of wheat street. the series, while having a particularly indigenous australian sense of identity, is also recognisably australian to a broad cross-section of viewers. in an australian indigenous way of seeing what is uncanny to a non-indigenous australian becomes perfectly normal while the dichotomy between reality and fantasy and the sense of the uncanny so predominant in australian gothic begins to disappear. the glitch, on the other hand remains a particularly gothic tale. the questions that the series raises, even in relation to the title the glitch, point to a sense of alienation, asking: what is the fault in the system, what or who has caused it and why? is it the medical company or the ill fit of the settler into indigenous country? while the series promises to do what turcotte describes as interrogate “historical and literary textualisations of racial, sexual or gendered ‘otherness’ … to alert us to the sinister side of australian history” the story could also serve to “remind us that that the air is thick with unacknowledged revenants, and that the process of healing in regards to the fallout from the colonial enterprise that gave birth to australia can only begin when we heed derrida’s call to sit, at last, and ‘talk with ghosts”’ (2009: 361-362). but the series never really talks to the ghosts as ghosts nor do the ghosts talk to each other very much, at least not about their situation or why they might have come back from the dead. what i have been looking for in the series has been a different way of seeing things, one that might make inroads into a deeper engagement with australian colonial history and its associated discontents. there is a strong connection between postcolonial representations and magic realism in the way that they both draw attention to the blindness of the imperial centre to its own machinations. australia as a nation is both colonized and colonizer and is often blind to its treatment of its own indigenous people while still looking towards a british imperial centre for a sense of identity. if the writers of the glitch began with an idea of trying to address changes in australia’s colonial status and corresponding identity then perhaps they have become caught up in the difficulties of representing that very change. magic realism, with its potential for revisioning history via changes in perception, aligns with the type of narration that coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 bakhtin (1981) refers to as a dialogical discourse; one that writes away from the imperial centre and towards non-hierarchal, heteroglossic ways of seeing. these narrative framings open up possibilities for categories of magic and real in the languages of storytelling that break out of the narrowness of a western binary opposition and into more pluralistic and inclusive representations. this, in turn, creates a situation that linda hutcheon describes as being ‘ex-centric’ where “[t]he centre no longer completely holds” and, “[t]he concept of alienated otherness (based on binary opposition that conceals hierarchies) gives way … to that of differences” (hutcheon, 1988: 12). i will be watching the next series, if there is another one, as i believe there is potential inherent in the series for a representation that allows for the suspension of disbelief involving both the magical and the real, not in opposition but in non-hierarchical combination. it is possible too that the glitch might also be able employ a new genre, one that is more inclusive of an aboriginal reality while also combining an uncanny realism that might reflect more accurately the settler experience and the way it effects them. perhaps then we might find that paddy’s aboriginal lover, the ancestor of the young beau cooper, can come back from the dead to provide some indigenous insights and ways of seeing. then we might be able to arrive at a point where australian identity moves away from gothic alienation and into an identity that is crucial to a shift in power relationships, one that allows for the colonial experience to be told within an indigenous language framework. something that indigenous australian author kim scott describes as: the potential of stories to shift relationships to demonstrate something like sovereignty. the tangible reality of sovereignty and language and stories that connect to landscape, that deep, deep indigenous narrative that feels like something special … that would have, regional indigenous roots anchoring a shimmering nation state to its continent. (2012: online) in 2015 questions of indigenous sovereignty are high on the australian political agenda. for many non-indigenous and indigenous australians recognition of aboriginal people as the original peoples of australia in our constitution is a welcome change in the political landscape. however many indigenous australians insist that they have never conceded their original sovereignty and so have no need of recognition within a white australian, anglo-european system of law. again it is a question of whose reality designates what is aboriginal australian sovereignty. when i think of those muddied bodies rising from their metaphorical graves in the glitch i see an image that points to a kind of rebirth, a chance at remaking history. it is also a chance to acknowledge indigenous australian sovereignty and in so doing, discursively as well as in a material sense, draw a comprehensive map of an australian nation state that truly acknowledges its indigenous heritage. coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 bibliography althans, k. darkness subverted: aboriginal gothic in black australian literature and film. gottigen: v&r unipress, 2010. bakhtin, m.m. the dialogical imagination: four essays, trans. m. holquist and c. emerson. austin: university of texas press, 1981. barber l. “gods of wheat street” the guardian, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/australia-culture-blog/2014/apr/11/thegods-of-wheat-street-abc (accessed october 30, 2015). bennett, a, royle, n. an introduction to literature, criticism and theory. third edition. harlow: pearson longman, 2004. chudy, t., cook, n., costello, m. “a ‘ruined or fractured’ sublime: voice, identity and agency in reading and writing the gothic/noir in subtropical, regional australia” strange bedfellows. refereed conference papers of the 15th annual aawp conference 2010. faris b. w. “scheherazade’s children.” magical realism: theory, history, community. eds. lois parkinson zamora and wendy b. faris. durham, n.c.: duke university press, 1995. 178-186. gelder, k, weaver r. “the colonial australian gothic.” the anthology of colonial australian gothic fiction. eds ken gelder and rachel weaver. carlton: melbourne university press, 2007. grieg, a., “why is everyone obsessed with this new aussie tv show?” mamamia, entertainment, july 16 2015, http://www.mamamia.com.au/entertainment/glitchabc/#aobbzompiem1am8x.99 (accessed october 15, 2015) hutcheon, l. a poetics of postmodernism, history, theory, fiction. new york and london: routledge, 1988. johinke, r. “uncanny carnage in peter weirs the cars that ate paris.” sydney studies in english, 2010, openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au (accessed october 30 2015). joyrich, l. “the magic of television: thinking through magical realism in recent tv.” transformative works and cultures, no. 3: 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0165.doi:10.3983/twc.2009.0165, (accessed october 15, 2015). knox d. “new series “glitch” announced.” matchbox news 2014. http://www.matchboxpictures.com/whats-happening/new-series-glitch-announced/ (accessed october 7, 2015). marsh w. http://ripitup.com.au/screen/glitch-abc-tv-emma-freemaninterview#.viw2a0k9d0g (accessed october 20, 2015). phillips b. and mendoza m. “the dead walk.” coolabah. australian studies centre, university of barcelona. no.13, (2014): 107 -117. ravenscroft, a. the postcolonial eye: white australian desire and the visual field of race. farnham: ashgate, 2012. rayner, j. “gothic definitions: the new australian ‘cinema of horrors.’” antipodes; special issue australia and asia, wayne state university press, june 2011, vol. 25 issue 1, 91-97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41957943 renes, cornelis martin, “from lifewriting to postcolonising dreaming narrative: uncanny articulations of race, class and gender in the indigenous australian corpus” (unpublished phd thesis). english department university of barcelona: barcelona, 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/australia-culture-blog/2014/apr/11/the-gods-of-wheat-street-abc http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/australia-culture-blog/2014/apr/11/the-gods-of-wheat-street-abc http://www.mamamia.com.au/entertainment/glitch-abc/#aobbzompiem1am8x.99 http://www.mamamia.com.au/entertainment/glitch-abc/#aobbzompiem1am8x.99 http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0165 http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0165 http://www.matchboxpictures.com/whats-happening/new-series-glitch-announced/ http://ripitup.com.au/screen/glitch-abc-tv-emma-freeman-interview#.viw2a0k9d0g http://ripitup.com.au/screen/glitch-abc-tv-emma-freeman-interview#.viw2a0k9d0g http://www.jstor.org/stable/41957943 coolabah, no.18, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 scott, k. the 2012 miles franklin award oration at curtin university, may 1, 2012. http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/, (accessed october 15, 2015). turcotte, g. “sexual gothic: marian engel’s bear and elizabeth jolley’s the well,” ariel: a review of international english literature, 26 (2), april 1995: 65–91. — “australian gothic,” roberts, m (ed.), handbook to gothic literature. macmillan: basingstoke, 1998. 10-19. — “the kangaroo gargoyles: footnotes to an australian gothic script.” a. sarwal, & r. sarwal, eds. reading down under: australian literary studies. new delhi, india: sss publications, 2009. janie conway herron taught creative writing at southern cross university for over sixteen years and coordinated the writing programme for the last decade. she retired in 2013 and is now an adjunct senior lecturer at the university. her first novel, beneath the grace of clouds, was published in 2010. her next novel, another song about love, along with a collection of songs of the same title, are due for release in late 2016. janie has had essays, poems and short stories published in a number of journals and anthologies. http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/ microsoft word elisa morera 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 a noah of our days: around him mythologies arose elisa morera de la vall abstract: from the pages of thomas keneally’s best seller, schindler’s ark, emerges the seductive figure of a modern hero of mythical proportions, the german oskar schindler who rescued over 1000 jews from the hands of the nazis and certain death. this noah of our days sheltered his jewish workers in an ark of salvation, his factory ‘emalia’, and originated a legend further popularized by steven spielberg’s film. keywords: facts, memory, story, history, legend, myth. the book of genesis narrates the fabulous story of noah who was chosen by god to save people and animals from the deluge that would drown all living things. noah built an ark that stayed afloat and saved its occupants from extinction: “and they went in unto noah into the ark …” (gen. 7, 15). in his best seller, schindler’s ark, thomas keneally narrates the fabulous story of a modern noah, oskar schindler, who managed to save the lives of over 1000 jews from the auschwitz ovens by turning his factory, emalia, into an ark of salvation. the author was persuaded to write the book by one of the schindlerjuden, or schindler’s jews, who survived. keneally acknowledges his debt in the dedication of his book: “to the memory of oskar schindler, and to leopold pfefferberg who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written” (keneally 2007, n.p.). it is then a story written ‘in memoriam’, in remembrance of a very uncommon person, a “german bon vivant, speculator, charmer, and sign of contradiction” (keneally 2007, 13), in the author’s own words. the character that gradually emerges from keneally’s pen shows the traits of a mythical hero, mainly because of “his salvage of a cross-section of a condemned race during those years now known by the generic name, holocaust” (keneally 2007, 13). should keneally’s narrative be considered memory, history or myth? the book is more than a transcription of pfefferberg´s memory. in the “author’s note” keneally states that it is an “account of oskar’s astonishing history” (keneally 2007, 13) (my emphasis). he claims authenticity based on his sources that include interviews with fifty schindler’s survivors, a visit to the main locations of the story, documentary and information provided by a large number of people, a great many written testimonies supplied by friends and by the yad vashem – the martyrs’ and heroes’ remembrance authority, in jerusalem –, plus a number of oskar’s papers and letters. keneally, then, copyright ©2009 elisa morera de la vall. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 has solid grounds to vouch for the historicity of his research. yet, his account cannot be labelled as simply history. the author testifies: “i have attempted to avoid all fiction (…) since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of oskar’s stature” (keneally 2007, 13-14). he further clarifies his stance: to use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course which has been frequently followed in modern writing. it is the one i have chosen to follow here; both because the craft of the novelist is the only craft to which i can lay claim, and because the novel’s techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as oskar (keneally 2007, 13). the narrative strategies employed by keneally have conferred on the book the appeal of a novel and are responsible, to a large degree, for its success, but, because of its ambiguity of genre, a controversy developed as a result of it winning the booker prize as a novel. ken gelder has written that schindler’s ark “has been referred to by keneally himself as ‘faction’, a journalistic type of fiction which draws heavily on facts, provides verifiable scenarios and generally covers an historical moment of crisis” (gelder 1988, 503). “so the story of oskar schindler is begun perilously…” (keneally 2997, 32), the author writes in the first pages. it continued to be perilous all along. in saving his jews schindler put his life in serious jeopardy. his is a story of extraordinary deeds, almost magical tricks and tremendous risks as befit a mythical hero. physically he was very attractive, described as having an “easy magnetic charm, exercised particularly over women, with whom he was unremittingly and improperly successful” (keneally 2007, 21). elsewhere in the book we read: “he looked sleekly handsome in the style of the film stars george sanders and curt jurgens, to both of whom he would always be compared” (keneally 2007, 233). on the other hand he “was not a virtuous young man in the customary sense” (keneally 2007, 16). he was in fact a womanizer and a heavy drinker but, as if having the powers of a mythological semi-god, oskar promised salvation and kept his promise. oskar had arrived in cracow in 1939 as a war profiteer, meaning to make a fortune in the recently conquered city, little suspecting that his ambitions would soon change dramatically. as he looked around, trying to find a profitable business, he met itzhak stern, a brilliant jewish accountant and philosopher, well versed in religion, who would eventually become schindler’s right hand. at the end of their initial conversation stern dropped the famous talmudic verse which would be so relevant in oskar’s history: “he who saves a single life, saves the world entire”(keneally 2007, 399). stern was later convinced that with those words “he had dropped the right stone in the well, that the crucial dictum had been deposited” (keneally 2007, 53) in the ears of someone who was becoming increasingly unsympathetic to the nazi regime. the reasons why oskar risked his life and lost his considerable fortune, to save as many jews as he could, have been amply debated and left unresolved. survivors are baffled. “i don’t know why he did it” (keneally 2007, 305) is the usual comment. there must coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 have been in him, indeed, “a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not be overwhelmed” (keneally 2007, 305). another question is: when did he determine to act the way he did? the inability to find satisfactory answers has added to the mythology that envelops the character. oskar himself would lay a special weight on the day when he witnessed the massacre of thousands in the ghetto: “‘beyond this day,’ he would claim, ‘no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. i was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system’” (keneally 2007, 147). by mid 1940, when the number of schindler’s workers was only 150, already “his factory had a minor reputation as a haven” (keneally 2007, 79). the numbers would soon grow and oskar would attain the status of a mythical creature that infused into his workers the confidence that with him they would survive. oskar’s gallant deeds are beyond count. while he learnt the bitter taste of arrest and the real possibility of being transported himself, he went on with his self-imposed mission. by way of example: he rescued, in the nick of time, some of his workers from a train that was taking them to their death, he saved people from imminent execution, he provided water to a trainload of jews left to die of heat and thirst inside the wagons, he passed information to the zionist rescue organization, he acquired some waste land and built huts for his workers to give them his personal protection, and he made his factory more plausible by adding a ‘patriotic’, if highly inefficient, ammunition section. some of his deeds were viewed by the nazi officials whom he cultivated and bribed, as eccentricities. “they thought of him as a good enough fellow who’d been stricken with a form of jew-love as with a virus” (keneally 2007, 213). had they guessed oskar’s real stance, he would not have survived. on the other hand, and no wonder, “(a)mong prisoners who knew there was (…) competition to get into emalia” (keneally 2007, 219), oskar’s factory. in the summer of 1943 “a host of incidents occurred that augmented schindler’s mythology, the almost religious supposition among many prisoners (…) that oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation” (keneally 2007, 234). actually, if prisoners’ lives were maintained it was, on many occasions, “by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical” (keneally 2007, 369). not surprisingly: emalia people would call the schindler camp a paradise. since they were widely scattered, it cannot have been a description they decided on after the fact. the term must have had some currency while they were in emalia (…). what it inspired in its people was a sense of almost surreal deliverance, something preposterous which they didn’t want to look at too closely for fear it would evaporate (keneally 2007, 222). oskar’s legendary deeds continued until the war was over. towards its end, he performed an incredible feat when he managed to liberate 300 female workers who had been sent to auschwitz. nobody had come out alive from there, but those women were finally rescued at great expense and risk. the procedure is still not clear. unable to produce evidence, keneally twice reiterates this formula: “according to the schindler mythology…”(keneally 2007, 345, 346). what transpires of this mythology is that coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 oskar almost certainly sent a willing girl loaded with drink, food and diamonds to make a deal and get oskar’s 300 women back. when she failed to return after a couple of days, schindler went there in person and had the women released. upon their arrival oskar was standing at the entrance of his factory to assure them: “you have nothing more to worry about. you’re with me now” (keneally 2007, 358). as one of them recollected: “it was an instant of the most basic and devout gratitude and quite unutterable” (keneally 2007, 357-58). another one would add years later. “he was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. he never let us down” (keneally 2007, 358). while oskar was engaged in saving the lives of his jews, titsch, a photographer, was busy taking the most stunning photos of the ghetto, the prisoners, their executions. he was a decent fellow who was obtaining valuable, incriminating data yet, as keneally observes, he “was never the sort of man concerning whom mythologies arose. oskar was” (keneally 2007, 251). the author expands: for the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself. (…) oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double faced – in the greek manner – as any small god, endowed with all the human vices, many-handed, subtly powerful, capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation (keneally 2007, 251-52). as the certainty of germany’s defeat grew, the nazis hurriedly tried to obliterate all proof of their past atrocities and to liquidate all remaining jews. schindler’s jews thought they were doomed, but then a rumour began to spread around: “oskar had spoken of buying them back (…).you could almost hear him saying it, that level certainty, the paternal rumble of the throat” (keneally 2007, 300). dolek horowitz was sure: “oskar would make a list of people and extricate them. oskar’s list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation. it was a list (keneally 2007, 300)” (emphasis in the original). the list became a myth and a myth, although ultimately based on facts, like history, can surpass history. it did in this case. ashcroft, griffiths and tiffin in their well-known book the empire writes back, discuss the distinction between literacy and orality, history and myth, and comment on the ideas of jan mohammed which imply that the tendency in oral societies is “to generate ‘mythic’ rather than ‘historical’ accounts of the world“ (ashcroft 1989, 82). this is what happened with schindler’s list. the ghetto jews had no access to the press, and news spread by way of mouth. they were actually living in an oral society, the right milieu for myths, fables and legends. they also needed to believe the unbelievable, only this time the unbelievable turned out to be true. more than 1000 names were included – as many as possible – in the frenetic composition of schindler’s list. there is (…) a haziness suitable to a legend about the precise chronology of oskar’s list. the haziness doesn’t attach to the existence of the list – a copy can be seen today in the archives of yad vashem (…) but the circumstances encourage legends. (keneally 2007, 314). the list tantalized the schindlerjuden for it meant they would live. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 when the war ended, oskar’s role ended. “the peace would never exalt him as had the war” (keneally 2007, 421). he lived in poverty the rest of his life but, while he was ignored or despised in germany, he found a family in his schindlerjuden who showed their gratitude in many ways. his heroic deeds were recognized by israel that paid him an official tribute with a plaque in tel aviv, a tree in the avenue of the righteous leading to the yad vashem museum in jerusalem, and with the formal declaration that he was ‘righteous among the nations’. when schindler died, 9 oct 74, he got his wish granted and was buried in the catholic cemetery of jerusalem. his body, followed by his friends, was carried “through the crammed streets of the old city of jerusalem” (keneally 2007, 429). lévi-strauss has written, in his histoire de lynx, that myths are endless. he compares them to an unfinished chess game (lévi-strauss, 1992, 23-24). in the “foreword” of the spanish edition of this book manuel delgado speaks of the unending net that myths have been waving ever since thought appeared over the earth (delgado 1992, 18). the fables, legends and myths that arose around oskar schindler began to be woven while he was still engaged in his work of salvation. once started, they are not likely to disappear. keneally made schindler, and the myths attached to him, known to many people, among them to film-maker steven spielberg. spielberg’s film, probably seen or at least heard of, by practically every person in this planet, has popularized oskar’s mythology all over the world. its title, schindler´s list, speaks more directly of the gist of the schindler’s legend, though the title of the novel is richer in biblical suggestions of miraculous survivals. oskar’s story is already part of the unending net of myths in which, as delgado says, we move, part of the endless chess game mentioned by lévi-strauss, and it can be expected that it will continue to be so, particularly if future generations follow the current trend of reading little, and losing interest in old films. the fabulous deeds of oskar schindler will be transmitted orally. even now, for millions of people, oskar has become a legendary figure. asked about him most people would not be accurate about his deeds. yet, all over the world, he would be considered a myth of our days. very truthfully keneally closes his narrative with these words. “when he died he was mourned in every continent” (keneally 2007, 429). references ashcroft, b, griffiths, g, tiffin, h. (1989) the empire writes back. routledge: london. delgado, m. (1992) “prólogo”. in claude lévi-strauss, historia de lince(histoire de lynx, paris 1991) anagrama: barcelona. gelder, k. (1988) “the novel”. in l.hergenhan (ed), the penguin new literary history of australia. penguin books australia. keneally, t. (2007) (1988). schindler’s ark. sceptre: london. lévi-strauss, c. (1992) historia de lince (histoire de lynx, paris 1991), anagrama (barcelona) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 elisa morera de la vall, phd, former associate lecturer in the english department at the universitat de barcelona. currently public relations officer of the australian studies centre (ub). main research area: jewish writing. doctoral thesis on jewish writers in australia. at present she is doing research on the recognition granted by israel to those gentiles who helped jews survive the nazi persecution. she has recently visited the yad vahsem museum to gather information on the subject. she has presented papers in conferences at home and abroad and has had articles and papers published in various journals besides being co-editor of the publications of the australian studies centre. she has also contributed a chapter to the book anglophone jewish literature (routledge 2007). microsoft word coolabah 1 lena.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.39-47 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona australia: the land that changed my life lena lund australia has turned out to mean more to me than i could ever have imagined. two years ago, the the universitat de barcelona offered me the opportunity to study the last semester of my undergraduate degree in english literature and language as an exchange student at southern cross university, lismore, nsw. it was a dream come true beyond my wildest dreams and i was determined to make the most out of it. back then, though i had never been to australia, my wish was to extend my stay down under a year or two after completing my undergraduate studies. firstly, because i felt that i needed more than six months to become truly fluent in english. secondly, because i had nothing that tied me back in barcelona and i was thirsty for some adventure. today, one and a half years after i first stepped on australian soil, i’m still here, happily married to an australian citizen, and this marvellous continent with its friendly people never stops amazing me. before continuing, i would like to point out that i limit this paper only to my own experiences. australia is a multicultural country and even though efforts are made to give equal opportunities to everybody, i feel that my european passport and my white complexion have opened doors to me here. consequently, it’s good to keep in mind that my experiences in australia might be more positive than those of other people with different backgrounds. i would like to start by expressing my fascination for australia. the best way i can think of describing australia is by saying that it is a human-friendly place. even though nature on this continent can be very hostile, its people have copyright ©2007 lena lund . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 67 built a friendly society in which to live. my experience here is mainly based on my time in melbourne, where i have lived for a year. i am also grateful that i got a chance to spend a semester in lismore, which provided me with a good introduction to the australian way of life from a small-town perspective. australia can be seen as a human-friendly place in many ways. to start with, the infrastructure of cities and towns seems to be planned to make living easy and pleasant for everybody. this, i believe, contributes vitally to the quality of day-to-day life in urban areas and to people’s well-being in general. let me give you some examples of small details that in my opinion make a big difference. for instance, when i first arrived in brisbane, i was amazed to see that river cruises actually are part of their public transport system. what a big difference it must be to catch a ferry to work every day instead of being stuck in a traffic jam somewhere! and then, when i moved to melbourne, i was surprised when i frequently saw groups of people having barbeques in parks and i was told that the gas barbeques located in almost every park are public. anybody who wishes to use them can do so for free. to me it seemed just too good to be true! also, apart from the ferries and the barbeques, the allpervading feeling of space is something i would like to mention. predictably you can sense the almost unlimited space when driving through the australian countryside and gazing at the horizon, but there is plenty of space even in cities. the generally low buildings, which welcome light into the streets, contribute importantly to the feeling of space. additionally, pedestrians and cyclists have been taken into consideration when planning the cities (particularly melbourne) and it is quite easy to move about; the streets are predominantly wide and bordered with cycle lanes and footpaths. there are also plenty of parks and other outdoor public areas where people can do sports and socialize without having to feel jam-packed in a big city. another human friendly aspect of australia is, of course, its people. it is not uncommon for a stranger to smile at you in the streets or say “hi!” in a 68 friendly manner. individuals talk to each other, even to strangers, in a very informal way, which i find warm and welcoming. in my opinion, people look generally happy and satisfied with their lives. i think the fact that people are content with their respective personal lives contributes to low criminality, especially in bigger cities. i appreciate the fact that one does not have to be afraid of being attacked when walking alone in the streets. of course, crime occasionally happens, as in any place, but as long as one has some common sense and behaves with caution, there is no reason to be worried. i could endlessly continue my list of things that make australia a human friendly place, but i will now move on to describe my experience here. i will first talk about my time in lismore, when i first arrived in australia, and then of my life here in melbourne and of some trips that i have made. when i first arrived down under i was not sure what to expect. i had heard plenty of good things about australia, but people’s opinions are always subjective, and i was excited to see if this ‘new’ continent would please me as much as it seemed to please most people. i was very happy about the opportunity to get to see australia as a student instead of getting only a tourist’s point of view. i must admit that when the bus dropped me off in lismore for the first time, and i realised i had arrived at the town where i was to live for the next four months, i was slightly worried. lismore seemed smaller than i had expected and not a place where too many exciting things happen. to be honest, i don’t think i would have stayed there too long had i been a tourist, but luckily i did not have a choice at the time and i stayed to discover what a curious little town lismore is. i had a good time in lismore. with time i got to meet some lovely people and to experience a small-town way of life. at university i chose to do three units that helped me gain a deeper understanding of australia and australians. 69 the first unit, perspectives on australia, initiated me to social and political issues of the country. the course material was very interesting even though the group, mainly exchange students in their late teens, was highly unmotivated. what i liked most about the unit were the community activities that we, the students, were invited to get involved with. thanks to the unit i got to plant native trees with a local landcare group, participate as a volunteer in a festival, do a fieldtrip to an environmentalist commune, visit a coffee plantation, etc. even now, after completing my degree and moving to melbourne, i still think that perspectives on australia was an excellent springboard for me to understand the australian culture better. the second unit i chose to do, cultural and spiritual wellbeing, gave me an introduction into indigenous ways of seeing the world and taught me quite a lot about myself. the course was given by an aboriginal professor and much of the material used in class was based on the aboriginal worldview. the main goal of the unit was to make students look inside themselves and to reflect on their beliefs about life. a strong focus was also laid on listening to peers and learning to appreciate and tolerate other points of view. time in class was mainly spent on group discussions. it was interesting to see how the bond within the group grew stronger and stronger every week that passed; people opening up and speaking about their beliefs, and being able to do so myself without feeling judged. i truly think that if everybody had a chance to do such a course relatively early in life, there would be more peace and understanding between people in the world. i found cultural and spiritual wellbeing a very useful course. it helped me to stop and think about life about what is important to me. it also prepared me for “real life” in my last semester at university. the third and last unit i did at southern cross university in lismore was outdoor education. i really liked this unit as it offered me the possibility to go and explore the australian bush with somebody who knew what he was doing. 70 at the time i would not have dared to go bushwalking by myself, since i had heard too many scary stories about australia’s dangerous animals. the absolute highlights of the unit were two 3-4 night fieldtrips to national parks in the area. on these trips i camped for the first time in the australian bush; saw my first wild kangaroos, possums and poisonous snakes; and was physically and emotionally challenged by the fieldtrip activities. thanks to outdoor education i gained knowledge, confidence and eagerness to do bushwalking in australia without a guide and have since visited many national parks where the beauty of nature just takes my breath away. moreover, after experiencing australia’s nature, my awareness of its crucial importance to life on earth has grown and i have thus recently joined the wilderness society: an environmentalist group that protects and restores australia’s forests and bushland. it has been inspiring to see so many people volunteering in a common effort to save old-growth forests, water catchments, etc. in order to reduce climate change and build a better future for all of us. my experience in lismore naturally involved much more than just the units i did at university. i lived at the college, which was convenient as it was easy to make friends. i had promised myself to try to make friends with the locals, but as it turned out most of my friends were other exchange students, together with whom i discovered lismore during our four months there. as i mentioned before, lismore is a small town but, surprisingly (for me), you can find there practically all that you need: shops, banks, a couple of pubs, some eateries, a swimming pool, a library and even cinemas. furthermore, there is more to lismore than one can see at first glance. although a small town, many cultural activities take place there: talks, exhibitions, plays, concerts, the lismore cup, etc. i guess living in lismore taught me that even in a small place you only get bored if you are boring. there are always things to do if you just show a little interest. 71 i would now like to talk about one of my discoveries in lismore: the church. just to give you an overview, i grew up in finland in a nonchurchgoing protestant family and even though i believe in god, my opinion was that the christian church was a dying institution. none of my friends in finland, nor the ones i had made in spain during the seven years i lived there, go to church more than maybe at christmas or easter as a family tradition. in this context, i assumed that it is mostly elderly people who go to church and, that in time, the church would completely lose its importance. however, in lismore i realised that i was wrong. one day when walking to the town centre, a german friend of mine and i were offered a lift by one of our neighbours at the college. we were surprised to hear that he was on his way to play in the rock band in one of the local pentecostal churches. he invited us to go with him, and so we did. i had never heard the term pentecostal before, but i soon saw how this christian church differed from the one i had experienced in europe. i was amazed when i saw the amount of young people who attended the service, the pastor in casual clothing, the informal way the service was given, the band playing catchy tunes and the cheerfulness of the congregation. all except the message of the service was totally different from what i had ever seen in a church before. for the six weeks we had left in lismore, we joined our neighbour when he went to sunday service and during these weeks we met some lovely people and learnt more about our religion. when talking to people about this experience, i learnt that pentecostal churches are fairly popular among australian youth. i also found that people spoke more openly about religion in lismore than what i had experienced in europe. looking back, i feel that my time in lismore was in a way a time for soul-searching. the fact that i was in a foreign country, outside my comfort zone, helped me to see things afresh. i feel that both the units i took at university and my experience with the church worked as guides for me. i 72 now no longer go to church, but i’m happy about the opportunities and the support i was given in lismore and i cherish the experiences i had there. during my time in lismore i investigated different ways of staying in australia after my student visa expired. when school was down, i worked for a couple of weeks picking blueberries on a farm close to byron bay and saved up for a plane ticket to beautiful new zealand. when i arrived there, i applied online for a working holiday visa to australia, which i was granted. i was thrilled. this meant that i could spend one year in australia with a limited working visa: i was only allowed to work three months for the same employer. this limitation did not bother me as my plan was to travel around australia and do some fruit picking along the way to pay for my travels. however, my plans changed. i first flew into melbourne, where i enjoyed the city with the freedom of new graduate that has no immediate responsibilities. when i was preparing myself to continue my travels to northern victoria, i met k.s., the love of my life, and i decided to stay in melbourne and look for work here. now the work limitation turned out to be a bit of a nuisance. predictably, it is hard to get a decent job if you can only commit yourself for three months. so, as i was running out of my savings, i did the worst job i’ve ever done: door-to-door selling of electricity contracts! i lasted for two weeks during which i got well acquainted with melbourne suburbia and realised that my future profession does not lie in sales. after being a ‘saleswoman’ i moved on to another job in melbourne city, which was also mainly occupied by working holiday visa holders. this time it was an administrative position, but it was advertised as a “night owl” job: working hours 10pm to 6am! the late working hours were due to the time difference with europe, since our customers were over there. as the pay was good and my colleagues were nice, i decided to stick with the job. moreover, the law regarding the work limitation changed during my time in this position 73 and i was allowed to continue there after my three months were completed. doing nightshift was not as rough as i had expected, but if i can avoid it in the future, i will, for sure. the longer i live in melbourne the more i like it. it is easy to feel at home here. melbourne is the most multicultural city in australia and there are people from all corners of the world living here, which makes it easy for anyone to feel part of the crowd and welcome. unfortunately, some racism still prevails, but considering the mix of people living in the city, i think the current situation in melbourne is quite good. through k.s., whom i recently married, i have got a deeper multicultural view on australia. his background is chinese-malaysian, and even though he has lived most of his life in australia, he still appreciates and understands both cultures, which i found fascinating. i believe it is the multicultural population that makes melbourne such an attractive and dynamic city: people from all over the world contribute with something from their own culture while adopting the local lifestyle. i find this can best be exemplified by the “sizzling” restaurant scene in melbourne. you can practically find any kind of food that you can think of in melbourne: spanish, vietnamese, algerian, colombian, russian etc. at the grocery stores you can also find a big variety of specialities from different countries, which makes the food preparation easier for those who like cooking. another great aspect related to multiculturalism that i would like to point out is the public tv-channel sbs, that daily shows news from many different countries in the original languages. firstly, i think this is good because it allows immigrants to keep in touch with the culture they have left behind. secondly, it helps australians to be more aware of other countries and their points of view regarding world news. and last but not least, it is a good tool for people who are studying a foreign language to practice. personally i am 74 grateful for the daily tve news from spain, especially when i’m feeling a bit homesick. settling down in a new country always takes some effort. the things you take for granted back home suddenly are missing and you have to build up your life again: home, friends, work, hobbies etc. generally i find this exciting, though challenging. what i find most difficult is finding true friends. with some effort you find friends with whom to go out and have fun, but it takes time, a lot of time, to make friends who are there with you no matter what. in today’s world we are lucky that we have modern technologies: when homesickness strikes we can call or write an email to somebody on the other side of the world who we know truly understands us, get something off our chest and life goes on again. i said before that i would talk about some trips that i have made in australia. even though i have spent here some time already, i have only seen a little part of this huge continent. my favorite trip so far has been a road trip form uluru/ayers rock to darwin. i found driving, especially in a 4wd, in the semi-arid desert very exotic and exciting. seeing my first wild crocodiles in kakadu national park (nt) was definitely another highlight, as well as spotting huge turtles just outside fraser island in queensland and seeing a platypus in its natural habitat on kangaroo island (sa). and, as i said before, overall i find the impressive nature in national parks around australia truly awesome. hopefully, with time i will get the chance to explore as much as possible of this beautiful country. when i think about australia and the things i have experienced here, more and more images and “magic milo moments” pop into my mind. there are so many different aspects of this enormous country that one could write about, but this time i will stop here. as closing words, i would like to thank everybody who made the exchange between southern cross university and the 75 university of barcelona possible. i do not have enough words to thank you for opening me the doors to this lovely country that changed my life forever. microsoft word coolabah 1 xampeny.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.7-13 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona what can we do about it? elena xampeny i solaní the australian political party of animals realized that global warming was threatening not only them but also all the living creatures. to fight this monster, worse than international terrorism, they had to start by convincing people, the so-called `rational animals´. therefore some members of this party decided to hold a climate conference at the top of anzac hill in alice springs. they introduced themselves: -“i come from tasmania. i used to live near scamander on the eastern coast but my former house was lost in a bushfire. so i moved to mount barrow”, said the tasmanian devil. copyright ©2007 elena xampeny i solaní. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 8 -“i come from melbourne and i have lived in the botanic gardens since i was a baby but recently my blue feathers have turned into a dull grey”, complained the kookaburra. “the air i breathe has tons of carbon dioxide! i can’t laugh anymore”, it continued. -“i live in the blue mountains, not far from sydney”, started the koala, “but eucalyptus leaves are not as juicy as they used to be”, she declared. “droughts worry me because if there is not enough rainfall to support suitable forests, our food will become scarce”, she added. -“that’s enough!”, cried the kookaburra. -“i think we should talk to the aboriginal tribe of anangu, here in uluru-kata tjuta, since they may give us a piece of advice on this matter”, suggested the tasmanian devil. -“i agree with you. they have always respected the land and have taken care of nature”, said the koala. 9 then the three of them went to meet the anangu and listened to their sensible words: -“we must always protect the land and the living beings that dwell in it. if land continues to be regarded as a mere source of economic productivity, our children won’t even see the frogs which store water in their bodies during severe droughts. it will be too late”, began an anangu old man. “even billabongs are drying up these days”. an anangu young woman who had read about this issue said: “the richest are giving preference to their economic benefit over the preservation of the environment. politicians are tied hand and foot by multinational companies. the latter seem to pay political leaders for their silence. we’re killing our children and grandchildren. what will become of them?” the silence broke and an anangu child began to play the didgeridoo. it was a deep melody that could be heard all through the valley. an old anangu woman who was cooking some bush tucker told the koala: “you, my sweet koala, despite your name meaning he who doesn’t need water, don’t forget that thanks to the rainwater, eucalyptus leaves are enough for you, fluffy baby, to feel satiated.” -“i guess you´re right, grandma”, admitted the koala. the setting sun was disappearing behind the valley of the winds and the three friends returned to anzac hill before dark. 10 that night they all had a strange dream. when they got up the following morning, everyone explained their dream to the rest of the group. -“i dreamt that an american squirrel and i ratified the kyoto protocol and everybody was congratulating us on our gesture”, said the kookaburra. -“i dreamt that i was lying down on a comfortable carpet made of eucalyptus leaves. then the sunbeams became so intense and strong that i started sweating buckets. what was the worst of all is the fact i couldn’t get out of that place”, cried out the koala. “what a nightmare!” -“you’re not going to believe what i dreamt!”, said the tasmanian devil very excited. -“tell us, we are all ears!”, the others responded. -“can you imagine the three of us singing on a video clip which was released on you-tune website?” 11 -“really?”, laughed the kookaburra -“and what were the lyrics about?”, asked the koala, “i’m getting hungry with such excitement!” -“well i’ll try to remember some words: ummmm…what does…, what does…”, he muttered. “oh yes, if i/let me recall the lyrics correctly… i think the song went like this”, started the tasmanian devil: what does well-being mean? what does prosperity mean? life does not make sense if you can’t feel the rain. ride a bike, take the train, go by bus not so much plane. life does not make sense if you can’t feel the rain. what does well-being mean? what does prosperity mean? life does not make sense if you can’t breathe clean air. buy your food from local shops, try to avoid imported goods, trucks and planes bringing in stuff, 12 they use huge amounts of gas. life does not make sense if you can’t breathe clean air. what does well-being mean? what does prosperity mean? life does not make sense if plants are in bad health. send less trash, recycle bags, ‘cos plastic goods make poor the land. life does not make sense if plants are in bad health. then the koala and the kookaburra joined the tasmanian devil and sang along for a while. some months later, their song became a hit at home and overseas. the beauty of it is that some people started paying attention to the real message of this song and followed not only its rhythm and music but also what it recommended. 13 references the animals were drawn by elena xampeny i solaní and coloured by caty ribas segura. the pictures of uluru and kata tjuta and anzac hill were taken by caty ribas segura in 2001 and 2005 and she holds all rights for them. caty ribas segura also drew and coloured the picture of the indigenous boy playing the didgeridoo. microsoft word eleonore wildburger 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 indigenous australian art in intercultural contact zones eleonore wildburger abstract: this article comments on indigenous australian art from an intercultural perspective. the painting bush tomato dreaming (1998), by the anmatyerre artist lucy ngwarai kunoth serves as model case for my argument that art expresses existential social knowledge. in consequence, i will argue that social theory and art theory together provide tools for intercultural understanding and competence. keywords: indigenous australian art and social theory. introduction indigenous australian artworks sell well on national and international art markets. artists like emily kngwarreye, clifford possum tjapaltjarri, kathleen petyarre are renowned representatives of what has become an exquisite art movement with international appreciation. indigenous art is currently the strongest sector of australia's art industry, with around 6,000 artists producing art and craft works with an estimated value of more than a$300 million a year. (senate committee, 2007: 9-10) at a major indigenous art auction held in melbourne in 2000, johnny warangkula tjupurrula's famous painting water dreaming at kalipinypa was sold for a record price of a$ 486,500. three years before, it was auctioned for a$ 206,000. what did johnny w. tjupurrula receive? – just a$ 150 when he sold that painting in 1972. (the courier mail, 29 july 2000) the süddeutsche zeitung (06 september 2005) reports that clifford possum tjapaltjarri received a$ 100 for his painting emu corroboree man in 1972. the very painting was re-sold for us$ 411 000 in 2005. however, the above-mentioned artworks were produced within the framework of indigenous cultural knowledge, and so they may also be evaluated as cultural texts and representations of indigenous identity. in this article, i will develop an intercultural perspective on classical indigenous australian art and i will raise a variety of questions in regard to representations of cultural knowledge. my concern here is an intercultural, interdisciplinary perspective on fine art. i will introduce the painting bush tomato dreaming (1998), by the anmatyerre artist lucy ngwarai kunoth, and i will use this painting as a case study. the artist is a member of the community of utopia (nt) and was introduced to traditional anmatyerre knowledge by community elders who are aware of their responsibilities as carriers of cultural knowledge. (personal communication with the artist). this means that the artwork relates to the indigenous australian concept of the dreaming, however, as it was produced for so-called “western” viewers and/or “western” art market, it is also copyright ©2009 eleanore wildburger. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 open to non-indigenous modes of interpretation and reception. so, i will focus on indigenous art as complex representations of indigeneity within intercultural contact zones. in this context, my proposition will be that indigenous artworks represent a source of existential social knowledge (harrington, 2004:3), and i will conclude that sociology of art helps to understand the degree to which art shapes and reflects society. indigenous australian art the art of indigenous australia is "one of the longest continuous traditions of art in the world [and is] dating back at least 50,000 years" (caruana, 1993: 7). on the one hand, so-called 'traditional' "[a]rt is central to aboriginal life [and] is inherently connected to the religious domain" (ibid), on the other hand, since the 1970s a significant variety of art works have been produced for the art market. the mental and artistic concepts of both domains could hardly be farther apart than they are: there are culturally determined, inherently religious regulations and prerogatives on the one side, and there is big business and 'western' concepts of art on the other side. before europeans came to australia, art was purely produced within "traditional cultural needs, and this has remained the case in varying degrees since"(caruana, 1993: 10). in recent years, indigenous artist have adopted new technologies and new materials, which has led to a variety of new art forms. yet the most prestigious artworks on the australian and international art markets are acrylic paintings, many of which come from famous artists of the western desert region. these paintings feature icons, symbols and signs which come in a multitude of combinations and contexts and each of which may carry a variety of meanings (caruana, 1993: 14). the spiritual concept of the dreaming provides the framework by which these meanings may unfold on different levels. the term ‘dreaming’ is in fact a trivialising english word which does not do justice to the complex concept as such. franchesca cubillo, indigenous art curator of yanuwa, larrakia, wardaman and bardi descent, explains: the dreaming is the eternal moment of creation, when the spiritual ancestors moved across the land, creating the landforms, the plants, animals, people and the languages. rules and languages were also established by the ancestors in this timeless moment and are maintained by aboriginal people in the present. the land is looked after, animals respected, ceremonies performed and social obligations adhered to according to the precepts of these traditions. aspects of the dreaming are taught and reinforced from an early age. everyone within the community is expected to know, in varying degrees, their place in the dreaming, their country, kinship and ceremonial obligations. designs are used to empower objects, people and places within the landscape. the artwork is painted on the bodies of the performers, on the ground on which the ceremony takes place and on ceremonial paraphernalia used during ritual. songs are sung to establish communication with ancestors at particular locations and at specific times. (2000: 44) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 this means that the dreaming, also known as the indigenous law, determines social and religious behaviour and defines the relationship between people and land. the art expert wally caruana explains that "[t]he all-pervasive powers of the [a]ncestral [b]eings of the dreamings are present in the land and in natural species, and also reside within individuals. they are activated by ceremony and art to nourish generation after generation of human descendants" (1993: 10). this means that the dreaming defines a person's rights and responsibilities to land and it links people with their particular tracts of land and everything in it. when indigenous artists re-create their dreamings in their paintings, the dreamings also regulate "the prerogatives of artists to use sacred designs and to depict religious subjects" (caruana, 1993: 15). in consequence, "the use of designs belonging to others without the appropriate permission constitutes a major breach of aboriginal law"(ibid). the artist owns her/his designs and has copyright over them, and in this way, artworks express and represent individual and group identities. to say it in caruana's words, art is an expression of knowledge, and hence a statement of authority. through the use of ancestrally inherited design, artists assert their identity, and their rights and responsibilities. they also define the relationships between individuals and groups, and affirm their connections to the land and the dreaming. (1993: 14-15) caruana adds that artists carry the dreaming regulations, "with varying degrees of modification… into the making of art for the public domain" (1993: 15). art production for “western” art markets: the contemporary so-called 'traditional' art movements go back to the early 1970s, when geoffrey bardon, a young art teacher at an outback school in papunya, a government-established indigenous township in the red centre of australia, encouraged some elders to translate their designs into permanent, portable art. this was the beginning of western desert art, which sells so well today. a representative of this art movement is the anmatyerre artist lucy ngwarai kunoth, whose painting bush tomato dreaming (1998) may serve as model case for my argument. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 lucy ngwarai kunoth, anmatyerre nation, utopia (nt). bush tomato dreaming, 1993, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 0,80 cm x 0,56 cm; private collection. © artist. the painting represents a piece of land, (the artist’s land, as it is confirmed by the indigenous law), seen from the bird's-eye view. the icons in the painting relate to narratives that draw upon ceremonial knowledge, defined by the indigenous law. the title of the painting provides a clue to the narratives in the artwork. lucy ngwarai kunoth’s dreaming ancestor is the bush tomato ancestor, which means that the artist knows (and owns) the sections of the indigenous law that was established by her dreaming ancestor. this means that lucy ngwarai kunoth owns the (copy)right to the set of laws that define the ownership and the responsibility in regard to her land and all phenomena on it. so, the painting is not only a piece of art, but also a representation of cultural identity that draws upon particular cultural regulations und rules that are defined by the indigenous law, which has been activated, remembered, practiced and confirmed in the ceremonies to date. an essential key to the understanding of classical indigenous paintings are the narratives that the composition of the paintings imply. the artist owns both the copyright of the painting and the relevant narratives. bush tomato dreaming shows five sets of narratives, designed as five groups of women who are represented by u-shaped icons. the group in the centre of the painting consists of seven women, four of which face each other. a big windshield emphasises the importance of the central scene. left and right of the central scene there are two other groups of four women each, facing each other. these two groups are protected by three smaller windshields at the top and bottom ends of the scene. related to the main scene in the centre, there is one group of two women at the top and another group of two at the bottom of the painting. in addition, some bowl-shaped dishes, so-called coolamons, carrying bush tomatoes, are placed between the sitting women. the background of the painting shows the well-known “dot”-technique of western desert art. an interesting artistic feature is the choice of three different background colours that support and emphasise the three main groups of women in the painting. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 for some so-called “western” critics, the artistic evaluation of this painting may include little appreciation, or even raise the point that indigenous artworks are “primitive” and demonstrate a lack of ingenuity, as the sets of icons would repeat given scenes in given settings, without much artistic variety or creativity. by contrast, the artist has indeed produced an individual artwork out of infinite options of compositions, all of which relate individual artistic productions to a complex set of cultural knowledge. the artistic evaluation of the artwork can be diversified and extended to further levels of meaning, if one is able to decode the narratives of the artwork. however, knowledge of indigenous law is subject to rules that do not give unlimited, open access to cultural knowledge. nevertheless, artists may provide some clues to the narratives of their artworks, without compromising the established rules. in our case, the artist confirmed that the narratives in bush tomato dreaming relate to girls’ initiation ceremonies. the artwork shows women that paint themselves up for ceremonies, and women that sing and dance in the course of ceremonial performances that commemorate relevant sections of the indigenous law. the artist remembers and confirms her responsibilities for the land in relation to the creation of the land and the members of her community. the coolamons with bush tomatoes, integrated within the respective sets of sitting women, emphasises the dreaming ancestor’s creative powers that are re-activated in ceremonies. (personal communication with the artist) for knowledgeable insiders, the narratives represent rules and regulations in full detail and at great length. clearly, informed insiders have the ability to decode further layers of cultural meanings that remain hidden to the uninformed outsider. so, on one level of meaning, the painting is an expression of cultural knowledge and indigenous identity. on another level of meaning, the painting is a piece of art that generates a complex variety of aesthetic judgements. simultaneously, this painting is a product of/for the art market with a completely different set of ©-laws and different concepts of intellectual property. needless to say those indigenous artworks relate to diverse mental concepts that may evoke a range of misconceptions and controversies. indigenous art and social theory this article cannot adequately deal with the complex context of indigenous art production and reception; on the contrary, i am well aware that i raise issues rather than offering solutions. however, in search of answers, i will draw attention to the interrelation of art production, art representation and art reception. in accordance with austin harrington i argue in favour of 'art and social theory' as "equal partners in a joint-venture of cognition of the world" (harrington, 2004:3). the problem lies in the interrelation of, or even interference from, different fields of action, such as art, culture, business, or politics, as bourdieu argues. modern society is determined by a web of interconnected areas that form fields of power and establish hierarchies. (alexander, 2003: 285). in the case of classical indigenous australian art, these fields of power not only have an impact on curatorial concepts of art exhibitions, or on sale strategies of art markets, they also transform the construction and conception of intercultural meaning. in consequence, i argue in favour of a well-balanced, joint perspective on indigenous art, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 which analyses artworks as a socially constructed category of cultural objects, yet also engages in questions of aesthetic content and artistic value. theorists are called upon to examine art not as an isolated entity, but in its interaction with society (alexander 2003: 292-294), as art represents “a source of existential social knowledge" (harrington, 2004: 3). therefore, social theory may provide a useful mental concept that takes the artistic value of artworks seriously, while also “recognizing political values of democracy of access to cultural production and cultural valuation” (harrington, 2004: 5). clearly, sociological analysis requires critical engagement with values, and theorists address questions, such as, who are the spectators? which factors have an impact on their judgement? does their judgments speak for everyone? are values in art universal? do values in art hold for ever? (h., 2004: 38). these questions may very well be applied to a critical evaluation of the abovementioned painting bush tomato dreaming. if we add the socio-political, postcolonial context to an artistic analysis of the painting, we will not only integrate intercultural issues but will also raise awareness for intercultural sensitivity and understanding. drawing upon harrington, i argue that social theory supports an interculturally approppriate approach to indigenous australian art, however, i am aware that social sciences can only adequately analyse artworks, if also questions of aesthetic content and intrinsic artistic value are addressed. interculturally appropriate art theories are supposed to find a suitable balance between (value-distancing) sociological analysis, (value-affirming) aesthetic appraisal and (value-affirming) social and political philosophy and practice (harrington, 2004: 210). in short, "social theory should seek to foster an understanding of art in which art objects and practices are experienced as value-relevant sources of sensuous knowledge." (harrington, 2004: 207) conclusion: in this article, i've introduced lucy ngwarai kunoth’s painting bush tomato dreaming as a model case of an intercultural, interdisciplinary analysis of indigenous australian art. in contrast to concepts of a detached aesthetic analysis of art i hold the view that aesthetic evaluations of indigenous art cannot be made "neutrally" (alexander, 2003: 294). according to contemporary understanding of art, aesthetics are socially constructed and historically contingent. sociology of art helps to understand the degree to which art reflects society, and how art may shape society. i've argued in favour of interdisciplinary research methods that take into account the complexity of art production, art reception and representation. (alexander, 2003: 307-308) i've argued that a balanced approach to art not only defines artworks as being autonomous in their normative principles, such an approach also takes into account that artworks serve a wider range of social purposes. in short, social theory and art theory together provide useful frameworks for intercultural competence. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 references alexander, d. v. sociology of the arts. malden: blackwell publishing, 2003. caruana, w. aboriginal art. london: thames and hudson, 1993. senate standing committee on environment, communication, arts, information technology and the arts. indigenous art – securing the future. commonwealth of australia: canberra, 2007. cubillo, f. ¨the remarkable kundu masks of the nyangumarta¨ kaltja now: indigenous arts australia. i. chance (ed). adelaide: wakefield press, 2001. hall, s. (ed). representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. london: sage publications, 1997. harrington, a. art and social theory. cambridge: polity press, 2004. lidchi, h. ¨the poetics and the politics of exhibiting other cultures¨ representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. st. hall (ed). london: sage publications, 1997. süddeutsche zeitung. 6 september, 2005. the courier mail. 29 july, 2000. eleonore wildburger is a lecturer at the department of english and american studies, at the university of klagenfurt/austria. my main fields of research (and teaching) are (indigenous) australian studies, cultural studies, intercultural methodologies, postcolonial studies. please see list of publications and conference papers on http://eleonore.wildburger.com microsoft word bill phillips 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 199 constructing catalonia bill phillips abstract: catalonia, in common with other nations, has long been concerned with the question of identity and difference. its problematic relationship with spain has led to an emphasis on differentiating itself from its larger neighbour (if we are to accept, as most spaniards do not, that catalonia is not spain), a situation complicated by the loss of the spanish colonies of cuba and the philippines in 1898, and the spanish civil war and subsequent dictatorship from 1936 to 1976. beginning in the late nineteenth century, the construction of a catalan identity followed a similar route to that taken by other european nations such as england, ireland and, indeed, spain, including an emphasis on rural values, activities and the countryside, and the conversion of specifically local traditions into national past times. it is only in the last ten years or so that this model of catalan identity has been recognised for what it is – a model constructed and encouraged for and by specific nationalist political interests. ironically, catalonia’s identity abroad has also been constructed and manipulated for political purposes, but from quite a different perspective. orwell’s /homage to catalonia/ (1938) narrates an extremely blinkered version of the spanish civil war which has achieved iconic status as a result of cold war politics. subsequent portrayals of the spanish civil war – valentine cunningham’s /the penguin book of spanish civil war verse/ (ed.), penguin, 1980, or ken loach’s 1995 film /land and freedom/ base their arguments unquestioningly on /homage to catalonia/, perpetuating a view of the nation’s recent history that is both reductive and inaccurate. keywords: catalonia, constructing national identity, spanish civil war, george orwell catalonia, in common with other nations, has long been concerned with the question of identity and difference. its problematic relationship with spain has led to an emphasis on differentiating itself from its larger neighbour (if we are to accept, as most spaniards do not, that catalonia is not spain), a situation complicated by the loss of the spanish colonies of cuba and the philippines in 1898, and the spanish civil war and subsequent dictatorship from 1936 to 1976. beginning in the late nineteenth century, the construction of a catalan identity followed a similar route to that taken by other european nations such as england, ireland and, indeed, spain, including an emphasis on rural values, activities and the countryside, and the conversion of specifically local traditions into national past times. it is only in the last ten years or so that this model of catalan identity has been recognised for what it is – a model constructed and encouraged for and by specific nationalist political interests. copyright ©2009 bill phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 200 ironically, catalonia’s identity abroad has also been constructed and manipulated for political purposes, but from quite a different perspective. orwell’s homage to catalonia (1938) narrates an extremely blinkered version of the spanish civil war which has achieved iconic status as a result of cold war politics. subsequent portrayals of the spanish civil war – valentine cunningham’s the penguin book of spanish civil war verse (ed.), penguin, 1980, or ken loach’s 1995 film land and freedom base their arguments unquestioningly on homage to catalonia, perpetuating a view of the nation’s recent history that is both reductive and inaccurate. “the ideology of england and englishness is to a remarkable degree rural” argues alun howkins in englishness: politics and culture 1880-1920, a statement that can most probably be applied to virtually any nation, the countryside and rural history being common sources for national self-invention, and catalonia is no exception. this is partly, no doubt, a romantic response to urbanisation and industrialisation, the citydweller’s desire to return to an arcadian golden age, if only for a few hours; to a pastoral world of innocence and purity, healthy living and spiritual calm. the catalans, in common with the english, took to hiking as a means of escaping the city but also, like the irish, of rediscovering and reclaiming their own land. at the same time that miss ivors was persuading gabriel conroy to visit the aran islands in james joyce’s short story “the dead” (1914), hiking clubs from barcelona and the catalan industrial towns of sabadell and terrassa, among others, were tramping the sacred places of catalonia, mountains such as montserrat, montseny and núria. their objective, according to the associació d’excursions catalana was “to study and learn about the natural and artistic beauties, the traditions, monuments and ancient sites; the local customs, popular songs, the oddities of language” (marfany 296). ideologically motivated hiking of this kind, which is still common in the basque country, as well as in catalonia, is a kind of beating of the bounds – the medieval custom of marking the parish boundaries on an annual tramp around the village limits, usually led by the priest in which the extent of local jurisdiction and identity is physically confirmed. hiking brings the town to the country, shared characteristics such as language, are reinforced, and rural economies benefit from the arrival of the city-dwellers anxious to try the local food and other produce, all of which is available at better prices and probably fresher, at their local market in barcelona. more recently – largely coinciding with spain’s entry into the common market in 1986 – car ownership became the norm, and other rural activities were revived to cater for the new mobility of catalan families no longer reliant on associations to provide them with transport. as well as the rise in the number of second homes scattered across the catalan countryside, and the enormous increase in the popularity of skiing – neither of which are quintessentially catalan traditions – mushroom collecting has, well, mushroomed over the last two decades, with routes to and from the bergadà region jammed with cars nose to tail during autumn weekends. the catalan government has responded by building motorways and dual carriageways, prioritising those routes used by skiers, and particularly those favoured by the mushroom hunters, as they like to be called. the restaurant trade, specialising in mushroom based cuisine flourishes around the town of berga, while on the side of the road stalls selling mushrooms, often flown in from eastern europe, are on sale to those unlucky not to have filled their baskets, but reluctant to return home empty-handed. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 201 entry into the common market, which brought the catalans a new-found mobility, coincided with the political domination, in catalonia, of the nationalist coalition convergència i unió, one of whose slogans was “fem pais”, or “let’s make the country”. convergència i unió strongly encouraged those local rural traditions which the newly mobile city-dwellers from the barcelona region were just beginning to discover and converted them into national traditions. two examples of local customs, originating from the tarragona region, and especially from around the small town of valls, in the alt camp, are interesting for the spectacular rise in their popularity over the last twenty years or so. firstly, the calçotada, or onion barbecue, which traditionally was cooked over the pruned cuttings of the local vines in late winter/early spring using locally grown and idiosyncratically cultivated onions. nowadays you can enjoy a calçotada in the smartest barcelona restaurants and the season has been extended from its late winter/early spring origins to cover most of the year. restaurant calçots are usually cooked in the oven and come as a starter or merely as the garnish to a main course, but eating them remains a profoundly patriotic act. the second tradition associated with the small town of valls is the castellers, or human castles. the activity itself has its origins in valencia, but the first ever “colla”, or club, dates from the early nineteenth century, in valls, not far from tarragona. making human castles remained a local tradition throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with rival ‘colles’ from valls, reus, tarragona and other towns and villages from the region competing against each other. by the late eighties the tradition had spread northwards, with “colles” such as the minyons de terrassa, founded in 1979, beginning to challenge the hegemony of those from valls. new “colles” continue to appear. els saballuts from sabadell, not far from barcelona, were founded in 1994, els sagals d’osona, in the north of catalonia, were founded in 1998 while els capgrossos from mataró, a town to the north of barcelona, were founded as recently as 2002. mushroom hunting, calçotades and castellers, although still recognised as having specifically regional and rural origins or centres of excellence, are now perceived as being catalan-wide traditions, and participating in, promoting or simply enjoying them is a demonstration of catalan identity. another activity although not necessarily perceived as being rural in origin is, in common with other nations’ defining traditions, folk dancing. the traditional catalan folk dance is the sardana, a profoundly unspectacular sight enacted regularly throughout catalonia, though it is most likely to be observed in the summer months in provincial towns where, when not forcibly imposed on the local school children, is most likely to be seen performed by those more advanced in years, as is appropriate to the dance’s characteristic shuffling steps and minimal movements. according to marfany the sardana was virtually unknown in most of catalonia until the early twentieth century when it became “the principal symbolic referent of catalanism” (328). “the tradition,” roundly affirms marfany, “was invented” (326). as a dance, however, it was seen to be deeply appropriate: a ring without top or tail, where everyone, equally, holds hands in a symbol of love, where everyone may freely enter or leave [the ring], which can always grow with more dancers; a dance of the square, of the community, open to all, rich and poor, old and young; a vigorous dance, sportive, healthy, a serious dance, methodical, elegant, suitable coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 202 for a people who even when enjoying themselves preserve their dignity, a dance, finally, of the land, of remote, mythical origins (marfany 326). interestingly, in sabadell, the sardana was promoted by the local bourgoisie in the early years of the twentieth century, precisely because of its boring nature. sabadell, an industrial town to the north east of barcelona, with its energetic, working class population preferred waltzes, pasodobles and other, sexier dances. the local bourgoisie, which had become increasingly allied with the church, frowned on such immoral behaviour, suspecting it of being both excessively spanish, as well as republican in nature. the suppression of such dances and the systematic implantation of the sober sardana was not only nationalist, but bourgeois and catholic in inspiration: “one day,” writes marfany, in the supposed words of a bourgeois catalan nationalist, “we will be able to say that the noble dance of the sardana has expelled the disgraceful local dances from our town forever” (marfany 325). the construction of a catalan identity relies on a binary opposition – to be catalan is not to be spanish, rather as the principal attribute of canadians is that they are not from the usa. hence the catalan emphasis on sobriety and dignity in opposition to spanish excess, exaggeration, idleness and waste. the sardana, together with its musical accompaniament is clearly not a jota, a dance with extravagant arm swinging, spinning and loud music, and even less a relative of andalusian flamenco. the catalans perceive themselves as sensible, thrifty people, disinclined to drunkenness and ostentation. the rest of spain sees them as mean, boring and unfriendly. they are not without a sense of humour, however, as demonstrated by the adoption of the donkey as a symbol of catalonia. a few years ago, sillhouette stickers of bulls began to appear on some people’s cars denoting their allegiance to spain rather than catalonia. the catalan response was to produce the donkey sticker, symbolising hard work, obstinacy perhaps, and, crucially, humility. a soberly effective response to the fighting bull whose only role is to pose nobly before dying a pointless death and then being dragged to the butcher’s by the donkey-fathered mule. donkeys aside, it cannot have escaped the attention of many catalans that the construction of catalonia offers a disturbing mirror to the construction of franco’s spain. during the dictatorship the paella, a regional dish from valencia was elevated to national status, bullfighting, traditional in the south, in madrid, navarra, and other regions, became the national spectacle and flamenco, cleansed of any andalusian gypsy influence, was sold to tourists as a charming example of spanish song and dance. calçotada or paella? castellers or toreros? sardanes or flamenco? the regional raised to the national. most likely, none of this is familiar to outsiders, particularly from the english-speaking world, whose only reference to catalonia has been supplied by george orwell. homage to catalonia is a widely recognised title, though perhaps the book itself is less widely read. for many reading people from english-speaking nations, homage to catalonia, together with hemingway’s for whom the bell tolls, provides an emotional backdrop to the spanish civil war which undoubtedly differs greatly from the perception held by most spanish people, particularly those who lived through the war and the subsequent dictatorship. homage to catalonia is actually only about a brief period of the war, and coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 203 is set in only two places: the aragon front, and barcelona. despite this, orwell’s report of the war has been adopted as the official account, in english at least, of what happened in catalonia during the civil war, as well as providing a description of the country and its inhapitants in general. basically, homage to catalonia describes the struggle, in barcelona, during may 1937, between the anarchists and trotskyists on the one side, and the communist party and the republican government on the other. these events, known as the “fets de maig”, took place between the 4th and 7th of may, and resulted in, according to the government, 500 deaths and 1,500 wounded. orwell, who describes his growing disillusionment with the communist party throughout the book, has enlisted in the poum, a trotskyist militia and, understandably, given the months he has spent fighting at their side on the aragon front, it is with them that his loyalty lies. the book, then, is a denunciation of the republican government and its soviet allies who have betrayed the revolutionary militias. orwell claims, indeed, that the communists were actually in favour of a bourgeois victory: the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in spain. in particular the communist party, with soviet russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. it was the communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in spain was not workers’ control, but bourgeois democracy” (52). orwell, through the independent labour party, had joined the poum, the partido obrero de unificación marxista, a small militia described by the historian paul preston as “anti-stalinist marxists” (184). the usual explanation for what happened is that during the early part of the war only the militias were sufficiently organised to hold back the uprising, but as the government gradually came to grips with the situation it attempted to centralise control over the military rather than allow independent and uncoordinated groups such as the poum to operate as they wished. orwell, who fought with the poum on the aragon front and was understandably loyal to his comrades felt that the government, backed by the stalinist soviet union had betrayed the revolution. perhaps he is right, but one of the great mysteries of orwell’s account, and that of his followers is the virtual absence of the rebel forces. certainly they are there, largely at a safe distance, at the front, and orwell is careful to recognise that they are unhappy conscripts, forced to fight for a cause that is not their own. but a reading of the whole book suggests that the spanish civil war, at least in catalonia, was really a fight between, on the one hand, sturdy anarchists and honest revolutionaries, and on the other, wicked stalinists and a despotic republican government. this version of the war in catalonia is not shared by historians or by the majority of those who remember the war “...when, from october 1936, soviet arms began to arrive in the republic, sympathy for thr soviet union increased considerably,” (241) argue catalan historians pagès i blanch and perez puyal, while paul preston suggests that “the communist party, for all its crimes and errors, played a major role in keeping republican resistance alive as long as it did” (190). the catalans themselves, it seems, were less keen on revolution that orwell believed: “eventually,” observes norman coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 204 jones, “lluhí’s prediction that the catalan masses would abandon anarchism and opt for either reformist socialism or communism was realized” (110). for most catalans who lived through the war, and especially the combatants, their memories are of the arrival in catalonia of the national forces, of the trek to france, the french concentration camps, exile, the reprisals, the forty years of dictatorship. orwell experienced none of this as he left spain and returned to britain in 1937. as such, he can hardly be blamed for merely describing the brief period that he was there. indeed, he says “beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events” (247). hugh thomas, rather more damningly, says that “his account of the [...] riots, marvellously written though it is, should be read with reservations. it is more accurate about war itself than about the spanish war” (424). furthermore, in his essay “looking back on the spanish war”, published in 1942, orwell himself quite clearly states that “[t]he outcome of the spanish war was settled in london, paris, rome, berlin – at any rate not in spain. after the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the government could not win the war unless there was some profound change in the international set-up [...] the much-publicized disunity on the government side was not a main cause of defeat” (300). a view shared, nowadays, by most historians. franco won because he had extensive help in arms and men from germany and italy. the government lost because it received only minimal help from the soviet union and mexico, and none at all from britain or france. orwell’s account in homage to catalonia would be of little significance – except perhaps as a minor contribution to an understanding of his particular corner of events were it not for the fact that homage to catalonia seems to have been taken up by later writers as the definitive account of the war. one of the most blatant is valentine cunningham in his introduction to the penguin book of spanish civil war verse, published in 1980, which, as well as drawing heavily on homage to catalonia, rather unsubtlely transfers orwell’s experiences to the war poet john cornford. cornford, claims cunningham, “whether out of ideological naivety or, more likely, because he was still just a young and romantic revolutionary, [...] promptly joined the wild, ragged, but exhilirating poum” (36). most of cunningham’s description of cornford’s experiences dwells on the various ways in which the stalinist supporters in the british communist party, which cornford was, in fact, a member of, did their best to write the young, doomed poet out of history once his treachery was discovered. elsewhere in the introduction cunningham, again in very similar language to orwells, rhapsodises about the early years of the war in barcelona, “the sudden alliance between what left-wing intellectuals and writers had longed vainly for in england and the tangible hopes for poetry incited by the spanish revolution and its defence of culture” (58). we nowadays accept that there is rarely, if ever, one history. rather, there are many histories and many accounts of events both in the past and the present. the spanish civil war is no exception, or at least should not be. my contention is that the perception outside catalonia of orwell’s highly limited and partisan description of one small corner of the spanish civil war as a representative account of the conflict –within catalonia it is largely celebrated for its flattering title– is a mythologising of events as a result of cold war propaganda. indeed, eric hobsbawm, in an article in the guardian in 2007 argued that “the public showed no interest in the book. it was published in coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 205 1938, in a run of 1,500 copies, which sold so poorly that the stock was not yet exhausted 13 years later when it was first reprinted. only in the cold-war era did orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure.” orwell has been used and popularised because his account demonises the soviet union while, rather indirectly, praising the anarchists. from a cold war point of view anarchists are quite cuddly, posing, as they do, no threat to the established order and being, indeed almost fellow travellers of the more libertarian factions within the republican party in the united states. furthermore, franco posed something of a problem for cold war historians, being, rather inconveniently, a cold-blooded dictator, a former ally of mussolini and hiler, and no friend of democracy. he was, however, an enemy of communism. what better way of reinterpreting history than simply writing franco out of the spanish civil war and turning it into a struggle between heroic anarchists and evil stalinists. orwell provides the model, and valentine cunningham, professor of english language and literature at oxford university, and tutor and senior fellow in english literature at corpus christi college, oxford, snaps it up. how ironic, also, that red ken loach, in his 1995 film land and freedom: the spanish revolution betrayed should offer the same discourse. the world socialist web site, published by the international committee of the fourth international praises the film, arguing that “british director ken loach's film about the spanish civil war of 1936-39, says [...] that the working class is capable of uplifting and liberating itself. it says further that the cause of the failure of the soviet union lay not with socialism, but stalinism.” extraordinary. loach’s film, then (which closely follows homage to catalonia in plot and sympathies) is not about the spanish civil war at all. it is about opposing stalinism. admittedly stalin was a monster – worse indeed than franco, if such comparisons have any meaning. but does this perverse interpretation of history really do homage to catalonia? references cunningham, valentine (ed). the penguin book of spanish civil war verse, 1980. harmondsworth: penguin, 1983. hemingway, ernest. for whom the bell tolls. new york, 1940. hobsbawm, eric. “war of ideas” the guardian. 17th february, 2007. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/feb/17/historybooks.featuresreviews> howkins, alun. “the discovery of rural england” englishness: politics and culture 1880-1920. robert colls & philip dodd (eds). london, new york, sydney: croom helm, 1986. jones, norman. “regionalism and revolution in catalonia” revolution and war in spain 1931-1939. paul preston (ed). london: methuen, 1984. joyce, james. dubliners. 1914. london: grafton books, 1988. marfany, joan-lluís. la cultura del catalanisme. barcelona: editorial empúries, 1995. orwell, george. homage to catalonia. 1938. london: secker & warburg, 1980. orwell, george. “looking back on the spanish war” the collected essays, journalism and letters of george orwell. vol 2. my country right or left. 1940-1943, 1958. harmondsworth: penguin, 1980. pagès i blanch, pelai and alberto pérez puyal. aquella guerra tan llunyana i tan propera (1936-1939): testimonis i records de la guerra civil a catalunya. lleida: pagès editors, 2003. preston, paul. a concise history of the spanish civil war, 1986. london: fontana, 1996. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 206 the world socialist web site, published by the international committee of the fourth international. <http://www.wsws.org/arts/1998/aug1998/land-96.shtml>. 23 october, 1995. thomas, hugh. the spanish civil war. london: eyre & spottiswoode, 1961. dr. bill phillips is a senior lecturer in the english and german studies department in the faculty of philology at the university of barcelona. his research interests embrace english romantic poetry, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, gender studies and detective fiction, on all of which he has published widely. recent publications include “shelley, catalonia and the spanish civil war” (/the reception of p.b. shelley in europe/ ed. susanna schmid and michael rossington: london, continuum, 2008), /frankenstein/ and mary shelley's "wet ungenial summer" (/atlantis/ vol. 28/2. madrid, 2006) and “representacions de masculinitat a la novel·la negra” (representations of masculinity in the detective novel) masculinitats per al segle xxi. (masculinities for the 21st century) barcelona: centre d'estudis dels drets individuals i col·lectius (cedic), 2007. microsoft word coolabah 1 mila.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.14-23 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona a view on the dialectic between the individual and the environment mila martínez the analysis of the relationship between the individual, their perception of the external world and their behaviour in it opens up the discussion of human agency and the dialectic of the individual and the social, and the individual and the environment. this essay will discuss this dialectic and will hint at possible ways to map the relationships between, on the one hand, indigenous peoples and white australia; and, on the other, between the rural and urban space which they inhabit and which, simultaneously, shape their identity as much as it is shaped by its inhabitants. it will also discuss how power and meaning are conditioned by subjectivity and space. keywords: identity, displacement, space, city, map, power. when europeans think of australia, one of the first thoughts that probably comes to mind is that it is a very distant country with a different time zone. this proves to be true when travelling to it. travellers are exposed to a physical and mental displacement which affects their experience of being and it is associated with a certain amount of discomfort. the physical displacement is usually accompanied by a disruption of behavioural, biological and psychological rhythms commonly known as “jet lag”, to which it can be added the sometimes uncomfortable disturbance of regular eating habits as a result of being served meals at unusual hours, according to the new time zones we are travelling through. the mental displacement is of a different nature. psychology tells us that we all inhabit multiple spaces at once in which we are different beings simultaneously. it also tells us that we have space-based identities, which differ one from another depending on the culture in which we grow up, but provide us with a deictic sense of us and the place we move in. so it seems copyright ©2007 mila martínez. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 15 that we are not able to think about ourselves and the world outside us without placing both in some kind of real or imaginary space. this territoriality of our experience is rendered into a geographical perspective of the world we live in and the emotional and psychological experiences that go with it. in her article “ground rules and social maps for women: an introduction”, that has inspired me to write this paper, shirley ardener, suggests that space not only speaks but “it is as if we have two maps: one that locates us in ordinary spacetime, and another consisting of an interior territory of a psychological nature in which we are located at the same time” (ardener 1-2). david lowental wrote a very interesting analysis on how individuals understand their external worlds. he drew on anthropological evidence to affirm that there is a physical realm, organised through language, common to all people who experience it, even though it can be symbolised in different ways. and this external world is not just a world of co-existing facts but it is profoundly spatial. thus, “territoriality”, understood as the division and ownership of territory, will differ from group to group, and it will be somehow shaped in a number of ways by feelings (lowental 241-260). from this perspective some theorists, like money-kyrle, point out that a solid shared world and a stable sense of oneself within that world are necessary for one’s psychic and physical survival (money-kyrle 96). lowental’s work opened the path to the analysis of the relationship between the psychology of the individual, their perception of the external world and their behaviour in it. this opens up the discussion of human agency and the dialectic of the individual and the social, and the individual and the environment. this essay will discuss this dialectic and will hint at possible ways to map the relationships between, on the one hand, indigenous and white australia; and, on the other, between the rural and urban space which they inhabit and which, simultaneously, shape their identity as much as it is shaped 16 by them. it will also discuss how power and meaning are conditioned by subjectivity and space. in the body and the city, steven pile suggests that the relationship between the external and the internal world is based in symbolic exchanges located in time and space. individuals are constantly engaged in linking symbols of all kinds to the constructs of their self-images. this is particularly evident when thinking of australia, a country where many cultures coexist and overlap in the shadow of one primitive and original culture which was about to be extinguished as a result of its encounter with the alien world brought by the european colonization in 1788. i began this paper by describing the first experiences which european travellers would have when travelling to that foreign and distant country which is australia. and i chose to describe that experience in coordinates of time and space. the reason to do this is that these coordinates seem to be even more relevant after the arrival in cities like melbourne or sydney. they are modern, sophisticated and thriving metropolis, which captivate the traveller with their dynamism, prosperity and a sense of on-going possibilities of change and progress. the country which was once thought to be the confinement of convicts has become for many their own “eldorado”. this is the first glimpse of australia that most travellers first encounter but it is not the only one. far away from the coast, travelling thousand of miles inland through a mythical and extraordinary landscape, other australians, the original dwellers of this land, struggle to survive in a world which has been profaned and which is still threatened. for millennia before the arrival of the white peoples, indigenous peoples lived a dignified existence by hunting and gathering, keeping a close and respectful relationship with their environment. australian indigenous peoples believe the earth is sacred and it contains a seed power called jiva or guruwari. in the indigenous world-view, every event or life that occurs in a particular place leaves behind a residue as plants leave behind 17 their seeds. so the natural world becomes a footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created it. indigenous peoples do not subscribe to the myth of the atomised individual. they extend their sense of the self to include the family, the nation, the dreaming trails, the landscape and the cosmos. an aboriginal legend tells the story of three sisters called meehni, wimlah and gunnedoo from the katoomba tribe, who fell in love with three brothers of the nepean tribe. their tribal laws prohibited their marriage but the three brothers didn’t accept the law and tried to capture the three sisters by force. that stirred a great dispute between the two tribes which went to war. afraid of the three sisters getting hurt, the witchdoctor decided to turn them into rocks until the battle was over. but the witchdoctor was killed in the battle and the three beautiful sisters remain today as the beautiful rock formation known as the three sisters mountain. indigenous australia speaks earth language and exudes a spirituality which comes from below, or paraphrasing meister eckhart, of a heaven which is as much below our feet as above our head. does this spirituality which links mankind to earth apply to the rest of australia? is this modern, industrialised and wealthy country eager to have a multiple identity or will it choose to keep intact its white anglo-identity against the threatening tide of foreign, prospective settlers from other races? according to pile, the identity of white australia is linked to the city, which becomes a metaphor for power and civilisation as well as mind and space, in which buildings mobilise, organise and house different times, spaces and functions. ardener’s article explores time and space in relationship to women and the dwelling place as a symbol of an entwined system of power relationships based on gender differentiation. she starts by pointing out that the use of spatial terms is also embedded in language. terms such as `high society´, `wide application´, `spheres of interest´, `narrow-mindedness´, `political circles´, `deep divides of opinion´, and so on, corroborate this idea and establish a link between the “real” physical world and the social reality. following goffman’s 18 argument, shirley ardener says that the division of hierarchies and social structure is depicted micro-ecologically, that is, through the use of small-scale metaphors. this suggests two things: on the one hand, space reflects social organisation; on the other, space exerts its own influence, so the place of action determines action. from this point of view, and using an extreme example, most people would probably agree that a dozen people nude on a nudist beach is not the same thing as a dozen people nude in the house of commons. ardener also asserts that behaviour and space are mutually dependent. she agrees with judy matthews regarding the fact that social identity is partly determined by social constituents of the group’s environments, that is, people define space as well as space defines the people in it. thus, the `court´ is where the king is and `churchgoers´ are people who go to church. ardener says, now paraphrasing goffman, that objects are affected by the place in space of other objects. three separate pieces of cloth, one green, one white, and one orange can mean nothing in particular. the same pieces sewn together and hanging from a flagpole do definitely mean something. in his book cultural representations and signifying practices, stuart hall highlights how representation produces meaning by reminding us of a very important premise: things – objects, peoples, events in the world – do not have in themselves any previous or fixed meanings. it is us who make things meaningful. therefore, things will change from culture to culture, from individual to individual, from place to place. so, a stone on a beach is not the same thing as a stone on a road and it is not the same thing as a stone in a museum. even colours can have meanings. among the atoni of indonesia, south is red (it is also associated with rulers), east is white (and it is connected with warriors), west is black (and it is associated with the village headman) and the north is yellow. and space, colour and meaning can also interrelate with each other, as happens with the irish flag, where green symbolizes the native people of ireland, orange stands for the british supporters of william of orange 19 who settled in northern ireland in the 17th century and white, in the centre of the flag represents, peace between roman catholics and protestants. accordingly, not only the presence of an object but quite often its absence can be very important, as we will see later. the study of space brings also into consideration the notion of boundaries, both physical and symbolic, where the difference between “what it is” and “what it is not” is put to test. the lavish hospitality shown occasionally to guests at the spanish table is an example of lowering the defences of the family’s circle and opening the doors to a stranger. moreover, it suggests that the visitors are outsiders; otherwise they would not be presented with a banquet. the realities of everyday life offer many possibilities to explore how place is socially constructed. the home also becomes an expression of the self. its location in the city landscape and its intrinsic qualities in terms of the building’s age, construction and style reinforce identity and status in its dwellers. andrew sayer summarizes the relationship of the subject, space and society this way: what you are depends not just in what you have, together with how you conceive yourself, but on how others relate to you, on what they understand you to be, and to a considerable extent on how people have to adopt meanings, roles, and identities which pre-exist them. (sayer 206) this multiplicity of identities that we are constantly enacting in our never-ending encounters with the other are dictated, to a lesser or greater extent, by structures of meaning and power. pile also refers to stallybrass and white’s work, in the politics and poetics of transgression, where they argue that european cultures are ordered and maintained through the social distinction of 20 high and low value, which they illustrate providing a categorical distinction of the body, which they term “classical and grotesque”. they point out that orifices are absent in classical statues while low value representations of the body usually use grotesque masks and costumes with prominent breasts, belly, buttocks and genitals. these distinctions are important not only because they speak of differences, whether they are of class, race, gender, sexuality and so on, but because they draw attention to the fact that those nets of meaning, identity and power are not possible without distinctions between high and low (place, again) and without the articulation of those distinctions in the domains of the body and the city. what is interesting about stallybrass and white’s perspective, pile adds, is that for the powerful to proclaim themselves as high value, they need to find, name and maintain others who are not of high value. this explains why the powerful are constantly looking at things which are considered outside them to denigrate them and see them as opposite and separate. they look at them with desire and disgust, in complete fascination with the “other”. stallybrass and white also establish an internal relationship between power and fear (expressed as shame, embarrassment or disgust and desire), which manifests itself in the city in different ways such as the sewer, the slum, the rat, the proletarian, the nomad, the bourgeois and the prostitute. in the nineteen century european city, the fear of difference became a reality through the gap between the suburbs and the slums, the grand building and the gutter, the respectable classes and the lumpen. the “other” was perceived not only as a separate entity but as a possible agent of pollution and contamination. in 1844 engels described a situation in manchester in which the slums where hidden behind respectable streets with shops. and in postcolonial discourses, the lives of the savages were described as “dirty”. this aversion to “dirt”, deeply engrained in some cultures and which exerts an important role in the early years of the individuals who belong to them, is always latent in the 21 transformations of cities. “dirty” and “ugly” are usually linked and they are hidden from view. power, social, and economic inequalities of cities all over the world coexist with the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of the thousands or millions of peoples who live in them. but not everybody is allowed their own space. alienation and marginality are created as a sub-product of a landscape which maps visible and invisible relations of power. the cityscape is legible because it leaves clear markings of where the individual is. it also informs the individual of where they can be. strolling through the streets of melbourne, the traveller often runs into objects which remind them of indigenous cultures. art galleries and shops exhibit and sell boomerangs, paintings, and musical instruments, such as, didgeridoos and rainsticks. in the past, museums dedicated several rooms to explain the history of indigenous peoples and the impact of the european colonization on them. and a quick look at the syllabus of most schools and colleges in town nowadays shows how easy it is to find courses on indigenous australia. but, where are they? one can live six months in melbourne and can never encounter an indigenous-looking person. one can hear about them, read about them, contemplate the artefacts they create, but one is rarely able to see them. it seems as if the city which celebrates their culture in earnest has cast them outside its boundaries. many agree that melbourne and sydney’s skylines represent one of the faces of capitalism. the mobility of capital investment in cities is usually reflected in tall structures, such as, monuments and skyscrapers. this idea is further developed in pile’s book by de certau, who claims that the view from above creates a city scene that celebrates its dynamism, the excesses of money and power and its energy and vitality, which complement each other. deprived of identity, tall buildings become ultimate symbols of power and money. the entrepreneurial city detaches itself from earth, creating new spaces of segregation of public space and private space, of culture and nature. 22 de certeau’s view poses an interesting opposition between “from above” and “from down below” which adds another approach to the two main narratives which interweave and overlap in current australia and that have been sketched through this paper. the conflicts, spurred on by the clash of two opposite world views, can be traced to and within the cities, which, as the spaces where the structures of power are located, produce actions, thoughts and beliefs that trigger some of those tensions. while this dynamics is taking place, australia has another challenge to meet: the constant flow of new migrants who threatens once again its white identity. this paper began by inviting the reader to stretch their imagination and travel to australia. it also invited the reader to ponder on issues – identities, displacement, space, city as centre of powerwhich affect everyone and which take place anywhere. finally, this paper aimed, although it was not stated, to bring australia closer and to suggest that the most defying challenges australians face are within them as much as these challenges are within all of us regardless of what country we are living in. as aldous huxley put it: our mind still has its darkest africas, its unmapped borneos and amazonian basins… a man consists of … an old world of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of new worlds… some people never consciously discover their antipodes. others make an occasional landing (huxley 67). references ardener, s. ground rules and social maps for women: an introduction. oxford: berg, 1993. 1-8 hall, s. cultural representation and signifying practices london: open up, 1997. 61-63 23 huxley, a. heaven and hell. london: grafton, 1956. 67 money-kyrle, r. e. “the world of the unconscious and the world and the world of commonsense.” british journal for the philosophy of science nº 7, 1956. 86-96. lowental, d. “geography, experience and imagination: towards a geographical epistemology”, annals of the association of american geographers nº 51. 1961. 241-260 pile, s. the body and the city. london: routledge, 1996. 19-31, 184-189, 221 256. stallybrass, p. and white, a. in the politics and poetics of transgression. ithaca: cornell up, 1986. sayer, a. “on the dialogue between humanism and historical humanism in geography.” kobayashi, a. and s. mackenzie (eds.) remaking human geography. london: unwin hyman, 1989. 206-226. microsoft word lyndall ryan 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 ‘the long shadow of remembrance’: remembering the debate about massacre in the black war in tasmania lyndall ryan abstract: the black war in tasmania 1823-1834, is widely accorded by historians as one of the best documented of all australia’s colonial frontier wars. yet debate still rages about whether massacre was its defining feature and whether it accounted for the deaths of many aborigines. as keith windschuttle pointed out in 2002, this is an important debate because it reflects on the character of the australian nation and the behaviour of its colonial forbears in seizing control of aboriginal land. to understand how the debate took shape and where it stands today, this paper reviews its origins in 1835 and then shows how it was played out over three historical periods: 18351870; 1875-1939; and 1948-2008; by focussing on the key protagonists and how they used the available sources and methods and explanatory frameworks to make their case. the paper finds that in the first period, the belief in widespread massacre dominated the debate, drawn from oral testimony from the victorious combatants. in the second period, the belief in massacre denial took hold, based on the doctrine of the self-exterminating aborigine. in the third period however, the protagonists engaged in a fierce contest for control of the debate. one side argued for massacre denial, based on the belief that more settlers than aborigines were killed in the black war while the other argued for the opposite case, based on the belief that the evidence for massacre was now too overwhelming to be dismissed. the paper concludes that the massacre debate today is a microcosm of the wider debate about the impact of settler colonialism on indigenous peoples; and in particular about the humanity of the tasmanian aborigines as a hunter gatherer people. above all it reflects the reluctance of many white australians today, to come to terms with incontrovertible evidence about our violent past and to seek reconciliation with the aboriginal survivors. keywords: tasmania, massacre, memory, historians, aborigines copyright ©2009 lyndall ryan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 introduction in 2002, historian keith windschuttle claimed that, from his own ‘exhaustive’ reading of the sources relating to the black war in tasmania (1823-1834) he could find only rare incidents of massacre and that overall, more settlers than aborigines were killed in the conflict (windschuttle 2002: 131-166). in making these claims, however, he was simply the latest in a long line of historians to enter the massacre debate which has dominated the historiography of the black war since 1835. the debate is central to understanding the wider debates about settler colonialism and how australian historians have framed the past. how then did the debate begin, how did it develop and where does it stand today? to investigate these questions, this paper has selected for analysis the arguments made by the key historians who have shaped the debate over the last 173 years. to understand how they have used the available sources and methods and explanatory frameworks to make their case, the discussion focuses on three historical periods: the first from 1835 to1870 when the black war was still vivid in colonial memory; the second from 1875 to 1939 when the ideas and beliefs of human evolutionary science dominated the debate; and the third period from 1948 to 2008 when competing views about settler activism and aboriginal resistance almost took the debate to an impasse. in taking this approach the key components of the debate can be identified and their impact on the debate today can be assessed. 1835-1870 the massacre debate took off at the end of the black war, when historians were confronted with the grim statistic that fewer than 250 aborigines had survived. what had happened to the rest? if there were few aborigines at the war’s outset, then how had they managed so effectively to terrorise the colonists for so long? if, however, there were many more, how had their numbers declined so rapidly? faced with this moral dilemma, historians looked to the colonists for some explanations. henry melville a radical journalist and newspaper editor set the parameters of the debate. arriving in tasmania during the war’s second phase in 1827 or 1828 he quickly found employment on the leading opposition newspaper. some of his articles and reports which were based on interviews with settlers in the war zones and discussions with the professional elite in hobart, became the basis of his own account of the black war, published in 1835 (mackaness 1965). melville was in no doubt that when the war escalated in late 1826, the aborigines were ‘massacred without mercy’. ‘at this period’, he wrote, ‘it was common for parties of the civilized portion of society to scour the bush, and falling in with the tracks of the natives, during the night to follow them to their place of encampment, where they were slaughtered in cold blood’ (mackaness 1965:71) and that the effect of martial law, which was in operation from november 1828 to february 1832, ‘was to destroy, within twelve months after its publication, more than two thirds of these wild creatures, who by degrees dwindled away till their populous tribes were swept from the face of the earth’ (mackaness 1965:79). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 however the conflict was far too fresh in popular memory for him to identify the perpetrators let alone the dates and locations of their awful deeds. the ‘failure’ to produce ‘real’ evidence would lead a later generation of historians to question his conclusions. john west faced a similar problem. a congregational minister and also a journalist he arrived in tasmania four years after the war had ended and quickly realized that it had been a defining moment in the colony’s history. as a leading opponent of convict transportation and an ardent advocate of colonial self-government however, he championed the colony’s future at the expense of its violent past. in the history of tasmania published in 1852, he was ambivalent about the use and extent of massacre in the black war. he offered four examples of how it probably happened and like melville, believed that it was inappropriate to identify the perpetrators and witnesses, let alone the dates and places where the massacres took place. he explained his decision to take this approach in the following way: it would be a waste of time even to condense, in the most succinct relation, all the incidents that occurred. narrative is tedious by the monotony of detail, and the events themselves were recorded by those who witnessed them, with ominous brevity. such crimes were of daily occurrence; perhaps sometimes multiplied by rumour, but often unheard and unrecorded….the poet of the iliad did not describe more numerous varieties, in the slaughter of his heroes (shaw 1971:283). he admitted that massacre had been an unfortunate component of the war, but he also firmly believed that it was more useful for the colonists to ‘move on’ from the horrors of the past to prepare for a rosy future of self-government where the aborigines, which he now believed were on ‘the brink of extinction’ could be conveniently forgotten (shaw 1971: 285). james bonwick disagreed. an evangelical schoolteacher, he had arrived in tasmania in 1842, eight years after the war had ended, and like west was also surprised to find that memories of the war, dominated the colonial psyche. he began to interview settlers and stock-keepers about their experiences and when he moved to victoria in 1849, collected even more accounts from colonists who had left tasmania in the mid 1830s and who were it seems, anxious to recall their involvement in some of the war’s more shocking incidents. in the last of the tasmanians, published in 1870, he furnished in some cases enough clues for the reader to identify the informant, the date of the specific incident and the place where it happened. in all he mentioned 16 instances of massacre, with a combined loss of at least 300 aboriginal lives. if any reader was in doubt that massacre was widely used to dispose of hundreds of aborigines in the black war, then bonwick’s account appeared to offer more than enough evidence to dispel it. at the end of this period, the debate appeared to have been resolved in favour of widespread massacre. this is not surprising. the black war was still a vivid memory for many colonists in tasmania and victoria and stories of massacre were pervasive in both colonies. by the time bonwick’s work was published in 1870 however, memories of the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 war were beginning to fade and some colonists were disturbed that his book had generated international interest in the war and in the fate of ‘the last of the tasmanian aborigines’. with tasmania’s violent past returning to haunt them, some colonists sought their own champion who would make the past more palatable. 1875-1939 if the hour produces the man, then james erskine calder, the colony’s former surveyor general, filled the breach. he had arrived in the colony at the height of the black war in 1829 and became firmly committed to the settlers’ determination to transform tasmania into a vast sheepwalk. determined to restore the colony’s reputation, that he believed had been tarnished by bonwick’s work, he located the ‘nineteen awful volumes’ of official archival sources of the war in the colonial secretary’s office in hobart and found a very different story of the black war from bonwick’s account. instead of reports of massacres he found instead, numerous accounts of ‘fictitious fights’, which ‘though still repeated by lovers of the marvelous and horrible, were found to be utterly false on investigation’ (calder 1875:7). he continued: i know of no trustworthy record of more than one, two, three or at most four persons being killed, in any one encounter. the warfare, though pretty continuous, was rather a petty affair, with grossly exaggerated details – something like the story of the hundred dead men, reduced, on inquiry, to three dead dogs….up to the time of their voluntary surrender …the [aborigines] not only maintained the ground everywhere …. they had by far the best of the fight; … and as far as i can learn, at least five of the [settlers] dying for one of the [aborigines] (calder 1875:8). furthermore, he argued, the aborigines were responsible for their own demise. they had died, not from mass killings by the colonists, but from intertribal wars and ‘to the prevalence of epidemic disorders; which, though not introduced by the europeans, were possibly accidentally increased by them…and their own imprudence’ in refusing to use european remedies to treat them (calder 1875: 25-7). from that moment, massacre denial took hold. based on the doctrine of aboriginal selfextermination, calder’s work absolved the colonists from responsibility for the past. indeed massacre denial had some interesting spin offs. in 1898, james backhouse walker suggested that at the colony’s founding massacre at risdon cove in 1804, the cannon, which every one agreed had been fired at the aborigines, may have been ‘loaded with blank cartridge’ rather than ‘grape’, because ‘we have no means of deciding’ (walker 1973: 52). by the end of nineteenth century the massacre debate appeared to have been resolved, with a resounding victory for the massacre denialists. this is not surprising. the era was dominated by the doctrine of aboriginal self-extermination, derived from discourse of scientific racism which placed the tasmanian aborigines at the lower end of the human evolutionary scale where they were considered as far too primitive to withstand british coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 colonisation. by world war ii this discourse had relegated the black war to a melancholy footnote in tasmania’s history in which the aborigines had simply ‘faded away’ (giblin 1939: 20). 1948-2008 at the end of world war ii however the debate was rekindled. clive turnbull, a war correspondent who was imbued with ‘the long shadows of massacre remembrance’ handed down by his own family which had settled in tasmania in the 1820s, produced his powerful text, black war: the extermination of the tasmanian aborigines. from his exhaustive search of the newspaper and official published sources of the war he was in no doubt that massacre played a key role in the extermination of the aborigines. he claimed that in 1828, ‘the wiping out of the aborigines began in earnest’ (turnbull 1965: 80) and that most massacres had probably occurred during the martial law phase, between november 1828 and january 1832 (turnbull 1965: 97). but he could find little real evidence for the fragmentary accounts of massacre in the published sources were too garbled to make sense of. perhaps his experience as a war correspondent enabled him to read between the lines. twenty years later, however, turnbull’s claims were contested by brian plomley, the editor of the tasmanian journals of the conciliator, g.a. robinson (plomley 1966). despite the fact that robinson had recorded several instances of massacre which had not previously been in the public record, plomley was convinced that massacre was a rare event in the black war. in his annotated bibliography of the tasmanian aborigines, published in 1969, he questioned in particular, bonwick’s claims about widespread massacre: his uncritical acceptance of the stories told him by “old hands” has reduced their value considerably. bonwick’s statements, if not confirmed from primary sources, should largely be considered as suspect, and opened to doubt in great or small degree. many of his informants had little or no understanding of the events they witnessed, if indeed they themselves witnessed them (plomley 1969). plomley’s attack was taken very seriously by younger scholars like me. embarking on my own research into the history of the tasmanian aborigines, i largely avoided bonwick’s work. in my own book, the aboriginal tasmanians, i argued that aboriginal resistance rather than settler activism was the key feature of the black war and believed that most aborigines were probably killed in ones and twos although at four times the rate of the settlers (ryan 1981:174). while i did record six instances of massacre, i concluded that they had little bearing on the war’s outcome. lloyd robson, tasmania’s leading historian, disagreed. like turnbull he was also a tasmanian ‘native son’, brought up with ‘the long shadows of massacre remembrance’. in a history of tasmania volume i, he made a particular study of at least eleven incidents of massacre during the black war, based on his exhaustive reading of all the known sources (robson 1983: 210-253). this damning evidence left robson in no doubt that massacre was widely used to exterminate the aborigines (robson 1983:211-219). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 at this point the massacre debate reached an impasse. the evidence appeared to support both points of view. what was needed now was an account which brought settler activism and aboriginal resistance together. however, this did not happen. a decade later, plomley re-entered the debate. in his exhaustive survey of the newspaper and archival sources of the war, published in the aboriginal/settler clash in van diemen’s land 1803-1831, he was determined to present what he called the ‘written record’ as unfettered data so that readers could, objectively, reach their own conclusions about massacre (plomley 1992:7). he had particular respect for some of the archival sources: so far as the official record is concerned, it is on the whole a factual one because it is based on statements by the magistrates of the various districts. the errors here lie chiefly in the exaggerations of the informants, who striving to present their cases in the best possible light claimed that larger bodies of aborigines were involved, or were killed, and that greater damage was done (plomley 1992:7). but he little respected the integrity of newspaper sources, in particular the non-official press, which ‘not only paid as much attention to rumour as to events, but commented freely upon the situation. rumour sometimes led a newspaper to proclaim atrocities in one issue and refute them in the next’ (plomley 1992:8). yet some of these ‘rumours’ of massacre were recorded as fact by g.a. robinson in his journals. instead of following up the stories he contended instead, that ‘wanton attack and illtreatment by the settlers was confined to a few individuals’ and only sometimes ‘by the mob’, although he did acknowledge that the ‘ku klux klan type mob who hunted down and killed parties of aborigines is on record in robinson’s journals, but as might be expected was never the occasion for comment’ (plomley 1992:9). furthermore, ‘the decline in the population was, generally speaking, gradual, although more or less rapid at one time or another’ (plomley 1992:11) and that in 1824, there were only 600 aborigines in the war zone of eastern part of tasmania. yet none of the contemporary evidence supported this conclusion. had he compared g.a. robinson’s reports of massacre with accounts in the colonial press and also the official sources, he might have reached a different conclusion. plomley’s unrivalled reputation as a scholar however, placed his findings beyond criticism and conferred on this particular work the status of an objective historical document. in 1995 for example, henry reynolds used it as the key source to argue that ‘the numbers [of aborigines] actually killed by europeans may have been less than is generally supposed’ (reynolds 1995: 51), that the massacres that robinson recorded along the meander river ‘were rare in tasmania’ (reynolds 1995:79) and that ‘the mortality rate on each side was more even: perhaps somewhere between 150 and 250 tasmanians were coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 killed in conflict with the europeans after 1824 (with another 100 or 150 dying before that date), while they killed about 170 europeans’ (reynolds 1995:82). in removing massacre almost entirely from the black war, reynolds had, albeit unintentionally, established the pre-conditions for keith windschuttle to enter the debate in 2002. however, windschuttle’s idiosyncratic approach to the investigation of eleven alleged incidents of massacre, in which, like plomley, he summarily dismissed or wilfully ignored just about every known piece of contemporary evidence (windschuttle 2002: 131166), led other historians to reach the opposite conclusion. they now considered that these incidents had probably taken place after all (boyce 2003, mcfarlane 2003, ryan 2003). rather than shutting down the debate, as windschuttle had expected to do, he has, perversely, opened it up new methods of investigation. many recent studies of the black war, including investigations of specific incidents of massacre and nuanced studies of specific regions in colonial tasmania, have concluded that massacre was most likely to have been used as a deliberate strategy to destroy targeted groups of aborigines in particular areas of tasmania during specific phases of the black war (breen 2001, ryan 2006, 2008, kiernan 2007, mcfarlane 2008, madley 2008). this new research leaves the reader in no doubt that the strategic use of massacre in the war resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of aboriginal men, women and children. this evidence offers the clearest explanation yet for the grim statistic that historians first confronted in 1834, that fewer than 250 aborigines had survived. conclusion in 2008, the massacre debate has turned full circle from its origins in 1835.the long shadow of massacre remembrance, that informed the debate at the outset, only to be discarded in later periods, has gained new resonance. while the debate is by no means settled, more recent research suggests that it has already made the transition from its exclusively tasmanian context to comparative trans national settings. in this new environment the massacre debate will, undoubtedly, take off into interesting and important new directions. references bonwick, j. the last of the tasmanians; or, the black war in van diemen’s land. london: sampson low, son, & marston, 1870. boyce, j. ¨fantasy island¨ whitewash: on keith windschuttle’s ‘the fabrication of aboriginal history.’ robert manne (ed). melbourne: black inc, 2003. boyce, j. van diemen’s land. melbourne: black inc, 2008. breen, s. contested places tasmania’s northern districts from ancient times to 1900. hobart: centre for tasmanian historical studies, 2001. calder, j.e. some account of the wars, extirpation, habits etc. of the native tribes of tasmania. hobart: henn and co., 1875. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 giblin, r.w. the early history of tasmania, vol. ii: the penal settlement era, 1804-1818, collins, sorell and arthur. melbourne: melbourne university press in association in oxford university press, 1939. kiernan, b. blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from sparta to dafur. new haven: yale university press, 2007. melville, henry. the history of van diemen’s land from the year 1824 to 1835 inclusive. mackaness, j. (ed). sydney horwitz: grahame, 1965. mcfarlane, i. ¨cape grim¨ whitewash: on keith windschuttle’s ‘the fabrication of aboriginal history. robert manne (ed). melbourne: black inc., 2003. mcfarlane, i. beyond awakening. the aboriginal tribes of northern tasmania: a history. hobart: jointly published by fullers bookshop, riawunna and the community, place & heritage research unit, university of tasmania, 2008. madley, b. ¨from terror to genocide; britain’s tasmanian penal colony and australia’s history wars.¨ journal of british studies, 47, january, 2008, pp. 77-106. plomley, n.j.b. (ed). friendly mission: the tasmanian journals and papers of george augustus robinson 1829-1834. hobart: tasmanian historical research association, 1966. plomley, n.j.b. an annotated bibliography of the tasmanian aborigines. london: royal anthropological institute of great britain, 1969. plomley, n.j.b. the aboriginal/settler clash in van diemen’s land 1803-1831. occasional paper no.6, hobart: queen victoria museum & art gallery tasmania in association with the centre for tasmanian historical studies, university of tasmania, 1992. reynolds, h. fate of a free people. ringwood vic: penguin books australia, 1995. robson, l. l. a history of tasmania volume i: van diemen’s land from the earliest times to 1855. melbourne: oxford university press, 1983. ryan, l. the aboriginal tasmanians. st lucia qld: university of queensland press, 1981. ryan, l. ¨who is the fabricator?¨ whitewash: on keith windschuttle’s ‘the fabrication of aboriginal history. robert manne (ed). melbourne: black inc., 2003. ryan, l. ¨massacre in tasmania: how do we know?¨ australia and new zealand law and history journal, 2006. < http//www.anzlhsejournal.auckland.ac.nz/pdfs2006/paper-6-:121 > ryan, l. ¨massacre in the black war in tasmania 1823-34: a case study of the meander river region, june 1827.¨ journal of genocide research, 10: 4, 2008, pp. 479-499. shaw, a.g.l. the history of tasmania by john west. sydney: published in association with the royal australian history society and angus and robertson, 1971. turnbull, c. black war: the extermination of the tasmanian aborigines. melbourne: f.w. cheshire, 1948. walker, j.b. early tasmania: papers read before the royal society of tasmania during the years 1888 to 1899. tasmania: t.j. hughes, government printer, 1973. windschuttle, k. the fabrication of aboriginal history volume i: van diemen’s land 1803-1847. sydney: macleay press, 2002. lyndall ryan, b.a. dip.ed (sydney), phd (macquarie), d. univ (uni sa), is honorary conjoint professor in the school of humanities and social sciences at the university of newcastle, australia. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 lyndall ryan’s long interest in aboriginal history has contested two long held beliefs: that aboriginal people did not resist colonial occupation of their lands; and that the colonists did not actively destroy them, rather they ‘faded away’ from introduced disease. in the aboriginal tasmanians 1981, 1996), she argued that contrary to widespread belief, the tasmanian aborigines had resisted colonial occupation and had not ‘faded away’ in 1876 or in any other period of human history. more recently, in articles published in journal of genocide research, the australian and new zealand law and history journal, and in the entry on tasmania in the international online encyclopaedia of mass violence she offers new evidence that colonial massacre played a significant part in rapid aboriginal population decline in the 19 th century. microsoft word 8camps&grau coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 philosophy for the body, food for the mind montserrat camps-gaset sergi grau abstract: ancient greek philosophers stressed the importance of asceticism, in order to increase wisdom, sometimes reaching the point of starvation. neglecting one’s own body by strict ascetic practices, which included a very poor and limited diet, led to a higher status at the philosophical level and was a way to ideal perfection. food or rather the refusal of it played a crucial role in their philosophy. ancient biographers tell us about this struggle against material needs, whereas at the same time some comic texts bear witness to the contrast with ordinary people’s way of eating. when christianity took over ancient civilization and became the dominant ideology, the ideal of perfection focused on salvation and union with god. in order to attain this divine union, which recalled the original perfection before sin, all passions should be controlled, especially sex and food. depriving the body from almost any nourishment was the safest way to attain a full development of the soul and a perfect knowledge of god. in the west, the ideal of perfection has changed throughout history up to the present, from ancient philosophy to spiritual salvation, purity or even aesthetic excellence, all of which are subjective concepts of perfection to be attained by individuals through despising material food, sometime to the point of starvation. keywords: ancient greek philosophy; asceticism; biographies; diogenes laertius; women saints a few years ago, at an advanced modern greek course for foreigners in athens, a divorced woman of british origin, having lived in germany and the usa and speaking fluent english, german and french, in her forties, very thin and looking very pale and emaciated, explained that she ate only once a day and very frugally. when she was asked why, her answer was “because it is important for our salvation”. her words did not put the stress on health, or well-being, or a longer life, but on “salvation”, whatever it meant, and she spoke in a collective plural, “our”, instead of using an individual “my”. it developed into a longer conversation in which she stated that she had converted copyright©2011 montserrat camps-gaset & sergi grau. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 to orthodox christianity and come to greece, having no previous knowledge of its ancient history or of its ancient or modern language, seeking knowledge and, in her words, “the birthplace of wisdom”. on the other hand, the daughter of a colleague went through a long and very serious period of anorexia. being a brilliant student as she was, good-looking and belonging to a structured and loving family, she had nevertheless a very different idea of herself, looking for physical and aesthetic perfection in her own, very subjective, terms. at the time, our research was focused on the concept of wisdom, the perception of the body and the biographical narrative, or in which way the account of a philosopher’s life is related to a philosophical doctrine. both cases (and many others which could be taken as examples) made us think that subjects and patterns of the past could be found through history up to the present day and could help to explain modern points of view in terms of personal identity and the idea of the individual self. does obtaining wisdom necessarily mean a certain diet? is it possible to define an inverse relationship between bodily and intellectual nourishment? does a subjective idea of perfection, either spiritual or intellectual or aesthetic or physical, include a need for self-destruction, which should be rather the opposite of perfection? we tried to follow the path of these questions along the ancient witnesses of wisdom, spiritual life and food, well aware that problems of the past are often the background of problems of the present and looking for what image of reality is created through narrative (in this case, biographical narrative). we have inherited a tradition deeply rooted in hellenism and christianity in which reality was often defined in dualistic, opposite terms: body and soul, matter and intellect (or mind, or spirit), good and evil, heaven and hell, even man and woman. in this context, we want to look at the relationship between body, soul and what nourishes both. modern medicine and psychiatry will probably put the stress on the interdependence of all parts and features of individuals, but we ask what the perception of food is in connection with the development of the inner human being, of human perfection, as it is perceived at the very beginning of european thinking. ancient greek philosophers stressed the importance of asceticism, in order to increase wisdom, sometimes reaching the point of starvation. when christianity took over the ancient philosophical and religious ways of thinking and became the dominant ideology, the ideal of perfection focused on salvation and union with god. in order to attain this divine union, which recalled the original perfection before sin, all passions should be controlled, especially sex and food. in the western tradition, the ideal of perfection has changed throughout history up to the present, from ancient philosophy to spiritual salvation, purity or even aesthetic excellence, all of which are subjective concepts of perfection only to be attained by individuals through despising material food, sometimes to the point of starvation. 1. the asceticism of ancient greek philosophers ancient greeks have often been quoted, in western literature, as a source of wisdom, the origin of philosophy and a model of human life. nearly everybody is acquainted with the socratic phrase: “as for me, all i know is that i know nothing” and epicure’s phrase is also familiar: “death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 not here. and when it does come, we no longer exist”, or the pythagorean theorem we learned at school. but literature preserves also the biographies of these ancient wise men (the greatest biographer is diogenes laertius, dl, of the 3rd. cent.), and it is proper to speak, here, of men rather than persons or people, since almost all ancient greek philosophers were male. philosophy and wisdom were a male privilege, as was freedom of speech and citizenship or involvement in politics. even literature was mostly a male activity, since it meant participating in political life, and although sappho and some other lesser known female poetic voices may come to our attention for their accomplishments, they were, nevertheless, a glorious exception. the contempt towards feminine intellectual abilities is deeply rooted in western history, too. in terms of ancient philosophy, only a “he” can be used, although some feminine nouns can be traced in selected groups such as pythagorism. therefore, philosophy as a privilege of the male mind makes a particulary strong impact when proceeding from some christian women in the first centuries, as we shall see further on. regarding food, the most widespread and readily identifiable trait amongst the vast majority of ancient greek philosophers, especially as portrayed in their biographies, is their contempt for the senses, their ascetic way of life. asceticism is a fundamental feature of a philosopher’s biography: it is what ensures that he is recognized by the community as a serious professional and it is seen to embody his singular freedom of spirit. an ascetic life is ordinarily associated with one that is simple and in agreement with nature, as postulated by pythagoras (dl 8.13). this is the typical canonical interpretation, and we see it resurface in philostratus (vit. soph. 2.1.7), lucian (nigr. 26), philo (de uita contempl. 37.73), porphyry (vp 46), iamblichus (vit. pyth. 69, 228) and philostratus (apol. 1.8). the pythagorean influence stands out in all these instances. this translates in practice into a renunciation of bodily needs (eating and drinking), extreme frugality and the rejection of all forms of personal comfort. 1.1 a philosopher’s diet socrates practiced frugality, claiming that the fewer needs a man has, the closer he is to the gods (dl 2.27; see also xenophon, mem. 1.2, 60; 6, 11-14), or in the famous phrase that he eats to live, not lives to eat (dl 2.34). epicurus ate only bread, cheese and water (dl 10.11). menedemus of eritrea, unable to refuse an invitation to dinner, ate nothing but olives (dl 2.129). timon had no qualms in going without his dinner (dl 9.114). diogenes was another famed for his frugality (dl 6.21, 22-23), to the extent that he once attempted to eat raw meat, but was unable to digest it (dl 6.34). this anecdote must probably be interpreted as the biographical manifestation of the return to nature claimed by the school of the cynics, in opposition to civilization (see m. detienne, dionisos mis à mort, paris 1977, p. 153-154, engl. dionysos slain, baltimore & london 1979). zeno ate only small loaves and honey (dl 7.13) or at the very least endeavoured to eat only uncooked food (dl 7.26), although he was somewhat less vigilant on the subject of drinking at banquets, claiming that lupins are too bitter, but when they are soaked they become sweet (dl 7.26). pythagoras declared himself wholeheartedly against the excessive consumption of food and drink (dl 8.9) and sought to train men to eat only uncooked food and to drink only plain water (dl 8.13), although delatte (1922:176) coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 views this pythagorean doctrine as a “contamination des theories pythagoriciennes par l’idéal cynique”. his own diet consisted solely of bread and honey, vegetables, and occasionally fish (dl 8.19). and whilst we are in the dark as to the nature of the special food epimenides received from the nymphs (dl 1.114), what is clear is that it was enough for him to live on over a long period of time, suggesting that he too must have been fanatically frugal, which may have contributed to his reputation among modern anthropologists as a greek representative of shamanism (see dodds 1951, p. 140-168). in practice, this frugality when it comes to food often took the form of vegetarianism: abstaining from both eating meat and drinking wine was the ultimate symbol of asceticism, since it implies purity of the soul, according to pythagoras, who would go down as one of the founding fathers in the history of vegetarianism (dl 8.19). nevertheless, there is some debate as to the extent of pythagoras’ vegetarianism, which appears to have been far less strict than that of empedocles: indeed, he allowed the sacrifice of inanimate animals (dl 8.19), although it is also asserted that he allowed the eating of all animals, with the exception of oxen and rams, and that he had no qualms in allowing athletes to train on meat (dl 8.12. 20).when considering these passages, some authors talk of pythagoras’s “empedoclization” (see delatte 1922, p. 175; burkert 1962 [1972], p. 180-182 and n. 111; and especially balaudé 1997; on vegetarianism, haussleiter 1935 is a useful resource). he was convinced that this type of diet was beneficial to the health of the body and the acuteness of the intellect (dl 8.13). thus he never sacrificed any living animal: the only offerings he made to apollo delian were bread, barley and cakes, all untouched by fire (dl 8.13). not only did he abstain from all types of meat, but he went out of his way to avoid close contact with butchers and hunters (porphyry, vp 7). pythagoras’ legendary abstinence from beans (dl 8.24), which has given rise to all manner of interpretations, ranging from the purely dietary (see delatte 1930) to the religious and the doctrinal (see burkert 1962 [1972], p. 183-184.), is a separate issue and is not something we address here. heraclitus fed on only grasses and plants; not, in his case, out of any philosophical conviction, but rather owing to a willed misanthropic isolation (dl 9.3). empedocles, who was supposed to commit suicide by throwing himself in the volcano and leaving only his sandal behind, a tale which impressed hölderlin to the point of dedicating him a great work, was certainly the most militantly vegetarian of them all; so radical was he in his vegetarianism that his sacrifices to the gods comprised of an ox made of honey and flour (dl 8.53). there may also be a hint of vegetarianism in plato: according to one of the biographies, plato’s diet, no doubt influenced by pythagoras, as so many features of his life were, was of vegetables (vita anonyma 79 westermann), not animals. xenocrates is another considered to have been vegetarian by some, as he once refused to kill a sparrow who had taken shelter under his cloak (dl 4.10). this is the explanation offered by isnardi parente 1985, with aelian, vh 13.31. apollonius of tyana is also reported to have been vegetarian (philostratus, life of apollonius 1.8), and so the association between vegetarianism and the philosopher has become commonplace. a number of philosophers are explicitly cited as non wine-drinkers as a symbol of their supreme austerity. these include the likes of the well-known pythagoras (dl 8.19) and epicure (dl 10.11) and the less famous crates (dl 6.90), pittacus (dl 1.76, athenaeus x 427e) and anacharsis (dl 1.103). plato advised people who got drunk to look at themselves in the mirror when “under the influence” in order that they might behold coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 their deplorable state (dl 3.39). the anecdote that plato deliberately situated the academy in a totally remote, unkept place (porphryry, de abstin. 1.36) should also be considered in the light of this asceticism, as a further display of abstinence from all kinds of comfort. riginos (1976, p. 122) wonders whether the origins of this story might not lie in the hostile tradition’s commitment to “ridiculizing the extremes to which the philosopher went in pursuing his own doctrine”, repeating a typical biographical cliché according to which the philosopher carries his own doctrine to the extreme. in any case, this anecdote about plato’s extreme asceticism is clearly one that the tradition, or at the very least all those who cite it, sees as a positive one (see also basilius, ad adoles. 9.8084; hieronimus, adv. iouin. 2.9). abstinence from or restriction of sleep was also common, as well as austerity in clothing. philosophers are supposed to have a single garment, which is light and is worn equally in summer or winter, like that of zeno (dl 7.26-27). diogenes, the one we know for living in a barrel, was the first to wear his cloak doubled to make it last longer, and also to sleep with it (dl 6.22-23). another frequent attribute is abstinence from sexual relations and must be considered a benchmark of asceticism, both among ancient greeks and among christians. pythagoras went as far as to declare that the sexual act is unhealthy, because it weakens the body (dl 8.9). indeed, he prescribed sexual abstinence as a rule of conduct for his disciples (dl 8.19). plato, according to tradition, remained totally celibate throughout his life, and explicitly declared himself against sexual relations, for the sake of purity. one of his disciples, xenocrates, a mathematician of the 4th c. bc espouses sexual moderation, as evinced by his immense display of restraint when a courtesan tried to seduce him, as well as when some of his pupils put a prostitute into his bed: neither of both manages to get anything out of him (the scene is clearly lifted from plato’s banquet 122b-223d). asceticism is understood, moreover, as a voluntary and impassible giving up of bodily sensations, a choice to focus on certain solid and immutable truths which belong to the realm of philosophy. cynical asceticism, in particular, involved a series of highly rigorous physical exercises (for an excellent all-round discussion of the meaning and the basis of this issue, see goulet-cazé 1986): diogenes lives in a boat; in summer he rolls around in boiling sand, and in winter he embraces statues covered in snow, in sickness and in health (dl 6.23). what is more, he shows the height of contempt for his own body, demanding he not be buried, but rather left out in the open so that the beasts can devour him (dl 6.79). the purpose of these habits is expounded in doctrinal form by none other than diogenes himself (dl 6.70-71): just like athletes and musicians have to constantly exercise their body to hone the particular skills of their art, so the philosopher has to exercise his body in outright contempt for pleasure in order to achieve an excellent conditioning of the soul, since there “is nothing whatever in life that can be achieved without practice, and that alone was able to overcome every obstacle” (dl 6.71; an extremely useful detailed discussion of it can be found in goulet-cazé 1986, especially pages 195-222). diogenes laertius constantly stresses the coherence between diogenes the cynic’s doctrine and life (dl 6.71, also dl 6.28 and 64), and thus it seems evident that these ascetic anecdotes in fact have their root in their own words and doctrines. however, lately (see bracht branham & goulet-cazé 1996, especially p. 81104), there has been an attempt to show that in the cynics, and particularly in diogenes, the force of the doctrines lies not in “a set of doctrines, let alone a method, but himself” (bracht branham & goulet-cazé 1996, p. 87): it is the philosopher’s life, as demonstrated in various concrete anecdotes, that transmits the doctrine. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 in the same vein, being impassible and despising luxury is also a form of wisdom. self control and disdain for material goods was a way to distinguish important belongings from unimportant: stilpo also disdained material goods and was unconcerned with losing everything he had, because what was most important to him, his reason and his knowledge, could not be taken away from him (dl 2.115). plato is extreme in his self control, going so far as to clamp down on his own desires: when he’s thirsty, he grabs the water and throws it to the ground as a form of punishment (stobaeus 3.17.35). this anecdote is attributed to pythagoras in other traditions (see riginos 1976, p. 159), a fact which serves to demonstrate its stock nature. one of the few females in this context is hipparchia, in the 4th. c., who, after her conversion to philosophy (among cynics), scorns her own beauty, her high birth and all of her suitors in order to practice philosophical askesis (that is, ascetic exercise) alongside crates (dl 6.96). aristotle’s customs, too, are temperate to the extreme (vita vulgata 24 düring) and xenocrates meditated with himself assiduously every day, spending up to one hour in silence (dl 4.11). in short, what we have here is clearly no more and no less than the application of the philosophers’ doctrines to their own lives. many are remarked upon for their utter impassibility in the face of misfortune, such as xenophon, who does not mourn his son’s death, because he knew all along that he had fathered a mortal man (dl 2.55) and xenophanes, who buries his sons with his own hands (dl 9.20). this brings to mind a stereotypical anecdote used to exemplify the impassibility and serenity of the wise man, especially in the face of the worst of tragedies. they can also be quite simply insensitive, whatever the circumstances. another direct consequence of this asceticism is the commonplace that the philosopher possesses extreme temperance and never falls ill. zeno, for instance, was so temperate that he lent his name to a proverb: “more temperate than the philosopher zeno” (dl 7.27), and indeed he knew no disease and always enjoyed excellent health (dl 7.28). socrates was another who enjoyed an extraordinarily clean bill of health, thanks to his orderly way of life: on several occasions a plague broke out in athens and he was the only one not to catch it (dl 2.25). crates draws an explicit parallel between ascetic exercise and good health, addressing himself thus to all those who mock his rigorous practices: “courage, crates, as far as your eyes and the rest of your body is concerned: for you shall see those who now ridicule you, convulsed with disease, and envying your happiness, and accusing themselves of slothfulness” (dl 6.91-92; see the discussion of this passage by goulet-cazé 1986, p. 155-158). the parallel, in this sense, is often drawn with heracles, as a hero who can endure all manner of hardships, a vanquisher of misfortunes, the ascetic symbol par excellence, especially but not exclusively amongst the cynic philosophers (see höistad 1948, p. 3363). indeed, as well as, naturally, diogenes, who states that heracles is the very model of freedom (dl 6.41, 50, 71), others explicitly compared to heracles for their powers of endurance are crates the academic (dl 2.78), plato (dl 3.63; 5.7), zeno (dl 7.29) and cleanthes, whom zeno dubbed a “second heracles” in admiration of his temperance and because he took on as his own the ridicule directed at the hero in the works of the poets (dl 7.173). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 in some cases this asceticism, which, as we have seen, is very widespread in the biographical tradition, reflects the embodiment in a philosopher’s life of his doctrine or that of his school: this is the case of all those characters who stand out for their impassibility and capability of staying unperturbed, the lot of them stoic philosophers. nonetheless, a lack of passions and asceticism seem to characterize the philosopher in general: absolute mastery of his passions and even his bodily needs forms part of his wisdom; making it, therefore, a totally novel form of wisdom, one which does not find its way into any other group of people’s biographies and which, without a doubt, serves as a positive benchmark of the philosopher within his biographical tradition. indeed, unlike the philosopher, poets are always represented as cloaked in the latest fashions and clean-shaven, a symbol for their tendency towards luxury, for which reason they often appear seated upon soft cushions (see zanker 1995 [1997], p.156-161). indeed, popular greek morale was always well-disposed towards those able to endure all sorts of troubles, such as soldiers, whose efforts were thus shrouded with virtue (see dover 1974, p.163-164). we could argue that in the popular imagination the good philosopher goes one step further and practices asceticism, just as in later ages asceticism would come to be expected of a saint. indeed, bieler, in his analyses of the lives of later generations of philosophers, states that a strict practice of asceticism is considered a fundamental hallmark in the life of a theios aner, a “man of god”: the ascetic wise man becomes an idealized figure which in turn influences the way philosophers are depicted (see bieler 19672, p. 60-73). the fact that the most widespread conception of the philosopher was an ascetic one is also demonstrated in comedy. philemon aptly sums up this commonplace in a work whose title, the philosophers, speaks volumes (philemon, fr. 88 kassel-austin): this man adopts a new philosophy, he teaches to be hungry; nevertheless he gets disciples. bread his only food, his best desert dried figs; water his drink. these verses are also cited, in a similar context, albeit in a different order, by clement of alexandria (strom. 2.121, 12). indeed, ascetic practices were viewed with much misgiving by the wider public. their dietary regime, in particular, was subject to all sorts of taunts and comic parodies. socrates appears most frequently in aristophanes, aues 1554f., ranae 1491f., clouds 103, 119f., 198f., 649f. (see also w. schmid’s 1948’s discussion of this popular image of socrates from aristophanes), and there are as many as three well-known comedies that bear pythagoras’ name in the title (sanchis llopis 2005). and the hostile biographical traditions portray the philosophers as notorious gluttons, given to drinking, lustful and luxurious, participants in all manner of sexual liaisons, notably involving boys and prostitutes. this sort of anecdote is generally used as ammunition to refute a particular philosopher’s doctrine, by demonstrating that he does not practise what he preaches. these attempts form part of a wider-reaching, more negative biographical tradition, generally committed to taking apart at the seams the ascetic profile of the philosopher as it is depicted by other traditions. sometimes, a tradition of moderation coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 and self-control coexists without problem with a comic description of excess. not even plato himself is spared: in stark contrast to his rigorous asceticism, he eventually dies of gluttony, ironically at a marriage banquet (dl 3.2). the oratory hosted a further repertory of commonplace anecdotes, most of which are lifted from the comedy itself, or invented and distorted for the occasion: trenkner 1958, p. 154-162, offers evidence for, at the very least, lysias, demosthenes and isocrates, the three greek models of rhetoric. the latin writers cicero (de orat. 2.59.241; 2.72.292) and quintilian (inst. or. 4.2.29) instructed the orators to invent stock anecdotes, if necessary, in order to create the right atmosphere amongst the audience. finally, a letter attributed to xenophon, rival of plato according to the biographical tradition, criticizes the philosopher for, leaving aside other things related to his doctrine, gluttony. what’s more, in defiance of plato’s strict, ascetic celibacy which is asserted by late byzantine writers, diogenes laertius spends some time dwelling on the narration of plato’s numerous liaisons with young boys, prostitutes, and even with socrates’ wife, xanthippe (dl 3.29-32). the origin of these particular anecdotes lies in several erotic epigrams that plato is supposed to have dedicated to his lovers, included in the greek anthology, a fact which itself amply demonstrates their commonplace nature. following the same formula of refuting a philosopher’s doctrine by demonstrating plainly that his actions speak louder than his words, the cynics and the stoics who, as we have seen, practice the most extreme form of asceticism, find that their critics come back even stronger with an image that is its very opposite. menippus (3rd.c. bc) has a deep love of money and only lived in austerity until he was made a citizen of thebes (dl 6.99). zeno (5th.c. bc) is a glutton who loved to feast (dl 7.26). dionysius of heraclea (4th.c. bc) indulged in luxury without disguise (dl 7.167). even aristotle squandered his family fortune and was forced to become a mercenary soldier and later a medicine salesman (dl 10.8). it is equally easy to see how, taken in malam partem, epicure’ doctrine on pleasure can be misconstrued to the extreme, giving rise to the image of an epicure who is so given to over-eating that he vomits twice a day (dl 10.6) – a popular interpretation that has been passed down and is widely held by many nonspecialists today. as we have previously noted, the bulk of these interpretations can often be traced back to comedy and reflect a popular reinterpretation of asceticism: those philosophers who went to great extremes of austerity and led a simple, frugal life, putting aside their passions, are in actual fact equally extreme in their debauchery. in virtually all of these cases, furthermore, we are drawn to the conclusion that these types of anecdotes are included in the biographies as a result of the rivalries between opposing schools: the best way to discredit a person’s followers is, clearly, to discredit the master himself, showing that his way of life goes against his own doctrine. it is made clear, however, by virtue of precisely that sort of counter-reading performed by the sources themselves, that what defines the philosopher in the positive biographical traditions is asceticism and not debauchery. indeed, aristophanes’ philosophers are portrayed as perfect ascetics (clouds 412-419): choir: o man, who hast desired great wisdom from us! coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 how happy will you become among the athenians and among the greeks, if you be possessed of a good memory, and be a deep thinker, and endurance of labour be implanted in your soul, and you be not wearied either by standing or walking, nor be exceedingly vexed at shivering with cold, nor long to break your fast, and you refrain from wine, and gymnastics, and the other follies, and consider this the highest excellence, as is proper a clever man should, to conquer by action and counsel, and by battling with your tongue.” (trans. w. j. hickie) this notwithstanding, it is worth noting that aristophanes’ description makes patent a large degree of bewilderment at philosophers’ ascetic behaviour: as we have seen, in the ancient popular imagination asceticism was largely viewed as an oddity, far removed from ordinary social habits, a fact that helps explain how a mirror-image of it was able to take roots so easily. 1.2 death by starvation though seemingly accidental in a few rare cases (see grau 2010), death by starvation is usually self-imposed as a form of suicide. thus, in his despair for failing to free his country, despite all his efforts, menedemus of eretria (3rd.-2nd. c. bc) lets himself die of starvation (dl 2.143). in some versions zeno also lets himself die of starvation as a form of suicide after breaking his finger (dl 7.31). other stoics also choose this way of dying, such as dionysius “the renegade”, who commits suicide in this way for motives that we do not know (dl 7.167). what interests us mainly is that starvation is not at all something that heroes, poets or any other ancient cultural agents die from. ancient myth and literature usually attribute a certain kind of death to poets, warriors, heroes or politicians, according to the meaning of their public life. starvation is not glorious or heroic. instead, it is a kind of death that can be considered exclusive to philosophers. this could be a popular interpretation of the extreme asceticism of philosophers who are capable of enduring long periods of famine, but it also leads to the fact that intellectual wisdom and material food are situated on opposite poles and seen as almost contradictory. one of the versions regarding pythagoras’ death seems to confirm this theory. according to dicaearchus (fr. 35 wehrli), a philosopher, cartographer and mathematician of the 4th.-3rd c. b. c., pythagoras, the champion of asceticism, dies of starvation after finding refuge in a temple of the muses at metapontum, presumably to escape persecution after his house had been set on fire. heraclides of lembos, a greek philosopher who served at the court of ptolemy in egypt (2nd. c. bc) however, explains that after pythagoras buried pherecydes in delos (dl 1.118), he returns to croton, where he meets cylon, who is about to offer a splendid banquet. pythagoras refuses to attend the banquet, since he is already on his way to metapontum, where he ends his days by abstaining from eating because he no longer wants to live (dl 8.40). the second version in particular makes explicit the contrast between pythagoras and his enemy cylon with regard to food. this seems to support the hypothesis of a popular interpretation of pythagoras’ asceticism, especially with regard to his diet, which leads coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 him to his own death. diogenes laertius dedicates two epigrams to pythagoras’ dietary paradoxes, which must have seemed rather surprising to the non-initiated. the second of the two epigrams seems to refer explicitly to the second version mentioned above with regard to death by starvation (dl 8.44): so wise was pythagoras that he would touch no meats, but called it impious, bade others eat. good wisdom: not for us to do the wrong; let others impious be. (trans. r. d. hicks) 2. asceticism and food among early christians seeking a perfect life through wisdom as taught by philosophers was also an aim of christian groups of the first centuries, but they included it in the path towards a perfection which could only be found in divine life, which, in christian terms, was called the path towards salvation. in the first centuries of our era, much of philosophical thought became theological thought, and together with the great treatises on divine or human nature, a lot of works on asceticism and human behaviour were produced. we focus here on individual renunciation of food as a subjectively perceived unavoidable necessity for spiritual growth or perfection among early christians, in a similar way to the colourful description of ancient biographies above. 2.1 renunciation and balance we do not want to put the stress on moderation, but on renunciation. among christians as well as among non-christian greeks, the idea of balance of the self included a rational, well-disposed distribution of bodily functions and spiritual needs. the idea of moderation is deeply rooted in ancient greek civilization: excess is a source for many diseases and catastrophes; the religious wisdom of delphi, the central religious point of ancient greeks, is “nothing in excess”, both in spiritual and in material practices. this includes the very structure of greek religion: in the polytheistic pantheon, every god should be conveniently acknowledged, and the tragic examples of hybris caused by despising a divinity are well known (as in euripides’ tragedy hippolytus, for instance, where the hero takes no notice of aphrodite and therefore provokes his own death). nothing in excess means therefore a little bit of everything, which includes food for the well-being of the body and its survival. among the first christians, there is an important stress on moderation in ordinary life, especially in food and sex. food is necessary for daily survival, but certain restrictions are required in order to avoid the excesses of lust or the gluttony which could be harmful to the very survival of the body. an appropriately frugal diet was considered sufficient to cover the unavoidable needs of the believer, allowing him or her to dedicate him/herself fully to the more important business of attending to spiritual matters. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 this moderate diet could include olives, bread, oil, water, dried fruits, possibly cheese and very occasionally meat, everything in small proportion considered only from an extremely practical point of view. moderation means also balance, in all senses, including a broader way of seeing the whole world as well-balanced, also (see skiadaslascaratos 2001). we are not so much interested in moderation as in renunciation and the relationship between the renunciation of material food and spiritual development. restrictions on food are a part of moderation: avoiding certain foods (meat, wine, animal products and derivates, etc.) or restricting eating at certain periods (liturgical fasting) can be a way of eating included in a larger project of balanced existence. a restricted diet, from the point of view of the first christians, can focus the purely necessary maintenance of bodily health which ensures spiritual capacities towards what is really important from a religious point of view. many of the first monastic diets or ascetic advices are concerned with the necessity of preserving bodily health without indulging in any luxury or moral weakness (see rousseau 1999). at the same time, the almost complete renunciation of food at certain periods (liturgical fasting) is also a part of a system of balance: especially (but not only) in the liturgical year; the alternation of periods of fasting with periods when food is allowed (not necessarily opulent or overabundant) represents an idea of giving to bodily health what it really needs for its preservation, but not wasting any extra attention on food itself or, especially, on the body itself. it would be interesting to examine the use of periods of fasting in terms of equilibrium, although this is not exactly the aim of this short paper. nevertheless, we would like to point out that fasting is normally seen (among ancients and often in contemporary societies as well) as a way of individual renunciation, self-denial or even selfchastening, even if it is promoted by a community inside of society (such as a monastic community), whereas it acquires a different, positive meaning if it is seen as a part of a whole, that is, a certain period of time (a year or a liturgical year) which contributes towards the equilibrium of the whole (see grimm 1996). certainly, for the common people, the liturgical year provides occasions for sumptuous feasting, with the result that the fasting periods are seen as necessary complements to overwhelming excess. fasting periods like lent do not exclusively have a sense of penitence: they also anticipate a period of compensating feasts and abundance (easter). it is interesting to remember here that, in modern times, christian fasting was not confined to lent and to the penitential sense of remembering death on good friday, but that before christmas there was also a four-week period of fasting (advent), with the object of anticipating the joy of birth (and, in both cases, the immoderate overabundance of easter or christmas). renunciation as equilibrium not only of the individual human body but especially of the community which seeks a spiritual significance in the whole year also includes indulging on ritual occasions in the opposite pole of overabundance. fasting becomes feasting (on ancient greek periods of fasting and its ritual significance, see campsgaset 1993). in modern western societies, deprived of a common religious aim, excessive feasting periods like christmas have gone beyond food consumption, but still focus on family sharing of overabundant, opulent and impossible meals, whereas the subsequent fasting periods are replaced by hygienic medical advice on healthy lowcalorie diets. we shall not follow the path of the collective calendar, but go back to the way of life of those who intend a higher aim, above ordinary people. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 moderation is, therefore, an important aim for any kind of life tending to wisdom or spiritual fulfilment, intended for everybody as a general advice. food (or sex, or material properties, or human glory) should not be the centre of your life, because your life needs everything in due measure, in well-balanced proportion, in order to avoid pain and disaster. this is, roughly, how ancient greeks would put it. early christians would say more or less the same, but giving as a reason that one’s life, as human being, longs for a higher position than the worldly one: human beings are, in christian terms, destined for divine salvation. 2.2 struggling for perfection but what about people who are extraordinary? what if somebody seeks a higher level of wisdom, a surer path of perfection leading to god, like ancient philosophers did in terms of wisdom? is moderation enough? or, putting the question the other way around, is the balance between many material and spiritual aspects of human life the proper way to attain divine perfection, or does the individual need something absolutely different, something like bodily denial, for instance? christian ascetic men and women and all those who sought a degree of perfection above that of the average faithful, stressed fasting as a very important measure, together with sexual abstinence, even more crucial, if possible, on the path towards god. in fact, their daily practices and renunciations were quite similar to those narrated by the biographers of ancient philosophers: refraining from sexual intercourse, despising any material luxuries or worldly honours, despising all kind of bodily comforts, often including elementary hygienic measures, and considerably reducing either the amount or the type of food taken, or both. we shall only quote a few cases, since the number of examples here would be overwhelming. fasting could be the appropriate behaviour against sin, as a practice of penitence and self-denial, for an individual who has become aware of his/her sins and has converted. metanoia, a greek word which is difficult to translate, since it means both conversion, change of mind, and penitence, necessarily involves fasting, among other practices. if fasting is considered as a means to wash away sin, there is, to our opinion, no contradiction with balance or moderation, in spite of certain modern analyses. the crucial subject concerning food and material survival is the idea of the body. the way a society deals with food and sex (as well and with hygiene and fashion) reveals its conception of the human body and, ultimately, of human beings, but sometimes modern (and individual) prejudices are projected on ancient studies. modern scholarship on the subject is plentiful (see the excellent review of j. p. culianu 1991). it is certainly a crucial subject, but we want to stress here a contradiction which is not always pointed out in modern studies: the contradiction, in the first centuries of our time, between a greek tradition which regarded matter as contemptuous and despicable and valued spiritual and invisible things, which we can call wisdom, and, on the other hand, an incipient christian belief which considered matter as being good, because it had been created by god. we should properly speak of tension and not of contradiction, because the balance fluctuates between one pole and the other, and because the theological controversies and the philosophic christian discourse of the first centuries coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 oscillate between justification of what has been created (which includes man and his/her bodily needs) and negation of the material being as a source of distraction (or direct cause of sin; see gregory of nyssa, 4th c. ad., on the making of man and especially his way of discussing original sin). an intellectual system which made a clear dualistic distinction between body and soul, asserting that the body was created by god and therefore good, created great intellectual uneasiness on behalf of inherited tradition (see keenan 1994 p. 335-337) while two natures—the divine and incorporeal nature, and the irrational life of brutes—are separated from each other as extremes, human nature is the mean between them: for in the compound nature of man we may behold a part of each of the natures i have mentioned—of the divine, the rational and intelligent element, which does not admit the distinction of male and female; of the irrational, our bodily form and structure, divided into male and female: for each of these elements is certainly to be found in all that partakes of human life. (gregory of nyssa, on the making of man, xvi. 9. transl. h.a. wilson). at the same time, sin (or passions, if we put it in a more classical as well as patristic terms), as the spiritual burden which stops the soul from rising to the superior level of divine perfection, made it easy to attach a completely negative sense to the body, as a potential source of all possible occasions for falling down and becoming the prey of undue passion (see tertullian, on fasting, clement of alexandria, stromateis ii.20, and the short and strict advice of jerome, letters xiv, xx and cxxx). to free one from the passions often meant distancing oneself from one’s body and its needs, and from here it is a short step to despising the body as such (see reineke 1990). the christian idea of the body as a vessel containing the precious gift of a christian soul born for salvation is sometimes not very far away from the ancient greek idea of the body as a grave imprisoning the soul which has to be liberated (see clark 1999). we do not know how many of these descriptions are real. if, as it has been established above, a pattern for biographies of ancient philosophers can be produced, and if common sense stops us from honestly believing in impossible deeds, modern readers should not trust christian biographies as being truly historical, even if tradition has tried to convince us that a true religious life means sacrifice and self-denial up to impossible extremes. there are studies of the lives of ancient ascetic women (especially medieval women) made from the point of view of modern psychiatry or medicine which show that the symptoms of diseases which are well attested today are also found among ancient men and especially women (see bell 1985 and tait 1993). we will not follow this path in terms of historical reality: what matters is the perception that society had of food, body and soul and the relationship between them, not the reliability of the historical account in itself. the fact is that in the first centuries of christianity, the perception of a true religious life leading to the divine union required a severe renunciation of material and practical aspects of life, even of the conscience of one’s own body. it is interesting to see that feminine characters appear in this context, even if referred to in texts written by men. let us see two examples: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 indeed, in the beginning, melania would just taste a little oil and take a bit of something to drink in the evening (she had never used wine during her wordly life[...]. then after that she began to mortify her body with strenuous fasting. at first she took food without oil every two days, then every three days, and then every five, so that it was only on saturday and sunday that she ate some mouldy bread. she was zealous to surpass everyone in asceticism. (gerontius, life of melania the younger, 22, transl. of e.a. clark) macrina aims to overcome matter, choosing the path of the spirit and the intellect: such was the manner of their life, so great the height of their philosophy, and so holy their conduct day and night, as to make verbal description inadequate. for just as souls freed from the body by death are saved from the cares of this life, so was their life far removed from all earthly follies and ordered with a view of imitating the angelic life.[...] but these women fell short of the angelic and immaterial nature only in so far as they appeared in bodily form, and were contained within a human frame, and were dependent upon the organs of sense. (gregory of nyssa, life of macrina, trans. h. a. wilson) her asceticism points towards philosophy, towards wisdom, as did ancient philosophers, and a parallel can be drawn between her biography and the biography of philosophers mentioned above. gregory of nyssa had a deep knowledge of classical tradition, having been taught in a good scholarly education and is himself one of the greatest christian thinkers. his conception of “philosophy” agrees with that of the ancient philosophers, and the narrative of macrina’s life is probably fashioned according to the standard features of classical biography. it should be remembered that one of gregory’s most controversial writings, on life and resurrection, is a formal dialogue in which macrina explains to her brother, in very platonic terms, the truth about the afterlife. what is interesting here is that macrina, idealized, is shown as an accomplished philosopher, having attained wisdom through asceticism and renunciation. fasting is not reserved only for one sex; it is advised for penitence in general and especially for those who want to attain perfection, that is, those who live ascetic or monastic lives (see rousseau 1999). but philosophy is certainly a masculine privilege: to interpret and teach is not allowed to women, at least as a general principle. women can approach wisdom occasionally through fasting and other ascetic practices. nevertheless, there are some cases of women capable of philosophy, as texts put it, but they are always compared to males because of this intellectual ability. there are many studies on the “masculinising” aspect of primitive female asceticism: women, through denying their own feminine body and their feminine condition altogether (sex and motherhood, but “spiritual weakness” as well) are closer to a masculine model which is closer to god or, at least, not as close to passions as women are (see petersenszemerédy 1993 and castelli 1991). fasting is a duty encouraged both in men and women, but philosophy is mainly a privilege of men, and philosophy, like in ancient models, has to be attained through many renunciations, including abstinence from food. it should not be forgotten that modern views of women’s lives, especially in antiquity, are necessarily arrived at through men’s eyes (and jerome played a very particular role coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 in this sense, see letters xxiii, xxxix, cvii, cxxx). there are very few accounts written by women. it is advisable to be careful when analysing ancient reports on women: the self-awareness of ancient women is almost impossible to define, since most accounts come from men. we can approach the image that men had of women, or of certain women, and the perception society had of them; but we can hardly approach the perception women had of themselves. something similar could probably be said about certain masculine attitudes, for which we are more indebted to literary patterns than to true beliefs, but in the case of biographies of women or information about them, what has survived is mainly the way women were looked at or were supposed to be, and not real feminine behaviour or consciousness. men and women intending to attain perfection or divine wisdom have a special relationship towards food: they should refrain from eating certain food or on certain occasions or, more often, refrain from eating in general, that is, reduce the amount of food to what is strictly necessary and avoid all kinds of luxuries. food is merely subsidiary to wisdom: it has to be taken (and cared about) in order to sustain the human body, but not in order to give pleasure to it or to improve its condition as body. it becomes a pure instrument for the development of the spiritual interests (clement, stromateis ii, 20, see also rousseau 1999). this abstinence can be due to several causes, always starting with this subsidiary condition of the human body: it can be a way to express repentance from sin and a selfimposed punishment, in order to attain forgiveness and salvation (tertullian, on fasting). the penitential character of fasting can be found through all ages and religions. but it can also be a way to express what is really important to the human being, and then it is not exactly a case of self-denial o self-chastising, but of stressing one pole of dualism instead of finding a balance. refraining from food can be the way to attain upper levels of knowledge, wisdom and especially to be closer to the angels (and therefore to god) who do not need to be fed on anything (as well as not needing sexual intercourse, since they need no reproduction). the angelical nature of perfection explains the contempt towards food and the benefits of fasting. but a number of theologians and writers insist on moderation at every level, fasting included. moderation and balance are necessary and food is the nutrition of the body. gluttony may endanger the salvation of the soul, but excessive fasting is not advisable. fasting to the point of starvation is a hindrance to the proper development of a mind devoted to god. theological advice against extreme fasting is frequent among first christians, not only through simple common sense, but also as a result of theological reasoning: the limit of fasting is starvation, and, even if the human body is considered to be an instrument and not a goal in itself, to endanger one’s own life is, after all, to attack creation (jerome, letters, cxxx, 11). the body is subject to passions and passions are the product of evil; this is the way some ancient christian thinkers tried to solve the contradiction (their contradiction) between material world and divine creation, but as long as humans control and dominate passions, necessary survival and nutrition are also a part of wisdom. in this context of self-renunciation and moderation, pointing to divine knowledge, the portrait of women is more radical: if fasting (among other types of renunciation) is the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 appropriate path to attain wisdom and divine perfection, women are supposed to fast more intensely because, theoretically and according to certain (powerful) authors (like clement, gregory of nyssa, and especially jerome), they are less close to divine nature than men. in ancient biographies of female saints or ascetics, women are supposed to be stricter and more demanding in their own renunciation, even to the point of being blamed for extreme renunciation. at the same time, the advice to be less rigorous in fasting provides them with a prestige which an average moderate life would hardly bring. i knew her labour all night long with her hands at the mill to subdue her body; and she used to say: “fasting is insufficient; i give it an ally in the shape of toilsome watching, that i may destroy the insolence of esau.” she abstained absolutely from anything with blood and life in it, but taking fish and vegetables with oil on feast days, at other times she continued to content herself with a mixture of sour wine and dry bread. (palladius, the lausiac history, engl. transl. 1918) on the portrait of feminine models, we see a pattern of excellence which makes them similar to men (they become “masculinised”) in terms of knowledge and wisdom, not only through fasting, but through other measures of renunciation and behaviour (see james 1997 and castelli 1991), and, at the same time, the extreme demands which conform this excellence and which can lead them to destruction are also the reason for which they are envied by ordinary people, both men and women (see macdonald 1996). there is a tension, a contradiction, between fasting as a way to attain wisdom or the moral perfection which leads to god, and the model of excellence of this same perfection, which paradoxically leads to the destruction of balance. through exaggerated fasting, to the point of starving, women not only attain the (male) condition of being wise, but they are accepted as superior to their own condition. to put it in other words, the image of a perfect, wise woman which some conspicuous first christian thinkers had is that of a woman who makes extreme acts of renunciation (gerontius, life of melania the younger, 22.25). there are shadows and lights in this portrait, since a certain kind of renunciation (on marriage and childbirth) also provided a space of freedom for women, as has already been pointed out (see salisbury 1991), but if we speak of food renunciation, that is, of the basic nutrition of the body for its survival, it is certain that, in spite of all advice for moderation, the expectations are higher and stricter for women. in spite of all exhortations to moderation and to take proper, even if scarce, nourishment for the body, the projected image of what feminine perfection should be is far closer to destruction than to balance. this is a great distance away from the consideration of body and soul as a whole, interdependent unity (see keenan 1994: 334). ancient philosophers were seen as different from ordinary people and this difference was expressed, among other ways, in terms of food peculiarities. the first christian men and women devoted to wisdom were considered, also, in very similar terms of renunciation of bodily activities. but the new way of thinking represented by christianity in the first centuries had different ways of absorbing tradition. since matter has been created by god, it is not evil (gregory of nyssa, on the making of man). the relationship towards one’s own body, as well as towards the material world, can be transformed. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 3. conclusion through this short historical account, we have tried to show the recurrence of a pattern which we can still find nowadays. the past may seem strange compared to our modern points of view, behaviour patterns or beliefs, but if we look at it closely, we may see that some of its features have changed only outwardly. ancient texts on philosophers allow us to recognize a social model of excellence, in terms of intellectual behaviour, which survives in early christianity and can be traced throughout history. this intellectual behaviour is heavily dependant on a particular relationship towards food and its consumption or abstinence. we could follow the relationship between this model of excellence and its real influence on society, in ancient and medieval, but also in modern times, aware that texts (that is, narrative, storytelling and even philosophy or theology) do not describe the real biography or the bare facts, but produce instead an image of what is supposed (or expected) to have prestige and to be a sometimes unattainable, destructive model of excellence. it is always a question of balance (or rather a tension), asking to which extent the special demands of a certain vision of life can lead to a full accomplishment of this life or to its destruction. people’s real lives try sometimes to accommodate to this image, either intellectually or physically aesthetic, in order to attain prestige and excellence. this survey of ancient texts may help us to put under critical focus the narratives on models of excellence and their influence on the individual and collective concept of the body and the self. works cited balaude, j. f. «parenté du vivant et végétarisme radical. le défi d’empédocle», in b. cassin & j.-l. labarriere (edd.), l’animal dans l’antiquité, paris 1997, p. 3153 bell, r.m., holy anorexia, chicago & london 1985. bieler, l., θειος ανηρ. das bild des «göttlichen menschen» in spätantike und frühchristentum, i-ii, wien 1935, 1936 [reprinted darmstadt 1967]. bracht branham, r. & goulet-cazé, m.-o., the cynics. the cynic movement in antiquity and its legacy, berkeley & los angeles 1996. burkert, w., weisheit und wissenschaft: studien zu pythagoras, philolaos und platon, nuremberg 1962. 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comedia de tipos», habis 26 (1995): 67-82. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 skiadas-lascaratos, dietetics in ancient greek philosophy: plato’s concept of healthy diet, european journal of clinical nutrition, 55 (2001): 532-537 tait, g. «anorexia nervosa-asceticism, differentiation, government», australia & new zealand journal of sociology 29.2(1993):194-208 trenkner, s., the greek novella in the classical period, cambridge 1958. von arnim, h., stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 3 vols., leipzig 1903-1905. indices conscripsit m. adler, leipzig 1924 [reprinted stuttgart 1964]. zanker, p., la maschera di socrate. l’immagine dell’intellettuale nell’arte antica, torí 1997 [revised translation from german original die maske des sokrates. das bild des intellektuallen in der antiken kunst, munic 1995]. acknowledgements: this essay was written as part of the «studies in ancient greek literature and its reception» research group (2009sgr 799), funded by the generalitat de catalunya. dr. montserrat camps-gaset has been a senior lecturer of ancient greek at the university of barcelona since 1987. her fields of interest are greek religion and mythology, women’s studies and early christianity. she has published on the subject of ancient greek festivals and translated many early-christian authors into catalan. dr. sergi grau studied at the university of barcelona, where he read his doctoral thesis (2008) on diogenes laertius and the lives of greek philosophers. after a research period at the university, he now teaches classics in a high-school. he has published studies and translations on thamyris, ancient greek biographies of philosophers and lucian and is currently working on an edition of diogenes laertius. both are members of the “studies in ancient greek literature and its reception” research group at the university of barcelona (2009sgr 799), funded by the generalitat de catalunya. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 aspiration, achievement and abandonment in ‘the world’s best country’: merit and equity or smoke and mirrors? david m. hoffman, sari pöyhönen, carine cools, anatoly stikhin, driss habti, taru siekkinen & thomas sama copyright©2015 david m. hoffman, sari pöyhönen, carine cools, anatoly stikhin, driss habti, taru siekkinen & thomas sama,. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract. finland is internationally valorised for its education system, quality of life and high-tech, innovative, competitiveness. however, a critical focus on institutional dynamics and trajectories of higher education careers illuminates questions about the reproduction of global inequities, rather than the societal transformation finland’s education system was once noted for. the purpose of this self-ethnography of career trajectories within finnish higher education is designed to call attention to institutional social dynamics that have escaped the attention of scholarly literature and contemporary debates about academic work and practice within highly situated research groups, departments and institutes. our analysis illuminates emergent stratification, in a country and institution previously characterized by the absence of stratification and the ways in which this reinforces and is reinforced by – the tension between transnational academic capitalism, methodological nationalism and the resulting global division of academic labour that now cuts across societies, manifesting within the one institution finland’s general population trusts to explain, engage and ameliorate stratification: higher education. key words: academic work; mobility; transnational scholarly precariousness; stratification; self-ethnography. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 detailed table of contents title page & abstract……………………………………………………………………1 table of contents………………………………………………………………………..2 editorial note…………………………………………………………………………….4 1. foreword/forward: fighting fire with fire …............................................................6 1.1. audiences…………………………………………………………………………...7 1.2. our methodological universe – and yours……………………………….……....9 1.3. structure of the study……………………………………………………….……..10 2. introduction. context, purpose and objectives………………………………….….…15 2.1. transnational scholarly precariousness: a global story………………….….….15 2.1.1. transnational academic capitalism – a primer……………………………...15 2.2. the finnish story…………………………………………………………………..16 2.3. purpose and objectives……………………………………………………………17 3. theory: conceptual problematization of context…………………………………….19 3.1. the academy of finland project on migration and the labour market………...19 3.2. aspiration, achievement and abandonment and career trajectories in finnish higher education…………………………………………………………………...20 3.3. academic work…………………………………………………………………….20 3.3.1. unpacking bourdieu’s approach to scholarly trajectory – a primer……...22 3.3.2. unpacking the comparative study of academic work – a primer………...23 3.3.2.1. disciplinary cultures…………………………………………..23 3.3.2.2. mission emphasis……………………………………………...23 3.3.2.3. career stage………………………………………………….....24 3.3.2.4. competitive horizon………………………………………….. 24 3.4. ascriptive characteristics and social constructs in finnish society: the sacred and safe versus the profane and problematic…………………………………………..25 3.5. problematizing academic work and ascriptive characteristics: the tensions between aspiration, achievement and abandonment………………………………26 3.6. conceptualizing social dynamics and who we are really talking about………26 4. methodology. methodological shift from planned study to unplanned study……….29 4.1. key methodological risks, gaps and our methodological dilemma……………..30 4.1.1. the absence of collective agency……………………………………………31 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 4.1.2. no tradition of critical introspection………………………………………...32 4.1.3. the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies…………………………………………………………………………..33 4.1.4. speaking truth to power: a good idea?.......................................................33 4.1.5. social media and transnational scholarly precariousness…………………..34 4.2. the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads………………….35 4.3. moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process………35 4.4. self-ethnography: ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’……………..36 4.4.1. data, methods and analysis…………………………………………………...41 4.4.1.1. rationale for ignoring convention……………………………...42 4.4.1.2. engaging methodological limitations: backyard research, in the first person………………………………………………………………..42 4.4.1.3. balancing anonymity, privacy and efficacy: incremental member check and impact aims………………………………………………….43 5. analysis. analysing our ‘academic limbo’…………………………………………...45 5.1. unquestioned assumptions and minimizing misrecognized transnational scholarly precariousness and exclusion……………………………………………………...45 5.2. the unintended consequences of group-think…………………………………..48 5.3. illuminating ‘disconnects’ and bringing aof back into the picture…………….51 5.3.1. connecting the dots: aspiration, achievement and abandonment in academic work……………………………………………………………………………52 5.3.2. ‘strategies’ of precedence and potential: hidden populations within parallel competitive horizons………………………………………………………….53 5.3.3. an institutional story…………………………………………………………53 5.3.4. the relationship between people, ideas and funding………………………55 5.3.5. the policy and practice of (human resources) ‘strategy’…………………...56 6. discussion. moving forward in terms of education studies, policy and practice……59 6.1. unquestioned assumptions: folk psychology, zombie discussions and ‘smoke and mirrors terminology’……………………………………………………………….60 6.2. unintended consequences: analysing methodological nationalism………………61 6.3. hidden populations: the nature of complex change in the general population, culture and society………………………………………………………………….62 7. methodological notes: an afterward/afterword………………………………………...64 references………………………………………………………………………………..66 biographical data on authors…………………………………………………………...75 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 editorial note cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu catalina ribas segura cesag, mallorca catymallorca@yahoo.com the following monographic study evolved from a paper given at the watershed cultural studies congress held at the university of barcelona, spain, 13-17 january in 2014. there, in a panel on the changing character of higher education, david hoffman addressed the issue of abandonment amongst immigrant scholars attempting to get a foothold in finnish academia. while finland is, in theory, a top performer in the education sector and the envy of many a country for its high standard of welfare, democracy, freedom and equality, hoffman argued that immigrant mobility within finnish academia actually pointed into an opposing direction, refuting the reputation of equal opportunity that the country had forged for itself over a long period of time. hoffman’s team’s research laid bare an emergent hierarchisation and stratification in finnish academia identifiable as ‘methodological nationalism’, which responds to the transnational character of capitalism and aims to contain the forces of globalisation within finnish academia inasmuch that access to, and mobility of immigrant scholars within the tertiary educational system are complicated precisely on the assumption that there is no competitive difference between national and foreign candidates for posts. in other words, there is a wishful thinking that in its assumption of equality and equity in fact obscures the very inequality that and informs permeates the career opportunities generated by the system. hoffman, of north-american origins, forms part of the finnish institute for educational research (fier) as a senior researcher and works together with a group of immigrant scholars in the research group education and social change, whose members had all signed the text that was submitted to the editors of the coolabah post-conference issue “after the water has been shed” in response to a call for papers. upon reading the essay, it became immediately clear that the topic addressed needed more space and attention than a mere article in a journal volume. the proposed essay was already 15,000 words long, and still felt it could do with more detail, development and clarification. the editors therefore contacted hoffman and his team and proposed the possibility of publishing a monographic issue of coolabah, entirely dedicated to their study. it would offer a springboard for a novel approach copyright© cornelis martin renes & catalina ribas segura, 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. mailto:mrenes@ub.edu mailto:catymallorca@yahoo.com coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 to research in the tertiary educational sector by introducing auto-ethnography as the prevalent critical approach to tackle the problematics of researching a framework of which the researchers themselves form part, or from within. it would also offer a group of wellinformed young-career academics an opportunity to voice a set of controversial ideas in a larger, international arena and so find transcultural and transnational support for their analysis. in these times of increasingly precarious academic work, which affects our younger generations of scholars, one cannot offer less. cornelis martin renes, co-editor catalina ribas segura, guest-editor barcelona, 21 december 2015 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 1. foreword/forward: studying and interpreting a context and topic versus engaging and changing a topic in context. fighting fire with fire we are not very sure how many people read ‘foreword’ sections. however, there are two types of scholars we have met during the course our study who might advise readers to read this foreword. these two types of colleagues are as follows: 1. many colleagues who are familiar with the work behind this publication have been highly encouraging and supportive of our efforts. we think this is because they have experienced – or are experiencing – the vague, arbitrary and harsh neoliberal, neocolonialization of education, as a social institution, set of organizations and as a profession. in addition, many of those supporting our work specialize in the study of the powerful structural dynamics our team found ourselves caught up in. some colleagues have both experienced similar situations and specialize in the study of scholarly precariousness. these three distinct groups are the scholars who got us through this. 2. many colleagues we have encountered are highly uncomfortable with our topic, the approach we have taken – or both – and have actively encouraged us not to pursue the work or to carry it out in a way other than the way we have chosen. they explicitly do not appreciate the type of study we carried out, do not generally acknowledge the necessity that drove our methodological choices, nor have they appeared to understood the necessity and nature of our actions. this is nothing new in the social sciences and humanities; especially when critique is focused on power relations within the social institution of education; within higher education institutions, in general, universities and the professoriate in particular and on the academic profession (abbas et al. 2013; alvesson 2003; bourdieu 1988, 2004; tight 2012). love us or hate us: these two groups of scholars – as different as they are – have an important feature in common: we have learned a great deal from both. we are indebted to all scholars who have used their valuable time to share their opinions, comments, advice, reviews, experiences, insights and perspectives. both sets of scholars have made valuable critical contributions which we have taken to heart. we would especially like to thank the editors of the open access publication coolabah, at the australian studies unit at the university of barcelona, dr. martin renes, dr. caty ribas and professor susan ballyn. their support and encouragement has been unwavering, from the moment of our first meeting till now. we are also are grateful to professor bill boyd, a longtime friend from southern cross university, australia, who invited us to present our research in our first major transdisciplinary conference, the 2014 watershed conference in barcelona. this event turned out to be a watershed for our study in the sense that we discovered a wildly diverse auditorium full of enthusiastic supporters from and across several countries, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 disciplines and domains and met the editors of this publication. in addition, our sincere gratitude goes out to cheer professors louise morley, director of the centre for higher education and equity of research at the university of sussex, and paula mählck, department of education, university of stockholm, each of whom gave us detailed comments on our manuscript and whose support is more appropriately measured now in years, as we have developed this study. we sincerely thank the reviewers of this manuscript for the considerable time and thought they put into the blind review stage of this work. we express our sincere thanks to the academy of finland, whose funding allowed the authors the possibility to pursue this study in the way we did. last but not least, we thank the university of jyväskylä, in general and the finnish institute for educational research and centre for applied language studies, and especially the colleagues who took the time to attend the interventions and presentations grounded in or otherwise linked to our study and especially those who read and or commented on our manuscript as part of our member-checks. returning to our reviewers, it was their comments that opened our eyes to the advisability of making our text more reader friendly and gave us key insights as to how this might be done. the result is this forward section to our study. the format of this section firstly spotlights who might actually be interested in reading this study and why. ‘why’ is important because our study deals with power relations in the academy and the difference – paradigmatically speaking – between unquestioning deference to those in positions of power or talking truth to power and action aimed at constructive change. it is our position that unquestioning deference is a road to nowhere especially regarding the topic our study brings into focus: transnational scholarly precariousness. the ability to talk truth to power, in the way wildavsky (1987) articulates, is a bare minimum considering the challenges the social institution of education currently faces. our position of critical advocacy and action locates us in a fundamentally different paradigm from many we have encountered. if you are not fond of work of this type there is no need to read further. secondly, methodologically speaking, we locate and contextualize our journey with regard to two key dimensions that can be used to pinpoint nearly all qualitative research. these two dimensions are key to understanding both our methodological choices and the consequences of those choices. in addition, this section is designed – like a streetlamp – to turn perceived ‘dark and potentially dangerous places’ into ‘routine scholarly terrain’. in that regard, this section is especially relevant for individuals and groups considering action in the face of arbitrary and vague power relations with an eye on constructive change, particularly regarding our topic. while jumping straight into methodological discussion might seem like ‘putting the cart ahead of the horse’ to many, we ask the reader’s patience as we have come to understand that the dimensions we highlight illuminative fundamentally distinct sets of studies, all of which are interesting, but some of which are intuitively easier to grasp than others. this depends mainly on methodological convention and personal preferences. thirdly, we explicitly lay out the highly inductive, unplanned, yet serendipitous journey our team found ourselves on. that said, we also explicitly map out how our unplanned, opportunistic study maps on to a highly conventional reporting format. structurally speaking, we also introduce a few features of the text that give different types of audiences the level of detail they may need, depending on their purposes. we will now briefly elaborate each of the abovementioned features of our text more fully. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 1.1. audiences the most interesting tensions we wrestled with as a team while doing this study ultimately turned out to concern our assumptions about different types of audiences. because the authors are specialists from different generations, genders, countries, cultures, career stages, institutional settings and disciplinary communities, it took quite some time before we truly appreciated the nature of these tensions, which (considering our analysis) ironically turned out to be unquestioned assumptions. however, during the review stage, two important tensions that became clear to us concerned the distinction between ‘specialist audiences, who generally share many points of departure to the extent they need little or no explanation’ versus ‘everyone else’ – specifically, scholars or higher education actors and stakeholders present in the social institution of education, higher education institutions and our profession not primarily focused on the specialties that drew our team together. these specialties include international comparative higher education (two of us), international migration and ethnic relations (four of us), applied linguistics and communication (three of us) and, especially, scholars focused on academic work (three of us). the reason these particular focal specialties are important is because state-of-the-art findings in these specialties – within educational settings – by their nature potentially have important implications across education as a transnational social institution, a set of unique organizations and as a profession within networked knowledge societies (hoffman & välimaa et al. in press). because higher education is an extraordinary focal nexus (scollon & scollon 2007), when it comes to history, biography and their intersection within society (mills 1959), the second key audience this study might appeal to is within the general social science and humanities, especially specialists studying social stratification, scholarly precariousness and socioeconomic precarity (standing 2011) and related social justice issues. these specialists may also find our study unique and relevant to several established and emergent conversations within and across several national contexts. closely related to specialist audiences, are labour union and scholarly activists, as well as professional advocacy groups who may find the study highly interesting in an actionable way. this powerful paradigmatic, yet practical distinction separates our study from a vast body of work in the social sciences and humanities which has little or no practical utility. nothing against scholarship with no application value (much of our other work falls into this category), but the topic in focus in our study here needs action. our team neither shies away from being very explicit about this point, nor has it hesitated to report what we have done that has actually worked out fairly well. this is a fundamentally distinguishing feature of our study. beyond specialist audiences, we believe the work has a broad, general appeal to scholars everywhere concerned with the ways in which neoliberal ideology has resulted in a growing transnational layer of precarious scholars, increasingly at the mercy of a shrinking professorate, core faculty and body of permanently employed higher education managers and administrators who directly benefit from the continued stratification of an increasingly precarious global academic labour force. these people face very little actionable critique, as they are co-creating the neoliberal project to the determent of the social institution in which we work, our organizations and profession. we choose not to shy away from these colleagues and instead engage them on common ground – specifically, peer-reviewed publications and coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 organizational interventions based on our studies. in other words, as the title to our foreword/forward indicates: ‘fighting fire, with fire.’ last but not least, this publication will appeal to scholars in the social sciences and humanities with responsibilities in doctoral training, graduate-level course work and the supervision of early stage/career scholars, particularly those interested in the topic our study brings into focus and more particularly acting on it in a way that preserves the integrity and viability of our institution, organizations and profession. 1.2. our methodological universe – and yours methodologically speaking, to locate our study and contextualize our efforts we underline two key dimensions that empirically illuminate a field into which nearly all qualitative work falls. specifically: planned or unplanned studies; and studies carried out by methodological specialists or generalists. these dimensions, in a contingency table, empirically illuminate and conceptually problematize four distinct types of studies: 1. planned studies carried out by methodological specialists 2. unplanned studies carried out by methodological specialists 3. planned studies carried out by methodological generalists 4. unplanned studies carried out methodological generalists by ‘conceptually problematize’, we mean that the areas spotlighted by this conceptualization have important methodological implications. each of these kinds of studies has its own challenges and all are seen with regularity. the reason we draw attention to these fundamental distinctions is because the study we carried out falls squarely into type 4, specifically; an unplanned study, carried out by methodological generalists. unplanned studies are sometimes termed ‘opportunistic’ or ‘tangential studies’. by methodological specialists, we refer to scholars who tend to focus, over time on a particular type or set of methodologies to the extent they develop an expertise far beyond the level of a person not experienced with a particular methodology. a generalist, on the other hand, might draw on a wide variety of different methodological approaches in the course of their work. the most important assertion we stress, particularly because of the wide variety of work the authors have both done and reviewed is that none of these types is inherently ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than another, normatively speaking. empirically speaking, they simply constitute – symmetrically speaking – a set of possibilities. another key point which was very challenging to communicate in earlier version of this text is the fact that authors hoffman and pöyhönen originally began a very different (larger) ‘type 1’ study (or planned study carried out by methodological specialists), which was funded to run between 2011 and 2014 together with several close colleagues. it was during the course of our 2011-2014 study in which the authors – as a group – spotted the opportunity to do the ‘type 4 study’ that you are now reading. in other words, the unplanned study was grounded in a planned study, however the methodology and purpose(s) of the planned study were not a good ‘fit’ for the topic and circumstances that came into view. because of the compelling nature of the unplanned topic, the authors quite intentionally coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 selected a very specific methodological approach, self-ethnography as specified by alvesson (2003), which was designed precisely because this category of studies exists within a social institution (education), set of organizations (universities) and profession (scholars) which has a demonstrated persistent reluctance for robust self-critique, in general and in particular transnational scholarly precariousness. methodologically speaking, the most important methodological implication of choosing selfethnography was that the authors had never worked before, as a team, using this methodology. each of the authors do have their own methodological preferences, levels of experience, even specialist expertise, but not with the particular methodological approach that best fit this topic. that said, the methodology was a much better fit than several of us anticipated and we were able to obtain the types of data we achieved in this study was far better than data several other specialist colleagues obtain on the exact same topic (in the exact same context) using alternative methodological approaches – although they are highly complementary. the other key assertion our conceptual problematization lets us underline is that because this particular study was an unplanned study (by content specialists) carried out by methodological generalists, it bears very little resemblance to planned studies by methodical specialists (the conceptual ‘opposite’). while this might seem like ‘pointing out the obvious’ we can assure you this distinction has not been clear to several colleagues. the final feature of our study is another new section, following our discussion, focused on methodological reflection. this study was an incredibly rich learning experience. the level of interest in our topic is rising as academic freedom becomes more circumscribed (baez, rhoades, metcalfe & torres-olave 2015; hoffman forthcoming). because of our very recent experience, we feel positive about encouraging other scholars to use ethnographic methodologies, especially regarding our key content specialist, advocacy-group and graduate student audiences, who are not familiar with ethnographic approaches to qualitative research. our methodological afterward focuses on key thoughts, texts and ideas that have the potential to lower the threshold for actually carrying out ‘up close’ ethnographies. the reason we adopted self-ethnography is because it was, methodologically speaking, very ‘plug and play’ compared to many approaches practiced by specialist ethnographers. that said, precisely because of the fault lines, debates and disputes that divide ethnographers, it is all too easy for our team to see why many scholars might very well put off from using any type of ethnographic approach, particularly when exposed to the methodological gatekeeping our team encountered within and outside ethnography. this is not a criticism of ethnography; it happens in every approach, methodological orientation or mode of inquiry we are familiar with. in order to give future scholars a faster start than we had, our last section will detail a few key sources that we wish we would have been more familiar with, before we started. our intent with this afterward underlines the rationale of alvesson (2003), whose approach we chose to use specifically because it was an ideal ‘fit’, methodologically speaking, to the topic we in fact encountered, the way we encountered it and the setting in which the topic was encountered institutionally, organizationally and professionally. in other words, it is clear now – in hindsight – how we can do even better in future studies. in this sense, our final section has been designed to give a faster start to colleagues who wish to adopt an ethnographic approach to these types of studies on these types of topics and avoid the rough patches our team encountered. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 1.3. structure of the study having identified who might want to read this and why, as well as explaining our methodological point of departure, we now explicitly map the highly inductive qualitative study we did onto a conventional reporting format. in other words, what we did and how we did it. (see räsänen 2014 for an excellent analysis of autonomous academic practices or the relationship between who, why, what and how.) the structure of our study flows much like many types of scholarly texts. in our specific case:  foreword: fighting fire with fire  part i: introduction. context, purpose and objectives o (review of literature)  transnational scholarly precariousness: a global story  transnational academic capitalism – a primer o (description of context/setting): the finnish story o purpose and objectives  part ii: theory. conceptual problematization of context o the academy of finland project on migration and the labor market o aspiration, achievement and abandonment and career trajectories in finnish higher education o academic work  unpacking bourdieu’s approach to scholarly trajectory – a primer  unpacking the comparative study of academic work – a primer  disciplinary cultures  mission emphasis  career stage  competitive horizon o ascriptive characteristics and social constructs in finnish society: the sacred and safe versus the profane and problematic o problematizing academic work and ascriptive characteristics: the tensions between aspiration, achievement and abandonment o conceptualizing social dynamics and who we are really talking about  part iii: methodology. methodological shift from planned study to unplanned study o key methodological risks, gaps and our methodological dilemma  the absence of collective agency  no tradition of critical introspection  the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies  speaking truth to power: a good idea?  social media and transnational scholarly precariousness o the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads o moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process o methodology: self-ethnography. ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’  data, methods and analysis  rationale for ignoring convention coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12  engaging methodological limitations: backyard research, in the first person.  balancing anonymity, privacy and efficacy: incremental member check and impact aims  part iv: analysis. analysis of ‘academic limbo’ o unquestioned assumptions and minimizing misrecognized transnational scholarly precariousness and exclusion o the unintended consequences of group-think o illuminating ‘disconnects’ and bringing aof back into the picture  connecting the dots: aspiration, achievement and abandonment in academic work  ‘strategies’ of precedence and potential: hidden populations within parallel competitive horizons  an institutional story  the relationship between people, ideas and funding  the policy and practice of (human resources) ‘strategy’  part v: discussion. moving forward in terms of education studies, policy and practice o unquestioned assumptions: folk psychology, zombie discussions and ‘smoke and mirrors terminology’ o unintended consequences: analytically illuminating methodological nationalism o hidden populations: the nature of complex change in the general population, culture and society  methodological notes: an afterward  references making the structure of our text very explicit and hierarchically outlining the flow of sections allows us firstly to highlight the conventional parts of the text in advance. especially because this study was unplanned, the reporting structure can be used to pinpoint key decision points where our team had to depart from convention – while ultimately staying within an overarching conventional process: a process of scholarly inquiry with a beginning, middle and end. the main ‘detours’ in conventional structure in our text come in part iii, our section focused on methodology. specifically, the point in the study where the planned methodological strategy: ‘case study’, was changed to ‘self-ethnography’. that point in time is both pinpointed and explicated in detail in the sections: the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads and moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process. the justification of changing methodologies is explicated and articulated in terms of the risks, literature, knowledge, practice gaps and dilemmas we outline in the sections leading up to our decision to adopt a new methodological approach. once the new methodological strategy was agreed on, we give a detailed account of the new, particular approach we chose. the reasons for the selection of self-ethnography, as opposed to any other version of ethnographic approaches, were firstly because not all of our group were specialists with ethnographic approaches, with the exception of pöyhönen. ethnography, as a general coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 methodological approach or mode of inquiry covers an enormous literature. we selected alvesson’s 2003 approach to self-ethnography because it is very accessible to non-specialists and was in fact advanced, as a coherent approach, because personnel in higher education institutions are in an optimal position to take notice of far more than we often do in precisely the manner our team had the opportunity to do – and for exactly the same reason. it was even more appealing because each member of our team – as alvesson points out – had very limited opportunity to focus on this topic. regarding the switch from a planned to an unplanned study, what is interesting to the authors is that these sorts of changes are made all the time in large research projects, particularly in complex, mixed-method and multi-method designs that run several years (hoffman & horta in press; torres-olave et al. in press). what is even more interesting, however, is that these types of changes are rarely critically scrutinized. it is easier simply to ‘sweep them under the rug’ (bourdieu 2004) pretending they never happened. that said, because of the nature of this particular topic, we would claim that lack of reflection, critique and methodological creativity causes transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming). while cause is a term that usually does not find its way into qualitative research, our analysis (part iv) establishes the qualitative foundation for the explanation-building necessary to work in that direction (miles & huberman 1994). explicitly outlining the underlying structure (above) also highlights different ways our study can be read. because our resulting ethnographic study was principally developed with content specialist audiences in mind, we have integrated focused subsections or ‘primers’ within our original outline which summarize specialist topics for general audience(s). these subjections ‘unpack’ specialist topics for non-specialist audiences. these sections can easily be skipped for those familiar with the subtopic under discussion, but may be of interest, particularly for audiences who desire more detail. all this said, we hope this initial foreword was helpful for the reader. in retrospect, our study is an example of what a small group of academics decided to do when directly confronted with a highly situated, arbitrary and vague set of circumstances that explain how transnational scholarly precariousness manifests in a specific national and institutional context. more than that, our efforts have been carried out in such a manner that has allowed us to constructively contextualize and engage the negative initial circumstances we met in a manner that has benefitted the institutes that employ us, as well as the university in which the research institutes are located in, in applied, practical and concrete ways. the reason our efforts succeeded was because our team has successfully grounded our efforts in state-of-the-art literature that explains the transnational nature of our topic, in a manner sensitive to local conditions and power dynamics. because of our efforts, several new studies and interventions are in progress, as are our efforts aimed at contributing to the internationally significant advances reported in our study. both the context in which this study played out and the ways in which we chose to methodologically engage the topic are not generally known, nor practised. because of this, the qualitative study we have done can be fairly regarded as both unconventional and high risk. ironically, it is clear the transnational neoliberal policy (which cuts across the countries in which our key audiences are located) valorises unconventional, high-risk studies. what makes this so ironic is that scholars themselves often are reluctant to acknowledge or value coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 efforts that do not conform to (low-risk), convention or canon. this is particularly the case when scholars and higher education are in empirical and contextual focus. more than anything, we believe this explains the dismissal and disdain experienced by our team from our first presentation of this topic in our local research group, as detailed in our analysis. it also explains why other leading scholars, particularly content specialists in our own fields have expressed admiration and encouragement of our efforts. this type of ‘love or hate’ reaction is nothing new or surprising in the social sciences and humanities, which is explained in the review of the seminal theoretical specialist literature that informed our efforts and analysis. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 2. introduction: context, purpose and objectives 2.1. transnational scholarly precariousness: a global story this self-ethnography began in august, 2013. during this time members of our selfethnography team, the authors of this text, have presented or drawn on our evolving understanding of transnational scholarly precarity in eight presentations of our topic, in five different countries. our presentations have mainly focused on problematizing and explaining academic career trajectories and key career transitions experienced by scholars who aspired to both remain in higher education, as a career choice and finland, as their home. unlike many studies of migration related phenomena and (academic) mobility in finnish society, our self-ethnography (alvesson 2003) implicates native-born finnish scholars, temporarily mobile scholars and scholars with a migrant background, each of whom experience key career transitions which are outwardly similar. that said, there are features of these transitions which are analytically and empirically distinct, due to complex, misrecognized (bourdieu 1988) social dynamics within finland’s rapidly changing higher education system (author1, nokkala & välimaa forthcoming) and the tensions between established and emergent forms of transnational scholarly precariousness (author1 forthcoming). it is fitting that this study will be published in a journal focused on australian studies. while the usa and europe may be the heart of transnational academic capitalism (slaughter & cantwell 2012; kauppinen 2012), many might claim australia is the soul, as an early forerunner in implementing and modelling what would become the hallmarks and signature of the aggressive adoption of global, neoliberal, new public management and the commodification of higher education. and, similar to the usa, some of the most serious critique of the global stratification of higher education along private sector lines comes from australian-born scholars (currie & newson et al. 1998; marginson 2006; robertson 2014). in the context of finnish higher education studies, it was grant harman, the former editor-inchief of higher education, who on 5 september 2005 delivered a keynote in finland’s higher education symposium prophetically centred on the wave of higher education mergers sweeping across australia in the first decade of this century. his message seemed to have been alternatively interpreted as an ominous warning by some scholars of impending rationalization of higher education in the audience that this rationalization was in fact a great idea by others (i.e. government officials) and most likely not taken seriously by others. that said, many who did not fully appreciate the concerns expressed by harman, nor the enthusiastic response by a senior ministry of education official, now work in one of finland’s newly merged higher education institutions. our higher education system was rationalized within a few short years between harman’s warning and the uncritically, enthusiastic embrace of finland’s higher education system – as a whole – of the international agenda-setting that now defines, in part, transnational academic capitalism (kallo 2009; kauppinen 2012: slaughter & cantwell 2012). recent comparative analysis now indicates the marginal place social justice issues have in finland’s contemporary higher education system (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). this self-ethnography questions the extent to which the nature of equality and inclusion in finland’s higher education system is quickly moving toward the social stratification characteristic of places like australia or the usa, or coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 whether this is seriously considered, or even noticed within higher education studies in finland. 2.1.1. transnational academic capitalism – a primer one of the most credible ‘big picture’ explanations for the emergence of transnational academic capitalism was recently advanced by (pashby et al. 2014) whose critical comparative analysis explains the continuity of ‘modern’ (kallo 2009) higher education, grounded in liberal ideology, in which prescriptive internationalization and higher education trends have never been subjected to serious critique. while mainstream social sciences and the humanities made considerable advances, liberal neo-colonial framing of internationalization and overly-narrow definitions of mobility were never subjected to theoretical debate and methodological development used in emancipatory paradigm shifts happening on the same campuses. those advances continue to define state-of-the-art scientific debate linked to widening access and demystifying faculties to all groups found within societies, not only elites (beck 1992; bourdieu 1988; pashby 2014, trow 1974). this lack of scholarly horsepower left higher education specialists ill-prepared for the transnational ideological shift in which neoliberal supplanted liberal ideology. while a few higher educational specialists engaged this ideological shift as it was happening, the seminal efforts (slaughter & leslie 1997; rhoades 1998; rhoades & slaughter 2004) were not aimed at internationalization, much less connected to the vibrant developments in thinking connected to mobilities or inclusion (kahn & pahlich 2001; stevens & dworkin et al. 2014; urry 2007). inside and outside finland, a few early efforts critiqued the global implications of transnational academic capitalism (currie & newson et al. 1998; marginson 2006; kallo 2009; ylijoki 2003) and incorporated more complex ways of thinking about mobilities (marginson, murphy & peters 2009; urry 2007). however, by the time pusser et al. (2012), slaughter & cantwell (2012), cantwell and lee (2010) cantwell and kauppinen et al. (2014) began to get traction on transnational academic capitalism, higher education across the globe had adopted neoliberal new public management and increasingly narrow operationalization of innovation and internationalization. finland passed neoliberal reforms as the 2008/9 global economic crisis unfolded, shifted its historical emphasis on inclusion and equality, in favour of high-profile internationalization and innovation. 2.2. the finnish story when viewed from the outside-looking-in, finland is frequently admired and valorised for the strength of its education system, quality of life and innovative, forward-looking artistic, high-tech achievements and economic competitiveness (radcliffe 2004; sachs 2004; partanen 2011; välijärvi 2006). however, from the inside-looking-around, a critical focus on mobility, broadly conceptualized, reveals key thresholds which have yet to be crossed by all population groups located in finnish society (forsander 2004; hoffman, sama, el-massri, raunio & korhonen 2013a; pöyhönen et al. 2011). in particular, our team’s focus on higher education career trajectories and key threshold transitions reveals the double-edged nature of mobility and migration dynamics within one of the few remaining models of the strong, universal, nordic welfare state (esping-andersen 1998). higher education systems, around coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 the world, are increasingly falling into step with the highly normative, neoliberal, international agenda-setting efforts of agencies like the oecd (cantwell & kauppinen 2014; currie & newson 1998; kallo 2009; shahjahan & kezar 2013; marginson 2006), the cumulative result of which is an uncritical adoption of an emergent form of transnational academic capitalism springing up in several major higher education systems, as well as any organization that – literally – wants to ‘do business’ with them (kauppinen 2012; rhoades & slaughter 2004; slaughter & cantwell 2012; slaughter & leslie 1997). amidst these trends, it becomes a fair question, following pusser et al. (2012) to problematize the extent to which the public good higher education could offer all in society actually exists; or, as hoffman et al. (2013a) query: are some groups and individuals ‘outside’ the working range of equity in contemporary higher education institutions in countries like finland? are there groups across societies that will not be found at certain strata of higher education systems or who are exploited across systems, as cantwell and lee (2010) argue? are there persistent aspiration gaps within education and between societies (bowden & doughney 2010) and if so, how do we better explain them? or are these types of questions, which once formed the bedrock of the finnish policy of ‘educational equality’, no longer of interest to policy makers and the strategic management of higher education institutions in finland – or relevant in finnish society? (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press) 2.3. purpose and objectives the objectives of this article are to firstly present the background of this analysis, as it was a methodological response to an unanticipated opportunity that arose, within the context of a larger, ongoing study of migration issues related to the labour market in finland. secondly, we present the results of the self-ethnography (alvesson 2003) as an institutional analysis carried out by the authors, designed to critically address and problematize the uneasy coexistence of working conditions and career systems which are, on the surface, talked about in terms of collegial equality and merit, yet have seldom been seriously considered with respect to robust, conceptually-driven and empirically-grounded analysis as to whether claims to equity or merit can be sustained when it comes to higher education careers (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000). we stress this because critical studies focused on our topic are not typically done in finnish higher education studies, nor in higher education studies generally, nor in many countries, outside well-known exceptions like the uk, north america, australia and new zealand (tight 2012; hoffman, blasi, cools, ćulum, dragšić, ewen, horta, nokkala, rios-aguilar and saarinen 2013b). as will be detailed below, this institutional analysis is distinct, in terms of scope, from two follow-on studies more narrowly focused on the experiences and perceptions of the authors and the use of selfethnography in organizational interventions. thirdly, in our discussion we underline the value of this general approach, in particular with regard to explaining, understanding and avoiding methodological path dependencies typical to higher education research on mainland europe in general and finland in particular. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 our analysis focuses on institutional dynamics in which questioning assumptions is not always welcome, unintended consequences are ignored and misrecognized. because of this, hidden populations – and their circumstances – do not exist. these are all important with regard to follow-on studies aimed at explaining key transitions which define a scholar’s trajectory over time (bourdieu 1988; baldwin & blackburn 1981) and in ways that will survive critical, comparative scrutiny outside finland. the key concern driving our methodological position, analysis and discussion is precisely our critical focus on the relationship between higher education institutions, the societies in which they are embedded and the implications of our analysis in the nordic context in general and finnish society in particular, because the system was noted for transformative equity in the 20 th century. the only way we can approach the global topic of transnational scholarly precariousness is to firstly lay a conceptually problematized, empirically grounded analysis of the way in which this manifests our highly situated local circumstances. secondly, problematizing this topic, robustly and methodologically engaging it, in a manner relevant to the state-of-the-art debate and international peer review is the only means available to both distance ourselves to the degree necessary for analysis that constitutes a contribution that merits anyone’s attention. thirdly, we assert the most meaningful contributions to the study of scholarly precariousness will be the relevance of findings to comparative designs which, in turn, offer the best road forward to critically framing, understanding and impacting scholarly precariousness in terms of scholarship, policy and practice. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 3. theory: conceptual problematization this study began in a deceptively conventional manner. our lives would have been easier had it stayed that way. however, this was not how things actually happened. the analysis we present below is instructive, especially in terms of the type of methodological reflexivity needed to pursue an unanticipated opportunity in the manner we chose for this study. more importantly, the authors are united in a need to articulate the reasons that justify questioning methodological convention, broadly speaking. specifically, during the course of this study we firstly became concerned with the relationship between methodological nationalism in the way shahjahan & kezar (2013) use that term, in the finnish context. secondly, as we went forward, we developed unease with knowingly contributing to the silent, scholarly capitulation criticized by currie and newson et al. (1998), marginson (2006) and robertson (2014), when faced with a choice of turning a blind eye to ‘international agenda setting’ (kallo 2009). as it links to neoliberal new public management, now entrenched across north america, europe and beyond (cantwell & kauppinen et al. 2014; slaughter & cantwell 2012), kauppinen (2012) aptly terms this transnational academic capitalism. as authors, we locate ourselves within the global scholarly conversations that have taken place over the last two decades and that trace their beginnings to slaughter and leslie’s (1997) coining of the term ‘academic capitalism’, along with pusser et al.’s (2012) sustained critique of the threat to the ideals of higher education as a public good. currently, “now that we (in finnish higher education) are in the business of academic capitalism, rather than simply studying it” (author1, nokkala & välimaa in press), our critical methodological positioning, with regard to these powerful trends, should become clear in the sections that follow. 3.1. the academy of finland project on migration and the labour market this self-ethnography is substantively grounded in a larger project titled: working age migrants in finland: the roles of language proficiency, multilingual and multicultural practices and identities in integration into employment and professional communities (here and after identified by the acronym aof). as we detail in our foreword section, the distinction between the larger aof study and this smaller ethnographic study was that the aof study was planned, while this self-ethnography was not originally part of that plan. in that sense, it was an opportunistic study. in the aof study, the research team normatively problematized finnish labour market dynamics in terms of aspiration: those who aspired to labour market participation; achievement: those who had achieved labour market participation; and abandonment: settings in which persons could be found outside institutions more accurately linked to aspiration or achievement (pöyhönen et al. 2011, 2013). our reason for problematizing social dynamics in this manner was grounded in the aof team members’ recent research in higher education studies and applied linguistics. when read together, our findings suggested many institutions inside or linked to finland’s labour market, particularly the research community focused on migration, had missed important social dynamics inherent in migration within finnish society, as the country made a subtle, yet important shift from being a country of net emigration to a country of net migration (jaakkola 2005). our approach, in aof, was to coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 carry out a series of arts-based, longitudinal, ethnographic, policy and case studies, focused on particular occupational sectors and in distinct focal settings. this included teachers, ict engineers, artists, policy actors active in the migration arena and particular areas (geographically and spatially) that had either come under stress or showed particular potential with regard to better understandings of contemporary migration phenomena in finnish society. our purpose for looking across these sectors, groups and settings was to qualitatively illuminate key facets of migration that remained opaque, especially amidst normative institutional reaction to migration-related phenomena. aof team members argued institutional reaction obscured far more than institutions had managed to constructively engage or impact. in order to do this the aof team developed a wide variety of unconventional strategies aimed at simultaneously providing better explanations of migration-related phenomena and impacting the settings, groups and individuals implicated by our participative strategies of engagement. these included an arts-based project of producing a theatre play, proactive participation in national-level policy debate and government service provision (pöyhönen & tarnanen 2015, hoffman 2013) and working within ngos. 3.2. aspiration, achievement and abandonment and career trajectories in finnish higher education within the aof study, as a higher education specialist, hoffman proposed to begin with a case study focused on the notion of abandonment, as he had become familiar with several scholars who had attempted migration to finland, but subsequently left for combinations of professional and personal reasons. hoffman had always been interested in these scholars as a source of unique experiences and perceptions, from an equally unique position. this perspective and position was qualitatively distinct from either scholars who were finnish nationals, by birth, scholars who only temporarily visited finland, with no intention of remaining or scholars who had migrated to finland and stayed (hoffman 2007). as the aof study began, hoffman began listing persons he wanted to request to participate in interviews, during the case study he would lead as a sub-project of aof. in order to guide a conceptually-driven purposeful selection, figure 1 was designed. 3.3. academic work the conceptual coordinates that illuminate the social dynamics which, to a large extent, shape the trajectories (bourdieu 2008) of scholars in higher education systems like finland are quite clear (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). to construct an analytically-driven purposeful selection (creswell 2002) regarding the topics the aof team were interested in—which would also be conceptually and empirically meaningful in international comparative higher education studies—hoffman conceptualized a variation of a three-dimensional construct he had used in previous multiple case studies of finnish higher education focused on the mobility of university personnel (hoffman 2007, et al. 2013a, in press). the main conceptual starting points in a case study of this nature are drawn from theory of the middle range coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 figure 1. conceptualization of analytically-driven purposeful selection (merton 1968), relating to ways in which contemporary university mission or missions are geared towards public or private goods (pusser et al. 2012), career stage as a developmental process (baldwin & blackburn 1981), scholarly productivity (fairweather 2002) and disciplinary cultures (becher & trowler 2001). beginning with a purposeful selection inside universities based on these conceptual coordinates insures that fairly different perspectives within potential higher education positions are taken into account. scholars within columns (a,b,c&d), have a lot in common, as do scholars who have more or less duties with respect to university missions (levels or rows 1-4) (hoffman 2007). these conceptual coordinates, as a point of departure, especially when combined with the analytical approach developed by bourdieu (1988), explain career trajectory in a far more convincing fashion than most approaches to mobility, within the broad category of academic work (a staple category of higher education studies) in finnish higher education. this is because the complexity of what is either assumed, routinely ignored or entirely missed in finnish higher education employment, as is outlined in this self-ethnography, is far more interesting than what is routinely studied (see critical analyses by hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 2001). in the most simple terms possible, this is because the ‘professional side of the story’, conceptually speaking, is only ‘half a story’. the other ‘half’ of the story, in finnish higher education, is often unproblematized. 3.3.1. unpacking bourdieu’s approach to scholarly trajectory – a primer bourdieu’s (1988) conceptualization of field, capital and trajectory provided considerable insight into academic work during the social transformation associated with the student movement in france in the late 1960s. that said, his theorization and explanation of scholarly trajectory remains far more powerful – across many settings – than alternative explanations known to the authors (see hoffman et al., in press for the way in which this theorization was operationalized in a comparative higher education study). the homology of trajectory, as used by bourdieu (1988) is useful regarding insight into the path of individuals with respect to the tension between a priori social relationships and the human capacity for change or agency. trajectory is used to analyse the degree to which the career path of an academic is in part determined by essential properties which define a given field. a field is defined as a delimited social space where positions and relationships between positions are defined in terms of the possession of specific forms of capital. different forms of capital are specific types of power, used in a given field, that determine specific position, movement and indicate potential relevant to both. (bourdieu 1988; wacquant & bourdieu 1992). the positions an academic has occupied in the past, presently occupies, and is likely to occupy in the future, correspond to clear positions which are normally not created by that academic. rather, the positions exist in the field of higher education, in this case, the finnish national university system. whether or not movement between positions within a field is understood by the persons occupying them is clear in some fields, where the forms of capital are very clear, e.g. on a soccer field or battle-field, less clear in others, e.g. kinship relations in extended families in unfamiliar societies (bourdieu 1990; wacquant & bourdieu 1992). in any case, what remains clear in many fields is that objective positions exist, regardless of the people who occupy those positions. this in and of itself makes analysis of movement between those positions possible. the field-specific capitals of academic and scientific power are the two most important forms of capital which govern durable social relationship patterns that simultaneously delimit and determine power relations within distinct academic fields, as well as one’s trajectory through those fields. academics who act with respect to academic power are focused on the social dynamics which will reproduce the next generation of academics in a given faculty, institute, department or basic unit. academics concerned with scientific power are concerned with the advancement of state-of-the-art knowledge in their discipline. relative position in either type of field is maintained in fundamentally different ways; for example, the control of a subordinate’s time and departmental politics in the former and the publication of scientific texts and innovative lectures concerning disciplinary developments in the latter (bourdieu 1988). in his last work, bourdieu (2004) also advanced the concept of administrative power, as a particular form of emergent capital increasingly important in higher education coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 institutions, as well as specialized research institutes. this coincided with the attention given to transnational academic capitalism (kauppinen 2012), in particular in the work of rhoades (1998), slaughter and cantwell (2012); rhoades and slaughter (2004) and cantwell and kauppinen (2014). 3.3.2. unpacking the comparative study of academic work – a primer globally speaking, several focal theories of the middle range are fruitful when it comes to saying something relevant, in general or new, in particular, regarding academic work, as it is understood by higher education specialists. to zoom in on what we are talking about we present an excerpt of the purposeful selection strategy used by a finnish-based team in a recent six country comparative study of higher education (hoffman et al. in press). the conceptually-driven approach builds directly on and elaborates the work of bourdieu (1988, 2004). in order to establish a basis for comparison and develop future research designs with regard to replication and increasingly robust approaches; particularly with regard to the limitations of any qualitative methodology, the following substantive and conceptual starting points are discussed in terms of the analytically-driven purposeful selection (creswell, 2002; yin, 2003) that often inform empirical focus in studies of academic work. 3.3.2.1. disciplinary cultures becher and trowler’s (2001) analytical coordinates concern two focal points. one is the cognitive component of what is studied by an individual and basic units in terms of the hardsoft, pure-applied dimensions that delineate the substantive context to which scholars orientate – along with their attendant attention to theory and linked traditions of inquiry and discourse. the other is a social component that illuminate how individuals – and ultimately, basic units – carry out their scholarship, in terms of dimensions that draw our attention to distinctions illuminated by urban-rural spectrum, in relation to the settings in which scholarship is actually carried out, as well as convergent-divergent orientations to potential topic(s). 3.3.2.2. mission emphasis välimaa’s (2001b) analysis of career patterns in finnish higher education illuminates crucial distinctions between the missions of research and teaching in finnish higher education, in addition to mission related dynamics affecting scholars who assume administrative responsibilities. his findings clearly underscore the consequences in terms of career opportunities linked to the missions and activities within finnish heis. välimaa’s analysis was elaborated by hoffman (2007) and hoffman et al. (2013), who assert a more nuanced approach that seeks to illuminate the distinctions between activities in heis related to research, teaching, service, administration and strategic level leadership. in particular, in the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 analysis leading to hoffman et al. (2013) a focus on the rapid expansion of ‘new professionals’ (rhoades 1998) who are neither teachers, researchers, strategic managers or engaged in service, i.e. any mission of the university, but whose activity is perceived to be critical for the control and steering of scholars by non-scholars (slaughter & cantwell, 2012; hoffman et al., 2013; rhoades, 1998). 3.3.2.3. career stage baldwin & blackburn’s (1981) study of career stage – as a developmental process – serves to underline the distinct perspectives researchers can expect to encounter when trying to understand phenomena within heis, from very different experienced-based assumptions. these perspectives manifest at different points in individual career trajectories. the views of an hei from the perspective of a senior strategic-level leadership position, a tenured professor, a lecturer, a temporarily employed graduate student or research assistant are akin to the blindfolded group of people describing the proverbial elephant. this empirical contrast is often far more meaningful, depending on the topic, than a focus informed by a single career stage or other perspective. while all of the aforementioned perspectives have potential value, the contrasts between early stage, early career, mid and late career operational, support and management personnel are particularly important in multiple case studies, if empiricallygrounded, holistic analysis is the ‘end game’ of a case study. 3.3.2.4. competitive horizon the heuristic of competitive horizons in contemporary finnish heis, was advanced and grounded analytically by välimaa & hoffman (2007) and empirically grounded by hoffman, välimaa & huusko (2008), raunio, korhonen & hoffman (2011), as well as conceptually problematized in relation to methodological nationalism (shajahan & kezar, 2013) by hoffman et al. (2013; in press). the heuristic illuminates three fundamental horizons can be analytically illuminated by the orientation of an individual or basic unit to their most important competitors, in terms of resources. the dynamics that underlie these orientations are produced by the tension between reproduction within the structure of a discipline and transformation of (or linked to) that same discipline. this tension was conceptually and empirically illuminated and advanced by bourdieu (1988), its implications highlighted by brennan (2002), and confirmed within the finnish context by hoffman et al. (2008; 2011.) attention to this heuristic draws attention to the social dynamics of basic units and individuals operating at the cutting edge of their disciplines/specialities at world class, where the most important norms are linked to scientific power (bourdieu, 1988; 2004), specifically, the power to transform one’s discipline/speciality. in contrast are local heroes who transmit and translate knowledge, but take no part in producing it, primarily orientating to the reproduction of the next generation of local scholars through the control of the time and resources of others. between these two extremes are national champions, middle tier scholars, who attempt some type of balance between transformation and reproduction, often without necessarily recognizing this as such. the heuristic of competitive horizons draw coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 attention to the challenges of managing heis, as activity at all horizons are in demand because they correspond to the global division of academic labour, while at the same time these are often thoroughly misrecognized (hoffman et al., 2011) in normative-level policy and organizational debate, where prescriptive fashions and fads (birnbaum, 2000) lag far behind, or are completely disconnected from the empirical space occupied by established and emergent stratification that defies convenient and obvious framing. the purposeful selection using these four criteria to the extent possible ensures that not too many similar types of personnel participate in interviews from units that are too similar. 3.4. ascriptive characteristics and social constructs in finnish society: the sacred and safe versus the profane and problematic in addition to occupational/professional coordinates, a complete range of ascriptive characteristics is needed to get full traction, conceptually and empirically speaking, in a purposeful selection of this nature. ascriptive characteristics are characteristics of a person or group that cannot be changed by individual effort, for example, gender, age, kinship, skin colour, national origin, sexual orientation, physical disability and ethnicity (beck 1992). complex intersectionality regarding the relationship between achieved or professional characteristics and the ascriptive characteristics that empirically exist in finnish society remains largely unproblematized in many studies of finnish higher education employment (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000, 2001), as well as professional practice, as this study spotlights. this is the reason why it is easy to locate domestic or local ‘explanations’ of – and approaches to – academic work and career trajectories in higher education employment in finland that amount to little more than stilted folk psychology that more accurately illuminates the finnish variant of methodological nationalism than robust approaches needed to provide viable explanations of career trajectories (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000, 2001; shajahan & kezar 2012) or robust, transparent hr policy. a specific example of this is detailed in the section: ‘the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies’ (below). by ‘viable’, we mean designs or practices that would be conceptually or empirically meaningful in comparative studies geared to state-of-the art knowledge on academic work. the previous paragraph might be regarded as polemic in the finnish context by many. however, when contrasted to the convoluted social dynamics encountered during this study, the authors are more comfortable with being polemic. by ‘convoluted’, we mean the longstanding avoidance by higher education actors of directly engaging conceptually viable, empirically-grounded explanations of persistent challenges experienced by scholars caught up in migration and mobility or implicated by these dynamics. these social dynamics remain largely unexplored and fundamentally misunderstood in our local context. this is because some ascriptive characteristics, like gender, are actively linked to equity discourse, while others, like ethnicity, national origin, religion and skin colour, are thought about – in everyday practice – under a successive ‘hit parade’ (bourdieu 1988) of ill-defined and routinely unproblematized ‘smoke and mirrors discourses’, such as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘integration’, ‘internationalization’, ‘diversity’, ‘multiversity’ and ‘good relations’ (blommaert 2009; hoffman 2013; hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). the notion of race as a coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 social construction (berger & luckmann 1966) is extremely problematic in the finnish context (cantwell & lee 2010; rastas 2009; beach & lunneblad 2013), where it is in many cases denied altogether – and ironically – by persons of colour, who realize what habti terms the ‘ethnic penalty’ of using his own name in email correspondence. while all ascriptive characteristics are ‘technically’ covered by legal statute concerning discrimination (as is the case in most countries), in everyday life the combination of ‘sacred and safe’ ascriptive characteristics like gender, mother-tongue and age rests uneasily alongside ascriptive characteristics covered by the umbrella of ‘smoke and mirrors discourses’, which are united by the fact that no one agrees on their meanings and they remain unoperationalized in research designs that purport to study academic work. both rest uneasily beside the ‘profane and problematic notion that shall not be mentioned’: race. what these three parallel discourses accomplish is the unintended consequence of thoroughly obscured, misrecognized (bourdieu 1988) constituents of biography that may – or may not – have relationships to the rather clear terminology (by contrast) linked to academic work and social theory that explains career trajectories. put another way, the unproblematized reality that results from de-linking achieved and ascriptive characteristics can be formulated in terms of the aphorism coined by w.i. thomas (marshall, 1994): the thomas theorem: “because equality in everyday academic life can be experienced as meaning nothing, it means nothing.” 3.5. problematizing academic work and ascriptive characteristics: the tensions between aspiration, achievement and abandonment mills (1959) wrote that the essence of the sociological imagination was the understanding of history, biography and their intersection in society. following mills, and bourdieu (1988), the relationship between academic work and ascriptive characteristics was problematized within the aof study, as we had a strong hunch this would shed light on key challenges across finnish society with regard to migration. this is because all teachers – as well as the majority professionals working with all of finland’s most important institutions, organizations and professions – are educated within finnish higher education. because the ‘intersection’ in focus in this particular study is higher education and the topic is academic work and migration, it is difficult to avoid ‘biography’ in the way which is routinely done inside contemporary finnish higher education institutions (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a). we would further underline that, historically speaking, finnish society and education have been fairly characterized by the relative absence of social stratification (välimaa 2001a). this said, the rationale of the approach of the aof research project, in general, was a critical re-examination of contemporary migration-related dynamics. the most recent research of the authors suggests new approaches are needed to interrogate and problematize relationships like those brought into focus in this study. 3.6. conceptualizing social dynamics and who we are really talking about during the initial meetings of the aof research team, two key ideas came up that aof researchers felt were preconditions to articulating new knowledge on migration in the finnish coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 context. firstly, we had to avoid regarding aof’s conceptual problematization (aspiration, achievement and abandonment) of our approach as static, if we wished to avoid the normative thinking that we suspected of creating so many blind spots in the initial institutional reactions to migration-related social dynamics in finland in the previous two decades. aof researchers had a strong hunch that it was most likely undetected movement within and between actual settings and concrete focal contexts (aspiration, achievement and abandonment) that our approach brought into view as interesting and would provide new knowledge with regard to phenomena missed in first-generation studies of migration in finnish society. because much of hoffman’s previous work on academic work, mobility and migration had focused on bourdieu’s (1988) homology of trajectory in its relation to academic careers, the idea of dynamic complexity within institutional settings like higher education was unproblematic and in line with the aof study as planned. a second central idea, one that originally grounded the terms aspiration, achievement and abandonment, was that the aof team’s problematization, unlike many previous studies of migration substantively, conceptually and empirically illuminated the general population of finland, not only persons with a migrant background (pöyhönen et al. 2011, 2013). the importance of this, in the context of academic work in finland, is getting past the pseudo debate, most often carried out at the level of folk psychology, concerning precarious higher education employment in finland. this ‘debate’ often begins with anecdotal claims that nonfinnish scholars have perceived or experienced discrimination in competition for positions, especially permanent positions. a ‘debate’ of this nature played out in the finnish press during this study in which this type of assertion was levelled by rice (yle 2014). the inevitable responses to anecdotal assertions of discrimination are – of course – more anecdotal assertions, like “times are tough for foreigners and finns alike” (primmer 2014). in other words, ‘it makes no real difference who you are’. the challenges and opportunities faced by all academics in finnish higher education are ‘the same for everyone’. while it is not difficult to find willing participants for these pseudo ‘debates’, the similarity of both positions is that neither makes reference to the wide body of international research literature in which answers to these types of ‘claims’ are routinely illuminated, problematized and addressed, including the recent studies of this topic in the finnish context cited throughout this study. the reason this pseudo-debate is confined to the media, lecture halls and pubs is because actually substantiating these claims requires theory, methodology, data analysis and peerreview by content specialists. folk psychology, anecdotes and personal opinions do not contribute to explanations of the way in which transnational scholarly precariousness manifests in finnish higher education, except perhaps as ethnographic data explaining a great deal, in terms of context, what higher education actors focus their attention on and, more importantly, what they miss. in the context of higher education, it is clear that academic life – at all competitive horizons – is often very challenging for everyone involved (hoffman et al. in press). that said, concerning migration, the aof team had begun to doubt if a focus exclusively on persons with a migrant background, which many approaches take as a point of departure, missed important phenomena integral to better explanations regarding key institutions and social structure in a quickly changing society. what is clear is that media-driven pseudo debates, like many studies of academic work in finnish higher education, operate at very low levels of abstraction (folk psychology) that favour untenable personal projections, anecdotes and coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 opinions over robust methodology, theory and data analysis (teichler 1996; hoffman forthcoming), packaged in conceptually ungrounded, unproblematized, uncritical, asymmetrical approaches that over-focus on individuals, while ignoring social structure (hoffman et al. 2013). while the above-mentioned hunches of the aof team formed a promising point of departure to separate debates of folk psychology versus debates between scientists, the actual beginning of the interviews, in conjunction with wanting to focus on empirically illuminating and explaining trajectory within and between the focal settings of aspiration, achievement and abandonment in finnish higher education, spotlighted an immediate set of dilemmas and challenges. these dilemmas and challenges changed the course, methodologically speaking, of the studies and interventions hoffman would lead within the aof project. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 4. methodology: methodological shift as the aof studies got underway between 2011 and 2013, two series of events were happening concurrently—as so often in academe—which initially seemed quite unrelated. these two events were methodologically grounded in an entirely different set of studies and practice-orientated, related to hoffman’s position in his research group education and social change at the finnish institute for educational research (here and after, fier). however, the way in which these two events came to be highly interrelated shaped our subsequent approach, in part, to the self-ethnography and interventions carried out by the authors, all of which were grounded in the aof project, but unplanned. the first of these events was grounded in a series of studies focused on research team dynamics and ict-based research team collaboration, within a european science foundation (esf) research program (hoffman et al. 2014). during this series of studies, hoffman and his colleagues initially designed a conventional, mixed-methods (sequentialexploratory) study to engage an unanticipated opportunity to study an under-researched topic within higher education studies on academic work. during the initial write-ups of those efforts, hoffman and his colleagues received strong encouragement regarding the focal topic selection, but a stark caution, in particular, with regard to the use of interviews and surveys within higher education studies, which were already ‘over-relied’ on within the power-laden social dynamics of universities. specifically, a conference discussant advised the team to take a far more critical stance that combined with a methodological approach that better fit the unique perspective that the team was working from and which would allow them to avoid the traps inherent especially in interviews of university personnel. this was self-ethnography, as advanced by alvesson (2003). after reconsidering the topic with respect to the critique of that particular discussant, the team adopted a self-ethnographic approach within an advocacy/participatory paradigm (creswell 2002), aimed explicitly at improving the situation the team found themselves and their field of studies in. the second of these concurrent events occurred under the auspices of hoffman’s membership of a research group in fier, which was focused on higher education and social change. at that time hoffman was managing this group. in this capacity, hoffman, over the course of several months, had become increasingly aware of the circumstances of two early-career researchers with a migrant background, sama and cools, with respect to their aspirations at fier. both appeared to be capable researchers, having recently earned doctorates in two fields highly complementary to the interdisciplinary mission of fier: social and public policy and speech communication. in addition, an early-stage researcher and doctoral student, siekkinen, had recently joined the team and hoffman had been discussing potential project ideas with her, as she sought funding that would allow her to begin her dissertation. based on both of his previous studies of academic work and personal experience, negotiating the doctoral and post-doc career threshold as a migrant in the finnish university system, hoffman identified with the key career transitions sama, cools and seikkinen were in and the way in which these would define their career trajectories within higher education. in ideal circumstances, sama, cools and seikkinen would find ideas that were viable in terms of funding and institutional support, the key to a way forward along their respective trajectories. however, with regard to the problematization of aspiration, achievement and abandonment, it was equally clear that their institutional status was highly precarious and depended on social coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 dynamics that were as uncertain and contingent as they were misrecognized (bourdieu 1988), and dangerous (hoffman 2007, hoffman et al. 2013a). 4.1. key methodological risks and gaps: our dilemma what was equally clear, based on the methodological realities of this situation, was that sama, cools and siekkinen fell squarely into the conceptual problematization outlined by the aof study (aspiration, achievement and abandonment), and the sub-study that hoffman intended to begin focused on academic work within higher education. this was because each of them faced the imminent prospect of leaving an institution in which they had achieved a precarious foothold through research team membership in the case of siekkinen and cools, which sama also aspired to. based on his recent experience with self-ethnography (alvesson 2003; hoffman et al. 2014), hoffman now knew the original case study methodological approach planned for his focus on higher education (as a sub-study of aof) was actually problematic, both methodologically and ethically. this was because negotiating the career transition faced by a fresh post-doc, in the case of sama and cools, or an aspiring doctoral student, in the case of siekkinen, was both time-sensitive and urgent. hoffman had to consider, in light of fresh experience, whether or not adopting a more critical and participative research design, as he and his colleagues had done in their study of research team dynamics, was in order. specifically, the skill-set and socialization process post-docs and doctoral students rapidly need to learn was obviously what sama, cools and siekkinen needed, rather than to be merely interviewed as to their highly uncertain precarious situation. further, hoffman had studied the trajectories of academics in finnish universities and was familiar with the unique challenges regarding migration and mobility dynamics. in that light, interviewing sama, cools and siekkinen seemed to border on the unethical, compared to the potential inherent in actively seeking a better understanding of the nature of the structural dynamics, cultural forces and limits of agency that would in effect determine their professional outcomes in the field of finnish higher education in general, and fier in particular. hoffman, cools and seikkinen were already acutely aware of the risk entailed in studies of this nature, as higher education studies are generally not a showcase for critical approaches to power relations within academe (alvesson 2003; hoffman et al. 2014, 2013b; tight 2012), and in finnish higher education studies in particular (hoffman et al. 2013a; hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). because of the obvious risks entailed in executing a novel, critical approach to studies of academic work in finnish higher education in the first person, hoffman contacted habti, one of the other scholars he had originally intended to interview in the aof case studies. this was because, unlike most mobility specialists in finland, habti’s recent dissertation firstly focused on the mobility of scholars with a migrant background – and secondly, he was, himself, a migrant as were sama, cools and hoffman. as a new funding period was approaching with regard to several national sources of post-doc support, both sama and habti had recently approached hoffman to discuss post-doc topics. habti, while recognizing the risks of this type of study, also understood the irony of the team’s position, in the sense that scholars the world over are generally encouraged to seek new knowledge in high-risk/high-gain studies. in the words of marja makarow, vice president for research, academy of finland, “your aim is to conduct cutting-edge research. our aim is to coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 fund it” (academy of finland 2014). that said, both habti and hoffman knew the approach they discussed, despite the fact that it was novel, high risk/high gain, posed serious risks within finnish higher education, where criticism is often personalized and contentious topics are not routinely raised in everyday communication (carbaugh 1996). while academic freedom offers a fig leaf of leeway for critique (kahn & pavlich 2001), all the authors of this self-ethnography are acutely aware that there exists no established tradition of pointed critique in higher education studies in finland on topics of this nature. there are numerous examples of early stage and early career researchers like sama, cools, siekkinen and habti invoking advocacy/participatory knowledge claims (creswell 2002) toward their own career trajectories, amidst the denial or minimization (bennett 1993) of the relationship between achieved and ascriptive characteristics and salient social constructions in the context of academic work (bird 1996; castellanos & jones et al. 2003; howardhamilton, morelon-quainoo, johnson, winkle-wagner & santiague 2009; li & beckett et al. 2006; thompson & loque 2005). this acknowledged, none of the studies cited in the previous sentence was carried out in finland or mainland europe. three clear risks needed to be understood by our team before we could move forward. 4.1.1. the absence of collective agency margaret archer (1995) draws the useful distinction between the agency of a single individual and the more powerful forms of agency inherent in groups of individuals. the reason why our team’s topic is not as obvious as the groups who have published the studies cited in the previous paragraph is a subtle combination of the very low numbers of persons with a migrant background in the finnish general population (as detailed below) and the even lower numbers in senior positions in the most important academic basic units and government agencies whose scope of interest could (potentially) include topics like the one on which our team has decided to focus in this study. as hoffman observed in his initial entry in the field notes kept during this study, on 23 august, 2013: …the most compelling of the potential interview participants are early career scholars (migrants)—at postdoc level (having recently completed their phds)—who are having significant difficulties in the key transition to their first post-phd post and early stage researchers, trying to get their phd going. regarding these persons, i find myself in a difficult position in one sense, as methodological approaches that have been used before for groups in this position are simply not in use in finland. the first reason they are not in use was the topic of our latest article (hoffman 2013a), i.e. methodological nationalism. and the second reason is that those types of studies have been carried out with homogenous groups that have at least a modicum of collective agency, in the sense they share key ascriptive characteristics. the group i have, though, is defined by complex intersectionality that is mot picked up by local framing. the post-docs, all at early-career, are thomas (sama), a black african male; driss (habti), a north african male who uses the term ‘ethnic penalty’ to describe him using his own name in correspondence, as well as the other ascriptive characteristics that describe him; carine (cools), a female early-career researcher from belgium; while coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 taru (siekkinen), a young, finnish female single parent at early-stage i . this primary group is also different, because we are both friends and colleagues. i am giving them advice and actively helping them in their efforts to go forward, including them in projects both of mutual benefit that—if successful—will allows [sic] them to advance in their careers. there are a lot of reasons to do this. the most important one is that—despite rhetoric on equality in finland—it’s much easier to make a case for emerging ethnic stratification than a ‘level playing field’, defined by merit. while some in higher education studies are not used to the presentation of data and field notes ‘in the methodology section’, we respectfully remind the reader that in empirical studies that confront convention, it is precisely methodological reflexivity that allows us – sometimes – to avoid the ‘blind spots’ made up of unquestioned assumptions, unintended consequences and which, in our case, hide entire populations in plain sight. specifically, in 2013, 22,119 persons of finland’s general population of 5,451,270 or 0.41% are “persons whose native language is a foreign language” (statistics finland 2014). the empirical distinction between the 5,429,151 native speakers of finnish, swedish or sami and what government statisticians refer to as “persons whose native language is a foreign language” grounds an interesting feature of methodological nationalism in the finnish case. specifically, these “persons whose native language is a foreign language” have nothing in common but for the fact they are non-native speakers of finnish, swedish or sami, yet they are frequently conceptually and empirically ‘aggregated’ in studies of education carried out by government agencies charged for evaluating the central challenges linked to this ‘group’, stretching that term quite broadly. 4.1.2. no tradition of critical introspection as bourdieu (1988) wrote, studying one’s situation amidst more powerful scholars who misrecognize that they are reproducing power relations – while believing they are entirely up to something else – is a sure-fire recipe for making life-long enemies and producing ‘books for burning.’ finnish higher education studies are not well known for taking a critical, inward-looking approach at the way in which we operate. this has not changed between the time bourdieu made the above-cited observation through tight’s (2012) recent review of higher education’s major journals and books, in which critical studies are conspicuously absent compared to mainstream social science and humanities literature. further, our own studies, which have been cited throughout this text and broached this area, have not produced any evidence contrary to these claims. rather, they have confirmed a persistent, uncritical path dependency, characterized by a lack of imagination, conformity to convention and risk aversion (hoffman 2013b, 2014). during this study, as things turned out, we would directly encounter this tendency on two distinct occasions, both of which are elaborated in our analysis below. there are solid examples of contemporary critique in finnish higher education studies (see kivistö & tirronen 2012) and even on academic capitalism and precariousness employment of scholars (see nikula 2012 & ylijoki 2003), but these studies, while critical, do not fully address contemporary migration, nor transnational scholarly coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 precariousness (hoffman forthcoming) in a way that is actionable within the settings in which it manifests. 4.1.3. the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies we have published and are finalizing accounts that explain the elements that comprise the variant of methodological nationalism (shajahan & kezar 2012) one will encounter in finnish higher education (hoffman et al. 2013a; author1, nokkala & välimaa in press). the central element of this is explained in the cited studies in terms of the competitive horizons formed by the tension between reproduction and transformation and the social dynamics of scholars whose work results in one, the other or both in three distinct strata, all of which are in high demand in several countries around the world. the competitive horizons heuristic posits the strata of the world class, national champions and local heroes, all of which orient to three distinct sets of cultural logic which shape and define distinct social structure and the nature of agency within and between these strata. like shahjahan and kezar’s (2013), critique of methodological nationalism, the competitive horizons heuristic references the nature of the global division of scholarly labour and the way in which this manifests in highly situated circumstances. it follows that distinct sets of national idiosyncrasies (kogan 2002) and variations can be articulated – as has been done in the above-cited studies which our team has discussed – most often in ways that avoid discussion of methodological nationalism entirely. this is because, locally, the social dynamics that look like methodological nationalism at distinct competitive horizons (from outside highly situated settings like fier) comprise the beliefs, values and norms – or cultures – that inform the social dynamics of everyday life within the social structure of one’s immediate work environment in subtle, nuanced ways that cannot be ‘seen’ using the highly conventional methodological routines employed to ‘study’ academic work. a concrete example of this was a survey on academic careers received by hoffman, pöyhönen and siekkinen during this study, on 17 september 2014, from the university which employs them. in this survey, ‘equality’ was asked about in five questions, but only operationalized conceptually in terms of gender in two questions about equality and discrimination respectively. all other ascriptive characteristics and social constructions needed for a problematization of contemporary academic work and equality that would be relevant to state-of-the-art debate or international-level comparative studies of academic work were missing. there was one open-ended question: “what else would you like to say about your experiences of work or equality?” the substantive, methodological, theoretical and conceptual assumptions underlying the de-linkage of biography and academic work are beyond the scope of this study, but worth highlighting, as they underline the general approach to studies of academic work in higher education studies in finland. to be fair, it is also worth pointing out that this is an example of institutional research and should be judged in that context. to be critical, the intersectionality that is missed in ‘studies’ like these is more interesting than what is purported to be in focus. 4.1.4. speaking truth to power: a good idea? to be fair, it is not difficult to locate higher education researchers extremely aware of the (above) risks that needed to be pointed out to each member of the team who participated in coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 our self-ethnography. during the course of this study, hoffman participated in two key presentations as an organizer (hoffman, rhoades, lee & shajahan 2013) and as an audience participant (abbas, a., ashwin, p. & trahar, s. 2013), both aimed squarely at the conventions that prevents working scholars—in many cases—from getting traction on interesting topics and, in our case, topics that affect the nature of their very existence— ironically—through the study of that same existence. but, to be blunt, this community of critical scholars is spread out over vast distances, across far flung countries and continents. both of these presentations were in national and cultural settings (the usa and the uk), where critical scholarship on topics like these is more of a norm than frowned upon and where speaking truth to power in the way foucault (1979) or wildavsky (1997) use the phrase is lauded, not damned. in earlier studies hoffman and his colleagues (hoffman, elmassri, sama, korhonen & raunio 2011; hoffman et al. 2014) as well as habti (forthcoming) have encountered colleagues and reviewers who expressed reservations and thinly disguised suspicion or irritation about using the established methods and modes of inquiry cited throughout this text in which working scholars step out from behind the cloak of passive, third-person, anonymous convention to critically question power relations in ways apparently outside the experience, approval or working knowledge of those presenting extraparadigmatic critique. in all cases, the colleagues in question seemed to either be genuinely unaware that studies of this type are routinely carried out in several countries across the globe; unfamiliar with the paradigmatic basis that necessitates the wide variety of traditions and modes of inquiry currently in use in contemporary social sciences and humanities; and unable or unwilling to evaluate studies of these nature – or some combination of these possible explanations (hoffman 2013b). however, in no case did those same reviewers hesitate to attempt an extra-paradigmatic evaluation. as this type of amateur gatekeeping is unfortunately not unusual, the authors frame this as an opportunity to sharpen their argumentation, analysis and general scholarship skills. 4.1.5. social media and transnational scholarly precariousness regarding social media, the same ‘disconnect’ our team was experiencing between higher education studies in finland and mainstream research within the social sciences and humanities was true regarding the vibrant, ongoing global conversations which squarely address the exploitation of the aptly termed new faculty majority (2014). in social media, a population of precarious faculty (2014) that now outnumber permanent faculty and staff cuts across the globe; they make up an invisible adjunct nation (2014) in which “improving the quality of higher education by advancing professional equity and securing academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty” is important, yet apparently unnoticed in groups and institutes like ours as emergent transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming). while these parallel social movements engage in “education and advocacy to provide economic justice and academic equity for all college faculty” by promoting “stable, equitable, sustainable, non-exploitative academic environments that promote more effective teaching, learning, and research” (new faculty majority 2014), and justice for adjuncts (2014), scholars in places like fier seem completely disconnected from these global sites of contention that frame and spotlight “non-negotiable sites of struggle” (mla subconference 2014) in which adjuncts and contingents together unite (2014) “adjunct and contingent professors at campuses … to address the crisis in higher education and the troubling trend toward a marginalized teaching faculty that endangers our profession”. methodologically coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 speaking, the idea we could better connect with ict-based activism bore fruit eventually, by connecting with members of finnish-based work life scholars hentonnen and lapointe (2015), who were using a combination of publications, training and a web-based approach (www.valtamo.fi) to engage the relationship between the ways in which transnational academic capitalism within finland manifested across finnish society. 4.2. the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads with respect to established and ongoing debates surrounding the ways in which the social stratification of the academic workforce clearly implicates higher education as a whole, along with the distinctive research literature on academic work, it is not problematic to conceptually and empirically locate the situation of the authors, locally speaking, within wider, established conversations and debates at the national and global level. that said, much of the active debate and above-mentioned research have missed the ways in which migration and mobility further complicate the social dynamics of academic work, with a few very important exceptions, such as cantwell & lee (2010), mamiseishvili (2010), pillay (2010) & torresolave (2013). while that might seem like ‘pointing out the obvious’ to some, the problem for our team was contending with the reality that those same individuals did not appear to be doing anything to ameliorate the scholarly precariousness. in terms of our direct experience, the obvious risks and the emergent trends in our field, our self-ethnography team as individuals and as a group was left with the decision to (also) turn a blind eye to the situation we found ourselves in locally, or attempt to constructively engage with it, through our scholarship, in ways that were going on primarily outside mainland europe and finnish higher education in general, and fier in particular. during the period of time hoffman became aware of the methodological crossroads the team was at, he decided to talk about risks with his colleagues, who were actually caught up in these dynamics to see what they thought, as individuals. 4.3. moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process in the case of fier, hoffman met with sama, cools and siekkinen individually, and proposed that they, together, study their collective circumstances as a group because of the commonalities regarding the professional circumstances they were immediately facing or had faced in the past. we aimed to begin by studying our immediate circumstances and relate these both to the mainstream literature in the social sciences and the humanities focused on scholarly precariousness in general, and engage the way in which transnational academic capitalism was manifesting in fier, in ways that were being engaged in distant locations but which had not yet been apprehended locally in a way that we could connect with. in this sense, we decided to directly investigate transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming) and the way in which it manifested in our immediate surroundings. http://www.valtamo.fi/ coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 to do this, firstly as individuals and then as a group, we decided to target settings, seminars and conferences in which our ideas could be presented, advanced and critiqued. these could then be developed as conference presentations and papers, then journal articles, and other types of publications. these, in turn could support ideas for funding applications and for use in our respective teaching practice and service. we agreed and decided these efforts need not to be thought about as an exclusive future career focus or long-term orientation. rather, we approached this topic as a set of issues that is currently unresolved in our local environment and which are viable topics in their own right. moreover, it was clear that working with novel ideas, as they evolve from peer presentations in conferences and seminars, and then developed into viable publications and funding ideas, was a skill set all scholars who aspire to positions in academe are better off acquiring sooner, rather than later. finally it was equally clear that the precarious professional path finnish higher education scholars needed to negotiate was a minefield of unquestioned assumptions that were having unanticipated consequences far from understood with respect to ‘hidden populations’, especially those caught up in mobility and migration dynamics. ultimately, with respect to a wider, more critical appraisal of the literature and the larger, international-level on-going conversations that concerned our topic, our group had the option to ‘sit on the side-lines’, hoping someone else in a position of power would notice the literature, knowledge/practice gap we had identified and constructively address the situation, or act ourselves. this study is a result of a decision to act on these circumstances, rather than wait. the concrete set of practices the group agreed to was firstly to begin working on the topic – as perceived by the group, using self-ethnography, as outlined by alvesson (2003) for the same reasons hoffman and colleagues had chosen the approach in their 2014 study (cited above). in addition, we proposed to work on other distinct types of related, parallel efforts relevant to career development and service projects if and when chances presented themselves – whether discussing and developing funding ideas and publication proposals, in the case of siekkinen, sama and habti; or the review of journal article write-ups and discussing career strategy, in the case of cools. finally, hoffman asked the group members to begin keeping field notes, in order to record their observations and reflections and sent them alvesson’s (2003) article, which details the rationale and general approach of self-ethnography, the team would use. 4.4 self-ethnography: ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’ while the conventional researcher (with an anthropological orientation) may ask “what in hell do they think they are up to?” the self-ethnographer must ask “what in hell do we think we are up to? … on the whole, students of organizational culture within one’s own national context suffer from a lack of imagination making it possible to accomplish studies not caught up in the taken-for-granted assumptions and ideas that are broadly shared between the researcher and the researched. too much of organizational life is often too coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 familiar. for academics studying other academics this is an especially strong problem (alvesson 2003: 171&177). the moment the most urgent questions and preoccupations of scholars in universities mirror social transformation in society is precisely the time for sociologically-driven inquiry (bourdieu 2004). finnish society is facing a challenging transformation, especially in terms of demographic pressures, still too often thought about in inward-looking, normative, institutional terms that do not explain the alternatives open to us, because they obscure the global nature of the social dynamics shaping structural change in highly situated national and local settings. the extent to which this is actually recognized in a way that is actionable in higher education or society is not difficult to call into question (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press; pöyhönen & tarnanen 2015). because this is the case and not otherwise, shifting methodology, in order to break away from approaches that seem to reproduce social stratification rather than ameliorate it, seemed worth a try. our analysis below focuses on data that cannot be framed using what beck & beckgernsheim (2012) term zombie categories or ‘smoke and mirrors’ jargon (hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). zombie categories are ideas that once were used to explain a great deal (often by themselves) or by referencing grand theory, like class or globalization. smoke and mirrors jargon is ‘policy-speak: terms or discourse adopted, borrowed or translated from other countries which are used to design policy and practice aimed at what are seen, by some, as ‘new’ situations in finland, like migration and internationalization. examples include multiculturalism, diversity or good relations. these zombie categories and jargon are routinely substituted for conceptually viable and comparatively meaningful ideas that explain our topic at a higher level of abstraction. as an alternative to the methodological path dependency we critique above, producing an empirically-grounded qualitative analysis involving a small group is often the first step on the road to a deeper, wider understanding, explaining – even engaging – challenging topic. as a qualitative, ethnographic write-up, the work stands or falls on its own and can be evaluated by anyone familiar with the basic principles of qualitative research (creswell 2002). self-ethnography, although unfamiliar to many in finnish higher education, is a way to illuminate our topic, using the lived experience of those inside the institution of higher education. a variety of insider-ethnography, alvesson (2003) defines the approach as follows: a self-ethnography is a study and a text in which the researcher-author describes a cultural setting to which s/he has a “natural access”, is an active participant, more or less on equal terms with other participants. the researcher then works and/or lives in the setting and then uses the experiences, knowledge and access to empirical material for research purposes. this research is, however, not a major preoccupation, apart from at a particular time when the empirical material is targeted for close scrutiny and writing. the person is thus not an ethnographer in the sense of a professional stranger or a researcher primarily oriented to studying the specific setting. participant observation is thus not a good label in this case, observing participant is better. participation comes first and is only occasionally complemented with observation in a research focused sense … the idea of a self-ethnography is coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 to utilize the position one is in also for other, secondary purposes, i.e. doing research on the setting of which one is a part. (alvesson 2003: 174-175, emphasis added) it is very important in our case to underline the episodic nature of self-ethnography, in which fairly long periods of time go by between times the authors were able to focus on this study. this was first and foremost because this was a curiosity-driven, opportunistic study for most of the authors, except hoffman & pöyhönen. secondly, all of the authors were engaged in other studies and duties linked to our jobs alongside this study. finally, we had no explicit direction on the study other than what we decided was the most appropriate course of action given our circumstances. the main reason we chose alvesson’s (2003) approach was because it was articulated precisely for the institutional setting we were in, as well as a good fit for the very limited amount of time we had for the study. in addition, the approach was very intuitive and accessible. finally, the ethnographic data, in and of itself, proved far more interesting than the types of data many colleagues were using to study what outwardly was the same topic. alvesson draws an important distinction between self-ethnography and auto-ethnography. he points out that the ‘self’ in the former draws attention to what is happening around an individual, the social dynamics, structure and culture an individual is caught up in, while the ‘self’ in the latter focuses attention on deeply personal experiences felt inside an author and what they need to share with a wider audience. in other words, self-ethnography refers to notions of what others do and say when a person is a participant in the setting and the analysis of the meanings these doings and sayings might have while auto-ethnography focuses more on a person’s own doings and sayings in a certain setting (eriksson 2010). alvesson stresses the distinction between the “careful documentation and interpretation of social events that one is witnessing”, which is the signature of self-ethnography and the introspective, autobiographical, even confessional style of auto-ethnography. as in many ethnographic approaches, introspection is not necessarily out of place, as long as it relates to the overarching analysis, which is the goal – and central challenge of most ethnographic write-ups (alvesson 2003:174-175, emphasis added; also clifford & marcus et al. 1986; emerson, fretz & shaw 1995). because of the multiple roles we have inside the institution and the situations we are involved in, our study combines both aspects: a self-reflection of what others are doing and saying, and how we give meanings to these, and analysis of what we are doing and saying and the meanings behind these. the central advantage our team relied on was that direct observation (adler & adler 1998) in settings where naturally occurring events are taking place allows researchers to reduce their dependence on oversimplified, surface-level accounts that often remain at a very low level of abstraction. this allows researchers to craft an analysis of phenomena that those observed may be entirely unaware of, which by definition would be difficult if not impossible to engage in either in a survey or interview. alvesson also draws an additional distinction between ‘conventional’ ethnography and selfethnography, stressing that, rather than focusing on a setting outside one’s ‘home-base’, the focus is on one’s ‘home-base’. his elaboration of this is worth citing: coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 while conventional ethnography is basically a matter of the stranger entering a setting and “breaking in”, trying to create knowledge through understanding the natives from their point of view … self-ethnography is more of a struggle of “breaking out” from the taken for grantedness of a particular framework and of creating knowledge through trying to interpret the acts, words and material used by oneself and one’s fellow organizational members from a certain distance. in the first case, we have the researcher as burglar, in the second as a run-away. the burglar researcher wants to overcome obstacles in order to get in contact with a target of interest, the run-away-researcher struggles in order to create sufficient distance in order to get perspective on lived reality. (alvesson 2003: 176, emphasis added) our approach to ethnography also differs that from a conventional team ethnography in which an analysis of settings and situations in which research team members are not personally involved or ‘insiders’. our strategy breaks with what many view as ‘traditional methodology’ in order to analyse social dynamics that have not been adequately critiqued or analysed within our institutional settings. thus, it is not ‘breaking in’, but ‘breaking out’ and conceptually distancing and situating ourselves with regard to everyday activity, both as individuals and as a team. a major problem in higher education research in general, and finnish higher education studies in particular at this time, is the overly-narrow range of topics engaged and methodologies, theories and methods used. ‘what is not’ studied, like the topic we explore here, in some cases is far more interesting than ‘what is’. (abbas, ashwin & trahar 2013; ahola & hoffman et al. 2013; hoffman, rhoades lee & shajahan & 2013; shahjahan & kezar 2013; scott 2013). in a comparative sense, this topic seems equally ‘underexplored’ in several countries, illuminating the tension between areas linked to economic competitiveness (much more studied in finnish higher education) and social cohesion (much less studied in finnish higher education studies) (hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). many topics, particularly academic work and migration (as two discrete topic areas in finland, each implicating two distinct groups of scholars) are studied via reactive implementation or ‘follow up’ studies, policy research, discourse analysis, and approaches that rely on surveys and different types of interviews. however, in the context of higher education studies, the authors have developed deep reservations about these conventional, over-used approaches, in particular that, in general, surveys in these areas are often conceptually ungrounded and unproblematized, as was the case in the career survey received from the author’s university (described above). interviews, in particular also, easily trigger ‘impression management’, ‘script following’ or ‘storytelling’, far more often than profound insights into everyday assumptions that seldom are questioned (alvesson 2003; johnson 2002). reactive or ‘follow up’ studies of reform focus on consensus-driven events, rather than the ‘bottom up’ logic of curiosity driven approaches that are sceptical, as a point of departure, of approaches that over-rely on the assumption that authority figures have a good grip on the most urgent needs linked to higher education and social change. higher educational settings, particularly universities, are often good candidates for selfethnography (alvesson (2003: 171, 176), because issues linked to personal, institutional and occupational prestige and reputation, complicated by organizational and professional loyalties, are often at the front of people’s minds—especially in interview situations. further, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 self-initiated, emergent topics, while having the potential to be highly interesting and catch attention, demand, as we have found out, careful attention to methodological ‘fit’. the thick(er) description (geertz 1973) we opted for, in our development of this topic, carries many risks. however, these were assumed because we needed to methodologically move forward, in a manner that allowed critique by our peers and development of the topic and engagement, aiming at impact. impact, in particular, is not something higher education researchers in finland are famous for. while our efforts can only be understood as an initial first step, it is one that cannot be simply ‘skipped’ on the way to illuminating the most fundamental dynamics that run within and across national, organizational, cultural, generational and disciplinary settings whose relationships to each other are simply not understood as such (hoffman et al 2014; hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). alvesson (2003) warns that the self-ethnography carries the additional risk of ‘backing off’ sensitive topics and taboos, resulting in less-than-bold analysis in order that everyone involved ‘save face’. in order to avoid this, an incremental member-check (as detailed below) of participants within the scope of the study seems warranted in order to address this challenge. the approach to known challenges—the risks we face as we conduct this study and submit it for peer review—are summed up well by alvesson (2003:183-184, emphasis added): in general, research suffers from the inability of researchers to liberate themselves from socially shared frameworks. that evaluators agree may not be a sign of objectivity as much as culturally or paradigmatically shared biases … the trick is to get away from frozen positions, irrespective if they are grounded in personal experiences or shared frameworks. a problem is that staying within socially shared frames and biases may make research life easier – while what is seen as personal biases are sanctioned, proceeding from and reproducing socially shared biases may be applauded. it is highly probable that we will encounter colleagues in the course of these studies who would have appreciated us (more) for adopting the biases we critique in this study, while lauding the ‘egalitarian fabric’ of what is often uncritically represented as a ‘shared’ social feature of finnish society and her educational institutions. as should be very clear in our problematization of our topic above and our analysis and discussion below, we neither share the biases illuminated in this study, nor see uncritical framing as viable, especially where education is concerned. this is because education is the single finnish institution that almost everyone in the general population passes through, in some form or another (saukkonen 2013). if we as ‘clever scientists’ are unable to come to grips with how social change plays out within our own building(s), using the tools of our own areas of specialization, explaining this in any other context or topic seems dubious. finally alvesson’s (2003) attention to power dynamics, which is starkly evident in contemporary higher education institutions and manifests in the power to include or exclude (välimaa, papatsiba & hoffman in press), convinced us that a sustained examination of our topic would be well served by framing our efforts to date—as well as taking the next steps forward—in terms of self-ethnography. our scope of analysis includes individuals and groups with a great deal of power, working in tight proximity to individuals and groups who have none. because of this, methodologically speaking, we can hopefully engage our topic in a coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 constructive manner that allows us to lay a qualitative foundation for further development which is open for all concerned to critique. 4.4.1. data, methods and analysis the switch from hoffman’s original approach (within the aof study) from case study (in 2003) to our team’s new methodological strategy of self-ethnography immediately freed us both from the traps inherent in interviewing within higher education, especially those detailed in the previous section, and allowed us to rely primarily on our own direct observations (adler & adler 1998), which, ethnographically speaking, took the form of jottings in the margins of our calendars, on our phones and reflection in our field notes (emerson, fretz & shaw 1995). in addition to our field notes, an important source of data was email communication and recorded conversations of key meetings and discussions between aof team members, including pöyhönen and stikhin from our unversity’s centre for applied language studies (cals). as is noted by alvesson (2003), self-ethnography is not a full-time pursuit and is most usually episodic, in the sense that our team’s ethnographic access to our topic meant that while we engaged in collecting data, thinking and communicating about our topic, this study occurred in the background of the myriad of other responsibilities and life events each of us was involved in. while this is quite usual for some in our team, it was quite new for others. because of the methodological shift we experienced, our analysis is presented in the form of an ethnographic write-up, in which the evolving text has been continuously framed and reframed, in ongoing iterations amongst the authors, based on our data, focused conversations on this topic and with respect to successive presentations of this topic, in several types of venues, including local research team presentations at the finnish institute for educational research, where hoffman, cools and siekkinen were employed and the centre for applied language studies (here and after cals), where poyhönen & stikhin were employed, dating from august, 2013, and several international conferences, till the present time. our iterative writing process as analytical inquiry (richardson 1998) is aimed at the type of holistic ethnographic write-up you are reading. as such, our analysis of the ‘blind spot’ we discuss, is a methodological outcome of our team’s iterative reflection, collaborative writing and analysis of ways of thinking about and doing research that constitutes everyday reality to some researchers, while remaining completely invisible to others (hoffman et al. 2014). the analysis we present lays an empirical foundation for further efforts, including the analysis of policy and practice related to several substantive issues spotlighted during the time in which this journey took place, as well as the further conceptualizing of the topic we engage below. while those topics are all beyond the narrow scope of this article and handled in follow-on studies, what remains is this account of our initial insights, which resulted from taking a calculated risk on a methodological road less-travelled. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 4.4.1.1. rationale for ignoring convention surveys and interviews in particular stand little chance of gaining traction on this topic, unless as part of a mixed-method study, in which viable substantive and conceptual connections that will stand up to robust international peer review can be made. our assertion is based on tight’s (2012) observation that higher education researchers over-rely on the accounts of others, as opposed to observation and critical engagement of naturally occurring events. in a study of this topic, researchers relying solely on surveys or interviews will either be asking senior scholars or ‘key informants’ to account for phenomena they have caused (intentionally or inadvertently), or cannot otherwise explain or engage, despite research literature and discussion surrounding this issue as it exists in the global or finnish context. on the other hand one can query early stage/career or mid-career scholars about dynamics they may be entirely unaware of. given those realities, the idea of asking people questions they cannot answer may very well be a methodological ‘road to nowhere’. 4.4.1.2. engaging methodological limitations: backyard research, in the first person. researching one’s own professional context or ‘backyard research’ involves known difficulties, particularly regarding power issues, information disclosure and assumptions of bias (creswell 2002: 184). that said, these difficulties can be outweighed by the fact that one’s ‘backyard’ can also be a unique context which would pose other researchers significant access problems (johnson 2002). in this regard, it is our belief that researchers using the approaches we critique in this study would have little or no chance accomplishing the analysis and discussion we present below using the methodologies higher education researchers in finland are more comfortable with. despite the methodological advances made in the 20 th century, it is not difficult to find scholars who are very squeamish about stepping up and critiquing their own organization, institution and/or profession in the first person. this denies the empirical and conceptual reality that “sometimes, the social scientist becomes his or her own object of study: it is their life which is the focus … the focus may be on the sociologist’s own ‘insider’ life but it is connected through sociology to an ‘outsider’ world of wider social processes” (plummer 2001: 32). when the voices ‘connecting the dots’ between our biographies, history and a particular intersection in society (mills 1959) belong to the researcher, it is hard to deny ellis and bochner’s maxim “to show how important it is to make the researcher’s own experience a topic of investigation in its own right”, stepping away from writing “in passive third-person voice … written from nowhere by nobody” (ellis & bochner 2000: 734). this effort seeks to avoid “contributing to the flotilla of qualitative writing that is simply not interesting to read because adherence to the model requires writers to silence their own voices and view themselves as contaminants” (richardson 1998: 347). in short, our efforts involve connecting our own direct observations to a wider set of concerns central to social science and higher education. despite the voices immediately above, every time we have sent a study arising from the advocacy/empowerment paradigm (creswell 2002) we are working in for initial review to a higher education publication, the use of actual names and events within our own institution coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 and specialty, as bourdieu (1988) found, disturbs the sensibilities of some reviewers in the highly conservative higher education research community (hoffman et al. 2013b). to be frank, this issue has caused worries also amongst the authors of this very article, because of our knowledge that power issues are unavoidable. the risk to be excluded or marginalized even further is higher for some of us than others. this said, all of the studies have been published, with the names of the people in the situation. because this is so commonly seen as a limitation underlines the risks the authors are taking with their careers and credibility. that said, given the ‘disconnects’ we are working within, we would assert this is not actually a methodological limitation, especially as this study is well-situated in the international literature and the global debates relevant to our topic. rather, we are pointing out a normative limitation, in our fields of specialization and how – or if – our specializations inform state-of-the-art inquiry and impacts institutional practice. 4.4.1.3. balancing anonymity, privacy and efficacy: incremental member check and impact aims while we have no issues with calling attention to the topic we are explicitly researching, we do draw a distinction within the ever-widening group of colleagues who we did not originally anticipate becoming caught up in our analysis. as was noted by hoffman and his colleagues (2013b), the scope of a self-ethnography can sometimes widen, quite quickly, based on direct observation of unanticipated events related to a study already underway. these events which, by definition, cannot be anticipated, nevertheless introduce a valuable opportunity to actively engage people in the widening scope of analysis. since our study did involve a quickly evolving scope of analysis, our team is engaged in an incremental member check. we originally did this explicitly with the members of our research team in our initial seminar presentation of this topic (see analysis section, below). however, as becomes clear in the analysis, our actual scope of analysis could be said to be fier, as a whole, as well as the cals, in which the aof project and some of the authors (pöyhönen & stikhin) were based. when the study reached a point where a larger member check could be done, especially with regard to fier, an invitation to a conference presentation of our study (in progress) was made to fier personnel in august 2014. this, in turn generated a follow-up request by fier personnel to present our analysis within fier. this was carried out in october 2014 in an inservice training event. during that presentation we stressed that the data in our analysis below has been altered in such a way as to render identification of anyone other than the authors anonymous until such time that these persons indicate this is – or is not – necessary. finally, follow-on studies and interventions will result from our efforts, consistent with the rationale for the approach to transnational scholarly precariousness we have developed in general and the situation of the individual authors in particular. the first, this institutional analysis, is aimed at a contribution to the body of literature on academic work in higher education studies in general and finnish higher education in particular. it was presented at the august 2014 (finnish) national higher education symposium, in jyväskyä, finland. the second was more narrowly-focused on the potential of self-ethnography as a research-based organizational intervention, in the annual conference of the finnish society for the study of ethnic relations and migration, in helsinki, finland, in october 2014. a third paper on the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 nature of transnational scholarly precariousness, focused on tensions illuminated by an ethnographic focus on the individual perceptions and experiences of scholars, was presented at the annual conference of the association for the study of higher education, in washington, d.c., in november, 2014. all participants in the scope of our research have been or will be made aware of and invited to attend these presentations and comment on the draft manuscripts of these studies. as the catch phrase of ‘evidence based policy’ is so often bandied about in the same uncritical manner as the ‘smoke and mirrors’ discourse we critique above, we assert our studies form both the basis for this, as well as further research on the issues we have identified in our studies, but which are outside the direct scope of this write-up. the added value of this type of incremental procedure is to stimulate discussion on the type of alternative, conceptually problematized, empirically-grounded analyses necessary to get traction on increasingly refined better explanations of the topics we bring into focus in studies of this type. active debate and discussion of this type is necessary to counter the tendency of asymmetrical consideration of topics, especially in studies of internationalization, migration and mobility, which often over-focus on only narrow facets of topics of this nature, at the expense of robust, symmetrical accounts which are comparatively viable and constitute new knowledge, ready for international peer review at the state-of-the-art. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 5. analysis: analysing our ‘academic limbo’ the following analysis, in the form of a focus on three vignettes, is a ‘thin slice of a thick description’. in order to achieve focus on the institutional context, along with the purposes of this set of studies (as detailed above), we have been selective in our initial focus, spotlighting particularly revealing and fundamental moments and events during the course of our study. in this regard, it is first and foremost the unquestioned assumptions, unintended consequences and hidden populations obscured by institutional dynamics that is the most relevant to our initial published account of this study. while this approach could be fairly criticized as ‘half a story’, we would firstly counter that higher education studies in finland, particularly those focused on internationalization and mobility, are flooded with studies that ignore the power of social structure at the expense of unquestioned assumptions linked to methods favoured by researchers operating within paradigms covered by the umbrella of methodological individualism. this specifically concerns the upward conflation (archer 1995) that results from an overreliance on interviews, surveys and policy research, combined with under-reliance on critique (teichler 1996, tight 2012; hoffman et al. 2013b). these researchers often assume and seek a focus on intentionality, rationality and agency, none of which we encountered during this study, nor typically encounter with regard to topics of this nature cited throughout this text. the methods and data most relevant to our institutional analysis is direct observation of naturally occurring events. secondly, the highly situated individual accounts, needed to form a more holistic, comprehensive picture of this analysis are handled in an identical manner, and published in the companion article as detailed above. the literature, policy and practice gap illuminated by our efforts as a whole indicate first and foremost analytically grounding a qualitative, empirical analysis that lends itself to further studies with respect to state-of-theart scholarship, policy analysis and collegial debate and practical organizational intervention. 5.1. unquestioned assumptions and minimizing misrecognized transnational scholarly precariousness and exclusion the nature of our situation, as a group, became clear the first time we presented our ideas to the research team in which hoffman, cools and siekkinen were based and in which sama was trying to become employed. this research group, education and social change, meets regularly to present its members’ research in progress, to discuss results and new ideas, and invite visitors whose work is of interest to the team. on 20 november 2013, our selfethnography team presented the set of ideas we had become interested in and received what was perceived by the authors as a ‘mixed reception’. hoffman had noticed on previous occasions that calling assumptions regarding the nature of equity into question in finnish society in general and finnish higher education employment patterns in particular sometimes provoked defensive reactions on the parts of individual group members. now that a group was doing work on this topic, the reactions seemed stronger, reminiscent of the first time hoffman, sama (along with el massri, raunio & korhonen) had presented the work which led to their 2011 and 2013a publications. following coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 this initial presentation, hoffman wrote up his thoughts in his field notes—as an email to the self-ethnography team—the following day: the most important ideas that came out of yesterday’s presentation is that we have a realistic chance to try something that’s not been done before in our institute, probably this university, maybe even finland … what i mean is that we find ourselves in a position in which ‘the normal way of doing things or framing issues’ is not consistent with a reality we are trying to pursue in our careers … last week, in a different conference (on a different continent), i organized a symposium panel that focused precisely on the type of situation our group is in at the moment. specifically, situations that have not been successfully resolved, adequately problematized, conceptually-speaking, nor studied in empirically meaningful terms. nevertheless, those kinds of situations exist and we are fully caught up in one of them … the point in our symposium (in the usa) was to spotlight scholars who had also encountered these sorts of situations and, recognizing them for what they were, created a novel approach that allowed them to overcome the ‘traps’ of normative substantive framing, inappropriate use of theory, using methodological approaches or methods that allowed the phenomena to remain obscure, vague, conflated, elided, etc. (methodology that obscures more than it reveals) and empirical foci that do not allow traction on the topic in focus. specifically, in our situation, the way in which things are normally dealt with and thought about is perpetuating the situation, rather than resolving the situation … the most important confirmation i got that we are really onto something were the comments, especially those offered by one of our senior colleagues, all of which i understood, but also which reveal the normative contours of how a topic like ours most ‘typically’ might be thought of, if approached by senior scholars in fier, drawing on the framing which – in many ways – has created the situation we are in at the moment. this is not the same as saying senior scholars in our system have deliberately created this situation. rather, the social dynamics have emerged, very slowly and subtly, over a long period of time. the reason we notice them now is because of the contradictions and paradoxes between what people ‘say’ they are trying to do and what they ‘actually’ do. this is nothing new in social science and the humanities – and these contradictions and paradoxes are precisely what we are going to study … a second set of comments from a different senior colleague were far more relevant and concrete as to what we need to do now, i.e. decide on the kind of data we will use and how it will be analyzed … my main point is: not many scholars get to identify and study a fundamentally ‘new’ topic … i recognize that the circumstances drawing us together at the moment are not ideal and i do not take them lightly. that said, this might be the most interesting, novel study being carried out in fier at the moment. we can change this situation, while at the same time, moving us forward in our respective career paths, in ways that are respected and recognized in our fields. thanks for yesterday! it was very clear, during our first presentation that some members of our team, especially senior scholars, were having difficulties trying to ‘place’ or take seriously the approach our self-ethnography team was using. one of these colleagues characterized sama’s comments coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 more as a form of ‘therapy’ than scholarship, suggesting we ‘re-label’ our approach in terms of approaches they were familiar with. however, another colleague, while unfamiliar with the approach we were using, offered practical, general hints that would help our team move toward types of generic framing that would help those unfamiliar with the overarching paradigm and methodological approach ‘get’ the idea via connecting the dots between substantive framing, theory, data, analysis and discussion. the most interesting aspect of this discussion for hoffman was not the reaction of the senior scholars in the research group, it was the negative reaction of the self-ethnography team, especially sama and cools, who perceived the reception of our ideas as the minimization of a situation the research group did not really understand, or as a rebuke for having brought the topic forward. as cools wrote in her field notes: i was not surprised of all these 'critiques' and negativity … the way our colleague said ‘yeah yeah i also had these periods of unemployment’ ... shows how unimportant and alien this subject is. or perhaps it’s actually ‘too close’ and that's why it is hard to talk about it more openly? … i agree some may have had the impression of having seen our presentation as a therapeutic kind of event; still, what we do is scientifically grounded. we know more about this because of what we’re doing. in the end, it may have a therapeutic effect on us, why wouldn't it? … afterwards, though, one always has very mixed feelings and wonders: did i reveal too much? do our efforts make me (therefore: us) too vulnerable? during the presentation, siekkinen and cools had been quite open about the fact that a common linkage between them, sama and habti was that they currently had no funding or formal positions. this was particularly problematic in siekkinen’s view, whose typical employment contacts had been mainly for extremely short periods of time, on very small contracts, often month-by-month. further, when asking advice on the way forward, siekkinen told hoffman a senior scholar had advised her to apply for mobility funding. this advice empirically illuminated two key links to both migration debates in the finnish context, which often only focus on persons with a migrant background, both of which have the important policy implications discussed in the last section of this study. the first of these was shown in siekkinen’s reaction to this suggestion, an emphatic “s/he knows i’m not going anywhere!” siekkinen, a young, single parent, has no desire at this time, nor the realistic possibility, to pursue the funding schemes she was advised were a ‘way forward’ in her career. even if she wanted to try this option, the practical difficulties would be considerable, compared to a person without a child. the structural consequences of early stage and early career mobility are serious, especially in the finnish university system, where mobility delays career progression and causes many to avoid mobility entirely (raunio, korhonen & hoffman 2010). local circulation patterns (vabø 2003) often confine the geographic territory of nordic scholars. the most important mobility pattern in finnish universities – specifically, the local and national patterns – is no mobility, a pattern entirely missed by many, as it is an assumption (hoffman 2007). ‘invisible’ mobility assumptions like these are seldom questioned, therefore they are unproblematized and projected, as was the case with siekkinen’s mobility ‘option’ for solving ‘her’ problem. this, by definition, means the migration-related implications are unseen, as well. siekkinen, when characterizing her own scholarly efforts termed her scholarly status during this period of time as ‘academic limbo’. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 looking back, the basic ideas our team presented on 20 november 2014 ironically underlined a set of truths that might be called uncomfortable except for the fact they are not recognized, as ‘truths’ at all. i use the word ironic to underline alvesson’s (2003) observation that it is the irony of the situation we find ourselves in within universities that justifies the use of ethnographic methods to more closely examine the difference between what we believe we are doing and what we are actually doing (bourdieu 1988). specifically, what we find ironic in our particular situation is that our fier research group specializes in the study of ‘academic work’ and has even sought funding during the time this study was in progress to study ‘why scholars leave academia’. it is clear, on the one hand, that many in fier could say the answer to this question is not particularly well understood in the finnish university system. however, the main difference between our self-ethnography team’s understanding of ‘why scholars leave academia’ and other approaches we are aware of is our direct experience of confronting the assumptions our analysis spotlights in this study, and the means we are using to actually answer that identical question. the main unquestioned assumptions we highlight appear above, in our problematization of our topic in terms of theory of the middle range (merton 1968) in the introduction to this study. first and foremost are assumptions that avoid questioning the relationship between robust conceptual explanations of social stratification, that have existed for decades, and the well-known conceptual coordinates of academic work, both of which are simultaneously masked and avoided in favor of the finnish variant of methodological nationalism as it plays out in basic units (becher & kogan 1992), focused on low competitive horizons like education (shajahan & kezar 2012; hoffman et al. 2013a). these social dynamics are so powerful that the connections between the circumstances of our self-ethnography team – discussed in our 20 november 2013 presentation – were not connected with the question ‘why scholars leave academia’ even though three scholars considering ‘leaving academia’ were sitting around the same table with other scholars actively seeking funding to ‘better understand’ the same topic. it was already in this session where we began to realize there were few or no ‘safe’ places for early-stage/career scholars to talk about their experiences without feeling ridiculed and patronized for raising the topic, inside our own institute. 5.2. the unintended consequences of group-think the type of social structure and organizational dynamics our team has become interested in cannot be problematized as intentional or a result of conscious thought any more than can the problematization of ‘why scholars leave academia’. rather, it is probably more accurate to assert that not thinking about emergent patterns of transnational precariousness (hoffman forthcoming) and what these patterns imply about our potential as an institute are a result of ‘group-think’. in other words, our policy and practice (group-think ), especially when it comes to apprehending the types of challenges we spotlight in this study, more accurately fall under the category of unintended consequences. the idea of unintended consequences was observed on 26 november 2013 as hoffman attended an institute-wide meeting of fier. the purpose of the meeting was re-thinking fier’s institutional strategy. hoffman has been employed in fier since 2002 and has participated in these types of events on two other occasions. what was striking, as the members of several different research groups, support staff and management gathered offsite in a local hotel, was not who was present, both generally and specifically. it was who was absent. the day after this meeting, hoffman coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 emailed two of the professors leading the reformulation of fier’s strategy. the body of the email reads as follows: i’m not sure exactly how the strategic development process will go from here, but i wanted to make one observation on the cluster of topics that included social inclusion yesterday. in our small group discussions i tried to raise the idea that we as an institute are not very good in this area, and for an educational research institute in finland, this is not viable. in terms of these types of topic, demographically speaking, the most interesting things that were discussed yesterday were not, in general, ‘the areas and themes in the exercise’ and ‘who’ was discussing those things, in terms of individuals and groups. the most interesting things, in terms of literature/knowledge/practice gaps were ‘who was not in that room’ and ‘the topics and themes this prevents us from seeing, articulating, problematizing and engaging’. as a group, i’m wondering if we really notice(d) what a homogenous group we are, in several aspects. when thought about, in terms of the global trends introduced in the opening lecture, i get the idea that ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’, which is dangerous, because of the power inherent in education as the only institution most people in society pass through. the capacity to constructively critique and study these types of topics are what i found most missing in much of yesterday’s discussion … i hope fier, as an institute can develop the critical capacity to engage topics like these, because some of our competitors in finland are already moving on this, but we might be in the best position to speak to this, in finland, if we chose. i think there are some significant potentials in this area, because – comparatively speaking – several european countries are in a similar situation because of demographically-driven phenomena. sorry if i’m repeating something someone else mentioned yesterday, but i never heard much critique within the ideas that were mentioned, except for our colleague’s observations about social inclusion. the other comments that came close to this had too many unquestioned assumptions that won’t stand up to the kind of robust conceptually driven, empirically grounded problematization i’m thinking of. hope this kind of comment is not too critical, it’s meant to be constructive, as it implies opportunities to research things that are ‘not seen’ by many, particularly in education. an excerpt from hoffman’s field notes from the same day gives further context to the email: what i found most odd ‘missing’ from that session were firstly the people on our (self-ethnography) team who are ‘unofficially here’ (like illegal migrants or something). secondly, of the 44 people in the room i found it surreal that there was such a narrow range of people, in terms of ascriptive characteristics. i especially thought it weird that people either did not notice this or if they did (which i really wonder about) chose not to talk about, when thinking of the ‘hot topics of the next two decades’. more specifically, the persons in the room on the day we discussed the best strategic fier focus can be mainly described in terms of ‘sacred and safe’ ascriptive characteristics. the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 only two exceptions to this were hoffman and one other early-stage researcher from an eu member country. this is not the same thing as saying the ultra-narrow demographic profile of fier’s personnel is good or bad, in normative terms. but it is direct observations of this nature and thinking about their implications that, as was pointed out in the email to the strategy committee, illuminate the potential downside of ‘group-think’. the broader context for these observations concerns fier’s nationally mandated status as an autonomous, interdisciplinary research institute, thematically focused on education. in addition to semi-regular reformulations of institutional strategy, hoffman has also been present in panel fier’s presentations to two visiting international evaluation teams. on both occasions, fier did not shine, compared to other institutions on the campus in which fier is situated. the units who did exceptionally well on both occasions can be fairly said to operate at world class competitive horizons (see hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). this is not exceptional in the sense that no university is composed of world-class units – across the campus. what is highly interesting in fier’s case is that a traditional rationalization of our mediocre international evaluation results has been that visiting international panels have not ‘understood’ the nature and the importance of fier’s ‘national mission’, which can be easily missed if only the empirical proxies linked to world class competitive horizons are used when comparing fier with institutes which focus mainly on cutting-edge, high-risk/high-gain, state-of-the-art outcomes. alternative interpretations are that fier personnel might not be doing an excellent job in explaining the nature and importance of our national mission; that we actually do not understand what might be the most important aspects of the changing nature of the national mission ourselves or that international evaluation panels are ‘blind’ to what fier has presented in the past, because the empirical proxies that indicate the nature and importance of our national mission simply are not one of the criteria they have developed or been supplied with. it could also be the case that what we have regarded as very important ‘traditions’ are actually not all that interesting regarding the relationship between cutting-edge scholarship and high impact societal needs in 21 st century finland. the narrowly-framed, deductive, ‘inthe-box’ approach to a ‘strategy for the future’ carried out by a culturally homogeneous group of scholars seems like a sure-fire recipe for another mediocre international evaluation, rather than any other type of outcome. considering the bigger picture of global scholarship, the challenges and potentials of the institutional analysis presented in this self-ethnography are, ironically, beyond the state-ofthe-art in education in several countries with identical challenging demographic pressures finland now faces. specifically, there is a rapidly-aging, culturally-homogenous (in terms relative to other eu or oecd countries) and rapidly-retiring workforce in a culturally, linguistically and geographically isolated society, which is highly ambivalent about the ‘place’ migrants ‘should’ occupy in the workforce (forsander 2004; jaakkola 2005; koivukangas 2003; pöyhönen & tarnanen 2015). even generally, critical, conceptuallydriven, empirically-grounded comparative studies of the relationships between ascriptive characteristics and career trajectory within academic work are not what higher education specialists in mainland europe are known for (tight 2012; hoffman et al 2013b). because of fier’s relationship to education as a societal institution, the potential to more broadly approach strategy, in terms of policy, practice and what is actually known about europe and finland’s most exigent challenges, is open to us. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 in other words, the way in which we are ‘not thinking’ about how social stratification plays out within academic work, prevents us, by definition, from considering whether or not social stratification is any longer an issue of concern within our internationally valorised education system, of which fier occupies a unique position (hoffman forthcoming). an interesting subtext to this was the theme of the 2014 higher education symposium, hosted by fier, where this analysis was presented: eriarvoistuva korkeakoulutus? or: ‘is higher education becoming more unequal?’ the ‘strategy process’ observed during this study, if it relies on the kind of efforts defined by ‘driving through the rear-view mirror of precedence’, has not seriously grappled with that question in terms of policy, practice or impact, dismissing it as something that occurs under the zombie categories critiqued in our introduction and our discussion, that have never before yielded any progress, nor are likely to in the future (author1 2013). as long as the discourse on sacred and safe ascriptive characteristics remains ‘disconnected’ from the profane and problematic; short-circuiting meaningful analysis of both in relation to academic work, it is not easy to see how groups of the type involved in our ‘strategy process’ will be able to problematize and engage the theme of the conference they ironically hosted on the theme: eriarvoistuva korkeakoulutus? 5.3. illuminating ‘disconnects’ and bringing aof back into the picture up till this point, what was clear was that there were four fundamental ‘disconnects’ our team was experiencing. the most fundamental is a growing, global annoyance, amongst higher education specialists outside mainland europe, with conventional approaches that prevented us from creatively engaging topics that matter. this was clear both in the 2013 association for the study of higher education (ashe) and society for research on higher education (srhe) annual conferences in the usa and uk, and specifically in the above-cited symposium facilitated by hoffman and a workshop focused on novel methodological approaches to higher education in the srhe conferences (as cited above). while shahjahan and kezar (2013) and the srhe conference panel of the same year were both focused outwardly on methodology, shahjahan and marginson (personal communications in those presentations) underlined the importance of the need for a holistic appraisal of topic selection, general approach, the use of theory, methodology and methods, and write-up conventions. a second ‘disconnect’ was the perceived lack of interest in the type of topic we are focused on locally, in our research group and institute, when contrasted to more conventional and traditional modes of inquiry and topic selection. when analysed ethnographically, this disconnect manifests between the top floor and the shop floor (cantwell & lee 2010). this disconnect becomes visible when considering the lack of serious thought given to the ways in which transnational scholarly precariousness manifests in concrete settings like fier (hoffman forthcoming). the third area apparently outside the consciousness of those immediately around us was the way in which our topic was playing out, internationally, within social media. this seems a further irony, especially surprising because members of our fier research team are focused on both ‘why scholars leave academia’ and ‘the emancipatory potential of social media within networked knowledge societies’ (välimaa, papatsiba & hoffman in press). despite what we ‘say’ we are interested in and what is in fact happening in the world around us, our coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 fier team is having challenges drawing connections and conclusions ourselves, and putting these into practice within our own institution. the ‘disconnects’ between the state-of-the-art scholarship and academic practices focused on our topic and the precarious circumstances of the authors became visible in the fourth and most powerful way when presenting this topic to our peers outside finland. it was in front of critical audiences, in seven international presentations following upon the original presentation, to our local research group (above) as it evolved, and which ended, full circle, in finland in august 2014. in conversations with colleagues from across the globe, our topic evolved when speaking with peers interested in both the established literature on social stratification and the ways in which distinct forms of methodological nationalism, across several countries, generate a set of hollow rationalizations for ignoring the issues we were engaging, or for remaining ignorant of the relationships between social stratification in the ranks of higher education personnel and social stratification across societies. our general approach and specific topic resonated in the international conference audiences in the usa, uk, spain and germany. comments were encouraging, constructive and followed up after each presentation, with discussions from members of the audience who we now recognize as a transnational population which is visible – if one knows where and how to look – across several countries. that said, this population ‘vanishes’, like a magician’s trick within the smoke and mirrors of zombie categories, methodological nationalism and local institutional dynamics. 5.3.1. connecting the dots: aspiration, achievement and abandonment in academic work the last trip of the 2013 was a research team visit by several members of the aof research team to dublin. it was on this trip that it became clear that several members of the cals component of aof were, analytically speaking, in the same situation as the fier earlystage/career researchers cools and seikkinen or sama, who wanted to join our team. pöyhönen and hoffman discussed this and agreed that hoffman would brief stikhin on the self-ethnography and see if he was interested in joining. following that meeting, stikhin agreed to consider the approach, together with those of us who had begun in 2013. a further advantage of widening our team’s efforts to include specialists from cals was that the critical modes of inquiry that make higher education specialist squeamish are ‘business as usual’ in the scholarly landscape of cals. this structural feature underpinned the efforts that led to the hoffman’s collaboration on the aof project from the beginning. finally, the strategic focus of cals, when thought about in terms of our analytical framing (see figure 2, below) is much clearer than fier’s. the most interesting aspect of our focus on analytically illuminating academic trajectory, using a fundamentally different methodological approach, was a symmetrical series of empirically-grounded studies of the institutional nature of the set of phenomena that came into view, as well as key individual experiences and perceptions, the combination of which we believe may have remained untouched by the unquestioned assumptions that prop up the local variety of methodological nationalism we critique in this study, especially with regard coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 to higher education employment and transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming). as mentioned above, due to the narrow focus of this write-up, we make a virtue out of necessity and focus the last section of our ethnographically-driven analysis on institutional dynamics that better explain and situate the circumstances in which a scholar’s trajectory is characterized by further achievement beyond critical career thresholds or ends in abandonment. the most interesting question raised by our framing is the critical question: who abandons who? 5.3.2. ‘strategies’ of precedence and potential: hidden populations within parallel competitive horizons taking a step back, trying to gain conceptual clarity and distance to this topic, one thing becomes very clear. the central irony of developing a better understanding of our topic demands symmetrical conceptual problematization of the social dynamics this study brings into focus. this is especially clear with regard to the original problematization the aof team began with regarding aspiration, achievement and abandonment. what we have observed is the tendency to project, conflate and misrecognize individual narratives, anecdotes and projections and confuse these with ‘explanations’, while not realizing more powerful explanations are actually being obscured within the social structure of major societal institutions like higher education. this is a challenge that has been well addressed by scholars like archer (1995), beck (1992) and bourdieu (1988, 2004). in migration and mobility literature, in general and the aof project in particular, this presents a difficulty for addressing the focal notion of abandonment. can abandonment be explained in terms of particular individuals or is it more of an institutional story? in other words, who – or what – is abandoning who or what? 5.3.3. an institutional story the reason our approach and topic was misrecognized and disturbing (bourdieu 1988) in fier but recognized and resonated in the usa, the uk, spain and germany was because topics like ours are more powerful institutional stories than individual stories. and institutional stories are ‘out of reach’ to those using substantive framing that hides more than it clarifies, ideas not powerful enough to address complex topics; to those ignoring theoretical conversations in which important questions pertaining to topics like ours decades ago are asked, explained and answered; and to those employing methodological approaches that channel our efforts into seeking the wrong answers to the wrong questions from individuals who simply have no idea that the social dynamics that actually explain why what they perceive as ‘reality’ are remarkably different when viewed using a different set of assumptions. this is not the same thing as saying the experiences and perceptions of individuals are irrelevant. robust analyses of individual accounts are crucial to gaining symmetrical traction on the multiple accounts of these circumstances that exist. but it is the highly situated, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 dynamic and particular set of intersecting cultures most relevant to the social structure we focus on in this study that already exist, before any of us ever stepped into the fier or cals research institutes, that institutional analysis illuminates. these social dynamics determine, define and delimit, to a very large extent, the positions and stakes within that field, which in turn illuminates both potential and actual individual scholarly trajectories. these social dynamics have not changed since bourdieu (1988) articulated the tensions and struggles that distinguished scholars who merely focus on simple reproduction, within their immediate sphere of influence from scholars who transform the world through their relentless search for new knowledge. because of the nature of today’s higher education institutions, the stratification of the global division of scholarly labour under a hegemonic regime of transnational academic capitalism, the power of the social structure that will be encountered by an early stage or early career scholar, stepping into, for example, fier or cals, is not usually comprehended any more than a fish comprehends water. the main challenge we face in the analysis of institutional dynamics, though, in higher education is that at institute or department level, the leadership was trained as scholars first. leadership, by contrast, prompted teichler to quip ‘higher education leadership, management and administration is the last bastion of amateurism’ (u. teichler, personal communication, august 28, 2002). in that instant teichler articulated a remarkably similar rationale to alvesson for using selfethnography, in order to avoid interviewing scholars about explaining anything having to do with institutional leadership. as he wrote earlier: ironically, research on all higher education, as well as the mobility and international aspects of interest to us here, is paradoxically both a rich and vulnerable position because it addresses actors who, besides believing that the nature of society and culture can only be fully understood through systematic research, are also convinced they understand their own living environment (i.e. higher education) perfectly well without it (teichler 1996: 343). teichler made these insights at the turn of the century and his position explains our pause about interviewing senior scholars about an institutional-level inability to grasp and engage the topic we present, via their own individual-level perceptions or projections; at least as an initial step. it is important to note the linkage here: both are important. in this study, within small or medium sized research teams and institutes, individuals were ‘not understanding each other’ – within an institutional framework. theoretically speaking, this is interesting because the way in which explaining trajectory from the moment aspiration is articulated till the moment abandonment occurs, in a comparatively viable, robust manner, has been possible for decades. we already know the empirical proxies, organizational practices and the essential analytical touchstones needed to do this, using several well-known approaches, at several levels of analysis, using tested methodologies suited to established goals that correspond to key audiences: our peers, students, policy-makers, practitioners, stakeholders and the communities our higher education institutions are located in. but regarding scholarly precariousness we don’t do any of those things. this is interesting, in and of itself. rather, we act ‘as if’ this were some kind of new situation, when in fact it is rather generic in terms of organizational dynamics and domain. what we sense many experience as ‘new’ is a complex combination of salient cultural (sets of) values that form the basis for the social structure that informs the social dynamics of each particular competitive horizon in any given higher education system, institution or basic unit. and in the case of our teams the types of understandings we have of these social dynamics give important hints as to the nature and coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 potential of agency, especially collective agency, which up to today presents urgent challenges to the authors of this study as individuals, the research group(s) we belong to and our respective research institutes. 5.3.4. the relationship between people, ideas and funding doesn’t happen all that often, but i woke up this morning, and sometime during the last 1.5 hours realized i’d cracked the conceptualization that might facilitate discussing the circumstances of our self-ethnography group that might lead to a better understanding (ourselves) while at the same time rendering this situation clear within fier. the reasons this happened are important, as they constitute a coincidence (literally) of several key events: realizing louise morley is on her way and the potential this brings our self-ethnography group in august; wanting to explain the potential of self-ethnography, in general and the nature of transnational scholarly precarity; an invitation received from mainz, germany to talk about this; my first fier board meeting and a board member’s incisive question regarding a permanent appointment and the policy analysis i did for the ministry of the interior on the (zombie) notion of ‘good relations.’ … in essence, it comes down to the institutional prism (fier) in this case and the nature of the work that occurs here, which can be explained (in many ways) by conceptual problematization (february, 2014: field notes/hoffman). hoffman, upon realizing the connections between these events and issues, got out of bed, made a pot of coffee and wrote up the field notes (above) and the conceptualization (below). it is important to note that several (other) key events that underpinned these thoughts fall much more under the scope of significant experiences and perceptions of individuals and, thus, fall outside the scope of this institutional analysis. of all the coincidental events and issues mentioned in the field notes entry (above), the single most significant concerned the meeting of fier’s board, of which hoffman was a new member in 2014. during the year’s first board meeting, on 30 january 2014, one of the agenda items was the nomination of a project researcher based on their considerable scholarly merit for a permanent position. hoffman was very familiar with this researcher, as they had gone through the same graduate program, had several areas of complementary interests and had worked in two very challenging research projects together, both of which turned out well and one of which— coincidentally – was a highly unconventional, critical self-ethnography (hoffman et al. 2014). in addition, this researcher had unique resources regarding established national and international networks, untypical to many research teams. because of all these things hoffman spoke strongly in favour of the hire. the most interesting thing, though, regarding this topic and the board’s transformation of a precarious position into a permanent position, was a question from one of fier’s board members to the professor who presented the nomination to the board. specifically, the board member firstly asserted that many scholars would like to attain the type of permanent position that the board was considering. but their question was more complex. s/he wanted to know how well known the procedures that resulted in a researcher becoming permanently hired by fier were. hoffman knew this was an awkward question, as there has never been a transparent procedure for this at fier. in coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 addition, it was equally clear that the candidate under consideration had worked it out. as clear, after working on the individual projects of our self-ethnography team, was that recruitment, selection, promotion and retention in fier remains a mystery shrouded in institutional-level dynamics, for many. this single question from the fier board member spotlighted one of the most interesting questions that can be asked in comparative higher education: what is the difference between ‘what we think and say we are doing’, as an institute and ‘what we are actually doing’ (bourdieu 1988; hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). 5.3.5. the policy and practice of (human resources) ‘strategy’ strategy of action, practices and outcomes purposeful linkage to strategically robust substantive framing and conceptually focused action, that can be elaborated empirically – and evaluated comparatively – in terms of domain & mission(s) ad hoc reaction to stimuli in the field (domain & mission[s]) strategy of policy (values, norms & beliefs) transparent, clear and unambiguous, with regard to pursuit of outcomes, within domain & respect to mission(s) transparent policy + robust action transparent policy + ac hoc reaction opaque, vague, and ambiguous, with regard to domain & mission(s) opaque policy + robust action opaque policy + ad hoc reaction figure 2. problematizing scholarly policy and practice in terms of our direct observation of strategically framing policy and practice at both the level of fier and within our own research group, the institutional context can be normatively coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 problematized, in terms of policy and practice, using a contingency table. in simple, pragmatic terms, the contingency table problematizes the tension between what we say we are going to do and what we actually do. this is important because the development of coherent, viable individual, group and institute-level scholarly agendas can be used to articulate the relationship between groups and institutes to people, ideas and the resources necessary for purposeful action in the field of higher education. because there are no more crucial resources in higher education than human resources, this is what hoffman believes the fier board member was driving at, as well as wanting to know if the procedures s/he questioned were fair and transparent. it is crystal clear that the answer to her question, in reality, is no for some scholars employed by fier. the evidence for this, in retrospect is evidenced in the ‘case by case’, de facto ‘procedure’ which is the only ‘procedure’ that has ever existed in fier regarding permanent positions. the fact that there are persons permanently employed means that a set of circumstances existed at the time of their hire. however, the flip-side of that procedure is that no one on the ‘outside’ can speculate what type of circumstances would have to arise, in order to trigger the chain of events leading to a permanent hire. from inside fier, this can be determined, but only within highly circumscribed circumstances of the type there were being considered in the board meeting hoffman attended. what is equally clear, upon more reflection, is that the degree to which the authors themselves accept the arbitrary and vague nature of policy and practice in fier. this ‘non-procedure hiring procedure’ is a good fit with the highly normative tenets of transnational academic capitalism that in fact creates, explains and sustains the darwinian necessity of an emerging transnational scholarly precariousness. but these understandings or – more precisely non-understandings – of the determinants of trajectory also illuminate another clear option: rejection. it could be the case that a scholar comes to understand the norms, values and beliefs that they perceive govern the institutional setting in which they aspire to work: the ‘worst of both worlds’ combination of opaque policy and ad hoc reaction combined with arbitrary and uncertain power relations. in this case, as morley (2014) points out, it is no surprise that outright rejection is a foreseeable outcome of this type of understanding. institutionally-speaking, it is quite clear that fier’s strategy, to any of us, is either:  transparent, clear and unambiguous with regard to the pursuit of outcomes within the domain of higher education and with regard to mission(s), or  opaque, vague, and ambiguous, with regard to domain and mission(s). the same is true of fier’s institutionally-framed actions. what we do day to day is either:  purposefully linked to strategically robust substantive framing and conceptually focused action, that can be elaborated empirically and evaluated comparatively in terms of domain and mission(s), or  ad hoc reaction to stimuli in the domain and with respect to mission(s). this type of either/or framing forces an exaggerated oversimplification because of the large number of ‘moving parts’ discussions of strategy and practice entail. that said, the points our analysis brings into view are key because, holistically speaking, a scholar aspiring to enter the field of higher education will find a place in the field in which they are comfortable – or not – coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 because of (or in spite of) their understanding of the social dynamics that can be used to situate them in relation to the global division of scholarly labour. a more important, underlying facet of this analysis is the idea whether or not an institute, group or individual has conceptually problematized policy or practice at all. it is not difficult to locate individuals, groups and basic units that have and those who have not. this idea, in turn, illuminates the institutional tension between teams, units, departments and institutes focused forward, on the transformative potential that defines the state-of-the-art in contrast to a referral backward, on the tradition and precedence of reproduction that have always determined collective action. whether or not an institution, basic unit or research team has articulated ‘why they do what they do’ is far more interesting than asking individual scholars or ‘key informants’ to answer that same question in a survey, interview or looking for clues as to these issues in policy documents. in the absence of clearly articulated hr strategy, or any other kind of strategy, the methods we have avoided (surveys, interviews, implementation studies) are open invitations to story-telling, script following impression management, folk psychology and ‘policy-based-evidence’ (alvesson 2003; hoffman et al. 2013b). the most important proposition this type of framing brings into view is foundational. a scholar who aspires to and achieves a viable and recognizable position in an institutional setting in which policy is transparent and practice is robust is in a fundamentally different position in the field than a scholar in an marginal and exceptional position in an institutional setting in which policy is opaque and practice is ad hoc (hoffman 2007). the trajectories available from these analytical coordinates illuminate the points of departure with which achievement and abandonment with regard to higher education career trajectories can be better explained than when using approaches that do not attend to the social structure which bears on career trajectory, the theory that explains it and data that allows something new to be said about it. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 6. discussion: moving forward in terms of higher education studies, policy and practice there are two central challenges our team faced in this study. they are inextricably fused within the same sentence. specifically, creating a conceptually viable, empirically-grounded shared understanding of the events and issues brought into focus in our analysis of contemporary academic trajectories through the field of finnish higher education. by conceptually viable, we mean an account that will survive the critical scrutiny of international peer review and also be interesting enough to constitute a meaningful contribution to the comparative study of the issues brought to light in our analysis. this is a challenging goal, because even a cursory examination of the intersections of situated migration dynamics and mobility phenomena within locally-framed debates will reveal far more examples of the unquestioned assumptions, unanticipated consequences and hidden populations obscured by combinations of persistent methodological nationalism and aspiration gaps than novel insights. however, more challenging than producing a study that is meaningful in terms of international state-of-the-art scholarship is working toward a shared account locally. this is not the same as saying an account where all involved parties agree on every aspect of the analysis and enjoy reading it. it is saying there is a daunting set of tensions illuminated by this study, even though the scope of our analysis is narrow. as is shown in our analysis, advances in this area are problematic, precisely because they are inextricably bound to topics scholars seldom problematize. in the case of academic trajectories, this can be seen in the contrast between institutional dynamics in fier that have evolved over a several generations. this has generally been an inward-looking, normative field of studies (education) versus cals (applied linguistics), which in general is home to greater methodological variety, much more at ease with critique and generally more international in character. yet, despite these outward-looking differences in research institutes that are located on the same campus, the highly heterogeneous ‘hidden’ population of scholars who are both implicated in migration dynamics and in highly precarious career situations are in plain sight, as is their situation. institutionally, our analysis suggests we accept a certain amount of collateral damage in our darwinian ‘train the best, discard the rest’ hr recruitment, selection, promotion and retention strategy. we use the term strategy broadly in the sense that ‘no strategy is strategy’. this said, the way forward in an analysis of this nature is paying close attention to the fundamentals of our craft:  what are the debates and issues in state-of-the-art scholarship and practice regarding this (or any) topic?  what are the optimal paradigmatic and methodological approaches that provide the ‘distance’ to think about and study a situation we are in the middle of?  what theory provides the best most potential, with regard to new knowledge?  what are the best questions we can now ask, as a result of what we’ve learned?  and what can we learn from alternative interpretations of identical events and critique?  are their better explanations or paths forward? coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60  what are the implications of what we have learned? solid qualitative work allows analytically grounding better questions and setting up the circumstances, methodologically, in which the problematization necessary for explanations can be sought concerning situations that are not understood very well. at its best, qualitative designs even allow us to consider alternatives that were not visible prior to problematizing a topic, in a way that breaks the surface level friction of folk psychology, where unquestioned assumptions govern everyday reality. in the social sciences and humanities there are several alternative paradigm/methodology combinations from which most topics can be approached. the self-ethnography we chose for this study analytically illuminates new knowledge, in a manner that allows international-level, state-of-the-art critique and potential engagement of a highly situated set of circumstances that was not possible prior to the presentation and publication of the study. in addition, methodologically speaking, this type of study militates against the hazards of methodological nationalism in general and unnecessary over-reliance on a narrow spectrum of what is actually available in the worlds of paradigmatic approach, substantive framing, standpoint, operationalization of theory, methodology and methods. because of these features, highly problematic circumstances come into view, in a manner that can be further researched, even as new knowledge illuminates key policy topics, which in turn spotlight practice intervention points. regarding the substantive framing of our topic, we now turn to the problematization, introduced at the outset of this study to clarify our analysis and what it means within the context in which it was carried out. merit and equity, in any form, do figure in explanations of academic trajectory in many places. as our analysis indicates, what is interesting about their relationship is the extent to which this relationship is problematized, or, in our case, to what extent it is not. 6.1. unquestioned assumptions: folk psychology, zombie discussions and ‘smoke and mirrors terminology’ in the studies hoffman, cools, habti and sama have carried out on academic work, the internationalization of higher education, and the (academic) mobility and migration of university personnel, it is common for us to encounter ‘smoke and mirrors terms’ as they are bandied about in finnish society, like multiculturalism, internationalization, integration and diversity. these examples of zombie discussions (beck & beck-gernsheim 2012), par excellence. these terms have been used in many places to reference many types of issues. however, it is instructive to note that in the societies in which those terms were originally used, they illuminate far more fault lines and contentious conflicts than uncontested success stories of social cohesion. in finnish society and culture in general and finnish higher education in particular these terms, paraphrasing rhoades, might best be thought of as ‘terms that illuminate phenomena higher education researchers ought to be problematizing and studying, rather than mindlessly perpetuating neo-colonial stratification of the global academic workforce’ (hoffman, rhoades, lee & shajahan 2013). in finnish society, these zombie discussions obscure much more than they reveal, particularly when they take on the character of slogans, unthinkingly – and often unconsciously – used to bifurcate, reify and essentialise (clarke 1999) discourses used on sacred and safe ascriptive characteristics at the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 expense of the profane and problematic characteristics and social constructions integral to our biographies we prefer to ignore and pretend do not exist, especially country of origin, mother tongue, race or skin colour. this topic can be understood and explained in a far more rigorous, critical manner that lends itself to comparative study and international-level peer review; it can be engaged, taught, mutually understood and critiqued. this cannot be done by everyone, but by more people in either positions of institutional responsibility, positions of trust and senior personnel than is the case at the moment in settings like fier. this said, as is evidenced by our analysis, the scholars who are analytically illuminated by our findings best not wait for senior-level scholars to figure this out. by the time they do, it may be too late. the stakes are highest for individuals in groups present in finnish society, but who are absent from the settings in which direct observations were made in this study. fier is not unique in this regard, rather it is representative of the key disciplinary fields and institutional settings from which scholarly critique, policy analyses and practical interventions could emanate, but have not, up till now, on the kinds of issues highlighted in this study. these types of focal settings are not difficult to locate in finnish higher education (hoffman 2007; raunio, korhonen & hoffman 2010). but, as our analysis suggests, finding leverage for intervention in the social structure that produces these sorts of settings, while less than obvious, first begins with their analytical illumination. 6.2. unintended consequences: analytically illuminating methodological nationalism more than anything else, our team is driving a methodological stake in the ground in sparsely populated territory, at least with respect to the overly-normative world of higher education in finland and finnish higher education studies. explaining higher education trajectories of groups and individuals is not particularly hard. it can be done a variety of ways, thanks to substantive, theoretical, methodological data analysis and general approaches and modes of inquiry that in many cases have existed for decades. what is more challenging, though, as forward thinking scholars in the social sciences and humanities have always known, is confronting the convention that blinds us and, by definition, limits our methodological options. during the course of this study in the major higher education conferences we highlighted in our analysis, international groups of higher education specialists were focused specifically on overcoming the self-inflicted limitations that seem to characterise higher education research and most probably explain why we, as a field, are simply not taken as seriously as other disciplines and fields of study who also regard higher education as an important focal context (kosmützky & nokkala 2014). the most important methodological advantage illuminated by our approach is the use of naturally occurring events that throw a spotlight on the difference between ‘what we believe we are doing’ and ‘what we are actually doing’, at the institutional level. we assert that while this only yields qualitative interpretations, we will happily compare our conceptually-driven, empirically grounded analysis against the folk psychology that produced and perpetuates the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 dynamics we analyse and see which approach produces better explanations with regard to our topic, going forward. in the same way, remaining outside the networks in which the global stratification of the academic workforce is discussed every day while we busy ourselves with unthinking compliance with the international agenda of neoliberal transnational academic capitalism rather than our own introduces the question robertson poses: why? (2014). if we let others do our thinking for us on the issues that actually define the integrity of scholarship, we forgo choices that our (non)approach to academic practice obscures as choices at all. this includes our hr ‘strategy’ and whether it prevents us from seriously considering the theme of the most recent conference in which we presented this topic: ‘is higher education becoming unequal?’ the approach we take to this study may be controversial to many inside our research group, fier, university and at system-level. that said, what kind of social scientists or scholars in the humanities would wish to be employed in a setting in which alternative points of view are not actively sought, welcomed and critically debated? while it is not difficult to find settings that fit that description, state-of-the-art social science and humanities are not one of them. as the section heading explicitly indicates, our analysis does not indicate whether the kind of dynamics we focus on are purposeful. actually, the opposite is the case. our point is that, as scott (2013) bluntly pointed out when speaking about leadership in higher education, ‘we need to raise the level of our game. to get better at what it is we do and have the potential to deliver.’ while there are many ways to do that, they are not to be found using the approaches to this topic we critique in our analysis. 6.3. hidden populations: the nature of complex change in the general population, culture and society one of our original analytical points of departure in the aof project was empirically verified in this self-ethnography. migration and mobility phenomena, as general demographic phenomena, cannot be studied by drawing untenable conceptual and empirical distinctions that narrowly focus only on ‘persons with a migrant background’. migration and mobility dynamics – across all domains in finnish society – implicate the general population. this is especially the case within the institution of higher education, in which overly narrow forms of mobility are uncritically valorised, promoted and used as a major empirical proxy by some of the most well-known global rankings of higher education institutions. as siekkinen’s dilemma vividly illustrated, the career advice she routinely gets at regular intervals is identical to the advice sama gets: leave. to take this one step further, many of the authors have families in which the line between finnish citizens, residents and migrants become very blurry. the policy implication of this finding is crystal clear. where we go, they go (maybe). the second most immediate policy implication of this involves highly skilled knowledge workers in a society where the dependency ratio is headed in the wrong direction, regarding persons inside the labour force, supporting the rapidly retiring baby boom generation outside the labour force. in the permanent hire discussed in the analysis (above), hoffman summed up fier’s position when considering whether or not fier should permanently employ a coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 highly mobile and highly capable scholar: “we need her, a lot more than she needs us.” this was true of the highly mobile scholar in question, but it implicates the hidden population, many of who currently desire to work in fier in spite of the working conditions, not because of them. when this is the dynamic that defines the people doing the hiring – and those they hire – the potential of any basic unit or institute is fundamentally distinct from selecting personnel based on something other than ‘settling for what’s available in terms of past practice’. more complex is the question the ethnic stratification our analysis brings into view as it links to the data-driven decision-making inherent in transnational academic capitalism and the precariousness of an emergent heterogeneous ‘invisible’ precariat (standing 2011). regarding scholars with a migrant background an emerging policy question is: ‘who is it more advantageous to employ’: a highly performing mobile scholar, for example using the academy of finland’s fidipro funding scheme, or the eu marie curie mobility grants; or should we assume the much tougher job of developing local talent who survive the ‘train the best, discard the rest’ de facto hr policy, which thrives in conditions of institutional dynamics characterized by opaque policy and ad hoc reaction? in the second type of hr conditions ‘the most suitable candidates’ are often hired, not ‘the best candidates’ (raunio, korhonen & hoffman 2010; hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). this highlights institutional conditions where those sought are not necessarily scholars willing to take risks in opening new pathways in research, but confirming and continuing traditions and neither questioning nor upsetting status quo power relations. taken further, this illuminates a combination of temporarily employing top performers, while subjecting locals to the ‘train the best, discard the rest’ hr policy regarding recruitment, selection, promotion and retention. it is possible to ask, at the level of policy, whether this is ‘the best of both worlds’ or ‘the worst’. and according to whom? the policy implication of this combination illuminates a clear choice regarding groups which can be found in finnish society, but who are not employed by our research team, nor whom were present in the meeting in which fier sought to identify ‘the most challenging topics to study, regarding education in coming decades’. and the policy implication that follows, as was pointed out in the email to the professors in charge of the fier strategy group, is having a thematicallyfocused, interdisciplinary research institute in which assumptions that obscure these dynamics and policy implications are unnoticed, ignored, uninteresting or perpetually confused. this is specifically so as to whether there is a relationship between perpetuating reproduction of transnational, global inequities within a specific institutional setting, versus problematizing our ability to include the personnel best able to study any of this outside, and inside, the walls and halls of a university. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 7. methodological notes: an afterword/afterward looking back on the interesting journey of our team leaves us with no regrets, but very clear ideas as to what we would do differently should this type of opportunity arise again. opportunistic, critical studies focused on power relations are not for everyone and there are some methodological tips we would underline for others, should they decide to adopt an ethnographic approach to topics like academic work in general, or scholarly precariousness in particular. the first concrete piece of advice we would stress is not to hesitate to use ethnographic approaches, but prepare if you do not have a great deal of experience with them. even for those generally familiar with specific types of qualitative strategies (other than ethnography), we advise reading creswell’s 1998 title qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five traditions. the distinguishing features of ethnography, contrasted to other types of distinct qualitative approaches, are not something to take lightly. more importantly, if collaborating with other team members who do not have a lot of experience with the general features of qualitative research in general, creswell’s 2002 research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches offer’s solid contrast between the general approaches to research that your colleagues are familiar with versus those that are not. for a first time attempt at a qualitative, ethnographic approach, alvesson’s (2003) approach to selfethnography is a good choice, particularly for higher education specialists who decide to take the leap and say something theoretically meaningful about their immediate surroundings. that said, now that we’ve used self-ethnography, we’ve been fairly humbled by the depth of the literature as much as the power of the general approach, and considering other types of approaches has become very tempting. reading a range of the literature might be advisable as there is a wide range of choice, levels of rigour and directions one can take in this vast literature. reading through hastrup’s (1995) passage to anthropology, behar’s (1997) anthropology that breaks your heart or scollon and scollon (2007) on nexus analysis will quickly open your eyes as to the underlying range of debates and choices that characterize the issues ethnographers – to a greater or lesser extent – feel to be important when differentiating themselves amongst themselves. this brings us to our second, practical point. don’t get hung up on the arcane infighting amongst ethnographers that probably would be much more interesting to study than letting it dissuade you from a goldmine of data that most researchers (not using ethnographic approaches) simply miss. ethnography, as a general qualitative approach or orientation is characterized by divisive cleavages and, as scollon and scollon write, ‘ethnographers seldom agree on anything’. for the methodological generalist, it is important to be aware of this, going in, in the sense this constitutes a well-known limitation of ethnography, as a general approach. as is the case with all qualitative methodologies, the paradigms in which many ethnographers operate are at sharp odds with each other, which leading ethnographers understand. this can introduce difficulties, for example with a methodological specialist located in a clearly delineated paradigm evaluating work carried out in ‘anything other than that paradigm’. our advice on this is clear. pick one clear approach initially. should this situation arise again, we would strongly advise a training session for the team which focuses on the fundamentals of solid qualitative work using practical texts like miles & huberman’s 1994 methods text and stressing how this will be operationalized in terms of ethnographic coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 methods and analysis, especially underlining the importance of observational skills, whether direct observation, participant observation, and especially the role of field notes in this type of research. to be very clear, many early stage and early career researchers have a rather vague sense of what ethnography entails. if and when the opportunity arises to do an ethnographic study our most recent experience is that you will find others to collaborate with. simple willingness is not enough. our advice is to take enough time to ascertain that everyone is trained up and has a shared idea of the general approach, how it differs from the approach they usually use, the methods that will used, data how the team is going to analyse the data and – from the very beginning – introduce them to the highly iterative type of collaboration that leads to an ethnographically-grounded write-up. if team members seem reluctant to commit to this initial training and the idea of spending some time on expanding their skill set, consider this a solid indication they may not yet be ready for this type of study. this is especially the case were early stage/career scholars display interest. when considering the risks we detail in our methodology section it is very easy for scholars to get in over their heads. finally, we stress that higher education specialists in places where ethnographic approaches are not typically used should strongly consider this general orientation and methodological strategy to approach questions that are missed by many who have not bothered to reflect on very serious issues that play out in our immediate surroundings – every day, much less the consequences and broader implications of these unresolved situations. while several types of trendy and familiar approaches might be more palatable to colleagues and (especially) superiors concerning topic like transnational scholarly precariousness, our advice – having given this a try – is clear. in ethnography, for all of its limitations, you will find ways of tapping into data that others simply are not getting using ‘conventional’ and ‘inside-the-box’ approaches. in our study, a specific, pragmatic ethnographic approach gave us leverage to directly engage our topic in ways that have been perceived by others in our institute, university and wider networks as critical, yet constructive. this – in and of itself – is why we will not hesitate to continue to develop our skills with regard to its efficacy, as a general methodological orientation and continue to prepare for the next time a similar opportunity arises. 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newbury park: sage. yle. 2014, july. overseas academics claim discrimination in university recruitment. yle news. 14 july. internet edition. accessed 14 august from: http://yle.fi/uutiset/overseas_academics_claim_discrimination_in_university_recruitment/735 5139 ylijoki, o. 2003. entangled in academic capitalism? a case study on changing ideals and practices of university research. higher education 45(3), 307-335. http://yle.fi/uutiset/overseas_academics_claim_discrimination_in_university_recruitment/7355139 http://yle.fi/uutiset/overseas_academics_claim_discrimination_in_university_recruitment/7355139 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 biographical data on authors thomas babila sama, phd, is a postdoctoral research associate in the social policy institute, university of helsinki, finland. the focus of dr. sama’s dissertation was a comparative study of ngos in finland and sweden. email contact: thomas.sama@helsinki.fi driss habti, phd, in sociology, is a postdoctoral researcher at the karelian institute, university of eastern finland, finland. dr habti’s main research interests include international migration and ethnic relations, highly skilled mobility, ethnicity and cultural diversity, career research, and sociology of work. his recent publications involve special issues on international highly skilled migration, internationalization of higher education, and ethnicity and cultural diversity in europe. he is member of the research network of borders, mobilities and cultural encounters, the nordic migration research association (nmr), and the european sociological association (esa). email contact: driss.habti@uef.fi carine cools, phd, born in belgium, completed her doctoral degree in speech/intercultural communication in 2011 in finland. in her doctoral dissertation she approached intercultural couples’ relationships in finland from the relational-dialectics perspective. during her research project, funded by the finnish academy she visited usf as a visiting scholar during fall 2012 to collaborate with dr. lasonen on the ongoing research and teaching on intercultural communication, which represents an important area in the changing global context for education and economy. her main interest areas are adaptation/transition issues in the context of intercultural communication research and migration studies. she has published in english in international journals, and has presented her research in numerous international and national conferences. dr cools has been lecturing about intercultural communication and research methods, in finland and abroad (australia, belgium, portugal) and has been supervising numerous students with their ma thesis. email: carine.a.cools@gmail.com. david m. hoffman, phd, is a senior researcher at the finnish institute for educational research at the university of jyväskylä, finland. dr. hoffman is the team leader of the internationalization, intersectionality, mobility and migration research group, is active in the higher education studies team as well as a co-founder of the collaboration development network. email contact: david.hoffman@jyu.fi sari pöyhönen, phd, is a professor at the centre for applied language studies, university of jyvaskyla, finland. her research focuses on language education policies, minorities and language rights, and notions on language and identity. her recent publications deal with policies and practices in adult second language teaching, and discourses and narratives of linguistic rights, migration, integration and work. email contact: sari.h.poyhonen@jyu.fi msc taru siekkinen is a project researcher and postgraduate student in the university of jyväskylä, finnish institute for educational research. her dissertation is about academic careers. she has been working in several different projects focused on higher education. her current projects are an assessment of the four-stage career model in finnish universities and the study of the academic careers and recruitment in finnish universities. email contact: taru.siekkinen@jyu.fi mailto:thomas.sama@helsinki.fi mailto:driss.habti@uef.fi mailto:carine.a.cools@gmail.com mailto:david.hoffman@jyu.fi mailto:sari.h.poyhonen@jyu.fi mailto:taru.siekkinen@jyu.fi coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 anatoly stikhin received his english teacher qualifications in 1986 and his research-based degree (licentiate of philosophy) in linguistics from st. petersburg, russia in 1992. anatoly stikhin taught english and language-related courses at petrozavodsk state university for 20 years, simultaneously holding various administrative positions in the institution. from 2013 till present he has been a doctoral student at department of teacher education, university of jyväskylä, finland. email contact: anatoly.a.stikhin@jyu.fi i in terms of academic work, the most important tension operating in our study is scholarly precariousness itself, in the sense that career stage (baldwin & blackburn 1981) does not map onto the field of permanent and temporary positions in finnish higher education (välimaa 2001; hoffman 2007), nor trajectory (bourdieu 1988). because the relationship between ascriptive characteristics (beck 1992), social constructions (berger & luckmann 1969) and academic work is not usually problematized in research on finnish higher education, nor policy discussion, except as outlined in our critique (above), the tendency to claim, as primmer (2014) does, ‘it’s the same for all academics’ is irrelevant at the level of abstraction needed to substantiate or refute such a claim. complicating the situation of the authors more by taking into account the complex intersectionality of their ascriptive and achieved characteristics linked to hoffman and pöyhönen (permanently employed scholars), cools, siekkinen, stikhin, habti and sama (precarious employment) only underlines just how little the authors have in common except for the occupational sector they work in and their interest in this type of topic. we stress this type of topic only comes into view, for us, in ways relevant to state-of-the-art scholarship because of the approach originally developed by the aof team and further developed, in this self-ethnography. in total, the seven authors of this study come from six different countries, work across two universities, two faculties and two research institutes, four scholarly specializations and are spread out along the academic food chain from early-stage researcher, just beginning doctoral work to mid-career positions in four organizational units. it is our heterogeneity, with regard to the relationship between academic work, ascriptive characteristics and social constructions, along with our previous research (cited throughout this text), that ground our skepticism to claims not relevant to the complexity of the causes and consequences of transnational scholarly precariousness in general and the ways in which this manifests in finnish higher education,in particular. mailto:anatoly.a.stikhin@jyu.fi microsoft word coolabah short poems issue (indexed) coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona contents coolabah short poem issue; foreword by peter bakowski ............................................. 1 mark mahemoff ................................................................................................... 3 jan price ................................................................................................................... 5 michaela mark ..................................................................................................... 8 barry d. gillard .................................................................................................. 9 jeff guess............................................................................................................... 10 adam aitken ......................................................................................................... 12 dan disney ............................................................................................................ 13 nathanael o’reilly ......................................................................................... 14 laurie duggan .................................................................................................... 15 john jenkins ......................................................................................................... 16 claire rosslyn wilson ................................................................................... 17 marisa fazio......................................................................................................... 19 amanda anastasi .............................................................................................. 21 gregory piko ....................................................................................................... 22 joe dolce ............................................................................................................... 23 geoff page ............................................................................................................. 25 justin lowe ........................................................................................................... 26 ross jackson ........................................................................................................ 27 julian mclucas ................................................................................................... 28 ray liversidge .................................................................................................... 30 alex mckeown .................................................................................................... 31 andy jackson ...................................................................................................... 32 chris ringrose .................................................................................................... 33 matt hetherington .......................................................................................... 35 lel sebastian ....................................................................................................... 36 leanne jaeger ..................................................................................................... 37 rob scott ............................................................................................................... 38 jan napier .............................................................................................................. 39 grant caldwell ................................................................................................ 40 aidan coleman ................................................................................................... 42 foreword to claire rosslyn wilson’s essay by peter bakowski ................................... 43 walking to montjuïc: cycles of belonging by claire rosslyn wilson .......................... 44 bibliography ............................................................................................................... 48 contributors ................................................................................................................ 49 microsoft word 21serra coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 226 cannibalism in montaigne, de certeau and derrida carles serra pagès abstract: in this text we introduce the discursive strategies of montaigne, de certeau and derrida in analysing the figure of the cannibal. both de certeau and derrida use textual strategies for their analysis, but whereas de certeau remains at the level of discourse and words and therefore at the level of phonocentric language, derrida’s analysis moves beyond western ethnocentrism. these different approaches lead de certeau and derrida to different conclusions. during the renaissance, the figure of the cannibal was the source of horror because it ate its own kind and married several women. de certeau inverts this ethnocentric ethics and shows that cannibalism was a form of paying tribute to the valor and honor of the victim, and polygamy showed the devotion and fidelity of women towards their husbands, not as a sign of male domination. contrary to de certeau, but building upon his critique of ethnocentrism, derrida does not bring about any reversal of values when analysing a particular cosmovision in the figure of the cannibal, for example. taking the meaning of the word “eating” in both a literal and a figurative sense, derrida shows that all cultures are organized around a notion of sacrifice that consists in clearing up an area that allows for a noncriminal putting to death. it is in this context that derrida denounces the ‘mass exterminations’ of animals and the ‘crimes’ against the environment that sustain carnivorous and industrialised countries. the figure of the cannibal also provides a good example of how western society constructs the height of its morality and good consciousness symbolically sacrificing and demonizing the other (the savage, the cannibal) just because it sacrifices another ‘other’: as all cultures are organized around sacrificial structures that are ethnocentric. keywords: derrida, de certeau, deconstruction, sacrifice, cannibalism, animal rights, environment. in the context of the congress “food for thought”, organized by the australian studies centre at barcelona university in february 2010, the present article analyzes two different interpretations of cannibalism carried out by two french authors: michel de certau and jacques derrida. both authors are representative of the so-called “thinking of the difference”, which originated with heidegger. in “montaigne's ‘of cannibals’: the savage ‘i’”,i as the title indicates, de certeau exposes his own method of textual analysis of montaigne's “of cannibals”. de certeau's text will be compared with and contrasted to an interview with derrida in 1989 by jean-luc nancy, entitled “‘eating well’, or the calculation of the subject”.ii their respective interpretations of cannibalism are a means to define western culture and law in relation to a hors-texte (outside the text, (t)exterior). copyright©2011 carles serra pagès. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 227 taken literally, the english expression “food for thought” is synthetic and a priori. it is synthetic because it is a statement about experience, and it is a priori because it is necessarily so – with the exception of god, a rational being always appears incarnated in a body that eats and can be eaten. this synthetic and a priori expression states the obvious in a context where the basic physiological needs are covered: nourishment, but also sleep, a basic sense of security, etc. (which means that “food for thought” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for thought). moreover, still in its literal sense, the expression “food for thought” implicitely carries within it a moral imperative. it is necessary to have the biological need of nourishment covered so as to develop good eating-thinking habits, that is to say, to eat what tastes good and is specially nurturing. in spite of appearances, what we eat is mostly a cultural thing. in western culture, insects are not usually eaten although they are highly nutritive, whereas mushrooms, which are barely nutritive, are very commonly eaten. in addition, taste and flavour are culturally determined, and what tastes good within a culture is also highly subjective. therefore, we must eat, and we must eat well. and if we understand “food” in a figurative sense, meaning as all that which nourishes not only the body but also the soul, the spirit, the mind, the metaphor of eating covers the whole field of culture. most commonly, the expression “food for thought” is used as an idiomatic expression in english. on the one hand, it refers to what triggers thinking, something that awakens your attention and deserves to be carefully or seriously considered; sometimes, it can also be said of something which deserves a second thought altogether. in this sense “food” means that which nourishes the mind. on the other hand, “food for thought” also refers to those bits and pieces in a legal or social context which are in dispute and which cannot be digested. what is at stake or at issue is “food for thought” (in sociopolitical debates and discussions, research institutions, etc.), because it is toxic and poisons society and politics at large. the figurative expression “food for thought” has, then, a double and interrelated meaning. sometimes it refers to that which nourishes thought, sometimes to that which in a certain sense poisons thought because it cannot be digested (“food poisoning”). “food for thought” as a matter of dispute puts a limit to thinking at the same time that it is a challenge to it and, therefore, a motivation and an impulse. for derrida and de certeau, what nourishes thought is 'difference'. in his reading of montaigne's “of cannibals”, de certeau expresses this thought in textual terms. he distinguishes between the “space of the other” and the “space of the text”. the “space of the other” constitutes and delimits the difference between the inside and the outside of a culture, the familiar versus the strange, and the way in which society is structured. it involves both ethnic and social values. on the other hand, the “space of the text” is the means by which the text structures itself and gives itself credibility, and makes a place of its own. it speaks about the other and it is the other that legitimizes in return the text that is produced in this way. the reader has to be made to believe that the text captures the truth about what it treats – its outside – whether the author relies on common opinion, myth, the authority of the ancients and modern rationality or questions them in the name of “bare experience”, as it is the case in montaigne's “of cannibals”. the “space of the other” produces the “space of the text” and the other way around. these are functional or “formal” distinctions, in between there is a “space of interplay” (this is how de certeau interprets difference). de certeau explains this “topography” in the following terms: the first aspect concerns the space of the other; the second, the space of the text. on the one hand, the text accomplishes a spatializing operation which results in the determination or displacement of the boundaries delimiting cultural fields (the familiar vs. the strange). in coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 228 addition, it reworks the spatial divisions which underlie and organize a culture. for these socio or ethno-cultural boundaries to be changed, reinforced, or disrupted, a space of interplay is needed, one that establishes the text’s difference, makes possible its operations and gives it “credibility” in the eyes of its readers, by distinguishing it both from the conditions within which it arose (the context) and from its object (the content). montaigne’s essay functions both as an index locorum (a redistribution of cultural space) and as the affirmation of a place (a locus of utterance). these two aspects are only formally distinguishable, because it is in fact the text’s reworking of space that simultaneously produces the space of the text (pp. 67-68). de certeau's cartography is elaborated in textual terms in the linguistic sense, that is, at the level of words and discourse. in montaigne's text, the words “barbarian”, “savage” and “cannibal” define that which organizes a language of culture in relation to its outside. but the outside always remains exterior to the topographical order that words and discourse place and organize. to that extend, these words name the unnamable, what allows a closure of culture in relation to an exterior, and that which threatens the symbolic order of language and culture. the “place of interplay” or difference between the outside and the inside is also what establishes a dynamic relationship between the familiar and the strange, and the inherent dynamism of every society. it is the same idea of difference that links what is familiar to what is strange (“what is near masks a foreigness”, p. 67). the cannibal is at the origin of a language of culture, it is that which is sacrificed for the sake of language and culture. what is foreign is first of all the “thing”. it is never where the word is. the cannibal is only a variant of this general difference, but a typical one since he is supposed to demarcate a boundary line. therefore when he sidesteps the identifications given to him, he causes a disturbance that places the entire symbolic order in question. the global delimitation of “our” culture in relation to the savage concerns the entire gridding of the system that brushes up against the boundary and presupposes... that there is a place for every figure. the cannibal is a figure on the fringe who leaves the premises, and in doing so jolts the entire topographical order of language (p. 70). derrida's interpretation of difference is similar to de certeau's in that it is also “textual”, but derrida resists talking about culture in topographical terms, and does not limit the meaning of “text” to linguistics, to words and discourse that amount to an inscription of speech and, therefore, to a phonocentrism, as de certeau does. interviewed by jean-luc nancy, derrida is questioned about the crisis of the idea of subject in the tradition of nietzsche, heidegger, levinas, foucault, and others. in answering to these questions, derrida refuses the idea that, previous to these discourses, there was a homogenous idea of the subject that would have been superseded. instead, he contends that these discourses have “reinterpreted, displaced, decentered, re-inscribed” (p. 258) the idea of the subject. as a result, there have been some consequences regarding what is understood as ethical, legal, political or scientific objectivity, and the definition of the subject has been put in terms of who answers to the call “who?” (even in those contexts when this question is not formulated in a natural language, as we will see), thus avoiding a substantialist metaphysics of the subject. talking about the “classic” (from descartes to kant and husserl) and “recent” discourses on the subject, jean-luc nancy proposes to do away with the word “subject” and to substitute it for a kind of topology, which is what de certeau does: “but in lieu of the ‘subject’, there is something like a place, a singular point of passage... how might one name this place?” (p. 259). in answering to this question, derrida explains what he understands as subject as a result of his analyses on writing, coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 229 which at the same time tells us how derrida interprets difference. he explicitely avoids speaking about the subject in exclusively topographical terms: in the text or in writing, such as i have tried to analyze them at least, there is, i wouldn’t say a place (and this is a whole question, this topology of a certain locatable non-place, at once necessary and undiscoverable) but an instance (without stance, a “without” without negativity) for some “who”, a “who” besieged by the problematic of the trace and of differance, of affirmation, of the signature and of the so-called proper name, of the je[c]t (above all subject, object, project), as destinerring of missive (p. 260). this paragraph deserves some explanation. the “instance” which lacks “stance” refers to the openness of the “who” that, in this context, means subject. as such, it means that in its relation to self this “instance” “without stance” is open to events and to the other, the opposite of nihilism. a pure identity that always remains identical to itself is oblivious to events and to otherness, even if it is also true that there is no identity without some sort of “stance”.iii the “who” refers to the call that comes from the other and that, in this way, lays out what makes presence and identity possible (not presence and identity as such, as they appear within a particular cultural context). the one who asks or wonders (with or without words) “who is it? who is there?” already acknowledges somebody's presence without the need of the other to answer in a natural language and according to a specific semantics, in particular without the need to answer “i” with all the implications that stem from grammar, attributing essence or substance to the subject of a sentence (“how can we get away from this contract between the grammar of the subject or substantive and the ontology of substance or subject?” (p. 262)). what derrida calls “the problematic of the trace and of differance” precisely refers to the critique he himself carried out of the “metaphysics of presence”, the belief that what constitutes a subjective identity is the subject's relation to self without the need of language, which requires intersubjectivity and history. the expression differance, we will recall, means both deferral in time and difference in the sense of non-identity. the “problematic... of the signature and the socalled proper name” refers to the basic structure of the iterability of language. and the “ject” of “subject, object, project” to the projectile and to dissemination, “destinerrance”, the fact that a missive, missile, letter or pro-ject may not reach its objective, its recipient. in conclusion, there are only traces, the always-already, there is no pure presence. it deserves special mention in this context that derrida elaborated the “problematic of... affirmation” in terms of a critique to heidegger. in being and time, heidegger defines “dasein” (man in the sense of a singularity that does not amount to but is presupposed by all the categories of human subjectivity: self, reasonable being, consciousness, person, etc.) as that being that can question its own being as well as being in general. the power to ask questions, or the ability to question that institutes a sovereign subject that questions, is what defines “dasein”. derrida critiques heidegger in this respect because derrida believes there is an autonomy that comes from otherness, a heteronomy that institutes the subject and is more originary – and it also involves an ethical responsibility – than the ability or the power to ask questions. this is how derrida states it: i have spoken of the “yes, yes”, of the “come” or of the affirmation that is not addressed first of all to a subject. this vigil or beyond of the question is anything but precritical. beyond even the force of critique, it situates a responsibility as irreducible to and rebellious toward the traditional category of “subject” (p. 274). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 230 the relation to self, in this situation, can only be differance, that is to say alterity, or trace. not only is the obligation not lessened in this situation, but, on the contrary, it finds in it its only possibility, which is neither subjective nor human. which doesn't mean that it is inhuman or without subject... (p. 260-261). we will deal more extensively with derrida's reference to antihumanism when analysing the figure of the cannibal and sacrifice. certeau and derrida’s thinking of the difference that we have just exposed is what keeps thinking going, it refers both to something that makes you think and to the inherent rationality of the one who thinks and therefore is made to think (these are, again, formal distinctions). difference means rationality. it is “food for thought” in the sense of that which makes you think. but, as we mentioned above, the idiomatic expression “food for thought” also means issues to be considered in the public or legal square. in de certeau, the figure of the cannibal provides “food for thought” in that it constitutes and menaces the symbolic order of culture, we can always re-interpret the “horror” that cannibalism produces in western cultures and turn it into a noble figure. paradoxically, in the end the figure of the savage ends up teaching something about ourselves: “what is near masks a foreignness” (p. 67). in de certeau's text first comes a critique of the different forms in which the other (the savage, the cannibal) has been represented. de certeau follows montaigne's method and examples in this respect. first of all, common opinion or doxa about the savage appears reliable but lacks the rationality of the ancients; the discourse of the ancients about the barbarian are inaccurate because the ancients had no travelling experience, and the cartography and cosmography of the moderns is unreliable because the moderns always add things to their experience, providing a generalized view in place of their particular experience. all this can be put together in the “inventions of poetry, philosophy and deceit” (p. 71), ignoring the fact that what appears in a fictionalized form is a conjuntion of a series of disjunctions: “reliability without reason, reason without knowledge, knowledge without reliability” (ibid.). before being able to understand the figure of the savage, one has to do away with all the prejudices that go with tradition. the deconstruction of tradition is carried out by means of a theory of writing. the subject is a grammatical function which belongs to a particular system of symbolization and culture (there is no universal definition of who a subject is), and the object is also always caught in a particular system of representation that is different from the thing itself (the “thing itself” is not outside the text). detached from a pure presence or essence, subject and object are always disseminated. the different series of discourse montaigne deals with (doxa, the discourse of the ancients and of the moderns) can only be artifically sym-bolized: it is noteworthy that this “series” is structured as a written discourse: the written text, a spatial dissemination of elements destined for an impossible symbolization, dooms the unity it aims for (the thing, or meaning), as well as the unity it presupposes (the speaker), to inaccessibility (by the very fact of the exteriority of the graphs to one another) (p. 72). in view of this theory of writing, which de certeau shares with derrida, one could ponder what form of knowledge is the best to adopt when faced with the figure of the barbarian, the savage or the cannibal, and also about the effects of this theory of writing in language. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 231 what form of knowledge about the savage is the most reliable? montaigne is of course familiar with the literature about the savage but he does not make any reference to it to remain faithful to his method. it is a matter of “going back to things themselves” as they are given in bare experience and expressed in a speech that has gone through the deconstruction of tradition or the speech of the “simple” man to the extend that he is not a scholar. the acknowledged sources in montaigne's “of cannibals” are the things that have been brought from overseas (“he can see their objects and ornaments” (p. 75)), the “simple”, western man that has travelled and lived among savages, and then the savage himself. if one wants to understand or learn about the savage or the barbarian, one cannot rely on common opinion, establish a difference or a definition in terms of a particular form of rationality (reflective, instrumental, etc.) or use the discourse of modernity that generalises in concepts that are empty shells. instead, one has to rely on bare experience, and that is what “simple” means, because the simple man “admits the particularity of his place and his experience” (p. 72). the effects of the above-mentioned theory of writing are the dissemination of language and its essential sacrificial structure. the dissemination of language is shown in that the words “barbarian” and “savage” and the meaning of “cannibal” appear disseminated within montaigne's text. first, the word “barbarian” is used as a noun, then as an adjective. its use as an “adjective” proves that what was initially over there can switch sides and come over here, it does not have a fixed reference but is caught in the play – or systemic nature – of language. living in a natural state, cannibals are barbarian, whereas “occidentals are barbarian because of their cruelty” (p. 73), so occidentals are more barbarian than cannibals. “thus, the name comes undone” (ibid.). and it is the role of what is referred to as “cannibals” or savage to name the place, within language, of that which is “emptied”, “vacant and distant” (ibid.). the words have no fixed meaning.iv the sacrificial structure of the language of the savage or the barbarian is seen in that “the savage body obeys a law, the law of faithful or verifiable speech” (p. 75). ultimately, what this means is that the savage body is literally and symbolically sacrificed to speech.v once de certeau has described the experience of the simple man as the true witness of savage society, the recourse to direct perception of the savage body and its “objects and ornaments”, and to the conversation with the savage itself, the description of savage society focuses in their modes of symbolization, in the way they come together as a social (and therefore symbolical) and unified body by means of speech: the body of the savage is subject to law by means of the sacrifice of the body of men in war and of women to their husbands. men defend honour in war, and women are faithful to their husbands, and this is the origin of law and savage culture. what first appears as a monstrosity, the cannibal eating the body of the enemy in a symbolic ritual and the domination of the wives by men, is reversed in montaigne's discourse in terms of an “ethic of speech” and sacrifice. cannibalism is a “variety of war” which is not colonization, because it is neither motivated “by conquest nor self-interest” (p. 75). it is motivated by a “demand for “confession” under pain of death”, and in the pursuit of honour and glory. the sacrifice of the enemy's body is a tribute to its honour and genealogy, it is incorporated in the victor's own genealogy, and there is a “communion with the ancestors through the mediator of the enemy” (p. 76). in the case of polygamy, the honour of women is shown in that they work at the service of their husband's honour and virtue “without jealousy” (p. 75). “in both cases, the value of speech is affirmed in the ‘loss’ of self-interest and the “ruin” of one's own body. it is defined as a ‘triumphant loss’” (p. 75-76). in that it responds to the system of language and the economy of ethics, cannibalism and polygamy express the authenticity of a savage society which institutes its law, honour and values by means of a sacrifice of the body of the warrior in its exterior (war among men) and of the body of the wife in its interior (polygamy). what was seen as a monstruosity is now seen coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 232 as heroic thanks to the symbolic structure of society and the systemic nature of language, as soon as we understand who or what is sacrificed at the expense of speech and ethics. what gives “food for thought” to derrida is that the figure of the subject has always been constituted by means of the sacrifice of what is not subject. the gesture by which derrida describes and critiques the way the subject has been constituted in western thought is slightly different from de certeau's. following montaigne, we have seen that a positive view of the cannibal comes after the deconstruction of the discourses of the west (doxa, the reason of the ancients, the knowledge of the moderns) which allows for a subsequent reversal of values. cannibalism shows the honor of men in battle, and the incorporation of the enemy's body is seen as a tribute to the enemy's valor. polygamy is not a sign of male domination, it shows the devotion and fidelity of women towards their husbands. derrida also starts by deconstructing the prevalent philosophical discourses of the west about the subject, but not in order to bring about any reversal of values, because they all are constituted around another notion of sacrifice. derrida interprets sacrifice as the place of a “noncriminal putting to death”, and questions the legitimacy of the sacrifice of the living in general (and not just of the sacrifice of the human subject), menacing in this way precisely the sacrificial structure that constitutes the subject. in analysing the original call that institutes the “who” before language,vi jean-luc nancy asks about heidegger's statement that the animal is sad because it is “poor in world”. derrida answers that for heidegger the animal is poor in world because the animal lacks all the categories that are characteristic of original existence in the phenomenological sense (in the reflective structure of the “as such”), for example, the animal does not have access to the world of man, truth, speech, death, or the being of being. that is the reason why the animal is sad or appears sad compared to the society of man. and this is also the reason why heidegger and the whole western philosophical tradition think that the animal is not a subject. to the questions of whether the call heard by dasein “can come originally to or from the animal”, “the voice of the friend can be that of the animal”, “or whether friendship is possible “for the animal or between animals”” (p. 278), the answer is always “no”. the subject or dasein are essentially different from the animal, because the animal is “poor in world.” derrida contends that this poorness in world, the lack of the categories of original existence in the animal or the non-human living world in general is what constitutes “a place left open, in the very structure of these discourses (which are also “cultures”) for a noncriminal putting to death” (p. 278). in western culture, this “noncriminal putting to death” is “as real as it is symbolic when the corpse is ‘animal’”, and it is symbolic “when the corpse is ‘human’” (ibid.). western culture is carnivorous and vegetarian in that it sacrifices animals and plants without this sacrifice constituting a crime. lacking all the categories of original existence, the living world that is not man is less than human and is worth less, because it is poor in world. the death penalty and the exportation of illegal immigrants are examples of symbolic sacrifice. that is the reason why, derrida contends, the discourses of montaigne, de certeau, levinas, heidegger, etc. disrupt a “certain traditional humanism” at the same time that they “remain profound humanisms to the extent that they do not sacrifice sacrifice” (p. 279). derrida concludes: the subject … and the dasein are “men” in a world where sacrifice is possible and where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on human life, on the neighbor's life, on the other's life as dasein (ibid.) derrida also explains how the subject has been instituted as “human” and excluding the animal in the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 233 discourse of levinas. levinas recognizes the other man in his facial traits, there is no animal face for levinas. according to levinas, the transcendence of the other is first of all constituted in an ethical bound that obliges me not to kill her and, in this obligation, institutes the subject as “self”. the “thou shalt not kill” (your neighbour, your friend, etc.) is the imperative that establishes the first figure of the other as subject and as man, first as other, then as self (oneself as other, the subjective structure). consequently, responsibility towards oneself also comes from the other. as soon as you recognize the other you are not allowed to put him to death, you cannot kill the other without turning into a criminal and you are not allowed to kill yourself either. the “thou shalt not kill” protects the figure of man as subject in the sphere of society; when a man kills another man, that's a crime, but he can kill animals with impunity.vii subject is subject before the law and subjected to the law, against the law the subject turns into a criminal, he is outside the law. that is why, for levinas, the “thou shalt not kill” the other man has “become meaningful in religious cultures for which carnivorous sacrifice is essential” (p. 279). for levinas, the animal is not a subject. consequently, derrida's critique of the subject involves a critique of sacrifice, and a respectively literal and symbolic interiorization of food and language. derrida's critique of sacrifice involves acknowledging a moral imperative that is respectful toward the living in general, and not just man as subject. the definition of the concept of legal subject should not exclude animals and plants, the biosphere and the living generally, because it is in relation to them that the legal subject is constituted. the ideal of sacrificing sacrifice is very difficult to defend because most societies are carnivorous and vegetarian, but still, they must be granted some rights and be treated with some respect. insofar as the symbolic is caught within the real and the other way around, the figure of man and that of the living world go hand in hand. the discourses about the animal and the living world are introjected as subjective psychic properties which allow us to define what is human and what is not. the interiorization of food is a real thing, in that we eat meat, and symbolic, because it is accepted as something good in our societies to eat a particular kind of food, and this symbolization structures the “fiction” of law in leaving aside an area, that of man and the human subject, where putting to death is a crime.viii the ethical question revolves, then, around the question of how to eat well, about the most proper, respectful and giving way of eating, speaking, interiorizing the other in general. finally, since every culture establishes its own legal and illegal sacrifices, there are “several infinitely different modes of the conception-appropiation-assimilation of the other”: if the limit between the living and the nonliving now seems to be as unsure, at least as an oppositional limit, as that between “man” and “animal”, and if, in the (symbolic or real) experience of the “eat-speak-interiorize”, the ethical frontier no longer rigorously passes between the “thou shalt not kill” (man, thy neighbor) and the “thou shalt not put to death the living in general”, but rather between several infinitely different modes of the conceptionappropiation-assimilation of the other, then, as concerns the “good” [bien] of every morality, the question will come back to determining the best, most respectful, most grateful, and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self (p. 281). going back to de certeau's analysis of montaigne, the cannibal eats human flesh because in war the symbolic structure of the culture to which he belongs allows for a non-criminal putting to death of an individual of his own species who is not part of his tribe. let's remind ourselves that this act was carried out as a tribute to the enemy's valour, incorporating into his own flesh the flesh of their ancestors. the sacrificial structure is as symbolic as it is real, and it is universal. that is what made it possible for de certeau to deconstruct and reverse the values that characterized cannibals. in that sense, western culture is not better just because its symbolic structure does not allow for a remorseless eating of human flesh. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 234 symbolic sacrifice is ethnocentric. non-cannibalistic cultures deem cannibalistic cultures as inferior because they do not eat human flesh, not on rational or biological grounds: “they practice a different mode of denegation” (p. 282). this denegation, the unawareness that ethics is constructed around sacrifice is what makes western cultures believe that they are superior because they do not sacrifice, when the truth is that they simply carry out other kinds of sacrifice. the moral judgment that condemns cannibalism is in itself a symbolic form of cannibalism, in the sense that cannibals are judged as being less than human, they are non-human because they practice anthropophagy. this is the origin of morals, law, and politics: “the so-called non-anthropophagic cultures practice symbolic anthropology and even construct their most elevated socius, indeed the sublimity of their morality, their politics, and their right, on this anthropophagy” (ibid.). there is no culture that does not put itself together around an ethnic group and a certain form of sacrificial structure that delineates a particular form of ethics. in conclusion, since sacrifice and the clearance of a space for a noncriminal putting to death within culture are irreducibly real and symbolic structures, the question is that of determining what is good to eat at the same time as the good as an eating-thinking process that takes place in language and by means of language. what gives “food for thought” in a figurative sense is something that makes you think, and the awareness that as long as there is sacrifice – and there must be sacrifice, otherwise there is no eating and no thinking (and we have seen how these issues are both biologically and symbolically connected) – there cannot be good-consciousness. but there are always better and worse ways of putting the other to death. the moral question is open and continues to give us “food for thought”: the moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there is no other definition of the good [du bien], how for goodness’ sake should one eat well? and what does this imply? what is eating? how is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? and in what respect does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? (ibid.) works cited de certeau, michel, heterologies, trans. brian massumi, minneapolis, university of minnesota press, 2006. derrida, jacques, points... interviews, 1974-1994, trans. peggy kamuf and others, stanford, stanford university press, 1995. carles conrad serra pagès holds a double degree in english and philosophy, and is currently employed as an associate teacher at the university of pompeu fabra (barcelona), where he is working on his thesis on derrida’s concept of sign. he has been a member of the australian studies coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 235 centre at the university of barcelona since 2007. i the text was first published in le racisme: mythes et sciences: pour léon poliakov, ed. maurice olender, brussels, complexe, 1981, pp. 187-200. it was later on published as chapter 5 of de certeau's heterologies, trans. brian massumi, minneapolis, university of minnesota press, 2006, pp. 67-79. all references in my text refer to the latter edition. ii first published in cahiers confrontation 20 (winter 1989), the text appeared later on in derrida's points... interviews, 1974-1994, trans. peggy kamuf and others, stanford, stanford university press, 1995, pp. 255-287. all references in my text refer to the latter edition. iii later on in the text derrida states, talking about the relationship to self of the subject in presence: “the subject assumes presence, that is to say sub-stance, stasis, stance. not to be able to stabilize itself absolutely would mean to be able only to be stabilizing itself: relative stabilization of what remains unstable, or rather non-stable (p. 270)”. iv it is not that the dissemination of language and its essential sacrificial structure is discovered by a “simple man” (not a scholar) who has lived among savages and reported about his experiences once back in the west. if the experience of the “simple man” is privileged at one point in the narrative in disregard of the doxa and the knowledge of the ancients and the moderns, it is always with a prevision to make his experience the experience of a scholar or the other way around (by learning from the “simple man” or trying to see things as a “simple man” (also a child) would do, the scholar becomes a ‘true’ scholar). the outward journey is an inward journey, “what is near masks a foreignness…” v this is also the case regarding the western body, as we will see more extensively further on when discussing derrida. vi in the course of the interview, jean-luc nancy comments: “you are keeping at a distance, under suspicion, the question “who?” while you also increasingly validate the “who?” you validate it by suppressing that which, a priori, would limit the question to humanity”, to which derrida answers: “yes, i would not want to see the “who” restricted to the grammar of what we call western language” (pp. 276-277). vii the extent of this impunity would depend, of course, on the country and its legal system regarding animal rights or its policy regarding the environment. some countries, like the uk and australia, have strong laws regarding animal and environmental laws. viii this is so in an ideal context, where all human beings are so regardless of their social class, national or ethnic origin, a context in which the words “rights” and “legal rights” are not limited either to the nation state and its language and tradition. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 the voices of women in the night: veronica and judith shirley walker independent scholar swalk52@westnet.com.au copyright©2017 shirley walker. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. i quite often leave the radio playing all night on the bedside table; my only company in an all too empty house. it shuts out the noises of the night: the cry of the great owl in the rain-forest trees, the scurrying of possums on the roof, or the rustle of the neighbourhood carpet snake, a beautiful multi-coloured python, slithering into or out of the roof-space. i’m used to him (or her). she’s harmless —just another presence in the night. one night recently, waking suddenly just after midnight, i was galvanised by veronica brady’s voice on the radio. it was an old interview, recorded when veronica was on the board of the abc. that familiar voice, its clarity, its utter conviction, has been lost to her friends for years: those of her reclusion and final illness, then the sad time since her death. but right now, the voice of veronica was washing over me in the quietness of the night, bringing with it a flood of memories. there were those of the many conferences, here and in europe, where veronica spoke of her speciality —australian literature— with knowledge and conviction. at the same time, and often in the same presentation, she spoke with great sadness about the dispossession of aboriginal australians: the loss of their lives, their land, their language and culture. both of these concerns —for literature and for the loss of aboriginal culture— came together in her last major work, her comprehensive biography of the poet judith wright. in south of my days (1998) two of australia’s most important women writers —poet and biographer— came together in a major undertaking. they were a perfect match. south of my days is the life-story of one of australia’s most brilliant poets, a sustaining poetic voice for well over sixty years. it’s also a love story, of wright’s long association with jack mckinney, the birth of their daughter, their life together at mount tamborine and their association with prominent literary and artistic people. it also provides a detailed account of wright’s ancestral heritage: that of the wyndham and wright families. as prominent pastoralists for generations, wright’s ancestors were certainly involved in aboriginal dispossession and would clearly have been aware of aboriginal massacre. judith wright concedes this herself, with great sadness (brady 1998, p. 191). mailto:swalk52@westnet.com.au coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 this ancestral material is so detailed and so authentic that it must have been provided by the poet herself. at the same time, there are significant omissions. there is no mention, for instance, of wright’s long and passionate love affair, towards the end of her life, with nugget coombes, australia’s most influential economist and public servant. this was so sensitive a matter at the time that i cannot imagine veronica brady opposing its omission (capp 2009). also, and possibly most importantly for veronica and judith herself, the biography charts wright’s leading part in the struggle for the preservation of queensland’s flora and fauna and the battle to save the great barrier reef from mining and other predatory activities. it also analyses the way this struggle is reflected in the poetry. south of my days, comprehensive, detailed and beautifully written, is in my opinion the major achievement of veronica brady’s academic career. while wright’s poetry has been the subject of exhaustive literary analysis for over half a century, south of my days not only provides analysis of individual poems, it also provides the background and immediate context of their creation. * an example is the poem at cooloola, very much in my thoughts at this time because of a recent conference at caloundra, north of brisbane, which concentrated on the writers associated with that area. 1 the poem was written when wright was spending long stretches of time at boreen point, near caloundra, and was deeply involved in the formation of the wildlife preservation society of queensland. she was also, after a long road-trip with jack mckinney around central and north queensland, acutely aware of the family’s personal involvement in the appropriation of aboriginal land and the destruction of aboriginal culture (brady 1998, p.186). they would also have been, at the very least, well aware of notorious massacres during the establishment of their queensland holdings. i quote from at cooloola: the blue crane fishing in cooloola’s twilight has fished here longer than our centuries. he is the certain heir of lake and evening, and he will wear their colour till he dies. but i’m a stranger come of a conquering people. i cannot share his calm, who watch his lake, being unloved by all my eyes delight in, and made uneasy, for an old murder’s sake . . . white shores of sand, plumed reed and paperbark, clear heavenly levels frequented by crane and swan – i know that we are justified only by love, but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none. and walking on clean sand among the prints of bird and animal, i am challenged by a driftwood spear coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 thrust from the water; and like my grandfather, must quiet a heart accused by its own fear. south of my days provides the emotional context of this poem (pp. 187-190). while the blue crane is the ‘certain heir’ of this place, the poet, because of the ‘arrogant guilt’ of her ancestors will always, sadly, be estranged from it. because of its emotional power and its sadness, this is one of my favourite wright poems. it too sings in my mind in the quietness of the night. * at many conferences in australia and overseas, and specifically at the oviedo eaclals conference in 1996, veronica brady spoke with great feeling and conviction about the loss of aboriginal languages. happily, this is not the case in the area where i now live. the tribal lands of the bundjalung in northern nsw stretch from north of the clarence river to above the queensland border. while the british place-names are an obvious act of appropriation, the retention of bundjalung place-names —wollongbah, newrybah, billynudgel and so on— are a gesture, perhaps merely a token gesture, but still an acknowledgment of aboriginal culture. the retention of the bundjalung language is a different matter. it is still a living, a spoken language. some forty years ago, linguists working on the various bundjalung dialects 2 were astonished to find that not only were the old people still speaking the language, and still are, so too were the children. the languages have survived and live on. meanwhile decades of linguistic study have resulted in the publication of the dictionary and grammar of the various bundjalung dialects. 3 for veronica, this would have been totally reassuring. * so now to my voices in the night —the great owl, the possums, the tribal snake, the poet and her biographer— i can add the soft murmur of the old bundjalung women, singing in the quietness of the night from wollongbar to mullumbimby, from the clarence river to the border ranges. * the night is full of meaning. works cited: brady, veronica 1998. south of my days: a biography of judith wright. sydney: angus & robertson. capp, fiona 2009. ‘in the garden: judith wright and nugget coombs’, in the monthly essay, june. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 1 conference of asalvets, caloundra, 17-20 april, 2016. asal is the association for the study of australian literature. 2 professor bill hoddinott of the university of new england, armidale and margaret sharpe of northern rivers cae, lismore were both working in this area in the ‘seventies. 3 margaret c. sharpe, the university of new england. an all-dialect dictionary of banjalang. see also the many google entries on the bundjalung/banjalang language and dialects. * bio note: shirley walker is an honorary research fellow at the university of new england in armidale, and she taught australian literature for over thirty years. she is a past president of asal, the association for the study of australian literature, and the founding director of the centre for australian studies. she has published numerous critical articles and four books on australian literature and is a specialist in poet judith wright. she now lives on the far north coast of nsw, where she has written two books of memoir, roundabout at bangalow: an intimate chronicle (2001) and the ghost at the wedding (2009), shortlisted for the prime minister’s literary awards 2010. microsoft word john ryan 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 213 la mel es més dolça que la sang: fiction as magical intervention a reading of e.m. forster’s the life to come. john ryan abstract: drawing on deborah bird rose’s notion that there is a need for a magical intervention on the part of individuals if humanity is to survive, this paper will consider how the ethical interventions of fiction writers are acts of imagination that bring about a new idea of the past (history), the human being (memory) and our own life to come (the mythic). the paper explores a short story by e m forster. the life to come, written in 1922 and published fifty years later in 1972, is set in the eye of an historical encounter both postcolonial and queer. forster’s story gives voice to an alternative historical space often made invisible; it represents one of, what ashis nandy calls, history’s forgotten doubles. the life to come is therefore a marker within a cultural discourse about injustice and the past, that continues to emerge, and write the world: it shifts the contents of our histories and memories through the invocation of myth. in the second part of the paper, i explore recent examples of this literary tradition. key words: ahistorical, forster, heteronormative, post-colonial, queer, myth. this paper explores the idea that fiction has the capacity to redress the wrongs of history because it can speak on behalf of the silenced and the oppressed. at the heart of the paper is a powerful and unsettling short story written by e m forster in 1922, the same year that joyce’s ulysses was published. however the life to come remained unpublished for fifty years. forster called his story “violent and wholly unpublishable” (forster: 1972, p. 14), and indeed, it is charged with salient anger that rails at the injustice of forster’s age against homosexuals. the story relates one poignant sexual encounter that takes place between a south american chieftain, vithobai, “the wildest, strongest, most stubborn of all the inland chieftains” (forster: 1972 p. 95) and the young priest with whom he falls in love, paul pinmay, who is in all ways, vithobai’s inferior. in a single night their passion transforms into rejection. then, in an entropic structure from night to evening, then into day and finally, morning, we ride into the wake of the initial event, to the deaths of both these characters, ten years later. copyright ©2009 john ryan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 214 forster sets his story in the past, during the early colonization and christianising of south america. however the life to come is not about a documented historical event, quite the contrary; forster was writing into the spaces of history. it is the absence of such a story from history that brought his story about. and the tone of the text, its expression of rage and a powerful cynicism, is testament to forster’s purpose: to address what he saw as an injustice. it is clear he saw that a connection exists between the past and the present: the values and practices of the past can be used to inform and justify those in the present. in my view, what forster was intending to do was to create a magical intervention into history. inserting a metaphorical screwdriver into the heteronormative hard wiring of historical discourse, and “…more from my heart than anything else i have been able to turn [out]” (19), forster hoped to create a space for the other, the omitted voices that are not part of dominant narratives, which he refers to as a “bleak ritualised offstage chorus of spiritual and commercial oppressors” (forster: 1927, p. 19) that naturalise historical orthodoxy. further, by writing into the gaps, a tale of those silenced others, it is possible that forster believed the narrative of the past and the mirror image it provides us could be transformed, as if by magic. that he gave up publishing fiction suggests that he came to believe the enterprise of literature, as ethical intervention into the silences of history, (which constructs the narrow human present), was not viable. perhaps he felt the story would not be listened to, that is, understood and accepted. in time, the stories he wished to communicate would be valued, but in his time he could not be expect that stories dealing with homosexuality and criticizing the collusion between imperialism and christianity would be published. further, “given forster’s deep inner honesty and artistic integrity, his gradual acceptance of himself as a homosexual made the decision to abandon the writing of fiction for publication heroic but almost inevitable” (stallybrass in forster: 1972, pp. 16-17). in an attempt to “think other-wise about history” (rose: 2008, p. 157), deborah bird rose, who once titled an article, what if the angel of history was a dog? (in the way of a response to walter benjamin’s ‘angel of history’), discusses the struggle to “resist reconciling her learning, and… desire to understand and communicate what [she] has learned, with a ‘modern, empirical and scientific’ anthropology… i worry,” she says, “about whether my words are sustaining …respect…or …opening gaps wherein the awesome can be tamed” (158). history, that baconian scientific rational categorizing enterprise, outcome of the enlightenment, does not deal with angels or dogs – neither is represented as a subject for history. thus neither exists. and we might well wonder therefore – if that angel-made-dog were, as rose suggests, howling, how would we hear its pain; since it is both invisible and inaudible? she writes: i came to realize i know this song; i have listened to it and sung it many times. from the babylonian victory right up until today, the song cried out the anguish of exile and diaspora, of those who can never go home again…if we could better hear the waves of their [animals’] agony we would know… that for the rest of our lives we would hear a growing chorus of increasingly diverse voices. (rose: 2006. pp. 154-5) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 215 it is not just angels and dogs that are unrepresented. there are, as ashis nandy points out, “millions of people [who] still live outside ‘history’. they do have theories of the past; they do believe that the past is important and shapes the present and the future, but they also recognize, confront and live with a past different to that constructed by historians and historical consciousness” (nandy: 1995, p. 45). furthermore, he suggests, historical consciousness, intrinsically connected to the imperialist and colonial enterprise, is singular: “it is my suspicion, broadly speaking, cultures tend to be historical in only one way, whereas each ahistorical culture is so in its own unique style” (47). the implication is that history is an homogenizing and exclusionary discipline and that all ventures practitioners of history attend to can not help but be reified to “an agglutinating, schematic ideology of astounding coarseness.” (alonso, i. and ortega, m: 2008). intrigued by nandy, rose sits with, listens to and reports that trees and dingoes become subjects when exploring the sense of the ahistorical in aboriginal culture. rose’s work is published, acknowledged and valued; as such it has the capacity to shift cultural consciousness and create possibilities of alternatives to history, extending our understandings of human consciousness which turns out to be far more diverse than accounted for by either scientific rationalism or myth. but rose is not forster. she is not a homosexual, writing a story about homosexual history(s) in early c20th england. there is also a powerful congruence between nandy’s analysis of history with barthes’ conception of myth as a bourgeois juggernaut that absorbs all difference through a universalizing homogenization. “the petit bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the other” (barthes: 2000. p. 151). both writers trace a plethora of contemporary injustices to the justifications provided by history or myth or a blurring of the two. inga clendinnen however sees a distinction between history and myth. she critiques former australian prime minister, john howard’s vision of australian identity, and associated values, as based on a version of the past that is in fact mythic, not historical. she says, “i was surprised to find myself in sympathy with much of his speech, even with his longing for a clear celebratory story of how australia got to be the fine country it undoubtedly is” (clendinnen: 2006, p.2). but howard “will find it difficult to arrive at his objective record of achievement…in human affairs there is never one narrative. there is always a counter story, and usually several…” (3). later clendinnen suggests, “…perhaps what mr howard needs is not history…but legends” (8). howard seeks an unquestionable, mythic spirit embodied through the white, male, anglo-mateship of gallipoli and the national project of federation, but this is one way at least that history with its scientific method and emphasis on the empirical differs and ‘disappoints.’ yet, as clendinnen implies, history as science offers a logic that contextualizes humanity in a metanarrative of linear time and progress: in the end it optimistically prophesizes a better future: the life to come is attainable. and given that, “those who control the past own the present” (orwell in nandy: 1996. p54), the prime minister was looking in the right direction when he was looking backward. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 216 scholars like rose have attempted to step away from this desire for control of what nandy calls the “the historical viewpoint [which] has been complicit with many new forms of violence and exploitation amongst many other horrors” (44). forster would have agreed and he stands in a remarkable position because he embodies the virtue of diversity: homosexual, writing about civil liberties and sexuality and a bourgeois, he is at the interstices of the colonial and the colonized. he embodies the ahistorical and is therefore able to achieve in his writings “moments of freedom from history” (46). perhaps his time spent into india, translating the vedas, helped him to frame his opposition to the ‘truths’ of linear history. he recognized and developed an understanding of a relationship between history and the social function of myth, “mythologisation is also moralization” (47) and an awareness that “…history fears ambiguity” (48), especially because it “includes mythic elements …but …it can not accept that history can be dealt with from outside history” (50). at the beginning of the twentieth century, max planck was theorizing quantum theory and freud had published an interpretation of dreams. in that first decade too, picasso and the cubists were determining a mode of painting that gave voice to the notion that “the truth [representation] is a lie” (picasso in conrad: 1998, p161) in england, victoria had died, and forster had completed most of his novels. though it was not until after world war i, in 1924, that a passage to india was published, both it and maurice were already near completion in 1914. forster’s social and historical context, an englishman and a european, at the birth of modernism, was conflicted: this was also the time and culture that vilified, tried, sentenced and imprisoned oscar wilde for being homosexual. wilde died in exile three years after his release from jail, at the age of forty six in 1900. so it is probable that forster had begun to turn aside from writing and publishing fiction even as early as 1914. his engagement with fighting for civil liberties reveals his belief that fiction was not enough to change the injustices in society and “my patience with ordinary people has given out” (forster in stallybrass p.16). he continued to write short stories but no novels. possibly he still felt that even the act of writing fiction had a social purpose, but his only audience was a carefully selected group of trusted friends such as christopher isherwood and lytton strachey. one collection of short stories that represents his efforts, like maurice, (his novel of homosexual love that challenges and transcends class) remained unpublished until after his death in 1970. this is the life to come and other stories. about a third of the contents in this collection deal with issues of sexuality, but without the viability of publication the stories of those ‘others’ remained invisible for fifty years; thus they had no place in human memory and they did not act to shift human consciousness. in effect they remained silent, ahistorical sleepers, both at the centre of history: imperialist britain, and, to what is paradoxically central to human identity – sexuality. forster felt that the purpose of prose was to find ways to generate passion within the reader but, “every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organised religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent [and]… if human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way” (forster in aspects of the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 217 novel: 1927). in my view, forster gave up on fiction as a means too difficult to use to bring about this new way of looking at ourselves. perhaps he had lost faith in the capacity of society to be qualitatively changed through fiction. even in the more liberal climate of the 1960’s, when he was still making adjustments to the manuscript of maurice, forster still refused to publish. the life to come’s paul pinmay is not just a weak individual who has chosen to become a patsy of ‘civilisation’; his choice, represented in this prophetic text, represents a stand against diversity of culture, identity, sexuality and experience that forster condemns. indeed pinmay’s is a stand against the sweetness of life. he sides with his own internalised, brutal authority structures rather than act with bravery and live with love unconditionally. forster, however, believes that love and creativity are transcendent over family or any other institution. a saying in catalan sums up his perspective: la mel es mes dolca que la sang: the honey is sweeter than the blood. the small-minded, the ungenerous, the narrow and unloving are bit players in the life to come, which is above all, a pagan homage to the ‘wildness’ of life. forster was not aiming to domesticate the past but to represent an ahistorical, disruptive truth that queer lives are fundamental to who human beings have been, are and will be. and queer lives are fundamental to living in dignity. the two key characters, paul and vithobai, exist in the vast and dark forest of difference, a “wondrous night web all the fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family [you are] born into or the headlines of the day” (ondatjee: 1987, p.151). this “night web… of human order” eludes rationalization; it is outside labels and categories. “love had been born somewhere in the forest…trivial or immortal, it had been born to two human bodies as a midnight cry. impossible to tell where the cry had come, so dark was the forest…so vast was the forest” the story begins. in a hut a light is lit to reveal “the pagan limbs and the golden ruffled haired of a young man”, calm and dignified, smiling, and surrounded by red flowers. the hut he is in lies at the roots of an “aged tree”, a stream “sings outside” this “remote, romantic spot” (forster: 1972, p.94). but within moments the young man is assailed by guilt. by the end of the story red flowers of joy and passion are an echo of a lost world. they are replaced by “a curious skein of blue flowers threaded round a knife”, the colour of despair. the “young man”, paul pinmay’s hair is now sparse, no longer golden and his cowardice has trumped his spirit. he is “fussy” and rebukes the dying vithobai for lying “stark naked” and exposed on his roof, “you can not possibly lie on hard asphalt,” he says. “i have found that i can”, is the poignant reply (108). vithobai has after all been witness to the destruction of the forests and his culture; civilization now bathes everything in a “whitish light that seemed to penetrate every recess” (103), and the people have lost their culture and their health: “can’t you grasp, barnabas, that under god’s permission certain evils attend civilization… five years ago there was not a single hospital in this valley.” “nor any disease, i understand.” coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 218 “there was abundant disease. vice and superstition… the cost of civilization is worth it,” says paul (104). vithobai, renamed barnabas, has also changed. from an enigmatic and powerful figure “impassive and unfriendly behind his amulets and robes” (95); then as “this gracious and bare limbed boy whose only ornaments were scarlet flowers” (96) who visits paul in his jungle hut where they make love, he is robbed of his dignity. he submits when paul rebukes him for “wearing but little” (100). forster describes him: “a cincture of bright silks supported his dagger and floated in the fresh wind when he ran. he has silver armlets and a silver necklet…his eyes flashed like a demon, for he was unaccustomed to rebuke...” (100). he is demeaned clothed in “soiled european clothes” (100), and in paul’s eyes he becomes “an affable and rather weedy christian with a good knowledge of english” (102). after ten years, vithobai, impoverished and landless, awaits his death from (the introduced disease of) tuberculosis. when paul delivers a confused and heartlessly simplistic diatribe about repentance, vithoai replies with a world-weary insight: “i repent. i do not repent…i forgive, i do not forgive, both are the same. i am good. i am evil. i am pure i am foul. i am this or that…” (109). he says, “the life to come… i had forgotten it…and we shall meet in it, you and i?” in characteristic weakness paul says that they will, but “properly” and, as paul leans over him, vithobai draws of his last energy and stabs paul through the heart. then, on the rooftop parapet of his small house, he dies himself. in the final scene vithobai rises in spirit. renewed and like a predatory bird of vengeance, “…a great chief again” (111), he begins pursuit of the ‘terrified shade’ of paul into the spaces beyond time and history, spaces where the empirical does not reach. it is this mythic, universal dimension to the story that is at the heart of its power to disrupt heternormative fixed identities as naturalized through historical discourse. the life to come is therefore a powerful defense for the diversity of sexuality. further it demonstrates that fiction does have the capacity to intervene into history on behalf of the other. the effect of this is at once magical and transformative. if forster did lose faith in writing stories for the public, he was mistaken. fiction acts as an ethical intervention on the memory of ourselves that we have inherited. like alchemy, our understanding of what it is to be human is transformed. “that narrative”, says judith butler, “is not capturable by a category or it may only be capturable by a category for a time. our life histories are histories of becoming”, (butler: 2004, p. 80). this is why forster has used the prophetic voice of myth to write otherwise of our humanity, enlarging its meaning. his was a pre-emptive strike for sexual diversity written at a time when silence was mistaken for survival. this alone makes a story like the life to come remarkable and of enduring relevance. references: alonso, i. and ortega, m. when we were kids: the treatment of race difference in texts and images under the franco regime. myth, history and memory conference, barcelona, 2008. barthes, r. mythologies. london: vintage, 2000. butler, j. undoing gender. new york and london: routledge, 2004. clendinnen, i. ¨the history question: who owns the past?¨ quarterly essay. 23, 2006, pp. 1-15. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 219 conrad, p. modern times. london: thames and hudson, 1998. forster, e.m. aspects of the novel: 1927. san diego: harvest, 1955. forster, e.m. the life to come and other stories. middlesex: penguin books, 1972. nandy, a. ¨history’s forgotten doubles.¨ history and theory, 34:2, 1995, pp. 44-66. ondatjee, m. in the skin of a lion. london: picador, 1987. rose, d. b. ¨journeys: distance, proximity and death¨ landscapes of exile: once perilous, now safe. haebich, a. and offord, b. (eds). 2006, pp. 149-156. rose, d. b. ¨on history, trees, and ethical proximity.¨ postcolonial studies. 11:2, 2008, pp.157-167. rose, d. b. ¨what if the angel of history was a dog?¨ cultural studies review. 12:1, 2006, pp.67-78. john ryan teaches english at richmond river high school, in lismore, thirty minutes west of byron bay. he grew up in narrabri and has lived and worked as a teacher and gardener in sydney, chennai and the north coast of new south wales. he has a strong interest in narratives that explore the connection between history and justice, in particular with regard to sexuality, and he is currently completing an ma in the centre for peace and social justice at southern cross university on the stories of same sex attracted asylum seekers, titled in their own right: interviews at the outer edge of the margins. microsoft word coolabah 1 introduction.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.2-5 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona introduction coolabah 1: this foreign country is the first edition of the online journal of the australian studies centre of the universitat de barcelona (spain). the previous printed journal, eucalypt, had four volumes, respectively guest edited by dr. bill phillips, prof. john barnes, prof. christopher lee and brian beasly, and dr. elisa morera de la vall. this edition was first conceived as the last printed edition, but a slight delay in the publication allowed us to have this foreign country as the first number of coolabah. the name was chosen because it refers to a kind of eucalyptus (magnoliophyta, genus: eucalyptus species: e. coolabah). it derives from the indigenous australian word “gulabaa” in yuwaaliyaay language and it is included in the quasi national anthem “waltzing matilda”. therefore, the word “coolabah” included three very important aspects: first, it was related to the previous printed journal (eucalypt); second, it acknowledged the traditional inhabitants of australia; and, finally, it is known by all australians. in this edition, the use of the term “indigenous peoples” instead of “aboriginal” is defended. “indigenous” is written with a capital “i” because it is a nationality and it is preferred to “aboriginal” or “aborigine” when the noun designates the name of mainland aborigines and torres strait islanders. furthermore, “peoples” is written in plural because, before the colonization of australia, there were many clans with more than 600 different language groups and each clan spoke about four or five different languages or dialects. therefore, the heterogeneity of the traditional inhabitants of australia cannot be forgotten in their naming. copyright ©2007 caty ribas segura . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 3 the title of this issue, this foreign country, makes reference to a thought all collaborators to it shared at some point during their time in australia. as none of us was born down under we perceived it as a “foreign country” and our experiences there influenced us deeply. all the writers share the treat of having been exchange students between the universitat de barcelona and la trobe university (melbourne) and/or southern cross university (lismore) between the years 2000 and 2006. australia has provided us with a huge baggage of feelings, emotions, experiences and memories we will never forget and for some of us australia became a turning point in our lives, personally or academically speaking. this edition was born as a tribute to our experiences, as a moment to reflect and remember how we once perceived australia as a foreign country. at some point before, during or after our exchanges, we all thought australia was such a foreign country: because of the different season-month calendar, the trading hours or the custom of walking barefoot at home and sometimes even on the street, to give a few examples. contributors were asked to write a text where this foreignness was dealt with, in any style and format. the outcome is the mix of creative, academic and personal writings that follow. the reader of this journal will encounter a “dance” among the topics of the writers, as each paper, story and poem is completed by the following one: from one view of a topic to another aspect of the same topic, which, at the same time, suggests or deals with other aspects further developed in the following contributions. this is the reason why the arrangement of the table of contents is not alphabetical, but thematic. the reader will find theoretical articles, creative pieces of writing and personal papers dealing with different aspects of the “foreign country” that australia was for all contributors. each one of us had the freedom to choose the style and the minimum length of the contribution but the topics chosen can be described by four main keywords: city, nature, identity and migration. 4 the first contribution is ruth sancho´s poem “melbourne in winter”, a wonderful piece which makes the reader feel as if they were walking through melbourne. in “what can we do about it?”, elena xampeny makes us think and reflect about the importance of nature and global warming. mila martínez´s “a view on the dialectic between the individual and the environment” discusses the relationship humans have with cities and nature. carles serra´s “reflections on phenomenology and the poetry of kevin hart. foreignness and strangeness at the heart of australian identit”y takes the reader through a poetic journey in order to understand the relation between individuals and nature. a second poem written by ruth sancho takes us through a literary, sensual and mythological journey in her “gulliver surfs into alice´s virgin bay”, where the loss of innocence and the end of dreaming are dealt with. iissues of identity and place are explored in david calderón´s “expatriates: who are they?”, where he approaches this subject from a sociological point of view. victòria gras “mama `poma´, dad `apple´: raising a child with catalan in australia” explains her personal experience of migrating to australia and deciding to raise her daughter in catalan and english. therefore, here we find the opposite point of view: that of an immigrant to australia, not of an expatriate from australia. in anna zamora´s “destination: down under” the issue of identity is the main topic in a fictional account of the experiences an exchange student from barcelona in australia. lena lund´s personal experiences in australia, especially her relationship to cities, villages and nature and meeting her husband there, are the topic of her paper “australia: the land that changed my life”. 5 to finish with the personal accounts, in my paper “this foreign country fascinates me”, i write about my relation to australia and about the many experiences i had there. finally, ruth sancho´s third poem “why do you have to own everything nice?” is the perfect closing text as it deals with city, nature and a farewell. as the reader can see, the structure of this journal is circular and the reader can appreciate the theoretical articles, personal experiences or creative pieces of writing. i am sure all texts will make the reader reflect on the issues raised by the authors and will agree that they all have in common a view of australia as “this foreign country”. enjoy the reading! caty ribas segura palma de mallorca balearic islands, spain coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 foreword to reimagining australia, part 1 guest editors: baden offord, thor kerr, rob garbutt, yirga gelaw woldeyes, elfie shiosaki, misty farquhar and dean chan the two special issues of coolabah numbers 24 and 25 were developed from selected presentations at reimagining australia: encounter, recognition, responsibility, the international australian studies association (inasa) conference 2016, hosted by the centre for human rights education, curtin university, and held in fremantle, western australia, on 7-9 december. these coolabah issues address the urgent need for australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in tony birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay. microsoft word coolabah 1contributers.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.85-87 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona contributors to this edition david calderón prada was born in barcelona in 1984. he loves travelling as a way to discover new cultures, and that is why he does it as often as he can. this is precisely what may have pushed him to study english literature and language. his passion for english language and anglo culture, in general, started after taking an english course in clonmel, ireland, in 2001. the next year he started studying english literature and language at the universitat de barcelona. there he took introducció a les cultures postcolonials de parla anglesa (taught by dr. susan ballyn) and, from that moment on, australian cultures and literature interested him greatly. david coursed his third year undergraduate degree at goldsmiths college, university of london, based in south-east london. there he made some australian friends, which was his first contact with australian reality. finally, in july 2006 david moved to melbourne, australia, to study at la trobe university (bundoora), where he completed his bachelor degree victòria gras was born in barcelona (spain). she studied english literature and language at the universitat de barcelona followed by a post-graduate program offered by the department of linguistics at the same university. victòria taught english as a second language at various schools while studying, and around the same period, she started learning catalan sign language, which very soon became, together with sociolinguistics, her passion. victòria became a catalan sign language interpreter, later on, a spanish sign language interpreter and worked full-time for deaf organizations for five years, both as an interpreter and as a linguist mainly producing teaching materials. she concluded her phd in september 2006: a sociolinguistic description of the deaf signing population in spain. she moved to melbourne in 2003, where she works as a catalan 86 lecturer and spanish tutor at la trobe university. her main research interests are deaf communities, language planning, bilingualism, and language endangerment. lena lund was born in finland in 1978. at the age of 16 she spent a year as an exchange student in barcelona (spain) after which she went back to finland to complete her secondary schooling. she then returned to spain where she combined work with her studies in french and english literature and language at the universitat de barcelona. in 2004, the universitat de barcelona gave her a scholarship to spend the last semester of her undergraduate degree as an exchange student at southern cross university (lismore, nsw). after completing her degree in november 2005, she travelled in australia and met her husband. she now lives and works as a translator in melbourne. mila martínez was born in madrid (spain). she studied public relations and worked for an international transport company for three years. then she travelled to the usa to do a one-year course in english at harvard university extension, boston. back in spain, she moved to barcelona, studied catalan and took some courses in translation at the universitat de barcelona. mila also studied to become a teacher of spanish as a foreign language at international the house (barcelona). she worked both as a spanish teacher and as a translator for a number of years. in september 2000, she started a bachelor degree in english literature and language at the universitat de barcelona. in 2005, she was granted a scholarship to work as a professor’s assistant at the english and german department of the faculty, as well as a scholarship to study at la trobe university (melbourne) as an exchange student. she graduated at the end of 2005. mila then moved to ireland to do a dip/m.a in intercultural studies at dublin city university (dcu). catalina ribas segura was born in palma de mallorca (balearic islands, spain) in 1980. in 1998 she moved to barcelona to take a degree in english literature 87 and language at the universitat de barcelona (ub). whilst working towards her degree, the universitat de barcelona gave her a scholarship to spend a semester at la trobe university (melbourne) as an exchange student. after graduating, she decided to embark on a phd program “the construction and representation of identities” and in 2005 caty enjoyed another scholarship from the universitat de barcelona to spend a semester at southern cross university (lismore, nsw) as an exchange student. during a third trip to australia, in 2006, she did research for her thesis, titled “hieu thao: duty and obedience in chinese-australian and greek-australian literature”. caty moved back to mallorca in december 2006 and she is writing her thesis, working as a teacher of english at the tertiary institution c.e.s. alberta giménez and as a proof-reader and editor for a company in barcelona. born in castellón de la plana (valencia, spain), ruth sancho writes since the age of three. in addition to her poetry, she wrote for theatre and film whilst studying at the col·legi del teatre in barcelona for two years and in the laboratorio de teatro william layton in madrid for another three. in 1994 she won an award for the play entre vía y vi-a and in 2004 moved to new york where she directed in praise of folly (a theatrical version of don quixote) and began to write poems in english. in 2005 ruth arrived in australia to participate in the melbourne writers festival and in the overload poetry festival, also in melbourne. it was here where she wrote and performed her poetry for almost two years (arts centre, heidi modern museum of art, etc.). during this time, she received a scholarship from the universitat de barcelona to study at la trobe university. at the moment, she is focused on finishing her first poetry book “the shadows of the words” and completeing her bachelor degree in english literature and language at the universitat de barcelona. 88 carles conrad serra pagès was born in 1976, in figueres (catalonia, spain). after getting his degree in english literature and language, he attended a master on modernity and representation at north-london university. in the year 2000, he was offered a lectureship at atlanta international school (usa), where he taught spanish and english at high school level in salt lake city and new york, respectively. after that, he decided to go back to spain and commence a phd in humanities at the universitat pompeu fabra, while he also enrolled in the bachelor degree of philosophy at the universitat de barcelona. in 2005, the universitat de barcelona offered him a grant to study at latrobe university for one semester. currently, he holds a part-time position as english teacher for the city council of barcelona and has defended his minor thesis “the concept of transcendental space in the work of derrida”. elena xampeny i solaní was born in barcelona in 1969. during her childhood she studied music and piano at the municipal conservatory of music in barcelona. whilst at university, she took two degrees simultaneously. she graduated from the teacher training college and got a bachelor degree in english literature and language at the universitat de barcelona. she has been a primary school teacher in a state school until 1991. she got two scholarships from the universitat de barcelona as an exchange student to la trobe university (melbourne), in the years 2000 and 2001, which contributed to her acquisition of a deeper knowledge of the australian culture and society. currently, she teaches adults in a public school in terrassa. she has become a defender of sustainable mobility and an active member of a ngo which supports the use of public transport, especially the bicycle, as a means to avoid climate change. 89 anna zamora graduated from the universitat de barcelona (b. a. in sociology) in june 2006, and she is currently pursuing a phd in sociology at columbia university, new york. she was at la trobe university for the academic year 2003-2004 as an exchange student from the universitat de barcelona, and throughout that time she worked as a research assistant for the centre for citizenship and human rights, at deakin university, also in melbourne. her article with michael p. leach, “ilegals/ ilegales: comparing anti-immigrant/ anti-refugee discourses in australia and spain” was published in the journal of iberian and latin american studies, vol. 12 (1), 2006, 51-64. microsoft word merce cuenca 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 182 “inscrutable intelligence”: the case against plastic surgery in the works of jean stafford and sylvia plath mercè cuenca abstract: jean stafford’s short story “the interior castle” (1946) and sylvia plath’s “face lift” and “the plaster”, written in the early 1960s but published posthumously in crossing the water (1971), dwell on a theme which is rarely tackled in postwar american literature: plastic surgery. using a markedly mnemonic tone, both authors trace in detail the passive submission of female bodies to male (re)construction. while the history of women in early cold war america is usually associated with the patriarchal mystifying of housewifery, the myth of ideal, domestic femininity was also intimately related to bodily beauty. the demand for physical “perfection” which resulted from constructing women as, primarily, objects of male desire was mirrored in popular magazines, such as ladies’ home journal, which endorsed women’s seeking medical aid to model themselves into “ideal” sexual mates (meyerowitz in meyerowitz ed., 244). women’s submission to the notion that they should use any means necessary to become aesthetic objects to be appraised by men was thus represented as desirable. in this paper, i shall trace how both stafford and plath adopted a confessional style of writing in the abovementioned pieces in order to denounce the cultural construction of women as passive bodies to be moulded at will, instead of as active, thinking subjects. i shall argue that by reproducing the recollections and thoughts of the women being stitched, sewn and bandaged in their pieces, both authors articulated an alternative protofeminist aesthetics based on the beauty of what stafford described as “inscrutable intelligence”. keywords: postwar american confessional literature, (re)construction of female bodies, protofeminism we lie under anaesthesia our wit and wonder snuffed in our routine operations our own beauty not enough (suzanne vega, 2007) according to virginia blum, “imperfection is inevitable for the postindustrial, twentyfirst century western woman who is always evaluating her appearance (intimately bound up with her identity) in relation to some standard that must be other in order to function as a standard” (104). hence, many women seek to mould themselves into the “ideal woman” according to patriarchal standards, and allow themselves to be (re)constructed primarily for the benefit of the heterosexual male gaze (blum 107). copyright ©2009 mercè cuenca. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 183 in this paper, i would like to focus on early cold war american women’s literary representation of female figures who subvert the routine acceptance of male (re)construction of female bodies, or who sometimes even rebel openly against such a chastisement of female corporeality for the sake of male complacency. in particular, i will analyze jean stafford’s “the interior castle” (1946) and sylvia plath’s “face lift” and “in plaster” (early 1960s), arguing that, in these texts, the authors seek to make a case against plastic surgery, by attempting to redefine female beauty, making it transcend the material limitations of the body, and finding its origin in the intellect. thus, i contend that they articulate a protofeminist agenda: a defence of the importance of the life of the female mind over the material consumption of the female body. the period emcompassing from the mid-1940s to the mid 1960s, when stafford and plath wrote their texts, was characterized in the united states by what alan nadel has termed “containment culture”, “ a period [. . .] when ‘conformity’ became a positive value in and of itself” (4). what, then, was considered to reveal an adequate sense of confomity in women? domesticity, sexual containment within marriage and, very importantly, adequacy to expected standards of feminine beauty (meyerowitz in meyerowitz ed., 232). in the deeply heterosexist scenario which succeeded the gender ambivalence of the great depression and, above all, the second world war, no amount of effort was spared in convincing women that the “rosie the riveter” days were over. if, as judith halberstam notes, “female-born people have been making convincing and powerful assaults on the coherence of male masculinity for well over a hundred years” (15), never were those assaults more fully sanctioned by the united states government than during the armed conflict against fascism, when women were encouraged to join the “home front” by undertaking professions traditionally reserved for men, and to mould their bodily image accordingly (tyler may, 23-37). however, as soon as the war was over, the accepted, mainstream definition of womanhood shifted radically: a model american woman’s sense of achievement was now to be defined not by how she worked to build up her country’s economy, but by how she strived to (re)construct her bodily image for the sake of her husband’s enjoyment. this state of affairs meant that women were culturally indoctrinated with the idea that “individual effort, careful consumerism, and reliance on experts could bring any woman success, even in the realm of beauty and appeal” (meyerowitz in meyerowitz ed., 245, my italics). thus was born the myth of the “self-made beauty” whom, with a little surgical help if necessary, could embody any heterosexual man’s desires. the insistence of popular culture on beauty and heterosexual marriage is, at the very least, conspicuous. women’s magazines, such as harper’s, ladies’ home journal, and woman’s home companion sought to teach women how to be women, that is, suitably beautiful and chaste. articles like “she turned herself into a beauty” (1954), interestingly penned by a woman, dawn crowell norman, dwelled on how women’s efforts, and medical aid, could lead a woman to such “achievements [as] weight loss, better grooming, and medical help for acne, a deformed nose, and a bent back”. needless to say, the objective sought through these efforts, both of will and of monetary expenditure, was to become a pleasing aesthetic object for male consumption and, eventually, a pleasing sexual mate within heterosexual marriage (meyerowitz and meyerowitz ed., 244-245, 259). other popular cultural products, such as pulps or movies, provided foils to those ideal women and constructed threatening messages for coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 184 women who deviated from the norm. pulp novels repeatedly paralleled women’s sexual freedom with their eventual suffering of violence and with their meeting an untimely death. one only needed to look at their lurid cover art to experience vicariously and learn (server 67). likewise, film noirs like fritz lang’s “the big heat” (1953), starring glenn ford as sergeant dave bannion and gloria grahame as debby marsh, did not augur a pleasant time for women who made an unlawful use of their physical beauty. debby, whose affair with mob member vince stone, played by lee marvin, ensures her material luxury, also ends up winning her a gruesome facial disfigurement when the villain thinks, erroneously, that she has betrayed him to the police. clearly, women who did not wish to use their beauty in order to secure a heterosexual marriage, or who simply did not wish to marry for that matter, did not receive very inspiring messages from the entertainment industry. undoubtedly, the prevailing discourse on how women should appear before society in early cold war america, and how this was connected with their sexual behaviour, constituted a tight-knit, heterosexist matrix which operated with a fine scalpel upon women’s bodies and controlled the uses they were put to. this was so because, to use a foucauldian term, a particular discursive formation on womanhood, that is, a set of statements containing a certain regularity, as to form and content, in terms of establishing who was considered a woman, became the mainstream discourse on the issue. thus, it assumed a regulatory function, ensured that female individuals followed suit (2006, 41). in her introduction to bodies that matter (1993), judith butler inquires how it is possible that the heterosexist, social delimitation of suitable corporeality may lead to the appraisal of certain human lives, while denying others acknowledgement: how, then, can one think through the matter of bodies as a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the formation of what qualifies as a viable body? how does the materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation, which, in failing to qualify as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms? (16). clearly, in cold war america, a suitably beautiful and chaste female body was a body that mattered, whereas other forms of female corporeality were considered abject lumps of flesh ready to be deformed and/or killed. notwithstanding, if discursive formations hold in their performative function as language the power to produce certain types of subjects (foucault 2006, 54), according to foucault, every discourse is always “a space of multiple dissensions” (2006, 173). since the narrative on women’s adequate corporeality, and concomitant sexual behaviour, was a especially narrow discursive site in early cold war america, it can be argued that it was a paradoxically fertile ground for contradictions. this explains its blatant need for reaffirmance in popular culture, and the existence of literary texts, such as stafford and plath’s, which unequivocally question and subvert its main tenets. in her brilliant article “between mother and history: jean stafford, marguerite oswald, and u.s. cold war women’s citizenship”, kate a. baldwin analyzes why the role of female counternarratives played such a key part in the disruption of the period’s heterosexit status quo. theoretically developing on the belief in the power of language so characteristic to early cold war america, baldwin highlights what she terms “the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 185 performative force” of written discourse (87): “what narrative is “doing” is dialogue: it is effecting an intersubjective relationship between at least two characters – an author and her audience, a text and its public, etc.” (85). as she goes on to point out, “critics have been relatively silent on the interruption of [cold war] metanarratives by performative displays of dissent and/or difference” (87). indeed, stafford and plath operate such a textual interruption of the cold war metanarrative on plastic surgery, which presented the undergoing of medical intervention on one’s physique as a desirable process for women by focusing only on the ultimate effects of the operation, never on the subjective experience of the patient. by using a markedly mnemonic tone, both authors pay attention to the subjectively lived experience of surgery and its psychological corollaries. jean stafford’s short story “the interior castle” (1946) is a case in point. the text is based on the author’s own experiencing of facial reconstruction after a car accident suffered with her husband, the famous confessional poet robert lowell. the main character, pansy vanneman, undergoes a medical intervention on her nose which is described in gruesome detail along with the physical pain it occasions. such a first-hand account of the experience of plastic surgery was nowhere to be found in popular appreciative accounts of the wonders it performed on women. she writes: he [dr. nicholas] had now to penetrate regions that were not anaesthetized and this he told her frankly, but he said that there was no danger at all. [. . .] he began. the knives ground and carved and curried and scoured the wounds they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the scalpels chipped off bone. it was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were being cut dexterously, one by one; [. . .] the pain was a pyramid made of a diamond, it was an immense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak, the fastest force, the furthest reach, the newest time. it possessed nothing of her but its one infinitessimal scene [. . .]. (193). interesting in this passage is the use the narrator makes of metaphors to describe the pain which vanneman endures, thus highlighting what ann hulbert terms “the role of language [in stafford’s text] in linking the mind to physical and metaphysical reality” (128). actually, despite the focus on the material conditions of surgery and the physical pain it entails, stafford’s text concentrates precisely on the metaphysical aspect of pansy’s experience, particularly, her preoccupation with the preservation of her priceless mind. before the operation, “she thought, quailing, of those plastic folds as palpable as the fingers of locked hands containing in their very cells, their fissures, their repulsive hemispheres, the mind, the soul, the inscrutable intelligence” (185). that is why, for pansy, the physical pain inflicted by the doctor never possesses her real self, never mars her true source of beauty, her brain. the corporeal versus intellectual duality which structures the text is further highlighted by the author’s juxtaposition of the inner thoughts of doctor and patient. in this way, while dr. nicholas focuses exclusively on pansy’s exterior, pondering over the damage wreaked on the physical appearance of his patient’s “pitiable skull”, and patronizingly feeling sorry for the woman’s loss of beauty and “joy in herself” (187), pansy is exclusively concerned about her interior: “what pansy thought of all the time was her own brain. [. . .] it was only convention, she thought, that made one say “sacred heart” and not “sacred brain””(183). in this way, the male (re)construction of the female body is posited by stafford as an exclusively coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 186 masculine obsession, projected and enforced on women by the pervasive heterosexist discourse on what constitutes female beauty. plath’s “face lift” and “in plaster” (early 1960s) develop this point of view on plastic surgery by omitting the male perspective on female beauty. interestingly, plath’s journals reveal that she had stafford’s “the interior castle”, a text she describes as “a lurid, terrifying recreation of intolerable pain” (kukil ed. 508). the diaries also show plath’s preoccupation with external female beauty – a preoccupation which echoes stafford’s will to redefine it as being the consequence of intelligence and, for plath particularly, of artistic creativity. for instance, on january 7, 1959, plath wrote: nose podgy as a leaking sausage: big pores full of pus and dirt, red blotches, the peculiar brown mole on my under-chin which i would like to have excised. memory of that girl’s face in the med school movie, with a little black beauty wart: this wart is malignant: she will be dead in a week. hair untrained, merely brown and childishly put up: don’t know what else to do with it. no bone structure. body needs a wash, skin the worst: it is this climate: chapping cold, dessicating hot: i need to be tan, all-over brown, and then my skin clears and i am all right. i need to have written a novel, a book of poems, a lhj [ladies’ home journal] or ny [new yorker] story, and i will be poreless and radiant. my wart will be non-malignant. (kukil ed., 457). writing is revealed in this diary entry to be a healing, cleansing and beautifying activity. interestingly, in her poems, she deconstructed the prevailing mythical discourse on female beauty and its beneficent social function, creating an alternative counterdiscourse where, for example, female beauty is exclusively the source of her bearer’s enjoyment, as in “face lift”, or where a perfect physique is derogatively compared to the allure of the intellect, as in “in plaster”. narbeshuber argues that “plath’s poetry reacts against the absence, especially for women, of a public space, indeed a language for debate, wherein one might make visible and deconstruct the given order of things” (185). in my opinion, plath sought to open such a debate on the female body as a site of social containment in “face lift” and “in plaster” – an issue which, as has been shown above, worried her and affected her everyday life. narbeshuber contends that: transforming the conventional female body of the 1950s into a kind of transgressive dialect, plath makes her personae speak in and to a public realm dominated by male desires. [. . .] [h]er poetry confronts the mentality of the status quo that accepts the ideology of the individual and notions of the natural, or even the personal, self. she unveils and critiques the private, the hidden, and the normalized by parodying various public discourses of power (gendered male), while portraying her personae as objects of those discourses and, thereby, both the agents and the spectacles of punishment. (185-186). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 187 such is the case of “face lift” where plastic surgery is presented as a form of punishment which a woman inflicts on herself, thus perpetuating the rejection of the aging female body so peculiar to patriarchal notions of the aesthetic: now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady i watched settle, line by line, in my mirror – old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg. they’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar. let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years, nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair. (250, 252) thus, the female persona in the poem dissociates herself from the abjectness which age has forced upon her body, parroting the prevailing mainstream discourse of the time about the ease with which women could, and should, abandon the physical features which marked their identity. plath’s persona, ends her poetic statement triumphantly, the sole spectator of her rejuvenated self: “mother to myself, i wake swaddled in gauze, / pink and smooth as a baby” (252). if “face lift” has been read as one of plath’s poems where “the poetic voice is one of the utmost address to others: a call, an invocation to the reader to see, recognize, assemble, and act” (wolosky, 499), the same agenda can undoubtedly be traced in “in plaster”, a poem whose sardonic style is even more blatantly subversive. in the text, the female persona has a bifurcated personality, that of intelligent but ugly speaker whom we read, and that of the silent but perfect bodily beauty. the female persona compares her own imperfect body to that of her other perfect self, who is taking care of her by hiding her ugliness: “there are two of me now: / this new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, / and the white person is certainly the superior one” (272). conscious that her body will be found wanting, the female persona soothes herself reflecting that her perfect other “had no personality” and eventually comes to realize that “it was i who attracted everybody’s attention, / not her whiteness and beauty, as i had first supposed” (272). however, plath takes her subversion further, ending her poem with a clearly vengeful spirit, showing how the intelligent, uglier part of herself, will surely destroy the empty-headed, beautiful one, since an individual without an intellect is nothing but a lump of matter: now i see it must be one or the other of us. she may be a saint, and i may be ugly and hairy, but she’ll soon find out that that doesn’t matter a bit. i’m collecting my strength; one day i shall manage without her, and she’ll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me. (274) of course, plath’s cynicism resides in the fact that her perfectly beautiful self is a lump of matter, a plaster cast which covers her own body. thus, the author exposes the hatred of real female corporeality behind the endorsement of the idealization of female beauty. to conclude, as i have attempted to prove, stafford’s “the interior castle” and plath’s “face lift” and “in plaster” can be read as complementary texts which, in exposing the mythical nature of female physical perfection and the perverseness of (re)constructing the female body for male consumption, point to what baldwin has described as “a coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 188 reocnfiguration between narrative and perfomative displays of female selfhood” which took place in the early cold war era (87). it seems to me that in the wake of such cultural phenomenons as nip/tuck and extreme makeover, their attempt at redefining female beauty as residing in women’s “inscrutable intelligence” (stafford 185) is well worth revisiting. references baldwin, kate a. ¨between mother and history: jean stafford, marguerite oswald, and u.s. cold war women’s citizenship.¨ differences, 13: 3, 2002, pp. 83-120. blum, virginia. ¨becoming the other woman: the psychic drama of cosmetic surgery.¨ frontiers, 26:2, 2005, pp. 104-131. butler, judith. ¨introduction¨. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”. new york & london: routledge, 1993, pp. 1-23. foucault, michel. archaeology of knowledge, 1969. london and new york: routledge, 2006. halberstam, judith. female masculinity. durham and london: duke university press, 1998. hulbert, ann. the interior castle: the art and life of jean stafford. amherst: the university of massachussetts press, 1992. lang, fritz. the big heat. new york: columbia pictures corporation, 1953. meyerowitz, joanne. ¨beyond the feminine mystique: a reassesment of postwar mass culture, 1946-1958¨ not june cleaver: women and gender in postwar america, 19451960. j. meyerowitz (ed). philadelphia: temple university press, 1994. nadel alan. containment culture: american narratives, postmodernism, and the atomic age. durham and london: duke university press, 1995. narbeshuber, lisa. ¨the poetics of torture: the spectacle of sylvia plath’s poetry.¨ canadian review of american studies/revue canadienne d’études américaines, 34:2, 2004, pp. 185-203. plath, sylvia. the journals of sylvia plath, 1950-1962. karen v. kukil (ed). london: faber and faber, 2000. plath, sylvia. ¨face lift¨ plaster. m. abelló (ed). sóc vertical: obra poética 19601963. (bilingual anthology) enciclopèdia catalana: barcelona, 2006. server, lee. over my dead body. the sensational age of the american paperback: 1945-1955. san francisco: chronicle books, 1994. stafford, jean. ¨the interior castle,¨ 1946, the collected stories of jean stafford. new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 2005. tyler may, elaine. world war ii: the chance for change. pushing the limits: american women, 1940-1961. new york and oxford: oxford university press, 1994, pp.23-37. vega, suzanne. edith wharton’s figurines. beauty & crime. new york: blue note records, 2007. wolosky, shira. ¨the ethics of foucauldian poetics: women’s selves.¨ new literary history, 35, 2004, pp. 491-505. mercè cuenca is a lecturer in postwar american literarure at the university of barcelona. her research focuses mainly on mid-twentieth century american literature and on gender and lesbian studies. she has published several articles on cold war american women writers such as sylvia plath, carson mccullers and lillian hellman, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 189 and is currently completing her dissertation on the representation of lesbianism in cold war american literature (1945-1963). coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 198 foreword to reimagining australia, part 2 guest editors: baden offord, thor kerr, rob garbutt, yirga gelaw woldeyes, elfie shiosaki, misty farquhar and dean chan this special double issue of coolabah, numbers 24&25, was developed from selected presentations at reimagining australia: encounter, recognition, responsibility, the international australian studies association (inasa) conference 2016, hosted by the centre for human rights education, curtin university, and held in fremantle, western australia, on 7-9 december. the double issue addresses the urgent need for australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in tony birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay. microsoft word carles serra 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 a reading of husserl’s “life-world” against the loss of history in the context of postcolonial aboriginal australia. carles serra pagès abstract: recently, husserl’s phenomenology of the “life-world” has been given special emphasis in those areas of the social sciences that are concerned with the crisis of values and meaning in our contemporary world. husserl conceived the concept of “life-world” as a final introduction to his system of transcendental phenomenology, the project of a lifetime. as husserl puts it in the crisis of the european sciences and transcendental phenomenology (7), phenomenology is not only the act of “senseinvestigation” (besinnung), but also the universal “coming to self-awareness” (selbstbesinnung) of humanity in a reflective manner, and herein precisely lies humanity’s responsibility towards itself. husserl expected phenomenology to be the ultimate universal science, destined to ground all human achievements in the soil of the “life-world” (33-34). but can husserl’s phenomenology accomplish this task effectively outside the horizon of europe, and outside the context of a critique of modern science and technology? so as to try to answer this question, our aim will be to introduce some key concepts and notions that characterize husserl’s phenomenology of the “life-world” or philosophy of genesis in the context of aboriginal identity in australia. for this purpose, we will offer a reading of sally morgan’s my place, an autobiographical novel which narrates the personal quest of a woman of aboriginal descend to find her roots and identity in a westernized world. in the course of our analysis, we will describe in what ways some of husserl’s notions related to the life-world are hindered in postcolonial contexts, and whether a phenomenological analysis can provide a means of reconcilement. finally, we will also ask ourselves about the possibility of a phenomenological idea of history that respects the idiosyncracies of historicity. keywords: husserl, sally morgan, phenomenology, lifeworld. introduction in a text entitled the crisis of european humanity and philosophy, written in 1935 husserl says that the crisis of the european sciences is the result of the mathematization of nature in the natural sciences. inspired by the method of the natural sciences, natural psychology and historicism reduce nature to mere facts, and lead to scepticism. they fail to see that they are themselves as sciences the result of a spiritual process of investigation, applicability and thematization that acquires its sense and legitimacy copyright ©2009 carles serra pagès. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 within the context of a particular way of life, that of an individual or a community. husserl calls the internal unity of these spiritual performances “life-world”. when as a result of the influence of the natural sciences, the life of the spirit is objectified, or the psychic is reduced to its physical properties, then humanity is alienated from itself, because its destiny and being is no longer in its hands. it looses all freedom and responsibility. this is what we mean by “loss of history” in this text. in a certain way, both husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and my place can be read as pharmakons to heal europe from the crisis of the sciences that led to world war ii, to the crisis of the environment that we suffer today, to the dispossession and oppression brought about by colonization, immigration and poverty, that is, to a existential crisis at all levels. the first chapter of my place is precisely entitled “the hospital”. hospitals are a product of modernity, they reduce the person to its physical body, which can be studied by means of physics and chemistry, by means of the natural sciences. sally’s father is in hospital because of the psychological traumas he went through during world war ii. as sally will recall later in the book, it is hard for people to understand that you can be broken “inside”. sally tells us that she feels terribly uneasy and confused in the hospital: “i was full of secret fears.” (secret in the sense of “unknown”. secrecy is the possibility of consciousness.) philosophy as strict science and worldview philosophy in this context, it seems suitable to recall a distinction that husserl makes between worldview philosophy and scientific philosophy in his book philosophy as strict science. that will allow us to inquire whether and, if so, in what way life-world philosophy differentiates itself from worldview philosophy. worldview or weltanschauung philosophy is a cultural and epochal philosophy. it contends that all scientific human achievements are the result of a spiritual process that takes place in time. therefore, no science and no philosophy as science can claim universal and objective validity and legitimacy. a proof of that is the continuous refutation of the findings of the natural sciences. but husserl contends that this argument aimed at invalidating the objectivity of science is wrong, because you cannot question the rationality of mathematics, for instance, from a historical standpoint, in the same way that mathematicians cannot do mathematics analysing the history of concepts. mathematics is a logical process independent of cultural or contingent factors. worldview philosophy uses the result of the particular sciences and gives form to a metaphysics that tries to give an answer to the mysteries of life and death. its ideal is the cosmopolitan man, the virtuous man. this ideal is an idea which is practically accomplished, and changes with time and it depends on culture. philosophy as science, on the other hand, does not take place in time. the man of science is the man of infinite tasks, because once the man of science has cleared up and established a new region of study in the scientific sense, this region stands as an idea to be investigated by the new community of scientists ad infinitum. husserl specifies that the distinction between worldview philosophy and philosophy as science is a modern distinction, and even though they certainly influence each other, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 this distintinction is final and there is no way back. it cannot be undone. it is not possible to go back to a time where worldview philosophy and science in the strict sense are part of one and the same phenomena. the question we want to ask ourselves is why and in what sense life-world phenomenology can give rise to a scientific philosophy. it is very intuitive to define the concept of “life-world” as a cultural concept, and as coextensive with that of worldview philosophy. but it seems clear that husserl wants to retain the best of the scientific model of the natural sciences and worldview philosophy in his transcendental phenomenology. in crisis, husserl makes of the concept of life an absolute value, relating it to the idea of philosophy and of humanity. “life-world” is a spiritual concept, independent and autonomous from the physical world. that is the reason why it is useless to try to understand the spirit in terms of the natural sciences. on the contrary, the natural sciences are the result of a spiritual performance, and their sense and legitimacy can only be found within the sphere of the spirit. but what distinguishes life-world phenomenology from worldview philosophy is that phenomenology investigates the unconditional elements and laws of the spirit as they are in themselves. this autonomy of the spirit forms the spiritual figure of europe and its freedom to shape its existence according to the idea of reason. this is why all indians, says husserl, and by extension we might add all aborigines want to become european, because in their becoming european they can make of the preservation and investigation of their cultural and spiritual identity an infinite task. life-world phenomenology and the loss of history of the aboriginal peoples it is not a rational matter but a matter of casualty that i found myself preparing this conference during the celebration of world youth day in a café in sydney. but i think that if it hadn’t been for this fortuitous event i would not have paid that much attention to chapter 16 of my place, entitled “what people are we”. the chapter is divided in two parts. in the first one, sally behaves in what husserl calls the natural attitude: sally just accepts the facts of the world as they are, its world beliefs, its objective validity, etc. but in the second part, sally performs what husserl calls a phenomenological reduction. this chapter also represents a turning point in the book. first, the chapter begins when sharon, a friend from sally at school asks sally out to a youth meeting at a church nearby. you may recall that sally initially refuses, but her friend sharon insists that there won’t be any religious stuff, just some gathering together and some chinese food. sally ends up going and taking her friends along with her. but after eating, a mrmcclean gives a talk to the kids, much to sally’s dread. sally soon goes absent-minded, and this is what happens: suddenly, there was someone talking to me. i knew it wasn’t mrclean. i looked around in a furtive kind of way, trying to see who it was. all eyes were fixed on the speaker, there was no one new in the room. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 ‘who are you?’ i asked mentally. with a sudden dreadful insight, i knew it was god. ‘what are you doing here?’ i asked. i don’t know why i was surprised. it was a church hall, after all. it had to be him because the voice seemed to come from without not within, it transcended the reality of the room. i couldn’t even see my surroundings any more. i was having an audience with him, whom i dreaded. the mental images that i had built up of him so far in my life began to dissolve and in their place came a new image. a person, overwhelming love, acceptance and humour. what nan would call real class. in an instant, i became what others refer to as a believer. i joined the local youth group after that. 102. what i want to retain from this passage, is that sally turns into a believer, and that the qualities she ascribes to god are those that nan would term “real class”: infinite love, acceptance and humour. a symbiosis of aboriginal and western values seems to take place. also i want to point out that in crisis husserl is aware that the event of a monotheistic religion that is rationalized in the form of logos is intrinsic to the spiritual figure of europe, and he links worldview philosophies to mythical religions, and scientific philosophy to the religion revealed in the form of logos. after this episode sally cancels her unquestioned belief in her feelings and in the way she relates to the world. she carries out a phenomenological reduction, she realizes that the world in which she lives is not an objective world, but the result of a spiritual performance. this is how the second part of the chapter starts: “it was about time that i began to analyse my own attitudes and feelings.” we can also argue that it is thanks to this change of attitude that sally is eventually able to set for herself the task to investigate into the history and life of her aboriginal heritage. it is also worth noting that sally’s new attitude comes about “in an instant”. in somewhat the same fashion in which kierkehaggard says that “the instant of decision is madness”, sally’s decision is mad because it does not take place in time. the instant that separates her old self from her new self is not in time: it separates two heterogenous times and ways of life. one cannot account for the other. there is no rational explanation, if we are to believe what the text says literally, as to why sally turns into a believer. or, is there? why does one need to believe? if sally can set up for herself the study of her aboriginal past and culture as an infinite task, it is because it has previously been lost. aboriginal peoples have lost their history not only in the historical sense, but also in the existential sense: their culture and tradition is no longer the means by which they “are” in the world. worst still: it is repressed, denied by meanstream “white”, “western” australia. more specifically, the european worldview metaphysics labels everything related to aboriginal australia as animal, inferior, irrationasl, that is, primitive. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 just before sally decides to analyze her own behaviour and attitudes, the dean tells sally that he wants her to stop being friend’s with his daughter. the reason is sally’s aboriginal background, to which the deacon refers to somewhat indirectly with the expression “bad habits”, and, paradoxically, by an appeal to “understanding”, as if raional matters had anything to do with worldviews. sally’s witty comments and sense of humour do not diminish the cruelty of the episode: one night, one of the deacons of the church asked if he could talk to me. i was friendly with his daughter and he seemed like a nice man, so i agreed. ‘you and mary are having quiet a lot to do with one another, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘i suppose so, but we’re not best friends.’ ‘no. i know that, but you see a lot of each other at youth group and church.’ ‘yeah.’ ‘well, sally’, he smiled, ‘i want to ask a fvour of you.’ ‘sure, anything.’ ‘i’d like you to stop mixing with mary.’ he smiled his charming smile again. ‘why?’ i was genuinely puzzled. ‘i think you know why’. ‘no, i don’t’. ‘you’re a bad influence, you must realize that.’ believe or not, that was one part of my character i was unaware of. ‘what do you mean?’ i wanted him to spell it out. ‘this is mary’s leaving year, the same as yours. i don’t want her mixing with you in case she picks up any of your bad habits.’ aaah, i thought. he’s heard about my truancy. ‘what about after leaving?’ i asked meekly. i sensed there was more to this than just that. ‘no. i don’t think so. really, it’d be better if you broke off your friendship entirely. you do understand, don’t you’, he said in an incredibly chrming way. ‘oh, i understand’, i replied. i was amazed that he could have such a charming manner and yet be such a dag. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 ‘good girl, i knew you would’. he was relieved. ‘oh, by the way. i can count on you not to say anything to mary, can’t i? you’ll find a way of breaking things off between you, won’t you?’ i nodded my head, and he walked off. i was hurt and disappointed. he was a deacon, i’d looked up to him. i was lucky i had my pride, it came to my rescue yet again. i didn’t need people like him, i decided. 102-103 this passage is an example of the existential gap opened up by western metaphysics, or worldview philosophy, in primitive and aboriginal cultures in general. the deacon and sally do not talk from person to person. there is a loss which has nothing to do with science, but with cultural prejudices. conclusion we started this paper recalling how husserl conceives of his transcendental phenomenology as a means to heal europe of the objectivation of all areas of life that the natural sciences were carrying out and to free humanity from oppression and prejudice. europe and the natural sciences are not scientific enough, they are not aware that all human achievements are the result of a spiritual performance that gives them validity and legitimacy. then, we used husserl’s idea of reason in the phenomenological sense to describe sally’s self-reflective attitude against the racism and oppression that her own people and culture suffered after colonialism. both the natural sciences and worldview philosophies are dependand, in this way, from an unbiased, rational and unprejudiced phenomenological method that would materialize the genuine idea of europe and which universality would be extended in benefit of all peoples and cultures. the question is whether husserl can in fact distinguish worldview philosophy and science, and then continue to make this distinction dependant upon a reflective attitude which he founds upon life-world phenomenology. does an anthropological philosophy sustain husserl’s entire enterprise, as the kaizo texts suggest? if so, then science and worldview philosophy should be checked by life-world phenomenology, in which way life-world phenomenology would have no positive content in itself. then, all the a priori analyses of essence would be aimed at checking the foundational basis of the natural sciences and worldview philosophies respectively, so that essence would have to be understood differently if we are analysing the concept of life in biology or as a cultural value. but this purely methodological approach to phenomenology gives up an analysis of the a priori forms of consciousness in the form of empathy or measure in space-time or else as a basis to the rational investigation of the spirit. shall we give up this form of rational investigation? there is also a terminological problem: can a purely methodological phenomenology still be called a phenomenology? a life-world phenomenology? that would give rise to an anthropological phenomenology that is purely methodological, which is contradictory. this last move reminds us of heidegger’s existential philosophy. but to continue in that direction would take us too far from the husserlian questions on culture. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 references morgan, sally. my place. london: virago, 1988. husserl, edmund. fenomenologia. francesc perenya (trans, ed). barcelona: edicions 62, 1999. acknowledgments: i would like to thank sue ballyn for putting me in touch with australia and for her continuous support. i would also like to thank francesc perenya for teaching me husserl. what i say in this article about phenomenology is related to a course francesc gave in the autum semester of 2007 at the university of barcelona. carles conrad serra pagès was born in 1976, in figueres (catalonia, spain). after getting his degree in english literature and language, he lived one year in london and three years in the united states, where he met derrida at university of california, irvine. after that, he decided to go back to spain and commence a phd in humanities at the universitat pompeu fabra, while he also enrolled in the bachelor degree of philosophy at the universitat de barcelona. in 2005, the universitat de barcelona offered him a grant to study at latrobe university for one semester. in june 2007 he defended his minor thesis “the concept of transcendental space in the work of derrida”. currently, he is a collaborator and a member of the societat catalana de fenomenologia (institut d’estudis catalans), under the direction of francesc pereña, and he is working on his thesis “the notion of ‘sign’ in derrida’s work” under the supervision of eugenio trías at universitat pompeu fabra. he holds a part-time position as english teacher for the english department at the universitat de barcelona and a full-time post as english teacher for the city council of barcelona microsoft word coolabah 1 calderon.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.39-47 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona australian expatriates: who are they? david calderón prada australia is made up of 20 million people and, interestingly enough, over one million of the total population live overseas. australians living abroad are known as `expatriates´ and they have a particular profile: highly educated and better skilled than their counterparts at home. thus, on the one hand, a general division may be established between expatriates and australians living at home; on the other, a particular division between expatriates themselves, which depends on the individual reasons that push them to leave australia. at this point, it is important to outline the general reasons that lead expatriates to go overseas. to begin with, in terms of migration, australia is both historically and contemporarily linked to other countries. secondly, australia is geographically isolated and, therefore, far away from the main global markets. finally, it is quite right to conclude that although the logical assumption of expatriation is distance, expatriates are mentally, and often emotionally, linked to australia and, therefore, the understanding of their situation is more positive than negative. keywords: expatriation, distance, history, culture, repatriation, collective consciousness. australia is well-known as a country made up of immigrants. indeed, more and more new migrants arrive at those shores. however, a paradoxical and parallel phenomenon is taking place: while the immigrant population grows, a large number of australian citizens are leaving the country. those emigrants are called `expatriates´. the reasons that push them to leave their country of birth to do so are specific: “[e]xpatriates choose to live in another country mostly for personal reasons, often for more or less defined periods of time” (kokanovic, 2006: 353). within australia, expatriates represent the two sides of the same coin: they can be defined both in positive and negative terms. certainly, expatriates are subjects of controversy in their homeland but they are also unknown people for most of the australians living in the country. thus, copyright ©2007 david calderón prada . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 40 the aim of this paper is to provide a sociological description of the so-called expatriates. in order to do so, the essay will be divided into three main parts. the first part will be a general study of some statistics, such as the number of expatriates and the places where they go, which will lead us to state where divisions take place. secondly, and taking the statistics as a reference, the essay will provide the different reasons that explain why expatriates leave australia and go to specific places. in this light, the paper will argue that there is a strong relationship between the places expatriates choose to go and the cultural background of australia and it will emphasise, on the one hand, the historical facts that inexorably link australia to europe and, on the other; the geographical and the economic reasons. thirdly, this paper will examine the australianness of australians. over one million australians live overseas, that is, almost 5% of a total population of 20 million inhabitants (acci, 2004:1). consequently, it is quite right to talk about two kinds of australians: those living inside the country and those living overseas. the dichotomy between one and the other is evident. indeed, “[t]he categories of class, race, and gender have been used as the primary indicators of social division” (papastergiadis, 2006: 336) and, in general, expatriates have a particular profile that differentiates them from the rest of australians. in this way, education becomes a key factor. as a matter of fact, the vast majority of expatriates tend to be highly educated and better skilled than their counterparts at home. evidence of this is found in the data provided by a study of australian emigration: while 42% of the australian emigrants have a post-graduate degree, only 7% of the residents in australia have one (acci, 2004: 1). another evident and powerful factor that divides australians living in the country and expatriates is distance, which can be either physical or mental. the former means the actual distance, the geographical distance that separates the physical body from the place of birth, in this case australia, and their 41 people. the latter is more complex: it is the feeling of not belonging to the place in which one lives and, therefore, it may lead to alienation. in both cases, the offshoot is their own perception as outsiders (hage, 2006: 342-345). however, the division may not only be traced between those australians in australia and those overseas, but also between expatriates themselves. in this particular case, the difference depends basically on the place they choose to live. therefore, at this stage, it is important to work out the destinations of choice for expatriates, which are: the united kingdom (21%); new zealand (17%); the united states (16%); and hong kong and singapore (around 6%) (acci, 2004: 1). demographically speaking, statistics show that there is a link between the country of destination and sex and age. indeed, more females move to the uk, and more males to the us. thus, those australians going to the us tend to be older than those going to the uk: the movement to the us is dominated by young adults, but not to the same extent as the movement to the uk where two-thirds of the migrants are aged between 20 and 29 years compared to less than a third of those going to the usa (hugo, 2006: 359). at this point, the question that arises from all the data provided above is why do australians decide to leave their own country? the reasons why they decide to leave and become expatriates are various and can be explained at different levels. culturally, it is factual to state that australia has an affinity with countries such as the uk and the us. the relationship with the former is quite clear: australia is a very british country and there are “dense networks of close attachment and inter-familial connections between the imperial `core´ (britain) and an australia that, certainly in the 1940s, could still be characterised as an example of a `colonial fragment´ society” (goldlust, 2006: 350). today, the uk is the favourite place to move for australian expatriates, as graeme hugo points out: “estimates of the number of australians in the uk are as high as 300,000 and partly reflect strong 42 links forged during colonial times” (hugo, 2006: 359). besides, history connects australia to the motherland and, indeed, australia´s cultural roots are to be found in england: from 1788 until the beginning of world war i in 1914, australia attracted around 2 million settlers from the united kingdom. if you include those who were transported as convicts, most came from england but there were substantial minorities from scotland and ireland (goldlust, 2006: 349). the latter suggests that many of those expatriates are the grandchildren of those english immigrants. thus, from this data it may be asserted that there is a process of “repatriation” through which australians go back to their “home” country or rather to their roots. the australian writer tara brabazon explains, theoretically, “britain is not our home. we can not return there as citizens. we are foreigners to the country represented in our national flag” (brabazon, 2006: 147). however and ironically enough, even today, as brabazon points out, britain is too present in australia´s daily life: “our coinage still has the queen´s profile on one side. the australian flag displays the union jack in the corner” (brabazon, 2006: 146). thus, britain becomes a myth, a mirror in which australia can look at itself. in other words, metaphorically speaking, those australian expatriates in england are meeting the country which “invented” them as a way to see themselves. indeed, in most cases human beings need to know the place where their roots come from in order to trace their identity. apart from the above-mentioned reasons, australia, the uk and the us share a language: english. this represents a powerful tool that not only facilitates their communicative relationships, but also encourages australians to move to other english speaking countries. the impact of media may also explain and reinforce the cultural connections between the uk, the us and australia. popular series and shows arrive from both sides of the atlantic, the uk and the us, and trans-pacifically from the us to australia. this media 43 impact can be seen as an over-simplification, but on closer examination, evidence suggests that these programs create models and some australians project their dreams on the places where those shows are set. in this way, the us becomes, after the uk, one of the most popular destinations for australian expatriates. on the other hand, the identification of australia with the us may be found in historical facts: australia was an ally against japan in world war two, and the us was seen from then on as: “a powerful protector” (kirkby, 2006: 181). however, the phenomenon of expatriation is today much more complex and can be studied as the consequence of the status of australia as a country made up of immigrants. indeed, there is a logical relationship between immigration and expatriation: expatriates to europe and south-east asia may be the children of immigrants, now australian citizens, but whose roots lay in their parents´ countries. alternatively, the countries and continents outlined above offer the possibility to move around with more or less difficulty but, certainly, in an easier way than in australia. in europe, for instance, distances are not as big as in australia, and from london it is easy and cheap to fly around the european continent. as hugo explains: “[a] large number of young australians who are on working holidays use the uk as a base for travelling in europe” (hugo, 2006: 359). in geographical terms, australia is separated from the rest of the world, and especially, from its mother continent: europe. as a consequence, australia presents a contradiction: physically the country is close to asia and, therefore, may be seen as an eastern country but, psychologically, the general conception is that australia belongs culturally to europe and, as such, it is classified as a western country. the isolation in which australia is geographically located embraces significantly the economic arena. indeed, australia is far away from the main global marketplaces. in this way, economic reasons may be the most powerful forces that push those australians to leave the country. many expatriates look for new opportunities in bigger and leading 44 markets. in addition, the new technologies such as internet play an important role. in spite of australia´s physical isolation, the country is, technologically speaking, one of the most advanced in the world. as a result, some australians may have moved to another country because they have met their partner via the internet. however, whether they leave because of cultural, historical, geographical or economic reasons, they are known and unified as one within australia: expatriates. the understanding of their situation within australia is quite positive and can be illustrated through durkheim´s social theory: the collective consciousness. the collective consciousness claims that “[w]ithout social obligations backed by moral force, the cooperation and reciprocity which social life requires would be absent” (haralambos, heald & holborn, 2000: 635). at first glance, expatriates may be negatively depicted, since they leave the country. besides, many are young, well educated and highly skilled and, consequently, many fear that australia is experiencing a “brain drain” of its best workers that can negatively affect both the economy and society. however, many others see “brain drain” expatriates positively because they are part of the collective consciousness. indeed, the vast majority are strongly linked to australia and consider the country as their homeland. in this light, it is quite right to assert that expatriates contribute to the australian nation and society in general and, therefore, they must be included as part of the national definition. in fact, australia is disadvantaged by its geographic remoteness and small population and expatriates become ambassadors (legal and constitutional references committee, 2005: 121). expatriates are engaged with australia because they have a self-understanding that relates them to their homeland: “[t]he collective conscience constrains individuals to act in terms of requirements of society” (haralambos, heald & holborn, 2000: 635). and though physically absent, expatriates promote australia overseas at all levels: socially, economically and culturally. furthermore, when they return, “[t]hey have extended their 45 knowledge and experience while overseas and return with a network of overseas contacts that can benefit their work at home” (hugo, 2006: 360). thus, expatriates assume an important role in australia. they can be differentiated from the rest of australians in various aspects. to begin with, their profile is quite clear: well-educated and highly skilled people. indeed, it is precisely their “high” status that makes australian expatriation relevant and controversial: would it bother anyone if the emigrants were unskilled australian citizens? the answer is quite clear: no, in capital letters. consequently, it can be stated that there is an advantage for well-educated people since they can decide whether to stay at home or go overseas. if they choose the second option, that is, going overseas, the question that arises is why being skilled do they leave the “lucky country”? there is a wide range of answers to such a question. roughly speaking, it may be due to cultural, geographical or economic reasons, however all of them interact. in the same way, expatriates are supposed to interact with australia as they are part of the collective consciousness and contribute to the welfare of the australian society. yet, is it factual that they can positively contribute to australia from afar, or is it an illusion and an idealisation? the answer is a question mark. 46 47 references australian chamber of commerce and industry. “why do one million australians live overseas?” number 118, december 2004. <http://www.acci.asn.au/text_files/review/r118.pdf> australia. parliament. senate. legal and constitutional references committee. “promoting australia´s interest through its expatriates”. they still call australia home: inquiry into australian expatriates, legal and constitutional references committee, canberra: commonwealth of australia, 2005. 121-133. brabazon, t. “britain”. beilharz, p. and t. hogan (eds.), sociology: place, time & division. melbourne: oup, 2006. 146-150. goldlust, j. “immigration”. beilharz, p. and t. hogan (eds.), sociology: place, time & division, melbourne: oup, 2006. 348-353. hage, g. “insiders and outsiders”. beilharz, p. and t. hogan (eds.), sociology: place, time & division. melbourne: oup, 2006. 342-345. haralambos, m., r. heald and m. holborn. sociology. themes and perspectives. frenchs forest: pearson longman, 2000. 635. hugo, g. “expatriates”. beilharz, p. and t. hogan (eds.), sociology: place, time & division, melbourne: oup, 2006. 180-186. papastergiadis, n. “division”. beilharz, p. and t. hogan (eds.), sociology: place, time & division, melbourne: oup, 2006. 336-342. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 foreword: veronica brady, academic voices and pending hugs aurora garcía-fernández university of oviedo aurora@uniovi.es socorro suárez-lafuente university of oviedo lafuente@uniovi.es copyright©2017 aurora garcía-fernández & socorro suárez-lafuente. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. we could hardly guess its consequence at the time, but back in november 1988, as white australia celebrated the bicentenary of settlement and indigenous australians mourned two centuries of dispossession and annihilation, the cultural distance between western australia and northern spain began to shrink. not that flight connections were miraculously improved, or that our old but modest university had struck a magical jack pot of funding to spot us on the map of the already expanding academic networks. no such luck, as so many other exploits of development in this country, the reason was serendipitous and quixotic or, to update it to more fashionable jargon, the feat was made possible by a small group of strong-willed academic entrepreneurs who schemed their best to bring oz to asturias. history may have slipped on it, but on november 13th, accompanied by two spirited interlopers from the university of barcelona, doireann macdermott and susan ballyn, the first two academic envoys from australia alighted from the barcelona express; their names bruce bennett and veronica brady. truth to tell we had also had our cook of sorts, for a few years back colin roderick had paid a short visit; he had abstained from ruthlessly renaming any faculty office to suit his mood or exploratory tribulations, nor had he planted his flag in the north wing of the old conventturned-to-faculty building, but our late head of department, prof. patricia shaw, distinctively remembered his “extravagant” hat, and he did leave us a copy of his henry lawson criticism, 1894-1971 (1972), probably the first australian critical work to make its way into our library funds. that first 1988 visit was not long, but in the span of a couple of days guest and local academics formally launched australian studies at oviedo university in our first seminar on australian literature and culture. we had thus become the discipline’s second outpost across the country after the university of barcelona. in the sessions students and young postgraduates learnt both about the great south land and multicultural australia, about settlers and indigenous people, about formidable and desperate men and women, about history and autobiography. and yes, there were some gorgeous pictures of exotic fauna too, and we also heard of gum trees, which honouring their colonial nickname were then wreaking havoc in the landscapes of northern spain —a lesson in ecological colonisation in reverse at a time when postcolonial eco-criticism was yet to be formally introduced. mailto:aurora@uniovi.es mailto:lafuente@uniovi.es coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 eucalyptus plantations have been on the retreat here ever since, not so with australian studies, which grew strong and healthy under the shade of the expansion of postcolonial studies for more than two decades, not only as a research, but also as a teaching subject, with a specific undergraduate module on offer for thirteen years and several post-graduate courses. those were the days of the precious and fruitful interval before the brainiacs of global capitalism took again issue with the humanities and made sure little or no public money —i.e. hardly any money at all— was spent in non-technological or businessoriented disciplines, that is to say before they saw to it that universities across the world were inexorably turned into consumer-targeted competitive “business mongrels”. this label has stuck to my mind since veronica brady used it in a long and rather meandering conversation we had the last time we met in her perth home in 2010; her health visibly deteriorated, her rebellious and outspoken spirit intact. during that interval, veronica brady visited spain many times, occasionally for severalweeks stays. not only barcelona and oviedo, but also galicia, león and the balearic islands, where she taught on australian literature and deciphered her country’s myths and reality to us, antipodean spaniards. in her lectures and generous tête-à-têtes with academics, young researchers and students there was no misunderstanding she loved her country dearly —“i enjoy travelling, but when the plane descends on my tiny, dear perth i can’t help the glee to be back home”— yet critically. much as she often got run away with her enthusiasm for australian literature, she rarely spared a hefty dose of open criticism at the country’s materialism or failed to acknowledge and denounce its most deadly sin: the atrocities committed against indigenous australians and their culture. introducing us to judith wright’s poetry she would tell us of australia’s “mortal wound” and of the unrelenting psychological anxiety that “oozes” from that wound and “bedevils relations between aboriginal and non-aboriginal australia” (brady 1998: 115). she generously shared her vast knowledge of australian literature and entertained us with her stories —the odd song included. she transmitted her knowledge with passion and encouraged us to read, from convict to modernist novels, from barbara baynton to brian castro, from patrick white to oodgeroo noonuccal. interspersed with thought-provoking background information and challenging critical references, she would offer vital clues to interpret and appreciate australian literature and give a hint, or a dozen, about what book or author to read next. her views on the indissoluble bond between ethics and aesthetics, between politics and poetry forever underlying those recommendations: “language is a primary cultural and therefore historical fact” (1998: 116). she often explained this with regard to aboriginal writers, poets in particular, warning us against the temptation to approach their work as an exotic and fashionable topic, but encouraging us to read them and discover their impressive achievements against the gigantic windmills of colonial and post-colonial australia —her fondness for don quixote was not a secret either. those lectures, lessons and conversations not only brought australia and australian literature closer to spain, they also brought veronica brady closer and closer to our minds and our hearts. the initiative to dedicate a special number of coolabah to her figure, promoted by sue ballyn and the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona, aims to honour her memory and the stamp she left in our field of studies, but even more so it is intended as a polyphonic expression of remembrance and gratitude to the friend and the mentor, the colleague and the teacher —or rather la maestra, for spanish is much more expressive here, and she would understand that. as guest editors we have been coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 honoured with the task of inviting contributions and engaging veronica’s friends from both hemispheres into a written conversation either about veronica, her work or on topics they would have enjoyed discussing with her. eventually, tight academic schedules or personal circumstances have deprived us of some dearly longed-for and meaningful voices, but paraphrasing shirley walker’s comment on judith wright’s at cooloola, they nonetheless sing in our minds much as we are sure veronica’s memory sings and will remain in theirs. unlike more rigid academic journals, coolabah has allowed us beyond the constraints of the conventional essay volume to include also memoir pieces. veronica being veronica, we have thought she would have liked to hear/read them for starters and as a final note to keep reverberating in our minds. in fact, sue ballyn’s sparkling recollections of her encounters and adventures with veronica in australia and in europe close with a brisk non-hug at budapest airport. as we first read susan’s account of the incident we realised that missing hug was just one among many other pending hugs, trips and drinks with veronica, so we suggest you read this special number and the papers it includes as a collective thank-you rather than goodbye hug to her. hurry o no hurry veronica was not fond of saying goodbye, in spain she learnt soon to say hasta la vista and she would rather leave with a see-you-my-friend even when she had just met somebody. for someone who knew the past so well, she always seemed to be looking beyond farewells into the next conversation, looking forward to the next hello hug. in this her concept of time, or rather, of our “being in time” matched her views on the proper way of “being on the earth”, as she explained at the eaclals conference in oviedo, quoting from julia velanquez: “the whole earth is a single cell and we are all simply symbiotic particles, related to one another. there can be no ‘us and ‘them’, we are all part of the whole […] truly a bios as well as a logos” (1999: 115). no time for farewells then: too much reading and writing to do, too many wrongs to expose and denounce, lots of people to meet, lots of thinking to do, lots of ideas to ponder over and share, a vast world to contemplate and “dwell in”, the whole “art of living” to refine. that art integrates poetry and politics, the combination of which is indispensable to regenerate our existence and our relation with the world. this was one of the pillars of veronica brady’s thought, as reflected in her own life and in her critical appreciation of literature. her views on life and literature are perceptively analysed in this volume by gail jones, whose intellect and literary work veronica valued and praised repeatedly. eliciting a set of crucial questions from a painting by fra angelico, she confronts the loss of significance, the impression of emptiness and absence that follow death: is there any sign to “offer consolation”, any clue to “secure significance”, she prompts. is there any sense to be made out of “peering down” into the “vastly deep well” of absence? according to jones’ reading of brady’s work, the answer is to be found in “the trace, a notion she loved” —not that, as jones reminds us, veronica was any fonder of answers, “the idol of the answer”, than she was of farewells. and veronica’s trace was made manifest in her personal trajectory, her political persona and, indefectibly, in her critical work, which jones examines with rigour and emotion. on reading her bio-essay in the light of current politics and fascistic revivalism across the world, one cannot help missing veronica’s sharp analysis or instinctively summoning up her memory when you hear pope francis disown religious hypocrites, “the pseudo-religious”, or the threatening omnipresent drumming of racist and materialistic discourse. that is part of veronica’s trace, and so is her example of vital energy and indefatigable struggle for social justice, of humility and coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 “discomfortable” faith. against the darkening clouds of today veronica would be —her trace is— at the forefront of resistance and leading the march of environmentalism, for there is no denying that, as judith wright said of australia in 1970, we are both “conquerors and self-prisoners” of a world we are scarring to (self)destruction: “[we are] dying of the venoms that we make / even while you die of us” (cited brady 1999, p. 114). the choice is there to die the “holy white” death that gail jones claims for veronica in the moving final section of her article or to stick to “the destructive powers of technology” and the venomous forces of patriarchal culture (brady 1999: p. 117). the three personal pieces that open and close this volume which, paraphrasing gail jones, rehearse veronica’s memory are complemented with six academic contributions from scholars who knew and appreciated her dearly. as editors we considered the possibility of offering a list of suggested topics, but then decided that would go against veronica’s larrikin vein, not to mention her boundless range of interests, so we eventually opted for leaving authors complete freedom in their choice of topic. harvest time left us with a miscellaneous collection that we have listed in alphabetical order. it includes essays on an australian classic such as christina stead, who veronica studied in her time and whose relevance for the present context anne holden ronning feels the need to vindicate and on whom she focuses “a transcultural lens”, but also on new south-asian voices, such as suneeta peres da costa and michelle de kretser, who alejandra moreno álvarez studies in her paper on planetary conviviality. maría jesús lorenzo modia from the universidade da corunna writes on the transnational narratives between galicia and australia that date back to the 16th century and have continued up to the present in the work of several galician and australian authors, such as contemporary galician-australian writer félix calvino. m.s. suárez lafuente and paloma fresno calleja venture across the tasman sea to analyse eleanor catton’s booker-winning novel the luminaries and alison wong’s as the earth turns silver. despite the novels’ overseas setting, both articles have been written with veronica in mind, for while the former analyses a settler epic through the critical lens of paul carter’s the road to botany bay, the latter chooses a contemporary writer of chinese descent in recognition of her well-known attraction to china and chinese culture. last in this section, but first in order of appearance, is a dialogical essay by simone lazaroo and isabel carrera in which writer and critic analyse not only different ways of researching and recreating cities, but also different ways of being and living in the city. moreover they propose a whole new ethics for post-global-financial-crisis cities that can no longer cater exclusively to the demands of cars, business and tourists, but need to acknowledge the presence of beggars, street-dwellers or refugees. the “larrikin angel” would have sympathised with that! “those who knew veronica hear her voice in her prose”, says gail jones in her essay. while preparing and editing this volume we have received emails from quite a few people expressing their respect for her and reporting on anecdotes they had shared with her; veronica’s voice was distinctively there too. as it was in our own recollections of her visits, which prolonged more than an editing meeting or two. to quote from jones again, they are all but “exchanges of sorts”, “modest retrievals” which befit the “condition of bereavement”. much as we agree that words cannot bring the lost ones back, it is comforting to think that their trace remains with us, even if only in the darkness of the night. it is the anecdote of waking to veronica’s voice at midnight that triggers the final appraisal piece which we propose as the coda for the volume. in this short, but exquisite piece, shirley walker —another very special friend and mentor; another prominent coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 critical and narrative voice from australia— evokes both veronica and judith wright, in her view “a perfect much”. herself a specialist in wright’s work, walker threads a brief but perceptive analysis of south of my days, veronica brady’s biography of the poet, with her reading of “at cooloola”, which she claims as one of her favourite wright poems and talks about white australia’s guilt and estrangement from the land. but that estrangement can be lessened by conceding the sin and making reparations, i.e. “by love”, which poet and biographer felt deeply. so that in shirley walker’s view their passionate and penetrating voices will not be silenced or forgotten, for their echo has been duly absorbed into the australian night —with the great owl’s, the possum’s, the tribal snake’s and the indigenous women’s— and from there they sing to us, to remind us of their vision for their country, and for the human-kind at large. their combined, nurturing voices will keep giving meaning to the night and “flowing through us” (brady 1991, p. 115). works cited: brady, veronica 1998. ‘“the dark side of the moon”: aboriginal poetry’, kunapipi, vol. xx, no. 3, pp. 115-127. --1999. ‘from the world without to the world within: the politics of the personal. judith wright’s translations’, in translating cultures, carrera-suárez, i., garcíafernández, a. and s. suárez-lafuente, eds. oviedo and hebden bridge: krkdangaroo press, pp. 113-120. bio note: aurora garcía fernández is senior lecturer at the university of oviedo, spain, where she was responsible for the module of australian and new zealand literature while it was on offer. she now teaches postcolonial studies and cultures of the anglophone world. her interests lie mainly in postcolonial and global studies and the role literature plays in them, as well as in curriculum design and methodology. she has co-edited translating cultures (1999) and two festschrift volumes and is the author of la revisión postcolonial de la historia de australia en la obra de patrick white y peter carey (2001). she has also translated into spanish shirley walker’s story “the cedar room”, which she edited for publication with an introduction. m. s. suárez lafuente is professor of english literature and literatures in english at the university of oviedo, spain. her interests lie in the field of contemporary literature, feminism, critical theory and the development of the faust theme. she has published extensively on those fields, has been co-editor of several volumes and is the author of a collection of literary essays, and she has been presented recently with a volume of essays: a rich field full of pleasant surprises: essays on contemporary literature in honour of professor suárez lafuente. she has been president of the spanish association of women´s studies and president of the spanish association of anglo-american studies. she is now the spanish representative in the spanish society for the study of english and is fellow of the english association. microsoft word juliette mallari 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 227 king sinukwan mythology and the kapampangan psyche julieta c. mallari, ph.d. abstract: this paper focuses on the metaphorical categories of the sinukwan legends that could account for the ethnocentric qualities of the kapampangans (people of pampanga, a province in the northern part of the philippines) and their behavioral patterns as a distinct race. according to oral accounts, sinukwan, supposedly the first inhabitant in pampanga, was a noble, gigantic being whose countenance reflected beautiful traits such as royalty, wisdom, faithfulness, ability and love. sinukwan is a product of the kapampangans’ primordial culture but, in many respects, he serves as a central image in the maintenance of their internal racial affinity as well as in the interaction of their past and present. on one hand, he may be perceived as an instrument of sentimental evocation. but on the other, sinukwan is an indispensable force in asserting and reasserting the kapampangan identity. the kapampangans still believe that their historical beginnings were woven into and their society constructed within the realm of a powerful cultural symbol. in the development of kapampangan civilization, sinukwan has become an established archetype in kapampangan arts and literature, a rallying point in the socio-political transformation of the kapampangan community, and the paradigmatic model that is constantly invoked in the unfolding events of kapampangan history. to be mentioned in particular is an aspect of a sinukwan legend that provides a colorful explanation of one of the worst calamities that struck pampanga: the eruption of mt. pinatubo. the story is, in a sense, an imaginative articulation of a historical phenomenon that pierced through the very heart of kapampangan civilization and altered the course of its development. keywords: sinukwan, kapampangan psyche, kapampangan history ...out of the whole symbol-building achievement of the past, what survives … is the tale of wonder. the tale survives … not simply as a quaint relic of days childlike in belief. its world of magic is symptomatic of fevers deeply burning in the psyche: permanent presences, desires, fears, ideals, potentialities that have glowed in the nerves, hummed in the blood, baffled the senses since the beginning. flight of the wild gander joseph campbell copyright ©2009 julieta c. mallari. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 228 king sinukwan: the essence of kapampangan culture and identity each culture springs “with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle...” (spengler 1932:21) like a tree planted in that soil, a culture grows and blossoms, having its own life, people, language, myths, passions and images. pampanga, a province in the northern philippines, had immense physical geography in its pre-colonial history and, even during the coming of the spaniards, it nurtured its selfcontained culture and civilization. the kapampangan ancestors established their roots quite extensively, reaching the end of a main river system flowing into three channels: rio grande, chico river and agno river. towering over the expansive landscape of pampanga, like a quiet but an imposing guard of its wealthy physical domain, is mt. arayat. this mountain, believed to be the legendary king sinukwan’s abode is the primary source of inspiration among the kapampangans. for the kapampangans, sinukwan of mt. arayat is the essence of their culture and identity: the powerful force lurking in their collective unconscious, the creative spirit hovering over their civilization, the inspiring “muse” impregnating their artistic imagination. sinukwan legends for some reasons, the traditions of explaining and understanding the ethnocentric qualities of the kapampangans and their behavioral patterns as a distinct race, including their propensities for certain endeavors, go back to the metaphorical categories of the sinukwan legends. suku (an older version of the name sinukwan) was supposedly the first inhabitant in pampanga. according to oral accounts, he was a noble, gigantic being whose countenance reflected beautiful traits such as royalty, wisdom, faithfulness, ability and love. he ruled over other creatures that, in a later period, began to populate the region. first were the black aytas (pygmies), then the straight-haired brown people. he became a model to all of them, even to the succeeding generations of his daughters who married mortal men. he was also noted for the splendid banquets he had in his palace – serving the most delicious dishes and using the finest dining sets. an important part of the legend refers to the origin of the name sinukwan. to begin with, suku’s subjects were as hard-working as he was, planting the sturdiest trees in their kingdom. but at one point in time, the taga-ilug, people living along the bank of ilug a maragul, cut down these big trees without suku’s permission, so they were chased by the kapampangans until they all reached suku’s kingdom. the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 229 kapampangans reported the misdeed to suku who immediately discerned the validity of his people’s contention. furious, the taga-ilug threatened to return together with their queen, makiling. and they did. countless people on speedy boats came back to attack later on. suku was alerted. soon, he brought with him two big rocks and he jumped into the river. his companions assisted him in filling up the river to reverse its flow. the enemies were helplessly driven back. makiling acknowledged their defeat and thought of surrendering to suku. thus, she changed the name suku to “sinukwan” which means “someone to whom others submit or surrender.” it should be noted that in the figure of sinukwan lies a mixture of imaginative and existential kapampangan conception of his own character. in the imaginative reflection of an apotheosized king, there evolves a distinctive mark of a superior being which he assumes as his own. the conventional qualities accorded sinukwan such as strength of character, bravery, love for beauty, etc. modulate into the human characteristics of the male kapampangan. there is a kind of identification between the mythical god and his ideal “descendant.” descriptions in terms of similes are not uncommon to emphasize the idealized attributes of sinukwan that cling to the romantic image of the male kapampangan. thus, the latter stands out wherever he is: attractive, dominant, strongwilled, artistic, refined with exquisite taste in food and in clothes. in the same manner, makiling, the love object of sinukwan who is herself a goddess, plays a significant role in the imagined world of the kapampangans. she is a paragon of beauty and strength as well as an embodiment of virtues. legendary accounts about the three children of sinukwan and makiling, who are all women, underscore the inherited traits associated with the goddess and, for that matter, the recognizably excellent qualities accorded to kapampangan women. malagu (“beautiful”), mahinhin (“modest”) and matimtiman (“charming”)—the names of the children—allegorically represent not only the inherent nature of makiling’s offspring but her own character as well. and, as hitherto understood, makiling’s womanhood is the central emblematic image that is to be projected by the ideal female kapampangan. a further expansion of the mythical conception of the origin of the race is the legendary account regarding the marriage of sinukwan’s daughters to mortal men whose names also suggest allegorical possibilities: masikan (“strong”) became malagu’s husband, matapang (“brave”) was mahinhin’s and masipag (“industrious”) was matimtiman’s. the natural consolidation of sinukwan’s traits and the corresponding qualities of his sons-in-law is reckoned as the final phase of the evolution of the kapampangan character. both male and female are supposed to exhibit the excellent and royal lineage of their legendary ancestors. sinukwan is a product of the kapampangans’ primordial culture but in many respects, he serves as a central image in the maintenance of their internal racial affinity as well as in the interaction of their past and present. on one hand, he may be perceived as an instrument of sentimental evocation. but on the other, sinukwan is an indispensable force in asserting and reasserting the kapampangan identity. the kapampangans still believe that their historical beginnings were woven and their society was constructed within the realm of a powerful cultural symbol. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 230 in the historical development of pampanga and its civilization, sinukwan has become an established archetype in kapampangan arts and literature, a rallying point in the socio-political transformation of the kapampangan community, and the paradigmatic model that is constantly invoked in the unfolding events of kapampangan history. another sinukwan legend provides a colorful explanation regarding one of the worst calamities that struck pampanga: the eruption of mt. pinatubo. the account is, in a sense, an imaginative articulation of a historical phenomenon that pierced through the very heart of kapampangan civilization and altered the course of its development. the story began with the locust infestation in the kingdom of makiling. malyari, the king of mt. pinatubo and makiling’s friend, tried to help by causing heavy rains to fall but the downpour was not enough. the remaining locusts were driven by strong winds to the mountain of sinukwan. to drive the insects away, sinukwan told one of his followers to blow them away towards the west (where the kingdom of malyari was). this led to a big fight between the two immortal kings–malyari and sinukwan. the former hurled a huge rock which hit and chipped off the peak of sinukwan’s mountain, forming a crater-shaped top. angered, sinukwan threw all the big rocks he could find without ceasing until malyari’s mountain was turned into very rugged mountain ranges. and the last object to be hurled by sinukwan was a huge grinder made of solid gold. the result was a most destructive eruption of malyari’s mountain: blinding lightning, deafening thunder, and terrifying fiery explosions dominated the entire atmosphere. what was even more horrifying was the echoing voice of derision and bitterness sounded by malyari and overheard by sinukwan. “from now on, my name is no longer malyari but punsalang -the chief of all your enemies”. the historical fact of the mt. pinatubo eruption remains a painful experience among the kapampangans but is continually being purged by the vestigial memory of the race. and the catharsis helps them transcend even the unbidden forces that may threaten their collective existence in their own province. like sinukwan, whose magnanimous reply to malyari’s anger was his determination to restore whatever got destroyed in his kingdom, they are, as it were, governed by the same principle of self-possession. the eruption of mt. pinatubo the ancestral origin of the aytas, the aborigines of certain portions of pampanga and neighboring provinces, may be traced to the foot of mt. pinatubo, which they believe to be the abode of their god, apo malyari. they have always feared this deity and paid him homage in the form of animal offerings embellished with ornate rituals. oral tradition underscores malyari’s intense character and his being pitted against sinukwan. the organic connection between these mythical figures and the mountains they inhabit is a pivotal factor in the weaving of legendary accounts. interestingly enough, mt. arayat and mt. pinatubo have been suddenly but mysteriously linked when the latter erupted—a historical event that made the stories come alive. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 231 the legendary fight between sinukwan and malyari reached its climax when the latter’s abode, mt. pinatubo, released its hellish fury, blowing turbulent fiery explosion. but this legendary episode surprisingly ceased to be simply confined within the primeval memory of the kapampangans. the marvelous tale became a reality. mt. pinatubo, hardly known as a volcano since it was inactive for five centuries, began stirring in april 1991. finally, on the 7 th of june, its phenomenal eruptions began—with its major blast happening on 15 th june. resembling a nuclear detonation, a giant mushroom of ashes and steam rose from the crater of the volcano, overspreading the entire atmosphere of central luzon. hours later, while a typhoon was entering the area, the volcano ejected blasts of incandescent rocks, sand, and ashes, turning day into night. what the aytas believed to be the wrath of their apo malyari was literally a curse visiting most specially the people of pampanga. buildings collapsed under the weight of a billion cubic meters of sand and ashes spewed by the volcano. rains combined with ash falls, turned the whole region 3 into an infernal maze where thousands of people, driven into fits of despair, either tried to escape in their vehicles or waded through knee-deep mud to reach safer grounds. this they did in pitch darkness while being jolted by recurrent earthquakes or shocked by the terrifying flashes of lightning. rivers swelled and the mudflows from the volcano destroyed flood control systems. the day after shutting off of the sun’s glowing presence (june 16), only ghost towns completely shrouded with tons of sand met the eyes of those who were unable to leave their places. major roads were blocked and a huge number of hectares of agricultural land were transformed into desert-like wastelands. rooftops were covered by thick layers of sand and ashes, and several buildings, including markets, schools and churches, caved in. water and electric supply systems, telecommunications, hospitals and other public facilities were rendered non-functional for weeks or even months. and later, because of monsoon rains, a worse aftermath of the eruptions was yet to come. lahar, a grayish mixture of sulfuric flakes, sand and even rocks, with consistency and properties similar to that of cement, came down from the slope of pinatubo rampaging like galloping horses whenever there was a typhoon. and the six-month long rainy season (june to november) sent these most destructive avalanches down to the different river channels. what used to be nature’s channels of blessing to the kapampangans became the natural pipelines for this steaming sulfuric mud which would soon erase major villages from the map. it was in those days of “the lahar season,” when thousands of people experienced the havoc of the deadly torrents, engulfing even the very ground their houses occupied. unable to escape the impending doom of the incinerating lahar, these victims had no choice but to seek higher elevation. the more fortunate ones found themselves on rooftops and stayed there either drinking rainwater to survive or, if the rain stopped suffering the scorching heat of the sun. their only hope was for rescue helicopters to spot them. as a consequence of the tempestuous eruptions, a massive population displacement as well as an irretrievable loss of cultural artifacts happened in the most notable places of coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 232 pampanga. bacolor, the “athens of pampanga” was tragically ravaged, with only few remaining villages; porac, famous for its class a sand, became desert-like; betis, known for its artisans, guagua, noted for its fishponds, and san fernando, the center of region 3 and capital town, would always be susceptible to flood waters; sta. rita, “the home of sweets and pastries,” was not spared by pinatubo’s awful fury. the eruption of mt. pinatubo, believed to be the “disaster of the century,” is a significant chapter in the history of pampanga and represents a compelling force —like the echoing voice of malyari who proclaimed himself an implacable enemy of sinukwan—that will have a prolonged impact and far-reaching effects. the tons of ash spewed by the volcano and the subsequent flow of steaming lahar may not only mean compounded misfortune but also indicate nature’s capacity to redirect what could have been considered a matter of course in kapampangan communities. the shifting geography of the province, the changing socio-demographic profile and the solving of the long-standing dilemma regarding the presence of clark air base (the biggest american base in the far east)—all these happened in so short a time because of what the aytas believe as their apo malyari’s wrath. by and large, it was a kind of subliminal victory for the indigenous aytas despite the fact that many of them suffered as well. they were also forced to leave the mountain, their habitat. as far as the contending forces of the two mythical gods are concerned, however, the power of malyari apparently brought the havoc that could not be thwarted by sinukuan. this gives an affirmative and empowering expression to those who have always been treated and considered “children of the lesser god”: the black, kinky haired, small people called aytas. at least, at one point in history, their god overpowered the mythical god of the lowlanders and straight-haired kapampangans. indomitable descendants of suku despite the still threatening shadow of mount pinatubo—the ten year lahar period, the unsafe atmosphere due to the ash falls plus all the other psychological pains that usually result from disconcerting memories -the kapampangan victims have remarkably exhibited the recuperative power of resiliency. and numerous possible reasons are suggested by such ability to transcend the disheartening reality. first, the kapampangans appear to be strongly attached to their province of birth. call this “clannishness” but they cannot help it: after all, their vast cultural heritage extends even beyond the dark smoke emitted by pinatubo. to move to another place might not only mean physical dislocation but cultural stripping as well. a naked race they become if uprooted from their native soil. in a very deep sense, they feel the tormenting effect of losing their ethnic identity. thus, the kapampangan victims’ decision to stay in pampanga, although in resettlement sites, reduces the “trauma” of carrying the burdensome yoke of alienation and rootlessness. second, the kapampangans are noted for their entrepreneurial spirit. their province has always been known as a leading growth center in region 3. this land of opportunities, therefore is difficult to abandon, more so by its own people who have cultivated it and coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 233 have been nourished by the fruit of their own labor, figuratively and otherwise. to the kapampangans, their pasture is never less green. oddly enough, in the face of pinatubo’s apocalyptic ire the kapampangans did not lose their composure. even in the most adverse circumstances, the inner impulsion of the kapampangans, as always, was to be firm and never to surrender. with the sinukwan strain prevailing upon them, they tenaciously clung to the supreme worth of their race. their remaining strength as a tribe was, once and for all, gathered to save their ancestral ground’s precious heritage. today, pampanga is back to its normal course. within the recesses of the kapampangans’ minds are painful memories of lost property and lives. ancestral homes and grounds were either buried or washed out by lahar but not erased from the memories of the people. at present each town has vivid and staggering stories to tell regarding such losses. what is significant, however, is the kapampangan way of stirring life and overcoming the menacing gloom of pinatubo eruption in less than a decade. the province is now as progressive as ever. in a sense, the wrath of malyari had its damaging consequences, but the restorative power of sinukuan proved to be stronger. conclusion the kapampangans cling to their primordial history, the childhood of their race, and their original traits. most of the time, they summon up remembrance of ancient accounts, whether in the spirit of nostalgia or in a deep conviction, to glimpse contemporary significance in the lingering sinukuan myth. deeply entwined in the realm of their collective consciousness is this mythical and racial association. historical events continually unfurl and lodge in their memory. as they go through their life’s episodes, they take refuge behind such saving power of their archaic base, possibly to overcome the temporal finiteness of their being, i.e., as individuals or as a tribe. despite the dynamic cultural changes and rapid emergence of scientific knowledge, therefore, the myth persists and resists even fatal forces that strike the race. it may also be pointed out that the presence of the past in the present provides transcendence (bloch 1977) is classically portrayed in the kapampangan survival mechanism during the mt. pinatubo eruption. the challenge of surmounting present events (e.g. the aforementioned eruption at that time), in which the past was represented in the myth of sinukuan, is likely to sustain the preservation of the race. references: bloch, m. "the past and the present in the present." journal of the royal anthropological institute, 12, 1977, pp. 278-292. spengler, o. the decline of the west. charles atkinson (trans). new york: a kroff, 1932. <www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/myth mineke defdefdef.pdf > julieta c. mallari is the present director of the university of the philippines extension program in pampanga. she holds a ph.d. in comparative literature. she is a literature coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 234 and an english professor at the university of the philippines. she is also a cultural worker in the province of pampanga. microsoft word requena 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 bringing out censored stories and reassessing the past in catharine maria sedgwick’s hope leslie teresa requena pelegrí abstract: catharine maria sedgwick’s texts and achievement have been long overshadowed by the undisputed recognition of some of her male contemporaries. james fenimore cooper, washington irving or william cullen bryant have received all the credit for having shaped -and for many, createdu.s. literature. however, sedgwick’s contribution to the development of a specific native tradition in american letters is undeniable. long before ralph waldo emerson’s call for a specifically national subject-matter, sedgwick was consciously giving her texts an american perspective by combining the techniques used in sentimental fiction with the historical romance. set in colonial times, hope leslie or early times in the massachusetts (1827) constitutes one of sedgwick’s poignant explorations of the puritan past of the country and its interrelation with issues of gender and race. by fusing puritan historical accounts with fiction, sedgwick’s technique succeeds in foregrounding the partiality of historical accounts in opposition to their supposedly objective exposition of facts and in this way the text manages to challenge puritan self-righteous historiography. moreover, the use of the puritan past as material for her fiction together with the inclusion of native american characters makes sedgwick an extremely interesting foil to other contemporaries such as nathaniel hawthorne or james fenimore cooper. this paper wishes to explore sedgwick’s version of the puritan presence in the american colonies and compare it with nathaniel hawthorne’s to demonstrate how the former made gender indistinguishable form the construction of a national narrative. the paper also tackles sedgwick’s sexual and racial politics in her treatment of fully developed native american characters thus constituting an enlightening counterpart to the stereotypical and reductive portrayal found in james fenimore cooper’s work. keywords: catharine maria sedgwick, hope leslie, historical romance, puritan historiography, colonial america, ambivalent feminism. catharine maria sedgwick was one of the most popular writers of the first half of the nineteenth century in the united states. praised by critics, writers and readers alike, sedgwick enjoyed widespread popularity, comparable to that of james fenimore cooper or washington irving. she wrote novels, novellas, and children’s stories. she copyright ©2009 teresa requena pelegrí. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 pursued her literary career at a time of major social and ideological redefinition in the united states. her texts, written between 1820s and 1860s engaged in a dialogue with the utter transformation of a republic that witnessed the advance of jacksonian politics; the triumph of market values; and an impending division that would culminate in 1861 with the outbreak of the civil war. in this context, sedgwick poignantly set out to reveal the fundamental ideological lapses and actual omission of disenfranchised groups from the revolutionary rhetoric while at the same time sedgwick paradoxically adopted its very same language. the topics she addressed in her fiction ranged from the attack of religious hypocrisy in, for instance, a new england tale (1822, which had a controversial reception precisely for that reason); the revision of the puritan past in hope leslie (1827); marriage and the possibility of remaining single in “married or single” to the appraisal of the american revolution in the linwoods: or, sixty years since (1835). sedgwick’s pioneering role in the creation of a national literature falls within the now recognized contribution of women writers to nineteenth-century us literature. specifically, in the work carried out by nina baym in the 1970s, a new england tale (1822) was singled out as the text that began a specific literary genre written by women which baym termed “woman’s fiction” and has been popularly known as sentimental fiction ever since then. sedgwick became the first of the “literary domestics” -a term used by mary kelley in private women, public stage: literary domesticity in nineteenth-century america to refer to a writer who successfully stepped into a public arena traditionally ruled by men-to make her appearance on the public sphere. she, like other writers of the time, saw how the changes in the publishing world -a developing national publishing industry, a nascent profession of authorship, an increasing reading audience-made it possible for any writer to reach a national audience. thus, like other women writers of the time such as maria mcintosh, susan warner or e.d.e.n. southwork, sedgwick would become a best-selling author and major money-makers although the money usually engrossed the publisher’s arcs rather than the writer’s (kelley 12). sedgwick’s new visibility has been granted on the grounds of her being a major contributor to the frontier romance and the historical novel. actually, the expansion of the canon of american literature to include forgotten writers has led to a revision of the american literary tradition. as critics such as carolyn karcher or judith fetterley have argued, sedgwick has to be seen as the founder of a home-grown novel of manners, a pioneer in the development of realism. sedgwick’s work has for some decades now elicited a wide array of critical reactions. i want to focus on her use of history and memory in one of her most popular narratives, hope leslie or early times in the massachusetts (1827), although it is common to other of her texts to hark back to historical episodes as a backdrop for her narrative. in the linwoods, for instance, sedgwick sets the time of the story in the american revolution, an extremely popular subject-matter in the first half of the 19 th century for a domestic literature that was searching for a parallel way to reinforce the political break with britain (kafarilis xvii). hope leslie (1827) constitutes one of sedgwick’s poignant explorations of the puritan past of the country and its interrelation with issues of gender and race. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 138 hope leslie is set in puritan america. it tells the story of the fletchers, a family of puritans in massachusetts in the 17 th century, who suffer the retaliation for the pequod war in their own flesh. the story revolves around three main characters: everell fletcher, a survivor of the attack of the pequods, hope leslie, his distant cousin and heroine, and magawiska, the pequod girl, the daughter of the pequod chief who, despite her origins, serves in the fletcher’s household and eventually develops a sincere love for the family. despite the various impediments, everell and hope eventually marry and magawiska chooses to return to her tribe. the story is a complex tangle of subplots and temporal references that include the colonial past of the nation, comments on sedgwick’s contemporary time, and even some comments about a future time. from the literary point of view, it is also a combination of genres: the historical romance --with references to actual puritans and other historical characters as well as puritan historical sources-; the sentimental tradition; the use of national myths such as the pocahontas story, with the addition of the severed arm in magawiska’s intervention to save everell from her own father; the captivity narrative in the story of hope leslie’s sister and her marriage to a native american-which is actually an incident which sedgwick seems to have drawn from a similar event in her family. in short, sedgwick is keen on mingling popular material drawn from some of the nations’ literary myths with high cultural forms such as puritan historiography at a time in which history-writing was becoming one of the most reputed forms of writing, hence sedgwick’s emphasis in the preface and in the text to distinguish her narration from “true history”. by fusing puritan historical accounts with fiction, sedgwick’s narrative technique succeeds in foregrounding the partiality of historical accounts in opposition to their supposedly objective exposition of facts and in this way the text manages to challenge puritan self-righteous historiography. in this sense, the text importantly participates in a revisionist trend that questions the puritan accounts of the pequot war, thus advancing the concern of revisionist historians in the late 20 th century, who have interrogated the reliability of puritan accounts on the motives, the reasons for the outbreak of the conflict, even whether this was a defensive war or an imperialistic one (gould 641). 1 early critics of sedgwick’s text such as michael d. bell discussed sedgwick’s work as either an accurate or unreliable account of the historical sources used in the text. thus, bell argued that sedgwick’s vision of history embodied a typically 19 th century attitude toward history in its belief in ‘progress’, that is the belief that history had been a movement towards the ‘natural’ outcome in which hope leslie and everell marry and magawiska returns to her tribe, order restored (214). bell continued to argue that such belief was paralleled by the also conventional narrative plot that featured an inevitable progress towards the eventual marriage of heroine and hero. thus tracing the accuracy or inaccuracy of sedgwick’s reference to history, bell concludes that hope leslie constitutes an exercise of identity formation for the nation in which hope embodies the qualities of naturalness as opposed to the artificial ways associated with england and 1 the pequot war initially entered history as an instance of mass murder of native americans, a genocide. reassessment has been pursued on the grounds that the puritans may have had an imperialistic interest behind the attack since the pequots did not mean an actual threat for the colonists. see gould for the controversy over the historical origins of the conflict. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 139 the puritans (219). if england’s sectarianism and paternal authority prevented the marriage of alice and william fletcher, hope and everell can overcome all difficulties to eventually marry. sedgwik’s hope leslie, however, is far from conventional although it certainly has typical conventional elements of the sentimental tradition such as the orphaned heroine who through her courage and moral virtue overcomes all obstacles to do what she feels is right. actually, sedgwick, like most of the early nineteenth century women writers, is caught in a political ambivalence that leads her to voice traditional views on questions such as history or gender roles while at the same time her plots are punctuated with transgressive incursions that challenge her own conventional assumptions. in the linwoods, for instance, sedgwick affirms that the novel is designated for young readers to “deepen their gratitude to their patriot-fathers; a sentiment that will tend to increase their fidelity to the free institutions transmitted to them” (sedgwick 5). thus, the linwoods “marked undercurrent of conciliation that leaves the reader with the sense that continued revolution and discord are to be put aside.” (kafarilis, xxix) as kafarilis further argues, the linwoods therefore performs the conservative work of containing revolt and revolution at a moment when the nation was facing precisely this possibility” (kafarilis, xxix). in this sense, sedgwick retorts to history as part of her utopian project of healing the nation. despite sedgwick’s incursions in the field of conventional politics, there is a clear dissident political stance as regards both historical authority and gender constructs in hope leslie. as regards history, the text offers a complex web of past references to the 17 th c pequod war; references to the text’s moment of production; the 19 th c, and even some comments of the narrating voice to the future of the country. it is however, sedgwick’s significant alteration of the authoritative voice for the account of the pequod war what has attracted the attention of criticism, especially new historicist readings. instead of reproducing the puritan version of the attack -an defensive attack launched by the puritans against the pequods in order to defend the puritan settlements in massachusetts --, sedgwick crucially situates the only account of the conflict in magawiska’s voice, and thus, it is the version of one of the “savages” --the voice supressed from official histories-the one that we hear. as it has been argued, sedgwick’s crucial retelling of the puritan attack from the perspective of a native american woman questions 17 th -century accounts of the conflict found in puritan sources -such as john winthrop’s the history of new england, which had just been reprinted at the time sedgwick wrote the novel (gould 641). by having magawiska speak in representation for the victims, sedgwick focuses on the cruelty and brutality of the puritan attack as well as the superior technology the english used in order to defeat the pequods. jeffrey insko has extended and complicated this argument by both questioning new historicist readings of the novel and arguing that the complex tangle of historical references found in the text are not flaws but rather very conscious narrative strategies that work towards a common interest: that of showing the ideological bias of all representation. by criticising the new historicist impulse “to keep each historical event (and text) assigned to its proper temporal slot in the past” (182) insko suggests that hope leslie asks for a reading that, like the text itself in its self-conscious use of anachronisms, transcends that assumption. thus, insko argues that new historicist coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 140 readings of hope leslie have rightfully placed the writing of the text in its context. he has, however, contended that such readings have tended to regard sedgwick’s use of history as a tangle of anachronisms. insko, however, far from deeming those apparently contradictory historical time-frames as a flaw in the novel, claims that it is precisely such inconsistencies what make hope leslie a metahistorical narrative that challenges the historicist will to encapsulate texts in a context (180) insko’s thesis reinforces hope leslie’s modernity, even posmodernity in its selfconscious use of history --and representation at large-as a construct and its contention that history is a scientific search for knowledge, but rather a matter of who has the power to tell the story. insko’s analysis highlights sedgwick’s reluctance to accept “history” as a matter of single truth, a notion found in the puritan conception of the world and by extension, in puritan historiography when they proclaimed the book the only source of authority. as insko has contended, hope leslie’s insight into the narrative character of history anticipates postmodern theories of history by more than a century and a half, emphasizing the mutability of historical truth, challenging the scientific objectivity claimed by twentieth-century historians, and affirming textualist versions of historical representation (183-84) certainly, the preface offers good proof of sedgwick’s self-conscious writing, in which she admits to having altered the chronology of events as told in traditional narratives of the pequod war and therefore, making a metahistorical reference (insko188) that foregrounds history and representation as constructs. and as insko suggests, the use of anachronism in hope leslie reinforces the text’s self-conscious historicity, thus engaging in the politics of representing history and representation at large (insko 187). certainly, sedgwick recurrently uses self-conscious narrative strategies in order to break the illusion of reality and thus foreground the hypocrisy of the puritan social world. in this sense, the narrative voice presents itself as a historian; the narration is interrupted by expressions that bring the reader back to either the time of production or to a future time (such as “this is no romantic fiction” (12), “in the quaint language of the time (9)) i certainly concur with insko’s analysis of sedgwick’s historical revisions through metanarrative and metahistorical strategies. insko, however, fails to significantly include in his analysis the parallel effects that such strategies have in the reassessment of gender constructs that sedgwick is also carrying out in hope leslie through her two heroines (hope and magawiska), and the comments of the narrative voice, mainly. it is because the reassessment of puritan historiography is carried out through the voices of two female characters that sedgwick’s project of reassessing historical representation cannot be severed from her parallel political statements as regards gender. if the project entails a radical dissidence from established notions of historical reception, sedgwick’s equally radical position in relation to gender evinces two relevant points. first, that women are also political subjects in the glorious past of nation-building and, therefore, clear political agents, active members in the construction of the nation. the combination of the historical past of the nation with comments about the present allows sedgwick to reflect upon the role of women both in the proto-nation as in the new republican period. thus, sedgwick’s plot reinforces the idea that women are effective coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 141 political agents and thus they become a reminder of women’s important and often unrecognized roles they played in the american past (kafaralis xxx). certainly, magawiska’s testimony contests the ethnocentric and patriarchal authority of puritan historians and thus foregrounds the “political aspect of all historical representation” as regards race and sex (dana d. nelson qtd. in gould 642). the second important assumption is that hope leslie demonstrates the utility of appropriating the revolutionary rhetoric of the founding fathers for political uses other than independence. as the women’s rights movement and other reform movements of the time contended, the revolutionary rhetoric of the not-so-distant revolution could be successfully re-appropriated to serve the interests of women and other groups. in this sense, the tyranny that the founding fathers fought is shown in the book to be the same yoke that women experienced under patriarchal regimes (both the puritans and the pequods). thus, the narrative voice criticises the puritan wives’ blind obedience their husbands: “mrs. fletcher received [her husband’s decision] as all wives of that age of undisputed masculine supremacy (or most of our less passive age) would do, with meek submission” (16). the reference to the time of the text’s production becomes thus a selfreflexive statement on the narration, which, in the same way continues to emphasize the tyranny under which women still live in the new republic. the text presents hope and magawiska as characters who, in different ways, transgress codes and behaviours: hope is a female huckeleberry finn who follows her own dictates at whatever cost. in the same way, magawiska disarms the puritans by pointing at the hypocrisy of a religion that teaches mercy, compassion, forgiveness but then justifies the onslaught of natives (51). the most significant element, however, in the narration is that both hope and magawiska are allowed to publicly speak in a trial. it is in this way that sedgwick gives hope and magawiska the chance to subvert the rigid gender codes that dominate their patriarchal universes. by allowing them to speak in their trial and thus publicly occupy a space that had been traditionally banned to women and female characters, hope and magawiska experience the same transition that was taking place for women writers in early nineteenth-century. sedgwick -like other women of the time -was for the first time able to leave aside the private voice to be heard publicly and therefore, their experience was antithetical to what had been woman’s historical experience (29). in the same way, female reformers reinterpreted the famous revolutionary slogan of “no taxation without representation” to claim that they could not be sentenced by a jury that did not recognise women as subjects. this is the very same claim that magakiska makes during her trial. the significance of such acts may seem dated to contemporary readerships today. nina baym in woman’s fiction noted, however, the significance of such characters in woman’s fictions, representations of gender behavior in woman’s fiction, no matter how retrograde they seem today, were challenging the male-defined status quo. then, as now, most male writers would rather write about vapid angels and malign temptresses than about what louisa may alcott called ‘good, useful women’; and they prefer to represent women as men’s auxiliaries rather than center them in worlds of their own (baym xi) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 142 indeed, the daring showed by hope and the significance of her voice is felt by the jury. when hope testifies to defend nelema, an old woman accused of witchery, judge pynchon affirms: “you are somewhat forward, maiden, in giving thy opinion; but thou must know, that we regard it but as the whistle of a bird; withdraw and leave judgement to thy elders” (109). sedgwick’ significance, despite her extremely ambivalent proto-feminist stance, comes to the forefront when she is compared to other writers of historical fiction of the time such as cooper. in opposition to other texts, sedgwick’s characters remain icons of empowerment for a female readership that was disenfranchised in the political and public arena while her achievement in terms of narrative form and questions of selfconscious representation have been only lately assessed. it is when we take into consideration narrative form and its relation to ideology that sedgwick’s talent can be fully appreciated and can still speak to contemporary debates about the representation of history and of the past. references baym, nina. woman’s fiction: a guide to novels by and about women in america 1820-70. urbana: university of illinois press, 1993. damon-bach, lucinda and victoria clements, (eds). catharine maria sedgwick: critical perspectives. boston: northeastern university press, 2003. gould, philip. “catharine sedgwick’s ‘recital’ of the pequot war”. american literature, 66: 4, dec 1994, pp.641-662. insko. “anachronistic imaginings: hope leslie’s challenge to historicism” american literary history, 2004, pp.179-207. karafilis, maria. “introduction” the linwoods. hanover: university press of new england, 2002, pp.xi-xxxv. karcher, carolyn l. “catharine maria sedgwick in literary history” catharine maria sedgwick: critical perspectives. lucinda damon-bach and victoria clements (eds). boston: northeastern university, 2003, pp.5-15. kelley, mary. “foreword” catharine maria sedgwick: critical perspectives. lucinda damon-bach and victoria clements (eds). boston: northeastern university press, 2003. pp.xi-xvii. kelley, mary. private women, public stage: literary domesticity in nineteenthcentury america. oxford: oxford university press, 1984. sedgwick, catharine maria. hope leslie: or, early times in the massachusetts. new brunswick: rutgers university press, 1993. sedgwick, catharine maria. the linwoods: or, sixty years since. hanover: university press of new england, 2002. teresa requena is a lecturer in the english department at the university of barcelona where she teaches nineteenth-century u.s. literature and history and cultures of the u.s. she earned her ph. d. with a dissertation on gertrude stein’s theater as an example of postmodern literature. she has written articles on u.s. theater, the work of adrienne kennedy, nathaniel hawthorne, and nineteenth-century u.s. women writers. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 belonging on the borders inez baranay independent scholar and novelist inezbaranay@gmail.com copyright©2017 inez baranay. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract: a personal essay by a novelist in response to the theme of borders and belongings, which sparks thoughts about what belonging is, a life-long sense of outsiderness and its gifts, the pernicious appeal of national identity, and the useful and valuable notion of transcultural, where non-belongers can belong. keywords: borders, belonging, nationalism, transcultural the word belonging starts to sound odd the name of the conference is “borders and belonging”. its name seems to be enough for me to think, and for someone to say “that sounds like one for you”. as i begin to think about what can usefully or interestingly be said about this topic, the “borders of belonging”, the word belonging starts to sound odd, the way familiar words suddenly do sometimes, and a line from a cheesy old pop song of my childhood years comes into my head and stays a while as ear worm, going “i belong to you dear and you belong to me” … that kind of belonging, the kind sappy, catchy songs were about, still are some of them, suggests the romantic, the illusory and fleeting. and exclusionary. if you and i belong to each other we don’t belong to anyone else and no-one else belongs to us. it’s an expression of a weird ideal or a hope and cannot be taken literally without an uneasy rubbing up against the notion of actual slavery, even while voluntary slavery might be the mailto:inezbaranay@gmail.com coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 ultimate paradoxical freedom in a state of freedom. of course, another part of me will respond, we all necessarily exclude what we don’t include and none of us can include everything. also, i suspect that a longing for belonging is inescapable and that’s why it’s such a potent subject, whether one is looking for ways to belong or ways to escape it. still, what i see is a burden of romantic yearning that attaches to the notion of belonging. i have tended to refuse to belong to that kind of belonging and i don’t know which came first, a realisation or insight about that, or, on the other hand, a credo, a politics. i’m pretty sure that to the extent there is anything essential and immutable in my self it is in this kind of feeling. if so, as a novelist, i mine these and allied feelings — outsiderness, demurral about exclusionary relationship —and give a voice to these feelings and explore such themes, through the characters i write. faithlessness — in my first novel i read a lot of graham greene during the early stages of writing my first novel between careers (published in 1989, seven years after its completion) and was inspired by him for some sentiments i gave to my narrating character who claims in the last pages, in a mood of a kind of resolution or entering a new transition, that she has discovered that her first allegiance is to “faithlessness”. this was written about 35 years ago and it expressed something the writer strove to articulate, a kind of credo: it must be addictive, this feeling of being essentially rather faithless. without creed, allegiance, attachment. […] well, without the obvious attachments— religious, political, romantic. but what she'd just called faithlessness required the most binding commitment. which was a kind of attachment. […] what she'd just called faithlessness was the choice she felt chosen by. it was a choice of an extended world of possibilities. it included opposites and contradictions and outlandish conjunctions. it meant that even the most witless and tedious moments in another breath could turn everything hopeful and enthralling. and not stop there. (baranay 1989) i must have liked the idea at the time. i don’t dislike it now. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 betrayal and it is greene again who reminds us that belonging brings with it the possibility of betrayal, and therefore gives rise to arguments about what is the greatest betrayal. speaking of the british spy kim philby greene says, “‘he betrayed his country’—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country” (osborne). which of course brings to mind em forster’s declaration that he would rather betray his country than his friends. this makes us ask questions like: do you belong to your country above all belongings? and what is your country? and so we come to that vexed notion of nationality. the recent death of benedict anderson reminded us of his valuable concept of imagined communities and discussing that could hijack the rest of what i might say here but i’ll mention two things apropos: 1: that the concept of nations has fulfilled in a religious way the idea of belonging and 2: that there seems something central to human experience to feel a connection with other people most of whom one will never meet but are in some sense of one’s own kind however that might be understood. and it’s often understood in terms of a shared nationality. and another thing: that there is no border until it is imagined and others also believe it is there. torres strait: borderlines, maps i think of the time i lived in the torres strait islands, that sea strait between the australian mainland and papua new guinea; the strait’s indigenous people are the same melanesians who populate the southern areas of png, and family and trading connections have always united the whole area. one day, there was a line drawn on a map, a line through the torres strait, making some people residents of one country, australia, and some of the other, papua new guinea, even while for aeons they had had no notion of any such line, and even while they continued to visit and trade with each other, with official permission up to a point, thus bestowing fresh, odd (and even absurd) challenges to the work of border patrol, the official government border control, who had to tell from their surveillance flights which bits of going back and forth they saw were legal and which were not. there are so many stories from areas whose official borders are redrawn and where people might wake up one morning to find that they are living in a new country even while they have not moved. there was a joke in eastern europe about someone who had lived in seven different countries without ever leaving home. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 the population exchange of greece and turkey in 1922 i live on another sea strait now, the dardanelles, where the ships of the odyssey fleet once sailed past, and troy is a short distance down the coast, but now who thinks of turkey as the ground of hellenic culture? in turkey, now my country of residence, an absurd and ill-conceived population exchange took place when in 1922 between greece and turkey a line was drawn with particular emphasis and intent and people who had spoken greek in turkey and turkish in greece, living in a mélange of cultures that to me is the very essence of civilisation, were made to move to their side of this newly emphasised border with a newly emphasised, even newly creative, newly exclusive distinctiveness to their identity, its primary component a new sense of nationality. making meaning / nationality we humans are the meaning-making animal. we look for causes, sources, origins, influences. we ask why and how. we cannot accept living in a universe entirely random or one in which nothing can be truly known. the likes of us, educated and socialised in a certain way, are influenced by psychology and a sense of linear time. therefore i point to my origins as a migrant child in 1950s australia as a source of an essential sense of outsiderness; that and the addiction to reading, soon followed by an addiction to writing. because of this background, i was from an early age alert to the odd use of the word nationality. what nationality was my name, people would ask me; they asked me what nationality i was. well, i had hungarian parents but was born in italy, what did that make me? i found out that officially i had been born unable to claim any nationality; i was in the category “displaced person” at birth. so that could be a kind of explanation. or cause. the sense of displacement as essential, unalterable, persistent. a source of distress at worse, of intellectual and creative curiosity and stimulation at best. the idea of nationality the idea of nationality in my view has given rise to some of the most pernicious aspects of human life. in any case, it has always had a weird ring to it in my experience, for what can nationality mean to a migrant child who was always asked about the “nationality” of her name or of her existence? and now i find it is so common … and now i find it is so common that identity is not understood as nationality nearly so coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 much, that so many people have a mix of nationalities in their official identities, that it’s unexceptional to grow up in a different country than you were born in, live and work in countries you are not a citizen of, become a citizen of more than one nation, be inspired by writers and artists who involved you in cultures you had not previously been part of, and to find affinity in intellectual, artistic productions that dissolve notions of the foreign. it is common, now, in our connected online world, to understand and discover your people, your tribe, through your common interests, passions, ethics, politics. what travels show you / trans-national affinities i spent a lot of time in india, making many trips over 35 years; traveling, researching, writing, giving talks and classes; attending concerts, plays and films. three of my books were first published there. in india it was made clear to me, as i joined like-minded people in seminars, interviews and informal conversations, and as i formed friendships, both of finite and infinite duration, that i shared cultural references, humour, political sympathies, literary favourites and a range of tastes and values with many people there. it was made clear that affinity is trans-national. we had more in common with each other than with many people of our own nations. this insight is the bedrock of my current understanding of why normal, unexamined notions of belonging and borders do not reflect real lived experience for some of us. nationality, even ethnicity, even class are not indicators of anything more than themselves. “where do you belong?” “where do you belong?” this question was put to me recently at a talk i gave, where i was questioned about the many relocations in my life, the different places i have lived in. i overlooked the begging-the-question aspect, that is, the assuming that everyone does belong somewhere. i treated the question as if it had an answer. i did not know what i was going to say when i answered: i belong to my network of friends, to the web of friendship made by people i love and keep communicating with. i belong to friendship. also to cities on further reflection, there is more. my recently published memoir is called local time a memoir of cities, friendships and the writing life. you’re “on local time” when you’ve stopped remarking on or being aware of what time it is somewhere else you’ve recently departed, when the time zone of your current locality has become the time to which you are now attuned. as seasoned travelers know, the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 sooner you think local time the sooner you overcome jet lag, the sooner you’re in tune with your current environment. a border has dissolved between you and where you are. so besides friendships also i belong to cities. though i have spent several long periods in very isolated places, and appreciating their particular beauties and pleasures, i return any chance—and hope to return indefinitely—to old inner-city environments, for the particular vitality and intensity of the streets with their historical layers, for their architectures, for the greater possibility of real life conversations and encounters in which that spark of fellow-feeling, of connection can be found. to quote the narrator of my novel with the tiger speaking of the indian city madras: madras was a provincial city compared to the movie, business, fashion and crime glamour of bombay or the government, education and research centres of delhi but it had the buzz and energy, the sense of history, diversity, tension, tolerance, industry, initiative and miscegenation that great cities have. (baranay 2008) mostly to writing mostly i belong to writing. writing has always been compelling, essential—what can be called a vocation, rather than a choice or an option from a range of career possibilities. why this is so belongs to all that is mysterious about life and existence for just as there is no definite answer to the question why is there something rather than nothing there is no answer to why someone should persist in writing; one might offer reasons out of the mystical or the psychological dimensions but now i accept an absence of reason. to live a life where writing is central takes care of a range of other consequent choices. now—what about the logical fallacy in the question about where you belong? why assume we all do belong somewhere, do we have to, is it a lack if we don’t? belonging to borders when we put the words belonging and borders together at first it’s as if borders marked the end of belonging, marked where the belonging stops. but i wonder if in fact some of us belong only on borders. suddenly i find that a pleasing notion, in keeping with our era’s sense of fluidity and indeterminacy in so many aspects of identity that once might have seemed fixed. let’s live where distinct and exclusionary identities are permeable, labile, constantly evolving. that’s where we belong. to the borders! let’s live on borders. until all borders, like hamlet’s too too solid flesh should melt thaw and resolve itself into a dew, until then, let’s live on borderlines! coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 but wait, what happens when a border expands to become a space which might have its own borders? what is it now? maybe, then, it becomes a transnational space and a transcultural space. the necessity of transnational literature dubravaka ugresic calls transnational literature “a new cultural platform, a literary territory for those writers who refuse to belong to their national literatures, or to belong to their national literatures only”. (medin) elsewhere, ugresic says this: the construction of a context — of a literary and theoretical platform, a theoretical raft that might accommodate the dislocated and de-territorialized; the translation and a-national; cross-cultural and transcultural writers; cosmopolitans, neo-nomads, and literary vagabonds; those who write in “adopted” languages, in newly -acquired languages, in multiple languages, in mother tongues in non-maternal habitats; all those who have voluntarily undergone the process of dispatriation—much work on the construction of such a context remains. i think to some extent this transcultural space already exits—we might all inhabit it to some extent; some of us work in it with a growing realisation of what it is and why borders (that are confining categories) create or perpetuate falsity in the categories, or the lack of them, that try to name the positions from which we write. the space has been described in her invaluable work by dagnino thus: transcultural continuum/transpace/transplace. an all-inclusive space of subjective consciousness and cultural possibilities which does not deny the formative importance of native cultures (and, to some extent, their accompanying worldviews) but at the same time allows an openness to the reception, integration, negotiation, and permeation of other cultures, languages, worldview transpace/transplace. another way of defining the transcultural continuum. transpace/transplace is the transcultural dimension that lies beyond the divides, often commercially or ideologically emphasized, of cultures. it represents a nonoppositional point of confluence or overlapping of cultures that in many ways expands bhabha's notion of the third space, the in-between space where hybridization occurs. in my experience, we live in transcultural space when we reject, ignore or transcend the divisions and categories of identity that emphasize difference and separation. this is a space in which a range of worldviews co-exist, where many languages are spoken even while english is recognized as our current lingua franca; english is spoken in multiple coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 accents, dialects and variations and part of the work of transcultural space is to acknowledge this. as i have recently written, summarising a long consideration: everyone in here knows some version of the world language; it’s english now and the word has but a historical connection to the people of england; the language is not defined by, not authorised by, the england where it purportedly originated, at first spread by former forms of imperialism. in here, we speak english. not england language. (yes, let’s use england as the adjective for “from england”. as in cricket: “the england team”.) (baranay 2016) in transcultural space, borders which are lines drawn by men on maps have no bearing on our senses of connection, empathy, community. final definitions of identity are indefinitely deferred. foreignness is a kind of nationality. home is wherever you’re sleeping that night. where you “come from” is where you’ve just been, or once have been. writers do not belong to their national literature but to the world of literature. every difference co-exists. transcultural space, then, is where the unbelonging can belong. as a writer, if i belong anywhere, it is here. -ends this essay is based on a talk given at the conference “go between, in between: borders of belonging” held at the australian studies centre at barcelona university, january 2016. my attendance was made possible by support from the creative individuals career fund of cal, australia. works cited baranay, inez. between careers. sydney: collins. 1989 -----. with the tiger. delhi: harpercollins india. 2008 -----. “transcultural space and the writer” humanities 2016, 5(2), 28; http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/28/html dagnino, arianna. transcultural writers and novels in the age of global mobility. west lafayette: purdue up, 2015, pp. 201–2. medin, daniel. “a conversation with dubravka ugresic” music and literature 18 may 2015 http://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2015/5/12/a-conversation-withdubravka-ugresic osborne, lawrence. “agents of betrayal: a reconsideration of graham greene’s our man in havana” lapham’s quarterly http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/agents-betrayal ugresic, dubravaka europe in sepia. edited by david williams. translated by http://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2015/5/12/a-conversation-with-dubravka-ugresic http://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2015/5/12/a-conversation-with-dubravka-ugresic http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/agents-betrayal coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 rochester. new york: open letter, 2014 inez baranay was born in italy of hungarian parents and grew up in australia. in the 1980s she began publishing short fiction in small press anthologies of experimental, feminist and multicultural writing. since 1989, she has published over a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction (3 of them first published in india), as well as many short stories and essays. most recent books are a novel, set in berlin, ghosts like us, and local time: a memoir of cities, friendships and the writing life. she has a phd in creative writing from griffith university. in australia, india, usa and europe, inez has lectured on writing issues and taught creative writing in universities, schools and community groups, given many readings and talks, been a guest at conferences, seminars and literature festivals, and been a resident at various international writers’ centres. she has lived in turkey since 2011 and currently teaches literature there. microsoft word baden 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 androgynous ethical intervention and living history baden offord abstract: this paper explores how narratives of australian belonging are formed through a quilted matrix of myth, history and memory. this is done through looking at the sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras and the beach, tracing the mythology of the surf life saver, the surfer and contemporary sexual and ethnic identities. i suggest that life is lived through layers of the past, organised in formal and informal, conscious and unconscious ways, connected in asymmetrical and symmetrical fashion. the aim here is not to add to the measurable, instrumental canon of history, but to activate what greg denning has referred to as “living histories”, by exploring androgynous moments of belonging. keywords: androgynous belonging, australian beach culture, living history, sexuality, colonisation, cultural imbrication, borderland introduction the dominance of history as a project of the western enlightenment has truly fixed itself in our major cultural, political, economic and social institutions. in this sense, the western mind with its ideas, ideologies and style has become, by and large, the primary template on offer and the sole arbiter for the organization of knowledge. as an effect of colonisation, the world has turned increasingly to the instrumentalisation of knowledge, or what the indian political psychologist, cultural critic and futurist, ashis nandy calls the scientisatation of knowledge (2007). history is a domain and mechanism in this instrumentalisation of knowledge, and has substantially helped to embed central notions of european enlightenment thought. for example, it has entrenched ideas of progress, measurement and reliability, which are based on certain assumptions about the autonomy of the individual, equality, justice, truth, accuracy and tolerance. history is a pre-eminent tool in the management of western hegemony and therefore of its values, and through the logic of domination, it has become, unfortunately for many in the south, the accepted template for building future societies (d’cruz, 2008; connell, 2007). nandy has approached these ideas in his two books, time warps and time treks. in the former, he argues that history is only one “way of organising the past… that there are other ways, represented by legends; informal public memories; family stories told, retold and reconfigured over generations, and private and public myths that process the past for us” (2007: xi). so, in nandy’s thought, memory and myth are alternatives to history. this is an important and powerful theoretical insight, as the significance of memory and myth then becomes cognitively charged and offers the capacity for coherent, informed copyright ©2009 baden offord this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 ethical interventions into the dominance of history in our lives. this is where narrative is then regarded as crucial to our own interpretation of the world and of that ability and capacity in interpreting our own lives to ourselves. as nandy would put it in his own attempts to counter the hard objectivity of history, the efforts now need to be towards demystifying and defying “‘the tyranny of history’ and to recover the past as an interactive part of the contemporary” (2007: xiii). i think this is both very grounding and emancipatory. i have thus taken up nandy’s thought to explore social and psycho-cultural intersections found in recent australian narratives of belonging that are found in the quilted matrix of myth, memory and history. in this paper i have chosen two intersecting sites, the sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras, and the beach, as specific examples of how memory, history and myth become imbricated. they also demonstrate the intersection of sexuality with history and myth. i am suggesting that our lives are lived through layers of the past, organised in formal and informal, conscious and unconscious ways, connected in asymmetrical and symmetrical fashion. therefore, the aim here is not to add to the measurable, instrumental canon of history, but to activate what greg denning (1997: 30) has referred to as “living histories”. here it is very useful to be quote him directly: living histories and cultural memories have more than the rhetoric of all the varieties of institutionalised histories. living histories are part of the theatre of life. living histories recognise the significance of things more than their explanation. living histories are more likely to well up in tears than in words, or come out in shouts and screams, or solemn silences. living history does not belong to the artificiality of learning and schools but to human realities. it is about truth, not accuracy. thus, what i intend to do is relate the mardi gras to the layering of myth, memory and history, refracted through the beach culture of australia. in this regard, i look at the mythology of the beach and two australian icons, the surf life saver and the surfer. underpinning these icons are dominant histories of masculinist australia, a heterosexual nation that is also white. my main argument is that these histories are subverted by ethical interventions, and by stories told that are linked to living histories and the production of powerful myths. androgynous moments androgynous moments have been increasingly apparent in contemporary australia. for instance, in 2006, byron bay, bastion of conurban cultural diversity, was voted the sexiest beach in australia (as voted by forbes traveller magazine, reported in sydney morning herald, 22 december 2006). at the 2007, sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras parade, around eighty gay, lesbian and bisexual surf life saving club members, hosted their own float with the full support of surf life saving australia. this parade is characterised by its political and cultural intervention into mainstream australia (see contrasting photos of the parade between 1978 and 2007 below). in 2006, the surf film tan lines, bondi beach’s answer to brokeback mountain, was released, showing for the first time that there are queer surfers. this has been recently followed by newcastle (2008). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 [gay, lesbian and bisexual surf life savers, 2007 gay and lesbian mardi gras, sydney. courtesy: glbt life saver float blog. 2007. (http://lifesaver2007.blogspot.com/).] [the first sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras march. reported in sunday, 25 june 1978] these moments happened despite an entrenched politics at the time that sought to strategically retreat from cultural and social complexity. this retreat was evident through vigorous public debate about australian values and predicated upon ideas nurtured in a continuing colonial context. the howard government’s push (putsch) between 1996 and 2007 emphasised social cohesion at the expense of support for cultural diversity and multiculturalism, and was driven by an ontological ‘collective amnesia’ (gandhi, 1998) about the colonial project and a nationalist, reductionist ideology that although deeply irrational, was hyper-rationalised. for example, when launching the book, the conservative, in 2005, john howard remarked that he was a ‘profound opponent of changing the social context in which we live’ (quoted in wilson, tim. 2007). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 for howard, the viability of the conservative social context was through the maintenance of borders – physical, psychological, political, cultural, – framed through specific values. but these fixed borders were and are unrealistic and are indeed transgressed, subverted and negotiated in borderlands, examples of which are australian beach culture and collective spectacles such as the sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras. the howard era systematically and strategically worked towards the maintenance of the ‘colonial mind’. and there were two primary contexts in which this took place. the maintenance of the colonial mind is both form and informal, but nonetheless structured and pervasive. ghassan hage (2001: 350) comments that: this is what constitutes the objective difficulty of the australian situation. for a long time to come, australia is destined to become an unfinished western colonial project as well as a land in a permanent state of decolonisation. the following three points illustrate the effects of this ‘difficulty’. first, support of a culture of whiteness in australia has developed despite the demise of the white australia policy well over thirty years ago. ien ang (2003: 65) writes: ‘what seems to be the object of anxiety today is the maintenance of the culture of white australia’. second, the howard government’s rejection of multicultural australia as a reality, and the downgrading of the policy of multiculturalism was systematically sustained through the production of a culture of border security and protection, fashioned around the motif ‘we decide who comes here.’ the ‘we’ in this motif appeared to be non-negotiable. third, the howard government’s change to the marriage act in 2004 to federally legislate that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, entrenched an anxiety about the maintenance of the culture of heterosexual and patriarchal australia. for howard, and it seems for kevin rudd as well, marriage is a bedrock institution of australian society and must be preserved (see ‘pm – howard and costello publicly reject gay marriage.’ 2002. abc online. http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/. accessed 15.04.2007). these three examples form a specific axis of conservative border patrol over the nation. reading the beach as cutting edge the beach, on the other hand, is perhaps the most significant example of how australian values are in fact more real, organic and fluid. as a discourse, text, set of symbols and practices, iconography or narrative, the beach has come to represent one of the key ways in which australia interprets and defines itself. as the site of european invasion, of the first encounter between minds that were separated by thousands of years of knowledge, experience and being, the beach in australia is a powerful symbol of civilisation, its creation and destruction. as the (cutting) edge of the australian continent, the beach has played a role in the australian imaginary just as significant as the bush. my reading of the beach follows nandy’s proposition that ‘colonialism is first of all a matter of consciousness and needs to be defeated ultimately in the minds of men’ (1983: 63). the beach in the australian imaginary has held both the conscious and unconscious effects of colonialism (in terms of race, gender and sexuality). it’s the place in the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 australian psyche where history and mythology are like oil and water: a crucible for nourishing australian values; representation of invasion, masculinity, unity and nationalist ideology; but also, and counter to these colonising effects, a playground of cultural diversity, it’s the place of abandonment, re-invention, and surfing. by using nandy’s notion of dissident androgynous cultural intervention, sexuality, gender and race in relation to contemporary australian beach culture become the markers through which we can see the contest raging within the ‘unfinished western colonial project as well as a land in a permanent state of decolonisation,’ as hage (2001) stated earlier. the beach as androgynous space: (cape hellas), surf lifesavers and surfers looking at the beach in terms of its history and mythology in australia through the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, what is achingly revealed is the fluidity (and complexity) of the australian psyche, where counter streams to the colonial project have been fecund. although the myth persists of the masculinist bushman of the nineteenth century, embodied in white, anglo-saxon, heterosexual ideology, the beach has suggested a powerful, alternative engagement in being australian, and importantly, belonging to australia. there are androgynous cultural interventions in relation to the bush and masculinity, sexuality and race, as well, among them the film and theatrical versions of priscilla, queen of the desert. an absorbing and astute postcolonial, queer and critical race reading of this film and narrative has been recently published by damien riggs (2006). most significantly, that engagement has been underwritten by profound cultural diversity, shown in the ways the beach has been used in terms of cultural politics, practices and artefacts. three examples are offered here as a means of understanding the notion of the beach as an androgynous space, and therefore critical to de-colonising attempts. first, the turn towards the beach as a defining feature of australian culture rather than the bush occurred in the early part of the twentieth century, re-imagined through visual and literary narratives about gallipoli in the first world war. leone huntsman has described the classical significance of the australian campaign in terms of its location on the edge of gallipoli, and the effect of the light horseman and soldiers swimming naked in the sea. the beach and australia’s ‘quintessential… war legend’ known as anzac became embedded in the australian consciousness (huntsman, 2001: 197). the later reimagining of this event, which can be read as an androgynous cultural intervention, is the film gallipoli. david coad writes of the two central heroes, that ‘the buddy bonding between archy and frank is mildly suggestive of ties between lovers as in the scene of nude bathing’ (2002: 116). although the film does not consummate their love, and was criticised for underplaying their sexuality, coad argues that the narrative is a moment of complexity, difficulty and challenge for the super script of dominant heterosexual and masculinist australia. the reading of gallipoli also involves acknowledging that the beach where the soldiers swam was located at cape hellas, and the symbolic meaning of hellas has direct resonance with greece and notions of civilization. importantly, however, it reminds us of the ongoing debate about sexuality and identity that has preoccupied the western mind since the time of plato and aristotle. the enculturation of the australian coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 imagination has thus been formed through an imbrication of meanings that are related to notions of justice and a specific regard for cultural diversity that extend into the historical reaches of western culture and its expansion. furthering an androgynous cultural interventionist perspective, the turn at gallipoli was also inspirational and resonant with the advent of the surf life-saving club (slsc) movement in australia. leone huntsman traces the development of the slsc phenomenon and compares the militaristic nature of the movement with the soldiers at gallipoli (2001: 196). the surf life saver became the embodiment of the ‘bronzed aussie’ who is heroic and displays a certain uniformity of (exclusive) masculinity. these images below show how this mythology was communicated through the cultural practices of the slsc movement. [stained glass of surf life savers, byron bay surf life saving club. photograph: john ryan] coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 [byron bay surf life savers marching. on the wall of the byron bay surf life saving club.] the image of the life saver became so important to the self-definition of sydney as a civilized and masculine city, for example, that on the 70 th anniversary of the sydney harbour bridge, the sydney morning herald displayed the event with a souvenir showing a full front-page figure of a (male) life saver holding the australian flag (see below). the conflation of the bridge, the life saver, the flag and two figures (male and female) sitting as if at the beach, with hints of sand, somehow conveys the establishment of white, patriarchal, anglo-saxon australia, a new kurnell, (where captain cook landed in 1770). [‘the sydney harbour bridge 70 th anniversary 1932-2002.’ 2002. sydney morning herald. 19 march.] coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 the history of surf life savers and the development of beach culture through the later part of the twentieth century is significantly marked by the arrival of surfers, also male, but rebellious and unruly. surfers did not work, used drugs, wouldn’t go to war, and had an important and lasting impact on shaping the attitudes towards the beach from the 1950s to the present. surfers were also perceived to be a departure from the type of masculinity characterised by surf life saving clubs, embodied in ‘clubbies.’ leone huntsman (2001: 102) notes that in 1966 there was a clash between 350 board riders and ‘clubbies’ at palm beach. she writes: surfer’s hostility towards ‘clubbies’ was expressed by the cartoon character in tracks, captain goodvibes, who ridiculed lifesavers’s sexism, homophobia, and predilection for beer drinking (qualities by no means lacking among board riders themselves!). thirty-nine years later in 2005, clubbies and surfers became pivotal to the cronulla riots (just around the corner from kurnell), which involved the clash between lebanese-australian beach goers from southwest sydney and cronulla locals. the resonance of this event with the howard era and its push for social cohesion based on paranoia is self-evident. but, what is remarkable is that two positive androgynous moments occurred in 2007 that speak back to this event, re-establishing the beach as a borderland. first, the cronulla surf life saving club introduced muslim-australian female and male life savers to their patrols along cronulla’s beaches. in response to the cronulla riots surf life saving australia, the federal immigration ministry and the local council established a program called ‘on the same wave’, to promote participation by australians from very ethnically diverse backgrounds – chinese, sudanese, somali, lebanese, syrian, libyan, etc., in surf life saving clubs (bonner, 2007). new cultural formations emerged of the surf life saver, which underscores a transformation of australian beach culture (see image below). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 [the burqini meets the surf life saving. photograph by matt king/getty images source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/photogalleries/wip-week15/photo3.html. accessed 20.01.2009] second, at the sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras in 2007, about 80 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender life savers from beaches around sydney and further, participated with a float. i indeed, the iconography of the mardi gras party was based on a queer interpretation of this most traditional of australian identities. [sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras party image. original artwork: jozef szekeres www.blackmermaid.com. by permission of the artist.] the representations used in this image above can be regarded as dissident androgynous cultural interventions. not only is there an inclusion of an asian-australia surf lifesaver, but there is a play with gender and beach culture that is expressed in the wearing of both speedos and boardshorts, the latter being associated with the culture of surfers. in the following picture of sean ashby, the gay founder of aussiebums, which is a hugely successful swimwear company that actively promotes male sexuality as fluid, the images of the statue of david surfing, the model in briefs, and the entrepreneur, all resonate with a powerful counter-heterosexist meaning, somehow linking and playing with notions of enculturation that link back to cape hellas and living on the edge or borderland (the beach). aussiebums (see: aussiebums.com) supported the 2007 sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras kylie minogue float, while advertising in men’s health about who has got the ‘world by the balls?’ coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 [photo: jacky ghossein, by permission.] reporting on the mardi gras surf lifesaving float, the sun-herald’s editorial (28.01.2007) stated: although the editorial questionably normalises drew lambert, the overview is, however, illustrative of cultural values challenged within a masculinist, heterosexual context and therefore an acknowledgement of actual diversity. the co-float organiser, ruairi o’connor of tamarama surf life saving club, stated: whether you are a woman, muslim, gay or lesbian; surf lifesaving is a great way to give back to the community and make life long friendships, while also being a fantastic way to keep fit. i urge every gay and lesbian who loves the beach to find out how they can become a lifesaver at their local surf club (reported at: http://lifesaver2007.blogspot.com/. accessed 1.12.2008). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 [cover of dna 100 th issue, 2008 with drew lambert on the right.] both these moments of androgynous cultural intervention, actively use a language of values that invokes respect for difference. bringing together gender, sexuality and ethnicity into an accord through a shared love of the beach demonstrates the fluidity and possibilities of the australian psyche (which is clearly not homogenous and monolithic). in conclusion, what this paper has suggested, through its brief journey into the cultural borderland of the beach, is that australian narratives of belonging are evident in the quilted matrix of myth, memory and history. they can be seen refracted through the beach as a site that has produced cultural practices such as surf life saving and surfing, demonstrating both tradition and change. the australian beach has become a key site of androgynous moments (and living histories), as well as a key marker of contemporary claims to belonging. as a response to the european mind (and its colonising effects) inserting itself into the great southern landscape, the beach speaks to us of social and cultural complexity, where sameness and difference are in mutual negotiation about possible and alternative futures. new waves, so to speak, of attempts at decolonisation. note a version of this paper appears in d’cruz et al (eds.), as others see us (melbourne: australian scholarly press, 2008). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 references ang, ien. ¨from white australia to fortress australia: the anxious nation in the new centruy¨ legacies of white australia. laksiri jayasuriya, david walker and jan gothard (eds). crawley: university of western australia press, 2003. anzaldua, gloria. borderlands: the new mestiza. san francisco: spinsters/aunt lute foundation, 1987. coad, david. gender trouble down under. valenciennes: presses universitaires de valenciennes, 2002. connell, raewyn. southern theory. crows nest: allen and unwin, 2007. d’cruz, j. v. little cultures, local histories and national literature. privately published, 2008. denning, greg. ¨past imperfect.¨ the australian review of books, 4-5: 30, april, 1997. gandhi, leela. postcolonial theory: a critical introduction. st leonards: allen and unwin, 1998. hage, ghassan. ¨polluting memories: migration and colonial responsibility in australia¨ race panic and the memory of migration. meaghan morris and brett de barry (eds). hong kong: university of hong press, 2001. huntsman, leone. sand in our souls. melbourne: melbourne university press, 2001. nandy, ashis. the intimate enemy. new delhi: oxford university press, 1983. riggs, damien. priscilla, (white) queen of the desert. new york: peter lang, 2006. films brokeback mountain, dir ang lee, universal studio, 2006. gallipoli, dir peter weir, r&r films, 1981. newcastle, dir dan castle, dragonfly pictures, 2008. priscilla, queen of the desert, dir stephan elliott, polygram filmed entertainment, 1994. tan lines, dir ed aldridge. 2006. press allen, dan. ‘life in oz’ the advocate. september, 2002. bonner, raymond. ‘australian muslims go for surf, lifesaving and burqinis’ new york times. march 9, 2007. editorial. ‘lgbt lifesavers on parade’ queensland pride. february, 2007. wilson, tim. ‘nothing radical about equal opportunities for all citizens’ the australian. 7 march, 2007. baden is associate professor in cultural studies at southern cross university, australia. his latest publications include the co-edited volume with anna haebich, landscapes of exile: once perilous, now safe (oxford: peter lang, 2008) and the coedited volume with christopher newell, activating human rights in education (deakin, act: australian college of educators, 2008). he has two chapters forthcoming in vin d’cruz et al (eds.), 2008, as others see us: the australian values debate: postcolonial perspectives on australian culture, (melbourne: australian scholarly press, 2008). microsoft word 4baumer& van rensburg coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 cross-cultural pragmatic failure in computer-mediated communication martina baumer henriette van rensburg abstract: the study reported in this paper examines the occurrence of cross-cultural misunderstandings in computer-mediated communication (cmc). cmc has become a part of many people’s everyday life; rules of language practice such as politeness and other characteristics of relational communication are blurred. the study will expose subtle conducts that are language and culture specific. it will further explore how these social and culture factors influence language use of native and non-native english speaking national and international postgraduate education students. in particular, the positive and negative tactics and the depiction of relational regularities and patterns prove to be useful to uncover cross-cultural interactions. questions that arise are: what is considerate as polite and acceptable and what is rude and intolerable in cmc? is politeness a luxury we no longer can or want to afford? how is this affecting cross-cultural communication and negotiation in cmc? keywords: cross-cultural pragmatic failure; computer-mediated communication; politeness if persons have a universal human nature, they themselves are not to be looked to for an explanation of it. one must look rather to the fact that societies everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilise their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters. … universal human nature is not a very human thing. by acquiring it, the person becomes a kind of construct, built up not from inner psychic propensities but from moral rules that are impressed upon him from without … the general capacity to be bound by moral rules may well belong to the individual, but the particular set of rules which transforms him into a human being derives from requirements established in the ritual organisation of social encounters (goffman, 1967, pp. 44-45). copyright©2011 martina baumer & henriette van rensburg. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 introduction in the cmc domain, cross-cultural communication is twofold. the internet and the world wide web have shrunk the physical world, fitting it into peoples’ offices and homes as soon as their equipment interfaces with a server. new technological designs, applications and meanings promote change and influence or alter the status quo (okan, 2007). information is often just a mouse click away and online communication overcomes geographical and time limitations. computer technology changes so fast that its users are continuously stimulated and challenged by its boundless interactive environments. digitally influenced outlooks, understandings and cognitive processing routines entice interlocutors as individuals or social groups by allowing them a sense of freedom and equity. conversely, cmc is limited by its own qualities, as it requires competence in computer application, technical sophistication and communicative proficiency. the internet dissolves face-to-face (ftf) natural occurring inhibitions while drawing interlocutors into its boundless digital environment. social interactions are manifested in the first or second virtual world and are supported by animation, graphics, sound and text. ftf interactions are simultaneously occurring cooperative processes between two or more interlocutors. these interactions require instantaneous and continuous signal transmissions and receptions, while uninterrupted feedback is enhanced by non-verbal cues. in cmc, such cues are limited, requiring a high level of interactional control and an awareness of linguistic norms and pragmatic peculiarities (felix, 2003). the occurrence of cross-cultural misunderstandings in cmc is common and occurrences are well documented. in particular, people from the same language and cultural background develop similar cognitive processing habits informed by environmental perceptions, observations and agreed norms (feenberg, 1991). language manners, such as politeness and other attributes of linguistic interactions are becoming increasing distorted. in ftf, agreed politeness conventions assure interlocutors by means of interactional prompts, making it easy to identify the other’s intent. however, group and cultural norms inform politeness: what one interlocutor conveys is not necessarily what the other interlocutors perceive, requiring cautious application of politeness norms among local and across global groups (pohl, 2004). particularly in cmc, the singularity of politeness from an english linguistic and cultural perspective seems to enforce incivility towards supposed out-groups. aim of the study this study focused on the phenomena of written expressions in cmc. besides crosscultural pragmatic differences, written language in asynchronous communication proposes the advantage of compositional control; however, it cannot precisely determine the interlocutors’ interpretation due to the lack of paralinguistic and prosodic elements, which boost the possibility of misunderstandings and failure. it investigated how social and coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 cultural factors influence language use of native and esl postgraduate education students. the findings of this study intended to further the discussions and initiate research in cmc in the negotiation of communication problems. literature review language identity and culture language is intrinsically embedded in culture, therefore, a tool to become aware of cultural peculiarities in communication (vygotsky, 1978, cited in dunworth, 2002). language is fluid and modification takes place first on the individual level, sub-group or community in practice, while later gradually progressing into changes at the social level (mills, 2008). native and non-native english interlocutors because of their likely diverse cultural background encode and decode messages in different ways. native english speakers tend to become content with the idea that the english language and culture are omnipresent and understood around the world. as thomas (1983) stressed “emerging cross-cultural pragmatic differences may potentially threaten or disrupt collaborative interaction between native and non-native interlocutors” (p. 109). pragmatics according to thomas’ (1983) model of pragmatic failure, cross-cultural communication refers to the messages transmitted between two or more interlocutors who do or do not share a common cultural or linguistic background. in other words, pragmatics goes beyond the meaning of syntactic form and semantics or as stated by grice “the overt meaning differs from the implied” (1975, as cited in hatch, 1992, p. 260). dash (2004) highlighted that interlocutors in cross-cultural communication are required to become cultural sensitive and objective, avoiding prejudice and stereotypical assumptions to prevent communication breakdown in cmc. lin (2008) discovered that interlocutors from different social and cultural traditions tend to use their own cultural values and systems to comprehend and interpret new social situations. she stressed that it is impossible for esl speakers to acquire all pragmatic rules but it would be beneficial if both native and non-native speakers were aware of linguistic multiplicity, which reaches beyond the spoken word. computer-mediated communication cmc takes place between one or more interlocutors via the instrumentality of a computer as the tool and telecommunication networks. cmc is predominantly carried out through discursive interaction. in cmc, the physical absence of interlocutors is replaced with coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 language and its multimodal, semiotic systems. interlocutors use the keyboard to type verbal language that appears as a readable text on the computer screen (herring, 2004). cohen and metzger (1998) made the point that the fundamental … motivation for both mediated and face-to-face communication is a basic need for social affiliation. the need for social affiliation is so central for communication because it stems from, and is necessary for, understanding of who we are in relation to the world around us (p. 1). the popularity of cmc and the tremendous boom in globalisation, immigration and travel allows interlocutors to create a new category of social interaction. initially, cmc was created purely as a tool for data transmission but quickly gained attractiveness as a social interface (walther, 1996, as cited in herring, 2004). people who use the internet for commercial purposes or pleasure can easily attain some basic computer literacy and can access reliable internet connection from a wide range of providers offering an ever-growing range of plans and options. wireless internet connections make it possible to stay connected anytime and almost anywhere (heisler & crabill, 2006). interlocutors appreciate the interactive mode as it allows language to be manipulated, reproduced, altered and updated (herring, 2008), and identities in regards to gender, race, class, ethnicity and religious affiliation can be concealed or reinvented (heisler & crabill, 2006). in cmc, the physical absence of interlocutors is replaced with language and its multimodal, semiotic systems (dresner & herring, 2010). in real life, people’s identity is primarily created through the interaction with families and secondary environmental relations. the way people interact and converse is determined by their cultural rules (montero-fleta, montesinos-lopez, perez-sabater, & turney, 2008). in cmc, interlocutors who belong to a linguistic community share similar linguistic and communicative competence (felix, 2003). consequently, notions of egalitarian internet communities seem enticing. herring (2008) concluded that the emergence of communication software applications such as skype, elluminate and wimba pronto often integrated in learning management systems (lms) offer real communities in virtual communities a platform for the progress of certain behaviours, norms and values that can be constructed and interpreted in many ways based on individual preference and projection, group expectation and cultural norms. yus (2001) investigated the concept of cyber-pragmatics, a branch of pragmatics and cmc, and discovered a potential for simulated and immersive learning in a variety of contexts. delucia, francese, passero and tortora (2009) explored second life as an educational web3d environment and revealed that the low cost virtual world supported interlocutors’ engagement and social relationship building. politeness as the underpinning theory brown and levinson defined politeness as the considered formulation of utterances in regards to other’s feelings without exposing their face. ‘face’ relates to the perceived and constructed image of the self (goffman, 1955). politeness theory focuses on interlocutors’ individual speech acts. brown and levinson’s (1987) intricate theory intended to unravel coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 the underlining factors of discourses that, intentionally or not, lack clarity, directness and efficiency (holtgraves, 2002). according to brown and levinson (1987), interlocutors use a range of tactics either to provide or threaten the face: “direct and unambiguous comments – ‘bald on record’; respect statements – ‘positive politeness’, lessening imposition statements – ‘negative politeness’, subtle requests – ‘off-record-and silent treatments – ‘withholding the face-threatening act’” (pp. 68-70). expressions of politeness can be misinterpreted depending on the individual’s perception or cultural practice (yus, 2001). golato and taleghani-nikazm (2006) concluded that interlocutors transferred real life interactional tactics into cmc depending on the individual and cultural personified behaviour. spencer-oatey (2002; 2005) confirmed these as interlocutors’ seek peer acceptance to conform to group norms. vinagre (2008) agreed to some extend as she puts forward that interlocutors preferred clarity and collaboration, and use “positive politeness to show solidarity, like-mindedness and friendship” (p. 1031). in cross-cultural communication, ftf or in cmc, judgments about politeness/impoliteness are based on the highly ideological assumption of what is considered the norm of language behaviour in a society, subgroup or community in practice (mills, 2008). kasper (cited in kasper & kellerman, 1997) questioned the culturally neutral approaches in cross-cultural communication, while graham (2007) concluded that a fulfilling cross-cultural communication means something different for each interlocutor. methodology the subjects the subjects were usq postgraduate education students. the reasons for approaching postgraduate education students were threefold as is was assumed that these students are highly trained and proficiently skilled in education and related fields and uphold a sense of professionalism and integrity in their responses. secondly, it was anticipated that these students have come across cross-cultural contexts in teaching and learning, therefore are aware of possible cross-cultural pragmatic issues. thirdly, postgraduate education students may conduct research in the future. instruments this study used a questionnaire containing two components. the first component included general demographic questions to establish background data concerning the participant’s native language, cultural background, and place of residence, age and gender, foreign language knowledge, and their regular use of cmc. the second component referred to the dcts, which comprised of six cmc scenarios. the design of the dct questionnaire was based on anecdotal incidents within cmc in university, business and private contexts. the dialogue-type situations focused on four work-like scenarios ranging from formal to coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 friendly, while the two other scenarios represented a closer relationship between the interlocutors. procedure postgraduate students from the faculty of education at usq were invited via an email to take part in the study. by responding to the questionnaire, participants gave permission for the investigator to use information for research purposes only. data was collected using a self-completion questionnaire eliciting numerical information that was quantitatively analysed. discursive responses were also coded and analysed for possible patterns and correlations. the first part of the questionnaire contained inquiries that aimed to elicit nominal data to determine gender, native language, age range, cultural background and place of residence. the participants were expected to provide extended responses to gain an understanding of the distribution of gender participation of ne and esl interlocutors. firstly, language and cultural background was anticipated to impact on the findings of this study. it was also anticipated that the place of residence would impact on cross-cultural pragmatic behaviour, therefore providing further insight. in the second section, participants were asked to provide ordinal data about second or other language knowledge and proficiency. while the number of languages was unlimited (the first five languages were individually stated while further language knowledge could be noted in a rubric of ‘other’ (please specify). a category of proficiency levels was employed, ranging from native-like, to vocational, minimal vocational, minimal social, survival and minimal survival. it was expected that knowledge of a second language or more and varying degrees of proficiency might influence communication across languages and cultures. the third section was concerned with the frequency distribution of cmc. participants were asked to indicate if they used asynchronous and synchronous communication and how often they used it. frequency of use ranged from frequently to regularly, occasionally and rarely, while the option of ‘other (please specify)’ was given for further information. again, cmc participation patterns across gender, age, language and cultural background were expected to provide answers to the research questions. the last section contained cmc scenarios, which were adapted from real life situations, and names and distinctive features of real life incidents were omitted. the content was adapted without losing its authenticity while at the same time adjusted to suit the purpose of this study. the study aspired to keep the scenarios free from gender bias to appeal to females and males alike. furthermore, the scenarios ranked from professional workplacelike scenarios to more familiar or friendship-like situations. while the work related scenarios expressed professional language use, the more familiar situations allowed for colloquialisms and emotional expressions. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 data analysis and coding the component of analysis was determined by the responses produced in the four sections. sections one to three were coded and analysed according to participant’s native language, cultural background, age and gender. place of residence was disregarded due to insufficient information. native language referred to native english (ne), while non-native allowed for categories of english as a second language (esl) speakers who have a non-english cultural background, and english speakers with a non-english cultural background (nebg). the scenarios were classified in accordance with brown and levsinson’s (1987) politeness theory. the responses were annotated, classified, coded and sorted applying leech’s (1983) taxonomy of illocutionary functions (table 1). these classifications related to the interlocutor’s goals of “establishing and maintaining comity” (leech, 1983, p. 104). they were separated into the four classes of “competitives, convivials, collaboratives and conflictives” (leech, 1983, p. 104). for the study, the second and third class are regarded as polite, while the first and the last classes are referred to as impolite, with the latter considered the rudest. table 1: leech’s (1983) classification of illocutionary function illocutionary function definition examples polite impolite convivials collaboratives competitives conflictives the illocutionary goal coincides with the social goal the illocutionary goal is indifferent to the social goal the illocutionary goal competes with the social goal the illocutionary goal conflicts with the social goal offering , inviting, thanking, promising, vowing claiming, boasting, complaining ordering, demanding, advising, commanding accusing, cursing, reprimanding results participants by gender this study received 133 responses within a few days. however, eight prospective interlocutors chose not to participate. a further sixteen participants were unable to complete the questionnaire or provided insufficient information to be included in this study. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 in total, 109 usq postgraduate education students participated in this research. female participation (72 participants) was higher than male participation (37 participants). participants by gender and language a further break down into language background revealed that 65 females, or 60%, identified english as their native language while seven females, or 6 %, indicated they spoke languages other than english. in comparison, 34 males, (31%), were ne speakers while three, or 3%, named languages other than english as their native tongue. participants’ native languages included afrikaans, arabic, chinese, dutch, german, polish, portuguese, tagalong and tamil. participants by gender, language and cultural background participants’ cultural backgrounds were defined by their native language as well as what they identified as their cultural background. according to the information provided, 65 ne female participants (53%), and 34 males (27 %) considered themselves to be from english/australian cultural background. a further 7 females or (6 %), and 3 males (2 %) considered themselves as esl speakers. most importantly, another 11 english-speaking females (9 %), and 4 english-speaking males (3 %) insisted they belonged to a negb. figure 1: female and male participants: native-english, english as a second language, and native-english speaking from non-english cultural background as the data revealed more females than males participated in this study. participants from esl backgrounds formed the smallest group. on the other hand, a group emerged that considered themselves as ne speakers but identified themselves as belonging to nebg. second or more language(s) knowledge and proficiency levels coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 figure 2: female and male participants: second and more languages spoken at differing proficiency levels the data revealed that more languages are spoken by esl, and esl and nebg speakers than ne speakers. the level of proficiency is consistent with the rank of languages spoken. in other words, the second language was often spoken at a high proficiency level while subsequent languages were spoken less proficiently. in particular, ne speakers’ second or more language knowledge was at a lower proficiency level. cmc participation in regards to cmc, participants of different gender, age, language, and cultural background equally appreciate asynchronous but were less enthusiastic to utilise synchronous communication. figure 3: male participants: cmc preference and frequency coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 figure 4: female participants: cmc preference and frequency discourse completion tasks – 6 scenarios table 2: numbers of female and male participants: language and cultural background participants ne esl esl & nebg males 30 3 7 females 54 7 18 total 84 10 25 scenarios and coding the six scenarios were adapted from real life situations. this part of the survey required participants to read the scenario description and to respond as they would in reality. the scenarios were coded according to brown and levinson’s politeness theory (1987). the third, fourth and fifth scenarios were considered positive polite while the first, second and sixth were considered negative polite. the scenarios were also ranked in regards to the seriousness of face threatening acts (fta’s) which are part of most cultures. the fta ranking referred to the social distance between the two interlocutors, the relative power between interlocutors and the absolute ranking of impositions in the particular culture. in that sense, scenario one was considered to be the most serious or the most formal and distant. levels of social distance were gradually reduced, therefore classifying scenario six as the most familiar, along the lines of a recreational chat. responses coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 the responses were coded according to leech’s (1983) illocutionary functions. polite responses were grouped as a – presenting convivial, or b – presenting collaboration. impolite responses were grouped in c – presenting competitive, or d – presenting conflictive. a neutral factor for omitted responses was represented by an o. results by gender, language and cultural background table 3: numbers of male participants: all ages and language backgrounds employing polite or impolite tactis table 4: numbers of female participants: all ages and language backgrounds employing polite and impolite tacits females a – convivial b – collaborative c competitive d conflictive o – no response ne 128 76 57 7 56 esl 14 13 11 1 1 esl & nebg 40 34 15 3 6 total 182 123 83 11 63 table 3 and 4 clearly demonstrated a trend towards convivial responses across genders, language and cultural backgrounds. males responded more frequently with option a than females. noticeably, ne males and females chose to ignore messages more often. in particular, in scenario 1 language behaviour was similar for both genders and across language and cultural backgrounds with the exception of esl speakers, who clearly preferred the most polite option, while in scenario 2 the results indicated that males preferred to respond politely or ignore the message. ne females responded similarly to males while esl and nebg chose polite, collaborative and competitive options. in scenario 3, ne, esl and nebg male participants reacted similarly choosing polite options over impolite. however, ne females, in contrast to esl and nebg females, clearly asserted their position with response c while esl and nebg chose politer options. in scenario 4, ne males preferred polite options, while the esl and nebg males were slightly less kind. ne and esl and nebg females were mostly collaborative but they also chose competitive alternatives. in scenario 5, all males chose to respond most politely. females also preferred the politest options with a few exceptions resorting to competitivenesss. in scenario 6, a rude comment prompted differing responses. ne males males a convivial b – collaborative c – competitive d – conflictive o – no response ne 85 39 20 1 34 esl 11 3 2 1 1 esl & nebg 23 10 4 1 3 total 119 52 26 3 38 coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 either chose to collaborate or to skip the inquiry. esl and nebg males still preferred to respond competitively, collaboratively or conflictively. ne females ignored the messages while others expressed a strong preference for competitive or collaborative and conflicitve responses. esl and nebg females responded in a similar way. discussion the results from the inquiry corresponded with the findings in the literature. in today’s globalised world and competitive job market which is driven by economic rationalism, the individual is required to be able to think creatively, work collaboratively, and possess a high degree of linguistic proficiency and communicative competence, particularly in cmc (bonilla, 2003; ling, gen-cai, chen-guang & chuen, 2003). language is a vehicle to articulate emotions and ideas; it moulds thinking, creating a unique way of understanding the world. vygotsky (1978, as cited in dunworth, 2002) pointed out that people’s identity is primarily formed through the interaction with families and secondary environmental relations. pragmatic competence refers to the understanding of meaning in context, as it is culturally informed while functioning in the social context level of language performance (montero-fleta et al. 2008; thomas, 1983). pragmatics is concerned with the way language is communicated, rather than its structure. it seems that the greater the structural differentiation of languages (kecskes & papp, 2000), the more dissimilar their conceptualisation of the world, making it difficult to detect the subtle nuances of meaning, ambiguous words, or the accidental or intended use of a word (schnitzer, 1995). an agreed language standard and an eagerness to embrace cultural differences promote cross-lingual and cross-cultural enrichment, understanding and admiration (durham cited in danet & herring, 2003; hrastinski, 2008; pohl 2004). preference for politeness and high tolerance for impoliteness in cmc politeness is a matter of taste (fromkin et al. 2007), and a tool for power relations to assert superiority as well as group relations (lanteigne, 2007; limberg, 2009; spencer-oatey, 2002, 2005). everywhere in the world people like to be respected; hence, politeness is a universal phenomenon but cultural differences are prevalent and expressed through subtle nuances in discursive interactions (kienpointner, 2005; montero-fleta et al. 2008; tang & zhang, 2008). politeness in essence is not only a strategy to ensure smooth conversations between interlocutors but it is also a technique to prevent conflict and misunderstandings (yus, 2001; kasper cited in kasper & kellerman, 1997). according to brown and levinson’s (1987) theory, interlocutors consider the other person’s face in interactions to enhance their self-image and to avoid communicational reconstruction. however, as the literature reveals such assumption are not always applicable cross-culturally or with ftf and cmc interactions (oliveira, 2003; watts, 2003). in some languages, politeness is a component of grammar while in others rude nicknames are an expression of fondness and acceptance. interlocutors in cmc similarly develop their own range of community specific coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 semiotic systems to assert individuality in addition to group belonging (herring, 2004). politeness and its interpretations fluctuate between language and cultural group and on the attached value to proper conduct (leech, 2007). the data revealed that participants across a wide range of genders, languages, cultural backgrounds and generations demonstrated a preference for polite language and a high tolerance for rude and offensive language. the results from the ‘results by gender, language and cultural background’ section confirmed the findings in the literature, which conveyed that participants in general communicated politely, and with kindness. a close examination of table 3 and table 4 showed that neither language nor cultural background determined a polite response but rather, gender did. males chose positive politeness while females used competitive responses, which indicated some endorsement for impoliteness. at first glance, these results seemed to suggest that men are the more courteous gender. however, if the language and intent of the scenarios are taken into consideration, it became apparent that gender binaries continue to exist in cmc, where males dominate the public arena (mills, 2002; oliveira, 2003). in the findings, male responses showed a tendency for short answers, fewer apologies, and deliberate employment of clichés, and expressed less doubts about meaning of messages and used humour and irony more often. female participants on the other hand, used elaborate expressions in their answers, responded with more apologies, openly expressed their confusion about the messages and expressed more gratitude as well as asserted disapproval. females also temporarily increased written dexterity, poise and linguistic frankness to counteract transgression. women’s language behaviour in this study confirmed the findings of the literature, which emphasised that females employ co-operative strategies such as care, concern and sympathy in communication (coates, 1996). they are also more likely to reveal personal details in cmc, exposing themselves as easy targets for cyber predators (herring, 2000). evidently, both genders favour a polite and conflict free interactional environment. however, women safeguard their interaction in cmc, and react with greater caution and assert their position if necessary. language is never cultural neutral language is not culturally neutral, as it is continuously reinvented, moulded and constructed by cultural norms (deutscher, 2005; kasper & kellerman, 1997; mills, 2008). language is flowing, and is therefore a site of ubiquitous change and endless opportunities (berendt & kralisch, 2007; schnitzer, 1995). interlocutors from different language and cultural backgrounds are often unaware of each other’s particular values, social customs, social status, and principles in communication (adams st pierre, 2000; lin, 2008; tang & shang, 2008). in contrast to ftf communication where sensitivity, sociability and empathy are at the highest level, the low level of social presence proposes a particular challenge in cmc (felix, 2003; herring, 2004; nobila, 1998). disappointments also arise from expectations that esl interlocutors abide by and assimilate the cultural peculiarities of the dominant culture in their language compositions consequently handing over linguistic autonomy (bastardas-boada, 2002). this leads to further frustration as cross-cultural coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 pragmatic failure results not only from errors in syntax, inaccurate pronunciation (not applicable in asynchronous communication) or literal meaning, but also in part from the misunderstanding or miscommunication of the implied meaning (thomas, 1983). in cmc, interlocutors are dependent on the written text, their language skills and their knowledge about their online community. the outcomes of the evaluation process of the scenarios clearly illustrated once more the participants’ inclination for polite responses confirming brown and levinson’s theory (1987) that interlocutors generally strive to save the other person’s face. the third, fourth and fifth scenarios were categorised as positive and the first, second and sixth scenarios as negative polite. in the first scenario, participants’ language behaviour was similar in both ne genders, with the exception of esl and nebg participants, who clearly preferred the most polite option. in the second scenario, ne female responses were comparable to male responses, while esl and nebg females chose the politer options. as both the first and second scenarios referred to distance and the professional world, answers were clearly composed to neutralise possible power imbalance by reacting to impoliteness with a positive response (herring, 2004; mills, 2002; yus, 2001). in scenario 3, ne, and esl and nebg male participants reacted similarly, using polite options. however ne females, in contrast to esl and nebg females, clearly asserted their position with competitive responses while esl and nebg females still chose politer options. interestingly, in this scenario professional distance was surmounted with familiarity. this seemed to have violated ne female boundaries but not the esl and nebg female ones. these findings may convey a greater tolerance on the part of esl and nebg females. it also affirms that ne females possess a greater knowledge about their language and cultural norms and its violations (lanteigne, 2007). in scenario 4, ne males preferred polite options, but esl and nebg were slightly kinder. ne and esl and nebg females were the most collaborative. this scenario clearly appealed to participants’ empathy, eliciting the politest responses from females to support and encourage the composer. in scenario 5, all males agreed to respond most politely. females also preferred the politest options, except for a few considered competitiveness. this indicates that familiarity and humour in language, which are understood to be positive qualities, are a matter of taste and agreed norms which in unfamiliar situation can result in misunderstandings or conflict (graham, 2007; matthews, hancock & dunham, 2006). in scenario 6, the offensive language in this scenario tested tolerance levels and provoked participants to possibly cross the line of formality and good manners. the rude comment prompted ne males either not to comment or not to collaborate, which indicates personal distance, group belonging and a sense of sensitivity to others’ needs (katz, lenhardt and mitchell, 2007). esl and nebg males still preferred to respond competitively, collaboratively or conflictively. most ne females ignored the messages, while others expressed a strong preference for competitive or collaborative responses. esl and nebg females responded similarly, communicating assertiveness and dismay. the results confirmed the findings of the literature that participants, regardless of their gender, language, cultural background or age, predominantly favour politeness or choose not to respond to avoid conflict (duthler, 2006). coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 implications for further research it became apparent in the course of the inquiry that more work could be undertaken in the areas of politeness and bilingualism. how important is the notion of politeness? how and to what extent does the ne speaker’s non-english cultural background influence their perception of politeness. how are they adjusting to the ongoing cultural divide and how are these changes reflected in their language? in particular, the australian indigenous perspective of the middle class white male construct of politeness behaviour may challenge the current theoretical underpinnings of politeness. due to university policy, this study exclusively recruited usq postgraduate education students. for further research, data gathered from across a range of disciplines may bring further light on cross-cultural pragmatic failure in cmc. future research could include the broader public to gain a greater insight into australians’ motivation to use polite tactics in cmc. conclusion in conclusion, the literature proposes that language and culture are intrinsically intertwined; that language is constructed by cultural values and norms to articulate human needs and emotions. politeness, conditioned through cultural experiences, is considered a means of respect and kindness to allow the other interlocutor to save face. the data affirmed the findings of the literature review, revealing that neither ne, esl nor nebg groups are exclusively responsible for cross-cultural pragmatic failure in cmc. language and cultural background influenced responses in such a way that participants predominantly drew on polite tactics. even the most bad-mannered scenario prompted understanding, support or disregard. the study also uncovered that pragmatic misunderstandings are not just the signs of insufficient language control on the part of the esl interlocutors. the myth of the perfect interlocutor’s discourse in a uniform language community with exact language comprehension contributes to the expectations of esl interlocutors as language culprits (chomsky, as cited in le page, 1997). this attitude ignores accidental or deliberate inconsistencies of pragmatics on the part of the ne interlocutor. however, cross-cultural pragmatic failure has the potential to transform into cross-cultural sensitivity and awareness benefiting the ne and esl interlocutors promoting cross-cultural communication and dialogue in today’s conflict ridden world. works cited adams st. pierre, e. 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(2001). ciberpragmatica, entre la comensacion y el deconcierto. retrieved from http://www.cibersociedad.net:80/archivo/articulo.php?art=42 martina baumer is an academic skills development (asdu) lecturer in the school of health and human sciences at southern cross university, lismore, nsw, australia. she recently finished her master thesis (hd) in education. she is interested in language and literacy, in particular bilingualism, pragmatics, adult education, and effective pedagogy in e-learning. currently, she focuses on early intervention and embedded literacy support programs in the school of health and human sciences. henriette van rensburg is lecturer in pedagogy and curriculum (blended learning focus) and postgraduate program coordinator in the faculty of education, university of southern queensland, toowoomba, 4350, queensland, australia. she has research interests in linguistics, technology education and postgraduate supervision; and has published research about afrikaans speakers in australia, improving english language and computer literacy skills in an adult refugee program, as well as postgraduate supervision. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 introduction susan ballyn & elisa morera de la vall copyright©2019 susan ballyn & elisa morera de la vall. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. when anna mow, serge liberman’s widow, wrote to us both to tell us serge had died, we were stunned. we had no idea he had been ill nor so tragically terminally so. we both felt that we had lost a dear friend and a wonderful writer and thinker. serge was always willing to help and when elisa decided to do her phd on jewish australian writing with me as her supervisor, serge facilitated contacts, allowed her access to his own library and advised wisely. i could not have had a better ally in supervising elisa’s work. in his usual quiet generous way serge was thrilled with elisa’s thesis and remained in contact over the years. we were truly honoured when he came to lecture to the students at the university of barcelona. we met for coffee before the lecture and serge seemed totally at ease. that was until we stood waiting outside the lecture room. his nervousness became patent and he seemed anxious. once introduced, however, he began in his quiet engaging way, his eyes lighting up as the students responded to him, his smile ever present and away he went to give a truly magnificent lecture. a version of that lecture is reproduced for the first time in this volume of coolabah. we had left time for questions after the lecture, but it proved not to be enough. the questions continued as the students swarmed around the desk and then outside the classroom. the last time we saw serge was when he came to barcelona as part of a tour of sephardi spain. anna was with him. before coming he sent us a wealth of material on the itinerary that they were following and articles relevant to the tour. when we met, he was absolutely shining with delight at being able to see us, but even more at being able to do the tour which must have been very grueling given the lectures included at each place visited and the route coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 itself. generous as always, serge later sent a detailed summary of the experience. when we received the news from anna that serge had died, both of us felt that we had to do something in his memory and a volume of coolabah seemed appropriate. anna’s support was invaluable in all stages of this sad venture and she gave us permission to publish the lecture he gave to the students. all the contributors were close to serge and each has written in the way they have felt fit to honor sege’s legacy as a writer, medical practitioner, intellectual, his profound humanity and understanding of human nature. serge left behind him what we call “a golden wake” for others to follow. his life and work are an example to us all of passion and humanity. he will not be forgotten. sue ballyn elisa morera de la vall barcelona 2019 serge amidst books (courtesy anna mow) microsoft word coolabah 1 caty.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.75-83 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona this foreign country fascinates me catalina ribas segura when people learn that i have been to australia three times, that i am writing a phd thesis on greek-australian and chinese-australian literature and that i love the country, the most frequent remark is: “why australia? you could not go much further, eh?” the fact is that my romance with australia started in my childhood due to my curiosity and the lack of information we received at school: why was `australia´ not on our curriculum? at some point in our studies, we learned about most european countries, africa, north america, south america and asia, but nothing about oceania. even when we studied the first trips around the world, we learnt about “the indies”, but the torres strait was hardly mentioned. being a very curious person, i became interested and started to watch documentaries on the unique australian flora and fauna – many of them presented by the late steve irwin, the crocodile hunter, read books about australia and its “discovery”, about indigenous peoples, etc. only when we studied geography, did we learn that some areas in australia have a mediterranean climate. that was perfect! i could live there! my interest in australia continued to grow gradually until university when i met dr. susan ballyn and became absolutely fascinated by australia. i studied hard, improved my level of english, applied for a scholarship to study a semester at la trobe university, melbourne, and, living my own odyssey, landed in melbourne in the early hours of 14 july 2001. copyright ©2007 catalina ribas segura . this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 76 that semester changed my life as i fell in love not only with the feeling of freedom and multiculturalism and the way of teaching and learning but also with the people, the landscape and all the places i visited: melbourne, ballarat, the great ocean road, phillip island, hobart, port arthur, sydney, the blue mountains, brisbane, fraser island, alice springs, kata tjuta, uluru, kings canyon and bali. i tried to learn and steep myself in australia as much as i could, although i could not understand the point of view of many australians in some debates, such as, the “tampa” crisis1 (“mv tampa”), and felt the “tyranny of distance”2 after the 11-s. despite these two crucial and intense situations, my overall stay in australia was fabulous and it raised a deep thirst for knowledge and understanding in me. back in barcelona, i kept studying “australia” and attended as many activities related to australia as i could: i joined the australian studies centre, enrolled in the course “the mondays of australia” organised by els amics de la unesco, went to the australia expo in casa asia and i kept studying, reading and attending conferences about australia. before finishing my degree, i decided to further my studies with a phd. i took that decision after listening to the defence of a minor thesis on new zealand and dr. elisa morera de la vall´s thesis on jewish australian literature: i realised i wanted to do that, to research and gain knowledge about a specific topic related to australia and, hopefully, transmit my passion for that country to other people. the first subject of my phd program, “construction and representation of identities”, was identity and belonging in contemporary australia, taught by dr. 1 on 24 august 2001, the mv tampa, a norwegian cargo ship with 27 crew members, rescued and saved more than 400 people, mostly afghans, whose ship became stranded in international waters and who wanted asylum as refugees. the australian territory of christmas island was the closest port where the rescued should be taken to for medical attention, but australia did not give permission. the diplomatic dispute between australia, indonesia and norway lasted for five days, until 29 august 2001, when captain rinnan lost his patience with the authorities, was very concerned with the safety of those on board, declared the state of emergency and entered australian territorial waters. most refugees were sent to two detention centres in the island of nauru, and about 150 were sent to new zealand in 2001 and 32 more in august 2005. 2 this term was coined by geoffrey blainey in his tyranny of distance: how distance shaped australia´s history.rev. ed. melbourne: sun books, 1982. 77 baden offord. this subject enlightened me as i studied many points of view of belonging and identifying as an australian, or not. in class, we read about, watched and discussed the following topics and films: being indigenous in contemporary australia in ivan sen´s beneath clouds (2002), the experience of migration for a chinese family from hong kong in clara law´s floating life (1995) and the search for identity a greek-australian teenager leads in ana kokkinos´ head on (1998). we worked on stereotypes, perceptions and feelings, and we learnt about cultural studies and many theories i still work with. that subject opened my eyes to a wide continuum of possibilities, theories and schools of thought i had not paid attention to before. i learnt a lot from the other subjects of my phd but they did not deal with “australia” specifically, although i took every chance i had to write a paper on a topic related to australia. during the summer and after reading a few books, i decided to write my minor thesis on greek-australian migrant literature and spent the whole year working on it. reading helen nickas and konstandina dounis´ anthology retelling the tale: poetry and prose by greek-australian women writers (1994) in august 2004 was a turning point: i identified with so many of its poems and short stories! i could understand exactly how the characters felt and i had been to many of the places that appeared in the texts. therefore, i felt very comfortable working with this topic. i was able to research a lot in dr. ballyn´s library and i could focus on the aspects i wanted thanks to the support of dr. jacqueline hurtley, my minor thesis tutor. that winter i realised i needed more resources in order to write my phd thesis, so i applied for an exchange with southern cross university, lismore. thirteen days after the defence of my minor thesis, i landed in perth, exactly on the late afternoon of 13 july 2005, in order to attend the second conference on landscapes and exile: `landscapes, exile, belonging and home´, a topic started in barcelona the previous year. this conference was very moving for many of 78 us who attended it and i will never forget the experiences and feelings i had: we belonged together, the landscape spoke to us and the milky way shone brightly above us. “australia” was offering me a great welcome. four days later i took two more flights to get to lismore. two friends came to pick me up and showed me the “city”. that was a change and a challenge: lismore was very small and there were not many people on the street. i remember being puzzled, wondering whether or not i would be able to live there for six months and do research. after travelling often and living in big or medium-sized cities, lismore seemed to be very small! however, my first impression could not have been more wrong. during my first five days in lismore, i met many people, fell in love with the teachers, the campus and the library, enjoyed a barbeque, went to a heavy rock concert and learnt about the byron bay writers conference. all this happened in less than one week! dr. baden offord taught me two subjects: unruly subjects: citizenship, with dr. erika kerrusih, and cultural studies research project, and dr. linzi murrie taught me perspectives on australia. these three subjects helped me to gain and develop an insider’s knowledge of institutions, policies, social structures and culture. they provided me with all the tools i needed to start my research, keep learning and knocking on the correct doors for information. i will always be thankful to my teachers and other members of the staff for all their help, conversations, meetings, classes and lectures, for their friendship and support: it was absolutely invaluable. whilst in lismore i went on field trips to protestors falls, nimbin and tuntable falls and to lismore institutions, to minyon falls and to community activities, such as, the university race day, the health and herb festival and the representation of two plays: oscar wilde´s the importance of being earnest and terry pratchett´s guards! guards!. it was so wonderful listening to british english in australia! the actors and actresses were terrific. 79 during that semester, i travelled quite often in order to attend conferences, seminars and do research. i went to the byron bay writers festival (byron bay), where i met christos tsiolkas, one of the writers i dealt with in my minor thesis; out of the spotlight (lismore); journeys of the dragon: chinese migration to australia (sydney); the melbourne fringe festival (melbourne); the interdisciplinary research forum of the centre for peace and social justice at southern cross university (before the centre for cultural diversity and social justice); the cultural studies association of australasia conferences prefix and culture fix (sydney); and the conference and master-class on whiteness and the horizons of race (brisbane) thanks to a scholarship granted by southern cross university. i also travelled to darwin and they opened the chinese museum just for me! whilst in the northern territory, i visited kakadu national park, litchfield national park, katherine gorge, tennant creek and devil´s marbles and alice springs again. when i went to melbourne for a second time, i met dr. helen nickas, the author whose anthology had influenced me so much! two days later i also met some members of the asian-australian discussion list group i had joined a couple of weeks before. two weeks later, in october, i met a friend in brisbane, and we both met dr. david carter and his wife. after finishing the semester and handing in all the papers, i went to sydney and visited carmen castelo and her mother in canberra: carmen is the founder of the spanish heritage foundation and, whilst visiting many institutions and museums, she encouraged me to keep working hard. before leaving australia, i visited melbourne for a third time, and i met dr. vin d´cruz, my `uncle´, whose australia´s ambivalence towards asia (2003) helped me to understand the sometimes difficult dialogue between the east and the west and provided me with an explanation of the way individuals behave. i also went to the national centre for hellenic studies and research, at la trobe university, where i was able to walk into the archives and admire many of the 80 resources they have. there i heard the name of “paradissis” for the first time, without realising how important that surname would be for me. that was one of the best semesters in my life, in fact, 2005 was one of the best years in my life: i met wonderful people who are still my friends, i learnt a lot and could do lots of research. lismore, the subjects and all my experiences there provided me with the energy and food for thought i needed to do my research, learn and focus in many different aspects. but this experience also allowed me to grow personally: i learnt to relax more, to look at “australia” with new eyes and i analysed some aspects of my life. after such an intense semester, i went back to majorca and started to work on all the information i had collected those months: i realised that there was an author of greek heritage born in china in 1923 who migrated to australia in 1949 and was living in melbourne: aristides george paradissis. i couldn´t believe it! i started to plan my next trip to australia to read his works, meet him and interview him: he was the summum of my research! late on the rainy afternoon of 19 july 2006, i landed in sydney, eager to read all the books written by a.g. paradissis. i had reserved them at mitchell library weeks before so, after sleeping the jet lag and with renewed energy, i headed for the state library. i spent the thursday, friday and saturday reading all his books and taking notes. i also found information about some films i needed, so on friday afternoon i headed for the australian film commission to enquiry about them. four days after landing, i took a flight to lismore, where my best friend in australia, katie, met me. that week i moved to byron bay to attend and participate in the third conference on landscapes and exile: “landscapes of exile: `once perilous, now safe´”. this conference was very special as many good friends and professors were there: dr. susan ballyn, dr. vin d´cruz, dr. baden offord, dr. terri-ann white and many, many others. i felt absolutely at home and welcomed. 81 i went back to lismore and started to research a.g. paradissis address and/or phone number. i found it and on thursday 3 august 2006 i dialled the number: no one answered, so i left a message. his wife, ada, phoned me later to let me know that dr. paradissis had died in late december 2005 but that i could visit her when i went to melbourne. she was very kind and generous, but i was very shocked by the news. a friend from the copy and print services, nathan, was the first to see my face and guess something was very wrong. after telling him the news, he suggested i go home and take the rest of the day off: i was blocked. that was a difficult moment for me but i had the support of my family, my friends and tutors, both in australia and in spain, who were also shaken by the news. during the four weeks i spent in lismore and byron bay, i could read many books and do research, but i also attended the byron bay writers festival, several conferences, a workshop on whiteness organised by the centre for peace and social justice at southern cross university and the herb and health festival. my friends and professors made my stay there fantastic and helped me to feel comfortable so i could make the most of such a brief stay. it is difficult to differentiate “professors” from “friends” sometimes because many of them are both: they taught me in class but also opened their hearts and minds, their offices and homes to me. the relation was beyond the academic. dr. d´cruz once explained to me that in india children used to live with their teachers so not only academic knowledge was passed onto them, but also their point of view towards the world and many social and cultural matters that cannot be dealt with in class due to the lack of time. this integral teaching was what i felt with them: every single conversation we had was a treasure. when i moved to melbourne, i spent ten days doing research and meeting my friends. there are many highlights of those days but the meeting with ada paradissis, my conversations with dr. vin d´cruz, my visit to the migration museum and the research i did at the australian film commission 82 were key moments. on a personal note, meeting my friends who were living there provided me with an insight view of the city i had forgotten. walking together through chinatown and the greek district, we discussed migration nowadays and two hundred years ago and i kept wondering about what melbourne will look like in 200 years´ time. when i left australia and moved back to mallorca i thought i would not be leading such an intense life but, again, i was mistaken. i am engaged in many different projects, amongst which the edition of this journal, and my hopes keep coming true! whilst in australia, i was offered a teaching position at a tertiary institution: ces alberta giménez, so as soon as i arrived home, i started to prepare the classes for the subjects i would teach. although none of my courses where fully on “australia”, i did introduce some linguistic and cultural references in my classes and was an invited teacher to give a class on the historical context of australia at the ces alberta giménez, on australian literature at the university of the balearic islands and on the film floating life at the university of barcelona. furthermore, i also gave a class on that film to journalist and audiovisual communication students at the ces alberta giménez. so many things were happening! i was teaching at a tertiary institution and i started to transmit my passion about australia to students, one of the goals i set before starting my phd. this year i am teaching “australia” as part of the curriculum in one my subjects and i will also be giving a lecture on greek-australian women writers to a non-specialised audience. all the people i have mentioned in this text were extremely kind and generous with their time, space and belongings: many gave me copies of their books, others invited me to stay at their places, to show me around, to have lunch with them, etc. some of them became like family and all of them remain in my heart. i consider myself a privileged person as i am able to do so much of 83 what i really want to do. slowly but steadily i am working on what i like: australia, and i hope i will be able to make a living out of it. before moving to australia in 2001 i knew the trip would change my life, but i did not guess australia, australians and all those who love “australia” would give me so much. thank you to all the people who have helped and supported me all these years, i hope that one day i might make you proud of me! references d´cruz, vin and steele, william. australia´s ambivalence towards asia. rev. ed. clayton: monash asia institute, 2003 (2000). kokkinos, ana. head on. 1998. australia. 104 min. law, clara. floating life. 1995. australia. 95 min. "mv tampa." wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 19 jun 2007. wikimedia foundation, inc. 28 jun 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=mv_tampa&oldid=139179710>. nickas, helen and konstandina dounis. re-telling the tale: poetry and prose by greek-australian women writers. melbourne: owl publishing, 1994. sen, ivan. beneath clouds. 2002. australia. 90 min. microsoft word gloria montero 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 152 myth and memory in the “queen of dreams” gloria montero abstract: aristotle said that where the historian tells us what took place, the poet tells us how it came about. more recently, gore vidal defined ‘memoir’ as how one remembers one’s own life as distinct from an autobiography which is history, requiring research into dates and facts which must be double-checked. memory and myth play an important role in memoir, allowing the writer to incorporate the real underpinnings of a story that has been lived through rather than simply the account of a sequence of actual events. it might also be argued that the patina of memory that coats the ‘memoir’, as distinct from autobiography, might indeed add its own dimension, taking the account of something very real into a more surreal space. what i call my rora stories published in spanish under the title todas esas guerras- all those wars – have never appeared as a collection in english but have been published separately in literary journals. these stories, the very closest i think i will ever come to writing autobiography, grew out of a need to explore my own background – so fragmented in terms of geography, history and culture – at a time when, as a writer, i felt the desperate need to find out exactly who this multicultural person with her mixed baggage might be. the queen of dreams, one of the stories in the collection, uses the memory of the child rora as she attempts to understand the drama and magic of sexuality and love in a grown-up, intolerant world at war. while the story explores the child’s personal history, it also reflects the psyche of australia at that particular moment. myth and memory in “the queen of dreams” aristotle is probably a good place to start this particular exploration with his definition of the historian as someone who tells us what took place and of the poet/narrator telling how it might have come about. however, when we add the extra dimension of myth and memory, we can begin to place an account of something very real into a much more surreal space. there are various ways of defining myth but i like jung's idea that myths reveal the archetypes of the collective unconscious. copyright ©2009 gloria montero. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 153 what i want to explore here with you today is how myth and memory reveal something of the collective unconsciousness, the psyche if you like, of australia at a particular moment, in my story “the queen of dreams”... from all those wars... a collection of stories set in north queensland where in the early decades of the 20 th century a large number of southern europeans, including many italians, had settled to work and subsequently to own the big sugar plantations in the area. by 1940, around 40% of the italian community in australia were naturalized and several thousand more had been born in australia. we must remember, of course, that there was no separate australian citizenship until 1949, so that all australians held british citizenship under the commonwealth. in this same period, mussolini insisted that italian emigrants, naturalized or not, were to remain italian. when in july 1940, italy entered the war on the side of germany, italians in australia were declared “enemy aliens”. some 4,700 were interned and their assets confiscated. as ilma martinuzzi o'brien points out in her book enemy aliens: the internment of italians in australia during the second world war, the social and legal position of italian immigrants in australia during the war was a fairly logical outcome of australian immigration and settlement policies and practice in the preceding years. as europeans, italians had easy entry into australia although it wasn't their preferred destination. most of them would have chosen to go to the united states. however, when immigration restrictions to the u.s. were imposed at the beginning of the 1920's, the italian population in australia began to increase considerably. the italians settled well in australia and many were attracted by opportunities in the sugar industry in north queensland. seasonal work harvesting sugarcane paid good money and before long many of the farms in the area were owned by italians. this caused concern among some australians who feared that italians would dominate the sugar industry, both as cane cutters and farm owners. despite the opportunities, however, for individuals, the period between the two wars was rife with political and industrial unrest and opposition to italian cane cutters increased. moreover, most italians in the sugar districts were restricted by what was known as british preference, where 75% of jobs were reserved for british workers. as naturalization didn't qualify you as british this posed a real restriction for italians. from time to time italian-born farm owners and workers would campaign for their rights and this would later be used as evidence against them of anti-british activity. when australia entered the second world war in 1939, the government enacted a national security act which gave it extraordinary wartime powers. the reason i feel it important to know and remember exactly what this meant is because historically the world seems to enter periods when an irrational paranoia takes hold that makes suspect any citizen easily identified as a foreigner. today, where a similar paranoia has become rampant in our multicultural world, i feel it imperative that we learn from the mistakes that have been made and use them to guide us. under the national security regulations in australia immigrants were classed as enemy aliens if they had not been naturalized. however, there was a regulation 28 which made it possible to consider naturalized british subjects of enemy origin as enemy coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 154 aliens, while regulation 26 provided the power to intern citizens whether they were natualized british subjects or australian-born. all of these people of “enemy origin” could be restricted on where they lived, where they travelled or worked, on their owning cameras, wirelesses, motorcars and carrier pigeons. it was an offence to speak other than english on the telephone and freedom of assembly was denied. in all, australia interned 4,721 people of italian origin, some of whom were naturalized british citizens and some australian-born. the majority were from north queensland. while it might be argued that these were reasonable security risks, ilma martinuzzi obrien cites documented evidence not publicly stated that shows how internment was considered a method of increasing public morale in support of the war effort by finding an enemy within. for anyone wanting to know more details of the italians considered enemy aliens during the war, i recommend highly o'brien's book published by connor court in 2005. however, here my interest is rather to show how memory can work to uncover jung's idea as myth displaying archetypes of the collective unconscious. and not only political and social archetypes, but those that dominate a country's psyche in terms of sexuality as well. the queen of dreams, one of what i call my rora stories from the collection all those wars, published in spanish and catalan as todas esas guerras and totes aquelles guerres, has never appeared as a book in english but the stories have been published separately in literary journals. these stories, the very closest i believe i will ever come to writing an autobiography, grew out of a need to explore my own background – so fragmented in terms of geography, history and culture – at a time when, as a writer, i felt the desperate need to find out exactly who this multicultural person with her mixed baggage might be. the stories use the memory of the child rora as she attempts to understand the drama and magic of sexuality and love in a grown-up, intolerant world at war. the queen of dreams down toward the railway station was the spaghetti factory. rinaldo benedetti reckoned well when he set up his bella ciao pasta proprietary limited. now macaroni and spaghetti were no longer confined to puny cellophane packages. an infinite variety of shells and tubes tumbled out unhampered into huge vats marked with extraordinary names: gnocchi, tagliatelli, manicotti, grandini, linguini, vermicelli. gradually, even people who had never got beyond an insipid plate of macaroni and cheese bought rinaldo's excellent pasta. even mrs. raleigh donoghue's cook had been seen buying broad lasagna strips while rinaldo beamed at her and urged her to try the grated parmigiano. "it's made from buffalo milk. special italian buffalo. it'll put some da-da-da-da into old donoghue's balls. tell the missus that," rinaldo laughed delightedly using both hands to demonstrate the power he was claiming for the stiff white slivers of grated cheese. the woman's pale face flamed a violent pink and her hand trembled as she held it out for her change. raleigh donoghue was the manager of the commonwealth bank. having his cook in the shop was like putting a royal seal on each package. everyone coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 155 agreed that whatever else you could say about them, the italians really knew how to make pasta. alongside the factory, famagusta –rinaldo benedetti's eldest daughter– set up her hairdressing salon. the tendency among the italians in the town to stick together was matched by the bitter rivalry of the various factions among them, be they of the same family or just people from the same village. fama's beauty salon did sporadic business for a couple of weeks and then catered almost exclusively to the benedetti family. between sisters-in-law and cousins there were enough heads to keep fama busy. but rinaldo's business sense was offended. the famagusta beauty salon closed down and the sign outside was replaced by a brand new one painted in the same red paint as had been used on the bella ciao awning next door. famagusta's boarding house had room for ten guests. almost immediately, the beds were filled and rinaldo's pride satisfied. he turned his attention back to his spaghetti factory and the newly-painted boarding house sign was neglected to peel in the scorching tropic sun. most of the boarders were drifters and canecutters from the south who stayed on in town drinking away the little hoard they had made during the short cutting season. although there were a few regulars as well. the rev. brandon spicer made his home at fama's. he always called rev. though no one was certain what church he belonged to or even what religion he was affiliated with. he just appeared in town one day with his paints, an easel and an old cardboard suitcase. the rev. kept to himself a lot of the time, disappearing for weeks at a time then arriving back, his old studebaker loaded with canvases which, according to fama, were nothing at all like the coast he said he had been painting. she claimed there were dozens of them stacked up along the wall in his room. if the rev. kept it up, she said, there would be no room in there for the bed. and as fama was the only person who ever got into the rev.'s bedroom, people had to take her word for it. henry wong, who had worked for years as cook at the golden horseshoe hotel until the day he just up and left without any explanation, got a room at fama's. henry spent all his time locked in his room until six-thirty in the afternoon. then he would put on his one grey suit with a tie, stick a paper carnation in his buttonhole and stroll over to the horseshoe's dining room where he would proceed to eat and drink everything on the menu, complaining when the steak was not tender or the roastbeef not sufficiently rare. after dessert, a couple of brandies and a cigar or two which henry would make last until the diningroom staff were already upturning the chairs on top of the tables to swab down the floors, he would stroll back to his room at the boarding house and lock himself in his room until six o'clock the following afternoon. for a while people speculated on how long he would be able to keep it up and what he did all by himself in his room. but after a few weeks henry's idiosyncrasies simply took up their own space in the life of the town and no one thought another thing about him. like many tropical towns, this one, too, attracted misfits from all over the world. the bizarre underpinnings of their lives were what held the fabric of the town together. then elvala and nando arrived. and they, too, ended up at famagusta's boarding house. the first rora knew they were in town was when she went on her bicycle one afternoon down where the railway bridge crossed the old creek. she liked to go down there and sit on the side of the bank waiting until a trolley came charging overhead across the high narrow tracks. the men working up the line used the trolleys to come back to town. they were nothing more than a platform on wheels with a long coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 156 handle that had to be pumped to move it along. as the small grooved metal wheels spun over the iron railway lines they made a whirring sound that echoed down into the creekbed below like the wail of a banshee. the regular grunt of the trolley handle pumping back and forth was the human element that put fear into the unreal eerie echoing song. rora would sit among the damp clumps of grass and ferns that rolled like green waves down to the miserable trickle of creek water and wait, her heart in her mouth, until she could see the trolley, tiny and shrill, suspended on the tracks above her. halfway across the steep gorge the regular screech of its wheels would turn into echoing screams that trembled up and down her spine with fear and excitement. it only lasted a moment; once the trolley was over the other side, the sound it made was regular and predictable again. that particular afternoon no trolley came screaming through the air above the narrow gully. rora sat and waited until her dress was wet through behind. to add to her frustration she got a flat tire and had to walk home wheeling the limping bicycle beside her. she turned into the main street where fama's boarding house stood on the corner. rinaldo benedetti and his brothers had built the place themselves. it was an attractive unpainted building left to weather with narrow slats of wood covering the open area under the house and stretching right up to the little porch above the open staircase. as rora passed she could not help but notice the two people leaning on the porch railing as if they were in a theatre and about to perform a scene. the woman seemed all bones. her red hair was tied back with an enormous green chiffon scarf. her dress looked like chiffon, too. and around her neck she was wearing a little furpiece with a flat head and beady eyes that glistened in the sun. it was a scorchingly hot day but neither the long narrow green sleeves nor the furpiece appeared uncomfortable nor out of place. rora thought she had never seen anyone so beautiful in her whole life. beside her, with an arm around her waist, was a small thin man with thick brown hair plastered down on his forehead. he wore a brown three-piece suit and a narrow moustache under his straight thin nose. later rora could never remember how it was that they started to talk to her. or she to them. it might simply have been because she stopped in her tracks, abruptly silencing the dull ugly noise the front wheel rim of her bike made as it grated beside her. "you're a melancholy child." the woman's voice was deep and husky. if rora had not been able to see her standing there looking fragile in her green chiffon dress she might have thought it was the man speaking. rora did not answer immediately. was "melancholy" something to be proud of? the woman threw back her head and laughed. it was a deep happy sound so rora laughed too. although it was a bit the way she used to laugh at sawdy's revue when she didn't understand the jokes. more or less to be polite. and also so they would not think she was dumb. there were so many things to remember from that first meeting. where had they come from? what did they do? why were they there? they had travelled the world over, they said, and had lived for so long out of a trunk they had forgotten what it meant to have a home. “we're circus folk," the man explained. and there was a respect in his tone that gave the high, light voice great dignity. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 157 he introduced himself as nando –the strongest man in the world. and the slight figure in the dark brown suit gave a little bow as he said it, as if he was receiving the applause of the whole town down below. "then i know who you are?" rora said breathlessly to the woman. the red painted lips looked delighted. "you're the beautiful lady that comes out to bow with him and hold all his things and..." elvala's laughter cascaded out over the balcony as she shook her red hair back and fro. it was nando who explained proudly that elvala was the queen of dreams. there was so much to talk about. rora asked them if they had ever come across pinhead the dwarf or amelita the fat lady but they never had. right at that moment they themselves were on vacation. they had just picked the town out of a hat, nando explained. or at least elvala had, he said. picking dreams out of a hat was her specialty. as he said it he reached up and planted a gentle kiss on elvala's white neck, and elvala laughed a light frothy laugh that had nothing at all to do with the sultry afternoon in the little tropic town, nor with the peeling paint on fama's boarding house sign, nor the incessant chug-chug of the machinery at the bella ciao spaghetti factory next door. after that day, rora passed by the boarding house at more or less the same time every afternoon. and elvala and nando would always be standing on the stoop of the tall front stairs as if they were waiting for her. they never came down and rora certainly never went up. her mother would have killed her if she had. but the very distance they had to communicate across added another dimension to their conversations. "they must be terribly famous," rora told the family dinner table. "they've been everywhere. paris. rome. i think they've even been to istanbul!" she wasn't sure where istanbul was but it sounded like a place that would definitively identify someone as famous. "what do you say their names are?" her mother asked nervously as if she were wondering what kind of influence istanbul might have on a person. "he's nando, the strong man. and she's elvala, the queen of dreams." her grandfather snorted at his end of the table. and her uncle hooted with delight. "elvala! that's a racehorse's name!" it was hard to get the family to take her new friends seriously and so rora, as much as she could, kept them to herself. but it made her mother uncomfortable to know the girl was spending so much time standing talking on the main street of the town to two strangers no one knew anything about. furthermore, the two newcomers did not seem to have any place of their own at all. nowhere they could fit in. or be catalogued. "they've got scrapbooks and newspaper clippings and all sorts of things they're going to show me." rora said it by way of proof. another grunt from her grandfather's end of the table. "don't you ever take it into your head to go inside famagusta benedetti's place," her mother threatened the girl. "not to see anything!" "but..." coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 158 the snort this time from her grandfather was directed at his daughter, rora's mother, as if she had no idea how a child ought to be brought up. so what could you expect? "but elvala said..." "elvala's a racehorse's name," her uncle hooted again. "she's the queen of dreams, you can tell she is. you can tell she's different. she can make the most extraordinary things happen, just by wanting them to. nando told me." this time, the grunts, the taunts, the squealing affirmations were like an orchestra tuning up around the dinner table. rora fought back tears and hardly ate anything at all. she wanted to tell them all she felt melancholy. she knew what it meant now, she had looked it up in the dictionary. but hers was a family that hardly admitted melancholy. more than ever, she felt that only nando and elvala, especially elvala, understood her at all. later though, when she and angelina were doing the dishes, her grandmother surprised her by suggesting: "why don't you ask those friends of yours to tea on sunday afternoon. you and i will be here alone and i'd like to meet them." nando and elvala said they would be delighted to come and for the next five days rora did little but plan the tea party. right down to the very last detail. she even convinced her grandmother to serve tea in the sitting-room. the sitting-room was a cramped, dim room off the hallway opposite her grandparent's bedroom. it seldom received the kind of formal visitors its darkness warranted. the pianola was in there, black and shiny, piled high with music rolls –"la cucuracha" and "amapola" getting equal space with "the student prince" and chopin's "minute waltz". to the right of the piano was angelina's curio collection: teasets and complete little kitchens, minuscule people in national costume, delicate crystal animals and impeccably crafted farm implements, sets of dominoes and clocks and swords and pistols and musical instruments. and not one of them more than two inches high! to rora, the curios were like a perfect little world her grandmother had furnished for herself. it was small enough to carry around with her so she would never have to leave any one part of it behind the way she already had left behind her several countries, friends, her father and three brothers. two great-grandparents looked imperiously down from the wall. rora was never certain how they came to be in the family. she hated the sternness in the faces that did not appear to be attached to anything but seemed to float disembodied in the middle of the oval wooden frames. nando and elvala were to come at five. but already at eleven rora was removing the heavy green brocade cloth from the small round table in the middle of the room. then for at least an hour the girl kept trying one after the other of the freshly starched embroidered tablecloths in the bottom drawer of the polished wardrobe in her grandmother's bedroom that served as a linen closet. some aesthetic sense that no one not even rora herself understood begged to be appeased. but one would hang too short, another have too narrow a crocheted border or be the teeniest bit worn right in the middle of the table to satisfy her. finally, she settled on a white linen cloth embroidered with enormous sprigs of flowers in each of the four corners. the little table positively glowed in the middle of the dim room. then out of the blue felt pockets in the polished wooden box that was kept on top of the curio cabinet the girl singled out one pretty silver teaspoon after another, and graceful dessert forks and bone-handled knives – not one of them ever used except on the most celebratory coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 159 occasions. although their guests were coming at tea-time, rora convinced her grandmother to serve coffee. it seemed somehow more in keeping with the exotic travelling all over the world that nando and elvala had done. angel cakes, their high pointed middles cut off and placed on a mound of soft white cream; a loaf of plum cake marbled with fruit and nuts; warm biscuits; even tiny sandwiches, their crusts cut off and filled with anchovy paste! angelina showed rora how to fold the napkins like crowns. it would be a perfectly wonderful tea party. by three o'clock rora had put on her new red dress with matching socks and could not stop herself from going in to the sitting room, again and again, to make sure everything was ready. the room more than met the challenge of the occasion. the musty darkness had changed miraculously into a cool shade around the glowing round table while between the doors where the room opened out to the wide verandah the white crocheted curtains billowed ently inwards like a series of soft sighs. at exactly ten past five rora saw them come past the yellow sign outside yee lee's grocery store next door. there, shimmering in the heat of a flaming sun that pulsated relentlessly even though it was already growing low in the sky, sashayed elvala in a filmy white dress. she wore spindly high white pumps and over her red hair she had thrown a triangle of white lace. beside her strode nando in his dark brown three-piece suit, his tan and white shoes stepping out smartly under the cuffs on his pants. arm in arm, they turned up through the wooden gate between the pink and red of the hibiscus bushes along the front fence and walked slowly up the long staircase to the wide verandah where rora and her grandmother stood waiting to greet them. the girl tugged at angelina's arm, her eyes wide with excitement and wonder as she watched the tall extravagant white figure get closer with each step. "she looks exactly like a bride!" she whispered. her grandmother did not answer and when rora looked up at her face angelina's eyes were narrowed slightly as she chewed at her lip exactly as she did when she was trying to work out what card to play at poker. "i think we're a teeny bit late. but then it isn't exactly polite to come right on time, is it?" elvala's deep musical voice ended in a tinkling laugh as she and nando reached the top step. when rora introduced them to her grandmother, elvala almost curtsied and nando drew his heels together and bowed low from the waist. "come on now," angelina said quickly in a no-nonsense voice and taking hold of elvala's arm steered her through the front door and into the dim little sittingroom. they all sat down on the high-backed wooden chairs that rora had spent a good half-hour dusting. the girl wanted to dash right out to the kitchen to get the tray with the coffee but angelina patted her arm as if to slow her down. "we can chat for a bit before we serve the coffee!" "oh, how divine! you're going to serve coffee. i'm a demon for it but here almost everyone drinks tea. i'll never get used to it!" elvala pushed back a curl of her red hair under the white lace with her strong long fingers. "nando says that's probably why i'm so restless at nights. all that caffeine!" and she threw back her head and a little peal of laughter rippled out of her. but nobody else laughed. not even nando. elvala's laughter this time sounded to rora like something breaking. when it died away it seemed as if the whole room was full of tiny broken pieces of something precious. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 160 "perhaps that coffee would be a good idea after all," angelina suggested to rora. the girl raced out of the room delighted to have something to do. "rora tells me you've done a lot of travelling." angelina said it smoothing her skirt over her knees. "all over the world we've been. well, most places anyway," answered nando. "we're circus folk, you see." "and where are you working now?" "well, right now we're kind of between shows, you might say." rora stood still in the middle of the kitchen listening to their voices. she was terribly afraid something else was going to break in the room. "this is the first time we've been invited to someone's home in such a long time." from the kitchen rora could hear the pleasure in nando's voice. it seemed to make things safer in the sitting-room. she picked up a pot-holder to take hold of the hot coffee pot. "do you know what it's like to have lived in so many countries?" he told her. "you feel as if you belong nowhere?" nando gave a high, nervous little laugh and rora heard her grandmother say something although she could not make out what it was. "i felt like that for years before i met nando. as if there was no place at all for me. only when nando came along was i able to be my true self again." elvala's voice sounded so strange that for a moment rora thought somebody else had come in and was talking. the girl stood still, the coffee pot in her hand, straining to hear. the deep husky voice became confidential. "as a woman, you'll understand." although rora was not in the room she could imagine elvala leaning over toward angelina and maybe even reaching out and touching her arm. "when i met nando he made me feel like a flower. have you ever been made love to so you feel like a flower?" the silence that followed elvala's comment was much louder than any sound anyone might have made. by the time rora came in with the coffee the three grownups were sitting stiffly in their seats in the middle of the awful absence of words hardly looking at each other. nando and elvala had not brought their press clippings and there did not seem a thing to talk about. they all sat there and drank their coffee and no one ate anything at all. when the guests left rora went straight to her room leaving angelina to clear the table on her own. aware the visit had not been a success, the girl was bitterly disappointed and determined to avoid her grandmother at all cost. she had a terrible feeling that if angelina spoke she might say something rora would never be able to forget. however, that night when her grandfather came home from work he brought such shocking news that nobody even thought of discussing anything else. rora hardly listened to them. and when she did she could scarcely understand a word they were saying. it was all about "enemies" and "aliens" and "possible sabotage". she left the table as soon as she could and went out and sat on the front steps to count the stars. but it was impossible to keep a proper tally: there were far too many glitters in the dark above her and rora kept forgetting exactly where she had started counting. she gave up finally and went into the kitchen where angelina was doing the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 161 dishes. when rora saw the hot tears sliding down her grandmother's cheeks and into the soapy water, she grabbed a tea-towel and began drying. however, there was no room in rora for concern about anyone else's sorrows, she was too full of her own. without understanding why, she felt that by treating elvala and nando as if they were just ordinary people she had somehow betrayed them. rora maintained her distance from angelina during the next few days and kept away from famagusta's boarding house as well. however, by friday she could no longer bear the uncertainty. she took her bike and walked back and forth for almost an hour in front of the tall wooden house. but no one appeared on the landing at the top of the steps. the house appeared quite empty. that weekend angelina told rora they were going to visit friends. rora was pleased to be going out although she feigned indifference. she had hardly spoken to angelina since elvala and nando's visit and she had no intention of acting interested in anything her grandmother might do. angelina was unusually quiet, too. she baked all morning, rolling out the dough for empanadas filling them with ham and green peppers. after they were taken out of the oven and had cooled, they were wrapped in waxed paper and packed in blue biscuit tins with pictures of old-fashioned ladies on them. rora and her grandmother each carried a tin and angelina put up her black umbrella to shade them from the sun. they walked all the way past famagusta's and the spaghetti factory, past the railway station and the hill beyond it. when they got to the showgrounds they turned to go in through the wide gates. rora was baffled. they only ever went to the showgrounds for the horse races on saturdays or in august when the annual show took over the big paddock with sideshows and local exhibitions. but it was october and there were no horse races all month. two soldiers with guns stood outside the closed gates. angelina showed them a piece of paper and the wooden gates were opened to allow them through. though not before the blue biscuit tins had been given a thorough inspection. inside the grounds, the frenetic activity made rora wonder for a moment if there might not be a special show being put on for private guests; trucks and people in uniform appeared to have taken possession of the entire area. the girl kept glancing at her grandmother hoping for some explanation but angelina did not give the impression she was there to enjoy herself. her grim face looked straight ahead as she walked toward the area where the cattle show was always held. as they got closer rora could see people inside the enclosure where barbed wire had been strung against the wooden slats. on the other side, men and women and children stood looking through it at them. dragging rora by the hand, angelina walked the length of the fence asking if anyone knew where the badieris were. mr. badieri worked with rora's grandfather at the mill. monica was in rora's class at school. "what are they doing here?" rora wanted to know. before angelina had time to answer, there was a yell from inside and mariella badieri came running to the fence screaming and crying as she clutched at angelina through the barbed wire. "tell them to let us go. we haven't done anything wrong, you know that. tell them to let us go home." angelina talked soothingly to the distraught woman but there seemed no way to stem the flow of tears from the wide dark eyes. and two-year-old luigi, in his mother's arms, seemed determined to cry as long as she kept it up. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 162 sandro badieri stood back beside the cattle sheds listening to his wife and angelina. he made no attempt to come over and speak to them but hung his head and peered at the ground. rora thought he looked ashamed. she wondered what he had done. monica stood beside her father staring across the fence at rora and her grandmother without smiling. inexplicably, rora began to feel ashamed herself. before visiting hours were over, angelina handed mariella her biscuit tin. the pretty old-fashioned ladies on the outside of the tin looked out of place in the cattle enclosure. rora was on the point of handing over her tin, too, when her grandmother told her quietly to hold on to it. "you've got other friends here. perhaps you should give it to them." and with her head angelina motioned to where two men sat in the shade of a corrugated iron lean-to. rora recognized nando immediately. he had his jacket and waistcoat off, but he was still wearing the striped pants from his brown suit. he had no tie on and the white shirt under his suspenders looked none too clean. "nando," she cried out happily. "what are you doing here? where's elvala?" the man looked surprised to find someone calling him and even more so when he saw it was rora there with her grandmother. he seemed undecided what to do for a moment and whispered something to his friend sitting on the ground beside him. when he came over to the fence angelina did most of the talking. "i didn't realize you were italians, too. it's shocking what they're doing to you. what have they told you?" "hardly anything," nando told her. just that all italian nationals are considered enemy aliens. there are rumours we're all going to be sent back to italy. but we don't want to go. we've lived so long here now. elvala was even born here." "is there anything we can do to help? anyone you want us to write to or inform about your situation?" angelina was eternally practical. but nando shook his head. "it's elvala i'm worried about." he looked back over his shoulder at the figure sitting on the ground in the shade. "she – she's not built for this kind of roughness. and they won't let her --" he looked back at angelina and then quickly down at rora. "it's very difficult for her." his thin voice petered out and rora felt he was going to cry. "i understand," angelina told him gently. "this is certainly no place for a lady." nando clutched her hand gratefully through the barbed wire. "give nando your empanadas, rora. maybe they'll help elvala to feel better." rora handed over the tin. she was dying to ask where elvala was but nando seemed anxious to get back to the man sitting in the shade beside the wall. he was a very tall man, thin and bony, with short blonde hair. he sat with his back to them and did not turn round, not even when nando went back and gave him the blue tin with the old fashioned ladies on it. "but they're for ---" rora began to call out. angelina took her hand and pulled her away. "come along now, that's enough for one day. let's go home." rora and angelina did not talk on the way home either, they just went straight through the big gates, past the armed guards and down on to the long main street to the big house with the gardens all around. rora kept thinking of the tall thin man and nando's arm around him as he gave him the pretty blue tin. it was like a riddle she felt she knew the answer to but could not understand. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 163 angelina made no attempt to explain until they were right inside the house. then she sat down on a chair and pulled rora onto her knee. for a few minutes she held the girl very close. "it's war, rora. it's always ugly and it reduces people to their barest selves. can you understand that?" rora was not at all sure that she did. they did not go back to the showgrounds until the following year when the annual show was on. everyone said it was nothing like a normal show; so many of the boys from the town were overseas and at least half the exhibits seemed to have something to do with the war effort, although there were the usual ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds and sideshows with freaks and fortune-tellers. around the cattle enclosure the barbed wire had all been taken down. there were no people inside anymore. now only bulls and docile cows with numbers around their necks stood inside the pens waiting to be judged. novelist, playwright, poet gloria montero grew up in a family of spanish immigrants in australia’s north queensland. after studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, then moved to canada where she continued her career as actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, tv interviewer, scriptwriter and producer of radio and film documentaries. at the end of the dictatorship, she made barcelona her home coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona looking back: inspiration to move on isabel alonso-breto, maria grau perejoan, kathleen hoyos, bill phillips and martin renes in this issue of coolabah we proudly present a new collection of essays which once again sprang from a conference jointly organised by the centre of australian studies at the university of barcelona, spain, and the centre for peace and social justice, southern cross university, australia. convened under the appealing catchphrase “looking back to look forwards,” the conference was celebrated at the university of barcelona from 10 to 14 december 2012, and brought together a good number of academics, writers and artists. during five not-so-cold december days we discussed a multiplicity of issues related to time, variously connected to its tricks, its virtues, its warnings, and its inescapable consequences. as on other occasions, the wealth of conversations responded to the resonant interdisciplinarity which characterizes the annual conferences organized by these two committed institutions. we would like to praise here the inexhaustible energy susan ballyn and baden offord invest in putting together these events, so endearing while remaining rigorously academic. martin renes, co-director of the centre for australian studies and co-editor of the present volume, deserves to be mentioned along with them. his craft in juggling with shifting panels and timetable changes due to tricks of the weather, funding surprises or flight scheduling is admirable. sincere thanks to the three of them. we live in a period when space, and a whole set of cognate or related terms such as place and displacement, location and dislocation, home and exile, travel and movement, territory and deterritorialization, locality and glocality, and the like, seem to have taken hold of our lives. those who are neither migrants nor diasporic nor exiles nor refugees nor immediate descendants of such peoples are becoming increasingly uncommon. at both experiential and theoretical levels, as doreen massey (2005) has emphasized, space is becoming more and more of an arena for research and reflection. coolabah issue n. 11, edited by bill lloyd and ray norman, and significantly entitled placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness… geography and cultural production, testifies to this turn in cultural studies, occurring, perhaps, at the expense of the simultaneous axis of time. and this is what makes a conference with a title like “looking back to look forwards” all the more relevant. necessary even. precisely because of the overwhelming importance attached in our days to the spatial, we need to recall the great impact that time has on our lives. time reveals our destinies: as individuals, as members of small-scale communities such as family or neighbourhood, and as members of copyright©2014 isabel alonso-breto, maria grau perejoan, kathleen hoyos, bill phillips and martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona bigger collectives such as ethnic or national ones. time definitely looms large in our human existence. history and memory are two ways of framing time which enable us to take stock of who we are at each of these levels. we could never think of such a crucial concept as identity without examining the temporal dimension, which tells us a great deal about ourselves. it tells us much about who we are at present because it reminds us of who we were in the past and, importantly, allows us to determine who we want to become in the future. hence the necessity to look back in order to look forwards. also, to repeat an old truism echoed among critics such as rey chow (1998), knowing about history is a means of not repeating past errors. as on previous occasions, given the thematic variety of the articles, we have decided to present them in alphabetical order, following authors’ surnames. readers may rehearse several possibilities of cross-arrangements, since topics such as colonialism and postcoloniality, oppression, cultural and educational politics, memory and history, aboriginality, and others, can be traced in several pieces. we leave it to them to arrange the menu following their own preferences. a possible way of arrangement, however, is proposed here, which may help the readers’ choice, or just boldly lead them through the collection. it often happens in cultural studies journal issues that most of the articles are about literature. this coolabah issue is no exception. in “the rhetoric of inferiority of african slaves in john fawcett’s obi; or, three-fingered jack (1800) re-evaluated in charlie haffner’s amistad kata-kata (1987),” ulrich pallua looks backwards to discuss slave narratives and a contemporary revision. maria grau perejoan’s pattern in “the grass that they cut and trample and dig out and sprouts roots again”: the spiritual baptist church in earl lovelace’s the wine of astonishment” is different but not altogether dissimilar, in that she analyses a narrative that challenges colonial predicaments in some unfortunate ways stretching into post-colonial times. on her part, in “beyond nation? ludwig leichhardt’s transnationalism,” katrina schlunke offers, through the figure of this colonial prussian explorer of northern australia, an examination of what “australian” meant in the past, means now and could mean in the future. without leaving australia or literature, john ryan’s “memory: the theatre of the past” discusses gail jones’s novel sixty lights, and links once again the past with the present. still on pacific waters, yasue arimitsu’s “nation, identity, and subjectivity in globalizing literature” takes us to japan exploring transnational identities in authors and works, while in “pacific studies: quo vadis?” anne holden rønning delves into transnational concerns in a paper focusing on new zealand literatures which nonetheless extends to the politics of reading and teaching on european soil. back in australia, the global and transnational dimensions remain in catalina ribas segura’s “language and bilingualism in antigone kefala’s alexia (1995) and the island (2002),” where she discusses the nuanced work of this greek-australian author. and from one multicultural nation to another, a swift geographic loop takes us to the other side of the pacific with kathleen hoyos’ “canadian multiculturalism, same as it ever was?” where once again literature is deployed to unpack social matters of relevance. the literature block closes with maricel oró piqueras’s “memory revisited in julian barnes's the sense of an ending”, which takes us to british territories of memory highlighting the crucial role of time in the (trans)formation of identities, while bill phillips and marlene mendoza’s piece “the dead walk” analyses the deep implications of the figure of the zombie in literature and media. two articles on aboriginal culture open the next, miscellaneous block, which to begin with also brings us back to australia. mitchell rolls’ “the northern territory intervention: the symbolic value of ‘authentic’ indigeneity and impoverishment, and the interests of the (progressive) coolabah, no.13, 2014, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona liberal left” audaciously explores issues such as authenticity and authority in indigenous communities, and virginia watson’s “colonialism’s past and present: performing history at a gold rush theme park,” in its turn, describes a construction of the past that erases any trace of indigeneity. moving on to more theoretical stances, eloise hummell’s “standing the test of time – barth and ethnicity” develops a nuanced analysis of the notion of ethnicity, crucial in the area of cultural studies and instrumental to understand the contemporary world. two pieces on education close the list of articles. in “the world of bullying: an overview and a reflexion,” gerard matinez criado offers a factual account of this unfortunately worldwide reality. finally, alfredo martínez expósito’s “vested interests: the place of spanish in australian academia” is an exploration of the situation of spanish studies in the island continent that echoes the connections between spain and australia which the ub centre for australian studies represents. to these fourteen articles add three appetizing extras: the presentation “applying a strait bat to living,” by nufarm food expert francesc llauradó, also part of the conference, and two book reviews. one of them, by paloma fresno, assesses a recent study of yvonne du fresne’s fiction. in the other one, as a beautiful closure, john barnes courageously appraises two massive critical collections on the works of henry lawson. a special issue of coolabah (n. 9, 2012) and the “looking back to look forwards” conference were dedicated to the memory of bruce bennett, and we would like to dedicate these pages to him as well. a few days before this introduction was written, nelson mandela passed away. the organising committee of the forthcoming cea-cpsj congress, “watershed,” to be celebrated in january 2014, has decided to dedicate this event to his memory. may nelson mandela’s life and deeds inspire us to look creatively and generously forwards. works cited ballyn, susan, ed. 2012. bruce bennett in memoriam. coolabah 9. boyd, bill and ray norman, ed. 2013. placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production. coolabah 11. chow, rey 1998. ethics after idealism: theory-culture-ethnicity-reading. bloomington: indiana university press. massey, doreen 2005. for space. london: sage. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 dark places: the movement of the image (thoughts on the work of veronica brady) gail jones university of western sydney gail.jones@westernsydney.edu.au copyright©2017 gail jones. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. (i) fra angelico’s painting, pious women at the tomb (1440), depicts four tragically bewildered women looking for the absent body of christ. one holds her hand at her brow like an explorer, and is peering down into his marble casket as into a vastly deep well. three others stand by, sadly dumfounded. behind the women, floating in air, is an image of the risen christ, autonomous, autotelic, blazing in a mystical disc. but the women all look the wrong way and are left bereft. an angel points to the vision, but still their gaze is misdirected. a dominican monk kneels in reverence before the empty space; a passage of gospel script instructs as to the correct sign to read; still, the four women stare into darkness. the image, one might say, is essentially of mistake: of assuming emptiness and absence, and of missing meaning. the image asks, what is the remainder of any death? how might secure significance be made? what signs offer consolation; what immaterially might make sense? bruno latour uses this image, among others, to make a distinction between idolatry and iconophilia: idolatry he defines as giving entire attention to the visual, as if this might offer unmediated access to the truth; iconophilia, on the other hand, “respects … not the image, but the movement of the image”; it respects “the series of transformations for mailto:gail.jones@westernsydney.edu.au coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 which each image is only a provisional frame” (latour 1998, pp 418-430, p 421; miller 2013). this distinction is relevant beyond the art-historical: it is an example of including what we might call an ‘inferred’ dimension, generously and openly, in all forms of knowledge in science, philosophy, art and social theory. science, in particular, can learn from art. latour recommends “multiplying mediators”, so that in our understandings, as in our readings of paintings, we consider movements of disembodiment and reembodiment, we imagine competing vectors in the construction of meaning, we admit the non-realist and inexact qualities in all things. latour uses obdurate terms like “information transfer” to describe the circuitry of fra, but he’s moved by its indirection and complication, and believes too that these are the basis for reconstructing an open model of knowledge. the woman with her hand to her brow, peering into enigma, is emblematic of the limit of material —let us say, positivist— signs; yet also human, deeply human, in the intensity of her searching. (ii) iconophilic in bruno latour’s sense, much of veronica brady’s intellectual life worked with the principles of fra angelico’s vision: the negotiation of puzzled being, the deep mystery of invisible presence, the ways in which art speaks in oblique and multiple registers. peering into the darkness. intuiting, not seeing directly. the human condition of stranded yearning after unverifiable transcendence. veronica spoke robustly of “the idol of the answer”1. she considered questions to be much more important than answers and her manner, though often publically hyperdeclarative, was more privately, and more secretly, interrogative. when she chose her name as a loreto sister – veronica the attraction was in part to a flimsy, even uncertain vision, and the idea of bearing of witness to physical suffering. she disdained sentimentalism, but was engaged by the charm of imagery. and in her own case, the idea of contact with the holy that was at once physical and metaphysical. the trace, a notion she loved, seemed to her to say something essential about how we apprehend mystery and are in a necessary relation of existential humility to the larger dramas of the world. the so-called ‘master of saint veronica’ produced this image in about 1420, ‘st veronica and the sudarium’, showing a modest and lovely woman holding up a gigantic christ head on a veil. now in the national gallery in london, i lodge on this painting among the many perhaps because its proportions are so endearingly odd and its saint’s face so endearingly distinctive. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 (iii) veronica brady’s heterodoxy centred on the trace. the undoing of certainty, kenosis as a mode of knowing: these were the cherished principles of her own version of faith. her commitment to australian literature was defined by essentially religious questions – but not doctrinally so (indeed she was ferociously anti-doctrinal), rather by the manner in which imaginative life produces and contemplates images of being and nothingness. drawn to the symbolic, she was devoted in particular to the work of patrick white, whom she held to be sui generis (her term) and paradigmatic. the material/immaterial nexus, so central to white’s imagining, was for veronica brady a touchstone to her own theology. she spoke sincerely of his work as a ‘theological training’, even as she described the writer himself as cranky, mischievous and sometimes perversely cruel. further, she wrote of white as engaged in ‘saintly’ narrative and like the jewish theologian edith wyschogrod, a congenial influence in her later years, the heuristic terms narrativity, corporeality, textuality and historicality were the basis for reading as moral philosophy (1990, p.5). citing both saints and postmodernism and an ethics of remembering2, she found in these books an eclecticism not unlike her own, and a philosophical preoccupation with similar themes. the central concern was antique and inveterate: the question of literature as a vehicle for spiritual values. but so too, and crucially, was the matter of ideology. in australia veronica brady was a public figure of leftist politics and a fearless activist, aware of the economy within which power accrues to the privileged and the wealthy. her sympathies were radical, with the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the neglected and the suffering; and religious vocation was the ineluctable centre of her values. liberation theology, simone weil, the work of philosophers who dealt with the idea that meaning might be beyond fixity (like derrida), 3 her nietzschean conviction that present age requires a “transvaluation of values”4 —these were the essential fixtures of her intellectual life. how valiant a thinker, and how principled. how bold and impertinent in her hermeneutical heterogeneity. i’m reminded here of roland barthes: “the critic does not ask to be granted a ‘vision’ or a ‘style’, but only to be granted the right to a certain discourse, which is an indirect discourse.” (1972, p. xii). those who knew veronica hear her voice in her prose and recognize the strenuous practice of a particular discourse. she possessed key terms and notions; but was always alert to new theories and difficult ideas, so that the epistemological grounds of her argument were flexible, variable and sometimes also a little vague. veronica’s championing of the cause of indigenous australians (and their literature) is well known5. apart from the wish to honour and make known aboriginal writing, she wanted also to accuse, to express dismay, and to insist on white culpability. settler australia, she maintained, was constitutively racist and founded on an anxious drama of psychogeography: the way most settlers then and now chose to deal with it [frontier violence], was to deny their situation and repress any sense of guilt, projecting it instead outwards, onto their victims. in this way … the aborigine came to be figured as the wild man, the embodiment not only of all that is savage, that is uncivilized, but also evil. psychologically, this projection was helpful. after the trauma of leaving home and the long, difficult and dangerous voyage and, coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 faced with an equally difficult and dangerous environment, the precise content of their own humanity no longer seemed clear. but at least they could assure themselves they were “not like that”, like the aborigines. (burderlean 2007, p. 128) versions of this argument appear throughout her work. most telling here is the phrase “psychologically, this projection was useful”. indebted initially to jung (whom she later repudiated), she relied mostly on a naturalized freudian lexicon —repression, projection, sublimation; also the use-value, as it were, of certain forms of displacement. unusually perhaps for a catholic thinker, she also located evil in self-interested projection and alienation and deplored the cultural capital possessed by those whom, with a wry and canny smile, she liked to call ‘the pseudo-religious’. her models were white’s characters —the banal and platitudinous mrs flack and mrs jolly from riders in the chariot, mr and mrs merrivale in the fringe of leaves; the smugly ignorant mr bonner in voss (brady 2005). bonner, the financier of voss’s journey, was a man who “was inclined to jingle his money in his pocket, for fear that he might find himself still apprenticed to the past” (p.17); this tiny detail also draws attention to the allegiance of capitalism and colonialism and the deathly fetish of money veronica saw everywhere in action. one of her articles was entitled “polyphonies of self” (1994, pp. 30-37); the metaphor of white’s autopoesis of faceted flaws is referenced here; likewise her belief that monoculture is fascistic and that self must be grounded in multiplicity. she was fond of quoting particular passages which made clear the false consciousness and anxiety of those who are spiritually afraid: safe in life, safe in death, the merchant [bonner] liked to feel. in consequence, he had often tried to calculate, for how much and from whom, salvation might be bought and, to ensure his last entrance would be made through the last cedar door, had begun in secret to subscribe liberal sums to all denominations, including those of which he approved. (p.349) mystery is that which is incalculable and which has no profit, or sum. convinced of the manichean allegory (janmohamed 1983), veronica saw in white’s satirical portrait of colonial mentality a broader social diagnosis of mistaken value. those who see only material signs are stranded in a depleted symbolic order. (iv) coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 against status, wealth, the comfortable life, veronica recommended spiritual and intellectual ‘discomfort’. although she called herself a ‘social-materialist’, she believed the immaterial, generally speaking, to have vital energy and agency and was enthralled to both the eschatological and mystical promise of the numinous. materiality itself depends on invisible entities, of which consciousness, the innerness that incessantly moves outward, is the human sign; and mysticism is the glorious possibility of transcendental semiosis. theologically, it is interception that defines the link. not will. not desire. not spiritual practice or enterprise. veronica often cited david marr’s account of patrick white’s fall into the muck on his farm at castle hill, cursing the god he did not believe in then being “interrupted … by a grandeur too overwhelming to express” (2003, p. 153). loss of freedom, abjection, unconcealment, a crucially transvaluing shift in scale: these were the forms of a true epiphany. in the via negativa tradition to which veronica was allied, it was stan parker’s loneliness at the end of the tree of man, during which he spits into the dirt at the feet of an evangelist, the convoluted suffering of the four elect outcasts in riders in the chariot, elizabeth hunter’s lear-like unmaking and dissolution in the eye of the storm, that offered moments of philosophical instruction. one might say these were the icons of her australian model of faith. “in white’s work,” she wrote, “discomfort rather than comfort is the sign of god’s presence.” (2003, p. 153) that she matched her christian sensibility to his image repertoire does not mean she was wholly uncritical; but certainly, she considered white a theologian-in-narrative. even more than discomfort, veronica believed in what she nominated ‘the darkness of god.’ if one must simply endure, and wait on interception, then religion, like interpretation, must submit to contingency and over-determined possibility. she was among the first critics to notice how profoundly white’s writing relied on images of light and darkness. writing on ellen roxburgh, captive of aborigines in colonial australia in the fringe of leaves, she suggests: women perhaps know more of this darkness, bodily as well as socially … women’s bodily existence makes us more aware of our own finitude and of our subjection to physical necessity, more aware of the need for the descent into the darkness of life if new life is to emerge. (2003, p. 157) veronica has in mind here the moment of ellen’s cannibalism, constructed through motifs of communion and sanctification. that she endorses white’s wish to make holiness of necessity is entirely within the frame they mutually recommend, an insistence that ‘civilization’ has a shadow side that might be the route to other forms of being and knowing. careful to avoid primitivism or some ‘use-value’ casting of aboriginal australians into spiritual guides, both the critic and the writer risk the insidious implication that abjection is finally the measure of self-realization –or what has been identified as the supplanting of indigenous rights and presence with that of the ‘white indigene’.6 what is interesting is the degree to which both are in concord; unfashionable spiritualism informs white’s and brady’s vision of australian meaning and neither resile from its vigorous defence. in part this was a critique of australian secularism: religion, it seems, is a scandal that refuses to go away, even in the most secular of societies … the impulse continues and must be acknowledged and lived through, especially perhaps in a secular society since it has to do with negative and midliminal experience… as common to the unbeliever as the believer.7 coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 unbelievers and believers alike are subject to the ‘impulse’ to recognize and assess ‘negative’ experience. when veronica brady located her own search in the field of australian literary studies, she sought to affirm the study of language and narrative —and the movement of images— as an endeavour that might, with due humility, enter and know fields of darkness. (v) there are no adequate summaries of the lives or thoughts of others. there are no accounts possible of the histories of our deepest affections. those we love remain illimitable, like the sky beyond the window. and inadequation (the non-realist, the inexact) is also the condition of bereavement: words are spoken, memories rehearsed, there are exchanges of sorts, there are even modest retrievals and small confirmations – ‘yes, i remember, yes, she once said that’ but the lost are always beyond, becoming stylized as we speak of them. so it is the poetic, more properly poesis, to which i turn. veronica adored poetry, above all that of francis webb, judith wright, rainer maria rilke and wallace stevens. a few lines of stevens come to mind: here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. we feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. within its vital boundary, in the mind. we say god and the imagination are one... how high that highest candle lights the dark. (1982, p. 524) for veronica the idea that god is also the faculty of imagination is not sacreligious, nor does it discount what she thought of as the utter alterity of her god. another kind of modernist, stevens considers the gentle, ‘intensest rendezvous’, not interception or interruption. wallace’s speaking voice is located in the calm repose of the dim room at dusk, feeling ‘the obscurity of an order’, apprehending settling presences; veronica is equally attracted to a rougher vision and one emphatically local. there’s another kind of indwelling and transfiguration —in the natural world, and in disorder. in the fringe of leaves we find this moment: there was once an occasion when she fell down, scattering skywards a cloud of ashen parrots. she would have continued lying on the ground and perhaps become her true self: once the flesh melts, and the skeleton inside it is blessed with its final articulate white, amongst the stone, beneath the hard sky, in this country to which it can at last belong. (p. 281) all shadows are black. all bones are white. this is holy whiteness, ‘the final articulate white’ of death. as far as i know veronica never commented on this moment in her favourite novel. but it seems to me an apposite point at which to conclude the imagining of her imagining, and the giving of honour to her important, still-persisting work. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 images: (i) fra angelico 1440. pious women at the tomb, retrieved from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/fra_angelico__resurrection_of_christ_and_women_at_the_tomb_(cell_8)_-_wga00542.jpg (ii) master of saint veronica (ca. 1395-1415). saint veronica with the sudarium, retrieved from: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/master-of-saintveronica-saint-veronica-with-the-sudarium (iii) caption: patrick white wearing the wooden cross veronica had given him, retrieved from: https://meanjin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/screen-shot2015-06-22-at-3.29.27-pm-e1434951043718.png works cited: barthes, roland 1972. preface, in critical essays, trans. r. howard. evanston, il: northwestern university press. brady, veronica 1994. caught in the draught: on contemporary australian culture and society. sydney: angus and robertson. --2003. ‘a grandeur too overwhelming to express: patrick white’s vision of god’, in david neville and phillip matthews, eds., faith and freedom: christian ethics in a pluralist culture. adelaide: australian theological forum press 2003) p153. --2005. ‘god, history and patrick white’, antipodes, vol. 19, no. 2, special issue: the sacred in australian literature, pp. 172-176. buderlean, alma 2007. otherness in the novels of patrick white. frankfurt: peter lang. caputo, john d. 1997. the tears and prayers of jacques derrida: religion without religion. bloomington, in: indiana university press. griffiths, gareth 2009. ‘open spaces, contested places: writing and the fundamentalist inscription of territory’, in a. stähler and k. stierstorfer, eds. writing fundamentalism. newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, pp. 55-76. hansson, karin 1984. ‘the indigenous and the metropolitan in a fringe of leaves’, world literature written in english, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 178-189. ingram, penelope 2001. ‘racializing babylon: settler whiteness and the “new racism”’, new literary history, vol. 32, no 1, pp. 157-17. janmohamed, abdul r. 1983. manichean aesthetics: the politics of literature in colonial africa. amherst, ma: university of massachusetts press. latour, bruno 1998. how to be iconophilic in art, science and religion, in peter gallison and caroline a. jones, eds., picturing science, producing art. hove, uk: psychology press, pp. 418-430; p. 421. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/fra_angelico_-_resurrection_of_christ_and_women_at_the_tomb_(cell_8)_-_wga00542.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/fra_angelico_-_resurrection_of_christ_and_women_at_the_tomb_(cell_8)_-_wga00542.jpg https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/master-of-saint-veronica-saint-veronica-with-the-sudarium https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/master-of-saint-veronica-saint-veronica-with-the-sudarium https://meanjin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/screen-shot-2015-06-22-at-3.29.27-pm-e1434951043718.png https://meanjin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/screen-shot-2015-06-22-at-3.29.27-pm-e1434951043718.png coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 miller, adam s. 2013. speculative grace: bruno latour and object orientated theology. new york: fordham university press. o’neill, ray j. 2010. ‘moments of grace and blessing: rites and rituals in the process of healing’, in e. burns coleman and k. white, eds., medicine, religion and the body. leiden & boston: brill, pp. 147-167. schaffer, kay 1995. in the wake of first contact: the eliza fraser stories. cambridge: cambridge university press. stevens, wallace 1982. ‘final soliloquy of the eternal paramour’, wallace stevens: the collected poems. new york: vintage, p. 524. white, patrick 1983 (1957). voss. london: penguin. --1987 (1976). a fringe of leaves. london: penguin. wyschogrod, edith 1990. saints and postmodernism: revisioning moral philosophy. chicago: chicago university press, p. 5. wyschogrod, edith 1998. an ethics of remembering: history, heterology and the nameless others. chicago: chicago university press. 1 i was reminded of this phrase when i saw veronica cited in gareth griffiths’ ‘open spaces, contested places: writing and the fundamentalist inscription of territory’ (2009, p 58). 2 wyschgorod was a scholar principally of levinas, but also dealt with many other thinkers, heidegger, derrida, delueze and sloterdijik among them, and connected themes of alterity, catastrophe and the need for regeneration of the spirit. 3 john d. caputo’s the tears and prayers of jacques derrida: religion without religion was one of veronica’s favourite books. 4 this was her often used phrase. veronica agreed with nietzsche’s critique of institutional christianity as in some ways decadent, corrupt and in need of reform. 5 see for example the essays in her caught in the draught: on contemporary australian culture and society (1994). this volume includes essays on mabo, bill neidjie, and indigenous writing more generally. 6 see also kay schaffer’s careful point-of-view analysis of the indigene in a fringe of leaves in in the wake of first contact: the eliza fraser stories (1995). 7 veronica brady in caught in the draught: on contemporary australian culture and society, cited in ray j. o’neill’s ‘moments of grace and blessing: rites and rituals in the process of healing’ (burns coleman and white 2010, pp. 149). bio note: gail jones is a novelist and short story writer and teaches at the university of western sydney. she is the author of two collections of short stories and six novels —the last one, a guide to berlin, was published recently. three times shortlisted for the miles franklin award, her books have won numerous literary awards: the nita b. kibble award and the fiction prize in the western australia premier’s book awards with her first novel. then she was in the longlist for the man booker prize in 2004 with sixty lights and was longlisted in two occasions for the orange prize. she also was shortlisted for the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 international impac dublin literary award, the victorian premier´s literary award and the nsw premier´s literary award. microsoft word coolabah 1 zamora.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.56-65 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona destination: down under anna zamora edu works as an engineer in a multinational company recently established in barcelona. the monotony of his routine does not bother him; at work from monday to friday, going out friday and saturday night with a group of unmarried thirty-five-year old friends, and sunday lunch at his parents’, overcoming his hangover. in the past, he used to be a non-stop traveller, and had been to everywhere in europe, most of asia, and a handful of countries in africa and south america. his apartment is adorned with furniture, carpets, pictures and masks from the most exotic corners of the earth, and he loves regaling his guests with the stories of their origin. studying abroad in australia encouraged him to travel from place to place, as a free spirit… down under he realized the world was out there, waiting for him. his nine-to-five job doesn’t allow him much time to think about past trips, but a voicemail from a friend brought back many memories: “hi there, this is sara. i was wondering what you’re doing tomorrow evening, ‘cause i’m flying down under next week and you are the only person i know who has been there, and uhm… i’m planning my trip right now, but i’ve no clue about how many days i should spend in each of the one thousand spots i’d like to visit... so could you give me a call sometime soon? take care”. standing by the answering machine, a thousand scattered thoughts came back to edu’s mind. australia had been a turning point in his youth; a reference to personal growth, and a place where he could settle down. copyright ©2007 anna zamora. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 57 shit man, sara is going to australia. i wish i could have had someone to give me the low-down before i went. i had no idea where i was going until i saw: “welcome to melbourne international airport”. reading bill bryson’s book on the plane was definitely not a good idea. that book scared the hell out of me when it talked about all the venomous snakes and scorpions running around the country, oh boy… i’d better tell sara to try kangaroo sausage, vegemite, carlton draught, vb, wine from the south and cadbury chocolates! i bet she will love the great barrier reef, the blue mountains and the twelve apostles, and who wouldn’t, right? ...mmm, those days… and where might nico be now? and pam? and that bunch of vegan hippies working for amnesty international? i haven’t got one of those group emails from them for a while… will sara be up for coffee tomorrow? they met at the cafè de les delícies, in rambla del raval. to summarize australia’s touristy spots was not an easy task for edu. his year in melbourne had been a life-changing experience, not even close to sara’s vision of a holiday destination. barcelonians in general do not go to australia because the ticket is too expensive and there isn’t much publicity about the country. the interest of sara and edu was unusual, and perhaps this common denominator was the major force binding their friendship. going to australia never crossed edu’s mind until he was desperately looking for a program to study abroad. he was not assigned to a college in france, italy, or alternative erasmus destinations, but to la trobe university in melbourne. he started writing a diary before leaving spain, and against all expectations, he writes an entry every now and then. i am not sure how much i will write because i am such a lazy ass when it comes to writing. i have almost done the packing, and i still cannot believe that all the bureaucratic hassle has actually ended. i am “ready to go” to the other side of the world. if i had known that picking an australian university amongst all the other study abroad options involved such a long paper trail i would have rather gone somewhere else, even to portugal. two months of filling in papers, and sending money to the embassy and 58 university, and don’t you dare miss any of these papers if you don’t want to get stuck in some airport shit hole somewhere between europe and asia. once you have jumped through all these hoops, you still have to pay over a thousand euros for an endless flight. mum and dad are nervous because they think i can’t do it. they plan to call me every two days, and i can only hope that something will eventually stop them. it’s already midnight; i hope you don’t mind being checked in at the airport. the flight from barcelona to melbourne was certainly long. the first impression he got was that australia represented a meeting point between england and asia, organized in a north american urban landscape; the majority of the population had distinctive multicultural features, but the spread of the roads and the boroughs of the city reminded him of the united states and canada, where he had previously been on vacation. ethnically, and in contrast to spain, australia was homogeneously heterogeneous. throughout the first month, edu heard the names of a dozen little countries between asia and oceania for the first time, and on many occasions he thought of a conversation he had had a long time ago with a friend of his, who told him that every time you meet somebody from a different country it feels like travelling to that country. australia is evidence of the utopia of multiculturalism. it feels like being in the future, and i like it. for some reason i had thought that australians were just like tanned brits, who were laid back and loved drinking beer. but this is not the case, indeed, anyone could be australian. i don’t feel like a foreigner at all (this is not france!), only when i screw up with the english grammar, which is more often that i expected… i blame it on the clumsiness of my friends with foreign languages, which makes my english stand out for no reason. so far, i have managed to express myself, but i am not sure about my future presentations and papers for class… at least i know there are many other international students who (i hope) will be as concerned with their english as me, and this is a comforting feeling, somehow. 59 the university campus was bright and sunny, and edu was living in a room facing a pond, next to a french guy named nicolas. during the first two weeks, he built a multicultural group of college friends with whom he could share his doubts about youth, mainly drugs and sex. coming from multiple cultural backgrounds, the voice of the experienced did not always provide the most useful piece of advice… and it did not take more than two months until edu started to feel something for his next door neighbour. it is common knowledge that the first homosexual love is always hard to manage, and edu was one of those shy types that relied on alcohol to make a move. as they spent more time together, it was increasingly hard for edu to deal with the fact that nico liked him just as a friend. damn, i like him. i know that dad shivers anytime somebody jokes about my homosexuality but i love nico. i would hold him right now if i could… pam told me that he gives good hugs and i bet he does, with those shoulders… are you kidding me? i never thought i could develop a feeling for a french guy from a ridiculous cold town known for being the place of origin of mustard. i can only talk about my feelings with 60 pam; she is the only person who is aware of how much i enjoy being close to nicolas. i thought women were complicated, but shit man, guys can be just as full of twists and turns! this coming weekend is lotzi’s birthday, and nico insisted that everyone get him a group present. i told him i would go to buy it with him… so i can get the chance to spend the whole afternoon together downtown, i can’t wait! nico never found out about edu’s feelings. nicolas was too blind to realize such things, and edu was too shy to deal with them. the situation was too much for edu, so he started looking for a place off campus to avoid seeing nico and feeling miserable. his difficulties encouraged him to start smoking again. he was looking for an alternative place where nico would not show up all the time, either cooking or getting out of the shower, and not persistently remind him of his bad management of personal issues. eventually, he found a room in the area of northcote, a residential suburb increasingly popular among college students, halfway between the university campus of bundoora and the city centre. he moved into a shared house with an australian biologist called mike, and a hindu computer scientist that everyone called sunny and he never bothered to ask why. they had a yard with a promising barbeque grill with which to enjoy the beginning of the summer. i am moving out, i have to. this will be the best way to stop seeing and thinking about him all the time. these guys living in northcote look alright. i mean, whatever, they look chill, so we will get along... but what really bothers me about nico is that he has absolutely no clue about how much i dream about him, travelling around australia, showing each other our mutual desire to be together, we would be a cute couple, wouldn’t we? and then i talk to pam and she crushes me with the fact that not a single thing will ever happen between us, basically because he likes women and i have neither tits nor a juicy ass, and that is apparently what all twenty-three year-old guys are looking for. pathetic. i will be better off getting out of this place; at least i won’t have to commute as much to get pot and listen to decent live jazz music in brunswick. i guess i have to think positive… 61 living with roommates was a lot different than what edu had initially thought. his housemates had their own friends, not like his ex-roommates on campus, so they didn’t care about hanging out with him. he felt lonely because coming from barcelona, a whole weekend at home without even going out to watch a movie is the most significant characteristic of losers. his roommates were not bad guys at all, but edu was just not used to the independence (and ignorance) of certain shared apartments. he was not used to eating, cooking and buying food on his own, or to asking for permission when he wanted to throw parties and have people over. it took him a while to become friends with his housemates. these guys ignore me until i bring people over and they want us to shut up. sometimes they even pretend to have a headache. assholes! they don’t tell me to party with them at all. if they ever talk to me about their parties it is the day after and always to show off about their supposed skills at picking up girls and getting free drinks downtown. aside from these two, it has been mentally healthy to get away from nico, i was going crazy; his haircut, his smile, and his subtle french accent were too much for me. in front of him i couldn’t pretend to be the stereotypical ‘spanish macho’ that could perhaps ignite something between us. well, who knows, right? someone said that time is the best healer, so i am taking my time to get over him. my feelings for him are still there, though, i wish i could vomit them away right now. after exams edu and his friend pam decided to explore the country up north, by the great barrier reef. pam had been his best friend since arriving in australia, a nice girl from queens, ny, who shared his sense of humour and made edu laugh non-stop. they flew to cairns and did their best to enjoy two weeks of holidays. for both of them, holidays were a synonym for doing absolutely nothing all day long. sleep, lie under the sun, eat, take a nap, and check email. that was their job for two weeks. the nature of northern australia was so astonishing that they both thought about becoming biologists and spending their lives in that corner of the planet. walking around the rainforest, 62 they understood why it was in this part of the world that the fieldwork of charles darwin turned into a cohesive theory about the evolution of species. they hugged koalas, took pictures of crocodiles, kangaroos, bats, snakes, and the most colourful, huge birds walking around town! since then, they have been most unimpressed by the pictures in travel magazines. paradise exists in cairns. the landscape here does not compare to anywhere else i have ever been to. the nature is absolutely amazing, like being in a different planet full of unique animals and plants, and where pollution and industry have not yet destroyed the flora and the fauna. but the greatest treasure of locals is under the sea: the great barrier reef. pam and i bought a camera to take pictures under water; and we almost used the whole film today. everyone here is very friendly with us, well, with the exception of a crazy cuban from miami that kept hitting on pam the other day while we were playing beach volleyball. i guess some people just don’t realize how inappropriate they are sometimes… at least i don’t think about nico as much. distance helps. the great barrier reef became an increasingly blurred memory when they got back to melbourne. edu started to hang out more with his housemates, 63 and to work for amnesty international. the trip had reconciled him with australia in general. through his job, he got in contact with grassroots associations in east brunswick, most of them concerned about the environmental threats of global warming and in two months he was moving into a new place with a vegan community. his new housemates were eric and sheena, who had a six month-old baby called sky, and simon, eric’s brother. they were peaceful people, sometimes taking things too easily, but edu was okay with it. at some point, he decided to quit pot because he was having sex with simon every time they smoked together, and edu didn’t really like his housemate that much. since i moved into this new place i haven’t had a problem, i actually find the baby entertaining. school has shifted down the list of priorities. i am not doing much these days… and the funniest thing is that even while thinking about it i don’t feel bad for procrastinating. i love my life now, it’s nice. i get good vibrations from this place; we share food, drinks, drugs… and i don’t even miss meat that much. i also got into photography as a hobby, so i am taking a lot of random pictures searching for a source of inspiration. cutlery, windows, yards… it´s obvious i am not there yet. i also take pictures of me, mainly naked and making more evident the lack of inspiration. i like to think that the problem is that photography is not aesthetic enough, because a camera only captures existing realities, it copies them and reports their existence, but there is no feedback between the artist and his work. smooth like a shot. take it or leave it. perhaps i should get some clay tomorrow, or painting oils, or both. i’ll see. the end of the summer was unpleasant, but at least he got a little more done for school. he dropped the job at amnesty international because the doorto-door campaign was exhausting, more psychologically than physically. one day on his way to school, he decided to get off the tram and take a bus to the twelve apostles. sitting next to a woman in her fifties, fat, with dark blonde hair and brownish eyes, looking nowhere, edu could not stop looking at her chubby fingers and facial hair. after talking for about ten minutes and telling 64 her about his impulsive decision to get out of the tram on his way to school she told him he was not original, and that she was meeting young guys that pretended to be special, exactly like him, on a daily basis. he didn’t remember the last time he had been shut-down like that, and tried to hide his resentment. they remained silent the rest of the journey. i went to the twelve apostles with my notebook and camera but i could only look at the water. there is endless water… until the horizon where nothing remains but the sea and the sky. i felt so small talking to the old lady on the bus, exactly like a piece of nothing. i am going to school tomorrow; i have missed too many classes this semester. and i am taking a plane home in less than three months, shit. melbourne, bundoora, nico, pam, lotzi, mike, chiranjiv, eric, myra, sky, simon, the great barrier reef, the twelve apostles, northcote… will all be gone forever in a plane ride? technology is like science fiction. perhaps i will be an engineer one day, and i will be close to understanding all this, but i still don’t know what i should have said to that fat woman with facial hair and chubby fingers who told me i was the archetype of the guy that thinks of himself as someone unique, when actually most average. 65 the waiter comes over to the table where sara and edu have been sitting for the last half hour. sara asks for an espresso while edu’s thoughts about his year in australia are still spinning around his head. he couldn’t care less about the touristy spots of australia that concerned sara. for him, down under had been the backdrop for life-changing experiences, condensed into a year that had taught him more about himself than about anything else. in five minutes the conversation was over. edu paid for the bill and wished sara a good trip. he started walking toward his apartment wondering in which random drawer he could have kept pam’s phone number. he felt like talking to her that same evening. it had been many years since they had met in australia… so she would probably be happily married and taking care of several children. he got home and smoked a cigarette while drinking a cool beer in his three square-meter balcony. his encounter with sara had taken him to australia, but he ended up not calling pam because once he found her number he thought it would be an inappropriate time to call. the next day, the beep of the alarm clock brought him back to his routine as an engineer in a recently established multinational company in barcelona. this week, edu is working from monday to friday, going out friday and saturday night with a group of unmarried thirty-five year-old friends, and will be having lunch at his parents´ on sunday. ---- the pictures included in this text were taken by anna zamora between july and october 2003. 1. chilsholm college, house 4, 2nd floor. campus of la trobe university at bundoora, victoria. 2. melbourne zoo, victoria. 3. flinders’ station, downtown melbourne. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 the biography of adelaide de la thoreza: fact or fiction? sue ballyn australian studies centre barcelona university sueballyn@ub.edu copyright©2016 sue ballyn. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this article centres on the first part of james cameron’s 1878 biography of adelaida de la thoreza, entitled adelaide de la thoreza: a chequered career, in order to briefly discuss the problematics of biography as a literary genre, but in particular to reveal what appears to be a reconstruction of identity in the figure of adelaide. although the discussion will leave many questions unanswered due to the lack of documentary evidence, this very lack of evidence will allow for a series of “reasonable doubts” to cast their shadow over the veracity of cameron’s text. key words: biography, australia, convicts, spanish, madrid, london, botany bay. this article takes as its departure point the biography of the spanish convict adelaide de la thoreza, transported to australia in 1829. as will be seen, the first part of the biography, authored by the reverend james cameron, is profoundly problematic given that no records can be found to support any detail of adelaide’s life before her trial. as i will discuss, the first part is, to all intents and purposes, fiction. before engaging with cameron’s text i will briefly look at some of the questions that biography raises as a literary genre and argue in favour of the sub-genre of “fictionalised biography” as a terminology well-suited to cameron’s text. so, just some general questions that emerge in discussions on biography: what is it; how do we place it, how reliable is biography as a genre in literature? in his review of nigel hamilton’s 2007 edition of biography: a brief history, scott stossel points to the complexity of the polemics that such questions raise regarding biography: biography, in our contemporary understanding of it, has a capacious range, embracing everything from plutarch’s “lives” and the new testament to st. augustine’s “confessions” and the e! television network’s “true hollywood story”. but a tension has haunted the biographic impulse from the very beginning. is the primary function of biography to idealize and commemorate figures in order to provide models for emulation? or is it to capture the warts-and-all essence of an individual human personality in a mailto:sueballyn@ub.edu coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 way that engages the sympathy and deepens the self-understanding of those who encounter it? this in turn generates another tension, one that has particular currency today: to what extent must biography, to be worthy of its name, be based on knowable fact, and to what extent does a full picture of a human personality depend on speculation, symbolism and fictionalization? (2007) stossel touches on the very nerve ends that surface even today in a discussion regarding biography. if we use the term in its widest sense, then biography covers a gamut of media from writing, art, theatre, film, blogs, facebook and the inevitable “new media”. regarded in this sense, which i consider justifiable, then humanity began the art of biography with rock art and other ancient manifestations of “self”. as nigel hamilton has argued, biography was long eschewed from academic study as trivia and yet it plays a fundamental part in understanding the individual and his/her world both in the past and in the present (2010). discussions have raged over the reliability of biography as textual narrative when, in fact, it is no more reliable, or not, than any other text in any written genre. the notion of reliability and truth affect both fiction and non-fiction. within the genre of biography a sub-genre has emerged: “fictionalised biography”. this genre certainly releases much of the pressure on the biographer to reflect only the truth of events in a life within the narration. alyona savenkova is one of many who have quite clearly defined what this genre is and where it lies with regard to biography: the books in this category belong to biographical literature only by courtesy. materials are freely invented, scenes and conversations are imagined; this class often depends almost entirely upon secondary sources and cursory research. authors have created a hybrid form designed to match the appeal of the novel. (2013) intentionality becomes a key in biographical narratives as multiple elements have to be factored in. who is writing the biography, what is their intention in doing so, on interviewing people regarding the object of the biography how reliable are they, and how do they position themselves and does the biographer slant questions to their own agenda and purpose? if the person about whom the biography is being written is alive, something which is becoming more frequent as “premature” biographies appear, what is their intention and how do they influence both the biographer and the answers they may give to such questions? what does a biographer and or the subject of a biography choose to exclude, include and why? such questions are inevitable but in answering them i am led to agree with jay parini who, at a key west seminar, said: “all biography is a work of fiction. it's an illusion of a life that may relate to reality” (2013). after all, each and every one of us lives out our own personal fictions on a daily basis whether we are conscious of it or not. let me now turn to the biography under analysis here: adelaide de la thoreza: a chequered career. this is the only extant biography of a foreign woman convict transported to australia that has surfaced so far. convict transportation to australia began in 1788 and a significant number of female convict biographies have been written coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 by members of the female convict research centre inc. and will be published in 2016. transportation to australia gave both male and female convicts the chance to adapt their own biographies to their new circumstances. as a result, we find many who state on arrival that they are single when document research proves otherwise. others state on their arrival a trade or skill which in fact they did not have. certain trades or skills could give them the chance for a better assignment within the colony. others mention no family members in england or a last address at which they had lived. the list of small deviations regarding their own personal biographies is long and proves the extent to which many saw transportation to be the gateway to a new beginning where a new fictionalised “self” could, to a certain extent, be constructed. the authorities seem to have cast a blind eye to reconstructions of self-regarding statements that an individual was single and thus a number of bigamous marriages were undertaken. after all, in order to check back on a convict’s statement of civil status would have involved a search among parish registers across england. the whole point of transportation was not only the setting up of the colony but also populating it with both free settlers and convicts, whether still under conviction or free, and their offspring conceived in the colony. finding adelaide’s biography was quite fortuitous and exciting. i was actually looking to see if i could find the first free spanish settler in australia at the la trobe university library as, at the time, i was interested in tracking down nineteenth century free spanish and portuguese settlers and detailing their history a name popped out of the card index: jean baptiste lehimas de arietta, spanish, settled in new south wales. the card referred me to a microfiche where there was a list of lehimas de arietta’s assigned convicts one of whom was adelaide de la thoreza from spain. little did i know that half an hour later i would actually have adelaide’s published biography in my hands. the more often i read cameron’s narrative the more skeptical i became. i sought the advice of prof. lucy frost and her reactions to the text mirrored my own. together we took on an extensive project, which lasted over years, to document every possible aspect of adelaide’s life and those mentioned in the biography together with the author. it was at this point too that i began over twenty years of research into foreign convicts transported to australia which has taken me into many interdisciplinary areas such as sephardi jewish history, the transcription of surgeons’ journals during the long voyage to australia, the kinds of plants used in medical therapies on board the vessels, convict transport shipwrecks and so many more areas that i still work in. adelaide de la thoreza: a chequered career was penned by the ref. james cameron, a presbyterian clergyman of note in new south wales, and published posthumously in 1878 after his subject’s death on 26 december 1877. what was it that attracted cameron to adelaide who did not even belong to his church? indeed, adelaide attended both the methodist church and the presbyterian and must originally have been a roman catholic as, according to her, she was born in madrid. cameron’s first encounter with her does not reveal a very attractive figure according to his narrative, but he suspects that there is more to the elderly ex-convict than meets the eye: a pastor, in mingling with people of all classes, has many opportunities of listening to strange experiences. in the course of pastoral visitation in the coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 pretty little town of richmond, i, several years ago, found in a humble cottage an elderly female who received me courteously. her figure was bent, as if from spinal injury, her face wrinkled, and her teeth gone, rendering her utterance somewhat indistinct. her appearance was, altogether, by no means very attractive to a stranger. there was, however, a gleam of intelligence in the smile with which she received me, and a courtesy of manner which led me to conclude, that, in her case, to look upon the outward appearance would probably be the surest way to misjudge her. (cameron 3-4) on subsequent visits, cameron finds adelaide to be eloquent in english and able to quote from “...our standard poets...” with great effect. most importantly, he discovers that in spite of her command of english adelaide claims to be spanish and to have been born in madrid in 1808. by now cameron is fascinated and strikes lucky when on one occasion, having been seized with a sudden and alarming attack of illness, i was sent for to visit her. while speaking of her state and feelings, there were incidental allusions to circumstances in her past life, which only increased my curiosity to know something more regarding her previous career than she had yet unfolded to me. i expressed to her the desire i felt to get a full account of her history, and asked if she would at some convenient time give me a sketch of it. at first she hesitated. she said her life had been a fated one, and that hitherto she had not divulged the secrets of it to any. at length, however, she agreed to accede to my request, and on subsequent visits she gave the sketch i asked for; and what follows is the substance thereof. (cameron 5) adelaide’s story, as cameron supposedly recounts it, is a straight forward narrative which can easily be summarised though, for the purpose in hand, i will only refer to that part of the biography which deals with her life in spain and england before her sentencing to transportation to new south wales. the reason behind examining only this part of her life is because we have found absolutely no documentary evidence to support any of the claims made about adelaide during that period of her life. what we are clearly dealing with here is a fictionalised recreation of identity either by cameron or adelaide. regarding the second half of the biography, most of the people and events in adelaide’s life can be corroborated by documentary evidence. as already mentioned, adelaide was born in madrid in 1808 the only child of julian de la thoreza, a member of the nobility who held a prominent position in government, and whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all “… been ministers of state.” from the biography we glean that de la thoreza was of liberal persuasion for which he and his family would later pay a heavy price. her mother’s family name was de la vega. though there is no given name for her in the biography, cameron states that she came from “... an ancient and honourable house” (cameron 5-6). as already mentioned above, there are no records that bear witness to these facts. adelaide had a happy early childhood even when she was placed in a convent for her own safety. this event appears to have taken place sometime between 1814 1815 and probably had something to do with the restoration of ferdinand vll in 1814 and the coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 abolition of the first written spanish constitution promulgated on 19 march 1812 by the cortes de cadiz which was supported by most liberals in spain. at the convent she learnt english language and literature. the inclusion of the acquisition of english sounds somewhat incongruent given that well into the mid twentieth century french was always the preferred second language. a touch of fantasy perhaps on whichever of the authorial voices? during her time in hiding, adelaide also became the favourite of the mother superior, as cameron points out there were special reasons for this fondness. the abbess in her younger days had a lover, to whom she had been betrothed. the young couple loved with all the fervour of youthful hearts. the nuptials had been arranged, but in the meantime her betrothed became involved in political troubles, was impeached, condemned to suffer an ignominious and cruel death. with a barbarity worthy of such a country, his affianced bride was compelled to be present at the execution to witness the expiring struggles of the object of her affections. to a sensitive nature, the shock, as we may well conceive, was overwhelming. life was no longer life to her. to take the veil, and devote herself to convent life, was the natural course for one in her position. (cameron 7-8) apart from the comment on the barbarity of spain, the narration has taken on the shape of an almost gothic-romance story. a narrative tone that will become further heightened as cameron continues to recount adelaide’s story. adelaide’s time in the convent came to an abrupt end when her family fled to italy as her father’s liberal convictions and political power had led to his persecution. once safe in italy adelaide falls in love with a young italian. tragedy ensues. being of engaging manners and of good family, he was approved by the parents, and an engagement was the result. in two months more she would be fourteen, and then her marriage was to be consummated. i must not omit to mention, that while yet a child, she had, according to a vile custom of the country, been betrothed to another child. the usual formalities had been gone through, and she was taught to look upon him as the destined partner of her life. but as she grew up, instead of feeling any affection for him, she hated him, and wished to escape from him; and now that she had quitted the country, she hoped and expected that her wish had been attained. she could not, however, thus easily throw him off; for although she detested him, he had an ardent affection for her. unknown to the family, he had followed them into italy, and there could see without being seen. one evening, adelaide and her lover were having a moonlight walk, in the public gardens of the town in which she resided. it was the evening before their marriage day, and their thoughts were on the happy event that was to make them one. they talked of the ceremony, of the arrangements connected therewith, and the part to be played by the different actors; and when they came to the putting on the ring the enthusiastic bridegroom pulled it from his pocket to place it by anticipation on the finger of his betrothed. but lo! when in the act of putting it on, a gleam as of lightning dazzled her sight. it was the coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 gleam of glittering steel, and that steel was being plunged by a vengeful hand into her lover’s bosom. (cameron 9-10) adelaide herself had a cut on her hand and she apparently showed the scar to cameron. in the only extant image we have of adelaide, she is sitting in an armchair and her hands are covered by lace gloves so it is impossible to verify the existence of the scar mentioned in the biography. the gothic-romantic tone is now well to the fore in the narrative and what must be cameron’s view of spain and its customs asserts itself again with the reference to the “vile custom” of a country which betrothed young children in marriage. such comments resonate with stereotypical views of spain prevalent at the time the biography was being written. the family were to remain in italy for three years in all, returning to madrid when adelaide’s father again became an eminent figure in politics. their return to spain was not long before their daughter’s fifteenth birthday which was to be celebrated in great style with a ball. on the eighth of december, adelaide’s birthday, julian de la thoreza left for the “senate house” but as [t]he evening came; the guests had assembled; the music had begun; and adelaide was waiting for her father’s arrival, to open the ball. of a sudden, a confused noise was heard in the great square. her mother rushed to the window to ascertain the cause. a sorrowful sight burst upon her view. a bleeding corpse was being borne toward her house. it was her beloved husband, struck down by the hand of an assassin. the hand that smote was that of one whom he had befriended—one high in office—one whom pure political rancour had goaded on to perpetrate the base and cowardly act. the shock was more than his devoted wife could bear. she fainted, and lay unconscious for many days. (cameron 14-15) in fact, adelaide’s mother was to recover only long enough to commit her daughter’s safety into the hands of “... an indian lady of rank, and of english extraction.” she was “...the widow of a military officer who had been killed in the peninsular war.” the woman in question was countess coutts trotter. adelaide was now most definitely in danger as we learn that the fate of her father, and of uncles, warned them that their lives were no longer safe. her uncle adolphus, like her father, had been basely assassinated. her uncle alonso had been immured in a dungeon, and on one occasion when he wanted water to quench his thirst, blood was brought to him instead, while the skull of his murdered brother was made to serve the purpose of a drinking cup. it was time to leave a land where political rancour was making blood to flow like water. (cameron 16) countess coutts trotter thus took flight to london with her charge. adelaide spent the next five years in the coutts trotter residence in grosvenor square. many young women would have yearned for adelaide’s life style given that coutts trotter was protestant, and attended to the proprieties of religion. family prayer was duly observed; but she was withal a woman of the world, haughty, coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 imperious and especially desirous of cutting a respectable figure in fashionable society. both she and her charge were dressed in the highest style of fashion: while balls, parties, the opera, the theatre, and all the accessories of high life formed the atmosphere in which they lived and moved. such a life, we might suppose, must have had great attractions for a young lady like adelaide — but it was not so. she had no heart for those things. her tastes lay in an opposite direction; and frequently did she beg herself off from entertainments, which were but a weariness to her, however much relished by others.” (cameron 18) one is left to wonder why adelaide behaved in this manner but things between the countess and her came to a head when an extraordinarily wealthy indian nabob arrived in london setting the society columns alive with speculation. the countess had met him while in india and came up with the idea of betrothing her spanish charge to the gentleman. adelaide refused the betrothal in no uncertain terms, braving the countess’s wrath that promptly turned her out of her house. adelaide, now almost twenty-one, was to take refuge in the home of lady kirkwall whose life style and household were much more to adelaide’s taste. lady kirkwall offered to take adelaide with her to scotland, but her charge decided to stay in london. it was arranged that lady kirkwall’s cousin would stay in the house with her for company. it now transpired that lady kirkwall’s brother, major de blatchford, was a frequent visitor and her cousin was obviously in love with him. unfortunately for adelaide, he only had eyes for her much to kirkwall’s cousin’s chagrin. the cousin devised a plan of revenge which would remove adelaide from her life. a lottery had been publicised and each ticket cost one hundred pounds with a sure return of a three hundred pound win. the household servants were determined to buy a ticket and the only way they could devise to raise the one hundred pounds needed was to pawn silver and valuables from the house which would be returned when the prize money came in. quite obviously they had fallen into a nasty trap and when they became aware of it, kirkwall’s cousin saw her chance. she lost no time in going to the police to lay a charge against adelaide and the servants for theft. adelaide and the servants were taken into custody, lady kirkwall informed, and justice took its course: in due time the trial came on, and, in consequence of the high social position of the chief of the prisoners, the event excited a more than ordinary amount of interest. the court was crowded. major de blatchford was there, and lady kirkwall, having returned to town, was also present to witness the proceedings. her sympathies, as may be imagined, had been deeply stirred, and when a verdict of guilty was returned against the prisoners, adelaide included, such a shock did this give to lady kirkwall, that she fainted, and shortly thereafter expired. the sentence was transportation to botany bay. (cameron 24) by now, if not before, we can assume that the text is a gothic-romantic fantasy. all the ingredients are in the text: unhappy lovers, murder, political persecutions, exile, coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 executions, the drinking of blood from a skull, betrayal of the heroine by another jealous woman. but nonetheless is purported to be the biography of a spanish woman of rank demoted to the sad, hopeless situation of a transportee to the antipodes. it was at this juncture that lucy frost and i became totally incredulous and began to wonder just how much of the first part of the biography was true, how much might actually be fiction, and if fiction whose: adelaide’s or cameron’s? it took us some ten years of detective work to actually put the whole of cameron’s biography into perspective and unravel the multiple cross threads of connections that run through the text. knowing that adelaide was tried in the central criminal court, old bailey, in london we located her trial and were not amazed to find that a network of lies was about to be uncovered. at the time of our research the central criminal court records were not online and we laboriously went through ledger after ledger for the year 1829 using deductions of dates from the biography. the trial document is as follows. before mr. recorder. 1286. adelaide de thoraza was indicted for stealing, on the 28th of april , 6 sheets, value 15s., the goods of martha davis. martha davis. i live at no. 15, finsbury-street, finsbury-square. i am single, and am a dress-maker the prisoner was a servant at my house for fifteen months and a fortnight; she was there i believe at the time the sheets were stolen she was the only female servant in the house; it was her business to mind the bedding and the bed-room; a butcher came to me to ask for a sum of money which i did not owe i then went and searched the prisoner's box; i found a sheet and a night-gown belonging to me i knew the sheet was mine, it had been worn a little, but was not dirty it was a sheet from her own bed, but it was mine; i examined her bed soon after, and both the sheets were gone this was on the 28th of april; i never saw the corresponding sheet; the officer produced some duplicates, by which we found six sheets; i knew them to be mine, as i had assisted to spin them, and made them up myself. susannah perry. i live at no. 7, camden-court, grub-street, chiswellstreet. i had known the prisoner for about a fortnight before she went into this service; she brought me a pair of sheets and a bolster one evening, some months before she was taken up she said she was tired, that the bailiffs had come into her mistress' house, and she had got a bed out and pawned it she had a pair of sheets and a bolster in her apron; she asked me to go and pawn them on her mistress account i pawned them in my own name, at mr. upsall's, in barbican; christopher deer advanced me 8s. i gave the 8s. to her. christopher deer. i am in the service of mr. upsall, of barbican. i know perry by visiting the shop; i cannot speak positively to her pawning these sheets, though i have reason to suppose she did, by her name and address being on them; i gave this duplicate they were afterwards claimed by davis. martha davis. these are my sheets, they are marked with my name; the prisoner had no authority to pawn them i never authorised her to pawn a bed; i had an excellent character with her. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 thomas brooks. i am a pawnbroker. i have four sheets pawned at two different times, one pair on the 19th of february, in the name of eliza wilson , no. 8, camdencourt, a lodger, for 3s.; i did not take them in this duplicate was given; i do not know who pawned them the other pair was pawned on the 2d of march, in the name of winson; i suppose the person who took them in did not rightly understand the name; i do not think davis swore to these because they are not marked. john bee. i am an officer. i was sent for to take charge of the prisoner she was not at first accused of stealing sheets, but was afterwards; i found two duplicates of mr. brooks', whitecross-street, and one other duplicate on her. court to martha davis. q. look at these four sheets, and tell me what reason you have to claim them as yours? a. i made up part of them some of them were kept in a cupboard and some in a box, they are both kept locked; i never sent the prisoner to take the sheets out; i always do that myself. guilty . aged 23. transported for seven years. (the proceedings of the old bailey, london’s central criminal court, 1674 – 1913, reference number: t18290611-289) brief though the printed transcript is, a close reading of its details tells us quite a lot about adelaide’s circumstances in london on a spring day in april when she was arrested. this is not the glamorous story cameron told of love, intrigue, and betrayal in the fashionable world of titled aristocrats in london. from her trial adelaide is unveiled as working for a seamstress, often a front for a brothel at that time, and was arrested as a common thief. her crime: stealing sheets. one doubt remains. how did adelaide de la thoreza get from madrid to london, or was she actually born in england? was her father a spanish soldier, seaman, merchant, servant in london? what is a fact is that adelaide’s gothic-romantic-tragic life as depicted in the biography will not sustain scrutiny. i set out to find any record i could pertaining to adelaide’s family in madrid or elsewhere in spain and also italy. later, lucy and i tramped london and the relevant parts of new south wales camera and notebooks in hand, consulted maps of the time, found descendants and talked to them, gradually drawing the threads of adelaide’s true story together. the question mark that still hangs in the air, however, is: who is responsible for the fiction of adelaide’s early life? adelaide herself or the reverend james cameron? suffice it to say that what we are dealing with in the first half of cameron’s adelaide de la thoreza: a chequered career is indeed a clear case of fictionalised biography even if the identity of the authorial voice remains unknown. works cited cameron, james 1878: adelaide de la thoreza: a chequered career. sydney: foster & fairfax hamilton, nigel 2007, 2010: biography: a brief history. cambridge, ma: harvard up. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 parini, jay 2013: “is the biography a work of fact or fiction? musings from key west literary seminar”, http://wlrn.org/post/biography-work-fact-or-fictionmusings-key-west-literary-seminar (accessed 4 december 2014.) savenkova, alyona 2013: “fictionalized biography as a subgenre of biography”. <https://prezi.com/peazczz2m-f_/fictionalized-biography-as-a-subgenre-ofbiography/> (accessed 21 june, 2014.) stossel, scott 2007: “whose life is it”. new york times sunday book review, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/books/review/stossel.t.html?pagewanted=a ll&_r=0> (accessed 1 november 2014.) the proceedings of the old bailey, london’s central criminal court, 1674 – 1913, reference number: t18290611-289, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18290611-289 off1516&div=t18290611-289#highlight. (accessed 1 november 2014.) the author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness for the writing of this article (research project ffi2013-45101-p). sue ballyn is professora emerita at barcelona university. in 1990 she founded the australian studies program which was recognised as an official barcelona university observatory – studies centre in 2000, the only australian studies centre in spain. over the last twenty-five years, sue ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to australia, in particular spanish, portuguese, hispanics and sephardim, and she works closely with the female convict research centre, tasmania. she has published and lectured widely in the area. 2017 will see the publication of a book on adelaide de la thoreza, a spanish convict, written by herself and lucy frost. more recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature dedal-lit at lleida university which in turn is part of a european project on ageing: siforage. as part of this project she is working on human rights and the elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. in 2017 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title stories of experience, will be published as part of this project. these oral stories are the result of field work she has carried out in barcelona. she currently holds the position of professor emerita and founder / co-director of the australian studies centre, at barcelona university. http://wlrn.org/post/biography-work-fact-or-fiction-musings-key-west-literary-seminar http://wlrn.org/post/biography-work-fact-or-fiction-musings-key-west-literary-seminar http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18290611-289http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18290611-289coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 passion, energy, and a love of languagei alex skovron copyright© 2019 alex skovron. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. a biographical outline of the life, work and achievements of dr serge liberman (1942–2017), noted author, editor, scholar and medical practitioner based in melbourne, australia. key words: australian jewish writers, short stories, melbourne, judaica. serge liberman in 2017 (courtesy alex skovron) coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 serge israel liberman—author, editor, scholar, bibliographer and medical practitioner, a leading light in australian jewish literary and multicultural spheres for more than forty years—was born on 14 november 1942 in fergana, uzbekistan (ussr), to abram jacob and regina liberman (née minski), who were polish-born parents made refugees by the war in europe. a daughter, also born in fergana, died there in infancy before serge was born. after spending time in a dp camp in germany (1946–7) and then in paris (1947–51), the family of three arrived by ship in melbourne in 1951. here, serge learnt english, continued his education, graduated in medicine from melbourne university in 1967, and (after a period in israel with his first wife eva matzner, where the eldest of their three children was born) began work in melbourne in 1974 as a general practitioner, continuing until his retirement in 2013. alongside that career he pursued his literary vocation. over some thirty years he published six collections of stories: on firmer shores (1981), a universe of clowns (1983), the life that i have led (1986), the battered and the redeemed (1990), voices from the corner (2000) and where i stand (2008). during much of that time he laboured tirelessly on his ground-breaking bibliography of australasian judaica: 1788– 2008, the updated and expanded third edition of which appeared in 2011. at more than 800 pages, this is a towering work for which researchers and readers will be grateful for decades to come: a compendium of meticulously organized information on all publications concerned with jewish life, literature, history, culture and the arts in australia and new zealand. liberman’s published work, represented in numerous journals and anthologies in australia and overseas, included editorials, translations, book reviews, and essays on historical, cultural, literary and communal topics. he was an editor of the melbourne chronicle, associate editor of the multicultural journal outrider, literary editor of the australian jewish news and menorah, vice-president of pen melbourne, and served on the editorial committees of the australian jewish historical society journal and gesher, journal of the council of christians and jews. for his short-story collections, he was three-times winner of the alan marshall award and a recipient of the nsw premier’s literary award; three of the books were set as study texts in a number of australian high schools and universities. in 2015 he was honoured with the medal of the order of australia (oam) for his contribution to australian literature as an author, historian and scholar. serge and i became acquainted in the early 1980s, when i was starting to publish my own poetry after migrating from sydney to melbourne. i became aware of the local young jewish doctor who was also a writer (or as serge might have put it, a writer who happened to practise medicine); he had already brought out his first book and was making a name for himself. inevitably our literary paths crossed and a firm friendship would develop. i was always struck, when reading his stories, by his passion and seriousness of purpose, his love of language, and his powerful sense of the interlocking of destinies. then there was that kaleidoscopic procession of characters who populate his narratives. his fiction is distinctive for its vivid, highly-charged prose, its ethical, at times metaphysical intensity, and especially for its myriad protagonists drawn with colourful precision and a compassionate understanding of the highlights and shadows of the human spirit. the stories are thought-provoking, rich in penetrating insights, and often extremely moving. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 liberman’s imagination was shaped by the world’s great authors, dramatists, philosophers, artists and musicians; and perhaps even more so by the greats of the jewish and yiddish literary traditions, which infused his writing. his strong jewish identity, and his history as a child survivor of the holocaust growing up in an atmosphere darkened by a backdrop of devastation and loss, underpin many of the themes woven through the pages of his books. and while the jewish experience, in its many guises, would remain his work’s centre of gravity, he regarded his stories as universal in their exploration of the elements and enigmas of our common humanity. serge liberman was a kind, courteous, softly-spoken individual, and a thoughtful, loyal and generous friend. forever excited by ideas, he relished good conversation and was always willing to question, to seek out, discover, engage. serious and studious, he could sport a correspondingly understated wit, while his humour could display an absurd, even wicked streak. he was a person of supreme dedication and immense energy – which he needed, in order to combine his creative, professional and voluntary work with a thriving fulltime medical practice. as a doctor, he was revered by his patients for his unstinting devotion and personal concern for their welfare. by nature a modest and humble man, serge gave of himself freely and generously. the bulk of his editorial and scholarly work was done on a voluntary basis, with no expectation of financial reward. he played a significant role in fostering australian jewish writing, not only through the publications he was involved with but frequently in less visible capacities. i know i speak not just for myself but for many other writers, young and not so young, who were the beneficiaries of his encouragement and support. confronted in 2016 with a diagnosis of motor neurone disease, serge the medical professional fully understood its ineluctable trajectory; as a committed rationalist, however, he eschewed the consolation of any thought of an afterlife. throughout his illness he maintained an extraordinary outward demeanour: his characteristic ready smile, expressed by the merest crease around the lips, could warm the heart and lift the mood of any visitor who chanced to offer a joke or ironic aside. his dignity and grace in the face of his unspeakable predicament were an inspiration. serge was looking forward to the publication of his final book, a selection of nearly thirty of some of his finest stories, under the title the storyteller. he took an active role in choosing the stories and discussing editorial and other aspects of the project, including the cover. on one occasion he asked me what would happen if he died before the book came out. i replied ‘don’t!’ – and added that it would be vastly preferable to launch the book before we launched him into eternity; to which he offered up one of those endearing little smiles. however, it was not to be: the storyteller did not make its appearance until a few months later, and serge did not live to see the finished book. he died on 22 december 2017, aged seventy-five. serge liberman’s staunch integrity, his caring, compassionate nature and his profound humanity were a hallmark not only of his work and his writing, but of the life that he led, and of the way he led it. he is survived by anna mow, his devoted second wife of more than twenty years, three children, two stepchildren, and six grandchildren. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 the x of his offence for serge liberman a woman sits half-naked on the parapet her posture amphibious from the left the sand would rise to claim her softly, irreversibly if she remained here within the scrutinies of a timelapse camera long enough, and we too stayed together for the required epoch, she, we, the machine to the right the footpath is trodden excessively in the habit of footpaths by slippery shadows by shadowy faces by careless limbs otherwise known as life the photographer vanishes, he was never here, the feet pass the girl's not unsuggestive position reminiscent of glossy rock loreleis with barely a snigger, or a leer might escape the gap of the odd truculent flâneur headed for cities these are skylined against the remote past or suspected future, but the beyond clouds could unveil very eternity if just that cinematographer could discard his cable come back to the x of his offence his innocent lack of guiltlessness where the naked woman now is lacked as well by the eroding parapet coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 bio note: alex skovron was born in poland, lived briefly in israel, and emigrated to australia aged nearly ten. his family settled in sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies. from the early 1970s he worked as an editor for book publishers in sydney and (after 1980) melbourne. his poetry has appeared widely in australia and overseas, and he has received a number of major awards for his work. the most recent of his six poetry collections, towards the equator: new & selected poems (2014), was shortlisted in the prime minister’s literary awards. alex’s collection of short stories, the man who took to his bed, was published in 2017. his novella, the poet (2005), has been translated into czech under the title básník (2014). the attic, a selection of his poetry translated into french, was published in 2013; and a bilingual volume of chinese translations, water music, appeared in 2017. the many public readings he has given have included appearances in china, serbia, india, ireland, macedonia and portugal. i this is a modified version of the obituary that was published in the australian press. its author, alex skovron, a longstanding friend of serge liberman, is a melbourne writer and editor. he and richard freadman edited serge’s last book, the storyteller: selected stories, published in april 2018 by hybrid publishers, melbourne. microsoft word roser bosch 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 243 a way of reasserting and sharing identity: acrylic paintings of the central desert. a critical approach. roser bosch 1 abstract: many different discourses about the “new” aboriginal art forms, especially acrylic paintings of the central desert, have been constructed during the last 30 years. these constructions have attempted to explain the role, the meaning and the reception of that art form, both in a local arena (concerning the communities in which it is produced) and in an (inter)national one. such explanatory discourses are used to exceed the specific object of study – the works of acrylic on canvas – becoming general and descriptive views of the whole art-production of aboriginal society, as well as of their culture and their identity. moreover, these constructions came from two different fields that traditionally – from the end of 19th century and the beginning of the 20th onwards – have competed for the imposition and hegemony of their views: one related to the artistic sphere (mainly art criticism) and the other related to anthropological and ethnological studies. this article suggests an approach to the acrylic paintings of the central desert as an element of identity, reasserting as well as a place for aboriginal cross-cultural understanding. from a critical point of view, many core topics -troposfrom classical discourses about acrylic painting -such as the dreaming, the land, aesthetics, the role of socialization and the power of the representational system of geometric formswill be discussed. in order to achieve the former, the mutually excluding polarization between art and anthropology has been avoided thus bringing together both perspectives. furthermore, the aim is to recover the too-long-forgotten voices of the artists involved by disregarding the mainstream colonial discourse. keywords: aboriginal acrylic painting – post-colonial aboriginal identity nowadays, most of the discourses related to australian aboriginal art point out that the acrylic paintings on canvas of the central desert communities is one of the great contemporary markers of aboriginal identity. moreover, most of the interpretations about these acrylic works read them as the real motor of a renewal of aboriginal desert culture(s) and identity in the post-colonial context (caruana 2000). in my opinion, following myers approach2, these acrylic works of the central desert region are regarded as a new phenomenon where traditional meanings and forms, on the 1 all the material used in the present paper is part of the author’s minor thesis research on her second year phd. this paper and the entire research is being done with the support of “departament d'educació i universitats de la generalitat de catalunya i del fons social europeu". copyright ©2009 roser bosch. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 244 one hand, and materials and contemporary artistic objectives, on the other, are mixed together. the genesis of this contemporary phenomenon is related to the so-called dot art movement. this artistic movement was born in the central desert region during the 70s and is strongly marked by the use of the traditional “geometric system of representation” (morphy 1980, 1991, 1999), also called “code of abstract symbolism” (johnson 2000:214), and the transmission of the dreaming knowledge. in the early seventies, papunya and yuendumu were the first and also the main communities involved, but the movement quickly spread out to the rest of the desert communities and became one of the principal economical activities for them. the genesis of this artistic movement is also related to the australian historical context of the political struggle for the recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights. this relationship between the artistic movement (dot art movement) with the political, economical and socio-cultural levels is the reason why the success of the works is read and interpreted as an assertion of the desert communities’ identity in the australian post-colonial context. the present essay analyses the discourse(s) of assertion and renewal, with the final aim of giving a critical approach to it/them and its/their reception in the so-called western art market. in order to achieve this objective, the essay is divided into two different sections. the first one analyzes the already mentioned issue of identity in relationship to the fast growing artistic success of acrylic paintings on canvas. this analysis is focused on two areas: the communities’ productive arena, and the (inter)national arena. the second part of the essays concludes this analysis with some critical notes that may enable a rethinking of the interpretation and reception of the acrylic works in relation to the discourse of reassertion of aboriginal identity. acrylic artistic success and aboriginal post-colonial identity renewal. analysis of the discourse. analysis of the discourse in the communities’ productive context. in order to start the first part of the analysis, focused on the communities’ productive arena, and to facilitate understanding, four different fields related to the success of acrylic painting should be distinguished: the political, the economical and the sociocultural. for each of them, only the main and most debated consequences of the artistic success will be pointed out in relation to the discourse of the reassertion of identity, in order to give an overview of the situation. each of these fields constitutes an integral part of any construction of identity. they are different parts of the whole, while related to each other. fist of all, the political field is one of the clearest levels where the consequences of the success of these works allow a discussion of aboriginal identity. the traditional meaning of the aboriginal aesthetic practice is unavoidably linked to the primary relationship and the responsibilities of aboriginal people with regard to their land. in the pre-colonial historical context, knowledge and also “country” were transmitted from 2 “for the aborigines of central australia, the acrylic paintings on canvas (as well as the paintings on bark) are a new form, objects made for sale and not for their own ritual or practical use” (myers 1991:27) coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 245 generation to generation through aesthetic practice. in other words, it is in the knowledge encoded in the aesthetic motifs and in the painted dreamings and stories from the dreaming tradition where the responsibility of “to hold the country” (bird 1992, myers 2002) is learnt within each aboriginal group (morphy 1991). the new acrylic art, using the traditional set of motifs and meaning, enables transmission and emphasizes that central relationship of aboriginal culture(s) with the land. through the new artistic practice and its success australia’s indigenous people have been able to prove and demonstrate their sovereignty over the land; a fact denied since the proclamation of terra nullis by sir richard bourke in 1835. therefore, the new artistic practice quickly became a powerful instrument of political struggle (stanton 2000). this use of art to claim the native title of the land is admirably modelled in the barunga statemen (1988). a project which has its precedent in the bark petition (1963)3. those initiatives are symbolical moments in the struggle for the aboriginal sovereignty over the land. and at the same time, both emphasize that the acrylic paintings are –as the traditional aesthetics werea reassertion of the aboriginal connection to the land. this relationship is one of the central and more characteristic issues of the aboriginal identity. less symbolically than bark petition or barunga statement is the direct link between the early success of the acrylic works and the return to the so called “ancestral” lands by many groups during the 80s (kean 2000). as vivien johnson –among other theorists points out: “the self-repatriation of the pintupi had only been possible because of the independent income generated by their paintings” (2000:214). consequently, the artistic and economical success of the acrylic paintings impacted actively on the political struggle and helped to change the situation of delocalisation of many communities in the central desert forced out by the governmental policies of the mid 19th and 20th centuries. the second notable level where the artistic success allows for the voicing of the reassertion of aboriginal identity is the economical one. many artists acknowledge and affirm that their artistic activity is closely linked with the income it represents4. these incomes are especially important for those communities that returned to their ancestral lands and which are established deep in the australian desert. nowadays, the production of acrylic works for the fine art and the souvenir market is the most profitable aboriginal industry in the central desert region. as john oster affirms this cultural industry is “one of the key drivers in regional and remote australia with comparable status as the cattle industry” (2006). 3 v. yunupingu, g. (ed.) (1997) and also morphy h. (2000). 4 johnson (2000:216) mentions the following testimony of an aboriginal painter, cassidy: “we make plenty of money. we have plenty of good painters here. it is something my people always do well. even the young fellas are getting interested in this. we can do work for ourselves for a change and not just take your government money”. this quotation remark the important link between economy and the new artistic practice in the context of aboriginal self-esteem (myers 1991). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 246 art centres are the core structures of that cultural industry. the control of the financial income and its return to the community-members is one of the principal tasks of art centres. the income generated by the artistic industry allows for an important degree of aboriginal economical autonomy. nevertheless, governmental support and subsidies are also needed by aboriginal communities in the desert regions and its hinterland (oster 2006). the third signalled level where the consequences of artistic success clearly involve a reassertion of aboriginal post-colonial identity is the social one. changes in aboriginal education of traditional law and in the social cohesion of the communities’ production are examples of this. in vivien johnson’s words (2000:217): “the desire to become an artist motivated individuals in alice springs to learn more about their dreaming stories and designs (…)”. this re-education (ryan 1989:71-72), with “aboriginality” at its centre, was needed by younger generations and middle-aged aboriginal people who grew up in missions and who had denied-access to their own culture(s) due to governmental policies of assimilation during the 20th century. moreover, this re-education was also needed in the context of the governmental reservations, where the social situation in general, as described by many researchers (bardon (2000), johnson (2000), barou (1996), barou & crossman (2005)) was alarming during the 70s, particularly on the subject of “aboriginality”. shame and embarrassment about aboriginal roots was a common feeling for the younger generations. elders saw the chance to proudly transmit their cultural inheritance again in the new desire to paint (clark 2005, johnson 2000, 2001:44)5. another consequence of the artistic success on the social level was the creation of art centres. these places opened a social space for communication, information and encounter with the mother culture(s) in each artistic community. the art centres also increased social cohesion through projects which aimed to encourage collective artistic creations (dussart 1999). these collective projects reinforce group cohesion in different directions. on the one hand, they help to avoid the risk of individualization and the division of the communities into two separate groups of artists: the so called “nonames” and the so called “big names” which was a real threat after the 90s, (johnson 2000:219, errington 1998:155 –among others-). on the other hand, they reactivated the use of the traditional relationships with regards to the rights and responsibilities over the paintings and their knowledge (morphy 1991, johnson 2001:40, dussart 1999). the collective projects are also a statement of the cultural richness and complexity of the aboriginal heritage, not only in the sense of the dreaming tradition but also in relation to the political and social traditional structures of the central desert 5 myers (1991:33) mentions the following testimony of and aboriginal painter, rita nungala, quoted by kent s. (1987 a burst of colour in the western desert. sydney morning herald, 11 july:48): “ (…) i show the young fellas what we aboriginal people can do for ourselves”. the quotation asserts the proud for aboriginal inheritance and the desire to transmit it to the young generations. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 247 communities (i.e. the system of restricted knowledge (morphy 1991) or the relationship with the land (myers 2002, bird 1992). these consequences on the social level are strongly related to those on the cultural level. many interpretations of the new acrylic works read them as a renaissance of aboriginal culture(s) in a growing context of “disculturation” (johnson 2000:219) in the desert region. this situation threatened to blend all the cultural diversity of aboriginal desert groups into a unique regional culture (johnson 2000, stanton 2000). the interpretation of the artistic practice as a cultural renaissance proposes that thanks to the works’ success the situation of “disculturation” could be superseded in favour of a new cultural reality. the new approach gathers the desert communities together in what has been called a “multitribal network” (mclean 2002). in my opinion, under this term each community expresses its richness and singularities through variations in a unique and common artistic style frame. this artistic style is based on the traditional system of representation and enables cultural expression on two levels. on a regional level, it allows an expression of the whole of the central desert region through the use of a distinctive and common style. on a local level, it permits the expression of the richness of each community through artistic variations in the common style. those variations are possible thanks to the inner malleability of the “geometric system of representation” (morphy 1980, 1999). the new interpretation of the cultural desert reality through the “multitribal network” term is enriching because it abandons the old idea of the central desert region as a single cultural block without singularities (stanton 2000:194). in consequence, the success of the acrylic works helped change western ideas about aboriginal groups as monolithic and static societies. analysis of the discourse in an (inter)national context. from my point of view increasing artistic success of acrylic paintings on canvas of the central desert has contributed to the visibility of aboriginal culture(s) and identity in the (inter)national arena. the prices these works reach at auctions, the importance of the collections that include them in (inter)national museums and galleries, the growing market of e-commerce, the works sold in the souvenir market and the catalogues from exhibitions around the world help to spread knowledge about aboriginal tradition and contemporary reality. this artistic success is also a recognition of aboriginal identity in the western world which helps to reinforce the links with the aboriginal inheritance. another important goal of the artistic success in the (inter)national arena is the revival in the 20th century debate on the reception of this kind of indigenous art. grosso modo, almost every interpretation raised by acrylic painting on canvas, since its beginning in the 70s, clearly comes from one of these fields: cultural anthropology or art criticism. these two academic fields focused on different features of the artistic phenomenon. the former evaluates the importance of the “ethnographic context”. that means the role of contemporary artistic activity within its social and religious context. the latter, art criticism, focuses on the “aesthetic context” (benjamin 2000), and therefore criteria have more to do with form and the ontological structure (burns coleman 2004) of the works. from my point of view, this debate is enriching since it opens a space of crosscultural dialogue that reveals aboriginal identity and culture(s) to the so called west. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 248 critical approach to the discourse. although most of the consequences of the artistic success mark an optimistic link with a contemporary reassertion and understanding of aboriginal identity in the central region, it is important to stress different critical points related to the interpretative discourse of the works and the whole phenomenon. in my opinion, the most important point is to keep the dialogue going with all indigenous parties involved. nowadays, as noted, discourses basically arise from two disciplines (cultural anthropology and art criticism), both monopolized by nonaboriginal researchers. as long as indigenous people are not being integrated into these dialogues on a daily basis, the so-called “westerness” will have to face criticism for their colonialist attitude. another important critical approach to the reassertion discourse that must be avoided is that which looks at and interprets central desert aboriginal culture(s) and identity only through these kind of successful art works. rowse already denounced in 1983 –as fourmille remembersthat this approach lead to a stereotype that refers to aboriginal culture(s) and their identity as a whole, only seen in relation to the production of this sort of artefacts. in consequence, this stereotype talks about a delusive and partial cultural aboriginal reality and identity. “delusive” and “partial” are used since some of the following issues are involved: a) it presents aboriginal society as a homogenous one, leaving aside its richness and multicultural complexity –linguistic, artistic, religious or spiritualamong communities, regions, linguistic groups,… (fourmille 1994); b) it does not take into account other cultural expressions, such as dance, literature, music and so on (fourmille 1994): c) it does not it take into account the rest of spheres that build up an identity – like political structures, religious beliefs, knowledge systems, history, collective memory or genre-age-sex distinctions-. as a result, it turns aboriginal people into a “domestic or historiographic subject” (spivak 1989/7, pratt 1992). moreover, this stereotype is completed with interpretations of the acrylic works as evidences of the spirituality and exoticism of aboriginal people (myers 1991:35-36, errington 1998). all those stereotypes facilitate a re-confirmation of the already established western ideas of aboriginal identity. it is just another way of explaining “the other” to ourselves, in an incomplete, unreal and pejorative way, which prove that neo-colonial discourses are reinforced again and again. conclusions to conclude, i think it is irrevocable that the success of acrylic paintings on canvas and the dot painting movement has become a turning point in the approach to aboriginal cultural inheritance, both in the communities’ productive arena and in the (inter)national context. it is obvious that the artistic success has had a positive effect on the political, economical and socio-cultural spheres in aboriginal desert groups. this repercussion is strongly linked to the revival or the construction of an aboriginal contemporary identity in the post-colonial context. in addition, the inner and traditional meaning of most of the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 249 acrylic works of the central desert and its success in the (inter)national arena spread knowledge of the desert aboriginal reality and identity all over the art world. these are the reasons why i propose the new artistic practice as a double-edged sword: towards an (inter)national context, but also into the communities’ productive context. the success of the acrylic paintings has created a space for interchange within which the collective aboriginal identity reasserts itself, and out of which this identity is shared and discussed in a space of cross-cultural debate. nevertheless, my personal proposal regarding acrylic painting success and aboriginal identity reassertion discourse is only focused on and only refers to the art of the central desert region reality and culture(s). nowadays, acrylic artistic success is one of the most important fields where desert aboriginal identity is being reasserted in the postcolonial context, but, as is observed by fourmille (1994) and rowse (1983), it is not the only one. finally, as is also emphasized by henrietta fourmille (1994), an increasing involvement of aboriginal theorists in the debate of the reception and interpretation of the acrylic paintings in particular, and of indigenous art in general, is needed. moreover, western neo-colonial approaches to the acrylic paintings can only be avoided in a space of equal interchange and participation by indigenous and non-indigenous people. references bardon, g. ¨the papunya tula movement¨ the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. kleinert and neale (eds). south melbourne: oxford university press, 2000, pp. 208-211 barou, j. p. l'oeil pense. essai sur les arts primitifs contemporains. paris: éditions payot & rivages, petite bibliothèque payot/283, 1996. barou, j. p. and crossman s. enquête sur les savoirs indigènes. paris: gallimard, folio actuel, 2005. benjamin, r. ¨the brush with words: criticism and aboriginal art¨ the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. kleinert and neale (eds). south melbourne: oxford university press, 2000, pp. 466-470. bird, d. r. dingo makes us human: life and land in an aboriginal australian culture. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992. caruana, w. ¨black art on white walls? institutional responses to aboriginal art¨ the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. kleinert and neale (eds). south melbourne: oxford university press, 2000, pp. 454-461 clark, g. ¨spirit braille.¨ quadrant magazine, 49:5, may, 2005. coleman, e. b. ¨aboriginal painting: identity and authenticity.¨ the journal of aesthetics and art criticism, 59:4, autumn, 2001, pp. 385-402. coleman, e. b. ¨appreciating ´traditional´ aboriginal painting aesthetically.¨ the journal of aesthetics and art criticism, 62:3, summer, 2004, pp.235-247. dussart, f. ¨what an acrylic can mean. on the meta-ritualistic resonances of a central desert painting¨ art from the land. dialogues with the kluge-ruhe collection of australian aboriginal art. h. morphy and m. s. boles (eds). university of virginia, 1999. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 250 errington, s. the death of authentic primitive art and other tales of progress: and other tales of progress. california: university of california press, 1998. fourmille, h. aboriginal arts in relation to multiculturalism. s. gunew and f. rizvi (eds). new south wales: allen & unwin, 1994, pp. 69-85 johnson, v. ¨cultural brokerage: commodification and intellectual property¨ the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. kleinert and neale (eds). south melbourne: oxford university press, 2000, pp. 471-480 johnson, v. ¨desert art¨ the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. kleinert and neale (eds). south melbourne: oxford university press, 2000, pp. 211-220 johnson, v. ¨especially good aboriginal art.¨ third text, 56, autumn, 2001. mclean, i. the modernity of tradition: interpreting acrylic desert paintings. conference: australian art after the aboriginal art revolution. art gallery of new south wales. 6-7 dec, 2002. morphy, h. ancestral connections. art and an aboriginal system of knowledge. chicago: university of chicago press, 1991. morphy, h. ¨art and politics: the bark petition and the barunga statement¨ the oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture. kleinert and neale (eds). south melbourne: oxford university press, 2000, pp. 100-102 morphy, h. ¨encoding the dreaming. a theoretical framework for the analysis of representational processes in australian aboriginal art.¨ australian archaeology, 49, 1999, pp. 13-22 morphy, h. ¨what circles look like.¨ canberra anthropology, 3:1, 1980, pp.17-36. myers, f. r. ¨representing culture: the production of discourse(es) for aboriginal acrylic paintings.¨ cultural anthropology, february, 6:1, 1991, pp. 26-62 myers, f. r. ¨ways of placemaking¨ culture, landscape and environment. k. flint and h. morphy (eds). oxford university press, 2002. oster, j. ¨aboriginal community art as sustainable business.¨ desert knowledge symposium address. alice springs, northern territory, australia from 1-3 november 2006. pratt, m. l. imperial eyes. travelling, writing and transculturation. london: routledge, 1992 ryan, j. and bardon, g. mythscapes: aboriginal art of the desert: from the national gallery of victoria. melbourne: victorian health promotion foundation, 1989. stanton, j. e. ¨l’art et la terre: perspectives sur l’art aborigène australien contemporain¨ partage d’exotismes. l. barbier (ed). 5ème biennale d’art contemporain de lyon. paris : réunion des musées nationaux (rmn), 2000. spivak, g. in other words. london: routledge, 1988. yunupingu, g. (ed). our land is our life. land rights – past, present and future. queensland: university of queensland press, 1997. aknowledgements the author would like to knowledge sue ballyn for her invitation to participate in the “myth, history and memory” international conference, held in barcelona from 28th to 31st july 2009; eleonora wildburger for her enriching comments on the content of the paper; igor goienetxea for his help on the translation tasks and meritxell ferrer and joan llibre for their constant support and suggestions. roser bosch i darné graduated in 2006 in humanities at the university pompeu fabra, barcelona. she has a governmental (agaur fi) fellowship to do a phd in humanities coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 251 (art, literature and philosophy) at universtity pompeu fabra. she is member of the ciap and cea organizations and her research is focused on contemporary australian aboriginal art and its reception in the (inter)national art market. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 becoming, belonging and sharing: striving to live in the spirit of ubuntu in portugal paula horta u of lisbon paulahorta@clix.pt copyright©2017 paula horta. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract. in this paper i examine the non-formal education programme of the ubuntu academy in portugal, a non-profit organisation that aims to empower and train young adults with strong leadership potential. the participants, who come mostly from african immigrant communities and contexts of social exclusion, are trained to develop and implement social entrepreneur and outreach projects in their communities. i explore the ubuntu academy’s use of the southern african communitarian philosophy of ubuntu and draw on ubuntu literature to argue that this specific education programme’s focus on the notions of humaneness and interdependence encapsulated in the concept of ubuntu has introduced a paradigm shift from an individualistic worldview prevalent in the west to a communitarian form of becoming, belonging and sharing. in this context, i consider the role of testimony and narrative in both promoting personal growth and developing a sense of interdependence and connectedness among people of diverse backgrounds and identities. keywords: ubuntu, storytelling, interdependence ubuntu: the very essence of what it means to be human ubuntu is very difficult to render into a western language. it speaks of the very essence of being human. when we want to give high praise to mailto:paulahorta@clix.pt coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 someone we say … ‘hey, so-and-so has ubuntu.’ then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. you share what you have. it is to say, ‘my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’ we belong in a bundle of life. we say, ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ it is not ‘i think therefore i am’. it says rather: ‘i am human because i belong. i participate, i share.’ desmond tutu, no future without forgiveness (1999) commonly translated as personhood, humanness, humanism or humaneness, the word ubuntu is found, with phonological variants, in the nguni and bantu languages of subsaharan africa (battle 2009; munyaka and motlhabi 2009). although varied definitions may be found in literature, according to munyaka and motlhabi (2009), ubuntu is said to derive from the word muntu, meaning a person or human being, and denotes a positive quality, an inner state, or a disposition towards good. it is, they conclude, “a person’s self-realisation and manifestation as a human being” (64-65), scholars are unanimous in claiming that this self-realisation can only come about through meaningful and positive interaction with others (munyaka and motlhabi 2009; murithi 2006; murove 2009; nussbaum 2009). in this regard, ubuntu constitutes a social ethic and a strong sense of community. as dirk louw (2001:15) writes, “it not only describes human being as ‘being-with-others’, but also prescribes how we should relate to others, i.e. what ‘being-with-others’ should be all about”. my starting point is desmond tutu’s definition of ubuntu, as i wish to signal what, according to what has become known as tutu’s ubuntu theology, are the central tenets of the philosophy of ubuntu — most notably, becoming, belonging and sharing. i consider how these have been applied to the non-formal teaching project of the ubuntu academy in portugal and reflect on how it establishes amongst its participants a network of interdependence and a shared sense of belonging. more specifically, i examine the programme’s use of personal storytelling and testimony to encourage personal growth, promote a sense of self-identity and a strong social consciousness. i contend that storytelling, developed within the framework of ubuntu, enhances the lived experience and voice of the individual but, essentially, it enables participants to think of themselves as inextricably bound to others. as munyaka and motlhabi (2009:69) suggest, “this belonging does not only make one complete but gives one a sense of identity and security. seeing oneself as part of the community leaves little room for narrow individualism.” personal narrative provides an avenue for introspection, self-interrogation and a search for meaning. as richard kearney (2002: 132) notes, “life can be properly understood only by being retold” and further concludes, “life is always on the way to narrative, but it does not arrive there until someone hears and tells this life as a story” (emphasis in the original) (133). in this sense, the linguistic mediation of a life gives meaning to that particular life script, but the meaning of a life script is, i wish to suggest, only fully comprehended if teller and listener enter into an ethical relation that gives rise to engaged storytelling. when the encounter between the teller and the listener takes place against a backdrop of ethical responsiveness, the act of telling involves a willingness to delve beneath the surface of one’s existence and to expose one’s vulnerability. by virtue of one’s vulnerability, much of who one is is revealed. as erinn gilson (2014:2) has shown, “vulnerability is the basis for learning and for empathy, connection, and coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 community … only by being vulnerable can one extend beyond oneself.” exposing one’s vulnerability is, i would add, an act of denuding oneself that beckons an ethical response – what emmanuel levinas (1985) terms an infinite responsibility, a being-forthe-other before oneself. in this context, listening entails a willingness to attend to the narrative of the other. it requires humility and the predisposition to, in levinas’s (1969:51) words, “receive from the other beyond the capacity of the i”. the ethical relation between the teller and the listener is then developed through a dialectic of offering and accepting. the generous act of offering one’s life (hi)story stems from both a recognition of one’s interdependence with others and the desire to have others co-author one’s narrative. the gesture of accepting the other’s (hi)story, and engaging with his/her vulnerability(ies) generates, in turn, not only an awareness of one’s own vulnerability(ies) but also a responsibility for the other. when the other exposes him/herself, responsibility becomes, as alphonso lingis (1998) observes, not only a form of recognition, but also a relationship with the other where one puts oneself in the place of the other. this experience of alterity is pivotal to ubuntu and informs the ubuntu academy project, which draws primarily on the application of the concept in south africa during the transition from apartheid rule to democracy and currently. i would therefore like to briefly place the concept into historical context and consider its political and social significance. ubuntu gained salience during south africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy (following the 1994 democratic elections) and particularly during the truth and reconciliation commission (trc) process. the philosophy of ubuntu formed the central matrix of nelson mandela and desmond tutu’s conception of a post-apartheid society oriented towards a mode of human togetherness in which individuals are able to establish relations of reciprocity and solidarity. on this basis, the interim constitution of south africa (1993) and subsequently the 1995 national unity and reconciliation act, which established the truth and reconciliation commission, stressed the “need for understanding, but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization”. the south african truth and reconciliation commission was set up to, among other tasks, examine the nature, causes and extent of gross human rights violations committed between 1 march 1960 and 10 may 1994 (the date of nelson mandela’s inauguration as president). perpetrators and victims of human rights violations were brought face-toface in non-judicial public hearings across the country between 21 april 1996 and 29 march 1998. it is not the purpose of this paper to examine the accomplishments and shortcomings of the trc. these have been amply discussed in an extensive body of literature that reveals the complexity of a process grounded in ideological, political and teleological premises. however, it is worth recalling that, for the first time in the history of south africa, victims were given the opportunity to tell their stories and, ultimately, to confront their perpetrators before an audience; perpetrators were given the same opportunity to disclose publicly unknown information about crimes committed during the apartheid regime. particularly important, in light of south africa’s history of repression, concealment and silencing of the majority of the population, the trc created what deborah posel (2006:91) termed “a platform for the narration of personal coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 stories”, thereby entrenching “new modes of speaking — a politics of speaking out predicated on newfound democratic freedoms” (93). it has been widely recognised in literature that nelson mandela and desmond tutu, the trc’s chairperson, played a crucial role in defining the guiding principles shaping the trc’s work. from the outset, the trc was framed in a discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation pivotal to the model of restorative (rather than retributive) justice adopted (amstutz 2005; graybill 2002). as desmond tutu (1998:9), explains in the foreword to the truth and reconciliation commission of south africa report, volume one, “we believe … that there is another kind of justice – a restorative justice which is concerned not so much with punishment as with correcting imbalances, restoring broken relationships – with healing, harmony and reconciliation”. accordingly, this model of justice “seeks to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he or she has injured” (munyaka and mothlabi 2009:72). ubuntu renders restorative justice possible because it promotes exercise of the responsibility of the self for the other as both the precept of social existence and the recognition of a shared humanity. although many critical voices articulated misgivings about both the model of justice adopted and the constant appeal to forgiveness and reconciliation, it was also acknowledged that the south african trc created conditions that favoured the rehabilitation of an ailing social character afflicted by the apartheid legacy of strife and conflict and fostered the development of humanistic values and effective interpersonal relations. ubuntu, forgiveness and reconciliation framing the ethical discourse of the trc opened a horizon of affective responses not only for those enduring suffering, but also for those responsible for the suffering. many attested that the compassionate gaze encompassed in ubuntu radically transformed restraint, mistrust, hostility and a sense of alienation towards the other — endemic to the apartheid’s pathological construct of race relations — into a sense of communion, of fraternity and solidarity. on this score, one of the trc’s most important contributions was that it framed inter-subjective relations in a new semantics, proposing a course of action capable of transfiguring social exchange and providing new grounds of human community. i suggest that this aspect of the trc process was crucial at that particular sociohistorical juncture in south africa but could be equally meaningful for societies with a legacy of conflict, injustice and political violence, as is the case with portugal, whose dictatorial regime (1926-1974) lasted for forty-eight years. the question that concerns me here, though, is how the ethic of ubuntu has extended beyond the context of the trc and, more specifically, how and where it has resonated in portugal. ubuntu in education programmes in the years following the south african trc process, the philosophy of ubuntu has gained prominence in a myriad of fields and discourses, both in south african and in other countries, ranging from politics to business management, restorative justice, conflict resolution, information technology and education. of relevance to this paper is coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 the application of ubuntu in non-formal and values-based education programmes in south africa and countries around the world. founded in 2013, the ubuntu academy cape town works with youth from isolated communities struggling with unemployment, poverty, violence, crime and gangsterism. it adopts a positive youth development approach to maximise participants’ potential. through entrepreneurship, leadership and talent development, it guides youth to a sustainable living, and encourages participants to become social change-makers and role models to the next generation. the programme uses participants’ talents in music, dance and drama to train them in these disciplines, but also in design, film, photography, social media, life skills and business skills. it thus combines arts education – that stimulates creativity and inspiration – with leadership and entrepreneurship to promote personal growth and skills development (http://ubuntuacademy.co.za). other ubuntu projects have been developed in austria, the uk, the usa, brazil, uruguai, australia and portugal. all these constitute the ubuntu global network, an international network that was launched in lisbon in 2014 to promote multilateral cooperation and partnerships between organisations whose social-minded projects use ubuntu philosophy as core values to their work (http://www.ubuntuglobalnetwork.com/charter/). chief among these is the ubuntu academy in portugal, a non-formal education project (nfe) that was founded in 2010 to provide training and education to young descendants from african immigrant communities. the programme targets young people (aged between 18 and 35) with leadership potential and helps them plan and implement social entrepreneur projects that respond to the social needs of their community. the values underpinning the philosophy of ubuntu of ethical responsibility, solidarity, humility, generosity, a willingness to share and communalism are the programme’s guiding principles. the first semester of the programme is structured around theme-based seminars, workshops and two residential weekends. citizenship, leadership and social entrepreneurship are explored through the lens of ubuntu. an emphasis is placed on a leadership model that prioritises respect for the dignity of others, group solidarity, teamwork, interdependence and service to others (mbigi 2002). in this regard, the central references and sources of inspiration are nelson mandela, martin luther king, desmond tutu, mahatma gandhi, aung san suu kyi and mother teresa of calcutta (http://academiaubuntu.org). ubuntu lives: the experience of storytelling leadership qualities are developed through a range of activities and techniques that include film screenings, discussion and reflection about real life experiences of ubuntu, and workshops or seminars with individuals whose life and work reflect the values of ubuntu. the programme culminates in two one-day sessions titled ubuntu lives, in which participants share their personal narratives in a semi-formal environment for an audience that includes guests, family members, friends and other ubuntu academy participants. in the lead-up to the ubuntu lives session the participants develop publicspeaking skills and begin the process of composing a personal narrative. http://ubuntuacademy.co.za/ http://www.ubuntuglobalnetwork.com/charter/ http://academiaubuntu.org/ coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 this brings me to the importance of storytelling to the ubuntu academy programme. as was the case with the trc, the ubuntu academy recognises the value of testimony and storytelling. explained from the perspective of narrative theory, storytelling has the social value of enabling individuals to reconstruct the meaning and significance of past experience. for michael jackson (2002:15), “to reconstitute events in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both in dialogue with others and within one’s own imagination”. during the trc the deployment of narrative as the matrix upon which both a sequence of events could be placed in time and space and a plurality of stories could intermesh to facilitate another understanding of the past allowed individuals to develop a sense of themselves as subjects and to perceive their stories as “something that endures and remains across that which passes and flows away” (ricoeur, 1991:22). scholars have been unequivocal in stressing that the conditions created for black south africans to relay their personal stories in the public realm had both historical and political purchase (godobo-madikizela and van der merwe 2009, graybill 2002, ndebele 1998). within the fabric of the trc, narrative was the way in which, to borrow from ricoeur (1991:30), “the story of a life [grew] out of stories that [had] not been recounted and that [had] been repressed in the direction of actual stories which the subject could take charge of and consider to be constitutive of his personal identity” (emphasis in the original). the multiplicity of the lived stories, shared across what de kok (1998:62) terms, “the dialectic between language and the grieving mind”, provided the locus for individuals to reinvent themselves − to (re)negotiate their identity − as they dealt with trauma, suffering and loss. in the context of the ubuntu academy, storytelling is the central methodology through which the participants gain an understanding of their identity, the values that guide their relationship with others, and how they contribute to others’ self-realisation and wellbeing, thereby engaging with the values of ubuntu. as richard kearney (2002:129) has observed, “every human existence is a life in search of a narrative. this is not simply because it strives to discover a pattern to cope with the experience of chaos and confusion. it is also because each human life is always already an implicit story” (emphasis in the original). articulating a personal story, that is, making one’s life into a lived story, entails examining the course of one’s life and making it present again. it is the act of drawing a self-portrait from, to borrow brady’s (1990:45) words, “one’s prior selves and images of significant others without which the story cannot be completely told”. inevitably, this involves reflection about the people, the experiences and the environments that have shaped one’s life. as munyaka and motlhabi (2009:70) write: the personal growth of individuals happens in community. only through the co-operation, influence and contribution of others, can one understand and bring to fulfillment one’s own personality. one is able to discover a sense of self-identity only in reference to the community in which one lives. the experience of narration offers a means through which storytellers (re)interpret events from their personal history, thereby “reconstructing the unity of a life across time” (brady 1990:47). as i was able to witness in the two ubuntu lives sessions that were held in lisbon on 30 november 2013 and 15 march 2014, when storytelling becomes part of a communal process of sharing personal stories, an emotional coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 connection is established between storytellers and listeners. under these circumstances, a “communion of persons” (quoted in coetzee and roux 2003:349), as leopold senghor phrased it, is created. in each ubuntu lives session, twenty participants told their personal stories. most developed a timeline from infancy to adulthood, reflecting on significant events or turning points that framed their lives or those of their immediate family. stories were infused with memories, emotions and everyday life or academic and professional experiences. some were intimate revelations of abandonment, a parent’s illness, drug and/or alcohol addiction and of how difficult moments had been overcome. many stories were filled with sadness, others with humour. some evoked a sense of place or expressed gratitude about nurturing mothers and fathers, devoted siblings, spouses and friends, generating insights about the storyteller’s sense of values and connection to community. others honoured family members who had passed away or invoked the stories of people who had, either at a personal or professional level, played an important role in the storyteller’s life. visual metaphors or photos of family, friends and places were combined and juxtaposed to create additional layers of meaning. at the end of each session, a mosaic of life stories had been formed, revealing, as barbara nussbaum (2009:101) writes, “our interconnectedness, our common humanity, and the responsibility to one another that flows from that connection”. the personal narratives also revealed that, according to joe lambert (2010:10) “while stories sometimes have a journey built into them, … that journey occurs for both the storyteller and the audience alike”. three stories among many illustrate this well. i have singled out these three stories because of the very different ways in which the storytellers engaged with their (hi)stories and how they chose to convey their lived experiences. even though the storytellers had been exposed to the same teachings at the ubuntu academy, they each interpreted ubuntu in their own way and reflected on how the philosophy of ubuntu applied to their own concrete experience. importantly, these three stories reveal that there was not a unified way of conveying life stories but there was a process of self-understanding, self-respect and growth that was common to the three storytellers. twenty-five year old marino relayed a story of courage and resilience. abandoned by his father and neglected by his drug-addicted mother, marino was taken in by his maternal grandparents, who were awarded legal guardianship of their grandson. his childhood was spent assisting his grandmother and ensuring his diabetic grandfather had adequate medical care after his leg had to be amputated. during a temporary stay with his drug-addicted and prostitute mother, marino would have to stay out in the streets to escape the hostile environment at home, often missing school. upon returning to his grandparents’ house, marino found it difficult to come to terms with his circumstances and attempted suicide. his teachers at school and spiritual leaders provided the guidance he needed to overcome his struggles and continue his studies away from home. now he works in information technology and is a volunteer animator in youth groups from highpoverty communities. the only image marino chose to illustrate his story was that of a burning candle that conveyed his message of gratitude and hope. he ended his story questioning whether his life is ubuntu, and concluded that, indeed, it is. he is who he is because of the people who kept him on track: teachers, doctors, counsellors, tutors and family. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 although marino’s story was interspersed with humour, the audience was deeply moved by his courage, dignity and integrity. another moment that captivated the audience was carolina’s creative and spontaneous presentation. the central theme in carolina’s story is the lessons she learnt as a child, as an adolescent and as a young adult. it was a meditation about what gave her life meaning: home, family, friends and relationships and, more recently, the ubuntu academy. it was a depiction of her search for her place in the world: as an artist, a storyteller and a volunteer in a youth arts and crafts programme in a poor neighbourhood. she ended her presentation with an illustrated story titled “those from above, and those from below”. told with great insight, the story was about the inhabitants above, who lived exactly like the inhabitants below. yet, those from above thought that those from below were different, and those from below thought those from above were different, but what, in fact, told them apart were minor differences. what those from above had in common with those from below was that they all dreamed they could fly. the story ended with a question: who are those from above, and who are those from below? the reply was that once in a while we ought to change (and be changed by) our gaze. this compassionate gaze was also conveyed in raquel’s honest and moving tribute to the people and experiences that have shaped her life. spoken with authenticity and humility, raquel’s story was a reflection about how her family values — humbleness, honesty and truth — have informed her life and helped develop the spirit of ubuntu. she chose forty-five photos to encapsulate her ancestry, her personal and professional journey, her dreams and ambitions. she claimed that through photos we reveal much of who we are: the books we have read, the journeys we have made and the people we love. hence, raquel carefully chose photos from her family album that reflected this affective connection to her personal history. each slide comprised a collage of photos, some taken by herself and others from the family archive, generating a visual narrative about meaningful moments in her life: a birthday party, a school event, her graduation ceremony, and her work, first as a volunteer in mozambique, and later with deaf-blind youths in a catholic social institution for underprivileged and disabled children in lisbon, and finally with prisoners. the latter experiences motivated a deep respect for the particularity of the other, sensitising her to different forms of communication, in particular, to “the dance of words in the air”, as she called it. that is why she had a sign language interpreter accompany her. ricoeur’s (1991:26) treatment of narrative focuses on how narrative acts upon the reader and how the reader acts upon it. he argues, “the process of composition, of configuration, is not completed in the text but in the reader and, under this condition, makes possible the reconfiguration of life by narrative”. to transpose ricoeur’s theory to the ubuntu lives and, in particular, to marino, carolina and raquel’s stories, the experience of narrating, and/or interpreting the narratives opens before the several agents in the process a horizon of affective responses. by exposing their vulnerabilities, and sharing thoughts and experiences that had previously been experienced only in private to a receptive audience, the storytellers’ life stories gained recognition and intensity. crucially, the willingness to lay bare what had previously been private beckoned an ethical response from the audience. to put it in levinasian (1985) terms, the face-to-face encounter with the vulnerable other engendered a mode of engagement that was both responsive and responsible. as a member of the audience i felt that in this other’s face i recognised my own vulnerability. responsibility claimed on me the ethical demand of not only taking cognizance of these life stories but affording them the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 respect they deserved. this awareness resonated with ubuntu ethics that prioritises the encounter with the human other and, most importantly, leverages this encounter on the understanding of one’s humanity through the humanity of others. conclusion each storyteller who contributed to the ubuntu lives came with a unique personal history. some stories dealt with loss and grief; others with race and ethnicity, home and family, but common to all the life stories, and in particular the three stories highlighted in this paper, was an ethic of service to others and an awareness of the speakers’ identity in relationship to others. all three reflected on how the concept of ubuntu was ingrained in their life trajectories. in a personal interview in december 2015, carolina and raquel revealed their thoughts about the ubuntu academy and the experience of telling their life (hi)stories. both considered that the ubuntu academy’s leadership programme, and the storytelling methodology especially, is unique in that it provides participants with a sense of self-identity and self-respect, as well as with an awareness of and respect for the other. the deeply affective process of sharing life stories is revelatory and empowering and, in some cases, healing. it is a humbling experience that teaches the value of giving and receiving and encourages participants to put themselves in the place of the other. both felt enriched by the life stories they heard and considered that reflecting on their own lives not only gave them a sense of gratitude but also contributed to their personal growth. these testimonies suggest, then, that narrative rooted in individual subjective experiences is the matrix upon which both a sequence of events is placed in time and space and a plurality of stories intermesh, enabling participants and audience alike to realise that we all have shared human experiences that connect us. most notably, the web of trusting and reciprocal relationships that grows from this process generates community. in modelling leadership around the importance of communal relationships, the respect for human values and the recognition of human worth at the centre of ubuntu, the programme enables the participants to consider how they can promote the ethic of ubuntu and become agents of social transformation. more specifically, it provides the participants the opportunity to experience the unifying character of ubuntu. as louw (2001:24) observes, “ubuntu unites the self and the world in a peculiar web of reciprocal relations in which the subject and object become indistinguishable, and in which ‘i think, therefore i am’, is substituted for ‘i participate, therefore i am’.” the ubuntu academy might be interpreted as attempting to achieve a utopia, or some kind of homogeneity, during the programme. this view might naturally raise the question: what further application has the concept of ubuntu had in the participants’ lives beyond the ubuntu academy or, more specifically, what is the reach of the southern african worldview in portugal? the three participants mentioned in this paper have developed/ collaborate in projects whose conceptual framework is ubuntu. carolina has spearheaded the vidas ubuntu: histórias para contar (ubuntu lives: stories to tell) programme for primary, secondary and professional schools in lisbon and the north of portugal since october 2014. the methodology of personal storytelling is used in 4/5 day workshops with students, aged between fourteen and twenty-five, from vulnerable contexts, immigrant, minority or refugee communities. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 the process of constructing and telling their personal stories allows participants to develop an awareness of the context of their lives and personal trajectories. this generates an understanding about when and where a change took place in their lives, as well as the circumstances and people that contributed to that change. in many cases, it has helped participants to find the courage to reveal experiences of domestic violence, abuse, racism or bullying, enabling teachers and school counsellors to address their students’ problems and provide adequate help. as carolina noted in a personal interview, the personal storytelling methodology has proved to be a constructive and transformative process for the more than 500 students who have taken part in the workshops. it opens pathways for self-reflexivity and engaged listening, and elicits an awareness of the life of the other. by approaching their life stories, as well as that of others, through the lens of ubuntu, the participants learn the importance of tolerance, acceptance, respect, empathy and reciprocity. importantly, in ethnically and racially diverse classrooms plagued by suspicion and conflict, engaging with the philosophy of ubuntu encourages students to reposition themselves in relation to the other and realise that every life matters. as a result, relationships have been strengthened and a sense of community has been built. as one of the students who participated in the ubuntu lives: stories to tell workshop reflects, “my story might not change the world, but it might change someone who listens to it”. references academia ubuntu, [online], available at http://academiaubuntu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=29 8&itemid=142 amstutz, mark m. (2005) “the promise of reconciliation through truth and some forgiveness in south africa.” the healing of nations: the promise and limits of political forgiveness. maryland: rowman & littlefield, 187-210. battle, m. (2009) ubuntu: i in you and you in me, new york: seabury books brady, e. m (1990) “redeemed from time: learning through autobiography”, adult education quarterly, vol 41 (1), 43-52 de kok , i. (1998) “cracked heirlooms: memory and exhibition”, in s. nuttall and c. coetzee (eds.) negotiating the past: the making of memory in south africa, oxford: oxford university press, 57-71 godobo-madikizela, p. and van der merwe, c. (eds) (2009) memory, narrative and forgiveness: perspectives on the unfinished journeys of the past, newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing coetzee, p.h. and roux, a.p.j. (eds) (2003) the african philosophy reader, 2nd ed. london: routledge gilson, erinn c. (2014) the ethics of vulnerability: a feminist analysis of social life and practice, new york: routledge graybill, lyn s. (2002) truth and reconciliation in south africa: miracle or model? colorado: lynne rienner publishers. jackson, m. (2002) the politics of storytelling: violence, transgression and intersubjectivity, denmark: museum tusculanum press. kearney, richard (2002) on stories, london & new york: routledge lambert, joe (2010) digital storytelling cookbook, berkeley: digital diner press http://academiaubuntu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=298&itemid=142 http://academiaubuntu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=298&itemid=142 coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 levinas, emmanuel (1969) totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority. trans. alphonso lingis, pittsburgh: duquesne university press levinas, emmanuel (1985) ethics and infinity: conversations with philippe nemo. trans. richard a. cohen, pittsburgh: duquesne university press lingis, alphonso. (1998) “translator’s introduction”, in otherwise than being or beyond essence, trans. trans. alphonso lingis, pittsburgh: duquesne university press, xvii-xiv. louw, dirk j. (2001) “ubuntu and the challenges of multiculturalism in post-apartheid south africa”, quest, vol. xv (1-2), 15-36 mbigi, lovemore (2002) “spirit of african leadership: a comparative african perspective”, journal for convergence, vol.3, no. 4,18-23 munyaka, mluleki and motlhabi, mokgethi (2009) “ubuntu and its socio-moral significance”, in munyaradzi f. murove (ed.) african ethics: an anthology of comparative and applied ethics, scottsville: university of kwazulu-natal, 6384. murithi, timothy (2006) “practical peacemaking. wisdom from africa: reflections on ubuntu”, journal of pan african studies, (1)4: 25-34 murove, munyaradzi felix (2009) “beyond the savage evidence ethic: a vindication of african ethics”, in munyaradzi f. murove (ed.) african ethics: an anthology of comparative and applied ethics, scottsville: university of kwazulu-natal, 14-32. ndebele, n. (1998) “memory, metaphor, and the triumph of narrative”, in s. nuttall and c. coetzee (eds) negotiating the past: the making of memory in south africa, oxford: oxford university press, 19-28. nussbaum, barbara (2009) “reflections of a south african on our common humanity”, in munyaradzi f. murove (ed.) african ethics: an anthology of comparative and applied ethics, scottsville: university of kwazulu-natal, 100-109. posel, deborah. (2006) “the trc’s unfinished business: healing” in c. villa-vicencio and f. du toit (eds) truth & reconciliation in south africa: 10 years on, claremont: david philip “promotion of national unity and reconciliation act 34 of 1995”, department of justice and constitutional development, [online], available at http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/1995-034.pdf ricoeur, p. (1991) “life in quest of narrative”, in d. wood (ed.) on paul ricoeur: narrative and interpretation, london: routledge. tutu, desmond (1998) “chairperson’s foreword”, truth and reconciliation commission of south africa report, volume one, [online], available at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/volume%201.pdf tutu, desmond (1999) no future without forgiveness, london: random house ubuntu academy cape town, [online], available at http://ubuntuacademy.co.za ubuntu global network, [online], available at http://www.ubuntuglobalnetwork.com/charter/ bionote: paula horta holds a phd in cultural studies from goldsmiths, university of london. she teaches at the department of english studies at the faculty of letters, university of lisbon, and is a research fellow at the university of lisbon centre for english studies (ulices). her current research interests focus on visual representation, narrative, and memory. http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/1995-034.pdf http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/volume%201.pdf http://ubuntuacademy.co.za/ coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 acknowledgements i wish to thank carolina and raquel for taking the time to speak with me and for sharing their stories and experience of the ubuntu academy. i am grateful to the reviewer for his/her insightful comments and suggestions. microsoft word vin d'cruz 1 coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 259 connectedness and being: reflections vin d'cruz when i arrived in australia in late 1955, i had been born in a british occupied colonial society in malaya, had lived through the japanese invasion and occupation of malaya, and where i experienced firsthand world war ii and was shocked to see the retreating backs of former colonial british administrators and soldiers, endured the early post-war guerrilla warfare attempt by the malayan communist party, composed predominantly of ethnic chinese, to wrest power in malaysia, and watched with pride, from our first floor window, the visit of the indian national leader subhas chandra bose to his troops in malaya. one of my adopted brothers, anthonisamy, had joined bose’s indian nationalist army (ina) stationed in kuala lumpur. i arrived in india in 1948, the year mahatma gandhi was assassinated. i lived for seven years in independent and postgandhi india (1948-1955), witnessed the early post-gandhi struggle to open the temples to those who then were still called harijans, 1 and witnessed the early and continuing struggle by the indian state to make hindi a national language, with continuing resistance rising from the south. in 1957, i witnessed at first hand and through student activism in my (linguistic) home state of kerala, the local communist party’s reach for power that was to lead to the world’s first ever communist government to be elected through the ballot. i had been the first (non-salaried) fulltime assistant at aicuf (the all india catholic university federation) in the very early 1950s. and i arrived in australia on a government of india passport, issued at madras, and a malayan identity card. 1 harijans, a term coined by gandhi himself, translates as “people of god” (hari is a name used for god in hinduism) and refers to poor and lower castes in indian society. but nowadays, the term harijan, with its hindu connotations, has less currency. dalit or bahujan is the term used more commonly now. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 260 yet all those shifts and changes in geographical, political and cultural locations and living had not prepared me for the australian society that confronted me. i had moved from societies i experienced as of connected people in asia to a society and a people in australia who valued their autonomy, individual space and separateness. as a student in india, i had hung on to a strap to hold my balance in a bus, and if the bus was crowded and a strap was not to be had, i would reach for a stranger’s shoulder to keep my balance: such personal contact was not possible in australia. why not? i wondered. i also recall a bus ride around downtown brisbane early one morning after my arrival in australia, when i leaned over and asked the gentleman seated beside me for page 5 of his newspaper, which he was not reading. he looked at me with a mixture of total surprise, increasing disbelief, then horror and fear, all in successive flashes. it was a common practice in india for pages of a newspaper to find themselves in several pairs of hands during a bus or train ride, but which would be handed back to the owner during or at the end of the trip. it took me a while to realise that such physical and other forms of intimacy, or of sharing of space and belongings, were not possible with people of predominantly anglo stock, and with those non-anglos who were consciously or unselfconsciously socialised into anglo enlightenment values of hyper autonomy, rugged individuality and individual privacy. 2 people i met with southern, central and 2 thomas keneally, a leading australian novelist, captures, with a touch of resignation, the “inevitable” arrival that the asian presence in australia engenders in anglo australia. australia, he reports, doesn’t want much to do with asians and their cultural impact, but it can’t just sell goods to asians, and not accept the other. you’ve got to accept the inevitability of it all [ . . . ]. (qtd. in vinocur 1) but then he reports that anglos find consolation in the robustness of anglo culture to assimilate the alien. he adds: coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 261 east european backgrounds had fewer concerns over issues of physical or other privacies and intimacies, but nor were they regarded with any respect by their west european, and especially anglo, cousins. 3 post-war australia was a mixture of formally instituted racism through a white australia policy and a degree of tolerance towards people-of-colour. this tolerance may have been due to an innocence born of people living in unreflective isolation, or due to the assumption of the world war ii soldiers returning from parts of south east and east asia where the japanese had been defeated and put in their place, that asians generally were once again seen to be behaving themselves under the tutelage of wise colonial officials. the associated assumption may have been that the children of these asians would be well-behaved too. the dominant australian culture, equipped with the confidence bestowed by allied victory, was thereby enabled to welcome overseas students with a great deal less anxiety, occasionally in the manner that one would welcome and pat bewildered creatures that had strayed in. except for the period of the old 6 o’clock “swill”, when australians downed as many beers as they possibly could between 5 and 6 pm, before the law and the publicans poured them on to the streets, by 2020, the country will be much more visibly asian but still completely and identifiably australian. it’s because australian popular culture is such a powerful entity, it subsumes any immigrant culture. even if the families that arrive are as big as platoons, you still have to send your kids to school, and they’re australianised, sometimes in the roughest way possible. but it happens. (qtd. in mckew 58) 3 such distinctions were also not always clear cut, for there were europeans who were exposed to certain racial ideologies, for instance, one experienced a reserve. the father of a young man who frequented our family home in melbourne at one time thought i was not a suitable person for his son to have anything to do with. later, the son explained that his father had been a member of hitler’s youth movement. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 262 where they snarled and abused people-of-colour if encountered. if they cornered us overseas students, they would claim to recognise us by our mothers’ and aunts’ features, which they announced they got to know very well, really well indeed. since then, i find the sight of australian “diggers” in uniform, especially on anzac days, nauseating. in such behaviour as theirs lies the bravado of arrested adolescence of child soldiers or of tales nurtured in guilty sexual encounters and kept from their sweethearts, wives and mothers to be spilt only when legless with alcohol. well, except for all that, life in australia was relatively benign, and i tend to recall the 1950s as “better times”. overseas students were very few in number in those days and there were relatively few of us at melbourne university, where i studied. i was not even aware if students were protesting about inadequate “facilities,” nor was i aware of any, whether asian or australian, who were questioning the dominant anglo characterisations of asian people, events and issues. however inadequately, i addressed those issues at tutorials and through my essays, as they rose out of intellectual and moral questions encountered in my studies as well as through socially encountered racism. 4 in my 4 by the 1970s and 1980s, my concerns had moved to the cultural process and product of australian education, and among my co-researchers were peter sheehan (originally at melbourne university, and now at victoria university), and brian crittenden (la trobe university). while the ‘60s spurred australian culture on to greater autonomy, freedom and choice, it also became obvious to some of us working at the centre for the study of innovation in education, at la trobe university, and especially to professor peter sheehan with whom i was collaborating in philosophical, cultural and policy areas at the time, that we were in danger of losing the bonds of cultural belonging. but which was to be the preferred cultural group to which we would belong? this question was also reflected in debates at that time around the issue of multiculturalism. for a while an “inclusive” australian culture was juxtaposed against exclusive ethno-religious cultures, until the “inclusiveness” was exposed as anglo-european culture writ large. similarly, the “australian values” debate has not quite recovered its anglo identity. it then appeared for a moment that mutually accountable modes of negotiation might restore coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 263 classes, i attempted to draw attention to the institutional racism that was reproduced at both official and unofficial levels of australian culture. for example, my research found that most of the witnesses at a commission of inquiry looking into the behaviour of the chinese on the nsw goldfields in 1858 reported that the chinese were for the most part exemplary citizens; yet, despite this positive finding, the commission believed that they were not fit to stay in the colony, or had to pay a higher tax for doing so (see d’cruz, 1973: chapter 1). no australian historian i had read at that time had condemned the commission. at tutorials, i wanted to know why those historians were still drawing salaries from their universities despite the fact they were not addressing these important issues. i must have been a real pain. still i persisted. some of those social bonds. in the 1990s i included health care, through nursing practice and nursing education, in my research with joan bottorff, grace tham (both formerly of rmit), jane hall and others, and taught courses in health, education and psychoculture. in the 80s and 90s, bernie neville and i were exploring, with our masters students at la trobe university, alternative modes of consciousness in traditional and contemporary cultural settings, and introducing them to other ways of knowing than reason alone. teaching at la trobe university’s graduate school of education for twenty years was a rewarding experience; while we had to justify the courses we taught, i was never stopped from teaching anything i thought was important. but, if i remember correctly, it took bernie neville and i at least two or three years to get the masters course on modes and structures of consciousness through the university’s board of studies. by 2003, while i was at the national university of malaysia teaching cultural linguistics, i had returned to issues of australia’s relations to people-of-colour within and outside australia, in the company of william steele (then at victoria university). in 2008, my enquiries include a concern over (more autonomous) australian values and (more interdependent, and for want of a better term) asian or non-anglo values, as well as an interest in contemporary asian political leadership. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 264 my reasoning to myself was quite simple—i knew at least one chinese, ah hin, my eldest and most senior (adopted) brother, to be a good person. it did not even occur to me that the immigrant chinese in the australian colonies, as a people, could be any different. it was initially a gut feeling. and so too were the japanese soldiers we met in malaya during world war ii; not all of them were cruel or barbaric, as they were often portrayed in post-war australia (d’cruz, 1973: chapter 2.) a few of these apparently “barbaric” people became our family friends, before they were repatriated to their homes after hostilities ceased. one of them arrived on the eve of his repatriation with a huge mound of white cloth, for which we were grateful since all cloth was scarce during the war. on closer examination, they were new, unused, lap-laps, which the japanese soldiers used for underwear. we still were thankful, for they could be stitched together into sheets and then into shirts and blouses. these were gut feelings of mine about the chinese and the japanese, but they were also drawn from limited but direct knowledge of the people concerned, and these feelings of mine ran slap-bang against australian community attitudes towards people-of-colour. nor could i identify then a single instance where australians welcomed one or other group of people-of-colour, including, of course, their own indigenous people. publicly, i wanted to be told why i could not have easily learnt from secondary sources how exemplary the chinese were, and why i was forced to dig for it on my own in primary source materials like reports of royal commissions? 5 why was the full and 5 some time in the md-60s, i recall with embarrassment buttonholing a poor chinese student outside the commerce building at melbourne university and haranguing him about not taking australians to task for misrepresenting the chinese immigrants throughout australian history, as he plaintively protested, but i am not a history student, i am doing commerce. that earned my wrath even more. no excuse, i declared. then study australian history, and protest! at times i wonder about that poor man; he’s probably running a huge corporation in hong kong, malaysia or singapore, recalling that weird indian student concerned over some chinese who lived and died in australia coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 265 true story about the chinese not told in australia? increasingly, i became aware of the manner in which anti-asian racism had become so naturalised amongst anglo australians as to be invisible to them; indeed, the symbolic violence of racism was inscribed at the everyday level of vernacular language. i still recall, for example, the blind anger i experienced in 1957 when a respected old jesuit theologian confessed to me his acute embarrassment over a memory dating back to his childhood in melbourne. in his early teens he was apprenticed to a baker. every morning he turned up for work around 4.00 am, and the baker would call out his first duty: bury the chinaman! 6 translated, it meant he, the apprentice, had to dig a hole out the back and bury the bucket of human excreta accumulated during the previous day. the baker’s self-worth could only hold up after another human being, a coloured one, had been reduced to human excreta. in history tutorials i was told i was talking politics and assuming moral positions (which was not on); in literature i was told i was expounding politics and philosophy; in philosophy i was told i was indulging in speculative philosophy when what was called for was analysis and more analysis, and so on. it was the heyday of analytical philosophy in australia. subjects were controlled in water-tight compartments of knowledge, and the final arbiter in all disputes was reason, and generalised reason alone prevailed. individual experience, or intuition, counted for little or nought. while formalised knowledge was compartmentalised in institutions of learning, 7 the a century before. he will never know how close he, as a chinese, was to me because of ah hin, my eldest and senior most (adopted) brother. 6 goldie osuri reminds me that maxine hong kingston, the chinese american novelist, countered this emasculating racist term “chinaman” in one of her novels which she named china men (1980). (personal communication 2008). 7 when, in the mid-60s, i recall quoting heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to make a point in the introductory paragraph of an class essay, the tutor instructed me in a note in the margins to remove that reference for not only was it too esoteric in the context of what was being written, but was also sourced from outside the discipline i was engaged coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 266 socialscape, where and how people lived, was itself compartmentalised racially: those who were anglo white were inside, and people-of-colour were outside. protestants were on the inside, catholics on the margins, people-of-colour clinging to the rim, and indigenous people, still non-citizens, were off the radar. it was also a left-out society. the poorer working classes and the rural poor were off centre, though there always seemed to be a strong dash of sympathy for the battler in australian life and its literature. while the irish, the poor and the non-urban folk were grudgingly allowed space in the sun, people-of-colour, indigenous and others, were kept further away. on consideration, i almost believe the omission was a blessing in disguise, for in the shadows people-of-colour could retain something of their own ways, unlike the australian irish, who, for the most part, appear to have become indistinguishable from their erstwhile anglo “betters”. 8 one hopes that people-of-colour have been rendered less homogenised through neglect. 9 in, which (i think) was in the area of ‘theories of politics’. on another occasion, i was asked to remove a reference to that popular radio serial dad & dave—set in mythical rural setting of snake gully, in the shire of gundagai (nsw), a serial which in its hay day ran for 15 years from 1937 onwards, 4 times a week, at 15 minutes a session, and i caught on a re-run in the mid-50s—because (i was instructed) the reference was from ‘popular/folk writing’, whereas the essay i was writing was set in the formal discipline of “history”. today i am a follower of a radio program titled australia all over led by “macca” (ian mcnamara) on abc local radio across australia, on sundays between 5.30 am and 10.00 am. it’s mostly recollections of times gone by and of things done and experienced which are rarely possible today. it is overwhelmingly ‘anglo’ in reminiscences, and nostalgic, something i have little problems with given that i’ve lived in such a culture for well over half a century and believe that, as with the notion of karma, the past, the present and the future are linked by our thoughts, words, and deeds. 8 in 1957, standing in front of burns oates bookshop at the top of bourke street, melbourne, i watched the long, seemingly unending, annual st patricks day procession, coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 267 there appeared little relief from any quarter, except that my university term papers, through which i mounted my counter attack, were curiously and generously marked with strong though for the most part quizzical encouragement from a few senior staff, who encouraged me to continue my research, 10 as well as the friendship and support of a few supportive australian friends. 11 those class papers were subsequently of school children and adults, with archbishop daniel mannix at its head, wend its way up bourke street and up past parliament house. within a few years the annual procession had stopped happening. i am informed (in 2008) by a trade unionist in melbourne that irish workers who came to australia in the last 15 or so years have retained their cultural identity. while worldwide today, ashis nandy (2008:xii) notes, ireland has carved for itself “a creative role as a culture that has been a victim of colonialism and, as an heir to the european civilisation, can claim access to the worldviews of both the rulers and the ruled.” 9 this is my guess that has yet to be tested. 10 melbourne university’s political scientists william macmahon ball and lloyd churchwood, and historian alan martin, come to mind. political scientist alan davies was an exception, for he took me aside several times to encourage me to keep writing, despite the fact my writing breached traditional genres and protocols; he also drew my attention to what he termed my “new genre” in political writing, a genre that utilised psychocultural insights to explain individual and social behaviour. (i was not even consciously aware of using psychocultural insights to do anything; i just wrote. it was also the first time i encountered the word “genre.”) a. f. davies, of course, was the exponent of the psychological genre in australian political writing. as head of politics at melbourne university, he also ensured that my small book, the asian image was prominently displayed in the mounted glass cabinet that advertised the department’s publications. 11 friends like jim bowler and geoff lacey at melbourne university and newman college were among those carrying the anti-racist fight through organisations like the coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 268 published in journals 12 and later a few of them were published in the asian image: episodes in australian history (1973). the asian image came into being as a response immigration reform group, and such efforts, together with those of law-enforcers, were also to be found among bureaucrats (tavan 2005). 12 fresh-faced, on arrival i was taken aside by older and knowing overseas students and coached on the finer points of staying on, together with the cautionary note about not making it difficult for others by rashly deciding to pass too many exams at once. exams, it was explained, were mostly passed or failed for strategic reasons--passing one or two exams a year, which one could get away with in those days, extended one’s stay in the country by quite a bit, quite a few years actually. during that extended stay one could have a lot of fun, we were told, and, if one were careful, one could work on nights and accumulate a sizeable nest egg at the end of our stay. after the first three of the four exams in my first year, i glowed with a feeling of accomplishment, and told my friends that i had done well. that night i was again taken aside by a senior who asked what on earth i thought i was doing; so i failed in my last exam, having handed in partially completed answers and feeling i had not completely let the side down. an anglo-irish australian i had befriended early on was distraught over how i had allowed myself to be manipulated by a group senior; for me, greater concrete group solidarity over individualistic personal autonomy was not an issue, especially when the group was, for all intents and purposes, mine (for a discussion on concrete/abstract relations, see d’cruz and steele, 2003: chapter 4). besides, the senior in question then was an older chinese student (and therefore a priori a good bloke) who was never short of a quid and doing an accountancy course, who (he assured me) after 7 or 8 years had passed a mere 5 or 6 subjects. that was unbeatable achievement, and we duly looked up to him. then there was that immensely wise and kindly civil servant before whom i had to appear annually and account for my academic (non-)performance, who, unknown to me, coincidentally read and wrote for one of the journals i wrote for, and who, more by his manner than anything else, wisely reassured me that my continued presence in the country was obviously justified by my published essays. he didn’t seem bothered coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 269 when a person of some consequence in academia took me aside one day in late 1972 and gave me a little unwelcome advice, the gist of which was that if i persisted in publishing the kind of articles i was then publishing, i could forget a university career in australia. gauging my feelings, his last words were— “start packing.” typically, my response was to gather a few of my published articles and reprint them in book form, the asian image, my first book. that reflex became a hallmark: whenever criticised over an article or book of mine, my reply was to produce another article or, preferably, another book. it drove my critics insane, which, at times, was one of the few consolations for living among them. 13 i was not aware then of anyone else who was whether or not i passed or failed miserable things like exams. once i caught his name on his desk name plate, and it seemed familiar; i recollected who he was some time later. the fact that we both wrote for the same journal never come up in discussions. however, on the last occasion we met, he suggested i might consider passing a subject or two in the following year, but said not to fuss over it. such wisdom! such unadulterated wisdom in the australian public service! [yes, he is still alive, and he still writes from abroad, where i believe he has lived for many years. and, no, i have not met him since those public service days.] however, as i acquired a family including two children, the need for additional income led me to doing a postgraduate degree, which was completed in minimum time, with the thesis, as i recall, committed for publication even before it was submitted for evaluation (d’cruz and sheehan 1975; chippendale 1977). the incentive was there on that occasion to complete my academic commitment on time. 13 while there was an element of defiance in my response, it was also the first time in my life that i felt the sensation of helpless vulnerability; i was vulnerable because i had a family and they were in a way being threatened. there was one other time when i felt really vulnerable, and that was in 1964 when i found myself late one night in a hotel room in saigon (south vietnam), just before the big us build-up of troops started in earnest in that unfortunate country. late one night with the sound of shelling in the distance and as i wrote a piece for the australian (30 january 1965, 9; 26 february coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 270 questioning the historical and moral basis of what passed for knowledge or bleached knowledge, at least in parts of the university; 14 for that matter, i wasn’t aware of mounting any such challenge myself. i wrote because i was irked, and i was irked because nonsense was being said and written about my people, that is, people-of-colour, whether chinese, indian, japanese or whoever, about whom i had some direct knowledge, and who feature in the asian image. after i had been writing and publishing for a decade, i came across syed hussein alatas’ seminal work, the then recently published the myth of the lazy native (1977). it was what i needed at that time, someone (in asia) who was addressing issues no one i knew in australia seemed remotely interested in. i contacted syed hussein alatas, who at once invited me to visit him at the national university of singapore, which i did and where he graciously received me and a friendship was forged. he passed away in 2007. 15 in the late 1970s, i made contact and visited ashis nandy, in delhi. his writings, beginning with the intimate enemy (1983), have seriously influenced my thinking. without pretensions, i must say that he writes as if he has direct access to issues i am wrestling with, and he was arriving at admirably sharper analyses and better conclusions. unashamedly, i acknowledge that these two intellectuals gave me real friendship and intellectual ballast, which i have valued over the years. three other specifically indian influences shaped my outlook in a lasting manner. firstly, after i arrived in india from malaysia, sometime around 1952 or 1953, in madras i came across a book by a frenchman which introduced me to india—hindu manners, customs and ceremonies (1816) by abbe j. a. dubois. dubois was a french christian missionary. the first english edition was published in 1816. it opened up an india that was for the most part closed to a catholic indian of the latin rite. so much of 1965, 9 ), i was gripped with this fear that if anything happened to me my family would be in danger. i wrote home about how i felt that night. 14 there possibly were others, but i personally was not aware of any. 15 a volume of essays has been dedicated to the memory of the late syed hussein alatas, titled political actors and ideas in contemporary asia (2008). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 271 our culture had been bred out of us through our westernized christian formation, leading me to repeatedly cry out in anguish: they have given me a god, but i know not where they have put my culture. or, perhaps more accurately, they have taken away my culture, and i know not where to find my god. indian latin christians knew more about rome (the seat of catholic power) than about rajkot (where gandhi was born); we knew more about london (the seat of british imperial power) than lucknow (a culinary centre in north india). i was 19 or 20 years old, and this might have been abbe dubois’s india but i instinctively recognized it as my long withheld inheritance; for me, it was india in the flesh and sweat, armpit whiff and all. i had long sought such a fountain without realizing it, and now i drank thirstily, deeply and greedily. whatever its limitations, 16 and there are many, this book by a frenchman drew me as nothing else did into the throbbing life of my people, which had been blocked out by the western cultural trappings of a mission-exported catholic faith and a colonial english education. 17 the association with these south asian families provided me with a sense of lived and shared cultural identity, location and security (disparagingly described as “ghettoes”) with which i was then able to negotiate more confidently with australians more generally. lived association with these indian sub-continental families, or “little 16 some of which were evident as i read them the first time, others, more serious, i identified later. 17 in mid-50s australia, the australian catholicism i encountered was split four ways: in addition to what passed for australian culture, bog-irish culture was evident in town and country parishes; at the university of melbourne, there was the studied irish orientation of people like australian-born vincent buckley (and irish-born archbishop daniel mannix himself); the english-oriented catholicism of the likes of australian born (later archbishop) eric d’arcy; and the european continental-oriented catholics, like australian-born max charlesworth, bill ginnane and the like. in the then nearfrontier towns like cunnamala and quilpie (in queensland), i’ve run into priests of germanic and other backgrounds. coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 272 cultures”, concretised the grand narratives of indian culture by giving me a better understanding of what i was comfortable with, enabled me to negotiate, from a secure base of an associated alternative network, with both the broader western and the local white australian cultures. now i too began to feel local; initially, the location was constituted of my own and the two families’ patches. i recall one of my academic colleagues cautioning me against the dangers of being trapped in a “ghetto”, while i myself found the experience very liberating. at last, i felt, i could “belong” in australia through a group of my own. “ghettoes” (a euphemism, disparagingly used to describe family, ethnic, religious or other such group environments) became important conduits for some of us immigrants in charting and making for locality. i began to see the largely anglo australian and the state sponsored campaigns against “ghettoes” as a ploy to deprive me of my ethno-cultural group particularity and one designed to dissolve me in the vat of an abstracted public culture that drew its values primarily from one culture, the dominant anglo culture. 18 by now, parts of me were no longer available to my anglo friends, and that disoriented them. i tried to explain my position, but they just couldn’t get it. (…)the agents of both the state and church fed off the little and more concrete cultures, while curtailing any autonomous existence on the part of the little cultures. it took some years between my initial experience of the homogenising tendencies of church and state and the subsequent understanding of their corrosive effects on the more concrete little cultures and on my own micro lived culture. for the first half century or so of my life in australia, i had stood toe to toe and slogged it out with the anglo denigrators of people-of-colour in australia. it slowly dawned on me that as i was punching away, i was becoming the enemy i wanted to vanquish, determined to reduce the opposition to my singular viewpoint, as would any worthy champion of the cyclopean enlightenment. i had coped with life by effecting a million compromises at the interpersonal level; but i had held together my ontological 18 for a more general discussion of some of these concepts (eg, the more abstract/concrete aspects of psychoculture, anglo culture, the public culture, multiculturalism, etc), see, (d’cruz and steele 2003: chapters 1and 4). coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 273 integrity with an apparent seamlessness while maintaining a billion bristling mutinies against the counter pressures to conform to the dominant anglo culture pressing on me from every side. but the mutinies could only be sustained once i understood how a dominance of reason and habit had failed me miserably by truncating life’s possibilities to anorexic proportions. i had to learn to belong in different ways. 19 aquinas, augustine and francis had to find spaces beside a sankara, a dalai lama and a gandhi, and assume proportionate roles. i decided that i would still fend off blows, make my points, forge alliances, and allow for greater diversity in desirable alternative futures we could live with. it has been by default a great adventure, not all of it pleasant. in time, janus-like, i reared my head with tired but searching eyes to simultaneously face an australia and an asia. in 1973, with an australian passport and my family, i had returned to india for the first time since i had left it in 1955, heralding the start of another, more painful as well as a more rewarding adventure, which, of course, was unknown to me at that time. but through half a century of socialisation in australia, and the influences of chinese, indian, japanese, malay and other cultures, i still take my bearings from the compass of my malayali mother’s inclusive yet discriminating values, refracted through all those other influences. while not a hybrid (a category i reject because of its heritage of biological racisms), i am fed by many cultural strands, and my primary reality “is necessarily experienced from [my] own [indian] horizon of intelligibility” (estava and prakash 11). yet, i am also an australian because of such cultural mixes. it takes all sorts to make australia, and i am one of those sorts. the fact that many cultural influences run through me does not make me ambivalent, it makes me inclusive. for all that, i am more comfortable declaring—i’m a melburnian. it’s australia i have problems with. 19 on her way to her death in auschwitz, twenty-nine year old dutch born etty hillesum (212) wrote: “it is the only thing we can do, klaas, i see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.” coolabah, vol.3, 2009, issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 274 for complete information on the late prof. j.v. d’cruz please go to: http://arts.monash.edu.au/mai/staff/vdcruz.php coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 folklore, media-lore & modernity: an introduction tiffany hutton crackle communications tiffany@cracklecommunications.com.au copyright©2019 tiffany hutton. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. introduction this special themed issue of coolabah features a series of papers exploring the connections between various forms of folklore and modernity and the development of contemporary media-lore. the concept of media-lore is a relatively recent one, elucidated by the russian laboratory of theoretical folkloristics at their 2014 conference ‘mechanisms of cultural memory: from folk-lore to media-lore’. comparing it to the classic oral culture of folklore, they position media-lore as a ‘third’, screen-based mechanism for the transmission of cultural knowledge (the second was writing). medialore, they posit, in its immediacy and interactivity, has more in common with oral folklore than in does with the intermediate stage of written text. where written text often intends to replace oral memory, media-lore shares with oral folk-lore the creation of cultural knowledge through dialogue. ‘this is a paradoxical similarity since the technology for information transmission and storing in the ‘screen age’ is radically different from those of the oral era.’ (russian laboratory of theoretical folkloristics 2014: online) mermaids feature in many articles in this issue, reflecting the numerous ways this creature of folklore has been adopted and adapted in contemporary media-lore. as hayward has argued, the mermaid is able to ‘manifest diverse and often disjunctive aspects’ (2018: 3). she figures variously in the media texts discussed in this issue as a metaphor for conflict, a symbol for a micronation and a prop for a performance piece. in ‘sung by an indigenous siren’, renes examines the use of the traditionally western mermaid in carpentaria, an indigenous novel. in this instance, the mermaid is both a mailto:tiffany@cracklecommunications.com.au mailto:tiffany@cracklecommunications.com.au coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 metaphor for and an embodiment of the conflict between antagonistic worlds, ‘country’ versus the ‘capitalist paradigm of ruthless economic exploitation’. the mermaid is by no means the only media-loric aspect of this dense novel, which also links the indigenous oral tradition to the contemporary world, deliberately crossing boundaries. hayward’s analysis of the symbolism and history of the micronation of achzivland, established in 1972 in north western israel, rotates around the use of a mermaid on the micronational flag. after discussing the symbol with regard to the vexed status of achzivland on occupied palestinian territory, the article compares the ideological operation of the micronational flag with the very different mermaid imagery produced by palestinian artist imad abu shtayyah. mermaids also feature (in a supporting role) in the ceremonies described in cashman’s ‘king neptune, the mermaids, and the cruise tourists’. the article focuses on how a long-established maritime tradition has undergone a transformation into a performative piece for cruise ship passengers in which gender roles and transgressions have been homogenised into a deckside entertainment. mermen, with their emasculated lower halves, have occupied a less prominent cultural position than their female counterparts. this makes their use in the artwork for craft beer branding, as discussed in mesker’s ‘through an ale glass, palely,’ apposite, as craft breweries style themselves in contrast to the mainstream, hyper-masculinity of ‘industrial’ scale beer, preferring to identify with a more tongue-in-cheek and ironic masculinity. although they are not mermaids, the narf and the selkie in the films examined in shalaby’s essay ‘reworking the postmodern understanding of reality through fantasy’ nevertheless fulfil a similar role to the mermaid, as ‘fantasy’ aquatic creatures who are able to offer the human protagonists a different and ‘more enabling’ understanding of themselves. in contrast to the previously discussed merman, there is no gender ambiguity in the aquatic creature in the film the shape of water. he is a specifically media-loric figure (aquaman as introduced in creature from the black lagoon) and jilken and johansson’s of ‘aquatic heterosexual love and wondrous cliché stereotypes’ argue that he represents the development of a softer, albeit relentlessly heterosexual, approved heterogenic masculinity. another specifically media-loric creature features in lee’s ‘the new zombie apocalypse and social crisis in south korean cinema’, exploring the rise of the zombie horror film in south korean cinema. the author describes how the zombie apocalypse has been adopted as a metaphor for crisis, disorder and fear; zombies also represent the loss of self (the concept of a ‘bare life’). she further argues that the south korean zombie films discussed are used to interrogate the country’s ‘the nation is a family’ metaphor, as well as the conflict between ‘pro-self’ and ‘pro-social’ behaviour. taking another angle on contemporary media-lore, in ‘place, visibility and perception’, farinelli and hayward explore how a location (the rocky outcrop es vedra, off the coast of ibiza) has been represented as a concentration of a variety of traditional, new age and media-loric discourses — including the ubiquitous mermaid and the 20th century ufos phenomenon. the authors argue that concentration of representations around the island create it as a media-logically resonant landmark. in terms of material culture, the love-locks phenomenon described in houlbrook’s ‘from coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 popular culture to popular custom, and back again’ illustrates the creation of a modern form of folklore and the rapidity with which the love-lock as an artefact has spread globally and also created its own ‘back history’. the genesis of the phenomenon was a 2006 italian novel, and yet in a 2017 hallmark film the tradition is asserted to have begun in 1997 and in a 2014 novel its origins are supposed to be 500 years old. the association between age and authenticity means that there is an imperative to create history. it is also notable that the locks are a mass-produced form of traditional technology redeployed for new purpose – which is in itself a tidy analogy for media-lore of the type discussed in this issue. overall, the contributions to this themed issue of coolabah demonstrate both the rich and constantly refreshed corpus of contemporary media-lore and the variety of critical approaches that can illuminate its texts and infra-textual operation. as individual articles identify, media-loric figure and practices occur in a range of official, touristic, popular cultural and new age contexts, making them key elements of 21st century public culture. references russian laboratory of theoretical folkloristics (2014). ‘conference mechanisms of cultural memory: from folk-lore to media-lore’, ranepa website: http://www.ranepa.ru/eng/activities/item/604-cultural-memory.html hayward, p. (2018). making a splash: mermaids (and mermen) in 20th and 21st century audiovisual media. eastleigh: john libbey and co/university of indian press. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 the representation of aboriginality in the novels of peter temple bill phillips university of barcelona billphillips@ub.edu copyright©2016 bill phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: identity politics is fraught with difficulties. of few places is this truer than in australia when it comes to the representation of aboriginality. on the one hand the absence or invisibility of aboriginality in australian life and culture maybe interpreted as a deliberate exclusion of a people whose presence is uncomfortable or inconvenient for many australians of immigrant origin. equally, the representation of aboriginality by non-aboriginals may be seen as an appropriation of identity, an inexcusable commercial exploitation or an act of neocolonialism. best-selling and prize-winning south african-born author peter temple appears to be very much aware of these pitfalls. in his crime novels, written between 1996 and 2009, he has obviously made the decision to grasp the nettle and attempt to represent aboriginality in a way that would be as acceptable as possible. this paper traces the evolution of temple's representation of aboriginality through the three major aboriginal characters present in his novels: cameron delray (bad debts, 1996; black tide, 1999; dead point, 2000; and white dog, 2003), ned lowey (an iron rose, 1998) and detective sergeant paul dove (the broken shore, 2005 and truth, 2009). keywords: australian crime fiction, peter temple, aboriginal australia, identity politics we are accustomed, in crime fiction, to tarnished heroes. these are men, such as philip marlowe, or lew archer, who drink too much, are rather too prone to violence and are incapable of settling down with the perky redhead/blonde/brunette who throws herself into their arms. yet these men, apparently, have a code, a set of rules which may not be broken. in the oft-quoted words of raymond chandler: “if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things” (198). there is a contradiction here which may be summed up in one word: hypocrisy. chandler’s heroes are, on closer inspection, dirty beyond redemption. they are racist, sexist and homophobic, unloved and unloving, mailto:billphillips@ub.edu coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 alcoholic sociopaths committed to a corrupt system sustained by seedy politicians, lawless cops and the undeserving rich. dashiell hammett – arguably the greatest practitioner of the american hard-boiled tradition, and among the first to make the transition from short story to novel – mercilessly deconstructed the genre's infatuation with power, violence and death in red harvest. yet he is the exception. despite chandler's hagiography of hammett in “the simple art of murder”, the former seems to have been quite unaware of the latter's subversive intentions. chandler's heroes are firmly embedded in the corrupt, masculine world of twentieth century america. friend of the rich and powerful, philip marlowe is borne along by a string of rich clients and a cooperative police force: the criminals being the depraved and twisted – which often translates as women, non-whites or homosexuals. many later crime writers such as joseph hansen, walter mosley, sara paretsky, sue grafton, george pelecanos and james sallis (to name but a few) have deliberately, like hammett before them, sought to deconstruct the genre and lay bare its prejudices and, in particular, its medieval model of masculinity. among such writers from outside the united states are to be found a generation who may loosely be termed postcolonial because of the countries they are from, and which they write about, and because of the issues that are raised in their work. such writers include the south africans deon meyer, mike nicol and roger smith, the scot ian rankin, the irishman ken bruen and, the subject of this article, south african-born australian peter temple. their fictional detectives – often ex-policemen turned private detective – are men of acknowledged frailty. they struggle to understand themselves, the validity of their work, and their capacity to do it well. like their american contemporaries, they are plagued by selfdoubt and beset by alcoholism, loneliness and depression. none of this is to be found in the works of that earlier generation of crime writers, men such as chandler, ross macdonald and their many disciples, including mickey spillane, and robert b. parker, or the dwindling number of diehard twenty-first century imitators such as lee child, whose heroes insist on a moral rectitude which, when examined, boils down to inanity and hypocrisy. inanity, because humanity is infinitely complex: solipsism and obstinacy is not heroism. and hypocrisy, because the hard-boiled genre's dissemination of misogyny, racism and homophobia, and the celebration of violence are not the pillars upon which a just society is built. peter temple's heroes, then, are truly flawed, demonstrably weak and convinced of their own inadequacy and guilt yet they endure: “who speaks of victory? to carry on is all” 1 exclaims stephen villani, the jaded protagonist of truth (376), but even that endorsement of survival is deflated with the warning: “just don't talk about it” (376), as he heads off for breakfast. temple's heroes are burdened with guilt before the novels even begin. as a consequence they are unable to assume the moral superiority, the adherence to the masculine code that characterises traditional detective fiction, because they have already transgressed: they are fallen. post-lapsarian, their aims are modest – perhaps to redeem themselves s– but ostensibly merely to survive without harming others. “how to be a halfway decent person. that's the main question in life” (171) is ken berglin's message coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 to mac faraday, the protagonist of an iron rose. faraday, now retired from the police following a botched operation in which a woman was killed, had been trained by the americans. “they tell you you can't do this work without a sense of moral superiority?” (168) asks bergin, cynically. “few hundred times”, replies faraday (169), and the attentive reader understands that the allusion is not only to the american police, but to raymond chandler and the pantheon of american hard-boiled writers whose heroes enjoy lives untroubled by guilt and self-doubt. contemporary society has developed three quite simple indicators of injustice and discrimination: the prevalence, or absence, of racism, sexism and homophobia. all three are endemic in traditional american hard-boiled fiction, which is why recent writers have deliberately subjected the genre to interrogation and deconstruction. but these indicators are of particular interest to postcolonial scholars in that colonial societies were often built precisely on one, if not all, of these prejudices (including, of course, the usa). racism is inevitably of particular significance, given that most, if not all european empires of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries justified themselves by an assumption of racial superiority. discrimination based on concepts of racial identity is, then, central to postcolonial theory and, not surprisingly, to postcolonial literature. edward said made this evident in his ground-breaking postcolonial study orientalism, which laid the foundations for the discursive treatment of academic structures of colonial domination, highlighting how racist binaries underpinned coloniser/colonised relationships so as to enthrone white imperial power. said, a palestinian-american author, speaks of the academic production of knowledge in disciplines such as anthropology, cartography or literature which, when dealing with the orient, are inspired by “a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate or even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world” (1995 [1978]: 12). said specifies that this “will” is structurally bound to the process of western self-definition against the colonial other: … the development and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of another, different and competing alter ego. the construction of identity –for identity, whether of orient or occident, france or britain, while obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences, is finally a construction –involves establishing opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from ‘us’. each age and society recreates its ‘others’. far from a static thing then, identity of self or of ‘other’ is a much workedover historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies (1995 [1978]: 332). the construction of the colonial other in said’s orientalism has had its particular equivalent in the process of australian nation-building through the dehumanisation of the indigene, in which the application of the legal concept of terra nullius or “a land belonging to no-one” served to dispossess the aboriginal nations of their rights and land (reynolds 2003: 14). hodge and mishra see this as “the unjust act of an imperial power whose direct beneficiaries [white settlers] have still not acknowledged that coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 injustice, nor succeeded in constructing a viable alternative basis for their legitimacy” (1991: x). the racist binary that has written the original inhabitants out of the continent and its history operates along lines that hodge and mishra describe as an australian equivalent of orientalism – ‘aboriginalism’ (1991: 27-30). aboriginalism as a variant of orientalism has still not disappeared as a discourse of western control and domination in post-colonial times, and arguably keeps informing the relationship between settlers and those settled – to the detriment of the latter. given that crime fiction is burdened with an ugly history of racism, in its postcolonial manifestation, representations of identity of all kinds become particularly fraught. it will be interesting, then, to observe how peter temple, a white man from south africa, and the most lauded crime writer in australian literary history, deals with the representation of aboriginals in his work. it has been particularly problematic for non-indigenous writers to incorporate aboriginal voices in their narratives without being accused of abuse of white privilege and usurpation in representation. there are plenty of examples of major writers struggling with the issue of entitlement: david malouf with remembering babylon (1993), kate grenville with the secret river (2006) and gail jones with sorry (2007), all try to maintain a respectful distance while dealing with indigenous subject matter, yet all have received serious criticism, and had their motives questioned. obviously, such criticism is fed by long years of a dominant white culture deciding what aboriginality was, or should be, usually in a disempowering fashion. this has placed contemporary non-indigenous authors in an impossible bind: if they ignore the aborigene in their novels, they seem to be denying their very existence – a reiteration of terra nullius – but if they do give them a voice, they are unlikely to please everyone, simply through the mere appropriation of aboriginal representation, or through depictions unacceptable to aboriginal tastes and concerns. thus, in a foucauldian analysis of an important academic debate on discourses of aboriginality carried out in the oceania journal in 1992 and 1993, carolyn d’cruz argues that: the matter of who speaks for and about whom is possibly the most sensitive and impassioned issue circulating within discourses of identity politics. more often than not, before confronting any other qualifying perquisite to speak, a speaker must satisfy the criteria of bearing the marker of identity that one is speaking about. in various public spaces in australia, both issues – the right to speak and the question concerning what constitutes authentic aboriginal identity – are debated with burning regularity (2001). one means, then, by which australian writers in general deal with the representation of aboriginals is simply to ignore them. another is to portray them as honorary europeans, happily adapted to white customs while retaining a few quirky characteristics of their own which usually involve a pre-enlightenment relationship with nature and an unerring sense of direction. this quirkiness is essential to remind the reader that the aboriginal, for all his new-found refinement, has not quite made the full transition. examples of the first kind of crime writer are garry disher and shane maloney; of the second, arthur upfield, creator of the widely acclaimed detective coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 inspector bony, short for napoleon bonaparte, of the queensland police, whose novels, published between the 1920s and 1960s were successfully adapted to television in the 1970s. upfield, in the words of stephen knight, “is at once respectful and contemptuous of aboriginals” (122), indeed, bony is uncomfortably evocative of homi bhabha's idea of mimicry, which he describes “as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (bhabha 85). peter temple's representations of aboriginal men (there are no aboriginal women in his work) attempt to avoid both traps with mixed success. firstly, there are only three aboriginals portrayed at any length in temple's novels: cameron delray, enforcer for a shady gambler named harry strang in the jack irish novels (bad debts, 1996; black tide, 1999; dead point, 2000; and white dog, 2003); ned lowey, a smallholder from rural victoria in an iron rose (1998); and detective sergeant paul dove in the broken shore (2005) and truth (2009). it can be argued – as no doubt garry disher would of his novels set in the peninsula region of victoria – that there are few aboriginals in south east australia, and those that do live there rarely impinge on the lives of settler australians, and therefore their apparent absence is more a representation of a particular kind of contemporary victorian reality – indeed, an indicator of their invisibilty – than a deliberate exclusion. for temple, then, to include aboriginals in his novels is a deliberate act. furthermore, the three aforementioned aboriginals are represented in consciously different ways as though temple were experimenting, rather gingerly, with politically acceptable alternatives to the kind of conventional representation of native australians by white authors such as arthur upfield. cameron delray, generally known as 'cam', is introduced in bad debts (1996) as “aboriginal/scottish/italian” (59) while in black tide (2007) he is an “australian minestrone of genes, dark and dangerous broth”. temple is doing a number of things here. firstly he is demonstrating the ethnically heterogeneous nature of modern day australians; they are a mixture of races and origins, and to pretend otherwise is either foolish or politically indefensible. secondly he is highlighting a particular kind of mixture: aboriginal – which, as the name implies, is representative of the first human inhabitants of australia. scottish, in representation of the british, the first european colonists of australia – but mediated by the fact that scotland, like australia, was a non-metropolitan region of the british empire. thus scotland foreshadows the metropolitan disempowerment and colonial empowerment later to be experienced by australian aboriginals in ways that did not favour the first nations (john hartley quoted in batty 1998, hodge and mishra 1991: xv). and italian, in representation of one of the most significant waves of european immigration into australia in the twentieth century once the country was no longer ruled directly from london; a representative of a people relatively unburdened with the ambiguous colonial heritage of dis/empowerment (gunew 1990: 111). finally, the fact that cam is not a fullblood aboriginal opens up a series of other questions about identity and place. perhaps, as happened to so many aboriginal australians and african americans, one or more of his ancestors was raped by european settlers and gave birth to a child of mixed race – what has gone down in australian history as the practice of ‘black velvet’ (collingwood-whittick 2000: 53). coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 perhaps (though this is less likely), he is representative of a harmonious melting pot whereby love, or personal, social and economic interests combined to bring his more recent ancestors together as a family. and, as a man of mixed heritage, how should cam behave? with whom should he identify? temple avoids arthur upfield's representation of detective bony as a neat amalgam of european rationality and aboriginal divination, a static form of hybridism that merely confirms known stereotypes, and presents us, instead, with a tall, dark, handsome man at ease with himself and the world, powerful, dangerous and feared, yet cultured and knowledgeable, successful with women and an aficionado of fine wines and good food. in short, cam is rather too good to be true, and his egregious completeness looks all too like an attempt by temple to present an aboriginal (and scot and italian) in as positive and unstereotyped manner as possible: an authentic model of political correctness. cam has literary antecedents. us writer robert b. parker (1932-2010), author of forty novels centred on the private detective spenser, introduces a character named hawk in the fourth novel of the series, promised land (1976). hawk is black. he is tall, dark and handsome, at ease with himself and the world, powerful, dangerous and feared, yet cultured and knowledgeable, successful with women and an aficionado of fine wines and good food. but, like cam, he is also a subordinate. hawk is spenser's best friend, yet the rules of the hard-boiled detective genre require that someone – in this case spenser – be the protagonist. spenser receives the clients and takes on the cases. hawk helps him out. in the case of the jack irish novels, cam is actually harry strang's subordinate, but he frequently helps irish out, either with or without his employer's blessing. cam, like hawk, is usually needed for strongarm work, contradicting their creator's insistence on their many non-physical virtues: unlike the main characters, irish and spenser, who agonise endlessly over the morality of their actions, cam and hawk have no morals qualms when it comes to putting a bullet in the enemy. ethics are a luxury they seem happy to do without. one significant difference between parker's treatment of hawk and temple's of cam is that the latter rarely refers to cam's aboriginality. parker makes much of hawk's blackness and his struggle to carve out a place in contemporary american society. cam's aboriginality is usually mentioned once in a novel, though in white dog (2003), not at all. presumably this is because neither temple himself, nor writers in general, make reference to their characters' whiteness (should this be the case): we take whiteness as normative; other shades are, literally 'other', and need to be pointed out. temple's reluctance to do this with regard to cam is, then, political – he is attempting to normalise difference. yet to fail to acknowledge his aboriginality at all would render it invisible and would also be of political significance, though of quite a different kind. temple's infrequent references to cam's aboriginality are his means of resolving the dilemma as best he can, which takes us back to the oceania debate on authenticity mentioned above. it should be noted that temple likes to play with the identities of other characters, not just cam's. jack irish himself, the series' protagonist, is deliberately named to confuse. most people, on learning his name assume that he is an anglo-celtic australian, a member of the historically dominant british colonial power. in fact, we discover his coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 origins are quite different. asked by a catholic priest in bad debts which part of ireland he is from he replies: ‘not a well-known part,’ […] ‘the jewish quarter of hamburg. my greatgrandfather's name was isadore reich. he ran away to sea and jumped ship in melbourne. when he wrote his name down as i. reich for his first employer, the man pronounced it as i. rish. that's what he became. irish. i'm thinking of changing it back’ (133). this passage beautifully encapsulates irish's (and, we assume, temple's) position with regard to identity and australianness. few of us, perhaps none, are what we seem; we are rarely what other people assume us to be. and in any case, we have the power to choose, if we wish, to be what we want. jack irish can be anglo-celtic, or jewish, or both. cam can do the same. or at least he could, if he were not black. temple's infrequent references to cam's aboriginality are not always confined to brief descriptions of his mixed ancestry. he also uses cam as a means of exposing australian racism. in dead point (2007), the only reference to cam's aboriginality comes during an investigation when he introduces himself to a potential witness as 'bruce', a generic name for white australian males. the witness, the uncouth operator of an earth mover called rick chaffee, replies: “bruce's not a coon name, […]. you look like you got a bit of coon in you” (127), before going on repeatedly to call cam a ‘boong’ (128-9). cam responds by breaking his collar-bone and nose before forcing him into his (chaffee's) car and piling rocks and stones onto it with the earth mover while calling him 'bubba'. chaffee's resistance, of course, is futile, and he gives up the information cam requires. cam (like hawk) uses his superior physical powers to overcome his enemies. indeed, as readers, we assume that these powers were necessarily and painfully acquired as a response to the hostile, racist world in which he lives, and we accept with satisfaction chaffee's thoroughly-deserved beating. in order that cam (and hawk) does not become typecast as a mere thug, the trappings of culture, good taste and refinement are necessary to round out his character, yet there remains something troubling about him: his super-powers are still insufficient to raise him to the level of jack irish, as the taint of moral ambiguity clinging to him confirms. but this is all rather heavy-handed and, not surprisingly, temple experimented with quite a different representation of aboriginality in an iron rose (1998). in keeping with peter temple’s policy of portraying aboriginality positively in his work without constantly drawing attention to it as difference, ned lowey, in an iron rose (1998) is depicted as a heroic figure whose ethnicity is referred to only once: “i remember my surprise at two things. one was that ned was aboriginal” (84), says mac farraday, the novel’s (white) protagonist. ned had been mac’s father’s best friend but, as mac goes on to say: “my father had never mentioned it” (84). farraday’s point here (and, presumably, temple’s), is that ned’s ethnicity was irrelevant to mac’s father, and therefore unmentioned. for mac’s father, ned had been “the still point” (84), a moral compass and model of masculinity that sustained him throughout his unsettled life. “i had been hearing about ned as far back as i could remember, things like ‘we need coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 bloody ned lowey for work like this’, or ‘here’s a little trick ned lowey showed me’, or, at picnic races, ‘back ned lowey riding sidesaddle against this lot’” (84). yet for mac the fact that ned was aboriginal had been a surprise. as if, unconsciously, he had been assuming that such a paragon would be white. the theme of racial stereotyping remains unspoken, yet present, throughout the novel, which begins with lowey’s apparent suicide by hanging. as mac goes through ned’s house, tidying up and sorting out his few possessions, he comes across three six-week-old newspapers all of which refer to the discovery of the skeleton of a young girl in a mineshaft. as mac pursues the story he becomes increasingly disturbed: “a girl with a broken neck, a naked girl, thrown down a mineshaft and the entrance covered. i couldn’t get it out of my mind” (52). further enquiries reveal that the girl had been an inmate of kinross hall, a home for young girls sent there by the courts for prostitution, drug offences or for being homeless. and that ned had worked there as a maintenance man: a naked girl, neck broken, thrown down a mine shaft, some time after 1984. a naked girl, beaten, by a lonely roadside in october 1985. ned worked at kinross hall in november 1985. and never set foot there again. until a few days before his murder (120). temple plays subtly with the reader. are we to believe that ned was the murderer? is this what mac believes? or does mac insist on referring to ned’s suicide – the act of a guilty man – as murder, because he cannot bring himself to believe that ned could have been a repentant child-molester and killer? why does ned return to kinross hall days before his death? had someone discovered his guilt? as the evidence seems to mount up mac’s “treacherous inner voice said: what do you really know about ned?” (191). by the end of the novel ned is proven innocent; ned had also been investigating the girl’s murder and was, for that reason, murdered himself. through the figure of mac farraday, a man with no reason to believe in anything but good of ned lowey, temple weaves a tale around our unspoken fears, drawing us toward assumptions that prove unfounded, and thus revealing our tendency for preconception and prejudice. ned lowey, however, is not the protagonist of the novel. mac farraday is. like cameron delray in temple’s jack irish novels, and hawk in robert b. parker’s spenser, the black man remains secondary. he is also, like parker’s hawk, something of a stereotype – in this case, that of the wise black man. the aboriginal sage. the noble savage. before mac ever contemplates the possibility of ned’s culpability, he is “the still point” (84), the man with a gift for nature, animals and quiet wisdom. this is a not uncommon white perception of blackness and aboriginality. the afrikaaner journalist and writer rian malan in his highly controversial book my traitor's heart (1990) describes something similar: “americans and europeans had their hindu gurus; we had our wise old afs […] almost all things south african were tawdry and third-rate except notional noble savages” (56-7). yet, as an older man, malan recognises the absurdity – racism even – of his youthful preconceptions with regard to africans, and the fact that he was “oblivious to the squalor and misery around us” (56). likewise, the aboriginal coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 scholar marcia langton notes that most white australians construct images of aboriginality through static colonialist stereotypes rather than actual contact with the indigenes. these racist stereotypes are evidently hard to break through for indigenous and non-indigenous australians alike, and any renegotiation of representation takes place in a discursive field in which stereotypes are strategically inserted and problematize communication (1993: 33-5). the third of temple’s representations of aboriginality, however, is more complex, as though the author were aware of the stereotypical nature of his earlier attempts. detective sergeant paul dove in the broken shore (2005) and truth (2009) inspires a mixed response from his colleagues and, consequently, from the reader. it is not always clear whether he is totally committed to his work, and his loyalty to his fellow officers and the police force in general is questioned; his capacity for hard work doubted; his courage and professional competence challenged, and he is constantly depicted as a prickly outsider. in other words, he is a perfectly ordinary person. yet, as marcia langton suggests above, being aboriginal, he is judged by a different, more unforgiving, standard. the broken shore (2005) is set largely in the fictional victorian town of cromarty, in which relations between the aboriginal and white communities are experiencing one of their periodic bouts of unrest. petty crime, presumed to have been committed by young aboriginal men, combined with the growing influence of a local campaigning aboriginal politician, bobby walshe, has only served to inflame the small town’s endemic prejudices and institutionalised police racism. into this environment detective sergeant paul dove is sent because, in his own words, “they want a boong present” (97) or, in the words of a local police hard man: “jesus, not enough coons here […] we have to import another black bastard” (95). despite warnings from more experienced officers, the local white policemen attempt to detain three young aboriginal men as they are driving home. as a consequence two of the young men die and the third ends up in hospital. dove has been deliberately left out of the loop – his attempts to prevent the shooting ignored. this behaviour only serves to alienate dove further. he is already, according to his previous boss, inspector stephen villani, “all chip and no shoulder. doesn't want to be white, doesn't want to be black” (182), and at various times dove plays up to this image. yet the chip on dove's shoulder seems to be perfectly justified. indeed, the only means by which the novel's protagonist, detective joe cashin, is able to befriend him is by revealing his own links to the aboriginal community. “welcome to boongland” says dove, and for the first time laughs with “real pleasure” (298). dove's behaviour is interesting in that he clearly does have a chip on his shoulder, is both defensive and aggressive and mistrusts his white colleagues while, at the same time, the reasons for his behaviour are quite obvious – the police force and virtually every white australian that he encounters are ingrained racists. dove, therefore, unlike cam delray, or ned lowey, who are blessed with extraordinary powers of wisdom, strength, taste and cool, is a normal man. were all aboriginals like cam and ned there would be no need for concern about discrimination, aboriginal rights, poverty, police brutality or any of the other factors bedeviling aboriginal life in australia. they would coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 be running the country. but aboriginals are like everyone else, and this is dove's role, as an aboriginal everyman. towards the end of the broken shore dove is shot during a botched arrest. ironically, it is this event, more than any other, which earns him a grudging respect from at least some of his colleagues. in truth, dove reappears much as he was in the broken shore – unloved and unlovable. “not a mixer” complains a fellow officer. “the abo chip. still, the boy took a bullet” (295). another officer makes a similar comment later, though slightly more respectfully: “‘an indigenous officer who’d now be the only nonbludger [non-shirker] on the force,’ said moxley. ‘what happened to the wound as a ticket to the gold coast on full disability pension?’” (truth 319). nevertheless dove still has to prove his worth on a day to day basis. at the beginning of truth he makes the mistake of asking for assistance, rather than dealing with a murder case himself. for this he is reprimanded by his superior, villani who makes sarcastic reference to dove’s qualifications: “honours degree of any use here?” (13), he enquires. however, by the end of the novel with the villains either dead or captured it is dove who is allowed to make the arrest. in this sense dove is an example of the raw, inexperienced, oversensitive policeman – a staple of police procedural fiction – and which comprises a bildungsroman subplot to complement the main story. but in the broken shore and truth this subplot is complicated by dove’s aboriginality. temple also likes to play with the existing stereotypes regarding aboriginals – the kind much favoured by arthur upfield whose hero, boney, has an unerring sense of direction. dove, who dislikes being asked to drive (“nice to be your driver” he sarcastically tells cushin in the broken shore 292, presumably equating the role of chauffeur with that of servant), is soon moved out of the driving seat once he has been transferred to melbourne because he invariably gets lost. in truth this becomes something of an ongoing joke: “villani and dove sat in the car eating salad rolls bought by villani on the way back to preston, he could not trust dove not to get lost” (truth 194). a final point about voice needs to be made. the traditional hard-boiled fictional detective is a first-person narrator. so much so that this has become a defining characteristic of the genre as exemplified by dashiell hammett’s continental op, raymond chandler’s philip marlowe, ross macdonald’s lew archer or mickey spillane’s mike hammer. lee horsley, one of the most respected scholars engaged in the analysis of crime fiction, argues that voice is crucial as “an element in most whiteauthored examples of the genre” (202). consequently “a transformation of voice is seen as crucial in detaching a novel’s centre of consciousness from the ideology and racial identity conventionally associated with the genre” (202). however, to avoid being nothing but the “voice of the subaltern”, whose agency gayatri spivak questioned (1988), it is essential that difference is overtly signalled through consciously manifested and specific language use, as a resistance to convention, perhaps at times through ironic mimicry (horsley 201-2). horsley offers the example of the black american crime writer barbara neely, whose black heroine, blanche white (the irony of her name is beautifully blatant), undermines the genre’s conventions on many levels (race, gender, class), but there are many other examples in crime fiction, most notably walter mosley, coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 whose hero easy rawlins speaks with the distinctive and authoritative voice of a black man from the deprived neighbourhood of watts in 1960s los angeles, or the multivoiced narrations of jamaican writer marlon james’s booker-prize winning novel a brief history of seven killings (2014). peter temple’s aboriginal creations cam, ned and dove are all subordinated by the literary genre in which they find themselves. by definition jack irish, mac farraday and joe cashin are the protagonists, just as spenser is in the crime novels of robert b. parker: they are the detectives, they are the heroes, they have the voice. the genre’s insistence on a powerful first-person narrative emphasises this subordination, which can only be overcome by a transference of voice. it might be argued (and here we return to d’cruz, referenced above) that only an aboriginal writer can create an aboriginal firstperson narrator, but there are plenty of examples of writers who defy this kind of restriction. the highly respected american author james sallis, whose postmodern detective fiction centres on the first person narrative of lew griffin is a case in point. in an interview included in his lew griffin novels long-legged fly and moth, he is asked whether he has run into trouble as “a white writer writing about blacks” (174). he replies that he has not, though confessing that there have “been some very surprised faces at signings, when they realise i am not black” (174). indeed, as the interviewer goes on to remark, the “whole argument is slightly ridiculous” (174) as authors cannot possibly be restricted to creating characters coinciding with their own race and gender. temple, of course, does not give his aboriginal characters a narratorial voice (nor, incidentally, does arthur upfield), but in the broken shore and truth, the novels which include his most complex aboriginal character, dove, he does not give it to the novels’ protagonists, joe cashin and stephen villani, either – they are third-person narratives. this contributes to detaching, in lee horsley’s words “the centre of consciousness” from “the ideology and racial identity” (202) of the protagonist. the representation of aboriginality by white writers is fraught with danger, as temple is clearly aware. even dove’s incompetence at finding his way around greater melbourne in a car may be interpreted as a dubious reflection on aboriginals’ inability to adapt to urban life. temple, however, is clearly determined to seize the nettle, deciding that the absence of aboriginals in his writing would be a falsehood and a capitulation to white australia’s history of denial with regard to the country’s first people. perhaps his next jack irish novel will be a cameron delray novel. 2 a decision that would not please everyone, especially those who believe that only aboriginals have the right to represent themselves. works cited batty, philip. “saluting the dot-spangled banner: aboriginal culture, national identity and the australian republc.” ahr 11 (sep.-nov. 1998). 6 july. <http:www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/ahr/archive.html>. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 bhabha, homi. “of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse.” in the location of culture. london and new york: routledge, 1994. 85-92. chandler, raymond. 1950. “the simple art of murder”. pearls are a nuisance. london, penguin, 1974. collingwood-whittick, sheila. 2000. “re-presenting the australian aborigene: autoethnography vs. colonialist discourse.” world literature written in english 38.2. 110-131. d’cruz, carolyn. ““what matter who’s speaking?” authenticity and identity in discourses of aboriginality in australia.” jouvert 5.3 (2001). 15 june. <http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/> gunew, sneja. 1990. “denaturalizing cultural nationalisms: multicultural readings of australia.” nation and narration. ed. homi bhabha. london and new york: routledge. 99-120. hodge, bob and vijay mishra. 1991 (1990). dark side of the dream. australian literature and the postcolonial mind. sydney: allen & unwin. horsley, lee. 2005. twentieth century crime fiction. oxford: oup. huggins, jackie. 2003. “always was always will be”. blacklines. melbourne: melbourne up. 60-65. knight, stephen. continent of mystery. a thematic history of australian crime fiction. melbourne: melbourne up, 1997. langton, marcia. 1993. “‘well i heard it on the radio and i saw it on the television…’ an essay for the australian film commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about aboriginal people and things”. north sydney: australian film commission. malan, rian. 1990. my traitor's heart. london: vintage, 1991. reynolds, henry. 2003. the law of the land. 2 nd ed. victoria: penguin australia. said, edward. 1995 (1978). orientalism. western conceptions of the orient. harmondsworth: penguin. sallis, james. 2000 (1996). the long-legged fly/moth. harpenden: no exit press. spivak, gayatri c. 1988. “can the subaltern speak?” in cary nelson and lawrence grossberg (eds.) marxism and the interpretation of culture. urbana: university of illinois press. 271–313. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 temple, peter. 1996. bad debts. london: quercus, 2007. --1998. an iron rose. london: quercus, 2007. --1999. black tide. london: quercus, 2007. --2003. white dog. london: quercus, 2011. --2005. the broken shore. london: quercus, 2007. --2007. dead point. london: quercus, 2008. --2009. truth. london: quercus, 2010. 1 “wer spricht von siegen? überstehn ist alles” “requiem für wolf graf von kalckreuth” rainer maria rilke. 2 other crime writers, the american novelist robert crais, for example, have converted their original protagonist’s sidekick into the hero in later novels. the author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness for the writing of this article (research project ffi2013-45101-p). bill phillips is a senior lecturer in english literature and culture at the university of barcelona and head of the modern languages and literatures and english studies department. he lectures on british poetry, crime fiction and other contemporary fiction. he has published widely on poetry, particularly of the romantic period, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postcolonial studies, gender studies and popular fiction including detective fiction, science fiction and zombies. he is head of pocrif. some of his publications on postcolonial crime fiction include “religious belief in recent detective fiction”, atlantis. journal of the spanish association of anglo-american studies, 2014; “irish noir”. estudios irlandeses. electronic journal of the spanish association for irish studies, 2014; “the representation of migrants in australian detective fiction”, anuari de filologia, universitat de barcelona, 2014; and “south african crime fiction: an illuminating window on the rainbow nation” published in reviewing imperial conflicts, cambridge scholars press, 2014. microsoft word 23wessell coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 251 dairy chains: consumer foodways and agricultural landscapes adele wessell abstract: food is significant as an agent of social change as well as being the subject of activism. the focus of this paper is on nature’s “perfect food”, milk, in the 1950s, a period of social transition that offers fertile space for reconstructing food activism and giving it a history. australia’s dairy industry is the country’s largest processed food industry and the fourth largest of the nation’s rural industries. milk is a fruitful site to consider the relationship between people and their food, production and consumption, the intimate way we bring our food into our bodies and the experience of farmers with personal connections to the ecosystems in which they live. dense networks connect farm producers and consumers. the dairy industry will be considered as a site of production and consumption where considerable political activity was concentrated in the 1950s. these themes are illuminated in the paper by briefly considering two groups of women caught up in very different family labour systems defined by their relationship to milk – housewives active in the state associations campaigning around milk prices and quality and farm women. the transformation of rural life, home and food culture during this period impacted on both groups of women, it was from their work that they expressed a position and identified, and both engaged in complex processes of negotiation that, i argue, have generated and sustained other movements. keywords: activism; dairy; consumption; housewives we understand food as crucial to life for physical and cultural nourishment, but food is also an agent of social change. although it is a staple of australians’ everyday lives, most people know virtually nothing about milk – where it originated or how it is being produced. as anne mendelson has shown of americans, australians too have simplified, modified and technologized milk beyond recognition (2008). industrialization and urbanization have so lengthened the food chain, products bare little knowledge of their origins or how it is produced. there are two main points i want to make: the first is that food is the basis of copyright©2011 adele wessell. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 252 enduring social organization through its production, processing and consumption. food is clearly an agent of social change and not just its product. secondly, food habits shape identity. gender roles, for example, derive largely from the division of labour in production, in processing and preparing food and allocating consumption within the family (pilcher, 2006: 4). both gender and social organization are thrown into sharp relief when we consider the ways in which the housewives associations in australia have used and constructed food to organize themselves. the 1950s in australia are significant for a number of reasons; the ‘long boom’ (for some), it was also a period of rapid change in the dairy industry in terms of regulation, mechanization and quantity. the economic boom that began in the 1950s was not confined to australia, and ushered in a new consumer society. in the dairy industry, more and more farms moved to liquid production; there was a surplus in production, not just in australia, but in the us as well, and consequent price reductions for the export market, and domestic price fixing to protect the market. during the same period there were constant complaints from both housewives and the industry about the high domestic cost and price fixing; there was more milk but higher production costs, which dairy farmers claimed they had little or no control over (dairy industry investigation committee, 1953: 2). for this reason the dairy industry investigations committee advocated using subsidies rather than higher prices to meet the increasing costs of dairy production (1953: 7). economic motives similarly drive the introduction of the free milk scheme in 1951, bolstered by nutritional science. this would distribute the surplus and, according to the british medical association, double the normal growth rate of children and improve their behaviour, their athletic prowess, dental health and attendance at school (department of education library services, 2000).i such ideas provide early examples of the use of scientific knowledge to understand and manage eating habits. in the face of concerns to stabilize the industry, a dairy industry investigation committee was established in 1953 and their reports provide a rich record of both the industry and the people who worked in it. the housewives’ day, a survey prepared for the australian sales research bureau at the end of the 1950s, provides an equally rich record of how women at home were spending their time. the report was the first major study of the bureau and recognized the importance of women to marketing. interviews were conducted with nearly 1400 women employed in “domestic duties” living in melbourne (australian sales research bureau, 1959). the women spent an average of 4½ hours every day on meals, on preparation, consumption and washing up. the london study the survey was modelled on showed the same general pattern. meals presented a series of tasks from which virtually no housewife could escape. younger women, however, were already spending less time preparing food than their older contemporaries. housewives younger than twenty-five spent 1½ hours less a day on meals than women over forty-six years of age. a suggestion was made in the report that younger women were more likely to live on tinned and prepared meals or have appliances that made their life easier. this points to the significant paradox at the heart of the 1950s dream: that the fantasy of domestic goddess, the coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 253 kitchen at the centre of her life is simultaneously bound up with the acquisition of appliances and prepared food that promise to free her from it. as susan sheridan has shown, while women during this period might be spending less time ‘actually preparing meals, she would have more products on her shopping list, more choices to make between brands, more information about nutrition to assimilate – and trips around the supermarket take up her own time, rather than that of the grocer and butcher who used to make up and deliver her orders’ (2002: 99-101). cars and refrigerators, television and supermarkets and a whole new market of convenience foods heralded a massive transformation in food culture in australia in the 1950s. the almost universal 9-to-5 working hours meant that women outside paid employment did all the shopping, learned to drive and took the family car. the formation of consumer groups like the australian consumers’ association and organisations specifically for housewives provided a forum for activism just when women’s place in the home was being venerated. lobbying for cheaper food, better quality food and a ministry of housekeeping showed how central food was to women’s politics in the 1950s. according to the official journal of the housewives association of new south wales, ‘the housewife was possibly more interested in milk than in any other single food on her refrigerator shelves’ (1953: 3). food was a major focus of the association’s activities; it took up a considerable amount of women’s time and the household budget – around 21 percent of household income in the 1960s (symons cited in sheridan, 2002: 101). the housewives association of nsw was founded in 1918, modelled on a similar group in new york. other associations were established in different states and a national organisation was formed (see mcleod, 2008; johnson, 1999; smart, 1986; 1994; 1998). they were also part of an international network. in spain such participation in housewife associations has been described as ‘part of an expanded notion of the political’ (radcliff, 2002: 79). this was a conception of the political that would encompass everyday life. the association aimed to educate women in the principles of proper nutrition and to campaign against rising food prices, although it broadened its interests to become a lobbying force on issues affecting women and children generally. as the official journal pronounced: ‘your problem is ours’. ‘this is your journal’ the president wrote, and we want every woman to write to us on every problem she meets and can’t cope with alone. it doesn’t matter how simple your query is, or which aspect of “living” it embraces, ours is a service magazine and we’re here to help (1953: 3). in the postwar period australian housewives’ associations engaged in consumer boycotts, factory inspections, letter-writing campaigns, cooperative buying and lobbying for representation in parliament, on boards and committees of inquiry. in all these activities housewives were represented as agents of rational consumption. while the dominant discourse emphasized national unity during wartime, alternative discourses of consumerism arose during the 1950s and gender and class conflicts were channelled into these, making food prominent as an agent of change. margaret howe urged readers ‘let’s have a bushfire’: coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 254 there is a vital need for women in parliament. some women are wasting their time in minor activities. they need to move up from parents’ and citizens’ associations to local councils. attend your local councils; get to know your mayors and alderman. take an interest in council affairs and make your presence felt…if your local member does not do what you require, vote him out at the next election, until you get someone who does… women of australia, join and support your housewives’ association, country women’s association and attend your local council meetings. this work is vitally important and for australia. your country needs you in peacetime even more than in wartime (1953: 9). the period was marked by changes in the nature of mechanisms articulating and mediating production and consumption where women’s role as consumers was both a source of political activism and a constraint. until recently historians have represented the 1950s as dominated by a conservative promotion of domesticity. taking an alternative perspective, justine lloyd and leslie johnson have argued that the figure of the housewife enabled the feminist subject by making it possible for women to think of themselves as having something in common, by encouraging women to insist on their right and need to represent themselves and by traversing the boundaries between public and private concerns (2004). taken together these factors, they argue, were crucial to the emergence of second wave feminism. in doing this, food played a central but neglected role. the housewives association used the language of a separate sphere of interest and influence to assert their claims for political change. their slogan ‘your problem is ours’ and endorsement for the idea that unity is strength encouraged women to identify with and support each other through what they saw as common problems. self-organization supported their identity as women and simultaneously expanded the possibilities for participation and created networks of solidarity. they also broadened the parameters of public debate. in a different way dairy farmers in the 1950s also worked at relationships attempting to provide a viable alternative to capitalist agribusiness. interdependence was a fundamental fact of farm life. while most families divided labour along gender lines, they did not always do it in the same way. dairy farming was dependent on family labour and practices of cooperation in daily chores, especially milking, could blur gender distinctions and generate common interests and understandings, (simultaneously perhaps drawing on the racial, gender and class biases that such a tradition embraces). and while women’s work could be subject to what jeanne boydston calls ‘pastoralisation’, becoming taken for granted as a ‘natural’ activity without distinct economic value, gender based networks integrated work with sociability that had an economic dimension (1990). dairy farmers depended on their neighbours and the integration of work with their social life and the mutual aid they provided each other contributed to a resilient network of interdependence among neighbouring farm families. such interdependence acted as a safety net during illness or absences and provided the basis for subsistence. until the 1970s the dominant organization of dairy farmers was a co-operative, coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 255 although this was declining, as dairy farming was for some years before that. the north coast fresh food & cold storage co-operative company ltd (norco), which began operations at byron bay, in 1895, was typical of dairy co-operatives. it commenced operations as a farmer-owned business. the lifestyle as well as the economic structure also encouraged interdependence among farmers. wages were too high to employ staff and the industry relied on family labour, extending to community labour when there was illness or the need for travel from home arose. dairies were characterised by subsistence farming where reliance on family and neighbours was customary. the dairy industry experienced a decline during the war years, a reduction in the number of registered dairies and in the number of cows, after the expansion in the industry during the depression as families on wheat farms turned to cows to acquire cash (wadham & wood, 1950: 181). the total output of milk also dropped considerably and the production of butter and cheese almost halved from the 1934 total. part of the explanation lay in the difficulty in obtaining labour, but dairying also lost its appeal in the face of the high cost of production and wages in relation to price and drought contributed to the problems. in 1953 the dairy investigation committee had warned that the ‘inability to secure satisfactory prices, would accelerate the drift of young people to the cities, and dairying would cease to attract new settlers’ (1953: 6). the average age of dairy farmers on the north coast of nsw in 1960 was 55, many were a lot older. the dairy industry act 1957 was introduced to provide a five-year stabilization plan for the industry, but it was too late for some. farmers diverted their dairy farms to other forms of agriculture – most notably the production of vegetables, and to beef production. some sold to neighbouring farmers, others to hobby farmers or speculators. successful farmers expanded their holdings and mechanization.ii in 1950 the commonwealth diary products equalisation board had guaranteed an increased and stabilised return with the advice that ‘it is to more modern farming methods, scientific improvement of pastures and more attractive working conditions that the industry must look for further stimulus’ (national bank, 1950: 18). the ideology of efficiency, as andrea gaynor calls it, which took hold in the twentieth century, privileged institutional knowledge over personal experience and skills, management strategies from agricultural scientists and the application of new technologies (1995). industrial inputs and scientific knowledge generated fertility and produce, not the interaction of land and people (main, 2008). as chief of the division of plant industry at the csiro, otto frankel observed in 1962, agricultural science became a ‘world force’, helping ‘to conquer the earth for man’s use’ (1963: 301). diverse interest groups in australia during the period of the long boom also believed that science could solve consumer problems, ‘be they declining demand or falling product standards’ (mcleod, 2008: 79). gladys hain, president of the victorian housewives association advocated up-todate methods of cooking, higher and more efficient knowledge of housekeeping to reduce work for the housewife (1953: 7). the association promoted cooking and domestic science courses to all girls in all schools, rather than the knowledge inherited from mothers and grandmothers. on milk it was nutritional experts the journal used to promote milk consumption and elevate its importance. a campaign coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 256 in 1953 demanded the removal of sales tax on ice cream, ‘a dairy by-product constantly billed as a national food’ recommended for children and invalids. while nutritional experts confirmed that ‘milk is nature’s most complete food…ice cream is even more highly concentrated’ and included as a basic food in the us (1953: 10). the journal suggested you should allow one quart of milk a day for each child, one pint a day for each adult (1953: 23). this amount of milk would be out of the reach of many families and the housewives activism was constantly directed at the milk board. as always, dora lawson, the organising secretary of the housewives association of nsw complained, ‘housewives suffer directly from the arbitrary declarations of the men in control’ (1953: 7). while they failed in their attempt to bid for cheaper milk and seasonal prices, the association took credit for the drop in consumption registered in 1953 and for preventing milk price rises the following year. the dairy industry investigations committee had warned against raising the price of butter during the same year because it would stimulate the demand for substitutes (1953: 7).iii the housewives association campaigned for bigger margarine quotas that would provide a viable substitute. letters from readers showed considerable interest in the way primary products were controlled and distributed, and complained that money was going to the factory and not the dairyman. dairy farming remained a demanding means of earning a livelihood; the cows have to be milked twice a day, 365 days a year. improvements in working conditions elsewhere were not passed on and made dairy farming hired labour less attractive. the industry was consequently dependent on family labour. as a 1950 report recognised: the process of milking and cleaning up the sheds and utensils, properly carried out, absorbs so much time that unless the family does this work the farmer has little time for other jobs on the farm. this is particularly so on small farms, where the no of cows kept does not warrant the use of milking machines (wadham & wood, 1950: 186-87). improvement in the quality of dairy products was explained by the application of knowledge acquired by research workers in dairy bacteriology, advances in the standard hygiene of farms and less contamination of the milk and cream in bails and dairies. milk was separated on the farm and fed to calves and pigs, that industry developing as a sideline to dairying as a way of using the by-products of the butter and cheese industries. reductions in the revenue from pig meats in the mid-50s then also impacted on dairy farms (dairy industry investigation committee, 1955: 19). other factors in this transformation were said to include better education of factory managers and their assistants, improvements in the design of churns and butter working appliances, the neutralizing of the acidity of the cream when the souring process had gone too far by the time it arrived at the factory, better control of temperature and improvements in pasteurization (watt, 1955: 163-65). pasture management and the maintenance of soil fertility were borrowed from great britain, france, holland and denmark to improve the carrying capacity of dairy farms. electric fences and strip feeding replaced more inefficient pasture grazing but curtailed the movements of the herd at the same time. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 257 farmwomen’s lives were also being transformed during the same period. there were fewer materials to clean when the farms became more mechanised. buying butter, rather than churning it at home became more common. the use of milking machines expanded throughout the early 20t, all changing the role women played on the farm and their contact with the herd. farms got bigger, regulations got tighter. between 1961 and 2001 the number of australian farms almost halved and the size of those that remained grew. alma graham was one of the farmers that turned to beef production, although she prefers dairy cows: i used to love them… and when we were milking the cows got to love me too. they’d stand there in front of my bail and they’d look at stew and they’d say don’t you let him milk me and they’d stand queued up at my bail so as i’d milk them. oh they were beautiful and i’d rub them and talk to them and stew’d say, ‘come on get in here’. know every cow. there’d be 80 and i’d know every cow…. you looked after them. every little calf you loved them. it was special. because you realised what that mother was going through. sometimes you go and you’d see that poor old mother just jump straight over the fence to try and get to her. … try to get to her little baby. i supposed i loved them too much. i did love them… i couldn’t go back to it. i still love the animals (2008). alma graham’s attachment to dairy farming was more than the sustenance it provided financially and the changes that the industry underwent had very real consequences for the way of life of farmers and their communities. this project is part of a much larger study trying to bring together people who live and work on farming land and those who sustain themselves from the same land, hundreds or thousands of miles away. the housewives’ association identified itself as political (although non-party), and their domain of interest included every sphere of public life, promoting the home, women and children as public policy concerns. the interlocking chains binding milk producers and consumers are much clearer when the historical narrative is reoriented, around the circles placing gender, family and community at the centre of the story. such an approach provides a valuable lens to re-examine how food was used and constructed to organise politics and people’s lives. some authors have proclaimed that we are currently in the midst of a food revolution. many separate movements are converging on a common goal to create a food system that promotes the health of people as well as the environment. such movements address the production and consumption sides of the food system: fair food, slow food, farm-animal welfare, the organic food industry, locally grown food movements, safe food campaigns, activism against marketing foods to kids, the kitchen-garden school programs, anti-trans-fats and anti-high-fructose-cornsyrup movements, better food labelling and food security (nestle: 2009, 37). women on dairy farms were both housewives and workers. they were linked with their contemporaries in urban areas by the consumption of the products of that labour. while the housewives associations were political in the sense of making claims about what the social collective and state ought to do, they were also civic associations directed outward to serve members and the broader community. farmwomen were part of that community and yet advocating on their behalf around coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 258 a common goal was hindered by the artificial boundaries between production and consumption that are now being questioned again. in the ‘pleasures of eating’ wendell berry advocates reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy: eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. they think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. they think of themselves are ‘consumers’. if they think beyond that, they recognise that they are passive consumers (1990: 145). eaters, berry argues, should understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. for women in the 1950s, both at home and on the farm, what we eat took up a considerable amount of time. food helped shape their lives. moreover, it contributed to the shape of women’s lives in the years that passed. the identification of common interests among women laid the groundwork for feminism and the civic and political dimension of housewives associations provided a model as well as experience in organisation. the significance of family and community central to both groups of women elevates the importance of everyday life, which has generated and sustained other movements. food is clearly an agent of social change and not just its product. works cited australian bureau of agricultural and resource economics, “trend toward larger farms likely to continue”, media release, 11 july 2002, www.abare.gov.au/pages/media/2002/11july1%20.htm australian sales research bureau pty ltd, the housewives’ day: a study with advertising, marketing, economic and sociological implications (st kilda: united service publicity, c. 1959?). berry, w. what are people for? (new york: north point press, 1990). boydston, j. home and work: housework, wages, and the ideology of labor in the early republic (new york: oxford university press, 1990). diary industry investigation committee, interim report presented to the minister for commerce and agriculture, 15 july 1953. diary industry investigation committee, third report related to the guaranteed return for butter and cheese payable to producers for 1955-56, 22 june 1955. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 259 frankel, o. h. “the social responsibility of agricultural science”, farrer memorial oration, 1962, australian journal of science vol. 25, no. 7 (january 1963). gaynor, a. sands shaped and shifting: an environmental history of the formation of the eastern wheatbelt of western australia, honours dissertation, department of history, uwa, 1995. graham, a. “interview with the author”. koonorigan, 2008. the housewife: official journal of the housewives association of new south wales vol. 3 no. 1, (1953), vol. 3, no. 2 (1953), vol. 3. no. 7 (1953) howe, m. “let us have a bushfire!” the housewife, august 1953, p 9. johnson, l. “as housewives we are worms”, cultural studies 10: 3, (1999), 112128. lloyd, j. and johnson, l. sentenced to everyday life: feminism and the housewife (london: berg, 2004). mcleod, a. “quality control: the origins of the australian consumers’ association”, business history, 50: 1, (2008). main, g. extending the farmlands, research essay, national museum of australia, 2008. mendelson, a. milk: the surprising history of milk through the ages (new york: knopf, 2008). national bank of australasia, australia – its resources and development (melbourne: national bank of australasia, 1950). nestle, marion “reading the food social movement”, world literature today january-february, 2009. pilcher, j. m. food in world history (new york: routledge, 2006). pamela radcliff, “citizens and housewives: the problem of female citizenship in spain’s transition to democracy”, journal of social history, (fall 2002). sheridan, s. who was that woman: the australian women’s weekly in the postwar years (sydney: unsw press, 2002), 99-101. smart, j. “feminists, food and the fair price”, labour history 50 (may, 1986), 113131. _________ for the good we can do”, australian feminist studies 19 (autumn 1994), 39-60. coolabah, no.5, 2011, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 260 _________ “a mission to the home: the housewives’ association”, australian feminist studies 13:28 (1998). wadham, m. and wood, g. l. land utilization in australia 2nd ed (melbourne: melbourne university press, 1950). watt, r. d. the romance of the australian land industries (sydney: halstead press, 1955). bio note adele wessell teaches history at southern cross university and is also an associate fellow at the national museum of australia, where she completed some of the research for this paper. adele’s main research interests are in food history and she is a founding editorial board member of locale: the australasian-pacific journal of regional food studies. i the free milk scheme was first advocated by dr cory mann in britain in the mid 1920s, and applied to a number of countries during the depression years. there was some opposition to the scheme in australia, on the grounds that distributing milk and collecting bottles and money would take up valuable teaching time. at a state education convention in 1941, dr noel gutteridge, from the british medical association, proposed a scheme to provide a dairy ration of half a pint of milk to children for the health benefits it would provide. menzies raised the matter of a free milk scheme with state premiers in 1950. in december that year the commonwealth’s state grants (milk for school children act was passed and by october 1951 all australian states were participating in the scheme, except queensland, where it began operating in 1953. see department of education and training library services, ‘free milk scheme’, state of queensland department of education and training, 2000. the scheme ended in 1973 when the review of the continuing expenditure policies of the previous government, the coombs report presented to the commonwealth government recommended discontinuing the scheme due to significant agreement among health authorities that it could not be justified along nutritional grounds. ii part of the rationale for protecting the dairy industry in the 1950s was the cultural significance of farming to australians. john howard used the same argument in 2006 when he announced that farmers would receive an extra 350 million dollars to see them through the drought: ‘we would lose something of our identification as australians’, he said, ‘if we ever allowed the number of farms in our nation to fall below a critical mass’ (sydney morning herald 2006). richard waterhouse has explained the significance of this in terms of the yeoman ideal and the commitment to improving and cultivating so as to legitimate non-indigenous claims to the land. this ideal continues to infuse the hopes many australians have for their land and society. iii until the 1960s there was a ban in australia on blending margarine with butter or using colouring to yellow margarine, which is white in appearance. both measures, in addition to quotas, were intended to protect the industry. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 remembering geoff davis bernth lindfors bernthlindfors@yahoo.com copyright© 2020 bernth lindfors. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a tribute to the warm personality of geoff davis and his pioneering work in postcolonial studies keywords: geoff davis, pioneering scholar, bonhomie what i remember best about geoff davis was his innate congeniality. bright, cheerful, witty, warm, and amiable, he made friends easily and enjoyed social gatherings of every kind, especially those in which he could engage in conversations with others on a wide range of topics of mutual interest. he was an entertaining and enthusiastic talker. one of his favorite topics was of course commonwealth literature, on which he possessed an uncommon wealth of knowledge based on the research, reading and reviewing he had done on works by writers from many different corners of the anglophone world. he was particularly well informed on south african literature, having amassed an impressive collection of south african books and journals to support the amount of writing and teaching he did in this field throughout his career. but he could also speak authoritatively about literary developments elsewhere, as he did both formally and informally at aclals and eaclals conferences. he had an irrepressible curiosity not only about the new writing coming out of west and east africa, india, and the caribbean but also about some of the earlier writing from australia, canada, and new zealand. he was a pioneering scholar who played a key role in the expansion and institutionalization of postcolonial studies in higher education. as a longtime administrator of eaclals and of the european branch of aclals, he travelled to many commonwealth countries to attend meetings, assist in conference arrangements, discuss curricular reforms, and meet with as many writers, critics, professors and publishers as possible. for thirty years he was part of the editorial team that brought out more than 200 volumes of the rodopi press series on cross/cultures: readings in the mailto:bernthlindfors@yahoo.com coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 post/colonial literatures and cultures in english. he was one of the shapers and movers in our new discipline and he did it all with zest, commitment, delight, and an unusual degree of bonhomie. bionote: bernth lindfors is professor emeritus of english and african literatures at the university of texas at austin. college educated pinatubo aytas: a “struggle of identification” coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 college educated pinatubo aytas: a “struggle of identification” julieta c. mallari university of the philippines jcmallari15@yahoo.com copyright©2017 juliet mallari. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract. after the eruption of mt pinatubo (philippines) in 1991, most aytas living at the foot of the volcano were resettled in lowland areas. breaking with the past entailed a painful struggle particularly among these indigenous people who were uprooted from their source of life. as they tried to adapt to their new environment, they had no choice but to conform in re-establishing their habitat and in attempting to find ways of achieving a better future. since formal education was a most promising venture, there were ayta parents who welcomed the scholarships offered by the government or the private sector to their children. this study features interviews with pinatubo aytas— who were given the opportunity to finish college—and highlights their struggle as they aspire for socio-economic mobility. the new generation of aytas has become an emerging breed of acculturation that puts their identity fundamentally at stake: their case demonstrates a “struggle of identification,” to use bhabha’s term. their experience of self-consciousness in their psychic identification with the dominant culture or their alacritous acceptance of their assimilated condition remains a critical issue calling for further inquiry. keywords: college educated pinatubo aytas, identification, acculturation, assimilation mailto:jcmallari15@yahoo.com coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 the colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. he becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. frantz fanon introduction known to be hunter-gatherers, the pinatubo aytas are a group of indigenous people in the philippines. in the past, they lived in the mountains with a sense of exclusivity. according to shimizu (1989), “within their own microcosmos, they have maintained their own autonomous society, especially because their villages were seldom visited by lowlanders who feared the aytas as savages” (15). given this hostility, the aytas were able to preserve their ethnic identity and culture. it may be pointed out that there were aytas who developed trade skills such as selling beeswax, root crops, tobacco, etc., but their nature and way of life prevented them from integrating with lowlanders. this is not to mention the prejudice against them because of their physical characteristics— short, dark, kinky haired—and their way of life. at present, however, the onrush of change looms over the existence of these people. disturbance happened when mt. pinatubo erupted in 1991 and they were most critically affected. with their natural environment being badly damaged, their only option was to stay in government resettlement areas. they were subjected to an indeterminate period of bewilderment and uncertainty as they found themselves in a new setting. their displacement and their struggles to survive and improve their situation all the more led them to disadvantageous circumstances including social isolation from mainstream culture and racial discrimination (shimizu 2002; gaillard 2006). corollary to such marginalization of the pinatubo aytas, they have formed a kind of “underclass” in their given milieu as they continuously suffer from economic disadvantage. this condition is in contrast with their self-sufficient existence before the eruption (seitz 2004; fox 1952). shimizu (2002) asserts that during the aytas’ relocation, they found themselves “at the crossroads of ethnic and cultural survival” (6) and if that condition will continue, “their own way of living and view of the world will disappear, the ayta’s pride in being aytas will vanish, and they will lose their ethnic identity” (6). at this point, more than twenty years has passed after the resettlement, and it may be most fitting to revisit the plight of the indigenous people to find out if such prediction eventually has come true. in particular, a second generation of resettled aytas is now an object of inquiry—if indeed these young people have become an emerging breed of coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 acculturation. with the nature of things surrounding these displaced people and the confrontation between their culture and a dominant one, shadows in the pictures of the currently evolving young aytas are inevitable. an analysis of their state of emergence, viewed as an examination of their identity, could be regarded as “a state of emergency,” to use bhabha’s (1994) play of words. their case possibly exemplifies socio-cultural negotiation involving a “struggle of identification”, to mention another of bhabha’s (1994:29) terms, and to apply its idea in their particular context. a new generation of aytas “when an ayta gets exposed to the conveniences of modern life and the advantages of personal development such as education, he will begin to abandon the idea of staying in the forest where there is no opportunity for advancement,” says vigor laxamana, an ayta working at clark development corporation. considering the re-orientation having undergone by the pinatubo aytas who were resettled after the eruption of the volcano, they now have a strong tendency to re-establish or plant their roots deeply in their present domicile. shimizu, a researcher closely monitoring these indigenous people, observes that “in terms of material culture and life style, the pinatubo ayta will, on the whole, move, step by step closer to the christian lowlanders’ way of life.”i many aytas cannot resist the seduction of the lifestyle of the lowlanders. they discover the conveniences of consumer society and will likely divert themselves from their “lost world”. their values and thinking will most probably be profoundly reshaped in the process of acculturation. with this apparently inevitable strain on the part of the aytas to give ground to the dominant group, what looms large is the inescapability of their loss of identity. their assimilation becomes a critical issue: through dispersion, intermarriage and acculturation, the gradual dissolution of their ethnic identity has begun to be exhibited by the younger generation. for decades, the aytas have subsisted in the futile class. they believe that “illiteracy and economic exploitation are the main forces that keep them impoverished, unhappy and unhealthy” (estacio 1997:47); thus, at present, they seek opportunities in whatever way they can to overcome their predicament. in this regard, they believe that sending their children to school promises a brighter future in terms of social mobility and economic alleviation. since the pinatubo eruption, scholarships have been available to these indigenous people so that a number of aytas already availed themselves of the opportunity. significantly enough, it will be worth finding out if indeed acquiring formal education, particularly the tertiary level, has actually contributed to the fulfillment of the previously mentioned promise. it is also interesting to analyze the impact of education on the aytas self-development and on their families as well as communities. this paper presents simple and brief narratives of aytas who were given the opportunity to finish their college education by clark development corporation (cdc), the agency that manages a former us military base converted into an economic zone. as part of its corporate social responsibility (csr), a scholarship program for coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 these indigenous people was established by cdc in collaboration with a local university (angeles university foundation).ii apparently, the humanitarian attempt of the two institutions to support the aytas can be perceived to be mutually beneficial to both the grantee and the grantors: it unlocked a new opportunity for the aytas to cross boarders, so to speak, and it gave the benefactors a sense of gratification in fulfilling their social responsibility to the marginalized people. but given such apparent advantage on the part of the aytas, a range of concerns regarding the implications of the benefits may be raised. in particular, the experiences of the aytas relative to the perceived desirability of their possible social mobility and achievement of material and non-material aspirations form a critical question: could there be a potential tension between the educational achievement of these aytas and their ethnic identity? this study presents some reflections on the attempt of these indigenous people to improve their socio-economic status through college education. as they are provided access to this form of social development, does the liminal problem of their ethnicity remain? after obtaining their college degrees, how do they take to the idea of transformation in the image (if there is any) of the dominant group? all in their twenties, these college educated aytas have developed a perspective arising from their direct exposure to the values and lifestyle of the lowlanders. over time they have been able to adapt to changes in their environment and have tried to bring to full growth their inherent capacity to learn and strive for higher education. this new generation apparently has undergone acculturation, defined by thurnwald as “a process of adaptation to new conditions of life” (cited by teske, jr and nelson 1974:351), now that they have been immersed in the mainstream culture through their college education. the consequences of this process for the fortunes of the young aytas could only be surmised. nine ayta graduates, identified as racially “genuine” by an ayta leader, were interviewed: 1) andrea, 28, married, a bachelor of elementary education graduate currently employed as an elementary school teacher; 2) leslie, 27, married, a bachelor of elementary education graduate currently working as an elementary school teacher; 3) roseanne, 22, single, a bachelor of secondary education graduate now working as an elementary school teacher (with temporary status) in a private school; 4) rachelle, 28, married, a bachelor of science in business administration graduate currently employed as an accounting staff in a public school; 5) jenery, 26, married, a bachelor of elementary education graduate working as supervisor in a restaurant where the waiters are mostly aytas; 6) augusto, 29, married, a bachelor of science in criminology graduate, currently unemployed; 7) aiden, 29, married, a bachelor of elementary education graduate, who worked as a computer teacher in a religious school but had to quit to look after her child; 8) maycie, 25, single, a bachelor of elementary education graduate currently working as treasurer of an ayta nongovernment organization; and 9) aries, 23, single, a bachelor of science in criminology graduate currently a staff in a manpower agency. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 an opportunity for advancement higher education is linked to building the indigenous human capital and professionalizing the indigenous people to help them achieve their material and nonmaterial aspirations (anderson 2015; lahn 2012). the idea of “closing the gaps” (mentioned by anderson 2015:2) between these people and the non-indigenous is a goal of many countries, including the philippines (thus, the implementation of republic act no. 8371, otherwise known as “indigenous peoples rights act of 1997 or ipra). and higher education provides a pathway into their social and economic development since they can gain access to the professions. in australia, for instance, there is now a growing number of aboriginal professionals and their greatest concentration is in urban areas (lahn 2012) and in canada these aboriginal people have professional and managerial positions (wotherspoon 2003; peters 2010; ponting 2005 cited by lahn). the college educated aytas in pampanga have just been initiated into the mainstream formal education. they raise their hopes that they can break into higher socio-economic status once they graduate from college. their deliverance from poverty is pinned on this belief since, similar to the aboriginal australian “pathway,” high educational attainment is inextricably connected with employment. however, unlike their australian counterpart, they have to go through a transition stage that could be sensitive to a possible series of unpredictable vicissitudes and problems. noteworthy is that the data collected regarding the nature of their scholarship, the qualifications of the grantees, the grantees’ performance as students, and the number of graduates within the implementation period of the scholarship program pose problematic issues at the very outset. out of eighty-seven (87) scholars during the thirteen years of the program implementation (2000-2013), only forty-five (45) finished collegeiii and only 11 of the latter are genuine aytas, according to bing, an ayta leader. moreover, the program is short-lived, starting in 2000 and ending in 2013 because of the grantees’ failure to cope with the required academic standards stipulated in the scholarship guidelines (all subjects must be passed and a general weighted average of 83% must be maintained) and/or the inadequate financial provision of the scholarship program. last but not least, occupational aspirations as pictured by the graduates remain uncertain because their representation in professional occupations is still insignificant. their education does not assure them of developing an ability to establish a stable future either in the mainstream culture or in their own communities. as far as their future is looked into, they see little to raise their hopes that they will ever be part of the dominant group that shapes the course of their existence. assimilation theory and process of identification: analysis of the ayta experiences coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 assimilation theory, according to gordon (1964, cited by wimmer 2009:247), involves “the disappearance of ethnic culture (“acculturation”) [that] would lead to the dissolution first of ethnic community and solidarity (“structural assimilation”) and finally of separate ethnic identities.” peoples endowed with different cultures, are gradually absorbed into “the mainstream” through the process of “becoming similar” (wimmer 1996; waldinger 2003a, cited by wimmer 2009). thus, the struggle to gain the acceptance needed in crossing “the mainstream” border usually involves the minority individuals’ willingness to be transformed according to the image of the majority. as previously mentioned, the aytas, especially the younger generation, have started to move along the road into the “mainstream”. the cdc-auf scholars—whose entry into the standard education system is a strategic means not only to achieve socio-economic mobility but also to gain acceptance by the lowlanders—are now going through the process of “becoming similar” to this prevailing group. significantly enough, a kind of trans-generational and trans-ethnic transmission happens. these young people who are now participants in the mainstream system cannot help being influenced by their dominant peers and usually end up being de-ethnicized. young as they are, these aytas inevitably acquire a series of ways of acting and thinking for dealing with the situations where they are in. their conditioning reflex becomes set into patterns of acculturation, and this process can be demeaning to certain aytas but a welcome “development” to many. bhabha’s essay on frantz fanon titled “interrogating identity” elicits ideas relevant to the current study. in particular, “the three conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification in the analytic of desire” (44) in the context of racial/ethnic discrimination may be considered. first, “to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness” (44) is an idea that is assumed to have dawned on the aytas when they were resettled. in their primordial existence, their identity and culture were embedded within their specific environment, the forest, and their hunter-gatherer society. now that they are transplanted in the lowland, they experience forces which are alien, yet these powers fully control and subordinate them. their “being” that is now “in relation to an otherness” is at stake as their existence has been a matter of learning how to cope, to adapt and to mimic the other. second, “the very place of identification caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a space of splitting. the fantasy of the native is precisely to occupy the master’s place…” (44). this idea in the context of the aytas and in the tradition of the other apparently finds its manifestation in the consciousness of the indigenous group: in the form of the dominant self of the lowlanders and the marginalized other, the aytas. in their case, the latter’s fantasy is to occupy the lowlanders’ place. although the scholars belong to the second generation of resettled aytas, the claim of their parents and elders on the ancestral land occupied by the former american base and now an economic zone remains a burning issue in their consciousness. aware of the inadequacy of their ethnic group, the scholars seek to overcome this predicament by accepting the challenge of acquiring formal education. once equipped with this empowering tool, they can be bolder in resisting their displacement and subservience. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 third, “the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy—it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image” (45). in the case of the aytas, rather than affirming their pre-given identity, they are willing to lose it and take on the image of the dominant majority since they know that their survival depends on such transformation. unwittingly, the aytas are actually re-enacting the experience of the dominant people who are themselves colonials trying to resemble the image of their colonizers (the americans, in particular). in other words, the aytas are subject to problematic identification not once but twice. in effect, they are confronted by two overpowering “other”, thus, in their deliberate effort to be like the majority group, they actually assume a tripling of identity. and this three-part identity creates a more complex curiosity by the sight of aytas with “rebonded” or straightened hair and fair complexion produced by whitening beauty products but speaking with ayta accent. it should be emphasized that the aytas have developed in themselves such desire to mimic and emulate the other. similar to the negro mentality expounded by fanon, the black ayta’s insecurity is founded on the idea that “the other alone can give him worth”: when the negro makes contact with the white world, a certain sensitizing action takes place. if his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of the ego. the black man stops behaving as an actional person. the goal of his behaviour will be the other (in the guise of the white man), for the other alone can give him worth. that is on the ethical level: self-esteem (fanon 154). moreover, fanon’s disturbing statement, “whiten the race ‘one is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent’” (52-53), which has been an inherent and established belief of the brown-raced philippine lowlanders, is likewise impressed upon the aytas. essentially, these indigenous people are now at the receiving end of this colonial transmission: they are also a link in the continuing chain of domination, i.e., in the tradition of the powerless revering the powerful. being treated as inferior beings, these aytas, oblivious of their psychic and social dispossession, simply yield to the lure of assimilation. to the aytas, “becoming similar” begins with their physical appearance: their skin, their hair and height are of primary consideration. and their most viable means to achieve their end is through genetic evolution. thus, it is quite noticeable that the parents of the scholars chose to marry lowlanders called “unats” or “straight-haired” since all of those interviewed are no longer pure aytas—the dilution ranging from 50 to 75 per cent. assimilation is nearly spontaneous since it means survival. significantly enough, the young aytas’ aspiration to acquire college education can be associated with their desire to emerge from the traumatic pattern of prejudice that they constantly encounter. this motivational dialectic can wind up in a situation where they have to adopt the identity of the other by consent, creating a split within them. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 identification, as described by bhabha, is “…the return of an image of identity which bears the mark of splitting in that ‘other’ place from which it comes”(45). the aytas are among the victims of colonialism and racism who are experiencing ambivalences: they try to assume the identity of the dominant group but, at the same time, many are still reluctant to abandon their communities. key themes derived from the interviews the thoughts and experiences of the ayta scholars can provide insights into their timeelastic period of adaptation before and after their college graduation. how they perceive their situation—first, as students and second, as graduates—given their historical background of disadvantage and marginalization, is a question, in addition to those cited previously, that forms a critical element. an access to the viewpoints and feelings of these aytas could lead to what bhabha (1994) sees as “a meditation on the experience of dispossession and dislocation— psychic and social—which speaks to the condition of the marginalized, the alienated, those who have to live under the surveillance of a sign of identity and fantasy that denies their difference” (63). with its potentially boundless context of meaning, such “psychic and social dispossession” marks the dilemma of the ayta scholars. this tacit assumption of their struggle and the aspiration for socio-economic mobility that puts their identity fundamentally at stake are key ideas deemed relevant to the analysis of their case. the concepts shed light on the aytas’ experience of self-consciousness in their psychic identification with the dominant culture or in their becoming estranged in their assimilated condition because of their being “different”. experience of psychic and social dispossession joining the mainstream academic world: initiation into dispossession to the aytas education is an apparatus of empowerment and a key to their admission to the lowlanders’ world. getting educated to most, in fact, could be an end in itself—for the sheer satisfaction of what they reckon as an extraordinary achievement, a deep sense of fulfillment and a kind of self-transcendence. in their attempt to counter the prevailing prejudice against them, they try to embrace what appears to them as the source of their liberation from such servile status. in other words, college education is indisputably associated with social power. thus, the scholars, before going to the university, presumably tried to be prepared to put up with discrimination for they believed that there was something in their pursuit which would make them better. as they endeavored to push themselves towards this new horizon, they had to accept exposure to dilemmas and subjection to pressures. by linking themselves to the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 mainstream way of life and established institutions, they had no choice but to conform in order to survive. in due course, it was inevitable that there were those among them who, upon experiencing psychic and social dispossession, struggled in the grip of pessimism. on the other hand, there were those who simply chose to submit themselves to the prevailing forces of mainstream society as a matter of expediency. such experience of psychic and social dispossession emerged as a key theme in the interviews. to begin with, verbal bullying has been the usual complaint of all the cdc-auf ayta scholars when they started their college education. “you’re just an ayta. you are not one of us,” is the most common statement of rejection, according to augusto, a scholar. “baluga,” a derogatory term used to describe the aytas, is what they are, as rubbed in by the lowlanders. the term was less a matter of name calling than an insult to their ethnic identity, and this bullying had debilitating effects that constantly played in their consciousness. maycie recalled how her classmates snubbed and avoided her. aiden, on the other hand, mentioned her autocratic high school teacher’s belittling remarks when she got accepted as scholar: “are you sure you can go to college?” (short of saying “your kind will never be a material for college education”). in the same manner, andrea was belittled by both teachers and classmates during the first weeks of her classes in the university. one other scholar was deeply embarrassed in front of her classmates because she was called a “social climber” by her instructor. those disparaging remarks necessarily produced far-reaching psychological effects on the aytas and shaped their consciousness and unconsciousness. their entry into a new world drew undue attention to themselves. striving to move onward, they found themselves constantly being driven to move backwards by the sadistic scourging even of those considered to be the vanguard of education. culturally displaced and psychologically oppressed, they had nothing to fall back on but their own individual aspirations. the persisting culture of discrimination against the aytas has always been a social obstacle, and it used to discourage them from going to school (estacio 2007). if not overcome, this psychological battering would all the more block off any desire of these people to rise above the poverty level. oddly enough, after getting used to being subjected to such discrimination, the present-day ayta students, particularly the cdc scholars, developed a coping mechanism. according to them, they just learned to ignore what they heard and saw because their aim was to finish their studies. the potentially intolerable misery and indignity that they would suffer could not match their longing for deliverance from their impoverished condition. deferred fulfillment of hope the promise of tertiary education to the aytas, however, was really too good to be true. besides being initially alienated because of their ethnicity, they found themselves slavishly struggling within a particular, socially structured academic domain as they coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 lacked the inherent qualities formed by this kind of society. at this point, their “being in relation to otherness” is undoubtedly emphasized. the inferior image inscribed in their ethnic identity becomes even more defined. first, a number of them dropped out of their programs for failure to maintain the required grade average stipulated in their scholarship contract. their prospect of survival in a mainstream academic setting would never be easy, considering their socio-cultural orientation. they knew well enough that, given their deficient educational background, they would likely to fall short of the standard college education. during the implementation of the scholarship program, every year, less than fifty per cent (50%) of the recipients were able to pursue and finish their studies. second, since only the tuition fee was provided by the program, most did not have the funds for other school expenses, such as payments for uniforms, books, projects, transportation, etc. the defective scholarship system, which gave them entry into a perceived haven from the exhaustion of their crisis-ridden origin but did not provide the necessary financial support for their other needs, subjected them all the more to this bewildering helplessness. ironically, the pursuit of their happiness through college education was ultimately bound up with constraints that they could not come to terms with, resulting in their further degradation and insecurity. out of resignation, those who dropped out of school did not see the need to strive to surmount the obstacles and simply resumed their ayta hand-to-mouth existence. on the other hand, those who continued their studies had to look for other sources of fund—usually from their families and relatives and from part-time employment. the case of aries is worth mentioning. according to him, his parents had to sell their four hectare-land to provide for his schooling. curiously enough, that piece of land is actually part of their ancestral domain, the selling of which is prohibited by the law. graduation from college neither automatically unburdened them from the weights of discrimination and disadvantage. employment is still a problem because of the prevailing bias against their physical appearance. those with strong ayta features have very little chance to compete with lowlanders in the world of professionals. the more hybridized ones admitted having to use whitening beauty products and hairstraightening ways to attain even more the looks acceptable to their employers. “we learned to improve our appearance,” say andrea and jenery, referring to the manner of dressing and prettying themselves up according to the lowlanders’ standard. raychelle and leslie, both with only 25% ayta blood and therefore possessing the desired physical features, are now very much at home with lowlanders and feel being “one of them”. moreover, these aytas’ college degrees do not necessarily provide enough preparation for their licensure examination, or these people are obviously not the ideal applicants for this type of examination. consequently, they could be jobless despite obtaining their degrees, could land in jobs that do not match their training or would have to take the board examination several times before passing it. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 to cite cases, first, there is augusto (75% ayta), one of the scholars, who completed the criminology program but has not passed the required board exam to become a licensed criminologist. given his degree, he worked on a contractual basis as an “intelligence employee” (a euphemism for “informer”), a kind of private detective, informing the authorities at clark development corporation about the activities of his fellow aytas, most especially at the height of the ancestral land and domain controversy between them and cdc, when aytas were fighting for their rights. he said, “at first, i felt the pang of my conscience as i did the job, being a form of betrayal, but the offer of good pay was hard to resist.” when the controversy died down, he tried to look for another job in the same corporation. to his disappointment, he was not hired despite his passing all requirements because of his height. his immediate remark was “don’t they understand that aytas have never been tall?” augusto has never found a regular job until now. when asked why he does not apply for a job outside the clark economic zone, his only answer is “i do not want to be subject to discrimination and bullying. i’ve had enough of it. i might not be able to control myself and would always be in trouble. i might even resort to violence. people outside clark will always look down on us.” in contrast, a contemporary of augusto is a criminology graduate who passed the board examination and became a policeman in a community outside the economic zone. however, his success story turned into a tragic one as he was psychologically illprepared to be part of the complex and even corrupting world of the police forces. he could not resist the temptation of obtaining “easy money,” got entangled into a drugrelated operation and was put in jail. the proverbial dream for a better life turning into a nightmare now haunts the tribe. another criminology graduate, aries, found employment not related to his college education in a manpower company two years after finishing his program. he has not taken the board examination because he lacks the requirements to be provided by the university. since the scholarship program has been discontinued for reasons stated previously, the financial accountability of cdc to auf remains unsettled. consequently, graduation documents required in aries’ licensure examination will not be released until the settlement is made. aries has been helpless, the fulfillment of his hope “to protect his people” when he becomes a licensed policeman is deferred indefinitely. other cases concern the majority of those who obtained a degree in education but found it difficult to pass the licensure examination for teachers. hardly do they expect the “first time takers” among them to succeed in their attempt. thus fettered, these graduates deal with such pessimism and feeling of uncertainty by engaging themselves in tutorial services for young children. their very small remuneration is hardly enough for their subsistence, but they feel elated when people in their communities address them with respect, calling them “madam”. as already cited, those who passed the examination usually would have taken it several times, and they usually got employed as public school teachers in their communities. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 andrea, a board passer, now teaches in a far-flung area where an ayta community is located. her college degree, she says, has given her an opportunity to be employed permanently, and she is grateful, despite the difficulty of her daily travel to her work place. proud of being an ayta, she feels the need to be back among her fellow aytas and to be part of their desire to become literate. although she was “caught in the tension of demand and desire” during and after college, she realized the fresh possibility of her being—an ayta—and kept that conviction. after joining the world of the lowlanders, she recognized the fact that she was not identical with them. she made up her mind to be grounded in her ethnicity rather than opening a “space of splitting” in her heart. and she is aware of the consequences of this determination: a constant sacrifice and struggle to surpass the challenges of her ethnic existence. jenery, another education graduate, also dreams of becoming a teacher to help her family and her community. she aims to encourage her fellow aytas to have interest in going to school and in obtaining a college degree. however, after graduation she ended up working in a restaurant employing mostly aytas. being the only college graduate among the aytas, she became a supervisor, but her salary is smaller compared to what she would receive if she were a public school teacher. she still hopes to fulfill her dream to be a licensed teacher someday. maycie, a former kindergarten teacher in a small private school, now works as treasurer of mabalacat ayta tribal association, a non-government organization. the bullying that she experienced developed in her a kind of “avenging anger” (bhabha 44), typical of oppressed and displaced people. though there is an obvious mismatch between her college degree and present job, her decision to be part of an ayta organization springs from her desire to “teach her fellow natives so that others will not vilify them.” strong willed, combative and articulate, she exudes self-confidence in saying that education is important, but survival does not depend on it. she thinks that her fellow aytas should learn how to respect themselves. surprisingly, however, her physical appearance—with straightened hair and facial make-up—belies her apparent sense of commitment to her ethnic lineage and reveals her assimilation of the way of life and looks of the people she is defying. in the same vein, aiden was also driven to finish her program as an act of vengeance for she suffered from discriminatory treatment of her high school teacher, in particular. she wanted to vindicate herself and make the teacher realize that an ayta like her has the capacity to succeed in such an undertaking. her motto is “whatever others can do, i also can”. with this perspective, she currently wants to encourage her fellow aytas to strive to be educated so that they can overcome the prevailing condescending attitude of the dominant majority towards them. though uncertain about the results of the licensure examination that she took, she is determined to pursue a teaching career. leslie, on the other hand, who is now a licenced teacher, appears to be completely acculturated and assimilated in the way she looks and carries herself. in spite of her apparent assimilation to the lowlanders’ world, she wants to promote her heritage by being outspoken about ayta culture in her class discussions. she also teaches her ayta students their traditional dances so that they can join the annual ayta festival in their coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 locality. the splitting of her personhood manifests itself in this most probably unconscious projection of her double image. roseanne is optimistic despite her long wait for her licensure. she tutors two children while anticipating the realization of her dream to become a public school teacher. among the interviewees, she seems to be the least affected by discrimination. according to her, she has learned to adjust and mingle with the lowlanders, quietly negotiating her passage through their domain. she claims that her interaction with them is considered “normal”; she downplays discriminatory attitudes and repeatedly emphasizes her ability “to get along well with them.” her case apparently illustrates the idea of “silencing race,” which “points not only to public disavowal of race, but also to the potential to silence resistance to racism,” according to b. harries (2014:108). the process of “becoming similar” all the interviewees did not only have the same bullying experiences but also keep a common inclination to believe that survival is a matter of adaptation—much like the evolutionary theory that the least fit are weeded out by natural selection. adaptation has begun as soon as their parents were resettled in the lowlands and carries on in their generation. this change in setting has endangered the aytas’ race as a consequence of their being overpowered by the dominant group. on the part of the young ayta scholars, adaptation now takes the form of acculturation and assimilation. regarding individual acculturation, according to teske and nelson, “the effect of dominance on degree and direction of acculturation would perforce be contingent on the relationship of the cultural groups” (1974:355). in this respect, since the essential core of each of the aytas’ ethnicity has become grounded in the shifting sand of their socio-economic existence, being subject to a more stable and dominant group is a situation that cannot be helped. the aytas’ acculturation may fall under the polar type called complete dominance in which the lowlanders allow the aytas “into [its] activities in positions of low status” (teske and nelson 1974:354). despite their being in the periphery, in their desire to have a more comfortable life, the ayta college graduates have begun their “identification with the ‘out-group,” (ibid, 360); their acculturation, which has been integral to their existence since their resettlement in the lowland after the pinatubo eruption, is a continuing process leading to voluntary assimilation. the latter has been “unidirectional,” and “it is conceivable that the attrition rate will be so extensive as to lead to [their] dissolution” (ibid). the dynamic process involved in identity is a two-edged assumption relative to the aytas being focused. if their acculturation were “democratic” and if “cultural pluralism [would] prevail[s]” (bogardus cited by teske and nelson 1974:355), coming to terms with their evolving identity would not be as problematic as it appears now. it would be easy for them to claim a “bi-racial identity,” an obvious awareness of advantageous racial fusion associated with higher status groups, as in the case of the mixed-race people from middle class backgrounds examined by townsend, et al. (2012). the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 balancing act of “mixing races”, so to speak, conveniently leads to a healthy synthesis or co-existence of two racial identities. however, the case of the aytas, given their socio-historical background, apparently poses a more complex challenge since the possible direction of their evolving “bi-racial identity” is akin to a flickering glow of the moon during an eclipse. producing an image of identity “the black man wants to be like the white man. for the black man there is only one destiny. and it is white,” says fanon (228). this same desire has been consciously or unconsciously harboured by the aytas in their own context. when they hear “baluga,” their consciousness undergoes the experience of yearning to move towards “otherness”. the derogatory word is a representation of who the other thinks they are, and, therefore, it is a source of their insecurity and anxiety. “baluga” connotes dark-skin, short stature, kinky hair and a primitive way of life; and this ethnic association creates a status of subordination. the ayta scholars, who aimed to be admitted to the world of the lowlanders, were readily pinned down to thoughts of this obstructive psychological wall. to make the latter recede, they inevitably embraced the cultural values and aimed at having the physical characteristics of the lowlanders, even if all these would mean becoming the opposite of who they are. the female scholars, in particular, are quite deliberate in pursuing the “whiteness and straight hair destiny”. as mentioned, their physical appearance seems to controvert their identification as aytas. jenery’s husband prides himself on the fact that she is as fair as the lowlanders and hardly has the ayta look. raychelle and leslie, on the other hand, are white-skinned and straight-haired as well as exude sophistication when they speak. there is hardly any trace of ayta-ness in them, and they admit their use of whitening and hair-straightening beauty products to attain such looks. moreover, being married to lowlander “seamen,” known to be big earners, they can afford to buy what they need for their transformation, including expensive gadgets associated with high socio-economic status. the rest of the ayta girls also have the same objective as they try to leap forward beyond their ethnic borders. they unanimously affirm their wish to put an end to the stigma of their being “baluga.” assimilation by “becoming similar” works very well among these individuals in their act of social survival. their college education, in fact, has served as a bridge in their crossing over the borders. though the process of traversing is full of crises, it is a critical step out of their limited world and they get exposed to the welter of influences until they arrive at their desired destiny. having better future by “improving the race” and getting educated coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 as cited before, all the scholars are not pure aytas, and as expected, they intend to perpetuate this evolutionary process, again as a means of survival. for instance, augusto married an “unat” (straight-haired) whom he met during a job fair in clark. they now have a child, and they live at the woman’s parents’ house because he is unemployed. he mentioned two reasons for marrying an “unat”. first, the dowry system is still observed in ayta communities and could be very expensive—way beyond what the prospective groom’s parents can afford such as a house, a lot, live animals, including water buffaloes. second, offspring by “unats” are fairer, straighthaired, and taller; thus they have better chance of a good future. the same reasons are given by the other scholars. all of the married ones have “unats” as spouses. aries, still unmarried, is advised by his own mother, a pure ayta, to look for someone “unlike her” to avoid the fate of the downtrodden tribe. aries looks forward to marrying an “unat”. but not everything is well to this vanishing breed whose ambivalences in their identification with the dominant race would surface every now and then. as their being gets closer to the otherness that they pursue, the mark of splitting in their identity is still manifested. jenery, andrea and others lament that their children have dominantly “unat” physical features. they are aware of the fast dissolution of their race, but they hang on to the idea that their children, being products of evolutionary forces, will have a better future. and this better future is also linked to education—a belief that the ayta scholars maintain despite their least enviable testimonies in their attempt to actualize their dream to enter the academic world. they still unanimously regard education as a most reliable means to a better life, especially in the best of circumstances. economically, for these young graduates education means better chances of being employed, though this prospect might take time. they unanimously assert that, with their achievement, their self-esteem has been boosted up. socially, they have learned to gradually fix the gulf between themselves and those who discriminate against them no matter how painful the process might have been. but the question remains: where do they belong? works cited abaya. e. 2010. “place, power, sensibilities: the politics of place-making in an ayta resettlement”. overcoming disasters: lessons from postdisaster interventions in japan and southeast asia. zayas, c., hernandez, v., and fajardo a. (eds.). quezon city: university of the philippines center for international studies. anderson, i. 2015. “indigenous pathways into the professions”. unesco observatory multi-disciplinary journal in the arts. vol.4, no.1.melbourne, australia: the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 graduate school of education, university of melbourne. bhaba, h. 1994. “interrogating identity”. the location of culture. london and new york: routledge. estacio, e. and marks, d. 2007. “health inequity and social injustice for the aytas in thephilippines: critical psychology in action”. journal for social action in counseling and psychology vol. 1, no. 1. london: city university. fanon, f. 1986. black skin, white masks. trans. c. l. markmann. london: pluto press. fox, r. 1953. “the pinatubo negritos their useful plants and material culture”. the philippine journal of science. manila: bureau of printing. gaillard, j.c. 2006. “was it a cultural disaster? aeta resilience following the 1991 mt.pinatubo eruption”. philippine quarterly of culture and society. vol. 36. accessed 16/2/2014 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/29792602 harries, b. 2014. “we need to talk about race”. sociology. vol. 48 (6). durham, uk: the british sociological association. lahn, j. 2013. “indigenous professionals: work, class and culture”. caepr working paper no 89. canberra: centre for aboriginal economic policy research, australian national university. lahn, j. 2012. “poverty, work and social networks: the role of social capital for aboriginal people in urban australian locales”, urban policy and research, 30:3, 293-308. seitz, s. 1998. “coping strategies in an ethnic minority group: the aetas of mount pinatubo”. disasters. 22(1). seitz, s. 2004. the aeta at the mt. pinatubo, philippines: a minority group coping with disaster. quezon city: new day publishers. shimizu, h. 1989. the pinatubo aytas: continuity and change . quezon city: ateneo university press. shimizu, h. 2001. the orphans of pinatubo. manila: solidaridad publishing house. shimizu, h. (2002 september 27). “struggling for existence after the pinatubo eruption.1991: catastrophe, suffering and rebirth of ayta communities”. paper presented at the session: “the philippine negritos: past, present and future,” inter-congress of iuaes 2002, toshi center hotel, tokyo, japan. http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shimizuh/shimizu_hp/essay/essay02.html http://www.jstor.org/stable/29792602 http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shimizuh/shimizu_hp/essay/essay02.html coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 teske r. jr and nelson b. 1974. “acculturation and assimilation”. american ethnologist. vol. 1, no. 2 . american anthropological association. http://www.jstor.org/journals/anthro.html. townsend, s. fryberg, s., wilkins, c. and mrkus, h.r. 2012.“being mixed: who claims a biracial identity?” cultural diversity and ethnic minority psychology . vol. 18, no. 1. american psychological association. wimmer, a. 2009. “herder’s heritage and the boundarymaking approach: studying ethnicity in immigrant societies”. sociological theory. vol.27, no. 3. washington: american sociological association. interviewsiv vigor laxamana, may 4, 2015, clark field, pampanga bing margarito, october 20, 2015, clark field, pampanga roseanne , october 22, 2015, clark field, pampanga augusto, october 22, 2015, clark field, pampanga maycie , october 24, 2015, clark field, pampanga jenery, october 26, 2015, clark field, pampanga raychelle, october 29, 2015, clark field, pampanga leslie, october 30, 2015, clark field, pampanga andrea, november 3, 2015, clark field, pampanga aries, june 28, 2016 julieta c. mallari, former director of the university of the philippines diliman extension program in pampanga, is an english and literature professor in the same university. she holds a phd in comparative literature. she has written coffee-table books, essays published in local and international journals, and biographies of two famous lawyers in the philippines. she is a cultural worker promoting kapampangan language and literature. she also conducts research on the plight of the aytas, an indigenous group displaced by the eruption of mt. pinatubo. i http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shimizuh/shimizu_hp/essay/essay02.html ii clark development corporation board resolution no. ec-0601. iii supplied by office of external affairs, clark development corporation. iv the author chose not to include the last names of the interviewees (except for vigor laxamana who was willing to be identified) to protect their identities. http://www.jstor./ http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shimizuh/shimizu_hp/essay/essay02.html coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 multiculturalism and legal plurality in australia justin dabner james cook university justin.dabner@jcu.edu.au copyright©2016 justin dabner. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. there is one law we are all expected to abide by. it is the law enacted by the parliament under the australian constitution. if you can’t accept that then you don’t accept the fundamentals of what australia is and what it stands for. peter costello, “worth promoting, worth defending. australian citizenship. what it means and how to nurture it.’, address to the sydney institute, 23 february 2006. abstract. the great multicultural experiment that is australia has engendered a reconsideration of core values. even the traditionally conservative legal system has not been immune. while the law remains anchored in its british christian common-law traditions, the influence of other cultures and beliefs are emerging. taking the term multiculturalism to encompass all cultures, including indigenous peoples as well as new comers, two instances of this are the partial accommodation of indigenous customary law and a debate over the accommodation of islamic law principles. the adoption of “foreign” legal concepts poses a dilemma for a liberal democratic society. on one hand, such a society might be expected to embrace wholesale legal plurality. however, there may be some foreign legal principles that are resisted on the basis that they are unacceptable to a free and equal society. the challenge is how to acknowledge the customary and religious laws of mailto:justin.dabner@jcu.edu.au coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 minorities whilst establishing one legal framework that applies to all, equally, and without discrimination and protects vulnerable parties. this article explores the implications for the legal system of a multicultural australia. taking the instances of indigenous and islamic law, it will be observed that legal plurality exists in australia but largely in the shadows where the vulnerable of society lack protection. it proposes an institutional response that might help shine a light on these shadows. key words: multiculturalism, legal plurality, australian culture, customary law, shariah multiculturalism’s dilemmas the inherent concern for a multicultural society is whether it will fragment as a result of accommodating differences that are inconsistent with secular liberal democratic principles of equality, stability and neutrality. this concern focuses attention on exactly how these principles would apply in practice. do these principles mean that a secular society should allow and actively accommodate all religions and cultural practices, or, rather, forbid those that are perceived to impinge on the fundamental civil and human rights of its citizens? putting the question another way, should a multicultural society mandate equal rights for all citizens or should it be prepared to permit, and even endorse, the trade-off of fundamental rights for the pursuit of cultural and religious expression on the part of some citizens who might even be coerced or vulnerable? western democracies, in particular, are struggling with these dilemmas. australia is no exception. australia’s multicultural experiment australia’s transformation from its “white only” policy to one of the most multicultural societies on earth in less than fifty years is truly remarkable. this transformation has not been without controversy and, indeed, the success or otherwise of the experiment is yet to be determined. some racial ghettoes do exist. furthermore, there has been racial conflict, most famously at cronulla in 2005. concerns about population sustainability, in terms of the environment and infrastructure, have also added weight to a reconsideration of immigration policy.1 one manifestation of government policy has been the provision of multilingual government services and anti-discrimination legislation. at the same time, concerns about the possibility of coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 australian society fragmenting into a cluster of tribes have seen emphasis on national cohesion.2 initially, immigrants were expected to “assimilate”, but a more enlightened policy saw the rhetoric change to one of “integration”, although the expectation of an overriding and unifying commitment to australia and its society and to accept the rights of others has seen the phrase coined “australian multiculturalism”. the government espouses diversity as a resource,3 and, whatever it heralds, multiculturalism is here to stay. there is no question that the impact of the immigration and indigenous policy has massively shaped australian culture. but what about the effect of multiculturalism on the country’s institutions? in particular, what influence, if any, has multiculturalism had on the law? as the nations of the world have become more integrated and populations have mixed, a move towards pluralistic rather than monocultural legal systems, has been increasingly debated. so, to what extent is the australian legal system pluralistic? english legal traditions in australia the australian legal system is founded on english legal traditions. the notion that australia had been empty land that was then “settled” not only permitted british sovereignty but meant that english laws applied. the colonial courts and the early parliaments took their lead almost exclusively from the motherland, and then, with the act of federation (itself british legislation), all the laws of england were adopted by australia the origin of these laws is often ascribed to the magna carta of 1215, a treaty between king john and his subjects specifying that they would not be governed arbitrarily. initially, the monarch was the sole arbitrator on legal matters, but then delegates were empowered, and, to ensure consistency, the doctrine of precedent was devised whereby previous decisions would be followed unless the new cases could be distinguished by their facts. as this doctrine over time rendered the “common law” too inflexible, a new system of courts, known as “equity”, evolved. these courts were less concerned with rigid principles and more focused on the overriding principle of fairness. just before australia’s federation, the two court systems were merged. this english legal system featured a feudal system of landholdings. the absolute power of the monarchy was reflected in the monarchy’s absolute ownership of the lands of england, the use and enjoyment of which (by its subjects) was permitted at its pleasure. thus, a pyramid system was created with the elites given possession of land in return for the allegiance of the monarchy’s subjects, with rights to use the land being defused down the pyramid in ever-decreasing portions to ever-decreasing persons of significance. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 by virtue of the australian courts act of 1828, the privy council became the final court of appeal for australian courts, and all the laws of england applied to the australian colonies. furthermore, the doctrine of repugnancy provided that laws passed by a colonial legislature were invalid if they were inconsistent with an english law, while the doctrine of paramount force permitted subsequent english statute law to apply to the colonies if it was so worded. the effect was to assimilate english and australian common law and ensure substantial compatibility with statute law. although the australian parliaments were freed up (at least in theory) with federation, the courts remained constrained for a further eighty-five years. in 1978, in viro v the queen (1978) 141 clr 88 the high court finally asserted the infallibility of the privy council, and, eight years later, the australia act 1986 abolished appeals to it. freed from these shackles, in the last thirty years australian common law has carved a divergent jurisprudence. customary law challenges the legal foundation although common law is prepared to acknowledge customary law, the criteria are strict and in light of the prevailing view that indigenous inhabitants were so primitive as to have no true laws and only unacceptable and barbaric practices, english law applied unfettered. so it was in milirrpum v nabalco pty ltd (1971) 17 flr 141 mr justice blackburn was able to say, albeit with regret, that the doctrine of communal native title was not part of the law of australia as a settled colony. as more enlightened views about the sophistication of indigenous society were adopted, there was a realisation that the law had been complicit in a great wrong. the parliaments of australia responded with land-rights legislation, but it was the decision of the high court in mabo v queensland [no 2] (1992) 175 clr 1that has become the highpoint in the recognition of indigenous customary law. rejecting the idea that australia was an empty land when the british arrived, the high court held that native title could coexist within the land tenure system, unless it was specifically extinguished. reform proposals some years before this decision, the australian law reform commission released a report entitled recognition of aboriginal customary laws on whether it was desirable to apply customary law to indigenous australians. the report acknowledged that customary laws significantly influenced the lives of many indigenous australians, but a fundamental difficulty was that no single version of coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 customary law existed. rather, customary law was a series of dynamic and changing systems applying to different groups of indigenous australians. in particular, the report referred to various objections to the recognition of customary laws, including the following:  the problem of unacceptable rules and punishments  the secret aspects of customary laws  the need to protect indigenous women and children  the community divisiveness that recognition could cause  the difficulties of definition  the possibility that such recognition would violate the principle of equality before the law. ultimately, the report recommended that indigenous customary laws should be recognised, but within the framework of the general law. particular areas included the recognition of traditional marriages for some purposes, the continued recognition of customary laws for the purposes of bail and sentencing, and the recognition of some hunting, fishing and gathering rights. more recently, the law reform commission of western australia revisited the topic: aboriginal customary laws, the interaction of western australian law and aboriginal law and custom, (september 2006). the essence of its 131 recommendations was the recognition of customary law on a case-by-case basis, always subject to the maintaining of international human rights standards, with particular attention to the rights of women and children and the right not to be subject to cruel punishment. furthermore, customary law was to be taken into account in a number of ways including the hearing of cases, sentencing, bail applications, parole and prison releases, coronial enquiries and post mortems, burial disputes, child custody, succession and maintenance, hunting, fishing and gathering rights. education of those administering justice (as to indigenous culture) and indigenous australians (as to the law, especially laws at odds with custom) was seen as vital. the commission emphasised that it was not recommending a separate set of laws for indigenous people but rather seeking to accommodate customary laws and practice within the australian legal system. importantly, it also advocated constitutional recognition. indigenous courts initiative a particularly important recommendation was that of involving elders and respected people in sentencing. this initiative was implemented in most australian states. these “indigenous” courts can display other novel features, such as the sitting of the accused unrestrained at the bar table coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 with a supporter, the magistrate and counsel. the informality and flexibility, together with the involvement of community justice groups, is directed to the judicial officer so that the officer can learn more about the offender, the offence and developing an appropriate response. the input of elders and respected persons also assists in the offender having a more positive attitude towards the process. the aim of these courts is, ultimately, to decrease the over-representation of indigenous people in the criminal justice system. although there is conflicting evidence about the success of these courts the real problem might be the lack of resources, especially post-court supervision.4 apart from statutory initiatives, there are many instances of judges using their discretion to take customary laws into account. such judges tend to be “cultural relativists”, a phrase to describe those who take the view that moral values operate in the framework of a cultural bias and that conduct should be viewed in its cultural context. although these judges might more readily recognise customary laws, some commentators argue that this approach is flawed to the extent that it can endorse repressive cultures or socially unacceptable behaviour.5 areas where this discretion has often been called into play include applying a reasonable person test, the granting of injunctions to prevent coronial autopsies and in family law (especially custody) and succession (often burial) disputes. although it could be argued that customary law has largely been marginalised in australian case law, the exercise of discretion by individual judges has served as a vehicle for its recognition. meanwhile, the high court has expressed its own necessity to deal with the issue when the appropriate matter comes before it.6 shariah with the increased migration of muslims from islamic nations, western nations are grappling with the accommodation of islamic beliefs in their societies, including their legal systems. although australia has a very small muslim population of around 500,000, it has not been immune from the issue of whether and how to accommodate islam. in fact, the place of muslims in australian society is a surprisingly controversial subject for such a multicultural society. this controversy is most pronounced in the debate over whether australia should accommodate shariah (islamic law). shariah is the set of principles that regulate the relationship between muslims and god, and between themselves. it derives from the principles laid down 1,400 years ago in the qur’an, believed to contain the word of god transmitted to the prophet mohammed, and the sunnah, rules derived from hadith, a document capturing the actions and life of mohammed. together, these rules are the subject of interpretation and extension by islamic (legal) scholars, creating a body of islamic jurisprudence or fiqh. as with indigenous customary law, there is considerable variation coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 in the interpretation and application of shariah in the muslim world. this is particularly relevant to australia, whose muslims come from eighty different nations, with fifty different ethnicities and cultures.7 in the shadows and out of step australian muslims live in a legally pluralistic environment in a similar way to indigenous societies. in their daily life, they strive to accommodate the official state law of australia while at the same time embracing their version of shariah. for muslims, shariah is more than law: it embodies their religious beliefs and practices. there is even jurisprudence to guide muslims as to which laws they are obliged to follow when in non-muslim lands.8 this jurisprudence requires muslims to obey the law of the land in matters other than those relating to personal obligations, such as rituals, food, drink, clothing, inheritance and, more significantly, in matters of marriage and divorce. much of this recognition of shariah occurs unobtrusively, but, in the context of family law, differences in the two systems of law can be controversial. for example, a 2008 request by two muslim leaders for the government to consider legalising polygyny was met with stern rebuke from the government, which stated that this would never happen. black and sadiq have sought to explain the negative perception of islamic family law that exists in australia.9 they suggest that family law is central to identity and belonging and that islamic family law is viewed as “out of step” with the australian way of life. certainly, although the media has fuelled this negative sentiment, there remain some fundamental inconsistencies between the two sets of family laws. under shariah, female-initiated divorce must overcome hurdles not applicable to men. furthermore, child custody and guardianship can favour the male. australian law approaches both divorce and custody from a no-fault, no-gender distinction, and an emphasis (in the case of custody) on the best interests of the child and shared parental responsibility in which religion plays no part. inconsistencies of this nature have influenced the government rhetoric against embracing shariah. in 2008, the then attorney-general is quoted as saying that the “government is not considering and will not consider the introduction of any part of sharia law into the australian legal system”.10 when, in 2011, the australian federation of islamic councils (afic) lodged a submission advocating that “multiculturalism should lead to legal pluralism”, the suggestion was met by a response from the minister for immigration that “anybody who calls for sharia law is not doing so in the name of multiculturalism. they are doing so as extremists and extremists need to be dealt with, whatever their creed.”11 coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 government hypocrisy on islamic finance given such emphatic statements of “principle”, it is extraordinary that, in the midst of these statements, the same government was promoting australia as an islamic finance centre and commissioning a review into australian law to determine how it might be amended to better accommodate islamic finance. apparently, offering islamic finance products might “foster social inclusion” and enable “australian muslims to access products that may be more consistent with their principles and beliefs.”12 islamic finance is a form of finance that accords with shariah, in particular the prohibitions on interest, uncertainty and gambling. although not embraced by all islamic scholars,13 there has been an explosion in the popularity of islamic finance in the muslim world in the last decade or so. the finance industry and the australian government have identified the economic opportunities for the country from facilitating islamic finance activities. however, there are regulatory and, especially, tax law barriers that arise from the nature of the transactions that are necessary to comply with shariah. essentially, these transactions recast the traditional finance arrangements in a shariahcompliant form that avoids the payment or receipt of interest, but this can have adverse tax implications that render the recast transactions less commercially beneficial. the basis of the reform proposals is to remove the regulatory burdens and imposts on islamic finance that are not suffered by parties to traditional finance arrangements. the government’s desire to accommodate islamic finance is motivated by perceived financial benefits for the country. however, there are valid reasons to be cautious. some of the issues are the artificial and complex nature of the transactions, the potential for fraud and tax avoidance and the problems of definition, the potential lack of parity with similar non-islamic arrangements, and the even doubtful shariah-compliant credentials of many of these products and their lack of takeup among muslims. furthermore, proper investigation is needed because it has been suggested that the products have the potential to damage the western finance system.14 although the australian government’s approach to recognising shariah may have the hallmarks of hypocrisy, the islamic finance proposals do illustrate how the legal system might allow for some incremental recognition of shariah. the challenge is how to expand this recognition beyond merely financial laws to the legal system more generally. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 bringing islamic and other faith-based tribunals out of the shadows whether the australian legal system should defer to islamic law where muslim parties are concerned, particularly in the context of family law, will become an increasingly vexed issue as the population of muslim australians increases. the islamic finance example may provide a precedent. furthermore, there may be an imperative for such recognition. as observed above, many muslims are operating in the shadow of australian family law by avoiding state-sponsored marriage and, largely unknown to the rest of the society, embracing shariah. but this unofficial family law system lacks fundamental protections such as due process, legal representation, appellate procedures and access to decision makers who are accountable and whose decisions are transparent. the lack of international recognition of decisions reached in this unofficial realm also has the potential to place australian muslims travelling to islamic countries in a difficult position. similarly, the concept of a “limping marriage”, where a wife has obtained a secular divorce but not one recognised for islamic law purposes remains a possibility. accommodating islamic marriages within the formal legal environment might not only be a remedy but could also provide the means by which adjustments to islamic family law would be negotiated, in order to render it more gender neutral and provide greater protection for the rights of children. there is precedent for an official pluralistic path, at least in regards to islamic law affecting personal rights. the united kingdom has its shariah arbitration councils, the decisions of which have been enforceable since 2008; india has the muslim personal law (shariat) application act 1937; and singapore has an entrenched shariah courts system dating from 1958. although the singapore system, in particular, could be asserted as evidence of a model that could be adopted “to help send a message of respect and inclusion, counter ethnic and racial tensions and provide a face of islam that is rational and moderate”, black concludes that it does not provide a solution for australia. 15 in her view, australia’s muslim diversity, the entrenched cultural preference for secularism over religiosity and, most significantly, the constitutional mandate in section 116 against sectarianism are obstacles that are too great. muslim diversity should not be understated as a roadblock to any, even marginal, recognition of shariah in australia. in the absence of a dominant muslim ethnicity, there is a divergence of views regarding an appropriate jurisprudence. in fact, there is evidence that many muslim immigrants are opposed to any form of shariah which they associate with oppressive and intolerant regimes. in this regard, australia contrasts with both britain and singapore, and probably has more in common with canada, where shariah has been comprehensively rejected.16 the current unofficial and voluntary realm of islamic law in australia at least allows for this diversity of views within the muslim population. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 further precedents questioning the need for formal shariah courts (at least in relation to marriage and divorce) are provided by the catholic and jewish examples. the catholic church does not recognise civil divorce, and so divorced catholics are viewed as sinners and may not remarry in a catholic church or even enter into the sacraments.17 in order to avoid these consequences, divorced catholics may apply to a church tribunal for an annulment, which may be granted where it can be established that the marriage was invalid according to canon law. there is no legislative endorsement or legal recognition of these bodies, and they too operate in the shadow of the official law. similarly, jewish “courts”, the beth din, have been established in sydney and melbourne. again, these tribunals have no formal legal recognition, yet operate in the areas of family law and deal with some commercial disputes between jewish people, imposing jewish law (halakhah). but is the mere existence of these other unregulated and unofficial courts justification for their continuation? rather, the decisions of all these religious tribunals should be recognised as law, with the attendant imposition of conditions of voluntariness, transparency, accountability and civil processes designed to protect the parties. furthermore, a right of appeal to the mainstream australian courts, empowered to overturn unfair decisions, would add a further layer of protection. the problem of the limping marriage might also be overcome if, during divorce proceedings, the family court was explicitly given the power to require the parties to submit to the relevant religious court or procedure. this could ensure that any grant of civil divorce is replicated in the religious court. section 116 of the australian constitution does present a potential barrier to such reconciliation of religious and civil laws. it provides that the government should not make any law “for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion”. strum argues that the referral by a family court judge of a matter to the beth din would not breach this section as it is directed at the legislature, not the judiciary.18 however, the official recognition of these courts in legislation providing for, among other requirements, due process and appeal rights might be in breach. it may be that the family dispute resolution process of the family court supplies the connection with faith-based obligations. since 2006, compulsory mediation is mandated before divorcing couples can file proceedings in the family court. the mediation is facilitated by family dispute resolution practitioners. a number of legally trained muslims have been accredited as practitioners, and this process might provide an avenue for muslims, and indeed those from other faiths, to reconcile their faith with civic rights and responsibilities. in the absence of legislative developments, contract law may also have a role to play in both recognising cultural diversity and providing protection from unacceptable or oppressive features of islamic or other “foreign” laws. this is illustrated by the recent decision in mohamed v mohamed [2012] nswsc 852 the case concerned the validity of a marriage agreement between coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 parties married under islamic law but not australian law. at issue was a clause stating that the husband was to pay the wife $50,000 in the event he initiated a separation. in dismissing the appeal, the court refused to set the contract aside on the grounds of infringing public policy and specifically acknowledged that the law needed to evolve in a manner that accommodated cultural diversity, quoting british and canadian case law and the high court decision in haque v haque [1962] hca 39; (1962) 108 clr 230. the latter case was more extraordinary in apparently suggesting that, as far back as 1962, a polygamous marriage entered into within australia in accordance with islamic law should be recognised as a valid marriage.19 a further example is the even older high court decision in macqueen v frackelton (1909) 8 clr 673 which held that the presbyterian general assembly of queensland was not a court in the sense that it took its powers from the state, but rather could merely arbitrate on the contract that bound members of the church. the parties remained able to “appeal” to the civil courts notwithstanding a decision of this arbitrator, and the courts were bound to give effect to the terms of the contract agreed upon between the members of the church. it followed that if any of these terms were against public policy, they would not be binding. the ultimate authority of the courts to be able to interfere in the interests of public policy may provide aggrieved parties at least some protection. at the same time, by virtue of the terms of these contracts, parties might be able to negotiate between their faith-based and civic responsibilities. extending the commercial arbitration legislation if constitutional objections can be overcome and faith-based tribunals brought in from the shadows, then the extension of australia’s state commercial arbitration legislation to accommodate them might provide the appropriate framework. again, this is controversial, as illustrated by the ontario experience where the arbitration act 1991 was sufficiently broadly drafted to permit such tribunals. however, following a public outcry concerning shariah tribunals, particularly over the lack of safeguards for the rights of women, the government amended the law to prohibit any form of religious arbitration in relation to family matters. this was notwithstanding a government review that had recommended retaining the right to faith-based arbitration with additional protections for vulnerable parties.20 some commentators argued that these protections simply did not go far enough and were not pragmatic for vulnerable parties. in particular, the notion of arbitration was only appropriate for commercial disputes where parties were more likely to be able to engage on an equal footing 21 as arbitration actually reinforces power imbalances. these criticisms all failed to address the fact that informal faith-based arbitration would continue to shape coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 the lives of religious parties, and, in the absence of any attempt of government oversight, these people remained vulnerable. the same issues are also surfacing in the united kingdom in relation to its muslim arbitration tribunals, and the issues have led to the introduction of the arbitration and mediation (equality) services bill [hl] 2015–16 addressing inequality and discrimination issues, and jurisdictional creep in the proceedings of these tribunals. maret argues that legislation will not remedy discrimination in the absence of social policies that seek to draw the muslim population into the main framework of british society.22 nevertheless, the arbitration model with jurisdiction extended from commercial to personal disputes may provide an answer to the question of how the state can ensure that its citizens are free to practise their faith and to pursue their consciences while at the same time preserving the integrity of public law and maintenance of central democratic institutions. such “faith-based arbitration tribunals” would provide a basis for disputes to be resolved with deference to the parties’ religious convictions, but they would also be free to have the decision reviewed by a civil court with the mandate to reject any decision that breached the general laws of the land, including fundamental principles of human rights. matters for consideration could extend to religious (not civil) divorce, marriage, inheritance, dowry payments, financial support and possibly custody. the difficulties of ensuring protection for vulnerable parties, especially women and children, should not be underestimated. there would be a particular need to ensure that such parties were not coerced into accepting an arbitrator’s decision. similarly, neither should the challenge of reconciling the various shariah schools with australian law be underestimated. however, the continuation of the alternative—allowing faith-based law to coexist in the shadows with no protections or oversight—fails a vulnerable section of society. conclusion although a multicultural society, australia has been slow to embrace legal principles foreign to anglo-centric values. typically rejected on the basis of the “one law for all” mantra, legal pluralism only appears at the margins and in the shadows. the principle of assimilation has been abandoned as the guiding principle of our migration policy, yet legal assimilation remains the dominant policy. thus, citizens with a particular cultural or religious background that might lead to discrimination and social exclusion are denied the sense of solidarity that could come from observing their religious laws and customs. we fail to appreciate their need for personal matters to be resolved before or among those who share a similar value system. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 notwithstanding the various law reform recommendations directed at integrating or, at least, recognising some indigenous customs and rites, much is left to the discretion of individual bureaucrats and judicial officers. the various guises of indigenous courts are the most significant development, but, in the absence of clear evidence of their success, their future is not assured in these times of budgetary constraint. the fundamental challenge for both customary law and shariah is whether they have a place in a modern society where they are at odds with the state’s official laws and international human rights principles. if these other systems of law are to gain a mainstream representation in australian society, they must overcome the perception, if not reality, that they oppress the rights of women and children and impose punishments and sanctions at odds with fundamental human rights. it is conceivable that the government or the courts might selectively choose from these other laws to accommodate some cultural nuances. however, fundamental principles of justice drawn from the embedded system and international treaties will, and should, operate to limit what a fair and just society should embrace. in the compromise between competing principles, the protection of the vulnerable should take precedence over cultural nuances and traditions. with the practical difficulties acknowledged, the best way to achieve this protection may not be to continue to acquiesce to legal pluralism in the shadows but to bring it within the safety net of official recognition, with the procedures and review rights that doing so would entail. the joint standing committee on migration, in its 2013 report inquiry into migration and multiculturalism in australia, did not appear to appreciate the extent to which de facto legal pluralism exists when the committee recommended against legislative recognition. one possible future would be to see these religious courts recognised as registered arbitrators, with ultimate recourse to the courts by aggrieved parties. decisions inconsistent with basic human rights and australian values/laws might then be set aside as against public policy. ultimately, this might lead to the creation of australian versions of shariah, halakhah and canon law mirroring the developments in some muslim jurisdictions witnessing the absorption of western legal principles into a modified shariah. such a convergence might accommodate the desire of devoutly religious australians to be able to satisfy both secular and religious obligations. biographical note: justin dabner is an associate professor at the law school, james cook university, cairns, australia and an adjunct research fellow in the business law and taxation, faculty of business and economics, monash university, australia. during 2012/13 he was appointed the professor of australian cultural studies at tokyo university. 1 australia to 2050: future challenges, commonwealth of australia, january 2010, accessed 19 may 2015, http://archive.treasury.gov.au/igr/igr2010/report/pdf/igr_2010.pdf. for a neat summary of the opposing arguments see jessica brown and william bourke, “should australia’s population be controlled?” sunday herald sun, 2 http://archive.treasury.gov.au/igr/igr2010/report/pdf/igr_2010.pdf coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 october 2011, accessed 7 march 2014, http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/should-australias-population-becontrolled/story-e6frfhqf-1226155091822. 2 elsa koleth, multiculturalism: a review of australian policy statements and recent debates in australia and overseas, research paper no 6 2010-11 (canberra: parliament of australia, 8 october 2010), accessed 20 may 2015, http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/pubs/rp/rp1011/11rp0 6. 3 national agenda for a multicultural australia (canberra: australian government (office of multicultural affairs), july 1989), accessed 21 may 2015, www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/pdf/na-multicultural-australia-sharing-ourfuture.pdf. 4 anthony morgan and erin louis, evaluation of the queensland murri court: final report technical and background paper 39 (canberra: australian institute of criminology, 2010), accessed 12 march 2014, http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tbp/21-40/tbp039.html. 5 see franz boas, race, language and culture (new york: macmillan, 1948); ben-ami scharfstein, the dilemma of context (new york: new york university press, 1989). on the difficulties of taking a cultural relativist stance and the retreat from the principle in relation to customary law see peter sutton, “customs not in common: cultural relativism and customary law recognition in australia,” macquarie law journal 6 (2006):161. 6 elizabeth byrne, “the world today—high court rejects customary law defence in sexual abuse case,” abc the world today, 19 may 2006, accessed 14 march 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1642802.htm. the particular case at issue, involving underage carnal knowledge, was not considered as an appropriate test case partly because the principle that ignorance of the law was no defence would deny the accused an argument that he was not aware that his reliance on customary rights was not a defence. 7 on the diversity of australian muslim community, see: abdullah saeed, islam in australia (sydney: allen and unwin, 2003); abdullah saeed and shahram akbarzadeh, ed., muslim communities in australia (sydney: unsw press, 2001); jamila hussain, islam: its law and society, 2nd edition, (federation press, 2004). 8 mohamad abdalla, “islamic australia? what place is there for sacred law in a secular land?” griffith law review 21.3 (2013). a shortened version of this article, accessed 20 may 2015, can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/05/10/3756163.htm. 9 ann black and kerrie sadiq, “good and bad sharia: australia’s mixed response to islamic law,” university of new south wales law journal 34.1 (2011): 383 at 395–401. 10 barney zwartz, “australia’s muslims cool on change,” age (online), 9 february 2008, accessed 28 march 2014, www.theage.com.au/news/world/australians-muslims-cool-on-change/2008/02/08/1202234168549.html. 11 sabra lane, “multiculturalism is back,” abc news am program, 17 february 2011, accessed 28 march 2014, www.abc.net.au/am/content/2011/s3141073.htm. 12 nick sherry (assistant treasurer), opening address to the la trobe university, national australia bank and muslim community corporation of australia symposium on banking and finance, melbourne, 6 july 2009, accessed 12 march 2014, http://ministers.treasury.gov.au/displaydocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2009/003.htm&pageid=005&min=njsa&year&d octype. 13 authorities identifying the different viewpoints are referred to in d. yerushalmi, “shariah’s ‘black box’: civil liability and criminal exposure surrounding shariah compliant finance,” utah law review 3 (2008): 1019 at footnote 59. 14 the so-called “trojan horse”: see yerushalmi, shariah’s ‘black box’. the 2008 global financial crisis could partially be attributed to islamic finance, according to some: k. b. day, “economic warfare report explains what shariah finance really means,” the u.s. report (1 march 2011), accessed 21 may 2015, http://www.theusreport.com/the-us-report/2011/3/1/economic-warfare-report-explains-what-shariah-financereally.html. claims that islamic finance is funding terrorist activities were rejected by the michigan district court in the course of dismissing a claim that federal assistance paid to an entity promoting islamic finance arrangements violated the secular guarantees in the united states constitution: see blake gould, “case against aig's islamic finance fails,” the islamic globe, accessed 21 may 2015, http://www.theislamicglobe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36:case-against-aigs-islamicfinance-fails&catid=13:article&itemid=38. 15 ann black, “replicating a ‘model of mutual respect’: could singapore’s legal pluralism work in australia?” journal of legal pluralism 65 (2012): 65, 95. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/should-australias-population-be-controlled/story-e6frfhqf-1226155091822 http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/should-australias-population-be-controlled/story-e6frfhqf-1226155091822 http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/pubs/rp/rp1011/11rp06 http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/pubs/rp/rp1011/11rp06 http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/pdf/na-multicultural-australia-sharing-our-future.pdf http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/pdf/na-multicultural-australia-sharing-our-future.pdf http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tbp/21-40/tbp039.html http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1642802.htm http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/05/10/3756163.htm http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/australians-muslims-cool-on-change/2008/02/08/1202234168549.html http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2011/s3141073.htm http://ministers.treasury.gov.au/displaydocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2009/003.htm&pageid=005&min=njsa&year&doctype http://ministers.treasury.gov.au/displaydocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2009/003.htm&pageid=005&min=njsa&year&doctype http://www.theusreport.com/the-us-report/2011/3/1/economic-warfare-report-explains-what-shariah-finance-really.html http://www.theusreport.com/the-us-report/2011/3/1/economic-warfare-report-explains-what-shariah-finance-really.html http://www.theislamicglobe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36:case-against-aigs-islamic-finance-fails&catid=13:article&itemid=38 http://www.theislamicglobe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36:case-against-aigs-islamic-finance-fails&catid=13:article&itemid=38 coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 16 at the instigation of canadian muslim women: see homa arjomand, international campaign against shari’a court in canada, accessed 15 april 2014, http://www.nosharia.com/eng.htm. 17 see the catholic australia website at http://www.catholicaustralia.com.au/page.php?pg=sacraments-divorcefaqs0, accessed 18 march 2014. 18 andrew strum, getting a gett in australian courts, published at jewish law articles, accessed 21 march 2014, http://www.jlaw.com/articles/getaus.html, 10–13. 19 note that the family law act 1975 (c/w) section 6 does recognise the validity of muslim polygynist marriages entered into overseas, and, since 2008, de facto polygamist marriages entered into in australia can be recognised as de facto marriages: section 4aa(5)(b). 20 marion boyd, dispute resolution in family law: protecting choice, promoting inclusion (toronto, ontario: ministry of the attorney general, december 2004), section 8, accessed 21 may 2015, http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/boyd/executivesummary.pdf. 21 larry resnick, “family dispute arbitration and sharia law” (2007), accessed 21 may 2015, http://bccla.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/04/2007-bccla-sharia-law.pdf. 22 rebecca maret, “mind the gap: the equality bill and sharia arbitration in the united kingdom,” boston college international and comparative law review 36 (2013): 255, accessed 4 april 2014, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1696&context=iclr. http://www.nosharia.com/eng.htm http://www.catholicaustralia.com.au/page.php?pg=sacraments-divorcefaqs0 http://www.jlaw.com/articles/getaus.html http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/boyd/executivesummary.pdf http://bccla.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2007-bccla-sharia-law.pdf http://bccla.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2007-bccla-sharia-law.pdf http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1696&context=iclr coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 richard flanagan’s the narrow road to the deep north and matsuo basho’s oku no hosomichi yasue arimitsu doshisha university yasuearimitsu@gmail.com copyright©2017 yasue arimitsu. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract. this paper investigates australian author richard flanagan’s novel, the narrow road to the deep north, and attempts to clarify the reason why flanagan chose this title, which is linked to the travel writings of the japanese author matsuo basho, for his novel. the novel focuses on the central character’s prisoner of war experience on the thai-burma death railway during world war ii, and depicts the pow camp as well as cruel japanese behaviour and atrocities in a realistic way. the work seems to provide a postcolonial framework in the sense that there is a colonial and postcolonial relationship between the colonizer, and the colonized. however, in this novel, the colonizer is eastern, and the colonized is western, and this fact reverses postcolonial theory which postulates a structure in which the colonizer is usually considered as western and the colonized, eastern. postcolonial theory, thus, cannot be applied in this novel, which attempts to fuse the two opposites, the western view and the eastern view, through the work of the japanese poet. as a result, flanagan, in writing the narrow road to the deep north, goes beyond being a postcolonial writer to become a writer in a globalizing age. keywords: pow camp; the burma-thailand railway; matsuo basho’s haiku poems mailto:yasuearimitsu@gmail.com coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 introduction richard flanagan is a contemporary australian writer from tasmania. he was born in longford, tasmania, in 1961 and brought up in a remote mining town on tasmania's western coast. flanagan left school at the age of 16 but returned to study at the university of tasmania, where he was president of the tasmania university union in 1983. he graduated with a bachelor of arts with first-class honours. the following year, he was awarded a rhodes scholarship at worcester college, oxford, where he was admitted to the degree of master of letters in history. before he started to write fiction, he wrote four non-fiction works, which he has called “his apprenticeship.” his books have been awarded a number of prizes, such as the commonwealth writers’ prize, the new yorker book of the year, the observer book of the year, the queensland premier's prize, the western australian premier's prize and the tasmania book prize. he is considered by many to be the finest australian novelist of his generation.2 he has written 6 novels so far and two of them have been translated into japanese: gould's book of fish: a novel in twelve fish (2001)3 and the unknown terrorist (2006).4 he was awarded the 2014 man booker prize for fiction for his sixth novel the narrow road to the deep north (2013), which is the object of this study. the man booker prize is one of the most prestigious prizes for fiction and until 2013 it had been awarded for novels written in english and only authors in the commonwealth, including the uk, the republic of ireland and zimbabwe were eligible for consideration. from 2014, however, the rules were changed to extend eligibility to any novel written in english. therefore, the case of flanagan is the first time in the award’s history that authors from the united states of america have been included. two australian authors before flanagan won this prize: thomas keneally and peter carey. in this paper, i intend to investigate australian author richard flanagan’s novel, the narrow road to the deep north, whose title is an english version of oku no hosomichi, a haibun travel collection of haiku poems and prose written by the japanese poet, matsuo basho. the story of this novel is about the central character’s experience as a prisoner of war of the japanese on the thai-burma death railway, and his illicit love affair with his uncle’s wife. i am very much interested in why flanagan chose this title for the novel, and in how well flanagan is versed in the knowledge of japanese haiku poems. in the novel, flanagan also quite often mentions tennyson’s poem, “ulysses,”1 through the main character dorrigo. in this paper, i would like to examine the link between basho’s work and tennyson’s “ulysses” to ascertain whether there is any relationship between coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 them. i also intend to verify whether this novel can be analyzed using a postcolonial framework; the colonizers and the colonized, and the western perspective and the eastern perspective, as the novel highlights two opposite australian and japanese views of the experiences of world war ii, and at the same time, attempts to reconcile the viewpoints of two hostile countries in world war ii, and eventually, fuse the views of the east and the west. the pow camp and the burma-thailand railway richard flanagan wrote the narrow road to the deep north, in a sense, as homage to his father, who worked on the railway as a prisoner of war and survived but saw a great number of friends and compatriots die in horrific conditions. flanagan spent 12 years writing this novel based on his father’s stories, and he says that his father died aged 98 on the day the book was finished. the novel revolves around the life of the physician, dorrigo evans, a flawed war hero and survivor of the burma railway, also known as the death railway, where more than 12,000 allied prisoners and 90,000 asian labourers lost their lives. dorrigo is a character modeled after war hero edward “weary” dunlop,5 who looked after his men as they struggled under the most heinous conditions to clear jungle, break rocks and lay rails from ban pong, thailand, and thanbyuzayat, burma,6 dunlop looked after his comrades, “living skeletons,” who were dying of malaria, beri-beri and cholera and tried to protect them from their japanese captors, some of whom were sadists who took the greatest pleasure in tormenting, torturing and beheading prisoners. according to roger pulvers, an australian playwright who is very familiar with japanese literature, after the war, dunlop returned to an illustrious career in australia, and he openly “forgave the cold-blooded and tyrannical japanese who tortured and murdered the men on the burma-thailand railway” (pulvers). this novel, however, bears little resemblance to the one the french writer, pierre boulle, offered in the early 1950s in the bridge over the river kwai,7 as michael gorra remarks. flanagan uses the word “kwai” exactly twice, and gorra assumes that flanagan “has something much deeper than revisionism on his mind, though, something even deeper than his pungent account of the prisoners’ life on the line” (gorra). flanagan, in fact, remarks about the novel in an interview with lorien kite: i think that more than his [flanagan’s father’s] stories, which were comic but imbued with a certain compassion and pity, what i absorbed from him and what coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 it took me so long to understand was an idea of life very different from most people’s,” flanagan says. “it was an idea about love—an idea of always meeting other human beings as equal and never as less than you. (kite) flanagan said that he had two purposes in writing this novel: the first was that his father was growing old and frail, and he felt that if he couldn’t finish this book while he was alive, he wouldn’t be able to go on writing. the other was the realization that it had to be a love story. he says: i think if people are presented with a picture of only darkness they revolt against it because they know, fundamentally, that it’s untrue to their experience of life, which is to hope,” he says. “if war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. it’s almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other. (kite) cruel japanese behavior and atrocities during world war ii are quite well known and flanagan’s realistic depictions of those scenes provide readers (including japanese readers) with information about what happened at the pow camp. particularly, through the japanese officers major nakamura and colonel kota, flanagan shows us the savage and violent treatment of the australian prisoners; the unbearably prolonged beating to death of darky gardiner was emphasized, “as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal” (flanagan 294-2951). however, flanagan’s way of depicting these cruel japanese deeds or atrocities was rather objective—neutral as he explained in one of his interviews. flanagan says, in writing this novel, he was not going to express his feelings of accusation, judgment or hatred towards japanese officers, but was rather very careful not to make the readers feel that way (koval). the depiction of cruel scenes could be observed from double viewpoints; one australian and the other, japanese. flanagan considers japanese officers as human beings and their cruel deeds and atrocities as human behavior in war, and places them in a historical context: for the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence. (295) 1 all references to flanagan’s novel by page numbers only henceforwarth. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 it is quite obvious that flanagan is trying to understand why all those japanese officers could be so cruel to the australian prisoners, treating them as victims of the war just like the australian prisoners. those who were trapped in the suffering and hardships of this scene were not only the australian prisoners, but also the japanese officers: and nakamura could see that, in this sacrifice too, there was no other way for the emperor’s wishes to be realized. what was a prisoner of war anyway? less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes. if he, a japanese officer, allowed himself to be captured, he would be executed on his ultimate return to home islands anyway. (114) whatever the circumstances nakamura might have to put up with, such as lack of tools and manpower, he would endure and the railway would be built, the war would be won, and all this would be because of the japanese spirit. the japanese spirit has a special meaning for nakamura, which has something to do with “the ancient wisdom of japan, of all that nakamura found good and best in his country, in his own life” (115). it was good and it was pure, and it was for him a more real force than the thorny bamboo and teak, the rain and mud and rocks and sleepers and steel rails they worked with each day. it had somehow become the essence of him, and yet it was a thing beyond words. (115) nakamura, however, would not have known what the japanese spirit precisely meant, and he could not even explain it in words. he was, in fact, himself confused about what he believed in, but he could not find any other way to survive except to become violent toward the prisoners as he thought to himself: “it wasn’t in his nature to be so harsh. but in the face of the australians’ intransigence, he had to be. if they had spirit, nakamura said, they would have chosen death rather than the shame of being a prisoner” (117). he justifies himself in his own way: “there was no choice in any of this: one existed for the emperor and for the railway—which was, after all, the embodiment of the emperor’s will—or one had no reason to live or even die” (288). this scene seems to be the interpretation of flanagan’s japanese spirit at this stage in his depiction of the character of major nakamura, but here flanagan was not really able to grasp the meaning of the japanese spirit. in order to solve this absurdity or irrationality, nakamura had had to devote himself to his coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 duty in the service of the japanese spirit, which is equivalent to the emperor. this is what non-japanese people, including dorrigo evans, could not understand; the logic of the japanese spirit and the japanese emperor. even major nakamura could not come to terms with this logic, and takes pills of philopon or shabu in order to accomplish his duties: “now the shabu was more necessary to him than food” (94). to build such a railway—with no machinery and through a wilderness—was a superhuman task. fired by shabu, he was able to return to it day after debilitating day with redoubled fervour. it was not just the railway, as colonel kota says, although the railway must be built and the war must be won. major nakamura said that the japanese attempted to show that “it’s about the europeans learning that they are not the superior race,” and “us learning that we are,” and colonel kota recited basho’s haiku poem: even in kyoto when i hear the cuckoo i long for kyoto. (125) both major nakamura and colonel kota here shared a passion for traditional japanese literature, especially basho’s haiku. nakamura thought: in this way, … the japanese spirit is now itself the railway, and the railway the japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the beauty and wisdom of basho to the larger world. (126) the japanese spirit was thus embodied by the haiku form of japanese poetry, and haiku poems helped them feel better “about their own privations and the bitter struggle that was their work” (127). nakamura murmured a haiku poem of basho when the guards were kicking a sick prisoner, darky gardiner, and asked japanese officer, fukuhara, to recite the poem in english translation for dorrigo evans: a world of pain— if the cherry blossoms, it blossoms. (292) hearing this poem, dorrigo evans understood that the railway had to be built, that the railway was the only reason for the immense suffering of hundreds of thousands of human beings at that very moment. he even thought that darky gardiner must be punished (292). dorrigo evans started to consider major nakamura not as the strange but a human officer coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 just like him, not a harsh but a pragmatic commander (293). dorrigo evans now understood that, in the situation of war, everyone had a role to play and had to put it into practice. he could accept this as he was a part of it (294). this is the point that made dorrigo evans understand the behavior of major nakamura and other cruel japanese officers, and here flanagan used basho’s haiku poems which seem to symbolize some kind of solace beyond words, logic, or rationality in the inhuman situation of the war. it is very significant to note that flanagan mentions, along with basho’s haiku, the japanese short story, ‘rashomon,’ in the novel. ‘rashomon’ was written by the very famous japanese author akutagawa ryunosuke (1897–1927), and was a great influence on modern japanese writers. ‘rashomon’ is a story about the human will to survive and is associated with the situation of the japanese officer, major nakamura, after the war. ‘rashomon’ is set in the heian period (8th-11th centuries) when japanese society was very unstable and a lot of crimes occurred. there was a big gate called rashomon in kyoto (it was actually a building similar to a temple), but it had been dilapidated for a long time because of the social disorder caused by the difficulty of obtaining food and prevalence of diseases. one samurai who was in a desperate situation having lost his job, strolled about in the rain and came to the rashomon gate, which was then used for storing dead bodies in the attic. in the attic, the samurai found an old woman, who was stealing hair from a dead woman in order to sell it. the samurai accused her of being a thief, but the woman justified herself by saying that the dead old woman was a fraud when she was alive. having heard this story, the samurai decided to live as a thief to survive, and robbed the old woman of her clothes. the story seems to tell that in order to survive, you are allowed to sacrifice others. this is reminiscent of the logic of major nakamura, as flanagan writes at the beginning of the novel: “war, though, is its own logic” (23). the japanese empire has the belief that it will win—the indomitable japanese spirit, “that spirit that the west does not have, that spirit it calls and understands the emperor’s will; it is this spirit that it believes will prevail until its final victory” (23-24). the japanese officers had to play their roles to construct the line, otherwise they would die. this is the reason why they could be violent to the prisoners; they were violent in order to fulfill their duties in the name of the japanese empire. the prisoners and their captors were thus all caught up in the same trap of war; they were all victims of the war. thus, flanagan shows that wars bring about nothing but the will to survive. after the war and the line and the dream of a global japanese empire were shattered after coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 the atomic bombs were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki, major nakamura was strolling amidst the ruins of shinjuku, and picked up a newspaper that lay trampled on the ground. he read it carefully, and found that it was about warrants being issued by the americans for the arrest of more ex-pow camp staff in relation to possible war crimes, and the article ended with a list of the wanted suspects’ names. halfway down the list, he found his name mentioned as a possible class b war criminal (309). then he attempted to survive, to avoid capture and execution, because his honour demanded it (310). in the rashomon-like ruins of shinjuku, he saw an american soldier and a japanese boy who were both dead, and an immoral woman who was selling herself to the “american devils” (314). nakamura was disgusted by this woman and decided to rob her. he scrambled down the shinjuku rashomon leaving the woman behind and headed into the city. nakamura survived by sacrificing a woman just as the samurai in akutagawa’s ‘rashomon’ had justified his sacrifice of the old female thief by his own need to survive. flanagan said in an interview that “we are all human beings and that evil acts are not theirs but ours” (kite). this is the reason why dorrigo evans understood the japanese officers as mentioned above. dorrigo evans says at the beginning of the novel when referring to his family: “their principal achievement was survival. it would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was” (12). dorrigo evans now understood the meaning of his family’s survival as immigrants to australia. it seems as if flanagan intended to make dorrigo evans understand how australian prisoners survived just as japanese officers survived the war. after the war ended, major nakamura, returning home to japan, told himself: … through his service of this cosmic goodness, he had discovered he was not one man but many, that he could do the most terrible things he might otherwise have thought were evil if he had not known that they were in the service of the ultimate goodness. for he loved poetry above all, and the emperor was a poem of one word—perhaps, he thought, the greatest poem—a poem that encompassed the universe and transcended all morality and all suffering. and like all great art, it was beyond good and evil. (392) major nakamura knows that he did the most terrible things at the war camp but he justifies himself by believing that he did the right thing in the service of ultimate goodness; constructing the line for the greatest poem, that is the emperor. this is how flanagan portrayed major nakamura in the novel. for flanagan, nakamura was a survivor but, at the same time, a victim of the war just as the australian soldiers. flanagan said in a conversation with ramona koval: coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 he [flanagan’s father] said that he was very lucky, that they were the best thing that ever happened to him, to be in these camps, because they only had to suffer. he felt that to go to war as a soldier means for most people that you have to inflict suffering, and then, if you survive it, you have to live with the fact that you acted as an agent of evil. he felt they were in a situation where they would discover, not the worst of themselves, but the best. (koval) flanagan thus attempted to describe human beings from multiple viewpoints and treated the characters who inflicted suffering and those upon whom suffering was inflicted at the same level. just as flanagan’s father said he was lucky because he did not have to inflict punishment or pain on other people, the australian prisoners and japanese officers are not portrayed as enemies: the colonized and the colonizers—they were victims in the same war. flanagan observed both sides equally without any inclination to either of them. dorrigo evan’s love story flanagan says that the novel is not about the war, about the japanese pow camp, or about the cruel experiences of australian soldiers, but a love story, “all about the beauty of human beings in the most extraordinary circumstances” (kite). the work is, in fact, a saga, a historical novel about dorrigo evans, which starts from his childhood and depicts how he was brought up in tasmania, a reflection of the author’s background, and then how he became a doctor, married ella, a woman from a good family, with the hope of leading a happy married life. however, when he was engaged to ella, he accidentally fell in love with amy, who was his uncle’s wife. flanagan connects dorrigo’s love story with his experience of the pow camp. at the beginning of the novel, dorrigo evans, memorized poems by tennyson, which were no longer very popular (18). when he read tennyson’s ‘ulysses,’ he was only a young man and did not know who and what he was in the deepest recesses of his being. while he was a successful physician, he was a relentless womanizer and deceived his wife by having adulterous relationships with a number of women and continued to lie, manipulate and deceive. therefore, his estimation of himself was realistically “low” (17). he felt rather negative in trying to find solid meaning in his life: coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 dorrigo evans understood that all his life had been journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away far from it forever after. nothing would ever be as real to him. life never had such meaning again. (9 –10) for dorrigo, tennyson’s ‘ulysses’ and amy, his lover, were the “first beautiful thing[s]” (13) he ever knew. she was very special although he met her outside of his marriage, and he read and reread ‘ulysses’ when he was lying in bed in a hotel with amy, watching the moon rise over the valley of her belly: the long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep moans round with many voices. come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world. (13) as a young man, dorrigo was a searcher for the meaning of life, but at the same time he was a successful physician in real life, and tried to find a harmony between being a searcher and a physician, although they did not necessarily go well together. dorrigo was trying to solve these contradictions of two opposites, but then he went to war, was caught by the japanese military, and went through the hardships of war. when he was in the pow camp where he experienced those extreme atrocities, he remembered only his illicit relationship with amy. in such a situation, human beings need something which makes their lives meaningful. for dorrigo, amy was an agent of something that might be called love, but it was difficult for him to explain or grasp what it was. flanagan attempts to show the meaning of life, or the meaning of beauty for dorrigo through amy, an agent of dorrigo’s love. amy was also a searcher for the meaning of life, while hiding her inner life, her true self, a turmoil, that took her elsewhere: she would know that that love is not goodness, and nor is it happiness. she wasn’t necessarily or always unhappy with keith [her husband], nor were her feelings about dorrigo always or exactly those of happiness. for amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. it was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds. (158) dorrigo’s and amy’s illicit love affair is thus connected to something beyond good or evil just as represented in tennyson’s poem ‘ulysses.’ dorrigo considers amy perfect: “he watched those perfect spheres of blood, three camellias of desire, continue swelling. her coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 body was a poem beyond memorizing” (132). dorrigo’s love affair was represented as a poem just as for nakamura the japanese spirit was represented as a poem: “the japanese spirit is now itself the railway, and the railway the japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the beauty and wisdom of basho to the larger world” (126). returning to australia after the war, dorrigo was not able to fulfill his love with amy because of an irony of fate. when he learned that amy was dead, he felt “how empty is the world when you lose the one you love” (413). he, however, finally understood: “it was she who had lived and he who had died, although she had thought him dead for many years” (414). dorrigo’s love story and his experience of the pow camp are both necessary for flanagan’s purpose in this novel. in this sense, jennifer scott is right in saying that “without the love story, the novel would be just another fictionalized account of wartime cruelty and survival, and there have been any number of those” (scott), while michiko kakutani’s comment in her new york times article that “the novel would have been far more powerful and coherent if amy were excised from the story” (kakutani) is not relevant to the purpose of flanagan’s novel. as the guards took turns kicking gardiner, nakamura murmured a haiku of basho. fukuhara looked at him queryingly: yes, nakamura said. tell him. fukuhara continued staring. he likes poetry, nakamura said. it is very beautiful in japanese, fukuhara replied. tell him. in english i think not. tell him. smoothing the side of his pants with his hands, fukuhara turned to the australian. he drew himself up straight, so that his neck seemed even longer, and recited his own translation: a world of pain— if the cherry blossoms, it blossoms. (291-292) this is the scene when major nakamura and dorrigo evans, a captor and a prisoner, were linked by basho’s poem, which encompasses the universe and transcends all morality and all suffering, and like all great art, is beyond good and evil (kite). they share something coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 about life which could only be represented by poems. dorrigo evans, at first, was unable to understand the japanese officers’ behavior, and considered them as ridiculous, cruel, or inhuman, but when dorrigo listens to nakamura reciting a poem, he began to understand him as a human being just like himself, as already mentioned before. now, when nakamura ordered fukuhara to translate basho’s poem into english for dorrigo, dorrigo was able to share the feelings of the poem with nakamura, something beautiful beyond good and evil. for dorrigo, it was possible to link tennyson’s ‘ulysses’ with basho’s the narrow road to the deep north, both of which are about the journey of life passing through happiness and harshness, good and bad, and at the end of the journey, he came to accept everything he has had in his life as fate and reconciled himself with his life. in the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo. (302-303) the narrow road to the deep north and oku no hosomichi why then did flanagan choose the english version of oku no hosomichi as the title for the novel the narrow road to the deep north? oku no hosomichi is the title of a collection of haiku poems written by basho, one of the most famous japanese poets of the edo period. haiku is widely known as the simplest form of poetry, and basho wrote oku no hosomichi after his journey to the tohoku district. when he wrote this collection, it is said that basho had reached the final stage of his life, the stage of “magokoro” (sincerity/true-heartedness in english) which is equivalent to the state of selfless spirit,8 and had come to terms with the idea of “fueki ryuko,” 9 which means “changeless” and “change,” a combination of two opposites. they look different on the surface, but they are the same when simply looked at from different angles. the poems in oku no hosomichi are thus basho’s representation of his philosophy of life, “a harmony of two opposites.” towards the end of flanagan’s novel, jimmy bigelow’s mind slowly distilled his memory of the pow camps into something beautiful. it was as if he were squeezing out the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 humiliation of being a slave, drop by drop. first he forgot the horror of it all, later the violence done to them by the japanese. he felt all those things he otherwise didn’t feel; he understood all those things he otherwise didn’t understand. for him, his words and memories became nothing, as “everything was in him” (432). and finally one afternoon he realized he could remember none of his time as a pow at all. his mind was still good; he knew he had once been a pow as he knew he had once been a foetus. but of that experience nothing remained. what did was an irrevocable idea of human goodness, as undeniable as it was beautiful. as the age of ninety-four he was finally a free man. (433) flanagan visited japan when he was writing this novel, and unexpectedly met some of the guards from the pow camp. flanagan felt they had all carried regret and shame. he felt something genuine in their words and that there was regret in them. returning home to australia, he told all this to his father, and later that day, his father suddenly lost all memory of the prisoner of war camps, although his mind remained very sharp and alert in every other way. just like bigelow in the novel, flanagan’s father knew that he had had this experience—like being in the womb—but he could recall no detail of it. it seemed as if he was finally free of it. roger pulvers again says: western writers have, for well over a century now, been puzzled by what looks like an inscrutable dichotomy in the japanese mentality encompassing an excessively cruel streak and one that is utterly gentle, lyrical and compassionate. but this can also be said of all other nationalities; such traits are common, in the 20th century, in the actions and expressions of, for instance, germans, russians, chinese and americans at war. (pulvers) pulvers might be right in the sense that war can drive people who are usually very gentle to become very cruel and violent. however, it should be noted that flanagan’s the narrow road to the deep north might be one of the most unusual novels in its attempt, through the figures of the japanese, to understand why human beings could behave like that in war, and its depiction not only of cruelty and absurdity, but also forgiveness and harmony after undergoing violence, suffering and hardship. in this novel, flanagan is not simply trying to understand the japanese mind as a stranger from the western viewpoint, but is attempting to become at one with the mind represented by basho’s haiku, which flanagan believes to represent a universal human truth. flanagan has said on various occasions that he loves japanese literature, and believes that coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 “basho’s writing, like so much of high japanese culture, is exquisite and beautiful, and rightly regarded as a high point in the history of world literature” (flanagan, “freeing my father”). flanagan even initially attempted to write the story in the form of ‘haibun.’ ‘haibun’ is poetic prose, one of the traditional japanese literary forms which was particularly employed by basho and other haiku poets, and flanagan, by using this form, tried to form a stark contrast between basho’s literary world and his father’s experience, as shown in his remark, “if basho’s narrow road to the deep north is one of the high points of japanese culture, the experience of my father and his mates is one of its low points” (flanagan, “freeing my father”). this seems to be the reason why flanagan used the title of basho’s book, oku no hosomichi. conclusion in this novel, flanagan wrote about the life of an australian physician, dorrigo evans, a survivor of the burma railway, known as the death railway, where a great number of allied prisoners and asian labourers died. flanagan used a huge number of pages to depict the pow camp as well as cruel japanese behavior and atrocities during world war ii in a realistic way. however, flanagan’s purpose in writing this novel was not to write about the cruel japanese deeds or to express his feelings of accusation, judgement or hatred towards japanese officers, but to consider japanese officers as human beings and their cruel acts as human behavior in war, and place them in a historical context. flanagan even made dorrigo understand why japanese officers could be so cruel in their treatment of prisoners in war. for dorrigo, japanese officers became human beings just like himself and were no longer strangers, and he came to the conclusion that major nakamura, a japanese officer, was as much a victim of the war as the australian soldiers. in order to survive, major nakamura had to inflict punishment or pain on other people, the australian prisoners. the australian prisoners and japanese officers, the colonized and the colonizers, were not portrayed as enemies but as victims of the same war. flanagan’s standpoint in depicting japanese officers and australian prisoners was neutral with no inclination towards either of them. in order to make dorrigo understand the japanese officers’ cruel behavior towards australian prisoners, flanagan used a love story as well as poems. dorrigo was a successful physician and led a happy married life, but he was not fulfilled by this life, and had a number of love affairs. dorrigo’s illicit love affair with amy, in particular, was represented by tennyson’s poem ‘ulysses’ just as the japanese spirit for major nakamura coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 was represented by basho’s haiku poems. tennyson’s ‘ulysses’ and basho’s haiku poems were both about the journey of life passing through happiness and harshness, and good and bad. listening to basho’s poem read in english translation, dorrigo accepted everything he had experienced in his life as fate and reconciled himself to his life. tennyson’s poem and basho’s haiku poems are thus related to something which encompasses the universe and transcends all morality, as does all great art. it was by basho’s haiku poems in oku no hosomichi that dorrigo evans and major nakamura were linked, and they are basho’s representation of his philosophy of life, “a harmony of two opposites.” this work seems to have a postcolonial framework in the sense that there is a colonial and postcolonial relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. however, the work has a rather complicated structure in terms of the postcolonial theory. in edward said’s orientalism, postcolonial theory postulates a structure in which the colonizer is usually considered as western and the colonized eastern. but the structure of this work is reversed: the colonizer is eastern and the colonized western, if australians are to be considered western, and as a result, the theory of postcolonialism in this work cannot directly be applied to the relationship between australia and japan. instead of advocating or correcting political exploitation or imbalance between australia and japan, the narrow road to the deep north has shown a fusion of two opposites— the western view and the eastern view, and brought a harmony to them. this work, therefore, certainly proves that flanagan has gone beyond being a postcolonial writer to become a writer in a globalizing age, although the issue of language still remains unsolved. we are not really sure whether or not flanagan had access to oku no hosomichi in japanese, because basho’s poetry expresses not only life, and the beauty of nature and human beings, but most importantly, it shows the beauty of the japanese language. to genuinely understand his literature, it would be best to read it in japanese; particularly haiku, the simplest form of poetry in the world, should be read in japanese. it is quite difficult for us to believe that flanagan read basho’s haiku poems in japanese.10 however, i should say that, even through translation, flanagan reaches the beauty of basho’s poetry, shares the reality of human beings, and goes beyond the boundaries of the two opposite worlds, the west and the east, and beyond the postcolonial framework to provide a new view of a globalizing age. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 works cited akutagawa, ryunosuke. “rashomon.” akutagawa ryunosuke zenshu, dai 1 kan. tokyo: iwanami shoten, 1977. 127-136. print. flanagan, richard. “freeing my father.” sydney morning herald. 21 september (2013): 24-25. print. flanagan, richard. the narrow road to the deep north. london: chatto & windus, 2013. print. gorra, michael. “bridge to nowhere, richard flanagan’s narrow road to the deep north.” new york times book review. sunday, 31august (2014): 12. print. kakutani, michiko. “a railroad built out of prisoners’ pain and sweat.” the new york times. 17 august (2014). web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/books/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-northby-richard-flanagan.html> kite, lorien. “interview: richard flanagan, man booker 2014 winter,” financial times, 17 october (2014). web. <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cc745fbe-5547-11e4-b750-00144feab7de.html> koval, ramona. “transcript: richard flanagan in conversation with ramona koval.” the monthly. 24 july (2014). web. <https://www.themonthly.com.au/transcript-richard-flanagan-conversation-ramona koval> matsuo, basho. oku no hosomichi: new edition. trans. into modern japanese. taizo ebara and tsutomu ogata. tokyo: kadokawa bunko, 2014. print. pulvers, roger. “the narrow road to the deep north.” japan times. 9 november (2013). web. <http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/11/09/books/bookreviews/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north/ > scott, jennifer. “the 2014 man booker prize winner: richard flanagan’s the narrow road to the deep north.” shujitsu english studies. 31 (2014): 123-129. print. notes: 1 “ulysses” is a poem in blank verse by the victorian poet alfred, lord tennyson (1808-1892), written in 1833 and published in 1842. it is about the mythical hero ulysses, who, facing old age, describes his discontent and restlessness upon returning to his kingdom, ithaca, after his far ranging travels. despite his reunion with his wife penelope and son telemachus, ulysses yearns to explore again. web. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cc745fbe-5547-11e4-b750-00144feab7de.html coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ulysses_(poem)> 2 “love and war, none of it fair,” the economist, 5 july (2014). web. <http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21606246-love-and-war-none-it-fairremembrance> 3 richard flanagan, guurudo gyorui gacho: juuni no sakana wo meguru shosetsu, tokyo: hakusui-sha, 2005. 4 richard flanagan, sugata naki terorisuto, tokyo: hakusui-sha, 2009. 5 sir edward ernest ‘weary’ dunlop (1907-1993), the army surgeon colonel, was an extraordinary australian whose actions embody the compassionate face of war. he became well known for his medical work and leadership during the second world war with prisoners of the japanese on the thai-burma railway, 1943-45. weary’ dunlop and the burma railway—australian government. web. <http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/weary-dunlop> 6 the burma-thailand railway was a 415-kilometre (258 mi) railway built by the empire of japan in 1943 to support its forces in the burma campaign of world war ii. this railway completed the railroad link between bangkok, thailand and rangoon, burma (now yangon). the line was closed in 1947, but the section between nong pladuk and nam tok was reopened ten years later in 1957. burma railway—wikipedia. web. july 17, 2016. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/burma_railway> 7 the bridge over the river kwai is a novel by the french novelist pierre boulle, published in french in 1952 and in english translation by xan fielding in 1954. the story is fictional but uses the construction of the burma railway, in 1942-43, as its historical setting and is partly based on pierre boulle’s own life experience working in malaysia rubber plantations and later working for allied forces in singapore and indochina during world war ii. the novel deals with the plight of world war ii british prisoners of war forced by the imperial japanese army to build a bridge for the “death railway.” the bridge over the river kwai—wikipedia. web. july 17, 2016. < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_bridge_over_the_river_kwai> 8 basho’s spiritual attitude was also represented as “karumi,” which was obtained through sufferings and hardships, and was equivalent to fundamental and eternal truth of this world that was beyond individual human being. tsutomu ogata, “kaisetsu” for oku no hosomichi: new edition. tokyo: kadokawa bunko, 2014, 310. 9 “fueki ryuko” represents basho’s philosophy of art, that was also the essence of haiku poetry. “fueki” signifies the unchangeable, and “ryukou” the changeable. thus the idea of “fueki ryuko” refers to the two opposites: things in this world all change, although this fact never changes. ogata, “kaisetsu” for oku no hosomichi 307. 10 he probably read basho’s haiku poems in english translation, as there is an excellent translator, donald keene, who has translated a number of japanese literary works, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ulysses_(poem) http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21606246-love-and-war-none-it-fair-remembrance http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21606246-love-and-war-none-it-fair-remembrance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/empire_of_japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/burma_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/world_war_ii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bangkok,_thailand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rangoon,_burma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rangoon,_burma coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 including narrow road to the deep north. keene loves japan as well as its literature, and was eventually naturalized as a japanese citizen and now he lives in japan. yasue arimitsu is professor emeritus of english and australian studies, doshisha university, japan. she is the author of finding a place: landscape and the search for identity in the early novels of patrick white (1986) and australian identity: struggle and transformation in australian literature (2003). she co-authored an introduction to australian studies (2007). she has also edited and contributed to translating diamond dog: an anthology of contemporary australian short stories―reflections on multicultural society (2008). her article “nation and literature: literary possibilities in a multicultural society” was published in wolfgang zach/ulrich pallua (eds.) racism, slavery, and literature (2010). “nam le’s the boat: a reflection of multiple selves,” appeared in michael kenneally, rhona kenneally, and wolfgang zach (eds), literatures in english: new ethical, cultural, and transnational perspectives (2013). she was the president of the australian studies association of japan (2010-2013), and currently the president of the australia new zealand literary society of japan (2014). acknowledgements: this paper is based on my research supported by the grants-in-aid for scientific research of the japanese government. i would like to express my sincere appreciation to all those concerned. microsoft word coolabah 1 carles.doc coolabah, vol.1, 2007, pp.24-35 issn 1988-5946 observatori: centre d’estudis australians, australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona reflections on phenomenology and the poetry of kevin hart. foreignness and strangeness at the heart of australian identity. carles serra pagès in a deconstructive fashion, this paper analyses the heideggerian concept of bodenständigkeit (“rootedness”) from the point of view of the boden (“earth”, “ground”) in general, that is, before its diffraction as bodenständigkeit and bodenlösigkeit (“uprootedness”). whereas heidegger makes of the concepts of “description” and “expression” two species of the genre bodenständigkeit, we will proceed otherwise, and derive them from the general concept of bodenlösigkeit (“uprootedness”). in this way, following the threads of the poetry of kevin hart, we will suggest that it is possible to affirm that all poetry is about finitude, contingency and destiny, both from the point of view of its form and of its content. in the course of our analysis, we will wonder about the role of identity and alterity in the construction of australian identity. keywords: bodenständigkeit, deconstruction, identity, australia. this glass on my desk may be an object for philosophical speculation or poetic inspiration. boldly speaking, husserl’s phenomenological method would start by detaching the contours of the glass i see from its surroundings, and set it against the horizon from which it has been extracted. the philosophical reduction would consist in voiding the object of my intuition – in this case, this glass on my desk here and now of any scientific preconceptions i may have regarding how it was made, its use, its shape, etc. then, the eidetic reduction would get to the idea or essence of the glass, its formal and irreducible eidetic contour. in this way, phenomenology provides the formal means of analysis for gaining the objects of any regional science; it is a pre-science or general ontology. the heidegger philosophy of being and time, on the other hand, would emphasize that the glass is only an object to the extent that it enters into copyright ©2007 carles serra pagès. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 25 a web of relations that can be characterized in notions of existence, because it is ultimately linked to a human being (dasein). as heidegger would put it, what is at hand (zuhanden) precedes what i can hold in my gaze (vorhanden), or, as it is more commonly phrased, existence precedes essence. in the opening lines of a poem entitled “firm views”, kevin hart brings face to face both philosophies, stressing, also by means of the title, their respective positive self-determination. kevin hart himself marks the italics: “firm views” back to the things themselves: this empty glass with no idea of water; sleeping cats that dream of ancient egypt in the sun; and ivy on the porch. now leave the mind with its divisions training on the page and walk out through a world untouched by thought where things exist as things, not otherwise impossible, the land is occupied by things as they appear to sight and touch; the mind approaches with its golden frame and frames itself: a judge with balding wig who sentences himself without appeal to life and death.1 in the years before the publication of being and time, heidegger conceives his prolegomena to the history of the concept of time, where he exposes what he takes from husserl’s phenomenology. he says that the phenomenological maxim “to the things themselves” (zu den sachen selbst) means, first, “to investigate showing things standing on the ground” (bodenständig ausweisend forschen2). then, he goes on to add that the maxim also means, “on the first 1 hart, kevin. flame tree, trowbridge, bloodaxe books, 2002, p. 97. 2 heidegger, martin. prolegomena zur geschichte des zeitbegriffs. frankfurt am main: vittorio klostermann, 1979, p. 104. 26 place, to obtain and to secure again that ground” (diesen boden erst wieder zu gewinnen un zu sichern). heidegger also points out that the second meaning grounds and legitimizes the first one. the concept of bodenständigkeit, on which this analysis rests, means “standing on the ground”, but it also means “well-rooted”, in the same sense in which we may refer to a native person as belonging to a particular place or as somebody who has been born in the same place where he lives. therefore, as heidegger conceives it here, phenomenology as a pre-science (vorwissensschaft3) presupposes this “being-rooted”, without which no being-in-the-world would be possible. from this point of view, then, whatever attitude is taken towards the world, whether scientific in its ordinary sense, theoretical, practical, poetic, or religious, it is presupposed that the subject in question is well-rooted on the soil, stands firm in the way of being of his/her community, even when it is the case that he/she wants to question it. but, while it is true that firmness and uprightness are a prerequisite for action, if we do not supersede them they may end up turning into mere rigidity and stiffness. this is also one of the possible meanings of “being well-rooted”. in the second half of the poem “firm views”, kevin hart puts it thus: the stone describes the peach, the noisy bird that bends the branch and eats, the sunlight bathing in the lazy stream, and these describe the stone. the door is locked, the windows covered with reflecting glass, the landscape is a portrait of the mind. that big clawed hammer rusting in the shed stands for the world: you grasp pure sullen weight not an idea; the handle scraps your skin, a signature of pain to make its point. just so. the hammer needs the hand that needs 3 ibid., p. 108. 27 a world of thought: the judge’s hammer strikes the bench, the sentence is, as always, jail from which there can be no escape till death: the judge is silent, standing in the dock. in a particular place, a group of people ground their existence living there. generation after generation, the community sets up and establishes a web of relations where everyone finds and gives meaning to existence: the shoemaker, the carpenter, the farmer, the priest, the minister, the mayor, etc. the bits and pieces of this set of relations may eventually be uprooted and be an object of description for the historian of ideas, or quantified and hierarchically organized by the scientist. for a certain period of time, some signifiers that express the way of being of these people would be uprooted and become an object of investigation. they would be uprooted from the source that gave them birth and life. in a certain sense, they would become dead signs, corps without life. for the argument’s sake, let’s keep the formal distinction between simply living one’s life and taking a cognitive attitude toward it. heidegger makes this distinction in being and time (§4), in terms of a properly “existentialist” (existenzialles) or methodological comprehension of the world and an “existential” (existenzielle) or pre-theoretical one.4 in the poetical work of kevin hart, this distinction is made in terms of a predicative and a pre-predicative world, and it is fleshed out primarily with biblical images of a mystical type. the question we ponder here is whether these distinctions are derived from the generic concept of bodenständigkeit, as we have seen it working in the text of heidegger or, contrary to heidegger’s stand, the act of firmly standing on the ground is ultimately accidental and contingent. what is the boden, the earth, the ground, the soil, before one is able to stand on it and take root in it? how would we know if, on the contrary, it was the case that we were never rooted on any soil in the most absolute sense of the word? 4 heidegger, m. sein und zeit. tübingen: max niemeyer verlag gmbh, 2001, pp. 12-13. 28 whereas heidegger makes of the distinction between the existential and the existentialist attitudes two species of the genre bodenständigkeit, in the sense that, in order to be able to adopt a theoretical attitude towards the world it is necessary to existentially be in the world, to us this derivation is as legitimate as any other distinction derived from the general concept of bodenlösigkeit (“uprootedness”). everything we call our own – language, experience, land, etc is personal, not transferable and will vanish with our deaths. what is the ground for this experience? even when we inherit the means by which we make an experience ours, and in most cases we pass it to future generations, still, in the last instance, on what soil does this legacy rest? the fact that our individual existence, as well as that of whole civilizations, is temporary makes it very plausible to think that our lives hang over an abyss. certainly, it will be possible to affirm that we have described our position in heideggerian terms, but this does not exclude the fact that heidegger still privileges the notions of presence and uprightness. and if somebody would point out that heidegger’s definition is restricted to phenomenology, and does not apply to the whole of his work, then the question is to what extent the analysis of dasein can be carried out without phenomenology. the pre-eminence of the concept of bodenlösigkeit is better perceived when we take into consideration countries and cultures relatively young, such as australia. even though what we are saying here provides plenty of food for thought for the topic, we will not elaborate on issues related to the question of the relation between mainstream australian and indigenous peoples’ identity. instead, we will focus only on how a reading of kevin hart’s poetry legitimates an alternative interpretation that would prioritize the concept of bodenlösigkeit. generally speaking, in australia the sense of possession over things is not as strong as in the old continent. this is also true of the idea of identity they hold. to some extent, australia is genuinely foreign, a strange place where the 29 ephemeral character of things is not hidden, but flows onto the surface. it is a “baby-country”. in the poem “gypsophila”, entitled after the name of the plant, the words “gypsy” and “philia” resound, and they would suggest, as the poem does, love of everything that is nomad, kaleidoscopic and fluid: that’s why the image of the rain predominates. the poem also brings together the motives of childhood and foreignness, the irredeemable character of things, and the importance given to the physical character of the voice (“a child’s breath”). to our purpose in this paper, it is important to point out that kevin hart does not reify either the soul of the child or the world that he is describing, whence the implicit influence of christian mysticism, especially that of meister eckhart and st john of the cross. “gypsophila” another day with nothing to say for itself – gypsophila on the table, a child’s breath when breath is all it has to name the world and therefore has no world. it must be made: her shadow sleeping on the wall, the rain that pins fat clouds to earth all afternoon, a river playing down the piano’s scales. this is the strangest of all possible worlds with foam upon the beach, the sea’s death skin, and lighting quietly resting in each eye. like gypsy camps or love, it must be made, undone, then made again, like the chill rain that falls without hope of climbing back, content to leave its mark, for what it is, upon the window or in the child’s mind. gypsophila on the table, rain outside, the child will tune the world to her desire and make another world to keep in mind: 30 these breaths of air in which we softly wrap the rain’s glass stems to let them fall again in sunlight, or flower forever in the mind. a world of things with nothing at all to say, a margin that absorbs our silences: the child must take the lighting from her eye and place it in the sky, her shadow must be told to fall asleep. this strangest world in which we say gypsophila, baby’s breath in australia, the expression “go west” is commonly used to refer to the western part of the continent. even though kevin hart was born in london in 1954, in 1966 his family moved to brisbane, in the golden coast, and in his poems brisbane is described as the place of his childhood. the exotic landscape and the heat of brisbane are a clear source of inspiration, and he repeatedly talks about the monaro moon region, mount coottha, the paw-paw trees and the resin hanging from eucalypts. brisbane is situated in the north-east of australia. this is the reason why in his poem “facing the pacific at night”, kevin hart comes across the experience of kenosis (“emptying oneself of self”) that surmounts him while driving east, towards the pacific, where brisbane is situated. this experience occurs at night, when the weight of things lightens, and again the images of rain and the ocean play an important role in this poem. i would like to briefly elaborate on the idea of the pacific ocean that we commonly have. in our collective imaginary, the pacific is not clearly outlined in our minds. we certainly know that it is situated in the east coats of asia and oceania, and on the west coast of america, and even that it is “the greatest ocean”. nevertheless, in the maps of the world that are usually displayed in western classrooms and atlases, the pacific ocean appears in the left and right 31 margins, quite apart from our focus of attention. moreover, it does not appear as whole, but divided. in “facing the pacific at night”, driving towards the pacific means driving to that area of which we have an unclear and foreign representation, the unknown soil of all things, even the most familiar ones. kevin hart makes of his homeland an unfamiliar place where all worldly things vanish. it is important to point out the ontological role that language plays in the imaginary of kevin hart’s poetry. he distinguishes between the noun and the verb, the world as representation, that is the world of language, and the world as will, that is the world of change. everything we know depends on our divine capability of naming things, but these names simply indicate a “silent place”, a “darkness”, a loving dimension that we cannot comprehend. the physical journey also brings about a mental pilgrimage: “facing the pacific at night” driving east, in the darkness between two stars or between two thoughts, you reach the greatest ocean, that cold expanse the rain can never net, and driving east, you are a child again – the web of names is brushed aside from things. the ocean’s name is quietly washed away revealing the thing itself, an energy, an elemental life flashing in starlight. no word can shrink it down to fit the mind, it is already there, between two thoughts, the darkness in which you travel and arrive, the nameless one, the surname of all things. the ocean slowly rocks from side to side, a child itself, asleep in its bed of rocks, 32 no parent there to wake it from a dream, to draw the ancient gods between the stars. you stand upon the cliff, no longer cold, and you are weightless, back before the thrust and rush of birth when beards of blood are grown; or outside time, as though you had just died to birth and death, no name to hide behind, no name to splay the world or burn it whole. the ocean quietly moves within your ear and flashes in your eyes: the silent place outside the world we know is here and now, between two thoughts, a child that does not grow, a silence undressing words, a nameless love. as we can see, in hart’s poetry the elements of air and water prevail over the element of earth, on which the existential analysis of dasein is grounded. finally, i would like to comment on the poem entitled “the river”, because it stands in sharp contrast with some texts published during the ontological period of what has been labelled as “the second heidegger”. in 1947, heidegger published brief über den humanismus, where being is not conceived anymore as mere presence, but as “event” (ereignis). in unterwegs zur sprache, in the chapter “das wort”, heidegger comments on a poem by stefan george that bears the same title, das wort. in the poem, stefan george describes how the poet obtains the names of things for his people to use from the depths of a forest that hides a mythical spring kept by the goddess norna, until one day norna tells him that there is no word for the jewel that he offers her on that occasion. i am not going to comment on the multiple meanings and vicissitudes of the poem that heidegger highlights. instead, i would like to simply point out that the poem moves between a dialectics of presence and absence: either the word is offered by norna, or it is unavailable for the poet. 33 kevin hart, on the other hand, stresses the shades and tones of words, focuses our attention on the blanks and silences that separate them, and reminds us that the breath in which they travel and that liberates the transcendental ether is embodied through and through in the physical world. i would like to emphasize as well that the narrative voice in the poem does not bespeak identity in the strong sense of the word, in the same way that the voice that responds to him, the other, is not as unrecognizable as to the extent of being absolutely foreign to the subject. on the basis of this “foreign” ground, no land or idea of subject can be said to properly belong to one man more than another. the `i´ and the `other´ hold each other. in an existential sense, this distinction does not hold water. “the river” there is a radiance inside the winter woods that calls each soul by name wind in young boughs, trees shaking off thick coats of snow, that rattle of frozen rain on a barn roof: all these will help you lose your way and find a silence older than the sky that makes our being here a murmur only, that makes me walk along the river beyond where it has flooded itself while freezing over, past these dead firs, the great assembly of cedars, so that i must say, i do not know why i am here, and move around in those few words and feel their many needles upon my lips and warm them on my tongue though i say nothing, for it is a calm i know beyond the calm i know that wants to talk now, after all these years 34 of hearing me say spruce, wind, cloud and face, not knowing the first thing about them all, not knowing the simplest thing, that every word said well is praise: and someone deep inside me wants to say i am not lost but there are many paths! while someone else will whisper back, so you are on the longest quest of all, the quest for home, and not appear though i have walked along the river now these good five miles while letting wind push me a little way and letting thoughts grow slow and weak before i feed them words, for what is told to me this afternoon is simply river, with each i and it dissolved, a cold truth but a truth indeed held tight on the way back past curves and forks, as evening takes hold, a strange light all the way that falls between the words that i would use when talking of this strangeness or this light so that i speak in small, slow breaths of evening, cedar, cone and ice in words that stick to skin in conclusion, we have seen that in certain social contexts as well as in particular attitudes towards life, it is possible to ascertain that the concept of bodenlösigkeit is more original than its counterpart, the phenomenological concept of bodenständigkeit. nevertheless, we still have to concede that we have carried out our analysis with the feet well-grounded, because we have appealed 35 to experience and facts to make our point. but there is no contradiction in this, since the question we have been seeking to highlight, this reversal and this originality are linked to the boden, the ground, the soil and the earth in general. at the level of this generality, there is an elemental unity of essence between the concepts of “being well-rooted” and “being uprooted”. references hart, k. flame tree. trowbridge: bloodaxe books, 2002. heidegger, m. unterwegs zur sprache. tübingen: neske, 1959. ---. prolegomena zur geschichte des zeitbegriffs. frankfurt am main: vittorio klostermann, 1979. ---. sein und zeit. tübingen: max niemeyer verlag gmbh, 2001. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 travelling with veronica sue ballyn university of barcelona sueballyn@ub.edu copyright©2017 sue ballyn. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: i met veronica in 1988 on my first trip to australia. i had admired her as an academic since my undergraduate days but had no idea what was in store for me once i met her. over the decades we met in places across the world and in spain and each meeting was unique, an intellectual uplift and more than often an absolute hoot when we travelled together. in paying tribute to veronica i would like to write about some of the incredible and on one occasion hair-raising, trips we shared. key words: veronica brady; shirley walker; julian croft; asal; easa; eaclals i first met veronica in launceston, tasmania in 1988. i had seen her before at an eaclalsi conference and heard her give a magnificent paper. i knew her reputation as a scholar, lecturer and human being. that preceded my first meeting with her in australia. i was in launceston at an asalii conference as part of an assimilation tour funded by asal and the australian department of foreign affairs. the funding for that trip came as a wonderful surprise to me thanks to two people; shirley walker and julian croft. julian had visited barcelona some time before giving a lecture in my poetry class. during his stay we talked about whether i would perhaps one day teach some aspect of australian studies given that my phd was the first in spain on australian literature. i also was privileged in getting to know his own wonderful work as a poet. on his return to australia, he and shirley were talking about whom to ask as a european guest for the 1988 asal conference and julian mentioned my name to shirley. the day shirley’s letter arrived notifying me of the chance to go to australia for a month was to change the route of my academic life until today. i distinctly remember ringing shirley to accept the invitation and to thank her, asal and dfat. mailto:sueballyn@ub.edu coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 so i found myself at sydney airport waiting at the airport gate to catch the plane for launceston. i had arrived very early on my first long haul flight feeling excited, wondering what the next four weeks would bring me. i sat and began to write in my diary. suddenly, i heard a bunch of people arrive in the lounge, obviously, all friends and colleagues and i guessed that they were all asal delegates. shirley walker, with her innate intuition, picked me out from the now crowded lounge with her warm smile and welcoming voice she said “you have to be susan”. among the group travelling with shirley there were only two faces i recognized: julian croft and veronica. the conference began the next day and at breakfast i found a quiet spot where i could sit and observe the people and space around me. i looked out at the sun beginning to clear clouds and admired the beautiful landscape. suddenly a voice said “good morning susan, we have met, you know”. it was veronica brady. in her characteristic way she had detected that i might be either jet lagged, out of my mind or feeling somewhat lost. this was the prologue to a series of conversations we had during the conference. she was curious, as only veronica could be, about who i was, where i came from, my relationship with australia and where i thought my post-doctoral road might lead me. veronica was renowned, like shirley, for her mentoring of young people, indeed of everybody who needed help. on the conference coach trip, which included a visit to a stunningly beautiful vineyard, she encouraged me to spend the next month not only investigating the richness of australian studies but also to try and get a handle on the complex multiculturalism of the country through its cuisine: “my dear, you have wonderful wines in spain. i love rioja but you must try our wines, a good contrast you know”. veronica was always able to open up a world of knowledge from the academic to daily life. over the coming decades i came to know, admire and care very deeply for veronica. we did not necessarily agree on things, but that was one of veronica’s strengths. one could disagree with her, have a long and profound discussion about the subject in hand but one was never made to feel that she was in any way attacking or attempting to undermine one. my next meeting with veronica was again in australia at an asal conference. the tradition in these conferences was that at the conference dinner there was a dancing competition and prizes were distributed. once the competitors left the floor, dancing continued. to my amazement, veronica who was sitting opposite me, suddenly stood up, grabbed somebody’s walking stick and danced away across the floor. i really should not have been surprised, after all, veronica was a bicycle-riding, roman catholic, communist nun! that said everything about her. our next meetings were in australia, where i returned every year, and across europe. it was then that i occasionally undertook travelling with veronica. it was always a challenge either intellectually, physically or both, as veronica seemed to have the energy of ten people rolled into one. after a conference in brisbane, she boarded the flight into sydney before me. as i came down the aisle she suddenly shot out in front of me “where is your seat my dear?” i told her. she took my boarding pass, gave me hers saying “you should sit here with tom”. before i could utter a word, she sprinted towards my seat at the back of the plane. and that is how i came to sit beside tom keneally, whose work i was using in class. stunned into silence, i need not have worried. tom has to be one of the greatest raconteurs in the world. i spent most of the flight in laughter. on disembarking, i waited to say goodbye to veronica who, with a wide grin, said “i thought you’d enjoy that”. we hugged each other and went our different ways. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 veronica was a frequent visitor to spain. like shirley walker, she had developed strong relationships with both doireann macdermott and the staff and students at barcelona university, as well as with with maria socorro súarez, isabel carrera and other staff and students at oviedo university. on one occasion she arrived in barcelona one evening after a very long train trip from somewhere in europe. i went to meet her at the station, convinced that she would be very tired and only want a snack and an early night, but i offered dinner. she accepted the invitation with delight. we spent the next two and a half hours laughing, chatting, talking earnestly and demolishing a bottle of rioja between us. next morning, she gave a great lecture to the students, showing no signs of travel fatigue or having had such a late night. the next time she came to barcelona she was with bruce bennett. i had arranged for us all to have dinner at home with doireann macdermott as we were to leave on the early morning train for oviedo. all went well until doireann and i went into the kitchen to make coffee. there was the most amazing explosion from the cooker. the coffee maker had blown itself up. before i could react, veronica and bruce had grabbed towels and were cleaning the walls, door, and windows! the memory of this incident caused frequent laughter during the long train trip to oviedo. the last time i saw veronica was at the easaiii conference in debrecen 2005. it was a wonderful conference in a beautiful location. veronica and i were to take a return train from debrecen to budapest. when we arrived at the station the departure showed debrecen – budapest, platform 4. however, there was no sign of a train. so, ten minutes before departure, veronica went to the ticket office and they confirmed platform 4. eventually the train arrived and we settled into our seats, veronica was about four rows ahead of me. the inevitable ticket inspector came into the carriage and veronica showed her ticket. she stood up very suddenly, turned towards me and came down the aisle looking very shaken. “this train” she said “is going to rumania”. the inspector had by now reached me and obviously realized that he had two foreign “ladies in distress”. we tried all the languages we knew between us to tell the inspector what was wrong. he only had hungarian. however, he sat with us and through sign language we began to communicate. he indicated that we should get off at the next station “and ….”, said veronica raising her eyebrows, shoulders and holding her palms upwards to indicate we needed further instructions. the inspector by now had rescued some english. “next stop off” and disappeared leaving both of us in a state of certain distress. veronica and i discussed what to do. i had to fly out of budapest in the early evening and veronica had to catch an overnight train to vienna. given the circumstances we decided we would not get off the train, but go through to rumania and sort ourselves out there. we could both imagine ourselves standing on a platform somewhere between debrecen and bucharest. it was a daunting thought. at this juncture the inspector came back and indicated, drawing a vehicle and a station platform, that there would be a car to meet us at the next station. our only thought was how much would it cost, and would we get to budapest in time for our connections. however, we had no choice, so we got off at the next station together with the inspector, who walked us through a very small station to the street where a black saloon car awaited us. he introduced the driver to us and ran back to his train. it was obvious that this was not a taxi but a private car as no taximeter could be seen. all our luggage would not fit into the boot and the front seat was occupied by another passenger, so veronica and i squeezed into the back seat with my suitcase dangerously poised vertically between us. we could not see each other but talked through the case coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 with our hands gesticulating over the top of it. veronica was very worried as she did not have much change in forints or euros on her. i told her not to worry as i had enough. immediately a book appeared over the top of the case: “that is for you my dear and you will tell me when you get home how much i owe you”. we indicated to the driver the time that we should be in budapest. as we entered a motorway we found ourselves engaged in a formula 1 race. the driver, with one hand out of the window, drove at a terrifying speed in the fast lane, blasting his horn at anything that got in his way. veronica and i decided that the best way to avoid being scared out of our wits was to concentrate on conversation and not look ahead. we finally reached budapest airport thirty minutes before take-off. as i was going to give veronica a hug she commanded “no time for hugs my dear … run”. and run i did. sadly, that was the last time i saw veronica. i heard from her from time to time by letter —she was of the old school— and occasionally by email. when i heard of her death i was deeply shocked, like so many people around the world. nonetheless, whenever i remember veronica i cannot help smiling when remembering our last goodbye in budapest. i european association for commonwealth languages and literature ii association for the study of australian literature iii european association for studies of australia bio note: sue ballyn is prof. emerita at barcelona university. she is the founder and co-director of the australian studies centre at the university which is fully recognized by the former as an observatory. her area of main research over the last twenty years has been and is the reconstruction of female convict biographies, the study and transcription of surgeons’ journals on female transports and work on convicts of non-british origin. she is a member of the female convicts research centre in hobart, tasmania. she is also a member of a project on postcolonial crime fiction and another project on ageing. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 tribute to geoff davis justina hart justinahart@mac.com copyright© 2020 justina hart. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a tribute to geoff davis and a poem inspired by meeting him keywords: geoff davis, inspiration, generosity i met geoffrey davis only once: during the three-day spaclals conference at une in parramatta in february 2019, to which i had travelled from england to give a paper as a uk poet and fiction writer, thanks to an artists' international development fund from the british council/arts council england. after his keynote speech about literature and activism, which i found deeply inspiring and which raised new possibilities for my own work, i went up to where he was sitting and asked if he might email me a copy. he thanked me and instantly took from his briefcase his only spare hard copy of the speech, neatly typed and paper-clipped, and handed it to me to keep. his spirit of kindness and generosity shone through that one encounter. geoffrey showed me how, with a single speech, conversation, or unexpected gesture, you can change a life. i shall not forget him. the following poem was written for a close friend, joy vellapah, who i heard had died when i was in cairns after the spaclals conference. joy was of mauritian heritage and she and i worked together at the british council in spring gardens, london, in the noughties. this poem had added poignancy for me when i received the news about geoff. mailto:justinahart@mac.com coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 in cairns i take refuge from tropical deluge in a church, shake out my brolly. eight huge ceiling fans are switched off as there’s no one here: the air’s left to cool itself – blowing through open, facing doors like sound drifting in one ear and out the other. after glancing at the 1918 memorial cross and a leaflet informing ministers about new same-sex marriage laws, i take a pew, shut my eyes, run through all those i know who are ill or under my umbrella. but i forget the friend who cried for help before christmas; and who, i’m to hear that night, died the day i flew out. bionote: justina hart is an award-winning british poet, fiction writer, and singersongwriter, who has performed her work internationally. for more information, see justinahart.com. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 geoffrey davis: interactions with australia, its literature and its culture russell mcdougall rmcdouga@une.edu.au copyright© 2020 russell mcdougall. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a description of geoff davis’s wide interest in australian studies, in particular war literature and indigeneity keywords: geoff davis, australian literature, aboriginal culture geoff loved australia. he came first on a holiday with two german friends and their little daughter in 1982. they hired a wreck of a car, drove it through a swollen creek and got stuck there. i met geoff three years later in singapore, when he attended his first aclals conference. it was my second; and i remember the paper was on a comparative australian/canadian topic, which would have interested him. the papers from that conference, edited by edwin thumboo & thiru kandiah, did not appear in print until 1995 – thirteen years later – due to circumstances that geoff and i were debating somewhat mischievously whether or not to reveal in the history of aclals that, unfortunately, we were still working on when he died. 1995 was also the year of geoff’s second visit to australia, to take up a senior research fellowship at curtin university, in western australia. he stayed with anne brewster, who satisfied his urge to see the outback by taking him on a road trip six hundred kilometres east, out through the wheatbelt and into the desert, to the old gold-mining town of kalgoorlie. they visited some remote aboriginal settlements and one night stayed in a country pub in the middle of nowhere. anne says: “i remember that i had to drag him outside at night he was a bit alarmed at how quiet and empty it was to see the milky way and the bright evening sky which astonished him.” but that night anne accidentally dropped her contact lenses into some kind of fluid other than the usual saline solution and in the morning she couldn't wear them, which meant that she couldn't drive. geoff was thrust into the driver’s seat, all the way back to perth, forced to learn the art of outback endurance driving. at the end mailto:rmcdouga@une.edu.au coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 of his fellowship, geoff flew to sydney to meet his girlfriend, ingrid, they rented a car and drove up to armidale to visit the australian poet, michael sharkey, who had been a guest at the autumn summer school on the new literatures at aachen the previous year. i taught in the same department as michael, so this gave me a chance to renew my acquaintance with geoff, and to meet ingrid for the first time. but the meeting was brief, as they wanted to be back in sydney for the new year's eve fireworks over the harbour. and it was there, in the shadow of the harbour bridge, at the heart of the eora homelands, where the european settlement of australia began, that geoff proposed marriage to ingrid, and thankfully she accepted. of course, this put the seal on geoff’s fond regard for australia. but his interest in australian literature and culture ran ahead of it. he attended his first british-australian studies conference at warwick in 1985, his first german-australian studies conference at blaubeuren in 1989, his first aboriginal literature conference at düsseldorf in 1993 – and he publicised all of these by reporting on them subsequently in print. sadly, none of those reports – and there were many others over the years are captured by the austlit database, which is the most comprehensive bibliography of publications concerning australian literature. geoff gave his first conference presentation on australian literature at a conference in tübingen in 1990; and the following year he and gordon collier published a piece on the iconography of landscape in australian film. but it was written in german, and it appeared in a book published by a german publisher, so again it went unreported in australia, although it was subsequently published in english. the austlit database lists twelve titles by geoff, five as an author and seven as an editor. three of his five authored articles focus upon australia’s war literature. this is important for two reasons: first, australia has taken part in so many more wars than australians themselves realise, including of course its own frontier wars against aboriginal peoples, but also the first taranaki war, the invasion of waikato, and numerous other conflicts and wars that are not captured by the anzac emphasis. the second reason that geoff’s writings on war literature are important is that, although war has been a significant shaping influence on australian society and national identity, australian war literature is not as well-studied or as well-known as its british counterpart, even within australia; and there is no readily agreed-upon canon of australian war writing. geoff’s articles are far from typical. the first, titled “the country we might have been,” takes a comparative perspective, drawing australian and canadian war literature into a single frame. the second is a review essay focused upon noah riseman and richard trembath’s book defending country, which documents the military experience of aboriginal and torres strait islander military veterans of the vietnam war, ignored altogether during the campaign for aboriginal rights, and “forgotten by the majority of australians.” this of course marked geoff’s growing interest in indigenous issues. but the indigenous experience is not the only marginalised element in the war literature; and the third of geoff’s articles in this area focuses on the bangladeshi-australian writer, adib khan’s novel, homecoming (2003), about australia’s migrant experience of the vietnam war. the austlit database also lists a piece that geoff wrote in 2007 about nicholas hasluck’s novel, our man k, the story of a german exile loosely based on the experience of egon coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 kirsch, an outspoken opponent of nazism, and a well-known communist, who visited australia in 1934 to speak against war and fascism, and was promptly arrested as an illegal immigrant. the immigration restriction act of 1901, which operated to exclude aliens in accordance with the white australian policy, insisted on a dictation test for any undesirable seeking entry to australia a passage of fifty words that could be dictated to them in any european language. kirsh was a problem because he was fluent in ten european languages. so they gave him the test in in scottish gaelic, and of course he failed. but the high court found subsequently scottish gaelic was not within the fair meaning of the act, and overturned kirsch's conviction as an illegal immigrant. geoff’s article on hasluck’s novel led him subsequently to write a longer piece on the depiction of german exiles in south african and indian writing, which really needs to be read alongside the article on hasluck and kirsch, if we are to appreciate the full scope of geoff’s insights on exile and interculturality. as frank schultz-engler wrote in the obituary for geoff in matatu the journal that he co-edited on african culture and society -the connections that geoff set up between german literary history and australian politics were far from random. geoff entered academia through german studies; he wrote his phd on the work of arnold zweig, the socialist-humanist writer persecuted by the nazi regime who emigrated to palestine and returned to the german democratic republic after the end of world war ii. and geoff retained a vivid interest in german literature throughout his academic career. sadly, geoff did a lot more work on egon kirsch that he ever managed to publish. but his piece of hasluck’s novel, in which kirsch figures, is one of his best. but geoff was also a wonderful enabler and facilitator of other people’s research and the cross/cultures series (brill/rodopi), which he co-founded in 1990 with hena maesjelinek and gordon collier, and which he co-edited for almost thirty years with benedicte ledent and gordon, produced more than two hundred books. many of these books were first books by scholars who subsequently became prime movers in the fields of postcolonial and world literatures. the cross/cultures series spans the literatures of all the english-speaking world, and many non-anglophone countries and regions besides. but at least 60 of its 206 volumes, according to the austlit database, include australian content. four of those geoff himself co-edited; and those four contain 54 items of australian content. the most significant of the four is undoubtedly aratjara, an anthology of aboriginal culture and literature that geoff co-edited with dieter riemenschneider in 1997, inspired by and titled after the aratjara art exhibition, the first and perhaps still the only comprehensive touring exhibition of aboriginal art initiated and controlled by aboriginal people which had opened at the kunstsammlung in düsseldorf a couple of years earlier. the impact of this exhibition was enormous. in düsseldorf alone it was seen by 55,000 visitors. but the impact of the international symposium on aboriginal literature that geoff organised to coincide with the exhibition at the kunstsammlung, "aratjara: literature of the first australians," was also massive. this symposium, held during the united nations year of the world’s indigenous peoples, attracted visual artists, writers and academics from all over the world. in attendance were the aboriginal poet lionel fogarty, making his first visit to europe; theatre director and coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 dramatist bob maza, who at the time was working with the black diamond theatre in poitiers; documentary filmmaker, frances calvert, who had just completed her second film, about the torres strait islanders, cracks in the mask based in berlin and sydney – sadly, she too, died last year. david mowaljarlai came from the kimberley, and jutta malnic, author of yorro yorro: spirit of the kimberley, which was launched at the symposium. the book that geoff and dieter edited after the symposium was the first collection of essays on aboriginal culture come out of germany. the message of the aratjara art exhibition was that aboriginal people were a sovereign nation. that is why the organisers had avoided the usual political and commercial sponsorships. in fact, aratjara means messenger. geoff picked up the message and he carried it forward in all his work subsequently. he carried it forward in his collaboration with the indian activists, ganesh devy and kalyan chakravarty, which between 2009 and 2016 produced no less than 6 books – six books in seven years on indigeneity; on culture and representation; imagination and expression; nomadism; indigenous knowledges; on the performance of indigenous identity in the arts; and on the loss of language. it is perhaps surprising, in view of geoff’s abiding interest in australian literature and culture, that he rarely attended the biennial conferences organised by the european association for the study of australia, especially since he maintained close friendships with successive generations of easa chairs and also entertained friendly diplomatic relations with the association in the context of his role as chair of (e)aclals. marc delrez (university of liège) explains this as follows: “easa typically held its major conferences in the third week of september, which sadly clashed with ‘the wife’s birthday’. diplomacy can take one only so far after all. imagine the glint of wistfulness in geoff’s eyes as he envisioned the successive venues: barcelona, lecce in the south of italy, prato in tuscany, palma de mallorca… but no, “‘the wife’ will not buy this.” but geoff kept stocking up on australian books and movies, cramming them into his already cramped and top-heavy apartment in downtown aachen. he was, as marc says, “incredibly well-read” and always “up-to-date in the field.” geoff was one of my closest friends. i travelled with him all over the world. i started books with him which we obviously will never finish. we were working on a history of aclals and we interviewed a number of people, whose memories were sharp, sometimes recalling details so scandalous we knew we would never be able to include them. from his deathbed, geoff asked me to bring him a copy of behrouz boochani’s recently published book about life in the manus island detention centre, no friend but the mountains. i was planning to give it to him on his seventy-firth birthday, but he died three days before it, on the very day i arrived in aachen, and i did not see him. nonetheless, i did celebrate his birthday, with his wife and a few close friends who had travelled with him to basutoland in 1975 on the fateful journey that opened his eyes to the injustices of colonialism and set him on his inspirational journey of exploration into the field we know today as postcolonial literature. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 bionote: russell mcdougall is professor of english at the university of new england, nsw, australia. his latest book, coedited with anne collett and sue thomas, is tracking the literature of tropical weather. typhoons, hurricanes, and cyclones (palgrave macmillan, 2017). with iain davidson he coedited the roth family, anthropology, and colonial administration (left coast press, 2008), with peter hulme writing, travel and empire (i. b. tauris, 2007) and with gillian whitclock australian/canadian literatures in english: comparative perspectives (methuen, 1987). he has also published widely on australian, african and caribbean literatures. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 thinking for place in australia: owning the occupation rachel joy the centre for ideas university of melbourne iamrjoy@gmail.com copyright©2018 rachel joy. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper takes as its starting point, the acknowledgement that the indigenous nations of the continent of australia have never ceded their sovereignty and as such the current nation-state of australia constitutes a nation in occupation of other people’s lands. from a philosophical perspective, the settler-citizens of the occupied territories of australia therefore emerge into the world as occupier beings. as the inheritors of a still post-colonising nation, can contemporary settler australians find a way to live together ethically with the indigenous population? this paper uses topologically based philosophical thinking of place in an effort to seek more expansive ways of thinking that might furnish us with productive questions about the meanings of place and identity in a settler-colonial context. i apply topological thinking to reveal the interrelated nature of settler identity and the key constructs of settler-colonial australia, the “possessive logics” of the political and legal systems that enact and maintain the occupation. the paper concludes with a call to thinking for place as a mode of acting in attentive awareness of the interests of a place as a whole, and in so doing realising an ethical relationship with both place and all the beings enfolded in it. through recognising and relinquishing occupier subjectivity, settlers might begin to transform and decolonise themselves and engage in a process of becoming other than occupier. keywords: settler; place; identity. as contemporary australia continues to struggle with the question of whether to formally acknowledge the aboriginal peoples of this continent in the preamble to the australian constitution1, a document created by settlers to enshrine settler agendas, it is mailto:iamrjoy@gmail.com coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 time to ask unsettling questions. by what right do non-indigenous australians make a claim over this continent and execute a governing document to supersede the sovereignty of indigenous nations and their laws/lores? by what blind arrogance do settlers expect sovereign indigenous nations to be interested in being ‘recognised’ in the legal documents of what many consider an ‘illegal occupying force’?2 this same arrogance compelled the turnbull government to reject the “uluru statement from the heart,”3 a joint statement from aboriginal nations calling for the establishment of a first nations voice enshrined in the constitution. as the inheritors of a still postcolonising nation (moreton-robinson 2003, p. 30), can contemporary settler australians live together ethically with the indigenous population? there are certainly many different ways to approach such questions but in order to better engage with them, my first consideration in this paper is to examine what it is to be. what is the nature of being and in particular, for my purposes, how does being relate to place and to others? while the problem of living ethically together is certainly political, it relates so squarely to the concerns of place and being-in-place that in seeking more expansive ways of thinking, topologically based philosophy (philosophy based in the thinking of place) is especially well equipped to furnish us with productive questions around space, place and being.4 topologically based philosophy prepares us to think in three ways. firstly, it lets us think from place, to be grounded, to speak from a particular place but also from a particular subject position. ethics “are properly always situated” (rose bird 2004, p. 8); we all emerge from a time/place/body/situation which influences our ontological perspective and that is the embodied experience from which we speak, for, as john roth (1999, p. xiv) argues, ethics are situated in bodies and in time and in place. secondly, a philosophy of topos also enables thinking of place, so that we might consider the meaning or importance of particular places that can be considered sites or spaces, and how place allows space and site to appear (heidegger 1975, pp. 150-152). finally, topologically based thinking also allows us the exciting idea of thinking for place. in thinking for place one might think and act in the interests of a place or places. we might consider being and behaviour in the light of the needs of place: not such a strange thing if one reflects that the nature of our being is profoundly shaped by our relationship to place. as jeff malpas (2015, pp. 1-2) explains, place is everywhere—ambiguously so, perhaps, in that it is both everywhere (‘all about’) and every where (every place is a ‘where’ and every ‘where’ a place) … still our thinking is essentially determined by where we are, by the contingencies of our own location (and one need not be a reductive materialist to claim that the place in which thinking takes place is indeed identical with the place of location of the body), and what it addresses is essentially given to us in and through the places in which we find ourselves. place and identity are inextricably linked, thus it is perhaps impossible to explore the thinking of place without also necessarily considering the spatio-temporal place of identity from which this thinking occurs. thus the first two methods of thinking— thinking of place and from place—are relational and intertwined, flowing like currents in a stream, through the arguments that follow. i will begin by thinking of place and examine the nature of place in australia, especially how the nation-state of australia is constituted. however, this will necessitate considering what place means to indigenous coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 and non-indigenous australians, and the nature of both our relationships to it. to begin to explore these questions, it is useful to examine private property in the context of settler-colonialism as it pertains to this country. there are some considerable differences in the significance of land and property, as well as the relationship of people to place, for indigenous and non-indigenous cultures. to illustrate, it would appear that where many indigenous people claim to intrinsically belong to a place, occupier australians are often more concerned that the place belongs to them. more specifically, indigenous people will most often introduce themselves by explaining genealogies and relationships to a place or places; non-indigenous australians usually locate themselves by identifying where they own property. for indigenous australians, “… where they are is who they are ...” (wolfe 2006, p. 388, original italics), whereas for non-indigenous australians, what they own is who they are (nicolacopoulos and vassilacopoulos 2014, p. 58). settler-colonialism has some important specificities of situatedness regarding the way it relates to both indigenous people and the land. settlers settle. they come to stay and they come to stay in a place, on land, on country that belongs to someone else. the driving factor behind settlers’ need to eliminate first nations people was that “indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land” (wolfe 2006, p. 388). crucially, settler colonialists do not share land but take outright possession of it and in order to achieve this they must not only dispossess the original inhabitants, but also replace them as sovereign (wolfe 2006, p. 388). as such, it is territoriality, as a method of thinking of place, that is a crucial defining element of settler colonialism and specifically how such territoriality relates to ideas of place or what can be described philosophically as topos. how, then, did british territoriality operate in australia;5 specifically, how was it that the country of the continent’s indigenous peoples was usurped by the british and turned into the legal entity known today as australia? if one maintains, as i do, that the sovereignty of australia’s indigenous peoples has never been ceded, how then are we to understand the imposition of another claim of sovereignty on this country: how did australia become british? in short, british legal sovereignty was conferred through the doctrines of ‘discovery’ and ‘occupation.’ with the discovery of the new world by europeans came a great power struggle for control of these regions. prior to the seventeenth century, the church had played a major role in arbitrating state conflict; however, by the era of hobbes’ leviathan, european legal theorists were using the jurisprudence of jus publicum europaeum (european public law) to understand the expansion of european states and to legitimise colonialism (dorsett and mcveigh 2002, pp. 291-292). it was this system of law, essentially the “international law” of the time, that was used by the european colonial powers to determine between themselves the division of the spoils of conquest and exploration (reynolds 1996, p. 87). any prior claim that the indigenous occupants may have had was of little concern. the apportionment of the new world was conferred through the concept of “title by discovery;”6 however, this could only be maintained through occupation. indeed, an act of discovery was sufficient to give a clear title to sovereignty “only when it is accompanied by actual possession” (reynolds 1996, p. 88). however, in the early years of the colony of new south wales, “actual possession” did not extend to more than a radius of a few hundred kilometers from sydney, hardly enough to give clear title to sovereignty over a continent. the british claim to australia was weak in international law (reynolds 1996, p. 90) and “survived less because of its intrinsic strength, or as a result of a rapid spread of settlement, and more because no european power was in a position, or had the inclination, to challenge it” (reynolds 1996, p. 90). coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 on the question of prior claims to the country by indigenous peoples versus the british reliance on the principle of terra nullius, there was at the time of invasion much uncertainty with the legal concept itself being the object of conjecture. some theorists of “title by discovery” equated (what they perceived as) “uncultivated lands” with “uninhabited lands,” making country populated by peoples not deemed “farmers” open to possession and population by colonists (reynolds 1996, p. 91). a further argument in support of legal terra nullius despite the obvious existence of a native population was provided through the idea that despite their presence, australia should still have been considered terra nullius at the time of invasion because the locals had no recognisable systems of government (reynolds 1996, p. 40). indeed, as late as 1968, justice elizabeth evatt defended the lack of a treaty and the probity of terra nullius as justifiable due to australia being “inhabited by scattered unorganized tribes” (evatt 1968, pp. 18-19). however, others were of a different mind, with early nineteenth century german scholars like klueber and heffter maintaining that only uninhabited land could be considered terra nullius such that no nation “regardless of its qualities can rob another of its property, not even from savages or nomads” (reynolds 1996, p. 91). many of those on the ground experiencing the occupation first hand also had qualms about the legality of british legal title; protector of aborigines g.a. robinson conceded he was “at a loss to conceive by what tenure we hold this country” (reynolds 1987, p. 179). with terra nullius in dispute but with no serious legal challenge to its claim to dominion, the british government chose largely to ignore or diminish the presence of indigenous people in australia so far as questions of legal sovereignty were concerned (reynolds 1996, p. 96). while it is apparent that legal theorists had a variety of positions on “title by discovery,” what emerges as a recurrent theme is an effort to distinguish “sovereignty” from “right of access.” patrick wolfe describes this as a clear distinction between dominion, which inhered in european sovereigns alone, and natives’ right of occupancy, also expressed in terms of possession or usufruct, which entitled natives to pragmatic use (understood as hunting and gathering rather than agriculture) of a territory that europeans had discovered. (wolfe 2006, p. 391) the attempted elimination of native societies would effectively establish the settlercolonial state as the only possible sovereign exercising exclusive dominion, underscoring for settler-colonialism its priority of the genocide of native peoples over their enslavement (wolfe 2001, pp. 868-869). the invasion of australia by the british led to the collision of two radically different systems of law/lore and meaning, two oppositional ways of thinking both for place and of place. with colonisation came the violent repression of one system by the other, although this has not been absolute nor without resistance. unfettered access to land is the requisite condition of both colonialism and capital in the interests of livelihood in the case of the former, and for the purposes of production in the latter (harris 2004, p. 179). in settler-colonialism these two forces combine with virulent efficiency. colonialism requires private property (patton 2000, p. 123) and property ownership, to a large extent, conveys belonging in australia (nicolacopoulos coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 and vassilacopoulos 2014, p. 58). indeed, it is as property-owning subjects that white settler australians recognise each other as sovereign beings (nicolacopoulos and vassilacopoulos 2014, p. 58). as aileen moreton-robinson reminds us, “belonging in this new nation … was racialized and inextricably tied to the accumulation of capital, and the social worth, authority and ownership which this conferred” (2003, p. 25). both the convict and free settler forebears of today’s non-indigenous australians were desperate to own land of their own (the fact that it was stolen goods did not seem to bother them except in the rarest of cases) and land ownership soon became ingrained in settler australian culture (bruce and kelly 2013, p. 417) as a kind of birthright exemplified by prime minister robert menzies’ (1942) “great (white) australian dream” of home ownership. in australia today, home ownership embodies a sense of “… entitlement and an expectation of economic and social advancement” (bruce and kelly 2013, p. 416). these are perhaps not such different dreams to those of their settler ancestors. coupled with this sense of entitlement and the expectation of wealth, many young australians striving to buy their first home identify the house they own as a primary source of identity (beer, kearins and pieters 2007; clapham 2010). leaving the suburbs and heading out into the countryside, australian historian peter read’s works belonging: australians, place and aboriginal ownership (2000) and returning to nothing: the meaning of lost places (1996) exemplify a characterisation of the australian pastoralist as belonging deeply to country. this is demonstrated in the negative in returning to nothing where pastoralists who have ‘lost their land’ are revealed to have suffered a loss so deep read equates it with the dispossession of aboriginal peoples (read 1996, p. 69). such erasure of difference, in both the experience of dispossession and its meaning to aboriginal people, is rooted in the rhetoric of the ‘white blackfellows’ of the 1930s and 1940s. those such as the jindyworobak literary movement seemed to hope that a little bit of belonging would rub off, if they appropriated some of the ‘window dressing’ of what they constructed as aboriginal culture. for peter read’s pastoralists, loss of land reveals to them a depth of belonging only realised upon its loss. in a reversal of the usual settler-colonial practice of turning earth into land as a commodity to be transacted, when read’s pastoralists lose their land they experience the “transformation of land into country, of a house into a home, [which] is enabled only through the experience of dispossession” (gelder 2005, p. 171). thus, it is through their dispossession that read’s pastoralists are revealed to locate their identity in possession of what they perceive themselves to be entitled to, their country. the possession of occupied territory is at the heart of non-indigenous australian identity, and as occupiers this identity lacks both integrity and sound legal reckoning. settler australians have attempted to confer belonging via land title: making boundary pegs a stake in the heart of any authentic settler being on this land. such acts of occupation are underpinned by a series of discourses invested in “reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership, control and domination” that aileen moretonrobinson describes as “possessive logics” (2015, p. xii). white political and juridical institutions then actualise these “possessive logics” in the form of property laws and other rulings. in order to establish private property as a legal entity, colonial powers must first complete the task of turning ‘earth’ into ‘land.’ settler-colonialists claim earth and turn it into land by utilising a number of processes. one of these is through the use of labour (their own or that of others in their employ) to work the land in such a way that gives coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 them rights over it. indigenous australians belonged to societies that had no use for ‘work’ or ‘labour’ as understood by europeans and so were not deemed to ‘work the land’ in a way that established a claim to it in the minds of settlers. aboriginal people were commonly characterised by settlers as “aimless wanderers with no sense of property at all” (reynolds 1989, p. 71). as historian henry reynolds (1992, p. 19) remarks, “the commonly held view has always been that the aborigines had no land rights because they were not farmers, did not enclose the land and did not till the soil.” however, recent works such as bill gammage’s the biggest estate on earth (2011), bruce pascoe’s dark emu black seeds (2014) and rupert gerritsen’s australia and the origins of agriculture (2008) put lie to such views and provide substantial evidence of complex aquaculture, agriculture, animal herding systems and semi-settled village life across the continent. the myth of the wandering nomad provided a convenient cover for appropriating country and establishing pastoral properties to run sheep for her majesty’s woolen mills. in such a fashion, the lie of the land was established. once portions of earth were captured and turned from hunter-gatherer territorial assemblages into “land,” the productivity of such portions of land could be assessed, appropriated and exploited (patton 2000, p. 123). in order to create “land” as private property, a juridical system informed by “possessive logics” was required to protect and enhance british claims. as such, the white settler legal system acted and continues to act as an “apparatus of capture” (deleuze and guattari 1987, pp. 437-448) when it established the sovereignty of the coloniser through the deterritorialisation of indigenous territories (patton 2000, p. 124). the transformation of earth into land and from land into private property is crucial to establishing the legitimacy of occupier claims to sovereignty under the settler legal system. while the imposition and later manipulation of the doctrine of terra nullius facilitated the development of private property in australia, it has also served the political ends of the settler community. despite the fact that the doctrine of terra nullius has been overturned by the mabo judgement, the juridical and political agents of the occupation have contrived to continue to deny aboriginal people political sovereignty. indigenous populations already had their own forms of social and political organisation, so in order for colonisation to occur “… they needed to be ‘deterritorialized’ before they could be ‘reterritorialized’ as dependent colonies of the relevant european state” (patton 2010, p. 103). the juridical process by which this was realised in australia occurred through a number of judgements, the most significant of which are arguably the mabo and wik decisions of the high court of australia and the parliamentary responses to these decisions, the native title act 1993 and the native title amendment act 1998. in 1992, mabo v queensland (no. 2) found that the meriam people of the murray islands in the torres strait did in fact have a concept of land ownership and that this sovereignty had not been extinguished by the crown (yunupingu 1997, p. 233). in making this ruling the high court introduced to australian law, the concept of “native title” (yunupingu 1997, p. 233). in response to this recognition of sovereignty, the parliament legislated the native title act 1993, which effectively limited the recognition of aboriginal sovereignty to those claimants who could prove through their traditional laws and customs that they have maintained a continuing connection to land or waters (yunupingu 1997, pp. 235-237). those limited rights were further circumscribed to achieve “certainty” and “workability” for the benefit of miners and pastoralists (office of indigenous affairs 1996, para. 18) by the howard government’s native tile amendment act 1998. commonly known as the ten-point plan, it was drafted to limit coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 the high court’s 1996 wik decision that native title and pastoral leases could co-exist. the ten-point plan “… provided for the subordination of native title to other interests …” and was “… directed to the wholesale diminution of native title rights” (bartlett 2004, p. 53). thus, it is clear that in exercising “possessive logics” as agents of the occupation, both the parliament and the courts have been responsible for the alternating delineation, expansion and curtailment of the rights of indigenous australians. this serves as a reminder that native title, from a settler point of view, is as much about politics as it is about law. (tehan 2003, p. 524). prior to mabo, the popular view among settlers was that aboriginal peoples had no rights to land. as a judgement made by the agents of the occupation, mabo will always be problematic for those who do not recognise the legitimacy of the high court to make any ruling. however, the mabo decision did change the political and legal landscape such that “indigenous interests in land could no longer be ignored” (tehan 2003, p. 525). indeed, then prime minister paul keating stated in his 1992 redfern address that mabo should be a “… building block of change …” 7 that might herald new relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous australians. twenty-five years later, neither the law nor politics have yet delivered even the limited degree of sovereignty extended by mabo. as indigenous leader noel pearson (2003) laments, “… the failure of law to live up to the promise of mabo is now apparent.” even before wik and the native title amendment acts came into being, some commentators felt native title as figured by mabo was too weak a form of land tenure to be useful to many aboriginals (hunter 1993, p. 97). as then prime minister keating (1996, p. 45) explained, it was not, however, of great practical benefit to the majority of aboriginal peoples and torres strait islanders. most will not be able to prove the continuing association with their land necessary to claim native title. many retain a strong attachment to their traditional country, but will be denied native title rights as a result of prior alienation of the land concerned. many also remain on the margins of this country's economic, social and cultural life. as it stands, the occupier government remains legally sovereign under white law, and for aboriginal people to make a land claim they must first relinquish their prior claim to land, their sovereignty, and stake a claim under the limited terms made available to them by the occupier’s law. in this way indigenous australians are first deterritorialised, when their original sovereignty is denied and then reterritorialised, through the possessive logics of mabo, wik, and the native title acts and amendments, which gave very limited tenure on the occupiers’ terms. this process makes aboriginal people refugees within their own country; they have been made stateless and now have to prove ownership of their own land using a system designed to dispossess them and to work in the interests of the occupation (foley 2007, p. 123). it was partly to highlight this situation of internal exile, of being as gary foley8 puts it, “aliens in our own land,” (foley 2007, p. 123) that aboriginal activists set up the ‘aboriginal tent embassy’ on the lawns outside parliament in canberra in 1972. the nature of place and coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 its legal and political meanings to indigenous and non-indigenous australians are today still highly contested and just as fraught as ever. both politics and law seem to be struggling to provide the kind of thinking required for ethical co-existence. aboriginal people continue to exist, resist and assert their sovereignty over this country and settler australians continue to struggle to find a legitimate identity grounded in this place despite their insistence on their right to claim sovereignty over it. rethinking identity and belonging leads us back to ontology and questions of being, of who settlers are, and more specifically who they are in a particular place: in this case, australia. human identity is entwined with place; most often we assert our identity through our claim of belonging together with a place and just as identity may be intricate and various so might be those places with which humans claim belonging. despite a desire for fixedness, settler australians are drawn into an unsettled space of shifting meaning and questionability where our relationships to belonging and place are constantly in a state of renegotiation. this is a condition opposed to the mythic “relaxed and comfortable australia”9 where unified white settler identity is irrefutably established— except that it isn’t, because the very existence of indigenous resistance in australia reveals the lie of settler sovereignty (nicolacopoulos and vassilacopoulos 2014, p. 15). settlers claim to be sovereign over this country, yet from where do settlers garner the legitimacy of their claim? thus far i have considered the legal and political rationale behind settler claims to sovereignty. i will now address how the legitimacy of settler sovereignty fails from a philosophical perspective. the notion of sovereignty being applied here is an ontological sovereignty defined by philosophers george vassilacopoulos and toula nicolacopoulos (2014, p. 90) as the way in which a collective “… primordially appears and announces itself as sovereign creator of a collective destiny, implicates its members’ emergence in the world and hence the question of sovereignty at the ontological level.” importantly, one emerges as a ‘beingin-the-world,’ as a sovereign being, through the practice of sovereignty and not because of one’s relationship to external institutions of juridical or political nature. it is in such a way that aboriginal peoples carry their relationship to land and sovereignty within themselves as something inalienable and prior to juridical sovereignty (brady 2007, p. 150). since roman times, western ontology has stemmed from a collective “gatheringwe” of private property owners, where “[i]n this case i emerge in the world by owning something specific, by claiming it as exclusively mine and, in doing so, claiming my emerging and unique being as exclusively mine” (nicolacopoulos and vassilacopoulos 2014, pp. 38-39). problematically for the occupier, that which we claim ownership over, for the purposes of emerging as sovereign, already belongs to someone else and thus results in a lack of ontological sovereignty. it is not that the private property owning being cannot be sovereign over property per se; it is that this being cannot be sovereign over a specific ‘property,’ namely that which is already owned by its aboriginal ontological sovereigns. it is clear then that ontological sovereignty is not conferred temporally but via collective origins, and this is why a statement of origins is integral to establishing the legitimacy of sovereignty and which the settler nation has thus far failed to provide. settler-colonial ontology was, and continues to be, responsible for the dispossession of indigenous australians but more specifically it was occupier australians’ conceptualisation of being, of what it means to be human and what it means to be in and coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 of a place (and thus what constitutes ownership and sovereignty) that is at the core of this dispossession. as part of a process of claiming an authentic belonging and relinquishing or becoming other than occupier, non-indigenous australians are required to give an honest account of themselves; settlers must provide a statement of origins. occupier identity as an experience of ‘being-in-the-world’ is deeply connected to a misguided sense of our sovereignty over this country. in the process of giving an honest account of oneself, one emerges into the world, becoming visible, whether one is in one’s own place as sovereign, appears in another’s sovereign place as a migrant, or appears as an occupier in a place one has stolen from its genuine owners (nicolacopoulos and vassilacopoulos 2014, p. 9). all occupiers must answer when asked by indigenous peoples, “who are you? where do you come from and how do you come to be here?” why must the occupier give an answer? occupiers must answer because it is from the subject position of legitimate ontological sovereign beings, that indigenous peoples have the authority to put this demand (nicolacopoulos and vassilacopoulos 2014, p. 9). as uninvited guests, settlers are required to respond. an honest account of one’s settler self means owning up to the fact that non-indigenous australians are people of a nation in occupation of someone else’s land. such an act is a radical act of thinking for place, of acting in attentive awareness of the interests of that place as a whole, and in so doing realising an ethical relationship with both place and all the beings enfolded in it, rather than simply considering one’s individual needs or desires. through recognising and relinquishing occupier subjectivity, thinking from place in a consciously embodied way, settlers might begin to transform and decolonise themselves. indeed, the only thing settlers can legitimately ‘own’ in this country in its current configuration is the truth of their being as occupiers. 1 for further information about constitutional recognition, see the referendum council website (https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/). some activists argue that the movement for constitutional recognition diverts attention from campaigns to settle treaties with indigenous nations. for further information on the treaty campaigns in australia, visit http://www.australianstogether.org.au/stories/detail/why-treaty; or the creative spirits website (https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/self determination/would-a-treaty-help-aboriginal-self-determination#axzz4gan9wvks). 2 see aileen moreton-robinson (ed.), sovereign subjects: indigenous sovereignty matters, crows nest, nsw: allen and unwin, 2007; and works such as the manifesto of the “warriors of the aboriginal resistance” (https://issuu.com/brisbane blacks/docs/war_manifesto_d91595ceee8754). 3 see https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/201705/uluru_state ment _from_the_heart_0.pdf 4 see the following works for more detailed discussions of these ideas: edward casey’s getting back into place, bloomington: indiana university press, 1993, and the fate of place, berkeley, ca: university of california press, 1997; gaston bachelard’s the poetics of space, london: penguin, 1969; husserl’s thing and space: lectures of 1907, trans. r. rojcewicz, netherlands: springer, 1997; maurice merleau-ponty’s https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/ http://www.australianstogether.org.au/stories/detail/why-treaty https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/self%20determination/would-a-treaty-help-aboriginal-self-determination#axzz4gan9wvks https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/self%20determination/would-a-treaty-help-aboriginal-self-determination#axzz4gan9wvks https://issuu.com/brisbane%20blacks/docs/war_manifesto_d91595ceee8754 https://issuu.com/brisbane%20blacks/docs/war_manifesto_d91595ceee8754 https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/uluru_state%20ment%20_from_the_heart_0.pdf https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/uluru_state%20ment%20_from_the_heart_0.pdf coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 phenomenology of perception, trans. d. landes, london: routledge, 2013; heidegger’s being and time, trans. j. macquarrie and e. robinson, oxford: blackwell, 1962, and his lecture “being dwelling thinking,” in poetry language thought, trans. a. hofstadter, new york: harper collins, 1971. see also the work of jeff malpas, place and experience: a philosophical topography, cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999, and the intelligence of place: topographies and poetics, london: bloomsbury. 2015; and paul patton, deleuzian concepts: philosophy, colonization, politics, stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2010, for an australian context. 5 indigenous peoples from the many nations whose lands are currently occupied by australia write eloquently on the nature of their relationship to place. to read indigenous authors on place, begin by reading the essays in aileen moreton-robinson (2007); the novels of kevin gilbert, alexis wright, tony birch, kim scott, melissa lucashenko and also lucashenko’s essays “country: being and belonging on aboriginal lands,” journal of australian studies, no. 6, 2006, and “more migaloo words?” overland, no. 163, winter, 2001. this is a very short and by no means definitive list of authors. 6 for varying analyses and discussions of the principal formulations of the doctrine of discovery, see, for example: anthony anghie, “francisco de vitoria and the colonial origins of international law,” in eve darian smith and peter fitzpatrick (eds.), laws of the postcolonial, ann arbor: michigan university press, 1999, pp. 89-107; andrew fitzmaurice, humanism and america: an intellectual history of english colonisation, 1500–1625, cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003; david kennedy, “primitive legal scholarship,” harvard international law journal, vol. 27, 1986, pp. 1-98; mark f. lindley, the acquisition and government of backward territory in international law, london: longmans, green, 1926; robert a. williams, jr., the american indian in western legal thought: the discourses of conquest, oxford: oxford university press, 1990, especially pp. 233-286. 7 redfern speech (year for the world's indigenous people) – delivered in redfern park sydney by then prime minister paul keating, 10 december 1992. australians for native title and reconciliation (antar) website https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf. 8 foley was one of a group of activists instrumental in establishing the aboriginal tent embassy. for more detail, see gary foley, andrew schaap and edwina howell (eds.), (2014) the aboriginal tent embassy: sovereignty, black power, land rights and the state, london: routledge. 9 this phrase was coined in an interview with then prime minister john howard about his conservative vision for australia. see the edited transcript of liz jackson's interview with john howard, during the 1996 election campaign, for the four corners program “an average australian bloke,” first broadcast on 19 february 1996, available at http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2004/s1212701.htm, viewed 2 april 2017. references bartlett, r. h. 2004. native title in australia, 2nd edn, lexisnexis butterworths, chatswood nsw. http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2004/s1212701.htm coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 beer, a., kearins, b., and pieters, h. 2007. “housing affordability and planning in australia: the challenge of policy under neo-liberalism.” housing studies, 22 (1): 11-24. brady, w. 2007. “that sovereign being: history matters,” in moreton-robinson, a. (ed.), sovereign subjects: indigenous sovereignty matters, allen and unwin, crows nest, nsw, pp. 140-154. bruce, m., and kelly, s. 2013. “expectations, identity, affordability: the housing dreams of australia’s generation y,” housing, theory and society, 30 (4): 416432. clapham, d. 2010. “happiness, well-being and housing policy,” policy and politics, 38 (2): 253-267. deleuze, g., and guattari, f. 1987. a thousand plateaus, capitalism and schizophrenia, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. dorsett, s., & mcveigh, s. 2002. “just so: ‘the law which governs australia is australian law,’” law and critique, 13: 289-309. evatt, e. 1968. “the acquisition of territory in australia and new zealand,’” in alexandrowicz, c.h. (ed.), grotian society papers, studies in the history of the law of nations, nijhoff , the hague, pp. 16-45. foley, g. 2007. “the australian labor party and the native title act,” in moretonrobinson, a. (ed.), sovereign subjects: indigenous sovereignty matters, allen and unwin, sydney, pp. 118-139. gammage, b. 2011. the biggest estate on earth: how aborigines made australia, allen and unwin, sydney. gelder, k. 2005. “when the imaginary australian is not uncanny: nation, psyche and belonging in recent australian cultural criticism and history,” journal of australian studies, 29 (86): 161-173. gerritsen, r. 2008. australia and the origins of agriculture, oxford, archaeopress. harris, c. 2004. “how did colonialism dispossess? comments from an edge of empire,” annals of the associationof american geographers, 94: 165-182. heidegger, m. 1975. “building dwelling thinking,” in poetry language thought, harper collins, new york, pp. 141-159. hunter, i. 1993. “native title: acts of state and the rule of law,” the australian quarterly, 65 (4): 97-109. keating, p. 1993. “australian launch of the international year for the world's indigenous people,” aboriginal law bulletin, 3 (61): 4-5. ---. 1996. “land fund and indigenous land corporation (atsic amendment) bill, second reading speech by the hon paul keating mp, prime minister, house of representatives, february 1995,” reported in australian indigenous law review, 1: 45. malpas, j. 2015. the intelligence of place: topographies and poetics, bloomsbury, london. menzies, r. 1942. “the forgotten people,” public address, http://www.liberals.net/theforgottenpeople.htm, retrieved 20 april 2015. moreton-robinson, a. 2003. “i still call australia home,” in ahmed, s., et al. (eds.), uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration, berg, oxford, pp. 23-40. ---2015. the white possessive, university of minessota press, minneapolis. nicolacopoulos, t., and vassilacopoulos, g. 2014. indigenous sovereignty and the http://www.liberals.net/theforgottenpeople.htm coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 being of the occupier: manifesto for a white australian philosophy of origins, re.press, melbourne. office of indigenous affairs. 1996. towards a more workable native title act, department of premier and cabinet commonwealth of australia, canberra. pascoe, b. 2014. dark emu black seeds, agriculture or accident? magabala books, broome, wa. patton, p. 2000. deleuze and the political, routledge, london. ---. 2010. deleuzian concepts: philosophy, colonization, politics, stanford university press, stanford. pearson, n. 2003. “where we've come from and where we're at with the opportunity that is koiki mabo's legacy to australia,” speech delivered at the native title representative bodies conference, mabo lecture, alice springs, 3 june, http://www.capeyorkpartnerships.com/noelpearson/np-mabo-lecture-3-6-03.doc, 3-4. read, p. 1996. returning to nothing: the meaning of lost places, cambridge university press, cambridge. ---. 2000. belonging: australians, place and aboriginal ownership, cambridge university press, cambridge. reynolds, h. 1987. frontier, allen and unwin, sydney. ---. 1989. dispossession: black australians and white invaders, allen and unwin, sydney. ---. 1992. the law of the land, penguin books, ringwood, vic. ---. 1996. aboriginal sovereignty: reflections on race, state and nation, allen and unwin, st leonards, nsw. rose bird, d. 2004. report from a wild country: ethics for decolonization, unsw press, sydney. roth, j. 1999. ethics after the holocaust: perspectives, critiques and responses, paragon house, saint paul, mn. tehan, m. 2003. “a hope disillusioned, an opportunity lost? reflections on common law native title and ten years of the native title act,” melbourne university law review, 27: 523-571. wolfe, p. 2001. “land, labour, and difference,” american historical review, june: 866-906. ---. 2006. “settler colonialism and the elimination of native,” journal of genocide research, 8 (4), december: 387-409. yunupingu, g. (ed.). 1997. ‘our land is our life: land rights—past, present and future, university of queensland press, st lucia, qld. rachel joy obtained her phd at the centre for ideas at the victorian college of the arts, university of melbourne. her research argues for an active role for artists in society and as such she views her critical practice as a process of relational change making. her studio-based work involves explorations of the way visual art can reveal truths about place and place making in post-colonising occupied australia. as an interdisciplinary practice her research involves the intersection of art with philosophy, geography, history, critical race studies, juridical frameworks and political theory and asks: how can art present non-aboriginal australians with the right questions to make settlers invest in ethical relations with australia’s first nations peoples? coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 re-remembering australia: public memorials sharing difficult knowledge alison atkinson-phillips newcastle university alison.atkinson-phillips@uwa.edu.au copyright©2018 alison atkinson-phillips. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper explores a new genre of public memorials: those which commemorate lived experiences of loss and trauma. this work contributes to the growing body of literature on memory work in settler-colonial and transitional justice settings. transitional justice has become an internationally accepted framework for societies attempting to move from civil conflict to peaceful democracy. while australia’s (post)settler-colonial context does not fit this description, transitional justice mechanisms have been widely adopted as a means of coming to terms with the nation’s past. i offer four short case studies through which i discuss memorials that acknowledge human rights abuses, and consider the kinds of cultural ‘work’ such memorials are expected to do in the present. firstly, public memorials are used by marginalised counterpublics to claim a space in the national story. secondly, they are used to create spaces where survivors of human rights abuses can have their loss acknowledged and be given space to grieve. thirdly, they are used as acts of witnessing, to speak back into the dominant public sphere. finally, and more recently, memorials have been created by governments as part of the widespread adoption of transitional justice mechanisms. such memorials are seen as acts of symbolic reparations and used to respond to claims of past human rights abuse on the part of the state. keywords: memory; human rights; memorial. the building of monuments and memorials is a western memory tradition brought to australia by settler-colonisers. in special symbolic places across the country, statues and cenotaphs celebrate the nation’s ‘great’ leaders and mourn those who sacrificed themselves for the nation (or its predecessor empire) in overseas conflict. however, the mailto:alison.atkinson-phillips@uwa.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 past 30 years has seen a cultural shift in the way we have come to think about what is worth remembering. rather than celebrating great achievement, service or sacrifice, today’s memorials commemorate loss and trauma experienced by ordinary and, in many cases, marginalised groups of citizens. instead of marking and mourning death, memorials and other forms of memory work increasingly acknowledge experiences people have lived through and survived. this paper gives an overview of the emergence of this new type of memorial in australia. it discusses the kinds of experiences that are commemorated in memorial form and considers the influence of human rights discourse and transitional justice mechanisms in opening up space for remembrance of previously marginalised histories. transitional justice has become an internationally accepted framework for societies attempting to move from civil conflict to peaceful democracy. while australia’s (post)settler-colonial context does not fit this description, transitional justice mechanisms have been widely adopted as a means of coming to terms with the nation’s past. using four short case studies, in this paper i explore the kinds of cultural ‘work’ memorials to lived experience are expected to do in the present. first, public memorials are used to claim a space in the national story. second, they are used to create spaces where survivors of human rights abuses can have their loss acknowledged and be given space to grieve. third, they are used as acts of witnessing, to speak back into the public sphere. finally, and more recently, memorials have been created by governments as symbolic reparations to respond to survivors of human rights abuse. memorials are a form of public memory work that is often associated with the nation. perhaps because of this, memorial research is often grounded within a national frame. there have been three extensive research projects into australian memorialisation in the past 30 years. chilla bulbecks’ (1991) study of ‘unusual’ (non-war) monuments was conducted in the lead up to the 1988 australian bicentenary, and considered the ways commemoration of ‘ordinary’ people differs from that which celebrates prominent rulers, leaders and explorers. kenneth inglis’ (2008) study of australia’s war memorials offers important insights into the development of themes of service and sacrifice through war memorialisation. these are themes which also emerge in bulbeck’s work on settlercolonial memorials. more recently, the places of the heart research project, 2004-2008, funded by the australian research council and led by paul ashton and paula hamilton, focused on civic memorials created in the post-world war ii era. ashton and hamilton identified a small but significant group of memorials that commemorate ‘violation’ rather than death. the material presented in this paper comes out of research that builds on ashton and hamilton’s identification of ‘violation’ as a distinct category of memorialisation. rethinking this category as ‘non-death’ or ‘survivor’ memorials, my research sought to understand the emergence of this new kind of commemoration. since the 1980s, a number of memorials have been created internationally that acknowledge places of trauma and that tell the stories of survivors alongside those who died; however, analysis of such memorials rarely asks what difference this makes. for example, a study by patrizia violia (2012) compares three different memorial-museums, two of which have few or no survivors; at the third, villa grimaldi in chile, the majority of torture victims survived the experience. it seemed likely to me that memory would be treated differently at sites where the primary objective is to commemorate the experience of people who are still living. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 my research has found that almost 80 public memorials have been built in australia to commemorate experiences people have lived through, rather than died because of. all of these memorials have been created since 1985, and the number appears to be steadily increasing. i used three primary methods to source information about these memorials. the first of these was a survey of all australian local government areas, requesting information about memorials that commemorated loss or trauma not primarily associated with death. the second method drew from secondary sources, looking at existing databases and online information about memorial projects using keyword searches. alongside the places of the heart database, the monument australia volunteer research project (monument australia, 2016) has been an invaluable source. finally, i also used word of mouth. this has often been fruitful in the early identification of new projects, as a number of new memorials were created while this study was underway (2013-2016). having identified memorial sites around australia, i have also conducted field research at over half the memorial sites, drawing on auto-ethnography, textual analysis of the memorial object and critical photography to get a sense of the kinds of places these are. australia’s survivor memorials cover a relatively small range of topics, suggesting that the range of experiences australians consider worthy of public memorialisation is quite narrow. some 14, or just under a quarter, of australia’s memorials to lived experience acknowledge natural disaster experiences. the 2003 canberra bushfires marked a change in the way natural disasters are memorialised, with a move away from remembrance of lives lost to a focus on the shared experience of living through catastrophe. other survivor memorials acknowledge a range of lived experiences of loss and trauma, the majority of which are connected to human rights violations. memorial topic description number of memori als colonisation (aboriginal perspective) since the arrival of europeans in australia, aboriginal peoples have experienced loss of land and loss or disruption of culture. these memorials tell some of the history of settlercolonisation from an aboriginal perspective rather than a ‘settler’ perspective, including struggles for self-determination or other forms of justice and recognition. 5 forced labour (south sea islanders in queensland) between 1860 and 1904, south sea islanders (also known as kanakas) were brought to north-east australia as indentured labourers to work on northern sugar plantations. many were not paid or lived in slave-like conditions. in 2013, the 150th anniversary of their first arrival precipitated a number of commemorative projects in queensland. 3 family separation (stolen generations) in 1996, the human rights and equal opportunities commission found that aboriginal children had been removed from their families and home communities as a result of assimilationist government policies, amounting to an act of genocide. most stolen generations memorials are created at the site of an institution; however, their focus tends to be on the experience of separation, rather than institutionalisation. 24 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 institutionalisati on/abuse of children (forgotten australians) in 2004, the senate community affairs reference committee found that australia’s state care system of the twentieth century was damaging to children and often led to cases of abuse and neglect. only one memorial pre-dates this inquiry. 11 migration (includes child migrants) migration is often a difficult experience, and migration memorials tell stories that include the separation of families as a result of indentured labour practises and refugee experiences. just over half of these memorials (6) commemorate the experiences of unaccompanied minors sent to australia from the u.k. and malta, known as the child migrants. 14 (6) war memorials that acknowledge experiences of war, rather than death in war. includes civilian and pow experiences, and the vietnam veterans memorial walk, which acknowledges the broad experience of the vietnam war. 4 natural disaster natural disasters are a regular occurrence in australia. these memorials sometimes include recognition of lives lost in natural disasters (usually bushfire), but their focus is on the shared experience of those who survived. 14 other homophobic rape attack; loss of home and community; torture; irish famine; convict experience; forced adoption; cancer; and loss (unspecified). 8 ashton and hamilton (2008) found that since the 1960s there has been a significant trend for retrospective commemoration of events long since past. many memorials to lived experience follow that trend. this is in many ways unsurprising, since there is often a long gap between the experience of trauma and public discussion of it. similarly, stories of human rights violations and other injustices sometimes take a long time to be made public. this has been particularly the case in settler-colonial contexts, where there has been no definitive break with the past. the majority of the experiences of human rights violations commemorated in australia’s memorials relate to settler-colonial history. while a few deal directly with the experience of colonisation, others address its effects, such as the removal of aboriginal children from their families and culture (the stolen generations); the institutionalisation and abuse of children; or the experiences of south sea islanders brought to australia to work in sugar plantations, often in slave-like conditions. i would argue that experiences of postwar migration are also connected to australia’s settler-colonial history, since these stories are part of the (very) slow move away from the white australia policy implemented at federation in 1901 and the corresponding widening of definitions of ‘whiteness.’ the experience of british child migrants is part of that narrative, since those children were exported to australia as ‘good british stock’ expected to help with nation building (darian-smith and pascoe, 2013). these are all stories that have emerged in the public sphere in the latter years of the twentieth century, as the language of human rights has gained international currency. one key characteristic of non-death memorials is that they acknowledge experiences that are shared. memorial projects are sometimes driven by a few key ‘memory activists’ but to make it to completion they require the formation of a community of memory. this is a coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 phrase that has been used extensively by memory scholars without being carefully defined, although it has many similarities to wulf kansteiner’s (2002) term “mnemonic communities.” i prefer to talk about communities of memory rather than using the halbwachian term “collective memory” to emphasise the point that not everyone within such a ‘community’ will have the same memory. i understand communities of memory as being formed by memory ‘work’ done through public practices including the circulation of shared texts, public art, activism, public history, heritage practices and in everyday conversations. these communities sometimes lead to or are sustained through formal groups and associations, but their members will move between a number of different communities. michael rothberg, drawing on the work of avishai margalit, uses the term “shared memory” in a similar way, to describe “memory that may have been initiated by individuals but that has been mediated through networks of communication, institutions of the state, and the social groupings of civil society” (2009, p.15). rothberg also emphasises that “the borders of memory and identity are jagged” (2009, p.5). memorials to lived experience do four distinct but overlapping types of memory work. first, and unsurprisingly, the memorial form offers a sought-after signal to marginalised groups that their experiences are not only remembered but valued as part of the narrative of the nation. second, memorials are used for mourning. they offer to the community of memory a space where their grief work can be carried out in a public setting. again, this is an opportunity for public acknowledgement. mourning memorials create sacred spaces for grief work, but also make use of less formal gathering spaces, such as barbeque areas, where stories can be shared. the other two types of memory work are specific to memorials that commemorate experiences of injustice. the third type of memory work involves speaking into the public space as a form of “witness citizenship.” this term is taken from the work of macarena gómez-barris, who describes it as “forms of cultural, social, and political engagement that share an imagination about a traumatic past in order to activate and promote usually local collective solidarity” (gómez-barris, 2010, p. 31). witness citizenship works to draw others into the community of memory. it is aimed at creating solidarity and is primarily undertaken by grassroots groups of memory activists. finally, memorials are also used to do the work of symbolic reparation. this involves the acknowledgement of human rights abuses by the state. as ereshnee naidu (2004) has pointed out, while reparations in any form cannot and will not compensate for the human suffering, trauma and loss undergone by victims during conflict, memorials have become a means of reclaiming an oppressed history. in the rest of this paper, i offer some brief examples of these four forms of memory work. claiming a place in the national story through the “reasons to remember” wall a national study conducted by paul ashton and paula hamilton (2010) found that australians have a high level of trust in the institution of museums. memorials to lived experience are often placed within museum grounds, and this may be influenced by a coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 desire to make use of the museum’s sense of authority. the “reasons to remember” wall at the adelaide migration museum has become one way that migrant groups can draw on that institutional authority to claim legitimacy for their own story. the development of the wall had its genesis in a conversation in 1992, when the baltic council of south australia approached the migration museum to ask permission to construct a memorial to honour those killed in their homelands while under soviet occupation (finnimore 2006). rather than creating a standalone memorial, the museum worked with the baltic council to develop a plaque. the “reasons to remember” wall now holds 12 plaques, each placed there at the request of a community group. some, like the baltic one, commemorate mass death. however, a number commemorate lived experiences of turmoil, often a catastrophic period of history, which led to the establishment of a diasporic community in south australia. the wall has become a place where communities can come and remember together, as well as performing a role in asserting the group’s identity in australia. often requests for plaques have developed out of a relationship between the community groups and the migration museum after an exhibition in the forum—a temporary exhibition space that community groups can use to tell their own stories within the museum (szekeres, 2011). both the forum and the “reasons to remember” wall require a formalised community to have coalesced around a shared interest or identity. however, the temporary exhibitions allow communities to tell their politically complex stories with a level of nuance the plaques can only hint at. the permanency and publicness of the plaques require a carefully managed process of negotiation. past curator of the migration museum, christine finnimore, has described the process: [e]ach version of past events that is inscribed on a plaque has been carefully negotiated between the needs of the two owners—the community groups and the museum. what emerges is what each community wants to remember but also how the museum allows them to say it. (finnimore, 2006) the fact that community groups are willing to work through this complex process points to the high level of importance they place on having a permanent place of remembrance. “reasons to remember” wall of plaques, adelaide migration museum, south australia. photo: alison atkinson-phillips. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 donauschwaben plaque, part of “reasons to remember” wall, adelaide migration museum, south australia. photo: alison atkinson-phillips. mourning many kinds of loss memorials often draw on a western (mostly christian) funerary tradition and are associated with mourning or grieving processes. grief has traditionally been understood as a response to death, but in the second half of the twentieth century it became more possible to think about grief as a response to other kinds of loss as well as to trauma. although not all trauma comes directly from loss, it is widely accepted that emotional reactions to traumatic experiences can involve feelings of grief, and that certain kinds of losses can be the source of trauma. this expansion of the idea of grief has happened gradually and is relatively recent. in the late 1980s, kenneth j. doka’s disenfranchised grief: new directions, challenges, and strategies for practice (1989) gave a name to experiences of grief that fall outside traditional social norms—including situations where the loss is not the result of death. the concept of “disenfranchised grief” has been influential in giving legitimacy to those who feel a need to mourn non-death loss. for example, the victorian adoption network for information and self help (vanish) referred to doka in its submission to an australian senate inquiry into forced adoptions. it argued that, “an adoption results in loss, of which grief is the anticipated outcome” (vanish inc. 2012). the widespread social acceptance that grief does not necessarily comes from death means that loss associated with lived experiences can be acknowledged in the same way as the loss of a loved one through death. in kings park in central perth, western australia, the “place of reflection” is a shared mourning space developed by a coalition of five community groups after they had all applied, individually, to community funding body lotterywest for assistance to create a memorial. the five groups are: the association for services to torture and trauma survivors (asetts); the compassionate friends; healing hearts foundation; soroptimist international of south perth; and sids and kids wa. they worked together for over a decade to bring the project to fruition. speaking at the dedication ceremony in 2011, perth radio presenter graham mabury described the shared experiences that brought the group together as, “the loss of family members, the realities of torture and the deprivation of human rights, the loss of country, the ongoing coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 journey towards reconciliation” and termed it a “fellowship of sufferance” (place of reflection, 2011). the resultant space brings together these different kinds of loss— through death, separation, human rights abuse and other suffering—in a multi-layered space that demonstrates many of the characteristics of other mourning memorials. mourning memorials need to create a space in which grief work can take place. such spaces need to be both public and intimate. in order to create such spaces, memorial designers use socially recognisable cues, including landscaping, visual symbols and the suggestion of ritual. gardens, symbolic walks and water are all commonly used. kings park is a nature park spanning 400 hectares. the “garden of remembrance” is located at a high point surrounded by native vegetation and which looks out over the swan river/derbal yerigan. a central pavilion, decorated by metal lacework, allows space for groups to gather and share their experiences. this can be booked for ceremonies. a path leads away from the central space through the bushland. it is interspersed with seating and words intended to be inspirational or comforting are embedded in the concrete: tranquility, compassion, friends. at two points, the path reaches a separate seating area. in these spots, a bench seat, again inscribed with text, allows mourners to spend time in private contemplation surrounded by nature and overlooking the river. “place of reflection,” commemorative garden, central space, kings park, perth, western australia. photo: alison atkinson-phillips. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 “place of reflection,” commemorative garden, seating, kings park, perth, western australia. photo: alison atkinson-phillips. the “garden of remembrance” was created especially for people who did not already have a specific place to go in order to mourn. where possible, and in keeping with a trend identified by a number of recent investigations into memorial practices (doss, 2010; ashton hamilton and searby, 2012), mourning memorials are situated as close as possible to the place where loss and trauma occurred. when memorials mark death, the return to such a site is bittersweet as it is the last place where the person they love was alive. for non-death memorials, the connection to the site is even more complex, especially when the loss or trauma being commemorated is not a one-off event, but an experience that took place over an extended period of time. for those who have lost their home in a bushfire, there are likely to be strong, positive memories at the site, as well as the pain of loss. however, in situations where the site of commemoration is an institution, the memorials may be both positive and negative. for example, the colebrook reconciliation park, in the site of the colebrook home for aboriginal children, includes a mural showing children playing together. this suggests that for some ex-residents there are good memories associated with their childhood there. for others, the bad far outweighs the good, and for some survivors return to the site is not possible. like the “garden of remembrance,” many memorial designs incorporate a central gathering point. this offers a space where the community of memory can gather to share and acknowledge their own experiences. the bench seats at the “garden of remembrance” are another common feature. they allow a small group—members of a family or close companions—to visit a memory space together and spend some time sharing stories. mourning memorials are often located close to other types of gathering spaces. for example, the mount annan “stolen generations memorial” is close to a picnic area, allowing memorial participants the option of making the journey through the memorial pathway alone, and joining with a larger group at the end. picnic or barbeque areas do not have the sense of sacralised space of the main memorial. in some ways, the comparison might be made between a funeral service and a wake, where the informal environment of the wake allows for a wider variety of sharing outside the formality of the memorial ritual. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 witness citizenship in parramatta traditional memorials are created to remember the past. however, for many people, the past is unfinished business. witness citizenship is the pedagogic task of sharing the difficult knowledge that the past continues to influence the present. the concept was developed by macarena gómez-barris from her research into the villa grimaldi peace park in santiago, chile. the park is located at a torture site used during the pinochet dictatorship; it is also the last known place where some of the regime’s ‘disappeared’ were seen. the memory work that led to the creation of the site, and its ongoing use, has been the focus of much recent memory scholarship (see, for example, klep, 2012; hamber, sevcenko and naido, 2010; violi, 2012). gómez-barris argues that the work of witness citizenship links local experiences to the nation, so that memory becomes about political engagement rather than individual contemplation. this is different from the kinds of memory work that claim a space within the national story by adopting already constructed, conservative narrative frames. instead, witness citizenship challenges national memory with “the ongoing social, physical, and psychological wounds from the past” (gómez-barris, 2010, p. 31). transitional justice has become an internationally accepted framework for societies attempting to move from civil conflict or dictatorship to peaceful democracy. although australia’s (post)settler-colonial context does not fit this description, parts of the transitional justice ‘toolkit’ have been adopted as a means of coming to terms with the nation’s settler-colonial past. by adopting gómez-barris’s term of witness citizenship to describe the cultural work australian memorials aim for, i do not assume that the context is the same as for memory activists working in chile, but aim to point to similarities between the work of memory activists who resist the call to ‘move on’ from their own pain to save others from discomfort. maria tumarkin claims that when sites of death and loss are forgotten and all traces of the tragic events are erased … the burden of memory is shifted onto the shoulders of survivors and victims’ families. they, and not the society as a whole, are the ones who have to carry the full weight of knowledge and grief, while the rest are free to forget, free to absolve themselves of any link to the tragedies. (2005, p. 120) in this sense, ‘sharing’ the story means also passing the burden of knowledge onto the wider community or expanding the community of memory. memorials act as witness citizenship, then, when they are aimed at sharing the burden of knowledge. memorials as witness citizenship are highly contextual. many of them are created by grassroots groups, and questions of finance, as well as access to and control over land, can constrain the ways memorial projects develop. the recently edited volume, memorials in times of transition (buckley-zistel and schafer, 2014) brings together a collection of international case studies that explore how internal conflicts and human rights abuses have been commemorated. the majority of these examples are memory sites that might be characterised as memorial-museums. at these sites, memory workers participate in ongoing dialogue and educational work. in contrast, most australian coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 memorials to lived experience are standalone objects which rely on spatial, aesthetic and textual elements to support the memorial participant’s engagement with the site and its story. other types of interactions are limited to special events, such as anniversary days. one australian memory site of ongoing dialogue and political engagement is the parramatta girls home, the focus of the parramatta female factory precinct (pffp) memory project. this is an arts-based memory project based in the sydney suburb of parramatta. some of the pffp buildings date back to the early days of settler-colonisation and the site has been used since early colonial days to house women and children in institutional settings including the original parramatta female factory, 1821-1847; parramatta invalid and lunatic asylum from 1847 (now cumberland hospital); the roman catholic orphan school, 1844-1886, parramatta girls industrial school/home 1887-1974; kamballa and taldree (female and male) children’s shelters 1975-1983; and finally the norma parker detention centre, 1980-2010. this continuing use makes the site valuable for those who argue that there is a link between settler-colonial and twentieth century practices of controlling poor and marginalised women and children. the parragirls group formed in the years following the australian senate inquiry that resulted in the forgotten australians report in 2004. parramatta was a place of detention where teenage girls were sent after being charged with ‘crimes’ such as their own neglect or having been ‘exposed to moral danger.’ in effect, this meant they were charged with their own sexual abuse. the pffp memory project is driven by two artists and memory activists, bonney djuric (a former inmate at parramatta girls home and founder of the parragirls group) and lily hibberd. this is not a traditional memorial, nor (yet) a memorial-museum. hibberd writes that, “the mission of the pffp memory project is to support the parragirls to generate new forms of memory” (2014, p. 105). they do this primarily through art; one building on the site has been adopted as an art space, and art interventions are visible around the grounds. “ilwa” (i love worship adore/always) graffiti painted as part of the parramatta female factory precinct memory project, parramatta, new south wales. photo: alison atkinson-phillips. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 les oubliettes (forgotten ones) by bonney djuric, installed at parramatta female factory precinct, parramatta, new south wales. photo: alison atkinsonphillips. mural at parramatta female factory precinct, painted by women of the norma parker detention centre, parramatta, new south wales. photo: alison atkinson-phillips. the pffp memory project works out of a single room in the precinct grounds. it has a precarious existence, relying on project funding. although the site is listed on the state heritage register, there is ongoing uncertainty about its future. hibberd and djuric argue that the site is a “crucible, where ideas of female immorality, criminality and insanity melded” (2013, p. 68). this view has led to the site being registered as australia’s first official “site of conscience.” the international sites of conscience movement uses places where past human rights abuses have occurred to educate people for a better future. the international coalition of sites of conscience use the mantra of “never again” but with awareness of the political implications of highlighting past conflict (ashton and wilson, 2014). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 since gaining full access to the site just days before the project launch in 2013, the pffp memory project group has managed to turn the two-storey building of what was australia’s first children’s hospital into a gallery space, hosting exhibitions and allowing artists to interpret the now-empty spaces on the second floor. there is an existing mural on the site, painted by aboriginal women in the 1980s, as well as graffiti scratched into surfaces around the site. some of the work of the memory project has been to draw attention to these marks. as well as this, the site has been used for gatherings of exinmates (known as parragirls), a conference and various community days. in may 2017 a special event will be held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the bringing them home report, acknowledging the stories of aboriginal people who spent their childhoods at parramatta. lily hibberd’s work is funded through an australian research council grant for a project titled “sentient testimony: trauma aesthetics, digital media and memories of parramatta girls home” and additional funding has been sourced from the australia council for the arts. however, the future use of the site is still uncertain. as an outcome of the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, the nsw department of family and community services is undertaking a consultation process to develop a memorial for girls abused at the parramatta girls home. despite active and continuous memory work undertaken by the pffp memory project since 2013, neither that group nor the parragirls support network, which dates back to 2005, is mentioned in the consultation report (elton consulting, 2015). the findings of the initial parramatta girls home consultation (elton consulting, 2015) echo much of the content of the pffp memory project’s and the parragirls’ websites. this suggests there is no disconnect between the groups of survivors involved in the grassroots and the government-led memory work; yet it raises the question of why the existing work at the site has not been formally taken into account. symbolic reparations in response to government inquiries the past decade has seen the increasing adoption of standardised bureaucratic approaches to commemoration, as governments have begun to understand memorial creation as a practice of symbolic reparations within a transitional justice framework. from the mid 1990s to 2004, three interrelated public inquiries were held in australia which brought to public awareness the history of institutionalisation of children in the twentieth century. the first was the inquiry by the human rights and equal opportunities commission (hreoc, now hrc) into the separation of aboriginal children from their families, with findings published in 1997 as bringing them home. the second and third were inquiries run by the australian senate which considered the history of child migration from the uk and malta; and the institutional care of children. these later inquiries resulted in the 2001 report lost innocents (scar, 2001) and 2004 forgotten australians (scar, 2004). there are strong similarities between the approach used in each of these inquiries (and their reports) and the truth commissions that have been used in post-conflict societies around the world since the 1970s. the two senate inquiries resulted in recommendations that public memorials be created as a form of symbolic reparation for survivors. this is another practice of transitional justice. the soon-to-be-completed royal commission into child sexual abuse has already spurred a number of memorial projects instigated by coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 individual institutions or state governments, such as the parramatta memorial mentioned above. the western australian memorial to child migrants, created in 2004, is one of several around the country created in response to the recommendations of lost innocents. the memorial takes the form of a figurative sculpture by joan walsh smith and charles smith, depicting two young children, a boy and a girl, standing with their suitcases near the edge of the fremantle wharf. the location is significant, because this is close to where many of the children arrived in australia. the girl clutches her luggage, looking down, while the boy places a reassuring hand on her shoulder. a statement by former wa community development minister sheila mchale (2004) says the expression on the children’s faces is of “awe and wonder.” in contrast, a former child migrant explained to me that the sculpture represented her sense of being “lost and bewildered.” she said when she first saw the memorial, “i cried because it was such a vivid reminder of when i first set foot in australia.” the memorial is near the entry to the wa maritime museum, which also hosts the wa welcome wall, a series of glass and metal panels that cover the entry courtyard. they attempt to give an overview of the history of australian migration through telling a few personal stories and giving some historical background. any migrant can pay to have their name added to the wall. however, similar to the listing of names on a war memorial, which removes distinctions of rank or length of service, this individualising of the migration experience serves to mask inequalities. convicts, free settlers, displaced persons, assisted migrants and skilled workers are all given equal space. the child migrants memorial, set slightly apart, raises the profile of the child migrants within all the other groups of migrants arriving in australia. the institutional authority of the museum lends weight to the state’s acknowledgement of the loss and trauma involved in this particular migration experience. the term ‘reparation’ holds within it the idea of repair. in the context of human rights abuse, it suggests the idea of ‘healing’ or ‘making whole’ individuals and nations. one of the risks, however, is that this association encourages memorial designers to aim for a sense of ‘closure’ that does not allow acknowledgement of ongoing suffering. a child migrants’ committee was involved in the memorial selection process, and submitted a number of suggestions for appropriate plaques that included poetry by former migrants themselves. however, a more prosaic form of words was eventually agreed. two plaques lie side by side, one of which contains the dedication of the memorial while the other gives details of the artists. the text on the acknowledgement plaque reads: this memorial is jointly funded by the commonwealth and western australian governments and is dedicated to the british and maltese boys and girls who left their homelands to brave an unknown future in western australia. hardships were endured, benefits were derived. these child migrants provided valuable contributions to australian society in diverse ways as parents, workers and citizens. australia is better for their coming. although the memorial acknowledges the child migrants’ experience, the plaque works to place it firmly in the past, rather than presenting it as an experience that continues to have impacts and implications in the present. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 charles smith and joan walsh-smith, commemorative sculpture to the child migrants, 2004, fremantle, western australia. photo: alison atkinson-phillips. conclusion memorials that commemorate lived experience are a new form of commemoration that has developed in australia over the past 30 years. these memorials differ from traditional memorials in their focus on shared experiences, rather than the commemoration of death. many memorials to lived experience commemorate human rights violations, and their growing popularity is connected to the rise of human rights discourse and the adoption of transitional justice approaches to addressing past wrongs. this paper has explored four australian examples of memorials to lived experience. the “reasons to remember” wall of plaques at the adelaide migration museum incorporates a variety of different stories of shared trauma. the museum lends its cultural authority to community groups, allowing their stories to be incorporated into the story of australia. the kings park “garden of remembrance” similarly demonstrates that lived experiences of trauma are increasingly treated with the same seriousness as death. this mourning space demonstrates the importance communities of memory place on having public acknowledgement of their grief and public places in which to do their grieving. the pffp memory project is an example of what can happen when communities of memory move from creating spaces to share their personal stories, to addressing the political context in which their suffering occurred. as an act of witness citizenship, the pffp memory project aims to expand the community of memory that understands and shares the burden of the history of australia’s institutionalisation of women and children. finally, the international coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 proliferation of transitional justice approaches to historical injustice has led to the australian government funding memorials as a means of redress for past human rights abuses. the highly bureaucratic processes by which they are created constrain the way the story can be told. nonetheless, they are often welcomed by survivors, who are able to use them to claim legitimacy for their own stories. in each of these examples, individuals and groups have had to engage with existing community and government processes in order to have input into the creation of these memorials. they have also had to both work with and subvert existing identity narratives to have their stories told. memorials do many things. they enable marginalised people to have their stories publicly acknowledged, and they create spaces where disenfranchised mourners can have their grief legitimised. they create spaces where communities of memory can gather and they help to reclaim spaces of pain. nevertheless, memorials cannot mend the brokenness of the past. one memorial cannot do everything; sometimes, that means one event or experience needs to be commemorated in more than one way. although national or state memorials are often appreciated by survivors as a way of acknowledging their experience, they rarely provide an appropriate mourning function. that kind of work seems to be best done at the site of the loss or trauma, and often involves a process of reclamation. memory work creates and strengthens communities of memory, leading to productive conversations about what will best serve their needs. references ashton, p., & hamilton, p. 2008. places of the heart: memorials, public history and the state in australia since 1960. public history review, 15, 1-29. ---. 2010. history at the crossroads: australians and the past, sydney: halstead press. ashton, p., hamilton, p., & searby, r. 2012. places of the heart: memorials in australia, melbourne: australian scholarly publishing. ashton, p., & wilson, j. z. 2014. sites of conscience: remembering disappearance, execution, imprisonment, murder, slavery and torture. in: ashton, p. & wilson, j. z. (eds.) silent system, ix-xiv. melbourne: australian scholarly publishing. buckley-zistel, s., & schafer, s. (eds.) 2014. memorials in times of transition, cambridge, antwerp and portland: intersentia. bulbeck, c. 1991. remembering ourselves. meanjin, 50, 406-414. darian-smith, k., & pascoe, c. (eds.) 2013. children, childhood and cultural heritage, london and newyork: routledge. doka, k. j. 1989. disenfranchised grief: recognizing hidden sorrow, lexington, ma: lexington books. doss, e. 2010. memorial mania: public feeling in america, chicago & london: university of chicago press. elton consulting. 2015. parramatta girls home memorial: consultation summary report. http://www.facs.nsw.gov.au/_data/assets/file/0007/331576/ parramatta-girls-home-memorial-consultation-summary-report.pdf. http://www.facs.nsw.gov.au/_data/assets/file/0007/331576/parramatta-girls-home-memorial-consultation-summary-report.pdf http://www.facs.nsw.gov.au/_data/assets/file/0007/331576/parramatta-girls-home-memorial-consultation-summary-report.pdf coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 finnimore, c. 2006. grief, protest and public history: the memorial wall in the migration museum, adelaide. museums australia national conference: exploring dynamics: citics, cultural spaces, communitites. brisbane. gòmez-barris, m. 2010. witness citizenship: the place of villa grimaldi in chilean memory. sociological forum, 25, 27-46. hamber, b., ševčenko, l., & naidu, e. 2010. utopian dreams or practical possibilities? the challenges of evaluating the impact of memorialization in societies in transition. international journal of transitional justice, 4, 397-420. hibberd, l. 2014. making future memory. in: ashton, p. & wilson, j.z. (eds) silent system: forgotten australians and the institutionalisation of women and children, 103-115. melbourne: australian scholarly publishing. hibberd, l., & djuric, b. 2013. art after oblivion: the parramatta female factory precinct memory project. artlink, 33, 68-71. human rights and equal opportunities commission. 1997. bringing them home: report of the national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and torres strait islander children from their families. sydney. inglis, k. s. 2008. sacred places: war memorials in the australian landscape, melbourne: melbourne university press. kansteiner, w. 2002. finding meaning in memory: a methodological critique of collective memory studies. history and theory, 41, 179-197. klep, k. 2012. tracing collective memory: chilean truth commissions and memorial sites. memory studies, 5, 259-269. mchale, s. 2004. memorial for former child migrants. media statement, https://www.mediastatements.wa.gov.au/pages/gallop/2004/12/memorial-forformer-child-migrants.aspx. monument australia. 2016. monument australia, electronic database. http://monumentaustralia.org.au. naidu, e. 2004. symbolic reparations: a fractured opportunity. johannesburg: centre for the study of violence and reconciliation. place of reflection. 2011. official launch, video recording, perth. rothberg, m. 2009. multidirectional memory: remembering the holocaust in the age of decolonization, stanford: stanford university press. senate community affairs reference committee. 2001. lost innocents: righting the record. report on child migration. canberra: commonwealth of australia. ---. 2004. forgotten australians: a report on australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children. canberra: commonwealth of australia. szekeres, v. 2011. the past is a dangerous place: the museum as a safe haven. in: lehrer, e., milton, c. e. & patterson, m. e. (eds.) curating difficult knowledge: violent pasts in public places, 41-54. new york: palgrave macmillan. tumarkin, m. 2005. traumascapes: the power and fate of places transformed by tragedy, melbourne: melbourne university press. violi, p. 2012. trauma site museums and politics of memory: tuol sleng, villa grimaldi and the bologna ustica museum. theory, culture & society, 29, 36-75. vanish inc. 2012., senate enquiry into forced adoptions, submission no.160 to the commonwealth contribution to former forced adoption policies and practices., parliament of australia, canberra. http://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_ http://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/committees/senate/community_affairs/completed_inquiries/2010-13/commcontribformerforcedadoption/submissions coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 business/committees/senate/community_affairs/completed_inquiries/2010-13/ commcontribformerforcedadoption/submissions. alison atkinson-phillips is a research associate with the oral history collective at newcastle university (uk). in 2017 she completed her phd thesis, titled “reasons to remember: public memorials to lived experiences of loss in australia, 1985-2015,” through the australian centre for public history, university of technology, sydney, and was awarded a postdoctoral transition fellowship at uts in the same year. alison was until recently an honorary research fellow at the university of western australian and is an affiliated researcher for the mapping historical dialogues research project, http://historicaldialogues.org/mhdp/. http://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/committees/senate/community_affairs/completed_inquiries/2010-13/commcontribformerforcedadoption/submissions http://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/committees/senate/community_affairs/completed_inquiries/2010-13/commcontribformerforcedadoption/submissions https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/qv1bbasxvm48sy?domain=historicaldialogues.org coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 australia’s greatest moral challenge? justin dabner james cook university justin.dabner@jcu.edu.au copyright©2016 justin dabner. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract. australians are amongst the highest per capita emitters of carbon on earth. the evidence is now clear that climate change will terribly impact all living things. as the window of opportunity to prevent this closes the country prevaricates on the need to act, rather deferring the cost to future generations. key words: australia, climate change, emissions trading scheme introduction as a country australia has faced, and continues to face, many moral challenges. the treatment of the first australians, of refugees, of non-european immigrants, of same sex orientated individuals continue to test the moral fabric of the community and its political representatives. unfortunately paranoia, xenophobia and plain ignorance overly-dominate the community’s response to these challenges. with politicians focused on short-term election cycles, too much regard is placed on focus groups and, even, shock-jocks, in the formulation of government policy. it seems that ben chifley’s light on the hill burns ever so dimly for many marginalised australians. as important as these moral challenges are it is a far different one that a recent prime minister described as australia’s “greatest” moral challenge. it is a challenge that if australia, and the rest of the world, does not respond to then the existence of the earth itself is imperilled. it is probably in this respect then that the prime minister was expressing that it was the greatest. if australia does not meet this challenge then how it responds to all those others may be irrelevant. it is climate change. the evidence is clear that the current rate of emission of greenhouse gases will have terrible implications for life on earth.1 the window to minimise the impact is rapidly closing. yet australians prevaricate. some of the wealthiest and most highly educated peoples on earth, mailto:justin.dabner@jcu.edu.au coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 who could readily respond to the crisis, but, rather, remain at the top of the world´s list of emitters of greenhouse gases. this is more astounding given that as the driest continent and home to the world’s largest coral reef, a national icon, and with 85% of the population coastal dwellers, australia stands to be affected by climate change more than any other country. any other country, that is, with the exception of those that will simply cease to exist being submerged under water. this paper traces australia´s response to climate change over the last decade of (apparent) political consensus on the scientific evidence. it critiques the latest policy directed at curbing greenhouse emissions. the paper does not seek to explain why australians seem so reluctant to rise to the challenge but does illustrate some of the considerations that have influenced the design of the policy and explain its limitations. ultimately, it may be that this reluctance can only be attributed to the power of vested interests in influencing public opinion and a failure of political leadership. climate change and the world’s response during the early 1970s scientists first began to reach a consensus that the climate was warming as a result of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, most likely arising from human activity. international agreement on the need to respond to this change in climate took another twenty years. in rio de janeiro, brazil in 1992, 166 countries signed the united nations framework convention on climate change (“unfccc”) agreeing to work towards stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. this convention set no mandatory limits but in december 1997 the parties adopted the kyoto protocol, under which developed countries collectively committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below 1990 levels during 2008 to 2012. working alongside the kyoto protocol have been the united nations climate change conferences. since the 2010 session at cancun (mexico), countries have pledged to limit or reduce their emissions. these countries include australia, which has pledged to reduce its emissions by 5% compared with 2000 levels by 2020. whilst it is difficult to compare the various pledges, australia’s climate commission had suggested that australia’s commitment was broadly comparable to other countries, in particular the targets of the united states, japan, europe and china. whilst the consensus on the science of global warming is now almost unanimous, in the early 1990s it was still contested, both as to whether warming was, in fact occurring, and, indeed, whether it could be attributed to human actions. in the absence of a definitive answer the unfccc adopted the pre-cautionality principle. if humankind is to blame then the consequences of not reducing emissions carries too many risks. the burden of proof that our actions are not harmful then falls to those alleging it. once it is accepted that human induced emissions must be reduced then how can this be achieved given the energy needs of modern society? first, governments can embrace command and control regulatory measures, such as prohibitions on, or phase out of, particular energy sources, energy efficiency mandates, the setting of renewable energy targets and the promotion coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 of measures to capture greenhouse gases before they are emitted. public transport can be promoted, community energy conservation education programs implemented and subsidies and incentives provided to both businesses in the development of renewable energy sources and consumers in the take up of energy efficient products. these policies focusing on reducing energy consumption and embracing renewable energy tend to be less controversial. somewhat more controversial are programs directed at the sequestration of already emitted carbon, such as trapping carbon emissions underground and, more commonly, the planting of trees. scepticism remains as to whether, and to what extent, such programs can be effective. forestry plans run the risk that all can be undone by wild fires, a particular risk with the prognosis of more, and more intensive, wild fires into the future. by far the most controversial response is the proposal to place a price on carbon emissions. whilst such an approach is viewed as the most cost effective, in a globalised market, the central controversy with such a measure is the potential to drive industry offshore to escape the competitive disadvantage generated by the added cost burden. in carbon pricing parlance the expression “carbon leakage” has been coined to refer to the phenomenon where origin based carbon pricing leads to a reorientation of carbon emitting activities away from countries that price carbon to destinations that do not. for those countries that look to implement a carbon pricing mechanism, essentially there are two choices: a tax on carbon emissions or a market mechanism whereby a cap is placed on the amount of carbon that the country should emit (in line with its ultimate goal of achieving its international obligations) and permits to emit carbon can be traded. under such a “cap and trade” system, or emissions trading scheme (“ets”), permits might be auctioned off by the government. furthermore, entities trapping carbon might be rewarded with permits they could trade. the respective advantages and disadvantages of these alternative approaches have been the subject of much debate, one which it is not appropriate to engage in this paper. suffice to say that a major deficiency in the carbon tax approach is the lack of a cap – conceivably the amount of carbon emissions could stay the same or even rise with the added cost simply passed on to consumers. the setting of the tax rate (the carbon price) would also be problematic for governments. too low and nothing is achieved. too high and the economy might be harmed. whilst a market based “cap and trade” scheme avoids these limitations, such regimes suffer from the unknown and complexity. the negative impact on investment planning arising from the uncertainty as to the future carbon price, difficulties in fairly allocating carbon permits and the potential for speculation and corrupt market practices also have the potential to derail their effectiveness. in the absence of a global co-ordinated regime either mechanism has to deal with the international environment. carbon leakage, as described above, is a real threat. one policy response is to introduce a border adjustment tax that seeks to tax the underlying amount of emissions inherent in imports from destinations without pricing mechanisms. apart from the obvious difficulties, in setting the rate of tax and identifying the amount of indirect carbon emissions, there is a concern that such taxes may violate international trade rules, in particular, the general agreement on tariffs and trade (the “gatt”). coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 for an ets a further issue is as to whether and what permits issued by foreign countries should be recognized. if foreign carbon markets are not available to domestic entities then a higher domestic market price compared to other countries (as would be expected if other markets were larger) might lead to carbon leakage. however, recognizing foreign permits exposes the country to integrity issues which might be problematic for its carbon regulator to resolve. year zero in australian climate change policy until the mid-2000s australia was in a convenient denial on climate change. since 1996 a conservative government had been in place, championed by climate change sceptics. any grand plan to reduce emissions was seen as an unnecessary intrusion into the australian way of life and impacting on the country’s all important coal industry. after all, as a relatively small country in terms of population, the global impact of any emissions reductions would be negligible. thus, along with the us, australia stubbornly refused to ratify the kyoto protocol or establish a comprehensive greenhouse gas reduction strategy. australia would not act until everyone else did. however 2007 was to be year zero for climate change response in australia. public sentiment was changing and the government was forced to react. following a report by the prime ministerial task group on emissions trading, the government committed the country to an ets. the labor opposition party had also commissioned the garnaut climate change review earlier in the year. the result was that both major parties went to the november 2007 election with a promise to introduce carbon trading. the subsequent election of a labor government was viewed as a mandate to deal with climate change, with the new prime minister issuing the greatest moral challenge statement. thus one of the government’s first acts was to ratify the kyoto protocol and make the pledge that australia would reduce its emissions by 5% by 2020. the introduction of an ets was to be australia’s primary response to its moral responsibility. however, this was not to be so easy. the public consultation process dragged on throughout 2008 and 2009. in the absence of control in the senate the government needed to negotiate to ensure passage of its legislation. against this political reality the government introduced a bill into parliament in may 2009 to enact its ets termed the “carbon pollution reduction scheme”. however as a negotiated compromise the scheme failed the expectations of environmentalists nor was it acceptable to industry. there were too many exclusions, free permits and a particular problematic feature allowing for the acquisition of cheap permits from the developing world. furthermore, uncertainties remained and the complexity of the regime made it difficult to sell to the community. a foreshadowed low fixed permit price of aud$10 per tonne in the first year of operation raised doubts as to whether it would achieve its environmental objectives. nevertheless, successful negotiations with the leader of the liberal coalition in november 2009 seemed to ensure the safe passage of the bill. however the inability of the opposition leader malcolm turnbull to convince his party saw him imprudently issue an ultimatum leading to him being replaced as leader by tony abbott. abbott, a professed climate change sceptic, led the senate to reject the bill for a second time. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 whilst the bill was reintroduced into parliament in 2010, public weariness of the issue, together with reluctance to impose a cost on the economy during a period of continuing global economic instability, induced prime minister rudd to announce that the introduction of an ets would be deferred until such time as greater world consensus was reached. his subsequent inability to achieve passage of an equally controversial piece of legislation enacting a special mining tax was to see him replaced as leader in june 2010. reading the community’s fatigue with the issue his successor, prime minister gillard, went to the august election on a no carbon tax platform. with the opposition leader publicly doubting the science of climate change, both major australian political parties had dramatically retreated from a policy to impose a price on carbon in three short years. a highly popular prime minister and well regarded leader of the liberal coalition had been dethroned in the process. nevertheless, a swing against the government was to see it only retain office with the help of independents and the greens. carbon pricing was now back on the agenda and as part of the power sharing agreement a multi-party climate change committee was established to determine the exact way this would be delivered. fundamental design issues had to be negotiated in a highly charged atmosphere. business and right wing lobby groups were fuelling the attacks by the opposition party. pledges in blood that the regime would be repealed when they were returned to office, calls for a national plebiscite and attempts to arrest power from the government in the lower house were all part of the attack. on the other side, environmental lobby groups were demanding a price that internalized the full cost of carbon pollution and an end to contradictory policies (such as assistance to polluting industries). even actor, most famously cate blanchett, and state politicians entered into the fray. in this environment, the government’s primary mechanism for galvanizing community support and introducing credible evidence to support its policy, the climate commission, was largely drowned out by emotional rhetoric. nevertheless, in february 2011 the prime minister announced the broad features of a resurrected ets to commence 1 july 2012 with the aim to reduce emissions by 160 million tonnes per annum by the year 2020. emissions trading scheme circa 2012 the 2012 ets had the following broad features (including those not implemented before repeal):2  entities emitting 25,000 tonnes or more of co2e annually were to acquire and surrender an eligible emissions unit (“eeu”) per tonne of emissions from facilities over which they have operational control (with no caps imposed until 2014).  entities were to report carbon emissions for a financial year to the clean energy regulator (“cer”) whose function was to ensure the accuracy of these reports and impose penalties if insufficient eeus were surrendered.  from 1 july 2014 fixed price eeus were to be replaced by a “cap and trade” ets with annual caps on emissions set five years in advance.  following the fixed price period eeus were to be allocated by auction in most cases. no eeus from the fixed price period were to be carried over to the full ets. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23  australian carbon credit units generated through the carbon farming offset scheme could be acquired and used to satisfy emissions obligations.  emissions intensive trade exposed (“eite”) industries received free units covering up to 94.5% of their liability during the fixed price period. free eeus were also issued to coal-fired electricity suppliers and tax cuts, pension increases and other compensatory government payments were implemented by way of household and small business assistance.  the agricultural sector was exempted. gasoline was also exempted but large diesel and jet fuel users were subject to increases in excise taxes. linkage with the european union (“eu”) shortly after the scheme came into effect it was announced that it would be fully linked to the eu ets by 1 july 2018. as an interim measure, from the commencement of trading under the australian ets, entities would be able to purchase eu allowances to satisfy their domestic obligations. to facilitate linking the government’s plan to implement a floor price in the ets was dropped. this was controversial. price parameters provided some certainty for business planning. furthermore, there was also a risk that the eu allowances would continue to price carbon much lower than the australian government forecasts, forcing down the auction price for australian government issued allowances and thereby adversely impacting revenue streams to the government. a lower price would also translate to a lower incentive to reduce emissions hence impacting the environmental objectives of the regime. the government continued to propose a price ceiling as a cost containment measure, although it would be set by reference to the expected price of eu allowances. as a final concession to the eu, with australian entities between 2015 and 2020 able to source 50% of their required allowances from international sources (rising to 100% from 2020), under the agreement to link a new 12.5% sub-limit was to apply to kyoto units. 3 this made it more likely that australian entities wishing to acquire international allowances would source them from the eu. furthermore, it provided some additional protection against the availability of so-called “hot air” allowances (primarily excessive allowances issued to former soviet bloc countries) asserting downwards pressure on the carbon price. the politics of implementation: price setting, exclusions and compensation the australian regime was the product of a political bargain. although based on the eu regime, numerous qualifications were included diluting its environmental effectiveness. the rationale for how the fundamental elements of the regime were arrived can be attempted as follows: coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 carbon tax or emissions trading scheme as observed earlier, carbon pricing can be accomplished by either a carbon tax or a market mechanism. the regime was a hybrid, initially operating as a fixed price regime under which the required permits would be purchased from the government and immediately surrendered. from 1 july 2014 (brought forward from 1 july 2015 as initially proposed) it was intended that emissions caps would be imposed, permits auctioned off and trading expected to commence. this reflected a view that australia needed to be part of a global market for carbon permits that the then government hoped would exist by 2014. interim operation as a fixed price avoided the potential negative impact from price volatility, which was a particular risk during the postkyoto framework negotiations. the carbon price this hybrid nature of the regime required the government to set the initial price. business interests referred to the price at which carbon permits were trading in europe (then around aud$15) whilst environmentalists pointed to the government’s own treasury estimates that a price around aud$131 per tonne was necessary to meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets. ultimately, the price of aud$23 for the first year, rising at 2.5% in real terms per annum, was selected as a compromise. this approximated the garnaut climate change report recommendation, although that price was envisaged for a scheme where no free permits were issued. large emitter threshold the regime applied to “large” emitters, specified as entities that emitted 25,000 tonnes of co2e annually. although this would only affect around 294 entities, the government estimated that this should account for around 60% of australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. the logic behind the threshold was to not burden smaller emitters with the cost and administration imposed by the regime, although those close to the threshold were required to verify that their emissions did not exceed it. exemption for the agricultural sector the agricultural sector was exempted albeit that it is the country’s third largest emitter. various justifications for this were given including the difficulty of measuring emissions on farms, the fact that the industry is a price taker and could not pass on the added costs and that the concession was necessary to obtain the support of the independents on whom the government relied. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 emissions intensive trade exposed (“eite”) industries eite industries (such as steel, aluminium, zinc and glass production) received substantial assistance in the form of free units (although this assistance was to gradually taper off at 1.3% per annum). the natural gas, coal and electricity generation industries also received assistance. the level of assistance to industry was controversial. whilst the rationale was to allow economically significant high emitting industries time to introduce measures to reduce their exposure and prevent carbon leakage it clearly had the potential to lead to windfall gains to these industries and increase the need for emissions reductions elsewhere in the economy to meet the country’s international commitments. in particular, the garnaut climate change report had strongly argued against concessions of this type. however the alternative of a border adjustment mechanism to tackle carbon leakage was equally problematic, suffering from legal uncertainty in terms of compliance with gatt principles, administrative costs, calculation difficulties and the potential to lead to international trade disputes and protectionism. in the absence of international agreement on such mechanisms, the free allocation of units was the preferred approach to counter carbon leakage. compensation and managing price rises whilst the government acknowledged, and indeed it was the rationale for the scheme, that the price of certain products would rise, the australian competition and consumer commission (“accc”) was to take action against any price gouging claimed falsely to be as a result of the introduction of the regime. certainly it was anticipated that the price of electricity would rise but businesses intending on passing on additional costs to consumers were required to be able to substantiate that this was a result of the carbon price. given the potential for the electricity price rises to challenge the community’s resolve, a marketing offensive was initiated to defray concerns as to the significance of the carbon price on electricity prices vis-à-vis the government compensation provided. although the opposition mounted a scare program in the lead up to 1 july 2012, price monitoring in the months following identified little impact from the ets. there were, however, a number of well publicized attempts to profit gouge blaming the carbon tax identified by the accc.4 there were also businesses that were rumoured to have sacked workers, closed down or moved offshore in response partly, at least, to the introduction of the measures, with small business reportedly particularly affected due to their apparent inability to be able to pass on the additional costs.5 the politics of repeal all etss compromise between environmental integrity and cost containment. this renders an ets open to attack from two opposing fronts. depending on the perspective of the analyst, the australian ets could be criticised for favouring one position over the other. the initial fixed price of aud$23was an obvious flash point. even on the government’s own analysis at this price there was insufficient financial imperative to steer the economy towards a renewable coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 energy future. yet those opposed to the regime argued that the price on carbon was damaging the economy. stung by these attacks, in its september 2013 election platform the government brought forward the proposed linking with the eu by a year, to 1 july 2014, arguing that the availability of the lower priced eu credits would reduce the cost burden on australian emitters. of course this would also further impact on the environmental credentials of the scheme. the low price imposed on carbon was exacerbated by other design features that detracted from the effectiveness of the scheme in reducing emissions. notable of these was the limited application of the regime to just 294 big polluters, the exclusions for some industries and sectors (notably agriculture), the free units for trade exposed high polluting entities and the massive household compensation scheme that saw 90% of households receiving some compensation.6 meanwhile the opposition maintained its promise that it would repeal the ets. however, although this introduction of political risk into the renewable energy investment equation impacted on the emerging clean energy industry, there was scepticism as to whether the threat would be carried out. for one, it would need control of both houses of parliament which was highly unlikely. furthermore, given that an agreement had been reached with the eu to link the regimes it appeared inconceivable that australia could now, unilaterally, withdraw from this commitment. the need to unwind the compensation arrangements for business and households also rendered repeal a challenging proposition. nevertheless, in july 2014, ten months after the election of the new conservative government, repeal legislation was successfully negotiated through the upper house. the delay was attributed to the control of the upper house by the greens until 1 july 2014. with the reversion of control to a minority party financed and controlled by mining magnate clive palmer, the government was able to negotiate its removal. bizarrely palmer, who had only recently been heralded by al gore in a high profile joint media appearance in australia, insisted that as part of the agreement a now aimless climate change authority be retained to conduct a review into whether australia should implement an ets in the future! ultimately, the demise of the regime might substantially be attributed to the perceived dishonesty of prime minister gillard in breaking her pre-election promise not to impose a carbon tax. this was played upon by conservative forces within the media and the opposition who also played up concerns about australia’s waning international competitiveness, attributing it to carbon pricing. the protective cost containment features of the regime, and dire predictions of science, were overshadowed by the political rhetoric of impending economic armageddon. the emissions reduction fund the new government had demonstrated a deft hand at negative politics in the manner in which it demonised the ets for its political gain. however, as it had given bipartisan support for australia’s international undertakings to reduce emissions it needed an alternative policy to achieve this. for a conservative government, a carbon tax was out of the question. the policy, that eventuated, it terms “direct action.” this policy has, at its core, the emissions reduction coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 fund (“erf”), a scheme to provide government assistance to industry to encourage a reduction in emissions. the erf builds on the carbon credits (carbon farming initiative) act 2011 (“cfi”). the cfi is an offset scheme under which australian carbon credit units (“accus”) are issued in relation to projects securing verifiable emissions reductions or carbon sequestration pursuant to approved methodologies. these methodologies have focused on land sector projects, such as methane trapping from landfill and piggeries and the devotion of farming land to reafforestation. whilst the scheme has its critics,7 under the erf amendments this scheme is extended to a wider range of activities allowing industry to participate. in the absence of an ets generated market in which to sell accus, participants in the erf submit approved proposals to the clean energy regulator (“cer”) to reduce emissions identifying a per tonne co2e cost. the cer holds reverse auctions whereby it will undertake to fund those projects below an undisclosed price. the successful bidders enter into “abatement contracts” and undertake to deliver the emissions reductions (or alternatively accus generated by other projects) at their bid price. the government funds the acquisitions from an earmarked aud$2.55billion fund. the rationale is that those proposals resulting in the lowest abatement cost will be funded first. the absence of any mandatory cap imposed on emissions by this scheme creates the risk that these reductions may be offset by increases in emissions elsewhere in the economy. accordingly, there is a safeguard mechanism that is to apply from 1 july 2016. under this mechanism entities with direct emissions in excess of 100,000 tonnes co2e per annum have an emissions cap imposed. entities that breach their cap are able to purchase accus from other entities in lieu of paying a penalty. whilst this policy is expressly not premised on carbon pricing, in fact, by virtue of the reverse auctions and the obligations on successful bidders under their abatement contracts, together with the caps on large emitters, it is likely that a secondary market will exist. however, the depth of this market is unlikely to be that significant, at least in the short term, given the weak emissions caps with baselines set using the highest level of historical direct emissions over a five year period. these are further weakened by the ability for entities to average emissions out over three years and new and expanding activities receive additional flexible treatment. exceptional circumstances exemptions also exist together with baseline setting concessions for the mining, oil and gas industry and the electricity industry. that the government watered down the safeguarding mechanism was probably to be expected given that it was forced to implement it as part of its agreement to ensure passage of its legislation. the government has, however, committed to review the erf, including the safeguard mechanism, in 2017 at which time it could be strengthened depending on how well australia is travelling to meet its emissions reductions obligations. given the government’s fundamental complaint against the former ets that it damaged australia’s international competitiveness the review may well amount to a whitewash. the new government had also criticised the ets for recognising foreign emissions units on the basis that this resulted in australia paying for emissions reductions overseas. this argument ignored the reality that emissions do not know national borders and that, furthermore, global emissions could be more cost effectively reduced where reductions occur in countries where coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 the marginal cost of abatement was lowest. it does explain though why the erf scheme does not allow for the purchase of foreign units. will the erf succeed in securing the committed emissions reductions? the government states that the erf will reduce emissions by the necessary 131 million tonnes per annum by 2020 to meet australia’s international commitments.8 however commentary on the erf has been universally negative.9 the cost of abatement has been identified as higher than both a carbon tax or ets and the fund set aside to acquire accus inadequate to ensure that australia meets its undertakings. these criticisms evidence an essential design flaw in the scheme. for the erf to generate sufficient incentive to encourage industry to innovate to reduce emissions the price offered by the cer must be sufficiently high. however, if the price is too high then the regulator will not be able to afford to fund the necessary number of proposals. with the second auction held in november 2015 a price signal has been established at aud$12.25. at this price it would be expected that few businesses are likely to be encouraged to participate yet, given the amount of abatement secured at the auction prices to date, the fund will not be adequate to meet australia’s emissions reduction commitment.10 are the environmental credentials of the erf robust? the key to registration of a project under the erf is compliance with an approved methodology. these methodologies identify the implementation, measurement and monitoring activities necessary to generate credits. they may even specify whether “additionality” is made out, which otherwise is stated as a further consideration for project approval. additionality is the necessity for projects rewarded under an offsets scheme to achieve additional emissions reductions from what may have occurred in any event. this requirement has been a much debated element of the kyoto clean development mechanism (“cdm”) where stringent additionality requirements have been identified as making it too difficult to have a project accepted. however, in the absence of a robust rule, business as usual reductions would be rewarded with no environmental benefit. the cfi stated its additionality requirement in terms that a project had to demonstrate that the reductions went beyond what was “common practice” for the industry and were not required by another legislative scheme (former s 41 of the cfi act 2011). under the erf this requirement has been replaced with a three new tests contained in s 27(4a):  newness requirement: the project must not have “begun to be implemented” (as defined) when the application for registration is made.  regulatory additionality requirement: the project must not be required to be carried out under another government law.  government program requirement: the project must be unlikely to be carried out under another government scheme. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 complementing the three tests the offsets integrity standards (the basis upon which methodologies are approved) have been amended to include a requirement that the emissions reductions would have been unlikely to have occurred in the ordinary course of events (s 133(1)(a)) the removal of the focus on additionality from the project approval stage to the methodology approval is likely calculated to have the effect of making project registration less onerous. it would also seem that the change in wording from beyond “common practice” to “unlikely to have occurred” may have also been designed to relax the requirement but whether this is indeed the case will depend on the subsequent approach of the regulator. certainly the white paper and the explanatory memorandum to the amending legislation both make it clear that the amendments are intended to make it easier for projects to be registered. a number of requirements are (also) relaxed such as rules relating to the aggregation of projects, restrictions on clearing native forests, the need for proposals to be supported by peer reviewed scientific evidence, the time required for public consultation over new methods and the need for a project to be approved by the offsets integrity committee (now removed to the minister).11 there is also an opportunity to reduce the permanence obligation in the context of carbon sequestration from 100 years to 25 years. as noted, the consensus amongst economists is that the erf is an inferior measure in terms of delivering emissions reductions compared to an ets. however, it is to be observed that the scheme does establish a price signal and envisages a secondary market operating for accus. whilst the voluntary project focused nature of the scheme reduces its impact compared to an economy wide ets, the mandatory nature of the safeguarding mechanism has the potential to deliver greater benefits for the environment. although the safeguard mechanism offers some hope as a form of ets notably it is in the nature of a baseline and credit mechanism. such mechanisms are generally viewed as second best to a cap-and-trade ets due to the administrative demands in setting individual baselines. the process of setting these baselines is open to rorting and influence. where the baselines might be set as a product of output and the emissions intensity factor of the items or services produced (an option under the ers), the price of emissions intensive products is left unaffected, thereby not presenting any demand side pressure to reduce emissions that a cap-and-trade ets can deliver. furthermore, the mechanism only applies to facilities with emissions greater than 100,000 tonnes per annum and the already weak caps are not decreasing over time as might normally be expected. conclusion some climate scientists depressingly refer to the debate over how best to reduce emissions as the “irrelevant discourse”.12 it is all too late and rather we should be considering how we will adapt to a very different world. in australia the debate has taken irrelevancies to an extreme level. once the country had decided that climate change was real and a response was needed then it might have been expected that attention would focus on the best policy measures to address it. indeed, this was our greatest moral challenge! with the world’s economists supporting a carbon price, a responsible government might adopt the experts’ advice. then there would certainly be room for argument as to whether a carbon tax or ets was the best way forward, with the former more consistent with a green philosophy and the later with a more business friendly government. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 this debate has never happened in australia. rather the focus has been on matters such as whether prime minister gillard lied and the nomenclature of a proposed measure, whether it was a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme. the views of conservative commentators, with no science expertise, have dominated the debate as to whether the earth is actually warming and whether humans are to blame. with the liberal opposition running a successful scare campaign on the ets to assist it to get into office, its natural policy measure was unavailable when grafting a climate change strategy. instead the inferior erf, a bureaucracy driven business subsidy measure, funded by tax revenue, has been implemented in lieu of a market based mechanism. a peculiar response for a free market orientated government. where there was some debate on the features of the ets, the unfortunate reality is that the true facts were the first casualty. claims about its impact on trade exposed industries ignored the concessions for such industries and exemption of agriculture. claims about the cost to the community ignored the compensation handed out to families and small business. claims that etss were not being adopted elsewhere ignored developments in the us, china, korea and japan amongst others. claims that the initial carbon price was too high ignored the likely impact of linking with the eu. claims that once linked it would encourage emissions abatement overseas but not domestically ignored the reality that emissions know no jurisdictional boundaries and may be more cheaply reduced in other jurisdictions. claims that the ets caused a huge spike in energy costs ignored the other factors impacting on electricity prices, especially the increased expenditure on capital investment. the government had created a climate change commission empowered to educate and bring the community along. staffed with scientists and issuing complex reports on the need to address climate change, it was spectacularly unsuccessful vis-à-vis the misinformation propounded by the general media, much of which was on a mission to replace the government. the erf has met with robust criticism but this has not stopped the government pushing ahead. offset schemes can complement a price on carbon but only if properly designed. where the regime is weak on additionality it becomes a mere windfall for business, achieving nothing for the environment. should the scheme give rise to credits that can be traded in a carbon market these will further infect that market and impact its environmental credentials. with weak caps imposed and limited funding the erf can only be a partial response. if there is a positive from this sorry saga it is that had australia continued with an ets and linked with europe then it may have been locked into a flawed regime, achieving little in terms of emissions reductions. the politics of implementation of the ets placed cost containment over environmental integrity, illustrated by the low initial fixed carbon price, number of exemptions and the extent of free permits issued to high emitting trade exposed entities. the decision to link with the known problematic eu regime was also predicated on cost containment, as well as a measure against market manipulation and an attempt to secure legitimacy for the regime. however, although the theory is that a global market will ensure a cheaper cost of abatement and engage the undeveloped world, the low global price to which australia was to link was, arguably, attributable to market failure arising from the oversupply of permits and offsets in the early years of the scheme and unambitious reduction targets exacerbated by the global financial crisis that saw emissions fall. in the absence of a floor price or, at least, greater limits on the use of foreign permits, australia was set to contract the european contagion. coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 although the emissions reductions sufficient to meet the country’s international commitments are likely to come at too great a cost to its taxpayers from the erf, its domestic focus quarantines australia from exposure to the problematic international carbon market, with opposition parties continuing to favour an ets, in line with the global trend, the likelihood is that the country will eventually again turn to an ets. an interim erf might then turn out to be a blessing in disguise that has saved the country from linking to a flawed scheme and provided an opportunity to learn from other´s mistakes. there may be much to commend focusing on getting a domestic scheme right rather than rushing to engage in a global market. but will the environment wait? biographical note: justin dabner is an associate professor at the law school, james cook university, cairns, australia and an adjunct research fellow in the business law and taxation, faculty of business and economics, monash university, australia. during 2012/13 he was appointed the professor of australian cultural studies at tokyo university. 1 the latest science from around the globe and what it means for the world points a bleak picture: international panel on climate change, fifth assessment report. climate change 2014. synthesis report, available at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#1 (last visited 30 july 2015). 2 the legislative package included four main bills: clean energy bill 2011 (which set up the carbon price mechanism); clean energy regulator bill 2011 (which established a regulatory body to administer the mechanism); climate change authority bill 2011 (which established a new authority to advise the government on the future design of the carbon price mechanism) and clean energy (consequential amendments) bill 2011. for discussion and analysis see: rosemary lyster, “australia's clean energy future package: are we there yet?” (2011) 28 (6) environmental and planning law journal 446. 3 the protocol established three market based mechanisms under which carbon permits might be effectively traded. initially developed countries receive an assignment of units relative to their emissions “budget” (known as assigned amount units (“aaus”). developed countries are also granted removal units (“rmus”) in relation to domestic activities resulting in the net removal of greenhouse gases. rmus and aaus may be converted into emission reduction units (“erus”), the later through a “joint implementation project”, namely a project that allows developed countries to work together by jointly implementing initiatives that reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. finally, there are certified emission reduction units (“cers”) generated from developed countries investing in projects that either reduce emissions or sequester carbon in sinks in developing countries, the socalled “clean development mechanism” designed to draw developing countries within the protocol. the intention was that cers and erus can be used by countries to comply with their emissions targets under the protocol or by operators of installations covered by domestic etss in order to meet their carbon emission obligations or can be assigned to other countries. under the australian ets it was proposed that the following international units might be used: most certified erus from cdms, erus from ji projects and rmus. furthermore, the government had stated that the types of international allowances recognized by both the eu and nz etss and the restrictions on their use would be taken into account in determining which are acceptable to australia. 4 the managing-director of one of the country’s largest bakery chains was forced to resign after a newsletter was leaked were he urged his franchises to put up prices and blame it on the carbon tax: randall jackson, “head of bakery chain resigns over carbon tax deception”, tax notes international 67 (16 july 2012): 201. also see randall jackson, “government clarifies relationship between carbon tax, gst”, tax notes international 67 (23 july 2012): 305. 5 steve lewis and lisa cornish, “carbon price unfair to small businesses”, the daily telegraph (august 20, 2012) available at http://www.news.com.au/business/your-business/carbon-pain-registers-for-businesses/storyfn9evb64-1226453653623 (last visited 31 july 2015). 6 $10.10 per week compensation for the average family as against an anticipated increase in costs of $9.90: the commonwealth of australia, securing a clean energy future: the australian government’s climate change plan. 7 the main reservations concern the science and recording of carbon sequestration in soil. colin bettles, “carbon farming initiative falls short”, farmweekly (26 july 2014) available at http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/agribusiness/general-news/carbon-farming-initiative-fallsshort/2706209.aspx?storypage=0 (last visited 23 april 2015). 8 emissions reduction fund white paper, commonwealth of australia, april 2014 available at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#1 http://www.news.com.au/business/your-business/carbon-pain-registers-for-businesses/story-fn9evb64-1226453653623 http://www.news.com.au/business/your-business/carbon-pain-registers-for-businesses/story-fn9evb64-1226453653623 http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/agribusiness/general-news/carbon-farming-initiative-falls-short/2706209.aspx?storypage=0 http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/agribusiness/general-news/carbon-farming-initiative-falls-short/2706209.aspx?storypage=0 coolabah, no.19, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/1f98a924-5946-404c-9510d440304280f1/files/emissions-reduction-fund-white-paper_0.pdf (last visited 5 may 2015). australia’s emissions in 2012 were 555 million tonnes: http://data.worldbank.org/country/australia (last visited 5 may 2015). 9 chief amongst which is the climate institute: see its report on the inadequacies of the erf at http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/submissions/emissions-reduction-fund-green-papersubmission.html/section/478 (last visited 23 april 2015). also see: emissions abatement options for australia: assessments against criteria of magnitude, cost and quality, anu climate change institute and energy change institute, canberra, april 2014 available at http://energy.anu.edu.au/files/abatement_options_report_final.pdf (last visited 23 april 2015). for recent considered media comment see: jake sturmer and lisa main, “direct action: government's $2b carbon scheme likely to fall short as first auctions approach, analysts say”, 7 news (12 april 2015) available at https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/27063861/direct-action-governments-2b-carbon-scheme-likely-to-fall-shortas-first-auctions-approach-analysts-say/ and tristan edis, “direct action: a billion-dollar party no one wants to attend?”, business spectator (14 april 2015) available at http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/14/policy-politics/direct-action-billion-dollar-party-no-onewants-attend (both last visited 23 april 2015). 10 tristan edis, “could minister hunt’s magnificent bluff come to an end?”, business spectator (23 april 2015) available at https://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/23/policy-politics/could-minister-huntsmagnificent-bluff-come-end (last visited 23 april 2015). 11 explanatory memorandum at paragraphs 1.6 to 1.9, 1.24 to 1.57, 2.7 to 2.24, 2.33 and 2.34, 2.39 and 2.40. also see chapter 2 of the commonwealth of australia, emissions reduction fund white paper, april 2014. 12 andrew glikson, the faustian bargain – while we debate the numbers, the planet suffers, the conversation (online) (27 july 2011), available at http://theconversation.com/the-faustian-bargain-while-we-debate-thenumbers-the-planet-suffers-2512 (last visited 31 july 2015). http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/1f98a924-5946-404c-9510-d440304280f1/files/emissions-reduction-fund-white-paper_0.pdf http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/1f98a924-5946-404c-9510-d440304280f1/files/emissions-reduction-fund-white-paper_0.pdf http://data.worldbank.org/country/australia http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/submissions/emissions-reduction-fund-green-paper-submission.html/section/478 http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/submissions/emissions-reduction-fund-green-paper-submission.html/section/478 http://energy.anu.edu.au/files/abatement_options_report_final.pdf https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/27063861/direct-action-governments-2b-carbon-scheme-likely-to-fall-short-as-first-auctions-approach-analysts-say/ https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/27063861/direct-action-governments-2b-carbon-scheme-likely-to-fall-short-as-first-auctions-approach-analysts-say/ http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/14/policy-politics/direct-action-billion-dollar-party-no-one-wants-attend http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/14/policy-politics/direct-action-billion-dollar-party-no-one-wants-attend https://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/23/policy-politics/could-minister-hunts-magnificent-bluff-come-end https://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/23/policy-politics/could-minister-hunts-magnificent-bluff-come-end coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 broken forms: prose poetry as hybridised genre in australia paul hetherington university of canberra paul.hetherington@canberra.edu.au cassandra atherton deakin university cassandra.atherton@deakin.edu.au copyright©2018 paul hetherington & cassandra atherton. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: traditional literary genres, such as the novel, lyric poetry and short fiction have been at the centre of australian literary practice since european colonisation. increasingly, however, australian creative writers are making use of narrative and poetic forms that do not sit comfortably within accepted genre classifications. they are doing so partly in order to respond to their encounters with fragmentation and multivalency and to register the disparate, the diverse and the ‘broken’ in postmodernity. it is possible that contemporary culture requires such literary forms in order to speak truthfully about the crises at the heart of modernity centred on identity, the interpenetration and mixing of cultures, and the need to find authentic ways of speaking. one form that crosses and destabilises genres is the prose poem. prose poetry enables intimate lyrical gestures to be joined to a limited narrative discursiveness and signals that the ‘prosaic’ and the ‘poetic’ are frequently bound together. in doing so, it challenges assumptions about what may be ‘said’ in writing, and whether much of human experience in the twenty-first century may best be expressed through the mailto:paul.hetherington@canberra.edu.au mailto:cassandra.atherton@deakin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 creation of ‘in-between’ literary spaces (and associated tropes of absence and indeterminacy), rather than through traditional generic models. using examples from contemporary australian prose poets, this paper demonstrates the way in which australian prose poetry prioritises spaces of uncertainty and anxiety to rework the british and american canon and make its own identity. keywords: prose poetry; hybrid; in-between. the conventional literary work many traditional and conventionally constructed novels, short stories, biographies and autobiographies confirm that what we know is often not what we think we know, and what we believe of ourselves is sometimes a stark illusion. if one reads anna karenina, for example, or the works of thomas hardy, george eliot, d.h. lawrence, or many other novelists, or various biographies of significant figures—for instance, richard ellmann’s magisterial 1959 biography of james joyce—one knows that human beings have always been prone to doubt, failure, misunderstanding and self-delusion. yet, although reasonably conventional narrative works of these kinds are often profound and salutary, they make use of narrative techniques that, in general terms, do not replicate the crises and uncertainties they recount. as they tell of broken lives and misplaced understandings, they employ aesthetically pleasing and often rounded plots and points of view. notwithstanding the literary innovations of modernism and postmodernism—which have tended to emphasise the registration of indeterminacy, irresolution, doubt and even the instability of textual meanings—many literary works continue to present a whole that is at least notionally complete and reasonably coherent: a summarised life, a resolved narrative, a tale told, closure. this is part of the beauty and satisfaction of a certain sort of literature—it edifies and enables readerly gratification by providing the intricacies and artifice a majority of readers associate with the ‘literary.’ it follows principles associated with notions of aesthetic unity and the fulfilment of narrative or dramatic arcs. it makes out of the disorderly and provisional nature of experience, a completed work. it may acknowledge that the story it tells is only part of something greater, and is perhaps just one more example of what has often been called the ‘human condition,’ but when the reader finishes such works, they often feel that they know most of what matters about what they have read. traditional lyric poetry also tends to emphasise what is complete in itself, however momentary the emotion or circumstance it conjures. a shakespearean sonnet, for example, follows its own formalities towards closure and resolution: shall i compare thee to a summer’s day? thou art more lovely and more temperate: coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 rough winds do shake the darling buds of may, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date; sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimm’d; and every fair from fair sometime declines, by chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; but thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, when in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: so long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (2014, n.pag.) the form of this famous poem is partly its point, just as the form of a conventional narrative work of prose is partly what drives it and gives it meaning. to a considerable extent, the writer’s skill is demonstrated in the way in which they are able to make their narrative or lyrical form aesthetically pleasing. while the focus of this paper is not on defining or characterising the formal components and qualities of conventional literary novels, biographies or lyric poems—such matters have been written about at great length and by many critics elsewhere—in order to emphasise our point we would like to note with barbara herrnstein smith (1968) that where lyric poems are concerned: it may be that we acknowledge a poem as whole or complete when ... we experience at its conclusion the sense of closure … [and] closure is often strengthened by convention: the reader’s sense of finality will be reinforced by the appearance, at the conclusion of a poem, of certain formal and thematic elements. (26-30) this is also true of other conventional literary forms. in the hands of a fine contemporary novelist, such as in john banville’s beautifully constructed work the sea (2006), the literary aestheticisation of difficult experience is able to make it shimmer, as it were, in the reader’s mind, and invest it with a deep poignancy: they departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. all morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheardof heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. (3) the sea is about broken and disjunct lives and experiences. these are retold through its protagonist’s recollection of childish events and, as the above excerpt that opens the novel demonstrates, evoked almost poetically in luminous prose. however, even such a harrowing work does not conjure the brokenness of postmodernity directly. it is too graceful and eloquent; it speaks too knowingly. despite its concessions to mystery and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 doubt, its narrative voice remains poised, polished and confident. this is not merely a matter of a narrative being told retrospectively by one of its chief protagonists, or a product of banville’s construction of an ironic distance between the narrator’s confident voice and the sometimes bewildering narrative he recounts; there is a sense that banville does not wish his wonderfully compelling style to be infected by the insufficiencies and confusions his work explores. furthermore, the british texts mentioned (and this is true of ‘classic’ american texts too) are examples of what has been considered australia’s literary inheritance, and they are part of the traditional literary ‘canon.’ in recent decades australian writers have chosen to “write back” or provide “counter-discourse” (thieme, 2001: 3) to this canon, in order to express dissatisfaction with the idea that these works may speak for the antipodean experience. in many cases, australian texts have focused on fragmentation, fracture and rupture to address stereotypes and “european myths of australia” (thieme, 2001: 4). and, in saying this, we are not referencing self-consciously avant-garde literature that often makes a feature of broken, disjunct or opaque styles. we are talking instead about mainstream writers seeking ways to speak as clearly as possible of their experiences. insufficiency as a postmodern literary trope the hallmarks of many traditional literary forms, whether novels, biographies or poems, and whether written last century or last week, increasingly worry a cohort of readers and writers who recoil from the unities such works present, and who distrust the aesthetic imperatives they invoke. so many conventional works seem to assume that human lives and writerly narratives may make good sense in the telling; that time, as it runs through a narrative, may be understood and rendered meaningful through a relatively orderly understanding of the unfolding of days, weeks and years—even as many readers of such works do not primarily understand experience in this way. molly andrews et al. (2004) note that: narratives come in many kinds; they are contradictory and fragmented; there is no such thing as a coherent story. there is also, in the aftermath of the grand ‘narratives’ of the social and political order, and in a time of identifications rather than identities, no entirely firm sociocultural ground from which to tell stories. moreover, human subjectivity itself is diverse and fragmented, and carries within it the pushes and pulls of various available narratives, which are contingent upon social and cultural positioning. (8) this perspective is crucial to understanding the need for narrative strategies that subvert conventional and traditional narrative forms. these forms appear to have embodied within them—even if this may not always be the case—attitudes and assumptions that for many people, or for particular narrative purposes, simply do not apply. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 for example, the experience of personal trauma—grief, or loss, for example—is often unable to be subdued to the requirements of conventional narrative. even in banville’s the sea there is a sense that the loss at the heart of the book is never fully articulated, partly because the narrative mode adopted by the novel prevents such articulation. this is not to criticise banville or this work—and banville may well have wanted to subdue his book’s treatment of loss for fully defensible aesthetic reasons, in any case. rather, it is to suggest that certain kinds of deeply subjective and difficult experiences need their own, hybrid narrative or poetic forms. they are simply not able to be fully registered in the modes and forms available to the writer using more conventional methods. anne whitehead (2004) in trauma fiction argues: novelists have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection. (3) moreover, the anxiety about australian literature’s place in the western canon frequently manifests itself in the disjunctive; in the rupture and brokenness of disassociation and trauma, remembered and actual. for many australian writers and poets, it is important that this is reflected in the form and style of their works, not just in its subject matter. the prose poem as unconventional form one unconventional form that offers writers ways of sidestepping the forward-moving, teleological, time-conscious pressures of conventional narrative methods and the sense of closure so often associated with the traditional lyric is the prose poem (in saying this, we note that some contemporary lyric poems inhabit similar territory to the prose poem but, as herrnstein smith comments, even in free verse poetry “the rhythm … as it is reflected in and reinforced by its lineation, is experienced as an expectation of the recurrence of certain distribution patterns of formal features” (1968: 85-86)). the modern form of the prose poem was invented, as it were, by nineteenth century french writers trying to step away from a highly literary and conventional poetic culture that advocated strict and inhibiting rules of prosody—the ‘appropriate’ use of metre, rhyme, rhythm, lineation and the like. despite some sputtering starts, the prose poem form has taken a long time to find its home in the english language but there is now a resurgence in prose poetry across the englishspeaking world. we have remarked elsewhere that the form of the prose poem is janus-faced, looking forwards and backwards, understanding transitions, providing passages and doorways. space opens before and behind it, sometimes like closed rooms, sometimes like expanding fields. it coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 understands both prose and poetry … its problematising of generic distinctions may be what makes it most modern (and postmodern) and which may see it become a defining post-postmodern literary form. (2015: 14) for this reason, prose poetry is a form suited to an expression of the australian postcolonial disconnect. bill ashcroft (1989) argues that: a major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with place and displacement. it is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. (8) this extends to language as an expression of alienation, explored in the gaps, spaces and ambiguity that australian prose poetry prioritises. jen webb’s prose poems often feature landscapes of grief and absence. in this untitled prose poem, she discusses dislocation: he died when i was away from home, not knowing it would happen, not expecting that something so momentous could arrive without its having made an appointment, but he did anyway die, and me without my thoughts straight without my face on without the words to say ready on my tongue. the world is too big in his absence, it takes a week to cross the street a month to make that call. the world is too big and there is no space in it for all the words we failed to share. (2016a: n.pag.) webb declines to clearly tie significant phrases to the pronouns that open the poem. is it the ‘i’ or the ‘he’ who did not “know [death] would happen”? this poem traverses grief and loss speedily and poignantly, and the brevity and pace of its prose poem rhythms open up a wide ground of consideration. it emphasises the importance of having a shared language and ready words. a second prose poem, “the site visit,” by webb captures a contemporary sense of uncertainty and anxiety by presenting a simple-seeming situation in such a way that its implications ramify in many directions: at the edge of the typhoon, the building moves the way large buildings do: uncomfortably. there are fifty foreign students on the loose. through the misted windows they are taking snaps of the hazy city-scape. the images will be murk on murk on murk: someone should let them know. but it won’t be me: my job is to count students back into the bus. when i do, two of them are missing. forty minutes later they are missing still. outside, on the street, someone is speaking urgent mandarin into a phone. i count heads, and count again. two short. someone should make a decision. (2016b: n.pag.) this prose poem opens in medias res, intensifying the confusion and dislocation it evokes. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 there are two crises unfolding—a typhoon and the two missing students. the setting is surreal, a “hazy city-scape” of moving buildings, which is unrecognisable in photographs of the event: they “will be murk on murk on murk.” as anxiety sets in, so does a desperate sense of repetition and disconnection—most significantly, the ongoing “count[ing of] heads,” an idiom for checking that all the students have returned and, metaphorically, also a way of conjuring ideas of dislocation and even of decapitation. these students are alienated by a series of barriers, most significantly, language. as “someone is speaking urgent mandarin into a phone,” there is a common understanding of the situation’s gravity and seriousness, but misunderstanding, alienation and discomfort is pervasive. the final line “someone should make a decision” is disturbing because of the failure of anyone to take responsibility for the lost students. there is eeriness in the suggestion that the students have not returned while the others sit on a bus “at the edge of the typhoon” taking photographs. webb uses the effect of the uncanny here to suggest that the sacred haunts the physical and psychological landscape. it is unclear where the prose poem is set, and the failure of the students to return from what appears to be an excursion in the unidentified place is intensely unsettling. such “unsettlement” is a feature of much australian writing. as ken gelder and jane m. jacobs (1998) argue: let us take unsettlement—the kind of unsettlement that a claim on a sacred site or object can give rise to, for example—as a productive feature of the postcolonial landscape. it incites discourses and counter-discourses; it produces alignments and realignments; most of all, it reminds us that (whether we like it or not) ‘all of us’ are implicated to a greater or lesser degree in this modern predicament [concerning reconciliation]. (xvi) webb’s prose poem references a built landscape and foregrounds the notion that people are all implicated in the crisis of “this modern predicament,” as her work suggests that the specific crisis it refers to may speak to postmodernity’s anxieties more generally. her prose poem even carries a suggestion that these students have been in some way sacrificial. in this sense, it is a moment weirdly reminiscent of joan lindsay’s picnic at hanging rock. prose poetry and “writing back” to the canon salman rushie used the term “writing back” in a 1982 article (“the empire writes back with a vengeance”) to discuss british imperialism and racism. it references the wellknown star wars sequel, the empire strikes back, and was taken up by bill ashcroft, gareth griffiths and helen tiffin in an early and major scholarly book on the status of postcolonial literature. in their discussion of the relevance of rushdie’s phrase, ashcroft et al. (2002) state: coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 directly and indirectly … the ‘empire writes back’ to the imperial ‘centre,’ not only through nationalist assertion, proclaiming itself central and selfdetermining, but even more radically by questioning the bases of european and british metaphysics, challenging the world-view that can polarize centre and periphery in the first place. (32) importantly, they are emphatic in their argument that it is reductive to set up oppositions or adversity between non-european and european cultures; postcolonial literature should, instead, offer alternatives. this is a point that john thieme addresses in his summary of responses to canonical literature. he states: ‘writing back’, ‘counter-discourse’, ‘oppositional literature’, ‘con-texts’: these are some of the terms that have been used to identify a body of postcolonial works that take a classic english text as a departure point, supposedly as a strategy for contesting the authority of the canon of english literature. (2001: 1; emphasis ours) while recent postcolonial scholarship encourages more expansive responses than this to european classics, there is undoubtedly a degree of antagonism in australia towards the western canon, not always tempered by discussions of alternatives. this partly stems from the fact that very few australian authors have ever been ‘canonised’ by international literary critics—and some writers understandably resent this—and it partly comes from australian writers increasingly wanting to speak with their own particular literary inflections. this has even led to restrictive arguments that the canon should not be imposed on australian school children because of its tendency to legitimise patriarchy, racism and imperialism (m. smith, 2014: n.pag.). these are matters of dispute because, as kate flaherty (2016) argues, “a danger more dire than expecting students to learn to read them is precluding students from the playing space through a scholarly culture in which reading is about having your local experiences, preferences, and prejudices affirmed” (182). breaking down colonialism’s barriers in its postcolonial manifestations through imaginative action and innovation, rather than erecting new walls, is arguably a more productive way forward. prose poetry is one way of taking this action in the sphere of creative writing; it is a flexible literary form in which postcolonial responses to the western canon can be productively explored. this is largely because prose poetry is a hybrid form that celebrates the blurring of boundaries, and is well suited to registering the kinds of experiences that are neither complete, nor fully coherent nor entirely resolvable. when michael chanan (2012) writes that “[c]olonial (and postcolonial) melancholy arises from an unresolvable contradiction within the (post)colonial subject” and that “colonial melancholy is a condition in which the concept of the nation is falsely embedded through the colonial relations” (92), one may apply such statements to the australian context. australia is an independent nation and yet many would argue that it is still in the process of finding ways to articulate an coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 identity that properly and sufficiently acknowledges its colonial past. while postcolonial prose poetry has yet to attract much scholarly discussion, jahan ramazani (2017) argues that: postcolonial poets have arguably made profoundly important contributions to literature in english. they have hybridized european with indigenous forms, inventing new literary structures for cultural expression in lyric and experimental styles … they have recast their cultural inheritances … they have found new ways of aesthetically embodying, probing, and dramatizing the divisions and complexities of postcolonial worlds. (1) specifically, australian prose poetry tends to prioritise spaces of uncertainty and anxiety to rework the western canon, and make its own individual forms of utterance. although considerable uncertainty and anxiety already exists in various canonical texts—in the novels of virginia woolf, for example—postcolonial anxiety is of a different order, and derives largely from circumstances specifically attendant on the postcolonial situation, and relating to ways in which one culture has dominated, transformed and compromised another. sigrun meinig expresses this succinctly: “[t]he interest of post-colonial criticism is in the pain, the atrocities, complexities, and the political consequences of colonialism and its aftermath” (2004: 26). although prose poetry is largely overlooked in the cambridge companion to postcolonial poetry (2017) and samuel wagan watson’s prose poem “parallel oz” is the only prose poem referenced in the australian/new zealand chapter, wagan watson is identified as a poet who “presents australia as a place haunted by its own (denied) indigeneity … characteristically deforming popular culture to produce unsettling allegories of the politics of post/colonial australia” (77). importantly, the prose poem form of “parallel oz” (a work also published in 2012 under the title of “there’s no place like home”) intensifies this haunting, not only because its slipperiness and hybridisation resist definition, but because of the pressing absence of line breaks in prose poetry which in this work are able to capture a sense of the pressing, almost claustrophobic nature of the postcolonial condition: it’s the lucky country’s closet; a dark interior with frontier skeletons … the yellow-brick road is pock-marked with massacre sites and the wizard, the wizard of parallel oz; he holds dorothy hostage to a mutual obligation agreement. the straw man has the grazing monopoly, the tin man has the mines, and the lion waits in the spinifex, with the long-grass drinkers. (2012: n.pag.) intertextuality in australian prose poems intertextuality is a term introduced by julia kristeva in “word, dialogue and novel” coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 (1966) where she states: “a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. the notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (85, original italics). while intertextuality has been accused of supporting canon formation because it tends to reference and therefore bolster texts already within the canon, the intertexts in australian prose poetry often work subversively to playfully create a new narrative from ‘classic’ quotations. canonical quotations (often british or american intertexts) and references appear as broken off from their original source and are re-assembled anew in the prose poems’ narratives. for example, one of cassandra atherton’s (untitled) prose poems writes back to an australian literary history built on british and american canonical texts, re-casting her intertexts in a meditation on betrayal. references are broken off from their original texts and manipulated into a new, fractured narrative highlighting the missing parts: you draw hearts from the top left, like you are drawing hemingway’s hills. only the elephant is scarlet and hangs around my neck. in the throbbing hotel room i open my mouth for your tongue but you speckle kisses over the shadows between my breasts. twilight bisects my left side from my right. i can’t speak. all i can think of is ‘please, please’. a triad without its final note. (2016: n.pag) this brief work covers considerable terrain—conjuring ideas of broken identity within an intimate relationship, and an associated rupture in thought. the literary works it alludes to—hemingway’s short story “hills like white elephants;” coleridge’s poem “the rime of the ancient mariner;” and hawthorne’s novel the scarlet letter—help to charge this prose poem with a great deal of condensed and not fully resolvable meaning. in hemingway’s short story, his female character is being told by her lover to terminate her pregnancy. he repeatedly tells her that the operation “is perfectly simple” (hemingway, 1987: 213), and in this gesture that takes the form of an apparent reassurance, hemingway emphasises her vulnerability and the precariousness of her situation. atherton connects hemingway’s image of hills as like elephants to coleridge’s albatross, symbol of bad luck, bad faith and damaged fate in the way the elephant is “hang[ing] around [the narrator’s] neck.” what’s more, the inferred albatross is scarlet in colour and references hawthorne’s scarlet letter, signifying adultery and the breaking of patriarchy’s social and sexual taboos. indeed, the “hills” in this prose poem are likened to the top section of a heart; a shape never completed like the missing note in the final “triad.” the form of this prose poem—the movement of its ideas—is also fractured, signalling that the intimacy it depicts is problematic and tainted. the inclusion of direct speech which is thought rather than spoken, and the statement “i can’t speak” references and recasts hemingway’s character’s request to “please stop talking” (hemingway, 1987: 214), and also gestures to australia’s unspoken history, in which women and indigenous australians have so often not been permitted a voice (the history which, with specific coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 reference to indigenous peoples, w.e.h. stanner (1968) called the great australian silence). paul hetherington’s prose poem entitled “antiquities” alludes to jane austen’s emma and henry james’ the turn of the screw: within the restrictions of our common knowledge, spaces began to breathe— this courtyard in the city; that old quadrangle of orange trees; the pathway leading to a river bed with pebbles congregating like shiny vowels; the long slope where grassland furs a hill. we surveyed sunflowers in nodding conversations and admired antiquities: ‘harriet smith was the natural daughter of somebody’; ‘it was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour’. we gathered them like a form of ardency, finding our own inflections in these words. among our vernacular phrases, the nineteenth century murmured in our ears. (2016: n.pag.) this prose poem prioritises “words” and “inflections” and in two intertextual moments recasts the references to these classic texts, finding resonances in their contiguity for a contemporary reader. indeed, the juxtaposition of the austen quotation—“harriet smith was the natural daughter of somebody”—with the james quotation—“it was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour”—changes their original meaning and introduces a splintered twenty-first century “conversation” between these disparate quotations. they haunt the prose poem, inflecting its meanings and offering different kinds of narrativisation, amounting to more than just a juxtapositioning of fragments. in emma, harriet smith is presented as illegitimate and struggles to finish a full sentence or know her own mind. her dialogue is full of dashes and broken thoughts, for example, when mr martin proposes she states: oh! no, i am sure you are a great deal too kind to—but if you would just advise me what i had best do—no, no, i do not mean that—as you say, one’s mind ought to be quite made up—one should not be hesitating—it is a very serious thing.—it will be safer to say ‘no’ perhaps.—do you think i had better say ‘no?’ (austen, 1999: 33) in this way, harriet’s illegitimacy and fragmented speech defer meaning. cleverly, hetherington is questioning and playing with concepts of authenticity, his use of a single line from the text further fractures meaning, but in a postmodern approach that prioritises spuriousness and simulacra. further, hetherington’s use of the quotation from the turn of the screw, parodies the canon in its referencing of shakespeare, who is at its centre: when the governess in henry james’s the turn of the screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet peter quint, the words she uses to describe the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 event—which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer—are words in which hamlet is remembered. (miller, 1987: n.pag.) thus, these canonical authors’ words inform hetherington’s prose poem in a variety of ways, and juxtaposing them in this revisionistic technique encourages a perspective of multiple viewpoints. as he recontextualises british and american texts that provide a literary inheritance for australian writing, hetherington urges us to “find … our own inflections in these words.” overall, these prose poems by atherton and hetherington—like jen webb’s works discussed in the previous section—demonstrate the way in which prose poetry inhabits an in-between and yet widely suggestive space between traditional narrative prose and conventional lyric poetry. this hybrid and unsettled form opens up shifting ground in which the unresolvable nature of so much experience is embodied in condensed fragments of poetic language, all of them gesturing towards a greater and often postcolonial narrative that, they imply, is otherwise unreachable or inexpressible—or expressible only in fragments. unlike conventional lyric poems with their formal containment and closed faces, the prose poem form remains remarkably open and continually suggestive. unlike conventional narrative prose, the prose poems’ condensed narrative gestures imply other simultaneous and sometimes hidden narratives. they emphasise the multivalency of human subjectivity and its frequently unstable complexities. conclusion we may not all wish to speak in prose poetry all of the time—such conversations would be hard work. however, prose poetry as a significant hybrid form is one avenue for bridging the divide between our desire for narrative, lyric coherence and reassurance and the less polished and finished subjectivities we know. our awareness of these subjectivities tells us a great deal about what it is to be human in the twenty-first century. prose poetry as a form speaks to this humanity in its fragmentation, contradictions, irresolutions and intensities. prose poetry is particularly well suited to articulating some of the conundrums and indeterminacies associated in contemporary australia with an awareness of postcolonialism and the issues this poses for indigenous and non-indigenous australians alike. for samuel wagan watson, the prose poem form is a way of speaking back directly to a nation where many indigenous australians still inhabit what feels like an alternative or “parallel” reality. wagan watson’s adaptation of tropes from the film the wizard of oz speaks back directly, ironically and with postmodern verve to mainstream australian (and american) culture, while poems by webb, atherton and hetherington all find modes of coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 authentic poetic utterance through foregrounding ways in which language in its various forms and contexts is both impediment to and enabler of communication. margueritte s. murphy (1992) argues that: the prose poem is potentially or formally ‘postmodern’ according to lyotard’s definition: ‘the unpresentable in presentation itself’. as a form that is by necessity a subversion of other prose forms, a form that finds its identity negatively, the prose poem never predicts its ‘future’ as text or genre. (170) all of the prose poems discussed approach their articulations of difficult circumstances through a hybridised form that has the capacity to invent itself as it goes and to make powerful use of intertextual references in defining simultaneously condensed and expansive preoccupations. in sitting outside of canonised generic categories, and in making a virtue of fragmentariness, these prose poems have a freedom to speak against traditional and conventional literary forms if they choose to do so. conventional literary forms continue to offer a great deal to readers, and many brilliant works, such as john banville’s the sea, continue to be written in such forms. however, in acknowledging that there are also other ways of speaking and of understanding one another—including through open and to some extent undecidable literary forms such as the prose poem—so new possibilities may be conjured, and ways found for postcolonial identities to be more truly and fully articulated. references 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http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2016/11/30/3311/ (accessed 26 february, 2017). http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2016/11/30/3311/ coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 hemingway, ernest 1987 “hills like white elephants,” in the complete short stories of ernest hemingway, new york: simon & schuster, 211-14. hetherington, paul 2016 “antiquities,” from the prose poetry project, canberra: international poetry studies institute. hetherington, paul and cassandra atherton 2015 “‘unconscionable mystification’?: rooms, spaces and the prose poem,” new writing, 12:3, 265-281, doi: 10.1080/14790726.2015.1047856. kristeva julia 1966 “word, dialogue and novel” in toril moi (ed), the kristeva reader: julia kristeva, new york: columbia university press, 1986, 34-61. meinig, sigrun 2004 witnessing the past: history and post-colonialism in australian historical novels, tübingen: gunter narr. miller, karl 1987 “things,” london review of books, 9:7, 2 april. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n07/karl-miller/things (accessed 26 february, 2017). murphy, margueritte s. 1992 a tradition of subversion: the prose poem in english from wilde to ashbery, boston: university of massachusetts press. ramazani, jahan (ed) 2017 the cambridge companion to postcolonial poetry, cambridge: cambridge university press. shakespeare, william 2014 “sonnet 18,” shakespeare’s sonnets, oxquarry books ltd, http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com (accessed 25 february, 2017). smith, barbara herrnstein 1968 poetic closure: a study of how poems end, chicago: university of chicago press. smith, michelle 2014 “a spurr to abandoning the literary canon,” the conversation, 28 october, https://theconversation.com/a-spurr-to-abandoning-the-literary-canon33529 (accessed 25 february, 2017). thieme, john 2001 postcolonial con-texts: writing back to the canon, london and new york: continuum. wagan watson, samuel 2011 “there’s no place like home,” poetry international rotterdam, http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/19584/auto/0/theresno-place-like-home (accessed 27 february, 2017). webb, jen 2016a “he died when i was away from home,” from the prose poetry project, canberra: international poetry studies institute. ---. 2016b “the site visit,” from the prose poetry project, canberra: international poetry studies institute. whitehead, anne 2004 trauma fiction, edinburgh: edinburgh university press. paul hetherington is professor of writing in the faculty of arts and design at the university of canberra and head of the international poetry studies institute there. he has published twelve full-length collections of poetry, most recently burnt umber (uwap, 2016) and íkaros (rwp, 2017). he won the 2014 western australian premier’s book awards (poetry); was commended in the 2016 newcastle poetry prize and shortlisted for the 2017 kenneth slessor prize for poetry. he undertook an australia council for the arts literature board residency at the br whiting studio in rome in 2015-16. he edited the final three volumes of the national library of https://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n07/karl-miller/things http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/ https://theconversation.com/a-spurr-to-abandoning-the-literary-canon-33529 https://theconversation.com/a-spurr-to-abandoning-the-literary-canon-33529 http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/19584/auto/0/theres-no-place-like-home http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/19584/auto/0/theres-no-place-like-home coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 australia’s authoritative four-volume edition of the diaries of the artist donald friend and is a founding editor of the international online journal axon: creative explorations. cassandra atherton is an award-winning writer, academic and critic. she was a harvard visiting scholar in english in 2015-16 sponsored by stephen greenblatt and was a visiting fellow at sophia university, tokyo in 2014. her most recent books of prose poetry are trace (2015), exhumed (2015) and pika-don (2017) and she was recently awarded a vicarts grant and australia council grant for her prose poetry on the atomic bomb. cassandra is the current poetry editor of westerly magazine and is writing a book, prose poetry: an introduction with paul hetherington for princeton university press. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 168 searching for the in-between: developing indigenous holistic approaches to cultural heritage assessment and interpretation sarah yu nyamba buru yawuru syu@iinet.net.au copyright©2018 sarah yu. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: writing about heritage values is tricky business where aboriginal cultural heritage is concerned. how might aboriginal worldviews, cosmologies and epistemologies be incorporated into a discussion and assessment of heritage values that have been defined and codified according to standards originating from the need to protect mostly european built heritage? in this paper, sarah yu revisits her cultural heritage work with the yawuru native title holders of the area of country in and around broome, western australia, to consider and challenge static notions of heritage (for example, as articulated in the burra charter) that relegate heritage into artificial dichotomies such as natural/cultural, or tangible /intangible, or scientific/aboriginal. her approach is developed from yawuru perspectives and worldviews that are holistic, founded in the bugarrigarra (the dreaming) and which acknowledge the traditional knowledge, rights and cultural responsibilities that people have in relation to looking after their country as a whole, rather than as separated values, as well as shared transcultural values that have emerged from the colonial history of the region. yu draws from her recent heritage work in cultural management planning (yawuru cultural management plan) as well as the curation of a heritage trail (jetty to jetty trail) and an exhibition about pearling in australia (lustre: pearling & australia). applying interpretive skills and thematic approaches, yu posits an holistic way for assessing heritage values that incorporates the relationships between people and the subject (not object) of value, and the broader country or context of that value. she argues for an holistic approach that looks beyond separated values, and encompasses the ‘in-between’ relationships of people with the subject (not object) of value. mailto:syu@iinet.net.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 169 recognising relationships as a value, yu argues, is an inclusive way to reimagining and assessing our heritage and reconciles differing worldviews. keywords: aboriginal worldview and cultural heritage; pearling; west kimberley; significance and the burra charter; yawuru. i live in a place where in december, as laja (the hot season) endures, everyone talks about the weather in anticipation of the arrival of the first rains. hot, humid and uncomfortable, it is one of the most exciting times of the year and a time of great energy and unpredictability. you never know what will happen. i live in a place where people say that jurru—snakes—are moving around at this time of year, and, if they ‘smell’ strangers, will ‘get up’ as storms and cyclones, with the potential to cause havoc and threaten both people and country. it is a place where strong people from the country can chase those jurru away. recently, i had a conversation with some yawuru men, my contemporaries, about a waterspout that was sighted off gantheaume point, at the southern end of broome’s tourist-famous cable beach. they immediately commented that it was one of the jurru that move around out there, and that this area is considered extremely dangerous. as i was preparing for this paper, i pondered about how many people who visit, or indeed live in, broome realise that they are immersed in country that is inhabited by snakes who ‘get up’ and move around; who can be both friend and foe; and who, above all, have to be watched and respected? the answer, of course, is not many. from within our rationalist, secularist paradigms, most of us cannot perceive a landscape that is inhabited by jurru who possess the power to both protect and destroy; where your life and that of your family may depend on knowing and respecting them and the many other metaphysical phenomena that exist in country; or a country where rayi (spirit children) live and are found, where the souls of old people continue to reside, and where people judge their health and the health of their country by their liyan (well-being). in this paper, i discuss the way yawuru people, the native title holders of the country in and around broome, have started to share their story of how they see and know their country and history. i draw on my work as curator of four cultural heritage projects that challenge the current commodification and subversion of broome’s aboriginal, multicultural and pearling heritage in tourism and mass media expressions in general. i discuss how, through these projects, the yawuru have created a conceptual framework for the recognition of the significance of their cultural values that is holistic and evolutionary, encompassing metaphysical understandings of the nature of people, their society and the country where they live. this approach challenges static notions of heritage by placing the relationships between people and their country as the central focus to understanding and assessing the significance of broome’s cultural heritage. it heralds the need for indigenous voices and culturally holistic perspectives to be heard if the living cultural heritage of broome is to be understood, protected and promoted. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 170 i am particularly interested in what an artist friend called ‘the in-between spaces’i of the historical narrative: the in-between spaces of the relationships that occurred as the historical narrative unfolded, which, for the most part, have remained undocumented and unrecorded except perhaps in the few oral histories of the regionii and the new writings of emerging indigenous writers.iii these new writings provide an alternative to the settler-colonial bias of most western histories of the kimberley’s and broome’s pearling history in particular. their personal accounts recognise the realities of the colonial encounter from an aboriginal worldview founded in the relationships people have with their country, families and working life. in the cultural projects that i have worked on with the yawuru, i endeavor to reveal the relationships that emerge (friendships, connections and shared experiences) from these cultural encounters, and how recognition of these relationships can assist in a new way of identifying and assessing cultural heritage values. in this approach, i am inspired by the work of eduardo galeano (2010) and japanese/australian historian minori hokari (2011) who urge us to pay attention to the non-secular, holistic understandings of history and the colonial encounter of the indigenous peoples of the country. the town of broome and roebuck bay, lying in an area of country called minyirr (also called rubibi), are steeped in cultural story and songlines. there are many sites—water sources, resources areas, hunting places, sacred areas—of cultural significance that attest to the presence of the yawuru people and their rich traditions of the bugarrigarra. as patrick dodson (2012), a senior yawuru lawman, explains: for the yawuru people … our history begins with bugarrigarra what most westerners romantically call … the dreamtime! the bugarrigarra encompasses the time well before western philosophy, religion and laws reached our lands. the bugarrigarra is associated with events that created our world, deep at the beginning of time yet it transcends time and space to inform and give meaning to contemporary yawuru life … it is the spiritual force that shapes our cultural values and practices, our relationship with our country and the responsibilities and obligations that we have to each other as yawuru people. in the 1880s, broome was the first town to be established in the remote corner of northwest australia after the pearlers who had been sailing up the coast from cossack discovered the vast pearlshell beds of the large pinctada maxima (the mollusc that produces the most sought-after nacre and pearls) in roebuck. for the pearlers, the future townsite on the edge of dampier creek was the only safe haven on this stretch of the coast with a good supply of fresh water. by the early 1900s, the small supply town had attracted the grandiose title of the “pearling capital of the world.”iv whilst bearing the brunt of the many phases of colonial contact and occupation of the northwest, broome’s growth and character was synonymous with the pearling story of the north which saw an influx of indentured workers from asia throughout the twentieth century. truly transcultural, broome became a town like no other in australia. as the rest of australia, a federated nation since 1901, became entrenched in controlling asian migration,v broome pearlers continued to seek exemptions to allow their skilled, and cheap, crews to stay. inevitably, despite restrictions, broome’s local community grew to become a rich, culturally mixed community of people descended from the regional aboriginal groups and those coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 171 who came to work in the pearling industry—chinese, japanese, filipino, ‘malay,’vi koepanger (timorese) and torres strait islanders as well as the europeans. broome’s transcultural community was heavily regulated by various government acts designed to prevent the mixing of races and to control virtually all aspects of their lives. they had little freedom to choose where they lived, who they married, where they sat at the local cinema, or which hospital or school they attended. most limiting was their right to being considered citizens of australia. in this legislative context, people managed, as best they could, to circumvent these limitations and develop their own rich cultural life that absorbed elements from each of the cultural groups, resulting in ‘mixed’ families who shared a distinctive broome-style creole, cuisine, music, social activitiesvii and cultural celebrations.viii as a result of the pearling industry, which waxed and waned according to the vagaries of the world pearlshell market, the coastal country of the yawuru (and other ‘saltwater’ people of the northwest) was inundated with pearlers as they came to shore to source local knowledge about pearlshell beds, get supplies of water and wood for their boats, and ‘liaise’ with local women. generally, the pearlers had little regard for the nature of the aboriginal peoples and their cultural and practical understandings of their country. however, in the treacherous coastal sea country of vast ten-metre tides and strong currents of the northwest coast, local aboriginal knowledge of the sea and the location of pearlshell beds, their navigational skills and their ability to hunt and supplement the limited diets of the crew with fresh food would have been invaluable to the pearling fleets. however, a colonial bias is reflected in the many popular histories of the industry (idreiss, 1984; edwards 1983) in which there is little reference to the presence of the many aboriginal people who worked on the boats or in the foreshore lay-up camps that dotted the coast and towns, and in whose traditional country the fleets were working.ix similar to their physical habitation on the fringes of the industry and the town, aboriginal people were marginalised in the storytelling of the pearling industry, appearing mostly as statistics in the pearling masters’ ledgers. and yet in the personal histories of most local broome families, there is a connection to the pearling industry. bart pigram,x a yawuru curator and tour guide, outlined his family’s diverse connections to pearling: i am yawuru and also of jabirrjabirr descent, and grew up in broome. our old people along the northwest coast used guwan (pearlshell) long before the arrival of european settlers and have continued their traditions to this day. since the pearlers came there has always been someone from my family working in the industry, including myself. we discovered that my great, great, great grandfather william bryan was a blackbirder who took a jabirrjabirr woman and had a child, who is my ancestor in the dampier peninsula. this is my heritage and part of australia's pearling story. it is etched in the land and we should know and respect these stories, the people and where they came from.xi coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 172 as the pearling industry based on the collection of shell waned (primarily because of the introduction of plastics) and the cultured pearl industry rose, broome began to lose its pearling identity. broome is currently marketed as a ‘beach destination’ with now-iconic depictions of camels walking along cable beach as the sun sets over the indian ocean. visitors would be hardpressed to realise that they had entered the traditional lands of the yawuru people, or that the site where the camel trips commence is a turtle-dreaming site, and the rocks that they trample over are considered sacred. close by there are other sites that mark the beginning of a songline that crosses the continent, an old ceremony ground and other gender-restricted areas that the yawuru are trying to keep protected. these culturally significant sites are now being contested with various coastal development proposalsxii and the demands of a growing resource industry based on extraction of natural gas.xiii my first project with nyamba buru yawuru (hereafter nby) was called opening the common gate: challenging boundaries in broome, a small interpretive exhibition to honour the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum in which the australian nation voted to include aboriginal people in the census and to establish a federal government department to govern their affairs. to the nation, the referendum marked a watershed of constitutional change, signaling the end of a bleak history that denied aboriginal people equal citizenship rights. however, whilst the rest of australia had voted for political change, western australia had the highest ‘no’ vote. in broome, few remember the referendum, and only a small percentage of the population voted. a local symbol of the denial of citizenship rights to aboriginal people in broome was the ‘common gate’—a fence and three gridded gates—that marked the municipal boundary of the township of broome. in the words of a senior broome local woman, the common gate was there to keep the “cattle and the full-bloods out of town.”xiv under the terms of the 1905 aborigines act, the fence physically signified that ‘full-blood’ and unemployed aboriginal people could not enter the town without an employer’s permit, and there was a curfew imposed between sunset and sunrise. in the town whose lifeblood was the growing pearling industry, one of the aims of the government-sanctioned curfew was to keep aboriginal people separate from indentured asian labourers. combined with the denial of other civil rights such as citizenship, the right to vote, the right to choose your partner in marriage, and the right to bring up your children, the common gate was a symbol of the state of injustices against aboriginal people at that time. in the exhibition, the common gate became a metaphor for all the discriminating boundaries that divided the town, and a vehicle to express local understandings of assimilation, citizenship, identity and discrimination. despite its racist origins, the common gate continues to be remembered with affection and is integral to nostalgia. i have always been amazed at the goodwill of many of the older people as they recounted stories of poverty, deprivation of rights and even atrocity. i was challenged how to tell this history in a way that captured their spirit of generosity and good spirit whilst acknowledging the pain and heartache. i turned to voice rather than written historical narrative and began to record their story and avoid a diatribe against those injustices. whilst the common gate defined the township of broome as a place where ‘life’ was controlled and regulated, the attachment to country was paramount as the stories spilled out into the open country (the allegedly wild/primitive country) beyond the town that was equally home to the aboriginal people. this was where they hunted and fished and continued their ceremonies. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 173 what emerged as a constant thread in these accounts was the strong attachment to place, in which the sense of home, of ‘our town,’ of being in country, and of living a life that was in tune with the cycle of seasonal change, was rich, regardless of how physically poor the families might be. it was through this connection, and the connection between families, that the local community survived and thrived within such repression of their human rights. although the exhibition opened nearly ten years ago, the panels of opening the common gate continue to be displayed in the nby offices, and are regularly used by schools and community groups. this longevity is perhaps due to one of the positive outcomes of the exhibition. it allowed the local community to reclaim their history and culture by increasing awareness of their struggles for identity in a cross-cultural world where rights and survival had to be constantly negotiated. the exhibition offers a bridge between the indigenous and non-indigenous communities of broome to develop a permanent relationship built on understanding, acceptance and appreciation of their values and view of the world. the attachment to place, the way people live in their country, and this connection being a source of pride and identity, even in the face of adversity and trauma, is a theme that i have carried through my cultural heritage work. the relationship between people and their home country is central to the cultural heritage of yawuru people and of broome. in 2009 i began my second project for nby based on the idea of an interpretive walking trail along the foreshore of roebuck bay, from the town’s oldest jetty (streeter jetty) to the site of the old jetty at town beach, called the jetty to jetty trailxv. by then, broome’s multicultural pearling heritage had mostly disappeared with only a few remnants of the built heritage remaining. as the town had turned its focus to creating a ‘beach’ destination for tourists, offering camel rides on the beach, the story of old broome, and the connection to waters and tidal flats of roebuck bay, was lost. access to and views of the water were limited and the vibrant pearling story of broome was only reflected in the local museums and the broome cemetery. travelling along a trail of thirteen sites, the project aimed to turn people’s gaze back to the foreshore, to see and know its beauty and history. the bay lies in the heart of yawuru country, and is where people hunted, set their fish traps and provided food for their countrymen. the surrounding dunes, laden with middens, are testament to the longevity of occupation. the intertidal mud flats were home to pearling fleets, lined with foreshore camps, shell-sorting sheds, the bustling jetties and the luggers, either floating or laid-up, often draped in their hessian coverings, all moving to the tides and rhythms of the bay. the stories unfold and are delivered by the jetty to jetty app,xvi with layered stories from local people embedded in sounds of the country and strands of broome music. jetty to jetty is a story that reveals the cultural life of how people live in the country, underlying the presence of the pearling industry that dominated life along the foreshore of roebuck bay. it tells of a cultural life that is the foundation upon which all the other aspects of life are built. people still hold on to traditional stories and names of country. they continue to fish and hunt according to the seasons and the ebb and flow of the monthly and annual cycle of tides. they still have strong coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 174 communities in which many of the asian indentured pearling workers were welcomed. in doing so, they created a broome ‘local community,’ of blended cultural identity with its own lingo, food and shared cultural traditions. these features are now expressed in their own forms of storytelling such as the music of the pigram brothers, tourism events such as goolarri media’s taste of broome, and jimmy chi’s musicals such as bran nue dae (now a film) and corrugation road.xvii this was also a dominant theme in the jetty to jetty project. as lulga francis djiagween (yawuru rntbc, 2016), the yawuru pbc chairman, explains: although we lived on the reserves and town camps, we considered ourselves rich as we roamed the foreshore with our spears and played amongst the old pearling luggers … we grew up eating curries, playing music, and speaking all kinds of languages. broome was a rich melting pot of cultures, very different from the rest of australia … by sharing these experiences, we hope to engage your hearts and minds, as you walk the foreshore of my childhood.xviii whilst most of the broome pearling masters have long gone, it is through these stories and memories of a shared past that revolved around pearling that yawuru, along with other ‘locals,’ can now reclaim not only their right to look after the pearlshell country—a right that had been taken away—but also to make the history of pearling their own. in a white-dominated industry that evolved through the era of the common gate, and in the similarly biased historical accounts of the industry, the aboriginal contribution was always downplayed. however, as the pearlers came into their country and into their lives, so pearling became a part of the emerging local culture, and its legacy continues today as the storytellers assert their agency in this oppressive history. in 2011 the yawuru articulated their approach to land and sea management in a seminal cultural management plan walyjala-jala buru jayida jarringgun buru nyamba yawuru ngan-ga mirlimirli planning for the future: yawuru cultural management plan (hereafter ycmp), which i produced with the yawuru cultural heritage group. this plan underpins the joint management plans for the yawuru conservation estate which is being established as a condition of the indigenous land use agreements entered into by the state of western australia after the success of the rubibi native title claim in 2006. if the opening the common gate exhibition was about boundaries of exclusion, the ycmp is about boundaries of inclusion. developed in response to the need to ensure the joint management of their estate, the ycmp expressed the yawuru’s aspiration of reclaiming their country, their culture, their knowledge and identity. it created a new way to map their country that had been subsumed into the geography of a nation state. it provided the platform for the yawuru to identify their cultural values, and to enshrine the yawuru’s agency in protecting and managing those values. the central vision of the plan is mabu liyan, mabu buru, mabu ngarrangunil (good feeling, healthy country, strong community) which expresses the need for yawuru to always maintain a balance between change and preserving the past. the four primary values of the ycmp include the understanding of the bugarrigarra as the foundation and as a living cultural space; the body of traditional ecological and cultural knowledge; the rights of the yawuru people to be in and enjoy their country; and the inherent responsibility that they carry to manage and look after their country. together they propose a non-linear, non-secular, holistic approach to heritage management based coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 175 on the interconnections between place (the environment), object (the resources and features of the country) and the people, who have the rights in, and responsibility for, looking after the country and all that it is made of. in winning the 2012 australian institute of landscape architects national medal, the judges said: the published yawuru cultural management plan expresses past, present and future; it offers discussions about culture, country, community and liyan (wellbeing) that transcend other reports of this kind, that record and map values. this cultural management plan will and should respectfully drive conservation plans, land management decisions and design activities in marine and terrestrial areas australiawide, such is its generous and visionary approach. it is more than a conversation, more than a listening and recording, more than walking and seeing the land; it is all of these things, but most importantly, it is none of these, but the land and its people.xix finally, the fourth project i developed in regards to the pearling history of the region began in 2014 when i was asked by the western australian museum to curate an exhibition about pearling in northern australia. lustre: pearling & australia opened in 2016 and is now travelling to major australian museum venues. the exhibition celebrates the pearling heritage of northern australia, weaving together aboriginal and european histories, to present a continuing 20,000-year-old heritage storyxx about the ongoing harvest and use of the pearlshell and, more recently, its bounty, pearls. in particular, the exhibition acknowledges the respect for and use of pearlshell by aboriginal groups who celebrate the lustrous virtues of the pearlshell as adornment and whilst the exhibition reveals the darker side of pearling, it also relates wonderful stories about the pearlshell and the pearls they produce, the relationships between the people of pearling, the country where shell is found and the industry that emerged from them. it respects indigenous people’s role as cultural custodians of pearlshell and pearshell country, and highlights the value of the northern australian pearling story, including appreciation of world’s best pearling beds, as significant national and world heritage. in particular, the exhibition acknowledges and explores the use of pearlshell by aboriginal groups who honour the lustrous virtues of the pearlshell which they use: as adornment to signify status; in ceremonies, such as the grand rain-making ceremonies of the desert regions; as powerful objects used for spiritual protection and sorcery; and as a valuable trade item that was passed through exchange networks that traversed most of the australian continent (see akerman and stanton 1994). by situating the pearling story in the context of aboriginal australia, we created a new perspective of pearling history whereby a deeper understanding of the cultural fabric of our current society and the values of our pearling heritage is achieved. a central theme of the exhibition is the universal attraction of human beings to the lustrous qualities of nacre.xxi however, it is in the aboriginal story that the exhibition explores the deep cultural appreciation of pearlshell. through stories and art, guwan (pearlshell) is transformed into riji (engraved shell), an object of beauty and spiritual power, embodying country and life forces. guwan, riji and binjibinji (smaller pieces of shell) become vehicles for telling the story of the country, including historical events and understandings. and they are given to young men to mark coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 176 their transition to manhood, worn in ceremony and used in many parts of australia for rainmaking, love magic and other powerful determinations. aubrey tigan galiwa (dec.) (yu and brisbout 2011, pp. 9, 38), an internationally renowned riji carver, explains the transformational process for him as an artist and mayala lawman with cultural responsibility for passing on the story of his country: when i make this riji i think of everything out in the ocean—the loo [tidal currents], the spout, the waves, the tides, the whirlpools, the land and under the water. all got their own spirit … when i carve pearl shell i feel good and strong. when i carve the old designs that i saw my father making, i feel connected to my father and grandfather and to my country. they come to me in dreams and tell me what to do, what to carve. this is my inspiration. (yu and brisbout 2011, p. 38) by combining indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives, the exhibition looks beyond pearlshell and pearls as trophies to be acquired and sold, and presents the intricate web of connectedness between the shell, its habitat, and the people who harvest and applaud its values. finally, lustre asks the audience to assume responsibility, alongside the cultural custodians of the pearlshell county and the current pearlers in the northwest, to ‘look after’ the country where the shell is found, and to honour the story of pearling in australia. in respect to this, the australian government in its listing of the west kimberley in 2011 (australian heritage database 2011) did include some values associated with the pearling story—the pearlshell beds; the aboriginal trade of shell; the beagle bay church; as well as the intangible values of the shinju matsuri festival. however, the listing fell far short of recognising, as we (akerman, skyring and yu 2010) had urged them to do, the use and significance of pearlshell as part of a living culture in which the shell, and its associated art, embodies a relationship of people and their country. collectively, the four cultural projects presented above, ranging from land management planning, to exhibitions and tourism projects, represent the cultural heritage of country, community and the yawuru’s historical struggles for recognition, rights and respect. the opening the common gate exhibition reveals the racial barriers that governed people’s lives in the diverse multi-cultural community of broome, but which people lived around, and eventually overcame. the jetty to jetty trail creates a conversation between the local, culturally diverse community and visitors to the region, so that there can be shared understandings of the values of roebuck bay and the aboriginal and asian contribution to broome’s pearling industry. the ycmp is pivotal in identifying a new model for assessing heritage significance in a holistic way that reflects an indigenous worldview that connects people and country in a non-secular space. finally, lustre: pearling & australia celebrates the unique 20,000-year-old pearling story of northern australia, which has yet to be fully recognised as significant to the nation’s heritage. these projects articulate aboriginal cultural values and provide an alternative view of the heritage values of the region, and how they should be managed and protected. it is a view that extends beyond the usual tenets of assessing and articulating heritage significance focusing on place coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 177 rather than people. the seminal document of international heritage assessment is the burra charter (australia icomos 2013). in the burra charter, the first taxonomical division is between the natural and the cultural significance of a place. the cultural is further divided into “aesthetic, historic, scientific, social or spiritual value for past, present or future generations” (australia, icomos 2013, p. 2). whilst the responses to the charter are increasingly sensitive to the cultural significance, both tangible and intangible values of a place, they do not necessarily embrace the relationship of people to the heritage place. similar to most heritage and environmental planning documents, the burra charter relegates this relationship as a management issue, rather than being a core value of a heritage plan. in the cultural heritage work at nby, we focus on the relationships of people and country, rather than isolating natural, social, scientific or aesthetic values of the country. the cultural meanings, and by extension the values, of a place must include the relationship of that place to the people who carry the story for that place. in this way, we present a holistic worldview that encompasses the cultural and the natural, the physical and the metaphysical, and focuses on the well-being of a society as a key outcome. this approach allows for the recognition of rights, acknowledgement of responsibility, and implies a use, and enjoyment, of the cultural asset by those who carry those rights and responsibilities. whilst i appreciate that there may be more than one cultural view of a place, a new model and a new language needs to be developed to represent indigenous worldviews. this should be based on the understandings of, responsibility to and care for a place—in which the cultural life of a place, and the relationships of people to that place, are the central focus (yawuru rntbc 2016). such a model is inclusive of a worldview in which place and society are joined. in the opening quote of this paper, patrick dodson explains that, for the yawuru, this relationship is embodied in the bugarrigarra, inadequately translated in to english as ‘the dreaming’. this is the metaphysical phenomenon that w.e.h. stanner (2009) profoundly called “the everywhen” as it exists as a pastpresent-future continuum, through which the yawuru people constantly negotiate their world. through each of our projects, we have invoked yawuru understandings of bugarrigarra to capture the depth of the cultural significance of place (country), of historical encounters such as pearling, and of the roles that people and government have played in the evolution of the story that has made broome, and yawuru country and people what they are today. we also seek to expose the inbetween spaces of cultural contact and cultural values, where people (of all cultures) connect and relate to one another, and to the country. by exploring these (in-between) spaces, our aim is to create a new language of understanding across cultures. a language that can then be translated into good action, that is, action that is articulated well and enables the future planning for the region to be respectful and embracing of the culture and relationship to country of the aboriginal people of this area. i finish with a quote from yawuru elder and statesman patrick dodson (2012), who speaks not only of his yawuru people but for all those who live in australia: our connectivity with our local communities and its values and our landscapes are central to our wellbeing and happiness …where i come from, the country of the yawuru in northern western australia, the term we use to describe the interconnectedness between a sense of personal self with the wider community and the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 178 natural landscape is called liyan … it is universal to the world’s indigenous people … yawuru people’s connection to country and joy of celebrating our culture and society is fundamental to having good liyan. when we feel disrespected or abused our liyan represents life which can be disjointed, unintelligible and unattractive. this can be corrosive for both the individual and the community if not reconciled … this is one of many values we share, as is our struggle to nurture and assert them within a world where western philosophic thought underpinning modernity dominates us … our challenge is to extricate ourselves from this framework and into one of our own making based upon our wisdom, values and practices. thus, our aim should be to create good liyan, for the country and the people of the north, and in so doing, develop the best model for the protection of the rich heritage of the country with the people who live there. the theme of this journal special issue is reimaging australia. in response to this theme, i want to reimagine an australia where there is respect and recognition for indigenous peoples and their persistent worldviews; where the histories of the colonial encounter are no longer hidden; where country can be seen as cultural, living spaces or entities in which that history has occurred and where jurru exist and our spirit children can be found; where the cultural divide is crossed so that other worldviews can be respected and recognised as our shared cultural heritage. i believe that it is these ‘holistic’ perspectives of country and the people who live in it—in which we are all held accountable and carry a shared responsibility to look after things—that will lead to a sense of balance, and is the key to our survival and having mabu liyan (well-being) with the world we live in. galiya mabu references published sources: akerman, k., and stanton, j., 1994 riji and jakoli: kimberley pearl shell in aboriginal australia, northern territory museum monograph series 4. northern territory museum, darwin. australia icomos 2013 the burra charter, icomos charter for places of cultural significance, icomos, burwood, vic. bin demin, s., 2007 once in broome, magabala books, broome. burton, v., 2000 general history of broome, broome historical society, broome. edwards, h., 1983 port of pearls, rigby, adelaide. idriess, i., 1984 forty fathoms deep, angus and robertson, sydney (first published 1900). galeano, e., 2010 genesis: memory of fire trilogy volume 1, nation books, new york. hokari m., 2011 gurindji journey: a japanese historian in the outback, university of hawai'i press, honolulu. lockyer, b., 2009 the last truck out, magabala books, broome. martinez, j., and vickers, a., 2015 the pearl frontier, university of hawai’i press, honolulu. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 179 mcgann, p., 1988 “malays as indentured labour: western australia 1870–1900,” ba honors thesis, murdoch university, perth. o’connor, s., 1999 “30,000 years of aboriginal occupation in the kimberley, northwest australia,” anh publications, centre for archaeological research, australian national university, canberra. stanner, w.e.h. 2009 the dreaming and other essays, black inc, agenda, swartz media, melbourne. wergin, c., 2016 “collaborations of biocultural hope: community science against industrialisation in northwest australia,” ethnos, pp. 1-17. doi: 10.1080/00141844.2016.1169203 wright, e., 2001 full circle: from mission to community: a family story, fremantle arts centre press, fremantle. yawuru rntbc, 2016 walking jetty to jetty, stories of broome, nyamba buru yawuru, broome. walyjala-jala buru jayida jarringgun buru nyamba yawuru ngan-ga mirlimirli planning for the future: yawuru cultural management plan, 2011, nyamba buru yawuru, broome. websites: australian heritage database 2011 the west kimberley, great northern hwy, broome, wa, australia http://www.environment.gov.au/cgibin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=10606 3 australian institute of landscape architects 2012 http://www.aila.org.au/imis_prod/ailaweb/chapters/wa/2012_wa_award_winners.as px unpublished sources: akerman, k., skyring, f., and yu, s., 2010 “the indigenous cultural heritage values associated with pearl shell and pearling for the west kimberley coast,” prepared for kimberley land council for national heritage listing for the kimberley region, kimberley land council, broome. dodson, p., 2012 “common roots, common futures—shared insights from indigenous people’s different pathways to self determination in australia, new zealand, canada and the united states,” keynote address, the university of arizona, tucson, february. ‘dodson, p., 2013 “an indigenous doctrine of discovery post-terra nullius,” thinking for yourself conference, la trobe university, melbourne. goldflam, r., and friends 2012, “farewell, pamela diane lofts, 9 august 1949 – 4 july, 2012,” alice springs. yu, s., & brisbout, j., 2011 ‘in mayala country with aubrey tigan’, report for indigenous heritage project, of the then dewha (now sewpac) on the recording pearling heritage values in mayala country with aubrey tigan, september. exhibitions: http://www.environment.gov.au/cgibin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=106063 http://www.environment.gov.au/cgibin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=106063 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 180 lustre: pearling & australia, 2015 western australian museum, perth. opening the common gate, 2007 lingiari foundation, broome. audio: djaigween, f. (l.), 2014 lustre oral history collection, nyamba buru yawuru. ‘dodson, p., 2013 “an indigenous doctrine of discovery post-terra nullius,” thinking for yourself conference, la trobe university, melbourne. lowenstein, w., 1969 oral history collection, paddy djiagween, paddy roe and thomas edgar, state library of western australia. pigram, b., 2014 lustre oral history collection, nyamba buru yawuru. acknowledgements: i acknowledge the yawuru, karajarri, bardi, jawi, and mayala people, and their organisations who i have worked with and for, and who have generously shared their stories and taught me a new way to see their world. sarah yu lives in broome western australia and works for nyamba buru yawuru the business arm of the yawuru native title holding group. sarah has most recently curated the successful lustre: pearling & australia exhibition (in an nby-wa museum partnership), training two yawuru emerging curators). she has lived in the west kimberley for over 40 years, working as an anthropologist, curator and heritage consultant focusing on relationships between people and their connections to country. she has curated, collaborating with artists and writers, the jetty to jetty heritage trial (2016) opening the common gate exhibition, to honour the 1967 referendum (2007); she produced the award winning yawuru cultural management plan (2011) aila national medal 2012 winner. she is currently enrolled as a doctoral candidate in anthropology at heidelberg university as part of the research group the transcultural heritage of northwest australia: dynamics and resistances. i from the funeral booklet “farewell, pamela diane lofts, 9 august 1949 – 4 july, 2012,” written by russell goldflam: “pam liked to enter an in-between zone of challenge and possibility. the inbetween-ness of this country was a lifelong stimulus and delight for her. she also included the inbetween zones of thought and feeling, where change, loss and uncertainty unsettle you, provoking you to listen closely, think differently, and find a way through. she talked about ‘being-with’ things, and each other, to find a way through change. to use the analogy of being in country, she thought that though she might never ‘belong’ here, nevertheless she could connect, and remain connected.” ii for example, wendy lowenstein’s (1969) recordings of paddy djiagween, paddy roe and thomas edgar. iii for example, sally bin demin (2007); betty lockyer (2009); and edie wright (2001). iv western australian department of fisheries, the history of pearling in western australia. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 181 v one of the first acts of the federated parliament was the immigration restriction act 1901, designed to restrict asian migration to australia. vi the term ‘malay’ is a diminishment of an ethnically diverse community, who originate from malaysia and surrounding islands, and who share common cultural traits (mcgann 1988, p. 4; martinez and vickers 2015, p. 9) vii the annual races, dances, lugger picnics and the daily chiffa (a chinese gambling game similar to lotto). viii the chinese festival of the dead—hung seng, the japanese obon festival, and the malaysian merdeka. ix legal recognition of this relationship of the saltwater peoples of the north to their saltwater country has only been recognised in the last 10 years as yawuru (rubibi) (2006), bardi and jawi (2005), karajarri (2004), worrorra and wunambal–dambimangari (2011) peoples won their native title through the federal court of australia. x bart pigram oral history, lustre exhibition collection, nyamba buru yawuru, broome, 2015. xi see the welcome exhibition panels for lustre: pearling & australia, western australian museum, perth, 2015, http://museum.wa.gov.au/explore/lustre-online-text-panels/welcome. xii for example, expansion of the broome jetty, proposed marinas, coastal revetment projects, new boat launching facilities as well as gas hubs and processing plants. xiii for example, the proposal by woodside to establish a natural gas lng hub at james price point, north of broome (wergin 2016). xiv lexie tang wei, opening the common gate oral history collection, 2007. xv i work collaboratively within nby, training emerging curators and working with consultant artists and other experts to create the final product. whilst the curatorial intent is my work, the final product is a collaborative effort with my colleagues. xvi see the jetty to jetty app from the apple and google store or go to www.j2jbroome.com.au. xvii bran nue dae was a very successful musical written by jimmy chi, and performed with many local actors, musicians and dancers. it opened in 1988 in perth and toured to other australian cities for nearly 5 years. in 2009 it was made into a film and was opened in broome’s historic open-air cinema, sun pictures. in the jetty to jetty sound app, jimmy edgar and stephen ‘baamba’ albert, who both performed in the original bran nue dae, laugh at how as kids they always came to the ‘pictures’ and now, as adults, they were seeing their own names up in lights. xviii see the foreword of yawuru rntbc, 2016 walking jetty to jetty, stories of broome, nyamba buru yawuru, broome. xix see the australian institute of landscape architects website http://www.aila.org.au/imis_prod/ailaweb/chapters/wa/2012_wa_award_winners.aspx xx the earliest evidence of pearlshell use comes from koolan island where a small fragment of pinctada sp was identified in a layer dated to around 26,500 years ago and widgingarri where a fragment of pearlshell was dated to around 22,000 years. at this time the sea stand was near its lowest and the widgingarri shelter was over 200 k.m. from the coast (o’connor, 1999). xxi in universal mythologies, pearls and pearlshell are powerful objects, often associated with the moon and water, and with wisdom. for example, the chinese depict dragons (similar beings to aboriginal rainbow serpents) that follow the ‘pearl of wisdom.’ gnostics believed that a serpent held the wisdom of the world in a pearl. melanesians of the solomon islands inlay pearlshell in larger wooden funeral vessels, where the iridescence invokes the shadows, or spirits, of the deceased. in the highlands of new guinea, pearlshell is a currency for bride price. the greeks coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 182 believed pearls to be tears from the gods and that wearing pearls stopped brides from crying and facilitated marital bliss. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 308 on the ground: reimagining community protection of the ecosphere in the northern rivers yvonne hartman southern cross university yvonne.hartman@scu.edu.au sandy darab southern cross university sandy.darab@scu.edu.au copyright©2018 yvonne hartman & sandy darab. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: it would appear that the effects of sustained overuse of the planet’s resources is straining the natural world to its limits. the consequences of staying on this path may be catastrophic for both planet and humankind. at this time, when the ecosphere which sustains us all is so fragile, it seems imperative that we address the nature of the fundamental relationship between humans and their environment. hence, we should perhaps undertake to reimagine our relationship with nature, with place and with each other if we are to counteract such malign influences. this paper will argue that localised, direct democratic action offers us one way in which we may begin to redeem these relationships by providing an account of the way in which an assortment of subcultures in the northern rivers of new south wales united to successfully oppose mining for coal seam gas. the northern rivers is renowned for its natural endowments and a community which boasts great diversity. a variety of motivations led to an array of groups exerting their collective power and unity at grassroots level to defeat the attempt to introduce unconventional methods of gas extraction. in this process, a sense of place emerged as an important factor for many of those resisting the mining. the movement as it unfolded ‘on the ground’ proposes an alternative way of being and belonging, developed through a different relationship to place, community and the ecosphere. keywords: sense of place; democracy; coal seam gas. mailto:yvonne.hartman@scu.edu.au mailto:sandy.darab@scu.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 309 introduction some days before an estimated 800 police were reputed to arrive to break the bentley blockade, the place was a hive of activity: groups of protestors were practising their methods of peaceful resistance and refining their contingency plans. newcomers were streaming into the area and logistical preparations were proceeding. it was feared that police intervention would be brutal and swift, and there was speculation on the direction of their approach throughout the site. however, later that day, it was announced that the new south wales state government had revoked metgasco’s mining licence, referred the company to the independent commission against corruption and called off the police action (nicholls 2014). jubilation and rejoicing ensued, though this was not a definitive end to the threat. the action at bentley came about as a response to impending unconventional gas mining in the northern rivers region of new south wales, a region that is renowned for its natural beauty and diverse community. its inhabitants were provoked to mobilise to protect the land, water and air on which they depend, working together at the local level, that is, ‘on the ground.’ this paper explores two related themes: how relationship with place and nature informed the on-the-ground collective resistance to the threat of invasive gas mining; and the inclusion of direct/participatory democratic principles in the array of methods used to achieve ends in a non-violent manner. these themes demonstrate one way of positively reimagining our relationships with others and with the earth, providing an example of what is possible. told from the perspective of the authors, both of whom engaged in sustained participation in the movement over a period of years, this paper firstly provides some context for this case study after which we outline a personal account of our experiences during the bentley blockade from an emic perspective. as such, we are part of the culture that developed and are able to provide a standpoint ‘from the inside.’ as olive (2014) notes, “it is impossible to truly comprehend and appreciate the nuances of a particular culture unless one resides within that culture.” after critically reflecting upon our lived experiences, we extend our analysis to a broader context. we suggest that the two themes identified above—sense of place and a combination of direct and participatory democracy—initiated at the local level, are important factors that may help to influence and inform responses to environmental problems on a national or international scale. indeed, one of the most fundamental facts of our existence is our reliance on the ecosphere for survival.1 at a time when the ecosphere is so fragile, it is imperative that we address the nature of the relationships between humans and their environment, and between ourselves. we will argue that there is increasing urgency to address looming ecological problems such as climate change and pollution at the planetary level. yet, achieving consensus is proving to be elusive in an atmosphere of escalating mutual distrust within and between nations, even in those with long traditions of liberal democracy, as president trump’s isolationism and rejection of the paris climate accord demonstrates. the consequences of ignoring ecological problems may be catastrophic for both planet and humankind (ripple et al. 2017). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 310 we contend that in the first instance it is at the local level that the threats identified above must be responded to, that is, ‘on the ground.’ this is because as embodied beings we are attached to the earth in particular places. our knowing and our being are informed by our physical location in fundamental ways—ways that permeate our whole physicality, not just our minds, and out of that is often born a deep affection for and connection to place (larsen & johnson 2012). many people are conscious of their affection for and attachment to their locale and when it is under threat, this can be a catalyst for provoking social action. thus, we argue that the beginning of any project to regenerate our relations with each other and with the ecosphere should incorporate a form of direct and participatory democracy practised in situ as exemplified by the anti-coal seam gas (csg) movement in the northern rivers, as described below. background in 1999, a small petroleum exploration and production company called metgasco formed to extract gas from the northern rivers (deem 2016) and initially received favourable attention from the local media on the basis that it would supply the area with cheap natural gas, as well as providing much-needed employment. it was not until around 2010-2011 that public concern began to be expressed about the method of gas extraction. it emerged that metgasco intended to use highly contentious extractive techniques: unconventional gas mining, which included fracking. this technique involves injecting water, sand and a range of highly toxic chemicals at high pressure to release gas, resulting in the production of huge amounts of salt water that may contain residues such as heavy metals and radioactive material. this water must then be either stored or treated due to its toxicity. further, there were concerns about the escape of emissions of methane and other gases into both the groundwater and the atmosphere (hartman & darab 2014). unconventional gas mining also carries the possibility of catastrophic pressure loss resulting from excessive drawdown of the ancient groundwater stored in the great artesian basin (independent expert scientific committee on coal seam gas and large coal mining development 2014, p. 116). in an already dry continent subject to frequent droughts that affect food production, any loss of groundwater is of great concern (eamus et al. 2015). in response to the emergence of these concerns, community landowners affected by the proposed mining began a resistance that initially took the form of an information campaign via the local press and community meetings. this quickly developed into a mobilisation drive involving countless workshops and the forming of a plethora of individual action groups in both town and country areas. rural residents were encouraged to survey their neighbours and declare their roads ‘gasfield free’ on the basis of the survey results, which invariably demonstrated overwhelming opposition to metgasco’s plans. the guiding principle adopted by the resistance was encapsulated by the slogan “nonviolent and non-negotiable” borrowed from earlier social movements. alongside the community actions, the lismore city council election, which was held in september 2012, included a referendum-style poll that was implemented by the electoral commission of new south wales. voters were asked whether or not they supported coal seam gas exploration and production in the lismore city council area. the response was coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 311 an overwhelming 87% opposition to this activity (luke et al. 2014). other local councils in the region were more circumspect, but were persistently lobbied in numerous ways by anti-csg groups and individuals. meanwhile, the state member failed to adequately represent these constituents’ concerns in the nsw parliament. the ongoing resistance continued from 2012 until metgasco’s acceptance of the nsw government’s buyback offer of its mining license in december 2015. during that time, the opposition in the northern rivers saw numerous meetings, rallies and a great variety of non-violent actions, including most notably three blockades; one in glenugie in late 2012/early 2013, one in doubtful creek in early 2013 and finally at bentley in the first part of 2014 (deem 2016) as outlined below. the drill rig in glenugie was considerably delayed in gaining access to the site selected for drilling owing to a string of events such as cars with flat tyres and other impediments blocking the road. many of the protestors were locals and were zealous in their continued efforts to hamper the drilling. the blockade itself endured over the christmas period, with protestors using their ingenuity to decorate the site and celebrate the festive season. eventually the police from the police rescue squad and the tactical response group were called in to break the blockade, using force to remove the protectors (feain 2013; northern star 2013). the blockade lasted 76 days (deem 2016), ending when the drill rig pulled out to move operations to doubtful creek. the rig arrived at doubtful creek in early february 2013 where protestors had been massing. the police contingent emerged out of the forest to be met by a determined but peaceful crowd of protestors singing and blocking the gate through which the rig needed to pass. over the course of this blockade, a number of arrests were made beginning with those who had attached themselves to various structures or were blocking access by other means (deem 2016). again, the rig established a drilling site, but abandoned it in march, subsequently announcing their decision to suspend all csg drilling in the northern rivers. however, in late october, metgasco stated at its annual general meeting a new intention to drill at bentley, approximately 10 kilometres from lismore, which has a population of around 44,000 (deem 2016; lismore city council 2016). in late december 2013, preparations began to oppose drilling at bentley and in late january a 24-hour vigil was established at the site. protestors now became protectors (deem 2016). collective power, ingenuity and cooperation as the movement evolved, a series of groups became key resources for organising the resistance. this included the nationwide group lock the gate formed by drew hutton, and at the local level, groups such as northern rivers gasfield free were influential. indigenous people, in particular the githabul people, played a significant role in expressing their opposition to what they saw as the violation of their land. a major contribution to the blockades was the smoking ceremonies indigenous people would conduct for those protestors who were willing to chain themselves to devices or otherwise resist attempts to remove them. the experience of participating in a smoking ceremony is one of deep connection to both the place that is being protected as well as the other coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 312 protectors. it is our understanding that these are considered to be sacred events and we felt privileged to be participants. elders also regularly gave impassioned addresses to the massed gatherings and lay down on the road with other protectors in attempts to halt the advance of drilling vehicles. such experiences brought disparate groups of people together in action, giving them a commonality and indeed a bond they might never have otherwise had, as discussed below. farmers contributed by providing land for protestors to camp on and they became a fundamental part of the campaign by giving addresses at rallies and meetings—in particular, the early morning meetings at bentley—as well as travelling to sydney to attempt to influence parliamentarians and other decision makers. they were particularly persuasive because their direct livelihoods were at stake. when they talked, they elicited emotional responses from the crowds, speaking passionately about their love for the land. thousands of local people from lismore and other towns in the region also became heavily involved and—for the first time in some cases—they rubbed shoulders with many people committed to alternative lifestyles and environmental causes—meetings that would normally be outside their daily experience, as reported to the authors. the social markers such as class, gender, place of residence and occupation that had previously separated and distinguished inhabitants from each other fell away in the unity of action, with many participants publicly expressing at the regular gatherings their emotional attachment to a place that had become imbued with special meaning for them. key actors also came from a range of disparate fields. their expertise encompassed the fields of psychology, chemical toxicology, local government, health promotion, community development, law, academia and politics. veterans of the previous environmental protest in the region in the late 1970s to save the rainforest in terania creek also made important contributions. these actors were not leaders in the sense of taking command; rather, they played an educative role and advocated a model of distributed leadership that saw many small groups forming to mount their own activities depending upon their areas of interest. with such a variety of groups and individuals participating, obviously there was bound to be disagreement at times. disputes were handled by holding regular meetings in which deliberative and consensus-style democratic approaches were employed, so that as many decisions as possible were taken at the grassroots level. inclusiveness, respect for differences of opinion and the general agreement about the broader objective of defeating the introduction of gas mining seemed to act as a sort of glue to bind the vast majority of protectors together, avoiding major conflict. one group that achieved some notoriety was the knitting nannas, who adopted as their slogan “saving the land for the kiddies” and sought through the use of humour and nonthreatening activity (i.e. knitting) to subvert the stereotypical image of so-called hippie protestors. for instance, they would sit outside the office of the local national state member of parliament (mentioned previously) every thursday lunchtime to knit, and the intention was to do so until the northern rivers was gasfield free. in this way, the group interacted with the wider community and garnered huge public support. cars would drive by, with drivers waving and tooting their horns, or the car occupants would yell, “go the nannas.” people in the street would stop and chat or buy a ban csg badge. sometimes coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 313 the nannas would attempt to see the member, but most of the time he was away—not on the ground at all. the ingenuity, imagination and co-operation that these small groups exercised drew in people who, as noted above, would not ordinarily have taken part in such a movement. they performed an educative role as well, which was very often persuasive. some participants, for example, organised viewings of films about unconventional gas mining for the general public. others used their premises, both commercial and residential, as a means to promote the movement. funds were raised in many ways, for example via the sale of merchandise but also more imaginative methods were employed, such as the staging of a locally written and produced play in pantomime style called coal seam gas: the musical, which used local talent and humour to convey a message of non-violent opposition. once again, the production brought a diverse range of community members together in a common cause. the movement also attracted others to the region to contribute. mostly they articulated a strong commitment to environmental protection as their main motivation for becoming involved. yvonne spent months participating in a roadside vigil at bentley with many people, some of whom were from other parts of the country. as these months elapsed, these contributors became woven into the fabric of the ongoing and growing non-violent resistance so that a little part of them, too, belonged in this place. at gate c, where yvonne began acting in a police liaison role on her pre-dawn shifts in the latter part of the blockade, an assortment of locals and non-locals was protecting a junction from whence the police might arrive. the usual tripod, signs and other installations began to sprout, and a fireplace was built, with a fire kept burning or smouldering at all times. even in the soaking rain of blackest night, the fire was burning. for those of us on the ground at those times, it was a symbol of that most elemental force that draws us together: the fire in the hearth. over time, more and more so-called ‘ordinary’ people were turning into eco-warriors. when the first mass call-out to block an estimated 200-strong police contingent occurred, a long line of car headlights was visible as far as where the road wound out of sight between the hills, as people arrived in the dark of the early hours to stand against the police. making one’s way up to the main gate, from the main camp (called liberty), hundreds of little points of light from torches bounced up and down in what seemed a never-ending stream as the protectors walked to the gate. such experiences were both exhilarating and deeply moving all at once. the police failed to materialise that morning, but their aborted exercise only added to the numbers of people joining us on the ground at bentley. as the anticipated final showdown at bentley neared with the predicted arrival of 800 police, sandy was joining very large groups of people who were gathering to train in methods of non-violent resistance in preparation for the onslaught. once again this activity fostered a sense of camaraderie. further, many expressed a love of place to the point of willingness to physically endanger themselves for the cause. our experience was that these kinds of activities drew locals and non-locals together for a common purpose that erased the distinction between locals and outsiders. the participants often articulated a sense of unity that arose from their desire to protect the land, which had achieved monumental significance for them. as the final confrontation loomed, regular morning rituals with singing and the bentley angel ascending the tripod coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 314 began to occur, taking on a sacred character for many. this significance was fuelled by the popular perception that the bentley site was pivotal in arresting the advance of gas mining in the northern rivers. the fire in the hearth: bentley 2014. © yvonne hartman. motivations a variety of motivations becomes apparent in the foregoing narrative. three in particular stand out. in the first instance we have seen that not only a sense of place, but a love of place was a potent impulse that provoked action on the ground. this was bound up to some degree with a sense of a distinctive regional identity that was expressed by speakers such as indigenous leaders and farmers. there is some support for this in the literature: usher (2013), writing about a mobilisation against a coal mine in britain, finds that local identity and place are intextricably intertwined, becoming cemented over time. chapin and knapp (2015) have proposed that a sense of place, often understood as a subjective interpretation of a space bound up with personal meaning and experience, acts as a coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 315 motivator for stewardship on a local scale, whilst kudryavtsev, stedman and krasny (2012, p. 229) relatedly suggest that sense of place can foster “pro-environmental behaviour.” however, larsen and johnson go furthest by developing what we mean by ‘sense of place’ using a phenomenological approach. they suggest that although we may see the natural and social worlds as distinct phenomena, the reality of our embodied experience depends first and foremost upon place, such that “place does more than bridge; it grounds” (2012, p. 641). a slightly broader motivation was community cohesion. the mayor of lismore city council often expressed her opposition to the mining in terms of the hole that would be torn in the fabric of the community. she outlined the divisions that would open up, for example, between farmers who allowed gas mining on their land and neighbours who did not; between the gas workers, who would not be living in the general community, and townspeople; and the effects on the regional economy that would see a devaluing of some resources and an overvaluing of others. finally, the broadest of all motivations and one that would seem to have been shared by all protectors was that of making a contribution to saving the earth in some small way. this was the most common motivation expressed by non-locals who arrived to take part in the resistance. and those locals who were newcomers to environmental activism often expressed a new awareness of the environmental dangers the planet is facing. their participation thus had an educative effect that may well be lasting. in the final analysis, not only was the movement successful in arresting the introduction of an extractive industry that promised great environmental harm to the northern rivers, it also produced intangible benefits such as: new skills learned, particularly in collective action and decision-making; stronger ties with neighbours and community members who would not normally be thrown together, or as larsen and johnson express it, “unexpected coalitions and partnerships” (2012, p. 633); and for many, a deep and abiding sense of place that demands ongoing praxis. discussion we suggest these motivations encapsulate the two themes referred to in the introduction. sense of place is specifically named as a motivation, whilst the practices of community cohesion and ecological activism are enacted via direct and participatory democracy. the question is whether they can be applied at a broader level, given that there is an urgent need for international cooperation and concerted effort to avert ecological collapse on a global scale (ripple et al. 2017). in order to interrogate the potential of these themes, it is necessary to provide some context in terms of the global environmental situation as well as economic and political arrangements that have contributed to current conditions. it would appear that the effects of sustained overuse of the planet’s resources through ever expanding industrialisation is straining the ecosphere to its limits. the price that china pays for its breakneck industrialisation is a range of environmental harms, of which life-threatening air pollution is but one example. however, the ore that china depends upon is mined elsewhere, causing environmental damage such as excessive water and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 316 energy consumption, and an increase in greenhouse gases in source countries such as australia (mudd & yellishetty 2011). this is not an isolated instance, but aptly illustrates some of the dimensions of the problem. we are now seeing ominous signals (such as climate change and its effects) that we are approaching a “tipping point” (scheffers et al. 2016). some are suspicious that we might have already passed it (arctic council 2016, p. xii; ripple et al. 2017). arguably, this state of affairs is attributable to the historical conditions of industrial society and more recently the economic and political circumstances of the twentieth century. the post-world war ii consensus in western nations was directed towards the prevention of extremism and authoritarian dictatorships like the fascism that had so recently resulted in armed occupations, genocide and war on a global scale. the war was partly attributable to the severe economic depression that had preceded it and so the post-war effort included not only liberal democratic principles such as individual liberty, the extension of citizens’ rights, periodic election of representative governments and the separation of powers, but also economic stabilisation and the development of a welfare state that provided for its less fortunate citizens, which esping-andersen (1996) has argued assisted social integration. this economic approach could be called managed capitalism, following keynesian principles (keynes 1997). however, as prosperity declined in the 1970s, neoclassical economics began once again to gain ascendency, with the result that over the next decades the welfare state was subject to incremental retrenchment. at the same time, economic globalisation increasingly led to more tightly integrated markets characterised by trade deals that have led to extreme imbalances in wealth in both the developed and less developed world (galbraith 2008; pogge 2008). this constellation of economic and political arrangements has had benefits for some social groups, but also malign consequences such as economic inequality and environmental degradation on a global level. previously—in liberal democratic states at least—some measure of stability and respect for human rights has existed alongside industrial capitalism. however, this situation seems to be eroding as we see populism, racism and xenophobia increasingly valorised in public. this is evidenced by such events as a presidential candidate (now president) in the united states of america calling for muslim immigrants to be placed in internment camps, despite the u.s.a. having apologised for doing that very thing to japanese residents during wwii (bronwich 2016). populism is also evident in the successful campaign for britain to leave the european union. we are also seeing migrants, refugees and asylum seekers portrayed as responsible for a range of ills that can arguably be attributed to the combination of war, environmental catastrophe and the economic inequality already referred to (inglehart & norris, 2016). media commentators argue that the new surge towards populism and intolerance is characterised by the erosion of trust in democratic institutions, as well as suspicion of and even outright hostility to minorities (inglehart & norris, 2016). australia is not immune in this regard. the current surge in popularity of minor parties and independents campaigning on ‘anti-political,’ anti-immigrant platforms such as pauline hanson’s one nation party testifies to this trend. cameron and mcallister (2016, pp. 74-79) find that trust in democracy and politicians is at its lowest level since the australian election survey began. this loss of trust in traditional political arrangements is unlikely to further efforts to halt environmental harm. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 317 in light of these developments, we suggest there is a need to reimagine our relations with each other and the ecosphere if we are to arrest the current, possibly irreparable, trajectory toward social and environmental damage. in such an atmosphere, we suggest that the antigasfield movement in the northern rivers can be an example of how protecting the ecosphere can be enacted, and a large measure of its success can be attributed to a different way of relating and doing that is literally grounded in our physical environment, namely, via sense of place and participatory democratic methods. the case of the anti-gas mining resistance in the northern rivers illustrates this different way of operating. in particular, the deliberate adoption of non-violence rules out the kinds of outrages we see being committed against migrants and other minorities in both the u.k. since brexit, and the u.s. since the american election campaign (abc television 2016; corcoran & smith 2016; southern policy law center 2016). a further crucial difference we have noted above is that the movement was generated by the people directly affected at the local level—on the ground—rather than by a national-level referendum or election. castells (2004, pp. 334-335) argues that in response to the legitimation crises experienced in western nations, nation-states resorted to the devolution of some of their powers to the regional or local level. however, because of the considerable attachment that people feel towards their spatial and cultural locales, “once decentralization occurs, local and regional governments may seize the initiative on behalf of their populations … eventually coming in competition with their own parent states” (p. 335). we have seen an example of this phenomenon described above, when the local government in lismore played an active part in the resistance towards csg mining, using direct democratic methods to oppose the state government. this included measures such as the poll discussed earlier, providing leadership by heading rallies, visiting the blockade, and media appearances advocating for an end to the csg mining. this kind of activity provides support for our argument that the most important factors in understanding the strength and resolve of the anti-csg movement in the northern rivers were a sense of place and the use of direct/participatory democratic methods. lake (1994, in pratchett 2004, p. 366) argues that local autonomy from central governments is a “bottom-up phenomenon, in which localities reflect and develop a sense of place through political and social interaction.” furthermore, larsen and johnson (2012) advance a notion of place as important in what they call “affinity politics,” which occurs when people disengage from the exigencies of states and markets, and instead adopt forms of direct action that address community needs, using fluid and decentralised forms of organisation, deliberation and engagement within the context of place, whereby unique meanings and bonds are created. as razsa and kurnik (2012, p. 250) state, in reflecting on the occupy movement in ljubljana, slovenia, “direct democratic practice extends across the fabric of daily life and is inseparable from lived experience.” our personal experience participating in the anti-csg movement in the northern rivers for a number of years confirms that affinity politics grounded in place and a sense of place was in play. indeed, we would argue that what we have seen demonstrated by this movement is an alternative way of being and belonging that embodies at its core a respect for the ecosphere; not just the humans in it, but the totality of the earth. of course, this is not a new phenomenon; it has been expressed most potently by indigenous peoples, but also by those who see themselves as stewards of something innately precious. as well, it has been expressed in other social movements attempting to save places under environmental coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 318 threat. however, it has not been the dominant mode of existence in modernity and postmodernity. what this way of being and belonging asks of us is that we pay attention to where we are, to the meaning imbued in physical location and to take action at that level, in a way that respects not just other humans but all that surrounds us. literally and metaphorically, we need to be on the ground. conclusion we have argued that liberal democracies are struggling to contain forces that are threatening the post-world war ii consensus on a global scale. while offering a measure of peace and stability, this consensus has allowed a continuation of pernicious practices and modes of existence that have exacerbated social inequality and invited environmental catastrophe. australia is bound up in this web of practices and relations but for many, there is a growing realisation that the dominant order must be resisted in situ. we have described one such case of resistance that we experienced in person, on the ground in our own region. in this instance, it was successful. factors that appear to have made major contributions to this outcome were a commitment to non-violence, a strong sense of place and the use of direct and participatory democratic methods to practise a form of affinity politics. we contend this constellation of factors offers a way of reimagining our relations with each other and with the environment that is more attuned to our real needs and place in the ecosphere. however, this assertion is not a call to reject cosmopolitanism or dispense with liberal democracy and the nation state. we have acknowledged the benefits that both national and supranational co-operation can bring, and they are necessary and appropriate for peace building, mitigating inequalities and environmental protection. nevertheless, action for all of these desirable goals may need in the first instance to originate from citizens on the ground rather than as prescriptions from a central government. the anticsg movement has spread to many other parts of australia and has offered other communities under similar threat a model for action that offers meaningful connection to place and each other. at this point in the history of our civilisation, such a model is sorely needed. after all, as ripple et al. 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354, issue 6313, aaf7671 (1-11). southern policy law center 2016, update: incidents of hateful harassment since election day now number 701, 18 november, viewed 29 november 2016, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/18/update-incidents-hatefulharassment-election-day-now-number-701. usher, m 2013, ‘defending and transcending local identity through environmental discourse,’ environmental politics, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 811-831. yvonne hartman is a lecturer in politics and sociology in the school of arts and social sciences at southern cross university, lismore, australia. her work is grounded in a critical paradigm that questions existing power structures and social arrangements. research interests are aligned with issues of social and environmental justice, and she has published on neoliberalism, social policy, work, gender and housing. her most recent work focuses on environmental activism. https://theconversation.com/the-boom-iron-ore-and-australia-1847 https://theconversation.com/the-boom-iron-ore-and-australia-1847 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ecosphere javascript:; https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125 https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/18/update-incidents-hateful-harassment-election-day-now-number-701 https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/18/update-incidents-hateful-harassment-election-day-now-number-701 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 321 sandy darab is a lecturer and researcher at southern cross university, lismore, australia, working in the school of arts and social sciences. her research focuses upon social justice concerns and is grounded in empirical studies. she has published on environmental and housing issues, health provision, work, welfare, time usage, and social policy. currently she has turned her attention to environmental threats and the responses they engender. 1 we use the term ecosphere as expressed by the oxford dictionaries (2016), where it is differentiated from the term biosphere by its emphasis on the interaction between living and non-living components. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 245 teaching the welcoming of diversity and difference in a contemporary australian university lekkie hopkins edith cowan university l.hopkins@ecu.edu.au lucy hopkins edith cowan university lucy.hopkins@ecu.edu.au copyright©2018 lekkie hopkins & lucy hopkins. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: reimagining an australia where diversity and difference are welcomed rather than feared holds particular challenges for academics charged with the task of educating new undergraduate students who have been raised on a diet of conservative binary discourses and fear-inducing political slogans. this paper reports on the thinking we have done and on the practices we adopt to create a one-semester undergraduate unit on working respectfully and inclusively across diversity and difference. the unit is designed for delivery to students who will be working as professionals in contemporary australia. although our unit is currently being taught to students in the human services and community development areas, it can be tailored to suit students bound for any professional arena including teachers, health workers, engineers, social workers, psychologists, business executives, musicians and media commentators. keywords: cross-cultural communication; ethics of encounter; respect and reciprocity. reimagining an australia where diversity and difference are welcomed rather than feared holds particular challenges for academics charged with the task of educating new undergraduate students who have been raised on a diet of conservative binary discourses and fear-inducing political slogans. this paper reports on the thinking we have done and on the practices we adopt to create a one-semester undergraduate unit on working respectfully and inclusively across diversity and difference. the unit is designed for delivery to students who will be working as professionals in contemporary mailto:l.hopkins@ecu.edu.au mailto:lucy.hopkins@ecu.edu.au coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 246 australia. although our unit is currently being taught to students in the human services and community development areas, it can be tailored to suit students bound for any professional arena including teachers, health workers, engineers, social workers, psychologists, business executives, musicians and media commentators. what distinguishes this unit from others we are familiar with in the tertiary sector is its emphasis on three-way thinking born of poststructuralist understandings of subjectivity and power (davies, 1994; davies et al., 2006) and its insistence on the ethics of respectful communication (hopkins, 2006; irigaray, 1995). additionally, it introduces students to sociological understandings of relevant concepts like prejudice, racism, difference, whiteness and othering within which to read their own cultural specificity (jureidini & poole, 2003; kimmel & aronson, 2009; van kreiken et al., 2010). to create this unit we drew initially on two existing undergraduate units, the first written specifically to prepare first year counselling students for working crossculturally, and the second to prepare undergraduate students in the human services to recognise and use a specific values framework when encountering difference and diversity. in creating this new unit we have adopted what we consider to be the most useful features of each of those units and additionally cast our nets wide to reflect on the philosophical and epistemological traditions we might most judiciously incorporate. we begin this paper with a discussion of the ideas and values that underpin our new unit, and move then to a discussion of the philosophical and epistemological traditions we have drawn on, and those we have rejected. finally, we outline the content and structure of the new unit in some detail, and conclude with a comment on the teaching practices that facilitate this learning and on the personal and professional shifts it requires of students. the concepts and values underpinning our new unit african-american scholar and activist audre lorde’s exploration of notions of difference, marginalisation and fear, published in her 1984 collection sister outsider, remains disturbingly relevant in contemporary australia, and provides a starting point for our thinking. she writes: we have all been programmed to respond to human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. but we have no patterns for relating across our human difference as equals. as a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion. (115) lorde reminds us that the challenge remains for difference to be an empowering exchange, rather than a threat: coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 247 it is not those differences between us that are separating us. it is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behaviour and expectation. (115) further, she warns, it is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim and define those differences upon which they are imposed. (115) crucially, lorde argues that we need to develop tools for using human difference as “a springboard for creative change within our lives …” (115). following lorde, then, we begin with the understandings that difference and diversity are intriguing if one is curious rather than afraid; we argue, too, that power is most usefully understood in poststructuralist terms as fleeting and fluid and able to be resisted and negotiated; and that cross-cultural interactions have to be undertaken with reciprocal deeply-held respect for the self and respect for the other; and finally that it is an ethical responsibility of the tertiary educated professional to learn the art of becoming cross-culturally competent. in the context of our unit, we use the term culture in its broadest sense: hence, crosscultural competence and interacting across cultures is code for interaction across any kind of difference—of ethnicity, of ability, of political persuasion, of identity, of socio/economic status. let’s unpack these understandings a little. firstly, as audre lorde (1984) has advocated, we encourage students to approach their encounters with people and ideas and practices and capacities that are different from their own with curiosity born of wonder and a generosity of spirit, rather than with fear and loathing. one of the conceptual tools we have used to underpin this manoeuvre is to invite our students to become self-aware by understanding the cultural and sociological underpinnings of exclusions and fear of differences by introducing them to notions of the discursive construction of racism, prejudice, othering and privilege. this begins to allow students to reflect on the discursive construction of their own identity or socio/political location. if we then link this sociological knowledge with understandings of the self not as an essential category that can be subsumed or taken over by difference but as multiple and capable of negotiation at all levels, we can learn to find similarities as well as differences within others, and to make points of connection with others. curiosity, coupled with this understanding of the self as multiple, permits engagement without judgment, without superiority, without needing to ‘change the other to make it the same’ because the other is no longer viewed as threatening to an intrinsic, authentic self. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 248 secondly, we acknowledge that power plays exist in every relationship, and that in order for communication to be effective the power relationship between players has to be read and negotiated. poststructuralist understandings of power which emphasise its fleeting nature, its fluidity and flexibility, give students insight into both-and thinking, allowing them ways to negotiate their own positions in an encounter, rather than feeling stuck in either/or binary thinking. thirdly, our suite of understandings about the communication process is underpinned by the following values: • that respect for the selfhood of the other is central to any genuine human exchange; • that respect for the self is, simultaneously, central to any respectful human exchange; • that the process of respectful communication is, consequently, reciprocal. finally, we consider that it is an ethical responsibility of the tertiary educated professional to learn the art of becoming cross-culturally competent. the philosophical and epistemological traditions on which we draw there are many ways to present a unit such as this one and many philosophical and epistemological traditions on which to draw. recent work by chun and evans, for example, features what they call an ecological framework to re-think ways to teach cultural competence in higher education (chun & evans, 2016). it is not our intention here to survey the current crop of teaching texts, nor to suggest that ours is the only way to proceed. rather, following irigaray’s understanding that every scholarly moment is preceded by a specific genealogy of reading and research (whitford, 1991), we provide the following account of our own intellectual journeys towards that moment when this unit becomes, for us, a solid working tool. our thinking on bringing curiosity fuelled by wonder and a generosity of spirit to the cross-cultural encounter emerges from our engagement with feminist scholars who advocate enacting a relational politics of difference rather than an adversarial politics of opposition—scholars such as luce irigaray (1985, 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1995), helene cixous (1981, 1991, 1997), elspeth probyn (1993), trinh t minh-ha (1989, 1993) and marguerite la caze (2002). for these and many other scholars, curiosity allows engagement without interpellation; it allows us to know difference without becoming that difference; it allows us to connect across difference without fear for the integrity of our selfhood. developing the capacity to work with respect for the self and respect for the other requires ways of knowing that are both conceptual and experiential. for insight into how to communicate the complexity of this process to students, we have turned to the seminal work of trinh (1989), irigaray (1995) and la caze (2002). coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 249 trinh uses a maternal metaphor to illuminate the processes of connecting across the space between the self and the other: in her maternal love, she is neither possessed nor possessive; neither binding nor detached nor neutral. for a life to maintain another life, the touch has to be infinitely delicate: precise, attentive and swift, so as not to pull, track, rush, crush or smother. (trinh, 1989: 38) the key to this delicate manoeuvre, we feel, is imagination: if we can fly on the wings of our own imaginations, then surely we can bridge the gaps between our own embodied suite of memories, dreams and reflections and those of the other, to glimpse, if only fleetingly, the sensory register which will allow us to empathise without ever claiming to know the experience as our own (hopkins, 2009). our thinking on respectful communication draws explicitly on the work of luce irigaray, who, in her work on sexual difference, has eloquently articulated a process of non-hierarchical exchange and interaction, where two people who are different stand beside each other, neither one more central nor more marginal than the other, to uncover points of similarity and points of difference. for irigaray, the notion of reciprocity offers one of the most fruitful dimensions of intersubjective bonds. as irigaray states so eloquently “in j’aime a toi (i love to you), ‘i don’t dominate or consume you. i respect you (as irreducible)’” (1995: 171). our understanding of the intricacies of the intrapersonal manoeuvres needed to bring curiosity to the cross-cultural encounter has been enlivened by the work of australian feminist philosopher marguerite la caze (2002). la caze reflects on irigaray’s work to argue that the passion of wonder and the virtue of generosity can be seen to underpin these ways of working. la caze explains that irigaray, following descartes, has argued that wonder is the first of all the passions, and provides the basis for an ethics of sexual difference. one of the challenges facing our students, though, is that they will be required to connect across many differences beyond sexual difference. la caze elegantly argues that generosity and wonder are both needed in the development of an ethics of respect for difference: we should respond to other differences beyond sexual difference with wonder … the passions of generosity and wonder need to be brought together to ground an ethics; … wonder and generosity must be understood as attitudes that we can cultivate in ourselves. (2002: 1) in thinking through ways to respond to differences between the self and the other, and to connect with respect and reciprocity across those differences, la caze argues that we need to mobilise both wonder and generosity in order to recognise similarities and differences. wonder, she argues, involves recognising others as different from ourselves. we are drawn by curiosity, by wonder, to something new precisely because of its difference. generosity, by contrast, involves seeing others as essentially similar to ourselves: unlike its present meaning, la caze explains, generosity for descartes is “a kind of wonder combined with love, which involves having proper pride or rightful selfregard” (descartes, 1989: 103, in la caze, 2002: 6). in summary, then, la caze argues that “generosity appears to be the converse of wonder, in the sense that it is regarding coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 250 others as like ourselves and looking for similarity, whereas wonder involves regarding others as very different from ourselves in their needs, desires and interests” (2002: 6). having wonder and generosity counter-balancing each other in these ways also prevents the danger to which iris marion young (1997) has alluded, that in our desire to acknowledge difference we may begin to exoticise it, or view it as alien. mobilising wonder and generosity to create and sustain respectful and reciprocal connections across the boundary between the self and the other are simultaneously practices that students will take into their professional lives, and practices that underpin classroom interactions. our task as educators is to find ways to enable students to carry these practices into their everyday lives. although it has not been necessary to take first year undergraduate students into the arcane philosophical reaches of the work of trinh or irigaray or la caze, as academics we have each found their work on human integrity, dignity and difference to be deeply satisfying philosophically. our thinking on power clearly derives from the poststructuralist theorising of foucault and a host of followers, including, again, luce irigaray, helene cixous, as well as australian scholars bronwyn davies (1994, 1996, 2000) and jan fook (1999). additionally, in order to explain how and why particular knowledges have currency we have drawn on postcolonial understandings of the relationship between the centre—in postcolonial terms, that space in which meanings made are naturalised and assumed to be universal, where the power of dominant discursive understandings of the world often resides—and the peripheries which are seen as other to the centre. for this spatial analysis of cross-cultural connection, we are indebted especially to the work of susan stanford friedman (1998). finally, in considering the ethics of respectful engagement, our message is simple: communicating respectfully is not about choice, it is about responsibility. what we have found in our reflections on the way previous units have been shaped and taught is that it is too easy for the ethics of respectful encounters to be overlooked, not explicitly articulated, or simply ignored. the notion that respectful communication is underpinned by an ethics of responsibility to choose a course of action that is least marginalising or dismissive is one we feel the need to stress and to articulate clearly. defining cross-cultural competence the conscious developing of cultural competence in higher education students is increasingly seen as a responsibility of australian universities, and we recognise that our unit is being developed in the context of some debate about what constitutes cultural or cross-cultural competence. for example, in its recent call for papers to define and discuss the topic cultural competence and the higher education sector, the asian conference on education being held in kobe, japan, in october 2017 acknowledges that “currently 12 australian universities include graduate attributes that encompass statements on cultural competence and the ability of graduates to engage with diverse cultural and indigenous perspectives in both global and local settings.” it cites a 2020 coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 251 vision for australian higher education whereby the system “produces graduates with not only the requisite knowledge and skills but also the understandings, capability or attributes permitting the individual to think flexibly or act intelligently in intercultural situations.” “but what,” it asks, “is meant by cultural competence and what are the implications for teaching, learning and leadership?” (asian conference on education 2017). our own understanding of what constitutes the kind of cross-cultural competence that will prepare our students for ethical cross-cultural engagements in their professional lives is quite specific. from the literature on equipping counselling students to become cross-culturally competent, most especially the work of u.s. academics smith (2004) and sue and sue (2015), we took the notion that cross-cultural competence (for which there is a checklist) is born of awareness (of self and others), knowledge (of one’s own culture and the culture of others), and the experiential skills of bringing those two qualities together in the process of respectful communication. although this combination of awareness, knowledge and skills relates specifically in this instance to the development of cross-cultural competence, where culture is seen in its original sociological sense in specific relation to ethnicity, we have applied it to developing the skills to work with populations who are culturally diverse in the widest possible sense. the following checklist which we present to students is our adaptation of the one created by sue and sue (2015). it was originally prepared specifically for preparing counselling students to work cross-culturally. we have adapted it for a wider cohort of potential professionals. multicultural competencies cultural competence: awareness • you have moved from being culturally unaware to being aware and sensitive to your own cultural heritage and to valuing and respecting difference • you are aware of your own values and biases and how they may affect diverse clients • you are comfortable with differences that exist between you and your clients in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and other sociodemographic variables. differences are not seen as deviant. • you are sensitive to circumstances (personal biases; stage of racial, gender, and sexual orientation identity; socio-political influences etc) that may dictate referral of clients to members of their own sociodemographic group or to different professionals. • you are aware of your own racist, sexist, heterosexist and other detrimental attitudes, beliefs and feelings cultural competence: knowledge coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 252 • you are knowledgeable and informed on a number of culturally diverse groups, especially groups that you are likely to work with • you are knowledgeable about the socio-political system and the treatment of marginalised groups in australia • you are knowledgeable about institutional barriers that prevent some diverse clients from using available services cultural competence: skills • you are able to generate a wide variety of verbal and nonverbal helping responses • you are able to communicate (send and receive both verbal and nonverbal messages) accurately • you are able to exercise institutional intervention skills on behalf of your client where appropriate • you are able to anticipate the impact of your interactions, and limitations you possess on culturally diverse clients • you are able to play professional roles characterised by an active systemic focus, which leads to environmental interventions. you are not restricted by the conventional expert professional mode of operation (adapted from sue & sue, 2008: 47) throughout the semester we encourage students to use the checklist to reflect on their own developing level of cultural competence. one of the most successful assignments we have used in the past five years has required students to keep a private weekly journal responding to that week’s material and reflecting on what they have learned personally and professionally. at the end of semester they are then required to draw on that journal and, using the four headings that refer to each module (understanding culture; developing awareness; gaining knowledge; practising multiculturalism) to write a report on what they have learned in each module on their journey to developing cross-cultural competence. as part of the assignment they are invited to rank themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of their awareness and abilities. clearly, students are encouraged to view their work in this unit as the beginning of a professional and personal journey, not as an end in itself. importantly, the private weekly journal activities we have used are pitched at a very accessible level to enable all students to grapple with the processes of reflection and developing awareness of self and others, regardless of their level of conceptual sophistication. hence, the journal activity for one iteration of this unit for week 4 asked the following: think back to the film, looking for alibrandi, which you watched in class last week, and which you wrote about in your journal last week too. this week consider the following: this film is about josie’s search for identity. what are the major influences on her identity? think in terms of family/school/peers/urban environment. explore these influences with reference to specific scenes in the film. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 253 where would you place josie on a continuum of cross-cultural competencies? does she become more cross-culturally competent during the film? where does she sit on the continuum at the beginning of the film? at the end? if you were josie, would you have handled things differently? reflect: where would you rate yourself right now on a continuum of cross-cultural competencies, where 1 is poor and 10 is excellent? is there room for improvement? students are free to discuss their journal entries online or in class; however, the entries are not assessed by the teacher but are used as a resource for the final assignment. so, how have we shaped our unit? the unit we teach runs simultaneously for on-campus and off-campus students. usually it is taught in a 12-week semester, with on-campus students meeting for one three-hour class per week. and so the unit we have devised is shaped to follow sue and sue’s formula for developing cross-cultural competence: we move from an initial focus on gaining self-awareness in the first two modules (two weeks each) to an understanding of how to gain knowledge about one’s own culture and other cultures (in the broadest sense of the term culture) in module 3 (five weeks), to a focus on respectful communication skills born of bringing awareness and knowledge together in module 4 (three weeks). like all good teachers, in devising such a unit we begin with our students. we recognise that many of our students have been raised in contemporary australia on a diet of conservative binary discourses (either you’re with us or against us) and fear-inducing political slogans. consequently, we recognise that we need to develop a classroom climate where students are able to trust, to relax their defenses, to look closely at their own suite of prejudices and fears. and so in modules 1 and 2, the process of gaining self-awareness is couched in sociological terms, so students are introduced to sociological understandings of prejudice, racism, whiteness and othering, and to discursive constructions of power and privilege (jureidini & poole, 2003; kimmel & aronson, 2009; van kreiken et al., 2010). hence, in these two modules students begin to understand the broader social discourses or narratives that often shape our individual responses to difference, and are especially alerted to the danger of stereotyping via the single story (adichie, 2009). additionally, they begin to be able to identify a range of value positions (specifically, excluding, ignoring, fixing, valuing) underpinning contemporary australian responses to marginalised groups. for example, discourses around asylum seekers in australia can be seen to constitute exclusions. the northern territory intervention can be seen to be underpinned by a paternalistic desire to ‘fix’ difference, and to accept only that which becomes the same as the dominant social mode. the silences around same-sex families within early childhood education and care pedagogies can be seen to be a form of ignoring difference, where sameness is privileged and difference tolerated only when it is not spoken. finally, modes of education that are underpinned by a valuing of difference can be seen to be propelled by a curiosity, an interest, rather than by fear. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 254 in module 3, gaining knowledge, we look at the process of learning more deeply about those who are different from ourselves. we look not only at the knowledge about different groups itself, but also how we can go about finding knowledge. students are encouraged to think about the validity of various knowledge sources, and how knowledge can be taken up. here, the unit explores issues such as the positioning of transgender youth, the marginalisation of indigenous people in australian history, and of cultural diversity in australia. students research these topics, watch documentaries, engage with stories and read academic work. module 4 develops the skills to connect respectfully across difference through drawing on the awareness and knowledges gained in the earlier modules. in the final week of semester, students are re-presented with the checklist for cross-cultural competencies to gauge their own development along the continuum from incompetent to highly competent. as we have stressed throughout, the process of connecting across differences is underpinned by the practice of respecting the self and respecting the other, which in turn is underpinned by what we see as an ethics of responsibility. that is, we argue to students that, as professional people working with someone who is culturally different, in the broadest possible interpretation of cultural difference, we have a responsibility to find ways to accord the deepest possible respect for the human dignity of the other when we interact, design programs, work with that other. in this respect, power relations at the level of communication have to be horizontal rather than vertical, even though of course the institutional and structural power held by the professional person will in most cases be greater than the power held by the client. negotiating these complex relations of power is difficult, often confronting, and demands a level of awareness of the self and the power of its discursive shaping that can be difficult to grasp. as we have seen, according respect at this deepest level also often demands specific knowledge of particular cultures, or at least a willingness to learn this knowledge. smith (2004: 15) argues, as do sue and sue (2015) and other therapy scholars, that what they call cross-cultural competence and what we might call capacity to connect across difference is attentive to the implicit dynamics of power and culture, and makes these dynamics explicit. counsellors and community workers and other professio nals who communicate effectively cross-culturally are thus attuned to the privileges, inequities, needs and biases, enabling them to respond more effectively to the contexts in which they work. they value others, listen attentively, and work hard to minimise their own defensiveness, reactivity and prejudice. a conscious awareness of the double manoeuvre of bringing wonder and generosity to their encounters helps facilitate this. cross-culturally competent professionals are aware of their own assumptions, knowledgeable about clients’ contexts, and skilful in their efforts to promote positive change. clearly, what this kind of cross-cultural communication is designed to combat is the top-down, expert service delivery that is born of unthinking acceptance of privilege (we know best what’s good for you), or of discursively constructed fear of difference born of cultural racism or prejudice, or of a lazy kind of ignoring of difference which culminates in assimilation and the erasure of cultural specificity. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 255 implications for teaching the unit the implications for teaching towards cross-cultural competence in these ways are that if students have been raised surrounded by discourses of entitlement to be free to express whatever view they want, no matter how hurtful or ignorant, we need to be prepared to provide them with additional ways of seeing to enable them to learn how to interact responsibly, by respecting the self and respecting the other simultaneously. this can involve some undoing of the discursive construction of the free individual in australia (an assumption that underpinned one of the earlier iterations of this unit and which we discarded) and replacement with a self-aware, ethically caring person who is linked into community. crucially, we have found that introducing students to using the both-and thinking of poststructuralism rather than the either/or thinking of binary thought facilitates the shedding of a fear response to difference and allows students to bring generosity and wonder to the encounter with difference. additionally, in order to teach the processes of working with respect and reciprocity. we have to alert students to forming an awareness of the self in relation to the culture surrounding them. underpinning the process of connecting with respect is the skill of active listening, evoking in turn the pedagogy of listening articulated by rinaldi (2006) out of her lively and respectful engagement with very young children. for most students, this kind of teaching and academic material demands a deeply thoughtful and embodied engagement to facilitate a re-thinking of existing values and aspirations. the implications for students undertaking this sort of education can be personally challenging and emotionally demanding. smith (2004: 14) is adamant that there’s no shortcut here: communicating cross-culturally must be practised in order to be understood. it is not enough to understand theoretically what to do: you have to internalise the values and the processes that allow you to work generously and openly and attentively with people. where this process is embodied, the learning deepens. although module 4 of our unit is devoted most specifically to the practicing of crosscultural communication, the development of the skills necessary to do this effectively occurs throughout the unit. from the beginning we attempt to model respectful encounter by creating a classroom climate (both on-campus and online) infused with an ethics of respect for self and other. because we teach on campus in one three-hour block of time, each week for 12 weeks, we have the flexibility to incorporate practical experiences throughout the semester. learning can be playful, active, embodied. sometimes students act out interpersonal interactions to demonstrate a range of responses to a particular situation for comment and discussion by the rest of the class; sometimes students reflect on the range of possible responses to a situation with a series of spatial representations through drawing or painting; sometimes they choreograph their response. when the academic classroom becomes a site of creativity, where imagination itself is welcomed rather than excluded from the academic endeavour, the possibilities for creative and embodied explorations to all kinds of cross-cultural encounters are multiple. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 256 to facilitate the personal deepening often required to become competent, in this sphere, parham (2001) cited in smith (2004: 14) recommends that students have courage; become risk-takers; inform themselves through new relationships; rediscover their capacity to trust; and renew their faith. finally, smith (2004: 14) warns, it will not be easy: students are advised to expect to encounter anger, frustration, surprise, humiliation, indignation and ambivalence in themselves—but to understand that experiencing and working with those emotions when they appear is part of the growing process. real growth, they argue, comes in extending the trust and acceptance that can strengthen a relationship and in working to overcome intolerance—especially outside one’s comfort zone. in their feedback on the unit, students invariably recognise the challenges of this kind of work: the last module was a great lesson in understanding how to communicate across cultures and how to welcome difference and diversity (lecture notes). i really enjoyed the article by smith and draper (2004) where they discuss the importance of placing the awareness not on the individual but on the context that every human being brings to the encounter. another student writes of the “inspiration i have found [in the notion of] respecting the self and respecting the other; and also understanding that each person sits at the centre of her own story. as easy as it sounds in real life i find it quite challenging to practise day by day.” some students clearly articulate a refining of their own awarenesses of socio-political location: i realised when reflecting on our week 11 class discussion of our own ethnic specificity that i am used to thinking about myself as an individual. i suppose this is a product of growing up in a westernised individualistic society. but as discussed by smith and draper (2004), we bring not only ourselves into the therapeutic setting but also the biases, stereotypes and prejudices that come from our cultural context. it is obvious to me that i am a product of my upbringing and i grew up in quite a racist environment. this is something i already understood and had tried to counter as i grew up by rejecting overt racism, but what i have learned while engaged in this unit of study is that racism, prejudice, biased thoughts and assumptions can go quite deeply and turn up where you least expect them. understanding where these come from in my cultural context has helped me to see them as things i can now acknowledge, be aware of and work on changing. some students feel as if they are well on the way to becoming cross-culturally competent: what i have learned from this unit is that it is important not only to recognise differences and the potential biases that i may hold but, to actually embrace and celebrate differences as mutually enriching experiences. i have coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 257 discovered that i unconsciously held onto biases before studying this unit, however i have become much more culturally aware and this helps me to accept differences. i believe i have also developed sensitivity to my own negative attitudes and beliefs which will assist in my role as a practitioner. i have gained invaluable knowledge on the issues surrounding cultural diversity and i have learnt especially to take into consideration the importance of the client’s cultural context. in regards to skills and implementing them i have developed both verbal and non-verbal skills so that i can communicate accurately to people from cultures other than my own. i am aware that if my own interpersonal skills are not in tune with the client’s specific cultural needs this could actually hinder my professional work. importantly for us as teachers, we have found that students at all levels of ability have been able to internalise some of the values (respect for the self and for the other; bringing wonder and curiosity to the encounter with difference) and to develop skills that they can use personally and professionally: in conclusion, this unit has been truly an amazing lesson for me and a very inspiring journey. i have learnt so much and encountered a lot. i believe all of these made me realise so much about my own self, my culture and my identity. i am sure all the knowledge i have acquired will help me to become a more competent person and also professional across the cross-cultural arena. finally, some students clearly articulate their understandings of the processes of change their engagement with the unit has begun in them: i have tried to examine my assumptions and prejudices in a critical way in an attempt to learn from them. i certainly feel that a number of issues and concepts that may have previously been on the periphery of my mind and understanding have now come into focus and under scrutiny. as several of us acknowledged in class, it has not been so much the information in this unit of study that has been so much of value, although it has, but the processes it has begun. i feel this is certainly true for me. our reimagined australia the australia that we have reimagined is one where everyone can thrive: where diversity and difference are celebrated rather than being feared, where communities are socially and culturally enriched by living with a generosity of spirit and a deeply held respect for the self and the other, and where university educated professionals of all flavours understand their ethical responsibility for initiating such respectful relations. the unit we have designed draws on the work of a series of fine scholars and on the practices of creative educators to help work towards that goal. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 258 references adichie, chimamanda ngozi (2009). the danger of a single story. ted talk available online. retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. asian conference on education, kobe, japan, october 2017. call for papers on the theme of cultural competence in higher education. retrieved online at https://ace.iafor.org. chun, edna, & alvin evans (eds.) (2016). rethinking cultural competence in higher education: an ecological framework for student development. ashe higher education report, vol 42, no 4. hoboken, nj: jossey-bass. cixous, helene (1981). the laugh of the medusa. in elaine marks & isabelle de courtivron (eds.), new french feminisms. new york: schocken books. ---. (1991). coming to writing and other essays. edited by deborah jensen. cambridge: harvard university press. ---., & mirielle calle-guber (1997). rootprints: memory and life writing. london: routledge. davies, bronwyn (1994). poststructuralist theory and classroom practice. geelong: deakin university press. ---. (1996). power, knowledge, desire. changing school organization and management practices. canberra: deet. ---. (2000). (in)scribing body/landscape relations. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. ---., jenny browne, susanne gannon, lekkie hopkins, helen mccann and monne wihlborg (2006). constituting the feminist subject in poststructuralist discourse. feminism and psychology, vol 16, no 1, 87-103. fook, jan (1999) critical reflectivity in education and practice. in bob pearse and jan fook (eds.). transforming social work practice: postmodern critical perspectives. sydney: allen & unwin. friedman, susan stanford (1998). mappings. feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter. princeton: princeton university press. hopkins, lekkie (2006). teaching group facilitation processes in the feminist classroom: from poststructuralist theory to activist practice. in international journal of learning, vol 12, issue 9, 331-338. ---. (2009). on voice and silence. giving life to a story and story to a life. saarbrucken: vdm. irigaray, luce (1985). speculum of the other woman . ithaca: cornell university press. ---. (1991). the irigaray reader. edited and with an introduction by m. whitford. oxford: blackwell. ---. (1993a). an ethics of sexual difference. ithaca: cornell university press. ---. (1993b). je, tous, nous. toward a culture of difference. london: routledge. ---. (1995). j’aime a toi (i love to you) (alison martin, trans.). new york: routledge. jureidini, ray, & marilyn poole (eds.) (2003). sociology: australian connections. (3rd edition). sydney: allen & unwin. kimmel, michael, & amy aronson (2009). sociology now: the essentials. boston: pearson allyn and bacon. la caze, marguerite (2002). the encounter between wonder and generosity, 
 hypatia, 17 (3), 1-19. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story https://ace.iafor.org/ coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 259 lorde, audre (1984). sister outsider: essays and speeches. berkeley, ca: crossing press. probyn, elspeth (1993). sexing the self. london and new york: routledge. rinaldi, carlina (2006). in dialogue with reggio emilia. listening, researching and learning. london and new york: routledge. smith, timothy b. (ed.) (2004). practicing multiculturalism: affirming diversity in counselling and psychology. boston: pearson education. smith, timothy b., & mathew draper (2004). understanding individuals in their context: a relational perspective of multicultural counselling and psychotherapy. in timothy b. smith (ed.), practicing multiculturalism: affirming diversity in counselling and psychology (pp. 313-323). boston: pearson education. sue, derald wing, & david sue (2008). counselling the culturally diverse: theory and practice. 5th edition. hoboken, nj: wiley. ---. (2015). counselling the culturally diverse. theory and practice. 7th edition. hoboken, nj: wiley. trinh, t. minh-ha (1989). woman, native, other. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press. ---. (1993). all-owning spectatorship. in sneja gunew & anna yeatman (eds.), feminism and the politics of difference. sydney: allen & unwin. van krieken, robert, daphne habibis, phillip smith, brett hutchins, greg martin & karl maton (eds.) (2010). sociology: themes and perspectives. (4th edition). sydney: pearson. whitford, margaret (1991). luce irigaray. philosophy in the feminine. london: routledge. young, iris marion (1997). intersecting voices: dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. lekkie hopkins is a poststructuralist feminist scholar who holds an adjunct senior lecturer position at in the school of arts and humanities at edith cowan university. she has been a teacher, archivist, radio broadcaster and oral historian and was the coordinator of women’s studies at ecu for 25 years. she is particularly interested in the history of social protest and in the lives of activist women. she is the author of on voice and silence (2009), among the chosen, the life story of patricia giles (2010) and the magnificent life of miss may holman (2016). lucy hopkins is a lecturer in the school of arts and humanities at edith cowan university, where she teaches on difference and diversity and childhood. her research concerns the cultural politics of childhood, diversity and ethics. her recent work includes an edited collection with arathi sriprakash entitled the 'poor child': the cultural politics of education, development and childhood (2015), which critiques the notion of a universal or 'global' child and calls for a rethinking of child subjectivities. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 empathy for the dispossessed ganesh devy ganesh_devy@yahoo.com copyright© 2020 ganesh devy. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a brief history of how geoff davis became involved with the adivasi academy in baroda and how the chotro conferences came into being keywords: geoff davis, activism, adivasi academy in our literary and academic life, we keep acquiring friends, adding more to the ones we already have, drawing and re-drawing an intangible but definitive circle of our knowing together and being together. i too have done this all along. however, the late prof. geoffrey davis was just not one of the friends in the community of scholars i have known. our joining hands to do a lot of innovative work was a result of his ability to swim across cultures and my disaffection with things academic. i think i met him the first time in 1984 at the eaclals conference at sitges, spain. during the 1980s, i was a 'regular' at the eaclals meetings, since india did not have an active commonwealth literature culture as yet. but, my memory of that meeting is not very clear. in 1988, geoff had convened a conference at aachen, germany, where he spent most of his academic life. i was invited to it for a plenary. this experience left me impressed by his organisational ability. in between, we had met at other places too, austria, hungary, singapore. but all these meetings were casual; and i do not recall any memorable conversation having taken place between us during these conferences. during the 1990s, geoff hosted a conference on literature and activism. i left my professorship at baroda, india, in 1996. geoff had heard about this move from friends. he asked me to lecture at the conference. i did. it was during this conference i noticed that he was deeply respectful of activism, that his empathy for the dispossessed was genuinely deep. i also noticed that he was extremely wary of using cliched and fashionable jargon. the impression these qualities made on me was strong. a few years later, he was to attend the aclals triennial in hyderabad, india. he wrote to me asking mailto:ganesh_devy@yahoo.com coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 if he could visit me after the hyderabad conference. he knew that i had stopped attending academic conferences and there was no chance of our meeting in hyderabad. so, i invited him to baroda, 1500 kms north of hyderabad. i am not sure if he enjoyed his visit to baroda. on the day he was to arrive, for reasons difficult for me to know, i altogether forgot about his arrival. i was to meet him at the airport. baroda in those days was a very small airport, only three or four flights arrived there each day; and overseas visitors were not a common sight. geoff waited there till almost the last co-traveller had left the meeting area. the last one to leave happened to be an architect named karan grover, who is a living legend in the field of architecture. grover asked geoff if he was expecting anyone. geoff mentioned my name. this worked. karan grover and i had been friends for decades and geoff was made to feel welcome on my behalf, brought to his lodgings and, the forgetting and forgiving over, we met over dinner. the next day, i drove him in my car to the location of the adivasi academy (the tribal university) that i was trying to establish in those years. this location was 90 kms east of baroda. on the way, i talked with passion all about my plans, my dreams. he listened. he spent another day in baroda meeting karan and enjoyed the famous grover wine. i was busy in my work with the tribal academy. the next morning, i drove geoff to the airport, as he was leaving for bombay and then to aachen. at the airport, he asked me if i could have him visit the adivasi academy again for a longer time, a week or so. i said, "why do you not come for a semester?" he was a bit puzzled by my offer, made in such a casual manner. so, i added, "be a fellow with us." he took that offer and returned to baroda the following year, but for a short time. i think, it was after two more brief trips that he agreed to spend six months in baroda. i must explain that the adivasi academy is not like a university. it is a community workstation at best, with really very minimum facilities that makes for most of us what we call 'civilisation.' the 'fellowship' had no set rules. they were made looking at the individual's ability and desire to contribute what one had promised to contribute. the 'projects' ranged from writing a book or an article, teaching music or language to children, keeping the library or museum in good order, tending a piece of agricultural land, setting up a community micro-credit group or just documenting any of these activities. when geoff became a fellow of the adivasi academy, there were three others, brian and eileen coates from limerick, ireland and lachman khubchandani, a linguist from pune, india. eileen had accepted to help us with the museum and lachman was to write a book in linguistics. i was more ambitious with geoff. i said to him, "if you do not mind, please do nothing, only watch what goes on here and when it pleases you discuss ideas with me." he agreed. the facilities given to the fellows included housing in baroda and meals when they visited the academy, 90 kms away from baroda. all my meetings with tribals were transacted in their languages. english words were rarely heard. only occasionally, some visitors helped geoff with english interpretations. geoff, i must say, braved all of this discomfort without a murmur. the impression i had formed about his deep empathy for the dispossessed became firmer. in the fifth month of his stay, i sent a word to him asking if he was available for a serious conversation. he obliged. we met in my baroda office the bhasha centre -at 2 pm. i asked him if he would join me in imagining an coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 international 'non-conference' for looking at the world through the perspective of the indigenous. he said, "i cannot promise, but i will try." our conversation continued for several hours and, probably, both of us had a reasonably good idea of what all needed to be avoided in making our idea of conference a completely rooted to the ground. i proposed the name 'chotro' (a shared platform), he consented to it with great enthusiasm. next morning, i found him at bhasha. he had a 'call for chotro' ready with him. i made several calls to various offices and individuals in delhi to finalise the material arrangements for the first chotro. that afternoon, geoff sat at the computer and sent out close to a 150 emails. before he left baroda, we were fully involved in putting together the unusual conference. he made one visit to india before the conference was held in delhi in january 2008. we met in delhi. i had to combine some of my other works with the work related to chotro. one of these involved a visit to the prime minister's office. he was a bit shocked when i told him that after sorting out the conference related arrangements for stay and local transportation, i would be going to the pm’s office and that he was welcome to join me. years later, i have heard him narrating this anecdote to friends over a glass of wine. the delhi chotro was the first one. we put together several more in subsequent years and worked on the conference volumes, meeting in several countries. geoff became a frequent visitor to india, to baroda, and also to my home and my family. i am not aware if we shared an ideology. in a way, all of us in the field of literature have a varying degree of progressive outlook on life and society. but, what clicked between geoff and me is something else, and that is his immense patience with me and his ability to cope with surprises and shocks, which could not be avoided considering my involvement in several social causes. john keats, speaking of william shakespeare's 'genius' used the term 'negative capability' -the ability to live amidst uncertainties. the mutual recognition of this negative capability brought us together for undertaking unconventional kinds of work, serious though not strictly academic. what role did geoff take as collaborator in co-organising chotro and in working with the adivasi communities? when we thought of creating the chotro non-conferences, we had no funding support. we had no sponsors, no funds for international travel. bhasha centre was not a full-scale 'institution' till then. besides, "indigenous studies' was not an accepted field of academic work. we were not sure if any self-respecting publisher would accept to publish the proceedings. therefore, in all of these matters, we shared responsibility. but, generally speaking, he dealt with the overseas participants and i handled the indian issues, material and academic. i accepted to identify publishers, negotiate with them, do the necessary correspondence, geoff focused on copy editing the texts. but, this division of work was not sanctimonious. either of us was free to cross over, and even required to do so, looking at each other's convenience. never forget that geoff had his other major obligations and academic projects, and i had mine. we had no desire to claim credit for the work we were doing. it was born out of our desire to create a legitimate space for the voice of the indigenous. the works we co-edited include indigeneity , edited by g. n. devy, geoffrey davis and k. k. chakravarty, orient blackswan, 2009; voice and memory, edited by g. n. devy, coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 geofrey davis and k. k. chakravarty, orient blackswan, 2009; performing identities, edited by g. n. devy, geoffrey davis and k. k. chakravarty, routledge 2012; knowing differently, edited by g. n. devy, geoffrey davis and k. k. chakravarty, routledge 2013; narrating nomadism, edited by g. n. devy, geoffrey davis and k. k. chakravarty, routledge 2014; the language of loss of the indigenous, edited by g. n. devy & geoffrey davis, routledge 2016. these six volumes resulted out of our joint work. another series of five volumes, published by routledge, is on its way under the titled key concepts in indigenous studies. thus, our collaboration produced 11 excellent volumes published by world class publishing houses. they total 5000 printed pages and form a body of scholarly literature covering many aspects of the indigenous people from all continents. all of this is quite outside the enormous amount of scholarly and organisation work that prof. davis did. it was a great good fortune for me to have known him and to have worked together. i cherish the memory of my association with him and deeply mourn his not being on this side of the mysterious divide bionote: ganesh devy, former professor at the maharaja sayajirao university of baroda, founder of the bhasha research centre, baroda, and the adivasi academy, tejgadh, is a literary scholar and cultural activist. he is chair of the people's linguistic survey of india and chief editor of the series of 50 volumes produced by the plsi. since 2015 he has been leading the indian writers’ resistance to fascism movement, dakshinayana (going south). coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 an open letter to geoff davis dieter riemenschneider kaitui80@gmail.com copyright© 2020 dieter riemenschneider. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: an open letter in which the author remembers the various conferences in which he coincided with geoff and the friendship that the two built up over the years. keywords: geoff davis, equanimity of spirit, postcolonial conferences dear geoff, whether my letter will reach you i cannot say but what i can say is: “what we really want is that we should not be forgotten. that our lives should not be completely wiped out as if we have never been”. i came across these words recently in shashi deshpande’s novel shadow play. and that’s what the few lines i am writing to you are meant to tell you. the more so when i remember the day frank schulze-engler gave me the totally unexpected news of your passing and i felt fate had almost decided that i should accompany you. i had been taken to the intensive-care station of our hospital after a massive heart attack. it all seemed so unreal with frank, the messenger, sitting next to my bed looking like a large green frog in his protective clothing. ‘not to forget’ means to remember, and there are many occasions and events we shared and discussions with you that now come back to me. i think we had our first longish exchanges on academic matters at the eaclals conference in nice in 1988, followed by many more talks at conferences we both attended. you kindly surprised me by inviting me to the trento conference of german and italian scholars in 1990 sharing our interest in postcolonial literature, and to a conference on australian aboriginal culture perfectly organised by you in düsseldorf in 1993. generous as ever, you drew me into jointly editing the proceedings of this conference, an unusual book published in 1997 under the title aratjara and assembling more than two dozen contributors of seven countries who set out to introduce a hardly noticed field of studies. and you surprised me again not only with your essay on “the experience of war in canadian and australian literature” contributed to crabtracks, a collection of essays published in my honour in 2002, but also with your active involvement, together with ganesh n. devy, in the promotion of indian culture at several chotro conferences, among them “chotro three” in delhi and simla in mailto:kaitui80@gmail.com coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 2010; a great international conference i happily remember and documented in knowing differently: the challenge of the indigenous you co-edited with ganesh and published in 2014. could i ever respond to your selfless way of sharing your thoughts and activities in our joint field of studies, research and teaching? perhaps to some extent when we met in frankfurt on several occasions to discuss your post-doctoral thesis on voices of justice – apartheid and beyond in south africa; or my contribution as one of your referees; or occasionally to talk about our shared interest in the various associations we were actively involved in like asnel or eaclals. certainly, you became an outstanding personality who contributed so much to organising their activities, even continuing with this work after your retirement. this reminds me of late 1999 and my suggesting your name to goethe-universität frankfurt to replace me till a successor would be appointed. i heard from students how much they appreciated your presence which confirmed my expectation you would continue and expand on my work. what else will i remember? certainly, a moment – i think it was in 2011 – in the strand just off trafalgar square, a hand on my shoulder which i took to be a policeman’s or a thief’s before turning around and seeing your beaming face. a smile that could not be replaced by an expression of displeasure when we exchanged and related less happy experiences about our work, our colleagues or writers – like your story of the exorbitant telephone bill incurred by an australian author at the aratjara conference for which you were neither prepared financially nor otherwise. for me your smile always meant you could distance yourself even when disappointed, which proved you had an equanimity of spirit i have encountered less often among my german colleagues. sorry, i can’t any longer see you keep smiling. instead i’ll try to repeat these words to myself when remembering you whom i last saw at my 80th birthday party in 2015 and frank’s 60th in may 2017. dieter bionote: professor dr. dieter riemenschneider obtained his ph.d. with a thesis on the modern indian novel in english in 1971, taught commonwealth literature / english language literatures at goethe-university frankfurt (1972-1999), and in 1993 set up the research/teaching centre “new literatures and cultures in english”. he founded, edited and co-edited the bi-annual newsletter acolit (1977-99) and was chair of “the association for the study of the new literatures in english” (1989-93). his main research areas are indian, african and australian aboriginal literature in english as well as new zealand / aotearoan māori literature and culture. most recently published are gentle round the curves: selected essays on indian writing in english (2016); his memoirs fluchtpunkte: erinnertes, anekdotisches 1935-1994 (2018) and neuseeland fürs handgepäck (²2019), an edited collection of essays by new zealand authors. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 editorial felicity hand felicity.hand@uab.cat copyright© 2020 felicity hand. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: an introduction to the special in memoriam issue of the journal dedicated to the memory of geoff davis. keywords: geoff davis, moving tributes, admiration i am greatly honoured to have been asked to guest edit this special issue of coolabah to commemorate the life and achievements of the late geoff davis. i met geoff several years ago at an eaclals conference and since that first encounter, he always remembered me and was ready for a convivial chat. i am grateful to him for having encouraged my colleague esther pujolràs-noguer and myself to publish our volume on south african indian writers in the brill-rodopi cross/cultures series that so many of the contributors to this issue have mentioned. geoff was so natural and down to earth, he had no airs and was the ideal person to have a drink with during a conference. i have fond memories of a friendly supper we had in brussels in the course of a conference on south african drama in 2017. last year, 2018, i coincided with him at two excellent conferences, spaclals in february at the university of new england, parramatta, and, thanks to his encouragement again, the 44th annual african literature association conference in washington dc. as i had seen and chatted to him twice that year i was absolutely taken aback when i heard about his death. he seemed to be larger than life and now, having read all the wonderful tributes that colleagues and friends have submitted to the journal, i realise what a great scholar and human being geoff davis was. i feel extremely privileged to have made his acquaintance. this special issue begins with a homage from three professors from the university of barcleona, home of the journal coolabah and is followed by fifteen contributions from fellow scholars and personal friends, all of which are at the same time moving and funny – some are really hilarious as geoff was anything but the typical academic who takes himself too seriously. i have arranged the contributions in strict alphabetical order as they are all exceptional documents on an exceptional man. i am grateful to geoff’s widow mrs. ingrid davis for allowing us to reproduce the photographs, which show his vitality and bonhomie as well as his love of our postcolonial world. mailto:felicity.hand@uab.cat coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 bionote: felicity hand is senior lecturer in the english department of the autonomous university of barcelona. she teaches post-colonial literature and history and culture of britain and the u.s. she has published articles on various indian ocean writers including m.g.vassanji, abdulrazak gurnah, yasmin alibhai-brown and lindsey collen. she is co-head of the research group ratnakara http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara which explores the literatures and cultures of the south west indian ocean. at present the group is working on community life writing. felicity is also the editor of the electronic journal indi@logs. spanish journal of india studies http://revistes.uab.cat/indialogs http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara http://revistes.uab.cat/indialogs coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 142 japanese ancestors, non-japanese family, and community: ethnic identification of japanese descendants in broome, western australia yuriko yamanouchi tokyo university of foreign studies yuriko.yamanouchi@tufs.ac.jp copyright©2018 yuriko yamanouchi. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper explores the ethnic identity formation of the descendants of japanese migrants in broome, western australia. from the 1880s to the 1960s, broome had an influx of japanese migrants seeking work in its pearl shell industry and related businesses; one of the longest continuous japanese migrations to australia. although the history of japanese migration and mixing with the locals of broome has been researched, and descendant experiences of being ‘mixed’ been portrayed in music and the performing arts, the internal dynamics of their ‘mixedness’ has not been investigated. this paper addresses the diversity of japanese descendant identity by focusing on the complex transmission of their japanese identity. case studies reveal that their sense of being a japanese descendant is transmitted and supported not only by their japanese ancestors and the local japanese community, but also by non-japanese family members and the larger broome community, operating in the background of broome’s rich history as part of australia’s “polyethnic north.” keywords: japanese migrants; ethnic identity; inter-ethnic relationship. mailto:yuriko.yamanouchi@tufs.ac.jp coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 143 introduction this paper explores the ethnic identity formation of the descendants of japanese migrants in broome, a town located 2,200 kilometers north of perth, western australia. from the 1880s to the 1960s, broome had an influx of asian migrants, including japanese, seeking work in its pearl shell industry and related businesses, making this one of the longest continuous japanese migrations to australia. despite the migration restrictions of the white australia policy, the internment of japanese during world war ii, and their subsequent deportation, they still found opportunities to have relationships with local indigenous people1 resulting in offspring and other descendants, some of whom are still living in broome and other parts of australia. studies of people with mixed ancestries 2 have been seen as an effective way to understand how various factors work to form social categories and strata along ethnic/racial lines. since they are often locally and historically specific, the necessity for comparative studies on such people in the greater global framework has been strongly advocated. however, most research in ‘mixed race studies’ has taken place in the united states (e.g. daniel, kina, dariotos and fojas 2014; small and king-o’riain 2014), with limited scope and effect. australia is a place where little debate on mixed ancestry people has been conducted despite its long history of migration. fozdar and perkins (2014: 124) write that there “are two main categories of mixed-race populations in australia, those with mixed aboriginal/non-aboriginal ancestries, and those with mixed white and other ancestries.” while most mixed indigenous people identify as simply indigenous, fozdar and perkins (2014) also point out that forces of globalisation have produced a need for ‘authenticity,’ which makes it difficult to create a space to be ‘mixed.’3 broome provides some counter-examples. the history of japanese migration and mixture with the locals of broome has been well researched, and the presence of mixed descendants—mainly japanese, indigenous australian, and other asian-mixed people— documented (bain 1982; choo 1995, 2009; ganter 2006; jones 2002; kaino 2009). asian (including japanese) and indigenous australian mixed descendant identity and experiences in broome have been expressed and celebrated through music, performance arts and personal stories (chi, et al. 1991; chi, et al. 1996; dann 2003; davies 1993; kaino 1999; kanamori and dann 2000; masuda 2014). exploring the internal dynamics that have made this ‘mixedness’ work locally contributes not only to discussions on mixed-descendant issues in australia but also to mixed race studies at the global level. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 144 japanese migration to broome spanned from the 1880s to the 1960s, during which political and social conditions changed alongside regulations, migration patterns and inter-ethnic relationships. the personal stories of japanese descendants (dann 2003; kaino 1999; masuda 2014) are diverse, reflecting the variety of relationships between their ancestors. some japanese fathers stayed to teach their children japanese customs and other cultural aspects (kaino 1999; masuda 2014). some offspring never met their japanese fathers at all (dann 2003). these cases suggest that their internal diversity should not be disregarded, though they also claim ‘mixedness’ as part of their identity. this paper addresses the diversity of japanese descendant identities by focusing on the internal dynamics of identity transmission. jenkins (1997: 14) argues that “ethnicity as a social identity is collective and individual, externalized in social interaction and internalized in personal self-identification.” an individual’s sense of ethnic membership can be internalised during early primary socialisation in a social environment where ethnic differentiation is salient and consequential enough to intrude into the social world of children. “children know who they are because others tell them” (jenkins 1997: 47). in many societies, family members engage in children’s early primary socialisation and may transmit ethnic identity to them. in theory, descendants of inter-ethnic marriage would develop a ‘mixed’ identity reflective of both parental backgrounds (e.g. portes and zhou 1993; root 1996). this does not necessarily happen (rodríguez-garcía 2015). king-o’riain (2014) maintains that mixed descendants are often under pressure to choose only one identity from the recognised categories they are descended from. many other factors such as social policies, discrimination, and class and gender relationships affect the formation and outcomes of intermarriage. for example, ozgen (2015) presented a case where strong patriarchal ideology within an inter-ethnic marriage prevented the development of a hybrid identity in the children. in other words, the development of ‘mixed’ identity also depends on social and political conditions, that is, how ethnic identity transmission is conducted, if at all. on the issue of intergenerational transmission of ethnic identity among inter-ethnic marriage, kukutai (2007) observed a broad academic assumption that a child’s identification with its minority ethnicity depends on the minority parent. it is considered to be the minority parent’s ‘job’ to transmit their ethnicity to their children. against this, kukutai suggests that mainstream parents can act as agents of minority ethnicity transmission, drawing on statistical data to show that some european mothers identified coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 145 their maori-european-mixed child as maori, despite themselves being part of the majority ethnicity. it appears that non-minority parents do play a role in transmitting minority ethnic identity—in the context of this paper, japanese identity—into their descendants’ early primary socialisation. ethnic identity can also be endowed at other levels of interaction, such as at the broader community level. although mixed descendants are often negatively “racialized” by the community (murphy-shigematsu 2012; small and kingo’riain 2014), kukutai (2007) suggests that this is not necessarily always the case. simply put, japanese identity can be transmitted to mixed-japanese children not only by japanese people, but also by non-japanese people. the dynamics of this transmission and its effects on ethnic identity are a good window through which to view the complexity and diversity of the relationship between broome’s history of japanese migration, its interethnic interactions, and its consequences. the rest of this paper will examine the experiences of broome japanese descendants, focusing on how they were endowed with japanese identity. all cases are mixeddescent offspring of relationships between japanese and local aboriginal, or aboriginal-asian/european mixed people. i will first describe the histories of japanese migration to broome, and broome’s multi-ethnic society. then, the role played by nonjapanese family and community members in ethnic identity formation will be extracted from narratives of japanese descendants. the findings are based on interviews and field research conducted in broome from 2009 to 2016: two weeks in 2009, one month in 2010, one month in 2012, one week in 2013, one month in 2014, two months in 2015, and one month in 2016. i interviewed three first-generation japanese migrants and thirty japanese mixed descendants. i also participated in local community and family events to observe social and community contexts. japanese migration to broome from the 1870s to the 1960s, japanese workers flowed into northern australia for industries such as pearl shelling and sugar cane farming, and quickly became sought after as labourers. although the 1901 white australia policy restricted migration and most sugar cane workers were deported, the pearl shelling industry—the second largest industry in northern australia at that time—was exempted. as a result, japanese pearl shell workers continued flowing in. in 1919, there were about 600 japanese on coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 146 thursday island in the torres strait and 1,200 in broome, the two main centres of the pearl shell industry (bain 1982; jones 2002; kyuhara 1986; nagata 2004; oliver 2007, 2011; sissons 1979). ganter (2006) calls the northern part of australia before world war ii, the “polyethnic north,” which connotes the commingling of various ethnic groups such as ‘malay,’ koepanger4, filipino, chinese and aboriginal people, who were attracted to the region by the pearl shelling industry. polyethnicity refers to “the close proximity of peoples from different ethnic backgrounds, and the frequent family formation across ethnic boundaries” (ganter 2006: 195). members of these ethnic groups, as well as aboriginal australians and torres strait islanders, married each other from generation to generation. “in the third generation a child in such a mixed family may have four grandparents speaking four different languages” (ganter 2006: 192). since most asians in broome were indentured labourers, there was a severe shortage of asian women. for example, in 1901, there were 303 japanese men and 63 japanese women in broome. this led to cohabitation and casual relationships between asian men and aboriginal or aboriginal-mixed-descendant women. european women were in most cases inaccessible as partners. the increasing number of asian-aboriginal australian people—so-called “mixed bloods”—became a government concern as they had expected aborginal people to die out, “bowing to the force of evolution” (ganter 2006: 118). in western australia, the aborigines act 1905 prohibited non-aboriginal men and aboriginal women from cohabitation, and the chief protector of aborigines had the power to permit or forbid the marriages of aboriginal women and non-aboriginal men (permission was rarely granted). some asian men were deported for living with aboriginal women. nonetheless, the ‘mixed-blood’ population continued to increase. in broome in 1954, ‘mixed-bloods’ numbered 347 out of the total population of 1,261, constituting a significant proportion of the town (dalton 1964:1). while this mixing led to many positive interactions (e.g. ganter 2006; yu 1999), an ethnic/racial hierarchy existed in the “polyethnic north.” ganter (2006: 195) writes, the northern polyethnicity was underwritten by finely graded rules of etiquette that dictated where one lived, which school one attended, with whom one socialized, and even where one sat in the picture theater. the japanese stayed in the japanese quarters and spent most of their time there. at the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 147 sun picture theatre in broome, white people sat on the best seats in the middle, japanese sat behind them, other coloured and ‘black (aboriginal) people’ at the back, right in front, or along the side.5 japanese ranked next to the whites in the polyethnic hierarchy due to their near-monopoly on diving work within the pearl shelling industry. koepangers, ambonese and other south-east asians—classified as ‘malays’ —had less power and prestige. they were often under the command of japanese divers on pearl shelling ships, and ill-treated. chinese had more prestige than south-east asians. although these differences did not necessarily mean that they were on bad terms all the time (cf. bain 1982; ganter 2006; kaino 2009), ethnic conflicts and riots did happen. for example, in broome in 1907, 1914 and 1920, street fighting between japanese, koepangers and ambonese caused several deaths (choo 2009). during world war ii, almost all japanese nationals in australia were interned and then deported after the war6. the “polyethnic north” went into decline. only nine of the japanese forcefully removed during internment returned to broome (nagata 1996). in 1953, western australia again introduced japanese indentured labourers into the area (bain 1982: 347). in 1955, 106 japanese pearlers were working in australia under special exemption (palfreeman 1967: 45; see also nagata 2001a, 2001b). however, the industry never fully recovered and practically ceased in the 1960s. with the decline of industry, the ethnic composition of the local population changed significantly. in the late 1970s the number of japanese working in the industry dropped to about 20 (kamo 1978: 37). the cultured pearl industry, which started in the 1950s as a japaneseaustralian joint project in and around broome, became successful and provided some employment, but not as much as the pearl shelling industry had. many japanese thus left broome. some old residents of broome suggest that attitudes towards ethnic relationships in broome softened (see also nakano 1986). for example, dalton (1964) wrote in the 1960s that a japanese who married an aboriginal woman was expelled from the japanese community.7 however, an old japanese ex-diver told me that when he got together with an aboriginal woman in the 1970s, “everyone celebrated.” discriminatory laws and customs were also abolished around this period. at the time i conducted my research, there were about ten japanese surnames in the broome phone directory. some belonged to families with a history in broome predating world war ii, while some other families had come after the war. there were also some japanese descendants who, for various reasons, did not hold or use japanese surnames. there were four first-generation japanese migrants 8 with first-hand experience of broome’s pearl shelling industry. the other japanese descendants belonged to later generations, and were mostly the fruit of inter-ethnic relationships coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 148 with local indigenous people. most second-generation broome japanese descendants do not speak japanese. they do not live in an enclave or meet regularly. in fact, some rarely meet each other in everyday life. the ‘japanese community’ emerges for some events, such as obon or when japanese exchange students visit. the primary drivers of the festivals are also the public face of the japanese community, and come from two families of ex-pearl shell divers. while they receive help from their family members and some other japanese descendants to run events, many others of japanese descent do not participate. there is no particular occupation or social strata they concentrate in either. in other words, japanese descendants in broome exhibit indicators of minority integration (e.g. alba and nee 2003; arias 2001; qian and lichter 2007; vaguera and aranda 2011). however, it does not necessarily mean that they have given up japanese ethnic identity. nor does it mean that japanese ethnic identity has little social significance. ethnic identity transmission of japanese descendants in broome while the history of japanese migrants and their strong relationship with the local broome community has been studied (ganter 2006; jones 2002; kaino 2009), little research has been conducted on the consequences of their contemporary socio-cultural experiences, such as their identity formation. japanese descendants vary greatly in terms of their experiences with japanese forebears and exposure to japanese cultural customs, practices and values. some of them had their japanese predecessors stay in broome. in these cases, their japanese father or grandfather taught them japanese customs and cultural practices. cauline masuda, who had a japanese father and an aboriginalscottish-filipino mother (2014: 161), writes about her childhood: when my father came back from the sea and stayed with us for a couple of weeks, he took care of us. he took us to the japanese camp, where japanese divers and crews were working. we used to play in the garden, climbed the coconuts and baobab trees, and watched these japanese people playing with cards and mah-jong, which we called sticks. younger japanese listened to everything the elder japanese said. they used to run to the shop owned by the streeter & male company to get tobacco or anything … .9 she writes that she used to eat boiled rice. she also had to follow japanese customs such coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 149 as taking her shoes off inside the house, not cutting her nails at night, and not turning her back when leaving the cemetery. her father took them to japan to see his relatives. although cauline says that she was mainly taken care of by her mother due to her father’s long absences at sea for work10, he was clearly involved in her early primary socialisation. being constantly taken to the japanese camps, surrounded by japanese people, given japanese food, and taught japanese cultural customs, would have embedded a sense that she was a ‘japanese descendant.’ other japanese descendants whose japanese forebears stayed in broome mentioned similar experiences. they were also taught japanese food and cultural customs, connecting them with local japanesedescent people and relatives in japan.11 various aforementioned historical circumstances prevented many japanese migrants from staying with their families in broome. thus, many of their descendants who had no contact with them may have heard about their ‘father’ or ‘grandfather’ who used to work in broome. for example, cynthia’s (pseudonym) japanese father left broome when she was just two years old. she was brought up mainly by her aboriginal grandparents as an ‘aboriginal child,’ surrounded by aboriginal relatives. even though some local people in broome knew of her japanese descent, her earlier life saw little involvement with japanese customs, food or relations. nonetheless, cynthia identifies herself as “aboriginal-japanese,” qualifying this by saying that her aboriginality comes first since that is what she knows. then japanese, since “i am japanese.” cynthia had chosen both aboriginal and japanese identity despite having little direct contact with her japanese father’s culture. cynthia learned of her japanese descent in various ways. she said, my grandparents told me lots of stories about [my father] ’cause i, we, look very different, myself and my sister. we’re very asian and we used to live at a mission12, so we stood out. straight black hair in my photos. i remember seeing photos, you know, how my mum used to cut my hair and we used to look like little geisha dolls, she said, so we knew, i knew that my dad was japanese. my grandparents used to talk about him and … he was sent away ’cause he hurt someone. they didn’t want to put him in prisons, they just thought, they’d just deport him and send him home. and that he was gambling when that happened. but he obviously cared ’cause he used to come and pick me up and take me for walks, so he visited quite regularly. note that cynthia gained knowledge of her father through her grandparents’ (and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 150 mother’s) stories of him. they (along with her mother) told her that he was a japanese diver, that he looked after her when visiting, that he had to leave because of some trouble, and that he visited to say goodbye the day before he left. essentially cynthia’s non-japanese family members were instrumental in cynthia’s ethnic identification as a person of japanese descent. as kukutai (2007) suggested, they could not convey any substantive components of japanese ethnicity, such as food, language or cultural customs, but nonetheless endowed her with japanese identity. background knowledge about her father was not the only formative information transmitted. the information that he “cared” about her encouraged her attachment to and connection with her japanese side. furthermore, cynthia and her sister’s ‘asian’ physical features would have marked her as ‘japanese’ in her eyes, and the eyes of the community. cynthia recounted how she and her sister were called “little geisha dolls,” a popular stereotype of japan. alongside—or perhaps because of—her appearance, her intelligence was also attributed to her ethnicity. cynthia reports being teased and praised for her “clever japanese brain.” she said, well, i remember my [grand]father and grandmother used to always, ’cause i was quite smart, when i was a little kid, they said, ‘oh, you got your brain,’ cause i used to go to the shop when i was a little girl and she’s send me with money to go and buy, you know, whatever she wanted me to go and buy. and i’d come back with the right change. and she said, ‘now send her.’ and i remember she’s always send me to the shop. and i said, ‘why do i always have to go?’ ‘well, you’re the one with the japanese brain.’ and they used to always say, ‘oh, that’s the thing …’. although cynthia now laughs at the credence given to these stereotypes, her constant exposure to them during childhood could have reinforced her ‘japanese’ ethnicity. jenkins (1997: 64) maintains that verbal and non-verbal cues “are used to allocate the unknown other to an ethnic category” at the level of “routine public interaction.” “items of behaviour are appropriated by others as criteria of ethnic categorization, without those who ‘own’ them participating in the identification” (jenkins 1997; 64-65). the fact that the shop people abided by the stereotype indicates that it was widely shared by the broome community. it also suggests some local familiarity with japanese traits, no doubt resulting from broome’s long history of asian immigration and mostly harmonious co-existence (bain 1982; ganter 2006; kaino 2009). unlike cases in many mixed race studies (e.g. king-o’riain, et al. 2014; murphy-shigematsu 2012), this endowment of ethnic identity by the community was not a painful experience for coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 151 cynthia. even now, old broome residents talk a lot about the old days, where there were many asians present for the pearl shell industry: how they enjoyed music, dancing, eating, drinking and gambling together. elderly locals show a strong emotional attachment to “old broome.” one japanese ex-diver in his seventies mentioned a similarly aged aboriginal woman who still addressed him (humorously) as “jap.” he went on to say that he only allowed this because of her status as a fellow resident of “old broome.” this episode indicates that broome’s ethnic commingling has developed these lighthearted displays of ethnic stereotyping as part of routine public interaction (choo 2009; dalton 1964; ganter 2006). in other words, instead of displaying bigotry, they actually point to extensive local japanese knowledge. cynthia’s remark reinforces this aspect: i know, from local people here, used to say, ‘oh, she’s got japanese heritage,’ you know, and my friends all malaysian and filipinos and that’s, you know, you learn about your history in broome and how can we became, you know, part of the histories because of the pearling industry … . cynthia suggests that japanese descendants hold their ‘place’ in broome through the historical memory of the broome community. broome is a “social setting where ethnic differentiation is sufficiently salient and consequential to intrude into the social world of children” (jenkins 1997: 47). the japanese stereotyping cynthia experienced in childhood pigeonholed her in the community but also let her ‘know’ that her “dad was japanese.” cynthia is not the only japanese descendant who had little direct contact with japanese people during childhood. lucy dann’s (2003) japanese father left when she was a baby. she was raised by her aboriginal mother and aboriginal stepfather. her experience of receiving her japanese identity is similar to cynthia’s. she recalls being teased as a young girl by other aboriginal children, who called her “moon face,” or declared, “you look like a japanese.”13 then one of her aunts told her that her aboriginal ‘father’ was not her biological father, a statement which her mother admitted as well. much later, her stepfather told her that her real japanese father had asked him to take care of her before he had to leave for japan. lucy was brought up in derby until she went to broome for schooling at year 8. community ethnic labelling, combined with family knowledge, informed lucy of her japanese heritage. this indicates that kimberley coastal communities share not only aboriginal kinship ties, but also asian contact histories (choo 1995; ganter 2006). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 152 moving to broome facilitated the process of discovery. lucy’s marriage to her aboriginal husband enhanced her connection to local japanese-descent people, as one of her husband’s aunts had married a broome-japanese who serendipitously knew lucy’s father. through this aunt, lucy learned more of her father’s background, including his name. here, casual interaction with the community, particularly aboriginal in-law relations, had supplemented ‘japanese’ ethnicity. this case also cements japanese people as part of the broome network of the “polyethnic north.” after gaining this knowledge, lucy questioned her mother more about her japanese father, who told her that he did not live with them but instead used to visit, nurse infant lucy, take her to the japanese quarter, and proudly show her to his friends. similar to cynthia’s grandparents, lucy’s mother (and to a certain degree, her stepfather) told their daughter that her biological father cared deeply for her. dann (2003: 60) commented that hearing about how he visited her mother and nursed her spurred her desire to learn more about him and her japanese roots. both lucy and cynthia do not exhibit typically ‘japanese’ cultural indicators. they seldom participate in ‘japanese community’ activities. cynthia has said that she does not have the ‘connection’ that other prominent japanese community members have. however, cynthia and lucy’s sense of ‘being japanese descent’ should not be seen as a mere label. with the help of japanese photographer mayu kanamori, lucy traced and visited her japanese father in japan. cynthia had her son find out her father’s possible address, and is now thinking of contacting him. like lucy, cynthia is concerned that her visit might upset her father’s alternate family in japan. on the other hand, both lucy and cynthia are driven to learn more about their japanese identity from their fathers. dann (2003: 62) wrote that after her visit to japan she felt “whole now with both sides of my roots in place.” their japanese identity, whatever its limitations, is clearly substantial and meaningful. conclusion this paper has outlined the role played by identity transmission in forming broome japanese descendants’ diverse ethnic identities. both those who personally knew their japanese ancestors, and those who did not, self-identify as japanese descendants as well as being ‘aboriginal.’ their diverse experiences with their japanese forebears are as varied as their experiences with receiving cultural identity, despite all being seemingly coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 153 fully ‘integrated’ into the local aboriginal community. the case studies reveal that their self-identification is supported in various ways. in some cases, it is through the presence of their japanese ancestors and recognition by the local japanese community; in other cases, it is by non-japanese family members as well as the larger broome community. they draw from broome’s rich history as part of australia’s “polyethnic north.” many studies on mixed descendant people indicate that most of the communities which raise them discourage them from developing hybrid identities. they are often under pressure to choose only one category of ancestry, or report being ‘othered’ and left to independently find a ‘space’ to feel ‘comfortable’ as they are (e.g. king-o’riain, et al. 2014; murphy-shigematsu 2012). broome is rare in that its community embraces a ‘place’ for those with mixed ancestries and gives them positive—or at least not negative—messages about their ethnic identities. one aboriginal person from broome argued that it is no ‘problem’ to have mixed ancestry and be ‘aboriginal’ at the same time. contrary to fozdar and perkins (2014), mixedness does not make them ‘less aboriginal.’ this could be a starting point from which to rework the concept of ‘ethnic identity’ in broader society. broome japanese descendants’ experiences indicate the complex means by which their mixed identity is developed and 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(2015) maintaining ethnic boundaries in ‘non-ethnic’ contexts: constructivist theory and the sexual reproduction of diversity. theory and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 156 society 44: 33-64. palfreeman, a.c. (1967) the administration of the white australia policy. london: melbourne university press. perkins, m. (2004) australian mixed race. european journal of cultural studies 7(2): 177-199. perkins, m. (ed) (2007) visibly different: face, place and race in australia. bern: peter lang. portes, a., and m. zhou (1993) the new second generation: segmented assimilation and its variants. annals of the american academy of political and social science 530(1): 74-96. qian, z., and d.t. lichter (2007) social boundaries and marital assimilation: interpreting trends in racial and ethnic intermarriage. american sociological review 72: 68-94. rodríguez-garcía, d. (2015) intermarriage and integration revisited: international experiences and cross-disciplinary approaches. annals aapss 662: 8-36. root, m.p.p. (ed.) (1996) the multiracial experience: racial borders as the new frontier. thousand oaks ca: sage. sissons, d. (1979) the japanese in the australian pearling industry. queensland heritage, 3(10): 9-27. small, s., and r. king-o’riain (2014) global mixed race: an introduction. in kingo’riain, r., et al. (eds.) global mixed race, new york: new york university press, pp. vii-xxii. vaguera, e., and e. aranda (2011) the multiple dimensions of transnationalism: examining their relevance to immigrants’ subjective well-being. journal of social research and policy 2(2): 47-72. wada, h. (1920) an audience at the sun picture gardens, broome [picture], state library of australia, call number 3680b. yu, s. (1999) broome creole: aboriginal and asian partnerships along the kimberley coast. queensland review 6(2): 59-73. acknowledgements: special thanks to “cynthia,” cauline masuda and lucy dann. i am also indebted to broome asian-aboriginal community members for their generosity and kindness during my fieldwork. finally, thanks to mr derek wee for editing my english. all the mistakes in this paper are mine. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 157 yuriko yamanouchi is an associate professor at the tokyo university of foreign studies. she gained her phd (anthropology) from the university of sydney. her publications include “kinships, organisations, and ‘wannabes’: aboriginal identity negotiation in south western sydney,” oceania (2010); “managing aboriginal selves in south-western sydney,” oceania (2012); “i am ‘mixed’ and identify with all the cultures i inherit equally’: japanese migrants and indigenous australians in broome, western australia,” in duncan williams (ed), hapa japan vol. 1: history (ito center editions, 2017). she also edited, o-sutoraria senjumin to nihon: senjumingaku, kouryu, hyosho (indigenous australia and japan: studies, interaction, representation) (ochanomizushobo, 2014). 1 there are roughly two kinds of indigenous australians: aboriginal people descended from the people who lived on the continent and surrounding islands before english settlement. torres strait islanders are descendants of pre-english-settlement residents in the torres strait. this paper only deals with aboriginal people. ‘indigenous people’ here includes mixed descendants with asian and european blood. when necessary, mixed heritage is specified. 2 my position is that ‘race’ is a social construct. following small and king-o’riain (2014: vii), i use “mixed” for those “who feel they are descended from and attached to two or more socially significant groups.” following most of the academic literature in australia, i use ‘mixed descendant’ and ‘ethnicity’ rather than ‘mixed-race’ and ‘race’ respectively. i use the term ‘race’ when referring to ‘mixed race studies’ where the term ‘race’ is used. the field of interdisciplinary ‘mixed race studies’ has developed since the 1980s, mainly in north america. as for its development, see daniel, kina, dariotos and fojas (2014). 3 perkins’s collection (2007) is exceptional. it deals with mixed descent people in australia focusing on their ‘mixedness.’ although it points out the complexity of ‘mixedness’ at the individual level, it does not examine the dynamics of their identity formation at the community and society levels. see also perkins (2004). 4 ‘malay’ people refers to those from the malay peninsula and indonesian archipelago. ‘koepangers’ denote those from port koepang in timor, though they may not have been born there. these south-east asians also worked in the pearl shelling industry. as for their history, see martinez and vickers (2015). 5 wada, h. (1920) an audience at the sun picture gardens, broome [picture], state library of australia, call number 3680b. 6 some australian-born japanese descendants, non-japanese people married to japanese, and people perceived to have special connections with japan were also interned (nagata coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 158 1996). 7 nakano (1986) dealt with the same era and people as dalton (1964). however, he reports a case where a marriage between a japanese diver and an aboriginal woman was celebrated by most of the japanese people. in examining the history of ethnicity in broome, we need to keep in mind from which vantage point these histories are written. older records on people in broome are often written by westerners. what, from one perspective, is taken to be ‘aboriginal women’s sexual exploitation by asian men’ might alternatively be viewed as a beneficial exchange between aboriginals and asians. i have heard descriptions from local asian, aboriginal and mixed people of more amicable relationships than those reported in historical records. although this could be them telling me—a japanese interviewer—what they think i want to hear, it suggests that a converse subjectivity may also be present in the written records. 8 in 2016, one of them passed away. 9 translation by the author. 10 interview with cauline masuda. 11 most of the japanese descendants in broome do not speak japanese. some japanese migrants tried to teach their children japanese, which was not successful due to their long absences at sea for work. 12 although cynthia was mainly brought up in broome, part of her childhood life was spent in a mission to the north of broome, where many aboriginal people have relatives, and even now sees inflows and outflows of people. 13 lucy dann’s mother met lucy’s japanese father in broome (interview with lucy dann). coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 from cosmopolitanism to planetary conviviality: suneeta peres da costa and michelle de kretser alejandra moreno álvarez university of oviedo morenoalejandra@uniovi.es copyright©2017 alejandra moreno álvarez. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: veronica brady, vigorous supporter of aboriginal causes and deeply concerned with social-injustice issues, underlined that anglo-australians were to be excommunicated from the land until they would come to terms with it and its first peoples (in jones 1997). nearly twenty years after this statement was postulated, it is my purpose in this paper to look at the land from an anglo-australian and nonindigenous australian perspective in order to assess if australian contemporary society has moved beyond what brady considered a “super ego status” and reconciled to the presence not only of its indigenous, but also its non-indigenous others. to do so i will exemplify novels which are part of and influenced by the matrix of relations and social forces in which non-indigenous australian writers are situated on, including suneeta peres da costa’s homework (1999) and michelle de kretser’s questions of travel (2013). key words: cosmopolitanism; hybridity; postcolonialism; south asian-australian literature. in 2009 the australian media coined the term “curry bashing” to refer to a wave of attacks on indian students which prompted demonstrations in melbourne and sydney and remonstrations from india. rudyard kipling’s (in)famous ballad resonated on both sides and a debate erupted as to whether australia was still a racist society that reacted to the presence of these indian students-migrants along the colonial binary of east vs west. against this logic, it can be argued that australia has never been a cultural monolith, nor the location of an immutable and monochromatic society. it is rather, a discursive construction in which incessant contestations of meanings are taking place. it is the land of the indigenous population, of colonists, settlers, but also of countless migrants of european and asian descent, including asylum seekers (mainly from iraq, afghanistan and sri lanka) and international students. despite the frantic and strident attempts to restore the one white nation of the past, many still prefer to see australia as a multilayered society. as regards literary creation and criticism this implies to challenge and negotiate the metanarrative of australian literature from a multiplicity of perspectives. mailto:morenoalejandra@uniovi.es coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 in the case of the south asian-australian population, which this article will primarily be focussed on, it is from 1970 onwards, with the adoption of the official multicultural policy, that a large number of people of south asian origin migrated to australia. time enough for south asian-australian literature to emerge and to achieve “in a relatively short space of time, ... commercial and critical success” (athique in sarwal 2013: 24). australian writers of south asian ancestry, such as mena abdullah, suneeta peres da costa, chitra fernando, yasmine gooneratne, adib khan, michelle de kretser, bem le hunte, chandani lokugé, or christine mangala, to name but a few, use literature as an instrument to voice often complex discursive strategies, such as belonging, inbetweenness, cosmopolitanism or planetarism. these authors negotiate their spatial identities within the g/local and continue to construe the past and the present. the australian land where first peoples, colonialists, settlers and migrants live form a palimpsest of hybrid subjects for whom conviviality or planetary citizenship become, at certain points, unavoidable. at the turn of the century, writers and critics were quick to develop theories and terms in line with a global political agenda. as alfred hornung highlights in “planetary citizenship” (2011), “[t]hey ranged from the willing embracement of globalization to new concepts of cosmopolitanism, programmatically announced in “the cosmopolitan manifesto” by the german sociologist ulrich beck, taking up immanuel kant’s idea of hospitality granted to all strangers” (in lenz 2011, pp. 39). in this line, professor renate brosch, in the keynote session entitled “fictions of planetary conviviality—towards a cosmopolitan practice”, given at the international australian studies association biennial conference “friends, foes and other intimacies” held at the university of tasmania in december 2014, defined cosmopolitanism as the interaction between self and other. brosch insisted that there is no human self in the absence of the other since, as defined by levinas, the concept of the self requires the existence of the other as the counterpart entity required for defining the self, “the origin of authentic ethical behavior is not from the self but from the other” (european journal of psychotherapy & counselling 2005, pp. 1). nonetheless, brosch maintained that cosmopolitan novels are still in process due to the difficulty of writing outside the dominant discourse. another theoretical term that has been suggested is that of “planetary”, adopted by paul gilroy (2005), from the position of race, gayatri spivak (2003), from a post‐marxist perspective, and ursula heise (2008) from an environmentalist point of view. gayatri spivak’s use of the expression planetarity is motivated by her concern for a new humanist attitude toward the less fortunate others. she considers planetary as “an alternate term for continental, global, worldly” since it encloses the human concern: “to be human is to be intended toward the other” (2003, pp. 73). michelle de kretser and suneeta peres da costa, used here as exponents of south asian-australian writers, seem to claim for a theoretical shift which ranges from cosmopolitanism to planetary conviviality. according to this logic the characters which they create are empathetic universals whose embodiment, spatiality and intersubjectivity is constituted in relation to others; where being human is being conhuman. this article will raise questions such as the need to redefine and review the australian literary canon, and with it, the meaning of australianness. authors such as michelle de kretser’s questions of travel (2013) and suneeta peres da costa’s homework (1999) coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 name what is for their non-caucasian characters “australia” in the contemporary entangled milieu. in gail jones’ interview “veronica brady” (1997), veronica brady emphasizes how australians ought to be excommunicated from the land: until we come to terms with the land and its first peoples. i cannot see how you can say that you believe in the christian story if you don't believe that god is present in each individual human being, and where an individual human being is being degraded and humiliated then the divine form becomes degraded. but on the other side, i am also very convinced of the holiness and sacredness of the other. (pp. 141) this “other” will be here understood as an australian of south asian lineage. according to amit sarwal, migration, in this rapidly globalizing world, has not only spread the roots of diaspora deeper but has also put it on a global level by concretizing it as a natural and inevitable result (sarwal 2013, pp. 1, my emphasis). in the case of the south asian diaspora, and following sutama gosh, “neither academics nor the general population seems to be sure of where ‘south asians’ are from” (2012, 36). most researchers coincide that india, pakistan, bangladesh and sri lanka are an intrinsic part of south asia, while afghanistan, nepal, bhutan and myanmar are both included and excluded from it. some scholars agree that those who have an indian origin (british india) should be considered “south asians” (kurian 1991). others consider those from the indian subcontinent as “south asians” (riaz 2010), excluding west indians, fijians and east africans (dasgupta 1994). this turmoil over the geographic location of “south asia” causes us to raise the question if “south asian” is itself a meaningful category and if so, if this categorisation is another example of the others having their identities homogenised. south asian-australian authors are considered diasporic due to their association with a geographical space of lineage which differs from the one they are living in. this classification is a strategy within the political project of othering so as to map ex-colonial non white bodies. in fact, authors such as de kretser and da costa offer hybrid literary spaces where australia becomes multilayered without the need to classify these authors as south asian-australians. since, as gosh underlines, “‘south asian’ is a category whose history and commonalities has been determined by outsiders, it has not been internalised by its intended subjects” (2012, pp. 48). australian authors of south asian descent have played, and continue with, an important role in the spreading of new ideas and thoughts. we all know that the history of migration from south asia is rich in tales and metaphors of its civilization and, following judah waten, its “imperishable peoples’’ influence lies far beyond their own subcontinental shores (in sarwal 2013, pp. 26). these people are many times drawn as a ficus benghalensis, commonly known as the indian banyan, bengal fig or indian fig. the roots of this tree propagate downwards as aerial roots. once these roots reach the ground, they grow into woody trunks, which makes the original trunk blurred as all the scattered stems seem to be as important. thus, the banyan tree and its branches take root in different soils, through different routes, which explains why it has been used by many to represent the migratory movement across borders, although there are many interpretations for this metaphor. on the one hand, hugh tinker emphasizes that to comprehend what a banyan tree represents, you must know its principle stem and soil, but you must also follow its growth of its different shapes, to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aerial_root http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aerial_root coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 conclude by saying, quoting rabindranath tagore, that “the civilization of india, like the banyan tree, has shed its beneficent shade away from its own birth place” (in tinker 1977, pp. iii). on the other hand, salman rushdie considers roots a “conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places”: i am comparing gravity with belonging. both phenomena observably exist: my feet stay on the ground, and i have never been angrier than on the day my father told me he had sold my childhood home in bombay. but neither is understood. we know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. look under your feet. you will not find gnarled growths spouting through the soles. roots, i sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. (rushdie 1985, pp. 90-91) migration represents, as sarwal underlines, transgression and thereby a loss of a “conservative” cultural identity on both parts, the migrant and the native (2013, pp. 26). as annette corkhill suggests, the feeling of dislocation, so frequently a part of the immigrant experience, can be overcome by “virtue of a commitment to loving and working the soil of the adopted homeland” (1995, pp. 37). what matters in the image of the nomadic subject is not the literary act of travelling or displacement; rather, it is the development of a consciousness which “combines coherence with mobility” (braidotti 1994, pp. 31). the nomadic subject “aims to rethink the unity of the subject... without dualistic oppositions” (braidotti 1994, pp. 31). therefore, the nomadic subject undoubtedly inscribes new ways of being. as rushdie corroborates: a full migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by being[s] whose social behaviour and code is very unlike, and sometimes offensive to, his own. and this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. the migrant denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself [or herself], new ways of being human. (1991, pp. ix) like rushdie, many diasporic writers use literature to address new cultural identities, subverting the postcolonial, alongside celebrating planetary hybridity, creating multiple and global spaces where meeting-point cultures of the global north and the global south, and the global west and global east, merge, so as to leave aside the inbetweenness that has until now constricted them. aerial roots, which form the banyan tree i have referred to, give rise to “newer and newer trunks, which over generations, make it almost impossible to tell the ‘mother trunk’” (prasad 1999, pp.12). the historical genealogy, the mother trunk, that first inscribed the inbetweenness of south asian-australians, has differed extensively from second generations. nonetheless, the movement out of india to other parts of the world began more than 2000 years ago: indian merchants traded in east africa and the persian gulf, and buddhist pilgrims migrated to southeast asia and china. in the 19th and 20th centuries, coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 however, a very different kind of migration took place. large number of indians relocated to various countries, particularly to other parts of the british empire. these resettlements began the growing, widely diverse, emigrant population that is sometimes called the “indian diaspora”. (prasad 1999, pp. 12) in the case of australia, the largest number of people of south asian origin have mainly migrated to australia since the 1980s. nevertheless, adrian mitchell remarks that the australia-india connection begins with the first settlement, “with the transport of ships heading off to india when once the convicts had been off-loaded; and soon after that the foundling colony was sending off to india for grain” (2000, pp. 19-20). in the early nineteenth century, a significant number of indians were brought to australia to work as labourers and more indians were brought thereafter to run the “camel trains”. samia khatun in her phd dissertation “camels, ships, trains: translation across the ‘indian archipelago’ 1860-1930” (2012) studies cross-cultural interactions arising from the scarcely but historically significant south asian presence in australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. khatun highlights how the best known south asian migrants to australia were the so-called “afghan cameleers,” recruited not only from afghanistan but other parts of british india. thanks to their skilfulness in camel handling: these men proved instrumental in establishing a viable pastoral industry in the arid interior of the continent. camel trains supplied remote sheep stations with necessary rations and served as the first link in a transportation network of railways and steamships that conveyed wool to distant markets. although individual cameleers amassed personal fortunes through shrewd investments in the transportation business, as a whole this community of men remained economically humble and marginal to white settler society while enjoying ambivalent relations with aboriginal communities. (foster 2012) punjabis also arrived in the late nineteenth century to take part in the gold rush in victoria or to work on the banana plantations in southern queensland. this first wave was followed by immigrants arriving through world wars i and ii, not for nothing indian soldiers were present in gallipoli fighting for the british armed forces alongside australian diggers. after india’s independence from britain, another important group of south asians, namely anglo-indians, migrated in large numbers to australia. as sarwal underlines, they did so as british subjects, “exercising the choice to settle permanently in australia” (2015, pp. 31). the anglo-indians were, in fact, among the first asians to immigrate under the relaxation of entry rules to persons of mixed descent to australia. it is true that the intake of indentured workers from south asia and china began at the same time, but until the advent of the “asian” economies on the global arena it went unnoticed (sarwal 2013, pp. 5). the third wave of migrants began arriving in australia immediately after the abandonment of the white australia policy (immigration restriction act, 1901) was abandoned in 1973 with the introduction of the multicultural policy in 1975. this “global migratory phenomenon” (rodrick in nye, j. and donahue, j. 2008) is portrayed in south asian diasporic literature which, according to tamara mabbott coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 athique, has “in a relatively short space of time, achieved commercial and critical success” and “come of age” (2006, pp. 1). nevertheless, even though there are relevant historical, anthropological and sociological studies available on the south asian diaspora in australia (rashmere bhatti, 2001; purushotttama bilimoria, 1996; r.s. gabbi, 1998; adrian gilbert, 2009; vijaya joshi, 2000; pamela rajkowski, 1987; joyce westrip and peggy holroyde, 2010), very few have dealt with south asian literature on the south asian diaspora in australia (sarwal 2013, pp. 34). as sarwal argues, “there are only nominal critical articles or dissertations on south asian diasporic literature published in australia and most themes remain under-explored” (2013, pp. 43) causing the south asian diasporic writer “anxiety of invisibility” (lal in madan 2009). these include cynthia vanden driesen’s and i.h. vanden driesen’s celebrations: fifty years of sri lanka-australia interactions (1997); glenn d’cruz’s phd thesis “representing angloindians: a genealogy investigation” (1999); mohit manoj prasad’s phd thesis “indofijian diasporic bodies: narratives in text, image, popular culture, and the lived everyday in fiji and liverpool, sydney, australia” (2005) and “roots & routes: politics of location in short stories of south asian diaspora in australia” (2010) by amit sarwal, but to name a few. mostly, these authors explore the process of displacement and dislocation of identities through migration, journey, settlement, and nostalgic returns where characters’ struggle to negotiate new spaces within australia. these migratory experiences have created diasporic locations which need to be read and explored within new and specific interpretative frameworks, since the migrant as a subject influenced by political, economic and cultural factors has the right to self-identification. athique’s thesis on south asian diaspora literature in australia “textual migrations: south asianaustralian fiction” (2006), for example, makes a new contribution to diversifying the field of criticism of diaspora by analyzing a set of texts (christopher cyrill, suneeta peres da costa, chitra fernando, sudesh mishra, among others) that operate across local, national and transnational literary contexts. yasmine gooneratne explains the reasons why authors such as mena abdullah, an author who has achieved substantial recognition in australia, is not well known abroad: “this is possibly because, although she is australia-born, the experiences she writes about place her inevitably on the ‘periphery,’ and beyond the line that has hitherto lovingly enclosed australia’s ‘traditional’ authors in an enclave that is deemed ‘central’ to the nation’s literary and cultural development” (1992, pp. 115). therefore, the metanarrative of australian literature has to be challenged from different perspectives so as to have a literary negotiation of multiplicities. feroza jussawalla points out that, in order to survive, minorities in india had to subsume identity into hybridity, what she defines as “authentic indianness” (in fludernik 1989, pp. 200): “hybridity is not a new condition in the postmodern era and is most definitely not a result of british postcoloniality. it is ‘authentic indianness’. and yet today, she continues ironically, fifty years after independence, ethnic identities are pulling india apart in their effort to recover their “authenticities” (in fludernik 1989: 200). diaspora should then be seen, following celia genn, “less a substantive bounded entity or ethno-cultural fact” (in raghuram, parvati 2008, pp. 252) than as an “idiom, a stance, a claim ... a way of formulating ... identities and loyalties” (brubaker 2005, 12-13). the term, as we know, has become an umbrella used to shelter “intellectual, cultural and political agendas” (brubaker 2005, pp. 1). coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 there is then an unavoidable planetary conviviality in australia as a result of the palimpsest resulting from colonialism and migration. michelle de kretser’s questions of travel (2013) and suneeta peres da costa’s homework (1999) name what for their characters is the authentic australianness in the contemporary entangled milieu. both authors’ literary endeavour is far from catering to potential readers’ demands for palatable exotica, avoiding anglicising and monogenising, and searching for “the location in which the self is at home” (george 1996, pp. 3). in homework (1999) suneeta peres da costa’s presents the heart-breaking story of a little girl’s struggle to survive a dysfunctional and chaotic family. defined by many as an extraordinary debut infused with a goan spice, homework is only her first major publication, for she had actually been writing for years and had stage and radio plays produced and performed in australia; the novel won her the 1997 ulitarra short story competition and was the runner up in the 1998 hq/flamingo short story competition. this first novel about an indian family who migrated to australia portrays a young character gifted with a tragicomic personality. indeed we first get to know that this intradiegetic omniscient narrator, mina pereira, was born with “protuberances, no bigger than finger tips” (peres 1999, pp. 3) on her skull, and no matter what surgery doctors attempted, they kept growing back. these nodes, which act as feelers, accentuate mina's emotional awareness. when consulted, one surgeon does not see much of a problem, though he does admit that mina “might be a little sensitive, that's all. there are enough nerve endings in those things for lightning to strike them!” (peres 1999, pp. 5-6). over time mina comes to think of them as her “feelers” through which she receives a heightened perception of the emotions flowing through the atmosphere around her: mina's mother, a palliative physician, suffers from a breakdown leading onto an irrational obsession with birds, to the point of trying to become one. her father, a loafer and dissident, has a printing press in their garage where he publishes a triannual publication on goan liberation. meanwhile, mina's genius sister, deepa, is so brainy that she calculates tax returns at the age of three. shanti, the youngest, and the only “normal” one, sits in front of the tv all day watching cartoons. mina is, within this convulsed household, a mutant: “you’re a mutant, mina, that’s what you are!” (peres 1999, pp. 9), with antennae that allow her to see farther than those who are around her. the double boundary her family inscribes, india-australia, becomes a plural boundary for mina. if martin heidegger highlights how “a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the greek recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing” (heidegger in bhabha 1994, pp. 1), peres da costa begins a “presencing” of a plural boundary that erases the t/here. mina, whom when looking at a tin of california sunshine, thinks about her mother complaining that “the sydney sun never lasted long enough for her” (peres 1999, pp. 14), and how “... i myself could remember gazing upon mum’s face as she and i had walked the streets of her bombay youth bathed in such an illumination” (peres 1999, pp. 15), when asked where she is from, points on the map that shows asia and the pacific, resting her hand “on the saggy soft breast of india” (peres 1999, pp. 72), and australia “(‘but we were born here –’)” (peres 1999, pp. 79-80). mina, second generation south asian-australian was breast fed, “when multiculturalism had just, only just, made it to st. sophia” (peres 1999, pp. 156). she describes her mother’s nipples as “imperceptible marks” (peres 1996, pp. 72) which might represent the core trunk of the banyan tree i have before referred to but which through her diasporic misadventures is blurred and many other aerial roots fill up her existence enriching her planetary conviviality. the “presencing” of two geographical borders becomes the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 inscription of a plural territory of nomadization (braidotti 1994) which mina, thanks to her antennae, inhabits and disseminates. a decade after homework was published, michelle de kretser was awarded with the prestigious for questions of travel (2013), which draws two very different lives, those of australian laura and sri lankan ravi. michelle de kretser was born in sri lanka and migrated to australia when she was fourteen. significantly, she does not use her hyphenated identity (sri lankan-australian) to promote her work and she does not consider that being a migrant is limiting (sarwal 2010, pp. 49) nor does she perceive herself as one. like chandani lokugé, as a writer, she feels that a “migrant’s double vision” is one of the most energetic areas of the creative process because you have a range of cultures from which to draw and you know each one rather well, which means you are not really strange to it and at the same time you are little distance (in sarwal 2010, pp. 49). both laura and ravi inhabit a world which de kretser defines, at first, as “full of people who don’t belong where they end up and long for the places where they did” (de kretser 2013, pp. 125). laura travels the world before returning to sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. ravi, on the other hand, dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from sri lanka to australia by a dreadful act of political slaughter. laura when arriving in london discovers a country she is already familiarized with: she looked at a bridge, and what she saw wasn't balustrade and arch but the embodiment of a sonnet. as for the monuments, they were iconic from tea towels. then came a red-purple tree, magisterial in a park. laura had never seen another like it and she recognised it at once—copper beeches were always turning up in novels. that was what it meant to be australian: you came to london for the first time and discovered what you already knew. (de kretser 2013, pp. 57). however, arriving in australia proved a contrasting experience for ravi, “[t]he beaches, couched between headlands and devoid of coconut palms, didn't correspond at all to ravi's notion of a coast” (de kretser 2013, pp. 288-289). robert mccrum suggests that “part of de kretser's point seems to be that the privileged travellers of the affluent west share a travel heritage, a way of looking and of describing that makes the world seem navigable and knowable: its horrors and injustices comfortably accommodated with the solipsism of the individual traveller’ (mccrum 2013). de kretser aims to go a step farther giving voice to a character, ravi, who claims that “the world has shrunk ... from new york to negombo, life would be digital and linked ... he said, ‘soon everyone will be a tourist’” (de kretser 2013, pp. 138). both stories intertwine and have an indian scent that lightly season the story, but it is never the main flavour. beneath the project of this novel is the question of how such different stories can be brought into a single and coherent narrative (mccrum 2013). the answer is that they cannot, and this, following mccrum, is the central enigma of our globalised world. laura and ravi may find themselves sharing the same space, making common friends, but they will always be on different routes and have different roots. crossing paths, they develop a work-place friendship before laura departs on a visit to sri lanka just before the 2004 tsunami, with plans to meet up with ravi, who had decided to return home, having rejected the security of his expatriate life. this is, in my opinion, the key message of this work. both laura and ravi have distinct coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 roots and follow diverse routes, that is, they are plural nomadic subjects searching for a third space which does not constrain them. laura sees herself as “between two destinations, she was virtual, she was online, she was on the phone. she was a voice on a machine, she was here not there” (de kretser 2013, 183). the environmental event, the tsunami of december 26th 2004 de kretser ends the novel with, is a coup de théâtre which offers an apocalyptic end. the brutal damages metaphorically represent a tabula rasa which erases the inbetweenness that places laura and ravi here and there, seeming to advocate for an “empty space”: “but it is only the nomads who possess the ‘war machine’—a phrase used by both hubac and deleuze-and-guattari. the goal of this machine is to restore land to nomadism, to bring everything back to ‘empty space’, the primordial tabula rasa” (cristopher miller in genosko 2001, pp. 1138). which means that in the case of questions of travel, the “super-ego-status” brady referred to, is still in existence. the space of planetary conviviality, in the case of homework, and the utopic tabula rasa, in questions of travel, represent the “‘interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative’ space where negotiation takes place; ‘a mode of articulation, a way of describing a productive ... space that engenders new possibilities” (bhabha 1994). literature, following david carter “is not just a set of individual texts or authors but rather a set of institutions and institutional practices which regulate the making and transmission of (literary) meanings in a given society” (1997, pp. 18). undoubtedly, authors such as peres da costa and de kretser are examples of how australians of south asian lineage have become part of the australian social order at the same time that they deconstruct the norm. with their literary works they raise uneasy questions; not in vain does de kretser entitle her novel questions of travel, since she is well aware of the need to redefine and review the australian literary canon and, with it, the very meaning of australianness. a canon and an identity which, according to australian novelist of bangladeshi origin, adib khan, had had to account for the “acceleration in the proliferation of cross-cultural voices in fiction’ occurring in the last decades of the 20th century an incorporate ‘the diversity that reflects the type of society that australia is” (2002, pp. 3). the concurrence of such a wide array of literary voices is what, ultimately, calls for a planetary conviviality at the point at which true dialogue begins, for, in bill ashcroft’s terms, “modernity, rather than a hierarchical and homogenizing western influence, is actually multiple and rhizomic” (2015, pp. 8). works cited: aschcroft, bill. “towards a postcolonial aesthetics”. journal of postcolonial writing. routledge, 2015. athique, tamara mabbott. “textual migrations: south asian-australian fiction”. phd thesis. u of wollongong, 2006. bhabha, homi. the location of culture. new york, routledge, 1994. braidotti, rosi. nomadic subject. embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. new york, columbia up, 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/australian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bangladesh coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 brubaker, rogers. “the ‘diaspora’ diaspora”. ethnic and racial studies, 28 (1), 2005, pp. 1-19. carter, david. “literary canons and literary institutions”. southerly 57.3, 1997, pp. 1637. corkhill, annette robyn. the immigrant experience in australian literature. melbourne, academia p, 1995. dasgupta, t. political economy of race gender and class looking at south asian women in canada. canadian ethnic studies, 26(1), 1994, pp. 59–73. de kretser, michelle. questions of travel. 2013. london, allen&unwin, 2014 european journal of psychotherapy & counselling. “levinas and the other in psychotherapy and counselling.7:1-2,2005, pp. 1-5. fludernik, monika (ed.). hybridity and postcolonialism. twentieth-century indian literature. tubinen, stauffeburg verlag, 1989. foster, richard. “a review a review of camels, ships, trains: translation across the ‘indian archipelago’ 1860-1930, by samia khatun”. the south asian diaspora in australia. http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/6656. accessed 16 oct. 2014. genosko, gary (ed.). deleuze and guatarri. critical assessments of leading philoshopers. new york, routledge, 2001. george, rosemary marangoly. the politics of home: postcolonial relocations and twentieth century fiction. cambridge, cambridge up, 1996. gilroy, paul. postcolonial melancholia. new york, columbia university press, 2005. goonerate, yasmine. "mena abdullah, australian writer” in striking chords: multicultural literary interpretations. edited by sneja gunew and kateryna o. longley. north sydney, nsw,allen & unwin, 1992, pp. 115-124. heise, ursula. sense of place and sense of planet: the environmental imagination of the global. oxford, oxford university press, 2008. jones, gail. “veronica brady”, journal of australian studies, 21:54-55, 1997, pp. 136149. khan, adib. “trends in australian fiction”. kosmopolis 2 (2002). centre de cultura contemporània de barcelona. http://www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/adib_khaneng.pdf. last accessed 10 feb. 2014. kurian, g. “south asians in canada”. international migration, 29 (3), 1991, pp. 421– 433. lenz, günter h. “symposium: redefinitions of citizenship and revisions of cosmopolitanism—transnational perspectives”. journal of transnational american studies, 3 (1), 2011, pp. 39-46. madan, karuna. “diaspora indians suffer from the anxiety of invisibility”. china view. press release 10.08.2009. http://english.cri.cn/6966/2009/08/14/2001s508882.htm. last accessed 5 may 2014. http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/6656 http://www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/adib_khan-eng.pdf http://www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/adib_khan-eng.pdf http://english.cri.cn/6966/2009/08/14/2001s508882.htm coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 mccrum, robert. “summer voyages: questions of travel by michelle de kretser”. in the guardian, 15.07.2013. http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jul/15/michelle-kretserquestions-of-travel-summer-reading. last accessed 9 sept. 2014. mitchell, adrian and cynthia vanden driesen (eds.). new directions in australian studies. new delhi, prestige books, 2000. nye, joseph s. and john d. donahue eds. governance in a globalising world. massachusetts, brookings intitution press, 2000. peres da costa, suneeta. homework. 2000. london, bloomsbury,1999. prassad, leela (ed.). live like the banyan tree. images of the indian american experience. the balch institute for ethnic studies, 1995. raghuram, parvati et al (eds.). tracing and indian diaspora. context, memories, representations. london, sage publications inc, 2008. riaz, a. religion and politics in south asia. london, routledge, 2010. rushdie, salman. imaginary homelands: essays and criticism, 1981-1991. new york, viking, 1991. ---. shame. new york, adventure, 1984. sarwal, amit. labels and locations. gender, family, class and caste. the short narratives of south asian diaspora in australia. cambridge scholars publishing, 2015. ---. bridging imaginations. south asian diaspora in australia. new delhi, readworthy, 2013. ---. “roots and routes: politics of location in the short stories of the south asian diaspora in australia.” unpublished phd dissertation, jawaharlal nehru university, new delhi, 2010. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. death of a discipline. new york, columbia university press, 2003. tinker, hugh 1977. the banyan tree: overseas emigrants form india, pakistan and bangladesh. oxford, oxford up. bio note: alejandra moreno álvarez holds a phd in women’s studies from the university of oviedo. she has been a research fellow at rutgers university, cornell university and the university of leeds, among others. currently, she is a senior lecturer in the english department of the university of oviedo. her teaching and research is centered in literatures in english language and feminist and postcolonial theory. she is the author of lenguajes comestibles: anorexia, bulimia y su descodificación en la ficción de margaret atwood y fay weldon (edicions uib, 2009); el lenguaje trasgresor de las ciborgs literarias (arcibel editores,2011) and ambai: un movimiento, una carpeta, algunas lágrimas / a movement, a folder, some tears (krk, 2011). http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jul/15/michelle-kretser-questions-of-travel-summer-reading http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jul/15/michelle-kretser-questions-of-travel-summer-reading http://www.krkediciones.com/autores.php?a=666 coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 it all started when ……………. mike senior michaelsenior@gmx.de copyright© 2020 mike senior. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a brief summary of how geoff davis first became involved in commonwealth literature following a visit to southern africa and experiencing applied apartheid. keywords: geoff davis, south africa, apartheid i first met geoff, well, i can’t really remember when or where and i’m sure he wouldn’t know any more either, but it must have been around 1973 and almost certainly in a pub. geoff had alread been at the technical university in aachen for some 6 years or so and i’d worked in various educational institutions there for 4 years. geoff and i grew to be great friends, best mates really, and for many, many years geoff, and his wife ingrid, have been our most welcome guests over christmas. again, no-one really knows since when exactly, but geoff and ingrid would drive down every christmas day, no matter what the weather, a round trip of over 600 km to enjoy a traditional british christmas dinner with all the trimmings and join in the festivities (see photo below). normally they would stay over a day or two and we would enjoy long walks together, go to a concert, exhibition or just gorge our way through the leftovers. at times, when the snow was deep and crisp and even, this never deterred them, preferring then to suffer the inconveniences of german rail travel (not cracked up to be what people’s illusions of german efficiency would expect them to believe) and my daughters revealed to me recently that they had always regarded geoff as more of an uncle. few people know that geoff was great with kids. mailto:michaelsenior@gmx.de coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 xmas day 2005: sitting between my two daughters, waiting for the turkey, and really getting into the swing of things. however, i digress. it all started when, in 1975, a good friend of ours, hamish (a white rhodesian, obviously of scots heritage) announced he would be going home in the summer to attend his sister’s wedding and foolishly added, “why don’t you come, too”. so, we did. we flew to johannesburg together with geoff’s then girl-friend renate and another good friend, gerd, where we stayed a few days with friends of hamish. perfect hosts, they took us to the kyalami race track (which put us off formula 1 racing for life) and we also had our first real indian nosh at “the garden of allah” in jo’burg. the food was magnificent and it was this first real experience of indian cuisine which triggered off a lifelong love of indian cooking involving many happy evenings together extolling the wonders of madhur jaffrey’s wisdom in her introduction to indian cooking and vying with each other as to who could produce the best meal. indian food in germany in those days was practically unknown such that we either had to either import the spices we needed from the uk or visit the local apothecary. however, this trip was also our first taste of apartheid. at first, being white, we hardly noticed it but as time passed this iniquitous system frequently raised its ugly head. from jo’burg we travelled by train through botswana to bulawayo and ian smith’s rhodesia where we met up with hamish again. he’d flown on in advance to be back with his parents who graciously accommodated us for the period of the wedding. we were typical tourists and drove around wankie national park to view the wildlife and spent some time at the coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 victoria falls. it was, however, a remark made by one of the female guests at the wedding feast which took us aback when she said, “…. but blacks aren’t humans.” – and, she meant it!! from bulawayo we took the train to harare (then salisbury) where we considered giving ian smith a piece of our minds – he held a regular surgery in those days – but, of course, didn’t. we hitchhiked separately from harare back to jo’burg, taking in the zimbabwe ruins on the way, and there we picked up a camper van and spent the next few weeks touring around swaziland and south africa. once back in aachen, we remembered what that one guest had said and began to investigate south african society, apartheid, we became members of the south african institute of race relations and actively involved ourselves in anti-apartheid and third world groups. at some stage in the late 70s geoff irresponsibly suggested, “why don’t we write a book?”. the target group was to be 6th form levels of german schools. naively, i agreed. and so after a couple of years of prevarication was born “the privileged and the dispossessed” comprising a 472 page tome of a teacher’s handbook and a thinner volume containing an anthology of south african writers of all creeds: the student’s book. the books were published in germany in the early 80s as part of the series “teaching english and american studies”. we didn’t sell many but we were proud of the fact that our books were officially banned by the then government of south africa as being “prejudicial to the safety of the state”! in the eyes of the then sa government, geoff was now an “enemy of the state”, a “terrorist”. to my great shame i have to admit that geoff was the workhorse behind these two volumes. everybody knows what a workaholic he was. thus it was hamish’s sister’s wedding that led to geoff’s subsequent career, eventually becoming one of the world’s recognised experts on commonwealth literature until one day, perhaps the pinnacle of his career, her majesty the queen was presented to him, the chairman of the commonwealth literature conference (although i suspect that with geoff being such a workaholic she probably had to wait some time until he had a slot free !). on a more personal note: geoff, a great mate, considerate, polite, generous to a fault and in an old-fashioned way, for me, the embodiment of a british “gentleman” and, for his many students over the years, a model of “britishness”. a fountain of knowledge such that some might maintain the ”v” in dr. g. v. davis stood not for vernon but “vikipaedia”. i do believe he was deserving of more recognition and, thanks to my innate indolence, i never realised my intention of recommending him for a mention in, say, the new year’s honours list. i shall never forgive myself, if anyone ever deserved that honour, it was geoff ! i, his mate, shall miss him. bionote: michael senior, born 1947 in sheffield. subsequently, nothing really. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 199 a case for reimagining australia: dialogic registers of the other, truth-telling and a will to justice dean chan curtin university dean.chan@curtin.edu.au misty farquhar centre for human rights education curtin university misty.farquhar@curtin.edu.au rob garbutt southern cross university rob.garbutt@scu.edu.au thor kerr curtin university thor.kerr@curtin.edu.au baden offord centre for human rights education curtin university baden.offord@curtin.edu.au elfie shiosaki university of western australia elfie.shiosaki@uwa.edu.au yirga gelaw woldeyes centre for human rights education curtin university yirga.woldeyes@curtin.edu.au copyright©2018 dean chan, misty farquhar, rob garbutt, thor kerr, baden offord, elfie shiosaki & yirga gelaw woldeyes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. mailto:dean.chan@curtin.edu.au mailto:misty.farquhar@curtin.edu.au mailto:rob.garbutt@scu.edu.au mailto:thor.kerr@curtin.edu.au mailto:baden.offord@curtin.edu.au mailto:elfie.shiosaki@uwa.edu.au mailto:yirga.woldeyes@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 200 abstract: the critical and compelling impetus of reimagining australia, which this and the previous special issue of coolabah attempt to realise, has been formed through an ethical and intellectual lens fraught with profound acknowledgement of and attention to the legacies of epistemic, structural and psychological violence that characterise the formation and continuation of the modern nation-state of australia. after all, what do we (writers, activist scholars, historians and intellectuals contributing to these special issues) mean by reimagining australia? is it possible to reimagine this place, polity, culture, country, nation, idea, people, with all the weight upon us of how it has been desired into being, specifically by those enlightenment traditions that have come to dominate its present? as much as australia is a vast place with diverse cultural lives, its dominant colonial history has incapacitated it from unleashing the energies within these diversities. by putting our sense of place central to how we mediate and relate with each other and the environment, by remembering silenced histories and recognising multiple memories, reimagining emerges from linked lives, crossed borders, and in-between spaces. we are reminded that reimagining occurs in multiple and intersectional sites that allow multiple realities to mediate with each other in dignity. in this regard, the significance of listening to diverse knowledge traditions, in particular indigenous and non-western voices, becomes critical for the type of cognitive and knowledge diversity such reimagining requires. keywords: reimagining; australia; other; truth-telling; will to justice. writing in reference to australia, ashis nandy has perceptively argued that over the past two hundred years the european enlightenment has “shaped virtually every new imagination of a desirable society and every radical intervention in societies and states, even when—during this same period—enlightenment values have also often been used to justify some of the major projects of satanism in our times” (quoted in offord et al. 2015, vii). australia—a stubborn crucible of such justification—remains an implacable site of struggle and unfinished business, manifest through cultural, political, social and historical arcs of amnesia; deliberate and conscious selections of story telling and ordering of nature; as well as the administering of an epistemic architecture that persists in its core institutions despite the mythology of terra nullius, (among many mythologies), being dealt a mighty legal and truth making blow. thus, the critical and compelling impetus of reimagining ‘australia,’ which this, and the previous special issue of coolabah, attempt to realise, has been formed through an ethical and intellectual lens fraught with profound acknowledgement of and attention to the legacies of epistemic, structural and psychological violence that characterise the formation and continuation of the modern nation-state of australia. after all, what do we (writers, activist scholars, historians and intellectuals contributing to these special issues) mean by reimagining australia? is it possible to reimagine this place, polity, culture, country, nation, idea, people, with all the weight upon us of how it has been desired into being, specifically by those enlightenment traditions that have come to dominate its present? what is required to identify, question and even, perhaps, undo (for the sake of honesty) those cultural priorities that have come to shape how australia is imagined? what are the ethical challenges of such energies? coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 201 reimagining australia through dialogic registers of the other the reimagining australia project substantially comprised of research conducted, presented, performed and discussed in and around the 2016 international association of australian studies (inasa) conference held in fremantle or walyalup in whadjuk noongar country. together with the editorial work represented in these two special issues of coolabah, the project itself can be thought of as an assemblage (srinivasan and fish 2017) that has been consciously co-constructed towards a more ethical horizon (zylinska 2005) of being and belonging in australia, and of understanding the deep and complex contextual ramifications of otherness, as it has been experienced through the effects of colonialism and its ongoing permutations. the project draws on and may in turn contribute to assemblages of reimagining in other countries and communities as geographically far away as canada, where familiar challenges have been addressed by emerging movements such as idle no more (coulthard 2014; john 2015). as editors we assumed authority for soliciting articles, arranging their peer reviews, then including, clarifying and excluding some of them to produce two issues of coolabah offered as a dialogic imagining (bahktin 1981) of a more ethical australia. in assuming this authority, we are ultimately responsible for the other (levinas 1985) represented in these issues: that is, the dialogic imagining of spaces outside or other than reimagined australia. notably, the dialogic other of this reimagined australia can be identified in the descriptions of processes—verbs and their nominalisations (fairclough 2013)—offered, typically, in the context of issues, themes and artefacts investigated and created in these coolabah articles. these processes endure, shun, lose, discover, occupy and settle. they socially and selectively dis and possess, de and re territorialise as well as hurt, forget and remember. these processes also inhibit, ignore, diminish, deny, reject, silence, limit, repress, capture, create, confer, accumulate, maintain, constrain, render, fix, normalise, predetermine, impoverish, accept, colonise, racialise, ethnicise, marginalise, dominate, exclude, fear, fail, disconnect and dichotomise. tony birch calls out the other of reimagined australia, as an enduring shunning of indigenous people, indigenous self-determination and indigenous care for country. for rachel joy, the other is produced by settler colonisation, where people are defined by possessions and belonging is conferred via land title. the other in maria chisari’s reimagination is the process of normalising an apparently unchanging and unique set of ‘australian values.’ the other in majon williamson kefu’s article is disconnecting policy and practice in teaching aboriginal and torres strait islander perspectives in primary school education. for alison atkinson-phillips the other denies space in the national story for grieving and making reparation claims. elfie shiosaki’s other silences and, collectively, imagines away the voices of aboriginal and torres strait islander people in accounts of australian history. this silencing contributes to the dichotomisation of heritage values in the other of sarah yu’s reimagined australia. the other of reimagined australia in fausto buttà’s work is the fixing and predetermining of migrant identity in australia. along these lines, carol millner’s other coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 202 is the dominating narrative of the single female immigrant arriving, working briefly then marrying well. yuriko yamanouchi’s other lacks understanding of the complexities of being a mixed descendent. diverse civic being and belonging are constrained by processes of enthnonationalism, the other in yirga gelaw woldeyes’ article. interventions are needed. yet, failing to intervene in processes that systematically marginalise african students is the other in the work of kwadwo aduseiasante’s article. apathy or doing nothing to enable spaces and places to promote knowledge sharing on different ways of being is the other in greg watson’s work. fearing diversity and difference rather than celebrating them is the other in the article by lekkie hopkins and lucy hopkins. michelle bui’s other of reimagined australia is the process of rendering people invisible through technologies of offshore incarceration. the other in shaphan cox and thor kerr hurts people through exclusive national celebration. brenda downing’s other inhibits understandings of sexual violence and trauma. while molly murn’s other ignores the creative opportunities for justice offered through encounters with liminal spaces. paul hetherington and cassandra atherton’s other limits truthful expression of trauma and anxiety through conventional literary genres. straight-acting away spaces for reimagining how class, ethnic and sexual mobility is negotiated is the other process in nicholas manganas’ article. the other in katie ellis, mike kent, scott hollier, shawn burns and gerard goggin is the process of socially creating the exclusion of disability through misrepresentation and inaccessible technology. danielle brady and jeffrey murray’s other is losing social memory of natural/cultural places. such loss strengthens yvonne hartman and sandy darab’s other in maintaining unsustainable relationships between humans and their environments. the multiple and diverse registers of the other found in these reimagining australia issues of coolabah were identified in the reflection of experiences, challenges, successes and injustices of living with contemporary australia. recognition of alterity in the dialogic of this collection has provided us with the possible energies to question accepted cultural priorities whenever we find ourselves implicated or mired in these processes outside a reimagined australia. by choosing to recognise and refuse these processes of othering through creative, written and intellectual acts and interventions (coulthard 2014; also see birch), of being idle no more, a sense of responsibility is manifest, where reimagining itself is able to go beyond the limits of enlightenment thought. acts of truth-telling through reimagining ways of knowing reimagining narratives of australian national history restores some sensation to our numbing encounters with the past in the present. these narratives of history weigh heavily on us. under their weight, we feel we are losing all sensation. acts of reimagining historical narratives are syncretic movements between the two worlds of past and present. they are momentary incursions across borders of time and place. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 203 this collection of writing reflects on how we might reconcile our truths in the present, with those in the past. in this way reimagining becomes a form of truth-telling, deeply motivated by a desire for reconciliation with ourselves and each other. this writing also reveals how colonial narratives of indigenous dispossession continue to pervade discourses about aboriginal and torres strait islander people, our humanity and our human rights. as the aboriginal and torres strait islander social justice commissioner, june oscar (2017, np), reflected in her mabo lecture, “for many of you, i know that human rights are just words on a page and not a part of your lived reality.” words are so easily erased. within these colonial narratives of dispossession, aboriginal people are voiceless. they are denied the agency to speak for themselves. they are spoken about by others. in the same way that colonisation attempted to erase aboriginal people by displacing them from country and systems of kinship, it attempted to erase their voice. colonial narratives too are acts of erasure. how do we restore humanity to such un-human ways of knowing each other? this collection of writing also reveals how aboriginal people have asserted their collective humanity. many of these assertions are held silently within the files of colonial archives. these assertions have been made in discursive advocacy by aboriginal people for self-determination for centuries. this advocacy is framed by indigenous ontologies of the way they are in their worlds. these assertions contribute to an unceasing movement for indigenous human rights in australia. in the words of noongar historian elfie shiosaki, “we echo the voices of our old people with our own, as aboriginal people of our generation continue to contend with practices of colonisation. we move between the two worlds.” these histories of advocacy revitalise colonial narratives of indigenous dispossession by amplifying significant aboriginal voices. these histories reveal more ancient narratives, which irene watson (2014, 515) defines as “one that situates us as we have always been, transforming the world, and as agents in the bringing of the future.” reimagining australia casts our minds back to the past, not the future. it asks us to reflect on its ancient creation as a nation. it asks us to reflect on its sovereign and lawful indigenous peoples. aboriginal people have been imagining country for tens of thousands of years. this imagining is of the beginning, when country was sung into creation in the first songs sung by our ancestors. shiosaki observes, “we continue to sing these songs.” in 2017 over 250 aboriginal and torres strait islander people gathered to make the uluru statement from the heart. the statement was a reimagining. it was a form of truth-telling. it significantly reimagined peace-making between indigenous and nonindigenous people in australia. one of the key recommendations of the statement was the establishment of a first nations voice enshrined in the constitution. such a polity would enable aboriginal people to speak for themselves. the statement reflects that “in 1967 we were counted, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 204 in 2017 we seek to be heard.” the statement made these recommendations to “… empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country.” this motivation echoes the voices of aboriginal elders who have advocated for self-determination as “a rightful place in our own country.” this collection of writing traces some of these histories of advocacy, which have compelled us forward to the present. this reimagining of narratives of australian national history will only be realised by continuing to amplify aboriginal voices, and listening with both our ears and our hearts. we encourage this form of listening to the voices within this collection of writing. reimagining australia: epistemologies, decolonisation, connection as a process, reimagining australia is necessarily always in the present with our senses simultaneously tuned towards the sediments of the past and an uncertain future. and the future, our imagined future, bears in on us often with a sense of foreboding, especially where the environment is concerned. we imagine and reimagine together the place where we (will) live and the time in which we (will) live. both are tinged with necessary hope and well-founded fears. in this context it is no wonder that apocalypse looms in the cultural milieu as a figure urging us to reimagine. in western popular culture the apocalypse figures as a catastrophic break in history, often marked by a world devoid of people, or at best one that is sparsely populated (danowski and de castro 2017). any human response is paltry against this scale of catastrophe. yet as stephan skrimshire (2010) reminds us, apocalypse in its original sense did not refer to the “end time” so much as to the unveiling of some truth, a revelation. this unveiling may occur in an instant or over decades. drawing on skrimshire, andreas malm (2016) suggests the unveiling of fossil-fuelled climate change may have first become apparent to workers in hot, steam-powered manchester factories in the 1850s. in our times, climate change has billowed such that earth systems are perturbed on a geological scale encapsulated in the term the anthropocene (latour and aït-touati 2017). if we add in other indicators that provide evidence for the great acceleration (steffen et al. 2015), the exponential growth since the mid-twentieth century of indicators of environmental degradation, our time is one of intense revelation: that those of us benefiting from “economic prosperity” are doing so to the detriment of ourselves and all others on the earth. the revelations are unfolding at a global level though through local manifestations (garbutt and mcintyre 2017, 166). in reimagining australia in the face of such revelations, the ancient greek origins of apocalypse might yield possibilities for response. in ancient greek apo kalúptō is to take off a covering, while the verb kalúptō not only means to cover, but also to cover with dishonour (liddell and scott 1940). with this in mind we could consider how indigenous australian activists, scholars and allies have uncovered for non-indigenous australians the “apocalyptic” events of unfolding colonisation and of the mechanisms by which colonisers have covered indigenous knowledge and culture with dishonour. it might be a revelation then, as mary graham (brigg and graham 2009) has observed, that in australia the mainstream has much to learn from aboriginal people who are well-versed both in living with country and responding to apocalypse in the form of the destruction of country, people, culture and knowledge. ecofeminists (for example, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 205 plumwood 1993) have also unmasked how masculinist, exploitative visions of nature have worked to normalise and celebrate environmental degradation. reimagining australia, then, requires developing an australian “ethics of location” that extends the decolonising ethic garbutt (2008) calls for, to one in which environmental justice and social justice are inseparable. this is a refashioning of the local order (garbutt 2005) that necessarily involves human and more-than-human considerations, that is, considerations of the culpability of the invaders in unsustainably exploiting resources in actions that necessitated the genocide and oppression of indigenous australians. we evoke the local here because when we bring the environment of australia into our considerations of what reimagining might entail, and connect it with an indigenous australian understanding of living within “ecologies that fit” (kearney 2018, 189) australia as a relational object seems at once too large and too small. too large because the nation and its country are too vast to consider in one gaze without venturing into space; too small because when it comes to the regional variations in country and cultures a unified national story could never contain them all. and as we have noted, this unified national story has been so carefully constructed within a masculinist, colonial clearing (garbutt 2010; latour 2009, 6) it is hard to open it out while leaving old unified concepts of australia intact. our task is to reinterpret and redesign australia, to reconnect its elements in new ways, to ‘restory’ it, to use the materials at hand in a construction relevant to our times. in addition, with the failure of political leadership in addressing anthropogenic environmental change, there is a sense in which the future needs to be reworked from below, through new cultural, social and economic forms (wark 2015). authors in these reimagining australia special issues do just that. joy explores the intricately entwined practices of belonging and their accompanying philosophical beings. as she writes, for non-indigenous australians, there is an imperative to begin reimagining their relationship with place by relinquishing the possessive logic of belonging (moreton-robinson 2004). with this logic of exclusive property rights, land is a belonging with which the subject-possessor does as he desires. from this proceeds a sense of entitlement over place despite global and local consequences of which adani’s proposed carmichael mine stand as an exemplar (see birch). this ethos of domination of land is at odds with joy’s call for non-indigenous australians to join indigenous australians in thinking for place. this is not a white, patriarchal call to do the thinking for another set of existents, but to think with attentive awareness “with both place and all the beings enfolded in it” (joy). this decolonising move has the potential to decentre the western settler subject and set in place a process of becoming other than occupier. this combined movement towards justice for land and indigenous people is extended by birch who proposes that combating climate change depends on productive relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous australians. while for joy place has the potential to link australians together, for birch it is country. drawing on the inspiring work of leanne betasamosake simpson (2014), birch evokes land as pedagogy, and conjures for us a judgment day when we answer to those who walk ahead of us, the elders who were stewards of country for millennia. like joy, birch challenges non-indigenous australians to embark on reimagining australia beginning with settler subjectivity. but unlike joy, he recognises tension for indigenous australians, a sense of doubt that colonisation as an ongoing process will ever be coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 206 changed by the colonisers without challenges, or acts of refusal, from indigenous communities: refusal in the form of denying rights to environmentally unsound development or refusal of a politics of recognition that is accompanied by the status quo. the tension therefore is between denying and nourishing relationships, of denying and maintaining connectivity in a contested process of re-imagination. there is nothing comfortable in the prospect of achieving environmental and decolonial justice except repose in the work for necessary change. of course, speaking for place through resistance and protest is occurring, with country/place as a meeting ground for developing a decolonising ethics that is necessarily collaborative and active (rose 2004, 33; aboriginal heritage action alliance 2017). the wetlands of perth, and the beeliar wetlands in particular, are such sites (see brady and murray). our cultural connectedness with wetlands demonstrates the difference between non-indigenous and indigenous relationships with country. for the former group, wetlands moved from being sources of water and fertile land in the nineteenth century to becoming undesirable swamps that were drained in the twentieth century. only more recently have the swamps been re-valued by some as abundantly biodiverse wetlands. brady and murray delve into the archive to reveal that for noongar people wetlands were always places of abundance providing food and places for gathering, even for evading hostile colonists. the recent roe 8 protests have the potential to take non-indigenous and indigenous relationships with country and place off the page and into the type of decolonising collaboration that rose suggests. for academics, the decolonising imperative is to consider how such relationships are developed through their work and into research outputs. similarly, hartman and darab write of the importance of people coming together “on the ground” regarding environmental matters of concern. examining the case of a successful campaign to stop coal seam gas extraction in the northern rivers region of new south wales, hartman and darab identify two important aspects of the action: an enmeshed relationship with place and the use of non-violent, direct democracy principles that are in continual development in the community. relationships with place enabled the drawing together of disparate groups into the action including githabul elders, land titleholders, farmers, and environmentally concerned community members of all ages, including the formidable knitting nannas (see https://www.knittingnannas.com/index.php). these groups were galvanised through learning from the experiences of those involved in previous non-violent environmental actions in the region that stretch back to the 1979 terania creek rainforest campaign, the first successful rainforest protection campaign in australia (bible 2018). in this sense, over an extended period of time resistance is always being learnt on country for country; learning that from the outset recognises the primacy of aboriginal claims to and relationships with country. reimagining australia in this local on-the-ground process is not solely a cognitive exercise, but as hartman and darab remind us, it is embodied and shared with a collective of human and more-than-human actors—as deborah bird rose (2008, 110) puts it, to “open our minds and our bodies to other people’s epistemologies.” and finally, on this theme, yu examines how this discussion centres on questions of value and relationship. she asks for relationships between indigenous people and country to be counted as cultural heritage; heritage that we might all learn from. the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 207 yawuru people of western australia have a word for the “interconnectedness between a sense of personal self with the wider community and the natural landscape”—liyan (patrick dodson in yu). when culture is strong, good liyan results, and when culture is interrupted, liyan is out of joint. yu calls for us all to be accountable for mabu liyan, well-being, to value relationships with country, that densely entangled term that ultimately is the key to survival, earthbound as we are. while it is currently impossible for non-indigenous australians to fully share in this sense of interconnectedness, it may be that reimagining australia in these apocalyptic times demands of us all to work towards mabu liyan as the horizon of environmental and decolonising peace. reimagining australia and a will to justice as much as australia is a vast place with diverse cultural lives, its dominant colonial history has incapacitated it from unleashing the energies within these diversities. for a long time, australian political culture has been driven by the anxiety to control the dynamics of change that its diversities may precipitate. this fear of change has initiated the institutionalisation of mechanisms for the control rather than the flourishing of difference. the will to reimagine australia partly emerges from the need to challenge the fear of diversity and difference in social and political life. as we have outlined above, in the political realm, reimagining is an invitation to critically examine the oft-celebrated ideals of australia’s liberal tradition. the mainstream political and cultural life of the country narrates the ideals of the rule of law, democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and ‘the fair-go’ as the foundation of the nation. in reflecting on this narrative, we can observe a fairly positive political culture that tolerates some level of dissent and is receptive of critical voices that lead to limited progressive outcomes. the mabo case, the apology to the stolen generation, and recent debates about moving australia day are important examples that show the possibility of the liberal tradition to permit progressive measures. yet, reimagining challenges us to go beyond the celebration of liberal ideals to consider the everyday experiences of australians under colonial and neoliberal systems of power. the shift from dominant liberal ideals and theories to the peoples’ historical and lived experiences reveals how liberal ideals are fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions. despite the stated commitment to ideals of freedom and human rights, the liberal tradition did not stop colonial violence or help the healing of the historical trauma unleashed through colonisation. the very same liberal tradition that values the rule of law and parliamentary democracy produced the white australia policy and off-shore detention. it hardly welcomes strangers who are vulnerable, especially when they arrive by ‘unsanctioned’ channels (by boat) or are disabled immigrants who are, among others, considered ‘economic drains’ on society. reimagining is a critical move towards the realm of uncomfortable but compelling and necessary questions. if we truly wish to reimagine australia, we must question how the nation’s celebrated liberal democracy was able to accommodate colonialism and how it continues to bear with, and ominously, sustain and rationalise its consequences. can the liberal political tradition listen to voices informed by views other than its own? coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 208 in reimagining australia, we consider the significance of listening to radically different worldviews or new voices. how can we imagine australian life as a place where plural, diverse, and intersectional worldviews could exist and flourish? reimagining is prefaced on the belief that “another knowledge is possible” and that cognitive justice is as important as social justice (santos 2007). the question of justice in relation to knowledge is tied with the recognition of the right to narrate, to ensure that suppressed worldviews are able to speak their truths with dignity. reimagining is not just a willingness to speak for suppressed voices or ensure the inclusion of their views into mainstream public discourse. it is the necessity to make public and political spaces available for subaltern, marginalised and suppressed agents; the recognition of the right of the supressed to narrate and create their world themselves (bhabha 1994). this is what seems to be absent in australian political life today. the rejection of the uluru statement from the heart (2017) is just one of the latest examples of how indigenous people struggle to establish a political space within liberal democracy in australia. the ongoing attempt by the current liberal government to introduce a regime of tough immigration measures based on proof of integration, an australian values test and english language test, is also another example of how liberalism is able to bend towards tyrannical routes by criminalising specific groups and identities through institutional mechanisms (belot 2018). furthermore, these patterns of setting political, cultural and historical priorities can be seen in how australian political discourse has been able to garner a high level of public support towards integrating minorities into mainstream society. both the political left and right are accustomed to representing indigenous people, refugees, lgbtiq people and other identities as objects of their discourses. while the idea of seeing marginalised people as ‘like us’ may be seen as a positive move, the tyranny of such discourses lie in the worth of these groups being evaluated in relation to their ability to conform to the values of mainstream society. to evaluate one’s worth by what is perceived to be ‘australian’ is to deny the agency of these people to speak their story and their truth. in the movement between the political left and the right, minorities such as indigenous people are not allowed to speak as subjects, act as agents or design their destinies as free beings. in this regard, the difficult question is how can we reimagine the liberal tradition to accommodate radical diversity that hosts “the otherness of the other” (levinas 1991), when in fact it is accustomed to subjecting all external meanings and realities into its own rationalities? the various essays in these two special issues have offered various points of encounter, recognition, resistance and change that trigger important insights for the future. by putting our sense of place central to how we mediate and relate with each other and the environment, by remembering silenced histories and recognising multiple memories, reimagining emerges from linked lives, crossed borders, and in-between spaces. we are reminded that reimagining occurs in multiple and intersectional sites that allow multiple realities to mediate with each other in dignity. in this regard, the significance of listening to diverse knowledge traditions, in particular indigenous 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deutsch, owen gaffney, and cornelia ludwig. 2015. “the trajectory of the anthropocene: the great acceleration.” the anthropocene review 2 (1): 81-98. the uluru statement from the heart. 2017. https://www.1voiceuluru.org/thestatement/ wark, mckenzie. 2015. molecular red: theory for the anthropocene. london: verso. watson, irene. 2014. “re-centering first nations knowledge and places.” alternative, 10 (5): 508-520. zylinska, joanna. 2005. the ethics of cultural studies. london: continuum. acknowledgements: we acknowledge the traditional owners of country throughout australia and pay our respects to them and their cultures as well as to elders both past and present. these two special issues of coolabah were edited on whadjuk noongar http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 211 country, and that of the widjabal people of the bundjalung nation. the editorial collective recognises that aboriginal sovereignty has never been ceded, and we will continue to work together towards establishing recognition, representation and selfdetermination. our sincere thanks are extended to the many peer reviewers who generously read and engaged with the submissions to these special issues. funding was received from the faculty of humanities at curtin university in 2015 in support of the reimagining project, including the conference and its outcomes. dean chan is project manager of deathscapes: mapping race and violence in settler states, an arc discovery project (2016-2019) led by professor suvendrini perera at curtin university (https://www.deathscapes.org). based in perth, western australia, dean is an independent consultant specialising in the development and management of academic research and publication projects in the humanities, digital media and creative arts (https://drdeanchan.wordpress.com). his indicative publications include gaming cultures and place in asia-pacific (routledge, 2009) as well as special issues of amerasia journal on “asian america and asian australia” (2010) and third text on “the transnational turn: east asian mobilities” (2014). misty farquhar is a passionate advocate, with a strong belief in inclusion for all people. misty has over 10 years of leadership experience in community and organisational development, and ongoing involvement with a number of not-for-profits. misty is currently working toward a phd at the curtin university centre for human rights education exploring how people living outside binary ideas of sexuality and gender experience recognition in australia. rob garbutt is senior lecturer at southern cross university, lismore. his placebased research considers ways of belonging through a cultural studies and environmental humanities lens. he works with words, sound and images. rob’s first book, the locals, was published in 2011 and he was co-author of inside australian culture, published in 2014. thor kerr coordinates the master of arts course at curtin university’s school of media, creative arts and social inquiry. at the nexus of discourse and space, thor’s research focusses on the representation of communities in controversies around island and waterfront reclamation projects in western australia and indonesia. his recent books include indian ocean futures (2016, as lead editor), to the beach (2015, as author) and setting up the nyoongar tent embassy (2013, co-authored with shaphan cox). baden offord holds the haruhisa handa chair of human rights; is professor of cultural studies and human rights and director of the centre for human rights education at curtin university. his contributions in the field of australian studies have focussed on critical notions of belonging, identity, and the effects of colonialism and include the books landscapes of exile: once perilous, now safe (co-edited with anna haebich, 2008) and most recently inside australian culture: legacies of enlightenment coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 212 values (co-authored with kerruish, garbutt, wessell and pavlovic, 2015), which raewyn connell has remarked is a ‘disturbing book, most relevant to our disturbing times.’ he is an executive board member of the international association of australian studies, a board member of the centre for australian studies at the university of barcelona; and was chair (visiting professor) of australian studies at the university of tokyo (2010-2011). dr elfie shiosaki is a lecturer in indigenous rights, policy and governance at the school of indigenous studies at the university of western australia (uwa). she held a position as an indigenous post-doctoral research fellow at the centre for human rights education (chre) at curtin university from 2015 to 2018. she is currently a chief investigator of an australian research council discovery project which identifies the hundreds of letters written by noongar people in the archive in western australia over 100 years between 1860 and 1960. dr shiosaki completed a phd (political science and international relations) on nation-building in post-conflict societies in 2015.” yirga gelaw woldeyes is a researcher and lecturer at the centre for human rights education, curtin university, australia. yirga taught law and worked with grassroots organisations in ethiopia before completing his doctorate in australia. yirga’s research focuses on the critical study of development, education and law, and the importance of lived experience and epistemic diversity for decolonial futures. his book native colonialism: education and the economy of violence against traditions in ethiopia is published in 2017. his teaching practice is informed by his research on how to teach human rights from the perspective of diverse cultures and religions. he also researches african experiences and ethiopian traditions, and writes creatively on belonging and diasporic lives. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 competing demands, intertwined narratives: ethnic, gender and national identities in alison wong’s as the earth turns silver1 paloma fresno-calleja university of the balearic islands paloma.fresno@uib.es copyright©2017 paloma fresno-calleja. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. this article focuses on alison wong’s 2009 novel as the earth turns silver, the first published by a new zealand writer of chinese descent, and considers the expectations and pressures placed on the author as a result of her ethnic background. as argued in the article, the “competing demands” affecting her as a novelist are solved by reconstructing chinese new zealand history as interrelated to the history of other new zealanders. this is done, primarily, by fictionalising the interracial love story between the two protagonists, a chinese man and a pakeha woman, but also by contextualising their romance within a range of interrelated debates on ethnic, gender and national identity. ultimately, wong’s creative choices allow her to recover the silenced chinese voice while exploring issues that were and continue to be of upmost importance for new zealanders of all ethnic backgrounds. keywords: alison wong, chinese new zealand literature, ethnic identity in new zealand, chinese new zealand history. introduction when the oxford companion to new zealand literature was published in 1998 the entry for “china” opened by acknowledging the “significant niche” (millar 1998: 104) that this country has occupied in new zealand’s literary imagination and then moved on to enumerate the ways in which well-known new zealand writers ―like katherine mansfield, robin hyde, roderick finlayson or michael morrissey― had variously reflected on the chinese presence in new zealand with stories that echoed both early anti-asian sentiment and more recent and ambivalent reactions to chinese migrants and their cultural influence. likewise, the entry documented the travels of several new zealand writers in china, as well as the more recent presence of exiled writers from that mailto:paloma.fresno@uib.es coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 country. it concluded by establishing a distinction between these “new migrants” and the long-established members of the chinese community, who descend from 19th century settlers, and whose literary activity was, at the time in which the work was compiled, still incipient. twenty years after the companion was published, the chinese experience has been documented, narrated and performed by historians, fiction writers, filmmakers and visual artists of chinese descent, in a joint effort that fortunately now demands a substantial expansion of the oxford companion entry and in turn a redefinition of new zealand literature. more recent works ―such as the auckland university press anthology of new zealand literature (stafford and williams 2012)― have conveniently acknowledged both the chinese heritage as part of new zealand literary history as well as the role of authors of diverse asian origins in reshaping its contours. the author i have chosen to focus on, poet and novelist alison wong, is among the “new voices” featured in the anthology. wong is a fourth generation chinese new zealander and the first new zealander of chinese descent to have published a novel, as the earth turns silver (2009). set in wellington in the period that goes from 1905 to 1916, the novel narrates the cross-cultural romance between yung, a chinese shopkeeper, and katherine, a pakeha widow, and the tragic ending of their love story, when katherine’s son robbie finds out about their relationship and murders yung in his shop. yung’s murder is based on a number of racist attacks which occurred in several new zealand cities and reflects the sinophobic feelings that dominated new zealand society from the mid-19th century, when chinese people began to arrive as temporary sojourners at the onset of the gold rush period and then settled in the country permanently, diversifying their occupations and consolidating as a more numerous community. my aim in this article is to reflect on the novel’s pioneer status and the ways in which wong’s creative choices could be read in relation to those debates affecting her as a new zealand writer of chinese descent and her novel as the first of its kind to be published in the country. my contention is that wong’s novel not only serves the purpose of inscribing the silenced chinese voice, but most importantly of inscribing that voice within a specific new zealand context, proving that chinese history must not be seen as separate but as integral to the development of national identity in the past and at present. in the first section of my article, i look at the specificities surrounding the publication of wong’s novel and its reception in the context of debates concerning chinese diasporic writing and new zealand multicultural literature; in the following sections, i focus on how the novel negotiates the intersecting notions on ethnic, gender and national identity as interrelated paradigms that cannot be understood in isolation but influencing each other. ultimately, i argue that wong’s novel responds to identitary dilemmas affecting new zealanders not only at the turn of the 20th century, a period that was crucial in the formation of new zealand’s identity, but also resonate with more recent articulations of new zealand’s multi-ethnic diversity in the 21st century, when different identity variables interact and influence each other, despite often being dealt with separately. the inscription of the chinese new zealand voice coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 the chinese voice only emerged in new zealand literature in the late 1990s with the publication of works like ka shue/letters home (1998), lynda chanwai-earle’s monodrama, a multigenerational portrait of a chinese family and the first play written in new zealand by a writer of chinese descent. the project of inscribing the chinese voice has gained strength at the onset of the 21st century thanks to a younger generation of chinese writers from various origins and who have experienced varied diasporic trajectories. although diverse in form and content, these works continue to be grouped as examples of the emergent “asian new zealand voice”. in australia, with a wider and more consolidated range of asian2 literary voices, critics have warned us against reading the work of these writers as “typically” asian, as well as of the dangers implicit in defining these works under “the generic diasporic umbrella” (ommundsen 2011: 503). for instance, readings of these works tend to frame them within the scope of international best-selling titles, as examples of what has been variously called “the amy tan phenomenon” (s. wong 2009), “the amy tan-syndrome” (wagner 2003) or “the wild swans factor” (ommundsen 2002: 68), in reference to jung chang’s 1991 best-selling work. ommundsen claims that reading these works as “diasporic”, “transnational” or “transcultural” fails to consider them as firmly rooted in their respective local literary traditions, minimising their particular contribution to the context from which they have sprung (2009: 2). granting that asian australian writing may display some similarities with its north american and canadian counterparts, ommundsen nevertheless stresses the need to consider it “in its broader historical contexts, the intersection of personal, national, and literary histories from which the writing has acquired its specificities” (2011: 504). in the same vein, jacqueline lo advocates for the establishment of critical models that are relevant to the specific context from which these works originate, models “that are grounded in australian histories and spaces in order to remain politically relevant to the australian context” (2006: 24), without losing their transnational appeal and their commonalities with other asian diasporic models to which, however, they cannot be simplistically and unproblematically related. wong herself has talked about the difficulties she experienced when trying to find “home in literature” (perkins 2011: 23), both due to the lack of chinese perspectives in new zealand writing and the remoteness she felt in relation to “chinese literature from overseas” (perkins 2011: 23). this demands rethinking the apparently evident connections among literatures of the chinese diaspora springing from different locations, questioning the very different migration experiences that are often grouped under the term “diaspora”, as well as the range of thematic and aesthetic concerns of works by new zealand writers of diverse asian descents whose aim is to inscribe their voices as new zealanders rather than as transnational or diasporic subjects. this line of thought has been reinforced by several new zealand critics when discussing the cultures of asian peoples in the country, especially in relation to the country’s specific social and political configuration. understanding the role of asian peoples in the making of new zealand means addressing the conflicts between the country’s foundational framework and the recent emergence of multiculturalism in whose consolidation the chinese, as one of the oldest and largest ethnic communities in the country, must play a relevant role. leckie and voci point at the importance of transcending official ethnic coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 classifications and the rigid separation between asians and new zealanders in favour of the development of a specific framework defined by “geographical and historical contexts, but also by specific cultural locations and personal interventions” (2011: 21). this is indeed a complex and incomplete project, as multiculturalism in new zealand remains politically contested, despite it has consolidated demographically and culturally, with writers and artists of various ethnic origins offering their own personal and artistic interventions into the debate. wong’s perception of her own work as part of the “organism which is multicultural nz” (2003: 11) addresses the construction of chinese identity as an ongoing project which cannot be detached from the interrelated and dynamic narratives of national identity, biculturalism and migration. although wong’s novel has only been a recent addition to these debates,3 its unique status as the first chinese new zealand novel has placed her amidst a number of discussions, even before its publication. in 2003, after receiving the robert burns fellowship and while working on the manuscript, wong tentatively commented on the expectations placed on her novel, its focus and subject matter: perhaps i have to shoulder a certain responsibility because we are only at the beginning of what i hope will be a wave of nz chinese writers. perhaps some people expect me to be some kind of spokesperson for the nz chinese. (2003: 10) wong protested that no new zealand writer is expected to write the definite new zealand novel (2003: 11), whereas for ethnic minority writers the expectation is that “what they write is held up to be a definitive work, instead of just one voice and story among what will hopefully become many” (2003: 11). wong has also talked of her condition as “ethnic writer” as “both a curse and a blessing” as someone who may have “a slightly different story to tell, which can set you apart in the marketplace”, but is also in “danger of being pigeonholed or stereotyped, of being expected to be different when you’re not” (2003: 5). these reflections remind us of what the philippine-australian writer merlinda bobis has defined as the “voice-niche-brand” framework (2008): the tensions between the need to inscribe one’s distinctive or underrepresented voice, the concessions often made by ethnic authors to be given a niche in the market, and the eventual process of branding that occurs once these authors have succeeded and are expected to stick to certain identitary and thematic parameters. wong has not been the only new zealand writer of chinese descent to point at these problems. in an interview for the new zealand book council in 2006, lynda chanwai-earle made a similar point when arguing that “using our ethnicities at a time when there is a scarcity of this voice in literature […] doesn’t mean that we should be then neatly packaged in a box and put on a shelf” (nz book council 2006). the expectations placed on these artists as a result of popular or market demands coexist with internal expectations from their own people. these internal pressures have resulted in harsh criticism on the part of their communities when the work in question does not offer a fully positive portrayal of their group.4 to refer to these conflicts, kathy ooi talks about the writers’ “insider dilemmas”, which result in pressures from their peers to produce alternative renditions of their ethnic identity to those expected from mainstream coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 audiences or outsiders, representations which, ironically, appear as similarly reductive and monolithic. “the danger ―ooi remarks― is that the community sanctions only certain images and viewpoints, which potentially suppresses the diversity that actually exists within” (2009: 335). in her study, ooi also talks about the “inconsistent ascriptions of ethnicity” (2009: 319) affecting ethnic writers; for instance, she contrasts the branding of new zealand authors like alan duff or lynda chanwai-earle as “ethnic”, with the creative strategies developed by others, like kelly ana morey and ann-marie houng lee, to avoid such branding. wong’s novel has mostly attracted positive responses by both chinese and non-chinese readers (wong 2011: 73; perkins 2011: 24). yet, despite this mostly positive criticism, it has not escaped such inconsistent ascriptions of ethnicity, to which she specifically refers as “competing demands” (2011: 73). in fact, to counteract the pressures and expectations placed on the novel as a “chinese” text, wong has often stressed her “hyphenated existence”, repeatedly claiming her status as a new zealand writer who ticks “chinese” for her ethnicity when “it would be as relevant for me to tick both chinese and nz european/pakeha” (2003: 9). a fourth generation chinese, born in hawke’s bay, wong grew up in an area relatively isolated from other members of the chinese community, and although she spent three years in china (wong 2003: 7), she claims that “new zealand is my one and only home, china and things chinese are also part of me, even if sometimes a little strange or foreign” (wong 2010: 489). she has also expressed her ease when approaching pakeha culture, her reluctance to tell the story from an exclusive chinese perspective (2011: 68-69) and her preference for her work to be read as informed by those multiple experiences (liang 2007), a point i consider below in relation to her choice of characters and narrative perspectives. critics have mostly read wong’s novel along those lines, pointing at her achievements as a “new zealand writer”, stressing her local ascriptions and her rooted sense of identity. a reviewer in the new zealand herald talked about “a homegrown writing debut” (hill 2009); a judge of the new zealand post book awards, awarded to her novel in 2010, talks of her work opening “new windows on the development of our nation” (quoted in pellegrino 2010). websites like nznewsuk proudly mention the international recognition given to a “kiwi author short-listed for aussie award” (2010), branding wong as “kiwi”, at the time when she actually moved to australia, where she now lives, and where, paradoxically, her novel was shortlisted for the 2010 australian prime minister awards. australian reviewers also emphasised her status as a new zealand novelist. one pointed that “wong is the patricia grace of the chinese new zealand experience” (tay 2009), placing wong in a similarly iconic position to that held by the pioneer maori writer. another saw “an undeniable touch of new zealand author janet frame” in the novel (jordan 2009), significantly connecting her with the icon of new zealand letters.5 reviews like these reflect the often ambivalent position occupied by writers like wong, on the one hand revealing expectations that she will become the chinese version of grace and frame, clearly filling that specific ethnic slot; on the other, firmly placing her within the new zealand tradition rather than as part of the mass of diasporic chinese writing. from australia, wong has also talked about the specific understanding of her work as distinctively coming from new zealand soil: coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 [i]n australia i am not chinese. people recognise my accent. they’re friendly. either that or they haven’t a clue what i’m saying. at a petrol station a young aussie-born maori heard my accent and asked if i was maori. everywhere i go kiwis come out of the brickwork and unreinforced masonry. they tell me they’re from wainuiomata, invergargill, christchurch or auckland. at the australian prime minister’s literary awards shortlisting, david malouf said to me, ‘ah, so you’re the new zealander.’ he did not say, ‘ah, so you’re the chinese,’ or ‘ah, so you are the chinese new zealander.’ (wong 2013) wong understands her new zealandness, from her australian standpoint, as inclusive of the maori and the chinese experiences, a definition which seems to be detached from perceptions of her work as typically chinese or simply as part of the asian diasporic tradition. despite being forced to explain her credentials and background prior to the publication of the novel (wong 2003), wong’s text thus seems to have managed to both portray the unknown or hidden chinese voice and engage in a redefinition of new zealand identity, presenting both projects as interrelated and compatible, as seen in her own authorial status. in the following pages, i focus on how wong confronts some of the common dilemmas and inconsistencies affecting “ethnic” writers, and how her creative choices allow her to critically engage with the constraining “ethnic” label. i will show that her novel offers a localised and inclusive approach to the history of the chinese in new zealand history, including but not limited to the chinese perspective. although wong’s main concern is to recover the silenced voice of the chinese community, her narrative intertwines ethnic and racial conflicts with discussions of gender and national identity, thus reflecting on the multifaceted nature of the debates affecting her chinese and pakeha characters, to which she grants equal weight in the narrative. finally, wong establishes a bridge between the historical events occurring at the beginning of the 20th century and the contemporary manifestations of those debates in what are still pressing conflicts for 21st century new zealanders sharing the multicultural national space. this makes her historical revision relevant from a contemporary perspective and pertinent for readers of diverse ethnic backgrounds. narrating racial conflicts and interethnic ties as the earth turns silver is set in the early 1900s and moves forward to the end of the first world war. new zealand historian james belich labels the period that goes from 1890 to 1920 as “the great tightening”, as characterised by what he calls the “three harmonies” (2011: 121): a process of “social, moral and racial integration” (2001: 121), aimed at minimising difference and forging myths of “social harmony, moral excellence and racial purity” (2001: 124) for the emerging nation. apart from attempting to reduce social differences, there was a moral component in such process intended to “exorcise numerous demons, such as disorder, dirt, disease, drink and difference” (2001: 122), as coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 well as a more racial dimension, informed by social darwinism and aryanism (2001: 123). the novel reflects the interrelated nature of the social, moral and racial process of harmonisation, which particularly affected the indigenous maori people, in an effort to assimilate them to the hegemonic white culture, as well as ethnic minorities like the chinese who were subject to the so called “white new zealand policy” in the form of a series of legal measures taken by new zealand governments from 1881 to 1920 to prevent or limit the number of new arrivals. the establishment of a poll tax in 1881 and of literacy tests from 1907 ensured that entry into the country could be denied to those who did not conform to the standards and reinforced the establishment of new zealand as a nation of (white) migrants addressing the risk of a what at the time was popularly perceived as the “yellow peril” (murphy 2009: 73). chinese, in fact, personified the fears and anxieties of the period as they were commonly accused of constituting an economic threat, of spreading improper of immoral behaviour in the form of “[s]exual depravity, vice, moral degeneration, disease, miscegenation, racial contamination and ruin” (murphy 2009: 74). for those who were already settled in new zealand, as is the case of yung and shun in the novel, the process of racial tightening translated in widespread sinophobic feelings and quotidian racist acts. to exemplify this environment, wong rescues the figure of lionel terry, an english migrant and government official who became infamously known for shooting an old disabled chinese man in wellington in 1905, subsequently justifying his act as a way of ensuring his rights and as a defence against invaders (moloughney and stenhouse 1999: 43). wong fictionalises terry’s visit to katherine’s husband where he appears as spokesperson of white supremacist theories and the colonial credo of the white man’s burden: this employment of alien labour is a criminal injustice to the british workman. it’s the chief cause of poverty, crime, degeneracy and disease throughout the empire […] the presence of asiatics in this country jeopardises the rights of our fellow britons. we have to take drastic measures before it’s too late… (2009: 26-27) katherine’s husband uses his position as editor of truth ―a tabloid newspaper which appeared in 1887 and published “stories of divorce and fallen women, the malodorous chow and the jew” (2009: 52)― to gather public support for terry after his crime, so that his death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. eventually, terry is sent to a mental hospital from which he regularly sends letters to katherine’s husband, who continues to defend and spread terry’s ideas organising petitions and events in his defence. wong’s narration skilfully presents these racist ideas as deeply ingrained in society and not merely the result of a lunatic mind or a casual incident; there are also references to other events like a shooting in naseby or a murder in tapanui (2009: 29), as well as more quotidian acts which affect the protagonists, who are verbally abused by different characters, including children. wong thus demonstrates the effective ways in which the official process of “racial tightening” worked its way into the popular imagination and conditioned chinese people’s lives. in fact, in the author’s note included at the end of the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 novel, wong mentions the historical accuracy of the “anti-chinese legislation outlined in this novel [as well] as the general climate of racism and sometime violence” (2009: 264) reflected in a number of racist murders including that of her paternal great-grandfather in 1914. despite condemning these racist acts, wong avoids presenting yung and shun as passive victims. the novel opens with an incident involving the brothers who are approached by a drunkard asking for money and a resolute and fearless yung defying the man and walking into the police station to demand protection (2009: 4); later, yung repels the abuse of “a couple of young hooligans” (2009: 13) whom he manages to kick out of his shop. the novel also hints at harmonious relationships between chinese and non-chinese characters, rejecting the idea of new zealand’s society as homogeneously racist. “alterity ―as moloughney and stenhouse suggest― had its limits [and] new zealanders did not ‘other’ the chinese as radically and systematically as we might think” (1999: 63). on the other hand, the decision of telling the story from both points of view allows wong to explore prejudice and mistrust as working in several directions. for instance, the novel opens with yung’s older brother’s reflection on the strange gweilos ―repeatedly defined by the chinese as “barbarians” (2009: 13, 15) ― and their religious practices: “it is a lonely place where the jesus-ghosts preach. they preach about love, about a god who died of love, yet in the street the people sneer and call out and spit, then on sundays sing in the jesus-house” (2009: 1). prejudice also affects both katherine and yung as they gradually get to know each other and become friends. although katherine displays a capacity for empathy since she first visits yung’s shop and shows a profound contempt for terry’s ideas, she unconsciously echoes some of the assumptions prevalent at the time at the onset of her relationship with yung: she took the carrots, feeling as if the feathery tops spilling out of the newspaper were spring blooms. why was she so light-headed? he was a chinaman. a sallow-faced, squinty-eyed foreigner. the dregs of society. heavens, he didn’t even make it into society. and yet when she was with him she forgot who she was. after all, he had a strong, almost european nose. he was tall. he didn’t really look chinese. (2009: 86) katherine tries to naturalise her feelings by persuading herself that yung’s physique is almost european, even though she simultaneously employs common assumptions about his physical and cultural differences. she manages to see beyond these appearances, behind “the buck-toothed caricatures you saw in the newspapers” (2009: 59), stressing yung’s “warm, generous smile that half-closed and softened his eyes” (2009: 59), and minimising his “strong [accent] and his [limited] english” through his ability to “gesticulate, laugh, commiserate” (2009: 59). liwewise, yung emphasizes katherine’s physical differences, while appreciating her appealing character: all for a devil woman. a devil woman. her nose is too big, and her breasts, and her feet. she doesn’t walk like a woman. she has red devil hair. and yet she has kind, sad, beautiful blue-green coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 eyes and full, luscious lips –and she calls me by name. mr wong, she says, as if i am a man and not a chinaman. (2009: 87) yung is described as a cultivated and a politically committed man, with a special poetic sensibility: “he was educated. he was respected […] people came to him to read and write their letters, their new year couplets. he went to meet the newcomers off the ships, to help them with customs and immigration” (2009: 13). wong thus avoids victimisation and presents him as an accomplished and resolute person who moves away from the stereotypical image of the poor and ignorant chinese shopkeeper, and whose personality attracts katherine despite the prevailing moral and racial constrains of the period. likewise, despite her unhappy marriage, the economic difficulties she faces after her husband’s death and the principles that inform her upbringing, katherine displays openmindedness, tenacity and a sense of humour that allows her to be critical of prevailing attitudes against the chinese: no one knew the names of the chinese. occasionally someone might say mr –mr wong or mr choy. but usually it was the chinaman next door to paterson’s or the john on the corner of tory and webb. they were all called john, the chinese. and even if anyone bothered to find out, who could remember? their names were like birds that never came into land. (2009: 126) the relationship between the characters allows us to witness how interpersonal relations eventually work independently from and very often against official and popular perceptions. wong adds an affective and personal dimension to the discussion, opting for a more inclusive view which condemns the long history of exclusion but engages more directly in less documented instances of intercultural interaction. on the other hand, the process of “racial tightening” (belich 2001) that determined official and popular perceptions of the chinese migrants, was also at the heart of debates about the status of the indigenous maori, who at the time were fighting against the long accepted notion that they were the last of a “dying race”. the official mechanisms of exclusion for both ethnic groups were therefore related and complementary, as they contributed to the creation of a new zealand white national identity (murphy 2009: 56). hence, in the novel wong has lionel terry equating migrants with maori people, similarly describing them as being in “a state of moral, mental and physical degeneration” (2009: 27). although wong does not fully develop these connections in the novel, there is a scene in which they are briefly hinted at. yung remembers his first contact with maori people, where he already notices that “whatever their standing they never called out names or pulled his braid. they smiled […] as it to a brother” (2009: 9). this flashback is followed by a brief exchange with a maori man who enters his shop. this second encounter takes places a decade after yung voices his first impressions on maori and, despite its brevity, it is punctuated by mutual respect and understanding: as he handed over the packaged fruit, the man thanked him. ‘good luck,’ yung said. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 the man looked at him quizzically. ‘your land,’ yung said. they almost bowed to each other before the man walked out into the southerly. what gweilo had ever treated him as respectfully? how many had even looked in his eyes. (2009: 10) despite the exchange between both characters is limited, yung openly acknowledges maori people’s indigenous status and their fight to recover their land. though irrelevant to the main narrative, wong does make a point to stress similar histories of exclusion as a potentially rich source of intercultural communication and solidarity. cross-cultural interaction between maori and chinese was common, especially in rural areas, where the communities displayed “a certain affinity in adversity” (ip 2009a: 1); yet, as ip reminds us, this relationship has “largely been overlooked in the formal historical and sociological discourse of new zealand” (2008: 1). in fact, ip explains that “the old chinese used to regard maories as allies, people who were fellow soil-tillers and who shared similar cultural norms such as respect for elders, unquestioning loyalty to family members and readiness to share resources with the community” (2009b: 149). this historical reassessment of the interaction among the chinese and maori communities relates directly to contemporary debates which have tended to present biculturalism, the official discourse which advocates the partnership of maori and pakeha, and multiculturalism ―inclusive of other ethnic groups― as contradictory and mutually exclusive debates. wong might be suggesting that the claims made by non-indigenous minorities do not work to deny the acknowledgement of the indigenous status of the maori people. on the contrary, ethnic minorities might contribute to the debate in useful and enriching ways. wong’s recreation of this period reveals the multiple fissures in a process of racial tightening predicated on the exclusion of alien others, but revealing instances of interethnic relationships and understanding telling the wives’ stories as the earth turns silver combines the discussion on ethnic identity with debates on gender in relation to both the effect of migration on chinese women and the fight for women’s rights taking place in new zealand from the end of the 19th century, thus avoiding the tendency to consider ethnicity and gender as separate debates. as stasiulis and yuval-davis remind us, “settler capitalism exacerbated and transformed relations based simultaneously on colonialism, capitalism, gender, class and race/ethnicity” (1995: 5), which far from being considered as discrete categories should be discussed “as falling along a continuum rather than within clear and fixed boundaries” (1995: 3). leckie similarly condemns the neglect of gender issues in the discussion of migration to new zealand (1995: 50), insisting on the need to undertake a similarly “fluid or intersecting approach between the identities of ethnicity, class and gender” (1995: 53). as does larner, when explaining that migration brought about an “increasing complexity within and between categories of race, ethnicity, colonial status, gender and class in new zealand” (1993: 88), foregrounding the need to explore “the partial and contingent coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 connections that can be developed between differently positioned women” (1993: 88). as the earth turns silver undertakes the exploration of such connections, intertwining the discussion of ethnic identity with gender and class variables to illustrate the outcomes of migration for both, chinese men and women, as well as a range of moral and social discourses determining the lives of pakeha women at the turn of the 20th century. although the focus of the novel is the interracial romance of yung and katherine, wong does not omit a discussion of the effects of migration on chinese women through the characters of the brother’s first wives, left behind in china, and of mei-ling, shun’s second wife, who travels to new zealand with her husband. from the mid-19th century, migration offered opportunities for men who came from overpopulated provinces with an scarcity of land (ip 1990: 18) and was at this stage an almost exclusively male project, which involved leaving their families behind and travelling to new zealand as sojourners, with the intention of spending a few years in the country and then returning to china. once settled, a migrant often paid for a brother or male cousin to travel to new zealand from china, but not for a woman (ip 1990: 20). in the novel shun sends for his brother and they both open a grocery store, a common occupation for many chinese after exhausting their time as gold seekers. as seen in yung’s story, it was also customary to arrange a marriage for a son before he travelled to new zealand and postpone the journey until the wife was pregnant; the child reinforced the link between the family and money was duly sent. the duty of the women was to remain in china and take care of elders and children, especially the parents in law (ip 1990: 19). wong gives voice to the brothers’ first wives in three chapters narrated in the first person, a narrative concession to the patriarchal nature of their society and the marginal position they occupy in their husbands’ lives. yung’s wife briefly recalls her childhood and upbringing and her arranged marriage just six months before her husband departs for new zealand. as it was the case of many chinese women, yung’s wife is prevented from travelling both due to familiar obligations and to the physical impediments deriving from her bound feet. after yung leaves, she gives birth to twin boys, although only one of them survives. moved by jealousy and the pain of having only given birth to daughters, shun’s first wife attacks her sister in law with a boiling iron lid disfiguring her face. the novel thus juxtaposes the wives’ narratives and presents their lives as interconnected by their own respective tragedies. wong also includes a very short chapter narrated in the first person by shun’s first wife, who experiences the common decision of husbands to take second wives or concubines to new zealand leaving their first wives behind to take care of his parents and children (ip 1990: 20). shun’s wife explains that once he decides to settle in new zealand permanently, he chooses mei-ling over her to accompany him: husband went to new gold mountain twenty-two years ago. devils made him pay to get off the ship. […] this is the poll tax, he said, this is why i could not go with him. i waited twenty-one years and he came back. bought concubine. […] husband took her to canton. paid for her to learn to read devil language so she could pass the devil test. he took her with her. […] she was first woman to see the new gold mountain. (2009: 102) coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 the wife’s explanations underscore the fact that chinese women are not only affected by the racist measures devised to reduce the number of chinese migrants, such as the poll tax and the literacy tests, but ultimately depend on the wish of chinese men and of family requirements to be able to make the journey. despite being chosen over shun’s first wife, mei-ling’s position does not prove to be so privileged. mei-ling’s experience is narrated in the third person in a chapter called “the concubine’s story”, a reflection of the violence and tyranny experienced in her marriage to shun, especially after he turns to opium and drink to fight familiar pressures and personal conflicts. these pressures include shun’s first wife exerting her right to take mei-ling’s son to china. the novel thus delves on the suffering and powerlessness of chinese women as silenced victims of their husbands’ wishes and their families’ impositions, but also capable of conditioning their husband’s behaviour and decisions. shun appears as both tyrant and victim of his position, as wong underlines the complex and interrelated operations of racism and patriarchy, showing that all characters have their own burden to bear. the novel also complicates the well-known repertoire of bound feet, concubines and opium, employed in some diasporic chinese fiction and its “exploitation of the exotic [and the] sensational foregrounding of the plight of women, particularly in the exposure of patriarchy in mid-twentieth-century china” (wagner 2003: 19). although the novel does address such plights, wong also includes alternative and more positive stories of chinese women to escape reductive victim roles often favoured in historical and fictional accounts of female diaspora. for instance, there is a reference to historical characters like annie wong, the wife of a chinese missionary, who acted as a helper, translator and guide for the newly arrived chinese women. annie helps mei-ling to settle down and is said to know “how to live in barbarian lands –she was born in australia. she spoke fluent australian and she could read and write. and because she was coming to marry the missioner, she was counted as clergy and didn’t have to pay the poll tax” (2009: 76). her visits and knowledge contribute to ease mei-ling’s suffering and dislocation, and points at the existence of female support networks that complement the rivalry and competition among wives and concubines. although incipient, these networks of female solidarity also work across ethnic divisions as seen, for instance, in the friendship between meiling and katherine, which is strengthened after yung’s murder. the other way in which the novel escapes conventional approaches to diasporic chinese identity is by placing the chinese female characters as marginal to the main narrative, shaping their stories as fragmented and certainly in need of further development, and telling the story from the point of view of a pakeha rather than a chinese woman. the weight of the discussion on gender thus falls on katherine and her evolution as a woman amidst a changing background where gender roles and relations are being redefined, partly in relation to new national definitions. the first part of the novel focuses on the expectations placed on katherine as a housewife and a mother and of her conformance to her husband’s wishes. wong combines fictional and historical material, by introducing real characters like doctor agnes bennett ―a pioneer in the defence of female education and in the professional practice of medicine― and fictional characters, like margaret newman ―modelled after feminist suffrage leaders like kate sheppard― who offers katherine a job as her assistant after the death of her husband and inspires her daughter coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 edie “to choose her own destiny” (2009: 81), which she does by attending medical school in dunedin thanks to the financial assistance of mrs newman. moreover, wong perceptively problematizes gender issues as interrelated to ethnic, moral and national discourses, as seen when katherine decides to start a relationship with yung. despite her involvement in social struggles and her liberal understanding of life, mrs newman rejects katherine’s relationship with yung and blames her for risking her fragile social position: i have nothing against the chinese. they’re a hard working race, they keep pretty much to themselves, and they don’t deserve the vilification granted them in the newspapers. [but] you marry a chinaman and you lose the right to vote, you won’t get the old-age pension, katherine, you lose everything. […] he’s a chinaman. that makes him worse than a jew and maybe a little better than a dog. maybe. (2009: 149) mrs newman’s words thus prove, as belich points out, that the sinophobic attitudes prevailing in this period transcended class distinctions and were shared by workers and intellectuals alike (2001: 229), while illuminating the pervading assumptions that characterised this period of “moral tightening”, sometimes operating in a curious alliance with the incipient feminist movement. in mrs newman’s eyes katherine relationship with yung may not be immoral, but it is certainly unpractical. in the eyes of the larger society, engaged in a crusade against immorality, miscegenation and interracial sex, the relationship between yung and katherine would certainly be deemed dangerous and unnatural. the novel thus questions views of women like katherine as morally debased or innocent victims, by explicitly voicing her fears with regards their unusual relationship but also her sincere and intense desire for yung (ooi 2010: 83). by reinforcing katherine’s agency, wong is also addressing representations of chinese men as sexual predators and stories about green grocers’ enticing their passive female customers into their shops in order to seduce them (ooi 2011: 221-222). the novel reconstructs a relationship that grows gradually and solidifies with time, focusing on the multiple emotional, sexual and intellectual connections that exist between the two characters, despite their very different cultural backgrounds. wong’s narrative explicitly addresses the interrelated nature of gender, ethnic and moral discourses conditioning the love story of the protagonist, and presents yung’s murder not merely as the result of a racist act but as depending on a number of interrelated factors that eventually relate to debates on new zealand’s emerging national identity, as discussed in the next section. forging a national identity the “great tightening” process described by belich can be framed within a more general period characterised by what he defines as “better britonism” which consisted of: “a strong collective new zealand identity as better britons; a patriotic and martial british ‘imperialism’; and an assumption of full compatibility between the two” (2001: 116). these features determined new zealand’s involvement in several armed conflicts, like coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 the first world war, which serves wong to frame her narrative. historian michael king has also talked of the apparently incompatible desire to “demonstrate the country’s unswerving loyalty to mother britain [and] to establish traditions and precedents that were new zealand in origin and flavour” (2003: 284). robbie’s decision to lie about his age and enlist voluntarily responds to these apparently contradictory impulses: now there was a new vocabulary: gallipoli, anzac, chunuk bair. each morning mothers, wives, fiancées opened the newspaper and turned immediately to the roll of honour, scanning the names under killed in action, died of wounds, wounded admitted to hospital. (2009: 196) in his study of pakeha male culture, phillips points out that the involvement of new zealand men in the great war was presented as a test to their masculinity and their warrior spirit, their “triumphant manhood was seen as proving new zealand’s very nationhood” (1987: 163). towards the end of the novel robbie has internalised a number of assumptions about his status as a male, a soldier, and a new zealander of british descent and these clearly mediate in his decision not only to go to war but to put an end to her mother’s romance with yung. keen on venting his frustration after his father’s death, he continues to write and receive letters from lionel terry and inherits his ideological legacy. obsessed by the perusal of heroism and confused about the sources of social evil, he walks into yung’s shop and murders him just before leaving the country: something drew him and he didn’t understand why. so absorbed in dreams of battle was he, of heroism in the face of the enemy, of victory over evil, that he did not know where he was going, didn’t realise until he marched right into the light, […] into his face and eyes. (2009: 213) the articulation of a national identity so strongly linked to a male pakeha ethos immediately places the ethnic other as irrelevant to this project. the masculinity projected by robbie is the result of the misappropriation the maori warrior spirit while it is simultaneously positioned against the alleged femininity of the chinese men, often portrayed as “celestials” (2009: 139), as being “thin and small […] polite and unassuming” (2009: 139-40). these views, as well as common assumptions about chinese men’s homosexual practices, ironically contrast with the aforementioned perceptions of chinese men as sexual predators. this shows that the anxieties of national definition and the forging of new zealand as a white man’s country are partly solved by reinforcing the exclusion and alienation of the male ethnic “other”, simultaneously misrepresented in contradictory ways. chinese men are represented as contaminating and alien to narratives of national construction and more hegemonic notions of masculinity, hence robbie reads her mother’s relationship with yung as an offence at a personal, familial, moral and ultimately at a national level. the discussion of new zealand’s involvement in the first world war and its effects on the construction of a male national identity is juxtaposed in the novel with a description of the 1911 revolution in china. like many chinese migrants living in new zealand, yung and shun show their support for the cause, gathering money among the members of the community (wong 2009: 266). yung is an admirer of president sun yat-sen and coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 becomes an active supporter of the revolution, to the extent that he regrets being outside china while his friends are fighting and dying for the cause: now, back home, there was so much to be done. hung-seng had died for this, but what had he done except debate with his countrymen and raise money for sun and the revolution? wasn’t this the time to go home? shun goh would not understand. how could they go home? he’d say. where was the money? there were carrots to be washed, cauliflowers to be trimmed, debts to be paid. (2009: 161-62) like robbie and the new zealand soldiers that resolutely leave their country to fight in the war, yung becomes involved in china’s new national project, although he feels he is marginal to such process as he is forced to remain in new zealand where there are more trivial obligations to be met. wong thus adds another historical layer to her discussion on national identity, problematizing the position of the chinese migrants who experience an ongoing sense of dislocation as a result of being away from home and of being excluded from new zealand’s emerging national narratives. conclusion in this article i have considered how “ethnic” writers like alison wong negotiate the “competing demands” placed on them when it comes to the choice and treatment of their topics and their portrayal of their respective ethnic communities, especially in a novel like as the earth turns silver, the first by a new zealander of chinese descent. my contention is that wong negotiates these tensions by creating a historical narrative for the new zealand chinese which relates directly to the lives of non-chinese new zealanders. thus, wong’s novel problematises the possibility of recovering chinese history as an isolated chapter of the country’s past and the need for a more inclusive revision of the country’s history. this is achieved by stressing the intertwined nature of ethnic, gender and national debates, through the development of the interracial love story, as the novel shows multiple personal and familial struggles that develop simultaneously and are in turn affected by wider national debates. the chinese voice thus has to be articulated not only in relation to its own history of migration, settlement and diaspora, or in relation to a hegemonic pakeha culture against which they have often been positioned, it needs to be inscribed in more complex manners. finally, wong reflects conflicts of the past which resonate with the presence of new migrants and renewed forms of racism in a more contemporary context determined, as it happens in the novel, by competing national narratives. works cited: belich, james 2001: paradise reforged. a history of the new zealanders from the 1890s to the year 2000. auckland: allen lane the penguin press. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 bobis, merlinda 2008: “‘voice-niche-brand’: marketing asian-australianness”. australian humanities review 45: 119-125. chanwai-earle, lynda 1998: ka shue/letters home. auckland: the woman’s play press. chung, hillary 2014: “chineseness in (a) new zealand life: lynda chanwai-earle”, new zealand journal of asian studies 16.2: 173-194. fresno-calleja, paloma 2009: ‘rocking the boat’: a conversation with new zealand playwright, lynda chanwai-earle, kunapipi, 31.1: 132-147. hill, david 2009: “two homegrown writing debuts show promise”, new zealand herald, 25 july. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10586926 . accessed 11 november 2009 ip, manying ed. 2009a: the dragon and the taniwha. maori and chinese in new zealand. auckland: auckland up. --2009b: “chinese perceptions of maori. the ‘important other’”, in ip, m. ed. 2009: 148-83. --2008: being maori chinese. mixed identities. auckland: auckland university press. --2002: “redefining chinese female migration: from exclusion to transnationalism, in shifting centres”, women and migration in new zealand history, eds. lyndon fraser and katie pickles. dunedin: university of otago press, 149-205. --1990: home away from home. life stories of chinese women in new zealand. auckland: new women’s press. jordan, mitchell 2009: “book review: as the earth turns silver”, the epoch times, 10 august. accessed 18 november 2009. http://printarchive.epochtimes.com/a1/en/us/nyc/2009/08aug/10/b2_eet20090810-nyus.pdf king, michael 2003: the penguin history of new zealand. auckland: penguin. larner, wendy 1993: “changing contexts: globalization, migration and feminism in new zealand”, in feminism and the politics of difference, gunew, sneja and yeatman, anna eds. sydney: allen and unwin, 85-102. leckie, jacqueline 1995: “silent migrants? gender, immigration, and ethnicity in new zealand”, in immigration and national identity in new zealand. one people, two people, many people, greif, stuart w. ed. palmerston north: dunmore press, 5076. leckie, jacqueline and paola voci 2011: localizing asia in aotearoa. wellington: dunmore publishing. liang, renee 2007: “alison wong talks poetry”, the lumière reader, september 2007, http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/arts.php/item/1306. accessed 13 march 2016 lo, jacqueline 2006: “disciplining asian australian studies: projections and introjections”, journal of intercultural studies 27. 1/2: 11-27. http://printarchive.epochtimes.com/a1/en/us/nyc/2009/08-aug/10/b2_eet20090810-nyus.pdf 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http://www.nznewsuk.co.uk/living/?id=10483&startrow=111. accessed 20 september 2016. ommundsen, wenche 2011: “‘this story does not begin on a boat’: what is australian about asian australian writing?”, continuum: journal of media and cultural studies 25.4, 503-13. --2009: “transnational imaginaries: reading asian australian writing”, journal of the association for the study of australian literature 12.2: 1-8. --2002: “of dragons and devils: chinese-australian life stories” journal of the association for the study of australian literature, 1.1: 67-80. ooi, kathy 2011: “indecent intimacies: chinese men as sexual predators in new zealand fiction, 1934 to 2006”, in recentring asia: histories, encounters, identities, jacob edmond, henry johnson and jacqueline leckie eds. leiden: global oriental, 217236. ooi, kathy 2009: “insider dilemmas. the politics of reading and writing ethnic minority fiction”, in ip, m. ed. 2009a: 319-337. pellegrino, nicky 2010: “first edition”, new zealand herald, 5 september, http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nickypellegrino/news/article.cfm?a_id=661&objectid=10671432 . accessed 11 march 2013. perkins, emily 2011: “writers in conversation. kate de goldi, alison wong and glenn colquhoun”, english in aotearoa 74: 21-28. phillips, jock 1987: a man’s country? the image of the pakeha male. a history. auckland: penguin. stafford, jane and mark williams 2012: the auckland university press anthology of new zealand literature. auckland: auckland up. stasiulis, daiva and yuval-davis, nira 1995: “introduction: beyond dichotomies – gender, race, ethnicity and class in settler societies”, in unsettling settler societies. articulations of gender, race, ethnicity and class, stasiulis, daiva and yuval-davis, nira eds. london: sage, 1-38. tay, karen 2009: “the puzzle of identity”, sunday star times, 28 jun 2009. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nicky-pellegrino/news/article.cfm?a_id=661&objectid=10671432 http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nicky-pellegrino/news/article.cfm?a_id=661&objectid=10671432 coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 wagner, tamara 2003: “‘after another round of tissues’: ‘bad time’ fiction and the amy tan-synrome in recent singaporean novels”, journal of commonwealth literature 38.2: 19-39. wong, alison 2013: “pure brightness”, griffith review 43, https://griffithreview.com/articles/pure-brightness/ --2011: “personal narrative: as the earth turns silver”, in jacqueline leckie and paola voci eds, 68-73. --2010: “a chinese ghost story”, in green, paula and harry ricketts: 99 ways into new zealand poetry. auckland: auckland university press, 489-491. --2009: as the earth turns silver. london: picador. --2006: cup. wellington: steele roberts. --2003: “writing historical fiction from a cross-cultural perspective”, stout research centre chinese new zealand seminar series, www. http://www.victoria.ac.nz/stout-centre/about/events/events-pastseminars/publications/chinesenzawong.pdf, 1-11. accessed, 12 december 2013. wong, sau-ling cynthia 2009: “‘sugar sisterhood’: situating the ‘amy tan phenomenon’”, in amy tan, bloom, harold ed. new york: blooms, 49-84. 1 the research for this article was carried out within the framework of the research project: “política, estética y mercadotecnia en las fórmulas literarias populares de consumo femenino: historia, exotismo y romance” (ffi2016-75130-p) funded by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness. 2 like their australian counterparts, new zealand critics have also shown reticence about the “asian” label, as clearly homogenising what are in fact internally diverse groups, cultures and artistic expressions; yet, this is still the label employed in the census of population, used officially and institutionally, as well as in media and popular references. as it happened in the australian context, the term “asian” has also been employed strategically as a synonym of “political solidarity rather than [as] essentialist classification” (lo 2006: 17). whereas my focus here is on wong’s articulation of the specific chinese new zealand voice, i concur with the strategic use of the label and have used it accordingly. 3 the lack of literary references and the set of expectations placed on younger members of the chinese community are some of the reasons wong mentions to explain her late arrival in the literary scene (perkins 2011: 23). her first poetry collection, cup (2006), obtained the best first book of poetry award in 2007. 4 this has affected other chinese new zealand writers like lynda chanwai-earle whose work has been deemed inadequate and inauthentic due to some of the negative views expressed on some aspects of chinese culture (see fresno-calleja 2009; ooi 2009; chung 2014). 5 wong has acknowledged the influence of frame’s owls do cry in her formative years (perkins 2011: 23). incidentally, as the earth turns silver received the 2009 janet fiction prize. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 bio note: paloma fresno-calleja is senior lecturer in english at the university of the balearic islands (spain) where she teaches postcolonial literatures. her research on new zealand and pacific literatures has been published in the form of books, chapters and articles in a range of national and international journals. she is also translator and co-editor, with prof. janet wilson, of un país de cuento. veinte relatos de nueva zelanda (prensas de la universidad de zaragoza, 2014), the first spanish anthology of new zealand short stories. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 an introduction to crime & punishment lorne walker-nolan australian and transnational studies centre university of barcelona lornebcn@hotmail.com copyright© 2021 lorne walker-nolan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. few scholars of australian history need reminding that colonial australia began as a british prison. the detrimental effect these origins had, and arguably still have, on indigenous australia is unambiguous. the extent to which this brutal background shaped the modern nation merits re-evaluation. in this issue of coolabah, we aim to extrapolate and explore the links stretching from the first fleet, and assess how much of a role this past plays in the building of the modern australian nation. keywords: australian colonisation; convict colony; indigenous displacement; indigenous genocide; re-evaluation of the past. mailto:lornebcn@hotmail.com coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 few scholars of australian history need reminding that colonial australia began as a british prison. the detrimental effect these origins had, and arguably still have, on indigenous australia is unambiguous. from 1788 well into the following century, australian society was divided into convicts versus guards, coves and whores versus their keepers, criminals versus state, executed and executioner with the indigenous population swept to the side lines. the sinews which link all australians to this past, some of us by blood, all of us historically, arguably have left a mark on the modern country a stain. the extent to which this brutal background shaped the modern nation merits re-evaluation. in this issue of coolabah, we aim to extrapolate and explore the links stretching from the first fleet, the ticket-of-leave men, bushrangers, female factories, larrikins and wowsers to contemporary australians. how much of a role does our past play? how do we treat our convicted, our criminals? how are they portrayed in modern australia? are they surreptitiously revered by society and the media? are their voices heard? should they be? as a society are we too keen to lock up miscreants, local and foreign? how does australian media report on crime? is it sensationalised for ratings, for a ghoulish gratification, or can it serve a community service? how has crime, criminal identities and law enforcement been portrayed in australian written fiction, tv and cinema? has it been glorified? idealised? why are crime tv series and movies popular? why is the sheep stealing fugitive swagman of waltzing matilda, arguably australia’s “people’s” anthem, still revered? why the prominence of ned kelly, chopper reid et al in our national narrative? in ghosting in the outback noir dolgopolov offers a critique of cinema in that unique australian genre together with the role of the ghost of the jolly swagman of waltzing matilda. dolgopolov examines the phantasmal hauntings of australia’s most famous vagrant, not always so ‘jolly’ as the name suggests. he is a dark figure, from the shadows, but has redemption in his death. the jolly swagman, dolgopolov argues, may have been in our national consciousness all this while, not alone but accompanied with indigenous characters who too have been shunned, imprisoned, destroyed or silenced. with the recent wave of outback noir films, their time has come again often with a vengeance. in 1997 i visited perth for the first time. it was a city under siege king-hit, as romano the author of enigma of the dark: reflections while researching journalism and the claremont serial killings puts it, by a menace it couldn’t see. a serial killer was on the prowl, murdering young women in the middle-class seaside suburb where i was staying with friends. ironically as an outsider, i was perceived as one of few men who could be trusted not to be the killer. romano herself was in the murderer’s geographic range and demographic at that time. it took twenty-five years to catch and convict the killer and romano’s article sheds light on complex dynamics in and around the journalistic practices which sensationalised and exploited the tragedies. the article describes how the term ‘serial killer’ became almost a badge of honour for western australian news services; how the status and financial clout of a victim’s family influenced media coverage and invigorated the police investigation; and, how the position of a journalist as an unbiased observer became untenable. in crime, punishment, and death: reading finitude and the self in david malouf’s ‘the conversations at curlow creek’, c. l. thakur explores a novel which is more than an accurate historical representation of convict australia, it depicts the transformation of an official coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 executioner while he is conversing with the condemned before execution. the essay argues that a realization of inevitable mortality, of facing certain death characterizes this change in the executioner’s nature and worldview. it concludes by suggesting that his acceptance of his own inevitable death, not only subverts the administration of capital punishment to convicts in colonial australia but also indicates the limits of polarized identity politics that shapes the country in the present times. smith’s poetry asks questions of crime and punishment from the victims’ and perpetrators’ perspectives. in mugs an easy victim reflects on the burglar of his house. can one empathise with the plight of their burglar? or should vindictiveness be the only solution? in rehabilitation a former prisoner returns to his prison, converted into gentrified townhouses. smith asks, can the ghosts of our past ever be expunged? is rehabilitation truly possible? in stitched up the boredom, inanity, banality, and a soft pain of prison life is exposed. finally, the plight of refugees and people seeking asylum in australia is well known. often remanded in pre-asylum detention, community groups such as the ballina region for refugees offer a window of support to refugees and asylum seekers both in australia and offshore. the 2020 ballina region for refugees poetry prize theme was seeking asylum—holding patterns. this collection presents the winning and highly commended poems, along with poems by refugee and asylum seeker poets whose lives are often on hold, on standby, waiting for release. lorne walker-nolan was a prosecution lawyer for the northern territory, victorian and australian governments. he now lectures at esade school of law, universitat abat oliba, and universitat autònoma de barcelona. he is a member of the university of barcelona’s centre for australian and transnational studies, and has guest-edited this coolabah issue 29. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 tribute to geoff davis nicholas birns nb2003@nyu.edu copyright© 2020 nicholas birns. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a tribute to geoff davis keywords: geoff davis, engagement, postcolonial criticism i first met geoffrey davis at the toronto mla in 1993. i was at a dinner with robert ross, my predecessor as editor of antipodes (and the journal’s founder). we fell into a discussion about sarah gertrude millin, how postcolonial criticism was not taking stock of her, and her anomalous role as both a jewish critic of nazism and a racist whose attitude towards africans was unconscionable. i got from geoffrey a deep sense of engagement with south africa as well as a sense of urbane, if grainy and engaged, cosmopolitanism. this was in the period of what i might term high postcolonial criticism, and geoffrey’s work was truly postcolonial, embracing both settler and imperial colonialism, and at home equally with indian, australia, and new zealand writers as well of course as south african fiction and drama. but he was not one of those who simply saw the common denominator of these places as the residue of british colonialism. a scholar not only in germany but in and of the german language, his scholarship crossed linguistic boundaries and thus was able to see that colonialism is not just about a specifically british administrative practice, but about larger patterns of domination, exploitation, and hegemony. his perspective looked forward to the critical approaches of the 21st century, and indeed he mentored many of the critics active in the study of the global south today. his dedication to aclals and his engagement in the institutional structure of an emerging field was evident in our conversations, and i know how much aclals will miss his participation and enthusiasm. geoffrey davis was a learned, compassionate, and kind man, who loved good writing and hated racism and any kind of cruelty. his loss a huge gap in the field that he would want and encourage emerging scholars to fill. mailto:nb2003@nyu.edu coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 bionote: nicholas birns teaches at new york university and edited the journey antipodes from 2000 to 2018. he is the author of contemporary australian literature: a world not yet dead (sydney university press, 2015) and is currently coediting the cambridge companion to the australian novel. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 213 reimagining australia at the cosmopolitan intersection greg watson curtin university gregory.watson@curtin.edu.au copyright©2018 greg watson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: living with difference is an unavoidable part of living in australia. how we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine australia. this paper considers the matter of reimagining australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. it is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of australia at the microlevel of society. it considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within anthony kwame appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism and jean-luc nancy’s vision of coexistence. key words: cosmopolitanism; coexistence; everyday urban; storytelling and dialogue. introduction interrogating how australia has been imagined shines a light on the ways that people and communities engage in variegated processes of knowing, being and doing as they imagine australia. it illuminates how australia: functions as “something we carry around in our heads” (white 1997, 13); is something that we have “imagined as a society, a culture and a nation” (carter 2006, viii); and has been dreamed and invented over generations (white 1981, 1997; carter 2006). because australia’s imagining involves such a dynamic intermingling of elements, we should not only attend to how australia has been imagined but how and where it could be reimagined. mailto:gregory.watson@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 214 living in australia teaches us that “living with difference is an unavoidable part of social experience” (ang 2008, 230). it illustrates australia’s increasingly cosmopolitan nature and should alert us to the need to develop habits of coexistence (amin 2012; appiah 2006). this, however, is not always the case and it is all too easy to gather examples that represent australia’s unease with “the ‘rubbing along’ of strangers in public space” (noble 2013b, 33; amin 2012, 59) and the subsequent need to develop “habits of living with difference” (noble 2013b, 34). for example, while australia comprises people who embody multiple identities, some australians prefer to continue imagining an australia that is “white, male-gendered, christian, and heterosexual” (louis, barlow and greenaway 2012, 88) and to render invisible the indelible marks that injustice and violence have visited, and continue to visit, upon its most vulnerable people. this is manifest in many ways, including how people use the macrospatial terrain of our towns and cities as well as the many everyday urban spaces within this terrain. this has raised my interest about how our everyday urban spaces can be used to contribute to the reimagining of australia. in response, i offer the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection as a way of examining how spaces can contribute to reimagining australia at the microlevel of society. i develop this thesis by discussing four areas of knowledge. firstly, i introduce two projects that demonstrate a link between people’s everyday spaces and storytelling and conversation. secondly, i frame reimagining within anthony kwame appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism and jean-luc nancy’s vision of coexistence. thirdly, drawing on scholarship that examines elements within the macrospatial terrain and the microecology of everyday urban spaces, i consider how this knowledge informs how we appreciate the way spaces function in our cosmopolitan societies. fourthly, using the knowledge that has been gathered in the first three sections, i discuss some ways in which the two projects demonstrate how the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection can contribute to the reimagining of australia at the microlevel of society. reimagining in spaces for stories and conversations my previous research into an anti-prejudice strategy, which used one-on-one dialogue, known as the human library (human library 2016; abergel et al. 2005) put me into contact with groups that use storytelling and/or conversation for a variety of objectives. this raised my curiosity about the allure of storytelling, especially as a strategy for community engagement. my initial investigation into groups in perth, western australia, revealed a wide variety of projects and an equally wide variety of objectives. these included such things as local oral history projects, diversity awareness initiatives, and stand-up comedy and storytelling classes. one group, tales of times past senior storytellers (henceforth, tales) (tales of times past senior storytellers 2016b), aligned more closely than the other groups with the human library because their strategies include processes of sharing personal stories through face-to-face dialogue. the following introduces these two strategies which will be used to discuss how the cosmopolitan intersection can contribute to the reimagining of australia. human libraries aim to engage people in “conversations that challenge stereotypes and prejudices through dialogue” (human library 2016). the conversations at human libraries usually take the form of thirty-minute, one-on-one dialogues, which are referred coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 215 to as ‘readings.’ to achieve this, the human library organisation (hlo) invites people who have experienced prejudice and negative stereotypes to volunteer as human books. the volunteers are people who identify as belonging to a wide spectrum and intersection of minority groups. for example, human books are people who identity as: living with physical impairment or mental health issues, lgbtiq, surviving as a refugee, practising particular religions, surviving domestic violence, as well as other identities. they are people who are willing to talk about any question or topic associated with their selfcreated title and description; no question or topic is taboo—in fact, such questions are encouraged. the human books’ titles form a catalogue from which people (members of the public) make a selection and choose to become the human book’s ‘readers.’ human libraries take place in a wide variety of settings. they are found in local libraries, festivals, schools and any location that organisers think will allow them to achieve the aim of reducing prejudice. each human library is organised and run as an environment that is safe and encourages frank and respectful dialogue. this is established via three rules: 1) a reader may ask her or his human book anything they wish; 2) a human book may ask her or his reader anything they wish; and 3) either person may decline to answer any questions or discuss any issues that are raised, and the reading may end at any time at the discretion of either participant. using this method of face-to-face dialogue, the hlo aims to provide people with opportunities to meet and speak with other people with whom they may not normally meet and speak, especially about matters that are often made silent or invisible because social norms define them as inappropriate. the intention is to work at the micro-level of society to enable people to confront their prejudices, increase their knowledge about other people and difference, and raise people’s respect for diversity (watson 2015, 2017).1 1 the metaphor of the human library and the term human book deserve some comment even though space does not allow for extended discussion. i, therefore, acknowledge the opportunity for a deeper examination about the exchange between subjects that is provided by the interaction between human books and their readers. ‘human book’ alerts us to the risk of objectifying embodied subjects. this indicates a substantial terrain demonstrated by studies that examine the numerous ways this is manifested, including: the disruption of embodied norms (drabinski 2014; frie 2011; jolles 2012); the bipolar system of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ (athanasiou 2012; de visser 2009; potgieter 2006); the unsettling of mind-body dualism (chadwick 2012; karin 2014; van laere et al. 2014); and how ‘self’ is examined through embodied practices (johnson 2007; lodge and umberson 2013; piran 2016). elsewhere, i examine and discuss the role of the human book and several issues that relate to objectifying embodied subjects (watson 2015, 183192; 2017); here, i offer one point to demonstrate how people who volunteer as human books regard their participation. human books (re)construct their own titles and descriptions to express how they perceive themselves. in doing so, they challenge the disembodied labels and descriptions that have been applied to them and they engage their readers in a dialectical process of thinking about human nature as “a social project more than a presocial given” (donnelly 2013, 15). these discussions are dynamic encounters of “shared and negotiated knowledge of what it means to be human, how humans expect to be treated and how humans should be treated” (watson 2015, 189). they challenge labels that are used to distinguish between “true humans and the pseudohumans” (rorty 1999, 67) and they contribute to the wider project of expanding the “reference of the terms coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 216 tales has some elements that overlap with the human library method, but apart from that the two strategies have no connection. tales is made up of local groups of volunteer senior citizens who use heritage storytelling in school classrooms as a way of sharing knowledge about “the old ways of living” (tales of times past senior storytellers 2016a). tales commenced in 1995 and was implemented in 26 shires, towns and cities in perth and country western australia (tales of times past senior storytellers 2016c). at present, there are about seven active branches in perth and mandurah, western australia. tales aims to help “current generations learn about australia’s ancestors, old values, and the rich cultures that have shaped today’s communities” (tales of times past senior storytellers 2016a). the storytellers encourage interaction “to promote lively discussion […] a sense of belonging and to establish a connection between old and new generations” (tales of times past senior storytellers 2016a). for example, when the senior storytellers visit students they normally bring personal artefacts that illustrate the stories they share. these artefacts include photos, old games and household items and other items that the senior storytellers used in past years. this method engages the children in discussions with the storytellers about the stories that have been shared. this dialogic method, employed by the human library and tales, has contributed to the methodology i have used to develop the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection. participants in human libraries and tales have provided the knowledge that forms the data used to develop the discussion section of this paper. the data are semi-structured, in-depth interviews with human books, readers (45) and senior storytellers (12). the discussion has been developed in the interpretive tradition and uses constructivist grounded theory as its lens for focusing on its subjects (crotty 1998). constructivist grounded theory regards data and analysis as products of the shared experiences of researcher and participants. this approach engages the research participants in interpreting their experiences and the researcher then interprets the participants’ interpretive work using qualitative coding to label segments of data in a way that emphasises what is occurring within the scene being coded. these codes are developed into analytic categories that are used to construct theoretical concepts (charmaz 2006, 2011, 2014). the discussion above explains how the human library and tales include people in processes of storytelling and dialogue that encourage them to reimagine what they have previously imagined about people who are different within the context of modern cosmopolitan australia. the following discusses appiah’s cosmopolitanism and nancy’s coexistence to develop a framework for understanding what we mean by reimagining. ‘our kind of people’ and ‘people like us’” (rorty 1999, 74). this is demonstrated by readers who describe their face-to-face conversations as having a “humanising effect” (watson 2015, 189). this dynamic helps people challenge the way in which some people, often represented by human books themselves, are often objectified as disembodied others and assigned to predetermined social categories (parekh 2007). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 217 reimagining as cosmopolitan coexistence appiah offers a way of thinking about what we mean by reimagining via his notion of cosmopolitanism as a response to the clash between the two ideals of “universal concern and respect for legitimate difference” (appiah 2006, xv). he illustrates the practical importance of this concern when he explains that “if we care about others who are not part of our political order—others who may have commitments and beliefs that are unlike our own—we must have a way to talk to them” (appiah 2007, 222, original italics). appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism seeks to resist the sharp distinctions between moral and cultural cosmopolitanism (jeffers 2013). this invites us to stretch ourselves beyond our “ties of kith and kind” (appiah 2006, xv) and to regard particular human lives seriously by “taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (appiah 2006, xv). at the heart of appiah’s cosmopolitanism is the belief that “exposing ourselves to the varying ways of others can enrich and ameliorate our lives” (jeffers 2013, 492). this belief is advanced via several convictions: cosmopolitans know that people are different and that there is much to learn from our differences; cosmopolitanism begins with the idea that humans “need to develop habits of coexistence” which appiah refers to as conversation understood as association; and cosmopolitanism requires “conversations across boundaries” because such conversations are inevitable (appiah 2006, xx). conversation is appiah’s “chief metaphor and organising theme” (jeffers 2013, 495). it is central to developing “habits of coexistence” (appiah 2006, xix) because it highlights the need to get people thinking and talking about the meaning of difference and shared humanity which makes it harder for them to divide the world into us and them (appiah 2006, xxi). given that habits of coexistence are at the heart of appiah’s cosmopolitanism, it is germane to consider coexistence in a way that helps us appreciate the types of habits that might be useful for counteracting the us and them divide otherwise expressed as “the binary of sameness and alterity” (watkin 2007, 51). nancy (2000) provides this in his fundamental ontology of being singular plural. for nancy, existence is coexistence: there is no being without ‘being-with’; the ‘i’ does not come before the ‘we.’ he explains that being singular plural means the essence of being is only as co-essence. in turn, co-essence, or being-with (being-with-many), designates the essence of the co-, or even more so, the co (the cum) itself in the position or guise of an essence […] therefore, it is not the case that the ‘with’ is an addition to some prior being; instead, the ‘with’ is at the heart of being. (nancy 2000, 30) ‘i,’ therefore, is simultaneously being singular plural. as the ‘i’ is incapable of being diminished to anyone else, it is always singular and because the ‘i’ must always be understood as being with others, it is plural (bertland 2011). nancy’s coexistence challenges the way in which ‘being-with’ has been subordinated by ‘subject’ or by ‘being’ coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 218 and it enables us to recognise that the “primal ontological conditions of our community” are “with,” “relationality” and “between” (devisch 2000, 244). the centrality of relationality demonstrates how ‘being-self’ is ‘being-together,’ characterised by mutuality and sharing rather than mere reciprocity. nancy explains that self “does not mean in itself, or by itself, or for itself, but rather ‘one of us’” (nancy 2000, 66) which might also be expressed as “self-as-relation” (watkin 2007, 54). humanity, therefore, cannot be grasped through one isolated human, separate from all others (bertland 2011). consequently, community does not embody some pre-given identity which we own or possess; rather, community is our being-in-common through the act of sharing a world. devisch (2000, 245-246) illuminates the potential that this offers for developing appiah’s habits of coexistence, explaining that the “question of our coexistence or being-with becomes therefore the ontological question to be posed in the development of a social ontology and the rethinking of the political space.” understood in this way, habits of coexistence must be understood as habits of being-with that exclude any acceptance of some pre-given identity. such habits would recognise the self-inrelation (being-with-many) acting to create political spaces (being-in-common and sharing a world) of mutuality and sharing, including appiah’s conversation as association. in addition to the metaphor of conversation, appiah advances a number of elements which add greater depth to what he means by habits of coexistence. these elements are part of the skills which “allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become” and they benefit from a number of ideas in being singular plural (appiah 2006, xiii). they include: seeking consensus is futile; the importance of stories and values; and the practice of cosmopolitan curiosity. firstly, it is futile for humans to try to achieve complete consensus. we enter into conversation without the promise of final agreement and there will be times when “we can at best agree to differ” (appiah 2006, 11). this illustrates the “irreducible plurality of coexistence” (watkin 2007, 51) and it is why nancy holds that humans are never able to fully communicate, are only capable of speaking in fragments, and their communities will never be fully unified (nancy 1991). rather than seeking consensus, people should seek to “share of themselves without trying to unify” (bertland 2011, 1). the way that humans discuss stories and values adds to this fragmentary dynamic. appiah (2006, 29) asserts that stories are so central to what it means to be human that we “wouldn’t recognise a community as human if it had no stories.” in addition to that, the way that humans respond to stories and discuss them contributes to the maintenance of the social fabric because this activity “reinforces our common understanding and the values we share” (appiah 2006, 29). values shape our responses to stories (for example, we can describe things as murderous, wasteful, courageous, dishonest, oppressive) and this helps us make decisions about how we feel about the stories we hear and how we act in the world beyond the story we have just heard. this is enriched if we consider stories and values through nancy’s (1991, 35) view of human sharing which he asserts “is always incomplete, or it is beyond completion and incompletion. for a complete sharing implies the disappearance of what is shared.” the incomplete nature of sharing always operates as part of who humans are and it defines how communities function as dynamic and enriching places (bertland 2011). the incomplete nature of sharing is also demonstrated coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 219 by nancy’s explanation of voice in which he “hears a multiplying of voices” and “a polyphony at the heart of each voice” (devisch 2000, 248). this incomplete sharing is enriching, however, due to the dynamic it embodies. to exist, to communicate, we need to address ourselves to another but even though the voice is never assured of reception “each voice trembles onto another voice” and this makes us aware that existence does not leave us to “tremble alone in the desert” (devisch 2000, 248-249). thirdly, what we achieve begins with a deed; “practices and not principles enable us to live together in peace” (appiah 2006, 85). conversation is a metaphor for experiencing other people and their ideas; it acts as a method that encourages us to take other people seriously. it is what appiah (2006, 97) refers to as “cosmopolitan curiosity” and it is illustrated by the phrase “to walk a while in another person’s shoes.” cosmopolitan curiosity does not require that we begin by searching for traits that all humans share; it can be enough to look for small things that the two people in the conversation share and that enable them to cross boundaries. we should learn about other people, not because it will bring us to agreement, but because “it will help us get used to one another” (appiah 2006, 78) and to understand one another which does not require that we come to an agreement. as appiah (2006, 97) explains, this “is one of the payoffs of cosmopolitan curiosity. we can learn from one another; or we can simply be intrigued by alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.” this resonates with nancy’s vision of the human community and its inability to fully communicate, meaning that it will “never function as efficiently as a community of machines” (bertland 2011, 1). the result is that people will always live with gaps between them. in response, some scholars argue that nancy would encourage us to “stop trying to control the future” and recognise that the best we can achieve is an inoperative community which will allow us to “be open to possibilities in the future” (bertland 2011, 7). this makes it reasonable to suggest that nancy would welcome appiah’s admonition to embrace alternative ways of thinking, feeling and acting as a means for providing spaces for being-in-common in which “the future will develop in surprising ways, and members of the community [may] reflect on how they exist with others without trying to predict the future” (bertland 2011, 7). each of these elements can be united by appiah’s assertion that one of the things that people require most to begin talking and learning from one another is enough “overlap,” especially if this indicates our being-in-common in mutuality and sharing (appiah 2006, 57; bertland 2011; devisch 2000; jeffers 2013, 495; nancy 1991, 2000). this understanding of an overlap brings together the various elements discussed above and demonstrates what i mean when i refer to reimagining. moreover, this resonates with the methods adopted by the two groups introduced above. this is seen especially in the way that they enable conversations between people, who would not normally meet, that encourage curiosity, relationality, mutuality and sharing, and working to diminish us and them distinctions and highlight our existence as a “being-with-many.” given the importance that appiah assigns to an overlap, the following considers the complex nature and function of space within our modern towns and cities. it pays particular attention to the way in which certain forces act on particular spaces and impact, both positively and negatively, their potential to act as spaces of overlap at the microlevel of society. the knowledge that i gain from learning about these spaces, along with the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 220 framework for reimagining that appiah’s cosmopolitanism and nancy’s coexistence provide, will be used to develop and advance the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection. spaces of the everyday urban the macrospatial terrain of the world’s towns and cities is increasingly experienced as a context defined by difference and the public spaces within this terrain are often spaces of “visibility and encounter between strangers” (amin 2002, 967). policy makers often focus on this broad terrain and implement political programs in an effort to foster greater social cohesion and interpersonal ties within neighbourhoods and communities. an increasing number of scholars, however, are raising concerns about this approach (amin 2012; noble 2013b; wise 2013). as a result of these misgivings, other scholars have turned their attention to studying the interconnection of everyday spaces and intergroup relations (alexander and tredoux 2010; dixon and durrheim 2003; durrheim et al. 2004;). ash amin (2002, 2012) is one scholar who voices such misgivings and has raised the need to attend to “the micropolitics of everyday social contact and encounter” (amin 2002, 959). the following discusses some of the scholarship that has examined the everyday urban, the microecology of everyday spaces and how these relate to the cosmopolitan challenge. the spaces of the everyday urban include our streets, parks, malls and cafes, and they are often described as shared spaces of freedom, mingling and serendipitous encounters. however, as will be discussed in greater detail below, while spaces such as these can place people from diverse backgrounds and groups in close proximity, it is important not to overstate their effectiveness in helping people overlap and engage in crossing boundaries or in mutuality and sharing (appiah 2006; bertland 2011; noble 2013a; priest et al. 2014; valentine 2008; wise 2013). this is the case because these are often territorialised by particular groups, subject to the intense focus of surveillance, or “they are spaces of transit with very little contact between strangers (amin 2002, 967). as such, these spaces do not naturally serve people’s need to negotiate their everyday encounters with difference and they do not offer the overlap discussed above (amin 2002; amin and thrift 2002; amin, massey and thrift 2000; appiah 2006; rosaldo 1999). this does not mean that these spaces offer nothing at all to the pursuit of the cosmopolitan ideal or that they are of no value as spaces for reimagining; rather, it alerts us to the need to work with these spaces in ways that help us unsettle and shift how some spaces perpetuate negative and habitual socio-spatial norms which encourage avoidance instead of practices such as taking other people seriously, getting used to one another and negotiating difference (appiah 2006; alexander and tredoux 2010; clack, dixon and tredoux 2005; dixon and durrheim 2003; durrheim et al. 2004; wise 2013). scholars who have turned their focus to examining the microecology of segregation in people’s everyday spaces provide some ideas regarding how we might go about unsettling and shifting socio-spatial norms. examining such spaces as public beaches, university class rooms, school cafeterias, playgrounds and local libraries has enabled scholars to developing their appreciation for how people interact in their everyday life spaces (alexander and tredoux 2010; clack, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 221 dixon and tredoux 2005; dandy and pe-pua 2013; dixon and durrheim 2003; dixon, tredoux and clack 2005; durrheim et al. 2004; priest et al. 2014; thomas 2005). in particular, it has highlighted a number of ways in which members of different groups “share proximity and co-presence” (clack, dixon and tredoux 2005, 2) and engage in informal practices that uphold barriers (alexander and tredoux 2010; dixon and durrheim 2003). for example, people were observed sharing the public spaces listed above in ways that enacted segregation along lines of race, ethnicity, age and gender. the way in which people practise acts of informal segregation in these publics spaces illustrates how intergroup contact in many shared spaces is more “illusory than actual” (dixon and durrheim 2003, 2). this demonstrates how people’s habitual everyday spatial practices can (re)instate borders around difference and act as sites in which “informal segregation practices can be enacted and reproduced” (priest et al. 2014, 32). the illusory nature of the way that contact functions is illustrated more clearly by everyday spaces in which people spend a significant amount of time; these everyday spaces can be referred to as micropublics (amin 2002; noble 2013a). they include our places of work and study (schools and colleges), youth centres, and sports and recreational clubs. micropublics function as spaces of habitual engagement, interdependence and “prosaic negotiations” (amin 2002, 969). for example, many people attend their place of work or study on a daily basis and they are required to interact with colleagues on a regular basis and to use various forms of social etiquette. in this way, micropublics often bring people from diverse backgrounds and identity groups together in spaces that require them to interact with people who are different. it would seem reasonable, therefore, to surmise that micropublics act as spaces of overlap that encourage colleagues to get used to one another, take each other seriously and understand each other (amin 2012; appiah 2006; noble 2013a, 2013b; wise 2013). this idea underpins the assertion that “strangers stop being strangers through collaborative work” (noble 2013b, 32-33). while this is appealing, in practice many factors stop this occurring and so they function as inoperative communities marked by incomplete sharing (bertland 2011; nancy 1991). for example, social norms often deny colleagues the opportunity to speak about issues associated with difference and identity because it is regarded as impolite or inappropriate, or because some topics are labelled as taboo. in this way, micropublics demonstrate that “co-presence and collaboration are two very different things” (amin 2012, 59). this discussion acknowledges the many ways in which our everyday spaces lack many of the elements required to provide enough overlap to enable conversations in which people think and talk about difference, and avoid reinstating divisions between us and them. bearing these problems in mind, many of our everyday spaces still embody elements that are useful in advancing the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection. discussion: the cosmopolitan intersection the following advances the cosmopolitan intersection as a way of constructing spaces for people to engage in the reimagining of australia at the microlevel of society. it regards the cosmopolitan intersection as a space of conversation that enables people to engage in practices of coexistence and overlap. in advancing this notion, i draw on participants’ coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 222 perceptions and interpretations of their involvement at human libraries and tales and consider how this knowledge, together with what we know about everyday urban spaces, demonstrates what cosmopolitan intersections look like and where we might locate them as alternative spaces to people’s other everyday spaces which do not serve our efforts to reimagine australia. i offer the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection and this discussion, not as a definitive answer or template for addressing the challenges that reimagining australia presents, but as one way of contributing to this ongoing task. spaces of coexistence spaces act as cosmopolitan intersections when they enable people to “develop habits of co-existence” (appiah 2006, xx), understood as habits that support our being-with in ways that exclude any acceptance of some pre-given identity (bertland 2011; devisch 2000; nancy 2000). habits of coexistence, therefore, recognise the self-in-relation acting to create spaces of mutuality and sharing. this occurs when people can cross boundaries and experience other people beyond the divisions of us and them. as discussed above, our everyday spaces do not naturally encourage contact between strangers; they often function to (re)instate borders around difference and to perpetuate segregation along lines of race, ethnicity, age and gender. human libraries and tales provide two examples of spaces for coexistence because they bring strangers together and enable them to cross boundaries, erode divisions and challenge practices of informal segregation. readers at human libraries explain that it is possible for them to meet people within this space in a way that is not possible in public spaces. they explain that they see people who are different in the street and at shopping centres but they feel that they cannot approach them and speak to them. one human book illustrates this by sharing an encounter with a reader who attended a human library and explained that he had never met a muslim, a jew or an aboriginal australian and that he heard he could do this at the human library, and so he decided to visit it to meet and speak with people from these groups (watson 2015, 126). in addition to this example, organisers explain that human libraries provide them with a strategy for bringing people from the margins of society to its centre so that they can meet people they normally do not meet and speak with, such as community leaders, public officials and policy makers who often decide on how to deliver programs that impact people’s lives who live on the margins of society (watson 2015, 124-125). senior storytellers explain that they spend most of their time with people who are similar, especially regarding age and ethnicity. their participation with tales provides them with a space that enables them to move beyond the boundaries of sameness. as such, tales brings strangers together from a variety of identities, including age, gender, ethnicity, nationality and (dis)ability. the senior storytellers illustrate the impact that this space has on them by using such phrases as: putting me back in the world; i am recognised and not invisible; i feel reconnected and engaged; i am not redundant, i am flesh. they also perceive that this space of coexistence makes it possible for them to interact with the children so that they can reimagine how they regard older people. they believe that they do not seem so alien to the children as a result of meeting them in this space. they also explain that because they are able to meet children from a diverse range of identity groups, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 223 which does not happen in their other everyday spaces, they increase their knowledge about, and appreciation of, the diversity of their local communities. the way in which these spaces challenge boundaries and divisions associated with difference also helps to challenge practices of informal segregation. human libraries and tales do not only provide spaces of coexistence within themselves, they also act as spaces that challenge practices of sophisticated strangerhood because they are located within other public spaces and can be used to disrupt social transit and parallel lives. for example, tales achieves this by providing an alternative space within the micropublic of the school, which is a space that is very strictly designed to only include children and some adults. similarly, human libraries are often embedded in public spaces such as festivals, fairs, local libraries and so on. one reader demonstrates the significance of this when she explains that she stumbled upon a human library at a food and wine festival and, as a result, engaged in a dialogue with a human book. organisers also speak about running human libraries in other public spaces and events which enables them to invite and encourage passers-by, who would normally avoid people who are different, to stop and talk with a human book (watson 2015, 127-129). by placing human libraries and tales in spaces of social transit and the micropublic of the school, they can be used to disrupt practices of sophisticated strangerhood and challenge practices of informal segregation. spaces of overlap spaces act as cosmopolitan intersections when they enable people to overlap. this occurs when people are able to share stories and values, develop curiosity, take people seriously, walk a while in another person’s shoes, and be intrigued by alternative ways of thinking, feeling and acting. again, our everyday spaces do not naturally embody or encourage these practices. they tend to offer spaces that are illusory and superficial, and embody forms of social etiquette that allow proximity and ‘rubbing along,’ but not mutuality and sharing. participants at human libraries and tales discuss what happens within these spaces and demonstrate how they enable people to engage in a space of overlap. each of the spaces is defined by a methodology that is built around stories, curiosity, mutuality and sharing, conversation and encouraging people to take other people seriously. the senior storytellers demonstrate how they practise this by explaining what happens when they tell stories about what life was like when they were children. the children are: intrigued by the freedom the seniors had as children; curious about how the seniors lived without today’s technology; able to develop relationality when they recognise that they share certain things in common (being-in-common and sharing a world), such as having played the same games, experiencing what it is like to be an immigrant, having lived through hardship and now using the same forms of technology. readers at human libraries discuss their experiences of the way in which the rules that structure readings allow them to walk a while in another person’s shoes and to be curious about topics and questions in ways they feel they cannot in the other spaces of their lives such as the workplace, school and social gatherings. one reader illustrates this when she coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 224 explains that she avoids people with disability in other everyday spaces but within the space provided by the human library she felt able to push herself to engage in dialogue with a human book with acquired brain injury (watson 2015, 130). another reader explains that she often sees immigrants from african countries in her local area but never speaks to them. when she attended a human library, she felt able to have a conversation with a human book who is from an african nation. other readers share similar experiences and explain that at human libraries they have been able to speak to human books about what it is like to live with an eating disorder, to be gay or lesbian, and to be an immigrant or a refugee and that, as a result, they are able to appreciate how people who identify in these ways experience marginalisation, lack of safety in public, and feel voiceless and invisible (watson 2015, 151, 165, 174, 176-183). furthermore, these readers explain that the conversations they have in readings at human libraries are much deeper than the superficial conversations they feel able to pursue within the confines of their everyday micropublics such as the work place, school or recreational club (watson 2015, 202-216; 2017). as spaces of overlap, human libraries and tales provide spaces for being-in-common that enable people the opportunity to walk a while in another person’s shoes and to enter into what it means to coexist, understood as being-with, rather than simply rub along in an illusory and superficial manner. in doing so, they enter into spaces that counter their other everyday spaces which so often exclude mutuality between people who are sharing a world. concluding remarks at the outset, i offered a reminder that living with difference is an unavoidable part of living in contemporary australia. how we approach living in this context of difference will shape how we imagine and reimagine australia. for some people, this task will be defined by a desire to reimagine what has always been imagined; their desire will be to live within an australia that is predominantly white, male-gendered, christian, ablebodied and heterosexual. for other people, this is a task that offers opportunity and hope and a chance to reimagine australia anew. they exhibit an awareness that existence is coexistence, that there is no being without ‘being-with,’ and that people have much to learn from being-in-common. my contribution to the matter of reimaging australia has been motivated by an interest in appreciating how and where this reimagining occurs. it is also shaped by a preference for what goes at the microlevel of society rather than attending to the macrospatial level, often favoured by policy makers and bureaucrats. the outcome of this discussion has been to advance the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection. it is not offered as a template or a program for ameliorating the numerous negative practices, habits and socio-spatial norms that render many of our everyday public spaces incapable of advancing the cosmopolitan project of living with difference. it is offered as one way, which has been tested and demonstrated by the ongoing activity of two groups in particular, that we might like to consider as we seek out spaces in which we may continue to reimagine australia. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 225 references abergel, ronni, antje rothemund, gavin titley, and peter wootsch. 2005. don't judge a book by its cover? the living library organiser's guide. budapest: council of europe. alexander, lameez, and colin tredoux. 2010. “the spaces between 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http://www.talesoftimespast.org.au/our-philosophy/heritagestorytelling/. ---. 2016b. home. accessed 24 november, 2016, http://www.talesoftimespast.org.au/. ---. 2016c. our history. accessed 24 november, 2016, http://www.talesoftimespast.org.au/about-us/our-history/. thomas, mary e. 2005. “‘i think it’s just natural’: the spatiality of racial segregation at a us high school.” environment and planning a 37 (7): 1233-1248. doi: doi:10.1068/a37209. valentine, gill. 2008. “living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter.” progress in human geography 32 (3): 323-337. doi: 10.1177/0309133308089372. van laere, katrien, michel vandenbroeck, griet roets, and jan peeters. 2014. “challenging the feminisation of the workforce: rethinking the mind-body dualism in early childhood education and care.” gender and education 26 (3): 232-245. doi: 10.1080/09540253.2014.901721. watkin, christopher. 2007. “a different alterity: jean-luc nancy’s ‘singular plural.’” paragraph 30 (2): 50-64. doi: 10.1353/prg.2007.0026. watson, greg. 2015. “‘you shouldn't have to suffer for being who you are’: an examination of the human library strategy for challenging prejudice and increasing respect for difference.” the centre for human rights education, curtin university, bentley. http://link.library.curtin.edu.au/p?cur_digitool_dc234254. ---. 2017. “being a human book: conversations for rupturing prejudice.” in rites of spring, ed. julie lunn. perth: black swan press. white, richard. 1981. inventing australia: images and identity 1688-1980. sydney: allen & unwin. ---. 1997. “inventing australia revisited.” in creating australia: changing australian history, eds wayne hudson and geoffrey bolton, 12-22. sydney: allen & unwin. wise, amanda. 2013. “hope in a land of strangers.” identities 20 (1): 37-45. doi: 10.1080/1070289x.2012.752372. greg watson is a lecturer at curtin university in the centre for human rights education and the school of media, culture studies and creative arts. he also teaches in the law and society major at the university of western australia. greg has an interdisciplinary teaching and research background in the social sciences and his particular interests include critical pedagogy, cultural studies and human rights education. in 2015, greg was awarded his phd (human rights education) for his doctoral thesis, “you shouldn’t have http://www.talesoftimespast.org.au/our-philosophy/heritage-storytelling/ http://www.talesoftimespast.org.au/our-philosophy/heritage-storytelling/ http://www.talesoftimespast.org.au/ http://www.talesoftimespast.org.au/about-us/our-history/ http://link.library.curtin.edu.au/p?cur_digitool_dc234254 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 228 to suffer for being who you are”: an examination of the human library strategy for challenging prejudice and increasing respect for difference. most recently, greg has published a book chapter, "being a human book: conversations for rupturing prejudice." in rites of spring, ed. julie lunn. perth: black swan press. greg is the australia contact officer for the human library organization. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 reimagining belonging: the quest of africans for relational belonging and the australian requirement of integration yirga gelaw woldeyes centre for human rights education curtin university yirga.woldeyes@curtin.edu.au copyright©2018 yirga gelaw woldeyes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper reflects on the challenges african refugees face in achieving a sense of belonging in australia, largely as a result of the negation of their traditional experiences by modernist states both in africa and australia. in australia, the dream of belonging to a new community is constrained by what i call the ethnicisation of civic belonging, a process whereby legal frameworks around residency and citizenship become beholden to the eurocentric interpretation of ‘australian values.’ this can be seen in citizenship exams that test a refugee’s adherence to such values, and often results in broader social pressure to assimilate in order to belong. the paper seeks to challenge and reimagine current attempts to integrate african refugees into australian society by considering african notions of belonging, using the importance of personhood and relationship with nature as important examples. the paper then considers how state violence towards communal belonging in africa contributes to displacement and the quest for belonging to a new community. african refugees have lost their physical belonging which constituted their relationship to land, ancestors and communities, and are in search of reconstituting belonging in new places. the paper argues that refugees will continue to live in a constant struggle to achieve belonging unless they are seen not simply as vulnerable beings who seek protection but also as active agents who bring new perspectives that enrich diverse ways of being and belonging to australia. keywords: belonging; relational belonging; citizenship; african refugees. mailto:elfie.shiosaki@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 introduction to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. — simone weil (qtd. in malkki, 1992:24) the australian government recently proposed a bill to amend the 2007 citizenship act for “strengthening the test for citizenship” (parliament of australia, 2017). according to prime minister turnbull, “we need to ensure that our citizenship test enables applicants to demonstrate how they have integrated into and engaged with our australian community, so that they’re part of the community” (office of the prime minister of australia, 2017). the proposed bill came with the rise of right-wing nationalism and populism, where anxieties associated with economic insecurity and cultural change are often framed through the politics of identity (dean, bell, and vakhitova, 2016; inglehart and norris, 2016). australian civic society groups and activists made submissions that were critical of the government’s plan (chre, 2017; refugee council of australia, 2017). these criticisms emphasised that the proposed amendment would have unjust outcomes, especially in relation to vulnerable refugees that need australia’s protection the most. their submissions also suggested that the proposal would have the effect of negating the emotional sense of belonging refugees aspire to develop in australia by putting cognitive skills as a prerequisite for belonging to the australian community. while the proposed bill did not pass initially, politicians and the media continue to discuss what is perceived to be the importance of citizenship tests and other measures through which immigrants and refugees can have their ‘australianness’ verified. in order to secure a place or belong in australia, one must adhere to the mythical ‘australian values.’ this paper seeks to add an important dimension to the argument by focusing on the importance of african experiences and perspectives of belonging to african refugees in australia. in doing so, it first shows how the current discourse on citizenship in australia excludes diverse ways of belonging by implicating civic institutions with a euro/ethnocentric interpretation of australian values (offord, kerruish, garbutt, wessell, and kirsten, 2015). it also shows the dehumanising effect of this process on the african sense of belonging. later, it shows how african refugees understand belonging based on their traditional experiences and how their sense of belonging is negated before and after settlement. the ethnicisation of civic belonging social and civil belonging in australia has long been ethnicised and the notion of testing one’s adherence to ‘australian values’ is by no means new. for example, despite being the indigenous people of the country, aboriginal australians have continually been required to ‘prove’ that they adhere to white australian values in order to belong to their own country. the assimilation policy of the 1950s and 60s provides a clear case study. paul hasluck, minister for territories with responsibility for aboriginal affairs between 1951 and 1963, promoted the idea that “aborigines ‘at all stages of progress from the primitive to the fully civilised’ would eventually come to ‘live like us’” (qtd. in haebich, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 2000:764). his vision of assimilation was that aboriginals and migrants alike would “‘[turn their] back on the past’” and move towards: an affluent, classless, monocultural society: the poor would forget their former privations; migrants would forget europe; and the aborigines would forget their past. in return, all would enjoy the ‘australian way of life.’ (qtd. in haebich, 2000:764) government pamphlets published in the 50s and 60s presented propaganda images of aboriginal people living the suburban dream in small nuclear families. some encouraged white australians to help aboriginal people assimilate, while others targeted aboriginal people by presenting the white australian way of life as the key to social success and belonging (see haebich, 2000:763-775). the violence of the stolen generation, where children were forcibly taken from their parents and raised in state institutions or adopted by white families, was publicly presented as a further step towards assimilation for aboriginal australians. haebich details the way in which the media published numerous articles featuring happy children in foster care, adopted households, or on holiday programs, where the success of assimilation would be in, as one adoptive parent said, “bring[ing] [the children] into the homes of white people so that they could be thoroughly acclimatised” (qtd. in 2000:794). as with african refugees today, the key to belonging was contingent on being “acclimatised” to the dominant white culture. research suggests that the key to belonging is significantly more complicated. the ways refugees develop a sense of belonging in australia have been understood based on two important concepts. firstly, according to fozdar and hartley (2013), the sense of belonging to australia is viewed in terms of achieving civic rights and responsibilities. this sense of belonging, which is sometimes referred to as civic, is nurtured through institutions that provide support services to refugees. often, refugees manifest a strong sense of civic belonging and are grateful for the services and support that they receive from institutions. the second aspect of belonging, which is regarded highly by most australians, “places a high value on the affective connection between compatriots” (fozdar and hartley, 2013:128). fozdar and hartley argue that refugees’ emotional connection to the land and the people is often constrained by experiences with the mainstream population and cultural differences. african refugees in particular expressed their sense of belonging to the mainstream population as “aspirational, something to be achieved overtime” (139). as one participant noted, “australians never treat us badly but they rarely accept us as their own people” (137). the above distinction between civic and ethno-belonging offers two important insights in relation to the proposed change to the citizenship act. firstly, the requirement to pass a test on australian values dismisses the significance and relevance of african perspectives and traditional experiences as important ways of belonging to australia. this paper will analyse the african sense of belonging and its relevance to the lives of refugees in the next section. secondly, the newly proposed citizenship bill will have the effect of blurring the distinction between ethno-belonging and civic belonging by making cultural tests a requirement for achieving civic belonging. under the proposed bill, ethno-belonging, which was seen as too difficult to be achieved by many refugees due to cultural differences between the majority white australian culture and the culture of the refugees, could become the most dominant means of achieving civic belonging. for example, the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 requirement of proficiency in the english language, although more relevant to ethnobelonging than civic duty, has now become a legal requirement for citizenship under the proposed bill. malcolm turnbull justified the requirement in terms of economic and social goals, stating that “we all know that the key to successful integration into the australian community, to economic success and every success—social success—in becoming part of the community is being able to speak english” (office of the prime minister of australia, 2017). in addition to proficient english, the citizenship test would require refugees to prove their integration by showing their connection to the community, by not having a criminal record or prolonged dependency on welfare, and by showing their employment history, income and tax. the above requirements present homo economicus as the good and desirable citizen. it also presents those who fail to meet these requirements as less human and unworthy of civic rights. the dehumanising effect of the citizenship requirement can be seen from the fact that the proposed document seems to hijack ‘universal’ moral and legal principles as uniquely australian values that can be used to objectively test the eligibility of outsiders. under the proposed bill, refugees would be required to integrate into a set of values such as democratic beliefs, equality, and freedom that are internationally regarded as universal human entitlements (un, 1948). states who signed human rights treaties have assumed the responsibility to implement these rights and to provide protection to individuals irrespective of nationality or citizenship (hrc, 1986). in other words, these international norms are not the duty of individuals towards states, they are the duties of states towards individuals. there are two consequences of requiring refugees to be tested for values that are regarded as ‘universal’ and ‘inalienable’ from human beings. first, it contradicts the claim of civic institutions to be neutral and objective. under the pretence of universal ideals of equality, freedom and fairness, the proposed bill reconstitutes the rites of civic belonging according to cultural, linguistic, ideological and economic factors that reflect ethno-nationalism. this is a form of “ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism” (fozdar and low, 2015). the application of these white australian values in civic institutions can also be seen as the culturisation of citizenship: by the culturalization of citizenship, we try to capture a process by which culture (emotions, feelings, norms and values, and symbols and traditions, including religion) has come to play a central role in the debate on what it means to be a citizen, either as an alternative or in addition to political, judicial and social citizenship (tonkens and duyvendak, 2016:3). it can also undermine cultural and cognitive diversity as the basis of multiculturalism. secondly, it also has a dehumanising effect on the identity of refugees. dehumanisation occurs when people are objectified with labels that are classified as sub-human, resulting in the justification of moral disengagement from them (bain, vaes, and leyens, 2014). as geertz argues, human beings cannot become fully human without their culture: “our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous system itself, cultural products” (1973:49). the negation of the culture of refugees leads to the reduction of their existence into “the abstract nakedness of being human” (arendt, 1979:287), a form of vulnerability that make refugees feel as though “nobody here knows who i am” (299). as can be seen, the current discourse on citizenship poses various challenges for refugees to achieve a sense of belonging in australia. for civil belonging to be contingent on coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 linguistic, social, cultural, ideological and economic tests, the opportunity for refugees to achieve belonging on the basis of what they know and experienced through their own cultures becomes significantly reduced. in order to belong, one must prove one’s adherence to ethnocentric values that are erroneously cast as inalienable ‘human’ values, thereby further relegating the refugee’s culture and experience to the realm of the inhuman. to become a refugee primarily means to lose the connection between one’s accumulated experience from tradition and the geographical and social context that makes those experiences meaningful. this means, refugees need belonging in order to flourish as equal citizens in their new country, as they no longer have the means to achieve it in their home country. as malkki (1995) argued, this loss does not lead to either the abandonment of collective identity among the refugees or the dynamism of the culture of the refugees. in australia, the effort of africans to use their tradition to develop their sense of belonging needs to be acknowledged and supported (babatunde-sowole, power, jackson, davidson, and digiacomo, 2016; mackenzie, mwamba, and mphande, 2015). it is therefore important to acknowledge that the meaning of belonging should go beyond the current discourse of citizenship. belonging from the perspective of african traditions it should be clear from the outset that there is no singular notion of african belonging. concepts of belonging from african perspectives cannot be exhaustively known or presented in one paper. however, it is possible and indeed necessary to explore how african refugees understand and feel belonging. in order to understand how african refugees experience and negotiate the complexities of belonging in australia, it is vital that we move away from the idea that belonging is assured simply by becoming a citizen of the state or passing a values test. african traditions and historical experiences provide proper insights into the meaning of belonging for african refugees. the history of colonialism in africa further complicates how one considers african notions of belonging. the european social contract theory that presents the state of nature as the original position from where individuals emerge to become members of a civilised society is historically irrelevant to africans due to the fact that state formation occurred through slavery and colonialism. in other words, africans did not wilfully surrender their freedom to a state that they created in order to protect their lives and liberty; they were controlled by the colonial and neo-colonial state largely for the sake of exploitation. the institutions of slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism were created and maintained through violence. therefore, a proper understanding of african senses of belonging should be taken from culture, from communal values and traditional ways of life that have been silenced by local and global power interests. the consideration of the african culture as a source of belonging requires an important qualification. due to the long history of colonial and neo-colonial experiences, one can identify three characteristics of the various cultures in africa. based on the low to high level of western influences, one can observe mimicry, hybridity and tradition (bhabha, 1994; ferguson, 2002). mimicry represents cultural forms imitated from western culture; hybridity refers to the mixture of mimicry and local tradition; and tradition refers to the common way of life of the majority based on customs, religions, and history. while no essentialist distinction is possible among these three forms, it is possible to notice that coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 mimicry and hybridity are predominantly elite-based cultures whereas tradition represents the residual and commonly practiced culture of the majority (woldeyes, 2013, 2017). it is therefore important to remember that the meaning of belonging sketched below is based on the traditional conception rather than that of western mimicry which is the basis of elite culture in africa. within african traditions, the concept of belonging refers to a way of coming into existence as a communal being. here, the rites of integration and verification do not make sense because those who exist in the community already belong, and those who belong cannot be regarded as unfit or outside of the community. this notion of belonging can be inferred from the african concepts of personhood, obligation and relationship with community and nature. one of the common examples of african notions of personhood is the concept of ubuntu, which recognises the humanity of the self through the humanity of the other. as archbishop desmond tutu states, ubuntu “speaks about the essence of being human: that my humanity is caught up in your humanity because we say a person is a person through other persons. i am a person because i belong” (tutu, 1998:xiii). in other words, belonging is a priori to the individual: a person comes into being human knowing the world and him/herself through belonging to the community. senghor provides more insight into the intimate connection that characterises this african sense of belonging as a way of melting oneself into the being of the other: the negro african sympathizes, abandons his personality to become identified with the other, dies to be reborn in the other. he does not assimilate; he is assimilated. he lives a common life with the other; it is a long caress in the night, an embrace of joined bodies, the act of love. (1964:72-73) the fundamental point here is that nothing exists between being and belonging. there are no impersonal institutions that verify, manage and control the way individuals exist or belong to the society. belonging involves the creation of unity with a community that includes the living, the living dead (ancestors), the living but not yet born, nature and spirits. the individual belongs to a community personally through and with other persons, and by the performance of rituals and the observance of traditional duties that involve other members of the community together. as menkiti noted, “in the african view it is the community which defines the person as person, not some isolated, static quality of rationality, will, or memory” (1984:172). we may refer to this as relational belonging: a process of becoming one with a world that can be lived and enjoyed only through the pursuit of communal ideals. all things—the dead and the living, animals and plants, bodies and spirits, heaven and earth—complement one another, supporting a sacred universe in which a person is a mere element in how things fit together in the world. this notion of belonging presents a notion of personhood embodied in networks of relations with society and nature. maintaining belonging is equivalent to maintaining one’s humanity, which may include the fulfilment of traditional obligations. obligation is how belonging is practiced in daily life. it involves the living of one’s identity through the fulfilment of communal expectations. individuals feel an intimate sense of obligation to a wide range of subjects because, as mbiti notes, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. the individual can only say: i am, because we are and since we are, therefore i am. (1970:108) obligation as a necessity for belonging entails the observance of communal responsibilities as a way of life. in many african traditions, this responsibility includes reverence to nature, ancestors and life. no obligation means having no belonging. that means traditional obligations are not imposed duties from a higher authority, they are key attributes of sociability and being-in-the-world (mbiti, 1970). one example of showing this conception of obligation and belonging is to look into the bantu traditional view that all things are forces. kagame divided these forces into four categories: muntu, kintu, hantu and kantu (jahn, 1961). muntu includes all forces endowed with intelligence: god, spirits, the dead, human beings and certain trees. the second category, kintu, encompasses forces that include plants, animals, minerals, and the like. hantu represents time and space, and kantu represents modalities such as beauty, laughter and so on. the common letters ntu that appear in each of the four categories represents the universal force or being which exists as the manifestation of the four categories. ntu, the universal force, is not an independent being located outside or in isolation from the rest. it is the spiritual force that is common in everything. this conception presents nature not as a dead matter devoid of personhood and values but as a force that manifests god himself. as mbiti notes, man sees in the universe not only the imprint but the reflections of god; and whether that image is marred or clearly focused and defined, it is nevertheless an image of god, the only image known in traditional african societies. (1970:48) belonging involves a sacred view and a harmonious relationship with nature. the dogon myth of creation views the earth as a mother that gives birth to creation thorough her conjugal love with the sky spirit. this sanctification of nature suggests a sense of place that is central to belonging: place is not devoid of meaning. it is the embodiment of life, knowledge and spirit. it is where all occurrences take place. nature in the broadest sense of the word is not an empty impersonal object of phenomena: it is filled with religious significance. man gives life even where natural objects and phenomena have no biological life. god is seen in and behind these objects and phenomena: they are his creation, they manifest him, they symbolize his being and presence. the invisible world is symbolised or manifested by these visible and concrete phenomena and objects of nature. the invisible world presses hard upon the visible: one speaks of the other, and african peoples ‘see’ that invisible universe when they look at, hear or feel the visible and tangible world. this is one of the most fundamental religious heritages of african people. (mbiti, 1970:56) this view of nature is important in offering the human being a sense of purpose and direction in the world. place is not a physical property that can be owned by individuals; it is not an entity to be mastered and controlled by human beings. place is the expression of god’s image; as some african muslim refugees would say, “everywhere is allah’s coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 place” (mcmichael, 2002). that means no individual or group can claim an exclusive title or impose a normative value or rule upon it. instead, place is the source of values. it presents human beings with certain normative demands that they should obey in order to live a harmonious life. this view is different from the view of a detached individual that seeks to control nature in order to create a civilisation of its own. no civilisation can be owned in exclusion of others and no achievement can be regarded as a personal achievement. in this african conception of belonging, a person can say “i belong to that place”, not “that place belongs to me” or “that is my civilisation or my country.” as the common african saying goes, “i conceive that land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living and countless members are still unborn” (qtd. in njoh, 2006:9). the view of nature and place as sacred is not just unique to africa. indigenous australians have a well-established tradition based on deep connection with land and nature. “rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human—all were formed of the same substance by the ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky” (kwaymullina, 2016: 12). human beings live in harmony with ancestors and nature following the dreaming that encompasses the philosophical, spiritual and cultural basis of aboriginal life (isaacs, 2006). the view of personhood embodied in nature has been part of most southern perspectives too. for example, zhang zai’s confucian teaching, “that which fills the universe i regard as my body and that which directs the universe i regard as my nature,” suggests that the goal of life was to live in harmony with nature, not to master and control it (chan, 1963:497). similarly, the view of nature as pachamama, a living mother of creation, has gained increasing acceptance, including legal recognition, in bolivia (vidal, 2011). in the constitution of the republic of ecuador (2008), article 71 and 72 guarantees nature the right to life and restoration. in western tradition too, merchant shows that the traditional view of nature was a sacred female that was venerated through various rituals. she argues that this view changed since the industrial revolution, resulting in what she calls the “death of nature” (1980). this “visibility of values” outside the mind of the individual, on people, nature and places, has important implications on belonging. it challenges the anthropocentric view that human beings are the sole sources of values. as bilgrami (2016) argues, it allows us to derive values not from our desires, fears, moral sentiments or state of mind, but from creating a relationship with nature and human beings, from acting as practical agents. for africa, the sanctity of nature imposes upon human beings the obligation to live in harmony with everything that has life. as makumba argues, “human existence was understood to be in harmony with itself when it was in harmony with nature and with the realm of the divine” (2007:170). the african way of relational belonging which supports persons embodied in nature and community has been a basis of authority in cultural and social life. traditional chiefs are obeyed to the extent that they also followed the traditional customs that were set by the ancestors and tradition. their power was predictable and limited by local traditions. for example, they were allowed to accumulate wealth, often in the form of gifts, in order to distribute it back to the community as providers (chabal, 2009). therefore, their power was built on the basis of reciprocity and the tradition of sharing (mpansu, 1986). persons contribute to their traditional leaders in order to enable them to carry out their traditional duties. the leaders were obeyed not because they were feared but because they were coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 respected; their power was proportional to their authority. success was measured not by individual accumulation but by generosity, by the ability to provide for the living and please the dead. although the loss of belonging is unthinkable, as a person cannot exist without belonging to the community, the sense of harmony in relationships with nature and society could be lost or strained due to the violation of traditional obligations. persons who cause harm to others or violate the sacred rules of the community would undergo a process of punishment, sacrifice or reconciliation that aims at restoring harmony. in our african understanding, we set great store by communal peace and harmony. anything that subverts this harmony is injurious, not just to the community, but to all of us, and therefore forgiveness is an absolute necessity for continued human existence (tutu, 1998:xiii). the relational belonging explored above suggests the frames of references and experiences african refugees have in relation to belonging. belonging is a communal way of life, a way of being a person through one’s relationship with others, including nature. the loss and struggle for belonging in africa the loss and the struggle to maintain belonging has been the most enduring experience of the majority of africans in modern history. from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, colonialism was practiced through the movement of slaves, resources, indentured labourers, colonial administrators, the creation of markets, farms, settlements, religious conversions and other related activities. in europe, the most obvious outcome of this process was the birth and growth of capitalism and industry (loomba, 2005:23). but in africa, it created the african state as a foreign transplant that was and continues to be contemptuous to africans’ communal traditions and relational belonging. clearly, colonialism was violent against the african sense of relational belonging. it introduced a new logic of power relationships by removing the sources of authority from traditional belonging and obligation to a foreign colonising power. it instituted a new model of rule by creating a state that operates based on imposed values. ranger (1983) argues there were two important assumptions europeans held that enabled them to achieve this. firstly, they believed that some africans could be trained to rule on their behalf. secondly, they believed that it was imperative to redefine the traditional relationship between local leaders and the people by creating new logics of hierarchy and command structures. on the basis of this model, the african state emerged as part of the colonising structure that sought to transform traditional identities, economies and beliefs into european constructs (mudimbe, 1988). this approach defined progress as a matter of conversion from tradition to modernity, from agrarian life to urban life, from local languages to european languages, from barbarism to civilisation. by defining the means and end of progress outside the experience and culture of the people, the colonial system engendered a principle of disharmony: an imposed set of rules that contradict relational belonging with institutional goals, for the purpose of achieving dominance over the populace. state officials who replaced the traditional chiefs started to collect taxes and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 exploit natural resources without following the traditional obligation to distribute back to the people. these institutions continue to suppress, disregard or manipulate local traditions for the sake of power and, according to englebert (1997), the african state in this sense is “neither african nor a state.” the british divide and rule policy is a typical example of how the principle of disharmony was put into effect. in 1917, a british official stated, “the spirit of nationality, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, of tribe, should be cultivated and nowhere can this be done with better chance of success than in britain east africa and uganda” (qtd. in vail 1989:13). the plan included the writing of african elastic and voluntary traditions as inelastic, non-porous, distinct tribes; the creation of curriculum that emphasised ethnic identities of students, and the creation of different denominations in adjacent places. in short, african politics inherited the turning of traditions into ethnicities from colonialis m (vail, 1989). the african independence movement was inspired by the desire to replace ethnic-based colonial rule with ‘modern’ nationalism based on african traditional ideals. julies nyrere’s ujamma and self-reliance, senghor’s philosophy of negritude, nkrhuma’s idea of conscientism and the pan-african movement are just a few examples of the many initiatives that tried to end the ideological and material dependency of the afr ican state on western constructs. practical steps were undertaken to implement some of these ideas. for example, between 1960-61, successive conferences were held to africanise the education system and move away from the current western system where africans would graduate “knowing nothing about their history and society” (unesco, 1961, 1962). another example is the initiatives of the african state building agenda, whereby the creation of strong institutions was regarded as a precondition for africa’s progress. many states borrowed significantly in order to implement these programs. all of these attempts later failed mainly due to the economic dependency of the african states on western powers. the financial crises of the 1960s and 70s added more fuel to the fire. african states were forced to borrow more in order to service their debts. in the 1980s, the international monetary fund (imf) and world bank (wb) introduced the structural adjustment programs (saps) which required the new african states to introduce neoliberal policies that crippled the new african state’s ability to deliver services to the people (ferguson, 2006). the african independence movement was left to the service of corrupt elite interests. important studies on the creation of show how this process led to the re-emergence of colonial ethnic-based politics (ekeh, 1975; vail, 1989). ethnicity and tribalism became a new political tool in the hands of corrupt officials. the above discussion is important to distinguish between ethnicity as the basis of african politics and communalism as a traditional way of life. most literature considers african traditions based on the ethnicist categories that were invented by the political processes of the twentieth century. ethnicity operates through a process that excludes the majority from politics by turning traditional obligations into polit ical patronage and clientelism (ekeh, 1975). henderson showed that african civil wars are not caused by traditional identities and cultures, but are the result of political elites who manipulate those identities (2008). the basis of relational belonging is left to anthropological, philosophical and cultural studies with few reflections on its relevance to modern political life. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 the above contextual analysis shows that the struggle of african refugees over belonging starts from their own country of origin. as the state is not considered credible, people make efforts to maintain their relational belonging by fulfilling their traditional obligations using opportunities available to them, including through the formal channels of the state. the state, partly due to its limited capacity to expand ‘modernisation’ to the rural masses, and partly due to its own power interest to exploit traditional belongings, tends to leave traditions as they are unless their destruction is required for larger advantages to the ruling elite. this has important implications for refugees. firstly, the dominant form of belonging in africa remains communal, despite variations in how this is lived and interpreted across diverse communities. africans maintain their communities through their traditional obligations that give them a sense of identity, security and purpose. this does not necessarily mean that the african life is antagonistic to modernist values or that there is strict demarcation between modernity and tradition. to the level that cultures are able to encounter with one another, there are always emergent practices and meanings. africans, too, incorporate new ideas into their traditions. but this does not necessarily mean that the entire traditional life can be washed out by the incorporation of modernist outlooks and cultures, especially when the possibility of such incorporation is limited by a lack of strong institutions that facilitate modernisation processes in africa. without considering african traditions as pure, static and antagonistic to modernism and accepting the possible existence of contradictions and change, it is still possible to argue that communal traditions persist as important sources of identity and belonging. as mbiti maintains: because traditional religions permeate all the departments of life, there is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and non-religious, between the spiritual and the material areas of life. wherever the african is, there is his religion: he carries it to the fields where he is sowing seeds or harvesting a new crop; he takes it with him to the beer party or to attend a funeral ceremony; and if he is educated, he takes religion to the examination room at school or in the university; if he is a politician he takes it to the house of parliament. (1970:2) the state’s disregard of communal or relational belonging has other consequences. since traditional communities do not have political power, they remain defenceless in the face of violent external disruptions. for example, during the international food crisis in 2008, land grabbing in africa led to the dispossession of millions of rural farmers from their land (macfarquhardec, 2010; rahmato, 2011). the forced removal of communities from their traditional holdings is often carried out in the name of development (dell’angeloa, d’odorico, rulli, and marchand, 2017). other factors, such as famine, civil war, political prosecution and epidemics, could also cause temporary or permanent displacement and migration. when people become refugees, the loss of land breaks their physical and social relationship with their land, environment and community. the life of a refugee is a quest to repair the breakdown of traditional life in a new way. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 refugee life as the loss and quest for belonging the breakdown of traditional life in africa has been carried out through colonial and neocolonial violence (mbembe, 2001). similar to how jonathan lear (2006) analysed the lives of the crow tribe in the united states following the destruction of their way of life, it is possible to note that communities that are uprooted from their places lose their sense of belonging which was constructed based on the intimate relationship they had with their community and nature. the farmers no longer have a land to harvest, the children no longer keep the cattle, the elders no longer meet under a tree to consult their ancestors about the coming harvest, the healers no longer have access to their secret medicine, and the priests no longer perform sacrifices or pray for the coming of rain. even if these activities are done in exile, there is a breakdown between the traditional purposes for which they were done and the new purpose for which they are being performed now. it is not easy to understand what to do with one’s traditional beliefs, experiences and skills, or how and for what purpose to transmit beliefs, languages and stories to children when a traditional way of life ceases to exist. as lear observed, “what we have in this case is not the unfortunate occurrence, not even a devastating occurrence like a holocaust, it is a breakdown of the field in which occurrences occur” (2006:9). the heaviest cost of being a refugee is, therefore, the loss of the context in which life is lived in a traditional way. malkki (1995) recognises the tragic effect of uprootedness and displacement but rejects the tendency not to go farther. people move with their memories and experiences. in her study, she showed how refugees from the same place may construct their sense of identity differently depending on how they belong to the new place. the desire to belong to a new place and community of persons is the major dream of refugees, and it is an act of human agency that should not be controlled by institutions alone. a study conducted to assess how successful settlement is measured by the australian government and refugees seems to affirm this point. while the government often measures successful settlement in terms of economic wellbeing and level of personal independence, refugees value community connectedness, interdependence and personal happiness as highly important indicators of successful settlement in australia (australian survey research, 2011). the refugees’ emphasis on connectedness and community, rather than independence and financial autonomy, should not be seen as a desire to live the african traditional way of life in australia as it is. refugees know that the traditional way of life is lost. rather, it should be seen as a hope that a traditional way of creating a new way of life is possible (lear, 2006). if we were to reimagine citizenship and asylum in this way, it could allow refugees to invent new purposes for their traditional beliefs and experiences. such an approach could not only allow refugees to invent new meanings that would help them achieve their desire for connectivity and community, it would also enrich the diversity and inclusivity of australia and avoid the alienation of refugees from mainstream society. conclusion african refugees came from a world that has been politically dominated by a system that serves the interest of westernised elites and their proxies. despite their desire to belong coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 to modernity as experienced by local traditions, the colonial and neo-colonial character of african states essentialise traditional identities and exploit them to advance their own power interests. refugees come with a well-developed tradition and experience that could nurture their ability to adapt into a new environment as long as their efforts to do so are not hampered by imposed cultural, ideological and linguistic rules and practices. currently, the requirements of proving integration to the community, linguistic competence and allegiance to australian values pose enormous challenges for african refugees who come from “the darker side of modernity” (mignolo, 2011; ndlovugatsheni, 2013). these rites of belonging do not take into account the cultural experiences and aspirations of african refugees. they are imposed and administered through governmental institutions that classify people as australians and non-australians, or insiders and outsiders. the boundary between the insider and the outsider is often drawn on the body of refugees who are seen in terms of their skin colour and the culture of the region or country they came from. the meanings of these characteristics are determined based on the values of the dominant culture rather than that of refugees, and imposed upon the latter as key determinants of their identity. in australia, imposed identity is “informed by australia’s concern over border protection, nationalism, and sovereignty” (moloney, 2007:78). as refugees do not have the power to ignore the externally agreed perception and meaning of their identity, they live responding and reacting under this imposed identity. the impact of imposed identity is often expressed in terms of objectification, submission, alienation, unemployment and suffering. as dussel noted, “the being of others is alienated when they are displaced from their own center and made to revolve around the center of a totality alien to them” (2003:53). this sense of alienation and suffering has been researched in relation to mental illness, depression and other issues (fleay, rezai, and hartley, 2015; nesdale, rooney, and smith, 1997; tilbury, 2007). the african sense of relational belonging introduces a possible insight to rethink the role of institutions in testing the identity of those who aspire to belong to australia. a human relationship is what refugees aspire to achieve. institutions could facilitate this important human need but it is also important that we stop seeing them as neutral, especially when they function according to ideological or nationalistic frameworks. to make belonging meaningful to all identities and cultures, institutional processes should be informed by a genuine dialogue that aims to include diverse cultures and civilisations. the search for belonging should be based on mechanisms that affirm rather than negate refugees’ ways of relating to the world. references arendt, h. 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(2013). elitdom and the discourse of relevant education in africa. in j. lunn, s. bizjak, & s. summers (eds.), changing facts, changing minds, and changing worlds, pp. 202-218. perth: black swan press. ---. (2017). native colonialism: education and the economy of violence against traditions in ethiopia. trenton: red sea press. yirga gelaw woldeyes is a researcher and lecturer at the centre for human rights education, curtin university, australia. yirga taught law and worked with grassroots organisations in ethiopia before completing his doctorate in australia. yirga’s research focuses on the critical study of development, education and law, and the importance of lived experience and epistemic diversity for decolonial futures. his book native colonialism: education and the economy of violence against traditions in ethiopia was published in 2017. his teaching practice is informed by his research on how to teach human rights from the perspective of diverse cultures and religions. he also researches african experiences and ethiopian traditions, and writes creatively on belonging and diasporic lives. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 coolabah 23: the short poem issue with poems by adam aitken, amanda anastasi, grant caldwell, aidan coleman, dan disney, joe dolce, laurie duggan, marisa fazio, barry gillard, jeff guess, matt hetherington, andy jackson, ross jackson, leanne jaeger, john jenkins, ray liversidge, justin lowe, mark mahemoff, michaela mark, alex mckeown, julian mclucas, jan napier, nathanael o’reilly, geoff page, gregory piko, jan price, chris ringrose, rob scott, lel sebastian, and claire rosslyn wilson, who also provides the closing essay. edited by peter bakowski coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 foreword to the coolabah short-poem issue peter bakowski copyright©2018 peter bakowski. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. as a practitioner of the short poem for 34 years, i have been and remain on the lookout for other practitioners. by putting on an editorial hat and placing a callout for 1 to 5-line poems via the australian poetry e-newsletter, i’ve hearteningly found numerous practitioners. it’s been a rewarding experience for me and now it may be for you, dear reader. “make your next poem different from your last” is a quote attributed to robert frost and it is quality, difference and variety i’ve sought to honour in my selection. poets continue to see the world from their own perspective, through their own history, environment and sifting process while keeping in mind what’s universal. what has caught their attention, engaged their senses, thinking and powers of observation they’ve found necessary to reveal via poems. the poems in this selection look inward and outward, span the world and are domestic, they record the “voices” of the child and the elder. the short poem has its appeal – it’s lean, exacting, pithy – wit, wisdom, wordplay and wonder whittled into a dart aimed to hit the bullseye which is you, dear reader. i don’t want to kill the short poem by defining it. via the formatting of the poems i’ve given the poems breathing space – as composer erik satie knew, the spaces between the notes are as important as the notes. i’ll leave you the space to wander and wonder amongst the poems. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 mark mahemoff babushka before my grandmother died at 92 she asked if the internet was closed on a sunday. she’s at home in her own skin. i’m a squatter in mine. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 mark mahemoff the taller my son grows the further away he wants me to stand. my mother’s death made space for me to make sense of her life. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 jan price he shackles the hands of his deaf wife to sign insults at her. headstones are for the living coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 jan price in mass she tells her son to sit still and give time to god – it’s ten past god he says. before sin there was curiosity. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 jan price “pass the salt” is conversation caviar between long married couples. a little girl kneels down calls out h e l l o into a flower-grate at the foot of a grave. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 michaela mark a ‘real’ job feels like acting. my mother complains of the ill effects of salt in the diet as she salts her steak and mash. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 barry d. gillard three ceramic mallards small steps wander along the polished floorboards of the hallway in the house, where the three ceramic mallards flew their flight nailed to the wall and their single eyes, ablaze, forever craved the door. emma morano emma morano, born in 1900, the year puccini penned his shabby shocker tosca, as kerman called it, is gone now and no longer the oldest person in the world. she was one hundred and seventeen — her credo had been three eggs a day, two raw, brandy infused with seven leaves of sage, to breath fresh air and stay away from men. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 jeff guess moss on a train station wall waits for the soft errands of the rain. history has failed us – but there’s more to come. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 jeff guess sad words, ‘what party?’ i can’t attribute this shiver to the cold. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 adam aitken jalan tun razak, kuala lumpur the gardener stacks the fertiliser bags in front of the us embassy. klang, selangor a plague of swamp mosquitoes leaves the unemployed scratching their heels. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 dan disney two sijo(stlings) ‘& what if we’re part flower, part crowd, part sewer, part cloud’ she said eyeing a mosquito at the bathroom window’s wire, long dead then one day puff (gone) ‘i know,’ she says ‘…you also think of it, with your body >>> hard against mine? & the boutiques of shinsegae windowless, foregrounding the sale! bling piled shine of things in muddling vistas promising i am >>> shopping twitterers echoing frisson & (outside, cicadas i’m-ing their tzzz in nude sun) coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 nathanael o’reilly cow parking in the shadow of the giant fiberglass cow at amarillo’s big texan steakhouse there’s an udderly perfect place to park. misnomer in the suburbs of vienna a station named simmering fails to live up to its name. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 laurie duggan the body politic get off the fence step up to the plate & kick the hot potato into the long grass. transcription haiku japanese compilers suspect musical pun on green do lp hy st reet coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 john jen ki ns don’t open! lo cked su it case o n a beach. insid e, a t id al w ave. overhea rd on bus “it was lik e … grasp ing at fo gwebs.” coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 claire rosslyn wilson pressed by the sun’s angle shadows don’t show our fight with the wind. here: i’ve not yet learnt how to waste my time to my taste. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 claire rosslyn wilson rain clouds clearing later the weatherman promised, but for now unrest. new hairdresser: she’ll get it wrong ‘til i shrug off past cuts. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 marisa fazio on a naples street a barefoot boy selling socks leaning in to read the sundial our shadows almost touch. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 marisa fazio deleting all photos of us i keep the landscapes. bedside vigil – another rose falls from the vase coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 amanda anastasi you need not have your eyes open to know that the sun is out. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 gregory piko jellyfish handbags bobbing at a summer sale coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 joe dolce ears have walls what goes down must come up. the cage in a gilded bird. worked his bone to the finger. a stomach in his butterflies. the ears have walls. poetry is like looking poetry is like looking for a haystack in a needle. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 joe dolce shakezheimers to be or voltaire left i may not agree with what you say, but i will attack, to your death, for my right not to hear it. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 geoff page patience in the coffee queue. sunday morning’s sermon. the poodle or the matron? who is leading whom? coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 justin lowe stocktake that dark mood when the shutters come down. abilities in one column, ambitions in the other, and a line crossed hard through achievements. this isn’t prize day, mate, it’s an inventory. let’s see what’s left on the shelves. dark star shuffles to a stool. midges of feedback from a dying guitar. raises the light like christ would the dead. woman is an enigma, he groans into his mic as the phone cameras carve out each year on his face. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 ross jackson traffic lights outside the maternity hospital still on amber. during the ice age so many reasons not to have sex, yet here we are. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 julian mclucas phonetic onomatopoetic palindrome poem pop reciprocity poem fly from sight sigh from flight coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 julian mclucas -realism sur realism sous autumnal hymn, outside autumnal hymn, outside a leaf lands, exotic as a spacecraft, yet we look for bigger things coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 ray liversidge rothko the more we look the more we see the more we see the more we look coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 alex mckeown the reddening face of the child who watches other children play as a grown-up asks what are your friends’ names? coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 andy jackson the sound of dawn birdsong is not an epiphany for the insects coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 chris ringrose sisters still good, from time to time to share a double bed, whispering secrets, till one of us is asleep and doesn’t answer. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 chris ringrose when i fell silent they all listened you can only repeat the past coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 matt hetherington an endless line of hands — all the beggars i never gave to. how can he hear, now his mask is stuck? coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 lel sebastian early evening walk in summer noisy grass until i get close paperbark forest sunlight has pinned notices to only three of the trees. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 leanne jaeger you touch me without touching me the treasure is in the trying coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 rob scott waking from a dream — i lose my dad again peace rally — children fight over a balloon coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 jan napier drying on the line dragonfly wings coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 grant caldwell in hundreds of years you have not learned about windows bee coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 grant caldwell blind man running loudly up the stairs he knows are there arguing about war no-one wins coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 aidan coleman cats sprawl like accordions. velcro soles. shed light insects hang like burnt-out planets. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 foreword to claire rosslyn wilson’s essay “walking to montjuïc: cycles of belonging” peter bakowski copyright©2018 peter bakowski. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. this essay conveys the first-hand experience of the overseas traveller in a foreign city. there is a certain wisdom in trying to understand, infiltrate, perhaps eventually ease into a single city which is not your city of birth, not your hometown, rather than try to understand a whole country and its place in europe and the world. it is the attention to detail that gives the poet a key, a beginning, a seed – to start with the flowerpot on the balcony, then take in the street, widen the view to the neighbourhood and convey whether it is representative or unique, rushed through on the way to elsewhere or a cherished destination. cemeteries remain an attraction for poets. the state of the graves, the headstones, their grandness or decline, the very ordinary or exotic names inscribed, the broken wing of a stone angel, all have the poet imagining the dead, the concentric circles of the living, the emotions spent, unnameable or not yet reconciled. claire rosslyn wilson reminds us of the importance of cafés, where if we understand the café’s “codes”, the clientele, the staff, the neighbourhood, how it is all ballet and theatre, we may perhaps succeed in making that transition from stranger, almost intruder, to greeted, even smiled at, regular. a personal triumph, internally applauded. claire rosslyn wilson also reminds us that travel is work. a wrong turn may be taken. suddenly there’s a hot dusty wind or pelting rain, we forgot to pack a picnic lunch, a passerby steps on our toe and we are reduced in our own eyes to the unsophisticated traveller, perhaps open game for watchful eyes. the essay may remind the reader why in this century there are reputed to be one million human beings in aircraft at any one time. some are seeking a bargain, some are after some pampering, some are working on their bucket list or their spanish. some wanted to simply get away, but nothing is simple dear reader, dear traveller. venture forth along the pathways of this essay with claire. peter bakowski, richmond, melbourne, 11 december 2017 coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 walking to montjuïc: cycles of belonging claire rosslyn wilson phd candidate, university of canberra copyright©2018 claire rosslyn wilson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a personal essay by poet claire rosslyn wilson that reflects on her recent practiceled creative writing research in the unfamiliar context of barcelona while she was a visiting researcher at the australian studies centre at the university of barcelona. the essay explores the process of adapting to a new place and the ways of learning to live between places. keywords: creative writing, cultural adaptation, translocal balconies ‘place is the product of a relationship – part subjective projection, part internalisation of an external reality’ (curtis 2001: 55). the sun is weak in the morning, coming in at an angle that barely reaches the end of the lounge room, while it glares brightly on the green awnings on the opposite building. i stare at them as i have my breakfast. i’m not good at routines. i resist them even more when i’m just starting to work out how to belong in a city i don’t know intimately. if i wanted a routine why not just stay in the same city that’s familiar, rather than cross the globe to live in barcelona? when i was younger i thought of travel as a way to collect stories to write about, exotic tales and exciting mishaps that could litter my poetry. but i’ve found living in a number of cities has a different way of getting into my work. it’s not the stories so much as the feeling of slight discomfort, the small daily challenges that inspire my creative work and keep me pushing further and further away from the familiar. the awnings on the flats opposite flutter, creating a ripple down the long building. if i stick my head out the window i can see down the busy street, a slight curve eventually cutting off my sightlines in both directions. i have to look carefully to see the lives within, separated from me by ten meters and a long drop. we mostly hide inside our boxes, curtains drawn and just coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 thick enough to shield our lives. people step out onto their balconies – hang the washing, water the plants, sweep – before scuttling inside again. there is one house that lights up at night, where, as i peer in, the family is sitting chatting at the dining room table, before the kids disappear to bed and a parent finally relaxes on the couch. there are a few smokers who brave the waves of noise from the cars below as they perch on their chairs for their last evening cigarette. we watch each other out of the corner of our eyes, holding on to our own spaces. there are two cats opposite that i worry about as they weave around the obstacles on their balcony, popping in and out of the window with a nonchalance that unnerves me. i’m not sure how their owners have taught them to avoid the thin rail dividing the house from the long drop to the street below. maybe barcelona’s cats have an instinct, bred into them by living in the stacked flats of this city, that keeps them away from the edges. i watch the two of them baking in the sun while my mind replays our clumsy family cat years ago falling out of the tree to land harmlessly into the rose bush half a meter below. cats don’t always land on their feet. lately the balconies have become political declarations, with flags declaring pro, anti or something in between. some nights after dinner at 10pm i’ve stood outside banging a pot with a wooden spoon and watched shadowy neighbours stand in the dark to declare their frustration. people walking dogs in the street below have stared up at the noise. there is a neighbour on one corner who uses the protest to practice drumming beats, banning out music long after everyone has retired. the clamour rose over the whole city for weeks. i glance at my balcony, without a cat as yet but with some herbs in various stages on a scale of growth to decay. in other cities i’ve been used to rosemary bushes that push other plants out of the way or mint that grows thickly to half a meter. but i haven’t yet worked out the light and shadow in this narrow outside space and life can turn quickly in a small pot. i watch from the inside, breakfast finished, considering the movement of the wind and the leaves in the shade. i keep the noise sealed behind double-glazed glass. overlapping views ‘translocal geographies [can be] a simultaneous situatedness across different locales which provide ways of understanding the overlapping place-time(s) in migrants’ everyday lives’ (brickell and datta 2011: 4). plane trees are everywhere. i first really noticed them one spring in melbourne when i was working in a restaurant that faced onto a picturesque street near the beach. all the streets in the neighbourhood were lined with the vibrant green leaves, their uniformity creating beautiful tunnels as their seed pods broke open and rained pollen onto the streets. that was the first year i got hay fever, crying plane tree dust. in barcelona i still sneeze, even though their leaves are sparse and slightly more browned, coated with a thin layer of dust, their trunks thinner as they’re forced into a smaller square of dirt between the paving stones. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 i dodge past their roots as i make my way down the busy street to my regular corner coffee shop. it’s a franchise, one of many that are emerging in shop fronts everywhere, selling bread and coffee with minimal smiles. i don’t come here for the waiters’ charisma or for the tv blaring in the background, i come for its big windows and the open space of the square it faces. when i look up from my table i can see the sky, not just peaking between buildings, but a vast expanse of it. i can see the weather drift, patches of cloud with tracts of sky. i can see the sun filter through the plane tree leaves and make patterns on the pavement. coffee shops give me patterns i repeat in different cities with only small variations. this square i watch from behind the large coffee shop windows has its own ecology of daily life – the newspaper booth with changing faces of strangers staring up at me from the latest gossip magazines, the small pile of uncooked rice that materialises and disappears again just outside the metro exit, the guy carting around his guitar and taking his early morning coffee with conversation, the waiters making bawdy jokes with their retired regulars, the flower lady bringing her plants by the trolley load from a side street behind the café. i notice it all in parts, catching sections of the routines that keep this corner of the city busy. rough surfaces ‘“knowing” the city invites, and invokes, a need to know the self…what we call objective historical knowledge cannot be separated from a fluid network of cross-linking, feedbacking, constantly shifting and reciprocal relations between outer and inner worlds, between the city and the self’ (rendall 2001, 108). i’ve been learning the city as i circled round its islands. i’ve built my familiarity of this place by pulling together its individual spaces with a thin thread through time and place. these pools of knowledge gather around my catalan classes, the university, apartments of friends, bars, restaurants, galleries, a circus or two. the spaces between not yet mapped when i take the metro. i once crossed the border into l'hospitalet de llobregat, the invisible line between one city and the next fell somewhere between busy roads and tall buildings. barcelona is a walkable city, compact so that you are never so far away from where you need to be – i discover the grids of the city by walking the pavements. but some days the roar of the cars, voices, shouts and horns overtakes my spiralling walks. on these days i don’t look up, just keep my eyes fixed on the pavement a meter and a half in front of me and hurry home. i dance between the plane tree roots and pavement, walking a wavering line to avoid the crowds and traffic. it’s a city of walkers with not enough pavements for us all. in the months here i’ve walked my spirals, slowly increasing the known, but often returning to these places where i don’t have to think, just exist in the familiar. i hang onto the things that fit like old pyjamas – the squawks of parrots, their colourful dashes between leaves, open space between tall buildings, grass, rambles unhindered by cross-roads. i use these patterns, familiar from other places, to wash over me while my mind resets. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 i displace myself for the irritation of the unknown, but i can only be outside of my skin for so long at a time. i write out my discomforts, trying to track the known against the unknown, but the dividing line between the two is constantly changing. my habits and comforts slip and merge so that when i look back i don’t recognise my footprints. my short poems, framed in the streets of barcelona, pin fragments to my changing wall of cultural understanding, creating a post-it collage that oscillates between acceptance and confusion. the fragments overlap the more i write, each piece reframing and adjusting what i think i know about this place. i once tried to pick up a pile of dirt and bring it home with me from the nearby rambla de brasil, a piece of the land in my apartment as a reminder of where i was. but the dirt was filled with dog piss, hard packed from rain and footsteps, compressed into a surface as solid as cement. cemetery flowers ‘the spaces of the city are as much real as imagined…the spatialities of the body are bound up in the production of urban spaces, and that there are very strong emotional investments in the spaces of the city’ (pile 2001: 268). the skin on the heels of my feet is starting to peel off layer by layer as i walk to montjuïc cemetery. the streets towards the cemetery are more sparsely populated and it feels like i’m heading into a dead end. in a way i guess i am as the cemetery is perched on the edge of a hill with the port at its feet and behind that, the open mediterranean. i’m tired before i’ve even made it to the cemetery, the sun relentless in late morning and i realise i haven’t packed a lunch. tucked away on the slopes of a hill, montjuïc cemetery was established to cater for the growing city and now houses over one hundred and fifty thousand people. the majority of the graves are built into walls that stretch long and high. as i stand at the base of the hill and look up i see tier upon tier of these walls, the road curves in s-bends up the hill. many of montjuïc’s residents have views out to sea over the busy port, others face inwards towards the land or walls of graves. there is one memorial sculpture that catches my eye, a woman in marble with stone clothes so fine it seems they will move in the slightest sea breeze. i watch her and wait for it, but much of the movement here is frozen in time. i pass by names: balaguer, fuster, lull, miró, mollet, puig. their names reach into blue sky, names i don’t know, so many of them with stories buried in this place. is there a part of barcelona that rests with them in their graves, a forgotten piece of history that attached itself to their bodies as they walked the streets, as i now do? this city is starting to get inside me now; i find its patterns in the way i move through the streets and metro without thinking, the way i expect conversations with neighbours, the way i avoid walking on the grass. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 it wasn’t the first time i’d idled through a space that seemed like it should be more sacred. i used to live opposite the melbourne cemetery and would often pass through it as a pleasant short cut. one day a young man approached me with a note in hand and asked me to put it on the gravestone i was visiting, as he had no family in any cemetery to give it to. i had to tell him that i was also passing through, that i had no one to commemorate there. when i look more closely here in montjuïc i notice that it’s not that time is static, but rather that it moves more slowly. the weeds are left to inch between the cracks while bouquets of flowers slowly decompose without water, their dried petals leaching colour between visits. there is a flurry of movement – brilliantly coloured expressions of new grief – that slowly fades while no one is watching. it’s a peaceful place where there is no longer the pressure to rush, where residents no longer fight against time. does it matter where i’m buried? i haven’t visited my relatives in their melbourne graveyards, but i wish i could have taken that young man’s note and shared it with someone here in montjuïc who might have understood the pain in his face. someday i might have a less idle reason to visit again. bibliography brickell, k. & datta, a. (eds.) 2011. translocal geographies space, places, connections, farnham and burlington: ashgate. curtis, b. 2001. that place where: some thoughts on memory and the city. in: ian, b., kerr, j. & rendall, j. (eds.) the unknown city: contesting architecture and social space. cambridge and london: mit press. pile, s. 2001. the un(known) city…or an urban geography of what lies beneath. in: ian, b., kerr, j. & rendall, j. (eds.) the unknown city: contesting architecture and social space. cambridge and london: mit press. rendall, j. 2001. "bazaar beauties" or "pleasuer is our pursuit": a spatial story of exchange. in: ian, b., kerr, j. & rendall, j. (eds.) the unknown city: contesting architecture and social space. cambridge and london: mit press. claire rosslyn wilson is a poet, nonfiction writer and researcher who is currently a phd candidate of creative writing at the university of canberra. coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 contributors for more info on adam aitken go to adamaitken@wordpress.com amanda anastasi’s poetry can be found as locally as the walls of artist lane in prahran, melbourne, and as far as the massachusetts review in boston grant caldwell is a poet and novelist, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at the university of melbourne. aidan coleman is an adelaide poet, working on a biography of john forbes. dan disney lives in seoul, and teaches with sogang university’s english literature program. joe dolce is a composer-poet; winner of the 2017 university of canberra health poetry prize. laurie duggan’s selected poems 1971-2017 appears from shearsman early in 2018. marisa fazio writes short form poetry and prose which have been published in journals and anthologies world-wide. barry gillard lives, writes and teaches in geelong, victoria. jeff guess: eleven collections. web: www.jeffguess.com visit jeff guess on youtube. matt hetherington sometimes knows when to stop. andy jackson’s most recent book is music our bodies can’t hold (hunter publishers 2017), which consists of portrait poems of other people with marfan syndrome. ross jackson lives in perth, western australia and his work has appeared on the web and in many literary journals. leanne jaeger is a tasmanian poet, artist and musician. john jenkins is an incredibly handsome, charismatic liar. ray liversidge has published four full-length collections of poetry and has a new manuscript ready to go if any publisher out there is interested. justin lowe is an internationally published poet and author who currently edits poetry blog bluepepper in the blue mountains west of sydney. mark mahemoff — i reside in sydney but live in my head. michaela mark, m.a. is a 32 year old mother of one, and the proud custodian of a reader’s physique. mailto:adamaitken@wordpress.com http://www.jeffguess.com/ coolabah, no.23, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 alex mckeown is a poet and translator based in hobart, australia. julian mclucas — artist & gardener living on the land of the dja dja wurrung. sometimes jan napier’s poems fly, sometimes… nathanael o’reilly is an australian poet residing in texas; his most recent book is preparations for departure (uwap poetry, 2017). geoff page is a poet based in canberra whose most recent collection is hard horizons (pitt street poetry) gregory piko is an award-winning haiku and free poet who lives in yass, new south wales and blogs at www.gregorypiko.com jan price’s poetry, painting and photography have granted her a public life. chris ringrose is a writer from melbourne, australia, whose poems have been getting shorter as he has been getting older. rob scott has been writing haiku since 1997. lel sebastian’s poems have appeared in a handful of australian poetry journals, and been broadcast on radio national. claire rosslyn wilson is a poet, writer and researcher who is currently a phd candidate of creative writing at the university of canberra. http://clairerosslynwilson.com/ copyright©2018 adam aitken, amanda anastasi, grant caldwell, aidan coleman, dan disney, joe dolce, laurie duggan, marisa fazio, barry gillard, jeff guess, matt hetherington, andy jackson, ross jackson, leanne jaeger, john jenkins, ray liversidge, justin lowe, mark mahemoff, michaela mark, alex mckeown, julian mclucas, jan napier, nathanael o’reilly, geoff page, gregory piko, jan price, chris ringrose, rob scott, lel sebastian, claire rosslyn wilson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. http://www.gregorypiko.com/ http://clairerosslynwilson.com/ coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 the other literature of australia posthumous first publication serge liberman copyright© 2019 serge liberman. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. i have titled this essay “the other literature of australia”. by this, i mean the writing by and about migrants in australia as distinct from that which is more generally thought of as distinctively australian, and that we have in recent years come to call multicultural. to put the subject in context, i will begin by giving you some idea of the changes in australia’s population and attitudes to migrants since the country’s settlement just over 200 years ago; i will go on to deal with the efforts of the country’s early writers to develop a distinctive australian literature and the effects of this on migrant writing; i will refer to the recent more visible emergence of migrant writers; and i will elaborate a little on the theme of the migrant being in a sense an exile in australia, a theme which i will illustrate by quoting from my own writing. * let me begin by saying that australia has from its beginnings been a country open to immigration. although it was originally settled by the english, its very first settler ships (which, as you will know, carried many deported convicts) already contained a mixture of other nationals spanish-speaking as well – followed, especially after gold was discovered in the 1850s by scandinavians, poles, chinese, frenchmen, hungarians, italians, jews and others, some of whom (or their offspring) quickly made their names in exploration, botany, art and political life. having said that, it still remains true that the greatest number of immigrants came from the british isles. it was therefore inevitable that the country always remained predominantly anglo-celtic in its tastes, values, allegiances and parliamentary processes. it was also from early on a very strongly democratic country which, in addition to welcoming migrants, overall offered them the same rights that they took for themselves. but in exchange for this tolerance, it did expect them to pay a price. not a price measured in money. to me, the price was even greater; it was that they assimilate quickly into australian society and leave their separate cultures and lifestyles back home. one of the major reasons for this is given by australian writer, tom shapcott. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 shapcott notes that the development of a clearly-defined torn australian culture needed a strong and simplified vision of the country and the direction it was to follow. but such a simplification does not sit well with the subtlety or shadings that form the deeper stuff of literature and stem more from the inner reaches of the artist, from his personal experience, his observation of relationships and his feelings and beliefs. australia’s first writers confronted not only a new country some 12,000 miles from their english home with its large, smooth, green and undulating glades and pastures, but a much, much harsher terrain consisting of vast tracts of raw undeveloped scrub, dense mountain ranges, sunburnt inland desert and, except for coastal areas, a great arid dryness. australia’s new sons had to adapt – or, more correctly, to redefine – old english-based attitudes to this harsh environment where matters of survival and endurance had to be put ahead of anything else. for the writers, this meant that they had to forsake what had been familiar back home and create their own language, images, narrative, colouration and rhythms to master the land through literature, as the pioneers had to do with their hands, muscles and sweat. through this shared experience, there emerged a common bond between the new arrivals right through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century which came to be called mateship, alongside a rugged individual vigour and passionate egalitarianism reflected in much colonial writing. non-english-speaking migrants also faced parallel problems of cultural dislocation; but against a background so dominated by an ever-sharpening australian ethos, where these settlers wrote, their writings remained either unpublished or locked in tiny ghettos. given the circumstances, it could scarcely be otherwise. why? consider the ways that minority group migrants can accommodate to a new home. they – an after them their children, the second-generation migrants in particular – are in a difficult situation. on arriving, they bring with them a culture expressed through their own language, festivals, family legend and memory, both individual and national. on coming into contact with a new and encircling milieu with correspondingly new and diverse ideas, attractions, lifestyles, expectations and ways of doing things, these migrants and their children come to a crossroads where they have effectively three main directions to follow: one, clinging exclusively to their family’s traditional culture and letting little of the outside enter into their lives; two, shaking off altogether their own cultures and language by assimilating totally and invisibly into the mainstream; and, three, in some way reconciling their particular ethnic lifestyles and the wider australian one outside, at the cost of diluting or compromising their own. in the early days, total isolation was not a sustainable option, and restricted almost exclusively to the chinese and indigenous aborigines. it was rather assimilation that was by far the prevailing response, this being the main explanation why there is relatively little of ethnic writing to be found in australia until well into this century. * i come here to the third direction that the migrant writer might follow. australia has changed remarkably. after world war ii, it opened itself to a mass migration which brought some 31/2 million people from a multitude of nations, (including 15,000 from spain), so that today some thirty to forty percent of australia’s 18 million inhabitants are first-generation immigrants or direct descendants of these. alongside this demographic change there has been another that has for the first time accepted the migrant vision of things and actively encouraged and responded to ethnic writing in a positive way. because of this encouragement and their expanding coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 audience, migrant writers have tapped the many issues that arise when migrants meet host – for instance, the conflicts generated by living in two cultures, this leading to a necessary working out of what to preserve and what may be shed of one’s inheritance, how far to go in adopting external ways, the representations of the host’s reception of the migrant and the migrant’s reaction to his adopted home, and alongside these, other issues such as uprootedness, homesickness, adaptation and literary stereotypes. these areas in recent multicultural writing are particularly rewarding to read. they are areas that i have myself explored in a number of my stories. * the question that arises here is how these trends and attitudes – the assimilationist through to the more recent multicultural – have been reflected in australian literature in relation to the migrant. in connection with stereotyping and the assimilationist ideal, one of the bestknown migrant characters in australian literature is nino culotta in the novel they’re a weird mob by john o’grady. in contrast to the southern italians whom he describes as small dark people with black hair having bad habits, nino is piedmontese, a northern italian who is big and fair, has blue eyes and good habits. but as good as these northern italians may be, they still cannot compete with the superior offerings of australia, and he enters that superior society by marrying an australian girl, and proudly discarding all contact with his own origins. with this australian girl, he has a son, whom he also calls nino and reflects on how fortunate little nino is to have been born in australia. “probably,” he says, “ he (nino) will never learn to speak italian. probably i will forget it myself, and will have difficulty conversing with my parents when we go visit them.” rather than causing him concern or regret, he actually celebrates this loss of his italian culture, and (as john o’grady’s voice) urges others to follow his example, as he writes: “there are far too many new australians in this country who still mentally living in their homeland, who mix with people of their own nationality, and even try to persuade australians to adopt their customs and manners. cut it out. there’s no better way of life in the world than that in australia.” the situation has changed. as tom shapcott also wrote: “we are, in our culture, at a stage where a particular richness of… perception is occurring.” that richness is the outward expression of what has come to be called multiculturalism – my personal preference is for the term omniculturalism – that is, the bringing into a nation of all nationalities and cultures and the recognition of their separately unique contribution to australian life and culture at large. with this increasing recognition of the migrant as a person in his own right, he has in a sense been liberated. first, he is more free to write as he will, and is also more likely to be listened to and heard; and, second, though a number of migrant writers do express gladness and gratitude at living in australia – after all, many have been refugees from war and oppression elsewhere – yet they are no longer as obliged as before to lose themselves in the country or to sing its praises. migration is not without its physical, emotional and psychic difficulties – for instance, the uprooting from one place and coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 sinking of new roots in another, the gaps between idealised expectations and the encountered realities, and losing one’s former home while not easily adapting to the new. it is scarcely surprising therefore that their writings express all these in their different ways and, wholly at the opposite end of stereotypic portrayals, they speak as individuals with complex physical, mental, emotional and spiritual baggage which cannot be neatly squeezed into a ready-made mould labelled “the migrant”. so we find, for example, jewish yiddish-language writers like pinchas goldhar and herz bergner, and others like david martin, judah waten, vasso kalamaras, maria lewitt, rosa capiello, dimitris tsaloumas, antigone kefala, lolo houbein, walter adamson and myself among others, who have tried to individualise migrants as credible flesh-and-bone characters, whether italian, jewish, greek, indigenous aboriginal, and so on and portray them as more than ultimately simplistic and offensive assimilationist nino culotta type caricatures. gone from the scene is nino’s supposedly effortless (too effortless) transition from foreigner to australian; gone is the migrant’s dream of easy fortunes and quick and easy social acceptance. instead there is bitterness, alienation, homesickness and prejudice, there is emotional, social, psychological and spiritual dislocation, as also the search for identity, meaning and self-realisation in the adopted home. * in a way allied to the notion of migration is that of exile, and i want here to end with one last and very specific matter, that of the migrant and the migrant writer as being in such a state. the experience of exile is a universally known one with roots extending as far back as adam and eve banished from the garden of eden for their supposed disobedience, and certainly a part of recent spanish history as well. what prompts this particular connection – mentioned here so that it may make tie in with a more personal parallel you can draw on – is a book i came across recently titled: literature and inner exile: authoritarian spain, 1939-1975 (johns hopkins press, 1980) by paul ilie of the university of michigan. while his specific theme is that of exile and spanish literature during general franco´s rule, professor ilie begins with more a general discussion of the different sorts of exile people may experience. hence, we have refugees or displaced people who, especially in times of war, leave their country for their survival. one has only to look at the multi-million refugees generated across the globe this century alone – throughout world war ii, and from vietnam, cambodia, rwanda, afghanistan, angola – to appreciate the enormousness of the flight of people from their home. these people may, through fleeing, forfeit their nationality and become stateless persons. settling into their new haven home, they may proceed either to hold to their imported traditions or assimilate into the new surrounds. (for some time after the war, my own parents who were from poland and i who was born in russia were such stateless persons living in a displaced persons’ camp in germany until we found a country that would accept us). then we have the emigres who are compelled to leave their country for fear of persecution, but who nonetheless hope to return when circumstances allow. spain during the franco era had a considerable number of writers and artists as well as political dissidents who went to other countries to wait until the time was ripe for their return. further, to distinguish from these external exiles –those who physically leave their country – professor ilie refers also to internal exiles, those who remain but are either sent to another part of the country (for example, russian dissidents to siberia), or dissidents kept under house arrest, and still others whose exile is located within themselves, those coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 who seem to function like everyone else around them, but feel distant from, and are unable to identify with the surrounding political, social and cultural expressions of mainstream life. what i am here talking about is a closely allied state – and that is profound alienation. but all forms of exile –whether external or internal – carry with them various degrees of alienation from one’s customary home. external exiles, for instance, whether refugees, stateless persons, emigres or voluntary migrants, are inevitably affected by the people and the cultures of the countries of destination, which may lead them in turn to acquire new ways of seeing, thinking, believing and behaving. meanwhile, in their absence, their home country may itself undergo considerable change. the end result is that, should they return, they may no longer feel they belong there. they are alien in their own land, something i have personally seen over and over among my italian and greek patients who after many years in australia visit italy or greece and return to australia, saying that they are glad they went but could never again live in their place of birth. the point of all this is that much of australian migrant writing is in a sense done by exiles, whether migrants by necessity or by choice. in fact, they are double, even triple exiles: they are both exiles from their native home and exiles in their chose one, in addition to which they carry with them that inner sense of exile i mentioned, an emotional and spiritual uprootedness and alienation even as they have to get on with living as best they can day by day – for their own sakes, for their children, and because most of them have no other choice. this is where i would like you to read from my own work, a story titled “home” which is complementary to “two years in exile”, both of which are part of my first collection of stories on firmer shores. while you read the story keep in mind the forms of exile i cited above: my parents’ (particularly my mother’s) physical exile from her polish home; their emotional exile or marginality in the country to which they had come; and their inner spiritual exile or alienation brought about by living in a still underdeveloped suburb called northcote, a “wilderness” as my mother called it, several miles from where the greater numbers of their fellow jews in melbourne lived at the time. people everywhere like to live in a place they can call “home”. for my part, as a boy of eight, i accommodated well enough; home, for me, was where the feet ran most freely. but my parent’s feet did not run truly freely anywhere. therefore, in their exile, where could they still find some semblance of home? my mother, as she appears in this story, found it, but it was not one that could give her – or anyone in her position – great comfort. ………………………… with this, before you begin to read the story “home”, let me just clarify a few terms: the bight is the great australian bight, the last stretch of sea before reaching melbourne. princes pier refers to the port of landing in melbourne. the vistula is the river dividing warsaw in two, with the city’s main centre on one side, and praga on the other, with the poniatowski bridge connecting the two. sliska, leszno and stawka are the names of streets in warsaw. ziegenhain was the dp camp in germany where we lived for a time after the war. tashkent was the place in russia to which my parents were exiled during the war, near to where i was born. in der heym is the yiddish for “back home” – that is, one’s original home. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 chassidism is a devout jewish religious ideology. bundism was an east european jewish socialist ideology. serge liberman and anna mow in july 2017 (courtesy alex skovron) i have titled this essay “the other literature of australia”. by this, i mean the writing by and about migrants in australia as distinct from that which is more generally thought of as distinctively australian, and that we have in recent years come to... coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 “mugs”, “rehabilitation”, and “stitched up” ian c smith icsmithpoet@gmail.com copyright© 2021 ian c smith. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. smith’s poetry asks questions of crime and punishment from the victims’ and perpetrators’ perspectives. in “mugs” an easy victim reflects on the burglar of his house. in “rehabilitation” a former prisoner returns to his prison, converted into gentrified townhouses. in “stitched” up the boredom, inanity, banality, and a soft pain of prison life is exposed. key words: australian poetry; crime; punishment; victims; perpetrators. mailto:icsmithpoet@gmail.com coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 “mugs” a strange impression persists; i leaf through a contemporary book of the dead, sightless funerary masks, some with closed eyes, others, bloodied faces, corpses photographed in a morgue, some girls who look young enough to attend primary school. shameful stuff. the sergeant interrupts several times to prompt me about race, mentioning a line-up. what if i turn a page, meet him face-to-face once more? i do. there he is. longer hair, younger, needing a shave, shorter than i guessed after his shadow filled my bedroom doorway, this photo two years old. what has he done since then? burgs, obviously, you fool. how do i waste my life? let me count the ways. but this is no love poem in evening classes. disoriented, i find him in another album slouched, looking decrepit, as if he slept under a railway viaduct. we can’t keep meeting like this. i attract the attention of the constable with pink cheeks, his uniform freshly laundered, mop my sweating face with a hanky. heavy keys sway like a weapon below the bustling sergeant’s huge belly. one of those fat men light on his feet. my burglar was light-footed, skinny. my burglar? when he saw me and my book he vanished quicker than youth. the sergeant says most of them aren’t real smart, yet a fingerprint blotted out one offender’s face. i wonder whose finger blocked the lens then fixed the ruined shot in the album? the intruder who stealthily forced a window, surprising us both, finding me re-reading ray carver on my bed, is good-looking in a hunted way. i agreed to the line-up but waver. what did you think would happen next? i don’t, always. think. vindictiveness flags. he armed himself with a screwdriver. that was for the window. he could have simply opened the back door, walked in. how stupid. you’ve been stupid, your own youth no golden age, common sense a phrase that irked. if you did normal things instead of forever catching up on precious lost reading time he would have heard you, slipped away unseen, leaving you to your alternative worlds. knee-jerk reaction, again, should never have come here, shall veto the line-up, say i am uncertain, confused. now that’s the truth. ****** “rehabilitation” anger off my heel for now, a murderous taste, metallic, blood in my mouth, drizzle in the yard beyond this high window, an air-slit in pitted stone the colour of bruises housing rage, terror, disgrace; sloughed up, a bucket, mat, graffiti, muscles still trembling, flesh lacerated, survival is my sole aim. if my heart shrivels i shall become a chalked outline. the boy prone on concrete, blood pooling around his head spreading ever wider filling cracks, alarmed me. captain armstrong, ‘snake’, for his venomous glare, controlled this regime; straight backed, boxing gloves displayed in his office a sign of muscular christianity, the firm instruction of young minds led astray. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 the historic c19th prison, gutted of tears, fear, yet wreathed in desolation, was sold to developers. before its makeover as townhouses it opened to the public. when i still searched for love, my then second wife, young sons, and i, joined tourists stickybeaking at forsaken souls’ lives. our guide, jim armstrong, flabby retired guard, hair, humour, thin, entertained us, a practised spiel, anecdotes about colourful inmates, reminding us to visit the souvenir shop when leaving. reaching the young offenders group area i struggle, remembered sour taste in my mouth, disoriented, itching to break out from our polite, voyeuristic seminar, step into shadow, find a vestigial echo of the vanished tool shed where i witnessed in dread a pitchfork at a terrified boy’s throat. leaving, i needed to talk, explain, but bore it, bottled up as usual. i didn’t tip jim, this actor, wanted to expose obscenity, but held that to myself, too, our boys, my salvaged life. i bought a t-shirt instead, wore it, days softening into years, until, pocked with holes, it eventually fell away into my foul ragbag of reminiscence. ****** “stitched up” no happy hearths for us. in the slowness of days while the lights of cities go on and off we work the dormitories for cigarettes, currency of the convicted, minor industries thriving in this chapel of corruption, regulations our enemy. dickie, who has already boxed in the tents, skin, features, gravelly pronunciation harbouring a vestige of his downtrodden people’s true australian tongue, contrasts with me, my skin pale, pimply, much taller, less brave, both adrift in the undertow of a treacherous tide, surviving. alert to venomous prejudice of outsiders, incomers, the disabled, the different, flotsam washed up on these isolated shores, my speech, london’s foggy guttural erased, sets up the entertainment, a ringmaster’s spiel to those whose lives have been fistfuls of pain, redemption a haven too far. if we feign placidity supervision is soft between grub and lights out at nine. after each boy hands over tobacco i thread a needle, cotton white for dramatic effect – how we came by these humble items for legerdemain beyond me now – before transporting dickie into his spirit world by muttering great bulldust as he calls it when we are alone together, that odd friendship of cast out boys. svengali sentenced, i hush them quiet as night, the only thing missing, a mopoke’s ancient call, hand the needle to dickie who flutters his black eyelashes, rhythmically whispering the names of racehorses backwards as practised, before opening his mouth wide, bad boys bored no longer, jostling to spot any hanky-panky. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 he pierces his plump cheek, a silvery glint emerging through the outside of his expressionless face eliciting disgusted oaths, some demanding he stop, as he pulls the entire shaft trailing cotton through, blood the climax, bright against white, a droplet left on his cheek as i snap my fingers to break the spell, bring him back, to survival, cigarettes. ian c. smith was born in the uk and, after migrating to australia, eventually settled in the gippsland lakes district of south-east victoria. smith overcame a period of criminal activity and subsequent imprisonment to see the value of word power, to educate himself and to write poetry and short stories. he wrote about these experiences in an article in overland in 1997. his poetry has appeared in cordite, divan, social alternatives, new england review, other voices (canada), the perfect diary and poetry new zealand (www.austlit.edu.au). article coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 king neptune, the mermaids, and the cruise tourists: the line-crossing ceremony in modern passenger shipping d a v i d c a sh ma n southern cross university david.cashman@scu.edu.au copyright©2019 david cashman. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the line-crossing ceremony is an ancient maritime tradition that marked the transition from inexperienced sailor to experienced sailor. this ceremony has been coopted by the cruise industry for the purposes of portrayal and commercialisation of the heritage of passenger shipping for consumption by cruise tourists. this paper discusses this process of adoption and commodification of the traditional crossing the line ceremony by the modern cruise industry. while the cruise ship version bears some similarities to the traditional ceremony, it differs in purpose, the brutality of the original version is lessened, and the gender onboard cruise ships permits a difference in the makeup of participants (including the portrayal of mermaids) and a reduction in the need for transvestite performances. it exists for two reasons: for the amusement and diversion of passengers, and in an attempt to buttress the historical portrayal of cruise ship as part of a naval tradition. data is drawn from interviews with cruise ship workers and published accounts of the ceremony by cruise tourists. keywords: cruise industry, line-crossing ceremony, mermaids, passenger shipping, commodification on the back deck of a modern cruise ship in the middle of the atlantic — or the pacific, it doesn’t really matter which — a curious ceremony is taking place. despite the luxurious and pampered nature of cruise tourism, passengers and a few crew are submitting to having food smeared over them. the (invariably male) cruise director, dressed in a white mailto:david.cashman@scu.edu.au mailto:david.cashman@scu.edu.au coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 sheet in facsimile of a toga, wearing a long straggly beard and holding a trident, watches on, grinning. the (usually male) assistant cruise director stands beside him in drag wearing a green wig and a green shiny dress. several female entertainment staff are dressed as mermaids. musicians play music on trumpets, trombones and saxophones and besmeared passengers are accused of ridiculous grievances before being pushed one by one into the increasingly fouled water. the cruise director rouses himself to read loudly from a scroll in archaic language. hundreds of laughing and jeering passengers and a few bemused crew watch this bizarre ceremony. the ship has not been taken over by mutineers or pirates or madmen; rather this is the modernised and touristically adapted version of the ancient line-crossing ceremony. humans have ventured seaward for millennia; yet the sea is an unnatural place for humans. we cannot easily exist there and it is fraught with danger. because of this strangeness, over the centuries, superstitions and arcane beliefs, rites of passage and protection, and stories of monsters gained currency among those who took to the sea. sailors know one of these rites as the line-crossing ceremony. this ritual is a rite of passage for new sailors whenever a ship crosses the equator. the ceremony divides a ship’s company into those who have already crossed the equator (called ‘trusty shellbacks’) and those who have not (‘filthy pollywogsi’). while modern merchant and military vessels continue to perform this ceremony, it is also reconstructed aboard modern cruise ships. the modified and hyperreal cruise version exists as a diversion for guests rather than a ritual trial by fire. it is an attempt by cruise ships to co-opt this historical maritime tradition to create a facade of the heritage of maritime travel for consumption by guests. the production of ‘heritage’ and ‘the golden age of shipping’ is one of the selling points of modern cruise tourism (cashman and hayward, 2015). in this paper, i reflect on the differences between the commercial cruise and the traditional versions of this rite, including the inclusion of mermaids in the cruise version, the alteration from a rite of passage to amusing diversion, and the fabrication of historical verisimilitude for consumption by cruise tourists. the implementation of this ancient ritual demonstrates how the cruise industry constructs fabricated and hyperreal versions of maritime history for consumption by cruise tourists to enhance the importance and status of the cruise ship experience. data for the paper is drawn from several sources, including my own experiences observing cruise ship ceremonies in the pacific and atlantic oceans. augmenting my own observation are interviews with 14 working ship musicians and online accounts of the cruise ship tourists. these responses were analysed using a grounded theory methodology. the line-crossing ceremony coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 the line-crossing ceremony is an ancient maritime tradition. the ships of many seafaring nations participate in this ceremony, called neptunusfeest (neptune festival) or zeedoop (sea baptism) in dutch, hønses for linjen (footing for the line) in danish, linientaufen (baptism at the line) or äquatortau-fen (equator baptism) in german, and passage de la ligne (crossing the line) in french (bronner, 2006). it is a maritime rite of passage — from inexperience to experience, from purity to corruption, and from peril to safety. new sailors (pollywogs) are considered weak, feminised, young landlubbers. this is in sharp contrast to experienced sailors (shellbacks) who are regarded as superior and masculinised but also evil and corrupted by neptunus rex, the king of the seas. by participation in the ceremony, thereby paying homage to and consequently being corrupted by neptunus rex, sailors are kept safe. traditional naval ceremonies and cruise ship ceremonies share features, but also maintain unique characteristics. the origins of the ceremony itself are unclear and largely lost to history. lovette (1939) cites the vikings as an early source, but provides no evidence. the equator itself was only crossed by documented western ships in the 1470s in great trepidation of boiling seas, sea monsters and running off the end of the world and into hell (rodrigues, 2013: 238). the first written reference to any ceremony associated with the equator dates from 1529, during a voyage from france to sumatra by french sailors jean and raoul parmentier. an account of this voyage described a ceremony celebrating the crossing of the equator by “knighting” new sailors (hersh, 2002; bronner, 2006; rodrigues, 2013). the dutch had developed a form of the line-crossing ceremony by 1583 and jan huyghen van linschoten, travelling to the west indies, described it as an “ancient custome” (bronner, 2006: 34). gradually the french adopted these traditions and by the 1670s it was also being performed on british ships. the 1705 gentleman’s dictionary (guillet, 1705: listed under ‘line’) describes a “ridiculous ceremony” when “sailors [who] cross the line, or tropic, that have not bin there before ... must pay certain forfeitures demanded of them, or else be duck’d, or baptiz’d (as they call it,) either from the main-yard-arm, or otherwise”. the entry notes that several nations practise it, “indispensably in east india voyages; and each practices it differently: nay, those of the same nation puts it in execution in different manner” (ibid). the tradition of the line-crossing ceremony continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. passenger shipping adopted this tradition early. it existed on the packet sailing ships of the early 19th century (north wales chronicle and general advertiser, 1828: 12) but seems to have fallen into disuse on passenger sailing ships at the end of the 19th century because of an “increase of steamships and frequent and rapid passages” (the clarence river advocate, 1901: 6). in the 1930s, passenger lines reintroduced the ceremony as a part of an equator crossing (the sphere, 1931: 411; the argus, 1936: 8). it was even performed aboard the airship graf zeppelin (the advertiser 1930: 18). by the late 1950s, the ceremony was an advertising point for cruising (the sphere 1959: 41). the modern cruise industry, which rose with norwegian cruise lines, royal caribbean and carnival in the late 1960s and early 1970s, did not at first adopt the line-crossing ceremony as early coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 runs did not take them to the equator. rather, traditional lines such as new zealand’s matson line (koenig, 1968) continued to mount these. by the mid 1970s, upscale cruise lines such as royal viking line were undertaking world cruises (guylay, 1975). even today, it tends to be mid-range and expensive cruise lines, such as regent, crystal, cunard and silversea that mount these as these lines are more likely to cross the equator. the more accessible carnival and royal caribbean lines tend to stick to cruising in the profitable caribbean, alaskan, european and australian markets. however, any cruise ship that crosses the equator, whether as part of a world cruise, a south american cruise, or a repositioning cruise, is almost certain to perform the line-crossing ceremony. the traditional naval line-crossing ceremony takes several days and includes several prescribed participants: the ceremonies are orchestrated and run by king neptune’s court, headed by neptunus rex himself — traditionally the oldest or most senior shellback in the crew. other members of the “royal court” assist him, including davy jones, the mythological evil spirit of the sea; her highness amphitrite, often a young seaman in a costume of seaweed and rope; the scribe; the doctor; and the barber. other members often include the royal baby, usually the fattest man in the crew wearing only a diaper; the navigator; the chief bear and his assistants, the latter of whom perform the dunkings; the chaplain; jesters; and the devil. the royals also have a secretary, sometimes known as a clerk, notary, or chancellor, whose job is to enter the names of the candidates to be sentenced by the court. the king’s entourage also includes a judge — davy jones sometimes performs this function — who passes sentence on the pollywogs (wildenberg, 2014: 55). little is known about the origin of neptune’s court in this ceremony. some characters exist outside of this ritual but they have been taken from multiple traditions. neptunus rex is roman, based on neptune, the god of the sea. amphitrite,ii comes from greek mythology, and was a nereid (sea nymph), the wife of poseidon.iii the origins of davy jones, the sailors’ devil, are unclear. some origin stories say davy jones was the captain of the legendary ghost ship, the flying dutchman, doomed with his ship to wander the seas forever unable to make port. others that jones is a corruption of the biblical story of jonah. no-one is quite sure (mambra, 2018, andrews, 2017). outside of this ritual, there is no evidence for a court of king neptune with barbers, surgeons, secretaries, or chancellors. the court makeup seems to have developed over time. bronner (2006) identifies eight stages in the traditional form of the line-crossing ceremony: coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 1. new sailors are separated from home. they may go through a basic training before being assigned to a ship. they are told that they will become more mature and stronger as sailors. 2. the ship becomes a separate world, and its inhabitants, a family. pollywogs may be forbidden to participate in activities that are enjoyed by shellbacks. pollywogs must give proper respect to shellbacks. 3. the day before the equator is crossed, this established order is violated. pollywogs may stage the mock ‘wog rebellion’. this can include a ‘bitch contest’ comprised of sailors in drag and culminates in the crowning of the ‘wog queen’. at this stage, davy jones appears on the ship and warns the captain he is in neptune’s domain with pollywogs on board, and to expect king neptune and his court onboard at a certain time to impose fitting trials and punishment 4. on the day of the crossing, the shellbacks take back control of the ship through trickery, complicity, and villainy. dressed as pirates or as equatorial natives (called ‘cannibals’), shellbacks hoist a pirate or shellback flag and wake the pollywogs earlier than usual. before the arrival of neptunus rex, pollywogs undergo ritual humiliations. ◦ they may be physically attacked with rope, rubber hose, or hand-driven generators. they may be verbally attacked as ‘slimy pollywogs’. individuals, unpopular or distinctive in some way, may be targeted for special treatment. ◦ they may be forced to undergo homoerotic acts such as retrieving objects from the anus of other sailors. ◦ they may be forced to wear blindfolds or wear clothes backwards. ◦ they may be forced through garbage chutes. ◦ they may be fed sickening substances to swallow or fed a ‘wog breakfast’ in a trough without implements. ◦ as polluted pollywogs, flour, eggs, and other less pleasant substances may be applied to their hair and genitals. greasy substances, representing excrement, may be poured over the pollywogs. ◦ they may be hosed down or forced to strip naked. 5. at the appointed time, neptunus rex appears to mediate on behalf of the pollywogs, accompanied by his court. he greets the captain and assumes command of the ship. 6. pollywogs are tested, interrogated, judged, and punished. the shellbacks present the pollywogs to neptune and his court for testing. neptune prescribes punishments such as faked dental exams by the royal doctor, botched haircuts and shaves by the royal barber, kissing the royal baby, beatings, or being doused with seawater. under verbal examinations, the royal doctor may administer a ‘truth serum’ comprising a liquid with hot sauce. pollywogs may be ‘executed’ and put in coffins by the royal executioner. 7. in a struggle between the worlds of the pollywog and shellback, pollywogs are led, sometimes struggling, to a tank of water and forcibly dunked. once they coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 emerge, they are questioned ‘what are you?’ and until they reply “a trusty shellback’, they are re-dunked. 8. after the ceremony, the pollywogs are transfigured as trusty shellbacks. feed and drink flow at ‘neptune’s ball’. new shellbacks receive certificates declaring them ‘trusty shellbacks’. figure 1 shows a pollywog being doused in a woodcut of an 1816 ceremony. figure 1: relation complète du naufrage de la frégate la méduse faisant partie de l'expédition du sénégal en 1816, by a. correard, h. savigny, d'anglas de praviel and paul c.l. alexandre rand des adrets the cruise version maintains a broad similarity to the traditional ceremony. alterations are for ease of consumption by cruise guests, to make the ceremony shorter, and to ameliorate the more brutal aspects of the traditional ceremony. the ceremony is generally well-known by regular cruisers, who form a significant cohort of the passengers, and tend to advertise it by word of mouth. the event is further advertised and contextualised by the cruise director after the evening show for several days before the ceremony, by the ship’s daily program, by the daily announcements over the loudspeaker and potentially within the onboard lecture series. in the days leading up to the event, participating passengers and crew — pollywogs — will have signed up at the purser’s desk and via their section heads. at about 11.30am, there will have been an announcement on the ship tannoy directing passengers to the pool decks. passengers arrive wearing old clothing that can be ruined without concern. at midday (regardless of when the ship actually crossed the equator) king neptune and queen amphitrite arrive, typically accompanied by ship musicians. they are sometimes accompanied by a reduced court consisting of perhaps coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 davy jones and one or two other courtiers. in a similar fashion to the naval ceremony, the accused are charged as pollywogs, and ‘crimes’ tallied. punishments are meted out that are amusingly humiliating and messy, often involving food made for the occasion. the punishments invariably concludes with the accused kissing a large fish drawn from the ship’s kitchen and then being thrown into the pool. after the ceremony — usually lasting about an hour — all pollywogs are determined to have become shellbacks. king neptune and queen amphitrite are then usually thrown in the pool themselves. with this, the ceremony is declared to be at an end and the cleaners then move in to return the ship to its pristine and luxurious condition. the cruise version maintains broad features of the traditional ceremony along with many of the same players, but differs in several key aspects. consumers of cruise tourism undertake cruises for enjoyment and are unlikely to take pleasure from brutal and humiliating naval rituals. neptune’s court is smaller and sometimes omitted altogether. pollywogs are voluntarily participating for fun and for the facsimile of naval heritage, whereas pollywogs in the original ceremony participate as a rite of passage. a participant describes a ceremony that took place in 1969: one of the fondest memories i have of ocean travel way back was when we crossed the equator. i transitioned from pollywog to shellback in 1969 on the tss castel felice. i was only eight years old at the time. i was brought before king neptune and was charged with the heinous crime of being a pollywog, king neptune summarily pronounced my sentence and i got doused in a lovely liquid concoction of well … let’s not go into the details of what it consisted of, but it was yuk. and thus i became a shellback. so each time i cruise i pay an ongoing penance to king neptune to thank him for allowing me to cruise upon his oceans. i do this by tossing something small and edible overboard. (dobby_the_ship_elf, 2016) while there are equivalents of bronner’s (2006: 9–14) eight stages of the traditional ceremony, these are mitigated for consumption by cruise guests. from my observation and that of several informants, there is similarity between the line-crossing ceremony of different cruise lines. 1. as new sailors are separated from land, cruise passengers are separated from home, albeit in a space that is designed to reassure them of safety and luxury. 2. the world onboard is definitely a separate and self-contained world. the onboard human societies of guests and crew are markedly different to land-based societies. 3. the established order is violated in that the back of the ship, usually the domain of sunbathing tourists, is taken over for the ceremony. announcements touting the ceremony are made in the ship news and on the public address system. 4. rather than trickery, cruise tourists are the subject of amusing and good-natured ridicule, though little of this takes place ahead of the ceremony. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 5. king neptune and his court appear in their traditional mediation role. the captain may or may not be present. the makeup of the court is changed though: traditional members of neptune’s court such as the barber and royal baby are typically not in attendance in the cruise ceremony. instead they are replaced by mermaids. 6. the pollywog guests are led out tied together by their hands and presented to king neptune who metes out various ridiculous ‘punishments’ for amusing ‘crimes’.iv 7. after these punishments, cruise tourists are pushed into the swimming pool paralleling the dunking of pollywogs. 8. in most cruise lines, this is where the ceremony ends. participating guests are given a certificate, certifying them as a ‘trusty shellback’. some cruise lines mount an evening ‘neptune’s ball’ (the telegraph, 2016) figure 2: king neptune and queen amphitrite arrive on a cruise ship for the linecrossing ceremony coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 figure 3: mermaids, pirates, and musicians during a line-crossing ceremony. (photo courtesy of gary bembridge, www.tipsfortravellers.com) the cruise and naval ceremonies considered the cruise version of the line-crossing ceremony has points in common with the naval version. it is clearly recognisable with many of the same characters as the original. bronner’s eight stages are still observable. however, it varies in three particular ways. first, the makeup of neptune’s court is different due to the greater availability of female crew, for ease of consumption by cruise guests, and out of consideration of the potential offence taken by guests. secondly, the purpose is different. the traditional ceremony is a ritual of protection and of transition whereas the cruise version is a diversion and attempt to reinforce the historicity of shipping and the purported unbroken line of authenticity from naval ships to cruise ships. thirdly, because of this different purpose, the brutality of the ritual is ameliorated to allow consumption by cruise tourists. participants vary from the traditional ceremony to the cruise version. the traditional ceremony includes neptunus rex and his court. neptunus rex is a corruptor of sailors, malevolent and impetuous, capable of saving or claiming a sailor swept overboard. the members of his court are brutal and equally malevolent. despite being portrayed as elderly, he brandishes a trident, a symbol of virility. an entourage of supernatural beings accompanies him, all of whom, like the pollywogs and shellbacks, are subservient to him. in the cruise version, however, this entourage is different. neptunus rex and amphitrite are in attendance, but the ceremony includes few of the traditional courtiers. the addition http://www.tipsfortravellers.com/ http://www.tipsfortravellers.com/ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 to the modern cruise version that is not regularly in the traditional ceremony is mermaids. early accounts of the traditional line-crossing ceremony do not mention them as taking part in the line-crossing ceremony. in the original naval line-crossing ceremony, female characters were (and are) performed by males in drag. given the era in which the ceremony originated, and the relative commonness of drag on the male-dominated stages of shakespeare and marlowe, perhaps this is not too surprising. while cross-dressed performances as mermaids did feature in some traditional ceremonies (hersh, 2002), they were not a regular inclusion. an account from 1920 of edward viii (then prince of wales) partaking in a naval line-crossing ceremony describes a “leggy, rope skirted amphitrite, and the aged and rouge-cheeked mermaid who attended her” (the times of india, 1920: 3), though this appears to have been unusual as other accounts do not mention mermaids. bronner (2006) notes that this representation of the feminine by the masculinised sailors is absurd, outlandish and sexualised, a portrayal of the transition from the feminised and ‘attractive’ pollywog to the tougher, grizzled and evil shellback. traditional drag performances during the line-crossing ceremony are not feminised, but rather masculinised in opposition to their costumes in a similar way to that of pipe band performers wearing kilts (tye, 2014). gender — portrayed or actual — is less important than performance and the need to fill the historical roles. drag portrayals aboard cruise ships are different. the full entourage of neptune’s court is usually replaced by mermaids. mermaids are among the most identifiable mythological creatures associated with the sea. in the form of sirens from ancient mythology, they were omens and provokers of disaster, sexually desirable, and tempters of sailors (alexander, 2012: 90). however, the modern ideal of the mermaid is of more benevolent (but still overtly sexual) beings, as typified by daryl hannah’s madison character in splash (1984) (hayward, 2017). within the context of the cruise line-crossing ceremony, mermaids are regarded as a popular and sexually desirable and are portrayed beautifully, rather than in a drag performance by a hairy sailor. drag and cross-dressing does exist on cruise ships, in particular regular drag performances by dominantly filipino staff in the crew bar. however, on a cruise ship, females are comparatively in abundance (zhao, 2002: 5), so there is less need for drag portrayals to cover the roles required for the ceremony. the mermaids depicted on the cruise ship version are traditionally played by young female staff. the dancers from the production show cast are often given this role as they are, by the nature of the work they chosen for, young and attractive. alternatively, they may be chosen from the other entertainment staff including youth workers or cruise assistants. in this role, they will dress up in costumes that are often green and shiny and which are designed to portray a facsimile of a fish’s tail (see figure 3). their role is to attend king neptune and assist in the management of pollywog passengers. cruise ship entertainment is designed specifically to give no offence, and the sight of drag performances could conceivably displease some socially conservative guests. the line-crossing ceremony as performed on cruise ships is a historical and heritage product that packages and confers a sense of naval history for the consumption of cruise coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 guests. the industry portrays concepts that are of use to it in its creation of diversions for guests. one of these is the concept of the heritage of passenger shipping. this can be observed in onboard signifiers that reference popular cultural images of the golden age of passenger shipping, such as the costume and performances of musicians on board, ballroom dance, and naval ritual such as the ‘captain’s cocktail party’, ‘formal nights’ where the wearing of tuxedos is encouraged or mandatory, and by the line-crossing ceremony. the original ceremony is a rite of passage for sailors who become more masculine and worthy sailors. the cruise ceremony is a farce; a diversion with which tourists can safely interact. it is a signifier of history and heritage, but does not depict it accurately. though the modern ceremony differs markedly from the original in several key aspects, it is similar enough to be recognisable. because of this difference of purpose, the cruise version is performed in an altered fashion with several of the more brutal rituals removed. the purpose of the original is for pollywogs to display their worth in order to transition by a trial by fire to the exalted status of shellback. however, there is no great difference between shellbacks and pollywogs among tourists, many of whom are older than their counterpart pollywogs would be on naval vessels. participation is optional for guests and enforced for naval personnel. the result is a playful, hyperreal representation of the linecrossing ceremony that emphasises fun and inclusiveness rather than the rigours of naval life and a transition from inexperienced to experienced sailor. cruise tourism, space, ritual and the line-crossing ceremony tourism is a production industry whereby experiences are packaged for consumption by tourists (cohen, 1988; pine and gilmore, 1998, 1999; chhabra, healy and sills, 2003; tung and ritchie, 2011). in particular, cruise ships are packaged tourist experiences with unique characteristics. a hyperreal tourism product, the cruise industry packages and improves reality (berger, 2004, 2011; kulhanek, 2012; cashman, 2013), creating experiences with which tourists playfully interact (feifer, 1985; wang, 1999; yarnal and kerstetter, 2005). cruise ships are places of transition referred to by augé (1992) as nonlieux and by relph (1976) as a state of placelessness. while cruise ships exist in one geographical point, this point is mobile. relph points out that the process of a ‘space’ becoming a ‘place’ occurs within the process of human naming and, the ocean being, for the greater part, uninhabitable by humans, it is not as precisely named. cruise ships therefore have less relation to geographical space. yet they are also mobile geographies unto themselves. these are some of the largest manmade spaces of inhabitation, with the largest measuring 360 metres by 60 metres. the spaces contained herein become places by naming them both in nautical tradition (starboard/port, forward/aft) and by name (the ‘emerald lounge’, the ‘red lion pub’, the ‘queen’s room’). these spaces are not actually lounges, pubs or ballrooms, but are fabrications. thus cruise ships are also coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 hyperreal spaces where the boundary between reality and fantasy is blurred (eco, 1987). the line-crossing ceremony is particularly noteworthy as one of the few examples of the non-space of the cruise ship interacting with geographical space in the wide ocean. ships broadly are spaces of liminality (lett, 1983; yarnal and kerstetter, 2005; kriwoken and hardy, 2018). the fetters of everyday life are off and participants are free to act in manners they would not on land. on board a cruise ship, this can mean indulging in the luxury of the ship, going to see live entertainment every night, travelling to exotic places, and participating in faux-naval ceremonies. the very liminality of the ship, whether naval, merchant or passenger, permits and mandates rites of passage such as the line-crossing ceremony (van gennep, 1909; turner, 1969, 1974). the pollywog and shellback tribes are discrete and delineated by participation in this rite of passage. onboard the various ships, participants in the line-crossing ceremony are separated not only from everyday life on land, but from everyday life onboard the ship. on the cruise ship, they are grouped, wearing old clothes and are the object of derision by the other passengers and the crew. during the ceremony, they enter a space of liminality where they are neither pollywog nor shellback. they prove themselves worthy of the title of shellback by trial of initiation. at the completion of the ceremony, they emerge proclaimed by king neptune as trusty shellbacks and certified as such. cruise passengers can even indulge the conceit that they are actually shellbacks, as can be observed in the aforementioned quote by dobby the_ship_elf. the line-crossing ceremony invokes the hyperreality inherent in cruise tourism in three manners: the artifice of the ceremony, the artifice of the involvement of the actors, and the artifice of the participation of the passengers. reality and fantasy are blurred by the ceremony itself. the ceremony is not the traditional one that marks the important transition of sailors from pollywogs to shellbacks; while the ceremony is memorable to tourists, it is of marginal significance to them. further, the cruise director is not king neptune. nor are cruise tourists actual sailors going through the ceremony put through the brutality of the traditional ceremony. they are fabricatedly taking part in the ceremony. passengers go through a construction of the ritual rather than the actual ritual. they are not beaten. they do not have to drink hot sauce or eat days old food. the ceremony is a farce, representative of the naval tradition, but different to it. conclusion the line-crossing ceremony continues to be performed on military vessels, though it has changed as well. increasingly since the 1980s women have actively served aboard naval vessels of various nationalities, thereby changing the power relationship of the traditional weak and feminised pollywogs to strong and masculinised shellbacks. the tolerance for hazing rituals has decreased in recent years. although the ceremony still occurs, it has coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 changed. one of bronner’s (2006: 51) informants noted that “that crawling on non-skid surfaces was eliminated as were the eating of cherries out of the royal belly and crossdressing in the wog contest”. although it still exists, the line-crossing ceremony is regarded with suspicion by the public. by contrast, the line-crossing ceremony on cruise ships maintains its popularity. while it bears some verisimilitude to the traditional ceremony, it differs in purpose, the brutality of the original version is lessened, and the gender balance onboard cruise ships permits a difference in the makeup of neptune’s court (including the portrayal of 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(2015) what is a king neptune ceremony?, cruise advice. http://www.cruiseadvice.com.au/2015/11/onboard-king-neptune-ceremony/. the advertiser (1930) ‘graf zeppelin arrives at pernambuco: crossing the line ceremony’, the advertiser 22 may: 18 the argus (1936) ‘sea days to remember’, 30 october: 8 the clarence river advocate (1901) ‘crossing the line’, the argus 31 may: 6 the sphere (1931) ‘crossing the line: the fifth of a series of short articles describing life on board and ports of call encountered on an ocean cruise’, the sphere 5 december: 411 the sphere (1959) ‘holidays at sea; on inland waterways; and other excursions’, the sphere 3 january: 41 the telegraph (2016) ‘strange but true: 10 bizarre cruising customs’, the telegraph june 6: travel 2. the times of india (1920) ‘crossing the line: the prince “baptised.”’, the times of india 11 may: 3 tung, v. w. s. and ritchie, j. r. b. (2011) ‘exploring the essence of memorable tourism experiences’, annals of tourism research v38 n4: 1367–86 turner, v. (1969) the ritual process, the ritual process structure an antistructure, ithaca: cornell university press turner, v. (1974) ‘pilgrimage and communitas’, studia missionalia n23: 305–27 tye, d. (2014) ‘“what’s under the kilt?” intersections of ethnic and gender performativity’, in greenhill, p. and tye, d. (eds) unsettling assumptions: tradition, gender, drag, logan: utah state press: 191–207 wang, n. (1999) ‘rethinking authenticity in tourism experience’, annals of tourism research, v26 n2: 349–70 wildenberg, t. (2014) ‘neptune’s band of brothers’, naval history v28 n6: 54–7. yarnal, c. m. and kerstetter, d. (2005) ‘casting off: an exploration of cruise ship space group tour behavior, and social interaction’, journal of travel research v43 n4: 368–79 zhao, m. (2002) emotional labour in a globalised labour market: seafarers on cruise ships, cardiff: seafarers international research centre (sirc) coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 bionote: david cashman is a pianist, music educator, researcher, performer and industry advocate. he is an adjunct associate professor at southern cross university. david researches live music performance and industry particularly in regional areas, within tourism, and the performance practice thereof. he is an advocate for regional music scenes and a founder of the regional music research group. his book performing popular music written with dr waldo garrido, is being released through routledge in december 2019. endnotes i a pollywog is a late middle english term for a tadpole. however, the origin of the usage of ‘shellback’ and ‘pollywog’ in this instance is unknown. ii both king neptune and queen amphitrite are characters in the animated us television show spongebob squarepants (1999– ), presumably taken from this ritual. both are portrayed as mer-people. iii in roman mythology, the consort of neptune was salacia, the goddess of salt water. iv one participant recorded that: for their crimes, the pollywogs are subjected to a serious of “humiliating” punishments for the amusement of the assembled crowd. “wearing a speedoiv on the pool deck” for one older gentlemen. “cutting in line at the breakfast buffet” for another lady as the standard of such indiscretions. in my case, my crime of “having limited french linguistic skills,” resulted in a fourpronged sentence: arm crawling across a tarp covered in dishwashing liquid — my comical struggle for propulsion was met with laughter from the crowd, kissing neptune’s feet, kissing a fish for good luck and finally crossing the line by swimming under a rope in the ships pool marked the end of my penance. (smith, 2015) coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 serge liberman. a story arnold zable abstract. a portrait of serge liberman, as i knew him, drawing parallels between his work as a physician and writer. as a storyteller serge drew on many sources. my focus here is on his roots, as an emigrant, and as a doctor who practiced in immigrant neighbourhoods, carlton and brunswick. he wrote in the tradition of earlier melbourne based immigrant yiddish writers, pinchas goldhar and bergner, exploring similar themes of displacement, exile and longing. he drew also on older traditions of yiddish literature, writers such as isaac bashevis singer. but serge was more forgiving of human foibles, less judgemental, a documenter of symptoms, both in the consulting room, and at the writer’s desk. here, i pay tribute to him, as one storyteller to another, in the form of a story about serge, the storyteller, and friend. key words: serge liberman, storyteller, physician, displacement, exile, longing. serge liberman was a fellow writer. he was also my doctor. my gp: general practitioner. it is an apt term. serge practiced both medicine and literature. he approached his twin vocations in the same way. as a doctor, he was meticulous and methodical. he erred on the side of caution. he took his time. he followed procedure. he practiced the old ways: stethoscope. taps on the chest. blood pressure test. hands pressed on the stomach, probing for the telling detail. whatever the symptoms, good or otherwise, serge entered the findings into the records in his tiny handwriting. his medical scripts were almost illegible. after each consultation, he took his notes to the front desk to be fed into the computer. in all his dealings with staff, he appeared polite and concise. i observed this many times as i sat in the waiting room before an appointment—serge walking from his room, handing over the papers at the front desk, focused on his task, bar a quiet nod in my direction. he was on familial terms with his colleagues—his relationship leavened by a quiet warmth, yet tinged by an edge of shyness. the heart of the practice was an enduring medical partnership, and friendship, between serge and dr magdy ramzy, a coptic egyptian. copyright ©arnold zable 2019. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 then it was my turn to sit in his modest consulting room. first, the check-up, a specific problem to be dealt with, my annual blood tests. serge noted the slightest deviation from the norm, and discussed them with me. he suggested follow ups to make sure all was in order. once the official business was over, we talked literature. i must confess we spent more time discussing books and writing, than we did on the consultation. timewise the scales tipped decidedly to literature over medicine; but in truth, the two vocations, and disciplines, fed each other. serge was a writer and physician who paid attention to human afflictions, whether of the body or spirit. he was my father’s physician too. as meier zable aged, serge did house calls. like father, like son: first serge would fulfil his medical task. then they would talk literature. serge came calling in the afternoon, after his morning consultations. the streets of carlton and the inner suburbs, were quiet in my father’s final decades. not as they had been, back in the post-war years when our mothers and fathers, serge and mine’s alike, made their way from the old world to what they called the new: seeking ‘firmer shores’ as serge names it in the title of his first collection of stories. my family settled in working class, immigrant carlton. serge’s in an equivalent suburb in bayside st kilda. whenever he published a new book, serge would present it to father. inscribed to mr zable, in that characteristic small script of his. my father loved the stories. they spoke to him because they were modest, and because they depicted human suffering, and modest aspiration. with the occasional outburst, in some of his characters, of feverish messianic visions. meier once told me that serge’s stories reminded him of the works of i.l. peretz, whose tales drew on yiddish folklore, and on the little things in which life is writ large. meier notated serge’s books in the margins like a talmudic scholar. father was a reader who conducted conversations, in writing, with his favourite writers, jotting his responses in the book, in notebooks, and on scraps of paper. picture the scene. serge draws up to the house on 387 canning street. he steps out of the car, carrying his black medical kit: briefcase size, akin to a small suitcase. he climbs the four stone stairs of the single-fronted victorian terrace, to the veranda. meier is at his makeshift desk, the dressing table in the front room. the window looks out onto the median strip, graced by palms and poplars. and yes, it is quiet. it is the paradox of gentrification. carlton, the setting for several liberman stories, had become middle class by the 1980s. visiting my father, for serge, was like stepping back in time, to the suburb as it was, when he first began practicing there. serge was at ease in the company of older people, and it appeared, more at home in times long past. warsaw was his spiritual home. before the catastrophe. perhaps as far back as pre-ww1, when peretz held court in literary warsaw and mentored many young yiddish writers. he grounded them in the history, ethics, and the scriptures and traditions of his people. serge would have felt very much at home in this setting. it is telling that serge moved from the carlton consulting rooms of the earlier years to a medical centre in sydney road, brunswick, where he treated a new generation of immigrants. many had recently emigrated from countries in the middle east. in search of firmer shores. they were first generation settlers, reminiscent, in their status, of the jewish, greek and italian immigrants who populate carlton and the inner suburbs in the immediate coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 post-war years. they lived alongside working class australians, whose families had dwelt in these suburbs for generations. serge thrived in the brunswick environment. he felt at home. he would drive in from glen iris, the middle class outer suburb where he lived, to a neighbourhood rich in diversity. serge was a firm believer in free medical care. he bulk billed his patients, and earned their trust through his methodical ways. some of his patients repaid him with little gifts—figurines, miniature statuettes, of glass, ceramic and porcelain—that serge loved collecting. chachkes, he called them, in yiddish, meaning toys, knickknacks. little indulgences. serge displayed them on the shelf of a book case in his consulting room. serge’s medical practice grounded him. working in brunswick kept him touch with the everyday dramas, the small things. human indulgences. the figurines reflected serge’s way of looking at things, and at people—the warts on the smooth skin, and the lesions in the soul. there are things i did not, and still do not know about serge. despite our long friendship, and our many conversations, serge was somewhat guarded. his manner was restrained. even as we conversed, he seemed preoccupied. he appeared calm and somewhat dreamy on the surface, yet, you sensed that he was churning with complex and conflicting ideas, thoughts, and emotions. and you sensed the wistfulness, and his regrets and misgivings. there were things, it seemed, that serge kept out of bounds. or, perhaps, reserved for his stories. his reticence was reflected in the way he dressed. i cannot recall much, if any, deviation, from his grey and beige v-necked jumpers, over a light blue shirt, and beige poplin trousers. regardless of the weather or season. he did not care for outer appearances. his inner world, and his overactive mind, was reflected in his writings. in his first collection of stories, published while serge was in his thirties, he appears old before his time. his characters are acutely aware of the passing of time. they too seethe with the inner life. the outside world intrudes, from time to time, and when it does, it dazzles. many of serge’s characters engage in internal monologues. on the surface, it was the little things that drew serge. the small afflictions and foibles, the self-doubts and thwarted ambitions, that, when added up, over years of storytelling, and six collections, ninety-seven tales by one count—made up an epic of the immigrant experience. he was a pioneer in this respect, the heir of melbourne based yiddish writers, pinchas goldhar and herz bergner, who wrote tales of immigrant jews of an earlier generation, often set in carlton, st kilda and the inner suburbs, in the 1920s through to the 1960s. goldhar died in 1947. bergner, who arrived in melbourne in 1937, kept writing, until his death in the 1960s. serge took up the baton soon after. but to pigeonhole serge as a writer of the immigrant experience, would be to diminish his achievement—it was also the universal human experience that serge wrote of. his stories reflect his own questing. the small things give way to philosophical musings. his characters’ grapple with the big questions. serge paints them with an underlying current of forgiveness. i would say he was more forgiving than goldhar and bergner, who often wrote with bitter irony, and with a suspicion of social climbers, and scorn for those who forsook their roots in their search for acceptance. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 serge did not sit in judgement. instead, like the doctor he was, he recorded the symptoms. the telling signs. his stories can be viewed as consultations. bearing in mind serge as i knew him, his tales seem to imply—there for the grace of whoever, go i. or indeed, there have i, in fact, gone. we are all in it together. sit down. roll up your sleeve. open your shirt. breath in deeply. exhale slowly. and tell me. what ails you? bio note: arnold zable is an award winning writer, storyteller, educator, and human rights advocate. his books include jewels and ashes, (scribe, 1991) which won five australian literary awards, and depicts his journey to poland to trace his ancestry. jewels and ashes was also published in the usa by harcourt brace in 1993. wanderers and dreamers, (hyland house, 1998) is a book of tales that depict the history of yiddish theatre in australia. zable's best selling novel, cafe scheherazade, (text, 2001) depicts the lives of former refugees who now meet in a coffee shop in a seaside suburb in melbourne. the fig tree, (text, 2002) is a book of true stories set in greece, eastern europe, inner melbourne and outback australia. the fig tree cd, a musical companion to the book, won the national folk recording award in 2004. his novel scraps of heaven, (text, 2004) is set in the post-war immigrant community of the melbourne suburb, carlton. his latest novel sea of many returns, was published by text in june 2008. arnold zable's most recent book, violin lessons was published in august 2011 to critical acclaim. formerly a lecturer in the arts faculty in melbourne university, zable has worked in the usa, papua new guinea, china, and many parts of europe and southeast asia, zable is the author of numerous feature articles, columns, short stories, reviews and essays. his work regularly appears in the age and a range of journals. he has written several works for theatre, and was a co-writer of the play kan yama kan, in which asylum seekers tell their stories. zable speaks and writes with passion about memory and history, displacement and community. he has conducted numerous writing workshops and has been a visiting lecturer in creative writing at deakin, melbourne, monash, rmit, la trobe and victoria universities. (taken from arnold zable´s web page: https://www.arnoldzable.com.au/about-the-author/ ) https://www.arnoldzable.com.au/about-the-author/ coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 ‘this is getting a little too chinese for me’: the representation of china in crime fiction written in english isabel santaulària i capdevila university of lleida isantaularia@dal.udl.cat copyright©2016 isabel santaulària i capdevila. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract:the article addresses the representation of china in contemporary crime fiction written in english. a close examination of a selection of works set in china by lisa see, peter may, catherine sampson, lisa brackmann and duncan jepson reveals that, following the hardboiled tradition and crime fictions produced in post-colonial times, these narratives scrutinize the west’s many deficiencies. however, the authors do not articulate a truly postcolonial discourse aimed at destabilizing the notion of the assumed superiority of the west and its right to intrude in other countries’ affairs. furthermore, these narratives seem to be written to confirm the readers’ worst expectations about china, which is fated to stay poor, backward and ultimately other, unable to achieve some degree of ‘normalization’ or westernization that could legitimize china’s claims to modernity, improvement and ascendancy in our global economy. thus, as we vicariously travel the country through these narratives, we face the usual array of fraudsters, tricksters and blood-thirsty murderers that populate crime fictions, but it is china itself that is singled out as the true monster of the stories. keywords: crime fiction in english, china, (sino)orientalism, postcolonial/postcolonial crime fiction, lisa see, peter may, catherine sampson, lisa brackmann, duncan jepson ever since the origins of the genre, detective fiction writers have looked at foreign lands as settings for their stories. edgar allan poe situated his seminal “the murders in the rue morgue” (1841) and his other two auguste dupin mysteries – “the mystery of marie rogêt” (1842) and “the purloined letter” (1844) – in paris. successive authors chose more exotic locations like seringapatam, india, in wilkie collins’ the moonstone (1868); salt lake valley in modern utah in arthur conan doyle’s first sherlock holmes’ novella, a study in scarlet (1887); or, to mention one last example, the colonial middle east in agatha christie’s murder on the orient express (1934), murder in mesopotamia (1936) or death on the nile (1937). in fact, detective fiction was born and developed in conjunction with the british empire and, as a consequence, as critics such as upamanyu pablo mukherjee (2003), caroline reitz (2004) and stephen knight (2006) have demonstrated, the genre “is an early, often the first voice, to respond to new mailto:isantaularia@dal.udl.cat mailto:isantaularia@dal.udl.cat coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 social and cultural encounters generated by the colonial situation” (knight, 2006: 25). detective fiction not only placed its plots, or parts of them, in the colonies but the genre itself became an arena where the tensions, fears and anxieties generated by transnational contact and “unassimilated racial and cultural difference” (pearson and singer, 2009: 4) were dramatized, often using the alien locale and/or ethnic villains as sites of evil and wilderness against which british superiority, ‘civilized’ values, and authority could be asserted. in this way, detective fiction, together with the coetaneous genre of imperialist adventure, contributed to “the energizing myth of english imperialism” (white, 1993: 6) and participated in orientalist practices that, under the pretence of informing the stayat-homes about foreign lands, helped define the difference between civilization and savagery and provided a rationale for the right of “the west to control, constrain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the other” (said, 2003: 48). the allure of the foreign in crime fiction has not vanished with the dismantling of the empire; quite the opposite. firstly, an alien setting is a marketable commodity in the crowded crime writing scene. ellen carter and deborah walker-morrison draw on casanova’s thesis in the world republic of letters to explain the success of authors such as caryl férey who place their crime mysteries in foreign lands. 1 they explain, “with thousands of freshly minted novels annually clamouring for the reader’s wallet, authors cannot risk their genius languishing in publishers’ rejection piles” (2014: 19). consequently, crime fictions that approach foreign locations to local readerships are saleable since they add the mystery of the outré to the crime investigated by the detective. in this way, they become exciting alternatives to travel writing, using “strategic exoticism” (whitfield, 2008: 20) to allow readers to “embark on ‘journeys’ (from the comfort of their armchairs) not so much to explore new geographies or recently ‘discovered’ countries as to scrutinize different cultures and societies” (anderson, miranda and pezzotti, 2014: 1-2). and secondly, (to us) foreign settings are the locations of postcolonial crime stories written by authors from the ex-colonies that use the genre’s potential to delve into the dark recesses of society to explore the effects of colonialism and imperialism, challenge white supremacy and/or expose the inconsistencies and depredations of western interventionism abroad. even though these stories do not particularly present postcard images of the countries they portray, they are still exciting for readers that crave for knowledge about foreign lands, are attuned to the genre’s dismaying revelations about the workings of our world, and, at the same time, draw a certain satisfaction from the observation that the west is not without flaws, but it is infinitely better than (or, at worst, as bad as) the societies portrayed in these stories – even if the west itself is to blame for the convoluted situations in postcolonial countries, which remain “insecure, dangerous and corrupt” (christian 2010: 284). china, itself a postcolonial country, 2 has also become the chosen setting of crime stories written by american and british writers, as well as by dissident chinese living and working abroad such as qiu xiaolong or diane wei liang. to mention just a few that will be analyzed in this paper, lisa see, peter may, catherine sampson, lisa brackmann or duncan jepson, 3 all have novels with chinese detectives as protagonists situated, partly or in their totality, in different parts of china. indeed, especially in the case of lisa see and qiu xiaolong, their stories are peppered with references to traditional and popular chinese culture, particularly food, festivities, proverbs and religious practices, thus “adorning [the books] with characteristics that are unmistakably coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 ‘chinese’, especially in the eyes of the non-chinese reader” (luo, 2014: 51). 4 consequently, they “[feed] into the western imaginations of china” and do not break free from the “exoticism on the literary representation of chinese culture, as exoticism is still the hallmark that helps to sell the books” (luo, 2014: 55). 5 certainly, as a (parttime, beginner) student of mandarin chinese myself, the location of the stories and the possibility to learn more about the country is what drew me to these narratives to start with. however, these novels offer an altogether grim picture of the country, which – ridden with corruption, oppression, poverty, eco-deterioration and mass migration – seems anchored in a stubborn backwardness in spite of its great leap forward toward prosperity and its supposedly beneficial westernization. i also found that they are mostly blind to china’s colonial past and the nation’s troubled and resentful relationship with the ‘foreign devils’. in fact, references to china’s colonial history, as jeffrey c. kinkley demonstrates, do not figure much, either, in detective fiction by chinese writers, mostly addressed in sub-literature produced during mao zedong’s era and used as propaganda which raised “the pitch of anti-imperialist rhetoric to unprecedented levels” by designating “all chinese history from 1840 to 1949 as ‘semi-colonial’ – that is, manipulated from afar by economic and political forces let in by the ‘unequal treaties’” (kinkley, 2001: 112-113). in turn, in detective stories set in china but written in english, mao and his infamous cultural revolution are steadily portrayed as haunting presences responsible still for the chinese protagonists’ worst nightmares and the political and social situation in which chinese citizens live nowadays. this dispiriting overview of chinese society is consistent with the demands of the genre, which, since the development of the hard-boiled tradition in the 1920s in the united states, has left its original conservatism behind to showcase the underbelly of corruption, destitution and sheer despondency which characterizes societies. as christian phrases the idea, “as a genre, detective fiction often moves from the interrogation of suspects to the interrogation of society, where crime stems from flaws in the political, social, and industrial systems” (2010: 284). in postcolonial crime fiction, this aspect of the genre has been used to take the west to task by featuring detectives who are members of the groups that “were once colonized or marginalized … struggling against neo-colonialism, assimilation, and the hegemony of western culture” (christian, 2010: 283). the novels considered in this article, mostly, but not exclusively, those which have parts of their plot situated in the united states and the united kingdom – lisa see’s the flower net (1997) and the interior (1999), peter may’s snakehead (2002), catherine sampson’s the pool of unease (2007) and the slaughter pavilion (2008), lisa brackmann’s rock paper tiger (2010) and duncan jepson’s emperors once more (2014) – do not shy away from criticizing the west. immigration policies and the fate of chinese immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the united states, for instance, are depicted as nightmarish for those involved. chinese workers were originally brought to america “to work on [the] railroad” (see, 1997: 152), 6 but after the exclusion act of 1882 “[n]o chinese were supposed to be let into the us” (see, 1997: 178), which resulted in waves of illegal chinese immigrants entering the country nevertheless, expecting “to become rich men” (see, 1997: 178) but finding poverty, destitution and abuse instead. more than a hundred years later, the situation for illegal chinese immigrants is not much better.they are still working in sweatshops or massage parlours to earn meagre salaries with which to pay back the money owed to snakeheads. if found out living illegally in the country, they are treated with contempt and indifference to basic human rights by the police and then “hauled up before the coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 immigration court and threatened with repatriation” (may, 2002: 84). even though the court is required to allow them “to make contact with their consulates, and they [have] the right to legal representation,” few of them have “access to a lawyer, never mind the means to pay for one,” (may, 2002: 169) while the law is served by “fast-mouthed conveyer[s] of ersatz justice, delivered on tap for the man with the most dollars in his hand” (may, 2002: 167). caught in the gridlock of the greed of americans and chinese alike to make money by using illegal workers and restrictive immigration policies, it comes as no surprise that chinese aliens “long for the familiar hardships of [their] home village” (see, 1997: 210) in a country where multiculturalism is only a façade of “[f]ast food joints … chinese, mexican, italian,” in a “battle between burgers and beijing duck, french fries and fajitas” (may, 2002: 179). a visitor in london, blue tang, one of the chinese protagonists of catherine sampson’s novels, experiences in her own skin the abuse against ethnic citizens. chased by hooligans who target her for her appearance – one of them tells her “i smell chinese fucking takeaway” (sampson, 2008: 186) – blue feels she has “stepped into a nightmare” where thugs “[have] white skins” and are “armed with beer bottles” (sampson 2008: 186). the ideal of a bountiful west regulated by democratic principles is further belied as the protagonists come to terms with, or simply observe, the iniquities that plague advanced countries with supposedly fully-developed civil societies. deprived expanses of “[r]otting wooden shacks with crudely patched roofs” – punctuated by “disenchanted black youths” with nothing to do apart from watching the traffic of “ancient rusting cars” limping along “pitted and potholed” roads – exist in cities such as huston, which in certain areas resembles “a shanty town on the edge of some third world city, instead of the fourth largest city of the richest country in the world” (may, 2002: 248-49). a london slum equipped with “broken windows and sheets rigged up as curtains” (sampson, 2008: 183) is populated by drunken thugs, beggars and religious fanatics. as recession hits hard in the country, especially in industrial cities, there are places “with an angry depressed feel” to them characterized by “grim housing, run-down pubs, and boarded-up shops,” revealing a decade of “economic devastation” as mills shrunk and “laid off workers” (sampson, 2007: 23). meanwhile, industries are dismantled and transplanted to countries such as china, as well as “indonesia, sri lanka, pakistan, haiti” (see, 1999: 225), where labour is cheaper and there is more profit to be made, even if this means that workers become virtual slaves in “a global market [where] there is no such thing as a minimum wage” (sampson, 2007: 138). all in all, western countries are revealed to have been built by “corporate and industrial bandits” who pull “themselves up by their boot straps by any means possible” (see, 1999: 300) and now are “eating away like insects at the rotting bamboo curtain … crawling all over everything” (sampson, 2007: 280). british and american politicians may “beat their chests about china’s unfair trade practices [or] its selling of nuclear technology to rogue nations” (see, 1999: 334); or boast about their “precious ideals of liberty and equality” (may, 2002: 321). however, they do not “look at the shades of grey in the big picture” (see, 1999: 334). in snakehead, for example, the united states is involved in cropspraying actions in coca plantations in colombia in order to “kill the plants where they grow and cut off the cocaine trade at source” (may, 2002: 160), even though they are infecting large numbers of people and animals with “pretty horrible diseases,” which is “tantamount to waging biological warfare on the people of colombia” (may, 2002: 161) and “trampling over other people’s rights and sovereignty” (may, 2002: 321). in the pool of unease, catherine sampson focuses on a fictional steel mill in northern coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 england, kelness, which she uses to showcase the irresponsibility of factory owners in their vain effort to save companies in britain’s decayed economy. kelness failed to buy radiation detection units since the monitors were too expensive. as a consequence, a “container-load of scrap from russia” which “should never have got through the gate without an alarm going on” was left at the scrapyard radiating poison for a week before “the one functioning monitor in the whole bloody place raised the alarm”(sampson, 2007: 192). and this is not to mention other cases of corruption and shady deals, as well as empire-building practices, depicted in the novels, since western governments are more interested in “guarding their budgets and their turfs” (may, 2002: 127) than in the wellbeing of their citizens or the people they exploit in third-world countries. these novels do indeed expose the underbelly of british and american societies and denounce neo-imperialist/colonial practices in china and elsewhere. however, they cannot be regarded as postcolonial texts writing “for the seat of empire, what is called the metropolis or metropole, with the aim of transforming it” (christian, 2001: 9). neither do they zero in on the ills of western societies in order to disqualify the west’s self-appointed right to interfere with the fates of people in deprived countries. also, even though they feature sympathetic chinese detectives who are sceptical about the west’s intrinsic worth, these selfsame detectives ultimately uphold western values regarding human rights and democratic principles that clash against the stringent policies and flagrant human rights violations in china – in snakehead, for instance, inspector li yan confirms that prisoners are tortured by the police, “beaten and blindfolded and stuck with … electric cattle prod[s]” in china, but “it’s never happened on my shift” (may, 2002: 44-45). furthermore, in most of the cases, members of the detectives’ families were targeted as traitors to the people’s republic of china and subjected to torture, injury or death during mao’s cultural revolution and, as a consequence, they are cynical about mao’s legacy and the country’s ensuing politics. finally, they are all fluent speakers of english, some of them – li hulan in lisa see’s novels and alex soong in jepson’s emperors once more – have even been educated in the west. all in all, they are not representatives of china’s common citizens and function instead as the authors’ figureheads that speak to and from the west to confirm the readers’ worst expectations about china and the country’s essential difference from the west. in fact, these novels are furiously engaged in the process of othering china by activating a series of strategies ultimately devised to reassure the west, if not of its superiority, at least of its inherent decency, social stability and overwhelming value in a world which has lost its master narrative of the cold war that, just a few decades ago, helped to fabricate interested knowledge of the east. to start with, these novels depict the formidable invasion of foreign companies in chinese territory taking advantage of the country’s resources and affordable land and labour prices, not to mention the huge potential of a new moneyed class eager to consume western products. in the interior city of taiyuan, for example, american companies “had set up joint-venture coal mines in the outlying areas and export companies in town” (see, 1999: 50), while australians and new zealanders were growing pigs and sheep and germans and italians brought heavy industry. in beijing, song, the private detective protagonist of catherine sampson’s novels, laments the overwhelming presence of foreigners in a city that had been isolated from the world just a decade before: coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 young europeans set up cafes on the pavements, the americans put sterneyed marines at their embassy gate, filipinas sang in hotel lounges, the french collected antiques, the italians shopped for textiles, the british opened schools for the children of the rich, the germans ran five-star hotels, the russians bartered furs, and mongolian women worked in the brothels, the koreans opened barbecue restaurants and the japanese ate raw fish and refused to apologize for history. (sampson, 2007: 280-81) however, the authors do not establish a sense of continuity between china’s colonial past and the neo-colonial practices at work in the country, as if neo-colonialism was a phenomenon that, far from revealing the west’s uninterrupted encroachment on foreign territories, has finally made chinese people aware of the opportunities and prosperity they had missed when the bamboo curtain fell. in fact, of the books analyzed in this article, only two address past colonial violations of china’s sovereignty, see’s the interior and jepson’s emperors once more. in both cases, in any case, those who criticize the west’s infringement on chinese territory are either bad or mad, or both. in the interior, amy gao – one of the characters working for the governor of shanxi province, corrupt sun gan – explains that “[for] centuries the west has wanted a piece of us … in the last century the british intoxicated us with opium, forced us to open our ports, and very nearly destroyed us” (1999: 412) and now she is against western factories being set up in china. nevertheless, she is dismissed as “either crazy or deluded” (1999: 413) and is revealed to be a murderer who killed innocent people in her race for the governorship. in emperors once more, the serial killer villain, seng pok, is a religious fanatic obsessed with the boxer revolution who wants to trigger an uprising “to restore china to its rightful place … fulfilling a destiny that will wipe away the hundreds of years of humiliation we have suffered” (2014: 275). in spite of the legitimacy of the claims of those who started the boxer revolution, in the novel it is exposed as a failure characterized by superstition, blood-lust and ineptitude; in fact, revolutions in general, like the 1967 revolts in hong kong against the british administration, are frowned upon in jepson’s novel since they result only in hundreds of victims and traumatized individuals like seng pok himself, who is, after all, moved by “an underlying rage and fury that stems from more than just politics” (2014: 371), so he is not a true revolutionary and is written off by the western-educated protagonist as “crazy” (2014: 324),“fucking deluded” (2014: 326) or “a vicious madman” (2014: 345). focusing as he does on the ex-colony of hong kong, jepson does not intend to denounce the abuse of locals by the british administration before 1997 or to address the difficult relationship between contemporary hong kong citizens and mainland china. he is concerned, instead, with undertaking a defence of progress based on the adoption of western values. in this context, mao’s revolution – no matter how pernicious it turned out to be in the end – to free china from years of subjection is presented as a big historical tantrum “led by a party of paranoia, fearing contamination” (sampson, 2007: 280) that stalled china’s progress for over four decades. consequently, even abusive foreign companies such as the fictitious knight ltd. in lisa see’s the interior, which employs female peasants in the provinces, bring prosperity to rural areas that had, in the past, been at the mercy of “famine or drought or flood” (1999: 182). in fact, “at least [the factories aren’t] the fields” (1999: 150) and even offer women the opportunity to escape from coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 “abusive fathers or unwanted marriages” or from “bandits or other rogue groups who [sweep] through remote villages kidnapping women to sell into marriages” after the one-child policy resulted in “millions of abortions of female foetuses” so “women … [have become] a valued commodity” (1999: 153). furthermore, these women send their earnings home to their peasant families or save their salaries to open little businesses, so suddenly chinese girls are “seen by their families as leaders of social and economic change; as a result … female infanticide [has] dropped for the first time in recorded history” (1999: 425). if the working conditions in foreign companies in china are bad, on the other hand, this is due to the complicity of the country itself, where it is not against the law to make money “by putting people’s health and safety in jeopardy” (see, 1999: 216). indeed, foreign businesses go overseas for “cheap labour and great tax breaks” but also because they can “skirt around … laws by hiring children, by using chemicals that would never pass [western] safety standards, by having working conditions that [are] dangerous, and by employing people for inhumane numbers of hours” (see, 1999: 223-24); after all, they are in china and they “can get away with a lot” (see, 1999: 252). also, and just in case foreign interests in china were seen as too opportunistic, the owners of american or british companies in these novels are not necessarily aware of the conditions in which their employees work– nor to be blamed for them. again, in see’s the interior, knight ltd.’s owner, henry knight, is a philanthropist for whom “china is just another cause” so he has “given money to hospitals, children’s organizations, various shelters” (1999: 117), and who thinks “he’s doing good for these people, paying them well, providing housing” (1999: 211). however, the money he sends for the company to operate goes through the area’s governor, sun gan, whom knight unwisely trusts. since “[t]his is china and sun is a smooth operator” he keeps part of the money that is supposed to be used to pay for workers’ salaries as he is implicated in a “scheme that net[s] him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year” (1999: 236). the connivance of the country’s government and chinese individuals in the abuse of their own people is also used to explain the massive diaspora of chinese citizens to the west. as one of the characters in lisa see’s the interior puts it, “even though [they] don’t admit it, every single person in china would like to leave” (see, 1999: 209), an opinion that even the cynical protagonist of peter may’s novels, li yan, corroborates when he witnesses the hardships which chinese immigrants are ready to endure to reach the united states. 7 the west, in turn and in spite of its deficiencies, is presented as a land of opportunity, freedom and justice which is offered as a better option than china by comparison. los angeles in lisa see’s the flower net, for example, is a paradise of balmy weather, carefree people, voluptuous girls, and lush spanish-style villas where the investigation the chinese and american governments conduct together moves forward with the help of “charts and … support staff,” so that officers can “cast a flower net and trap anyone or anything that lays within its reach (1997: 156). justice proceeds with search warrants and rules of evidence, unlike in beijing, where courthouses are “typically cold,” the air smells of “cigarette smoke and … fear” and death or labour camp sentences for crimes such as bank robberies or housebreaking are “meted out with amazing dispatch by a panel of three judges in military uniforms” (1997: 229). unsurprisingly, this explains why the chinese protagonist, liu hulan, does not practice law in beijing in spite of her training. it also explains the reluctance of peter san, hulan’s partner, to go back to china, since “[i]t is difficult for a snake to go back to hell coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 once it has tasted heaven” (1997: 162). huston in peter may’s snakehead is also a “spectacular” landscape of “shining glass tower blocks and skyscrapers” and the site of the texas medical center – forty-two medical institutions “serving five million patients a year in a hundred buildings … [w]ith an annual operating budget of more than four billion dollars and research grants of more than two billion” – which employs “fifty thousand people, attract[s] ten thousand volunteers and one hundred thousand students” (2002: 27). like “everything else in texas” it has ambitions to be the biggest and the best, and “probably it [is]” (2002: 27). this is demonstrated when medical experts collaborating in the investigation manage to identify the sophisticated gene engineered by a fanatic intent on spreading the spanish flu virus using illegal chinese immigrants as carriers and threatening, not only the lives of many, but also and very importantly, the site of democracy itself which serves man’s “inalienable rights … [l]ife, liberty, happiness” (2002: 217). even ellie cooper – the sceptical protagonist of lisa brackmann’s rock paper tiger who, once in china, observes the deprivation and abuse of chinese citizens – undertakes a defence of american policies abroad after a spell in iraq as a medical aid for the army during which she witnessed the torture of prisoners of war. brackmann, in fact, deflates responsibility for what americans do in places like iraq by justifying interventionism in a conradian admission that “the conquest of the earth [may not be] … a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (conrad, 1998: 140–41), but the idea still redeems it. the circumstances in which people live in iraq “just suck,” which means that “people around there [are] dirt-poor and [live] in shitholes with intermittent electricity and contaminated water” (2010: 111). the country as a whole is embodied in images of “desert; flat, endless scrub, different shades of dirt, an occasional clump of cinderblock buildings that [blend] into the grey dust”; towns that are “just a crossroads and a couple of telephone poles stuck between mud-brick houses and a few cement storefronts”; or impressions of horror in the form of a donkey hooked up to a cart, its “flanks crisscrossed by whip scars, ribs sticking out, head hanging down, like it’d had a lifetime of getting the shit kicked out of it” (2010: 61). into this mix brackmann throws in the oppression of the republican guards who kept jails not “for car thieves or burglars or that kind of thing. more for regime opponents. draft-dodgers. or folks who pissed off the local sheik” (2010: 152). as a consequence, the local nationals are “glad we’re here” (2010: 62), and american soldiers hold the optimistic belief that if they “cut the guts out of this whole bullshit resistance around here” they can “finally get things running the way they should. fix the sewers and the power plant, show the locals it’s all been worth it” (2010: 131–32). this, in turn, disqualifies resistance since, in the logic of the novel, this hinders the advance of progress. furthermore, it is the fact that hajjis engage in unending resistance that justifies the means used by soldiers to control prisoners of war. after all, they are used to it: “these people respect power and fear. you come across weak, they’ll rip your throat out the minute your back’s turned. …this is a shame-based culture” (2010: 159). in contrast, the west, especially the united states in the novels considered here, unlike places like china or iraq, offers people the possibility of earning a decent salary, even becoming rich, 8 and if chinese immigrants do not manage to succeed this is,once more, because they are exploited by their own people. “homeless and helpless and desperate to reach america” immigrants expect to find “[t]he beautiful country [美国, měiguó, the name given to the united states in chinese], the mountain of gold” (may, 2002: coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 49) but they are taken advantage of by the snakeheads working for the triads. these have “healthy international connections,” meaning “glorious access to heroin coming through the golden triangle,” and draw “a continual supply of foot soldiers to do their dirty work” (see, 1997: 14) from new immigrants. they “bring a lot of crime into [the united states]” (may, 2002: 21) in the form of “casinos, bookmaking, loan-sharking, prostitution, extortion, credit-card and food-stamp fraud … and … heroin smuggling” (see, 1997: 15). and, of course, one of their main businesses is “the illegal smuggling of chinese” which “generates revenues of more than three billion dollars a year” (may, 2002: 58). illegal immigrants have to pay a considerable amount of money to snakeheads to be taken to the states. this involves a dangerous sea passage from china with hundreds of people crowded in insalubrious conditions in the upper and lower decks of old and rusty boats, subjected to “the pain and indignity and humiliation of an endless journey to the promised land, in the hands of ruthless individuals who [rape] and beat them for pleasure and dollars” (may, 2002: 47). then they are taken to countries like guatemala, nicaragua, costa rica, el salvador and, eventually, mexico, where they are smuggled in into the states, often in false floors in the back of trucks where they spend “hours without food or water or the chance to move” so they have to “soil themselves where they lay, squeezed together like sardines, lying in their own filth” (may, 2002: 49). this suffering is all for nothing. since they do not have the money to pay for their trips to start with, they “[contract] with the triads – a free trip, room and board” in exchange for “years of indentured servitude” working in “sweatshops and restaurants, as prostitutes and drug runners” (see, 1997: 19). when they cannot meet their contractual obligations as the fees are too high, they are slaves for life. to add insult to injury, apparently respectable chinese americans are involved with the triads. in peter may’s snakehead, the ah kung or “the supreme grandfather” (2002: 59; emphasis in the original) of one of the tongs is councilman soong, who began life in america as an illegal immigrant, was granted amnesty by president bush after tiananmen, and is now “[t]he living embodiment of the american dream,” the “chairman of the houston-hong kong bank” and “a very rich man” (2002: 176). soong, however, is in the “exploitation business … charging poor people more money than they could dream of … to come to america and be forced into slave labour. a slightly more sophisticated version of what the british did to the africans two hundred years ago” (2002: 272). meanwhile, beijing is complicit in the trade with illegal chinese immigrants since “there are too many people already in china and too few jobs” and once they are abroad “all those illegal immigrants send money home” injecting “millions into [a] local economy … that would probably collapse without them” (2002: 273). the crime fictions in english with chinese settings considered in this paper do not only ultimately exonerate the west from its intrusion and depredations in foreign lands and blame china itself for the fates of its citizens abroad. they are also intent on presenting the country as essentially backward because of its inability to leave the past behind. china’s recent history, particularly mao’s cultural revolution, is singled out as responsible for the country’s chronic deficiencies. as daniel f. vukovich explains, “maoism was an active, real alternative to both soviet and american development and modernity” that, in spite of its “grave mistakes and its foreclosure by deng,” was characterized by “radically egalitarian social policies centred on co-operative rural development and mass participation; the empowerment of an urban proletariat; [and, among others] the attempt to overcome the rural/urban and manual/intellectual labour coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 split” (2012: 29). kinkley also points out that china “could be viewed by its citizenry as the first nation in asia, including russia, to stage a successful republican revolution; the bearer of modern nationalism to korea and vietnam; and, since the 1960s, the world socialist vanguard and leader of the third world, without quite having to belong to it” (2001: 112). in the novels analyzed here, however, these are not aspects that are taken into account to present the country in a favourable light. instead, mao’s pernicious shadow keeps the country in a perpetual state of arrested-development, unable to forget or overcome the past. thus, the years of “bloody turmoil lay buried in the soil and in the souls of the people” (see, 1999: 50) and haven’t “just vanish[ed]. [they]ha[ve] made [their] mark on all of them” (sampson, 2008: 93). the chinese citizens’ sufferings because of mao’s policies are, in fact, used as shorthand for the country’s whole traumatic past. in the novels, this past manifests itself both as haunted memories of tragic events and as an ingrained state of being that prevents china’s complete modernization, especially in rural provinces away from big cities such as beijing, shanghai or hong kong, characterized by a lack of basic facilities such as toilets, electricity or telephones. thus, when liu hulan visits the “primitive interior” only “three hundred miles from beijing” (see, 1999: 54), she feels “she could have been stepping back in time a hundred, even a thousand, years” (see, 1999: 55). private detective song has the same feelings and, when in lower xiaoshanzi, a tiny village of “ancient tile-roofed cottages,” he thinks he might have “stepped back a couple of hundred years” (sampson, 2007: 319). even in beijing, modernity shares space with anachronistic reminders of china’s dilatory state of progress, such as the “army of men wielding hammers and picks, and a cavalry of donkeys” (sampson, 2007: 8) that arrive to demolish one of the hutongs to make way for new tower buildings. actually, the association of china with the past, as tao zhijian asserts, “warrants not only change but also alterations that most preferably conform to western ideas of progress and modernity” (2009: 26), which in fact underwrites the assumption that westernization is a desirable objective. however, the crime novels set in china analysed in this article do not allow china to completely become ‘western’ and, therefore, contribute to confirming an essential asymmetry between china and the west. thus, china is made to remain other, suspended in a perpetual process of becoming ‘normal’ and yet moored in chaos and poverty because of its inherent cultural and political differences, unable to reach western standards beyond the mushrooming of high-rise buildings and the proliferation of kentucky fried chickens, mcdonalds, pizza huts, waffle kings or starbucks. therefore, in common with a constellation of other “scholarly, literary, filmic, journalistic and other texts” (vukovich, 2012: xiv), these novels produce interested, flash-in-the-pan, scare type knowledge that keeps alive china’s “third affliction”, “its largely negative image in the world” (chu, 2014: 164). this is offered in the form of sketches of tyranny, abuse, corruption, wily bad cops, frame-ups, extorted confessions, death sentences delivered with rapid dispatch, tight control over information, ingrained sexism, the effects of the one-child policy and criticism of the communist party; also, and very significantly, in vignettes of urban and rural desolation and defective infrastructures where souls are lost through the crush of everyday life. david trotter (1991: 71-72) argues that crime fiction can never remove the upsetting impact of the dead body, so a residue of the horror genre remains in crime fiction. in crime novels set in china written in english dead bodies proliferate but the horror comes from the rendition of the new china that capitalism has spawned, which becomes the true fear-inducing monster in these narratives. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 thus, capitalism has brought prosperity to the country, especially “all along the coast – in shanghai, guangzhou, shenzhen and fujian province” (see, 1997: 54). however, it has also transformed the outlook of cities since capitalism means frenetic change. consequently, “nothing look[s] … traditionally chinese” (sampson, 2007: 55) anymore as high-rises, neon lights and gigantic advertisements occupy the places of traditional hutongs in cities where “construction sites … [spring] up wherever there [are] slums or empty ground” (sampson, 2007: 177) and working gangs are “bashing away with picks at the tarmac or digging ditches or straddling pneumatic drills … engaged … in the brutal, back-breaking creation of … modern metropolis[es]” (sampson, 2007: 269). these construction sites turn cities into wastelands with mounds of rubble atop of which “mechanical scavengers … [pull and push] at the debris” along roadsides as “mules balefully [eye] the hot tarmacadam” and “[p]easant women [pick] through the ruins, piling bricks on top of … carts” (sampson, 2008: 17). indeed, transformation has not brought a change for the better. a few years back, the interior town of taiyuan had been made up of “avenues and alleyways … filled with the reassuring hum of bicycles transporting people and merchandise” and the air “had been clear and filled with the perfume of flowering trees” (see, 1999: 50). now streets are crowded with “bumper-tobumper traffic” and the air is “filled with exhaust and other fumes that [spew] from factory chimneys” (see, 1999: 50). shanghai has been taken over by “brash and unsightly” skyscrapers and a tv tower “like an alien killer spider rising above pudong” (sampson, 2007: 332), so it is a city of “neon lights …, the martian tv tower illuminated in pink, skyscrapers on whose massive sides gigantic advertisements [play]” (sampson, 2007: 339). commercialism is fiercely active so hawkers “offering … toys and souvenirs and food” (sampson, 2007: 332) besiege people on every side. in this new china, in fact, only money seems to matter and, as a result, crime – “kidnapping, petty crime, violent crime, id theft, insurance fraud, corruption and trickery in every facet of personal and commercial life” (sampson, 2007: 6) – is burgeoning “like fungus in the grey sludge that [washes] up around the edges of the harmonious socialist society” (sampson, 2008: 12) and cities like “beijing [are] not as safe as [they were]” (sampson, 2008: 210). in their pursuit of money, thugs are in the increase, abducting “children … for sale, either, in the case of girls, as wives to men in rural areas … or into prostitution. babies and young boys … to childless couples, and older boys … as slave labour” (sampson, 2008: 127-28). the illegal bear bile trade, to mention one last example, has resulted in bear farms where these animals are kept in cages “with no room to stand or even sit up”; they are also made to wear “metal corsets around their middles” so some of them have “gangrenous infections that [fester] and [ooze] pus from beneath” (see, 1997: 312). in china, indeed, “[e]verything’s for sale” (see, 1997: 332) and “there [is] only the reality of cash” (sampson, 2007: 121) no matter the cost in human lives, misery or abuse. capitalism in the novels has also “created an economic chasm unlike any seen before in history” (see, 1997: 54). while the red princes and princesses – the sons and daughters of the political and business elites –do not work or are handed cushy jobs, wield enormous power and have money that allows them to wear rolexes or jewellery “worth more than what an entire peasant village might earn in a lifetime” (see, 1997: 115), the situation for the rural or labouring population is one of sheer despondency. peasants are “the poorest of the poor … working land that [is] filled with too many minerals to sustain proper life” (see, 1999: 45), so they survive “only at the caprice of nature” (see, coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 1999: 66) caught in a “struggle between flooding and draught” (sampson, 2008: 88) in areas that are always described as vast expanses of bare “red earth … [that] the wind [whips] into a dusty haze” (sampson, 2008: 332) populated by strange visions of men on bikes weighed down with bizarre loads such as “pig carcass[es]” or “used tyres” (see, 1997: 65). in these unwelcoming landscapes men and women bear the signs of age earlier in time, their skins “wrinkled and stained dark brown from the sun” (see, 1999: 57). in factories, the working conditions are harsh: “the hours are long. the living facilities are substandard. the noise level on … factory floor[s] must be bad for [the] ears” (see, 1999: 197). they are also dangerous. an old beggar who approaches one of the protagonists of sampson’s the pool of unease had been working in a plastic factory, there was an explosion and one side of his body was burned down; now the skin of his face stretches “tight over the bone, his lips all but gone” (2007: 60). privatization and economic reforms have also resulted in lots of people being laid off. people trying to escape poverty, therefore, migrate to the cities thinking “the streets are paved with gold” (sampson, 2007: 138) and “looking in vain for a better life, only to find bitterness” (see, 1999: 59). thus, buses from the provinces disgorge their cargoes of country migrants with “tanned, burned faces; bulging nylon net bags with faded stripes; patched cast-off clothes; strange, stiff shoes” (brackmann, 2010: 4-5) who are going to “end up living in a shanty town in a refrigerator box,” picking “through junked computer parts for gold and copper wire” or stuck in “factories and malls and mcjobs that treat people like trash and throw them away whenever they feel like it” (brackmann, 2010: 18). at night, cities like beijing become fantasy worlds of fluorescent light with “flashing peacocks, shimmering rainbows and incandescent butterflies” (sampson, 2007: 73), but they do nothing to counter the brutality of day-time china, the ‘real’ china beyond this “weird twilight world” (brackmann, 2010: 1) which the authors present to their readers. this is a country of “cast-concrete high rises of shoddy design and even shoddier construction” (see, 1997: 232), where “[d]epartment store roofs collapse; chemicals poison rivers; miners suffocate in illegal mines” (brackmann, 2010: 2) and factories release “orange-brown chemicals from their smokestacks” (see, 1997: 302). transport is under-resourced and the conditions in which people travel are infrahuman with train compartments where “babies [wail], spit up, [pee] (or worse) on the floor;” men chainsmoke “rough-smelling cigarettes, occasionally hawking murky sputum” and often missing the spittoons, so “horrible globs of mucus [end] up on the floor;” people sit on “hard seats” and eat their provisions of “fragrant – sometimes too fragrant – … noodles” or “slivers of garlic on cold buns”; soon these odours blend with those of the toilet producing a “combination of [nauseating] smells” (see, 1999: 45-6). cities are a haze of pollution, air “thick with coal smoke [and] exhaust”, and “cacophonous swarm[s]” of “people, bicycles and cars” (see, 1997: 64-5). people live just above the poverty line in “crowded neighbourhoods” in “dilapidated conditions … [and] primitive facilities” (see, 1997: 73) or in outlaying villages where “families [struggle] against dirt and the bitter cold and poverty” (sampson, 2007: 71). as “in most of china, there [is] rubbish of every variety lying about” (see, 1999: 72). in a village square there are “twisted pieces of iron, scraggly baskets, some old barrels” (see, 1999: 72); outside walls of toilets, forests, ponds and abandoned quarries are turned into unofficial dumps forming “a carpet of degradation” (sampson, 2007: 273) littered with “old plastic bags, odd shoes, empty food packaging,” (sampson, 2007: 63) or a mess “of cigarette butts, dried faeces, discarded condoms” (sampson, 2007: 273). all in all, the whole country is a coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 nightmare of waste dumps, shabby neighbourhoods and dantesque landscapes with “acres of roads, ... inflated buildings, ... [wild] construction sites with their earthen dunes, their gaping foundations” (sampson, 2007: 58), home to a cast of miserable figures that populate the background of the stories. there are armies of “beggars everywhere now” (sampson, 2007: 59): “a girl with no legs ... who push[es] herself on makeshift wheels”, “ragged women with sleeping children in their arms,” a woman who pushes a “boy in a wheelchair, his mouth agape and drooling”, or a boy who darts back and forth “dropping to his knees, head jerking and bobbing in servile desperation, palm outstretched” (sampson, 2007: 340). scavengers move about “waterfalls of detritus”, “bent, spines doubled over their task” amidst the “reeking garbage” (sampson, 2007: 288-89) in dumps and gutters. the only children in the streets have “red windroughened faces and runny noses” (sampson, 2007: 71) or are “bare-bottomed” babies on the hips of “dark-skinned” (sampson, 2008: 87) peasant women. china’s dark and steamy environment, thus, has given birth to an ecosystem inhabited only by corrupt or criminal politicians, businessmen or policemen that share space with construction gangs and with the wretched of the earth, as well as with a fauna of always described as scrawny or scruffy mongrel stray dogs (sampson, 2007: 70, 71, 145, 270), cats or kittens (sampson, 2007: 332; sampson, 2008: 87), sheep (sampson, 2007: 288) or chicken (see, 1999: 72; sampson, 2007: 269). to conclude, china, like any other society, has deficiencies, made worse by the severe policies, tight control and stark oppression by the communist party. in fact, as chu yingchi writes, china’s representation of “herself to the world as an egalitarian society in which everyone is able to participate in the evolving market economy under the governance of a political collective … does not stand up to scrutiny” (2014: 164). having said that, china has also “wrenched itself from more than one century of decline to become the great global game-changer of our time, pulling more people out of poverty in a shorter space of time than ever before in human history” (fenby, 2013: 1). in any case, the country as it emerges from the crime fictions by authors such as lisa see, peter may, catherine sampson, lisa brackmann and duncan jepson is beyond redemption, so it could be argued these books partake of a (sino-)orientalist discourse, as defined by edward said, that celebrates western exceptionalism by emphasising the decrepitude of china. and yet, said’s contention that, in the condemnation of the brutality of ‘the east’ there is an implicit defence of western “human dignity, liberty and self-determination” (said, 1994: 343) does not apply, or at least does not apply unproblematically to these novels as the west’s shortcomings, ironies and contradictions are also scrutinized. these crime fictions set in china, therefore, may not be truly orientalist but we cannot regard them as postcolonial, either, since they do not ultimately demand a symbolic overhaul of the west or put its superiority and concomitant interventionist policies into question. neither do they try to find exonerating values in china or foresee improvement in the country through increased self-determination, economic prosperity or a relaxation of the government’s control over its citizenry. for that matter, they do even not allow china to resemble what’s best of the west since china has merely adopted capitalism without working for the construction of a civil society. thus, the china produced in these crime novels written in english remains the big bad communist monster – on capitalist steroids – of old, condemned to linger behind, backward, poor, depressed and dreary. and there is no intimation that the country will someday emerge from the swamp of moral sludge where it is moored. as lisa brackmann writes, mao’s revolution was “something deep, strong coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 and full of rage, a tsunami sweeping everything away” that allowed “the underdogs [to] stake their claims” (2010: 332). the problem with revolutions is that “[e]ventually the whole fucking thing repeats itself” (2010: 332). works cited anderson, jean, carolina miranda and barbara pezzotti, eds. the foreign in international crime fiction: transcultural representations. london: bloomsbury, 2014. brackmann, lisa. rock paper tiger. new york: soho press, 2010. carter, ellen and deborah walker-morrison. “cannibalistic maori behead rupert murdoch: (mis)representations of antipodean otherness in carylférey’s ‘maori thrillers’.” the foreign in international crime fiction: transcultural representations. ed. jean anderson, carolina miranda and barbara pezzotti. london: bloomsbury, 2014. 9-21. christian, ed, ed. the post-colonial detective. london: palgrave, 2001. ---. “ethnic postcolonial crime and detection (anglophone).”a companion to crime fiction.ed. charles j. rzepka and lee horsley. chichester, west sussex, uk: wiley-blackwell, 2010. 283-295. chu, yingchi. “the politics of reception: ‘made in china’ and western critique.” international journal of cultural studies. 17.2 (2014): 159–73. conrad, joseph. heart of darkness and other tales. 1899. oxford: oxford up, 1998. dirlik, arif, ed. chinese on the american frontier. oxford: rowman and littlefield, 2001. fenby, jonathan. tiger head, snake tails: china today, how it got there and why it has to change. london: simon & schuster, 2013. jepson, duncan. emperors once more. london: quercus, 2014. kinkley, jeffrey c. “the post-colonial detective in people’s china.” the post-colonial detective.ed. ed christian. london: palgrave, 2001. 112-139. knight, stephen. “crimes domestic and crimes colonial: the role of crime fiction in developing postcolonial consciousness.” postcolonial postmortems: crime fiction from a transcultural perspective. ed. christine matzke and susanne mühleisen. amsterdam: rodopi, 2006. 17-33. luo, hui. “shanghai, shanghai: placing qiuxiaolong’s crime fiction in the landscape of globalized literature.” the foreign in international crime fiction: coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 transcultural representations. ed. jean anderson, carolina miranda and barbara pezzotti. london: bloomsbury, 2014. 47-59. may, peter. snakehead. london: coronet books, 2002. mukherjee, upamanyu pablo. crime and empire: the colony in nineteenth-century fictions of crime. oxford: oxford up, 2003. pearson, nels and marc singer. “open cases: detection, (post)modernity, and the state.” detective fiction in a postcolonial and transnational world.ed. nels pearson and marc singer. farnham: ashgate, 2009. 1-14. reitz, caroline. detecting the nation: fictions of detection and the imperial venture. columbus: ohio state up, 2004. said, edward w. culture and imperialism. london: vintage, 1994. ---. orientalism. london: penguin, 2003 sampson, catherine. the pool of unease. london: pan books, 2007. ---. the slaughter pavilion. london: pan books, 2008. see, lisa. the flower net. london: arrow, 1997. ---. the interior. london: arrow, 1999. tao, zhijian. drawing the dragon: western european reinvention of china. bern: peter lang, 2009. trotter, david. “theory and detective fiction.”critical quarterly. 33.2 (1991): 66-77. vukovich, daniel f. china and orientalism: western knowledge production and the p.r.c. london and new york: routledge, 2012. white, andrea. joseph conrad and the adventure tradition. cambridge: cambridge up, 1993. whitfield, e. cuban currency: the dollar and ‘special period’ fiction. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2008. 1 in the case of french author caryl férey, his novels zulu (2010), utu (2011) and mapuche (2013) are situated, respectively, in south africa, new zealand and argentina. 2 china was colonized by the west ‘only’ in macao, hong kong and south east asia, though imperialism did indeed undermine china’s sovereignty and the country’s self-perception as the middle kingdom (中 国, zhōngguó), the centre of the cosmos. authors like kinkley (2001) define china as a post-postcolonial country, the country that has emerged after mao’s (post-colonial) china. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 3 lisa see has three detective fictions situated in china: the flower net (1997), the interior (1999) and dragon bones (2003). peter may’s beijing’s inspector li yan’s mysteries consist of: the firemaker (1999), the fourth sacrifice (2000), the killing room (2000), snakehead (2002), the runner (2003) and chinese whispers (2004). two of catherine sampson’s robin ballantyne’s stories take place in china: the pool of unease (2007) and the slaughter pavilion (2008). lisa brackman’s novels set in china are rock paper tiger (2010), hour of the rat (2013) and dragon day (2015). finally, duncan jepson has one novel that takes place in china: emperors once more (2014). even though there are many other british or american crime writers that situate their stories in china, only a selection of those written by the authors mentioned here are analysed in this paper basically for practical purposes taking into account the required length of articles for publication. 4 names in chinese start with the surname and are followed by the name, without a comma. thus, i follow this pattern throughout the article (for example, luo hui or chu yingchi). however, these selfsame names are standardized with a comma after the surname in the reference list (luo, hui and chu, yingchi). for the names of the chinese protagonists of the novels analyzed in this paper, i follow the pattern used in the novels, where sometimes they follow the traditional chinese practice (for example li hulan or li yan) or are sometimes westernized (for example, alex soong). 5 for an analysis of the exotic in qiu xiaolong’s novels, see luo hui’s “shanghai, shanghai: placing qiu xiaolong’s crime fiction in the landscape of globalized literature”, in anderson, miranda and pezzotti (2014: 47-59). the exotic in lisa see can be observed, to mention an example, in her novel the flower net. amidst the beijing traffic, the american protagonist observes “a caravan of camels loaded with goods” (1997: 78), while he witnesses other ‘curiosities’ on every street corner that reflect the city’s domestic life: “on a street corner stood a cart laden with candied crab apples on bamboo skewers. on another, a man grilled fragrant strips of marinated pork. on yet another, a small crowd of people clustered around a kiosk to slurp redolent noodles from enamelled tin bowls before handing the empties back to the proprietor” (1997: 84). the chinese liu hulan, on the other hand, converses with her mother about “light things. how the cherry blossoms looked lovely along the hillside at the summer palace. how old man chou was selling the first snow pea greens of the season. how the silk that hulan had chosen for a dress shimmered” (1997: 86). 6 an in-depth account of the chinese and their participation in the advance of the american frontier is arif dirlik’s chinese on the american fontier (2001). 7 li yan wonders, “could life possibly have been so bad for these people in china that it was worth enduring this? he knew that virtually none of them was fleeing political persecution. they were what the united nations would call ‘economic migrants’. the idea that in america they would find the fabled golden mountain was an illusion. and yet the myth persisted” (may, 2002: 135). 8 in los angeles, liu hulan and her partner, peter san, interrogate a chinese citizen in his house. peter cannot believe “chinese people live in these villas” since what is called “a villa in beijing [is] nothing compared to” these “ostentatious mansions too large for their lots” (see, 1997: 203). the author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness for the writing of this article (research project ffi2013-45101-p). isabel santaulària i capdevila is senior lecturer at the university of lleida, where she teaches english literature and popular narratives. her areas of research are cultural studies, popular narratives and gender studies. she has published a book on serial killer narratives – el monstruo humano: una introducción a la ficción de los asesinos en serie (barcelona: laertes, 2009) – and various articles in national and international journals including the journal of gender studies, diegesis, victoriographies, clues: a journal of detection, atlantis or lectora. she is also a member of the research group pocrif. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 337 writing on thresholds: ali cobby eckermann’s inside my mother molly murn flinders university, south australia molly.murn@flinders.edu.au copyright©2018 molly murn. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in australian poetics. the metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. it is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. during this (w)rite of passage something new is made. for a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative). yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. the word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (oed). in an australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground. this paper will discuss the poems of inside my mother (2015) by yankunytjatjara/kokatha south australian poet ali cobby eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary australian postcolonial poetics. writing on the threshold, cobby eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poetics. keywords: ali cobby eckermann; poetics; threshold. mailto:molly.murn@flinders.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 338 when the first footprints of my ancestors touched the northern shoreline of this land, humanity itself had crossed a threshold. (grant 2016) the metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. it is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. during this (w)rite of passage something new is made. dominique hecq explains the “poetic attentiveness” (2015, 139) a writer must inhabit in order to conceive a poem in this way: it is an inner gesture whereby the ‘i’ relinquishes its usual control and takes […] a step back, allowing an inner space to open up, so that it can simultaneously be inside and outside, both the observer and the observed. (139) this gesture, an “extension of [the] bodily self into some imaginative space” (138), suggests movement towards a position not quite here and not quite there: a threshold. seamus heaney might call entering this space the “first alertness” (1980, 49) of creativity. in “feeling into words” heaney explains this initial spark of creativity as “pre-verbal,” “vatic” and involving a kind of “divining” (49). the poet is on the threshold of speech. before words. in the same way that the seed holds all the materials of the tree, the threshold is redolent with potential. as gaston bachelard writes in poetics of space, “[t]he poet speaks on the threshold of being” (1964, xvi). as a site of poetics, the threshold is not only a site for listening, for gathering, “but is also a place of rigour and work” (mukherji 2011, xxiii). in this transitional space, the creative practitioner can thresh out ideas (receptive), and it is also the site of creative acts (generative). yet the threshold is not only a metaphor and site for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. the word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (oed online); that beautiful word, liminal, sounds the threshold. and the threshold figures in the imagination in different ways. the idea of the “threshold as a productive space in literature or art” (mukherji 2011, xvii) is a resonant one, not only because its poetic lure is so compelling for writers and artists, but also because of the kinds of terrains that may be “crossed and spoken across” (xviii) the threshold. as jeri kroll has discussed, the relationship between creative writing and liminality is potent: “writing finds its energy and innovativeness in just this uncertain and unsettled state, its sense of being on the edge, in being in transition” (2009, 3). for the purpose of engaging in a reimagining of australian poetics, i am particularly interested in what may be “spoken across” the threshold, or, indeed, not spoken. this paper considers the threshold as a category of experience—especially in an artistic sense, but also socio-politically, shifting emphasis out from the ritual and ritualised threshold processes of van gennep and turner 1 , to an embodied and empowered experience of the threshold during the creative process and of the creative process. a poetics of the threshold is one that considers the productive capacity of the middle—a site that is fluid, dynamic, essential and sustaining—as a meeting place that brings coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 339 worlds (imaginatively speaking) together. just as a river can only exist between two bodies of land, a threshold is an active space, fertile and teeming with possibility. the threshold as a locale suggests movement or passage and porousness, and is akin to paul carter’s (2008) concept of dark writing. the emphasis is on the spaces in-between, the pregnant spaces betwixt what is readily visible. in this region there is for the artist, not a border to cross, but a coming together that suggests transformation. the poetry of australian indigenous poet ali cobby eckermann dwells in just this threshold sensibility. i will consider her most recent collection inside my mother (2015) as an exemplar of threshold poetics. a threshold sensibility is reminiscent of gloria andalzua’s liminal “borderlands” where the convergence between cultures (in anzaldua’s case, mexican, indian and anglo cultures) creates a third space, a borderland, where a new consciousness—“a mestizo consciousness” (anzaldua 1987, 79)—is born. in this borderland, there is not only a confrontation with what is lost in the substitution of culture and language, but the capacity for something new to be made across and between cultures. through her poetry, cobby eckermann engages in what stuart cooke (2013) might call “world-making”: the relationship between poiesis, or the creative generative moment, and the act of poetry crosses cultures and territories […] poetry is linked to the process of world-making. (128) her writing creates spaces for a reimagining where a polyphony of voices can be heard in australian poetics—not only indigenous voices, but exiled, settler and migrant voices too—revitalising what philip mead (2008) calls the “networked language” of contemporary australian poetry. when the judges of the windham-campbell prize for 2017—a prize administered out of yale university in order to “call attention to literary achievement” —awarded cobby eckermann for her contribution to poetry, they had this to say about her work: through song and story, ali cobby eckermann confronts the violent history of australia’s stolen generations and gives language to unspoken lineages of trauma and loss. (windham-campbell prize n.d.) the judges of the windham-campbell prize draw attention to cobby eckermann’s “substantial and formally innovative body of work” with the “award-winning 2015 collection inside my mother” receiving a special mention (windham-campbell prize n.d.). in winning this international prize, cobby eckermann’s work crosses cultures and territories. inside my mother in the opening lines of the poem “australantis,” ali cobby eckermann (2015) writes “there’s a whole ocean filled with sand / between what was and what will be” (4). the ocean (that once was) figures as a threshold—the threshold between the ancient world and the world it has become or is becoming. the “stark canvas devoid of view” coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 340 (4) that cobby eckermann goes on to describe is not a blank space or an empty space, but a place perceived empty by those who do not know how to read it, “not a sand dune nor a tree” (4), and a place denuded (by colonisation) where the reader might contemplate what has been before, or project what will come to be. when europeans arrived on the continent of australia, they were crossing the threshold into a land already spoken for. in fact, the sea and sky, as well as every animal, rock, hill, tree, mountain and river, were known and sung and looked after (bird rose 1996, 7). what appeared an empty and alien space to the europeans was redolent with signification to the first peoples, and was not a wild and untamed place, but a carefully managed ecology. as bird rose explains, in an aboriginal concept of country, humans make up one small aspect of a holistic and multi-dimensional system which also includes “animals, plants, dreamings; underground, earth, soils, minerals and waters, surface water and air” (8). in this system, country is a conscious “nourishing terrain” (7) that can be spoken to and sung about, nurtured and cared for; it can get sick, as well as be worried and longed for (7). it is kin. ngarrindjeri elder aunty ellen trevorrow puts it this way: “the lands, waters and all living things are connected like family” (trevorrow et al. 2007, n.p.). bird rose makes a useful distinction between the aboriginal understanding of country and the european-derived notion of ‘landscape.’ while aboriginal country is “lived in and lived with” (bird rose 1996, 7), the term landscape denotes a “distance between the place … and the person or society which considers its existence” (10). this egocentric view sees landscape as empty if “one cannot see traces or signs of one’s own culture in the land” (17), and at the time of colonisation, this world-view neatly justified the legal concept of terra nullius (land that belongs to no-one). furthermore, aboriginal societies valued a knowledge-based system over a property-based/ownership system, and so even though there were complex land-management practices in place,2 the colonisers were blind to the signifiers of a rich and diverse cultural life flourishing on so-called terra nullius. as noongar author and scholar kim scott points out, despite the initial hospitality of the aboriginal people to ‘white’ visitors, in the settlers’ failure to understand an aboriginal world-view, an opportunity was lost where a “grafting of newcomers’ culture and being onto indigenous roots” (2007, 122) might have occurred. in the final stanza of “australantis,” cobby eckermann writes the following: “only a shell hangs beyond the skyline / spilling the noise of the in-between” (4). shells are fragile houses, containers, empty of life—they are ancient—but the “noise of the inbetween” cannot be contained. cobby eckermann invites her reader to listen to this noise. what might the “noise” have to say about the shared histories between aboriginal and non-aboriginal australians? cobby eckermann writes of the threshold, that in-between place where a so-called lost civilisation, australantis, may be contemplated. and she writes on the threshold between two or more locations, be they geographical, or figurative (the ancient world and the contemporary world), and two or more identities—her aboriginal identity and her identity as a woman raised by a white family in rural south australia (cobby eckermann wasafiri 2016). following the legacy of aboriginal writers and poets before her—oodgeroo noonuccal, jack davis, kevin gilbert, archie weller, lionel fogarty, to name just a handful—cobby eckermann’s poetic voice is shaped by the inheritance of loss and trauma that first nations people have experienced and do experience under colonisation. in a recent coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 341 interview, cobby eckermann explains that it is through writing that she makes sense of history: “[writing] was the only way to keep myself safe and healthy,” she says of the period in her life when she was coming to terms with her “role” as both “relinquished child” and “relinquishing mother” (cobby eckermann “books and arts” 2017). in cobby eckermann’s family, the severances between mother and child continued down the line—an intergenerational inheritance of loss and shame. cobby eckermann says in interview with mike ladd: “[my mother’s] generation were really shamed to give their children up” (earshot 2016). when cobby eckermann fell pregnant as a teenager, she was encouraged to give up her son for adoption because she did not feel mentally and emotionally equipped to care for him. and on a personal level, the ramifications for that are everlasting: “if you can’t trust the womb / how can you trust the universe?,” she writes in the poem “severance” (63). at a recent poetry reading in adelaide (november 14, 2017)—the first public reading since her return from collecting the windhamcampbell prize at yale—cobby eckermann explained that there will never be enough poems inside her to tell of the pain and ongoing ramifications experienced by the stolen generations and their families. “we [stolen generations] live it daily,” she says (little windows press poetry reading 2017). cobby eckermann has two mothers—her birth mother, yankunytjatjara woman audrey cobby, and her adoptive mother, frieda eckermann. cobby eckermann was taken away from her biological mother (who was herself a member of the stolen generations) not long after her birth. when cobby eckermann finally did meet up with audrey, three decades later, they had just fifteen years together before audrey died. cobby eckermann’s difficulty in grieving for a mother who had been absent for most of her life resulted in the poetry collection inside my mother. this book pays homage to cobby eckermann’s aboriginal heritage and her birth mother, audrey, but is dedicated to her mothers—plural. throughout the collection, cobby eckermann explores the body as the threshold between the natural world and her identity; in particular, the tangible (bodily felt) grief of separation between mother and child, and the liminal space she occupies from being cut off from her aboriginal heritage. in inside my mother cobby eckermann uses the central metaphors of sand, clay, birds and trees, to highlight either severance or connection to family, spirit and identity. sand and shorelines sand as symbolic of mother and country, and specifically cobby eckermann’s mother’s country, is a dominant metaphor throughout the collection. but in the early section, cobby eckermann treads lightly, excavating her origins to find a way ‘home,’ working through grief and personal and generational trauma both, leaving soft footprints in the sand—transient—like the footprints of her ancestors that wash away with the tides or become something else. not because cultural knowledge is disappearing but because sand is a living thing, and will move and shift as all living things do. in “tjukurrpa” (5), she writes, “tribes gather on the sand / at the ancient birthing place.” country is family—mother and father—and when it hurts it keens like all living things: “my father is the sand dune / that rock is my mother” (5). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 342 later in the collection, when cobby eckermann explores the sadness and desecration that has come with colonisation, the nourishing terrain of sand is transformed into something fixed (“footprints”; 39): the moment you jumped from your boat and landed on the shore your footprint stood next to mine in the morning my footprint had disappeared and yours remained it would not leave shorelines are in-between places, thresholds—places of crossing over between one kind of environment and another; they are places of exit and entry. shorelines embody a place of transition—perhaps violently, perhaps in the spirit of hospitality. in several of cobby eckermann’s poems, shorelines are not only the entry point for colonisation— “the incoming tide betrayed me” (39)—but are locations where all the parts of oneself can come together: “she remains beyond her imagination / no imprints mar her mind […] one foot in water, one foot on sand / the tidal gravity keeps her grounded” (“abstract”; 12). or shorelines are porous borderlands where a third space between languages or between cultural identities can open up: “a boy sits on the shore of languages, water babbles / there are no rocks, no constants, the tide laps gently […] the language names are twining like invisible string […] waiting for the approach of new” (“kaleidoscope”; 38). as carter illumines, the coastline is “the place where western and non-western people [were] suddenly exposed to one another” (2008, 9). it is a dynamic place of interaction, but it is also a generative place, artistically speaking. in “abstract,” the speaker inhabits the threshold: “one foot in water, one foot on sand […] rough-and-ready art erupts from her / she breathes air into a dead gull […] she scribes patterns in her mind / and naked she executes her future” (12). this “approach of new” might be a potential third perspective—or a potential synthesis. while cobby eckermann highlights the necessity to write her poems in english—“if you’re serious about having a career as a writer you’re simply forced to” (cobby eckermann wasafiri 2016)—she also hopes the “ancient rhythm of this ancient land” (wasafiri) is discernible in her writing. cobby eckermann explains that she tries to keep her writing sparse like the “sparse environment” (wasafiri) of the desert. in the region of the in-between (betwixt identity, language or location), the poet stands between those things that are parted and interacts. as cooke (2013) suggests in his study of aboriginal and chilean nomadic poetics of the “open-field,” “the syntax […] does not articulate discrete states of being […] but it seeks to draw connections between accumulations” (17). this “ability of both the poem and the poet to move” (278) between not only the open space of the page, but to articulate an in-betweenness, emphasises the “productive capacity of the middle” (36) as a site for becoming, reimagining, and fracturing the fixed point of view of a colonial sensibility and dominant/dominating language. cobby eckermann writes in “lyre birds” (89): meet me at the river where lyre birds hide coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 343 maybe we will catch a glimpse of them maybe hold me in that place where shyness and lyre birds meet maybe the tangle of thorns will retreat maybe touch me softly oh so softly stroke feathers on my cheek maybe my softness will return maybe there is tentativeness here. but the tentative step is towards a potential meeting place: a threshold where something new can be reimagined, or can emerge. this poem can be read with “overlapping cultural, emotional and personal possibilities” (wood n.d.), allowing a space to open up for the reader to contemplate the fragile middle ground between being born black and growing up white that cobby eckermann inhabits. in her memoir, too afraid to cry, cobby eckermann writes about reconnecting with her aboriginal family: “i learn that i can’t fully live their traditional lifestyle, and that they can’t live mine. so we compromise … [w]e grow smarter and stronger as one” (2014, 190). this place of compromise is a source of strength. it is a third place where bush way and whitefella way can coalesce. a threshold. the contemporary australian postcolonial poet is necessarily a ‘reconciler.’ the term postcolonial is used here with some trepidation because, as scott argues, contemporary australia cannot really be classified as such because australia is not a republic (the coloniser has not withdrawn); the power relationship characteristic of colonial societies still exists in australia and the benefits of colonisation have not been equally shared with the prior societies (2007, 120). to reconcile means “to bring together again” (oed online)—to stand between those things that are parted and negotiate. writing on the threshold, the postcolonial poet is a conduit who inhabits the intermezzo or the middle ground (cooke 2013, 36), and it is in this locale that a reimagining may take place. in any consideration of what spatial theorist and artist paul carter (2009) calls “a distinctively australian poetics” (148), the “prior acts of clearance, both human and environmental” (135) must be acknowledged. so that when we talk about ‘productive’ spaces and ‘generative’ spaces of art—including poetry—in an australian context, the political and the poetic are entwined. i take my cues from poet-critics philip mead and michael farrell, who both argue “for a future of post-settlement australian poetry” (farrell 2015, 6), where contextual readings (time and place) create a space for a fresh engagement with australian poetics—one that “comes to terms with the unsettling difference of indigenous narratives of place and history and the plural knowledges of the multicultural present” (mead 2008, 400-401). this kind of understanding sees poetic language “networked” to the culture and history in which it is formed, and is influenced by deleuze and guattari’s notion of the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 344 rhizome: a subjectivity that is not hierarchical but extends in all directions, and with multiple entryways and exits (12). poetic texts have “an after-life in subsequent and changing cultural contexts” (mead 2008, 1). a poem’s after-life, then, is significant in that it leaves a map, a poetic textual history, of what has been before and, just as importantly, what is coming into being. the reclaiming of aboriginal perspectives and alternative vantage points to those dominating the archives and poetry anthologies is about reconnection with and regeneration of an aboriginal heritage (scott 2010). the editors of the recent publication contemporary australian poetry emphasise: indigenous poetry in english has become a world of different voices in a way that can only have been dreamt of by pioneers such as oodgeroo noonuccal and kevin gilbert. one can well imagine future cultural historians regarding the present as the period in which indigenous poetry in english achieved take-off. (langford et al. 2016, viii) aboriginal artists, writers, poets, public intellectuals and activists—those engaged with “liberat[ing] our stories from the leaden pages of academia” (grant 2016, 63)—have tended to express the viscerally felt inheritance of subjugation and repression in their creative works. for contemporary aboriginal artists, this expression is less about victimhood and more about reclaiming voices that “suggest other possibilities latent in our history, and another relationship with the past” (scott 2010, 58). but for the poets who forged their work in the early part of the twentieth century and right up to the 1970s, this reclamation was hard won and grew directly out of protest and struggle. cobby eckermann says of her own work as a poet: i’m a little bit more passive [in my protest] compared to the freedom fighters and the premier poets who were helping to establish a louder voice for aboriginal australian writers back in the 70s and those earlier years. (cobby eckermann wasafiri 2016, n.p.) yet cobby eckermann’s poetic voice is subtly penetrating. in reviewing inside my mother, wood (n.d.) writes: it is not that eckermann forces non-indigenous people […] to acknowledge their occupation, perhaps bringing with it an idea of guilt or illegitimacy or un-sovereignty. it is that eckermann creates a world in which these questions may surface for the reader. as such inside my mother is less a work of harassment or protest than a piece of piercing subtlety […] that approaches difference and voice. in reconnecting with her aboriginal heritage, by finding her birth mother, and through taking part in healing ceremonies with the ngangkari—healers from her yankunytjatjara country in the far north of south australia—cobby eckermann unearthed her poetic voice. this voice has not come without struggle. it grows out of a relationship with land/country/origin—both as place of solace and healing, and as place of disconnection, severance and exile. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 345 clay in the poem “clay” (19) sand and dirt mix together to become both an “epidermal covering” (wood n.d.) as the narrator smears her body in clay—a metaphor for being overwhelmed, the threat of submergence, of not being able to cope: the world is turning to clay its muddy weight dry on my skin drags me down below river banks reducing the sky to a sliver […] shrinking me back into the earth only the whites of my eyes suggest clouds the clay on my skin has dried and cracks its earth voice hoarse, now drowned in mud (19) this poem is located in the body, where the body becomes a threshold between cultural knowledge and practice (smearing the body with ochre) and the overwhelming weight of (colonisation) history on the body. as wiradjuri journalist and author stan grant explains, “our history is a living thing. it is physical. it is noses and mouths and faces. it is written on our bodies” (2016, 69). in “clay’”the body is grounded, but not in the positive sense of the word, it is swallowed up—silenced. in the introduction to inside black australia, the first anthology of aboriginal poetry to ever be published in australia, activist and author kevin gilbert writes: “aboriginal poets share a universality with all other poets, yet differ somewhat in the traumatic and material experience of other poets” (1988, xviii). nearly three decades later, this definition still applies, as the effects of interventionist government policies since federation continue to ripple through the lives of aboriginal people. grant highlights that the “weight of history in australia” (2016, 117) is suffocating, and explains that aboriginal people “could do nothing to stop government officials invading [their] privacy […] homes and bodies could be invaded at will” (101). official policies that sought to ‘protect,’ and then assimilate australia’s first nations, dispossessed aboriginal people from their land and traditional ways of being irrevocably, and then severed children from their families. when cobby eckermann writes that “clay” “drags me down below river banks / reducing the sky to a sliver” (19), the feeling of drowning is tangible; the narrator’s ability to see, her autonomy, is reduced: “all peripheral vision is blocked by earth […] only my eyes reveal the myopia secret / my desire to live in the sky” (19). this notion of the sky being a free place, a place of birds and spirit, is juxtaposed by the embodied metaphors of clay, sand, earth, dirt and soil across the collection. this juxtaposition draws attention to both the earthy weight of loss and trauma on the body and landscape (the two are entwined), and the inseparable connection between body/landscape and a sense of belonging and heritage. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 346 cobby eckermann says of discovering her birth mother’s country: “that land loved me so much that it guided me there—i love the feeling of that and i love the truth of that—i ran to my mother’s birthplace” (earshot 2016). the closing stanza of the poem named after her mother’s birth place, “ooldea soakage” (15) tells of “old coals” gathered at “tribal camp,” the “history trapped inside / rubbing charcoal on skin” (15). cobby eckermann points towards the traditional practice of marking the body with charcoal, but in this poem “history” comes to bear too. she may be referring to both her ancestral history and the history of the maralinga atomic testing that occurred near ooldea when her mother was just a child. the layers of (a complex) history are felt viscerally. in “hindmarsh island” (41) the land protests against the violation that has been done to it. the mouth of the murray river, silted up from the building of a bridge through sacred women’s country, is “filled with screaming sand” (41). like a body, it is injured. it screams. the natural world and the body are synonymous in these poems: “aunty hold my mulloway hand” (41). the river is not only a threshold between what was (a culturally and environmentally intact and healthy place of sacred women’s business) and what is becoming (a culturally and environmentally violated place), but is filled with “our tears” (41). the birds and sky offer some hope to this bodily felt grief: “sing the pelican song / sing the blue sky refrain” (41). in the final poem of the collection, “evacuate” (91), it is the body that must be relinquished in order for the subject of the poem to heal—to “process” her “dreams of tragedy” (91): today i will relinquish my body […] only then can i return to myself the use of the word “relinquish” in this poem is significant, denoting a giving up, a giving over, as cobby eckermann has experienced from both perspectives—first when she was ‘relinquished’ by her birth mother, thus her connection to her aboriginal identity also ‘relinquished’, and then in ‘relinquishing’ her own child for adoption. her body is the site of these traumatising giving ups. but there is the sense in this poem that the relinquishing to be done now will not be traumatic, but will be an act of healing. the body a locale now for transformation—for inhabiting the threshold between what was and what will be. but it is from the eagle that the narrator takes her prompts: “i wait for eagle / only then can i / return to myself” (91). inside my mother, taking a circular flight path, both ends and begins with reference to birds as liminal messengers navigating the in-between. trees and birds throughout the collection, birds are spirit guides, “the song lives in the eagle flying overhead […] do not flinch away from angels” (“clapsticks”; 31), while trees are like ladders to the birds, rooted in the earth (body), but stretching skywards: “the song of owls pulsates / as trees guard the sky” (“heartbeat”; 17). the metaphor of the ‘tree’ for coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 347 cobby eckermann is not oodgeroo noonuccal’s “municipal gum”: “castrated, broken, a thing wronged / strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged” (noonuccal 1988, 100), but is restored to its original cultural position as a living thing imbued with sacred significance, rebuking the recurrent trope in much australian literature of the fallen tree, or dead wood as symbolic of the death of aboriginal culture: in her trance she observes the hard and the soft of the trees branches uplift his bark-bound body there is no request more sacred (“trance”; 11) this is not to say that the tree in cobby eckermann’s poems does not suffer or is not wronged—“we watch canoe trees / turn to ghosts” (34) because the river is dying, and in “warriors at salt creek” the “modern day warriors” hang from trees (33)—but that for her the tree represents a gateway, a threshold, between body and spirit, ancient culture and contemporary concerns. audrey cobby was born under a tree in kokatha country near maralinga, at a place called ooldea, but her people are the yankunytjatjara of sand hill country in the remote north west of south australia. in the poem cobby eckermann wrote for her mother “today” (88), the tree figures as an entry and exit point, for audrey’s life, but is also the location for a kind of transmutation where all the parts of oneself can coalesce: today i found the tree under which my mother was born her placenta was buried here as her ashes are now […] today i became a weeping tree a vision of memory deep inside a face embedded in its bark the mirror of my mum the tree of audrey’s birthplace is a gateway between life and death, between grief and memory. while in “canoe” (13), the material of the tree—the wood—becomes a vessel in which a rite of passage is enacted. a young woman looks on as her soon-to-be lover cuts and shapes a canoe out of bark stripped from a tree: the soft flesh of the tree expires the scar bleeds on the trunk […] the structure forms to natures [sic] laws a new dais of voyage prepared at midnight they sail the river she turns without causing a ripple looking back along the darkness to the neon of the scar tree coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 348 it shines like a bended doorway a light within beckons as if a sacred star has fallen and a yearning will soon be done the tree is transformed into something new. it is scarred now in the same way that the lovers will be marked by their first sexual encounter. and it is a threshold: “it shines like a bended doorway” (13). but if trees represent guardians, gateways, thresholds—sites of generative and transformative acts—then the birds of inside my mother soar beyond the trees in the realm of the spirit and are liminal ancestral figures of hope, redemption and power: our birds fly on elongated wings they fly forever they are our spirit (3) in the lines “fill my ears with / bird song / i will survive” (“tjulpu”; 49), there is the sense that the narrator survives because there is bird song—bird song is synonymous with life. this, of course, means that the inverse is true, so that in “mamu” (28), a poem about ecological and human desecration resulting from introduced substances and species—“sugar,” “catfish,” “toad”—it makes sense that the narrator claims, “the first metaphor is a dead bird / i have murdered it” (28). bird song in the poems of this collection both stands in for ancestral language, and is that language. when the warriors hang from trees (“warriors at salt creek”) “hatchlings shriek from grassy knolls” (33), like ancestors screaming murder murder murder. and in the poems, birds are timeless beings: “they fly forever” (3); they are messengers: “boobook owls permeate / their call transmutes me” (17); they are witnesses (to massacre): “crows gather and walk the sand / this vision can never leave their eyes” (33); and they are teachers/healers, showing the subject of the poems where to turn: “sing your love toward the sky” (31), and “in feather country / dancing is endless to / the music of wood” (36). the birds of this collection—owls, crows, eagles, lyrebirds, gulls—hover above the weighty concerns of the mundane—the scars of history on the land and body, the wounding severances of mother from child, the disconnection from heritage and belonging—and inhabit the sky “free from blemish” (19). they hover between the realms of earth and spirit like wishes, promising reconnection, regeneration and return. threshold creatures. and as such, they wing through the collection like points of light where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. for cobby eckermann, they represent a positive working through of grief, and of not being comfortable in her own skin: “most of my life had been a misinterpretation of the life and the person that i believe i was born to be” (wasafiri 2016), but writing poetry has been a way of resolving that schism. cobby eckermann’s development as a poet was born directly out of this tension of unravelling and reweaving the threads of her identity: “i think because my life was so fragmented, poetry was my only option to get a phrase or line out” (wasafiri). she uses brevity of form: two or three line stanzas, short lines, and lack of capitalisation. cobby eckermann creates spaces between lines for the reader to absorb and interpret: “now i want to write with my instincts totally in agreement with what i am putting on the page” coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 349 (wasafiri). through the craft of poetry, cobby eckermann hopes for “small shifts” in the consciousness of her readers “so that we [aboriginal and non-aboriginal people] can become better friends” (wasafiri). cobby eckermann’s creative work opens up spaces for contemplation. she says: acknowledgement and understanding […] is the main thing i write for. i think that when the readership can reflect their conversation back to you it also grants healing by understanding beyond the words on the page. (wasafiri) cobby eckermann’s poetry inhabits the threshold through the central metaphors of sand, clay, trees and birds, and cobby eckermann herself writes on the threshold, that inbetween place where a transformation—bodily, linguistically, culturally—can occur. writing on the threshold, the productive middle between cultures or identities, might be one way to consider a reimagining of australian poetics. references anzaldua, gloria. borderlands: the new mestiza = la frontera. aunt lute books, 1987. bachelard, gaston. the poetics of space. orion press, 1964. bird rose, deborah. nourishing terrains. australian aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness. australian heritage commission, 1996. carter, paul. ‘the forest in the clearing.’ halfway house. the poetics of australian spaces, edited by jennifer rutherford and barbara holloway, university western australia publishing, 2009, pp. 133-157. ---. dark writing: geography, performance, design. university hawaiian press, 2008. cobby eckermann, ali. too afraid to cry. ilura press, 2014. ---. inside my mother. giramondo press, 2015. ---. ‘an interview with ali cobby eckermann’ by ben etherington. wasafiri, vol. 31, no. 2, june 2016, pp. 13-17. doi:10.1080/02690055.2016.1145440. ---. ‘inside my mother: ali cobby eckermann’. radio national: earshot—other mothers series with mike ladd. aired monday may 2, 2016: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/inside-my-mother-alicobby-eckermann/7319198. ---. ‘book and arts’ with sarah kanowsky, radio national, march 8, 2017: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/ali-cobbyeckerman/8332138. ---. opening remarks at little windows press poetry reading, howling owl café, adelaide, november 14, 2017. cooke, stuart. speaking the earth’s languages. a theory for australian-chilean postcolonial poetics. rodopi, 2013. deleuze, gilles and guattari, felix. a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia, translated and foreword by brian massumi. university of minnesota press, 1987. farrell, michael. writing australian unsettlement. modes of poetic invention 17961945. palgrave macmillan, 2015. gilbert, kevin. (ed). inside black australia: an anthology of aboriginal poetry. penguin books, 1988. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/ali-cobbyhttp://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/ali-cobbycoolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 350 grant, stan. talking to my country. harper collins, 2016. heaney, seamus. ‘feeling into words.’ preoccupations. selected prose 1968–1978. faber & faber, 1980, pp. 41-60. hecq, dominique. towards a poetics of creative writing. multilingual matters, 2015. kroll, jeri. ‘living on the edge: creative writers in higher education.’ text, vol, 14, no. 1, 2009. langford, martin et al. contemporary australian poetry. puncher & wattmann, 2016. mead, philip. networked language. culture & history in australian poetry. australian scholarly publishing, 2008. mukherji, subha. thinking on thresholds: the poetics of transitive spaces. anthem press, 2011. noonuccal, oodgeroo. ‘municipal gum.’ inside black australia. an anthology of aboriginal poetry, edited by kevin gilbert. penguin books, 1988. oed online. “liminal, adj.,” oxford university press, january 2018, www.oed.com/view/entry/108471. ---. “reconcile, v.,” oxford university press, january 2018, www.oed.com/view/entry/159773. pascoe, bruce. dark emu: black seeds agriculture or accident? magabala books, 2014. scott, kim. ‘covered up with sand.’ meanjin, vol. 66, no. 2, 2007, pp. 120-124. ---. ‘apologies, agency and resilience’. frontier skirmishes. literary and cultural debates in australia after 1992, edited by russell west-pavlov and jennifer wawrzinek, universitatsverlag, winter 2010, pp. 57-68. trevorrow, tom et al. they took our land and then our children. migration museum and ngarrindjeri land and progress association, no date. turner, victor ‘betwixt & between: the liminal period in rites of passage.’ bewixt & between: patterns of masculine and feminine initiation, edited by louise carus mahd, steven foster and meredith little, open court publishing, 1987, pp. 3-22. vizedon, monika b. and kaffee, gabrielle l. the rites of passage. arnold van gennep. university chicago press, 1960. windham-campbell prize, http://windhamcampbell.org/2017/winner/ali-cobby-eckermann wood, rd. ‘heartsick for country. inside my mother by ali cobby eckermann.’ plumwood mountain, vol. 3, no. 2, no date: https://plumwoodmountain.com/r-d-wood-reviews-inside-my-mother-by-alicobby-eckermann/. molly murn is a south australian writer. she holds a bachelor of dance, a masters of creative arts, and is currently a phd candidate in creative writing at flinders university. molly works as a bookseller at matilda bookshop in the adelaide hills. her novel, heart of the grass tree, is forthcoming with penguin random house in 2019. molly has worked as a lecturer in english and creative writing, as a sessional academic teacher, research assistant, and is a sub-editor for transnational literature. at the moment, molly is composing a poetry collection that explores writing on thresholds. 1 the notion of the threshold as a mode of inquiry was first articulated by arnold van gennep in his 1909 cross-cultural study of ritual processes, les rites de passage. in http://windhamcampbell.org/2017/winner/ali-cobby-eckermann https://plumwoodmountain.com/r-d-wood-reviews-inside-my-mother-by-ali-cobby-eckermann/ https://plumwoodmountain.com/r-d-wood-reviews-inside-my-mother-by-ali-cobby-eckermann/ https://www.matildabookshop.com.au/ http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 351 that seminal study the threshold, the liminal (limen), marked the transitional stage between rites of separation, and rites of incorporation found in the initiation processes of many cultures. threshold rites include “direct and physical rites of entrance, of waiting, and of departure” (vizedon and kaffee 1960, 25) such as pregnancy, betrothal, initiation, and death. victor turner in betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites of passage (1987) saw threshold rites “deserv[ing] special attention as constructive ‘building blocks’ for change or possibly transformation and initiation to another level of consciousness” (ix). turner’s ritual liminality is characterised by “anti-structure,” a transition between states, where the liminal being is located outside the conventional social structures (temporarily) as they undergo “processes of growth, transformation, and the reformation of old elements in new patterns” (9). the phase betwixt and between is marked by a state of productive reflection. 2 see bruce pascoe’s dark emu: black seeds agriculture or accident? (2014). coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 muslims at the australian periphery linda briskman swinburne institute of social research lbriskman@swin.edu.au susie latham curtin university slatham0408@gmail.com copyright©2017 linda briskman & susie latham. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract: the overt expression of anti-muslim sentiment is a relatively new phenomenon in australia. it builds upon racism embedded in history, “clash of civilisations” ideologies and constructs of border-terrorism. denigration of muslims, commonly termed islamophobia, is overtly evident in the official sphere, media reporting and increasing popular rejection of islamic amenities such as schools and mosques. connected but more insidious is the islamophobia of the ‘white savior rescue’ movement, in which muslim men and islam are positioned as perpetrators of oppression and harm toward muslim women, requiring non-muslim intervention. varied forms of islamophobia and their impacts are discussed. keywords: islamophobia, borders, oppression of women, terror mailto:lbriskman@swin.edu.au mailto:slatham0408@gmail.com 34 twenty years ago anti-islam prejudice did not occupy public space…mainstream australians were largely indifferent towards muslims although one-dimensional images persisted. the voices of prejudice that existed spoke mainly in whispers and were hidden out of sight. in general, the australian media was uninvolved and the australian public proved an uninterested, unmovable audience (hanifa deen 2010). introduction this paper discusses how muslims in australia are increasingly being moved to the margins of society through a public campaign of misinformation and contempt, a paradox in an isolated nation that has prided itself on giving all a ‘fair go’. we posit that a confluence of factors has created a nation that is threatened by the ‘racialised other’ and in doing so we point to collusion within politics and media to shape discourses. as an explanatory framework we first provide an overview of a trilogy of influence: ‘raced’ history, border-terror reasoning and clash of values ideologies. we discuss how these converging factors exclude the racialised muslim from australian identity, which privileges anglo-saxon paradigms and judeo-christian schools of thought. we discuss two major islamophobic discourses – that of the oppressed muslim woman and that of the muslim terrorist. these interlinking foundations segue into defining, shaming and criminalising muslims, who are depicted as a threat to australian society. in linking these sections, we draw on the work of sherene razack (2007) on the interconnection of the tropes of ‘dangerous’ muslim men, imperilled muslim women and the ‘civilised’ european. the situation has changed markedly since the time that deen refers to above. now anti-muslim sentiment pervades official discourse, the media and sections of the broader community, particularly on-line. anti-muslim fervor as it exists today would not be tolerated if such vitriol were targeted at other groups. contextualising islamophobia commentators frequently revert to the colonial past to explain different racisms in australia and how, in outpost australia, there is a trajectory of locating new and othered enemies. the invasion of australia was the defining moment that shaped what was to follow, with this settler colonial society not coming to terms with its colonising past despite a modicum of apologies and tokenism at official events. with a vast land, much of it substantially emptied of indigenous occupants by brutality and disease and with slow emplacement by convicts and settlers, border anxiety emerged most robustly during the gold rush of 1851 that led to the arrival of chinese in australia. once the gold boom subsided by the 1880s a scapegoat was needed and the chinese 35 conveniently fitted as the demonised other with fears of an influx of ‘barbarians’ fuelling immigration restrictions (macleod 2006). legislating for white australia (immigration restriction act 1901) further defined the nation, setting in place regimes that had exclusionary consequences for waves of migrants despite the eventual demise of the policy and the advent of multiculturalism. this was not unique to australia. referring to the united states, joseph carens (2013, p. 176) points to the similar fears expressed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toward catholics and jews from europe and all immigrants from asia. he says the same rhetoric occurred then about alien invasions, with asians, catholics and jews portrayed as threatening and incapable of assimilating into the host society. according to taverna (2005, pp. 20-21), as inhabitants of a white, british colonial outpost in the pacific, australians in the early 1900s were ‘acutely conscious of their geographic distance from britain, their dependence on imperial protection, and their cultural and racial difference from the countries that surrounded them’. despite the multicultural nature of australian society today, the sense of an isolated, white and somewhat british nation persists to the present, which contributes to anxieties about loss of homogeneity. this takes hold even though there has been a substantial shift away from british and european migration with asian migration substantially increasing (markus, jupp and mcdonald (2009). fear of loss of identity and security are at the root of conflict within and between societies (lawrence 2006) and this is played out in constructions of the middle-eastern muslim migrant, particularly refugees arriving by boat. this fear was masterfully exploited by john howard’s liberal-led coalition government in august 2001 when, facing possible electoral defeat, it sent the sas counter terrorist force onto the norwegian freight ship tampa, which had rescued asylum seekers just off christmas island. the ship’s captain was refused permission to enter australian territory and threatened with prosecution as a people smuggler (briskman, latham and goddard 2008). after the september 11 terror attacks in the us the following month, the government conflated mainly muslim asylum seekers, border control and terror. howard’s declaration that the government would decide who came to australia and the circumstances in which they came became his election mantra. defence minister peter reith stated in interviews on 13 september 2001 that ‘security and border protection go hand in hand’, with parliamentary secretary peter slipper declaring without evidence ‘there is an undeniable linkage between illegals and terrorists’ (henderson, 2002). but as even conservative commentator gerard henderson (2002) pointed out, terrorists by their nature try to keep a low profile and were hardly likely to choose to enter australia via a route that would land them in mandatory immigration detention where they would undergo government scrutiny. henderson declared the linkage of asylum seekers and terrorism as irresponsible, opportunistic scaremongering. yet it was rewarded when the november 2001 election delivered a swing to the liberals, despite them having trailed in the polls for most of the year. 36 the potency of border terror politics was a lesson learned by both the liberals and the labor party, one capitalised on over a decade later by another liberal prime minister, tony abbott, who made his pre-election mantra a promise to ‘stop the boats’. border terror has fervently taken hold. terrorism in general has also dominated much of the australian political landscape since 2001. in the wake of september 11, australia joined in the invasion of afghanistan, then iraq, and today continues to embrace the ongoing western ‘war on terror’. the focus of this ‘war’, islamist extremism, is increasingly being conceptualised as stemming from a ‘problem with islam’, and implicitly, all muslims. this conception is underpinned in australia and other western countries by the ‘clash of civilisations’ theory (lewis, 1990; huntington, 1993), the idea that differences between ‘the west’ and ‘islam’ are irreconcilable. edward said (2001), postulates that the personification of the enormous entities of ‘the west’ and of ‘islam’ reduces complex matters of identity and culture to a cartoon-like world where ‘popeye and bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more worthy pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary’. in the writings of ‘clash’ proponents, the west is invariably portrayed as superior in political sophistication. sedgwick (2006, p. 205) argues that conflict between the west and muslim countries is the result of history and politics, not religion, but that for many westerners, the idea of a culture clash can be summarised as: muslims reject western values, and so are determined to destroy them. westerners also reject many muslim values, of course, but are not determined to destroy the muslim world, because westerners are tolerant, and will work for peaceful change. another key strand to the ‘clash’ narrative is the superiority of gender relations in ‘the west’, an idea which leila ahmed (1992) terms ‘colonial feminism’. she and others note that it has been used historically to justify western intervention to help foreign women being oppressed by foreign men in countries including egypt, india and algeria (abu-lughod, 2002; elia, 2006; ho, 2007). most recently it was used by us president george bush and british prime minister tony blair to justify the invasion of afghanistan. the wives of both leaders spoke publicly in support of the war, invoking the taliban’s poor treatment of women (ward, 2001). in 1998 academic jon stratton wrote race daze in which he argued that race has been a central concept in the formation of the australian nation, a marker to exclude those considered ineligible to be members of it. race has, he argues (p. 9) worked as a guarantor of a particular homogeneity, of language, culture and race. he debunks the myth of inclusive multiculturalism: the policy of multiculturalism is organized according to a metaphorical spatial structure in which migrant, ‘ethnic’ cultures are peripheral to a core culture named these days as ‘anglo-celtic’, which is privileged (p. 10). 37 fortress australia is an insecure nation – no longer truly british, not fully americanised and not identifying as asian despite its proximity. emerging right-wing groups, particularly anti-muslim organisations such as reclaim australia, assert australian values based on a christian-judeo heritage and the exclusion of muslims. the work of british sociologist frank furedi (2006, p. vii) on the culture of fear provides some insights. he sees fear as beyond an emotion or a response to the perception of threat. rather it has become a cultural idiom through which we signal a sense of growing unease about our place in the world. fear of ‘desperate middle eastern terrorists plotting our downfall’ (pp. ix-x) he says do not necessarily emerge from personal experience. they are dangers we cannot directly confront, but passive fear is prominent. the highly visible terror acts of september 11 2001 and of the so-called islamic state since 2014 have brought to life the stereotype of the violent muslim male that was previously present, but latent, in the western imagination. over the same period, popular literature detailing stories of brutality against muslim women have become best-sellers. these stereotypes of muslim men and women each add to the other and both are reinforced by ‘ex-muslims and anti-muslims’ (jabreal, 2005), the best known of whom is ayaan hirsi ali, assuring us that such acts are not exceptional, but actually integral to ‘islam.’ the oppressed muslim woman when academic tahmina rashid gave a talk in australia about violence toward south asian women, she was unprepared for reaction that followed, a woman rushed forward to give me a hug and congratulate me for being able to ‘run away’ from horrific violence that women face ‘there’. instantly, i became the object of the affection of a woman protector (rashid 2010, p. 110). the trope that muslim women’s lives are unrelentingly miserable, and that those who manage to ‘break free’ and enter the liberated (western) world by leaving their communities are both victim and hero, is one encouraged both by popular literature and conservative ideologues. memoirs by girls and women who have escaped the harsh repression of islamic fundamentalism are so prolific they have become a genre themselves. and there is often a disturbing, prurient element to the memoirs – these are stories of women who have been burnt, stoned, incarcerated, shot, starved and tortured (dempsey, 2016). more damaging though, is public commentary by those who claim these tales are not as exceptional as the stories of horror and exploitation that also occur in the west. when these commentators come from the religion they are criticising, people who have little first-hand knowledge of muslims see them as credible. that generalisations about over 500 million women from different ethnic, national, economic and social 38 backgrounds have any credibility is an illustration of how ‘othered’ muslims are in the west. the muslim veil in particular is seen as ‘a visual embodiment of gender oppression, self-segregation and the existence of parallel communities’ as well as a practice ‘synonymous with religious fundamentalism and, as such, one which fosters political extremism’ (zempi and chakraborti 2015, p. 44). the position of muslim women is both essentialised and also seen as totally resistant to change. ayaan hirsi ali has played a significant role in promoting these notions in her decade plus career of best-selling books, newspaper articles, media appearances and speaking tours. rising to prominence after september 11, hirsi ali has modelled herself as a cultural interpreter, explaining to western audiences how terrorism and muslim women’s oppression can both be blamed on the singular factor islam. having served as a conservative in the dutch parliament and being supported by right-wing think tanks in the us, she has been afforded platforms to promote a message she recognises as more potent when delivered by her (2010, pp. 97-98): i was to be the face of the muslim woman who had sought and found freedom in holland. unlike white commentators, who were hamstrung by the fear that they would be labelled racists, i could voice my criticisms. after interviewing her, rogier van bakel said, ‘it was a shock and a revelation to see a young, black, muslim woman championing causes previously associated with middleaged white male pundits who had often been dismissed as racists or islamophobes’ (2007). her promotion of these causes has seen her characterised as brave and won her accolades across the political spectrum, time magazine in 2005 declaring her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. hirsi ali has taken advantage of her fame, actively seeking to influence western political leaders on foreign policy. she voted for the iraq war when a member of the dutch parliament, asserting that one mistake western forces made was not staying ‘for at least fifty years or a hundred years’ and another not attacking iran first (whitney, 2007). she has also contributed to the demonisation of muslims living in western countries. dutch historian geert mak in 2005 warned that hirsi ali had helped create a tone in debate about dutch muslims similar to anti-semitic rhetoric a century earlier. he said she was ‘turning the language of feminism and the enlightenment inside out’ and legitimising ‘hatreds and prejudices that would previously have been considered out of bounds’ (scroggins, 2012, p. 315). the modern incarnation of what ahmed termed ‘colonial feminism’ is exemplified by western campaigns against female genital cutting (fgc) and child marriage. both practices are widely characterised in the west as islamic, despite their prevalence across religions and cultures and their strong association with poverty and insecurity. for razack (p. 88) ‘feminist arguments are part of the conceptual arsenal underpinning the permanent stigmatization of community’. 39 western campaigns to save muslim women overseas from these practices have encouraged western women to support social media campaigns, talk to western politicians and donate to western charities to help their supposedly helpless ‘sisters.’ even the official world health organisation (who) and other un agency literature on addressing issues including fgc and child marriage presupposes the need for western driven education, enlightenment or empowerment campaigns (latham, 2016). despite evidence that child marriage almost tripled among syrians in jordan displaced by war in early 2014 (unicef, 2014) and that iraqi women’s position declined dramatically after the west declared war on saddam hussein (pina, 2006), the western popular discourse has little interest in causes other than islam for muslim women’s problems. as henry louis gates asked (1994): is it, after all, unreasonable to be suspicious of westerners who are exercised over female circumcision, but whose eyes glaze over when the same women are merely facing starvation? these campaigns have recently been reconfigured by overtly bigoted groups such as reclaim australia who have railed about the threat the importation of such practices through migration poses to western societies. on-line anti-muslim forums frequently include comments like the one below by an anti-mosque campaigner, which was accompanied by a photo of children undergoing fgc: oh, we could have this here too? would you like your f**ny sliced off…i’m opposed to female genital mutilation, child brides, inequality, women beating, all part of quran, read it.1 these sort of depictions essentialise all muslim women as victims and all muslim men as violent. both fall victim to a form of hate crime, islamophobic victimisation, which is frightening and distressing for those targeted by it (zempi and chakroborti 2015). in 2016 the age newspaper ran a series of brief interviews with muslims telling of what it is like to live in australia. responses ranged from the passing of judgment on a young woman who wears a scarf, people refusing to ‘pair up’ for group work in schools, another was told that the only good muslim was a dead muslim. a highly qualified professional spoke of racist and hurtful comments by colleagues. ‘it’s like being an outcast’, one woman proclaimed; another spoke of ‘feeling isolated, harassed, always looked down on’. concern was expressed by parents for the futures of their children: ‘i have not spoken to my daughter about extremism because she is too young to understand hate. she only understands love’ (donelly, 2016). the public arena 1 australia: fearless councillor has her twitter account suspended after she tweeted graphic islamic female genital mutilation (fgm) photos to a supporter of a controversial mosque. (2015). bare naked islam. http://www.barenakedislam.com/2015/02/28/australia-fearless-councillor-has-her-twitteraccount-suspended-after-she-tweeted-graphic-islamic-female-genital-mutilation-fgm-photos-to-asupporter-of-a-controversial-mosque/, 22 june 2016 http://www.barenakedislam.com/2015/02/28/australia-fearless-councillor-has-her-twitter-account-suspended-after-she-tweeted-graphic-islamic-female-genital-mutilation-fgm-photos-to-a-supporter-of-a-controversial-mosque/ http://www.barenakedislam.com/2015/02/28/australia-fearless-councillor-has-her-twitter-account-suspended-after-she-tweeted-graphic-islamic-female-genital-mutilation-fgm-photos-to-a-supporter-of-a-controversial-mosque/ http://www.barenakedislam.com/2015/02/28/australia-fearless-councillor-has-her-twitter-account-suspended-after-she-tweeted-graphic-islamic-female-genital-mutilation-fgm-photos-to-a-supporter-of-a-controversial-mosque/ 40 sherene razack (2007, p. 7) speaks of a culture of exception that underpins eviction of increasing numbers of people from political community. there are a variety of ways in which this plays out in australia. these include directing of resources toward increased counter-terrorism measures and the bolstering of airport security. as a new ‘preventative panacea’, there is a raft of de-radicalisation programs aimed at young muslims, despite an inability to show that these have any efficacy. to bolster and justify these formal measures, inflammatory language has been used by politicians. for former prime minister tony abbott, so fond of holding press conferences in front of multiple flags that how many could be squeezed in became a running joke on social media, ‘death cult’ and ‘team australia’ were among his favourites. as anne aly states, ‘this rhetoric begs the question of who was on the team and who wasn’t. it left the impression the government believed there was an “us” and “them”, with australian muslims cast as “them”’ (cited in seccombe 2015). policing and surveillance practices are one of the strongest examples of public islamophobia. federal and state police regularly interrogate and arrest young muslims with significant media reportage that exacerbates community fear. the perception of muslim terrorist threat in australia is in keeping with cohen’s (2002) concept of moral panic. one of the most tragic examples of police action and associated media attention was the 2014 death of 18 year old numan haider in melbourne (aap 2014), who had come to the notice of security authorities. when he met with two anti-terrorism police as requested, he attacked them with a small knife and was shot dead. in its quest, governments have willing recruits in the media, in new political alliances and anti-muslim demonstrators. immigration officials are also at work, questioning people arriving and departing from australian airports who arouse suspicion. in an act of clear ethnic profiling, visitors to mecca for hajj in 2015 were warned about australian airport border requirements. in the same breath, the government missive proclaimed it does not discriminate on grounds of religion and ethnicity.2 criminalisation of asylum seekers by australia through the establishment of offshore detention camps in nauru and papua new guineas creates a convenient segue into the homily of the menacing muslim. despite extensive criticism of these sites by the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr 2016) and human rights bodies such as amnesty international (2016), the threat factor has enabled these camps to become entrenched, and with overall community acceptance. harsh treatment of asylum seekers and refugees is increasingly globalised. in recent years the actions of the so-called islamic state, both in causing millions to flee iraq and syria, and in raising the profile of terrorism, as well as the increasing appeal of rightwing parties, have contributed to the adoption of severe measures against refugees in europe, including containment and removal. betts (2016) states that ‘the elephant in the room is an underlying islamophobia’ and that ‘european member states don’t really want to welcome muslim migrants’. she points to how explicit this has been in 2 http://newsroom.border.gov.au/channels/corporate/releases/hajj-pilgrims-urged-to-know-their-rightsand-responsibilities-at-the-border, 21 november 2016 http://newsroom.border.gov.au/channels/corporate/releases/hajj-pilgrims-urged-to-know-their-rights-and-responsibilities-at-the-border http://newsroom.border.gov.au/channels/corporate/releases/hajj-pilgrims-urged-to-know-their-rights-and-responsibilities-at-the-border 41 countries with vocal far right parties and in central european countries with christian nationalist governments, with the change in acceptance of refugees since islam became ‘politically toxic’. this phenomenon is replicated in australia with far right groups of all persuasions decrying muslim immigration (illustrated below) and with the government acceding by providing preference to settling non-muslims fleeing syria (henderson and uhlmann 2015). anti-muslim political parties are gaining ground globally, the effect of which is to further normalise islamophobia in western societies. in australia, the most sophisticated is the internationally connected, well-resourced australian liberty alliance (ala), which was launched in october 2015 by anti-muslim dutch politician geert wilders. pauline hanson and her one nation party, originally anti-asian, have rebranded as anti-muslim and revived in the political sphere. the brand of the flamboyant hanson and the magnet she creates for media contributed to her party’s success in having four senators elected to federal parliament in the 2016 election. elections are a time when populist causes emerge. many people held their breath during the 2016 austrian election. in a close call the losing presidential candidate, norbert hofer, was a strident opponent of immigration and one of the authors of the freedom party manifesto that is regarded as xenophobic (strobl 2016). on the other side of the world president-elect trump has opened doors to a more overt and mainstreamed islamophobia than has ever been seen before. the us-based bridge initiative (2016) team makes the following point as it documents anti-muslim statements from a variety of politicians: …it’s not just talking about islam that’s the problem, but rather the degree to which that talk can veer off in the direction of prejudice and fearmongering.3 in australia, this normalisation of islamophobia within the political system takes various twists and extends into community reactions. the condemnation of simplistic notions of sharia law has reached into street and online movements that condemn the presence of mosques, halal food and head covering for women. rhetoric goes to absurd extremes as shakira hussein (2015, p. 97) proclaims: ‘stealth jihad’ and the smuggling of ‘muslim’ food into the bellies of unsuspecting australian non-muslims. but more insidiously, normalisation extends into institutionalisation. ismail (2007, p. 84) refers to this transition in the united states through for example racial profiling, ‘open season’ on expressions of hate for islam and its institutions, and rising respectability for obnoxious islamophobes’. arguably social media has immense power in the discord of hate. in australia, almost 21,000 people ‘liked’ the stop the mosque in bendigo facebook page and dozens of other anti-muslim pages attracting hundreds of thousands of ‘likes’ between them. in his book on the islamophobia industry, nathan lean reminds us that purveyors of islamophobia harness the power of the internet to expand small networks into national and international organisations (lean 2012). 3 http://bridge.georgetown.edu/islamophobia-and-the-2016-elections/, 21 november 2016 http://bridge.georgetown.edu/islamophobia-and-the-2016-elections/ 42 mainstream media, which is a source of information for large sections of the population, frequently expounds anti-muslim sentiment. this includes the broadsheet national news corp newspaper, the australian, which has an educated readership. during 2015 it rolled out what it described as an ‘unflinching series of articles examining muslim australia’ (the australian 2015), producing opinion pieces that were hostile to islam and muslims. it is owned by rupert murdoch, known as an owner who likes his opinions reflected in his media outlets (hosenball & holton, 2011). after the charlie hebdo terror attacks in france, murdoch declared to his 770,000 twitter followers, ‘maybe most moslems are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held re sponsible’4 overcoming hatred and bigotry olgier (2016) speaks of a bbc interview with a syrian woman who explained her understandings of western freedoms of expression, association and media, who then went on to explain that she did not want to have to jettison her religion. olgier suggests (2016, p. 9): ‘perhaps we’ll know that success on integration is approaching when she no longer feels that we think that she should’. nathan lean speaks of how the islamophobia industry manufactures fear (2012). as jonathan lyons (2012) states, rarely have the central themes of anti-islam discourses faced serious scrutiny or nuanced analysis. they operate silently in the background as they shape statements about islam and muslims. programs currently in place to combat racism and to foster interfaith dialogue will be ineffective unless we get perspective. the terrorism discourse has taken such hold that it is going to be a herculean task to eliminate. lean (2012) asks us to consider that in the nine years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 2010, muslim americans killed 33 people in terrorist attacks in the united states. in the same period, america experienced 150,000 murders unrelated to what is described as terrorism. the disproportionate fear about muslims is also reflected in the preposterous notion that two per cent of the population is islamicising australia. that significant numbers of westerners are concerned about, if not outright fearful of muslims, is a measure of the success those promoting islamophobia have had in recent times. these fears actually make all of us less safe, by encouraging harmful acts of exclusion against muslims that reinforce the message of groups like isil, as waleed aly so eloquently argued in his viral video message attacking those demonising muslims.5 they also make us less safe by distracting our attention from the violence within our society domestic, criminal and of inequality and deprivation violence that we can actually have some impact on and that actually harms many more people. 4 https://twitter.com/rupertmurdoch/status/553734788881076225?lang=en, 9 january 2015 5 https://www.facebook.com/theprojecttv/videos/10153243154568441/, 21 november 2016 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(2016), ‘muslim boy investigated by british police after 'terrorist house' spelling error’, abc news, 20 january, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-0120/muslim-boy-investigated-for-terrorist-house-spelling-error/7102802 zempi and chakraborti (2015), ‘they make us feel like we’re a virus: the multiple impacts of islamophobic hostility towards veiled muslim women’, international journal for crime, justice and social democracy, 4(3), pp. 44-56. linda briskman is professor of human rights at swinburne university of technology, where she conducts research on asylum seeker rights and indigenous rights. susie latham is completing a phd on western perceptions of muslim women at curtin university. she is a co-founder of voices against bigotry. http://unhcr.org.au/news/unhcr-calls-immediate-movement-refugees-asylum-seekers-humane-conditions/ http://unhcr.org.au/news/unhcr-calls-immediate-movement-refugees-asylum-seekers-humane-conditions/ http://www.unicef.org/mena/unicefjordan_earlymarriagestudy2014(1).pdf http://reason.com/archives/2007/10/10/the-trouble-is-the-west/singlepage http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/nov/17/afghanistan.september11?intcmp=ilcnettxt3487 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/nov/17/afghanistan.september11?intcmp=ilcnettxt3487 https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/infidel/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-20/muslim-boy-investigated-for-terrorist-house-spelling-error/7102802 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-20/muslim-boy-investigated-for-terrorist-house-spelling-error/7102802 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 reworking the postmodern understanding of reality through fantasy in m. night shyamalan’s lady in the water (2006) and neil jordan’s ondine (2009) manal shalaby ain shams university, cairo, egypt manal.shalaby@alsun.asu.edu.eg copyright©2019 manal shalaby. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: in the two feature films lady in the water (2006) and ondine (2009), m. night shyamalan and neil jordan, respectively, present us with two grounded-in-reality fairy tales whose two male protagonists come in close contact with two mythical water creatures – encounters that positively reshape their perspective on reality through the use of fantasy. shyamalan relates the story of an emotionally wrecked middle-aged man who rescues a ‘narf’ (a water nymph in an unoriginated ancient bedtime story) from the pool of the dreary building he is superintending, while jordan follows the ordeal of a struggling irish fisherman who accidentally fishes a ‘selkie’ (a celtic seal-like water creature that has the power to assume full human form on land by shedding its seal skin). the two films negotiate the problematic connection between the fantastic and the real, and question the postmodern concept of representations masking an absence of solid reality as proposed by jean baudrillard. the paper focuses on tracing the ontological and linguistic role of fantasy in relation to reality and delineates how acts of storytelling and representation can refashion the human psyche’s perception of reality in a postmodern world by analysing the narrative and psychological means by which this relation is constructed in shyamalan’s and jordan’s films. the main argument of the paper is to explore how employing metafictional narrative techniques and reworking the psyche’s ties to fantasy can offer the postmodern individual a more enabling understanding of themselves and their reality. keywords: postmodern psyche, reality, fantasy, storytelling, meaning-making, metafiction, unconscious “[a] deeper import / lurks in the legend told my infant years / than lies upon that truth we live to learn.” (schiller 3.4) mailto:manal.shalaby@alsun.asu.edu.eg mailto:manal.shalaby@alsun.asu.edu.eg coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 the word fantasy commonly connotes falsehood and is widely regarded as an antithesis to reality. many writers and philosophers have argued against fantasy because it distances people from the real. plato, for example, contends that fantasy breeds deceit and harbors untruth in the soul (1991: 59-60). nevertheless, and counter to popular belief, most human beings have the urge to engage in fantasy not because it serves as a distraction from reality; rather, fantasy draws our attention to the gaps between knowledge and experience and attempts to fill them in a constant process of meaning-making. for instance, the frame narrative of one thousand and one nights introduces us to king shahryar who deems all women inherently unfaithful due to his wife’s recent infidelity. after he kills the queen, he decides to marry a virgin every night only to have her beheaded the following day until there are no more virgins left in the kingdom. in spite of her father’s reluctance, the wazier’s daughter, scheherazade, offers to spend one night with shahryar. the witty scheherazade manages to force the king to spare her life for so many days by telling him a tale every night – these tales constitute the body of the fables and folktales in one thousand and one nights. and every night she stops halfway so shahryar will be eager to know the rest of the story the following night. by the 1001st night, scheherazade and her enchanting tales succeed in winning the king’s heart and he makes her his queen. not only does scheherazade use her tales to spare her own life, but the fantasy that she puts together works as an incentive to recast shahryar’s reality. aside from its technical components which usually involve magic, adventure and basic binaries, fantasy as a long-standing storytelling genre harbours a more essential quality at its core: the ability to create a world different from, yet parallel to, the real world based on the consensual construction of belief between the author and the audience (mendlesohn, 2008: xv). this consensual construction of belief is what makes scheherazade’s fantastical worlds derive from and flow into shahryar’s reality and, hence, give him the liberty to explore the alternative versions which the real world can offer. in other words, fantasy cannot be entirely divorced from reality, otherwise it would be incomprehensible and unrelatable; fantasy has to follow an underlying framework similar to that of reality in order to generate the needed make-believe effect. the concocted worlds that shahryar was captivated by for 1001 nights give him the opportunity to move beyond the inevitability of his self-structured reality and make room for negotiable alternatives and probabilities, which in time culminates in the restructuring of the aforementioned reality. accordingly, fantasy should not be contested against reality in terms of ‘truth’ because fantasy’s truth – unlike reality’s, which depends on verisimilitude – stems from an involvement in its conditions of creation/narration; fantasy’s truth becomes a reversal of expectations (spitz, 2015), and provides the tools needed for navigating the real. in that sense, fantasy seems to approach the concept of truth from a postmodernist perspective. whilst modernists’ main preoccupation was to search for the truth, postmodernists do not believe in the existence of one universal truth but a myriad of variable truths which the individual can actively participate in creating instead of being bound by them. this, to a great extent, describes the core notion of fantasy, but the analogy is only skin-deep; although both postmodernism and fantasy focus on representations in order to reject the definitiveness of reality and share in the meaningcoolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 making process, the role of fantasy in creating concocted representations of the real is complicated by the postmodernist nihilist outlook towards reality/truth. according to postmodernism, representation is an ongoing deconstructive process that ends up in denying the very thing it represents. now we live in a world that gives us the chance to experience reality through a plethora of representations, yet the problem with these extended representations is that they have to feed on each other for survival — each takes its predecessor as a point of reference then eliminates it — and the end result is usually divorced from the real; it is a hyperreal, or what jean baudrillard calls a ‘simulacrum’. simulation is then “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality”, and simulacrum “is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none” (baudrillard, 1994: 1). in other words, baudrillard concludes that creating multiple representations or versions of reality eventually denies its existence altogether — something that renders the representation process rather essentially grim and existentially disheartening. to think of folk and fairy tales and other subgenres of fantasy as simulacra of reality is to trap fantasy inside a self-reflective system of referentiality and, as a consequence, terminally limit its capabilities. fantasy does not point out countless versions of reality to prove the existence of none — or obliterate reality altogether; instead, it restores faith in our ability to continuously reshape reality and fill in its gaps. to further explain this gap-filling process, kieran egan offers another closely-related interesting approach and draws a rather convenient linguistic analogy. a child gains a linguistic grasp over the world and its objects through experiencing it and creating ties between the signified (referent) and the signifier (reference). for instance, in order to learn the word ‘cat’ the child has to see a cat to link the word with the creature. however, with concepts that are less obvious, the child resorts to gap-filling in a continuum of opposites. the child can never fully understand the word ‘warm’ without first experiencing the two ends of the spectrum ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ then placing ‘warm’ in between: this way of learning to grasp the world in language and concepts is clearly very common. young children first learn opposites based on their bodies; "hot" is hotter than the body, "cold" is colder; "big" is bigger than their body, "little" is smaller; "hard" is harder than the body, "soft" is softer; and so on. young children learn a great deal about the world using this procedure; wet/dry, rough/smooth, fast/slow, and so on. children's perceptions of their own bodies provide their first yardstick for making sense of the world around them, and gaining a conceptual grasp over it by means of language. once they have formed an opposition, they can learn other terms along the continuum between such opposites. (egan) but when reality fails to express this in-betweenness, the child or the adult adopts fantasy to fill in the gaps. between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ fantasy gives us ‘ghost’; between ‘human’ and ‘fish’ fantasy gives us ‘mermaid’. fantasy is thus perceived as a means of describing the world — an innate activity of the human mind that recognises reality and its elements but refuses to reel under its restraining realism. therefore, the human mind’s tendency coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 towards the fantastical does not necessarily destroy the rational/real; rather, it frees the mind from the possessive grip of undermining familiarity. this creative involvement in the meaning-making process is what makes fantasy specifically appealing to children and adults alike. marina warner draws an example from the theatrical performance of j. m. barrie’s peter pan where audiences were asked to clap their hands if they wanted tinkerbell to live after she was poisoned. children impetuously clapped but adults were reluctant to take part in the fantasy because it promised them the agency that reality usually denies them and the imaginative power they have buried under innumerable layers of rigid reason (warner, 2018: 11); it gave them the pleasure of being creators themselves. fantasy gives people agency and brings them back to a stage where they feel the excitement of experiencing and contributing to things for the first time. at the end of hans christian andersen’s the snow queen, the grandmother reads the following verse from the bible to kai and gerda: “except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (andersen, 2013: 184). fantasy requires nothing but a true sense of wonder that children naturally possess and adults need to rediscover. this distinct feature of fantasy is what sustains its survival and reproduction. lady in the water (2006) and ondine (2009) are two cinematic visions that do not introduce fantasy as such, but as part of a system that steadily renegotiates fantasy’s role in shaping reality. m. night shyamalan and neil jordan present us with two protagonists who epitomise the true spirit of postmodernism; both have lost faith in reality’s ability to provide meaning as an outcome of personal traumas. one is a middle-aged man named cleveland heep who forsakes his profession as a physician and works as the superintendent of an apartment complex after his entire family is murdered, and the other is a formerly alcoholic fisherman named syracuse whose only daughter suffers from kidney failure which leaves her in need of a wheel-chair. interestingly, the two unfortunate lead characters come in close contact with two female water creatures that change the course of their lives for good. after he encounters some bizarre incidents and hears frequent water splashing at night in the building’s pool, cleveland finds a young woman whom he later discovers to be a narf named story. a narf is a water nymph in an unattributed bedtime story created by shyamalan himself and whose premise is laid out to the audiences in the beginning of the film through animated chalkboard narration accentuating the fairy-like tone of the story: once, man and those in the water were linked. they inspired us. they spoke of the future. man listened and it became real. but man does not listen very well. man's need to own everything led him deeper into land. the magic world of the ones that live in the ocean and the world of men … separated. through the centuries, their world, and all the inhabitants of it stopped trying. the world of man became more violent. war upon war played out, as there were no guides to listen to. now those in the water are trying again — trying to reach us. a handful of their precious young ones have been sent into the world of man. they are brought in the dead of night to where man lives. they need only be glimpsed and the awakening of man will happen. but their enemies roam the land. there are laws that are meant to keep the young ones coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 safe but they are sent at great risk to their lives. many do not return. yet still they try … try to help man. but man may have forgotten how to listen. (shyamalan, 00:00:24–00:02:15) for all its simplicity, the film’s prologue establishes the basic fantasy-reality tension lying at the heart of shyamalan’s story. human beings were once close to the fantastical realm of the narfs; they exchanged knowledge and wisdom until people’s pride led them to conjecture that they are capable of possessing everything and they drifted away from the water (a symbol of fantasy) and more towards land (a symbol of reality/reason). the story also delineates human beings’ dilemma of growing up — how, in the process of relinquishing childhood and embracing adulthood, they gradually learn to abandon their sense of wonder and assume a firmer grip on the real. as cleveland spends more time with story and the tenants of the apartment complex, he finds out the purpose of the young narf’s visit: story is sent to the world of man in order to inspire and bring about the awakening of a human vessel, an author whose writings will positively impact future generations and change the world for the better, unless her mission is interrupted by a malicious dog-like monster called the scrunt. as story searches for the human vessel, cleveland unwraps the mystery around story and with the help of the rest of the tenants tries to protect her from the scrunt’s attacks so that she can complete her mission and safely return to her world. in a slightly more realistic setting, a down-on-his-luck irish fisherman named syracuse catches in his nets a mysterious young lady who claims to not remember anything about her past even though she calls herself ondine. the name is a variation of undine which means ‘a water nymph’ in traditional european folklore; it is also derived from the latin word unda which means ‘wave’ (“undine”). annie, syracuse’s free-spirited daughter, suspects that ondine is a selkie. there are widely different accounts of what a selkie is but in most scottish, irish and icelandic folktales, selkies are believed to be seal-like water creatures capable of shedding their seal skin and shapeshifting into human form upon reaching land. what those legends have in common is that if selkies lose their seal skin, they are bound to stay on land until the skin is found. female selkies have a special kind of allure since they metamorphose into extremely beautiful women and, hence, become the object of desire for fishermen who hide their skins and keep them as wives. ondine, being an exotically attractive woman whose songs seem to attract more fish to syracuse’s nets, sparks annie’s imagination – annie identifies ondine with the protagonist of the legend that she has read and decides to reenact in reality. following the lines of a typical fantasy, syracuse falls in love with ondine, regardless of her insistence on staying in hiding and keeping her identity a secret. as viewers, we slowly become entangled in annie’s story just like the skeptical syracuse does and we are drawn to a belief system that transforms the obviously gruesome reality into a narrative we can control; ondine turns out to be a romanian drug mule who has lost her drug package in the sea and is, thus, followed by the dangerous man she works for. these details, albeit sordid, fit perfectly in annie’s reinterpretation of reality as her imagination works them out to produce another fantastical version to realise her happily-ever-after story. ondine, with her foreign accent and outlandish beauty, becomes the selkie that annie has been reading about, her pursuer becomes the selkie husband that leaves his sea coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 home in search of his wife, and the lost drug package that ondine accidentally finds one day becomes the seal skin that she has to hide in order to stay on land. annie’s proactive involvement in the narration expounds the aforementioned gap-filling role of fantasy as she manages to find a more convenient middle ground between her father’s abject reality and her unlimited childless imagination. her metafictional role both as narrator and character helps ease the audience into accepting the two extreme contradictions – ondine being a selkie versus ondine being a drug mule – as parts of one bigger narrative which is her happiness and her father’s salvation. cleveland and syracuse are examples of the postmodern individual; both of them have lost faith in reality’s ability to provide meaning to their personal tragedies which have engulfed their entire existence. it is not until they are introduced to their respective water nymphs that they start to reshape their understating of reality. story and ondine are not just mythical figures; they are elements of the fantastical — as opposed to the rational — that the two protagonists have to face and integrate as part of their healing journey. the fantasy that cleveland and syracuse are forced into fills in the gaps in their failing systems of belief and motivates them to retell their own stories through ongoing, evolving negotiations with reality — a process that can be explored on two closely related levels: the narrative and the psychological. the narrative relation between fantasy and reality is interminably negotiated and renegotiated in the two films by means of metafictional storytelling. cleveland and syracuse employ fantasy to create narrative frameworks which are not only contained within, but are also ceaselessly overlapping and shifting roles with reality. traditionally, reality is viewed as the master narrative within which fantasy is extended and played out; this narrative paradigm is deconstructed by postmodern techniques of storytelling in which metafiction breaks reality’s confining limits and undermines its position as a master narrative. it is true that a loss of a master narrative means that meaning has lost its fixed point of relevance and reference, which results in a desperate sense of anxiety as experience by cleveland and syracuse, but this equally enables fantasy to exchange positions with reality as the two no longer control each other yet succeed in filling each other’s gaps. this dialectical narrative relationship impels cleveland and syracuse to realise that their perception of reality is shaped by fantasy as much as fantasy is maintained by the existence of reality. m. night shyamalan lays out the narrative structure of lady in the water as a metafictional commentary on the process of storytelling. story (the narf) is a story (the fantasy as experienced by cleveland and the rest of the tenants) within a story (the realistic borders of the narrative) even though the last two frames are conjoined coequally not hierarchically. despite the fact that all of the tenants play a significant role in cleveland’s newfound fantasy, there are two characters in particular who conspicuously embody the fluctuating tension between fantasy and reality: mrs choi and mr farber. in order to understand story’s sudden appearance, cleveland seeks the help of an old chinese woman, named mrs choi who, relying on an old chinese bedtime story, fills him in with story’s purpose, and a disgruntled film critic (mr farber), who analyses everything and everyone from a strictly rational point of view. mrs choi does not speak english and so cleveland uses her granddaughter young-soon as a translator, indicating that fantasy is not totally self-sufficient and still needs reality as a medium to operate. as coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 mentioned earlier, j.r.r. tolkien points out that fantasy does not exist in a vacuum and that the very words and objects we use in our everyday life are the elements upon which fantasy can thrive (tolkein, 1966: 48). moreover, the old woman only relates the bedtime story to cleveland if he allows her to treat him like a child. as eccentric as it may sound, the old woman’s demand reminds us of marina warner’s remarks referred to above that children are more receptive of fantasy than adults. mrs. choi realises, being a force of fantasy herself, that cleveland has to abandon his skepticism and receive her story with a true sense of wonder. on the other hand, while mr farber provides cleveland with the rational insight he needs to understand the tenants’ characters so as to assign them roles in story’s fantasy and help her escape the scrunt and return home, farber’s unbending reason and incessant clinging to reality’s restrictive rules renders him incapable of believing in story’s purpose. mr farber does serve as an equilibrating force so that cleveland does not lose himself in the fantasy, yet being suspicious of story and critical of the circumstances around her enigmatic appearance prevents him from understanding story’s purpose in cleveland’s life; his high-handed sense of realism endangers story’s existence the same way adults banish fantasy as an irrational undertaking. not only do mrs choi and mr farber embody the extravagant metafictional element in the film, they also represent the convoluted relationship between fantasy and reality in the narrative structure of the story. while mrs choi plays the role of the author as she continuously feeds cleveland with new information about story and her world, which determines cleveland’s actions and makes us, as audiences, witness of how the narrative is created and woven into existence, mr farber reflects the sentiments of the adult viewer who overanalyses the story’s farfetched fantastical element with a dismissively condensing attitude. the critic is eventually killed by the scrunt while ironically commenting on this ‘expected’ narrative turn of events: this is like a moment from a horror movie. it is precisely the moment where the mutation or beast will attempt to kill an unlikable side character. but in stories where there has been no prior cursing, nudity killing or death, such as in a family film, the unlikable character will narrowly escape his encounter and be referenced again later in the story having learned valuable lessons. he may even be given a humorous moment to allow the audience to feel good about him. this is where i turn to run. you will leap for me. i will shut the door. and you will land a fraction of a second too late. (shyamalan, 01:26:5101:27:44) mr farber’s words reveal that he is involved in the metafictional process of storytelling as much cleveland is; the only difference is that the former refuses to allow fantasy to reform his system of previous experiences, which strips him of the rational controlling agency he claims to be in possession of, whereas the latter permits his gradually blossoming sense of wonder to alter his perception of the world and give him the control he previously lacked. farber’s death could signify the triumph of reality or it could indicate that reality is devoured by the very thing it creates, referring to baudrillard’s postmodern notion of the simulacrum which mr farber also embodies in his refusal to assign relatable significance to story and the story in which she is contained (shyamalan’s film itself). mrs choi and mr farber are the two forces that cleveland has to balance in order to engage with his story; grounding fantasy in reality while employing reality to serve fantasy is what cleveland has to do to construct his own meaning. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 in ondine neil jordan also plays with metafictional techniques to highlight the relationship between fantasy and reality. the film is extremely self-reflective as it perpetually draws attention to its fantastical element; besides annie’s recurrent allusion to alice in wonderland, the film refers to the conventional fairytale tropes it uses as annie tries to challenge her father’s bleak reality with her reinterpretive imagination. annie assumes the role of the storyteller and uses mermaid story tropes, such as the fisherman and the beautiful female water creature and her interconnectedness to nature, to construct a story that she keeps on changing and discussing with her father as events unfold. annie creates this fantasy to make her father’s life more joyous while he decides to entertain the fantasy to help distract his daughter from her critical medical condition. they both negotiate the boundaries between fantasy and reality in their attempts to make each other happy — a process of storytelling in which we (as the audience) become emotionally involved because we want to save annie and syracuse the same way the peter pan audiences clapped their hands to save tinker bell. to express this marriage between the fantastical and the real, throughout the entire film jordan uses solid, atmospheric colours and angles; it is only in the scenes after syracuse knows the truth about ondine and violence ensues (01:31:22-01:35:12) that jordan uses washed-out, grained camera lenses to give those scenes an incredibly unrealistic/dreamy effect, so the only oppressively real events are purposefully represented as fantastical. this technical code-switching in cinematography further complicates the relationship between reality and fantasy and renders annie’s version of reality on equal footing with the viewer’s. the two films also investigate fantasy’s healing abilities from a psychological standpoint through engaging with their main characters’ unconscious. psychoanalysis does acknowledge the role of the imaginary in composing our notion of the world; both sigmund freud and carl jung recognise fantasy as an instinctual undertaking prompted by the unconscious, making it part and parcel of the human psyche. for jung, fantasy is “a result of spontaneous eruptions from the unconscious, perhaps archetypes which become the subject for active imaginative shaping” (quoted in egan). put differently, he proposes that fantasy is reflective of the unconscious and representative of the different facets of the individual’s psyche. the water nymph in the two films is the mirror in which the protagonist discovers more about himself, and the irrational elements of the fantasy she brings along help the protagonist scrutinise and acknowledge the significant parts of his psyche that were previously unknown to him. that is why the actual struggle in both narratives is essentially dictated by the human/realistic versus the mythical/fantastical — even the other characters in the films become part of this psychologically manifested dichotomy. cleveland is first introduced to us as a decent man who likes to keep to himself most of the time; he does know every tenant in his building but he does not know much about any of them. it is only when story’s story unfolds that he starts to get acquainted with them in order to figure out their function in the fantasy and, in time, help story return home. the act of reconnecting with the other tenants is what cleveland needs to understand himself if these characters are seen as the various aspects that comprise his psyche: mr farber, the cynical critic; mrs choi, the superstitious lady; reggie, the physical strength fanatic; mr leeds, the wise veteran; mr dury, the interpreter; and many others — including shyamalan himself who plays the writer — could all be regarded as the different forces within cleveland’s coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 unconscious, and these parts need to come together to save the narf, i.e. to help the fantastical survive. in a similar manner, people in syracuse’s small circle of friends and family correspond to integral parts of his personality: annie, his daughter, is the child, the creative force; maura, the drunken ex-wife who tries to lure syracuse back into alcoholism, is self-destructive desire; and the friendly priest is optimistic faith. directly or otherwise, all of them assist syracuse out of his personal tragedy by helping him save ondine and secure a future for her. the role that story and ondine play in cleveland’s and syracuse’s lives is far more important than restoring their belief in the supernatural; what they miraculously manage to achieve is prompting the two men to reconnect with themselves, to truly understand and reconcile with every part of their psyche. in addition to the introspective insight that story and ondine gift their human saviours, the otherworldly beings turn the conflict between the human/realistic and the mythical/fantastical into a subversive quest towards redemption. just as the metafictional quality of both narratives destabilises the long-established relation between reality and fantasy, the films psychologically renegotiate traditional masculine-feminine politics of representation. lady in the water and ondine overhaul the mythological image of the destructively alluring female water creature and, instead, create two figures whose existence provides the male protagonists with reassurance and equilibrium. story and ondine may seem like two vulnerable beings in need of help, but it is the very act of enabling cleveland and syracuse to save them that asserts their redemptive power because, in the process, the two men realise it is themselves that they ultimately redeem. alternatively, story and ondine could be representative of the female image in the two male protagonists’ unconscious, and confronting this image is what leads to total reconciliation with the self. according to jung, the female image of any man — the anima — constitutes a considerable part of the masculine unconscious, and how one deals with the emotions and desires it generates directly affects the formulation of the self archetype. it is interesting how jung attributes metaphysical and mythical qualities to the anima archetype, which gives rise to magically complex relationships that extend beyond the realm of the real (1968: 27–30). after their personal tragedies, the two men have subdued their feelings of grief and tried to emulate the image of the emotionally disconnected male figure society usually dictates; however, their encounter with the two female mythical creatures leave room for their emotional vulnerabilities to resurface and, hence, they come to understand the depth of their grief. it is no coincidence that mrs choi and annie are both women because they function as the external creative energy which fuels and facilitates the two men’s confrontation with their anima. cleveland and syracuse finally come to accept their anima not only as a disposition towards emotional balance but also as a creative force necessary for survival the same way lands make room for streams of water to flow through them. it is no wonder then that story and ondine are water creatures; their connection to water symbolises the inventive and redemptive force the two protagonists needed to allow into their lives. this symbolic fertility corresponds with fantasy’s ability to simultaneously affirm and regenerate reality not as simulacra but as extended versions of itself. if postmodernism deconstructs our long-established notion of reality by destroying all fixed points of reference, then fantasy reconstructs our fractured ties to the real world by narratively and psychologically engaging us in the very act of storytelling. stories tap into the potential of human imagination and teach the despondent postmodern individual that coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 fantasy can save them from the loss of meaning. through their tragedy-stricken protagonists, m night shyamalan and neil jordan affirm that fantasy neither negates reality or reason nor partakes in the lugubriously relentless process of deconstructing meaning, and that availing ourselves of the fantastical can reorient our understanding of reality and provide fresh outlooks on ourselves and the world around us. cleveland and syracuse are fictional examples of how the happily-ever-after in our personal stories can be as simple, yet as glorious, as restoring ingenuous faith to our imagination and coming to terms with who we really are. story and ondine challenge the two men to take part in creating their fantasy and by doing so they come to understand the narrative agency they possess and the kind of control they can practise over their own reality. moreover, engaging in the act of storytelling offers them a therapeutic insight into their psyches and ways to deal with their seemingly circumstantial, yet essentially existential, grief. in short, both lady in the water and ondine succeed in incorporating two fantastical female figures in relatively bleak realities, and by exploiting metafictional narrative techniques and destabilising masculine-feminine representations and their psychological effects on characters, they question the quasireality-fantasy hierarchy and assert fantasy’s redemptive quality. bibliography andersen, hans christian. (2013) “the snow queen (adventure in seven tales)” andersen’s fairy tales, trans. pat shaw iversen, signet classics: 148–84 anonymous. one thousand and one nights. trans. richard francis burton. shammar ed. 1885–8 baudrillard, jean. (1994) “the precession of simulacra” in simulacra and simulation, trans sheila faria glaser, u of michigan p: 1–42 duggan, anne e., haase, d. and callow, helen j (eds) (2016) “undine” folktales and fairy tales: traditions and texts from around the world, 2nd ed, abc-clio: 1067 egan, kieran. “fantasy and reality in children’s stories.” simon fraser university: kieran egan, https://www.sfu.ca/~egan/fantasyreality.html. accessed 22 november 2018 jordan, neil. (2009) writer and director, ondine, magnolia pictures jung, carl gustav. (1968) the archetypes and the collective unconscious, 2nd ed, trans r f c hull, princeton university press mendlesohn, farah. (2008) introduction to rhetorics of fantasy, wesleyan university press: xiii–xxv plato, (1991) the republic of plato, 2nd ed, trans. allan bloom, harpercollins coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 schiller, friedrich. the piccolomini. trans samuel taylor coleridge, project gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6786/6786-h/6786-h.htm#link2h_4_0021. accessed 13 december 2018 shyamalan, m. night. (2006) writer and director, lady in the water, warner bros pictures spitz, ellen handler (2015). “the irresistible psychology of fairy tales” the new republic, 28 december 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/126582/irresistiblepsychology-fairy-tales. accessed 2 december 2018 tolkien, j.r.r. (1966) “tree and leaf” the tolkien reader. ballantine books warner, marina. (2018) fairy tale: a very short introduction, oxford university press bionote: manal shalaby received a master’s degree in literature and adaptation studies in 2013 and a ph.d. degree in english literature in 2018, both from ain shams university in cairo, egypt. she taught arabic and middle-eastern studies at williams college in massachusetts, usa from 2013 to 2015. she participated in conferences and wrote articles that cover a wide range of topics yet focus on the interdisciplinary nature of artistic and cultural manifestations. her recent research interests include exploring the relationship between middle-eastern and european mythology in ancient and modern folklore, and examining the trauma discourse in post-arab spring fiction and film. she is currently a lecturer in literature, film and language at asu. https://newrepublic.com/article/126582/irresistible-psychology-fairy-tales.%20accessed%202%20december%202018 https://newrepublic.com/article/126582/irresistible-psychology-fairy-tales.%20accessed%202%20december%202018 https://newrepublic.com/article/126582/irresistible-psychology-fairy-tales.%20accessed%202%20december%202018 https://newrepublic.com/article/126582/irresistible-psychology-fairy-tales.%20accessed%202%20december%202018 coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 christina stead an internationalist and cultural mediator anne holden rønning university of bergen achrroen@gmail.com copyright©2017 anne holden rønning. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: christina stead was one of the great australian writers of the twentieth century. after a revived interest in her work in the 70s and 80s, hazel rowley’s biography (1993) and chris william’s christina stead: a life of letters (1989), as well as an issue of southerly in 2003, stead is in danger of being once again forgotten. many of her texts, however, are relevant today as they express attitudes dominant in social media. it is perhaps fitting now in the twenty-first century that we evaluate how relevant her work still is in an age of transculturalism and globalization. we see in some of her texts the same dissatisfaction with politicians, politics and social life expressed in current political events such as brexit and the trump phenomenon. key words: christina stead; internationalism; transculturalism; cultural mediator today we live in a world that in the course of a couple of decades has become dominated by a digital revolution. issues which christina stead took up in her many novels and short stories written throughout the twentieth century are paramount in social media today; the young girl and her behaviour including social expectations and peer pressure; and questions of ethnicity, discrimination, stereotyping, and xenophobia. border-crossings, ‘multiple homes’, as well as an ability to portray other cultures, and people’s reactions to them, are characteristic features of stead’s work. with her piercing eye for detail she is able to inform us of what life was like for many, especially women, during this period. christina stead was one of the great australian writers of the twentieth century, and a writer for whom people and their portrayal was important. as stead herself stated: “i confess that the study of personality is a private passion, with me” (sage 1986: ix), and personality is always connected in some way to the social setting in which we live. after a revived interest in her work in the 70s and 80s with the virago reprints, hazel rowley’s biography (1993) and chris william’s christina stead: a life of letters (1989), stead seems to have been yet once again to some extent forgotten. veronica brady wrote on christina stead, and it is perhaps fitting in this volume in honour of her to consider, now in the twenty-first century in the light of contemporary affairs and changing critical views, the continuing relevance of her work. in many of her books she takes a clear political mailto:achrroen@gmail.com coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 stance, whether it is the labour party in post-war england, or communism in the usa in the macarthur period. these attitudes are relevant for society today, a society where high on the political agenda is dissatisfaction with politicians, the establishment, and the way society works, as expressed in current political events such as brexit and the trump phenomenon. transculturality and internationalism in stead both christina stead and william j. blake, her lifelong companion and husband, were internationalists as anne pender states: [t]he fact that she and blake never set up a home base meant that they lived their lives as true internationalists, with a fervent interest in the future of the world, in social justice and a profound understanding of english, french and american political culture. (2003: 41) in this article i should like to look at aspects of stead as a transcultural writer, and her concern with identities and those who do not belong. having lived, from the 1930s through to the 1970s, in different places on three continents, australia, europe and america, stead experienced the diversity of the huge social and cultural changes that took place in the twentieth century. this provided her with a broad range of different people to draw on. as geering comments in the afterword to ocean of story: “christina stead’s books were written out of the times and places she lived in. her writings followed her around the world” (538). stead is remarkable for her ability to understand and portray the specific characteristics of a nation, and to mediate their cultures. christina stead was aware of how much her internationalism framed her own identity as, after her return to australia, she writes in a letter, april 1975. “i left my life lying on the shore of other countries and i came to australia. no question of coming back – you can’t come back. i am a migrant and must do my best without squawing but people expect, with an understanding smile, that i will say i am glad to be home, or something. i am not home” (ms 1aa: file 2, letter to stanley burnshaw 20.4.1975). such internationalists never settle. in “why i am an expatriate writer” written when living in 34 remsen street, brooklyn, new york stead says, “i never felt an exile, an expatriate. i always felt at home, or at least the same as at home” (ms 4967, box 15:6). she was a multicultural person, living in multiple homes and often with a sense of ‘unhomely belonging.’i apart from for love alone (1944) and seven poor men of sydney (1934), stead’s australianness is not overtly apparent in her texts. this is clear in the quote above on her reaction on returning to australia, and also in the fact that for many years australians did not consider her as an australian writer, and worthy of their prestigious literary prizes. as angela carter comments: stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness, and never asks if the reader wishes to be so furiously enlightened and instructed, but takes it for granted that this is the function of fiction. she is a kind of witness and a kind of judge, merciless, cruel and magnificently unforgiving. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 [stead] has written novels set in cities in various countries as if she were native to them all. this phenomenon of ubiquity helps to explain her relative obscurity: she appears to acknowledge no homeland and has therefore been acknowledged by none until her return to her native country after almost a half-century of absence. (1982: 11) in my opinion the views expressed by angela carter here epitomise a characteristic feature of stead, and one that shows the transculturality of her writing. her ability to depict accurately an environment is one of her strengths as a writer, but also places demands on the reader, as the constant mobility in her texts provides an approach to fiction writing not embodied in place, but rather character in place. if we look at her as a transcultural writer these gaps fill themselves, whether issues of gender or politics. stead portrays characters moved out of their comfort zone of home into other multicultural environments to which they attempt to belong. stead’s apparent concern with love in its many facets for women should not prevent us from seeing the broader critique of society and cultural norms that lie behind. a good example is letty fox: her luck where stead makes extensive use of satire to critique aspects of american society, especially sex and its links to money and power. letty fox: her luck takes the reader on a journey through different generations’ reactions to life in the 1920-30s whether it be socialism which solander, letty’s father, recommends (18), xenophobia (84), the stock market crash (116-17) communism and the second world war (443). letty is a transcultural figure who seems to adjust to her many environments whether it be france paris, england or america. she learns french and french customs while she and her sister lodge with a french peasant woman (124), adapts to life and schooling in england when the family move there, and finally in america becomes a promoter of free love, attends communist meetings and talks of “radicalism as the opium of the people“ (3867). she expresses the diversity and hybridity of cultures that edward said speaks of in “the clash of definitions,” his answer to samuel huntington’s essay “the clash of civilizations” which looks at the issue from a binary point of view. said opposes this binary view in the light of globalization and a world where multiculturalism is dominant and here to stay. as i have pointed out elsewhere “no one can live in another country or culture, or read extensively about other cultures, without being influenced and affected by it” (rønning 2011:5). it is vision, scope, and setting not necessarily theme, which makes stead a transcultural writer. transculturation, a term coined by fernando ortiz in the 1940s can be seen, not as a theory, but “a matrix through which a set of critical tools and vocabularies can be refined for the study of texts from a localized world, but institutionalised globally.” ii one characteristic feature of transcultural literature is a global and glocal perspective on cultural and social codes something epitomised in stead through the variety of characters and settings she depicts, and who often face a clash between the global and the local.iii we can ask whether such people become “orphans of both cultures” as ringrose suggests (2007: 24). they experience a feeling of ‘unhomely belonging’ as the life style chosen and familial traditions often make independence problematic, as well as identities. referring to gordon mathews priscilla ringrose poses an alternative approach: mathews contends […] that the global cultural supermarket is eroding the cultural norms propagated by the state. he believes that the taken-for-granted coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 aspects of identity inculcated by the nation are shrinking and that the global cultural supermarket is replacing them. as a result of globalization, then, we could say that identity is becoming more and more of a choice. (cited in ringrose 2007: 32) stead’s female characters tend either to revolt against the standard norms or conform to them. letty fox is described as a person who in the manner of a chameleon changes identities in an effort to fit in, and not least to have relationships with men. she is on a picaresque journey to find herself. this is in contrast to letty’s mother who conforms to standard norms for women at the time. we can interpret stead as favouring letty’s stance. there seems to be a generational gap where, as today, the younger generation’s attitudes to gender roles are more ambivalent. like letty fox stead’s characters are often portrayed as picking and choosing what elements of the new culture they will endorse. this can be paralleled today in the migrant situation, and at another level in peer pressure among teenagers, in particular encouraged by social media and reality shows. how far must we go in assimilating or integrating the diverse cultures that are part of our heritage and contemporary lifestyle? how different in fact are letty fox and other young people depicted in stead’s novels from young people today? in stead’s writing transculturality takes the form of analyses of contemporary society from a multifocal point of view. we can consider mary pratt’s ‘contact zones’ as applicable to stead’s work if we think of them as demonstrating that the very core of transculturation is the ability to move freely from one cultural stance to another, and give expression to the social spaces where cultures meet. stead demonstrates time and again that despite our intercultural understanding we all have a cultural baggage which is never entirely abandoned in another setting, no matter how far we have travelled in time or space. for people such as stead migration, whether voluntary or forced, is an essential part of life experience, a palimpsest. her characters frequently give an impression of never being satisfied with their lives — always looking for something else, sometimes in a desperate attempt to be accepted. angela carter posits that at an early stage in her writing stead had “already established her characteristic milieu as that of the rootless urban intelligentsia, a milieu as international as it is peculiar to our century” (carter 1982: 11). carter is referring specifically to seven poor men of sydney but her comment is borne out by the constant debate between characters on social and political issues that we find in stead’s texts. her characters are frequently cross-cultural, facing and living in changing socio-cultural contexts and perspectives, and reflecting thus the relation of these to their identities. for example, elvira western in the beauties and the furies (1936) has gone to paris to escape her conventional marriage and the confines of english society only to find she does not belong in the parisian cultural world of left-wing politics and political discussions in cafés either. it is one thing to be on “the socialist side in debates” at school (84), quite another to be part of the intellectually challenging political discussions conducted by her friends in paris. one of this group is marpurgo a wily, cunning, pseudointellectual italian englishman, and an inveterate talker. in this novel stead manages to create an atmosphere of reality and credibility, characters sitting around in parisian cafés dreaming strange intellectual fantasies. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 in an article on alessandro spina iv , arrianna dagnino rightly suggests that transculturality is a narrative expression of a state of being, and a rejection of “identitarian labelling” (2016, 5, 42). literature is often the emotional expression not only of identities, but also of how those identities came to be formed. as such it has an emancipatory function and is a socialising force. there are many ways in which we can interpret and look at stead’s texts, whether as a satirical comment on people and stereotypes in the many places she lived and worked, or as an ironical and critical eye on politics, love, and women’s position in society. however, looking at her texts through transcultural lens gives us a new understanding of her narrative skill in portraying these different environments and understanding of other people’s culture and way of life. the hybridity of the transcultural and the cultural mobility of ‘unbelonging’ have taken over, sometimes giving an overall bleak picture of living in another country or culture, and the concomitant depressive feelings that often ensue. this is evident in the ‘imaginaries’ of the text, narrative expression, theme, setting and representation of characters. i would suggest stead is an outsider and insider to her own original cultural background and to the societies and cultures about which she wrote. this provides her with a remarkable ability to distance herself from the text, and yet at the same time give an impression of having experienced the events narrated. to illustrate some aspects of stead’s internationalism and transculturalism i have chosen to look at the stories about england in the 1950s, and her novel the little hotel with its mix of characters from different countries, both microcosms of contemporary life then. to do this stead used character sketches much in the manner of katherine mansfield in her new zealand stories, undiscovered country (1974). in this volume ian gordon has collected the stories mansfield wrote about life in new zealand, mainly from a child’s point of view. the stories are vignettes and much in the same manner as we find in christina stead’s stories there is no closure. to stead writing was “essentially a social and communicative act” and she “saw her role as seeking to understand and to communicate this ‘embroiled world’ to the public” (cowden 2003: 70). she regarded the short story as more than a literary form, “it is an ever-changing proof of man’s universal need for expression. […] it is the million drops of water that are the looking-glasses of all our lives” (1968: 449). they thus give us a momentary insight into or view of a person or place, but lack permanence, as expressed, for example, in descriptions of class escape in post-war britain in cotter’s england. in the introduction to ocean of story stead writes that “[a]ny treasury of story is a residue of the past and a record of the day” (1986: 3). further that “it is the hope of recognising and having explained our own experience” (1986: 6-7). a vital element in stories is genuine experience and a personal viewpoint [… since] [t]he virtue of the story is its reality and its meaning for any one person: that is its pungency […] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one. … the short story can’t wither and, living, can’t be tied to a plan. it is only when the short story is written to a rigid plan, or done as an imitation, that it dies. it dies where it is pinned down, but not elsewhere.” (1986: 7 and 10) the inconclusiveness of her stories underlines this. she comments on people, their foibles and views. stead’s manuscripts confirm this, as well as rowley’s biography, both coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 showing the extent to which christina stead used real-life people, often friends, as models for her characters. stead in england speaking of cotter’s england and miss herbert, the two novels set in england, stephen cowden states in his essay “christina stead and the marxist imaginary” that: stead offers a picture of england through an analysis of the two central political and social structures from which it is composed: labour england and tory england. these are the two worlds not just of english politics, but in the post-war period lasting up until at least the 1980s, these were the two worlds of english life. stead’s choice of character in this sense is thus concerned with the way particular individuals become the imaginative ground from which she portrays the social forces which make up ‘england.’ (2003: 71-2, emphasis in the original) as hazel rowley points out: “in her [stead’s] fiction, personal relations were always grounded in the social and economic world” (1993: 255), as is seen in letty fox. this is especially apparent in cotter’s england where stead has succeeded brilliantly in depicting the working class social codes in newcastle and working class political views in london leaving us with the question of whether we really can leave our roots. in this text and in miss herbert stead shows her mastery of different forms of english — what in my opinion makes her characters so alive, and yet poses problems for critics who may not recognize the finer nuances of linguistic diversity. the ability to adapt her narrative expression to the circumstances in which her characters find themselves, is part of the border crossing of transculturalism — language being a key element. the short stories about england epitomize the situation in areas of london immediately post-war. we see a group of people of foreign descent struggling to come to terms with 1950s britain — a britain that was still recovering from rationing, which lasted into the early 50s, and the discrimination of foreigners that was prevalent after the war. transculturalism is evident in the characters portrayed, as the ethnic mix, and boarding house environment gave stead a diversity of people to portray. the views expressed in these stories written some sixty years ago are not that different from those experienced by many migrants and refugees today. all characters suffer from a sense of ‘unhomely belonging’ a key aspect being where you come from and whether you really belong in england. as ann blake has commented: these three stories of landlords and tenants present a materialist social analysis of english life in the 1950s, a telling image of stead’s england. it is an unequal and divided society, a nation where economic frustrations and jealousy are expressed in racial and class hatred [and] the complacency of the middle-class, their snobbery, chauvinism and coldness. (1993: 155-6) coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 stead depicts ironically a deep distrust of other foreigners among the boarding house owners, including those who themselves are foreigners, exemplified on the occasion when mr. turtell berates his wife for having bought an english stove from someone who is not english: “the mere fact of his being a foreigner and not born here makes him inferior and induces him to pick inferior goods to sell” (os 473)v. to show the diversity of people living that area of london stead includes the fact that one of their lodgers, hasma/hassan is an ‘oriental’ who states specifically that he can never take up with an english girl because their moral views do not agree with his: “[t]hey seem coarse to me” (os 471). however, satirical and ironical stead adds a twist as hassam asks if his fiancée from bengali, who is coming to london, can live with him in his room, as mrs. turtell’s presence in the house will function as a chaperone! neither christina stead nor blake liked living in england. blake comments on life in britain: there is such hostility to life in england […] here, in the euphoria of imperialism […] as the very anti-semitic mr. eliot observed there are no great themes left to exploit, the notion of purpose is itself childish, all values are tricks, hope is an illusion, despair silly, living for the moment is too petty for comment, in other words there are no themes big or little. but i just don’t believe that among 50 million people in the nursery of chaucer and shelley, that such things are possible. the other voices are simply given no hearing. but in an economic boom any there brains are at a discount and appetites at a premium. (letter to stanley burnshaw, sept 7, 1959) and in another letter blake comments on the dearth of intellectual life in britain which is dull “outside the theatre” where “behan and wesker etc.,” meet his approval. england seems to have entered a byzantine stage, full of clever and sophisticated and even nuance criticism, a rather distant, bored way towards creation, a feeling that values are dead and themes exhausted and that the upsurge of the socialist countries is naïve, so adolescent as not to be worth much attention. i don’t agree with kenneth tynan that the yawn is britain’s coat of arms but, compared to france […] we are certainly a great mass of sterile self-congratulations on our ability to originate. only in the social novel is there some rebirth of the “thirties”, as with braine and sillitoe. (letter to burnshaw december 6, 1960) the coldness of life in england is echoed in the gossip between neighbours gwen jones and rose turtell in the short story “accents.” the english in general are seen as cold and aloof, something she discusses with hassam who comments, “[t]he english are so cold and rude to foreigners. especially orientals” (os 464). mrs. turtell says the weather is no better, “i can’t stand the cold in this country. it’s worse than russia, worse than new york” (os 459) — a view we find again in stead’s papers. in “street idyll” gill likes to sit on a park bench and talk to people, but finds this difficult as when he tries to start a conversation, the woman “did not answer, she seemed offended, we had not been introduced, this is england” (os 399). the bench on which an old lady is sitting and which jenny associates with age, is symbolic of the feeling of loneliness and nonbelonging that the characters emanate, their sense of ‘unbelonging.’ the two characters coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 in “street idyll,” (which some critics maintain is autobiographical), are fundamentally different, gill is “a square-cut, dark man,” jenny, a “tall fair woman” but “[t]hey looked like strangers to each other; and they had never lost this look; reared in different countries, different traditions” (os 401). stead also has an interesting comment that it is not just language and looks which mark difference, but also ways of walking. jenny, the protagonist in this story, is told that her way of walking gives her away as not being british — “it was your walk, your australian walk ” (i.e. a stride). “it’s true, i saw an australian in tottenham court road the other day; it was his walk” (os 401) — a remark which is also found in one of blake’s letters to her, and an interesting sociological comment on how not just body language, but even our normal conduct can identify us as the ‘other’. the story “accents” is about the turtell family who run a boarding house for lodgers but criticize all the time other people for not being sufficiently english. mrs. turtell/rose dubrovsky is slav and “speaks english perfectly but has traces of a foreign accent” (os 456), and her husband, noel, is halfspanish and half-german. in answer to his perpetual demand that they must integrate rose comments: “john! your mother is a foreigner, your father too. i am a foreigner. aelfred and boadicea were born in buenos aires” (os 472). in other words none of them are of british descent, but john expects his children to be “more english than the english. that’s why our children have such ridiculous names” (os 463). the children are sent to a private school at great expense, where they are taught to speak with a ‘proper’ accent, and they are also given old english names, boadicea and aelfred. no one in the 40s or 50s would ever have given their children such names. the irony of this is lost on the parents, as they fail to understand that names are one of the criteria by which people identify others as being different and strange. “accents” is a sad story of how a bright young woman abandons her planned medical career for love — a typical stead characteristic – only to lead a life of dissatisfaction, as they are now in a “country […] full of stuck-in-the-muds” (os 461). how many of those who migrate from one country to another today are in the same situation? the question of ethnicity is also taken up in “1954: days of the roomers.” mr. warren has a french mother and english father, whereas his wife was born in lodz, poland, marking them as foreigners. when her husband is ashamed of the fact that his children have foreign parents mrs. warren seems by contrast to accept the situation as unchangeable: “you know i will never lose my foreign accent and you have a foreign accent too, except in french!” (os 404). stead’s portrayal of these families epitomises cultural conflict both in norms and the ability to speak the language and is one of the criteria that makes these texts transcultural. one brilliant feature of “accents” is how precisely stead has depicted the characters — the conversations between rose turtell and gwen jones is exactly the kind of gossip that was often heard on radio programmes in the 50s, such as mrs. dale’s diary. this allows stead to write as an outsider, but also gives her much space for ironic and satiric expression. her indication that this area of boarding houses and lodgers was populated by foreigners and not londoners, brings to mind the ghettoization that has taken place, in particular in many european countries recently with the free flow of labour. there was more integration in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, not least because the vast majority of migrants were from former colonies and spoke english, whereas today linguistic equality is not the case. in the wake of brexit the attitudes expressed in some of her english stories are paralleled by those heard in england today where people who have lived for years in britain, even irish people, are being asked if they should not go home. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 in “a routine” the text concentrates on a couple, noel and caroline, who scheme on how to avoid paying rent. it illustrates the phoney renting system prevalent at that time in parts of london. every time they get into severe debt they move, taking with them whatever they can from their lodgings. what is stead saying about lodgers in london? the landlords are extortioning money from people — a fact — and the market is dominated by non-brits, many refugees from central europe, but they are all considered suspect, especially those who are jewish. “the walkers are jews: they’re just spies for the landlords” (os 420). what it does show is that the english were sceptical of foreigners, xenophobia was prevalent, and integration was not a subject talked about. the little hotel a useful tool for discussing transculturality in stead is her short novel the little hotel. in the late 40s early 50s stead and blake lived in the netherlands, france and switzerland. this provided the background for this text with its residents from england, switzerland, belgium and austria — a microcosm of europe. two of stead’s short stories, “the hotelkeepers story” and “the woman in the bed” are interpolated into the text. the little hotel has a plethora of characters displaying aspects of the human condition, presented in an almost chekovian manner, but one which also has something pinteresque about it. putting people together in a setting and seeing what happens reminds me of the caretaker and the birthday party where the “conversation,” if it can indeed be called that, reveals a lack of communication, a topic which is central to pinter’s work, as is also the relation between people. stead’s reliance on her own source material is obvious in this text. if we look at her diary “the traveller’s bed and breakfast” for the journey she and blake took in switzerland and france from september 1950 to april 1951 we find among her manuscripts extensive notes on the characters that they met, and which fit at times word for word with her descriptions of characters in the text. i am not suggesting that this story is necessarily autobiographical, far from it, but the relation between the two texts is indicative of stead’s narrative method (ms 4967 box 15, folder 111). the little hotel is a satire on ‘genteel folk’ of different nationalities living in swiss hotels after the war. it is a cross-section of the guests in that kind of hotel at the time, delineating some aspects of society in the late 40s –post-war. as geering comments, “the little hotel is essentially a study of a group of people, living an existence curiously poised between isolation and dependence” (1978: 464). in her manuscript notes on the little hotel stead writes the ms of mrs. trollope and mme. blaise [the original short story] is a light thing, though a tone of pity perhaps goes through it –exiles, self-exiled, in a little hotel, people with sufficient money– except for the servants who are very poor. it is written up as a community, which in a way it was – it was small enough. (ms 1aa. april 15, 1973) those in the little hotel are shadows of the traditionally accepted, which is why stead places them in a fourth rate hotel. the text is a kind of ‘comedy of manners’ that is, a coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 satire of manners and affectations of a social group at whom stead is poking fun. judith kegan gardner writes that stead in this book “displays a wide international gallery of eccentric figures” (2003:18) but they can also be seen as funny and stereotypical. the guests represent a mix of nationalities. mrs. blaise is swiss from basel and has acquired nazi money through property. she lives in the hotel periodically to get away from her husband, the doctor. the mad, champagne loving mayor of b. is supposedly belgian, but uncertainty is expressed as to his real identity; lilia trollope is euroasian, described by madame blaise as “that asiatic” as “she is not one of us. you don’t feel she’s like you and me” (43). how like what we hear today in the twenty-first century. lilia’s ‘cousin’ robert wilkins, an ex-colonial from malaya is originally from yorkshire; miss abbey-chillard with her “highbred insulting voice” (79) is english, fleeing from the labour government in britain, and complaining that the bank of england refuses to give her full access to her money due to labour government restrictions (80-81, 91). lilia trollope also complains that life abroad is useless but feels she has to keep up the honour of the english on the continent, and despite her origins refers to herself and others as “we english” (87). racism is apparent in the fear expressed on seeing a coloured person, especially by the american mrs. powell. stead utilizes this mix of nationalities for all it is worth, not least in her depiction of princess bili di rovino, a rich american widow whose late husband was an italian prince, and who has a ‘singing’ dog (105). in fact it howls. however, are these characters really eccentric, apart from the mayor of b., who obviously suffers from mental delusion, and mrs. blaise who even wears her outdoor clothes in bed? these extraordinary people provide stead with a host of anomalous multicultural and transcultural characters, not just foolish ones. in many of her books stead uses a rich variety of scene, incident, character and imagery. in this text the scope is more limited, but it is significant that the setting is in switzerland where three languages and cultures meet and integrate typified in the servants; clara from zurich, the italian sisters luisa and lina, and the german-swiss housekeeper (os 302). the text is a reasonably faithful picture of life for this group if we compare it with other similar stories, dealing as it does an expatriate milieu; rich ladies who dress as if poor; the war and communism; escape from the labour government. in other words political undertones are present throughout. using a story-telling technique, the narrator, the hotelkeeper madame bonnard, sets the tone in the very conversational manner in which she describes her life in the hotel, the guests and their habits, and her evaluation of them as people. they are counting their pennies. they have some money, some are rich, all are getting on and getting anxious about their years; and besides them there are a few poor travellers, people without a home who go from one place to another, all over europe; there are some refugees now settled with us; some collaborators who escaped in time after the war; then the night-club people and, in winter, the people going up the snowfields. (31) stead often uses the cinematic device of zooming in to convey a portrait or create a mood in her texts, clearly seen here in the episodes where mrs. trollope visits madam blaise in her room, and at the dinner party. some critics think of the dinner party as the highlight of the novel, since it marks a change in point of view abandoning the first person narrative. however, in my opinion, it can rather be looked upon as a scene set with people from different countries where their own personality and national cultures come to the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 fore. it marks a change of point of view in the text, but it does not interrupt the flow, rather summarizes what we as readers have already surmised. a dinner party as the setting for a discussion of money and finances is also seen in the house of all nations (1938) when marianne and aristide dine with the hallers in paris, and the description of the stuffed carp dinner provides the background for discussions about investments and banking, but which also emphasizes gender role differences. what better than a dinner to satirize and reveal the true nature of the characters and what their priorities are. stead’s irony and tongue-in-cheek approach is fascinating. stead also expresses views on capitalism and money, and the little hotel is no exception. gardner suggests that the eccentrics are “not just foolish characters but oddly representative cogs in the complex machinery of global capital” (23). all the people in the hotel have real or imagined financial problems. robert wilkin has elaborate charts for investment and “cannot keep his hands off money” (126), and money becomes an important issue in conversations also between the women, but especially between mrs. trollope and mr. wilkin. he appears to have control of her money, which he is “investing,” but it is never clear exactly how. gardner sees wilkins as the epitome of the machinery of capitalism seen from a postmillennial perspective, as today global capitalism can immobilise the individual. his transformation “from passionate lover to egocentric calculator [...] can be seen as a transition from a colonial to a multinational capitalist masculinity, while his apparent rationality and manly protectiveness mask his depredations on his mistress’s assets” (2003: 25). however, passionate lover is not the way wilkin is portrayed in the text, rather an unscrupulous person who preys on other people’s resources to gain what he can for himself. thus in the little hotel stead brings together some of the major themes in her work, love and relationships, money, and political undertones in the way they affect the persona depicted. conclusion the creation of mood and atmosphere adjusted to the nationality and domicile of the characters is an essential feature of stead’s narrative expression. the strength of her novels lies in her character groupings and inter-relationships in diverse settings, as well as her sharp social observation. focusing a transcultural lens on stead shows her amazing ability to absorb and then portray narratively the situations and places in which she found herself. she depicts cultural encounters, border-crossings, and characters that are immersed in more than one culture, expressing it through narrative strategies and linguistic codes. we know from the manuscripts in the national library, canberra, australia and the harry ransom research centre in austin, texas, that she made extensive notes and researched details for every book. she was not just a fiction writer, but a portrayer of life as fiction. she was not bound by place in her writing, but chose to depict what she saw and experienced in many countries and on several continents. reading all stead’s work takes us on an international cultural journey over several decades of twentieth century history from widely different national and social settings and cultures, putting our own lives into perspective. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 works cited carter, angela. “unhappy families: angela carter on the scope of christina stead’s achievement.” review of the beauties and the furies in london review of books. vol. 4, no. 17, 16 (1982): 11-13. blake, ann: “christina stead’s english stories” southerly vol. 53:3, 1993: 146-160. cowden, stephen. “christina stead and the ‘marxist imaginary’.” southerly 63, 3: 2003, 63-75. dagnino, arrianna. “re-discovering alessandro spina’s transculture/ality in the young maronite.” humanities 2016, 5, 42. www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities. gardner, judith kegan. “christina stead and the synecdochic scam: the little hotel.” journal of the association for the study of australian literature. 2, 2003: 13-28. geering, r. g. “what is normal? two recent novels by christina stead.” southerly vol.38: 4 (1978): 462-73. huntington, samuel. “the clash of civilizations.” foreign affairs 72:3 (1993): 24-49. mansfield, katherine. undiscovered country. the new zealand stories. ed. ian a. gordon. london: longman, 1984. matthews, gordon. global culture/individual identity. london: routledge, 2000. pender, anne. “guest editor’s note. christina stead.” southerly 63:3, 2003: 41. pinter, harold. the caretaker. (1960). london: faber & faber, 1991. --the birthday party. (1959). london: faber & faber, 1991. pratt, mary louise. imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. london and new york: routledge, 1992. ringrose, priscilla. , “‘beur’ narratives of self-identity.” readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational. eds. anne holden rønning and lene johannessen. cross/cultures 89. amsterdam & n.y.: rodopi, 2007, 21-37. rowley, hazel. christina stead: a biography. port melbourne: heinemann australia, 1993. rønning, anne holden. “multiple homes and unhomely belonging,” le simplegadi. 2016, 14, 16: 50-60. http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi --. “literary transculturation and modernity: some reflections.” transnational literature. 2011: vol. 4, no.1: 1-10. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html sage, lorna. introduction to the salzburg tales. london: virago, 1986. said, edward. “the clash of definitions: on samuel huntington,” in said reflections on exile and other essays, cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2002: 569-90. stead, christina. (1973) the little hotel. north ryde: sirius, 1988. --1985. ocean of story. victoria and harmondsworth: penguin, 1986. --letty fox: her luck. (1946) london: virago, 1982. http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 --the beauties and the furies. (1936) london: virago, 1985. --for love alone. (1944) london: virago, 1986. --cotter’s england. (1966) london. virago, 1985. --miss herbert: the suburban wife. (1976) london: virago, 1992. --house of all nations. (1938) sydney: sirius-angus & robertson, 1988. --seven poor men of sydney. (1934) bondi junction, nsw: imprint, 1999. --talk at international symposium on the short story, england. kenyon review xxx, (1968) 4: 444 450. williams, chris. christina stead: a life of letters. london: virago, 1989. christina stead manuscripts in the harry ransom research centre, austin, texas. file 1aa: folder 1 and 2, letters to stanley burnshaw. william blake’s letters to stanley burnshaw. file 4. harry ransom research centre, austin. national library of australia. papers of christina stead, ms 4967: box 15 (folder 111 and 113). i see rønning, ‘multiple homes and unhomely belonging’, le simplegadi 2016, 14,16: 50-60. ii definition used in the transcultural and literary aesthetics network, university of bergen. www.uib.no/fg/transcult iii “‘glocal’ is a term coined by roland robertson, an amalgam of global and local” (ringrose 2007: 22.) priscilla ringrose discusses the term in “‘beur’ narratives of self-identity: beyond boundaries and binaries,” in readings of the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational ed. anne holden rønning and lene johannessen 2007. iv “ a contemporary syrian author who became a naturalized italian citizen,” (humanities 2016, 5: 42) v os stands for ocean of story. bio note: anne holden rønning is associate professor emerita at the university of bergen, norway. her research areas and fields of publication are women’s studies and postcolonial and transcultural literatures and ideas, especially from new zealand and australia. she has co-edited several volumes of essays in these fields notably identities and masks: colonial and postcolonial studies (2001), readings for the particular: the postcolonial in the postnational (2007) and for was i not born here? identity and culture in the work of yvonne du fresne (2010). she has also edited an issue of the online journal otherness and some issues of the online journal coolabah. she was chair of the european association for studies of australia 2001-2005. she has also published in and co-edited two books with mary louise kearney of unesco: women and the university curriculum: towards equality, democracy and peace (1996) graduate prospects in a changing society (1998). http://www.uib.no/fg/transcult coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 a look back in doubt “confessions of a heretic”: multicultural literature in australia manfred jurgensen copyright© 2019 manfred jurgensen. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. it is argued that the emergence of ‘multiculturalism’ in australia during the nineteen-eighties was almost entirely determined by political considerations. an application of the concept to literary culture was not anticipated. nor was there a discourse of migrant or ethnic literature before post-war immigration. as part of the australia council’s decision to sponsor a literary culture of ‘new australians’ it encouraged the creation of a journal for multicultural literature, outrider. this article is an attempt to characterise a group of perceived ‚multicultural writers’ by raising doubt about their real or assumed status. it is true they employ highly individual creative imagination and variations of literary style by questioning the nature of migration (often without being migrants themselves). however, such writing is hardly unique to inherent characteristics of ‚multicultural aesthetics’. formally and thematically these authors’ language frequently employs a wide range of elective affinities, alienation techniques or correlative analogies. they can hardly be considered ‚minority writers’ of limited literary genius. in truth they are creators of sophisticated poetry and prose by overcoming (or ‘integrating’) foreign language restriction. to them migration is not merely a subject or theme: it is a consciousness manifesting itself in literary form and style. the best ‘migrant writing’ invokes dimensions of alienation shared by a readership whose cultural dislocation is not confined to refugees, asylum-seekers or social outcasts. in the contemporary global end game, migration has become a shared state of mind. a brilliant and complex linguistic approach to ‘multicultural writing’ has been argued by australian sociolinguist paul carter. he rejects the negative view of immigration as a form of displacement. applying his well-balanced analysis of “migrant aesthetic” dialogue promises not only “a new kind of history”. in the end it means refining a new, distinctively migrant poetics. key words: ethnic literature; migration; multiculturalism; paul carter; post-colonial collage; migrant aesthetic; mainstream literary culture coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 introduction recent australian literary criticism has made much of the terms „multicultural”, “ethnic” or “indigenous”: the overall concept resulted in what was unhesitatingly called multicultural writing. much dubious speculation was prompted by the vagueness and general application of socio-political terminology to literary aesthetics. the designation “multicultural” was originally designed by politicians with the aim of attracting electoral votes of migrant, minority or inter-racial background. nations of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees were keen to project new democratic practices like positive discrimination, tolerance and equality, an ambivalent yet compatible co-existence. none of these qualities had much to do with literary aspirations. allow me to combine a personal review of australia’s sudden and dramatic commitment to “multiculturalism” with a short account of its earliest writers such designated. when i arrived in australia in 1960 the country was overwhelmingly committed to a “white australia policy”. to protect australian workers, governments and trade unions were unapologetically racist, both in dealing with post-war overseas immigrants and indigenous inhabitants who lived in their tribal nations for millennia. integrating the thoughts and ideas of australia’s native culture would have been the last thing on white australians’ mind. it was no more recognised than the first nation’s people themselves. until 1967 they were not even included in the official census. in 1992, two decades after the emergence of multiculturalism, i published an article under the title “multicultural aesthetics: a preliminary definition”. in it, i stated at the onset that “reviews of a multicultural literature in australia continue to suffer from a lack of terminological consensus, indeed from an applicable use of aesthetic concepts of any kind”. understandably, social politics dominated, leaving a vacuum of critical vocabulary specifically to analyse the art of what was sometimes referred to as ‘ethnic writing’. rather optimistically, i closed my discussion with the comment: “perhaps the time has come to attempt a few preliminary definitions of the nature and function of a multicultural imagination, if only to allow further literary discussion of a migrant aesthetic.” (29) in hindsight i was embarrassed by the boldness of that suggestion, until i came across a major study by the australian sociolinguist paul carter the very same year. his analysis living in a new country. history, travelling and language did provide a first “migrant aesthetic” which he described as a “post-colonial collage” (186). i will come back to it later. as i said, on my arrival in melbourne there was no concept of a ‘multicultural’ australian literature. let me attempt a somewhat heretical look-back at the emergence of this new idea. i can only offer biased aspects of a movement in which i had a part. we were aiming to convince australian readers of a literary development that subsequently came to be known as ‘multicultural writing’. the truth was that we ourselves were not quite sure if that was the right description. weren’t all writers ‘multicultural’? in the absence of a coherent “migrant aesthetic” the best we could do was acknowledge the emergence of a different group of authors. new voices demanded to be heard. hardly any derived from the multilingual ethnic press. the sudden increase seemed to have been prompted by submissions from educated europeans with a broader interest in multinational cultures. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 let me repeat: the concept of multiculturalism in the realm of literature never acquired the status of a dogmatic article of faith. as writers, we were still learning to understand ourselves. it took two decades before phoenix publications was founded as a press designed for mostly migrant authors of diverse cultural background. among the first writers it published were serge liberman, lolo houbein, walter adamson, antigone kefalá, dimitris tsaloumas, david malouf, maria lewitt, banumbir wongar, jack hibberd, margaret diesendorf, alex skovron and peter skrzynecki. its first anthology bore the programmatic title ethnic australia. (1981) it featured the work of two dozen at that time virtually unknown writers. phoenix was lucky to receive overwhelmingly positive responses. in brisbane’s courier-mail sybil nolan followed thomas shapcott’s description of the collection: she too found it “as ethnic as an anzac biscuit” (september 26, 1981). we were uneasy about the compliment, yet grateful for the well-meaning if ambivalent recognition. from 1984 to 1995 i acted as founding editor of outrider, a journal of multicultural literature that identified itself as “contemporary australian writing”. its modest, almost apologetic editorial policy was “to extend the concept of australian literature” (or, vol.4/no 1, 3). from the beginning there was strong reluctance to operate with ideological interpretations of terms such as ‘multicultural’. our stated ambition was the hope to integrate writings by migrants into the ‘mainstream’ of australian literature. throughout the life of outrider its editorial statements avoided narrow or dogmatic definitions. it acknowledged interrelations without equating them. once i was asked what i thought the australia council literature board was supporting in outrider. i thought my answer was valid and truthful: “good writing”, even while we were still trying to define the quality of excellence and where we were going. i have not changed my mind. however, it is also true that in some circles of social politics the word multicultural began to take on negative connotations of its own. australia was experiencing mass migration at unprecedented levels. in that context politicians were looking for ready-made slogans to propagate social harmony. government and opposition gradually developed increasingly different attitudes to migration, ethnicity, social services, aboriginal culture – and australian literature. during national elections the slogan ‘multicultural’ exercised a strong influence of divisiveness. outrider-91-almanach earth wings gave an introductory account of the journal. it began with the literature board of the australia council sponsoring a policy of encouraging writers of so-called ethnic background. (it seemed to have escaped the board, and many of us, that all australians were of local or overseas “ethnic background”.) back in the eighties, the council still boasted an official “multicultural officer” on its staff. in a very real sense outrider owed its existence to a conscious government decision by the literature board. originally it grew out of two “multicultural writers’ weekends” hosted by the council in sydney on 13 and 14 october 1984 and in melbourne on 27 and 28 october 1984. throughout the following decade the journal continued to attract its share of funding from the board. without official government support and subsidy, ‘multicultural literature’ in australia would not have got off the ground. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 nonetheless, with a gradual shift away from the politics of multiculturalism – the term itself began to be replaced by ‘cultural diversity’ – the previously strong support of board and council began to wane. a backlash against multicultural literature had begun. it was not unexpected. from the beginning serge liberman and i simply understood the term as an extension of the concept australian literature. it was to draw attention to the major contribution ‘migrant writers’ were beginning to make to australian letters. at the same time, it aimed to contextualise australian literature in broader perspectives of world literature. translations and essays on ‘foreign’ literatures served to support cultural affinities. of the four hundred authors published in outrider over the first eight years, approximately half were born outside australia. in fact, the journal never was a ghetto journal of migrant writing (unless one wanted to classify all australians as immigrants). as such, its content and format have been faithful reflections of the state of ostensible ‘multiculturalism’ in australian writing at that time. ‘migrant authors’ published in outrider considered themselves overwhelmingly as australian writers. it displayed a greater willingness to publish artists of different cultural background – indeed, that was its very brief. ‘multicultural writing’, then, never stood for separate development, a kind of literary apartheid. the broader editorial policy of outrider meant that australian literature was searching internationally for a new imaginative creativity. it developed a programmatic opening to global ‘source cultures’. alex miller’s novel the ancestor game (2000) proved a powerful demonstration the new quality of australian-chinese ‘inter-cultural’ writing. it was not merely a matter of retaining cultural ties with one’s ‘mother’ country – a characteristic colonial anglo-celtic phenomenon – but related australia’s own developing literary imagination to the rest of world culture. as a true reflection of the nation’s social structure outrider aimed to propagate a multilingual, multi-literary culture. in 1988 penguin published a bicentennial double edition under the heading australian writing 1988 (with robert adamson and manfred jurgensen as coeditors). 1990 saw the release of outrider. a year of australian literature. 1993 an edition of over 400 pages announced itself as outrider. the first decade. words and all. it featured a libretto by david malouf. the 470-page edition of 1994 bore the title riding out: contemporary writing, with an inside-subtitle new writing from around the world. titles and concepts reflect the enlarged national/international development from an “ethnic journal” to a global dialogue of multicultural literature. under the heading of “literary multiculturalism, australian and world literature” the extended editorial policy would “feature theme-related writing from all over the world, with a heavy bias towards australian authors” (ix). yet it became apparent over the first twenty years that the anglo influence re-emerged, even in outrider. the politics of multiculturalism no longer supported those ‘ethnic’ writers who depended on the government’s positive discrimination. a dialogue of constant questioning of cultural assumptions had been terminated. it became clear ‘literary multiculturalism’ could never be an exercise in social tolerance. rather, it aimed to be a creative world-wide confluence of imagination, made up of tributaries constituting fertile deltas of global and national cultures. however, in the end it seemed the ‘mainstream’ no longer remembered its mouth. the introduction to outrider’s earth coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 wings (1991) warned: “it may well be that a dialogue of constant questioning of our cultural assumptions has been terminated.” (x) on the day of australia’s first ‘multicultural writer’s weekend’ i introduced myself to maria lewitt, a polish-born writer who had just published two autobiographical novels, come spring at st. martin’s press in new york and no snow in december at william heinemann in melbourne. she had not come to listen to political or academic nonsense. i remember her one comment. it was short and sweet: “there’s only good or bad writing.” she was right of course, at least on one level. it reminded us to concentrate above all on the quality of ‘migrant writing’ (whatever that was). it did not take us long to realise it was indeed going to be a major issue. i tried to keep an open mind. my starting point was: a definition of culture is that culture is definition. so i posed the question: who, then, defines what culture we are, and raised the most important challenge: do australian migrant writers possess the freedom to be their own author? in socio-political terms the answer was: yes. australia was a democracy guaranteeing freedom of speech. our government aimed for true representation of all its citizens. outside politics, however, for authors of a creative imagination literacy was a fundamental presumption. no bureaucracy could empower a writer lacking artistic originality and literary knowledge. it would be interesting to see if recent arrivals still struggling to learn the new language would follow migrant literature. evidence showed they did not. outrider attracted relatively few migrant subscribers. it was not suitable material for language learners. (ethnic newspapers and radio broadcasts were of course published in most migrants’ native languages.) could the introduction of ‘multiculturalism’ merely be a matter of terminology, consensus and description? let’s be clear about conflicts relating to australia’s own historical identity. the europeanised country was itself a migrant culture, continuing the culture of a “motherland” that had little in common with the reality of the fifth continent. the title of maria lewitt’s novel was again short and to the point: “no snow in december”. the old language’s inaptitude to express a vastly different reality soon became apparent. political, social and cultural structures were retained under colonial and post-colonial conditions. white australia was „europeanised”. early paintings reinvoked or imitated well-known european art movements. similarly, the beginnings of australian literature proved simulations of 18th and 19th century english writing. creations in the arts lacked authenticity in reproducing nature, landscapes and wildlife. it took some time to acquire skills of a realistic stock-taking in the familiar mother tongue. not surprisingly, the “new australians” (as they subsequently all became) had difficulty accepting ‘foreign’ migrant cultures into their outdated or re-established home version of australia. migrants representing different ethnic origins were pressurised to ‘assimilate’. australia was interested in migrant workers, not in sensibilities and mores of ethnic backgrounds. in mainstream australian literature transported british low-brow culture formed, shaped and defined immigrants “for the term of their natural life”.  coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 until very recently, women, indigenous australians and migrants shared the suppression of not being allowed the freedom to define themselves, or to be their own author. yet imagination constitutes a migratory trait in human sensibility. it both defines identity and transforms it. man’s imagination is by its very nature social: it projects and rehearses modes of existence. role playing is a natural feature of human speech. distribution of social power creates a mainstream culture. in relation to their own imagination societies may for political reasons choose to enforce minorities and marginalities. the genesis of terms such as ‘migrant’, ‘ethnic’ or ‘mult icultural’ reveals the politics of cultural discrimination, the casting and evaluating of social roles. in contemporary australia all citizens are considered migrants, ethnics or ‘multicultural’. yet it reinforces the question of who owns the power of cultural definition, who is in control of determining traditional or new social identities. who owns the discussion? in the aim to authenticate their family history some modern australians are now ironically proud of their ‘shameful convict heritage’. in writing, the politics of creating and dispensing ‘multiculturalism’ proved rather less risqué. quality of writing is the one overriding factor for verbal art. recently many works by indigenous authors have joined the anglo-literary mainstream. (reflecting the nature of the art, painters, sculptors and composers are forced less frequently into a collective ‘multicultural’ identity.) depending on the many historical influences and variable writing impulses, it could be argued that artists of high imaginative creativity are by definition ‘multi-cultural’. experience of migration, on the other hand, does not by itself create a literary imagination. in fact, it seems inherently absurd to plead for a writing culture of authors whose language skills are handicapped by the very circumstance of their restriction. authors have to find a way of writing about migration without specific verbal or stylistic limitations forced upon them. (in a literary workshop for migrant writers i conducted, it emerged that writing about the experience of migration in their native tongue proved for many equally challenging.) in his novel the tree of man patrick white wrote about life’s migration within australia’s own culture. the great recurring human subjects can be presented in imaginatively variable ways of multiple meanings, allusions and settings. it is not necessary for an author who wants to write about migration to treat his subject under such thematic heading. a writer can choose a love story, a family novel, a bildungsroman, a phantasy, a biography and dozens of other literary forms dealing with unsettling trauma, restlessness of uprooting, displacement, homelessness, seeking refuge, migratory upheavals or the restlessness of life in australia as experienced by the quintessential australian stan, the hero of white’s ground-breaking novel. here is one of the rarer attempts to invoke the daily hardships and adjustments of migration being confined in prison-like conditions: bonegilla 1961 the heat of burnt grass, impotent anger at an english class, men getting younger coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 by each disciplined day till they are schoolboys again, told to pay attention, roll-calls into another life, how to translate the humid weather, the shame and the hate. at night the huts throb in desperate love making, young men sob in darkness, dreams of childhood call them home. twilight rains set in. morning builds its dome. the snake sheds its skin. (manfred jurgensen) only the poem’s title reveals its setting and occasion, capturing typical challenges of life in the historical nsw migrant camp bonegilla. among a short list of representative so-called ‘multicultural’ australian writers let me try to categorise examples of imagination triumphing over academic, critical, socio-political, purely linguistic or bureaucratic considerations. one author writes about absence and isolation, thus practising the art of migrating without leaving home. another invokes longing and belonging to express frustrations and alienation. migration, like alienation, is a state of mind. the formula remains the same: strength of imagination leads to good writing that effortlessly escapes descriptions or concepts such as ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’. with one line “for what we are can only be imagined” the poet james mcauley summed up more than any discussion about mainstream or multiculturalism in australian literature. the poem celebrates the full potential of human consciousness in verbal arts.  coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 when i think of the following australian writers still classified by too many as ‘multicultural’, i am struck by only one overwhelming feature they have in common: they are all so very different. during the mid to late eighties walter adamson (1911 2010) seemed the most recognisable ‘multicultural writer’ in australia. a german author born three years before the first world war, adamson emigrated in 1939. after teaching english as second language in la paz, bolivia, he returned to australia in 1953 and became a full-time writer in 1969. adamson is best-known for the institution, a novel first written and published in german. its english translation by sonja delander appeared in 1976. in 1986 penguin in england and viking-penguin in new york released parallel new editions. neither author nor translator seemed certain how much of adamson’s writing was a reflection of personal experience. in some of his short stories, most of all in the collection australia of all places (ausgerechnet australien), he wrote about migration. yet he refused to acknowledge it as a subject of special interest. meanwhile it could be argued that the recent flood of refugees and asylum seekers throughout the world strongly reinforced the topicality of migration and homelessness. in 1985 adamson published a collection of illustrated verse, adamson’s three-legged world. in one of adamson’s poems, ‚the immigrant’, the first words are: “to this, my land, i’ve come too late”. (7). the immigrant’s shelter or home is neither defined nor described. both remain a state of mind. all the opening lines reveal is that the poet did not find it until late in life. no adopted country is mentioned. we do not know why the migrant feels he has found his land “too late”. adamson’s delightful collection of nonsense verse, adamson’s threelegged world, demonstrates the overriding characteristic style of all his writing: comedy, warmth, wit and humour. the institution (die anstalt) has remained by far adamson’s most significant work. it is tempting to interpret it as an imaginative critique of ‘ethnic literature’ in australia. the novel’s plot consists of non-native artists performing soundless compositions. their “little chamber music” (53) without instruments is a fictional realisation of what many writers, critics and politicians meant by australian multicultural literature in the ‘eighties. the irony is that the projection of adamson’s swiftian model carried literary, social and cultural values that overtook contemporary australian developments. the “shock epidemic”(53) of such “experiment” outside mainstream culture had the effect of double alienation. nonetheless the work demonstrated a similar effect outside australia as well. the author’s imaginative social exclusion created a model not unlike albert camus’ outsider. the institution was not specifically about migration, but inescapably included such reflection. adamson’s grotesque distortion of social norm projects an intrinsic challenge of absurdist perversion. for all that, “the institution” was not merely written as a polemic against a perceived ownership of literary culture. the novel’s central theme deals with the fundamental uncertainty of who we are. the absurdity of language’s inability to do justice to the complex and contradictory nature of individual existence is highlighted by various establishment characters proclaiming their identity in their very names. adamson’s humour thus expresses a serious philosophical, socio-political and existential concern. his witty social criticism includes philosophical consciousness, a mixture curiously coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 appropriate for a self-deprecating australian writer. in the ‘real’ world, the reader is told, “everyone practised the playing of non-existent instruments”. (78) a key to adamson’s own thoughts reads: “it was in the irrational that life’s reason made itself most felt.” (193) such insight goes beyond mere irony. it is mindful of historical crimes against humanity and warns of repeating mistakes of the past. at one stage the narrator explains: “when something is senseless, it can’t become more so. no, it has to happen. you know, when i was young it did not have to happen. but nobody did what was necessary, although there were plenty to warn us. ‘doom merchants’, they were called.” (75) clearly, this is an important book deserving a wide reading public. its very conception and style it is unmistakeably european, its humour the voice of historical experience, its artistic form a rejection of traditional aesthetic and moral realism. adamson’s institution is a beckettian ‘end game’ played with clownish acrobatics of a desperate knowledge. as such, it offered australian literature a new dimension, an absurdist direction informed by kafka and wittgenstein. the unique tone of the novel derives from its intellectuality and the sustained witticisms of an imaginative tour de force. in adamson’s humour logic is seen as a sinister game of synonyms, disguising the violence of reason. insanity emerges as the only escape from falsified ‘sense’. language itself is the ‘institution’ inviting manipulation of truth and distortion of reality. the authorial narrator of the institution knows what he is saying when, in an act of collusive recognition, he identifies himself with his readers as “we outsiders”. (135) as with the direction of the institution, it is said of the writer he too “had, from being the puppeteer, become a puppet”. (137) it is in such manner that the indirect treatment of migration and so-called multiculturalism acquire a deeper and more unsettling meaning than the abstract manipulative arguments of sociologists and politicians. adamson is not limiting himself to writing about ethnicity, migration or other forms of alienation. his imagination embraces an inclusive code of multiple applications. this ‘migrant author’ has no need for a special ‘multicultural’ language and perspective. most important of all, his highly entertaining prose is eminently accessible to ‘mainstream’ readers. with walter adamson there is no conflict between mainstream and minority writing. he turns minority into majority concern. his coded imagination combines an extensive complexity with deceptive simplicity. the late dimitris tsaloumas (1921 2016), a poet both of international standing in both english and greek, was born on leros (greece), lived and taught english at melbourne high schools before returning to his home country where he died in his nineties. tsaloumas categorically disclaimed the description ‘ethnic writer’ with its implication of a cultural ghetto, preferring to describe himself as an australian greek writer. his works were published in either greek or english collections. he made no attempt at a unifying oneness. for many greek migrants both his english and greek volumes seemed too sophisticated; anglo-celtic readers, most of whom were unable to read greek, confined themselves to his australian poetry. unsurprisingly, tsaloumas did not attract ‘a multicultural’ reading public. outside australia, especially in his native greece, his poetry is highly regarded. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 david malouf (1934 ) is a second generation australian-born novelist of lebanese background, who lived both in australia and in europe. he is arguably australia’s greatest contemporary prose writer. his works are published in over twenty languages. in a context of world literature too malouf undoubtedly ranks as one of the most outstanding of contemporary novelists. despite his second-generation ‘ethnic background’ malouf’s genius towers above any attempt to claim him as a ‘multicultural author’. migrant backgrounds have invited a characterisation of more than one culture, a sensibility of at least partial ‘otherness’. yet the temptation to classify the nature of such imagination as if it were an exception to an assumed norm of ‘monocultural’ creativity is nonsense. any such terminological categorising violates the inventive creativity of great literary artists. in fact, there are few, if any, truly ‘mono-’ or ‘multicultural’ writers. creative imagination does not follow rules of academic prescription. david malouf describes the process perfectly: “…you have to find some real spiritual link between us and the landscape, us and the cities, us and the lives we live here… you have to give people – in books – something like a mythology… you have to make it for them – it’s not ready-made – it has to be imagined.“ (75) the new country does not require a knowledge of assimilation. it is imagination that creates the land and its people. there is little lebanese culture to be found in malouf’s prose. nor does his writing capture the ‘nature’ of life on this continent, except through the author’s creative sensibility, a uniquely personal quality. malouf explains: “i think this ‘australian-ness’ is what we’re all trying to work out. when i look at the body of my writing, i want to say to myself: ‘this is one person’s attempt to give an account of what being australian is – this particular australian.’” (75) in a novel such as fly away peter malouf creates his mythological australia in the context of europe’s ‘great war’. it is significant how little malouf reveals in various interviews about his lebanese family background. he frequently replies to specific questions with evasive answers such as “i don’t understand”, “i don’t know”, “i have no idea”, “no idea at all”. (89-93) at one point the interviewer, samar attar, prompts: “i got all that from your fiction.” (93) malouf does not agree. he declares unmistakeably: “i am a person who’s had a complete anglosaxon education in australia. i am an australian writer” and he adds more generally: “…almost all ethnic writing is marginal writing.” despite such statements by david malouf the interviewer retorts: “but i believe that all you write about is your ethnic experience.” (98) malouf replies to the question of autobiographical elements in his novels in an almost non-chalant manner: “they are just games you play, determined by fiction.” (103) he makes an important point when he argues: “history is not what happened but what is told.” he categorically rejects the interviewer’s assertion he was part of “a migrant family”. (105) he also reminds his readers that he has had no contact with the lebanese community since he left brisbane in 1948. perhaps the most revealing fact is that malouf has what he calls “a slight revulsion against all things central european”, but his feeling at home in “the mediterranean world of egypt, morocco, greece or italy and most comfortable” (106), a “whole world” for him quite different from central and northern europe. malouf lived of course in italy and wrote ‘classical’ novels like ransom, remembering babylon and an imaginary life. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 for those and other reasons i would argue strongly against any meaningful characterisation of david malouf’s writing as ‘multicultural’. unrelated to ethnicity or migration, his prose creates a reality of the highest poetic quality inherent in the language itself. discussing malouf’s conflict between australia and europe, philip neilsen rightly concentrates on the author’s habit of mythologising the idea of a place. he points out that in an imaginary life the antipodean myth is ‘reversed’: instead of exile and defeat, the antipodes are regenerative “a valuable place in their own right” (177). it is above all the ovidian claim that places do not ‘exist’ but are created. for malouf that means australia is “europe translated and changed” (265). it is through mythologising the country that it takes possession of its own culture. instead of borrowings from multicultural influences, malouf’s writing allows australia to be imaginatively and culturally “possessed” by its readers. the distinguished novelist alex miller (1936 ) was born in london and emigrated to australia at the age of seventeen. an anglo-saxon writer deciding to settle in australia seems comparable to ex-patriate authors who moved the opposite direction, from australia to london like robert hughes, clive james, barry humphries, germaine greer and other artists. miller fictionalises his impressions of australia without acquiring a recognisable ‘australian’ style. undoubtedly, his writing is based on experience, yet i have been unable to discover a transformative style, form or preoccupation. i see a gifted author living and writing in australia. his main themes are invocations of inner lives, the psychology of love, creating and experiencing visions of elective cultures. although miller could hardly be called a multicultural author as the term was applied by some, one of his finest novels, the ancestor game, deals with “a restless sense of cultural displacement” (110 -144), specifically with an ambivalent relationship with the culture of european australia. a loving involvement with chinese civilisation leads his characters to a complex and paradoxical realisation: that to be at home in exile may be the australian condition of belonging and estrangement at the heart of all european cultures. none of miller’s migrants leave australia, nor do they return to their ancestral dreams. the european cultural concept of exile reflects a belonging comparable to the mandarin meaning of lang tzu, the name of miller’s chinese protagonist, who remains an australian migrant: “two characters which signify the son who goes away” (blurb). miller narrates different cultural traditions to arrive at an elective relationship gained from imaginative or fictional integration. ancestry stories from shanghai are superimposed on the suburban melbourne setting of richmond. an extreme example of what could be termed fictional integration of cultures is described as follows: “i had also learned from my tutor, a minor prussian nobleman who was a fierce defender of something which he called the irrepressible genius of the germanic soul, that while the french venerated claude alongside poussin as one of the very best of their artists, in reality, historically so to speak according to my tutor, claude had actually been a german who had imagined into being the ideal landscape for the german soul to take up its residence in.” (270) this preposterous account is commented on by the narrator in a manner similar to the author’s own experience of fictional integration: “the prussian’s arguments did not convince me that claude was a german but rather that he had not belonged anywhere in particular.” (271) it is alex miller who puts words into the mouth of his fictional character august coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 spiess, when he is asked why he never returned to his native germany: “never before this have i replied with the truth. i have never confessed to anyone until this moment, in which i freely confess it to you, that for more than twenty years the international settlement has been for me the claudean landscape of my youthful dreams.” (272) antigone kefalá (1935 ) is a romanian-born poet and prose writer of greek origin who lived in greece, new zealand and australia. her overriding literary themes are absence, migration and non-belonging. asked whether there is such a thing as an ethnic literature distinct from the main-stream of australian writing, her answer remains undecided and open: “yes and no”. she speaks of “unblocking issues” between “ethnic and mainstream literature” yet argues that “we do at times express things which could not be expressed by a person who has been born here and belongs to the country from five generations back” (13). as a writer she defines herself quite generally as someone looking for her chosen material and remain “true to her own type of language” (14). in fact, kefalá contradicts her “unblocking argument” by rejecting claims of a migrant writer’s “special vision”. it is the strength of imagination, not the effect of ethnic belonging that determines how and what can be expressed. at the centre of her poetic writing stands the “individual experience”. expressing it, becomes for the writer almost entirely “a stylistic issue”. she repeatedly describes her own style as reflecting “views of a poet”. allowing for a generically low sale of poetry, kefalá’s work has been well received by australia’s mainstream readership. clearly, her readers do not experience a “block” between the poet’s ethnicity and other lyrical writing. confidently she advises migrant authors of a shared challenge for poets and writers of any origin: “to educate the market to their own form”. (14) yet contradictions continue. kefalá asserts: “i would never dare to write about purely australian issues” (16). (what are “purely australian issues”?) modestly she contends future migrant writing may in time “be an enrichment, another point of view” (17). that’s as far as she is prepared to identify herself with ‘ethnic writing’. her plan “to write about australia from now on” (18) is, as i say, in conflict with her earlier assertion. most likely she means “australia” consists of more than “purely australian issues”. kefalá’s voice is that of the paradigmatic “alien” in any context, a precarious subjectivity “lifted free of contextualising mutabilities” (21), as sneja gunew puts it so academically. the following lines invoke isolation and alienation not as a specific migrant situation: “i am tired, living at home among strangers, / sitting at the same tables, / waiting for an acceptance that never comes / an understanding that would not be born, / the measure in us already spent.” (‘family life’, the alien, 8) it would be a gross misunderstanding to judge such thought merely a reflection of migrant separation. the poem’s range speaks for itself. serge liberman (1942 2017) was the son of polish jewish refugees, born in russia during the flight from nazi-germany’s invasion. in 1951 he settled in melbourne where he combined a medical practice with writing and editorial activities. a prolific contributor to australian judaica, he wrote a prose reminiscent of nineteenth century european style. in 1984 liberman became a corresponding editor of outrider. during his lifetime he regularly addressed issues of multicultural and mainstream australian literature in numerous articles, letters and discussions. in 1984 he was featured coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 on an abc saturday guest programme under the heading of the place of ethnic minority writing in the mainstream of australian literature. ironically, he defines his concern for the relationship of ethnic writing to the australian literary mainstream with a confession: “i am not wholly sure what the true mainstream is.” (83) he is not troubled by his uncertainty. for liberman “the question is one of definition and not of substance” (84). he is strangely accepting of historical practice and terminology. all he asks for is that “ethnic writing” not be set distinctly apart from general australian literature. he modestly sees it as a tributary to the mainstream. his objection relates to an “elevation of abstractions”, to him “among the worst and waste-engendering of intellectual sins” (85). bravely he insists that “success may be won outside the indigenous literary establishment as well as within it”, for after all ethnic writing merely seeks “to add another dimension to australian culture” (86). outrider published his open letter to dr. judith brett, editor of the literary magazine meanjin, in which he proudly claims: “i do not feel that ethnic writing needs to answer for itself” (96). he sees “the ultimate aim of outrider in the self-destruction as a selfconsciously multicultural publication”. it should become so integrated into australian culture as it is evolving that it ought to take its place in the centre of the literary scene. his appeal culminates perhaps in an all-too-optimistic vision of meanjin and other established australian literary journals coming “closer in content and expression to the multicultural purposes implicit in the publication of outrider.” (98) the editorial board owes serge liberman gratitude for his generous, courageous and challenging zeal. the following is a somewhat more realistic description of outrider. it appeared 1994 in the oxford companion to australian literature: “outrider: a journal of multicultural literature in australia, published in brisbane under the general editorship of manfred jurgensen, began publication in 1984. the journal, which aims to add another dimension to australian culture by promoting the creative work if immigrant writers and artists and has frequently debated multicultural issues, includes poetry, short stories, essays and addresses, plays, criticism, bibliographies, reviews and art work. as well as drawing attention to the contribution ‘immigrant writers’ make to australian literature, the journal seeks to emphasise the place of australian literature within the context of world literature. of the 400 authors published over the first eight years, approximately half were born outside australia. outrider was published twice a year until 1989 and became an annual magazine in 1990. see also jurgensen, manfred.” sadly, the facts did not reflect serge liberman’s optimistic vision. however, he himself was a highly successful writer and critic who enjoyed strong support throughout the ethnic community, including countless jewish readers. his prose consisted mainly of short story collections. they won widespread recognition, among them several alan marshall awards, the ethnic affairs commission award and the 1984 nsw premier’s literary award. liberman’s writing addressed itself mainly to “the battered and the redeemed” (1990), not merely the survivors of the holocaust. one critic remarked on the depth and intensity of his prose that was “more characteristic of the european than the australian tradition” (465). serge liberman edited or co-edited the melbourne chronicle, the australian jewish news, the australian times, menorah and compiled a bibliography of australian judaica. he was indeed a true man of letters in the european tradition. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 alex skovron (1948 ) is a highly sophisticated poet born in poland who settled in sydney and melbourne. his writing has attracted international praise. skovron is a jewish artist of cosmopolitan urbanity, insight and wit. despite his migrant background he has kept distant from artistic ethnicity and cultural alienation. the title of skovron’s retrospective compilation of new and selected poems, towards the equator (2014), reflects the centrality of his direction and vision. skovron’s poetry has never been genetic in the ‘ethnic’ sense. the author never wrote as a fringe dweller. on the contrary: his work belongs to the mainstream of contemporary world literature. from time to time he speaks more specifically “of australia” (78), but his natural audience is an educated cosmopolitan readership. his beautiful lines from the horizon describe his writing as a “weaving” of “private fantasies”. skovron practises “the art to inhabit the vernacular australia from within”. its “dialect is the world” (79). he is an outstandingly precise poet, yet he completes his horizon-sequence with the lines: “i begin to believe in time, the old swindler… i do and i don’t, for i am speaking loosely.” (83) his last words pay homage to the language of an ironic, mock-heroic, distrustful and self-deprecating australian. skovron’s poems live with gods, divine artists and battlers. “i know you / wolfgang, you composed my books!” (97) he informs mozart. the complexity of his writing never loses a haunting presence. the poet knows “times after the future” (234). his elective affinity to music helps. like many other poems, “a marriage” demonstrates how powerfully skovron translates music into poetry. his lines to schoenberg end: “the zodiac crumbles, the world is shrinking, sickens, will suffer, the world will ever be the same”. (233) among the most powerful ‘jewish’ lines are words dedicated to reflections of guilt. in simple yet unforgettable language they read: “but in the night, if one dares to approach and enter the compound, and place a hand upon a wall and stare into the stone – at night the factory glows.” (237) the strength of skovron’s intellectual irony is demonstrated in “some precepts of postmodern mourning”. it summarises the vanity of human insights: “though in the end it needn’t be. later, this in itself must / be acknowledged as most significant of all, / or at least put down to the quintessential irony of death.” (256) the scope of skovron’s themes is almost limitless. its forms range from prose poems to free verse and compositions of intricate structure. one recurring subject is the reflection on time and history. the poet comes to accept the vanities, the horrors and absurdities of life. his work is not free from mourning, but as a survivor he endorses life with its injustices, complexities and glories. like music, he finds an almost stoic comfort in the gift of genius. alex skovron made no attempt to overcome the limits of ethnic or multicultural writing: thanks to the gift of poetry he succeeded in capturing profound insights of the human condition. his splendid writing quality has nothing to do with political, sociological or philosophical considerations. skovron’s speech is a matter of propensity, endowment and aptitude. he is quite simply one of the world’s best contemporary poets writing in english. peter skrzynecki (1945 ) invokes his polish-ukrainian descent in perspectives of immigrant experience, childhood and the loss of a native home. as an author he adopts the language and persona of a child recording the fate of his migrant parents. throughout his writing career alienation remains one of the main themes of his poetry and occasional prose. following the success of manfred jurgensen’s collection ethnic australia (1981), coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 he edited an anthology of migrant writing under the title of joseph’s coat (1985). his treatment of loss, separation and memory extends far beyond migration and becomes ever more personal. it includes grieving over marital alienation, family breakdown, his own ill health and other experiences of the human condition. his adoption of a childhood perspective lends his writing a characteristic tone of vulnerability, loneliness and rejection. his poems are characterised by delicacy of observation. skrzynecki has worked as a teacher. not surprisingly, his writing frequently gives the impression of addressing itself to a sensitive youthful readership. two of his poetry collections bear programmatic titles: immigrant chronicle and the polish immigrant. nonetheless, describing skrzynecki’s work as ‘multicultural’ seems problematic, if only because its draws a line of separation between different generations of immigrants. his poetry is in that sense single-minded. it bears witness to others. to him europe remains the ‘old’ country, the home of patriarchal origin. on a personal level his treatment of migration is extensive. the migrant child skrzynecki discovers many kinds of unsettled, transient and peripatetic lives. he included one of his own poems in the anthology joseph’s coat. ‘migrant centre site’ invokes an abandoned camp where he and his family lived on first coming to australia. he remembers and laments: “except for what memory recalls / there is nothing to commemorate our arrival – / no plaques, no names carved on trees…” (151). banumbir wongar [sreten božić] (1932 ) is the aboriginal name of a yugoslav/serbian-born author who entered a tribal marriage and experienced australian aboriginal culture first-hand. his writing attracted world-wide attention and praise from writers such as jean-paul sartre, simone de beauvoir, alan paton, thomas keneally, alan marshall and nadine gordimer. his work presents the most radical transformation and adaptation from one indigenous civilisation to another, not only in the context of multiculturalism. after transformation to a different native culture displacement, exile and hopelessness remain. they transcend historical and racial boundaries. the real force of wongar’s writing in a style of aboriginal approximation derives from the author’s preference of the poetic over other kinds of articulation. streten božić soon discovered the inherent poetry of aborignal faith and logic. thanks to his sensitivity and cultural responsiveness he succeeded integrating it into a poetry almost his own. ironically, much of his powerful wit also reveals the author’s european background. the following lines are taken from a ‘role-aboriginal’ poem transformed without alteration into euro/australian poetry. it is entitled ‘the forest’ and appeared in his collection bilma (1984): “when pillaged the country cries – a bee caught in a spider’s web – no soul likes to be eaten silently”. another curiously aboriginal/european metamorphosis presents the disturbing projection of a continuing industrial rape of the land: “all horizons are made of steel – you will curl into grief”. a prosaic statement like “in ashes we are all identical” (238) evokes even more painful memories of european history. to include the language of one culture in another discovers a profound but unknown shared sensitivity. the strength of wongar’s words derives from his grief over a culture all but destroyed by immigrant australians. as a white european, božić/wongar laments the destruction of aboriginal civilisation in much the same way as the annihilation of indigenous tribal cultures. his poems read like a warning for white australians struggling coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 against the pollution of the land, including the threat of complete nuclear annihilation. reading wongar reminds us there is no propaganda stronger than beauty. lamenting the excavation, uprooting and destruction of the earth, the fear of dust lies over all of wongar’s writing: “grains of sand stay on lookout. you might be ground into dust.” the late professor elizabeth perkins argued: “wongar’s poems often resemble anglo-saxon verse with the laconic simplicity and allusive irony.” it is this similarity that became the hall-mark of “his honest contemporaneity of style, compared with which the aboriginal names affect the reader as a play of wit rather than an emotional evocation” (239). yet for all that, wongar’s writing still raises the problem of a false sensibility: some (white and aboriginal) readers interpreted his posing as an aborigine by birth as another form of colonial usurpation. yet, despite such doubts and reservations, wongar’s poems do stand on their own aesthetic merit. indeed, it would be a gross disservice to both banumbir wongar and authentic aboriginal culture to classify his work as ‘multicultural’. his writing is rather a spectacular reminder of what goethe called a wahlverwandtschaft, (‘elective affinity’). the consequence of a ‘white australian adopting an aboriginal identity’ need not be a critical challenge to either culture, but an encouragement for both to enter a meaningful, mutually beneficial dialogue. nowadays children of inter-racial origin identifying themselves as indigenous have done just that: their own contribution to australian literature has changed the nature of multiple cultural relations within contemporary writing. the list of indigenous australian writers is long and distinguished. the pride of so-called assimilated firstor second-generation ‘interracial’ authors promises a continuation of a dialogue that could perhaps at some stage be legitimately called multicultural. as can be seen, the differences between these australian writers are significant. the only themes they appear to have in common are travel, walkabout, migration and transformation. thanks to the “tyranny of distance”, australians still are among the most widely travelled people on earth. it could be said there is at least some similarity between touring long distances, going “walkabout” on tribal land or migrating from one country to another. even at home most australians are frequently “on the move”, changing addresses throughout their lives. perhaps the vast continent called for a transient settlement. 1994 saw the publication of changing places. australian writers in europe. it featured 67 authors recording different travel experiences. the volume was received as a ‘counter-anthology’ reflecting a reversal of coming to australia. it would be misleading to apply the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ to such writing. instead, critics and readers treated changing places as a kind of literary migration. there is of course no denying the sensitising influence of getting to know other countries and peoples, but the prospect of permanent settlement in a different place and culture is another challenge altogether. the term ‘multicultural’ has remained a bureaucratic and political misnomer introduced by politicians, academics and the media. few authors or literary movements were subjected to such dubious concept. one leading critic of  coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 multicultural literature, sneja gunew, pleads in her writing for “specificity” o f subjects, themes, themes-within-themes (“feminist migration”) and other particularities. it is this lack of exact and explicit terminology that dampened my own enthusiasm a quarter of a century ago. in applying the term ‘multicultural’, australian politicians attempted to project social harmony within a migrant society. it soon became both criticised and idealised. the hope to counter developments of cultural ghettos did not always succeed. meanwhile the term ‘multicultural’ has long gone global. in the united states and europe nationalism and multiculturalism have become disturbing bedfellows. language remains the challenge of bilingual migrant writers. acquiring the skill to transform a native speech into a foreign tongue is still grossly underrated. histories of literature show it could be done, but such skills remain the exception (joseph conrad, samuel beckett, vladimir nabokov, joseph brodsky, andré brink, jack kerouac, milan kundera etc.). similar, equally unusual instances exist in other arts. ludwig van beethoven was in his late twenties when he lost his hearing. ‘overcoming’ the challenge of the medium by finding a way to realise it in a different way is both an inherent contradiction and the ultimate artistic triumph. banumbir wongar and walter adamson managed to side-step this dilemma in their own way. but there is a limit how often it can be repeated in traditional artistic genres. apart from the works of adamson and wongar, most other multicultural writing retains degrees of limitations in the structural scope and artistic quality of the work. in his study of “post-colonial collages” paul carter offers specific socio-linguistic reading approaches for such ‘imperfect’ works of ‘migrant literature’. subscriptions to outrider proved few migrants were committed readers of migrant literature. when outrider eventually changed into anthologies of international literature, support from migrant readers barely remained the same. the assumption that migrants would read a journal of multicultural literature to share the experiences of migration with other newcomers did not eventuate. generally, the government’s intended encouragement of positive discrimination in the republic of letters failed. literary multiculturalism merely encouraged a few individual writers. the oxford companion to australian literature featured outrider, but there was no entry under ‘multiculturalism’. it was not treated as a movement comparable to (say) the ‘jindyworobaks’ whose aim was a revival of nationalism in australia during the 1930s. despite a few critical publications dealing with ‘multicultural literature’, there was little national acknowledgment of ‘migrant writing’. some of these publications were k. gelder, p. salzman (eds.), the new diversity. australian fiction 1970 – 88, melbourne 1989; d. goodman, d. j. o’hearn, c. wallace-crabbe (eds.), multicultural australia. the challenges of change, newham 1991; s. gunew, k. o longley (eds.), striking chords. multicultural literary interpretations, north sydney 1992 and j. docker, g. fischer (eds.), adventures of identity, tübingen 2001. nevertheless, the actual communication of migrant language (or ‘language to migrants’) remains a complex and fascinating process. in the final chapter of paul carter’s classic living in a new country the sociolinguist claims that migrating not only marked “a new kind of history”. he believes that “in the end it means refining a new, distinctively migrant poetics” (blurb). admittedly, he offers only a theoretical projection that to date has not coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 yet been put to the test. however, if there is a sociolinguistic approach opening the path to a more meaningful evaluation of literary multiculturalism, it is carter’s uniquely original reading of what he calls a “post-colonial collage” (186-198). his theoretical analysis deals specifically with australia’s ethnic society, albeit without literary application. even so, two of his works should become compulsory reading for every literary and linguistic scholar researching “history, travelling, language” and “the migrant aesthetic”. carter’s living in a new country (1992) and the lie of the land (1996) promise to put an end to superficial readings of the ‘multicultural’. their only weaknesses would seem to be the term’s ready-made socio-political genesis, implying simplified conclusions of a complicated literary and linguistic phenomenon. carter claims authors and readers of migrant literature need to recognise “the artefactual nature of our reality and the possibility of reconsidering it” (198). despite its complexity, his essay “postcolonial collage: aspects of a migrant aesthetics” (186) is by far the most insightful discussion of ethnic, migrant or multicultural writing. its subtle but radical insights also point the way to a more meaningful and convincing understanding of ‘literary multiculturalism’. as he says: “identity is a function of place, language and tradition”, “place is arrived at by way of dialogue” and “we all are migrants even if we stay in the country of our birth”. (synopsis) works cited: adamson, walter. die anstalt (the institution). darmstadt: j. g. blaschke, 1974. adamson, walter. the institution. 16-17. sydney: penguin books, 1974. adamson, walter. adamson’s three-legged world. cheltenham: abalone press, 1985. 7. attar, samar. “history is not what happened, but what is told”. an interview with david malouf. in: outrider vol.vi, no.1, brisbane: phoenix publications, 1989. 89-110. carter, paul. living in a new country. london: faber and faber, 1992. 186-198. carter, paul. the lie of the land. london: faber and faber, 1996. fremd, angelika. interview with antigone kefalá. in: outrider. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1984. 13-18. gelder, ken / salzman, paul. the new diversity. australian fiction 1970-88. melbourne: mcphee gribble, 1989. 192, 195, 197. hergenhan, laurie / petersson, irmtraud. changing places. australian writers in europe. st lucia: university of queensland press. 1994. jurgensen, manfred. ethnic australia. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1981. jurgensen, manfred. literature and ethnicity. in: jupp, james. the australian encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins. north ryde: angus and robertson, 1988. 906-910. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 jurgensen, manfred. the politics of imagination. in: goodman, david / o’hearn, d. j. / wallace-crabbe, chris. multicultural australia. the challenge of change. newham: scribe publications, 1991, 21-31. jurgensen, manfred. blocking the delta’s mouth. in: earth wings. the outrider 91 almanach. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1991. ix. jurgensen, manfred. multicultural aesthetics: a preliminary definition. in: gunew, sneja / o. longley, kateryna. striking chords. multicultural interpretations. north sydney: allen & unwin, 1992. 29-36. jurgensen, manfred. multicultural literature in australia today. in: myers, david. reinventing literacy. the multicultural imperative. rockhampton: phaedrus books, 1995. 92-101. jurgensen, manfred. transformative identities of literary multiculturalism. in: docker, j. / fischer, gerhard. adventures in identity. european multicultural experiences and perspectives, tübingen: stauffenburg verlag, 2001. 215-224. jurgensen, manfred. multicultural literature. in: jupp, james. the australian encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins. sydney: cambridge university press, 2001. 811-812. kefalá, antigone. the alien. st. lucia: makar, 1973. 8. lewitt, maria. come spring. new york: st. martin’s press, 1982. lewitt, maria. no snow in december. richmond: william heinemann, 1985. liberman, serge. the place of ethnic minority writing in the mainstream of australian literature. in: outrider. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1984. 83-86. liberman, serge. letter to dr. judith brett (excerpts). in: outrider. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1984. 96-98, . liberman, serge. liberman, serge, wilde, william h. / hooton, joy / andrews, barry, the oxford companion to australian literature. second edition, south melbourne: oxford university press, 1994. 465. malouf, david. notes and documents, australian literary studies 12, 1985. 265-268. mcauley, james. collected poems 1936-1970. sydney: angus and robertson, 1971. 197. miller, alex. the ancestor game. st leonards: allen & unwin, 2000. neilsen, philip. breaking the myth: david malouf’s fly-away peter. in: outrider, vol. vi. no 1, brisbane: phoenix publications, 1989. 75-88. neilsen, philip. the conflict between australia and europe in david malouf’s johnno and an imaginary life. in: earth wings. the outrider 91 almanach. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1991. 175-179. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 perkins, elizabeth. bilma. b. wongar. outrider vol. 2 / no.1. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1985. 237-239. skovron, alex. towards the equator. glebe: puncher & wattmann, 2014. 74, 97, 250, 255. skryznecki, peter. immigrant chronicle. st lucia: university of queensland press, 1975. 151. skrzynecki, peter. the polish immigrant. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1982. skrzynecki, peter. joseph’s coat. an anthology of multicultural writing. sydney: hale & iremonger, 1985. white, patrick. the tree of man. london: vintage, 1994. wilde, william h. / hooton, joy / andrews barry. the oxford companion to australian literature (second edition). melbourne: oxford university press, 1994. 596. wongar, banumbir. bilma. columbus: ohio state university press, 1984. wongar, banumbir. banumbir. in: outrider, vol. ii, no.1. brisbane: phoenix publications, 1985. 237-238. bio note: manfred jurgensen (dr.phil., d.litt., ph.d.) is an australian novelist, poet and critic who holds a personal chair at the university of queensland (brisbane) where he served as professor of german studies for almost 30 years. in recognition of his extensive international research and publication he received the degree of doctor of letters. although he lived most of his life in melbourne and brisbane, he considers himself a european expatriate with australian citizenship. during 1980 to 2000 jurgensen became the most influential figure in the emergence of literary multiculturalism in australia. he founded phoenix publication in 1981 and became editor of outrider from 1984 to 1995. jurgensen won multiple literary prizes and holds many academic distinctions. in 1997 he was awarded the order of australia and germany’s federal cross of merit, first class. he is an alexander von humboldt fellow who held visiting professorships at various international universities. his academic publications include 16 books, 15 anthologies and over 100 critical essays in several languages. his literary work includes 14 novels in english, 8 in german. his most recent release includes the novels deutschland einst und dereinst, and fausts erbe. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 he is currently completing a major study on the great marxist critic hans mayer. manfred jurgensen is the author of 16 collections of verse, in english and in german. his bestknown poetry volumes are the otherness of words (2013) and the river (2016). coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 homage from the universitat de barcelona eaclals will greatly miss his cheery face, which has delighted so many people in meetings all over the world. he made a great contribution to the workings of the association-always helping us in difficult moments. doireann macdermott a little ditty from a northern lassie to a midlands brummie: unpretentious and full of fun - may we meet in kingdom come! kathleen firth it was the warmth … that is how i’ll remember you, dear geoff. i didn’t know you as well as some of my colleagues and now the chance has passed but the times we shared at conferences were always rewarding: your kind enquiry, your readiness to listen, your zest for living and knowing more, your eagerness to communicate and ability to convey scholarship with gargantuan gusto, laced with laughter. last seen in ljubljana, the summer before you left us. the fire doesn’t fade; we carry your embers. jacqueline hurtley microsoft word 00_introduction.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 an introduction to translation, poetry and creative practice claire wilson university of canberra clairerosslynwilson@gmail.com copyright©2021 claire wilson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. recent debates about the translation of amanda gorman's poems, after her moving reading/performance at usa president biden’s inauguration, have thrust this quiet artform into the spotlight. but while there is a movement against the invisibility of the translator, the argument that translations must almost be undetectable (in that if the translation is good you don’t notice it’s from another language) perhaps understates the productive cultural negotiations that take place when moving between languages. translation academic haidee kotze explains that ‘this demand that translations should completely assimilate themselves to the expectations of the receiving culture reflects the receiving culture’s ethnocentrism; its unwillingness to engage with cultural difference’ (kotze 2021). however, more than just translating meaning from one language to another (or from one culture to another), translators of poetry can find the act of translating opens up new spaces of experimentation and expression, stretching the rules of language in new ways as they endeavour to find the path between languages. the space between languages can be a creative space, rather than one that is solely concerned with questions of what constitutes a correct translation or what a readership might be expected to understand. rather than being invisible, a translation has the potential to start conversations between cultures and people, raising questions through the play of language. this edition takes a wide understanding of translation, exploring not only translation practices, but also the ways in which translation can be an impetus for thinking and creating for both poets and translators. the edition explores the practice of translation as an encounter with other cultures or as a collaborative act; it unravels the crossdisciplinary associations made when taking words into transit; it investigates the journey into the self as one’s own languages interact and pull against each other. for example, dominique hecq’s performative paper ‘explores what is at stake in the act of autotranslation’, drawing from her own practice to identify the transference between languages and how one negotiates this space through ‘a voice, a word, a letter threaded coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 through the fabric of language’. jean page also explores the way encounters with translation can contribute to a poet’s work in her analysis of australian twentiethcentury poet james mcauley’s reading and translation of the early twentieth-century austrian poet georg trakl. this encounter found its way into mcauley’s work and page considers the potentials of translation as travel. inevitably, this edition also explores the translation between cultures and places, exploring ways of encountering the words of another culture. cassandra atherton, paul hetherington and rina kikuchi’s paper is a good example of this, as it draws on the experiences in a series of translation workshops at meiji university. the paper investigates the role of place and translating in situ, as well as the role of informal conversations in developing an understanding of a poet’s perspective and poetic choices, arguing that ‘while translation is often undertaken by the translators in their country of residence, the experience of genius loci and undertaking co-translation in situ may best accommodate such a cross-cultural synergy’. nadia niaz straddles multiple cultural contexts in her paper as she considers translation in multilingual poetry. the paper raises the question of how australian and canadian poets ‘who write multilingually negotiate and deploy their cultural knowledges, who they write for, and how their audiences receive them’. subhash jaireth and bill boyd’s papers take a multidisciplinary approach to translation, opening up the discussion by applying ways of thinking about translation to different contexts. boyd explores the ‘borrowing, appropriation, reworking and decontextualisation of language, ideas and other writers’ work’ by scottish writer hugh macdiarmid, and in turn applies his own appropriation of a macdiarmid poem in a discussion of education. in his montage-essay, jaireth takes us on a journey through stephen poliakoff’s movie shooting the past as a way to unravel the notion of translation as movement between the photographic and the cinematographic, leading to a discussion of a wider understanding of the meaning of translation. woven throughout the edition are example of translations and self-translations into english from spanish, frisian, romanian, filipino, bikol and scots. the translations often reflect the challenges raised in papers, such as merlinda bobis’ and isabel alonsobreto’s self-translations following on from hecq’s discussions in the paper on the uncanny pleasures of autotranslation. the negotiation within this edition between critical and creative practice, also explored in several of the papers, proves to be a rich ground for thinking through the creative slippages and possibilities when translating poetry. each of the translations is accompanied by a note from the translator, which briefly describes their approach. these translator notes are not intended as a comprehensive outline of where their methodology sits in the academic field of translation, but rather it is intended to provide insight into the creative process and choices made when undertaking a translation. these introductions to the translation could be read as starting points for thinking about the creative potential of the translation process. together, the papers and translations explore a number of themes, including intercultural exchange, connection to place, the slippages and difficulty in the translation process and translation as a way to open up thinking about the world. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 bibliography kotze, haidee 2021, ‘translation is the canary in the coalmine’, medium, 15 march, retrieved 14 april 2021, <https://haidee-kotze.medium.com/translation-is-the-canary-inthe-coalmine-c11c75a97660> claire rosslyn wilson is a poet, editor and researcher, with particular interests in cultural diversity and creative expression for social change. she co-wrote freelancing in the creative industries (oxford university press, 2015), and was the poetry editor for the human rights journal right now. she is a phd candidate in the faculty of arts and design at the university of canberra, australia, where she is researching creative writing and cultural adaptation. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 292 reimagining the cultural significance of wetlands: from perth’s lost swamps to the beeliar wetlands. danielle brady edith cowan university d.brady@ecu.edu.au jeffrey murray australian army copyright©2018 danielle brady & jeffrey murray. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the history of perth, western australia, has been characterised by the incremental loss of its wetlands. while disputes about wetlands are often framed solely in terms of the environment, they are places of cultural significance too. the extensive wetlands of central perth, food gathering and meeting places for noongar people are now expunged from the landscape. urban dwellers of perth are largely unaware that the seasonal lakes and wetlands of the centre of the city were the larders, gardens, hideouts, dumps and playgrounds of previous generations; both noongar and settler. the loss of social memory of these lost cultural/natural places entails the framing of wetlands as aberrant and continues to influence perth’s development and the sense of place of its inhabitants. reimagining perth’s lost wetlands was a project which attempted to reimagine the pre-colonial landscape using archival material. reimagining the past allows connections to be made to the last remaining wetlands in the wider metropolitan area. the fight to save the beeliar wetlands in southern suburban perth as a cultural/natural place illustrates the changing value of wetlands and the laying down of social memories of place. keywords: social memory; wetlands conservation; reimagining landscape. mailto:d.brady@ecu.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 293 introduction a popular view of perth, western australia, is of a pleasant city on the edge of a vast, arid state. yet perth has a mediterranean climate, with a cool, wet winter. it is also centre of a biodiversity hotspot. the city sits on the swan coastal plain, a geographical region encompassing the meandering swan and canning rivers. the city was established on the banks of the swan river, technically an estuary at this point in its journey to the sea. prior to european colonisation in 1829, the plain was dotted with lakes and wetlands, or, as they are often known locally, swamps. the developing city of perth was situated between the river and a network of wetlands extending across the north of the city. while the journals of european colonists repeatedly refer to these wetlands, or ‘lagoons,’ within the first hundred years of settlement, most have been drained. perth dwellers can still experience a few highly modified lakes on the outskirts of the central district, but the original lakes and swamps are completely gone, covered by streets and buildings. the development of perth removed wetlands from the central city landscape and, moreover, from social memory. we use social memory in the sense articulated by sturken (2008) as different to historical records and solely personal memories, but continually reproduced through cultural forms. geographies of memory are reproduced not only by material form but by “bodily repetition of performance” (hoelscher and alderman 2004, 350). the limited visual traces of perth’s wetlands, in maps, artworks and photographs has led to a loss of understanding of the biogeography of the region alongside the physical loss of the wetlands, which can no longer be experienced. this paper takes as its starting point a research project that aimed to reimagine the lost wetland environment of central perth by reconstructing a digital image of the natural landscape as it might have appeared in 1827 prior to settlement. giblett (2011) problematises the separation of nature and culture, arguing that even national parks are cultural landscapes. in giblett’s (2011) five cultures of nature taxonomy, the transition from second nature (agriculture) to third nature (mining) occurred in a short period of time in western australia. agricultural and pastoral pursuits were followed quickly by mining and engineering, and the central city of perth began to engineer drainage solutions to perceived problems of flooding and sanitation from the early years after european settlement. perth was settled by europeans just before the photographic era. many of the well-known images of colonial perth were taken by alfred stone, a lawyer and pioneer photographer (o’brien and statham-drew 2012). as perth was slow to develop at first, stone’s photographs taken from the 1860s show examples of original vegetation and landform. however, the majority of photographs of perth, and indeed artworks, are from a perspective facing the river and the wetlands at the back of perth do not feature. the other common perspective is from the highest point of kings park. this 400 hectare park, the majority of which is remnant vegetation, is promoted by its own park authority as the largest of its kind contained within a capital city. while it is not the pristine bush many believe, having been quarried and logged in colonial times (seddon 1972), it has hundreds of endemic species and remains significant in how western australians view themselves. seddon and ravine (1986) have written about the iconic view from mount eliza, kings park, across the swan river to perth, and its linkage to arcadian themes. despite the fact coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 294 that this view now takes in a freeway interchange, constructed over a large, filled section of the swan river, it is still understood as aesthetically pleasing. by contrast, there are just a few images of wetland areas in perth, such as an image of claise brook by alfred stone (o’brien and statham-drew 2012). giblett (1996a, 127) has challenged the pleasant view of perth, seeing instead “a city malignantly settling its swamp setting.” perth’s kings park, renamed for the king in 1901, is the approved park with its pleasing prospect from mount eliza, whereas the lakes and wetlands behind the city were first exploited and then expunged. wetland drainage and clearing in metropolitan perth continues to the present day, a local manifestation of a worldwide problem. the drivers for wetland clearing are most frequently transport development and urban sprawl. in this century, the few remaining wetlands on the swan coastal plain are in the outer city and all are threatened by development of different kinds. the values attached to wetlands in perth, however, have changed over time. after considering the lost wetlands of central perth, this paper moves to a contemporary dispute about the beeliar wetlands in outer, suburban perth. reimagining perth’s lost wetlands the original intention of the reimagining perth’s lost wetlands project was to create a model of the centre of perth in similar way to the mannahatta project. manhattan island is one of the most altered physical environments on earth. landscape ecologist eric sanderson led a team who attempted to reimagine the island, mannahatta, at the time of dutch colonisation in 1609 (sanderson, boyer and robertson 2009). the foundation for this work was the british headquarters map, which dated from the american revolutionary war, and detailed topography, shorelines, streams and wetlands along with settlement (sanderson, boyer and robertson 2009, 35). lacking anything as detailed as the british headquarters map, the reimagining perth’s lost wetlands project used several archival maps to infer topography and the location of wetlands. one example is the 1838 roe-hillman map (figure 1) showing the lakes and early city layout. maps showing the water table and well depths were used to glean additional information about the seasonal nature of the lakes and contemporary soil maps were used to deduce the broad vegetation categories. settlers’ and surveyors’ accounts, noongar oral histories, colonial era artworks and the early photography of alfred stone were used to create a historical impression of the city. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 295 figure 1: plan of town site of perth western australia 1838 by colonial draftsman, a. hillman, and surveyor general, john septimus roe. photo: state library of western australia. figure 2a shows the reimagined visualisation of perth before european settlement. it reveals forgotten interconnectedness between the wetlands. the pre-settlement wetlands all drained eastward into a seasonally flooded area called variously tea tree lagoon or swamp and from there into claise brook, prior to emptying into the swan river. the image shows the wet season extent of the lakes, whereas their boundaries would have varied during the year and across seasons. in figure 2a, artistic licence has been employed in exaggerating the height of the vegetation to indicate the relative locations of forested areas and swamp/lake margins occupied by paperbark and rushes. the vegetation types, including sandy areas of native grass, are portrayed in locations deduced from the many historical sources researched during the project. tree types appearing to grow in water replicate genera that were seasonally flooded. the image, therefore, presents an artistic impression of what the central area of perth might have looked like in 1827, rather than a reconstruction, as in the mannahatta project. in contrast, a contemporary view of perth shows no trace of the lost wetlands (figure 2b). claisebrook cove shown in the foreground is a completely reconstructed inlet. it was developed as part of the east perth project in the 1990s and is in approximately the same area as the original tea tree lagoon/swamp but with a larger entrance to allow egress by boats. the present day ‘brook’ entering the cove from the north is an engineered, artificial waterway, complete with bronze turtle public art. as with many contemporary waterways in perth, the cove has limestone banks surrounded by either mowed lawns or paving. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 296 a. reimagined view of perth, circa 1827. image: edith cowan university. b. contemporary view, 2014. photo: city of perth. figure 2: south west view across central perth from the swan river at east perth. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 297 the reimagined impression of central perth is viewed obliquely from the east of the city at the point the swan river turns north. this is the opposite side of the town from the pleasing aspect from kings park (seen in figure 2b as the vegetated area to the left of the skyscrapers). from colonial times, the east side of perth was the location of tanneries, rubbish dumps, an abattoir and a cemetery. later industrial uses included a power station, gas works and train yards (stannage 1979). claise brook, which had drained most of the fresh water swamps and seasonal lakes across perth into the swan river, became instead the carrier of its effluent. the loss of the social memory of the original landscape, particularly the wetlands, is only one layer of re-inscription of east perth’s, and perth’s, cultural history. east perth has been continuously inhabited by noongar people, but during 1927-48 they were prohibited from entering central perth after 6 p.m. without a permit (gregory 2003). it was the location of the coolbaroo club for aboriginal people and their white supporters between 1946 and 1960 (taylor 2000) and became a residential area for aboriginal people from outside perth due to the lower cost housing amongst the industrial activity (gregory 2003). in 2000, east perth was cut in two by construction of the graham farmer freeway. while few can now afford to live there, sites of significance to noongar people are memorialised in east perth public art and plaques. byrne and houston (2005, 1) have pointed out that in the gentrification of east perth “the colonial past has not really been displaced, but rather has been incorporated into popular multicultural representations of place.” gregory (2003, 328) cautions accepting a romanticised version of east perth’s history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. avoidance of the mistakes of the past was a motivating factor in exhibiting the reimagining perth’s lost wetlands project. an exhibition of materials from the reimagining perth’s lost wetlands project was held in the perth town hall in 2014 (and later formulated as an online exhibition by the western australian museum). the exhibition contains archival photographs, maps and textual accounts of the lost wetlands. when the 1827 view (figure 2a) was displayed, exhibition visitors expressed surprise, and even disbelief, at the extent of wetlands that had existed across central perth. the visual materials prompted visitors to make connections between the lost wetland landscape of central perth, remaining wetlands in outer perth, or their memories of wetlands. while it is obvious on one hand that all urban environments were once natural, change has taken place in perth over such a short period of history it is almost as though the wetlands of central perth had never existed. the superficially pleasant tree-lined streets and abundant parks mask the extent of the changes. bolleter, buck and sweetman (2016) have noted that although parks are numerous in the suburban core of perth, “one quarter have no trees, only one-tenth have significant wildlife function and only one-hundredth have wetlands” (68). this loss of biodiversity in urban environments has motivated at least some perth residents as the city spreads further across the swan coastal plain. organisations such as the urban bushland council have attempted to link together localised “friends” groups who act as custodians of remnant wetlands and bushland. “friends” volunteers promote activities like weeding, planting, watering and rubbish removal. the bodily repetition of these communal acts of care may inscribe a different suite of social memories for the remaining wetlands of perth. perth’s lost swamps as landscapes of culture coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 298 wetlands and swamps have been described as intermediate, neither wholly land nor water, which may account for the ambivalence towards them (giblett 1996b, 39). even the arguably more aesthetically pleasing river systems of western australia have been paid limited attention in histories of perth, given their importance to settlement (grahamtaylor 2011). however, the river is still visible, albeit with modified foreshores and declining biota. the wetlands of central perth are gone and the seasonal fluctuations in water and fauna activity are no longer visible. gardens and public areas are planted with species expected to survive the hot, dry summers with reticulation from precious water supplies. morel-edniebrown (2009) demonstrated by gis (geographic information system) analysis of colonial perth town plans that depictions of the inner city swamp lands disappeared over the twenty-two years from 1833 to 1855. she concluded that swamp lands were preferentially selected by settlers due to their fertile soil and access to fresh water and that the town plan was modified to maximise lots with swamp frontages. this work showed that drainage and clearing were not due entirely to fears about disease. indeed, disease had been associated with swamps in colonial perth due to sewage entering the water table connected to the lakes. outbreaks of typhoid in the 1890s doubtless extended the period in which people associated swamps with illness and beyond the era when miasma were thought to cause disease. chinese gardeners had been amongst the first of the settlers to utilise the rich, swamp soils for food production and became the target of complaints, along with their swamp gardens. at the time this aggrieved perth resident wrote to the daily news in 1909, the inner city swamps were no longer shown on maps: there is no doubt the time is fast approaching when the citizens will demand the filling up of all the oozy swamp areas all over the city. these areas are the breeding ground for that champion disease-carrier, the ubiquitous mosquito, and one has but to notice the heavy dank pall which hangs over the swamps during most nights to be convinced that in the interests of health an end must come to their existence in their present state. another serious menace to health lies in the use of high-smelling fertilisers by the chinese gardeners, who rent the swamps. the heavy stench which arises from the vegetable gardens on muggy nights is clear evidence that public health is menaced by their existence. the time must come when every city swamp must be filled in, and when every chinaman now cultivating the gardens will be told to remove their business to less populous parts. (“swamp lands of the city” 1909) while all of the wetlands shown in figure 2a had disappeared by the turn of the century, two on the outskirts of central perth, lake monger and third swamp (later hyde park), would continue to elicit public commentary until they were tamed. in the 1890s, arguments about what to do about third swamp resulted in numerous letters to local papers. residents made a deputation to premier john forrest about third swamp claiming “a great deal of the sickness in the locality it was thought was due to the bad smell that came from it” (“third swamp reserve” 1897). however, not all were content with the moves to turn the swamp into a park: coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 299 an expensive fence has been placed round the said reserve, the value of which, as an investment, can benefit only the surrounding estate. again, trees which cost nothing and gave a grateful shade, also tending to keep the earth cool, have been ruthlessly cut down, and to replace them 300 border plants have been set, and at a cost, did the ratepayers know it, that might well make them ponder. then come to the swamp itself, and what has been done to it? as things go in perth it would make a valuable market garden addition, if cheapness of living is a sufficiently important factor to be considered. it would economically dry by evaporation if undue haste were absent; and then the reeds could have been cut and grubbed, islands banked, and all else done at a fractional expense of what has been already expended, and for which there is so little to see. (“third swamp reserve” 1898) this agricultural reimagining of third swamp did not come to fruition, and it was reborn as hyde park, complete with decorative flower beds. negative connotations of swamps and indeterminate wetlands persist to the present. as recently as 2012, the hyde park lakes restoration working group investigated options to ensure the park “does not continue to be a ‘seasonal wetland’ and a casualty of declining water levels which transforms it into a swamp each summer” (city of vincent 2012). in this context, the term “swamp” is understood intrinsically as undesirable. the restoration of hyde park did not restore the original landscape, a swamp rather than a lake, but extended the already parklike environment with limestone edges to the lake, constructed islands and artificial water level management. the memory of swamps as places of abundance and social activity has largely been lost along with their original ecosystems, except to noongar people. interviewed about their family connection to forrestdale lake, south of perth, noongar elders described the swamp as “a larder,” “a kitchen” and “a supermarket,” thus reflecting the memory of this usage (giblett 2006, 4-5). lake kingsford, one of the original lakes in central perth and now replaced by the perth railway station, was known as a collection site for vegetable foods, fresh water crayfish and turtles (bates 1929). swamps were also places of refuge. in the second year of european settlement of perth, a battle occurred between local noongars and soldiers and armed settlers. fought over the course of one day in may 1830, this dispute started near present day kings park and ended at a swamp believed to be lake monger. at this site, the noongar attempted to take cover in the tea trees and dense reeds. spears were thrown from the cover of the swamp and muskets fired into the bush. at nightfall, the soldiers attempted to corral the noongar: darkness had now fallen, and patrols were told to completely surround the lagoons and prevent, if possible, any movement during the night. for a considerable time voices were heard in the lagoon, but in a while silence reigned. yet the patrols had not reported any movement on the part of the blacks. at daybreak next morning the commander of the troops endeavoured to get into communication with the blacks and, if possible, re-establish friendly feelings, when it was found that the lagoon was practically deserted by the enemy. the military cordon had reported no movement during the hours of darkness, but the thick scrub made the matter of reconnaissance very coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 300 difficult. in a little while, however, the patrol to the eastward reported that the enemy were in the act of crossing the river at what is now the causeway, having eluded the vigilance of the reconnoitring parties, travelling, no doubt, along the chain of swamps which than extended to what is now east perth. (“a battle near perth” 1914) the account of the battle and aftermath by the commanding officer, captain frederick irwin, also explained that, in the morning, the noongar were “seen to cross the river at the islands, with their families, in considerable numbers” (cited in carter and nutter 2005, 68). the swamps across the northern boundary of perth had provided refuge and an escape route for the noongar people as they fled along a traditional route across the river. while combatants on both sides were wounded in the battle, it is unknown how many noongar people were killed. this significant event in colonial history is not well-known in western australia and there is no written account of the noongar side of the story. lake monger continued to be a meeting and campsite for noongar people until the 1920s (stannage 1979). arguments about the vegetation, drainage of, and access to lake monger were made as the city grew, and early claims were often utilitarian, preferring wetland uses that favoured agriculture. ultimately, exertion of control over the indeterminate wetlands and swamps was often achieved by turning them into rubbish dumps: five acres have been reclaimed for the lake monger reserve by the tipping of refuse into the swamp […] 25,960 loads of trade waste and rubbish (making a total of 30,797 tons) had been dumped at the tip and 13,000 cubic yards of sand had been used for the covering seal. the area added to the reserve would ultimately be grassed and added to the acreage already reclaimed for the ‘creation of a fine recreational reserve.’ (“swamp to be reserve” 1948) in 2017, the assumed site of the battle of lake monger is a clearly defined lake with sparse vegetation around much of its perimeter. due to its proximity to the city, it is heavily used for recreational purposes such as walking and cycling. although the natural environment of lake monger has changed dramatically, it is still home to large numbers of birds including the black swan, and is a place where city people now encounter wildlife. on the east side of town, the river crossing of muddy islands where the noongar fled the muskets of colonists in 1830 is today the discrete heirisson island. it is traversed by a causeway and is a major traffic route into and out of perth. the route across the causeway and down the albany highway was probably a noongar bidi, or traditional pathway, and the island known also by its noongar name, matagarup, has been a site of protest and resistance since 1978 (kerr and cox 2013). facing matagarup on the city side is the reconstructed wetland of point frazer park. bolleter (2015) has suggested this particular ‘park’ is a minimal response to numerous failed naturalisation plans for the reclaimed river foreshore and notes that the original, swampy point frazer is subsumed within the reclaimed foreshore. the original lakes and swamps in central perth are long gone, but even the two remaining on the outer edges of central perth are lost in the sense that they no longer resemble their natural state and only a part of their histories is retained. lake monger has been coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 301 hydrologically disconnected completely from the claisebrook catchment, with a drain emptying into the swan river at mounts bay. hyde park is faintly reminiscent of its english namesake. perth’s inner city wetlands have been reformulated as discrete lakes and parks and only selected social memories of these former cultural/natural places are held. there are no ‘swamps’ left in central perth. reimagining the beeliar wetlands as other than the roe 8 reserve colonial attitudes to wetlands continue to shape the development of the city as perth expands inexorably across the swan coastal plain. a present-day dispute about wetland clearing demonstrates the changing value of wetlands in metropolitan perth and that, although road development continues to override other land uses, the clearing of swamp land can no longer proceed uncontested. the foundation of what was ultimately a successful protest against a highway project was the reimagining of the beeliar wetlands as other than a road reserve. this reimagining was mediated not only through the spatial and experiential knowledge of the natural wetland environment, but by acknowledging the social values attached to the specific place of beeliar. the colonial surveyor john septimus roe is well remembered in perth for laying out the inner city. a monument to his memory can be found in kings park, not far from the location of the famous viewing site. the place, roe gardens, has at its centre a granite plinth topped with a bronze version of the map shown in figure 1. of course, no lakes or swamps can be observed today from the viewing point of roe gardens, and significant areas of swan river in the vista have been reclaimed. the roe gardens monument dates from 1956, the heyday of modernist highway planning in perth (gregory 2011). roe’s name was given to a highway first proposed in 1955, which later became part of perth’s metropolitan regional scheme (mrs). the roe highway was to be an outer ring road around the city centre at the time it was planned, but by the time construction commenced in 1981 it was contained within greater metropolitan perth. construction of several sections of the roe highway involved the clearing of remnant bushland, but the most controversial section, roe 8, was to pass between two lakes and bisect the beeliar wetlands. the beeliar wetlands, named for the original beeliar people, also contains bibra lake (wallibup) and north lake (coolbellup), now part of the beeliar regional park located about twenty kilometres south of central perth (department of conservation and land management 2006). surrounded by residential development and encircled by roads, the wetlands contain fauna species that are now rare in urban environments, including splendid fairy wrens, oblong turtles and the shy, burrowing marsupials known locally by their noongar name quenda. the banksia woodland flora includes iconic species, such as spider orchids and the christmas tree (nuytsia floribunda), and serves as critical foraging habitat for the endangered carnaby’s black cockatoo. migratory birds like the rainbow bee-eater nest in shallow burrows in the sandy ground. massive flooded gums and paperbarks grow in a swampy peat basin believed to be hydrologically unique on the swan coastal plain (v. semeniuk, pers. comm.). the high biodiversity of this area has been recorded by successive studies, both in terms of plant communities and in total coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 302 number of species. it contains a particularly unusual and untouched swamp that has come to be known as roe swamp. in contrast to the situation with the wetlands of central perth lost in colonial times, the beeliar regional park is commonly agreed to have environmental value, and parts of the wetlands are mapped as “conservation category,” a category intended to ensure their preservation (department of conservation and land management 2006). however, the state government has excised parts of the regional park in order to build the roe 8 highway. the roe 8 reserve can be clearly seen on maps dating from the 1960s. strong objection to roe 8 has been voiced since the 1970s, alongside the growing environmental movement, while the need for it to be completed has been supported by successive liberal governments in western australia. while justifications for the highway have changed over the fifty years since it was first suggested, they are all connected to the idea that roads equal progress and that highway building is a natural consequence of development in perth. in 2008, the state government recommitted to completing the roe 8 highway section. by this time, the beeliar regional park containing the wetlands and two lakes to be impacted by the highway was heavily used by the local community and increasing numbers of visitors. recreational users, such as bird-watchers, dog-walkers and cyclists contributed new values ascribed to the wetlands and social memories associated with them. the wetlands became a focus for education with the establishment of a wetlands education centre in the 1980s, attracting students, artists and tourists. increasingly the beeliar wetlands are cherished for their intrinsic value as a wild place remaining within an urban environment. there is also growing understanding that this urban bushland provides necessary habitat for mobile endemic species like the endangered carnaby’s black cockatoo. the assemblage of plants and animals found in the remaining wetland areas of perth are often described in the terms of environmental science, but there are complex values attached to the sights and sounds of the native flora and fauna in their natural habitat. the beeliar wetlands were settled by europeans in the 1840s and, as with other wetland areas on the swan coastal plain, there were early incursions for agricultural purposes including dairying and market gardening and the inevitable rubbish dumping at the southern end of bibra lake (berson 1978). an australian women’s army service (awas) camp was stationed at bibra lake during the second world war (tucker 1991). residential developments have continued to infill around the wetlands and recreational facilities, including a water park, ice rink and skateboarding park, abut bibra lake. the shores of bibra and north lake have long been known as aboriginal heritage sites, and remain significant to noongar people, but in 2015 approval was given for construction of roe 8 through heritage sites (kagi 2015). a traditional noongar custodian, corina abraham, attempted to challenge the approval in the western australian supreme court on cultural heritage grounds. just before christmas in december 2016, work on the roe 8 highway commenced. this followed the overturn on appeal of a western australian supreme court case won by the community group, save beeliar wetlands, which had held off construction for a year (nisbet and syme 2017). over the following three months, a grassroots community protest movement opposed the dominant narrative surrounding the need for the highway to reduce traffic congestion and improve road safety. community members instead supported the retention of the beeliar wetlands, firstly, for their intrinsic value as a wild coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 303 place and, secondly, as a space tied to community values of connectedness and wellbeing. this emotional geography incorporated natural and cultural values (davidson, bondi and smith 2007) and led to indigenous and non-indigenous people joining forces to protest the construction of the highway. the desire to preserve the beeliar wetlands, and opposition to the highway, revealed that fragmenting wetlands into discrete areas is no longer uniformly accepted. in a similar way to the network of seasonal lakes and swamps behind perth, the beeliar wetlands comprises several lakes and swamps with interconnected hydrology. building a highway between the two lakes would disrupt the natural flow of water, make the movement of animals difficult and also fracture the community. this barrier to movement, of both people and fauna, was a major point of opposition. the past human uses of the wetlands, both indigenous and settler, were incorporated into the suite of cultural touchpoints referenced by protestors. for example, two norfolk island pines, non-endemic species planted in 1900 by dairy farmer john dixon, were cut down during early site works to the outrage of the community (figure 3). the city of cockburn heritage inventory entry captures the layers of meaning surrounding these trees on the shores of bibra lake: the pine trees are very tall and have streetscape and landmark qualities. the trees have historic value as they display strong links with a dairy industry on the shores of bibra lake, an industry that is no longer practiced in this vicinity. the trees are fine representatives of vegetation that has survived urban development and are associated with early settlers, the dixon family. (city of cockburn 2014, 287) figure 3: heritage norfolk island pine trees at bibra lake in 2017. (left: fenced in the roe 8 reserve; right: lopped). photo: d. brady. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 304 the trees were crudely lopped at an early stage of work when they did not pose any impediment to other clearing and well before other nearby work began (figure 3). the local community and protestors experienced this as a purposeful desecration of the place they were fighting to preserve and as an attempt to demoralise the community. the lost trees were seen as a symbol of the government attitude to the protest, a metaphorical two finger salute, and even mentioned in the federal parliament by an opposition member: “a few weeks ago they were chopped down to stumps and left to stand in a fenced enclosure like exhibits in a display of human stupidity” (wilson 2017). so easily observed in the wetland area at stake, the ruined trees hardened the resolve of protestors and galvanised non-violent direct action at the construction site (figure 4). although the dixon pines were the remnant of an agricultural incursion into the beeliar wetlands, they were incorporated into the social memory of the place along with the noongar heritage sites, the awas camp and the biodiversity of roe swamp. figure 4: non-violent direct action by roe 8 protestors at the beeliar wetlands, 2017. credit: s. stevens. the roe 8 clearing was halted with a change of the western australian state government in march 2017 with community protest as a likely factor in the election result. by this time, however, a path had gouged the entire length of the roe 8 reserve and through the wetlands. the ghost road seen on maps since the 1960s had become a physical road. the attempts to preserve the beeliar wetlands by mapping unique landforms and cataloguing rare species had been unsuccessful. just as the city maps of the wetlands of central perth were instruments of colonial intent, the later mrs overlays predetermined that road uses would outweigh other uses of the beeliar wetlands. all maps betray the social systems that create them. the people who sought to preserve the wetlands, however, rejected the mapped and catalogued version of the beeliar regional park, preferring their experiential, spatial knowledge. numerous mass protests were held in bushland around the perimeter coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 305 of the construction site and tree-sitters—and those who locked themselves to trees and equipment—used local knowledge to circumvent fencing and security. turnbull (2007) considered the ways differing knowledge traditions could be used in mapping and concluded that a performative dimension was one solution to avoid “subsumption into one common or universal ontology” (turnbull 2007, 140). certainly the regular pathways through the wetlands used by the community included an old limestone road to the dixon farm, an access road for the state electricity utility, fire breaks and the roe 8 road reserve itself. the emotional performance of walking through the space but experiencing it as ‘other’ than a road reserve was the foundation on which the protest movement was built and led to the later ‘reclaiming’ protest actions. protestors also objected to the loss of land for the highway being ‘offset’ by purchase of conservation land one-hundred kilometres outside the city. the place of beeliar, in the eyes of its protectors, was indivisible, specific and irreplaceable. one wetland is not as good as another and the cultural values inscribed upon it are a complex of interactions between the people, animals and plants that inhabit or continue to experience that particular place. giblett (2011) has claimed that “wilderness is a human artefact, or more precisely a european settler aesthetic and land-use artefact to which various, often contradictory, meanings have been ascribed” (114). while the beeliar wetlands, with an auditory background of birdsong and traffic noise, can hardly be described as a wilderness, it was their wild, non-urban character which first drove efforts to preserve them. and yet, as the description of layers of meaning inscribed on the beeliar wetlands show, the most recent preservation efforts involved an emotional geography of interwoven cultural and natural values (davidson, bondi and smith 2007). hoelscher and alderman (2004) point out the spatial aspect of social memory and its linkage to identity. the location and characteristics of the original wetlands of central perth are largely lost to social memory, while urban development and transport needs continue to dominate the identity of the city. in the fight to save the beeliar wetlands, a community of activists acted out their protest that the wetlands were other than a road reserve. the laying down of social memories about beeliar, mediated through cultural objects, and through practices of walking and remembering in the natural environment, provides a possible new context for perth identity, one which values wetlands for their intrinsic cultural and natural attributes. references “a battle near perth.” 1914. the western mail, jan. 9, 38. bates, daisy. 1929. “aboriginal perth.” the western mail, july 4, 70. berson, michael. 1978. cockburn: the making of a community. cockburn, wa: city of cockburn. bolleter, julian. 2015. take me to the river: the story of perth’s foreshore. crawley, wa: university of western australia press. bolleter, julian, mackenzie buck, and sam sweetman. 2016. “going public: auditing perth’s public landscapes for urban infill.” westerly: walking, 54-79. byrne, jason, and donna houston. 2005. “ghosts in the city: redevelopment, race and urban memory in east perth.” in consent and consensus: politics, media and governance in twentieth century australia, jean hillier and denis cryle, eds., 319-349. perth: api network. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 306 carter, bevan, and lynda nutter. 2005. nyungah land: records of invasion and theft of aboriginal land on the swan river, 1829-1850, guilford, wa: swan valley nyungah community. city of cockburn. 2014. local government inventory. cockburn, wa: city of cockburn. www.cockburn.wa.gov.au/council_services/city_development/heritage/. city of vincent. 2012. hyde park lakes restoration. vincent, wa: city of vincent. www.vincent.wa.gov.au/your_council/council_matters/corporate_projects/hy de_park_lakes_restoration. davidson, joyce, liz bondi, and mick smith. 2007. emotional geographies. new york: routledge. department of conservation and land management. 2006. beeliar regional park final management plan. perth: 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stone: a pioneer lawyer & photographer. fremantle: fremantle press. sanderson, eric, markley boyer, and chad robertson. 2009. mannahatta: a natural history of new york city. new york: harry n. abrams. seddon, george. 1972. sense of place: a response to an environment, the swan coastal plain, western australia. crawley, wa: university of western australia press. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-10/roe-highway-aboriginal-cultural-consent-refused-then-granted/6763502 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-10/roe-highway-aboriginal-cultural-consent-refused-then-granted/6763502 http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/setting-up-the-tent-embassy-kerr-cox.pdf http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/setting-up-the-tent-embassy-kerr-cox.pdf coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 307 seddon, george, and david ravine. 1986. a city and its setting: images of perth, western australia. fremantle: fremantle arts centre press. stannage, charles thomas. 1979. the people of perth: a social history of western australia’s capital city. perth: carroll’s for perth city council. sturken, marita. 2008. “memory, consumerism and media: reflections on the emergence of the field.” memory studies 1(1): 73-78. doi: 10.1177/1750698007083890. “swamp lands of the city.” 1909. the daily news, jan. 23, 7. “swamp to be reserve.” 1948. the west australian, mar. 24, 9. taylor, a. 2000. “‘the sun always shines in perth’”: a post-colonial geography of identity, memory and place.” australian geographical studies 38(1): 27-35. doi: 10.1111/1467-8470.00098. “third swamp reserve.” 1897. the daily news, mar. 3, 4. “third swamp reserve.” 1898. the west australian, nov. 15, 7. tucker, eileen (reilly). 1991. we answered the call: awas of western australia and their mates. perth: vanguard press turnbull, david. 2007. “maps, narratives and trails: performativity, hodology and distributed knowledges in complex adaptive systems: an approach to emergent mapping.” geographical research 45(2): 140-149. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2007.00447.x. wilson, josh. 2017. “the summer of roe 8: speech to house of representatives.” josh wilson mp, mar. 20. http://joshwilson.org.au/news/speeches/811-the-summerof-roe-8.html. acknowledgements: the authors acknowledge funding and collaboration for the reimagining perth’s lost wetlands project from edith cowan university, landgate and the city of perth. the authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. danielle brady is a senior lecturer in communications, media and cultural studies and co-ordinator of higher degrees in the school of arts and humanities at edith cowan university. with postgraduate qualifications in both science and arts, she currently teaches research methods and supervises students across a range of disciplines, including communications, arts and design. she is particularly interested in working collaboratively on projects which benefit communities. recent collaborative projects include communication and design aspects of a satellite-based fire mapping system for regional communities in wa and reimagining perth’s lost wetlands to preserve those remaining. jeffrey murray is the regional indigenous liaison officer in wa for the australian army with responsibilities to assist units to engage and participate in indigenous communities and support local commanders on indigenous and cultural issues. his previous roles have included cartographer, gis and native title positions in the departments of planning & infrastructure and land information (now landgate). since 2012 he has run kareff consultancy, an independent historical land research business mapping the history of land, people, places and events and specializing in mapping and field-identifying indigenous, traditional country, pre-european settlement. http://joshwilson.org.au/news/speeches/811-the-summer-of-roe-8.html http://joshwilson.org.au/news/speeches/811-the-summer-of-roe-8.html coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 digressions on davis and the natterjack toad dennis haskell dennis.haskell@uwa.edu.au copyright© 2020 dennis haskell. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a series of humorous anecdotes about the author’s friendship with geoff davis and a poem written in his honour keywords: geoff davis, sense of humour, friendship this geoff davis issue of coolabah is a fitting tribute to a wonderful, intelligent and dedicated scholar. inevitably it is elegiac, and as such provokes in me an impulse to write about him directly rather than about his work; others can do that better than me. i would never want to disparage geoff davis’s substantial contribution to commonwealth and postcolonial studies but he was unusual amongst academic researchers. never the distant scholar, he had distinctive personal qualities: humility; a great sense of humour; downto-earth unpretentiousness; endless curiosity; an open friendliness; a love of the arts, especially – apart from literature – of music; and joie de vivre. he had enormous love of learning and of life. we first met when he visited the university of western australia but i already knew his name, and as an australianist who sometimes ventured into postcolonial studies i knew some of his work. during a period of high theory which seemed to distance literature and even language itself from experience, geoff davis’s writing firmly placed literature in the midst of people’s lives and implicitly saw elements of common humanity, whether they lived in south india or south africa. his work was writing, not “discourse”. geoff’s visit resulted in an agreement between the arts faculty at the university of western australia and rwth-aachen, partly because he knew alexandra ludewig, who came from aachen and taught german studies at uwa. this led to my coming to aachen as a visiting scholar in 2000; i taught an australian literature course at rwth to bright, interested students, a little surreptitiously since i was simultaneously supposed to be on a by-fellowship at cambridge university. for this reason the semester-length course was compressed into six weeks; it seems totally in character for geoff to be helping an mailto:dennis.haskell@uwa.edu.au coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 australian to subvert cambridge’s official rules. six weeks seems a short time but it was memorable for my wife and me, partly because of the ongoing friendship we formed with geoff and with peter marsden. geoff and ingrid had married not long before, and it was a very happy time for him. he showed us wedding photos, and sometime later offered words to the effect of “i don’t know why she’s interested in an old bloke like me!” it’s a question ingrid could readily answer but it showed his customary self-deprecation. amongst memories of that time is a rushed trip one evening to köln (cologne) for dinner and a concert by the orchestra of the age of enlightenment, conducted by simon rattle. we drove to a station, then caught our train; i can’t remember what station we drove to but the freeway was crowded, professor davis hadn’t allowed enough time, and dressed in our best gear we had to run furiously for the train. geoff bought the concert and train tickets and wouldn’t take any money for them, the concert hall was rounded in beautiful timber, and the concert was superb. looking back, all these details seem inevitable, since they fit so well with geoff’s indomitable character. he also drove us to antwerp one sunday; as we crossed the german-belgian border, its guard stations now crumbling and becoming overgrown with grass, geoff commented, “it shows you how useless and unnecessary they were in the first place!” he had a spirited interest in politics and a lively distrust of authority. as we walked into antwerp we passed a large window which held two slightly overweight, scantily clad ladies; geoff, actually a touch embarrassed, remarked, “that’s what you get in european cities these days”. he had great a regard for human dignity. i still have a photo of geoff scanning the map of antwerp with my wife laughing at him, and he laughing at himself, as we wandered around the city, trying to find the car and lost! but he eventually found the way – ingrid tells me that he was a boy scout. in some ways he always was. i made a trip back to aachen in 2012 and stayed with geoff while ingrid was away. i slept on a mattress put down in his stupendous study – books and papers everywhere, but geoff had a scruffy control of them. among other subjects, we talked about the beatles; he had grown up near liverpool and i was envious that he had seen them in their early, legendary days at the cavern. he told me that the management didn’t like the way couples stopped dancing and just stood and listened when the beatles played – they were that good. he commented memorably that younger people knew the beatles’ music but, unlike our generation, they “didn’t have it in the blood!” it was only at this time that i learnt he had been adopted; he’d had a happy childhood and, interestingly, held no inclination to look for his biological family. when invited to contribute to geoff’s festschrift i felt the same impulse for personalisation i feel now. i wrote a poem rather than an article – which says as much about him as about me. the poem is reprinted here, in its comical, ridiculously rhyming couplets. it also says a lot about geoff davis that i knew he would be delighted by my making fun of him. later, others told me that he loved the ending, about “the greatest empire, the empire of friends”. (i hasten to mention that the lawnmower museum and the natterjack toad in his home town are real!) coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 in 2014 i was invited to the eaclals conference in innsbruck, and had another chance to read the poem publicly in geoff’s presence. although we lived many kilometres apart, it would be hard to think of a more generous, more genuine friend. i think he would appreciate that i’m writing this in a café in kaohsiung, taiwan – it seems appropriate for such an internationalist. now that i have entered a senior age myself, with friends and contemporaries dying around me, i have this curious feeling that friendship never ends. geoff’s friendship has not ended for me, even if he is no longer on this earth, and i suspect that many contributors to coolabah feel exactly the same way. a tale of two cities (for geoff davis) i wrote those words, gave a short shriek and cursed: some pommy bastard had pinched my title first! but since it sets down just what i have to say i think i’ll use the damned thing anyway for although many a pommy bastard may be miffed it won’t bother the subject of this festschrift, who first faced life in sandy southport: southport, it’s in the north of course, a sort of directional confusion, a sandbank of delusion to you and me, fed by the fervour of the irish sea, a town over which sand, like boredom, flowed, home of the lawnmower museum and natterjack toad, but so near liverpool, with people who thought fit that the city turn out another mock-scouse git where sea and sky unite in a grey more ugly than the grit guffing the soul of every liverpudlian, but not our geoff’s. every tide must have its turn and in his youth every youthful eye would yearn to be where sea shanty and skiffle riffed on dixies brought in the frank and frisky, frenzied sixties when the hip got high and sexy, and their parents apoplexy to the pulse of cilla black, merseybeats, the undertakers – the cavern would have ‘em, plus gerry’s odd pacemakers – and every young mouth could shout the lingo of john and george and paul and ringo. even now many think that’s what liverpool gave us but what it really gave us, god save us, was davis! with rocking sounds below and endless drizzle above he might be the walrus but money can’t buy me love; by these shores our hero might long have lingered coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 but it’s not every city has an ingrid. so he danced into deutschland, almost by chance – i think he mistook it for the south of france; despite his earnest search for eminent champagne he washed into the beery city of charlemagne where for centuries people had argued like hell whether they were in farkin’ aachen or aix-la-chapelle. great karl came here for a spa, and refused the warpath, geoff was keener on a bar, but i say on his behalf even an englishman eventually needs a bath! perhaps he thought he’d enjoy an inky saturnalia at the technische hochschule of rheinish westphalia to which ardent students came, to learn, to love, to laugh; geoff just sort of wandered in, and joined the staff and from a pile of papers and mess unceremonial he wrote and spoke and spoke and wrote of literature postcolonial. nothing dodged his radar: the praise poem, the novel petit bourgeois, a brouhaha in zanzibar or the cha cha cha in chandigargh: that scholarship and editorship indefatigable educed a worldwide german english wisdom enigmatical. “geoffrey” – means god’s peace, but so does nigh on every name, yet in your chaos and your zest there’s something few can claim: a generosity and lack of ego in everything you do so we see you centred in an empire charlemagne never knew; for the absurd jibes above, our each word to you extends the heart of the greatest empire, the empire of friends. bionote: dennis haskell has published 8 collections of poetry, most recently ahead of us (fremantle press, 2016) and what are you doing here? (university of the philippines press, 2015) plus 14 volumes of literary scholarship and criticism. he is the recipient of the western australia premier’s prize for poetry, the a a phillips prize for a distinguished contribution to australian literature, and of an honorary doctorate of letters from the university of western australia. in 2015 he became a member of the order of australia for “services to literature, particularly poetry, to education and to intercultural understanding”. his website is dennishaskell.com.au coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 living on the borders of belonging: an editorial note cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu copyright©2017 cornelis martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. this post-congress coolabah issue entitled “on the borders of belonging” offers seven papers developed from presentations at the go between in between congress, held at the university of barcelona 18-22 january 2016. they offer different perspectives on identity formation but all deal with the potentialities and pitfalls, the enrichment and impoverishment, the empowerment and disempowerment that may flow from identitarian in-between positions, an area of inter and crossculturality homi bhabha famously coined “the third space” in “the manifesto” (wasafiri 29, spring 1999: 38–40). located between the known and the unknown, the homely and the unhomely, the national and the foreign, the self and the other, this culturally fluid, mixed, hybrid discursive space is the zone where more and more human beings, perhaps willy-nilly, find themselves in these times of globalisation. in western societies, most of us have turned into cosmopolitans, or weltbürger to stick to the kantian term: citizens of the world, free to use our resources to travel abroad and imbibe gratifying experiences, presumably open to cultural difference. yet, globalization and cosmopolitanism also appear to favour those that already have over those who have not. the global spread of capitalism and its increasingly free circulation of capital is not necessarily accompanied by an equally free flux of labour, curtailing access to vital resources to large populations. as nation–states fail to control multinational capital, they can and do often impose restrictions on processes of migration; this is especially the case with political and economic refugees, who cannot return to their countries of origin but depend for their present and mailto:mrenes@ub.edu coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 future well-being on the world’s wealthier nations’ adherence to the universal declaration of human rights passed by the united nations in 1948, precisely in the wake of the genocidal horrors of wwii. in the face of increasing economic insecurity at the western home front, immigrants and refugees are often perceived as unfairly feeding on jobs, resources, services and rights available to local citizens. weltbürgerschaft only reaches so far, and where the cultural other comes to close for comfort, where the comfort zone threatens to disappear between self and other, where the distant tourist view is confronted with itself, nationalism may raise its head again to defend local interests, perceived as inalienable. great britain of the 1980s was a precursor of the xenophobe ghosts that have been haunting the old continent over the past two decades: pm maggie thatcher’s ultraliberal economic policy delivered the country to the mercy of multinational capital. yet, this opening up to free trade was corresponded by a much tighter and stricter definition of national identity, which was felt to be endangered in the face of diminished economic control, and whose impact on migratory movement was serious. it is not difficult to see that britain’s current brexit zeal responds to similar spectres in the european continent at large; neither that the united states’ president elect donald trump is immersed in, and conditioned by a similar set of regressive racial politics, ordering a wall to be built on the mexican border and american territory to be closed off for muslims. and as scholars of australian studies, let us not forget the barely-hidden racism of the howard years in australia, which laid the ground for ex-pm tony abbott’s border policies based on offshore retention in nauru and christmas island, continued as part of the current pm malcolm turnbull’s conservative agenda. in one way or another, the seven essays presented in this coolabah issue have connections to the themes raised in the lines above and interconnect in various ways. yasue arimitsu’s essay elaborates on the postcolonial links between the australian writer richard flanagan’s awarded novel the narrow road to the deep north and its japanese namesake oku no hosomichi, the masterwork by the 17th c. japanese poet and travel writer of the edo period matsuo basho. flanagan’s investigation and reimagination of his father’s sufferings as a prisoner of war in japanese captivity on the burma/death railway develops into a critical assessment of the cruel behaviour of the japanese officials in charge of the western pows. arimitsu places flanagan’s text within a reversed postcolonial framework which puts the asian in the place of the colonizer, which at the same time allows her to profile the coloniser as a victim as well as victimiser within the self-same colonial logic. arimitsu argues that, as the japanese code of honour traditionally places service to the emperor at the centre of life, an understanding of the absolute obedience, sacrifice and hence suffering this cult requires paves the way for a process of mutual understanding and acceptance between the east and the west. if flanagan’s intentions are indeed of breaking open this taboo area of war crime and creating a space of communication and healing between both former enemies, then his novel may be seen to occupy an illuminating cultural in-between location. intercultural incomprehensibility also forms the backbone of linda brinkman and susie latham’s essay, which provides an overview of australian-muslim relations over the years, and the way these have evolved into islamophobia on the part of the australian mainstream ever since the twin coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 tower attack in 2001 and the subsequent fear of local ‘terrorist’ acts by islamic perpetrators. brinkman and latham delve deep into the border patrol history of australia ever since its founding as a british convict colony, and lay out the conditions that inspired invigilation of the fearsome conceptual, emotional and geographical border zones on white australia’s inner and outer perimeters of identity, affected by the proximity and enduring dark presence of its indigenous nations and the asian continent as well as by its physical marginality to europe and north america. according to brinkman and latham, the current height of islamophobia in australia follows on to the older perceptions of black and yellow peril, and is nothing but the latest manifestation of a lobby as old as post/colonial australia itself: one that secures white privilege over other ethnic groups’ rights of access to common resources, and that fears to lose such advantage. brinkman and latham claim a productive space of intercultural acceptance and coexistence can only be created by laying bare the hidden interests of those media and lobbies that advocate islamophobia in the first place, which is a conclusion we should bear in mind in contemplating contemporary europe’s treatment of immigration as well. the ongoing discursive effects of the colonialist white australia policy are at stake in thor kerr and shaphan cox’s essay, which looks at australia’s indigenous underbelly analysing the media portrayal of aboriginal solidarity gatherings on an urban heritage site for which native title was claimed and granted. in uncovering the subtle changes in media discourse centring on the heirisson island aboriginal presence in perth 2012 and 2015, kerr and cox show how the adverse mainstream reactions towards the aboriginal presence on this officially recognised indigenous site is steeped in fear of proximity and too close for comfort. yet, after initial rejection and calls for eviction and the imposition of the law, some media started to frame the aboriginal gatherings within a discourse of tolerance, foregrounding that people gathered round fires which offered a sense of home and safety, while a discourse on aboriginality as a non-urban phenomenon, at a safe distance from spaces perceived as white was maintained. kerr and shapan’s analysis reveals that, at bottom, the intercultural meaning of a gathering around fire as a temporary shelter for all to share could muster up a sense of mainstream solidarity only to reinstate the premise that oncetribal land now be considered urban and therefore white. julieta mallari’s essay on the ayta, a group of indigenous people displaced from their natural habitat in the philippino highlands to the urban lowlands by the 1991 eruption of mt pinatubo, takes another take on indigeneity and national belonging—not from the point of land recovery but highlighting university training to counter the disenfranchisement contemporary aytas are confronted with, and how this affects their identity. mallari’s essay is another case study that delves into the often vexed relationship between first nations and settlers, laying bare the depth to which colonial discourse perpetuates itself into postcolonial contemporaneity. as mallari’s set of interviews with selected and funded university candidates shows, positive training results often run up against engrained philippino mainstream racism and the aytas’ assimilation of mainstream values regarding behavior, aspirations and looks. mallari concludes that university education has certainly boosted the aytas’ self-esteem, improved their chances of employment and raised their standard of living; yet, her study also reveals that this process implies what homi bhabha has termed a “struggle of identification” sparked off by a strong, often traumatic loss of cultural identity, so that the critical issue remains where these well-trained aytas belong. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 cynthia lytle’s essay draws on judith butler and athena athanasiou’s conceptualisation of disenfranchisement and dispossession by showing how white sovereignty is maintained in western society through acts of “dehumanization, disposability and death” of targeted ethnic minorities. this enables her to draw a parallel between the events surrounding the recent ‘black lives matter’ movement in her homeland, the united states, and the refugee crisis in her host continent, europe. despite the vast differences in both focus groups, lytle discerns a common agenda in the underlying “necropolitics” and “necropower” exerted by the state apparatus which are given wider traction by active media support: both the oppression of the afro-american underclasses and the barring of poor, displaced, disenfranchised migrant and refugee flows from europe share the political objective of keeping american and european territory white. ultimately, lytle’s argument is we can only rehumanise the populations discarded by white sovereignty by recovering their silenced voices, incorporating their personal histories from the identitarian borderlands where they have been made to dwell as part of a diverse national history. paula horta’s essay on the practice of ubuntu also chimes in with the need for recovering subaltern voices. she takes her cue from the south-african truth and reconciliation commission, which was proposed by the country’s first black president in democracy, nelson mandela, and directed by the black religious leader bisshop desmond tutu after the apartheid regime had come to an end in 1994. the commission, in which victimisers and victims of the apartheid regime were heard in public hearings without punitive intent, made an essential contribution to the peaceful cohabitation of formerly segregated classes and peoples beyond the racist violence, damage and trauma of apartheid. the ability to share individual stories, confessions and forgiveness so as to create a sense of community, collective and national identity and belonging took place in the spirit of ubuntu, defined as “a person’s self-realisation and manifestation as a human being” by delivering a personal narrative in which the tellers make themselves vulnerable and open to critique before an ethically responsive audience. ubuntu has subsequently been applied in other postcolonial settings as well, amongst which portugal. referring to some case studies, horta describes the importance of the implantation of the ubuntu philosophy in some educational community projects in disadvantaged areas in and north of lisbon, involving immigrant, refugee and other minority groups, and so highlights how solidarity, engagement and progress can be achieved despite disenfranchising social contexts. inez baranay’s contribution is a creative writer’s reflection and unique voice on the question of national, communal and individual belonging that firmly commits itself to a transcultural location and strongly argues for the benefits of our constant going and being in between identities. baranay’s multicultural biography is testimony to the identitarian fluidity and flexibility she proposes, in which a certain amount of outsiderness is often—and contradictorily—tantamount to the most inclusionary of attitudes. aware of the extent to which our lives have become intercultural and defined by crosscultural contact in these times of globalization, baranay argues for transcultural space as the very place “where the unbelonging can belong”. although my presentation of these essays suggests a certain order of reading, no bias of interpretation is intended, and they have therefore been uploaded alphabetically according to the author’s last name as is habitual in this journal. coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 cornelis martin renes holds a phd in english literature from the university of barcelona and lectures for its department of english and german studies. his main area of interest is the study of film and literature from a postcolonial point of view within the larger framework of cultural and australian studies. he codirects the university of barcelona’s interdisciplinary observatory: australian studies centre, through which he co-edits the journal coolabah, and he is the current chair of the european association for studies of australia, easa. he has also co-convened congresses on australian studies in collaboration with similar centres at southern cross university nsw, curtin university wa, and the university of tasmania, all three in australia: see http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/. http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/ coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 larger than life: a tribute to geoff davis (1943–2018)1 peter marsden peter.h.marsden@gmail.com copyright© 2020 peter marsden. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a celebration of the life of geoff davis with special emphasis on the many activities he pursued and his indefatigable energy keywords: geoff davis, energy, versatility it’s time to honour someone who throughout his professional life was pivotally instrumental in establishing, forming and consolidating postcolonial studies in germany and beyond. i feel honoured to have been entrusted with this daunting task and am hoping that in performing it, i’ll be able to tap into just a bit of that huge and apparently endless supply of positive energy that was one of geoff davis’s many exceptional characteristics. i would like to start by picking out just one of the multitudinous and multifarious lifetime achievements of our honoree that owed their existence at least in part to that enormous energy, namely the rodopi/brill “cross/cultures” series we are all familiar with and that has provided the soundtrack for the way our field has evolved over the last three decades. this venture was originally co-founded more than thirty years ago by geoff together with his colleagues hena maes-jelinek (liège) and gordon collier (giessen). visionary though the intrepid trio were, i don’t think even they imagined at the time that this series was ultimately going to run to more than 200 volumes – a tangible reflection of the individual stamp geoff put on the world. look on his works, ye mighty – and admire! geoff, editor extraordinaire. my aim in this tribute is not so much to mourn the death of a great friend and a great man as to celebrate his life. what follows will be more a eulogy than an elegy. already a legend in his own lifetime, geoff davis was a man of many lifetime achievements. when i first met him nearly fifty years ago in england (yes, the temporal dimensions are geological), he had already been living and working in aachen for four years. little did i realise that i was going to end up as boswell to his johnson (not boris, samuel!) when i last saw him – in aachen – he was his usual cheerful, ebullient self. despite having been mailto:peter.h.marsden@gmail.com coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 retired for over a decade, he was as busy as ever, bursting with projects and full of travel plans…einfach unkaputtbar. geoff, the indestructible. geoff davis played many roles in his life but geoff as retiree was one he manifestly didn’t intend to play. even just thinking of this purely nominal pensioner’s punishing programme of work and travel was enough to make lesser mortals balk and blanch. geoff’s motto was clearly: more of the same. when asked by concerned colleagues how he managed to do all the things he did and how much longer he was intending to keep on doing them, he would respond: “what else should i do?” the german notion: unruhestand comes to mind – a popular, jocular antonym to the standard term for retirement: ruhestand (literally: a state of repose). shakespeare’s jacques almost got it right. one man in his time does indeed play many parts. true enough. but the man whose life we are celebrating tonight played far more parts than the average. and unlike the average man, he didn‘t gradually decline into dotage; no slippered pantaloon he. much less did his voice revert to childish treble, pipes and whistles nor did he ever reach the final stage of second childishness and mere oblivion. no, geoff went from strength to strength. chugging to and fro from chotro to chotro, from chair to chair, with the odd chogm chucked in along the way, geoff continued with a workload that would tire out many a full-time worker and kindle work-weary thoughts in them of burn-out. burn-out?! geoff and burn-out? more like burn-on. burn on, baby – burn on! geoff, the inextinguishable; geoff, the inexhaustible. one of those many parts geoff played was that of “mr commonwealth” – sharply focused on his own very uncommon wealth of interests, commitment and involvement, publications etc. latterly (well into his retirement) he was really mixing with the mighty, the great and the good of the commonwealth. at some point he met the queen and subsequently appeared to have been sent on some sort of high-powered top-secret mission to zimbabwe with a royal remit to investigate what was happening to cultural life there on behalf of the commonwealth high command, about which he told us mysteriously and suspiciously little, making us wonder whether he was perhaps not allowed to divulge anything to anyone. not even me! he must have been sworn to secrecy because just for once he was very tight-lipped about what exactly he was doing… it did seem fitting that his last role should have been that of special agent ohmss – code name: 009? another role was geoff, the ideas man. but geoff wouldn’t have been geoff if he had been purely an ideas man. he was at the same time geoff, the implementation-of-ideas man. the one who put ideas into practice, set them in motion, got things done. he had the ideas, then found the colleagues and friends to implement and realise them together with him – be they joint classes or departmental lecture series in which as many members of staff as possible could be persuaded to give their take on a given theme. (whilst some members of staff could be pretty reluctant, geoff could be extremely persuasive). not to mention books edited by him, with articles by various hands; workshops; conferences (the bigger the better – preferably in conjunction with some other association; wherever possible what he liked to call, with not all that much hyperbole, a “three-ring circus”); coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 books series – you name it. well, he usually named it, actually…he was the ideas man, after all. geoff, the organisation-of-conferences man. later on, geoff, the experienced consultant (for a whole generation of younger colleagues following in his footsteps in organising conferences etc. themselves). geoff, the éminence grise. in a word (several words, actually): geoff, the facilitator; geoff, the enabler and encourager, geoff, the mover and shaker. not forgetting geoff, the networker supreme (avant la lettre), geoff, the teamteacher, geoff, the collaborator. geoff, the project manager. he dreamed up countless joint projects with colleagues and students, involving and encouraging them to provide their own input. but at bottom, he was the instigator, the driving force, the energiser. the visionary who made sure the dream came true. then there was geoff, the time manager. how on earth did he manage to read all those books – in all those literatures and genres? to edit all those articles, papers, journals and books? to watch all those films (or “movies”, as in a rare departure from his predilection for british english he preferred to call them)? to go to all those plays? to attend all those concerts? to see all those exhibitions? to visit all those countries? to bone up on the latest cultural and political developments in all those countries? to catch up on the latest gossip…? just how did he do it? sure, he was always “writing against the clock,” as he liked to put it. but – miraculously – despite taking time to tell you that he was, once again, writing against the clock – he usually made it. he usually ended up beating the clock and delivering the paper. and he hardly ever appeared stressed or driven. yet he wasn’t one of those enviable people who could get by on four hour’s sleep a night. and whenever you just happened to bump into him somewhere, he would always have time for a drink and a natter. he lived the good life. he loved the other good things in life – quite apart from literature. no ivory-tower-dweller, he. where did he get his legendarially boundless – almost superhuman – energy from? the question, it seems, must remain purely rhetorical. i, like many others, have so far found no answer to it. the same goes for his infectious enthusiasm – or rather enthusiasms. geoff, the ultimate enthusiast. he liked to say that one of the best pieces of advice his mother used to give him was: “don’t lose your enthusiasm!” as if he needed to be told! in a guardian review of george steiner‘s magisterial opus on translation after babel (1975), idris parry, professor of german literature at the university of manchester, asked, rhetorically: “how can one man have read and absorbed so much?” had professor parry ever come across my esteemed colleague, he might well have repeated his question – but he would have had to expand it to include: “written, edited...and interacted” – with so many people, had such a huge worldwide network of fellow-scholars and fellow– enthusiasts, for the generating of whose enthusiasm he was often personally responsible. just take a look at the man’s cv – if you have an evening to spare. for once the cliché is justified: his publications really were too numerous to mention. i once planned to mark the 50th anniversary of geoff’s historic arrival in aachen by putting on an event inspired coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 by the dublin bloomsday read-in of ulysses. over the full twenty-four hours of “davisday”, the titles of his complete works would have been recited on the steps of aachen town hall. parallel to this readathon i was going to curate an exhaustive exhibition (retrospective and prospective) of his personal tee-shirt collection in aachen’s ludwig forum for international art, as a warm-up for the definitive show in the v & a. geoff just had to be the ultimate seen-the-movie-got-the-poster-bought-and-worn-thetee-shirt man. geoff davis wore his heart on his tee-shirt. unfortunately, the first of these projects was stymied by some medieval municipal bye-law dating back to charlemagne. (the second project also came to naught – because the museum needed the space for the kylie minogue exhibition.) to return briefly to geoff’s capacity for enthusiasm. it included his apparent ability to invariably be the first to hear about – and purchase – and have personally signed by the author – the latest book or books. not to mention publishing the latest paper and editing the latest collection of essays. but the one book he himself only got to see after the whole world knew of its existence was his festschrift, being at the receiving end of a festschrift is sufficient distinction in itself, but not many recipients get to get a two-volume festchrift (two whole books – more like an uberfestschrift, as it were) with a total of some 800 pages and more than sixty contributions by friends and colleagues. hardly surprising, though, considering not only geoff’s very high profile in his chosen field and the great esteem in which he was held within that field. or rather, his chosen fields. geoff, the festschriftee par excellence. where other, equally industrious and brilliant, scholars spend an academic life-time delving into the culture of one field – australian or indian or south african – or german studies [sic!], geoff managed to do x and y and z with thoroughness and insight, always backed up by first-hand and highly up-to-date background knowledge, and still keep up with developments in all these individual specialisms. in short, a phenomenon. not a generalist – a hyper-specialist. geoff, the true all-rounder. and despite the enormous breadth of these disparate activities, their yield was never ephemeral. on the contrary, it seemed to be infinitely accretive. geoff seemed to have almost total recall of everything he had read and seen and done. the sheer size and scope of that festschrift reflects the enormous impact he had on all of those fields and more. it’s an appropriate testimony to an awe-inspiring achievement. geoff, the new renaissance man. world literature? geoff was onto – and into – this field long before the term was conceived of, let alone coined. this “roving scholar,” as frank schulze-engler (2018) has so aptly dubbed him, spanned the globe. how that globe is going to miss one of its most intrepid serial master-trotters! how inadequate the concept of “frequent flyer” seems when applied to this continent-hopper, ocean-collector! the understatement of the century. a man who needed the quadruple extra-large (xxxxl) 48-page version of a british passport (referred to even officially as a “jumbo” passport) – to provide sufficient space to accommodate multiple rubber stamps from all the many countries he visited. constantly on the move, restlessly exploring the world, unstoppable. he himself liked to attribute this innate wanderlust to having been brought up in the vicinity of the thriving port of liverpool, with all its daily bustle of ships from all over the world coming and coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 going, plying their way across the oceans. yes, the man certainly made his mark way beyond merseyside – on both the academic and the wider world. permit me to intercalate a couple of anecdotes as i work towards my peroration. the first illustrates the personal touch, which geoff had – and he had it in spades. the scene is the first aachen conference organised by geoff (with the assistance of a team of dedicated student helpers), which took place in 1988 (a year before asnel/gnel – the predecessor of gaps – was founded). the conference theme was: “crisis and conflict in the new english literatures”. in the words of one observer: “am liebsten hätte er jeden gast einzeln am bahnhof abgeholt und dort schon willkommen geheißen.” [if he’d had his way, he would have gone to greet every single guest as they arrived at aachen main station.] he even drove to the (pre-schengen) german–belgian border in person to ensure that one of his international guests was granted free passage. his guest – one edward kamau brathwaite – reciprocated by presenting his host with a poem entitled “aachen”, which kicked off by darkly prophesying the death of “the empire”… that was all shortly before the actual conference opened. appropriately enough for such an historic event, the official opening took place in the historic aula carolina. had the wow factor already been invented at that time, it would have been huge – all these people from all over the world turning up, joining the very long queue of guests, each personally greeting their host: “hi, geoff!” …“hi, geoff!…“hi, geoff!” ad infinitum. as a somewhat staid senior colleague – one of many in our department who hadn’t yet been bitten by the poco bug – noted with a mixture of faint disapproval and envy in his voice: “auch solche aus südlichen gefilden!” [there were even some people from sunnier climes!] by aachen standards, that conference certainly was a mega-event. it attracted 300 participants from 35 countries. a couple of days after the three hundred had dispersed, the local paper reported that the world-famous aachen university clinic had just staged a symposium on behalf of the deutsche gesellschaft für urologie [the german association of urologists] with a total of over one hundred participants from nine countries. peanuts! what a personal triumph for geoff! my second anecdote could be headed “cross-cultural qualifications”. after geoff had been “allowed” to teach for a couple of years in aachen, he was informed somewhat abruptly and brusquely that having no more than a ba he was under-qualified for the job. the degree he had was declared by the university admin. to be “kein gültiger studienabschluss” [not a valid final examination] equivalent merely to the zwischenprüfung [intermediate examination] at most. well, mies van der rohe, no less, was once rejected as a candidate for an honorary doctorate in his native aachen – on the grounds that despite his massive international renown he unfortunately failed to fulfil the formal requirement of having an abiturzeugnis [a-levels], the usual prerequisite for admission to a german university. how times change – even in the academic world. geoff, who at the time fumed furiously at the implication that an oxford degree was being deemed by the rheinisch-westfälische technische hochschule aachen [aachen university of technology] to be worth virtually nothing, later enjoyed the irony and the belated satisfaction of the ba (with the full status of a first university degree) actually being established all of a sudden in a big way at german universities in the wake of the bologna accords. in a further ironic development three decades later, the supposedly unqualified lektor ultimately went on to achieve the ultimate abschluss [final exam], the highest academic accolade germany has to offer, viz. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 habilitation [second, or higher doctorate; or post-doctoral qualification]. a measure of how dramatically things had changed within his lifetime. i’m going to conclude with a shaggy-dog story. it revolves around a man called robinson, a member of a london club, where he has made a name for himself as a supreme dropper of names, claiming that he regularly receives personal invitations from vips all over the world to go and visit them. in the first two cases – winston churchill and president eisenhower (it’s a very old joke!) – his fellow-members were prepared to simply believe him, and to be suitably impressed. but when robinson announced that he had been invited to the vatican, they decided that this time they wanted to see for themselves. they wanted ocular proof. on the due date, they all travelled to rome and duly assembled on an even more than usually crowded st peter‘s square. necks were craning, the suspense was building. then suddenly right across the square, on the papal balcony way up high on the opposite side, two tiny figures emerged. spotting a pair of carabinieri standing conveniently close by, one of the group asked them, pointing to the distant balcony: “excuse me, officer. is that his holiness up there?” slowly removing his sunglasses and peering into the distance, the policeman shrugged his shoulders, replying somewhat hesitantly: “i don’t know, signore. but the man on the left, he is robinson!” for robinson, read davis. geoff davis was a giant of our field. liverpudlian, oxonian, weltbürger [citizen of the world], he bestrode our poco world like a colossus. here’s to his memory. endnote 1. this text is a speech delivered on may 31st 2019 in bremen, at the annual gaps conference. works cited schulze-engler, frank, “in memory of a roving scholar: geoff davis (1943– 2018).”acolit. newsletter der gesellschaft für anglophone postkoloniale studien 75 (2018): 2–3. bionote: born in the uk, peter marsden read modern languages, with a special emphasis on german language and literature, at the universities of oxford, london and manchester. relocating to germany, he spent most of his working life as a lecturer in the english department at aachen university of technology – a post from which he retired in 2007. his research interests encompass linguistics (varieties of english, bilingualism, translation studies) as well as literature, with a particular focus on australian, new zealand and irish poetry. he has published on the oral tradition in aboriginal and maori writing as well as on individual authors including peter bland, peter goldsworthy, les murray, robert sullivan and hone tuwhare. a long-term project on literary relations between germany and new zealand continues to be ongoing and open-ended. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 a marvelous man gareth griffiths gareth.griffiths@uwa.edu.au copyright© 2020 gareth griffiths. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: an account of geoff davis’s enormous contribution to african studies keywords: geoff davis, african studies, matatu, african theatre i have been asked to speak about geoff davis's contribution to african studies. you will forgive me if before speaking of that i speak briefly as i am sure others will have done about geoff, the friend i knew and loved. as is so often the case with your oldest friends and as you yourself age i cannot recall when i first met geoff or even where. he seems always to have been there, at conferences and in recent years on visits to australia when he or sometimes he and his beloved ingrid stayed with us. that was where i last saw him. but before that we met in south africa where we were both at the aclals conference in stellenbosch. before that conference my wife and i travelled together with geoff and ingrid, ben and judy lindfors and russ mcdougall through south africa for a month, from kwazulu-natal through grahamstown and through the eastern and western cape. four weeks in a small people mover. no tougher test of friendship and a test that geoff passed with flying colours. he was the warmest and most engaging travelling companion anyone could have desired. geoff and i were of an age, both born in 1943 a stone's throw apart, he in birmingham and i in south wales. geoff was brought up in liverpool and he often used to say that with the surname davis and brought up in what is often thought of as the capital of north wales he was an honorary welshman. anyone who remembers geoff's lovely liverpudlian lilt, which he retained even when speaking german, will have a chuckle at that. he was my friend and i mourn his passing too early. but to his role in african studies. from virtually its foundation in 1957 until 1999 geoff was a mainstay and co-editor of what remains one of the most important periodicals in african studies, "matatu: journal for african culture and society". geoff's co-edited 1988 book "towards liberation: culture and resistance in south africa” was published as a special issue of that journal. but in the more than 30 volumes of the journal in which geoff was involved a truly unrivalled body of work on africa was charted under his mailto:gareth.griffiths@uwa.edu.au coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 guidance. when you add in the fact that he was also co-editing the amazing crosscultures series during much of this time one is amazed at his energy and his work ethic. only the passion of true commitment can explain it. in addition to this amazing editorial work, geoff wrote, edited and co-edited some 20 books. of these 9 were on aspects of african literature and culture. despite this i remember geoff and i agreeing that we neither liked the term africanist, geoff commenting that it was akin to those early anthropologists who seemed patronizingly to co-opt those they studied as in the titles "my people of..." etc. for geoff his commitment to southern african studies was part of his broader engagement with the role of culture and literature in the self-realization and liberation of people everywhere who had suffered discrimination and dispossession. from 1983 when he co-authored the aptly entitled book "south africa: the privileged and the dispossessed" until the 2003 book "voices of justice and reason. apartheid and beyond in south african literature" geoff maintained a passionate scrutiny of the changes and developments in southern africa. two other main strands of geoff's work on southern africa deserve mention. the first was his keen interest in theatre both as academic critic and as passionate audience member. i can still recall the wonderful time we had seeing plays together at the festival in grahamstown during our last african trip. the 1996 book "theatre and change in south africa" charted the way south african drama has moved through and beyond the oppositional model of the apartheid era into an exploration of the complex issues posed in the period since its overthrow. in 1997 the collection of the plays of the artist and playwright matsemela manaka, edited by manaka and by geoff displays this project too as its title "beyond the echoes of soweto" suggests. it reflects the work of manaka from its start in the 1976 soweto rising to the post-apartheid period and chronicles the shifts that occurred during the lifetime of this remarkable south african playwright. the second main strand of geoff's african work is the amazing and exhaustive work he did as a bibliographer and encyclopaedist as the compiler of the updated volume on south africa in the world bibliographical series that came out in 1994. this monumental task occupied geoff for several years and involved scrutinizing and evaluating almost 2000 volumes. as geoff, with characteristic modesty, said to me at the time, "somebody's got to do it." the last of his books on africa in 2006 was the co-edited volume on the work of the nigerian poet and biographer ezenwa-ohaete. this was the first full-length study of this important nigerian poet and was designed as a tribute to him as he had died of liver cancer the year before. as always geoff was generous with his tribute to those he admired and it is marvellous that we can do a little in the same way for him here today. can you hear him? i can. throwing his head back in that wonderful guffaw of a laugh and saying as he always did when appreciating something: "marvelous! marvelous!" that sums up what we think of you and your life geoff. "marvelous! marvelous" coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 bionote: gareth griffiths is an emeritus professor at the university of western australia. he has written extensively on postcolonial literature and theory with an emphasis on african literatures coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 geoffrey davis: interactions with australia, its literature and its culture ‘the intoxicated octopus and the garlic-kissed prawn’: geoffrey davis in canada laura moss laura.moss@ubc.ca copyright© 2020 laura moss. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a celebration of geoffrey davis’s work in canadian literature and his great organizational skills keywords: geoffrey davis, canadian literature, consummate organizer i have a confession to make. although i am here representing geoffrey davis’s influence on canadian literature, i have been more influenced by his work on south african drama than anything else. theatre and change in south africa and voices of justice and reason: apartheid and beyond in south african literature are hugely important books in my library. and he wins for the best article title of all time: “the intoxicated octopus and the garlic-kissed prawn: on south african bibliography.” i borrow it here in his honour. that said, what i want to highlight today is the beautiful way that geoffrey’s work has opened countless conversations across space, geography, and time, and that includes both south africa and canada. in his introduction to crisis and creativity in the new literatures in english canada, a collection of essays drawn from the 1988 xi annual conference on commonwealth literature and language studies in german-speaking countries, geoffrey davis writes with nothing short of glee about the good fortune the conference organizers had in locating the conference in aachen, at the borders of belgium, germany, and holland so events could be spread between aachen and liege. effervescently, he continues, “having decided to mount the occasion in two countries, we discovered that this reckless undertaking apparently entitled us to partake of the generosity of two canadian embassies!” (xii). this introduction highlights what i know of geoffrey davis—he was mailto:laura.moss@ubc.ca coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 a consummate organizer who took full advantage of the vicissitudes of place and of public funding alike to bring disparate people and ideas together and he seemed to do so with immense joy. i know that good fortune in conference organization is only good fortune if people work really hard to make it so. i admire that. looking back at geoffrey davis’s career in world literature/ commonwealth literature/ and postcolonial studies, i marvel at the way he endeavoured to bring people and ideas together—across borders, cultures, disciplines, languages, and genres. his work was at the forefront of transnational studies long before the term transnational came into vogue. he looked at points of interference, entanglement, and interaction, between knowledges and histories. as an editor, organizer, and collaborator, he had an extraordinary impact on the development of a number of different fields, often because he placed them in conversation with each other. at the aachen/ liege conference in 1988, he notes that he collected “the insights and interest european scholars have to bring to canadian literature but also something of the intellectual stimulation and the sheer pleasure that canadian writers and scholars continue to offer us in europe” (xii). such structural reciprocity is rare. it is also where geoffrey excelled. and it is so incredibly valuable. as a postcolonial comparativist, one of geoffrey davis’s key contributions to canadian letters was the very act of taking canlit seriously in conversation with other anglophone literature from around the world. doing this in the 1980s and 90s was instrumental in thinking about canada’s history as a settler-invader colony and about systems of displacement and violence, as well a way to highlight voices of resistance and abrogation. such comparative conversations happened at the gatherings he helped organize. they also happened in his research on a wide range of topics. steadfast advocate of comparisons within a well-historicized framework, one of his final articles considered patricia grace’s tu from aotearoa/ new zealand and joseph boyden’s three day road from canada and recovered voices of war. comparative conversations also seem to have happened in his supervision of a number of graduate theses on a range of canonical and less canonical subjects in canadian literature, among dozens of other locations. he steered theses on an eclectic mix of the old and the new—including some on the works of margaret laurence and timothy findley, on immigration and multiculturalism, and even on anne of green gables. i love imaging geoffrey davis talking to german students about the red-haired orphan from prince edward island. i first met geoffrey davis in 2005 at the german conference on new literatures. i remember two things about that conference in kiel. 1) first, i gave a keynote on antjie krog’s country of my skull. seconds before i was to speak, the organizer who had invited me to the conference told me that he had been warned that i was pregnant. 2) second, i met geoffrey the day after that address and we talked about krog’s book. while walking around a rose garden, we spoke for ages about south african literature, canadian literature, aclals and caclals, and many other things. at the end of the coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 conference, he pressed several of his books on south african theatre into my hands to take home. this gesture seemed like a natural extension of our conversation. he never once mentioned my large belly. i subsequently met geoffrey on several occasions—in st lucia, in montreal, and in stellenbosch. there were wonderful conversations at each occasion. in an article called “doing the right thing: aclals, social change, and cultural activism” on the role aclals has played in two projects in india and zimbabwe, geoffrey davis wrote: “our function as literary scholars may be seen to have provided us with relevant and usable experience and expertise.… demonstrating how literary studies may be profitably reconciled with social and cultural activism” (4). he continued, “in reconciling our literary scholarship with our social conscience we have been able to make a significant contribution to both enterprises” (18). i think the best tribute to geoffrey davis would be to continue conversations about the productive and meaningful conjunction of social justice and literary work. i think that conversation itself can be a legacy. who speaks? who listens? who benefits? who profits? how do you hear voices of justice and reason? how do you share cross/ cultures? these are the kinds of questions geoffrey davis asked and it is imperative that we continue. works cited davis, geoffrey v. “doing the right thing: aclals, social change, and cultural activism.”vernacular worlds, cosmopolitan imagination, edited by stephanos stephanides and stavros karayanni, rodopi, 2015, pp. 1-20. ---. introduction. crisis and creativity in the new literatures in english: canada, edited by geoffrey davis, rodopi, 1990, pp. ix-xii. bionote: laura moss is professor of canadian and african literatures at the university of british columbia in vancouver, canada. she is the editor of the journal canadian literature: a quarterly of criticism and review and she currently holds the brenda and david mclean chair in canadian studies at ubc. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 honouring geoff davis christa stevens c.stevens@brill.com copyright© 2020 christa stevens. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a brief account of how geoff davis came to found the highly successful cross/cultures series published by rodopi together with hena maes-jelinek and gordon collier. his active participation in the journal matatu is also remembered. keywords: geoff davis, cross/cultures series, matatu i’ve been working with geoff at rodopi’s since 2005, when i became the editor-in-charge of the series cross/cultures and matatu. i was really looking forward to working with the editors of these series, not only because at rodopi’s the editorial meetings at hena maes’ lovely apartment in liège were famous for their lively discussions and lovely lunches. i’ve asked fred van der zee, rodopi’s publisher until our move to brill publishers in leiden, how geoff became a member of the rodopi family. fred remembers that his first contact with geoff started with a publication proposal from him and hena which eventually became the very first cross/cultures volume in 1990 – crisis and creativity in the new literatures in english. at that time, fred was not familiar with this new field of research so he called theo d’haen for advice; and theo assured him that geoff and hena were two excellent and highly reputed scholars and that the field they were working in was new, refreshing and of the highest importance. so fred called geoff, dr davis as he called him at the time, expecting a very reserved englishman on the phone, which obviously was not the case, and he explained to him that he would like to publish the book, but had no series for it, so no backing-up academic board, so would dr davis consider creating such a new series for rodopi, with a board of his choice. geoff promised to think about this. history tells now that when the text was camera-ready and ready to be sent to amsterdam, geoff and gordon collier, who had planned to go by car to an important conference in canterbury, said that they would pass by in amsterdam and hand over the manuscript directly. in amsterdam the three gentleman went for a coffee and a lunch, fred popped the question of the series again, geoff was saying yes nor no, but gordon stated that this would be a great opportunity for all and that they would form the board, together with hena as the authority in the field. and so it happened. mailto:c.stevens@brill.com coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 at the same time, at the end of the eighties, fred met at the frankfurter buchmesse a young man, holger ehling, who told him he had created a journal on african literatures entitled matatu, that six issues had appeared but that he wanted to hand it over to a real publisher. here also geoff played a big role as fred consulted him about this project and later geoff became a member of the board, together with gordon collier. at brill we are publishing this summer volumes 210, 211, 212 of the series cross/cultures, which all still date from geoff’s editorship; matatu, which brill has turned again into a journal, is publishing volume 50, the latest issue including an obituary for geoff. i mention these numbers to show the amount of work that has been done by him and his co-editors in almost thirty years, and to honour and to thank him. we miss him dearly. for me personally, i will continue to miss him at postcolonial conferences, where geoff always joined me at my booth, taking his seat behind the table so that the booth became a meeting point for colleagues and friends. i remember a conference in oviedo where geoff and russell mcdougall had an enthusiastic discussion about all the books they still wanted to write, starting their sentences with “i also want to write a book about” and then numerous subjects were mentioned. this was very inspiring. i also owe to geoff my one and only visit to the metropolitan opera in new york, during the mla convention in 2018. he was sitting somewhere down from my perspective, i had found a seat on the balcony. did you actually know that he was a big opera and classical music lover who was not afraid of bela bartok and the like? it was thanks to this love that on a saturday in 2012, ingrid succeeded in travelling with him to liège supposedly to go to a concert, but in reality to go to a gathering of friends and colleagues who had published a festschrift, in two volumes, in honour of him. one bears the subtitle “a worldly scholar”, a perfect name for him and an example for other, newer generations, as for geoff, working in postcolonialism was not just an academic affair, but a personal and political engagement which enquired a lot of travelling, dealing with people, communicating across borders. but this is also what he loved to do. i’m grateful to have known geoff davis and been part, a little bit, of his worldly scholarly travels. bionote: christa stevens received her phd in french literature from amsterdam university. she has been teaching literature and french at several universities in the netherlands and is working now as an editor of literature and cultural studies at brill, the netherlands. microsoft word 02_on crossing barriers-grau perejoan and collins klobah (1)-2.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 on crossing barriers: contemporary caribbean women poets in translation maria grau perejoan university of the balearic islands loretta collins klobah university of puerto rico copyright©2021 maria grau perejoan and loretta collins klobah. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. as luise von flotow already emphasized more than two decades ago in her work translation and gender: translating in the ‘era of feminism’ (1997), often times feminist translators try to assume the responsibility of offering a critical reflection to their readers about their process, diverse methods and philosophies of translation. from our stance as feminist translators, we offer here a critical reflection on the process of collectively translating the bilingual anthology of poetry the sea needs no ornament/ el mar no necesita ornamento (2020), accompanied by a sample of four poems by four of the thirty-three contemporary caribbean women poets included. in this way, this paper contextualizes and offers a glimpse into the bilingual anthology of contemporary caribbean women poets we have edited and translated from a feminist as well as a postcolonial perspective. we believe that the practice of translation can be transformative only when carried out critically. thus, we hold the social and ethical responsibility of making voices that have been traditionally underrepresented or less critically acclaimed available and resisting homogenizing strategies that erase cultural or linguistic difference. with the more than one hundred translated poems included in our bilingual anthology of contemporary women poets from the english and spanish-speaking insular caribbean (the first to be published in more than two decades), we have sought to contribute to breaking not only linguistic barriers but also the barriers women writers continue to experience. our main objective has been that of favoring and boosting the dialogue – within and beyond the region – between women poets and their readers, separated by geography and language barriers but often impacted by shared global histories and the urgencies of the contemporary moment. the poems speak to women’s experiences in astonishing, gripping, powerful, and radical ways, challenging gender, racial, ethnic, cultural, class, historical, and societal orthodoxies and proscriptions of all sorts. we also chose to include poems on an array of subjects, written in a diversity of moods, tones, and poetic styles so as to suggest the breadth of the poets’ concerns and writerly approaches. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 due to the nature of our anthology, we were not interested in transgressing or rewriting a text aggressively, intentionally creating ruptures and linguistic changes in the source text that illuminate the prejudices based on gender as discussed by von flotow (1991). instead of conducting this type of disruptive translation practices which are intentionally “faithless” to the original texts through “deliberate mistranslation and extension of the source text” (wallmach, 2006, p. 1), we have sought different ways of transferring the transgressions present in the source text into the target language. throughout the process we foregrounded the importance to comprehend and express the multiple forms of feminism that can be found in their poetry and that might differ among them. moreover, our task has not overlooked the complex linguistic context of the multilingual archipelago. focusing on the poetry from the english-speaking caribbean, after having observed that traditionally the use of the different island creoles in literary works has been mostly gone unnoticed or unattended in normative translation practices, we have identified understanding and distinguishing the different island creoles as crucial for our practice. in order to avoid misinterpretations and achieve nuanced verses that reflect the possible ambiguities that the poet might have consciously or unconsciously conveyed in the original, we have resisted the assimilative strategies found in normative translation theory, which, as charles forsdick explains, have been questioned by the postcolonial conceptualization of translation, as they are focused “on a transaction between stable or homogeneous linguistic systems” (2015, p.159). right from the start we identified the collaborative dimension of our translation practice as a feature of feminist translation. as joanna trzeciak huss asserts, literary translation is and has always been intrinsically collaborative (2018, p.389). we are no exception, and as “companion collaborative translators”, we comply with most of the ingredients that trzeciak huss identifies for them to be successful. we have different origins and mother tongues, both our mother tongues are source and target language respectively – since we translate into and from them – and we have strong shared literary and cultural interests (2018, p. 392). in fact, the collective nature of our translations goes beyond the extremely enriching experience of conducting all translations together, as to a greater or lesser extent, most poets were also involved in the process. our collaborative translation practice also benefited from their involvement, as we were able to ask them for clarification on lines or words which we were unsure how to understand, discuss the poetic qualities of possible translation solutions as related to the sound, the rhythm or allusive associations and afterwards share our final drafts of the poems inviting them to give us their opinion on them. this has been extremely helpful in order to help us adapt to the idiosyncrasies of thirty-three different poets. as in the anthology, here we also present the poets in alphabetical order rather than identifying them by caribbean island(s), the language(s) that they write in, their birthplaces, their current homes, or other descriptors of identity. we leave the process of identification to the writers themselves either in their poetry or their biographies. in the biographies that follow the bilingual poems, some mention their caribbean heritage or connections. several of the writers selected for the anthology consider themselves persons of multiple origins, locations, and affiliations. some identify as non-binary, bisexual, lesbian, or heterosexual, as allies, or speak to life experiences related to sexuality and sexual identity, societal pressures, and justice issues. most address political and societal agency, discrimination, and the traumas of history in one manner or another. yet, as the rest of poems included in the anthology, the four writers chosen to be part of this paper coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 have shown in their oeuvre an on-going commitment to writing poems that address both women’s experiences in the most intimate and public realms and caribbean cultural and social imperatives. first presented in the language in which they were originally written followed by our translation, we here include one poem by four of the caribbean women poets featured in the anthology: thaís espaillat ureña, zulema leonor gutiérrez lozano, tanya shirley and donna aza weir-soley – two from each linguistic context. we see the publishing of these additional unpublished translations as a means of continuing and extending the collaborative translation work that we started in the anthology project. we are particularly excited to present them in this special issue of coolabah because it is the first time that these poems in translation see the light. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 thaís espaillat ureña tengo sed hoy mis amigos y yo descubrimos algo importantísimo: en la fábrica de presidente todavía inflan las botellas unas filas largas de hombres y mujeres soplando el vidrio verde una botella detrás de otra botella detrás de otra botella en la cinta transportadora los viernes hacen competencia a ver quién puede soplar más botellas para ganarse una nevera llena de cervezas frías como en los anuncios para toda la familia y los vecinos cervezas recién exprimidas de la mata de cebada y soplarán y soplarán y soplarán botellas hasta quedar la mayoría desmayados en el piso y como todos los viernes saldrá alguno victorioso levantando su última esmeralda a la luz blanca de las lámparas industriales. i’m thirsty today my friends and i discovered something really important: in the presidente factory bottles are still hand-blown long lines of men and women blowing green glass one bottle after another bottle after another bottle on the conveyor belt on fridays, they compete to see who can blow up more bottles to win an ice chest full of cold beers like in the ads for the whole family and neighbors beers freshly squeezed out of a barley plant and they’ll blow and blow and blow up bottles until most of them are passed out on the floor and like every friday someone will end up victorious raising up their last emerald to the white light of industrial lamps. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 zulema leonor gutiérrez lozano paisaje rojo 13 hombres detrás de la puerta con las manos en la entrepierna/ una mujer siente el peso de la sombra/ la punzada del miedo/ la huella dolorosa sobre su vientre/ 13 hombres frente a lo más oscuro de su espíritu/ todo está sucio/ una mujer hace cualquier cosa por volar unas horas/ nunca sabrá que 13 hombres cruzaron el umbral de su carne mientras flotaba en el nirvana/ yo fui la sombra de un perro aquella tarde/ los vi derramarse/ volverse ratas y excremento/ un paisaje rojo después de la batalla red landscape 13 men behind the door with their hands on the crotch / a woman feels the weight of the shadow / the pang of fear / the painful imprint on her belly / 13 men facing the darkest part of their spirit / everything is dirty / a woman does anything to fly for a few hours / she will never know that 13 men crossed the threshold of her flesh while floating in nirvana / i was the shadow of a dog that afternoon / i saw them spew/ become rats and excrement / a red landscape after the battle coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 tanya shirley grandpa in the departure lounge i black old man you are so beautiful when you die i will peel the skin off your cold bones and wear you over my breasts. ii at your nine night i will bathe in white rum roll naked in red, country dirt, rise with death in my nostrils. iii when you go up in flames i will take your charred remains brew them with chamomile, drink your tea to soothe my grief. iv i will wear black for forty days until the colour bleeds in my mouth – my tongue like tar. v you said dead people are calling you, read their names out loud: luna, freddie, iris, bunty ... eyes closed, lips limp, rocking – you are ready. vi i am not prepared; wear red to bed, sprinkle this oil under your pillow, walk with salt, tell them to go to hell. vii your domino group dwindled, visitors never come often enough, abuelo en la sala de embarque i viejo hombre negro eres tan bello cuando mueras arrancaré la piel de tus huesos fríos y te llevaré sobre mis pechos. ii las nueve noches de tu velatorio me bañaré en ron blanco me revolcaré desnuda en el barro rojo del campo, me levantaré con muerte en las fosas nasales. iii cuando ardas en llamas recogeré tus despojos calcinados y con camomila te haré en brebaje, beberé de tu té para aliviar mi pena. iv vestiré de negro por cuarenta días hasta que el color sangre en mi boca – mi lengua como brea. v dijiste que la gente muerta te está llamando, leíste sus nombres en voz alta: luna, freddie, iris, bunty… ojos cerrados, labios aflojados, meciéndote – estás listo. vi yo no estoy preparada; vístete de rojo en la cama, rocía este aceite debajo de tu almohada, camina con sal, diles que se vayan al inferno. vii tu grupo de dominó menguó, las visitas nunca son lo bastante frecuentes, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 the swelling in your legs is traveling up, the weed concoction no longer suffices. you are losing sights and sounds. viii old man are you going to make a mad woman out of me? por tus piernas se trepa la hinchazón el preparado de hierba ya no basta. estás perdiendo vistas y sonidos. viii viejito ¿vas a hacer de mi una mujer loca? coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 donna aza weir-soley mama water mama water, protector of women riding a blue crested wave your flouncing tail thrashes the surface of the ocean raising a colling spray to water the wills of frail failing human spirits. mama water, river mummah, yemanja mother-goddess, nurturer, protector of children, fishermen washerwomen, mothers and would-be mothers, accept with grace these offerings accept with grace these salted tears we women give back in gratitude. mama water mama water, protectora de las mujeres cabalgando una ola de cresta azul tu cola salpica y aplasta la superficie del océano levantando una refrescante espuma para mojar las voluntades de espíritus humanos frágiles y menguantes. mama water, river mummah, yemayá madre diosa, cuidadora, protectora de niños, pescadores lavanderas, madres, y las que querrán ser madres, acepta con gracia estas ofrendas acepta con gracia estas lágrimas saladas que nosotras mujeres te devolvemos en gratitud. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 authors thaís espaillat ureña (santo domingo, 1994) is a poet and visual artist of the dominican republic. she edits and designs zines in her small literary press, hacemos cosas. her first poetry collection pudo haberse evitado was published by ediciones cielonaranja in 2018. her poems have been published in argentina, the dominican republic and mexico. her work often deals with the absurd and the search for poetry in weird and small places. thaís sometimes remembers to update her blog, saltedeaqui.wordpress.com, with freshly picked poems from the tamarind tree. zulema gutiérrez lozano was born in holguín, cuba, in 1982. she is a poet, story teller and promoter of literature. she is a graduate of the centro de formación literaria onelio jorge cardoso, and she is a member of ahs. she is also a writer of children’s literature. she has received various poetry prizes, including the premio portus patris (2018), the premio nacional for adelaida del mármol (2018), and the premio de la ciudad de holguín. her poetry collections danza alrededor del fuego and metralla are forthcoming. she has also been published in anthologies and journals within cuba and elsewhere. tanya shirley has published two poetry collections: she who sleeps with bones (peepal tree press, 2009) and the merchant of feathers (peepal tree press, 2014). she is a featured poet on www.poetryarchive.org and has read her poems and conducted writing workshops in venezuela, canada, the u.s.a., england, scotland and the caribbean. she was awarded an mfa in creative writing from the university of maryland, usa. she taught at the university of the west indies, mona, jamaica, for over ten years and has been writer-in-residence twice at sierra nevada college, lake tahoe. shirley is also a proud cave canem fellow. her second poetry collection, the merchant of feathers, was longlisted for the ocm bocas prize for caribbean literature and shortlisted for the guyana prize for literature, caribbean award. in 2017 she was awarded a silver musgrave medal from the council of the institute of jamaica for her outstanding contribution in the field of literature. donna aza weir-soley was born in st. catherine, jamaica and migrated to the united states at the age of 17. currently, she is an associate professor of english, and affiliate faculty in african and african diaspora studies, women's studies and the latin american and caribbean center at florida international university. dr. weir-soley is also the vice president of the association of caribbean women writers and scholars. she won the woodrow wilson career enhancement fellowship in 2004-2005 to complete her scholarly work, eroticism spirituality and resistance in black women’s writings (university press of florida, 2009, reprinted in 2017). weir-soley is a frequent invited speaker at the annual woodrow wilson foundation career enhancement fellowship conference where she mentors new woodrow wilson fellows. she is coeditor (with opal palmer adisa) of the anthology caribbean erotic (peepal tree press, 2010), and the author of two books of poetry: first rain (peepal tree press, 2006, reprinted 2011) and the woman who knew (chapbook, finishing line press, 2016). she is the mother of three wonderful young men and lives in miami. loretta collins klobah’s first book the twelve foot neon woman (peepal tree press, 2011) received the ocm bocas prize in caribbean literature in the category of poetry and was short-listed for the felix dennis prize in the forward prize series. her second book ricantations (peepal tree press, 2018) was a poetry book society coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 recommendation and a national poetry day selection. it was long-listed for the bocas prize. she has been awarded the pushcart prize, the earl lyons award from the academy of american poets, and the pam wallace award for an aspiring woman writer. her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. she lives in san juan, puerto rico, where she is a professor of caribbean literature and creative writing at the university of puerto rico. maria grau perejoan is a lecturer and a literary translator. she holds a doctoral degree in cultural studies with an emphasis on caribbean literature and literary translation from the university of barcelona, and an mphil in cultural studies from the university of the west indies, trinidad and tobago. she was visiting lecturer at the uwi, st augustine campus for three academic years, she then moved on to lecture courses in translation and caribbean literature at the university of barcelona, and since 2020 she is a lecturer at the department of spanish, modern and classical languages at the university of the balearic islands. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 works cited: collins klobah, l., and grau perejoan, m. (eds. y trans.). (2020). the sea needs no ornament / el mar no necesita ornamento. peepal tree press. espaillat ureña, t. (2020). tengo sed. in ¿tienes quien te cuide la mula? (p. 96). ediciones liliputienses. forsdick, c. (2015). translation in the caribbean, the caribbean in translation. small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism, 19(3), 147-174. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-3341741 flotow, l. von. (1991). feminist translation: contexts, practices and theories. ttr, 4(2), 69-84. https://doi.org/10.7202/037094ar flotow, l. von. (1997). translation and gender: translating in the ‘era of feminism’. routledge. gutiérrez lozano, z. (2020). paisaje rojo. in metralla. unpublished. shirley, t. (2009). grandpa in the departure lounge. in she who sleeps with bones (p.21). peepal tree press. trzeciak huss, j. (2019). collaborative translation. in k. washbourne y b. van wyke (eds.), routledge handbook of literary translation (pp. 389-406). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315517131 wallmach, k. (2006). feminist translation strategies: different or derived? journal of literary studies, 22(1-2), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/02564710608530388 weir-soley, d. a. (2006). mama water. in first rain (p. 98). peepal tree press. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 aquatic heterosexual love and wondrous cliché stereotypes: amphibian masculinity, the beast bridegroom motif and ‘the other’ in the shape of water olle jilkén & lina johansson olle.jilken@gmail.com lina.mj.johansson@gmail.com copyright©2019 olle jilkén & lina johansson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper addresses the representation of masculinities in the award-winning romantic fantasy film the shape of water (2017). the study examines how the shape of water communicates with other texts and myths portraying aquatic entities such as gill man from the creature from the black lagoon (1954) and how the movie is tied to the folkloric tradition of monstrous love interest. further, the text investigates how otherness is portrayed and constructed through the different representations in the movie. the paper concludes that the film’s diverse characters create a superficial appearance of an understanding for marginalised subjects. the shape of water is a classic beast bridegroom fairy tale with stagnated representations of feminine and masculine ideals that turn ‘the other’ into an instrument of self-realisation for a white subject. moreover, the amphibian man is differentiated from his aquatic female counterparts through traditional masculine attributes such as a muscular body type, a reptilian appearance and being two-legged instead of having a fishtail. keywords: the shape of water, masculinity, media studies introduction a mute cleaning lady and an amphibious creature fall in love in a laboratory. this might not be the most traditional set-up for a romantic film, but it is a setting which has led to commercial and critical success for the shape of water (del toro, 2017). the amphibious creature in the film has no name and is in the closing credits simply referred to as ‘amphibian man’ (doug jones). amphibian man has a lot of similarities with gill man, the monster from the cult film the creature from the black lagoon (arnold, 1954). the two creatures look visually akin, they both live in the amazon river and share qualities with mythical creatures existing in cultures around the amazon rainforest (verevis, mailto:olle.jilken@gmail.com mailto:olle.jilken@gmail.com mailto:lina.mj.johansson@gmail.com mailto:lina.mj.johansson@gmail.com coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 2012: 68). in the creature from the black lagoon, gill man, like many other monsters in 1950s films, kidnaps a woman and is in the end shot and left to die. del toro has stated that when he watched the 1954 cult film as a child, he always wanted a happy ending for gill man and the beautiful woman. therefore, in the shape of water, del toro gave a water dwelling monster a love story of his own (kit, 2017). the shape of water has been celebrated not only for its production design, directing, musical score, acting and screenplay, but also for its political message of empathy towards marginalised groups. for example, guy lodge (2017) writes in the guardian that “[the shape of water] is a film that rousingly, none-too-subtly champions marginalised minorities and outsiders, and regards conservative masculine authority with a jaundiced eye”, and adds that the film constitutes “a very literal ‘fuck you’ to the man” (authors’ emphasis). these claims make the film particularly interesting to analyse from a gender theorist’s perspective. for example, what is this “conservative masculine authority” contrasted with? and furthermore, how are masculinities represented in the shape of water? representations of masculinities representations of monstrous amphibious men and mute beautiful women can facilitate the understanding of how gender is depicted in contemporary media. while film characters are not representative of real, lived experiences of women and men, media representations have an impact on, and are influenced by, society’s attitudes and understanding of gender (hall, 1997: 50). gender studies have a long history of investigating the construction of gender. as the gender theorist judith butler explains (2007: 33–4), gender and sex are ongoing constructions that occur primarily in social interactions and they are governed by the heterosexual matrix. the concept of the heterosexual matrix assumes that sexual desire derives from the reproductive organs and therefore heterosexuality becomes the only acceptable sexuality (ibid: 95–6). thus this matrix creates and recreates the idea of two genders as stable binaries which must desire each other; and must also be constructed in contrast with each other (29–30). this is a useful framework for thinking about issues of gender and will be used to unpack what different gendered positions are communicated through the shape of water, focusing on masculinities. the plural “masculinities” implies that there are multiple ways to construct masculinity. according to butler (2007: 9), there are as many ways to do gender and sex as there are humans. however, some ways are more accepted than others, and the accepted masculinities differ from society to society and from period to period. the masculinity theorist raewynn connell (1995: 77) proposed the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to refer to the most accepted and dominant masculinity in a patriarchal society. when the society and the nature of the patriarchy change, other masculinities are able to become the hegemonic masculinity by challenging and superseding the previously dominant masculinity (ibid). this continuous negotiation of hegemonic masculinities is often portrayed in media texts, such as disney films from the 1990s (macaluso, 2018: 3). the villain’s authoritative, hyper-masculine personality is first portrayed as the hegemonic masculinity. he might be rich, handsome, powerful and/or cunning. however, the audience eventually realises that the villain is evil and what he is doing is wrong — coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 138 especially when compared to the protagonist who has a softer approach, and who may be violent but whom, the films assure us, only resorts to violence when it is absolutely necessary (ibid). as the protagonist is now understood as presenting a more desirable form of masculinity, the villain loses his dominant position. the softer personality of male protagonists in films from the 1990s onward is referred to as ‘the new man’ (gill, 2003: 37). the gender sociologist and cultural theorist rosalind gill describes the new man as “sensitive, emotionally aware, respectful of women, and egalitarian in outlook” (2003: 37). moreover, he is a man who is allowed to care about his appearance and be eroticised by women (ibid: 45-6). gender theorist susan jeffords found that the ‘new man’ in films often is not initially emotionally aware and respectful, but only becomes the ‘new man’ after a woman teaches him (1995: 169, 171). the analysis below explores how the men in the shape of water relate to ‘the new man’, but we begin with an investigation of the influence of the heterosexual matrix on representations of fictional sea creatures. amphibious men in media-lore amphibious men have a long history in stories. in modern media-lore, the figure of a monstrous amphibious humanoid can be traced back to russian author alexander belyaev’s 1928 sci-fi adventure novel the amphibian. belyaev’s amphibian man is a human turned into a water-dwelling creature by his scientist father who gives him a sharkgill transplantation. the theme of science is common in media-lore about amphibious men. even if they do not always originate from laboratories, they are often captured and studied in them. amphibious men not created in a laboratory are generally loosely linked to myths or folklore regarding water-dwelling entities. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 139 figure 1: poster for creature from the black lagoon this is the case for both gill man from the creature from the black lagoon and amphibian man in the shape of water who are connected to native mythology of the amazon river. in the shape of water it is mentioned that “[t]he natives in the amazon worshipped [the amphibian man] like a god”. even though del toro has stated that the amphibian man is not an imitation of any existing mythical creature (lussier, 2017), amphibian man shares considerable similarities with folkloric water spirits, such as the mythical yacurunas of the amazon, water people who live in underwater cities and have healing powers that shamans summon to help with shaman magic. the yacurunas also have a more sinister side — they are known for seducing humans and luring them into their underwater world (beyer, 2009: 320-2). amphibian man proves to have healing powers also and although he does not seem to show any sinister motives he still succeeds in seducing the main character to elope with him into his watery domain, just like the yacurunas. of course, the yacuruna are not the only water spirits possessed of both healing powers and menace. probably the best-known aquatic creature in both traditional folklore and contemporary media-lore is the mermaid, although contemporary versions play up the mermaid’s beauty over her danger and tend to have happier resolutions than older tales. compare, for instance, both the romantic mermaid comedy splash (howard, 1984) and disney’s hugely successful the little mermaid (clements & musker, 1989) with andersen’s original little mermaid. in both the modern tales, we are permitted a happy ending; in andersen’s original, ariel loses everything, not just her voice (andersen, 2000). in the shape of water, the main character elisa esposito (sally hawkins) is introduced by her friend giles (richard jenkins) who tells the story about the “princess without a voice”, immediately linking elisa to ariel. references to elisa’s connect to water permeate the film — in her dream world, her apartment is underwater; the audience is also told that she is an orphan, found in the river as a baby. moreover, elisa has scars on her neck near her vocal cords; in the final scene those scars become gills, and she is able to breathe under water, just like a mermaid. in much media-lore, amphibious characters like amphibian man and gill man are portrayed as male equivalents of the mermaid, despite not being mermen. this is because mermen have a more precarious position in contemporary culture, owing to their fishtail making their masculinity frail. the merman’s fishtail can be regarded as having a castrating effect and can be read as a feminising component because of its curvy forms, colorful and shimmering appearance and its visual similarity to a dress that keeps the legs tight together, leaving no place for a penis (jilkén, 2018). some have taken this argument even further by claiming that the merman’s kinship to fish removes the possibility of him having a human penis, making him symbolically non-phallic (hayward, 2017: 158). however, masculinity is not only symbolised through the phallus but can also be communicated by other cultural means. these include a herculean body shape, masculine body language, substantial muscle mass and/or an attraction to women (dyer, 1989: 206), all of which attributes amphibian man possesses. other than the absence of a phallus, fish have other feminine associations. for example, the term ‘fish’ is used in drag queen communities to describe someone, most often a drag queen, who passes as a good looking cis-woman (the queendom). amphibian man, however, and other water-dwelling male humanoids of his kind in contemporary media seem to be more closely related to amphibian animals and/or reptilians than fish. gill man’s dark thick scales and his way coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 140 of lurking in the canals of the amazon river resemble an alligator, while amphibian man makes reptilian sounds and has dark crocodile green scales. moreover, both of them have legs, not fishtails. these qualities make amphibian man into a more masculine ‘pair’ to the mermaid than the merman could ever be, with or without a penis. in addition to amphibian man’s stereotypical masculine attributes, that already serve to negate the feminising characteristics of the classic merman, the film is at pains to spell out that there is indeed a phallus hiding underneath all the scales. elisa demonstrates this to zelda, with hand gestures. as masculinity scholars, we were never in doubt about amphibian man’s penis, but the filmmakers clearly did not want it to be an unanswered question for the audience. this pairing of amphibious men and mermaids can be seen in several other texts in modern media-lore. for example, in the role-playing video game darkest dungeon (red hook studios, 2016), the player fights the siren and her underlings, the pelagics. while the pelagics appear as male and stuck in their form as aquatic humanoids, armed with harpoons and dressed only in scales, the siren has the ability to turn from a grotesque anglerfish-creature into an alluring maiden with naked breasts and a fishtail — the established image of a mermaid. other examples of this pairing can be seen in the film dagon (gordon, 2001), where a demonic mermaid figure rules an island with her amphibious underlings and in the multiplayer online battle arena video game league of legends (riot games, 2009), where players can choose the character fizz, an amphibious octopus-boy, or nami, a mermaid-esque fish-woman. there is an additional example in the episode “the mermaid” of the television series voyage to the bottom of the sea (allen, 1964), where an amphibian man, who looks almost identical to amphibian man and gill man, saves a mermaid from human scientists (hayward, 2017: 152). clearly, the allure of legs among mythological water beings seems to differ depending on gender — their absence is seen as seductive in the case of mermaids, but emasculating in mermen. in the shape of water amphibian man is a somewhat ambiguous character but maintains his masculinity through the use of standard symbols (size, strength) as well as the deliberate spelling out of the existence of his penis and heterosexual agenda. beast bridegroom fairytales the shape of water takes inspiration from many different genres: while stories about sea creature might be the most obvious, it shares similarities with beast bridegroom fairytales. fairytales and myths about women (beauties) who marry monstrous men (beasts) can be traced back to psyche and cupid. this story emerged in the second century ad (warner, 1994: 274). psyche is not allowed to watch her husband, cupid, and therefore she believes that he is a monster. in this myth, psyche has to confront being married to an unknown man, which is the underlying theme in many beast bridegroom fairy tales from around the world (ibid: 276). the folkloric scholar jack zipes (1983: 41) argues that commonly, in the older versions of the myth, the beauty has to forget about herself and learn to be a submissive wife. in her role as a submissive wife, the beauty educates her beast bridegroom in kindness, reshaping him into the husband she always longed for. in other words, the woman has to change in order for her man to change (swan, 1999: 363). moreover, the beast was, according to the cultural historian maria warner (1994: 280), a symbol for the male sexuality that, like the beast, had to be domesticated in order to fit coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 141 the norms of society. fairy tales are influenced by the time in which they are told (ibid: xix) — they and their messages change over time, and contemporary stories of the beautiful woman and the monstrous beast may have different implications in the present to their traditions. contemporary women are no longer as economically dependent on marriage but are still expected to find a male partner with whom they can be emotionally and sexually close (ganetz, 1991: 18; warner, 1994: 312–13). thus, the beast is no longer a symbol for harsh and authoritarian patriarchs, and the beauty does not have to be submissive for the beast to find her attractive. instead, the wild and manly beast can be read as a symbol of female sexuality that women have to release in order to live a full life (warner, 1994: 318). the beauty still needs to change in modern beast bridegroom fairy tales, but now she has to become more like a beast, and not less like one. as soon as the modern beauty encounters the beast, she sees the good in him and because of that she chooses to marry him. to stress the kindness of the beasts in the newer beast bridegroom fairy tales, a new character is often added as a foil. in disney’s beauty and the beast (trousdale & wise, 1991) this is gaston. at first, the foil is depicted as the better choice for the beauty, because he is handsome, but as the story evolves, he displays an aggressive and egoistic side. in other words, he loses his place as the hegemonic masculine. simultaneously, the beauty sees more and more of the beast’s kind and emphatic side — making his masculinity the new hegemonic masculinity. including the hyper-masculine gaston means the beast can still have hyper-masculine traits but because he is compared to gaston he appears soft (jeffords, 1995: 170; warner, 1994: 316). however, even in the newer versions of beast bridegroom fairy tales it falls on beauty to educate the beast for him to see his own soft side (jeffords, 1995: 171). susan jeffords (1995: 165) argues that one reason for the popularity of disney’s beauty and the beast is that the message is that we should not criticise men when they are harsh, but instead be kind and love them — only then they will find their gentle side that has been hiding deep inside them all along since the beast of today is a softer monster than he was before, he would be “too good” if he turned into a human. the beast should have some hardship in life for the audience to sympathise with him despite his initial boorish behavior. therefore, it has become more common in the newer versions of the fairy tale for the beast to not transform into human form (warner, 1994: 313). warner (1994: 317) gives edward scissorhands (burton, 1990) as an example of a film where the monster does not turn into a human in the end, and we would also add shrek (adamson & jenson, 2001) to this category. from a narrative perspective, it is even better for the beast not to become a human, because then he will stay dark and wild but still with a soft personality, showing the opposing sides that are expected from the ‘new man’ (ibid: 318). except for the beast turning into a prince in the disney version of beauty and the beast, which warner (1994: 313) claims was a risk that disney took in that no child liked the prince more than the beast, almost all newer versions of a tale with a monster bridegroom do not involve a bodily transformation. nor does the shape of water, and it does not have to, because the audience already sympathises with the amphibian man and loves him just as much as elisa does. at first, he is slightly frightening because he is presented as different, but as the story unfolds he is revealed to be no more different from other humans than elisa is. moreover, it becomes apparent that, just as gaston is the true villain of beauty and the beast, strickland is the true villain in the shape of water. richard strickland (michael shannon), the head of the science facility where elisa works, abuses amphibian man, because he can only see him as a monster — in doing so, he shows his own monstrous form. when elisa instead coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 142 treats amphibian man with kindness, amphibian man proves to be a creature capable of love. consequently, amphibian man is, as are his beast predecessors of the 1990s, the embodiment of the ‘new man’. when he needs to fight, he does, but when treated right he can perform a soft, more desirable masculinity (jeffords, 1995: 170). with this ‘new man’ to take care of her, elisa is free to explore her sexuality, which she earlier has been controlling by masturbating in the bath every morning. by releasing amphibian man from the prison of the laboratory, she also uncages her own lust. as warner (1994: 318) puts it: “the beast stirs desire, beauty responds from some deep inner need which he awakens.” however, it comes with the price of patience with all the wildness inside amphibian man. just like beauty from disney’s beauty and the beast and fiona from shrek, elisa does not scold her beast when he is bad (not even when he eats giles’s cat!). instead, she continues to show him love, because elisa knows that when you treat someone like a human, they will behave like a human. although the shape of water shares many features of contemporary beast bridegroom stories, especially with regard to stereotypical gender roles, it differs in that amphibian man is not the only character with desirable masculine traits. hegemonic masculinity in the shape of water the framework of competing masculinities discussed above is a major theme in the shape of water, but rather than a simple duality, it is a three-way competition between the love interest (amphibian man), the father figure (elisa’s gay neighbour giles) and the villain (strickland). the masculinities of all three characters are defined through their interaction with elisa. strickland is initially portrayed as a sober, sexually attractive man who takes what he wants. he is dominant at home and in charge at the facility. in other words, his masculinity is portrayed as the hegemonic masculinity. in contrast, amphibian man is, in his first scene of the film, locked in a metallic pod. moreover, he does not talk, he can breathe under water and he does not seem to be fully human. his masculinity is altogether different from strickland’s and that leaves him powerless in a society where strickland is the norm. giles also fails to demonstrate the masculine ideal represented by strickland. he (giles) is initially depicted as lazy, afraid of breaking the law, vain and escapist, preferring to inhabit the world of old films rather than confront the harsher realities of contemporary life. this is in addition to being both gay and older — he lacks physical and sexual capital. at first, the competition appears to be between amphibian man and strickland, when strickland treats amphibian man with cruelty. the musical cues and the distinct depiction of amphibian man’s pain clearly signal that the audience is meant to feel sympathy toward the amphibious creature. elisa befriends amphibian man and, through elisa’s eyes, he is revealed to be a kind, inquisitive creature who, unlike strickland, only hurts those who hurt him first. the audience, who by now dislikes strickland because of his cruelty towards amphibian man, are confirmed in their suspicions regarding his aggressiveness and cold-heartedness when he plans to kill the innocent creature to extract coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 143 information. if this was not enough, he is also revealed to be a misogynist sexual predator who sexually harasses elisa, in whom he has become interested because of her muteness. when elisa frees the amphibian man, strickland loses his position as defining hegemonic masculinity. he does everything to find amphibian man, the antagonist who has deposed him, but when he screams and threatens elisa and her co-worker zelda (octavia spencer), he begins to expose a more desperate and monstrous side of himself. in the meantime, amphibian man, now living in elisa’s bathtub, makes elisa happier than ever. by showing a more desirable masculinity he is rewarded with access to her vagina. in the film’s climax strickland finds elisa and amphibian man in the harbour, bidding farewell to each other. strickland shoots amphibian man, but amphibian man recovers and kills strickland. amphibian man has saved both the woman and society from aggressive, misogynistic, hyper-masculinity. figure 2: poster for the shape of water coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 144 although this makes amphibian man the hero of the story, he still isn’t human. the other representation of human masculinity is giles. while he embodies the voice of reason and is a modern man, he is nevertheless flawed, most specifically by his sexuality. when giles is rejected by straight male society, he joins elisa’s quest to saves amphibian man. he is thus able to reject hegemonic patriarchy as he simultaneously climbs upward on his own ladder of masculinity, as modern man is expected to (schoene-harwood, 2000: xi). giles’s queerness is also rendered harmless as it is never shown as anything more than yearning glances towards a waiter who turns out to be both racist and homophobic. in fact, it could be argued that it is the ‘disarming’ of giles’s sexuality that allows him to represent the alternative human masculinity that the audience is invited to identify with (given that amphibian man’s otherness remains actualised). giles develops from being a coward to daring to defend the people he cares about. in effect, it is giles who is held up as a better candidate for a modern masculinity than amphibian man, who is inescapably ‘the other’. amphibian man as ‘the other’ a common theme in more recent versions of beast bridegroom fairytales is loneliness and otherness (hearne, 1988: 105). both beauty and the beast feel alienated from society and therefore understand each other’s hardships (ganetz, 1991: 24). this is true for the disney version of beauty and the beast, the tv series with the same name (koslow, 1987) and shrek. the same theme also informs the shape of water. elisa’s muteness makes her an outsider and the strange amphibian man has no place in the human world. while they have problems communicating with other people, they have no problem communicating with each other. elisa makes their likeness explicit when she tries to convince her neighbor giles that amphibian man is not an animal by signing: “what am i? i move my mouth like him, i make no sound, like him, what does that make me?”. if amphibian man is an animal, then why would she be considered any different? elisa does not feel included in the society she is living in, and therefore she senses that she has more in common with a monstrous amphibian humanoid than with other humans. the history scholar lois w. banner (2008: 5–6) argues that monster films became popular in the 1950s because the monster symbolised threats from the unknown, of which, at the time, there were many in the us. the salvation from the monsters in the films told the americans that they need not fear, because their government could take care of the threats. in a closer reading of the shape of water it becomes obvious that the film’s message is the opposite — we should not fear the unknown, but rather try to get to know it. this theme can also be found in gill man’s storyline in the creature from the black lagoon. even though gill man poses a more distinct threat than amphibian man, screenwriter harry j. essex claims that “[a]ll [gill man] wants is to love the girl, but everybody’s chasing him!”, and the director, jack arnold, has said that it is only because gill man is “disturbed [that] he fights back” (verevis, 2012: 68, 75). in other words, gill man is misunderstood and treated badly because he is different. the feeling of being misunderstood is relatable to minority groups, and therefore they tend to see themselves represented in monsters. film studies scholar lindsay ellis argues that “people from marginalized communities, immigrants, queer people, people of color, would not only see themselves in film-monsters but [also] start to invert what we even expect from monsters” (2018: 00.20.10). just as audiences’ marginalised status can connect them to coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 145 film monsters, elisa’s muteness connects her to amphibian man and gives her the ability to see that he is misunderstood, not evil. the shape of water has been discussed in terms of its nuanced and new ways of representing muteness (wilde, crawshaw & sheldon, 2018), but it also addresses many other types of otherness, which may be a partial explanation for its success. elisa’s closest co-worker at the science facility, zelda, is a talkative, african-american woman with a lazy husband, who has taken elisa under her wing, while elisa’s closest friend outside of work is her elderly gay neighbor, giles, who is unemployed, involuntarily single and troubled by his hair loss. later, elisa also finds an ally in the russian immigrant, scientist and spy who goes by the undercover name dr. robert hofftstetler (michael stuhlbarg). elisa’s muteness combined with these other representations of minority groups in the film are perhaps designed to compensate for the fact that amphibian man himself doesn’t represent a number marginalised human categories — defending the film from the accusations levelled at the black lagoon that gill man represented troublesome racial stereotypes of a dangerous black man (verevis, 2012: 72). associating aquatic beings with the racialised other has been done before as sea creatures, such as mermaids and amphibious men, often are portrayed with facial features resembling people of colour and are strongly connected to nature by, for instance, being depicted as lost in the civilised (white) society (sells, 1995: 178). the shape of water may have sought to avoid these associations by providing elisa with a close african-american friend, but it could be argued that amphibian man’s strong relation to nature and his difficulties with language, as well as his admirable physical abilities and heterosexual love-affair, position his otherness closer to a racialised position than anything else. amphibian man’s otherness is extreme, making him more difficult for the audience to identify with. elisa is similarly difficult to identify with — her (slightly obsessive) dedication to amphibian man and her quirk personality are perhaps more puzzling than endearing. it is this inaccessibility of both hero and heroine that leads us to question who in the film the audience is actually invited to identify with. we suggest that it is in fact giles. he has the first and last lines in the film, and is thus effectively the narrator. through the arc of the narrative, he is guided by elisa and amphibian man to a position more representative of ideal hegemonic masculinity than where he began (although he was more privileged than either of them to begin with). we would argue that giles is the ‘politically correct hero’, less preoccupied with physical accomplishments and more invested in moral an intellectual growth (armengol, 2013: 8), a palatable ideal for a liberal white audience. conclusion the aim of this article has been to investigate how masculinity is represented in the shape of water. our analysis has found that the depictions of the male characters follow the same pattern as countless earlier films with themes regarding water deities and the beast bridegroom motif. in other words, the amphibian man embodies the stereotypes of ‘the new man’, the disney-fied version of the beast and the two-legged amphibious creature who in many ways can be regarded as the male counterpart to mermaids. moreover, by including a diverse set-up of characters, the shape of water avoids turning amphibian coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 146 man into a representation of a marginalised group, even though he still possesses racialised attributes. however, amphibian man’s animalistic otherness makes him hard to identify with, which turns him into a tool for giles’ self-fulfilling quest. yet again, it is the white male who narrates a story about ‘the other’. cultural studies scholar angela mcrobbie argues that, “power resides in the currents of meaning which condense at key cultural sites in society” (1997: 193). this article, by studying representations of masculinity in the shape of water, is searching for cultural meanings hidden in the film. as it was highly publicised, and received a number of prizes, the shape of water certainly qualifies as a key cultural site in society. the importance of a critical reading of celebrated films (and other cultural sites) cannot be stressed enough. however, we do not wish to detract from the experience of people who feel represented by the film — what we want is to encourage people to do a closer reading of the cultural sites they love, and through that deconstruct the stereotypes which exist in culture and media. nonetheless, when a film is praised for its nuanced representations of ‘the other’, but a closer investigation finds that it uses ‘the others’ as token characters, and focuses to a larger extent on a white man, we have to ask ourselves what message that conveys. first, the film tells us that it is still the white people who own the narrative and it is their feelings a film must please to become successful, even when the film is good at hiding it. secondly, it reveals that contemporary society does not require much for defining someone as a good ally towards racialised, queer and disabled subjects. you only need to accept ‘the other’. the film mirrors liberal white people’s self-image. they tolerate differences and therefore they see themselves as good people. unlike strickland, they do not want to kill strangers, they want them to live, but only on their conditions. since the movie ends with the strange amphibian man and eliza going to the sea, ’where they belong’ and where they do not disturb the (white) norm society, anyone, even racists, are able to agree with the film’s essentially conservative message. we would like to give special thanks to tiffany hutton for encouragement and editorial aid. likewise, we would like to thank our friends erik van berlekom and daniel zavala svensson for feedback and support. references armengol, josep m (ed) (2013) embodying masculinities: towards a history of the male body in u.s. culture and literature, new york: peter lang banner, lois w (2008) “the creature from the 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hearne, betsy (1988) “beauty and the beast: visions and revisions of an old tale: 19501985” the lion and the unicorn, 12(2): 74-111 imdb, “the shape of water: awards”, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/awards (retrieved 2019-06-11) jeffords, susan (1995) “the curse of masculinity: disney's beauty and the beast” in bell, elizabeth, haas, lynda & sells, laura (ed) from mouse to mermaid: the politics of film, gender, and culture, bloomington: indiana university press, 161-72 jilkén, olle (2018) “‘a phallus out of water’: the construction of mer-masculinity in modern day illustrations” shima, 12(2): 196-207 kit, borys (2017) “how guillermo del toro’s 'black lagoon' fantasy inspired 'shape of water'” the hollywood reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/howguillermo-del-toros-black-lagoon-fantasy-inspired-shape-water-1053206 (retrieved 2018-12-10) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/15/the-shape-of-water-review-guillermo-del-toro https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/15/the-shape-of-water-review-guillermo-del-toro https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/15/the-shape-of-water-review-guillermo-del-toro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yesmwaxqj60&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yesmwaxqj60&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yesmwaxqj60&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yesmwaxqj60&t=2s https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/awards https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/awards https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-guillermo-del-toros-black-lagoon-fantasy-inspired-shape-water-1053206 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-guillermo-del-toros-black-lagoon-fantasy-inspired-shape-water-1053206 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-guillermo-del-toros-black-lagoon-fantasy-inspired-shape-water-1053206 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-guillermo-del-toros-black-lagoon-fantasy-inspired-shape-water-1053206 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 148 lodge, guy (2017) “guillermo del toro’s the shape of water is a much needed ode to the ‘other’” the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/30/guillermodel-toro-the-shape-of-water-is-a-much-needed-ode-to-the-other (retrieved 2019-03-10) lussier, germain (2017) “if you wanted to know where the shape of water's fishman came from, i have bad news” io9. https://io9.gizmodo.com/if-you-wanted-to-knowwhere-the-shape-of-waters-fishman-1821051561 (retrieved 2019-03-10) macaluso, michael (2018) “postfeminist masculinity: the new disney norm?” social sciences, 7(221): 1-10. mcrobbie, angela (1997) back to reality? social experience and cultural studies, manchester: manchester university press schoene-harwood, berthold (2000) writing men: literary masculinites from frankenstein to the new man, edinburgh: edinburgh university press sells, laura (1995) “where do the mermaids stand?: voice and body in the little mermaid” in bell, elizabeth, haas, lynda & sells, laura (ed) from mouse to mermaid: the politics of film, gender, and culture, bloomington: indiana university press, 17592 swan, susan z (1999) “gothic drama in disney’s beauty and the beast: subverting traditional romance by transcending the animal-human paradox” critical studies in mass communication, 16(3): 350–69. the queendom (n.d.) “glossary of drag terms.” https://enterthequeendom.com/glossary/ (retrieved: 2019-03-10) verevis, constantine (2012) “bizarre love triangle: the creature trilogy” in perkins, claire & verevis, constantine (ed) film trilogies: new critical approaches, london: palgrave macmillan, 68–87 warner, marina (1994) from the beast to the blonde: on fairy tales and their tellers, london: chatto & windus wilde alison, crawshaw, gill & sheldon, alison (2018) “talking about the shape of water: three women dip their toes in” disability & society, 33(9): 1528–32. zipes, jack david (1983) fairy tales and the art of subversion: the classical genre for children and the process of civilization, london: heinemann https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/30/guillermo-del-toro-the-shape-of-water-is-a-much-needed-ode-to-the-other https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/30/guillermo-del-toro-the-shape-of-water-is-a-much-needed-ode-to-the-other https://io9.gizmodo.com/if-you-wanted-to-know-where-the-shape-of-waters-fishman-1821051561 https://io9.gizmodo.com/if-you-wanted-to-know-where-the-shape-of-waters-fishman-1821051561 https://io9.gizmodo.com/if-you-wanted-to-know-where-the-shape-of-waters-fishman-1821051561 https://io9.gizmodo.com/if-you-wanted-to-know-where-the-shape-of-waters-fishman-1821051561 https://enterthequeendom.com/glossary/ https://enterthequeendom.com/glossary/ https://enterthequeendom.com/glossary/ https://enterthequeendom.com/glossary/ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 149 media adamson, andrew & jenson, vicky (2001) shrek, motion picture, usa: dreamworks pictures allen, irwin (1964) voyage to the bottom of the sea, tv series, usa: 20th centuryfox television andersen, hans christian (2000) the little mermaid, project gutenberg: netlibrary arnold, jack (1954) the creature from the black lagoon, motion picture, usa: universal international pictures belyaev, alexander (1959) the amphibian, moscow: progress publishers burton, tim (1990) edward scissorhands, motion picture, usa: 20th century fox clements, ron & musker, john (1989) the little mermaid, motion picture, usa: walt disney pictures del toro, guillermo (2017) the shape of water, motion picture, usa: fox searchlight pictures gordon, stuart (2001) dagon, motion picture, spain: filmax international howard, ron (1984) splash, motion picture, usa: touchstone pictures koslow, ron (1987) beauty and the beast, tv series, usa: worldvision enterprises red hook studios (2016) darkest dungeon, video game, australia: merge games riot games (2009) league of legends, video game, usa: riot games trousdale, gary & wise, kirk (1991) beauty and the beast, motion picture, usa: walt disney pictures bionote: olle jilkén has a master of arts in gender studies and a bachelor of arts in arts management. his earlier research includes analysis of modern representations of illustrated mermen, the queer status of the swedish tv-show "melodifestivalen" and representation of queerness in ancient nordic mythology. his theoretical interests revolve around critical culture studies, queer theory, gender studies and critical masculinity studies. lina johansson is a master graduate from stockholm university. she earned two master’s degrees, the first in translation studies (with japanese as source language) and the second in gender studies. her research has mainly dealt with gender representation in japanese pop culture and media. recently, her focus has shifted towards the representation of minorities in japan. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 “on what terms can we speak?” refusal, resurgence and climate justice tony birch victoria university anthony.birch@vu.edu.au copyright©2018 tony birch. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: australia, along with nations and communities across the globe, faces the difficult task of formulating genuine responses to climate change. indigenous people in australia are at the forefront of the issue, both as communities majorly impacted on by climate change, and the custodians of knowledge, scientific and philosophical, able to assist other communities in working towards the health and protection of country. indigenous communities also have historical relationships with mining companies responsible for the mining of fossil fuels, and face a decision of allowing or refusing mining on traditional land, which may result in a material loss for these communities, while producing a long-term benefit on behalf of the planet. future relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people in australia will determine the success of initiatives in combating climate change. for this to occur, productive and equitable relationships will need to move beyond the symbolic gesture, beyond a form of recognition that does little more than maintain existing colonial relationships. in recent years, indigenous scholars, particularly from north america, have articulated ‘the politics of refusal’ as a strategy of empowering indigenous people and protecting country. in doing so, important questions arise: can we afford to refuse acts of engagement with ‘outsiders’ that may benefit country? or is the act of refusal a necessary step that may confront colonial society with the reality that it is colonialism itself that refuses change? keywords: recognition; refusal, protection of country introduction: “unite with us to fight this fight” in june 2017, the prominent indigenous intellectual and academic, professor marcia langton, delivered a keynote address to australian mining industry leaders. during her speech, langton was critical of those she described as “cashed-up green groups” and their mailto:anthony.birch@vu.edu.au coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 supporters who oppose the proposed adani coal mine planned for central queensland. (for a detailed summary of the size and scope of the proposed mine and its potential impact on indigenous land owners, the wangan and jagalingou group, see lyons, brigg and quiggin, 2017.) according to langton, opposition to what would be one of the world’s largest fossil fuel mines, one that would have a dramatic impact on carbon levels released into the atmosphere, was a clear example of the “environmental industry hijacking our [indigenous peoples] most serious concerns, and in their own way trying to return us to the pre-1992 era of terra nullius” (langton, quoted in murphy, 2017). several weeks earlier, warren mundine, a former representative on the commonwealth’s indigenous reference group, also criticised unnamed environmental activists who he claimed had repeatedly “attacked mining and infrastructure projects” to the disadvantage of indigenous people (mundine, 2017). neither langton’s or mundine’s criticisms would have surprised anyone with a passing interest in the interactions between indigenous communities, mining companies and environmental groups. the historic relationship has sometimes been a tense one, with conflict and division well documented. in a recent collection of essays discussing this history, key researchers in the area, eve vincent and timothy neale, while recognising such tensions, astutely examine the complexity of ‘green/black’ relationships in a thoughtful and informed manner, moving beyond a discussion of environmentalists being “crudely characterised” and “lampooned” by opponents, as langton and mundine had done (vincent and neale, 2016, p. 3). during langton’s lecture, she referred to indigenous communities in australia as the “collateral damage” of environmental activism, with opposition to the proposed adani mine her focus. her provocative stance was immediately countered by tony mcavoy sc, a legal representative the wangan and jagalingou people. (mcavoy is himself a member of the wangan and jagalingou community.) in a retort to langton’s remarks, he commented that “to suggest that the greens are puppet masters pulling the strings and we’re somehow puppets was wildly off the mark and disrespectful to the many families opposing the mine” (mcavoy, quoted in robertson, 2017). he concluded that langton was “very poorly informed” about the adani mine dispute, and supported the formal position of the wangan and jagalingou, who have repeatedly stated, in opposition to the mine, that they “have never consented to adani’s mine being constructed on our land” (wangan and jagalingou family council, 2017). the wangan and jagalingou have also refused to sign an indigenous land use agreement (ilua) with the queensland government and the adani corporation. without their written consent the mine cannot proceed, unless the queensland government is willing to suspend the native title act, which for some within the state labor party creates a political, if not an ethical dilemma. the traditional owners, who do not regard themselves as the “puppets” of any outside group, green or otherwise, have actively sought the support of environmental groups, in addition to calling for the assistance of indigenous and non-indigenous people across australia willing to commit themselves to protect the health of both country and the planet. adrian burragubba, a senior wangan and jagalingou man, has led the call for collective action: i’m going to convince all of our people to stand together as one people, one voice. and then we’re going to ask all australian people and people from all coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 over the world to stand with us, unite with us to fight this fight. (burragubba, 2015) just a voice invitations by indigenous land owners to support the protection of country is occurring during a political and social climate that will determine future relationships with country and each other. this is a major issue, not only for australia, but with consideration of the extent of the climate change challenges we face, the manner in which we engage with species, both human and non-human on a global scale. within australia, environmental challenges coincide with a shift in political, legal and social relationships between indigenous people and the australian nation. over recent years the commonwealth government, with the general bi-partisan support of the labor opposition, the greens party and independents within the parliament (with a few notable exceptions, including pauline hanson’s one nation party), has led an initiative directed towards holding a future referendum that may deliver formal recognition of indigenous people within the commonwealth constitution (for details, see http://www.recognise.org.au/about ). while the formal wording of any proposed statement within the constitution, and any subsequent legal implications, remain to be determined, in 2015 the commonwealth embarked on an expensive branding and education program in an effort to facilitate the success of a future “yes” vote amongst the wider population, in addition to attempting to gather support within indigenous communities. the second task remained a difficult one throughout the campaign, with many people within indigenous communities sceptical of the proposal due to its limited symbolic value. the view of many was summarised by the artist and theatre director rachel maza: i liken the recognise campaign and the push to make mention of indigenous and torres strait islander people in the constitution to the scenario of someone moving into your house, taking over, and kicking you out into the yard in the shed. after many years, maybe even several generations, they come out to the yard holding the contract that states their rights to the house that was once yours, and suggest that it’s only fair to include a sentence that says: ‘we acknowledge that you once lived there. there you go! now you’re recognised,’ they say, and they go back into your house and you go back to the shed (maza, quoted in kelly, 2017). the referendum council, established by the commonwealth, comprising both indigenous and non-indigenous members, travelled the country, meeting with communities and holding information forums to promote the initiative; a program since regarded as flawed from the outset: few bothered to ask why indigenous people would want symbolic recognition in what many regard as the founding document of the settler state—as opposed to the many practical measures, sadly lacking, that might actually improve aboriginal and torres strait islander human outcomes. if such a document was to acknowledge indigenous people, they were saying, it would http://www.recognise.org.au/about coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 have to do so in a way that would amplify—rather than merely note—the black voice. (daley, 2017) the recognise campaign culminated in a gathering of indigenous representatives from across australia at uluru in may 2017 (walhquist, 2017). the meeting produced the statement “from the heart” addressing the possible wording of constitutional recognition, limited indigenous parliamentary representation and the concept of a treaty, discussed at a broad level (see kelly, 2017, for a summary). several delegates at the gathering were critical of the final wording of what also became known as “the uluru statement” as they believed it did not provide a legitimate and authoritative role for indigenous people in parliament, nor address the demands for a treaty in a concrete and specific manner. nevertheless, the request for the establishment of a representative indigenous advisory group to the parliament and the noting of future discussions of a treaty, were enough to unsettle a government suddenly blindsided, having not foreseen or welcomed a conversation either about a treaty or limited parliamentary representation. (although a prominent member of the referendum council noel pearson has subsequently stated that he had discussed the prospect of parliamentary representation on several occasions with members of the government, including the prime minister malcolm turnbull. for details, see pearson, 2017.) soon after the uluru meeting, the formal recognition campaign came to a quiet and unheralded end in august 2017, absent of the fanfare accompanying its launch. the commonwealth subsequently rejected the advice provided to it by the very group it had established (the referendum council) to engage in a dialogue with indigenous communities to gauge how to best grant recognition. senior ministers within the government quickly dismissed the idea of limited representation to the parliament (rather than in it) as a “radical proposal” that the commonwealth could not support (viellaris, 2017). and while the government decision was received with apparent ‘shock’ by members of the referendum council, it did not surprise others versed in the limitations of what amounted to yet another symbolic colonial gesture: i’ve written previously about how ‘recognise’—for all the tens of millions of dollars spent on it by successive governments—was a white political construct, dreamed up by john howard (never a friend of indigenous australia) in an attempt to slither out of a political jam, that attached itself to successive governments. (daley, 2017) while ‘giving voice’ to indigenous people in the parliament might not seem such a radical proposal to some, opposition to idea by the commonwealth highlights an enduring inability of australian governments to engage with indigenous people beyond the symbolic, with governments preferring to maintain relationships limiting the rights and autonomy of indigenous people. noel pearson was a key member of the referendum council. in a recent essay, both a highly charged critique of the failed journey of the recognise campaign and an appraised self-reflection, pearson states that he is “astounded at the pragmatism and discipline i mustered in giving voice and life” to what he has repeatedly referred to as “the radical centre” (pearson, 2017a, p. 28). according to pearson’s own analysis, it was a strategy of failure: “reaching out to the political leadership of the right availed us nothing in the end. this is the bitter truth i learned in the past 17 years” (pearson, 2017a, p. 34). the flaws in pearson’s strategy and coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 conclusions are numerous, chiefly the belief and rhetoric that the political centre is radical. within australian political culture, such a strategy relies on a benign centre, with both the parliament and the political constituency across the country. it is where symbolism flourishes, where genuine challenges to the political and cultural status quo are not welcome. following the commonwealth’s decision to reject the council’s key recommendation, he (along with others) repeated the statement of the indigenous “elder statesman,” patrick dodson, that the government’s decision was a “kick in the guts for aboriginal australians” (pearson, 2017b). while he claimed the uluru statement rejected “mere symbolism,” pearson’s own analysis of the structure of an “indigenous voice to the parliament” appears to be, if not symbolic, severely limited in what it could achieve. the referendum council, having adopted a strategic approach of soft recognition were subsequently outmanoeuvred by more conservative forces in government, regardless of referendum council members, including pearson himself, attempting to highlight the limitations of their own definition of recognition: the proposal is for an indigenous advisory body, constitutionally mandated but legislatively implemented, to give indigenous people a non-binding say in our affairs. not a veto. just a voice … it would empower parliament to define the body, fully respecting parliamentary supremacy (pearson, 2017b, my italics). following the collapse of the recognise campaign and the body charged with delivering constitutional reform, the commonwealth, state and territory governments must now contend with more overtly self-determining strategies being adopted by indigenous groups, most particularly a proactive treaty campaign framed and led by victorian indigenous communities, initiated in 2016, running a counter political and legal narrative to the recognise discourse (see victorian traditional owner land justice group, 2016, for a detailed summary of the planned treaty process). it was an outcome of the success of the victorian grassroots campaign and a willingness of the victorian state government to begin negotiations on the form of treaty (for details, see victorian state government, 2017) that shifted the focus of national indigenous responses to the recognise campaign, to the surprise and disappointment of both the commonwealth government and the referendum council. during the formal life of recognition, direct activist campaigns were also being organised within indigenous communities, gathering widespread support, particularly amongst younger people. bypassing symbolic gestures, younger indigenous people were voicing their concerns about issues such as climate justice, the impact of climate change on the ability to protection of country, and the struggle for a genuine recognition of indigenous sovereignty in the form of land rights. the climate justice campaign was led by the climate justice group, seed indigenous youth climate network (see http://www.seedmob.org.au/ for details of the organisation and its programs). warriors of aboriginal resistance (war), inspired by the history of direct activism employed by indigenous groups in australia, and the more recent occupy and idle no more campaigns of north america (see https://www.facebook.com/warcollective/) reject the concept of recognition, with their activities contingent on the politically guiding statement, “sovereignty has never been ceded.” not surprisingly, one of war’s strategies, the http://www.seedmob.org.au/ https://www.facebook.com/warcollective/) coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 temporary shutting down of whole streets and blocks within major australian cities, has limited appeal for those in the wider non-indigenous community unable to countenance the true principle of self-determination. war’s direct-action strategy is a challenge to those within australian society more concerned with image than substance. war also challenged the central tenet of the recognition campaign. it not only opposed the recognise charter. war also refused to be recognised. refusal and reciprocity the language of recognition within australia has coincided with a global critique of the colonial baggage and psyche framing both the term and its supporting narrative. in a recent special issue of the academic journal postcolonial studies, the editors introduced the collection of essays with the statement that “recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts” (balaton-chrimes and stead, 2017, p. 1). while the genesis of the language and critique of recognition can be traced to the work such scholars as charles taylor in the 1990s, via franz fanon’s seminal black skin, white mask, published in 1967, contemporary critiques have been led by indigenous scholars from north america, such as audra simpson (her work appears in the same postcolonial studies issue) and glen sean coulthard, whose book red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition appears to be compulsory reading on the subject (coulthard, 2014). in a provocative analysis of the politics or recognition recognisable to indigenous people in australia, audra simpson positions contemporary notions of recognition offered by settler-colonial governments as integrally linked to past “colonial contexts [that] enforced indigenous dispossession and then, granted freedom through the legal tricks of consent and citizenship” (simpson, 2017, p. 20). equally familiar to indigenous people in australia is the analysis provided by lara fullenwieder (in the same edition of the journal), commentating on a comparable situation in canada. fullenwieder argues that having positioned “recognition as a policy strategy for governing settler/indigenous relations,” the canadian national government, led by prime minister justin trudeau, is attempting to “evade central contestations regarding land, autonomy, and indigenous sovereignty,” preferring an orchestrated and benign shift “beyond the violence of the frontier” (fullenwieder, 2017, p. 37), absent of the need for responsibility for ongoing impacts of colonisation on first nations people. glen coulthard’s demand for a concerted refusal of colonial/governmental recognition is not simply a negative or static example of the act of refusing. he is concerned with the potential and political revitalisation contained within what he defines as first nations “resurgence,” being the outcome of what he refers to as “the politics of the act [of refusal]”; an act of necessity in order to restore knowledge eroded through the ongoing settler-colonial project of “undermining indigenous intellectual development through cultural assimilation and the violent separation of indigenous peoples from our sources of knowledge and strength—the land” (wildcat, mcdonald, irlbacher-fox and coulthard, 2014, p. i). coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 in an interview following the publication of red skin, white masks, coulthard explained the politics of refusal as “enacting indigenous alternatives [that] on the ground will bring us into productive confrontation with the colonial structures of exploitation and domination” (coulthard, quoted in interview with gardner and clancy, 2017, my italics). for coulthard, and for many indigenous people globally, this productive confrontation is necessary if we are to overcome the stubborn adherence to a continuation of colonial domination, embedded in the ideology of recognition itself: instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the ideal of reciprocity or mutual recognition, the politics of recognition in its contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend. (coulthard, 2014, p. 3, original italics) land as pedagogy we know that climate change poses a grave threat to the livelihood and health of country. it is a crisis impacting severely on global indigenous nations and poorer communities more generally. to face the global crisis of climate change we require collective, collaborative, and equitable strategies of achievement. we desperately need people to work productively together. therefore, is the politics of refusal a strategy we can afford? sarah hunt, discussing the act of indigenous refusal in relation to both the value of knowledge exchange and the pragmatism that may be required by indigenous communities and individuals negotiating change with colonial power, addresses the pragmatism of refusal: it does not seem that outright rejection of all forms of recognition are politically viable … if indigenous sovereignty can only be attained through self-affirmation, how do we reconcile the inclusion of indigenous knowledge, and ourselves as indigenous people, in these dominant institutions? (hunt, 2014, p. 29) while hunt’s point is vital in considerations of contemporary and future relations with the colonial state, coulthard’s analysis of the potential of indigenous resurgence as an outcome of the act of refusal does not begin and end with self-affirmation. in relation to climate change and the collective challenges we face, coulthard’s view is key to the mature and ethical and shift required to both recognise the role exercised by colonialism in the destruction of people and country historically, and a need to begin the restorative processes required to protect country and facilitate climate justice. he articulates the persuasive argument that through the refusal of the offer of repeated gestures of symbolism, absent of a genuine tangible change in indigenous/settler-colonial relationships, an opportunity arises, focusing our attention where it is most needed: the theory and practice of anticolonialism … is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in a material sense, but also deeply informed by coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations. (coulthard, 2014, p. 13, original italics) absent of this focus, as far as coulthard is concerned, the hollow colonial gesture will continue to prevail. with the climate crisis in mind, it is a gesture we can no longer afford. jason w. moore offers a model of ethical engagement similar to that presented by coulthard. moore, responsible for the term “capitalocene” as a means of countering the dominant anthropocene thesis, regards capitalism, and its rise from the beginning of the industrial revolution (see malm, 2016, for a discussion of this history) as a major contributor to the current climate change crisis. as a direct result of climate injustices, he has argued for a fundamental shift in relations between indigenous nations, the colonial state and global corporations based on a concept of “reparations ecology,” which moore regards as “fundamental to remembering the violence and inequality of modernity … the question of justice and sustainability are deeper than interlinked, they are intimate” (moore, interview with velednitsky, 2017). with moore’s and coulthard’s provocations in mind, we need to address the concept of justice and reparations within australia, commencing with developing equitable and respectful relationships between indigenous people and non-indigenous australia. the protection of country will become a precarious venture if we do not do this. while researchers and policy makers agree that indigenous communities will be severely impacted upon by climate change, until recently indigenous people have not been duly considered, either as the victims of climatic disasters, such as extreme and unpredictable weather events, or, based on traditional knowledge and experience, the providers of insights in how the challenges of climate change may be met (see birch, 2016, for details). for the exchange of knowledge around ecological maintenance to be rendered equitable, dialogues and communities of trust must be developed. we require fresh and meaningful approaches to indigenous/non-indigenous relationships that bypass the symbolic gesture in favour of the tangible and grounded, embedded in country, articulated no more pointedly than in leanne betasamosake simpson’s comment “the land must again become the pedagogy” (simpson, 2014, p. 14, original italics). for simpson, as with coulthard, the recognition of land itself as our teacher is a key stepping-stone towards indigenous resurgence: a resurgence of indigenous political cultures, governances and nationbuilding requires generations of indigenous peoples to grow up intimately and strongly connected to our homelands, immersed in our languages and spiritualties. (simpson, 2014, p. 1) whose bones do we walk on? the potential for enriched connections, producing outcomes of common good—being the protection of country—remain hamstrung by both our colonial past and the contemporary failure to attend to the potential of equitable recognition. we may rightly question whether it is possible for a colonial society such as australia, one that applies symbolic gestures as a masking agent, to engage with indigenous people and country in a substantive way. zoe todd, an indigenous scholar from canada, believes that in order to coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 address the global environmental situation we face, whether it be a world increasingly impacted on by chaotic weather events, or a realisation that we are witnessing the birth of a “new epoch,” the anthropocene (contested or not), “there are other stories that could be told” beyond those of the dominant culture (todd, 2015, p. 244). and yet todd remains cautious about the sharing of indigenous knowledge, through narrative, with a society yet to fully comprehend storytelling as a form of sovereign knowledge; a society yet to address the fundamental question, “whose bones are ground into the earth we walk on” (cree legal scholar, tracey lindberg, quoted in todd, 2017). many indigenous thinkers and protectors of country, while valuing the strength of stories that sustain our engagement with country, remain equally concerned about the issue of sharing knowledge and its abuse. alexis wright, the indigenous intellectual and writer, discussing both the misappropriation of indigenous stories by the colonial nation and the production of fictitious counter narratives constructed to damage indigenous people and country both, has recently asked, “what happens when you tell someone else’s story” and what happens when you are silenced by a society that both covets your own story and invents others to advance its own power? we do not get much of a chance to say what is right or wrong about the stories told on our behalf—which stories are told or how they are told. it just happens, and we try to deal with the fallout (wright, 2016). the potential for what deborah bird rose discusses as an equitable relationship or “dialogue” (as opposed to integration) between indigenous and non-indigenous people (rose, 2015) is repeatedly hampered by the realities of the unfinished business of colonial history and its contemporary manifestations. and yet, if there is cause for optimism, it may be located in the spirit of generosity offered by indigenous people inviting others to join with them in valuing and caring for country through cultural practice and exchange. in accordance with the strategy adopted by the wangan and jagalingou efforts to halt the proposed adani mine, other indigenous communities and individuals across australia actively seek a more productive relationship with ‘outsiders’ with regard to both the protection of land and knowledge of country more generally. teila watson, a birra gubba and kungalu woman, writes that for country to be adequately cared for and protected, “white australia” must invest in a “black future” that formally recognises indigenous culture and law (watson, 2017). in parts of australia, innovative relationships are being forged along such lines; connections that move beyond the short-term and strategic to the more sustained, long-term and philosophical. miriamrose ungunmerr-baumann, a traditional woman living outside of alice springs, regularly invites non-indigenous australians to begin an engagement of country invested in patience, meditation and what she refers to as “deep listening” to the land, or “dadirri,” an “indigenous practice her people use to find out who they really are, their purpose and where they are going” (kohn, 2016. n.pag.). the concept of dadirri requires a ‘deeper’ understanding of country by non-indigenous people. the generosity of ungunmerr-baumann’s offer to participate in learning from country cannot be underestimated. hers is a bold gesture within a socio/political climate of friction, suspicion and occasionally, open hostility. similarly, darren perry, the chair of the murray lower darling rivers indigenous nations, working alongside indigenous coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 and non-indigenous groups in an effort to protect the health of waterways of country across regional new south wales, seeks wide-ranging partnerships with people willing to recognise the knowledge of country and deep history held within the forty-six indigenous groups his organisation represents: we’re sovereign first nations and we’ve been managers of water resources within our traditional country for many thousands of generations, so it goes without saying we should be partners not stakeholders in water management in this country. (darren perry, quoted in winter, 2015) the invitations offered by indigenous people to participate in the protection of country could not be happening at a more vital time. country is suffering on a global scale as a result of past colonial land management practices and a contemporary reliance on those practices within both mining and agricultural industries. and while climate change itself might not be best described as a colonial event, it is clearly a phenomenon created to some extent by the combined forces of colonial expansion, the industrial revolution and an increased reliance on the burning of fossil fuels (malm, 2016). zoe todd recently commented that in her “short lifetime” she has seen “the waterways of my home province deteriorate as intense oil and gas activity, urban development, agricultural demands, and climate change tighten” (todd, 2017). she concludes that new and innovative formations between people and communities are necessary, not only due to the catastrophic environmental changes she has witnessed, but with the knowledge that the manner in which we now proceed as a global community will be judged by those who have gone before us. todd’s telling statement, that “the ancestors [will] bear witness to our deliberations,” provides us with both a warning and an opportunity to rectify our relationship to country and each other (todd, 2017). the balance we require when confronting the environmental challenges of our times must combine aspects of the spiritual and intellectual practices of indigenous thinkers and land protectors such as miriam-rose ungunmerr-baumann, alongside a transformative self-critique of colonial institutions and practices at odds with our duty to revive the health of the planet: using, respecting, and making space for indigenous knowledge constitutes a fundamental challenge to power relations in whatever context it operates. indigenous knowledge has transformative potential with respect to confronting settler colonial norms within institutions in which it is used. (irlbacher-fox, 2014, p. 148) a great deal is at stake for indigenous peoples considering entering into new relationships with colonial society. our collective first steps are generally understandably tentative but potentially invaluable. stephanie irlbacher-fox makes an instructive point that strategic and mutually beneficial relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people— in the opposition of a fossil fuel mine, for instance—need not be overburdened with the objective of establishing “permanence” or the immediate “decolonizing of the [colonial] self.” she reminds us that “often alliances are transitory, cemented by mutual selfinterest” (irlbacher-fox, 2014, p. 151). she argues that any new relationship can work more productively with the realisation of its limitations in mind. relationships initially structured to be temporal and strategic in nature do offer the potential of evolution, a more coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 binding relationship that may occur at an unspecified future date. simone bignall raises this idea in a discussion on activism and political collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous people. hers is a deliberately fluid and speculative notion, but one that nonetheless presents us with an opportunity for a valued and sustained shift: i introduce the term ‘excolonial’ (‘exit-from-colonialism’) to designate an ideally decolonised form of future community that is (perpetually) ‘yet to come’ … i would use ‘ex’ to describe a former relationship, which remains indelible and shaping part of my history but with which i am no longer entangled in a defining manner. (bignall, 2014, p. 241) conclusion: the ecological imagination so, how might we “exit” from colonialism and refuse the limitations of recognition while not turning away from each other at a time in our history when we can least afford to do so? dwayne donald, an indigenous scholar from canada has been dealing with this question for some years. with regard to the potential for conversations and connections that might lead to productive change, he believes that “we’re frequently missing each other,” making fruitful dialogue hardly possible. the cause of what he refers to as “disconnection” is clear: “i see colonialism as an extended process of denying relationships” (donald, 2011). interestingly, for donald, a politics of refusal is embedded within the history of colonialism itself. his challenge to us is that we refuse colonialism’s stubborn and arrogant act of refusing its own dismantlement, and rather, begin the important archaeological work of “excavating the colonial terrain:” decolonisation can only occur when we face each other across these historic divides … when we deconstruct the past we share, and begin to imagine a different relationship, ethical and respectful. (donald, 2011) the “different relationship” that might be achieved, for donald, may be located in modes of thought and action that he refers to as “ethical relationality,” addressing the reflection “who you are, where you come from,” and secondly, engaging in the “enactment of ecological imagination” that helps determine and answer the “who” and “where:” paying attention to the webs and relationships that you’re enmeshed in—depending on where you live … all those things that give us life, all the things that we depend on, as well as the entities that we relate to … we depend on those relationships for survival. (donald, 2011) zoe todd calls for a relationship to country similar to donald’s (as many indigenous intellectuals do). she asks that we “speak about indigenous people’s relationships to land, water, law, language, history, and futures” (todd, 2017). our relationships, therefore, to non-human species, including plants, raises ethical questions for all involved in issues of indigenous rights, climate justice and environmental protection. for instance, who speaks for and on behalf of non-human species? or rather, how do we speak with the non-human? does the act of refusal of the colonial gesture by humans, impact negatively on nonhuman species? or does refusal, enacted with the level of cultural and political coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 sophistication with which glen coulthard articulates it, hold the potential for deeper, more permanent and equitable relationships for all, forged of action rather than symbolism? the question cannot be answered here. and perhaps it is not a question to be answered at all, but rather serve as a reminder of the challenging work to be done that will both protect country and dismantle the framework of global colonisation. it is worth closing with a story of north america’s pawnee nation, retold by the first nations scholar and activist, winona laduke. the pawnee had been driven from sections of their own land, which had been incorporated into the state of nebraska. the pawnee were forced to move to oklahoma. they took many of their sacred vegetables seeds with them. the seeds failed to adapt to the soils in oklahoma, on what was for the pawnee and the seeds both, foreign land. their precious seed bank dwindled. many years later, settlercolonial communities back in nebraska heard about what happened to the seeds. contact was made and the pawnee were asked if they wanted to return some seeds to home soil for planting. after some discussion, and seemingly some anguish (according to laduke), the seeds were sent home, where they flourished. vegetables grew and the seed bank itself was replenished. laduke’s own response to the pawnee story is both provocative, in a generous manner, and instructive. it is also helpful when considering the type of relationships that will help us move forward and protect country. she concludes that the exchange of the seeds and the valuable outcome resulted from the exchange was an act of both “apology and redemption” on the part of the settler community, based on their actions above and beyond symbolism. it is only through such actions that forgiveness, subsequently offered by the pawnee, was possible. laduke concludes the story with a remarkable comment, which is as challenging as it is exhilarating. her reasoning for the healthy outcome of the planting of seeds is that “the seeds remembered the land they came from … corn is more than a food. it is a history” (laduke, 2011). corn does not carry a history. it is a history. laduke also believes that “corn in itself, needs relationships to humans” in order to survive. to become truly invested in the protection of country, therefore, we must become responsible for the health and survival of the non-human. while we could sensibly argue that our own survival ultimately depends on accepting this view, as both indigenous knowledge and the science of ecology realise, we should think beyond or rather before survival as a primary motivation for acceptance of this realisation. we must also understand the act of reciprocity as not one that exists only between human societies. reciprocity, in its fullest sense entails “systems of creating and maintaining useful knowledge of how humans can be good stewards of the earth” (chief, daigle, lynn and whyte, 2014, p. 163). therefore, what we choose to truly recognise or refuse is a difficult, necessary and powerful choice. references balaton-chrimes, s., and stead, v. 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(2017). “adani ‘investment’ decision meaningless without indigenous consent.” retrieved from http://wanganjanjalingou.com.au/adani-investment-decision-meaningless-withoutindigenous-consent/. watson, t. (2017). “indigenous knowledge systems can help solve the problems of climate change’. the guardian, 2 june. wildcat, m., mcdonald, m., irlbacher-fox, s., and coulthard, g. (2014). “learning from the land: indigenous land based pedagogy and decolonization”. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, vol. 3, (3), pp. i-xv. winter, c. (2015). “indigenous groups call for a new water partnership with government on the murray-darling basin system.” sa country hour. australian broadcasting commission. https://culanth.org/pages/contributing-editors http://wanganjanjalingou.com.au/adani-investment-decision-meaningless-without-indigenous-consent/ http://wanganjanjalingou.com.au/adani-investment-decision-meaningless-without-indigenous-consent/ coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 wright, a. (2016). “what happens when you tell someone else’s story?” meanjin, summer, retrieved from https://meanjin.com.au/essays/what-happens-when-youtell-somebody-elses-story/. tony birch is a professorial research fellow in the moondani balluk academic centre at victoria university in melbourne. his research is centrally concerned with climate justice, protection of country and indigenous ecological knowledge. birch publishes academic research in the areas of indigenous history, current debates on climate change and environmental activism. he is also a widely published fiction writer. his short story collections and novels have won numerous awards, including the victorian premier’s literary award in 2017, and the patrick white literary prize in the same year. https://meanjin.com.au/essays/what-happens-when-you-tell-somebody-elses-story/ https://meanjin.com.au/essays/what-happens-when-you-tell-somebody-elses-story/ coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 commonwealth literature: an uncommon literary inheritance satendra nandan satendra.nandan@gmail.com copyright© 2020 satendra nandan. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: in this piece professor nandan writes about his journey through commonwealth literature for the past fifty years and his remarkable voyages of literary discoveries. keywords: commonwealth literature, fiji, indian diaspora geoff davis had asked me of my memories of aclals for a book project he was contemplating writing. i sent him a version of this piece. he had replied: i’ve just read your fascinating and moving aclals piece. many thanks…i wonder how many of the rest of us have seen their lives changed so radically by commonwealth literature. then i met him in ljubljana, slovakia, last july 2018 for the cisle (the centre for the international study of literatures in english) conference. i gave my keynote paper on the theme of the conference: transcending borders: refugees. we’d a drink or two with russell mcdougall and his companions. and shared breakfasts, lunches and dinners. as ever he was full of conviviality and warm friendship. my last trip with him was on a bus journey to and from lake bed. he was talking to a friend on the back seat and planning another trip to india. his enthusiastic voice still rings in my mind. i returned to canberra with jyoti. then we heard of his sudden death. my literary readings in english began with a new zealand teacher named mr frederick earnest joyce. mr joyce had come to fiji from dunedin. he taught me for six months in lautoka after i’d completed the ubiquitous senior cambridge examination in the colonies from a school in nadi named after swami vivekananda, the fiery hindu monk born in 19th century british-bengali india. at vivekananda i read a few texts for the ‘literature’ paper prescribed for the senior cambridge. these were charles dickens’ a tale of two cities, shakespeare’s julius caesar and a few selected poems of tennyson including ‘the lotus-eaters’ but not ‘ulysses’. passing the examination was paramount for us as we dozed under avocado trees. we began with 88 in the class under a tin-shed but only a few survived to pass the mailto:satendra.nandan@gmail.com coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 examination. a ‘fail’ in english meant you failed the entire exam and your four years’ study was not recognized in any certified form and you were likely to end up as a canecutter on your father’s ten-acre farm, run for the csr company of australia. sugar often became bitter for the descendants of the ‘girmit’, indentured, people. i entered my secondary school from a home that had not a single english book; only my mother read a lot of hindi magazines from india and a few indian detective novels in hindi supplied by a distant relative who lived in lautoka town and sold jewelry to rustic women. we called him mama lal singh. he was possibly the best read man i’d met in my childhood. after a sumptuous lunch, prepared by my mother, he would show us the parcel of books with colourful covers with dramatic, lurid pictures of murderous men, lotus-breasted women and a hooded detective, doubtless influenced by bollywood. he’d leave one detective novel for my mother to read, to be collected on his next visit, after another lunch. who said there’s nothing like a ‘free lunch’? but before i started reading english, i’d done desultory readings in hindi of the two indian epics, the ramayana and the mahabharata. they were part of our daily evening readings. the stories from the ramayana were enacted annually for a fortnight on the ramlila grounds of the village of votualevu. hanuman, the monkey brigadier-general, was my favourite character with a red swishing tail endless like the nadi river. pundit rajbali’s voice flashed and thundered in the darkening sky of my island-village in the sun as he bestrode the ramlila grounds in his resplendent white safa, turban, and dhoti. pundit’s memory was phenomenal and he could recite the ramayana story like a waterfall in the himalayas. only now i’m beginning to understand the richness of that oral tradition that men and women like rajbali pundit had carried across the dark waters of the seven seas. the story of rama and sita was the story most intimately felt in the hearts of my ancestors, 10,000 miles from their unmarked villages found on no maps. they were exiled souls farther away from sri lanka. for millennia my ancestors were illiterate but richly endowed in oral folklores and fabulous fables full of moral teachings. they carried the epics across the black waters wrapped in their memories. they were uprooted and transported to fiji from the gangetic plains in sailing ships. where their ancestors came from, i’ve no idea. but their unnumbered rites and rituals dominated their lives in a caste-ridden habitus. they lived in mud-huts, worshipping stone-images, and grew in a sea of mythology sanctioned by mantras for every act, especially birth, marriage and death. especially death: the corpses and the wilted flowers were consigned into the sacred waters of a river or a stream and floated away towards the sea. sometimes in a lake where lotus and water lilies flourished. yet they had never seen an island, a sea-wave or a seashore. but all water flows towards the indivisible ocean. so did my girmit grandparents with incredible physical strength in their legs and hands. soon after slavery was officially abolished on paper in 1833, these peasants became indentured laborers in many parts of mainly the british empire. they carried in their tattered gathries, bundles, their meagre utensils and in their mind many rituals by which they worshipped, lived, loved, labored, and died. most were cremated by the sea-shores; some were buried on the gashed hills in coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 the villages where they had built their fragile and flammable bures, thatched native huts, in the sun. we were afraid of their ghosts whistling in the wind at the midnight hour. theirs was a long journey--in fact, the longest in fiji’s history. now their children’s children continue to other shores among other peoples, plane-load by plane-load. * the last british crown colony to be so populated by such migrants was fiji--an archipelago of 333 islands and islets in the south pacific. my indentured grandparents were transported to fiji via calcutta port on sailing ships to work on the sugar plantations owned by the csr company of australia at a time when indians were scarcely allowed to enter australia. ironically peasant indians were uprooted from 10, 000 miles away from their ancient land to come and protect the fijian way of life from disintegrating--a unique fragment in imperial history? australia and new zealand were our ‘civilized’ neighbours but ‘dusky indians’ were not allowed to settle in either country. from 1879-1920, 60,939 men, women and children were brought to fiji in 87 ships. most of these people were illiterate and had signed their ‘girmit’, a pidgin distortion of the word ‘agreement’. they had imprinted their left thumbmark on a piece of paper at calcutta depot before embarking on their unknown voyage across the dark waters into the south seas. many thought ‘phijee’ was in the bay of bengal. all was legal, if not quite ethical. subsequently labourers were indentured from madras. indenture was a step away from slavery with an expiry date: after ten years, they were entitled to a ‘free passage’ back to their lost homes. many committed suicide in their isolation and loneliness and back-breaking work on the plantations; some returned to their villages but felt alienated by the oppressive caste considerations; most, however, remained in the islands, in their new thatched homes. and in the ‘lines’. years later, my third collection of poems was titled lines across black waters, launched by professor bruce bennett at the international word festival in canberra. i also published another volume, the loneliness of islands, launched in fiji by the then vicepresident of fiji, ratu joni madraiwiwi. many of the pieces in the two volumes are about the grim girmit life of the girmityas. some old men and women were put in old people’s homes and died decrepit and destitute. they had arrived in fiji as young men and women. life was hard and the labour grinding with ‘coolumbers’, overseers, from white australia. and they exercised their authority through whips and indian sirdars and village headmen. many thought they’d little culture and belonged really only to agriculture. out of this experience come the unsettling and compelling narratives of a writer like vidia naipaul. girmit is integral to his submerged area of darkness and in his writings one can perceive the psychic dislocation of his ancestors, giving them a hauntingly human face and accents of exile. no-one has explored this indian experience with more unsentimental honesty of bitter irony than v s naipaul, the literary nobel-laureate, one of the descendants of the indentured, from trinidad. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 * somehow i passed my senior cambridge examination--the first person in my family to do so; in fact i was the first person in the history of my ancestry to enter a secondary school; and to read a book in english. to think of it today is a miracle of a kind--we now have three phds in english in my immediate family! and all three in commonwealth literature. but this was a common narrative thread of education in the girmit children of my generation, born during the second world war. we, in fiji, escaped the wounds and horrors of that war. but the war changed the world and the waves touched our island shores in the south pacific, including the magnificent mahatma mohandas gandhi’s struggle for a profoundly flawed freedom on the subcontinent. it was at natabua school that mr joyce introduced me to a few selected poems of william wordsworth and gerard manley hopkins and the novels of james joyce and virginia wolfe. more importantly, perhaps, he started a school magazine in which i contributed a few articles of my school experience. living in the hostel was an experience for me-i’d not known such luxury when i walked barefoot for miles to my primary and secondary schools. until the age of 18, when i successfully completed the senior cambridge, i’d no shoes. years later i wrote a short story ‘a pair of black shoes’--the most popular short story in fiji secondary school english syllabus for the past forty-five years. a generation has grown up reading it. i’m known by it more than a score of books i’ve authored and edited. how the story came to me is a tale in itself. it was published in an australian magazine hemisphere and i was paid $80 for it. hemisphere was the cultural organ of the australian department of foreign affairs where today two of my children work. when i was in natabua for two terms, mr joyce must have glimpsed something in me. he gave me books to read. he even awarded me the joyce prize for literature in form vi. in the late 50s there were few opportunities for the descendants of indentured indians. becoming taxi-drivers or being a primary school teacher was the ambition of most children of my village. most ended as cane-cutters, farmers and tractor drivers. it so happened the government of india had a few iccr scholarships for the third world children, especially of indian indentured origin. a couple were given to fiji. i sent in halffilled forms, given to me by a class-mate, not expecting to hear from anyone. but because of my senior cambridge exam results, i was asked to attend an interview in suva, the capital of fiji. i’d never been there. city lights were a distant dream. but i did go for the interview, accompanied by mithai lal, our tractor driver in the flourishing pineapple fields of lega lega, next to nadi international airport where i grazed my nani’s holy cow lali. i’ve described this in my autobiography requiem for a rainbow: a fijian indian story (2001), launched at the 11th aclals conference in canberra by the then shadow minister for aboriginal affairs, mr bob mcmullan. and at the india international centre, coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 new delhi, by my intellectually energetic friend, professor seumas miller at a conference he organized on ‘terrorism’. as luck would have it, i got one of the awards to travel to india the following year. the whole village and district was excited about it as mr shiv nandan’s son was going to delhi to be educated by pandit nehru, the first prime minister of free india! my humble father got his bowl of grog at every home and shop he visited with this ‘gret noos’. * in june 1958 i flew from a nondescript nadi airport to sydney by the panam flight. the motley crowd which came to bid me goodbye was the largest seen at that airport created in the year 1939 by the nz airforce. and the place i embarked the aircraft was the very ground on which my holy cow lali had grazed with a horse named charlie. so began a new journey to an ancient land about which i’d vaguely read in the great indian epics and heard in innumerable ceremonies performed in my little village on a south sea island. mythical india was part of my knowledge of the subcontinent. our grandparents didn’t talk of their ‘mulk’, homeland, that they had left behind. this great silence still remains inarticulated, buried in their ashes of cremation. but the turbulent realities of india hardly mattered to us--we’d no newspapers to read or radio to listen to. and when we got the radio, it was full of bollywood songs which affected us all with its romance and illusions. i hardly saw any films as we had to walk six miles to the nadi theatre and return after midnight. we grew up without being aware of the epic struggles of freedom on the indian soil. even partition was a dark and bloody fog that had descended over the mythological landscape of my mind. only the sad songs we hummed as we worked and walked. but india was more familiar to me than australia, our closest and largest neighbour. even today fiji is barely four hours from sydney; delhi almost four times: the distance in time and several civilizations in between. fiji people have a special bond with india pilgrimages go annually, planeload by planeload. i believe no place in the indian diaspora has this depth of feeling for india as the descendants of indian indentured labourers of fiji. many members of my family have visited places in india several times; and a few studied in delhi, bombay, bhopal and madras. * i arrived in delhi’s indian summer: it was an oven and a loo, a hot wind, blew across an old city where we lived in a hostel in the remnants and ruins of several cities with squirrels scampering over broken rocks and kites flying in a dusty sky. one morning a few of us were taken to meet pandit nehru. i was in a crowd of strangers from many parts of the postcolonial world where indian peasants were taken to work mainly on the sugarcane plantations or to build railway lines: to mauritius and fiji, with trinidad, guyana, malayasia, surinam, south africa, uganda, kenya, among other colonies. pandit nehru was the first prime minister i met in my life. later i met a few more but none measured up to his stature. it was in delhi that i made some of my closest friends: coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 rajinder, sudhir, deepak, chander, pradeep, ramesh and rupin desai. but it was in leeds, in the 1970s, that i read jawaharlal nehru’s wonderful books. in delhi university’s hons english course with 8 papers, we began with the plays of shakespeare and concluded with the poems of tennyson. no indian writer was ever mentioned by any of the lecturers. writers like mulk raj anand, raja rao, r k narayan, nirad chudhauri, nehru, gandhi were alien to the syllabus in the english courses. after i completed my ba hons in english, i was sent to the central institute of education, next to miranda house. my classmate was jyoti and we fell in love. i’ve no idea how i passed my b ed but i did begin writing poetry of a kind. love makes you do wondrous things and write love poems with a melancholy tone. to be beloved is a gift. we trained to be teachers of english. and i left delhi and jyoti for fiji only to return after a year. jyoti and i married in 1963. our son rohan, now a diplomat in dfat, was born in new delhi in 1964. during 1963-65 i trained as a journalist on the statesman, new delhi, and subsequently taught at india’s two famous public schools, delhi and the doon. vikram seth was one of my students at doon--i wrote about these experiences in a long essay for unfinished journeys: india file from canberra, edited by debjani ganguly and kavita nandan, and published in canberra , marking the 50th anniversary of indian independence. * during my four year stay in delhi university, i met only two writers in english: dom moraes and ved mehta. they were visiting india under the aegis of the british council. the poet had deep, drunken eyes; the prose writer seemed blind from childhood. but they were friends and, years later, i was to read their many delightful books. and at the hyderabad aclals i paid a special tribute to the late dom moraes. otherwise even indian writers were seldom invited to the college. nirad chaudhuri lived a few miles away from our college but i didn’t hear about him until i went to leeds. and he had published, in 1951, ‘probably the greatest autobiography written in the english language in the twentieth century’, the autobiography of an unknown indian. it’s only at the university of leeds in 1971 that i began reading commonwealth literature. arthur ravenscroft had introduced a special masters in commonwealth literature. and i was taught by cdn and william walsh. william walsh became the first professor of commonwealth literature in the world; cdn, c d narasimhaih from mysore, was the great guru of indian writing in english, with f r leavis’s great tradition in his mind. with him, i met f r leavis one evening in leeds, after the latter’s lecture on milton’s paradise lost. but it was in london, in the winter of december 1971, after the completion of a masters in linguistics and english language teaching, that i read two novels of patrick white remaindered in a bin in foyles bookshop. the tree of man and voss i read while looking after my three children in a hotel called cambridge run by a pakistani. my commonwealth fellowship was extended by another year to study commonwealth literature at leeds. this was my sea-changing literary experience. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 * my small world has been most significantly shaped by commonwealth literature which i’d discovered tentatively in a remarkable moment of serendipity in the newly created usp library. in my keynote paper at the 11th aclals triennial conference in kuala lumpur in 1998, i tried to capture a bit of the magic of ‘commonwealth lit’ in my talk titled ‘literature and politics, language and freedom: a commonwealth inheritance’, published in sharing a commonwealth edited by c s lim, et al, and published in 2001. what has commonwealth literature meant to me? to some there’s no literature called commonwealth literature. for me, however, it’s been a whole universe, new and refreshing and life shaping. it’s through commonwealth lit that i began writing and reading world literatures in english with a few translations. reading the novels of patrick white and vidia naipaul has been both exhilarating and enlightening. they remain my favourite novelists from two different backgrounds, poles apart. and one consequence is that i’m in canberra today where my wife jyoti and my younger daughter kavita are scholars and teachers in commonwealth literature. and my four grandchildren are all born in canberra. i would not have come to canberra if i’d not read patrick white’s voss and written an essay on the voss-laura relationship in the course taught by william walsh. the tree of man, not unlike a house for mr biswas, remains my favourite australian novel. in leeds i also wrote a masters dissertation on the ‘immigrant experience’ in v s naipaul’s writings. i’d seen him on the bbc in september 1970 when he had won the booker prize for in a free state: a novel in fragments with an underlying unifying theme of human displacement that’s become so urgent and heart-rending today. he was being astutely interviewed by alastair niven who was to become a dear friend later. indeed as i’m scribbling these words, i’m preparing a keynote paper i’m scheduled to give in ljubljana, slovenia, at a cisle conference in july; alastair, too, will be there. both jyoti and i’ll be going. jyoti will be giving her paper on patrick white. my paper on ‘refugees’ explores three literary texts: king lear, go, went, gone by jenny erpenbeck, and riders in the chariot by patrick white. it concludes with my piece ‘a christmas story’. i’ll also be launching two of my books recently published, across the seven seas (poems) and dispatches from distant shores (essays) .cisle has been a great tributary for me flowing towards the commonwealth ocean. * so from leeds i came to the anu via usp. bob brissenden , who had done his doctoral studies at leeds, became my delightful supervisor. a d hope, bob brissenden, david campbell, taught me about aussie wines at the generous staff club. i spent three and half years of my happiest student life here with my young family, reading, researching and a bit of writing too. it was a rich orchard--i met ian donaldson, who became a life-long friend; and john hardy and w s ramson. ian was the foundation director of the humanities research centre, established at the anu; in 1987 december, it was ian’s coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 letter of invitation to hrc that got me out of the clutches of a coup colonel. i’m still associated with hrc. but that is another story of almost another time. among the post-graduate students at the anu my companions were diana brydon, john docker, bill ashcroft, frances devlin-glass and michael cotter. it was a rich harvest of friendships, some of these have lasted almost fifty years now. and a few have made notable contributions to commonwealth-postcolonial literary studies, both in theory and practice. * when i returned to fiji, politics became part of my roller-coaster journeys, from 19781987. but commonwealth literature sustained me because i’d read wole soyinka, chinua achebe, vidia naipaul, wilson harris, nadine gordimer, gandhi and nehru’s writings. and when things became difficult for me, after the two racist coups in 1987, i returned to canberra and taught here for 17 years, and lived on the anu campus for four years in judith wright’s corner of liversidge street, next to the university house, almost on the edge of lake walter burley griffin. as fate would have it, walter burley griffin, who originally designed canberra, and died in lucknow in 1937, is buried not far from the antique villages from which my grandparents were transported to fiji as indentured labourers at the turn of that imperial century. this literature had taught me that one shouldn’t despair of despotism. that my fate in postcolonial societies was common to many better men and women. it strengthened me in many ways and taught me to look around for i knew the most creative ground is always under your bare feet. indeed i liked it so much that my younger daughter, kavita, and my wife, jyoti, both did their doctoral studies in commonwealth literature in the a d hope building at the anu almost in the same room where i’d completed my phd in english in 1977. kavita, who has taught at several universities, is now teaching at macquarie. she’s also a writer and scholar. her husband works at the unsw. jyoti is an honorary associate professor in the school of literature and linguistics at the anu. i mention this just to show how our lives have been so profoundly enriched and entwined by readings in commonwealth literature. * in december 1977, i gave the keynote paper at the founding of spaclals at the university of queensland. the inaugural spaclals was organised by professor ken goodwin, dr chris tiffin and helen tiffin. it gave recognition to the south pacific writers and several australasian scholars interested in regional literary culture, emerging from this region. my paper: “the artist as a healer” was published in south pacific images (uqp), edited by chris tiffin. subsequently ken, chris and helen came to fiji and we organised the next aclals in at the university of the south pacific in december 1981, chaired by ken goodwin. i was the director of the conference and edited the proceedings of the conference launched at the guelph conference. ken, chris and helen became dear friends who opened the world for many of us in the south seas. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 it was also in 1977 that i attended my first aclals in new delhi. alec hope and i were invited by cdn and anu generously sent both of us to the conference. it’s here i met a number of dear friends including diana brydon, victor ramraj, subramani. out of it came a poem ‘hope in delhi’ and lasting friendships. sadly victor is dead; gladly subramani, this year, has just taken jyoti’s position at unifiji where jyoti and i had gone to establish a new university for the poor. and diana continues to make her critically creative contributions beyond canadian studies. to pay my tribute to canberra, bruce and i managed to get the 2001 aclals in canberra. it was also a tribute to the generosity of this small national capital that had given me and my family so much. aclals 2001 was attended by over 600 delegates from many places and institutions. local and regional writers were given special sessions to read and talk. we established a branch in the usa also. bruce was the director of the conference; i was elected chair, with jacqui lo as secretary and jen webb as treasurer. both are now professors at anu and uc respectively. j m coetzee was one of our invited guests. from here aclals went to india at hyderabad with meenakshi mukherjee as the chair of aclals. canberra aclals supported it with a generous grant. indian aclals became my favourite branch of aclals with many special friendships. aclals also brought me in contact with some wonderfully generous writers like janette turner hospital. i’d met her at the guelph conference and she invited pio manoa, a fijian poet, and me to come and stay in her kingston home on the edge of the great lakes where she lived with her husband and two children. we developed a fond relationship and when things went haywire for me and jyoti in fiji during the 1987 coups, janette flew from canada to be with us for a few days; she was especially delighted to meet fiji writers at our home for dinner. such acts of kindness have sustained me throughout my life and healed the hurts of one’s heart and betrayals of one’s compatriots, indigenous and migrants. years later jyoti and i met janette and cliff in montreal during a cisle conference organized by michael and rhona kenneally, scholars in irish studies. * commonwealth literature not only gave me a new world to explore; it brought my literary excavations closer to home. i began writing my short stories and poems and essays. my book the wounded sea (1991), published in australia, was generously acclaimed and brought me awards and rewards--perhaps because it told the story of the first fijian coup. fiji was not well-known in australia. i owe a lot to david parker, anu, who first brought me in touch with a young enterprising publisher, born in mauritius, philippe tanguy. vijay mishra launched it at the perth festival and don dunstan at canberra word festival. two film-makers came to me to ask for the rights to make it into a film but disappeared, perhaps through lack of funding. commonwealth literature gave me some of the finest friendships; it took me to every part of the commonwealth i wished to visit. it brought me in contact with professor wolfgang zach who is the director of cisle: i’d met him at the jamaica aclals swimming in the caribbean sea. here i met isabel santoalalla who became a family coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 friend. she organized a most stimulating conference in zaragoza. wolfgang launched the wounded sea at the graz aclals conference with david dabydeen in the chair. at wolfgang’s invitations jyoti and i have attended cisle biennial conferences in barcelona, innsbruck, montreal, gottingen and this year we’ll be in ljubljana in july. i’ve met so many friends interested in the study and propagation of commonwealth literature. among them edwin thumboo, kirpal singh, ranjan gonnetilke, kee thuan chye, harish trivedi, meenakshi mukherjee, santosh sareen, debjani ganguly, pankaj k singh, vijay mishra, bruce bennett, dennis haskell, alastair niven, gareth griffiths, chelva kanaganayakam, stan atherton, cecil abrahams, doug killam, edward bough, bharati mukherjee. a few are no more: i miss friends like ralph elliot, bruce bennett and bob brissenden in canberra. another remarkable offshoot of aclals was meeting syd harrex of flinders university of south australia. syd, a talented poet and discerning critic, had seen the value of establishing the centre for the study of new literatures in english. crnle published several writers and critical works and opened the overemphasized eurocentric literary world in australia to new literatures, particularly of india. he also invited me for a visit to flinders and collaborated in publishing two books of mine. two of my compatriots, sudesh mishra and som prakash, completed their doctoral studies at the crnle. at the first fiji writers festival, organized by jyoti on the campus of the fnu in namaka, near the airport where i used to graze my cow, syd was the chief guest and a real presence; others who came included gillian dooley who has been a bundle of creative energy for transnational literatures at flinders. although he was in frail health, syd was full of life. i wrote an appreciation of this remarkable friend in my column for the daily fijisun when we heard the news of his death. * indian aclals was a real revelation--cdn had opened the doors for many of us. from mysore to shimla, through delhi, i went to these with great pleasure. a tributary of it has been the literature of the indian diaspora which has added a dimension to our lives for it is rooted in one’s personal experience and community history and connects one to a world-wide phenomenon. i was invited to give talks at the inaugural bharitya pravasi divas in new delhi in 2004. v s naipaul and amartya sen spoke with the then prime minister of india, atalji, a poet. it’s here i saw and met sonia gandhi who had sent two books to me on her husband rajiv, so tragically assassinated in an obscure town in south india. i’ve visited the place where a monument in concrete was being erected. rajiv was a student of doon school. i’d given a memorial address at the anu. sonia gandhi, after reading it, sent me two beautiful books she had edited on her husband’s life and his untimely assassination. a few years ago i was invited to the regional diaspora conference in sydney. but nothing could exceed the generosity of the inaugural one in delhi. and last year i was invited to give the gandhi oration at the canberra national press club on october 3. gandhi has been like an ocean for me---a voyage of many discoveries, comfort-giving, in coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 the currents of our turbulent and treacherous world. he has given me the light to see a bit more clearly by his life, work and writings. hence my forthcoming volume gandhianjali. another offshoot of aclals was assa and iasa--two indian-oriented organizations enthusiastically run by cynthia vanden driesen of edith cowan university, and santosh sareen of jnu. through these i discovered several friends like greg battye, adesh pal, malati mathur, rita kothari, among a host of others. * leeds was the creative catalyst. it had the first professor of american literature in england; it also appointed the first professor of commonwealth literature in william walsh. the volume titled commonwealth literature, edited by john press, was published by the university of leeds in 1965. i found a copy of the brown volume in the meager library of usp in suva, fiji, in 1969 when i joined the new university as one of its first local lecturers in english in february 1969. it changed my life’s trajectory. i was determined to study in leeds, if ever i got a scholarship. meanwhile others came: albert wendt, majorie crocombe, konai thaman, epeli h’uofa, raymond pillay, jo nacola, ken arvidson, vilisoni heneriko, subramani, vanessa griffin, later sudesh mishra and mohit prasad among almost a new and inspired generation who continued their own creativity for the south pacific with intense commitment and extraordinary energy. stan atherton from canada and i co-edited the first collection of creative writing from fiji. i also edited the proceedings of the aclals conference held at usp in 1981. it was launched by ken goodwin at the guelph aclals in the presence of arthur ravenscroft from leeds, one of the pioneers of commonwealth literature. at usp the volume was launched by professor frank brosnahan, from new zealand, the then vice-chancellor of usp. the south pacific became the last region to become a part of the commonwealth literary imagination and exploration. and our students grew up reading its varied and manifold voices to discover their own. leeds had given me that gift. i was given a commonwealth fellowship in 1970 to study linguistics and elt at leeds for two years. with my wife and three children, i left usp and took up the fellowship. within a year i completed my first masters and then luckily my award was extended for another year to study an ma in commonwealth literature. this most creative academic year gave a new direction to my life and the destinations of my family. it brought me in contact with literatures that spoke directly to my history and heart and made me halfperceive other horizons. in fiji we lived a life of sorts and the soil produced almost everything we needed for nourishment. we lived on the riparian banks of a clean and bountiful river full of fish and, in floods, it flowed with vegetables and fruits, towards the pacific ocean. we gathered them in sugar sacks and fed on them for weeks. on the river’s banks farmers had planted fruits and vegetables in their teiteis, native vegetable gardens, and they grew in abundance in the alluvial soil. slowly through reading, ideas of landscape, home, exile, migration became part of my and my family’s life and movements. and it brought us finally to canberra in december 1987. i did not return to fiji for five years, three months and eight coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 days. the anu and uc gave me a new life of the mind. and slowly canberra became our home, away from home. * after 17 years at the university of canberra we created a new school of creative communication and taught many commonwealth-postcolonial literary texts, including the works of edward said. it also led to the setting of a centre for writing, cultural studies and media. i was its director for a decade and several more talented colleagues joined the faculty. we also established a branch of international pen in canberra with the assistance of poet-professor dennis haskell from perth. i was its president for a dozen years. scholars such as bill mandle, graeme osborne supported our efforts; bill vander heide added films to the courses.on aitkin, the vice-chancellor, became a friend and wrote his own works of fiction. then in 2005 i resigned from uc and, with my wife dr jyoti nandan, who was teaching at the anu, we went to fiji to establish the university of fiji. here as the foundation dean and professor of the school of humanities and arts, i introduced writers, mainly from the commonwealth. jyoti subsequently became the head of literature and language studies: women writers became part of the literary fare of our postgraduate students. perhaps the most important course we introduced at undergraduate level was ‘writing fiji’. it inspired our young students to read the literature, collect stories from living mouths, and study passages of history, politics and culture, contained in the words of people who have written about fiji. we left after six years and i believe the course continues as the most popular unit in literary studies. sometimes i’ve claimed that it was the first course of its kind in the smallest university in the commonwealth! we also instituted the nandan literary prize for writing at unifiji. this also led to the first fijian writers festival in fiji: around 3000 people attended over four days with a score of writers from overseas who had come to it at their expense. the local community supported the writers festival with exemplary generosity. we set up a fijian writers association. i was elected its interim chair. all this, i feel, we did because of our life enriching experience of aclals and its branches. * today i live in a suburb called harrison in canberra. across it is another named franklin where all streets are named after australian writers, scholars, journalists, professors. i couldn’t purchase a house on patrick white street; so we did the next best thing we bought a house in the adjacent suburb. near it is a park named mullion park. on concrete slabs are inscribed several poems by david campbell and as we go for our evening strolls, i read them. sometimes loudly to the amazement of passersby walking with their mobile phones attached to their right ear. i’d met david campbell with his very dear friends bob brissenden, w s ramson and ad hope on the anu campus. in their company i learnt to drink red wines at the staff club at the anu. at the death of bob at the tender age of 63 (i was one of the pall-bearers), i coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 wrote an appreciation to my mentor, published in a magazine. at the death of a d hope i wrote another piece published in the canberra times. david campbell died when i was enmeshed in fiji politics. later, on my return to canberra, fred langman and greame clarke became deeply hospitable friends. it’s been an exhilarating journey through commonwealth literature with readings, writings, teaching, travelling through so many landscapes and friendships, once strangers, now part of my imagination and contemplation and writing and relationships. fiji was a long way from everywhere like all false paradises are but it gave me a life to see the world beyond an archipelago and into the republic of the imagination of literature. here there are no borders or barbed wires. but there are always coups of many kinds. only yesterday i bought a wonderful edition of v s naipaul’s short fiction for my granddaughter hannah maya who goes to the anu next year. i hope she will read it and understand how an accidental journey has become an endless voyage of joy for her grandparents’ family. ‘good writing,’ as a norman jeffares wrote in 1964 ‘transcends borders…it is possessed of human and universal qualities…we pay homage to those who create for us this way into an imaginative understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live’ and make us understand lives distant from our own. and ‘the real thought of a country--what it conserves from its past, what it makes of its present, what aims and ideals it forms for its future -is expressed in its literature’. it’s through commonwealth literature i went into politics; it’s through this literature i regained the poetics of my little life with some sense of wholeness. * only last month an old friend wrote from dunedin, new zealand, after almost 45 years. once we were neighbours on the usp campus at laucala bay in suva. our children swam in the same pool with other children. one sentence moved me: ‘satendra’, she’d written, ‘you introduced me to so many writers of commonwealth literature’. clare brown is now a priest in the anglican church in christchurch. i receive emails from so many of our students now completing their postgraduate studies in literatures in english, the heart of it is commonwealth lit. several are also writing creatively. commonwealth literature may also take us on that inward journey that makes life and literature vibrate together and makes us a bit more human and humane as we read and imagine other lives seemingly distant but not so different from our own: our many lives on a single, vulnerable planet. no-one experiences daily its beauty and fragility better than the peoples of the pacific. commonwealth literature has been a great gift to me and my family---it opened our world into other worlds. there’s another world but it’s in this one. it may even be within one--literature’s deepest exploration--our common human wealth. our shared humanity writ in words: hope and joy, in heart and head. easter, 2018 coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 bionote: born in nadi, fiji, satendra nandan studied, under various scholarships and fellowships, in delhi, leeds, london and canberra, where he completed his phd in english in 1977. he joined the university of the south pacific in 1969. 1982 he was elected to the fiji parliament and subsequently became a cabinet minister in the bavadra coalition government of 1987. after the two fijian coups , he came to the anu at the humanities research centre in december 1987, and stayed on for 17 years in canberra. in 2005 he resigned from the university of canberra and was made an emeritus professor for his creative and academic contributions; he returned ‘home’ with his wife dr jyoti nandan to establish the university of fiji as its foundation dean and professor in the school of humanities and arts. he’s currently writing a novel as a visiting fellow, humanities research centre, anu, and compiling a collection of his writings on gandhi entitled gandhianjali as an adjunct research professor at the australian centre for christianity and culture, barton campus csu, act. he’s an emeritus professor in the centre for creative and cultural research, faculty of arts and design, university of canberra. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 the case of the pocrif research group isabel alonso-breto universitat de barcelona alonsobreto@ub.edu copyright©2016 isabel alonso-breto. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. 1. the body this issue of coolabah compiles a sample of results of research carried out by the members of the group pocrif: “postcolonial crime fiction: a global window into social realities”. the group was founded in 2013 under the aegis of the centre of australian studies at the university of barcelona. although cea focuses much of its activity on the lively exchange of ideas, scholars and students between catalonia and its antipodes, it does not constrict its activities to the pacific area. rather, it has a global postcolonial vocation, and is thus the perfect matrix for a research group with such eclectic and diverse interests as pocrif. all its members belong to cea, and their research is part of the wider academic and investigative work carried out therein. coolabah is one of the journals published by the centre itself, and the works presented in this issue, except for one invited contribution, are the result of a ministerio de economía y competividad financed research project on postcolonial crime fiction (ffi2013-45101-p). 2. a few clues and antecedents the postcolonial crime fiction group’s main ambition, as one reads on their webpage (https://crimefiction.net/), is to open “a global window into social realities”. working mostly on fiction, though also interested in other media such as cinema and the visual arts, in their critical approach to postcolonial crime fiction they emphasize “the most important social issues of our day: poverty, marginalisation, injustice and the use and misuse and significance of place and space”. i they consider that what has come to be called the “postcolonial crime novel” offers particulary significant insights into these problematic issues. pocrif’s objects of study, therefore, are to be met at the crossroads between postcoloniality and crime. this is is indeed a savoury knot. this introduction is not the place to look into the debated meaning of ‘postcolonial’, but i cannot resist synthesizing mailto:alonsobreto@ub.edu coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 its complexity through recall of said’s words in his introduction to orientalism. as he puts it there, his aim in writing this seminal book is, in short, “unlearning the inherent dominative mode” (said 1979: 66) that characterizes human relations. one must note how nicely this coincides with the central concerns explored by pocrif, namely “issues such as injustice, poverty, corruption, racism, misogyny, homophobia or exploitation”. ii regarding the second member of the equation, crime fiction, definitions also vary, and this is neither the place to draw thin lines between namings and sub-genres such as mystery, spy, ‘hard-boiled’, detective fiction, and other labels which circulate in the literature about this type – or rather, these types – of stories. the forms of crime fiction are vast and varied, yet we need to note that, as charles j. rzepa and lee horsley recall in their introduction to a companion to crime fiction (2010), not everything that shines – that sins – is crime fiction: “transgressions alone do not crime fiction make [sic.]. sin does not rate, generally, or violent or even illegal acts, per se, but the degree to which their illegality features in the plot” (2010: 1). in this sense, the place the transgression occupies in the narrative is crucial, as is crucial also the place where the crime happens – once we agree that such thing means crime. each place, culture and historical moment qualifies crime and its punishment differently, and therefore there cannot be a universal definition of this concept, nor of crime fiction itself. it follows that, as claimed by george demko, “as a literary form, the mystery is uniquely suited to provide a window into places, cultures, environments and more” (demko, 2007). iii opening this window is precisely pocrif’s mission statement, as we have read. it follows then that crime fiction is not only concerned with individual ethical choices, but with those of the whole society where the crime takes place. to quote rzepa and horsley again, “detective fiction has remained a resilient and versatile genre because … it represents the investigation of individual crimes but can also work to expose the failures, traumas and brutalities of political and social life” (2010: 1). in his chapter from the same anthology devoted to postcolonial crime fiction, ed christian agrees on this point, stating that “as a genre, detective fiction often moves from the interrogation of suspects to the interrogation of society” (christian 2010: 284). postcolonialism being so concerned with social landscapes and inequalities, it is not surprising that it has come to be on such good terms with the literary genre of crime fiction. nels pearson and mark singer, who have edited one of the most important anthologies of critical studies on this productive tandem published so far, detective fiction in a postcolonial and transnational world, remark in their introduction what has not gone unnoticed to many, namely, “the increasing number of postcolonial and … transnational authors who adapt detective and crime fiction and conventions” (qted. in dony 2009: 3). there is general agreement that crime fiction as we know it (mostly through the detective figure, though again, not only) has its foundation in edgar allan poe’s “murders in the rue morgue”, first published in 1841. for its part, postcolonialism is but the obverse of colonialism. being obvious that crime and colonialism go hand in hand together, it is perhaps not a coincidence that, like crime fiction, also colonial fiction should have also come of age in the 19 th century. the two items put together gave rise to the popular genre of colonial crime fiction, where, of course, the criminal was of necessity the native – and the figure of the indian thug comes to mind http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/book?id=g9781405167659_9781405167659 coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 immediately. the connection between british imperialism and criminality has been explored by upamanyu pablo mukherjee in crime and empire: the colony in nineteenth-century fictions of crime (2003), by caroline reitz in detecting the nation: fictions of detection and the imperial venture, 17881927 (2004), and by yumna siddiqi in anxieties of empire and the fiction of intrigue (2008). iv these studies add to earlier ones, frequently focusing on the giant figure of sherlock holmes and its inextricability from empire, such as jon thompson’s fiction, crime, and empire: clues to modernity and postmodernism (1993). v colonialism gave rise to deep anxieties in the metropolitan populations, which were often exorcized through the relaxing means of reading crime fiction portraying both clear culprits and the appeal of charismatic detectives, policemen or keepers of law and order of different kinds. 3. but ‘who done it’ in postcolonial crime fiction? postcolonial crime fiction turns the tables on colonialist ideologies. in colonial crime fiction the detective was part of the oppressive machine of empire, whereas the villain was all too often the native. yet in postcolonial times this distribution of roles does not hold any longer, not only because to a considerable extent colonialist ideologies have been replaced by postcolonial ones (meaning both anti-colonial and egalitarian ones), but also because, happily, the empire is no more – senso strictu at least. thus, “if the genre is defined by a dialogue between a crime and its resolution and punishment, then what needs to be explored is how the definition of crime, of the criminal and of the detective has evolved from the publication of the first crime fiction books in colonial times to the current multimediality of the genre in our postcolonial and globalized world” (bertacco 2014: 7). things have indeed become complicated at present times, thus it is not straightforward to answer questions such as: who is now the detective in formerly colonial and colonized nations, be they settler societies (such as australia), settled ones (like india or the caribbean) or ambiguously both, like south africa? and who is the new criminal in those same places? and, more importantly, what are the crimes that at present times need to be discovered, uncovered and investigated in those places, and others? what transgressions should be redressed, atoned or exonerated? the range of suspects thrown by postcolonial crime fiction onto these categories is unending, in a globalized world characterized by cross-culturality and transnationalism, boundary blurring in all spheres of life, cultural and ideological hybridity and, ultimately, a tendency to emphasize transitional positions of all kinds. regarding the detective figure in postcolonial crime fiction, it can belong to different groups and communities “police, private, or amateur detectives from formerly colonized peoples or nations” (rzepka and horsley 2010). but the picture, again, is complex: some readers might include among postcolonial detectives only indigenous people from once colonized countries that have achieved independence. others might include detectives who are members of groups that were once oppressed or marginalized, wherever they may live, (rzepka and horsley 2010) which means that, as we had effectively suspected, postcolonial crime fiction can be set anywhere, not only in formerly colonized countries. rzepa and horsley also coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 consider that postcolonial theory need not be restricted to postcolonial fictions proper, but that it can be applied to any criminal fiction, since even though they are not strictly postcolonial, applying to these detectives the critical insights of postcolonial theory can be illuminating, as they too can be seen to be struggling against neo-colonialism, assimilation, and the hegemony of western culture. (rzepka and horsley 2010: 283) notwithstanding this wide range of possibilities, the pocrif group has chosen to focus their critical attention on the postcolonial world in a geographic sense, and most of the works discussed here are set in australia – plus three set in china, gibraltar and the caribbean, respectively. since some analyze aboriginal detectives, a couple of observations may be of relevance. on the one hand, christophe dony and others have noted that postcolonial crime fiction and its guardians of law and order, be they detectives or not, often challenge received notions of good and evil as understood in western societies. those detectives tend to complicate purely reason-driven western epistemologies in their ways of solving their cases. notions such as those of justice, retribution or truth are approached in manners which evince the complexity of their authors’ cultural alignments, often educated in-between western and non-western cultures, or living transnational lives and publishing books with a virtually global reach. in these cases, are they to rely on western investigative techniques or on their own cultural intuitions and experience? they occupy, in homi k. bhabha’s terms, a liminal space within which their choices can constitute an extension of colonial control and oppression or an expression of resistance, accompanied by a reliance on indigenous knowledge. (dony 2009: 2) another very important element in postcolonial crime fiction, as we shall also see in the following pages, is that most often the cases – be they crimes or mere transgressions – are connected to the traces of colonialism and to neo-colonial corruption, usually provoked or magnified by rampant neoliberalism. and very frequently, as happens with some fictions analyzed here, authors as well as detectives have very clear ecological agendas in mind. 4. further suspects pocrif has positioned itself at the leading end of research into a vibrant genre which is gaining adepts by the day in the form of writers, readers, and critics. engaged and passionate scholarship such as that provided by the articles contained in this issue is on the increase. besides the critical anthology edited by pearson and singer aforementioned, several other anthologies and monographies on postcolonial crime fiction have seen the light of day in recent years, like adrienne j. gosselin’s multicultural detective fiction: murder from the other side (1999), ed christian’s the post-colonial detective (2001), and christine matzke and susanne mühleisen’s postcolonial postmortems: crime fiction from a transcultural perspective (2006), together with very related ones such as traces, codes, and clues: reading race in crime fiction (2003), by maureen t. reddy. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 academic journals have joined the effort through issuing special volumes on the genre. for instance, the prestigious postcolonial biannual moving worlds: a journal of transcultural writings published its “crime across cultures” volume in 2013. textus: english studies in italy also devoted one of its 2014 volumes to the topic of “postcolonial crimes: crime fiction and the other”. and probably many other special issues on the area are in circulation, or will be soon – like this volume of coolabah, for that matter. as to the very useful scholarly companions, it is remarkable that the cambridge companion to crime fiction, published in 2006, should not contain any specific chapter on this booming area of creation and enquiry. by contrast, the also mentioned a companion to crime fiction, by blackwell-wiley, includes the chapter “ethnic postcolonial crime and detection (anglophone)” authored by ed christian. remarkably, the (to my knowledge) most recent critical anthology on postcolonial fiction, the cambridge companion to the postcolonial novel (2015), includes a chapter on ‘the postcolonial crime novel’, authored by stephen knight. 5. back to forensic evidence the following pages open with bill phillips’s article “the representation of aboriginality in the novels of peter temple”, where he cleverly dissects ideological aspects in the work of this australia-based, south-africa-born author, both against the received tropes of the genre and with regard to temple’s political agenda. providing a useful introduction to key aspects of crime fiction and explaining how contemporary authors interrogate and subvert them in different ways, phillips argues that in his novels temple strives to eschew what has been called ‘aboriginalism’ – australia’s local version of said’s orientalism – and that his success in this undertaking is, as the scholar puts it, “mixed” rather than complete. as a very fitting complement to phillips’s discussion of temple’s work and his contextualization in the wider genre conventions, in “philip mclaren and the indigenous-australian crime novel”, cornelis martin renes provides a detailed introduction to the specificities of the genre in australia. renes positions the fiction of the best known aboriginal australian crime fiction writer within this tradition, and goes on to offer a detailed analysis of the political implications of each of mclaren’s novels, which are very connected to economic and ecological interests of different parties. in the article mclaren is shown to condemn the perpetuation of colonialist oppression, now taking the form of neo-colonialist, neo-liberal practices which unfortunately keep alienating aboriginal communities from their inherent rights. for her part, sue ballyn has chosen to present us with a well-documented and readable ‘detective case’ in her contribution. “the biography of adelaide de la thoreza: fact or fiction?” begins with some stimulating reflections on the nature and complexities of the biographic genre, to then take us by the hand into the quite sensational biography of this spanish woman convict, published in 1878 and purported to be true. as the text progresses, however, ballyn discloses how her detective work as researcher has proven that this high-flown melodrama text is pure fabrication. having reached that conclusion, there still remain some doubts… which i shall not ungraciously dispel here so that you enjoy the article – ‘the case’ – all the better. http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/book?id=g9781405167659_9781405167659 coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 the cycle of australian detection closes with catalina ribas segura’s “phryne fisher: a postcolonial female detective in ruddy gore (1995)”, which continues the historical excursus initiated in the previous article. here we have a chance to recall the contemptible situation of non-white migrants and residents in the australia of the early 20th century, severely constricted by the white australia policy and the damaging stereotypes it generated. ribas segura’s detailed analysis of the character of phryne fisher incorporates the crucial figure of the woman sleuth into our collection, braiding together gender, ethnicity and class in a suggestive intersectional analysis of ruddy gore, both the novel and its audio-visual version – which show remarkable ideological contrast. beyond australian borders but still on pacific waters, isabel santaulària i capdevila’s “‘this is getting a little too chinese for me’: the representation of china in crime fiction written in english” transports the reader to chinese latitudes, to provide analysis of several crime novels written by non-chinese authors who choose to set their narratives in a territory endemically prone to exoticization. santaulària’s straightforward indictment is that although criticism of the west is not absent from the works she analyses, all of them commit what she names as sino-orientalism – another cognate of said’s productive concept – as they present contemporary china as an alternately backward or felonious society, and often both, whose only way to progress is through imitation of the western way. the only contribution by a non-member of the pocrif group takes us to the mediterranean, with john a stotesbury’s “the crime scene as museum: the (re)construction in the bresciano series of a historical gibraltarian past”. this article delves into the little known world of gibraltarian fiction and its specific problems, introducing unfamiliar readers to a seven-volume series of novels written in tandem by two well-known local writers. their collaborative fictions are set in the gibraltar of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and feature giovanni bresciano, of mixed genoese and english parentage, in the amateur detective role. the series was completed in 2015, and stotesbury claims that it deserves further attention from scholars interested in the connections between (post)colonial crime, historical fiction, and what has been termed “museumification”. the issue closes with “marlon james’s ‘dangerous’ a brief history of seven killings”, a review contributed by maria grau perejoan, again a member of pocrif. travelling to caribbean shores, in her text she reports on jamaican writer marlon james’s acclaimed novel, winner of the man booker prize in 2015. set in the convoluted atmosphere of jamaica in the 1970s and describing an attempt of assassination of bob marley (in the novel referred to as “the singer”) from a plurality of viewpoints, this is a sophisticated and multivocal text which overflows with crime and violence. in her discussion, grau points to some reception and linguistic issues which in different ways affect not only this particular work, but the totality of caribbean fiction. i would not want to close this introduction without thanking the pocrif group for entrusting me with the edition of their first joint publishing venture, to which i have dedicated as much care as i could within somewhat adverse circumstances. thanks are also due to the peer reviewers for their careful reading and meticulous timing. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 works cited bertacco, simona. “introduction.” textus. 2 (2014): 7-18. christian, ed, ed. the post-colonial detective. houndmills, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2001. ---. “ethnic postcolonial crime and detection (anglophone).” in a companion to crime fiction, charles rzepka and lee horsley, eds. malden: wiley-blackwell, 2010. 283-295. demko, g.j. “maps in mysteries.” mystery scene magazine. winter 2007. retrieved on 22 november 2016 at: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gjdemko/maps_mysteries.htm. dony, christophe. review of detective fiction in a postcolonial and transnational world, nels pearson and marc singer, eds. postcolonial text 5, 4 (2009): 1-3. evans, lucy, and mandala white, eds. “crime across cultures.” special issue of moving worlds, 13, 1 (2013). gosselin, adrienne j. ed. multicultural detective fiction: murder from the other side. new york: garland, 1999. knight, stephen. “the postcolonial crime novel.” in ato quayson, ed. the cambridge companion to the postcolonial novel. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. 152–165. matzke, christine, and mühleisen, susanne, eds. postcolonial postmortems: crime fiction from a transcultural perspective. amsterdam and new york: rodopi, 2006. pearson, nels and marc singer, eds. detective fiction in a postcolonial and transnational world. london and new york: routledge, 2009. reddy, maureen t. traces, codes, and clues: reading race in crime fiction. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2003. reitz, caroline. detecting the nation: fictions of detection and the imperial venture, 17881927. columbus, oh: ohio state university press, 2004. said, edward. orientalism. western conceptions of the orient. harmondsworth: penguin,1995 (1978). rzepka, charles j.and lee horsley, eds. a companion to crime fiction. malden: wiley-blackwell, 2010. otis, laura. “the empire bites back: sherlock holmes as an imperial immune system.” studies in 20th century literature. 22, 1 (1998): art. 4. thompson, jon. fiction, crime, and empire: clues to modernity and postmodernism. urbana and chicago: university of illinois press, 1993. upamanyu, pablo mukherjee. crime and empire: the colony in nineteenth-century fictions of crime. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. siddiqi, yumna. anxieties of empire and the fiction of intrigue. newyork: columbia university press, 2008. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gjdemko/maps_mysteries.htm http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/book?id=g9781405167659_9781405167659 coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 i pocrif webpage (https://crimefiction.net/). ii pocrif webpage. iii george j. demko created a vibrant webpage devoted to the exploration of the genre: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gjdemko/toc.htm iv siddiqi analyzes colonial as well as postcolonial fictions. v as well as numerous journal articles such as otis 1998. isabel alonso-breto lectures on postcolonial literatures and cultures in english at the university of barcelona. she has published articles by authors of caribbean, canadian, indian, south african and sri lankan origin, and is interested in migrant and diasporic literature and in the negotiation of cultural identities and social boundaries and its representation. she is the vice-director of the centre for australian studies at the university of barcelona, and a member of the research group ratnakara, devoted to the study of literatures and cultures from the indian ocean (http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara/). . https://crimefiction.net/ http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gjdemko/toc.htm http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara/ coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 kalla yarning at matagarup: televised legitimation and the limits of heritage-making in the city thor kerr curtin university thor.kerr@curtin.edu.au shaphan cox curtin university s.cox@curtin.edu.au copyright©2017 thor kerr & shaphan cox. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract. this paper is directed towards furthering understandings of popular television news reporting on aboriginal solidarity gatherings at matagarup on heirisson island, a state-registered aboriginal heritage site in perth, western australia. in doing so, it also seeks to identify the practical limits of heritage making in disrupting the legitimization of state action not recognizing such heritage claims. in 2012 and 2015, aboriginal citizens gathering and camping at the heritage site were subject to police raids legitimized by popular media organizations reporting a breach of municipal bylaws prohibiting camping and fires on heirisson island. this paper examines a shift in popular television reporting over the three years towards acknowledging that aboriginal people should be able to assemble, without police harassment, around a fire at the site. the most radical shift in reporting is observable in nine news coverage of events. for this reason, eight televised items from nine news in 2015 are analysed alongside nine news reporting described in the authors’ previous study of reporting of events at matagarup in 2012. the paper identifies and discusses the implications of two key dialogical processes in the news production: firstly, a process of cross-cultural reading and shared understandings of fire as hearth, and secondly a process of reproducing a dominant discursive tradition locating home for aboriginal people outside the city. keywords: fire as hearth, aboriginal tent embassy, dialogic mailto:thor.kerr@curtin.edu.au mailto:s.cox@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 this paper is part of a broader project that began in 2012 when the nyoongar tent embassy invited curtin university to investigate how its gatherings at matagarup (heirisson island) in perth were being criminalized in popular news reports. through this project, the authors along with other partners have produced a book on the systemic criminalization of the tent embassy by popular media organizations (kerr & cox 2013), an exhibition disrupting the criminal image of aboriginal activists in perth (creagh, ryder, cox & kerr 2013) and a paper demonstrating that western australia’s largest commercial media organisation, seven west media, acts in the interest of its holding company in undermining the legitimacy of aboriginal heritage claims through its news reporting and editorial publication (kerr & cox 2016; thomson, bennett, johnston and mason 2015). in this paper, we turn our attention to a noticeable shift in the reporting of aboriginal gatherings at matagarup by nine news, which claims the greatest share of national television evening news audience ratings (nine entertainment co. holdings 2014, 11). eight key media texts produced by nine news between march 1 and may 1, 2015 relating to an aboriginal refugee camp located at an island adjacent to the perth cbd are analysed in comparison with findings from the kerr & cox (2013) study of a similar gathering at the same place. this paper identifies two ‘outside-in’ dialogical processes running through the production of popular media representations, firstly to do with a cross-cultural reading and shared understanding of fire as hearth and secondly, the reproduction of a powerful discursive tradition which locates home for aboriginal people outside the city. this colonial tradition obstructed popular media representation of kalla yarning (talking around a home fire) as a local contemporary place in the city. fire as hearth in the context of this study represents a potential for transformational politics through shared understandings amongst settler and indigenous cultures in western australia. an opportunity for popular recognition and respect for aboriginal sovereignty seemed to occur at the matagarup refugee camp when nine news perth (nine news perth, march 13, 2015) reported that police had treated the campfire as a safe zone for the people gathered around it during one of their raids to remove the camp. ten days later, nine news perth (nine news perth, march 24, 2015) offered its audience an opportunity to move in from outside the camp to share in the fireside stories around a nyoongar sacred fire. this was an interesting moment in popular media representation because nine news like other popular news organisations had actively reproduced a discourse of aboriginality synonymous with illegality in reporting on the previous aboriginal gathering, the nyoongar tent embassy, at heirisson island in 2012. in a study of these media reports, kerr and cox (2013) demonstrate how perth media outlets, notably nine news, worked to place authority directly in the hands of police and government workers intent on removing an ‘illegal’ aboriginal gathering. popular media reports relied heavily on the construction of a threatening nyoongar menace while refusing to engage with any reference to heirisson island’s status as a state-registered aboriginal heritage site as a ‘meeting place, plant resource, camp, hunting place’ (aboriginal heritage enquiry system, 2012). instead, authorisation was given to city of perth bylaws prohibiting camping and lighting fires in a public reserve in popular news reports on the tent embassy in 2012. this law-breaker protester frame was maintained across the mainstream news organisations with very little challenge or critical questioning. however, in march 2015, amid growing public outrage over a government plan to close 150 remote aboriginal communities, there seemed to be an opportunity for popular news media to represent the island as an aboriginal place – recognised in state, national and coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 international law. this public mood and apparent police recognition of the fire at the island as sacred may have provided the impetus for the nine news media team to spend the night there ten days later (nine news perth, march 24, 2015). fire as a home-making technology fire is an important place-making technology that signifies home in both nyoongar culture and in the popular culture of invading settlers. as british settlers secured their hold over nyoongar country in the 1830s through militia raids that ended the lives and home fires of aboriginal people (statham-drew 2003), charles dickens was writing the texts in london that would place the ‘roaring fire of the domestic hearth’ at the symbolic centre of his novels (buckland 2009), a significant node of popular modern english storytelling. dickens’ fireside was read as ‘an idyllic space of conflict resolution’ in a city of problems, according to buckland, and the attraction of the fireside transcended class divisions (2009). with dickens’ novels, readers could empathise with the orphaned, displaced and disowned individuals yearning to get closer to the blazing fires of home (buckland 2009). fire was a symbol for shared experience and harmony in the minds of british readers, presumably including the settlers arriving on the shores of nyoongar country. fire continued to hold a special place in the minds of modern readers even after the advent of electricity. this is evident in the importance given to the domestic hearth while suppressing the overtness of electric lighting and heating in le corbusier’s studio residences (willmert 2006). fireplaces were used to define individual retreats and places of communal gathering in the home, partly because they can be seen as engendering and reinforcing creativity. despite a shared understanding of fire as hearth, the use of fire by aboriginal people as a practice of sovereignty has tended to be overlooked in popular media reports and commentary (vincent 2006, 14). sacred fire and smoking ceremonies have been central and important features in the representation of justice claims, decolonization and sovereign right to land for decades at the aboriginal tent embassy in canberra (gilbert 2013, 196-201), and its coals have been used to light fires for similar purposes at other embassies such as the 1998 declaration of sovereign space in melbourne (vincent 2006, 13). in nyoongar culture, ‘kalla’ or ‘karla’ is at the heart of a range of meanings that have been interpreted into english. ‘kalla’ has been interpreted to mean ‘fire’ but also ‘a country, firewood’ or ‘camp’ (bindon & chadwick 2011, 109). it is an important root word for dozens of words: ‘kalla-budjor’ means ‘land, property in’; ‘kalleep’ means ‘one’s own country, land or fire’; ‘kallip’ means ‘acquainted with country or people; property in land; knowledge of people and localities’; and ‘kalok’ means as ‘at home, at my camp’ (bindon & chadwick 2011, 109-110). in describing the karla yarning: stories of the home fires mapping project sponsored by the city of perth (jones & collard 2014), professor len collard described karla as not just a camp fire but a symbol implying ‘the home where people gather to meet around the fire’ and yarning as an interrogation, analysis and ‘a dialogue around a subject’ (wynne 2014). in wynne’s interview on abc news, collard described the relation of karla to the site of this study: coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 karla yarning is an ancient phenomenon here in the noongar country around the derbal yerrigan, the estuary or the perth waters but the karla is a highly symbolic thing and in noongar it means the campfire, but it also implies and means the home where people gather to meet around the kalla. and kalla also means estate and your estate, your country, the place where you live in and around the traps. yarning in noongar really means to interrogate, or to investigate or to analyse, or to have a dialog around a subject… so in this particular project, with the perth city council, karla yarning was to interrogate the country, or the fire place of traditional owners in and around the perth metropolitan area, the wadjuks. (wynne 2014). besides being an important technology for creativity, kalla is also an important symbol of home and a place of dialogue and problem solving in noongar imaginaries. given the domestic hearth’s enduring symbolic centrality in popular modern culture and colonial interpretation of kalla in language studies, it is unsurprising that colonial recognition of noongar home places has been solicited around the kalla fireside (hallam 1975; jones & collard 2014). the kalla hearth may also provide the aesthetics of an ‘unknowable space’ onto which non-aboriginal knowledge of aboriginal people can be projected in postcolonial australian imaginaries (gelder & jacobs 2006, 156). after all, fire has been used to solicit a sense of sacredness in memorialising australian contribution to imperial overseas wars. the ‘eternal flame’ in kings park was placed for sacred–soliciting effect in a ‘pool of reflection’ in the foreground of a crucifix-inscribed obelisk ‘overlooking perth water’ (botanic gardens & parks authority 2015). in an ironic performance of the sacred, the flame was inaugurated by queen elizabeth ii on april fools’ day 2000. it has burned at the site for 15 years symbolising ‘the promise of all western australians’ to remember dead soldiers (botanic gardens & parks authority 2015). while the eternal flame may help western australians to forget that the memorial was constructed relatively recently on a much older, and arguably more important, sacred site in wadjuk country, the flame itself is an empty signifier that can be used for incorporating a variety of claims and desires (laclau 2005). although audiences in western australia have been encouraged to read the sacredness of imperial war in the ‘eternal flame’, this encouragement may also help them to recognise the sacredness of noongar people using smoke and flame in their political gatherings in perth. in other words, there is an opportunity for media audiences in western australia to see aboriginal people at home and in a sacred place yarning around the kalla fireside at matagarup, even if they have not been informed that the state has already recognised this as a sacred site for aboriginal people (kerr & cox 2013). authorising heritage-making: a study of nine news this section will show how popular media representations of aboriginal gatherings at matagarup shifted between 2012 and 2015. a review of publically archived media texts between march 1 and may 1 2015 indicated that nine news perth had demonstrated the most empathy with the gathering by the end of this archive period. this was particularly noticeable in a special report (nine news perth, march 24, 2015) when nine news journalist scott cunningham spent the night around the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 campfire reporting fireside stories of the gathering at matagarup. this item and seven other television reports produced by nine news were analysed for this study (table 1). the key findings from analysis of the nine news 2015 archive are described below in relation to the results of our previous study (kerr and cox 2013) of popular media reporting on the 2012 gatherings. three key themes have emerged from this analysis relating to: media representation of a problem to be solved; representation of fire for community making; and, representation of campfire as a temporary aberration, not an enduring home place in the city. nine network has free to air television broadcast licences in perth and australia’s other major cities. the network focuses on the core genres of news, sport, local drama and quality reality. after extending its 6pm news to one hour in early 2014, nine network claims that it has come to dominate ‘the all important 6-7pm timeslot’ by ‘delivering australians world class and local news and current affairs content’ (nine entertainment co. holdings 2014, 11). the composition of this holding company suggests that nine network serves broader investment interests than the majority shareholder for perth’s dominant news provider, 7 news, whose main source of income comes from the supply of heavy equipment for mining and other industries (kerr & cox 2016). in light of these sets of corporate interests, it could be argued that nine news was relatively less constrained in authorising aboriginal voices and recognising the performance of aboriginal heritage at matagarup in its news reports in 2015. the 8 media texts are documented in table 1 below: table 1: nine news perth media archive 2015 item number and date source title 1. 10 march 2015 nine news perth island stand off 2. 11 march 2015 nine news perth island stand off 3. 13 march 2015 nine news perth island showdown 4. 17 march 2015 nine news perth heirisson protest 5. 20 march 2015 nine news perth heirisson protest 6. 24 march 2015 nine news perth special report: inside heirisson 7. 30 april 2015 nine news perth show of force 8. 1 may 2015 nine news perth city protest setting the scene: construction of the problem in 2012 media coverage of the aboriginal gathering constructed events as a ‘problem’ caused by aboriginal ‘protestors’, a problem which therefore had to be policed. the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 coverage tended to represent aboriginality as synonymous with criminality and although initial news reports focussed on land and justice claims, the media’s framing of news stories quickly shifted to an alleged illegality of camping on the island and the camp’s potential for violence. the media frequently represented the aboriginal participants in negative or problematic ways: by reducing them to illegal protesters; and by silencing them and excluding them from the ordinary right to seek recognition of legal entitlement. media reports also turned them into lawbreakers through news narrative and visual composition techniques that implicitly encouraged viewer identification with police and state authorities. in 2015, aboriginal activists recreated the camp at matagarup but this time not under the banner of nyoongar tent embassy but as an aboriginal refugee camp set up in response to a state-and-federal government policy to shutdown aboriginal communities. media reports maintained that the gathering had been camping illegally at heirisson island but framed it within the context of a bigger problem of government policy causing aboriginal homelessness. news item 1 makes a connection between government plans and the gathering’s concerns: prime minister tony abbott has taken a stand against protesters on heirisson island by backing a plan to shutdown 150 remote aboriginal communities. demonstrators have been illegally camping on the island for a week and a half now, saying people will be left homeless. abbott is then quoted making a statement (that stimulated international concern in popular and social media): “what we can’t do is endlessly subsidize lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in australian society that everyone should have”. the subsequent audio and visual segment of the news item problematised the statement. state shadow minister for aboriginal affairs ben wyatt appears, saying: “native title demands that aboriginal people stay on country”. while wyatt continues to speak, the scene cuts to footage of the violent police raid on the nyoongar tent embassy on heirisson island in 2012 in a way that suggests that aboriginal people are right to want to remain on country and that government policy is causing unnecessary trauma and violence. shots of heirisson island are then mixed seamlessly with images from remote communities making it difficult for viewers to distinguish the camp at heirisson island (in the perth metropolis) with footage of remote communities. producing this ambiguity for viewers places the action outside of familiar cityscapes. aboriginal country is made remote where popular australian imaginaries of idealised aboriginal country safely locate it (shaw 2007). when the political authorities bill shorten, noel pearson and warren mundine are shown voicing opposition to the closure of communities, these communities are shown to be remote with footage of aboriginal men sitting on the dirt in a township, children running across a field and women standing amongst trees (item 2). the voices of authority apparently do not object to city of perth seeking to shut down the camp on heirisson island. this is exemplified in the special fireside report when reporter scott cunningham says: coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 it’s a peaceful protest, they say it’s a refugee camp for anyone that’s homeless, specifically those displaced by a state government policy that will see 150 remote communities shut down. they have a genuine fear of what will happen. (item 6) fire for community-making in 2012, the media held tent embassy members responsible for a social division that it constructed against them, and held them responsible for the state acts of violence that it legitimised against them. the media’s law-breaker-protester frame in 2012 not only legitimised the western australian government’s violence against aboriginal people, it also excluded relevant state, federal and international laws from news reports about the embassy. this exclusion went unnoticed because of the media’s broad failure to recognise nyoongar tent embassy participants as fellow members of ‘perth community’: as co-equal citizens. also, they failed to see that the embassy was open to the public, actively promoting engagement and reconciliation with the wider community of western australia. in 2015, popular media authorised voices overcoming such divisions. there was a constructed attempt to represent aboriginal activists as integrated within a broader community. although the 2012 gathering was open to the public at most times, only the 2015 gathering was reported as open to the public in popular media. in 2015, the media recognised the gathering as a safe place for people particularly for anyone hoping to engage with aboriginal culture (by enjoying fireside tradition). from news item 1 fire is used to suggest aboriginal people making a stand at heirisson island. footage showed a campfire with aboriginal people and aboriginal flags. this becomes an important node for suggesting empathy with camp participants during a major police raid, as reporter rachel cary (item 3) stands by camp participants and explains: while the police are dismantling the tents, protesters have chosen to stay around this sacred campfire that they have here. the women are in the middle. they say it is a safe spot in case they see a repeat of 2012. in a live cross to heirisson island during the report, cary says that the elders at the island were: ‘glad that police did not touch their campfire which they say is sacred in the middle of the ground and they have had that burning for almost two weeks now’. a week later flag and fire mark the centre of the camp, a position of empathy, after carey says ‘the police will be coming in later this morning’ (item 5). in the nine news special report broadcast on march 24 2015 (item 6) reporter scott cunningham spends the night inside the campsite at heirisson island. cunningham says his purpose is to find ‘out what they want and why they are refusing to give up and move on’. the opening scene is a close up of a blazing campfire and a billy, as the camera pans left to show the reporter speaking to aboriginal activist ‘julie dwyer’ talking about how she and others are sitting around the fire lamenting the closure of communities and what to do about it. the camp, which has now gone on for three weeks, is offered to the viewers as an exception from popular news imagery of an aboriginal camp. as footage shifts to people sitting around the camp fire with drinks through to a close up of young man mouthing an empty water bottle (which coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 may solicit readings of glue-sniffing) the audience is told: ‘it’s a dry camp. no alcohol, no drugs, and children who stay here still go to school’. later julie dwyer is described as arriving from geraldton the previous night to show her support to save remote indigenous communities: “they have been there for years, it is their land, it is their culture, it is a spiritual connection to their soul, their heart, their families”. in the middle of the piece cunningham describes how he came to join the fire-side discussion: ‘we arrived at six o’clock last night, eventually invited in and allowed to pitch a tent and sit with them by the campfire’. by the fireside, cunningham informs viewers ‘the area is culturally significant as is what they are doing there, their cause reaching all walks of life’. the piece is closed by scott cunningham away from the fire saying: ‘most of the people have gone to bed in their tents after spending a night around the campfire sharing their stories and reasons why they are here on heirisson island’. the footage then cuts to a morning scene, with a close up of a pot on a fire being stoked by a camp participant while cunningham says ‘by morning they are back around the campfire to start their next day on heirisson island welcoming in anyone who wants to join their fight’. a final word is offered by an unnamed camp participant saying “people are losing their homes, that’s what made me come out here” (item 6). this news report confirms the shift in nine news’ reporting of the 2015 gathering. gone are the constructed social divisions overcome via a meeting around the safety of the heirisson island campfire. between march 24 (item 6) and the next report in the archive on april 30 (item 7), a groundswell of public concern over remote community closures was demonstrated by a large rally on april 9 in melbourne. with may day rally’s planned across australia, focusing on opposition to remote community closures, nine news (item 7) reported on april 30: another show of force on heirisson island today as dozens of police again moved in to break up the protesters’ camp. amid the angry clashes and arrests, accusations some officers were being heavy handed. throughout this footage of police arresting camp participants and removing equipment, the viewer is asked to empathise with camp participant perspectives and see the absurdity in the police arrests and issuances of move on notices. the report closes with a reporter standing outside the camp at night saying: after police left, several protesters set up camp again. there are about five tents here, they have got a campfire going and plan to stay here again tonight. they say that more people will join them later this evening and tomorrow. (item 7) the suggested empathy with and rationality of joining a movement to protest government policy is continued in item 8. after various shots of the may day demonstration in the perth cbd and outside parliament, footage cuts to a night scene of a tent and blazing campfire with the reporter saying ‘tents are still standing at heirisson island’ (item 8). coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 campfire not a homefire the campfire on heirisson island functioned as an important node for communitymaking in the 2015 nine news archive, however it was not represented as a place of home or aboriginal sovereignty. similarly, in 2012 media workers, politicians and governmental spokesmen failed to see that embassy members were at home in the state-listed aboriginal heritage site within a native-title claim area, recognised by the federal court of australia. they failed to hear the tent embassy’s repeated efforts to engage in direct dialogue with state and city authorities about its at-home status. in 2015 this elision was maintained. item 2 announces: time is running out for protesters taking a stand on heirisson island. they have been given a deadline to leave or be forced out by police. flag and fire may suggest an aboriginal place at heirisson island, but this place is rendered temporary by the report as the authority of the city of perth’s ceo is reinforced: protesters are illegally camping on city of perth land, they say this is a refugee camp for those made homeless by state government plans to close 150 remote communities. (item 2) the problem, again, seems to lie in the representation of ‘protesters’. carey’s empathy (item 3 and 5) is with ‘protesters’, not self-determined aboriginal people on their own land. this supports the rationality of her saying that the city of perth ‘will not be removing protesters themselves unless they break the law’ (item 5). for in this representation, protesters are always on the cusp of breaking the law. even when cunningham reports from the fireside, he does not question the authority of police or the state to move aboriginal campers out of the city. also, the nyoongar place name ‘matagarup’ is not mentioned in his report (item 6). the closest the special report comes to recognising aboriginal people at home is through cunningham’s statement: ‘the area is culturally significant as is what they are doing there, their cause reaching all walks of life’ (item 6). although the culturally significant area could have been read as matagarup, the subsequent opinion of a non-aboriginal man by the fireside was likely to have been read as maintaining aboriginal home outside the city: “listening to these guys who have got family and stuff up there and what they are going through, and how important country is to them, and what it means to be put off country is something that i think our culture really struggles to understand”. the speaker is identified in subtext as matt crocky who “joined the cause”. the news item reproduced a growing discourse of concern about the closure of remote communities in western australia. despite soliciting audience empathy with aboriginal people in remote communities, the item does not solicit empathy for aboriginals in perth. when local aboriginal activist bella bropho is on camera earlier in the piece, she is introduced with cunningham’s question: “how long do you think you guys will be down here for?” bella responds: “i don’t really know.” bella bropho is already known by many media workers in perth as a key activist voicing concern over the bulldozing of the swan valley nyungah community at lockridge in the perth metropolitan area. a year earlier, bella bropho was reported by abc news (2014) saying in relation to her community’s ownership of the land at lockridge that ‘the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 government is intensively trying to destroy the last visible vestiges of what was a thriving community’. in the nine news report the dialogic of the fireside at matagarup was fabricated for audience consumption without reference to the site being an enduring aboriginal place in the city. instead permanency is given to the european place name heirisson island while temporality is associated with aboriginal presence at an apparently non-urban island. conclusion this paper argues that the matagarup campfire in perth city functioned as an important node for community-making, enabled through broad cultural understandings of what a campfire might symbolise. representation of the campfire marked a significant shift in media reporting for at least one popular news organisation, nine news. media audiences were invited to engage with the sacralisation of the campfire through the reporting of a major police raid where the campfire was represented as a safe zone for participants, and again a week later as audiences got to share in the fireside stories with nine news reporter scott cunningham. however, despite the marked shift in media reporting of the 2015 gathering compared to the 2012 nyoongar tent embassy, the politics of belonging at matagarup remained unchallenged in popular television news. the media dialogic authorising heritage making may have constrained the violence of police responses to the 2015 aboriginal gathering at matagarup but it also limited popular understanding of this event to a temporary gathering of outsiders who should move on once government policy had 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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-11/noongar-maps-of-perth-cityreleased/5589910 dr shaphan cox is a human geographer in the department of planning and geography at curtin university, western australia. his research explores contestations of space and place through representation. recent publications include the book setting up the nyoongar tent embassy, co-authored with dr thor kerr, and the article “indigenous persistence and entitlement: noongar occupations in central perth, 1988-1989 and 2012.” http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n53/029902ar.html http://www.nineentertainment.com.au/media/3771/nec-annual-report-2014-web-.pdf http://www.nineentertainment.com.au/media/3771/nec-annual-report-2014-web-.pdf http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-11/noongar-maps-of-perth-city-released/5589910 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-11/noongar-maps-of-perth-city-released/5589910 coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 dr thor kerr is a lecturer in the department of communication and cultural studies at curtin university, western australia. dr kerr’s research focuses on media and public representation in negotiations of urban space, particularly in relation to environmental issues, colonisation and aboriginal heritage. his latest book, to the beach, examines public controversy and policy making around ‘sustainable’ coastal property development. his previous (co-authored) book, setting up the nyoongar tent embassy: a report on perth media, investigated the systemic shaping of popular news reports that criminalised aboriginal activists. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 it all began with an invitation – from china. manfred f. romich dr.romich@ize-aachen.de copyright© 2020 manfred f. romich. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: an account of how the author and geoff travelled together to china several times. forty years of friendship and common interests are fondly remembered. keywords: geoff davis, china, travelling companion within the framework of a project-based seminar i was running at the time i had sought official permission to undertake a research trip to china. this was back in 1978. the longed-for invitation from peking came unexpectedly soon – and was then granted for two trips. since our department didn’t really know how to proceed, i was sent to see the vice-chancellor. the vice-chancellor, by contrast, had a very clear idea about how to handle things. “okay”, he said, “you can go. but the first trip should be reserved for members of staff. the second one can be open to students.” a group of professors from various faculties was quickly assembled – but there were still some places left. then somebody piped up: “why don’t we ask that chap davis from the english department. he loves travelling.” no sooner said than done. geoff was invited round to the vicechancellor’s office to introduce himself. the welcome he got was rather special. somebody present remarked: “ah, so you’re the one who failed my wife in that language proficiency test.” geoff kept his cool: “sorry ’bout that.” at the time he was also in a clinch with the university over his employment contract but that didn’t seem to be a problem: “ok, it can’t count as an official trip but you can still go.” oh, well, he would manage to scrape the money for china together somehow or other. and so off we set in november 1978. geoff and i had very quickly realized that we had a lot in common. we both loved flying, we both loved getting to know new places, we were both very curious – and neither of us had much money. probably because we were always spending it on travel. we flew with lufthansa via the north pole to tokyo, where we had a short stay, overnighting in a luxury hotel. we did a tour of the city and were mailto:dr.romich@ize-aachen.de coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 astonished to see the prices in japanese restaurants. and then the onward journey immediately continued, this time with pia (“please inform allah!” – that was yet another thing in common: we both enjoyed thinking up alternative names to fit the airline codes. and apart from that, we both “knew” a whole lot about flying and loved to show off our “knowledge” (without being asked). when had a plane of the same type crashed? what technical faults did which individual types of plane have? who had the nicest stewardesses? and so on and so forth. we had a whale of a time just talking planes. when there was something i didn’t know, he could fill me in or vice versa. all this didn’t necessarily help to keep our fellow-passengers calm. after all, who wants to hear about the design flaws of the airplane they’re actually sitting in. the boeing 707 from tokyo to peking wasn’t exactly overbooked and so we managed to persuade the flight attendant to let us check out the cockpit. it was simply great to stand behind the pilot and look through the cockpit window into the great wide open. where exactly were we now? we had flown round korea (the airspace was blocked) and after glancing out of the window the pilot informed us: “we’re looking for shanghai.” as geoffrey and i were leaving the cockpit, the flight engineer (yes, they still had them then) turned to us and asked: “would you like a drink?” he was handing us a half-empty bottle of whisky.” “no, thanks” we said and returned to our seats. geoffrey fastened his seat belt just a little bit tighter than usual. and the actual landing in peking was in fact pretty bumpy and scary. visibility was poor and after feeling the plane almost scrape along the grass as it did a steep turn, we were quite relieved when we finally landed safe and sound on the tarmac. we exited the plane on the airfield. someone was pointing in the general direction of the arrivals building, saying: “you can’t miss it.” a gigantic portrait of mao was hanging over the entrance. we had arrived. to be welcomed by a representative of the german embassy. geoff was okay with that – but the british representative might have come along too, might he not…? we didn’t need to bother about luggage and suchlike. how should i put it? – our reception was definitely vip-style. two interpreters were assigned to us. they were to accompany us throughout our stay. they took us from the airport to the hotel. on the way there we were all fairly quiet. we were suddenly immersed in a different world: fields on which peasants were working under red flags; people in uniformly blueish-grey work clothes; no cars – just a few hand tractors instead; no end of bicycles and donkey-carts. so this was the realm of socialism. in the friendship hotel we all met up again in the bar. a colleague bought a round of drinks. happy to have survived the flight, he observed: “the pilot must have been a good airman in the pakistan army.” our rooms in the friendship hotel were enormous suites, complete with desk and telephone, with words of the chairman himself on the dial. geoff took a photograph – one of the first of the trip. our programme began the following day: sightseeing, lectures, chats. interrupted only by opulent meals, with ten to twelve courses consisting of the finest dishes. geoffrey liked to use chopsticks – another thing we had in common. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 in those days there were limitations on the number of films you could have with you (this was till the digital age) so we had to make do with the few we had. you could buy additional films but they were very expensive. however, geoffrey had to buy some... i have fond memories of the long overnight train journeys. we had berths in a sleeper. these journeys had three distinguishing features: firstly, you could hardly sleep; secondly, you spent a lot of time in the dining-car; and thirdly, you prevented the interpreters from getting any sleep. geoffrey and i enjoyed returning to the dining-car after dinner. the only people there by then were the train crew. astonished but interested faces looked at us: what are the long noses doing here? i usually ordered a couple of beers for us: “beijing pijiu” or “qingdao pijiu”. my order in chinese usually caught the attention of the locals which was further sparked by geoff’s diligent writing of chinese characters in his diary – with which the chinese always and eagerly offered to help. and so, we ended up in lively discussions with the locals, had our drinks and even received some snacks for free. what a great way to travel! when we were not in the dining car we were standing or sitting in the corridor, trying to engage our interpreters in conversation. “where is china heading?” we would ask. “what about hua guofeng?“ “what about the gang of four?” we had seen wall newspapers. “how important are they these days?” we wanted to know. etcetera, etcetera. on one occasion one of the interpreters took me on one side and asked me: “your colleague – he’s not german, is he? he’s somehow different.” “well, he’s british, isn’t he?” how on earth had she spotted that? in guangzhou we bumped into a painter who was producing huge portraits of the new chairman hua guofeng. geoff was visibly impressed by the man’s artistry – that too had coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 to be photographed. then we left china. our train went as far as the border bridge and then we carried our cases across the bridge. we had arrived in hong kong. immigration formalities. for the germans, a short residence permit. for the brit, a very long residence permit. a quick grin: “sorry ’bout that.” in china we had really enjoyed the chinese food. the last meal we had had there had been the snakes in guangzhou. but what were things going to be like now we were in hong kong? nothing here was as thoroughly organised as in china. nevertheless, the british dimension made a lot of things easier than in china. we were staying in the furama intercontinental. a first-class hotel, no question. very western and – most importantly – it boasted a café: the café vienna. british or not, geoff made his way straight to that café. no more green tea. proper coffee again and apple strudel with cream to go with it. after all, he was a gourmet, wasn’t he? and for hong kong there were decent travel guides again, so geoff could read up what was going on, where to go and what you could do there. sometimes the “must-do’s” didn‘t match the means available for our budget. what really was a must, though – there was no way round it – was enjoying a whisky in the foyer of the peninsula hotel. and there i must admit i didn’t say “no” either – despite the prices, which were of course astronomical compared with china. when the time came for our return flight, a surprise was awaiting us. the lufthansa dc-10 that was to take us to frankfurt was grounded. following a crash, this type of plane was not allowed to fly at all. so our booking was switched to pan am flight no. 1, west-bound from los angeles to new york – around the world, stopping among other places in hong kong and frankfurt. only shortly after take-off, geoff and i were in full agreement. we had the oldest and unfriendliest stewardesses we had ever seen. how could the yanks allow such people to fly? what a good thing times have changed since then. today such remarks would meet with harsh criticism. and then here we were again, back in germany. what the heck?! life goes on – there’s always another trip. i can’t remember whether i had to persuade geoff to join us again the following year – 1979. looking back, i have the feeling i didn’t even need to ask. and so we set off for china again, this time with students from the project-based seminar. the trip was at least as interesting as the first china trip. what was different was that this time our interpreters’ sense of humour was somewhat underdeveloped and they didn‘t want to play mahjong on the overnight trains or have long discussions with us. this time the powers that be had picked some really “tough cookies” – to make sure this crowd of western students were kept in check. but there was another surprise on this trip: we were on television! in peking we were invited by the president of the pan-chinese women’s federation and vice-president of the people‘s congress, ms kang keqing, to attend a reception and take part in a discussion in the great hall of the people. this was highly theatrical, statesponsored stuff. we entered the great hall of the people, the seat of parliament, on tiananmen, the square of heavenly peace. television cameras in front, next to and behind us. lots of ceremonial activity, a lecture, a discussion, followed by posing for the group photo, which had of course been rehearsed before the actual reception took place. it was all enormously and unbelievably impressive. in the evening we sat in front of the coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 tv set, waiting for the news of the official reception of the group from germany to be screened. it was all highly cinematic. in one shot, geoff could be seen from behind – not at all good for him. he realised for the first time that his hair wasn’t developing evenly in all places. on the following day the official photo appeared in the newspaper – taken from the front this time. that looked quite ok. geoff and i were among the few members of the party to enthuse about the peking operas that lasted for hours and hours but also about romantic musical compositions such as “the butterfly lovers”, about which our interpreters told us such beautiful stories. of course we would have loved to see the revolutionary operas but they were already a thing of the past. as we were also told when we tried to buy a “mao bible”: “the time is over.” and then it turned out that they did still have a copy – under the counter. our enthusiasm for the chinese theatrical performances was so great that we bought a stage sword each. they were really big and looked extremely martial. but what was the consequence? chaos at the airport check-in. “no, that’s not permitted!” “no!” we said, “we have to take them with us!” geoff tried using a bit of british humour but that didn’t go down too well with the chinese. nevertheless, the swords did find their way to germany in the shape of “accompanying baggage”. as did a set of four targets (bearing the heads of the gang of four) and a pistol with a rubber arrow. all items that were of great interest to the airport security authorities. our other purchases, especially books, developed into a problem in view of the 20-kilogram baggage allowance. geoff revealed himself to be a packing genius. and so, we survived our first two trips, during which we had looked for socialism and found china. actually, we became more and more convinced with every trip that the more we saw of china, the less we knew about the place. this society was an enigma. what now was certain knowledge changed only a little later into its opposite. what we did grasp was the size and the diversity of the country, its development and its belief in a “glorious future”. our questions became more and more numerous. but the answers we received rarely made us any the wiser. and yet back then we felt ourselves to be witnessing events of historic importance. we were in china, others were not. and what do you do in such a case? you disseminate the knowledge you have acquired, and so geoff and i went on tour, from tecklenburg in the north to oberstdorf (allgäu) in the south. we were a good team, geoff. people listened to us. you probably won’t be surprised to learn that i didn’t have to persuade geoff to go on yet another trip. this time the journey was to take place in the summer. it would take us to cities like wuhan, known as “hot furnaces”, and through the three gorges of the yangtze. this trip turned out to be a real photo orgy. but it was not without its dangers, for instance when the inhabitants set up their beds on the unlit streets because it was so hot. occasionally geoff had his work cut out to avoid driving into somebody’s bed. once we were home again, geoff started delving more deeply into the history of the yangtze and those who lived on its banks. geoff became an expert on sampans and junks. and then we decided to write about it all. when we started writing i discovered a new side of geoff, his – shall we say – literary side. and i as a mere german had the interesting experience of being taught my own language by an englishman. up to that point i had coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 never heard of the german word “treideln”, which refers to the practice of a boat being towed along a river or canal by animals or human beings using a towpath alongside the waterway. i must say it was all a lot of fun. “changjiang – the long river” was published in england and hong kong. thanks, geoff, for having me as your co-author. joint seminars in aachen and further publications followed. a lovely time and a friendship i’ll never forget. the 1980 trip was something special: apart from china our itinerary also took in hong kong, thailand and singapore as well as sri lanka. in other words, the return journey consisted of a number of stages. i hardly need mention that we had to have a gin and tonic in the raffles hotel, singapore. for medical reasons, of course – it’s simply the best way to ward off malaria. cockroaches in the salad in our bangkok hotel – ok, you can get used to that. but in sri lanka things got really stressful. in colombo i knew some people of the goethe institute whose guest house we were able to stay in. during the night, geoff woke with a start – what was that?! snakes? they had already crossed our path in singapore – right in the city centre. we preferred them when they were in a chinese saucepan. anyway, we set off to find out what was causing the noise. our enquiring minds were leaving us no peace – and then we discovered the source of the problem: the uncanny noises were emanating from the bathroom. we opened the door and switched on the light. and then we saw a whole armada of giant cockroaches. what were we to do? geoff had the solution. he started sealing the bathroom door with newspaper. a good night’s sleep was now guaranteed. foodwise, sri lanka was quite a comedown for me. geoff was ecstatic. a curry – and then another curry – and then yet another curry. that must simply be a legacy of the british empire: indian curries, all well and good – but not several times a day, if you don’t mind. we went to kandy for a few days to visit some relatives of our hosts’. a bungalow in the jungle – a new challenge. everything was open to the elements. “please coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 don’t forget to search the room for snakes!” there are a few photos of us chatting on the veranda over a cup of tea or a gin and tonic – and when i look at those pictures i always have to think the british must have felt just as relaxed in their south-asian empire as those people look. we watched the perahera and were thrilled by it. we were travelling in an old vw beetle through jungles and bamboo forests and across rivers. and then back to the beach in colombo. whilst geoff over the years focused his attention time and again on india and frequently visited the country, he unfortunately didn’t succeed in persuading me to go with him. india also remained alien territory to me even though i had published a few things there – about china of course. but although our travels again and again took us in different directions, there was nothing nicer than to meet up over lunch and chat about them. we did once go back to china again, this time together with our wives. for geoff, china in 2005 was a very different china. having returned there frequently in the interim, i was familiar with the way the place had developed. but geoff was really shocked by the way some things had changed. the place had become western, capitalistic. cars had begun to replace the bicycles. people were wearing brightly coloured clothes. women were wearing skirts again. the morbid charm of socialism was somehow missing. and so, during this trip we found ourselves embarking on a journey of rediscovery. “now which hotel did we stay in? do you remember?” geoff was well prepared. he had always kept a diary but often the old things simply weren’t there anymore. or was it just our memories that were beginning to fade? some cities had fundamentally changed. but suzhou still had the charm of yesteryear: the canals, the venice of the east. in peking the portrait of coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 mao was still hanging over the gate of heavenly peace. and yet – the time really was over, as we had already been told by one of the locals some years earlier. geoff found the terra cotta army enthralling, and so did our wives. but i couldn’t help thinking repeatedly: “it all used to be so much nicer – there weren’t so many tourists”. but what were we now but tourists ourselves? that was evident not only in the fact that we were unaccompanied by guides or interpreters but also in the way geoff was taking out his lonely planet and reading it out to us at every possible opportunity. i can still hear my own repeated question: “so what does the lonely planet say about it?” what a pity that that was our last trip together. for me, travel and geoff will always go hand in hand. curiosity, an eagerness to discover new things and to rediscover familiar older things. i’m going to miss all that. just as i’m also going to miss those many lunchtime conversations about the university, about trump, about brexit and about all the plans we still had...and i am also missing no longer being able to ask him: “remember when we…?” when a friend dies, it’s not only a person that goes but also that person’s memories which have become part of our own lives. over forty years with you, geoffrey! what times we had, what trips we took, what conversations we had. how i’m going to miss it all... bionote: dr. manfred f. romich, m.a., is a sociologist and political scientist with a focus on environmental and china studies. he worked as researcher and lecturer at the coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 institute of sociology at rwth aachen university and retired in 2017. he now works as a consultant to academic institutions in the eu. he was guest professor at the shandong jianzhu university in jinan/china for four years, held positions as a research fellow with a member of the federal parliament of germany in the early 1990s and as an external eu-expert to the ministry of labor of romania in the early 2000s. since 1978 he used to visit china and southeast asia frequently and committed common research projects with chinese institutes on environmental issues. his works were published in 14 countries including singapore, vietnam, china, hongkong, and india. he also worked as a freelance journalist for journals in germany and italy and was an external fellow at the research institute for peace policy in starnberg and the research centre in jülich (germany). he most recently published about marriage, family, and the demographic problems in china (2019). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 from popular culture to popular custom, and back again: a love-lock’s tale ceri houlbrook university of hertfordshire c.houlbrook@herts.ac.uk copyright©2019 ceri houlbrook. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: walk over a major bridge in a western city and chances are you will come across at least one or two love-locks. these are padlocks inscribed with names or initials and attached to a public structure, typically by a couple in declaration of romantic commitment, who then proceed to throw the key into the river below. some assemblages of these love tokens are modest; others number the thousands. this has become a truly global phenomenon, with over 400 love-lock assemblages catalogued across 62 countries in all continents bar antarctica: popular custom in the true sense of the term. although this custom was practised prior to the 21st century, with evidence of it in serbia and hungary in the 1900s,i it did not gain widespread popularity until the mid-2000s — sparked, this paper contends, by an italian teenage romance novel. this paper explores the transition from popular culture, defined here as mass-produced cultural products — including but not limited to television, film, literature and music — accessible to and consumed by the majority of a given society, to popular (or folk) custom. it also explores the reverse. as the love-lock custom gained popularity and familiarity, it became an established folk motif in films, television, and novels — from popular custom to popular culture — and this paper considers what these transitions demonstrate about the relationship, or interrelationship, between popular custom and popular culture. keywords: love-locks, popular culture, folk custom. ‘this is “the lover’s chain” …’ in 2006 italian novelist federico moccia published ho voglia di te (i want you), the sequel to the highly popular tre metri sopra il cielo (three metres above heaven). a coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 first-person narrated story of teenage angst and love, centred on roman ‘bad boy’ step’s relationship with a girl called gin, the novel’s second half sees the pair driving through rome in step’s brother’s car. gin tells him to stop near the milvio bridge. gin runs over the bridge and stops in the middle, in front of the third street lamp. “ok, this is the one.” “the one what?” “the third street lamp. there’s a legend about this bridge […] can you see this, surrounding the street lamp?” “yes, probably someone got something wrong while chaining up a scooter …” “not at all, silly! this is ‘the lover’s chain’. you have to put a padlock on this chain, lock it and throw the key in the tevere.” “and then?” “you never break up.”’ii (mocchia, 2006: 274–6) gin accuses step of being ‘scared of locking a padlock’, to which he responds by retrieving a padlock from his brother’s car. i hang the padlock to the chain, lock it and pull out the key. i keep it in my hand for a moment, while i stare at gin. she looks at me. she challenges me, smiles at me, raises an eyebrow. “so?” i hold the key between my thumb and forefinger. i hang it loose for a while, suspended in the air, uncertain. then suddenly i let it go. and it flies down, fast, rolls in the air and gets lost in the waters of the tevere. “you really did it.” (ibid) and thus the love-lock phenomenon was born. in an interview with usa today, moccia admitted to placing a padlock on the third lamppost of the ponte milvio the night before ho voglia di te was published, for the benefit of any curious readers who might visit the site to check if the love-lock custom was real. ‘i thought only someone particularly engrossed by the story would have wanted to check,’ moccia is reported to have recalled in 2015, bemused by what happened next. ‘i went there a week later and there were already 300 locks. they haven’t stopped since’ (berton, 2015). it certainly did not take long for the custom to establish itself on the ponte milvio. one year later, an article in the ‘travel’ section of the telegraph reported that, following moccia’s novel, the lamppost on the ponte milvio has become: … bedecked with hundreds of padlocks. like characters in the book, lovers come here to add a chain inscribed with their names — and then throw the key into the river. but hurry if you want to follow suit. the weight of the locks is bending the post, and there are now calls for the custom to be banned. (owen, 2007) it is unsurprising that such quantities of people visited the site from the book. it was a remarkably successful novel, with a million copies sold in italy alone, and translations also proving popular; 600,000 copies were sold in spain, for example.iii moccia’s work coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 has been published in 15 languages worldwide, with an english translation planned for 2021.iv films followed the books, with ho voglia di te, directed by luis prieto, hitting the screens in italy in 2007 (a spanish version, tengo ganas de ti, was released in 2012). the film is evidence of the love-lock custom on the ponte milvio, for the scene with step and gin on the bridge features the assemblage. so in the short amount of time between the book’s publication in february 2006 and the release of the film in march 2007, the lovelock lamppost had become an established feature. connected to the film was singer-songwriter tiziano ferro’s ti scatterò una foto [i will take a photo of you]. the lyrics of this love song speak of ‘memory’, ‘always’, ‘remember[ing] forever’, and the fear of being forgotten. the music video for this featured ferro standing on the ponte milvio with actress laura chiatti, who played gin in ho voglia di te. throughout the video, which is regularly interspersed with shots of the bridge’s assemblage, both ferro and chiatti melancholically touch and study the lovelocks. the song was released in february 2007 and was in the italian music charts for 20 weeks.v the popularity of the novel, films and song has been dubbed the ‘moccia phenomenon’ in popular media, and the love-lock custom — sprung from this popularity in such a short space of time — was soon being dubbed the same. from popular culture to popular custom this conversion from popular culture to popular custom is not uncommon. literature, film and television are well-known travel inducements, attracting fans to the sites that feature in the fiction. fans of the lord of the rings visit new zealand in their search for middle earth; for the twilight saga they travel to forks (washington) and volterra (tuscany); for gladiator, the roman coliseum (buchmann, moore & fisher, 2010; lexhagen, larson & lundberg, 2013; frost, 2006). similar to the moccia phenomenon is what amy sargent terms the ‘darcy effect’, which saw immense increases in visits to historic homes following the hugely successful 1995 bbc adaptation of pride and prejudice (sargent, 1998: 177–86). visitor numbers at the national trust property of lyme park — bbc’s pemberley of colin firth’s wet-shirt-scene fame — rose from 32,000 to 91,000 the year of the miniseries’ release (orr, 2018: 248). what compels such visits? ashley orr writes that fans seek connections with fictional ‘characters through a sense of shared geographical, if not temporal, space’ and such trips ‘offer the possibility of inhabiting a beloved narrative’ (ibid: 247–8). this form of visit, known as literary tourism and film tourism, can sometimes offer more than habitation in a narrative; it can offer the opportunity for imaginative and embodied play through the re-enactment of character actions. this is what is happening when, as nick couldry writes, visitors to the manchester set of british soap opera coronation street ‘pretend for a moment they live on the street, posing with door knocker in hand or calling upstairs to a street character’ (couldry, 1998: 97). this is also what is happening in transylvania when fans of bram stoker’s dracula retrace the journey made by the character jonathan harker, and when they pay a fee to lie in — and rise dramatically from — a coffin in the basement of hotel castle dracula coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 (light, 2009: 248–50). and this is what is happening in london kings cross train station, when fans of harry potter queue up at the staged ‘platform 9¾’, don a hogwarts scarf, grasp hold of the handlebars of a half-disappeared luggage trolley, and pose for photographs (iwashita, 2006: 66). to use a folkloric term, these are examples of ostensive action. folklorists linda dégh and andrew vázsonyi borrowed the word ‘ostension’ (from the latin ostendere, ‘to show’) from semiotics to make sense of this relationship between folklore and popular culture. communication through ostension is, they explained, ‘essentially the showing of actions’; the physical enactment of folk narrative and legend (1983: 7–8). and like folk narratives and legends, popular culture, chieko iwashita observes, ‘is very good at turning people’s dreams and curiosity into action’ (2006: 70). such re-enactments even precipitate adaptations of belief systems and lifestyles. for example, helen berger and douglas ezzy explore how modern witchcraft has been impacted by popular culture, with the number of teen witchcraft practitioners seeing a significant increase during the 1990s. this was, berger and ezzy argue, accelerated or even triggered by the popular 1996 film the craft, which centred on a group of teenage witches, and television shows sabrina the teenage witch (which ran 1996–2003) and charmed (1998–2006) (2007: 32). the same process is evident in what markus davidsen identifies as ‘fiction-based religions’, such as those based on the lord of the rings and star wars — while the ‘jedi census phenomenon’, which in 2001 saw more than 500,000 people claim ‘jedi’ as their religion, was largely a prank, there are groups who earnestly identify themselves as jedi knights (2013: 378–95). often, however, re-enactments are transient, consisting of a single action that lasts no longer than a few moments. they also often, like moccia’s love-locks, have a romantic element. visitors to the casa di giulietta in verona, for instance, queue for their brief moment on ‘juliet’s balcony’ to re-enact that most famous of love scenes: ‘romeo, romeo, wherefore art thou romeo?’ likewise, kim explores couples’ fan play at sites from south korean television show winter sonata, where they re-enact romantic scenes of bicycle rides through a specific redwood-lined road, as the show’s characters did before them. ‘by this performance,’ kim writes, ‘it is presumed that the tourists would then become true lovers in their own context and love story’ (2010: 67). these romantic reenactments, while transient, can sometimes leave tangible traces, physically altering the landscapes and creating something real that only previously existed in fiction. love-locks are an example of this; imaginative play forms a folk assemblage and popular culture begets a popular custom (coffey, 2017). this is the process that popularised the love-lock custom in italy. fans of moccia’s novels and the subsequent films re-enacted the locking of a padlock on the ponte milvio, creating a folk custom by drawing a fictional action into reality. fans who could not visit rome initiated the custom elsewhere, such as venice’s rialto bridge, forming further folk assemblages and cementing the custom as a ritual declaration of romantic commitment. and so, by the 2000s, love-locks had become an established feature in some european cities. what followed was a rapid and geographically unbounded growth. however, it was spurred less by moccia’s fanbase and more by the masses of tourists who were now encountering these tangible traces of the custom left on the landscape. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 the many articles which describe the custom in italy as a symptom of the ‘moccia phenomenon’ go on to observe that by the late 2000s tourists had begun imitating the local fans by adding their own love-locks. one written in 2007 for the new york times notes, ‘tossing a key off ponte milvio, some italians complain, may soon be as touristy as flipping a coin into the trevi fountain’ and ‘some young roman said that … the ritual had lost its appeal and gotten touristy’ (fisher, 2007). two years later, in cologne, the custom is described as one practised by local lovers, but the author of the article observes that ‘the tokens have also become an attraction for tourists, who stop to take a closer look at the messages inscribed on them’.vi from this point on, the myriad newspaper and magazine articles which refer to the love-lock custom describe it as a tourist practice — in many cases actually having been initiated by tourists. it is no coincidence that many of the world’s tourist attractions also feature love-locks: new york’s brooklyn bridge, paris’s pont des arts, florence’s ponte vecchio, sydney’s harbour bridge, prague’s charles bridge, seoul’s namsan tower. tourists brought the custom to these sites and took them onwards from there, seeing them while on one holiday (or encountering them less directly — see below) and then disseminating the practice on their next trip or back home. ‘the idea of hanging locks originated from local tourists a few years ago who saw the same thing at tokyo tower’, wrote park ji-yun in her article on love-locks on seoul tower (2008). even in the more obscure locations, once enough locks are added to a structure, that structure becomes culturally and aesthetically interesting, consequently attracting tourists. love-lock assemblages thus became something more than features of tourist attractions; they became tourist attractions in and of themselves. from popular custom to popular culture since federico moccia’s use of love-locks in ho voglia di te, the custom has appeared in myriad pieces of fiction, from hollywood to hallmark, from international drama to korean melodrama, from teen thriller books to children’s superhero cartoons. in some examples, love-locks act as incidental backdrop. in others, they are drawn on to communicate a message or materialise a sentiment; in yet others, they are integral to the plot itself. however, it is not sufficient simply to ‘motif-spot’, as koven disparagingly phrases it; that is, to catalogue instances and thus demonstrate the frequency with which love-locks appear in popular culture (2003: 190). alan dundes stressed in the 1960s that folklorists need to do more than simply identify folk motifs (1965: 136–43). interpretation and analysis are needed to understand how and why folklore and popular culture converge, and how they structure, adapt to, and influence each other. the remainder of this paper therefore aims to analyse the various uses of the love-lock as folk motif in popular culture in order to better understand how the love-lock custom is perceived, used and affected by mass media. as we will see below, love-locks are particularly popular backdrop material for films and television series set in paris. this use of love-locks demonstrates two important things. first, they fit one of priscilla denby’s categories of folklore in the mass media — ‘folklore as an aside’, in particular that which is ‘used consciously for effects’ (1971: coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 118). the custom of love-locking is incidental within the plot, not directly engaged with, but the love-locks are part of the mise-en-scène,vii consciously chosen to form part of the setting — both for decorative purposes, to make the backdrop more visually interesting, and to locate the scenes within central, popular and romantic locations within paris. this leads to the second point: love-locks are used in these scenes because, being so popular in paris, they have become synonymous with the french capital. therefore, just as stock shots of the eiffel tower, notre-dame and sacré-cœur are employed excessively, almost uniformly, in visual media to set the scene in paris, now so too are love-lock bridges. in roger michell’s 2013 film le week-end, british actors jim broadbent and lindsay duncan play husband and wife nick and meg, visiting paris to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. taglines for the film included ‘nick & meg are returning to paris for a second honeymoon … and a last chance’ and ‘a story about reigniting the spark in the city of light’. the spark is not necessarily reignited, but at the end of a dissatisfying trip, the long-time marrieds find some common ground and towards the end of the film, a 23-second scene has them talking and laughing on a love-lock bridge. there is no discussion or engagement with the love-locks, but part of the scene has the characters as backdrop and the locks in the foreground. parisian love-locks also feature briefly in a 2013 chanel coco mademoiselle advertisement, in which keira knightley drives a speedboat down the seine, passing an admirer — russian actor danila valerievich kozlovsky — as he walks across a heavily love-locked pont des arts, to the theme song of ‘she’s not there’. again, the love-locks are not engaged with, but act as backdrop. likewise in 2018, the paris love-locks made a cameo appearance in an episode of french superhero cartoon miraculous: tales of ladybug and cat noir, entitled ‘glaciator’. they feature as backdrop in a scene featuring a villainous ice-cream vendor, and again are not commented on or looked at by the characters.viii the use of love-locks as backdrop has also occurred in seoul, where the vast assemblage of love-locks on namsan tower (or n seoul tower) feature as the romantic backdrop of many korean dramas (more details below). they have also been similarly used, to a lesser extent, in the uk. for example, the love-locks on ha’penny bridge in dublin featured in a 2012 episode of british soap opera hollyoaks, in which the characters ste and brendan are reunited and declare their love for each other on the bridge itself.ix likewise in coronation street, when character phelan travels to liverpool’s albert docks, the lovelocks adorning the chain-link fences act as backdrop, and the extent of engagement with them is phelan briefly and absently looking down at the locks before he walks away.x for liverpool, dublin, and seoul, as well as paris, the love-lock assemblage has entered the scene-setting corpus of visual media. in many other cases, however, love-locks are used as more than scenery, but act as symbolic objects and plot devices. the love-lock as folk motif objects are a language that popular culture is fluent in. films and television in particular know how to use material culture effectively; they know how to squeeze the symbolism coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 out of an object (bordwell et al, 2017: 118). obviously, the selection of props is culturally dependent, but there are some objects that boast near universal symbolic resonance. the ring is one such object, utilised in abundance in film, television, and literature to symbolise romantic commitment, to hold a mirror up to a couple’s relationship (and economic) status, and to foreshadow future events. hidden in a pocket or sock drawer a ring indicates future plans; deposited in a champagne flute, imminent proposal; slipped on a finger, engagement or marriage; too small for the finger, bad luck; removed from a finger, thrown away or given back, the end of a relationship; and accidentally lost or broken, future problems or tragedy. the ring is without a doubt the most commonly used material symbol of love within popular culture, but it is not the only one. love-locks have entered the arena. they have become, like the ring, ‘objects of endearment’, to use a term coined by victor margolin, who asserts that love, in its myriad forms, can be ‘played out through … objects’ identities both as possessions and as props in the performative enactments of social rituals’ (2014: 16). the love-lock scene in moccia’s ho voglia di te was a short one, occupying only two pages in the book and less than two minutes in the film, but the love story became so synonymous with the custom that later editions of the novel featured only an image of the love-lock on the front cover. likewise, the whole of tiziano ferro’s 2007 music video for ti scatterò una foto, which accompanied the film, centred on the bridge and its lovelock assemblage. this was because the love-lock works so well as a folk motif – bordwell et al. note that when props enter the narrative action, they can ‘weave through a film to create motifs’ (2017: 188) — no doubt due to the universality of its symbolism (maiwald, 2016: np). because this small and inexpensive object can, like the ring, so readily allegorise love, it has been employed extensively within popular culture. in 2017, hallmark released the made-for-tv film love locks, which, unsurprisingly, centred on the custom. directed by martin wood and starring american actors (and reallife husband-and-wife) jerry o’connell as jack and rebecca romijn as lindsey, the film opens with the couple cycling through paris. cue the typical shots of the eiffel tower and the louvre, and of course they end on the pont des arts. they are soon to part ways, with lindsey returning to the us, so she has brought a love-lock to attach to the bridge. lindsey: we’ll lock it on the bridge and our love will last forever. jack: forever? lindsey: forever. [they write their names onto the lock] jack: ok. with this lock i thee — what follows is a clumsy fumble and they accidentally drop the lock into the seine; the camera follows it to the bottom of the riverbed. they accuse each other of dropping it and the scene ends with the unspoken assumption that this did not bode well for their relationship. the next scene takes us to new york, twenty years later, jack and lindsey not having seen each other since paris. lindsey has since married and divorced, and is returning to paris with her teenage daughter, where she inevitably reunites with jack. love-locks feature throughout the entire film. the daughter, alexa, wants to include the love-locks in their sightseeing tour, but lindsey is reluctant: ‘it’s just a bridge. with locks’, to which alexa responds, ‘yeah but those locks are people pledging their love for coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 each other’. reference is made to the council removing the locks, and this is used to explore the custom through other couples’ eyes. side-character kathryn, a widow, wants to find the lock on pont neuf she and her late husband locked there some years before, before it is removed by the council; her new love interest has retrieved the lock for her by the end of the film. in this specific storyline, the love-lock acts as mnemonic device, recalling a past relationship. while alexa is given a love-lock by her new love interest and she declares not to care if the council removes it: ‘it’s still ours’. the film ends with lindsey and jack back on the bridge, having rekindled their romance. this time they have brought extra love-locks, just in case. this film is interesting on a number of levels. it reveals something of the love-lock’s realworld status; the daughter’s eagerness to see the love-locks indicates that they have become tourist attractions in and of themselves. it reveals how the love-lock has become a strong and familiar enough folk motif to act as the central theme of an entire film. it reveals how the love-lock can be variously used as a plot device; while it brings some couples together throughout the film, it foreshadows the main characters’ (temporarily) doomed romance. a failed love-lock here symbolises a failed relationship. the love-locks are also used as a character-building device, for instance demonstrating the contrasts between the perspectives of lindsey, characterised as middle-aged and cynical, and alexa, young and idealistic. finally, it tells us something about the tendency to project age onto this custom. according to this film, love-locks were being attached to the pont des arts since 1997, over ten years before they were in reality. this is frequently the case with folk customs, antiquity often being equated with authenticity and therefore fabricated, knowingly or unknowingly, for commercial reasons. customs feel more firmly established if bestowed with a sense of age. age ‘lends it status’ (lowenthal, 1985: 265).xi as sefryn penrose observes, ‘the older something becomes the more important it tends to be thought’ (2007: 13). this applies to customs, which appear to be viewed by many as only interesting insofar as they are seasoned, survivals from an earlier time. alessandro testa demonstrates this in his ethnographic exploration of carnivals in europe today, which are given (largely false) historical roots: ‘one can explain the emic usage of adjectives like ‘very ancient’, ‘antique’, ‘pagan’, or even ‘prehistoric’: the equation at work is that the more remote the evoked past is, the more ‘authentic’’ (2017: 124). an even greater exaggeration of antiquity is given in a. scott’s 2014 independently published novel the cornuta curse, which is the first in the love locks trilogy. the story follows mara, an australian of italian heritage, who learns that the women in her family are cursed in love, following her ancestors’ failure to throw the key into the sea when they attached a love-lock on the via dell’amore (a real place, today heavily adorned with love-locks) on the cinque terre in 1545. according to her grandmother, 500 years ago ‘lovers would go up there with a padlock, and put their initials on it, and lock it before throwing the key into the sea. that way, the love would last forever’. however, ‘by not throwing the key into the sea, [mara’s ancestors, adriana and tomolsino] had failed to complete the pact so had secured their love but without the “forever” part … as a result, adriana was doomed to suffer tomolsino’s infidelity, as we were, one generation after the next, to be betrayed by our partners’ (scott, 2014: 14–15). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 mara’s plan when she travels to the cinque terre — ‘find lock, unlock lock, relock lock, throw the dang key into the sea and live happily ever after’ (53) — is thwarted by the sheer number of locks on the via dell’amore and the various factions of local inhabitants who wish to see her fail. when she does finally succeed in finding the lock, her observation that ‘its size mocked its importance’ (243) is applicable also to its importance within the plot itself. as with the film love locks, the small object of the padlock is deemed of enough cultural significance and symbolism to play not only the central plot device but the theme holding the novel together. another projection of (less unrealistic) age is evident in us television series homeland, which sees marine sergeant nicholas brody reunited with his family after being missing in action since 2003. in an episode that aired in 2011, brody takes his daughter dana to see a love-lock assemblage on a chain-link fence in some unnamed, nondescript woods in virginia. when his daughter asks what they are, brody responds ‘historical artefacts’, and explains that he and his wife attached a love-lock there (at some point that must predate 2003, and that therefore pre-dates the spread of the custom). ‘each padlock put here by a couple who thought they’d stay together forever,’ muses brody, ‘i wonder how many did. not many, i bet’. when dana asks why he brought her to see them, he explains ‘i’m kind of struggling for things to hold onto’. in this example, the love-lock represents memory and the past, and is used to demonstrate brody’s struggle in the present.xii love-locks have been employed in various ways over a number of years in the australian soap opera neighbours. the first episode to feature a love-lock storyline aired on 13 february 2014 (the day before valentine’s day) and involved character callum jones creating a love-lock assemblage on the chain-link fences along the fictional lassiter’s lake. he pitched his idea: ‘couples will be brought here to lovers lake to put a lock on this bridge, just like in paris … and then afterwards, they'll drop lots of money at local business’. throughout the following few episodes, the romantic status of several of the show’s couples is reflected in their responses to the love-locks. young love is cemented through the locking of a lock, secret lovers consider using the custom to make their relationship public, while a marriage is shown to be struggling when a husband is too busy to participate in the custom.xiii love-locks appear again in june 2014 as a mnemonic device, with one character encountering the lock she had attached on valentine’s day; again in february 2016, when another character protests against the local council’s plans to remove them; and again in october 2017 when one of the locks is removed to signify the end of a relationship.xiv the love-lock is not always used romantically within popular culture, again demonstrating its adaptability. in the 2013 hollywood film now you see me, which centres on a mysterious organisation of magicians, character alma dray of interpol describes the custom as one of magic, wishes, and secrets: there is a place in paris, pont des arts. sometimes in the mornings i sit on a bench there and i watch the people make a wish and lock it in a lock on the bridge then throw the key into the seine. all day they do this. mothers, lovers, old men. watching the keys sink into the water and their secret is locked away forever. for real and at the same time magical. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 in the final scene of the film, alma is on the pont des arts with fbi agent dylan rhodes (who has revealed himself to be a member of the secret organisation). he asks alma to keep the secret of his identity and has brought a padlock: ‘one more secret to lock away’. they lock it and throw the key into the seine; the camera follows it beneath the water to rest on the riverbed, amidst hundreds of keys. the effects of popular culture the love-lock custom has impacted popular culture by providing a familiar and adaptable motif easily employed to symbolise romance and memory, and to hold a mirror up to the status of people’s relationships: young love, secret love, long-lost love, rekindled love. however, as was demonstrated by the ‘moccia phenomenon’, the love-lock custom has also been impacted by popular culture. gin and step attached a love-lock in ho voglia di te so italian teenagers began imitating the practice in a form of embodied play. we witness the same process following the appearance of the custom in other examples of mass media, where audiences become aware of the custom through their exposure to it on the screen or in the pages of a novel, and then perhaps even visit the specific love-lock assemblage referenced. it has been suggested that this process is behind the popularity of the namsan tower lovelocks, seoul. going to the top of the tower has become the stereotypical korean date as shown in korean dramas (known popularly as k-drama) and it is often accompanied by the locking of a love-lock. appearing in such dramas as boys over flowers, rooftop prince and my love from the star, it is unsurprising that the site features in many ‘kdrama’ sightseeing itineraries.xv however, references to the site are not limited to kdrama. an article in korea times identifies the namsan tower’s love-locks’ appearance in korean reality television programme we’ve got married in 2008 as another factor behind its popularity (ji-yun, 2008). they also feature in paula stokes’s 2017 young adult thriller ferocious, in which protagonist winter and love interest jesse climb to the top of the tower on their first date and discuss the locks, observing that there are similar assemblages in the us. ‘it’s a cool gesture, but i never really understood,’ jesse admits. ‘i feel like love is the kind of thing you have to nurture and care for. you can’t just lock it up in some faraway place if you want it to last’ (268–9). this process of popular cultural references increasing the number of participants in the custom has occurred elsewhere, albeit to a lesser extent. the hollyoaks scene, described above, which features two characters declaring their love on the ha’penny bridge, dublin, is believed to have motivated fans to visit the bridge and attach love-locks themselves.xvi one commenter on travel review website tripadvisor responded to a complaint about the love-locks on ha’penny bridge by noting ‘those locks could be something attracting tourists to dublin [—] ever since the same bridge was seen in [h]ollyoaks with [s]te and brendan!’. while another person responded to an online the journal article on the love-locks by writing ‘hollyoaks, the tv show, has a lot to answer for’. following the episode in 2012, photographs circulated on the internet of a love-lock with the two characters’ names on, despite the fact that no scene aired showing the pair coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 lock one.xvii this was possibly the result of a scene filmed but cut from the show; it may also have been the deposit of a fan, partaking in embodied play. another love-lock deposited in direct connection to a television show was one locked during the 100th episode of american sitcom parks and recreation, when the central character leslie takes a romantic trip to paris with husband ben. one of the final scenes of the 2014 episode shows them locking a love-lock on pont neuf. sean o’neill, writing for entertainment website av news, observed that ‘fans have since made their own pilgrimages to seek out the lock and take their pictures with it, and it was all incredibly sweet and sentimental and a shared experience until some selfish jerkface cut the fence and stole the lock for themselves’ (2014). actor adam scott, who played ben, shared this news on 5 february 2014 on social media platform twitter, with the simple message ‘this is shitty’.xviii that the folk custom of love-locking is being transmitted to a wide audience and consequently perpetuated through popular culture is not surprising. as early as 1946, folklorist stith thompson was declaring cinema as ‘perhaps the most successful of all mediums for the presentation of the fairy tale’ (1977: 461). making particular reference to disney’s 1937 snow white and the seven dwarves, thompson noted the animated cartoon’s unprecedented scope for constructing and therefore communicating the creatures and characters of the folk imagination. juliette wood made a similar assertion about fairy beliefs and film: ‘contemporary audiences are more likely to be exposed to folk legend and belief in the context of mass media than by any other means’ and so, she concluded, traditions ‘are transmitted through popular culture’ (2006: 281). leonard primiano made the same remarks regarding television: ‘the nature of television is that it expresses individuals’ views while simultaneously influencing them. television media treatment may often trivialize and sensationalize personal experiences of the supernatural, but it can also inspire and inform them’ (2001: 57). and thus has popular culture inspired and informed the love-lock custom. conclusion when moccia used the love-lock custom to make a statement about the romantic commitment between his two main characters, he created a folk motif: a symbolic element within the narrative that draws on a folkloric custom. having become an established ‘object of endearment’, one that so succinctly allegorises love, the love-lock’s popularity as a folk motif grew. it has appeared in numerous films, television shows, and pieces of literature, demonstrating the ease with which folkloric customs and popular culture converge, whether the love-locks act as incidental backdrop, are drawn on to communicate a message or materialise a sentiment, or are integral to the plot. through a consideration of how the love-lock custom and consequent assemblages are used in mass media, a better insight has been gained into how they are perceived: as familiar landmarks, as romantic settings, and as a ritual of universal but also adaptable symbolism. this exploration into the love-lock as mass-mediated ostension has also illustrated how popular culture has impacted the custom. first, transmission: through exposure to it on coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 the screen or on the page, audiences become familiar with the symbolism of love-locking and with the assemblages as landmarks. and vice versa, the more familiar the audiences become, the more this motif is used. and second, dissemination: familiarity leads to the perpetuation of the custom, with fans imitating the practice through embodied play. these various strands all serve to demonstrate how interrelated popular custom and popular culture can be. the custom was borne from popular culture, perpetuated and shaped by it, just as popular culture has been created for and coloured by the custom. bibliography berger, helen a. & ezzy, douglas. 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(1965) ‘the study of folklore in literature and culture: identification and interpretation’ journal of american folklore 78: 136–43 https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/06/05/paris-love-locks/28532155/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/06/05/paris-love-locks/28532155/ https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/lyras-oxford-walking-tour-philip-pullman-book-of-dust-trilogy-la-belle-sauvage-northern-lights-his-a8005131.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/lyras-oxford-walking-tour-philip-pullman-book-of-dust-trilogy-la-belle-sauvage-northern-lights-his-a8005131.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/lyras-oxford-walking-tour-philip-pullman-book-of-dust-trilogy-la-belle-sauvage-northern-lights-his-a8005131.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/lyras-oxford-walking-tour-philip-pullman-book-of-dust-trilogy-la-belle-sauvage-northern-lights-his-a8005131.html coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 fisher, ian. 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(2017) ‘’fertility’ and the carnival 2: popular frazerism and the reconfiguration of tradition in europe today’ folklore 128 (june 2017), 111–32 thompson, s. (1977 [1946]). the folktale. berkeley: university of california. wood, juliette. (2006) ‘filming fairies: popular film, audience response and meaning in contemporary fairy lore’, folklore 117(3), 279–96 bionote: ceri houlbrook is a lecturer in history and folklore at the university of hertfordshire, currently teaching on the folklore studies ma. she holds a doctorate in archaeology from the university of manchester. her primary research interests are contemporary folklore and the material culture of ritual and popular practices. she has co-edited volumes on ‘the materiality of magic and magical folk’, has published a monograph on the roots of a ritual: the magic of coin-trees from religion to recreation, and has an upcoming monograph on unlocking the love-lock with berghahn publishers. https://news.avclub.com/some-jerkface-stole-the-parks-and-recreation-leslie-an-1798265993 https://news.avclub.com/some-jerkface-stole-the-parks-and-recreation-leslie-an-1798265993 https://news.avclub.com/some-jerkface-stole-the-parks-and-recreation-leslie-an-1798265993 https://news.avclub.com/some-jerkface-stole-the-parks-and-recreation-leslie-an-1798265993 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/italy/rome/738422/rome-city-of-love.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/italy/rome/738422/rome-city-of-love.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/italy/rome/738422/rome-city-of-love.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/italy/rome/738422/rome-city-of-love.html coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 endnotes i for a detailed discussion of the history of this custom, see houlbrook, c (forthcoming). ii translation from italian by francesca benetti, with much appreciation. iii personal communication, maria cardona serra, pontas literary agency, 23 november 2018. iv pontas literary agency (2018) ‘grand central publishing to publish the #1 italian bestselling author federico moccia’ https://www.pontas-agency.com/grand-centralpublishing-to-publish-the-1-italian-bestselling-author-federico-moccia/ [accessed 23 november 2018] v italian charts. tiziano ferro – i scattered a photo (song). https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl =translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3fi nterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26 cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,1 5700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta [accessed 22 november 2018] vi ‘cologne gets a lock on love’ dw, 2 february 2009 https://www.dw.com/en/cologne-gets-a-lock-on-love/a-4008316 [accessed 26 july 2018] vii the mise-en-scène is defined by john gibbs as ‘the contents of the frame and the way that they are organised’ (gibbs, 2012: 5). viii ‘glaciator’, miraculous: tales of ladybug and cat noir. season 2, episode 9. first aired 14 january 2018. ix hollyoaks, 19 december 2012. x coronation street, episode 9195, 26 june 2017. xi see also holtorf and schadla-hall, writing of ‘age-value’ (holtorf & schadla-hall, 1999: 232). xii ‘clean skin’, homeland, season 1, episode 3. xiii neighbours, episodes 6819, 6820, 6823. xiv neighbours, episodes 7292, 7710, 7714, 7717. xv korean dramaland. 2018. namsan tower aka seoul tower: https://koreandramaland.com/listings/namsan-tower-aka-n-seoul-tower/ [accessed 1 december 2018]; adrian. 2016. locks of love: why n seoul tower is romantic. hellokpop, january 3, 2016: https://www.hellokpop.com/korea-joa/locks-of-lovewhy-n-seoul-tower-is-romantic/ [accessed 1 december 2018] xvi lollymcd. 2013. seriously! the ha’penny bridge is not the love lock bridge. tripadvisor: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showtopic-g186605-i90-k6637516-o50seriously_the_ha_penny_bridge_is_not_the_love_lock_bridgedublin_county_dublin.html; https://www.thejournal.ie/love-locks-poll-on-bridges1947130-feb2015/ [accessed 19 december 2018] xvii emmett fans. 2014: http://emmettfans.tumblr.com/post/47703848840/here-is-theste-and-brendan-love-lock-from; brendan brady (emmett j. scanlan) fan thread! digital spy: https://www.pontas-agency.com/grand-central-publishing-to-publish-the-1-italian-bestselling-author-federico-moccia/ https://www.pontas-agency.com/grand-central-publishing-to-publish-the-1-italian-bestselling-author-federico-moccia/ https://www.pontas-agency.com/grand-central-publishing-to-publish-the-1-italian-bestselling-author-federico-moccia/ https://www.pontas-agency.com/grand-central-publishing-to-publish-the-1-italian-bestselling-author-federico-moccia/ https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&sp=nmt4&u=https://italiancharts.com/showitem.asp%3finterpret%3dtiziano%2bferro%26titel%3dti%2bscatter%25f2%2buna%2bfoto%26cat%3ds&xid=17259,15700021,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700214&usg=alkjrhgoanciz_bzj8r1t2ifdwy81svjta https://koreandramaland.com/listings/namsan-tower-aka-n-seoul-tower/ https://koreandramaland.com/listings/namsan-tower-aka-n-seoul-tower/ https://www.hellokpop.com/korea-joa/locks-of-love-why-n-seoul-tower-is-romantic/ https://www.hellokpop.com/korea-joa/locks-of-love-why-n-seoul-tower-is-romantic/ https://www.hellokpop.com/korea-joa/locks-of-love-why-n-seoul-tower-is-romantic/ https://www.hellokpop.com/korea-joa/locks-of-love-why-n-seoul-tower-is-romantic/ https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showtopic-g186605-i90-k6637516-o50-seriously_the_ha_penny_bridge_is_not_the_love_lock_bridge-dublin_county_dublin.html https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showtopic-g186605-i90-k6637516-o50-seriously_the_ha_penny_bridge_is_not_the_love_lock_bridge-dublin_county_dublin.html https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showtopic-g186605-i90-k6637516-o50-seriously_the_ha_penny_bridge_is_not_the_love_lock_bridge-dublin_county_dublin.html https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showtopic-g186605-i90-k6637516-o50-seriously_the_ha_penny_bridge_is_not_the_love_lock_bridge-dublin_county_dublin.html https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showtopic-g186605-i90-k6637516-o50-seriously_the_ha_penny_bridge_is_not_the_love_lock_bridge-dublin_county_dublin.html https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showtopic-g186605-i90-k6637516-o50-seriously_the_ha_penny_bridge_is_not_the_love_lock_bridge-dublin_county_dublin.html https://www.thejournal.ie/love-locks-poll-on-bridges-1947130-feb2015/ https://www.thejournal.ie/love-locks-poll-on-bridges-1947130-feb2015/ https://www.thejournal.ie/love-locks-poll-on-bridges-1947130-feb2015/ https://www.thejournal.ie/love-locks-poll-on-bridges-1947130-feb2015/ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2070543/brendan-brady-emmett-j-scanlan-fanthread-part-196/p552 [accessed 19 december 2018] xviii parks and recreation, 2014, season 6, episode 10. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2070543/brendan-brady-emmett-j-scanlan-fan-thread-part-196/p552 https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2070543/brendan-brady-emmett-j-scanlan-fan-thread-part-196/p552 https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2070543/brendan-brady-emmett-j-scanlan-fan-thread-part-196/p552 17 coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona enigma of the dark: reflections while researching journalism and the claremont serial killings mary-anne romano curtin university wa mary-anne.romano@postgrad.curtin.edu.au copyright© 2021 mary-anne romano. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. after almost 25 years of mass media coverage on the claremont serial killings, perth audiences were informed in december 2020 that bradley robert edwards would serve two life sentences for murdering two of the young women. this article draws on interviews with journalists to discuss media practices in the case that shocked perth while shaping audience understandings of women as victims. the article describes how the term ‘serial killer’ came into use to bolster the importance of western australian news; how the status and resources of victim’s family influenced media coverage and, consequently, the police investigation; and, how the position of a journalist as an unbiased observer became untenable in the case. keywords: claremont serial killings; journalism as ritual; media coverage mailto:mary-anne.romano@postgrad.curtin.edu.au 18 western australia tends not to be a place where people come by accident. it is a conscious decision; whether it is to be with family, a long holiday, a place to work or in more recent times, to live life without the constraints of masks, lockdowns and the constant rhetoric of life during a pandemic. there has not been any covid related community transfer here in over nine months. landlocked between desert and ocean, isolation has been part of our narrative from the early days of colonial settlement, when british capitalists and supporting troops invaded indigenous country and transported convicts to perth to build the infrastructure for emerging colonial industries and government institutions (kerr, 2015; statham-drew, 2003). many western australians jokingly enjoy referring to remoteness as part of their identity; ask anyone from perth to tell you a surprising fact about our capital city and they will most likely tell you that ‘we are the most isolated city in the world’. it is not true though, perth actually comes in fourth; iquitos in peru has earned that honour (gill, 2015), but no one here will tell you otherwise. also, by listening carefully, you may hear the longstanding – but often forgotten – discourse of indigenous connection here to trade routes and social contacts in other nearby countries. our singularity around our identity of isolation and remoteness is what makes us unique. unlike our (much smaller) east coast cousins, western australia geographically makes up nearly a third of the australia landmass, with our vast commodities, including mining and agricultural goods, not only being exported overseas but to our counterparts on the east. our moniker of being the ‘engine room of the australian economy’ (wyatt, 2019) is not lost on us, in fact there is almost a perverse enjoyment of knowing that the national economy could be left floundering if we happened to up and leave. this detachment has also translated into how we view our capital city, perth and the surrounding areas. our seclusion can be seen as insular, in fact, rhetoric in perth still describes us as a ‘big country town’; more laid back, safer and less crime than the giant cities of sydney and melbourne on the eastern seaboard. what people sometimes fail to mention, either purposely or unintentionally, is that perth has been affected by a number of high-profile crimes which have altered its perception of itself and its community. more than two decades ago, on australia day 1996, the disappearance of an 18-year-old woman from an affluent suburb in perth, would mark the beginnings of the claremont serial killings. the longest and most expensive unsolved murder investigation in australian history followed, with the killings affecting the psyche of the perth community. the community of just over 1.2 million (australian bureau of statistics, 1996) was “king-hit by a menace it couldn’t see” (marshall, iii). the disappearance of sarah spiers from claremont in january 1996, followed by the disappearances of jane rimmer, 23 and ciara glennon, 27, in 1997 and discovery of rimmer and glennon’s bodies, has become part of perth’s crime narrative. bradley robert edwards, 52, was arrested and charged in december 2016 with the wilful murders of jane rimmer and ciara glennon as well as charges related to two sexual assaults in 1988 and 1995. then, in february 2018, edwards was charged with the wilful murder of sarah spiers even though her body has never been found. edwards pleaded not guilty to the murders. the judge-alone trial before justice stephen hall, ran from november 2019 until june 2020 in the western australian supreme court, and according to the western australian department of justice, cost $11 million, which is believed to be the most expensive in western australian history. 19 in late september 2020, edwards was found guilty of the wilful murders of jane rimmer and ciara glennon but acquitted of the murder of sarah spiers. on a side note, edwards pleaded guilty to five charges related to the 1988 and 1995 sexual assaults at a pre-trial hearing in the month before his trial began. two days before christmas 2020, edwards was sentenced to a total of 113 years, which included two life sentences of 40 years for each of the murders. he will not be eligible for parole for a minimum of 40 years – the longest ever non-parole period in western australian judicial history. semi-structured interviews have been applied in this study to understand the complex behaviour of journalists through multiple sources. the plan has been to interview at least ten journalists from the australian broadcasting corporation (abc) and sevenwest media, in particular. to date seven journalists have been approached for interview; four have accepted (one from the west australian and two from channel 7 news perth, one from the abc and an additional one from another news organisation), two have declined and the investigator is awaiting a response from several others. for this article, data is analysed from interviews with journalists who worked on the case as it emerged into the media. they include rex haw (channel 9 news perth and channel 10 news perth), torrance mendez (the west australian) and john townsend (the west australian). this article also refers to the researcher’s conversation with a fourth journalist who refused to be interviewed but who, generously, has granted consent for including their reasoning for the refusal in this article and subsequent work. their reasoning provides insight into the impact the case has had on journalists who worked on it. after the interviews, data was coded, arranged into categories pointing to significant concepts and emerging research themes were identified. these themes include why some journalists are reluctant to recall their work on the case; journalist’s desire to take on additional ‘roles’ beyond just being the story teller; use of the term ‘serial killer’; a culture of trying to outdo east coast news media; and, why the disappearance and murder of ciara glennon appeared to take the case to new levels. this sections below will discuss findings from the analysis of interviews with journalists who worked on the emerging news story of the claremont serial killings. these interviews were undertaken as part of a phd project on journalistic practices in the case which includes interviews with other journalists and media participants as well as analyses of newspaper articles, television news broadcasts and a recent audio podcast series. the disappearances and murders were especially formative for the researcher, as i entered womanhood in perth within this context. i was among a whole generation of young people (best identified as those in the late generation x phase) who were coming of age as the police incidents became news and were legally able to enter night clubs and bars when the sensational news story emerged just before mobile phones became accessible to the average consumer. this meant we relied on lifts to and from home from friends, catching a taxi (if money was available at the end of a night) or walking home, which was a relatively common sight in the early hours of a weekend night in perth at the time. 20 the subheadings included in this article have been taken directly from headlines used in the west australian newspaper from after sarah spiers disappearance until just after the discovery of ciara glennon’s body. headlines set the tone for an article and are usually picked from the most newsworthy point regarding the story. headlines can determine how many readers you will get, can change the way the audience reads the article and in the case of this larger project, remembers it. psychologists have long reasoned that first impressions do count – what we see, hear, feel and experience when we first chance upon something, influences how we process it. in this case, the headlines can influence an audience’s perception to the narrative and draw attention to aspects that can be inaccurate (ecker et al., 2014). ‘we’ve had enough!’ (mallabone, 1997) writer david whish-wilson (2013a) argues these events have shaken perth’s public to its core. this sentiment has also been reflected by western australian lead state prosecutor carmel barbagallo, who, in her opening address to the court on 25 november 2019, explained how profound the impact of the disappearances and murders had been on an entire generation in perth: in a 14-month period in the mid-1990s, three young, bright, beautiful women vanished off the streets of claremont under the cover of darkness… going out in claremont to have an enjoyable night out with a few drinks in the company of friends and then making their way home safely, no matter how they chose to get home, or the darkness of the hour (mcneill, 2019). how could three young women disappear from an upmarket nightspot without anyone seeing anything? the cases had remained unsolved for more than two decades and have become the subject of morbid fascination and speculation. marshall (2007) describes perth in the early years of the investigation: a city [that has] descended in the twilight world of outright panic and bedlam. the shockwaves are felt throughout perth, permeating the press ... politicians and police. perth has reverted to the horrific, dark days when serial killer eric cooke indiscriminately ran amok in suburbs near claremont, killing its beautiful young women (marshall, 2007: 66). the claremont murders became public folklore, as did another case of serial murder 30 years earlier. eric edgar cooke, the last man hanged at fremantle prison in 1964, commenced his murder spree of five people in perth’s wealthy inner-western suburbs on australia day in 1963, terrorising perth with his random acts of violence. as many writers and commentators of the time suggest, perth, with its small size (in 1963, perth’s population was approximately 450,000), isolation from other australian capital cities, has always been small enough that dynamic people, such as serial killers and murderers, can have a disproportioned effect on decision making, particularly by police and politicians, and create certain modes of behaviour from the public (drewe 2003; whish-wilson, 2013b). the claremont serial killer was seen as enough of a real threat for the public, particularly women, to change their social behaviours, and to result in a proliferation of news coverage on the killings and its influence on the culture of perth. 21 ‘woman missing: serial killer fear’ (morfesse, 1997) the study of serial killers has included biographies of offenders and criminological analyses of the causes of their behaviour (douglas and olshaker, 2017). while serial killing is statistically rare (schlesinger, 2001), it nonetheless has a significant impact on society; one that for the majority of people is only known and felt through news coverage and other mediated events. in this research, the claremont serial killings are analysed as a series of media events with a focus on furthering understandings of the concept of journalism as ritual (curran and liebes, 2002). this research considers the symbolic systems and rituals by which journalists maintain their authority as the voice of events in the public domain, and how that affects the public. the inspiration for this work comes from research, particularly during the 1970s (cohen, 1972; hall et al., 1978; tuchman, 1978), where an expansion of the sociology of culture and journalism led to an expansion of understandings of journalistic practices and research begun on journalism as ritual. the aim here is to view journalism, ritual and culture as an interrelated web within society. this research contributes to the development of understandings described above by examining the rituals of newspaper and television reporting over a period when newsrooms have merged or got smaller, lines have blurred between advertorial and editorial, and editorial is responding to the rise of social media (couldry, 2013). the concept of ritual has been addressed in journalism studies by scholars (couldry, 2005; coonfield and huxford, 2009) looking to understand the symbolic power of the media to direct public attention, define issues, and cause either social cohesion or dissolution. media rituals performed in and through news coverage indicate social norms, common and conflicting values, and different ways of being included. the idea of ritual in journalism is related to discussions around the societal power of journalism as an institution, the ceremonial aspects of news coverage (in this case, around serial murders) and the different techniques journalists use to “make the news” and “construct reality” (bell, 2009). journalism does more than merely cover events or chronicle history—it provides a mediated space for audiences and publics that both allows and extends rituals that can unite, challenge, and affect society. a ritual view of journalism focuses on a different range of problems in examining a news text. it will, for example, “view reading news less as sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a view of the world is portrayed and confirmed” (carey, 1975: 20). as carey elaborates (1975: 21), “news reading, and writing, is a ritual act, and a dramatic one”. what is displayed before the audience is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in a particular context. as readers make their way through the news they engage in a continual shift of roles or dramatic focus. in this way, news can be seen as not only imparting information but also as a representation of a society’s shared beliefs. if we apply this ritual view to what newsmakers choose to include as news, then we must conclude that a journalist’s political attitudes, values and opinions as well as their personal experiences in life, exert an influence on their work, regardless of the standard met opmerkingen [a1]: begun? 22 values or criteria (conley and lamble, 2006) applied to news. relooking at studies of journalism through a ritual model, as this research proposes, aims to not only grasp this process more firmly, but to provide a way in which to rebuild a model of and for communication that could be of value in reshaping our collective culture. ‘maniac feared as crimes list grows’ professional roles in journalism research have been well studied, mostly from the perspective of studies on regulating standards and around the conception of roles in journalism. to date, research on professional roles has analysed the different roles that journalism normally fulfil (christians et al, 2009), as well as the roles that journalists give more credence to when working in different political, cultural, and technological circumstances (willnat et al., 2013). however, less attention has been given to the study of these roles in both news decisions and the news stories that reach the public (mellado, 2015). journalism culture implies a particular set of ideas and practices by which journalists legitimate their role in society and render their work meaningful. understanding how journalists perceive their roles is imperative for this study because the understanding of journalistic culture, for example how journalists interpret news events and how journalists perform their work, may identify different perspectives of journalism for reporting on different types of events. scholars have noted that journalists regularly use the methods of narrative storytelling and personalisation to find lessons in the news (kitch, 2002). journalism practices and methods are essential not only for understanding the elaborate subtleties by which the news works, but for understanding journalism’s central part as a primary receptacle of collective memory in every society it finds itself. “what is more, journalism itself is full of the past” (kitch, 2002: 61). many journalism researchers have found that reporters tell stories about current events by using culturally iterative archetypes and descriptions in their work. oft quoted as the first draft of history, journalism has had a love/hate relationship with the notion that it is adding to the collective memory of society. journalism appears to want to fit more comfortably as contemporary, unique, instantaneous and timely. however, journalism provides a public archive on which those who work in the media can draw, republishing previous photographs or texts and reusing them for their lasting or contemporary significance. in doing so, they reshape as well as revisit the past. the “newer elements contextualise the past within the present and the future within the past, creating a narrative path with meaning” (kitch, 2002: 6011). findings from interviews during interviews, the journalists were questioned on a wide variety of issues related to the claremont case, including what role they were in at their workplace during the case, how they perceived other journalists were working the story, the opinions about how the 23 victims were portrayed in the media and the effect it had on perth as a whole, keeping in line with the themes around journalism practices, ritual and memory. a number of research themes surfaced through the interview process and analysis of interview responses. these themes include why some journalists are reluctant to recall their work on the case; journalist’s desire to take on additional ‘roles’ beyond just being the story teller; use of the term ‘serial killer’; a culture of trying to outdo east coast news media; and, why the disappearance and murder of ciara glennon appeared to take the case to new levels. one of the journalists who declined the invitation to take part in the study, did make contact to explain why they did not want to take part. the journalist will remain anonymous but they have granted consent to include our conversation in this article and subsequent work. this particular journalist wrote a large number of articles over the past two decades on the disappearance and murders of sarah spiers, jane rimmer and ciara glennon. while they did not want to take part in the study formally, they did indicate that reporting on the case had a profound effect on them personally, particularly once they had children of their own. journalist john townsend, from the west australian, who covered general news at the time of the disappearances and murders, was more philosophical in his recollection. i mean the reality of journalism, you have to do uncomfortable things, you have to speak to traumatised people, or do things on deadline or where there’s a risk to your sanity or a threat to your health… i don’t know why people [or organisations] don’t want to be investigated, but i can understand for a lot of people, they’ve moved on… i’m in exactly the same boat. i didn’t have kids [at the time] and now we do, we’ve got a family and it’s absolutely critical. but i can understand that… (townsend, personal communication, july 13, 2020). the ability to compartmentalise the information about the case, both the published information and information gleaned from other journalists and police sources, was something journalists relied on, particularly early on in the case. a lot of the information coming from these sources was deemed to be unpublishable due to its content which would upset both the public and in particular, the families of the women. furthermore, the anonymous journalist also mentioned how coverage of the women “completely overtook the news coverage in perth and once ciara glennon’s body was found, and the police used the words ‘serial killer’, it went into overdrive”. (anonymous, personal communication, 20 february, 2020). these comments have been echoed by the other journalists who have been interviewed to date. torrance mendez, who worked at the west australian from 1990 until 2016, said the coverage became “feverish”, but was coupled with an awful realisation. it was feverish. that’s the best way to describe it. people were jumpy… and there was a glumness [other journalists] was sad, and it went quiet and people were looking at each other and fearing the worst, but by the same time, you wanted the worst to come out so that you’d get a good run at it, to have it published for the next day… there was this – it was a disappointment, because although the newspaper would sell handsomely the 24 next day, the awful truth was dawning on a lot of people that we had a serial killer. (mendez, personal communication, july 12, 2020) the term ‘serial killer’ had not been used in the media in western australia since the murders perpetrated by the birnies in the early 1980s or the legendary murder spree and subsequent other killings by cooke, referred to earlier in this article. david and catherine birnie were a couple from the perth southern suburbs, who, over a five-week period in 1986, murdered four women ranging in age from 15 to 31, and attempted to murder a fifth. it was this fifth victim, seventeen-year-old, kate moir, who escaped via a window from the birnie’s home and ran into a local vacuum cleaner shop informing the owner she had been raped. there is speculation that the birnies were responsible for a number of disappearances of women as early as 1980, but have never been proven. david birnie died by suicide in prison in 2005 and catherine birnie is currently in prison. in 2009, after her first parole application was declined, her case papers were marked “never to be released” by then western australian attorney general christian porter. perhaps it is indicative of the overabundance of coverage the story will attain if using the phrase, but if the federal bureau of investigations definition is what is deemed as definitive, then why not call it by its name? previous definitions of serial murder specify a certain number of murders, generally varying from two to ten victims, and also require a period of time between the murders. as morton (2005) suggests in the fbi publication serial murder: multi-disciplinary perspectives for investigators, serial murder also requires a temporal separation between the murders, such as a separate occasion, cooling-off period, or an emotional cooling-off period. all these cases fitted into this definition. since 2005, the fbi suggest the inevitable public reaction of the term ‘serial killer’ should be proactive from law enforcement. in fact, if the media link cases and use the term, then investigators should proactively release information, respond quickly and use the opportunity to gain an investigative advantage. by the time jane rimmer’s body was found in june 1996, the term ‘serial killer’ was used unofficially by the media, but not by the western australian police (wapol). in fact, they made a pointed action in not using it, which journalists retrospectively suggest they should have followed, considering the previous experiences in perth: we [the west australian] weren’t the first cab off the rank, where possibly if we had this culture [as we do now], we should have done … from what i can see, there have been three big serial murders in perth … so there was cooke, and that introduced a terror to perth society … it was a coming of age … the second was the birnies and that was absolutely horrific where people were being picked up and then used as sex slaves and then killed ... and then there was the claremont serial killings. of these three cases, i would submit that the cooke slayings did not capture worldwide imagination. the birnies did. why? husband and wife, man and woman, sex, and the sheer scale and the horror …but the media did not exist then to promote that story in that way and the third was the claremont case, three pretty girls taken from a nightlife district and for decades the perpetrator is not identified. (mendez, personal communication, july 12, 2020) 25 rex haw, a former journalist from channel 9 news perth and 10 news first perth was reflective in his reasoning behind the use of the phrase. when he was working on the east coast of australia earlier in his career, it was commonplace for journalists to try and link murders, as a way to get extra leverage from a story or to at least get police to comment; either way, the media outlet gets another story to publish: the perth media and police treated the claremont serial killer stories, the whole case, a lot differently than the same story would’ve been covered if it had been in sydney or melbourne. we had serial killers in melbourne … we had a couple of serial killer uprisings and so i knew the term. and here they’d had the serial killers, the birnies, but nothing in recent memory apart from them. (haw, personal communication, october 29, 2020) he likened it to an enviousness between the west and east coasts of australia, and even to a professional jealousy, particularly after ivan milat, an australian serial killer who assaulted, imprisoned, robbed and subsequently murdered two men and five women, all backpackers, in new south wales between 1989 and 1993. the media coverage of his capture, trial and his time incarcerated, until his death in 2019 has been fodder for books, documentaries and television crime specials. because everything in perth has got to be better than sydney or melbourne. the attitudes i got here was even if there was a plane crash in melbourne because of a fuel tank problem the different producers would ask, “can you localise that story and make it a wa story?” and i’d say, “how?”. “well, it could it happen in wa, couldn’t it?” they would ask. that ‘could’ve happened in wa story syndrome’ was nearly everything. (haw, personal communication, october 29, 2020) this contest between major capital cities news media is not uncommon. coulson and lacy (1996) reviewed this competitiveness and found that a majority of journalists surveyed believed that direct competition promotes editorial diversity and competitiveness among journalists, but it can also lead to sensationalised news coverage. the notion of sensationalism in news is not a novel concept. the use of sensational typification (wood, 2005) is a common theme in media representation of crimes, particularly in cases such as this, where news coverage is used to gain attention or rally the public to action. sensational typification of crime often involves super-violent predator-criminals, perpetuating horrific crimes that effect public outrage and whose deviance is attributed to purely individual flaws of that perpetrator. in the case for the claremont disappearances and murders, the catalyst for further state action and sensationalism was ciara glennon’s disappearance, which injected a note of urgency from journalists and demands for safety from the public. … and that’s when the ciara glennon case erupted in the media. basically, as soon as she disappeared, i’m thinking, another girl missing, bang. at that point, it became definitely a serial killer and i was really concerned about it. (haw, personal communication, october 29, 2020) 26 for this particular case, haw along with several other journalists from competing newsrooms around perth, took it upon themselves to get educated about serial killers. haw was also the first journalist to use the phrase, ‘serial killer’, in a broadcast on 10 news first perth on 6 august 1996. “they're looking for the remains of other missing women, possibly dumped here by a serial killer, including south perth teenager sarah spiers who vanished six months ago.” we got into that a bit and then we started thinking… simultaneously, we started pushing the criminal psychology line… that’s when the ‘mindhunter’ stuff came in. when you look at, what they call, the victimology… (haw, personal communication, october 29, 2020). for haw, his next move was to contact john douglas directly. douglas is a retired special agent from the fbi. he was one of the first criminal profilers in the world and has written many books on criminal psychology. he was also the inspiration, most recently, for david fincher’s mindhunter (fincher et al, 2017-2019) on netflix. douglas was more than happy to give haw his views on what was details of the disappearances and murders as they stood in 1997. access to the transcript for this interview with rex haw and john douglas has been granted and will be used in the final study. when asked in the interviews why he and other journalists felt the need to explore other elements of the case in more detail, there were a number of reasons, most importantly, because of a sense of public service: i don’t think we saw ourselves at the time as doing or if we did, we did it subconsciously. because it was one of those things “what’s in the public interest, rather than what’s interesting for the public?” and we often found, it’s almost like the news stories about the case became a public service rather than just news… (haw, personal communication, october 29, 2020) as conboy and eldridge (2017: 165) state, journalism has very much rested “on broad and noble-sounding commitments to service of the public”. in this vein, the journalists have reconstructed the sense of responsibility to the public and its place within the public sphere. to take this position further, for some of the journalists, they felt they were a conduit for the families, particularly when wapol appeared to not be following up leads that journalists were fed from the public. we were really working for the families. not really working for the cops, so much as the families. (mendez, personal communication, july 12, 2020) while john townsend was a general news journalist during his time covering the cases, he confirmed that the family connection was strong for some journalists: well, i would endorse that. i think that was the case…[name redacted] was more deeply involved through that entire period, so they were the number one point of contact who was dealing with the police as well, and with the family. i had a more peripheral role i guess; i was in and out and did press conferences and bits and pieces. they were more heavily involved with 27 dealing with the families, and although i think i interviewed all of them, or had contact with all them, they were certainly far more deeply immersed in it. (townsend personal communication, july 13, 2020). i know we were as respectful as we could have been with the families in a pretty horrific time and having a lot to do with them too meant that there was a developed relationship between the reporters, who were the regular reporters and the family. (townsend personal communication, july 13, 2020). for torrance mendez, the feeling of just being an unbiased observer to the case, was impossible. … for weeks and months afterwards, i would go around walking by the river and looking into the water wondering, if i would see anything that would be the remains of a body, and it’s awful to say, and i spoke to other people that said the same, that they did that, people who would go out walking their dogs and they would look around and see if there were human remains… and it was simply awful. (mendez, personal communication, july 12, 2020) the journalists interviewed were also aware the “glennon factor” was moving this case into a level not seen before. the headline on the front page of the west australian (staff reporters, 1997) the day after her body was found summed up the community mood: a state mourns. the bolded, double barrelled headline was accompanied by the photo the community knew instantly; the picture of ciara glennon that had been released by her parents when she was reported as missing. sub headings “ciara’s body found in bush”, and “where the search ended” accompanied the most up to date news by staff reporters, but while the print gave details, the other additional photograph of a bird’s eye view of police and forensic experts at the scene, gave a morbid view into what the investigators were dealing with. the other most obvious reflection was clear to the public also. this perpetrator had used the same manner to dispose of ciara glennon’s body as he had with jane rimmer, despite them being 86 kilometres apart. no longer did the perth community have another lost woman; we had a woman taken, taken off the streets of claremont and the public were up in arms about it. the measure of the case was graded according to the victim and victim’s circumstances… that ciara glennon had the wherewithal to make this a sledgehammer inquiry. sarah spiers didn’t, she was a girl shortly out of school, she was just 18, young, her body’s never been found, do we really know what’s happened to her? jane rimmer, she worked in a kindergarten, she wasn’t a girl in the peak of society, she was a simple young woman on a night out, probably hoping for an early marriage in a short time and made a very silly decision on her own, but then we have ciara glennon where we have a woman of the world, who is experienced in travelling and has everything to look forward to, a life at the top and that is snatched away from her, and that simply should not happen, that is intolerable, we will not 28 tolerate that kind of behaviour and it was made clear to the police. (mendez, personal communication, july 12, 2020) without prompting, journalists also said that due to the personal wealth and influential connections of the glennon family, the case was going to be at the forefront of police interest as well as having political clout. two days after ciara glennon went missing in march 1997, then premier of western australia, richard court, approved a reward of up to aud$250,000 (approximately us$192,000) for information leading to the whereabouts of sarah spiers and ciara glennon, and a conviction for the murder of jane rimmer. in a press conference to the media at the time, mr court said the size of the reward – the largest monetary amount ever offered in western australian history – reflected the community’s concern. apparent political and business influence from the glennon family gave her particular disappearance and murder an injection of funds that the family spearheaded, with large amounts of donations coming from high profile legal firms and business organisations being made available to wapol directly to help solve the mystery. … the glennon family marshalled the big end of town … to raise the funding. but the message that money sent to the community was that this is high level crime, so high that the top person in the state is announcing it, and it was the premier who made the announcement, it wasn’t the police … and that itself was curious … the lay public had the impression they’re putting huge money, no stone is being left unturned, it’s being afforded top priority, it [ciara glennon’s disappearance] is more important than anything else. (mendez, personal communication, july 12, 2020) it was common knowledge amongst the journalists interviewed that the money raised was used to purchase a state-of-the-art dna analysis machine, which wapol may have been able to afford but would, likely, have been subject to copious paperwork and government regiments, holding up the process of obtaining it. this machine and international crime experts and analysts were fast tracked onto this case with the help of this funding. there are several other themes emerging from interview data that cannot be discussed here due to insufficient space, and the focus of this article on journalistic practices during the emergence of this news story. these other themes are likely to be addressed in my thesis and subsequent subsequent research as other interviews and analyses are completed. these themes include use of the word ‘girl/s’ to describe women in the case; differences in how disappeared or murdered women received different media treatment due to their circumstances or lifestyles; and, collective trauma propagated by news media. conclusion: serial killing and ritualistic practices in western australian news with the sentencing of bradley edwards at the end of 2020, it is timely to reflect on journalistic practices in the emerging news coverage of this serial murder case that began 25 years ago. informed by an archive of news reports on the case across this 29 period and previous studies of journalism, this article has analysed data from interviews with three journalists who had contributed to the emerging news story on the case as well as the reasoning of a fourth journalist who refused to be interviewed but gave consent for discussion of their reasoning to be included in this article. analysis of this information has provided the insights discussed above about the desire of journalists to take on additional ‘roles’ beyond the story teller; on why ‘serial killer’ entered news reports; on ritualistic practices in western australian newsroom culture around trying to outdo east coast news media; and, on why the disappearance and murder of ciara glennon led to western australia’s premier and other political and economic elites becoming involved in the case. this article sheds light on complex dynamics in and around the journalistic practices through which emerged a sensational and enduring news story on the murders and disappearances of women in western australia. references australian bureau of statistics., 1996. 1996 census community profiles: perth. retrieved from https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/1996/communitypr ofile/505?opendocument bell, c., 2009, 1992. ritual theory, ritual practice. oxford university press. carey, j.w., 1975. a cultural approach to communication. communication 2: 1–22. christians, c. g., glasser, t. l., mcquail, d., nordenstreng, k., & white, r. a., 2009. normative theories of the media: journalism in democratic societies. urbana, il: university of illinois press. cohen, s., 1972. folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the mods and rockers. routledge: london. conboy, m., eldridge, s., 2017. journalism and public discourse. in: cotter, c. & perrin, d. 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retrieved from https://www.watoday.com.au/national/westernaustralia/enigma-of-the-dark-mystery-of-claremont-killings-finally-begins-to-unravel20191125-p53dz3.html mellado, c., 2015. professional roles in news content: six dimensions of journalistic role performance. journalism studies, 16: 596–614. morfesse, l., 1997, march 17. woman missing: serial killer fear. the west australian, pg 1. morton, r., 2005. serial murder: multi-disciplinary perspectives for investigators. federal bureau of investigation: west virginia. schlesinger, e., 2001. is serial homicide really increasing? journal of the american academy of psychiatry and the law 29.3: 294-7. staff reporters., 1997, april 4. a state mourns. the west australian, pg. 1. 31 statham-drew, p., 2003. james stirling: admiral and founding governor of western australia. university of western australia press: crawley, wa. townsend., j., 1996, august 5. maniac feared as crime list grows. the west australian, pg. 2. tuchman, g., 1978. making news: a study in the construction of reality. free press: new york. willnat, l., weaver, d. h., choi, j., 2013. the global journalist in the twenty-first century. journalism practice, 1–21. whish-wilson, d., 2013a. perth. university of new south wales press: sydney. whish-wilson, d., 2013b. zero at the bone. viking: melbourne. wood, j., 2005. in whose name? crime victim policy and the punishing power of protection. nwsa journal, 17.3: 1-17. wyatt, b., 2019. the wa economy: insights from the treasurer [ilecture]. retrieved from https://www.ceda.com.au/events/library/past-events1/w191101 mary-anne romano is a doctoral candidate at curtin university in perth, australia. her currently research areas include journalism as practice, journalism and cultural memory, and how the media reports major crimes. as a former journalist who has worked and taught in the journalism field, she has completed an honours thesis and subsequent research work in the areas of moral panic, and the discrimination of women in newsrooms. in 2014, she was invited to take part in a student fellowship at harvard university, where she was able to work with sociology, communication and journalism scholars to develop her current research specialities. https://www.ceda.com.au/events/library/past-events1/w191101 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 159 “they were afraid to speak”: testimonies of aboriginal women at the 1934 moseley royal commission elfie shiosaki centre for human rights education curtin university elfie.shiosaki@curtin.edu.au copyright©2018 elfie shiosaki. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: archival traces of early discursive advocacy by noongar people in the southwest region of australia contribute to emerging narratives of indigenous political autonomy. this paper is a case study of archival traces of a royal commission into the state government’s policies towards aboriginal people in western australia in 1934, known as the moseley royal commission. these traces reveal how many noongar women contributed to this commission by writing letters or testifying. these letters and testimonies represent discursive advocacy by noongar women for indigenous human rights—around seventy years before these rights were recognised in the united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples in 2007. keywords: indigenous human rights; indigenous history. archival traces of discursive advocacy for indigenous human rights by noongar people in the southwest of australia contribute to narratives of indigenous autonomy. these traces reveal how noongar people dynamically engaged with an international circulation of ideas and movements and contributed to a new discourse of rights from around the mid-nineteenth century. this paper speaks to the many silences which pervade accounts of national histories. it recognises that aboriginal and torres strait islander voices have been seemingly silenced mailto:elfie.shiosaki@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 160 in accounts of australian history by collective remembering, forgetting and even reimagining. what happens when we speak and break these silences, even momentarily? this paper argues that emerging national and transnational narratives of indigenous political autonomy contest and negotiate some of these silences. these narratives of indigenous autonomy recognise the agency of indigenous peoples to fight against colonisation. this agency to fight is a means to self-determination, whether the fight is won or lost. archival traces of a royal commission into the state government’s policies towards aboriginal people in western australia in 1934, known as the moseley royal commission, are a compelling case study of indigenous political autonomy. the scope of inquiry for the commission included investigating widespread revelations in national and international media of serious human rights abuse of aboriginal people in the state. these archival traces reveal that noongar women contributed to this commission by writing letters or testifying. these letters and testimonies represent discursive advocacy by noongar women for indigenous human rights—around seventy years before these rights were recognised in the united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples in 2007. this paper recognises and accounts for their contribution to a new discourse of rights in the 1930s— breaking a silence which pervades accounts of western australian history. collision and convergence in the archive the archive in western australia is a remnant institution of a colonial state. it produces more knowledge about how the state exercises power over noongar people than it does knowledge about noongar people and families (haebich 2014). this power is manifested today in the archive, which holds thousands of files about noongar people. my study of the archive has at times evoked memories of my visit to the tidal race at te rerenga wairua, cape reinga, in the northern region of aotearoa. te rerenga wairua, meaning the leaping place of the spirits, is a site for spirits to return to hawaiki, the land of the ancestors. the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation (unesco) has tentatively listed the cape for world heritage site status. standing on the cape, i watched the turquoise waters of the tasman sea to the west of the cape collide and converge with the darker waters of the pacific ocean to the east, forming waves, whirlpools and turbulent currents. an historic lighthouse, at 165 meters above sea level, bears witness to this unceasing battle of oceanic giants. the light from its beacon, which can be seen more than 30 kilometres out to sea, warns and guides vessels around this watery battle ground and the black jagged rocks of the cape. like this tidal race, seas of remembering, forgetting and even reimagining collide and converge in the archive, forming waves, whirlpools and currents (harris 2002). yet, in these unsettled waters, there is no beacon to warn or guide us, and navigate us to calmer waters. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 161 i do not find my grandmother’s story in the archive. i find it listening to her tell her own story, in her own words and in her own way. i even find it in her silences. yet, like the flickering light from a distant beacon, some of her story can be found in the many files held in the archive about her family. the archive is spectral, haunted by ghostly voices, contents and contexts (derrida 1994 and 1995). within the archive in western australia, there are many letters written by noongar people to the state and its institutions. some of these letters are acts of grief. some are acts of desperation. some are acts of subversion or protest. some are strong assertions of indigenous human rights. we can hear the voices of noongar people, or echoes of their voices, speaking from the pages of these letters. some voices are loud, some are quiet, others a whisper. yet, all honour noongar peoples’ political autonomy. my study of the archive is influenced by south african archivist verne harris’ (2015, p. 19) conceptualisation of the archive as a “… condition of a liberatory future that wants to be made [my emphasis]”. such a conceptualisation of the archive, as a means to liberation, also transforms our conceptualisation of ourselves as researchers. harris (2002, p. 85) argues that all researchers, regardless of their own borders of identity and belonging, are “… subject to the call of and for justice.” they are subject to such a call because the archive is not a “… quiet retreat” for researchers (ibid). instead, it is “… a crucible of human experience, a battleground for meaning and significance, a babel of stories, a place and a space of complex and ever-shifting power-plays” (ibid). such “ever-shifting power-plays” evoke memories of the waves, whirlpools and turbulent currents colliding and converging in the tidal race at te rerenga wairua. a researcher should learn to navigate these unsettled waters, and its waves, whirlpools and currents. tossed about in these waters, “any attempt to be impartial, to stand above the powerplays, constitutes a choice, whether conscious or not, to replicate if not to reinforce prevailing relations of power” (harris 2002, p. 85). in the quiet of the state records office of western australia, i have spent many hours searching for knowledge about my own family: listening to the voices of government officials tell stories about my family, or sometimes, listening to their own voices telling their own stories. this quiet in the office is only interrupted by footsteps, whispers, the turning of file pages and, at times, the sound of researchers using digital cameras to take pictures of the pages in the files. this sound is the one which interrupts my reading. in one click, a researcher releases the archival trace from a paper record and into a digital record and releases this trace from the archive—potentially reimagining a “liberatory future” for this trace, and the voices within it. discursive advocacy in the archive in western australia: 1934 moseley royal commission coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 162 restoring archival traces of discursive advocacy by noongar people to their families reimagines a “liberatory future” for the archive in western australia by transforming it into a dynamic site of indigenous cultural heritage (shiosaki 2016). this restorative historiography reveals that within histories of dispossession for aboriginal people, and their recurring traumas, there are histories of strength, courage and resilience. these histories of resilience restore our spirit. archival traces of a royal commission into the state government’s policies towards aboriginal people in western australia in 1934, known as the moseley royal commission, are a compelling case study of indigenous political autonomy. these archival traces reveal that noongar women contributed to this commission by writing letters or testifying, including my grandmother’s aunt, mary alice harris. the moseley royal commission was appointed in 1934 to “investigate, report, and advise upon matters in relation to the conditions and treatment of aborigines.” the commission was led by henry doyle moseley, a police magistrate in perth. the scope of the inquiry included investigating widespread revelations in national and international media of serious human rights abuse of aboriginal people in western australia (haebich 1992). mary bennett, an activist for women rights, had denounced the forcible removal of aboriginal women and children as “akin to slavery” and in violation of the league of nations covenant and slavery convention which had been signed by australia in 1929 (paisley 1997/98, p. 1). in reacting to these widespread revelations, the commission seemed to become some kind of performance by the state to reassert senses of nationalism and national identity in australia, which had been deeply unsettled by these revelations (ibid). the moseley royal commission was held at a time when indigenous human rights were systematically violated under the discriminatory aborigines act 1905 (wa) and the administration of the chief protector a.o. neville between 1915 and 1940. the 1905 act denied aboriginal people human rights and granted the state and its institutions great power to exercise control over their lives. in her letter to the commission, mary bennet included a statement by my grandmother’s cousin, norman harris: under the aborigines act every one of us is a prisoner in his own country. any police officer can come along and take all of our children at any time, and we cannot object or we are committing an offence under the act. a police officer deeming us to come under clause 3, sends us off. if we refuse to go, we are forced to a settlement under clause 55, and can be kept there under clause 12. in many cases death alone ends our term of duress. (cited in haebich 1992, p. 336) chief protector neville introduced a radical policy of eugenics which intended to destroy aboriginal families through biological absorption, including by forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families. under the act and neville’s administration, noongar women experienced even greater controls over their personal and family lives. the moseley royal commission was held at a time when aboriginal women were oppressively silenced by ideologies of both racial and gender inequality. yet, archival traces indicate that many aboriginal women were speaking. however, their voices were coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 163 not being heard. even some non-indigenous activists and organisations for women’s rights did not seem to hear aboriginal women’s voices, believing that they must speak for them. the dawn, a publication of the women’s service guild, stated in 1927 that “[i]t must be remembered that the [a]borigines are an inarticulate race, unable to voice their own wrongs, hence the more reason that others must do it for them” (cited in paisley 1997/98, p. 14). many of these activists contributed to the moseley royal commission by writing letters and testifying, such as mary bennett. their contributions to the commission were widely reported in national and international media at the time. yet, i would gently and gingerly argue that while they protested against the human rights abuse of aboriginal women, they spoke the language of protectionism rather than self-determination. the aboriginal men and women who wrote letters and testified to the commission seemed to broadly condemn protectionism as persecution. five strong, courageous and resilient noongar women testified at the moseley royal commission, including melba egan, mary alice harris, emily nannup, annie morrison and mary warmadean. these women testified to serious human rights abuse of aboriginal women and girls. questioning one woman about her testimony about inhumane conditions at moore river native settlement, commissioner moseley asked her why other women and girls at moore river had not spoken to him about these conditions: the commissioner: i asked a lot of the girls about these things when i was at moore river? witness: they must have been afraid. the commissioner: why? witness: they were afraid to speak. (report of evidence 1935, p. 563) i imagine that many noongar women were afraid to speak because of possible retribution by the state. by speaking, they were advocating indigenous human rights and holding chief protector neville and his administration to account for serious human rights abuse. i imagine that some were afraid to speak, but spoke anyway. i would like to share with you some of mary alice harris’ story. mary alice harris is my grandmother’s aunt and it is with her permission that i share this story with you. she is a noongar woman from the wilman people in the williams river region. the harris family, in particular mary alice harris’ brothers, william and edward harris, and her nephew, norman harris, advocated indigenous human rights from the turn of the twentieth century, together with many other noongar families. william and edward harris established the first aboriginal political organisation in the state, the native union, in 1926 to demand the repeal of the 1905 act. william harris (1926) described the organisation as a “protective union” for all aboriginal people in the state. indigenous political organisations were emerging in australia in the 1920s and 1930s, within a dynamic international economic, political and social context. these movements, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 164 however, were often formed by courageous aboriginal people who had campaigned for the rights of their families since the turn of the twentieth century. these organisations were connected with each other as well as with an international circulation of people, ideas and movements. archival traces reveal that, like her brothers, mary alice harris, also advocated indigenous human rights. she wrote many letters to demand the repeal of the 1905 act. in a letter to the chief secretary, norbert keenan, dated 2 february 1931, she calls for the repeal of work permits for aboriginal people under the act, writing: … i am writing on behalf of us aboriginals and half cast[e]s to have the existing law or act abolished. a law or act that requires us to have a permit. a permit to work in the land of our birth. i doubt if the[re] are any origin[al] inhabitants who[se] land like our[s] taken ov[e]r by the britons are required by the law of their government to have a permit to work in the land of their birth … .1 in her letter, mary alice harris recounts that the day before, the police had visited her house in south perth and harassed her niece, my great-grandmother, olive harris, for working without a permit. she seems outraged by this harassment. in her letter she also recounts that the next day, she had travelled into the city to call on the premier, sir james mitchell, to demand a repeal of work permits, but was turned away from his office. undeterred, she then called on minister keenan, but was again turned away from his office. still undeterred, she then called on chief protector neville, but was told he was on leave. i wonder what mary alice harris would have been thinking and feeling that day. in her letter, she reflects, “… it seemed to me that day that i had called on 3 caesars but could not get any satisfaction… .”2 she concludes her letter by proposing a further petition of right to the governor of western australia, writing: must we get advice from you the minister for the aboriginals department or shall we petition his excellency the governor of western australia to have that unjust law requiring all aboriginals and halfcastes to get a permit to work in his or her land of their birth. waiting a reply.3 the moseley royal commission was another opportunity for mary alice harris to advocate indigenous human rights. she wrote a letter and testified to the moseley royal commission. in her letter, she makes a case—from points ‘a’ to ‘i’—about how noongar women and their families could have self-determination. she calls for a ban on nonindigenous men from entering camps and settlements, to protect aboriginal women and girls. she calls for farming land for aboriginal families “that would provide occupation and become self-supporting.” as a nurse herself, she calls for transportable hospitals to be established in major camps and settlements, and for noongar women to receive training to become nurses, stating in her testimony that “the girls could then attend to their own folk.” in her testimony, she challenges commissioner moseley, stating that coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 165 aboriginal people “… like to be out by themselves” (report of evidence 1935, p. 465), free from state intervention. in her letter and testimony, mary alice harris also makes a case about indigenous human rights, using a new language of self-determination, and not protectionism. she again calls for the repeal of work permits for aboriginal people, which she describes as “unjust and seriously objectionable.” she calls for equal wages. when commissioner moseley asks her what aboriginal people would do with equal wages, she replies, “the same as white people. if they are capable of doing the work they should be paid …” (report of evidence 1935, p. 465). she calls for aboriginal people to be subject to the same laws as europeans. finally, she calls for aboriginal people to have the right to vote and for aboriginal representation in each electoral district in the state parliament. she was a woman ahead of her time. mary alice harris’ writing is a great example of her strength, courage and resilience. it is an example of her ability to move in and out of, and through, a non-indigenous world. it is an example of her ability to move in and out of, and through, a man’s world. it is an example of her ability to fight for her family, which had been torn apart by successive stolen generations. mary alice’s writing is also an example of her ability to articulate a new discourse of indigenous human rights. she spoke the language of self-determination, rather than protectionism. her writing, and the writing of many other noongar women, represents discursive advocacy for indigenous human rights—around seventy years before these rights were recognised in the united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples in 2007. new histories of resilience: indigenous cultural heritage in the archive the moseley royal commission did not contribute to tangible social and political transformation for aboriginal people. instead, the commission granted the state and its institutions greater power to exercise control over aboriginal people’s lives. chief protector neville’s radical policy of eugenics through biological absorption was enshrined in the new aborigines act amendment (native administration act) 1936. yet, i would argue that archival traces of discursive advocacy by noongar women for indigenous human rights reveal that they could have contributed to intangible transformation. what happened when these strong, courageous and resilient noongar women spoke and momentarily broke the silencing of their voices during this period? what happened when their voices were heard by commissioner moseley, chief protector neville, other government officials, reporters, and other witnesses? where did their words go when they were spoken? as a.b. original rap in their anthem 2 black 2 strong (2016): “smart black [wo]man with a plan/nothing scarier.” the noongar women who contributed to the moseley royal commission by writing letters and testifying were smart black women with a plan. they embodied a subversion of the state, its institutions and its policies. they embodied a coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 166 greater subversion of ideologies of racial and gender inequality. they embodied indigenous human rights by living and breathing these rights—“nothing scarier” for a colonial state. advocating human rights is about more than influencing government policy, it is about influencing how a community thinks and feels about these rights. by dwelling on such fleeting moments of history, this research reveals that aboriginal people have been ‘reimagining’ the australian nation since its formation. it encourages us to listen deeply instead of speaking, instead of speaking over these voices with our own or speaking for them. reimagining australia seems to be an old conversation, not a new one. histories of indigenous dispossession are astonishing. yet within these histories, there are also astonishing histories of strength, courage and resilience. the resilience of the human spirit is as astonishing as the fight. every noongar woman who experienced histories of dispossession, regardless of her fight, regardless of whether she fought or not, has an astonishing spirit within her. these noongar women were asserting a collective humanity in the face of the inhumanity of colonisation. these histories of resilience have been passed down in noongar families as oral histories for generations. yet many of these stories are unrecognised and unaccounted for in western australian history. recognising and accounting for these histories revitalises enduring, dominant colonial narratives of indigenous dispossession, which deny indigenous peoples’ political autonomy. sometimes we hear the voices of noongar people speaking from the archive. these voices reveal that within astonishing histories of dispossession, there are astonishing histories of resilience. these histories hold an enduring legacy for noongar people as these voices of our old people become a call to action to our young people. listening to these voices, we are compelled forward, moving in time to a rhythm and beat which is not our own. references a.b. original (2016), 2 black 2 strong, on reclaim australia, golden era records, adelaide. derrida, j (1994), specters of marx, routledge, london. ---. (1995), archive fever: a freudian impression, chicago university press, chicago. dos, m and lieff, k (2012), letters from berlin: a story of war, survival, and the redeeming power of love and friendship, lyons press, guilford, ct. haebich, a (1992), for their own good, uwa publishing, perth. ---. (2000), broken circles: fragmenting indigenous families 1800-2000, fremantle press, fremantle. ---. (2014), “aboriginal families, knowledge and the archives: a case study” in decolonizing the landscape: indigenous cultures in australia, ed. beate neumeier and kay schaffer, brill/rodopi, amsterdam, pp. 37-56. harris, v (2002), “the archival sliver: power, memory, and archives in south africa,” archival science, 2, pp. 63-86. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 167 ---. (2015), “hauntology, archivy and banditry: an engagement with derrida and zapiro,” critical arts, 29, 1, pp. 13-27. harris, w (1926), “letter to the editor,” sunday times, 14 november. paisley, f (1997/98), “race and remembrance: contesting aboriginal child removal in the inter-war years,” australian humanities review, nov-jan, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-november1997/paisley.html. report of evidence (1935), royal commission appointed to investigate, report and advise upon matters in relation to the condition and treatment of aborigines. shiosaki, e (2016), “writing from the heart,” westerly, 61.1, pp. 83-91. dr elfie shiosaki is an indigenous post-doctoral research fellow at the centre for human rights education (chre) at curtin university. she is a chief investigator of an australian research council discovery project which identifies the hundreds of letters written by noongar people in the archive in western australia over 100 years between 1860 and 1960. dr shiosaki completed a phd (political science and international relations) on nation-building in post-conflict societies in 2015. 1 excerpt from harris family personal documents. 2 excerpt from harris family personal documents. 3 excerpt from harris family personal documents. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 sung by an indigenous siren: epic and epistemology in alexis wright’s carpentaria cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu copyright©2019 cornelis marten renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: one of australia’s most distinguished indigenous authors, alexis wright, stages the fleeting presence of a popular character of northern european folklore, the mermaid, in an awarded novel of epic proportions. the mermaid is not a haphazard appearance in this antipodean narrative, but one of the multiple, cross-cultural ways in which carpentaria, first published in 2006, invites the reader to reflect upon the ongoing tensions between the disenfranchised indigenous minority and the empowered non-indigenous mainstream, and their serious lack of communication due to the antagonistic character of their respective universes, one rooted in a capitalist paradigm of ruthless economic exploitation and the other in a holistic, environmentalist one of country. this essay addresses how carpentaria, by writing across indigenous and european genres and epistemologies, makes a call for the deconstruction of colonial discourse, for an invigorating indigenous inscription into country, and for intellectual sovereignty as the condition sine-qua-non for the indigenous community to move forward. keywords: alexis wright; indigenous australian literature; generic innovation; mermaids; indigenous sovereignty introduction: black mistress, white mermaid the fleeting appearance of a mermaid in carpentaria, the miles franklin award-winning 2006 novel written by the indigenous-australian author alexis wright, reflects innovative uses of the epic in postcolonial contexts, that is, how epic may bridge across antagonistic coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 cosmologies and how it may empower indigenous inscriptions into country and culture. one of the tragicomic stories that support the grand, decolonising narrative of carpentaria poses the hybrid charms of the european mermaid (half fish, half woman) against interracial abjection and so comments on the dubious ethics that ground racist thought and behaviour. white bartender lloydie falls in love with a mermaid he believes to be caught inside his wooden bar top, and consequently rejects his black mistress and mixed-descent son as the ‘abominable’ taboo product of what was known as ‘black velvet’. this referred to sexual intercourse between white settler men and indigenous women, which led to ‘coloured’ offspring managed through the eugenic policy of the stolen generations. lloydie’s delusion comes full circle when he unsuccessfully tries to save the trapped chimera when his coastal town at the top end is flooded and devastated by a massive hurricane. the latter is generated by the area’s displaced and long-dysfunctional aboriginal leader, norm phantom, who barely survives at the town’s rubbish tip; yet, a demiurge of sorts, he controls the elements through his dreaming so as to recover vital space and tribal land from mainstream society (wright 2006: 472, 490). the presence of the mermaid, often an ominous symbol of seduction, deceit, doom, and natural and human disaster in western folklore (martos garcía 2016), symbolises the antagonistic worldviews of european and indigenous australia and the search for an indigenous space of belonging. it is an example of the transcultural epistemological work the novel sets out to do by priming a holistic indigenous paradigm of country inclusive of, but not assimilable to, the west. the text poises itself on the critical epistemological margins of both worlds to carve out a space of intellectual native title and sovereignty. the bartender’s infatuation with the inaccessible, wood-locked mermaid stands for the narrow-minded hypocrisy and racist violence of the outback, resulting from an assimilative, reductive approach to the world. the western lack of empathy with the indigenous universe is underlined by the apparent incongruity of the mermaid cameo within the indigenous setting. more typically found in medieval northern european legend and often likened to, and confused with, the homeric siren (originally a seductive bird–woman; see martos garcía 2016: 184), in carpentaria the mermaid’s hybridity (half fish, half maiden) symbolises the clash of mutually-exclusive paradigms of knowledge, ‘condemned’ to get on with each other. yet, philip hayward points out the mermaid’s “polyvalency [or] the potential for multiple associations and combinations of elements to accrue to a text and/or a cultural entity”. this highlights the mermaid’s inherent syncretic character despite a discrete hybrid appearance. he argues that: often mischaracterised as hybrids, mermaids (and mermen) are anything but coherent entities resulting from the blending of heterogeneous elements. in physical terms they conjoin two pre-existent entities (i.e. humans and fish) around a transitional midpoint and require considerable suspension of belief to accept their coherence and viability (2018: 3). hayward therefore argues that “the mermaid’s distinct physique allows her to manifest diverse and often disjunctive aspects” (2018: 3), and in this sense, the perceived hybridity of coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 the mermaid trope — both fish and human, unable to live on land but fatally attracted to it — both defines the existence of, and appeals to, the merging of antagonistic worlds: water and land; foreign mainstream and indigenous margins; european invaders and indigenous australians who must learn to coexist and communicate across two divergent epistemologies that meet in australia’s coastal contact zone, both sea and land-bound. hayward highlights that: … folkloric and subsequent popular cultural depictions of mermaids and related aquatic entities are manifestations of what might be termed an ‘aquapelagic imaginary’ that explores the boundaries between marine and terrestrial worlds and experiences in various ways. given the close — and, as i argue, generative — association between mermaids, maritime and island cultures in their original european context, it is unsurprising that a number of the socio-geographical locations to which the mermaid has been exported to and been depicted and elaborated within have close associations with aquatic spaces (2018: 3-4). one can therefore claim that the mermaid trope befits carpentaria as it, despite inherent difficulties, attempts to bridge these two worlds, making the fertile coastal strip around the condemned mining town of desperance the focus of the novel’s action; it is this liminal location between land and sea, indigeneity and foreignness where the fringe-dwelling indigenous leader norm phantom eventually restores an invigorating sense of country by recovering his groper fish dreaming. the mermaid trope also operates on a metatextual level. charting narrative songlines with her story-telling — something that kim scott has described as ‘storying’ (buck 2006) — wright takes on the classical role of a siren whose epic chant of gulf country lures the reader away from a competing paradigmatic australian epic, capricornia (1938), set in the same area. this iconic mainstream epic about the carpentaria region was written by a — for his time — progressive chief protector of the aborigines, xavier herbert, who from a western perspective addressed the taboo issues of ‘black velvet’ and ‘coloured’ offspring alluded to in the white barman’s abuse of the black female body in carpentaria. using the mermaid trope as an overarching metaphor for the tense and conflictive nature of their interface, this essay addresses carpentaria as a sustained intent to bridge critically across two radically different epistemologies, the indigenous dreaming and the european real from an indigenous standpoint that rewrites capricornia’s narrative and agenda. carpentaria and genre an evocation of the sovereignty of the indigenous mind, carpentaria is concerned with the search for an original and authentic indigenous voice in literature and in doing so constitutes a generic innovation. ian syson praises carpentaria as “a remarkable and huge dreamscape novel [. . . ] the range and diversity of form, content and influences [. . . ] [are] astounding.” coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 wondering whether the novel is “a rambling showing-off of wright’s undoubted literary skills [. . . ] a mere pastiche of good ideas” or “a pleasing and important document of our time”, he sees it as closest to “an australian epic” (2007: 85). written in consonance with the parameters of the indigenous oral tradition, it therefore “replicat[es] the story-telling voices of ordinary aboriginal people whom [wright] ha[s] heard all [her] life” (wright 2007: 84). syson’s analysis resonates with wright’s own view, as she chooses not to write fiction based on historical fact or personal history so as to avoid a western encapsulation into realist linearity, progress, finality and authenticity, but envisages the novel more holistically as “an old saga [. . . ] stories that travel across countries, ceremonies, songs [. . . ] sagas that can take days singing the story of a country” (wright 2007: 84). within the northern-european literary tradition, a saga can be understood as a “genre of prose narrative” that addresses medieval heroic characters and events from the scandinavian, especially icelandic, oral tradition, fictionalised in imaginative accounts employing an elevated style and building on heroism, loyalty, revenge and action rather than on reflection and inner motivation (bce 2008). wright’s novel fits these terms in its use of the indigenous oral tradition, indigenous heroes and leaders, their loyalties and disloyalties, the revenge theme, indigenous myth and legend, and its creation of a literary habitat and community through geographical locatedness. but wright also works within the genre of the epic with carpentaria, positing that “the everyday indigenous story world [. . .] is epic,” combining the merits of the oral tradition reaching back to “the laws, customs and values of our culture” with those of “epic stories of historical events” (2007: 84). within the european literary tradition, an epic is a “long, narrative poem in an elevated style that celebrates heroic achievement and treats themes of historical, national, religious, or legendary significance”. more specifically, […] primary (or traditional) epics are shaped from the legends and traditions of a heroic age and are part of oral tradition; secondary (or literary) epics are written down from the beginning, and their poets adapt aspects of traditional epics. the poems of homer are usually regarded as the first important epics and the main source of epic conventions in western europe. these conventions include the centrality of a hero, sometimes semidivine; an extensive, perhaps cosmic, setting; heroic battle; extended journeying; and the involvement of supernatural beings (bce 2008, my emphasis). as related narrative forms, it is probably best to see saga and epic as two genres that share a number of features in overlap rather than subcategorisation. as a polyvalent text, carpentaria borrows from both literary conventions in celebrating heroic indigenous achievements and treating themes of legendary significance such as the destruction of white civilisation and the survival of the indigenous nation. it links the indigenous oral tradition to the literary, and thus should be seen as a mixed epic. moreover, it uses the centrality of the hero and his semi-divine character, norm phantom, and his ability to influence the weather through the dreaming within the cosmic setting of the gulf of carpentaria, including its land, sea and sky. lastly, heroic battle, as in norm’s struggle with local nature and his son will’s coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 confrontation with the mine, is joined to a multiplicity of quests by several indigenous heroes and to the involvement of supernatural beings, such as the sea and bush ladies, and the groper fish. in her self-reflective essay “on writing carpentaria”, wright highlights carpentaria’s uniqueness, in that indigenous epic is ancient, mythical, historical, and contemporary at once; in other words, by collapsing history, the aboriginal dreamtime is taken into the present and made part of our contemporary world, blurring the western distinction between story and history, fact and fiction. thus, carpentaria, “a novel capable of embracing all times,” is, to follow the anthropologist w.e.h. stanner’s cue (1968: 58), a transgressive “everywhen”, in that “this fictional work could not be contained in a capsule that was either time or incident specific”. rather, wright meant it to be a boundary crosser: it would not fit into an english, and therefore australian tradition of creating boundaries and fences which encode the development of thinking in this country, and which follows through to the containment of thought and idea in the novel [. . .] the fundamental challenge i wanted to set myself, was to explore ideas that would help us to understand how to re-imagine a larger space than the ones we have been forced to enclose within the imagined borders that have been forced upon us (2007: 81–2). it took alexis wright a full decade to write carpentaria, generating an epic tale as large and sprawling as her traditional waanyi country at the southwestern coast of the gulf of carpentaria, with a storyline of community and country meandering like its serpent river and expanding and contracting on the perpetual movement of the gulf’s tides. while the novel’s length has been critiqued as excessive (see davison 2007; devlin-glass 2007; pierce 2006; sharrad 2008), craig san roque observes that carpentaria needs its 500 pages in order to bridge “contemporary insight and ancestral integrity”. he also argues that wright excels at the complex task of transposing her own culture, her “known and familiar”, into a shape, content, and structure that is intelligible, sensible and aesthetic to the dominant culture, “whose conceptions of love, death, hate, knowledge, truth and continuity are enfolded into a european grid system” (2007: 4, 19). the author’s inspiration for her contemporary origin story is drawn from a commanding vision of the gulf’s “ancestral” gregory river, which reminded her of the rainbow serpent myth and inspired “carpentaria [as] a narration of the kind of stories we can tell to our ancestral land” (wright 2007: 79–80), the novel’s setting as well as main protagonist: i develop my novels on ideas of seeing how the land might respond to different stories. the land is [. . .] one of or even the central character. most of the images and ideas relate to the land being alive and having important meaning, which is tied to the ancient roots of our continent. the people who populate the landscape of my writing usually come afterwards—after i have built a place for them (vernay 2004: 121). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 carpentaria is indeed “an indigenous sovereignty of the imagination” (wright 2007: 94), an attempt at intellectual native title through an imagined recovery of the author’s traditional country. wright’s celebration of her indigenous homeland is peopled with a variety of indigenous characters fighting the despairing odds imposed by mainstream society. the first chapter’s title, “from time immemorial”, draws the reader into the endless time-space of the dreaming, while its capitalised epigraph denounces the impact of white society on indigenous girls in remote communities: a n at i o n ch a n t s , b u t we kno w y o u r s t o r y a l r e a d y . t h e be lls p e a l e v e ry wh e re . ch u rc h be l ls c a l li n g t h e f ai t h fu l t o t h e t abe rn a cl e wh e re t h e g at e s o f h e av e n wi ll o p e n , bu t n o t fo r t h e wi c ke d c al li n g i n n o ce n t li t t le bl a c k g i r ls fr o m a d i s t an t co mm u n i t y wh e re t h e wh i t e d o v e be ari n g a n o li v e br an ch n e v e r l an d s . li t t le g i rls wh o co me b a c k a ft e r ch u r ch o n s u n d ay , wh o lo o k a ro u n d t h e ms e lv e s at t h e h um an f a l lo u t an d a n n o u n ce m at t e r o ff a ct l y , a r m a g e d d o n b e g i ns h e r e (wright 2006: 1). the epigraph leads us to the rainbow serpent dreaming, which tells us of the perpetual making and remaking of the river country that nowadays boasts desperance, an outpost of western civilisation hosting the divided society of the indigenous westside and eastside mobs and white uptown, which all three make competing claims on traditional land. the destruction sung to indigenous culture and country by the suspect imposition of white civilisation and religion (“we know your story already”) is questioned and unsettled by an indigenous counternarrative of mythical dreamtime proportions, moulded by the meandering tracks of the slow, sinuous and powerful rainbow serpent’s movements through waanyi country that determine the structure of the ensuing narrative (1–3). according to nonie sharp, the interface of indigenous and non-indigenous culture is structured as “an epic on several planes that knits together meanings underlying the lives of the waanyi people of the gulf country of far north queensland with local stories of responses to new invasions” (2007: 62). the novel goes far beyond the western containment the first chapter’s epigraph suggests and undoes its capitalised weight by the bulky impact of its interwoven, heteroglossic stories in double-spaced small print. the large print of the secondchapter’s epigraph fixes the novel’s indigenous inscription and sprawling structure as the remedy for present-day despair: “t h e g h o s t s i n t h e me mo ri e s o f t h e o ld f o l k [ . . . ] s ai d an y o n e c an fi n d h o p e i n t h e s t o ri e s : t h e bi g s t o ri e s a n d t h e li t t le o n e s i n be t we e n ” (12). thus, the powerful rainbow snake’s stirrings of literary creation eventually don’t suggest armageddon for the indigenous mob, but “honour” the town’s name in wiping it from the face of the earth with a devastating cyclone. a tropical storm slowly builds up throughout the text in magic–mythic interplay between the sea, sky, land and their superhuman mediator, the ‘ghosted’ indigenous coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 leader normal phantom, whose vengeful anger at the impositions of white society explodes and clears the usurped land for a new and fresh indigenous beginning at the novel’s ending: all dreams come true somehow, norm murmured, sizing up the flattened landscape, already planning the home he would rebuild on the same piece of land where his old house had been, among the spirits in the remains of the ghost town, where the snake slept underneath [. . . ] it was a mystery, but there was so much song wafting off the watery land, singing the country afresh as [norm and his grandson bala] walked hand in hand out of town, down the road, westside, to home (519, emphasis added). sharp therefore argues that carpentaria spins “a powerful allegory for our times: the earth’s retaliation in gaia-like fashion, responding to the deep tramping marks of our footprints on the climate, on the places of both land and water” (2007: 62). other critics have also drawn attention to carpentaria’s political agenda as ecologically inscribed, promoting awareness of the interconnectivity and interdependency of all life forms in their local habitats. carpentaria and epistemology in nourishing terrains, deborah rose addresses epistemologies from an eco-scientific perspective, closely linking respect and care for the local natural environment to the observance of indigenous belief systems known as the dreaming or dreamtime. thus, the dreaming is at once timeless and local by dictating the law of the land and so becomes stanner’s everywhen. she calls attention to how these belief systems foster non-hierarchical economies of mutual benefit between the different constituents of a local habitat, connecting all country horizontally and laterally rather than vertically and hierarchically, in a binding manual of good environmental conduct: the totemic metaphysics of mutual life-giving draws different species into overlapping and ramifying patterns of connection through benefit. many of these benefits are not immediately reciprocated. rather, they keep moving through other living things, sustaining life through the twin processes of life for itself and life for others (2004: 295–297). this analysis provides a sustained critique of the racial, gendered and classist hierarchies and economies generated by the capitalist exploitation of the australian land. thus, rose specifies that indigenous epistemologies “resituate the human” by conferring subjectivity as sentience and agency on country; by the reciprocity of all life processes; by kinship with nature through human and non-human totems; and by calling humans into action rather than having them act autonomously, so that “country, or nature, far from being an object to be acted upon, is a self-organising system that brings people and other living things into being, into action, into sentience itself” (2005: 302–3). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 frances devlin-glass highlights how the novel, through the use of the central trope of the rainbow serpent, activates “indigenous knowledge systems”. what these contain in terms of “ecological depth”, local situatedness, interrelatedness with all aspects of life, and “communal construction/negotiation of reality” is hard to translate into western systems of knowledge. ashcroft, devlin-glass, and mccredden speak of “dreaming narratives,” which they elaborate following deborah rose’s eco-analysis. dreaming narratives […] integrate fields that are separate discursive domains in western knowledge — philosophy, religion, economics, ecology, epistemology, kinship, gender behaviour, kinship systems, interpersonal relations, geography and mapping. to separate storying as a self-contained discursive field is therefore not possible, and that creates an epistemological impasse for westerners which poets and prose writers have sought to bridge (ashcroft et al. 2009: 205–9). it is therefore tempting to consider alexis wright’s fiction part of a larger holistic project to decolonise the indigenous and western mind and world by rewriting the embodied australian experience of time, space and place along indigenous parameters and from within the indigenous community. as was pointed out by the indigenous scholar, poet and writer jeanine leane at the 2013 asal congress at wagga wagga, sturt university in nsw, alexis wright has casually spoken of ‘aboriginal reality’ as a generic term for recent indigenous australian fiction that fits this deconstructive purpose, to be distinguished from denominations such as magical realism (latin america), maban reality (mudrooroo) or, as i have defended, uncanny realism (renes 2002). the generic denomination ‘aboriginal reality’ more accurately posits the indigenous life experience as the basis of an australian epistemology in which narrative flows from a sovereign universe whose spiritual and material effects solicit the colonial legacy of the enlightenment. carpentaria as an instance of ‘aboriginal reality’ cannot be read within the constraints of academic criticism as its narrative, style and structure spill over the discrete borders and niching of western genre and knowledge. not surprisingly, wright has an idiosyncratic view of her epic’s configuration; she visualises the novelistic structure and content resulting from “our racial diaspora in australia” as “a spinning multi-stranded helix of stories”: [. . .] the helix of divided strands is forever moving, entwining all stories together [. .. ] relat[ing] to all the leavings and returnings to ancient territory, while carrying the whole human endeavour in search of new dreams (2007: 84). this structure she sees open to the inclusion of the ‘new’ australians, and in carpentaria, this helix foregrounds the indigenous perspective within the mutually soliciting coexistence of indigenous and non-indigenous epistemologies, mixing dreamtime, christian and classical lore. frances devlin-glass therefore coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 […] expect[s] that her waanyi and indigenous readers will find the integrity of this work empowering in ways that will disturb white australia, but that her non-indigenous readers will find it illuminating, if puzzling (2007: 83). indeed, readers of carpentaria must work hard to make sense of its heteroglossic tapestry of intermingled accounts in which the true heroes are marginalised indigenous tribesmeni; tribal guerrilla warfare develops into heroic acts; language mixes mainstream english and indigenous speak; everyday reality blends with the dreamtime; quests develop out of old and new songlines and walkabouts; and its supernatural powers simultaneously invoke christian and classical characters and dreamtime ancestors, of which the mermaid is only one example. it is for the manner in which carpentaria imposes a recovery of indigenous culture and an agenda of indigenous self-definition and self-determination onto european conventions that it inscribes itself in the peculiarities of a genre that alexis wright tentatively coined aboriginal reality. in his analysis of carpentaria, the jungian psychoanalyst craig san roque’s ecopsychological tack avoids subsuming indigenous reality and myth into the hierarchical freudian framework of his discipline and takes this agenda into literature. he laments that his australian peers are often not open to “the indigenous faculty of imagination — that is to say, imagination alive in the specific context of the local environment — in ‘country’”, and flags alexis wright’s writing as a positive example for its productive/promiscuous interconnection of “ancestral themes, nature experienced, contemporary fact” (1–3, emphasis added). driving his eco-psychological argument further, michèle grossman sees carpentaria as an antidote to freud’s traditional patriarchal account of indigeneity by the way the novel configures an all-embracing awareness of identity rooted in the ‘oceanic’ effacement of the distinction between the self and the surrounding world: sigmund freud had his doubts about what romain rolland termed the “oceanic feeling” of seamless union between one's self and the world at large. for rolland, the oceanic signified a universal human impulse towards spiritual conviction. freud disagreed, characterising the oceanic in his civilisation and its discontents as a remnant of infantile narcissism, in which the very young child fails (at its peril in later life) to distinguish between self and other. freud’s insistence that to be truly civilised requires the abandonment of oceanic bliss in order to build an ego that can survive the traumas imposed by a capricious external reality is deeply ingrained in western thinking about the self. alexis wright's carpentaria makes one wonder afresh what it was that freud so feared about a relationship between self and world conceived of ecologically, so to speak, rather than forever at war (2006: 10, my emphasis). grossman’s reference to the french nobel-prize-winning dramatist, essayist, art historian, mystic and pacifist romain rolland (1866–1944) is not gratuitous, as he was a major influence on freud’s work. his pacifist theory of ‘oceanic feeling’ was developed out of his studies of eastern mysticism and claimed an indissoluble and limitless bond between the coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 individual and the outer world which freud rejected in his civilisation and its discontents (roberts 2011), at odds with his proposal of civilisation as a repressive means to curb individual desire and ensure social conformity. grossman’s lacanian discussion of freud and rolland’s thoughts on socialisation and civilisation takes us back to the mermaid, who is a symbol per excellence for the communal, female sphere of the oceanic whose ‘bliss’ the child has to give up in the freudian account to complete the process of education and reach its resulting state of grace: the emotional and physical isolation and self-control provided by western civilisation. it is worth noting philip hayward recognises this psychoanalytical legacy in his mermaid study making a splash (2017): […] the particular psychoanalytic paradigms i drew on […] were formulated within a highly specific context; that is, the bourgeois milieu of late 19th/early 20th century vienna, where freud and colleagues practiced and, more broadly, europe and the eurocentric metropolitan society of north america where psychoanalysis became established and formalised in the 20th century (2018: 4). the mermaid easily reads psychoanalytically, as the creature’s feminine upper body contrasts with the phallic connotations of its powerful tail, and is therefore poised between the male and the female (hayward 2018: 3). her undeniably erotic nature (hayward 2017: 13) makes her luringly and deceptively attractive, both passive and active, symbolising both safety and threat. in line with the latter, grossman uses the metaphor of “a world forever at war” regarding carpentaria, significant in that throughout most of the novel, the indigenous mob is divided over traditional ownership and so never ‘safe’. joseph midnight and norm phantom, the local indigenous leaders, are “stubborn old mules who anchored their respective clans in the sordid history of who really owned different parcels of the local land [. . .] the old war went right up the coastline to desperance and out to sea” (426) and will not stop until their respective children, will and hope, manage to bridge the mobs’ differences through a firm bond of love. carpentaria’s ‘oceanic antidote’, then, pits the modern, familiar world of christian faith and civilising zeal against the ancient secret–sacred dreamtime belief and regenerative power of the rainbow serpent. it is their incommensurable epistemologies that solicit each other throughout the text in unsettling ways: this double-or-nothing proposition marks out the territory of carpentaria. it’s a novel in which the doppelganger effect of indigenous and settler ways of being and knowing is fully, furiously, sustained as tandem stories and lives variously intersect and diverge, yet remain haunted by the shadows of others’ truths and lies (grossman 2006: 10). in grossman’s understanding, as a locally specific, non-hierarchical and non-exploitative form of knowledge, it is the indigenous approach that takes the upper hand in this narrative, against “those who claim authority over it without accepting responsibility for its care and management”. as she argues, “carpentaria is a swelling, heaving, tsunami of a novel” (2006: coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 10), whose oceanic rhythms of fictional imagination turn the biblical threat of a terminal armageddon into a cleansing deluge for the indigenous australians by annihilating all vestiges of western civilisation on the local coast. this matches craig san roque’s decolonising perspective that “the bruising truth is that australasia and oceania are locations of ‘end times’ for many, and ‘new times’ for others” (2007: 4), in the crucible of life and death configured by desperance, whose culture is based on the exploitative, materialistic, destructive economy of local mining. the novel names locations, entities and characters with an ironic, premonitory touch. the town desperance is both the western outpost where exploitative capitalism can show its meanest face and the uncanny margin from which indigenous culture can write back and decolonise. desperance is also named after its founder, captain matthew desperance flinders. this toponym ambiguously shuttles between doom and hope by engaging different morphological possibilities across a variety of languages. its connotations range from ‘desperate’, ‘despair’ (english), ‘désespoir’ (french), ‘desesperado’ and ‘desesperanza’ (spanish) to ‘d’espoir’ (french), ‘de esperanza’ (spanish), and thus ‘of hope’ or ‘hopeful’. many names of white uptown’s population join form and content — ‘mayor bruiser’, ‘constable truthful e’strange’, ‘y. pedigree’, ‘i. damage’, ‘a. clone’, ‘u. torrent’, ‘b. easy’ reveal and mock their respective personalities, while a blurring lack of identity is suggested for a whole range of anonymous inhabitants taking their last name after the jesuslike elias smith, a visionary who came to desperance from the sea. responsible for indigenous dispossession and dislocation, the gurfurritt mining corp is reminiscent of the powerful century zinc mining company’s impact on waanyi country (devlin-glass 2006: 82; wright 1998; wright 2001: 135–43), its phonetic transcription of the expression ‘go for it’ blatantly referring to its unscrupulous land-grabbing policy — nowadays embodied by the imminent destruction of the great barrier reef through the adani coal-mining project, which receives federal support. irony in carpentaria engages with the town’s history from an indigenous perspective. the seaboard town’s natural marine economy is cut short by the changing tracks of a meandering “river that spurns human effort in one dramatic gesture” (3). it cuts its port off from the sea, and the economic activity shifts to the exploitative impact of mining. however, lloydie’s luring mermaid and a mine explosion foreshadow the destructive tidal wave which turns desperance onomatopoeically into a “boomtown” (98) and returns the area’s life-sustaining link with the sea. norm’s grandson bala’s perception of the location as a “big yellow snake” places the destruction wrought by the cyclone in the mythical realm of the great creation being. and norm’s relief that “[t]hey were home” is based on the secure bearings provided by his groper dreaming, overruling the fact that “he could not discover one familiar feature of desperance” at their arrival. the clima(c)tic d-day of the local habitat’s rebalancing has d-/decapitated the alien presence of white civilisation and reinscribed the coastal strip as the locus of ‘esperance’ for its host of indigenous characters, enabling them to “sing the country afresh” from an epistemologically-valid and environmentally-sound perspective (515–19).ii given the current impact of storms, flooding, and mining on the australian continent’s environment and economy, desperance’s fate as foreshadowed by lloydie’s impossible love coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 for the mermaid stands as a metaphor for australia’s destruction by the global capitalist production system, in its impact through extraction and climate change. craig san roque takes his eco-psychological critique into an analysis of the unique ways in which carpentaria reveals its disquieting truths to mainstreamers. praising alexis wright as a skilful, didactic and generous translator of the unconscious into the conscious, san roque commends carpentaria’s deconstruction of freudian analysis, and highlights its engagement with a country and society fallen upon hard times: carpentaria is my ‘recommended text’ mainly because it is a direct counterpoint to freud’s totem and taboo which draws extensively upon australian aboriginal material [. . . ] speaking out about the broken children of vienna. carpentaria is a psychiatric cultural text. in oceania, there are many lost thoughts wandering like spirits looking for a thinker (san roque 2007: 10–13). san roque’s reference to totem and taboo positions the novel as antidote to the freudian classification of civilisations, as carpentaria constitutes a sophisticated, invigorating indigenous epic tale of origins against the western sublimation myth of art and science developed by the viennese psychiatrist, who, as a male urban-middle-class central european, developed his discipline using questionable late 19th century anthropological data from australia. totem and taboo takes the premise that inasmuch as they maintain the capital penalty for incestuous behaviour, indigenous peoples (and most of all indigenous australians) ‘show’ they have not yet managed to control the incest wish, unlike westerners. as freud considers the management and sublimation of the oedipal incest wish in the nuclear family unit to be at the root of all human civilisation — art, society, religion, justice, ethics — the imposition of patriarchal and colonial authority is conflated and justified; this, in turn, creates a social underclass of ‘primitive natives’ in alleged need of western civilisation for the management of their so-called child-like state. thus, it is mainstream initiative and control that is put in charge of their purported progress and improvement modelled on the example of the west. aileen moreton-robinson deconstructs the freudian inscription of white prevalence and privilege from an indigenous point of view. she writes to this effect that “the belief that the assumption of patriarchal white sovereignty is morally right and legally correct” has a fatal consequence: the disadvantage suffered by indigenous people is not perceived as an effect of this assumption; rather, the implication is that indigenous people lack the core values required to contribute to the development of the nation (2007: 100). in the face of the havoc wrought by the western irruption into indigenous australia, carpentaria‘s inscription into aboriginal reality necessarily makes an antidote to the crippling freudian account of incomplete, stunted adulthood. wright writes: carpentaria should be written as a traditional long story of our times, so the book would appear reminiscent of the style of the oral storytelling that a lot of coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 indigenous people would find familiar [. .. ] i thought by writing this way, i might contribute something to disrupting the stagnating impulse that visualises the world of aboriginal people as little more than program upon countless program for ‘fixing up problems’. surely, we are more than that (wright 2007: 80–1). not surprisingly, wright professes herself to be “very disappointed” with the state of government policies and public resources for aborigines, of which she said: “i think we’re at an all-time low now” (o’brien 2007: 218).iii indeed, carpentaria’s receipt of the miles franklin award in 2006, australia’s highest literary distinction, coincided to the day with the start of the controversial, repressive northern territory intervention, which put remote aboriginal communities under ongoing, direct federal control of the conservative howard and later governments, after insistent rumours and reports about child sexual abuse in remote aboriginal communities.iv specifying wright’s lament, marcia langton states that “aboriginal society is sliding into a terminal state of under-development,” highlighting “the unassailable facts in hundreds of impoverished aboriginal communities across remote australia: radically shortened lives; the highest national rates of unemployment; widespread violence, endemic alcohol and substance abuse; the lowest national levels of education; and lifelong morbidity for hapless citizens suffering from heart disease, nutrition and lifestylerelated diseases such as diabetes” (langton 2008: 155, 158). carpentaria and capricornia despite its expansive indigenous inscription, critics have pointed out that carpentaria follows the structure, content, style and humorous tone of the epic novel capricornia, written some seventy years earlier by the mainstream author xavier herbert (england 2006; perlez 2007; pierce 2007; sharrad 2008; syson 2007). herbert held the post of chief protector of the northern territory aborigines for a brief period between 1935 and 1936, and delivered an origin story of the gulf area from a white settler’s perspective, dealing with cross-cultural contact through the issue of ‘black velvet’. paul sharrad notes some parallels suggesting that wright’s unwritten intention in writing carpentaria was to decolonise herbert’s text: it is not hard to see a transition from norman to wright’s central character, normal, just as it is possible to hear an echo in his termagant wife, angel day, of herbert’s hotel keeper, daisy shay (40). these small intertextual ties serve to show up the more significant relations between the two novels, manifest as corrective surgery from an aboriginal viewpoint. although herbert created something of a scandal for making explicit the then illicit relationships between white and black australia and revealing the inhuman disregard for the mixedblood offspring of such connections, his narration is relent lessly external and from a white perspective. if his central concern is the problematic issue of how to treat ‘half-caste’ australians, herbert’s anchor character norman frequently coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 disappears from view for long stretches while obnoxious, hypocritical and ignorant whites take centre stage to be pilloried. moreover, it is their attitudes and language that dominate the text [.. . ] there is very little room here for a ‘third space’ of undermining sly civility: it is a predominantly dualist world of struggle and death, black and white, seen from a white male perspective, albeit a drily [sic] critical one (2008: 7–8).v these echoes cause carpentaria’s authenticity to be inflected by capricornia — albeit only to a certain extent, as wright never makes allusions to capricornia as a source of inspiration or reference in her interviews and essays regarding her writing, or clarifies whether she has read herbert’s novel. rather, she holds that she works from the sophistication of the ancient waanyi storytelling tradition and a series of south american, magical-realist authorsvi to produce a provocative decolonising tale that is familiar as well as strange. does the former imply that, rather than indigenising the characteristics of a european-style epic, the similarities are just coincidental, wrong-footing some readers into believing the case for an australian precedent where none exists? while peter pierce notes that “wright knows well that xavier herbert’s comic epic, capricornia (1938), will be on our minds”, jane perlez mentions that “wright said she chose the title ‘carpentaria’ as a celebration of the ancestral lands that her mother and grandmother, members of the waanyi nation, were forced from, and not as a nod to xavier” (pierce 2006: 13). this contradiction suggests that wright insists on carpentaria’s originality out of a concern to “create in writing an authentic form of indigenous storytelling” (ashcroft et al. 2009: 212– 13, emphasis added). she therefore denies the existence of a western prequel, defies inscription in the western literary tradition, and insists on an independent indigenous configuration of truth through fiction. no doubt wright adopts a trickster stance in maintaining a revelatory silence on the question of capricornia’s presumed precedence. this silence appears politically inspired and embedded in the problem of the uneven balance of power underlying the hybridisation of indigenous and non-indigenous literary genres and content. it is with both of these fields that the author is obliged to work when transposing the oral into the written. ashcroft, devlin-glass and mccredden maintain that the discursive struggle inherent in hybridisation tends to raise discomfiting issues of the capricornia– carpentaria kind: in sam watson’s the kadaitcha sung and mudrooroo’s master of the ghost dreaming trilogy, dreamtime tropes are the medium in which the authors satirise colonialism, westernisation or urbanisation [. . .] in doing so, they deploy literary forms as diverse as magic realism and, in the case of the elder watson and mudrooroo, more populist and inventive forms, such as gothic, fantasy thriller and dirty realism. within western paradigms, such symbolic systems are available for re-use and hybridisation within western genres. however, within both communities questions increasingly arise about the coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 ‘authenticity’ of the ‘translation’ of mythic material into western representations (ashcroft et al. 2009: 212–13). one may conclude that the objective of authenticity can never be absolute in a global culture — let alone in an isolated culture — and must always be tainted when intercultural communication sets the oral against the written, resting on the incorporation of divergent systems of knowledge and communication. by definition, the end-product ‘indigenous australian literature’ must be a mixed heritage and collage, although recognisably ‘indigenous’ to maintain its claim to a political agenda of enabling self-definition, to follow michael dodson’s lead (1994: 39). no doubt wright had prior knowledge of capricornia’s content as sharrad shows, but this does not imply loss of originality, or that her novel is a rewrite of a prequel, or that it lacks substance — in short, that it can be de-authorised. the important point is that carpentaria is able to stand out as an independent work of art by the way it draws on and reworks existing cultural traditions. it appears the author has been successful at this, as the prestigious miles franklin award may serve to prove. the general public recognition of carpentaria’s merits may thus help lay to rest the disturbing ghosts provoked by the capricornia issue. conclusion: indigenous sovereignty and the imagination published under john howard’s conservative tenure in 2006, carpentaria can be seen to denounce the neocolonial powers in contemporary australia that marginalise, reify and stifle the indigenous world out of agency. such neocolonialism is given fictional shape through the destructive manipulations of the multinational gurfurritt mine against native title and through the stunting impact of small-town racism. the novel questions the race, gender and class divisions that hold exploitative, capitalist relationships in place in australia and employs dreaming narrative in a generic configuration we could call aboriginal reality to achieve its postcolonising thrust. it proposes a return to a holistic understanding of man and nature, and creates contemporary storylines and structures recognisably drawing on australia’s oldest cultural heritage, the dreamtime, but also incorporates european legend and myth. wright centres her discourse on an enabling focus from the fringe, but works across both cultural frameworks to create a textual embodiment of her people’s “strange cultural survival” (bhabha 1990: 320). the hybrid, dichotomous aspect of the mermaid, a figure of fantasy come alive in wright’s dreaming narrative, stands for the epistemological tensions in the text and the way they can(not) be bridged, and signals what effort may be needed to reach beyond mere tolerance and coexistence. importantly, alexis wright not only primes her own oral tradition but also engages with the european literary tradition so as to allow non-indigenous readership access to carpentaria (arguably she does the same with the black swan trope in the swan book 2013), making for myriad interpretations that circulate through and solicit each other. this blend is manifest in the rainbow serpent’s dreaming/mother nature’s powers in the land and sea against the coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 imposition of the stark reality of racist exploitation by white uptown and the mine. it is evident in the merging of quest, odyssey, songline and walkabout in the journeying of norm, his activist son will, and his preacher friend mozzie/moses. it also manifests itself in norm’s miraculous recovery from a defeated, ghosted fringe dweller to a maban/cleverman bridging the forces of life and death and wreaking havoc upon desperance. it evinces itself in will’s haunting terrorism in the service of the recovery of the ancestral link to country and indigenous community. it is addressed in the inscription of the father–son–grandson triad/trinity norm/will/bala as configured in a local inscription merging the christian fisher king myth with indigenous regeneration. it comes to the fore in the wish-fulfillment of gurfurritt’s and desperance’s destruction and in traditional country’s renewal as the signified of the area’s ambiguous belonging to end times and new times. it is also apparent in norm’s wife angel day’s merging of christian and indigenous beliefs and conversion into a white metropolitan ghost appearing only in norm’s dreams. it reveals itself in elias’s biblical sacrifice to redeem a lost indigenous mob holding on to the spirit of country. and it is, finally, reflected in lloydie’s exchange of ‘black velvet’ for the fatal love professed for an enchanting siren trapped in the wood of his bar top, perhaps the product of alcoholic delusion. reading alexis wright’s fiction is like being sung to by an indigenous siren who lures one into an alternative, enabling, holistic universe. the sophistication of wright’s epic “resistance writing” (ferrier 1992: 215), a call for self-definition and self-determination, is evident in the ways carpentaria participates in the multicultural complexity of contemporary australia while steering clear of a crippling discourse on indigenous authenticity rooted in essentialist identity politics. while recognising the perceived incommensurability of indigenous and non-indigenous epistemologies in its treatment of time and space (devlinglass 2007: 83), carpentaria works toward closing the hierarchical eurocentric gap between the oral and written, tradition and modernity, nature and human, fact and fiction, past and present, story and history. with its inscription in a holistic cycle of destruction/renewal and life/death through a strategic employment of dreamtime tropes as well as western ones such as the mermaid, carpentaria constitutes a grand “micro-narrative” (cf. lyotard 1984: xxiii– iv) against the race, gender, and class binaries underlying the western distinction between self, other and world that has wrought so much havoc in our society. works cited “epic,” in britannica concise encyclopedia 2006 (encyclopædia britannica, 2006; answers.com, 2008), http://www.answers.com/topic/epic (accessed 29 december 2008). “saga,” in britannica concise encyclopedia (encyclopædia britannica, 2006; answers. com, 2008), http://www.answers.com/topic/saga (accessed 29 december 2008). altman, jon, & melinda hinkson, ed. coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit aboriginal australia (north carlton, melbourne: arena, 2007). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 ashcroft, bill, frances devlin-glass & lyn mccredden. intimate horizons (adelaide, s a: at f press, 2009). bhabha, homi k. “dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation,” in nation and narration, ed. homi k. bhabha (london: routledge, 1990): 291–322. buck, joseph. “trees that belong here: an interview with award-winning australian author, kim scott,” boomtown magazine 1.3 (2001), www.boomtownmag.com/ articles/200101/benang.htm (accessed 16 february 2005). davison, liam. “a powerful new black voice,” australian book review 191 (june 1997): 42. devlin-glass, frances. “review essay: alexis wright’s carpentaria,” antipodes (june 2007): 82–4. dodson, michael. “the end in the beginning: re(de)finding aboriginality,” in blacklines: contemporary critical writing by indigenous australians, ed. michèle grossman (1994; carlton, victoria: melbourne u p , 2003): 39. england, katharine. “small-town dreaming,” the advertiser (30 september 2006), review section: 10, http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/infoweb?p_product= awnb&p_theme=aggregated5&p_action=doc&p_docid=11475000229bfc40&p_docn um=1&p_queryname=14 (accessed 9 september 2008). ferrier, carole. “aboriginal women’s narratives,” in gender, politics, fiction, ed. carole ferrier (st lucia: u of queensland p, 1992): 200–18. freud, sigmund. civilisation and its discontents, in the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, ed. & tr. james strachey, vol. 21 (das unbehagen der kultur, 1930; tr. 1961; london: hogarth, 1961): 59–145. freud, sigmund. totem and taboo, resemblances between the mental lives of savages and neurotics, tr. a.a. brill (totem und tabu: einige übereinstimmungen im seelenleben der wilden und der neurotiker, 1913; tr. 1918; mineola n y : dover, 1998): grossman, michèle. “risk, roguery and revelation,” australian literary review 1.2 (october 2006): 10, http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iwsearch/we/infoweb?p_product=awnb&p_ theme=aggregated5&p_action=doc&p_docid=1148a0d9851be068&p_docnum=1&p_q ueryname=16 (accessed 9 september 2008).hayward, philip (ed). scaled for success : the internationalisation of the mermaid. indiana university press, 2018. proquest ebook central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/scu/detail.action?docid=5441165 (accessed 6 august 2019). hayward, philip. making a splash: mermaids (and mermen) in 20th and early 21st century audiovisual media, (eastleigh: john libbey and co./indiana university press, 2017) hayward, philip. “mermaids, mer-cultures and the aquapelagic imaginary”, shima 12 (2) (2018): 1–11. herbert, xavier. capricornia (1938; london: harpercollins, 2008). http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/scu/detail.action?docid=5441165 http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/scu/detail.action?docid=5441165 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 langton, marcia. “trapped in the aboriginal reality show,” griffith review 19 (autumn 2008): 145–62. lyotard, françois. the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, tr. geoffrey bennington & brian massumi (la condition postmoderne. rapport sur le savoir, 1979, tr. 1984; minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1984). martos garcía, aitana. “las sirenas como arquetipos transculturales y como recurso para la educación literaria/sirens as cross-cultural archetypes and as a resource for literary education” didáctica : lengua y literatura; madrid tomo 28, (2016): 181–99. doi:10.5209/dida.54081 moreton-robinson, aileen. “writing off indigenous sovereignty: the discourse of security and patriarchal white sovereignty,” in sovereign subjects: indigenous sovereignty matters, ed. aileen moreton-robinson (crows nest, n s w: allen & unwin, 2007): 86– 102. o’brien, kerry. “alexis wright interview,” hecate 33.1 (2007): 215–19. perlez, jane. “aboriginal lit,” new york times sunday book review (18 november 2007), http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/books/review/perlez-t.html?fta=y (accessed 3 may 2008). pierce, peter. “calming influence in balance fraught with pain (alexis wright’s carpentaria),” canberra times (2 september 2006): newspaper section: panorama 13. renes, cornelis martin. “discomforting readings: uncanny perceptions of self in alexis wright’s plains of promise and david malouf’s remembering babylon,” eucalypt 2 (2002): 76–102. roberts, robert, “emotions in the christian tradition,” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. edward n. zalta (summer 2011), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/emotion-christian-tradition/ (accessed 31 may 2012). rose, deborah bird. “an indigenous philosophical ecology: situating the human,” in australian journal of anthropology 16.3 (2005): 294–305. rutherford, jonathan. “the third space: interview with homi bhabha,” in identity: community, culture, difference, ed. jonathan rutherford (london: lawrence & wishart, 1990): 211. san roque, craig. “on reading carpentaria: a review of alexis wright’s miles franklin award-winning novel,” in the uses of subjective experience: a weekend of conversations between a nz s ja analysts and academics who work with jung’s ideas (an zs j a, melbourne, 20–21 october 2007). sharp, nonie. “fiction (review of carpentaria),” island 111 (summer 2007): 61–7. sharrad, paul. “beyond capricornia: alexis wright’s ambiguous promise,” paper delivered at e ac l a ls conference, ca’ foscari, venice, 25–29 march 2008. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 stanner, w.e.h. the dreaming and other essays. with an introduction by robert manne. black inc 2009 (1968). syson, ian. “uncertain magic,” overland 187 (winter 2007): 85–6. vernay, jean-françois. ”an interview with alexis wright,” antipodes 18.2 (december 2004): 119–22. wright, alexis, ed. take power: like this old man here (alice springs, nt: iad press, 1998). wright, alexis. “one hundred millenniums plus two—maintaining traditional indigenous geographies. minus two centuries of lost life in the geography of australian ignorance,” in changing geographies. essays on australia, ed. susan ballyn et al. (barcelona: centre d’estudis australians, universitat de barcelona, 2001): 135–43. wright, alexis. “on writing carpentaria,” heat 13 (new series 2007): 79–95. wright, alexis. carpentaria (artarmon, n s w: giramondo, 2006). bionote: cornelis martin renes is an associate professor for english studies at the university of barcelona, spain, and specialises in postcolonial literatures and film from australia, new zealand, and south africa. he co-directs the australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), recognised as an official interdisciplinary, intercultural research centre within the university’s faculty of letters. he is involved in the organisation of research projects, regular conferences, lectures, and academic exchanges of postcolonial content, often centred on australian academia, and co-edits the ceat’s online journals coolabah and blue gum. he has chaired the european association for studies of australia (easa) since 2015. endnotes i wright says that “my hope was that the novel would allow a space where indigenous heroes are celebrated” (wright 2007: 85). ii desperance’s location is marked by the southern fish or fomalhaut star, “the brightest in the constellation piscis austrini which followed the water carrier’s jug of aquarius [...] it was the groper who swam from the sea at certain times of the year to the sky and down again, falling back into the shallows of the groper’s hole” (515). iii no doubt this comment was partly inspired by the 2007 invasion of the northern territory by the conservative howard government, after insistent rumors and reports about child sexual abuse in remote aboriginal communities — for detailed criticism of these governmental actions, see coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit aboriginal australia, ed. jon altman & melinda hinkson (north carlton, melbourne: arena 2007). note also marcia langton’s statement that “aboriginal society is sliding into a terminal state of under-development,” highlighting “the unassailable facts in hundreds of impoverished coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 aboriginal communities across remote australia: radically shortened lives; the highest national rates of unemployment; widespread violence, endemic alcohol and substance abuse; the lowest national levels of education; and lifelong morbidity for hapless citizens suffering from heart disease, nutrition and lifestylerelated diseases such as diabetes”; langton, “trapped in the aboriginal reality show,” griffith review 19 (autumn 2008): 155, 158. iv for detailed criticism of these governmental actions, see coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit aboriginal australia, ed. jon altman & melinda hinkson (north carlton, melbourne: arena 2007). v homi bhabha coined the ‘third space’ in an interview with jonathan rutherford, and describes its cultural hybridity in fanonesque supradialectical terms: “for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third arises, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. this third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” — see jonathan rutherford, “the third space: interview with homi bhabha,” in identity: community, culture, difference, ed. jonathan rutherford (london: lawrence & wishart, 1990): 211. vi she mentions carlos fuentes, gabriel garcía márquez, édouard glissant, eduardo galeano, and patrick chamoiseau as important influences (wright 2007: 82–3, 85–6; o’brien 2007: 216). coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 the pathfinder ingrid davis davis@eine-welt-mvg.de copyright© 2020 ingrid davis. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: an homage to the scholar, traveller and person geoff davis by his wife, ingrid davis. keywords: geoff davis, travelling as learning, sense of direction geoff proposed to me under a palm tree in sydney harbour on new year’s eve 1995. we had been travelling around australia for two months by the time we reached sydney, and had been a couple for five years. it is telling, i suppose, that i agreed to marry him at (from our perspective) the other end of the world, even though we didn’t know then just how often we would be visiting australia and new zealand in the years to come and how much we would come to love both countries. geoff was a world traveller, always just back from somewhere, and always on the way to somewhere else, his curiosity about other cultures, countries and their people was unending. i caught the travelling bug quite early on in our relationship and i’ll be forever grateful for all the wonderful memories i have of our numerous trips across the globe. geoff never just travelled, he always explored. he would walk around for hours to familiarise himself with a new city; he would work out how to use the public transport system in a blink; and you could trust him to locate the best pubs and restaurants in no time. and he would talk to people, without prejudice and always prepared to listen – and learn. when geoff came back from a trip, he would always talk about the fascinating conversations he had with people on trains, on busses, in pubs and everywhere else, really. geoff’s sense of orientation was incredible. i’m convinced, if you had dropped him in the desert somewhere, he would have found his way home. i think people sensed this about him, because in a lot of places, tourists would actually come up to geoff and ask him for mailto:davis@eine-welt-mvg.de coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 directions – whether it was london, berlin, paris, innsbruck or amsterdam. and the mind-boggling thing is that he would know the answer in nine out of ten cases. i have called this piece ‘the pathfinder’, because i think that is what he was, in all sorts of ways. he constantly found new paths in which academic research could and should move, and he helped people along on these paths as best he knew how. more practical pathfinding he did for his students – he was the only person in his department who offered excursions for students, to ireland, wales, england or south africa, thus opening a door into a new world for a lot of us. and it is certainly no coincidence that he joined an excursion to china organised by the sociology department in 1978 – which was one of the first student trips allowed by the chinese government. geoff was there. of course. i don’t think i have ever met anyone who was interested in and knowledgeable about so many different things – such as art, architecture, languages, literature, film, classical music and jazz, history and most of all politics. likewise, as a scholar he didn’t specialise in one field or one country – he was simply too interested in the world and all its goings-on to limit himself to one field of expertise, one country or one genre. if geoff was addicted to anything, it was the news. no matter where he was, you would always see him with a newspaper under his arm or in his bag, and if he put on a tv, the first thing he would look for was the bbc or at a pinch cnn. while following the news from europe and around the world, he would also read at least one newspaper from the country he was in at any one time. what was phenomenal, however, was how much of the information he absorbed, he actually retained. the breadth and depth of his knowledge on all sorts of things was truly amazing, and his memory simply unbelievable. mind you, this was not limited to news or academic knowledge. if you travelled with geoff, let’s say through england, after turning one corner or another, he would say: “oh, hang on, there’s a pub around this bend. i had a fantastic meal there thirty years ago, let’s see whether it’s still there.” and usually, it would be – whether it was restaurants, pubs or his second addiction: bookshops. geoff was a reader. you would hardly ever see him without a book, a magazine, a newspaper or – when on the road – a travel guide. he believed that as a university teacher it was his job to be aware and informed about the world and to be able to apply this knowledge to the study of literature. he was much more interested in the social, historical and political background of a literary work than he ever was in literary theory. he firmly believed that it was essential to be aware of the background and context of literature, and i think that this approach was what made his work so unique and interesting at a time when (to my outsider’s view) literary theory seems to have taken over the academic discourse about literature. one of his favourite quotes was from one of his tutors at oxford who must have said to him: “if i want to know what’s in the secondary literature, i’ll read it. i want to know what you think about it.” of course, he taught his students about the importance of secondary literature and the necessity to engage with the contributions of other scholars. but mainly his aim was to teach his students to think for themselves rather than just regurgitate what other people had already written. and i think that that is one of the reasons why he was so popular with his students. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 i think another reason for his popularity was his humility and modesty. to my mind it is an incredible achievement to have won a scholarship to oxford university, especially for a boy from a very humble background in northern england in the 1960s. but all he would ever say was: “there were so many people there who were so much more intelligent than me. i just worked very hard.” until his dying day oxford the place and oxford the university were very close to his heart, and he remained immensely grateful to have been given this chance. he achieved so much, did his doctorate in german studies, his habilitation in post-colonial studies and his list of publications is roughly 50 pages (!) long – yet he never bragged. he moved academic studies forward significantly – yet he never needed the trappings of power for his ego. as a teacher he was always approachable for his students, and he loved engaging with intelligent young people and opening doors for them, be it through creating exchanges with other universities or by encouraging them to tackle unusual and interesting projects. geoff was not only a gentleman, he was also a gentle man, and it was almost impossible to pick a fight with him. he was passionate, about his work and about things that were wrong in our society – and he wouldn’t only speak out against things that he thought to be wrong, but he would also try to do something about them. he wasn’t one to stand idly by. looking back on his life, he would always say: “i’ve had an incredible run for my money.” and yet, he wasn’t ready to go. at 74 he was still working as though retirement hadn’t happened, because he loved his work so much – and the first thing he said to the doctor who gave us the terrible diagnosis, was: ”i haven’t got time for this.” pancreatic cancer is a bastard. geoff was ready to fight it tooth and nail, but there was nothing anybody could do, and ultimately, he faced the final challenge of his life with stoicism and courage. i suppose the quiet times in heaven are over… aachen, germany march 2019 coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 geoff in the 1960s © ingrid davis coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 geoff lecture habilitation 2000 © ingrid davis coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 china 2006 © ingrid davis coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 india 2007 © ingrid davis coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 festschrift event 2012 © ingrid davis coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 zimbabwe 2012 © ingrid davis stirling castle 2017 © ingrid davis coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 researching the city and walking with street dwellers: recreating urban encounters past and present simone lazaroo murdoch university s.lazaroo@murdoch.edu.au isabel carrera suárez university of oviedo icarrera@uniovi.es copyright©2017 simone lazaroo & isabel carrera suárez. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the art of recreating cities imaginatively and the critical act of reading urban fiction involve processes of research and learning that often include encounters with specific cities and their dwellers, prompting reflection on the forms and ethics of such encounters. whether carrying out historical research into the past or observation of the rapid transformation of contemporary cities, writers and critics often combine the acquisition of documentary and experiential knowledge of urban spaces. taking two different categories of writing by simone lazaroo, on the one hand her texts on past relations between singapore and australia, and on the other her current stories on global cities after the great financial crisis, we explore the processes of learning before and through representation, and the ethics of human interaction in the contact zone of the global urban where, increasingly, the world’s expelled have become street-dwellers. keywords: urban fiction; simone lazaroo; eurasian; expulsion; sassen to veronica brady, exceptional traveller, faultless pedestrian. the research carried out by writers prior to producing their texts, and fiction in particular, is most often discussed in terms of archival work and historical documentation. acknowledgement sections (personal credits aside) tend to include visited archives, books and documents used, exchanges with experts. this is particularly true of historical or historicised fiction, and of writing about geographies outside the author’s context. direct observation of worlds and people is at times more obliquely recorded in the text itself, through figures such as the eavesdropper or observer turned narrator, producing classic figures such as the flâneur. perhaps because travel has become so accessible and migration a more extended experience, transnational urban writing today makes use of a mailto:s.lazaroo@murdoch.edu.au mailto:icarrera@uniovi.es coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 multiple method approach to research, which involves, among others, archival and historical work, diasporic memory and embodied encounters in the cities, an approach which requires critical modifications of figures such as that of the classic, modernist flâneur. focusing on the writing of simone lazaroo, and alternating the perspective of writer and critic, we will discuss a writer's practice and poetics when researching contemporary cities for the purposes of writing, first, (post)diasporic memory fiction and, second, contemporary stories of exclusion, foregrounding the ethical positionings and knowledge production involved. we relate this learning and creative process to the reverse, yet sometimes parallel, voyage of knowledge undertaken by readers and critics, focusing particularly on the analysis of transnational urban writing and the recurrence of embodied ethical encounters in a context of growing urban exclusion. 1. researching post/diasporic narratives: a writer’s perspective. simone lazaroo most of my writing has in some way explored individuals searching for belonging and meaning at the juncture of cultures. my interest in writing about such individuals stems partly from my parentage. my mother’s parents were australians of mostly anglo-saxon and some french ancestry; my father’s parents were eurasians from malacca and kuala lumpur, most likely descendants of sixteenth century partnerships between portuguese sailors or merchants and malay as well as possibly indian women. one of my paternal great-grandfathers, joseph marbeck, was a eurasian from indonesia, possibly with some dutch or german ancestry. a family photograph taken in the early 1900s, most likely in a malaccan photographer’s studio, shows my paternal grandmother rose, the oldest child in the photo, with her parents and the rest of their young family. my paternal great-grandmother, dolphine, is dressed in her sarong kebaya; but her husband joseph and their children are in western dress, apart from the baby naked and nappyless on dolphine’s lap: it’s easy to imagine that dolphine, then in her early twenties, might have been even more stressed than the photographer about timing whilst this photo was taken. sometime after my father’s parents rose and daniel married, they migrated from malaya to singapore. both countries were then part of the british straits settlements. during the british colonial era in malaya and singapore, british expatriates sometimes referred to eurasians as ‘in-betweens’, partly because of their mixed european and asian ancestry coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 and culture, and partly because of their role as intermediaries between the british colonial government and locals who didn’t speak english. some characters in my novels reflect my paternal great-grandfather’s and grandfather’s experiences of working for the british colonial government. however, anecdotal accounts indicate that despite their ability to speak english, my grandfather and other eurasians of portuguese descent were generally considered of lower social standing than those eurasians with english forebears, and found fewer opportunities for higher status jobs with the colonial government. some of my published novels and my current work in progress, provisionally titled bodies of water, have referred to the effects of such historical circumstances upon eurasian individuals. i’ll refer initially to my second novel the australian fiancé (2000), which explores the relationship between a young singaporean eurasian woman and a privileged western australian heir in post world war ii, and to bodies of water, my text about a singaporean-born eurasian migrant woman evangelia oliveira’s attempts to recover, in australia and singapore, the story of her divorced elderly parents’ courtship, marriage and her own origins. both these texts could be categorised as writing which explores diasporic topics such as home and belonging. later, i’ll discuss how my most recently published short stories “duty free” and “those who grasp lose” (2016), which are about travellers in contemporary cities, also reflect my interest in writing about belonging and home. i will discuss first the approaches to researching details that enabled me to write the australian fiancé and bodies of water. like many other writers of literary fiction, i build my story drafts upon detail drawn in some way from the “real world.” this usually involves detail drawn from my own direct observation, including encounters and memories of people and places; but details are also often drawn from diasporic memory informed by narrative fragments from family members, pre-existing texts, photographic images and other archival material. the kinds of research undertaken have varied from fiction project to project. for my novel the australian fiancé, set mostly during the years following world war ii, researching archival and other textual sources was necessary for obvious reasons: in old photos, maps and texts, i found details of that era’s geographical and social settings that are often no longer very evident in those cities. but visiting singapore in the 1980s, i found traces of the old city, its people and their occupations in chinatown, little india and around arab street, and in colonial buildings such as the raffles hotel. these informed my representations of post-world war ii singapore in the australian fiancé, supplementing the images of that era that i found in photos, archives and other published texts. this novel was also partly set in post-world war ii broome in western australia and drew on photos, texts and archives about broome and wider australia during that era, including texts about the administration of the white australia policy and post-world war ii australian parliamentary debates about the minimum percentage of european blood socalled “part asians” should possess if they wanted to migrate to australia. a minimum of 50% was suggested in federal parliamentary debates at one point; this intriguing suggestion informed a passage in the australian fiancé. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 my more recent project bodies of water traces the trajectory of eurasian migrant evangelia oliveira’s parents’ bi-cultural partnership after her father francis meets her mother elspeth green at university in perth, where he’s sent to study water supply after he receives a post-war commonwealth scholarship. this last detail reflects the experience of my father, who was one of several singporeans of his generation trained in australian universities to help build the post-war infrastructure of singapore. such familial memories were usually relayed through anecdotes or narrative fragments, sometimes accompanying old family photos which also informed my representations of fictional characters. post-war photographs showing my now deceased father and uncle as young men, and family anecdotes about them, indirectly informed some of my representations of francis xavier oliveira’s appearance, habits and aspirations in bodies of water. during the process of writing such pieces of fiction, details drawn from “real” people are altered in various ways, partly out of respect for privacy, partly to serve the story better, make characters more engaging and relevant to the story and its themes, or other narrative reasons. for example, i incorporated and exaggerated my father’s and uncle’s fondness for swimming and eating ice cream into the representation of the youthful francis oliveira: francis hadn’t aspired to saintliness as his mother had hoped when she named him, but he had become swimming champion of his school in singapore after taking up the sport to build his muscles following his war-time malnutrition. he’d developed an interest in pools, reservoirs and other bodies of water as he looked for places to train. he did push-ups three times a day in front of his poster of charles atlas, and he fortified himself with milo and dutch maid powdered milk after double helpings of nasi lemak and kuey teow from singapore’s street hawkers. he bought himself a small serve of singapore cold storage’s icecream when he could afford it, to alleviate the heat, hunger and other unnameable cravings rising in him. texts, familial anecdotes and maps have all been crucial to writing bodies of water, complementing my personal memories and observations of singapore made during visits. i pored over maps from my deceased father’s 1950s singapore street directory to get a sense of the streets and sites my character francis xavier oliveira might have moved through after the war. i roughly based the location of francis oliveira’s parents’ house, between the city reservoir and jungle reserve, on family narratives about the location of my grandparents’ post-war house, which was bulldozed after their death to make way for a multi-storey shopping centre. later in bodies of water, i described a similarly altered singaporean streetscape, changed coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 to the point of being unrecognisable from the one francis and his new australian wife elspeth had left behind when they migrated to australia with their newborn evangelia in the early 1960s. this dramatically altered streetscape underscores evangelia’s sense of dislocation from her birthplace when she revisits singapore as a middle-aged woman for the first time: she wandered through the gleaming white shopping centre interior. copy watches, mobile phones, vinyl accessories and women’s clothes from china, way too small for her. she bought herself pork dumplings and a can of chrysanthemum tea from the food stall next to mcdonalds, its posters advertising hamburgers with satay sauce. she carried them across the car-park to a bench seat overlooking the reservoir, silver as a mirror under the overcast sky (…) evangelia turned again to the map of the area in her father’s 1957 street directory, tried to align his hand-drawn lines and writing with the streetscape in front of her. roughly where mcdonalds now stood, the heads of hungry civilians might have been stuck on fence palings by japanese. somewhere beyond that, she would’ve been conceived in her grandparents’ last home, generosa, screened by the orchard where trees from the east and the west bore fruit … and she remembered the long drought in her parents’ australian garden before their divorce, and saw for the first time that some of the biggest changes in history were unmappable. perhaps, as evangelia apprehends by the end of the story, her parents’ relationship might be metaphorical for the relationship between australia and asia: australia doesn’t fully understand asia, and vice versa, yet the two nonetheless remain complexly conjoined. this is implied in the extract near the end of their story when evangelia takes her mother elspeth to visit francis decades after their divorce, as he’s dying in a northern suburban perth nursing home: taking the watch her father had been awarded by his british colonial bosses for helping install all those water pipes in singapore after the war, evangelia backed through the doorway into the corridor. but she couldn’t stop herself from eavesdropping on her parents. ‘francis,’ elspeth confided. his eyes widened with the effort of acknowledging her. she lowered her voice. ‘i am sorry i was never any good at it.’ evangelia had to concentrate to hear her mother’s words. ‘something terrible happened to me when i was a child, you see, which caused me pain when we… made love. uncle arthur...’ she glanced up, saw evangelia listening, stopped talking. evangelia took a few steps back. the corridor was warm with the end of another summer day, but she couldn’t help shivering. she closed her eyes, but couldn’t shut out the war medals swinging from uncle arthur’s chest against her face. her mother murmured something to her father she couldn’t hear. ‘why... didn’t you... tell me... all those...years...ago?’ her father rasped. ‘i thought you wouldn’t want me if you knew,’ her mother replied. their murmuring stopped. evangelia peered through the doorway again. in the dim room, their gaunt old faces were only just visible. but she coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 saw that francis xavier oliveira and elspeth green understood each other more than they had when they were married. through the window behind them, she thought she could just make out waves rising and spending themselves on the shore before returning and merging with the indian ocean. ‘so much... we haven’t... told each other,’ her father finally said. ‘how many of our stories stay untold because we’re ashamed of them?’ her mother patted the back of his hand. ‘some histories …never… end …’ he replied. in the long pause, evangelia heard his watch ticking again. 2: reading and walking singapore, with the australian fiancé. isabel carrera-suárez historical documentation, needless to say, is a vital exercise for the critic and reader’s understanding of texts. my own knowledge of the eurasian community in singapore was non-existent prior to reading the australian fiancé, but what seemed immediately crucial from a theoretical and analytical perspective was the localised specificity of this bicultural community and its borderline status as (aspiringly) “british” colonial hybrid. as explained by simone above, the european side of singaporean eurasians was often portuguese, the asian malay, and they constituted a distinct, named social group in colonial singapore, whose specificity demanded located research. the sophisticated theorising on hybridity, in-betweenness and liminality, from bakhtin to bhabha, was an uncomfortable fit for the reading of a novel where the crossover relationships are made difficult by deep racialization and exclusion, and even more critically, war rape trauma. the brutal history of japanese abduction of young women for sexual slavery during world war ii informs the story, as do the stark facts of the white australia policy at its peak. feminist studies of forced sexual encounters, which deconstruct the idea of an abstract and “happy” hybridity, offered a more useful tool for understanding, as did situated studies of australian-asian cultural relations, such as the work of ien ang on chinese diasporas in the australian context (2001) or insights into the proximity of urban encounters (ahmed, 2000). whatever the critical approach adopted in reading the australian fiancé, however, its wealth of urban detail, the protagonists’ constant and significant traversing of singapore neighbourhoods, together with the powerful visual basis of the narrative, turn the understanding of the city’s layout and inhabited spaces into an imperative. my own early archive was a large format book, singapore, a pictorial history, 1819-2000 (liu, 2001) which contains 1200 historical photographs of the city, and whose publicity claims to show how “in less than two centuries, singapore has transformed itself from a small seaside kampong into a modern metropolis, growing first into a thriving colony, then a straits settlement, and becoming in 1965 an independent nation,” and to tell the story of “a nation of mainly immigrant stock and the island they transformed from fishing village to a global city state” (liu, 2000, back cover). the latter part of this transformation, from colony into independent nation, and beyond nation into global city, is the time period of the australian fiancé, which foregrounds the charged relationship between australia and singapore. the wealth of visual information contained in this pictorial history allows good insight into the historical world recreated in the novel. the next essential coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 step, however, prior to interviewing simone in perth for the first time, was to walk, in a parallel journey to her research trip, singapore’s historical urban neighbourhoods, and to look back through its museums and visual archives. my own route, in contrast to simone’s family photos and narratives, was proposed by a crucial image from liu’s book, not a photograph but a map, the famous “jackson plan,” also known as the “raffles plan” or “plan of the town of singapore,” seemingly drawn in 1822, three years after the establishment of the colony. it transpires from historical records that the founder of the colony, sir stamford raffles, had given specific instructions on allocation of land in the town, but returned to singapore in 1822 to be displeased by “the haphazard growth of the settlement” (“raffles town plan,” nlb singapore), thus creating a town committee to revise the layout of the city and giving lieutenant philip jackson the responsibility of designing the plan. following this crucial design, the colony was divided into functional subdivisions arranged in a grid pattern, with segregated ethnic residential areas: government; europeans and merchants; chinese; malays; indians. this most colonial of city structures, the grid, thus recomposed the “disordered” (mixed) expansion of life into segregated and stratified areas; it seems to have failed, however, to curtail the resistant interaction that followed nevertheless, represented in its complex fluidity in the australian fiancé, a novel which works as much through story-telling as through visual recreation, through an extended metaphor of photography and precise spatial evocation. it excels at bringing to life the socially determined spaces in singapore and broome, streetscapes and interior enclosures, as well as the passageway, limbo locations of the ship and the boat. the eurasian woman, always caught in-between, must finally renounce desires made impossible by such confinements and return “home” to construct a new self in singapore. when in later life she dreams of the past and of her former fiancé, she sees him in two types of places: the neighbourhood of hunger [in singapore], the one she knows best, kampongs and shophouses scanty with shared taps; plywood and tin walls behind which you have to keep your desire muffled, through which desire might be heard easily. where longing grows the stronger for being denied. or, conversely, a neighbourhood of affluence [in broome], where imported exotic plants tended by aboriginal servants flourish in symmetrical groupings and chase out the shadows of the desert; where houses are so big you can barely hear the sounds of desire from room to room. in both places, she has to keep herself hidden from the neighbours. (202) while few of the original dwelling places were left in my visit to singapore in 2005, two decades after the author’s research visit, the visible traces the original layout, present in chinatown, arab street, a few kampongs and colonial buildings such as the crucial raffles hotel, were unequivocal entries into colonial memory. such spaces are of course in contrast with most post-war singapore architecture, which develops the dream of the island-state as world finance city, a global dream of affluence. the varied manners in which cities change and reinvent themselves are a major theme in urban theory and literature, as writing on many other cities such as london, toronto or sydney, shows. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 the link between present urban forms and colonial or past history also constitutes the subject of analysis in both fields, with creative writing focusing, as simone lazaroo’s fiction does, on the lived, human experience accompanying such transformations. in bodies of water, evangelia meditates matter-of-factly how “roughly where mcdonalds now stood, the heads of hungry civilians might have been stuck on fence palings by japanese soldiers.” a similarly gruesome revelation in her earlier novel also emphasized the invisibility (and relevance) of alternative knowledges: when the australian fiancé takes the young eurasian woman to the luxurious, emblematically white raffles hotel, where their first skin-to-skin encounter (in sara ahmed’s term) will take place, she silences her own geo-historical wisdom: the hotel rings daily with the sounds of forgetting. along the corridor for their suite, the doors are ajar on haughty bathrooms being re-tiled and repainted. she doesn’t mention to him her native’s knowledge of what’s gone on behind those doors, before, of defeated japanese soldiers disembowelling themselves on the old tiles and the claw-footed baths. (59) one of the running themes in the novel is precisely knowledge and its desire, the power of certain knowledges, the wisdom but danger of other, subaltern, knowing. creative fiction, in its dose of reality or speculation, feeds into and often anticipates critical work and theorisation. simone’s lazaroo’s fictionalised, historically grounded version of alternative knowledge predates theoretical insights into the subject such as saskia sassen’s recent reminder that the spatial knowledge sustained by the “expelled” inhabitants of any city is a one we ignore at our cost (2014a). the fiancé in the novel is guilty of such blindness throughout. the eurasian woman, on her part, desires his technical (photographical) know-how only to enable the agency of her own subaltern information. her final reinvention of herself as an ethical observer/artist is a key example of the embodiedness and significance of a transformed, gendered flâneural figure, represented in a significant number of texts on postdiasporic metropolitan cities, a figure which i have analysed elsewhere (carrera suárez 2015). according to visual critic and photographer marcia meskimmon, the concept of the pedestrian is about the condition of knowing space through embodiment… conceptually, the pedestrian differs from the flâneur in locatedness and physicality… she is not a disembodied eye like the theoretical flâneur who wanders through the city ‘invisibly’ and untouched, but a sentient participant in the city. (meskimmon 21) this sentient, participant artist is fleetingly but crucially represented at the end of the australian fiancé by the eurasian woman, now long established back “home” in independent singapore, photographing people in the street but returning the images to their owners: “you are really something,” she tells them, resisting the practice of her former fiancé-tourist, whose coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 possessive, objectifying photography captured and owned its subjects while screening off the world through the camera lens. reversing the use of the coveted technical knowledge first acquired through his camera, she returns self-image and speech to her fellow citizens in 1980s singapore. this figure of an embodied, sentient participant in the city will have an echo in later work by simone lazaroo, in the aspirations of the travelling woman and amateur photographer sheila, protagonist of the contemporary stories collected in duty free (2016). 3. walking the streets in search of a subject: the ethics of pedestrianism. simone lazaroo as a literary researcher, i often find myself doing more than noting details of city inhabitants and streetscapes as i walk through them. during the very process of wandering through streets, i begin to construct, inwardly or in my notebook, reflections, journeys and events that become the basis of main characters’ stories, thoughts and voices. individuals and streetscapes encountered thus generate ideas for fictional scenes that bring together representations of characters within specific physical, social and cultural settings. i begin as an “eavesdropper / observer” (carrera-suárez 2015), but sometimes also begin to narrate stories to myself as i undertake this research. often, firsthand encounters with people in city streets prompt this narration. so for me, being “an embodied, located researcher” is crucial to the construction of stories involving “embodied, located” fictional characters. the critic james wood alludes to the sense of being overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of detail encountered whilst wandering through the streets of large cities: …detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness … in life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. we have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. (wood, 47) i’d concur with wood: at least during the earliest stage of walking to research new cities and their inhabitants, my focus is broad and unselective, and i find the range and density of detail in them difficult to process. during the early stage of walking to research cities for my short stories “duty free” and “those who grasp lose,” published in 2016, it sometimes seemed more like aimless wandering than research, but in fact was neither aimless nor passive. the initial stages of this kind of research involve constant attempts to “read the signs”: on streets, buildings, and in other people’s appearances and behaviour. i’ve long agreed with twentieth-century american critic and writer e. b. white’s dictum “good writers report the details that matter,” but during early research walks through cities, it’s not clear in advance which details will “matter” to my writing. at that stage, i’m trying to locate myself not just spatially, but in terms of what my stories’ focus will be, and therefore it’s crucial to make an effort to be a “noticer” of as much around me as i can. although in some ways i am no different to most travellers walking through a city for the first time, this “noticing” entails practising a kind of conscious receptivity to people and places. it requires awareness of the potential of often unexpected encounters for enlarging my sense of a city and its residents, and for helping me to “represent in the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 imaginary” people who mightn’t be well represented in other kinds of texts about that particular city. none of my prior reading of tourist websites or guidebooks about san francisco, new york and paris, the cities that later informed my short stories (duty free 2016), had prepared me for what turned out to be perhaps my most enduring memory of those postglobal-financial-crisis cities: the many people begging and often homeless. my first instinct was to keep my distance from, ignore or “screen out” these individuals, partly because i was disconcerted and shocked by their presence, partly because i hadn’t seen so many people homeless or begging back in perth at that stage, and partly because they didn’t seem to “fit” my preconceived ideas and research plans for those cities. but the more i walked those streets, the more i realised that i could not do justice to writing about post-gfc cities without including some representation of these street dwellers. in san francisco, new york and some european cities, the sidewalks and tourist sites seemed to be sites of cross-cultural encounters different to the ones i’d written about before. these new cross-cultural encounters seemed most often to be between poverty-stricken, sometimes homeless individuals and relatively privileged tourists and residents. an example of this was the woman i saw begging from tourists queuing outside notre dame cathedral in paris. despite the multi-lingual welcome sign near its entrance, beggars were not welcome around notre dame: most tourists disregarded her, and i observed police taking her and another beggar away in police cars. i confess that whilst walking through north american and european cities, i succumbed to eavesdropping and spying on tourists’ responses to the beggars. one tourist informed me, when i gave money to the woman begging near notre dame, that “most of those beggars are just working for pimps who they have to give all our donations to.” another warned me, “don’t give all your money away, you never know when you’ll need it yourself in this place.” these tourists’ comments and some of their gestures, such as shooing beggars away with a wave of the hand, as they would insects or perhaps stray dogs, indicated clearly that many visitors and local residents found the beggars a pest or inconvenience. indeed, while i was in san francisco, the san francisco chronicle bore a headline reading panhandlers drive tourists away. observing other tourists’ responses to beggars, i saw we had a lot more in common than i’d first admitted to myself. noting my own touristic behaviour and thoughts was useful to writing both “duty free” and “those who grasp lose.” when i began writing about my main character sheila smith’s affective responses to her encounters with people begging, i often based them on my own: relief, embarrassment and shame when i hurried past street-dwellers or gave them only meagre small change, despite the money in my wallet for buying food and souvenirs; apprehension or fear if the beggars behaved in a confrontational way. and like sheila, i also initially perceived some of the beggars as dangerous, and tried to minimise contact with them. in this paper, i will not explore further my own experience and how it translated into sheila’s story, but will just add that, for some literary researchers, there are at times additional anxieties and fears of real or perceived danger that complicate our ability to communicate with some strangers; the fear of receiving unwanted sexual advances, for example, or of sexual assault. i hinted at these kinds of anxieties in my accounts of sheila’s interactions with homeless men. there are also anxieties associated with ethical issues raised by this observing of people experiencing hardship. when writing fiction based on my observations and encounters coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 with such people, i avoid identifying them.. yet i’m still uneasy about benefitting, artistically if not financially, from such observations. the begging and homeless strangers encountered during my research undertaken whilst walking, were significant to me for a number of reasons: because they challenged my preconceived ideas about those cities and their inhabitants; because they challenged my ideas about myself as both traveller and researcher; because they helped me represent embodied, located characters; and, finally, because they suggested to me new insights into city streets, sidewalks and tourist sites as places where people of divergent cultural and socio-economic backgrounds encounter and sometimes confront one another. in san francisco, new york and some of the cities of europe i visited a few years later, i came to see sidewalks, parks and tourist sites as places where some people struggle for connection, food, money and sometimes shelter. in a sense, this is an extension of my earlier novels’ exploration of people living and searching for meaning and belonging at the juncture of cultures. my encounters with those strangers in north america and europe enlarged my sense of the ways in which individuals strive for physical and psychological survival at these sites. i hope my fiction about contemporary cities and those who dwell in them will at least trigger in readers some kind of acknowledgement and empathy for “real” individuals and their predicaments, even as we make our way through the apparently increasing inequities and turmoil of the world’s cities today, and regardless of whether those cities and people are familiar or strange to us. some of the issues discussed so far are reflected in the following extract from my short story “duty free” (2016): the beggar-woman wasn’t there under the welcome sign. sheila scanned the square, but the woman was nowhere to be seen.maybe the police had locked her up the evening before. as sheila rounded the corner into the street of souvenir shops and cafes, she collided with a slight, plaid-scarved figure hovering between the sidewalk tables. small metallic pieces jangled dully as they hit the pavement. ‘merde!’ the beggar-woman swore under her breath as she scrambled to pick up the coins, the lines on her forehead and either side of her mouth deepening, her dark eyes hard and piercing. she smelled faintly of urine. she’d changed her paper starbucks cup to a foam mcdonalds one. ‘sor-ry!’ sheila apologised. ‘parlez-vous anglais?’ the last syllable revealed dark gaps in the woman’s top teeth. ‘give me your coat.’ the woman murmured softly, but her grip on sheila’s arm was firm. ‘i need it. the cold.’ ‘you have two coats. you have a nice warm ’otel room to sleep in, non?’ the woman held out her cup. ‘and you took of me some photographs, and you did not pay for them.’ ‘sorry.’ how many times had the woman noticed sheila aiming the camera at her? sheila scrabbled around in her coat pocket for the spare change from galeries lafayette. she’d probably forget to use it before she returned to australia, anyway, and it was a hassle adding up all those unfamiliar coins in the middle of shopping here. they sounded like plastic game tokens as they fell into the beggar’s cup. she prodded sheila’s handbag. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 ‘you ‘ave more.’ ‘no.’ sheila tugged her handbag back under her coat. ‘lies, non? where you from?’ ‘australia.’ ‘australienne, ah? i met many australiennes here.so much space there to, to, how you say? to fuck-up in, non?’as sheila hurried across the road, she heard the woman shout derisively: ‘and to run away.’ … (…) at charles de gaulle airport, sheila felt the dull pain in her left side, couldn’t tell if it was her heart aching or the mastectomy scar. paris cost too much, in more ways than one. (…) had the beggar-woman too packed up her meagre takings from the city of love and begun her return to a solitary place she called home? 4. contemporary urban exclusion: the ethics of close encounters isabel carrera suárez while the racialised, gendered and sexualised subject was a key figure of literary and cultural analysis in the final decades of the twentieth century, recent years have foregrounded new actors and historical events. aside from the rather excessive body of writing on 9/11, with its very specific american trauma, and the shifting of fearful racialization to undefined “muslim” features, there is a growing body of writing on asylum seekers and collected refugee narratives, often the stories of those prevented from accessing urban nodes at all, interviewed in detention (herd and pincus, 2016). early in the new century, amid a certain indifference, many western or metropolitan cities found their social landscape deeply affected by the so-called “great-financial-crisis,” and an increasing number of those who, in saskia sassen’s terms, are “expelled” by a brutal profit system, which disregards any human or ecological rationale. the expelled, are, according to sassen, “people being (usually permanently) cast out of what had been their lives” by permanent unemployment, urban plans, land buying, war, human beings who are becoming invisible in the process (2014b). sassen advocates the need for a different language to represent the scale of such actions, their permanence and structural novelty, hence her use of the term expulsion. simone’s recent stories of travelling encounters foreground some of these expulsions resulting from a failing capitalist context. the narratives bring other manners of in-betweenness to the fore, the living on the “systemic edge,” in sassen’s term (2014b), in the invisible position of no return. such are the characters encountered by sheila in simone’s stories “duty free” and “those who grasp lose” (2016). dealing with breast cancer and its scars, sheila is also a markedly embodied street walker, whose “strange encounters” (ahmed, 2000) are anxious and ambiguously unequal. not wealthy, but wealthier than the homeless, she is nevertheless physically and psychologically less confident. she walks the streets of mythologised cities, the quintessentially european paris, the urban symbols of the us --new york, san franciscoas a gendered, embodied pedestrian, whose desire for contact is nevertheless curtailed by her corporeal self-consciousness and her geography of fear, real and perceived. her close urban encounters are shockingly contemporary, exposing the breach of trust in the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 narrative of progress and urban affluence that had dominated the final years of the twentieth century. like the now prominent figure of the refugee, the beggar or street dweller in the west has unexpectedly ceased to be a faceless outcast, the once romanticised embodiment of freedom, and has turned instead into a warning of what may come, or what we may become, a pervasive example of extreme expulsion, in the cycle described by sassen: expelled from land and jobs, then from homes, then from the streets (“bad for tourism,” “bad for security”). writing on contemporary cities has analysed spaces of transit and microspaces, train stations, airports, cafés, “non-places” as traits of modernity (augé 1995). but the sidewalks portrayed by simone’s stories have become spaces of dwelling, of negotiation, of undesired but eloquent urban speech (sassen 2013). by occupying what manuel castells called the “spaces of socialisation, “ those needed for a cohesive social life, for leisure or social organization, and increasingly, the areas of transit and tourism, the homeless demand recognition of the existence of those alternative stories, not told by gdp figures or macroeconomic narratives. this implicit demand for acknowledgement, which simone has referred to above in terms of ethics and empathy, prompts multiple responses in the recreation of urban discourse. returning to the ever inspiring henri lefebvre, the “right to the city” also assists street dwellers and sassen’s expelled, as they refuse disappearance from the spaces and the narratives of global cities, exclusion from the right to representation. simone lazaroo’s stories in duty free show the extent to which reading and writing the contemporary urban demands a ground level, embodied journey through modified streetscapes, confronting human narratives we often (would rather) ignore. works cited ahmed, sara. 2000. strange encounters: embodied others in postcoloniality. london: routledge. ang, ien. 2001. on not speaking chinese: living between asia and the west. london: routledge. augé, marc. 1995. non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. trans. john howe. london: verso. carrera suárez. 2015. “the stranger flâneuse and the aesthetics of pedestrianism: writing the post-diasporic metropolis.” interventions 17.6: 853-65. herd, david and anna pincus, eds. 2016. refugee tales. manchester: comma. jackson plan. “plan of the town of singapore.” national archives of singapore. original artist: lieutenant philip jackson. available at: http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/maps_building_plans/recorddetails/f9926418-115c-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad lazaroo, simone. 2016. duty free. bilingual edition. translated by lucía prada gonzález. introduction by isabel carrera-suárez. oviedo: krk. lazaroo, simone. 2000. the australian fiancé. sydney: picador. liu, gretchen. 2001. singapore: a pictorial history 1819-2000. richmond: curzon. http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/maps_building_plans/record-details/f9926418-115c-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/maps_building_plans/record-details/f9926418-115c-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 meskimmon, marsha. 1997. engendering the city: women artists and urban space. london: scarlet press. raffles town plan (jackson plan). singaporeinfopedia. national library board. singapore. http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/sip_658_2005-0107.html sassen, saskia. 2014a. expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy (harvard up/belknap). sassen, saskia. 2014b. “the language of expulsion.” truthout, 30 july 2014. sassen, saskia. 2012. “urban capabilities: an essay on our challenges and differences.” journal of international affairs. 652: 85-95. sassen, saskia. 2013. “does the city have speech?” public culture 25. 2 70: 209-221. white, e. b. 1959. the elements of style. new york: macmillan. wood, james. 2008. how fiction works. london: jonathan cape. bio note: isabel carrera suárez is professor in english at the university of oviedo, spain. she has published widely on the intersections between feminism and postcolonialism, particularly as reflected in contemporary women’s fiction. among recent publications are reading transcultural cities (coedited, 2011), and her discussion of the aesthetics of pedestrianism in post-diasporic cities (interventions 17.6; 2015). her contribution to the oxford history of the novel in english is forthcoming (2017) simone lazaroo has won awards for her five published novels and several short stories exploring individuals living at the intersections of cultures. her current writing projects explore contemporary experiences of travel, home, homelessness, belonging, loss and memorialisation in cities during the aftermath of the global financial crisis. she is a senior lecturer in creative writing at murdoch university, western australia. http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/sip_658_2005-01-07.html http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/sip_658_2005-01-07.html coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 on the road to hokitika: the epics of a new constellation m.s. suárez lafuente university of oviedo lafuente@uniovi.es copyright©2017 m.s. suárez lafuente. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this article aims to analyse eleanor catton’s novel the luminaries mainly using paul carter’s theory of spatial history and catton’s own notions of the influence of astronomy upon human behaviour. the novel portraits a number of individuals who get together in a sparsely populated spot in the south island of new zealand and develop a gold-rush town that will eventually become actual hokitika. turning a natural space into a "civilized" place requires much toiling and moiling, many personal clashes and the solving of a few mysteries —eventually hokitika will have its own history grounded and the luminaries can be concluded in a scene that rounds up the epic construction of the city and promises, at the same time, a consistent future. keywords: eleanor catton; paul carter; new zealand; hokitika; the luminaries; spatial history; gold-seekers. it is not the historian who stages events, weaving them together to form a plot, but history itself. history is the playwright, coordinating facts into a coherent sequence: the historian narrating what happened is merely a copyist or amanuensis. (paul carter in the road to botany bay, 1987: xiv) when i first visited fremantle in 1990, veronica brady took me book-hunting and, in the very first bookstore we entered, recommended me to buy paul carter’s the road to botany bay. in time, carter’s book would prove a mine of ideas for my academic work, as it weaves together notions of literature, history, mythopoesis and sociology applicable to many a literary text. when i read eleanor catton’s 2013 man-booker-prize-winning novel the luminaries, carter’s theories came to my mind when trying to unravel catton’s complex narrative. carter elucidates australian history not only from botany bay onwards, but by rising awareness about the steps that conducted to botany bay, similarly, the luminaries looks backwards into the personal stories of those that grounded hokitika, and into the movement of the stars as a reflection of how humans interpret and fantasize those worlds that we cannot easily grasp. eleanor catton was born in 1985, the year that keri hulme received the only other man booker prize for new zealand with the bone people, which put her country on the international literary map. the luminaries tells the deferred story of twelve gold-seekers whose lives could be taken for each zodiacal sign, or, for that matter, for the twelve christian apostles. in either case, they quiver around mailto:lafuente@uniovi.es coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 a central axis which determines their runs, a centre that could easily be read as the sun or god, among other possibilities, depending on who is directing the inscription of the new community. but, to all purposes, in catton’s novel it is gold that turns these men into modern alchemists, ready to trade country, family, genealogy, honourable name and ethics for the shining mineral. nevertheless, in a superficial first reading, what is actually at the centre of this novel is a mystery, a crime that brings fiction into the narrative in the form of ghosts, rumours, speculation and, therefore, fear. in accordance with the complex structure of the novel —allegedly sustained by astrological principles— readers have a hard work combining all these layers of meaning in order to complete the puzzle and identify the godspeed’s ghost and its legend and, on its tail, the epic of creating a new world from scratch, thus converting the muddy hokitika into a proper city. catton gives us some key words in the "note to the reader", in the first page of the novel, where she explains that action in the luminaries takes place during the age of pisces, an age of "mirrors, tenacity, instinct, twinship, and hidden things". this lead into the story influences our perspective and delineates our choice of language in assessing the novel, knowing that the narrative pretends to evolve around those characteristics and within the realm of the zodiac. each character has his or her own personal story, consisting of hopes, wishes, loves, pains, name, place and chronology, which develop, clash or collapse when, within the general outline of hokitika country, their orbits cross those belonging to someone else. but, while catton tells us to believe all along in the cosmological characteristics implicit within this new society, she is subverting ptolemy’s classic definition of the field, which defies her point of departure in enumerating precisely the opposite of what she proposes: with regard to virtuous conduct in practical actions and character, this science, above all things, could make men see clearly; from the constancy, order, symmetry, and calm which are associated with the divine, it makes its followers lovers of this divine beauty, accustoming them and reforming their natures, as it were, to a similar spiritual state. ptolemy the making of hokitika does not fulfil the idea that ptolemy had of cosmology and how it governs people’s attitudes; on the contrary, his definition seems to be the specular image of the steps taken in the epic of the new place. where the classic thinker sees order hokitika offers chaos, where he sees symmetry, the new town presents constant and unexpected alterations, and as for calm —if any—, we find it only on the surface. in fact, we could safely assert that hokitika is the exact reverse of ptolemy’s ideal: the place to bring out the worst in human nature. there is nothing divine in the pioneering town, but only despair that leads its inhabitants into drugs, whoring, cheating, fighting and, eventually, killing. this same idea of reversion or specular image is observed by one of the main characters, walter moody; when first considering the new zealand diggings, he felt "a dim sense (he did not know from where) that the colony was somehow the shadow of the british isles, the unformed savage obverse of the empire’s seat and heart" (11). more than three hundred pages later, moody recalls that on disembarking in dunedin, from liverpool, "he had cast his gaze skyward, and had felt for the first time the strangeness of where he was. the skies were inverted, the patterns unfamiliar, the pole star beneath his feet, quite swallowed. [...] he found orion — upended [...] it was as if the ancient patterns had no meaning here" (342-343). "hokitika" is a maori word and te-rau tauwhare, the only maori in the novel, explains the meaning of that word, which actually accounts for what the novel is trying to convey: "around. and then back again, beginning" (106). this eternal recurrence is what makes hokitika one in a long series of fantasy communities in the making narrated in film and literature: the goal, the journey, the fear and, eventually, success and destruction are recurrent, but the need to establish difference is what adds fantasy to it, what turns history into narration. so, it all must be set in a proper epic narrative in order to validate the story and turn it into history. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 the luminaries starts with a meeting of prominent men, hokitika’s agents to be. first we hear about their physical appearance, their dress and their body language, then we learn about their past and genealogy, the why and how they have converged in this same place on earth. and then, step by step, we find out about the network of relationships that binds them together. together they form hokitika, and their individual stories account for the foundation of the town, a patriarchal constellation drawn by the fate of those twelve men, a firmament dominated by males, drawn to a centre secularly compound by the triad of gold, money and power. these men interrelate with one another, their orbits crisscross and, as a consequence, their individual stories are modified and proceed in unexpected courses. but it is practically impossible for the reader to account for those changes, both in character or motivation, unless we unravel the narrative mesh by carefully organizing the bits and pieces and their chronotope, thus creating an order we finally manage to understand. that is, we need to elaborate a story, the history of hokitika, and close-read the luminaries as the novel it is. this can be easily compared to the reading of the universe at large, if we are to follow catton’s suggestion; as astronomers divide the infinite into houses, organize them within the structure of the constellations, and proceed from there, leaving aside, for future use, the sidereal dust that dissolves our fictitious orderly notion of a world of reality and facts, so does the luminaries create spheres of influence within the area of hokitika, classifying persons according to class, race and gender, and re-enacting and reinforcing the appropriate dose of fantasy and reality that has secularly transformed space into place. in the novel catton makes events happen simultaneously but, following the good practice in detective stories, gives us a summary from time to time in order to enable us to disentangle such a wealth of information. the following paragraph, at the beginning of the chapter entitled "true node in virgo", is a good example of this: at the very moment that gascoigne took his leave of edgar clinch, slamming the gridiron’s front door rather discourteously behind him, dick mannering and charlie frost were disembarking from the ferry onto the stones at the riverbank at kaniere. the commission merchant harald nilssen was also rapidly approaching that place on foot: he had just passed the wooden marker announcing he was one half-mile distant from the settlement, an encouragement that had induced him to increase his pace considerably, though he continued to swipe the wet grasses at the roadside with his stick. the object of all three men was, of course, to reach kaniere chinatown, and there demand an interview with the chinese goldsmith quee long who had just been startled, as presently he would be again, by the arrival of a very unexpected guest. (257). this quotation depicts for us the characters’ motivations, shown in the adjectives and adverbs that accompany them ("rapidly", "discourteously", "startled" or "very unexpected"), and provides a carefully drawn map of the place, with the road in the making, from hokitika to the chinatown in kaniere, part a river way, part a mud path. this undecidability of the physical route, and the fact that the path is not used by the honourable citizens of hokitika in the open, converts its transit into a rite of passage, makes that road the representation of "a journey" (carter, 1987: 310). not only do people feel the loneliness and deviousness of the path to chinatown, with the accompanying sense of fear (all three basic characteristics of any rite of passage), but they charge this road-to-be with direction, with a determined, if forbidden, destination. thus, hokitika’s citizens fulfil s. blair’s dictum that "the meaning of place [is] not a matter of intrinsic or dominant cultural value but of experiential history" (1998: 551). that is, the connecting thread between the only two existing communities in that part of the country has no more value than that experimented by those characters, who do not coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 inscribe it in their speech, since kaniere, even though crowded with citizens and regularly visited, is a taboo place in the community. in order to inscribe meaning into culture and turn it into history, any new world —be it geographical, ideological, sidereal or else— needs an epic to be made understandable to the human mind so that people are able to take root in it. hokitika wounds around a chimera, defined in the dictionaries as "a wild and unrealistic dream or notion" (collins concise) or "an illusion or fabrication of the mind" (merriam-webster). the chimera of the luminaries is that of the gold seekers, who, through their capacity for fantasy and their hope to hit a gold vein, imagined the place out of a few rumours and, in the act of picturing themselves there, brought it "into being as the occasion of a historical event. in this sense, from the point of view of spatial history, the road is richly metaphorical" (carter, 1987: 310). if we understand a galaxy as the space occupied by a group of stars, where the different stars stand for individual characters, the luminaries constitutes a sustained metaphor of the making of a new galaxy: hokitika, an incipient social unit. difficult as it is to delimit or understand what a galaxy is, we could easily agree on calling it the material world, the physical representation of what we might understand as "reality". and, pursuing the cosmological metaphor stated by catton herself, we can oppose it to the fictional world of the novel, the constellation, which is made from weaving together the fantasy route of the different stars of the galaxy, and assigning each route a particular picture, a name and a whole set of zodiacal meanings. carter, again, relates the stars, "which provided as good a genealogy as any" (1987: 334), with such an important action as naming and the creation of meaning —even though it is clear that naming depends on power and has nothing to do with the subject itself. the names anna, the main female character, is called are a good example of that; she is a whore, a lover, an interlocutor, a friend or a loved one, among many others, depending on who mentions her. these processes fulfil zygmunt bauman’s theories on movement and identity building, according to which meaning is effected through the wandering of characters along "the track leading to the finishing line where the meaning resides. [...] [they and the world] acquire their meanings together, and through each other." (1996: 22). so do characters and the town itself experience different stages of being till they reach the identity accord to them by time, place and history. meaning, in catton’s novel, is constructed through a convoluted and devious structure. the luminaries is divided into twelve parts of different length, modelled on the signs of the zodiac. the first part, which takes place on one day, 27 january 1866, is a long chapter of narrative formation; its 360 pages are, in turn, divided into twelve parts, one for each main character. the title of this chapter is a good indicator of the intention of the novel "a sphere within a sphere", pointing to the spidernet of different ways of being and states of development, closely interconnected so as to create a sense of belonging that will allow for the formation of a new community from scratch and with a vocation into the future. this meeting of differences makes hokitika and its surroundings, necessarily, a site for tensions "peculiar to borderline existences" (bhabha, 1994: 218), since new communities are built through performative discourses. out of these tensions characters emerge, also necessarily, changed by their encounters. this human sphere "in the making" evolves outside the limits of imperial history, which turns hokitika into frontier land, land yet to be "civilized" and inscribed into history. unlike in imperial history which, according to carter, only "pays attention to events unfolding in time" (1987: xvi), the events in the luminaries unfold in space, in parallel and superimposed narratives. this is why carter’s notion of spatial history becomes so useful to unravel catton’s hokitika, for "the country was not simply already there, waiting to be discovered, but the act of journeying in and around it, mapping it, naming it, is what tenders it meaningful" (sheridan, 2010: 1). with the collusion between imperial and spatial ideas of history, characters create, inadvertently, hokitika as a na(rra)tion (bhabha,1990), dependable on the ability of its inmates to recognize, share and narrate their participation in converting space into a place. once hokitika becomes a space full of meaning for the twelve main characters, it can be considered part of the sidereal sphere, that is, as history within coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 cosmos. this experience has been common to other such enterprises throughout the history of art producing to witness, when marianne o’doherty summarizes the travels of sir john mandeville, which first circulated around 1360, in terms that could still be applied, seven centuries later, to the luminaries: the author structures the book to mirror the world it seeks to represent, confects a single spatial representation out of multiple perspectives, imagines cosmology through the experience of the traveller, embeds the experiences of the individual traveller within a geographical and cosmological framework, and, occasionally, shows signs of the difficulty of his compositional task. (2013: 211) the luminaries shares with other narrated places the epic of creating a new world from scratch, a world full of legends (godspeed, crosbie wells, chinatown, etc), since any new community validates its existence only through the exhibit of force and bravery, the magnanimity of exposing one’s own life for the benefit of the people and a sort of communion with the gods, a touch of extra-sensorial virtues. this requires a language that is beyond the ordinary, a language of fantasy, half historical, half legendary that will elevate this unnamed, unnarrated portion of earth to the category of a star, that is, a meeting point in the map of new zealand and, as such, a genesic cultural and literary possibility. the initial blank space of new zealand territory of what is going to be hokitika has to be mapped and named, not only with ordinary possibilities but with the language of purpose, the language of history. this is done in a similar fashion to the way we come to terms with the understanding of the universe: starting with the most apparent element and proceeding from there to the closing of the sphere —not in vain did eleanor catton professed her "faith in the vast and knowing influence of the infinite sky" (note to the reader). consistently, each of the main characters represents a necessary profession to ground a gold-rush town: a goldfields magnate, a digger, a goldsmith, a banker, a shipping agent, a commission merchant, a justice’s clerk, a newspaperman, an hotelier, a chaplain and so on. they not only display the conventional characteristics associated with the signs of the zodiac —as has been previously pointed out— but they are also archetypes, blueprints of their profession, to the point that we do not need to have their function in hokitika explained to us. given their role, we expect certain actions from them in order to keep the town in motion and make the life of its inhabitants an easy task. homi bhabha has pointed out that the making of a new society by definition has tensions, and so do literary archetypes act and react differently within their own boundaries, so that their actions, therefore, have to be explained in order to be understood. that is, novel and characters develop in a similar way to the creation of a zodiacal system, in that the universe and the novel need to be rendered feasible to the human mind. the luminaries’s structure and narrative constitute the myth that explains the creation of hokitika. a myth that is expressed with the type of language with which the imagination orders basic mental images, initial feelings that are, in this case, prompted by the possible existence of gold, the riches that metal would bring, and the potentialities of a new beginning in a new place and the promise of a better life. this cannot be expressed only in terms of greed, hokitika needs, as well, honest, positive characters that fulfil the archetypes of the good citizen, but good citizens alone cannot account for the founding of a proper new place. the language of myth fuses the conscious with the unconscious, what we inherit already impressed in our imaginary, as a result of eons of culture building, while believing, at the same time, that we are free agents in a random world. myth is a discourse created to help people order the complexities of life, while myth-makers (and literary authors) capitalize on the construct we call culture, impelling people to move forward and face unknown fates and fortunes. thus, hokitika has become a literary paradigm of the grounding of a new city in a frontier, uninhabited land. the last eleven parts of the luminaries cover, one part a month, a whole year —ranging from april coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 1865 to 1866. the fourth part, "paenga-wha-wha", overlaps the beginning and end of the series within the same month and zodiacal sign, aries, to show the slight change in the position of aries in the sky or, rather, our perception of it; in a word, to show how such a short spam of time has changed characters and their position in hokitika. as chapters progress from january 1866 onwards they become one part shorter at a time, till we arrive full circle to chapter twelve which has, consistently, only one part. the whole sphere of the world as we humans are able to perceive it is, so far, completed. the last part, or chapter, in the book is titled, precisely, "the luminaries", and in its few lines (seventeen) it links the novel with western tradition through the recurrence to t.s. eliot’s epic language and christian iconography. it starts with the line "tonight shall be the very beginning" (832), reminiscence of eliot’s "in my beginning is my end" ("east coker", four quartets: 1945), which renders human life as a perfect sphere, and breaks, therefore, the illusion of chronological evolution. at the same time the concomitance of both sentences immediately establishes a play with creativity and fiction writing: "ought we to have different ones?" "different beginnings? i think we must." "will there be more of them?" "a great many more". (832) this last part of the novel is indeed illuminating, and it highlights the main themes that underlie the story. anna refers to her role in hokitika in the following terms: "my beginning was the albatrosses" (831), thus connecting her fate to coleridge’s well known literary reference in "the rhyme of the ancient mariner" (1798), in which the poet inscribes the bird as a metaphor meant to be a psychological burden that feels like a curse —and that, pointedly, anna will carry then around her neck from the beginning to the end of the luminaries. but anna implements the reference, by using the plural, to the "real" albatrosses that had welcomed her to her new country, the albatross being also a bird of good omen, and, in that category, referring to her (in the end) successful journey to new zealand. part twelve is subtitled "the old moon in the young moon’s arms". since the very last words of the novel are "the rain", we can take this chapter to stand for hope and renewal —the phases of the moon starting all over again and the positive meaning of rain comprised in its force to germinate new seeds, to cleanse away all curses and sins and to bring spring out of a barren winter. at this point we find anna wetherell and emery staines in each other’s arms: they are the young newcomers into a plot already enmeshed in lies and thefts. throughout the novel they remained mostly in the dark with regard to the abuses in hokitika and they finish the narrative in complete physical darkness. nonetheless, they represent the luminaries of the title, the sun and the moon indistinctly, one as the source of light, the other as its reflection. they are the embodiment of their times, the age of pisces, an age of mirrors, tenacity, instinct and twinship, as stated at the beginning by the author. furthermore, their names also invite to be read as emblematic; not only because of the genealogy of their last names, wetherell and staines, but because of that final, meaningful dialogue: "i feel more than myself." "i feel as though a new chamber of my heart has opened." (832) if anne wetherell is more than just herself, she is to be read as the woman for all seasons (wheterell is an homophone for "all weathers"), the one character with the strength to minister differently to different people and to assist emery staines (the man to bear the original sin or human stain in the novel) and other characters in changing their lives and improving their social behaviour. this reading coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 would account for the religious cosmogony we mentioned at the beginning —that of a godly axis surrounded by twelve acolytes and implemented by a healing woman, morally virginal if not physically a virgin. this linking of human life and culture, completed with life in the sky and literature, complex as it is, fits jacques derrida’s concept of "dissemination". if, according to the argelian thinker, meaning is scattered throughout time and space, we can deduce that individuals harvest their own bits and pieces in consonance with their means and wits as they are moved by fate and deeds through life. so, when characters come together, in hokitika, as is now the case, they have to elbow other experiences of life, other "truths", aside by the force of their own conviction. all lives and accounts constitute, thus, not simply a novel or a town, but a "mythical milieu that is now washing over [the reader], slipping into [the reader], out of [the reader], everywhere, forever" (sollers, 1981: xxx). in fact, this overflowing of meaning in the making is the site for polyphony and polysemy, the coming together of many voices and different meanings. this meeting is punctuated in the luminaries by the rendering of a tableau of all the characters —a pattern that is repeated throughout the novel and also in the final heading to the last chapter: walter moody, in his role as focalizer of the narrative, interprets those communal portraits; in his mind moody had arranged these external figures. [...] this realization pleased him for moody’s mind was an orderly one, and he was reassured by patterns of any kind. almost whimsically he wondered what role he himself played, in this strange tangle of association, yet to be solved. [...] they were gazing at him with more or less the same expression of hopeful expectation the emotion betrayed, restrained, or displayed, according to the temper of the man. so i am to be the unraveller, moody thought. the detective: that is the role i am to play. (352). again we find the conjunction of motives in the story; in arranging the external figures moody is drawing a zodiacal constellation, amplifying the narrative over and above characters, the writer and the reader. moody, in attentively recording what he sees and hears, functions, according to paul carter, also as a historian, as "an impartial onlooker, simply repeating what happened" (xv). polisemy could not have been accomplished by realism alone, by narrating the story in a linear, self-explanatory way, as this would have resulted either in an impersonal historical account or in a moral tale. and it is polysemy which validates the "real" possibilities (we can accept an oxymoron at this point in the narrative) of the text since, after all, hokitika is a real town in contemporary new zealand that was, indeed, formed during the gold-rush. all these efforts to convey the multiplicity of human experience, which drain into a common cultural waterway of language, are affected and re-created by our individual and communal actions, and they conform an ever new, contemporary subject. this new subject, as embodied in walter moody in the luminaries, would respond, partially and with many caveats, to the nómade subject as defined by rosi braidotti, "a subject in becoming and, at the same time, grounded to a determined historical situation, embodied and situated" (hoi.polloi, 2011). only such a subject can analyse the varied mutations that configure our contemporary cultural cartography, that is, "what is happening to bodies, identities, belongings, in a world that is technologically mediated, ethnically mixed and changing very fast in all sorts of ways" (hoi.polloi, 2011). with the luminaries, catton has gone one step further into fantasy, the language of re/creation of new worlds —she has brought to life the zodiacal signs, transmuting them into people, or maybe it is the other way around, maybe we should say that catton has forced people into astral archetypes. from a literary perspective, catton has provided an important stepping stone towards proving that the world coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 as we know it is one entangled net of interactiveness, an increasingly globalized, closely knit and overwhelming sphere, impossible to experience as a whole, which is why human intelligence has been breaking the world up into small pieces, each one adjusted to our partial knowledge. in recent decades, contemporary, postmodern culture has attempted to fuse as many pieces together as language and thought will allow. catton has, therefore, attempted to coordinate different approaches to history, including everyday life and myth creating, and she has produced an original, multifarious novel. catton, on the other hand, is only reproducing the patriarchal system. she has persevered in the dominant and secular invisibility of the role of women in the event of any new cultural construction or in any rendering or analysis of a partial or holistic cultural reading. the very few women who appear in the luminaries fulfil the worst aspects of female possibilities, they are merely fragments of the male imagination: a prostitute (a former candid, credulous girl), a widow (formerly a madame in a brothel for rich men) and a passive, subdued wife. the luminaries missed a grand occasion to fill in the absences in this new epic of a gold-rush town. it simply followed suit, backing up the masters. we are too far gone into the twenty first century not to miss the female voices that should have been there, especially after other literary works from and about the antipodes have paved the way to such an implementation while also showing its benefits, as in the case of linda spalding’s daughters of captain cook (1961), jean bedford’s sister kate (1982), peter carey’s oscar and lucinda (1988), kate grenville’s joan makes history (2002), or, for that matter, keri hulme’s the bone people itself, to name but a few novels that took into consideration the "other side" in history making. it might be argued that both women and men in the luminaries are mere archetypes of the grounding of a city, but surely a novelist in 2013 should have a broader perspective when launching into an innovative fictional and fantasy world. back in 1994, braidotti, for one, already gave us the tools and precise instructions to use them: "nomadism is a qualitative shift of consciousness that makes you inhabit the positions of power so as to change it." (hoi.polloi, 2011) we should once again turn to paul carter’s theories to find a general explanation for this major omission in catton’s novel. in summarizing the many sides of writing history, towards the end of his book, he reminds us that history has a historical horizon which is constituted by the activity of history itself: the horizon of writing. it offers the mechanism for generating a tradition, but not the means of reflecting on the validity of the tradition itself. in this sense, it may exclude much of the past which matters to us our own spatiality, for instance. [because the fact] that history is essentially an act of interpretation, a re-reading of documents, means that it hides our origins from us. for, by its nature, history excludes all that is not quoted or written down. (carter, 1987: 326) literature is not subjected to that historical horizon, nor are we humans. so it is the prerogative of authors to provide that missing link, the written words that can open life to a historiographic metafictional perspective. paul carter subverts the presupposition that australia came into being from the time captain cook rests his foot in botany bay, therefore he uses "to" in the title of his book, a preposition that inscribes the time previous to cook’s landing. but that time is not written down, black letters on white paper, that time has to be recovered through memory, traces and artefacts, much aided by the logic and reason western culture has been treasuring for ages. failing that, we can always follow carter’s dictum of "perception as interpretation" (324) and adhere to philippe sollers’s words that "this tale is addressed to the reader’s intelligence, which puts things on stage, itself" (johnson, 1981: xxx). but not in vain, we are reminded by astrophysicists themselves that even astronomers have been drawing and redrawing orbits and celestial routes for the last five hundred years, which, to them, is sensible and logical within such a vast, unstable terrain —so, even that "scientific" lead will allow for relocations in the polyphonic scene. the luminaries should not be only the past of the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 present, not even the present come back, but the discovery of a new galaxy full of potentialities and open to the future. its addition to fantasy is bringing the astrological realm into the composition of a new community, making readers understand that eight hundred pages on the birth of a town mean no more than sidereal dust in the myth of eternal recurrence of contemporary civilization. works cited: bauman, zigmunt: "from pilgrim to tourist or a short history of identity". questions of cultural identity. ed. by stuart hall and paul du gay. sage publications, london: 1996. 18-38. bhabha, homi, ed.: nation and narration. routledge, london and new york, 1990. bhabha, homi: the location of culture. routledge, london and new york, 1994. blair, s. 1998. “cultural geography and the place of the literary”. american literary history, 10: 3. 544-567. braidotti, rosi: nomadic subjects. embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. columbia university press, 1994. carter, paul: the road to botany bay. faber and faber, london: 1987. catton, eleanor: the luminaries. granta publications, london: 2013. hall, stuart and paul du gay, eds.: questions of cultural identity. sage publications, london: 1996. johnson, barbara: translation, introduction and additional notes to jacques derrida’s dissemination. the university of chicago press, 1981. hoi.polloi: "interview with rosi braidotti", january 10th, 2011. http://www.cluesforum.info/viewtopic (last consulted 25.03.2013) o’doherty, marianne: the indies and the medieval west. thought, report, imagination. breport publishers, turnhout, belgium: 2013. ptolemy. http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/ideas/journey.htm (27.06.2014) sheridan, susan: "book reviews", transnational literature, e-journal, flinders university, australia: vol.3, nº1, november 2010. http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2328/15143/1/road to botany bay.pdf (01.07.2014) bio note: maría socorro suárez lafuente is professor of english literature and literatures in english at the university of oviedo, spain. her interests lie in the field of contemporary literature, feminism, critical theory and the development of the faust theme. she has published extensively on those fields, has been co-editor of several volumes and is the author of a collection of literary essays, and she has been presented recently with a volume of essays: a rich field full of pleasant surprises: essays on contemporary literature in honour of professor suárez lafuente. she has been president of the spanish association of women’s studies and president of the spanish association of anglo-american studies. she is now the spanish representative in the spanish society for the study of english and is fellow of the english association. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 philip mclaren and the indigenous-australian crime novel cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu copyright©2016 cornelis martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: this paper locates the postcolonial crime novel as a space for disenfranchised groups to write back to the marginalisation inherent in the process of colonisation, and explores the example of australia. from its inception in the mid-19 th century, australian crime fiction reflected upon the challenging harshness and otherness of the australian experience for the free and convict settler, expelled from the metropole. it created a series of popular subgenres derived from the convict narrative proper, while more ‘standard’ modes of crime fiction, popularised in and through british and american crime fiction, were late to develop. whereas australian crime fiction has given expression to the white experience of the continent in manifold ways, up until recently it made no room for indigenous voices – with the exception of the classic inspector napoleon bonaparte series written by the prolific arthur upfield in the first half of the 20 th century. for the longest time, this absence reflected the dispossession, dispersal and disenfranchisement of the colonised indigenous peoples at large; there were neither aboriginal voices nor aboriginal authors, which made the textual space of the australian crime novel a discursive terra nullius. this paper will look at the only indigenous-australian author to date with a substantial body of work in crime fiction, philip mclaren, and elucidate how his four crime novels break new ground in australian crime fiction by embedding themselves within a political framework of aboriginal resilience and resistance to neo/colonialism. written as of the 1990s, mclaren’s oeuvre is eclectic in that it does not respond to traditional formats of australian crime fiction, shifts between generic subtypes and makes incursions into other genres. the paper concludes that mclaren’s oeuvre has not been conceived of as the work of a crime writer per se, but rather that its form and content are deeply informed by the racist violence and oppression that still affects indigenousaustralian society today, the expression of which the crime novel is particularly well geared to. key words: indigenous-australian literature; crime novel, postcolonialism, philip mclaren mailto:mrenes@ub.edu coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 introduction: australian indigeneity and the post/colonial crime novel the popular subgenre of the crime novel can be located as a literary formation rewritten by once-disenfranchised groups. in the case of the post/colonial encounter, which operates along the axes of class as well as gender and race, this has led to the margins of empire writing back critically to its metropolitan centre as bill ashcroft, gareth griffiths, and helen tiffin famously argue in their ground-breaking 1989 study. looking back at empire through the lens of crime fiction may be particularly instructive: michel foucault points out in discipline and punish. the birth of the prison that it is precisely the margins of society that display what is essential to that very society’s making. it is not what is included but what is excluded from ‘normality’ that is most instructive of the social fabric, so that crime fiction’s investigation of violence and its control through the imposition of the law on the colonial and postcolonial contexts reveal a society’s structure and operation. the narrative possibilities range from merely a conservative confirmation of the powers that be – and so the maintenance of the status quo – to a subversion of social, economic and political unfairness and injustice. the penal origins of mainstream australian society have contributed to the production of what stephen knight describes as “teeming shelves of … crime fiction” (1997: 56) and turned the post/colonial crime novel into a successful genre. its commercial viability has, in turn, attracted practitioners of other genres to make incursions into crime fiction as major australian novelist peter carey’s true history of the kelly gang (2001) may attest. while it has proven an apt channel to express the post/colonial tensions in australian society for white settlers, little crime fiction has been written from the aboriginal point of view, and one may wonder why. the following will give an overview of australian crime fiction since its origins, and trace how its general characteristics and peculiarities are expressed in, and defied by, the literary work of australia’s most well-known indigenous crime-fiction author, philip mclaren. crime fiction in australia: origins, development and types in dark side of the dream, hodge and mishra argue that the convict status of many early australian settlers as well as the stark natural environment, which many europeans experienced as hostile, informed the settler psyche from the very beginnings of colonisation (1990: 25-30). far away from europe and america, penal and very different in nature and culture, the continent has provided a rich and fertile ground for mystery, crime and violence which writers reflect in often idiosyncratic ways (knight 1997: 8). the first crime novels do not necessarily concentrate on the murder mystery and its resolution, which is a modern development, but address the harsh living conditions and concomitant violence with which australia’s early white settlers were confronted. thus, stephen knight identifies a series of subgenres flowing from the 19 th c. convict narrative proper, which was developed by such authors as henry savery (quintus servinton, 1831), john lang (frederick charles howard, 1842), caroline leaky (the broad arrow, 1859), and marcus clarke (for the term of his natural life, 1882). a first subtype, the goldfields mystery, depicts the vicissitudes of the digger experience during the gold rushes in victoria in the mid-nineteenth century, and it took shape in the writings of william burrows (adventures of a mounted trooper, 1859), mary fortune (“the dead witness–or the bush waterhole”, 1866), charles de boos (mark brown’s wife, 1871), and randolph bedford (billy pagan, mining engineer, 1911) among others. another generic strand is the squatter thriller, which focused on the new land-owning class coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 and its hunger for possession and property, and was written by the likes of charles rowcroft (tales of the colonies, or the adventures of an emigrant, 1843), henry kingsley (the recollections of geoffrey hamlyn, 1859), barbara baynton (“the chosen vessel”, 1896), ellen davitt (force and fraud, 1865), william howitt (talangetta: the squatter’s home, 1857), and david hennessey (the caves of shend, 1915). a last subtype is the popular criminal saga, which celebrates the white bushranger as the national prototype as well as the criminal as a hero, while refusing identification with, and faith in, the colonial authorities; criminal sagas were written by herbert de hamel (many thanks ben hasset: an australian detective story, 1915), arthur gask (the red paste murders, 1925), alfred e. clarke (tommie the growler, 1929) and judah waten (e.g. shares in murder, 1957), and in recent times by ray mooney (a green light, 1988), lance peters (e.g. the dirty half-mile, 1981), garry disher (the wyatt series), and john carroll (the don bartholomew series). a contemporary genre such as the private eye thriller is the domain of peter temple (the jack irish series), peter corris (the luke dunlop series), shane maloney (the murray whelan series), ian hamilton (the pete heyssen series), marele day (the claudia valentine series), and kerry greenwood (the lady phryne fisher series), whereas the society clue puzzle written by jean spender (the charge is murder, 1933) and margot neville (the grogan and manning series) among others, only came into vogue on the wave of 20 th c. urban development and mostly foreign, american influence (1997: 10-44). in terms of mode, australian crime writers have often resorted to zero-setting fiction, meaning that the narrative’s setting or location has universal rather than specifically local, australian characteristics. zero-setting results from the marketing requirements of the powerful british overseas market; the inhospitable character of the australian land (barnes 1986: 600-1); and the need for white settlers to disacknowledge indigenous ownership of the land and so gloss over the illegitimate act of the continent´s occupation (knight 1997: 157). australian crime writers have also generated a considerable amount of zero-detection fiction, in which the central character of the detective/investigator is absent. this peculiarity can be brought back to a natural suspicion and rejection of the civil authorities, as well as a firm belief in the corrupt character of the police force (knight 1997: 128). thus, the internationally popular detective-inspector following police procedural as well as the private eye using less conventional detecting strategies in their urban locations did not become central features until the 1980s, when the sydney-set detective novels written by the “godfather of australian crime fiction”, peter corris, gained popularity (gelder & salzman 2009: 144-46). australian crime fiction has addressed the issue of violence in the post/colonial situation almost exclusively from the standpoint of the white settler. it has perhaps been the australian genre par excellence to comment on, and come to terms with, the convict past and the hardship imposed by the harshness of the land itself, the lawlessness of colonial society in the outback and the imported british hierarchy imposed upon the continent’s urban centres. yet it has also traditionally glossed over the crime of white invasion and colonisation. the myth of the continent´s ‘benign settlement’ created a welcome levelling of class as expressed in the figure of the white bush ranger and the settler culture of male mateship, but it also meant the dispossession, displacement and killing of the first nations and the overall exclusion of aboriginal voices from australian fiction into a textual terra nullius of sorts. the first writer who attempted to introduce an indigenous point of view in crime fiction was the mainstream author arthur upfield, who was born in britain in 1890, migrated to australia in 1911, and spent many years in the outback. he created a detective of mixed descent as the coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 main character of an early mid-20 th c. crime novel series whose aboriginal tracking skills, or what john and marie ramsland call his “innate abilities, intelligence and close examination of the landscape” (2012: 101), are of capital importance in solving crimes in the bush. whereas australian readership was not ready yet for a more empowering characterisation of indigeneity than that portrayed by upfield, the series became a huge success in the usa in the mid-twentieth century, and its author the “first foreign writer to be admitted to the prestigious mystery writers guild of america”, celebrating its aboriginal protagonist as a hero rather than a victim (ramsland & ramsland 2014: 99). it would not be until the 1980s that the first-contact history of aborigines and european colonisers was rewritten and the genocidal legacy revealed. this was the bone of contention in the so-called history wars – the ongoing debate in australia’s public domain on the nature of european settlement of the continent, in which participants defend views on a continuum that moves from benign settlement, minor conflict, tensions and incidental strife to violent invasion, structural guerrilla warfare, massacres, dispossession of tribal land and genocide. indigenous writers only started to employ the genre recently so as to do away with engrained colonialist stereotypes and colonial myths. ramsland & ramsland point out that philip mclaren broached new terrain in this sense: “with a number of well received novels, he [mclaren] has mapped out the route for a militant postcolonial discourse based on an insider perspective” (2014: 99). likewise, stephen knight, after observing that australian crime fiction has voiced the conflict between coloniser and colonised from an exclusively white perspective, celebrates the publication of philip mclaren’s crime novels in the 1990s as a watershed moment. he highlights mclaren as one of those few indigenous voices who “have found the genre a highly effective instrument to question the uses of racialized power in the country” (1997: 176). philip mclaren is of kamilaroi descent, a mob from northern new south wales, but was born in 1943 in redfern, inner sydney, and married a woman of white british descent. having worked in europe and the usa as a graphic artist, set designer, script writer, illustrator and creative director in television and advertising, mclaren might be best described as a broadminded globetrotter who is at home in cosmopolitan environments and finds expressive freedom in a wide range of arts and genres. as a writer, he has earned recognition nationally and abroad, and his work has been awarded and translated into french and german. philip mclaren’s oeuvre philip mclaren has written six novels to date, four of which address the violence of the colonial project by investigating its criminal character in a wide range of colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial settings, thus showing his political commitment with the indigenous cause. the following will discuss his four crime novels to date by placing them in their corresponding socio-political and historical context of writing and by elucidating how they react to issues relating to indigeneity. his first novel, sweet water stolen land (first published by uqp in 1993, reissued by magabala books in 2001), won the david unaipon award for literature in 1993. the novel was published in the wake of the mabo decision (1992) and native title legislation (1993), whose politics reverberate to some extent in the novel. the plot addresses the colonial politics of dispossession and subverts the ‘benign settlement’ paradigm, which holds no violence was perpetrated against the indigenous-australian nations in the process of colonisation. the court coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 case the torres strait islander eddie koiki mabo initiated against the state of queensland exposed and initiated a new discourse on colonial and postcolonial racism; it also undid the legal fantasy of terra nullius, by which australia was declared void of human habitation prior to, and so unproblematically available for, european settlement. on the basis of a eurocentric interpretation of the concept of civilisation – based on the fixity and permanence of homes, on individual property rights and on western forms of agriculture and means of production – it denied human status to the australian aborigines and torres strait islanders, who operated on the basis of a shifting, collective economy of the land. never acknowledged as nations in their own right by the australian state, their status is still polemic due to the absence of a treaty which could improve the basis for their legitimate claims against mainstream australia. the land rights under dispute in the mabo case concerned murray island, or mer, in the torres strait, which is the homeland of the meriem people. in 1988, after long years of debate, the australian high court declared the state of queensland’s attempts to extinguish native title – the traditional ownership of the lands lost by the indigenous peoples in the process of colonisation – illegal according to the racial discrimination act 1975, in a ruling that is known as mabo no 1. this was followed by the mabo no 2 decision in 1992 – just after the case’s principal claimant had died – which found native title compatible with australian common law. this ruling acknowledged the legitimacy of indigenous property rights in the whole of the australian continent and turned the mabo case into a landmark victory in the recovery of tribal land. the high court ruling found its way into the 1993 native title legislation under the labour administration of pm paul keating, although its enabling effects were largely undone by the subsequent wik decision of 1996 and then further diluted by the native title amendment act 1998, popularly known as the 10 point plan issued by the conservative howard government. sweet water stolen land reads well against this background. the novel is written as a zerodetection thriller and firmly embedded in kamilaroi country, which universalises the sensation of crime against community and the local nature of the search for solutions. the novel became a national bestseller as it depicted australian frontier conflict in northern new south wales in the mid-nineteenth century (1869), and its first-contact context addresses the indigenous fight to protect and keep traditional country from a cruel and ruthless colonial invader. it describes the consequences of european settlement for mclaren’s mob, the kamilaroi, by highlighting how brutal violence and dispossession informed the processes of ‘christianisation’ and ‘civilisation’. mclaren picks up on the infamous myall creek massacre near bingara in northern new south wales, where ten white europeans and one black african ambushed and killed 30 unarmed indigenous australians on 10 june 1838. the australian government page on the myall creek memorial site says that [t]he massacre of approximately 30 wirrayaraay people at myall creek, the subsequent court cases and the hanging of the seven settlers for their role in the massacre was a pivotal moment in the development of the relationship between settlers and aboriginal people. the myall creek massacre is outstanding in the course of australia's cultural history as it is the [first and] last time the colonial administration intervened to ensure the laws of the colony were applied equally to aboriginal people and settlers involved in frontier killings. i coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 mclaren efficiently maps the historical facts of the notorious myall creek massacre onto his mob’s contact history to depict the genocidal ways in which white settlers imposed and compounded their understanding of ‘legal occupation’, terra nullius, which was the original legal justification for the british colony, asserted by king george v in 1770. thus, mclaren cleverly uses the only case in australian history of a court case in which white settler violence was condemned and punished to support his critical review of contact history between colonisers and colonised in the australian setting. mclaren shows the christianising zeal of the german lutheran pastor karl maresh to be utterly depraved in his wish to build a thriving centre of christian civilisation in the outback: determined to have the local aborigines live on his mission, karl murders local white settlers while throwing suspicion onto the kamilaroi by wielding their weapons and leaving their ritual objects, which he has collected and now put to new, perverse use with warped ethnographic zeal. this leads to white revenge raids and murder, which force the kamilaroi to seek shelter on mission ground and relinquish their land. karl pays for his crimes with his own death in ritual payback at the hands of manduk, the aboriginal warrior who becomes karl’s wife gudrun’s lover. gudrun is depicted as responding to her own set of ethical values from the outset of the novel, which pits her against karl. gudrun’s sense of independence and critique of white masculinity allows mclaren to show that race and gender can team up in the fight against the powers of colonisation, as well as that interracial relations do not necessarily have to be manichean but may perform on a more sophisticated level of power balances. mclaren followed up with the highly successful scream black murder (harpercollins 1995, reissued by magabala books in 2001), an urban police-detective thriller based on the police killing of david gundy in redfern in 1989. in a report commissioned by the national inquiry into racial violence, chris cunneen writes that david gundy was killed when police raided his home before dawn on 27 april 1989. eight members of the special weapons and operations squad, (swos) armed with shotguns, a sledge hammer and a search warrant, were seeking a suspect in relation to the murder of a police officer. the suspect was not in the house at the time. david gunby was killed in his bedroom by a shotgun blast fired by one of the swos officers. the colonial inquiry accepted the evidence of officers that the gun had accidentally discharged during a struggle. (1990: 9) the ombudsman unsuccessfully “recommended that the procedures and instructions for swos in relation to arrest, detention and interrogation be reviewed immediately by the commissioner of police” after a series of swos misconduct against aboriginal citizens. at the same time, the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody was prepared to investigate the death of david gundy. however, a successful challenge was made to the federal court by the nsw police association. counsel for the association argued that the death was outside the commission’s terms of reference because it did not occur in custody. (1990: 9) philip mclaren elaborates on the previous from a later vantage point in the novel’s prologue. it summarises the gundy case (1995: viii-x) and points out that, though unmarried, david coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 gundy and dolly eats had been living without conflict and in bliss for thirteen years until his murder. mclaren contrasts this to the behaviour of ted pickering, the state police minister, [who] was quick to endorse the police action at carefully conducted media conferences. stern-faced, he told the public that police were feeling ‘uptight’. three years after the killing neither dolly nor her [gundy’s] son had received an apology from the policeman who killed david, the police commissioner or the state police minister. most australians were deeply shocked by the manner of gundy’s death and understood, perfectly, the distress and outrage dolly eats was feeling. not long after the killing, a video was broadcast on national television showing a police staff party at which two giggling policemen had arrived with their faces blackened with make-up. one had a hangman’s noose around his neck. the blackened policemen had signs with the names of two recent dead aboriginal men on their chests, one was david gundy, the other was lloyd boney. (mr boney had recently died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.) this police behaviour outraged the public: the australian prime minister publicly announced this mockery of aboriginal deaths to be a disgrace. mr hall wootton qc prepared a report about the gundy killing for the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody. he found the raid was unlawful and that mr gundy was a law-abiding man. he expressed his appal at how the gundy family had been treated after the raid. more than four years after david gundy was shot … the supreme court sanctioned an out-ofcourt settlement of seven hundred thousand dollars as compensation from the new south wales government to mr gundy’s de facto wife dolly and his son bradley. (1993: x) the out-of-court character of the settlement essentially protected the policemen involved in the killing from direct prosecution. thus remaining fundamentally unresolved, the gunby case had a major impact on aboriginal and police relations in redfern and beyond, and it inspired mclaren to forge an enabling narrative of australian police procedure as regards his own community, while at the same time denouncing the white racism that makes arrogant, hostile, even criminal behaviour against the indigenous population possible and condones it. setting most of the action in sydney, mclaren breaks new ground by introducing an indigenous male and female detective as the central characters in the urban setting. in the light of the gundy killing, it is key for the story that the perspective of the investigators’ gaze is aboriginal and not white, as much as it is key that the criminal to be pursued is the perverse product of the same kind of irrational racist thinking that inspired and condoned gundy’s murder. members of the first aboriginal homicide unit in new south wales have ‘typical’ aboriginal backgrounds. gary leslie comes from a sparring context, whereas lisa fuller has a stolen generation mission school past. they both engage in the investigation of a deranged white stalker and serial killer, whose italicised stream of consciousness narrative contemplating his murders of black indigenous women brings (white) readers uncomfortably close to his madness: i’m not sure that the cops ever found that black girl i shoved into the ocean at bulli. that was one out of four of mine that didn’t make it into the news. that bulli girl had no idea i was watching her, for weeks i watched her before i grabbed her – it was my disguise. at the theatre i played one of the kids of the musical ‘oliver’, i used some of the make-up tricks to make me look like a tramp. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 i usually do it that way now. women never look at drunken tramps, they just don’t want to catch your eye … i know it’s a bit conceited but i keep a scrapbook and a video library. (1995: 34-5) the murderer’s motives are located in his traumatically violent youth, while his predilection for killing black women finds free reign in the lax attitude of the authorities towards interracial violence. yet, mclaren paints a nuanced picture of racism in the way gary and lisa are tolerated and supported by some (but not all) non-indigenous colleagues in the corps. gary and lisa steer clear of the hard-boiled ruffian type detective who walks the margins of the law to achieve their aims. it is of critical importance that they perform their corrective action in unblemished ways so as to root the centre of moral correctness in indigenous culture and not to fall prey to the critical eye of white scrutiny. thus they follow a strict police procedural method to hunt down the killer, and in doing so, prove their effectiveness and worth as investigators and agents of law while doing away with the ‘natural suspicion’ the police authorities have usually received in australian society and fiction. mclaren’s third novel, lightning mine (harpercollins 1999), is a zero-detection thriller that focuses on the political influence of the powerful multinational mining industry on contemporary australian society. by choosing the country’s top end, rich in minerals, as its setting, it allows for an analysis of mining’s impact on nature and culture, and the fight of the aboriginal owners to put a stop to the destruction of sacred land. by the time of writing this novel, multinational mining lobbies and projects in australia’s outback had already been well documented, and data regarding their business ventures had reached the public sphere. one of the most notorious players in the field was cra (conzinc rio tinto of australia), nowadays part of the multinational mining-giant rio tinto, australia’s largest mining company, and one of the country’s biggest privately-owned corporations. one of its largest exploitations is in the northern territory: in 1990, cra discovered the century zinc deposit, north-west of mount isa [near cloncurry, 300 km south of the gulf of carpentaria]. this world class resource contains 118mt of ore averaging 10.2 percent zinc, 1.5 percent lead and 35 g/t silver and will be developed by pasminco century mine limited (pcml). the century mine will produce 450,000t of zinc concentrate and 45,000t of lead concentrate per year for export from the port of karumba [at the mouth of the norman river in the gulf of carpentaria]. in may 1997, an agreement between the waayni, mingginda, gkuthaarn and kukatji peoples, the state and century zinc was ratified and the government obligations under the agreement are being implemented. ii cra has a bad track record for encroaching upon aboriginal territory and denying indigenous land rights, which was echoed in a national 1981 car bumper sticker campaign by the aboriginal information centre which read “don’t crap on our land!” iii the ongoing impact of the mining industry on the continent is evident in australia’s largest private fortunes being located in this area of the economy – for 2014, these were: gina rinehart with 20 billion us$ (1 st position); ivan glasenberg with 6.6 billion us$ (5 th position); andrew forrest with more than 5.9 billion us$ (10 th position) iv ; angela bennett with 1.6 billion us$ (22 nd position); and clive palmer with 1.2 billion us$ (28 th position). the mining industry is responsible for 60% of australian exports (2014) and so australia’s economy is largely dependent upon its presence. not surprisingly, the mining industry’s lobby is politically coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 empowered, perhaps most blatantly so in the case of clive palmer and his palmer united party, which gained representation in federal parliament through the city of fairfax in queensland. the main focus of present and future mining activity is the indigenous south west of western australia, which is currently divided over the ‘one-billion-dollar deal” between the state government and the noongar peoples, a compensation for rights of mineral exploitation that – at best – equals one of australia’s lesser private mining fortunes – clive palmer’s to be precise (roman 2015). lightning mine’s depiction of aggressive, violent presidential and corporate politics – blackmail, manipulation and murders included – is well in line with the previous analysis of the australian economy, and the novel denounces the white mainstream’s greed, justified by its alleged entitlement to traditional country. it puts the novel’s resolution in the hands of a special ‘detective’ and indigenous avenger, namarrkon, “the lightning spirit [who] causes severe tropical storms, destroys homes, and kills people”, and so restores the balance in traditional country. mclaren draws inspiration for this character from local dreamtime accounts: it is believed that if man disturbs the sacred dreaming site of namarrkon, the spirit will send a violent storm which will result in severe destruction and death. about 30 miles east of oenpelli [east of darwin in the northern territory] there is a taboo dreaming site called namarrkon which is the camping place of this dreamtime spirit. it is a sacred site which is rarely approached by aboriginal people who fear the wrath of the lightning spirit who lives there. (1999: 312-13) in the novel, mclaren makes the severe lightning namarrkon provokes scientifically plausible by linking it to the massive presence of iron ore deposits in the area. these allegedly enhance the impact of tropical storms with intense discharges of energy through excessive lightning, caused by the high conductivity of the subsoil. on the last pages of the novel, such a storm is responsible for the total annihilation of the mdg/global mining corporation’s brand-new extraction installations built to exploit the locality’s massive iron sources. the day-mining operation is depicted as a red sore that festers in the surrounding landscape and so begs removal and repair: in one year, jarra had seen the whole namarrkon area transformed from pristine green tropical wilderness–as it had been for countless thousands of years–into a 20 mile wide red desert. massive machines roamed the surface, while yellow, grey and blue structures dotted the landscape on geometric roadways–circles of roads linked to more circles by short straight sections. on a normal workday there were hundreds of men in light blue overalls running about the place. all of these objects were colour-designed to contrast against the blistering rust-red earth–they were meant to be seen. (1999: 292) the bulk of company staff and its executives die in the cyclone’s rage, and only a few people survive the weather’s onslaught – those favourable to a respectful treatment of the land, such as the american mining surveyor aaron shoemaker, who played a decisive role in prospecting the area but has changed allegiance. he has taken issue with the company for its ruthless policies and teamed up with the indigenous, politically astute lawyer and negotiator jarra, who is responsible for a strategic alliance with the trade unions in the fight against mdg/global. aaron makes it to safety so as to call in help for his wife lee and jarra, who coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 have barely survived the destruction. it turns lightning mine into a story of personal redemption that points the way out of capitalist greed into environmentalist engagement. as alexis wright does in her epic carpentaria (2006), mclaren lets country itself restore the natural balance that the neocolonialist excesses of white civilisation have disturbed. coinciding with federal military action at the top end, mclaren’s fourth, murder in utopia (fr: éditions traversées 2006/en: cockatoo books 2009), came with a significant statement of intentions. introducing the novel, mclaren writes: “there is a real place name utopia, it’s situated in the red-desert centre of australia. this story is not about that place, nor is it about any real people. i found the irony irresistible: imagine naming a place utopia, a place so impoverished, so desolate” (2009: 4). mclaren picks up on the disastrous statistics regarding australian indigeneity: especially remote aboriginal communities constitute, rather than a utopia, a fourth world within one of the world’s wealthiest nations. aboriginal scholar, elder and spokeswoman marcia langton claims that “aboriginal society is sliding into a terminal state of under-development,” highlighting: … the unassailable facts in hundreds of impoverished aboriginal communities across remote australia: radically shortened lives; the highest national rates of unemployment; widespread violence, endemic alcohol and substance abuse; the lowest national levels of education; and lifelong morbidity for hapless citizens suffering from heart disease, nutrition and lifestyle-related diseases such as diabetes. (2008: 155, 158) these facts were used by the conservative howard federal government to occupy the northern territory in 2007, further spurred by a heart-rending report on child sexual abuse and domestic violence in its remote aboriginal communities. while nobody will deny that indigenous dysfunctionality in these remote communities is rampant, the northern territory emergency response (also known as the nt intervention or invasion) has further disempowered indigenous society by suspending rights and entitlements and imposing an assimilative agenda (see altman and hinkson 2007 among others). ironically, alexis wright was awarded australia’s most important literary prize, the miles franklin, for carpentaria on the very day the intervention started. whereas mclaren’s murder in utopia is a fictionalised construct of aboriginal dysfunctionality in a remote community, the mainstream journalist and documentary maker john pilger situates his 2013 report utopia in the northern territory’s location of the same name, no doubt attracted by the same irony that mclaren highlights in the contrast between the locality’s ingrained poverty and the bright future its toponym unsuccessfully beckons toward. indeed, pilger uses this contrast as the structuring device that underpins his analysis of australian indigeneity at large in postcolonial times. the guardian newspaper provided the following review of pilger’s latest film: veteran investigator john pilger has an extraordinary story to tell about white australia and its deeply dysfunctional relationship with the indigenous australian community. pilger sees it as unrepentant apartheid, and cites a bizarre act of taxpayer-funded official hysteria: the 2007 "intervention" in the northern territory organised by the john howard government on the pretext that paedophile gangs were operating in indigenous settlements. troops were sent in; townships were compulsorily acquired and native title legislation coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 ignored. yet no prosecution for child abuse resulted, and studies appeared to conclude that the situation was no better or worse than in white areas. the awful truth is that indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms. even if the "intervention" wasn't a straightforward land grab, then it suited powerful people who have a vested interest in keeping indigenous australians second-class, itinerant and stateless citizens in their own state, without anything like the consideration that native americans have achieved in the us. they are still living in desperately poor conditions, and can expect more insidious harassment. pilger's film argues that the history of abuse and bullying, so far from being a closed chapter, is merely a prelude: it is set to get worse. this is a grim and powerful film. (bradshaw 2013) mclaren’s murder in utopia delivers its social criticism by describing the trials and tribulations of a prestigious but alcoholic surgeon, jack nugent, who becomes one of the countless homeless victims of new york’s frantic pace of life and seeks shelter in utopia’s deprived aboriginal community in the australian outback. the novel constitutes itself as a minimal-detection thriller (involving minor police presence) in a specific geographical setting 250 km north-east of alice springs, a neglected aboriginal homestead in the red centre of australia. nugent’s informed outsider perspective allows mclaren to drive home the dire living conditions of the indigenous australians in remote communities: [jack] was extremely agitated and angry. almost every child he saw that week was deaf. half the women and nearly all the man had syphilis – most of them had come in presenting other symptoms: influenza, and more serious, whooping cough. there were several who were suffering pulmonary tuberculosis. but it was the fact that he diagnosed three cases of terminal leprosy and was compelled by government regulations to remove into a quarantine community 700 km away that angered him most. world medical organisations had long ago announced that leprosy had been treated out of existence. yet here new cases were reported every year and victims lived out their remaining years away from their family and friends: the australian government quietly maintained a leper colony in which all patients were aboriginal. nugent continually asked himself the question: how could this neglect be allowed to happen? (2009: 66) utopia’s alcohol-free community provides this renegade professional the opportunity to redeem himself as a medical practitioner, even if utopia’s medical centre is underfunded and inadequately equipped. what is more, his contract’s terms force him to work as a stand-in coroner for the understaffed local police force, and soon nugent must participate in solving a crime involving sexual violence and its ritual punishment within tribal law, which clashes with western legislation. the victim jimmy djungawarri’s emasculated corpse irresistibly draws nugent into a web of mystery which needs inside help to be untangled. carla kunaardi, an attractive aboriginal lawyer devoted to improving the community’s standard of living, becomes his lover and fiancée, and instrumental in solving the murder. carla is not the only strong and independent female character, as the narrative displays a series of empowered women that undercut female victimisation and gendered violence: will and nora, nugent’s diligent nurses and assistants at utopia’s medical centre; the two gifted women aboriginal coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 artists edith bungwarrye and berta gwandjulpur; and the latter’s daughter esmay, the clever woman endowed with the gift of clairvoyance. mclaren is nuanced in his depiction of interracial contact and relationships and proffers an interracial love affair as the path towards repair. the remote setting near alice springs allows mclaren to address the conflict between tribal and western law, as well as the exploitation of aboriginal art by western intermediaries. as art is one of the very few means of income in remote communities, this puts into question to what extent remote communities can find independent economic bases for their development within a mainstream framework. the latter issue is, of course, of vital importance in the face of the enduring character of the northern territory intervention. philip mclaren within australian (crime) fiction philip mclaren uses crime fiction so as to address the awkward embedding of indigenous australia within mainstream society, creating an apt vehicle for his criticism of mainstream attitudes towards indigeneity. as mireille vignol corroborates, aboriginal issues are … part of the social economic background [in his novels,] and they determine often the motivation of the characters [and so he has] dealt with the stolen generation, black deaths in custody, domestic violence, alcoholism, police harassment, land and cultural dispossession, massacres, everyday racism, [and] health. (2002: 4 of 5) by not sticking to one particular setting or character and so avoiding set formulas, mclaren writes back to ingrained literary tropes and not surprisingly, he considers arthur upfield’s series of napoleon bonaparte novels as “outdated, patronizing and stereotypical and his characterization as thin and culturally unconvincing” (ramsland & ramsland 2012: 99). unlike some non-aboriginal australian crime fiction, mclaren’s crime novels and thrillers work with a strong sense of place which may precisely boost the role of the indigenous land as an active agent in the detection and the application of justice. according to stephen knight, one common way of treating the land in the non-indigenous australian crime novel is to create a “touristic version” of it. the land in these novels is “not so much owned as inspected in excitable and alarmed tones”, charting its dangers and powers for readership abroad. of course, the notion of ‘visitor’ in the indigenous crime novel would align the non-indigenous settler with the tourist. we can adapt knight’s words to our purpose, then, and consider namarrkon’s impact in lightning mine in the following terms – the land as an “avenger” and agent of payback: …flood, fire, avalanche, snake or crocodile can act as agents of vengeance destroying the criminal. but they are not merely useful, and even simplistic, plot devices; they also suggest that there are evaluative capacities in the land itself, that visitors [substitute for: colonial invaders] can themselves become disturbingly involved in a power greater and more threatening than they or the inhabitants can sometimes comprehend. (1997: 144) in a way, lightning mine restages the land conflict of mclaren’s first novel in contemporary neocapitalist and neocolonialist terms. thus, sweet water stolen land could be interpreted along similar lines. marduk’s bush skills and understanding of the land, for example, are an coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 expression of the healthy relationship between human guardians and the restorative powers of country. in line with common practice in some australian mainstream crime fiction, mclaren has often used the zero or minimal detection mode so as to avoid the use of serial characters, which, combined with a penchant for the local, in turn favours the land – country – as the real protagonist in resolving crime and conflict and confers indigenous flavour to his fiction. sweet water stolen land and lightning mine are zero-detection novels whose resolutions are provided by the omniscient narrator, while murder in utopia employs minimal detection in the shape of a renegade new york surgeon acting as stand-in coroner in the outback. set in sydney, scream black murder is different in that it is a reaction against the marginal role that indigenes have played in crime detection as black trackers, and makes its aboriginal detective-inspectors central to the narrative as they employ police procedural to track and catch a white serial killer. in pushing indigenous crime fiction into the mainstream, scream black murder broke new ground. public recognition was rife and the novel was short-listed for the ned kelly crime writers' award (knight 1997: 124). another peculiarity in mclaren’s fiction is that the author has never restricted himself to a particular formula within the crime genre or without. his fourth novel, there will be new dreams is his well-achieved and well-received answer to a critique of his work from the perspective of écriture féminine. mclaren puts it as follows: i sat on a panel at the sydney writers festival one year and a few of the people on that panel were asked how we approached our writing and our characters, how we developed our work. someone put forward the idea that generally men write plot driven works and women write character driven works. i took that as a certain challenge and i didn’t entirely agree with it. i opposed the argument in the public forum and afterwards we went into the green room and we continued to chat. a lot of other writers who were sitting back there got involved in it as well, and i really had to agree with her in the end. generally speaking that that was true, that men have these plots, they kind of go galloping on and have these climaxes and mini climaxes all the way through the book really, but women take more time with their characters and they spend more time developing their characters. so ‘there’ll be new dreams’ was my attempt at writing a character driven novel which didn’t rely heavily on plot and all these extreme circumstances that we’d like to dramatise our stories with that we kind of dot all the way through. so i really let the characters take over and i wanted to have a book full of characters and this was my attempt to do that. (vignol 2002: 1 of 5) what kevin brophy calls a “picaresque novel of character” (2002, n.p.) paints an enabling “mosaic of stories, spanning over 30 thousand years and following aborigines and others here and abroad [in which] mclaren lets the characters construct the plot. the result is a complex and entertaining web, completely stereotype-free” as mireille vignol writes (2002: 1 of 5). his sixth novel, west of eden – the real man from snowy river: the original (2009), equally departs from previously-trodden paths in employing docu-fiction (“fully-documented fiction” as his webpage says v ) to narrate the life of toby, a legendary indigenous horseman. his life inspired banjo patterson’s famous, near-eponymous poem that became an icon of white-australian bush culture and is recovered by mclaren to express its indigenous coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 heritage. his seventh novel, black silk, is a work in progress which returns to the legal thriller mode. conclusion australian crime fiction has special features resultant from the continent’s particular history of colonial invasion and settlement as a penal colony; it has generated special narrative genres and modes to address the idiosyncracies of settler society, which indigenous authors have started writing back to only recently. a good example of the latter development is the crime fiction written by the indigenous author philip mclaren, which offers a strong sense of place and a shifting use of characters and detection options that in combination offer an enabling inscription of country for the indigenous community. in 2009, ken gelder and paul salzman held that “contemporary aboriginal fiction is still primarily autobiographical and genealogical, uncovering family histories and negotiating identities in relation to kinship claims on place.” yet, they continue that “mclaren’s murder mysteries/thrillers are unusual in this respect, although these popular genres do of course share autobiographical fiction’s narrative drive towards individual discovery and self-discovery” (2009: 61). one may argue that mclaren has already wrought and found ‘his place’ in a crossover between western mainstream and indigenous cultures and is therefore less concerned with individual identity formation than with the grand picture of indigenous disenfranchisement and disempowerment and the violence this generates in indigenous society. bearing in mind that his latest work in progress is a crime novel, there is no doubt mclaren will continue to employ the detective and thriller genres in future writing projects as an appropriate mode to reply to the ingrained racism and violence confronting his people. however, he shows himself unconstrained by literary pigeonholes when his particular range of interests and needs thus require, and therefore refuses the epithet ‘crime writer’. it is probably fair to say that his penchant for crime fiction is a ‘natural’ consequence of the violence that permeates aboriginal society rather than a commercial choice: tellingly, he rejected the publisher’s proposal to write a series after scream black murder’s success, his ‘purest’ detective novel according to western standards. his eclectic body of writing is an apt reflection of his commitment with the indigenous community, his cosmopolitan curiosity and his sense of freedom of expression. works cited altman, jon. & melinda hinkson, eds. coercive reconciliation. stabilise, normalise, exit aboriginal australia. north carlton: arena, 2007. print. ashcroft, bill, gareth griffiths, and helen tiffin. the empire writes back: theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. london and new york: routledge, 2002 (1989). barnes, john (ed.). the penguin henry lawson short stories. ringwood, vic.: penguin, 1986. bradshaw, peter. “utopia review”. the guardian online, 14 november 2013. retrieved 12 april 2015 at: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/14/utopia-review. brophy, kevin. “there’ll be new dreams by philip mclaren. notes”. melbourne: council of adult education, 2002. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/14/utopia-review coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 “brw rich 200”, brw business review weekly, australia 2014. retrieved 12 april 2015 at: http://www.brw.com.au/lists/rich-200/2014/. “century zinc mine, a stones [sic] throw from adel's grove and the lawn hill gorge, is one of the largest open cut zinc mines in the world”. accessed 09 april 2015 at: http://dropbears.com/m/morning_glory/century_zinc.htm. cunneen, chris. “aboriginal-police relations in redfern: with special reference to the ‘police raid’ of 8 february 1990”. national inquiry into racist violence. australian human rights commission. may 1990. retrieved 04 april 2015 at: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/race_discrim/redfern_1990 .pdf. foucault, michel. discipline and punish. the birth of the prison. new york: random house, 1977. gelder, ken & paul saltzman. after the celebration. australian fiction 1989-2007. melbourne: mup, 2009. hodge, bob and vijay mishra. dark side of the dream. australian literature and the postcolonial mind. sydney: allen & unwin, 1991 (1990). knight, stephen. continent of mystery. a thematic history of australian crime fiction. melbourne: mup 1997. langton, marcia. “trapped in the aboriginal reality show.” griffith review 19 (2008): 14562. mclaren, philip. sweet water stolen land. brisbane: uqp, 1993 (reissued broome: magabala books, 2001). ---. scream black murder. sydney: harpercollins, 1995 (reissued broome: magabala books, 2001). ---. lightning mine. sydney: harpercollins, 1999. ---. there will be new dreams. broome: magabala books 2001. ---. murder in utopia. cockatoo books 2009 (french version luxemburg: éditions traversées, 2006). ---. west of eden – the real man from snowy river: the original. cockatoo books 2013. “myall creek massacre and memorial site”. department of the environment, water, heritage and the arts. 25 jun 2008. retrieved on 30 march 2015 at: http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/myall-creek. ramsland, john & marie ramsland. “arthur upfield and philip mclaren: pioneering partners in australian ethnographic crime fiction”. in jean anderson, carolina miranda & barbara pezzotti. the foreign in international crime fiction. bloomsbury: london, new york 2012. 99-111. roman, hayley. “two native title claim groups vote in favour of billion-dollar settlement”. abc news, 17 feb 2015. retrieved 12 april 2015 at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/201502-17/second-native-title-group-votes-in-favour-of-deal/6126628. “the gulliver cra dossier”. www.sea-us.org.au the sustainable energy & anti-uranium service 1992, 1997, 2008: n.pag. web. retrieved 10 november 2008 at: http://www.seahttp://www.brw.com.au/lists/rich-200/2014/ http://dropbears.com/m/morning_glory/century_zinc.htm https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/race_discrim/redfern_1990.pdf https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/race_discrim/redfern_1990.pdf http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/myall-creek http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-17/second-native-title-group-votes-in-favour-of-deal/6126628 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-17/second-native-title-group-votes-in-favour-of-deal/6126628 http://www.sea-us.org.au/gulliver/cra.html coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 us.org.au/gulliver/cra.html. also available at: http://dropbears.com/m/morning_glory/century_zinc.htm. vignol, mireille. “philip mclaren interviewed by mireille vignol for the space abc 13/6/2002”. abc net. retrieved 04 dec 2013 at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/40384/20040218000/www.abc.net.au/arts/books/stories/s580900.htm. “west of eden. the real man from snowy river”. www.philipmclaren.com. retrieved 12 april 2015 at: http://www.philipmclaren.com/. i the location became a memorial site on 7 june 2008. see works cited: "myall creek massacre and memorial site". ii see works cited: “century zinc…”. one of australia’s foremost indigenous authors, alexis wright, belongs to the waanyi nation and has repeatedly taken issue with the mining industry’s impact in her essays and fiction, notably her award-winning novel carpentaria (2006), which is set at the mouth of the quasi-homophonous ‘normal’ river. iii see works cited: “the gulliver cra dossier”. iv see works cited: “brw rich 200”. v see works cited: “west of eden …”. the author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness for the writing of this article (research project ffi2013-45101-p). cornelis martin renes holds a phd in english literature from the university of barcelona and lectures at its department of english and german studies. his main area of interest is the study of film and novels from a postcolonial point of view within the larger framework of cultural and australian studies. he co-directs the university of barcelona’s interdisciplinary observatory: australian studies centre, through which he co-edits the journal coolabah and he is the current chair of the european association for studies of australia, easa. he has also co-convened congresses on australian studies in collaboration with similar centres at southern cross university nsw, curtin university wa, and the university of tasmania: http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/. http://www.sea-us.org.au/gulliver/cra.html http://dropbears.com/m/morning_glory/century_zinc.htm http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/40384/20040218-000/www.abc.net.au/arts/books/stories/s580900.htm http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/40384/20040218-000/www.abc.net.au/arts/books/stories/s580900.htm http://www.philipmclaren.com/ http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/ coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 violence, borderlands and belonging: the matter of black lives and others cynthia lytle independent scholar cynthialytle@gmail.com copyright©2017 cynthia lytle. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative common licence. abstract. the word “violence” usually brings to mind a harmful, physical act. this paper explores not only physical violence but also structural violence through colonial systems that has constructed the other and have kept “them” in a perpetual state of marginalization and unbelonging, through the concept of dispossession, as outlined by judith butler and athena athanasiou, this paper will focus on black lives and turn to refugees and migrants crossing to europe in the so-called refugee crisis to demonstrate the ways necropolitics and necropower, through dehumanization, disposability and death, uphold sovereignty. although these populations are seemingly very different, both have been violently displaced through forced migration. moreover, this paper aims to analyze the violence, which can be extended by the media, that currently affects both groups to show the need for humanizing stories that counter the grand narrative of the other. keywords: black lives, refugee crisis, state violence mailto:cynthialytle@gmail.com coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 introduction to belong, as defined by the oed, is to “have an affinity for a specified place or situation” or to “have the right personal or social qualities to be a member of a particular group.” a particular group can be demarcated through cultural, geographic and national borders. in instances where a group is threatened, violence can be used to protect members and keep others out or contained. belonging to a group can mean acceptance, but it can also be claimed as a method of protection. yet who dictates the social qualities needed to belong? how are these powers to separate the belonging from the un-belonging obtained? in dispossession: the performative in the political, judith butler points out that belonging is sometimes supported by the perception of the autochthonous, through belonging by rights of land and earth, and this nationalist logic, for example, emboldens people to tell african-americans to go back to africa or to claim immigrants from africa and the middle east do not belong in europe (butler and athanasiou 2013: 23). butler argues that through colonial violence, populations can become simultaneously dispossessed in processes and ideologies that disown and abject through powers of normalization (butler and athanasiou 2013: 2), such as one’s removal from lands, detention or immobilization in designated areas such as in refugee camps, and through the refusal of entry into european cities with the result that “the targeted population belongs, finally, to no land” (2013: 23-24). moreover, violent ways of subordinating a group in which people are dehumanized, made precarious, and ultimately deemed disposable, what achille mbembé terms as necropower and necropolitics, are not only used as methods of un-belonging but become methods of destroying a population (mbembé 2003: 40). through the concepts of dispossession and necropolitics, this paper will explore the black lives matteri movement and refugees of the so-called refugee crisis to argue that systemic violence, through intersectionalities of race, gender, and nationality, has continued to reinforce the black/white binary and push these groups to the borderlands, which, according to gloria anzaldúa are “physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (anzaldúa 1999: 19). while these groups are seemingly different, both groups have been displaced through forced migration and dispossession, and marginalized through continual violence. this paper will also contend that to combat this perpetual construction of the other and maintenance of the status quo, in addition to multiple narratives, a greater context of history and the power structures created during colonization must be considered. the matter of black lives black lives matter. sparked by the despair and outrage over the death of 17-year-old african-american trayvon martin, these three seemingly simple words became a social movement that swept across the u.s. and crossed the atlantic into europe.ii on february 26, 2012, martin was killed while walking home from a convenience store by neighborhood watchman george zimmerman, who followed martin because he was “suspicious” (botelho 2012: “what happened”). zimmerman was acquitted using the defense of florida’s “stand your ground” law, which enables the use of deadly force if a coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 person “reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony” (florida statute 776.012). his acquittal moved the nation, and with the simple hashtag #blacklivesmatter, a national conversation soon became a social movement (chokshi 2016: how #blacklivesmatter came”; stephen 2015: “social media helps”; safdar 2016: “black lives matter”) and later an official policy agenda (“the movement for black lives”). amid the increasing reports of police violence and unfortunate deaths of black girls, boys, women, and men, black lives matter (blm) has fought to reify the humanity of the lives of all black lives. in their “herstory,” co-founder alicia garza writes, black lives matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of black people by police and vigilantes. it goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some black communities … black lives matter affirms the lives of black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all black lives along the gender spectrum. it centers those that have been marginalized within black liberation movements. it is a tactic to (re)build the black liberation movement. when we say black lives matter, we are talking about the ways in which black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. it is an acknowledgement [that] black poverty and genocide is state violence (garza 2014: “a herstory”). by calling attention to the underlying structural racism that makes laws, controls court systems, and ultimately governs the daily lives of black people, garza raises awareness to the profundity of the power and violence that have commanded black lives both externally and intra-communally through gender, racial, social and class hierarchies throughout american history. as in the death of trayvon martin, media has contributed to violence through the inclusion of irrelevant background information about the victim, the violence is seemingly justified, as exemplified on cnn.com: martin didn't live in sanford, a central florida city of about 53,000 people. yet by that winter night, he'd been there for seven days, after being suspended for the third time from dr. michael m. krop high school in miami, in this instance, for 10 days after drug residue was found in his backpack, according to records obtained by the miami herald (botelho 2012: “what happened”). by describing martin as being outside of his hometown, alluding to multiple school suspensions, and implying martin is linked to drugs through the drug residue discovered in his backpack, the young victim becomes a wrongdoer and criminality is inferred. moreover, he is made a trespasser who does not belong in sanford, while his background and suspicious activity put trayvon martin on the path to his death. furthermore, this suspicion enables the rationalization of zimmerman’s deadly actions as “self defense.” in an interview, judith butler argues coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 every time a grand jury or a police review board accepts this form of reasoning (that police act in self-defense when there is no gun present), they ratify the idea that blacks are a population against which society must be defended, and that the police defend themselves and (white) society, when they preemptively shoot unarmed black men in public space (yancy and butler 2015: “what’s wrong”). in the interview butler argues the phrase “black lives matter” states that what should be obvious—that a life matters—is apparently not and has not been historically realized (yancey and butler 2015: “what’s wrong”). she reminds readers that under slavery, black lives were deemed barely a fraction of a human life, and with this in mind, today, what justifies violence against black lives is that these lives are perceived of as a threat (yancey and butler 2015: “what’s wrong”). police violence has been justified through self-defense and the fear of danger, resulting in the rash killings of black men, women, boys and girls. mappingpoliceviolence.org, based on an effort to record police violence throughout the u.s., has found that blacks are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites. moreover, in 2015 police killed 102 black people. this number is five times more the rate than killings of unarmed whites and likely to be higher due to underreporting. of the black people killed, less than 30 percent were armed and suspected of a violent crime. in police violence on black lives, police hold the power to “define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (mbembé 2003: 27, original emphasis; butler and athanasiou 2013: 20), what mbembé describes as sovereignty. in his example, mbembé refers to frantz fanon’s spatial reading of the colonized world that is divided and made exclusive. fanon argues this space is separated in two with the border marked by barracks and police stations, and mbembé brings this argument into a contemporary space where what he calls necropower operates, controlling death over life (mbembé 2003: 27; fanon 2004: 3). thus, with both fanon and mbembé in mind, to avoid the terror and possibly deadly consequences of leaving one’s space designated through sovereignty, black lives must have an inherent knowledge of which spaces are and are not allowed to be entered. simply by being in the “wrong place,” black lives, considered trespassers, can be lost, and at times, as in the case of trayvon martin, among countless others, there is neither consequence nor remorse for the death (almukhtar 2016: “driver aquitted”; baker and mueller 2015: “beyond the chokehold”; chiquillo 2016: “teen slammed”; hackman 2015: “she was only a baby”). fanon argues, “the agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. he displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcers, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject” (fanon 2004: 4). moreover, as agents of sovereignty do not hide their authority but use violent rationale that continually seeks to demonstrate power over the dispossessed, they continue to assign precariousness and maintain vulnerable states of life in their “proper place” under constant control (butler and athanasiou 2013: 20). the politics of disposability comes from histories of liminality that take place along “racial, gendered, economic, colonial, and postcolonial lines” (butler and athanasiou 2013: 146-147). as previously mentioned in the black lives matter herstory, garza takes these intersections into consideration and calls for the rights and dignity of “all black lives along the gender spectrum” as a way to strengthen and rebuild the black coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 liberation movement both from within and externally. this herstory points to the need for a movement that is more inclusive by opening dialog on the intersectionalities of gender, social class, and ability as black liberation has been criticized in its cisandrocentricity (hall 2000: 151; hill collins 1998: 67; wicomb 1990: 63-70) while women’s liberation has largely ignored people of color (anzaldúa 1999: 230-231; carby 2000: 389-403; hooks 2000: 372-388). thus, blm not only acknowledges but also insists on placing importance of the intersectionality of identities within the movement, and in this way, she recognizes the borderlands of the movement and pushes back the borders to make an all-encompassing space. gloria anzaldúa describes her experience with white feminism and explains, “gender is not the only oppression. there is race, class, religious orientation; there are generational and age kinds of things, all the physical stuff, et cetera … they wanted to apply their notion of feminism across all cultures … i was asked to leave my race at the door” (anzaldúa 1999: 230-31). kimberlé crenshaw points out, when considering violence against women, race and class are important dimensions (1991: 1242). she contends, “although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. and so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling” (1991: 1242.) violence on black women in importantly different ways includes lesser media coverage and even the exclusion of their stories. in february 2015, the african american policy forum, a think tank of academics, activists, and policy makers created initiatives including the hashtags #blackgirlsmatter, which focuses on excessive disciplinary actions against young black girls, and #sayhername, which highlights issues around brutality and racial violence against black women. in a report for the sayhername campaign, crenshaw and andrea j ritchie write, “black women who are profiled, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed by law enforcement officials are conspicuously absent ... when their experiences with police violence are distinct—uniquely informed by race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation—black women remain invisible” (crenshaw and ritchie 2015: 1). the report includes individual cases categorized by “catalysts” to the violence such as “driving while black,” being poor, and being casualties of the war on drugs and, it lays bare the violence women face while they are suffering from mental illnesses, are imprisoned, or are just “collateral damage.” black lives matter and sayhername quickly became a great presence in social media and in physical demonstrations, heightening the vocalization against police violence on black bodies. the blm movement has also become a hot topic in politics, as exemplified by new jersey republican governor chris christie. in an interview with cbs, he argues, “[obama] does not support the police, he doesn't back up the police, he justifies black lives matter” (flores 2015: “chris christie”). in this way, christie constructs the black lives matter movement as an antithesis to police or “lawfulness.” moreover, he attempts to simplify police violence to the narrative of a “bad cop,” or an anomaly, removing accountability. he argues, when there are bad cops, they need to be prosecuted, like there are bad lawyers and bad doctors and bad engineers, they all need to be prosecuted when they see something wrong … but our police officers are putting their lives on the line every day, let's back them up so we can coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 end the real violence in this country that's happening in the streets of our cities all across this country. (flores 2015: “chris christie,” emphasis added) christie not only removes the fault of police but he proclaims the violence against black lives is not real, and in effect, he denies the systemic violence that embedded within law enforcement culture (anderson 2016: 1-2; jones-brown and maule 2010: 140-173; bruce-jones 2017: 25-35). furthermore, by suggesting that the violence against black lives is unreal, christie alienates black lives by denying them the right to feel safe, the right to be conscious of the violence they experience, and the right to feel protected by the police as other citizens of the nation are, all of which are forms of dispossession similar to marx’s concept of alienation, as athanasiou points out, in the “[deprivation] of the ability to have control over life” and the denial of the “consciousness of their subjugation as they are interpellated as subjects of inalienable freedom” (butler and athanasiou 2013: 6). as a way to combat the ever-present threat of violence, parents instruct their black children on what to do when approached by police known as “the talk,” exemplified by author and journalist ta-nehisi coates on the moment his son finds out the killer of michael brown, the 18-year-old who was stopped for “fitting a description” and later shot by the police officer from inside his car. brown fled and was later killed; however, wilson was not charged, resulting in protests that turned into riots in ferguson, mo (buchanan 2014: “what happened?”). in “between the world and me,” which was written as a letter to his son, coates explains, i heard you crying...i didn’t hug you, and i didn’t comfort you, because i thought it would be wrong to comfort you. i did not tell you that it would be okay, because i have never believed it would be okay. what i told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. (2015: 11-12) coates’s decision to not console his son attests to the conditions of necropolitics and threat in which black lives must live as, what is described as “non-being” in the logic of dispossession (butler and athanasiou 2013: 19-20), or in mbembé’s terms, a “social death” by way of removing one from humanity (2003: 21). coates acknowledges the forces, or the necropower, that work to take ownership of black lives and uses history to explain the constructs that continue to subjugate the black body, showing the capacity of un-belonging. he warns and empowers his son through knowledge to resist comforting narratives that suggest irrepressible justice, and he also reminds his son, “the enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. they were people turned to fuel for the american machine” (coates 2015: 70). by stressing the humanity of the enslaved people to highlight the importance of remembering the humans that were terrorized to create america, coates emphasizes the repercussions of this systematic subjugation that still echoes today. the matter of other(ed) lives coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 imperialism and colonial occupation led to new technologies and declared new spatial and social relations that helped instill the systematic frameworks of oppression that is modernly practiced today (mbembé 2003: 25-26). such practices have included the categorization of people and the segregation of geographical spaces enabling the sovereignty or occupation and marginalization of a population, in what mbembé describes as “a third zone between subjecthood and objecthood” (2003: 26). in such spaces, necropolitics, as argued in the previous section, sees that the sovereign exercises power over who lives and who dies, who matters, and thus asserts who belongs (2003: 26-27). thus, as people are deemed disposable by sovereignty, their humanity is put into question. they are dispossessed and made precarious, and in instances where the battle is no longer between two nations but between a nation and various groups, as in the case of violence, conflict and war, the civilian population is often made disposable. mbembé writes, “increasingly, war is … waged by armed groups acting behind the mask of the state against armed groups that have no state but control very distinct territories; both sides having as their main targets civilian populations that are unarmed or organized into militias” (2003: 34-35). conflicts in the middle east and africa have created spaces that are no longer safely habitable for stark circumstances such as, in many cases, threats of violence, torture and life endangerment. such precarious conditions have led people to leave their homes for an arduous journey to the unknown. although a final destination might be an eu country such as germany, death is a very real possibility. this influx of refugees, migrants, and displaced persons came to be the so-called refugee crisis (european commission/echo 2016 “refugee crisis”; lehne 2015: “the roots”). as individuals no longer have their safety, living in violent conditions such as the syrian civil war is a form of dispossession, and leaving one’s homeland leads to another form of dispossession; by leaving one’s homeland, a person allows him or herself to become dispossessed (butler and athanasiou 2013: 2). however, while refugees, migrants, and displaced persons risk their lives—and sometimes the lives of their children, large amounts of money and the possibility of being exploited—their act of leaving is a call for the recognition of their own humanity and the humanity of their families in a search for a better life. those who embark on this journey perceive the possibility of death is better than staying in their own homes, neighborhoods, lands, and nation. in mbembé’s analysis of necropolitics, death and freedom are hand-in-hand for those enslaved or living under occupation (2003: 38). he argues, “in such circumstances, the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship (trial by death) are marked by excess. what connects terror, death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics…the present itself is but a moment of vision—vision of the freedom not yet to come” (2003: 39, original emphasis), and in such extreme cases, death is the only site where an individual has power over his or her life. thus, through their act of walking for months through several countries and crossing deadly seas, these displaced persons see that only by leaving, regardless of danger that could also be a freedom, can an end to precariousness be reached. in 2014, roughly 170,000 refugees and migrants landed in italy, with the highest numbers from eritrea, somalia and nigeria. in 2015, this shifted and refugees mostly travelled from syria and afghanistan to greece; 90 percent were asylum seekers (unhcr 2015: 11). from january to march, 479 refugees and migrants died at sea or went missing and this number soared to 1,308 in april alone (unhcr 2015: 8-9) with one capsized boat taking roughly 800 lives from various nationalities. this was finally coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 the catalyst to get some aid from the eu, and numbers significantly dropped. the boat was found in june 2016 with about 400-600 bodies still inside (kingsley 2016: “italian navy recovers”). the plight of these people was occasionally highlighted in a special report or on the front page of daily newspapers, but many european countries turned the other cheek, and in this way, these lives were disposable. athanasiou argues, “as long as bodies are deemed disposable, found discarded, and remain uncounted, the notion of disposability will be associated with the concepts and practices of dehumanization and necropower” (butler and athanasiou 2013: 147). butler brings up the important point that “to count” in english means both to matter and to be a calculated number; however, numbers and ordering can prove to be polemic in situations such as in the war in gaza, where every person in the population is an enemy (2013: 100). butler questions, “under what conditions do numbers count, and under what conditions are numbers uncountable?” (2013: 100). in terms of necropolitics, if bodies are deemed disposable, what do these numbers signify? the refusal to aid italy and share in the acceptance of refugees and migrants into other eu countries led italian prime minister matteo renzi to threaten to issue temporary schengen visas. at this time, about 40,000 refugees and migrants on their way to other countries like germany and sweden were stuck in greece and italy (kingsley 2015: “this isn’t human”). renzi’s strategic threat of legalizing bodies and allowing them to freely enter the eu, a foucauldian performance of biopower, became a way of dealing with the so-called refugee crisis, and fellow eu states responded (foucault 2007: 16-17; butler and athanasiou 2013: 168). rendering these refugees and migrants immobile is a form of detention, and by creating spaces that confine, these groups are dispossessed and forced to remain in physical borderlands. in calais, thousands of refugees and migrants were stuck at the borders between france and england in makeshift camps. in what came to be known as “the jungle,” the population waited to enter england through the port or eurotunnel by hiding in trains, trucks, ferries, and cars. british prime minister david cameron described the group as, “a swarm of people coming across the mediterranean” (elgot and taylor 2015: “david cameron condemned”), and after international condemnation for his degrading words, cameron contended that he did not think the use of “swarm” was dehumanizing (walton and ross 2015: “david cameron insists”). such othering language is reminiscent of colonial thought on the native other as an animal and from a completely different world and species, in what mbembé calls part of the “credo of power in the colony,” where the native belongs to a set of objects that could and would be used according to sovereign will and where the only relationship was one of violence (mbembé 2001: 26). in this relationship, the colonized’s death did not matter but was nothing more than an “inert object” (2001: 26). thus through such othering language, especially by a high state official, the lives of those in “the jungle” were deemed of no more importance than a threat to british society. more than 137,000 refugees and migrants crossed the mediterranean in the first half of 2015 (uhcr 2015: 2-3) and continued on through serbia and hungary, the latter of which enforced a billboard campaign against immigration (thorpe 2015: “hungary’s poster war”). the situation and numbers escalated, and hungary put up four-meter high, razor-wire fences along the borders of serbia and croatia, and threatened to do the same in romania. using othering language and fear tactics, the campaign presented refugees and migrants as a threat to hungarian jobs and livelihood. moreover, on september 15, 2015 the hungarian government passed a law that treated anyone coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 illegally entering its borders as a criminal. the following day 367 people were taken into custody: 51 are being prosecuted for illegally entering and 316 for damaging the fence (squires 2016: “hungary says migrant influx”). the new law did not distinguish juveniles as in normal procedures and put defendants under house arrest in a refugee camp. once a refugee was arrested, he or she could not apply for asylum and did not receive the charges or judgment in his or her mother tongue, and in some cases, he or she might not even receive the documents as they might be delivered to the defense lawyer (budapest sentinal staff 2015: “lawyers rule of law”). thus, not only was the erecting of the fence and criminalization of refugees received as a way of protecting hungarian society but also a very direct way of denying life. yet people crossed the razor-wire-lined border, and in doing so, the refugees and migrants performed acts of resistance in what butler and athanasiou describe as becoming present (2013: 14). athanasiou explains, in becoming present to one another, as an occasion of being both bound up with subjugation and responsive and receptive to others, we may be positioned within and against the authoritative order of presence that produces and constrains the intelligibility of human or non-human presence … if we reinstate presence in a different or catachrestic way, we might put our social existence at risk…but we might also start to performatively displace and reconfigure the contours of what matters, appears, and can be assumed as one’s own intelligible presence. (2013: 15) refugees and migrants finally entering austria and germany were met with big signs welcoming refugees in a stark contrast to hungary. volunteers, organizations, and companies worked together to bring hot food and cold water to train stations. big tents, community centers, and school gyms were set up with cots and blankets, giving refugees and migrants temporary places to sleep while they waited to be registered. in the meantime, disagreements within the eu over a quota system continued. slowly the influx of refugees became too large for germany and sweden to bear, and borders were temporarily closed and the excitement and acceptance of refugees began to die down. in january 2016, after a string of thefts, violence and sexual assaults reportedly by men mostly of arab and north african descent (smale 2015: “18 asylum seekers”) on the night of new year’s eve in cologne, 1,700 from anti-islam group pegida (patriotic europeans against the islamization of the west) and afd (alternative für deutschland) demonstrated against islam and refugees. holding signs stating “rapefugees not welcome” and “integrate barbarity?” the groups protested against immigration and merkel’s “open-door” policy claiming that refugees and islam would ruin germany and that protecting women was their right and duty. as anne mcclintock argues, family is an important motif of nation, with women symbolizing the land, markers of national borders, producers and bearers of tradition, among other representations, that must be preserved for the sake of the nation (mcclintock 2010: 89-92). by using the woman as a marker of the nation and some “thing” that must be protected, women’s bodies are transformed into tools of the nation, with patriarchy in control. in this way, women belong, as objects, to the discourse of national race, which in effect, must be protected from the others. however, it was not only rightwing groups such as pegida and afd that promoted such othering and scare tactics. reporting on these assaults in cologne for the new york times, alison smale writes coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 it was not clear exactly when the migrants who may have been involved arrived in germany. but the disclosure added to worries over acculturating hundreds of thousands of people from conservative muslim societies—many of them young men—who have little experience with open european mores, particularly regarding women (smale 2015: “18 asylum seekers”). smale’s patronizing narrative of the event displaces the assaults and a culture of violence against women as part of muslim culture, and she continues by mentioning the “challenge of assimilation.” in this way smale presents muslim culture as misogynistic while reinforcing anti-immigration notions through fear for european safety. reporting such as smale’s helps shape public discourse on refugees and migrants and an entire religion, and it reiterates the repeated fear of threat to the sanctity of white womanhood (crenshaw 1991: 1266). the events on the night of new year’s eve in cologne also motivated alice schwarzer, a prominent german feminist, to comment that those involved in the attacks were “young men of arab or north african descent [that were] playing war in the middle of cologne” and described their night as a “gang-bang party,” attributing sexual violence in germany as a problem that originated outside and arrived with immigration” (spiegel staff 2016: “how new year’s eve”). her comments were not only racist and xenophobic but, in the name of “protecting women,” she employed patriarchal narratives using women’s bodies to fuel antiimmigrant sentiment. schwarz has also suggested people from “islamic cultural groups,” including existing immigrants and incoming refugees, migrants, and displaced persons, ought to be taught gender equality (hoffman and pfister 2016: “a feminist view”), and in this way, schwarz presents a monolithic threat, feeding the justification of xenophobic sentiment perpetuating racist ideologies and calls for a protection of national culture and white space.iii in this way the intersections of patriarchy, racism, misogyny, and colonialism work together and dispossess not only the refugees and migrants but also the very european women that are claimed to be protected. in an understanding of national identities where whites are the most valuable and have the most power such as in the u.s., england, and germany, non-white groups attempting to enter pose a threat to the nation in degradation of racial and blood purity. patricia hill collins connects the notion of blood ties and race in the u.s. with the view of race as family, which was based on scientific and lawful classifications (hill collins 1998: 70). using the logic of race as an indicator of common bloodline, hill collins ties this logic to an understanding of ethnic nationalism where the group shares common cultural expressions (1998: 70). therefore when media outlets illustrate refugees as a great muslim danger, the threat is not only on white women, as they represent the protectors of blood purity, white family, and a white nation but muslims—and nonwhite others—are also a threat to white spaces and, in effect, whiteness. therefore all groups that do not have family blood ties, meaning they are not from white countries, are considered less-worthy to immigrate and become naturalized citizens (1998: 70), resulting in a diminished acceptability of people of color to belong in such countries. the notion of blood ties and race sometimes can prove to play a stronger role than citizenship. in france, prime minister manuel valls has promoted the consequence of stripping citizens with dual nationality of their french citizenship if convicted of terrorism, despite the fact that the paris november attackersiv were mostly french coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 citizens without dual nationality (nossiter 2015: “french proposal”). such alarming notions not only further stimulate feelings of fear and being under threat, but they also send the message to non-white europeans and those with dual nationality that they are still “the others,” and their belonging is, paradoxically, circumstantial. furthermore, while the proposal was eventually abandoned, it helped create the false notion that that french nationals, or nationals of any “western” country could be terrorists. this circumstantial belonging can also be exemplified by the comments of angela merkel, who in 2010 claimed that the notion of living in a multicultural society “had absolutely failed” (evans 2010: “merkel says”). to a group of cdu party youth, she said, we are a country, which at the beginning of the 1960s actually brought guest workers to germany. now they live with us, and we kidded ourselves for a while saying that they won’t stay and they’ll disappear again one day. that’s not the reality. this multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side-by-side, and are happy about each other, this approach has utterly failed. (evans 2010: “merkel says”) merkel’s rejection of the possibility of living happily together with guest workers is in complete contrast with the portrayal of “mama merkel” for the welcoming of syrian refugees, who are patronizingly likened to poor children by mainstream media. while merkel opened the borders, she has admitted to a lack of “order” and “control,” and was worried about losing german’s “societal center” that “makes germany so strong” (spiegel staff 2015: “the lonely chancellor”). furthermore, to combat the criticism and the poor election results that resulted in afd wins in berlin in september 2016, merkel has worked toward integration policies that require german language acquisition and entry into the labor market. included in these policies are courses that would include topics to reinforce social values such as gender equality (delcker 2016: “angela merkel to refugees”). when considering those who live in precarious circumstances and are categorized based on race, gender, sexuality and these representations, athanasiou questions the act of judging and sanctioning through migration policies (butler and athanasiou 2013: 165). she gives the example of the misuse of power when dutch immigration required immigrants and asylum seekers to view videos of topless women swimming and gay men kissing as a way to evaluate the capacity to integrate (2013: 166). such events not only use naked women and gay men as tools of european openness but they also dispossess these people and movements from their continuing struggles (2013: 166). moreover, if an integration policy includes courses on gender equality, or other values of germany society that make it so strong, is it inferred that there is gender equality in germany? if so, what ruler is used to mark gender equality? returning to the events on the night of new year’s eve in cologne, schwarzer’s comments also sparked a feminist debate. schwarzer was criticized for suggesting gender violence did not exist before immigration but was imported (hoffman and pfister 2016: “a feminist view”). in an interview with schwarzer for der spiegel, anne wizoreck contends schwarzer’s view of muslims wrongly displaces the focus of the issue of sexualized violence regardless of the perpetrator and calls for a debate on integration rather than exclusion (hoffman and pfister 2016: “a feminist view”). the construction of refugees and migrants as sexual predators and integration policies that aim to “correct” behavior, as previously argued, reiterates a fear of the coolabah, no.21, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 other that threatens european values, and it is this message that is repeated by governments and instilled in the minds of many european citizens. conclusion my aim has been to analyze ways in which oppressive colonial systems are foundations of dispossession and how, through violence, dehumanization, and disposability, they affect belonging. i have attempted to show that through nationalisms, necropower and necropolitics, sovereignty continues to construct, impose, and enforce systems that maintain the subordination of the marginalized and destroy populations. i have chosen seemingly distinct populations: black lives on the one hand and refugees, migrants, and displaced peoples from the middle east and africa, part of the so-called “refugee crisis,” on the other to show how both these populations are dispossessed through intersectionalities of race, gender, and nationality. while the violence of forced migrations has caused these populations to become dispossessed, these populations have performed acts of resistance, calling for their humanity and dignity and for the end of their precariousness. moreover, as media can act as tools of the sovereign, we must look for the lesser-told stories of the borderlands, of the precarious, and all stories, as most of us have been taught only the single story, which was to be accepted without question. and what is wrong with this single story? 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date: 10 dev. 2015. cynthia lytle completed her phd at the universitat de barcelona department of english and german philology. her dissertation, “deracination: reading the borderlands in the fiction of zoë wicomb” was written under the direction of dr. rodrigo andrés gonzález and dr. susan ballyn. her current research focuses on violence in the construction of racial and gendered identities and their representations in media and transnational english literature. she is currently an independent scholar living in germany. i keeping with the black lives matter movement, this paper will retain their capitalization of “black” in discussing the violence that affects the everyday lives of african-americans. ii while black lives matters has moved across the globe (hassan 2016: “how the black lives matter”; winsor 2016: “black lives matter”; armitage 2016: “2016 was the year”), this paper will focus on events in the u.s. iii refusing the quota is a way of protecting national culture and space. slovakia completely rejected the quota system, while hungary, the czech republic, and romania voted against it. on november 16, 2015, the hungarian parliament voted to challenge the mandatory quotas. the bill cites that the quota system “would increase crime, spread terror and endanger hungarian culture” (zalan 2015: “hungary to challenge”). iv for an interesting analysis on necropolitics in the logic of martyrdom and logic of survival, including the figure of the suicide bomber, see mbembé’s section “on motion and metal” (2003: 35-39). coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 260 from rhetoric to learning: bridging the disconnect between policy and teaching practice around aboriginal and torres strait islander australia in the australian primary education system majon williamson kefu batchelor institute of indigenous tertiary education majon.williamson@batchelor.edu.au copyright©2018 majon williamson kefu. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper will examine the need for strengthening the support mechanisms for learning about aboriginal and torres strait islander australia in the australian primary education system to support the implementation of existing education policies. while there is currently strong rhetorical commitment through educational policies and related supporting documents, these do not provide sufficient practical support of—or enable teachers to effectively teach—aboriginal and torres strait islander content or perspectives. it is essential that we recognise and address the obstacles that teachers must overcome in practice. specifically, enhanced support to source appropriate high quality resources could help to address many of the issues encountered in the process of transforming educational policy to teaching practice. keywords: aboriginal and torres strait islander; primary education; teaching policy and practice. in order to reimagine australia as a nation that acknowledges, values and respects its first nations peoples, first nations perspectives, first nations cultures and first nations histories, and even embraces and celebrates these as fundamental parts of our national identity and national story, it is essential to first reimagine our education system, starting from primary education. every australian state and territory has policies and other supporting documents and resources that claim to facilitate learning about aboriginal and mailto:majon.williamson@batchelor.edu.au coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 261 torres strait islander australia in the primary education system. in practice, however, realising these policies in classrooms is significantly more challenging due to a variety of complex and often interrelated issues. in this paper, i will examine some of these obstacles and discuss options for overcoming them and strengthening the link between policy and practice. i will firstly summarise the rhetorical commitment that already exists in the form of a wide variety of policies. i will then look at how these are disconnected from the lived realities of australian primary school classrooms. finally, i will discuss how this disconnect can be partially addressed through the provision of better access to appropriate and high quality resources. an overview of relevant educational policies starting from an international policy perspective, there are three major rights-based international documents that support and encourage the role of learning about aboriginal and torres strait islander australia in primary schools. looking at universal human rights (un 1948), article 26 section 2 states: education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. it shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups. similarly, in the convention on the rights of the child (un 1989), article 29 affirms that it is the responsibility of governments to ensure that the education of all children develops the respect for the child’s … own cultural identity, language and values … in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin. the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples (un 2007) article 13 asserts: indigenous peoples have the right to revitalise, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and states shall take effective measures to ensure this right is protected. further, article 15 of the same document (un 2007) confirms governments shall take … effective measures, in consultation and cooperation with the indigenous peoples concerned, to combat prejudice and eliminate discrimination and to promote tolerance, understanding and good relations among indigenous peoples and all other segments of society. even through a broad international policy lens, australia has already committed to providing each and every child and person in australia with an education that promotes understanding of aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples, and specifically and coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 262 effectively works towards protecting the rights of indigenous australian children to use and revitalise their languages, histories and traditions, and pass them on to future generations. narrowing the focus slightly to national policies, the best known national education policy is the australian curriculum, assessment and reporting authority’s australian curriculum (acara 2016), which is currently being rolled out around australia. one of the major relevant achievements in this area of policy is acara’s selection of aboriginal and torres strait islander histories and cultures as a cross-curriculum priority. until recently, however, the cross-curriculum priority consisted of just one and half pages of original content that related specifically to aboriginal and torres strait islander histories and cultures in the 1,846-page curriculum document (acara 2015b). these one and a half pages include three paragraphs, which were repeated throughout the curriculum content areas, slightly rephrased in each, as well as a diagram and nine general “organising ideas.” in the current australian curriculum version 8.3 (acara 2016), greater detail has been added throughout the content areas, including many “elaborations,” possible learning outcomes and suggestions on lesson content. acara also recently released the framework for aboriginal and torres strait islander languages (acara 2015a). this is a significant milestone for all those who have worked for the recognition of the important role that aboriginal and torres strait islander languages have not only in australia but in the world. these languages represent the most organic way to express some of the oldest living cultural concepts, and as roberta sykes (1989, p. 13) observed: … if every migrant language in australia stopped being spoken here the language would continue to survive in the country of origin. the only languages which would disappear completely off the face of the globe without support and attention are the indigenous languages. this is even more poignant if we understand that every group’s entire history of experience with life, law, nature and culture is contained in their language, and that each group develops its own unique concepts of their perception of the world and these concepts can often only be expressed in that language … the melbourne declaration on educational goals for young australians (mceetya 2008) was made by all australian education ministers in 2008 and is still used as a guiding policy document in some states. the two main goals in this document are: australian schooling promotes equity and excellence; and all young australians become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens. this could be perceived as problematic because the document discusses these goals in a way that would require the societal challenges and learners themselves to change to achieve the goals. alternatively, this document could recognise the need for the education system to make changes, such as providing stronger support for teaching a more holistic curriculum, encompassing indigenous knowledges, languages and histories. this could then enable students to connect more genuinely with the curriculum, which could, in turn, produce better and more tangible results in relation to the stated goals. building on the melbourne declaration on education goals for young australians, and other similar documents from the last three decades, the national aboriginal and torres coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 263 strait islander education strategy (education council 2015) was released in 2015. this document outlines a number of key principles that should underpin the approach of all education systems. these include, but are not limited to: cultural recognition, which refers to the need for aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples’ histories, values, languages and cultures to be acknowledged and respected; relationships, which refers to the need for meaningful relationships that value community cultural knowledge, wisdom and expertise, and demonstrate trust and respect; and partnerships, which refers to the need for aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples to be engaged in decision making, planning, delivery and evaluation of early childhood, schooling and higher education services at local, sector and national levels. thus, each of these principles sets out a series of tasks that could equate to a full-time job in themselves, which teachers must engage with individually. the cultural recognition principle requires teachers to develop and maintain sufficient knowledge of the diverse histories, values, languages and cultures of aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples to be able to acknowledge them adequately and respectfully. however, this idea of acknowledging them and respecting them is very open to interpretation and could be implemented in a wide variety of ways. the relationships principle requires teachers to know who to engage with to create meaningful relationships. further to this, the partnership principle requires teachers to know who to engage with to adequately and appropriately represent “aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples” in the decision making, planning, delivery and evaluation of all levels of education. within the australian professional standard for teachers (aitsl 2014), standard 2.4 outlines the need for teachers to understand and respect aboriginal and torres strait islander people to promote reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous australians. standard 1.4 also requires teachers to be able to apply their understanding of aboriginal and torres strait islander cultures, languages and identities to enhance the education and teaching of aboriginal and torres strait islander students. in practice, therefore, these national policies require individual teachers to interpret how the cross-curriculum priority could be and should be taught, while knowing how to approach reconciliation effectively, and navigate multiple cultural knowledge systems with appropriate respect. shifting attention now to state-based policies, these policies will not be discussed in as much individual detail, as australia is currently moving towards a nationalised system. however, as education in australia remains primarily the responsibility of state and territory governments, it is valuable to understand the existing policies. firstly, the australian capital territory’s every chance to learn curriculum (act education directorate 2007), which preceded the australian curriculum currently rolled out, only committed to very limited and generalised aboriginal and torres strait islander lesson content. in contrast, the government of new south wales provides more specific policies, including, for example, the turning policy into action (nsw dec 2008) document, which supports the implementation of the aboriginal education and training policy. this document mandates aboriginal cultural education through professional learning and career development experiences for all staff, and under the local schools, local coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 264 decisions reform, this responsibility lies with the individual schools. the “together we are, together we can, together we will” partnership agreement (nsw dec, nsw aecg and aetd 2009) with the nsw aboriginal education consultative group advocates for a close working relationship between schools and their local aboriginal education consultative group to enable the effective implementation of the connecting to country program, as well as other classroom-based learning. importantly, the partnership agreement also provides a very useful and necessary conduit between active teachers and aboriginal peoples and communities. with regards to the northern territory, where there is a larger percentage of aboriginal students than anywhere else in australia (abs 2011), it is significant to examine the role that aboriginal languages have played in education over time. the first school to offer instruction in both english and an aboriginal language was ntaria (or hermannsburg), which taught in western aranda from around 1896 (abc 2009). this, however, did not get discussed at a policy level of bilingual education until the 1960s and did not get officially implemented until the 1970s (ibid). the momentum around this grew into the 1990s, until it hit some speed bumps as bilingual education was scapegoated for lower overall student performance in remote communities (ibid). in more recent years, a “twoway learning” or “both ways learning” approach has gained popularity, in both policy and practice, at all levels of education (mcconaughy and nakata 2000, p. 11; ober and bat 2007; yipirinya school 2017). on their website, the queensland curriculum and assessment authority provides some very practical guidelines for how to best embed aboriginal and torres strait islander perspectives, including an explanation of “outsider v. insider” information in the sharing knowledge about sacred sites and ceremonies document; some general ideas on how to combat racism in schools; advice on how to engage and work with aboriginal and torres strait islander guest speakers; and importantly, how to choose quality resources to support lesson plans (qcaa 2015). unfortunately, some of the resources referenced in this material are considerably dated, but without more contemporary alternatives, they still make a necessary contribution to the resource pool. in addition to these, the website provides access to other protocols, resources and readings. south australia’s department of education and child development’s webpage (decd n.d.) links directly to the aboriginal and torres strait islander histories and cultures cross curriculum priority (acara 2016), and to the early years learning framework (deewr 2009), referring to its advocacy for the practice of cultural competence. other than these documents, the south australian certificate of education board has an aboriginal education strategy 2017-2021 (sace board 2017), which claims to build on the success of the previous strategy, but this is targeted at preparing aboriginal students to undertake and achieve their senior secondary qualification in south australia. it does not address content or primary education. thus, there is limited guidance for teachers in south australia relating to teaching about aboriginal and torres strait islander australia in the primary education system, without practical advice on how to bring the policies into classroom teaching. tasmania’s aboriginal education framework 2016-2017 (department of education tasmania 2016) is succinct but comprehensive, covering both aboriginal student education outcomes and aboriginal content learning outcomes. tasmania’s aboriginal coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 265 education services page (department of education n.d.) supports this framework through the provision of a number of programs, which are listed on the webpage and available through the service, as well as a series of practical and instructional video resources. the victorian aboriginal languages curriculum (vcaa 2016) and the aboriginal languages and cultures micro-site (vcaa 2017) explain how to start an aboriginal language class in schools, which protocols should be followed, and what resources and links are available to support these classes. western australia’s aboriginal education webpage (doe 2016) provides resources to support the teaching of aboriginal perspectives across the curriculum, with lesson plans, teaching resources and mind maps. policy v. practice disconnect from a policy perspective therefore, it is apparent that the governments of australia are willing to commit to enhancing teaching and learning around aboriginal and torres strait islander australia. the challenge is to connect this to teaching practice, move beyond rhetoric, and enable these policies to be create learning in every primary school classroom around australia. to achieve this, it is essential to recognise and overcome some of the practical challenges experienced by teachers. these include, but are not limited to, graduate teacher knowledge and the limitations of initial teacher training; a lack of experience and expertise specifically in teaching aboriginal and torres strait islander content and perspectives; the time restraints that teachers face, which limits their ability to research and design lesson plans around what is often unfamiliar content for them; the difficulty associated with finding and vetting appropriate and high quality resources; the challenge of negotiating the line around what can and should be shared; and understanding and addressing one’s own values and experiences and the way these impact teaching practices. mayer and her colleagues (2017) have recently published a longitudinal study into the effectiveness of initial teacher education. the research showed that the introduction of the australian curriculum changed the way teachers were teaching (mayer et al. 2017, p. 72), and a couple of the key areas for potential improvement of initial teacher training was “more engagement with school curriculum and content” and “more focus on nonteaching issues related to teachers’ work beyond the classroom” including professional engagement with parents/carers and the community (mayer et al. 2017, p. 92). moretonrobinson, singh, kolopenuk and robinson (2012, pp. 6-9) compiled a report aimed at improving teaching for aboriginal and torres strait islander education, and found that initial teacher training should better address the need for parent and community involvement in educating teachers and participating in school life generally. this is especially important in relation to learning about aboriginal and torres strait islander australia because teachers should engage the school’s community in this learning process. international discourse (including zeichner and conklin 2016) highlights a narrative of teacher education failure, but i would argue that the australian system needs to be reimagined to help prospective teachers navigate and engage with a lifelong learning practice. mayer et al. (2017, p. 129) argue there is a need to shift the focus away from coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 266 “classroom readiness,” and instead recognise teacher training as an ongoing process. this process should be a cumulative program of connected multi-disciplinary and multi-focused work in teacher education that concerns itself with issues of practice and policy, curriculum and pedagogy across the continuum of preparatory, transitional, and continuing teacher education, and involves both universities and the profession. (green 2009 cited in mayer et al. 2017, p. 127) teachers have usually only completed limited “indigenous education” training, and this can encompass both pedagogy specifically for the education of aboriginal and torres strait islander students, and aboriginal and torres strait islander content and perspectives (e.g. craven 2011; harrison 2011). this type of core unit is often taught within the first year of the degree (moreton-robinson et al. 2012, p. 6) and as such, it often does not involve sufficient analytical or skill-building components to enable teachers to source and maintain appropriate and relevant resources to enable their effective teaching. generally these core courses have been found to have a greater impact on a teacher’s self-confidence and feeling of competence, than on their enjoyment of or ability to effectively teach aboriginal studies (craven et al. 2003 cited in moreton robinson et al. 2012, p. 7). many early career teachers are not comfortable or confident teaching aboriginal and torres strait islander histories and cultures in a “meaningful, relevant and respectful” way (gilbert 2015), and do not fully understand or relate to them (harrison 2011, pp. 17-18). this raises a complicated question: is ignorance a good enough reason to have made errors or omissions in teaching indigenous studies? this is a difficult issue too because sometimes teachers argue that in their fear of saying the wrong thing, they will decide not to touch indigenous issues in their classrooms at all. (lampert and lilley 1996 cited in lampert 2005, p. 89) the insufficient studies at university and lack of opportunities for in-service professional development are often used to explain teachers feeling inadequately prepared (rotary 2015, p. 58). gilbert (2015) argues professional development is essential to overcoming this challenge. ma rhea, anderson and atkinson (2012) highlight the need for more culturally responsive teaching and emphasise the potential impact of professional development with an aboriginal and torres strait islander focus for teachers on the quality and truth of their teachings. alternatively, mundine (quoted in wiltshire and donnelly 2014, p. 101) suggests that aboriginal and torres strait islander learning, as a discrete course, should be delivered by specialist teachers specifically “qualified to teach in this domain.” time restraints are another practical challenge that teachers must address, and this can be compounded by the need to research and design lesson plans around potentially unfamiliar content, such as aboriginal and torres strait islander australia. for any set of curriculum materials, it is necessary for a teacher to select from available materials and teaching strategies and alter and creatively combine them to produce an engaging and effective educational experience for their particular students … . (rotary 2015, p. 5) coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 267 teachers are required to work broad curriculum ideas into specific lesson, assessment and reporting plans. as summarised above, there is a wide range of policies and supporting documents that should guide the teaching and learning of content and perspectives around aboriginal and torres strait islander australia, but these can be difficult to locate and apply to one’s teaching practice. even where more specific suggestions are now available in the curriculum (acara 2016), teachers are still required to have sufficient local knowledge to be able to incorporate the recommendations to their practice. unless additional practical support is provided, this is likely to result in a tokenistic reference to aboriginal and torres strait islander histories and cultures to tick the cross-curriculum priority box (williamson and dalal 2007). furthermore, the difficulty associated with finding and vetting appropriate and high quality resources that are endorsed by aboriginal and torres strait islander communities should not be underestimated. there are some general texts available (e.g. craven 2012; harrison 2011), but ghillar michael anderson (nsw aecg 2015) warns that printed resources should be read with caution because “when you come from a secret society, you don’t tell your secrets.” working within and around aboriginal and torres strait islander cultures respectfully is a significant challenge for many people, including teachers specifically (e.g. carlson et al. 2014). thus, nakata (2011, pp. 1-8) argues that when resources are so difficult to locate and filter for quality, greater guidance is needed around how to improve understanding and the valuing of differences, while encouraging genuine engagement with the cross-curriculum priority. teachers must also be relatively familiar with indigenous knowledges and knowledge systems, in order to successfully and respectfully negotiate the line around what can and should be shared. “[a]ppropriate levels of knowledge, attitudes and enthusiasm is critical to the success of teaching about indigenous history, culture and issues” (rotary 2015, p. 5). for example, some information, also referred to as insider knowledge, should never be shared with outsiders (qcaa 2008), while other information can only be shared with permission from the knowledge holders and/or a particular place. knowing who can make decisions around indigenous knowledges is central to engaging with these knowledge systems respectfully. understanding this, and knowing who to ask, is another challenge teachers are often faced with. mackinlay and barney (2014, p. 32) note … educators are being asked to localise, enter into relationships with and make space for indigenous australian people as holders of knowledge that is valid, legitimate and relevant for all australians. in addition to this, it is important to understand the role that an individual teacher’s values and identity can play in the classroom, and how these issues can have tangible effects within educational settings in australia (miller, dunn and currell 2005, pp. 60-79; vass 2012). even teachers who believe in “indigenous justice” may not know how to enact that in their classrooms (lampert 2005, p. 87), or may not recognise the impact of race, whiteness, othering and racialisation on education, curriculum and teaching (moretonrobinson et al. 2012, p. 9). without actively reflecting on one’s position in and exposure to a racialised education system, there is a significant danger that teachers will perhaps inadvertently and unconsciously reproduce the inequity and injustice through their teachings. simply understanding the values and histories of the constructs of education coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 268 and schooling can help to give perspective to this process (see martin 2005, pp. 37-38). vigilante (2007 cited in moreton-robinson et al. 2012, p. 10) argues for two essential goals in effective anti-racism education: curricular justice, and the wider responsibility of redressing the social disadvantage experienced by aboriginal people. as an example, a belief in an essentialist notion of aboriginality may not only result in a failure to recognise and therefore teach the diversity among indigenous peoples, but also potentially “reinforce the racism of the dominant culture and contribute to stereotypes about who is a ‘real’ aborigine” (taylor 1999, p. 44). thus, understanding and empathising with the personal lives of your students and their cultures, while reflecting on and recognising the role of your own values and practices as an aspirant teacher, or as a practicing teacher in the classroom, can help to improve the outcomes for students (gower and byrne 2012, p. 380) and the quality of your teaching. sourcing resources to support better teaching practice there are some isolated examples of local initiatives that have made progress towards bridging the gap between the numerous education policies and improved teaching practice. these include the work of tasmania’s aboriginal education services, and a rotary joint project, which provided curriculum resources and professional development for secondary school teachers on wadjak noongar history, culture and issues. these initiatives have already produced positive outcomes in the area of teaching and learning about aboriginal and torres strait islander australia by providing resources to address the challenges highlighted above. although current outcomes have been limited to the local contexts of such initiatives, the promising results suggest that similar initiatives should be trialled more broadly to support the rollout of the australian curriculum, and the teaching of the cross-curriculum priority at a primary school level specifically. the department of education tasmania’s aboriginal education services webpage (n.d.) provides the necessary information to understand, contact and/or access their programs, including the aboriginal sharers of knowledge (ask) program; the aboriginal educators in schools program; aboriginal history and culture videos and learning tasks; aboriginal education services—funding for schools, tasmanian museum and art gallery tours for schools with an aboriginal learning facilitator; and bush kinder at the sustainability learning centre, mount nelson, as well as the contact details for the aboriginal education library. the webpage has a simple and easy-to-use interface. the instructional video clips provide lesson ideas with an explanation of how they can be run, how to incorporate other learning objectives, and why the lesson is important. while other webpages may have more information or more resources, the simplicity, accessibility and time-efficient layout of this site makes it a great example of how to support policy in teaching practice. furthermore, combining this with the aboriginal education services’ suite of programs, which provides the human resources to support teaching and learning about aboriginal tasmania, this is a strong example of existing resources that could be nationalised to effect positive change in primary school classrooms around australia. the rotary project was a successful joint initiative between the rotary clubs of belmont, subiaco, west perth and western endeavour, the south west aboriginal land and sea council (swalsc), murdoch university and the western australia department of coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 269 education (rotary, 2015). although its focus was on year 9 secondary school teaching and learning around aboriginal history, culture and issues, the lessons learned can and should be applied more broadly to both primary and secondary school contexts. the project addressed the low level of knowledge among western australian people relating to aboriginal history, culture and contemporary issues by developing a set of swalscendorsed ready-made lessons, including supporting materials and films, and providing complimentary professional development for teachers. the project’s final report (rotary 2015, pp. 4-5) lists ten principal recommendations. the majority of the recommendations can and should be applied to wider teaching practice around australia to support the effective implementation of existing education policies. indigenous individuals and cultural organisations should be involved to the maximum extent practicable in the design and development of curriculum materials, teaching activities (including incursions and excursions), evaluation of teaching programs and training of teachers at university and especially during in-service professional development courses … the development of local and regional cultural material to insert into a generic state[or nation-] wide curriculum could be productively integrated with [professional development] … for teachers. (rotary 2015, p. 5) the final report also recommends that more comprehensive curriculum materials should be provided to teachers in an easy-to-use format: “providing teachers with the skills and tools (and adequate time to [sic] for this task) is critical to the success of the teaching and learning” (rotary 2015, p. 4). in conclusion, existing policies are generally supportive of a strong role for teaching and learning about aboriginal and torres strait islander australia in the primary education system. unfortunately, teachers experience a wide variety of obstacles that prevent a comprehensive engagement with those policies, and their promises, at a classroom level. accessing appropriate resources, including targeted professional development training and purpose-designed sources, however, could effectively and efficiently bridge the gap between relevant educational policies and teaching practices. specifically, these resources should include human resources, such as aboriginal organisations and individuals, and secondary resources, such as documents, websites and video clips, and should cover the local, state and national contexts. a greater level of practical support for teachers is essential to overcome the various barriers and ensure they deliver on the rhetorical commitment given in current educational policies. references australian broadcasting corporation (abc) 2009, “chronology: the bilingual education policy in the northern territory,” four corners, viewed 11 march 2017, http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20090914/ language/ chronology.htm. australian bureau of statistics (abs) 2011, 4221.0 schools, australia, 2010 – indigenous students, viewed 22 april 2017, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ abs@.nsf/lookup/4221.0main+features52010. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 270 australian capital territory government education directorate (act education directorate) 2007, every chance to learn, viewed 14 march 2017, http://www.education.act.gov.au/teaching_and_learning/every-chance-tolearn/curriculum-resources. australian curriculum, assessment and reporting authority (acara) 2015a, framework for aboriginal and torres strait islander languages, viewed 20 april 2016, http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/languages/introduction. ---. 2015b, the australian curriculum version 7.3, viewed 27 january 2015, http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/. ---. 2016, the australian curriculum version 8.3, viewed 1 april 2017, http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/crosscurriculumpriorities/aboriginaland-torres-strait-islander-histories-and-cultures/overview. australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations (deewr) 2009, belonging, being and becoming: early years learning framework for australia, viewed 12 march 2017 http://files.acecqa.gov.au/files/national-quality-framework-resourceskit/belonging_being_and_becoming_the_early_years_ learning_framework_for_australia.pdf. australian institute of teaching and school leadership (aitsl) 2014, australian professional standards for teachers, viewed 18 march 2017, http://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standards-forteachers/standards/list. batchelor institute of indigenous tertiary education (biite) 2014, both ways learning [video clip], viewed 19 march 2017, http://www.batchelor.edu.au/. carlson, b, berglund, j, harris, m, poata-smith, e, barney, k, shannon, c, and nakata, m 2014, “four scholars speak to navigating the complexities of naming in indigenous studies,” australian journal of indigenous education, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 58-72. craven, r 2011, teaching aboriginal studies: a practical resource for primary and secondary teaching, 2nd edn, allen & unwin, crows nest. department of education tasmania 2016, tasmania’s aboriginal education framework 2016-2017, viewed 10 march 2017, https://www.education.tas.gov.au/documentcentre/documents/ tasmania's-aboriginal-education-framework-2016-2017-final.pdf. ---. n.d., aboriginal education services [webpage], viewed 10 march 2017, https://www.education.tas.gov.au/parents_carers/schools-colleges/programsinitiatives/pages/aboriginal-education-services.aspx. education council 2015, national aboriginal and torres strait islander education strategy 2015, viewed 18 march 2017, https://www.education.gov.au/nationalaboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-education-strategy. gilbert, s 2015, “the australian curriculum offers hope for the future of indigenous communities”. the guardian, 22 july 2015, viewed 20 april 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/the-australiancurriculum-offers-hope-for-the-future-of-indigenous-communities. government of south australia department of education and child development (decd) n.d. curriculum and teaching [webpage], viewed 11 march 2017, https://www.decd.sa.gov.au/teaching/curriculum-and-teaching. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 271 gower, g, and byrne, m 2012, “becoming a culturally competent teacher: beginning the journey,” in q beresford, g partington and g gower (eds.), reform and resistance in aboriginal education, uwa publishing, crawley, pp. 379-402. harrison, n 2011, teaching and learning in aboriginal education, 2nd edn, oxford university press, south melbourne. lampert, j 2005, “the teaching that matters: merging our personal beliefs with our professional practice in the classroom,” in j phillips and j lampert (eds.), introductory indigenous studies in education: the importance of knowing, pearson education australia, frenchs forest, pp. 83-100. ma rhea, z, anderson, pj, and atkensen, b 2012, improving teaching in aboriginal and torres strait islander education: australian professional standards for teachers, australian institute for teaching and school leadership, melbourne. mackinlay, e, and barney, k 2014, “pearls, problems and politics: exploring findings to teaching and learning projects in indigenous australian studies at the university of queensland,” the australian journal of indigenous education, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 31-41. martin, k 2005, “childhood, lifehood, and relatedness: aboriginal ways of being, knowing and doing,” in j phillips and j lampert (eds.), introductory indigenous studies in education: the importance of knowing, pearson education australia, frenchs forest, pp. 27-40. mayer, d, dixon, m, kline, j, kostogriz, a, moss, j, rowan, l, walker-gibbs, b, and white, s 2017, studying the effectiveness of teacher education: early career teachers in diverse settings, springer nature, singapore, doi: 10.1007/978-98110-3929-4 mcconaghy, c, and nakata, m 2000, rethinking indigenous education: culturalism, colonialism and the politics of knowing, post pressed, flaxton. miller, m, dunn, t, and currell, k 2005, “learning and the importance of knowing: student perspectives on centralising indigenous knowledge in their preparation as teachers,” in j phillips and j lampert (eds.), introductory indigenous studies in education: the importance of knowing, pearson education australia, frenchs forest, pp. 60-79. ministerial council on education, employment, training and youth affairs (mceetya) 2008, melbourne declaration on educational goals for young australians, viewed 18 march 2017 http://www.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/national_declaration _on_the_educational_goals_for_young_australians.pdf. moreton-robinson, a, singh, d, kolopenuk, j, and robinson, a 2012, learning the lessons?: pre-service teacher preparation for teaching aboriginal and torres strait islander students, viewed 17 october 2017, http://www.isrn.qut.edu.au/research/documents/ learning_the_lessons_final_report_isrn_qut__phases_1_-_3_2012.pdf. nakata, m 2011, “pathways for indigenous education in the australian curriculum framework,” the australian journal of indigenous education, vol. 40, pp. 1-8. new south wales aboriginal education consultitative group (nsw aecg) 2015, connecting to country [video clip], viewed 22 april 2017, https://www.aecg.nsw.edu.au/policies-and-programs/connecting-to-country/. new south wales government department of education and communities (nsw dec) 2008, aboriginal education and training policy: turning policy into coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 272 action, viewed 13 march 2017, https://education.nsw.gov.au/policylibrary/associated-documents/aetp_turning.pdf. ---. 2016, aboriginal education policy, viewed 13 march 2017, https://education.nsw.gov.au/policy-library/policies/aboriginal-education-andtraining-policy. new south wales government department of education and communities (nsw dec), new south wales aboriginal education consultative group (nsw aecg), & aboriginal education and training directorate (aetd) 2009, together we are, together we can, together we will: maintaining a collaborative partnership into the future. partnership agreement 2010-2020, viewed 13 march 2017, https://education.nsw.gov.au/aec/media/documents/ partnershipagreement.pdf. ober, r, and bat, m 2007, “both-ways: the philosophy,” ngoonjook: a journal of australian indigenous issues, vol. 31, pp. 64-86. queensland curriculum and assessment authority (qcaa) 2008, sharing knowledge about sacred sites and ceremonies, viewed 23 april 2017, https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/downloads/approach2/indigenous_p002_0802.pdf. queensland curriculum and assessment authority (qcaa) 2015, aboriginal and torres strait islander perspectives support materials [webpage], viewed 11 march 2017, https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/k-12-policies/aboriginal-torres-straitislander-perspectives/support-materials. rotary district 9455 aboriginal reference group (rotary) 2015, research project concerning a pilot education curriculum for perth secondary students about wadjak noongar history, culture and issues: final report, rotary district 9455, perth. south australian certificate of education board of south australia (sace board of sa) 2017, aboriginal education strategy 2017-2021, viewed 11 march 2017, https://www.sace.sa.edu.au/documents/652891/3311159/sace+board+aborigi nal+education+strategy+2017%e2%80%932021.pdf/d7dbd4b5-7033-4ecba1e7-92433163a781. sykes, r 1989, black majority, hudson publishing, hawthorn. taylor, s 1999, “indigenous cultures and identities”, in d meadmore, b burnett & p o’brien (eds.), understanding education: contexts and agendas for the new millennium, prentice hall, sydney, pp. 41-47. united nations (un) 1948, universal declaration of human rights, viewed 18 march 2017, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html. ---. 1989, convention on the rights of the child, viewed 18 march 2017, http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx. ---. 2007, declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, viewed 18 march 2017, https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/un-declaration-rights-indigenouspeoples-1. vass, g 2012, “‘so, what is wrong with indigenous education?’ perspective, position and power beyond a deficit discourse,” the australian journal of indigenous education, vol. 41, no. 2-3, pp. 85-96. victorian curriculum and assessment authority (vcaa) 2016, victorian aboriginal languages curriculum, viewed 11 march 2017, http://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/languages/victorian-aboriginallanguages/introduction/rationale-and-aims. coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 273 ---. 2017, aboriginal languages victoria [website], viewed 11 march 2017, http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/pages/alcv/about.aspx. western australia department of education (doe) 2016, aboriginal education: aboriginal perpectives across the curriculum (apac) [webpage], viewed 12 march 2017, http://www.det.wa.edu.au/aboriginaleducation/apac/detcms/portal/. williamson, j, and dalal, p 2007, “indigenising the curriculum or negotiating the tensions at the cultural interface? embedding indigenous perspectives and pedagogies in a university curriculum,” the australian journal of indigenous education, vol. 36, suppl., pp. 51-58. wiltshire, k, and donnelly, k 2014, review of the australian curriculum: final report, australian government, canberra, viewed 17 june 2015, http://www.studentsfirst.gov.au/review-australian-curriculum yipirinya school 2017, curriculum [webpage], viewed 22 april 2017, http://www.yipirinya.com.au/education/curriculum.phtml. zeichner, k, and conklin, h 2016, “beyond knowledge ventriloquism and echo chambers: raising the quality of the debate in teacher aducation,” teachers college record, vol. 118, no. 12, pp. 1-38. acknowledgements: i acknowledge that the research for this paper was conducted on arrernte and jagera country, and presented on nyungar country. i pay my respect to each of their elders, past, present and emerging. majon williamson kefu is a phd candidate with the batchelor institute for indigenous tertiary education. majon is currently based in alice springs, but is originally from brisbane, australia. majon has a variety of experiences working in community development and education in australia, papua new guinea and japan. her current research is focusing on the need for enhancing the role of learning about aboriginal and torres strait islander australia in the australian primary education system. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 tracing the girls: reimagining the immigrant past carol millner curtin university c.millner@curtin.edu.au copyright©2018 carol millner. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: on 19 january 1898 kate teehan disembarked from the s.s. wolloomoolloo at fremantle. she and kitty page, who arrived here in 1901, are but two out of the approximately 1,700 single women who came to west australia from great britain between 1849 and the early 1900s. this paper describes a reimagining of their stories; a practice-led research journey towards a piece of short fiction that unsettles the dominant narrative of single female immigration—that is, good but poverty-stricken lass boards a ship for australia where she works briefly before marrying well. while this narrative accurately describes the trajectory of kitty page, it fails to encompass the experience of kate teehan, an immigrant woman, multiply marginalised by gender, class, illiteracy and poor mental health. key words: single female immigration to western australia 1890-1905; practice-led research; short fiction. mailto:c.millner@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 richard godfrey rivers, under the jacaranda, 1903, oil on canvas, 143.4 x 107.2 cm, purchased 1903, collection: queensland art gallery. image courtesy: qagoma. richard godfrey rivers’ painting under the jacaranda (1903) depicts the artist and his wife, selina, taking afternoon tea under what is thought to have been the first jacaranda tree planted in australia (millner, 2014, pp.174-175; tiffin, 1988, p.88). under the jacaranda provides a valuable insight into the lifestyle and aspirations of australia’s burgeoning middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century. indeed, the brisbane scene depicted here seems to be aping the manners and mores of british high society in a very minor way when compared to images of the fremantle hunt club enjoying afternoon tea on the tennis courts at the stirlings’ claremont home in west australia1 around 1900 (bolton and gregory, 1999, p.77). of immediate interest to this discussion is the young woman in the centre of rivers’ painting. dressed in formal black and white to mark her servant status is a young woman whose name i have not anywhere seen recorded. we do not know who she is, where she was born, or how she came to be serving tea to godfrey and selina rivers. we do know that between 1860 and 1900 almost 90,000 single british women accepted an assisted passage to one of the six australian colonies in order to work as domestic servants (gothard, 2001, p.2). 1,700 of these young women came to west australia. two of these women are the subject of a short fiction narrative i am developing as part of a practice-led phd in creative writing. tracing the girls (working title) is an attempt to reimagine, through creative research, the lived reality of kate teehan who arrived in coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 west australia in 1898 and kitty page who arrived in 1901. the aim of the piece is to unsettle the dominant narrative of single female immigration—that is, good but povertystricken lass boards a ship for australia where she works briefly before marrying well.2 while this narrative accurately describes the trajectory of kitty page, it fails to encompass the experience of kate teehan, an immigrant woman, multiply marginalised by gender, class, illiteracy and poor mental health. kate teehan and kitty page, who i rename eva and bridie in order to reimagine their past as short fiction, arrived at the tail end of the pre-federation period in which west australia accepted assisted female migrants. following the discovery of gold at coolgardie and kalgoorlie in the 1880s, perth went from “makeshift to made it” (mackay, 2016, p.46) and the population of west australia exploded from 29,000 in 1880 to 288,000 in 1910 (hetherington, 2009, p.130). a rapidly developing social elite, and those who aspired to be like them, fuelled demand for domestic servants. kate teehan, who arrived in 1898, and kitty page, who arrived in 1901, came to work in perth just as west australia’s first boom period was ending. from shipping lists, it is apparent that both girls were irish but that is where the similarity ends. while kitty page left posterity a photograph, a shipboard journal and two letters to her mother, kate teehan died without leaving any firsthand trace of herself. official documents, a few newspaper accounts of her death and sparse notes that outside observers, such as miss monk, the shipboard matron, made are all that remain of kate teehan’s life on board ship and in west australia. perth, april. on a late summer’s day in 1899, bridie macken sat up straight and still in a darkened photography studio, looked unsmilingly at the camera and was rewarded, eventually, with a black and white photograph that showed her to advantage. this image of her, in a new dress with fashionable leg of mutton sleeves, her hair piled high on her head and her chin tilted slightly, was to be a present for her mother. bridie slipped the photograph into an envelope and wrote an accompanying letter in which she spoke of her place of employment, her wages and pastimes and the black grace of west australia’s swans which are perpetually a surprise to her. she did not mention the business with eva, thinking that it would only bring darkness to her mother’s eyes. instead, what her mother will see from the photograph is that she, bridie, has arrived already into a better future.3 historical accounts of the women who came to australia to work as domestic servants rely on colonial records that were kept in order to select, protect and receive them (gothard, 2001, p.viii). firsthand accounts of the women’s experience survive only as shipboard journals, diaries and letters penned by middle-class immigrants and philanthropists. these do not reflect the experience of working class girls like kate teehan who were largely illiterate due to their lack of access to education. marxistfeminist historians such as charlotte macdonald (1990) and jan gothard (2001), who have provided the most comprehensive surveys of the female immigration schemes to australasia, explore the way that societal structures impacted the emigrating women. in coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 130 particular, they describe the effect of benevolent maternalism as it was implemented by middle class women’s organisations such as the united british women’s emigration association and the british ladies’ female emigration society, as well as government officials in great britain, prior to departure, and in australia and new zealand, after arrival. disembarking in west australia in the late 1890s and early 1900s, kate teehan and kitty page experienced the three-fold system of selection, protection and reception at its height. by this time, pre-selected groups of single women travelled to west australia under the care of a ship board matron such as mary pittman monk (fairweather and hayes, 2013a, p.213; gothard, 2001, p.84) who served as the girls’ chaperone. upon arrival the girls were received at an immigrant depot in goderich street, perth, which served concurrently as the women’s home and poor house. visitors other than ministers of religion were discouraged and “although the women could apply to leave the poor house they were treated very much like prisoners and compelled to work hard while they were there” (hetherington, 2009, p.115). perth, 20-21 january. as they approached it from the road the girls saw that the immigrant depot was a long two storey brick building with outward opening windows, only the top level of which could be seen above a high wooden fence. conducted through the main entrance, the girls were shown in to a dusty yard where a pile of wooden planks rested at one end and a row of w.c.s lined the other. here the matron, mrs cullen, greeted miss monk warmly, while the existing residents stood in an untidy group, wearing what looked like a general servant’s uniform; long dark sleeves under pinafores that shone with such brilliance in the hot january light that the immigrant girls found themselves blinking under the curious gaze of their owners. eva was reminded of the orphanage she had come from, and bridie was not surprised to later discover that mrs cullen was a widow with four children, and that the immigrant depot did double service as a poor house and women’s home. following miss monk’s departure the girls were shown into a long room divided into sections by means of simple wooden partitions. each compartment was sufficiently large to accommodate three girls. wooden slat beds, devoid of bed clothes stood ready on a scrubbed stone floor. despite the windows all standing open the atmosphere indoors seemed hot and airless. looking around at the stable-like accommodation bridie thought that calling this place a “home” was a bit of a stretch considering it was barren of soft furnishing, or any other decorative element that might render it inviting. clearly the colonial secretary does not mean for us to become comfortable here, she thought. out loud she said – “come girls. if we take these stalls side by side and top ’n tail the beds we can all stay together for one more night.” as soon as the last four words were out of her mouth bridie wished with all her heart to call them back, for in the faces of her companions she saw the same fear that lay coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 unspoken in herself. she encouraged them too quickly to arrange their things, as though bustling about might turn their minds away from the uncertainties and fears that lay in all their hearts. bridie knew that no one could, at this moment, tell them what would become of them in the morning or how they would be getting on in the colony a week from now, let alone what the long wide future held in store for each of them. control or protection of the women at each stage of their emigration “had many faces: protection of immigrant women from physical and moral danger, protection of the colonial government investment in domestic labour, and protection of colonial homes from ‘contamination’ through contact with ‘immoral’ women” (gothard, 2001, p.viii). the underlying assumption of contemporary middle class philanthropists and government officials was that the women would be safe upon their arrival at the private homes in which they were to serve. danger would attend them only while travelling alone. emigration proponents overlooked the fact that living and working in private homes, the women were still alone and, i would suggest, vulnerable to what we would today acknowledge and name as sexual predation. employers were not screened, although hoteliers were not permitted to hire staff directly from the immigrant depot (gothard, 2001, p.84), and no checks and balances existed to ensure that the women were safe from sexual abuse within the private homes that served both as workplace and domicile. alone in a country where she had no family network, a young woman had no one to turn to if she found her position to be intolerable. significantly, opponents of these immigration schemes for single women, such as the agent general for west australia, sir malcolm fraser, based in london until 1898, felt that migration within a family group or migrating to join family members already resident in the colony was preferable to emigrating alone (gothard, 2001, p.87). claremont, 24 january. eva and mrs price descended from the railway platform at claremont on the shenton road side, opposite butler’s swamp which exuded at all hours a stench of mud, ooze and rotting vegetation. encountering the smell for the first time, eva put one hand up to her face and faltered under the weight of her trunk, even though it held little. mrs price announced in a bracing voice and with an accent eva was coming to associate with australia, “the smell gets bad but it’s nothing to the insects.” alighting as they had the women stood with their backs to the iridescent glory of freshwater bay; its jetties and picnic areas and the splendour of the osborne hotel. that she had alighted in a pretty water-side village and that the friendly society rooms were but two blocks away from her new address was something eva was quite unable to realize. in shenton road a scant half dozen houses had been built. the prices’ house was the farthest from the corner, and the handsome limestone block and terracotta railway station which had itself only recently been completed. on the southern side of the price coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 property there was no neighbouring home, only the bare dirt road, the bright sky and the flat summer browns of the swamp across the street. as she stepped into the shade of the narrow hall eva felt anxiety once again enclose her, as if a dark swarm of insects had already come inside. when mrs price closed the door behind them eva realized that she would be the sole servant in the house. the work begun by macdonald and gothard in the 1990s and 2000s is now being enriched by the work of inter-disciplinary feminist scholars like amanda gardiner who cites jacques derrida as her theoretical inspiration, the magdalena group as her context and arts-based approaches from sociology as her preferred feminist methodology (gardiner, 2015, p.3). in her essay “wet their bones with sweat and blood, knit their bones with me” (2015) gardiner describes the arts-based feminist methodology that underpinned her phd, completed the previous year.4 gardiner’s study focuses on the archival remains of 55 single women (1829-1901) who secretly carried and killed their “unlicensed children” (swain and howe, cited in gardiner, 2015, p.2). from gardiner’s study, it is possible to see that single women in west australia were at times sexually abused and raped, and that the society of nineteenth century west australia did not accept unlicensed sexual behaviour from young women. it was assumed that any rupture of the polite boundary between sexes occurred because the young woman’s morals were suspect, making it impossible for victims to seek help. the women in gardiner’s study, desperate to remain on the right side of the moral divide, hid their pregnancies and killed their “unlicensed” children. the women’s embodied experience, their pain, and the pain of their children has been suppressed, gardiner argues, by the nature of colonial record-keeping. she poses the question, “if there is no archive should there be no history?” (gardiner, 2014, p.7). gardiner’s work not only evidences that some single women in west australia engaged in domestic service were sexually abused and raped, but describes how she utilised an arts-based methodology to continue her work in the absence of comprehensive archival remains. gardiner’s approach was to interweave three voices in the telling of mary summerland’s story—just one story out of the 55 cases she uncovered. the first voice in mary’s story provides a historical non-fiction narration, “the second is musing, a reflexive examination of [gardiner’s] own knowledge making” (gardiner, 2015, p.1) and the third voice is “a fictionalized imagining” (gardiner, 2015, p.1) that comes into being by virtue of the space between what gardiner knows from the archival remains of mary’s story, and what gardiner senses her embodied experience might have been. in order to begin tracing the girls, i undertook the traditional archival searches. newspapers, ships lists, shipboard journals, letters and police files were all grist to the mill but, as i anticipated, i found little trace of kate teehan’s embodied experience. it was as i procrastinated, and drew back from beginning my creative response to the archive, that ross gibson’s (2012) reimagining of william dawes at sydney cove came to my attention. working from scant archival remains, albeit that they are in dawes’ own hand, gibson wrote: “where the most important relationships are not explicit in the records, they might be implicit in the absences” (gibson, 2012, p.134). gardiner and gibson alerted me to the idea that i might develop a “speculative biography” (gibson, 2012, p.134). this was both an exciting and frightening idea. as a coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 historian, inhabiting a post-truth world, i was wary of stepping off into the unknown and unknowable, of departing from my disciplined adherence to evidence and of producing something that might be mistaken for ‘history.’ as a fiction writer i was excited by the possibilities of this more speculative approach, and as a feminist scholar i could not pass up the opportunity to explore the central question—what happened to kate teehan? i wanted to further explore kate’s life and agency, to spend time with her, to explore the meaning of comments like “slow” (monk, 1897). i wanted to tell one possible version of kate’s story. in deference to the feelings of family members, albeit that i do not know who they are or even whether they exist, i decided to set the short fiction narrative in 1899; to invent a name for the ship that the girls arrived on; to create composite characters; and to change the names of the girls’ employers, the staff at the immigrant depot, and police personnel. only miss monk appears in my story wearing her own name, for she was an australasian institution. the key event, kate’s suicide remains, of course, central to the fiction narrative. a suicide of an unusually horrifying nature took place at the women’s depot, in goderich street, yesterday morning. a young woman named kate teehan, who was one of the batch of immigrants who arrived in the colony from england a few weeks ago, had been staying at the depot while awaiting engagement as a domestic servant. yesterday morning at about seven o’clock, she dressed herself, and after carefully saturating her clothes with kerosene, retired to an outhouse and applied a match to them. in a moment she was a mass of flames, and before any assistance could be rendered she had been burned beyond recovery. she was immediately conveyed to the hospital, where she lingered in great agony until a few minutes after nine o’clock, when she died. no reason can be assigned to the rash action, but the woman is said to have been somewhat eccentric in her behaviour. this opinion was formed by the hospital authorities during a two-day sojourn ... . (suicide, 1898, p.2) perth, 8 february. “are you miss bridget macken?” “yes, constable. i am.” “and did you arrive here on the s.s. wyndham, january 19 of this year?” “i did, constable.” bridie took her eyes off p.c. bremworth for a moment to look across at her employer who was standing behind and to one side of him. bridie had not served in the house long enough to be able to read mrs marshall’s gaze and looked to her now, in the absence of a closer ally, for some sign, some hint of reassurance but mrs marshall’s coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 tall frame was unbending and her lips, pressed together as they were, reminded bridie of a reluctant cockle which, having been plucked summarily from its tidal home had no intention of ever re-opening its mouth. “are you listening now, bridget?” the soft, grave tone of his voice caused bridie to look back at him, as though he were the parish priest at home. she nodded her head, “yes, constable.” “i need you to tell me the truth now, for it concerns one of you girls.” there had been sixty girls on the voyage out with bridie, most of them english, all of them single and all of them bound to pay for their free outward passage with a year of domestic service in the swan river colony. at the policeman’s words, bridie’s thoughts flew swiftly to the other seven girls of the irish watch, the girls she had eat and slept and larked about with on the shipboard journey; eva, kate, hannah, mary, kitty, maggie and ellen. for forty-three days they had been like sisters to each other and bridie often felt a pang of loss at the way they had all now been scattered. she, kate, hannah, maggie, ellen and eva had each gone to employment in perth houses, so might at least be afforded some opportunity to meet one another at friendly society gatherings, but kitty and mary had gone to work at a dairy in guildford and bridie felt that in all probability she would never see them again. she was not surprised that p.c. bremworth had come to ask her about the irish girls, for she had been the leader of their watch on board ship, but whatever could she tell him of them now, nearly a month after they had parted? fixing her grey eyes to the policeman’s own bridie replied – “i will tell you what i know, constable.” “was eva collins known to you on board?” “yes, constable.” “and are you aware that eva collins died yesterday in hospital?” “that cannot be the same girl, sir. eva has gone to work at claremont. i visited her at the depot on the sunday before she was to be collected. and that was only a fortnight ago.” as kate and kitty morphed into eva and bridie, and i gradually began writing their story, i became fascinated by the girls’ creativity and resourcefulness. i did not want to represent eva solely as a victim. i turned the archival information over and over in my mind, deliberating. apparently she had purposefully set fire to herself. was the journalist being sensationalist, i wondered? could this have been an accident? there are kitchen and hotel fires aplenty in the police general files for the period. and surely women were more inclined to use poison, or if nothing toxic were available, to jump coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 down a well? evidence of women using both these means to commit suicide in claremont in 1895-1900 are evidenced in the police occurrence books for the period (bolton and gregory, 1999, p.75; gothard, 2001, p.204). i requested kate teehan’s death certificate in the hopes that the coroner might have questioned the suicide finding but he was categorical: “cause of death—from the effect of a severe burn which was self-inflicted while in a state of unsound mind.” the assertion that kate suffered poor mental health also led to a period of gardiner-like musing. kate is described in the archives as “slow” (monk, 1897), as “showing signs of weakness of intellect” (shocking suicide, 1898, p.47) and “eccentric” (suicide, 1898, p.2). how were these opinions formed? what did kate’s behaviour look like? considering that she was accepted into a selective emigration scheme in the late 1890s, she must have presented reasonably during the selection process. perhaps if kate were living in today’s world she would be diagnosed with poor executive function and a range of processing problems symptomatic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (see symptoms of adhd, 2016). if kate had an inattentive form of adhd with a tendency to become anxious and depressed, she would have been especially vulnerable to the exigencies of migration, and a less than competitive candidate for domestic service. still, i felt that this was not sufficient to explain her swift decline upon being returned to the immigrant depot. kate teehan burned herself to death just eight days after coming back to perth. what might have caused her to feel so desperate? perth, 9 february. “am i correct in thinking that you met eva while still in ireland, that you travelled to london together and boarded the s.s. wyndham together?” “yes, constable. from dublin as my family live nearby and eva was living in dublin itself.” “what did you think of eva when you first met her?” “we were all homesick in the beginning and then we became ill....and it was very discombobulating to be at sea.” “but there was never anything about eva that made you think that she was more melancholy than the rest of you?” bridie did not reply to constable bremworth’s question immediately, recalling how, a few days after the weather settled and the girls were feeling better, miss monk and the captain had arranged for them to take a gentle dinner of beef tea, bread and biscuits on the poop deck. here they had been segregated from the saloon and kitchen which, busy with the activities of men in varying states of mannerliness and inebriation, miss monk felt to exude an atmosphere unlikely to enhance the good character of her coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 charges. when the time came to gather for the meal, eva had remained below so that bridie was forced to go down to look for her. eva had not stirred as bridie approached their compartment but remained stooped at one of the long tables customarily used for meals. the room had smelt unpleasantly of sea-sickness. “it’s very nice outside, eva.” eva had made no sign that she had heard her, continuing to look down at her hands which were, bridie had then seen, engaged with some activity that caused the tip of eva’s tongue to peek out the corner of her mouth. with her red hair and gentle features eva reminded bridie of a match, a flame, though she had none of a flame’s quick brilliance. “eva,” she had tried again. “eva. miss monk is asking for you upstairs.” her lack of response had not surprised bridie a second time but she had felt a growing urgency for them both. she knew that if they did not move quickly, to rejoin the girlish crowd on the poop deck, another of miss monk’s charges would be sent to find them and that miss monk would have cause to note in her shipboard diary that not all the girls were obedient. a copper plate remark such as this against your name would, bridie knew, make it doubly hard to get work in the colony upon arrival. moving closer she could see that eva held a small white object and a knife. her voice, when it came sounded flat, as though all the air had been kicked out of it, “we will never go back will we?” eva had said, still looking down at her hands which were busy below the table. it was a statement although it sounded like a question. “have i been that bad that they should send me away?” the depth of appeal in eva’s words shook bridie who had not thought too much about eva’s past. instinctively she had sought to reassure her. “no,’ she had said, watching eva, whose cheeks were flushed. “i’m sure not.” at bridie’s words the limp and crooked line of eva’s mouth had set firm and she had straightened up. “are you alright to go now?” instead of answering her, eva had slipped one hand, together with its contents, into the pocket of her pinafore, gathered up her mug and spoon with the other and moved towards the door. sticking together, they had made their way wordlessly along the narrow passage, up the wooden steps and out from between the decks into the light. “no,” said bridie out loud to the policeman. “eva was as she was.” coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 today we understand that suicide results from several factors. the most common factor is a pre-existing mental health issue and/or one of the following: “anniversary of someone else’s suicide; pregnancy or fear of pregnancy; loss of freedom (incarceration); physical or sexual abuse; taunting or humiliation by peers; loss of self esteem; actual, perceived or anticipated humiliation, reprimand, parental disappointment or disapproval” (see factors and triggers for suicidal behaviour in youth, 2009). i reasoned that kate might be suffering from adhd with related anxiety and/or depression. it may be that she never fully understood or accepted the reasons why she had to leave ireland, in the same way that the child migrants of later years did not (humphreys, 2011). when she was returned to the immigrant depot from claremont, she would have understood herself to be unemployed and, given her depressed state, again unwanted. finding herself virtually incarcerated with inhabitants who would, by then, have viewed her as unemployable, kate’s self-esteem was likely to have plummeted. this would have meant that kate, already struggling with her mental wellbeing, was impacted by four out of the seven factors that commonly lead a vulnerable young person, aged 15-25 to suicide today. considering kate’s lack of social status, as a young female servant living in 1890s west australia, and given the silence that surrounded the “unlicensed” actions of the young women brought to light by gardiner’s study, it is difficult to rule out the possibility that kate was sexually abused or raped while staying at claremont. “where the most important relationships are not explicit in the records, they might be implicit in the absences,” writes gibson (2012, p.134). kate’s death was not investigated with the thoroughness or empathy that i have suggested in these excerpts; there was no bridie and no p.c. bremworth in real life. the police department general files for 7 to 10 february show that the police were not made aware of kate’s selfimmolation at the immigrant depot around 7 a.m., until 10.30 p.m. that night. there is no document extant that suggests that kate’s previous employer was interviewed, or the matron of the immigrant depot, or miss monk (the shipboard matron), or any of the immigrant girls. it seems as if nobody wanted to know why kate might be feeling suicidal. if, perhaps, something specific had gone wrong in the private and domestic space in which kate was sent to work, no one wanted to hear about it. the ‘fiction’ that i have written is informed by what i have found in the archives and imagined after attending to the patterns of absence there. claremont, 28 january. eva was relieved to discover that mr and mrs price had three young children for her to look after. there was also another, an older boy named john. from her first days in the house eva committed to establishing a routine and mrs price, who was expecting another baby, did not, at first, criticize her efforts. eva rose in the morning and lit the stove so that there was hot water by the time mr and mrs price appeared. next she shepherded the energetic children through breakfast, in to clothes and out the door to the one-room school. as their chatter receded up the road, she turned her attention to cleaning the house and preparing a meal for mrs price to eat at coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 138 noon and by friday she had caught up with the household’s laundry, a chore with which the family had fallen woefully behind. eva was preparing to press a basket of clean linen on friday afternoon, when the eldest price boy appeared unexpectedly and stood in the doorway, casting his shadow across the blanket she had laid over the table for ironing. john, eighteen years old and a head taller than his father, had a job further down the railway line towards fremantle. eva was accustomed to him leaving even before she was awake and he usually returned home only slightly before the younger children. his early arrival today made her uneasy, and she moved quickly toward the stove to test the irons with a flick of water from the saucer that she had prepared nearby. “aren’t you going to wish me good day?” john asked. neither of the irons was hot enough for eva to continue her work, so she moved to shake out one of mr price’s shirts and greeted john without looking up, hoping that he would realise that she was uncomfortable with him there, and that he should move off. “you’re a dainty little thing.” eva moved a little further away from him to wait beside the corner cupboard where she barked her shin against an empty tea chest. john moved swiftly then and held his hand over her mouth so that she was forced to taste the sweat and wood sap still on him. eva bit down hard on his thumb. “no one will come at this time of day, even if you scream” he said and shoved her roughly toward the table. eva saw the heavy irons still warming and, quickly twisted her torso to fall out of his reach. “don’t –“ she began holding an arm out in front of her and the other out toward the stove. “what?” john taunted. eva did not stop to answer but swung a hot iron at him and ran out the door, directly to the w.c. where she locked herself in. the small space was hot and stunk worse even than the swamp across the street but she had managed to throw the iron towards him and he did not come after her. eva dropped her weight on to the edge of the latrine and sat there, sweaty and shaken. after a time she heard the sound of an axe, as john took logs from the pile and split them for the stove; one, two, three blows and a piece fell into sections. she considered the lock on the w.c., a narrow strip of wood dropped into an useless looking catch. she heard john’s axe again, another block of wood demolished ... in the spaces and gaps within the archive, there is the shape of a girl named kate teehan. her shape is preserved by what we can piece together from the archival record. kate, newly arrived from ireland and suffering from poor mental health, went to work as a domestic servant in a private home at claremont. within a week kate was returned to the immigrant depot and effectively incarcerated. eight days later, kate was dead. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 139 tracing the girls is one literary response to the girl-shaped space left behind by kate teehan. references bolton, g., and gregory j. (1999) claremont: a history. perth: university of western australia press. the burning of kate teehan, an inmate of the female home [file of the superintendent of relief]. state records office of western australia. (cons 527, 1898/0345). erickson, r. (1992) the bride ships, experiences of immigrants arriving in western australia 1849-1889. perth: hesperian press. factors and triggers for suicidal behaviour in youth (2009) retrieved from www.schoolnurse.org.nz/attachments/pdf_files/bestpractice. accessed may 5, 2017. fairweather, t., and hayes, l. (2013a) bride ships in all but name: miss monck and the servant girls, part 1. western ancestor. june, pp. 211-216. ---. (2013b) bride ships in all but name: miss monck and the servant girls, part 2. western ancestor. september, pp. 241-247. gardiner, a. (2014) sex, death and desperation: infanticide, neonatacide and concealment of birth in colonial western australia. unpublished phd thesis, edith cowan university, western australia. this work is currently embargoed. ---. (2015) wet their bones with sweat and blood, knit their bones with me: reflections on arts-based research into colonial western australian child murder (1829-1901), outskirts online journal, 32. retrieved from http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-32/amanda-gardiner. gibson, r. (2012) 26 views of the starburst world: william dawes at sydney cove 1788-91. perth: university of western australia press. gothard, j. (2001) blue china: single female migration to colonial australia. melbourne: melbourne university press. hetherington, p. (2009) paupers, poor relief and poor houses in western australia, 1829-1910. perth: university of western australia press. humphreys, m. (2011) oranges and sunshine. australia: penguin. macdonald, c. (1990) a woman of good character: single women as immigrant settlers in nineteenth century new zealand. wellington: allen and unwin. mackay, m. (2016) perth: growing up. in white, t-a. (ed.), perth, a guide for the curious (pp. 43-53). perth: university of western australia press. millner, c. (2014) settling. westerly 59:1, pp. 174-175 ---. (2017) tracing the girls (working title). unpublished manuscript, curtin university, western australia. monk, m. (1897, december 8) matron’s diary for the voyage of the wooloomooloo, (8/12/1897–19/1/1898). [journals of immigrant ships]. colonial secretary’s office. state records office of western australia. (cons 504/12, an228). news and notes—coroner’s inquests (1898, march 5) the west australian, p. 5. retrieved from http://trove.nla.gov.au/news-article/ 3196517 [police department general files] (1897-1898) state records office of western australia. (cons 430, 5000/1897 -1776/1898). http://www.schoolnurse.org.nz/attachments/pdf_files/bestpractice http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-32/amanda-gardiner http://trove.nla.gov.au/news-article/ coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 140 shocking suicide (1898, february 11) western mail, p.47. retrieved from http://trove.nla.gov.au/news-article/33150317 suicide: a recent immigrant burns herself to death (1898, february 8) the daily news. retrieved from http://trove.nla.gov.au/news-article/82076769 symptoms of adhd (2016) http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/adhd.html. retrieved october 14, 2017. teehan, k. (1898, february 7) [death certificate]. department of attorney general, western australia. tiffin, s. (1988) looking for the beau monde in brisbane: godfrey rivers under the jacaranda. in seear, l., and ewington, j. (eds.), brought to light: australian art 1850-1965 (pp. 88-93). brisbane: queensland art gallery. acknowledgements: i am indebted to my supervisors dr. deborah hunn and dr. marilyn metta at curtin university for their generous support and advice, as well as to dr. lucy dougan, dr. philippa martyr and dr. bobbie oliver, who provided additional comment and encouragement. the short fiction work, tracing the girls, had its beginning at varuna, the writers’ house, nsw, where i was a participant in the short prose intensive 2015. i am indebted to everyone concerned for their hospitality and encouragement. thanks are also due to the staff of the state library of western australia, battye library and the state records office of western australia. thank you too to my phd colleagues at the hub. this research was supported by an australian government research training program (rtp) scholarship and curtin university post graduate scholarship. carol millner has a ba (hons) in history and is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at curtin university where she is developing a book of short stories concerning immigration to western australia. carol has published poetry and short stories in a range of anthologies and journals most notably, lines in the sand, amber contains the sun, indigo, regime, westerly and poetry new zealand yearbook 2017. carol’s poetry manuscript, settling was shortlisted in the inaugural dorothy hewett award for an unpublished manuscript, 2015, and her academic writing has been published in australasian drama studies, the new zealand women’s studies journal and women together: a history of women’s organisations in new zealand. 1 west australia is used to refer to the contemporary state of western australia throughout this article as the fiction work under discussion is set in the pre-federation period, the years immediately prior to 1901. 2 charlotte macdonald in new zealand has already gone some way towards debunking this popular myth, suggesting that it is something of an over-simplification. in her study http://trove.nla.gov.au/news-article/ http://trove.nla.gov.au/news-article/ http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/adhd.html coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 141 of 4,028 single immigrant women to canterbury in the 1850s and 60s (macdonald, 1999, p.135), she found that a little over half of them could be traced from passenger list to marriage registrar. macdonald’s evidence suggests that the women married men of a similar class to themselves, and that only “over the course of a lifetime, as a result of the joint labor of a married couple, rather than suddenly upon marriage” (macdonald, 1999, p.148, my italics) did they experience upward social mobility. western australian attempts to trace the social destination of the single immigrant women have been limited to date, but suggest a similar pattern (erickson, 1992, p.151; fairweather and hayes 2013b, p.244). 3all italicised fiction excerpts are from millner (2017). 4 see gardiner (2014). this work is currently embargoed. microsoft word bobis edit menage a trois of tongues-merlinda bobis.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 ménage à trois of tongues (a trilingual homecoming) merlinda bobis australian national university merlinda.bobis@anu.edu.au copyright©2021 merlinda bobis. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. the following brief essay and three versions of a poem are excerpts from paguli, pag-uwi, homecoming. poetry in three tongues. merlinda bobis, university of santo tomas publishing house, manila 2004. a few years ago, she returned to writing poetry after four novels. ‘ménage à trois of tongues’ (preface of pag-uli pag-uwi, homecoming. poetry in three tongues) strange to resurrect old voices, old images. strange to hear them with new ones. even stranger to sing ‘old-new’ all at once. is this possible? i stopped writing poetry in favour of prose. i stopped writing in bikol and filipino in favour of ‘just english’. i left more than a decade ago. now i come home stuttering to my old loves that still give this heart an acheful turn. ay, maduso! laid out beside each other, these old and new loves (bikol, filipino and english) are contesting-romancing one other. and like in any romance, they surrender pieces of the self. words, images and metaphors are sacrificed. time and context are shaken; all must forego precious affinities. some of the bikol poems were completed as early as the late eighties. in australia, i visited them countless times: linakaw paduman-pabuwelta / paduman-pabuwelta / an sakuyang daghan — lest i got lost. i translated them into filipino then english, in little bursts. strange to grapple with biriran, tambis, milflores, kamya or pili in winter. the poverty of english! it can never sweat convincingly, not in the way we do among a field of naglalaad-laad na bandera española. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 my newer poems are as new as 2004. there are also earlier poems written in english first then translated into bikol and filipino. i like to believe that most of them sound better in my first tongue, even marilyn monroe with her skirt flying and pale legs flashing. and she pales even more beside a banana heart just blooming: nabalikasan / bako su saiyang mapuputi na tabay / kundi su guramoy na saraday-saday — ay, amarillo! yes, i come home stuttering, but i try. i even try to evoke in english the lilt of the old voices, their taste on the tongue. but the timbre of old loves is elusive and nostalgia can be a curse. it is wiser to make the most of wintering with the new sweetheart. english prose. but i know, try as i do, this english that i need to love more because of the demand of domicile, this english that has opened secret doors for me can never begin to comprehend how, at times — napuputot an bayawas sa sakuyang puso. ———————————————————————— translations of bikol lines (as in the order above): 1. ay, how it stings! 2. paced back and forth / back and forth / this breast of mine 3. star fruit, java rose apple, hydraenga, butterfly lily, philippine almond (canarium ovatum) 4. flaming cana lilies 5. … unfurled / not pale legs / but tiny yellow fingers — ay, how golden! 6. the guava unripens in my heart 1. english banana heart right after my long flight, i wore it on a tree under a canopy of green flags, my banana heart magenta velveteen and just beginning to open. my petticoated flirt: coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 130 three layers of heartskin unfurled in the air, a la monroe flashing not pale legs but tiny yellow fingers — ay, how golden! as if strung into a filigree of topazes. but yesterday, grandmother plucked it, stripped it to the core (desecrating aesthetics and romance), and cut it in two. one half she served fresh, dressed in vinegar; the other, she cooked in coconut milk and chilli while humming about young girls who eloped with an alien tongue. later, while filling my plate, in the dialect, she said, ‘here, two dishes from one heart.’ i could not eat, not on a hollow growing peculiar in my breast. 2. filipino puso ng saging pagkatapos ng kaytagal na biyahe, isinuot ko sa isang puno itong aking puso ng saging — coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 131 sa lilim ng mga lunting bandera, heto ang biyoletang pelus namumukadkad pa lamang. ang aking naka-petticoat na kiri: tatlong suson na balat ng puso iwinawagayway sa ulap; a la monroe bagang naglalantad di ng kayputing mga hita, kundi ng maliliit na daliri — ay, amarillo! wari’y tinuhog na topasyo. ngunit kahapon, pinitas ni lola itong bunga, hinubdan pagkaraan hanggang kaibuturan (di man lang iginalang ang estetika at romansa) saka hinati sa dalawa ang kalahati’y ginawang ensalada sa asim ng suka; ang natira’y ginulay sa gata at labuyo, habang umaawit tungkol sa mga babaing nagtanan kasama ng banyagang dila. pagkatapos, habang sinasandukan ang aking pinggan, ako’y tinitigan, ‘heto, dalawang putahe mula sa isang puso.‘ di ako makakain — dama ko, walang kalaman-laman ang aking dibdib. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 3. bikol (my first tongue) puso ki batag pagkatapos kan haloy-haloy na biyahe, pigsulot ko sa sarong kahoy an sakong puso ki batag — sa lindong nin mga berdeng bandera, honi an biyoletang pelus na nagbubukad pa sana. an sakong naka-petticoat na duraton: tolong suon na kublit nin puso an pigwawagayway sa panganoron; a la monroe bagang nabalikasan bako su saiyang mapuputi na tabay, kundi su guramoy na saraday-saday — ay, amarillo! garo bagang tinuruhog na topasyo. pero kaso udma, pinudo ni lola ining bunga, tapos hinubaan hanggang sa kaubud-ubudan (dae man lamang ginalang an estetika asin romansa) tapos ginurot, pigduwa. an kabanga ginibong ensalada sa alsom kan suka; su iba, ginulay sa natok asin sanggariya, habang pakuru-kanta manongod sa mga babaying nagdulag kaiba kan estrangherong dila. pagkatapos, habang pigpapanuan su sakuyang pinggan, tolos akong pinutitukan, ‘honi, duwang putahe hale sa sarong puso.‘ coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 dae ako nakakaon — mate ko, daeng kalaog-laog an sakuyang daghan. merlinda bobis is an award-winning filipina-australian writer who has published in three languages: english, filipino, and her mother tongue bikol. she has had 4 novels, 6 poetry books, 2 collections of short stories published, and 10 dramatic works performed for stage and radio. her awards include the christina stead prize for fiction, 3 philippine national book awards, the steele rudd award (best collection of australian short stories), and the australian writers’ guild award (radio play). while most of her works are in english, they incorporate words and concepts (sometimes untranslateable to english) in her original languages. to evoke the landscape of her first home, she echoes the cadence, tone and orality of these languages. these features are evident in her new book of short stories the kindness of birds (spinifex australia, anvil philippines 2021). she has also returned to writing poetry. her latest poetry book accidents of composition was highly commended for the 2018 act book of the year award. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 183 resistance and visibility: how technology has promoted activism from australia's black sites michelle bui curtin university michelle.bui@curtin.edu.au copyright©2018 michelle bui. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the rise of social media platforms and online communication channels has strengthened the ability of australia’s political prisoners to form connections with the world beyond the fences. people who were previously rendered invisible by the australian immigration department are now increasingly participating in public forums and gaining access to platforms through which they are able to reclaim control over how their experiences are recorded and represented. technology has permitted the documentation and transmission of actions of resistance from within australia’s immigration prisons in the form of written testimonies, photos, videos and audio recordings. access to information and the ability to develop strong connections and working relationships has in turn impacted upon how community based activists articulate solidarity. the increase in information associated with these relatively new communication channels, which include facebook and other messaging applications have not yet manifest in substantive policy change; however, they have presented serious challenges to the standard operating procedures of the immigration detention regime. this paper will explore examples of how technology has promoted activism from australia's black sites and some of the actors involved in the creation and dissemination of this work. keywords: activism; political prisoners; refugees. australia's offshore prisons in the pacific, officially known as regional processing centres, are operated under a veil of secrecy, outside of an effective state jurisdiction mailto:michelle.bui@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 184 and with little independent oversight. this has led to their characterisation as black sites, as articulated by researchers against pacific black sites (rapbs) who state, black sites is a term that has been widely used in the war on terror to describe locations where the us and its allies maintain secret prisons or conduct other illicit activities away from public or legal scrutiny. these sites are characterised by secrecy and lack of accountability. they are most often located in racialized and/or formerly colonized territories, and they continue practices of abuse and torture perpetrated there against colonized peoples. we refer to australia's camps on its own former colonial territories of manus island, png, and nauru as black sites in order to highlight their structural connections with other extra-legal or illegal places of confinement, abuse and torture ... australia’s black sites, we argue, are precisely those extrajudicial spaces where people of colour are imprisoned and tortured through the exercise of sovereign forms of white, settlercolonial violence. (rapbs, what are black sites?, 2015) australia’s neo-colonial strategy of appropriating neighbouring pacific island nations for sites of carceral punishment effectively expands the border zone to distance its extremities from public view in an attempt to render the plight of australia's political prisoners invisible. imprisoning asylum seekers in remote sites within australia is a strategy that has been persistently employed by the australian government. historically, remote mainland detention sites have included christmas island, curtin, leonora, port hedland, scherger, woomera and baxter (phillips, 2013). the introduction of the ‘pacific solution’ in 2001, effectively remade the australian border, expanding it to annex the sovereign space of other states for its own uses. aside from enacting the punitive agenda of ‘deterrence,’ the removal of refugee bodies to spaces of indeterminate sovereignty reflects an attempt to relocate responsibility, deflect blame and allow these exceptional spaces to operate outside the law with diminished mechanisms for accountability (perera, 2007, pp. 206-207). australian media are routinely denied access to the camps on manus and nauru, and secrecy clauses pervade the contracts of the private companies and ngos complicit in their operation. in these sites, mobile phones have at times been rendered contraband, and communication with advocates, media and human rights organisations outside the camps has exposed both prisoners and employees to considerable personal risk. despite these risks, the vast majority of knowledge in the public domain has been sourced from people who are themselves subject to australia’s violent detention regime. for as long as there has been violence enacted upon the bodies of asylum seekers and refugees there has, too, been resistance. actions of resistance have ranged in nature and scale, from working within department of immigration, serco and ihms complaint systems, in addition to lodging complaints with human rights bodies, to defying the system itself by smuggling contraband goods into the centres, talking to journalists, in addition to more direct actions where people have used their bodies to challenge the system. in the early 2000s one of the primary means of resistance were protest actions which were intended to increase visibility through media coverage and thus help challenge the information blackout. at this time, however, prisoners were rarely able to speak directly for themselves to narrate or explain their own actions, thus their intent could easily be misconstrued or manipulated to suit alternative agendas (fiske, 2012, p. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 185 2). in recent years, the ability of australia’s political prisoners1 to speak to their own actions and enter into and challenge mainstream discourses has increased significantly. this paper will explore how social media platforms and online communication channels have strengthened the ability of australia’s political prisoners to reach through the wire, to defy fences, seas and borders, and connect with people who the government does not want their voices to reach. it will consider the volume of knowledge available prior to the rise of technology-driven communication and how technology has influenced the actions that prisoners engage in, supported their agency, and shifted the role of australian activists to respond to and amplify the voices that can now be heard more clearly. illuminating the black sites the ‘pacific solution’ was first announced in september 2001 in the aftermath of the ‘tampa affair.’2 the subsequent excision of particular australian territories from the australian migration zone, including christmas island, ashmore reef and the cocos islands, resulted in people who arrived in these excised zones being classified as “offshore entry persons” who were then barred from making a visa application in australia. “offshore entry persons” could then be taken to nauru and png for “processing” (mansted, 2007, pp. 1-2). the first iteration of the ‘pacific solution’ (2001-2007) marked the beginning of the ‘deterrence’ policies that persist today. in 2012, the labor government reopened the camps on manus and nauru. the current iteration of the ‘pacific solution’ has emphasised resettlement in their countries of incarceration, or a third country, like cambodia, that are seen as unattractive destinations. a very small number of people have been resettled in the u.s. and offers have been made by the new zealand government; however, the australian government has continuously refused to accept responsibility and provide resettlement. behrouz boochani writes from the manus prison, “our legal status as individuals has been suspended and we become legally un-nameable beings, transformed into animals devoid of dignity” (boochani, 2016a). in line with this perspective and akin to joshua comaroff’s analysis of guantanamo bay, it can be said that australia’s pacific black sites function “within a deliberate series of legal and geographical contradictions” that are tactical in nature and within a “system by which a detainee may be ‘rendered’ among different nation-states and legal norms.” like the “effective but not ultimate sovereignty” of the united states over guantanamo, australia can be understood to have “effective but not ultimate sovereignty” over the camps, and refugee status determination and resettlement processes on nauru and papua new guinea (comaroff, 2007, pp. 397-398). how activists and the wider australian community have been able to understand and engage with these processes and conditions has shifted considerably since 2001. it can be argued that this is largely a result of increased access to information and direct lines of communication with people on the ground. technological advances and the availability of mobile phones have facilitated outlets for activism that were previously either more difficult or not possible to access. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 186 the first iteration of the ‘pacific solution’ under the howard government was at a time where mobile phones were becoming more widely available. attempts were made to smuggle them into the detention network; however, access remained heavily restricted (briskman, 2013, pp. 14-15). camera phones, in particular, have been critical in documenting abuses, conditions and incidents within these black sites; however, the world’s first camera phone was only released in japan in 2000 (art gallery of new south wales, 2015). facebook, which has now become one of the primary means of communication with people incarcerated both in australia and on manus and nauru, was first launched in 2004 and was only extended beyond educational institutions in 2006 (phillips, 2007) and messaging applications like whatsapp, imo, viber, line, telegram and signal are all very recent developments. previously, letter writing and the restricted use of landline phones and detention centre computers were relied upon; however, these channels could easily be subject to censorship. in addition, the number of people in any given centre would significantly outnumber the number of available phones and computers, and in remote sites internet access was slow and unreliable (briskman, 2013, p. 14). as a result of the limited avenues of communication, access to information was largely contingent on the ability of journalists and independent oversight bodies to gain access to the centres. announced inspections and guided tours, however, cannot provide a holistic understanding of a prisoner’s experience. in theory, prisoners could use fixed landline telephones to speak with the media, but given the limited number of phones and queues for their use, prospects for doing so remained limited. some people chose to speak out; however, many were concerned that telephone calls were being monitored by immigration and understandably feared possible repercussions (briskman, 2013, p. 16). now, letter writing has largely been replaced by instant messaging and the increased accessibility of personal mobile phones permit relatively free disclosure. currently in most mainland immigration detention centres, a discriminatory policy operates whereby people who arrived in australia by plane are permitted to have a mobile phone (without a camera or internet connectivity); however, those who arrived by boat are not. possession of contraband phones in some cases allows additional communication channels to remain open, however, exposes people to potential risks and consequences. attempts to thwart access to mobile phones have continued as evidenced by an attempt to ban all mobile phones in mainland centres and on christmas island. this is a strategy likely intended to assist serco, who are contracted to operate and provide security in the mainland centres, to detect and confiscate contraband phones, and break established communication channels. legal challenges to the ban successfully secured an injunction; however, it is likely a temporary solution to ongoing challenges to phone access which at present remains inequitable (national justice project, 2017). in recent years, most remote mainland australian detention centres have been closed down. the location of centres in urban or suburban areas has meant that physical accessibility and scope for face-to-face visits have generally improved despite increasingly stringent ‘security’ measures. within australia, surveillance and monitoring systems are more restrictive than on manus and nauru thus rendering devices deemed to be ‘contraband’ more difficult to obtain. despite this, communication channels remain strong, such that where protests, deportations, deaths coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 187 and other incidents have occurred, activists are quickly alerted and are able to respond or release information to the media before notification through official channels occurs. lucy fiske’s phd thesis “insider resistance: understanding refugee protest against immigration detention in australia, 1999-2005” identifies that according to the people she interviewed, reaching the media was the primary consideration in organising protests inside the camps (fiske, 2012, p. 129). some prisoners developed an awareness of how protest actions could be manipulated to reinforce the portrayal of refugees as ‘uncivilised,’ ‘barbaric’ and ‘other’ to the australian citizenry. negative representations affirmed the government's argument that asylum seekers presented a criminal threat; however, they could not be easily avoided due to the department’s ability to frame events with their own narratives and disseminate those narratives to a wide audience. there were few platforms from which alternative perspectives could be presented. often the only power prisoners could exercise was over their own bodies. consequently, acts of resistance often included participation in hunger strikes, lip stitching, rooftop protests or breaches of the fences. while people continue to use their bodies to make visible the violence they have been subjected to, there are now more alternative outlets for expression available. access to technology, for example, has meant that people in detention can directly respond to comments and allegations made by the immigration minister, more easily disseminate journalistic or creative writing, and enter into existing public forums, which are deemed to be more “socially acceptable” than protest actions. this has helped increase the credibility and visibility of activists inside the camps. to some extent it has allowed prisoners to move away from more marginal spaces and have their voices reach different audiences, some of whom are in greater positions of power than typically sympathetic constituencies. penetration into mainstream media, however, still remains limited. the presence of camera phones in detention centres today means that the production of images from protest actions can often be controlled by those organising and participating in the protests. while journalists would previously have to travel to these sites to obtain photographs and video footage, which they would frame from their own vantage point, now activists inside the camps can share their own images on social media, or in some cases send journalists photographs for inclusion in articles and reports. this is exemplified by the peaceful demonstrations on nauru which began on 20 march 2016 and persisted for 238 consecutive days until 12 november 2016. these protests involved two groups—asylum seekers in the detention centre and refugees in the ‘resettlement’ camp opposite. despite the governments of nauru and australia declaring the camp to be an “open camp,” a gesture intended to thwart court challenges to the legality of “detention” (perera and pugliese, 2015), the positioning of people behind the fences was a very deliberate and symbolic representation of the ongoing denial of freedom despite the eased restrictions on physical movement. messages on banners and placards served to reinforce the visual symbolism of how bodies were positioned and framed. these messages helped prisoners to narrate their own actions and ensure that observers could quickly gain an understanding of their grievances and intent (figures 1-3). more recently, prisoners on manus island have used a telegram channel (https://t.me/manusalert/) to broadcast statements, articles and photos of protests in the lead up to the forced ‘closure’ of the camp on 31 october 2017. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 188 figure 1. day 200 of peaceful protests, nauru, figure 2. children protest, nauru, image: supplied. 5 october 2016, image: supplied. figure 3. australia. what is justice? nauru, figure 4. 14 april 2017 shooting manus island, image: supplied. image: supplied. camera phones have also allowed for the documentation of incidents and provision of photographic evidence. in several instances this has been useful in order to refute false claims or challenge evasive statements made by the government. this was evident in april 2017 when bullets were fired into the manus island immigration prison and the immigration department provided minimal comment but instead made the statement that “there are reports png military personnel discharged a weapon into the air during the incident” (cited in tlozek, 2017). photos published by men detained in the prison on social media accounts and published by journalists clearly depicted a different story. images of bullet holes through fences and steel sections combined with statements and testimony provided by the men helped construct a counter-narrative against which immigration minister peter dutton’s statements had to be measured (figure 4). it then became clear that bullets were fired into accommodation blocks and that men had been at risk of being shot. throughout the current iteration of the ‘pacific solution’ the accessibility of online communication channels has allowed some light to be shed where previously an almost impenetrable information blackout existed. while australia's prisoners remain physically remote, their voices are increasingly transcending the steel fences and making their way into australian media, social media and public spaces. information can be relayed to journalists, many of whom have established direct lines of communication with activists inside the camps. this has allowed for a much larger volume of media reporting both in australia and internationally. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 189 speaking for themselves australian advocates and human rights supporters are often quick to highlight the apparent absence of journalists from these sites; however, there are both professional journalists and citizen journalists incarcerated within the camps who are constantly reporting on incidents and conditions and whose work should be acknowledged. what was initially a trickle of information has become a flood of evidence of violence and abuse in the form of photographs, videos, audio recordings, and visual and written testimonies. this documentation, investigation and reporting has enabled the construction of a powerful counter-narrative that challenges mainstream discourses around ‘border protection’ and ‘saving lives at sea.’ incarcerated writers, poets and artists have also published work from behind the wire that can be appreciated as forms of art in their own right but equally as acts of resistance and bodies of evidence. the increasing presence of asylum seekers and refugees in the public discourse has challenged the passive victim archetypes too often ascribed to refugees. australia’s political prisoners are not objects upon which the state can exert violence and absolute power, they have less power than the government but they are not powerless; they are engaged in an unequal struggle for the restoration of their rights (fiske, 2012, p. 248). in the early 2000s people did manage to smuggle out some notes and make telephone calls to media and australian supporters; however, their voices were largely marginal to more dominant ones. aamer sultan recognised the absence of “detainee” voices in the public discourse and attempted to “try be the voice from inside” (fiske, 2012, p. 145). aamer is an iraqi doctor who was incarcerated in villawood for over three years who was determined to use his professional status as a doctor to bring credibility to observations about the mental health impact that detention has on people. in collaboration with an australian psychologist, he had research published in the medical journal of australia in 2001 while he was still in detention. he was in contact with a journalist, jacquie everitt, who helped smuggle a camera into villawood (fiske, 2012, pp. 145-147). in august 2001, footage recorded by aamer aired on national television. it was of an interview with saeed badraie, the father of seriously ill six-year-old shayan badraie who, during the interview, sat limp on his lap. as a young child, shayan had witnessed multiple suicide attempts, suffered from nightmares, and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. it was the first time that footage had been taken inside a detention centre without the government having editorial control. it caused national outcry and shortly after, shayan was transferred into foster care. five months later he was reunited with his mother and baby sister, and by august 2002 the entire family was reunited and granted temporary protection visas. they were later awarded financial compensation by the federal government for the psychological harm that shayan had suffered. there are other examples of people speaking out whilst in detention and upon release, including shahin shafaei, who is a playwright, actor, college lecturer and activist who wrote and performed refugitive, a play about hunger strikes in detention, following his release (fiske, 2012, pp. 137-138). while it was uncommon to hear directly from people in immigration detention during the early 2000s when mobile phones were not widely coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 190 available, there were some people who worked very hard to give people the opportunity to hear their voices. there are many contemporary examples of individuals who have spoken about their experiences and sought to inform people about the reality of the detention system. among those are hani abdile, behrouz boochani, ‘eaten fish’ and abdul aziz muhamat, each of whom has made a significant contribution to our collective knowledge and understanding of australia’s remote immigration prisons. they have skilfully used the channels of information exchange and dissemination that have been available to them. hani abdile is a poet, writer and advocate who fled somalia in 2013 and now lives in sydney. she started to write while held in australia’s immigration prison on christmas island, where she was detained for about 18 months. during this period she learned to read and write, which proved to be a source of strength and empowerment. she describes writing as a “weapon against stress and despair” and as “a way of healing and relief.” she recalls how one day she posted a poem on facebook entitled “freedom for education” following which she received a message from janet galbraith, coordinator of the writing through fences group. at the time hani did not consider herself a poet; however, this conversation marked the beginning of a strong personal and professional relationship (abdile, 2016, pp. 1-7). hani became involved in the writing through fences group which functioned as a supportive and nurturing predominantly online community of writers and poets. this group has also provided an outlet through which currently and formerly detained writers can publish and disseminate their work. from 2015, hani has also shared her work on a facebook page entitled “thoughts of freedom” which helped her connect with other people in the australian community. technology continues to be an important tool that hani and others have used to help amplify their voices and experiences both before and after they are released from detention. since hani has been living in the community, she has performed around australia including at the sydney opera house, been the recipient of numerous performance and community leadership awards, and has had her work published in literary journals, online and in anthologies. in 2016, she published and launched her first collection of prose and poetry entitled i will rise (abdile, 2016, pp. 4-6). behrouz boochani is a kurdish journalist and human rights defender who is currently incarcerated in the manus prison. he has had articles published in various online media sites and journals and has had his work recognised by pen. in 2015, behrouz lent his voice to co-narrate the short film nowhere line directed by lukas schrank. in june 2016, he sent a pre-recorded video question for prime minister malcolm turnbull that was aired on the q&a television program and in october 2016 he participated in the “diaspora symposium” held in sydney via video-link. he co-directed a feature film chauka, please tell us the time, which was shot with his mobile phone and produced in collaboration with filmmaker arash kamali sarvestani who is based in the netherlands. this film premiered at the sydney film festival in june 2017 and has since been screened elsewhere across australia and internationally, including in london and glasgow. the accessibility of the camera phone allowed behrouz to participate in and undertake these endeavours and become one of the most important voices in challenging the government’s offshore detention policies. of the film, boochani writes, “chauka is the name of a famous special bird in manus island that i love. it is also the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 191 name of solitary confinement unit in manus prison” (boochani 2016b). a description of the film states, at the heart of the film, the central thread around which all the others are woven—is the chauka, a bird that is sacred and central to manus island culture. the camera roams through the centre, and beyond, and conveys the torturous ordeal endured by the 900 men, incarcerated in the prime of their life, for over 40 months now, endlessly waiting, aimlessly pacing, enduring the heat, the erosion of hope, and destruction of the spirit ... through an ongoing conversation with several manus island men, we begin to understand the deep significance of the bird, and the ongoing colonial history of the island. we come to see the cruel irony—the name of a bird that means so much in manus island culture, being used as the name for a high security prison within the wider prison, which, for a time, was a place of isolation, and punishment. we come to understand that the appropriation of the chauka, as a name for a place of such abuse and suffering, is obscene, and reflective of the neo-colonial system on which the offshore detention system is based. (imdb, 2016) this unprecedented film, as a narrative framed, filmed and controlled by a prisoner recognised for his sophisticated political analysis, is a powerful challenge to the australian government. life in detention is a battle for control and behrouz has been successful in preserving his agency and overcoming attempts to silence him. the volume and variety of journalistic and creative work that he has been able to undertake from within the manus prison has been permitted by the technology-driven communication channels that he has been able to access. recording devices, mobile phones and messaging applications have allowed him to reach out to the outside world and collaborate with fellow activists, journalists and other allies. ten years ago, these opportunities would have been far more limited, which to some extent explains why the world’s understanding of the camps on manus and nauru was far less comprehensive than it is today. eaten fish is an iranian artist and political cartoonist, named ali, who was incarcerated in the manus prison. ali suffers from extreme ocd, panic attacks and complex ptsd, he was seriously assaulted in the manus prison and endured ongoing sexual harassment; his work speaks directly to the nightmarish world that he was enmeshed in. recently he was awarded the 2016 award for courage in editorial cartooning from cartoonists rights network international (crni) (perera and pugliese, 2016). crni wrote, the importance of the work of human rights defenders, artists, cartoonists and writers, such as eaten fish, within the prison camp cannot be overstated. nor can the fact that they are at further risk of violence each time they create, speak, draw or write. eaten fish is one of those whose work as a cartoonist brings to light the horrors that are happening around him. crni believes that his body of work will be recognized as some of the most important in documenting and communicating the human rights abuses and excruciating agony of daily life in this notorious and illegal prison coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 192 camp. his work pushes through the veil of secrecy and silence and layers of fences in a way that only a talented artist speaking from the inside can. (crni, 2016) in early 2015, award-winning cartoonist first dog on the moon connected with eaten fish online. in july 2016, he helped launch a campaign that invited cartoonists to draw cartoons in support of the “save eaten fish” campaign (https://eatenfish.com), urging the australian government to bring him to australia for specialised medical treatment. countless renowned australian cartoonists including david pope, cathy wilcox and david rowe have made contributions. in december 2017, after more than four years in limbo, eaten fish left papua new guinea after securing an artist residency through the international cities of refuge network. this was only made possible by the sustained advocacy of the cartoonists’ network, janet galbraith and first dog on the moon (doherty, 2017). another project that demonstrates the possibilities permitted by access to relatively new communication channels is the messenger, an award-winning 10-part podcast series produced by behind the wire and the wheeler centre. this project is a collaboration between abdul aziz, a community leader, writer and activist incarcerated in the manus prison and michael green, a melbourne-based journalist. over the course of about a year, the two men exchanged thousands of voice messages via the messaging app, whatsapp; these include autobiographical detail about abdul aziz's flight from sudan, and the experiences he has been subject to after being sent to manus island, which include intimate details about the day-to-day struggles that people face in the camp. these messages were collected and composed into a series of podcasts that people can access or download online (the wheeler centre, 2017). in this way, the voice of a man who is being held on a remote island in the pacific ocean can theoretically be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. likewise, abdul aziz has been given a platform that a decade ago simply did not exist. technology has permitted important interventions and dialogue and as a result solidarity is taking new forms and arising from different sectors of society. hani abdile has been acknowledged among communities of poets, behrouz boochani has been acknowledged by writers and journalists, eaten fish has gained the respect and support of fellow political cartoonists, and abdul aziz has gained from human rights activists and community members. these individuals, among others, provide evidence that australia's political prisoners are more than capable of speaking for themselves, which signals to australian activists that the best thing we can do is make space for and support the work that they are doing. shifting modes of solidarity and resistance the connections facilitated by online communication platforms has reframed the positioning of asylum seekers and refugees from subjects of activism to active participants, who are not only included but are increasingly acknowledged as the leaders of the resistance movement. the ability to connect with people in detention has prompted greater pursuit of platforms for people to speak for themselves. this is not coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 193 universally recognised and understood by australian advocates, activists and the broader community; however, the work of individuals and organisations like rise (refugees survivors and ex-detainees) is instructive. rise is the first refugee and asylum seeker directed welfare and advocacy organisation in australia, entirely governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees. rise pursue a strong “nothing about us without us” position and are often critical of how some refugee support groups and organisations engage with refugee rights activism (http://riserefugee.org). actions of solidarity are increasingly based on the messages and actions that activists inside the camps are taking. rather than australian activists attempting to speak for or over people, there is a growing recognition that their role is to amplify the voices, demands and political acts of those who are living with the consequences of government policy. this includes efforts to increase the visibility of camp-based protests and promote the messages of australia's political prisoners in our public spaces. examples of this can be seen when activists replicate banners (figures 5 and 6), shirts or images from protest actions on manus and nauru (figures 7 and 8). figure 5. protest on nauru, 2012, image: supplied. figure 6. replica of banner drawn by ravi, image: alex bainbridge for rran. figure 7. nauru protest following omid’s death, figure 8. perth protest following omid’s death, image: ali raza. image: supplied. in 2014, farhad, a political prisoner from iran, currently interned on manus island began taking photographs of messages written on his hand. these would often offer commentary on topical political issues or events including equal marriage rights, responses to incidents of racism in australia, in addition to expressions of solidarity with other people who have been targeted by the detention regime. in using this communication device, he was able to maintain anonymity whilst drawing upon the symbolism of the hand and reminding people that these messages were coming from a person reaching out to be heard. researchers against pacific black sites called for coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 194 people to engage with his political acts and submit photos in solidarity with the political prisoners on manus and nauru (figures 9 and 10). they stated, “through these political statements initiated on manus island’s illegal prison we will join together with those in australian black sites to bring this message to all” (rapbs, 2016). the concept of attempting to help bring the messages emerging from australia's black sites to the broader community is at the crux of the current role of australian-based activists. figure 9. farhad, “political prisoner manus,” image: supplied. figure 10. janet galbraith, “political prisoners manus nauru,” image: rapbs. the rise of mobile communication devices has helped australia’s political prisoners, both in remote or restrictive mainland detention centres and remote sites, penetrate public forums that were previously far less accessible and defy the government’s attempt to maintain an information blackout. the development of facebook and online messaging and calling applications have helped overcome the prohibitive cost of international text and call rates, and systems have been developed by australian-based activists to ensure that prisoners can maintain access. the ability to have direct contact with people on manus and nauru has also drawn more people into the refugee rights campaign, as personal connections have fostered a greater sense of responsibility to act. a lack of direct contact and widespread silencing of voices has been replaced with the increasing personification of what were previously nameless and faceless masses that were easy to characterise as a threat. despite acknowledging how much better communication links are now than what they were previously, they can be variable across different locations and attempts to sever these connections remain present. countless examples of prisoners speaking for themselves, however, must help develop an appreciation for the necessary hierarchy of voices. the hopes and aspirations of australian activists must be acknowledged as secondary to the voices of the communities who are directly affected by and who have experienced the impacts of government policies. technology has opened up many different opportunities to promote activism from australia’s black sites and detention camps and thus is an important tool for activists working to challenge the detention regime. activists inside the camps are increasingly able to narrate their own actions, receive acknowledgement and recognition for their work, and increase the visibility of their political acts. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 195 endnotes 1. in april 2016, behrouz boochani, kurdish journalist and human rights defender, currently incarcerated in the manus camp labelled himself and his fellow inmates as “political prisoners.” the appropriation of this terminology is a deliberate means of challenging the legitimacy of the regime of indefinite detention and the political motivations that drive it. this paper will adopt this reference. 2. the mv tampa was a norwegian freighter vessel involved in the rescue of 433 people seeking asylum from sinking en route to australia from indonesia (about 140 k.m. from christmas island) in august 2001. after people were taken onto the tampa, it began to head towards christmas island; however, permission to enter australian territorial waters was refused. after a standoff of several days, it was decided that people would be taken to nauru to have their refugee claims processed (willheim, 2003, pp. 160-162). references abdile, h 2016, i will rise, writing through fences, victoria. art gallery of new south wales 2015, the photograph and australia: time line, accessed 24 november 2016, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/artsets/51b88k. boochani, b 2016a, “australia, exceptional in its brutality,” overland, accessed 5 november 2016, https://overland.org.au/2016/04/australia-exceptional-in-itsbrutality. ---. 2016b, facebook post, accessed 6 november 2016, https://www.facebook.com/ behrouz.boochani.7/posts/643741965797914. briskman, l 2013, “technology, control, and surveillance,” refuge, vol. 29, no.1, pp. 11-15. cartoonists rights network international, 2016, 2016 courage in editorial cartooning winner announce, viewed 10 november 2016, http://cartoonistsrights.org/cp8ug. comaroff, j 2007, “terror and territory: guantanamo and the space of contradiction,” public culture vol. 19, no.2, pp. 397-398. doherty, b 2017, “eaten fish, manus island's refugee cartoonist, given sanctuary in northern europe,” the guardian, accessed 17 january 2018, https://www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/19/eaten-fish-manus-islands-refugeecartoonist-moves-to-northern-europe. fiske, l 2012, insider resistance: understanding refugee protest against immigration detention in australia, 1999-2005, curtin university. imdb 2016, “chauka, please tell us the time,” viewed 15 april 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6229152. mansted, r 2007, “the pacific solution—assessing australia's compliance with international law,” bond university student law review vol. 3, no.1, pp. 1-2. national justice project 2017, “federal court rules asylum seekers can keep mobile phones in detention,” national justice project news, accessed 26 october 2017, https://overland.org.au/2016/04/australia-exceptional-in-its-brutality https://overland.org.au/2016/04/australia-exceptional-in-its-brutality http://cartoonistsrights.org/cp8ug http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6229152 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 196 https://www.justice.org.au/news/2017317/federal-court-rules-asylum-seekers-cankeep-mobile-phones-in-detention. pen international 2015, “pen melbourne: iranian journalist behrouz boochani tells of the horrors of manus island: out of sight, out of mind,” accessed 10 november 2016, http://www.pen-international.org/centresnews/pen-melbourneiranian-journalist-behrouz-boochani-tells-of-the-horrors-of-manus-island-out-ofsight-out-of-mind. penovic, t 2008, “mental harm as an instrument of public policy,” psychiatry, psychology and law vol. 15, no.1, pp. 140-152. perera, s 2007, “a pacific zone? (in) security, sovereignty, and stories of the pacific borderscape,” in p kumar rajaram and c grundy-warr (ed.), australia and the insular imagination: beaches, borders, boats, and bodies, university of minnesota press, minneapolis, pp. 201-228. perera, s and pugliese, j 2015, “detainees on nauru may have been ‘released,’ but they are not free,” the conversation, accessed 10 november 2016, https://theconversation.com/detainees-on-nauru-may-have-been-released-butthey-are-not-free-48648. ---. j 2016, “the tragedy of eaten fish, the award-winning cartoonist on manus island,” the conversation, accessed 10 november 2016, https://theconversation.com/the-tragedy-of-eaten-fish-the-award-winningcartoonist-on-manus-island-65150. phillips, j and spinks, h 2013, “background note: immigration detention in australia,” parliamentary library, canberra, accessed 26 october 2017, https://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamen tary_library/pubs/bn/2012-2013/detention#_toc351535457. phillips, s 2007, “a brief history of facebook,” the guardian, accessed 5 october 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia. researchers against pacific black sites 2016, “political acts,” accessed 24 october 2017, http://rapbs.org/index.php/political-acts. ---. sites 2017, “what are black sites?”, accessed 24 october 2017, http://rapbs.org/index.php/what-are-black-sites. tlozek, e 2017, “manus island detention centre shot at by png defence force members, detainees say,” abc news, accessed 30 october 2017, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-14/png-police-respond-to-reports-ofshooting-at-manus-is-centre/8445274. wheeler centre 2017, “the messenger,” accessed 23 april 2017, https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadcasts/podcasts/the-messenger. willheim, e. “mv tampa: the australian response,” international journal of refugee law 15 (2003): 159-191. writing through fences 2017, “about,” accessed 10 november 2016, writingthroughfences.org/sample-page. acknowledgements: the author would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon which she works and writes, the whadjuk nyoongar people, and pay her respects to elders past, present and future. she would also like to acknowledge the work of australia’s current and former political prisoners, including hani abdile, behrouz boochani, eaten fish and abdul aziz muhamat, who resist behind, through and beyond the fences marked by australia’s border policies. https://www.justice.org.au/news/2017317/federal-court-rules-asylum-seekers-can-keep-mobile-phones-in-detention https://www.justice.org.au/news/2017317/federal-court-rules-asylum-seekers-can-keep-mobile-phones-in-detention coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 197 michelle bui is a research assistant in the faculty of media, culture and creative arts at curtin university. she is currently involved in a project called deathscapes which seeks new ways to document, understand, and respond to contemporary racialised violence (against indigenous people and racialised migrants and refugees at the border) in the settler states of australia, canada and the united states. her research work follows a longstanding involvement with the refugee rights action network (rran) wa. her engagement in political activism has allowed her to work closely with people seeking asylum both in detention and in the community. she regularly visits people detained at the yongah hill immigration detention centre and maintains contact with several of australia’s political prisoners, incarcerated on manus island and nauru. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona the aftermath of rape: innovative approaches to understanding sexual violence against australian women and children brenda downing edith cowan university brendadowning747@gmail.com 
 copyright©2018 brenda downing. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: more than 50 years after american feminist susan brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” australian girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped. in order to reimagine an australia where the rape of women and children is socially and culturally unacceptable, we need to understand more fully the long-term and multiple impacts of violence of this nature. this paper reports on australian research that uses innovative arts-based methodologies to shift the emphasis from the primacy of the psychological impact of childhood rape to the enduring, though less understood, multiple and embodied impact of childhood rape. the research holds important insights for women’s and children’s health professionals, for women who have experienced, and continue to experience the trauma of childhood rape, and for the discursive construction of a country where acts of sexual violence are unthinkable. keywords: rape trauma; somatic symptoms; arts-based methodologies. introduction in australia, we’re proud of our endless blue skies and crystal clear oceans, our white sandy beaches, our sweeping bays, our clean rivers, the tall forests, the bushland and the red dust deserts, the oxygen-laden air we breathe. we’re proud of our modern glossy cities, our neat suburbs, our large, air-conditioned homes, our fast freeways, and our glinting four-wheel drive cars. we’re proud of our sporting heroes and our internationally recognised artists. we tell our daughters and sons to dream big and mailto:brendadowning747@gmail.com 323 wide—because anything’s possible. we have vast horizons in australia. the sun shines on us. we all feel its warmth on our upturned faces. and yet. i’m tired of the superficiality and complacency of this idealised facade of comfort and opportunity. and i find the endless sunshine deeply unsettling because beneath the surface, australia is not all it seems: australia harbours a dark and toxic secret obscured and muted by its projected image of pride, comfort and opportunity, a shameful and festering secret, a secret it should not be proud of. this paper reveals that shameful secret and discusses its profound implications because i’m tired of the facade and secrets are no longer secrets if they’re shared. the great australian ‘secret’ australia has grown to become a country with one of the highest rates of reported sexual assault in the world (abs, 2015). in 2015 alone there were 21,380 reported incidents of sexual assault with four out of five of those incidents committed by male perpetrators against girls or women. the figure represents a 3 per cent increase on the previous year (abs, 2015) and a staggering 51 per cent increase since 1995 (aic, 2007). the number of people directly impacted by sexual assault in australia in 2015 would fill the sydney opera house concert hall to capacity—three and a half times over. while this number is alarming, it is crucial to understand that the figure is a highly conservative one, given that the majority of sexual assaults in australia go unreported to police (aic, 2007). in the 1970s, american feminist susan brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” whether you agree with this statement or not, almost 50 years on, in australia the fear remains: girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped (o’donovan, devilly, & rapee, 2007). there can be no doubt that the spectre and reality of rape limits women’s lives and shapes our movement through the world. as rape victim and feminist philosopher susan brison (2002, p. 18) states: “the fact that all women’s lives are restricted by sexual violence is indisputable.” this is the shameful and toxic secret that quietly pollutes our oceans, rivers and harbours, stains our cities and suburbs, and poisons the air we breathe. in 2002, brison (p. 97) wrote: “rape has, all too often and for all too long, been considered a private, personal matter, and thus not worthy of public, political concern.” this position on rape violence continues in contemporary australia. if we are to begin to reimagine australia as a country where the rape of girls and women is truly unthinkable, a country where rape is truly socially and culturally unacceptable, a country where boys and men value and respect girls and women, where girls and women can trust and respect boys and men, we need to open up a conversation about 324 the reality of gendered sexual violence. we need to appreciate that rape, and the profound and long-term associated consequences, is worthy of public, political concern. while useful for determining the scale of reported sexual assaults, the statistics i have provided above can only take us so far in our imagining. indeed, karyn l. freedman (2006, p. 113) offers the following: “if the occurrence of rape were audible, its decibel level equal to its frequency, it would overpower our days and nights … an insistent jack hammer … we would demand an end to it … we would refuse to live under such conditions.” in order to render the statistics audible and to bring about real change in attitudes, i suggest that in australia, we have an ethical and social responsibility to collectively open our senses and imaginations further. to do this, we need to be exposed to the jack hammer noise of rape; to the myriad ways trauma’s dense shadow darkens futures and colonises the bodies of countless numbers of australian girls and women. in short, we need to acknowledge and understand the ramifications of both the prevalence rates and the lived and daily reality of the longterm impacts of rape if we are to begin to comprehend how it is to live with the consequences of rape trauma and reimagine a different future. contextualising my interest in sexual trauma research i write not only from a position as a feminist materialist researcher with a specific interest in the embodied impact of sexual trauma, but also from a position of experiential ‘knowing’: i endured the terror of rape violence on two separate occasions in 1971 and have lived with the evolving and multiple consequences ever since. following the rapes, the shame and self-blame i felt was immediate, and because of this, i didn’t, or couldn’t tell my family. i chose instead to disclose to a school friend. she insisted i was lying. i insisted i was telling the truth. she won. i lost. i then resolved never to risk disclosure again, and the events of that year transformed into a shameful, yet grief-laden secret. i kept that secret tucked inside my body for almost 30 years, until its weight and the strain of years of self-censoring left me distraught, curled me into an immobilised foetal position on my kitchen floor. personal consequences of rape based on my experiential understandings, i know that rape, especially in childhood, has both immediate and profoundly complex lifelong consequences. in the immediate aftermath, i was left with a shattered sense of self, fragile self-esteem, a lack of personal boundaries, chronic hypervigilance, and a sense of deep mistrust of the world around me. as time went on, the list grew longer: terrifying nightmares; acute insomnia; paralysing and socially isolating anxiety; an exaggerated startle reflex; a sense of bodily dissonance; and a profound loathing of, and sense of detachment from, my body. i overfed my body in my teens and starved my body through my 20s. i developed physical illnesses in my early 30s and severe clinical depression in my late 325 30s. the latter diagnosis saw me swallowing anti-depressants for three years and attending weekly cognitive behavioural therapy sessions for five years. at the end of my therapy, my mental health was improved; however, the bodily dissonance, the nebulous physical complaints and the punitive relationship i had with my body remained unchanged. it was the experience of rape in 1971 and its catastrophic consequences that propelled me to undertake honours research in 2007. viewed through a broad sociocultural lens and set within a feminist framework of understanding, the arts-based and reflexive autoethnographic project examined the multiple ramifications of childhood rape. the trauma literature i immersed myself in during the project was abundant, interesting and to some extent affirming. however, i increasingly became concerned that the research gave precedence to psychological expressions of post-rape trauma—very little attention appeared to be given to the somatic or body-based manifestations i had experienced in my youth and continued to experience as a mature-aged woman. at the end of the project, my interests in the long-term somatic aftermath of childhood rape, the material states of the human body under stress and the uniqueness of embodied memory were sharpened. these interests came together with my lifelong interest in creative writing and performance and in 2009, i began an arts-based doctoral project at edith cowan university in western australia. the paper will now shift its focus to this project to discuss the innovative arts-based methodology i employed as well as the insights and outcomes that emerged from the research. “feeling the fleshed body” (phd 2009-2014) my doctoral research examined the trauma of childhood rape as it specifically manifests in and is expressed through the adult female body. the work was primarily autoethnographic although it also included significant data gathered from other australian women also raped in childhood. as previously stated, the work chiefly grew out of earlier research that had refined my interests in body-based trauma. but it was also a response to my feeling inadequately attended to by a range of healthcare professionals across a number of decades, some of whom specialised in women’s health, who never questioned me about a possible history of rape trauma. the doctoral project, then, was initiated by my experiential understandings of the somatic aftermath of childhood rape and my feeling of being ‘let down’ by healthcare professionals, and was propelled by the following research questions: do women who have endured childhood rape make links between their body and the experience? how do women who have endured childhood rape read their own body-based responses? how might these responses be similar or different to my own? where and how does the trauma of rape reside in the body? what are our cultural understandings of body-based post-rape trauma? what broader understandings of rape trauma might healthcare professionals need to know in order to adequately respond to female patients who may be unable to articulate their rape history? all of these research questions honoured the materiality and reality of embodied experience. the feminist, arts-based and multi-modal methodology i designed to support these questions was a reflection of my desire to uphold the integrity of my 326 living, breathing, fleshed and raped body. as such, the methodology also acknowledged the central role experiential understandings play in knowledge making practices. the paper will now move to the background behind the methodological design of the project and discuss the insights and outcomes. arts-based embodied methodology i have been a creative writer since i could grasp a pencil, and my interest in performing and performance has been life-long. engaging writing and performance making as forms of embodied inquiry, then, was as natural as breathing. but i also wanted to engage my body in other ways. more specifically, i wanted to engage methods of inquiry that would help me understand why i continued to hold a profound sense of detachment from my body, despite five years of weekly psychotherapy in my late 30s and early 40s. i wanted to understand why i still felt that the trauma of my experience haunted my body because surely five years of talk-based therapy should have laid this to rest. shouldn’t it? the final methodological framework grew organically from these questions. described by examiners as “pioneering,” “methodologically provocative” and “innovative,” it was multidimensional in nature, experimental and, as a result, full of risk. the four methods of inquiry i engaged were: autoethnography; somatic inquiry; writing-as-inquiry; and performance-making-as-inquiry. the paper will now discuss each of these methods. autoethnography the primary focus of the research was my own experience of childhood rape. the role i took up then, was dual: i occupied the autoethnographic position of both researcher and research participant. as an autoethnographer, the method facilitated the development of an intimate space within which the particularity of my experience could resonate. the critical reflection and reflexivity that is a feature of autoethnographic research (spry, 2011), however, enabled “a dance with different partners” (downing, 2016, p. 186) as i moved within the inquiry space, back and forth, across and between not only my own story, but “the stories of other women, and the broader sociocultural storying of sexual violence” (downing, 2016, p. 186). to have simply given an account of my aftermath story alone would have given the reader only one view or perspective, as any autobiographical writing or memoir does. the beauty and strength of autoethnography, however, lies in its complexity and dynamism: the method allows a range of narratives to be drawn together and reflexively interrogated, while inviting an exchange with different conceptual and theoretical frameworks. norman denzin (1997) understands the potency of autoethnography to be its ability to facilitate introspection and selfreflectivity while simultaneously enabling space for the uniqueness of personal context to move within broader sociocultural narratives. stacy holman jones (2008, p. 207) concurs, noting that “[a]utoethnography works to hold self and culture together.” my choice of autoethnography as a starting point for the organic development of my methodological framework enabled the eventual production of a rich, multilayered and multidimensional reading of the topic. 327 somatic inquiry at the time of writing, i remain unable to locate other studies in the field of sexual trauma research that have engaged a corporeal, experiential and autoethnographic method of inquiry. consequently, while i was in the midst of this component of my research, i had no precedent to guide me. this inevitably led to the method evolving organically as the research went along (downing, 2016). i knew from the outset though that if i were to immerse myself in the deeply held cellular states of my trauma experience, i would need to engage a research method that fully supported this exploration. across a period of four and a half years in both perth and melbourne, i immersed myself in the experiential body-based practice of body-mind centering. i worked closely with alice cummins, a body-mind centering practitioner and dance artist, as a workshop participant, private client and intensive program participant to forensically examine my trauma story at a cellular level. body-mind centering is a body-based experiential approach to “movement and learning” (bainbridge cohen, 2008, p. 2) that begins from the premise that body and mind are not separate but are each part of a whole and integrated entity. the approach is grounded in a philosophy that honours the intelligence of the cellular body-mind, and is an “integrated and embodied approach to movement, the body and consciousness” (bmc, 2012). the approach engages techniques such as hands-on (touch), movement, embodied imagination, and experiential anatomy to promote self-awareness and help facilitate change (bainbridge cohen, 2008). while immersed in this phase of the research, i drew heavily on the work of hélène cixous (cixous, 1976, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1997, 1998). i was, and remain, enchanted by her sense of presence, her eye for detail, and her insistence on the connections between the body, writing and feeling: “i do not write to keep. i write to feel. i write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of the words” (cixous, 1998, p. 195). she talks of wanting to cultivate presence to enable her to live “[…] in the present absolute. in the happening of the instant” (cixous, 1991b, p. 104). and she talked of holding a myopic view of the world around her which allowed her to see the detail of her existence yet, through her writings, simultaneously demonstrating her deep connection to broader social, cultural and philsophical considerations: “details are my kingdoms,” she says (cixous, 1991b, p. 109). cixous’ approach also reflected my desire as a researcher: [because] her close and evocative attention to detail mirrors the attention to detail that was necessary during my autoethnographic somatic inquiry. her simultaneous sweep into broader realms of consideration echoes the reflexivity present at every level in this research project, particularly this autoethnographic component. in order to first uncover the subtlety and nuance of my autoethnographic somatic inquiry and then illuminate this through evocative language with as much exactitude as possible and with reflexivity, it was essential that i maintain a myopic or forensic awareness of my body at a cellular level while simultaneously holding my experience 328 within a wider cultural context, filtering this through an aesthetic lens. (downing, 2016, p. 191) engaging in the practice and techniques of body-mind centering, the somatic inquiry work also cultivated presence, enabling me to remain present to and feel my unresolved body states. it slowly validated those body states and enabled a process of reintegration. and as part of that re-integration, it brought clarity where there was confusion and a sense of reconnection with my body where there was acute detachment (downing, 2016). participant somatic inquiry to add a final dimension to my research, i also recruited nine other women from across australia, all of whom had experienced at least one rape event in childhood (under the age of eighteen years). recruitment took place via flyers, posters and email to women’s health and sexual assault centres. my interest in other women’s experiences was multiple. i wanted to: gain a sense of how the women viewed their bodies across time; discover their interpretation of their bodily responses since being raped; determine if the women made links between their physical health across time and their rape experiences; see if disclosure to health care professionals had taken place and whether they had discussed their physical symptoms; and discover if any of the women attended therapeutic bodywork sessions and how this impacted on them (downing, 2016). the findings from this phase of the research, arrived at through a thematic analysis of material collected from the women via electronic surveys and interviews, revealed that the women experienced a suite of symptoms that echoed, and added to, my own. some of these included: headaches and migraine; insomnia; pain; eating, digestive and weight concerns; anxiety and tension; gynaecological and sexual concerns; depression; post traumatic stress disorder—which has significant physical attributes (rothschild, 2000); exaggerated startle reflex; hypervigilance; and claustrophobia (downing, 2016). all of these symptoms are consistent with the post-rape literature (boyd, 2011; martin, young, billings, & bross, 2007; waldinger, schulz, barsky, & ahern, 2006). additionally, and almost without exception, the women, like me, had held extreme negative attitudes towards their bodies in the years and decades since being raped, and had carried intense feelings of self-blame and shame well into adulthood (downing, 2016). the rape trauma literature supports these findings. it notes that women who experience rape and other forms of sexual violence more often report compromised overall health (golding, 1994) and/or a range of chronic illnesses compared with those who have not experienced sexual violence (koss & boeschen, 2000); self-blame and shame are often linked (koss & boeschen, 2000; vidal & petrak, 2007; weiss, 2010), with shame playing a key in role in determining whether a victim will disclose or whether a victim will self-silence (feiring & taska, 2005; lee & james, 2013; lievore, 2003). concluding this section, and to further amplify how it is to live with the profound and long-term consequences of childhood rape, i include extracts from the survey and interview material i gathered from the women participants (downing, 2016). in line 329 with edith cowan university’s ethics protocols, pseudonyms have been used. it should be noted that although some of the women did not feel ashamed of their experience and felt the use of a pseudonym unnecessary, they all agreed to their use. kate: “i felt disconnected from my body when i was growing up, it felt like a stranger’s body. i used to feel like i was here for sex, here to be used. i didn’t have a sense of my body separate from how an abuser might view and value my body. it was something i blamed for what was done to me.” monica: “my first sexual assault was washed under the carpet […] one little girl was not important […]. when i was raped [again], at 18 i scrubbed and scrubbed with a scrubbing brush but i could not get clean […].the first time i spoke to a health care professional about being raped as a child was 16 years later. a social worker (male) said he didn’t believe my story and that i didn’t have my facts straight. i love massage but am not good with trust so have found the chairs in shopping centres to be the best alternative/compromise. after the childhood experience, i wanted to never have breasts so i bound them for a long time. i couldn't stand touching my own skin directly, and after my son was born i found it really hard to wash him because of my own fear that i would somehow tarnish him with my own filth. it took decades to be ok within my own skin.” nancy: “there are many things i realised over time that were the result of the childhood sexual abuse.” philipa: “i only remember trying to tell my gp once, & being totally discounted, & being told not to make up silly stories. […] i’m not very good at describing how my body responds—sorry.” felicity: “[i] push thought [to the] back of [my] mind. never think about it.” ros: “on one of the rare occasions that i have discussed the childhood rape with a health care professional, it was at my antenatal booking appointment and i received a pamphlet about childhood abuse and was advised to seek professional counselling, no personal interest was shown.” carol: “i can’t breathe if i watch people in confined spaces […] i can’t have my face underwater or held under a blanket. […] i cannot eat tapioca or the other dessert which is similar without wanting to physically throw up because the texture and flavour is reminiscent of semen. i don’t sleep longer than 2 hours ever. i am hypervigilant to sound and my environment. i notice everything. i cannot make noise of any kind during sexual activity; i fear being heard.” nina: “[i have] fear about their [healthcare professionals] responses, fear i’d be forced to report the abuse.” patricia: “flashbacks can induce a sense as though somebody is painfully entering my body. [i] truly hated my body with a passion and imagined that it was dirty— particularly my sexual parts and my backside. i actually felt sick if i contemplated it for too long. [i once] considered having a sexual body was disgusting or dangerous.” 330 writing-as-inquiry my thesis, and the book that emerged from it (downing, 2016), includes many extracts from my phd journal. journal writing was my “aesthetic/epistemic praxis” (spry, 2009, p. 604) and my way of coming to knowing through what tami spry calls “embodied theorizing” (spry, 2009, p. 604). i turned to my journal writing for critical reflection on the work of others, to explore kernels of ideas, develop slender thoughts, delve into intuitive hunches, struggle with difficulty and experiment with creative form— especially poetry. the privacy of my journal enabled me to berate myself, wrestle with and shout at the world, give in to grief, rejoice in pleasure, rest, gather myself, stretch, yawn, re-energise. it was also where i found my voice as a researcher. every word in my journal helped me negotiate my way through the personal, sociocultural, political and historical landscapes and complexities of my research. my journal held just over 138,000 words (downing, 2016). while writing was a principal mode of inquiry, it was, at times, also problematic. more specifically, i found the task of bringing symbolic language to what was a process of interrogation of semiotic or bodily signs and sensations highly challenging. the work i engaged with in the autoethnographic somatic inquiry phase of the research was so deeply embodied that i often struggled to frame this within a system of language that often felt masculinist, overly analytical, and clumsy, and therefore inadequate to the task. i overcame this by lapsing into metaphor and poetry. lori neilsen glenn (neilsen, 2008, p. 98) argues that writing that engages poetic language “can be a transgressive and powerful tool, especially for women and others who prefer to write outside rationalist forms of language.” i argue that “by writing my way into knowing through language that engages deeply with metaphor to reach new meaning subjectively and tangentially, i am honouring the embodied process that supports this kind of arrival at understanding” (downing, 2016, p. 243). by beginning from a position of valuing metaphor and poetic language for its groundedness in embodied states, i gave myself permission to unfold my somatic knowing through its use. metaphor and poetic language were a means of grasping hold of wisps of elusive experience, a way to hold myself in feeling that sometimes refused to linger. it reminded me that as we rub shoulders with experience and try to link arms with language, the beauty of metaphor is in its constantly evolving shape, in the certainty that the relationship we have to the words one day can be, will be, different to the next. (downing, 2016, p. 244) metaphor was also “a device of memory” (cook, 2000, p. 18) useful for animating embodied trauma memory through language “more connected to my body than more conventional forms” (downing, 2016, p. 245). however, not all of my writing was poetic and laden with metaphor. many passages were spare, stripped back to reveal the rawness of my experience. overall, though, the practice of writing was, and remains an embodied process, not simply an act of cognitively arranging words together on a page. it is also, without any doubt, a way for me to come to knowing. in the embodied “doing” and “feeling” of writing, the contemplation, the movement of feeling responses, ideas, thoughts, and images through my body (downing, 2016), i am enabled to through a range of writing forms to “make the world make sense” (mairs, 1994, p. 36). 331 performance-making-as-inquiry i brought into my research a life-long interest in performing and the performance arts as well as a desire to give my thesis a three-dimensional embodied and performative companion. spry (2011, pp. 28-29) argues that “performance is not an added scholarly bonus. it does not operate as an interesting feature or entertaining option […] performance does not ‘illuminate’ the text, rather it assists in the creation of the text; it is in itself performative.” although i welcomed the opportunity to make a creative work, like spry, the inclusion of a performance piece was not an added scholarly bonus. nor was it an act of self-indulgent entertainment. for me, the making of a performance work was essential in order to engage an audience in the reality of sexual trauma in multiple ways. della pollock (2005, p. 2) notes: “performance is a promissory act. not because it can promise possible change but because it catches its participants—often by surprise—in a contract with possibility: with imagining what might be, could be, should be.” to bring the stark consequences of rape into the public realm, to begin to find ways for the public imagination to engage with the topic of rape violence at a personal and cultural level, to enable uncensored public discussion, i felt performance was a means to explore pollock’s notion of contracting others within the realm of possibility. as a response, building on the emergent journal writing and drawing on the autoethnographic somatic inquiry work, i co-devised the solo theatre piece, aperture. working alongside, and with the artistic guidance of alice cummins, i performed aperture in 2012. the critical reflection necessary for the making of this work, gave the bones of the written language of my explorations a heartbeat. through rigorous creative interrogation, aperture draped muscle and flesh on the words of my written inquiry and pumped blood through its sentences (downing, 2016). during the creative development phases of aperture, my experiential knowing percolated through me in the studio and was spontaneously expressed through my body. the movement this generated enabled the multidimensionality of my silenced experience to “move and sweat, collapse and stand—rather than remain in stasis” (downing, 2016, p. 258). the work also gave me another level of creative freedom when “the semiotic was given precedence over the semantic” (downing, 2016, p. 260). in its final form, aperture became a multi-layered and multidimensional embodied conduit for the dissemination of knowledge to those who had not experienced sexual violence and a means of holding up a mirror to those who had; because aperture didn’t just evoke my story. it also creatively opened up a reflexive space for the wider story of rape to resonate against my own. aperture additionally enabled feminist theory and discourse, and ontological reality to co-mingle, grounding the work in an embodied materialist ethics and making it both culturally challenging and epistemologically relevant. by relying on my moving and, for the most part, non-verbal body and the capacity for experience and story to be evoked without reliance on symbolic language, the work also challenged the poststructuralist positioning of discourse and language as the primary means of identity construction, knowledge making and information dissemination. 332 karen barad (2008, p. 120) states unequivocally that “language has been granted too much power” and that matter, or the biological and fleshed body, has been diminished as a result. while elizabeth grosz (2008) notes that to interrogate the role and influence of discourse, there needs to be greater clarity around understandings of the complex interplay between biology and discourse. she suggests that if we are to assume that humans are biological, then it is necessary to formulate a sophisticated and nuanced interpretation of our biological basis that holds the capacity to offer an adequate explanation for the diversity that exists within our sociocultural and political lives. i argue that the performative nature of aperture enabled insight to be gained into the complexity of rape trauma and its social, cultural and political ramifications through the nuance of embodied performance and the complex voice of bodily narrative. key insights and outcomes within therapeutic discourse and rape trauma research, there remains a tendency to hierarchically privilege psychological expressions of post-rape trauma over those that manifest in the body (wilson, 2004), suggesting that the trauma of rape begins in the psyche. my research revealed key insights that challenge the dominant psychological and discursive construction of rape trauma. firstly, the damage of rape begins, in the first instance, with the sensing and feeling body, and psychological damage develops subsequently as the cognitive brain begins to process the sensory event. and secondly, the raped and traumatised body is not passive or inert and is instead agentic, often refusing to be silenced in the long-term aftermath (downing, 2016). finally, my autoethnographic somatic inquiry revealed that to fully attend to my trauma, talk-based therapy alone was not enough. the re-integration of the sensory elements of my childhood experience—‘frozen’ in my body since childhood—and a concomitant change in attitude towards my traumatised body was, i believe, only possible through an engagement with my body. a call for change with these insights in mind, i argue that psychological interpretations of rape trauma offer one perspective only and that the cellular body with its capacity for storing embodied memory, cannot be overlooked, diminished or ignored. even if, for some rape victims, the trauma they carry in their bodies cannot be articulated in other ways, even if some rape victims do not make links between bodily symptoms and their rape history, and even if girls and women are silenced by their experience of rape and rendered incapable of disclosure, “it does not mean the symptoms do not exist” (downing, 2016, p. 283). it is imperative, therefore, that somatic symptoms are treated alongside and with the same level of respect and gravitas as symptoms that manifest or are expressed psychologically (downing, 2016). 333 in terms of therapeutic options, for me, the benefits of body-based work cannot be underestimated. in a reimagined australia, i would like to see body-focused therapies included in all post-rape care and treatment, not as an aside or afterthought, but centrally, to augment talk-based therapies and help create more appropriate holistic and multidimensional therapeutic treatment programs. therefore, i call for a wider understanding of post-rape trauma within rape trauma research and women’s healthcare practice, one that acknowledges all dimensions and expressions of trauma, including, and especially, those that manifest in and through the female body. and finally … the misplaced shame that victims so often feel in the aftermath of rape is just another violation. in a reimagined australia, i posit that the shame carried by countless girls and women be transformed into the country’s shame, and, as citizens, we would consciously share the responsibility for creating cultural change in order to reduce or eliminate the incidence of gendered sexual violence. we all have the potential to initiate change through action, however small or large that action may be. change is possible on many levels and in many ways. within academia, researchers can be bold and creative with their methodologies. they can ask difficult questions of themselves and of others. they can make themselves vulnerable and they can take risks. but beyond academia, all of us—not just those directly impacted by the violence of rape, or family and friends of victims, or those who fear being raped—all of us can begin by recognising and publicly acknowledging that australia’s global ranking as a country with one of the highest rates of sexual violence, particularly against girls and women, is a shameful one. action for change comes in many forms. as individuals, we can equip ourselves with knowledge and be alert to the possibility of rape trauma in those closest to us. we can make empathic space for victims to talk about the many dimensions of their lived experience, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable personally, and even if it challenges us professionally. collectively, we can make room for the voices of rape victims and the narratives of rape violence and its consequences. we can expose ourselves to, and learn from, those narratives. we can discuss and accumulate and build on existing knowledge. we can critically reflect on, and take steps towards challenging the sorts of power structures, entrenched discourses, and social attitudes that fail rape victims and serve to support the status quo. in time, if we are individually and collectively able to achieve these possibilities, we will truly begin to understand the reality of rape trauma and australia’s shameful status as a country with increasing rates 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(2007). shame and adult sexual assault: a study with a group of female survivors recruited from an east london population. sexual and relationship therapy, 22(2), 159-171. doi: 10.1080/14681990600784143 waldinger, robert j, schulz, marc s, barsky, arthur j, & ahern, david k. (2006). mapping the road from childhood trauma to adult somatization: the role of attachment. psychosomatic medicine, 68, 129-135. weiss, karen g. (2010). too ashamed to report: deconstructing the shame of sexual victimisation. feminist criminology, 5(3), 286-310. wilson, elizabeth a. (2004). psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body. durham: duke university press. http://ecu.eblib.com.au/patron/fullrecord.aspx?p=1108651 http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/d/4/6/%7bd4631ac0-2ddc-4729-ad3c-8a69df33ba65%7d2003-06-review.pdf http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/d/4/6/%7bd4631ac0-2ddc-4729-ad3c-8a69df33ba65%7d2003-06-review.pdf 336 brenda downing is a feminist researcher and writer with specific interests in sexual trauma and embodied memory, autoethnography, and arts-based inquiry. brenda is especially interested in exploring the material conditions of the traumatised female body by engaging with forms of inquiry that move beyond abstract theorising into rigorous methodological investigation and theoretical insight. her phd thesis, feeling the fleshed body: the aftermath of childhood rape, won the edith cowan university faculty research medal, 2014 and, jointly won the magdalena prize in feminist research, 2014. in 2016, her thesis was published by peter lang, bern. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 re-imagining australian citizenship: australian values and allegiance to australia maria chisari university of sydney maria.chisari@sydney.edu.au copyright©2018 maria chisari. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper explores how australian values have been incorporated in the recently enacted allegiance to australia act. it focuses on the discursive shifts that have refigured the concept of australian values as a way of defining disloyalty and treason among particular migrants who threaten the australian way of life. originally popularised by the howard government as a way to define australian identity and replace multiculturalism, australian values are today presented in legislation as a mechanism that can combat youth radicalisation and counter terrorist activities. through a genealogy of how the debate around australian values has evolved over the past decade, this paper suggests that such notions are not fixed. an exploration of the transformation of australian values culminating in their inclusion in allegiance legislation allows us to become conscious of the myths that surround the notion of a unique national australian identity. it highlights the need to ‘denaturalise’ these values so that they can be reimagined in other ways which are inclusive of all citizens. keywords: australian values; allegiance; australian citizenship. new act, old values on the last day of parliamentary sitting in december 2015, malcolm turnbull’s centreright government passed the australian citizenship amendment (allegiance to australia) 2015 bill. this act focuses on the revocation of australian citizenship for dual nationals who are involved in terrorism offences. today dual nationals who mailto:maria.chisari@sydney.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 become members of terrorist organisations and engage in terrorist activities are deemed to have “severed their bond and repudiated their allegiance to australia” and as a consequence, can be stripped of their australian citizenship (australian citizenship amendment (allegiance to australia) act 2015 (cth) s. 4 (austl.)). the allegiance to australia act was introduced by the government as a response to public concerns about the radicalisation of muslim youth and terrorist-related activities on australian soil, and was guided by a desire to protect national borders. since the attacks of september 11, australia, along with other liberal democratic nations have obsessed over national security, fearing that many migrants from non-western nations are threatening the freedoms, institutions and values of the western world. this prevalent discourse has led to the introduction of a range of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies of government that include citizenship tests, immigration contracts, national values statements, mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and now with the outcome of brexit and the election of donald trump, stricter and more punitive citizenship practices are envisaged. in australia, the declared objective of these new technologies of government is to regulate the conduct of migrants so that they can integrate into a prescribed way of life and become model citizens. related to this process of “securitising citizenship” (hindess, 2004) is the government’s desire to simultaneously reassure those australianborn citizens of european and judeo-christian heritage who are considered to be the ‘mainstream’ that their way of life will prevail. since 2007, reassurance has come in the form of officially defining this australian way of life by a set of core civic values that have their origins in european enlightenment and which are simply referred to as “australian values” (chisari, 2009). while many believe that the debate over australian values is a recent phenomenon born out of the fear that these values are being threatened by migrant differences (bhandar, 2010), this has not always been the case. in the 1980s during the early days of neoliberal governing, the notion of “shared fundamental values” was promoted as integral to the policy of multiculturalism (fraser, 1981). this association between values and multiculturalism was further accentuated during the lead up to the centenary of federation celebrations, when the australian citizenship council (2000) proposed the australian compact, an official civic statement that was purported to celebrate cultural diversity and ensure social cohesion. the australian citizenship council (2000, p. 6) defined the meaning of citizenship as encompassing “ideals of civic life that can be seen as the public core values in a society whose people follow many different beliefs and ways of life, are of many different national and ethnic origins.” it acknowledged that these civic values had been informed by both indigenous and non-indigenous traditions and recommended that the principles of the australian compact should support social cohesion and define australian multiculturalism. the council wrote: to speak of social cohesion is not to say ‘you must all become like us,’ ‘us’ being an imagined ‘typical australian’ who does not exist. it is to say that what we have in common, what holds us together, are the core civic values which, as australian multiculturalism implies, include strong acceptance and respect for cultural diversity. (2000, p. 19) coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 the australian compact was never put into practice and soon after the events of september 11, the notion of australian values took on a more sinister function. this paper explores how the notion of australian values has recently evolved in political and public discourse to become implicated as a mechanism of national security. through a genealogical approach, the analysis reveals that australian values are not fixed notions that represent australia’s ‘true’ national identity. genealogy allows us to investigate how the allegiance legislation works as part of a “historical specificity” and in doing so reveals that “who and what we are is not fixed or eternal, not a matter of destiny or grand design, but a series of contingent becomings” (walters, 2012, p. 115). in this way, the recent iterations of australian values in public discourse can be understood as part of technologies of the self that instruct migrants on how to conduct themselves as ‘model’ citizens while at the same time work as a form of reassurance for the broader australian community. reassurance is desired in this neoliberal way of governing as it aims to give confidence, peace and a sense of security to a population (chisari, 2012) while at the same time, it affirms the government’s role as “providers of protection and security” (bigo, 2002, p. 65). such practices need to be reimagined so that we can come to understand that in a globalised world, ‘australian values’ are essentially basic political rights that are desired by all kinds of residents living in a neoliberal society. in this way, native-born citizens, new citizens, migrants and refugees can achieve a sense of belonging and inclusion as members of the australian community. the remaking of australian values under the new allegiance to australia act, the citizenship bond between the individual and the nation is considered to be “severed” if dual nationals behave in a manner that is incompatible with the shared values of the australian community. the new act states: parliament recognises that australian citizenship is a common bond, involving reciprocal rights and obligations, and that citizens may, through certain conduct incompatible with the shared values of the australian community, demonstrate that they have severed that bond and repudiated their allegiance to australia. (australian citizenship amendment (allegiance to australia) act 2015 (cth) s. 4 (austl.)) throughout the act, there are many definitions of the ways in which the bond between the individual can be severed from the national body. yet the inclusion of australian values as part of incompatible conduct is unprecedented as it represents a new and radical context for the use of australian values. traditionally, australian values have been evoked by both sides of government as a way of defining what is considered to be australia’s ‘unique’ identity. they include the notion of mateship and a fair go, freedom of speech and respect for equality among different groups. they have also encompassed democracy and the rule of law (austin and fozdar, 2016). more recently, the concept of australian values has been offered as the solution to the problems associated with the policy of multiculturalism (howard, 2006). yet, despite the government’s protestation that these values are uniquely australian, it is clear that these principles share much coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 with what is generally referred to as the basic human rights shared by a common humanity. the language of values, however, is more affective than the language of rights. values allude to the personal attributes of individuals as they are equated with notions of morality and ethics (mitchell, 2005). the etymology of the word touches on notions of “justice, morality, virtue, pleasure, utility and happiness” (mitchell, 2005, p. 365). the inclusion of the language of values in legislation can therefore be understood as “an attempt to regulate and instil in the population a system of ‘ethical behaviour’ that is predicated on the notion that living by a set of core values will secure the happiness and moral wellbeing of the national body” (chisari, 2015, pp. 576-577). it is also ethical because migrants come to regulate their own behaviour as free individuals who want to achieve a sense of belonging in their newly adopted nation. it should be noted that native-born australian citizens, as has become common in matters of civic duties, are exempt in this legislation from having to demonstrate their loyalty to australia for it is only the dual national that is targeted as the ‘deviant’ who has divided loyalties and threatens what is commonly praised as the australian way of life. in singling out dual nationals, the government claimed to have acted according to international obligations which stipulate that individuals cannot be made stateless if their australian citizenship were to be revoked. yet the outcome of such a decision is that it is the migrant as ‘other’ who needs to be disciplined into the correct way of being a model australian citizen while ‘native’ australian nationals form part of the social norm, that is, ‘the mainstream’ who will not need to prove their allegiance as it is presumed that they naturally embody the set of core civic principles known as australian values. redefining allegiance under the new legislation, the concept of allegiance has replaced the traditional expectation that new citizens make a commitment to the nation. the use of allegiance is interesting as it implies a stronger and more complex legal bond than a commitment between the new citizen and the nation, leading to an obligation, that is, “a duty of obedience in exchange for protection” (jenkins, nolan and rubenstein, 2014, p. 9). in this way, the enactment of the allegiance legislation demonstrates how foucault’s notion of disciplinary power continues to be relevant in modern neoliberal societies as dual nationals are subjected to continual surveillance of what is deemed to be correct conduct in order to be permitted to maintain their australian citizenship status. the new legislation also alludes to what perera has described as the “privatization of citizenship” (2007, p. 7) whereby neoliberal governing reconfigures the conferral of citizenship as a contract between the citizen and the nation, what many politicians have described as a mutual obligation. the requirement that new citizens demonstrate their allegiance to australia is not a new concept. traditionally it has been expressed through the saying of the pledge of commitment at the official and mandatory citizenship ceremony. it is a form of disciplinary power that works on the individual bodies of new citizens as they are coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 instructed to stand and perform the pledge. in this way, the saying of the pledge normalises australian values as the ‘true’ values of ‘real’ australians. the new citizens promise to be loyal to “australia and its people” by “respecting,” “upholding” and “obeying” the democratic beliefs, rights, liberties and laws of the nation. they promise to regulate their conduct and embrace the values and laws of the ‘mainstream’ australian people and through this compliance are rewarded with the conferral of australian citizenship. the citizenship oath was first implemented with the enactment of the nationality and citizenship act of 1948 when all aspiring citizens were required to swear to “bear true allegiance to” the king (department of the parliamentary library, 2002, p. 2). in those formative days of citizenship law, allegiance was sworn to the monarch in the name of god rather than swearing allegiance to australia and its people as is the practice today, which reflected older influences of juridical and pastoral relations of power at play in the process of joining a national community. in 1966, the oath was amended to include words of renunciation to all other allegiances in order to “control” the loyalty that new citizens expressed to australia (department of the parliamentary library, 2002). this change can be understood through foucault’s (1988) writings on technologies of the self in which the notion of renunciation is raised as part of ancient christian practice and as part of caring for the self and knowing the self. according to the greeks, “to be concerned with oneself was … one of the main principles of cities, one of the main rules for social and personal conduct” (foucault, 1988, p. 19). foucault elaborates that by “teaching people to occupy themselves with themselves, he [socrates] teaches them to occupy themselves with the city” (1988, p. 20). hence, in the modern world, “knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle” (foucault, 1988, p. 22) so that to renounce one’s ‘native’ citizenship status during the saying of the citizenship pledge serves to transform the migrant “from one reality to another” resulting in the transformation of the self (foucault, 1988, p. 40). in this way, the saying of the australian citizenship pledge is similar to christian practices in antiquity, that is, a confessional religion that imposed on its followers the duty of truth obligations which today are represented as the embracement of australian values. the obligation of renunciation was removed from australian law in 1986 as it was deemed to be “ambiguous and unnecessary” (department of the parliamentary library, 2002, p. 2). further changes were made in 1993 when the oath of allegiance was replaced with the pledge of commitment. at that time, immigration minister nick bolkus explained that new citizens needed a new oath which reflected “the core values of australia and which is a bonding instrument” (cited in department of the parliamentary library, 2002, p. 2). that pledge of commitment still remains in place today and it is still promoted as being symbolic of the embracement of australian values. the new allegiance to australia act refers to ‘renunciation by conduct’ and defines the criminalised terrorist offences of certain dual nationals as those who have repudiated their allegiance. to renounce means to abandon one’s obligation while to repudiate it is to reject and deny the ‘truth’ and value of australian citizenship. in this way, this can be understood that to repudiate one’s loyalty is to reject australian values. hence, it is now unlawful for dual nationals to engage in or advocate doing a terrorist act as well as to be coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 part of a terrorist organisation that does not respect australian values. this is the dual citizen who, according to the act, is opposed to australia’s interests, values, democratic beliefs, rights or liberties, so that if a person were to fight for or be in the service of such an organisation the person would be acting inconsistently with their allegiance to australia. (australian citizenship amendment (allegiance to australia) act 2015 (cth) s. 35aa (2) (b) (austl.)) what is astonishing about this new piece of legislation is that the rejection of australian values forms the basis for defining a betrayal of allegiance. howard’s manifesto the idea of revoking the australian citizenship of citizens who engage in conduct that is deemed unbecoming of australian values is not a new concept. in 2005, immediately after the london terrorist bombings, the then prime minister john howard stated that he supported the then british prime minister tony blair’s proposal of introducing deportation laws for terrorists. howard believed that if migrants had “failed to properly embrace the values of this society” then government should consider taking away their citizenship because they had broken their part of the mutual obligation deal (cassidy, 2005, p. 2). furthermore, howard believed that all migrants who came to australia had “the responsibility to endorse and imbibe and embrace the values of our society” (cassidy, 2005, p. 2). howard defined these values as “free speech, but it also includes a respect for religious difference and it includes a total repudiation and rejection of violence or the preaching of violence or the endorsement of violence as a solution to political disputes” (cassidy, 2005, p. 2). he further elaborated that his comments represented “a fair balance” between the demand for migrant integration and the granting of citizenship and that “most australians would see it in those terms” (cassidy, 2005, p. 2). hence, howard believed that newcomers had to regulate their own behaviour in order to reassure the australian people that they would not threaten australia’s peaceful society. according to mckenna, comments such as these became common during howard’s term as prime minister as he “initiated a reliance on the rhetoric of australian values” that emerged as a “moral language” through which to define a singular national “ethos” (2008, p. 593) while at the same time denouncing the values of others (bhandar, 2010). in this way, learning about australian values was presented as a civilising force that would bring improvement and progress to migrants (hindess, 2004). this language became howard’s own political manifesto as it provided the rationale for policy decisions in immigration, citizenship, national identity, education and history (mckenna, 2008). however, the stripping of citizenship for individuals who engaged in terrorist activities did not eventuate under the howard government. it would not be until the election of the next coalition government in 2013 when public debates about australian values and allegiance would resurface. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 team australia’s values in september 2013 during his swearing-in speech as prime minister, tony abbott declared that his government would govern for “all australians” and that “we will be a problem-solving government based on values, not ideology” (cited in griffiths, 2013). like howard before him, abbott promoted australian values as the very dna of australian identity. yet while prime minister, abbott went further than howard in championing ‘our’ western values in the name of national security. at the same time he attempted to make australian values more ‘mainstream’ and less contested than earlier by shifting the rhetoric to “team australia.” team australia was abbott’s new catchphrase, a term he drew upon in order to appeal to “all australians” (cox, 2014). in this way, abbott was hoping to appeal to the nation’s self-proclaimed ideals of fairness and egalitarianism as the term alludes to australia’s illustrious sporting culture. team australia, according to this logic, ‘naturally’ embodied the principles of australian values. in august 2014 during a press conference announcing new counter-terror laws to combat “home-grown terrorism,” abbott declared that “everyone has got to be on team australia … to put this country, its interests, its values and its people first” (cited in cox, 2014). in this way, he hoped to provide protection to the australian community. in february 2015 at the launch of the national security statement that followed sydney’s martin place siege, abbott (2015) declared that his government's greatest responsibility was to “keep australians safe,” drawing on older notions of the art of government as part of pastoral care. to do so, he evoked the notion of australian values as the mechanisms that not only were to instruct migrants on how to conduct themselves as model citizens, but also as part of counter-terror activities, stating that “no one should live in our country while denying our values and rejecting the very idea of a free and open society” (abbott, 2015). yet, as mckenna aptly explains, “security is not a value” (2008, p. 596). it is merely used to obscure political truths such as australia’s controversial participation in wars in iraq and afghanistan as an attempt to present them as a “moral struggle” (mckenna, 2008, p. 596). theorised in a more productive way, the imposition of australian values in citizenship legislation can also be understood as part of the techniques of pastoral and disciplinary power that have as their main objective the ‘moulding’ of individuals, both ‘native’ and ‘naturalised’ citizens, into free and self-regulating individuals (hindess, 1996) who may comply with or resist such techniques. a few months later, abbott called for a public debate about what it means to be an australian. he appointed former immigration minister and elder liberal statesman, phillip ruddock, to act as expert and ‘truth-teller’ and lead the discussion paper australian citizenship: your right, your responsibility (commonwealth of australia, 2014), and asked ordinary citizens to provide suggestions on ways to develop greater appreciation of australian citizenship and its privileges and obligations. these processes of consensus and consultation are important in neoliberal governing as they reassure native-born australians that they are participating in the decision-making coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 process. with this new discussion paper, australian values were once again put in the spotlight, ready to be employed as a counter-terror mechanism that would protect the australian way of life. the government also proposed strengthening the citizenship test framework by “including questions about allegiance and more questions about the rule of law, values and democratic rights and responsibilities” (commonwealth of australia, 2014, p, 4). it also proposed “strengthening the pledge and preamble to the citizenship act to include words about allegiance to australia and an undertaking not to act contrary to that allegiance” (commonwealth of australia, 2014, p. 4). in particular, abbott (2015) stressed that new citizens had to understand the ‘core’ values that are embedded in the meaning of the australian citizenship pledge. it should not be forgotten, however, that there already existed a disciplinary mechanism that had the same objective, namely, the australian citizenship test. the test had been introduced a decade earlier by the howard government as a way to judge and classify migrants’ suitability to receive the conferral of australian citizenship through their ability to regulate their conduct and acquire the prescribed knowledge through self-study. as hindess argues, disciplinary power is “exercised over one or more individuals in order to provide them with particular skills, and attributes, to develop their capacity for selfcontrol” (1996, p. 113) so that they can be transformed into ‘civilised australian citizens’ who do not threaten the native-born australians. it should be remembered that in 2008, the original australian citizenship test had been revised so that aspiring citizens would come to appreciate and share the core values embedded in the australian citizenship pledge (commonwealth of australia, 2008). abbott’s proposed changes suggest, however, that the test had failed to achieve this outcome. furthermore, many of those that were being targeted by these proposed reforms were radicalised youth who, as abbott himself would have understood, had been born with the status of australian citizenship and therefore would not be required to sit the citizenship test. so, perhaps one way of understanding how the discussion paper worked is to view it as a governmental tool that, although ineffective in achieving what it claimed, its purpose was to symbolically reassure the australian community that something was being done to combat youth radicalisation. at the time, the immigration minister peter dutton described becoming a citizen as entering a contract, which if breached should be revoked. he elaborated: when people make an oath or an allegiance to our country, it is a very serious undertaking and at the moment there is no consequences for a breach of that contract. and if you like going around as an australian citizen killing, raping and pillaging people in syria [and] if your intent is to cause harm back here in australia, to detonate a bomb or cut off someone's head. if that is your intent you don't deserve to be an australian citizen. (cited in whyte, 2015) dutton’s comments portray dual nationals as deviants who should be punished for not understanding how to conduct themselves in the ‘correct’ manner deemed appropriate in australian culture. furthermore, his reference to a contract can be understood as a “reciprocal relationship,” that is, a mutual obligation with the state providing privileges (elder, 2007) to individuals in return for them performing certain responsibilities and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 living in the ‘correct’ manner. in this context, australian values become performative because, according to dutton, as migrants go to work, speak only english at home and send their children to school (whyte, 2015), they become familiar and knowable (perera, 2007) and reassuring to “team australia” through the elimination of their differences. dutton, too, declared that “the vast majority of the australian public support the government's actions to tighten up citizenship” (cited in whyte, 2015), supporting the view that reassurance of the australian public was the government’s ultimate objective. new prime minister—old rhetoric when abbott was ousted by malcolm turnbull in september 2015, it was expected that the allegiance to australia bill would be abandoned for turnbull had previously spoken out against it, declaring it to be “unconstitutional” (turnbull, 2015a). turnbull had not previously demonstrated any desire to use the rhetoric of australian values in order to regulate the conduct of the australian community. yet soon after taking up the prime ministership, he, too, adopted the language of australian values, particularly after the fatal shooting of curtis cheng in sydney by a fifteen-year-old radicalised youth (turnbull, 2015b). immediately after the shooting, turnbull urged the australian public not to blame the australian muslim community for the murderous actions of one and praised them stating that “it has been heartening to see strong statements of support for australian values from leading members of the muslim community” (turnbull, 2015b). it appears, then, that no australian leader can ignore these principles that have now become established in the australian psyche as the weapon to fight violence and differences as well as essential for political survival in contemporary australian politics. turnbull’s new found appreciation for australian values was further accentuated during his first national security speech in november 2015, just two months after taking on the position of the national leader when he declared that his main objective, like abbott before him, was to keep australia safe (turnbull, 2015c). in turnbull’s own words, “the strongest weapons we bring to this battle are ourselves, our values, our way of life” (turnbull, 2015b). he continued: this is an important step as we all unite to ensure that we keep australia safe and ensure that we make it utterly clear to everybody, those who love us and those who seek to harm us too, that we will never walk away from our australian values. (turnbull, 2015b) like other prime ministers before him, turnbull’s main objective was to reassure the people of australia that his government was committed to ‘civilising’ the violent behaviour of those people with different values who threatened national security by punishing them with the revocation of their australian citizenship status. at the time of the enactment of the allegiance to australia legislation in december 2015, no major media outlet reported on this radical and controversial change to the rights of citizenship. according to law expert kim rubenstein, the allegiance to australia bill was “arguably unconstitutional” and lacked clarity in its attempt to define coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 the repudiation of allegiance through “conduct incompatible with the shared values of the australian community” (rubenstein, 2015, p. 1). in particular, she believed that the bill’s attempt to define allegiance was unclear and opened the matter “to abuse on many levels” (rubenstein, 2015, p. 1) and would have the effect of making dual nationals feel as “vulnerable” second class citizens who are always “suspect” and “insecure” (2015, p. 4). rubenstein hence concluded that the bill was inconsistent with “the democratic principles of a multicultural country where most members have links to other nationstates” (2015, p. 4). thus, linking allegiance to national identity and to australian values has the effect of developing a “moralisation of rights,” that is, a judgement made of the “moral worth of the person” in regards to them being permitted to secure their australian citizenship rights (golder and michaelsen, 2014, p. 288). it illustrates how disciplinary power still informs neoliberal governing as the radicalised citizen is judged to be a ‘deviant’ who needs to be surveilled and disciplined into docility by swearing allegiance to australia and accepting the normative notions that have been officially defined as australian values. a ‘return’ to australian values in the australian citizenship test? by april 2017, the turnbull government had decided to continue with abbott’s proposed reform of the australian citizenship test in order to ensure that migrants swore allegiance to australia. the prime minister announced that allegiance to the nation would be demonstrated through the candidate’s knowledge of and commitment to australian values (remeikis, 2017). these changes, turnbull claimed, would put “australian values at the heart of citizenship processes and requirements” (cited in dziedzic and belot, 2017) and demonstrate that new citizens had integrated into the australian community, forgetting that this had been the original brief of the australian citizenship test when the howard government introduced it a decade earlier. in june 2017, the government introduced the australian citizenship legislation amendment (strengthening the requirements for australian citizenship and other measures) bill 2017 and in the ensuing four months, the bill faced heated debates in parliament. such controversies did not deter the government from arguing that some migrants were lacking respect for what was promoted as ‘uniquely australian’ values (dziedzic and belot, 2017). it provided assurance that the revised test would place greater emphasis on assessing migrants’ attitudes towards religious freedom and “respect for women and children … questions about child marriage, female genital mutation and domestic violence” and the government concluded that addressing such matters would “empower applicants” (dziedzic and belot, 2017). the aforementioned issues suggest that the government was targeting muslim migrants and implying that they subscribed to inferior values and were not appreciative of the superiority of australia’s enlightened western values and therefore needed to be ‘civilised’ and ‘empowered’ through obligatory learning of these ‘superior’ values. the revised test would hence instruct migrants on how to be rewarded with what dutton described as “the big prize” of australian citizenship (cited in dziedzic and belot, 2017). this disciplinary technique would also act as a form of reassurance for the australian community as turnbull stated that “the vast majority of australians were coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 pleased to see politicians ‘standing up for australian values’” (cited in dziedzic and belot, 2017), suggesting that the government would safeguard the australian way of life from the threats posed by migrant differences. the citizenship test amendment bill was rejected by the senate in october 2017 (zivic, 2017). the shadow minister for citizenship and multicultural australia tony burke declared that the bill’s demise was “a great victory for every person who wants to pledge allegiance to this country and make a commitment to australia” (cited in acharya, 2017), suggesting that it was the government’s proposed changes that had prevented aspiring citizens from demonstrating their allegiance and commitment to their adopted nation rather than the turnbull government’s claim that migrants themselves were hostile towards such notions. furthermore, burke declared that the bill was “appalling” and that it harked back to the white australia policy as people from china and india, who, being obliged to sit the test as non-native speakers of english, would also need to demonstrate university-level english proficiency while those exempt from sitting the test like canadians and people from the united kingdom would not have to demonstrate the same high level of english language proficiency (hutchens, 2017). burke makes a poignant point in connecting the proposed changes to the citizenship test with the old discriminatory practices of the dictation test that restricted non-white immigration to australia for over seventy years. as offord, kerruish, garbutt, wessell and pavlovic argue, past practices need to be revisited from different perspectives “in order to recover what has been suppressed and marginalised” (2014, p. 6) so that normative notions such as australian values can be exposed for their own discriminatory, colonial origins. similarly, deputy opposition leader tanya plibersek’s accusation that “the bill was hateful and un-australian” (borello, 2017) was notable as it appropriated the language of politicians like dutton who frequently accused migrants of displaying violent hatred and ‘un-australian’ behaviour incompatible with australian values while the immigration minister’s own attempts to amend citizenship legislation equated to similar undemocratic and discriminatory practices. it is interesting to note that some of the strongest criticisms directed at the bill came from politicians like nick xenophon, richard di natale and tanya plibersek who, reflecting on their own parents’ and grandparents’ difficult migrant experiences (borello, 2017; remeikis, 2017), reveal how values are fluid concepts that require constant reimagining in order to ensure a sense of belonging in contemporary australia. by acknowledging the hardships faced by many migrants and refugees, and learning to engage with and respect their diverse and multiple cultural practices, we as a nation can reflect on “other ways of knowing” (offord et al., 2014) in order to reimagine australia as more inclusive. in this way, we can come to an understanding that there are multiple truths and multiple value systems that characterise humanity from all corners of the world. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 conclusion: reimagining an inclusive citizenship for over a decade now, australian values have been ridiculed and censured while at the same time praised and championed, ensuring their survival in public debate and their ongoing connection to australian identity. the fact that australian values have become fluid and part of everyday life is testament to their resilience. it is also testament to the support they receive from many migrants who have come to australia in search of these notions that have been audaciously defined as uniquely australian values (chisari, 2015). these values, then, cannot be ignored. yet this is not to suggest that the australian community must accept only what is government-sanctioned and adhere to a global dissemination of a neoliberal agenda based on what are claimed to be exclusive values of western peoples. nor does it mean that we can ignore the limitations of a value system that was forged from enlightenment ideals and a brutal colonial past (offord et al., 2014). instead, we should identify multiple and inclusive values that are fluid, dynamic and respectful of differences. by exposing the fluidity of australian values, we are able to create new spaces and new ways of being australian. we can reimagine an australian identity that is inclusive of cultural differences. such a reimagining will allow us to inform future policy decisions on immigration, citizenship rights and human rights. in this reimagined australia, the value of freedom would prevent the mandatory detention of asylum seekers. the value of equality would encompass support for marriage equality. the desire to protect the nation would be extended to protecting the environment. in an inclusive australia, there would be universal support for indigenous reconciliation and recognition that indigenous peoples are the original custodians of this great southern land. a reimagining of australian citizenship is therefore called for that recognises the multiple value systems experienced by the australian population. a reimagining of australian citizenship affirms the government’s role as protector of the australian community while promoting respect for cultural differences. a reimagining of australian citizenship therefore promotes the production of an inclusive society where fostering belonging becomes the responsibility of all australian residents whether one is a british migrant, a muslim refugee, a second-generation australian politician, an indigenous activist or an ordinary, australian-born citizen. references abbott, t. 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(2014). introduction: allegiance and identity in a globalized world. in f. jenkins, m. a. nolan & k. rubenstein, (eds.), allegiance and identity in a globalised world (pp.1-27). cambridge: cambridge university press. koziol, m. (2017, april 21). “i don't think your heart's in it, leigh:” malcolm turnbull defends “uniquely australian: values. sydney morning herald. retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/i-dont-think-your-heartsin-it-leigh-malcolm-turnbull-defends-uniquely-australian-values-20170420gvp2hy.html. mckenna, m. (2008). “we think we’re pretty good and we are:” values and patriotism in john howard’s australia. in d. gare & d. r. ritter (eds.). making australian history: perspectives on the past since 1788 (1st ed., pp. 592-600). south melbourne, vic.: thomson learning australia. mitchell, w. j. t. (2005). value. in new keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society, edited by t. bennett, l. grossberg & m. morris, 365-67. maiden, ma: blackwell publishing. offord, b., kerruish, e., garbutt, r., wessell, a., & pavlovic, k. (2014). inside australian culture: legacies of enlightenment values. london: anthem press. perera, s. (2007). “aussie luck:” the border politics of citizenship post cronulla beach. australian critical race and whiteness studies association e-journal, 3(1). retrieved from http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/64suvendrini perera. pdf, 1-16. remeikis, a. (2017, october 16). citizenship bill dead in water with nxt calling for it to be scrapped. the guardian australia. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/oct/16/citizenship-bill-dead-inthe-water-with-nxt-calling-for-it-to-be-scrapped. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 rubenstein, k. (2015). submission to the pjcis: new inquiry into the australian citizenship amendment (allegiance to australia) bill 2015, 20 july 2015. submission 35. turnbull, m. (2015a). transcript—interview with michael rowland on abc news 24 breakfast. 19 june. retrieved from http://malcolmturnbull. com.au/media/transcript-interview-with-michael-rowland-on-abc-news-24breakfast. ---. (2015b). transcript—prime minister malcolm turnbull addresses summit. 15 october. retrieved from http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/primeminister-malcolm-turnbull. ---. (2015c). statement—paris terrorist attack. 14 november. retrieved from http://www.malcolm turnbull.com.au/media/statement-paris-terrorist-attack. walters, w. (2012). governmentality: critical encounters. london and new york: routledge. whyte, s. (2015, may, 25). people killing, raping and pillaging in syria should lose citizenship: dutton. the sydney morning herald. retrieved from, http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/people-killing-raping-and pillaging-in-syria-should-lose-citizenship-dutton-20150524-gh8rgx.html. zivic, m. (2017, october 19). migrants no longer in limbo as citizenship changes killed off by senate. sbs news. retrieved from http://www.sbs.com.au/news/ article/2017/10/18/migrants-no-longer-limbo-citizenship-changes-killed-senate. maria chisari’s research interests are interdisciplinary, covering the fields of cultural studies, governmentality, citizenship, australian values, academic literacies, education and tesol. her doctoral research consisted of a genealogy of the introduction of the australian citizenship test and focused on how migrants both negotiate and contest the discourses around what it means to be a model australian citizen in contemporary australia. maria currently teaches in the field of academic literacies and education at the university of sydney. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 phryne fisher: a postcolonial female detective in ruddy gore (1995) catalina ribas segura centro de enseñanza superior alberta giménez (cesag) universidad pontificia comillas cribas@cesag.org copyright©2016 catalina ribas segura. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: kerry greenwood’s the phryne fisher mystery collection is formed by 19 novels set in 1928-1929 australia and its main character is the hon. phryne fisher, a young beautiful intelligent rich woman who works as a private detective. the seventh novel of this collection is ruddy gore (1995), which presents one of the most relevant characters in the series: lin, and which includes a turning-point in the protagonist’s life. this article analyses the depiction of miss fisher as a postcolonial detective in the late 1920s melbourne, and focuses on the constructs of gender and ethnicity in the creation of miss fisher and of lin. this novel was adapted as a tv episode, aired by the australia broadcasting corporation in 2012. this article also explores the way phryne is depicted in the episode and how she interacts with some of the characters. the article aims to find out whether the adaptation creates a female detective as author kerry greenwood had envisioned, and whether this character breaks stereotypes or follows them. keywords: crime fiction, female detectives, postcolonial studies, racism, australia, the phryne fisher mystery collection, miss fisher’s murder mysteries “disguise, silver lady. concealment. protective colouration. if a chinese wants to live in a foreign country he has to be twice as clever as the inhabitants and make perfectly sure that they never suspect it.” “not a new idea,” said phryne… “women have been doing that for a thousand years.” ruddy gore, 183. this dialogue takes place between two of the main characters in kerry greenwood’s novel ruddy gore (1995), the seventh novel of the phryne fisher mystery collection (1989-2014). mr lin chung is a high-class educated businessman who imports silk and porcelain from china to australia. he is a member of one of the two oldest chinese mailto:cribas@cesag.org coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 families in melbourne, arriving in australia in 1845 during the gold rush (greenwood 152). ‘silver lady’ is miss phryne fisher, the protagonist of the novel, a brave independent rich educated woman who works as a detective. lin and phryne are having dinner in a chinese restaurant in little bourke street, the chinatown in melbourne, in february or march 1928. the date is not clearly stated, but it can be deduced from the fact that the premiere of the play ruddigore, or the witch’s curse includes an event in honour of bert hinkler for his successful solo flight from england to australia, which took place between 7 th and 22 nd february 1928. in this novel, phryne is on her way to his majesty’s theatre with a friend when they get involved in a fight. phryne helps mrs lin and her grandson, mr lin chung, who wants to meet her again. once in the theatre, phryne witnesses the death of an actor on stage and the manager, sir bernard tarrant, asks her for help. phryne will face the ghost of the leading actress of the premier in london – who died in 1898 –, three murders and a murder attempt on herself before solving the case with lin’s help. a postcolonial female detective the fact that each character is privileged with regard to one identity marker (gender and ethnicity, respectively) is not fortuitous. the above-mentioned conversation between lin and phryne explains a strategy used by people belonging to a minority group in order to avoid being perceived as a threat by those with power. sociologist zygmunt bauman (1991) argues that the notion of ‘otherness’ is central to the establishment of identity categories as they are constructed in terms of binaries, in which the second term is the other of the first, thus, ‘us’ vs ‘them’, men vs women, native vs stranger, friend vs enemy, etc. sociologist madan sarup (1996) further examines these concepts and explains that individuals can be perceived as friends, enemies or strangers. while friends are associated with cooperation and enemies with struggle, strangers are placed in the in-between as they are “neither friend nor enemy” (sarup 10), are “not ‘one of them’” (7) and are the “eternal wanderer, homeless always and everywhere” (11). migrants are considered to be strangers so their position within society is not of being one of ‘us’, but different from ‘us’. while the idealised australian is a white, protestant, middle-class, australian-born, english-speaking, heterosexual, able-bodied man of british ancestry (hage 1998; hage 2003; whitlock and carter 1992), the two main characters in ruddy gore do not conform to this ideal: mr lin chung is not white, his ancestry is not british and his religion is not stated, while miss fisher is a female. mr lin knows he is ‘othered’ and that he is perceived as an agent who threatens the aristocratic fantasy of a white nation. in fact, the ‘other’ is regularly reminded that s/he does not belong by means of “the white nationalist practices of exclusion” (hage 1998: 68-70). in white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society, hage explains that nationalists believe in some ideals which differentiate the way the nation is and how it should be. first, there exists the “fantasy of dominance” (hage 1998: 69; italics in the original), where white nationalists behave as if they owned the national space and act violently when they feel that the state is not maintaining their dominant position. second, the white nationalists treat non-whites as objects because they want them to behave as such given the fact that, in that position, they will not question anyone’s situation and behaviour. as hage explains, “nationalist practices embody a fantasy of the self as a fulfilled nationalist, more so than a fantasy of the coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 nation, for in this yearning nationalists establish their very raison d’être” (70). if the nation was inclusive and egalitarian, these nationalists would not have an ‘other’ to differentiate themselves from and being nationalist would be meaningless. this is why they continue to exacerbate differences based on appearance and objectify non-whites. mr lin comes from a respectable family, is wealthy, elegant and studied in cambridge (england), as shown by his “pure eton and oxford” accent (greenwood 3), as well as in shanghai (greenwood 149), but he will never have the privileges of a white person. the construct of ‘whiteness’ is formed by different characteristics besides skin colour, such as looks, language, accent, religion, behaviour, citizenship and nationality. following bourdieu (1986), hage explains that cultural capital “represents the sum of valued knowledge, styles, social and physical (bodily) characteristics and practical behavioural dispositions within a given field” (hage 1998: 53). this capital is not cumulative, each characteristic has a different fluctuating value and a non-mainstream person will never get the total capital. by trying to master as much cultural capital as possible, migrants aim to accumulate national capital because it leads them to being “recognised as legitimately national by the dominant culture” (hage 1998: 53) and, thus, to national belonging. however, the fact that a person acquires cultural and national capital devalues the capital itself: the migrant was not born with it, and does not have the ‘essence’ that the national aristocracy possesses (hage 1998: 62). consequently, whites maintain their hegemony and superiority. miss fisher is depicted as a rich, beautiful and determined young woman, who likes beautiful costumes, good manners and parties, but is also independent and generous, and defies conventions. phryne has an english accent despite the fact that she was born poor and spent her childhood in australia. thus, she has both cultural and national capital because her english wealth and social position are not questioned, while her humble australian origins give her the moral credit to defend fairness and egalitarianism. as ryan-fazilleau (2007) explains, “this is a playful reversal of a motif frequently found in colonial literature: the attainment of legitimacy and social recognition through the recovery of a british birthright” (ryan-fazilleau 63). these links to england make phryne part of the australian aristocracy, but she is not ashamed of the poverty she experienced in her childhood. on the contrary, she explains it in each novel and it is her way to justify her reasons for helping others. throughout the novels, phryne’s biography is hinted and explained. phryne was born in a working class family in melbourne and had a difficult childhood, as her father drank heavily – although “she had never seen him violent” (greenwood 164) –, while her younger sister disappeared and the case was not investigated because the family was poor. the family moved to england because some relatives died and her parents became the new lord and lady of “a fine english country estate” (“honourable miss phryne fisher” 4). as a young adult, phryne joined an all-women ambulance brigade in france during world war i, where, obviously, she saw much loss of life. after the war ended she moved to montparnasse, where she became an artist’s model. the first novel, cocaine blues (1989), is set in 1928, when she returns to melbourne to investigate the irregular behaviour of the daughter of some acquaintances of her parents. however, she sets the conditions for the job. throughout the collection of novels, she becomes a private detective and lives in a big house with her maid and companion, dot, her butler and her cook, mr and mrs butler, and creates a family of her own, with two adopted daughters, a dog and a cat, and a close group of friends. in spite of enjoying the luxuries of high-class social life, coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 she explores the freedoms women enjoy in post-war melbourne and tries to “change the world for the people who are in serious trouble” (“producer’s perspective” 3). however, miss fisher is also a victim of patriarchy and social conventions. although she is a white, protestant, australian-born english-speaking woman of british ancestry, she is a female and the behaviour expected of her as a woman is constructed according to the nationalist project of a country. yural-davies (1997) presents three main aspects of the relationship between gender relations and nationalism. first, she claims that “women have been constructed as the biological reproducers of the nation” and that “specific national codes define and constitute appropriate gender roles” (yural-davies in stychin 8). second, she explains that the discourse of citizenship constructs the public/private spheres as well as the active/passive citizenship, which follow the male/female binary. third, the role of women is, thus, clearly determined, as they are judged according to their fulfilment of the role of the feminine mother dedicated to domesticity. consequently, the ideal woman is the wife and mother who maintains the gender roles stays in the private sphere, practices a passive citizenship and enjoys her role as care-taker. as will be seen in the following pages, phryne fisher defies gender conventions and interethnic relations, and proves she possesses the characteristics of a successful detective: curiosity, “moral integrity” (“world” 1), a “sharp wit, powers of observation and [an] ability to read people” (“honourable miss phryne fisher” 4). women have been represented as detectives in the genre of crime fiction since its early years. andrew forrester, with his mrs g (or miss gladden) in the female detective (1864), and william stephens hayward with mrs paschal in revelations of a lady detective (1864), are considered to be the first english texts with professional female ‘detectives as protagonists. agatha christie’s miss marple, however, who appeared in 1930, is the most famous female detective, although she was not a professional sleuth. as socorro suárez (2013) explains, detective fiction is a genre suitable for average female protagonists, not necessarily femme fatales or victims, because they are considered to have some of the qualities of a good sleuth: curiosity, attentiveness, quietness, patience and ability to enter private spaces where others are not allowed. women, suárez argues, have traditionally been accused of having these qualities in negative terms, that is, of enjoying gossiping and having morbid curiosity. they were also expected to be quiet and organised even under long-term confinements due to maternity or because conventions did not approve of them being outside the house if it was not to take care of the children or do the shopping. besides, they were also to be quiet in social situations, that is, they should listen and look but not to give their opinions. the characters of female detectives, both professional and amateur, had to convince other characters, especially male ones, of their mental and physical abilities to solve the mysteries and face the criminals, and that they were good at detecting because they relied on those qualities they had developed because they were part of their cultural construct. as i explain somewhere else (ribas 2016), drawing on showalter’s organization of literature written by women (1982), phryne fisher is an example of a third stage of detectives: not a feminine nor a feminist, but a female one. in fact, phryne is successful, respected and valued mainly because she is a curious, determined, intelligent and rich woman who defies conventions. neither lin nor phryne are fully privileged, and each one of them has felt discriminated against at times. before reaching the restaurant where the words from the opening quote coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 are pronounced, lin and phryne are walking in little bourke street. a chinese shopkeeper makes a remark to lin and after his reply, the shopkeeper laughs. phryne guesses the comment: “on the general subject of ‘aren’t chinese ladies good enough for you?’” lin is surprised she knows, to which phryne replies: “that’s what someone would say to me if i escorted you down toorak road” (greenwood 177). on their way to the restaurant they comment that their relationship will be “a rocky and difficult road” (177), but both are eager to walk on it. when they finally reach the restaurant and enter, the whole room goes quiet: phryne is the only non-chinese person there. the situation is disconcerting for both phryne, because she is otherised, and for lin, because he had not envisaged that happening. after some seconds, two grandparents start summoning their families to eat and soon the restaurant is lively again. phryne acknowledged their courtesy: “no australian pub crowd would have been as polite to a visiting chinese woman, she was sure” (greenwood 180). lin asks her if she feels comfortable because “you must feel like a zoo animal”, but phryne replies: “a lady, my governess told me, is always on display” (181). again, phryne equates discrimination as a woman to that of ethnicity. the two characters are aware of the fact that their relationship breaks many social norms. in 1920s australia, the white australia policy was in force and it aimed at creating a white nation through the restriction of immigration and of the rights of those non-whites living in australia. these were achieved by means of different laws as well as the dictation test, that is, a fifty-word text dictated to a migrant in a language different from his or hers which, supposedly, s/he had to write correctly to be allowed to enter the country. some of the most restrictive laws were passed between 1901 and 1905, which means that their consequences were experienced by both lin and phryne. in 1901 the pacific islanders labourers act forbade pacific islanders from entering the commonwealth of australia after 31st march 1904 and stated that most of the islanders living in australia would be repatriated from 31st december 1906. in 1902 the franchise act (cwth) stated that “no aboriginal native of australia, asia, africa or the islands of the pacific except new zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an electoral role unless so entitled under section forty-one of the constitution”. in 1903 the naturalisation act (cwth) specified that maoris were not entitled to welfare benefits but were eligible for naturalisation. in 1904 according to tavan (22) or 1905 according to williams (42), a special passport agreement with japan and india, that is, the ʻcertificate exempting from dictation testʼ (cedt), “permitted the temporary settlement of merchants, students, and tourists and their wives” (tavan 22). the chinese received this right in 1912 (tavan 22). in 1905, the dictation test suffered a modification as it could be given in “any prescribed language” instead of in a “european language” (tavan 22). in 1908 the old age and invalid pensions act specified that “ʻasiaticsʼ not born in australia, and aboriginal natives of australia, africa and the pacific islands and new zealand were not qualified for the pensions” (tavan 8). then, in 1912, a law giving £5 to white european women on the birth of each live baby was passed. all these bills positively discriminated white australians and migrants of british descent. besides, assistants to merchants were allowed entry from the early 1920s (markus 52) and after 1934 their permission also included those substitutes for the chinese traders and businessmen who wanted to retire in their homelands and who had established residence before federation (markus 52; williams 37). coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 it is interesting to note that during their conversation, lin explains that he was born in australia, just as phryne was, but neither does he consider himself australian nor is he considered to be one, while she is an australian citizen. this is another of the privileges of whiteness: citizenship did not depend on place of birth. in fact, the australian constitution did not define who was a citizen of australia to avoid confrontation with other countries: if ʻcitizenʼ was defined as ʻbritish subjectʼ, then indians and chinese people from hong kong and other places would be citizens with equal rights, and politicians wanted a country for white people (rubenstein 23). however, economically speaking, the existence of a small resident chinese population was beneficial as long as it did not compete with the white australian workforce. therefore, chinese presence in the form of traders, market gardeners, restaurant owners and chefs (markus 52-53) was allowed. consequently, there existed a chinese community which had been living in the country for more than a century but whose members could not become citizens nor bring in their families. this situation posed a problem: many chinese needed to travel abroad more often than the rest of the population, and thus needed a passport. the administrators of the immigration restriction act decided to label them as ‘domiciles’ and the “customs and excise office of each state (and later the immigration department) [were required] to issue a ʻcertificate exempting from dictation testʼ (cedt) each time a ʻdomicileʼ wished to travel” (williams 37) abroad or return. as lin suggests in his comment in the quote on the first page, the chinese in australia had used different strategies to avoid trouble, and one of them was working on professions white australians did not want to perform, such as having vegetable gardens or laundries. as lin explains, one of the reasons for this decision was to avoid being considered a threat and, consequently, the target of more discrimination. this desire for ʻracial purityʼ was described by attorney-general alfred deakin, who defended the idea of the white australia policy by stating: no motive power operated more universally on this continent … than the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races. it is only necessary to say that they do not and cannot blend with us, that we do not, cannot and ought not to blend with them. (tavan 9) “they” and “them” refer to indigenous australians, chinese and people who were not considered to be white. at the time, not only were interethnic couples not desired, but their offspring was also rejected. as nikos papastergiadis (2000) explains, “the question of genesis in the nineteenth century was symptomatic of a generalized state of unease over origin and identity” as the encounters between europeans and the inhabitants in the colonies “had profound and disturbing consequences in the self-imaging of both ruler and the ruled” (papastergiadis 170). this anxiety concerned relationships between people of different ethnicities, as it was thought that there existed a hierarchy of races among humans and that these differences created different species. consequently, some ‘species’ would be superior to others. following this line of thought, “in 1883, francis galton, a cousin of darwin, coined the term eugenic to describe the science of using genetics to improve racial quality” (papastergiadis 173; italics in the original). this led to campaigns to “sterilize the poor, insane and feeble” and to encourage “successful adults to breed” (papastergiadis 173). from the late 19 th century to the early 20 th coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 century, eugenics “was the science of ‘good breeding’ and it became the most sophisticated justification for the maintenance of purity in the white race” (papastergiadis 173). as a result, not only were interethnic relationships disapproved of but their offspring were considered to be ‘hybrids’, a term which had negative connotations, as there was the belief that the hybrid was a monster or deviant, and would have worse health and physical conditions than their parents. thus, an interethnic couple was a defiance of the establishment and led to colonial anxiety in the society as a whole. as phryne ponders and remarks, she had spent all night playing clouds and rain with a heathen chinee, and he had been loving, delicate, skilled and terribly intelligent. yet what she was thinking of – an alliance with a man of a different race – would be considered by all of society to be a vast and irretrievable degradation, making her of less value than a whore. phryne closed her fists and stiffened her spine. “to hell with all racialists,” she said outloud. “and to hell with eugenics, degenerate heredity, miscegenation and frauds who pile up skills like a conqueror as well. may they choke on their bone… there is no place for them in the kingdom of heaven.” (greenwood 162-3) phryne does not agree with racism and the official political discourse of fear of the ‘other’ and, accordingly, she bases her opinion and behaviour on the individual characteristics of each person. she defies the rules and aims for a change, to accept others for their virtues, regardless of their origins. her attitude can cause colonial anxiety to some of her contemporaries and, in the novel, phryne’s friend bunji and a welsh priest are two of the best examples, as she is suspicious of entering the lins’ house and giving mrs lin her address to allow her show her gratitude, and the welsh priest mutters a common racist saying, “a heathen chinee” (greenwood 162), to express any undesirable person. however, mrs butler and taxi-driver bert, both working-class characters, value the good skills, diligence and care the chinese profess at their jobs. phryne feels aggravated when someone makes a racist comment and, as the narrator in the novel explains, phryne was at a loss dealing with those who considered other races to be inferior. she herself dealt with everyone from an attitude of effortless superiority, but there were no ranks in the rest of humanity. to phryne, a stupid englishman was just as much an affront to her as an obstructive hindu or a foolish greek. and while the world was positively littered with beautiful men of all races phryne thought that it would be criminal to neglect one because he happened to be of a different hue. (greenwood 147) phryne acts with a sense of superiority because she is constantly reminded of her beauty, intelligence and skills by others, but she is also approachable and helpful, and does not discriminate against others because of their social class. she rather makes up her opinions on their fairness to others. phryne is described as having many qualities desired in chinese women (small feet, white skin, dark hair, fair complexion) but also of having a “surpassing otherness” (greenwood 3). lin and phryne’s second encounter happens at her place, and when lin coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 sees phryne walk down the stairs, he is “struck by how chinese she looked, except that she could never be chinese. she was altogether unique and other” (greenwood 148). this comment will appear a few more times in the novel, especially when they are naked in bed. during the dinner, lin expresses this thought on her ambivalent looks to phryne and mutters the following words: “you could almost be one of my own people,” he said, trying desperately not to give offence. “the manchu princesses had your carriage, the proud set of your head, and they had black hair and red mouth like you. but you have green eyes, and there is more colour in your hair, yet…” (greenwood 149) the attraction between lin and phryne is mutual, as they feel comfortable with each other and recognise in the interlocutor characteristics that they value. as far as phryne is concerned, she is intrigued by lin and attracted to his outstanding physical appearance, his elegant manners, his educated accent, his savoir faire and his conversation. during the dinner he says that his grandmother, whom phryne also met, considers her to be a courtesan, a respected female figure implying independence, education, beauty, manners, intelligence, determination, economic freedom and their own honour. this idea, lin continues, is already in phryne’s name, as it makes reference to the favourite muse and lover of praxiteles, a greek sculptor who lived in 4 th c bc, who was born with the name of mnēsarétē. she was a hetaira, that is, a highly educated and refined courtesan, the only group of women who were allowed to have discussions with men, who could read and write, were independent, highly influential and enjoyed social prestige. hetaira phryne was the model for several sculptures of the goddess aphrodite, that is, the goddess of love, fertility and female beauty, the most well-known being aphrodite of cnidus, the first life-size sculpture of aphrodite. lin recalls the legend that has it that she became so rich and powerful that she offered to rebuild the walls of thebes if they included an inscription saying that she, a courtesan, had rebuilt them, but the people of thebes preferred the ruins. throughout the collection of novels, the character of phryne is depicted as one breaking conventions, not only between the centre and the ex-centre (england and australia), social classes (low class and aristocracy), patriarchy and the established role of a woman, but also between cultures (in this novel, anglo-australian and chinese). ruddy gore is part of collection formed by 19 books, all of them set in 1928 and 1929. in each novel, phryne is considered beautiful and elegant, but it is in ruddy gore when characters of another ethnicity appreciate characteristics of their culture in her and, to a certain extent she feels an equal to them. some of the novels of the phryne fisher mystery collection have been adapted into episodes of a tv series entitled miss fisher’s murder mysteries, released by the australian broadcasting corporation (abc) in 2012 with two more seasons aired in 2013 and 2015. greenwood’s novels explore many social issues, such as physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse of children, power relations within the family, drug and alcohol trafficking and/or abuse, war veterans, revolutions, corruption, racism and discrimination based on other features, but, above all, they give voice to women, not only as victims but also as detectives and agents of action. in the following coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 section, i will contrast the novel and the episode and explain the implications of their differences. ruddy gore: one title, two formats, two texts the text ruddy gore is presented into two formats: the novel, published in 1995, and the episode of the tv series, released almost twenty years later, in 2012. due to the characteristics of each format, the episode does not include all the information that appears in the novel. the process of adapting a written text to a screen involves changing some characters and even the plot, as the written and audiovisual languages are different and have specific patterns and techniques. as subouraud (2010) states, turning literature or theatre into cinema, as paul ricoeur reminds us, supposes a change in narrative… to adapt, it is necessary to take a written ouvre and give it life again not only using the procedures of the cinema to transform written text (script, dialogues) but also, and mainly, making the most of all those procedures that come from the cinematographic production. (suboraud 3; my translation) part of the adaptation process, seger (2000) explains, includes providing a clear structure of the plot, and that may include reducing the number of characters or stories, changing settings or the order of events or including scenes and dialogues that did not exist in the original text. she argues that “films are usually experienced only once. we do not have the possibility of turning the page, checking a name or reading a description again. clarity is a key element in the commercial viability of a film” (seger 36; my translation). the novel ruddy gore (1995) was turned into a 55-minute episode of a tv series and, consequently, the number of deaths and sub-plots was downsized, which implies a reduction in the number of stereotypes that were questioned and defied. the four deaths, one ghost and two assassins of the novel were reduced to two deaths, one ghost and one murderer in the tv series. the character of phryne is the protagonist in both, although she is depicted with many deep differences: while she questions and defies stereotypes in the novel, she follows and does not question them in the episode. moreover, her relationship with some characters and the way these are depicted may be antagonistic to the one in the novel. thus, this section portrays some of the characters (lin, mrs lin, jack, dot, dorothea, herbert and mr brawn) and compares the relationship of phryne with them in both the novel and episode versions of ruddy gore. one of the most relevant differences between the novel and its screen adaptation is the relationship between lin and phryne, his ancestry and his current life. in the novel, their first encounter happens in the street. while phryne and her friend bunji are on their way to his majesty’s theatre, they see some men attacking an old chinese lady and a young man. as they cannot stand an old lady being hurt they intervene, and the fight stops. after the attackers leave, lin and his grandmother thank the women for their help. lin explains that they have rescued “the lin family” (greenwood 3) and phryne asks him for “a wash and a brush up” (4) as she “really must restore [her] friend to respectability” (4). lin asks phryne and bunji to accompany them to their luxurious house and, after helping them and getting their addresses, lin and phryne, who does not speak cantonese, agree to have dinner on the following thursday at phryne’s. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 however, in the tv series, phryne meets lin at the backstage of the theatre, after he has helped an actor in a fight. that night, after the function, they meet again in the lane behind the theatre, where phryne helps lin in a fight, and he invites her and her reticent companion dot to dinner. they go to his family’s restaurant, where his grandmother questions him about and disapproves of phryne, who can speak cantonese. during the dinner phryne learns that lin imports different products, but he gives her little personal information. two main differences are present in these approaches: on the one hand, the novel focuses on the importance of family, respect to elders, honour, manners and etiquette, while the tv series focuses on the number of fights in the chinese community, on the suspicion of the kidnapping of women and on the idea of opium smuggling. that is to say, while the novel pays attention to some of the values of chinese culture, the adaptation turns to stereotypes. another relevant difference is the depiction of lin’s family. in the novel, lin’s father is alive and he helps to make a truce between families, which means he is respected. lin was born in australia and educated in cambridge and shanghai, he imports silk and porcelain, was trained as a stage magician – a family tradition –, and he will help phryne solve the case. an arranged marriage has been organised for him as “a way of cementing an alliance” (greenwood 155) between the two oldest chinese families in australia, who had been rivals for generations: the hus and the lins. the two heirs, lin and sang-niang (or annie hu), are born in melbourne, know each other, do not want to marry each other and do not like the idea of arranged marriages. but hu sang-niang is in love with a young man of the li family, and lin does not want to get married at all. sang-niang defies her elders by telling them that she does not want to marry lin and, as her family does not want her back, she is staying with the lins. the fight described above is an attempt by the li family to kidnap mrs lin in order to exchange her for sang-niang and force an end to the dispute. but phryne and her friend bunji interrupt the fight and the kidnappers leave. this subplot continues without the interference of phryne, and is solved while phryne and lin are having dinner in a chinese restaurant. both lin and sang-niang represent a generation which follows chinese customs but defies some traditions while honouring their elders. consequently, the lins are presented as the aristocracy of the chinese community in melbourne, a rich and respected family who has lived in australia for five generations and who maintain the importance of family and honour in their behaviour. while absent in the novel, the suspicion of opium smuggling hovers over the whole tv episode. in the episode, the couple’s first dinner is at the lin’s family restaurant, while the second one is at phryne’s. in these two conversations, the reader learns that phryne speaks cantonese and that lin trades in silk and detests opium, as his dead father became addicted to it and lost the family’s business, which lin is determined to make successful again. he has been engaged to the daughter of a shanghainese family, and this arranged marriage is to provide his family with wealth and her family with a good reputation. lin has never seen the bride, who is not described, and knows nothing else about her. her family wants him to trade in opium, something he does not accept. furthermore, in the tv adaptation lin has not been trained as a magician, and he does not help phryne solve the case. therefore, the stereotypes of the ‘yellow peril’, seduction of women, opium, immorality and no respect for individual rights are present in this text. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 regarding mrs lin, she is depicted as an elegant, determined and discrete old woman, who feels mesmerized by phryne’s appearance when she helps her and lin in a fight near his majesty’s theatre: in fact, she thinks phryne is a spirit sent by her ancestors. as the matriarch of the lin family, mrs lin is respected and honoured not only by her family but also by the chinese community. the second time they meet is at mrs lin’s. while lin is momentarily absent, mrs lin elegantly lets phryne know that she accepts their love affair, that she will not intervene in their romance and will accept her as his concubine, as long as she does not want to marry lin, since each one of them is supposed to get married to someone of their own ethnicity and culture. mrs lin cares about phryne and treats her with kindness and respect. phryne’s answer is in consonance with mrs lin’s thoughts, so their relationship is most cordial. had mrs lin not approved of phryne, lin would not have gone against his grandmother’s wishes and lin and phryne would not have had a relationship, as the concept of hsiao or ‘filial piety’ is core to chinese cultures, and lin clearly follows it. this concept “encompasses a broad range of behaviours, including children’s respect, obedience, loyalty, material provision, and physical care to parents” (zhan and montgomery 210). hsiao states the order of obedience a person should follow according to his/her social and family role: emperor/subject, father/son, husband/wife. this role also limits the acts of power of a person: the head of the family had to obey his emperor, but not his wife or his mother (although he had to show them respect), while a daughter, for example, had to obey her emperor, her father, her brothers, her older relatives, her mother and her older sisters. lin is not the head of his household, so he has to obey all his elders. consequently, this set of roles justifies the fact that all individuals had to fulfil their roles in order to maintain familial and social harmony: from the emperor, also known as ‘son of heaven’, to the child. the fact that sang-niang wanted to marry a man different from the one chosen by her family is a disruption of the social order and, if a solution that satisfies her family is not found, the three families involved will be enemies and, thus, there will be chaos in the chinese community again. consequently, the novel highlights the value of honouring the elders and respecting chinese traditions especially by introducing the figure of mrs lin. mrs lin compares phryne to a manchu princess and to a courtesan. both are positive images of chinese women as manchu princesses were known for their beauty, obvious high position and luxurious lifestyle; and courtesans were intelligent, beautiful, economically independent, literate and cultivated, and had refined manners. another female stereotype is mentioned in the novel: that of a fox spirit. lin explains phryne that dorothea, the ghost, may be one, as they are beautiful and intelligent but they aim to take the properties of men and waste them. however, in the adaptation, lin’s grandmother is distant, disdainful and distrustful of phryne. this grandmother does not respect nor accept phryne, accuses her of being a fox spirit and threatens her with a curse if she interferes in lin’s life and prevents him from marrying his shanghainese bride. this conversation takes place at the servants’ door of phryne’s house and, consequently, not only does she behave in a far less ladylike way than she does in the novel, but the fear of the other and suspicion about other cultures is always present. also mrs lin is dressed in black, while phryne is coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 dressed in white, clearly using colours to vilify the chinese grandmother and mark the purity and good intentions of phryne. the episode focuses on more harmful stereotypes, such as the “heathen chinee”, whom a welsh priest refers to (greenwood 162). this colonial anxiety constantly appears in the tv episode, and not so often in the novel. in the novel, detective inspector (di) john ‘jack’ robinson is happily married, and his relation with phryne is just professional: he accepts her as a private detective and they only collaborate to solve the cases. phryne does not share all her information with him and does not give him an account of all her movements and investigations. also, when there are family gatherings, constable collins is invited, but jack is not, which is another proof of their cordial but just professional relation, free of physical attraction. in fact, the relationship between phryne and lin is a turning point in her life and in her relations with men, as she considers having a long-lasting relationship for the first time. this is because lin is also upper-class, is elegant, has good manners, is respectful towards her, fulfils her sexual needs and accepts and values her independence and lifestyle. in the tv series, two of phryne’s closest friends are jack and her maid and companion dot, both of whom question her taste in men. the relationship between lin and phryne is just a random affair with no emotional consequences for phryne, and it seems that she is just moved by lust and not by a keen interest in lin and his community. the audience, however, can see how the intimacy between phryne and jack grows in each episode, by means of their physical distance, touch, conversations and looks. in the episode ruddy gore, it is jack who saves phryne from an attack on her, and it is phryne who helps lin in the fight. thus, the audience receives a triple message: jack and phryne have a common ancestry, he protects phryne and is there when she needs him, and she is the one who helps lin, who has a more troubled life than jack. phryne and jack’s relationship is thus more conservative, and it exists even though jack is married. his wife has temporarily moved to the countryside with her sister in retreat from their strained marriage. thus, jack seems to be a good candidate for phryne as he does not have a devout and loving wife at home and, consequently, phryne does not play the vamp. moreover, he behaves as the lovely friend who has feelings for another friend and accepts her love-life while waiting for her to realise that they are meant to be together. phryne and dot make a singular pair of detectives in the novels the phryne fisher mystery collection. however, in ruddy gore, dot is not as decisive for the solution of the cases as in other novels or in the tv series. dot is a sensible, young, devote catholic woman who enjoys domesticity and security and has been raised with a sense of decorum and modesty. she is often described as a plain woman in plain clothes. throughout the collection, dot develops her inner strength, self-confidence, independence and determination with the support of phryne, who encourages her to become her assistant: dot searches for clues, investigates and interrogates witnesses, becomes phryne’s secretary, and is asked for her opinion on domestic matters, a topic phryne knows nothing about. both of them use their femininity to further their investigation, but each has a different approach: phryne through her intelligence and deductive skills, braveness, femininity, determination and sexually active attitude, while dot reads gossip magazines, may be invisible in her plainness, knows a lot about domestic matters, is dutiful and has more empathy with average women. both phryne coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 and dot complement each other’s skills, deeply appreciate and care for each other and work as a team. their main differences, which both of them respect, are that phryne loves speed and danger, seduces many attractive young men of any nationality or ancestry (anglo-australians, italians, latvians, russians, jews, chinese, gypsies, etc), and does not contemplate marriage, although she is gentle and respectful with all of them and considers having a lasting relationship with lin. on the other hand, dot is a devote believer, who often prays and worries about the wellbeing of all the members of the household and of her family and friends. she wants to marry constable collins and have a family of her own, but throughout the collection of novels she also realises her worth and independence and wants collins to appreciate her mind and inner strength. in the tv series, however, dot is shy, less determined and more dependent and passive. she needs more encouragement from phryne to look for clues and sometimes, such as in the episode ruddy gore, she helps phryne solve the case but she is not aware of it. in the tv series the character of dot is not as developed as in the novels, so her evolution is less palpable. she is clearly a more conventional patriarchal character who follows the establishment. another character i would like to refer to is dorothea curtis, the actress who incarnated the main female character when the play ruddigore, or the witch’s curse, was played in london in 1898 (in the novel) or in melbourne in 1908 (in the episode). she died and, while her cousin and dresser thought that she had been killed, her lover and fellowactor, bernard tarrant, assumed she had committed suicide. now he directs ruddigore in melbourne, and dorothea’s ghost has appeared and threatened some of the actors. as part of the investigation that phryne manages, she finds out that the current main actress, leila, who learnt about her biological mother as an adult, is really bernard’s and dorothea’s daughter. bernard did not know that dorothea had been pregnant and had had a child. in the novel, the voice of dorothea is heard through a medium. after an attempted murder attack on her, phryne sees the ghost and receives a threating note. phryne goes to a medium, not because she believes in them, but because two of the actors are agitated and want to talk to dorothea. during the trance dorothea says she had a child and claimed she had been murdered by poison due to jealousy. phryne questions her own opinion on mediums and wonders whether this one is not a fake. reardon lloyd (2014) mentions that the hard-boiled detective must always make his way into the underworld of the urban landscape usually for one of three reasons –because he finds himself in mortal danger; because he must rescue someone or something…; or because he seeks an object or information which is crucial to his heroic task of restoring justice and moral order…it is in this underworld that he is likely to hear the voices of the dead more clearly. (reardon lloyd 105) in the novel ruddy gore phryne goes into the underworld, in this case, the world of theatre and its backstage, its intricacies, the relations and tensions among the different actors, actresses, other members of the cast and other workers. she goes there for the three reasons reardon lloyd mentions: first, she must find information about the assassin/s; then, she finds herself in mortal danger; and, finally she rescues targets who, otherwise, would have died. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 phryne’s relation to dorothea is uneasy: while she does not believe a ghost is the assassin, she does not believe the official version either (that she committed suicide) and is determined to find out who killed her. during her analysis of events, phryne remembers her first idea: that “dorothea had not returned to ensure any happy endings. she was raging for revenge on her murderer. and he or she had still not been found” (greenwood 175). thus, she focuses on the dead actors and actress rather than on those alive. she asks lin for information on magical tricks, as he had learnt how to become a magician in shanghai. he explains how to create the image of a ghost with a humansize figure carved on a glass and some lights to project it. also, he teaches her how to produce the hyacinth scent that is smelt during each vision of the ghost. this allows phryne to discover the murderer of three victims of the case (the carpenter), but not dorothea’s assassin. after the carpenter’s confession, the hyacinth scent is perceived one more time, and leila appears dressed up as the ghost and delivers the accusation that somebody killed her. the voice of dorothea is heard through her daughter so her assassin confesses and her death does not go unpunished. however, this is not the last time that the voice of the victim is heard in the novel, either by invocation or by representation. a week after solving the murders, phryne and lin attend the burials of an actor and his dresser, and then she leaves some flowers on dorothea’s grave. both can smell the scent of hyacinths, a flower which is neither on the bouquet nor nearby. this, phryne assures lin, is a sign that dorothea is happy with them (greenwood 207). phryne feels that she has provided closure on all the open wounds that existed and that justice has been gained. the concept of ‘closure’, which is central to the genre of crime fiction, aims to restore justice, listen to the victim’s voice and lay it to rest (reardon lloyd 2014). dorothea’s voice is not heard in the episode, as neither the visit to the medium nor to the cemetery is included in the visual text, maybe due to the limited time of an episode. her voice is only represented by leila’s appearance at the end. this change prevents the character of phryne from questioning her beliefs about life after death or the world of spirits and ancestors, topics which are present in her interactions with lin and mrs lin. it is sensible that phryne should also question these topics in her own culture. besides, having lin to explain the mysteries of the ghost and the scent and to show how the tricks were played, gives value to chinese cultures away from the stereotypes and simplicities mentioned by some characters, consequently counteracting those comments. furthermore, having lin help phryne solve the case instead of dot, reinforces multiculturalism and respect between cultures, and breaks the hegemony of the mainstream anglo-australian one as the only valid example to frame certain accounts. the novel also explores the case of herbert, the call boy, who does not appear in the episode. herbert works at the theatre and is often beaten by his alcoholic stepfather. phryne manages to free him from this abuse by convincing bernard to give him a contract and an education so he can follow his dream and become a good actor and live in a safe environment. also, phryne is going to pay his living expenses until he can pay her back. this way herbert feels he has a duty towards her, and sees the need to honour his promise. in this case, the issues of social class, child abuse, and the possibilities of change thanks to individual initiatives, are not present in the tv adaptation; maybe again due to time constraints. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 another character who does not appear in the episode is mr brawn, the stage carpenter, who causes most of the deaths. his case also relates to social class: he wants to ruin the theatre in revenge for the lack of respect technicians are shown, and for being treated as a slave at work. by scaring the actors and actresses with tricks which they do not understand, they will notice the valuable work done by other members of the staff who do not get the same recognition. mr brawn’s anger has built up over years and it talks about conflicts at work, respect and recognition beyond the salary. this feeling, which can relate to the notion of being burnt out, does not appear in the episode, which focuses on a patriarchal understanding of love. all in all, it can be argued that the episode is more traditional as, first, many of the messages that greenwood was trying to get across are inverted here; second, the stereotypes of the 1920s are brought back; and, third, some social class conflicts are ignored. all these changes make the tv series less challenging than the novel. conclusion kerry greenwood’s collection of novels a phryne fisher mystery presents the character of phryne as an independent, fair, rich, beautiful, elegant and determined female detective. the fact that the novels are set in australia in the late 1920s allows the author to explore some of the social injustices of the time. in the novel ruddy gore (1995), greenwood focuses her attention on the constructs of racism, gender and social class, as well as on the themes of revenge, unrequited love, envy and hate. greenwood creates the characters of lin chung and his grandmother as well-mannered and educated, with strong family values and deep feelings of honour and respect. lin helps phryne and becomes visible to a part of the society. although he (and probably his grandmother) was born in australia, he is not considered an australian citizen, as certain restrictive laws affect him. phryne ponders on the idea of racism and eugenics to express the unfairness and erroneousness of this construct, and defies many social conventions of the time when having an affair with lin, one which moves her deeply. the character of phryne also uses her skills, economic situation and social position in society to help those in need (from the director of a play to the call boy) and to break many stereotypes regarding women and the roles they are expected to play in her time. what is more, phryne defies the construction of the female detective, as she is intelligent, active and determined, as well as feminine, and not a tomboy or a spinster; she appreciates good manners, education and sartorial elegance both in women and in men, and spends fair amounts of money on clothes, garments and accessories. kerry greenwood creates a character which defies the notion of patriarchy and questions the australian concepts of ‘fair go’, egalitarianism and citizenship in the 1920s, at the time of the white australia policy, when it was believed that eugenics explained both human relations and the superiority of the white race and when miscegenation was penalised. with regard to the adaptation of ruddy gore to the tv series, while it has managed to create a female detective who represents the character that greenwood envisioned in her collection of novels, the topics of social justice have been reduced, ignored or modified coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 in the audiovisual text. the adaptation does not break with stereotypes but rather reinforces some of them, such as the conflicts in the chinese community, the assumption that silk importers also smuggle opium, arranged marriages, negative female imagery, and coercion. the character of phryne is constructed as morally just, but in the adaptation she offends lin when she arrives at erroneous conclusions due to her prejudices regarding chinese peoples and cultures. in my opinion, the adaptation misses the opportunity to defy unconscious forms of racism and break with micro-racisms, that is, racist attitudes that take place on a daily basis, which are mainly expressed by members of the dominant group, most of whom are unaware they are being racist. that is to say, the episode goes back to the prejudices that the novel was aiming to defy and, consequently, misses a splendid opportunity to introduce positive images of chinese australians and to echo and reflect on the historical heterogeneity of australian society in the 1920s, when many non-mainstream groups were ignored and marginalised. despite the fact that the episode refuses to engage in the postcolonial questioning of social injustices that is present in the novel and, consequently, the phryne series audiences are not presented with a postcolonial detective, the character of the hon. phryne fisher in the novel does represent the construction of a quite unique, postcolonial female detective. works cited ashcroft, bill, gareth griffiths, and helen tiffin 1989. the empire writes back: theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. london and new york: routledge. bauman, zigmunt. 1991. modernity and ambivalence. cambridge: polity press. bourdieu, pierre. 1986. “the forms of capital.” handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. ed. j. g. richardson. new york: greenwood press. 241-258. d’cruz, vin, and william steele. 2003. australia’s ambivalence towards asia politics, neo/post-colonialism, and fact/fiction. 2 nd ed. clayton: monash asia institute. forrester, andrew. 2016 (1864). the female detective. scottsdale: poisoned pen press in association with the british library. greenwood, kerry. 2007. interview by kathleen fisher. “crime according to kerry greenwood”. tinypurplefishphotography.blogspot.com kathleen fisher. web. retrieved 15 january 2015. http://tinypurplefishphotography.blogspot.com.es/2007/10/crime-according-tokerry-greenwood.html ---. 2006 (1995). ruddy gore. scottsdale: poisoned pen press. http://tinypurplefishphotography.blogspot.com.es/2007/10/crime-according-to-kerry-greenwood.html http://tinypurplefishphotography.blogspot.com.es/2007/10/crime-according-to-kerry-greenwood.html coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 hage, ghassan. 1998. white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. annandale: pluto press. ---. 2003. against paranoid nationalism. annandale: pluto press. hayward, william stephens. 2013 (1864). revelations of a lady detective. london: the british library. “honourable miss phryne fisher”. 2011. miss fisher’s murder mysteries. concept document. melbourne: every cloud productions pty ltd, australian broadcasting corporation, film victoria and screen australia. web. retrieved 21 april 2014. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/phrynefisher/classroom/ horsley, lee. 2005. twentieth-century crime fiction. oxford: oup. markus, andrew. 2004. “reflections on the administration of the ‘white australia immigration policy”. after the rush. regulation, participation, and chinese communities in australia, 1860-1940. ed by sophie couchman, john fitzgerald and paul macgregor. fitzroy: otherland. 51-58. medina, herminia. 2015. “friné: la hetaira más bella de grecia”. los ojos de hipatia. blog: 11 july 2015. retrieved 20 july 2015. http://losojosdehipatia.com.es/cultura/historia/frine-la-hetaira-mas-bella-degrecia/ papastergiadis, nikos. 2000. the turbulence of migration: globalization, deterritorialization and hybridity. cambridge: polity press. “producer’s perspective”. 2011. fisher’s murder mysteries. teacher notes – the arts. melbourne: every cloud productions pty ltd, australian broadcasting corporation, film victoria and screen australia. web. retrieved 21 april 2014. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/phrynefisher/classroom/ reardon lloyd, joanne. 2014. “talking to the dead – the voice of the victim in crime fiction”. new writing: international journal for the practice and theory of creative writing, 11. 1: 100-108. ribas segura, catalina. 2016. “postcolonial crime fiction and gender in the phryne fisher mystery collection (1989-2014)”. postcolonial studies, 40 th aedean conference, 9 november 2016, palacio de villahermosa (huesca), university of zaragoza. conference presentation. rubenstein, kim. 2004. “chinese immigration and australian citizenship”. after the rush. regulation, participation, and chinese communities in australia, 18601940. ed. by sophie couchman, john fitzgerald and paul macgregor. fitzroy: otherland. 21-34. ryan-fazilleau, sue. 2007. “kerry greenwood’s “rewriting” of agatha christie”. jasal, 7: 59-70. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/phrynefisher/classroom/ http://losojosdehipatia.com.es/cultura/historia/frine-la-hetaira-mas-bella-de-grecia/ http://losojosdehipatia.com.es/cultura/historia/frine-la-hetaira-mas-bella-de-grecia/ http://www.abc.net.au/tv/phrynefisher/classroom/ coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 said, edward. 1995 (1978). orientalism. western conceptions of the orient. harmondsworth: penguin. sarup, madan. and tasneem raja. 1996. identity, culture and the postmodern world. edinburgh: edinburgh up. ebook collection (ebscohost). web. retrieved 30 november 2011. seger, linda. 2000. el arte de la adaptación: cómo convertir hechos y ficciones en películas. trans. marisa chacón and alfonso méndiz. 2ed. madrid: rialp. showalter, elaine. 1982 (1977). a literature of their own. london: virago press. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. 1987. in other worlds: essays in cultural politics. new york: methuen. suárez lafuente, socorro. 2013. “desarrollo de las detectives en la literatura contemporánea”. raudem: revista de estudios de las mujeres, 1: 167-182. subouraud, frédéric. 2010. la adaptación. el cine necesita historias. trans. alicia capel tatjer. madrid: paidós. stychin, carl f. 1998. introduction. nation by rights: national cultures, sexual identity politics and the discourse of rights. philadelphia: temple up. 1-20. tavan, gwenda. 2005. the long, slow death of white australia. melbourne: scribe publications. whitlock, gillian and david carter (eds). 1992. images of australia. an introductory reader in australian studies. st lucia: uqp. williams, michael. 2004. “‘would this not help your federation?’” after the rush. regulation, participation, and chinese communities in australia, 1860-1940. ed. by sophie cohn fitzgerald and paul mcgregor. fitzroy: otherland. 35-50. “world”. 2011. miss fisher’s murder mysteries. concept document. melbourne: every cloud productions pty ltd, australian broadcasting corporation, film victoria and screen australia. web. retrieved 21 april 2014. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/phrynefisher/classroom/ yuval-davis, nira. 1997. gender and nation. london: sage. zhan, heying jenny and rhonda j. v. montgomery. 2003. “gender and elder care in china. the influence of filial piety and structural constraints.” gender and society 17. 2 global perspectives on gender and carework (april): 209-229. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/phrynefisher/classroom/ coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 the author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness for the writing of this article (research project ffi2013-45101-p). catalina ribas segura joined the languages department at university college alberta giménez (cesag-up comillas) in 2006, where she teaches english at the faculties of education and communication. she has also run its international relations office and now manages its english language school. her phd thesis, defended at the university of barcelona, explored the concepts of duty, obedience and identity in greek-australian and chinese australian migrant literature from 1971 to 2005. her research is now focused on crime novels and tv series as she is a member of the research project pocrif (postcolonial crime fiction: a global window into social realities). her research interests include contemporary australian literature, crime fiction, multiculturalism, diaspora, migration and identities. she has published more than twenty articles in academic journals. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 between two worlds: the stories of serge liberman richard freadman copyright© 2019 richard freadman. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. serge liberman, who died in december 2017, was an important and highly distinctive australian ethnic writer. his short stories, including the posthumously published the storyteller, conduct what is in effect a conversation between two worlds: that of post-enlightenment rationality, on the one hand, and that of the magical, the folkloric, the hassidic, imagination of the shtetl, on the other. liberman’s profound tragic sense does not preclude the possibility of human redemption through empathy, compassion and imaginative inspiration. key words: australian jewish short fiction, post-enlightenment rationality, jewish mysticism, existentialism, redemption serge liberman as both man and writer had a marvellous sense of life’s ironies and incongruities. indeed one could imagine a story of his in which a man, a sort of australian chekhov, whilst ministering compassionately to thousands of patients during a long medical career, spent his spare time writing short stories and dreaming of the day when he would produce a magnum opus that would be launched before a large and admiring gathering late in his life…but in which death takes him just months before the great work debuts. just such a liberman plot played itself out at a packed launch of his posthumously published the storyteller: selected stories on april 3, 2018, less than four months after he died on december 22, 2017 after a remarkably gracious and uncomplaining journey through motor neuron disease. though he did not live to attend the launch liberman knew precisely what was brewing in this volume. he had consulted closely with alex skovron (who did the bulk of the work on this project) and myself on the selection of the stories; with alex on detailed editorial issues; had signed off on the title, the foreword and the cover image after discussions that included his wife anna mow and his publishers anna blay and louis de vries of hybrid publishers. serge liberman came to prominence as a writer during the 1980s and 90s, principally as what we would now think of as an ethnic writer. and certainly he was that. but he was also much more than that. like all deeply reflective and accomplished writers liberman coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 creates a world, indeed as is quite often the case, overlapping, even colliding worlds. thus the specifics of any particular liberman story are deeply rooted in and unfold against a complex metaphysical background. his characters, those ‘vagabond souls’ in search of an author, as they are described in the story “voices from the corner”, are a voluble lot and if you listen to their various musings and expostulations you can start to piece together what you might call the modern metaphysical worldview of many of these stories. in the story “the promise”, hana speculates that ‘“maybe chance itself is god’”. in “fame: or the rise and fall of benny liner” (like all stories not included in the storyteller, this one is available on liberman’s website: https://www.sergeliberman.com/), liner speaks of ‘“the gaping contrast between the heedless flow of time and the flitting evanescence of existence which both [make] meaningless and pathetic all our fretting, our ambitions, our very lives, yet...[charge] every man and woman alive ever to create meaning, even to invent it if need be….”’ in “messiah in acland street”, gotteswill, the would-be messiah, commends the atheistic writer-narrator, elias federman, in the following terms: what is constant in your work...is how a man stands always at the centre of your world, how it is in man that you place your highest trust, and how it is his sanctity that you prize, and his genius, his innate goodness, his diversity and great potential… in this, you see, you show more religion than a host of others who pray and beat their breasts before god but have no feeling for others… in the tale “the fortress” (see website), stillman, confronting widowski with the brute fact of mortality, tells him: ‘“what is yours is not yours. you have it merely on loan. what you say is yours belongs not to you but to time.”’ if you put these various ideas together – that the world is a realm of chance, contingency, and does not operate according to a divine masterplan; that we are not presented with meaning but must rather seek, indeed make, meaning for ourselves; that death is absolute; that a compassionate ethical humanist outlook offers greater hope than dogmatic religious tradition – you have several of the elements of the world view often designated existentialism, or, more generally, the metaphysics of secular modernity. it is with this general understanding of life in mind, i suggest, that many of liberman’s major fictional themes should be read: the struggle to find meaning and dignity after holocaust trauma and loss; the hard facts of mortality with which his doctor-narrators must help their patients to deal; the disorientation and pain of migrant experience (but also its new vistas); tensions between first and second generation australian jews, and more. liberman’s writing also constantly echoes the existential dictum that one must take ethical responsibility for one’s own actions, and the ethical entitlements of the other. a fine example of this is the story mentioned earlier, “the promise”, promising being a fundamental feature of ethical life. in all of this we see powerful ethical elements of jewish tradition in liberman’s work, but his ethical outlook is perhaps best described as a form of ethical universalism with deep jewish roots. in the story “africa” (see the website), the young jewish doctor, raphael bloom, says: our history, our writers – peretz, sholom aleichem, bergner... have all taught me… that before we are white, black, yellow or brown, before we are african, jewish, australian, european, russian or whatever, we are all human beings first and…the more a jew cares about others too, the more jewish he is. coolabah, nr 26, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 the mention of these great yiddish writers is important for another reason. i said earlier that a serious writer might seem to articulate more than one world, and serge’s writing, like that of peretz and sholom aleichem, contains what is in effect a conversation between two worlds: that of post-enlightenment rationality, on the one hand, and that of the magical, the folkloric, the hassidic, imagination of the shtetl, on the other. thus you will find in the storyteller stories that read like parables and fantasy – more like magic realism than realism; stories which seem to live outside the ‘heedless flow’ of chronological time, as liner puts it, and to lift us into a realm of archetypal imaginings, preternatural happenings and stunning metamorphoses. a fine example of this latter kind is the aforementioned “messiah in acland street” where gotteswill, despite commending the sceptical young federman for his humanism, takes himself to be, and may indeed be, the or a messiah, and anoints elias as a sort of elijah who must take over the prophetic task. i use the qualifier ‘may’ here because some of the stories are pitched in a sort of liminal zone, familiar in magic realism, where it is finally hard, often impossible, to know where reality lies. maybe, as the story seems sometimes to hint, gotteswill is one of those ‘vagabond souls’ who needs a writer like elias to bring him into being? maybe the whole scene is a creation of elias’s imagination? and how interesting that federman early says of gotteswill that ‘he could have been a character right out of peretz.’ two constants wend their way through both the realist and the magical realist liberman stories. the first is a tremendous sense of human intensity, urgency, and striving among many of his characters. this brings to mind a wonderful phrase in george eliot’s middlemarch: ‘the terrible stringency of human need’. his stories reflect and often minister to this need with compassion but also with uncompromising honesty. the second is liberman’s prose style, unique in australian writing, which reflects this stringent, questing and complex quality of need, drive and emotional complication. the style is often elaborate, always charged with feeling, and is equally good at gritty sociological detail, fantasy, and the great profundities of human life. thus it is that in “the promise” hana, rejecting the possible resumption of a life wrecked by the holocaust, tells the fiancé she has not seen for fifty years, in delicate yiddish cadences: ‘“i have what i have, and what i have i have.”’ history has shifted the ground of her promising, but she continues to see the keeping of promises as a sacred ethical duty. liberman’s first volume of stories was entitled on firmer shores. those ‘shores’ were australia’s, a place where harassed and traumatised post-holocaust jews had a chance to live in relative security. but for liberman the world was forever and everywhere a shifting and hazardous place which only the empathic, principled and imaginative heart could redeem. bio note richard freadman is emeritus professor of english at la trobe university and is the author of a study of this crazy thing a life: australian jewish autobiography, and two volumes of memoir, shadow of doubt: my father and myself, and stepladder to hindsight: an almost autobiography. coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 a totara has fallen chris prentice chris.prentice@otago.ac.nz copyright© 2020 chris prentice. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a tribute to geoff davis as a committed commonwealth scholar and promotor of inclusive education, indigenous rights and climate justice keywords: geoff davis, aclals, commitment, commonwealth scholar it was a shock to learn of geoff’s passing on 22 november, 2018. he and i were in regular email exchange since i, based in new zealand, took on the role of chair of aclals in 2016. geoff — as a past chair, as well as past chair of european aclals, and a longstanding executive member of both — was a constant source of support and wisdom. i had emailed him in mid-november, 2018 and received a reply from his wife ingrid to say he was in hospital and would be in recovery for a while. he sent his best wishes, and i sent mine in return, wishing him a smooth and speedy recovery. i would wait until hearing that he was better before contacting him about any more aclals matters, but knowing nothing of his illness, imagined that a period of enforced rest and recovery — as much as he would be wanting to keep as busy and active as ever — would see him better soon. the news that he had passed away, six days after that email from ingrid, was almost impossible to believe, and the same sense of unreality continues to permeate the sadness of losing a dear and valued friend and colleague. the european aclals conference in istanbul, in 2011, is where we really started getting to know each other – but he was of course well known to me as a scholar and editor, especially with the rodopi cross/cultures series, before that. i remember earlier being at both european and international aclals conferences where geoff was elected chair, then subsequently re-elected for second terms. his deep knowledge of these associations was obviously recognized as invaluable, and his selfless willingness to continue serving in these roles — as well as staying on ex-officio after stepping down — were all things i benefited from enormously when i became international chair. from 2011, meeting up with him at triennial and branch conferences was a highlight, and he always radiated a cheerful and enthusiastic presence. i have many happy memories of meals with geoff in mailto:chris.prentice@otago.ac.nz coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 the different conference locations around the world – a biryani in a little indian restaurant in istanbul, and after the conference a ferry ride to explore markets followed by lunch; meeting up again in innsbruck, 2014, then at the international aclals conference in 2016 in stellenbosch, where we shared a convivial dinner; and the same in early 2018 in sydney, where he was keynote speaker and dynamic presence at the south pacific aclals conference. the conversation was always marvelous, and i reveled in his wit, knowledge, insight, and his love of literature and the arts. yet his keen intellect was always equalled by his genuine and generous interest in others, and his remarkable achievements by his personal humility. geoff was a tireless supporter of aclals and advocate for literature, the arts and culture in scholarly, political and activist sectors. for me, in the role of chair, he was a constant support, someone to check in with, someone who had the history, the contacts and connections, and the political wisdom, and shared these generously throughout our time working together. whether it was the administrative process of reaccreditation, or more creative and proactive work, geoff was incredibly supportive and helpful. but i think his willingness to help was also a testament to how important he believed this association with the commonwealth foundation and secretariat to be. he was an avid supporter of the value of the various commonwealth forums into which aclals could have input and though which it could form collaborations, and he contributed enormously to these things himself. geoff recognized the current commonwealth as extending beyond the old british commonwealth, with secretary-generals from different regions; the first from canada, and most recently from india and dominica; and he valued the inclusion of nations like mozambique, rwanda, namibia — not ex-british colonies — as well as png and samoa. it was his fervent wish that zimbabwe would rejoin. zimbabwe was especially close to his heart: he had been a member of the culture cluster of the commonwealth organisations committee on zimbabwe, and was part of a delegation visiting zimbabwe to report on the state of arts and culture there. in 2012, he co-authored the report, “reengaging with zimbabwe through arts and culture — a needs audit for commonwealth countries”. one of the opportunities aclals has, through its accredited commonwealth status, is to be represented at the people’s forum during the commonwealth heads of government meetings. geoff had represented aclals at chogm in malta, 2005; uganda in 2007; trinidad in 2009; sri lanka in 2013; and malta again in 2015. in 2018, he attended in london. he wrote in an email of his plans to attend sessions on inclusive education, indigenous rights, climate justice, and renewing the commonwealth — an indication of the breadth of his concerns, and his commitment to seeing these things prioritised in commonwealth forum discussions. afterwards, he wrote me an enthusiastic account of events: “the master of ceremonies was a witty and very effective rap poet called mr gee, ben okri gave a very upbeat opening address (which you can see on youtube), coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 there were assorted poets from places like st lucia, malaysia and tonga [who gave] readings.” “numerous speakers came out in favour of the diversity of the organization, of its role as a debating forum for people from all over the world, and as a force for good in all sorts of areas. the flow of ideas seemed endless and the mix of people was quite unique and very stimulating.” geoff valued, and made the most of, the chance to collaborate with other civil society organisations, and at this 2018 people’s forum, he spent time with catherine cole of the commonwealth association of museums, based in canada. he and catherine had “discussed all manner of ideas and projects” and had also “managed to have a brief conversation on the importance of culture with justin trudeau.” he consistently advocated for aclals, and for the role of arts and culture more generally, often at high political levels. he was very keen on the idea of a consortium of culture oriented civil society groups that would work together to impress the importance of culture as a means of advancing social justice within and between nations. geoff regularly attended meetings in london on aclals’ behalf, to the point where it was easy to forget that he was actually based in germany, and that his travel to and from london was in his own time and at his own expense. he travelled, often in three or four widely disparate places in any one year. photographs from 2018 suggest it was a typical year in that regard, showing him in slovenia, in nsw, australia, and texas, us. i don’t know of anyone associated with aclals whose familiarity with so much of the commonwealth, and arts and scholarship in and on the commonwealth, exceeds geoff’s. by way of his roles in aclals organisations and commonwealth groups, as well as travel, conferences, collaborative projects, teaching, his own scholarship, and sheer intellectual energy, he epitomised the commonwealth scholar and all that aclals stands for. geoff was a remarkable scholar and a mentor; a man who strongly believed in the social good that attaches to work in the cultural sector, and in the literature of commitment; and he believed in the need for culture and activism to work together. in fact, the last conference paper i heard him present, at the south pacific aclals conference, “the two canaries of climate change,” in early 2018, was a keynote address entitled “‘the imagining of possibilities’: writers as activists.” his work with ganesh devy and the chotro conferences are further examples of his engagement with the intersection of scholarship and activism. geoff always had numerous “projects on the go.” although officially retired, he was actively writing, publishing and delivering papers, and he managed to fit aclals and commonwealth-related travel around these things. but much of the time he gave would and should normally have been family time. over the christmas and new year period of 2017 coming into 2018, he and i worked together — via daily email exchange — on a grant that sought funding for a linked group of projects across different branches of coolabah, nr 28, 2020, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 aclals connecting the power of story and storytelling to social integration and wellbeing, aimed towards groups of young people and others who risked or experienced disadvantage through social marginalisation. it probably made both geoff and i very unpopular with our respective families as we worked on this at such a traditionally family time, but i will always appreciate his willingness to give that time, and his belief in what we were doing. his emails were always seasoned with updates on the german and family social calendar, such as an imminent visit his mother-in-law for german mother’s day (where there would be excellent cake), or christmas celebrations, his planned travels for other family events or friends’ weddings (and sometimes he wrote in the midst of travel), and his always witty commentaries on everything from the weather to political figures and events. he often seemed to be just about to go for a swim or have just come back from a swim. his sheer energy and joie-de-vivre was so compelling. and he also expressed a lot of pride in [his wife] ingrid’s writing. i know he was greatly looking forward to coming to new zealand with ingrid for the 2019 aclals triennial in auckland, and he had emailed me about his excitement at the keynotes as their selection was shaping up. like all who knew him, i felt his absence at the aclals conference very keenly. a māori proverb, marking the passing of someone of great importance, says “kua hinga te totara i te wao nui a tane” — the totara has fallen in the forest of tane. but another, “me te koteo mau kupenga,” refers to the post to which the net is attached. i like to think of geoff’s legacy as that post that will hold the net of aclals together. bionote: chris prentice was chair of aclals, 2016-2019. she researches and teaches postcolonial literatures at the university of otago, new zealand, and has been a member of spaclals since 1990, and eaclals from soon after. she has been a south east asia and south pacific regional panel judge and then regional convenor and member of the international judging panel for the commonwealth writers’ prize. her publications include chapters in books published by rodopi, and she co-edited cultural transformations: perspectives on translocation in a global age (rodopi, 2010). her editorial board memberships include brill’s cross/cultures series. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 ghosting in the outback noir greg dolgopolov university of new south wales gregd@unsw.edu.au copyright© 2021 greg dolgopolov. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. who was the ‘jolly swagman’ in waltzing matilda, australia’s unofficial national anthem? in this essay i argue that the ghost of the swagman can be heard in a number of recent de-colonising crime narratives. outback noir is a relatively recent genre category that describes a new wave of australian crime films that highlight indigenous and white relations and take a revisionist approach to traditional history. these films often feature redemption stories that highlight effective collaborations between indigenous and white policing practices. uncovering a rural communities’ dark, repressed secrets in order to solve a current problem is a common trend in outback noir cinema. i examine patrick hughes’ 2010 film red hill as an early provocative example of outback noir and as modern reimaging of the waltzing matilda narrative with the swagman’s avenging ghost exposing the social fractures and corruption that are destroying rural communities. i argue that the outback noir genre with its focus on revenge-redemption narratives shapes the cultural dialogue around putting the ghosts of the colonial past to rest. key words: outback noir; neo-westerns; waltzing matilda; red hill; mystery road; goldstone mailto:gregd@unsw.edu.au coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 “i could never decide if the scrub actually was evil or if it was just the stories shivering in my young mind. but i also remember how everything was real – the ghosts truly were there at the same time as they were just steam.” ross gibson, seven versions of an australian badland (2002: 21) outback noir, as a uniquely australian crime genre, has a weirdly melancholic approach to the past, ghosts and guilt associated with ‘frontier justice’. the ghost of the jolly swagman pervades the genre. uncovering a rural communities’ dark, repressed secrets in order to solve a current problem is a common trend in outback noir cinema. in describing the collection of paintings and photographs at the ian potter museum of art subtitled “the australian gothic”, curator suzette wearne advocated that, “our collective repressed is haunted by the ghosts of our indigenous past. she suggests “a fear of retribution for the mistreatment of aboriginal people explains the menace projected onto the landscape in the australian gothic. where the aboriginal presence is denied, or repressed, the landscape is embedded with this trauma the ghosts of the brutal colonial encounter” (power 2015). the notion of the ghost may suggest something that is not quite there anymore, but that lingers as an invisible sacred force or settler guilt that plays out as tragedy in the present – visceral and corporeal. think the jolly swagman – ever present in song and a haunting ghost in our imagination. ‘waltzing matilda’, australia’s unofficial national anthem may provide some insights into australian cinema’s recent trend in representing crime. this dirge that both uplifts the nation’s spirits at international sporting events and reminds us of our mythical national commitment to commit suicide rather than succumb to the rough justice of the police is dripping in noir sensibilities of moral conflict, ghosting, perversions of history and the uncanny. in this essay i seek to examine the ghostly hauntings of the itinerant, not always jolly swagman figure in recent outback noir cinema with the inversion of the traditional bucolic image of the australian outback into something dark and sinister, but also potentially redemptive. as avery gordon asserts, “when the over-anddone-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view. haunting raises spectres, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way that we separate the past, the present and the future” (1997: xvi). the jolly swagman may have been in our blind spot all this time and with him a whole host of indigenous characters who have been shunned, imprisoned, destroyed or kept silent. with the recent wave of outback noir films, they are returning often with a vengeance. ‘waltzing matilda’ is without doubt one of the most passionately contested australian texts. whether it is the meaning or symbolism of the song, or the identity of the characters or the perennial debates about it being more than our ‘unofficial’ national anthem – waltzing matilda continues to manifest considerable passion and debate. what appears to be less contentious is the incongruous ‘weird melancholy’ that marcus clarke observed of the australian landscape of the 1800s. perhaps it is the same weird melancholy that the song provokes as a commemorative epithet that has been used as a rallying folk song espousing a national identity that is a celebration of paradoxes and sleights-of-hand in honouring and repressing history. writing in the music section of the guardian, patrick marlborough, claimed that ‘waltzing matilda’ was australia's creepiest ballad and he provided personal recollections that perceived coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 reviving the past as somehow uncanny to support his assertion. “i put it to you that banjo paterson’s banger and monster-mash, about an outlaw swagman gone troppo, epitomises the madness that haunts the australian psyche”, marlborough claimed. this article did precipitate some interesting reader comments, 240 to be exact on the guardian site. one comment, in particular, stood out: the song seems to make more sense if the swagman is thought of as an aboriginal type swagman trying to make it in a white man's world. the swagman doesn't make sense as an icon of some australian digger type trying to eek out a living during a depression; or as some shearer type wandering around from farm to farm peddling his skills during tough times; or as some ned kelly like honorable outsider outlaw type character; or as some rebellious remnant of the eureka stockade. none of the traditional icons make sense. however, it does seem to make more sense today as an icon of aboriginal racial alienation, although it may be contrary to banjo's original meaning, whatever it was. (mancan18) this was not the only comment to have made a clear link between the song, the bush setting and aboriginal people who were the victims of multiple miscarriages of justice. neither the article nor the comment is about cinema, but they do raise important questions for australian film studies of the connection between ‘waltzing matilda’, indigenous themes, and the connection to outback noir, crime and ghosts. what if the mythical character of the swagman is the story of an indigenous man’s attempt to evade colonial injustice and that this moment of original crime has been hiding in plain sight for more than a century concealed by debates of whether the identity of the swagman was the murdered shearer “frenchy” hoffmeister or if it was a symbolic of our struggle to find our own identity. professor ross fitzgerald suggests “there seems to me no doubt that waltzing matilda wasn’t just a little romantic ditty, it was very deep, multi-faceted political allegory and lament” (2010). waltzing matilda is not a cold case but a search for a shifting identity. let us then imagine, in a politically allegorical way, that the swagman was an indigenous man. what could be the impacts on australian crime narratives and representations of aborigines as summarily criminalised without experiencing justice – choosing to commit suicide rather than succumb to the authorities? ‘waltzing matilda’ has enjoyed many different musical interpretations as well as more than a dozen cinematic iterations with both in australia and abroad. the majority of these ‘uses’ highlight a shorthand of national identity genuinely (australia 2008) or satirically (three summer, 2017) or in a complex melancholy, end-of-theworld way (on the beach, 1959). not surprisingly, the song’s more explicit themes addressed in the lyrics of anti-authoritarianism, ghosting, homelessness, crime and an absence of justice have not been directly addressed in cinema. however, the outback noir film cycle goes some way to examining this foundational story of original sin in colonial crime and the scratching back of the concealed histories of this weird melancholy. one of the earliest films of the emerging outback noir cycle, red hill (2010), written and directed by patrick hughes, is a symbolic inversion and rehabilitation of the swagman story but made for a present-day audience seeking moral de-colonialising redemption with their crime thriller fix. in this essay i argue that red hill could be read as an interpretation of the waltzing matilda narrative – the (imaginary) revenge by the swagman’s anti-authoritarian ghost fighting entrenched privilege coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 and police corruption as a celebrated social bandit. it is a revengeredemption outback noir narrative that resurrects and empowers the ghosts to achieve some sort of revitalisation of the landscape. outback noir the location that unites so many outback noir films is the same region where banjo patterson penned waltzing matilda and where it was first performed the winton shire region of central queensland. it is the same outback landscape that patterson explored in 1894 that was still resonant with the recent union strikes that attracted a savage police response and only a few years earlier the brutal genocidal massacres of aborigines at skull hole among other locations – all in plain sight. this unquantifiable resonance could go some way to explaining the postcolonial production of revisionist westerns and outback crime stories in this region and the inevitable turn to a noir sensibility to shine a light on what is hiding in plain sight. some of the most prominent examples of outback noir that includes john hillcoat’s the proposition (2005), gone (2006), ivan sen’s mystery road (2013) and goldstone (2016) were all filmed in and around winton – a difficult and challenging production location due to its isolation but offering incredible vistas and remarkable local support. these films are variations on the revisionist western, the neo-noir, the sunburnt crime narratives that in a flurry of bullets on corrugated iron reframe and contemporise colonial violence and reveal the ongoing police brutality against indigenous people in conjunction with reverberations of ancestral trauma. location is important for outback noir. it is not simply an adaptation of the highly marketable nordic noir into an australian landscape. it is about provoking that landscape as a character that facilitates the criminal anthropology of digging up the past to help address a contemporary tragedy through the landscape. the concept of ‘outback noir’ is effective as marketing for its appeal to a national specificity based on its incongruity and inversion of the traditional noir visual iconography of the nocturnal urban scene and the presentation of the australian rural landscape that is breathtaking and sublime. but underneath the stunning, iconic australian imagery is a dangerous, twisted noirish world hiding in the blind spot. in examining ivan sen's mystery road, film critic eddie cockrell compared it to roman polanski's 1974 drama chinatown, “both are sun-drenched films noirs, both feature commanding protagonists who spend much of the film doing wrong things for the right reasons, and both feature climactic showdowns in places laden with metaphor” (2013). the place of metaphor for outback noir is that idyllic billabong – initially peaceful and fecund but turned into a hushed-up murder scene by the arrival of the police. the unifying aspect of outback noir films is that they examine the trauma of the australian frontier – the past in the case of the proposition and wake in fright (kotcheff, 1971), the future in the rover (michôd, 2014), but mainly the present that is skewed out-of-time in films such as the dry (connolly, 2020), the tv series mystery road (2018 2021), locusts (davis, 2019), wake in fright (stenders, 2017) and kill me three times (stenders, 2014). more recently the resurrection of the australian gothic, mixed with the popularity of nordic noir and literary crime thrillers (scrublands, the dry, the hunted) have coalesced to form a loose collective of films, tv series and books that examine coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 our fear of the other and the dreaded revelation of repressed histories. these themes that are often set in burnt out rural badlands tend to prosper during periods of social anxiety. outback noir is not just a location, but an aesthetic trope and a marketing term that blends the crime thriller that happens to be set in the outback, with a national inflection of noir iconography and post-colonial soul searching. outback noir is not a genre, but more of a sensibility that has become the most prevalent style for representing prestige, high concept crime in recent australian cinema. these films continue the australian landscape cinematic tradition, but with an accent on the western and rural crime story, while foregrounding a post-colonial investigation into buried histories and contemporary corruption. an important strand of outback noir films is focused on indigenous investigations of a crime that is invariably rooted in the past and covered in ghostly hauntings of colonial violence that set the template for many other cinematic crime films that investigate corruption hiding in broad daylight. the characters are haunted by the past. revenge is often the driver to resurrecting and engaging with the past in order to solve a current tragedy. the revenge theme drives some of the films into horror territory following in the steps of wolf creek (2005). the marshes (scott, 2017) and two heads creek (2020) de-emphasising the investigation of a crime while playing with jump-scares, gruesome body torture and pitch-black humour. the marshes is not a crime film, although the narrative concerns an investigation of a sort by scientists researching a complex marsh ecosystem. it twists the waltzing matilda story into a slasher, eco-horror film where the monster is a giant masked swagman who rises out of the billabong and gruesomely dismembers anyone who goes there. before the monster appears, university biologist ben (matthew cooper) tells his colleagues a fireside tale intended to terrify them: “the real waltzing matilda happened not far from here … it’s a bit suspect don’t you think? who has ever killed themselves over a sheep… the malignant ghost of the swagman has haunted remote waterways, whistling his mournful song, and tuckerbagging anyone unlucky enough to stumble into his watery domain … don’t say that i didn’t warn you…” the marshes is not an adaptation of ‘waltzing matilda’, but the monster certainly provides an imaginative resurrection and inversion of patterson’s story with the swagman no longer the victim of colonial violence, but now a modern, brutal eco-warrior defending the mysteries of the land from any scientific research. in contrast, films such as locusts, the dry, swerve (lahiff, 2011) and kiss or kill (bennett, 1997) highlight the recognisable noir tropes and character types, but without the same emphasis of colonial hauntings although there is the inevitable digging up of the past to solve current issues. unlike the sleek urban streets, fluoro lights and long dark shadows of traditional noir with its chiaroscuro lighting and brooding psychologically damaged characters, outback noir highlight incongruities – the blinding sunlight of the outback appears to offer no place to hide or to conceal that past. but the constantly glaring sun eventually exposes the shady deals and the sun bleaches the decrepit, decaying history of corruption. outback noir uncovers the picture postcard outback landscapes to reveal the heat, hatred, suspicion of a zone where the past is unsettled and volatile and there is no place for future dreams. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 as the leading commentators of film noir, silver and ursini suggest, the noir protagonists are “often escaping some past burden, sometimes a traumatic incident from their past…. occasionally, they are simply fleeing their own demons created by ambiguous events buried in the past… the past to a noir protagonist is no fleeting phantom. it is real and tangible and menacing. in the noir world both past and present are inextricably bound…. one cannot escape one’s past, no matter how much he or she might try. and only in confronting it may the noir protagonist hope for some kind of redemption, even if it is at the end of a gun…” (2004: 15). in an inversion of traditional archetypes where the noir protagonists seek to escape the light, the outback noir characters are fully, blindingly exposed by the dazzling light. the brightness of the light and its intensity sear the eyeballs and dull the mind making the outback a perfect place to hide the past and dirty dealings by having them parched and bleached by the burning incandescence. the characters of outback noir are constantly moving to avoid claustrophobia, blindness, stagnation and possibly getting stuck in the past. if the figure of the ‘swagman’ in the marshes was dark and silent, then seeing the constantly roaming mick taylor of wolf creek notoriety is probably closer to patterson’s sardonic description of the swagman figure as “jolly” and itinerant. the figure of jimmy conway in red hill performed by tommy lewis, a veteran of more than half a dozen outback noir films, is constantly in motion and is ‘jolly’ only in a sarcastic sense as his outlook is pessimistic. similarly, detective jay swan (aaron pedersen) in mystery road and goldstone appears as a surly cowboy, constantly on the move and far from jolly. he is not motivated by revenge, but he is driven to attain justice for people who have been marginalised either by the community or by dark (police) forces. solving the crime in outback noir is rarely about restoring justice and order, but about a realisation that the distinction between right and wrong is uncomfortably blurred. jimmy conway, like the swaggie, is an outcast because he was denied the opportunity of a ‘fair go’. he confronted the authorities and for that he was destroyed. there is an element of the revenger’s tragedy at play in outback noir in that search for restorative post-colonial justice. in an interview with luke buckmaster for crickey, director patrick hughes explained the complex menacing figure of, jimmy who is not a straight cut villain and anti-hero: he’s a monster and throughout the film we humanise him. i really wanted to present him as this disfigured monster, this shadow of fucking evil that stalks into this town, much the same way as the panther in the film does. death has just come and he’s come for fuckin’ payback. we treated jimmy’s performance as a sort of last supper. we put all these little sensory experiences. just little things, like him eating a cake. it’s like fuck – he’s been in prison for 15 years in maximum security, he’d probably enjoy to eat that piece of cake. so taste it and enjoy it because it’s going to be the last thing you eat on planet earth, know what i mean? i wanted to tell a tale of revenge and i wanted to create something quite confronting. the image of an aboriginal man with a sawn-off shotgun is pretty confronting. patrick hughes developed a complex anti-hero in the figure of jimmy conway a man who was at once a menacing supreme hunter and yet kind and honourable when it mattered. he was very specific in his casting of tommy e. lewis as jimmy conway. lewis is a fascinating, complex figure in australian crime cinema and it is no surprise that he has appeared in so coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 many outback noir films and their predecessors. his performance as jimmy conway is inevitably infused by the memory of his blistering portrayal of another jimmy in the chant of jimmy blacksmith (1978). he appeared as two bob in the proposition (2005) as a leading gang member of an outlaw band that had no fear of the police or the law. later in his career, he was the deceptive aboriginal politician ‘tommy’ in goldstone that precipitated the political rorting and then its revelation. he was mundaru, a smart and wilful renegade in the naked country (1985) ready to take on the entitled squatters with no sense of inferiority. tommy e. lewis became a symbol of resistance in a range of films about frontier justice. in so many of his roles he is more than ready to take on the white boss and assert his own law and authority. from his first role as a young indigenous man who has been exploited and wronged and who then fights back for justice and honour most of his performances demonstrate his proud, anti-authoritarian, ‘jolly’ warrior spirit. in another interview hughes explained that he “was drawn early on to the western [genre] because of the moral code. everyone identifies with it. in australia we call it “country justice.” at one point do you take justice into your own hands. and if vengeance is justified, that’s powerful for an audience, and the story will have emotional weight” (macaulay 2010). for hughes, jimmy conway followed a moral code and understood “country justice” but when he and his family were wronged, he adopted the mayhem of frontier justice through a not quite blind pursuit of retribution. conway becomes a classic figure of australian antiauthoritarianism resonating clearly with the swagman who defied the authorities and rose to fame as happy-go-lucky social bandit. as erik hobsbawm reminds us “the point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported” (1972: 13). like the ghost of jimmy blacksmith, conway is an avenging social bandit and one constructed by the diegesis as a positive agent for change and fiery redemption. in the following section i will examine the film red hill in greater detail with a focus on the role of justice and revenge in shaping its articulation of outback noir and its resonance with ‘waltzing matilda’. red hill red hill (2010) as an example of outback noir that combines a revenge crime thriller narrative blended with a neo-western that is set in the present day but the community on the edge of an abyss is defined and damned by past crimes. it is not an adaptation of ‘waltzing matilda’ and the tune does not appear in the soundtrack, but the film exhibits a certain ghosting resonance with the story that is driven by an indigenous man’s desire for vengeance as retribution for past trauma at the hands of the community and the police. red hill is the story of the unexpected connection between two very different men one long, rainy explosive night in a dying rural town: a young white city policeman constable shane coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 cooper (ryan kwanten) who moves to the small rural community to experience the quiet country life with his young family and a dangerous escaped prisoner, indigenous man jimmy conway (lewis) who is making his way back to his home in this bucolic land to exact justice from the men who raped his wife and destroyed his life. red hill was described by jeannette catsoulis of the new york times as “a galloping revenge tale that uses young blood to unearth old sins” (2010). on cooper’s first day on the job there is an announcement that conway has escaped jail and is heading to town. red hill’s head of police, old bill (steve bisley) arms all the old blokes ready for a brutal confrontation. conway is cast as a murderous monster and old bill as the town’s saviour a kind of inversion of high noon. while the setting is modern, the context is one of uncovering the town’s buried histories by an outsider. we find out later that conway is returning to red hill to take vengeance out on old bill and the police and townsfolk complicit in raping and murdering his wife and framing him with the crime. half of his face is disfigured by massive burn scars. his damaged past is inscribed on his face. conway is an expert hunter and adept at dispatching the hillbilly perpetrators of the historic crimes one by one with a pump action shotgun, a spear and a boomerang. he is silent, merciless and relentless. although the inept cooper represents the law (he is the modern, sensitive version), conway lets him go a number of times as he understands the moral codes of the conflict and the fact that cooper is expecting a child. these would-be combatants are brought together by the unravelling of old secrets and together they uncover the truth of the past and expose old bill’s lies and deception. years ago old bill and his posse attacked conway because of his resistance to the destruction of an ancient sacred site. in the film’s denouement, cooper and conway together drag the long-buried truth into the light and destroy the town’s perverted old law and old bill as its deceptive perpetrator. they release the ghost. the representation of the indigenous past of red hill is limited, but what there is appears in multiple modes – as venerated cultural traditions with talk of sacred sites and symbolically as a source of kitschy irony. in the main street at the run-down information centre there is a ‘historical display’ that features a mannequin of a near naked indigenous male hunter in a staged forest scene. the display is awkward and incongruous and as kit harvey notes, “the display, quite literally, puts aboriginal culture safely behind glass, as something consigned to history, a museum piece best appreciated as a relic of the past. its singularity claims to capture all of what it means to be aboriginal – a “primitive”, “uncivilised” existence” (2012). this tacky display plays an important symbolic role in the film. it is seen three times and each time it performs a different role and each time it is seen differently. the first time is when cooper first comes into town and sees it as a representation in microcosm of what the townsfolk think of their indigenous history: a quaint, kitschy remnant of the past – so obvious and so awkward that it decimates any sense of ghostly agency or haunting. the second time it is conway who sees the ‘the ‘historical display’ this time at night and sitting on horseback from on high. a thunderclap followed by a lightening flash reveals conway glaring at the degraded mannequin in disgust. is the captured in fiberglass and locked up under glass ‘aboriginal elder’ meant to represent him? the threat is still there as in another lightening flash conway spots the reflection in the safety glass of a local thug hiding on a rooftop behind him poised to shoot. but conway is too fast, and the man tumbles down off the roof scattering another goon hiding among the rubbish bins. the third and final time that the ‘display’ comes into view is when cooper comes back into town with the historical secret crimes unravelling the ‘historical display’ that is now coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 trashed: the mannequin albeit having lost an arm, is now liberated of the broken glass. in order for indigenous culture to be resurrected the display needs to be destroyed and trashed. its’ boomerang and spear artefacts stolen and used to assassinate the historic killers to ironically highlight conway’s ‘mysterious’ hunting skills. this is a strangely symbolic moment in an otherwise fast paced action genre section of the film. a feeling of fatalism imbues this outback noir with conway’s indigenous agency: a brutal but righteous response to redeeming his ancestral trauma. his relentless pursuit of his victims is matched by a narrative expectation that his vengeance will have no personal redemption; that he will not survive this night of terror but that it will be his ghost that will be heard after the reverberation of bullets terminates. conway and cooper’s informal alliance brings about a strange, but cathartic justice to the town with the bloody destruction of all the rogue cops and purifying vengeance that puts to rest the wrongs of the past. ben goldsmith claims that the “story opens up the questions of frontier violence, contemporary racism and the silences of local history, as well as issues around environmental protection and the economic future of once-thriving rural towns’ (2015: 220). the frontier violence is resurrected, but this time reversed. it inverts the expectations of the western with the film squarely not on the side of the cowboy coppers and weather-beaten mountain men. patrick hughes fashioned indigenous vengeance as contemporary entertainment that captures the zeitgeist where viewers seek the visceral feeling of retribution, if not the rehabilitation of ancestral trauma. restaging a frontier massacre of aboriginal people as retributive bush justice does not necessarily transform the mythical conway-the-ghost as it just repeats the history of brutality again and again in a desperate search for resolution. but the ghosting remains. in discussing the australian colonial gothic in the literature of the 19th century ken gelder observes that a story about a bush ghost “mobilises its ghost as a kind of symbolically displaced image of settler guilt, its blackness suggesting something that is not quite there anymore but which lingers on as a kind of unwanted companion. settlers who see it die soon afterwards. at this post-frontier moment, the killing and dispossession of aboriginal people are distanced from settler memory; the gothic, on the other hand, breaches that distance by turning frontier encounters into a kind of special effect that reaches into a settler future (the "future empire") and negates it” (9-10). the connection of conway with the mythical black panther that appears mysteriously in the film points to his symbolic freedom and his magical, dangerous ghost like appearance in redefining settler guilt. no one claimed that this film was subtle or that it avoided cliches and stereotypes but that makes it all the better to provoke debate. in ivan sen’s outback noir classics, mystery road and goldstone, there is a similar examination of the injustices of the past, the buried ancestral trauma and the divisions between black and white australia as issues of the ambivalence of figures of authority. in contrast to red hill, the indigenous protagonist is not destroyed in the process of retribution, but there is considerable collateral damage along the way for the black and white members of the rural community. all three films feature three different white cops who are seemingly surrounded by a racist paradigm, albeit they all turn out to be decent men capable of cross-cultural collaboration in the heat of battle. in the vast expanses of the australian outback with the sun so blinding and the landscape so parched, the light conceals far more than it reveals. it is in the bright midday sun of the godforsaken goldstone where the mayor (jacki weaver) makes unveiled threats over tea and freshly made cake. it is in the heat of the day that bribes are coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 offered, murders executed, and honest cops attacked. but it is by a burning barn in the dead of night, high on the hill at red hill that the past is revealed and conway the monster avenged and at the same time, historicized (through flashbacks we learn what devilry brought him there) and in the process humanised. film noir traditionally explores the moral trauma of combat or corruption on its protagonists. characters are often trying to hide and escape distressing incidents from their past. where better to hide than out in the open? red hill, mystery road and goldstone examine ancestral trauma – both indigenous and settler. their narratives challenge official versions of events that cover over and forget historic massacres (or freeze them in dusty time as ‘historic displays’ for tourists that seemingly never come). noir characters are forever escaping traumatic incidents from their past. it is by destroying that ‘historic display’ that conway and cooper sow the ground for a different future. it is only in confronting the past, their ancestral trauma that they can they hope for redemption, even if it is at the end of a shotgun. outback noir films are preoccupied with characters lost in a landscape that is at once epic and brutally sublime and scarred by colonial violence, the vibrations of mining and business corruption. yet the landscape in these films offers a form of healing to the wounds of the ancestors by crafting a kind of investigative communal ceremony that exposes the corruption and softens the light on these sun-blasted people. it is through the police detective’s work on the past, performed in collaboration between indigenous and white people that offers a glimmer of hope against the noir fatalism. conclusion as noted earlier, suzette wearne argued that, “our collective repressed is haunted by the ghosts of our indigenous past” (power 2015). nowhere is this more clearly evident than in ‘waltzing matilda’ as the template for concealing the past and keeping the ghosts hidden in plain sight. like the ‘jolly’ swagman, jimmy conway is not over-and-done-with, he has come alive in this outback noir. leading film scholar james naremore makes an important observation on the issue of time in this field, “most contemporary writing and filmmaking associated with noir provokes a mourning and melancholy for the past, made all the more poignant because the objects being mourned are still with us” (1998: 4). jimmy conway may be gone, but his ghost remains. it is still with us. it is still tangible. weird melancholy indeed. the community of red hill nestled in the bucolic hills beyond the dark and menacing streets of melbourne is riddled with moral ambiguity, criminality and social perversion under the thin veneer of an upright rural community with its own modest historical tableaux that captures the ‘history’ of the aboriginal inhabitants. as ben goldsmith notes, “the townspeople justify to their actions [raping conway’s wife and framing him for her murder] to themselves as being what they see as the best interest of their town; they are motivated by the desire to ensure its survival and future prosperity. that is, they are motivated by a sense of community, albeit one which deliberately and violently excludes indigenous australians” (2015: 220). red hill, like many outback noir films, focuses on the moral rottenness of small towns with their sheen of coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 decency concealing repressed, dark secrets. in the context where old certainties have disappeared, there is a desperate attempt by figures of authority to hold on to their power base at any price. in red hill as in mystery road and goldstone the status quo is upset by the intrusion of an outsider, a cop forced to unravel the source of corruption for the community to survive by cleansing itself of its ghosts. what unites these disparate outback noir films is not just the aesthetics, the big brutal landscapes, the production processes, the modest budgets, the style and mood, but the prevailing themes of the concealment of old, criminal secrets that bind a community together in past that is full of ghosts and this brings with it a pervading sense of social hopelessness. it is only in overturning the past and reversing polarities that the community have any chance of survival. it is not surprising just how many of these films feature morbid tales of old cops gone rogue. from wake in fright with its top copper precipitating the naïve school-teacher’s downfall with an introduction to the illegal gambling dens to the crooked policemen of the cars that ate paris, swerve, cactus, the proposition, sweet country, mystery road and goldstone – the rogue cop as the ambivalent and twisted source of authority is a prevailing theme. in the outback noir the bad cop is narratively tamed and overthrown by the protagonists often in cross-cultural collaboration. in red hill, the initially monstrous jimmy conway becomes the town’s spiritual saviour by cleansing the community of people who went against the moral code. red hill is an interrogation of postcolonial trauma through and shared retribution between conway and cooper that leads to the disappearance of binary certainties of good and evil. whether examining criminal actions against indigenous people or uncovering dark secrets from the past – all the outback noir films are committed to an investigation of repressed histories of violence and crime that are connected to the law and the land. outsiders or liminal characters, caught between two worlds, are often the only possible saviours of the community with the denouements cautiously optimistic. the ghost hiding at the basis of many outback noir films begs the question of complicity or collaboration – working together… “who’ll come a-waltzing matilda with me?” as viewer’s we participate in a shared, cross-cultural investigation. bibliography buckmaster, luke (2010) ‘interview with patrick hughes, writer/director of red hill’, crickey, 25 november [https://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2010/11/25/interview-with-patrickhughes-writerdirector-of-red-hill/] catsoulis, jeannette (2010) ‘western meets horror’, the new york times, 4 november, 2010. [https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/movies/05red.html] cockrell, eddie (2013) ‘sun-drenched film noir’, the australian, 17 august, 2013 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/sun-drenched-film-noir/story-fn9n8gph1226698413712 fitzgerald, ross (2010) ‘waltzing matilda an old cold case’, abc 12 february 2010 [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-02-12/waltzing-matilda-an-old-cold-case/329506] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-02-12/waltzing-matilda-an-old-cold-case/329506 coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 gelder, ken ‘australian colonial gothic’ oxford research encyclopedia of literature: http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore9780190201098-e-143 gibson, ross (2002) seven versions of an australian badland, university of queensland press: st. lucia, queensland. goldsmith, ben (2015) ‘red hill’ in directory of world cinema: australia and new zealand 2nd edition, intellect: bristol, uk/chicago, usa p. 220 gordon, avery (1997) ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination, university of minnesota press: minneapolis, london. harvey, kit (2012) ‘red hill (patrick hughes, 2010) ‘key moments in australian cinema’, sense of cinema, issue #64 http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/key-moments-in-australiancinema-issue-70-march-2014/red-hill-patrick-hughes-2010/ [accessed 2 august 2018] hobsbawm, eric (1972) bandits. pelican revised ed, weidenfeld & nicolson, 2001. macaulay, scott (2010) ‘a talk with red hill director patrick hughes’, filmmaker magazine, 4 november 2010, [https://filmmakermagazine.com/15814-a-talk-with-red-hills-patrickhughes/#.ybs24ulr02w] mancan18 (2018) ‘comments’ on patrick marlborough’s article in the guardian [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/31/waltzing-matilda-is-australias-creepiestballad-let-me-tell-you-why]. 1 november 2018, 9:42am marlborough, patrick (2018) ‘waltzing matilda is australia's creepiest ballad. let me tell you why.’ the guardian, 31 oct 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/31/waltzingmatilda-is-australias-creepiest-ballad-let-me-tell-you-why#comment-122081045 [accessed 5 december 2019] naremore, james (1998) more than night: film noir in its contexts, university of california press: berkley and los angles. power, liza (2015) ‘weird melancholy: exhibition probes fear at the heart of the australian landscape’, the sydney morning herald, april 3. [https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/weird-melancholy-exhibition-probes-fear-at-theheart-of-the-australian-landscape-20150328-1m9uk2.html] accessed 13 february 2020. silver, alain and ursini, james (2004) film noir, taschen: germany. greg dolgopolov teaches and researches at unsw in video production, film festivals and film theory and literacy. his research interests include film festivals, short films, film distribution, australian and post-soviet cinema and the crime genre. he has written extensively on historical television detective serials, reality game shows and more. his research has been published in social semiotics, senses of cinema, metro, lumina, real time and kinokultura. greg is a http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-143 http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-143 http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/key-moments-in-australian-cinema-issue-70-march-2014/red-hill-patrick-hughes-2010/ http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/key-moments-in-australian-cinema-issue-70-march-2014/red-hill-patrick-hughes-2010/ https://filmmakermagazine.com/15814-a-talk-with-red-hills-patrick-hughes/#.ybs24ulr02w https://filmmakermagazine.com/15814-a-talk-with-red-hills-patrick-hughes/#.ybs24ulr02w https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/31/waltzing-matilda-is-australias-creepiest-ballad-let-me-tell-you-why#comment-122081045 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/31/waltzing-matilda-is-australias-creepiest-ballad-let-me-tell-you-why#comment-122081045 coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 documentary and drama filmmaker. the really true history of the ned kelly gang (2019) appeared at the vladivostok international film festival. greg is the artistic director of the vision splendid outback film festival (2013 ), short+sweet film festival (2017 ), the russian resurrection film festival (2008 ) and the internationally touring best of australian shorts festival. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 46 consumed in the fog: a metropolitan revenge fantasy erin malley writer malleypengerin@gmail.com copyright© 2023 erin malley. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. i have revenge fantasies. i usually keep these to myself. my clients would be horrified if they knew. i used to be preoccupied with blues point tower, a monstrous, modernist lego block on the north shore of sydney (my sydney) harbour harry seidler’s unwelcome and incongruous raised middle finger to zoning regulations on the north shore: 25 storeys high, in a residential neighbourhood. sidebar. blues point was named after billy blue. a convict deported to the colony from england in 1801 after being convicted of stealing a bag of sugar. the committee of dull, grey, chain-smoking men who approved blues point tower’s construction in 1960 were never convicted. now i fixate on barangaroo (crown) tower(s)1. my imagination takes wings (like ‘q’, larry cohen’s winged, b-movie serpent.) my clients would be horrified if they knew that along with well-worn copies of inspirational tomes such as michael j. lewis’s city of refuge: separatists and utopian town planning, max page’s the city’s end (2010) – informatively subtitled “two centuries of fantasies, fears, and premonitions of new york’s destruction” – sits on my bookshelf. max (i met him once, i can use his first name) writes about big events – meteors, bombs, aliens. (think matt reaves’ cloverfield [2008], for instance). i like new york but i get it. 1 the building is variously referred to as tower and towers – i use the singular in this piece after this initial qualified reference. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 47 my fantasies are smaller, neater and tidier. and nobody dies. my fantasies involve concealment and erasure. my fantasies loom in the fog. another book sits on my office shelves. christine corton’s london fog: the biography (2015). i have been preoccupied (maybe ‘haunted’ is a better word) by the fogs of victorian era london and by the menace and beauty that loomed within them. sidebar. as i have been penning this slender text i’ve been peppered with emails and texts from my london friends who know of my obsession, telling me about the walter sickert exhibition currently on at the tate. i read up on it. i’m glad i can't see it. the jack the ripper association is too visceral for me. 2 it’s not my fog fantasy. but my fantasies also involve concealment and erasure. fog often blankets sydney harbour in the autumn and winter. its vaporous snow sits on the city in the mornings, making ferries anxiously sound their horns as they move into circular quay, wary of smaller watercraft hidden precariously in the gloom. the tv news regularly shows the upper reaches of the harbour bridge arching above the mist and tells us that early morning flights are delayed and the backlog at the airport will take time to dissipate. here’s an image that often greets me walking to work. figure 1. barandaroo crown casino tower and harbour boardwalk april 2022 (author's photo). 2 there have been rumours and theories that sickert was variously preoccupied with, appreciative of or else actually was jack the ripper. the exhibition apparently explored this angle (jones, 2022). coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 48 staring up as the tower disappears into low cloud i’m always reminded of the murkiness that surrounds crown casino tower’s approval, financing and governance. it reminds me of a thorn. a thorn that has pushed up from the asphalt and sandstone of the foreshore, erect and hard-edged. unrepentant. money talks. mick tsikas (2021) summarised it well: crown towers sydney, at 75 storeys, is now the city’s tallest building. it should not exist, and certainly not where it is – in prime location on sydney’s famous harbour… it is a familiar story of a culture of wealthy mates and backroom deals. it is also a story about the novel use of an obscure infrastructure approvals mechanism called “unsolicited proposals” – or usps for short – that circumvented established processes intended to protect the public interest. it affronts me. usps affront me. i have revenge fantasies. the image of the tower increasingly obscured by clouds activates my scifi fandom. i crossreference texts as i fantasise. i’ve slipped in and out of doctor who over the years. i had a partner who was tediously preoccupied with the old black and white episodes, their creaky sets and their low-rent, shuffling monsters. me, i was particularly taken with a more modern episode entitled ‘planet of the dead’ (2010), which features a storm of metallic, flying stingray-type creatures that consume everything in their path, leaving only sand behind. this intrigued me. i fantasised about training the swarm, directing them, deploying them to erase structures in the ‘clinical strikes’ beloved of military rhetoric but rarely delivered by their technologies. but i’d want to conceal them. the cloud clinging to crown tower helps complete the fantasy. one wet weekend i watched the luridly entitled the trollenberg terror (1958). while the execution was ropey, to say the least, the premise was fascinating. a small area of cloud is observed moving peculiarly in the alps, as if directed and targeting particular locations, swooping on them and leaving destruction in its wake. the viewer and characters first are at first led to believe that the cloud is sentient and malevolent a premise sharp enough to whet my interest3 before finding out that it conceals murderous, one-eyed, octopus-like aliens. i cross-reference texts as i fantasise. concealed in a curling ball of fog, my flock of metallic stingrays quickly gobbles up the peak of the tower. as the sun burns off the lingering cloud, the top of the building is revealed as a ragged shard, with rooms open to the elements. helicopters hover, the media is abuzz. 3 and also that of john carpenter and his collaborator debra hill who were reputedly inspired to develop their own film project the fog (1980) after watching the trollenberg terror (cole, 2020). coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 49 the next morning the cloud is low again and my misty wrecking crew returns. it quietly erases more floors and visits again and again until a low sand hill is all that remains. and then – but only then – it rolls across the glassy blue harbour and across henry lawson reserve over to the seidler tower. in the fog, the stingrays make short work of the old concrete, leaving another low hill. ***** the new south wales government website has a page entitled ‘unsolicited proposals’ that emphasises that it: welcomes unsolicited proposals from the non-government sector that will deliver innovative ideas, places, services and infrastructure to the people of nsw. consider my stingrays in the fog an “unsolicited proposal” that seeks no approval and brooks no quarter. i have revenge fantasies. (april 2022) acknowledgement thanks to philip hayward for encouraging me to produce this version of what started as an impassioned rant early one summer’s evening in the lord nelson and for giving me feedback on the initial written draft. references corton, christine. (2015). london fog: the biography. harvard university press. cole, mark. (2020). the trollenberg terror [the crawling eye] (1958). rivets on the poster. https://rivetsontheposter.wordpress.com/2020/03/11/the-trollenberg-terror-the-crawling-eye1958/ jones, jonathan. (2022). walter sickert review – serial killer, fantasist or self-hater? this hellish, brilliant show only leaves questions. the guardian april 26. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/26/walter-sickert-review-serial-killertate-britain-london-show-women-victorian-painter lawrence, quintin. (1958). the trollenberg terror (feature film), eros films. lewis, michael j, (2016). city of refuge: separatists and utopian town planning. princeton university press. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 50 new south wales government. (n.d). unsolicited proposals. https://www.nsw.gov.au/unsolicited-proposals page, max. (2008). the city’s end: two centuries of fantasies, fears, and premonitions of new york’s destruction. yale university press. reeves, matt. (2008). cloverfield(feature film), bad robot productions. strong, james (2010). planet of the dead (episode of tv series – doctor who), bbc. tsikas, mick. (2021). how sydney’s barangaroo tower paved the way for closed-door deals. the conversation june 2. https://theconversation.com/how-sydneys-barangaroo-tower-pavedthe-way-for-a-culture-of-closed-door-deals-161816 erin malley is the nom de plume of a sydney town planner who learned her trade in the united states. she is an urbanist, fantasist and inner-city flâneuse who occasionally engages in creative writing. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 reimagining australia via disability and media: representation, access and digital integration katie ellis curtin university katie.ellis@curtin.edu.au mike kent curtin university m.kent@curtin.edu.au scott hollier curtin university scott@hollier.info shawn burns university of wollongong shawn@uow.edu.au gerard goggin university of sydney gerard.goggin@sydney.edu.au copyright©2018 katie ellis, mike kent, scott hollier, shawn burns & gerard goggin. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper takes up pressing, yet sorely neglected, questions of disability and media to argue for a reimagining of australia to be more inclusive of this group. to do so, we outline theoretical approaches to a reimagining of disability in society and culture. we then identify and debate the lessons from disability and media studies that help us to reimagine australia. in particular, we focus on what we describe as the three key media models of disability in australia—representation, access and digital inclusion. a key aim throughout this paper is to include the insights of people with disabilities themselves using the media in contemporary australia. our reimagining of australia via disability mailto:katie.ellis@curtin.edu.au mailto:m.kent@curtin.edu.au mailto:scott@hollier.info mailto:shawn@uow.edu.au mailto:gerard.goggin@sydney.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 and media exposes both the ambivalence taken towards disability in contemporary australia as well as the potential for change. keywords: disability; media; technology. introduction: reimagining disability as social disability is typically thought of as an individual’s problem that requires medical intervention, with little in common with other marginalised groups within australia. yet, disability is increasingly being reimagined in humanities disciplines as socially created by inaccessible environments and negative attitudes. australians with disability are also increasingly identifying as a marginalised group with a common history and culture. the social model of disability, first developed in the u.k. in the 1970s, has had a significant influence on a reimagining of disability in contemporary australian society (young, 2010). the social model offers a redefinition of disability whereby impairment is located in the body and disability is created by society (oliver, 1996). human rights models of disability extend the insights obtained via the social model and offer a framework for removing socially created barriers (harpur, 2012). according to the human rights framework, people with disabilities have the same rights as everyone else. like the social model, environmental, attitudinal and organisational barriers are recognised as creating obstacles to enjoyment of human rights. however, the responsibility is placed on society and government to ensure full inclusion of people with disability through environments that support human rights. the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (crpd) offers a non-radical framework for governments to facilitate the enjoyment of human rights for their disabled populations. among an extensive list of articles and obligations of ratifying countries (of which australia is one), the convention specifically addresses questions of accessibility to information and public space, and unequivocally calls for fair and progressive representations of people with disability as means to creating an inclusive society. article 9 on accessibility declares “states parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure to person with disabilities access, and an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including information and communication technologies and systems …;” article 21 on freedom of expression and access to information highlights “encouraging the mass media, including providers of information through the internet, to make their services accessible to person with disabilities;” and in article 8, on awareness raising and media representation, it states all parties will “… combat stereotypes, prejudices and harmful practices relating to persons with disabilities …,” and “… promote awareness of the capabilities and contributions of persons with disabilities” (united nations, 2006). in recent years, much of the public domain discussion of inclusion of people with disability in australia has centred on the formulation, trial and rollout of the national disability insurance scheme (ndis)—what many would contend to be a national reimagining of disability. one of the only spawn of the 2020 summit run in 2008 by then prime minister kevin rudd to reach adulthood, the idea of the ndis was credited to coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 summit participant and philanthropist bruce bonyhady. he proposed the scheme as a means to “… shift from the current crisis-driven welfare system to as planned and fully funded national disability insurance scheme that would underwrite sustained significant, long-term improvement in meeting needs of people with disabilities and their families” (bonyhady, 2008; burns and haller, 2015). subsequently, the australian productivity commission was tasked with exploring potential for a scheme that would deliver “long-term essential care and support for eligible people with severe and profound disability, on an entitlement basis and taking into account the desired outcomes for each person over a lifetime” (australian government productivity commission, 2011). at its heart, the australian government productivity commission report presented the ndis as a productive and progressive measure that would encourage and enable people with mild to profound disabilities to find employment, and free up family members to enter or return to the workforce. the commission estimated there could be additional employment growth of 220,000 by 2050 and “its benefits would significantly exceed the additional costs of the scheme” (australian government productivity commission, 2011). the australian government announced launch sites for the ndis in 2013 and gained bipartisan political support for a federal levy to fund its rollout to completion in 2019. the ndis was widely endorsed and championed as a scheme that would help “… hundreds of thousands of australians with disability and their families to have opportunity to participate actively in their communities by providing targeted supports aligned to need” (national disability services, 2014). in the contemporary transformations we describe in australian society, culture and economy, the media has an important role in how disability is imagined—and how it might be reimagined. much of the focus on disability and australian media has centred on the notion of representation and meaning making. this analysis has been vital in setting the agenda for other related disability media work such as an exploration of access, accessibility, and the use of digital media in everyday life. in the three sections that follow in this paper, we outline what we describe as the three key media models of disability in australia—representation, access and digital inclusion. representation: how people with disability react to news media representations of the ndis much of the potential for reimagining disability in australia is within the remit of the country’s news media. there is broad support for the contention the news media has the capacity to set the public agenda (mccombs and shaw, 1972; deering and rogers, 1996), and influence the way people think about other people, events and issues through story framing, even given the transformations of media and society in the past two decades. some academics contend the news media also has a capacity to tell people what to think about, but it does not have the power to make them think anything (mccombs, 2002). there are numerous assessments of the role the media plays in society. most of these highlight the media’s ability to shape the way people think and its influence on personal choice and perceptions. cohen (1963) noted the media may not be successful much of the time in telling us what to think, but is stunningly successful in telling us what to think about, words later echoed by neuendorf (1990). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 frame analysis, first explored by erving goffman (1974), is considered “… a number of related, even though sometimes partially incompatible methods for the analysis of discourses” (the cathie marsh centre for census and survey research, 2008). goffman considered framing to be an innate part of all social processes and necessary to facilitate understanding. media studies academics have adapted goffman’s framing analysis to their own purposes (entman, 1993, p. 52). burns and haller (2015) explored the presence of traditional and progressive representations of people with disability in reportage of the ndis. they used both clogston’s and haller’s media models of disability (clogston 1990, 1993; haller, 1995) that divide coverage of people with disability into traditional and progressive representations (table 1). table 1. media models of disability (burns and haller, 2015). traditional 1 medical disability is presented as an illness or malfunction 2 social pathology disabled people are presented as disadvantaged and must look to the state or society for economic support, which is considered a gift, not a right 3 supercrip the disabled person is portrayed as deviant because of ‘superhuman feats,’ or as ‘special’ because he or she lives a regular life ‘in spite of’ their disability 4 business disabled people and their accessibility to society are presented as costly to society in general, and to businesses especially progressive 5 minority/civil rights disabled people are seen as members of a disability community which has legitimate civil rights and grievances 6 legal disabled people are presented as having legal rights and possibly a need to sue to halt discrimination 7 cultural pluralism people with disabilities are seen as multi-faceted and their disabilities do not receive undue attention 8 consumer disabled people are presented as an untapped consumer group and making society accessible could be profitable to business and society these frames are vital in helping us understand both media representations of disability and how media access can facilitate social inclusion by recognising people with disability as a diverse minority group with legal and human rights. increasingly as people with disability embrace the consumption of digital media such as video on demand and tablets and smartphones, they are also being recognised as an untapped consumer group. the question of representation of people with disability is important in the context of news media coverage of the ndis as the media has a part to play in public policy discourse. burns and haller (2015) identified 455 articles about the ndis published in coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 high circulation australian newspapers between 2008 and 2013 and, by using the media models as an analysis tool, found the vast majority (74%) contained traditional representations of disability—94% of those articles (306) represented people with disability within the social pathology media model where people with disability are seen as disadvantaged and reliant on the state for support. the study revealed that news media coverage of people with disability remains anything but reimagined and, for the most part, is mired in traditional media frames of pity and tragedy. while this is contrary to the ndis architect’s stated aspiration of maximising “people’s independence and social and economic independence” (ndis, 2014), it does not come as a surprise to people with disability interviewed by burns (2016) in his exploration of news media coverage of the ndis. the interviews were carried out as part of a larger research project, with interviewees self-nominating after participating in an online survey about news media representation of disability and, specifically, coverage of the ndis. participants took part in semi-structured interviews to provide insight into what people with disability think about the media coverage of the ndis and the representation of disability within that coverage. eighteen people were interviewed (n=18), with participants de-identified. each participant selected the mode of interview, most (10) choosing to participate via an exchange of emails, others (8) choosing a combination of email and telephone interviews. the interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed. the interviews aimed to “foster a sense of their understanding of their experiences” (pain, masullo chen, and campbell, 2016, p. 404). participants were asked 11 questions related to the representation of disability in the news media. this section reports insights obtained when participants were asked about how they felt about news media representation of people with disability and representations of the ndis in particular. participants focused on the media’s lack of diversity when it comes to disability, the prevalence of stereotypes and the influence of welfare discourses. despite this, many participants reflected on the potential for the media to offer powerful and progressive reimaginings. an understanding of identified themes informs an exploration of a reimagined representation of disability in the australian news media and the media more broadly. the themes of individuality (lack of) and stereotype were recurrent, as represented by these responses: i believe representation of people with disability in the media needs to be objective and pragmatic. it need to be clarified that one person’s experience doesn’t represent everyone else’s experience. (interview 1) mostly it’s crappy—news media, and most other media, get stuck in the tropes of people with disabilities as either superhero or tragedy, and if you or your story doesn’t fit either narrative you don’t get represented at all. (interview 2) i think there’s a tendency for news media outlets to focus on the pit or the pedestal, so we’re either, super humans, paralympians, inspirational. you know, people who overcome great barriers to achieve great things, or conversely we are um the pit where we are pitiful objects of welfare and charity and we can only be depicted in ways that objectify us and make us worthy of other people’s pity. (interview 3) coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 similarly, when asked about coverage of the ndis, traditional representations and themes of condescension and pity were present: well i think they’re resorted to the puppies and kittens sort of thing … that’s how i refer to that kind of coverage ‘puppies and kittens’ you know ‘chickens and ducks’ aren’t they cute haha, look at little the sweet little old lady, look at these sweet little child with a disability isn’t she cute? (interview 5) the narrative was very much about help the poor disabled people rather than give people what they need, you know? so it was less of a human rights perspective. (interview 3) once again, the majority of coverage related to the ndis has focused on budgetary blow outs which has perpetuated the narrative of disabled people being seen as burdens on the system. (interview 18) my main issue with the reporting of the ndis generally has been that it continues to portray pwd [people with disabilities] as users and a burden on society by continued emphasis on the economic cost without the corresponding reporting of the economic benefits. it’s almost as though it is laziness, with the ease of vilifying pwd to make the rest of australia feel better about themselves. (interview 9) the responses, however, were not universally critical of the coverage, with some observing progressive elements: i think the representation of people with disability in the media under the coverage of the national disability insurance scheme has been more accurate and positive. i think that the media is learning to understand what pwd can achieve and portray them in ways that focus on what pwd can achieve. (interview 12) when asked about how the media should represent disability, the responses were similar, if not identical. themes of individuality, uniqueness and potential were dominant: not as a single group for a start. like there really isn’t a group of people with disabilities, and not a monolithic group anymore than you know australians have a monolithic group or women are a monolithic group. there’s lot of people with different opinions and also just that we’re all complex, these human beings that we have, we’re not just a tragedy on a stick or a superhero in a box to unpack every paralympic year and tell inspiring stories around. (interview 2) i think they should have more stories about the average day person, and not use such emotive terms, you know rather more, report more of the facts, go a little bit easy on some of the objectives. (interview 10) coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 people with disability need to be presented as people with potential. however, for them to achieve their potential, they need opportunity. opportunity to work, opportunity to be independent and opportunity to make their own choices if they are able to do so. (interview 10) these interviews paint a picture of australian news media still being reliant on traditional representations of disability, no matter the seemingly progressive nature of the overarching story. set against this situation, these respondents provide insight into how they are represented in in the news media, and offered a template as how to reimagine disability outside the traditional media models of tragedy and hero. access: broadcasting and streaming australia following analysis of representations of disability in the media, it is important to consider whether this group can access media. for example, as an audio visual medium, television can exclude people with impairments related to vision and hearing. however, television can be redesigned to allow access by people with disability. for example, captions provide the text version of speech and other sound on videos to compensate for hearing difficulties. similarly, audio description provides a spoken narration to describe visual content such as scenes, settings, actions and costumes included between sections of dialogue for people who cannot see it. while deaf advocates have long campaigned for more accessible television via the provision of closed captions (downey, 2007), for potential viewers with vision impairments, demands for access through audio description are only recently gaining traction (ellis, 2015). this issue came to the fore in australia with the transition to digital television broadcasting. the government released a policy discussion paper regarding improving access to television for audiences with vision and hearing impairments and a review was conducted in 2010 (department of broadband, communications, and the digital economy, 2011). a total of 22 recommendations were made by the review grouped into captioning, audio description and uncrpd and social inclusion. notably, recommendation 5 suggested a trial of audio description, which was subsequently carried out in 2012. in response to this trial, lauren henley articulated the importance of making television accessible to people with vision impairments as facilitating “social inclusion” (henley cited in australian communications consumer action network, 2012). responding to calls to introduce audio description on broadcast television, both government and industry predicted the introduction of video on demand in this country would result in a more accessible form of television for australians with disability (australian government, 2008; ellis, 2014). netflix, in particular, was seen as having a potentially disruptive influence (ellis and kent, 2015). this has certainly been the case— subscription video on demand services have caused a major shift in the way television is used and consumed in australia. video on demand is streamed over internet-based online services and is not linear, giving viewers the opportunity to watch video at any time once the programme is available. prior to 2015, there was a small subscription video on demand industry in australia. providers had limited content and the bulk of video on demand services used by australians related to catch-up television or watching usercoolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 generated videos on youtube or vimeo. however, 2015 saw the introduction of three new service providers in quick succession—stan, presto entertainment and netflix australia. popular commentary described the expanding market as the “streaming wars” and predicted consumers would be the beneficiaries (tucker, 2016). however, despite great potential for accessibility, people with disabilities risked being left out of the video on demand revolution in television viewing. a survey of 173 people with disability, along with 14 follow-up interviews conducted in 2015 (ellis kent, locke, and merchant, 2016) revealed people with disability like the choice and freedom offered by video on demand but not its limitations such as difficult set up and inability to integrate with assistive technologies such as screen readers. cost is a significant prohibitive factor, particularly in the context of the lower income levels of people with disability alongside increased costs related to assistive technology. as consumers of video on demand, people with disability experience both the same issues the broader population report in relation to video on demand (geoblocking / licensing and connectivity) as well as those specific to disability (absent or inconsistent accessibility) (see ellis, kent, locke, and merchant, 2016). the participants responding to australian media representations of the ndis discussed above (burns, 2016) highlighted the notion of independence versus charity as a significant issue in reimagining disability in australia via media. this reimagining of disability is also evident in the desire of australians with disability to use subscription video on demand. however, video on demand providers have been ambivalent towards consumers with disability as a potential audience. stan, presto entertainment and netflix australia all launched without an accessibility policy in place and, at the time of research, only netflix australia offered both captions and audio description. to a certain degree, then, the australian government’s 2008 prediction that industry competition via video on demand would result in a more accessible television experience for people with disability was almost accurate (department of broadband, communications, and the digital economy, 2008). this was reflected in the interviews where participants directly compared australia’s approach to accessibility on broadcast television with netflix’s approach: netflix has been excellent in providing closed captions, and far better than what is currently available for free-to-air (fta)/on-demand (i.e. abc iview, sbs on demand) … i get continually frustrated when trying to catch-up via on-demand, and finding things are not captioned, when they were on fta (free-to-air) broadcasts … or they have been captioned on original screenings in the past, but are no longer provided with captions on repeat screenings. also, the accessibility of turning on captions on fta on-demand services, is far more complex and sometimes impossible (i.e. not provided on ipad, or cannot be accessed via certain smart tvs). this participant raises an important point regarding the ambivalence taken towards consumers with disability who require captions. whereas the provision of captions on broadcast television is mandated by the broadcasting services act 1992, it is not required on catch-up television nor subscription video on demand. given this lack of legislative power, broadcasters will screen captioned versions of programs via broadcast television coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 and then uncaptioned versions online (ellis, 2014). similarly, accessible electronic program guides and interfaces are crucial in facilitating full access: [the] netflix app on [my] iphone allows me to access lists of programs, and search and turn on audio description for those shows and movies that have it. i have control and am able to use the service. with regular broadcasting tv however, it’s a matter of pressing buttons on a remote to find channels. foxtel is completely visual and unusable by me. i couldn’t use foxtel independently because the menus are visual with no voice output. these insights suggest people with disability, and specifically people with vision impairments, are also members of the australian television audience and therefore are also seeking social inclusion. further, the netflix approach shows that the technology is available via digital distribution to improve television access for this group. video on demand has shifted the concept of the mass audience in recognition that aggregating a number of smaller niche audiences (via personal recommendations, for example) results in a larger total audience share (ellis, 2015; napoli, 2011). while it is true that subscription video on demand has reimagined television in australia, for people with disabilities, this site of potential social inclusion has again reflected the current ambivalence towards this group. indeed, we should heed ellis and kent’s caution against the technologically determinist view of technology as an inevitable source of liberation from exclusion for people with disabilities. as they note, “the uneven interface of the virtual and the analogue indicate that this inclusion is far from an inevitable consequence of development” (2011, p. 2). digital integration: new spaces of internet and cities an important site of reimagining and remaking disability in australia is in the use of digital media devices such as smartphones, tablets and, increasingly, the internet of things (iot). for example, people with vision impairments can access newspapers using digital devices and screen readers. for example, goggin (2011) has observed that people with disabilities have adopted mobile phones to act as assistive technology in “creative ways.” he notes the use of screen reading technology with gps technology and locative media to provide greater accessibility. indeed, the disability community are reimagining smartphone technology to be assistive technology in a wide variety of areas, including both personal communications, health service delivery—including mental heath support and communicating accidents and incidents (doughty, 2011)—and education and learning (abbott, brown, evett, and standen, 2013; doughty, 2011). similarly, the deaf community has used mobile video services to allow for signed communications through the phone service (cavender, vanam, barney, ladner, and riskin, 2008) and also short message service technology in innovative ways (okuyama, 2013). as söderström (2011) observes, smartphone technology has a “twofold property as a mainstream technology simultaneously functioning as an assistive technology” (p. 105). morris, mueller, jones and lippincott (2013) found that smartphones were removing the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 digital divide for people with disabilities, and hollier (2013) observed that these devices made previously inaccessible information accessible. mcnaughton and light (2013) also note that this type of mobile telephony increases the level of social inclusion for people with disabilities through the use of the medium when it is used in the same way as the non-disabled population. notably, ellis and goggin (2015a, 2015b) and spinks (2014) all observed that smartphone-enabled mobile technology provided people with disabilities assistence in navigating cities. yet, the unfolding of this media adoption and appropriation by people with disabilities involves considerable patterns of uneven and equal use, even to the extent of new forms of exclusion. this ‘uneven interface’ is the less well studied and discussed ‘dark side’ of digital media that we shall now explore in a case study of socio-technical evolution of the iot in everyday life. the iot refers to how everyday objects and appliances can interact online with us and with each other (burgess, 2015). the rapidly evolving interest and broad implications (gartner, 2016) of iot relates to a number of benefits such devices can provide, and these have been increasingly discussed and celebrated across a wide range of settings (bunz and meikle, 2017). while the presence of iot is only just starting to seep into the home, the concept has been explored by manufacturers over the past two decades. for example, back in 2000 lg released its digital dios internet-connected refrigerator (appliance design, 2000) which offered many similar features to the connected refrigerators currently available. these included a built-in screen, web browser and email support, the ability to sense when products were removed, and the ability to connect to the internet to order new groceries. while, conceptually, the lg product seemed likely to gain traction, the reality was that it was not successful. this was primarily due to its primitive user interface, its inability for the refrigerator to identify specific products (beyond identifying if an item was present), the use of dial-up in some regions (which meant the refrigerator tied up the telephone line as the only internet-connected device in the home) and the us $20,000 price tag. by contrast, modern technological advances offer always-on connectivity, intuitive interfaces, multiple control methods and a significantly reduced price point, making iot devices far more practical and commercially viable. from the perspective of people with disabilities, the method of engagement with iot will be a key factor in determining if the benefits of iot are realised and therefore provide additional disability-specific benefits. one aspect of this relates to the rapid evolution of built-in accessibility features into popular mainstream operating systems. this includes the presence of screen readers, screen magnifiers and switch key support in microsoft windows, apple mac os, apple ios and google android (media access australia, 2016). as such, interaction with iot using mobile devices with built-in accessibility features via an app or digital assistant can provide an effective method of interaction. a second method is via a built-in interface such as a touchscreen on an iot-based refrigerator. using iot through a smartphone app or digital assistant has a number of uses for people with disabilities. it allows the user to engage with the device using an accessible interface, making it simple to provide commands to iot and, in turn, find out information from the device. for example, a person in a wheelchair unable to reach buttons can use a smartphone app to interact with it. another example is a blind person who cannot view a coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 screen on a microwave being given updates by a digital assistant as to how long the food has left to cook. further, as standalone digital assistants such as google home and amazon echo gain in popularity, new opportunities for iot interaction continue to evolve. as manufacturers battle for consumer interest and push their particular ecosystem (carter, 2015) in the iot space, it is important to consider the interface access implications to ensure that people with disabilities can also enjoy the benefits that iot can provide. however, there are obvious downsides—if the mobile device has a flat battery or is unavailable, it is not possible to interact with the device directly. to counter this, an interface on the device itself would enable direct interaction. however, it is unlikely that a proprietary built-in interface would have all the accessibility features needed, and a significant amount of training would be required to learn the accessibility features on that specific device. to address this, raising the floor have an initiative called the global public inclusive infrastructure (gpii) (raising the floor, 2017) which is based on iot devices customising their interfaces based on user preferences stored in the cloud. while this idea is effective in concept, it has yet to be widely adopted due primarily to the need for a massive infrastructure project to set up the system, cooperation from stakeholders, and concern by people with disabilities about privacy and security of their disabilityrelated information being available on the cloud. while some of this seems futuristic, a useful perspective on the iot can be provided by a digital technology that is already widely implemented and used by people with disabilities —smartphones. in australia in 2016, there was a 77% penetration rate for smartphones, second only to south korea’s 88% globally (pew global, 2016). while there were initial criticisms about the accessibility of these devices for people with disabilities (ellis and kent, 2008), these devices now present significant universal design features to provide accessibility for this group (apple, 2016; google, 2016). in particular, smartphone technology is a key way that the social inclusion of people with disabilities is being reimagined in relation to access to urban environments (imrie, 2004). for instance, cake and kent (2014) explore how cityscapes have been retrofitted to enable better access for people with disabilities, with ramps and lifts applied to work around previously inaccessible stairs, curbs cut into the sidewalk to provide better access to the street, and braille signage added to assist navigation. smartphones can be used to assist with this by linking a person’s location to nearby services through digital web searches, providing access to maps, and offering directions and links to local services and public transport. for people with disabilities, this can represent an additional layer of accessibility. smartphones can provide information on the number of steps in a staircase, the presence of access ramps and their gradient, and the nature of ground surfaces likely to be encountered on a journey. they can also indicate the presence of accessible parking, the layout of stations for public transport, and they can be synched to transmit instructions audibly for directions and to indicate when crosswalks are safe. they also highlight the importance of the digital signatures of these urban spaces being developed in an accessible way. however, along with these affordances, smartphones also present challenges for people with disabilities. complex operating systems can be hard to master, apps can upgrade and change, often in ways that limits their accessibility, batteries are not always charged, and gps can struggle with outdated maps and with poor signal reception in buildings and built-up city centres. as ellis, kent, locke, hollier and denney coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 (2017) note, “these technologies pose many opportunities and challenges for the disability community” (2017, p. 11). in the australian context, three of the authors conducted a study into how people with disabilities use smartphones to navigate urban environments, engaging focus groups of people who are wheelchair users and also people who are blind or have low vision (see ellis, et al., 2017). the study investigated people in perth, the capital city of the state of western australia, as well as the regional centres in the south west of the state. the notable findings were that participants acknowledged that their smartphone was an essential requirement for navigating urban spaces and decreasing social isolation. key benefits the devices provided include: ▪ gps built-in functionality—examples include the ability to provide your location to taxis and other transport services, and the ability to identify the location of objects and places nearby such as accessible toilets. ▪ mapping—specific guidance on going to a particular place. ▪ quick web search—use of digital assistants such as siri to provide an easy hands-free option to perform quick searches and find locations. ▪ environment monitoring—identification of specific weather conditions in a localised area. ▪ optical character recognition (ocr) and image recognition— identification of documents, signage and landmarks for blind and low vision users. (ellis, et al., 2017, p. viii) this sense that the smartphone was an ‘essential service’ also needs to be viewed alongside another key insight—that participants with different types of impairments were using the devices in different ways. wheelchair users, for instance, mounted their smartphone on their wheelchairs to allow them to use the phone while controlling the chair. they used the phones to seek information about wheelchair accessibility, including building access, accessible toilets, and topographical information such as sloping ground or steep inclines. they also made use of imbedded digital assistant technology to aid in using the smartphone, such as in sending texts or taking photos, and noted how this allowed greater independence in tasks that previously might have required the assistance of a support worker. this group also made heavy use of the gps functionality imbedded in the phones to aid navigation and plan journeys. significantly, people in the study who were blind had less confidence in the gps services on the phone. despite this, this group also focused on the ability of the smartphone to aid in navigation, as well as features such as ocr. this group were more inclined to experiment with a greater variety of apps and the accessibility features of the phone. they were also more likely to be aware of the potential of other peripheral devices, such as an iwatch that can be used to navigate through haptic feedback (for example, vibrating once to turn left and twice to turn right) and bone conductor headsets that allows access to a phone’s audio features while not blocking sound from a person’s surrounding environment. while this group showed greater awareness of more disability-specific apps (see wersényi, 2015), like the wheelchair users they generally made use of the same relatively common apps found on any smartphone. it was a case of reimagining existing coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 apps as assistive technology, rather than making use of any customised apps for disability access. this speaks highly of the universal design available through these devices and mainstream apps. when discussing the design of urban spaces, cake and kent (2014) observed when thinking of designs that can exclude or include people with disabilities, “these decisions determine who is considered normal or within the parameters of participation in society, and who falls outside the definition” (p. 115). smartphones, and their potential as an aid to navigating urban environments for people with disability in australia, are now extending this participation envelope. conclusion public culture and spheres, as well as social, collective and individual lives in australia are increasingly being reconfigured through social imaginaries, practices, experimentation, making, design, and cultures centring on media and technology. in particular, the reimagining of australia via media technology engages and implicates disability. in this paper, we have aimed to introduce and discuss the three main models of media and disability via which australia is imagined—representation, access and digital inclusion—and, as we have suggested, might be reimagined. in the longstanding area of representation, we have drawn on research, especially interviews with people with disability, that presents a picture of australian news media still being reliant on traditional representations of disability, no matter the seemingly progressive nature of the overarching story. in rich and productive contrast, we have shown how drawing on the practices and perspectives of people with disabilities offers insights into such media representations, as well as resources for reimagining disability outside the traditional media models of tragedy and hero. in the area of access, often the most prominent area associated with disability in public discourses, we have examined the resonant case of broadcasting. what emerges is again something of a paradox—longstanding exclusion from the creation, distribution and consumption of stories via the crucial medium of television has only been very slowly addressed by traditional broadcasters and policymakers. transformations in new television media have offered new possibilities, especially with the advent of streaming video and television services in recent years. yet, while there are important advances here, industry practices are surprisingly poor and inaccessible, and policy frameworks cry out to be updated. again, there are rich resources for hope and change here, in the innovative media creation and practices of producers, consumers, communities and publics alike. the third model of disability and media we examine is inclusion, often discussed in the present time as digital inclusion. via case studies of the iot and smartphones in urban environments, we discuss their interplay, including the ways in which technologies are imagined; how technologies are designed and implemented, and what their affordances might be; how users take these up, with particular cultures of use and innovation; and the major challenges that typically still remain such as creating new spaces of exclusion coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 where, ironically, inclusion and possibility for diversity and justice, with digital technologies, cultures and formats, should be easy to realise. in conclusion, contemporary disability and media offer powerful, far-reaching ways to reimagine australia. such transformations are well underway, but still are hampered in their take-up, reach and broader understanding. thus, in this sense, reimagining australia via disability remains a vital and richly 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(2015). evaluation of a navigational application using auditory feedback to avoid veering for blind users on android platform. journal of the acoustical society of america, 137(4), 2206-2206. katie ellis is associate professor and senior research fellow in the department of internet studies at curtin university, western australia and the convener of the curtin university critical disability research network. she has worked with people with disabilities in government, academia and the community and has convened disability research advisory panels. she has authored and edited nine books and numerous articles on the topic. she began a discovery early career researcher award (decra) in 2013 to investigate the impacts of the changing television environment on the social inclusion and exclusion of people with disabilities. mike kent is head of department and a senior lecturer at the department of internet studies at curtin university, western australia. mike’s research focus is on people with coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 disabilities and their use of, and access to, information technology and the internet. his edited collections with katie ellis, disability and social media: global perspectives and chinese social media today: social cultural and political implications with katie ellis and jian xu, were both published by routledge in 2017. his book, also with katie ellis, disability and new media was published in 2011. his other area of research interest is in higher education and particularly online education. his edited collection with tama leaver, an education in facebook? higher education and world’s largest social network was released in 2014, and his collection with rebecca bennett, moocs and higher education: what went right, what went wrong and where to next? in 2017. scott hollier is a senior research officer in the department of internet studies and the department of electrical & computer engineering at curtin university. he specialises in the field of digital accessibility and is the author of the book outrunning the night: a life journey of disability, determination and joy. scott is also an internationally-recognised researcher and speaker; consultancy areas include consumer-based support for service organisations, developer-based support for ict professionals for web and app-related work, and support across different organisational roles to achieve compliance with digital accessibility standards such as wcag 2.0. scott also lectures at edith cowan university, western australia and the university of south australia in the areas of information management and web accessibility. scott is also an active participant in the w3c web accessibility initiative research questions task force. in addition, scott is legally blind and as such has both a professional and personal understanding of the importance of accessibility. shawn burns is a journalism lecturer and phd candidate at the university of wollongong, new south wales. he researches the representation of people with disability in news media, disability inclusion, newsroom practice and pedagogy. he is a former news journalist, new director and political media adviser. gerard goggin is professor of media and communications at the university of sydney, and an arc future fellow. he is author of various books on disability and media, including listening to disability: voices of democracy (2018, with cate thill and rosemary kayess), routledge companion to disability and media (2018, with beth haller and katie ellis), normality & disability: intersections among norms, laws and culture (2018, with linda steele and jess cadwallader), disability and the media (2015, with katie ellis), disability in australia (2005) and digital disability (2003) with christopher newell. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 an introduction to coolabah’s special issue on mythical and fictional islands sarah r. mackinnon sarahk@siar.fm copyright© 2021 sarah r. mackinnon. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. island studies as a distinct but interdisciplinary field of scholarly enquiry is relatively new, coalescing around the year 2000 (see grydehøj 2017 and 2020 for an overview of the field). in these past two decades island scholars have grappled with island typologies (royle & brinklow, 2018), their location and distribution across the globe (depraetere, 2009a and b), island epistemologies and methodologies (baldacchino, 2008), and the complex relationship between the terrestrial, aquatic, and living/non-living elements of island places (hayward, 2012a and b). as well as discussions around the geographic particularities of islands, scholarly attention has turned to the depiction and representation of island places and spaces in fictive literature (crane & fletcher, 2017), and other media (fitzgerald & hayward, 2016). in such examples, islands are often used as a metaphor for “socio-political or ontological conditions, challenging and deconstructing common ideas about island spaces and thus inventing and even establishing, [...] new island myths” (dautel & schödel, 2017: 229). islands are enduringly irresistible; they entice, ensnare, imprison, inspire, relax, and revitalize to the point that some people are said to suffer from ‘islomania’ an obsession with islands (weale, 1992; gillis, 2004). islomania can manifest itself as a physical draw to be islanded in space, separate from the influence of the frenetic humdrum of continental life, or as a psychoemotional draw to construct or consume ‘islandness’; the essence of geographical precision, comprehensible scale and boundedness by water (conkling, 2007). islands are said to occupy "such a powerful place in modern western imagination that they lend themselves to sophisticated fantasy and mythology" (baldacchino, 2005: 247-248), and as such they are often “presented as locales of desire, as platforms of paradise, as habitual sites of fascination” (baldacchino, 2010: 373-374). it is no surprise then that islands feature frequently in western mythology such as the fortunate isles in classical greek mythology. in celtic mythologies tír na nóg, mag mell, hy-brasil, emain ablach, st brendan’s isle, annwn and avalon are all island paradises where everlasting beauty, health and happiness reside, and a similar tale can be found in russian mythology in the island of buyan. such mythical islands are not confined to western folklore; the isles of the blessed are winterless places of abundance that are an important aspect of the taoist search for longevity and immortality, and a similar, albeit less cheerful version, also appears in japanese mailto:sarahk@siar.fm coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 mythology. in hindu cosmology the puranas, written between the eighth and tenth centuries ce, refer to celestial bodies as islands (the planets) within a cosmic ocean. fictional islands have formed a central motif of western fantasy literature since classical times such as homer’s iliad and odyssey, to renaissance works like thomas more’s utopia (1516), colonial-era works like jonathan swift’s gulliver’s travels (1726), to more modern works like edgar rice burroughs' caspak trilogy (1918), michael crichton’s jurassic park (1990), christopher priest’s dream archipelago in the islanders (2011) and michael crummey’s (2014) sweetland. recently thematic atlases of fictional islands have gained popularity such as lewis-jones’ (2019), archipelago: an atlas of imagined islands and dirk liesemer’s (2019) phantom islands: in search of mythical lands. ‘unreal’ islands have featured on screen to contain and contextualise fantastical narratives such as the films attack of the beast creatures (1980 dir. michael stanley), and the wicker man (1973, dir. robin hardy), as well as television shows such as thunderbirds (1965-1968), lost (2004-2010), stargate atlantis (20042009) and the i-land (2019). such fictional islands tend to be either primeval places where nature rules or high-tech compounds of human ingenuity. fictional islands have also featured within other media such as the long-running bbc radio programme desert island discs where celebrity guests choose eight recordings (usually musical), a book, and a luxury item with which to be castaway. fictional islands have also been the subject of several pop songs such as madonna’s 1987 hit ‘la isla bonita’: tropical the island breeze all of nature wild and free this is where i long to be la isla bonita madonna herself admitted she invented the name san pedro, "i don't know where san pedro is. at that point, i wasn't a person who went on holidays to beautiful islands”.1 aussie-new zealand band crowded house released a song entitled ‘to the island’ in 2020. lead singer, neil finn, commented that the song was partially a response to the coronavirus pandemic, “everyone’s looking for a refuge, a place to escape, a myth or a mystery to follow…”2, the lyrics include: oh, let me move you (off my feet) come to the island where we can save our souls it's just the right size the world is beyond us it's too enormous but oh, the island is just right it's the perfect size several island scholars have warned that the “richness of literary and cultural islanding could be so obtrusive and pervasive that it could actually threaten and dismiss the physicality of islands as ‘real lived-in places” (baldacchino; 2008:44), and could re-produce “geographical imaginaries that orientalize an other” (mountz, 2015: 636). this is certainly possible as some islands have been mediatized to the point of a ‘mythscape’ being created (see mackinnon & coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 hannan, 2017, although in this case st kilda no longer has a permanent population). one island scholar has suggested that island studies should move away from theories of what constitutes ‘islandness’ that can emphasize the limited characteristics that islands share, ‘toward an engagement with psychologies of island experience’ (hay; 2013: 209). other island scholars have acknowledged that there is a striking diversity between the islands of the world while at the same time there is a ‘standardized genre of the island’ that features in media as more than a simple container or backdrop for stories (owe ronstrom 2012: 153). increasingly literary studies and media studies have become sub-fields within island studies as a means for understanding the significance of islands within popular culture for human geographical awareness and imagination (crane & fletcher, 2016). to this end, several island studies journals have published special editions exploring mythical and fictional islands. shima, the international journal of research into island cultures, published a thematic issue in 2016 with various papers discussing the mythical island of atlantis and in 2018 a thematic issue on mermaids, mercultures and the aquapelagic imaginary, while in 2017 the island studies journal published a special thematic section on island fictions and metaphors in contemporary literature. more widely, island scholars have also begun to consider the representations of islandness within media; these include, graziadei et al.’s discussion of michael bay’s film the island (2017), lucchitti’s (2013) discussion of the blasket islands in irish literature, kinane’s (2016) theorising literary islands – the island trope in contemporary robinsonade narratives, and crane and fletcher’s (2017) island genres, genre islands discusses islands in popular fiction. in 2020 i wrote a paper about seasteading in speculative fiction literature as a way of bridging the fields of island studies and speculative fiction studies. i concluded that while island scholars have begun to engage with media and literature on or about islands there is much discussion to be had about the interaction of sentient beings with their aquatic and terrestrial surroundings outside of an earthly setting. this special issue of coolabah features a series of papers that explore how islands are imagined and articulated outside the geographical and biological parameters of reality. philip hayward’s paper explores the evolution of the depiction of skull island within the king kong franchise. juni’chiro suwa discusses japanese cosmology through the performance of one of japan’s earliest written legends. henry johnson analyses the representation of a fictitious channel island and how a ‘converse parody’ challenges depictions of islanders. sotirios triantafyllos’ paper offers a critique of islomania as a draw to the purely paradisiacal, through examination of early modern literature that presents islomania as a more nuanced psychological phenomena shaped by political, religious and social mores of the time. almudena machado jiménez’s paper offers a feminist critique of thomas more’s utopia and explores the role of women as dominated ‘matrixial entities’, whose roles in society are limited to their embodied (re)productive capabilities and are islands within an island. it is hoped this special thematic issue of coolabah will introduce island studies to a new audience of interdisciplinary scholars and in doing so will encourage new debates and/or viewpoints to engage with the field of island research. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 endnotes 1. as quoted in rolling stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musiclists/madonnas-50-greatest-songs-126823/la-isla-bonita-from-true-blue-1986-100592/ 2. from crowded house’s twitter feed: https://twitter.com/crowdedhousehq/status/1362159652683702272 reference list baldacchino, g., 2005. islands—objects of representation. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography, 87(4), pp.247-251. baldacchino, g., (2008) studying islands: on whose terms? some epistemological and methodological challenges to the pursuit of island studies, island studies journal, 3(1), pp. 37-56. baldacchino, g., (2010) the island lure, international. journal of entrepreneurship and small business, 9(4), pp. 373-377. crane, r. & fletcher, l., (2016) the genre of islands: popular fiction and performative geographies, island studies journal, 11(2), pp. 637-650. crane, r. and fletcher, l., (2017) island genres, genre islands: conceptualisation and representation in popular fiction. washington dc: rowman & littlefield. crichton, m., (1990) jurassic park, london: arrow. conkling, p., (2007) ‘on islanders and islandness’, geographical review, 97(2), pp. 192-201. crummey, m., (2019) sweetland, london: corsair. depraetere, c. 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contemporary literature, vol. 12 (2), pp. 229 328. https://www.islandstudies.ca/node/526 kinane, i., (2016) theorising literary islands: the island trope in contemporary robinsonade narratives. rowman & littlefield. lewis-jones, h., (2019) archipelago: an atlas of imagined islands, london: thames & hudson ltd. liesemer, d., (2019) phantom islands: in search of mythical lands. london: haus publishing. mackinnon, s.r., (2020) seasteads and aquapelagos: introducing nissology to speculativefiction studies. nordic journal of science fiction and fantasy research, 7(1), pp. 27-41. mackinnon, s.r. & hannan, m., (2017) myth-making through music: the" lost songs" of st kilda. shima, 11(2), pp.185-204. more, t., ([1516] 2012 reprint), utopia, london: penguin. mountz, a., (2015) political geography ii: islands and archipelagos, progress in human geography, 39(5): pp. 636–646. priest, c., (2011) the islanders, london: gollancz publishing. rice burroughs, e., (2020) the complete works of edgar rice burroughs, oxford: pergamon media. ronström, o., (2009) island words, island worlds: the origins and meanings of words for ‘islands’ in north-west europe, island studies journal, 4(2), pp. 163-182. https://www.islandstudies.ca/node/526 coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 royle, s.a. and brinklow, l., (2018) definitions and typologies. in the routledge international handbook of island studies (pp. 3-20). routledge. shima: the international journal of research into island cultures, (2016), 10(2) atlantis special issue: https://www.shimajournal.org/issues.php#previous shima: the international journal of research into island cultures, (2018), 12(2) mermaid special issue: https://www.shimajournal.org/issues.php#previous swift, j., ([1726] 1992 reprint) gulliver’s travels, hertfordshire: wordsworth editions. weale, d., (1992) them times, charlottetown: institute of island studies. other media bbc, (1942 present) desert island discs, [radio show], available online at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr, last accessed 20 may 2021 stargate atlantis (2004-2009), syfy attack of the beast creatures (1980) dir. michael stanley, [film], usa: obelisk motion pictures six days seven nights (1998), dir. ivan reitman, [film], usa: buena vista pictures thunderbirds (1965-1968), itv lost (2004-2010), abc the wicker man (1973), dir. rob hardy, [film], uk: british lion films the i-land (2019), netflix crowded house, (2020) to the island, from dreamers are waiting, lester records ltd. madonna (1987)la isla bonita from true blue, warner bros. sarah r. mackinnon is an independent researcher based on the isle of barra in the outer hebrides of scotland, where she is working to revitalize the scottish gaelic language. she completed a phd in island geography in 2014 and has written papers on islands in science fiction and island music. https://www.shimajournal.org/issues.php#previous https://www.shimajournal.org/issues.php#previous https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr microsoft word 04_from the germanic soup-david colmer.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 from the germanic soup david colmer copyright©2021 david colmer. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. one of the basic principles of literary translation is that you shouldn’t translate from a language you don’t know well. i say “you” deliberately here, rather than “one” or a construction like “responsible literary translators”, because as much as i hold this principle to be fundamental and almost self-evident, i have to admit to applying it more to others than myself. let me be specific. i learnt german first, as a young adult, and then dutch, and for the last twenty years or so my main work has been translating dutch novels, poetry and children’s literature into english. although i have lived in the netherlands for almost thirty years and have translated millions of words of dutch, i am still learning and hardly a day goes without my stumbling upon a word or phrase that is new or difficult to interpret, sometimes because it’s regional or historical, but often enough simply because i’ve somehow managed to avoid noticing it or thinking about it up till that moment. if i’m translating belgian dutch, sometimes called flemish, i might experience the same phenomenon every hour. of course, these gaps in my knowledge are exposed more readily because of my preference for stylistically challenging literature, but over the years my sense of the importance of a deep understanding of the source language has only grown. if i’d known what i know now thirty years ago, i would never have dared to take my first steps as a literary translator! besides translating from dutch and occasionally german, i have also, over the last decade or so, translated poems from frisian, perhaps one a month on average, and this is a much more dubious endeavour. frisian, or more properly west frisian, is the netherlands’ second official language and spoken by some 400,000 people, mostly in the dutch province of friesland. i have never lived in friesland, i don’t speak frisian, and i can only follow it when people talk simply and slowly. (although i translate from the page, i believe firmly that being able to understand and appreciate spoken language is a prerequisite for translating poetry and any prose with poetic elements. unless you understand the “music” of the original, you can’t possibly reproduce it.) i can read frisian when it’s fairly straightforward, but anything even slightly complicated has me running for a dictionary. with ample recourse to that dictionary, i can more or less read a poem or short story, but i mustn’t forget that my comprehension is naive. at best, it lacks appreciation of subtleties and references; at worst, it’s full of misunderstandings. a coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 prerequisite of my translating “from frisian” is having a translation of the same work into dutch to use as a crib. if somebody else were to translate dutch with such cursory knowledge and relying on a german or french translation, i would be irate, and rightly so. what, apart from deep-rooted hypocrisy, can justify my doing this work? the simplest explanation is that i have been asked, several times, and each time, neither i nor the poet, editor or publisher doing the asking has been aware of anyone with a track record in english poetry translation and the frisian skills to do the job directly. the second ameliorating factor is the closeness of dutch and frisian and the fact that i have done the translations with the help of a dutch translation, often produced by the poet in question. third, i have been able to consult at length with frisian speakers, including the poets, editors and frisian-dutch translators. (sometimes asking the poet to send a recording of the poem so i can listen to it over and over again to absorb the rhythm and rhyme.) none of this makes me the ideal translator, but until that translator emerges and proves their ability, others will continue to see me as an available stopgap. the translation i am presenting here is particularly complex because the poem, by the former poet laureate of friesland, eeltsje hettinga, is about the german-language poet paul celan, his life and work, his relationship with the austrian poet ingeborg bachmann, and his death in paris in 1970. all too often there is a tendency to see the literature of minor languages as interesting only inasmuch as it fills the gaps in the canon by concentrating on its own provincial, often rural, backward-looking reality, as if the interconnectedness of the twenty-first century doesn’t extend across the whole planet or as if languages that are being pushed back into the private, familial sphere can’t be used to reflect on the literary and political world that impinges on that sphere. i translated the poem for swallows and floating horses, a major anthology of frisian literature, basing my translation on jetske bilker’s dutch translation and the frisian original, and consulting both bilker and hettinga about how to resolve the many translation problems. the german epigraph is from celan’s “psalm” (in michael hamburger’s translation: “a nothing / we were, are, shall / remain, flowering: / the nothing-, the no one’s rose.”) there was something head-spinning about trying to use a dutch translation to produce an english version of a frisian poem about a german subject, and some elements are illustrative of the problems and possibilities of trying to fish an acceptable translation out of this kind of germanic soup. simple but troublesome problems were presented by two double meanings. frisian kaai, which means both of the english homophones key and quay, and frisian boek, which means book and beech. in the case of kaai, the meanings separate completely in dutch (sleutel and kade) only to merge again aurally in english, which has a pleasing effect in this poem as quay can be retained as the literal meaning while key functions as a symblolic echo, especially in combination with the adjective broken. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 the two meanings of frisian boek are even more crucial and reflect the origin of the word book from a common root with beech before it diverged across the germanic languages, i.e. german (buch and buche) and dutch (boek and beuk). the west frisian homonym maintains the connection between the tree and the written word and this association is anchored in the poem with an indirect quote of the first line of bachmann’s poem “entfremdung” (the literal line is “in den bäumen kann ich keine bäume mehr sehen” – in my rough translation “alienation”: “i can no longer see the trees as trees”), linking the difficulty of celan’s poetic project after auschwitz to bachmann’s alienation from a guilty landscape through the double meaning of the word boek. faced with the prospect of losing a crucial layer of meaning, i fell back on a kind of etymological explanation that was alliterative enough to fit into the tone of the poem (“the beeches became books”). this is perhaps outside the scope of usual translation tactics, but it seemed like the best alternative, and i discussed it with hettinga before adopting it. another translation issue was whether to give the epigraph an english translation or follow hettinga by leaving it in the original german, despite german being much better understood by the average frisian than by the average english-speaking reader. one problem with giving it in english in either of the well-known translations by pre-eminent german-english translators, hamburger or john felstiner, would have been the breach this would have opened between celan’s niemandsrose and hettinga’s nimmenslân (no-man’s land), because of both translators’ very understandable decision to translate the former as no one’s rose in the context of celan’s poem. other aspects of the poem, although difficult, were no more problematic than general poetry translation from frisian or dutch, which requires a certain inventiveness to retain the lyricism while making the essential grammatical adjustments, but is eased by similarities in the poetics of the three languages, particularly in the use of metre. oddly enough, although dutch and frisian share a lot of vocabulary, there are certain similarities between english and frisian pronunciation that make it possible to approach the sound of the original more closely in english. this can be very gratifying and it does please the poets. perhaps i should try to learn some more frisian. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 pont mirabeau ein nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die nichts-, die niemandsrose. ut: ‘psalm’ paul celan (23 nov. 1920 – 20 april 1970) 1. dit is it plak dat machtiger as in minske syn frije kar lang om let dy keazen hat: de rivier, de brêge en wyt yn it bloeien de boeken oer tebrutsen kaaien, ein april, it seizoen dat nacht oan nacht himsels lêze liet as de moanne fan dyn moardner. dûnker waard taal in nimmenslân, sa’t tsjuster te sizzen de dagen de kleur fan jiske oannamen. in grouwélige, fier oer europa rôljende boer wie gods einleaze ûnferskillichheid. do, begroeven yn wa’t dy leaven, te drinken kaamst de stream fan har útrikke lûding. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 2. by alle wurden dy’tsto hiest mei de taal, dêr’t yn moarde waard, bisto de paden delgien, ferreind en smokend ûnder de ljochtstêd syn dôve lampen. fan al dyn deaden bosken gear de skimen en skaden op place d’italie. dêr’t swellen oer de seine tipten, swijden dy de boeken de tongen. maitiid wie it, nacht noch, mar hoe wûnder it ljocht oer de kym op blériots kaai. net mear binne de beammen de beammen, skreau b. dize lei dy del yn dyn fal, elke brêge in ferlitten. alle wurden lykje hjir op fleanen, hear ik yn de neaken’buorren fan wat libben is, dea syn inkeldspraak. eeltsje hettinga (from: ikader. gedichten. 2012, gerben rypma stifting, blauhûs) coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 pont mirabeau ein nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die nichts-, die niemandsrose. from: ‘psalm’ paul celan (nov. 23th, 1920 – april 20th, 1970) 1. this is the place which mightier than a man’s free will chose you at last: the river, the bridge and blossoming white the beeches on the broken quays, late april, the season you could only read night after night as the month of your murderer. darkening language a no-man’s land, as if to darkly say the days were fading to the colour of ash. a gruesome belch rolling high over europe was god’s infinite indifference. you, buried in those who loved you, come to drink of the stream of her smoked-out voice. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 2. you went down the paths of all the words you had with the language in which they murdered, rain-wet and smoking under the blind lamps of the city of light. the shades and shadows of all your dead gathered on place d’italie. where the swallows skimmed the seine, the beeches became books that would never speak. it was spring, still night, but how extraordinary the light low in the sky over blériot’s quay. the trees are no longer the trees, wrote b. mist laid you down in your fall, every bridge a leaving. all words are misplaced here, on the barren streets of life i hear death’s only tongue. eeltsje hettinga translation: david colmer (from: swallows and floating horses: an anthology of frisian literature, london, 2018) coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 eeltsje hettinga is a frisian poet, essayist and translator. he also spent five years working as a journalist in the united states. hettinga has translated the work of a number of poets into frisian, including ingeborg bachmann and, more recently, the surinamese poet michaël slory. in 2017 he was made the inaugural poet laureate of friesland, a post he held for two years. recent publications of hettinga’s poetry include de moanne (frisian), terras (dutch) and sinn und form (german). david colmer is an australian translator, writer and editor, and a longtime resident of amsterdam. he has won many prizes for his literary translations including the impac dublin literary award and the independent foreign fiction prize (both with novelist gerbrand bakker) and the nsw premier’s translation prize for his body of work. recent poetry translations include beautiful things by menno wigman and chameleon |nachtroer by charlotte van den broeck. essay © david colmer, 2020 original poem © eeltsje hettinga, 2012 english translation poem © david colmer, 2018 relacións culturais e literarias entre galicia e australia coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 australia and galicia in transnational narrativesi maría jesús lorenzo modia university of corunna maria.lorenzo.modia@udc.es copyright©2017 maría jesús lorenzo modia. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this article analyzes the transnational features of narratives between galicia and australia from the year 1519 to the present-day. sailors like pedro fernandez de quiros and luis váez de torres, who reached australia in the sixteenth century, will be considered as the starting point of a cultural dialogue still going on in today’s literature not only as regards the geography of the continent but also in the collective imagination of the country. other connections between these countries are also established by contemporary novelists such as peter carey, sally morgan and murray bail, who use galician history and places, filtered through british sources, to address australia and its present-day characters and decolonizing conflicts. finally, the works of other authors such as robert graves and félix calvino, who also deal with this literary dialogue in their fiction, are explored. keywords: australia; galicia; robert graves; james mcauley; félix calvino; transnational fiction; diasporas. migrations occurred in recent centuries have led to intricate interactions and exchanges between cultures and nations, often involving peoples and countries far removed from one other. ever since the renaissance people, cultures and ideas have been in ever-increasing circulation due to migration, exile or other forms of displacement, which has duly resulted in constant and multi-faceted cultural transfers. these have correspondingly involved negotiations, alterations and reinventions of national traditions and literary forms which have had deep theoretical and methodological implications for cultural and literary studies. among these is the turn to a transnational approach to literature, both in the era of the nation-state and in that of globalization, in which decolonization praxis is attempted in order to contest discursive representations of former colonies as marginal and to engage analysis instead from an epistemological position in which mailto:maria.lorenzo.modia@udc.es coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 they are the centre (connell 2007). although the term transnational was first used in the early twentieth-century by randolph bourne (1916) in relation to the history and migration of jews, it is now used to refer to other world-wide diasporas and to their reflections in culture and literature. modern approaches to transnational literatures include a post-colonial perspective on global relations, a respect for aboriginal native peoples or first nations of the world, and an inclusive perspective on imperialism, as described by mary louise pratt in imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (1992). for pratt, the existence of a “contact zone” is understood as a requirement for transnational literatures (pp. 76-77); gloria anzaldúa in borderlands develops the same idea, noting that “identities, cultures and nations are produced, fractured and continually reproduced within spaces or locations” (p. 76). this approach has recently been explored further by paul jay in global matters: the transnational turn in literary studies (2010), and by sten pultz moslund in migration literature and hybridity: the different speeds of transcultural change (2010). both authors look at issues relating to the ongoing debate on how anglophone literature is being written by transnational and multicultural writers who deal with the interstices of colonialism, decolonization and migration. at various points australian studies have been charged with speaking from a position of eurocentrism, considering this country subsidiary. contemporary approaches on subaltern studies view australia as an arena on which the colonial encounter takes place and where the so-called southern theory developed by raewyn connell should be applied (2007). for this author “southern theory […] calls attention to periphery-centre relations in the realm of knowledge” […] and uses “the term subaltern not so much to name a social category as to highlight relations of power” (viii-ix). the relations between spain, particularly galicia, and australia began, as we know, with the arrival of navigators in the era of european voyages to lands “unknown”. in the year 1519 galician sailors arrived on board the ships of ferdinand magellan and juan sebastian elcano. then between 1525 and 1527 the caravel san lesmes and other vessels left the port of coruña in a flotilla led by francisco josé garcía jofre de loaysa, who was the first navigator to reach cape horn from europe. ships from galicia had arrived on australian soil by the 16th century and there is evidence of trade between corunna and the maluku isles and adjacent territories, with the city having received in 1522 the exclusive concession by king charles v of habsburg of a trading house specializing in spices called the casa do maluco [maluku house] (migués, 2008: p. 85). in 1606 the expeditions of pedro fernandez de quiros (1565-1614) and luis váez de torres (1565-1613?) made their arrival, which would be key in the european discovery of what we now know as australia (fernández de quirós, 2000, iii: p. 23; pittarello, 1990; hervé, 1983). it should be noted that the identities of these sailors can be understood to be european and transnational, as quiros, for one, was a portuguese in the service of king philip ii, not only king of castile, aragon, milan, etc., but also king of portugal between 1580 and 1598, to be succeeded by his son philip iii. the stories of quiros’ travels were published in english and french in 1617 and likely served as the basis for subsequent expeditions from other countries, particularly from what is now the united kingdom. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 the 17th and 18th centuries also saw voyages to oceania (prieto, 1984), among which we might note the voyage of isabel barreto de castro (1567? -1612), the wife of alvaro de mendaña de neira, originally from santa maria de bendaña in touro (corunna) (fernandez de quiros, p. 107), the sailor from pontevedra (galicia), on the first european voyage to the solomon islands and the marquesas islands (bosch 1943; elias de zevallos, 1995). indeed, the old bendaña residence in toural square in the city of santiago de compostela is currently open to the public as a museum. isabel barreto was the first woman to command a ship, following the death of her husband, and arrived in manila with quiros (majo, 1946, márquez, 2006). a novel about this has recently been published by francisco núñez roldán, jaque al peón (2014) [putting a pawn in check], which won the city of badajoz novel prize, and which deals with the union of spain and portugal, with narrative material based on the correspondence between philip ii from el escorial and lisbon’s rúa do comercio (commerce street), the base for the diplomat cristobal de moura, the architect of the union (alonso giráldez, 2014, n.p.). in this text we can see in detail that identities were fluid in such a transnational context (gil, 1989). as this brief historical sketch shows, 500 years ago europe already had relations with the land which from a eurocentric viewpoint was known as terra incognita (fernández-shaw, 2000: 83-89). however, the presence of galician sailors on australian shores is barely known, having occurred 200 years prior to the arrival of british with captain cook in 1770 and the subsequent first british settlement near botany bay in sydney in january 1788. as the australian historian kenneth gordon mcintyre indicates in the very title of his book the secret discovery of australia: portuguese ventures 200 years before captain cook, the voyages prior to the arrival of the british were forgotten and it is only recently that the stories of those voyages are being recovered and have begun to appear in historical works (day 2009, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii). one of the most distinguished galician travellers to the continent of australia is the benedictine monk rosendo salvado, who arrived in perth in 1846. salvado‘s presence in australia is still remembered due to the community that he founded and because of his recognition of aboriginal cultural and artistic values, as his work in this area continues to be acknowledged and analysed today (shell 2015, haebich 2015). when salvado came to australia, settlers treated the indigenous peoples in a way that reminded of slavery. against that context of oppression, salvado’s vision was to base life in his community on the principles of racial and cultural coexistence, creating a kind of garden of eden on earth, one in which the aborigines could educate their counterparts (stormont, 1998). we could say that this nineteenth-century world is similar to the portrayal by nobel prize winner mario vargas llosa of the painter paul gauguin in tahiti in his novel el paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) (the way to paradise (2004)), in that the ideal of salvado was creating a paradise on earth or, at least, the improvement of living conditions for the aboriginal peoples. though relationships between travellers from galicia and the southern continent suffered many ups and downs, they remain to this day, and galicia is present in australia through the teaching of the language and literature in different communities, and also at universities such as queensland, la trobe, sydney and coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 melbourne, where there are also centres for galician studies. however, the presence of galicians in australia remains alive in the collective imagination not only through the memory of sailors, by place names, such as the torres strait between australia and papua new guinea, and by the work of salvado —even though thriving in the benedictine community of new norcia—, but also due to the importance of galician elements in australian literature. much of contemporary literary production in australia focuses on the exploration of a new reality by european characters who arrive from across the oceans. this happens in the work of peter carey and other authors, and thus galicia and galicians remain in the collective imagination and become a part of the literary and creative fabric of the continent, as with australian authors murray bail and sally morgan, and even the british writer robert graves. authors of galician origin also use australian themes in their works, published in galician and in english, which are read both in australia and the united states. one notable case is that of the navigator pedro fernandes de queirós, in the portuguese spelling, fernández de quirós in spanish spelling and quiros in english, who referred to the continent as "la austrialia del espiritu santo" to honor the reigning house of habsburg in spain, note the 'i' in spanish, since the habsburg family name was "austria" (clark, i, 1962: p. 15). in the failed voyages of quiros he believed and claimed to have reached what he called the “great south land” and this gained him a place in the imagination of the inhabitants of the lands of which he dreamed, that is, in the minds of contemporary australian artists, for some of whom he became an eternal character. his narratives have been studied both from historical and cultural perspectives (kelly 1960, pp. 183-193), and was memorably recognized by james mcauley (1917-1976) in his 1964 epic poem captain quiros. this now classic piece pays homage to the sailor and his frustrated dreams of becoming an australian hero –or perhaps an antihero, as he failed to realize his dream of making a third voyage and actually setting foot on the island-continent. years later, in 1980, one of australia’s best-known composers, peter sculthorpe (1929), fascinated by the epic figure of quiros, as seen through the work of the poet james mccauley, premiered the visions of captain quiros: for guitar and orchestra. the symbol pedro fernandez de quiros represents continued to grow in the collective imagination of the australian people as suggested by the fact that in 1982, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the abc communications company produced the televised opera quiros, with a libretto by brian bell and peter sculthorpe himself. in this production the navigator is represented as an idealistic visionary who goes in search of his dream, stubbornly so in view of the many failures and obstacles encountered on the way. in the words of historian k.g. mcintyre, this is the first patriot and prophet of australia (1977, p. 25). this idealistic vision of what was for him a continent to be discovered can be found at various moments in the libretto in the voice of quiros himself: i believe in the force that drives us past horizons of the mind… i believe that i could find in these dark seas the great south land. east of india, coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 west of the solomons, south of java, a continent. a vast land from tropic to the pole, a past and future to unfold, a last grand enigma to be solved, this continent. moreover when the character of quiros perceives the failure of his unsuccessful trips, he analyses the possible perverse effects that colonization would cause, contrasting this with his idealistic vision of the voyages made by europeans to australia: if we had reached the great south land, with all our superstitions, our arrogance, our ignorance, our covetous ambitions, we should have spread our decadence, our fever and destruction, and stamped upon that bright new world, the old world's dark corruption. thus, the opera not only reflects on quiros’ voyages and his achievements or failures, but also has him voice the kind of considerations that would arise from a contemporary postcolonial perspective and that attest to a re-envisioning of australian history that incorporates images which are more inclusive and integrative of the indigenous peoples. since peter sculthorpe is known to take inspiration from australian painters in his compositions, especially the work of russell drysdale (1812-1981), it is not unlikely that these visions of the australian visual artists perhaps also resonate in the musical composition commemorating quiros and were surely present in the visual and aesthetic design of the opera for television. sculthorpe’s work about quiros was premiered on october 27th 2007 in the concert hall of the sydney opera house, hosted by the spanish ambassador in australia, and it has since been performed several times in the country, such as in 2013 when it featured in the concert program of the capital, canberra. additionally, the composer would later return to the themes and music of quiros, using them as the basis for the oratorio the great south land, broadcast on abc classic fm on saturday may 11th 2013. this adaptation of the opera into an oratorio allowed for its performance in concert halls, without the need for a large theatre, so that the work could reach a greater variety of audiences in different parts of the country. according to stephen adams (2013), the evolution of the character of quiros through australian literature, music and opera from the 1960s to the present day reflects the different positions of the country and the intelligentsia regarding the coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 conception of their own identity as a nation and their own evolution away from eurocentrism, thus recognizing their specific reality from positions that encompass their own complexities and historical contradictions (n.p.). a contemporary of quiros, galician explorer and navigator isabel barreto, appears as a fictional character in both hispanic and anglophone cultures. in contemporary hispanic letters we first see the entry of isabel barreto as a fictional heroine from the pen of galician journalist pemón bouzas in el informe manila: isabel barreto, la que surcó los mares del sur en busca de las rutas de las especias (2005) [isabel barreto, the lady who sailed the south seas in search of the species route]. however, some fifty years prior to this british literary critic, poet and novelist robert graves (1895-1985) also made a fictional treatment of the voyages of isabel barreto in the islands of unwisdom (1949), translated into spanish in 1984. this novel includes a particularly revealing depiction of galician women, described by one of the male members of the expedition as “astonishingly” hard-working, in a portrayal of european female identities which was discursively constructed in colonialist manichean oppositions north versus south and extrapolated to wider contexts: [...] your galician women of every rank and station show remarkable independence and fortitude: while passing though the province on a journey to corunna i was astonished to see them guiding the plough, sowing, harrowing, felling trees, in short, doing all the work of men, yet keeping their modesty and piety in a way that would shame many women of the south. (p. 354) however, ysabel (the old spanish spelling, used in this novel) does not embody all the virtues which the rest of galician women apparently possess: “the gold-fly seems to have bitten doña ysabel too, and her greed matches her courage” (p. 365). graves depicts the spaniards as having a high opinion of themselves: as we sat at dessert, with doublets unfastened, in a happy mood, we were preached a second sermon, this time by the general. it concerned our dealings with the natives, to whom we came not as conquerors, but as ambassadors of christ; not as takers, but as givers. (p. 405) the identity of the voyagers here is presented as transnational, in that they speak in different languages on board the ship, including castilian, galician and portuguese (p. 448). galician traditions such as witchcraft are also incorporated as key elements in the text, with ladies from corunna said to use black magic: ‘the witches of corunna they come in black and white, but saint james with his sword-hilt put them all to fight; for the devil, their master, who on that cross did gaze broke foul wind at either end and swooned for amaze.’ (p. 487) coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 moreover, the general population in this area is said to be familiar with such practices: “[...] not for nothing does he come from corunna, where every child is raised in terror of witchcraft, and the very priests are alleged to be in league with satan.” (p. 547), and it is a place where one can suffer their invectives, since “[...] the witches of corunna don’t use their spells merely in self-defence” (p. 547). ysabel barreto is familiar with witchcraft although she does not use it herself, but rather plays with it to scare the crew and thus to make use of its power (p. 547). the navy officers pedro fernández de quiros, chief pilot of the san geronimo, and álvaro de mendaña, leader of the expedition, are the characters most fully described in the novel. through their voyage the author also analyses the causes of the failures of the future conquest of the pacific ocean by the spaniards, as well as the significant loss of power in the world by the spanish crown. part of the history of australian literature revolves around the arrival of people to the land and their experiences of exploring their new environs. these explorations are not necessarily just geographical but also psychological, and thus we find bildungsroman in which the characters recall their experiences on arrival in the country. one of the novelists who has dealt in detail with this issue is peter carey, who addresses the arrival of people from different countries of the united kingdom to australia. in his true history of the kelly gang (2000) he recalls the harsh experiences of an irish family who struggle to escape poverty by coming to settle in australia in the 19th century after the father of the family had been transported to tasmania for crimes allegedly committed in the united kingdom. the family’s way of settling in the new continent involves a challenge to a tough and unfair system of power, in that they become bandits and misfits. also in this period we find the voyage of young english men and women who sought a new life on their arrival in sydney. such is the case in oscar and lucinda (1988), a novel which describes a not too distant past and which owes a debt to magical realism. dangerous expeditions through the australian bush, colonizing supposedly virgin and unknown territory to the foreign europeans, come to life in carey’s novel and also in the subsequent film version by gillian armstrong (1997). as in the novels of garcia marquez or salman rushdie, oscar and lucinda appears to be based on the many chance possibilities that life has to offer, as well as on the many limitations imposed by fate. carey uses a historical narrative from a current perspective, adding a postmodern and postcolonial viewpoint (woodcock, 2003: p. 73) and also allowing us to learn from past mistakes, both personal and collective (lorenzo modia and alonso giráldez, 2008: p. 327). the filmic nature of carey’s novel was evident from the moment of its publication, and the film itself did not take long to appear in cinemas (craven, 1998: pp. 25-26; carter, 2006: n.p.). in the same way, many studies noted the similarities between carey’s work and the spanish conquista films of werner herzog aguirre, the wrath of god (1972) and fitzcarraldo (1982) (woodcock, 1996: 84). with reference to the film version of the novel, armstrong recognises: “it was my little fitzcarraldo” (carter, 2006). herzog’s story deals with the extravagant figure of brian sweeney fitzgerald, who was determined to make money from the construction of an opera house in what he refers to as a border town in the peruvian jungle. the grandeur of the project is equal only to its apparent madness. fitzcarraldo attempts to avoid the river rapids by transporting the peruvian steamship over land, from river to river. similarly, coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 oscar tries to build his glass cathedral on the australian continent, seeking thus the rare balance between reason and madness. in this sense it seems to bare a connection with the adventures of the galician rosendo salvado, who in the nineteenth century also carried his piano and the materials to build a monastery through the australian bush, his purpose —as mentioned earlier—being to raise funds for the aborigines and thus to provide what he envisioned as a better spiritual and material life for them (stormont, 1998). also worthy of mention here are two novels by contemporary australian authors in which galician place names play a notable part. these are eucalyptus (1998) by murray bail, and my place (1987) by sally morgan. in the former, the name corunna (the anglicised form of the city of a coruña) evokes a distant place with legends and mysteries. the novel relates the story of an australian girl who falls in love with a dark foreigner, both of them finding themselves faced with the miraculous and mysterious reflection of corunna’s lighthouse: there’s a place called corunna in north-west spain, he had said. a place of rocks – geological delirium. corunna is known for just two things: foul weather, it never stops raining, and its lighthouse built of granite in the dark ages. local families call it ‘the tower of caramel’. (p. 208) the account of corunna contains a mirror structure, in that in australia a story is created that reflects what happens in the galician city, where the girl imagines coming in search of her lover, with whom she has lost contact (cabarcos, 2008: p. 265). what is produced, then, is a reflected relationship between what happens to the heroine of the novel in australia and what happens to the imaginary one, whom she thinks about, and who himself comes from corunna. in my place australia is the centre and corunna is the mirror image. these parallels are seen to be illuminated by the physical mirrors which were historically used in the tower of hercules, the lighthouse of corunna, to amplify its light, and which seem to be a caramel colour due to the shade of the granite facade of the tower. ellen is also seen to be doubly trapped in a tower waiting for her beloved: firstly, because in her father’s plantation she meant to become a fairy princess, and secondly, because in her home there is a real tower. in mirror images there is always a true image and an inverse one, and on this occasion the woman from corunna is the one who cannot find her lover, so that it is in the inverse image that ellen can be happy with him. in the case of sally morgan’s my place, the place name corunna appears in “return to corunna” and as a family name in three other sections with different titles, “arthur corunna’s story,” “gladys corunna’s story” and “daisy corunna’s story.” these names come from the australian place name corunna downs, located in western australia, given that an ancestor of one of the characters in the work comes from a ranch there: “corunna downs was named by my husband. there is a poem, “corunna”. he was reading a book at the time with the natives, and in it was a poem about corunna, i think it was in spain, so he named the station after that” (morgan, 2003: p. 168). the best known poem about the city in the english canon, and almost certainly the one to which she is referring to, is the one by irish writer charles wolfe, written about the battle of elviña, known in english as the battle of corunna, in january 1809 (cabarcos, 2008: p. 269). it deals with the struggle in coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 spain between french and english forces for pre-eminence in europe, and hence in the world, a struggle called the peninsular war in england and known in spain as the war of independence. the english were considered inferior in strength and decided to avoid a confrontation with napoleon’s troops and to retreat by sea via the port of a coruña. the strategy was successful, but the commanding british general, the scot sir john moore, died during in fighting in the hills at the entrance of the city, today the site of the university of coruña’s elviña campus. the poem “on the burial of sir john moore after corunna” first published by wolfe in the newry telegraph in 1817, and later, anonymously, in the scottish blackwood’s magazine, came to attract the attention of such illustrious readers as lord byron, edgar allan poe and george orwell, and was widely anthologised, finally becoming the most widespread patriotic elegy in the british empire, and was for many years part of the compulsory education of english schoolchildren. even the preeminent galician writer rosalia de castro sought to participate in this literary dialogue, publishing the poem “the tomb of general sir john moore” in her book follas novas [new leaves] (1880). yet the power struggle that arose in europe at the beginning of the 19th century through this galician city is represented in the australian narrative with a different meaning, in that the colonial power takes possession of new territories, including the aboriginal peoples, who come to serve the british and even to be their property and are given names by their owners in a negation of their aboriginal identity, origin and culture. as nan noted in reference to 19th century aboriginal ranches, “in those days, we was owned, like a cow or a horse” (morgan, 2003: p. 337, cit. in cabarcos, 2008: p. 274); their identity, then, was like that of working animals, not human beings. thus the name corunna, a city associated with the liberation from the napoleonic yoke in spain and thus as the first step in the final defeat of the latter, takes on in sally morgan’s novel various meanings, depending on whether it is spoken by owners or aborigines. in the case of women this submission is twofold, since they also suffer sexual exploitation by the ranch owners. in fact, it is out of a rancher’s sexual relationship with annie that nan is born, so becoming a personal property of the rancher —indeed the same ranch master goes on to have an incestuous relationship with her which will yield new workers for the plantation (cabarcos, 2008: p. 274). over time, the old estate, called “la coruña”, becomes an air base for the australian forces during world war ii and acquires a new meaning, that of a place of liberation from the yoke of the axis forces, and later on it even receives recognition for its part in the agricultural development of the australian northwest. as seen so far the relationship between galicia and australia endures in place names, taken there either by galicians or by travellers who symbolically maintained the iconography of these. the complexity of the meanings are multiplied in australia, and can be seen as dependant on the specific period analyzed and the perspective taken. however, there are also other elements of galician culture that persist today in australian literature and culture. these are mainly related to the underprivileged galicians who migrated to the country in the large exoduses of the 1950s and ’60s, sometimes via previous points of emigration, such as brazil, france and england, among others. galicians and spaniards arrived in steamers chartered by the australian government in programs known as “kangaroo”, “eucalyptus”, coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 “emu” and “kerry.” about 500 unmarried women also arrived on a program called “martha”, recruited in collaboration with the spanish church to accompany the more than 7,000 men who had emigrated from spain to australia (boland, 2008: p. 16). many found in australia the better future that they sought, especially for their children, the second generation, though not of course in all cases. contemporary writer félix calvino was born in galicia (spain), but emigrated definitively to australia and currently publishes novels and short stories in english which are anchored in his galician infancy. he is thus a current link between australian fiction and galicia, where he was born in 1944. he emigrated in the late 1960s after a rural education under franco’s dictatorship. his refusal to undergo compulsory military service led to his abandoning the country for good. having lived in the united kingdom, he settled in australia, where he graduated in spanish and english at the university of melbourne, and is about to earn a doctorate in creative writing at the university of queensland. calviño, or calvino as he is known in the english-speaking world, started his literary career late in australia, publishing short stories and a novella. galicia, an autonomous territory in northwestern spain, has long known emigration to europe, america or indeed to other parts of spain, for economic as well as political reasons. its marginal economic and political situation within both the spanish and the european context produced a widespread migration. the galician diaspora is scattered throughout the world and its literary and cultural rebirth has been nourished by expatriate writers, particularly in cuba and argentina, from the early twentieth century onwards. its literature can be described as transnational in that, from the thematic point of view, it resides in one country and is published in the language of another, and develops the theme of memory and nostalgia for a past which is distant in both time and space. this transnational approach is useful for the study of calvino’s work, in that the role of memory and nostalgia are key issues in his texts, which reflect the memories of his childhood in galicia and express the difficulties of migration from the point of view of a galician, turning the lives of so many people into literature that can be shared by readers from different continents. his first published work is a collection of stories, a hatful of cherries: short stories, issued in 2007 and again in 2011. since the start he has enjoyed considerable success. these sixteen stories are by an author who hails from elsewhere, and there is some irony in the fact that the name of his village of birth is alemparte, (lalín, province of pontevedra, galicia), literally ‘a different place’. calvino manages to evoke other parts of the world in english. he decided to devote himself to literature in his maturity, leaving a career as an entrepreneur in australia to explore this transnational adventure from the point of view of writing from a contemporary point of view in the style of magic realism. he published in the continent’s most prestigious magazines, such as quadrant (2011, 2015) and review of australian fiction (2015), in which the country’s most significant authors appear. his use of english is exceptional, but the admixture of galicia —particularly in the themes of “do not touch anything”, “detour” and “basil”— and the conscious shift away from australian literary language and culture lend his writing a strange beauty and produce in it a notable attractiveness. félix calvino resolves to use galician themes and to write for an anglophone audience, and from that mixture arises his originality. as he indicates in the preface to his book of stories, he physically left galicia in a sort of exile incited by his coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 rejection of the rules of francoism (p. 7). the author further explores the connections between memory and imagination, moving through topics such as childhood, the difficulties of the post-war period in galicia, but also seemingly minor events occurring on the streets of australian cities which reveal suspense, a random event, or a profound tragedy. the different places in which the stories take place do not lead to the collection being disjointed, and the work as a whole is archetypical of the australian experience, historically composed of immigrants from various places around the globe. the stories are full of tenderness, humour and irony in everyday themes, with a simple and clear style, as in the following sentence: “grandfather had become disillusioned with women when my grandmother died young and without his consent” (calvino, 2007: 42). it is to be noted that this writer, who comes from a marginalized country, depicts both galician and aboriginal poor peoples in his australian texts, making them the centre of a new fictional universe. my contention is that in his literature calvino claims that poor dispossessed people from other lands find in australia a new place in which they sometimes feel as homeless and peripheral as the aborigines may have felt after colonization. calvino, as a writer, enters this experience of colonial and postcolonial societies in which some of the stories on contemporary life in australian cities are, albeit indirectly, dealing with issues of modernization, race, class, cultural domination and identity. thence, the critical reception enjoyed by calvino comes not only from those readers who avidly follow his work but also in the voice of one of australia’s principal literary authors, david malouf (1934), a playwright and poet who is especially known for novels such as fly away peter (1982) and remembering babylon (1993). on félix calvino’s story collection, malouf said: it deals with testimonies of other lives in another place, something very alive, exciting, humorous, strange, a gift to the reader, as is also the austere and tender way in which it is written. calvino is a new voice in this scenario, a fascinating, individual voice, and now that we know that he exists, he has become indispensable for all those who construct our history. (verbal testimony of roy boland) this claim by malouf about a collection of stories on galician themes as an adjunct to the construction of australian history, and of what immigrants have contributed to this, is related to the ever-fluid identity of the country, built since ancient times by the peoples that first inhabited it and, subsequently, from the peripheries by immigrants of all kinds come from all confines of the world, galicia included. in this sense the periphery and margins serve as a place of creation and power and become central in the contemporary history of australian literature (hooks, 1990: p. 152), and ultimately we are dealing with transnational literature as defined by paul jay (2010). for his part australian writer venero armanno (1959) said, in presenting the collection a hatful of cherries, that there is no romanticism in calvino’s writing, and that it has a very natural style. he also suggested that it is not far from giseppe tomasi di lampedusa, from italo svevo, italo calvino –who is no relation–, or his favourite, cesare pavese. a further aspect that accounts for the positive literary reception of calvino in australia is the use made of his texts in the visual arts. for example, one of his stories was adapted as the short film coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 unfinished thoughts, which, following a very favourable reception in australia, was nominated for eight south australia screen awards, winning the best actress award for chantal contouri. despite the fact that the film has a director of greek origin, dimitrios pouliot, and is set in the culture of that country, the figure of the grandmother who dies in bed can nevertheless be clearly recognized as an old galician lady who has undergone the experience of emigration. in january 2014 félix calvino published the novella alfonso, and once again david malouf was present at the sydney launch of the book. armanno, who is of italian origin, said of this new work: alfonso is a gentle yet searching exploration of a spanish migrant’s feelings and experiences in the country australia used to be more than forty years ago. felix calvino infuses the stuff of everyday life with tenderness and magic. he recovers a lost time and sensibility. the past shimmers back to life. (n.p.) it was also noted at the presentation of the book that this experience of emigration, with all its potential advantages for the emigrant, is endured at the cost of material and emotional security. in alfonso the author tries to describe the difficulties of men who migrate alone, since in exchange for attaining material prosperity they lose their history, and their own language and culture, sinking into a kind of spiritual poverty. they are equated to displaced aborigines, who feel that they are neither here nor there, with a permanent sense of longing (popa 2016: 231), with “two selves” (harp 2016: n.p) and with “the specifically galician ache for home” (halford 2016: p. 3). in an interview, calvino speaks about his five fundamental literary influences: cervantes, flauvert, chekhov, hemingway and garcía márquez (horner, 2009: n.p.). the influence of the colombian nobel laureate seems to be key in his praxis, given that in calvino’s stories we are on occasion taken into a magical atmosphere, a time which does not exist, yet which native galicians recognise as real and close to their own memories. in “they are only dreams”, one of the stories from his first collection a hatful of cherries, calvino depicts a family of three, whose daughter has the power of predicting death. the parents continue to ignore it so as to avoid being accused by the neighbours for witchcraft, and convincing themselves that “they are only dreams”. similarly, one of his most recent stories, “the road” also reflects the garcía-marquezian atmosphere of mixing the sublime and the earthly, transforming the awesome into the common. this story is part of a new book, so much smoke, published in late 2016 and advertised alongside with books by highly-reputed authors such as zadie smith’s swing time (anon. avidreader.au.com, dec 2016 n.p). the ancient beliefs and the way of life depicted in the text seem to be the leit motiv of the characters’ existence in a far-off land in southern europe which is completely unknown for the intended australian readership. the very first word of the story is actually a hispanic name, francisco, and later in the story the reader comes across with the name of the city of lugo, founded in galicia by the romans in the third century ad, but absolutely unfamiliar to anglophone audiences. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 the road stands for both the hard path to the city, in terms of physical and economic effort, and for the old roman road hidden under the arid land. calvino touches on surrealism, as men and women in rural galicia are shown in isolation within their own village, engaged in a subsistence agricultural economy. in terms of travel, their horizons are the nearby village, and they hardly ever visit the city, even in times of extreme necessity. while the mother of the family was alive, their life had been stable, but later the family disintegrates, for the father dies intestate and one of the children refuses to continue to remain together in the same house. death, poverty and the potential envy between brothers in a rural community are in fact among the key issues in the story from the very beginning. it actually opens with the father’s intention to make a will and with the anxiety of the preparations: “the nearest authority was more than two hours’ walking distance, and there would be expenses, and money was scarce” (p. 61). francisco’s feelings are, on the one hand, that death could come any day, healthy as he may be, and, on the other, that he has to make his will so that there would be no disagreement between his sons. yet making a will would involve expense, so the narrator reveals the thoughts of the father-character in considering a cheaper possibility which, nonetheless, would also have religious implications. in rural galicia, social control by the foreign, castilian-speaking catholic church was still common in the early twentieth century, and the father rebels against the normal expectations by not approaching the parish priest in order to make a will, since that would mean both working for free for the church at harvest time and a compulsory confession with father herrera. it seems that francisco is against the type of lavish, feudal church represented by a priest with a castilian name, before whom he would feel not only poor but condescended to, or even despised: of course there was the priest, legally binding, free of charge, and not far away. unsettling, though. francisco could not see himself arriving at the priest’s house, taking the soft hand put out to shake his. sitting in the spacious office with its inlaid furniture, his hat in his lap, conscious of his wooden-soled shoes on the waxed floorboards (p. 61). not for nothing the character’s name, francisco, is related to an austere type of catholicism concerned with the poor, represented originally by saint francis in the middle ages, and which, incidentally, coincides with the name of the present pope. other characters’ names in this story also have a biblical significance. when francisco finally dies intestate, his sons initially take to working in the fields and sharing the “carving of a tombstone for their father’s grave” (p. 61). however, later on francisco’s youngest son, josé, is expelled from his home by his elder brother, who claims the house for himself as “the elder’s privilege” (p. 62). hence josé has to live in a barn with animals and becomes the poorest man in the village, as the property assigned to him is close to the sea and is described as “harsh, arid land, inhabited by crying seagulls and brown lizards” (p. 62). like the biblical joseph, he never complains and works hard, “never lost his spontaneous laugh” and helps everyone (p. 63), including his own brother. surprisingly, an ancient stone road appears on josé’s land after a storm. this road is thought to be “a sea gate in the early stages of the building of the roman fort of lugo in the 3rd century” (p. 63), and as a result of its discovery josé “became a wealthy man” (p. 63). calvino’s josé coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 is as generous with his brother as joseph is in genesis (35: 22) when, after being thrown into a well by his siblings, he offers to share his wealth: the first thing josé did after receiving his settlement was to call on his brother and offer him half a share of his money, even the lot. all he wanted was for them to live together as in the past. his offer was brusquely rejected. well-meaning neighbours’ attempts at reuniting them met with the same fate (p. 63). as seen in this essay, félix calvino’s stories are only the most recent in a long list of transnational narratives which attest to a long history of relations between galicia and australia. they were first established by travellers of the 16th century, whose epic voyages are imprinted in the collective cultural imagination of both the place of origin and destination, as evinced in epic poems such as captain quiros by james mcauley and its musical reinterpretations. similarly, we have seen that galician themes are also present in the works of other contemporary australian writers such as murray bail and sally morgan, in whose novels eucalyptus and my place we found references to galician towns and historical events that reveal the transcultural dialogue between both countries. as a new literary voice from galicia, félix calvino is now inscribing the rural culture of post-civil war galicia in the multiethnic collective imagination of present-day australia. if we accept that the formation of a country involves the compilation and organic hybridization of images and associated notions which, in the case of australia, would include, among others, narratives of explorers, maps, migrant literary voices, and related artistic events, we could conclude by saying that galicia has also played a constitutive part in the literary and cultural construction of contemporary australia. works cited: adams, stephen (2013): “imagining australia” [on line], australian music, 7 may. <http://www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2013/05/07/3753891.htm>. aguirre, the wrath of god, dir. werner herzog, int. klaus kinski, helena rojo, ruy guerra, peter berling), hessischer rundfrunk, 1972. alonso giráldez, josé miguel (2008): “félix calviño publica en inglés un libro de relatos galaicos en australia”, el correo gallego, 18 may. -- (2014): “el sábado libro: felix calviño, escritor gallego en lengua inglesa» el correo gallego, 24 de maio, http://www.elcorreogallego.es/tendencias/ecg/ felix-calvino-escritor-gallego-lengua-inglesa/idedicion-20140524/idnoticia-870620/# anderson, benedict (1983 [2006]): imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, london, verso. anderson imbert, enrique (1976 [1992]): el realismo mágico y otros ensayos, caracas, monte ávila. http://www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2013/05/07/3753891.htm http://www.elcorreogallego.es/tendencias/ecg/felix-calvino-escritor-gallego-lengua-inglesa/idedicion-2014-0524/idnoticia-870620/ http://www.elcorreogallego.es/tendencias/ecg/felix-calvino-escritor-gallego-lengua-inglesa/idedicion-2014-0524/idnoticia-870620/ http://www.elcorreogallego.es/tendencias/ecg/felix-calvino-escritor-gallego-lengua-inglesa/idedicion-2014-0524/idnoticia-870620/ coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 anon. http://avidreader.com.au/product-lists/bestselling-books on december 19, 2016. anzaldúa, gloria (1999): borderlands/la frontera, san francisco: aunt lute books. archer-lean, clare (2007): “review – social alternatives” [review of a hatful of cherries] [on line], social alternatives, vol. 26, nº 4, 2007. 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(2000): españa y australia: cinco siglos de historia = spain and australia: five hundred years of relations (ed. mercedes palau e alonso ibarrola), madrid, dirección general de relaciones culturales y científicas, ministerio de asuntos exteriores de españa, pp. 83-89. fitzcarraldo (dir. & prod. werner herzog, int. klaus kinski, claudia cardinale, paul hittscher, miguel ángel fuentes, josé lewgoy), west germany, 1982. garcía márquez, gabriel (1967 [2007]): cien años de soledad [edición conmemorativa], madrid, real academia española / asociación de academias de la lengua española / alfaguara. trans. gregory rabassa (1970): one hundred years of solitude, new york, harper and row. gil, juan (1989 [1992]): mitos y utopías del descubrimiento: el pacífico, madrid, alianza universidad, 3 vols. graves, robert (1949): the islands of unwisdom, londres, carcanet; new york, doubleday, 2003. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 --(1984): las islas de la imprudencia, trans. rubén masera, barcelona, edhasa. --(1934): i, claudius, introd. barry unsworth, london, penguin, 2006. haebich, anna (2015): “bishop rosendo salvado’s vision of aboriginal mission work in the victoria plains of the colony of western australia”, in máiz, ramón and tiffany shellam eds. rosendo salvado and the australian aboriginal world, santiago de compostela, consello da cultura galega, pp. 117-140. halford, james (2016): “félix calvino’s lost galicia”, sydney review of books (2 december, http://sydneyreview of books.com/so-much-smoke-felixcalvino/ pp. 1-6, accessed 02/12/2016. harp, grady (2016): “review of félix calvino. alfonso” cultural heritage and miscegenation, dec. 16, n.p. hervé, roger and john dunmore (1983): chance discovery of australia and new zealand by portuguese and spanish navigators between 1521 and 1528, palmerston north, the dunmore press. hooks, bell (1990): yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, boston (massachusetts), south end press. horner, anna (2009): “félix calvino, author of a hatful of cherries, makes u.s. debut”, baltimore literature examiner, 30 july, 2009. <http://www.examiner.com/article/f-lix-calvino-author-of-a-hatful-ofcherries-makes-u-s-debut>. jay, paul (2010): global matters: the transnational turn in literary studies. ithaca and london, cornell up, 2010. kelly, celsus (1960): “the narrative of pedro fernández de quirós”, historical studies, australia and new zealand, 9. 34, may, pp. 183-193. lorenzo-modia, maría jesús and alonso giráldez, josé miguel (2008): «misfits in the hands of destiny: peter carey’s antipodean conquest in oscar and lucinda», in maría jesús lorenzo-modia and roy c. boland osegueda (eds.), australia and galicia: defeating the tyranny of distance, antípodas monographs, sydney, pp. 321-336. majó framis, ricardo (1946): navegantes y conquistadores españoles del siglo xvi, madrid, aguilar. márquez de la plata, vicenta maría (2006): mujeres de acción en el siglo de oro, madrid, castalia. mcauley, james (1964): captain quiros, sydney, angus & robertson. mcintyre, kenneth gordon (1977): the secret discovery of australia: portuguese ventures 200 years before captain cook, london, souvenir press. migués rodríguez, vítor manuel (2008): «early links between galicia and the pacific: the house of the maluccas in corunna», maría jesús lorenzo modia and roy c. boland osegueda (eds.), australia and galicia: defeating the tyranny of distance, antípodas monographs, sydney, pp. 85100. coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 moslund, sten pultz (2010): migration, literature and hybridity: the different speeds of transcultural change, london, palgrave. morgan, sally (1987 [2003]): my place, london, virago press. núñez roldán, francisco(2014): jaque al peón, sevilla, algaida. orwell, george (2008): “the lion and the unicorn” [on line], charles’ george orwell links. <http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/lionandunicorn1.htm> [5 sept. 2007]. oscar and lucinda (dir. gillian armstrong, int. ralph fiennes, cate blanchett, based on peter carey’s eponymous novel) [cd-rom], usa, australia, and uk, twentieth-century fox, 1997. pittarello, elide (ed. and intr.) (1990): pedro fernández de quirós: viaje a las islas salomón (1595-1596), roma, consiglio nazionale delle ricerche and bulzoni editore. poe, edgar allan (ca. 1825): unpublished note on «the burial of sir john moore», repr. “notice of ‘the burial of sir john moore’”, 20 aug. de 1999, usa, edgar allan poe society of baltimore, inc. <http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/wolfe.htm> [20 oct. 2007]. popa, jeniffer (2016): “‘in the quiet company of a dreamer’ review of felix calvino. alfonso,” antipodes, 30.1 (june), pp. 231-33, http://australianliterature.org/ accessed 09/26/2016. portsmouth napoleonic society (1999): “the battle for elvina”, portsmouth, september 1999. <http://www.pns1814.co.uk/corunna.htm> [20 oct. 2007]. pratt, mary louise (1992): imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. routledge: london and new york. prieto, carlos (1984): el océano pacífico: navegantes españoles del siglo xvi, madrid, alianza editorial. sculthorpe, peter (1980): the visions of captain quiros: for guitar and orchestra, london, faber. --(2013): the great south land, abc classic fm, 11 may, 2013. --and bell, brian (1982): quiros [film abc tv]. shellam, tiffany (2015): ‘“on my ground’: indigenous farmers at new norcia 1860s-1900s”, in máiz, ramón and tiffany shellam eds. rosendo salvado and the australian aboriginal world, santiago de compostela, consello da cultura galega, pp. 161-184. stormon, e. j. (1998): the salvado memoirs, nedlands, university of western australia. vargas llosa, mario (2003): el paraíso en la otra esquina, barcelona, alfaguara. --(2004): the way to paradise, trans. natascha wimmer, london, faber. woodcock, bruce (1996): peter carey. manchester: manchester up, 2nd ed. 2003. http://australian/ coolabah, no.22, 2017, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 wolfe, charles (1979): “the burial of sir john moore after corunna”, helen gardner (ed.), the oxford book of english verse: 1250-1950, oxford, oxford up, pp. 579-580. wright, judith (1969): “the upside-down hut”, the writer in australia. ed. j. barnes. melbourne: oxford up. i this article is a reworking of a previous paper, and has been possible thanks to the research networks red de excelencia competitiva mineco (ffi2015-71025-redt) and programa de consolidación rede de lingua e literatura galega e identidade ii r2014/043 funded by xunta de galicia and the european regional development fund (erdf), and to the research projects from the ministerio de economía y competitividad and feder (ffi2012-35872) and fem2015-66937p). these grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged. bio note: maría jesús lorenzo modia is full professor of english literature in the university of corunna (spain), and dean of the faculty of philology. her main scholarly interests are modern and contemporary literature and culture, women writers, translation, and cultural relationships between spain and the anglo-saxon world. she is currently doing research in contemporary literatures in english. 112 future clouds: diatoms, speculation and weather modification benjamin kidder hodges university of macau bhodges@um.edu.mo copyright© 2023 benjamin kidder hodges. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this article uses diatoms and the role they play in cloud formation as a prompt to consider histories of weather modification in practice, science fiction and possible future applications to address climate change. diatoms are a form of microalgae that are present in all waterways and contribute significantly to atmospheric oxygen. they also provide condensation nuclei around which water droplets form, effectively creating clouds. such naturally occurring particulate matter interacts with intentional and unintentional anthropogenic influence on the atmosphere. the long history of folk speculation and scientific experimentation about effective ways of seeding clouds for rain can help us consider the potential impacts of new forms of atmospheric intervention. from the use of algae as a tool for bioremediation to marine cloud brightening techniques, a multiscalar ecological awareness needs to be publicly fostered in making choices about how to influence climate futures. keywords: diatoms, algae, cloud formation, climate futures, atmospheres grains of stone “that which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.” (steele r. & singer 1928, 486) this quote is an extended english translation of the much paraphrased line ‘as above, so below’ attributed to hermes trismegistus and his ancient treatise known as the emerald tablet. such ancient celestial speculation so popular with alchemists and occultists may not be as influential today but it is a reminder of the interrelations between the sea and sky, the atmosphere and land. these days, we rely on other tools to make sense of atmospheres. on one level, this might involve just a quick google search or glance at a weather app to see news about the coming week. at another scale, there is peering into the deep time of climate futures, of possible natural disasters and global catastrophes. if we turn away from our screens for a moment and look back at the sky, we might be surprised to see algae play a previously overlooked role in shaping the clouds on the horizon. mailto:bhodges@um.edu.mo 113 recent research has discovered the prevalence of a wide variety of algae, diatoms and microbes in the atmosphere. this organic matter in the atmosphere contributes to the density of cloud formation. in one study, researchers collected cloud and rain water samples from around puy de dome mountain in central france and found a diverse collection of living microorganisms (dillon et al. 2020). in framing the importance of their study these researchers emphasize a better understanding of, “these aeolian dispersed organisms is needed to understand their ecology, as well as how they could affect ecosystems and human health” (2020, 1). another study has shown how atmospheric aerosols, including fresh water diatoms, from africa are born through trade winds to the western equatorial north atlantic ocean where they play a significant role in contributing iron into the marine ecosystem. the prevalence of aerosolized organic matter in the atmosphere has also been studied in terms of the influence of virus infections on phytoplankton (diaz et al. 2023). viruses play a role in how much organic matter is subsequently turned into cloud condensation nuclei (2023). an example of such viral inflections and their effect on cloud formation can be seen in the diatom known as emiliania huxleyi, or e. huxleyi, a single-celled phytoplankton. e. huxleyi surround themselves with coccoliths, or ‘grains of stone,’ calcium carbonate plates that together form into a coccosphere. viral infection of e. huxleyi "leads to bloom demise and results in e. huxleyi cell death and enhanced shedding of coccoliths into the seawater.” (trainic et al., 2018, p. 328). some of these shedded coccoliths drift down to the seabed while other broken and discarded coccoliths make it into the atmosphere, tossed skyward by sea foam and waves (2018). these tiny, light coccoliths then drift around in the currents of the atmosphere. caught up in the wind, they provide surfaces for condensation to form and therein help create clouds. paradoxically they can also have the opposite effect, breaking up clouds and preventing rainfall. as an anthropologist interested in parallels between folklore, mythology and the history of science, learning of this role diatoms play has led me to wonder about past and future attempts to influence the weather. in folk traditions, a whole variety of rituals, dances and customs, have been used as proactive measures to call for rain in the face of drought. in the balkan peninsula there are a variety of related practices for rainmaking. in bulgaria, the practice known as peperuda (butterfly) involved a young woman dressed up in a costume made from plants who then travels door to door in the village with the community pouring water on them (petroff, 1957). james george frazer writing in the golden bough (1889), would call such practices ‘sympathetic magic’ pointing out that they rely on imitation or a logic of contagion to be effective. frazer’s attempt to create a comparative catalog of magic, dedicates a chapter to ‘the magical control of the weather.’ subsequent scholarship has rightly critiqued the armchair eurocentrism of frazer’s interpretation of indigenous practices as ‘failed science’ (kumar 2016). as seen in the work of michael taussig, there is still a need to think through the mimetic powers of magic, ritual and images (taussig 1993). whether such traditional practices are effective triggers of precipitation is not really the point. what is important is that they are expressions of atmospheric attunement and part of a common cause to try and understand and influence the weather. this diverse global history of folk rainmaking traditions predicts later scientific attempts to understand cloud formation. the relationship between such speculation and science can be more a continuum than figure 1 emiliania huxleyi 114 a clear cut boundary. speculation about the world can be a spur that prompts more rigorous scientific investigation. even though looking at clouds in wonder is a common childhood memory, most of us don’t go on to pursue degrees in meteorology; nonetheless, that initial sense of wonder and curiosity can fuel continued study of the atmosphere. speculative history knowledge of the role diatoms play in cloud formation comes after a long line of speculation and largely unsuccessful attempts to deliver on the promise of weather manipulation. in the 19th century, ‘rainmakers,’ charlatans, and confidence men traveled the arid regions of the north american west and australian outback, with elaborate elixirs and contraptions meant to seed clouds with rain for ailing crops. while largely ineffective or at best inconsistent at curing drought, these early interventions into the atmosphere did unwittingly predict the importance of cloud condensation nuclei such as the coccoliths of diatoms. clement wragge, an australian meteorologist, put his weight and reputation behind the ‘steiger vortex’ a conical device he had seen used in austria to disperse clouds that threatened grapes still on the vine with destructive hail. wragge manufactured his own large rainmaking canons in australia as a means of combating the drought that was affecting australia at the time. unfortunately, when they were fired in 1902 they didn’t have the desired effect with a couple even exploding. wragge attributed this to too much explosive being used and a lack of a consistent firing routine (sinnamon, 2017). the fact that each 5meter-tall device was labeled with the names of the key parties involved, wragge, stiger, philip, harvey, suschnig or leahy, surely added to the ignominy of this failed experiment. nonetheless, the knowledge that the addition of particulate into the air could trigger participation was part of the best understanding of cloud formation at time. figure 2 battery of stiger vortex rain-making guns at charleville, australia 1902 115 in his book rain produced at will published in 1891, louis gathmann first outlines the science of seeding clouds, a theory that he could not implement at the time but that would later be put into practice. gathmann foresaw techniques for fog dispersal that could save ships edging too close to shore and clear london’s legendary fog. cloud seeding was seen as more than just an agricultural concern. it was also not always an innocent act. it has been used by states as a tool of war and propaganda as well as a way to mitigate the effects of drought and storms. during the vietnam war, ‘project popeye’ was a us military project designed to prolong monsoon rain along the ho chi minh trail with the aim to reduce the mobility of north vietnamese troops (darack, ed. 2019). before the beijing olympics in 2008, the beijing weather modification office used rockets to release silver iodide into the skies outside of the city, in order to keep the opening ceremony free of rain. this practice, known as ‘blueskying,’ is aimed at bolstering china’s internal profile when hosting large scale events and foreign dignitaries (chien 2019). the u.s. government’s project to influence the weather began in collaboration with ge (general electric). this joint project known as ‘project cirrus,’ grew out of earlier study of aerosols and began with a stated initial goal of finding a solution for de-icing airplane wings. one of the research associates in the project, dr. vincent j. schaefer, later chanced on the discovery that dry-ice could be used effectively as a technique for cloud seeding. initial experiments in the lab with dry-ice (carbon dioxide in its frozen form) were soon after put into practice with the first successful seeding of snow fall over mt. greylock massachusetts in 1946 (tietz, 2022). the project subsequently evolved into an attempt to alter the path of, or otherwise modify, hurricanes using silver iodide as a form of artificial cloud condensation nuclei. this hurricane focus was stalled soon after but taken up again with ‘project stormfury’ in 1962. experiments with anthropogenic weather modification work much like coccoliths, sand, and other naturally occurring particulate matter; by introducing more particulate into the atmosphere they create more nuclei on which condensation can form. these early weather modification experiments also have an interesting parallel with and influence on science fiction. kurt vonnegut’s brother bernard vonnegut played a leading role in the ge project. kurt vonnegut, himself, also worked for a period as an in-house writer for ge. he later incorporated a speculative version of these weather experiments in his novel cat’s cradle (1963) in the form of ‘cloudnine’ a military developed substance that could turn water into ice at room temperature. in science fiction we find a whole host of gaseous clouds and atmospheric effects that were used to control people, the planet and alien worlds. in h.g. wells’ influential the war of the worlds (1898) extraterrestrials use a variety of tools to exterminate earth’s population with one of them being canisters of ‘black smoke.’ m.p. shiel’s the purple cloud (1901) chronicles an expedition to the north pole which unleashes a deadly purple cloud that spreads around the world to devastating effect. in the 1957 scifi novel the black cloud author fred hoyle tells of a giant sentient black cloud that comes to rest in between the earth and sun threatening all life on earth. in more recent clifi (climate fiction), the threat no longer comes from other worlds but instead from the out of control impact of human life on the environment. in neal stephenson’s termination shock (2021), cloud formation on a global scale is proactively used to stave off the effects of global warming by increasing the albedo or reflectivity of clouds against solar radiation. the termination shock of the title refers to the disastrous effects of such solar geoengineering if they are not maintained and abruptly stop. in kim stanley robinson’s ministry of the future (2020) waters around the north pole are dyed yellow to effect their albedo and thereby help stay iceberg melt and in his mars trilogy of books he considers the terraforming of mars and the challenge of making it hospitable for human life. 116 these more recent science fiction scenarios both predict and warn about the unintended impacts of geoengineering. part of the appeal and temptation of weather modification is that it can be bounded and controlled. what if we were able to wield the power of diatoms to create localized weather? the perpetual rain cloud pictured above a particularly grumpy cartoon character could be a reality. like the enclosed microclimates of greenhouses, control of specific small areas of the atmosphere might also be useful in tending to future crops and gardens, but at what cost? experimental futures recently researchers off the coast of australia have experimented with the first use of cloud brightening technology to combat coral bleaching (bay et al. 2019). the trial worked by atomizing seawater to turn bits of sea salt crystals into cloud condensation nuclei. these thickened and in turn more reflective clouds bounce more sunlight away from reefs suffering from higher water temperatures. while the long term impact of such localized marine cloud brightening is not known, it is no longer just the stuff of science fiction. at the same time as it is important to be wary of any unintended ecological impacts of geoengineering it is also necessary to keep these separate from conspiratorial visions of secret government weather manipulation campaigns. such conspiratorial thinking still abounds in theories of so-called ‘chemtrails.’ conspiracy theorists believe that contrails, the clouds formed in the wake of airplane engines are part of a sinister government conspiracy to poison and control the general population (tingley & wagner, 2017). in fact, such contrails are simply ‘homogenitus’ as classified by the world meteorological organization in the international cloud atlas. they are a kind of anthropogenic cirrus cloud without any malevolent agenda. such clouds are also visible in the exhaust from shipping boats and a source of inspiration for new ideas about how to combat climate change. researchers have speculated on using hundreds of socalled ‘albedo yachts’ circulating around the world’s oceans (latham et al., 2012). these boats would emit atomized sea spray to create new cloud cover and cool off the planet. the ethical dimensions of such geoengineering have been taken up earlier by none other than wilhelm reich, freud’s protégé and infamous theorist of orgone energy. reich was invested in trying to solve the problem of desertification which he believed was brought on by ‘dor (deadly orgone radiation).’ to combat this process, reich developed his ‘cloudbuster’ device. developed in the 1950s and later immortalized in kate bush’s song ‘cloudbusting,’ the device used long tubes to draw reich’s theorized orgone energy out of bodies of water and pass it into the sky at orgonon, his farm and research center in the us state of maine. reich, while wrong about the mechanism of cloud formation, did show a real intuition as to the interaction between clouds and bodies of water. we are left to wonder what reich would have made of the revelation that algae is more of a connective element than orgone energy. one thing reich did leave us with is a manual or manifesto on the ethics of geoengineering. he published his own rules to follow in cloud engineering in 1954. the 15 rules begin with the rather direct admonishment to “shed all ambition to impress anyone” (reich 1954). alongside a whole variety of safety warnings he also includes a reminder that “in cloud engineering you do not ‘create rain,’ you do not ‘destroy clouds,’ briefly, you are not playing god. what you do is solely helping nature on its natural course” (1954). the ethical and safety concerns in reich’s imagined cloud engineering presage debates around solar geoengineering 117 and other proposed solutions for global warming. reduced to a simple maxim, one must be careful about the unintended impact of proposed solutions. this history of cloud busting and weather manipulation isn’t just a story of failure and fantasy. these speculative devices hold grains of truth and spurred future variations that ultimately proved more effective. looking to future projects, we can consider how diatoms might help us think about links between the sea and sky in new ways. what strange devices might be created to draw them out, to disperse them in the atmosphere or spread them out into new environs? in fact algae, in their many forms, already play an important role in water cycles and the atmosphere. with their intricate silica outer layers, diatoms contribute significantly to atmospheric oxygen and sequester carbon dioxide carrying some of it into the deep sea. they were also once a source of wonder for hobbyists in victorian britain, who carefully arranged them into microscopic patterns, some of them presumably more interested in their visual characteristics than their role in the environment. more recently, they have also been studied as tools for bioremediation in the removal of heavy metals from polluted waterways. international researchers working with the royal netherlands institute for sea research have experimented with diatoms as an alternative to other bioremediation processes reliant on large amounts of fresh water (hedayatkhah et al, 2018). a byproduct of the process is the creation of lipids that could serve as potential biofuel (2018). diatoms have also been studied by a trio of indian biologists, thomas thomas kiran marella, mallimadugula venkata bhaskar and archana tiwari, as a remediation solution for eutrophication or the presence of too many nutrients in freshwater lakes due to fertilizer runoff (marella et al, 2016). with just a bit of speculative imagination we can begin to envision a near future where diatoms are used to seed clouds in a form of atmospheric bioremediation. taking inspiration from this latest research on algae and historic cases of cloud seeding, such an imagined future is a chance to consider the biological, political and social implications of algae bioremediation both at sea and in the sky. in considering future prospects of such intervention into the climate, we might learn a lesson from e. huxleyi. we can build protective walls and environments around ourselves but we would do well to remember that these materials will outlast us. like the remnants of coccolith spheres, they will stick around and find their way into waterways, winds and atmospheres. they will impact the peoples, algae and clouds of the future. thinking at scale controlling the weather may be the wrong way to be thinking about future clouds and climates. instead of devices and tools to empower bioremediation of atmospheres and waterways with algae, perhaps we should be simply trying to think of new means of being able to see the microscopic and multiscalar connections already happening in multispecies worlds. being able to both see and narrate these relationships is one of our biggest challenges. how can we predict the future if we can’t even see it? science fiction, folk practices and popular science scholarship can all help us begin to see and take note of the vast scale of interrelationships between the microscopic and the global, between things too small to see and things too big to see. multiscalar stories are needed to help us comprehend our intended and unintended anthropogenic influence. 118 a good example of this kind of public science storytelling comes from the british biologist and anthropologist thomas henry huxley, for whom e. huxleyi are named. he famously used his lecture in 1868 entitled ‘on a piece of chalk,’ to inspire a general audience in norwich, england to think about diatoms. he directed the audience to consider the very earth beneath their feet and how it was formed over millennia through the slow collection of a mass of coccoliths on an ancient sea floor. under that audience were the same white chalk deposits that are on display at the great cliffs of dover, deposits that stretch all the way to continental europe. those hulking white cliffs of dover are also made of some of the same matter that floats above them, creating microscopic cloud condensation nuclei around which water droplets form causing clouds to appear. they are also made of the same stuff as the professor’s chalk, a finite resource hoarded by mathematicians and other academics who have come to rely on the chalkboard as a primary tool of scholarship and education. these are the kinds of interrelationships that we need science scholarship and good stories to understand. in spite of the best efforts of huxley to make the general public aware of diatoms, e. huxleyi and other diatoms remain largely absent from the public imagination. perhaps it is because individually they exist at a microscopic scale where they can be easily overlooked and ignored. they do, however, also collectively form into large algae blooms that can be seen from space. their silica based coccolith shells reflect sunlight creating huge swaths of aquamarine waters, swirls of color more associated with tropical seas than the north atlantic. these massive algae blooms change the albedo of the water, transforming how much sunlight is reflected back. clearly, diatoms have a large impact even if their net effect on the climate is not precisely known by scientists or acknowledged by the general public. into this gap in understanding and awareness, there is a place to try again to imagine new devices and means of drawing public attention to the diatoms beneath their feet and aloft above them. conspiratorial worries about government seeding of 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(2017, februrary 22). early rain-making experiments in queensland. state library of queensland https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/blog/early-rain-making-experiments-queensland reich, wilhelm. (1954). rules to follow in cloud engineering. orgone institute in “core” july 1954 vol. vi nos. 1-4; appendix a robinson, kim stanley (2020). the ministry for the future. orbit. shiel, m.p. (1901). the purple cloud. chatto and windus. steele r. & singer d. w. the emerald table. proc r soc med. 1928 jan;21(3):485-501. pmid: 19986273; pmcid: pmc2101974. stephenson, neal. (2021). termination shock. william morrow / an imprint of harper collins publishers. taussig, m. t. (1993). mimesis and alterity: a particular history of the senses. new york: routledge. tietz, tabea. (2022, july 4) vincent schaefer and the invention of cloud seeding. scihi: daily blog on science, tech & art in history. http://scihi.org/vincent-schaefer-cloud-seeding/ tingley, d., wagner, g. (2017). solar geoengineering and the chemtrails conspiracy on social media. palgrave commun 3, 12 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0014-3 trainic, m., koren, i., sharoni, s., frada, m., segev, l., rudich, y., & vardi, a. (2018). infection dynamics of a bloom-forming alga and its virus determine airborne coccolith emission from seawater. iscience, 6, 327–335. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2018.07.017 vonnegut, kurt. (1963). cat's cradle. holt, rinehart and winston. wells, h. g. (1898). the war of the worlds. william heinemann. wilson, t., ladino, l., alpert, p. et al. a marine biogenic source of atmospheric ice-nucleating particles. nature 525, 234–238 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14986 benjamin kidder hodges is an artist and anthropologist originally from richmond, virginia whose research based art and writing draw on folklore, mythology and media archaeology to call attention to overlooked histories. this involves building links between material culture and lived affects from boredom to shock. he is currently an assistant professor at the university of macau where he teaches filmmaking, media studies, and cultural studies within the department of communication. coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 the crime scene as museum: the (re)construction in the bresciano series of a historical gibraltarian past john a stotesbury university of eastern finland/joensuu john.stotesbury@gmail.com copyright©2016 john a stotesbury. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract: the “bresciano” series of seven historical detective novels (2010-2015) by sam benady and mary chiappe set in a period of four decades early in the british imperial history of gibraltar from the 1780s to the 1820s provides an excellent opportunity not only for reconstructing a significant image of the historical past of the colony – and possibly also of its current status – but also for investigating a complex of critical approaches to such writing in terms of historical crime fiction, post-coloniality, and the wider ramifications of the function of cultural-historical “museumification” and its impact on the literary narrative. the present brief study should be regarded as an introductory discussion rather than a definitive analysis. keywords: gibraltar, bresciano, crime fiction, museumification, historical memory, reconstructed narrative memory contexts in the course of some five or six years, between 2010 and 2015, a duo of native gibraltarian friends, sam benady and mary chiappe, both in their seventies, produced a collaborative seven-volume series of detective novels set in early colonial gibraltar. the novels encompass in particular the great (french and spanish) siege of gibraltar of 1779-1783 (itself staged during the course of american liberation from the british empire) and its domestic and international aftermath at a level of historically detailed domestic life that is complemented by overt reference to the increasing imperial significance of the territory for the british, their allies and their enemies. as fiction, the detective perspective is channelled through the nascent amateur skills of a character named giovanni bresciano, a local merchant of genoese descent, who ages with the series from his youth through to his mid-50s. for its chronology the series covers a span of some four decades. thus, the earliest historical reference of the series commences in 1779 with that of the second completed mailto:john.stotesbury@gmail.com mailto:john.stotesbury@gmail.com coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 novel, fall of a sparrow (2011), set at the iconic, extended moment of the great siege, and closes with the dead can’t paint (2015), linked in part with the historical visit of a french exploration vessel the uranie, bound for the south seas, but also in part with the later fictional historicity of sherlock holmes. thus, the time-settings of the bresciano novels do not entirely coincide with the sequence of writing and publication of the novels themselves, since the first to appear was the murder in whirligig lane (2010, set in 1813 at the time of a yellow fever epidemic in the colony). this title and the subsequent fall of a sparrow have been succeeded by the pearls of tangier (2011; set in 1789; william lempriere’s visit to morocco); i the prince’s lady (2012; set in 1790; prince edward, king george iii’s fourth son, stationed with the british military in gibraltar); the devil’s tongue (2013; set in 1793, at the start of the anglo-french wars ending in 1802); death in paradise ramp (2014; set in 1802, and featuring the colonial governorship of the “licentious” duke of kent and the 1802 gibraltar mutiny); and the dead can’t paint: bresciano and the french inheritance (2015; set in 1817). at the end of this relatively compact heptalogy, the authors aver that, between his first case at the age of 18 and his last, not only has the protagonist survived to the age of 55 but “bresciano lives on!” ii my initial premise is that, given the completion of series, it deserves close treatment (if only briefly here) not only as a significant part of increased literary production since 2000 by local gibraltarian authors, but also as an extended narrative that treats the earliest years of gibraltar as a militarized british colony that continues to exist to the present day. given this framework, my intention is also, in part, to indicate a number of critical approaches that may help to focus on the broad (and in the context of gibraltarian writing, controversial) label of “postcolonial” detective fiction, in particular through attention to the concept of “museumification”, in this case in reference to a literary construct rather than the more widespread application of the conception in the field of architecture and the city – although these, too, have a bearing on the present initial discussion. my starting-point, however, draws on an observation made by stephen knight in his definitive study crime fiction since 1800: detection, death, diversity (2 nd ed., 2010). knight’s verdict on the run of historical crime fiction may perhaps be considered somewhat dismissive of the subgenre: [m]any periods and locations are used to combine the knowledge-rich security of historicism with elementary crime fiction plots. the link often made to the “cozy” [crime novel] is credible in that the politics of historical crime fiction are basically traditional, including in terms of gender and race. (knight 2010: 225; my italics) according to the wikipedia entry (which in the present case may be regarded as uncontroversial), the notion of “cozy” crime or mystery fiction can also be considered a positive marketing ploy: “also referred to simply as ‘cozies,’ are a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community”. interestingly, however, the us critic marilyn sasio, writing in the new york times in 1992, points out that the appeal of the “cozy” is reportedly strongest amongst a female readership, thus tapping into the burgeoning gender politics of the past two or three decades (stasio 1992: n.p.n.). iii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/crime_fiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/crime_fiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/violence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/humor coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 in light of the stand-off between knight’s dismissive view and the intriguing but fragmented approaches to the cozy subgenre suggested by its authors, publishers and readership, i will attempt here to approach benady and chiappe’s fiction not solely in terms of their stated intention to investigate an imaginary crime (i.e., a murder mystery, narrativized within conventional literary constraints) but also through their repeated endeavours to create a valid, historically centred historical cultural narrative, that of early gibraltar, as an extended indigenous “tale” rather than one told by outsiders. it might even be claimed that benady and chiappe have constructed their series in the same spirit as that expressed by the mainstream gibraltarian novelist, m. g. sanchez, who has suggested that his own writing is primarily concerned with “giving gibraltarians a linguistic and cultural space for themselves. […] if we don’t start writing about ourselves, we run the risk of being presented to the world solely through the prism of others’ perceptions” (sánchez 2015: n.p.n.). appropriately, therefore, given their shared pan-iberian location, an especially provocative approach is suggested by jose f. colmeiro’s discussion of the spanish detective as “cultural other” in carlos g. reigosa’s galician vernacular crime en compostela (1984). foremost in colmeiro’s reading of reigosa is his speculation that the “old city” of santiago de compostela is the real protagonist of the novel, having become a living art museum for tourists (modern-day pilgrims), a lively university town, and the seat of the newly restored galician autonomous government. the city is the narrative space in a symbolic search for collective marks of identity through architecture, geography, history, legends, food, and popular customs. (colmeiro 2001: 181; my italics) transferred to the bresciano series, this view may well help to provide a centred rereading of the seven novels, no longer in terms of their common “distractor”, the potentially “cozy” human protagonist, giovanni bresciano, but for their re-construction of a historical gibraltar – vide reigosa’s contemporary santiago de compostela – as a narrative “museumification” of the territory. in consequence, my intention here is to discuss some of the implications of museumification per se, especially with regard to ways in which it may feature in the bresciano heptalogy, concentrating in particular on the chronologically first title in the series, fall of a sparrow, whose setting is crucially located at the historical frontier between gibraltar and spain. museumification as a theorized notion, museumification seems to have given rise to a number of somewhat disparate and even contradictory ideas. for obvious reasons, it has also emerged predominantly in the general area of architecture, heritage, and tourism, and only secondarily in relation to literary studies. for example, michael a. di giovine’s 2009 study titled the heritage-scape defines the term as the process of “transition from a living city to that of an idealized re-presentation of itself, wherein everything is considered not for its use but for its value as a potential museum artefact” (261). di giovine also suggests that to distinguish between “regular” institutional museums and the museumification of actual, experienced (though now disappeared) urban coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 environments, the process requires the active participation of genuine local people rather than the perhaps more scholarly intrusion of knowledgeable outsiders (di giovine 2009: 261). pertinent to this architectonic argument is an online article dated 2013 in which, under the compelling headline “is amsterdam turning into a museum?” the dutch critic alexandra mientjes claims that museumification entails the process of denominating certain buildings or areas as monuments of history (either official or unofficial), which often leads to an arresting [i.e., conspicuous, astonishing] development of that specific building/area. they are declared sacred, as it were.. (mientjes 2013: n.p.n.; my italics) mientjes also notes that in terms of heritage the process is often referred to, negatively, as a form of “disneyfication” and of the conversion of “a ‘living’ city into a ‘dead’ city. or, in some cases, turning a free space for locals into a commodity for tourists”. contrastingly, she also suggests that a new focus on cultural heritage “functions as a testimony of our identity (as human beings, or more specifically as dutch people)”. but the downside of this view is, precisely, the problem of whose view: only too often, the dominant reading of a museumified amsterdam, mientjes suggests, is that of the “dominant white (male) population of the netherlands” (mientjes 2013: n.p.n.). it may be somewhat facile to extend versions of mientjes’s observations to other famous cities such as venice or (closer to my present home) the starkly contrasting areas – the old and the new, the medievalized versus the commercialized – of a capital city like tallinn, and perhaps provocatively even more so in the case of the city-withina-city: the vatican city encapsulated within the greater city of rome itself. in the case of crime fiction, no doubt like many other readers, i willingly read ian rankin’s rebus novels as much for their particularized male reading of the historical and present city of edinburgh as i do for their spin on the processes of the scottish police procedural. at the same time, i also read sara paretsky’s chicago novels as much for their vision of that decaying, yet repeatedly resuscitated, city as i do for their radically “sensible”, liberal-feminist take on american gender politics. these examples are, however, a far cry from the “cozy” historical fictions contained in the bresciano novels. if these seven novels indeed depend on a museumification of a gibraltarian past, it may be worth considering the extent to which they have been influenced by the combined historical visions of their two – local – authors, one male, the other female, both of them with previous professional lives that were rooted in their contemporary “lived” community, respectively as paediatrician and as educationalist. this, in turn, then raises the question of the extent to which benady and chiappe have absorbed and also deployed the kind of fictional commodification of the past decried by a critic such as neil mccaw in his study of english crime fiction and its adaptation for television. mccaw’s discussion focuses on museumification in the context of crime fiction, consisting of a brief, but telling, analysis of agatha christie’s at bertram’s hotel (1956), a fairly minor miss marple mystery, although one that was adapted at least twice for british television, first by the bbc in 1986, and again in 2007 for itv. in brief, mccaw’s analysis can be regarded as heavily polemical, detecting the “sick coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 culture” of a fading, urbane englishness that, under the memorializing scrutiny of miss marple, is revealed to be a significant symptom of the decline of empire (mccaw 2011). this may well be pertinent to a fuller discussion of the present brief treatment of the bresciano novels. fall of a sparrow on the level of narrative in the series, the identity of the amateur detective, giovanni bresciano, is, in historical terms, particular to the historical and geopolitical settings of fall of a sparrow; bresciano is constructed as a loyal, balanced, conventional, indigenous inhabitant of that peculiar gibraltarian fragment of the larger empire, the son of an immigrant italian ship chandler, who in the course of the series himself becomes a chandler and merchant whilst simultaneously functioning as something new: an amateur investigative eye, and hence also a critic of the functioning of an urban environment that is frequently threatened by both internal and external disruption. to this extent, therefore, bresciano more than fulfils the normal terms of conventional detective fiction. in addition, even at first glance it becomes clear that benady and chiappe have set out to devise a potentially complex formula for their fiction: a gibraltar imagined at an early moment in its colonial formation, at a conflicted period in its history, with a protagonist whose identity is hybrid, both gibraltarian and british. in fall of a sparrow bresciano is both fledgling recruit to the local british garrison and also a character inching towards an awareness of the ramifications of his self-appointed apprentice role as crime investigator; but he is also credibly hybrid in his imperial identity – his mother is english, while his father is a first-generation gibraltarian, with genoese origins. in addition, as the authors themselves have indicated in interview, benady’s primary interest has been in “gibraltar history and forensic and medical detail”, while chiappe’s has been in the “social history of the period”, iv aims that find their focus in and through bresciano’s role as an increasingly observant, investigative gibraltarian citizen. the first of the bresciano novels, the murder in whirligig lane, may in some senses be read as the two authors’ own “apprenticeship” piece in collaborative story-telling, but the very title of the novel, with its assertive deployment of the definite article within the context of a now-extinct but historical place-name, suggests an intention to recall an event that, despite its fictionality, can be imagined as part of a collective memory: essentially, a reconstructed gibraltarian experience: arguably, an instance of museumification. as popular reviewers have noted, the plot of this first novel in the series is coherent, and the solution of the crime plausible. v fall of a sparrow, in contrast, appears to mark the authors’ growing awareness of the complexity of the task in hand, as already mentioned above: “to show our community in the process of its formation”, to create a gibraltarian narrative, and to explore some of the origins of the present-day community. as benady has informally commented in response to a question concerning allusions to some of the named characters in this and other novels, we used real gibraltarians where we could [e.g., in the devil’s tongue]: menahem benady was my g-g-g-grandfather and was a shoemaker. abraham hassan was a cousin 4 times removed and did volunteer during coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 the siege. sgt miles is mary's husband’s g-g-grandfather and was in the first gib police force (later, in 1830) and there are others. [… jane austen’s] capt wentworth started it all – i then found it amusing [in the murder in whirligig lane] to have him read sense and sensibility. vi it may also be noted that in the cast of characters included at the start of fall of a sparrow, the authors have listed the names of “real historical personalities” in bold – including the governor of gibraltar, general eliott, and, notably, that of lieutenant john drinkwater, “diarist of the siege” – while adding a secondary allusion to the fictional cast: “[t]he others are no less real to us” (benayd and chiappe 2011: n.p.n.). vii the potential museumification of the historical moment is both transparent and persuasive. the story effectively starts in 1780, “eighteen long, hungry months […] since the start of the spanish blockade” (5). the siege conditions are reflected in the protagonist’s symbolic view of his home, where he arrives to reveal that he has joined the local british military forces in defence of his community: “the large room […] was the centre of family life, but the house seemed empty” (7) – the symbolism of the home requires populating with human relationships, which in the construction of the communal story necessarily undergo threats to their survival in the form of malnutrition and disease. an immature eighteen year-old, giovanni bresciano, stands out from his fellow soldiers as an individual who is “curious to hear more” (28) from them concerning the violence suffered by a fellow soldier, jamie macfarlane, whose ethnic “difference” as a scot eventually proves crucial in the solution of the mystery surrounding his death. in this regard, bresciano’s role is to convey curiosity and then suspicion: has jamie suffered accidental violence and then, as a result of his damaged mind, committed suicide, or has he become the victim of murder? the first stage is for the fledgling amateur detective to discover for himself the “only rational explanation” (31), and then to convince others, firstly a childhood friend and fellow local recruit, abraham hassan, whose simple role is to indicate the route that bresciano must take as an investigator: “giovanni, you have to look at the actual facts carefully” (43). this process becomes crucial to bresciano’s detective maturation after jamie’s death by hanging, where the search for the location of a missing key becomes symbolic as well as factual. the second stage in bresciano’s detective apprenticeship is then to consolidate suspicions through detailed consideration of others’ potential motives. again, his mentor abraham acts as guide: “you have given me a number of names of people who might have had a grudge against jamie, but have you cited a single powerful motive?” (85). this dilemma continues through much of the novel, with the narrative voice, at a mid-point in the investigation, reminding the reader that “[w]hile bresciano had the intelligence to resolve the puzzles that jamie’s death faced him with, he had more imagination than organizational skills and his investigation was lurching on from one random idea to the next. he was himself aware of it: he knew he should have looked for the key sooner” (121). perseverance, naturally enough, eventually pays off: bresciano gathers evidence, harbours his suspicions, and enhances his own understanding of the process of death coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 itself by questioning the more experienced regiment cook about the onset of rigor mortis in human cadavers: “no! i mean, when you find a dead body, how can you tell when he died?” “most dead bodies i seen ‘ve bin on the battle field. […] funny that. sometimes they was limp when it ‘ad all just ‘appened. an’ sometimes, when we ‘ad to wait to collect the dead, it were a different tale. stiff as a board they’d be. awful – lyin’ there all twisted and stiff like wooden dolls. been dead for hours. and ‘ere’s a strange thing. […] we’d ‘aul away to get these rigid corpses moved, sweatin’ over it […] and if we could ‘ave waited to the next day, the job would’ve been that much simpler. that’s it, you see: first you’re floppy, then you go all stiff and then you go floppy again.” (174-175) the “näive” learning process involved in the honing of bresciano’s suspicions and his accumulation of keys to the resolution of the crime eventually fails to direct him by means of rationalization to reveal the identity of the perpetrator. instead, his assiduous pursuit of misleading lines of inquiry places him in immediate danger of becoming the killer’s next victim. but bresciano now understands the process that has led him into danger, and his future as an occasional detective who will act in civilian life on behalf of his community, gibraltar, is ultimately certified by the (historical) governor of gibraltar, general eliott himself: “’i congratulate you on as pretty a piece of deductive work as i have seen’” (283). provisional conclusions in light of the stand-off between knight’s dismissive view of, and the intriguing but fragmented approaches to, the cozy subgenre suggested by its authors, publishers and readership, my approach has been to read benady and chiappe’s fiction in terms of a complex attempt on their part to investigate not only an imaginary crime (i.e., a murder mystery, narrativized within conventional literary constraints) but also their attempt to investigate and explore valid methods – especially that of “museumification” – for recreating a historical cultural narrative, including its actual telling as a “tale”. as sanchez has emphasized, the narrative of gibraltar is always at risk of oversimplification in the views and narratives of outsiders, with the result that the indigenous perspective becomes overlooked and ignored in the modern world. arguably, this may well be a common experience in colonized cultures. hence, while my initial reading of the benady/chiappe narratives has been in terms of their presentation of a constructed "memory" of a fictional character, it is also bresciano’s community – gibraltar – that not only has its own roots embedded in “real” place and time but also has its own ongoing, imaginary connections with present times. as benady has commented, “we aimed to show our community in the process of its formation, with a backdrop of real events – the siege, the epidemic, etc”, which chiappe has augmented with the comment: “though [we] never formulated such a purpose per se”; predictably, like many effective story-tellers, their stated primary aim has been “to tell a good story”. viii coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 a telling moment in my email interview with the authors is contained in another chance observation of sam benady’s when he suggests that a secondary aim of their writing, from his perspective, has been “to bring gibraltar history to our reading public”, modestly adding in parentheses: “(mostly gibraltarian!)”. for benady and chiappe, the problem of distribution and readership has been compounded by publication that has been only local, and thus while there may be some ambiguity in benady’s response, there must also be some wryness in his consideration of the extremely limited scope locally for cultivating a readership: do the bresciano narratives appeal solely to a gibraltarian readership, dependent on their insiders’ familiarity with the historical referents, or can the authors design their narratives for consumption by, say, a british public with a partial awareness of the rock as an imperial icon, or eventually, perhaps in translation, by a future, hypothetical iberian readership, perhaps one whose own perspective on gibraltar has undergone “translation”? ix where the bresciano novels coincide with general descriptions of post-colonial crime fiction (as opposed to colonial narratives produced by “settler” authors) may be seen, at least in part, in the identity of their protagonists: post-colonial detectives are always indigenous to or settlers in the countries where they work; they are usually marginalized in some way, which affects their ability to work at their full potential; they are always central and sympathetic characters; and their creators’ interest usually lies in exploration of how these detectives’ approaches to criminal investigation are influenced by their cultural attitudes. (christian 2001: 2) ed christian concludes from this generalization that “books featuring post-colonial detectives are interesting not only because of their plots and the quality of their writing but because of their revelations of diverse cultures” (2001: 2). for obvious reasons, this would appear to be problematic in the context of historical crime fiction emerging from a culture such as that of gibraltar: giovanni bresciano is by no means a “post-colonial” protagonist. equally, gibraltar, situated at the present moment between its self-governing status as the most populous of britain’s remaining overseas territories and its historical dilemma as a geopolitical appendage to the iberian land-mass, nicely complicates and frustrates any quest for satisfactory categorization. christian’s discussion of post-colonial detective protagonists seems, nevertheless, to provide a potential solution. he suggests that “these [post-colonial] detectives are in process, they are learning, adjusting, changing, compromising, rejecting, resisting. they are not heroes of the resistance, out to destroy the oppressor. they are all employed, whether publicly or privately – they answer to employers” (2001: 13). in this view, fictional detectives in the post-colonial process function in an apprentice capacity, and play a conservative role – their function is, after all, to restore order and equilibrium to their community rather than to re-form it. in brief, their role, from a textual perspective, with the unravelling of the crime, is for a community and its individual members to discover how to become again what they have been previously. but they have also to create a new consciousness – in some sense, a “museum” of reconstructed memory – of how their previously secure past cannot be restored: violence has occurred, and the victim(s) and their community have undergone an unwilled transformation. on our behalf, as readers, christian suggests, such investigative characters undertake a form of coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 surveillance, “observation of both the empire and the indigenous culture; the observation of disparities, of ironies, of hybridities, of contradictions. now the surveillance is not for imperial dominance, though, but for the restoration of what is right” (2001: 13). works cited adami, esterino. 2014. original english transcript of e-mail interview with m. g. sanchez, https://aperto.unito.it/retrieve/handle/2318/150037/26278/e%20interview%20g% 20m%20sanchez.pdf. accessed 6 april 2015. beaumont, gray. 2012. “local author does it again, and again!”, a review of sam benady and mary chiappe, the prince’s lady. 28 december. http://manilvalife.com/179/. accessed 6 april 2015. benady, sam. 2005. the keys of the city: an episode in the history of gibraltar. gibraltar: gibraltar books. benady, sam and mary chiappe. 2010. the murder in whirligig lane. gibraltar: calpe press. ---. n.d. [2011]. fall of a sparrow. gibraltar: hkb press. ---. n.d. [2011]. the pearls of tangier. huntingdon, uk: rock scorpion books. ---. n.d. [2012]. the prince’s lady. gibraltar: two pillars press. ---. 2013. the devil’s tongue. gibraltar: two pillars press. ---. 2014. death in paradise ramp. gibraltar: two pillars press. ---. 2015. the dead can’t paint. gibraltar: two pillars press. christian, ed, ed. 2001. the post-colonial detective. basingstoke, uk: palgrave. colmeiro, jose f. 2001. “the spanish detective as cultural other”, in ed christian, ed., the post-colonial detective, pp. 176-192. di giovine, michael a. the heritage-scape: unesco, world heritage, and tourism, lanham: lexington books, 2009. domínguez, césar. 2010. “historiography and the geo-literary imaginary. the iberian peninsula: between lebensraum and espace vécu”, in fernando cabo aseguinolaza, anxo abuín gonzalez, and césar domínguez, eds, a comparative history of literatures in the iberian peninsula, vol. 1, amsterdam: john benjamins, pp. 53-132. https://aperto.unito.it/retrieve/handle/2318/150037/26278/e%20interview%20g%20m%20sanchez.pdf https://aperto.unito.it/retrieve/handle/2318/150037/26278/e%20interview%20g%20m%20sanchez.pdf http://manilvalife.com/179/ coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 levey, david. 2008. language change and variation in gibraltar. amsterdam: john benjamins. knight, stephen. 2010. crime fiction since 1800: detection, death, diversity. basingstoke, uk: palgrave. mientjes, alexandra. 2013. “is amsterdam turning into a museum”, pop up city, 8 august. http://popupcity.net/is-amsterdam-turning-into-a-museum/. accessed 6 april 2015. mccaw, neil. 2011. adapting detective fiction: crime, englishness and the tv detectives. london: continuum. sanchez, m. g. 2015. “if you don’t write your own stories, others will”, new statesman, 17 feb. http://www.newstatesman.com/gibraltar/newstatesmangibraltar/2015/02/if-you-don-t-write-your-own-stories-others-will. accessed 6 april 2015. stasio, marilyn. 1992. “crime/mystery; murder least foul: the cozy, soft-boiled mystery”, the new york times, 18 oct. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/18/books/crime-mystery-murder-least-foul-thecozy-soft-boiled-mystery.html?pagewanted=all. accessed 6 april 2015. stotesbury, john a. 2014. “the rock and the barbary macaque in 21 st -century gibraltarian fiction in english”, the european english messenger 23.2: 34-9. ---. 2015. unpublished e-mail interview with sam benady and mary chiappe, 4 and 9 february. “cozy mystery list: a guide to cozy mystery (and other favourite) books and dvds.” http://www.cozy-mystery.com/. access 18 march 2015. i william lempriere subsequently published his travelogue, a tour from gibraltor (sic) to tangier, sallee, mogodore, santa cruz, tarudant and thence over mount atlas to morocco (london, 1791). ii personal email with sam benady, 9 feb. 2015. iii see also the web “cozy mystery list: a guide to cozy mystery (and other favourite) books and dvds”. iv john a stotesbury, unpublished email interview with sam benady and mary chiappe, 4 feb. 2015. v see, e.g., the compilation of general reviews at http://manilvalife.com/179/, accessed 6 apr. 2015. vi sam benady, personal email, 4 feb. 2015; original abbreviations. vii page numbers without further indications hereon refer to this work. viii email interview with the author, 4 feb. 2015. ix benady’s earlier historical novel is entitled the keys of the city: an episode in the history of gibraltar (2005). http://popupcity.net/is-amsterdam-turning-into-a-museum/ http://www.newstatesman.com/gibraltar/newstatesman-gibraltar/2015/02/if-you-don-t-write-your-own-stories-others-will http://www.newstatesman.com/gibraltar/newstatesman-gibraltar/2015/02/if-you-don-t-write-your-own-stories-others-will http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/18/books/crime-mystery-murder-least-foul-the-cozy-soft-boiled-mystery.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/18/books/crime-mystery-murder-least-foul-the-cozy-soft-boiled-mystery.html?pagewanted=all http://www.cozy-mystery.com/ http://manilvalife.com/179/ coolabah, no.20, 2016, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 john a stotesbury moved from britain to teach in finland in 1970, principally from 1975-2013 at the university of eastern finland at joensuu. his phd for the university of umeå, sweden, was titled apartheid, liberalism and romance: a critical investigation of the writing of joy packer (uppsala, 1996). since then, he has edited and coedited numerous anthologies, largely in post-colonial studies, including southern women write africa (scrutiny2, 2007), and most recently aging, performance, and stardom: doing age on the stage of consumerist culture (berlin, 2012). he was editor of the european english messenger for 2004-2009, and is currently retired and researching anglophone writing by gibraltarian authors, as well as editing joy packer’s unpublished novel, lovers don’t talk war (ms, 1942), for first publication. microsoft word 05_translating trakl-jean page.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 translating trakl: james mcauley’s encounter with the cultural other. jean page phd researcher, group 4, other literatures and cultures in english university of lisbon centre for english studies (ulices) jean.page@mac.com copyright©2021 jean page. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: translation theorist laurence venuti has written how a translator, in “a romantic transcendence” can lose “his national self through a strong identification with a cultural other.” ts reader, 20) australian twentieth-century poet james mcauley’s reading and translation of the early twentieth-century austrian poet georg trakl presents a significant literary encounter. cosmopolitan by nature, mcauley, as a young poet, had been drawn to, and translated, the german language lyric poet rainer maria rilke (1875-1926). few of mcauley’s translations of trakl are included in his collected poems (1971 and 1994); they appear in a separate posthumous collection (1982) and in his essay “the poetry of georg trakl” (1975). this article offers a literary appreciation of mcauley’s translations and his commentary on trakl’s imagery, prosody, symbolism and world view which mcauley described, borrowing baudelaire’s term, as “a landscape of the soul.” it considers the hypothesis of translation as travel. drawing on harold bloom’s theory of influence it examines mcauley’s encounter with trakl in his late work, translations and poetic dedication (“trakl: salzburg,” 1976) written after visiting salzburg in 1973. a comparatist approach traces trakl’s influence, the discovery of affinities or parallel paths with the earlier poet who might be considered, in bloomian terms, to be mcauley’s “gnostic double.” keywords: translation, influence, travel, lyric. james mcauley (1917-1976), regarded as one of the important australian poets of the mid-tolate twentieth-century, remains a complex of seeming paradoxes; regarded as representing the “second wave of modernism” (letter h.m green to mcauley, 15/3/44) in australia in the 1940s, but predominantly as an anti-modernist, formalist poet, catholic convert, and polemic critic. reputed for a conservative neo-classicism linked with his apprehension of the “horrors of modernity” and his turn to the “dubious haven” of the church,i in australia he is best known for his controversial antimodernist collaboration in the dazzling surrealist parody, the “ern malley” hoax poems of 1944, still a celebrated forerunner of australian post-modernism. he is also admired, if less known, as one of the most “inward and subtle of australian poets” (bradley, 444). his return to his early lyric inwardness coincided with, and was reinforced by, his profound encounter with the poetry of georg trakl (18871914) between 1970 and 1973. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 the short lyric: john shaw neilson and georg trakl mcauley’s late lyrics, written between 1970 and 1976, were widely acclaimed. they comprised the last sequence “the hazard and the gift” of collected poems 1936-1970 (cp, 1971), music late at night: poems 1970 to 1973 (mln, 1976), time given (tg, 1976), and the posthumous a world of its own (1977). these poems represent a highly productive period, of “more and better lyrical verse than i have written in my life” (letter to a.d. hope, 11 november 1970). mcauley had emerged from a serious illness with cancer “with that exquisitely keen sense of life and its fragility which such experiences give” producing “a number of short poems which use a language of sense-impressions to render a sense of world” (a map of australian verse, mav, 204). the poet explained his wish, during convalescence, to write a set of lyrical poems in honour of john shaw neilson, the untaught australian lyric poet. they appear in the first half of “the hazard and the gift.” mcauley concluded however that “apart from one poem [. . .] nothing would come as i wanted it to come. the muse [. . .] refused my intentions” [. . .] (“the rhetoric of australian poetry,” 116). the second group of thirteen poems in “the hazard and the gift” section of cp 1971 (220-226) reflects the stronger impact of his concurring encounter with the work of georg trakl, also evident in another twenty lyrics written from december 1970 until late 1973, published in music late at night: poems 1970-73 (mln). literary biographer peter coleman observed how, “now almost everything is evoked in symbols. […] the bardic impulse does not appear but is incorporated within the lyric impulse” (1980 111-112). mcauley had already translated trakl in 1956, “ein winterabend” as “winter nightfall” (cp, 103) — an elegiac description of passage dedicated to the memory of his colleague camilla wedgwood, anthropologist at the australian school of pacific administration (asopa). during his convalescence through 1970, his own encounter with mortality, mcauley wrote his second trakl translation, of “frauensegen” (1913), with the title “blessing of women” (cp, 220): you move among your womenfolk smiling often but oppressed, for the anxious days have come. along the fence white poppies fade. like your body swollen ripe the grapes are golden on the slope. the pond reflects the sky’s far height, and a scythe ii swishes in the field. (cp,220) using imperfect rather than full rhyme in the translated version, this apostrophe to the farmer’s wife presents a physical, homely rural world, constructed with colour (white “poppies,” “golden” grapes, leaves “autumn red,” even the farmer “brown as a moor”), and sound (the onomatopoeic scythe which “clatters”). it presents a world in autumn, with figures at harvest, the pregnant woman (“your body swollen ripe”), and the farmer, her husband. the absent subject is suggested in the address to the woman – “you” at the beginning of the poem and “your” (st.2). it celebrates an inhabited, natural world though signals the “anxious days” of life’s uncertainty (st.1) accentuated by the symbolism of the scythe. such pictorial style, using colour and sound to denote affect, can be seen entering mcauley’s work. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 a similar detached, visual and sonorous intensity can be detected in mcauley’s poem “st john’s park” (1970) which coincides with his first translation. a dream-like detachment vividly describes a world in present tense: “[. . .] a dark-green gum bursts out in crimson flowers” a flourishing which contrasts with decay: “old people slowly rot along the wall./ the young ones hardly notice them at all. /both live in the same picture-book of hours [. . .]” (cp, 222). this visual landscape of mcauley’s neighbourhood in new town, near hobart (tasmania), beginning in stillness – the medieval “picture book of hours” (st. 2) – sets a contrast with “the screaming brakes” (cp, 222) of an implied, depleted modernity. while its tactile physical sense may have drawn from trakl, the evolving style was also honed out of the heightened sensitivity of illness and mcauley’s established preference for a “concrete particularity” (the personal element in australian poetry, 4). the poet associated such highly visual poems with the place where he walked during convalescence: “[ . . .] in that ill state i was very alive and sensitive to the external world [...]” (kinross smith, 319). the space in which mcauley was living and walking, with its familiar universal images, was becoming place, through regular evocation and naming. new town, hobart, starts to come to life in the sense of thomas hardy’s “genius loci” (jude the obscure, 98). reading, writing, translating trakl mcauley’s encounter with the austrian poet in 1970 was the second, but deeper, poetic meeting of mcauley’s convalescence, following that with neilson. it involved textual and imaginary encounter, and also translations and a visit to trakl’s native austria. this article examines mcauley’s translations or versions of trakl, written between mid-to-late 1970 and july 1973, together with parallel poems written in dialogue with trakl, to identify what mcauley may have learnt from or recognised in the austrian poet, including any commonality or differences in themes, motifs, diction, form, rhetoric, personae, and worldview. this includes in the light of comparisons already madeiii but principally by mcauley himself in his essay “the poetry of georg trakl” (1975). the essay refers to a brief literary encounter with the austrian poet’s work between 1956 and 1960: “[…] it was not till nearly 10 years later, in 1970 in a period of convalescence, that with the aid of a commentatoriv i began to learn trakl’s difficult personal language and realize his achievement” (the grammar of the real, gr, 203). as catalano has remarked, mcauley’s essay is a “primer on the work of both poets, for a number of the observations he makes about trakl’s poetry can also be applied to his own” (1996 136). the translations cited are taken from mcauley’s 1975 essay, based on his 8 july 1973 abc radio broadcast and collected in the 1982 posthumous publication georg trakl. while mcauley considered trakl’s poems difficult to translate, tasmanian poet gwen harwood, who understood german, considered mcauley to have “caught the tone” of trakl (introd. georg trakl). poet and translator keith harrison considered “remarkable” (2005 53) mcauley’s earlier 1938 translation “autumn” (cp, 5) from german of rilke’s “herbsttag,” but did not comment on, or perhaps know, his trakl translations. this study accepts mcauley’s poems as his interpretation of the austrian poet’s work but does not assess the quality of his translation. such an assessment would be invaluable.v a handwritten note with glossaries and synonyms in german suggests mcauley received some interpretation help in preparing his translations, but none of mcauley’s translation drafts has survived. he knew less german than french; his university friend joan fraser (and later novelist and poet, amy witting) had helped with his 1938 translation of rilke. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 georg trakl was an austrian expressionist poet who struggled with drug addiction, an apparently incestuous relationship with his sister grete (a talented pianist) and died of a possibly suicidal overdose at the beginning of world war i (gr, 205). mcauley noted the traces of early twentieth-century decadence in trakl’s work but preferred: “[…] the first half of his mature period […]: some fifty […] well-formed lyrics of extraordinary, intense, inward and mysterious beauty, unease, disgust and suffering dread” (202).vi mcauley considered them “perhaps the finest poetry written in our century” (202).vii he was attracted, in his first translation, of “ein winterabend” (1913-15) as “winter nightfall” (cp, 103), to the poem’s simplicity but “controlled ambiguity” (gr, 203). similar praise for the poem had been expressed by martin heidegger in his 1950 essay “language.”viii mcauley’s later general observations identify how trakl creates a powerfully felt world in which the subject often transforms into the landscapes and its figures: these poems are beautifully shaped lyrics that mingle sound and colour in a way i cannot hope to render in translation. they are set in a recognizable place and construct a recognizable situation out of a relatively small number of elements. […] there is often a solitary figure moving through the landscape, walking, listening, seeing. [ . . .] nothing much happens. but the scene, apparently so simple, becomes charged with meaning. it is a landscape of the soul, of the divided soul in torment and longing. (gr, 207) the expression, “it is a landscape of the soul,” is from baudelaire, (“[…] paysage d’ âme […]”ix) a term cited much earlier in mcauley’s 1940 master’s thesis in describing the french symbolist’s technique for constructing lyrics. mcauley’s reading of trakl, during his lonely convalescent walks, places him doubly in the role of wanderer; he is an older flâneur than in his first encounter with rilke’s parisian-inspired “herbsttag” in his tender encounter with his immediate, newly fragile world and with trakl’s. the trakl translations include one sonnet translated as “decay” and 10 short-lined poems, usually quatrains from three to four stanzas. mcauley’s trakl-influenced poems follow the short quatrains of trakl’s “early mature” period, though mcauley already favoured that form. in “in autumn,” mcauley’s translation of trakl’s short poem “im herbst” 1913, he employs trakl’s characteristic end-stopped line: the sunflowers are bright along the fence. sick people are sitting out in the sunshine. in the field the women [sing]x at their toil, into which falls the ringing of cloister-bells. [ . . .] people there appear joyful and mild. today the tawny wine is being pressed. the rooms where death comes are open wide and brightly painted with the sunshine. (gr, 222-223) mcauley’s translation uses the musical repetition of: “today the tawny wine is being pressed.” in the difficult task of translation different forms of rhyme are used to evoke trakl’s originals (fence/bells, bells/pressed, mild/wide.) the motif of “sick people sitting in the sunshine” later linked to “the rooms where death comes […] brightly painted with the sunshine” is echoed in mcauley’s poem, the above-mentioned traklean “st john’s coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 park” – “old people slowly rot along the wall […] the old have crept inside to meet the dark” (cp, 222). the “village” terrain of mcauley’s local walks to the st john’s church precinct, with its old people’s home and orphanage seems reminiscent of the integrated rural christian world of villages, churches, vineyards, fields and hospitals, of the trakl translations. the invisible “you” subject (“the solitary figure moving through the landscape” gr, 207) appears in the first line of st.2 of “in autumn”: “the birds tell you news from far away” (gr, 223). gwen harwood remarked on a physical presence in mcauley’s “profoundly beautiful and disturbing” translations of trakl, and arguably, the quality of trakl’s poem themselves: you have entered into trakl’s world as if you lived there physically. i don’t feel these poems are a recreation; they give the uncanny feeling that you are there […] quite simply moving about in it and speaking from it […] (unpublished letter to mcauley, 25 may 1975) mcauley’s description of the “interplay of positive and negative in a value-charged landscape” (gr, 214) is evident in the paradoxical last lines of “in autumn”: “the rooms where death comes are open wide/and brightly painted with the sunshine” (223). mcauley’s poem of two rhyming quatrains in iambic pentameters, “nocturne”, written in rural bruny island, south-eastern tasmania, during summer 1972 when he was translating trakl, displays a similarly arresting physicality in establishing trakl’s admired “composition of place” (gr, 210): a gull flies low across the darkening bay. along the shore the casuarinas sigh. resentful plovers give their ratcheting cry from the mown field scattered with bales of hay. the world sinks out of sight. the moon congealed [ . . .] a cry goes out from the exhausted will. nightmares and angels roam the empty field. (cp94, 280) this acutely observed natural landscape uses present tense, as does trakl, with the subdued alliterative sibilance of lines 1 and 2 broken by the uneasy onomatopoeic “ratcheting” in the plovers’ cry (lines 3 and 4). the poem’s reclusive subject seemingly emerges in the disembodied “cry” going “out from the exhausted will” in st.2. the void, frozen quality of this world (“congealed” moon, “motionless” clouds and “empty field”) contrasts with its unquiet inhabitants (the flying and crying birds (st.1), the enigmatic “nightmares and angels,” or the premonitions of death (st.2)). the vivid physical world suggests the hypotyposis harwood observed in mcauley’s trakl translations. a “small stock of images” mcauley stated it was “simple words and images” in a “small number of elements” which kept afloat “a range of multiple meanings” through trakl’s work (gr, 203), seemingly coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 repeating his poetic precept from twenty years earlier: “only the simplest forms can hold/a vast complexity” (“an art of poetry,” cp, 71). in their acutely observed worlds, both poets use adjectives with precision, their language retaining a universal, archetypal or figural quality. mcauley judged trakl’s “themes, images, key-words” to be “very varied, and subtle and ‘polysemous’ and ‘multivalent’ within that range” (gr, 211), as his own work had become. what mcauley called trakl’s “colour language” (221) tends to be more symbolist than mcauley’s, or even synaesthetic, as can be seen in “god’s azure breath is blowing” in “geistliches lied” (“spiritual song,” 212), or “the brown stillness” of “the ravens” (214). however, as mcauley noted, it was not “inflexibly fixed.” it tends to be naturalistically imagist, as in his own colour language in “autumn images” – “white geese feeding on sweet grass, /crows flying over yellow pears” (cp94, 282). the realistic painterly tendency noted by coleman becomes important in mcauley’s construction of presence. mcauley’s discursive leanings before 1960 had long been discarded in favour of the admired “concrete particularity.” decadent expressionism to naturalism in “decay,” mcauley’s translation of trakl’s sonnet “verfall” (1913), the poem’s wandering, observing “i” subject is more prominent than in most of trakl’s poems: at evening as the bells are ringing peace i follow from afar the flight of birds; strung out in flocks, like files of pious pilgrims, they vanish into autumn-clear distance. (gr, 207) however, a strong physical sense of place is animated with conflicting energies in the depicted landscape: then a breath makes me shudder with decay. a blackbird sings lament in the bare tree. a red-leaved vine sways on the rusty trellis. and like pale children in a dance of death round about dark fountain-rims, that crumble, blue asters bow and shiver in the wind. (gr, 208) from the hopeful symbol – the bells (st.1, line1) – decay or abandonment is unleashed with the bird’s departure from the autumnal landscape, and in the frail actions experienced by the subject – “shudder” – and by the landscape – “sways,” “crumble” and “shiver.” by breaking the pattern of end-stopped lines, in the enjambment of the 3-line sentence in the last triplet, mcauley’s translation places greater focus on the metaphoric and symbolic play culminating in the final image of the shivering blue, metallic-coloured asters in their “dance of death.” this is not an autumn of fulfilment and contentment. [ . . .] it is a landscape of decay. but [ . . . ] there is also the sound of the vesper bells, and the sight of cranes or other migrating birds like pilgrims on the way to a distant [ . . ], holy land. the watcher’s coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 spirit is drawn to make the transition with the birds from this existence to those “brighter destinies” (gr, 208) the highly empathetic engagement in mcauley’s interpretation almost suggests trakl has become a mask for describing experience and techniques already well understood. gwen harwood provides a clue, connecting the unstable motif of hope (and its departure) in trakl’s migrating birds to mcauley’s similar use in an earlier poem evoking despair, and belatedness: (georg trakl, ii) look, cranes still know their path through empty air; for them our world is neither soon nor late; but ours is eaten hollow with despair (“the tomb of heracles,” cp, 59) those notes of unbelonging in mcauley’s 1949 poem, a time of intense doubt and searching that contributed to his adherence to catholicism in 1952, seem revived and sharpened in his reading of trakl. the theme of decay, relocated from baudelaire’s city to rural tasmanian landscapes, is reflected in mcauley’s 1970s poems, including one of 12 sonnets in mln, “in northern tasmania”: soft sodden fields. the new lambs cry, and shorn ewes huddle from the cold. wattles are faintly tinged with gold. a raven flies off silently. […] (cp94, 288.) here mcauley revisits the imagism of his youthful rilkean poetics in “at bungendore” (1938): “now the white-buskined lamb/ deserts his ewe and bawls [ . . .]” (cp, 5). the lamb and raven of the later poem reappear as leit-motifs for vulnerability and threat. as well as showing mcauley’s penchant for naturalist detail (the “mud-pools at the gatepost”) and adherence to rhyme, the poem displays a “valedictory mood” (smith, 1981 391), a predisposition to epigram in its concluding triplets: “a way of life is in decline” and “what it is time overwhelms.” this is less apparent in the work of trakl. evident in 1949, and surfacing again in the early 1970s, mcauley’s own sense of belatedness – “lateness is my fear, my crime” (“the garden,” cp, 218) – pervades the trakl-inspired work of his last half-decade. curiously, the term “belatedness” matches the german “verlassenheit” (abandonment, desolation, aloneness) on which both trakl and heidegger had written. for mcauley this sense stems variously from a foretaste of mortality, questions about poetic vocation and his relation to his culture and time. edward said’s comments on “lateness” echo mcauley’s observations about illness: “[ . . .] the quality of time alters then, like a change in the light, because the present is so thoroughly shadowed by other seasons: the revived or receding past, [ . . .] the unimaginable time beyond time” (said, 2006 xi). such heightened sensitivity intensifies mcauley’s lyric inwardness, his resistance to desolate realist observations, unleashing his “strong romantic leanings […]” (kirkpatrick, 204). in his needy response to trakl’s voice and forms, the mutable mcauley reabsorbed an element of the late romantic decadent, liberating the early lyric voice into a richer late voice. the pared symbolist and epigrammatic techniques practised in reading and translating trakl, his most important “poetic forefather” (mccredden, 266), represented a felicitous return. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 “the solitary figure […] walking, listening, seeing” in mcauley’s 1972 poem “in northern tasmania,” the subject emerges briefly as a wandering, watching “i” figure: “at dusk i look out through old elms” (cp94, 288). in mcauley’s trakl translations, the presence of the subject is mostly omniscient or disguised. mcauley noted the lack, in trakl, of an authorial “i” figure, replaced by “a solitary figure moving through the landscape, walking, listening, seeing. sometimes the poet refers to himself as ‘eye,’ but more often he avoids saying ‘i’ and leaves this figure as ‘the solitary’ or ‘a stranger’ or ‘the silent one’” (gr, 207). in mcauley’s translation “winter nightfall,” the subject’s gaze transfers to the wanderer appearing from the dark: “enter, wanderer, take your fill” (cp, 103). the subject is often suggested by a shadowy figure or presence. in the translation “music in the mirabell garden” the subject may be the “pallid stranger” (209) entering (the poet trakl stepping into his house where his sister plays a sonata). trakl’s elusive “flâneur” prowls through his poetry at this time like that precursor, the “solitary,” “homeless,” “wanderer” of mcauley’s earlier, 1938 translation of rilke’s “herbsttag” (cp, 5). at times mcauley’s concurrent poetry employs a masked omniscient gaze through the personae that haunt his own landscapes – the “fevered sleeper, dreaming a call/from somewhere outside” and the “tired watcher/lean[ing] forward” in “sickroom” (cp, 223), which are among the first poems written during convalescence. “motel, burnie” offers a contemporary variation on the wanderer figures of rilke, trakl and australian symbolist ancestor christopher brennan (1870-1932): “travellers breakfast from a tray. […] then check out at the desk and go” (cp94, 286). the colloquial “check[ing] out” holds potent meaning for one facing terminal illness, but also shows the former neo-classical poet’s use of everyday language, and wry humour. the autumnal sketch “morning voluntary” has the bells as narrator: “flat strokes dinned out […] / tell the tale that must be told.” “private devotions” introduces a “trespasser” figure, a biblical variation on mcauley’s recurring wanderer, or prodigal (the “wanderer in the darkness of the heart” of the earlier (1953) “a leaf of sage” cp, 80). animated landscapes mcauley’s early 1970s poems show a trakl-like translucent impersonality, in which the mood, whether despair or reconciliation, is woven across an integrated symbolic landscape, often absent of human figures. his early spring poem “pastoral” evokes the precarious balance between life and death: “rain-filled ponds and brimming dams/ hold an image of the sky” (cp, 224). its landscape is sentient, energetic, its silence broken by the “hungry raven’s cry,” and charged with contrary forces of fullness and danger. the “brimming” presence of the dams and the wattle’s “age of gold,” contrast with threatening images – “shadows wheel[ing] above new lambs.” mcauley’s “gold” is multivalent, here a spring image, but also autumn’s spent foliage, as in “autumn images” – “young poplars tremble in their gold” (cp94, 282). such constructions resemble trakl’s irresolute landscapes, animated with sounds, breath, utterances and quivers. in trakl’s “evening thunderstorm” (gr, 222) “seagulls cry round the window frames” and more expressionistically “the sick are screaming in the hospital.” coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 more often the representation is harsh, as in “the ravens,” mcauley’s version of trakl’s “die raben” (1913) – “morosely resting./[…] quarrelling /about some carrion[. . .]” – but also shadowy and elusive, as they “suddenly fly off north/ and dwindle like a funeral procession/into airs that tremble with sensual delight” (gr, 214). mcauley associated the flight of birds in trakl’s poems, including “decay,” as “representing a transition, a passing over from here to the other realm – the idea, but not an actual release” (208). the vivid pictorial stanzas of both authors elaborate both a precise and suggestive world; nonetheless the somewhat random cataloguing of scenes, without apparent narrative or narrator, suggest a dream world. northrop frye describes this structure of “discontinuous units of the stanza” (1990 272) and its dream-world effect, as characteristic of the lyric genre, though trakl’s and mcauley’s are not only entranced but decadent. as earlier mentioned of “in northern tasmania” (cp94, 288), mcauley’s detailing of a symbolic world often gives rise to epigram. occasionally this reflects a sense of reconciliation and affirmation, as in the concluding sestet of the sonnet “saturday morning” describing the harvesting of firewood and sodden leaves: “boy’s voices from the home next door/ ring out like chimes, and every chore// seems blest in ordinary light” (cp94, 287). the “chime” of the boy’s voices recalls “the orphans are sweetly singing vespers” from trakl’s “im roten laubwerk voll guitarren” (“in the red foliage full of guitars” gr, 221). more often, mcauley’s epigrams are pessimistic, reflecting a failure of understanding, as in “another day, another night” where: “[…] there is less and less that can be said./ when the wind lapses in a vast silence […]” (cp94, 289). trakl, less frequently, lets his symbolic evocations shift into philosophical commentary, as in mcauley’s translation: and yet how sickly all this becoming seems! a breath of fever circles round a hamlet; yet a mild spirit beckons out of branches […]. (“glad spring,” gr, 216) in the “heideggerian” expression “becoming” (“werdende”), trakl seems to mean the birth/death cycle, or simply living. referring to this sentence of trakl’s poem, calinescu suggests a “[modernist] utopia that is silently embodied in the image of decline” (209). interestingly, trakl’s grim observation shifts to positive in the ultimate stanza, in a striking apprehension of paradox: so painfully good and true is all that lives; and quietly an old stone touches you: ‘verily i am with you all the days.’ (gr, 217) the ambiguous aphorism – “so painfully good and true is all that lives” – seems less linked with a human subject than fused with the wise “touch” of trakl’s symbolic “old stone,” which mcauley judges to be “a cross or a statue of christ” (gr, 217). the unexpected vatic – “so painfully good and true” – is here attributed to the poem’s “old stone” rather than to the subject, obliquely denoting acceptance. mcauley thought it “like god pronouncing it is good after his creation” (gr, 209). to the contrary, almost all epigrams in mcauley’s texts issue from the subject, a heavier presence than in trakl. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 synchronicity there is a pronounced synchronicity in mcauley’s encounter with trakl; in the discovery of, and attraction to, trakl’s symbolic language and paratactic techniques, and in a recognition of a technical and spiritual affinity which also entailed a rediscovery of earlier, youthful techniques. thus, a random comprehensiveness in the accumulation of detail, in end-stopped descriptive sentences returns in mcauley’s later style, a “growing emphasis on the line as the basic ‘semantic’ unit of his verse, [reflecting] a certain fragmentation of perception, a less rationally structured movement away from his earlier more discursive mode” (kirkpatrick, 197). such fitfully catalogued descriptions and statements (bradley 459) suggest a lower level of expectation, and a reluctance to make grand claims. the commentary, when it arrives, seems masked, enigmatic and surprising, akin to the aphorism northrop frye associated with the truth-telling seer (56). mcauley’s aphorism is often expressed in the negative: “loss is what nothing alters or annuls” (“st john’s park,” cp, 222). nonetheless, in aesthetic terms, the attainment of a stillness and objectivity seems an advance on the quarrelling voices of mcauley’s middle phase. mcauley admitted in 1975 that rediscovering trakl “[…] happened at the right moment, because i found that he had worked out ways, procedures for the writing of intense, small rather lyrical poems which were the kind that i was ready to do” (de berg 11, 352). eleven years earlier, following his long experiment with the discursive poem, the poet had already accepted that the “modern short poem offer[ed] the chance of [ . . . ] exploring a limited situation,” as demonstrated by trakl, rather than “committing yourself to a whole world-view” (1964, 11). travel and dedication mcauley’s major tribute was his “pilgrimage” to trakl’s homeland, salzburg, innsbruck and the wachau during october 1973, following his translation of the poems and his abc radio broadcast (8 july 1973). it culminated in the dedicatory suite of four poems titled “trakl: salzburg.” the first, titled “mönchsberg” (the fortification within salzburg), was written between april and may 1973, before mcauley’s visit. the following poems, “in the mirabell garden,” “in a village churchyard” and “spiritual song,” were probably written during or after the visit, as they describe details of the city and region. these, unlike his translations of trakl poems contained in his essay, were included in mcauley’s publication mln (1976, 289-292) and cp94, 289-292. “mönchsberg,” comprising four triplets in blank verse, is an apostrophe to the poet for whom mcauley felt such rapport, named only in the overriding title “trakl: salzburg”: heavy is such a task: born in a broken time, to carry it all within, and bear it into freedom, in a world towards evening where insatiate hungers prowl. o music out of decay coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 intoning a dark prayer! rooks build in the sound of bells. a level mild sun lights up new sprigs of green on boughs that shiver with cold. (cp94, 289) the expressionist, curt trimeters and trochaic line beginnings, accentuate themes of decadence and belatedness, and of trakl being “born in a broken time,” and “in a world towards evening” (st. 2) before the outbreak of wwi. they voice a fellow-lament at the burden of the poet fated to be born out-of-his-time, or “in an impoverished time,” words cited by a younger mcauley in 1946 from friedrich hölderlin,xi also a forerunner of trakl. the “heavy […] task” (st.1) is that of being a poet. mcauley’s youthful apostrophic style returns in st.3 in the utterance “o music” and also his focus on abstract themes (time, freedom, hunger and decay) in contrast to the objective imagism of his late lyrics. however, that later style reappears in the last triplet, detailing a cold, late-winter landscape. its rooks echo the morbid raven motif of trakl, and even poe, in a landscape infused with catholic motifs, dark prayer (st.3), music (st.3) and bells (st.4). even the “insatiate hungers” that “prowl” (st. 2) recall the elusive hunter-figures stepping through the trakl translation “in winter” (gr, 214) and mcauley’s trakl dedication “spiritual song” (cp94, 292). the shivering boughs with “new sprigs of green” suggestive of trakl’s animated landscapes, blend vulnerability and hope, like the music born “out of decay” (st. 3). the emphatic trochaic meter of the first triplet (“heavy is such a task: /born in a broken time”) reinforces what mcauley observed: “[ . . .] trakl’s deeply pessimistic view of man’s condition […] that mankind had never before sunk so deep as it had now sunk after the resurrection of christ” (gr, 217). it echoes mcauley’s remark during his earlier spiritual crisis: “[ . . .] my role is to bear it all within me, and not grasp at quick solutions” (unpublished notebook 1, 11 december 1950). reading trakl during his illness, mcauley revisits the malaise reflected in his essays (the end of modernity, 1959). such resonances explain how mcauley saw in trakl a poet of admired technical skill (reminiscent of his own early style), and shared the blend of hope and uneasiness for the world in which each lived. “mönchsberg” is a poem about kinship and self-recognition. other places, cultures, times the other three sections of the dedicatory “trakl: salzburg” are constructions of travel, marking the poet’s physical arrival in trakl’s geographical world, his journey to salzburg, innsbruck and the wachau during october 1973. even while seeing trakl’s world anew, mcauley’s poems are coloured by the world of his translations: the “scattered villages” of trakl’s “melancholie des abends” (“melancholy of the evening,” gr, 215/st.3), the neglected “cross” which “surmounts the tangle of vine,” the beggar praying before “an old stone,” and the image of mary from trakl’s “geistliches lied” in “spiritual song” (gr, 2123), as well as the “lament” and the “dance of death” of trakl’s “verfall” (“decay,” gr, 207). like the neglected cross, this rural catholic world was already a landscape of decay in trakl’s time, but one in which “god’s azure breath” could still be observed to be “blowing” (“spiritual song,” gr, 212). mcauley’s final dedicatory poem of the same title was an attempt to recreate trakl’s “geistliches lied” (1913), using his six-line stanza. mcauley coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 thought trakl’s poem demonstrated, despite “so much that is fearful and horrible and distraught in the poems […] a vision of innocence and peace and happiness, of goodness and rightness, and of intimacy with god” (gr, 211). while not part of mcauley’s formal homage to trakl, another poem of this group, “madonna,” draws on the catholic motifs of trakl’s “geistliches lied.” in its three unrhymed triplets, followed by an irregular single line, “madonna” offers an expanded apostrophe to the mary of trakl’s poem: “your head bent in the gesture of caring” (“madonna,” cp94, 283). the beggar in prayer in st.4 of “geistliches lied”xii reappears as mcauley’s “derelict counting grains of prayer [ . . .]” (cp94, 284). however, the serene, nostalgic gaze upon mary, the central figure of the catholic faith which mcauley had stubbornly sought, is shattered by an undisguised, autobiographical outburst in the final triplet, in protest at the ritual-deprived post-christian world:xiii “give us back the images. and shut/the foolish mouths” (cp94, 284). the imperative eliotian “give us back the images,” and abrupt “shut/the foolish mouths” leaves an apocalyptic tang that threads through mcauley’s late work. the poem concludes with a desolate array of images: “whirls bits of paper, dust, dead leaves.” they evoke both decay and, in the last line, cataclysm: “the sky runs cracks of jagged glare” (cp94, 284). the decay of trakl’s old christian landscape was well advanced, even within the european rural community, but more so in the vision of the contemporary travellers in mcauley’s sonnet “autumn in the wachau” (cp94, 295), the last of the austrian travel poems in mln. the late twentieth-century travelling poet can be imagined among the “busloads” “in the church” (cp94, 295) who come to observe the old-world graveyard but who frown in their failure to understand the once-significant symbols of the medieval “coat of arms and martyr’s crown.” sensitive to the presence of the past and the evidence of recent conflict endured in central europe bordering western asia, the poem offers the pagan simile of the “sun” of present and past times “riding” across the landscape, perhaps like the horse warriors of the “hunnish nation” visiting its remoter past: the sun rides like a nameless god that the hunnish nation saw. ancient ground cries out with blood (cp94, 295) the “ancient ground” crying out with blood also suggests the witnessing by the youthful trakl, who was posted to the german front at the outbreak of ww1. the “blood” and the “vanished flesh” of the first and second stanzas are both ancient and “raw” (cp94, 295). the poem presents a contrast between the “young” poet who died, near the front in late 1914, and the older, ill, visiting poet, depicted among the uncomprehending “busloads.” it evokes belatedness, reminiscent of thomas hardy, that the christian world, with its icons, is as transitory as its pagan predecessor in the face of time and indifferent nature. rowe has suggested that mcauley’s fractious relationship with the catholic church was “[…] fortunate for his poetry. it meant that the church which might have falsely consoled him, received him as, secretly, he would have wanted: as the trespasser, the exile, the wanderer in the darkness of the heart” (1984 48). mcauley’s poems for the austrian poet, his world and his apprehension are elegiac, paying homage to lost, past times in which trakl lived and breathed. mcauley’s travel texts create doubled layers of text – of place observed by mcauley, his imagined subjects and the apostrophised character trakl – producing a dialogue resounding between present and past, between an australian but also transnational poet and more significantly the other, earlier coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 european ancestor or precursor who had come to haunt mcauley’s present and his poetic landscapes. becoming trakl: reading, translation, adaptation, appropriation reading mcauley’s translations of trakl beside his own poems from this time, the imprint of the austrian poet on mcauley’s work is overwhelming. poem speaks to poem, in an echo of motif, phrase, mood, form, diction, colour-language, theme, rhetorical and metaphoric construction and figurative landscapes. it seems that trakl’s landscape of salzburg and its rural surrounds were the landscape mcauley himself coveted (page, 2014) and attempted to replicate or discover in his actual imaginative landscape of new town and tasmania. paul ricoeur has argued that an understanding of “otherness [was] at the heart of selfhood” (1992 318), notably in the travel involved in translation or reading, evident in mcauley’s literary journey and his austrian visit. while not acknowledging many, mcauley admitted the strong “influence of a remarkable kind, an austrian poet, georg trakl, who belonged to the preworld war one generation in europe […]” (de berg 11, 351). mcauley admitted that trakl “[…] has marked certain features of my late work. […] i have been extremely interested in him” (santamaria 56). the late poems (the dedication “trakl: salzburg” and the associated trakl-influenced poems) and translations testify to a disconcerting homogeneity, a coincidence of lyric apprehension and forms, a shared vision of man in his search for order and meaning in a precarious world. trakl’s poetry and world haunts the later verse of mcauley, his australian acolyte, to an extraordinary extent. maver has underlined mcauley’s fin-de siècle affinity with the decadent trakl (1990, 121). kramer considers that mcauley’s personal crisis and increased sensitivity arising from his illness made him feel especial sympathy with trakl’s “disturbed and sensitive spirit” (jm xxiv). pybus argues that mcauley, visiting salzburg with a girlfriend, was, like trakl, tormented with sexual guilt, a trespasser like mcauley’s persona in “private devotions” (cp94, 281) (1999 238). ackland surmises that mcauley's own addiction to alcohol “drew him towards his doomed poetic double in trakl” (2001 218) and that the australian poet felt “compelled to replicate aspects of the doomed european's life,” citing mcauley's own acolyte, graeme hetherington: “[…] with so little time left [ . . .] he elected to be trakl” (qtd in ackland, 230). while that claim seems overstated, trakl does become the overriding ghostly presence in mcauley's late work, more pronouncedly than in his early apprenticeship to rilke. however, as mcauley explained, “they were intense, small, rather lyrical poems which were the kind i was ready to do” (de berg 11, 352). in the anxiety of influence, harold bloom emphasised andré malraux’s observation how a young man’s heart might be haunted by a “few almighty, often antagonistic ghosts […]” (1997 26). so, if rilke was one of the ghosts of mcauley's youth, the poet trakl, already a light influence in his late thirties, would be the even heavier ghost of mcauley's late middle age; his penultimate productive period. in bloomian terms, mcauley's “profound act of reading” trakl (xxii), resulting in his combined tribute of dedication, translations and appropriations, might be described as a “swallowing” (xxi) of trakl's haunting verse. throughout mcauley’s profound “trakl” encounter we sense bloom’s “return of the ‘apophrades’” (139) – the powerful dead in mcauley’s work in which trakl, in his middle pre-expressionist period, represents a restrained, more compatible, relative of rilke, an early master. bloom saw such vulnerability to a “revisionary relationship to the dead” as characteristic of the “mature strong coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 poet [evident in] poems that quest for a final clarity” (140). it reflects endorsement of the style to which mcauley returned – the paratactic nature lyric, enriched with experience and strengthened symbolic language. what laurence venuti has written about translation in the romantic period, in which the translator “loses his national self through a strong identification with a cultural other” (2004 20), applies to mcauley’s relationship with trakl. the translation work feeds the growth of the poet. while mcauley’s earlier travel to the usa and ireland provided literary stimulus and productive discovery of his childhood and natural culture, his interpretations of trakl provided another kind of transportation, into the place and culture of the translated and, to a degree, appropriated “other” poet. in the end of modernity (1959) mcauley described the modern industrial world as one of “disinherited beings, cut off from the deepest sources of human satisfaction, [. . .] driven [...] through a course of life without meaning or direction” (“what must be developed,” em, 25). he contemplated the order possible in a “metaphysically-oriented society” (“the grinning mirror, em, 69), possibly thinking of the central european villages rilke had envisaged in “herbsttag,” or the “old social order” he would find in trakl's early twentieth-century salzburg (gr, 209). throughout this time mcauley seemed less nostalgic for place than for time and culture, a prelapsarian anguish he had encountered in the poetry of the australian symbolist christopher brennan. while mcauley’s long repudiation of a national approach to poetry matched his cosmopolitan, even transnational, reaching out to other cultures, he consistently celebrated a “healthy, normal regionalism” (em, 65). since settling in hobart, in 1961, and getting to know its natural and human landscapes, mcauley had found a “community small enough to be experienced as a whole, unsimplified” (kramer, 1988 8), whose temperate european climate and landscape in some way matched the images of his european translations, and that became transformed, through poetry, into a world parallel to, and identifiable with, trakl’s. mcauley’s trakl translations brought about a creative dislocation, an experiment with a different and somewhat nostalgic mask, and the description of other landscapes quite close to his own. gwen harwood describes the translator (but also poet) mcauley as walking with ease through trakl's worlds, suggesting thus a two-way or double occupation – trakl in mcauley: mcauley in trakl. for mcauley, reading and translating trakl may have been, to recall bloom, like looking into a mirror at his “gnostic double” (145) or an “encounter with one's own alterity” (ravenscroft 82-83). that crisply imaged and musical voice, that recognisable sense of place and situation mcauley admired in trakl was, to some extent, being established in his 1960s poetics in poems of place such as “in the huon valley” and his 1970s lyric landscapes celebrating the homely, temperate environment of his new home, tasmania. mcauley commented not long before he died that while trakl’s influence had been “more identifiable than any other poet, [it had served] to liberate, not deflect, my native impulse” (mav, 204). “i haven’t felt that i’ve been subjugated but rather have got further along my own way by the accidental meeting with trakl’s work” (santamaria 57-8). affinities – the “real subject,” the “special mode of expression” the presence of trakl, arguably a poetics of decay and transience,xiv casts a heavy shadow over mcauley’s late lyric landscapes, being the strongest of his bloomian precursors. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 sensitised by his illness mcauley lifted from trakl’s sensitive apprehensions (from another hemisphere and time) a lens for viewing and representing his late twentieth-century tasmania at the time of his impending death: “each breath we draw draws in the time allowed” (“in aeternum,” cp, 225). his late work gives shape to a somewhat older, more experienced, heavier persona than the haunted younger trakl who steps beside mcauley through his lyric landscapes. this wanderer of european towns and churchyards, as well as the parklands of his new town home, has finally found less the epiphanic “‘land of similes’ closer to his own suburban home” (kirkpatrick 193) than a familiar terrain from which he could draw meaning and of which he could speak authentically. there is recognition in mcauley’s observation how: “in the last two years of [trakl’s] life he found his authentic voice, his real subject, his special mode of expression” (gr, 202). the australian poet’s excursion with trakl reflected a similar transformation, but in the sense of what he called coming “full circle,” recovering the symbolist short lyric poem (mav, 204) and inward glance with which he had begun. it was something rediscovered, though its “greater depth of experience” brought a new inflection, the laconic, stoic voice, weighted with epitaph. references ackland, michael. damaged men: the precarious lives of james mcauley and harold stewart. crows nest: allen and unwin, 2001. bloom, harold. the anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry. (1973) 2nd. ed. oxford: oxford up, 1997. bradley, david. “james mcauley: the landscape of the heart.” the literature of australia. ed. g. dutton, ringwood: penguin, 1976, 443-460. calinescu, matei. the five faces of modernity: modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, postmodernism. durham: duke up, 1987. catalano, gary. “the language of sight: the late poems of james mcauley.” imago: new writing, 8, autumn 1996, 135-144. coleman, peter. the heart of james mcauley: life and work of the australian poet. wild cat: sydney, 1980. frye, northrop. an anatomy of criticism. (1957). london: penguin, 1990. gaffney, carmel. “music out of decay: mcauley’s late poetry and trakl.” southerly, 36.4, 1976, 407 – 19. gifford, terry. pastoral. london new york: routledge, 1999. green, h.m. letter to james mcauley, 5 march 1944. h. m green papers, nla hardy, thomas. jude the obscure. (1895), ware/uk: wordsworth classics, 1993. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 harrison, keith. “the geist in the mirror: harold stewart and james mcauley.”australian book review, 272, june july 2005, 53-57. harwood, gwen. unpublished letter to james mcauley, 25 may 1975, mcauley papers, state library nsw. heidegger, martin. “language.” poetry, language, thought, trans. albert hofstadter, new york: harper, 2001. 187208. . . . “what are poets for?”, poetry, language, thought, 87-139. kinross-smith, graeme. australian writers. west melbourne: nelson, 1980. kirkpatrick, peter. “patience and despair. james mcauley’s pessimism.” southerly, 44.2, 1984, 191-205. kramer, leonie. ed. james mcauley: poetry essays and personal commentary, st lucia: u. queensland press, 1988. lawrence, d.h. “the spirit of place.” studies in classic american literature, 1923. mcauley, james. “symbolism: an essay in poetics.” unpublished masters thesis, u. sydney, fisher library rare books. . . .the end of modernity: essays on literature, art and culture. sydney: angus and robertson, 1959. . . . “the grinning mirror.” the end of modernity, sydney: angus and robertson, 1959. . . . “what must be developed.” the end of modernity, sydney: angus and robertson, 1959. . . . (and v. b. smith). “poetry today – a dialogue”. diogenes, literary annual, u. tasmania, 10, 1964, 9-17. . . . the personal element in australian poetry. townsville: foundation for australian literary studies, monograph 3, sydney: angus and robertson, 1970, lectures delivered 1968. . . . letter to a.d. hope, 11 november 1970. a.d. hope papers, nla. . . . collected poems: 1936-1970, sydney: angus and robertson, 1971. . . . “the poetry of georg trakl.” the grammar of the real, selected prose 1959-1974, melbourne: oxford up, 1975, 202-223. (abc ts, 8 july 1973, australian archives, sydney. . . .music late at night: poems 1970-1973. poets of the month series, sydney: angus and robertson, 1976. : : time given: poems 1970-1976 by james mcauley. canberra: brindabella press, 1976. . . .a map of australian verse. melbourne: oxford university press,1975. . . . “the rhetoric of australian poetry.” southerly, 36.1, 1976, 3-23, 1976, (herbert blaiklock memorial lecture 1975). . . . “culture and counter-culture: a personal view.” quadrant, 20.9, 1976, 12-21. . . .interview with hazel de berg. oral history trc 856-57 and ts, nla, 18 september 1975. . . .interview with catherine santamaria, oral history trc 576 and ts , nla, 5 may 1976. . . .(and patricia giles). a world of its own: poems by james mcauley, paintings by patricia giles. introd. a.d. hope, canberra: brindabella press, 1977. . . . georg trakl, music in the mirabell garden: translations, images and songs, james mcauley, larry sitsky, john olsen, ed. john winter, introd. gwen harwood, hobart: new albion press, 1982. . . . collected poems, ed. leonie kramer, sydney: angus and robertson, 1994. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 mccredden, lyn. “mastering romanticism. the struggle for vocation in the texts of james mcauley.” imagining romanticism: essays in english and american romanticism, ed. deidre coleman and peter otto, west cornwall, connecticut: locust hill press, 1992, 265-273. macainsh, noel. “music in mirabell.” quadrant, 28.9, 1984, 18-23. maver, igor. “the mirabell gardens revisited poets of the ghostly – pale moon and leaden sky – james mcauley and georg trakl.” outrider. a year of australian literature, 1990, ed. manfred jurgensen, brisbane: phoenix, 106121. page, jean. “writing from the periphery the haunted landscapes of james mcauley”. journal of the association for the study of australian literature, 14.1, 2014. preminger, alex, and t.v.f brogan, eds. the princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics, princeton:princeton up, 1993. pybus, cassandra. the devil and james mcauley. st lucia: u. queensland press, 1999. ravenscroft, alison. the post-colonial eye, white australian desire and the visual field of race. farnham: ashgate, 2012. ricoeur, paul. oneself as another. trans. kathleen blamey, chicago: u chicago press, 1992. rowe, noel. “the catholic element in james mcauley’s poetry.” quadrant, 28.5, may 1984, 45-48. said, edward. on late style: music, literature against the grain. london: bloomsbury, 2006. smith, vivian. james mcauley australian writers and their work. (1965) melbourne: oxford up, rev. ed. 1970. trakl, georg. gedichte, wolff, 1913. venuti, lawrence. ed, the translation studies reader. 2nd ed. new york: routledge, 2004. i “australian poetry.” princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. ed. alex preminger and t.v. f. brogan, princeton up, 1993, 108. ii in the 1982 edition of mcauley’s trakl translations the line was altered from this cp 1971 version to replace “swishes” with “clatters,” and also the 4th line of stanza 1. see georg trakl, music in the mirabell garden: translations, images and songs, james mcauley, larry sitsky, john olsen, ed. john winter, introd. gwen harwood, n.p. iii comparisons have been made by coleman (1980), catalano (1996), gaffney (1976), kirkpatrick (1984), macainsh (1984), and maver (1990). iv the commentator mentioned was eduard lachmann. fn 3, gr, 223. v an honours thesis commenting on mcauley’s translations of trakl, by elaine wells for the german department in 1972 at u tasmania (mcauley note, 20 march 1972, journal 13, box 1), unfortunately, has not been located. vi most of the translated poems come from trakl’s gedichte, wolff, 1913. vii the german philosopher ludwig wittgenstein seemed to share mcauley’s admiration, signalled by bequests in 1912 to both rilke and trakl. viii heidegger. “language.” (1959) 187-208. (original lecture, 7 october 1950.) coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 ix “symbolism: an essay in poetics,” 16. x ƒrom abc audio-tape, 8 july 1973. xi heidegger shared mcauley’s admiration for the german romantic strand in the “ontological poets” –hölderlin, trakl and to some extent rilke, as outlined in his hölderlin-inspired essay “what are poets for?” xii trakl. “geistliches lied.” “bettler dort em alten stein/scheint verstorben im gebet.” xiii mcauley saw the vatican reforms as unleashing “a riot of anti-traditionalism.” “culture and counterculture.”1976, 18. xiv calinescu sees adorno’s apprehension of decadence as “a culture of negation,” as belonging to modernism, (1987, 210). jean page is a researcher at the university of lisbon centre for english studies (ulices). in 2018 she completed her doctoral thesis on the successive voices in the poetry of james mcauley. she completed a master of arts degree in australian literature on the poetry of john shaw neilson at the university of sydney. her research interests include poetry and short fiction, from australian and other english-language postcolonial literatures, studies in identity and spatiality. she participates in international and national conferences on australian literature and has published in their journals. she works with ulices’ research project representations of home in literature and the visual arts (rhome). coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 shimaumi: aquapelagic imagery and poetics of ‘island-laying’ in kojiki juni’chiro suwa hirosaki university suwa@cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp copyright© 2021 juni’chiro suwa. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: kojiki, one of the oldest surviving records of japanese history and mythology compiled in 712 ce, tells of the origin of the japanese archipelago and nation. the initial chapter is known as shimaumi, or ‘island-laying’, where the birth of gods also gives rise to the formation of japanese islands. this paper considers two aspects of shimaumi, firstly the spatiality of the myth and how aquapelagic imagery occurs both within shima (a locus of livelihood) and within the choice of kanji. secondly, this paper considers how the aquapelagic imagery of shimaumi can be characterised as territorializing the sacred through ‘island-naming as a god’. additionally, while kojiki is mostly written in classical chinese, some japanese words and phrases are used for island names, onomatopoeia, mystical words and transliterated poetry within chinese syntax. performance, particularly of these japanese elements, means that kojiki can be viewed as an act of totohogi; a rejuvenation of the world in japanese cosmology that is as individual as each re-telling. keywords: shima, kojiki, performance, aquapelago, shimaumi introduction kojiki is widely considered as the oldest surviving record of japanese history and myths, dating to approximately 712 ce. the introduction, written entirely in classical chinese, was probably added decades later anonymously, although it attributes authorship to court official ōno yasumaro (suzuki, 1967). most of the historical accounts in kojiki are laden with incredible tales, if not fantasy, and hard to make reference to without extensive criticism and contextualisation. nonetheless, the first section consists of creation myths known as the legend of shimaumi (island-laying). these myths provide an example of how imagination interacts with the epistemology of island formation and location to create ‘aquapelagic imagery’ that is recreated uniquely each time it is performed with different actors and audiences. this paper will elaborate how cosmological story-telling mailto:suwa@cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 interacts with aquapelagic imagery within the socio-spatial context of shima to produce a multi-layered experience that blends the temporality of creation with the here-and-now of the performance. aquapelagic imagery ‘manifested itself as an aggregation of beliefs and imagined figures’ (hayward, 2018: 2) in order to grasp and expand on philip hayward’s key ideas of ‘aquapelago’ and ‘aquapelagic assemblage’ (2012a&b), that conceptualises an island and its surrounding waters as a rhizomatic assemblage rather than a stereotype of a lone and deserted piece of land. the aquapelago explicitly integrates living and non-living actants within their terrestrial and aquatic environments, including any inland waters and waterways. aquapelagoes wax and wane with human inhabitation and movement, therefore they are not fixed but performed, elastic entities (hayward, 2015). aquapelagic imagery can also be performative. one example of this are the legends of ningyo, the japanese version of the mermaid, where tourist-pilgrims visit the mummified and enshrined ‘bodies’ of ningyo (see suwa, 2018). in this regard, aquapelagic imagery is not simply imagination per se, instead it is a multi-layered act of dreaming: the dream itself, and the act of seeing a dream cannot be separated. the reading of island-laying re-enacts the very moment of creation to be witnessed and participated. aquapelagic imagery is therefore a phenomenon which assembles the image with the process of performance. the shimaumi myth tells that the first japanese island was created from primeval chaos, whereupon a god and goddess descended to reside. subsequent islands were born from the womb of the goddess. the myth gives each island a pair of names, one as an island and the other as a god. the assemblage of landmasses as deities generates a multiplicity of images wherein non-living objects and phenomena lose distinction from the living. this has implications for our conceptualization of the ‘aquapelago’ that distinguishes between the living and non-living actants. the japanese islands are simultaneously animate and inanimate. the shimaumi myth of kojiki in this regard is an aquapelagic tale within the socio-spatial construct of shima (suwa, 2005). in japanese and particularly the okinawan lexicon, shima, are not merely geographical features but generators of cosmological order since the word connotes a locus of livelihood, foundation, base, home and territoriality (ibid.). the space of shima does not necessarily comprise a political entity but a territory, or site, of human activity. most of kojiki is written in modified classical chinese, but in some instances japanese words are inserted fragmentarily. the part which appears in japanese (with transliteration in chinese letters) mainly records names, speech and lyrics by the protagonist. in terms of aquapelagic imagery, preservation of japanese phrases is crucial in making the islandlaying a reality for the japanese nation. the act of speech, whether narrating, reciting or singing is therefore a performance of aquapelagic imagery and island-laying. this paper employs one of the most accessible and popular editions of kojiki by kurano kenji (kurano, 1963), and for an alternative interpretation in contemporary japanese it also refers to the edition by tsugita masaki (1977). for convenience, old spellings that appear in the text are transformed to contemporary ones; for instance, awaji instead of ahaji. the only exception is the old onomatopoeia koworo koworo, instead of contemporary kōro kōro, because of the significance of the original sound in the thesis of this paper. as the scope of this paper is aquapelagic imagery, its objective is neither the scholarship of asian history or classical japanese literature, nor does it attempt to interpret facts about kojiki and decode historical events from the text. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 the shimaumi myth the drama of shimaumi is depicted in the first part of kojiki. the following is an abridged summary (translation and interpretation mine, for an alternative and full translation see philippi, 1969). izanami and izanami, along with other gods, come out of the primeval chaos as if shoots of reeds sprout. the gods give a sacred spear to izanagi and tell him: with goddess izanami he consolidates the floating land to create a country. the couple stands up on the bridge of heaven. as izanagi stirs the spear gently and then pulls it out, salt dripping from the blade accumulates to form an island. this is onokoro island. izanagi and izanami descend on onokoro. they raise posts to build a large palace. izanagi says to izanami, ‘how is your body made like?’ izanami replies: ‘i am almost perfect but there is just one part short.’ izanagi says, ‘mine is one part sticking out. why do we not put them together to form a country? can you bear it?’ izanami replies: ‘that’s fine!’ izanagi continues: ‘then, make a turn around this sacred post. when we meet again, we have mito no maguwai (intercourse). you turn from the right. i come from the left.’ as the couple walk around the post, izanami calls: ‘o what a lovely boy he is!’ izanagi responds: ‘o what a lovely girl she is!’ as they meet again, however, izanagi complains: ‘it is not good for a woman to initiate the speech’ however, they sleep together and izanami gives birth to hiruko, the leech child. the two put their invalid infant on a straw boat to desert it. izanami bares an island awashima then, but this island too, is not counted as their heir. the couple is perplexed and make a visit to heaven for guidance. a divination is consulted: the pattern of cracked burnt deer’s bone dictates that changing turn of the call is the solution. they come back home; this time izanagi initiates the address and awajinohonosawakenoshima is born. and then, there is the island of iyonofutananoshima. this island has one body but four faces: iyo province is named ehime, sanuki province is named īyorihiko, awa province is ōgetsuhime, and tosa province is named tayoriwake. next are the triple islands of okinoshima known as amenookoshirowake. the next is tsukushi island: he, too, has four faces… [a lengthy list of islands with their god names follows.] when all parts of the country were born, other gods are given birth. [a list of natural elements and so forth with god names follows.] at last, when izanami gives birth to the fire god, she divinely passes away. during her last moment her vomit, urine and faeces turn into gods as well. izanagi becomes angry and cuts the fire god with a sword. the dismembered parts of his body become gods of swords, water and mountains. izanagi is grief-stricken, yet he still craves for his dead wife. he decides to go to dark yominokuni, the realm of the dead, to bring her back. there he meets izanami. he pleads to her: ‘my dear, our country is still unfinished. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 please come home with me!’ izanami tells him that because she has eaten otherworldly food, she is unable to come back. she can still ask the god of yomi, though, but during their talk izanagi should not peep. to the dismay of izanami, however, izanagi cannot resist looking in the window and finds out that she is a rotten corpse covered with maggots and angry thunder goblins. izanagi runs away as he casts magic to ward off his furious wife and an army of her darkly daemons chasing after him. at last, the dead izanami and her company are held at the border. unable to capture her man, she casts a curse at him over the rock of chibikinoiwa [literally, ‘the rock to be hauled by a thousand]: ‘i will strangle to death a thousand of your populace a day, my sweetheart!’ izanagi replies: ‘so do you, my dear, but i build one thousand and five hundred delivery rooms a day!’ the chibikinoiwa rock, which separated the couple, becomes a god named chigaeshinokami [literally ‘the god of turned-away road]. this tells how the japanese populace multiplies. the gods izanagi and izanami are married and give birth to god-islands and many other cosmic elements follow. legendary emperors are described as the descendants of the original couple, which acts as a bridge between the kojiki myth and the japanese chronicle. the creation myth personifies the islands as gods as well as the constituents of japanese native lands. the islanders are the siblings of these god-islands upon which their livelihood depends. in the shimaumi tales an island takes a pair of names: a geographical one by which the island is called, and another name as a god (the kami are deities in the shinto belief system). provinces may be entitled to a paired name as well, not just whole islands. for instance, iyonofutananoshima (today’s shikoku), literally ‘island of iyo with double names’, has four provinces with a god name for each. the first two islands in the myth, onokoro and awashima, take no god names. these islands were created not from copulation but drips of muddy water from the spear of izanagi (kishine, 2018). the lack of a godly name for sado island remains as an enigma. although kojiki does not state who gives the kami-islands their names, it is said that when an island is given a godly name it acquires a body (the physical manifestation) of a god. this resonates with some folk beliefs in contemporary practice. okinoshima, an island off the coast of fukuoka, enshrines the island goddess tagorihime, a god who is mentioned in kojiki. simultaneously, the whole island is believed as the goshintai, the body of god. tagorihime is invisible and her figure can never be iconified but she is embodied as the island. the entire island, therefore, is a forbidden territory: no one is allowed to visit okinoshima, even the priest is only allowed to set foot ashore for rituals. it is strictly taboo to remove anything from the island, even a pebble or twig of a tree. the whole okinoshima is an assemblage of tagorihime as far as it is considered to be a space of life. similarly, a number of small islands and rocks in mainland japan are also known to be worshipped as goshintai, and the rituals conducted for and on them generate sacred territoriality as in the case of shimokita peninsula of northern japan (suwa, 2016). to name an island is to name a god, and the entire space becomes a shima, a here-and-now space of activity. the names izanagi and izanami probably derive from the verb izanau, ‘to invite’, with suffixes to designate masculine ki (or gi) and feminine mi. they invite each other for marriage but the incestual marriage of siblings is biologically unsound. the ‘proper’ procedure for invitation with divinatory guidance suggests that only such a ritual process coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 can lead to legitimate marriage and fecundity. thereafter, the relationship is no longer incestual and the brother and sister are transformed into husband and wife and this is truly celebrated with pregnancy.1 the couple give birth to the islands west of mainland japan. later chronicles indicate that eastern honshu and hokkaido were the home to nonjapanese groups in the ancient era, namely they are emishi (reputedly ainu) and ashihase or mishihase (feasibly a branch of tungus). wakatsuki (1999) makes a fine analysis that to decipher the group’s name as mishihase, which is more common, is equivocal. the first island, onokoro where izanagi and izanami marry, is spelled in chinese characters, or kanji, as 淤能碁呂. the first letter 淤 contains an idiographic indicator for various states of water (e.g. 海 ‘sea’; 湖 ‘lake’; 河 ‘river’; 潮 ‘tide’, 池 ‘pond’, 沢 ‘brook, gorge, narrows’, 流 ‘current, flow’ 滴 ‘drops’ 液 ‘fluid, liquid’ 酒 ‘sake’ etc.). similarly, a stone (石) is hidden in 碁. onokoro is therefore an aquapelagic assemblage: the kanji are selected for visual effect to show the island as a rock coming out of the primordial murky waters. whereas it may appear as simple idiographic wordplay, the spelling of onokoro in kanji textually visualises the drama of creation. this form of aquapelagic imagery, through the choice of kanji, is a desire to narrate the performance of the island creation myth. after the failed attempt to recover his wife from the realm of the dead, izanagi continues to generate numerous gods sui generis during purification rituals. as he washes his left eye the solar goddess amaterasu is born. amaterasu is destined to become the ruler of heavenly land takamagahara as well as the ancestor to the imperial family. her younger brother susanowo was born when izanagi washed his nose. izanami’s death marks the end of the couple’s role as the creator of japanese land, as they are taken over by the drama of conflict between amaterasu and susanowo, which explains the origin of the ancient dual states of yamato and izumo. at this point, the gods appear as rulers of the land, not personified as islands, suggesting that the two tales may have different origins. today, there are three places that are thought of as the location of onokoro: nushima, eshima and a shinto shrine named after onokoro, all of which are located on or near awajishima (map; photos 1, 2 and 3). awajishima appears to be a composite of particles awa (province named after finger millet) – ji (road) – shima (island). awa, synonymous with the millet and the oldest known crop in japanese archipelago, is a province in shikoku. only the narrow naruto strait separates awajishima and tokushima prefecture (then awa) of shikoku, and from the ancient capital of nara, the island is located between honshu and shikoku. the name awajishima therefore indicates that fertility is a key element of the shimaumi, and that the islands are the space associated with producing, growing and harvesting of life. for example, in tokushima, the finger millet, the traditional awa crop, is still grown by slash-and-burn cultivation as a way of preserving cultural heritage that existed before rice (see sekai nogyo isan, website). in folk beliefs, it is not uncommon to enshrine a rock as a shima, and regard it as a sacred territory (suwa, 2016). the fact that onokoro appears as a rock (as in eshima) or an isolated landmark (as in onokorojima shrine) further indicates that territoriality, rather than proportion or even aquapelagity, is important for the space of shima. the rock that separated the living izanagi and the dead izanami is given the name chigaeshinokami, literally meaning ‘the god of turned-away road’, because of its significance. the naming of gods, kami, takes place when an animating power generates coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 an assemblage of space-event. in this regard, kami are transcendental supernatural beings; actants which interact as agents of events to happen. the rock chibikinoiwa is a shima and simultaneously a god, therefore, it becomes the site of territorialisation on which the drama of light versus darkness and life against death takes place (suwa 2012). whether it is an island or a rock, shima is a lively space of being, and the shimaumi myth is the narrative of such a reality. the events in shimaumi are an assemblage of the simultaneous placing/making of islands and naming of gods, a mystical, even sacred, process where gods become the agent of the assemblage. therefore, the process of ‘island-laying’ does not necessarily mean that a shima is an island in a geographical sense, but the relationship between the sacred and the fertility of earth invites discussions of gender. for instance, does izanami make herself a shima in a larger sense because her womb is a space-event of island-laying? what of izanagi’s spear? map: locations of onokoro showing eshima絵島, nushima沼島 and onokorojima shrineおのころ島神社. (source: https://note.com/lightwind/n/n30d5baf48068 n.d.) https://note.com/lightwind/n/n30d5baf48068 coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 photo 1: eshima (source: japan line website, n.d) photo 2: nushima (source: nushima website, n.d.) coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 photo 3: onokorojima shrine on awajishima (source: http://s1nakagiri.blogspot.com/2015/12/blog-post_57.html n.d.) enunciation, performativity and aquapelagic imagery kotohogi is the ancient japanese term meaning ‘to celebrate words’, it is an enactment of rejuvenating the world in japanese cosmology. the concept persists in a number of traditional rituals and performative arts across buddhist, shinto and folk beliefs. this section explores how performing kojiki, particularly shimaumi, highlights the importance of musicality in a broad sense; or what might be called ‘epi-music’, dramatic narrative, tone of words, diction, syllabic rhythm, choice of song or line of theatrical speech together generate a mythical reality that is located in the space of shima. as such these performances are a form of kotohogi. in kojiki, japanese sound is retained in transliteration with instructions such as ‘read the following seven letters as they sound’. fujii sadakazu, in his distinguished insights of ancient chronicles, elaborates how bilingualism in kojiki took place (1978, 1987). he theorized that the original oral pretext of kojiki was filled with too many fixed expressions to be properly interpreted and reproduced by the formality of classical chinese. in his detailed analysis fujii categorises the cases of transliteration into two approximate categories: those which retain distinct grammatical elements, such as particles, and those that are presumably intended to be pronounced in a performative mode (fujii, 1987: 207-322). therefore performance can be seen as central to the shimaumi myth and ‘island-laying’ is not a passive textual event that has happened in the past but an interactive re-creation that takes place in the here-and-now and shaped by the creative choices of the performers. the retention of particles seems to strongly suggest that the words preceding them are to be read in kun’yomi (the reading of a kanji by the native japanese equivalent). examples of latter are abundantly observed in today’s folk and modern orality: kudoki (aka saimon), naniwabushi (aka rōkyoku), various styles in http://s1nakagiri.blogspot.com/2015/12/blog-post_57.html coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 mandan (aka mangei), and casual conversation dialect. therefore, retention of japanese phrases in chinese syntax, however fragmentally, can indicate that parts of myth were originally written as a piece of music or a theatrical speech. as such, shimaumi is performative, and the time-space of performance is always the present whenever imagined and recited. the list below shows four cases of transliteration that appear in the shimaumi myth (in order of appearance). a 布斗麻邇爾 futomani ni [futomani (type of divination)/(particle)] b （鹽）*許々袁々呂々邇畫鳴 (shiho) koworo koworo ni kakinashi te [(salt water)/ (onomatopoeia)/(particle)/stir up/(particle)] *whether this letter is transliteration is uncertain but likely. c 美斗能麻具波比 mito no maguwai [genitals / (particle) /sexual intercourse] d 「阿那邇夜志愛上袁登古袁」「阿那邇夜志愛上袁登賣袁」 ‘ananiyashi, e otoko wo.’ ‘ananiyashi e onna wo.’ [‘(exclamation)/nice/man /(particle).’ ‘(exclamation)/nice/woman/(particle)’] the syllables of futomani (a) retain the japanese word for a form of divination; to receive an oracle by reading patterns of a burned shoulder bone of deer. the closest equivalent to this divination in china uses turtle shells instead. it was perhaps possible to insert a more general term to suggest divination instead of continuing to use the word futomani; however, the sound of language was regarded as even more important in order to vividly preserve the momentum, performativity and dramaturgy of the crucial moment of shimaumi. in addition, the fact that the particle ni is retained here further indicates the importance of the sound and rhythm produced by japanese phrasing for preserving the sense of orality. the creation of onokoro island is described by the very unique onomatopoeia koworo koworo (b). the first character 鹽shio (salt) and last two 畫鳴 kakinashi (to stir up) are instructed to be read in japanese native reading, or kun’yomi (as opposed to on'yomi which is a reading style derived from the chinese pronunciations). since the rest of izanagi’s action is in chinese, the author of the text considers the onomatopoeia indispensable for dramatic effect to re-enact in the very moment of creation. the whole world of shimaumi is in the rhythmic mood of six syllables. in japanese onomatopoeia, the duration of enunciation is produced by mora (a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight), and it can actually express velocity of action by changing the number of syllables. if the primeval sea was light, smooth and fluid, izanagi would only stir it easily, briskly or softly. in such a case, it can make it shorter such as koro koro. however, the myth tells that the primitive sea is murky and the magical spear is long as well as heavy. izanagi has to stir his spear from the top of the bridge while other gods are coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 watching. as a consequence, he starts to stir hesitantly, awkwardly and carefully, but with a great force. it was not an easy business to create an island from the chaos, even to a god. this moment makes a dramatic highlight of kojiki, as all gods in heaven watch anxiously waiting for the creation of an island forming. the best onomatopoeia to convey such nuance would be adding another syllable, wo. the syllables koworo koworo is an impeccable solution to reproduce vivid image of the birth of onokoro, as the first island of archipelago gradually taking shape: koworo koworo koworo… as izanagi participates in this painstakingly slow accumulation of consolidating landmass. in any dramatic reconstruction, the enunciation of koworo koworo can even direct the acting protagonist to comically exaggerate his stirring action. it cannot be verified that the section of onokoro was originally a part of theatre performance or a piece of oral poetry, but the case of koworo koworo suggests that it may have been so. izanagi’s action of stirring is the first climax in the tale of shimaumi; therefore, the selected onomatopoeia was not only popular but an expression of what the origin of the universe is all about. the phrase mito no maguwai (c) further exemplifies that the nuance of words and rhythm produced by syllabic meter are equally important. this rather graphic reference to sexual intercourse finds no equivalents among the sacred language of confucian scripture or buddhist sutra. the text narrates about the erotic contents of oral tradition for the sake of depicting the shimaumi myth as a sympathetic magic of fecundity. the phrase mito no maguwai counts seven syllables, which suggests that the words are originally part of a legend to be narrated or sung as part of a drama. as in this case, sensuality plays a key role in earlier chapters of kojiki to generate the world. in the chapter following shimaumi, when the upset solar goddess amaterasu hides in the cave and the whole world is lost in the darkness. the rainmaking goddess amenouzume is called upon for her intense entrancing dance. as she wiggles her waist strip of cloth hangs down in front of her genitals to make all gods laugh. amaterasu hears the noise over the rock and slightly opens it to see. the gods remove the rock and the world is full of light once again. eighth century japanese poetry is structured by grouping phrases of five and/or seven syllables, as in tanka (5-7-5-7-7) and epic chōka (a desired sequence of several phrases of 5-7 syllables with a final phrase of 5-7-7). as a result, specific or coincidental phrasing of five or seven syllables can produce a rhythmic effect, even in contemporary japanese. the phrase koworo koworo ni kakinashi te (b) is a syntax formed by a group of seven and five syllables. by the same token, the exchange between izanagi and izanagi, ‘ananiyashi, e otoko o!’ and ‘ananiyashi, e onna o!’ consists of groups of five syllables (d) (onna’ has three syllables since in this case the ‘n’ /n/ takes one mora or syllabic count). as an actor addresses ‘ananiyashi, e onna o!’ the marriage of gods becomes reenacted here-and-now so that the whole cosmology becomes rejuvenated and all those present rejoice, as happens in many traditional theatrical performances in japan. the word ananiyashi is an ancient form of address, and it also highlights the emphatic value of the first marriage of the world between izanagi and izanami. the retaining of japanese words is effective as it produces syllabic meter. the islands having been born in the mythical drama are felt in the actual enunciation of the text. these islands are individuated by means of naming, mythical reality and the musicality of syllabic organisation. the grouping of five and seven syllables survives and is widely popular in japanese poetry today, particularly as in the fixed form of tanka and haiku. this might facilitate aquapelagic imagery of shimaumi to generate in contemporary contexts. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 returning again to kotohogi, the performing of shimaumi utilizes japanese phrases, syllabic meter and diction to create a musicality. this musicality is reflected in the japanese language itself. shimao miho, the novelist from amami describes how troublesome it is to transliterate her dialect in japanese orthography: ‘it is extremely difficult to write the words of the island… especially the accent cannot be reproduced at all, so when i read what i wrote i feel like: ‘oh, where are these the words come from?’’’, she goes on to say, ‘the words of southern islands have got rich enunciation of song’ (shimao & ishimure, 2003: 45-47). this musicality is not fixed but is as individual as the performers. as such, the space of shima generates only when language and performance are seamlessly assembled into the territoriality of a live experience. the space of shima is the time of shima. as the words in kojiki are recited, it becomes the act of generating the ancient island in the here-and-now of performative space. the islands in shimaumi are performative, and the time-space of performance is always the present whenever imagined and recited. this resonates with words of e.e. cummings commenting on his poetry: “we can never be born enough” (1972:461). conclusion in the chapters after shimaumi, kojiki proceeds to tell of another creation myth; the beginning of the ancient state of wa (which becomes known as yamato and then nippon). however, reading kojiki is indeed a difficult task as not only are the multiple interests of the editors woven into it but also any interpretation is influenced by the reader’s particular socio-cultural context. it is widely known that things described as ‘japanese’ in kojiki cannot be taken as evidence of the essentialism of japanese culture. ever since the ground-breaking, but shinto-nationalist, scholarship of motōri norinaga from the 18th century, kojiki’s contexts as well as division between chinese and japanese syntax has made essentialism easy to overplay. this paper has highlighted that shimaumi is a narrative of aquapelagic imagery territorialized within shima. japanese islands are born of kami and named as their descendants, therefore ‘island-laying’ is a sacred process. further, it has been shown that performance of this aquapelagic imagery ensures that kojiki does not stand alone as an autonomous literary episteme but finds a place in the continuum of performance and ritual that is continually re-created and re-imaged through each performance. as such, any performance of kojiki acts as ‘kotohogi’, rejuvenating and reimagining the world in japanese cosmology. endnotes: 1. this episode of male initiative in adjusting the ‘right’ marriage proposal is reminiscent of patriarchy in ancient china (tsugita 1977: 44). the practices of calling and song exchange are known as utagaki, in which either man or woman can initiate the address. utagaki develops into an important genre in medieval court poetry. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 bibliography cummings, e.e., (1976) collected poems 1913 1962 boston: houghton mifflin harcourt fujii, s., (1978) ko-nihon bungaku hasseiron. tokyo: shichosha fujii, s. (1987) monogatari bunngaku seiritushi tokyo: tokyo daigaku shuppannkai hayward, p., (2012a) aquapelagos and aquapelagic assemblages: towards an integrated study of island societies and marine environments shima 6 (1), 1-11. hayward, p., (2012b) the constitution of assemblages and the aquapelagality of haida gwaii. shima: the international journal of research into island cultures, 6(2), pp.114. hayward, p., (2015) the aquapelago and the estuarine city: reflections on manhattan. urban island studies, 1(1), 81-95. hayward, p., (2018) introduction: mermaids, mercultures and the aquapelagic imaginary, shima 12(2), 1-2. kishine, t., (2018) kojiki shinwa niokeru ahajinohonosawakenoshima wo megutte, fukuoka daigaku jinbun ronso. 50(1), 205-238. kurano, k., (1963) kojiki, tokyo: iwanami shoten. philippi, d. (1969) kojiki translated with an introduction. [online] available at: http://www1.udel.edu/history-old/figal/hist138/text/er/kojiki.pdf last access 1 april 2021 shimao, m., & ishimure, m., (2003) yaponeshia no umibe kara: taidan, fukuoka-shi; gen shobō suzuki, s., (1967) kojiki gishosetsu no rekishi to sono igi nitsuite, rekishi kenkyu v5, 1-23. suwa, j., (2005) the space of shima. shima, 1 (1), 6-14. suwa, j., (2012) shima and aquapelagic assemblages: a commentary from japan shima 6 (1) 12-16. suwa, j., (2016) becoming island: aquapelagic assemblage of bentensai festival in sai, northern japan. shima 10(2), 5-19 suwa, j., (2018) ningyo legends, enshrined islands and the animation of an aquapelagic assemblage around biwako. shima, 12(2), pp.66-81. http://www1.udel.edu/history-old/figal/hist138/text/er/kojiki.pdf coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 tsugita, m., (ed.) (1977) kojiki (in three volumes) tokyo: kodansha. wakatsuki, y., (1999) ashihase – shukushin ko, hirosaki daigaku kokushi kenkyu, 107, 19-37. urls cited awa sekai nogyo isan http://www.awa-nougyoisan.jp/ (final access jan. 28, 2021, 10:46) line travel.jp https://www.travel.co.jp/guide/article/4315/ (final access jan. 22, 2021, 11:20) nushima http://nushima-yoshijin.jp/ (final access jan 22, 2021, 11:25) onokoro meguri https://note.com/lightwind/n/n30d5baf48068 (final access jan. 22, 2021,11:09) taishokukyoju no mihatenu yume http://s1nakagiri.blogspot.com/2015/12/blog-post_57.html (final access jan 22, 2021, 11:15) jun'ichiro suwa specialises in cultural anthropology with particular interest in performance and music. he has conducted research in papua new guinea, romania, tuva and japanese localities. he has authored a monograph about png power band music and epistemology of sound (both in japanese). his recent interest includes island studies with japanese indigenous perspectives. http://www.awa-nougyoisan.jp/ https://www.travel.co.jp/guide/article/4315/ http://nushima-yoshijin.jp/ https://note.com/lightwind/n/n30d5baf48068 http://s1nakagiri.blogspot.com/2015/12/blog-post_57.html microsoft word 11_accompanying a drunk man-bill boyd rvmr proof changes made & accepted bb 07.04.21.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 146 accompanying a drunk man from “coupin’ gless for gless” to silence – an essay in translating hugh macdiarmid bill boyd southern cross university william.boyd@scu.edu.au copyright©2021 bill boyd. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this essay explores possibilities for translating the scots language poetry of 20th cenury poet, hugh macdiarmid. mirroring macdiarmid’s propensity to draw on and recontextualise other sources of poetry and to create new poetic language, the essay illustrates options of translation as (i) repurposing the ideas of the poem, and (ii) reworking events associated with the poem. two examples are contextualised in an overview of macdiarmid’s prolific and intellectual scots and english language poetry. macdiarmid drew on both languages to create what he called synthetic scots and synthetic english. this allowed him to explore scottish cultural, social and political identity, in part to promote scottish independence and autonomy, and in part to stimulate a new scottish intellectual and literary tradition. his work typified what is known as caledonian antisyzygy. antisyzygy allows for borrowing, appropriation, reworking and decontextualisation of language, ideas and other writers’ work. the essay describes my own appropriation of one poem, on a raised beach, to inform a discussion of future education (translation as repurposing). it closes on a contemporary retelling of the construction of the book-length poem, a drunk man looks at the thistle (translation as reworking). key words: hugh macdiarmid, scots language, caledonian antisyzygy, translation as repurposing, translations as reworking in this essay, i explore several threads loosely woven into a translation of poetry. the essay focuses on the 20th century scottish renaissance poet, hugh macdiarmid, providing a macdiarmidian ramble through possibilities of ‘translation’. it is a ramble that is, perhaps, in keeping with macdairmid himself and, especially, his propensity to draw on and recontextualise other sources of poetry. in this essay, i consider options of translation as repurposing of ideas of the poem, and translation as reworking or redrafting of events associated with the poetry. the essay ends in a translation as reworking of events of a drunk man looks at the thistle. this reworking mirrors an example i provide earlier in the essay of translation as repurposing of ideas. neither is so much as translation from one language to another, but more from one context to another, one purpose to another. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 147 i am not a translator of poetry, but rather a borrower of ideas. my translation is one of appropriation, a translation of poetry into other contexts as a tool for, and way of, exploring ideas, and translation as a reworking of events associated with the poetry. that is part of my scholarly tradition. however, as a person of scottish heritage, i am also drawn to the scots language. in this context, i am drawn to the scottish poet hugh macdiarmid and his scots language poetry. the challenge for me as an english-speaking scot – english is my first language, scots my lost language – is to return to my lost language. english speakers will be familiar with the scots language as used by poets such as robert burns, even if they find it challenging to understand. fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, great chieftain o’ the puddin-race! aboon them a’ ye tak your place, painch, tripe, or thairm: weel are ye wordy of a grace as lang ‘s my armi english speakers will also be familiar with the range of scottish dialects of english – glaswegian comedian billy connelly is well known, if not fully understood, globally. scots is the lost language my forbearers would have spoken before “that is not the language we speak at school”. it nevertheless articulates the culture of thought and understanding, the humour and seriousness, the relationships with people and land of my ancestors. and thus, i suspect, of myself. while the personal importance of engaging in one’s lost language may lie in nostalgiaii, i hope that it better reflects a more fundamental process, that the web of languages we grow up with defines and articulates our feelingsiii. exploring one’s lost language is, therefore, less a process of linguistic nicety, but one of potentially fulfilling one’s identity. and so it is that i turn to the poet hugh macdiarmid. as i struggle to learn and understand the scots he writes in, a slow realisation of the humour and irony he writes about dawns on me. as the joy and the pathos of his observations elevate my emotions, i come to realise that he is expressing ideas in one context that resonate for me in others. indeed, it was during a period of writing a speculative article on the future of educationiv, to which i will return later in this essay, that i first immersed myself in macdiarmid. his geological poem on a raised beach introduced me to his synthetic english, creating poetry out of a language i was familiar with: geological english. i am a scholar who has sought to find an intellectual homev. a geographer, archaeologist and geologist, i have migrated into the social sciences, and beyond them into postmodern and post-human cultural studies. i have sought frames of reference for understanding the present and exploring futures, and, as a consequence, have periodically drawn on the writings of foucault, bhabha, said, deleuze, braidotti, and other european philosophers. perhaps, as macdiarmid drew on the european thinkers of his time to create an expression of a scottish intellectual and literary sensibility, i too need to draw on a corpus of difference to find ways of expressing my nascent thoughts. and so it is to the scots language, and to hugh macdiarmid in particular, that i turn. christopher murray grieve was born christopher murray grieve, but wrote himself into posterity as hugh macdiarmid. he – hugh that is – was what the poet edwin morgan described as an “eccentric and maddening genius”. a man of language and literature, macdiarmid was an ardent scottish nationalist, founder of the national party of scotland in the 1920s, the precursor to the modern scottish national party, and a communist. his agenda was for a scottish literary and cultural renaissance, a revitalisation of scottish intellectual culture and language. he wrote – extensively – from around the 1910s through to the 1970s. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 148 macdiarmid’s earliest published poetry was a translation of gaelic poems. his translation was received well by gaelic scholars, which is no mean feat, as he was later to be received favourably by foremost russian poet scholars for his translations or re-creations of russian poetry, albeit derived from english and german versionsvi. this early work was shortly followed, during the 1920s, by poetry and other writing in the scots language. and this, in turn, was followed by a corpus of poetry in english. neither the scots writing nor the early english writing, however, was in a conventional version of either language, although later in his life, he tended towards writing in a more conventional english. macdiarmid’s early writing was in what he described as synthetic scots and synthetic english. what did he mean by this? his scots was a revival based on many forms of the scots language. this was the working language of the lowlands of scotland, based on language derived from the late medieval transactions of trade and commerce with europe, a language bringing together elements of english, dutch, german, french and other languages of the north sea. it is a language that english speakers may recognise as familiar, yet incomprehensible. macdiarmid drew on a broad range of local dialect dictionaries and other sources, and as such drew on linguistic traditions from the border with england through to the northern isles, from the southwest to the northeast, and then added some. he would draw on the scots language of my forbearers in ayrshire. this was a very different form of scots to which i, in my youth, encountered amongst shepherds in the glens of the east coast. macdiarmid was born in, and later returned to, the southern borders of scotland, but lived elsewhere in scotland, including many years in shetland. he could not have chosen two more contrasting places – the borders and shetland – to live. the language of each was equally contrasting. where necessary, macdiarmid’s poetry includes his own words, or at least traditional words assigned new meaning. when he got to the english, his borrowing extended to the sciences. in his poetry, literary and everyday english becomes peppered with scientific technical terms. this, in many ways, was my introduction to macdiarmid, since my early education had been in the sciences. his extensive borrowing of scientific terms, especially from the earth sciences, aligned with my own other ‘language’. in his preface to macdiarmid’s book-length poem, a drunk man looks at the thistle, kenneth buthlayvii talks about macdiarmid’s use of the scots language thus: the difficulty of the scots vocabulary deployed in a drunk man is not excessive, although it does contain a few set-pieces which were constructed on an armature of unfamiliar words assembled in the course of the poet’s imaginative exploration of the scots dictionary. … but most readers of poetry themselves tend to be word-fanciers to a sufficient extent to overcome the occasional obstacle of the sort which will confront them in the work itself, provided that their social and educational formation has not induced too rigid a prejudice against the very idea that forgotten scots expressions are capable of imaginative revival in poetry of modern sensibility. buthlay concludes that, “if any writer can overturn such preconceptions it is macdiarmid, and giving him a chance to do so can have rich rewards”. and rich rewards there were to be. the poetry foundationviii acknowledged him as being “credited with effecting a scottish literary revolution which restored an indigenous scottish literature and has been acknowledged as the greatest poet that his country has produced since robert burns”. macdiarmid, by the way, was no great fan of burns, considering his poetry to be lightweight and populist. but that was to be expected: macdiarmid was a man to be reckoned with. he was described by ian hamiltonix as coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 149 a man who “makes his own rules, contemnsx categories, cracks open water-tight compartments, bestraddles disciplines, scorns social, cultural and academic cliques and claques, and affirms … that is it not failure but low aim that is criminal”. a drunk man was furnished with a running glossary, both in the original provided by macdiarmid himself, and subsequently extensively elaborated by buthlay in the 1987 edition of the poemxi. this, ironically, follows in the tradition of robert burns himself. to add piquancy to the experience, buthlayxii explains that “the glossary is critical to the sense that the poet’s usage of scots expressions, and indications of their meanings in his own glossaries or elsewhere, have not been taken on face value … and … he would occasionally give words a meaning he wanted them to have, regardless of received usage”. macdiarmid’s poetry spans a vast universe of ideas, philosophies and perceptions of the world. in a wide-ranging introductory essay to his book-length scots poem, a drunk man looks at the thistle, kenneth buthlay reviews the depth and breadth of macdiarmid’s sources and inspirationsxiii. drawing widely on european intellectual thought, macdiarmid finds himself translating from the russian poets, for example, although he professes to not knowing russian – his translation, in parts verbatim translation, in other parts more a translation of ideas – coming via english and german versions. buthlay’s heavily annotated volume of a drunk man provides ample evidence of macdiarmid’s translatory inspiration from english, scottish, european, russian and classical writers. in his drive to redress the woeful state, as he saw it, of lowland scotland’s national language – “we have the hopeless mass of anglo-scots to contend with, the virtual monopoly accorded to english literature on our schools and universities, and the fact that our leading newspapers … give no space to our younger writers but in so far as they give space to poetry at all continue to give it only to the traditional post-burnsian rubbish”xiv – he created his "gallimaufry in braid scots"xv, an extended contemplation of the state of the world, the scottish world to be specific, through a logic of drunkenness. he opens his poem with: i amna fou’ sae muckle as tired – deid dune. it’s gey and hard wark coupin’ gless for gless wi’ cruive and gilsanquhar and the like and i’m no’ juist as bauld as aince i wes.xvi it is hard work, in other words, getting drunk. and so he commences on a reflective lambasting of society, authority, intellectual snobbery, politics, and on and on – a typical drunken rant, one might suggest. in the course of his drinking, being thrown out of the pub, wandering home, communing with nature en route, he gives rein to an extensive contemplation on contemporary scotland. as the drunk man emerges from the pub into the moonlight, his long walk home provides grist for his contemplative mind. the moon and the thistle become signifiers for scotland and its society, triggers for further thinking. some maudlin, some angry, some humorous, always intellectual and intellectually challenging, and always drawing on a wide range of sources. he finally, well over two and a half thousand lines later, arrives home, where he is brought to silence: o i ha’e silence left -‘and weel ye micht,’ sae jean’ll say, ‘efter sic a nicht!’xvii coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 150 whether this is a real logic, of course, is left open for speculation. the drunk man himself provokes scepticism. close to arriving home, he questions the logic itself, oddly enough in english: but in this huge ineducable heterogeneous hotch and rabble why am i condemned to squabble? his answer to himself is macdiarmid’s condemnation of the scots: a scottish poet maun assume the burden o’ his people’s doom, and dee to brak’ their livin’ tomb. many ha’e tried, but a’ ha’e failed. their sacrifice has nocht availed. upon the thistle they’re impaled.xviii and so on. here we see a typical, for macdiarmid, expression of a characterisation of the scots he frequently references, and indeed appears to take to heart. known as caledonian antisyzygy, the term was first used by g. gregory smith to counter views that there was, at least in the early 20th century, no value in scottish provincial literature; nothing of coherence and foundational value. the argument was that the scottish psyche is inherently complex and contradictory – a blend of ethos, pathos and logos, of joy and misery, diverse and yet capable of a union of opposites, relishing tensions between the transcendental and the mundane, disjoined from reality yet grounded in gritty reality, capable of ontological shifts. this “presence of duelling polarities within one entity”, smith argued, would all play seminal roles in how the scot sees the world – the concise scots dictionary considers this to be “characteristic of the scottish temperament … in other words we scots are thrawn [contrary, perverse, twisted or misshapen]”xix. for macdiarmid, caledonian antisyzygy provides the intellectually rigorous and challenging basis for scottish literature. indeed, an antisyzygial posture suits macdiarmid well, and he taps into the contradictions he understands to be, or at least at great length claims to be, inherent in the scottish character. an antisyzygial posture allows the borrowing, appropriation, reworking and recontextualising of language and languages, of ideas and philosophies, and of other writers’ work. it also, perhaps, validates a logic that only a synthetic language can bring. in short, it allows for, and demands, synthetic language. and from a translation perspective, it challenges the notion of a linguistic translation from one language to another. where the original is already second hand, modified and, one might argue, derivative, and where the original is expressed in a hybrid version of language – and indeed a drunk man also contains verses in both english english and scottish english – what would the language look like after translation? how, for example, might one translate the following beautifully antisyzygial verse? type o’ the wissenschaftsfeindlichkeit, begriffmüdigkeit that has gar’t men try morphologies der weltgeschichte, and mad expressionismus syne in art. i have, i will admit, included a few short translations of my own in the endnotes, but would argue that while they make sense, they cannot capture poetic qualities of the original. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 151 i will not, however, enter into more than an initial discussion about language (linguistic) translation here – i have no authority in this regard. i do note, however, that, while there is a growing tradition of literary translation both between and into the native languages of scotland – gaelic, scots and english – it seems that most translation relating to scots is into scots rather than from itxx. furthermore, translating macdiarmid is challenging. an example is a 2016 collection of french translations by the breton poet paol keinegxxi, which has been hailed as a “first and major step towards giving french poetry readers some access to the genius and linguistic experiments of hugh macdiarmid”xxii. it had, however, to accept that translating macdiarmid’s “wide range of linguistic experiments, from synthetic scots to scientific poetry, from joycean portmanteaus to terse statements or found poetry, is a new and daring step towards poetic claims”xxiii. in noting that macdiarmid’s texts would challenge any translator, a reviewerxxiv of keineg’s work suggested that a translator would rewrite rather than translate the originals. keineg’s approach, however, was to translate directly into french. in doing so, he was acknowledging the identity of scots as a language in its own right rather than as an english dialect. he could have differentiated macdiarmid’s english and scots writing by adopting translation into french and, say breton or gallo. he apparently rejected this option, partly due to his dislike of modern synthetic breton (a curious contrast to macdiarmid’s own cultural and linguistic views). his translations, it seems, rely much on his own prowess as a poet, and thus his poetic ability to resonate with macdiarmid’s ethos. given, therefore, the challenging and, typically, antisyzygial nature of macdiarmid’s poetry, it seems appropriate to explore alternative ways in which his work may be translated. to this end, i present two experiments in translation. the first is an appropriation of sorts — a repurposing of the ideas of the poem. the second is a reworking or redrafting of events associated with the poetry. i will first describe translation as repurposing by example from a prior publication of mine, in which i drew on the poetry of a contemplation of the insignificance of humanity in a world of infinitely greater size and age – hugh macdiarmid’s 1934 on a raised beach – to frame a speculative article on future educationxxv. i return to translation as reworking or redrafting of events towards the end of this article. the example of translation as repurposing was included in my response to a call for articles on the theme of education in a post-human era. the central premise was the recognition of the anthropocene, the contemporary geological era in which human forces play a significant, if not the most significant, role in shaping the world we live in. intellectually, there are arguments around the de-centring of the human, the emergence of a new relationality between humans and the rest of the world. in short, the article was to address the nature of education in the future in which people are not at the centre of the endeavour. in seeking an anchor for my response, i stumbled upon on a raised beachxxvi. among its opening lines the following sets a scene worthy of exploration: what happens to us is irrelevant to the world’s geology but what happens to the world’s geology is not irrelevant to us. we must reconcile ourselves to the stones not the stones to us. i drew on this verse to commence speculation on what would become an experiment in deleuzian writing. using giles deleuze’s methodological concept of the foldxxvii i explored the stimulatory effects of a range of writing, largely around our relationships with the past as signifiers coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 152 of potential relationships with the world in the future. my early and enduring interests in archaeology and geology were mined for new purpose. hugh macdiarmid’s long 1934 poem ranged widely through what is now understood as a post-human agexxviii. his poem, i asserted, may be read as a post-human educational manifesto. if so, it comes with a cost, a natural consequence of a true mergence of humanity and nature, a true recognition of nature’s primacy over humans. it ends in death, the human returning to nature, the ultimate realisation of the integrated, relational position of humanity in the world. while this may be an education of participation, integration, inseparability, it is also an education of reality, the reality of oneness. macdiarmid does not seem to see this eventuality negatively. rather, he celebrates optimism. i closed my engagement with his poem by suggesting that this is the true and virtuous inevitability of an honest post-human engagement, the natural graduate outcome of a posthuman education. why did i translate the poem in such a way? the poem is a deep contemplation of the relevance of humanity and nature, a potentially grim vision, at least to a contemporary society fixated on its own primacy. for macdiarmid the stone is all, having“ dismissed / all but all of evolution, unmoved by it”, while “… the essential life of mankind in the mass / is the same as their earliest ancestors yet”. he reveals the folly of modern humanity, celebrating the absoluteness and infinity of nature,“ the unsearchable masterpiece, the music of the spheres”. this provided a springboard for me to seek insights that may be relevant to a new education: we must be humble; we must be aware of death; we are increasingly losing control — the stones will have their revenge. pragmatically, macdiarmid seeks an opening of eyes, an acknowledgement of the inseparability of humans and the world, and an acknowledgement of nature’s primeval character. i asked the question, “is this the beginning of a manifesto for a new education?”. i am sure that macdiarmid did not conceive of his words in this way. and yet, nearly a century later, his words resonate as the urgency of a significant shift in human-nature relations becomes blindingly clear. there is a growing need for (in my words elsewhere) a multi-dimensional perspective on social and ecological systems – and most importantly on our engagement with them – one in which properties of interconnectedness, flows of energy and materials, linkages, feedback, relationships, and agency play central roles … a perspective borne of deleuze and guattari’sxxix concept of … the interrelatedness of everything … in which learning is all encompassing and ceases to be pedagogically – and disciplinarily – boundxxx. the language differs, but the sentiments parallel macdiarmid’s insights. he argues for what might be read as a true, embedded, relational (post-human) environmental education, an education built on participation, interaction and faith, a post-human future in which the binaries of human-nature, adult-child, person-animal, public-private … are rendered obsolete ... the concept of milieu asserts its relational self as an honest framework for a productive response to the anthropocene … [and] of real, continuing and experiential learning, by all parts of the world, located in the interstitial space that is the anthropocene worldxxxi. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 153 hence my confidence in a justified appropriation or translation as repurposing. it provided an excellent frame to explore contemporary ideas from an historical perspective, untainted by post-modern or post-human thinking. what, however, i did not do in that exploration was consider the geological side of the synthetic english. on a raised beach opens with the lines: all is lithogenesis — or lochia, carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree, stones blacker than any in the caaba, cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces, celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige, glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform, making mere faculae of the sun and moon, and so on. here we see the “eccentric and maddening genius” in full flight, making his own rules, treating categories with contempt, cracking open water-tight compartments, bestraddling disciplines, scorning social, cultural and academic cliques and claques, and certainly not aiming low, to paraphrase hamilton's characterisation of the poet. in seeking more macdiarmid, my introduction to a drunk man looks at the thistle invited me to reconsider this opening section to on a raised beach, and to better appreciate what may be seen to be clumsy juxtaposition of technical, scientific and everyday language. importantly, it helped me open up to the possibilities of other hybrid writing — a functional extension of the translation as repurposing i summarise above. as a consequence, i have more recently drafted a short piece in my own synthetic scots – probably more scottish english than scots per se – reworking or redrafting an account of the creation of a drunk man. this is the second mode of translation i mention above. much is written about macdiarmid’s poem, and much is speculated about its origins and original intent. the original manuscript is, apparently, lost. it may or may not have been intended to be a very long or a somewhat shorter poem – there are several published editions varying from around 600 lines to 2,685 lines. it may or may not have been written as individual poems, and individual sections may or may not have had titles. buthlay’s extended essay in a drunk man canvasses all these possibilities, and macdairmid himself comments on these possibilities in his author’s note for the 1926 edition. “it would have been further misleading,” he tells the reader, if i had (as, arbitrarily enough at best, i might have done) divided my poem into sections or in other ways supplied any of those ‘hand-rails’ which raise false hopes in the indigenous minds of readers whose rational intelligence are all too insusceptible of realising the enormities of which ‘highbrows’ of my type are capable – even in scotlandxxxii. he further explains, i would suggest, on the other hand, if i may, that they [the readers] should avoid subtleties and simply persist in the pretence that my ‘synthetic scots’ presents insuperable difficulties to understanding, while continuing to espouse with all the impressiveness at their command the counter-claims of ‘sensible poetry’. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 154 returning to buthlay’s account, however, it is pertinent to read of the role one of macdiarmid close friends, francis george scott, played in the eventual publication of a drunk manxxxiii. scott was a scottish composer associated with the scottish renaissance. he wrote more than three hundred songs, including musical versions of macdiarmid’s poems. macdiarmid opens a drunk man with a poem dedicated to scott, and makes it clear that a drunk man could not have been completed without his help. buthlay explores scott’s help. based on diverse accounts – the more that is written, the more opaque reality becomes – it seems that much of the structure of the poem, and indeed some of the content, was down to scott. indeed, there is a claim that the closing lines quoted above (“o i ha’e silence left …”) were scott’s suggestion for a closure. there was urgency in getting the draft to the publishers – macdiarmid was notoriously awkward with his publishers, in part due to a perfectionism that impeded his willingness to finalise a poem. according to buthlay, scott’s contribution to the actual manuscript “has become legendary”. there was a meeting (which true to form for macdiarmid, buthlay says was glasgow, while scott, decades later, describes as being held in the east coast town of montrose) between scott and macdairmid in which the poet … had bits of the manuscript stuffed in all his pockets, from which they were transferred to a bed, where scott proceeded to demonstrate his principle that ‘a work has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. … [by one account] the poet was sunk in alcoholic slumber while scott spent the night in editing and putting in order the ‘fragments’ of his work. … by ‘unifying them into a complete whole’, scott ensured that ‘a masterpiece was born’. scott’s account differed in detail, but the essence prevails: … we sat down to a table, a great heap of scribbled bits of paper and a bottle of whisky … we spent until day-break sorting out the items worth keeping, christopher [hugh] arranging them on the table like a pack of cards in the order that i indicated as likely to give the best sequences, climaxes, etc. … buthlay’s (and scott’s) account, therefore, provoked my version of translating macdiarmid. this essay is a long way round, a macdiarmidian ramble, through possibilities of considering ‘translation’, a ramble that is perhaps in keeping with macdairmid himself, and with his propensity to draw on and recontextualise other sources of poetry. i close, then, with an offering: a translation of a drunk man not so much as translation from one language to another, but more from one context to another, one purpose to another. in turning to a suppressed language – the scots that is the native language of lowland scotland, and the same scots that is my own lost language – macdiarmid reminds me of other modes of language, encouraging me to draw on my own other languages – the scientific languages of my education and profession, and the scottish version of english that is my own everyday language. in turning in this direction, i find an opportunity to liberate my own thoughts, and, especially as a scholar, seek other ways of building knowledge. so let us return to a drunk man. the following is entitled a drunk man looks at the thistle – a re-telling of a poem. it is my translation of the poetic giant, hugh macdiarmid. i’ll tell yous a story. it’s true. weel, least based on true events. perhaps. it's a story o’ a poet. an’ a story o’ his mate. the critic. irascibles, drunks and scotsmen, the pair o’ them. aye, you say, so what? it is a story of a drunk man and of the moon and of the thistle. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 155 it was the evening afore the book was due at the publishers. a masterpiece. a book o’ poetry unlike any ever conceived. a single poem, the length o’ a book. in scots. the critic was in the poet’s parlour. collecting the manuscript. he’d tak it up the city i’ the morning. wet the baby’s heid? says the critic. aye. one for the road. out comes the macallanxxxiv. two glasses. three fingers. clink. sláinte. aye, that’s good. warms the heart. the comfortable silence of auld friends. easy in a shared love of the uisce beatha. so whar’s yon book says the critic. aye. the only answer. anither? three fingers. clink. sláinte. come oan, says the critic. i’ve no goat a’ night. aye. anither? no until the book is in ma ain hauns. a vague pointing finger. the mantelshelf. a box. an auld shoebox. that it? pass it o’er. an auld shoebox wi’ a thoosan slips. scraps. bits ‘n’ bobs. yer joking says the critic. did i ever joke says the poetic. that’s the book. just needs tae be put in order. the big city printers willnae get oot ae bed for this. yer oot yer mind. aye. anither? three fingers. clink. sláinte. a fumble o’ passin hauns. the box went heid o’er heels, aw o’er the floor. a thoosan scraps o’ genius. aw o’er the floor. a thoosan scraps o’ the scots language so beloved of the poet. o’ a drunk man. the moon, the thistle. thinkings ‘n’ thoughts. philosophisings ‘n’ cries o’ anger. humour ‘n’ piss-taking. political commentary on the state o’ the nation. snooks at politicians. lambastations. a thoosan scraps aw o’er the floor. i’ll be buggered says the poet in his finest eloquence. aye fuck me sideways says the critic. anither? three fingers. clink. sláinte. fit we’ll do noo? aye, it’s easy. put them together. yon is the start, then this, then, na, no that one, the ither. haw aboot these couple o’ verses. they’re for the ending. no makes sense. and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. twa auld irascables, twa auld drunks getting drunker, more maudlin, more creative, as the hours crept by. anither bottle, something else frae the speyside. three fingers. clink. sláinte. the sun crept intae the collective consciousness o’ twa auld drunks. intae the consciousness of the drunk man looking at the thistle, sitting there looking fine and dandy twixt the macallan ‘n’ the ither. the critic was sober enough to scoop up their collective work. pack it into the shoebox, more or less in order. anither? aye. three fingers. comoan, no so miserly. a finger or twa mair. clink. sláinte. the book goat to the big city. the poet and the critic goat to their beds. an mony years later, the drunk man still howls at the moon. the moon still shines through the thistle above the drunk man. a work o’ genius by ony meesure. the academics an’ the scholars an’ the smartypants an’ the clever clogs o’er at the learn-ed establishments are still debating the book. a work of unmitigated genius? the likes of which we will never see in our day? or the ramblings of a couple of old drunks? the three a. m. result of an uisce beatha fuelled night? they’ll never know. good on yez, ye auld buggers. i address to a haggis: the scottish country dancing dictionary web site (www.scottish-country-dancingdictionary.com/to-a-haggis.html) provides two english translations, an idiomatic translation and a free translation. the idiomatic translation is: nice seeing your honest, chubby face, / great chieftain of the sausage race! / above them all you take your place, / belly, tripe, or links: / well are you worthy of a grace / as long as my arm. the free translation is: may good fortune attend your honest jolly face, / o king of puddings. / you are superior to / tripe and all other offal. / you are also worthy of a paean of praise / even longer than a presbyterian sermon. neither translation, in my opinion, does justice to the original, nor to the haggis itself. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 156 ii i have explored my own search for identity as a scot living in australia in boyd, b. 2013. (hardly) anyone listening? writing silent geography. coolabah, 11, 97-113. this exploration was triggered by a single word of scots – driech – that found its way into a poem entitled verdant memory: celtic dreaming, in which nostalgia for my ‘geographic origins’ induced the lines ‘celtic verdant at the other end of this continent? / i wade through tropical downpours and think: driech’. iii campbell, m. & szilágyi, a. 2014. introduction: how scotland translates. pp. vii-xxv in: quaich: an anthology of translation in scotland today. westport: evertype. isbn 9781782010692 iv boyd, w.e. & horstmanshof, l. 2019. a meditation on what a post-human education might look like: “touching something beyond myself and my time”. education in the north, 26(1), 56-70. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/eitn. v boyd, b., rall, d., ashley, p., laird, w. & lloyd. 2013. finding a home: harnessing biographical narrative in teaching and learning in cultural geography. coolabah, 11, 187-204. vi much of this general introduction to hugh macdiarmid is derived from kenneth buthlay’s extended introductory essay to the 1987 edition of hugh macdiarmid’s a drunk man looks at a thistle (scottish academic press, edinburgh). vii buthlay, op. cit., p. vii. viii poetry foundation, 2020. hugh macdiarmid, 1892–1978 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hugh-macdiarmid ix poetry foundation, op. cit. x appropriately, hamilton uses an archaic verb, meaning to treat or regard with contempt. xi macdiarmid, h. 1987. a drunk man looks at a thistle. edinburgh: scottish academic press. this is an annotated edition, edited by kenneth buthlay. xii buthlay op. cit., p. viii. xiii buthlay op. cit. xiv hugh macdiarmid’s ‘author’s note to the second edition (1953)’, p. 247 in macdiarmid, 1987 op. cit. xv a gallimaufry is a confused jumble or medley of things; the braid scots, of, course, is broad scots or, simply, the scots language. xvi i am not so much drunk as dead beat / it is very hard work downing glass after glass / with cruive, gilsanquhar and others / and i am not as healthy as i once was. this is my own translation. xvii oh, i have left is silence / “as well you might” / so jean [his wife] will say, “after such a night!”. this is my own translation. xviii a scottish poet should assume / the burden of his people’s doom, / and die to break their living tomb. / many have tried, but all have failed. / their sacrifice never prevailed. / upon the thistle they are impaled. this is my own translation. xix https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/view/id/5260 xx campbell & szilágyi, op. cit. xxi keineg, p. 2016. hugh macdiarmid, un enterrement dans l’île, traductions de paol keineg. brest: les hauts-fonds. 122pp. isbn: 978-2-919171-14-9 xxii noirard, s. 2017. hugh macdiarmid, un enterrement dans l’île, traductions de paol keineg. études écossaises, 19, 1-3. http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/1159 xxiii noirard op.cit. xxiv noirard op.cit. xxv boyd & horstmanshof, 2019, op. cit. xxvi macdairmid, h. 1934. on a raised beach. stony limits, and other poems. london: victor gollancz. xxvii deleuze, g. 1988. foucault. minneapolis: university of minneapolis press. see also tom conley’s clear exposition on deleuze’s concept of the fold: conley, t. 2011. gilles deleuze: key concepts (2nd edition). london: routledge. xxviii boyd & horstmanshof, 2019, op. cit. pp. 57-58. xxix deleuze, g. & guattari, f. 1987. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. london: continuum. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 157 xxx boyd, w.e. 2020. “it is not a question of either/or, but of ‘and ... and’”: the socioecological learner as learner-teacher-researcher. pp. 99-138 in cutter-mackenzie-knowles, a., lasczik, a., wilks, j., logan, m., turner, a. & boyd, w. (eds) (2020). touchstones for deterritorializing socioecological learning: the anthropocene, posthumanism and common worlds as creative milieux. palgrave macmillan, london. xxix & 283 pp. isbn 978-3-030-12212-6 (e-book), isbn 978-3-030-12211-9 (hardcover), doi 10.1007/978-3-030-12212-6. xxxi boyd, 2020, op. cit.; the reference to interstitial space is from bhabha, h. 1994. the location of culture. london: routledge. xxxii macdiarmid, 1987, op. cit., p. 245. xxxiii buthlay op.cit., pp. 7-13. xxxiv i have used the macallan as a signifier of the single malt whisky that i must assume macdiarmid would have enjoyed. it is a speyside whisky of fine repute. i have, however, no knowledge of macdiarmid’s whisky of preference. the macallan just seems to fit. bill boyd an emeritus professor at southern cross university and former professor of geography. he is a geographer with scholarly interests in environmental change, human-landscape relationships, cultural studies and higher education. he has taught, researched and published widely in these fields. holding doctorates from the universities of glasgow and st andrews, scotland, he is a life fellow of clare hall, university of cambridge, a visiting professor at the centre for australian and transnational studies, university of barcelona, and a visiting professor in the school of education, glasgow university. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 crime, punishment, and death: reading finitude and the self in david malouf’s ‘the conversations at curlow creek’ chinmaya lal thakur latrobe university vic c.thakur@latrobe.edu.au copyright© 2021 chinmaya lal thakur. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. the present paper reads david malouf’s 1996 novel the conversations at curlow creek as portraying a vivid and realistic picture of events relating to crime and punishment in colonial australia in the early nineteenth century. the depiction of death penalty accorded to the bushranger daniel carney under the supervision of the irish sheriff michael adair in new south wales thus resonates with numerous historical accounts of incidents that actually happened. the novel, however, does more than only provide accurate historical representation as it also presents adair as having undergone a rather dramatic transformation in the process of conversing with carney before the latter’s execution. the paper, drawing on the views of the german philosopher martin heidegger, argues that a realization of inevitable mortality, of facing certain death characterizes this change in adair’s nature and worldview. it concludes by suggesting that adair’s acceptance of his finitude intimates of a way of being in the world that not only subverts procedures of administering punishment to convicts in colonial australia but also indicates the limits of polarized identity politics that shapes the country in the present times. keywords: realism, transformation, finitude, subversion mailto:c.thakur@latrobe.edu.au coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 david malouf’s novel the conversations at curlow creek (1996) has a rather simple plot. its protagonist, the irish sheriff michael adair, comes to new south wales in the 1830s to supervise the execution of the bushranger daniel carney. as the punishment is scheduled to be meted out the next day, adair and carney spend the night conversing with each other. apart from the impending death penalty to be awarded to carney, there is another reason though as to why adair is in australia. he is looking for fergus, his companion since boyhood and son of the generous couple who adopted him and took affectionate care of him. fergus, virgilia (their common friend) and he presume, left the irish shores to come to new south wales to struggle against the oppressive colonial rule and somehow ended up leading a band of bushrangers and escapee-convicts. if successful in the search, adair hopes to take fergus along with him while returning to ireland. in addition to its simplicity, the plot of the conversations at curlow creek also stands out for its plausibility. the whole action seems credible as it attests to historical accounts of contemporary events and circumstances. historians and other social scientists have thus not only described the significant irish and scottish presence in and around sydney in the early nineteenth century at length but have also detailed the activities of bushrangers and escapeeconvicts in the region. lindsay j. proudfoot and dianne p. hall, for instance, underline that colonial presence in australia has always been misunderstood to have been homogeneous and has never been segmented in terms of its substantial minority identities like the irish and the scots. they also suggest that historiography has been unable to provide an adequate account of the emotional, physical, and political dislocation felt by such minor colonial populations. consequently, history-writing has been virtually silent on the formation and subsequent development of social groupings like the irish-australian and the scottish-australian. (proudfoot and hall, 1-7) in a similar vein, jennifer a. mckinnon has highlighted the ambiguity and complexity of the apparently simple and unambiguous appellation “bushranger”. she argues that though bushrangers were runaway convicts who lived in the bush and committed serious crimes, it was difficult for them to be distinguished from nonabsconding convicts who performed similar actions. the crimes, usually, were of acquisitive nature, thefts of property that entailed aggression and implied threats of violence directed at the victims. most of such offences—highway robbery, burglary, stealing in a dwelling house and putting persons therein in bodily fear, rape, shooting with intent to kill, murder, stockstealing, arson, presenting a loaded gun, assault and the like—were recognized as capital and carried the death sentence as punishment. (mckinnon, 5-6) perhaps on account of his irish heritage and the sheer sense of dislocation that the rough terrain of provincial new south wales causes him to endure, adair does not quite feel up to the task that the british colonial administration located in sydney wants him to carry out before carney’s execution. the administration believes that bushrangers like carney, led in their illegal activities by the now-slain dolan, had been receiving assistance from irish revolutionaries. it would therefore require adair to ask carney about the same. ‘what were you waiting for, that dolan had to be so cautious?’ ‘for our tracks to go cold. if we’d slipped into some little settlement and, like, done something.’ … ‘wasn’t he maybe waiting for something else?’ ‘like what, sir?’ coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 ‘for someone to contact him. some group, for instance.’ ‘oh’, the man said, ‘the irish, you mean. that was just talk. there wasn’t no gathering intended, if that’s what you mean.’ …carney shook his head. he looked desperately unhappy. adair feared he might at any moment cut the conversation off and turn away. it was shameful, he knew, to harry the man like this, to unsteady his last hour or two with useless doubts. he had no interest in the official rigmarole of unrest and rebellion; not much belief in it either. (malouf, 98-100) no wonder then that as adair continues to speak with carney, he keeps losing interest in the question of the alleged symbiotic relationship between the bushrangers and the anti-british irish revolutionaries. instead, he begins to believe that the convict’s leader, dolan, was actually fergus. as a result, his words merely serve as an alibi to conclusively establish his view. ...then looking up with a gaze adair found unsettlingly steady: ‘you know, sir, there’s a lot of injustice in the world’. a statement ordinary enough, but what he heard behind it, or thought he heard, was the echo of another voice. he felt strongly another, a third presence in the closeness of the hut, and with his heart sounding above the rasping of daniel carney’s breathing, he asked: ‘did you hear that from him? from dolan?’ the man seemed surprised. … ‘so what did he say?’ he persisted. ‘about injustice.’ ‘dolan’? ‘yes.’ the man’s face softened. he sat with his head lowered a moment. ‘he said it was why we were fighting. at the end, when things got bad.’ (malouf, 29) as the night preceding carney’s scheduled execution moves, though, adair’s words to him come to acquire a different color. despite his best attempts, adair is unable to keep up his own interest in getting to know more about dolan and gives into the force of carney’s innocent questions. carney’s doubts, suggestions, and comments make him examine his own beliefs and thoughts in a fresh light. he begins to reconsider the significance of his past life, especially the part which was spent in ellersley, ireland, with virgilia and fergus as he journeys to new south wales with its characteristically rugged and distasteful terrain. … ‘i’m sorry, sir. i just thought, you bein’ irish an’ that, you wouldn’ mind me askin’.’ ‘well, so long as you don’t expect me to have an answer. what is it?’ there came then the first of the man’s awkward questions, each of which, adair found, caught him on the raw, since they were sent to the center of his own thoughts, his own confusions, as if this illiterate fellow had somehow dipped into the dark of his head and drawn up the very questions he had chosen not to find words for. (malouf, 28) coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 it is not just the past, however, that carney’s queries force adair to reexamine. he must, in the face of them, scrutinize the present as well. consider, for instance, carney’s question about there being forgiveness in the world for those like him who have committed crimes of great violence and terror. in adair’s mind, it seems to develop into a consideration of the difference, if any, between bushrangers such as carney on the one hand and the punitive colonial machinery on the other. as both of them indulge in violent means to achieve their desired ends, he cannot perceive any substantial incommensurability between them. ‘i was goin’ to ask you something. i hope you don’t mind.’ he rubbed his nose very vigorously with the back of his fist. ‘do you think, sir,’ he said after a moment, ‘that there is such a thing as forgiveness?’ adair stared at the man, unable for a moment to focus his mind. ‘i meanyou know, for what we done.’ he found his voice after a moment but it was thick with emotion. ‘i’m sure there is,’ he said... ‘if there isn’t, there is no hope. none. for any of us.’ the man nodded, but in his scrupulous way was not convinced. (malouf, 128) the question as to whether the slain dolan was indeed fergus therefore ceases to matter for adair as the narrative of the conversations at curlow creek propels him into rigorous introspection. in such a situation, combined with the simultaneous and constant questioning from carney, he moves from anchoring his being in the search for fergus in new south wales to looking for such a foundation within himself. it is crucial to note, however, that though the novel presents carney as the principal catalyst that initiates him on the said journey towards self-evaluation and (re)making, it is not the case that carney comes to replace fergus/dolan in his worldview. the nature of adair’s introspection is significantly deeper than that which would involve merely substituting a particular individual with another as the anchor of his being. that adair, in considering his place in the world, moves past even the impetus provided by carney becomes clear as the latter takes the final bath before being executed. while bathing in the waters of the curlow creek, carney attempts to divest himself of everything that is material, human, and earthly. adair’s reaction reveals him to be reading carney’s act as the concluding scene in the rather difficult and painful life that the latter has led. both adair and carney, in fact, appear to be aware of something fundamental and primordial that lies beyond the bath and (even) the execution. carney, for instance, gets rid of the grime, the muck, and the blood-clots that mar his body. as he cleans his feet off dirt and sweat to reveal their paleness, he seems to be giving up on the part of his self that is linked with the business of his flesh, with his corporeality. in the same vein, adair too seems to reach a ‘quiet’ realization, a sense in which the immediate context of his meeting with carney—a legal obligation to oversee the latter’s execution—seems redundant and irrevocably trivial. witnessing carney’s bath, in other words, makes adair reach a stage in emotional and cognitive terms where the apparently ordinary leads to an awareness of some potent force that exceeds it thoroughly. the man reached down, scooped up a double handful and splashed it over his head…slowly, with what appeared a loving care for the heaviness of his own flesh, he began to wash from his body the grime, the caked mud, the dried blood of his wounds… coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 and against the sunlit channels that cut the sandy bed beyond, with its occasional stunted shrubs and bushes, and the grey-green foliage of the farther bank, his largeness bulked and imposed itself, the knotted shoulders, the breast to which the tatters of his thin shirt clung like a second skin, its shocking whiteness… slowly the man turned and stood with lowered head, observing with a child’s interest the paleness of his feet through the swirling water. almost done with himself now. with the business of washing off the long accumulation of dirt and sweat and blood, with the heaviness of the flesh... …and at last it was enough. the man simply stood, staring down at his clean feet through the running water. the last of the world’s muck was off. …and adair? he too stood watching. relaxed. quietened. subdued to the rhythm of the man’s reaching down, time after time, to the water and letting handfuls of it gush then trickle over his neck. it should finish here, he thought. this is the natural end. in the man’s intense absorption in his task, and his own in watching, was a quietness he had been reaching for, he felt, for the whole of his life, for so long that he could not have said when the yearning for it, amid so much fret and action, had first come to him. years back, in another country. when he had had no notion—how could he?—of who it was who would be standing here, in what as yet unimagined landscape, watching an action so simple that it was hardly an action at all- the man looked up then. their eyes met. the moment was broken. the man moved, lifted his foot from the water, set it down in the clinging grains of sand. returned, adair thought, to this other condition we are bound to. both of us. all of us. the insufficient law. (malouf, 198-201) sadly, carney and adair’s cognizance of something fundamental compared with the filth and stain of everyday human existence has gone unnoticed in most critical commentary on the conversations at curlow creek. don randall, for instance, in his otherwise fine study of some of malouf’s work seems to have underread carney’s gesture of giving up on his corporeality in the face of something that renders the body immaterial. as he believes that it is the body that serves as the site of socio-political resistance in malouf’s novels, he overlooks phrases in the bathing scene such as ‘paleness of his feet’, ‘done with himself’, and ‘heaviness of the flesh’ that suggest the opposite i.e. the transience that carney comes to recognize as the essential quality of corporeality. unsurprisingly, as a consequence of holding such a view, randall reads adair’s experiences with carney as signifying a profitable exchange or transaction for the irish sheriff. he suggests that ‘adair draws a personal, developmental profit from carney’ as, according to him, carney is the ‘abject other’ who possesses ‘unconquerable vitality’. (randall, 159-160) in contrast with such readings of the bathing scene, the present paper understands it as underlining adair’s realization of his own finitude, of the certainty that he like carney will also meet the end someday. this suggestion is drawn from the work of the german thinker coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 martin heidegger, specifically the second division (‘da-sein and temporality’) of his most well-known treatise being and time. (heidegger, 213-398) as john haugeland and richard polt argue, heidegger’s discussion of death in the second division of being and time is premised on a distinction between mortality on the one hand and perishing and demise on the other. mortality is a condition, a possibility that belongs to us while demise is an actual happening, a one-time event. perishing, however, is a biological phenomenon that occurs as organic functioning in an organism comes to an end. all organisms, including humans, eventually perish due to the onset of organic decay in their bodies. heidegger presents death as the possibility that happens to all human life and underlines what may be an authentic response to the same. he calls the response vorlaufen and it translates into “anticipation of” death or “facing up” to mortality. vorlaufen, in other words, does not mean that we should be worried about when our demise may occur but that we should recognize and accept that our possibilities are finite and our choices, as a result, are limited by the finitude. in haugeland’s words, this implies that ‘death is the possibility of no more possibilities.’ (haugeland, 179-183) the choices we make then, as we anticipate death, are resolute as they lead to the world at large becoming clearer for us. we do not, in such a scenario, subordinate the past and the future to the present but imagine the present to be gaining a fresh and significant meaning from the past and the time yet to come. the enterprise is inherently risky as it entails our resolute commitment to living in the light of the certainty of our end. the strength of resoluteness, however, should not be overestimated as it cannot guarantee that we shall be authentic in the future as well. resolutions, according to heidegger, therefore need to be reaffirmed in the face of our tendency to fall into irresoluteness. (polt, 86-100) the question that needs to be asked, in the context of our discussion of adair from malouf’s the conversations at curlow creek, is whether heidegger is calling on us to live authentically, to face up to the condition of our finitude. as far as haugeland and polt are concerned, they believe that heidegger indeed conceives of a personal transformation to be the prerequisite to understanding being and time. polt argues: ...since some ways of life are more insightful than others, it seems clear that a philosopher must live as insightfully as possible. heidegger claimed as early as 1919 that “genuine insights” require “the genuineness of a personal life”. he consistently holds that the correctness of theories depends on a more basic unconcealment that pertains to our being-in-the-world. it follows that seekers of truth, such as writers and readers of philosophical texts, must not only construct the right theories, but also live in the right way. (polt, 94) the epilogue to malouf’s novel answers, to a great extent, the question as to whether adair continues to live up to the realization of mortality and finitude after carney’s execution. it relates a conversation that takes place between adair and his friend saunders over a meal. as they meet the day before adair is to set sail for ireland aboard the hyperion, saunders tells him about a rumor that has spread throughout the colony in new south wales like wildfire. most people there have come to believe that the irish officer “o’dare” had ultimately saved the convict’s life. the following constitutes what is reported to adair: at the last moment daniel carney had been saved—that was the nub of it. the irish officer who had been sent out to oversee the hanging had all along been in on the thing, but had played so skillfully his part of lawman and public official coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 that even the prisoner had been deceived. some sort of unmasking had taken place during the night they had spent locked up together. at dawn the prisoner, still shackled, had hobbled down to the shores of a large lake, or inland sea. his chains were removed and he was allowed to wash. while the other troopers watched from a distance, a boat paddled by natives appeared, who were involved it seemed in the ordinary business of spearing fish. but suddenly the natives produced muskets, and under their covering fire, the officer and the convict both had clambered into the boat and been whisked away into the mist, the natives being in reality members of a settlement of disaffected ticket-ofleave men and runaway convicts who, over the nearly forty years of the colony’s existence, had created, on the shores of a freshwater sea teeming with every sort of wildlife, a rival colony, a shadow sydney as large almost as the original. anyway, the officer, who name was o’dare, had become the hero of the hour, a true embodiment of the spirit of irish resourcefulness and derringdo, and daniel carney a martyr miraculously resurrected; or o’dare was a hateful renegade and confounder of the rule of law and carney a dangerous rebel, once more on the loose. (malouf, 207-208) to check if there is any truth to the rumor, saunders details further, the governor of new south wales wants to send out a party of men supplemented with horses, oxen, and collapsible boats to the sea. saunders then asks adair if he has indeed been offered the chance to lead the said party. reluctantly, adair accepts that the offer has been made but also adds in the same breath that he has politely declined the same. he suggests that he refused to lead the group as he had already added to the fascinating history of the colony in new south wales, made his contribution to the mythology of the place. and, as if underlining his view, he attests to the “price” that he has had to pay for the strangeness that he has encountered there. the price is nothing but almost a giving up of his previous self, a self that did not have the resolve to face up to the truth of mortality and stayed limited to thinking of human existence in terms of limitless potentiality and possibility. that self is now being left behind in australia and it will be the ‘new’ self which will sail to ireland. ‘even if it was an involuntary one, mere fantasy, and made under a false name. the fact is,’ he said after a moment, ‘i am tired of all this. it has cost me something. you may laugh—i do myself—at the absurdities that have come of it, but the thing itself— he did not go on. the rest of what he might have said dived underground, like one of those elusive rivers they had been speaking of, and saunders, one eyebrow raised like a hook, was left hanging. he had no wish to speak of daniel carney, still less of fergus; to add to speculation and mystery by admitting he had his own purpose in being at curlow creek, and how much of himself he had left there—of his real self, of adair—no less deeply buried than they were under a night, with its secrets and veiled desires, that was not the opposite of day but, for those who had entered its rich depths, the simultaneous underside of day, the swarming underside of life as it is lived, and as he would live it again, up there on the other side of the globe. (malouf, 210) the problem of reading the nature of the transformation that adair undergoes in the colony inevitably leads us to ask questions about its rendering in the narrative of the conversations at curlow creek. how are we to understand, for instance, the figuration of the rumor about the coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 irish sheriff o’ dare letting the convict carney escape in the novel’s epilogue? ostensibly, of course, it presents a rather sharp break within the realistic mode of telling that the narrative utilizes till the end. yet, the rumor is also fundamentally that which is not true but is believed to be so. as a result, it marks the frontier of a zone in which the sharp lines between the actual and the possible are blurred. or, to put the same in other words, the rumor signifies the fictional being (taken as) the true within the fictional world of malouf’s text. most criticism on malouf’s novel under discussion has unfortunately tended to read the episode about carney’s rumored escape in literal terms assuming, in the process, not only a stable subaltern position for the escapee-convict but also as some sort of deus-ex-machina for the narrative itself. helga ramsey-kurz, for instance, argues in the essay ‘lives without letters: the illiterate other in an imaginary life, remembering babylon, and the conversations at curlow creek’ that ‘the ultimate intangibility [of the illiterate and disappearing other] renders the narratives that tried to contain him incomplete.’ and, in the process, the readers of malouf’s novel come to doubt the text’s very reliability. (ramsey-kurz, 126-127) departing from such readings of the novel, the present paper pays attention to the way the form of the novel itself has been understood to undertake a critique of the canonically established stringent binary distinction between the fictional and the real. additionally, it underlines the fact that the figuration of the counterfactual in fiction necessarily entails the latter playing out only against the horizon of possibility and, therefore, history. in other words, the counterfactual cannot be understood if it is divorced from the historical context which surrounds it in the first place— the context of colonial crime and punishment in colonial new south wales, for instance. the noted critic frank kermode has identified the form of the (modern) novel as being characterized by the imperative to reimagine the relationship between fiction and reality. he suggests that modern novelists (must) allow room for different versions of reality, “including what some call mythical and what some call absolute”, despite the paradigmatic form that they inherit from their preceding writers. (kermode, 132) read in this vein, the rumor that marks the epilogue of the conversations at curlow creek is therefore that which the people in provincial new south wales take as if it were the truth and their gesture indicates the incontrovertible mingling of the real with the imaginary. drawing on sartre’s reflections on the novel, kermode explains this “as if” as follows: novels, says sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. in life, he once remarked, ‘all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. so we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.’ the as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of determinism, the establishment of an accepted freedom by magic. we make up adventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those ‘privileged moments’ to which we alone award their prestige, make our human clocks tick in a clockless world. and we take a man who is by definition de trop, and create a context in which he isn’t. (kermode, 135) moreover, as argued by catherine gallagher in her acclaimed work on counterfactual characters in fiction, the counterfactual cannot contradict the historical and must function in its backdrop. with regard to the representation of napoleon in tolstoy’s fiction, especially war and peace, she argues that the russian writer takes great pains in his narrative to create the impression that ‘the fictional moments are plausibly consistent with the historical record’. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 additionally, she suggests that though tolstoy’s narrator attempts to build a case against napoleon’s importance as an individual in the way french and european histories have turned out over the last three centuries or so, he is remarkably precise in his account of the events of the battle of borodino. he, in fact, accurately describes the emperor’s whereabouts, his positions, his speeches, and his commands. (gallagher, 320) even if one were to go with the argument presented in this paper thus far, it would perhaps still not be unreasonable to ask if our daily lives, our very quotidian existence is indeed marked by the event of the unexplainable. experiences like the one that adair has in new south wales, it would seem then, are extraordinary and terribly rare even as they have the capacity to alter the mode of being of those who go through them. arguing in this manner, one could suggest that such occurrences are impossible in the real, material world we inhabit despite heidegger’s sincere belief in the mutual translatability of thought and action in the anticipation of death. derek attridge’s argument about “everyday impossibility” presented in his celebrated study the singularity of literature throws some significant light on this problem. attridge argues that the event, in that it is extraordinary, does not necessarily imply that it is uncommon, rare, or impossible. for him, the wide scale on which creativity and inventiveness get expressed— “from the minute to the monumental”—is a testament to the fact of their everydayness. attridge takes the example of the everyday phenomenon of ‘laughter’ to buttress his point further. he suggests that we laugh as we respond to otherness and the response manifests in terms of a physico-psychological affirmation of a work’s inventive coalescing of diverse cultural materials. and even if there exist multiple explanations for laughter, none of these can predict as to when and where it might erupt. for attridge then, laughter is an unpredictable, eventful response to a singular event. (attridge, 133-134) on the basis of the above discussion, it can thus be argued that malouf’s the conversations at curlow creek maintains a delicate balance between historical plausibility and fictional possibility in its depiction of the events surrounding the execution of the escapee-convict carney under the supervision of the irish sheriff adair in colonial new south wales. the contextual accuracy, as attested to by the accounts of historians discussed in the beginning of the present paper, provides a well-laid out backdrop for nascent prospects to develop and prosper in the novel’s narrative. the possibility in question, of course, is carney and adair’s realization of their necessary and inevitable finitude which not only indicates the transience of their corporeality but also underlines the limits of their self-identification—in terms of nationality, nature of work, and humanity—in the process. the rumor about carney’s escape that adair does virtually nothing to curtail is a testimony of the latter’s resolute commitment to the force of having witnessed, contemplated, and realized the essential end that all humans must encounter and live in responsible anticipation of. the question that faces us thus, to paraphrase the title of nikolai chernyshevsky’s 1963 novel, is what is to be done in the present scenario when we read malouf’s novel under discussion. the question is especially important for a society like contemporary australia that finds itself sharply polarized and at the crossroads on a variety of issues like climate change and the fear of mass extinction, the ‘place’ of the aboriginal peoples in the ‘national’ imaginary, guncontrol, checks on immigration, and the significance or otherwise of religion in an increasingly secular, scientific, and modernizing milieu. it would seem in this situation that works like the conversations at curlow creek would hardly have anything to contribute to these pressing concerns. however, if we were to carefully peruse the current debates on climate change and the anthropocene, for instance, it would appear that the novel’s suggestion about a balance coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 between non-identitarian historical awareness and our acceptance of our necessary and inevitable finitude can indeed be of great relevance. let us take, for example, the case of fernando flores and b. scot rousse’s articulate argument about the relationship between ecological finitude and ontological finitude. in the essay ‘ecological finitude as ontological finitude: radical hope in the anthropocene’, they argue that our collective undoing of the hospitality extended to us by our planet implies and presents itself in the backdrop of the constitutive susceptibility of all human worlds to meet their eventual collapse. however, the fact that we are dying, according to them, does not absolve us of the responsibility towards future generations to emerge in a new world. in other words, even as we cannot imagine what that world would be from our present perspective, we must bring about practices that prepare genuine and fresh possibilities for those yet to arrive on the scene. how can we bring about such practices? flores and rousse suggest that we need to be increasingly receptive to whatever is gathering in the present, in the historical moment that we inhabit. this would entail, for instance, recognizing and creatively responding to the fact that ‘new practices, along with new entities, technologies, identities, and ultimately new understandings of what is important and possible, emerge on the margins of the present and shape our trajectory into the future.’ (italics in original. flores and rousse, 184) the development, they believe, would lead to the appearance of a new configuration of practices that will cast a fresh light on the horizon of our possibilities as human subjects. they term this initially unfocused and faint but revitalizing glow fulgor, in line with the heideggerian sense of lichtung i.e. the open space or field in which events occur. wouldn’t it be fair to say then that malouf’s novel the conversations at curlow creek also participates in the process of making us increasingly aware of our historical present? by portraying carney and adair as cognizant of their inevitable finitude as human beings in a specific socio-historical context, it indeed invites us to consider the manner in which we can understand the very now in which we exist and respond to it in new and creative ways. references attridge, derek. the singularity of literature. london and new york: routledge, 2004. flores, fernando and b. scot rousse. ‘ecological finitude as ontological finitude: radical hope in the anthropocene’. the task of philosophy in the anthropocene: axial echoes in global space, ed. richard polt and jon wittrock. maryland: rowman and littlefield, 2018, pp. 175-192. gallagher, catherine. ‘what would napoleon do?: historical, fictional, and counterfactual characters’. new literary history, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp. 315-336. haugeland, john. ‘death and dasein’. dasein disclosed: john haugeland’s heidegger. ed. joseph rouse, cambridge, massachusetts, and london: harvard university press, 2013. heidegger, martin. being and time: a translation of ‘sein und zeit’. trans. joan stambaugh. albany: state university of new york press, 1996. kermode, frank. the sense of an ending: studies in the theory of fiction (with a new epilogue). oxford: oxford university press, 2000. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 malouf, david. the conversations at curlow creek. london: vintage, 1997. mckinnon, jennifer a. ‘convict bushrangers in new south wales, 1824-34’. thesis submitted for the degree of master of arts by research work at the department of history, la trobe university, 1979. polt, richard. heidegger: an introduction. ithaca and new york: cornell university press, 1999. proudfoot, lindsay j. and dianne p. hall. imperial spaces: placing the irish and the scots in colonial australia. manchester and new york: manchester university press, 2011. ramsey-kurz, helga. ‘lives without letters: the illiterate other in an imaginary life, remembering babylon, and the conversations at curlow creek’. ariel: a review of international english literature, vol. 34, no. 2-3, 2003, pp. 115-133. randall, don. ‘the conversations at curlow creek’. david malouf: contemporary world writers. manchester: manchester university press, 2007. chinmaya lal thakur is a doctoral researcher in the department of creative arts and english at la trobe university in melbourne. he studies the representations of subjectivity in the novels of david malouf. postcolonial literatures, modernist writings, continental philosophy, and literary criticism are the areas of his academic interest. he has published a number of articles and reviews in various edited volumes and journals including 'journal of language, literature, and culture', 'journal of postcolonial writing', 'cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry', 'south asia research', and 'contemporary south asia'. he has also edited the anthology 'literary criticism: an introductory reader' for worldview publications, new delhi. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 reimagining italian-australian identities through soccer: critical notes on a history of italian soccer clubs in perth fausto buttà the university of western australia fausto.butta@uwa.edu.au copyright©2018 fausto buttà. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this paper offers a critical contribution to the understanding of issues such as transnationalism, social inclusion, and the construction of italian-australian identities by exploring the untold history of italian soccer clubs in perth, particularly east fremantle tricolore and perth azzurri. it aims at integrating individual narratives within a broader framework that includes the historical development of multiculturalism in australia since the end of world war ii. by considering key factors such as regional origins, intergenerational gaps, gender, and the weight of personal experiences in relation to deep social and political changes in australian society, these narratives reveal distinctive forms of culture, social practices, and a sense of belonging. this paper draws from homi bhabha’s (1990b) concept of “third space” and argues that soccer can be seen as a metaphorical place for the meeting of different identities, and that individual transnational narratives help us to reimagine italian-australian identities as fluid, thus avoiding the risk of accepting ideas of a fixed and predetermined migrant identity. yet by focusing only on the historical development of italian soccer clubs in perth, the arguments of this paper are limited to a specific aspect of the ‘identitybuilding’ discourse. keywords: western australian history; italian migration; soccer. soccer, transnationalism and “third space” for many, sport represents a symbolic core of australian identity, in that it has been used as a vehicle for definitions of australianness (hallinan and hughson 2009). especially in relatively young nation-states, such as australia and italy, sport has served mailto:fausto.butta@uwa.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 political purposes in the process of ‘imagining’ communities, building identities and offering opportunities to “construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life” (bhabha 1990a p.3). unlike australian football, however, soccer was not accepted by the australian postcolonial sporting society (hay 2003). consequently, soccer in australia can be used as a cultural analytical tool to read national as well as transnational narratives (danforth 2001). in particular, soccer can further our understanding of ethnicity as an imagined anthropological and cultural construct that is reproduced in social interaction (banks 1996; jenkins 1997). indeed, a few scholars have addressed the importance soccer played in shaping migrant identities, including in australia (ricatti and klugman 2013; damussi 2015). many of these studies are based on ethnographic research and emphasise the role of individual memories as analytical tools for interpreting theoretical frameworks such as transnationalism and identity. according to vertovec (2009), the concept of transnationalism applies to a variety of links and interactions that connect people and institutions across nation-states. the meaning of transnationalism as a social morphology is underpinned by an array of different historical experiences of ethnic diasporas and transnational communities. within this framework, transnational narratives not only contribute to defining the practices, boundaries and constructions of an ethnic community, but they have also been used to support the concept of migrant identities as “fluid” identities (harney and baldassar 2007). loretta baldassar (2001) identifies migrants’ return home as being the key to capturing these identities. ethnographic research, however, also tends to overlook the historical and political contexts that provide the background for individual personal memories to play their parts. by investigating the origins and early development of two well-supported italian-based soccer clubs in perth, this article explores the relevance of the broader australian post-war historical context as an indispensable background for the building of “fluid” italian-australian identities. the core argument of this paper, which draws from preliminary research on the history of italian migrants and soccer in perth since 1945, is that reimagining italian-australian identities through soccer means using soccer as a cultural lens to magnify the history of italian migration in order to arrive at a better understanding of contemporary issues of transnationalism and social inclusion in australia. homi bhabha suggests that cultural reproductions continue to change in a process of “hybridity.” the anti-essential nature of bhabha’s post-modernist theory denies “originary culture,” while stressing the importance of hybridity as a “third space,” where other positions and forms of culture can emerge (bhabha 1994). therefore, reimagining italian-australian identities through soccer means identifying soccer as bhabha’s “third space,” a metaphorical forum that fragments identities and displaces the histories that comprise it. soccer comes to represent the object with and through which a new process of identification takes place, as well as a metaphorical transnational space for the meeting, interaction, confrontation and dialogue of different individual migrant identities, cultural orientations, and emotions. yet, to better understand this process of reimagining italian-australian identities through soccer, it is paramount to integrate individual memories within a broader australian historical framework that spans from the end of world war ii to the early 1990s. the historical development of australia’s socio-political context, particularly the idea of multiculturalism, needs to be taken into consideration as it played a direct role in the process of building individual identities, and can tell us much about italian migrants. post-war australia’s social, cultural and political climates not only gave birth to white australia assimilation policies in the 1950s, the social and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 technological changes of the 1960s, and the consequences of intergenerational conflicts in the early 1970s; they have also deeply and directly influenced the construction of italian migrant identities, both as an ethnic community and as individuals within that group. within this conceptual framework, the following introductory notes on the so far untold history of east fremantle tricolore and perth azzurri aim at representing a particular and critical contribution to the understanding of transnationalism and social inclusion in australia. yet, by focusing only on the historical development of italian soccer clubs in perth, the arguments of this paper are limited to a specific aspect of the ‘identity-building’ discourse. “what is wrong with azzurri? cannot they take a beating?” italians and soccer in perth after wwii in the early 1950s, perth local newspapers, such as the west australian, sunday times, and the western mail reported an increasing number of pitch invasions and clashes off the field of play during soccer matches. tensions among emotional spectators were often caused by alcohol and betting activities, and were further fuelled by the establishment of fierce rivalries between different ethnic-based soccer clubs, such as the italian perth azzurri and the croatian north perth clubs. the azzurri, established in 1948, was the first soccer club founded by italian migrants in perth. many founding members came from valtellina, an alpine region in northern italy. the azzurri quickly became one of the most successful soccer clubs in perth (guzzi and andrews 1998). in 1952, during their first league encounter, an incident involving an azzurri fan and the north perth goalkeeper ignited a bitter rivalry between these two teams. on saturday 21 june 1952, azzurri and north perth met again at dorrien garden, azzurri’s home ground, to play their second match of the charity cup knockout competition. the first match had ended in a draw, two-all. with only five minutes to go and with azzurri leading three to one, referee rhys hill showed north perth’s captain, bert robertson, a red card for striking azzurri’s joe skrabel, who was also sent off for using offensive language. the two players continued their violent confrontation on their way to the change room and their behaviour sparked the first controversial incident involving spectators and players. there were no police attending the match, as the control of the crowd was the responsibility of the soccer association of wa, which, despite words of provocation between the two clubs in the days leading up to the match, did not organise security. after ten minutes of fighting, players were able to conclude the match (kreider 2012 pp.108-115). over the following days, local newspapers published numerous letters by readers who addressed this incident. a reader, who signed himself as “scotia,” wrote: having attended the azzurri vs. north perth game at dorrien gardens on saturday last, i should like to express my disgust at the behaviour of some of the azzurri players and supporters. the letter continued: coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 it is about time that this club, which could be such an asset to the code because they have the ability to play good football without needing to resort to unsportsmanlike tactics to gain their ends, took their players and a section of their supporters in hand and inculcated in them a spirit of fair play. (the western mail june 1952, qtd. in kreider 2012 p. 113) this strong feeling of “disgust” and disapproval towards azzurri for not respecting the referee, and thus the authority, the law, was echoed in other letters, such as the one by “nobby” who wrote: what is wrong with azzurri? cannot they take a beating? it appears the general rule that when they are not in the lead, the idea is to start something to upset their opponents by not abiding with the referee’s decisions. i venture to say that swan valley has not done half what azzurri have done and yet they have their ground closed for four weeks. what about doing the same to azzurri and perhaps they will learn a lesson? (kreider 2012 p. 113) the discussion on violence in soccer games quickly led people to address the issue of new migrants. on a regular radio soccer programme, listeners could hear comments such as: i listen with interest to mr des abraham’s broadcasts on soccer each saturday. his one particular plea has always been ‘be tolerant with these new australians because of their war experiences and life caused through such.’ from what i have seen as regards witnessing their play and in private life, past and present, you can’t change a leopard’s spots. (kreider 2012 p. 113) what this listener, who called himself “fair play,” arguably meant was that these “new” australians, including italians, are different from us, in both the public and private spheres, and they will never change. the step to ‘they cannot integrate with us’ was a relatively short one. yet the ‘us and them’ discourse did not always have a negative connotation. for example, the sunday times, on 12 april 1953, reported that 5,000 people had witnessed azzurri beat sokol, and being colourful in its varied dialects, it was a pleasant change from ‘’ave a go’ and ‘holding the ball’ which are so standard at the australian games. no doubt sensitive and extremely nationalistic, this type of crowd, while still partisan, were certainly spontaneous in applause for the good play of both sides. (“5,000 see azzurri beat sokol at soccer” 1953) these comments on the issue of sport and migrants offer an insight into views held within australian society as they address the question of the unequal power of discourse that has marked the relationship between the anglo and non-anglo communities in australia. at a time when the wounds of wwii were still fresh and australia was coping with the dismantling of the british empire, this selection of comments mirrors only a small sample of the wide range of feelings and attitudes held by ‘old’ australians towards ‘new’ australians. these ranged from disgust and the need to teach them a lesson, or inculcate in them ‘our’ values, to acceptance of and tolerance towards the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 colourful, pleasant and spontaneous italians, the latter revealing a more curious and open-minded approach to the exoticism of these southern europeans. in other words, at the time, italian migrants and other non-anglo ethnic minorities represented “the other.” as said (1977) suggested, the construction of “the other” is fundamental for the construction of “the self,” as it provides a context and criteria for defining one’s own identity. therefore, what these comments published in popular newspapers actually help to reveal is the general climate in australian mainstream society; they are indicators of a widespread exclusivist, dominant and civilising attitude that reinforced the notion of assimilation. this concept of assimilation was part of a complex ideological system that included notions (and practices) of nationalism, imperialism and racism, which eventually contributed to the birth of the white australia policy. after wwii, australian nationalism aimed to control immigration and shape the development of a narrow idea of multicultural mass society under british command. sport, including soccer, served australian nationalism by giving both ‘old’ and ‘new’ australians a sense of national solidarity, and represented a tool to achieve national reconciliation among all social classes. yet, until the mid-1990s, when the process of de-ethnicisation of the game occurred, soccer was considered not to be a game having suitable australianness, and despite government policies that encouraged citizens to practice sport, it was marginalised as it was seen as ethnic and feminine (o’hara 1994). australian player johnny warren’s famous book title sheilas, wogs and poofters perfectly encapsulates soccer’s marginalisation, relative to other football codes and signified by the use of the ethnically stereotyped term “wogball” (warren et al. 2002). nonetheless, migrant communities in australia were the main contributors to the expansion of the “world game” in mainstream australian society (skinner et al. 2008). within this framework, a history of italian soccer clubs in perth represents a significant tool to shed light on the issues of transnationalism and social inclusion in australia, as it can enhance the understanding of some of the dynamics that affected italian migrants’ social process of settling, integration and inclusion within the development of a multicultural mass society in australia. a general historical background of those italian migrants who played soccer in australia after the war highlights their experiences of tragedies such as fascism and war. over the previous twenty years, italians had been indoctrinated by mussolini’s fascist propaganda which aimed at forging a new man, a new italian, a fascist italian, who had to be strong, healthy, vigorous and victorious. it was mussolini’s totalitarian idea of integrating the individual within a culturally and ethnically homogenous society, the fascist italian state. mussolini’s regime used italy’s 1934 and 1938 soccer world cup victories to forge and manipulate italians’ feeling of grandeur on a sporting level into a new fascist identity (foot 2006; martin 2004). yet the tragedy of wwii—logical consequence of an ideology such as fascism that aimed at total domination—brought italians back to their reality: italy was a destroyed country with ruins, misery and unemployment that contributed to the decision of a massive wave of italians to migrate to australia and other countries following the war. more than 280,000 italians emigrated to australia between 1947 and 1976 (castels et al. 1992). as a type of consciousness, transnationalism refers to migrants’ awareness of “multilocality” (vertovec 2009). in australia, the trauma of wwii saw italians being targeted coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 and persecuted as war enemies. for those italians forcibly interned during the war on rottnest island, in fremantle jail, or kalgoorlie, soccer became their main activity. when they were released, for many italians soccer continued to play an integral part in their lives. after the war, like other ethnic minorities, italians were subjected to discrimination through government policies and attitudes held by the general public. they had to carve their space within australian society, and soccer served to aid this purpose. soccer became an expression of what bhabha would describe as a process of hybrid cultural reproduction, which stimulates something new and whose meaning and representations are continuously negotiated (bhabha 1990b). for italians, soccer became an extra-territorial space, their clubs’ success being a source of pride, and the relatively quick spread of italian soccer clubs in perth metropolitan area (azzurri, tricolore, vastese and aurora) as well as in country regions (la fiamma in geraldton and swan athletic in the swan valley) reflects the developing process of social inclusion of italian migrants in australia. club names, intergenerational gaps, and gender variations to reimagine fluid identities the humble origins of east fremantle tricolore soccer club epitomise the italians’ effort to smooth their settling into a new society. at the beginning of 1951, it was possible to meet a few sicilians in market street and high street in fremantle, collecting subscriptions for a new soccer club. they organised dances at the fremantle trades hall, where participants were entertained by ugo bartolomei’s accordion. a local newspaper reported that it was always un pienone, very crowded (the italian club fremantle december 1969). in 1952, their application to register a team was rejected by the western australian soccer association because the club did not have a home ground. that year they could only play friendly matches, while continuing their fundraising activities. in 1953, they again lodged an application to register a team. this time, thanks to the intervention of the catholic priest father nanni, they finally had a home ground, a pitch at south beach held in concession by the town of fremantle, when in 1954 the town of east fremantle granted the club the use of wauhop park. in exchange for the new facilities, the new italian soccer club agreed to change its name from torino into east fremantle tricolore soccer club. club members decided to keep torino’s original colours (granata, maroon), as a reference to the best team in italy at the time; as with perth azzurri (azzurro, light blue, was the colour of the former italian royal family), the name tricolore, the italian flag, was also a clear reference to their national identity. influenced by an official australian governing body, the town of east fremantle, the decision to adopt east fremantle’s name may be seen as a step in the assimilation of soccer by australians. yet the choice of a nationalist name such as tricolore mirrored a common habit among other ethnic-based soccer clubs, such as the greek athena, the polish cracovia and others. club names became a metaphorical space within which migrant and australian identities met. for migrants, club names and colours represented transnational bonds and manifestations of different types of belonging, of feeling ‘here and there.’ migrants recreated a shared imagery through cultural artefacts and social reproductions. one could argue that all those nationalist coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 names, including tricolore and azzurri, represented a tool to set social practices, features and boundaries, and aimed at constructing their own identity as a group. in other words, in the first years after wwii, in a time of strong nationalistic feelings, italians staked a claim for their own national identity through soccer and in particular through the relationships with, and differentiation from, other anglo and non-anglo soccer teams. in reimagining italian-australian identities, transnational narratives can reveal distinctive forms of culture, social practices and a sense of belonging, particularly when one considers factors such as regionalism, generation, gender and personal experiences with reference to the historical developments of australia’s social, political and cultural contexts. italian migrants’ identification with and attitudes towards their regional and national identities changed over time as they were influenced by deep changes in australian society and its cultural constructs, particularly multiculturalism. as a matter of fact, there is a significant difference between italian soccer clubs that were founded just after the war, and those that were founded later in the 1970s and 1980s. during the period of the white australia and assimilation policies, when multiculturalism simply meant the acknowledgment of australians’ different ethnic origins bound together by a dominant british ethnic cultural identity, italians belonging to the first wave of migration (1945-1970) used some nationalistic references in the names of their clubs. the names azzurri and tricolore reveal a need for ethnocentric identification, rather than regional. italians chose those names because, according to mario carosella, a player for tricolore during the 1960s and secretary of perth italia in the late 1980s, “they symbolised italy to them” (carosella interview 2015). carosella remembers that: “when they met tricolore or azzurri, other teams knew they were meeting italians.” regionalism was not a selective criterion for membership to an italian soccer club. there was a greater concentration of northern italians in the northern suburbs and a majority of southern italians south of the river. yet, as ennio tavani reports, italians did not base their loyalty to a club according to their regional origins: in fact, as a young italian migrant from lombardy, tavani played alongside sicilians, calabrians, people from valtellina and abruzzo (tavani interview 2015). rather, their membership to a soccer club was based upon the distribution of the italian migrant community in perth’s metropolitan areas. in the early 1970s, on the contrary, when multiculturalism became associated with migrants’ freedom of expressing their own cultural identities, and when notions of australian identity, australianness and whiteness were also changing, names of italian soccer clubs show references to regional origins, such as stirling tuscany, lathlan inter, rosemount juventus, and also balcatta etna, founded by sicilians and offering a clear ethnic identification in its club name. this significant change suggests different attitudes towards concepts of italian national and local identities and their negotiation with an australian identity, showing perhaps a revival of the specifically italian feeling of campanilismo (loyalty to one’s own town). in this way, the development of a new concept of australian multiculturalism in the 1970s may be seen to have resulted in more complex and nuanced processes of identity-building. moreover, further differences of identification with an italian-australian identity were given by the generational gap among members of the italian community, between first and second generation italians. indeed, the pride of being italian was mostly felt by older italians rather than by the youngest generation, who preferred being identified as australian. a generational gap that was mirrored by the choice of sport practiced by the coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 children of migrants: unlike soccer, afl was the real australian game. it had more appeal to second generation italians because it was the sport of mainstream australian society and represented a way to better integrate with it (tavani interview 2015). this generational gap, expressed through the choice of sport, was part of a broader ethical and intergenerational conflict which had its apex in the 1968 phenomenon of youth rebellion that occurred in the western world. within this context, in examining the relevance of soccer to italian migrants’ experiences of social inclusion, in light of changing ethnic politics, questions on gender issue need also to be addressed. undoubtedly, italian clubs, including soccer clubs, offered italian women opportunities to establish and develop social networks. cosimo monaco, the secretary, treasurer, and committee member of tricolore for many years during the 1960s-80s, reports that the role of tricolore was not limited to sport; it also served a social function as it offered assistance and support to italian migrants, men and women, who were looking either for jobs or for social relationships, including finding a partner (monaco interview 2016). this was the case of giuseppe (joe) fulgaro and his wife luisa, who met in 1964 at wauhop park, on the very first evening of giuseppe in australia, during a social event organised by tricolore’s social committee (fulgaro interview 2015). social gatherings were organised frequently: mrs monaco remembers that tricolore organised saturday night dances every two weeks, as well as day trips to the south-western region. italian women played an important role in the organisation and running of these events by volunteering at the clubhouse, selling food they had previously made and working behind the bar selling beer, homemade wine and spirits. ethnographic studies on italian women in australia could investigate whether their involvement with soccer was structured according to gender ideals or if there was, instead, gender variation and any evidence of resistance. on the one hand, scholarship on italian women in australia (in particular, kahan-guidi and weiss 1989; pallotta-chiarolli 1989; ricatti 2010; and baldassar & gabaccia 2011) has focused on the emancipatory potential of migration, overlooking how those women who did not participate in soccer felt about the impact this popular sport had on their lives and if they felt marginalised. on the other hand, the risk is in using soccer as a vehicle to portray one migrant group as a homogeneous group, while the nuances in experience within such groups are in some ways more intriguing and less predictable. in this sense, future research on italian migrant women’s individual experiences with soccer and other social activities could reveal some of those nuances, and help us to reimagine migrants’ identities as fluid rather than predetermined and fixed. transnational individual narratives of soccer and italian migration the process of reimagining italian-australian identities starts from the analysis of personal transnational experiences in relation to the individual’s own public and private spheres of interaction. ennio tavani, president of perth italia in the 1990s, attributed a key role in his personal process of defining himself as italian to his experience with the australian army in vietnam (tavani interview 2015). for many young people around the world, the war in vietnam represented the centre of an international struggle against american imperialism, as well as against traditional forms of authoritarianism, including family, state, and capitalism. individual expressions of transnationalism, such as tavani’s personal experience as an italian-australian soldier in a hostile coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 environment, are indicators of fluid identities that continue to change and to be reimagined in relation to both private and public social and cultural environments. within this process of reimagining italian-australian identities, individual ethnic narratives of soccer can be used as a cultural lens to magnify transnational issues of social inclusion. for thousands of italians, men and women, of different generations, soccer has offered avenues to smooth their way in a new country. these opportunities were given by different individual experiences with soccer that went beyond the soccer match. the match itself—ninety minutes on a saturday afternoon—was the culmination of a process that included the organisation, administration and management of a community group. from a transnational perspective, different narratives of soccer are able to capture italian migrants’ fluid identities, as they show how soccer offered italians the opportunity to connect not only with members of an imagined italian migrant community, and thus with italy, but also with other ethnic-based communities and with the broader australian society. the few available written sources reveal that some italian migrants significantly contributed to the early development of east fremantle tricolore soccer club. many of those italians came from capo d’orlando in sicily, vasto in abruzzo and molfetta in apulia, and for them soccer was not only a recreational activity, but also a means to bond and build social relationships with fellow italians. soccer became the fabric of a vast social network. among the most charismatic figures were osvaldo tagliaferri, franco fausto (frank) stazzonelli and luciano (lou) ricci. osvaldo tagliaferri, from sicily, was the first president of east fremantle tricolore. he owned interfoods, a local business located in fremantle’s cappuccino strip, and managed it with his wife giovanna for more than 35 years. by becoming mayor of fremantle in the 2000s, osvaldo’s son, peter, has made another significant contribution to the inclusion of the italian migrant community within western australian society. franco stazzonelli arrived in australia in 1949 aboard the sebastiano caboto. he was born in sondrio, a small town in north of italy, and settled in fremantle where he contributed to the establishment of both the fremantle italian club and the tricolore soccer club. stazzonelli sponsored tricolore as the owner of atlantic travel, an authorised travel agency located in fremantle. the wa museum website explains that he was also involved with the promotion of italian culture and art through radio shows and other entertaining activities (stazzonelli, n.d.). stazzonelli’s name appears several times in tricolore’s early documents, and his long-lasting presence and support to the tricolore club, as well to the fremantle italian club, suggest that stazzonelli played a major role within the italian community in fremantle. the port city, located at the south of the swan river, for many years has been welcoming italian migrants, and after the war became a safe harbour especially for sicilian fishermen and their families. through social activities and by providing work to his fellow countrymen, stazzonelli became a leader of the italian migrant community. a similar role was played by luciano (lou) ricci. he was born in italy in 1935 and moved to australia, together with his family, in 1938. like many other young italians, ricci began to follow the azzurri team but in 1953, the establishment of tricolore in the fremantle area led him in a new direction. although ricci never played the game, soccer became such an integral part of his life that he served for many years as president of tricolore (1959-60 and 1969-78). in 1960, ricci, owner of hilton estate coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 agency in beaconsfield, played a major role in establishing the soccer federation of wa. under different managerial roles, he served this institution for several years and worked hard for the development of the game in western australia. not surprisingly, ricci became first a life member of tricolore in 1972, and later, in 1987, a life member of the soccer federation of western australia. “there are a number of memorable occasions in my time at tricolore with the building of the clubhouse at wauhop park high on the list”, said lou ricci (qtd. in 2001 perth soccer club yearbook p.120). as a common goal for the italian community in fremantle, the construction of tricolore’s clubhouse at east fremantle’s wauhop park became an opportunity to bring many italian migrants together. they offered skills, services, and private business in order to complete one of the best facilit ies for soccer players at the time (monaco interview 2016). tricolore became “the first soccer club in wa with premises devoted exclusively to the advancement of soccer” (lee 1979 p. 180). tagliaferri’s, stazzonelli’s and ricci’s personal stories stand up more than others as these industrious men represented important points of reference within the italian migrants’ social network. their stories, the development of successful soccer clubs and, particularly, the construction of one of the best soccer facilit ies in perth epitomise italian migrants’ hard work in carving their space within australian society. at the end of the 1950s, tricolore quickly emerged as one of the most successful clubs in perth. credit for its early successes goes to both italian migrants and some influential non-italian top players. italian players were quite good and they had a distinctive style of play; however, except for only a few who had experience in italian professional and semi-professional leagues, the majority were amateur players. nonetheless, these amateur italian migrants managed to win the 1956 second division, just three years after their first official match. tricolore’s speedy forward line, in which vic coccia, alessio poladori, mario casotti and andrea scarangella were outstanding, proved too much of a match for most opposing defences. centre-half mario mercati, left-half l. pedris and left-back l. granelli worked the half line and backed up the forwards. former state player vincent parlatoni played some beautiful games as a centre-half, before breaking his leg. together with the full back angelo torelli, they protected the young goalkeeper nick d’orazio (the official w.a. soccer annual and year book 1956). two years later, in 1958, tricolore won its first state premiership title. yet in reading the names of the 1958 tricolore squad, the main difference that strikes the eye is the presence of a few more english names, such as johnny mcinroy, tony monks, peter atkinson and doug stewart (the official western australia soccer annual and fixture book 1959). the following years can be considered as the ‘golden years’ of tricolore: the club won the title three times consecutively (1963-65), and then again in 1970 and 1972. tricolore’s most representative player of those golden years was a scottish player from dundee, john mcinroy, who, from 1961 to 1969 scored 203 goals for tricolore, heading the goal scoring list five years consecutively (1961-1965). his personal best of 48 goals in one season (1963) still represents the best scoring figure in wa.1 while in the 1950s the majority of tricolore players were italian migrants, in the 1960s tricolore’s managers began to invest more money in order to attract and keep former professional british players, mostly english and scottish. since the end of the 1950s, the club had welcomed non-italian members. this major shift was magnified by the 1960 turmoil that hit soccer in western australia. that year, eight differently ethniccoolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 based soccer clubs pressured the western australian soccer football association (wasfa), the all-english governing body, to open up to professionalism by paying players and retaining them under contract. it is difficult to assess to what extent ethnic issues played a role in this breakaway. it is more likely that the reasons behind their wish to play soccer under a professional rather than amateur status were mainly financial: from the heavy monetary fines laid against azzurri and tricolore, due to incidents where match officials had been attacked, to claims of unfair percentages of gate money taken by the wasfa, to the unofficial payment of players in order to keep them on a regular basis. among those clubs involved in the breakaway were the italian azzurri and tricolore. they were not only among the most talented clubs in the metropolitan area, but also the most financially sound as they were well-supported by the italian communities north and south of the swan river. in july 1960, together with athena, cracovia, olympic, south perth, swan athletic, and windmills, the two italian clubs participated in the establishment of the soccer federation of western australia (sfwa). soon after, all of the other clubs, attracted to the lights of professionalism, deserted the wasfa and joined the new federation, and in 1965 the wasfa ended its activities. the establishment and development of italian soccer clubs in perth was favoured by the entrepreneurial nature of some italian businessmen who became leaders of their migrant community. they were not the richest men in town and it is not easy to say whether they made money out of soccer. the financial aspect of the 1960 breakaway operation undoubtedly required the commitment of successful businessmen. three of them, julius and frank re and tommaso d’orsogna, were the owners of two local smallgoods companies, re store and d’orsogna ltd. italian entrepreneur julius re was the main character in the establishment of the federation. he had to make sure that the administrators of all clubs were financially able to support a professional team. julius re became the first secretary of the new professional sfwa, while his brother frank was among the founders of the perth azzurri club in 1948. born in sicily, the re brothers came to perth in 1933, the same year that tom d’orsogna arrived in australia. during wwii d’orsogna was forcibly interned on rottnest island where he met other soccer-mad italians, and after the war, in the 1950s, he became president of the aurora club. d’orsogna was a highly regarded butcher who soon began to manufacture and trade italian food products. his smallgoods business became one of the main sponsors of the newly-born sfwa. in post-wwii australian society, italian food did not have the same good reputation that it has now. established in 1960, the d’orsogna cup became immediately the main knockout competition, as well as a vehicle for the popularity of both soccer and italian food. the cup was played for the last time in 1995. at the beginning, as a business incentive, italian soccer clubs were not remunerative and members’ participation in fundraising activities was crucial to support the clubs financially. the aspiration of establishing an italian soccer club that could compete in the national league materialised in 1987 with the establishment of perth italia, born out of the merging of the two historical rivals azzurri and tricolore, together with balcatta etna. for those italians strongly involved with the management of this new club, the huge financial investment to sustain a team in the national soccer league meant a constant effort to gain power and influence the control of the game, especially through the involvement of local mass media in the competition with other football codes and sports (moore 2009). nonetheless, it is also thanks to this constant effort and coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 commitment to the game by some influential italian entrepreneurs that the whole italian community in perth can be credited with the advancement of soccer in western australia. conclusion this paper has shown that individual transnational narratives of soccer, as multiple expressions of ‘fluid’ identities, make more sense if they are considered within a broader historical context that considers different agents, particularly an ideological and political force such as australian nationalism, a social issue such as transnationalism, and a cultural construct such as multiculturalism. all these factors contribute to the understanding of social patterns, territorial similarities, gender differences, and intergenerational gaps. the interaction of all these forces at play contributed to shaping the identities of those italian-australians who, despite accepting and abiding by the rules of the game, by playing without a script, made the “third space” (the soccer match) an ever-changing, unique experience. in other words, by assessing the role played by soccer in shaping italian migrant identities, one has to avoid the risk of juxtaposing microhistory with macrohistory for, as this paper has shown, individual memories, stories and emotions are as significant as their historical context. on the contrary, any attempt to understand the impact soccer had on migrants’ lives, both as individuals and as a group, highlights the need for marking the space for the meeting of different identities, and the necessity to identify these intersections between political and cultural orientations and individual identities. in conclusion, this paper has suggested that the historical development of the relationship between italian migrants and soccer in perth was affected by political, social and cultural orientations that marked the history of post-war australian society, and that they were as significant as transnational individual experiences. the individual dimension of the game has been thus elucidated in relation to the broader historical picture of multicultural society in australia. by addressing questions concerning social exclusion and the construction of an italian-australian identity, this paper has shown that, in order to further our understanding of the roots of these issues, transnational narratives of soccer that consider multiple different cultural orientations can help us to reimagine italianaustralian identities as fluid, and avoid the risk of accepting ideas of a fixed identity, which, unlike soccer, represents a predetermined outcome rather than a unique expression. references 2001 perth soccer club yearbook, perth, 2002. “5,000 see azzurri beat sokol at soccer, but not fire works,” sunday times, 12 april 1953. l. baldassar, visit home: migration experiences between italy and australia, melbourne, melbourne university press, 2001. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 l. baldassar and d. gabaccia (eds), intimacy and italian migration gender and domestic lives in a mobile world, new york, fordham university press, 2011. l. baldassar and j. pyke, “intra-diaspora knowledge transfer and ‘new’ italian migration,” international migration, vol.52, no.4, 2014, pp.128-143. m. banks, ethnicity: anthropological constructions, london, routledge, 1996. h.k. bhabha, the location of culture, new york, routledge, 1994. ---. (ed.), nation and narration, london, routledge, 1990a. ---. “the third space: interview with homi bhabha,” in j. rutherford (ed.) identity: community, culture, difference, london, lawrence and wishart, 1990b. s. castles, c. alcorso, g. rando and e. vasta (eds.), australia’s italians: culture and community in a changing society, sydney, allen & unwin, 1992. j. damousi, memory and migration in the shadow of war. australia’s greek immigrants after world war ii and the greek civil war, cambridge, cambridge university press, 2015. l.m. danforth, “is the ‘world game’ an ‘ethnic game’ or an ‘aussie game’? narrating the nation in australian soccer,” american ethnologist, vol.28, no.2, 2001, pp.363-387. east fremantle tricolore soccer club membership book, east fremantle, years 19661973. j. foot, calcio. a history of italian football, london, harper perennial, 2006. a. guzzi and d. andrews, azzurri. fifty golden years, perth, perth azzurri, 1998. c.j. hallinan and j. hughson, “the beautiful game in howard’s ‘brutopia’: football, ethnicity and citizenship in australia,” soccer and society, vol.10, no.1, 2009, pp.1-8. n.d. harney and l. baldassar, “tracking transnationalism: migrancy and its futures,” journal of ethnic and migration studies, vol.33, no.2, 2007, pp.189-198. r. hay, “the last night of the poms: australia as a postcolonial sporting society,” in j. bale and m. cronin (eds.), sport and postcolonialism, oxford, berg, 2003, pp.15-28. the italian club fremantle, fremantle, december 1969. r. jenkins, rethinking ethnicity, london, sage, 1997. a.m. kahan-guidi and e. weiss (eds.), give me strength: italian australian women speak, sydney, women’s redress press inc., 1989. r. kreider, paddocks to pitches: the definitive history of western australian football, perth, sportswest media, 2012. j. lee, this is east fremantle. the story of a town and its people, east fremantle, east fremantle town council, 1979. s. martin, football and fascism, oxford, berg, 2004. p. moore ‘soccer in the west: the world game in australia’s western periphery’, soccer and society, vol.1, no.1, 2009, pp.84-95. the official western australian soccer federation soccer annual fixture book, perth, years 1956-1977. j. o’hara (ed.), ethnicity and soccer in australia, assh studies in sports history, no.10, sydney australian society for sports history, 1994. m. pallotta-chiarolli, “from coercion to choice: second generation women seeking a personal identity in the italo-australian setting,” journal of intercultural studies, vol.10, no.1, 1989, pp.49-63. f. ricatti, “elodia and franca: oral histories of migration and hope,” journal of the australian historical association, vol.7, no.2, 2010, pp.33.1-33.23. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 f. ricatti and m. klugman, “‘connected to something’: soccer and the transnational passions, memories and communities of sydney’s italian migrants,” the international journal of the history of sport, vol.30, no.5, 2013, pp.469-483. e. said, orientalism, london, penguin, 1977. j. skinner, d.h. zakus and a. edwards, “nations and ethnicities. coming from the margins: ethnicity, community support and the rebranding of australian soccer,” soccer and society, vol.9, no.3, 2008, pp.394-404. stazzonelli, franco fausto, n.d., in wa museum, retrieved 1 april 2017, from http://museum.wa.gov.au/welcomewalls/names/stazzonelli-franco-fausto. s. vertovec, transnationalism, london and new york, routledge/taylor and francis, 2009. j. warren, a. harper and j. whittington, sheilas, wogs and poofters: an incomplete biography of johnny warren and soccer in australia, sydney, random house 2002. interviews by the author interview with mario carosella, east fremantle, 22 december 2015. interview with giuseppe fulgaro, fremantle, 14 november 2015. interview with cosimo monaco, beaconsfield, 20 july 2016. interview with ennio tavani, east fremantle, 22 december 2015. fausto buttà is an associate lecturer (italian studies) and an honorary research fellow (history) at the university of western australia. his main field of study is contemporary italian history. for more than ten years fausto has researched the history of italian political movements, particularly anarchism, fascism, and antifascism. on these subjects, he has published living like nomads. the milanese anarchist movement before fascism (cambridge scholars publishing, 2015) and anarchici a milano. storie e interpretazioni (1870-1926) (zero in condotta, 2016). fausto is currently working on italian migration and soccer in australia. 1 data and statistics for this article have been taken from east fremantle tricolore soccer club membership book, east fremantle, years 1966-1973; the official western australian soccer federation soccer annual fixture book, perth, years 1956-1977; and the 2001 perth soccer club yearbook, perth, 2002. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 229 one day in fremantle: tv representation of this alternative to australia day shaphan cox curtin university s.cox@curtin.edu.au thor kerr curtin university thor.kerr@curtin.edu.au copyright©2018 shaphan cox & thor kerr. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: a 2016 decision by the city of fremantle in western australia to change its date of national celebration generated a televised controversy about the municipal observance of australia day. beneath this controversy, fremantle’s decision to change the date reflects a long ongoing struggle over the colonization of country belonging to aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples. this struggle can be traced back to the landing of the first fleet of british settlers in cadigal, eora, country (sydney) on 26 january 1788. this paper analyses the context of fremantle’s decision and considers how television and current affairs reported it to audiences across australia. twenty-eight news and current affairs video recordings broadcast between 25 august 2016 and 29 january 2018 by abc, nine, nitv, seven and sbs networks were analysed. key themes emerging from this study are discussed, including: the emptiness and trouble with australia day representation; diversion through division and false economy; and, from genocide to solidarity with aboriginal leadership. finally, this paper offers an opportunity for understanding how australian community has been imagined and how community in australia could be imagined. keywords: indigenous sovereignty; australia day; national celebration; genocide; television. mailto:s.cox@curtin.edu.au mailto:thor.kerr@curtin.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 230 western australian premier colin barnett explained in november 2016: everyone understands the history and the debate about australia day but australia day is our national day, most aboriginal groups accept it and history is put to one side. (bembridge, 2016) dumbartung aboriginal corporation announced in january 2017: at 10am at the fremantle roundhouse foreshore a massive cleansing ceremony will commence … it is our young people’s initiative to smoke the barbaric portholes of the british empire where they held tens of thousands of our men chained and shackled prior to their transportation to rottnest island concentration camp of death. (eggington, 2017) western australian premier mark mcgowan emphasised in april 2017: there is one australia day. it shouldn’t be played around with. i think we’ve had that debate now, and let’s move on. (9 news perth, 2017) introducing australia/invasion day municipal demand to change australia’s day of national celebration from a commemoration of british colonisation to something more inclusive is growing despite state and federal governments wishing the change away. tom calma (2015) argues that aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples have suffered a brutal exclusion from the celebration of australian community, and that rejection of australia day is an important element of ongoing resistance: ‘invasion day’ sowed the seeds of a movement by the first australians—one underpinned by resilience and determination—to fight for our survival and the connection to our lands, without which we are not complete … the refusal by aboriginal and torres strait islander people to acknowledge australia day is part of the ongoing struggle for recognition of indigenous people’s rights. (calma, 2015, p. 11) aboriginal opposition to australia day is not new. it was clearly expressed in the 26 january 1938 “day of mourning” and protest in sydney against the celebration of 150 years of colonisation (foley, 2007, pp. 121-122; kwan, 2007, p. 10). from that day, gary foley (2007, p. 122) argues, indigenous people have marked 26 january as “invasion day” and by less polite terminology (p. 130). this paper examines television news treatment of the city of fremantle’s decision to invest in a day of community celebration on 28 january instead of a 26 january australia day. australian-licensed television stations mediated this decision for their audiences as a controversy in challenging the latent governmental practice of investing in australia day celebrations that commemorate the first day of british settlement in new south wales on 26 january 1788 (kwan, 2007). this paper discusses the context of fremantle’s decision through an analysis of television news and current affairs clips from 2016 to 2018. key themes emerging from this study coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 231 include: the emptiness and trouble with australia day representation; diversion through division and false economy; and, from genocide to solidarity with aboriginal leadership. these themes will be discussed in subsequent sections. approaching television representation of a reimagined national day the imperative for this kind of work was brought home to us when we heard repeated requests from teenagers in perth for inclusion of aboriginal representations in public spaces, such as in the downtown city square, the airport and in their suburban streets. this would give them some pride in being aboriginal, they said, and would counter the exclusions and negative representations that make their lives difficult and casual employment nearly impossible. these motivated teenagers provided this advice as a youth panel at the decolonizing settler cities symposium in perth in september 2017. they requested ordinary things, the indigenous representations that can be found in most international airports but not in perth, and an exchange of the american green cactus in perth’s city square for a work of aboriginal art. in other words, they called for inclusion of their people’s culture in the public life of metropolitan perth. the problem of excluding indigenous peoples’ culture and claims and the technologies of legitimising this exclusion have been the focus of research into media and public representation in western australia for some time (mickler, 1998; kerr & cox, 2013; thomson, bennett, johnston & mason 2015; cox, birdsall-jones, jones, kerr & mickler, 2016; kerr & cox, 2016). so, although profoundly sad, it was not surprising to hear the aboriginal youth panel lament the lack of public indigenous representations and the, integrally related, difficulty of being a proud aboriginal person in the perth metropolitan area. although indigenous representations and acts of sovereignty can be identified in public places and performances (haebich, 2018), they are often negotiated within the constraints of expression allowed by the colonial state (cox, 2010; kerr & cox, 2013). when the city of fremantle attempted to open up a space for aboriginal initiative in developing a community celebration through its one day festival in 2017, we could not resist examining how popular television news and current affairs mediated this event. compared to other forms of media, territorialised broadcast television has been identified as the media technology that most directly addresses and consolidates communities of modern nation states because the boundary of broadcast is typically in alignment with national territory (volkmer, 2014). all of the television stations included in this study were licensed to transmit within australian territory by the australian communications and media authority. while the nation-state boundaries of television are being disrupted by satellite transmission and, more recently, internet streaming, this study is as much about the end of an era in a particular form of mediated community imagining as it is about highlighting a new beginning. in attempting to further understandings of australian television representation of ways of imagining community celebrations in australia, we assembled a corpus of television news and current affairs clips referencing the words ‘fremantle’, ‘australia’ and ‘day.’ the corpus of video clips was collected from the informit tvnews archive as well as from commercial television station pages on facebook and youtube. twenty-eight news and current affairs video recordings produced between 25 august 2016 and 29 january 2018 by the abc, nine, nitv, seven and sbs media organisations were subject to analysis (table 1). these videos and their coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 232 table 1: corpus of television news and current affairs clips. intertextuality (shapiro 2001) enabled us to identify and explore how an organised challenge to the celebration of australia day was dealt with during the end of an era in reproducing modern nation states through territorialised broadcast television (volkmer, 2014). the process of analysis and our interpretations were informed by our research on contemporary spatial-rights issues in fremantle in fields of geography and urban planning date source title min's 25-aug-16 nine news waterside bars and cafes are set to be the biggest losers in a decision to axe fremantle's australia day fireworks 01:32 25-aug-16 abc1 perth news fremantle city council has axed its australia day fireworks celebrations, saying it's insensitive to aboriginal people 00:49 26-aug-16 nitv news a fremantle city council has axed its australia day celebrations saying its not culturally appropriate for aboriginal people 00:57 25-nov-16 seven news first it banned australia day fireworks now fremantle city council is changing the date 00:30 25-nov-16 abc1 perth news national day: divisive debate: the city of fremantle's decision to shift australia day celebrations two days later to heal a division within the community has generated an even more divisive debate 02:41 25-nov-16 sbs world news an aboriginal elder has condemned a city council for creating an alternative day to australia day 02:09 25-nov-16 nitv news the city of fremantle and western australia has decided to celebrate to australia day on the 28th of the january not the 26th 00:46 27-nov-16 abc1 perth news the premier admonished the city of fremantle for cancelling its australia day celebrations in favour of an alternative event two days' later broadcast 00:40 28-nov-16 nitv the point fremantle city council made the historic step of cancelling celebrations on australia day, the council will instead hold festivities two days after the 26th of january 02:10 28-nov-16 nitv the point just a day after a fremantle council announced it's plans to shift australia day celebrations an editorial was published in the saturday paper echoing those calls to change the date 05:37 30-nov-16 nitv news our elders have confirmed that the city of fremantle did consult with them over the port cities plan to hold a celebration separate to australia day on the 20th of january next year 00:29 02-dec-16 abc1 perth news the federal government has upped the ante over fremantle council's decision to hold australia day celebrations two days after the national holiday 01:48 09-dec-16 nine news fremantle council has back flipped, now agreeing to hold ceremonies for new citizens on australia day 00:26 09-dec-16 abc1 perth news fremantle has bowed to pressure from the federal government 00:44 02-jan-17 nine news fremantle businesses are fighting back, announcing their own fireworks display and festival for australia day 01:52 20-jan-17 nine news there's a new controversy over australia day celebrations with a group of perth employees vowing to boycott the public holiday, and instead go to work 01:46 24-jan-17 abc1 7.30 it is getting close to australia day and there is debate about whether the date should be changed 06:58 25-jan-17 nine news australia day celebrations will go ahead in fremantle despite the council's controversial snub for cultural reasons 02:38 26-jan-17 sbs world news what led to the city going it alone on this? 02:06 28-jan-17 abc1 perth news thousands have turned out to fremantle for its version of australia day celebration after the council decided to hold what it describes has a culturally inclusive event 02:26 28-jan-17 sbs world news as the port city holds its alternative to australia day 02:14 30-jan-17 nitv news the fremantle city council says it hopes others will follow in it's lead after it's success of the one day festival on saturday 02:20 09-apr-17 nine news two perth councils are considering following fremantle's lead and changing the date of australia day 01:57 14-sep-17 abc1 perth news first was fremantle and now a third victorian council has joined the municipal revolt against australia day 01:58 14-jan-18 abc1 melb. news as australia day draws closer, debate around changing the date is likely to intensify 02:58 26-jan-18 abc1 perth news australia day: even as many west australians were celebrating the city of fremantle has again opted not to mark australia day today 02:09 28-jan-18 sbs world news the city of fremantle its celebrating 'one day'its alternative to australia day for second year 01:42 29-jan-18 nitv news fremantle’s one day festival is once again being held a success, after around 17,000 people attended the australia day alternative 00:53 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 233 (cox, 2010; cox 2012) as well as cultural studies and media studies (kerr, 2012; kerr, 2015), and through the experience of our research partnership with the nyoongar tent embassy in examining and challenging media and public representation of aboriginal people and their gatherings in western australia (kerr & cox, 2013; creagh, kerr, cox & ryder, 2016). this research was also informed by insights from speakers on the changing the date—and a state of mind pop-up panel at the inasa conference in fremantle on 9 december 2016, as well as our visits to “one day” events and sites in fremantle from january 2008 to 28 january 2018. in the following sections, we examine television coverage of fremantle council’s decision to hold a community festival two days after australia day. fremantle ‘scraps’ australia day fireworks, exposing intolerable emptiness news broke on 25 august 2016 with nine news reporting that fremantle council had voted to ‘axe’ its 2017 australia day fireworks event. nine out of 11 councillors voted to end the 10-year fireworks program on the grounds that it was culturally insensitive towards indigenous people. controversy in the news was constructed around the council’s decision being ‘cheap and petty.’ nine’s clip shows fremantle’s cappuccino strip to be empty and reports the city’s chamber of commerce saying, without irony, that the “port city will become a ghost town on the 26th of january, businesses forced to shut on our national day.” regarding this potential loss, media positioned fremantle’s mayor brad pettitt defending the decision. on 25 august 2016, abc shows pettitt saying: what came out of last australia day, especially speaking to aboriginal people in fremantle, is that for them it’s a really complex day. it’s actually a day of sadness … a day that reminds them of dispossession. for the first few weeks of coverage, the cancellation of fireworks—a betrayal of australian community—is the source of controversy around which all the news is constructed. even the local scholar and “traditional land owner” len collard is subject to this limited news frame, but he finds a way to offer a subtle, critical response through nine’s coverage on 25 august: i love the fireworks. i bring my grandkids down here. we like to watch all the flashing lights, but at the same time i think we have got to have diversity and we have got to have an opportunity to maybe try something new. perceptively, to remain in the frame and still get his point across, collard gestures towards the pleasure and child-like fascination that audiences have with australia day fireworks. indeed, the first 163 of 564 seconds (29%) in the news archive (items between 25 august and 25 november 2016) show empty night skies being lit up by fireworks. while every television station in the corpus constructs widespread condemnation about the loss of fireworks and divisive debate in this period of broadcast, nitv (on 25 november 2016) was the first to describe what would be added through the change: coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 234 earlier this year fremantle announced it had cancelled its 26th of january fireworks display in deference of indigenous australians. now the city, south of perth, has declared it will stage a culturally inclusive alternative australia day in 2017. a concert on the fremantle esplanade with the likes of dan sultan and john butler is set for the new date of january 28. on 25 november 2016, sbs visualised the change by showing clips of music videos by “former fremantle busker john butler and indigenous artist dan sultan” in rich contrast to the conforming images of fireworks and flags that were used to open all other news on the issue between 25 august and 28 november. dan sultan’s and john butler’s humanist clips provide momentary relief from the radical emptiness of night skies pierced by fireworks explosions used repeatedly to signify australia day celebration. while the lead into sbs news argues against fremantle’s decision, the visual aesthetics of the news package offers the possibility of a richer and more personal celebration of community. where nitv showed how artists and performers and municipalities could take the lead for politicians to follow, the abc on 2 december showed the federal government upping the ante by “threatening to revoke the city’s power to hold citizenship ceremonies.” this apparently came in the form of a letter, sent by “assistant minister for immigration alex hawke on the request of wa liberal mp ben morton” threatening to revoke the council’s authority to hold citizenship ceremonies if it changed the date because it would be “in breach of the code that says these ceremonies can’t be used for political purposes.” council reportedly said this contradicted earlier advice it had received from the immigration department and responded that it had received no letter. morton, the only person shown interviewed on camera in the abc clip, says: i think fremantle council’s going far beyond its responsibilities of picking up rubbish and making the gardens nice in fremantle. citizenship ceremonies should not be part of council’s wanting to make a political statement. the abc clip suggests a bi-party political front has emerged against fremantle’s ‘politicization’ of australia day. a week later, on 9 december, the abc shows fremantle bowing to pressure from the federal government: “it has dropped plans to hold its citizenship ceremony on january the 28th” but would still hold its one day in fremantle event. the mayor is shown in an abc radio studio arguing for the more inclusive celebration. then the news clip ends with a fremantle street scene and a reporter making the public service announcement that “new citizens can attend ceremonies in fremantle on january 26 or march 14 next year.” on the same day, nine reports that “fremantle council has back flipped, now agreeing to hold ceremonies for new citizens on australia day.” visually, nine pans out from an australiana beach-ball held by a young girl to a diverse gathering of happy, waving people. the scene then cuts to an outdoor citizenship ceremony where a mixed-ethnic audience declares its allegiance and receives citizenship certificates. the applause shown at the ceremony seems to support the backflip. happy people decked out in australiana are then shown on a fremantle beach after order has been restored. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 235 diversion through division and false economy while the one day initiative was an attempt to heal division, television news tended to construct division—particularly within aboriginal communities—and divert attention away from substantial interrogation of the meaning of australia day. headlines included: “first it banned australia day fireworks, now fremantle council is changing the date” (seven on 25 november 2016) and “the city of fremantle’s decision to shift australia day celebrations two days later to heal a division within the community has generated an even more divisive debate” (abc on 25 november 2016). all televisions stations, to varying degrees, construct division against fremantle council, and reinforce this division by presenting the opinions of conservative male aboriginal opponents in the first three months of coverage. the views of these opponents are reinforced by vox populi reports of apparently everyday people on the streets of fremantle’s retail/tourism precinct and brief comments from prime minister malcom turnbull, wa corrective services minister joe francis as well as a spokesperson for fremantle’s chamber of commerce (seven, sbs and abc on 25 november 2016). abc, on 27 november, broadcast western australia’s premier colin barnett condemning the one day initiative: i think it is disloyal of the city of fremantle to somehow question the standing of our national day. it’s disloyal to our country, it’s disloyal to our state and, i think, it’s disloyal to the community of fremantle. the news presentation of aboriginal people opposing fremantle’s decision came apart on 30 november 2016 when nitv showed noongar elder robert eggington offering a photograph of fremantle councillors discussing australia day in a yarning circle with a substantial group of female and male elders prior to the council’s resolution. the position of aboriginal voices against fremantle’s decision was, perhaps, already untenable for some viewers because all the televised aboriginal opponents were male members of state institutions such as the australia day council, the prime minister’s indigenous advisory council, western australian of the year, opposition spokesman and member of state parliament and a former police officer. representation of aboriginal opposition had dissipated in television news by the first one day festival on 28 january 2017, and by its second go around in 2018 it had disappeared altogether. nitv played a significant role in disrupting the appearance of criticism of one day. key footage included nitv’s current affairs show, the point (on 28 november 2016), reframing and appending a musical clip to sbs new footage from 25 november. nitv’s clip features a.b. original with paul kelly and dan sultan performing a remix of kelly’s australian classic dumb things in which briggs (of a.b. original) points at the camera and states, “the date’s changing!” (drawn from triple j’s like a version broadcast on 25 november 2016). the point’s clip closes with kelly, sultan and others singing the memorable line “in the middle of a dream … i’ve done all the dumb things.” representation of aboriginal opposition to fremantle’s decision disappeared over the period of this study, even the former police officer mentioned above opposing the 2017 date change had come around and led the one day smoking ceremony on 28 january 2018. no longer able to rely on conservative aboriginal opposition, commercial media maintained division against fremantle’s decision on the grounds that waterside bars and cafes were “set to be the biggest losers” due to the cancellation of fireworks (nine on 25 coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 236 august 2016). a binary in the controversy was maintained by showing fremantle mayor brad pettitt defending the decision, arguing that “we are keeping the budget, so it’s not about saving money, it’s about re-investing that money in a different kind of activity.” on 2 january 2017, nine reports fremantle businesses “fighting back” against the one day initiative on the grounds that australia day “has been there for yonks and why change a good thing.” the report says businesses will hold their own fireworks display and it appropriates the council’s alternative events into the business-led fiesta: “almost 380 fed-up operators have banded together to fund a $50,000 fireworks spectacular plus a four-day fiesta.” nine excludes the inclusive one day event from its business-led fiesta from january 26 to 29—despite one day in fremantle falling between the dates on january 28. the journalist seemed so misinformed that she denounced the new “multicultural event on february [sic] 28.” the reporter introduces a businessman relieved that “australia day celebrations have been saved.” a convenience store is shown, then its operator says to camera that businesses in the last few months have “closed down because of high, high rent.” if it were not for the reporter’s frame, audiences would be correct in assuming that the systemic challenge to businesses in fremantle is not the date of national celebration but high rent for shops in fremantle. also, the reporter neglects to mention the international business success of musician john butler that has risen out of fremantle and escaped this rental trap. instead, the reporter almost spits out the word “butler” when implicating him in leading the concert that replaces the council’s “firecracker night.” despite nine positioning itself as supporting local business, in its report, “fremantle businesses are fighting back,” it neglects to represent the creative artists at one day as entrepreneurs making significant contributions to the fremantle brand and economy. john butler, for instance, would earn a reported $58 million in the 2016/17 financial year (kearney, 2017). butler’s most viewed clip on youtube, with 37 million views, was filmed in his fremantle hometown studio (john butler trio, 2012). nine fails to recognise butler as a successful global business that has grown out of fremantle. the other fremantle-raised musical entrepreneur that comes to mind is the legendary, late ac/dc front man bon scott. it is not surprising that council seeks to incubate local musical entrepreneurs through its national day celebration when they have proved to be a much better investment than firecrackers. dan sultan, for instance, starred in the successful western australian theatre and film musical, bran nue dae, shot in fremantle and written by the legendary late baada aboriginal composer, musician and playwright jimmy chi. a year later, the second one day line-up would feature one of fastest rising stars in australian music, baker boy, and the entrepreneurial high-energy dance group djuki mala. yet, throughout the archive, commercial media persisted in providing a local economic rationale for the defence of australia day. this defence became particularly problematic when nine on 20 january 2017 condemns a perth-based company for giving its staff the option to work on australia day out of respect for indigenous people. gumala investments is offered to nine’s audience on 20 january 2017 as a do-gooding organisation for its “boycott” of australia day whereas hospitality and retail businesses in fremantle are the aggrieved parties for being “forced to shut” (nine on 25 august 2016). at the end of nine’s report on gumala investments on 20 january, the australian flag is flown across the screen under a super-imposed text asking viewers to say whether they “agree with a boycott of australia day out of respect for indigenous people,” then the anchor unashamedly promotes her network by telling the audience: “head to the nine news perth facebook page to have your say.” coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 237 the false economy continues on the eve of australia day 2017 when nine laments fremantle’s bars and restaurants having to pay “for entertainment and activities in a bid to attract just a quarter of last year’s crowd to the district,” then directs viewers to “perth’s biggest party” being the skyworks air show and fireworks, where 300,000 people are expected to watch “32,000 firework explosions” over swan river. the report shows audiences the best vantage points and how to get to skyworks, then cuts back to fremantle where audiences are warned of “more conflict tomorrow.” nine’s reporter says to camera: “reclaim australia will hold a rally here in fremantle tomorrow to show their support for businesses who oppose the decision to scrap the australia day fireworks here in fremantle.” by warning people to be weary of fremantle, nine undermines the very businesses that it had professed to support in this and earlier broadcasts. in the end, the real danger on australia day occurred on the swan river when a pilot and his girlfriend died when their seaplane crashed during the skyworks air show. this tragedy resulted in the state’s largest fireworks display on australia day 2017 being cancelled (abc news, 2017). coming to ground: the trouble with australia day a powerful challenge to aboriginal division and false economy came from current affairs programs, nitv the point and abc 7:30. the longer format enabled problems with australia day to be aired and discussed. the point on 28 november 2016 interviewed the saturday paper’s editor, erik jensen, about his recent editorial, which was “a call to action, not to politicians, but to musicians, artists and families to boycott events” held on the 26 january. change the day is re-centred as a national issue. jensen is interviewed before a backdrop of flinder’s street station, suggesting the principal social gathering and recent place of substantial aboriginal protest in melbourne. jensen asks artists and performers to pull out of australia day concerts to encourage families to ask what they are celebrating on 26 january. nitv enables the central problem to shift from the loss of fireworks and division over the date change to become a problem of the “hard sell” of “convincing the average australian to stop marking australia day on january 26th.” this shift allows jensen to inform viewers that australia day is not a deep-rooted tradition with this date only fixed federally since 1994. jensen says it “shouldn’t be complicated to say that the day on which we are currently celebrating australia day is the wrong one” because it is so linked to “dispossession.” he reiterated that he supported celebrating “a national day, but we should be more articulate in why we hold that day and when we hold that day.” jensen sees an opportunity in other municipalities following fremantle in changing the date “for their people,” but also sees no federal politician will because “politicians don’t want to have this conversation because they think there are no votes in it.” he also reminds nitv viewers that this is certainly “not the single most important issue in indigenous politics” compared to treaty or recognition. the politics in this broadcast, it seems, is all about convincing people to reflect on the beginning of aboriginal dispossession with the flag raising at sydney cove on 26 january. the potential value of cancelling australia day events in favour of a different national celebration becomes clearer on 24 january 2017 when the 7.30 current affairs show, hosted by indigenous journalist stan grant, explores the issue in relation to meanings in the actual place of celebration. after showing various clips on the controversy coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 238 backgrounded by cold chisel’s forever now and shots of aboriginal activists interspersed with shots of the australian flag, noongar leader robert eggington is shown reminding viewers of the paradox of celebrating a particular history through australia day in which “aboriginal people have suffered so greatly.” the shot cuts from aboriginal activists marching to have their voices heard in their distinct red yellow and black colours to images marked with the red-white-and blue of the australian flag: from an aboriginalflag-wearing woman marching with a megaphone, the visual cuts to footage of six australian flag-wearing women bearing flags on water skies. the piece then focusses on the local context with mayor pettitt explaining, “the idea that we have a unity day on a day of white settlement doesn’t really make a lot of sense when you think about it.” then eggington patiently informs the reporter that “the aboriginal community have decided to hold a massive smoking ceremony at the round house.” he explains that the round house is a former jail “where the aboriginal men were held before transportation to wadjemup, or what’s now commonly known as rottnest.” many viewers may not know, however, that the rottnest island holiday resort is built upon the mass grave of aboriginal men interned there by the emerging western australian state. the reporter describes how eggington is helping to make an alternative national day of celebration more meaningful and unifying. “white australia,” eggington says, “the only way they know how to celebrate is, you know, put the barbeque on, fill it up with lamb and get a gutful of grog and, you know, gaze at a skyworks show, you know, made in china.” after eggington, 7:30 cuts to the newly minted elizabeth quay waterfront development with noongar elder and australia day wa ambassador dr robert isaacs saying: “we are one nation of people” and have to go forward and not go back. isaacs also encourages voters at the next fremantle election to send a message to the council that it should bring “australia day back to where it belongs, january the 26th.” a sense of irony can be read into the second half of the piece when the british-sounding reporter interviews the british-sounding publican of the national hotel who is promoting not just australia day but a “massive week long party” called “australia week.” the publican karl bullers argues that “it is not about the politics, it’s about the community and the business side of it.” the piece then introduces federal liberal mp ben morton, who according to the report “feels so strongly” about the city of fremantle’s plan that he has taken out a full page advertisement in the local paper “calling for residents to celebrate on the 26th.” morton appears outside a tree in fremantle’s kings square and argues that the city of fremantle should be “sticking to its core business of making our parks nice and clean and picking up the rubbish” rather than creating a “national debate.” pettitt then says that the current australia day has little to do with western australia because “it is new south wales day.” the reporter then introduces australian unity, the “company that led the original push in the 1880s to celebrate australia day,” as agreeing “it could be time for a change.” archival images of the australian natives’ association’s promotional materials appear before the australian unity spokesperson rohan mead is presented supporting a rethink of the national day and saying to camera: “over the last couple of hundred years we’ve come to learn much, much, more about the hugely valuable human cultures that were displaced on european settlement.” the 7.30 reporter closes by reminding viewers that they now have a choice in fremantle between “the traditional fireworks or the council’s weekend alternative”: a choice to “get a gut full of grog and gaze at a skyworks show made in china … while celebrating the beginning of a genocide within australia” or a chance to do something better. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 239 the only media organisations in our archive to report from the one day event in fremantle on 28 january 2017 were abc, sbs and nitv, followed a year later by just sbs and nitv. on 28 january abc opens with news anchor describing the event as fremantle’s version of australia day, and says, “mayor brad pettitt has hailed the event a success but the state government says fremantle council needs to focus more on developing the port city.” abc provides a routine news reporting format with clean frame-by-frame images synched with an unemotional narrative. sounds and scenes suggest a typical fremantle street festival, which is reported as a possible distraction from the business of developing fremantle’s economy. this uneventfulness is contrasted by sbs and nitv reports focussing on the morning and evening events of the 28th respectively. sbs on 28 january opens with footage from a smoking ceremony as the reporter sets the scene: “at the base of fremantle’s round house, a colonial jail, indigenous and non-indigenous people are recognising a brutal past.” the report focusses on recognising the damage of colonisation and how people can reconcile this past with the present, and reconcile themselves with each other. people are moved to tears; express their gratitude; wave smoke across themselves. the reporter continues, “it was from this coastal spot that thousands of aboriginal prisoners were taken to rottnest island, or wadjemup, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” authority in the sbs report on 28 january is given to leaders of the smoking ceremony including robert eggington who says: … people are wanting that history, they are wanting that knowledge. they are wanting to find out the things in which are denied them in the education curriculums, or through political influence, or media. pettitt is presented by sbs with tracks of white painted finger trails across his forehead and down his cheeks, emotionally moved after passing through this healing ceremony. authority rests in aboriginal solidarity from painted youth to elders as the clip closes with two aboriginal men, arms on each other’s shoulders, looking out to sea towards wadjemup. on 30 january, nitv reports on the afternoon and evening events at the nearby esplanade park in downtown fremantle two days earlier. footage opens with four people happily shouting “mooditj, mooditj” (‘solid’, or ‘the best’ in noongar language). as scenes of happy people at the event are shown, the nitv reporter says the event was “the perfect antidote to the anxiety many felt leading up to the 26th of january.” the reporter, craig quartermaine, moves through the crowd getting reactions to the event. while not providing any subtitled names, some may recognise local aboriginal activist mervyn eades holding a large aboriginal flag and saying: “today is awesome because it’s inclusive.” another participant says this is a day “that we can all celebrate, can put aside differences and come together as one.” no australian flags or paraphernalia are shown, instead viewers are treated to an indigenous dance by members of the audience. richard walley is shown performing noongar music on the main stage followed by aboriginal dance. the mayor is positioned as a spectator, seemingly overjoyed by the occasion. reporter quartermaine says what this event on 28 january means to him as he wanders among the crowd: as somebody who grew up in perth and dreading the 26th down by the swan river every year, to be here in fremantle two days later and see so many people just down here and enjoying each other’s company and celebrating being here together is kind of what it’s about … brad pettitt and the fremantle coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 240 city council received so much grief both federally and at a state level for taking on this decision and abandoning the 26th. second go around: through genocide to solidarity with aboriginal leadership on 9 april 2017, nine reports that two other councils in perth are considering following “fremantle’s lead in changing the date of australia day celebrations despite a backlash from locals and businesses.” the report recycles earlier footage of empty skies, fireworks and aussie stereotypes before introducing the new western australian premier, mark mcgowan, reiterating the last premier’s position and attempting to close down debate about australia day. on 14 september 2017, abc reports: “first it was fremantle, now a third victorian council has joined the municipal revolt against australia day.” moreland council in melbourne voted to shift the date to a day that is “more acceptable to aboriginal australians,” following similar decisions by nearby councils. the report offers nuances in the debate within the moreland council chamber by both aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. a polarised debate was constructed within the aboriginal community with “gary murray, member of public” asking the council: “why would black people, aboriginal people, celebrate a holocaust.” the council votes to change the day then immediately “ian hunter wurundjeri elder” is shown condemning the council for taking away australia day and asking, “are you going to take away ramadan? are you going to take away christmas?” cutting away from the community-filled interior of the council chamber to a shot of the lone assistant minister for immigration, alex hawke, offers a sense of federal authority being restored despite the reporter’s problematic narrative: “the federal government has condemned the debate saying comparing the date to the holocaust is offensive.” murray’s claim about historical events is undermined by the reporter while hunter’s claim about the council possibly cancelling christmas goes unchecked. the structure of the report arguably implies that the federal government could remove the council’s right to hold australian citizenship ceremonies because of the holocaust statement. the abc news item closes with an affirmation of the importance of australian citizenship ceremonies in moreland and other municipalities while the debate around australia day continues. in october 2017 voters in fremantle returned brad pettitt and much of the fremantle council for another term in office despite the dominant media construction of popular offence against councils that attempt to “hijack australia day” (abc on 14 september 2017). then on 14 january 2018, abc reports that fremantle council’s decision “to ditch” australia day celebrations was not as controversial as first reported. this headline news is offered in relation to a tasmanian council’s decision to hold an alternative celebration in 2013. the first half of the abc’s report presents indigenous people talking about the suffering of aboriginal people exiled to flinders island through a colonial technique replicated in the transportation between fremantle’s round house and rottnest island. an examination of these technologies supports murray’s holocaust claim, denied by the assistant immigration minister. racially identified people were herded en masse into concentration camps where many died; racially identified people were forced to work without pay; records of racial identities were collected and stored by government; and, territories occupied by a genocidal authority were cleansed of racially identified people. that these technologies signify holocaust to some people in australia is understandable. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 241 the challenge accepted by fremantle councillors was to face up to local acts of genocide and be guided by aboriginal elders to a space where non-aboriginal australians could build an alliance under an aboriginal flag. on the morning of 28 january 2018, a community healing process was led by aboriginal leaders, building on the previous year’s smoking ceremony at the round house jail that addressed its role in genocide. this healing process included a richer re-articulation of the relationship between walyalup (fremantle) and wadjemup (rottnest island) on pre-colonial terms. through this healing ceremony and the fun aboriginal-led music festival later in the day, it became possible for non-aboriginal australians like us to imagine the possibility of people in australia being unified under an aboriginal flag. it takes courage to reimagine australia this way. mayor pettitt was accused of being “disloyal” by premier barnett, accused of acting outside his jurisdiction by a federal mp, and threatened with consequences by the assistant minister of immigration. on 26 january 2018, before a giant australian flag backdrop abc’s anchor announced: “fremantle has once again opted not to mark australia day today.” abc shows scenes of relaxed celebration from the previous one day festival, then interviews from the street framed in support of maintaining australia day, and then scenes from fremantle council’s australia day citizenship ceremony. the overall effect of this footage and a short interview with mayor pettitt minimises fremantle’s role in controversy around australia day. instead, controversy seems to have moved to other places, including perth where a small street march by reclaim australia supporters is contrasted against hundreds of people assembled in the city square for “an invasion day rally led by aboriginal elders.” noongar elder ben taylor is shown on microphone calling on people to stand together “to get this date changed because there is too much fighting and suffering.” despite the potential of one day to heal and unify, it was left to sbs and nitv to report on it in 2018. sbs on 28 january describes a successful inclusive community event in fremantle despite “triggering a backlash from the prime minister, the west australian premier and many in the business community.” from the festival in esplanade park, mayor pettitt appears on sbs in the most relaxed state of any of the clips, saying: doing this again was a no brainer, we just wanted to build on that and really make it something that fremantle was really proud of. we had an amazing smoking ceremony down on the beach this morning with the community cleansing the place, and then the idea of this afternoon is a celebration of australia but on a day that doesn’t have the baggage that january 26th does. pettitt is followed by noongar singer gina williams at the festival site on 28 january on sbs, saying: we had the event and the sky didn’t fall in, and we didn’t break australia, and actually what happened was a really beautiful, inclusive, wonderful concert. on 29 january 2018, nitv’s anchor announces: fremantle’s one day festival is once again being hailed a success after around 17,000 people attended the australia day alternative. it is the second coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 242 year in a row the west australian city’s council has changed the date of its celebrations out of respect for first nations people. from the newsroom, nitv’s visual cuts to the one day stage where contemporary aboriginal dance crew djuki mala and hip hop artist baker boy perform. afterwards, one of the djuki mala dancers is interviewed, saying: “the main thing is being amongst everyone and seeing the solidarity between all cultures here.” conclusion this paper investigated how an organised challenge to the celebration of australia day was reported by television networks in australia. an intertextual analysis of twenty-eight news videos highlighted how news items constructed opposition to fremantle’s decision to change its date of community celebrations. key themes emerging from this study include: the emptiness and trouble with australia day representation; diversion through division and false economy; and, from genocide to solidarity with aboriginal leadership. the emptiness and trouble with australia day representation is reinforced through an unproblematic treatment of the 26 january national day of celebration which relies on history being put to one side. news images of fireworks lighting up night skies can be considered a metaphor for the emptiness of australia day. diversion through division and false economy reflects the way that television news structures a division relying on a small selection of male conservative aboriginal voices representing opposition to fremantle’s decision. as these oppositional voices dissipate, a discourse of economic loss suffered by business in fremantle becomes the source of news controversy. in the end, however, indigenous television, indigenous media workers and indigenous community spokespeople find a way to report the ongoing trauma of genocide and methods of collective healing. through the analysis of television news and events, this paper offers an opportunity for understanding how australian community has been imagined and how community in australia could be imagined. references 9 news perth. (2017, april 9). your say: two perth councils are considering following fremantle's lead and changing the date of australia day. watch the story… [facebook status update]. retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/9newsperth/videos/1577090755636412/. abc news. (2017, january 27). australia day plane crash: two dead, perth skyworks event cancelled. retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-26/twodead-in-australia-day-light-plane-crash-in-perth/8215720. bembridge, c. (2016, november 27). wa premier colin barnett calls fremantle ‘disloyal’ for axing australia day celebrations. abc news. retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-27/colin-barnett-on-row-over-fremantledelaying-australia-day/8061644. calma, t. (2015, january). australia survival day. australian quarterly, 10-12. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 243 cox, s. (2010). voicing the unseen in fremantle’s kings square: re-instating fremantle’s ‘civic-heart’ and the exclusion of aboriginal groups. paper presented at the eleventh humanities graduate research conference, perth. ---. (2012). ‘whose city/whose fremantle?’: reconceptualising space for an open politics of place. doctoral thesis, curtin university, perth, western australia. cox, s., birdsall-jones, c., jones, r., kerr, t. & mickler, s. (2016). indigenous persistence and entitlement: noongar occupations in central perth, 1988-1989 and 2012, journal of historical geography 54, 13-23. doi: 10.1016/j.jhg.2016.07.002. creagh, r., kerr, t., cox, s. & ryder, p. (2016). securing space for hospitality in a settler-colonial city. in t. kerr & j. stephens (eds.) indian ocean futures: communities, sustainability and security, 229-246. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. eggington, r. [robert]. 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(2017, june 22), john butler highest-paid singer in the world. mediamass. retrieved from http://en.mediamass.net/people/john-butler/highest-paid.html. kerr, t. (2012). reproducing temples in fremantle, international journal of heritage studies 18(1) 629-645, doi: 10.1080/13527258.2011.576687. ---. (2015). negotiating green space between ecological threats and beloved objects, continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 29(3), 402-418, doi: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1025368. kerr, t. & cox, s. (2013). r. briggs, n. lucy & s. mickler (eds.). setting up the nyoongar tent embassy: a report on perth media. perth: ctrl-z press. isbn 9780987592804 ---. (2016). media, machines and might: reproducing western australia’s violent state of aboriginal protection, somatechnics, 6(1), 89-105, doi: 10.3366/soma.2016.0176. kwan, e. (2007). celebrating australia: a history of australia day. report commissioned by national australia day council, https://www.australiaday.org.au/storage/celebratingaustralia.pdf. mickler, s. (1998). the myth of privilege: aboriginal status, media visions, public ideas. south fremantle: fremantle arts centre press. shapiro, m. 2001. textualizing global politics. in m. wetherell, s. taylor & s. yates (eds.) discourse theory and practice: a reader, 318-323. london: sage publications. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 244 thomson, c., bennett, d., johnston, m. & mason, b. (2015). why the where matters: a sense of place imperative for teaching better indigenous affairs reporting, pacific journalism review 21(1), 141-161. volkmer, i. (2014). the global public sphere: public communication in the age of reflective interdependence. cambridge: polity press. acknowledgements: this article was researched and written in whadjuk noongar country. ngaala kaaditj nyungar moort keyen kaadak nidja boodja. ngaala kaaditj nyungar karbarli bworan koora yey. we acknowledge nyungar people are the first custodians of this land. we acknowledge elder women and elder men past and present. shaphan cox is a cultural geographer in the school of design and built environment at curtin university. shaphan’s research explores the politics of space and place through representation. recent publications include indigenous persistence and entitlement (2016) and kalla yarning at matagarup (2017) co-authored with thor kerr. shaphan lectures in human geography, research methods and urban theory and is the course coordinator of the undergraduate program at curtin university and graduate certificate through open universities australia. thor kerr coordinates the master of arts course at curtin university’s school of media, creative arts and social inquiry. at the nexus of discourse and space, thor’s research focusses on the representation of communities in controversies around island and waterfront reclamation projects in western australia and indonesia. his recent books include indian ocean futures (2016, as lead editor), to the beach (2015, as author) and setting up the nyoongar tent embassy (2013, co-authored with shaphan cox). microsoft word 07_the uncanny pleasures of autotranslation-dominique hecq_dh.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 103 the uncanny pleasures of autotranslation dominique hecq dmhecq@gmail.com copyright©2021 dominique hecq. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: if, as walter benjamin suggests, a translation must 'lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification', translating is an act of creation predicated upon transference – a rewriting that entails a relationship with the other. this is in accordance with benjamin's proposition that the translator must allow her language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. but what if the foreign tongue is one’s mother tongue? this performative paper explores what is at stake in the act of autotranslation when a writer returns to her mother tongue. i will use my own practice to identify what is recovered in this act, namely, a voice, a word, a letter threaded through the fabric of language. i ask why this act produces a linguistic and subjective destabilisation that opens up translinguistic play and suggest that autotranslation consists of a creation in each language with its own interferences, rhythms and affects. though the theoretical frame of my investigation touches upon linguistic and translation studies, this paper is essentially underpinned by psychoanalytic concepts and concerns itself with experiential knowledge. keywords: autotranslation, subjectivity, affect there is a double polarisation in the rapidly expanding field of literary autotranslation (ferraro and grutman 2016: 7). on the one hand, scholarly approaches tend to either privilege contextual frames or textual dynamics. on the other hand, scholars are divided by those who consider autotranslation ‘translation’, that is, as a pure interlinguistic transfer even though it might potentially lead to creative rewriting (tanquerio 2007: 96) and those who, emphasising the prefix ‘auto’, see it as an act of recreation, or ‘alloglot auctorial rewriting’ (ceccherelli 2013: 14). as a writer who has translated both fiction and poetry and who now autotranslates, i am interested in textual dynamics and in the autotranslator’s relationship with what i call the material fabric of language. however, unlike scholars such as chiara montin (2016) or pascale sardin (2016) who explore the genesis of texts or their mechanisms, i explore the act of autotranslation as a coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 104 practitioner, that is from the inside out, as it were. my methodology is that of practiceled research and my method is inductive. ‘the uncanny pleasures of translation’ explores what is at stake in the act of autotranslation when a writer returns to her mother tongue. i will use my own practice to identify what is recovered in this act, namely, a voice, a word, a letter threaded through the fabric of language. i ask why this act produces a linguistic and subjective destabilisation that opens up translinguistic play and suggest that autotranslation consists of a creation in each language with its own interferences, rhythms and affects. the chosen approach is to rely primarily on psychoanalytic concepts and on experiential knowledge. the paper is performative in that it incorporates poems that are not only autotranslations but also poems about translation. these are meta-translations that enhance the writing process and may even contribute to research. why ‘autotranslation’? why erase the hyphen that usually separates ‘auto’ from ‘translation’ in english? as the italo-australian poet paul venzo reminds us, ‘the terms “auto-translation” and “self-translation” are often used interchangeably’ (2020:1) to refer to the act of translating one’s own original work into one or several languages. as a native speaker of french, i would prefer to highlight the latin root of the word auctor and thus use a term that fluidly crosses the linguistic divide that conjures ‘author’ and ‘authority’ while occluding the ‘self’ implicated in the practice of writing and translating. indeed, i chose to write in english at a point in time when my relationship with french was problematic. though it would have made sense for me to use the term ‘auto-translation’, which highlights the greek εαυτός (self), the practice itself provoked a linguistic and subjective destabilisation that needed to be addressed intellectually. as i coursed to and fro between english and french, i realised that i was not translating at all. or rather, i realised that in the act of self-trans-la-tion i was not only investigating my relationship with two languages, but with language at large, by which i mean the material fabric of language comprising speech and writing, parole and langue. therefore, i prefer the term ‘autotranslation’ because it refers to crafting a parallel text in each language while enabling an exploration of the hidden life of language, including linguistic interferences and rhythms, but also its affective dimension. i call this affective dimension the lining of language. while interferences and rhythms are scrutinised and modified in the process of revision, affects remain intact despite the difference in register in each language. affects are the signature, so to speak, of my relationship with each language. to put it another way: affects are the trace of ‘transference love’, a freudian concept which designates an emotional relationship determined by the analytic setting, where the manifest love object is the analyst (freud 1915). in translation, as in any writing, the love object is seemingly language, but it covers the primary love object, i.e., the mother. writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue means covering up this primary love object. returning to one’s mother tongue in autotranslation means uncovering affects tied up with this lost object. it means reaching for the infancy of one’s relationship with language. it means brushing against the lining of language. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 105 pascale sardin’s study ‘ecriture féminine et autotraduction: entre “occasion délicieuse”, mort et jouissance’ (189-203) is of particular relevance to this paper. in it, sardin examines the linguistic manipulation of two autotranslators, hélène cixous and nancy huston. the case of nancy huston bears some resemblance to my own history: huston wrote her first fictions in french, thereby rejecting english, the tongue of the mother who had abandoned her as a child, then autotranslated herself whereas i discarded french in favour of english. sardin notes that for both cixous and huston the act of autotranslation is charged with jubilation, a pleasure that she calls ‘trajouissance’ (189), expressed by way of neologisms, puns and onomatopoeias, a feature that also applies to my own work. sardin’s trajouissance derives from roland barthes’s the pleasure of the text (1975), but ignores the fact that barthes himself drew on a jacques lacan’s concept of jouissance, which is far from benign. the french word jouissance means enjoyment with connotations of excess as well as sexual pleasure. in this sense it is located beyond the freudian pleasure principle. in the 60’s, lacan contrasts jouissance and pleasure, the pleasure principle functioning as a limit to enjoyment, therefore to excess and pain. the term jouissance therefore also expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom and sufferings. for lacan, jouissance is located in the death drive: it is ‘the path towards death’ (1969-70: 17). thus, jubilatory though it might be, trajouissance covers up (self) destructive impulses. i grew up in the french-speaking part of belgium. in 1985 i flew to australia to write a phd on exile in australian literature. now living and working in melbourne, i have become one of the characters in the fictions i analysed thirty-five years ago. my first published piece, ‘embabelled’ (1997) was written concurrently in french and english. then tragedy struck and i stopped speaking my mother tongue. it took twenty years for me to return to it when, in 2015, i was invited to an international poetry festival at trois rivières, quebec, and had to translate fifty of my poems into french. not an easy task. nonetheless, from quebec, i began translating out of bounds (2009), my fourth book of poetry. hors limites only appeared in 2018, marking the end of a three-year wrestle with french. since then, i have entertained a practice of writing and translating in a mode of chassé-croisé across both languages. kosmogonies (2019) exemplifies this form of bilingual dance. like ‘embabelled’, it was written simultaneously in english and french except that in this case, english had the supremacy over french, highlighting in the process linguistic interferences and rhythmic variances. the sequence of poems pistes de rêve, on the other hand, was first written in french, then in english, making me acutely aware of the different affective registers i entertain with each language. a short work of fiction, ‘embabelled’ probes the relationship between grief and aphasia. out of bounds, a sequence in three parts, is a double story of dislocation that explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist’s experience of migration and motherhood. it draws together the two strands to reveal a subject at pains to re-define herself through language in a space circumscribed by sexuality, culture, and postcolonial politics. hush: a fugue weaves a contrapuntal mix of poetry, memoir and reflections on literary theory to tease out the relationship between mourning, mothering and art making. kosmogonies expounds the dialectic between poiesis and poiema on the cusp of creation understood literally and metaphorically. pistes de rêve takes the reader to the north of australia in search of aboriginal rock paintings. acutely aware of the coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 legacy of colonisation, the speaker focuses on issues of nomination and appropriation as she writes country, her mind a predator. all these works, indeed probably all of my work, nudge at the limits of language. what is interesting to me from a reader’s point of view is the difference in affective register as i cross languages. i am often struck by the violence of the language in the french versions, not because french is a violent language, but because it is my mother tongue. like other writers such as nancy huston, i confess to having a difficult relationship with my mother. i also confess to finding the process of translating myself back into french exhausting. the dominant pitch of hors limites is frenetic, while for instance that of pistes de rêve contains rings of composure that nonetheless speaks of self-punishment. the english versions tone down these extreme qualities. it is as though english shields both author and reader from violent emotions buried in my mother tongue. re-reading the previous paragraph, i realise that this paper will have to take into account the notion of ‘self’’, or to be more precise, the ego. all art practice is enmeshed with the ego (m’uzan 1977), and sometimes consists of a never-ceasing refashioning or remaking of the ego, especially as regards writing, as jacques lacan, among others, pointed out. lacan even somehow scandalously suggests in his seminar titled le sinthome (lacan 2005) that james joyce may have avoided madness because his art and artifice offered an alternative to psychotic delusions. further, the rewriting of one’s own text in another language may have something to do with a tacit desire to retrace the creative self or what george steiner calls ‘a narcissistic trial of authentication’ (1998: 336), by which he means that the author ‘seeks in the copy the primary lineaments of his own inspiration and, possibly, an enhancement or clarification of these lineaments through reproduction’ (337). though writing may be a narcissistic act, it should not be an egotistic affair. i used to think that one writes alone: the potential and anonymous reader is absent by definition. i used to think that this absence is a prerequisite for all written acts of communication, that absence here is compounded by the fact that writing is not the transcription of speech and that writing fashions this dimension of absence into language while it re-presents some ‘thing’ through imaginary and symbolic operations. i used to think that writing intensifies the dimension of absence which endows it with its creative specificity and destructive capacity. but one does not write alone. i used to think that, in translating, the author is always absent despite the shape of her ghost flickering in and out of the room where the translator alone creates the quasipresence or quasi-absence of a voice. i used to think that the author is a secret sharer whose name and palimpsest of traces are part of the text. i used to think that i could shut the ghost out of the room so that i could ghost my voice better into this other throat. in the course of translating a novelist’s work i encountered fantasies and obsessions as i unpicked threads that were part of the text’s fabric, and though i bracketed these out of my consciousness, some threads stuck in the guise of images and cadences, thus colouring my own fictions. one does not translate alone. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 in the course of translating my own work i realised that the text was layered in a series of linguistic strands and latent threads leading (back) to what winnicott, in his book playing and reality (1971), called 'transitional space', the latent threads that i, as reader, re-covered in the act of autotranslation—that i uncovered and covered again, metaphorically turning a blind eye to some ‘thing’ i did not want to see. it is on this site of trans-narcissistic communication, where the doubling of potential reader and breathing author occurs, where doubles indeed communicate through the writing, its echoes and uncanny silences, that ghosts might reveal themselves and not want to leave the room. as strange as this may sound, one does not engage in autotranslation alone. neither writing nor translating are lonely pursuits. nor are they benign affairs. the doubles and repetitions are what unite the figure of the ghost with the author and translator in the uncanny territory that is the haunted text—a fiction in the making through the interplay of two languages. but if death, as 'the uncanniest thing of all, can only return in fiction' (wright 1984: 149) and if the ghost is 'the fiction of our relation to death' made visible (cixous 1976: 542), questions arise with respect to the operation of autotranslation as writing. what space does it uncover at the point at which the two versions of one text reflect each other? what is at stake? what does it mean as regards the status of so-called ‘original work’ and translated text? incarnadine sun the skin of day bursts a wild goat leaps off the page word parola wort mot woord— a dice throw cast in jest— a tongue in free fall— images adjust to words: things said things utterly written where do words come from? from behind an eyelid the world slows down coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 silence swaps the living with the dead the mother with the child the dead for the living dead. is language the world? soleil incarnat la peau du jour éclate une chèvre sauvage saute hors de la page word parola wort mot woord un coup de dés exécuté par plaisanterie – une langue en chute libre – les images s'ajustent aux mots choses dites choses uniquement écrites. d'où viennent les mots? de derrière une paupière le monde ralentit le silence échange le vivant et le mort la mère et l'enfant les morts pour les morts-vivants. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 le langage est-il le monde? absence. loss. ghosts. death. presence. some ‘thing’ signalling that ‘incarnadine’ vies with incarnat(e) and silence with the word made flesh. we are on a familiar-not-familiar ground: the uncanny strand upon which one finds oneself suddenly marooned, perhaps. in german, 'unheimlich' is, as freud points out, a compound word (freud 1919: 337). the negation prefix 'un' precedes 'heimlich', familiar. 'un', freud stresses, is the mark of repression, which is part of the term as such: something that was familiar has become not-familiar, strange and threatening. through the peculiar status of the unconscious, where opposites, far from excluding one another, make up for, substitute for, or replace one another or are implied in pairs, the familiar and the strange end up surfacing together. writing is suspended in the provisional space, of reading/writing, which is the point at which the text breaks silence by saying something, but also does not divulge what is more essential: the truth of our desire for the lost object once familiar, yet now made unfamiliar via repression. thus, reading and writing constitute an uninterrupted search for the lost object, an uninterrupted work of mourning. it is a ghosting process whereby the subject hides from the dark object of desire also named das ding, the ‘thing’ which heralds the death of subjectivity, in order to keep desire alive via a series of metonymic displacements originating in the word itself. rock clouds a clutter of tongues the gaze of silence she is in limbo where blue is green is yellow is white, where sweet is bland is bitter and bites, and where silence is an incessant excess of violence. for something to come about something must go away, she hears. she wants to go. she wants to stay. as in bleiben blubbering blancheur des mots blackness of things blurring of boundaries bewitching soundaries in babel instead of that blundering babbelchose to be—is a belle. she hangs on to the word word. nuages rochers désordre de langues l’œil du silence elle est dans les limbes où bleu est vert est jaune est blanc, où douceur est sans goût dégoûtante et amère et mord. et où le silence est incessant excès de violence. pour que l’un advienne, l’autre doit disparaître, entend-elle dire. elle veut s’en aller. elle veut rester. comme dans bleiben blundering blancheur des coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 mots noirceur des choses néant de limites annulant son et frontière à babel au détriment de cette excrembuting babblechose à être – is a belle. elle s’accroche au mot mot. it is the ghost's disruption of temporal and spatial boundaries here reduced to the other’s spectral eye that makes it such an effective figure of psychic and semantic disruption. temporally, the spectre has to do with what derrida calls the 'pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority' of every event, the way every human action is motivated by anterior ones (derrida 1994: 21). yet the ghost also embodies the paradox of its own 'radical untimeliness': it represents both the first originating time and its endless repetition (derrida 1994: 25). spatially, the spectre effects similar disruptions. for derrida, its challenge to identity and its presence makes it a crucial concept for modern philosophy. the spectre functions as 'an identity that … invisibly occupies places belonging finally neither to us nor to it … this that comes with so much difficulty to language, this that seems not to mean anything, this that puts to rout our meaning-tosay' (derrida 1994: 172). ‘ghosts are go-betweens. they tell us where death resides. where life is. they tell us that art is an entwining of death and life and what lies in between’ (hecq 2017: 4). out of bounds’s protagonist and narrator inhabits this in between. the gap between worlds: a no man’s land. i am struck by the fact that i effectively stage myself as author in the dynamic heterolinguistic threading between languages of ‘bleiben blubbering blancheur des mots blackness of things blurring of boundaries bewitching soundaries in babel instead of that blundering babbelchose to be’ that anticipates the dedoubling that occurs in the act of autotranslation just as the sliding of meaning in the original version is compounded in the translation, mirroring what occurs at the level of subjectivity—my ‘self’. but in this linguistic sliding, ‘i’ is always out of step and the mirror slightly askew. traditionally, translation is 'concerned with meaning' (hervey and higgins 2002: 132). linguistic research in the field of translation studies, with its emphasis on the 'target literature' and its 'norms', would not dispute this (venuti 2000). walter benjamin, however, suggests that 'a translation … must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification' (benjamin 1970: 79). i am struck by the use of the adverb 'lovingly': does this mean that for benjamin a translation should bear the mark of love? a love of the work? a love passed on to the text? a love of this palimpsest of signs we call an author? if this is so, then love is the con-text of translation, that which accompanies the text. it is in this con-text that the work of translating occurs, a work that produces another text just as fiction produces parallel texts to desires and fantasies. benjamin's comment also refers to incorporating ‘the original’s mode of signification’. this reference to an oral relationship to the text resonates with my own reference to a tactile relationship with the fabric of language: what the translator does in working the text is to experience it as a texture—be it in the mouth, in the throat, or on the skin, i.e., when the translator has become a disembodied subject ghosting herself into some other's voice or when the autotranslator has become a doubled subject projecting her voice into another language. the text is a textile composed of differing threads or coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 strands, now loose, now woven tightly together, always retaining a set of relations to each other. as a text evolves through successive interpretations, the traditional role of the author as creator slowly wanes, the notion of intentionality wanes in the process of this everelusive search for meaning, this unpicking and re-assembling of signifiers from the text. post-structuralist theory denied the previously fundamental assumption that literary meaning originates from the author. 'to give a text an author is to impose a limit', whereas without one the text becomes indeterminate, achieving reality in the imagination of the reader instead of the author's supposed intentions (barthes 1993: 157). hence the instability of the relationship between textual signifiers and their signifieds is acknowledged and used positively, not to undermine the possibility of consistent meaning, but to affirm the creativity inherent in the decoding process of reading, and hence of translating. imagine insisting too heavily on the side of meaning in the translation: then you would lose the trace left by these strands; you would no longer be able to follow the threads, the insistence of certain sounds, the cadences of sentences. imagine insisting too heavily on the side of meaning in the autotranslation: then you would lose what roland barthes has famously called ‘the grain of the voice’ (1977). this is actually highlighted in autotranslation whereby ‘the bilingual writer-translator produces two different but interrelated texts-in-translation rather than separate source and target texts' (venzo 2016: 1). these two interrelated texts partake of the same texture. they originate from the same breath. but is it the same voice? gorge non saperlo mai per te, pei tuoi puri occhi so cold the ends of twigs burn white with frost voices hover over flames sing to the fire’s crackle silent cadences squeeze the breath out of your chest you wait for daybreak’s natural selection to lisp moonlight prayers dyed bright orange yellow blue enter the freezing dawn… gorge non saperlo mai per te, pei tuoi puri occhi coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 si froid l'extrémité des brindilles brûlent de givre flottis de voix par-dessus le brasier chantent le feu crépitant cadences tues t’arrachent le souffle hors de la poitrine tu attends le ramage de l’aurore et son zézaiement habituel prières de clair de lune teintes d'orange vif jaune bleu tu pénètres l'aube glaciale … apart from the epigraph from giaccomo puccini’s madama butterfly, which duplicates a voice, the two poetic excerpts modulate a voice, gesturing to the encrustation of the grain of the voice in the texture of the human gorge, so to speak. roland barthes’ focus on the ‘pulsional incidents’ inherent in vocal performance is congruent with the more general ‘definitive discontinuity of the text’ that he promotes in the pleasure of the text whereby writing becomes ‘writing aloud’ or ‘vocal writing’ (1975: 66), a form of writing that abolishes the distinction between speech and writing, langue and parole. it is also opposed to linguistic closure and to the cultural subordinations for which it stands. thus, what we call ‘voice’ is a distributive, rather than univocal, dimension of the signifying chain with its variations in register, timbre and tone. the voice’s texture. to allow something of this texture and of this grain to cross over from one language into another, we need to follow what lacan calls the letter of the text, that is, to create a literal translation and therefore one whose end, underlying desire and purpose is to recover, uncover, even discover traces or latent threads. this makes sense, for what is buried in the text are events and affects transformed by the process of writing where the unconscious plays a part. further, doesn’t jacques lacan say in his 'discours de rome' that ‘the word is the murder of the thing’ (2001: 137)? it is as though the function of the text, reduced to the chain of language, is to resuscitate that which has been murdered in the process of writing. the word is a vital necessity. without language we are returned to the inanity of nothingness. the moon is a glass bowl full to the brim dead matter lifeblood how it s a coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 h darkness m i d w a y b e t w e e n (us) t t e s r how it s s s it s’m at s m a t s s m a t t e r s brittle birds hankering after air light water (our lungs) burr …burring …burn… burning la lune est un bol de verre plein à ras bord matière inanimée élan vital comme elle s b e b b obscurité b r i s à mi coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 c h e m i n e n t r e e (nous) comme elle sss aile s’e fr f r a c f r a c a s s e oiseaux fragiles en mal d’air lumière eau (nos poumons) brr… bruibrui… brûle …brûlants constellations disperse in a stutter alongside antiphonic song lines because every star has its avatar, double, negative. take b-612 from the depth of the night you call childhood, renamed st-b-612 when it shrunk to the size of your hand out of shock due to the indo-european st st stem ‘st’ meaning just that: ‘shock’. the star has dulled, or faded, but if you squint you can see its body encrusted with salt now that it has drained and dried out in the sun, now that it has been scrubbed ever so gently, now that its surface is peeling like the skin of a paper gum. stars are not made for the gaze. they need space, light, wings. les constellations se dispersent dans un bégaiement le long de lignes de chant antiphoniques car chaque étoile a son avatar, double, négatif. de la nuit que vous appelez enfance, exhumez b-612, renommée st-b-616 lorsqu’elle fut réduite à la taille de votre main sous le choc de la ra ra racine indo-européenne ‘st’ qui ne signifie que ça : ‘choc’. l’étoile a pâli ou s’est estompée, mais si vous regardez bien, vous verrez que son corps est encrusté de sable maintenant qu’on l’a saigné et séché au soleil, maintenant qu’on l’a délicatement excorié, maintenant que sa surface pèle comme l’écorce d’un eucalyptus à la peau de papier. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 les étoiles ne sont pas faites pour le regard. elles ont besoin d’espace, de lumière, d’ailes. what makes translating oneself back into one’s mother tongue so problematic is that one uncovers traces, latent threads and fibres which occasionally cause the skin to itch, or indeed burst as does the skin of day in the opening to out of bounds. the above excerpt from kosmogonies highlights the interrelatedness of external and interior spaces—an enmeshing of threads and interplay of spaces—witness how i spread myself on the page, destroy time and space. make them real by invoking b-612, a fictional planet in antoine de saint-exupéry’s le petit prince (1945). it also foregrounds what i would call the navel of autotranslation in the interference ‘encrusté’, from the english ‘encrusted’ now enlisted in my french lexicon for its play on ‘incrusté’ and ‘encroûté’ to convey the hold of one language on the other. the depth of it. the ambivalence at the core of it: the word suggests both a healing wound and a precious stone set in a jewel. but the ‘i’ of the french ‘incrusté’ has been sewn over just as the ‘i’ of the poem has been erased by matter. i used to think that one writes the thought unthought alone, and therefore that one translates one’s own work unpicking threads of this thought unthought alone. but that is not the case. any writing is unsolitary. i move the pen across the page or my hands hover over the keyboard in the company of those i have read or heard. i write in the company of the long and recent dead. in the company of ghosts and ghosts of ghosts. and shadows. i dream-walk with them. in that walking, fragments of memory, residues of experiences lodged in the body and deposits of nomination. flashes of intuition and concepts are shaken, jumbled, altered, processed, reshaped. dream-walking is a prelude to making. the pre-amble to creation. it bears a relation to the stuff of writing, including theme, form and syntax. i notice that the poems i walk into the world, so to speak, have a freer syntax. they are also unrestricted by punctuation. this is not to say that they are unstructured and unbridled. quite the opposite. i don’t write when i am dream-walking. i take notes. i consider myself at liberty to collect images, impressions, sounds that will later constitute a body of thought unthought. the linguistic fabric of the writing to come takes shape retroactively. first, random notes. second, a succession of drafts, or different incarnations of thought unthought suffused with images, rhythms, affects. third, the text on the cusp of autofiction or autotranslation with all its linguistic trammels and enabling devices. a self-reflexive and reflective process kindled by the letter. although both writing and autotranslation are acts of creation in their own right, it needs to be stressed that one is composed ex-nihilo while the other ex-novo (sperti 2017: 2). as i write, i catch myself doubting myself: am i losing the thread? i am suddenly reminded of the shadow of the object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known where christopher bollas (2018) contends that ‘within the analytic relationship it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought’. checking the preface, i read that most of our experience of the object world resides within us as ‘assumed knowledge’, a domain which he calls the ‘primary repressed unconscious […] the unthought known’ (xviii). in this book, bollas argues that ‘aspects of the unthought known – the primary coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 repressed unconscious – will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other’. so, i have reconfigured bollas’ concept of ‘unthought known’ when i speak of ‘thought unthought’, by which i mean imagining in the act of moving the pen across the page, narrative making, sensing ideas in the form of concrete and specific details, images, metaphors: writing. a writing that leads to the emergence of aspects of the ‘unthought known’ consonant with mood, affect and movement—a day-dream-ing aesthetic, an othered sense of self. it is this othered sense of self which is birthed in the autotranslation as i confront the ghost train of memory trailing in the fabric of language. lier, délier, relier. tying, untying, retying. a kind of corporeal schema meant for the other: the image of a body of thought unthought. it is this ‘primary repressed unconscious’ tied up as it is with the mother’s body, indeed its presence and absence, which emerges in the course of writing in any language. in my case, writing in english means that this primary repressed unconscious is already at one remove. the act of autotranslation annihilates all distance, throwing into relief that which has been excoriated from and encrusted in my imaginary body. no wonder it hurts. nonetheless, there is an exhilarating dimension to autotranslation, too. it is no other than sardin’s trajouissance. the process is generative and regenerative: autotranslation opens up a space where two versions of one text reflect each other, however imperfectly. gaps between words make room for neologisms, puns, archaisms, foreign words, assonances, internal rhymes, alliterations and other figures of speech whose threads illuminate the fabric of language and might repair a fraying ego. alone with the dark an odour of seaweed a whiff of oil open space from littoral to ocean earth to firmament day a sunken boulder on dry sandbar the horizon lies flat on your hand underfoot squeaky sand plastic scraps to glide onto a dead seal alive with maggots night glass water the milky way drinks you with the cosmos shhh a chirp blue moon thrust against the sky you lower your gaze the sea froths at the river’s mouth a taste of salt spray and spume on the surface of the water whitecaps everywhere you dive surface paddle plough the water as you would wordsoil strike the waves harder and harder you are a rider of white horses rolling in the storm gathers momentum and the sun slowly climbs on its upward course schimmelreiterin you are a prose poem on the make stimmung seething semiotic flux not gravid amniote allant-toi fuzzy-wuzzy wavelets horsehair in aqualune lunaqua chevaux de frise friesland mijn platte land belaqua whetting stone cutting cold you are flayed alive el desdichada sheer mise en abyme an eclipse washed ashore memory fussig pebbles pummice porous skin papyrus pailles de papier flick flicker the sky catches on fire tongues of pink violet crimson lemon orange butter blue plumes of sea green elderflower ash coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 ember rain schimmel argent alloi hors la loi loops ululation elation entanglements black sun shining bright alone with the ghosts that people the dark … autotranslation enhances one’s ‘capacité de décentrement et de mise en perspective’, that is, one’s ability to decentre and refocus (bachir diagne 2019: 88), as does the wild goat that leaps off the page in the fictitious incarnadine sun. the skin of day bursts and she regards her mother tongue from another perspective. from the other tongue. from outside her ‘self’. she is free in the playground of language. she can gambol back to its indo european roots, should the idea tickle her fancy. she can take language apart and remake it. she can reinvent herself in another language, tie herself back to life through language. it need not be a bilingual affair. though that may be the beginning of a plurivocal, even heterolinguistic, affair. orfeu une pièce d’or sous sa langue affronte ses démons dans l’imperfection de la traduction. orfire a gold coin under her tongue confronts her demons in flawed translation. language is metamorphosing and metamorphic. its fabric is a seething semiotic flux made of phonemes, syllables, figures of speech, cadences, rhythms and silences that hark back to what the english language translates by the word ‘uncanny’. the phrase ‘pleasures of the uncanny’ is necessarily ironic. the uncanny is an index of what lacan calls the real, that is, what is outside representation and where das ding and death reside. the gossamers of the real induce anxiety. translating is an act of creation predicated upon transference: it is a rewriting that entails a relationship with the other that bears the mark of love, which harks back to benjamin's proposition that the translator must allow her language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. this performative paper has explored what is at stake in the act of autotranslation when a writer returns to her mother tongue, gesturing to that which is lost and re-covered in the process, namely, a voice, a word, a letter and, surprisingly, the ‘i’ of the self threaded through the fabric of language—an ‘i’ lost and found again through trajouissance. in what may just be a case study, autotranslation consists of a creation in each language with its own interferences, rhythms and affects that opens up new linguistic and subjective spaces. though autotranslation may be a recreation, it has here the status of a writing: a type of writing whose function is to sound out the nature of an author’s relationship with language at large. works cited barthes, roland 1975 the pleasure of the text, trans r miller, new york: hill & wang coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 barthes, roland 1977 ‘the grain of the voice’, in image, music, text, trans s heath, london: fontana barthes, roland 1993 'the death of the author', in k newton (ed) twentieth century literary theory, 155-56 benjamin, walter 1970 'the task of the translator', in h arendt (ed) illuminations, london: jonathan cape, 69-82 bollas, christopher 2018 the shadow of the object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known, anniversary edition, new york, routledge. ceccherelli, andrea 2013 ‘introduzione’, in ceccherelli at la (ed) autotraduzione e riscrittura, bologna: bolognia university press, 14-15 cixous, hélène 1976 'fiction and its phantoms: a reading of freud's das unheimliche', new literary history 73: 542-52 derrida, jacques 1988 the ear of the other: otobiography, transference, trans christie mcdonald, lincoln: university of nebraska press derrida, jacques 1994 the specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international, trans p kamuf, new york: routledge diagne, souleymane bachir & carré, nathalie 2019 ‘portrait du philosophe en homme de langues’, apulée: revue de littérature et de réflection, 4: traduire le langage, 87-93 ferraro, alessandra & grutman, rainer (eds) 2016 l’autotraduction littéraire: cadres contextuels et dynamiques textuelles, paris: garnier freud, sigmund (2001 [1905]) jokes and their relation to the unconscious, standard edition: 6, london: vintage, hogarth press freud, sigmund (2001 [1915]) introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, standard edition: 15, london: vintage, hogarth press freud, sigmund (2001 [1919]) ‘the uncanny', in standard edition: 17, london: vintage, hogarth press 335-81 grutman, rainier 2001 ‘self translation’, in m baker (ed) routledge encyclopedia of translation studies, london: routledge hecq, dominique 1997 ‘embabelled’, in c pagnoulle (ed) writing (on) short stories, liège: l3 hecq, dominique 2009 out of bounds, melbourne: re-press hecq, dominique 2017 hush: a fugue, crawley: uwap hecq, dominique 2018 hors limites, paris: l’harmattan hecq, dominique 2019 kosmogonies, colomiers: editions encres vives hecq, dominique 2020 kaosmos, melbourne: melbourne poets union hecq, dominique, (forthcoming), pistes de rêve, nantes: editions du petit véhicule lacan, jacques 2005 [1975-76] le séminaire: livre 23. le sinthome, j-a miller (ed), paris: seuil coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 lacan, jacques 2001 [1953] ‘discours de rome’, in j-a miller (ed) autres ecrits, paris: seuil, 133-55 lacan, jacques 1969-70 [1991] le séminaire: livre 17. l’envers de la psychanalyse, ja miller (ed), paris: seuil montini, chiara 2016 ‘génétique des textes et autotraduction: le texte dans tous ses états’, in a ferraro and r grutman (eds) l’autotraduction littéraire: cadres contextuels et dynamiques textuelles, paris: garnier, 169-188 saint-exupéry, antoine de, 1945 le petit prince, paris: gallimard sardin, pascale 2016 ‘ecriture feminine et autotraduction: entre “occasion délicieuse”, mort et jouissance’, in in a ferraro and r grutman (eds) l’autotraduction littéraire: cadres contextuels et dynamiques textuelles, paris: garnier, 189-203 sperti, valeria 2017 ‘l’autotraduction littéraire: enjeux et problématiques’, revue italienne d’études françaises, http://rief.revues. org/1573 steiner, george 1998 after babel: aspects of language and translation, oxford: oxford university tanquerio, helena 2007 ‘l’autotraduction comme objet d’étude’ atelier de traduction, no 7 m’uzan, michel de 1977 de l’art à la mort, paris: gallimard venzo, paul 2016 ‘(self)translation and the poetry of the “in-between”’ cordite, http://cordite.org.au/scholarly/selftranslation-in-between/6/ venuti, lawrence 2000 the translation studies reader, london: new accents winnicott, donald 1971 playing and reality, london: tavistock wright, elizabeth 1984 psychoanalytic criticism: theory in practice, london: methuen dominique hecq grew up in the french-speaking part of belgium. she now lives in melbourne. with a ba in germanic philology, an ma in literary translation, and a phd in english, hecq writes across genres and disciplines—and sometimes across tongues. her creative works include a novel, three collections of stories, and nine volumes of poetry. among other honours such as the melbourne fringe festival award for outstanding writing and spoken word performance, the woorilla prize for fiction, the martha richardson medal for poetry, the new england poetry prize, and the inaugural aalitra prize for literary translation (spanish to english), dominique hecq is a recipient of the 2018 international best poets prize administered by the international poetry translation and research centre in conjunction with the international academy of arts and letters. coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 the macdermott lectures series #1 between the colonial and the postcolonial: writing and the creation of a third-space identity m.g. sanchez novelist www.mgsanchez.net special issue edited by isabel alonso-breto i. imagine coming from a territory where there are no writers. imagine living in a place without its own novels and short stories. yes, a few pamphlets on the local flora and fauna have been published and one or two books on military history have been written – but that’s about it: little of real literary value exists out there. this was the depressing situation that i faced growing up in gibraltar, a british overseas territory that almost everybody in the world has heard about, but which few people really understand. but it gets even worse than that. because even though no novels or short stories had ever been written by native gibraltarians, the little that was being said about the place was exaggerated and misleading. let me start by sharing with you a rather blurry screenshot. it is taken from a series called gibraltar: britain in the sun which was aired on british television some years ago. throughout the series you see people waving union jacks and parading up and down the streets dressed as british nineteenth-century redcoats. the narrator, the renowned british actor timothy spall, describes the rock as “a little bit of blighty in the mediterranean sun … which juts proudly out of the southern tip of spain”; later he says “that for over three hundred years [the territory] has enjoyed life as a pint-sized piece of britain.” this is an example of copyright©2022 mark g. sanchez. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and series are properly cited and no fee is charged. http://www.mgsanchez.net/ coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 how gibraltar is frequently portrayed in the british media – as a bastion of britishness, a stronghold of anglo-saxon values standing defiantly in a corner of the western mediterranean. but in my opinion this view doesn’t do any real justice to the nuanced and multi-layered reality of the place. gibraltar is a complex town, a city that resists easy definition. it is not as british as spall and other commentators claim, neither is it as spanish as right-leaning papers in spain suggest. in reality, it is a hybrid, a cultural, linguistic and racial melting pot. it has been like this for nearly three hundred years – thanks to successive waves of migration from places like menorca (1740-1840), genoa (1770-1810), malta (1888-1920), india (1920-1960) and morocco (1970-1980). time constraints do not permit me to discuss these different influxes of people and how they have helped to shape the character of the modern-day gibraltarian, though there is a great deal to be said. instead i’d like to focus for a moment on the first of these migration waves – the one coming from the island of menorca. why did so many menorquines come to gibraltar during the 18th century, you will be wondering. what is the connection between the balearic island and the rock? the answer is that, under article xi of the treaty of utrecht of 1713, menorca, like gibraltar, passed from spanish to british hands. the treaty stipulated that catholics could continue settling on the rock after 1713. the british upheld this regulation, but soon realised that many of the local catholics were loyal to the nearby diocese and bishopric of cádiz rather than the british crown. so, from around 1740 onwards, they began to encourage catholic subjects from the british territory of menorca to come and settle in gibraltar – thus helping to dilute the local catholic population’s ties of loyalty to the dreaded “diocese and bishopric of cádiz.” this policy was so successful that, according to the catalan author martí crespo, by the start of the nineteenth century over 10% of gibraltar’s catholic population was of menorcan origin!1 in fact, i myself have menorcan ancestors on both my mother’s (vicens) and father’s side (seguí). the ‘menorcan rush’ was the first of various migrant waves to reach gibraltar after the british conquest of 1704. migrants began to arrive from britain, from portugal, from genoa, from malta, from northern spain and other places – attracted by the high rates of pay and good working conditions found in the british colony. if you look at the 1774 population census, the first official census undertaken by the british authorities in gibraltar, you will find genoese, portuguese and british names interspersed with spanish surnames like sánchez, jiménez, gómez, rodríguez and garcía. in fact, not only do you find all these names listed side by side in the census; we also encounter individuals bearing the most fascinatingly hybrid names: gerónima allow, cosmo gordon, gasparo brandy, septimus croxe, theodor gavaron, pantaleón davies and – my personal favourite – hamlet codali. if you need further proof of gibraltarian hybridity, then all you need to do is look at individual family trees. consider my own. so far, i have come across genoese names (ferrari, durante), spanish names (villanera, castillo, luisa, duo, sánchez, popa, prieto), menorcan names (vicens, seguí, vilches, miró), british names (brown, whitelock, jones), maltese names (schembri, borg, caccia) and portuguese names (duarte, de silva). the cosmopolitan origins of the gibraltarian population are also reflected in how we use language. in gibraltar we speak llanito – a form of andalusian spanish heavily laced with 1 martí crespo, els 'minorkeens' de gibraltar, p. 107. coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 words from english and other languages, such as ligurian and maltese. traditionally, spanish has been the dominant language in llanito, but over the years we have come to a position where english and spanish are used interchangeably, with plenty of code-switching thrown in just to confuse the issue even further. according to dale buttigieg, a gibraltarian linguist with a suitably hybrid name, llanito “incorporates … different aspects … from … languages around the mediterranean…. [this] makes it difficult and incomprehensible to … people of … hispanic or anglophone backgrounds.”2 so how does llanito actually sound? well, if you google llanito i am sure you will find plenty of examples of people speaking with each other in our highly idiosyncratic dialect, but today i want to read an extract from gooseman, my latest novel, published just five days ago on 9 december 2020. gooseman is a novel about a young man who emigrates from gibraltar to the uk and suffers all sorts of tragicomic misadventures. the “gooseman” in the title refers to the way most english people mispronounce his spanish surname (guzmán). i am going to read a short section from the opening of the novel, when the four-year-old “gooseman” is about to start his first day at school in gibraltar. his mother, who is standing outside the school gates, notices that all the other kids are ignoring her son and – like an overprotective latin mama – calls over the teacher on playground duty: ‘excuse me, plis, miss. that’s my johann en medio del playground. mira lo solo que ehtá, el pobrecito. why do you think the other kids are not going anywhere near him, miss? do you have any idea?’ the teacher scrutinised my mum from behind the iron bars. ‘don’t worry, señora mía,’ she said with a faint sneer, ‘it’s always like this on their first day of school. he’ll start making friends soon.’ ‘pero míralo, miss,’ my mother cried. ‘míralo! it’s like they’re all scared of going up to him or something. that can’t be right, no?’ the teacher twisted around and contemplated the object of concern – standing there with his shoulders hunched in the middle of the playground. ‘listen, mrs.... ’ ‘guzman, miss,’ my mum replied, already wiping a tear from her cheek. ‘marla guzman.’ ‘listen, mrs guzman, all kids go through a phase like this on their first day at school. that’s just how things are. he’ll be okay in a little while, i promise.’ ‘okay, miss. if you say so, miss.... but please take care of him, miss. he’s my only child, my johann is. y eh muy delicao. got bad problems con el ehtómago. finds it hard to go to el toilet. it’s something to do with his sigmund or sigman colon, or whatever it’s called. it’s all knobbly and twisted, me dijo dr girasol, como uno de esoh twiglets que venden en liptons.’ ‘don’t worry, marla. i’ll make sure he’s okay, you have my word.’ 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sozwhsvbi24, 20 april, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sozwhsvbi24 coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 ‘thank you, miss. you’re really nice, miss. you really are. de verdá que sí.’3 ii. having established that gibraltar is a fairly complex place which resists simple definitions, i will now provide you with a few quick facts about myself and why i chose to embark upon my path as a gibraltarian writer. i was born in gibraltar in 1968. my father was a civil servant and my mother a primary school teacher. from an early age i was interested in writing and literature, but it was not until 1995, at the age of 26, that i was able to properly pursue a course of academic study. i studied at the university of leeds, where i took ba, ma and phd degrees in english literature. my plan was to finish the doctorate and become an academic, but the more i learned about books, the more i realised that i needed to start writing gibraltarian stories. in reaching this conclusion, i was influenced by postcolonial writers and thinkers like chinua achebe and wole soyinka and their quest to reclaim their forgotten or at least deliberately sidelined heritage. gibraltar enjoys a high level of self-government and cannot in all fairness be described as a colony, that much is true – but it is striking nonetheless how we – the gibraltarians – are strangely absent from the pages of most history books written about the rock. david lambert, one of the few contemporary british scholars to have looked at the subject of modern gibraltarian identity, recognises as much in an article published in 2005: another consequence of empire in gibraltar has been that the non-military population has been marginalized consistently, hidden by the looming shadow of the rock.... the effacement of the indigenous populations is a common feature of imperial discourse.... similarly, the reduction of gibraltar to ‘the rock’ effaces its human geographies and histories, aside from the endeavours of transient soldiers.4 from the very beginning my purpose as a writer has been to reclaim these human geographies and histories, to bring the gibraltarian experience away from the periphery and into the spotlight. but how does one go about writing stories in a gibraltarian manner? well, as obvious as it sounds, the first thing that you should do is to look closely around you, to actively engage with gibraltar’s hybrid, cosmopolitan reality. go to gibraltar’s old town, for instance, and look at the wonderful panoply of street names – lynch’s lane, pezzi’s steps, fraser’s ramp, arengo’s palace lane, baca’s passage, abecasis’s passage – english names, genoese names, scottish names, menorcan names, spanish names, sephardic names – often arranged side by side. or else sit on a bus and listen to how casually local kids switch from spanish to english and into spanish again. or notice the juxtapositions that you encounter as you saunter up main street. tobacconists selling ducados and benson & hedges. red phone boxes beside subtropical palm trees. kids wearing both manchester united and barcelona fc football shirts. lawyers – fully robed and wigged – striding out of the law courts joking in spanish. above all, the most important thing that you can do, i think, is to focus on the people around you – for they are the living embodiments of this hybridity. here, for instance, is a passage from my 2015 book past: a memoir: 3 m. g. sanchez, gooseman, pp. 1-2. 4 david lambert, ‘as solid as the rock? place, belonging and the local appropriation of imperial discourse in gibraltar,’ transactions of the institute of british geographers, 30: 2, 2005, p. 212. coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 this is a picture of my father’s father, joseph sanchez. he was a handsome and imposing man, broad-shouldered and piercingly blue-eyed, unusually tall, too, for a gibraltarian at just under six feet. he had the names of his wife and children inked on his right forearm, and on each hand, on the fleshy mound of muscle between thumb and forefinger known as the opponens pollicis, he bore a series of faded, violet-coloured squiggles which were supposed to represent flying seagulls and which his brotherin-law, a budding artist, had once tattooed with a knitting needle and a bottle of what my grandfather used to call ‘tinta china.’ he had inherited his fair looks from his maternal grandfather, a mancunian called joseph brown who spent a few years posted in gibraltar with the king’s royal rifle corps in the mid-1880s. in 1888 or 1889 private brown waved goodbye to the military in order to marry sebastiana villanera, a locally employed seamstress from cortes de la frontera in spain. throughout gibraltar’s colonial history there have been countless protestant-catholic nuptials of this type. the template hardly varied. english soldier meets spanish/gibraltarian woman. quits the military. gets married. finds a job on the rock. becomes a father. allows his children to be brought up as catholics so that they can integrate better with the local community. this was more or less what came to pass in sebastiana’s and joseph’s case – except that for some reason (probably joseph’s pig-headedness) their children came to be baptised as anglicans rather than catholics. there were five of them altogether: charles, florence, isabel, joseph and maria luisa. i’m not sure whether the first four continued this tradition when they themselves came to have children, but i do know that when maria luisa gave birth to my grandfather while domiciled with her gibraltarian husband oscar sanchez in la línea she wasted no time in having him baptised as an anglican. thus, my grandfather joseph (who throughout his life remained completely uninterested in political or religious matters) can in some ways be seen as the embodiment of one of those befuddling gibraltarian paradoxes: a man who was born in spain and whose surname was sanchez... and yet who looked as light-skinned and blue-eyed as a cockney costermonger and who was taught as a child to believe that the pope was only the plain old bishop of rome.5 the second thing which i think is important is for a writer to engage linguistically with one’s surroundings. as gloria anzaldúa writes in her essay how to tame a wild tongue, “ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – i am my language”6 – and i think that one cannot debunk the stereotypes that are told about gibraltar without bringing to the fore the hybrid linguistic reality that is lived and felt in our streets. ideally, the best way for a writer to reflect this reality is by thinking and writing in llanito – but in practice this is complicated. firstly, llanito has not been standardised and codified by scholars. second, if i were to write exclusively in llanito my already small readership would get even smaller – down to a hundred readers or even fewer than that. this, as you can imagine, would be disastrous for a writer. as a result, there has to be a certain amount of compromise in manufacturing a gibraltarian text. in my case i try to write my books in standard english, with a few touches of llanito thrown in here and there. just enough, in other words, for the gibraltarian reader to recognise the book as gibraltarian, but not so many as to completely alienate an anglophone reader. i suppose you could describe it as a balancing act. but it is a balancing act that is not so unusual either; this 5 m. g sanchez, past: a memoir, pp. 103-104. 6 gloria anzaldúa, borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza, p. 39. coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 kind of thing happens all over the postcolonial world. let’s say, for example, you are an aspiring nigerian writer. do you write your book in yoruba or igbo, thereby limiting your readership to people in specific parts of nigeria, or do you write it in english, which would potentially open up your book to a readership of millions? here is a passage from my 2015 novel jonathan gallardo which demonstrates what i am talking about: every sunday afternoon [jonathan and little paulie] walk down to fish market road and catch a bus to the frontier. there they spend about an hour strolling up and down the gibraltarian side of the fence, watching families that were divided back in 1969 communicate across the empty hundred-metre stretch separating them. in hoarse and emotional voices, often trying to make themselves heard above the shrieking westerly wind, the families exchange news in spanish about betrothals and maleh de salú, job interviews and sudden deaths, marital break-ups and school exams, all of it drifting past the lone guardia civil who stands there just outside his wooden sentry hut looking bored and resentful, his clunky fr 8 fusil propped up heavily over his right shoulder, his already swarthy features made even swarthier by the long hours he spends under the unforgiving glare of the mediterranean sun. little paulie finds it all very amusing and often mimics the cross-frontier dialogue, putting on a bumbling, high-pitched voice for the women and a gruff masculine one for the men. he declares that if he had any relatives over on the spanish side he’d rather not see them at all than discuss family problems in this way – a berríoh limpio. jonathan says that he’d be the same, but privately wonders what it must be like to have somebody who cares for you stuck on the other side, so close and yet so far away, so perfectly visible and yet so detached. no puede seh fácil, he concludes, shoving his hands deep into his trouser pockets.7 i have chosen this passage not only because it gives an idea of how i “gibraltarianise” my writing, but also because it illustrates how writing can reclaim, or at least give priority to, elements of one’s social history (in this case the experience of living in gibraltar through the ‘closed frontier years’) that for some reason haven’t been given the prominence they deserve. throughout gibraltar’s history, you see, there have been various pivotal moments which have helped to shape our present-day reality. there were the migration waves mentioned earlier. there was the cholera epidemic of 1865 which killed off a significant percentage of the population. there was the large influx of republican refugees during and just after the spanish civil war. there was the evacuation of 1940, when the entire civilian population was transplanted to london, madeira and other places to make way for military troops. all these events have been debated and analysed in history books written by outsiders, but you’ll find almost nothing written from the perspective of the people who went through them. this for me has always been a source of great frustration. it seemed to me that, wherever i looked, there was always an absence, a lack of written testimony, what could be termed a selfrepresentational deficit. 7 m. g. sanchez, jonathan gallardo, pp. 40-41 coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 possibly the most frustrating of these deficits could be seen in the way that, until recently, we remembered the closure of the border and the closed border years. in 1969, general franco decided to close the border between gibraltar and spain in an attempt to drain the lifeblood out of the british territory. the gates remained shut until 1982, causing all sorts of problems – from food and medicine shortages to the separation of families living on either side of the frontier. everybody in gibraltar agrees that the closure was one of the most traumatic episodes in our recent history – una herida abierta (to once again quote anzaldúa) whose lingering effects are felt to this day – and yet, when i started gathering and writing gibraltarian stories in the early 2000s, i discovered that almost nobody had captured in prose what it meant to be alive at the time of the closure. sure, there were the usual references in british history books and one or two articles about food shortages and the rise among gibraltarians of a so-called “siege mentality” – but i never came across anything which had direct human testimonial value. all i could find instead were photographs. photographs of families huddled by the frontier gates. photographs of young babies held aloft so that they could be seen by their relatives on the other side. photographs of people staring forlornly across the hundred-and-fifty-metre divide. photographs of children playing innocently by the barb-wire fence. here, for instance, is a photo taken next to the border gates around 1981. in it you can see a boy and a girl dressed in the traditional catholic first communion outfit. the fact that they are at the border and that there are well-dressed adults with them (notice the man wearing a suit on the right, and the lady with high heels on the left) suggests that the children were taken there on the day of their first communion to be seen by relatives on the other side. but who were the children in the pic? what was their story? after a lot of frustrating dead-ends, i was able to track down the girl in the photo and learn that her name was catherine mor. she told me that her spanish mother manuela had decided to stay with her gibraltarian husband when the border closed in 1969. manuela’s elderly parents, however, had remained in the spanish town of la línea, and every now and then manuela would take her children down to the frontier so that their grandparents could see them from the spanish side. “i do remember seeing mum in tears ... and dad consoling her,” catherine told me about these family visits to the frontier. “mum’s elderly parents were so near but yet so far, and the fact that she couldn't embrace them or get close to them was very painful and distressing for her, and for those of us who witnessed this.” i think it is important to gather and incorporate testimonies like catherine’s in novels and memoirs. if we don’t, future generations will find themselves in the position that i found myself eighteen or nineteen years ago, when i couldn’t locate any first-hand accounts describing the closure of the border and its impact on the gibraltarian psyche. in the last few years, the authorities in gibraltar have initiated an oral history project called bordering on britishness which seeks to preserve in print and on tape the memories of people who have lived through some of these events, as it were, in their own flesh – but, as laudable as this is, i don’t think that placing a microphone in front of someone and asking them to divulge their memories is enough. we need to give these memories literary form, to somehow bring them alive in the shape of readable narratives. to quote the jamaican poet olive senior: coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 writers over the ages have found ways of talking about issues – like politics – without seeming to talk about them. the function is not to present the world as it is, but to present it in a new light through the narrative power of art. literature does not ask “what is it about?” it asks “how do we tell it to make it real?”8 this is what it is all about: communicating lived reality, making our life experiences more present and real. last year, for example, i brought out a book called border control and other autobiographical pieces. in many ways this book is an attempt to explain what it means to be gibraltarian – misunderstood by both the british and the spanish as we are – but it is also an extended philosophical meditation on the border that both separates us from and unites us with spain. for instance, though the border is now open and families are no longer split up, the area still exhibits many typical borderland characteristics. in fact, i always tell people that there are three parts to the border – gibraltar, spain, and a sort of tarkovskian ‘middle zone’ between them incorporating a bit of gibraltar and a bit of spain. in border control and other autobiographical pieces, i reflect on the men and women who gather in this liminal borderland zone: out of the corner of my eye, i spot an elderly spanish couple hiding behind the bus shelter next to mr parody’s kiosk. the woman is half-naked and holding a money belt stuffed with cigarette packets next to her flabby abdomen. the man has a lone cigarette tucked behind his ear and is patiently winding some brown parcel tape around his wife’s midriff, whatever he is saying drowned out by the tearing, high-pitched sound made by the tape as it unwinds from the reel. this is the kind of cross-border contraband that goes on in 2016: pitiably amateurish and small-scale, its meagre profits helping to keep afloat la línea’s neediest and most wretched classes, making a mockery of the oft-repeated spanish nationalist claim that gibraltar is ‘un nido de delincuentes y contrabandistas.’ looking at this particular pair of geriatric estraperlistas, i find myself thinking of spinning dervishes and the paintings of velázquez, of the bandage-wrapped lazarus emerging from his cracked open tomb. most of all, though, they make me think of the chicano writer gloria anzaldúa and her work of non-fiction borderlands/la frontera. in this splendidly eclectic and hard-edged biographical essay, anzaldúa writes that borders are like ‘heridas abiertas’, where two worlds grate against each other and then bleed. borderlands are the crusted scab that forms over the original wound, problematic interstitial spaces that lie suspended between the solid existential certainties on either side, their very moral indeterminacy attracting those whom anzaldúa calls los atravesados: ‘the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the halfdead; in short, those who cross over and pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” ’ though anzaldúa was thinking about the border between the us and mexico when she wrote these powerful words, they could very well apply to the elderly matuteras, varillas, tissue-sellers and other luckless chancers associated with our own frontier, a human grotesquerie that congregates mainly on the spanish flank of la frontera, but sometimes spills over onto the gibraltarian side, continually reminding us of the unnaturalness of all dividing lines.9 while on the subject of borders, another feature which the gibraltar border shares with other border zones is that you never know what to expect while crossing it. as the novelist janette 8 olive senior, 'literature is political because we are political animals', online guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/29/olive-senior-literature-political, 17 november 2020. 9 m. g. sanchez, border control and another biographical pieces, pp. 25-26. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/29/olive-senior-literature-political coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 turner hospital says in her 1985 novel borderline, “at borders, as at death and in dreams, no amount of prior planning will necessarily avail…. control is not in the hands of the traveller.”10 a direct consequence of this unpredictability for us are the traffic queues which occasionally build up at the border area and stretch back for miles around the rock itself, causing mayhem on our roads. when this happens, ambulances cannot attend emergencies; police cars are stranded at the police station; and spaniards who work in gibraltar and reside in la línea find themselves queuing for hours at the border on their way to and from work. in border control and other biographical pieces, i describe what it is like to be stuck in one of these dreaded fouror five-hour-long queues: i look at my partner beside me and then gaze down at the back of my interlaced hands. a lone horn is blaring up ahead, and someone is cursing in either danish or swedish. near the front of the queue, a gibraltarian copper has removed his peaked cap and is wiping the sweat from his forehead. the poor guy looks tired, visibly stressed. if the beeping continues for much longer, other horns will join in and then, before you know it, the sound of shrill metallic honking will be ricocheting up and down the queue, spreading from car to car like some airborne virus. it’s what i most hate about this damned queue – this sense of edginess, of continually simmering frustration. only twenty minutes ago, my father was telling me about a german tourist who got so stressed while stuck in the queue that he simply climbed out of his mercedes and walked off in the direction of the airport terminal, leaving the vehicle stranded in the middle of the four-lane ‘loop.’ ‘no vea el follón que formo el alemán,’ my father said, looking at me via the rear-view mirror. ‘i can imagine,’ i responded with a weary smile, secretly empathising with the harassed german.11 iii. i have been looking at how i write and what i write about. now, for the last part of this talk, i want to focus on how my gibraltarian writings have been received. as i mentioned before, i started writing while i was finishing my phd. for the first few years there was hardly any interest in what i was doing – either in gibraltar or overseas. this was a very demoralising time for me, as i was working very hard but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. my lowest point probably came in 2007, shortly after the publication of my diary of a victorian colonial, my fictional attempt to imagine what it must have been like to live in a working-class street in nineteenth-century gibraltar. i put a lot of effort into this short novel – spending hours looking at archival material and trying to recreate the sights and sounds of fin-de-siècle colonial life as accurately as possible. once again, the idea was to reclaim part of our lost history, to come up with a text that would counter a representational absence. the objective was not to glamorise or prettify aspects of gibraltar’s working-class past – the objective was to paint it as it was, or at least as my research indicated that it might have been. in fact, you could say that a diary of a victorian colonial was an attempt to recreate that first-person nineteenth-century memoir that i had been looking for in my own private research for so long, but never found. imagine my surprise, then, when, a couple of days after a short press release on the book was published in one of the local papers, a letter appeared in the same newspaper accusing me and my book of having performed – and i’m quoting now – a “huge disservice to our noble city and honourable ancestors.” the letter-writer admitted that he had not yet read the book – yes, that’s 10 janette turner hospital, borderline, p. 1. 11 m. g. sanchez, border control and another biographical pieces, pp. 3-4. coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 how bizarre the whole thing gets! – but claimed that the extracts in the press release were so “negative and unedifying” that they denigrated gibraltar and “insulted the memory of our noble city and ancestors.” 12 it was, like i said, one of the lowest points in my writing career. ‘what’s the point in doing this?’ i asked myself. ‘why bother with it all? i try to bring to life the difficulties faced by nineteenth-century gibraltarians and i end up antagonising those who are determined to see the past through rose-tinted spectacles.’ but eventually something stirred in me and i realised that i couldn’t give in because of what one person thought. i had to carry on. i almost had no choice in the matter. somebody had to be writing stories from a gibraltarian perspective, and i couldn’t allow myself to be derailed by an individual who hadn’t even read the book he was criticising! so i bit the bullet, as we say in english, and continued writing. in fact, over the next five or six years i wrote all manner of books. i wrote novels, short stories, essay collections, autobiographical memoirs. i even wrote a three-hundred-page travelogue about india, in which i explored the parallels as well as the differences between tiny, not-quite-colonial but not-quiteindependent gibraltar and gigantic postcolonial india. i wrote all these texts without expecting much in return, driven only by the desire to see words in print that were faithful to the complex, multi-layered reality found in gibraltar’s streets. but here’s the surprising thing: slowly but surely people started taking an interest. first, it was an interview in a postcolonial journal, then an article about my work in another journal, then an invitation to speak at the university of salamanca, then an invitation to take part in a colloquium in basel in switzerland, then a commission for the bbc world service. things quickly snowballed from there and almost before i knew it i found myself in the position where i am today, having spoken about my books at universities all over europe and having had a number of scholarly articles published on my work. there have been several exciting moments along this journey, but one of the most thrilling came when i was contacted out of the blue last year by a professor from the university of california. in his email he explained that he had recently run a course entitled “el mosaico ibérico". the object of this course, he told me, was to introduce californian students to the high degree of geographic, linguistic, and political diversity found in the iberian peninsula, and he had used some of my works to exemplify this diversity. hearing that young men and women in far-off california were reading my books, of course, was very flattering. but what really, really excited me was learning that many of these undergraduates were identifying parallels between the mexican-american borderlands and our own border with spain. as dr robert newcomb himself put it to me: “the students, the majority of whom are second-generation mexican americans, made several interesting comparisons between the situation of gibraltar and the us-mexican context, which is similarly defined by border politics, cultural hybridity [and] linguistic code-switching…. various students commented on the relevance of your stories to their own experiences. the students’ interest in gibraltar was reflected in their selection of final paper topics – gibraltar was one of the most popular parts of the peninsula to write about, punching far above its weight if you take population into account!” 12 ‘disservice to our city’, gibraltar chronicle, 3/8/2010, p. 6. coolabah, nr 32, 2022, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 since our first email exchange last year, dr newcomb and i have corresponded several times and he is now planning to one day bring out a book-length study of gibraltarian forms of selfexpression – something which, as you can imagine, makes me very, very happy. so what conclusions can we draw from this personal odyssey of mine? well, i feel that there is still a lot of work to be done before it can be said that gibraltar has a literary tradition of its own, but i believe that we are finally moving in the right direction. but i think my story also carries a wider message embedded within it, and that is that you should never give up on your intellectual projects and aspirations. i know that some of you are postgraduate students who may be thinking about following careers in academia. my advice to you is this. if you have a subject which you believe in, stick with it, nurture it, make it your passion. carry on believing in it when nobody else does. don’t be demoralised by those who tell you that you shouldn’t be doing what you are doing just because nobody has done it before. if i can get people thinking and writing about a subject as neglected and disregarded as gibraltar’s hybrid identity, then you can also get people interested in your field of speciality. thank you. works cited anzaldúa, gloria. 1987. borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. aunt lute books. buttigieg, dale. 2020. ‘a linguistic perspective on gibraltar's llanito language’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sozwhsvbi24&ab_channel=garrettgibbons, 20 april 2020. crespo, martí. 2018. els 'minorkeens' de gibraltar. publicacions de l'abadia de montserrat. lambert, david. 2005. ‘as solid as the rock? place, belonging and the local appropriation of imperial discourse in gibraltar.’ transactions of the institute of british geographers, 30: 2: 206-220. lombard, anthony. 2010. ‘disservice to our city’, gibraltar chronicle, 3 august 2010. turner hospital, janette. 1985. borderline. dutton. sanchez, m. g. 2020. gooseman. dabuti collective. ---. 2019. border control and another biographical pieces. dabuti collective. ---. 2015. jonathan gallardo. createspace. ---. 2015. past: a memoir. createspace. senior, olive. 2020. 'literature is political because we are political animals', online guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/29/olive-senior-literature-political, 17 nov 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/29/olive-senior-literature-political coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 51 my mother’s ghosts simone lazaroo writer s.lazaroo@icloud.com copyright© 2023 simone lazaroo. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. my mother began seeing ghosts in singapore during her first pregnancy, a few months after she had travelled from western australia to marry my father. perhaps the pregnancy hormones and singapore’s layers of history produced these apparitions. or maybe they were illusions caused by the way the light fell through thunderclouds and humid air as it gathered steam during her first monsoon. * she took long walks during that pregnancy, while my father worked at the nearby power station and the rain wasn’t falling too heavily. at first she kept to the long jungle-fringed beach, walking as far as the pasir panjang forest reserve near the entrance to the harbour. she watched the sampans rocking near the mouth of the river, felt the baby rocking in her womb. the map she carried of the nearby mangrove-lined inlets in my father’s 1957 singapore street directory reminded her of the diagram of the human body’s arteries she’d seen in the anatomy building at university back in perth where she’d met my father, a singaporean scholarship student. everything led to the heart, everything sprang from the heart, it seemed. she felt her blood pulsing food and love to the baby in her own harbour. this perfect tropical island. you could lose yourself, yet you’d always find your way back home. * coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 52 sometimes on her way home from her walks, she cut through the remnant jungle and stopped for a cup of tea at the hotel overlooking the south china sea, where english and australian expatriates and tourists drank tiger beer, bombay sapphire gin and singapore slings copied from the raffles hotel’s recipe. but back at their flat on the fifth floor, my father admonished her for roaming so dangerously. ‘ah-yah! bandits hide in that jungle. and that hotel’s as wild as the jungle. not safe for a woman to walk on her own anywhere around there lah!’ so my mother began catching buses towards the city centre. how desperate she was to find good food and faith. she ate nasi lemak at street hawkers’ barrows and many kinds of noodles in chinese labourers’ canteens that would have turned her parents’ stomachs. she bought fabric and prayer mats at arab street and visited the nearby tomb of the malay princes in the old malay cemetery. she scrutinised the raffles museum’s zoology, anthropology and history collections; peered into intricate dioramas showing early singapore’s malay kampongs, sultans and pirates, its british colonization and independence. on lavender road she watched the chinese funeral decoration makers using bamboo and paper for replica houses, cars and effigies of recently deceased people, which they called zen-sheng, or ‘true bodies’. she ate longevity noodles in chinatown, bought dependable british underwear and jolie madame perfume at robinson’s department store in orchard road, stopped in little india’s sri sivan hindu temple to pray under polished brass statues of elephant-trunked and multi-limbed gods and goddesses, before going around the corner to eat dhal and curry served on fresh banana leaves. she felt almost delirious with happiness: so many different ways to nurture body and soul within this small island’s city, compared to perth. * once in a chinatown alley opposite a shophouse selling true bodies, a wrinkled old chinese woman wearing a moth-eaten black silk jacket beckoned to her and touched her long-nailed forefinger to the mole at the corner of my mother’s jaw. ‘a sign of… unspeakable pain in infancy. you won’t understand. until you are old,’ the fortune teller predicted. ‘what do you mean?’ the fortune teller’s eyes were sympathetic, but she simply shook her head, over and over, until my mother thanked her and left. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 53 * in her third trimester of pregnancy, the humidity increased as the monsoon season descended. my mother’s migraine headaches intensified, sometimes accompanied by auras and bright white flashes. in the immediate aftermath of these auras and flashes, she sometimes saw strange people doing strange things. once, on the edge of a kampong near the apartment she shared with my father, she saw a wrinkled old chinese woman with thin grey hair breastfeeding a newborn baby. impossible, surely? she described them to my father after he returned home from work. ‘people said there was a woman in that kampong who breast-fed her grandchild after his mother was killed during the war,’ he said. ‘but the old woman and the baby died a few months afterwards.’ the next evening, she told my father when he returned from work that she’d seen an aging bald man in a sarong and white singlet sitting in his deceased father’s carved plantation chair in their living room, drinking a whisky stengah. ‘he sort of … evaporated when i approached him.’ ‘evaporated? impossible lah! describe him.’ ‘stocky build. same skin colour as you. thick eyebrows. almost fierce expression on his face but he nodded at me and smiled before disappearing.’ her young husband’s eyes widened behind his spectacles and his voice trembled slightly as he hastily crossed himself. ‘ah yah! how did you know my father looked like that? he used to sit in that chair after he changed out of his harbor officer’s uniform into a sarong after work. many singaporeans believe in ghosts. but not any british or australian expatriates i know.’ he paused. ‘so why are you not like other white women, lah?’ he asked. ‘why do you see ghosts?’ my mother did not know how to answer that question. not until decades later when she was old, as the old chinese soothsayer had predicted. * my father took photographs of his pregnant wife. when he had them developed, one of them showed a bright white person-shaped flare behind her, its face apparently looking out through the french doors of their apartment towards the south china sea. but the flare obliterated any identifying features. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 54 ‘must be one of the ghosts you saw,’ he joked. ‘maybe it is.’ ‘nonsense lah. you can’t photograph ghosts. a ghost image like this is common in the tropics when you’re shooting into bright light. it’s just a phantom image, most likely of the camera’s lens diaphragm itself. personally, since i went to university in perth, i only believe in what i can see and touch.’ my mother felt a pain, low and sharp in her belly. a contraction, she guessed. ‘breathe in… breathe out…’ she told herself. * we left singapore when i was almost too young to remember everything we left behind, and built a new life in perth, the capital city of western australia, named by the white settlers of the1800s after a city in scotland. by the time we arrived, the streetnames, buildings and institutions in our new suburb seemed almost to have erased all traces of the indigenous people who’d lived there in previous centuries. but when my mother and i went walking along the river nearby one hot summer evening, she stopped suddenly on the walking trail, looking stricken. goosebumps appeared on her arms, despite the heat. ‘what’s wrong mum?’ she shook her head, rubbed her upper arms as if she was cold. ‘i can sense something here.’ ‘what? what mum?’ ‘spirits.’ ‘spirits?’ i squawked. ‘do you mean ghosts?’ ‘more or less,’ she said. ‘what kind of ghosts?’ ‘very old ones. spirits who’ve always belonged here, i think.’ ‘what do you mean?’ ‘aboriginal spirits, probably.’ but she hurried on, and wouldn’t be drawn further. i ran after her as the river sheoaks shivered in the weak sea breeze, dark against the silver river. i looked for ghosts around the river for months after that, but found not a trace. and just as disappointingly for me, our suburb lacked the diversity of people, food and languages i dimly recalled from our old singaporean home. ‘i’m sick of this place,’ i complained to her during my early adolescence. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 55 ‘i feel the same way,’ she sympathized. ‘too much consumerism. not enough space for the old histories and cultures. you have to open your eyes to other things. look at the way the light falls here, how it leads us to the world beyond.’ * my mother hoped to travel to europe. ‘i would like to see spain, portugal and venice,’ she said. ‘and maybe singapore again.’ but divorce, poverty and illness made it impossible for her. ‘i will take you when i get the time,’ i promised her as she grew old and i became middleaged. i began planning how, when and where i would take her. but i did not find the time, not in time for her. because death had already begun mapping its course through her body’s tributaries, and took her much sooner than both of us had planned. breathe in. breathe out. * after my mother died, i hoped in vain to be visited by her ghost, or to receive some kind of message from her. i finally left australia a few years later, after the vapours of covid had subsided slightly, to visit the cities she’d wanted to visit. maybe there, denser layers of history might produce ghosts. during my brief stopover in singapore, i visited our old apartment block overlooking pasir panjang beach and the south china sea, but it was completely uninhabited, locked up and surrounded by demolition equipment. all the kampongs were gone, and the only place i could find to eat longevity noodles was in a glaringly lit new shopping mall. the closest i came to seeing ghosts were brightly illuminated international brands and holograms on orchard road. perhaps partly due to my jetlag, the layers of history in europe seemed more conducive to ghosts. in lisbon’s alfama district, i walked down an apparently ordinary set of steps between two buildings with a local archaeologist who showed me on the exterior wall of the closest building, the traces of the revolution, dictatorships, jewish, medieval, moorish and roman history. in barcelona i saw churches built on similar foundations, with bullet holes added at contemporary eye level by franco’s murdering men. in venice, i found myself floating on a temporary pedestrian bridge erected for the acqua alta tides. on a full moon evening it carried coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 56 me past byzantium, roman and medieval buildings as if i’d lost my footing and bearings in time and place, like a ghost myself. but unlike my mother, i did not see any ghosts. yet when i close my eyes sometimes now, in whichever city i am, i sense her as i continue travelling amongst the vapours of covid and earlier eras, hoping to find traces of histories i can see and touch before they are eroded by water, wind or evaporate in the mists of forgetting. still i don’t see any ghosts. but it occurs to me that my mother’s ghost lives in me, heightening my sense of the world around me and enjoining me to open my eyes wide again after the weight of grief closed them. breathe in. breathe out. if i could, i would show you this, the way the light falls on the world. even here in the harsh glare of perth’s consumerism and its hottest summer on record, where i still sometimes struggle to believe in anything but what i see and touch. simone lazaroo’s award-winning novels and many of her short stories explore individuals struggles for survival and meaning at the juncture of cultures. her short fiction has been published in australia, united states, england, spain, portugal and cuba. her novel the australian fiancé is currently optioned for film. she mentors emerging writers and is an honorary research fellow at murdoch university. her new fictional memoir, to be published in 2023, will be her seventh book. she is now writing a novel about a western australian’s relationship with regulars at her local beach and her encounters with residents, homeless people and tourists in mediterranean europe. coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 352 queering and querying the australian suburbs: reimagining (sub)urban identities nicholas manganas university of technology, sydney nicholas.manganas@uts.edu.au copyright©2018 nicholas manganas. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this article takes an autobiographical approach to explore the changes that have occurred in australian suburbia over the past twenty years. it considers two key queer texts—christos tsiolkas’s loaded (1995) and peter polites’s down the hume (2017)—and the manner in which the protagonists of these novels express their class and sexuality in their respective suburbanscapes. published more than twenty years apart, i argue that the process of queering australian suburbia that can be read in both novels opens up a space to reimagine how class, ethnic and sexual mobility is negotiated in contemporary australia. keywords: queer; suburbia; sexual identity. introduction i had that western sydney patois that divided us two like the m5. (polites 2017, 89) australian cities are divided by bridges, rivers, harbours, arterial roads, motorways. m1, m2, m4, m7, whatever their coded name, they snake around large metropolitan centres, designed to get the locals from a to b efficiently. they are, in essence, a public good that is supposed to connect us, unite the suburban fringes with the inner city suburbs, and loop us as close as possible to the city centre. sitting in the inevitable halted traffic somewhere along sydney’s m4 amid an unrecognisable section of the city’s urban sprawl, i wonder if their real purpose is to divide us. mailto:nicholas.manganas@uts.edu.au coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 353 growing up in sydney’s western suburbs, the skyscrapers of our harbour city seemed a million miles away. my references were suburban streets, local shopping centres, football ovals and bowling alleys. churches, civic centres and train tracks. distance, like time, is vast when one is a child. how my eyes lit up when i saw those tall buildings on the horizon during fleeting moments in my childhood. when i became an adult, it did not take long for me to escape what i considered a suburban hell, to shed the suburban skin that i had become ashamed of. soon i was living in sydney’s urban centre. not content with my escape from the suburbs and subsequent resettlement in the inner city of sydney, i, like many australians, packed my bags and headed to the dark continent. europe. there is something about australians when they step outside of their comfort zones and come face to face with the weight of history; a sort of shame about how slight and quaint australia really is. but there is much to be said in revelling in the small stuff. after ten years living in europe, i returned to australia and i now find myself once again living in sydney’s western suburbs. in her book relocations (2011), karen tongson suggests “one’s arrival in or return to the suburbs is more often than not thought to herald the end of creativity” (xii). the perception of the suburbs as an “aesthetic vacuum” was especially true throughout the twentieth century, but according to tongson, it can be traced back to the eighteenth century in england and the united states (9). the word itself—suburbia—can be traced back to ancient rome. as robert bruegmann explains, “suburbium” literally referred to what was “outside the city walls” (2005, 23). australian cities are almost all suburban and i wonder if such invisible walls exist and where they might be located in the spatial configuration of our cities. as the city sprawl continues, it is difficult to focus on these lines as the sprawl becomes one big blur of concrete and power lines. as a queer child growing up in sydney’s western suburbs in the 1980s and early 1990s in a greek-australian immigrant family, i had very little exposure to anything that could be considered queer or homosexual. in a key queer text tendencies (1994), however, eve kosofsky sedgwick points out how the ability of many queer people in childhood to attach intently to a few cultural objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. we needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love. (3) as i look back on my own story and consider kosofsky sedgwick’s words, i recognise that i, too, invested certain texts with queer meaning to survive, even if i was unsure about what it all meant. glimpses of queer imagery in european films that i caught late at night on sbs gave me the few titillating images i obsessed over in my head. the dark brooding atmosphere of those films contrasted sharply with the scorching sun i arose to. in 2017, a queer child discovering their sexuality in australian suburbia has many possibilities open to them, from internet porn and social networking sites, to increasingly more rounded representations of queer characters in film and television. australian novelists have also sought to explore that queer terrain in the suburbs. two greekcoolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 354 australians, christos tsiolkas and peter polites, have given voice to the queer greek man living on the suburban fringe, reflecting the complexity of suburbia and how it can intersect with a radical queerness. christos tsiolkas is a melbourne based writer of greek descent whose acclaimed novels do not shy away from controversy. his debut novel loaded (1995) follows the story of ari, a nineteen-year-old second-generation greek living in suburban melbourne. as a young queer man, he traverses the city in a twenty-four-hour period negotiating his way through encounters with his family, lovers, strangers and friends. the novel oozes a gritty, nihilistic realism. peter polites, a western sydney writer, is the associate director of western sydney’s sweatshop collective, which, according to veronica sullivan (2017), is “a group of writers from migrant and marginalised backgrounds who are challenging and subverting the narratives that long dominated mainstream australian literature— white, middle-class, colonial.” his debut novel, down the hume (2017), is even bleaker than tsiolkas’s loaded. it follows the story of bux, another young greek-australian man, and his journey through addiction and destructive relationships in a sort of noir narrative of despair and identity struggle. in tsiolkas’s loaded and polites’s down the hume, the relationship between cultural practice and suburban life is intertwined with questions of ethnicity, history, class, gender and sexuality. yet, there is a key difference in these works. in loaded australian suburbia is a nihilistic ‘season in hell’ that its protagonist ari seeks to escape from through the rituals of sex and drugs. bux in down the hume, however, is living in a ‘reimagined’ queer suburbia. written twenty years after loaded, the nexus between queerness and suburbia has shifted from the abject to the unassuming. bux’s sexuality revels in the suburban experience and far from needing to escape it, bux is attempting to tame it, to make suburbia adapt to him and his own internal exigencies. it is this twenty-year journey that i explore in this article and suggest that the narrative of queer suburbia in these novels reflects a particular evolution of queer emancipation in contemporary australian society that leads up to the problematic same-sex marriage postal plebiscite in november 2017. escaping suburbia: tsiolkas’s loaded there are myriad approaches to reading suburbia in contemporary australian literature. joan kirkby, for one, highlights the class anxiety apparent in novels such as tsiolkas’s loaded where, she argues, the attack on suburbia is a “slippage” displacing “an attack on industrialisation” (1998, 1). it is a fair question to consider what the suburbs would be if it were not for “the economic conditions that created and maintain them” (1). kirkby thus considers loaded as a powerful critique of modern industrial capitalism because ari “has more or less decided to opt out of the conventional world of work and suburb for the warm symbiotic world of casual sex, music and drugs” (11). mandy treagus (2013) similarly highlights the hyperreality of loaded and how melbourne is constantly mapped in terms of class. in fact, loaded is divided into four sections—east, north, south, west—reflecting and commenting on the hierarchies of class and how it intersects with ethnicity and sexuality in contemporary melbourne society (hunn 2000, 114). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 355 when thinking about the australian suburbs we need to ask “what difference social class makes to queer subjectivity and representation, and what difference queerness makes to class hierarchy and value?” (henderson 2013, 1). what might be the value of reading queer suburbia and class narrative in tsiolkas’s and polites’s novels? their writing is pervaded by a sense of class pathology and gritty realism, shame and excess. you could argue that even that sense of excessiveness nicely fits in with queer imaginaries. as lisa henderson puts it: even our stereotypical strengths mark us as excessive: too stylish, too expressive, too aggressive, politically uncivil, too shameless or shamed, too vulnerable to mental anguish born of bodily condemnation, too needful of recognition, too funny, and, often, just too angry. it’s a lot of excess to manage on one’s way back to the fold. (2013, 35) part of that excess is coupled with illicit drug use. anna dunkley (2011) examines how drug use is used in loaded as a conduit to connect pleasure and space with an “escape” from suburbia. in considering “affective spaces,” she argues that ari seeks sexual freedom in the “liberty of liminal spaces in the city” in order to escape the confining pressures of his home life (8). recreational drug use intensifies the route of that escape and the performance of his sexuality is both entwined with his drug use and with the spaces that drugs inevitably inhabit (12). writing about suburban communities in the u.s.a., lynn spigel in welcome to the dream house (2001, 33) suggests that the suburbs are designed to reproduce nuclear family life, excluding others such as gays and lesbians, single people, people of colour, etc. who were “relegated back to the cities.” although australian cities have never had such a stark city/suburban divide as can be found in many american cities, there was for a long time a similar phenomenon in cities such as sydney and melbourne. the inner city suburbs were mainly occupied by ethnic communities such as greeks and italians and within the confines of the inner city a small, self-contained gay mecca sprang up. karen tongson in her study on queer suburban imaginaries in the u.s.a. suggests: “queer subjects […] are—for cultural, political, and stylistic reasons—compelled to leave ostensibly homogenous suburban spaces to find more active (and implicitly activist) lifestyles in the urban ‘gay meccas’ of the national imaginary” (2011, 3). in australia, the inner cities of melbourne and sydney represent these “gay meccas,” and i was one of these young gay men who was dying to escape australian suburbia and flee to them. as joan kirkby points out, it is common for commentators on suburbia to remark how suburbia is not fully urban, neither country nor city: “neither at the centre, nor with a centre; neither one thing nor another; it was hybrid, potentially abject” (1998, 2). in loaded and down the hume, ari and bux live in such an in-between zone. they are not quite in an urban gay mecca but not necessarily confined to a suburban space and imaginary. we follow them across the cityscape, wandering in and out of the suburbs, and with that mobility we see them express their sexuality in quite distinct ways. tsiolkas’s loaded narrates a particular historical moment, a particular ‘slice of life’ of a nineteen-year-old same-sex attracted young man in suburban melbourne in the early 1990s. queer culture then was at a significant historical juncture. ari, like myself, had few queer role models in his ethnic (sub)urban environment. it was still a few years before international celebrities such as ellen degeneres and george michael would coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 356 (unceremoniously) come out. the 1990s was the era of increasing queer visibility on the small and silver screen, yet most of that visibility did not reach mass audiences until the late 1990s in shows such as queer as folk (1998). growing visibility on television, however, does not always translate into social tolerance (dow 2001). historically, queer culture had always been situated in the shadows and that darkness had a dangerous allure for many queer men. on the margins of respectability, to be queer meant subverting mainstream sexuality, and the 80s and 90s were the decades where that dangerous allure was still visible in many urban centres. in her critique of current queer culture, cynthia belmont (2017) lashes out at the sanitisation of queer culture in contemporary society: “i came up in the ’80sand ’90s, when queer culture was hot because it was outsider culture, and i like it that way.” despite queer culture being heavily dominated by white gay men, it had, she argues, glamour. although these decades were “serious and terrible and terrifying”—it was, after all, the era of act up and silence = death—she argues that it was also “a time of joy, pleasure and celebration—a frisky era of pride symbols, drag balls, dykes on bikes, public sex.” ecstasy was linked to the politics of marginalisation and forms of resistance. ari’s sexual misadventures fit within this historical sketch. queer culture was definitely coming of age during this period but it had still not decidedly been incorporated into the mainstream capitalist machine. for ari, growing up in the suburbs meant that queer culture was still virtually invisible to him but he could traverse the city and perform his sexuality in the burgeoning gay mecca of inner-city melbourne. the blurb on the back cover of loaded (tsiolkas 1995) reads: “ari is nineteen, greek, gay, unemployed, looking for something—anything—to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban melbourne.” the novel is filled with excerpts that directly deal with ari’s need to escape his suburban nightmare. as a second-generation greek, ari’s experience of suburbia in melbourne is riddled with his sense that he is on the lower spectrum of the hierarchy. his family are working-class and they encompass many of the values that they brought with them from the peasant villages of rural greece. but his angst is not simply directed at the values of his own family, but against all australian families and the suburban values that they espouse: no one, of course, is on the streets. and every street here looks like every other street, every stranger you meet walking along looks like the same stranger you passed blocks ago. the blocks are huge. big brick buildings, one after another. this could be balwyn, could be burwood, could be vermont. could be mitcham. maybe if you grew up around here all the spaces might mean something to you. east, west, south, north, the city of melbourne blurs into itself. concrete on concrete, brick veneer on brick veneer, weatherboard on weatherboard. walking through the suburbs i feel like i’m in the ugliest place on the planet. (37-38) if the sameness of suburbia creates ari’s experience of his season in hell, then it is the intersection of class that makes that hell unbearable: the whitest part of my city, where you’ll see the authentic white australian is in the eastern suburbs. a backdrop of seven elevens, shopping malls, gigantic parking lots. i was picked up by a guy once, he lived in this shit-hole suburb somewhere, burwood, or balwyn or bentleigh or boronia, and i wake up in this coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 357 strange man’s bed, got up and made myself a coffee, went into the front yard, looked down the street and thought oh-my-fucking-god-is-this-america? i didn’t feel sane again until i reached the corrosive stenches of the city. lead and carbon dioxide in my lungs to make me forget the disneyland i had woken up to. east are the brick-veneer fortresses of the wogs with money. on the edge, however, bordering the true anglo affluence, never a part of it … (41) in the east, in the new world of suburbia there is no dialogue, no conversation, no places to go out, for there is no need, there is television. (43) loaded was published in 1995, well before the advent of marriage equality debates in australia and firmly at the tail end of the keating era (treagus 2013, 3). as robert reynolds argues, the official story under the keating labour governments “was built around the idea of a multicultural, cosmopolitan and tolerant society embracing and invigorated by change” (1999, 58-59). that official story led to a degree of recognition of sexual identity and how it related to national identity (hunn 2000, 113). but in ari’s experience of suburban melbourne that official story had not filtered down. it is not surprising, then, that ari links suburbia with heteronormativity and his wholesale rejection of the australian suburban dream is, on the one hand, a rejection of where his class is situated: “there is no way out of this boring life unless you have lots of money. […] hard work bores me. i ain’t no worker” (tsiolkas 1995, 148-149). on the other, it is a rejection of a society that places his queerness at odds with the working-class values that his friends and family freely adopt. he is drifting apart from his best friend, joe, because joe is working nine to five and wants to get married—“once his parents and her parents offer a house or at least a hefty deposit the deal will be clinched” (10). ari, in freely moving between the suburbs and the inner city, is utilising coded cultural markers and signifiers as a strategy for marking one’s own place in the suburbs. he is managing a “marked” identity attribute like “queerness” in a culturally “unmarked” identity space like the suburbs (brekhus 2003, 5). ari, in freely moving between the suburbs and the inner city, is able to play out a dramatic part-time “satellite self” (6). ari, like many who live in the suburbs, is an “identity commuter”: he lives in a heterosexual space and commutes to a gay space to perform his queer self (50). as ari tells the reader, “my silence and my secrets allow me to move freely around the landscape of my city” (133). ari is not ashamed of his same-sex desire, rather there is no space in the suburbs where he can freely express it. his closet is thus one of complex dimensions (hunn 2000, 116). mandy treagus suggests that tsiolkas is firmly providing ari a “queer identity” in the sense that the category “queer” resists essentialism and unsettles the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality (2013, 2). in an oft-repeated quote, ari says: “i’m not australian, i’m not greek, i’m not anything” (tsiolkas 1995, 115); thus he is “queerly” resistant to “all the subject positions available to him” (pavlides 2013, 106). in short, loaded conveys a sense of “multidimensional alienation” (arroyo 2000, 43). the novel is destabilising because it is not simply about a young greek man insecure in his sexuality but instead about an “unmanageable queerness” that makes all identificatory narratives problematic (papanikolaou 2008, 191). coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 358 suburban accommodation in down the hume, polites has created an altogether different sort of suburban universe. his novel explores the greek-australian queer suburban experience more than twenty years after tsiolkas’s loaded and this time the drama has shifted from melbourne to sydney. although both novels revel in the dysfunction of their characters and the antihero traits of their protagonists, polites has reimagined the wasteland of australian suburbia. on the surface, bux is similar to ari in his criticism of the oppressing sameness of australian suburbia: “i shouldn’t be held ransom to sienna roofs, green wheelie bins. this place, it’s purgatory, it’s shit” (2017, 3). bux works in a nursing home where the constant questions wear him out: “straight-acting fatigue” (19). and like ari, he is selfreflective of his position as a young greek queer in sydney’s western suburbs: never said to her that she reminded me of the kind of life i couldn’t have. being some wog fag way out west. semi drug-addled. limited money. housing insecurity. never having a wedding that my parents would dance at. never having my own child that looked like the sum total of me and the boyf. (29) bux is also just as aware of the class differences in which he circulates. he narrates about his old job working at a western suburbs bowling club: we had homos come in sometimes. around christmas and new year’s, the poofs who came good came home. they wore thin blue polos tucked into tight beige chino shorts with braided patent belts so shiny you’d think the leather was sweating. their families dared them to drink vb. they came to the bar heroically. (32) when bux begins a flirtation with a young doctor who also works at the nursing home, the class differences are more visceral: the different ways we spoke came and sat next to us on the plastic chairs. our body shapes we inherited and fought for laid out on the table. our money, the places we came from, ideas we picked up were all around us. in that shitty room. on display via our bodies. the accents when we said stuff. and the fact that i smelled like a deodorant that comes in a man can and he smelled like something that started with the words eau de. (90) yet, for all his troubles, bux is living, more or less, as an openly gay man in sydney’s western suburbs, out to his troubled mother. whereas ari in loaded has a troubled identity that negates any self-identification with his ethnicity or sexuality, bux is a troubled young man with an untroubled identity. his relationship with nice arms pete mirrors his parents’ destructive relationship. and like his mother, bux is addicted to painkillers. yet, the domestic abuse he suffers in this relationship is downplayed, just one more aspect of the complexity of his character. the narrative of down the hume makes clear that bux is firmly integrated into the western sydney suburbanscape. unlike ari, who seeks to escape suburbia, bux is at home on the streets that the novel pays homage to: burwood road, haldon street, auburn road, brunker road. bux is comfortable expressing his sexuality in the suburbs when he cruises the middle eastern young men coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 359 on haldon street, lakemba, or when his mother fends off a female admirer of bux at canterbury leagues club by exclaiming that her son is gay and to leave him alone. bux is also painfully aware how eastern suburbs men fetishise the young ethnic men from the western suburbs who wear tracksuits that cover their hard muscles. bux is living the suburban dream. only in his case it is a suburban dystopia. there is a significant difference between ari in loaded and bux in down the hume and that is that despite tsiolkas’s apparent motivation to efface ari’s identity, to queer his experience, to destabilise the concept of identity altogether, there is no escaping the fact that ari is in effect representing that rejection of identity. in denying him an identity (“i’m not australian, i’m not greek, i’m not anything”) he is paradoxically given an identity. it might be a troubled identity, but he is a representation of a particular historical moment when there was so much overloaded meaning (displaced diaspora, desire and masculinity) that he cannot effectively escape it, despite disavowing it. with bux, on the other hand, we read him as being, as opposed to representing (uhlich 2015). although his existence is even more grungy and gritty than ari’s, there is a sort of ‘artful artlessness’ in polites’s description of his narrative journey, his existence merely commonplace and anthropological; in short, suburban. tsiolkas’s loaded has spurred an eclectic array of academic literature on how ari subverts fixed ethnic and sexual identities and even challenges benedict anderson’s conception of “imagined communities” (pavlides 2013). down the hume does not lend itself so easily to think pieces on queer representation because it revels in its matter-of-factness; it constructs a universe where queerness is banal. much has changed in contemporary australian society in the period between the publication of these two novels, and these changes are also readily apparent in australia’s suburbs. as recently as 2004, only 38% of australians supported same-sex marriage. in the ill-conceived same-sex marriage postal plebiscite, 61.6% of australians voted in favour of same-sex marriage (karp 2017). cynthia belmont’s (2017) concern that queer culture has lost its edge, points to the anxiety many queers like herself have about the changes that are currently occurring in many western societies such as australia as queer culture increasingly becomes incorporated into the late capitalist machine. gay bars, such as sydney’s iconic midnight shift, are increasingly closing down (jones 2017), sex-onpremises venues and gay cruising areas have now made way for smart phone apps, and gay, lesbian and transgender visibility on television has increasingly become unexceptional. with these steady changes in such a small time span, inevitably, the “gay meccas” have also begun to dissipate. it is now not so extraordinary to see same-sex couples leading open and ordinary lives in the suburbs. polites, despite his ‘artful artlessness,’ has perhaps unintentionally reimagined what suburbia might mean in contemporary australian society. conclusion: queer reimagining tsiolkas’s loaded reminds us of a historical suburban moment when class and queer shame came together to stifle a young generation of queer youth. down the hume, on the other hand, begins a project of reimagining the australian suburbs. such a reimagining, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 360 polites challenges us, should include a queer reimagining of them. a reimagining is a project of recognition, which as lisa henderson explains, asks: […] whether one can calm class and queer shame by socializing it, not by denying or dispelling it or by displacing it with a shaky or assertive pride, but by imagining and politicizing a communal form rooted in the vulnerabilities, privileges, and relations of economic, cultural, and sexual hierarchy. (2013, 100) it is such a project of recognition that these novels bear witness to. in loaded and down the hume, we can see henderson’s project of recognition take shape: the vulnerabilities, privileges, and relations of economic, cultural and sexual hierarchy. loaded is essentially a coming-of-age story that never occurs. ari needs to escape from suburbia but there is nowhere for him to escape to. he is trapped in a moment in time where his sexuality is a challenge to his family, where his family suffocates him but he does not really have anything to hold on to. returning to kosofsky sedgwick, ari still needs for there to be sites where “the meanings don’t line up tidily with each other and to invest those sites with fascination and love” (1994, 3). bux, on the other hand, is living on the cusp of a new queer suburbia. he has reconfigured the suburban space, carved a space for himself to live his life openly. there are no untidy meanings for him. he has tried to adopt the new gay dream of finding a muscly stud and settling in a suburban home. yet, the suburbs, as an intermediary space between the rural and the urban, are an ephemeral dream. just like the sydney housing bubble, bux’s dream bursts as he negotiates the physicality of love, lust and desire on the arterial roads that criss-cross the hume highway. a reimagining of queer suburbia is more necessary than ever in light of the recent postal plebiscite on same-sex marriage. only 17 electorates voted against supporting same-sex marriage and 12 of those electorates were located in sydney’s western suburbs, including the suburbs that bux in down the hume navigates (overington 2017). although we can now begin talking about how queer visibility is increasingly becoming banal, the sorts of suburbs that ari and bux come from are still populated with ethnic and religious minorities who, for whatever reason, cannot bring themselves to vote in favour of samesex marriage. the ensuing debate on why western sydney was lagging behind the rest of the country will certainly prove fraught with tension in the coming years. andrew jakubowicz, professor of sociology at the university of technology, sydney, has already commented: these communities are socially conservative and very family focused. some of them are religious and, let’s face it, the religious leaders for the russians, the greeks, the jews, the muslims, they were fierce on this from the pulpits […] this was a day for asserting their authority when it’s been gradually eroding. (cited in overington 2017) andy marks, assistant vice-chancellor at western sydney university, however, was more circumspect, highlighting socioeconomic factors and arguing that race and religion were just background noise: in western sydney, you have hundreds of thousands of people all dealing with the same issues. their manufacturing jobs are disappearing. you have coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 361 people stuck in traffic, paying huge tolls, or jammed like sardines into train carriages. you have wage stagnation, and crowded schools and soaring electricity prices. you have childcare fees. then the political class comes along and says, ‘excuse us, what do you think about this issue, gay marriage?’ and western sydney says: ‘are you kidding me? with all the challenges we face, this is your question?’ (cited in overington 2017) in loaded and down the hume we are witness to a generation of queer youth that straddle mainstream australia and their local ethnic and religious communities. in tsiolkas’s and polites’s suburban universes we see that the argument is not whether the suburbs are too poor, or whether they are too ethnic or too religious. the suburbs are complex sites of conflict, accommodation, struggle, desire and alienation. i am convinced that part of the reimagining of queer suburbia is evident in australian literature. loaded and down the hume are two historical and geographical novels that document very specific moments in time in the history of queer suburbia. despite their bleak outlook, they reflect the changing faces of australian suburbia by queering the streets where class and ethnicity are socially reproduced. the reimagining of queer suburbia is also evident in our own experiences. now that i am once again living in suburbia, i am forced to become selfreflective on my place in these suburbs as a queer man. i have to wrestle with the fact that my home on the whole voted against validating my queer identity. loaded and down the hume may not be sites of resistance. within them, though, there exists potential to honestly reimagine australian suburbia in all its narrative complexity. references arroyo, j. 2000, “review of from the edge of the city,” sight and sound, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 43-44. belmont, c. 2017, “has queer culture lost its edge?” slant, 7 august, viewed 12 august, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/08/06/has-queer-culture-lost-its-edge/. brekhus, w. h. 2003, peacocks, chameleons, centaurs: gay suburbia and the grammar of social identity, university of chicago press, chicago. bruegmann, r. 2005, sprawl: a compact history, university of chicago press, chicago. dow, b. j. 2001, “ellen, television and the politics of gay and lesbian visibility,” critical studies in mass communication, vol. 18, pp. 123-140. dunkley, a. 2011, “drugs, pleasure, sexuality and the australian space in christos tsiolkas’ loaded and kate holden’s in my skin,” anu undergraduate research journal, vol. 3, pp. 1-16. henderson, l. 2013, love and money: queers, class, and cultural production, new york university press, new york. hunn, d. 2000, “‘it’s not that i can’t decide; i don’t like definitions’: queer in australia in christos tsiolkas’s loaded and ana kokkinos’s head on,” in d. alderson & l. anderson (eds), territories of desire in queer culture: refiguring contemporary boundaries, manchester university press, manchester. jones, j. 2017, “iconic gay sydney club midnight shift to close its doors,” star observer, 13 september, viewed 18 november, 2017, coolabah, no. 24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 362 http://www.starobserver.com.au/news/national-news/new-south-walesnews/iconic-sydney-club-closes-doors/161869. karp, p. 2017, “australia says yes to same-sex marriage in historic postal survey,” the guardian, 15 november, viewed 18 november, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/15/australia-says-yes-tosame-sex-marriage-in-historic-postal-survey. kirkby, j. 1998, “the pursuit of oblivion: in flight from suburbia,” australian literary studies, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1-19. kosofsky sedgwick, e. 1994. tendencies, routledge, london. overington, p. 2017, “same-sex marriage: western sydney shouts no,” weekend australian, 18 november, viewed 18 november, 2017, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/samesex-marriage-westernsydney-shouts-no/news-story/a5a43a8775d1bd3e6aef7fb4333d3d59. papanikolaou, d. 2008, “new queer greece: thinking identity through constantine giannaris’s from the edge of the city and ana kokkinos’s head on,” new cinemas: journal of contemporary film, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 183-196. pavlides, e. 2013, “the queer and european journey of christos tsiolkas and dead europe,” in un-australian fictions: nation, multiculture(alism) and globalisation, 1988-2008, cambridge scholars publishing, newcastle-upon-tyne. polites, p. 2017, down the hume, hachette, sydney. reynolds, r. 1999, “living the gay life: identity and politics in twentieth century australia,” island, vol. 77, pp. 53-62. spigel, l. 2001, welcome to the dream house: popular media and the postwar suburbs, duke university press, durham. sullivan, v. 2017, “queer, working-class noir: debut novelist on australian narcissism and suburban masculinity,” the guardian, 24 february, viewed 12 march, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/24/queer-working-class-noir-debutnovelist-on-australian-narcissism-and-suburban-masculinity. tongson, k. 2011, relocations: queer suburban imaginaries, new york university press, new york. treagus, m. 2012, “queering the mainstream: the slap and ‘middle’ australia,” journal of the association for the study of australian literature, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 1-9. tsiolkas, c. 1995, loaded, random house, sydney. uhlich, k. 2015, “looking: a new way to break a tv taboo,” bbc culture, 12 january, viewed 30 july, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150112-the-tv-showthat-breaks-a-taboo. nicholas manganas completed his phd in international studies at the university of technology in 2010. he currently teaches at both the university of technology, sydney and western sydney university. he is the author of las dos españas: terror and crisis in contemporary spain, which was published with sussex academic press in 2016. he has published extensively in various disciplinary areas including international studies, contemporary spanish studies, cultural studies and queer theory. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 under the mermaid flag: achzivland and the performance of micronationality on ancestral palestinian land philip hayward university of technology sydney prhshima@gmail.com copyright©2019 philip hayward. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this article considers the relationship between symbolism, interpretation and grounded reality with regard to “achzivland,” a small area on the eastern coast of the mediterranean that was declared an independent micronation in 1972. the article commences by identifying the principal geo-political and military factors that created the terrain for the enactment of fantasy utopianism, namely the forced removal of the area’s palestinian population in 1948 and the nature of israeli occupation and management of the region since. following this, the article shifts to address related symbolic/allusive elements, including the manner in which a flag featuring a mermaid has served as the symbol for a quasi-national territory whose founder — eli avivi — has been compared to the fictional character peter pan, and his fiefdom to j.m. barrie’s fictional “never never land”. consideration of the interconnection of these (forceful and figurative) elements allows the discourse and rhetoric of achzivland’s micronationality to be contextualised in terms of more concrete political struggles in the region. 73 keywords: achzivland, micronationality, palestine, israel, mermaids, peter pan introduction over the last 50 years, the term “micronation” has been applied to usually (but not exclusively) small territories that have been declared independent by their inhabitants. these territories are either located within established nation states or else, on occasion, on islands, sandbanks or platforms outside of national territorial waters. one aspect they share is a lack of recognition of their claims to sovereignty by established nation-states or by international bodies such as the united nations. surveys such as shima’s online anthology of island micronations (2016–18) illustrate the diversity of seriousness with which micronational enterprises are conducted by their claimants and/or responded to by established nation-states, their variable viabilities and the range of durations that they operate for. some micronations, such as sealand, located on an abandoned british fort in the english channel, have operated as independent entities for extended periods (in sealand’s case, continuously since 1967) (see dennis, 2002), while others, such as lamb island, in the australian state of queensland, were the sites of putative micronations that only existed as temporary conjecture avidly covered by national and international media during a single month (hayward, 2014). in recent years, these types of entities, which at least have some degree of association with physical spaces, have been joined by a throng of virtual micronations entirely constituted on websites and social media, where claims (and often counter-claims) have been made for actual or purely fictional territories as a form of online gaming and role-playing (see hayward and khamis, 2015 for discussion). as discussed at length in the aforementioned shima anthology, and in subsequent work such as de castro and kober (2019), micronations — like nations themselves — can be understood to be performed by rhetoric, by quasi-legal and administrative practices and/or by symbolism and symbolic acts. symbolic images have a particular strategic value in micronational contexts in signalling the existence of an entity that claims autonomy for itself. one of the most important of these images is the flag. broadly speaking, flags 74 represent social entities of different kinds: transnational organisations, nation states, provinces within nation states, cities etc. and variously archaic, emergent and/or contested geo-political entities. in all of these, the flag serves to assert the existence of what it represents in a loop between the flag-as-thing and the geo-politicalentity-as-thing, generating what callahan and ledgerwood (2016) refer to as entitativity. the constant reiteration of the flag as symbol of a something that exists by the entity that it symbolises confirms the validity of the flag as an officially sanctioned and/or definitive symbol of the entity. but micronational flags operate significantly differently in that symbolic manifestations of micronationality, such as flags, passports, websites etc., are often the primary constituents of a (real or virtual) place asserted as a micronation. flags convey gravitas by virtue of being symbols of something and invite interpretation in that regard. they also exist in an historical context. the components of their (usually rectangular) form have symbolic and/or design aspects that relate to, derive from and/or respond to previous vexillological, art historical and/or other visual practices. the first section of this article discusses the establishment of achzivland, its relation to palestine and israel and the avivis’ development of the territory. the second section considers achzivland’s flag, and its mermaid motif in particular, as a cameo of the micronation and compares it to a long-established tradition of fish-tailed femininity in the region concerning the arabic hourriyat al-bahr. as the article discusses, the latter has been deployed very differently by the palestinian artist imad abu shtayyah. in this manner, the article analyses the differential use of similar imagery to markedly different ends, crystallising the contrasting fates of achzivland and dispossessed palestinian people through two focal images and, thereby, demonstrating the resonance of traditional folkloric figures in modern political discourse. achzivland1 and avivi achzivland was established in a small area of israel’s far north coast, immediately to the north of the historical site of achziv2 (from which the micronation takes its name) and south of the highly sensitive lebanese border region (figure 1), which has been the site of 75 recurrent clashes between palestinian guerrilla groups and the israeli armed forces since the 1940s. the micronation’s history is entwined with that of the state of israel through its founder el avivi’s participation in the establishment of both. born into a jewish family in persia (now iran) in 1930,3 avivi migrated with his parents to the british mandated territory of palestine in 1932 following a rise in anti-semitic sentiment in persia that was fanned by the country’s authoritarian leader reza pahlav. the british administered territory of palestine was contentious and highly contested from its inception, through a league of nations mandate in 1920, until its dissolution in 1948, following the proclamation of the state of israel by zionist activists. the principal cause of conflict in the territory from the 1920s on was the tension between the wishes for self-determination and security of the area’s established palestinian (and predominantly muslim) population and the desires of jewish settler-refugees to set up jewish areas and spheres of influence in response to varying degrees of marginalisation and/or hostility in their former countries of residence. the tenuous basis of the jewish settler/refugees’ presence in palestine led to the formation of various jewish activist and/or paramilitary groups, initially deployed to oppose the british authorities and military and to assist the arrival and settlement of jews in the territory (in contravention of british policies to limit this). following the defeat of germany in 1945, zionist activists organised an unofficial navy, known as the palyam, to ferry jewish settlers to palestine despite the british navy’s attempts to blockade the coast in order to prevent their access. avivi joined the palyam in 1945 and worked with the organisation until joining the jewish resistance movement following the rebellion of arab communities against the united nations’ partition plan for palestine (moved and adopted in november 1947) that proposed the partition of palestine between jewish and palestinian communities. 76 figure 1 – position of achzivland within israel and broader region (christian fleury, 2018) while the far north-west of palestine was identified as a palestinian area under the united nations plan, forces acting on behalf of the newly proclaimed state of israel invaded the area in may 1948 in an initiative named operation ben-ami. the coastal village of al-zeeb, a settlement with a population of around 2,200 built on and around the historic site of achziv (which its name is a variant of), was a major target on account of its serving as a regional centre for palestinian resistance to jewish settlement over the preceding decade (zochrot, 2014). israeli forces secured control over the village after the majority of its residents fled a mortar barrage. after detaining and removing the remaining residents, the village was razed to the ground in an act of retribution.4 in the following year a kibbutz (communal settlement) was established in the area to house jewish migrants from the united kingdom, usa and south africa and there has been no palestinian repopulation of the village in subsequent decades. avivi first visited al-zeeb in 1952, settled there and restored a derelict house on the northern outskirts of the former village site, 77 earning a living from fishing (selling his catch to the local kibbutz), learning about the area’s ancient history, collecting artefacts and living with his german partner rina. the couple led a quiet life until 1959 when the israeli government declared the area around the historical site of achziv and adjacent offshore islets a national park and went on to announce their intention to remove residents from the area. despite this the avivis refused to vacate their home and land. after four years of dispute, the national government authorised the destruction of the avivis’ home and sent in bulldozers to demolish it. the avivis successfully resisted all attempts to evict them over the next eight years, resulting in the authorities escalating the dispute in 1971 by attempting to fence off the couple’s home and thereby to block their access to the coast and to prevent eli avivi earning a livelihood as a fisherman. the couple responded by renouncing israeli identity and proclaiming their home and surrounding block as the independent territory of achzivland. in response, israeli police detained the couple and sought their prosecution. but the state action proved ineffectual and the couple were released from custody with the matter being resolved by their being allowed to continue residing in their 1.4-acre property within the designated park site (with access to the coast via a pathway) on a 99-year lease (ibid). buoyed by their success in retaining right of residence, the avivis developed the micronational identity they had initially adopted as a protest move and attracted counter-cultural cache by embracing libertarian values. achzivland held one of israel’s first ‘counter-cultural’ music festivals, in 1972, and became notorious in israel for tolerating and encouraging nudism (and on account of tel avivi’s penchant for photographing female nudists). this fashionable rebelliousness attracted a stream of visitors in subsequent decades including highprofile actors such as sofia loren and paul newman. the effaced palestinian presence in the area had a brief, dramatic but ultimately ineffectual moment of return in january 1971 when a group of palestinian guerilla fighters arrived in a small boat from lebanon with the intention of kidnapping eli avivi. accounts of what followed differ. the most frequently cited one describes that when one of the group entered the house (while the others waited outside) he was met by an armed rina avivi who had been warned of the arrival of a suspicious group inquiring as to her husband’s whereabouts. thwarted, the group dispersed and were captured by israeli forces soon after. while the reasons for the attempted 78 kidnapping (subsequently attributed to affiliates of the fatah faction) remain unclear, it is likely that the presence of such a high-profile “soft target” espousing values abhorrent to islam in an area close to the lebanese border was an enticing one. the paradoxes and suppressions of history inherent in achzivland’s perception and promotion as a utopic haven were also apparent in the marketing of the area to its immediate south in the same period. keysar (2009) reflected on these aspects in her analysis of a 1970s postcard image of the historical/touristic centre of achziv. the image (figure 2) shows young people in abbreviated swimming costumes relaxing in the sun against a background of ruins. keysar’s analysis of the postcard (mail-franked in 1977) is also singularly apposite for the micronation located a few kilometres further north. commenting on the postcard and its caption — which describes it as showing an “abandoned” arab village on the site of what is now a holiday area (ibid: 94) — she contended that the photographer responsible for the image “was fulfilling a social mission by depicting, through an idyllic view, a fixed and condensed idea of the jewish nation state … as a ‘promised land’ [constructed in] the abandoned and uninhabited land of palestine” in which the “traces of pre-1948 omnipresence are there and at the same time no longer there” (ibid: 95–96). 79 figure 2 – postcard of achziv (c early-mid 1970s) (from original photograph by werner braun) the avivis cemented their rule in their depopulated enclave by adopting various trappings of micronationality. eli avivi declared himself president, by means of an election in which he was the only voter, produced achzivland passports that were available for purchase, adopted a flag and, in recognition of the micronation’s location and his maritime associations, adopted the sound of the sea as the micronational anthem. while i have been unable to ascertain when it was adopted by the avivis and how much input either/both had into its design, achzivland’s flag exhibits two distinct symbols — to the left, a mermaid, and to the right, a simplified rendition of the avivis’ house (the built centre of the micronation and the location of its micronational museum, containing various historical artefacts from the area and mementos of various guests) (figure 3). while the mermaid does not feature in traditional jewish folklore,5 avivi would have been likely to be aware of international maritime folklore/imagery concerning the mermaid as a result of his career as a sailor and fisherman and as an aficionado of regional history and collector of archaeological artefacts. it is also possible that he would have been aware that the figure of the mermaid had its antecedence in that of the assyrian goddess atargatis, often represented with a fish-tailed lower body (see shalaby, 2018), who was associated with the port city of ashkelon, located 125 kilometres to the south of achziv. on the flag, the mermaid’s arms are extended in a welcoming gesture appropriate to both eli avivi’s own past in facilitating jewish settlers’ arrival and settlement in palestine and achzivland’s policy of welcoming visitors.6 the colours of the flag — which can be read as representing the dark blue of the sea (bottom band), the yellow of the area’s sandy landscape (middle) and paler blue of the sky (top) — also echo israel’s national flag, with its blue and white stripes and (singular) central motif. 80 figure 3 – achzivland’s official flag taking another approach to the flag symbolism, verveer has characterised the presence of the mermaid as: a symbolic representation of eli’s love for the ocean, but as a creature of duality, belonging to two worlds, the mermaid also embodies the contradiction and unity of achzivland. she is a half-human, half-fish creature that absorbs and transforms whatever hopes, anxieties, ambitions, and fears we imprint upon her. (2018: online) this characterisation accords with recent critical analyses and discussion of mermaids, particularly with regard to the polyvalence of their cultural role and symbolism (hayward, 2017: 188) and with regard to their ability to express slippery concepts of identity formation. indeed, inkol has characterised them, in deleuzian terms, as ideal navigators of the “desiring machines” that are at work in all socio-political systems (and individuals within these), providing: keys that open and close domains, instituting and rupturing connections that previously existed, dictating the course of movement of the flow of desire, its ingress and egress between things. (inkol, 2018: 6) 81 further to this, verveer has also characterised achzivland as a latterday “mermaid land” (ibid), commenting that its strangeness reminds her of “never never land,”7 the island in j.m barrie’s play peter pan, or the boy who wouldn’t grow up (1904) inhabited by peter, the “lost boys” and the mermaids who frequent its lagoon. to this end she quotes a passage in the play that relates that: if you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire. but just before they go on fire you see the lagoon. this is the nearest you ever get to it on the mainland, just one heavenly moment. (ibid) verveer’s characterisation of achzivland being a figurative island of a similar ilk ascribes a mystical/visionary aspect to its realm arising from its location in a liminal space — on the “mainland” but at the north-western fringes of israel, close to the shore and in easy access to the sea. the comparison of the two fanciful locations is also pertinent since in barrie’s stage play and its subsequent novelisation (1911), peter pan and the lost boys effectively inhabit and manage their island as a “temporary autonomous zone” (taz) of the type hakim bey characterised as being created by 18th century pirate societies.8 the latter took the form of “whole minisocieties living consciously outside the law” (1991: online) for as long as they could sustain that position in the face of competing forces and discourses. the mermaid image from achzivland’s flag was given an interesting interpretation in an artwork posted on the deviant art website9 (not available for reproduction here) by an artist identifying herself as “israel600”10 that engages with various political issues inherent to the micronation. the work is a digital sketch/cartoon rendered in a simple manner. it features two mermaids, one, black-haired, represented as floating erect in the sea in a manner that recalls the mermaid on achzivland’s flag, and another (slightly smaller) blondehaired one shown more horizontally, colliding with the larger mermaid around the intersection of her fish tail and upper torso. the dark-haired mermaid’s alarm at the impact is represented by her posture, with her hands raised, and both mermaids are open mouthed 82 and wide-eyed, suggesting an ambiguous and mutual sense of surprise at the situation they find themselves in. aside from ambiguous red lines on the erect mermaid’s upper torso and face, the only other significant images in the picture are the two identical grey (implicitly silver) chains tied around their waists. these give the image a particular inflection. both feature the six-pointed star of david that is a symbol of both judaism and the nation of israel. as the mermaid is not a folkloric motif that features in either traditional jewish or modern israeli culture, the image invites inquiry into the reason for this representation, which is answered in the artist’s caption on the deviant art website: “‘mother mermaid israel x child mermaid achzivland.” given the minor size discrepancy, the darkhaired mermaid appears to be the “mother mermaid” who symbolises israel (the meaning of the “x” is unclear) while the blonde mermaid is both presented as her “child” and as symbolising achzivland (with the nation of achzivland thereby being posed as the “child” of israel). perceptions of the blonde mermaid as representing achzivland are bolstered by the resemblance of face, hair and hair colour of the smaller mermaid to eli avivi’s blonde wife rina, who was herself subject to frequent representation in the israeli press in the 1960s1970s. in this regard, the image is notable for emphasising rina’s role in developing achzivland, countering the strong emphasis on her husband in most press accounts. despite the artwork being simply executed in terms of detail, it neatly summarises one of the paradoxes of achzivland’s foundation and claims to legitimacy. after being an active participant in the struggle to assert jewish migrant-refugees’ rights to settle in palestine, and then for the establishment of the state of israel, avivi found himself in conflict with a nation state attempting to evict him from the same area that palestinians had been forced from two decades earlier.11 his response, the unilateral declaration of a micronation, has obvious parallels to the unilateral declaration of the state of israel in 1948. in this manner, the two mermaids are intertwined by the histories of the states they represent. while israel600’s artwork engages with achzivland’s flag and imagery to produce a nuanced interpretation of the microstate’s relationship to israel, another image featuring a mermaid, produced independently, provides a significantly different perspective. imad abu shtayyah’s 2016 painting ‘yaffa — hourriyat al-bahr’ (figure 83 5) shows a figure that is neither on the liminal coastline nor in a position to welcome visitors to a terrestrial homeland. instead she is represented hanging just below the surface of the water, reaching up to grasp an orange that has floated out from the coast. the painting’s title associates her with the palestinian port town of yaffa that underwent major expansion in the 1950s and 1960s as the israeli city of haifa and also explains the very different nature of her appearance to the classic western mermaid figure represented on achzivland’s flag. hourriyat al-bahr (literally ‘bride of the sea’) is the common arabic term for mermaid and the figure’s appearance, in ornate garments covering her torso and arms, is typical of her representation in 20th and early 21st century middle eastern visual media (see shalaby, 2018). hourriyat al-bahr feature in a number of ancient middle eastern texts, including alf leilah wa leilah (known in english as one thousand and one nights), a collection of regional folktales that have been the subject of modern representation in middle eastern television in recent decades (ibid). shtayyah’s painting represents his female protagonist as separated from yaffa, positioned offshore and only able to access the fruits of the land when they fall into the water and drift out to her. this aspect of the artwork reflects shtayyah’s personal circumstances. his family fled from the town of algebad, near ramla, in 1948 and have remained in jordan since, unable to return to their ancestral homeland. the artist has described his vision for the painting as inspired by the predicament of “someone in the middle of the desert who can see water but who cannot reach it; or someone in the ocean who can see the coast but who cannot go ashore because he may be killed” (personal communication, 4.9.2018). in this manner, the mermaid symbolises the plight of palestinians in general for the artist (ibid), representing their estrangement from and their nostalgia for their former homeland. in a further level of irony (and estrangement), haifa went on to become israel’s major entrepôt for jewish migrants arriving by sea. 84 figure 5: imad abu shtayyah’s 2016 painting ‘yaffa – hourriyat al-bahr’ in terms of the mermaid and her role as within the previously discussed “desiring machine” of the region, shtayyah’s hourriyat albahr manifestly lacks “the keys that open and close domains, instituting and rupturing connections” (inkol, 2018: 6) and, instead, stands as a marginalised figure of exile, proud yet irreducibly 85 alienated from her homeland. not all mermaids are equal — or equally empowered — along the shoreline of the eastern mediterranean. conclusion while the profile of achzivland diminished in the 1980s–2000s, the demise of its founder in early 2018 prompted a ripple of nostalgia for achzivland’s heyday by some israelis and western media outlets. in the early 21st century it has occupied a particularly problematic position as a micronation affectionately tolerated by a nation-state that remains resolutely opposed to statehood for the population of its two major palestinian enclaves, the west bank and the gaza strip. the principal difference is that achzivland’s self-proclaimed status (and the israeli state’s tacit approval of it) represents a minor idiosyncrasy within the national system whereas some (currently dominant) political factions in israel regard palestinian statehood as an anathema and as untenable for national security (at the same time as the israeli state is moving to define itself as jewish one, further marginalising and disenfranchising its palestinian population). in this manner, the fanciful and (now fading) counter-cultural enclave that verveer (2018) compared to the mermaid lagoon in j.m barrie’s peter pan stands in stark contrast to the harsher realities of the palestinian refugee camps of southern lebanon or the embattled enclaves on the west bank and gaza strip. as the above discussion has identified, achzivland owes its existence to the dispossession of the palestinian population who resided in the area until 1948 and its whimsical enclavity within the contemporary nation-state of israel is entirely rooted in a recent process of dispossession. viewed in this regard, the abortive palestinian guerilla raid on achzivland in 1971 represents the jarring encounter of two radically differently constituted, protected and enabled worlds in which the inhabitants of the whimsical micronation were supported by the agents of the israeli state which the micronation had specifically disavowed as a tenet of its foundation. this characterisation chimes with the nature of avivi’s “never never land,” premised on a micro-utopian impulse enacted in a forcibly depopulated area whose most significant history (for its new occupants) was a deep archaeological past commemorated in its museum. the symbolism of the mermaid’s 86 arms on achzivland’s flag is telling in this regard. interpreting the image with regard to both the location of the sea to the immediate west of achzivland and the worldview of the avivis, her arms extend to the west — to those arriving from the west and to western secular values. there is little suggestion of her offering an embrace for the dispossessed palestinians who lived in the area within living memory nor for religiously conservative israelis for whom avivi’s hippy haven was an anathema. avivi’s “never never land” is, in this way, distinctly “out of place” in its geo-political locale, and represents an ephemeral performance of counter-cultural chutzpah in a region where bigger issues are in play and where daily tragedies continue to be enacted. thanks to henry johnson for suggesting the topic of this article and to peter goggin and susie khamis for their comments on earlier drafts. bibliography arad, r (2018) ‘president of fancied hippie micro-state achzivland in northern israel dies at 88’, haartetz 16th may: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-eli-avivi-presidentof-fancied-state-of-achzivland-dies-at-88-1.6095276 — accessed 4 may 2019 barrie, j.m (1904) peter pan or the boy who would not grow up, archived online at: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300081h.html — accessed 20 march 2015 — (1911) peter and wendy, london: hodder and stoughton berg, r (2015) ‘one-man’s rule in israel’s hippy micro-state’, bbc news magazine 10th march: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine31800580 — accessed 20 may 2018 bey, h (1991) ‘the temporary autonomous zone’, online at: mobilecanteens.pbworks.com/f/hakim+bey+taz_.pdf — accessed 19 may 2018 87 callahan, s.p and ledgerwood, a (2016) ‘on the psychological function of flags and logos: group identity symbols increase perceived entitativity’, journal of personality and social psychology v110 n4: 528–50 de castro, v.b and kober, r (2018) ‘the principality of hutt river: a territory marooned in the western australian outback’, shima v12 n1: 142–59 de castro, v.b and kober, r (2019) ‘the royal republic of ladonia: a nation built of driftwood and bytes’, shima v13 n1: 116–35 dennis, t (2002) ‘the principality of sealand: nation building by individuals’, tulsa journal of comparative and international law v10 n1: 261–96 hayward, p (2014) ‘in a stew: lamb island’s flirtation with micronationality and the related consideration of a local representative body for the southern moreton bay islands’, shima v8 n1: 95–103 — (2016) ‘islands and micronationality’ (version 2), shima website: http://shimajournal.org/issues/anthologies/islandsmicronationality-anthology-intro.pdf — accessed 17 may 2018 — (2017) making a splash: mermaids (and mermen) in 20th and 21st century audiovisual culture, new barnet: john libbey & co./university of indiana press hayward, p and khamis, s (2015) ‘a historical account of quasimicronational initiatives on lundy island and their contemporary reconfiguration on microwiki’, shima v9 n1: 69–84 inkol, c (2018) ‘melusine machine: the metal mermaids of jung, deleuze and guattari’, shima v12 n2: 52–65 keysar, h (2009) ‘addressing the ruins (a postcard’), in misselwitz, c and sibeck, c (eds) exchanging young discourses between israel and germany, pistcataway: transaction publishers: 93–102 88 rick (2010) “akhzivland’, rick on theater blog 10th december: 10http://rickontheater.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/akhzivland.html ryan, j, dunford, g and sellars, s (2006) micronations: the lonely planet guide to home-made nations, melbourne: lonely planet shalaby, m (2018) ‘the middle eastern mermaid: between myth and religion’ in hayward p (ed) scaled for success: the internationalisation of the mermaid, new barnet: john libbey & co/university of indiana press: 7–20 shima (2014) v8 n1 – special issue on ‘islands and micronationality’: http://shimajournal.org/issues.php — accessed 2 september 2017 slifkfin, n (2011) mysterious and mythical creatures of scripture, talmud and midrash, new york: zoo torah verveer, t (2018) ‘mermaid land’, new york jewish week 17th may: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mermaid-land/ — accessed 19 may 2018 weeden, l (2015) ambiguities of domination: politics, rhetoric, and symbols in contemporary syria (2nd edition), chicago: chicago university press yney (2005) ‘forces storm militant settler’s home’, ynet 18th may: https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,l-3129848,00.html — accessed 25 october 2018 zochrot (2014) ‘al zeeb’: https://zochrot.org/en/village/49145 — accessed 17 may 2018 bionote. philip hayward is an adjunct professor at the university of technology sydney and is editor of the online journal shima. his research interests include aquapelagos, mermaids, micronations and he is actively involved in rainforest regeneration in far north new south wales. 89 endnotes: 1 spellings of the micronation’s english language name in media reports vary as to the manner in which they render its initial phonetic component — the two most common ones being achzivland and akzivland. i use the former throughout this article based on spellings on various official materials (passports, passport stamps etc.) but it should be noted that these also vary, occasionally rendering its name as achzirland. 2 the site has a rich and varied historical heritage. established as a canaanite town around 2000 bce, the port became a phoenician settlement during the first millennium bce and was subsequently occupied by persians, greeks and romans and later, in the early 1100s, was briefly the site of a european crusader fortress. 3 while ryan, dunford and sellars’ widely-read volume micronations cites avivi’s birthplace as tel aviv (2006: 49), the majority of other sources — including authoritative obituaries such as arad (2018: online) — give persia as his birthplace. 4 the village’s mosque and village leader’s house were later restored and are now tourist attractions. 5 while an 11th century jewish scholar named rashid interpreted passages from the talmud referring to “dolphinin” as mermaids, this characterisation was not common and did not lead to subsequent elaborations. (see slifkin [2011: 85–116] for discussion of various talmudic sea monsters). in recent years, the port town of kiryat yam, north of haifa, has actively promulgated rumours concerning mermaid sightings to boost tourism. these are a recent phenomenon, however, and do not reflect any aspect of preceding local folklore. 6 her bare-breasted appearances also evokes tel avivi’s frequently produced photographic images of topless female visitors to the micronation. 7 nb barrie’s 1911 novelisation “peter and wendy’ primarily — although not exclusively — refers to “neverland” (i.e. in the singular). 8 there is a degree of irony here in that in the play, novel and subsequent film adaptations, peter pan and his lost boys struggle to maintain their taz in the face of aggression from a band of pirates led by captain hook. 9 online at: https://www.deviantart.com/israel600/art/mother-mermaid-israel-xchild-mermaid-akhzivland-466465835 — accessed 28 march 2018. 10 online at: https://www.deviantart.com/israel600/art/mother-mermaid-israel-xchild-mermaid-akhzivland-466465835 — accessed 28 march 2018. 11 there are similar parallels to subsequent secessionist/micronational initiatives in israel. the two most notable of these have been the proclamation of micronationality made by baruch elmakias the mayor of yeruham, in 1984 for the town in the negev desert (on account of its alleged neglect by israeli central government) or that declared by activist arieh izhaki for the jewish community residing in kfar yam in the gaza strip in 2005. whereas the first was merely a rhetorical gambit, the second had a brief moment of assertion and contestation when izhaki first appealed for recognition by the united nations and then mounted a lone attempt to resist the evacuation of the jewish population until forced to surrender by armed israeli police (yney, 2005). microsoft word 10_shootingthepast_subhash jaireth.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 translating the ‘still’ and the ‘silent’: stephen poliakoff’s shooting the past subhash jaireth university of canberra subhash.jaireth@gmail.com copyright©2021 subhash jaireth. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: in this montage-essay i want to explore the co-being of two forms of visuality in contemporary culture: the photographic and the cinematographic. but this is not my main concern. the more important thing for me is to unravel the notion of translation as movement between them. for this purpose, i’ll focus on stephen poliakoff’s movie shooting the past1. i’ll also show that a similar translation/movement takes place in various sections of the text that makes this essay. i will examine translation, as an act/event, at three different but inter-related levels: at the level of the film, that is, within the cinematic narrative; at the level of this essay, that is, in the process of writing and reading this essay; and at the most general level, the level of signification. keywords: translation, cinematic image, photographic image 1 british playwright and film director stephen poliakoff has so often used photographic images in his well-known television serials and films that it is described as a trademark of his style. they appear in films such as, the tribe (1998), perfect strangers (2001), the lost prince (2003). for a comprehensive study of his work see, nelson, robin. stephen poliakoff on stage and screen, (london: bloomsbury publishing, methuen drama imprint, 2011). coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 film gives back to the dead a semblance of life. photography maintains the memory of the dead as being dead. christian metz (photography and fetish, 1980:84) the promise of translation is that which announces to us being-language of language: there is language, and because there is something like language, one is both able and unable to translate. jacques derrida (the ear of the other 1988:124) let me begin this essay with a story about a movie-wallah who visited the street of a small indian town in punjab where i used to live. i was ten or perhaps a little older. the movie-wallah would come hauling a movie box in his brightly painted rickshaw. there were six peeping holes in the box which used to be pasted with technicolour posters of hindi (bollywood) films. on the top sat an old gramophone, the one which you have to wind up with a handle. he would place a vinyl record, wind up the gramophone, and with his righthand start turning the other handle. we, the kids, sat around the box peeping through the holes watching colourful images move in front of us. the speed with which the images moved often depended on how tired the movie-wallah was on that day. his repertoire was limited to a few sets of reels, and the records were old and scratchy, and often images and songs didn’t match, but that didn’t bother us. we were happy watching the same reels again and again, thrilled by the movie-wallah and his magical box. for a sumptuous feast of ten to fifteen minutes, we paid him an anna, one twelfth of an old indian rupee. fifty years later, when i think about the movie-wallah, i am unable to pinpoint the reason why i and other children were so fascinated with the movie box. this is even more puzzling because by then i had already seen ‘real’ movies in a cinema theatre. i had also discovered that the reels we were shown in the magic box were nothing other than a sequence of still photographic images. it seems what fascinated me most was the fact that by merely turning a handle on the movie box, the movie-wallah was able to transform still images into images that moved. this movement aided by optical illusion conjured stories i heard and saw at the same time. the magic, i am convinced now, was indeed in the stories which used to come alive by adding movement and translation to the images. like many movie-goers i have come to believe that our desire to read, hear and watch stories compels us to suspend our disbelief and assume that in a movie we encounter, ‘real’ people living in a ‘real’ world. movement and translation append time to still images making the stories spatial as well as temporal. they no longer appear to us as mere abstract representations of the real world but the real world itself. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 136 translation/movement 1 two monologues addressed to the viewers frame the narrative in shooting the past. the first appears just after the introductory sequence and shows oswald bates sitting on a couch; a porky, dishevelled nerd wearing a cardigan. he is looking at us and talking. we hear the click of a shutter, a flash flashes, and we realise that he is sitting in front of a photographic camera. to his right, on a table, we see a tape recorder. he speaks and the tape records. every now and then he clicks, and the camera takes his photo. this is what he has to say: first of all, clearly, i don’t have a video camera. the only time in my life it would have been handy to have one. i want to leave a record of what has been happening. if at all, it bloody seems late to buy one on the last afternoon of my life. but i have got this, a camera with a remote shutter …. a short history of the macfarlane photo library follows, and the movie begins to roll. the second monologue comes towards the end, and shows marilyn trueman, the chief librarian of the macfarlane photo library. her role is to tie up neatly all the loose ends of the narrative. it seems that the opening shots of oswald bates precisely define the main narrative thread of the film. the opposition between ‘still’ photos and moving images is thrust right up, although we also hear oswald acknowledging that he would have, at this time of crisis, the last day of his life, found a video camera handy. oswald, the archivist of photos who has dedicated his whole life in collecting, seeing and showing these photos, suddenly finds doubting their capacity to record the last day of his own life. why this doubt? why this distrust in letting his story being committed to a series of photos? has he been seduced by the flickering images of a movie camera? is he scared of the openness of photos, their strange emptiness which triggers the viewers to weave stories around and about them? perhaps he doesn’t want any other oswald like him to inseminate his images with alien stories, the way he himself does to the photos which fall into his hands and catch his eyes. perhaps that is why he is recording his story. the photos need the safety net of his voice to keep them shielded from being corrupted by other voices and stories. oswald’s monologue drives the narrative. it moulds and modulates it. its content and duration change, and often the monologue accompanies the narrative as a voice-over. he is the main narrator of the story. his point of view dominates. the only exception perhaps is the last sequence in which marilyn takes over. the unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide leaves oswald crippled, half dead, almost as dead as the people in the photos of the collection he looks after. the nexus between death and photos, the one which roland barthes so eloquently exposed in his camera lucida, is made visible again and again in the movie. one of oswald’s many monologues is heard and seen as he readies himself for his final exit. he is facing his camera and talking to us. ‘all these people killed themselves,’ he tells, ‘because they were unhappy with their lives.’ and he shows us the photos of coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 137 virginia woolf, marilyn monroe and tony hancock. the camera clicks and the flash flashes. these photos would appear again in the final episodes of the story. as one would expect from a movie about a photo library, there are hundreds of photos seen, shown, and talked about in the film. there are photos which serve as a background for the narrative, creating an engaging visual ambience. at times, these photos only hint, make a gesture or cast a sideway glance, looking cheekily for the eyes of the viewers, generating ripples in the narrative. however, there are photos and sequences, which are asked to play a specific role in the narrative. they are the ones through and around which different stories are told. one of the stories tells us about three fat brothers who committed a bizarre murder with apples and a crossbow. another story shows us lily katzman, the jewish girl, who was sent to live with an upper-class non-jewish family to save her from the concentration camp. however, the most intriguing story is that of mr. anderson’s grandmother. mr. anderson is an american businessman who wants to empty the grand, eighteenthcentury, country house of its ten million photos and convert it into a twenty-first century school of business and economics. often, photos on their own possess enough charm to seduce us but when they invite stories to weave their own narrative web around them, the level of seduction becomes irresistible. oswald and marilyn, the two curators in the library, know this fact well, and therefore use stories deftly to charm and entrap mr. anderson. a remarkable feature of the film is the way repeated movement/translation between sequences of still and moving images is employed to structure the narrative. this is the first level of translation/movement i want to discuss in some detail. what interests me most is the nature of visuality created through this mode of translation. when i call the still images ‘still’ and ‘silent’, i do it metaphorically. it is obvious that they are neither still nor mute. when they are thrust in front of a movie camera and projected onto a tele-screen, they gain an excess, both visual and narrative. in a similar fashion the cinematic narrative created through and around them also acquires an excess. the movie-ness of the movie is not only defined but accentuated. in cinema 1: the movement image, gilles deleuze notes that ‘…cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image. it does give us a section, but a section which is mobile, not an immobile section + abstract time’ (1996: 2). deleuze begins with bergson’s three theses on movement and constructs an understanding of cinematography that overcomes bergsonian scepticism of a cinematographic image, which according to bergson only represents false movement. bergson understands movement to be distinct from the space covered. the space covered is infinitely divisible whereas movement cannot be divided without changing it qualitatively. false movement takes place when immobile sections are arranged along the axis of abstract time. ‘real movement,’ to quote deleuze, ‘needs to be understood as a mobile section of duration, of the whole or of a whole. it expresses the change in the duration, in the whole. the whole is neither given nor givable because it is open and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short to endure’ (1996: 9). according to deleuze, through the combination of fixed and moving shots (fixed and mobile camera) and through montage, cinema is able to present coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 138 movement-images which are ‘…pure movement extracted from bodies or moving things’ (1996: 23). ‘the essence of cinematographic movement-image,’ he adds, ‘lies in extracting from vehicles or moving bodies the movement, which is their common substance, or extracting from movements the mobility which is their essence’ (1996: 23). the movement-image in his opinion has two facets, ‘one of which is oriented towards sets and their parts (frames or closed system), the other towards the whole and its changes’ (1996: 55). let us examine how the story of lily katzman is shown and told. marilyn takes a photo out of a folder and slides it in the direction of mr. anderson who is sitting on the opposite side of the table. mr. anderson takes the photo and the camera moves behind him looking over his shoulders. for the viewers the seeing of the photo becomes framed within a subjective shot, the point of view of mr. anderson. although it is marilyn who is showing the photos and telling the story, the viewers are still made to look over the shoulders of mr. anderson. at first, we are shown one or two photos but gradually we are exposed to a montage of photos embedded within a haunting soundscape. we hear the off-screen sounds and watch lily sitting with her mother in the park. the sounds continue as she walks back home alone. on the way she has to stop for a nazi street march to pass. the penultimate photo of the sequence shows lily standing on a railway platform with other children holding their bundles, ready to be deported. ‘the bundles,’ we hear mr. anderson speak. ‘the bundles,’ replies marilyn. we, like mr. anderson, are already hooked eagerly waiting to find out what happened next. marilyn tells us that lily survived the camp and shows us the last photo in which we find an old chubby woman, standing on the old kent street in london, feeding pigeons. in the essay painting and cinema, andre bazin notes that the frame of a painting is centripetal whereas the screen centrifugal (1974: 166). this means that when a painting, and in this particular case, a photo, outspans the screen (that is when parts of it fill the whole screen) the space of the painting/photo loses its orientation and its limits (1974: 166). in shooting the past we see similar outspanning frequently. often, we are shown close-ups of photos. the cinematographic camera zooms in and out. frequently, it pans over the surface of the photo, mimicking the eye looking for a face in the crowd. in the photo that shows lily katzman with her bundle, the camera not only pans over the surface but rocks up and down. and when we hear the rattling sounds of wheels accompanying the movement, this slight gesture, this minimalist hint of a train taking the kids to the camps, becomes visually palpable. one of the most intriguing sequences of the film involves oswald taking an overdose of pills. we see him sitting on the side of a bed. he opens a bottle and pops a handful of pills in his mouth, grabs a glass of water and washes them down. then he puts away the glass, walks over to a table lamp with a single bulb, turns the light off, and unscrews the bulb. in the darkness he walks over to the bed and lies down, waiting for the moment to come. a close up of his face fills the screen. slowly the camera moves away still focused on his eyes and ends up with a shot that shows oswald sitting in front of his camera. the camera clicks and the flash flashes after which we are taken back to oswald lying on his bed. the camera is still focused on his eyes. this is when black and white photos of oswald appear in a quick succession. most of them are close-ups of his face. we remember him shooting these photos, and we also know that just a few hours ago he had got them printed. in one of them he is holding the photos of woolf and monroe: the photo within a photo, framed by a static, frontal cinematographic shot. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 139 a visual walking trail, a movement, a sort of translation, from one photo to the other and to the next. along this trail also lie the signposts of past times, more past than the one that precedes it, as if we have traced a geological traverse in the landscape of memories. ‘the cinematic apparatus,’ notes jacques aumont, ‘implies not only the passage of time, a chronology into which we would slip as if into a perpetual present, but also complex, stratified time in which we move through different levels simultaneously, present, past(s), future(s) …’ (1992: 130). it seems that the sequence of black and white photos of oswald, i have described earlier, achieves a level of condensation of various forms of time, of its flow, its duration. the present-ness of oswald’s monologue first brings the past represented by the photos of woolf and monroe in the present moment of oswald’s monologue, but as the monologue itself moves into past, that past time is pushed back into much deeper past. but the two pasts still remain bound to the presentness of the ongoing movie and the story it shows and tells. it coincides with the presentness of my watching the movie. as i watch the sequence, i begin to understand the idea of the crystal-image discussed by deleuze. deleuze describes crystal-image as a special form of time-image, a kind of ‘direct image of time’ that shows ‘pure time’ independent of movement. in the timeimage, to quote aumont, ‘time is barely re-presented. instead, it is presented, made into present, cloned or twinned’ (1992: 181). in deleuze’s own words, in this image ‘…the past does not follow the present which it no longer is, it coexists with the present it was’ (1996: 183). 'walking,' notes michel de certeau, 'is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, … speaks’ (1998: 97). in shooting the past we are invited to take many such walks, and as we walk with the camera and hear and see the story, memories begin to unravel with the help of stories stringed by photos, littered across the passageways. the time is unfolded and refolded. it becomes spatial, geographic. take for example the story of hettie, mr. anderson’s grandmother. it begins in a photolab where marilyn is examining some old negatives on a screen attached to an enlarger and a projector. once a connection to the next sequence of photos is found, the story moves to a room with a table where we see marilyn and mr. anderson sitting on the opposite sides. the next narrative segment takes us on a walk with mr. anderson along a passageway where photos are hung from strings crisscrossing the space. we walk with them and soon find ourselves near a table with a red velvet tablecloth opening the way into an empty room where we encounter photos spread on the floor. in the film, translation of still and moving images becomes intertwined with walking and movement in the company of photos. translation and movement begin to complement and stand for each other. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 140 translation/movement 2 there is a story often told about matisse. it is said that one day as matisse was working in his studio, a visitor who had come to watch him paint, asked him, ‘what are you painting?’ ‘i am painting a painting,’ he replied. i smile reading matisse’s reply and yet it leaves me wondering about his intention. i don’t want to believe that he is being arrogant or snobbish. most probably, he is trying to express his inability to find a reference in the real world outside the painting his visitor was keen to know about; in a way he is questioning the idea of ‘aboutness’ of a work of art; a question that demands translation of the visual content of an image into words. like all translations this is a process fraught with pitfalls. it is never complete, marked either by excesses or deficiencies. roman jacobson calls this mode of translation between two different art-forms intersemiotic. ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation,’ he notes, ‘is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign system’ (1959: 233). although matisse was asked to do just the opposite, to interpret non-verbal sign system by means of verbal signs, the task he faced was similar: to bridge the gap between two different modes of artistic expression. in a way, he was trying to explain the visitor that in order to explain what he was painting, he’ll have to paint another painting about the first painting. this incommensurability of intersemiotic translation also shows that the dichotomy between content and form, which forms the basis of much of the popular understating of works of art is artificial and unusable. the two elements are inseparable. their osmosis is intrinsic and organic. separating them, even for methodological reasons, sucks out the life force from these works. and yet that’s what most critics and interpreters attempt to do. in fact, that’s what i have been doing in this essay: translating the narrative content of poliakoff’s movie. after watching shooting the past several times, i have attempted to translate its content and form into verbal signs. i have downloaded from a website stills and photos used in the film and printed them out to look at them separately. i have similarly listened to the excerpts of the soundtrack independently. i am hoping that by moving from the whole to the parts, and then form parts to the whole, i’ll be able to grasp the meaning of the film, or at least be able to explain to the readers why the movie manages to engage me emotionally. an easier way would have been to insert a youtube address of the movie and ask the readers to watch the movie and find the answer themselves. but this would have brought an end to the process of translation i have been engaged in. like hamlet, the question i, and others like me, face is simple: to translate or not to translate. the answer for me is simple: to not translate is impossible. this is what we, as thinking and feeling human beings, have always done. this is our predicament, our burden, and our joy. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 141 in a roundtable on translation, collected in the book the ear of the other, derrida expresses the same double bind. ‘translate me,’ he notes, ‘and what is more don’t translate me. i desire that you translate me, that you translate the name i impose on you; and at the same time whatever you do, don’t translate me, you will not be able to translate it’ (1988: 102). derrida here talks about the special status of a proper name, of its translatability and untranslatability. but it won’t be incorrect to suggest, as i have done earlier, that we face the same double bind when we encounter a text (object, thought, painting, film) created by someone else’s words, language, seeing and showing. perhaps what drives my project is the belief that readers of this essay are interested in the nature of my engagement with the movie. they don’t want my disinterested or objective look at the movie. they are looking for my presence and my voice. however, i hope they aren’t interested only in my voice. i hope they want to know how my voice interacts with many other voices and seeings in the movie and thereby hear a polyphonic dialogue between the voices, including my own. a polyphonic dialogue, i believe, might help the readers of this essay to establish a similar dialogue with the movie. like most translators, i hope that after reading the essay they’ll develop an urge to watch the movie and talk about it. the movie, as expected, ends on a positive note. the library is saved and sold to an american collection. we hear this from none other but marilyn in her final monologue. however, the focus of this monologue is oswald, who according to her had an uncanny capacity to make connections between photos, events and people. ‘i make connections,’ he tells the woman in the photo-lab waiting for the roll to be processed. but marilyn tells us something else about oswald. ‘oswald changed my life,’ she remarks, ‘and the life of mr. anderson but in the process harmed his own life. the world needs many more oswalds,’ she laments. although oswald has been turned into a hero, and in a way, he is a hero who helped save the collection. he achieved the task not merely because he loved the photos or his job but because of his uncanny ability to see and engineer connections between photos, stories and people around him. in my view he is a masterful translator who can use translation and movement to spot, establish, and unravel connections between seemingly disparate events. translation/movement 3 in an interview poliakoff was asked to explain the idea behind the making of shooting the past. ‘the idea,’ he replied, came from an archive in england that belonged to one of the big studios, just outside london. the studio closed in the sixties, then emi, the british music company, bought it. anyway, it changed hands again, in the early nineties, they were going to bulldoze the site and destroy all the photos. there was an art director who tried to get somebody in england to rescue the collection, and she failed. finally, she got the george lucas foundation to take it. in the same interview, poliakoff mentions another collection. ‘there was a collection (which has just been sold) very like the one in the film, a period house in the middle of coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 142 london … very, very dusty … it was an old ballet school, all covered up with pictures. that was literally the archive you see in the film, but much worse, much less tidy.’ poliakoff seems to suggest that the macfarlane photo-library in the movie has not one but at least two real-world proto-types. poliakoff in his movie transports or, let us say, translates these two, or elements of the two, to clone, like dolly, the sheep, the macfarlane photo library. according to poliakoff the process of cloning began with the photos preserved in and provided by the hulton photo archive in london. these photos are ‘real’ photos firstly because they have been turned into pro-filmic objects filmed in the movie. they are also ‘real’ because they exist as a photographic imprint, a mould, an instantaneous abduction, to use metz’s words, ‘of the object out of the world, into another kind of time’ (1985: 84). they possess a higher degree of ‘resemblance complex,’ in the words of bazin, or a higher ‘analogy effect,’ in the words of aumont, than, for example, oswald bates played by timothy spall. therefore, if after watching the film, one wants to know whether the film is based on a true story, this is most probably because the presence of ‘real’ black and white photos of people and places used in the film urge us to. in them we can possibly see the connection with the real world outside the film. and because we suspect this connection, we readily let ourselves believe that some of the stories told about and through them might also be true. it doesn’t matter if the actual filming took place in the hulton archive itself or in some other similar library. the photos compell us to suspend our disbelief and perceive the imagined reality in the film as real and artistically true. poliakoff translates/transports elements of a real photo archive to create an imaginatively real macfarlane library by shooting the photos with a movie camera and stringing them into a compelling narrative. however, in this process, the movie also creates the possibility of a second, reverse, translation or movement. for instance, if i were to find myself in the hulton archive in london, i would find it hard to escape the presence of macfarlane library imaginatively created by poliakoff’s. it would block my way to the real hulton archive, which i would be forced to see, as if, refracted, transmitted, and transfigured by poliakoff’s library. in this way poliakoff’s translation begins to blur the boundaries between the two worlds: the real and the imagined. in his much cited paper, jacobson distinguishes three kinds of translations: intralingual or rewording where an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs in the same language takes place; interlingual or translation proper where interpretation of verbal signs by means of other language occurs; and intersemiotic translation or transmission where interpretation of verbal signs by nonverbal signs happens (1959: 233). in my essay translation of still photographic images into images in a narrative film represents an example of intersemiotic translation. here the sign system of still photographic images is translated (or interpreted/assimilated) into the sign system of a cinematic narrative. it needs to be emphasised that this process is hard to imagine without the presence of written text because the filming is invariably preceded by screenplay which involves not only directions but also dialogues. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 143 in my essay i have also used the notion of translation in a much broader sense, and the use is essentially metaphoric. translation as movement in this sense occurs whenever we try to create a representation of the world. the world and its representation are only strategically and temporarily separate because the world represented and its representation exist symbiotically; they lose meaning and salience as soon the relation between the two are severed. it can be argued that translation of the real into the imagined real, and transposition of the imagined real onto the real is one of the most significant features of our being in the world. the movement or translation from an object to thought, thought to speech, and speech to alphabetical and non-alphabetical writing is essential to us as homo sapiens. to live without it is impossible because translation seems to become an essential element of our co-being in the world. in place of conclusion here is a list of some of the words i noted down as i was doing my reading for the essay: translation, movement, sliding, displacement, replacement, transmission, transfusion, transaction, transposition, transportation, transference, travel, detour, dissemination, insemination, inhabitation, iteration (iter, means once again, in sanskrit itra – the ‘other’), citation, grafting, performance, trace, residue, weaving, cleaving, joining. as i move from left to right reading aloud these words, i discover that i am enacting a mode of translation. my eyes move across the page, my voice pronounces the words, and their meaning unfolds. on the paper they sit close to each other. however, their proximity, spatial and semantic, doesn’t make them dissolve into each other. instead, they appear to overstep and overlap on each other casting shadows. thereby, as i move from one word to the next, i seem to carry traces of sounds and meanings with me. each word i meet interacts with what i have received from the word i had left behind, the two undergoing a subtle transformation in the process. the words traversed by me don’t disappear but find a new mode to enrich, endure and survive. to help the ‘original’ endure was in walter benjamin’s view the prime task of a translator. in the ear of the other, derrida reads benjamin’s the task of the translator, to emphasise the same point. derrida writes: it happens that benjamin says substantially that the structure of an original is survival, what he calls überleben. at times he says überleben and the other times fortleben. these two words do not mean the same thing (überleben means above life and therefore survival as something rising above life; fortleben means survival in the sense of something prolonging life), even though they are translated in french by the one word survivre (to survive, to live on), which already poses a problem. given the surviving structure of an original text – always a sacred text in its own ways insofar as it is a pure original – the task of coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 144 the translator is precisely to respond to this demand for survival which is the very structure of the original text. (notice benjamin does not say the task of translation but rather of the translator, that is, of a subject who finds him/herself immediately indebted by the existence of the original, who must submit to its law and who is duty-bound to do something for the original.) to do this, says benjamin, the translator must neither reproduce, represent, nor copy the original, nor even, essentially care about communicating the meaning of the original. translation has nothing to do with reception or communication or information. as christie mcdonald has just pointed out, the translator must assure survival, which is to say the growth, of the original (1988: 122). if the real task of a translator and translation is to help the ‘original’ endure and survive, poliakoff in my view achieves the task admirably. he translates the still photos by stringing them into a compelling cinematic narrative. in a way, i have attempted to do something similar: translate poliakoff’s movie into a narrative essay, hoping that after reading the essay, the readers would want to watch the movie. the movie, therefore, will endure. references aumont, jacques. aesthetics of film (austin: university of texas press, 1992) bazin, andre. what is cinema? tr. hugh gray (berkeley: university of california press, 1974). de certeau, michel. the practice of everyday life, tr. steven rendall (berkley: university of california press, 1984) deleuze, giles. cinema 1: the movement-image, tr. hugh tomlinson & barbara habberjam (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1996). derrida, jacques. the ear of the other, tr. peggy kamuf (lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1988). jacobson, roman. “on linguistic translation”, in on translation, ed. reuben brower (cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press, 1959), 232-239. metz, christian. “photography and fetish”, october, 34, fall, (1985), 81-90. poliakoff, stephen. shooting the past, television serial, 3 episodes (london: bbc, 1999). poliakoff, stephen. interview, mobil masterpiece theatre. accessed on 1 july 2020 at http://shootingthepast.tripod.com/shootingthepast/articles/poliakoff_interview.htm subhash jaireth was born in punjab, india. between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in russia studying geology and russian literature. in 1986 he migrated to australia. he has published poetry in hindi, english and russian. his published works include yashodhara: six seasons without you (wild peony, 2003), unfinished poems for your violin (penguin australia, 1996), golee lagne se pahle (before the bullet hit me) (vani prakashan, 1994), to silence: three autobiographies (puncher& wattmann, 2011), after love (transit lounge, 2012), moments (puncher & wattmann, 2014) and coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 145 incantations (recent work press, 2016). a catalan translation of the novel after love was published in october 2018 in valencia. he has also published english translations of russian, japanese and persian poetry, and has translated poems of indigenous australian poets into hindi. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 seeking asylum—holding patterns: the 2020 ballina region for refugees poetry prize bill boyd (ed.) southern cross university ballina region for refugees hendboyd2477@gmail.com emma doolan (ed.) southern cross university emma.doolan@scu.edu.au ruth henderson (ed.) ballina region for refugees hendboyd2477@gmail.com copyright© 2021 bill boyd, emma doolan, and ruth henderson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract. poetry provides valuable and insightful ways to explore and record social and political experiences and engagements. the plight of refugees and people seeking asylum in australia is well known. community groups such as the ballina region for refugees provide support to refugees and asylum seekers both in australia and offshore. to help raise awareness and validate the experience of refugees and asylum seekers, the ballina region for refugees runs an annual poetry prize. the 2020 ballina region for refugees poetry prize theme was seeking asylum—holding patterns. this article presents the winning and highly commended poems, along with poems by refugee and asylum seeker poets. poems from both insider witnesses – refugees and asylum seekers – and outsider witnesses – poets who seek to express an empathy with the plight of refugees and asylum seekers – have contributed to this collection. from haunting statements of human dissolution that should strike fear into anyone’s heart, through glimpses of hope, the poems explore the trails of asylum seeking and the dysfunctionality of the aftermath. keywords: refugee; asylum seeker; poetry; social advocacy; writing for social justice; poetry as social activism; insider witness coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 the 2020 ballina region for refugees poetry prize poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. plato a poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. salman rushdie in early 2020, the australian refugee support group ballina region for refugees (br4r) invited submissions to its 2020 seeking asylum—holding patterns poetry prize. the poetry prize is a collaboration between the ballina region for refugees group and southern cross university. the prize celebrates the positive contributions refugees make to our communities, and it acknowledges the circumstances that forced them flee their homelands and request refuge in australia. the prize was open to writers around australia, including refugees and asylum seekers detained in australian detention centres and hotel ‘prisons’. this year’s competition theme was seeking asylum—holding patterns. poets were invited to submit poems of up to fifty lines that considered the variety of roles holding patterns occupy in refugee and asylum seeker experiences. the invitation provided the following provocation: planes circle, unable to land. queues stretch past the horizon. waiting periods extend beyond memory. names slide from one form to the next. a backlog of unanswered questions, a hallway that never ends, a compound that never closes. the holding pattern can be approached from a broad variety of perspectives, and contributors may consider the ways in which holding patterns signify delay, disruption and discouragement, bureaucratic complexity, the stasis of legal and financial processes, systematic and institutional structures that obstruct or delay action—but also holding onto, being folded into, patterns of family, friendship, community, and culture. in inviting australians of all backgrounds to engage creatively with the concept of seeking asylum, the prize encourages the community to connect empathetically and imaginatively with the realities inhabited by refugees and asylum seekers. this is not to say the prize gives licence for writers to appropriate the lived experience of refugees and asylum seekers. rather, it seeks to draw on poetry’s ability to connect us to one another, to foster empathy and understanding, and to inspire changei. creative expression, including poetry, provides a means to critiqueaustralia’s current inhumane policies and stance with regard to asylum seekersii to a global audience and citizenry. in this sense, the publication of these poems may be seen as an enabling act in a very positive and powerful sense. furthermore, the collection of poems presented here also continues an emerging tradition in which borders between the notion of a professional poet and a poet who writes out of the pressure of an historical moment are being questioned and broken downiii. unsettling the dominant paradigm of authority and authorship in an important process in re-setting social understandings of refugees and asylum seekers. behrouz boochani’s recent book, no friend but the mountains, highlights the power of such re-author(is)ing of writingiv. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 some of the poems presented in this collection draw, in part, on the tradition of the poetry of witnessv. this is poetry of poets whose lives were shaped “by unsurmountable forces, thrown off course, even – at worst – destroyed … [who composed poems] at an extreme of human endurance, on the brink of breakdown or death”vi. they bear witness to historical events and the impacts of these events. importantly, they bear witness to events for which ordinary language is inadequate in articulating a full reaction, a task to which some would argue poetry is particularly suited, in “its ability to accommodate the sublime, the ineffable, that of which we cannot speak”vii. other poems in this collection also, however, draw on outsider perspectives, those of poets who have not necessarily or directly experienced asylum seeking or being a refugee, yet who seek ways to empathise with refugees and asylum seekers. likewise, poetry offers a suitable language. while the concept of empathy is problematic in contemporary poetryviii, it appears to provide a powerful medium for building social connections in times of stressix. as one study of post-9/11 outsider witness poetry suggests, “third-party witnesses, like poets, [have the potential to] provide new understandings of historical responsibility and national identity in the [national] imagination”x. they seek, as do others, possibilities to create space to listen to the stories being told and, in doing so, assist in exploring social identity, and through coconstructing new realities and promote healingxi. and yet, despite the personal perspective of the witness, is there more to the poetry? does it have an ability to mould the course of events? the palestinian poet mahmoud darwish noted, “i thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize … but now i think that poetry changes only the poet.”xii his comments, must be taken in context; he is described as having written under a state of siege. as almog beharxiii notes, “perhaps mahmoud darwish sought to break the siege with his poetry and believed in poetry’s power to stand up to armies and to reality. yet he admitted, more than once, that poetry was defeated by reality.” nevertheless, we can take darwish’s potent comments as a challenge for poets and poetry readers alike, a challenge to persist on a journey of change. while it may, therefore, be argued that the poetry in this collection may not change the past of suppression and dehumanisation of refugees and asylum seekers in australia, the fact of this very publication articulates a belief that such a collection of poems can change something. the highly personal and experiential nature of the poems, whether by refugees and asylum seekers or by others, supports darwish’s presumption that poetry can change the writers of these poems. however, in a nation that persists in a draconian approach to refugee and asylum seeker policies and treatmentxiv, there is an urgent need to effect change beyond the poet – at least, amongst ourselves as readers and amongst our communities. there is a need to, for example, lend our voices to welcoming and supporting refugees and asylum seekers in the hopes that, eventually, we can change the course of events, and that australia can become a more humane nation. we can gain strength from other fields of social justice action. if such an aspiration had little validity, the growth of poetry in, for example, the school education of social justice would be viewed as futile; there are many examples where this is not considered to be soxv.this collection supports such optimism. turning to the poetry presented in this collection, it is satisfying to note the extent to which the seeking asylum poetry prize’s aims were achieved. encouraging and supporting refugee coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 and asylum seeker voices resulted in strong submissions from both writers identifying as refugees or asylum seekers, and from others. our third-place winner, yasaman bagheri, oscillates between painful hope and excoriating anger in her poem empty envelope, as she reflects on the experience of children born under the shadow of australia’s border policies, policies that declare that “we will make sure / you will never have a home”. jalal mahamede’s haunting dear gardener, in looking into the depths of his being, laments his loss of being and connection, concluding with an indictment of the condition we allow our refugees and asylum seekers to reach: “now i stayed with the dark forest, where are you? i call you from the depths of my being, oh lord, i am losing my mind”. “nothing is in place anymore”, he continues in his second poem, “you try to talk to me, my ears do not hear …”. his accompanying art speaks to the dissolution of being expressed so eloquently in his poems. kazem kazemi’s the monday so gloomy without you reiterates the loneliness and the loss: “in your absence, i leave the world”. what a state to find one’s self in! and yet kazemi seems to find a glimmer of hope, closing on, “i wish you’d been here to close my eyes / they’ll be opened, because of my waiting for you”. he continues in his second poem, freedom, to place his lack of freedom up front, in terms all readers must surely be able to understand, and all readers must surely fear. our fear should be amplified by kazemi’s simple question: “will i see freedom again?”. kazemi, however, still hangs onto the possibility of release, of sorts: “it is too hard with my heart / full of emotions and love / i must go somewhere else / where i can be a stranger again”. farhad bandesh’s poem, also titled freedom, likewise takes us to dark places, the corners of our dark shadows where the refugee is thrown, dark places where“ my body is in tatters … the delicacy of my soul and body is no more …”. the real fear – a fear we should all acknowledge – is the fear of never seeing light again, and of our souls being forever black. from the outside, victoria king wonders, “is this me?”, in her first-place winning poem can i hold a village?. “what’s it like?”, muses second-place winner genevieve barr in disappeared. both poems enter imaginatively into the experience of the asylum seeker, the repeated questions in each marking the poets ’progress towards an understanding that is ultimately partial and elusive. the questions remain unanswered, but an avenue has been opened, a hand extended. in her second poem, holding pattern: a sestina, victoria king continues her imagining by seeking to imagine the journey of promises, given and broken, faced by refugees. these are broken promises that result in incarceration “ –but i am here. still. and time / is marked each day by the strike and whisper / of a rock against a whitewashed wall that never / ceases to be temporary. …” the fundamental insult to any person: “for never shall this place be home”. the dispossession continues: kate cantrell’s map-scrapping reminds us of other holding patterns, of how events create forgetting. “a dutch man went continent hunting,” kate tells us, “and they still left us off the map in 1982 … it’s a national embarrassment we said when baz forgot tasmania.” how easy is it to forget? kim lateef provides something of an answer coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 in her poem loose thread: “my mother pulls at a loose silver thread / and i want to scream / at how quickly / thread / unravels”. a timely reminder, indeed. ion corcos, in his poem handkerchief, draws on abdurrahim buza’s the refugees (1957) to paint a deceptively simple picture of the refugee. drawing images upon image, perhaps metaphor upon metaphor, ion reminds us of the humanity of each and every individual refugee. he reminds us, however, of the incremental tearing away of that humanity during the flight: “… he wears no shoes, limps, / his pants torn at the knees. … no lentil soup, no potatoes tonight. … the road is long; they will not sleep.” are the wolves who, in the final line, howl on the mountain slopes mere wild animals …? otto de pele’s poem azadî – kurdish for freedom – reflects on a refugee artist’s success, “his art hung in local galleries as an expression of ambition for freedom”, tempered by the years and cycles of detention. “there are other worlds we may wish for our very own self” the poet states, closing on the words of a refugee who has given the poet permission to name him, harhad: “stolen from me, years of life, how easily we break each other”. there is a lesson for us all: no matter what freedom we eventually obtain, the past of pain, the pain of the past, remains. helen gearing breathes life into the almost comical dysfunctionality of displaced lives in her poem, gentle dystopia. the details and coping are important: “widowed, we share a house riddled with unlabeled teas, pickled limes / and a friendship that reads like a marriage palimpsest … we are hungry / and ridiculous side by side / in white-pimpled pyjamas”. the past will never be silent. fadi jan’s three bird poems, finch, dove, and sparrow, draw on the fragility of life. life, we are reminded, is so easily dismantled and disrupted. seduced into the gentle world of small birds – are we not all just small birds? – readily and instantly destroyed, we are gently shocked into the realization that nothing will ever be the same again. rebecca sargeant’s sovereign borderlands, the final poem in this collection, brings us back to the human reality of power and sovereignty, of dispossession and detention. this is what fadi jan’s birds experience, had they been people such as you and me, but “hands tied”, ready to run, until, in closing, “from the terror of having to look / into light-coloured eyes / and see all the ayes in favour / and all the i’s left to drown / in the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea”. below are presented the three winning entries in the 2020 seeking asylum—holding patterns poetry prize, followed by a shortlist of entries by poets from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds, and finally a selection of highly commended entries. the 2020 ballina region for refugees poetry prize winning entries “can i hold a village? “ victoria king first place can one person hold a village? bear the message of lineage? can one person hold a people, a country, a faith, a race, coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 a way of seeing, of being? a legacy? is this me? could i be that container, floating on waters captured and caught and still holding that message, as a mother to my daughter? that message whose nuance is so rich and so deep, so pungently technicoloursweet and then agonisingly elusive and fleet but there, like a handprint indescribably perfect. for yes, that message lies in me, swells through me in the deep, blood-heavy thud in me, swelling and abating, flood-like washing, enveloping, leaving me wanting gasping, for i am unable not to hold this message and tend it, and send it in the milk of my breast with the heft of my chest along the glide of my breath through the slick of my sweat imbued in my smiles, my tears, my cries, denials my lullabies to my child. can one person whisper the wilds of the shushing trees that push and ease the bulge of their girth through rock-layered earth? can they breathe the plumes of blue sky crags and silver streams of smoke curls leaving evening fires? can one person perspire the honey-rich sweetness of dates hanging uneaten? or hum the buzzing burr of flies snatching at dust-filled eyes that are deep and brimming with love. am i enough? my mother held all this in me for me as did her mother, and her mother, and her mother … and so on forever. our heredity, our legacy. but now, how can i find a way? a castaway, no longer there coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 encumbered, deracinated, gasping for air grasping for the clutch of home, for the certainty of knowing. i am suffocating, alienated, carved in two by the currents that rage in me, claw at me. and yet their power enables me. and so determinedly, i make my plea: my child, let me try. “disappeared” genevieve ross barr second place day breaks, out of tune, and morning finds its way, half-heartedly to its well-worn pedestal. stale air, and the sheets are stained again with the boredom of insistence of existence. a howling routine. a calendar is checked, (always full of hope that it will tell me something more). is it yesterday? tomorrow? or today? i position myself, straight-backed upon the waiting room chair and waste away the beginning of another, other day. there’s a lethargy in here. harsh words scrape at the door. an afternoon hides behind household chores. i have seen the undead blinking, as i sit giggling at the in-joke written long ago today. what’s it like to have never been? to turn a corner, never seen. to turn another … where was i? and now i’m not. what’s it like to be in between? a time … a place … my defining moment. what’s it like to have disappeared? or worse; thrown out with the trash and pissed on by the cat. what’s it like to have disappeared? coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 an empty space. a weeping sore. a crashing bore. a deaf ear turned. a history burned. a future scorned. a lethargy born. what’s it like to be in between? is it like a tiresome day? is it like a routine way? and not soon enough, evening arrives and extinguishes any hope of an unexpected tomorrow. “empty envelope” yasaman bagheri third place falling off the sinking boat with our hands held against the waves, we kept the pattern to rescue every second’s worth and stretched to a lifetime. inside the cloud of spilled gasoline and blood when hope was sinking down hands reached to rescue. our disappeared boat was given a name, (u)niform (l)ima (a)lpha. as if water had washed our names away; instead, numbers had appeared from one to a hundred and two. we were (re)named and handed an envelope – a message of hope. time worked differently in there: we watched it, counted it; they got paid for it; we suffered it, lost it; inside the reports never read. we were kids born between policies. the border force man spoke to us of laws. laws denied us, detained us. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 laws always designed against us. when he sent out his men and they had our throats in their hands, i thought about how “boat” came before “people” and “border” before “force”. this was the message of hope: we opened it, an empty envelope, full of unwritten words: “we will make sure you will never have a home.” every year we are less human more popular election-winning lies. you can rise from the ocean with blood-coloured wings sharks will let you pass – unharmed. but you will drown in prison camps. close your eyes this time, let me build you a boat from my two hands, a boat that will set you free from these prison camps. you will sail to no “shore” “off” of our hearts; the road you’ll travel from seeking refuge to finding home, will not end behind a maximum-security fence; home will not be a place in the palm of your hands where you hold the tally mark of years – (un)lived in prison camps. the 2020 ballina region for refugees poetry prize poems by refugee or asylum seeker writers “dear gardener” jalal mahamede dear gardener i look into the depths of my being coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 my whole body is shaking. the roots have turned into trees, and the trees have blossomed but why do flowers turn black? the branches whisper the song of sorrow in my brain and they show me their hatred like this it’s as if their place is narrow ... my body no longer has place for these roots and foliage i remember one day there was a gardener pruning these leaves the gardener also migrates of course he was right now i stayed with the dark forest, where are you? i call you from the depths of my being, oh lord, i am losing my mind, i know you won’t come again … i fell coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 “nothing is in place anymore “ jalal mahamede nothing is in place anymore; no more eyes or mouth can be washed the brain it sits in the side pocket, the hands spray poison into the brain waiting and tiredness are long-standing habits the mouth has nothing to say the looks have no meaning anymore … do you think like that??? eating the blood of liver has been our daily business for a long time the tearful eye hid in the mouth but … the day will come, when you come to me, complain about the pain in your eyes that day is too late, i know and you do not know i spent my life in vain and it was wrong but look in the old box, the writing is left in there for you, enjoy the taste and the feel of those words. you try to talk to me, my ears do not hear, nothing is in place … “the monday so gloomy without you” kazem kazemi in your absence i leave the world my hands want to convey customs of lovers and beloved poured water from behind me coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 my tears weeping in the absence of you i wish you’d been here to clear the tears and given me the power the ease with which to go the trees take me ahead to the door with the frame of black and waiting till i go without you in your absence i can't be touched by the elegance of rain it slaps me brutally it has my sentence in its hands i am condemned to not see you again my darling, the pink flowers are here within the colour i visualize your lips they are crying for me in your absence ah what’s a gloomy monday far from you in your absence to leave the world without closed eyes to tell the truth to you my darling i always wanted you i wish you’d been here to close my eyes they’ll be opened, because of my waiting for you “freedom” kazem kazemi will i see freedom again? my wings have become disabled in the cage of waiting. the vision of my eyes can’t see from behind the grid fences anymore. hope and love are dying in my body i have become a stranger to myself. yes, it is me. i was condemned coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 to say hello to people who were born without our heart. it is too hard with my heart full of emotions and love i must go somewhere else where i can be a stranger again. will i see freedom again? “freedom” farhad bandesh my soul once provided only tranquillity and it would not make my body impatient. now my soul’s tenderness for my body has been forgotten. my body is in tatters. my soul follows to notify you: “i am talking about freedom! you throw me into the corners of your dark shadows. you put me into the very depths of exile. the delicacy of my soul and body is no more in this endless shadow. if this continues any longer i will not see any more light and my soul will be forever black.” the 2020 ballina region for refugees poetry prize highly commended poems “holding pattern: a sestina” victoria king he promised me the shelter of long, golden sunsets dripping with the mellifluence of time and the comfort and warmth of blood. my eyes flickered, ignoring the whisper, coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 the embrace and insistence of home that churned within as i nodded assent, never thinking how wrong he might be, never daring to believe how his treacle-golden tones, flowing through my home might seep through the cracks of time leaving me with just that crashing whisper of doubt. and so it was, with blood rising in my cheeks, that my blood money was negotiated. never once did i falter as the paper whisper of notes of effort, the golden legacy of my parents ’lifetime folded in his palms and sauntered from my home. it’s taken me a long way from home that money, a tectonic shift in my blood a fissure in my existence, in distance and time here, in this centre in the centre of a red earth never-never this land of blue faultless sky casts its searing golden eye over me and its wind carries a whisper of gritty resentment, to which i respond in a whisper that i am crushed now with longing for home for the cries of the village, the golden dust motes in the still air, the blood of goats, the curds, the flies, the familiar never ending solidity of easy time. but i am here. still. and time is marked each day by the strike and whisper of a rock against a whitewashed wall that never ceases to be temporary. where is home? so far now, surging momentarily like blood in shuttered memories, ghastly and golden. this place, this time may hold me in its golden shadow, but the whisper of my blood screams defiance. for never shall this place be home. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 “map-scrapping” kate cantrell behold the island! once the beating heart of history, now clotted and compressed by the roaring forties. i’m talking about eddy’s lighthouse where ghost ships sail recklessly. a dutch man went continent hunting and they still left us off the map in 1982. across the bass, imperial wounds bestowed in the playground that dangerous and sub-divided land where a boy moored himself to me and tugging hard broke my arm in two places. the funny bone is a joke i don’t understand. sant wrote close to the continent who wouldn’t make a fuss? there have been wars for less. in the nineties the queen had a mastectomy the stitches would not go quietly and had to be extracted with a plier eight weeks later. the queen was unimpressed. you see it was the nineties, the worst decade by far. later arnott’s produced a biscuit that paid homage to ponting. at christmas we read a book on kindle how to be invisible by j.j. luna. we fought about moving south to brisbane. this was before nam le wrote the boat and hanson said without irony we’re in danger of being swamped. it’s a national embarrassment we said when baz forgot tasmania. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 on friday at 5pm our three-year-old had a fit in the line at centrelink. with a fat lip, she asked the doctor glumly where’s my lollypop? he laughed and tickled her ribs while she looked for something to do to him. “loose thread” kim lateef brown-wrinkled hands against bright blue taffeta silver-threaded patterns glint and the magpie watches us my engagement dress before the war … before you became a refugee? my mother winces as if still in disbelief yet i am a child of refugees and i cannot wince even if, my only inheritance are fragments, ghosts and a silver-threaded blue dress my only regret is drinking amniotic fluid and swallowing my mother’s nightmare of loose threads unravelling from ancestral carpets. * my mother pulls at a loose silver thread and i want to scream at how quickly thread unravels. the magpie swoops and i whisper into my mother’s ear: refugee is the most beautiful word in the english language. “handkerchief” ion corcos after abdurrahim buza’s the refugees he carries a red bag with all their belongings, holds his wife’s hand tight; coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 she walks with a stick, her grey hair hard like the barren land she has left. he wears no shoes, limps, his pants torn at the knees. they press against the wind, her white handkerchief flapping; their grandson looks behind. no lentil soup, no potatoes tonight. the gallery chose a gilded frame, but their night to greece is dark. the boy is too young to know where they are going, why they left their home, why his parents have been missing for three days after men came to their door. the road is long; they will not sleep. wolves howl on the mountain slopes. “azadî” otto de pele i know a man who painted wrote songs and poetry behind bars of hope it’s been nearly seven years (or more) of brush strokes and removed strings that time haunts most although i wouldn’t really know such things i’ve lived for 26 years in a foreign land ancestors in wedlock from bread and wine on a ship of crime to a massacred milestone of a society. his art hung in local galleries as an expression of ambition for freedom that some here could not even fathom to inhabit in patterns misused and confused in brief fragments of comfortable complacency. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 a cycle can last so long that its own reprieve attempts to belong although time is a story it doesn’t mean justice isn’t unnecessarily handled differently. there are other worlds we may wish for our very own self or words to describe – standing next to invisible chains. the pain of being moved to a new waiting room blue lights and black crows out hotel windows detention centres attention not mentioned couldn’t tell you anything politician. farhad sang: “stolen from me, years of life, how easily we break each other.” glossary: azadî means freedom in kurdish. farhad is the first name of an asylum seeker who has given me permission to mention him. “gentle dystopia” helen gearing widowed, we share a house riddled with unlabeled teas, pickled limes and a friendship that reads like a marriage palimpsest. over time our outlines seep, unheimlich heffalump our shared self-portrait. milne, you remind me, arrived late while you sampled english and offshore hospitality. now, you pretend your english is deteriorating and foist errands you don’t care for onto me. my farsi, meanwhile, has outgrown its sapling aspirations. when i dream, aspirated zhs and hzs form a staccato kaleidoscope of orange groves, fuchsia and a family garden pregnant with fruit ordained for export. i turn the dial, passing you cabbage leaves and lanolin. you laugh as i nurse your newborn – his surprise at my areola, pale and strange as fish lips. our voices pulp a score of prayers, filtered from the detritus of priestly egos. spiritual sisters, our tomes unfurl in cascading canons while we agree the coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 god of individuality is a fraud. at other times i bad-burn the tahdig, you neglect a tissue and we are hungry and ridiculous side by side in white-pimpled pyjamas. “finch” fadi jan i gather twigs and leaves and build over a street pole egress from the east side. now the sun burns off the crop-seeds sunflower and safflower are neglected from the country insects are no longer optional. i lay three pale eggs one spins off and sizzles against the asphalt street-path a black bird swings down and steals the eggshells grief runs like ash over a puddle of membrane. two blue eggs sit under a green-fade plumage and a crimson wrench-beak in the past plains, we cheep playfully his brown crown grey nape my lively tail. shells crack at sun-down two heads pop out bare, with little grey hairs on their bodies a fresh rosy wingspan bills wide open they cry (in gesture alone). hung up the street pole, nestlings rest between hay, grass and cotton scruff laughter stalks us from a distance an off-white blur glides over a kookaburra eye-striped, we are pushed out we take our pullus and drift back to the past plains repose in a rock patch between debris and dry grass. two finches learn to fly coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 66 dust storms coil over and through another white blur seeps through the flurry its shadow breaks evenly something falls from its tail grazes through a lone cloud a whistle trails its terrene draw amid the tender silence that ran before. “dove” fadi jan soft coos a formation of doves pierces the atmosphere wings cut through thick fog the sun braces behind them envelops the earth in a shadow chatter or turbulence or flutter the trailblazer flatters herself mid-way spreads her wings two-fold layers of feathers flap in the rage of wind a white dove bleeds through the masking-clouds exposed now, she is small and slender and delicate looking closer, her wings are lined white-lined wings on a grey-white dove suddenly the white clouds stain grey shadows multiply she is a mourning bird she is cooing the melody of a siren call her delicate wings are metal plates white lines are cannon drives she is the permanent silhouette in the grey-blue our people are the filtrate the masses that didn’t swallow in the dust storm coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 67 she swoops down for bone fragments and snail shells drinks from our water wells and lifts up again “sparrow” fadi jan it’s the middle of the night and my tree glows aflame, my nest blazes: dancing flames father has too little a reaction time i leap with wings i don’t know how to fly. my voice box became the black box of a plane that broke down in the middle of the ocean. chirrs turn-leaves and float away i leap and land onto another bird’s nest – sounds are familiar. i sit quietly, watching the inferno and my parents ’bodies – masticate and desecrate. silence is the sound of cries in our inside voices. now, waiting and wailing, black birds surrounding, squawking and yakking. they investigate. crank open my beak digging deeper; they search for the black box of a bird that fell from the atmosphere. i, am a broken plane my black box sank into the ocean; broke against a patch of rocks; turned into a gust-storm – ravens circle over the nest-trees; crows rip at me. i wake up in a cage of passerines and mute songbirds coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 68 “sovereign borderlands” rebecca sargeant hands tied recedes into recidivism of pounding waves fare-thee deep in an empty wishing-well being demands clean hands a sentence constructed in local lore language of love thy neighbour hoodwinked by repetition of the problem with the pounding press on pavement poured on massacre site unseen in the eye of the beholder of the legislative body bag of ill-fitting clothes numbered with a price to pay for running a way to protect our children from the terror of having to look into light-coloured eyes and see all the ayes in favour and all the i’s left to drown in the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea background and context ballina region for refugees ’vision is to welcome, respect, and support refugees and people seeking asylum. the group’s goal is to promote the acceptance and integration of refugees and people seeking asylum in australia by thinking globally and acting locally. ballina region for refugees is a community-based and volunteer-managed organisation in regional new south wales. it is dedicated to supporting and advocating for refugees and asylum seekers, and especially supporting settlement in the rural shire of ballina in northeastern new south wales. ballina region for refugees volunteers organise rallies, vigils, and talks to raise awareness. the group also fundraises to provide financial and https://br4r.org.au/ https://br4r.org.au/ https://br4r.org.au/ coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 69 material assistance for refugees and asylum seekers in on-shore and off-shore detention and in the community. ballina region for refugees has recently joined the nationwide community refugee sponsorship initiative. as one of over twenty regional refugee support groups nationwide, the group will support refugees to settle in regional australia. this support will include assisting with housing, employment, education, access to social services, and social integration. the ballina region for refugees poetry competition commenced in 2018, when br4r supporter christine ahern offered $1,000 for a poetry competition to broaden awareness about refugee issues. the first competition was launched during refugee week in 2019, with the broad theme of seeking asylum. br4r received tremendous support from dr emma doolan of southern cross university’s school of arts and social sciences. emma located judges for the competition (saba vasefi, manal younus, and ella jeffery), created the terms and conditions, and negotiated for the winning and shortlisted poems to be published in the academic journal social alternatives and the creative arts journal verity la. late in 2019, a long-time supporter of ballina region for refugees, louise griffith, passed away. her family and friends donated to br4r in lieu of flowers. this legacy has meant that the competition can continue for a number of years. the competition is run in memory of louise. for this year’s competition, prizes were awarded to first, second, and third place winners, and the judges were also asked to provide a shortlist as well as a list of highly commended poems from poets who identified as being from refugee or asylum seeker backgrounds. it is important that poets be allowed to self-identify as being from refugee or asylum-seeking backgrounds or to abstain from doing so; some may object to the labelling as part of the dehumanizing processes they have endured, and indeed some entrants refused or took a creative approach to answering this portion of the entry form. the three winning entrants shared in a prize pool worth aud $600, with the first prize winner also receiving a one-year subscription to the saturday paper, and their poems are published in this issue of coolabah, along with a number of highly commended entries from writers who self-identified as having refugee or asylum seeker backgrounds: jalal mahamede’s dear gardener and nothing is in place anymore (accompanied by original artworks by the author), kazem kazemi’s the monday so gloomy without you and freedom, and farhad bandesh’s work, also entitled freedom. also published here are highly commended poems by victoria king, kate cantrell, kim lateef, ion corcos, otto de pele, helen gearing, fadi jan, and rebecca sargeant. in addition to this publication in coolabah, the poems appear on the ballina region for refugee website and newsletter. it is highly appropriate that this work is published by coolabah. as the official journal of the australian and transnational studies centre at barcelona university, coolabah publishes original material about australia and its place in the world, with a focus on critical engagement with contemporary issues. there can be no more critical contemporary issue than the plight and fate of refugees and migrants globally. coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 70 acknowledgements for the 2020 competition, ballina region for refugees has again been supported by dr doolan and southern cross university, and two of the previous years’ judges – saba vasefi and ella jeffery – have returned, along with samah sabawi. the authors also acknowledge two anonymous reviewers of an early version of this article, and thank them for their valuable comments and suggestions. saba vasefi is multi-award-winning writer, journalist, academic, poet and documentary filmmaker. she researches her doctor of philosophy on exilic feminist cinema studies and teaches at macquarie university. she writes for the guardian on the rhetoric of displacement and reports on the narratives of refugees incarcerated in australia’s detention regime. her journalistic works have appeared on the bbc, sbs, buzzfeed, the age and sydney morning herald. saba was twice a judge for the prestigious sedigheh dolatabadi book prize for the best book on women’s literature and issues, as well as for the ballina region for refugees (br4r) seeking asylum poetry prize. the new south wales parliament house recognised saba’s success in directing the diaspora symposium—social justice award, and commended her ongoing contribution to women’s rights and social justice. saba’s poems have appeared in a variety of journals including wasafiri magazine of international contemporary writing in the uk, australian poetry journal, transnational literature, and anthology solid air: australian & new zealand spoken word. she has been awarded the nsw premier’s multicultural medal in art and culture; an honorary brave rising star award for her courageous writing on the gendered impacts of seeking asylum; the commonwealth scholarship, and the national council of women award for her academic research. ella jeffery is an award-winning poet. she is a recipient of the 2019 queensland premier’s young publishers and writers award and her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies including best australian poems, meanjin and griffith review. she co-edits stilts, a digital poetry journal, and holds a phd from queensland university of technology, where she currently teaches creative writing. dead bolt is her first book, and won the puncher & wattmann prize for a first book of poems in 2019. she lives in brisbane. samah sabawi is a palestinian multi-award-winning playwright, author and poet, who believes art can be a ‘beautiful resistance ’against injustice, racism and oppression. her plays include cries from the land (2003), three wishes (2008), tales of a city by the sea (2014) and them (2019). sabawi’s essays and op-eds have appeared in many international newspapers. she is a frequent guest and co-presenter on 774 abc melbourne’s jon faine’s conversation hour, where she has appeared alongside israeli writer ari shavit, bbc news new york and un correspondent nick bryant, actress miriam margolyes and others. sabawi is a policy advisor to the palestinian policy network al shabaka, and a member of the board of directors of the national council on canada-arab relations. she participated in various public forums on peace building, women in conflict areas, the palestinian right of return, as well as various presentations for interfaith groups. in 2016, novum publishing released i remember my name: poetry by samah sabawi, ramzy baroud and jehan bseiso. the anthology featured “deeply personal and deeply political expressions of three gifted palestinian poets in exile”. the book received the middle east monitor’s 2016 palestine book award. https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/ttrzc4qoz6fl1zkbsodhje?domain=protect-au.mimecast.com https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/231ic5qpr7f6gmnzfo9k1y?domain=buzzfeed.com https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/8iznc71rp9tzkz7atnv4ef?domain=protect-au.mimecast.com https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/8iznc71rp9tzkz7atnv4ef?domain=protect-au.mimecast.com coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 71 prof. bill boyd is a member of the emeritus faculty at southern cross university. his scholarly interests range widely across the geographical, social, cultural and education disciplines. he is a visiting professor of the australian and transnational studies centre at barcelona university. dr emma doolan lectures in the school of arts & social sciences at southern cross university. her research explores gothic representations of place, particularly in writing about australia’s hinterland regions. her practice-led doctoral thesis was completed at queensland university of technology in 2017. ruth henderson is the current president of ballina region for refugees. ruth has been a social worker for over forty years. endnotes i earley, s.m., & dejoy, n. (2020). image-ning the emotive power of the poetic word: multi-layered, multi-faceted images as pathways for understanding our singular and collective lives. international journal of the image, 11(3), 77-93. ii zarzosa, h.l. (2020). immigration detention through time. initiatives, 25 february 2020. rego, n., & gottardo, c. (2020). australia: australia’s border and its discontents.pp. 299338 in alberto ares mateos, s. j., mauricio garcía, durán, s. j., cecilia estrada villaseñor, & juan iglesias martínez (eds) (2020). migratory flows at the borders of our world, 299. editorial pontificia universidad javeriana: bogota. iii see for example, rivera, t. (2013). you have to be what you're talking about: youth poets, amateur counter-conduct, and parrhesiastic value in the amateur youth poetry slam. performance research, 18(2), 114-123, doi: 10.1080/13528165.2013.807175; this is an excellent account of the role of urban youth poetry and its emergence as a vibrant account of the potential of the amateur poet capture the essence of connection and feeling in contemporary social landscapes in ways that a professional poet may find irrelevant and inexpressible. iv boochani, b. (2018). no friend but the mountains: writing from manus prison. picador australia. v forché, c., & wu, d. (eds.). (2014). poetry of witness: the tradition in english, 15002001. ww norton & company. vi forché & wu, op cit., p.1. vii forché & wu, op cit., p.3. viii veprinska, a. (2020). empathy in contemporary poetry after crisis. springer international publishing. ix see, for example, the role of poetry in narrative therapy: freedman, j., & combs, g. (2020). narrative therapy, poetics and poetry: revisiting a workshop. international journal of narrative therapy & community work, 2020(2), 54-57. x moran, m. (2020). rummaging through the ashes: 9/11 american poetry and the transcultural counterwitness. european journal of american studies,15(2), 18pp. doi: 10.4000/ejas.16018 coolabah, nr 29, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 72 xi e.g kreller, c. (2020). bridging cultural divides with the power of poetry: an educator’s reflection. british journal of guidance & counselling, 48(1), 78-88. xii mahmoud darwish interview with nathalie handal, october 21st 2006, tribes, https://www.tribes.org/web/2006/10/22/mahmoud-darwish-palestines-poet-of-exile xiii behar, a. (2011). mahmoud darwish: poetry’s state of siege. journal of levantine studies, 1(1), 189-199. the quote is from page 189. xiv zarzosa (2020) and rego & gottardo (2020), op cit. xv e.g. camangian, p. (2008). untempered tongues: teaching performance poetry for social justice. english teaching: practice and critique, 7(2), 35-55. stovall, d. (2006). urban poetics: poetry, social justice and critical pedagogy in education. the urban review, 38(1), 63-80. sánchez, r.m. (2007). music and poetry as social justice texts in the secondary classroom. theory & research in social education, 35(4), 646-666, doi: 10.1080/00933104.2007.10473354 coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 57 effects of atmosphere in andrew mcgahan’s “the rich man’s house” marea mitchell boswithick@gmail.com copyright© 2023 marea mitchell. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: receiving an aurealis award for best horror novel in 2019, the rich man’s house tells the story of events that unfold within and around the mansion commissioned by walter richman on a mythical mountain in the southern ocean near tasmania, australia. the external atmosphere around richman’s house consists of elemental forces or “presences” that become increasingly sinister. these external elements and the architectural atmosphere of the house create disturbing uncertainties about how to interpret the events of the novel. collapsing traditional notions of background and foreground, mcgahan’s novel is susceptible to “an atmospheric reading” (chandler, 199) that includes but exceeds the fogs, clouds, mists and winds that are its partial constituents. keywords: andrew mcgahan, the rich man’s house, atmosphere, atmospheric readings beginnings and endings this is my last book. an author can’t always say that with certainty, but as i’m in the final stages of dying as i type this, it seems a safe bet. andrew mcgahan’s brief but clear articulation of his own imminent death provides a dramatic entry point to the world of the novel, where the character richman’s hubristic obsession with defeating death creates chaos and destruction. mcgahan’s final novel conjures internal, external, and psychological landscapes to create an atmosphere of horror and ecstasy, foreshadowed in these first and last autobiographical words. the reader’s introduction to the novel is also loaded with significance given that these are a dying man’s last published words. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 58 plot, author, context the central point of view of the novel comes from rita gausse, who is herself author of a book on “invisible non-human presences, non-human forms of consciousness, all around us in the landscape” (229). these presences are: inorganic. they are born only of stone, or of the atmosphere, or of water.…these forms of awareness do not exist in just any piece of stone…they are born only when something unusual happens within a landscape or environment. (229-30) rita is the daughter of a famous and controversial architect whose speciality is cutting into physical landscapes, such as cliffs and mountains, in what becomes known “as an ‘enfolded’ or ‘buried’ style of architecture” (82), embedding domestic structures deeply within, rather than on, the land. in less sympathetic terms, it could also be described as a masculinist, penetrative style. some critics call his works “an offense against nature” (36) and “abominations” (37). at her father’s funeral, rita gausse is invited to visit her father’s last project (commissioned by walter richman), a massive house built on observatory mount, theodolite island, “two thousand eight hundred metres above the sea, sheer sided and narrow as a finger…only a tenth the size of its awesome neighbour” (59). richman has a particular interest in this site as it stands next to and looks out on the massive 25 km mountain known as the wheel. the summit, which he is the only man ever to reach, culminates in a cave-like area called “the hand of god.” rita accepts the offer, and her book becomes increasingly relevant to the catastrophic events that occur when only richman, rita gausse and four other guests are left in residence. she is the only one to leave the house alive. the rich man’s house is mcgahan’s seventh novel (in addition to one play and four young adult novels) written between 1992 and 2019 when he died at the age of 52. all his novels have strong political or environmental themes, ranging in genre from “grunge” or “dirty realism” to science fiction. some have specifically australian contexts such as praise (1992) a semi-autobiographical story of youth in brisbane; 1988 (1998) set in the northern territory; last drinks (2000) set in the world of corruption and politics in the years of joh bjelke-petersen’s premiership of queensland (1968-1987); the white earth (2004) located in darling downs, queensland, exploring the tensions and issues around the australian high court decision in 1992 that indigenous people had existing customary rights and therefore native title rights to land (known as the mabo decision after leading activist edward (eddie) koiko mabo); and underground (2007) set in a near-future world of politics and terrorism, partly in canberra. two novels use place rather differently: wonders of a godless world’s (2009) main location is a hospital for people with mental illnesses, adjacent to a volcano that is intermittently active, with two key characters who can time and space travel, but otherwise is non-specific in terms of place. the rich man’s house occurs on a precisely detailed but nevertheless non-existent island in southern tasmania. while mcgahan’s novels are varied in style, they all rise to the call that prominent journalist and critic david marr made in 2003: “that writers start focusing on what is hapcoolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 59 pening in this country, looking australia in the face, not flinching.” they also prove exceptions to the rule addressed by kerryn goldsworthy in her 2006 review of underground, “why are so few people writing novels about the lives we are living right now, here in australia?” (goldsworthy). mcgahan’s novels are unashamedly political, unashamedly critical, unashamedly australian. they are inherently concerned, as stephanie green puts it, with “racial, spatial and cultural politics” (green, 84). his final novel most certainly addressed marr’s and goldworthy’s concerns about cultural and political relevance, as do other novels published in recent years, including heather rose’s bruny, also published in 2019. the rich man’s house and bruny have commonalities: both are set in or near tasmania, with accurate representational descriptions of place; both include fantastical elements (in bruny the construction of a bridge between tasmania’s mainland and the island of bruny); and both are overtly polemical in their critiques of capitalism, environmental degradation, and corrupt political systems. for my purposes here, however, what is significant about the rich man’s house is the process of delivering direct criticism of current exploitative human practices in ways that lead readers to question their own reactions and interpretations. this can be seen as an atmospheric reading practice, where a reader actively engages with the narrative materials. the rich man’s house foregrounds texts and textual interpretation in its proliferation of books and written sources. the novel not only evokes atmosphere, the novel creates it, replacing a detached subject/object reading experience, where a reader can fairly passively observe events described, with an immersion in the atmosphere of the novel that restricts the ability to remain unscathed, untouched, unimplicated. the novel can produce in the mind of a willing reader a connection between what is being criticised—anthropogenic climate change, human hubris, the betrayal of the land itself—and the rational and psychological means by which that damage occurs, so that the reader confronts their own imbrication in those processes. here an important caveat must be made. mcgahan’s novels received many nominations and awards, including the australian/vogel literary award for praise (1991), a ned kelly award for last drinks (2001), and the miles franklin award for the white earth (2005). they have also been enjoyed by many readers who admired the imaginative, speculative elements of mcgahan’s writing. however, it must also be said that his final novel disappointed many of his readers precisely because of the experimental aspects that i am here connecting to an atmospheric reading: while it's ably written throughout, there are far too many plot elements that require such drastic suspension of disbelief that getting absorbed proved impossible. (kate cornfoot, september 7th, 2019.) the supernatural trope was odd, and i wasn't convinced at all about it. (camila, september 1st, 2019.) the alternative history of prominent historical figures, that didn't really gel with me. if you like technical detail, want to learn about weather, climbing[,] go for it. (giovanni walker, may 1st, 2020.) (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51068309-the-rich-man-s-house https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51068309-the-rich-man-s-house https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51068309-the-rich-man-s-house coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 60 suspending disbelief, accepting what does not “gel,” exploring what is beyond the “natural,” a reader might come to confront their own complicities in the damages outlined by the novel. structuring the atmosphere i: externalities in the rich man’s house at just under six hundred pages, the rich man’s house consists of four books, two prologues and two epilogues. there are two main narrative strands. one details the “history” of the wheel in extracts from diverse fictional publications, the second relates events as they occur on observatory mount in richman’s house. prologue 1 contains an extract from the cloven sky by roger fitzgerald in which we learn that gerrit jansz, “dutch master-seaman and ocean-going explorer, born 1605” (1), sees what he first thinks is cloud: “‘i bethought it the top of a cloud,’ writes jansz, ‘which, ascending to a great height, was catching the unrisen sun.’” (5). but if it is a cloud then it is anomalous with jansz’ previous experience of cloud. but the more he looked, the less jansz thought the glowing red sliver to be a cloud. for one, there were no other clouds at all in the south. nor was it the shape of cloud form: neither the cauliflower cumulus of a storm, nor the diaphanous sheet of high-level cirrus. (5) seeing no other clouds at all in the area, he applies his navigational skills and observations to calculate that it sits at a height of twenty-five thousand metres. understanding this to be an impossible height for a mountain, and unprecedented even for a cloud, he reconsiders and decides that far from being a mountain what he is actually seeing must be “a cloud, and only a cloud” (7). jansz sees the mountain through what might now be understood as an “elevated cloudy ecosystem” (hayward, 2) but working with his own knowledge and experience misidentifies it. much later, in 1772, frenchman marion du fresne happens upon it and identifies it as in fact a mountain, which he calls the “red wall”, the name taken up in james cook’s journals. through a printer’s error “wall” is turned into “wheel”, and this is the name by which the mountain becomes known. these first twenty pages of the novel introduce some of the main themes and strategies that contribute to how atmosphere is used structurally in the novel. at its most straightforward this is a novel fundamentally concerned with atmosphere: atmosphere understood through climate and geography. the mountain at the heart of this story, initially misunderstood as cloud, is described in great physical detail as experienced by its first explorers: naked rock was all that greeted the four men, the stony surfaces without lustre or sheen. nor was there any glint of ice, for even the trace moisture that had been contained in the rocks themselves, millennia ago, as they lifted inch by inch into the sky, had long since been sublimated away into the parched air. (11-12) …the wheel dwarfs all normal mountains. at twenty-five thousand metres, it rears clean through the troposphere and penetrates fully thirteen kilometres into the stratosphere, a part of the atmosphere that is entirely alien to the realm in which humanity exists. (257) these details occur in the supposedly factual accounts of attempts to scale the mountain and the difficulties inherent in this process. these passages emphasise the size and magnitude of the mountain, with emphasis on the hard work humans undertook to climb it— coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 61 many dying in the attempt. the physical atmosphere of the mountain is awesome, and its ominous presence dominates these sections of the novel. yet its physical appearance is only part of its power. as the ship carrying rita gausse approaches the mountain for the first time, the mountain remains tantalisingly invisible. the clouds remained all day, only to blow away frustratingly at nightfall, and then by the next day, infuriatingly, fog had come instead, followed by rain….the mountain loomed immediately above them now, and should have been a spectacular sight, climbing away to the stratosphere—but, other than its dreary lower ramparts, the wheel remained as invisible as ever in the clouds. and so it stayed for the next day as well, the rain and the fog and the cold equally miserable and unending… (57) as this description demonstrates, for all its implausibility, the wheel is knowable because of its shared characteristics with known other mountains, and part of the atmospheric effect of the novel relies on knowledge commonly available to a reader. the detailed descriptions of the weather of and around the mountain create a vivid picture. furthermore, these intense accounts of clouds, fog and rain that recur throughout the novel, recognisable as accurate manifestations of high-altitude atmospheres, also create a mood or feeling about the mountain that can be thought of as atmospheric in a different but also familiar, even uncanny, sense. the implausible has its roots in the plausible. mcgahan here complicates the familiar and longstanding conception of the relationship between people and land understood in terms of an subject/object dynamic. in the nineteenth century, john ruskin, in modern painters (1843-1860), excoriated what he saw as the tendency by his contemporaries to attribute feelings or emotions to non-sentient objects. it was in his eyes an abhorrent tendency in “that it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us” (chapter xii, of the pathetic fallacy). so, a character’s happiness is reflected in the sunny, cloudless blue sky; the opposite in cloudy, rainy weather. for ruskin this was a form of anthropomorphism that was lazy and androcentric. nevertheless, the habit of using the weather or geographical landscape primarily in terms of their impact on human beings has a long and ongoing history, and elements of it can be seen in the description above. rita gausse’s eagerness to see the mountain is met with a denial that seems deliberately obstructive. her experiences of the clouds and rain coming and going “frustratingly” and “infuriatingly” do indeed conceive of the mountain specifically in terms of its meaning to gausse. however, what emerges from this account also suggests an alternative interpretation that breaks down the subject/object polarity that is at the heart of ruskin’s scathing attack on his contemporaries. on the face of it, gausse’s experience seems entirely subjective; the clouds and fog that linger around the mountain in daylight when it might be seen, and disappear at night when it cannot be seen, are experienced through her frustration and desire to see it. however, this also suggests a deliberation and intent on the part of the mountain and its attendant atmosphere that troubles the androcentric binary of the superiority of human over non-human. and, in fact, this is a perspective that gausse explored in her book, in which she outlined the way that certain spaces and places have “presences”: presences have nothing—nothing—to do with the notion of gaia, or with any sense of life force or mother nature, or with environmentalism. remember, they are non-organic. they do not rely on the system of photosynthesis; they coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 62 do not care about global warming, or about preserving forests, or about saving the whales. the scurrying life of plants and animals is of no consequence to a consciousness that is born of motionless stone, or of shifting air masses, or of the upthrust of an ocean wave. (233) gausse’s desire to see the mountain is thwarted by factors over which she has no control. little by little, detail by detail, the wilfulness of the mountain emerges, challenging the attributions to it by humans. in this context, architect richard gausse’s project is a difficult one: “how do you humanise a space so cold, and so windy?” (115) rita gausse asks. the second phase of human effort to “conquer” the mountain and its environment, and to render the non-human habitable, lies in the architecture of the rich man’s/richman’s house itself. structuring the atmosphere ii: the internal architecture of the rich man’s house snežana milosavljević milić describes a traditional understanding of “atmosphere as the qualitative characteristics of a situation or the mood caused by a situation,” (milic, 32), and sees the “experience of reading as the perception of atmospheres” (37). the reader’s perceptions of richman’s house are channelled, at least initially, through rita gausse, and her first impressions consider the extensive work that has gone into creating this building in the most inhospitable location. the snugness of the setting—the soft couches, the whisky, the fire—was heightened by the fact that outside the wind had been rising all evening and was now moaning audibly about the observatory. whenever rita looked up to the windows of the atrium dome, she could see wraiths of icy fog racing across the terrace above. occasionally a deeper thrum would signify an even stronger gust, and the very stone foundations of the mount seemed almost to tremble underfoot. (136) airlocks separate the inside from the outside, and each has a control panel that indicates temperature, average and maximum windspeeds, and whether the external conditions are safe. if conditions become too severe, clara lang, mountaineer turned major-domo to richman, explains: “the doors automatically lock at that point anyway and will only open with a manual override” (93). part of the extravagance of the building lies in the effacement of its production. of the “nearly seven kilometres of passageways and service tunnels” tracking through the building “only a third…were ever meant to be seen by guests” (119), and this effacement includes the workers who make the building tick. when rita encounters a cleaning woman lost in the service corridors, the woman is immediately sacked for being seen. the building may be “pushing the technology to its limits” (79), as clara has said earlier, but the philosophy of its running in terms of human labour is punitive. while the description of the house is extensive, and much is made of the effort and cost used in its construction, three elements can be said to symbolise the ambiguity of the project that is this rich man’s house. the first is a staircase ominous in its first apprehension by rita gausse: coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 63 it appeared at first—as rita moved to the balustrade to see better—as if the structure was some mad kind of m. c. escher illustration brought to life. circular flights of stairs curled impossibly around other circles of stairs in a puzzle without end, the twined serpents forming a great column of stone that plummeted away into dimness (90). while rita thinks of escher’s image (see above), clara points out that the inspiration for the staircase is of a much older origin: the staircase in le chateau de chambord, designed by leonardo de vinci in 1516. clara, who is conducting the tour of richman’s house, explains: “this is the double helix staircase. it’s two spiral staircases entwined in each other: whichever flight you take, it never meets the other one, though they both get you to the same place” (90). rita’s response sets the tone for one of the key atmospheric effects of both the inside and outside of the novel’s setting—vertigo. placed high on a mountain overshadowed by another much bigger mountain, everything about the geographical location of the house and its internal architecture is on edge. the scale, complexity, cost, and implausibilities of the house threaten to overwhelm both gausse and the reader, as they lurch from one impossible extravagance to another. a second key image that haunts the novel is “the triumph of death,” by pieter breughel the elder (1525-1569), which is the centrepiece of richman’s collection of paintings and sculptures in the foyer. gausse sees this painting and other works by rembrandt, picasso and raphael as “an orgy of death” (201), and kennedy, the security officer, points out the four wheel shapes figure 1 château de chambord double helix staircase (design attributed to leonardo da vinci) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:escalier_chambord.jpg coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 64 mounted on tall poles at the top right of the painting, explaining that they are medieval instruments of torture known as “breaking wheels” (203). seeing them as “some kind of metaphor for the wheel the mountain,” (203) gausse expresses surprise that richman’s association with the mountain is so morbid, to which kennedy replies: ‘you don’t understand. the breaking wheel means pain and defeat for its victims, just as the wheel the mountain has meant pain and defeat for all those who’ve attempted to climb it. except for one man, that is. except for richman. he’s the only one who has ever stood atop the wheel, the only one who has beaten the world’s greatest mountain. and to beat the wheel is to beat the breaking wheel.’ (204) this dense and populated picture replete with images of torture and death symbolises richman’s fantasy of overcoming death, in the same way that he thinks he has overcome the wheel. his devious and malicious actions to make sure he is the only one to stand at the top of the mountain, are compounded by his actions when he gets there. the horror of richman’s callous disregard for the environment reaches its apotheosis in his final revelation to gausse. trapped in his own house, in a manic delusional state, he believes he will be rescued by helicopter, and speaks to her as she makes her descent on the emergency stairs, intending to tell his rescuers that she is already dead. with this in mind he tells her what no one else knows: “ ‘i took a piss in the hand of god. did you know that, rita? i pissed on it.…as long as the wheel itself stands, my piss will be on its summit. is there a better way to say how much i fucking own that mountain?’” (567-8) for kennedy, however, richman’s interpretation of the painting reveals that “richman might have missed the point completely” (207). while kennedy does not go on to explain what it is that richman has missed, one clear implication is that no one can in the end figure 2 the triumph of death by pieter bruegel the elder. 1562. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:the_triumph_of_death_by_pieter_bruegel_the_elder.jpg coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 65 defeat death. richman’s faulty appreciation of the picture, encumbered by his outrageous self-importance, flag to the reader the likely nature of his own end. a third key image that contributes to the vertiginous effect of the highly detailed descriptions of the house occurs before the two images just described, but its significance and terror only emerge later in the novel. this is the emergency staircase by which rita eventually escapes the rich man’s house. clara’s guided tour of the house works its way up from the entry level at three hundred metres where she and rita enter the building on a buggy that takes them into the mountain before they ascend. the lift shaft runs upwards for two thousand five hundred metres. at this point in the novel the description of the “emergency staircase” is brief, except for clara’s ominous remark “best hope you never have to use it though; the flights are steep, and there are thousands upon thousands of them. i’m told it’s the longest internal staircase in the world” (77). much later, when an avalanche has destroyed part of a face of the wheel and a tsunami has wiped out all services at the base of observatory mount, when all technical help is gone and only six people are left in richman’s house, the emergency staircase becomes their only hope of escape. gausse’s glance into the shaft sums up the intensifying horror of the situation. the stairs were not really stairs, she had been told. and it was true. what she beheld was a series of ladders, narrow, bare and steeply angled, that switched back and forth as they descended within the scaffold tower, joined each to each by only the tiniest of landings made of naked squares of metal grating. there was nothing solid to any of it, no proper railings, no floors that weren’t merely screens. and around this matchstick structure opened the immense emptiness of the shaft, falling and falling in vanishing perspective to its invisible base, two and a half thousand metres below in the darkness….none of that was the worst….rita was battling with nausea, so revolting was the sight. about fifty metres below, just where the gloom of the shaft began to dim details into a blur, one entire flight of stairs had come loose from its lower landing, and was now hanging about forty degrees askew, its last step dangling over the gulf. and even further down, at the limit of visibility, a second flight of stairs had come similarly free. (367-8) when there seems no other option but to seek help from the base, the much lauded security of the building becomes the main problem. the difficulty of clara’s attempt to descend the damaged stairs is evident, despite her mountaineering experience, and this is compounded by what happens on her descent. each section of the staircase is numbered, and clara’s passage directly downwards ceases. now she appears to be climbing up and down in a frenzied replication and macabre revisiting of the illusion of the double helix staircase. ‘the numbers again? i told you—' ‘please clara. it’s important.’ ‘well, it’s es27. but…’ rita bowed her head: that confirmed it, the panel before had been es26. the major-domo was climbing upwards now, not down. worse, she was nowhere near the bottom, she was merely circling about at the halfway mark. (435) coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 66 clara’s mental disorientation continues. the experienced climber repeatedly climbs up and down the same set of stairs while believing that she is progressing to the bottom. tortured by the illusion that she is being tricked and pursued, she takes off her clothes and jumps off the staircase into the shaft. at the end, gausse is left alone, all her companions having died in horrifying circumstances. each death involves the active compliance of the victim. the architecture of the house directly contributes to the disorienting effect of events and narrative, replicating in the reader a vertiginous sense of displacement. affective resonance in the rich man’s house the rich man’s house provides a good example of milić’s point that the perception of atmosphere “cannot be defined as a purely cognitive construct” (37), but lies in the “space, description, the sensory experience of the character, and the affective resonance of the reader” (37). the novel uses both external dynamics of atmosphere (the wind, rain, fog) and the internal architecture of space within the house (the dizzying staircases, the size and labyrinthine structure of the house) to “conjure atmospheres” (chandler 194: my emphasis). “[a]n atmospheric reading” (chandler, 199) also involves “considering “the physical spaces and cultural contexts in which they are encountered” (hodges, v). the ultimate horror of reading the rich man’s house arises not from the setting, although the extreme weather conditions of the mountain are worrying enough, nor from the human actions depicted in the story, some of which are certainly malicious, but is “a production precisely of the narrative” (chandler, 199). the connections between setting (traditionally background) and events (traditionally foreground), create the affective resonance in the mind of the reader, and herein lies the impact and wider significance of this novel. at this point, it is worth noting again, that this involves a willingness to engage on the part of the reader, and this is an engagement that not all readers are inclined to make. how might this affective resonance be described? part of the impact lies in the interweaving of the plot, the events as witnessed and understood by rita gausse, with the “elaborate imaginative history” (bradley) of the novel’s main location. one key effect of this interweaving is that the reader constantly feels like gausse standing at the top of the 2.5 km staircase looking down into the abyss. the abyss the reader confronts is the inability to differentiate consistently between what is real and what is fictional, and to inhabit a comfortable and certain zone of interpretation. mcgahan’s brief preface establishes his role as a reliable authority that is almost immediately undercut by the play between fact and fiction through which the novel is structured. the two prologues and two epilogues play key roles here. prologue 1 purports to be an extract from the introduction to the cloven sky, a history of exploration of the australian continent, detailing the failure by early explorers to “discover” the mountain that is at the core of the book’s story. yet from the outset there is a strong sense of ambiguity surrounding the mountain, as we have seen. what is it? is it a cloud, is it a mountain? furthermore, while readers may recognise the names jansz, du fresne and, most likely, james cook, as they are all real men drawn from history, and in particular the history of colonial “discovery” and subsequent exploitation of australia and new zealand, the published “authorities” quoted in the prologues are fictional. the events coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 67 described in the prologue did not occur. there is no mountain as described. yet, as james bradley puts it: “despite the wheel’s improbability (or perhaps impossibility), mcgahan goes to considerable lengths to make it feel plausible.” george mallory and edmund hillary are two examples of real figures named in the book whose histories are distorted. in the middle of the novel they are recuperated as a part of the history of the wheel. here they both died on the wheel, demonstrating partly the superiority of richman as a mountaineer, and partly technological advances since the twentieth century. in fact, mallory died on everest, the wheel’s constant shadow, in 1924, and hillary died in 2008 in new zealand, having been, amongst other things, ambassador to nepal from 1985-88. prologue 2 describes the first and only time that the summit of the wheel is reached, and the description is dense with details of how that is achieved. the extract from “reaching for the hand of god by john soliola, 2007” (8) describes how on november 14 1974, the team led by walter richman approached the climb. studded with details and technical accounts of climbing suits, huts and equipment built specifically for “haev, a high altitude environment” (9), this section of the novel constructs a carefully precise account of the climb. the “painstaking checking of equipment” (9), the “hft11 (high terrain function) suits” (10), the technical details “thin air, for instance, even at only five per cent of the atmosphere at sea level, is better than no air at all” (10) are all scientifically laid out. the reader is drawn into the sense that this could all have happened. time after time, known experiences are detailed with the express effect of making the unknown sound plausible: to those who have not been there, the higher altitudes of the stratosphere, free of winds and weather and ice, may sound like an easier place to climb, compared to the lower, windier, snow-bound regions of normal mountains, especially with an htf suit to keep one warm, and to provide air. but those who have done it know differently. (15) furthermore, there is always, lurking in the shadows of the wheel, a literal benchmark against which it is measured: “far away in the himalayas, the world’s second highest mountain, everest, long ago defeated, was less than half that height” (12). the known existence of everest is used to assert the possibility of the wheel, while simultaneously proving its impossibility. the ongoing and insistent assertion that the wheel is higher than everest effectively reminds us of the wheel’s non-existence. this disorienting sense of uncertainty as to what is true and what is made up is profound, as one reader commented: “the genius of this story was the compelling and realistic world-building. so many times throughout i started to google the wheel, wanting to examine the particular part of the mountain that he is describing” (kylie westaway, september 13 2019, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51068309). the affective resonance of the rich man’s house is complex. in part, the novel can be read as a simple morality tale, as one understanding of its title implies. in biblical terms, the phrase “the rich man” probably best recalls the story in the book of luke about the rich man and lazarus, where the rich man, shocked to see lazarus’s preferential treatment in the bosom of abraham, is reminded: “son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivdst thy good things, and likewise lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented” (luke, 16:25). there are consequences of the rich man’s actions that exceed his understanding. as kennedy indicated earlier in the novel, walter richman https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51068309 coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 68 fails to understand his own hubristic actions, and his end is presaged by his behaviour in scaling the mountain. in 2021 in the second epilogue, the reader learns that richman’s corpse is finally found in the hand of god, naked and battered. it was as if the man had blundered from place to place under the overhang, grazing up against the brutal cold of the stone, his skin freezing on contact, so that he had to tear it away to be free (593). richman quite literally has his nose rubbed in the result of his previous actions of pissing all over the cave. there is poetic justice in richman’s death. here the reader might experience a type of schadenfreude. the enlightened reader, in anticipating the punishment of richman, and symbolically therefore all rich men, can bask in the knowledge that they would not make the same mistakes and need not expect the same punishment. yet in so far as “the sensory experience of the character” constitutes part of the “affective resonance of the reader” (milić, 37) rita gausse’s role in the novel adds a level of ambiguity that is not easily ignored. the content of her book is gradually revealed to the reader, outlining her understanding of “presences” in the environment, and her attempts to placate a presence through “lustrations” or blood sacrifices, as “payment for its suffering” (399). in the past she has been successful in calming a presence by self-cutting, but her attempt to appease the wheel in this way is summarily dismissed. in a kind of mindmelding moment, the consciousness of the wheel takes over gausse in an experience “beautiful beyond bearing” (532). the wheel had held her, effortless in its supreme strength, examining her in the fullness of its loathing, and then, instead of destroying her, it had tossed her aside. (533) gausse is irrelevant to the wheel, intent on the pursuit of its only objective, walter richman. gausse’s lustrations are examples of a different kind of human hubris, however sympathetically intended, in seeking to treat the non-human world as an object to be controlled. the sonorousness and self-importance of the word “lustrations'' gives this away. furthermore, there is a sense that gausse’s role as focaliser of the novel is flawed or at least highly naïve or neglectful. her knowledge of “presences'' does not lead to a sophisticated understanding of the events going on around her. furthermore, while she, unlike clara, does miraculously escape down the emergency staircase, she does not go on to tell the tale of what actually happened. she does not “tell truth to power” as she so easily might have done. why is she silent? “is it merely because, as ms gausse claims, she has no desire to relive what was undeniably a stressful experience?….or is it because, as has been increasingly rumoured, the richman family has pressured her to remain silent?” (589) after her death in 2049, it is reported in the final epilogue, “a printed manuscript was found with her belongings, which, among other autobiographical matters, detailed richman’s demise” (595). yet the manuscript goes missing: richman’s relatives, “owners still of vast commercial enterprises, went to some lengths and expense to purchase ms gausse’s estate, including all writings and documents” (595). gausse’s role in covering up the events, particularly richman’s confession, and his complicity in the deaths of others, remains questionable. the fate of the wheel also troubles reading of the novel as a morality tale where evil doers get their just desserts. one of rita’s findings is that if a presence lashes out at human intrusion and seeks revenge, that act brings about the death of the presence itself. “the entity that had been so angry and vengeful over the intrusion of humanity into this coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 69 previously untouched place, had, after its last display of fury, bowed to the inevitable, and died” (389). and so it is with the wheel. while the wheel itself is physically little impaired by the storms and weather that contribute to the human deaths, the power that characterised it when we first see it has gone. one commentator says: “i have never seen the mountain look friendlier…it’s a hard thing to explain to non-climbers, but all peaks have moods, and to me, even after all that’s happened, the wheel is looking like a happy mountain” (587). the wheel might be calmed after its mighty act of revenge on its abuser. however, having wreaked revenge, the wheel no longer seems to have the presence that made it a thing not governable by, not explicable to, human beings, and not measurable in human terms. there is a triteness in its reduction to the simplistic human perception of it as “happy.” the final voice of the final epilogue is speculative. “a fantasy? a ghost story? of course it is, most would say” (594). the rich man’s house is ultimately a conundrum. its uncertainties are overdetermined in the sense that some of its contradictions could come from mcgahan running out of time to complete it. the novel escapes authorial control in this very specific way. however, some of the uncertainties that make the novel so intriguing lie in the construction or conjuring of its external and internal atmospheres, the way they are apprehended through gausse, the reader’s increasing caution about her, and the richly elaborated fictional histories the novel supplies. yet it is also susceptible of a more troublesome moral reading that re-aligns the reader with gausse through acts of affective resonance. given that the damage that has been done by treating the planet predominantly in terms of human needs is already understood, why, like gausse, do humans continue to act as if we did not know? the rich man’s house makes for sober reading, an uneasy but salutary reminder that in understanding the world as an object for our subjective pleasures, in the end, humans reap what we sow. atmospheric readings— by dissolving barriers between self and other, subject and object, background and foreground—promote further questioning about these pressing global concerns. references anderson, b. (2009). “affective atmospheres,” emotion, space and society 2:77-81. https://www.academia.edu/14267077/affective_atmospheres accessed 26 may 2022. bradley, j. (2019). “the rich man’s house by andrew mcgahan,” september https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/417-september2019-no-414/5782-james-bradley-reviews-the-rich-man-s-house-by-andrew-mcgahan. chandler, t. (2012). “locus amoenus: pastoral atmosphere of virgil’s eclogues, colloquy 23, 185-207. dolin, k. (2014). “place and property in post-mabo fiction by dorothy hewett, alex miller and andrew mcgahan,” jasal: journal of the association for the study of australian literature, vol 14.3, 1-12. goldsworthy, k. (2006). “underground by andrew mcgahan,” abr october, no 285 https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2006/273-october-2006no-285/6716-kerryn-goldsworthy-reviews-underground-by-andrew-mcgahan https://www.academia.edu/14267077/affective_atmospheres%252520accessed%25252026%252520may%2525202022 https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/417-september-2019-no-414/5782-james-bradley-reviews-the-rich-man-s-house-by-andrew-mcgahan https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/417-september-2019-no-414/5782-james-bradley-reviews-the-rich-man-s-house-by-andrew-mcgahan https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2006/273-october-2006-no-285/6716-kerryn-goldsworthy-reviews-underground-by-andrew-mcgahan https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2006/273-october-2006-no-285/6716-kerryn-goldsworthy-reviews-underground-by-andrew-mcgahan coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 70 green, s. ( 2016). “the condition of recognition: gothic intimations in andrew mcgahan’s the white earth,” queensland review, 84-94 https://doi.org/10.1017/gre.2016.9. hayward, p. (2022). “apex liminality: comprehending lord howe island’s cloud forest and related island ecosystems,” anthropocenes – human, inhuman, posthuman, 3(1): 5. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.1217 hodges, b. k. (2021). “atmospheric visions: mirages, methane sweeps and ‘clam-monsters’ in the yellow sea,” shima, 16 (1), 115-136. 10.21463/shima.132 accessed may 15 2022. mcgahan, a. (2019). the rich man’s house. allen and unwin. mclary, r. (2019). “the rich man’s house by andrew mcgahan,” queensland reviewers collective https://www.queenslandreviewerscollective.com/2019/09/14/the-richmans-house-by-andrew-mcgahan/ accessed may 26 2020. milić, s.m. (2020). “notions of atmosphere: toward the limits of narrative understanding,” primerjalna književnost (ljubljana) 43.1 31-49. ruskin, j. (1843-1960). “of the pathetic fallacy,” in modern painters https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38923/38923-h/38923-h.htm#chapter_xii accessed 13 may 2022. sloan, a. (2020). “man and nature collide in andrew mcgahan’s final work, the rich man’s house,” may 14 https://thesloanranger.org/2020/05/14/review-rich-mans-house/ accessed may 26 2020. my thanks, as always, to robert mackie in memory of australian literary scholar, brian matthews (1936-2022) before taking early retirement, marea mitchell was a professor of english literature at macquarie university. https://doi.org/10.1017/gre.2016.9 https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.1217 https://www.queenslandreviewerscollective.com/2019/09/14/the-rich-mans-house-by-andrew-mcgahan/ https://www.queenslandreviewerscollective.com/2019/09/14/the-rich-mans-house-by-andrew-mcgahan/ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38923/38923-h/38923-h.htm%2523chapter_xii https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38923/38923-h/38923-h.htm%2523chapter_xii https://thesloanranger.org/2020/05/14/review-rich-mans-house/ microsoft word 01_poetry co-translation and an attentive cosmopolitanism-atherton_hetherington_kikuchi.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 poetry co-translation and an attentive cosmopolitanism: internationalising contemporary japanese poetry cassandra atherton deakin university cassandra.atherton@deakin.edu.au paul hetherington university of canberra paul.hetherington@canberra.edu.au rina kikuchi shiga university kikuchi@biwako.shiga-u.ac.jp copyright©2021 cassandra atherton, paul hetherington and rina kikuchi. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the majority of japanese poetry currently reaches a limited readership outside of japan. as a result, many contemporary japanese poets are searching for ways to have their poems translated into english and published in english-language journals. achieving satisfactory translation results, however, is considerably more complicated than switching words from one language into another and scholarship on the subject of translating japanese poetry is often vexed. this scholarship frequently traverses much of the same ground as the debate about japanese prose translation where, depending on their approach, translators may be labelled ‘literalists’ or ‘libertines’. this paper argues that co-translating japanese poetry may be as much about sharing ideas and ideologies as about lineation, cadence or word choice. co-translating japanese poetry has the power to build cross-cultural understandings and to explore and promote ways of understanding japanese identity. we argue that while translation is often undertaken by the translators in their country of residence, the experience of genius loci and undertaking co-translation in situ may best accommodate such a cross-cultural synergy. this paper draws on our collective experiences in a series of translation workshops at meiji university. these were organised by rina kikuchi, a literary scholar and translator from japan. among other australian poets and scholars, paul hetherington and cassandra atherton were paired with japanese poets for co-translation purposes. they co-translated japanese poetry into english and had their own poems translated into japanese with the assistance of kikuchi who acted as the lynchpin for the workshops. the experience was celebrated in a series of poetry readings in tokyo and nara. significantly, although neither hetherington nor atherton is fluent in japanese, they found the process of co-translation to include what one may call an attentive cosmopolitanism, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 incorporating respect and understanding for different cultural assumptions and poetic ideas. keywords: poetry co-translation, japanese poetry, cross-cultural lost in translation in the spirit of the original meaning of the word, translation may open up new ways of thinking and seeing, and a carrying across of fresh perceptions. juliane house, for example, argues ‘translation can provide access to new ideas and new experiences that stem from a different language community, opening horizons that would otherwise remain unknown behind the barrier of another language’ (2018, p. 9). from this perspective, translation may be as much about sharing aspects of history, philosophy and culture as about translating words and, in this light, translators may be understood to be cultural teleporters or tour guides. indeed, american poet and translator, charles simic, identifies translators as ‘the first multiculturalists’ (qtd in kelly & zetzsche, 2012, p. 106). he views the translator’s role as builder and supporter of cross-cultural understandings by extending the readership of translated works. house contends that translators are mediators ‘between different languages, cultures and societies’ (2018, p. 9), a point that is even truer today than it was only a few decades ago because, for the purposes of basic (as opposed to cross-cultural) understanding, online translation services have become readily available and relatively sophisticated. as a result, the role of human translators, whether they are dealing with conversation or fiction, has increasingly shifted towards allowing the translation of accurate, nuanced and appropriately contextualised meaning from one language to another (anyone who has used google translate knows that machine-translation often produces gaucheries and inaccuracies). and where the translation of poetry is concerned, there are further intricacies involved, including issues relating to literary tone, craft and technique. an early supporter of machine-translation, norbert wiener conceded, ‘no reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. [the nineteenth-century russian poet] pushkin need not shudder’ (qtd in hofstadter, 2018, n.p.). poetry translation has unsettled many scholars and poets, because they view the process as a kind of unachievable alchemy – partly because poetry depends so much on a particular disposition of words in a particular language. poetry activates various verbal associations inherent in a language to achieve complex and often unparaphraseable meanings. thus, one prevalent view is that if poetry is not even able to be successfully paraphrased in its original language, then it is very unlikely to be successfully translated into another. this view is evident from the frequent repetition of quotations that flag the impossibility of the task, including roman jakobson’s argument that poetry by definition is untranslatable and ‘only creative transposition is possible’ (2000, p. 118). robert frost’s well-known assertion, often rendered as ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’, makes a similar point, especially when seen in context: ‘i like to say, guardedly, that i could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation’ (1961, p. 7). coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 despite the prevalence of views about the difficulty of translating poetry, daniel weissbort argues translators of poetry ‘clearly think it worth attempting, even if crises of faith are quite frequent’ (1989, p. xii). for the remainder of this paper, we take up the question of why poetry translation is worth attempting, focusing on some of what may be gained in translation. we argue that cross-cultural collaboration and an appreciation for poetry’s ineffability may thrive in many of the more difficult moments of poetry translation. sandy farquhar and peter fitzsimons even suggest that what is ‘lost’ in translation is part of what allows the process of translation its profusion, diversity and openness: the phrase ‘lost in translation’ brings together both openness to new ideas and a willingness to embrace multiplicity … the idea of being ‘lost’ [is] a commitment to engaging in a journey, to finding new meanings and trajectories, and to embracing destinations that are tentative and negotiable … translation is a commitment to openness and continuous reinterpretation, enhancing possibilities in our ethical endeavour as educators. (2012, p. 101) when co-translating japanese poetry into english, frost’s statement about what gets ‘lost in translation’ is now, at least in popular culture, irrevocably connected to sofia coppola’s 2003 film of that name. described as ‘elegiac’, ‘poetic’, even ‘uncanny’, this film is partly about what is discovered (as well as what is lost) when culturally dislocated people make various connections and ‘translations’ (rich 2003, n.p.). in a retrospective review of the film, mairead small staid argues, ‘lost in translation isn’t a portrait of a place nor even of people, but of the shimmering space around and between them, a diptych that grows singular as it goes’ (2018, n.p.). rich’s and staid’s discussions of the film can be repurposed as metaphors for the practice of poetry translation, especially its dependency on connections and ephemeral, creative and ‘shimmering’ spaces. translation: issues and debates writer and translator, andre gide believed that ‘a serious writer owes his own language at least one good translation of good written work in another’ (davis 2007, p. 18). however, because relatively little japanese poetry is translated into english, part of the decision to undertake translation from the japanese into english may include the prospect of extending the readership of japanese poets into the anglophone world. when invited to participate in a series of translation workshops organised by rina kikuchi at meiji university, both atherton and hetherington were interested in how such an international partnership may extend readership opportunities for all participants. they also saw the workshops as an opportunity to develop their interest in translation as an empathic process, where the translator is able to enter the imaginative world of the original poet. this dimension of translation is not always discussed by scholars, but russian poet anna akhmatova argues, ‘for a poet, translating is like devouring one’s own brains’ (qtd in hanne 2006, p. 216). indeed, if the representation of poetry translation as an especially problematic process is not uncommon – as we have mentioned – such views often centre on the difficulty of translating the elements of prosody from one language into another and across cultures, and the associated difficulty of registering poetry’s many, often ambiguous layers in a new language. in other words, although denotative meanings in a coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 language are often able to be successfully translated (for instance, a shopping list may not necessarily pose a major translation challenge), the connotative meanings of poetry are frequently elusive. these meanings are largely derived from the interplay of various specific words and other linguistic features in poems, along with the effects of cadence and numerous implicit cultural assumptions and understandings – and as recreated by a translator they can never be congruent with the meanings and effects in the original work. while various scholars such as jakobsen and andré lefevere, and poets including robert bly, have outlined a number of steps or stages in the translation process, broadly speaking there are two historical approaches to translation which are frequently understood to be in opposition to one another – although the distinction between these approaches is not always as clear-cut as one might assume. wei lu and hong fang call these approaches ‘literal’ and ‘free’: such debates have quite a long history both in the west and in china. in the west, the distinction between ‘word-for-word’ (i.e. ‘literal’) and ‘sense-for-sense’ (i.e. ‘free’) translation goes back to cicero (first century b.c.) and st jerome (fourth century a.d.). (2012, p. 742) a famous and controversial example of relatively ‘free’ translation is ezra pound’s cathay poems. pound didn’t speak chinese and his reading of chinese poetry was, as michael alexander states, filtered through ‘the posthumous notes of an american [ernest fenollosa] learning from a japanese’ (1981, p. 97). pound used these notes to make his own english-language versions. some european and chinese critics admire his cathay poems, while others repudiate their errors. wai-lim yip writes that ‘to take cathay for a group of excellent english poems based upon some chinese text rather than for translations as such has become the attitude of most pound critics’ (1969, p. 4). importantly, even so-called ‘literal’ translation usually goes beyond word-for-word translation, especially in languages that do not have definite and/or indefinite articles. in the translation of japanese poetry into english, for instance, there are particular difficulties. alison kirby record and adnan k. abdulla comment on: the absence of articles, a lack of singular and plural markers, the use of special particles that mark case relations, and major differences in word order. with regard to the syntactical position of the headword of any grammatical phrase, english is a ‘headfirst’ language, while japanese is ‘head-last’; in japanese, objects come before and not after the verb. (2016, p. 172) harold wright extends this argument by outlining these two historical models in the context of japanese prose: a number of years ago several of our japanese-related journals carried an ongoing debate on the art or techniques of translating the prose literature of japan. some of these manifestos and arguments often degenerated into a subtle, or not so subtle, academic name-calling. but two distinct groups did emerge. one was called, by the other perhaps, the ‘literalists’ (those who strove as much as possible to remain faithful to the original syntax), and the other side was branded as the ‘libertines’ (those who moved away from the original syntax in an attempt, they coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 felt, to present the reading public a work in english that conformed to their own standards of literature). (2013, n.p.) importantly, he makes the point that while translators of japanese poetry can also be divided into a literalist/libertine binary, ‘for the most part, they seem to fall in the middle of the road’ (2013, n.p.), supporting record and abdulla’s discussion. anglophone translators of japanese are always on some level libertines, as they are unable to translate word for word because of the different structures of the two languages. in this context, translator judy halebsky’s simile is useful in its focus on translation as ‘a process of trust almost like spinning while holding hands. we both need to lean out and give weight to create the new poem without falling’ (qtd in musha, 2013, n.p.). the meiji university co-translation workshops however interesting the translation process may be in theory, it is only when translators are working with original material and making new translations that the issues addressed by scholars really come into focus. in 2018, this coming-into-focus occurred during cotranslation workshops that were undertaken at meiji university and which then culminated in live poetry readings in tokyo and nara. hetherington and atherton were two of nine anglophone poets paired with japanese poets. kikuchi was one of two bilingual co-translators involved in the workshops – and also the lynchpin in the translation process, moving between the pairs of poets throughout workshops, helping establish lines of communication, fielding questions, facilitating relationships and organising associated events, from poetry readings to lunch arrangements. while a major stimulus for this project was to introduce anglophone readers to exceptional contemporary japanese poets and their work, the translation project developed into a two-way process where english-language poetry was translated into japanese and published in japanese journals; and translated japanese poetry was published in english-language journals. these outcomes introduced poems and poets to new readers and, in this way, fulfilled one of the translation project’s key aims. however, it is the experience and particular features of the co-translation process which is perhaps most enlightening where discussions about translation are concerned. for this reason, we will move to a discussion of our individual experiences in the translation workshops as a series of case studies focused on translation practice. rina kikucki: translation, cooperation and collaboration rina kikuchi’s role in the translation project began long before atherton and hetherington arrived in japan. she selected australian and japanese poets for the project, giving priority to poets who she believed were open-minded and willing to learn. kikuchi assisted in the selection of the best and most suitable poems for translation into the target language. selecting poems for translation is not always straightforward, because the best literature in japanese does not necessarily translate well. examples are the writers yukio mishima and natsume soseki. mishima is one of the most widely read japanese novelists in english but soseki is considered in japan to be one of the greatest coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 authors of modern japanese literature. however, soseki’s works do not always translate easily into english and, as a result, he is not as popular as mishima with anglophone readers. kikuchi’s experience as a translator ensured the selection of poems for translation had the greatest chance for success in reaching and engaging new readerships in the two target languages. kikuchi’s role was also to pair japanese and anglophone poets who would work well with one another. she took into consideration the poets’ personalities as well as their style of poetry. for example, she paired hetherington with yosuke tanaka. both are distinguished poets and university professors who have published many books of poetry and both are accomplished in free verse and hybrid forms. atherton was paired with mari kashiwagi for more complementary reasons. kashiwagi is an up-and-coming poet who prizes minimalism in her poetry, while atherton is a prose poet, invested in the sentence rather than the line. both partnerships were ultimately successful and hetherington and atherton discuss their co-translation relationships in more detail below. in approaching the workshops, kikuchi addressed the ‘literalist’/‘libertine’ dichotomy in terms that were more unified, expressing her interest in a co-translation process that combined ‘literal’ translation and ‘re-creation’. this was crucial to all of the poetry translation workshops because it meant that the border between literal translation and recreation was never seen by any of the participants to be fixed. kikuchi wanted the translations to reflect the language, meaning and style (the more ‘literal’ aspects) of the source language but at the same time to have rhythms, sounds, echoes, imagery, colours and even smells that were consistent with expectations of poetry in the target language (re-creation). because co-translation workshops involving poets who have little significant knowledge of the source language remains a relatively unexplored frontier in the field of poetry translation, these workshops constituted a practice-led research project investigating what does and does not work in this notoriously slippery field. in a broad sense, the project outcomes added to the work of scholars who have written more generally about the importance of collaborative translation. for example, sharon o’brien comments that ‘[c]ollaboration is evident in all types of translation scenarios and across the whole process of translation’ (2011, p. 17) and joanna trzeciak huss observes: [t]he definition of collaborative translation is highly contested and forms of collaboration are variously designated. when distinctions are drawn between, say, co-translated by and translated in collaboration with, rules and conventions for applying these epithets are often fluid, negotiable and subject to the discretion of various parties in the network of publication. (2018, p. 389; emphasis original) more particularly, kikuchi’s approach was in sympathy with what alexa alfer has called ‘translaboration’ (2015, p. 26-27). it also revealed similarities to what jessica griffiths and harry williams describe as the transcollaborate process, in which: participants play one of two roles: either the ‘source collaborator’ (one who is fluent in the source text language but has only conversational fluency in the target text language) or the ‘target collaborator’ (one who is fluent in the target text coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 language but has minimal or no knowledge of the source text language). (2018, p. 44) kikuchi particularly emphasised how every translation reflects the individual way a translator reads and interprets a poem, and was also cognisant of the fact that, as each person reads a poem differently, translation is able to become a form of creative and constructive mis-translation; the result of a to-and-fro between what exists in one language and what is being newly made in another language. such a process should not be a deterrent to translators or readers, because such ‘mistranslations’ saw the creation of excellent translations of japanese and english-language poems (we say more about this process below). this approach to co-translation is also one way of addressing emily apter’s claim that ‘nothing is exactly the same in one language as in another, so the failure of translation is always necessary and absolute … if there were a perfect equivalence from language to language; it would be a replica’ (2004, p. xiv). since the translation workshops simultaneously valued accuracy, creativity and collaboration, they enabled the ‘failure’ that apter identifies to be considered as a new and shared opportunity for problemsolving and creative activity on the part of the participants. additionally, and more generally, whatever the result of any individual translation, the collaborative translation activities adopted during the workshops demonstrated how dynamic the translation process continues to be. there may be many different translations of a single poem and, taken together, these variations enable a rich and complex understanding of the original. atherton and hetherington as translators at the beginning of this translation project, hetherington and atherton had modest claims as translators. both had undertaken small amounts of translation work but, if asked, neither would have called themselves a translator. nevertheless, both believed they had the capacity to translate poetry sympathetically – if only because of their interest in and understanding of poetic techniques and forms. this accords with huss’s contention that a poet–translator’s ‘poetic skills, knowledge and experience, and perhaps even a heightened sensitivity to the sonic qualities of poetic language, may compensate for any potential lack of fluency in the source language’ (2018, p. 395). it is in this light that huss quotes david young’s views that collaborative translation is ‘half creativity and half scholarship’ along with his further statement that ‘[w]hile fluency in the source language can be convenient, it can also be a hindrance, an intimidation. it’s the target language that counts’ (qtd in huss 2018, p. 395). while atherton speaks some japanese, neither she nor hetherington writes or reads more than scraps of the language and both shared young’s interest in making persuasive works in the ‘target’ language while respecting the nuances of the original works as far as possible. when considering their participation in the co-translation workshops they agreed that the process would be best if it also involved a bilingual translator and, while kikuchi and other workshop participants excelled in this role, it proved at least as important that kikuchi encouraged both poets to embrace various strategies to overcome a translator’s unfamiliarity with a language – most notably collaborative workshopping and an awareness of genius loci. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 paul hetherington: a space to make decisions in the translation workshops at meiji university hetherington was paired with poet, yosuke tanaka and translation companion, andrew houwen. tanaka speaks english very well and translates poems from english into japanese. however, because of the complexities involved in the co-translation of his own poetry into english, houwen – who speaks fluent japanese, but whose first language is english – was engaged to act as what kikuchi terms ‘a conveyor’ between the two poets. significantly, tanaka’s poetry is layered with references to the past and he is known for his juxtaposition of historical and contemporary poetic forms. yasuhiro yotsumoto states: yosuke tanaka … casually introduces elements from the past or from other poetic forms such as tanka, combining them with a 21st-century sensitivity to create something extraordinary which is simultaneously old and new, traditional and experimental, lyrical and critical. (2008, n.p.) with tanaka’s and houwen’s assistance, hetherington was keen to trace this combination of historical and contemporary moments in the poems and find a way to recreate them for an anglophone readership. the experience of working at meiji university also significantly and positively impacted on hetherington’s co-translations. as well as the workshops themselves, various interactions with japanese students and academics, and hearing the japanese language in use, allowed him to gain a sense of the sounds and rhythms that belonged to tanaka’s poems. on some days, as hetherington participated in co-translation workshops, he discussed tanaka’s poems with both the poet and houwen, taking notes and explicating poems line by line. on other days, and in the evenings, he would attempt to learn more about japanese history and culture. he travelled by train and on foot to shrines and museums, where he spent many hours – and there was also something about the coffees he drank and meals he ate that communicated a broader, contemporary and more intangible sense of japanese culture. such moments became an underlying part of the process of translation in a way that would not have been possible if he had undertaken this work in australia. very little has been written about translating in situ as a way of using the idea of genius loci to enhance an understanding of place. notwithstanding its origins in roman religion, the latin phrase, genius loci has become increasingly secularised to mean ‘the special atmosphere of a particular place’ (samyn 2012, p. 23.). marlilena vecco has argued: the discourse on the genius loci is characterised by a multiplicity and multidimensionality of theoretical approaches and theoretical approaches … cover[ing] a very wide understanding, from physical substantiality of a place and its sense-based perceptions to spiritual experiences and intangible interactions, which imply a relationship between special and social processes. (2020, p. 2) it is impossible to glean from research or technology alone the special and dynamic nature of a place. the feeling cannot be experienced on google or through facebook or coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 via another person’s explanation. it has to be experienced in person. this is largely because, ‘genius loci is a signifier of a process that is happening and cannot intentionally be created’ (vecco 2019, p. 1). prior the first workshop, hetherington received the japanese versions of three of tanaka’s poems and the literal english translations from houwen. beginning with a literal translation is common practice in many translation practices because, as weissbort argues, the most satisfactory procedure is to provide the non-linguist reader with a lexical and contextual commentary and an ad verbum, non-literary translation alongside the original, thereby enabling him to experience the source text for himself. (1989, p. xii) during the first day of workshopping, tanaka, houwen and hetherington met and tanaka read his poems aloud in japanese. this was important for hetherington as he wanted to preserve some sense of the rhythm of tanaka’s original poems in his english translations. the three writers then discussed the poems and translations line by line, considering various options. tanaka contributed a great deal to the discussion and was knowledgeable about how he understood his japanese might be inflected in english. in some cases, houwen was differently attuned to the contemporary vernacular idioms and associations of various english words. houwen provided the following literal translation of one of the stanzas in tanaka’s ‘orion’: plaza in [topic marker] cleanly/beautifully polished bench [subject marker] one, various-trees-wood(s) and grain field(s) [direct-object preposition] can see/visible condition placed were. every day always, endless/eternal sleep in arrive/enter/adhere children are. lightly disinfectant ’s smell [subject marker] flows. continuously north from sun [topic marker] this garden [direct-object preposition] shines on. (houwen 2018a, n.p.) here, houwen signals issues such as the lack of pronouns in japanese and the lack of clarity over plurals – which leaves a good deal of space to make decisions. hetherington initially translated this stanza as: there’s a beautifully polished bench in the plaza among the numerous trees. it has been placed to offer a view of the grain fields. every day there are children who sleep eternally. a faint smell of disinfectant wafts. the sun continually shines on this garden from the north. houwen and tanaka read this version and discussed it with hetherington, who took notes of the various comments and suggestions they made. he wanted to get both the details of the poems and the poems as a whole as close as possible to what tanaka wanted, but also to take note of houwen’s meticulous advice about how key japanese phrases and meanings might be interpreted in english. he also wanted to include his own understandings and re-create the poems with what he thought was an appropriate coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 overall aesthetic, achieving a balance between literal translation and a sense of how the whole translated poem should unfold – conveying an appropriate tone, sense of irony and something of the ‘feel’ of the originals. overall, hetherington completed six drafts. apart from numerous comments in person and by email on a number of these drafts, houwen provided comments in track changes on his third draft. as one small example, the lines: there’s a gleaming bench in the plaza, which has been placed to offer a view of the natural forest and grain fields were annotated with the comment: ‘my interpretation, also based on yosuke’s comments, is that the bench is placed there as if offering a view of natural forest and grain fields’ (houwen 2018b, n.p.). after working with this comment, the final version of this stanza became: there’s a gleaming bench in the plaza, which has been placed as if to offer a view of natural forest and grain fields. every day there are children here who pass from the world. a faint smell of disinfectant wafts. it is always from the north that the sun shines. (hetherington, et al 2019, n.p.) as well as the use of houwen’s ‘as if’, the revised lines include a change in lineation to more fully capture the sense of the japanese source poem and also to improve the flow of the english-language version. in a second translation, houwen’s literal translation focused on the many possible ways of translating the original poem, once again highlighting the lack of true pronouns in the japanese language. hetherington was keen to keep the synaesthetic qualities of the poem in the english co-translation and was assisted by his experience of eating ramen in tokyo and nara, and watching it being cooked and consumed. as he continued to work with tanaka and houwen, he turned houwen’s original translation into a witty gastronomic tour de force of a poem. the list of food items and the restaurant in the literal translation, below, becomes a visible place with a cauldron of bubbling ramen creating a kind of chaotic magic. here is the literal translation followed by hetherington’s final draft: to someone/those with air-conditioning syndrome japan [topic marker] asia ’s edge so really good soup ramen can eat that introduction from let’s begin hot outside ’s road(s) from small door(s) [direct-object preposition] when enter steam rising l-letter ’s counter(s) [subject marker] is/are there at bearded uncles/middle-aged men [subject marker] work/are working. first bean(s) [direct object preposition] base as done salty flavour’s drop [directobject preposition] immoral messy boiled/cooked soup as chopped/split one pan/pot in water [subject marker] violently bubbling coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 noodles portion/clump/handful [direct-object preposition] small basket in put in and cooks cooked noodles [direct-object preposition] bowl in put roughly disentangle, soup, red meat, yellow egg(s), black seaweed, green small vegetable(s) together with when eat body [topic marker] its inside from fully warmed, definitely summer lose not is. (houwen 2018a, n.p.) by the time hetherington completed his sixth and final draft the translation had become: for a person suffering from air-conditioning syndrome because japan is located at the edge of asia you can enjoy great soup noodles there let’s start with that as an introduction when you enter a small door from the hot road there’s steam rising from an l-shaped counter and bearded middle-aged men are working. first, put salty fermented beans into a ramen bowl then sieve soup from an unholy mess in a cauldron the water convulses violently – a handful of noodles is boiled in each small basket. the noodles are roughly disentangled in a bowl, and when you eat them with soup, red meat, a yellow egg, black seaweed and small green vegetables your body is fully warmed from the inside, and you will never relinquish summer. (hetherington, et al 2019, n.p.) such co-translations, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, emerge from an immersion in a new culture, and from a cooperative and creative process of exchange between various writers – original author, bilingual translator and translating poet. there are freedoms being taken with co-translation in this process, but they are scrupulous freedoms, tempered by a meticulous attention to the original work and a sense of the places from which that work emerged. cassandra atherton: translation at home and away atherton’s first experience co-translating japanese poetry with kikuchi was in australia. atherton was initially invited to be part of an anthology of translated women poets and, because she writes prose poetry, often about tragedy, kikuchi paired her with a poet who had written about the earthquake and tsunami in march 2011 in a prose-like structure. she emailed atherton, introducing nakamura sachiko: coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 the poet, nakamura sachiko was born and grew up in iwate-prefecture, and she is now in her early (or mid) 50s. her home town was ... damaged ... by [the] 2011 earthquake. ... the town, called oofunato, is by the sea, and her family used to grow oysters. she has been writing poems and prose since her childhood, but she [has] never really had a chance to publish her own poetry collection. this poem won [the] iwate-prefecture 2011 disaster poetry prize. her poems (including this one) have been published in a few anthologies/poetry journals. [p]oets, who live away from tokyo, do not have much chance to publish their works, unless they [have] got a lot of money ... (it has been like this for 100 years) ... i assume there are lots of women poets, in the same situation ... (kikuchi, 2017, n.p.) this email makes clear how translation and publication outside of japan is able to provide new opportunities for the publication of poetry, especially for women. it also demonstrates the importance, when translating, of knowing something about the poet’s biography and situation. when the poem atherton translated was published in meanjin, it was introduced with a description of the translation process: rina, a native speaker, completed a literal translation of the poem and liaised in japanese with the poet, nakamura, to clarify some of the ideas embedded in the work. cassandra who has limited japanese language but is a scholar in the field of japanese disaster poetry, worked with rina and her translation to create a poem in english that stayed true to the original, but engaged a readership outside of japan. once the english version was drafted, rina who describes herself as a messenger between poets, took this to nakamura and some redrafting was completed based on her feedback. (2018, p. 10) atherton initially found this co-translation challenging and it took her some time to find the right space for her own re-creation. kikuchi provided a literal translation with which she began working. as part of this process, she also explained particular ideas reflective of japanese culture – such as the reference to shiju-ku-nichi or the 49th day which kikuchi stated was a ‘(special day – must get together to commemorate person’s death)’ (2018, n.p.). there were also restrictions – one of them being that nakamura didn’t want to use the words ‘tsunami’ or ‘corpse’. the first long translation session took place on skype. atherton was given some notes by kikuchi and she then took more notes as kikuchi explicated the poem line by line. the first stanza of her literal translation read: 1. feeling empty inside heart questioning is this the emptiness of the heart after i saw my father’s death 2. or is this the tiredness of long caring (elderly) 3. or is this the feeling of guilt for being saved 4. from the hospital which is placed on the hill 5. is this god’s punishment? because i was watching it… coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 kikuchi explained, ‘the narrator is feeling guilty for surviving and watching [the] tsunami washing everything, from the hospital window (the hospital stands on the hill, and she could see everything, and she was safe)’ (2017, n.p.). atherton’s co-translation of these five lines became: is this the hollowness of my father’s death or the bone tiredness of his long illness in my chest? from the hospital window, i watched it unfold. is this emptiness the heavy guilt of inaction? or punishment for surviving? (2018: p11) keeping the same number of lines and the overall visual form of the poem was particularly important for atherton. however, in re-creating the mood of the poem, she employed phrases such as ‘bone tired’ and ‘the hollowness ... of death’ to emphasise the sense the poem conveys of deep regret and sadness. atherton’s favourite part of the poem was nakamura’s use of a black dot. she recognised it as a form of censorship, and kikuchi explained in her notes to the poem: [huge dot – government] black ink covers what has been written on the paper (used in wwii censorship) the authority are taking the coffins under their control so they can’t get access to coffins (buy them) and therefore everywhere you go if you are an ordinary person … (can’t get a coffin). be suggestive. the dot is controlling – everywhere you go. (kikuchi 2017) atherton wanted to preserve the dot – and, indeed, she wanted it to be nakamura’s dot. she decided to copy and paste it from nakamura’s word document onto her own: 霊安室は満杯です棺は被災者様の分です●が押さえているので crematoria are overflowing there are no more coffins ● is to blame they control the living (sachiko 2018: p. 12) for atherton, it was a perfect moment – where a symbol could be transported from one language to another and mean a similar thing in japanese and as it did in english. for her second co-translation, atherton was paired with mari kashiwagi in the meiji university workshops. they are of a similar age and a comparable stage of their poetry careers, but their styles are vastly different. in particular, as a prose poet, atherton uses white space in her work very differently from the way it is employed in lineated poetry and – as yasuhiro yotsumoto states – there is an ‘unusual amount of white space’ in kashiwagi’s poetry, ‘a few words spread over the pages not unlike the works of some imagist poets, or of e.e. cummings’ (2008, n.p). the third stanza of one of her poems appears as seven lines stretching down the page: coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 (kikuchi, 2018, n.p.) kikuchi explained that kashiwagi’s poetry is like japanese emaki, or a picture scroll – words hang vertically like unfurled parchment. atherton was keen to incorporate both the minimalism and the visual effects on the page. this required a delicate balance where very few words are chosen to convey the much larger picture. kashiwagi speaks english, but does not write poetry in english and is invested in both the perceived connotations of her poems in english and their reception. for example, when atherton discussed using the phrase ‘intimate space’ to covey a bower, kashiwagi believed the word ‘space’ was too connected, however laterally, to aliens and outer space to capture her meaning. therefore, much of the workshopping was about finding suitable synonyms with positive connotations in japanese, as much as it was about co-translating for angolophones. it was as if kashiwagi was translating atherton’s co-translations of her poems back into japanese to make sense of the word choices, which was an interesting layer of the cotranslation process. kikuchi provided the following translation of the third stanza: 3. (i am/ was) born (here, right now) a tree holding/ embracing transparent wings come out/ grow (instantly) i the sky to take ( am taken)/ bring (am brought) (kikuchi 2018, n.p.) atherton’s co-translation of kashiwagi’s poems initially included too much information. the balance between expressing everything in the poem and maintaining its sparseness was challenging. atherton also reacted to what she interpreted as a fear in kashiwagi that her poems, with all their subtleties and ambiguities, would be lost in the translation process, primarily because she uses so few words. this is not uncommon for japanese poets working in compressed forms – especially tanka-poets and haiku-poets. there is a belief that these poems cannot be translated into any other language because they use so few words to express large concepts, philosophies or beliefs. if this co-translation had taken place with the poets in separate locations, it may not have been successful. this is because interpreting kashiwagi’s minimalism required considerable discussion – not just in terms of unfolding poetic meanings, but also how the poet was reflecting on japan from a woman’s point of view. co-translation for atherton included lunches and some dinners with kashiwagi and discussions about their coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 lives, which unearthed similarities in their choices and decisions. the experience of sitting in classrooms and common rooms with kashiwagi was in some respects similar to being in an australian university, and in other respects vastly different. this binary assisted atherton in working out how to approach the simplicity and detail in kashiwagi’s poetry as she searched for the middle ground between literal translation and re-creation. finally, atherton’s struggle with the visual component of the poetry was resolved through her experience as a flaneuse in japan. while atherton has been to japan many times as a scholar on the atomic bombing of hiroshima and was a visiting scholar at sophia university, tokyo, this experience of co-translation provided a very different insight into japanese culture and philosophy as she walked the city in the days between translation workshops. psarras argues the flâneur: walks both physically and intellectually, the place – the streets – become embodied sensory avenues orchestrated with memory and imagination by him. flaneur seems to be the genius loci himself as he celebrates place and its details to such an extend [sic] that he is the place – he becomes the street and the asphalt – he contains the very core of moment in the midst of the urban winds. he is the ambulant guardian spirit of place through a constant dialogue between senses, memory and intellectualism. (psarras 2015, n.p.) as a flaneuse atherton was claiming a space for herself in the city and simultaneously a space for her re-creation of the poetry. as lauren elkin argues, ‘the flaneuse walks the streets defiantly … rather than wandering aimlessly, like her male counterpart, the female flâneur has an element of transgression: she goes where she’s not supposed to’ (2016, n.p.). the movement of the flaneuse became a metaphor for movement in kashiwagi’s poetry. atherton’s final draft of stanza three used a visual element on the page to explore this motion: i was born! embracing the tree, transparent wings sprout from my back and take me to the sky (kashiwagi, forthcoming.) in her arrangement of ‘take me to the sky’, the word ‘me’ sits in the centre representing the twinned ‘me’ of poet and co-translators. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 call and response the project confirmed for us that translation has the power to build significant crosscultural understandings because in facilitating a broader readership for japanese poetry, translators are not only exploring language, but are also exploring and promoting ways of understanding japanese culture, values, identity and philosophies. translating japanese poetry in a way that simultaneously values accuracy and creativity is as much about sharing ideas as it is about lineation, cadence or word choice. such translations aim to incorporate respect and understanding for one another’s cultural assumptions and poetic ideas, sharing them across languages and national boundaries. this can be achieved through an understanding of genius loci – and of flaneurism, too – where a sense of a place and perambulation provide pathways towards understanding. the experience of co-translation in japan demonstrates that: translation of poetry is conceivable. a translation dwells in imperfection, using equivalents and shunning mechanical replicas – which is the dream of literalists who believe in truth. it gives us the other. or under another name it gives us itself. (barnstone 1993, p. 266) when engaged in this complex project – and we have only touched on its various intricacies in this paper – we considered a range of japanese poems in terms of their meanings, shapes, histories, ideas, contemporary relevance and even the disposition of the white space on the page, along with pauses and particular inflections. we examined the emphasis in many of them on a more formal, and even elevated cadence and rhythm than we were used to employing in our own poetry. in this way, our translation of japanese poetry into english involved something of a call-and-response process. and perhaps most importantly, it was a complex set of conversations that included many different people – what one might, in retrospect, think of as a chorus of translators. this involved what we would name as an attentive cosmopolitanism, as all participants embraced the idea of multiple enmeshed perspectives and shared, sometimes shimmering, understandings of different places, 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225-31. yotsumoto, y 2008, ‘mari kashiwagi’, poetry international archives, 1 october, retrieved 29 april 2020, <https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/12583/mari-kashiwagi/en/tile>. yotsumoto, y 2010, ‘yosuke tanaka’, poetry international archives, 1 january, retrieved 29 april 2010, <https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/15801/yosuke-tanaka/en/tile>. yip, w 1969, ezra pound’s ‘cathay’, princeton university press, princeton, nj. cassandra atherton is an award-winning scholar and prose poet. she was a visiting scholar at harvard in 2016 and a visiting fellow at sophia university, tokyo in 2014. her most recent books of prose poetry are pre-raphaelite (2018) and leftovers (2020). she co-edited the unfinished bomb: shadows and reflections and received an australia council grant to write book of prose poetry on the hiroshima maidens. she is co-author of prose poetry: an introduction (princeton up, 2020). paul hetherington is professor of writing in the faculty of arts and design at the university of canberra, head of the international poetry studies institute (ipsi) and one of the founding editors of the international online journal axon: creative explorations. he founded the international prose poetry group in 2014 and is an award-winning poet. with ken gardiner he has published translations from the chinese poetry of li bai, wang wei, tu fu, meng hao-jan and lu lun. rina kikuchi is a professor of literature at shiga university, japan, and an adjunct associate professor at the university of canberra. she is currently working on a research project on japanese women’s poetry of the asia pacific war. her bilingual books of poetry translations are poet to poet: contemporary women poets from japan (2017, coedited with jen crawford) and pleasant troubles (2018, co-edited with harumi kawaguchi). coolabah, no.24&25, 2018, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 274 the impact of targeted educational programmes on academic outcomes for african students in western australia kwadwo adusei-asante edith cowan university k.adusei@ecu.edu.au copyright©2018 kwadwo adusei-asante. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: over the past two decades, people with african backgrounds have become part of australian society. there have been extensive discussions of the various academic challenges african students experience at all educational levels in australia. the academic challenges identified range from low academic achievement to unemployment and are particularly prevalent among african students who are refugees or those who have low socio-economic status. this paper argues that targeted educational programmes need to be implemented to support african students who are struggling in their academic pursuits. the positive outcomes and lessons learned from our implementation of the top-up programme, a peer-mentoring educational initiative that supports domestic undergraduate sub-saharan african students at edith cowan university, western australia, are discussed. keywords: peer-mentoring; african students; targeted educational approach. introduction formal education is key to the social mobility of individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds (cunninghame, 2017). in the long term, higher education can improve an individual’s income, health and employment opportunities, social stature and personal mailto:k.adusei@ecu.edu.au 275 dignity. as a type of social good, the acquisition of a university qualification has also been found to benefit the larger community immensely (adams & kirova, 2013; affolter & allaf, 2014; clarke & leigh, 2011; dockery, seymour, & koshy, 2015; sainsbury & renzaho, 2011; samani & lozeva, 2016). it is within this context that african migrants in australia (amia) strive to and are encouraged to obtain formal education and qualifications. however, amia represent a diverse group of individuals with varied needs, and mainstream academic support approaches have been unable to support academically challenged amia adequately. this failure has led to the adoption of victim-blaming attitudes toward academically struggling students with african backgrounds, some regarded as “problem students” (gately, ellis, britton, & fleming, 2017; turner & fozdar, 2010). this paper argues that targeted educational programmes can effectively support students with complex academic needs. the following four sections substantiate this proposition. first, a brief overview of the trends in migration and a description of the different groups of amia are presented. second, the literature on the various academic challenges facing african students at various educational levels in australia is also reviewed. third, theoretical discussions of targeted educational programmes and the outcomes achieved in contexts where they have been implemented are discussed. finally, the description and outcomes of the top-up programme (a peer-mentoring initiative funded by the higher education participation and partnerships program [heppp] that supports domestic african undergraduate students [daus] at edith cowan university [ecu], western australia) are discussed. african migrants in australia over the past two decades, the number of individuals arriving in australia from africa has increased. according to hugo (2009), there were only 1,590 african-born persons in australia in 1861. almost 57% of african-born migrants in australia at that time were from south africa and were mostly ‘white’; the immigration of white africanborn persons continued to be the case until the federation in 1901. in 1890, the number of african-born persons in australia increased to 2,923; only to decline to 2,840 at the founding of the federation in 1901. notably, this decline occurred in the aftermath of the economic depression (hugo, 2009; jakubowicz, 2010). the immigration policy of the australian government in the period limited migration to australia based on race. under the policy, ‘whites’ were accepted, and ‘blacks’ and other individuals of noneuropean origin were rejected (hugo, 2009; jakubowicz, 2010). tellingly, “[black] africans were specifically mentioned in the debates about immigration and [in the] restrictions and limitations” (jakubowicz, 2010, pp. 4, 21; jupp, 2007; williams, 2009). hugo (2009) notes that as of 1947, there were only 75,506 african-born people in australia. of these, a little over 78% were ‘white’ south africans or “the children of anglo saxons colonial functionaries” (p. 15). the so-called ‘white australia’ policy was replaced by less restrictive immigration policies in the 1960s and early 1970s that paved the way for the migration of people of african and non-european descent into australia, particularly in the late 1990s. however, the changes in australia’s immigration policies were largely driven by the government’s desire to serve its own 276 interests by “recruit[ing] highly skilled immigrants, especially for the burgeoning mining industry” (jakubowicz, 2010, p. 21). australia’s 2016 population census showed that 317,182 people living in the country were born in sub-saharan africa, representing 5.1% of australia’s overseas-born population (australian bureau of statistics, 2017). amia are often erroneously thought of as a homogenised group of individuals who are designated as “disadvantaged,” “refugees” and/or as having low socio-economic status (lses) (naidoo et al., 2015; silburn et al., 2010). there are three broad categories of amia: (i) caucasian africans, consisting of white africans, mainly born in south africa and zimbabwe; (ii) north african australian residents, comprised of people from the maghreb (algeria, libya, morocco and tunisia) and egypt; and (iii) black africans born in or with familial ties to sub-saharan africa. each of the three collectives is further classified into five categories based on visa status, namely: (i) middle class professionals, (ii) humanitarian entrants, (iii) australian-born africans, (iv) family reunion entrants, and (v) international students (see adusei-asante, awidi, & doh, 2016). the first category of amia comprises highly skilled and educated migrants. many of these migrants are managers and professionals. migrants in this category are often ‘white’ or the “children of european-origin parents from south africa and zimbabwe who subsequently moved to australia” (hugo, 2009, p. 15; jakubowicz 2010). a significant number of the highly skilled and educated african migrants are also ‘black’ middle class individuals from ghana, kenya, nigeria, tanzania, uganda, zambia and zimbabwe. between 1999-2000 and 2008-2009, 80,252 africans migrated to australia as professional accountants, medical doctors (3,000 in 2006) and nurses (4,100 in 2006). notably, 5.4% of medical doctors in australia were born in africa (commonwealth of australia, 2011; jakubowicz, 2010). africans who arrived in australia (either onshore or offshore) under the country’s humanitarian programme represent the second largest proportion of african migrants in australia. from 2000 to 2010, over 48,000 african refugees settled in australia, mainly under the offshore programme (commonwealth of australia, 2011; jakubowicz, 2010). sudan was one of the countries that benefited the most from the australian humanitarian programme. this programme led to an increase in the population of sudanese migrants in australia from less than 5,000 in 2001 to almost 20,000 in 2006. notably, the majority of these migrants (54%) were male. jakubowicz (2010) argued that the influx of sudanese refugees, particularly the 6,000 refugees who arrived from 2004 to 2005, placed enormous pressure on the fragile government structures that had been previously established. consequently, these newly arrived refugees and humanitarian entrants did not receive adequate support when settling in australia. australia’s humanitarian migration programme also led to the intake of refugees from sub-saharan africa (ssa), mainly from west africa, the congo (formerly zaire) and the horn of africa (hugo, 2009; jakubowicz, 2010). the majority of these ssa refugees were young and had limited formal education and poor english language skills (jakubowicz, 2010). the majority of africans who arrived in australia seeking refuge have been granted citizenship; for example, from 2008 to 2009, 11.3% (i.e., 9,841) of the applicants who were granted australian citizenship were born in africa 277 (commonwealth of australia, 2011). of these, the largest proportion (i.e., 4,128) was born in south africa followed by sudan (i.e., 1,430) (commonwealth of australia, 2011). the increased migration of african refugees to australia has given rise to a second generation of african australians (i.e., children born in australia to a parent or parents from africa). this collective makes up the third category of africans living in australia; data on this cohort is limited. the fourth category of amia comprises migrants who came to australia under the family reunion programme (commonwealth of australia, 2011; jakubowicz, 2010). the majority of individuals in this category migrated to join family members who were already resident in australia and who held either skilled or humanitarian visas. between 1999-2000 and 2008-2009, over 22,000 africans migrated to australia under the family reunion programme. the last category of africans living in australia comprises international students. in 2014, it was estimated that there were nearly 9,000 african international students in australia (tyler, 2014). these migrants contribute significantly to the income stream of the education sector—the third largest export industry in australia and the biggest export industry in the state of victoria (deloitte access economics, 2016; wells, 2017). the majority of these international students come to australia from nigeria, kenya, ghana and uganda to participate in student exchange programmes, engage in research partnerships and undertake leadership development courses at australian universities (tyler, 2014; wells, 2017). a number of these international students remain in australia (either temporarily or permanently) after they graduate; however, no data are available on the number of students that remain in australia. both the literature and the federal government’s 2011 report (commonwealth of australia, 2011) on the inquiry into australia’s relationship with african countries (organised by the joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade) acknowledged the contributions that amia make to australia and their respective countries of birth. in addition to raising and donating several thousands of dollars directly to african governments for various development projects, amia contribute extensively to the economies of their birth countries by making financial remittances. while no specific data is available in relation to financial remittance amia make to their respective countries of origin, several studies have shown that members of the african diaspora remit us$40-51.8 billion to the african continent a year, a figure larger than the total official development assistance the continent receives from donors (doyle, 2013; international foundation for agricultural development, 2009). although african migrants have acknowledged that their migration has caused a ‘brain drain’ in their original birth countries, their financial remittances contribute significantly to the economic development of those countries. for example, such remittances have been used to improve living conditions and support the development of small businesses, especially in rural areas (refugee council of australia, 2010). africans also contribute to australia’s human capital and multiculturalism. despite representing less than 2% of the australian population, african migrants constitute 5.4% of the medical doctors in australia (commonwealth of australia, 2011; jakubowicz, 2010). examples of the acts of heroic african medical doctors in australia abound. notably, a ghanaian-born surgeon, dr kwasi yeboah, saved the life of a 278 person who had been involved in a near-death motor accident in perth when he performed a roadside open-heart surgery (mcneill, 2016). people from african backgrounds have also played key roles in facilitating cultural, scientific and educational relationships and exchanges between their respective countries of origin and australia. amia also have introduced diverse and beautiful traditions, rituals, cuisines, art forms and languages that have enhanced the richness and diversity of the australian cultural landscape (commonwealth of australia, 2011; jakubowicz, 2010; refugee council of australia, 2010). further, the participation of individuals from african backgrounds in australian community life has enhanced the broader society’s knowledge and understanding of african cultures. african australians have been commended for using their personal connections in their countries of origin to raise awareness about issues pertaining to human rights and vulnerable groups on the african continent. they have also raised refugee issues with government representatives and senior officials at the united nations high commissioner for refugees that may have otherwise gone unreported in the media. for example, in 2009, members of african-australia communities brought a number of issues to the attention of the refugee council of australia, including revelations that amputation was being used as a tool for torture in sierra leone, that more resettlement places were needed for members of the afar community in camps across the horn of africa and that acts of fraud were being committed in the congolese community camps responsible for the offshore processing of visas (refugee council of australia, 2010). academic challenges confronting african students in australia academic challenges confronting amia in various educational programmes in australia have been discussed in recent literature. in 2011, various submissions were made in relation to these issues to the federal joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade, which examined australia’s relationship with african countries (commonwealth of australia, 2011). in their submissions, the refugee council of australia informed the committee that some african refugees in the country sacrifice or postpone their education, work two jobs, and forfeit their holidays and other social and recreational activities to send financial remittances to relatives (commonwealth of australia, 2011, p. 212). in her submission to the committee, professor ware also observed, “we need to take care that africans who come to australia with little or no formal education are able to catch up and do not become an underclass here” (commonwealth of australia, 2011, p. 216). a study by burgoyne and hull (2007) revealed that refugees from sudan who became students were confronted with multifaceted, but interrelated, issues that affect their resettlement in australia. burgoyne and hull argued that these students’ “educational challenges and aspirations are inextricably bound up with [an] array of other resettlement issues” (p. 21). turner and fozdar (2010) drew similar conclusions when they conducted research with 40 adult sudanese learners at three different educational settings in australia. the authors framed their study theoretically in relation to the concepts of social capital, interdependent self-construal/conjoint agency and active versus passive settlement styles. these concepts were used to: (i) analyse sudanese 279 learners’ ideas about belonging; (ii) ascertain their ability to negotiate in a different environment; and (iii) determine how these viewpoints affected their learning experiences. the authors found that if teachers were to communicate with and support sudanese students successfully, building trusted relationships was critical. harris and marlowe (2011) researched the experiences of a group of young africans from refugee backgrounds who were studying at a south australian university. they found that many of these students were facing issues related to understanding the expectations of australian educational institutions, living in residential environments that were not conducive to study, ascertaining culturally appropriate ways to seek academic assistance, accessing study materials and studying in another language. adusei-asante, awidi and doh (2016) undertook a community consultation exercise in perth and found that students from sub-saharan african backgrounds in australia had varied and complex academic needs. they also showed that these students experienced difficulties related to: (i) their english language comprehension; (ii) conceptual learning; (iii) low levels of academic achievement; (iv) self-esteem issues; (v) managing their academic work, family and work commitments; (vi) career guidance issues; and (vii) adjusting to the australian way of life. they also found that sub-saharan african students tended to view ‘help-seeking’ as a sign of weakness. more recently, gately, ellis, britton and fleming (2017) adopted a multi-method approach to explore the experiences of 22 sudanese students at western australia’s ecu. the study was partly informed by a preliminary analysis of the data that revealed interesting results about the performance of sudanese students at ecu between 2010 and 2014. the researchers found that: of all units undertaken in that period by sudanese students the failure rate was 47.53% despite completion of assessments for 73% of the units of study involved … further, sudanese students discontinued their course[s] primarily for academic issues of which the precise nature is unknown. (p. 121) to determine the factors causing low levels of academic achievement among sudanese students at ecu, gately, ellis, britton and fleming (2017) used two quantitative scales to explore the students’ motivations for learning and their english language skills. they found that the sudanese students were extrinsically motivated to study and were confident in their english language skills, but needed additional support to improve their competence in written english. other researchers have reached similar conclusions in their studies of african students in australia (see, for example, cassity & gow, 2005; hatoss, o’neill, & eacersall, 2012; loshini, 2009; matthews, 2008; miller 2009; woods, 2009). the above review of the issues facing african students in australia raises some critical points for discussion. first, commentaries on these issues could be described as the ‘sudanisation’ and ‘refugeenisation’ of the experiences of most african students in australia. refugees from africa represent only a fraction of the total population of individuals from the african continent living in australia (jakubowicz, 2010). however, the literature tends to present the experience of african students in australia in ways that ignores their differences and uniqueness. this is particularly concerning as 280 these narratives seek to portray sudanese and other refugee students as “problem students” and also associate lses with “stupidity” and “failure” (mckay & devlin, 2015). for example, most researchers who have conducted studies on african students in australia have argued that african students have limited language skills; however, this is inaccurate and an oversimplification (burgoyne & hull, 2007, p. 21). second, the broad-brush deficit characterisation that african students have low levels of academic achievement ignores the fact that educational differences have historically existed between advantaged and disadvantaged groups in australia. for example, the 2016 grattan institute’s report entitled widening gaps: what naplan tells us about student progress revealed that: low achievers in year 3 are an extra year behind high achievers by year 9. they are two years eight months behind in year 3, and three years eight months behind by year 9. the gap to students whose parents have a degree is ten months in year 3 but two and a half years by year 9. even when capabilities are similar in year 3, disadvantaged students fall between 12 months and 21 months behind more advantaged students by year 9. (goss & sonnemann, 2016, p. 2) similarly, perry (2017) argues that: where one goes to school matters in australia … australia has one of the highest levels of school social segregation of all oecd countries … advantaged students in australia are much more likely to attend school with other advantaged students. and the same is true for disadvantaged students … while educational disadvantage is a problem in almost all education systems across the globe, it is especially large in australia … for example, 47% of indigenous [students] meet the minimum proficiency science standard in timss compared to 77% of non-indigenous students. (p. 3) thus, the low levels of academic achievement among sudanese and refugee students cannot be framed only as an ‘african problem’; rather, it is a systemic problem that policies should seek to address (see naylor, baik, & james, 2013). ford (2013) attributes differences in educational outcomes among different cohorts of people in australia to institutional racism. further, several thinkers have argued that education needs to be rethought and redesigned in ways that targets and responds to cultural uniqueness and that education should not only be informed by models that appear to promote ‘white’ and western hegemonic ideations (ford 2013; goss & sonnemann, 2016; ladson-billings, 2005; nakata, 2010). additionally, while ‘formal education’ is being encouraged among amia, a recent study showed that acquiring an australian qualification has not improved employment prospects for some african groups. el-gack and yak (2016) interviewed 72 members of the south sudanese community living in the australia capital territory who were attending workshops on the topic of finding employment. of these workshop participants, 42% held tertiary qualifications in accounting, nursing, public health, medical science and law, but could not secure employment in their chosen fields. notably, 95% of the participants were job seekers who already held casual or part-time jobs. the study also showed that while 24,000 south sudanese currently live in 281 australia, nearly 30% of the population is unemployed. additionally, after conducting an examination of longitudinal studies around the world, argy (2007) argued that education success rates at school and post-school are in large part determined by social class origin and noted that there is a correlation between education inequality and employment inequality (p. 1). in its submission to federal joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade, the department of education, employment and workplace relations noted that the following factors contribute to the high unemployment rates of africans: “the period since [their] arrival in australia, [and their] skill level, age, english language proficiency, and recent and relevant work experience” (commonwealth of australia, 2011, p. 211). the government of western australia also submitted to the committee that “african humanitarian entrants face a range of barriers to inclusion and integration, particularly in the areas of employment, education and training, social participation and political, civic and community participation” (commonwealth of australia, 2011, p. 213). there have been numerous calls to promote targeted educational programmes beyond those generally offered to migrants and humanitarian entrants to address the educational needs of african students in australia. the government of western australia captured the importance of offering such programmes in their submission to the federal joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade, when it stated that there is “a need for targeted programs to increase access to further education, [and to address the] issues associated with the high costs and complexity of recognition” (commonwealth of australia, 2011, pp. 213-214; see also argy, 2006, 2007). peter odhiambo, an influential amia, reiterated this point when he submitted to the committee that “african populations in australia are critically under-served … there are no clear policies designed to integrate africans into australia …” (cited in commonwealth of australia, 2011, p. 216; see also sidhu & taylor, 2007). the 2008 review of australian higher education (also known as the bradley review) set the following objective to increase the percentage of university students of lses to 20% by 2020 (bradley, noonan, nugent, & scales, 2008; commonwealth of australia, 2009). since the publication of the bradley review, a broad range of equity programmes and strategies targeting various lses students have been implemented to enhance these students’ access to and participation in higher education (see cardak, bowden & bahtsevanoglou, 2014; somerville et al., 2013). accordingly, the heppp was established to encourage all australians to access higher education, regardless of their socio-economic background (australian government, department of education and training, 2016; samani & lozeva, 2011). the heppp assists australian universities to undertake projects and activities aimed at improving access to university education for people from various backgrounds. however, as learners with specific characteristics, sub-saharan amia appear to have received little direct support or specific attention. additionally, the in-group differences of sub-saharan amia do not appear to have been addressed adequately other than in programmes that seek to target refugees more generally (see arnot & pinson, 2005, cited in sidhu & taylor, 2007; jakubowicz, 2010). 282 some australian educational institutions have tended to address academic challenges confronting their students by using mainstream student support services; for example, by referring them to learning advisors for advice and support. however, a study by karimshah, wyder, henman, tay, capelin and short (2013) revealed that while academically challenged students may be aware of such support services, they tend not to access them, as they offer limited assistance. the authors argued that it was important for students to have access to opportunities for social integration within a university, a feeling of belonging and a good support network of family and friends. the authors also noted that educational institutions that wish to retain their academically challenged students need to focus on processes that encourage social inclusion and social networking (for example, by offering greater targeted support programmes and peer support programmes to student groups and by providing campus spaces for peer-to-peer social interaction) (see also maher & macallister, 2013; thomas, 2012). targeted educational programmes research has shown the value of identifying, developing and targeting specific members of lses groups rather than implementing ‘one-size-fits-all’ and mainstream educational programmes for all students (see cardak, bowden & bahtsevanoglou, 2014; gale et al., 2013; gore et al., 2015). targeted educational programmes seek to identify students’ learning needs and to adapt the teaching and learning processes in response to students’ needs (goss, hunter, romanes, & parsonage, 2015). targeted educational approaches also refer to systematic efforts aimed at “lifting the performance of students who are many years behind and also finding ways to challenge students who are already well ahead of year level expectations” (goss, hunter, romanes, & parsonage, 2015, p. 6). the approach, while not new, has been found to be critical in closing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged groups and in encouraging increased participation in higher education by people from low socio-economic backgrounds (samani & lozeva, 2016; see also recommendation 2 in goss & sonnemann, 2016). targeted educational interventions are person centred and have also been shown to benefit all learners, including struggling students and those doing well. designing and implementing targeted educational interventions involve gathering and using credible data to meet each student’s needs at their respective starting points while remaining cognisant of students’ cultural needs and personal characteristics (aduseiasante & doh, 2016; goss & sonnemann, 2015). an example of the systematic collection and use of data has been reported in new zealand, where the ministry of education is currently working towards identifying correlations that can be used to target interventions to improve the life outcomes of at-risk learners whose needs are identical to african students in australia (adusei-asante & doh, 2016; goss & sonnemann, 2016). numerous examples of good-practice-targeted educational interventions have been reported. loshini (2009) discussed an after-school homework tutoring programme (i.e., the refugee action support programme at the university of western sydney) in which students who were studying to become secondary education teachers tutored african refugee students in secondary schools to facilitate their inclusion in australian society. the author found that the targeted intervention programme enabled the refugee students to learn formal english. in the process, the 283 students were also empowered “to move beyond their adversities to acquire some form of cultural and symbolic capital that could be converted to economic capital” (loshini, 2009, p. 20). samani and lozeva (2016) conducted a case study/pilot outreach project entitled “ride ahead.” the project sought to inspire young people who had become disengaged from mainstream schooling to access higher education. ride ahead used bicycle restoration activities, campus visits, mentoring, career counselling and community engagement to motivate participants to view university as a post-school option. the researchers concluded that their outreach programme effectively targeted disengaged young people whose post-schooling options and exposure to improved life choices in higher education were broadened through the ride ahead programme. burgoyne and hull (2007) also researched and reported on a number of successful initiatives that had been adopted by registered training organisations and were aimed at sudanese and other african refugee student populations. the researcher found that initiatives that linked english language tuition to immediate settlement concerns related to the students’ local employment opportunities or practical skills had a greater success rate of retention and academic progress. a key recommendation of the authors was that the outcomes and methods of delivery of any programme “adequately respond to the needs of … learners presenting with very limited spoken english, very little experience of literacy in any language, and very little experience of formal education” (p. 10). the ensuing discussion clearly shows that peer-mentoring is an effective vehicle for implementing targeted educational programs for students experiencing academic difficulties or those with low socio-economic status backgrounds. as a concept, peermentoring in higher education involves an experienced or knowledgeable student providing support to a less experienced student to improve academically (collings, swanson & watkins, 2014) and engage in life at university (hall & jaugietis, 2011). the literature outlines several positive outcomes of peer-mentoring programmes for mentees and mentors. research has found that mentees display higher levels of integration into university, are less likely to consider discontinuing their studies and better prepared to enter second year compared to non-mentored students (see collings, swanson, & watkins, 2014; fox & stevenson, 2006). peer-mentoring programmes have also been found to provide mentees with guidance to career planning, competence awareness, establishing networks and navigating new environment (adusei-asante & doh, 2017; schmidt & faber, 2016). positive outcomes for mentors include improved leadership, communication and organisational skills (adusei-asante & doh, 2017; hall & jaugietis, 2011), professional development, institutional recognition and personal satisfaction (schmidt & faber, 2016). top-up programme the top-up programme (top-up) was introduced in 2015 to address academic challenges of daus at ecu (see adusei-asante, awidi & doh, 2016; gately, ellis, britton & fleming, 2017). top-up is heppp-funded and designed as a targeted peermentoring initiative. students self-select to participate in the programme or are referred 284 by academic staff (see adusei-asante, awidi & doh, 2016). while the programme is open to all daus, it targets african students who need an intensive, culturally-sensitive and person-centred academic support that are generally not provided by the conventional student support services at the university. however, the top-up team collaborates with academic support officers across the university, some providing guidance and learning materials to top-up mentors; others facilitate selected plenary sessions as explained below. top-up comprises three components: (i) one-on-one peer-mentoring, (ii) a compulsory plenary session and (iii) a walk-in option. students participating in the programme are matched to a paid mentor. the mentors provide academic support to the mentees and or direct them to appropriate services within the university. mentors meet their mentees on a weekly basis (preferably face to face and on an ecu campus) to discuss any assignments that the student might have and the student’s academic progress. mentors and mentees may also discuss the content of lectures, develop plans for assignments, discuss draft essays and feedback, rehearse presentations and prepare for midand endof-semester examinations. the support provided by mentors is largely driven by the needs of mentees, but mentors may also suggest topics for discussion. mentors report on each of the mentees they work with each semester, highlighting their mentees’ achievements and the areas in which the mentees could improve. students who show a mastery of academic skills through their assignment and end-of-semester examination results are encouraged to leave the programme and assume an autonomous learner stance. in the second component of the programme, mentees participate in a one-hour plenary session each week. the session provides students with insights into the use of academic language and conceptual learning competences, and covers areas such as plagiarism, semester planning, academic reading and writing skills (for example, subject-verb agreement and the parts of a paragraph), drafting essays and preparing for examinations. towards the end of the semester, a session is dedicated to job employment applications, interview skills and careers. academic support officers at the university and top-up mentors facilitate the plenary sessions. the plenary meetings are delivered in a handson fashion providing students with immediate opportunities to practise what they are taught. light refreshments are served at the sessions as an incentive, and students are encouraged to socialise to increase their social capital. funds are also available to support students who need financial help to purchase textbooks and bus or train tickets to attend lectures. a third component was added to top-up in 2017. referred to as the ‘walk-in option,’ this component of top-up assists students who are not participating in the programme as mentees, but who have immediate academic needs. the flexibility of this component allows students with work or other commitments who do not require intensive support to seek help as and when required. all mentors are paid employees of ecu and receive casual rates and other ancillary benefits. mentors are expected to have obtained or be enrolled in a master’s degree or hold a master’s degree or a higher degree. currently, nearly 90% of the mentors in topup are ecu doctoral candidates of african descent. mentors wishing to work in the programme apply to the programme manager and are recruited based on student 285 availability, funding and their suitability to the programme in terms of their background and skill set. on average, each mentor is assigned two to five students. as of november 2017, thirty students were participating in the programme. top-up has had a positive effect on student retention and improved the academic achievements of daus at ecu. over 90% of the students who participated in the programme in 2015 remained enrolled in their courses: except for one student, whose personal circumstances did not permit him to be present all the time, most of the participants attended the plenary sessions regularly. attendance averaging 70% was recorded. the sense of community created in the sessions played a role in the sustained patronage of the plenary discussions. the atmosphere enhanced [the] sharing of ideas, [the] sense of belonging and networking among the students. through the project, the students … formed study partnerships, which are improving their academic skills. (adusei-asante, awidi & doh, 2016, p. 4) in 2016, 20 of the 22 students who participated in the programme were retained. the mentors reported a significant improvement in the academic outcomes of their mentees, some of whom were awarded high distinctions (80+) and distinctions (70+) for the first time in their academic studies. as of june 2017, 10 students had taken advantage of the ‘walk-in’ component of the programme. these students came from various schools at the university and mostly sought assistance with essay assignments, proofreading and the statistical analysis of quantitative data. there are currently 30 students in the programme, all of whom have been retained. the heppp programme is now a reference point for ecu academic staff who have african students that require additional academic support. the model and outcomes of top-up have also been shared at various national educational conferences including the 2016 and 2017 students’ transition, achievement retention and success conference held in perth and adelaide respectively, and the 2017 association for academic language and learning conference in geelong, australia. the success of the top-up partly stems from its uniqueness, differentiating it from conventional peer-mentoring initiatives in several respects. first, mentors participating in the programme are paid wages, unlike conventional peer-mentoring programmes, which function on unpaid volunteerism. top-up mentors receive several ancillary benefits including access to subsidised parking fees, professional development and contributing to publications on the programme. these incentives, which are not provided in most conventional peer-mentoring initiatives, underscore the high-level commitment of the mentors to the programme (see adusei-asante & doh, 2017). second, the level accountability required of mentors and mentees is relatively higher in top-up than conventional peer-mentoring programme. mentors are accountable to the top-up manager who monitors their performance regularly. mentors provide reports on their mentees every semester, outlining the extent to which the students’ objectives for the term or academic year had been achieved, and if not, steps to address relevant issues identified. mentees are compulsorily required to meet their mentors every week and also attend the plenary sessions. mentees who are absent from both sessions on three consecutive without legitimate excuses are queried and sometimes warned about being 286 expelled from the programme. while there has not been the need to expel any student so far, the policy of compulsory attendance has successfully provided positive deterrence to the students, compared to the rather laissez faire approaches that characterise conventional peer-mentoring programmes. another key feature of top-up is the style of teaching. mentors apply one-on-one teaching approaches and support their mentees on an individual needs basis. additionally, mentors provide pastoral support to their mentees or refer them to relevant services on issues they have less competence in. students experiencing financial hardships receive financial assistance to purchase textbooks for the semester books, if they are able to demonstrate the genuineness of their requests. finally, because top-up is designed to target daus, most of the mentors are of african backgrounds. for example, of the ten mentors currently in the programme, the majority (i.e., seven) are african postgraduate students. the other three mentors are non-african higher degree students. there are five female and five male mentors. the decision to involve africans in the programme was informed by the need to inspire students to realise that if people who resemble them physically have been able to achieve laurels in education they could too, if they remained committed to their studies (ortiz-walters & gilson, 2005; santos & reigadas, 2002). conclusion this paper has discussed the effectiveness of targeted educational programmes in supporting african students who are struggling in their academic pursuits drawing on findings related to the top-up programme at ecu, western australia. the paper has also highlighted the point that africans living in australia are not a homogeneous group, but comprise a diverse collection of five different cohorts. the majority of africans living in australia hold skilled visas. this is important given that issues relating to sudanese refugees often take centre stage in the australian media as an ‘african problem.’ more importantly, the study has outlined the various academic challenges african students experience and the theoretical debates among researchers and practitioners on the subject. based on our successful implementation of the on-going top-up programme at ecu and the lessons that have been drawn from other good practice frameworks, we argue that ‘one-size fits all’ approaches do not provide academically challenged students with sufficient support to succeed at school or in higher education. this paper has shown that targeted educational interventions offer better opportunities for understanding students’ educational needs. targeted educational interventions place students at the centre of all learning and teaching processes. they also offer avenues for students (who through no fault of their own may be lagging behind) to catch up. the strategy is personalised and culturally appropriate. further, the paper has also demonstrated that, if designed appropriately, targeted interventions provide a non-intrusive way of supporting struggling students in a manner that does not make them feel that they are being ‘treated’ as ‘academic patients or special needs learners.’ 287 however, targeted educational interventions are time consuming. as such, they require patience, tactfulness and resources. in the present case, the paper has demonstrated the effectiveness of a monetary incentive in the mentorship project. the community atmosphere created through the programme has meant a great deal to student participants. the paper has also highlighted how critical institutional support is if any targeted educational interventions are to succeed. the success of the heppp project is partly attributable to the immense support that has been provided by ecu leaders and staff in participating schools in the past two years. references adams, l., & kirova, a. 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(2009). learning to be literate: issues of pedagogy for recently arrived refugee youth in australia. critical inquiry in language studies, 6(1-2), 81-101. kwadwo adusei-asante is a senior lecturer within the school of arts and humanities, edith cowan university, western australia. kwadwo’s research focuses on equity issues in education, international development and policy impact assessment. in the last fifteen years kwadwo has led and been part of agency-wide research, audit and social impact assessment of strategic projects that have advised and provided insights on policies and matters relating to operational and business area performance for universities, ceos, corporate executives, and policymakers in four different countries: australia, ghana, the netherlands and sri lanka. he holds a phd in social science from edith cowan university. https://www.thesmithfamily.com.au/about-us/media/2016/03/22/08/44/220315-targeted-educational-support-needed https://www.thesmithfamily.com.au/about-us/media/2016/03/22/08/44/220315-targeted-educational-support-needed http://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australian_outlook/africa-australia-and-international-education/ http://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australian_outlook/africa-australia-and-international-education/ https://www.campusreview.com.au/2017/02/international-education-worth-21-8-billion-to-australia/ https://www.campusreview.com.au/2017/02/international-education-worth-21-8-billion-to-australia/ http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/racist-premise-of-our-constitution-remains-20090406-9utm.html http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/racist-premise-of-our-constitution-remains-20090406-9utm.html coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 piffling: differential geography, islandness and a fictional channel island henry johnson university of otago henry.johnson@otago.ac.nz copyright© 2021 henry johnson. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: wooden overcoats is an independent comedy fiction podcast from 2015 about rival funeral homes set on the fictional island of piffling. study of the podcast offers a window into contemporary fictional channel island representation, a critique of which can help in comprehending the space and place of islands in literary studies more broadly. this article explores wooden overcoats in terms of small island representation (i.e., islandness) and how this contributes to discourse in the field of island studies. focus is given to the ideas of differential geography, islandness and a fictional channel island. the podcast’s metaphorical language is deconstructed within a dialectics of space and place in order to foreground signifiers of cultural meaning that can help uncover meaning about the ontology of islands and the epistemology of islandness. contrary to the cliché of social island insularity, wooden overcoats presents piffling’s islanders as mostly open-minded and welcoming of outsiders. however, while the idea of ‘converse parody’ offers a surface-level depiction of islandness, this method of representation actually helps to reinforce the stereotype it’s aiming to counter. whether remote, hostile or paradisiacal, islands have a character that can capture the creative imagination. such inventiveness is played out in wooden overcoats in two main ways: (i) the island of piffling is presented as central to the storyline, which portrays the lives of its islanders; and (ii) the social dynamics of piffling are presented as a converse island parody in that the story portrays islanders in ways that refute stereotypical depictions that are typical in everyday discourse about island society. keywords: channel islands; converse parody; fictional islands; islandness mailto:henry.johnson@otago.ac.nz coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 introduction virgil sodbury: fans of island of passion will of course know that it is the story of marianne, a vivacious young woman, who is shipwrecked on an island inhabited only by lots of men. lots and lots of men. (wooden overcoats, “piffling lives: island of passion”) these words are from a special episode of wooden overcoats (2015–), an independent podcast that takes its title from a euphemism for a coffin and set on the fictional island of piffling, which is located in the channel islands in the english channel (british, but close to france). (the channel islands are comprised of two bailiwicks with four selfgoverning jurisdictions), in this particular episode, the scene is set in a similar way to many other island-based stories in that it aims to capture the listener’s attention and imagination not only with island of passion’s inviting title, but also by portraying an island’s isolation, remoteness and danger. as a story within a story, island of passion by veronica night, “the most infamous erotic novelist of the channel isles!” (captain, s1/e6 [i.e., series 1 /episode 6]), is also set on a fictional island, and this embedded narrative is an important signifier not only in terms of its account of an island experience, but also regarding its portrayal of loneliness, albeit with its alluring innuendo of marianne being stranded “on an island inhabited only by lots of men”. as the narrator of this episode continues, island of passion “billed itself as a sort of philosophical treatise on the nature of loneliness but was . . . just a raunchy book”. it is with such innuendo and humour that wooden overcoats portrays the island of piffling, but the story also acts as a window into island representation through fictional narrative, an interpretation of which helps in discerning and interpreting tropes of islandness as they are presented within a podcast medium produced primarily through an island gaze with village humour at its core. wooden overcoats is a comedy fiction podcast about rival funeral homes. the podcast ran for three series with eight, c30-min episodes in each. in addition, there were several extra, shorter podcasts covering “piffling lives” (5 podcasts), “funn fragments” (5 podcasts), “funn” (1 podcast), “fragments” (4 podcasts), and “the trouble with rudyard” (1 podcast). in addition to the podcasts, there were also occasional staged shows performed in front of a live audience. the humorous dimension of the podcast helps the audience distinguish fact and fiction, and allows the writers to embellish island representation within the storyline. the series was created by david k barnes,1 who conceived the initial characters rudyard funn and his sister antigone, who have run the island of piffling’s only funeral home, funn funerals, for some time. when a competitor and newcomer to the island, eric chapman, sets up business on the island, the social dynamics of small island life – depicted as a ‘converse parody’ – creates competition that drives the story’s plot. the critically acclaimed podcast, as commended by the likes of the new statesman, the new york times and the times,2 is narrated by madeleine, who is a mouse and rudyard’s (only) friend. full of eccentric characters, including nigel wavering, who is an agnostic vicar, wooden overcoats offers a window into the medium of contemporary podcast fictional island representation, a critique of which can help in comprehending the space and place of islands in literary studies more broadly. this article is a study of the portrayal of the fictional island of piffling. the enquiry places emphasis on understanding the invented island on its own terms (mccall, 1994, p. 1) by coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 expanding the field of fictional island studies into the sphere of theatrical podcast content analysis. i explore wooden overcoats’ depiction of its concocted island, not only in terms of narrative, but also regarding the process of small island representation (i.e., islandness) in contemporary fiction and how this contributes to discourse in the field of island studies. the subject of fictional islands has been a significant feature in the field of island studies (crane and fletcher, 2017). why do islands make popular subjects in works of fiction? an answer to such a question is that, whether shakespeare’s the tempest (1610–11) or arthur c clarke’s islands in the sky (1952), the notion of an “island lure” (baldacchino, 2010) reveals real and imaginative locations as phenomena of geographic stimulus. especially in creative contexts, including literature and location branding, islands are “presented as locales of desire, as platforms of paradise, as habitual sites of fascination, emotional offloading or religious pilgrimage” (ibid, p. 374). while the fictional island of atlantis, which features in plato’s texts timaeus (c. 360 bce) and critias (c. 360 bce), thomas more’s utopia (1516), and francis bacon’s new atlantis (1627) has been significant in establishing islands within the cultural imagination, scholars of islands have explored imaginary islands from a variety of perspectives, from, for example, literature to micronations, and myths to fantasy (crane and fletcher, 2017; mackinnon, 2020). the field of fiction is awash with island stories and capturing the interest of writers and readers in a range of subject areas (bockrath, 2003). for example, daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe (1719) was a story about being shipwrecked on a remote island, and it set the scene for related novels over the next few centuries. crusoe-ism includes rm ballantyne’s the coral island (1857), which is based on the lives of three boys who were shipwrecked on an island in the south pacific, and william golding’s allegorical and dystopian novel, lord of the flies (1954), which offers a similar thought-provoking story of male juveniles stranded on a tropical island and venturing through some brutal processes while exploring and experiencing life in this isolated setting. these and many other island-based novels generally portray islands as remote and hostile locations, which is very much antithetical to the imagery associated with islands in the sphere of touristic island destination culture in the contemporary mediascape. with the fictional island of piffling, however, the storyline isn’t about abandonment or island branding on a surface level of interpretation, but about the lives of islanders as portrayed through a humorous narrative of spoken text. within this particular storyline, tropes of islandness permeate the diegesis and are interpreted in this article as a way of discerning how and why the fictional island and its islanders are presented through an island gaze. in a study of micronations, hayward comments on “site-responsive art’s ability to provide illuminating representations of key issues in local discourse” (2018, p. 161). while the island of piffling is portrayed as a type of micronation, as alluded to in the special episode “piffling lives: agatha doyle and the honey trap” in connection with piffling’s ambassador to new zealand, or an “(imaginary) island micronation” (ibid, p. 165), it is an invented island within literary and media creative thought, and close content analysis of its island-related themes can offer insight to the field of island studies on island representation in contemporary media fiction. offering a further analogy with the idea of micronations, hayward contends that “however imaginary the micronation is, its association with a region of a small state raises questions concerning the ethics of (mis)representation” (2019, p. 183). this idea can also be applied to the imaginary island coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 of piffling and interpreted through a critical lens in connection with island characterization. in this context, the purpose of this article is to interpret islandness as portrayed in the story and to consider critically its (mis)representation in the field of island studies. the dichotomy between the extreme notions of remoteness and resourcefulness has been explored in island scholarship through an “engagement with psychologies of island experience” (hay, 2013, p. 209). further, “in some of its manifestations this psychology is pathological in character, conducive to despair, cultural and economic stagnation, and a xenophobic conservatism. in others it is enabling, conducive to resilience, resourcefulness, cultural dynamism and a can-do economics” (ibid). this is a type of “nervous duality” (baldacchino, 2005a, p. 248), which is a notion of islands that reveals a simultaneous interconnection of opposites. in my analysis, piffling is presented in what might be termed a ‘converse parody’. that is, and based on the main writer’s explanation for choosing an island location (barnes, in bbc radio guernsey, 2015), the imaginary small island of piffling is represented by fictional locals who actually behave in what barnes believes is an opposite way to stereotypical images of islanders, who are invariably characterized by having a suspicious outlook on the outside world and newcomers. as barnes says, he “thought it would be really nice to do something on an island “ (ibid), and one of the reasons for this is that the characters are all: really loveable . . . it’s one of those stereotypes you don’t get in series which are set in a village on islands where it’s a closed community. they don’t trust outsiders. we thought, no, no, that’s not true. most of these communities are exceptionally welcoming. and that’s what we wanted to do with this. so the humour for us in this series is that it’s an island full of very welcoming, warm and fun individuals. (ibid, my emphasis) in the story, such an outlook is presented through an island gaze on eric chapman, who is a newcomer and rival funeral director to the (suspicious) funns. rudyard funn, in particular, doesn’t like the idea of having a competitor business on the small island (even though the island seems to have a large population and an array of facilities within a tiny space), and is portrayed as one islander who is especially hostile to newcomers. as an example of ‘converse parody’, wooden overcoats presents eric as a particularly popular new resident of piffling vale, the island’s only village. while residents of small islands may be associated with being wary of newcomers, which might be linked to “a wider trope of ‘invasion’” (king, 2009, p. 71), eric is offered a counter reception as a way of playing on such preconceived perceptions of islanders and islandness. islands are often “facing the challenge of finding the balance between local and global, openness and closure, threat and opportunity, trust and xenophobia” (groome wynne, 2007, p. 120) that results in them being ‘a nervous duality’ (baldacchino, 2005a p. 248). in the story, “the locals are friendly, open-minded and keen to experiment. if you know what we mean” (wooden overcoats, “characters”, 2020). to add a twist to the story, rudyard’s sister, antigone, is attracted to eric, which is played out in the first episode: antigone: i’m the mortician. where the action is! (shrill) ha ha ha! eric: (polite) ha ha. i bet there’s not much you don’t know about the body, eh antigone? coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 antigone: (beat) that sounded like a double meaning. georgie: it’s called flirting. antigone: oh! gosh! is it? eric: (embarrassed) well now antigone: no! it was lovely, smashing, do it again. have i made it awkward? damn rudyard: (clears throat) haven’t got all day. (s1/e1) in the field of island studies, “the term ‘insularity’ carries problematic connotations of isolation and inward-lookingness, whereas many islanders are very outward-looking, by their very nature as islanders” (king, 2009, p. 57). following this line of thought, and contrary to an island insularity cliché, wooden overcoats presents piffling’s islanders as mostly open-minded and welcoming of outsiders. however, it is only with one main character in the story, rudyard funn, who negates this perspective, and because of this he is a local who is actually viewed as an outsider by other islanders (barnes, in bbc radio guernsey, 2015; barnes, in morrison, 2015). it is with this ‘outward-looking’ trope of ‘island openness’ that the writers of the podcast characterize this small british island and its residents. in this context, and following barnes’ point above, the podcast’s metaphorical language of small island representation can be deconstructed within a dialectics of space and place in order to foreground signifiers of cultural meaning that can help uncover meaning about the ontology of islands and the epistemology of islandness. while the idea of ‘converse parody’ offers a surface-level depiction of islandness, what i illustrate in this article is that this method itself actually helps to reinforce the stereotype it’s actually aiming to counter. whether remote, hostile or paradisiacal, islands have a character that can capture the creative imagination. such inventiveness is played out in wooden overcoats in two main ways: (i) the island of piffling is presented as central to the storyline, which portrays the lives of its islanders; and (ii) the social dynamics of piffling are presented as a converse island parody in that the story portrays islanders in ways that refute stereotypical depictions that are typical in everyday discourse about island society. the article is divided into three main sections. the first, “differential geographies”, discusses piffling’s wider geography within the english channel, along with the idea of difference as a result of its inbetweenness in relation to the english and french mainlands. moving to the island itself, the second part of the article is a succinct examination of piffling island, looking especially at its name, location and size. lastly, as a way of comprehending the space and place of piffling as an island phenomenon in fictional island studies, the notion of islandness is discussed in connection with island and island-related tropes that appear in the podcast. differential geographies according to the storyline, piffling is located in the english channel. the island is fictional, while the english channel is real, which creates a podcast context that simultaneously includes the unknown and known. within the english channel, which covers an area of 89,870 square km and provides a bustling sea passage between england and france, there are a number of tangible islands that are mostly very close to the shore coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 and are either british or french (fig. 1). on the british side of the channel, the largest of these islands, the isle of wight, is just a few kilometres off the english coast. also on the southern english coastline there are a number of small islands, including hayling island (bridged to the mainland), brownsea island, isle of portland (a tied island), looe island (also known as st georges island), st michael’s mount (a tidal island), and st clement’s isle. all of these islands are very close to their mainland, which is england on the relatively large island of great britain and part of the uk. other british islands in the channel are the channel islands (e.g., jersey, guernsey, alderney, sark, herm, and a number of very small islands, islets and reefs), but rather than being close to the english coastline, as with the other islands noted above, the channel islands lie very near to france – their closest mainland. the link between the channel islands’ geographical distance from great britain and their french propinquity pertains to their historical integration within the duchy of normandy (now part of northern france), which conquered england in 1066 and with the norman duke, william the conqueror, becoming the first norman king of england. because of their relative closeness to france and strategic importance in the channel, the islands have long been contested by the french (several wars and invasions of the channel islands have occurred), and were even occupied by germany for five years during world war two. the french islands in the channel (known as la manche in french, meaning “sleeve” due to its shape) are numerous and include îles saint-marcouf, tatihou, chausey (an archipelago of 365 islands at low tide), mont saint-michel, île de bréhat, île de batz, île de sieck, and île vierge. the islands within the english channel/la manche are, therefore, situated along both the english and french coastlines, with the channel islands occupying a somewhat anomalous politico-geographic space due to their norman history and allegiance to the anglo-norman crown. it is with such differential geographies of the space and place islands in the channel, and especially the dutiful peculiarity of the channel islands, of which piffling is a part, that becomes an underpinning point of difference in wooden overcoats. figure 1. edited map of original by nordnordwest – own work, using united states national imagery and mapping agency data, cc by-sa 3.0 de, coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11624375 (accessed 12 november 2020). in this setting of islands (and mostly sea), cultural difference is evident in several ways, and it is a theme that is part of wooden overcoats raison d’être. first, there is a difference between the english mainland (on the island of great britain) and the small islands along the english coast. the dissimilarity is primarily in terms of coastal islands that are mostly detached from their mainland by a narrow passage of sea. and second, there is a sense of difference with the channel islands that are located just off the french coast. for the channel islands, they have a sense of difference inherent in their geographic proximity to france yet are british crown possessions (crown dependencies). they have maintained a sense of cultural inbetweenness and identity ambivalence due to their historical influences not only from their norman forebears, but also the french mainland more broadly. indeed, as the podcast’s main writer mentions, the space between france and england is important to the storyline as piffling is set between and is a melting point of cultures (barnes, in bbc radio jersey, 2015; and bbc radio jersey, 2018). this space can be considered as liminal, in that it occupies a position of difference as a consequence of geography, history and culture, politically disjunct from two mainlands yet culturally connected to both. wooden overcoats points to the channel islands as its island location. as madeleine mentions in her opening lines to s1/e1: “now, hidden in the english channel is an island called piffling. on the island is a village: piffling vale”. while the channel islands are only mentioned by name in s3/e8 (the last main episode), as well as in two special episodes, media commentary on the series, allows the listener to discern the island’s geographic and archipelagic location. the idea of a location such as the channel islands (also referred to as channel isles in s1/e6), which has an ambiguous sense of identity that is neither french nor part of the united kingdom (notwithstanding the large number of uk residents who have immigrated to the islands), but having cultural roots in normandy and maintaining allegiance to the crown, is at the core of what the main writer wanted to achieve as a point of difference. indeed, barnes notes that piffling is “an island between two countries [i.e., the uk and france], neither entirely one nor the other”, and, as a result, it does have its own distinct identity (barnes, in morrison, 2015, see also baldacchino et al. 2019). to locate piffling as an island location of inbetweenness, as with the non-fictional channel islands, the podcast mentions france in connection with geography, and england with regard to culture. that is, in s1/e2, when the listener is still at an early stage of comprehending piffling’s raison d’être, rudyard and antigone are in discussion over a game of boggle (a word game) they are playing when the geographic proximity of their island location is foregrounded (see also s3/e8, the last in the series). when antigone declares two words, “nouvelle and vague”, rudyard retorts: rudyard: no good and against the rules. antigone: no they’re not! rudyard: you can’t have french words in an english game! antigone: but we’re closer to france! one of the traits of channel island identity is that the islands are closer to france than they are to the mainland of great britain, therefore showing their inbetweenness as a place that has a hybrid culture with various cultural influences and their own island coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 identity. for example, the laws of the islands’ jurisdictions have emerged from their norman period and are nowadays distinct in europe. there are also unique currencies, postage stamps, languages, and folklore, each of which makes the islands’ cultures quite different to the land of their british sovereign and their nearby french mainland. in connection with piffling’s geography, barnes comments that he was looking for a location for the story, and as english villages had been the focus of other series, he thought that an island would be a point of difference, so he set about creating a fictional channel island (barnes, in bbc radio guernsey, 2015). such a fictional site would be surrounded by water, thereby offering a sense of difference in contrast to small villages and towns on the mainland, which have often been portrayed in british tv comedy series (e.g., doc martin; the vicar of dibley). as noted earlier, another point of difference for barnes was that he wanted the islanders to trust outsiders so that part of the podcast’s humour was an opposite idea to the stereotype that insular locations did not welcome outsiders (ibid). barnes’ intention in locating the podcast on a fictional island relates to the phenomena that baldacchino labels “the island effect” (2005b, p. 30) or “the island lure” (ibid). for barnes, the “lure” of piffling for its main writer was more to do with the location as a point of difference vis-à-vis the english mainland as well as the possibility of portraying that difference in a contrary way to island stereotypes. while the location of piffling is slowly established throughout the series, barnes notes his personal distance from the channel islands. as he comments, “i have no first hand experience of the channel islands, alas, though one of the other writers on the team did, and the producers’ [sic] flatmate comes from one of them too, and was able to vet what we were doing in the scripts” (barnes, in morrison, 2015). regarding his cultural knowledge of the islands, as he admits: “i feel like a total fraud” (barnes, in bbc radio guernsey, 2015). the main writer, therefore, is scripting the storyline around his imagined notion of not only what piffling might be, but also life in the actual channel islands. this type of double inventiveness plays on how islands are perceived, and in the case of the channel islands how they are perceived and represented through an english gaze. some of these traits are played out in the series, particularly in connection with locating piffling (e.g., near to france but close to england) and describing some of the islanders’ key traits (e.g., tax avoidance). it is here that content analysis of wooden overcoats must consider the “ethics of (mis)representation” (hayward, 2019, p. 183) and what the story signifies about islandness, which are topics of discussion in the following parts of this article. the channel islands have been the location of other media series. these include the british tv series, bergerac, which was a crime drama set on jersey and running from 1981 to 1991. although being a dissimilar genre, the visual imagery of bergerac, such as beaches, coastlines and boats, helped portray scenes of islandness on jersey in ways that wooden overcoats as a podcast would find particularly demanding. there is also the bbc three tv pilot of 2010, this is jinsy, which, in its name, plays on the names of jersey and guernsey. set on the latter, this is jinsy is a fictional eccentric comedy that also offers a glimpse of some island locations. for example, on its facebook page, a short description of the show helps illustrate its particular brand of island comedy: jinsy is a little island whose 791 residents are monitored by 1,067 tessellators. these tessellators include video cameras for surveillance as well as little coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 screens to allow the residents to watch important island events, such as the tri-annual island cow wash (live from glotters field). they also include a handy slot for paying fines, and a sphincter nozzle for product and pill downloads. (there's a hook at the back to put your coat on too!). (https://www.facebook.com/thisisjinsy/) the series’ webpage included much information about the show, and even showed a detailed map of jinsy with numerous island landmarks (see https://web.archive.org/web/ 20110925001653/http://www.jinsy.com). however, barnes notes that he hasn’t heard of this is jinsy (barnes, in bbc radio guernsey, 2015), which adds to his unfamiliarity not only with the channel islands, but also how they have been represented in other popular media. while wooden overcoats is a podcast that lacks the imagery of the tv shows such as those mentioned above, it did include some illustrations that helped portray piffling (fig. 2). for example, in a promotional image included on a poster for a 2018 tour, as well as the podcast’s website and facebook page, the subject matter introduced pictorial representations of the island’s residents, as well a shot that seemingly portrays an island scene with an ocean backdrop. the image, however, was actually taken in south devon at compass cove on the dartmouth coast of southern england. regardless of the actual location, and the possibility that the islanders were actually on holiday together on their british mainland, the purpose of the scene is to showcase an idea of the characters and to signify islandness, which is achieved in part with the backdrop of the english channel. fig. 2. publicity image. left to right: agatha doyle, petunia bloom, herbert cough, mr crumble the donkey, sid marlowe, lady templar, eric, madeleine, rudyard, antigone, dr edgware (david k. barnes), georgie, nana crusoe, mayor desmond desmond, rev. nigel wavering and jennifer delacroix. see https://www.behance.net/gallery/74536751/wooden-overcoats. image used with permission courtesy of wooden overcoats. one might think that as an island of inbetweenness, piffling’s residents might have a distinct language, dialect or accent. notwithstanding the need for the series to maintain a degree of familiarity for its target audience, and also the availability of its actors, the characters in wooden overcoats sound very english. they do have a range of accents, but these mostly represent a middle-class southern english village lifestyle albeit with a https://web.archive.org/web/ coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 few northern accents included. the small cast of main characters provides a mix of genders and ages along these lines, but, as the series unfolds, there are some personalities that contribute to a socially diverse island population. for example, s1/e1 includes the following characters (various other figures are introduced throughout the episodes): rudyard funn voice of felix trench proprietor of funn funerals antigone funn voice of beth eyre rudyard’s twin sister mortician at funn funerals eric chapman voice of tom crowley newcomer to piffling who runs a funeral home georgie crusoe voice of ciara baxendale assistant at funn funerals madeleine (narrator and a mouse) voice of belinda lang rudyard friend mayor desmond desmond voice of steve hodson piffling’s mayor rev nigel wavering voice of andy secombe an agnostic vicar marjorie voice of elle mcalpine works in the mayor’s office jerry voice of max tyler a baker piffling the term “piffling” is included in the oxford english dictionary (2020) as both a noun and an adjective. as a noun, it means “the action of talking or behaving ineffectually”, and as an adjective it means “inconsequential, trivial; derisory”. in the context of a comedy fiction podcast, the use of such a name for the island of piffling helps explain the jocular mood that the writer was intending to create. at first, barnes, thought about setting the series in an english mainland village, but because he wanted “a greater sense of a self-sustaining community” (barnes, in morrison, 2015), he chose an island setting because such a location “sounded far more interesting” (ibid). in the podcast, piffling is considered one of the channel islands (morrison, 2015), although its exact location within the archipelago in relation to jersey and guernsey, which are mentioned, is difficult to discern. island locations are typically very selfsustaining, with varying degrees of connectivity to mainlands and other islands, large or small (grydehøj and casagrande, 2020). while in a globalized world, local, national and international trade seem to dominate the commercial sphere of consumer choice, the idea of an island setting such as piffling offers to listeners a sense of an idyllic island lifestyle that has community and a self-sustaining lifestyle at its core. a small village in england might have offered an imagined lifestyle with quaint pubs full of eccentric characters, a post office and village shop, which all meet the demands of locals. there is, of course, coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 connectivity beyond the village, and travel to and from the village might be a regular part of daily life. an island, however, offers a sense of detachment. it is a location beyond the mainland where travel to and from the island would require (if there isn’t a bridge) a journey on a boat or an aircraft. an island creates a liminal dimension of inbetweenness, in both travel and life on the island. some small island locations have even further degrees of separation (pugh, 2013; stratford et al., 2011). for example, in the channel islands, the island of herm is located within the bailiwick of guernsey (an archipelago of three jurisdictions). to get to herm from guernsey one must take a boat. to get to the island from england, one would normally either fly or take a ferry to guernsey. it is with this degree of separation from the mainland that the author wants to present piffling. the island provides a setting that is surrounded by water, limited in space but with abundant facilities, and full of local characters that together help to provide a particularly zany and engaging storyline. in its fictional setting, piffling has a single village called piffling vale. the term “vale” for the village is similar to some villages in england, and may also play on the name vale, which is one of guernsey’s ten parishes (the second largest of the channel islands). even though it’s a small island, piffling has a number of facilities and attractions, including two hospitals, a golf course and a marina, all of which make the island seem abundant in space and population. further, piffling “has a hall, a flower market, two funeral homes and a mayor. despite its size, the village is deceptively well stocked with other establishments and amenities, though mobile phone signal is only available in the vicar’s bathroom” (wooden overcoats, “characters”, 2020). there is clearly a jocular narrative that exaggerates piffling in terms of space and place. its smallness, yet with an abundance of amenities, offers a humorous contradiction that plays along with the story’s characterization of islandness. as baldacchino comments: “islands – hundreds of thousands in the material world, countless more in the fictional one – come literally in all shapes and sizes” (2005a, p. 247). piffling is one such fictional island, the size of which exaggerates its importance in the plot, although island size and the utilization of island space is often an area of concern for island populations (johnson, 2019). however, piffling is very much a fictional island and often represented with an exaggerated text as part of the witty storyline. piffling is actually a particularly small island. as noted on the podcast’s website, it has “a landmass exactly 1 mile [1.6 km] in diameter located in the english channel” (wooden overcoats, “characters”, 2020). in the context of the channel islands, of which piffling is considered a part, the island would not be the largest, and would be smaller than jersey, guernsey, alderney and sark. with a description of being 1 mile in diameter (see also s1/e7), one might presume that piffling has a more-or-less round shape, otherwise its landmass would normally be measured in terms of its length and width. piffling would presumably be smaller than sark, but have a land mass slightly larger than herm. however, in a setting of a seemingly impossible geography (carpenter, 2013), as the writer notes: “quite how everything fits geographically, nobody knows. it’s half the fun!” (barnes, in morrison, 2015). coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 islandness concerning the portrayal of the podcast’s island setting, an analysis of piffling’s tropes of islandness, and that of archipelagic channel islandness, should be considered. as journalist ryan morrison (2015) comments, “it is surprising just how accurately he [barnes] manages to capture the odd, but wonderful weirdness that comes with living in the channel islands, somewhere that isn’t really england but isn’t france either”. the notion of islandness is important to consider regarding how a fictional island is represented and what signifiers of island meaning might be discerned within this particular island discourse. what are island and channel island tropes? just how are islands and the channel islands represented in the podcast? in an attempt to address such questions, i have offered below a study of some key terms that one might expect to appear in the script, along with ones that actually appear. interestingly, as noted above, the word “channel islands” only occurs in s3/e8 and in two special episodes: “random mouse” and “agatha doyle and the honey trap”. as part of an unfolding text on piffling’s exact location, it is only at the end of the third series that the island’s location is explicitly revealed. early in the episode, the channel islands are mentioned in connection with the amount of (alcoholic) drinks at a wedding reception, which have been imported by helicopter, but later in the episode is a scene explaining how georgie arrived in the channel islands. in a boat, she asks: georgie: where are we? nana: the channel islands! georgie: you what? so after all this, we’re only just off the coast of britain? nana: actually, we’re closer to france! (s3, e8) in the “random mouse'' episode, the channel islands are mentioned once. during dialogue on the french mainland, they are referred to in connection with their proximity to france. at random mouse (a pun on the publishing company random house), and with a text replete in similar puns, the mice decide to give madeleine, who narrates the podcast and wants to turn her stories into a bestseller, a publishing opportunity: trevor: right, back to this funeral thing alright, i’ll come out whiskers first; i’ll take this one on. the channel islands would be great for breaking into the french domestic market. i’ve got a contact at bloom-souris i can call. esmerelda: excellent. i think we’ve got space for this madeleine whoever-she-is on the slate for summer. gloria, can you draw up a standard two-book deal and pop it in the post? cheers, thanks. the approximate archipelagic location of piffling is established further with references to real islands in the channel islands. the second largest of the channel islands, guernsey, is referred to in s1/e2. the island is mentioned just once in the episode and in this case in connection to the characters sid marlowe (a journalist) and petunia bloom (a florist), taking a short vacation together. when rudyard asks sid if he’s brought a camera, sid notes: “this better be important. i’m meant to be taking petunia bloom on a hot weekend to guernsey.” while mention of guernsey doesn’t necessary locate piffling coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 within the bailiwick of guernsey, which includes the island of guernsey and the island jurisdictions of alderney and sark, in the context of early references to the channel islands (noted in s3 as discussed above), one might establish that piffling is indeed nearby. further nearby geographical references are given in s3/e1, when there is mention of the largest of the channel islands, jersey, which is referred to once in one scene in opposition to piffling. here, the character lady vivienne templar, when requesting a funeral service, discovers that rudyard’s friend is a mouse and complains: “i’m not hiring funn funerals and i’m not hiring you! i shall be taking my business to jersey!”. the implication is that jersey is nearby and would be able to take on funeral services. most importantly, lady vivienne doesn’t refer to a mainland, either england or france, but stresses jersey as an island of geographic and commercial importance viv-à-vis piffling. in s3/e6, the third largest of the channel islands, alderney, is mentioned, thereby firmly establishing piffling’s geography. referred to four times in scene 9, alderney is presented as a location that could be reached by boat for five pounds or less, with a departure from piffling after 5:30 (presumably in the morning) and returning the same day. in this scene, the mayor missed the boat back to piffling and had to stay the night in alderney. no other channel islands are mentioned by name. with mention of guernsey, jersey and alderney at various places throughout the podcast, piffling’s position is presumed to be as one of the channel islands, although a more precise geographical location is not known. nevertheless, the island seems to have mostly english influences in terms of accents and island features, and, together with the references to other channel islands, one might presume that it is not as close to the french mainland as the other channel islands. the four jurisdictions in the channel islands are well known in the financial services industry. on the islands there are rates of tax that make them favourable for individuals and businesses alike to be based there. sometimes known as “tax havens”, or relating to “tax avoidance”, the islands have featured much in the field of island studies regarding the status of islands in many locations that benefit from the development of a local financial services industry (e.g., oliver, 2019). in wooden overcoats, piffling is contextualized on several occasions in connection with tax, and especially tax avoidance in s1/e5. in this episode, seymour profitte describes with enthusiasm about his tax avoidance in a discussion with antigone, who refers later on in a somewhat sneering manner to “aunty tax man”: antigone: (with effort) so, seymour, my brother said you worked in finance? seymour: i’m a rich man who keeps rich men richer. tax avoidance, that’s the name of the game! keep it quiet. antigone: why? seymour: because people with a lot of money want to keep it – that’s kind of their slogan. antigone: can’t they afford to pay seymour: let me cut you off, you poor deluded fox. economics is a bit more mucho complicato than that. see, my current client made an absolute packet in the nineties working with donatella in heroin-chic, invested everything in north london props, and now he's looking to bring it over here coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 to keep it away from aunty tax man. comes to me, i save him two point five million, pocket ten percent myself: job’s a good’un. antigone: that’s... sweet. seymour: sweet profit, you mean. ha! what else can i tell you? in this setting of small island society that seems to capitalize on its offshore tax status, seymour is aptly named seymour profitte. with a surname that is borrowed from the french for “profit”, which is a further signifier of location in terms of french influence, seymour is all about making a gain from business transactions. he brags about his wealth, tax avoidance, and desire to always make a profit. however, later realizing that seymour was simply after her money, antigone retorts: “oh stuff it, rudyard – it was a con! seymour wanted us to bury millions of pounds in a tax fiddle!”. in the podcast, the degree of engagement with island-related tropes is an important factor to consider when examining islandness in its broadest definition. for this particular series, two spheres of analysis might be considered. the first relates to the author’s outsider perspective on what might be expected to be represented concerning an island in the english channel. if piffling is an island in the channel islands, typically there might be references to nearby and distant mainlands, forms of sea transport, and mention of searelated themes. such expectations relate primarily to a physical focus of the island, rather than occurrences of themes within the podcast’s dialogue itself. for this reason, table 1 shows possible island-related word occurrences that might be used to represent the island as found in s1. while mention of other channel islands and france have been discussed, in the first series of the podcast, for example, there are several distinct direct references to island tropes. however, apart from establishing that piffling is an island in the english channel, typical island-type themes are few. table 1. island-related word occurrences in s1. e1 e2 e3 e4 e5 e6 e7 e8 piffling 4 10 7 12 7 12 16 3 island/isle(s) 3 6 3 4 2 7 3 5 sea/wave 0 0 0 0 0 5 2 2 channel 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 mainland 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 boat/boating 3 1 0 0 0 7 0 0 england/english 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 france/french 0 4 5 0 0 0 0 0 rock 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 sand 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 a comical storyline focused on two funeral houses on a relatively small island helps foreground some of the issues islands have with economies of scale and internal competition (grydehøj, 2011), and the dialogue is centred around this subject matter. local features of the island are also prominent (i.e., village and shop), as is commentary on the weather (i.e., rain). even though the mouse (madeleine) is a character, her presence is also stressed through sound with periodic squeaks. another feature of the soundtrack is the ringing of a bell above the front door at funn funerals. the bell is heard much in the first episode, thereby establishing the business setting rather than the island location. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 several other terms used in the podcast offer a sense of islandness, or at least a coastal culture. for example, seagulls are mentioned on several occasions. in one episode (s2/e1), the natural environment is foregrounded in the dialogue. the text opens with a scene entitled “waves and seagulls”, two island-related tropes, although also common to many coastal settings. the text is complemented by the sounds of waves and seagulls. in a later episode, s1/e6, the topic of seagulls is stressed throughout the text and especially in connection with a type of competition between the rival funeral homes. as rudyard comments: “whoever gives their seagull the best funeral by six o’clock gets the client and the cash.” the subject matter offers much comedy, with, during one heated moment, georgie retorting: “and eric can shove his seagull up his arse”. another coastal reference is mention of fishing and fish. indeed, throughout s1/e6, which is entitled “georgina and the waves”, part of the episode is set on a boat and the narrative has many references that signify a coastal community and help support piffling’s island identity: madeleine: (v.o.) on rudyard’s orders, georgie rowed as furiously as she could, until eventually, well, here we are. adrift, tired, and nowhere to go. and still with a dead seagull to dispose of. still, i should be grateful. they haven’t tried eating me yet. further coastal terms include waves, sea, (sea)gulls, boat, atlantic ocean, mainland, lighthouse, yacht, rowboat, and splashing. of these terms, reference to the “mainland” is particularly important in reinforcing the characters’ island home. while islandness is created through textual references to geographic space and place, the podcast includes background sounds and music that help contribute to the sense of location, albeit not directly to islandness. for example, in s1/e1, the sonic environment includes the sound of rain, wind and sheep, among a number of other sound effects. there is also original incidental music at start and end, which, again, does not have an inherent island association. the voices of the actors seem to signify englishness, and especially a southern, middle-class accent. there are no citations of an island language or dialect, unlike some of the actual channel islands where there are both local accents using spoken english as well as local languages with norman roots on the french mainland (e.g., jèrriais in jersey and guernésiais in guernsey). there are also significant numbers of residents of portuguese and polish decent living on the islands. however, a multicultural island context is signified with a number of global accents, including new zealand, australian, mexican, and irish. conclusion wooden overcoats depicts the fictional island of piffling within a discourse of ‘converse parody’. in the story, make-believe locals are characterized in a way that is intended to challenge commonplace stereotypical images of islanders who, rather than being suspicious of the outside world, are actually open-minded and welcoming of newcomers. that is, with the exception of one of the main personalities in the podcast, rudyard funn, who is confronted by a rival who has recently set up business on the island. for the islanders, it is rudyard who becomes the outsider, rather than his rival, eric chapman, who the islanders adore. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 recognizing that the writers of the podcast may embellish island representation within the story, for the field of island studies such depiction helps reveal several important features of fictional island representation. as well as expanding the critical scholarly field to include further detailed studies of fictitious islands, albeit in this case within a paradigm of existent contextual surroundings such as the island geography of the channel islands and nearby france, this article has foregrounded through critical content analysis distinct tropes of islandness that permeate the narrative. these island expressions are important in terms of not only how and why they are featured in the storyline, but also because of their meaning beyond this particular theatrical podcast. this short study has highlighted the importance and prevalence of the island lure in contemporary media culture, and in this case within the medium of a theatrical podcast. the show’s narrative illustrates how a fictional and geographically insular culture (i.e., piffling) can be vulnerable yet resilient, dependent on travel by sea or air, meteorological conditions, and tidal flows. as a british comedy, it foregrounds the english channel not only as an aquatic border between the uk and france, but also as a space occupied by the liminal channel islands with their distinct heritage geography. in the storyline, the negation of island stereotypes helps reinforce a negative discourse of difference, where the foregrounding of islander attitudes through humour highlights its opposite, which in the storyline is the character rudyard funn. acknowledging the possibility of further study of the podcast, which might include additional qualitative content analysis, an investigation of reception, and interviews with the writers and actors, this short article has offered an inquiry into some of the fictional island dynamics connected with piffling, and added to discourse of fictional island studies more broadly. endnotes 1 as a writer and script editor, barnes has many other credits to his name. born in the coastal city of portsmouth in the south of england, barnes has focused on comedy, where he has worked in audio, stage and dramaturgy, amongst other areas. other writers have also worked on the podcast (see https://www.davidkbarnes.com). 2 see further https://www.woodenovercoats.com/press (accessed 9 february 2021). references “piffling, n.”. oed online. september (2020). oxford university press. https://www.oed.com/view/entry/236605 (accessed november 10, 2020). “piffling, adj.”. oed online. september (2020). oxford university press. https://www.oed.com/view/entry/244603 (accessed november 10, 2020). coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 bacon, francis [1627] (2008). new atlantis, in more, bacon and neville, three early modern utopias: utopia, new atlantis and the isle of pines. oxford: 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(2011). envisioning the archipelago. island studies journal 6 (2): 113–130. vicar of dibley (1994-2000). tiger aspect productions wooden overcoats website: https://www.woodenovercoats.com (accessed 17 november 2020). the podcasts are available on the website or on itunes. wooden overcoats. (2020). “characters”. https://www.woodenovercoats.com/characters (accessed 17 november 2020). biography: henry johnson is professor of music at the school of performing arts at the university of otago. https://www.woodenovercoats.com/ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 150 the new zombie apocalypse and social crisis in south korean cinema sung-ae lee lecturer, asian studies macquarie university sung-ae.lee@mq.edu.au copyright©2019 sung-ae lee. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the popular culture version of the zombie, developed over the latter half of the twentieth century, made only sporadic appearances in south korean film, which may in part be attributed to the restrictions on the distribution of american and japanese films before 1988. thus the first zombie film monstrous corpse (goeshi 1980, directed by gang beom-gu), was a loose remake of the spanish-italian non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (1974). monstrous corpse was largely forgotten until given a screening by kbs in 2011. zombies don’t appear again for a quarter of a century. this article examines four zombie films released between 2012 and 2018: “ambulance”, the fourth film in horror stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; train to busan (2016) (directed by yeon sang-ho), the first south korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; seoul station (2016), an animation prequel to train to busan (also directed by yeon sang-ho); and rampant (2018, directed by kim seong-hun ), a costume drama set in korea’s joseon era. based on a cognitive studies approach, this article examines two conceptual metaphors which underlie these films: the very common metaphor, life is a journey, and the endemically korean metaphor the nation is a family. keywords: zombie, social crisis, south korean cinema korea’s traumatic history throughout most of the twentieth century — japanese colonisation, the korean war, and almost forty years of military dictatorship — has left deep psychological scars on the national psyche, and the recent emergence of zombie narrative genres has furnished another vehicle for expressing the social impact of that mailto:sung-ae.lee@mq.edu.au mailto:sung-ae.lee@mq.edu.au coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 151 history. the globalised popular culture version of the zombie, which was developed over the latter half of the twentieth century, had made only sporadic appearances in south korean film before the twenty-first century, which may in part be attributed to the restrictions on the distribution of american and japanese films before 1988 (the year of the seoul olympics). thus the first korean zombie film, monstrous corpse (goesi 1980, directed by gang beom-gui), was a loose remake of the spanish-italian non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (1974). zombies made no further screen appearance over the next quarter of a century, and monstrous corpse was largely forgotten. interest in zombies did not emerge until the early twenty-first century with the release of two zombie films: the clichéd dark forest (2006), directed by kim jeong-min, and the well-received the neighbour zombie (2009), a low-budget portmanteau film on which four new directors cooperated. consisting of six stories under the umbrella of the outbreak of a zombie virus in seoul, the neighbour zombie explores several themes and motifs which recur in subsequent zombie films, especially issues of human consciousness and the propensity of those in power both to disregard the plight of everyday or marginalised people and to exploit disruption to their own advantage. thus in segment four (directed by ryu hun), a scientist working for the corporation from which the virus escaped develops a vaccine to cure it, but must flee when the corporation seeks to murder him so it can have sole ownership of the vaccine. segment five (directed by jang yun-jeong) explores the post-traumatic stress caused by the memories of the horrors perpetrated by those zombies who the vaccine had restored to humanity and those citizens who had done terrible things while retaining human form. zombies, however, are not just a metaphor for trauma and dehumanisation in the past. writing of the prominence of zombie movies in american cinema, daniel w. drezner argues that the living dead are a metaphor for a variety of anxieties in an american body politic buffeted by asymmetric threats and economic uncertainty (2014: 825–6). similarly, linnie blake, in a formulation that also resonates with recent korean experience, suggests that “the zombie apocalypse has provided audiences with a means of looking at and working through the contemporary deliquescence of a body politic infected by neoliberalism. the zombie is, in short, the monster of choice for a generation tired of a decade of governmental facilitation of the anti-democratic impulses of neoliberal corporatism” (2015: 28). a comparable tendency in south korea, impelled by the aftermath of the catastrophic attempt to impose neoliberal economics by the imf in 1997, by the stranglehold on wealth maintained by a few family companies, and by endemic corruption in legal and political systems, is to use the genre of the zombie apocalypse as a metaphor for global crisis, disorder and fear. the imf intervention is just another example of the threat of invasion by outsiders which has been a shadow — and reality — under which the korean peninsula has lived for centuries, and which is overtly evoked in the historical film rampant (2018), in which the zombie virus arrives on a boat captained by a dutch-speaking westerner whose business is to sell guns to a faction planning to overthrow the royal family. societal structures and institutions, including governments and the military, are not only ineffective in stopping the chaos that occurs during a zombie outbreak but are apt to be its cause. the attribution of the source of the virus to a biotech or pharmaceutical company, as in the neighbour zombie or train to busan (2016), comments on the moral irresponsibility of such companies in their drive for higher profits and monopolies over expensive products, but also expresses scepticism coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 152 about levels of government complicity in favour of these companies and against the interests of the people. zombies and symbolic representation this article examines some zombie films produced in south korea between 2012 and 2018: “ambulance”, the fourth segment in horror stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; train to busan (2016) (directed by yeon sang-ho), the first south korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; seoul station (2016), an animation prequel to train to busan (2016, also directed by yeon sang-ho); and rampant (2018, directed by kim seong-hun ), a costume drama set in korea’s premodern joseon era (a genre known as sageuk in korean). some examples will also be drawn from kingdom (2019), a television drama series still in process at time of writing. based on a cognitive studies approach, the discussion explores two conceptual metaphors which underlie these works: the very common metaphor, life is a journey,ii and the endemically korean metaphor, the nation is a family. these metaphors are expressed as simple scripts or schemas (a journey, for example, has a beginning, a purpose, some encounters and an end) but, as david s. miall argued in his influential article “beyond the schema given”, simple schemas do not explain the unfolding and shifting meanings of complex narratives and must be modified or adapted. the process of comprehension is further guided by affect. miall contends that affect “allows experiential and evaluative aspects of the reader’s self-concept to be applied to the task of comprehension; [it] enables cross-domain categorisation of text elements”; and it pre-structures the audience’s understanding of the meaning of a text (56). there has been considerable scholarly attention from various critical perspectives to the functions of affect in horror films (e.g., bartsch et al 2010; hoglund 2013; winter 2014; benson-allott 2015). underpinning this conversation has been the work of silvan tomkins (1963), who argued that affects give depth to human existence through selfawareness and intersubjective relations. because we build up a memory bank of affective experiences we are able to develop and draw upon complex affect theories in order to negotiate our social world. zombie films, however, are premised on the possible destruction of that social world and hence, as affect, “horror emerges as a relation between subjects and objects by threatening the perceiver with his or her insignificance and ephemerality as an object” (benson-allott: 268). because zombie films centre on bodies that transform and become monstrous — the once-human that is no longer human — they produce distinct affects of fear and guilt in represented characters who escape, however temporarily, zombification. on the other hand, some characters transform into altruistic subjects, transcending the self-regardingness that had characterised their lives. this transformation is especially evident in train to busan. as undead creatures, zombies are symbolic representations of the consequences of the loss of self (wonser and boyns: 632) and subsequent exclusion from any actualisation of life is a journey because between the moment of transformation and any depicted destruction a zombie lacks consciousness, agency, social life or deliberated action. a zombie has only a drive to run with a zombie pack and to kill. likewise, the metaphor coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 153 the nation is a family cannot apply to a zombie, which is no longer a member of either nation or family. none of the films which comprise the corpus of this article shows any interest in the specific identity of a zombie or in the life of a character subsequent to zombie transformation. he or she simply disappears into the undifferentiated zombie horde, even those characters in train to busan or rampant who have engaged audiences in strong affective involvement. a useful argument here is mitchell travis’s application to zombies of agamben’s concept of “bare life” as applied to a person who is not necessarily recognised as having a socially or morally significant life and is thus outside of the boundaries of the social order and juridical structures (795–6). how such a person is treated is therefore without ethical consequence (wonser and boyns: 635). however, in seoul station and rampant, in particular, the rulers do not make a moral distinction between people and zombies and, identifying a zombie irruption as an insurrection, kill indiscriminately. the erasing of the personhood of characters who become infected thus accords with processes of exception which embrace not only zombies but also underclasses, security threats, terrorists, aliens and frequently women. the infection in rampant originates with a foreign merchant ship, and the “insurrection” in seoul station is blamed on “communists”, that is, north korea. prosocial and pro-self behaviour in zombie films as bishop (2015: 14) argues, new directions in zombie films in the twenty-first century have been enabled by “the world’s collective fears and anxieties about terrorist attacks and global pandemic. because zombies look like our former friends and loved ones, they represent the plain-clothed terrorist or the brainwashed extremist”. in south korea, such anxieties take the form of persisting contemporary and collective fears about north korean terrorism and international pandemics (sars, avian flu, mad cow disease [bse]), and cultural concerns over immigration and identity politics. finally, and indeed centrally, a core thematic element of south korean zombie film is a contrast between proself and prosocial behaviour and the classic contrast between egoism and altruismempathy that underpins it. as a recurrent theme, the contrast between prosocial and proself behaviour has run through cinema and tv drama since at least the end of the 1980s. more recently, the extreme symbol of pro-self behaviour has crystallised as the zombie, for although zombies are devoid of ego their single drive to attack humans figures the drive to survive which becomes extreme in pro-self people in a time of crisis. characters in zombie films always include one or two who are so deeply egoistic they cannot grasp that their survival, for which they are ready to sacrifice the entire country, depends on prosocial action. in their survey of motifs and conventions in western zombie films, robert wonser and david boyns (2016) observe that those who survive a zombie apocalypse do so by creating supportive and protective social networks; in contrast, “it is extremely rare to find a lone individual who successfully survives without social support; most survivors of a zombie apocalypse have to collaborate” (642–3). korean zombie cinema has reproduced this convention and blended it with the contrast between pro-self and prosocial behaviours. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 154 as i have argued, what zombies might signify or symbolise embraces a range of possibilities, but it can nevertheless be left inexplicit, as in “ambulance,” the first zombie story to appear in film after the neighbour zombie. although the journey of the ambulance through one zone to another indicates that the larger setting is based on a war zone created by a partial invasion of seoul, the focus of this short film is on the failure of a small group to sustain a level of prosocial behaviour which would enable them to survive. “ambulance” is only twenty-four minutes in duration and the action mostly takes place within the confined space of a moving ambulance, so zombies make only fleeting appearances when they either pursue or attack the vehicle. the practice of depicting zombies as catalyst or enemy secondary to the situation of characters who are still human is the norm in south korean cinema. the action played out within the ambulance pivots on the metaphors life is a journey and the nation is a family. an ambulance crossing a zone of the city infested with zombies is flagged down by a woman seeking help for her injured daughter, who remains unconscious until the final seconds of the narrative. the crew of the ambulance consists of a driver, a female nurse and a military medical orderly. tension develops between orderly, nurse and mother because of an ambiguous wound on the child’s arm: if the cause is a traffic accident, as the mother asserts, all will be well, but the orderly believes it is a zombie bite and insists the child should be thrown from the ambulance. the lives of everyone in this microcosm depend on resolution of their conflicting desires: the mother places family above everything and ends up killing the other adults; the orderly is obsessed with self-preservation; and the nurse is stubbornly professional and altruistic. mother, orderly and nurse represent schemas which appear in all of the zombie texts considered here. for example, in a parallel incident depicted in episodes three and four of the television drama series kingdom, an aristocratic mother refuses to allow the zombified body of her “precious son” to be burned and smuggles it onto the boat in which town officials, aristocrats and military leaders are irresponsibly making their escape. the mother is depicted as unlikable and the officials and aristocrats are contemptible, assuring one another that “noblemen are the pillars of the country” and must survive (ep.3, 47:50) as they flee after making no provision for the common people. the affective alignment of viewers with the people thus abandoned pre-structures the outcome of the nobles’ behaviour (a zombie on the boat is to be anticipated, even hoped for) and audience acquiescence to and satisfaction with their destruction. the recurrent self-preservation schema contrasts with the altruism schema within the enclosed space of the ambulance and again of the train in train to busan. in the latter, one of the most affective moments occurs near the close of a twenty-minute segment (00:54 ff.) in which after an abortive attempt to find security at daejeon station the surviving passengers have become separated into three groups. seok-u, sang-hwa and yeong-guk team up to fight their way through the zombies in four of the train’s carriages in order to rescue four passengers, including seok-u’s daughter (su-an) and sang-hwa’s wife (seonggyeong). having done that, they take them through one more carriage only to find that the other passengers, led by egoistic, pro-self businessman yong-seok, have barricaded the connecting door and refuse them entry. in a very moving scene, working-class, foulmouthed sang-hwa entrusts his wife to seok-u’s care and sacrifices himself to give the coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 155 others a chance to survive;1 in contrast to sang-hwa’s altruistic act, yong-seok demonstrates his preparedness to sacrifice everybody else on the train to save himself. his response when seok-u’s group break into the carriage is to assert that they are infected and in a mob response the other passengers support his demand that the new arrivals must move to the vestibule. on two later occasions yong-seok pushes other people into the path of zombies to enable his own escape (01:31:15, a train conductor; 01:33:31, schoolgirl jin-hui). the main contrasts between egoism and altruism in these scenes (and there are more) further demonstrate how affect pre-structures both understanding and response: in simple terms, an audience will feel strongly that seonggyeong must survive as a proper outcome of sang-hwa’s altruism, and that yong-seok is contemptible and should not survive. the three social groups on the fleeing boat in kingdom — aristocrats, government officials and higher military — function as a cross-domain reference to the socio-political structure of modern south korea. historical dramas in south korea are always also about the present and readily suggest cross-domain parallels between, for example, joseon aristocrats who possess and consume much of the country’s resources and the modern chaebols, hereditary family companies which make up 1% of the population and control 60% of the country’s wealth. in a comparable way, the social schemas represented in the ambulance can be deemed to represent wider social domains, such as the self-regarding family, those who wield political and judicial power, the everyday worker (the driver), and the professional class. as a microcosm of society, the ambulance should be a vehicle (literally and metaphorically) that supports people on life’s journey but instead embodies the helplessness and paranoia instilled in characters (and audiences) by the common conflict between self-preservation and moral behaviour which is prompted by a social division figured by the zombie outbreak. the close of “ambulance” suggests that the story is a dark fable about social cohesion. having killed the orderly, the nurse and the driver (who transformed after being bitten during a zombie attack on the ambulance), the mother brings the ambulance into the safe zone where it crashes. the daughter wakes, not a zombie, and greets her mother, who promptly zombifies and, her former life obliterated from memory, bites the daughter she relentlessly protected. there are thus no survivors of the journey, the family has collapsed and zombies have entered the safe zone, presaging a full invasion and the collapse of the nation. social disorder as a cause of a zombie apocalypse “ambulance” and seoul station, the harrowing animation prequel to train to busan, are both zombie apocalypses in which there are no survivors. only two of the train passengers in train to busan are human at the end of the journey, a pregnant woman (seong-gyeong) and a young female child (su-an), in an apparent allusion to apocalyptic disaster narratives such as george r. stewart’s seminal earth abides (1949) and robert c. 1 the affective appeal of this character is confirmed by the national and international popularity of the actor, ma dong-seok, subsequent to the screening of the film. “train to busan takes don lee [ma dongseok] to hollywood.” http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2016/09/398_214970.html coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 156 o’brien’s z for zachariah (1974), in which a small breeding stock exists to repopulate the destroyed world. seoul station associates the outbreak with government incompetence and wide-spread social problems. a scientific blunder, enabled by economic adventurism, corrupts the natural world; politicians manipulate the media to cover it up; society is driven by self-interest and a cultural investment in hierarchy and power; and as a result the altruistic minority can preserve very few citizens. the suggestion that a zombie apocalypse in south korea is a reflection of a debilitated social disorder is made most strongly in the opening eighteen minutes of seoul station, at which point the first zombie attack is shown. set in dimly lit streets populated by the city’s underclass, the opening depicts a dystopian world inhabited by the unemployed, the homeless, alcoholics and street prostitutes. the first scene depicts an elderly man in a dishevelled state bleeding from a wound on his neck. two young men he passes, who — in a heavy-handed coincidence — are discussing the need for a universal welfare system, decide they should help him, but change their minds when they realise he is one of the homeless and exudes a horrible smell. other people the man passes exhibit a general lack of willingness to be involved. help is attempted by a friend, another of the homeless, but he is incompetent in the face of the apathy of officials and public hostility. this strand is continued across the opening until a pivot point at which the man zombifies (18:46). a second strand entwined in the opening involves a runaway teenage girl, hye-seon, who emerges as the film’s focal point. life is a journey and the nation is a family again coincide in hye-seon’s journey through the night. she lives with her egoistic boyfriend in a sleazy apartment building, has no money, and cannot pay the rent. having woken to find her boyfriend has gone out, she seeks him in an internet café, where he has just posted an online advertisement to prostitute her. they argue and she then roams the darkened city, arriving at seoul station just after 12:30 as the first zombie horde erupts (25:15). for the rest of the film she flees the zombies who infest the city, but is also sought by seokgyu, a man who claims to be her father but is really a brutal pimp she had run away from in the film’s backstory. the cross-domain lapping of schemas for father and pimp, of concepts of protection and exploitation, resonates with repeated complaints amongst underclass citizens that society has used and discarded them (“this country doesn’t care about us” [01:08:57]) and interrogates the nation is a family metaphor. the idea is kept visually prominent by a repeated motif of billboards advertising the availability of new luxury apartments, which mock the homeless in seoul station who sleep in front of these billboards. a viewer’s affective response to this motif pre-structures understanding of the text. encounters with riot police and the military escalate disregard for the common citizens, since they are conflated with the zombies and accused of staging an insurrection, which in turn becomes an excuse to declare martial law and to attack the citizens with tear gas, water cannon and bullets (01:00). such scenes further allude to the many representations of police or military brutality in realist films depicting the suppression of the 1980 gwangju democratisation movement. classic films include peppermint candy (1999), the old garden (2006) and may 18 (2007), but the topic comprises a filmic sub-genre, most recently exemplified by a taxi driver (2017). the intertextual effect, which is evoked overtly in the film’s penultimate scene which depicts zombies being shot by the military, calls into question any assumption that the nation is a family. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 157 viewers easily distinguish the uninfected from the infected, but seoul station is an emotionally disengaged film, as only characters in small roles elicit empathy from viewers: a middle-aged homeless man who helps hye-seon and is shot when he protests about the mistreatment of ordinary people; and a young man who embodies the altruist schema by saving hye-seon at the cost of his own life (01:13:50). hye-seon might have attracted some empathy as a weak, female victim lacking any agency, but she is not attributed with any inner life and shows little concern for other people. at the close of the film she is caught by seok-gyu after she has taken refuge in one of the advertised luxury apartments, kicked until she is only semi-conscious and is about to be raped in the expensively furnished bedroom that adorns the display apartment. a tear trickles from one eye, perhaps a realisation that she is trapped in a cycle of prostitution and violence. however, she instead dies and transforms into a zombie, but there is little audience satisfaction when she then destroys the pimp who is her persecutor — she has zombie strength, but because a zombie has neither memory nor consciousness she has even less agency than she had when human. affect is shaped here not by empathy with hye-seon nor by satisfaction at the natural justice meted out to seok-gyu, but by the significance of the setting in its confirmation of the social injustice that overwhelms the “bare life” population. viewers are not directly shown the end of seok-gyu but see rather the shadow of the former hye-seon as she stoops to where she has thrown him to the floor. the shadow plays across an expensive vanity table while the light falls brightly on a wall plaque which details the cost and provenance of the object (see figure 1). figure 1. hye-seon zombifies seok-gyu in that zombies are symbolic representations of the consequences of the loss of self, it seems clear that hye-seon’s lack of personhood as a zombie is merely an extension of her lack of personhood as a young woman in an androcentric society which treats her as coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 158 a possession without rights. it is arguable that a further reason for the lack of audience empathy with hye-seon is that it recognises her bare life status. affect and closure in train to busan affect plays a more substantial role in train to busan, especially in its very powerful close. from the outset of the film, an audience is positioned between apprehension and hope because, as in seoul station, director yeon sang-ho opens the film with images of a dystopian society: farmers suffer from economic uncertainty and fear of another pandemic; families are dysfunctional, as exemplified by seok-u’s broken marriage and his poor relationship with daughter su-an; a research facility has caused an environmental crisis which authorities dismiss as an insignificant issue; and financial institutions are greedy and opportunistic and pay no heed to the wider economic damage they cause in their quest for profit. a strong image is established in the scene which concludes the pre-titles segment of the film: a farmer takes his truck through a checkpoint controlled by a man wearing chemical protection clothing, and knows he has been told a lie about the reason for the check; his truck then hits and kills a deer on the road, but as he drives away the dead animal struggles to its feet and a final close-up as it stares at the camera shows a bloody neck and the glassy eyes of a zombie. the image obviously declares that this is a zombie film, but also establishes that the zombie represents a widespread social and ecological crisis. having established this moment of anxiety, the film then cuts to the title screen. the opening vignettes about scientific and economic irresponsibility, egoism in family life and ecological crisis also establish the core thematic element of the film as a contrast between pro-self and prosocial behaviour and the classic contrast between egoism and altruism that underpins it. these contrasts are demonstrated at a more specific level by the behaviours of seok-u and su-an but are also distributed among other characters. characters in zombie films may be fixed, like the zombies themselves in their mindless drive to attack humans, but are not defined like the zombies by a single characteristic. character complexity may emerge as the film unfolds, as with the character of sang-hwa: he does not develop during the brief journey but reveals depths of other-regardingness, compassion and courage in his response to the extreme situation in which most of the passengers on the train turn into zombies. in contrast, seok-u is a character who develops, jolted by events to change from a self-centred individualist into someone who can think altruistically and hence behave prosocially. his early behaviour emphasises his pro-self attitude — for example, when su-an gives up her seat to jong-gil, an elderly woman, seok-u reprimands her: “you didn’t have to do that … at a time like this, only watch out for yourself” (34:42). su-an defends her prosocial action by commenting that her grandmother had sore knees — that is, her physical explanation works by analogy and evokes a particular form of altruistic motivation which batson and shaw define as behaviour “induced by feeling empathy for the person in need” (110). su-an’s concern for the well-being of another thus accords with robert shaffer’s (2000) definition of prosocial behaviours as “actions that benefit other people by helping, supporting, and coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 159 encouraging their goal accomplishment or well-being”. much of the research into prosocial behaviours since the concept appeared in the 1970s has been focused on the moral development of children (choi et al. [2011], leahy [1979], shaffer [2000]), which resonates with the strategy in train to busan of presenting many sequences, especially in the first half of the film, from su-an’s perspective. she is represented within a concept of childhood as innocent and open-hearted and more capable of altruistic behaviour than adults, which is still a common conception in south korea. she overturns seok-u’s proself assumptions when, for a brief and dangerous time, passengers disembark at daejeon station. seok-u thinks he has made a special arrangement with a friend there and draws su-an away from the other passengers. in the following exchange su-an’s criticism of her father’s pro-self attitude from her own prosocial perspective shocks him into speechlessness and initiates a process of change. when she learns about his arrangement, she immediately wants to include the acquaintances they have made on the train, especially seong-gyeong and sang-hwa (43:08): su-an: i’ll go tell the others. seok-u: you don’t have to. su-an: of course i do. seok-u: forget them! we’re all on our own! su-an: you only care about yourself. that’s why mummy left. su-an’s acts of kindness and altruism are not performed with any expectation of reward, but audience affective alignment with her actions looks forward to a close in which she is rewarded by survival. it is thus affectively satisfying that near the close of the film a now prosocial but infected seok-u entrusts su-an to the care of seong-gyeong, just as sang-hwa had entrusted seong-gyeong to seok-u’s care. affect is visually reinforced near the close as seok-u, su-an and seong-gyeong flee the pursuing zombie horde to seek safety on a train engine set in motion by the original train’s driver (figure 2). the pursuit-script in which audience alignment is with the fugitives is calculated to generate strong affect driven by hope and anxiety. this scene is a montage of high angle shots from behind the fugitives, low angle frontal shots, and shots of the pursuing zombies from various angles. camera placement thereby builds anxiety through details such as distance to be traversed and the vast number of pursuers (see figure 2, top), while the low angle frontal shots accentuate the fugitives’ impediments (seok-u is carrying su-an and seong-gyeong is heavily pregnant – see figure 2, bottom). in the shots filmed from a high vantage point, everything in the mise-en-scene – buildings, trains, railway tracks, the converging zombie horde – is directed toward the focal point at the top centre of the screen, the obscured horizon where safety may lie. everything in the scene that moves – the engine, the humans and the zombies – are moving toward that exit point, which functions as a symbol of hope. because a possibility of escape remains, viewers will hope their affective alignment will be rewarded. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 160 figure 2. zombie pursuit in train to busan. top: aerial view; bottom: low angle reverse shot. a similar ambivalence is produced in the five low angle frontal segments, which twice interact with the aerial shots in shot-reverse shot sequence (as in figure 2). the lower camera placement narrows the visual distance between pursued and pursuers, thus increasing viewer anxiety, but these characters are also the three in whom most empathy has been invested by this stage of the film. affective anxiety is also increased in two other ways. first, by the music on the soundtrack, which alludes melodically and instrumentally to ennio morricone’s unsettling “ecstasy of gold”; second, by the recuperation of the metaphor the nation is a family, in that the three characters appear visually as a family and an imaged, but unlikely, romantic closure might choose that option. the image of a blended family changes the idea of what constitutes a nation, since, in contrast to the undifferentiated horde of zombies, such an imagined family would have two children each with a blood relationship with one different parent and no blood relationship with each other. in other words, the nation is multiple not homogenous. of course this does not happen, as once they safely board the engine they encounter yongseok in the process of zombification, and in the inevitable struggle seok-u manages to push him from the engine but is bitten in the process. seok-u’s ending is the only exploration of zombification offered in any of these films. having said his farewells, and entrusted su-an to seong-gyeong, he walks to the back of the engine in order to throw himself off before he transforms. standing there, he returns to the happiest moment in his human life and remembers su-an at the time of her birth, and particularly sharp is a memory of holding her tiny foot between his thumb and forefinger (see figure 3). the coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 161 scene defines the elements of cognition and subjectivity a person loses when he or she turns into a zombie: consciousness, self-awareness, memory, perception, intentionality, emotion, empathy and, as exemplified by the vivid memory of su-an’s foot, perceptual qualia, that is, specific individual instances of subjective, conscious experience, or “the ways that things look, seem, and appear to conscious observers” (mclaughlin: 856). earlier in the film memory loss is foreshadowed when seok-u realises that zombies do not remember how a sliding door operates, but his final human moments present a subtler and more comprehensive account of what it means to be human. his fall from the engine as zombification strikes is expressed only as a shadow, as reproduced in seoul station, but here more overtly as a shadow of his former self, symbolising his transition from the humanity he has discovered in this journey to the non-human state of the zombie. positively, su-an and seong-gyeong have been saved by his efforts. after they have arrived at the perimeter of busan, the two escape being shot as they approach a military barricade because the soldiers hear su-an singing the song she had learned to sing for her father, an action which defines her as human, but which also affirms that humanity must be intersubjective. figure 3: memory of qualia in train to busan zombie apocalypse and the protagonist’s redemption-script character development is apt to occur according to familiar scripts. in the everyday world the train journey from seoul to busan, travelling on the ktx, takes less than three hours. in the film the journey is interrupted, first by the unsuccessful attempt to find security at daejeon station and later when the line is blocked at east daegu station, and while the extended time of the journey is not necessary for seok-u to gain self-knowledge and moral redemption it does serve that process practically and thematically. seok-u enacts a form of a redemption-script, which is based on a narrative assumption that individuals are both socially constituted and have agency, so that an individual’s subjectivity evolves out of a dialogue between social constitution and agency. to surrender one’s agency, as seok-u is shown to have done in his employment as a fund manager, is to become something not very different from a zombie, whereas a redemption-script assumes that a character has the agency to exchange the narrative he or she is living for a better life (colvin: 221, citing maruna). the redemption-script here includes five steps: evidence that the character is living a reprehensible life; the character’s expression of pro-self coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 162 beliefs; behavioural reactions of others; a confrontation which prompts self-examination; and consequent changes in attitude and behaviour. in developing this redemption-script as a core modifier of the life is a journey metaphor and in particular as the pathway from pro-self to prosocial attitudes, train to busan extends the tendency in south korean cinema for zombies to be employed as secondary to a main story about human relationships, as is again evident in the genre mash-up rampant, which mixes a sageuk “palace intrigue” story with a zombie blockbuster and throws in elements of humour and contemporary satire along the way. rampant is almost a collage of zombie film motifs — resources hoarded by the wealthy and powerful, who cause the zombie plague; towns where buildings are broken and deserted, and streets strewn with bodies and rubbish; selfsacrificial heroes — but the strongest thematic element is the redemption-script which frames the career of the protagonist, prince ganglim. having lived as a political hostage in qing (china) for ten years, ganglim returns to joseon at the behest of his brother, the crown prince, who is embroiled in a coup against his incompetent and paranoid father and wants ganglim to take the crown princess out of the country to safety. ganglim has no interest in politics or power, but wants to return as soon as possible to his hedonistic, womanising life in beijing. the power struggle for the throne becomes intertwined with a zombie epidemic when sociopathic war minister kim ja-jun leads a raid on the dutch merchant ship which is selling guns but also has a crew member who has become a zombie and who bites one of kim’s soldiers. kim opportunistically sends the soldier home and plans to take advantage of the ensuing chaos to seize power and declare himself king. as in many zombie films, pro-self behaviour of government institutions proves complicit in the outbreak of the zombie infection, and the uncontrollable hunger of the zombies parallels the hunger for power which corrupts those institutions. this is the context in which ganglim enacts the same redemption-script developed in train to busan and through overcoming both the machinations of kim and the zombie scourge matures from an idle hedonist into a leader who actualises the metaphor the nation is a family in his willingness to hear the cries of the people and to strive to lessen human suffering and improve social well-being. conclusion as daniel w. drezner observes, zombie stories end in one of two ways: “the elimination/subjugation of all zombies, or the eradication of humanity from the face of the earth” (2011: 9). these are broadly the options available to south korean cinema: “ambulance,” seoul station and train to busan indicate the second, tragic option, while rampant is a triumphant heroic narrative. the late appearance of zombie films in south korea has meant that the zombie has arrived with narrative forms, attributes and contexts that post-date, for example, danny boyle’s 28 days later (2002): zombies now move fast and their drive to consume commonly reflects neo-liberal manifestations of contemporary capitalism and the potentially destructive effects of the quest by social and economic elites for power and short-term financial gain. two components which seem to be special characteristics of this cinema, however, are the prominence of prosocial themes coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 163 and the redemption-script. contrasts between prosocial and pro-self behaviour have been a feature of south korean cinema and tv drama since around 1990, where they have been an aspect of social critique directed at the extreme concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few and corruption in the legal and political systems that sustains and profits from inequality and injustice. elements of rampant make obvious reference to the impeachment of president park geun-hye in 2016 for a variety of acts of malfeasance. the reference is especially evident near the close of the film where a torch-light gathering of citizens to celebrate the defeat of the zombies and a change of regime is a visual quotation of the candle-light protests which were instrumental in the downfall of park. prosocial behaviour and the redemption-script come together at this point. the genre-blending of rampant gestures toward a sub-genre of zombie films which is comedic. this genre appeared sporadically in the 1980s and has been established in western cinema since shaun of the dead (2004). as rodger a. payne explains, comedic zombie stories disrupt the genre “by creating characters, situations, and narratives that are not altogether centered on the apocalyptic nature of the situation” (220). he further argues that satire and black comedy can effectively critique the self-centredness of elite characters and provide subversive perspectives (213). a zombie comedy, the odd family: zombie on sale, was released in 2019, and evoked the familiar satirical themes of a corrupt pharmaceutical company behind the advent of the first zombie and the attempt to exploit the situation financially, but is a genre mishmash rather than a subversion of a tradition as achieved in its main precursors, the american films shaun of the dead, zombieland (2009) and warm bodies (2013). a successful zombie comedy needs both a production team and an audience well-versed in a zombie tradition in order to bring about the interplay of familiarity and difference that will have a comic effect and at this time the small number of zombie films made in south korea does not constitute a sufficient mass. references bartsch, anne, markus appel, and dennis storch. “meta-emotions at the movies: the role of the need for affect in audiences’ experience of horror and drama,” communication research 37.2 (2010): 167–90 batson, c. daniel and laura l. shaw. “evidence for altruism: toward a pluralism of prosocial motives.” psychological inquiry 2.2 (1991): 107–22 benson-allott, caetlin. “dreadful architecture: zones of horror in alien and lee bontecou’s wall sculptures,” journal of visual culture 14.3 (2015): 267–78 bishop, kyle william. how zombies conquered popular culture: the multifarious walking dead in the 21st century. jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2015 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 164 blake, linnie. “‘are we worth saving? you tell me’: neoliberalism, zombies and the failure of free trade.” gothic studies 17.2 (2015): 26–41 choi, jiyoung, david w. johnson and roger johnson. “relationships among cooperative learning experiences, social interdependence, children’s aggression, victimization, and prosocial behaviors.” journal of applied social psychology 41.4 (2011): 976–1003. colvin, sarah. “why should criminology care about literary fiction? literature, life narratives and telling untellable stories.” punishment & society 17.2 (2015): 211–29 drezner, daniel w. theory of international politics and zombies. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2011 drezner, daniel w. “metaphor of the living dead: or, the effect of the zombie apocalypse on public policy.” discourse social research: an international quarterly 81.4 (2014): 825–49 hoglund, johan anders. “parables for the paranoid: affect and the war gothic.” continuum: journal of media & cultural studies 27.3 (2013): 397–407 leahy, robert l. “development of conceptions of prosocial behavior: information affecting rewards given for altruism and kindness.” developmental psychology 15.1 (1979): 34–7 maruna, shadd. making good: how ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. washington, dc: american psychological association, 2001 mclaughlin, brian p. “hill on phenomenal consciousness.” philosophical studies 173.3 (2016): 851–60 miall, david s. “beyond the schema given: affective comprehension of literary narratives.” cognition & emotion 3.1 (1989): 55–78 payne, rodger a. “laughing off a zombie apocalypse: the value of comedic and satirical narratives.” international studies perspectives 18.2 (2017): 211–24 shaffer, david r. social and personality development. belmont, ca: wadsworth/thomson learning, 2000. tomkins, silvan. affect, imagery, consciousness vol ii: the negative affects. new york: springer publishing, 1963. travis, mitchell. “we’re all infected: legal personhood, bare life and the walking dead.” international journal for the semiotics of law (revue internationale de sémiotique juridique) 28.4 (2014): 787–800 winter, bodo. “horror movies and the cognitive ecology of primary metaphors.” metaphor and symbol 29.3 (2014): 151–70 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 165 wonser, robert and david boyns. “between the living and undead: how zombie cinema reflects the social construction of risk, the anxious self, and disease pandemic.” the sociological quarterly 57.4 (2016): 628–53 filmography 28 days later. dir. danny boyle. usa: dna films, 2002. film. “ambulance” (aembyuleons) in horror stories (museoun iyagi). dir. kim gok and kim sun. korea: lotte entertainment, 2012 dark forest (jugeumui sup). dir. kim jeong-min. korea: cj entertainment, 2006. film. kingdom (kingdeom). dir. kim seong-hun. korea: astory, 2019. tv drama series. a monstrous corpse (goesi). dir. gang beom-gu. korea: hanrim films, 1981. film. the neighbour zombie (iutjip jombi). dir. o yeong-du, ryu hun, hong yeong-geun, jang yun-jeong. korea: kino mangosteen, 2010. film. the odd family: zombie on sale (gimyohan gajok). dir. lee min-jae. korea: cinezoo, 2019. film. rampant (changgwol). dir. kim seong-hun. korea: leeyang film, 2018. film. seoul station (seoulyeok). dir. yeon sang-ho. korea: studio dadashow, 2016. animation. shaun of the dead. dir. edgar wright. usa: studiocanal, 2004. film. train to busan (busanhaeng). dir. yeon sang-ho. korea: next entertainment world, 2016. film. warm bodies. dir. jonathan levine. usa: mandeville films, 2013. film. zombieland. dir. ruben fleischer. usa: relativity media, 2009. bionote: dr sung-ae lee is a lecturer in asian studies in the department of international studies at macquarie university, sydney, australia. her major research focus is on fiction, film and television drama of east asia, with particular attention to korea. her research centres on relationships between cultural ideologies in asian societies and representational strategies. she is interested in cognitive and imagological approaches to adaptation studies, asian popular culture, asian cinema, the impact of colonisation in asia, trauma studies, fiction and film produced in the aftermath of the korean war, and the literature and popular media of the korean diaspora. endnotes coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 166 i names follow the normal korean order, that is, family name followed by given name. revised romanisation has been used throughout. ii i follow the normal practice of identifying conceptual metaphors by placing them in small capitals. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 7 extraordinarily hazardous. fog, water, ice and human precarity in the aquapelagic assemblage of the grand banks (northwest atlantic) philip r hayward university of technology sydney prhshima@gmail.com copyright© 2023 philip r hayward. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this article examines the disruptive role that fog and associated weather conditions play in human livelihood activities undertaken on and around the grand banks of the northwestern atlantic, the affective atmosphere they create and their effect on human participants. after an introduction to the position and nature of the grand banks, relevant weather systems, ocean currents and iceberg trajectories through the region, the article profiles the nature of fishing (and, subsequently, oil extraction) in the area, of the precarity of livelihood activities undertaken and their reflection and inscription in various media. this approach identifies the manner in which aquapelagos (integrated terrestrial and marine systems) are not necessarily safe or stable entities – even in the shortest of terms – and can, indeed, represent assemblages in which humans are stressed and threatened. within this, the case study examines the manner in which fog is not so much an uncomfortable intrusion into an otherwise manageable industrial operation as a key characteristic to be accommodated. the experience of fog is crucial to the social experience of the grand banks and of the aquapelago that is constituted around it. substantial consideration is also given to the atmospherics of grand banks fog in literature and visual art and of the imaginative space created for it. keywords: fog, the grand banks, fishing, human perception the grand banks: position and features the grand banks is an elevated, approximately 93,200 square kilometre area of continental shelf that peaks at between 15 and 90 metres below the ocean surface approximately 330 kilometres southwest of the southern tip of newfoundland (figure 1). the area is located at the point that the southerly flowing, cold labrador current first abuts against and coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 8 subsequently flows north of the warm, north-easterly flowing gulf stream. the contact of the moist, warm air occurring over the latter and the cold surface of the former causes advection (the horizontal transfer of heat), which produces concentrated water vapour that manifests as fog. the continuous nature of the two currents results in advection fog forming for the majority of the year (often reported as around 300 days p.a.1), most predictably and intensely in mid-spring to mid-summer periods, when fogs are often prevalent for extended durations. as a result, the grand banks are commonly recognised as the most fog-bound area of the planet, an attribute that has caused major logistical difficulties for shipping, fishers and the oil industry. the reliable presence of fog in the region in mid-spring to mid-summer, even during windy periods,2 coincides with the regular arrival of sea-ice and icebergs in the area, swept down from greenland and the canadian arctic on the labrador current. as the passengers and crew of the rms titanic found in the southern area of the grand banks on april 14th 1912, the encounter of icebergs and ships can often be catastrophic for the latter. if this combination of phenomena were not hazardous enough, the grand banks is also commonly acknowledged as one of the most storm prone areas of the planet. as the us department of homeland security navigation center of excellence (usdhsnce) (n.d.) has detailed: the tracks of the storms leaving the north american continent frequently pass over or near the grand banks, particularly in the winter and early spring. in some cases the storms explosively intensify as they leave the east coast, and by the time they reach the grand banks they carry storm or hurricane force winds. these storms are sometimes called “weather bombs”, which is defined as a low pressure system that experiences a decrease in central pressure of 24 millibars in 24 hours. winds can exceed 100 km/h (62 mph) and seas 15 m (about 50 ft). as the usdhsnce has summarised, with little (if any) exaggeration, the “combination of frequent storms, persistent fog, and the presence of sea ice and icebergs creates extraordinarily hazardous conditions for mariners” (my emphases).3 given the extreme precarity of maritime operations in the area, at any time of year, and particularly in spring and summer, it is pertinent to consider why maritime livelihood activity has developed and persisted in this region. the answer is relatively straightforward. the mixture of warm and cold waters around the banks enables nutrients to be constantly elevated from the shallows, ensuring an abundance of fish principally cod, hake and haddock in the area before they were catastrophically over-fished in the mid-late 20th century. the high value of this product in global markets over an extended duration has ensured that there have been substantial profits to be made, however, precarious the livelihoods of those involved. 1 while this is not disputed, bodaghkhani (2017: 14-15) provides an important qualification in that fog days per year is somewhat arbitrary as a measurement in that “the problem with focusing on a mean annual monthly number of days with fog is that if a day has only one hour of low visibility, it is treated the same way as a day with multiple fog observations” and also that fog only occurs for a fraction of any given day, meaning that a “fog day” is a day in which fog occurs at some point. 2 fog at sea and on land – is commonly associated with calm conditions but it can often aggregate in windy conditions if temperature variations and air humidity are sufficiently marked. 3 precisely these kinds of conditions caused the “perfect storm” represented in sebastian junger’s (1997) eponymous account of the loss of the gloucester fishing vessel the andrea gail with all hands in 1991 (subsequently adapted into an eponymous film, directed by wolfgang petersen, in 2000). coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 9 in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it seems unlikely that the grand banks were fished by indigenous communities from (present-day) newfoundland, the canadian maritime provinces or the us new england states (the closest land areas to the banks) in the period prior to european intrusion into the north-west atlantic in the late middle ages. this is not to say that the maritime technologies, skills and/or collective enterprise required were beyond the capabilities of the beothuk or mi’kmaq peoples of the region but, rather, that there is no evidence that these were galvanised in pursuit of the fishery, perhaps due to the plentiful supply of fish in safer, more immediate offshore waters (gilbert, 2011), thereby ensuring that the grand bank’s fish biota remained unexploited by humans until western fishing commenced in the area in the late 1500s. holm, ludlow, schere et al. (2018: 1) have identified that the discovery of the grand banks and its recognition as a “super-abundant” fishing ground (for cod, in particular) by european mariners in the late 1400s and early 1500s precipitated a “fishing revolution” in europe. this occurred because fish was “a high priced, limited resource” due to “an already -severe depletion of european waters” (holm, ludlow, schere et al., 2018: 14). the authors have also contended that the exploitation of the grand banks by fishers, initially from the basque region of spain and, subsequently, from england and france, led to “a 15-fold increase of cod… catch volumes and likely a tripling of fish protein to the european market” (2018: 1). given that the european market was geared to fresh fish supply, wholesale and retail, the extreme distance of the grand banks fishing grounds from europe (c 3,750 kilometres) figure 1 map of the northwest atlantic shelf showing positions of newfoundland and the grand banks and the labrador and gulf stream currents (wikicommons, 2006 utc). coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 10 mitigated against cod being delivered in sufficiently fresh form (given the lack of iceproduction and/or refrigeration in this period) and required the fish to be processed, in this case, dried and salted. the small size of fishing vessels and the difficulty in establishing stable drying and salting environments on ships at sea in stormy waters meant that the processing enterprise was best undertaken on land, and, particularly, on the nearest land to the banks: newfoundland’s southern shore. seasonal drying operations led to individuals or small groups of mariners ‘wintering over’ to look after drying facilities thereby creating the first all-year round (micro-)colonies of europeans on the island. this pattern of resource exploitation created an aquapelago – a socially constructed space derived from island or coastal locations where humans have developed particularly concentrated engagements with the marine environment for their livelihoods (hayward, 2012; suwa, 2012). evidence of the perception and constitution of this space has been outlined by rankin and holm in their (2019) study of the early maritime cartography of the region. such studies illustrate, as maxwell (2012) has ably identified, that there are places in the sea that merit attention as assemblages in their own right and that can be inscribed – in various ways, in various media – in a manner that “sets subjective and objective epistemologies into productive dialogue” (maxwell, 2012: 23). from the early 18th century on, as european colonial fishing communities became established in the north-west atlantic, the central area of the aquapelago – i.e. the grand banks – was linked through separate but parallel industrial enterprises to communities on the shores of newfoundland, new england, the french micro-colony of st pierre and miquelon and on to major markets in western europe, the north east coast of america and european colonies established in the west indies4. while the broad settlement of new england derived from various factors, newfoundland and st pierre and miquelon were founded as terrestrial adjuncts of the maritime area of the banks, as exploited by european powers, and, thereby, the livelihood activities on the banks preceded and prefigured the establishment of the land colonies. the decline of the grand banks fishery and the near-total collapse of cod stocks in the 1990s, following peak, unsustainable extraction in the 1970s, is well known5 and marks the (current) endpoint6 in the banks’ active maintenance as the focus of newfoundlandic and transatlantic aquapelagic systems focussed on cod extraction. this illustrates a key point about aquapelagos present in early discourse about them but developed more thoroughly by subsequent discussants (e.g. guerin, 2019), namely that, as entities “constituted by human presence in and utilisation of the environment” – rather than being ‘objective’ geo-physical entities – they “come into being and wax and wane as climate patterns alter and as human socio-economic organisations, technologies, and/or the resources and trade systems they rely on, change and develop” (hayward, 2015: 5). in this sense, aquapelagos are “performed entities” (hayward, 2012: 5) and their performances are finite in duration. they also involve 4 indeed, the west indies were linked by an exchange of salt cod, intended for enslaved africans working on plantations, and molasses, which were subsequently exported to newfoundland and used for both food and rum production (tye, 2015). 5 see, for example, myers, hutchings and barrowman (1997) or kurlansky (1997) for a more generalistic overview. 6 while there is little scientific evidence (or belief) that aquatic biota on the banks can return to its former levels in any foreseeable future, it is not impossible. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 11 sets of subsidiary performances that involve humans interacting with various aquapelagic actants. enter the fog… fog on the banks/ humans in the fog while the grand banks was an “extraordinarily hazardous” area to fish from its earliest stages, with regular losses of ships, an industrial innovation raised the precarity of the enterprise for the humans involved in hauling the catch from the icy waters of the region. until the early 1800s, fishing was undertaken by crewmembers casting and hauling in handlines from the decks of schooners. while arduous, the schooners’ decks and gunwales offered some stability, a degree of protection from being washed overboard and some shelter from the harshest aspects of the elements. however, initial experiments with launching dories (small boats with high flared sides) from schooners showed that handline fishers working in these over a dispersed area could haul in greater volumes of fish than the same number could working alongside each other on a schooner deck. as a result, by the 1860s dory fishing was the dominant industrial practice (stoodley, 2021). it was also a far riskier one. the risks were multiple and included being swamped in high seas and the regular danger caused by fog. fog is particularly disruptive to human perception and navigation capabilities. dense concentrations of water vapour foreshorten the limits of human visual perception and also impair our abilities to distinguish objects and their proximity through diminishing – ‘greying out’ – the stimulus contrast (the ratio of foreground to background luminance) between dark and light objects, thereby obscuring details (figure 2). as harley, dillon and loftus (2004: 198) have identified, “although there are many ways in which visual stimuli may be degraded, a large body of research indicates that stimulus contrast… is critical in determining the fundamental response of the visual system.” their study also suggests that impairments to distinguishing visual stimuli might complicate mental processing of such stimuli and, consequently, adversely impact recognition, memory and related cognitive operations: the data from all the experiments allow the conclusion that some function of stimulus contrast combines multiplicatively with stimulus duration at a stage prior to that at which the nature of the stimulus and the reason for processing it are determined, and it is the result of this multiplicative combination that determines eventual memory performance. (harley, dillon and loftus, 2004: 198) put more simply, low-contrast visual environments can be confusing and impressions gained from them can be unreliable. persistent fog thereby impairs human abilities to navigate through visual orientation (which relies on a positional sense that utilises memory) and/or to track their trajectories through space. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 12 acknowledging fog’s complication of standard perceptions, martin (2011) has focused on the human experience of being in fog and of the bodily apprehension of it, asserting that fog acts as a “gathering-force, intensifying the immanent entanglements of body with world” that give fog – and human experience of fog – an associative dimension: through its opacity fog connotes feelings of density and dislocation, the suspension of water droplets mid-air communicating a sense of inaction, of stillness… alongside such representations the presence of fog also forces a phenomenological engagement with embodied immersion: one's body enveloped and entwined with space. (martin, 2011: 454) supporting this characterisation, martin quotes michel serres’ (2008: 69) contention that “night is empty or hollow, fog is full; darkness is ethereal, mist is gaseous, fluid, liquid, viscous, sticky, almost solid.” these perspectives accord with more general work that has been undertaken on what has been termed the “atmospheric turn” in anthropology (see griffero, 2019) and, more specifically, to critical work addressed to perceptions of space and of being in space. vale’s work on the mistiness of the azores (2018) is a striking example of the latter. she asserts that, “bodily apprehension-immersion” and processes in which “the subject recurrently and continually receives impressions” are crucial to experiences and representations of the islands (vale, 2018: 92). more broadly, in a contention that could serve as a summary of the framework for this article, hodges (2022: 122) contends that the atmospheres – understood as affective dimensions of places: figure 2 – ‘grey-out’ view from deck of ship on the grand banks (national oceanic and atmospheric administration, 2014) coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 13 … are more than just isolated destinations, material resources or idyllic representations. they are ecosystems, spheres of influence and sites of collision between competing systems: of the colonial and indigenous, the geologic and oceanic, the gaseous and the liquid. [and to] study these environs involves thinking about their relationship to wider networks and assemblages, both real and imagined. returning to fog with such a conceptual framework, martin identifies that his discussion derives from considering the logistics of movement-space and of how fog disrupts this and needs to be accommodated within such logistics. he moves beyond a discussion of foggy atmospheres to argue that: … fog positions us in the midst of the aerial, intensifying the schism between lightness and heaviness, entangling us with space in a determinedly material sense. by highlighting such a problematic of immersion, i suggest that fog momentarily strands us in the instant of disorientation, leaving us to ponder our conditional engagements with the near and far. (martin, 2011: 454) drawing on his own experience of walking along the english coast in fog, he reflects that: … the fog was not simply disorienting in its thickened presence, it also gathered together the spatial, illustrating in an acute sense the relational tenacity of space. similarly, the corporeal relationship to this phenomenon was such that the bodily inhabitation of space was intensified. (martin, 2011: 455) shifting from martin’s focus on the aerial geography of the english coast to the present article’s address to aquapelagic experience on the grand banks, we can regard the latter in terms of an “admixture” of ocean, air, ship and ice. martin’s discussions of the physical sensation of fog – which are echoed by the descriptions of being in fog on the grand banks detailed in the subsequent section of this article – are not simply imaginative. while humans do not have dedicated physical mechanisms to detect changes in the moisture and humidity of an environment similar to those of insects (for which these are an important environmental sensing mechanism), filingeri (2015: 763) has identified that in humans “the sensory integration of cutaneous thermal (i.e., evaporative cooling) and tactile (i.e., mechanical pressure and friction) sensory inputs” function to detect skin wetness and humidity and, thereby, perform a similar hygroreceptive function. feelings of clamminess are therefore very real and, in some individuals, can lead to senses of claustrophobia, of being ‘hemmed in’ by humidity. and then there’s the auditory element. the water particulates that constitute fog impair human auditory perception, inhibiting the transmission of sound and making sounds fainter and, thus, less easy to perceive, and also blurs their timbres and attack, making their nature and sources both ambiguous and ill defined. fogs are also tricky. as shagapov and sarapiulova (2014: 62) have identified, there is no necessary correlation between the density of fog and the attenuation of sound, “when the mass content of water in drops increases within a certain range, a damping coefficient may decrease; i.e., a thicker fog may turn out to be more acoustically ‘clear’” – a phenomenon that is confusing in itself. similarly, “random inhomogeneities” within fogs may contribute to the apparent “scattering” of sound in foggy spaces (rozenfeld, 1983: 231). combined with the disorientations produced by visual impairment and related perceptualcognitive difficulties, the simple experience of being in fog can be perceived as fraught even coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 14 before issues of the safe management of the situation and/or tasks ascribed during it are considered. dense fog’s ability to cloak objects close to ships combined with its aforementioned capacities to distort sound and an intensified human concentration on sound in such vision-impaired environments has led to particularly disconcerting experiences on the grand banks in the spring-summer period when drifting ice is at its peak. aspects of this were calmly understated in reports by us coast guard ice patrol vessels sent to the grand banks in 1920 to monitor ice incidence in the form of large icebergs and smaller fragments known as growlers (so-called due to the animalistic growling sound of trapped air that escapes from them as they melt) in shipping lanes. lieutenant commander john boedeker, captaining the cutter androscoggin in april-may, for instance, noted that after a brief period of clear weather on april 30th he steamed northward to 43o 44’ n, 48o 55’ w until: … we passed a few small pieces of ice close alongside, and stopped at once to await daylight, as it was thought that this ice indicated the presence of a berg or a growler in the vicinity. when completely stopped and drifting, the swash and breaking of the sea against the ice could be distinctly heard about two points on the bow and very close aboard. the sound was unmistakable, but the fog was too dense to make out the berg. at 4.20 a.m., there was a loud, heavy rumbling like thunder, accompanied by a heavy bumping noise and splashing [as a section of ice broke off and fell into the water]. (us coast guard, 1920: 11). fortunately, the androscoggin was unaffected by this ‘close call’ but the sonic scenario enacted in the dark, and the material presence it indicated as looming close by in the fog, is a vividly dramatic one. as previously outlined, the drive for great productivity on the grand banks led to increased numbers of small dories being launched from schooners on the banks, usually crewed by two fishers. the boats carried lines, tools, bait, food and water for the crew and foghorns and/or other forms of noisemakers (including conch shells7). the latter were necessary in case the dory lost sight of its ‘mothership’ in the fog and had to signal its whereabouts in order for the mothership to try and locate and retrieve it. crew remaining on the schooners were tasked with listening out for dory noises and producing their own, using similar equipment, to help the dory crews to locate the ships and try and approach them. however, as the previous discussion of sound transmission in fog outlined, this was not a straightforward procedure – especially in stormy conditions that were both noisy in themselves (with thunder, wind, crashing waves) and made it difficult for dories and ships to locate and approach each other. additional difficulties arose in fog when other vessels were sailing through fishing areas, with the risk of collisions that were commonly fatal for dorymen. there are extensive examples of dory crews that could not reconnect with their motherships by nightfall and that had to wait until morning to try and use the increased visual opportunities delivered by daylight to find their ships. others spent longer periods adrift before being picked up by their parent ship or another vessel (which could result in them being carried back to a remote port and having to find their way back home independently) and many examples of crews who simply disappeared, presumably drifting out of populated fishing areas and shipping lanes. 7 conch shells were used to signal for various purposes in newfoundland, including when small fish arrived inshore, hence their common description as ‘bait horns’. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 15 even for those crewmembers who returned to their motherships, exposure, frostbite and/or injuries were common. while the early phases of the fishing revolution enacted on the grand banks were largely an anonymous, unheralded exercise, the experiences of hardy fishers out on the stormy, fogbound seas were increasingly represented in various media in the late 1800s (in a period when dory fishing was already in decline). these experiences were ably represented by the new england painter winslow homer,8 who produced a number of significant maritime themed works after sailing on schooners operating out of gloucester and talking with the crews about their experiences (provost, 1990: 20). one of his best-known works is ‘the fog warning’ (1885), which shows a schooner on the horizon dwarfed by an ominous fog bank rolling in towards it and a solitary fisherman in a dory gazing back at both. the fisherman’s concerned glance suggests an anxiety about whether he will reach his mothership before it becomes obscured from view. complementing this painting, homer’s work ‘lost on the grand banks’ (also 1885) ably illustrates key themes explored in this article by representing a dory pitching on a wave with no mothership in sight. its crewmembers are depicted staring intently off-canvas, as if straining to see their schooner in the foggy gloom, with the colours of water and sky rendered in similar palettes and merging at the mid-right of the image. while these two paintings are not direct visual records of actual events, they are substantially researched and are thereby insightful about issues regarding the precarity of fishing on the banks and convey the theme of stoicism in the face of adversity that attracted artists to represent them. 8 homer was a new england landscape painter who turned to marine themes after visiting the uk in 1881-1882 and painting fishing themes around cullercoats, a coastal town on tyneside associated with the north sea fishery and home to small artists’ colony (newton, 2001). inspired by the topic, he returned to the united states and based himself in prouts neck, maine for the remainder of the decade, working on various fishery themed canvases. figure 3 winslow homer’s ‘lost on the grand banks’ (1885) (wikimedia commons). coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 16 along with winslow’s paintings, perhaps the best-known representation of fishing on the grand banks was supplied by british journalist and novelist rudyard kipling, who resided in brattleboro, vermont, between 1892-1896. intrigued by tales of the new england fishery related by a local doctor named james conland, who had worked on it in the 1850s-1860s, kipling conducted research in gloucester and boston, familiarised himself with charts of and general information about the grand banks (ormond, 1995: xii-xvii) and dramatised aspects of these in his novel captains courageous, published in 1897. one of the most striking aspects of the novel, for this article at least, is the representation of fog, particularly in chapter 5, which sets the scene of fishing on the grand banks, which he describes as “a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet”.9 given that the volume of schooners fishing on the banks had declined by the 1890s, the crowded scene is perhaps more representative of an earlier period but the description of the “dank” cloaking fog is astute and his extended description of its effects has some credibility: for days they worked in fog—harvey at the bell—till, grown familiar with the thick airs, he went out with tom platt, his heart rather in his mouth. but the fog would not lift, and the fish were biting, and no one can stay helplessly afraid for six hours at a time. harvey devoted himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as tom platt called for them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and tom’s instinct; manuel’s conch sounding thin and faint beside them. but it was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, harvey dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes… they made another berth through the fog, and that time the hair of harvey’s head stood up when he went out in manuel’s dory. a whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting. it was his first introduction to the dread summer berg of the banks, and he cowered in the bottom of the boat while manuel laughed. homer’s painting and kipling’s novel merit reference in this essay given that the everyday experiences of fishermen from isolated coastal areas were rarely – if ever regarded as significant (and/or directly reported) outside of the oral culture of their home communities or the broader fishing community in the period. those accounts that have survived from this context primarily take the form of songs and verses that were collected by early-mid 20th century folklorists. elizabeth bristol greenleaf and grace yarrow mansfield, for instance, who collected in northern newfoundland in the 1920s, heard “many songs… about life while out fishing on the banks” (greenleaf & yarrow mansfield, 1933: 228), including ones that celebrated the adventure of the experience – such as ‘the banks of newfoundland’ (greenleaf & yarrow mansfield, 1933: 230-231) and others that recorded fishers separated from their vessels and/or “the loss of ships and men” – such as ‘the fishermen of newfoundland/the good ship jubilee’ (greenleaf & yarrow mansfield, 1933: 285-287). historians, folklorists and local writers who worked in areas of regional newfoundland in the mid 20th century also were also given various accounts of dorymen lost for days, weeks and even months before being able to return to their home ports by either the protagonists or 9 this quotation is derived from the unpaginated chapter 5 of the online version detailed in the references section of this article. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 17 members of their communities. the story of george may and charles williams, who sailed to the grand banks in 1927 on a schooner operating out of fortune bay, as recounted in newfoundland historian l.w. james’s edited 1961 collection the treasury of newfoundland stories,10 provides one such example: they had not gone more than a few hundred yards from the vessel when the fog, with the suddenness for which it is noted on the banks, closed down upon them. bank fishermen are well-accustomed to thick fog, however. may and williams continued on their way toward the trawls. they were unable to find them, though they spent an hour searching where they thought them to be. they decided to return to the ship, which was to prove as elusive as the trawls. for five hours they rowed and sailed, but never a sign or sound of her greeted them. the dreaded realization dawned in their minds that they were, for the time being at least, quite hopelessly lost: brave fishermen that they were, they remained cool, lowered their sails and lay down on the floor of their dory to have a night's rest, in the hope that daylight would find the weather clearer and enable them to locate their ship. the only food they had in the dory was twenty biscuits, and there was not a drop of drinking water. imagine their bitter disappointment when daylight broke next morning to find the weather just as thick and the fog as dense as before. (unattributed, 1961a) realising that they were unlikely to rendezvous with their ship, they attempted to navigate their way back to st. johns (newfoundland) with the aid of a small compass. either their navigation was awry or they were being carried away by currents but by day 5 – with the heavy fog still in place – they were tired, severely afflicted by the cold and wet and suffering from thirst. fortuitously they came upon an iceberg and managed to break off ice to suck. weak and hungry they were eventually discovered on day 11 by the steamship albuera, 600 kilometres from where they had initially become lost, and were given passage to the english port of tilbury (unattributed, 1961a). other dorymen were not so lucky, such as william butt, the companion of william strickland, who set out to the grand banks from burin on a schooner in april 1897. once on the banks their dory departed from its mothership on a “fine but misty morning” before the weather turned and they found themselves lost in an increasingly windy “thickenfog” (unattributed, 1961). a not uncommon fate awaited them: when darkness came the wind was a gale from the southeast and the sea was running high; it required all our skill and strength to keep our boat from filling. at about 10 o'clock we heard a steamer's fog hooter but, although we pulled frantically in the direction of the repeated sound, which seemed for a while to be looming nearer to us, no lights of a receiving steamer were seen and the mournful bellowing died away in the dark distance. again, perhaps near midnight, another whistle clear and distinct was heard and our hopes were raised only to be shattered once more. (unattributed, 1961b). the next six days proved traumatic. after sighting land low on the horizon on the fourth, the pair rowed towards it, only for butt to expire. after two more days afloat, and severely weakened, strickland was finally rescued by a fisherman and carried ashore at ramea island, off the south coast of newfoundland. 10 the authorship of individual entries in the collection is not specified. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 18 along with these stark accounts of misadventure, one of the most detailed subjective descriptions of dory-fishing in adverse conditions was provided by australian sailor and journalist-adventurer alan villiers in 1952 when he tried (sole) crewing a dory from a portuguese ship named the argus “for six cold and foggy weeks” in spring 1950.11 i quote at length to convey the experience villiers recalls having in the fog: …i was mighty glad to call it tried and get on my way back to the ship. but that infernal fog had blown down. an arm of it was between me and the argus. suddenly i found myself alone on the sea, and the ghostly arms of the horrible fog were wraithlike around me! well, i could anchor and wait. antonio rodrigues had said to do that. “don’t ever panic,” he had said. “the panicked are dead.” but the fog didn’t look like the really determined kind. now and then i could see the gray sky above; sometimes there were lesser clearings. i hoisted the little mainsail and the minute jib, for there was a gentle sailing breeze upon the water. i had my bearings, and i put the boat compass on the thwart before me. with one of the dory’s three small oars down to leeward as leeboard and rudder, i made grimly off along the bearing that i’d had of the ship, and kept a smart lookout for other dories. i had a conch shell to blow. i also had a loaf of bread, and water enough for a couple of days if used sparingly. when you go off in a dory, you expect to come back the same day. dorymen never prepare themselves or their boats against calamity. if it comes, they take it in stride… after a while i heard a schooner sounding her great fog siren, for they all carried air-raid sirens at their mastheads to summon the dorymen in fog. but where was this schooner? was she the argus? i didn’t know. i had no judgment of sound direction in fog. i knew the distinctive signal the argus used on her fog bell, the big old church bell which hung in the mizzen rigging. i blew this signal on my conch shell and waited for a reply. none came. then that siren wasn’t aboard the argus, or i’d heard it through some freak condition in the fog. i carried on. i blew my conch again. what was that? an echo? i blew again. it was no echo! it was a doryman sounding our signal, an argus man, in the fog like myself. i shouted to catch his attention, to check my compass course with his. he shouted back. i saw nothing but the white and ghastly fog and the greasy cold swirling of the wretched sea. and then, indistinct at first and almost unbelievable, i saw the triangle of a tiny sail harden in the surrounding murk; a roll of white water gurgled at the little laden bow. there was a dory! no. 16! baptista, the first fisher—i couldn’t strike a better man than that. he grinned…. once i had found the first fisher, i knew i was all right. after a quarter of an hour of gliding through the pall of fog, a white monstrosity suddenly loomed above us, right alongside. it looked like an iceberg… “argus,” battista grinned. “we come back, no?” (villiers, 1952: 596) 11 one of the most significant audiovisual representations of dory fishing on the grand banks, john o’brien’s cbc documentary the white fleet: portuguese fishermen on the grand banks of newfoundland, dates from 1967. the dories depicted in the film, many of the items carried in them and the fishing and processing practices are closely similar to villiers’ account and also recall homer’s (previously discussed) paintings. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 19 villiers’ account suggests that his hygroreceptivity led him to feel uncomfortable, disorientated in and even menaced by the fog (as conveyed in phrases such as “the ghostly arms of the horrible fog were wraithlike around me” and “the white and ghastly fog”) compounded by the anxiety about losing the mothership, its safety and comforts. while colourfully phrased, the senses of stress he records are all the more credible since he was an experienced sailor in cold water climes waters, having previously sailed on antarctic whaling ships in the ross sea and having written of these experiences in his book whaling in the frozen south in a relatively prosaic manner. although it peaked in the mid-late 1800s, dory fishing from schooners continued until the 1960s, when it was finally superseded by modern ships that were equipped with sonar, radar and electronic navigation systems that enabled them to more precisely target fish masses from single vessels. large, industrial-scale fleets of ships briefly dominated the fishery before they decimated regional fish stocks, leading the canadian government to declare a moratorium on fishing in the area of the grand banks that fell within the 322 kilometre (200 mile) economic expansion zone it had declared in 1992 (figure 4). the moratorium has been maintained, albeit with variation and no little controversy, to the present (rose and rowe, 2022).12 the period of the dory fishery discussed in this article was thereby just over a century in duration and is now remembered, with some nostalgia, as a time when fish were plentiful and when human grit and labour could secure favourable returns. the sensory confusion, stress and frequent injury and loss of life experienced by dorymen is less often recalled but is nonetheless significant as an example of the manner in which capitalist enterprises can require and inveigle poor workers into working in extreme conditions – in this case, into one of the foggiest, stormiest (and frequently sea-ice populated) areas of the planet’s oceans. in this regard, we might view the dorymen’s experiences as an effective experiment into human performance under stress and disorientation whose results were recorded, subjectively and haphazardly, in a range of cultural media that can only produce the partial glimpses of and speculations about experience. this history is, nevertheless, significant in itself – as a cluster of vivid experiences – and as another on extractivist capitalism’s demanding deployment of labour in harsh and demanding environments while over-exploiting the resource concerned. 12 also see thornhill verma (2019), for a historical overview of the determinations and implications of overfishing in the region. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 20 figure 4 – extent of canada’s economic exclusion one and relationship to the grand banks (herit newfoundland and labrador, 1997) fog, flight and oilrigs while the fog, storms, ice and all-encompassing cold may no longer play havoc with dorymen’s’ lives, the decline of the grand banks fishery was followed by a new form of extractivist exploitation in the eastern part of the area, the development of oil-drilling, led by the massive hibernia platform, which commenced production in 1997 after a fraught exploration and construction process in which the area’s full range of environmental hazards had to be negotiated.13 subsequent wells have been developed nearby on the terra nova and white rose fields and local conditions have continued to cause considerable logistical difficulties for their operations, particularly in terms of rotating staff and provisioning by means of ships or helicopters. difficulties in landing the latter on platforms during foggy daytimes have led to frequent cancellations or turn-backs (and operator pressure to compensate with – 13 including the loss of the ocean ranger in 1982, a semi-submersible drilling unit that sank with 84 crewmembers onboard, leaving no survivors. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 21 equally problematic – flights on clear or semi-foggy nights) and other weather problems have also contributed to a number of crashes by helicopters working the route. these issues were explored in the 2010 canada-newfoundland and labrador offshore petroleum board (cnlopb) inquiry following the 2009 crash of a cougar helicopters flight returning from a platform that resulted in the death of those on-board. along with its examination of procedural and engine part issues, the c-nlopb report documents that piloting and traveling on helicopters over the grand banks to rigs located on it is a singularly risky exercise. the difficulty of predicting and safely negotiating fog patterns around the grand banks oilfields has been documented and analysed by bullock, isaac, beale & hauser (2016) and bodaghkhani (2017). referring to his case study area – the hibernia field – in particular, bodaghkhani (2017: 20) has contended that fog: … forms and develops due to multiple local microphysical, dynamic, and radiative processes; these are in turn influenced by boundary layer and synoptic-scale meteorological conditions … the ways these various influences work in combination and opposition varies considerably between locations, and consequently understanding fog and improving predictability typically requires detailed research on specific locations of interest. until such detailed observations, predictive models and monitoring of fog for incoming and outgoing air transport is developed, the precarity of helicopter transit between grand banks rigs and shores can be considered alongside dorymen’s experiences on the open seas as a direct effect of working in such fraught environments. conclusion as this article has detailed, the grand banks are as singularly inhospitable to human perceptions and activity as they are “extraordinarily hazardous” to the conduct of marine livelihood enterprises in general. the creation of such a workplace in the stormy, fogbound area of ocean has resulted from high commodity prices and product demands, initially from the european market for fish and, more latterly, from the global thirst for oil in the final phase of a carbon dependent global economy. with particular regard to the working conditions of dorymen, which have been the principal focus of this article, the experience of being upon the seas in fog and, more broadly, of inhabiting the affective atmosphere of a foggy oceanic space, represents a unique episode in human history. capitalism can be regarded as having provided the stage, script and directions for a group of human actors to interact with the complex actant system of the north-west atlantic. neither the dorymen’s experiences – let alone multiple losses of life, injury and/or psychological trauma – are incidental aspects of the fishery; they are key aspects of the human experience of the industrial operation and the low value it placed on human safety and comfort. the role that fog played in this drama is notable. while seemingly a softer, less aggressive agent than storms, raging seas or icebergs, its disruption of human perceptions and abilities to navigate space reveal it to be a singularly problematic entity for humans encountering it for extended durations. unlike the classic polluted urban fogs of the 19th-mid 20th centuries (corden, 2015), the grand banks’ fogs contained no particulate threats to injure human health but, like the urban places that were afflicted by cold seasonal envelopment, severe stress was put on standard perceptual and behavioural modes by being placed within them. in this manner, the grand banks provides coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 22 an unlikely complement to the streets of cities such as london, where another aspect of unfettered capitalist expansion proceeded without adequate address to issues of human safety and comfort. the study of affective atmospheres and human perceptions, disorientation and stress detailed in this article attempt to centre the former with regard to livelihood activities as the raison d’être of such immersions and to keep focus on the extractivist enterprise more generally as it bends human actors to its will. references bodaghkhani, e. 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(1990). winslow homer’s the fog warning: fisherman as heroic character. the american art journal 22(1): 20-27. rankin, k.j. & poul holm, p. (2019) cartographical perspectives on the evolution of fisheries in newfoundland’s grand banks area and adjacent north atlantic waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, terrae incognitae, 51(3), 190-218. renton, a (2001) lost sounds: the story of coast fog signals. whittles publishing. rose, g.a. & rowe, s. (2022). congruence of stock production and assessment areas? an historical perspective on canada’s iconic northern cod. canadian journal of fisheries and aquatic sciences. https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfas-2021-0230 rozenfeld, s.k. (1983). scattering of sound waves by random inhomogeneities of atmospheric fog. akusticheskii zhurnal 29, p. 392-397 shagapova, v.s. & sarapulova, v.v. (2014). features of sound refraction in the atmosphere in fog. izvestiya, atmospheric and oceanic physics 50(6), 602–609 stoodley, r.w. (2021a, november 14). how grand bank made the 'grandy dory' a newfoundland icon. cbc newfoundland and labrador. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/grandy-dory-newfoundland1.6225449 thornhill, v. j. (2019). cod collapse: the rise and fall of newfoundland’s saltwater cowboys. https://cdnsciencepub.com/journal/cjfas https://cdnsciencepub.com/journal/cjfas coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 24 nimbus publishing. tye, d. (2015). “a poor man's meal”: molasses in atlantic canada. food, culture & society 11(3): 335-353. unattributed. (1961a). adrift in an open dory. in james, l.w. (ed.) the treasury of newfoundland stories. maple leaf mills limited. http://ngb.chebucto.org/articles/adrift.shtml unattributed. (1961b). adrift on the banks in an open dory six nights. in james, l.w. (ed.) the treasury of newfoundland stories. maple leaf mills limited. http://ngb.chebucto.org/articles/adrift2.shtml united states coast guard. (1920). international ice observation and ice patrol service in the north atlantic ocean: season of 1920. treasury department. u.s. department of homeland security navigation center of excellence (n.d.) weather. uscg.gov/?pagename=iipweather#:~:text=foggy%20conditions%20can%20exist%20most, foggy%20conditions%20with%20calm%20winds. vale, c. (2017). understanding island spatiality through co-visibility: the construction of islands as legible territories a case study of the azores. shima 12(1), 79-98. villiers a. (1931). whaling in the frozen south: being the story of the 1923-24 norwegian whaling expedition to the antarctic. robert mcbride. villiers, a. (1952, may). a pesca do bacalhau: i sailed with portugal’s captains courageous. national geographic, 565-596 philip hayward is an adjunct professor at university of technology sydney and a contracted researcher at western sydney university. he founded and continues to edit the journal shima <www.shimajournal.org> and is a strategic advisor to the river cities network. he has published widely on island and oceanic topics. his current research involves the reimagination and reconceptualisation of waterways in urban contexts. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 place, visibility and perception: the materiality of es vedrà and its enfolding within new age discourse and media-lore marcel a. farinelli, university of corsica marcelfarinelli@gmail.com philip hayward, university of technology sydney prhshima@gmail.com copyright©2019 marcel a. farinelli & philip hayward. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the rocky island of es vedrà, off the south-western tip of ibiza, in spain’s balearic islands, features prominently in tourism materials and in related social media postings. its scenic aspects have prompted a physical orientation of shoreline buildings around its vista and it has also been the subject of accounts detailing its allegedly mysterious attributes. the latter derive, in part, from regional histories and folklore but more fundamentally relate to recent new age/counter-cultural perceptions of the various “energies” that have been perceived to flow around parts of ibiza and the enfolding of es vedrà, in particular, within a set of generic associations of mystical spatiality. following a discussion of the latter, this article identifies the development of the area around es vedrà and the rocky island’s representation as a specially “charged” location. drawing on these aspects, the article identifies the manner in which the rarely visited island is, simultaneously, highly visible and overlaid by cultural associations that effectively “cloud” its materiality. in view of these aspects, the island is characterised as a distinct entity within international secular traveller pilgrimage circuits. keywords: es vedrà, ibiza, media-lore, new age, tourism introduction es vedrà and its smaller companion es vedranell (figure 1) are uninhabited and sparsely vegetated limestone islands located between 1.5 and 2.5 kilometres off the south-western tip of ibiza, close to the small beachside settlement of cala d’hort (figure 2). es vedrà rises steeply from the sea to a height of 420 metres while es vedranell is a flatter outcrop that only reaches 128 metres. while es vedrà has been used by humans for various purposes at different historical junctures there is no evidence of any settlements having mailto:marcelfarinelli@gmail.com mailto:marcelfarinelli@gmail.com mailto:prhshima@gmail.com mailto:prhshima@gmail.com coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 been established there or on es vedranell and both islands are currently uninhabited. over the last fifty years es vedrà (or, rather, shoreline and/or adjacent marine areas that provide views of it) have become a popular site for tourist/new age traveller visitation, cued by their prior perceptions of its attributes. our approach to characterising and analysing es vedrà with regard to new ageism and related media-lore draws on two perspectives. the first concerns locales of various types that have been interpreted and enfolded within folkloric and/or new age discourses as worthy of visitation. comparative research on this topic has provided insights into the complex ascriptions of mythic and ideological significance to a range of global sites by individuals and communities involved in forms of modern-day pilgrimage. as kedzior has asserted: traditionally, pilgrimage has been defined as a physical journey in search of truth, pursuit of what is sacred or holy … more recently however, researchers have identified that the distinction between pilgrimage and other forms of travel is increasingly fuzzy, as the separation of the spiritual from the religious in contemporary western societies leaves individuals with choices of what they want to consider sacred … some scholars suggest that for new agers, journeys to sites of unique natural beauty containing the vestiges of ancient civilizations have the elevated status of pilgrimage. (2012: 181) figure 1: location of es vedrà (pinned), off the south-western tip of ibiza coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 as this characterisation suggests, a new form of what might be termed “recreational pilgrimage” has emerged in recent years through the rise of tourists with new age sensibilities that has led them to valourise certain sites for visitation. while “new age” is a broad and somewhat amorphous category, we use the term to refer to a set of beliefs around spirituality, the spiritual qualities of landscapes and the linkage of these to various facets of religion, folklore and/or belief in the existence of phenomena such as ufos and extra-terrestrials. we characterise the aggregation, amplification and elaboration of these beliefs within digital media channels such as social media as a form of modern “medialore” (russian laboratory of theoretical folkloristics, 2014) that exist in a “feedback loop” with the experiences, perceptions and digital media postings of “recreational pilgrims”. figure 2: location of es vedrà and the south-western coast of ibiza returning to kedzior’s (2012) characterisation, he identifies key recreational pilgrimage sites as combining “unique natural beauty” and “the vestiges of ancient civilizations”. one such destination is glastonbury tor in south-west england. as well as possessing a striking aspect within the landscape, the tor has been associated with the holy grail, king arthur, druids, ley lines and, more recently, ufos and diffuse counter-cultural activities and spiritual beliefs. glastonbury’s enmeshment in folkloric discourse is explicitly acknowledged by tourism websites. london toolkit, for instance (whose website proudly proclaims, “guiding the independent traveller since 2000”), states that glastonbury “is steeped in legends and mysticism that weave themselves through much of what you will see and experience” (nd; online). the acknowledgement of this aspect is a salient one, and invites travellers visiting such sites to be aware of the artifice of the associations accruing to them as they visit them and document their experiences on social coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 media. glastonbury tor provides a useful point of comparison for es vedrà in several ways. the first concerns its relationship to the surrounding region. while major international recreational pilgrimage sites that combine unique natural beauty and “the vestiges of ancient civilizations,” such as macchu pichu, uluru (ayers rock) and mount fuji, are located in continental interiors, glastonbury tor has an unusual attribute in that it is often perceived as a “land island” by virtue of its elevation above a flat, marshy, flood-prone plain1 and on account of it forming the pinnacle of an area that was surrounded by shallow, coastal waters within historical memory (as the much mythologised “isle of avalon” of arthurian legend) (rahtz, 2002). the second aspect concerns visibility. as wylie (2002) has identified, lines of sight and visitor perceptions of the elevated area from afar, as they approach and seek ideal perspectives, and the view from its peak, as visitors ascend via various routes, are key to recreational pilgrims’ senses of space and visitor experience at the tor. but while the former aspect is key to recreational pilgrimage to the coast and waters adjacent of es vedrà, the latter is entirely absent as es vedrà is a restricted access site that is explicitly prohibited to recreational pilgrimages (and/or any other form of unauthorised visitation).2 indeed, the former aspect — i.e. the importance of vistas from nearby vantage points — and the aggregation of media-lore around the unvisitable island can be seen to compensate for its very inaccessibility. while interdisciplinary island studies has not developed a concentrated focus on recreational pilgrimage to island sites, suwa (2018) has recently provided a detailed case study of how the uninhabited japanese island of chikubushima, in honshu island’s lake biwa (biwako, in japanese), has been imbued with spiritual and social significance through the erection of temples and monuments that have become religious and touristic pilgrimage sites. in his discussions of the location, suwa has developed his earlier concept of islands as “small but densely cultured territory” (2007: 6) to consider how sacred places such as chikubushima involve a “networking of representable beliefs and substantive materiality” that “connect” visitors to them (2018: 79). while he does not specifically develop a discussion around visibility, it is worth noting that as an uninhabited island, all visitors to chikubushima approach it on ferries from the mainland in journeys that move progressively towards it (in an effective “slow zoom”) and subsequently depart (visually/associatively “pulling out” from it). these gentle, phasings-in and out of contact with the island provide suitably measured points of connection with the spirituality of its buildings, pathways, external monuments and the broader island space that can be perceived to be imbued with spirituality. as an island without any buildings, ruins or other visible traces of human presence and/or engineering,3 es vedrà lacks the combination of distinct natural beauty and traces of ancient civilisations that kedzior (2012) identifies as prime assets for international recreational pilgrimage sites. but while the island may not possess the material assets and/or archaeological records that can provide such “vestiges”, since the 1960s it has been ascribed a set of (often tenuous and/or tendentious) associations that have become institutionalised within new age/recreational pilgrimage discourse, forming a medialoric mass that has come to serve a similar function for es vedrà as (more empirically verifiable) ancient vestiges have for locations such as manchu picchu or glastonbury tor. while unusual in comparison to other established inland recreational pilgrimage sites, es vedrà’s merits comparison to other island sites. in their profile of the sparsely-populated coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 takarajima island in southern japan, for instance, hayward and kuwahara (2014) detail the manner in which historical folklore has become entangled with 19th century fiction, 20th century popular culture and late 20th and early 21st century digital media-lore to produce a highly speculative swirl of discourses that have been variously embraced and refracted as elements available to the island community in its attempts to create a brand identity to attract tourists. similarly, hayward (2013) has contended that catalina island off the coast of southern california, has been “englamoured” by imported cultural figures (and, particularly, that of the mermaid), that have been prominently featured in the visual iconography of the island’s main town, avalon, and in online audiovisual media. the principal difference between es vedrà and the japanese and californian islands is that the latter have populations that inhabit the space that such fanciful discourse adheres to, providing a grounded everyday reality that throws their artifice into stark relief. unpopulated and rarely-visited es vedrà, by contrast, provides what might be regarded as a blanker scenic backdrop upon which all manner of imaginative association can be projected. our study of es vedrà draws on the research perspectives identified above with particular regard to the relationship between media-lore, touristic experience and representation of locale and we also contextualise these aspects with regard to the organisation and articulation of space around es vedrà and related experiences of it. our discussion identifies the centrality of a coastal vista4 — and specifically, the vista of es vedrà — to tourist development and visitation around the south-western tip of ibiza. these discussions provide the context of the related imagination and representation of es vedrà within medialoric discourses we explicate. subsequent sections of this article provide accounts of the history and development of the region, its early associations with spirituality, the development of new age culture and sensibilities on ibiza and the nature of medialoric inscriptions of the island that have developed. reflecting on these, the conclusion identifies es vedrà’s position within the modern phenomenon of recreational pilgrimage. i. locale and context while various dates for the earliest human settlement on ibiza have been posited, dawson has identified that the earliest settlement of ibiza would appear to have been around the third millennium bce (2013: 81). while the historical record of the early inhabitants of ibiza is meagre, the island became a phoenician colony in 654 bce following the construction of a fortified port city (present-day ibiza town), and in 5th century bce the island became part of the carthaginians’ western mediterranean empire. the port developed as a thriving centre for trade and ceramic manufacture that supported several temples devoted to carthaginian deities. carthaginian control over the island continued until around 150 bce, when ibiza came under control of the roman empire for a 600year period. after brief periods of domination by the vandals and the byzantine empire, the island first fell under moorish influence and was then occupied by the moors until they were ousted by aragonese forces in 1235. despite the subsequent absorption of aragon into the spanish monarchy, the island was subject to occasional raids by corsairs coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 based in north africa until the early 19th century when western european powers moved to erase their bases in algiers and tunis. the origin of es vedrà’s name is unclear. while it is catalan, some theories posit latin words such as vitrum (“glass”), possibly referring to the water around the island’s shores, or veteranus, meaning “uncultivated” and/or “abandoned”, if referring to a plot of land, as its source. another hypothesis suggests a galician–celtic origin, since vedra is the term for “horse” in that language, and the islet, seen from a certain position, resembles the animal.5 but the most commonly accepted theory is that that the name is a phonetic modification of the initial syllables of the ancient latin adjective petranu, meaning “rocky” or “cliffy” (coromines, 1989–1997). the name es vedranell is a diminutive, simply meaning “little vedrà”. es vedrà is located in the present-day municipality of sant josep de sa talaia, a sparsely populated area whose communities have traditionally devoted themselves to agricultural work (in farms and vineyards) rather than fishing or maritime commerce. this is due, in part, to the geography of the south-western tip of ibiza, which lacks a suitable port site, but also to the presence of piracy in the western mediterranean until the early 19th century, which made living on the shore dangerous. after the pacification of the region, ibiza experienced a general population growth and increasing settlement around the coastline. fishermen subsequently began to use cala d’hort bay, on the shore directly opposite es vedrà, as an occasional anchorage and locals took to using es vedrà to graze their goats. in this period, the small village of es cubells was established, 6 km to the east of the bay, around a church founded in 1864 by catalan friar francesc palau, who was a significant figure in the development of the phenomena discussed in this article. palau played an important role in the history of 19th century spain on account of his efforts to reform the spanish church and to spread christian devotion throughout catalonia (leading to his beatification in 1988). born in 1811 in rural catalonia, he decided to become a priest at the age of 17 and moved to barcelona in 1832, where he entered the order of the discalced carmelites. three years after, in 1835, the friary where he studied and lived was destroyed by working class insurgents in one of the many violent uprisings that occurred in early 19th century barcelona.6 palau was galvanised by the political situation and actively participated in the first carlist war, fought between conservatives and liberal factions (casal i bergés, 2017). after a period of exile in france between 1840 and 1851 he was allowed to return to spain and spent some years in barcelona, where he gained fame as a proselytiser. in 1854, after being accused of having inspired another uprising, he was forced to relocate to ibiza, where he assumed the task of re-asserting christianity in the island, which he perceived to be lacking in piety and morality. as one way of attempting to achieve his goals he oversaw the building of a church dedicated the holy virgin on the south-western tip of ibiza with direct sightlines to es vedrà, which he took to visiting for periods of quiet contemplation. during long periods of the summer he lived in a cove on the otherwise uninhabited island, climbing to its peak for intense sessions of meditation.7 in his letters, which gave details of the months he spent in solitude, palau attests to having met a mysterious white woman on several occasions who he identified as the personification of the church (palau, no date). she revealed to the friar that his duty was to promote a reform that would involve not just ibiza or the balearic islands more generally, but the whole catholic world (ibid). palau https://www.google.com.au/search?q=proselytizer&spell=1&sa=x&ved=0ahukewis9fu51ofhahxt4xmbhuqzdy8qkeecccsoaa https://www.google.com.au/search?q=proselytizer&spell=1&sa=x&ved=0ahukewis9fu51ofhahxt4xmbhuqzdy8qkeecccsoaa coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 died in 1872 and his engagement with es vedrà is commemorated by a metal cross erected there in 1959. while notable as an aspect of local history, palau’s sojourns and mystic experiences on es vedrà and its subsequent perception as a place of holiness and mystery were not activated in broader discourse until the mid-late 20th century. the context for this activation was their incorporation as aspects of local place mythology promoted and elaborated with the rise of tourism and with visitation by counter-cultural westerners, who began to frequent the island, attracted by its unspoiled beaches, under-developed interior and perceptions of its traditional mediterranean lifestyle.8 since spain opened to external tourism in late 1950s, the balearic islands have become one of the most visited places in the country and ibiza has been associated with various types of counter-cultural tourists and longer-term visitors, starting with hippies in the 1960s and more recently with new age travellers and dance party enthusiasts flocking to the island’s giant “mega-clubs” during the summer season. ibiza’s development as a centre for international/western lifestyle “dissidents” from the 1960s on appears to have derived from two complementary elements. the first was the island’s remoteness from the repressive conservatism that dominated spain during the period of general franco’s rule (between 1939 and 1975). at a safe remove from the mainland, the rural island offered quiet places where opponents of franco’s values and policies could reside relatively undisturbed. this situation made the island (and other balearic locations such as majorca’s north shore and formentera) appealing to the first waves of western european and north american hippies who sought to escape the restrictions of their own home cultures in the mid-late 1960s in search of freedom, authenticity and a relaxed lifestyle. called barbuts by the locals (a catalan word meaning “hairy”), the hippies were initially welcomed by locals, who were receptive to the economic opportunities their visitation offered. but the sartorial style, sexual openness and drug use associated with the newcomers soon came to be seen as a threat to the island community’s traditional values. acting on these concerns, local authorities made complaints to the national government in madrid, which responded in 1968 by moving to expel the barbuts under the terms of a 1933 law designed to crack down on homeless people, prostitutes, junkies and alcoholics (rodríguez and cerdà, 1999). despite this decision, the limited number of police based in ibiza made the policy difficult to enforce. while some foreigners were expelled in the late 1960s, leading to a diminution of hippy presence across the island, others remained and many took up residence in the 1970s, when the initiative was relaxed. the charms of ibiza as a sun-soaked island populated with relaxed hippies (and its darker side as a place where hard drugs are readily available) were vividly represented in barbet schroeder’s 1969 film more, scored by pink floyd (then close to their apex as an iconic counter-cultural ensemble). the band’s involvement with the film followed visits by band members syd barrett and roger waters in 1967, at a time when other british and america rock musicians were also visiting ibiza and nearby formentera.9 while precise data is unavailable, anecdotal accounts suggest the film served to publicise the island as a counter-cultural mecca, particularly in western europe, and an influx of alternative life-stylers and older, more affluent tourists visited the island in the 1970s and subsequent decades. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 the substantial rise in tourism impacted the coastal area adjacent to es vedrà, formerly a mosaic of farms, vineyards and untamed maquis shrubland, through its development as a tourism area, with restaurants, villas, hotels and ancillary businesses, the majority of which were established and positioned to access vistas of es vedrà. today cala d’hort is one of the most popular beaches in ibiza, and some of the improvised slipways and boatsheds once used by fishermen have been converted to loft spaces rented out or used as beachside “weekenders”. the impact of the touristic economy on the environment began to cause concern in the 1980s and 1990s. the hilly areas of the serra de ses roques altes that rise beyond the beach provide clear — albeit more distant — vantage points to view es vedrà. given this aspect, it is unsurprising that the slopes above the bay have attracted the attention of developers keen to capitalise on their vistas. this impulse first manifested itself in the 1980s as a wave of tourism development applications and approved developments occurred across the island. concern over the rapid transformation of the ibizan shoreline led to the formation of the local green organisation gen-gob, in 1982. from 1992 on gen-gob campaigned against a proposal from a madrid-based company to create resort facilities, a golf course, a residential estate and a desalination plant to service them on the slopes. despite widespread antipathy to the development proposal, and a series of legal actions initiated by gen-gob to prevent it proceeding, the ibizan government approved the development in 1998, prompting gen-gob to organise a major protest march in january 1999 that attracted around 12,000 demonstrators. the unprecedented scale of the event undermined support for the ruling peoples party and allowed the opposition to make it a key issue in their successful contest of the elections in august of that year. the new government reversed the approval soon after its election and set up the 2700-hectare cala d’hort national park in 2002 to impede any future development proposals in the area. while the park included es vedrà, vedranell, their fringing islets and the waters surrounding them, together with the adjacent coastal slopes, the latter (comprising an area of 2466 hectares) was excised from the park in 2007, following pressure from pro-development lobbyists, rendering it vulnerable to future development proposals and their potential acceptance by future governments (ibiza preservation foundation, nd). as part of a national park area since 2002, es vedrà, vedranell and their fringing islets have been restricted access areas requiring visitors to obtain permits to visit them. as such, their socio-cultural significance resides in their scenic aspects (as seen from shore sites and the decks of visiting boats), their environmental value (as wilderness sites) and the cultural associations that have accrued to them. these aspects attract visitors to cala d’hort and adjacent areas, generating income for tour companies and for restaurants and hotels that cater for visitors. the latter aspects are not simply incidental to the settlements and businesses located around cala d’hort; the vistas can be understood to have effectively generated the shore sites and enterprises that serve the views. the high, rocky coast of the south-western tip of ibiza provides several vantage points from which es vedrà can be perceived. at various points along the coast nearest to the island there are vehicle pull-ins and short trails that lead to viewing spots. the popularity of these with tourists can be gauged by the variety of photos posted on social media which show landscape shots (such as figure 3), selfies and posed photos with es vedrà in the background. several other photos posted online show activities enacted on the cliffs exploiting the scenic backdrop — including weddings, musical performances, dances and meditations.10 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 figure 3: es vedrà (right) and es vedranell (left) viewed from cliffs on adjacent shoreline of south-western ibiza. (photograph by philip hayward, september 2018) the geographical alignment of the coastline and es vedrà allows viewers the experience of watching the sun set behind the island, an aspect that is frequently remarked upon by visitors and tourism promoters, e.g.: undoubtedly, the most anticipated moment for everyone in this lovely beach is its famous sunset, a true spectacle for the senses that becomes even more amazing when it is accompanied by the mythical island of es vedrà, situated just off the coast. there is no more beautiful view to enjoy than watching the dim silhouette of the island while the warm colors of the sunset fade on the horizon. (sant josep, 2016: online) while there are areas of rocky foreshore from which es vedrà can be clearly perceived, the only sandy beach with such a vista is located at cala d’hort. combined with the allure of its narrow beach strip and a ramp that allows boats to be put into the bay, its low-angle perspective on es vedrà is a key attraction that is, similarly, evident in social media photos and is exploited by two restaurants located just above the main beach area (the el carmen and cala d’hort) and one slightly higher up the coastal slope on the north side of the bay (the mediterranean). all three have seating areas that grant patrons clear views of the scenic bay (see figure 4, for instance), an aspect that the el carmen represents in its logo (figure 5). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 figure 4: es vedranell and es vedrà viewed from inside the terrace area at el carmen restaurant, cala d’hort (photograph by philip hayward, september 2018) figure 5: el carmen restaurant sign, cala d’hort (photograph by philip hayward, september 2018) coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 new age insofar as they have connection to pre-existent mythologies and associations of place, the contemporary new age/mystical mythology around es vedrà appears to derive from two strands. the first concerns the association of ibiza with the phoenician/carthaginian goddess tanit. while tanit is prominent in the archaeological record across the western mediterranean, her attributes and associations are unclear (stuckley, 2015). she appears to share generic aspects with other goddesses, in that she is associated with (human and agricultural) fertility, but she also has another potential aspect in that her name has been interpreted as suggesting an association with canaanite sea‐dragon tannin (hyidberghansen, 2012). while usually depicted in fully human form, ibiza’s es culleram temple cave site, at the far north eastern end of the island, contains a number of winged figurines that are unique to the site and, as described by lópez-bertran: depict females usually seated on a throne wearing a kalathos (headdress). the wings, the herald’s wand (caduceus) and the solar disc or lotus flowers that the figure wears identify her as representing the carthaginian goddess tanit. the plain figurines are characterized by obvious iconographic references to demeter such as a kalathos, a veil, torches, piglets and babies. the 17 incense burners (thymiateria) are in the shape of a female head habitually associated with the cult of demeter and persephone. (2011: 89) the latter image — of a woman with a circular container on her head — is one that has been promulgated throughout the island as a visual motif associated with tanit (rather than, more correctly, with demeter/persephone) particularly in logos and merchandise aimed at tourists (with the name and visual branding of the tanit beach resort, which opened in 2015, being the most notable example). while various of the accounts discussed below associate tanit with es vedrà, this appears to be a modern — and highly speculative — linkage and there is no evidence of any association between tanit, es vedrà and/or the seas paisses archaeological site near cala d’hort. during the mid-late 20th century, the association of tannit with ibiza and of es vedrà with the mystical experiences of fr palau formed twin poles around which a set of modern folklore circulated, largely generated by resident, non-ibizan counter-culturalists, travellers and those who sought to represent those tales at second hand. these poles were “powered” by another aspect, the perception of ibiza and of es vedrà as having “energy vortexes”. as ivakhiv has characterised, places of natural wonder such as mount fuji in japan and sedona in the southwest usa “are believed by many to harbour ‘earth energies’ of some sort — energies that are thought to be beneficial and health-promoting in their effects and catalytic to spiritual growth” (1997: 266). similarly, other sites, such as macchu pichu in peru and the great pyramid in egypt, are valued for their ancient cultural value and are also often perceived as having enhanced value through some new agers’ belief that they “have been constructed in coordination with the natural energies represented by the former” and are similarly “charged” (ibid). as in the case of glastonbury, such sites are also believed by some to attract ufos and a variety of other paranormal phenomena. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 as d’andrea detailed in a study of techno music, new age sensibilities and transnational counter-cultures: many expatriates, particularly those of a more mystical proclivity, described their presence on the island as a blessed mystery. those into astrology claimed that ibiza is ruled by scorpio, a zodiacal sign that represents intense sensuality (and materialism), mysticism (and selfishness) and radical change (and betrayal). in the same vein, the sea rock of es vedra has been an object of fantastic stories due to its peculiar standing shape and luminosity, its ‘powerful energies.’ and, while some residents jocosely commented on alleged predictions by nostradamus that ibiza would survive a nuclear war, others recalled rumors about geo-magnetic streams that could account for the ‘special nature’ of the island. (2007: 124) as this quotation suggests, one element common within counter-cultural communities on ibiza is a belief in healing and/or otherwise positive energies that can be nurtured and channelled by mediation, yoga, other spiritual practices, music, dance and/or the consumption of mind-altering substances. es vedrà — and, to varying extents, some other places on the island — have been regarded as possessing natural energies and as functioning (effectively) as “spiritual batteries” that both have their own impact on spiritually attuned individuals and are able to deliver a special “charge” to meditation (etc.) conducted in their vicinity. this belief is ably represented in a video uploaded to youtube by long-term ibiza resident mark bajerski that shows him approaching a cliff top overlooking es vedrà, arriving at a vista point and announcing his intention to mediate there. he memorably conveys the impact that the island’s “charge” has on him as “like a thousand tons of feathers smashing you right in your heart” and refers to “the spiritual alignment of getting what can only be described as … the perfect energy in certain places”. while the latter statement is in accord with a commonly perceived sensibility on and of ibiza within the counter-culture, the “amplitude” of the spiritual charge attributed to es vedrà marks it as a particularly powerful location. in a surprising attempt to connect traditional religious beliefs with current perceptions of es vedrà as “spiritually charged”, the european carmelite mission has recently revived the special status of es vedrà — with regard to its significance for francesc palau in the 1850–60s — by featuring an image of the island at sunset on its official webpage that strongly resembles those used in various new age social media contexts (figure 6). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 figure 6: image from main page of carmelitas de europa website (2019), showing ibizan coast (far left) and es vedrà (centre left) medialoric es vedrà within the international counter-cultural community, its ibizan participants, tourism entrepreneurs and, to some extent, elements of the ibizan community more generally, a process of “co-mythologising” has occurred, not only with regard to es vedrà, as discussed in detail below, but also to a location on the coast directly opposite the island that merits reference. the site in question is a former coastal quarry at sa pedrera from which rectangular and circular blocks of various sizes were hewn, principally in the 16th century, to construct walls and buildings in ibiza’s old town. the extraction of these blocks left geometric formations, forming natural, tidally replenished rock “baths” in some areas and leaving smooth surfaces that generations of visitors have adorned with carvings and inscriptions. hippies and other travelers visiting the site in the 1960s–70s appear to have given it the name of “atlantis/lost kingdom of atlantis”, with the term persisting in tourist promotions as an attractive moniker and conceptual “hook” for subsequent tourists. this element has been cross-associated with es vedrà in recent media-lore, and particularly on the internet, in the manner characterised by hallerton: the internet is a wonderfully sprawling repository of arcane fictions and crypto-everything. its fragmentary and often inter-generative texts thrive and gain momentum with the slightest (and often most erroneous) of pretexts, generating threads of online mythology that variously intersect with older folkloric and mythological stories or else develop independently. (2016: 112) the material referred to by hallerton is that generated by a sprawling community of internet users who have various motivations for posting material and whose contributions towards the topics they address are rarely (if ever) externally assessed with regard to any kind of veracity to traditional forms of knowledge and/or research. a survey of website, blog and social media postings, visual artworks of various kinds and audio-visual media texts conducted by the authors in early 2019 identified the following clusters of elements associated with es vedrà: coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 a. new age/extraterrestrial aspects and energies 1. its mysterious and/or spiritual energy — an aspect that appears to derive from the writings of josep palau; 2. its (literal) magnetism — heavey, for example, states: according to experts, the rock of es vedrà is one of the strongest centres of magnetic forces in the world … what does appear certain is that the magnetic fields around es vedrà disorientate birds’ flight patterns … (2017: online) (nb this claim is somewhat peculiar given that es vedrà is a limestone outcrop with no magnetic attributes); 3. its position as one of the boundary points of a mysterious zone akin to the atlantic’s bermuda triangle, sometimes referred to as a narrow “triangle of silence” between alicante, mallorca and es vedrà where “sailors and airplanes have noticed strange energies that affected their equipment” (san josep, 2016: online); 4. strange lights and/or objects rising from or descending into the sea in the area and odds sounds heard in and above the waters; 5. es vedrà’s status as a ufo visitation “hot-spot” (an aspect that may be related to the famous “manises” incident over the western mediterranean in 1979 when an airliner diverted from its flightpath when its pilots perceived it to be intercepted by ufos (admin, 2012) (also see figure 7); and 6. its status as a remnant of the lost island of atlantis. this association appears substantially aligned with/derived from the modern appellation and associations given to coastal quarry site at sa pedrera discussed above. b. mythic/folkloric femininity 1. an association with tanit (deriving from the broader association of ibiza with the carthaginian goddess); and 2. an association with mermaids (apparently loosely aligned to 1. [above] and suggested by associations of other western mediterranean islands with sirens in ancient mythology11). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 figure 7: digital image showing an artist’s impression of ufos flying around es vedrà (source: heavey, 2016: online) the two clusters of female imagery are often cross-associated, as in the following blog post, which places the island at the centre of two classical myths in a manner not suggested in any mainstream reference source: it is said of es vedra that it is the birthplace of the phoenician goddess tanit, it has also been mentioned that this ancient island was the home of the sea nymphs and mermaids who tried to decoy the great ulysses in homer's odyssey of his ship. (hang loose ibiza, 2016: online) the visual design of the mermaid in cristina prieto’s artwork ‘sirena en es vedrà’ (figure 8) neatly draws together the above associations by virtue of depicting its eponymous, fish-tailed sirena with small wings, like those on the tanit figurines discovered at es culleram.12 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 figure 8: ‘sirena en es vedrà,’ cristina prieto (2015?) exemplifying hallerton’s comments about the “fragmentary and often inter-generative texts” that occur on social media, an online commentator on mystic matters named lisa provides a verbal summary of the various threads of legends and media-lore referred to above in a talk-to-camera entitled es vedra ibiza: mysteries, legends, ufo sightings? (2018). while she introduces her talk as collating material she has found on the topic, it also illustrates the “chinese whispers” element of serial re-telling by embellishing and inflecting her material. (at one point, for example, she states that she will commence by giving the “facts” about the island first and then mentions that fr. palau claimed to have seen “extra-terrestrials” during his visits to the island — which he did not.) her spoken word explication is also notable for being one of the few that references an actual ibizan folkloric tale that is omitted from the melange of elements usually associated with es vedrà. lisa provides a summary of an ibizan tale known as es gegant des vedrà (“the giant of es vedrà”), which was collected by the folklorist joan castelló guasch sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s and was published in 1952. the story concerns an ailing ibizan fisherman’s wife and her two sons who visit es vedrà to gather a special type of rock samphire (crithmum maritimum) growing on the island in order to heal him. their mission was particularly fraught in that they had to overcome an inhospitable giant to obtain the plant, which they managed through presenting the giant with an octopus stuffed with sea urchins, which incapacitated him after he ate it, allowing them to gather their crop and escape. the reason for the lack of incorporation of this story into the modern media-lore around the island is open to conjecture, but one notable element is that the giant (and his aggression and negativity) are antithetical to the positive “vibes” coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 associated with es vedrà in contemporary media-lore and therefore resist easy assimilation into contemporary place mythology. musical visions in addition to website material and social media postings, the associative elements detailed above have been frequently represented in musical contexts. there are a wide variety of tracks (or mixes of other tracks) that are entitled es vedrà; a music ensemble named es vedrà; a youtube music channel named es vedrà; and a variety of live music performances filmed on the cliffs overlooking es vedrà. the majority of these are in various combinations of the digital, mid-tempo groove “chill-out” style associated with the island (exemplified by music releases on the café del mar label) or the more up-tempo style of dance music associated with ibizan “mega-clubs” such as amnesia and ushuaïa. the variously relaxed and/or meditative mid-tempo grooves of the former and progressions of slow-paced sections, “builds” and climaxes in the latter support new age sensibilities and senses of spiritual energy that are widely associated with the ibizan scene. through the names of the material and the visual images that accompany the tracks in their youtube uploads, which frequently show the island as perceived from shoreline vantage points, es vedrà is imbued with associations that complement the affective significance of the music. examples of the latter include the b-tribe’s 2008 track ‘es vedrà’13 and aly & fila vs the thrillseekers’ identically named 2015 track.14 there are also a number of musical performances in clifftop locations overlooking es vedrà available online, ranging from amateur ones that have received few views through to giorgia angiuli’s late afternoon 86-minute long, digital keyboard-based piece (filmed in 2018) which has been watched by 1.34 million viewers to date.15 angiuli’s track builds its dynamic pattern in real-time synchronisation with the movement of the sun as sets behind es vedrà, the changes in light enhancing the musical experience and providing a strong evocation of space and prompting 1,156 almost uniformly positive viewer comments (as of 20 march 2019). a different vantage point is provided in the video of dj don diablo performing a set onboard a cruise boat moored off the island. 16 there are also a number of hybrid audio-visual texts available online, such as how to get to atlantis ibiza, next to es vedra (2015)17 that combine travelogue-style representations of the sa pedrera site with shots of es vedrà from nearby cliffs and “chillout” music. cross-associating music of a different kind, the practice of yoga (which is widespread on the island) and es vedrà’s spiritual mystique, a local yoga teacher named dagmar also filmed a “vinyasa flow” video promoting her business in which she performs various yoga moves to the accompaniment of a hang (standing bell) played by a male accompanist with the island as a visual backdrop.18 these tracks, and many similar audio-visual texts available on youtube, serve to perpetuate es vedrà (or, rather, the island viewed from nearby vantage points) as a spectacular, spiritually imbued and special place and provided a strong contemporary association of it with ibizan electronic music styles (as a form of meta-textual soundtrack). coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 conclusion this article has primarily addressed es vedrà as an island perceived from nearby vantage points and imaginatively interpreted by modern-day recreational pilgrims, media producers and creative artists, almost none of whom appear to have ventured on to its slopes. in these regards, the island primarily exists in socio-cultural discourse as an imagined entity. as an immaterial object of this type, the various — and often fanciful — narratives and characterisations that have been affixed to it operate within their own logic systems and rationales that “snowball” as they progress chronologically, adding fresh layers. the materiality of the island is simultaneously a premise for them and a largely redundant aspect of their elaboration. one of the few audio-visual texts to actually document the island provides a very different vision. although es vedrà is introduced by the documentary’s participants in familiar terms — “no question this island inspires people” — a national geographic sponsored team that obtained a permit to visit the island and photograph its endemic lizards produced a short video entitled the symbol #3 es vedra (2012)19 that showed its vertical landscapes, slippery scree slopes, minimal vegetation and occasional lizards in a manner that emphasised the physical rawness of the island (rather than its embellishment with mystic associations). the video thereby performed a useful historical “looping” function. by representing the difficult and exposed slopes that fr. palau had to negotiate in order to traverse the island and reach the points of the summit on which he experienced visions of a mystic female presence, the video both returns the viewer to the origins of the contemporary myth of “mystic es vedrà” and asserts the material character of the island in a manner lacking in other contemporary representations. but despite this re-assertion of the essential materiality of es vedrà, the island remains a key location on an international recreational pilgrimage circuit and one that forms a new sub-category within the formation initially suggested by kedzior (2012) whereby such sites are required to possess distinct natural beauty and vestiges of ancient civilisations. as a thoroughly modern addition to the “a list” of iconic new age places, es vedrà’s status is strongly predicated on its medialoric elaboration and is, thus, as much an invention of recreational pilgrim sensibilities as it is the recipient of them. bibliography admin (2012) ‘comunicaciones originales del caso ovni de manises (1979)’: http://www.controladoresaereos.org/2012/04/26/comunicaciones-originales-del-casoovni-de-manises-1979/ armstrong, stephen (2005) the white island: the colourful history of the original fantasy island, ibiza, london: corgi bowman, marion (2007) ‘arthur and bridget in avalon: celtic myth, vernacular religion and contemporary spirituality in glastonbury, fabula v28 n2: 16–32 castelló guasch, joan (1952). rondaies eivissenques, palma de majorca: f. ferrer coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 casal i bergés, quintí (2017) ‘el carlisme a lleida durant el sexenni democràtic (18681875)’ in montaña, daniel and rafart, josep (eds), la industrialització al berguedà i el fenomen carlista, avià: centre d’estudis d’avià coromines, joan (1989-1997) onomasticon cataloniae, barcelona: curial/la caixa d’andrea, anthony (2007) global nomads: techno and new age as transitional countercultures in ibiza and goa, abingdon: routledge dawson, helen (2013) mediterranean voyages: the archaeology of island colonisation and abandonment, new york: routledge ferrer tur, marina (2009) ‘morir de éxito: visualizando la dystopia de ibiza’, unpublished bachelors fine arts thesis, university of valencia hallerton, sheila (2016) ‘atlantis/lyonesse: the plains of imagination’, shima v10 n2: 112–17 hang loose ibiza (nd) website: https://hanglooseibiza.com – accessed 7 march 2019 hayward, philip (2013) ‘englamoured: mermaid iconography as a contemporary heritage asset for catalina island’, contemporary legend series 2 v3: 39–62 hayward, philip (2017) ‘enduring perceptions: placenaming and the perception of louisiana’s salt dome islands’, island studies v11 n2: 417–30 hayward, philip and kuwahara, sueo (2014) ‘takarajima: a treasured island: exogeneity, folkloric identity and local branding,’ journal of marine and island cultures v3 n1: 20–30 hyidberg-hansen, finn o (2012) ‘tanit’ encyclopedia of ancient history: https://doi.og/10.1002/9781444338386 ibiza preservation foundation (nd) cala d’hort: preservation for a sustainable future: https://ibizapreservationfund.org/project/cala-dhort-conservation-sustainable-future/ ivakhiv, adrian (2007) ‘power trips: making scared space through new age’, in kemp, daren and lewis, james r. (eds) handbook of new age, leiden: brill: 263–90 kedzior, richard (2012) ‘materializing the spiritual: investigating the role of marketplace in creating opportunities for the consumption of spiritual experiences’, in rinaldo, diego, scott, linda m., and maclaran, pauline (ed) consumption and spirituality, new york: taylor and francis: 178–94 lipiński, édouard (2003). “phoenician cult expressions in the persian period,” 297–308 in dever, w.g and gitin, s (eds) symbiosis, symbolism, and the power of the past: canaan, ancient israel, and their neighbors from the late bronze age through roman https://hanglooseibiza.com/ https://hanglooseibiza.com/ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 palaestina, winona lake: eisenbrauns london toolkit (nd) ‘glastonbury myths and legends’: https://www.londontoolkit.com/whattodo/glastonbury_myths_legends.htm accessed 21 march 2019 mckay, ben (2015) ‘how to get to atlantis, ibiza, next to es vedra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqcokszhpe online etymological dictionary (nd) ‘vista’: https://www.etymonline.com/word/vista accessed 15 march 2019 planells i bonet, josep (1982) ‘el p. palau, un carmelita polifacètic vinculat a eivissa’ eivissa n14: 34–5 lópez-bertran, mireia (2011) practical movements: kinetic rituals in the ancient western mediterranean, journal of mediterranean archaeology 24.1: 85–109 palau, francesc (nd) cartas, caremlitas misioneras en europa: http://www.carmiseuropa.org/adftp/cartas.pdf rahtz, philip (2002) ‘glastonbury tor: a modified landscape,’ landscapes v3 n1: 4–19 rodríguez, rosa and cerdà, joan (1999) la repressió franquista del movement hippie a formentera, ibiza: res publica edicions. russian laboratory of theoretical folkloristics (2014) ‘conference “mechanisms of cultural memory: from folk-lore to media-lore”, ranepa website: http://www.ranepa.ru/eng/activities/item/604-cultural-memory.html – accessed 11 february 2019 san josep (2016) ‘6 tips: a guide to cala d’hort, ibiza’: https://www.santjosep.net/en/6ideas-una-guia-cala-dhort-ibiza/ stuckley, joanne (2009) ‘tanit of carthage,’ matrifocus v8-4: 1–13 suwa, jun’ichiro (2007) ‘the space of shima’, shima v1 n1: 6-14 suwa, jun’ichiro (2018) ‘ningyo legends, enshrined islands and the animation of aquapelagic assemblages,’ shima v1 n1: 6–14 wylie, john (2002) ‘an essay on ascending glastonbury tor’, geoforum n33: 444–54 bionote: philip hayward is an adjunct professor at the university of technology sydney and is editor of the online journal shima. his research interests include aquapelagos, mermaids, micronations and he is actively involved in rainforest regeneration in far north new south wales. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 marcel a. farinelli is a research academic at the university of corsica. he is interested in modern and contemporary history of mediterranean islands — particularly corsica and sardinia — nationalism, linguistic minorities island-to-island relations and archipelagos. endnotes 1 in this regard it resembles the elevated five salt-domes of south west louisiana that have been perceived as “land islands” by successive population groups (see hayward, 2016 for discussion). 2 our research has failed to uncover a single claim of illicit visitation to es vedrà by visitors. this is in striking contrast to the number of tourists and/or recreational pilgrims who climb uluru during visits to central australia despite explicit requests that such visitations should not occur since the site is regarded as a holy (and thereby restricted access) one by the indigenous people of the region. 3 such as, for example, the spiralling, ancient pathways that mark the recreational pilgrim’s ascent to glastonbury tor. 4 vista, an italian term meaning “sight” or “view”, was adopted into english language in the mid-1650s and has come to refer to a sightline onto a pleasing landscape (online etymological dictionary: nd). 5 similar place names existed in the northern iberian peninsula, the most famous examples of which are the town of pontevedra and the village of vedra, in galicia. 6 barcelona was, at those times, one of the most important industrial cities of southern europe, with the highest concentration of working-class population, and uprisings were frequent and often involved the burning and looting of religious buildings. 7 as illustrated in the video the symbol #3 es vedra (2012), discussed in the conclusion to this article, such climbs were arduous and risky. 8 they were not the first to find in the island an oasis of liberty. since the beginning of the 20th century catalan artists visited ibiza in search for inspiration, and in the 1930s a group of german intellectuals moved there to escape nazism, among them the philosopher walter benjamin and the artist raoul hausman. 9 king crimson’s 1969 song ‘formentera lady’ is one memento of such sojourns. 10 see, for instance, the range accessed by a google image search for “es vedra photos”. 11 such as the sirenusas archipelago, off italy’s amalfi coast, which is reputed by have been the home of sirens in the pre-christian era. 12 the association of es vedrà with the odyssey is also explored by french artist chloé poirier sauvé in a sequentially evolving, seven-minute duration sand drawing performed in 2015 and uploaded to youtube, set to music by debussy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfkp9jozav0 — accessed 20 march 2019 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etklp4ilmia — accessed 20 march 2019. 14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3pjjqc6qs — accessed 20 march 2019. 15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpog56e0vaq — accessed 20 march 2019. 16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikrwlok5ix0 — accessed 20 march 2019. 17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqcokszhpe — accessed 20 march 2019. 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oblezdorrrk — accessed 20 march 2019. 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wj67zmjlzk — accessed 20 march 2019. https://www.youtube.com/channel/uccuptdvny_phodcxnswqdfa https://www.youtube.com/channel/uccuptdvny_phodcxnswqdfa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfkp9jozav0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfkp9jozav0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etklp4ilmia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etklp4ilmia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3pjjqc6qs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3pjjqc6qs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpog56e0vaq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpog56e0vaq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikrwlok5ix0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikrwlok5ix0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqcokszhpe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqcokszhpe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wj67zmjlzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wj67zmjlzk microsoft word 08_feeling and healing in languages alonso-breto.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 feeling and healing in languages / sentir y sanar en mis lenguas isabel alonso-breto universitat de barcelona illustrations by sabrina atanasiu alonso copyright©2021 isabel alonso-breto and sabrina atanasiu alonso. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. the red sea and thus we were crossing the sea thousands of women of any size and condition tall women, short women fat and skinny lean and bright, sturdy women women without a degree women with a doctorate in suffering women mother-of-child childless women women in green women with beautiful scarves brought from yonder women with skins virtually transparent spoiled, rich, superficial all kinds of unlivable women women with spots women with scars women with seas of wisdom spotless women scarless women ignorant, indecent, inappropriate women women who love women and don’t women who don’t love men and yet do women who love men till self-starvation coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 women so selfish that could nauseate passers-by women with flowers in their hair women with their souls full of flowers women with star-apple and jellyfish in their armpits hands smelling of cinnamon women like, perhaps, your own mother like perhaps your daughter women with hope for a better world women with shining futures women like me humble women like you inconceivable deeply powerful women look at them being born to a new, deeper transcendental glee look at them …healing and thus we were thousands women crossing the sea the red sea the red sea of breast cancer the red sea y fue así que cruzamos el mar un millar de mujeres de toda condición y signo mujeres altas, pequeñas enjutas y gordas brillantes y opacas, resistentes mujeres sin estudios mujeres con un doctorado en congojas mujeres con hijos sin ellos vestidas de verde o con lindos fulares coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 comprados en el extranjero mujeres con la piel virtualmente translúcida ricas, mimadas, superficiales toda clase de mujeres estupendas también toda clase de mujeres insoportables mujeres con granos mujeres con cicatrices mujeres con mares de sabiduría mujeres sin granos sin cicatrices ignorantes, indecentes, impropias mujeres que aman a las mujeres y otras que no mujeres que no aman a los hombres y sin embargo los aman mujeres que aman a los hombres hasta desangrarse mujeres tan egoístas que podrían asquear a los paseantes mujeres con flores en los cabellos mujeres con el alma llena de flores mujeres con caimitos y aguavivas en las axilas olor a canela en las manos mujeres quizás como tu propia madre como tu hija quizás mujeres con la esperanza de un mundo mejor mujeres con futuros deslumbrantes mujeres como yo humildes mujeres como tú inconcebiblemente hermosas poderosas hasta extremos insospechados míralas cómo nacen a un gozo nuevo, profundo transcendental míralas cómo …se curan y así somos millares mujeres cruzando este mar el mar rojo el mar rojo del cáncer de mama coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 the red sea /el mar rojo ©sabrina atanasiu alonso coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 tree (in the place of a justification) i was born monolingual. indeed the first person ever to have learned a foreign language in my tree, too busy scraping dry land to convince it to give away a few sprigs and some apple to chase away hunger, and thanking dictatorial gods and spurious law-makers for allowing whatever disadvantageous agreement with the yet gorgeous provider. yes, i was born monolingual and then came to learn a different language which i could play with, revel in suffer with through and through, -and i’m serious-, escape from myself and be myself anew together. so yes: i started writing a poem now and then in that foreign language and it felt good it felt funny it felt sometimes inadequate and often, when subject matter so required it felt equally painful. árbol (a modo de justificación) nací monolingüe. fui, de hecho, la primera persona que aprendió un idioma extranjero en ese árbol mío, ocupado en arañar la tierra seca para convencerla de alumbrar alguna espiga y alguna que otra manzana para amansar el hambre, dando gracias coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 a dioses dictatoriales y a espurios legisladores por permitir vagos acuerdos siempre desfavorables con esa tierra, hermosa casi a nuestro pesar. sí, nací monolingüe y entonces aprendí un idioma diferente. con él podía jugar disfrutarnos y sufrir también a menudo. y sí; con él podía escapar de mí misma y volver a ser yo y ser aun otra, distinta. y sí; empecé a escribir poemas de vez en cuando en ese idioma extranjero que me hacían bien resultaban divertidos y a veces inapropiados. aunque otras, cuando el tema lo exigía los sentía igualmente dolorosos. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 in languages / en mis lenguas ©sabrina atanasiu alonso coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 isabel alonso-breto is a scholar in the area of postcolonial studies in english, and also a translator and occasional poet. she is the author of the poetry collection elogio de la tabla de surf y otros poemas desde el cáncer de mama (helicóptero, 2021), and the translator of siembra solo palabras, a poetry anthology by cheran (navona, 2019). sabrina atanasiu alonso is a ba student in audiovisual communication at university pompeu fabra, barcelona. isabel alonso-breto ejerce como académica en el área de estudios postcoloniales en lengua inglesa, y es también traductora y, ocasionalmente, poeta. es autora de la colección de poesía elogio de la tabla de surf y otros poemas desde el cáncer de mama (helicóptero, 2021), y traductora de la antología de cheran siembra solo palabras (navona, 2019). sabrina atanasiu alonso estudia comunicación audiovisual en la universitat pompeu fabra de barcelona. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 1 apparitions and atmospheres: an introduction to the special issue “on gases, clouds, fogs and mists” benjamin kidder hodges university of macau bhodges@um.edu.mo copyright© 2023 benjamin kidder hodges. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. atmospheres are always all around us; but they are also routinely overlooked and ignored. when they become visible, are felt or otherwise noticed they can be experienced as an unusual interruption. whether a storm cloud or a roadside flare, they mark a change. we also know from gothic literature and horror films that fogs and mists roll in and change the mood of a scene turning innocent bucolic landscapes into sinister reminders of dangers, real or imagined, that may be lurking in the dark. unseen invisible gases can impact us too, making spaces unpleasant and even uninhabitable. of course, it is not all just doom and gloom. atmospheres are also full of the particulate that makes neon glow and nightclubs create otherworldly spaces. they create moods and affects, aesthetic experiences to be desired, bought and sold. atmospheres are the stuff of fairy dust, sci-fi special effects and divine halation. they can be seen at a distance causing optical effects like mirages and we can also find ourselves right in the middle of them like humidity stuck to the skin. architectures define atmospheres. tourists seek atmospheres. new writing and research on atmospheres has brought about what has been called an “atmospheric turn” (griffero 2019, sobecka 2018). what unites this recent research across the sciences, cultural studies and comparative literature is a concern with the particular qualities of atmospheres and how they have historically been interpreted, controlled and experienced across cultures and communities. in theorizing what he calls ‘affective atmospheres’ anderson reminds us that “atmospheres are perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing, as bodies enter into relation with one another. they are never finished, static or at rest” (2009, 79). thinking about atmospheres involves thinking about an always changing relationship between subjects and their environment. the significance of atmospheres as a global phenomenon is also increasingly understood in terms of the very real impacts of climate change, with nearly every discipline from the humanities to the sciences trying to contribute to a greater understanding of its effects on communities and multispecies relationships (bastian, m., & bayliss hawitt, r. 2022). from pollution to sea level change, the risks mailto:bhodges@um.edu.mo coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 2 of climate change are global but their impact is disproportionately felt by disadvantaged communities; from the precarity of island communities to the poor air quality of urban centres, atmospheres foretell such looming threats. this special edition of coolabah, ‘on gases, clouds, fogs and mists,’ collects articles and creative writing on the theme of atmospheres. while set in a variety of geographic regions and spanning different historical time periods, a through line in these works is their concern for the embodied experience of atmospheres. they are also full of ghosts, monsters and unexplained apparitions, gaseous forms that demand our attention. these apparitions are not just figments of one’s imagination or mere frightened projections, they are made of real atmospheric effects that exist outside of human perception or narration of them. apparitions are unexpected appearances, things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye or seen on the horizon. they have physical and optical explanation but also an affective punch. their physical composition can be studied and understood but their uncanny first appearance can be their most lasting significance. freud’s famous account of the uncanny or the unheimlich as he phrases it in the original german is more a catalogue than a precise definition. he lists things that are at once both familiar and strange. in this accounting he highlights the “the unheimlich mist called hill-fog” (2003, 3). this low-lying cloud cover can be seen in traditional chinese paintings and in gothic literature, highlighting from the beginning that responses to atmospheres are culturally and historically specific. to this list, it would be easy to add any number of other atmospheres that evoke more than just the weather. in addition to moisture and particulate matter, atmospheres can also carry memories and unresolved histories. the authors in this special issue use atmospheres to engage with legacies of resource extractivism, settler colonialism and other anthropogenic effects of human development. the atmospheres and spaces they address are at times haunting and uncanny. confronting them by tracing their underlying physical properties and cultural histories does not make them any less impactful or even, at times, frightening. in the collection “exploring atmospheres ethnographically”, schroer and schmitt highlight work that considers atmospheres set amidst the quotidian smells, sounds and rhythms of daily life (2018). the particular contribution of this current coolabah special issue collection of writing is a situated approach that considers atmospheres and optical anomalies in historical and cultural context. folklore, fables and ghost stories can be mined to make sense of the physical worlds around us. amidst the intermingling of styles and subject matter in this special issue, there is also a shared concern with more-than-human ecologies. these authors are not only engaged with human precarity in the face of climate change and natural forces, they are also concerned with diverse environments themselves, how mountains, seas and fungal spores persist and persevere. this aligns with the multispecies concerns of what has been termed the ‘ecogothic.’ in their collection ecogothic (2013) smith and hughes anticipate a growing body of scholarship that seeks to link ecological thinking about environments with the affects and emotions familiar to us from gothic literature. the ominous and foreboding 18th and 19th century moors, bogs and locks so common to this literary tradition from northern europe can teach us a few things about how to link emotions and affects to a place. philip hayward’s “extraordinarily hazardous’ fog, water, ice and human precarity in the aquapelagic assemblage of the grand banks (northwest atlantic)” introduces the reader to a unique marine region with a particularly high occurrence of fog and abundance of sea life. hayward situates us in the confusion of this dangerous marine environment and thereby gives the reader a feel for an atmospheric precarity that predates more recent concerns about climate change. through historical examples from coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 3 paintings to literature, he shows how ‘aquapelagos (integrated terrestrial and marine systems)’ can be dangerous zones where the atmosphere itself puts human life on edge. in “nessie and noctilucent clouds: a meteorological explanation for some loch ness monster sightings” oliver d. smith draws attention to atmospheric effects and their ability to inspire mythologies and speculative theories about the loch ness monster, one the most infamous subjects of speculation and folklore. this work shows how atmospheric imaginaries are influenced by and subsequently inform people’s optical experience of the material world. atmospheres are not just symbolic repositories, they are physical phenomena that exist outside of interpretation. the gothic has also been applied to new geographic regions and cultural legacies as in the case of the tropical gothic (edwards & vasconcelos, 2016). in this current special issue three works address australian spaces, both real and imagined. in these works, the ghosts and figments of monumental mountains and architectures loom over the australian landscape demanding attention to colonial histories and possible environmental futures. in ‘consumed in the fog: a metropolitan revenge fantasy’ erin malley’s daily walk along the sydney waterfront turns into a fantasy about consuming the architectures of capital that have arisen along the shore. she adopts a confessional tone that is at the same time unapologetic and not cowered by the sheer size of the anthropogenic changes transforming the landscape. her imagined ‘revenge fantasy,’ a swarm of building devouring drones, comes across as an empowering force, a technological cloud of agency in the face of large scale urban development. and in simone lazaroo’s ‘mother’s ghosts’, family and diasporic histories are set against suburban development and precolonial aboriginal histories. lazaroo tells a very personal story that is at once linked to larger narratives about immigration and displacement. her attunement to haunted spaces and histories raises questions about what history is seen and what history is ignored. writing about apparitions and atmospheres grants us access to these questions and can give form to otherwise elusive memories. in marea mitchell’s ‘effects of atmosphere in andrew mcgahan’s the rich man’s house (2019)’, a fictitious island off the coast of australia is the site of a murder. mitchell draws us into the intricate interiors of this house and leads us to question the significance of its elaborate design. this island escape relies on surrounding atmospheres to hide its truth from the rest of the world. andrew mcgahan’s final novel resonates with south seas fiction that considers the island as a recurrent place of secrecy and fantasy. the island in this tradition is also frequently a dream of abundance and insolation from the troubles of the rest of the world. the recent special issue of coolabah, no. 31 (2021): mythical and fictional islands (special issue on island studies), offers further examples of the signification islands play in such literary and folkloric traditions. inspired in part by an ecological approach, a number of authors in this current special issue attend to more-than-human relationships in familiar environs. donna haraway brought back to scholarly attention the speculative fiction of ursula leguin and her carrier bag theory of fiction (leguin & haraway 2019). leguin’s method involves decentring the prototypical male hero of joseph campbell outlined in the man with a thousand faces (2012). in contrast to campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ narrative, leguin brings to the fore the mundane material world as key elements of effective worldbuilding and storytelling. christian dymond adopts a similarly decentred, non-humancentric approach to cinema in his contribution ‘weather as cinema: exploring fungal and weatherly creativity in film.’ dymond shows how weather itself is generative and capable of both affecting the cinematic image and working directly coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 4 as an agent on filmic medium. dymond explores the history of weather in early cinema and introduces the work of two artists who use fungal spores and other particulate matter driven by weather to create cinematic images. the interviews he shares with these artists further help readers to understand the relationship between a decentred creative practice and the weather. the anxieties manifest in gothic literature have also taken on a new form in what morton has called the ‘dark ecology’ or a critical self-awareness of anthropocenic effects on climate futures (morton 2016). in this theory of the anthropocene, atmospheres and apparitions can be felt as an ecological threat. along a similar vein of thinking a “gothic ecocritical lens illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervades those relationships: it orients us, in short, to the more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies” (keetley and sivils 2017, 1). there is a kind of precarity when people are faced with atmospheres and environments beyond their control. in their article, ‘mistification: the dreadful side of cloud computing’ authors vicente bicudo de castro, heitor coelho and danilo bantim frambach apply a gothic reading of cloud computing in line with james bridle’s dark new age: technology and the end of the future (2018). they propose ‘mistification’ as a new more appropriate metaphor for the obscurity of cloud based computing. the authors draw an original parallel with the ravenloft campaign setting of dungeons & dragons exploring how the horror and fear of this roleplaying game might evoke the confusion and anxieties of cloud computing users unaware of the mechanism behind the technology. my own contribution, ‘future clouds: diatoms, speculation and weather modification’ is a speculative reflection on the role algae play in the formation of clouds. in a continuation of a method developed in my work on the mythology behind mirages, i explore links between speculation in science, folklore and science fiction (hodges, 2022). microalgae such as diatoms were discovered to play an important role in cloud formation as cloud condensation nuclei. this discovery provides a chance to reflect on the experimental history of cloud seeding projects as an attunement to dynamic relationships between the sea, sky and weather. the very diversity of subjects and approaches in this special issue suggest that there is a place for more scholarly and creative work centred on atmospheres and the imaginaries they engender. more than just triggers for fantasy or scientific speculation, atmospheres might offer a model in themselves in how to think seemingly disparate materials at the same time, like particulate suspended together in air. particulate matter from diatoms to anthropogenic aerosols populate the atmosphere. they can form an oppressive haze as in the great smog of 1952 that engulfed london or in the wildfires that have more recently blanketed the skies of california (corton, 2015). they can also give shape, even if just for a moment, to fleeting images of past tragedies and unresolved histories. for all these diverse forms of atmospheres the focus of this collection is to look for ways in which cultural understandings and misunderstandings of atmospheres might offer new ways of thinking about a complicated now and a perhaps even more complicated near future. folklore, popular culture and speculative fiction can provide new ways of understanding the atmospheres around us and what impact we have on them as well as they have on us. references anderson, b. (2009). affective atmospheres. emotion, space and society,12(2),177–81.11 coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 5 bastian, m., & bayliss hawitt, r. (2022). multi-species, ecological and climate change temporalities: opening a dialogue with phenology. environment and planning e: nature and space, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221111784 blanco, m. d., and e. peeren, eds. 2013. the spectralities reader: ghosts and haunting in contemporary cultural theory. new york: bloomsbury academic. campbell, j. (2012). the hero with a thousand faces. (3rd ed.). new world library. corton. christine l. (2015). london fog: the biography. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press. edwards, j.d., & vasconcelos, s. (eds.). (2016). tropical gothic in literature and culture: the americas (1st ed.). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315689999 freud, s. 2003. “the ‘uncanny’.” trans. david mclintock new york: penguin books. griffero, tonino. 2019. “is there such a thing as an “atmospheric turn”? instead of an introduction” in atmosphere and aesthetics a plural perspective. palgrave mcmillan. hayward, philip. ‘aquapelagos and aquapelagic assemblages’ (2012) shima: the international journal of research into island cultures v6 n1: 1-10 hodges, b. k. (2022). atmospheric visions: mirages, methane seeps and ‘clam-monsters’ in the yellow sea. shima, 16(1), 115–136. keetley, d., & sivils, m. w. (2017). ecogothic in nineteenth-century american literature (1st ed.). taylor and francis. retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/1498472/ecogothic-in-nineteenthcentury-american-literature-pdf (original work published 2017) le guin u. k. haraway d. j. & lee b. (2019). the carrier bag theory of fiction. ignota. morton t. (2016). dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence. columbia university press. schroer, s. a., & schmitt, s. (2018). introduction: thinking through atmospheres. in s. a. schroer, & s. schmitt (eds.), exploring atmospheres ethnographically routledge. smith, a., & hughes, w. (eds.). (2013). ecogothic. manchester university press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mvk5r sobecka, k. (2018). the atmospheric turn. in s. bergmann & f. clingerman (eds.), arts, religion, and the environment: exploring nature’s texture (pp. 43–58). brill. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv2gjwms3.6 benjamin kidder hodges is an artist and anthropologist originally from richmond, virginia whose research based art and writing draw on folklore, mythology and media archaeology to call attention to overlooked histories. this involves building links between material culture and lived affects from boredom to shock. he is currently an assistant professor at the university of macau where he teaches filmmaking, media studies, and cultural studies within the department of communication. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 6 through an ale glass, palely coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 106 through an ale glass, palely: mermen, neptune/poseidon and tritons as motifs in beer brands and product labels alex mesker macquarie university alex.mesker@mq.edu.au copyright©2019 alex mesker. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: while the merman has been a minor figure in modern popular culture — in marked contrast to his gender counterpart, the mermaid — the figure has begun to enjoy a resurgence in several cultural niches in recent decades. one of the most notable of these has occurred with regard to the branding and marketing of types of beer and, in particularly, with the burgeoning ‘craft beer’ movement that has taken off in north america, europe and australasia (in particular) since the early 2000s. after an introduction to the merman in popular culture, this article analyses the use of mermen and related fish-tailed mythological males in brewery names and symbols, on beer bottle labels and in related marketing material. the article considers the product image created by such symbolism and the manner in which it might be modifying the role and perception of the merman and related figures in contemporary popular culture. it furthermore aims to illustrate ways that contemporary abstract, naïve, camp and kitsch depictions of mermen are embraced by breweries to situate themselves as culturally engaged, environmentally oriented, or anti-establishment agitators. keywords: mermen, neptune, beer, hybridity, folklore, product labelling introduction for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now i know in part; but then shall i know even as also i am known. (bible 1 corinthians 13:12 [king james version]) like his female counterpart, the mermaid, the merman is a composite creature with the upper torso of a human and the lower body of fish. unlike the mermaid, the merman’s prominence has been marginal in 20th and 21st century film and television and various coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 107 forms of visual media. indeed, the mermaid’s ascendancy was paralleled by the merman’s retraction from the public sphere for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. analysing the highly limited number of representations of mermen in 20th and early 21st century film and television, hayward (2016: 151–66) characterised their marginality with reference to freudian/phallocentric discourse, identifying the lack of visible genitals on mermen’s tails as marking them as problematically unmanly. discussing the few examples of mermen that have maintained some faint presence in film and television, he characterised three principal types: aged and bearded patriarchs (ibid: 152), transformative teenage mermen (ibid: 155–8) and queer mermen (ibid: 158–66).1 as he characterises, none of these are equivalent to the types of adult heterosexual males typically represented in mainstream cinema and popular culture more generally. in age terms and sexual proclivity, they are also markedly different from the highly standardised archetypal mermaid, represented as a highly attractive and often highly amorous young adult. but however accurate hayward’s characterisation of the lack of mermen on-screen (and of this being a result of their lack of phallic agency within the masculinist/heterosexual visual regime of western audiovisual media culture — ibid: 12–16); the situation is less schismatic and polarised in other aspects of contemporary popular culture. jilkén (2018), for instance, has provided a study of the merman in a range of modern illustrations primarily — although not exclusively — produced for male homosexual consumers. his case study suggests that lack of phallic agency is simultaneously less marked, more ambiguous and of less consequence in such material than in the audiovisual material hayward profiles. this article aims to complement these authors’ studies by providing a case study of representations of mermen and related fish-tailed male figures in beer brand product imagery (and on beer bottle labels in particular). before proceeding with an introduction to that area of commodity production, a note on the inclusion of neptune imagery in this study is required. neptune, the roman god of the sea and freshwater systems, and his greek equivalent poseidon, have traditionally been depicted in fully human form and have often been represented as wielding a trident and/or bearing a flowing beard. representations of the gods in fish-tailed form are less common in antiquity but poseidon is closely associated with his multiple offspring, the tritons — originally male and female figures with lower fish-tailed bodies but increasingly from the medieval period on as male figures, often seen blowing conch shell trumpets. however, over the last century variants of his form, variously called king neptune or king triton have appeared in various disney productions (hayward, 2017: 35–7, 152), blurring the distinction between the fully human figures of neptune and poseidon and fish-tailed tritons and mermen. a similar pattern can be seen in representations of neptune (in particular) in beer brand imagery and, for this reason, neptune and mermen are considered together in this article. the contemporary craft beer movement and the rise of artisanal beer brewing growing globally since the 1980s, the craft beer movement typically refers to the production of beer by independent and small-scale breweries that use traditional methods and focus primarily on the flavour and quality of the product. while the term itself is somewhat nebulous, the ‘craft beer’ designation is typically aligned with terms like ‘micro’, ‘nano’, (and occasionally ‘pic0’) which are used as prefixes to ‘brewery’ to indicate the scale at which beer is produced and ascribe a somewhat neolocal/locavoric distance from the production scale and far reach of ‘macro’ equivalents. as much as craft coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 108 brewing draws from tradition in terms of ingredients2 and practices, craft brewing is also an area of vast experimentation, with many breweries working in conjunction with hop growers to showcase experimental hop hybrid varieties, as well as draw on new production technologies3 created for the brewing process. while beer typically consists of four ingredients — water, malt, hops and yeast — differences in the ingredients and how they are used in the brewing process leads to broad diversity in the final product. the articulation of difference has led to the categorisation of dozens of beer styles,4 most often relating a beer’s visual appearance, taste, ingredients and production methods. historically, many beer styles have an association with ‘place’ and are named in relation to their origin, as local water chemistry, availability of ingredients (including malt, hops and other herbs or spices), yeast strains, and regional approaches to the brewing process have great impact on the resulting product, and consequently are a crucial factor in defining style. given their frequent independence and small production scale, craft breweries are more able to experiment with batches than their macro counterparts, and as such are largely responsible for the resurgence and diversity in the less-produced beer styles. with craft breweries often approaching the creation of beer as an artistic endeavour, several breweries furthermore seek to augment and redefine existing conceptions of classic beer styles as well as revive historical locational variants. in addition to the definition of craft brewer by scale, independence and adherence to traditional brewing ingredients and techniques, craft brewing also resonates with some alternative cultures and anti-corporate movements. the united states’ brewers association also suggests that a modern hallmark of craft brewing is innovation and social engagement, suggesting that craft brewers “tend to be very involved in their communities through philanthropy, product donations, volunteerism and sponsorship of events” (nd: online). the reclamation of historical styles, adherence to traditional practices, social engagement, and ‘slow beer’ ethos has resonated with those who are passionate about quality and taste and those whose ideals are represented by the brewery themselves. the frequent association with ‘micro’ also resonates with some alternative cultures and anti-corporate movements. parallelisms: craft beer movements and hipster subcultures while the two are not synonymous, craft beer culture parallels many traits of hipster culture on both surface and deeper levels. aside from shared similarities in terms of the archetypal visual style of men involved in them — such as beards and other stylised facial hair, tattoos and retro chic — both embrace neolocalism, artisanality, a rejection of the ‘mainstream’, and notions of ‘small-scale’ and ‘hand-made’ as emblems of authenticity. articles on the rise of craft beer in recent years highlight similarities between slow-foodstyle descriptors that recur in the communities, with adjectives like ‘craft’, ‘artisanal’, ‘micro’ and ‘nano’ considered as “cult adjectives” (day, 2015: online). like the hipster movement’s rejection of mainstream culture, craft beer culture rebels against massproduced beer and craft beer epitomises the pursuit of “individuality, heritage, tradition, exploration, and taste and smell captured there in the glass” (ibid). modern craft beer cultures reframe the brewer as artisan, and craft beer’s association with hipster subcultures is frequently portrayed in beer branding and beer label art with several labels depicting characterisations of consumers in hipsteresque styling and regalia.5 coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 109 with ‘hipster chic’ as the cultural brand for ‘indie’, it is also the case that mainstream breweries attempt to co-opt the indie marketplace with similar depictions and through engagement with and commercial perpetuation of the hipster mythos, consequently contributing to the marketplace appropriation of the hipster (see arsel and thompson, 2011). for mainstream breweries, these mirrors may represent a flirtation with hipster culture, or aim at satirising the subculture, but also may be co-opted to add indie cachet to a brand. as arsel and thompson suggest, as the hipster “became more visible in the american public sphere, parodies and critiques of the hipster icon emerged as a result of reflexive public engagement with the narrative” (2011: 796). beer branding, sexuality and gendered stereotypes although this article concentrates on depictions of the mermale form in beer branding, it is important to acknowledge the prevalence and recurrence of mermaids — and the female form more broadly — in beer brand imagery.6 mermaids are used as the icon of several beer brands,7 as well as motifs on several beer labels. the mermaid frequently emerges as temptress/seductress or in roles of servitude (brandishing or offering beer to the consumer),8 which perpetuates gender stereotypes that “women advertise and serve beer, rather than enjoying the consumption of beer” and further, that when labels “do show some agency among female figures, their bodies remain on display” (kappele, 2015: 27). as temptresses, the use of assertive female sexuality is described by steward as “a sexual double standard in the act of consumption” that links objectification of the feminine form (and the gendered personification of the beer in the taproom) to the objectification of the feminine form in ship figureheads, with the underlying metaphor being that “both brewery and bar are male-only domains, just as surely as an 18th century ship was” (2018: online). mermen, by contrast, are frequently depicted as a caricature of the brewer, or in an idealised masculine form. these kinds of depictions reinforce beer as a means of consumption-based masculine identity formation (messner and montez de oca, 2005), or echo kappele’s identification of the objectification of the female form for the male gaze — suggesting that label art presents to the drinker as something attainable through consumption. the depiction of the merman perpetuates the idea that “the female body and masculinity are attainable through beer consumption” (kappele, 2015: 54). as this article aims to illustrate, modern depictions of the merman reinforce certain gender stereotypes of beer as a male-only domain. numerous examples of anthropomorphic adjectives recur in beer terminology. human traits have long been ascribed to beer (such as ‘head’, ‘body’ and ‘legs’ used to describe characteristics of the beer), and gendered connotations emerge is several beer styles. with the increased diversity of styles available in craft beer circles, styles such as blonde, red and brown ales are frequently personified as women in artwork (echoing kappele’s assertion that label art acts as conquest for the consumer), and deeper hues frequently invoke exoticisation of dark-skinned women. similarly, personifying descriptors like ‘naughty’, ‘cheeky’ and ‘tart’ (see megginson, 2010; pour curator, 2011; and steward, 2018) are frequently used as misogynistic double entendres. as well as being shown in roles of servitude, mermaids are occasionally rendered as sirenic,9 depicted luring consumers (depicted as sailors and divers) to the abyss. as an example, coronado coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 110 brewing (whose brand icon is a swimming mermaid brandishing a beer glass) produce a ‘mermaid’s red’ that is promoted with the tagline, “the siren's calling”, and a description that reads: inspired by the siren song, mermaid’s red lures you in with sweet toffee malts and seductive red hue. but don’t be fooled, this hoppy red is dry-hopped with a blend of pacific northwest hops for big citrus and pine aroma and a lingering dry finish.10 figure 1: examples of beer label art illustrating objectifying and misogynistic themes (source: steward, 2018: online) while a broad discussion of gender disparities and misogyny in product branding goes beyond the scope of this article, there are notable ways in which depictions of mermaids and mermen are used to reinforce gender stereotypes in the brewing industry. while mermaids are frequently depicted as objects of desire on beer labels, mermen are instead framed as objects of identification. characterisations of mermaids frequently depict mermaids as servers of beer, or as slender and beautiful barmaids in the form of seminaked figures brandishing glasses of beer. depictions of mermen, however, tend to show either the muscular male figure as consumer, or in caricature form as the beer’s creator/brewer. kuehn and parker (2018) highlight that such stereotypic portrayals exist in the wider brewing community, and such are not only perpetuated by male-run breweries. in an attempt to recognise and highlight continuing demographic shifts in craft beer culture, festivals such as beers with(out) beards promote and celebrate diversity within and surrounding the brewing industry. aiming to highlight how common perceptions of what the typical brewer looks like set women back in the industry, festivals like this celebrate women-owned breweries, breweries ‘helmed’ by female brewers, the growing number of female beer drinkers, and broader shifts within craft beer culture. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 111 figure 2a (left): london artist sam taylor’s depiction of the less well-represented female beer brewer, laden with kegs, as icon of the ‘beers with(out) beards: a week of women in brewing’ festival in new york (2018). figure 2b (right): kailah ogawa’s art for the event’s official festival shirt depicting under-represented diversity in the craft beer community shifts in beer label art alongside festivals that recognise and celebrate shifts in the industry and community, there are movements around craft beer culture that recognise shifts in the way craft beer is presented in terms of brand imagery and label art. in craft beer circles, the branding of beer is often colourful and playful and beer art has itself become a gallery space for designers and artists. the oh beautiful beer blog draws inspiration from instagram culture and “celebrates remarkable graphic design from the world of beer”, through imageoriented blog posts that sideline the brewery (and the product itself) in favour of showcasing bottle and can art and design portfolios (favouring links to designers in place of links to breweries). festivals like ‘pumped’ — run as part of the 2017 leeds indie food festival — celebrate the art and design of beer labels that break with traditional brewing imagery. with the exception of abstract art, depictions of place and space are regular staples, as is local mythology,11 with the visual communication of these traits ultimately lending authenticity to the product. becky palfery (a facilitator of the ‘pumped’ beer art exhibition) describes yesteryear’s real ale packaging as “ludicrous” and replete with a clichéd “lingua franca of craggy moors, steam trains, adolescent fantasy imagery and lazy sexism (blonde pinups on blonde ales etc.) [that] defined good beer as a middle-aged, male pursuit” (naylor, 2017: online). while modern craft beer labels are not devoid of sexually charged imagery, the embrace of original and contemporary artwork in beer labelling is an attempt by some breweries to distance beer from some of its misogynist past and suggests a wider contemporary shift away from beer-associated masculinity.12 the approach that many modern craft breweries take in transforming beer in terms of flavour and style is reflected in shifts in the branding, with artwork that is increasingly asexual, inclusive and urban (ibid). alongside the endeavour of a brewery’s self-expression emerging through their beer, breweries playfully brand their beers in attempt to construct authenticity or to resonate with an audience coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 112 through the use of tongue-in-cheek or pop and meme culture. naylor (2017) suggests that this break with traditional brewing imagery and consequent ‘makeover’ of pump clips, bottle labels and packaging is a pivotal aspect of craft beer’s appeal. 13 nick dwyer (a 27year-old creative director at beavertown brewing in north london) describes the “shared visual language of graphic novels, old star wars comics and cult movies” and unashamed embrace of nostalgia that frequently emerges on the brewery’s label art as one that “build[s] trust and intimacy with an audience of a similar age” (ibid). furthermore, dwyer suggests that the incorporation of quirky visual non-sequiturs helps establish inclusive shifts in craft beer demographics, given that “with skeletons and aliens you don’t have to think about gender, race, [or] age” (ibid). many modern breweries attempt to “alienate the aesthetic from its [historical] misogyny by emphasising an appropriation from an ‘historical context’ for a knowing, ironic, non-sexist contemporary consumer” (pursuitofabbeyness, 2018: online) with an aim to redefine the boundaries erected around ‘beer’ as a male-only domain. modern craft beer art therefore still aims to provoke but does so in post-modern, self-referential and ironic ways. the following survey of mermen in beer branding highlights both of these contentions, highlighting beer branding’s shift towards modern mashup and meme culture, as well as the perpetuation and reinterpretation of traditional gendered stereotypes surrounding beer culture. contemporary beer lore, mythology and the sea beer and sea travel have significant historical associations.14 the india pale ale beer style, characterised as “a special, highly hopped, high alcohol beer brewed specifically to survive the ocean voyage to india” (steele, 2013: 23) was, according to legend, invented by george hodgson at the bow brewery in the early-mid nineteenth century. the bow sold beer to the nearby east india company’s captains and commanders who shipped it to merchants and expats internationally. given that beer destined for india occasionally arrived spoiled, the origins of the style are frequently referred to as an accidental style, or one that was situationally determined. the story of its genesis is likely an early example of myth and marketing in beer production. much contemporary popular belief about the style is that hodgson’s approach of creating a beer with a higher than normal alcohol by volume (abv) and an increased amount of hops — a bittering herb used in the boil to offset the beer’s sweetness — acted as a preservative, resulting in a beer that was resistant to spoilage over long journeys. the length of the sea voyage and elevated temperature that the casks were exposed to additionally hastened the maturation of the beer. this practice of higher hopping rates and an increase in abv give rise to this style of india pale ale. however, this legendary and often-perpetuated tale of the beer’s creation (sometimes framed as the accidental invention of the india pale ale style) is itself somewhat of a myth. in beer judging circles, style guidelines15 for the india pale ale acknowledge hodgson as a well-known exporter of the style (and a person whose name first name frequently mentioned with its popularity) but acknowledge that accounts of its origins vary: the attributes of ipa that were important to its arrival in good condition in india were that it was very well-attenuated, and heavily hopped. simply because this is how ipa was shipped, doesn’t mean that other beers such as porter weren’t also coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 113 sent to india, that ipa was invented to be sent to india, that ipa was more heavily hopped than other keeping beers, or that the alcohol level was unusual for the time. (bjcp 2015: 22, emphasis added) while the demand for the export-strength16 style of pale ale developed around 1840 (see daniels, 1996 and cornell, 2008a), beer historian and author martyn cornell argues that strong, well-hopped beverages brewed for the east and west india climate had existed long before this time in the form of porters. uses of the term ipa (india pale ale) and eipa (east india pale ale) also predate the commonly proffered story that identifies hodgson as the creator of the style. foster (1999) also suggests that while the ipa was slightly higher in abv than other popular beer styles of the time, it would not have constituted a strong ale, and suggests that the notion that early ipas [were] stronger than other beers of the time [such as porters] is a myth. steele (2013: 26) suggests that the perpetuation of the myth can be attributed to william molyneux’s (1869) volume burtonon-trent: its histories, its waters, and its breweries that dubiously attributes hodgson with the invention of the india pale ale. furthermore, he suggests that the attribution and alignment of hodgson and the bow brewery with the development of the ipa style largely lies in the brewery’s “reputation for producing excellent beer that arrived in great condition … the reliability of the beer supply, [given] the brewery’s proximity to the east india company docks”, and the ruthless business acumen of the hodgson family (ibid). advertisements for hodgson’s “beer as prepared for india” emerged in the 1820s, some 50 years after the company began exporting beer to india (steele, 2013: 27). given hodgson’s successful shipping of porter to india in the eighteenth century, steele suggests that “this evidence deflates the theory that a pale strong beer with heavy hopping was the only beer that could be successfully shipped to india” and posits that rather that “considering the hot and humid indian climate, dark, sweet ales were simply not preferred, and beers brewer with pale malt suited the climate better” (ibid). given that the beers were shipped in wood, they would likely have been more well attenuated, due to the continued fermentation by wild yeast and bacteria present in the wood casks.17 the perpetuation of this myth is often recounted as it makes for a good story. brown’s hops and glory (2010) playfully examines the mythology behind the style’s origins through re-enacting a voyage to india by boat with a keg of burton ipa in tow. it’s likely that history adds legitimacy and connotes exoticism to a modern pleasure in that there’s “something about ipa that just captures the global beer imagination — part of it is the story, the legend, the myth” (brown, in smith, 2011: online). while there is evidence of an historical link between sea travel and beer,18 as well as a frequent perpetuation of nautical themes in beer branding,19 the modern india pale ale is somewhat distanced from its historical definition, given that the modern style has little direct connection with its sea travelling ancestor.20 while english and american ipa beers share similar traits (as comparatively strong hopped beers) their styles are notably distinct. ‘ipa’ has become somewhat of a catch-all for several beer styles, typically strong hoppy ales. the bjcp even suggests that the contemporary term for the beer term ‘ipa’ is “intentionally not spelled out as ‘india pale ale’ since none of these beers historically went to india, and many aren’t pale” (bjcp, 2015: online). despite the above, the link between the ipa style and the sea is frequently depicted in the label art. while ipas are enjoying a prolonged popularity (given that continued experimentation in craft beer gives rise to variations on the style), it is interesting to note that a significant proportion of the beers identified in this article are classified as part of the ipa class of beer styles. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 114 the merman in beer label art and branding the following section discusses characterisations of mermen and mermale figures in beer branding, and highlights recurring themes in beer styles, brewery locations, and their roles in significations of hybridity. as noted earlier, with regard to parallels between craft beer and hipster movements, contemporary depictions of mermaids and mermen often align with notable signifiers present in contemporary hipster cultures. characterisations of mercreatures frequently depict mermaids21 adorned with tattoos (often verging on rockabilly stylisation), and mermen (and mermale neptunes/poseidons) are depicted in varied ways, from classical and quaint, to humorous, modern and metrosexual. this research outlines a taxonomy of how the merman is used in beer labels, and finds that depictions and presentations of mermales carry several meanings. as with garrido, bendrups and hayward’s suggestion that traditional aquapelagic folklore is occasionally deployed in modern scenarios for artistic and/or political purposes in regional communities (2019: 53–74), aquatic humanoids appear on beer labels as artistic placebinding metaphors for coastal locations of breweries, as well as used as metaphors of the sea and hybridity. the use of the merman manufactures ‘history’ for a brewery, and despite craft beer’s embrace of the ‘local’, the universality of the figure enables a globalisation of brand. the following textual analyses of mermen in beer branding suggests that the merman figure is typically used to represent hybridity (in a range of soft to hard-masculine forms) and to represent elegance and strength; with its presence recurring in coastal breweries as a motif representing a form of locational authenticity or terroir, representing not only the coastal proximity at which the beer was made, but also, the coastal cultural ideals of the brewery. neolocalism: the merman as icon of local identity holtkamp et al examine neolocalism and its embrace in craft beer culture, describing it as “a conscious effort by businesses to foster a sense of place based on attributes of their community” (2016: online). in addition to depictions of mermen, several breweries draw on mythological figures, such as neptune/poseidon, and other romanticised iconography (e.g. tridents, ships, anchors, divers, pirates etc.) as a means to construct identity. the incorporation of mermaids and mermen into coastal breweries’ iconography often echoes hayward’s (2018) assertion that the prevalence of mercreatures in local lore relates to coastal communities’ engagements with their aquapelagic locales. in other cases, merfolk are used to invoke a largely imagined history and function as novel constructions of identification with coastal locales. the ‘merman xxx’ (figure 3) was a 4.8% abv scottish export ale brewed by caledonian brewery22. although no longer in production, the ‘merman xxx’ was typically served in cask and bottle, accompanied by pump clip and label art that showed a clothed merman reclining on the banks of the river forth, gazing at boats on the water. unlike classical depictions of mermen, the caledonian merman is wearing a coat and quakers’ hat, holding a beer and smoking a pipe, and his presence on the label is coupled with the tagline “safe were the ships who would see the merman of the forth”.23 the coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 115 likeness of the merman conjures up an entirely fictional mythology behind the beer itself. while caledonian brewery was established in 1869, the merman functions as a marker of neolocal authenticity for the modern beer — in terms of place, local mythology and beer’s history — and plays into the historical mythmaking of the importance of safe and timely sea travel in the distribution of export beer. in contrast to the portrayal of the siren as saboteur, this casts the merman as protector. although rose (2001) suggests that in medieval europe mermen were thought to cause violent storms that sank ships, what is curious here is framing of the merman as sign of good fortune in local mythology, in contrast to other sea entities from scottish mythology24. figure 3: the caledonian ‘merman xxx’ (2012–2015) label art depicting an atypically clothed merman, reminiscent of a jolly publican, on the rocks of the river forth. the scottish swannay brewery — located on the north-westerly tip of orkney's mainland — draws heavily on maritime themes and orkney’s history in the naming and label design of their beer range. self-described as being “proud of our exposed location and our reliance on the sea”, the brewery lies in an area with a rich agricultural history and close proximity to the coast, “showered in spray from the atlantic ocean in the winter and surrounded by fertile farmland in the summer” (swannay brewery, nd: online). the brewery’s ‘orkney blast ipa barleywine hybrid’ depicts a merman offering a pint to a mermaid (figure 4a) and while the imagery reflects the brewery’s proximity to the ocean, the beer’s name and label design are derived from the masthead of orkney’s ww2 forces newspaper the orkney blast (figure 4b). the use of the merfolk here serves two purposes: first, the merman and mermaid figures suggest hybridity of beer styles — an ipa that merges fruity american hops with spicy european hop varieties, supported by a strong malt body, reminiscent of a barley wine; and secondly, the label art highlights the historical significance of the locale in which the beer is made. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 116 figure 4a (left): label art for swannay brewery’s orkney blast, showing a merman brandishing a pint of beer riding a hippocamp or ‘sea-horse’. figure 4b (right) the orkney blast masthead (1944). western australian brewery gage roads (whose name is derived from a coastal basin and shipping lane between perth and rottnest island) incorporate a piscine neptune and the trident in their branding (figure 5a). the recurring figure is used to position the company both geographically (based in fremantle on the south-westerly coast of australia, adjacent to the indian ocean) and metaphorically — as a deity that holds a position of power over the ocean. the brewery adopted the icon to position themselves as a new brand of uncompromising brewers that would stand out in a crowded market.25 although neptune has legs in traditional mythology, the stylisation of the figure takes on some creative license and depicts the character with tail. the company’s beer names and artwork similarly draw on the brewery’s coastal location and surf culture. launched as a one-off brew on australia day 2013, the brewery created a somewhat anti-seasonal26 beer: an 7.2% abv australian strong ale named ‘the convict’, brewed with all-australian ingredients. intending to be provocative in terms of both artwork and style,27 the beer alludes in imagery and name (figure 5b) to australia’s penal-colonial past28 and the voyages that australian convicts had taken by sea. ‘the convict’ frames the neptune character as an incarcerated mermale, breaking through his shackles, framing the beer as the embodiment of strength, and as one that challenges the norm by bucking with convention. the label reads: australian beer drinkers, you’ve been locked up by bland, watered down lagers for too long. never fear — the fussy bastards at gage roads are here to set you free! you won’t find a boring, run-of-the-mill lager here. this is a big australian ale. a boatload of aussie ingredients: 6 specialty ale malts, 4 of our finest hops. the convict is rich in flavour, soaked in tropical aroma. dry hopped with an insane amount of summer, stella and galaxy hops, this in an ale that could bend even the strongest bars at freo prison. break off the shackles with gage roads the convict australian strong ale. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 117 figure 5a (left): gage roads’ icon of piscine neptune brandishing a trident. figure 5b (right): ‘the convict’ australian strong ale label art with a convict mermale breaking from its shackles neptune emerges again in several new york-based breweries located around manhattan and brooklyn. neptune brewery — who lay claim to being new york city’s first microbrewery — was an early (and short-lived) operator in manhattan’s initial brewpub boom. the brewery opened in the mid-1990s, pushing craft beer practices at a time before they were fashionable, but closed a few years later. the brewery released several beers depicting neptune rising out of the hudson river brandishing a trident and tankard in front of new york’s iconic city skyline (figure 6). similar themes are echoed by liverpoolbased micro-brewery neptune brewery,29 whose branding features a trident, and beer names draw thematically on sea voyage and mythology. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 118 figure 6a (left): label art for new york micro-brewery neptune brewing’s ‘neptune 66 brown ale’. figure 6b (right): the brewpub’s beer mat artwork. in more recent years, the merman and mermaid figures have been adopted by coney island brewing co., likely due to the brewery’s proximity to neptune and mermaid avenues and the strong association of the area with the annual mermaid parade which commenced in 1983. the brewery’s ‘mermaid pilsner’ is a light-bodied lager supported by a balanced fruity, floral hop aroma, replete with label art (figure 7a) depicting a mermaid with kelplike hair adorned in pearls, starfish, and tattoos (and occasionally, posing with the coney island boardwalk in the background). in 2016, the brewery experimented with a stronger version of the ‘mermaid’, creating the limited release ‘merman imperial pilsner’ (figure 7b), centre) in a similar fashion to the ‘mermaid’, the ‘merman’s’ label art shows as mermale neptune, bearing a trident and crown. the merman icon became a mainstay when he was recast as the figure of the brewery’s ‘merman ny ipa’ (figure 7c, right). figure 7a (left): coney island brewing co.’s ‘mermaid pilsner’ label art. figure 7b (centre): the brewery’s special release ‘merman imperial pilsner’and figure 7c (right): the brewery’s mainstay ‘merman ny ipa’ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 119 in addition to the brewery’s location, the brewery has also become affiliated with the area’s famous annual mermaid parade — an annual art parade enabling self-expression of new york residents.30 as presenting sponsors of the mermaid parade in recent years, coney island brewing co. embraces local culture and folklore in the branding of its merbeers stating: mermaids, those mysterious aquatic lovelies, have popped up all over the world in legend since 1000 bc. no scientific evidence has ever surfaced to support their existence, but we’re not ones to argue with folklore. (coney island brewery, nd: online) the merman and mermaid figures re-emerge in the brewery’s ‘pride 365 ipa’ — a beer brewed collaboration with a local gay craft beer lovers meetup group — highlighting their embrace of inclusivity and diversity within craft beer culture (figure 8). several layers of meaning are signified here, with the beer showcasing a hop variety called ‘super pride’, and promotional marketing for the beer reframing the merman and mermaid characterisations as icons of lgbt pride. further abroad, the beer emerges as a vehicle for social change with the satellite room dc club donating a portion of the beer’s sales to the trevor project, the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organisation for lgbtq youth. figure 8a (left): a banner featuring the coney island brewing company’s merman and mermaid imagery used to promote the brewery’s support for and involvement in the nyc pride march. figure 8b (right) promotional material for the satellite room club’s ‘pils for pride’ event. with beer label art acting as instructive fictions for consumers, examples such as those identified above illustrate craft beer’s deviation from beer’s traditional heterosexual maledominant domain. aside from beer label art acting as a representation of locale, these forms of signification show inclusivity through emerging styles of identification through consumption in craft beer culture, and beer as vehicle for social change. in a similar vein to new york’s mermaid parade, the neptune festival of virginia beach, virginia is an annual celebration of the heritage of the city, celebrating local beach culture, food, arts and music. the festival is overlooked by a statue of neptune that was erected in 2005, and in recent years has been augmented with a coastal craft beer festival, intended to showcase local virginia beers, as well as regional and national craft beer as part of the state’s craft beer month celebration. as icon for the festival, characterisations of neptune coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 120 are part of the festival branding (figure 9a), but are restyled in the coastal craft beer festival’s branding, with neptune’s trident replaced with a beer bottle (figures 9b and c). figure 9a (left): the neptune festival icon. figures 9b and c (centre and right): images of neptune used on festival glassware with the figure’s trident replaced with a beer bottle. several virginian breweries incorporate imagery of the iconic sculpture of neptune into their label art, with back bay brewing company — supporters of the festival — using a hybridised duck-billed neptune logo (merging their brand icon with the festival’s icon) on the label for their ‘neptune’s nectar american wheat’ beer, brewed for the festival in 2017 (figure 10a). the figure emerges again as a fixture of place in local micro-brewery two fathers beer’s ‘king neptune india pale ale’, named after neptune and with label art featuring the bronze neptune statue on the boardwalk at virginia beach (figure 10b). figure 10a (left): back bay brewing’s ‘neptune’s nectar american wheat’ depicts the brewery’s duck mascot in neptune form. figure 10b (right): two fathers beer co’s ‘king neptune india pale ale’ with artwork of the silhouetted neptune statue on the virginia beach boardwalk. (the left panel of the label also shows images of the bearded brewers, accompanied by the brewery’s tag line: ‘eat drink live local’.) the themes detailed above have been echoed by san diego-based coronado brewing. a pioneer in the san diego craft brewing scene, the company’s branding attempts to convey a “soulful legacy” of “delicious beer, great food, and coastal lifestyle — all captured in the spirit of the mermaid”.31 while the mermaid features regularly in their beers’ branding, the male form makes an occasional appearance in the form of triton, who appears on the brewery’s ‘coastwise session ipa’ (figure 11) a session strength beer (denoting a lower abv than ipa’s typical range) brewed in collaboration with the surfrider foundation. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 121 the brewery’s alignment with the surfrider foundation, which describes itself as a “community of everyday people who passionately protect our playground: the ocean, waves, and beaches that provide us so much enjoyment” (nd: online) raises awareness of its ties to the coast and its ongoing contribution beach clean-ups, and consequently allows drinkers to consume and perform the brewery’s identity work. as messenger of the sea, the iconography of triton frames the beer as a vehicle for ecological awareness; through its consumption, drinkers promote and enact future oceanic conservation. figure 11: san diego-based coronado brewing’s coastwise session ipa, brewed in collaboration with surfrider foundation. (the shape of tail on the rear of the can also connotes stemmed glassware.) caricatures of masculinity and the merman as beer brewer mermen are sometimes portrayed as idealised masculine holotypes, but also emerge in caricature form, echoing pop culture references, and occasionally as beer-bellied caricatures of the brewer and consumer.32 consequently, the presentations of merman as beer brewer and beer consumer emerge as tools for constructing modern masculine identity. in contrast to kappele’s idea that the label presents the consumer a with masculinity attainable through beer consumption, the use of caricature reinforces a subtly different kind of attainable masculinity distanced from a male gaze by presenting the viewer with a caricature of self, or of the typical bearded pot-bellied, beer aficionado. while this still constitutes a form of attainability through consumption, it is inwardfocused and perhaps more an example of satirical realism than consumerist idealism. san diego based karl strauss brewing company uses themes of elusiveness and rarity in their marketing of their holiday series iiipa,33 using the mythological status and rare appearance of mermen as a marketing strategy to construct a mythological status for their seasonal beer: locals swear they can catch a glimpse of them every year. sailors remember the very first time they saw them. some people can’t even recount their experience without being brought to tears. yes, legend has it that every coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 122 holiday season, the eight merry mermen hit the san diego shores with what the people want most: beer! the 8th instalment in our “twelve days” holiday series is … the perfect beer to enjoy with friends whether they have feet or fins. (karl strauss, nd: online). the imagery here (figure 12 a and b) constructs the brewery’s own neolocal lore, and depicts the jovial santa-like merman as beer brewer, replacing his trident for a mash paddle. figure 12a and b: a jovial merman ‘brewer’ (depicted with a mash paddle and pint glass) featured on the label of karl strauss’ ‘8 merry mermen iiipa’ also based in san diego, california, ballast point brewery emphasises its strong ties to environmental conservation and its local community. the brewery’s iconography and branding frequently incorporate themes of the sea and, despite their sincere messages of conservation and social responsibility, the company occasionally exercises a tongue-incheek playful streak in the naming and presentation of their beers. released in a limited run in late 2016, ballast point’s ‘the bearded merman’ was a pale, unfiltered saison, heavily dry hopped with amarillo. while the company regularly draws on the art of local beer-enthusiast paul elder in their nautically-themed branding — typically of ‘glimmering fish and haunting seaworthy skeletons’ (ballast point, nd: online) — the small-scale production of ‘the bearded merman’ beer resulted in minimal need for a prominent visual identity.34 instead of engaging elder, the brewery elected to represent the beer in tonguein-cheek fashion, embracing viral ‘dudeoir’35 imagery of joshua varozza cavorting on the beach dressed as a merman (figure 13). varozza, a california bail agent, had risen to ‘facebook fame’ after being photographed in various roles for a ‘god bless america dudeoir collection’ calendar in aid of the ‘wheelers for the wounded of california’ charity organisation (hayward and thorne, 2018). the same images of varozza later served as inspiration for a charity calendar featuring bearded newfoundlanders cosplaying as mermen36, with the imagery symbolising “the gradual modification of regional stereotypes of masculinity” (ibid) in an island area long viewed as a quintessential folk setting. (see hayward and thorne, 2018) coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 123 figure 13a (left): pump clip art for ballast point’s limited release beer ‘the bearded merman’. figure 13b (right): tami bear’s original ‘dudeoir’ photograph of joshua varozza as a merman37. similarly, caricatures of merman masculinity and references to pop-culture exist in other breweries and collaborations, such as ‘merman’ (2016–) a 5.20% abv sour ipa brewed as a collaboration between swedish and english micro-breweries brewski and siren craft brew, that marries the hop-forwardness of the ipa style with the puckering sourness of bacterial fermentation38). siren craft brew — whose branding typically features the mermaid and appears to reserve its use of the merman in labelling for collaborations with other breweries — describes its goal to “discover ways to excite people’s curiosity and share our knowledge of our craft” using the theme of the sirens’ call, suggesting that “our sirens exist to the share our message and open people’s minds”.39 as the ‘merman’ beer is not bottled — but rather distributed in kegs for draught dispensing — the visual imagery and branding of the beer does not feature prominently and is reserved for pump clips, and depicts a caricature of derek zoolander’s emasculating role as beautiful merman in the 2001 film zoolander (figure 14).40 the label perpetuates in-jokes and meme culture amongst its consumers, and more subtly, the description of the beer as “elegant” and “fruity” frames the beer as a feminine form of the ipa and hints at themes of metrosexuality and emasculation associated with the scene from where the concept is derived. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 124 figure 14a (left)artwork for brewski and siren craft brew’s ‘the merman’. figure 14b (right): photograph of tasting notes that describe the beer as ‘elegant’ and ‘fruity’.41 siren employed a different stylisation of merman in their collaboration with dutch brewery de kromme haring for ‘the crooked nykk’, a honey and citrus kveik, a beer brewed with a norwegian traditional farmhouse yeast (figure 15). with breweries plundering beer’s rich history and stylistic diversity in terms of ingredients and terroir, the kveik ‘style’ is enjoying a resurgence, along with its own invented mythology. a kveik is not a style as such, but rather an emerging popular approach to beer making that uses a non-purified traditional norwegian farmhouse yeast to ferment wort. interestingly, the word ‘kveik’ has a gendered meaning in norwegian, both literally as ‘yeast’ (the feminine form) and ‘rebirth’, ’reawakening’ or ‘new strength’ (the masculine form).42 figure 15a (right): bottle of de kromme haring and siren craft brew’s ‘the crooked nykk’, a honey kveik with citrus. figure 17b (left): artwork used in promotion of the beer. gender: mermen and sexuality/asexuality as hayward (2016: 151–66) suggests, depictions of mermen in popular culture present a problematic view of masculinity within freudian/phallocentric discourse due to the lack of visible genitals on their lower bodies. in contrast, jilken (2018) suggests that mermen’s archetypally feminising components of exposed bodies, exoticisation and excessive beauty coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 125 present them as examples of “marginalised masculinity” with respect to normativity within modern myths of gender and sexuality created in our culture. the following examples are illustrative of such marginalised masculinity, and soft masculinity. chicago-based pipeworks brewing co., which got its start through a kickstarter campaign, and quickly earned a cult status by catering to a niche market of craft beer connoisseurs,43 uses a recurrent theme of quirkiness, postmodernism, irony and camp in its branding and imagery.44 despite the brewery’s evolving beer list that appeals to the ideologies of craft beer, one of the brewery’s mainstays is the ‘glaucus belgian ipa’, named after a mythological greek mortal-turned-deity, part man and part fish. unlike the siren who lured ships to the rocks, the glaucus came to the rescue of sailors and fishermen in storms. the beer label’s description suggests that the name is a metaphor for the beer’s hybrid style, one that it says “marries bold spicy belgian yeast with bright citric american hops in a way even the gods would adore”. beejay oslon, co-founder of pipeworks brewing co. notes that the name and style of the beer emerged from research on mermen after seeing the naïve artwork of chicago local emily cunningham (figure 16a), who was the inspiration for the beer, suggesting that the imagery “just seems so beery, and i knew right away that i had to use that label … what’s important for us is to get a variety of imagery … this is a fun image, and we’re a fun brewery”. (beer advocate, nd: online). cunningham echoes the importance that imagery plays in craft beer communities suggesting that “a label is probably the thing that most people base their decisions to try a new beer on … since most drinking is done in public or at least with company, it’s a sort of self-expression, like a pair of shoes [and] part of that is definitely visual” (ibid). figure 16a (left) pipeworks brewing’s glaucus belgian style india pale ale, artwork by emily cunningham c2012. 16b (right): pipeworks brewing’s 2013 rebranding of their glaucus belgian style india pale ale. in 2013 the brewery rebranded ‘glaucus’ and upgraded the label art to depict a hypermasculine rendering of a hipster merman, replete with pipe and trident (figure 16b). the artwork by jason burke45 bears a passing resemblance to oslon himself — who is both bearded and adorned with tattoos — and its framing is somewhat reminiscent of the works of the artist touko valio laaksonen (best known as ‘tom of finland’). while the ‘gay gaze’ and homoerotic overtones may not be intentional in the artwork, the stylisation has characteristics that undermine notions of heternormativity in beer labelling. given that much of the brewery’s recent label art draws on movies and shared nostalgia, memes and playful references to pop culture — with frequent use of unicorns, ninjas, rainbows, coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 126 skeletons and zombies — the use of the merman figure here falls within the idea of shared nostalgia, but also aligns with cunningham’s notion of identity formation and selfexpression through consumption. although the label is not genderless, its use arguably adheres to palfery’s assertion that craft beer’s contemporary aesthetic of genderless pop and meme-culture icons of skeletons and aliens represents a shift in label art toward asexual orientation, inclusivity and urbanness.46 mermen as icons of hybridity, and metaphors for the sea as with several beers introduced earlier, two chefs brewing’s ‘crying merman’ is similarly a beer that defies existing categorical beer style boundaries.47 the beer is a double ipa inspired by a gose and quite literally inserts the sea into the beer, listing seawater among beer’s traditional ingredients on the label. described as having “the salty flavors of the northern latitude sea water [with] twice the bitter, [but] twice as fresh, twice as delicious” the beer marries two beer styles that are somewhat at odds given the gose style typically has subdued hop bitterness, flavour and aroma compared with the ipa’s typical emphasis on hop-forward characteristics. the label art of a merman (figure 17a) — depicted head in hands cupping his lush beard — serves a dual purpose here. in one sense, the merman whose tears are becoming sea water symbolises the sea water in the beer. in another sense, it connotes a forced hybridity: the mermale characterisation echoes the chimeric nature of beer’s mash-up style. the dutch brewery aims are to “provoke the conventional and … to stick out our tongue to the familiar” (two chefs brewing, nd: online) and in place of a description of the contents within, the bottle label presents an absurd account of the mise -en-scène on the label: crying merman. they kidnapped me, blindfolded me and took me to some place below sea-level. now i’m stuck here with a tail and fin for legs and all my friends are laughing at me. please make it stop. figure 17a (left): two chefs brewing’s ‘crying merman’, a double ipa brewed with sea water. 17b (right): dc brau and baxter brewing co.’s ‘the daughters of poseidon’, a black ipa brewed with oysters. several other breweries incorporate ingredients from the sea and use mermen as illustrative metaphors, such as dc brau and baxter’s collaboration ‘the daughters of poseidon’, a black ipa brewed with oysters (figure 17b). although poseidon was not a coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 127 human-fish hybrid, he is depicted here with some artistic license in mermale form, bearing a giant clam and trident. in addition to mermen as icons of style hybridity, several merhybrids emerge on beer labels as icons of brewing collaborations or as symbolic representations of breweries’ neolocal identities. coronado brewing and bear republic’s 2016 collaboration beer ‘merbear rye ipa’ — a “love child of socal icon coronado brewing and norcal heavyweight bear republic” (brewbound news, nd: online) — mixes iconography associated with the californian hills with the ocean, merging both breweries’ iconic mascots representative of place (figure 18a, left). figure 18a (left): promotional imagery of a merbear reclining in a scallop shell for bear republic and coronado’s ‘merbear rye ipa’ collaboration beer. figure 17b (right): western newfoundland brewing company’s mersasquatch logo. in order to construct unique local identities, other chimeric fictionalisations occur. western newfoundland brewing company constructs their own merhybrid, the mersasquatch as a means to embody the significance and wildness of newfoundland’s environment. according to brewery co-founder jim macdonald, the mythological mersasquatch figure represents “the best of both worlds, from the tops of the mountains to the bottom of bonne bay” (collins, 2018: online).48 conclusion: mermen, symbolism and constructions of meaning with beer branding acting as an instructive fiction for its consumers, bottle art and labels have the power to perpetuate or arrest coherences in the categorisation of sex, gender and sexuality typically associated with beer consumption. this taxonomic account of the ways that the merman is used to construct meaning in beer labelling finds that the embrace of merman mythology is used by breweries to highlight locational identity through the merging of local lore and a historical universality of mercreatures in popular culture across the world. as kuehn and parker note, with respect to craft beer labelling more widely, “authenticity and place attachment are the main stories told” (kuehn and parker, 2018: online). the merman adheres to this approach, portraying roles that establish local coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 128 identity, caricaturises brewers and consumers, and satirises notions of masculinity and strength. in addition (echoing galman’s [2018] suggestion that the mermaid acts a symbol of hybridity, challenge and contradiction), the merman often appears in beer branding as a symbol of hybridity, challenge and contradiction, as well as a motif for strength and as an illustrative fiction for breweries and consumers. the mermale emerges as metaphor for the brewer, occasionally with his trident exchanged for mash paddle, invoking poetic and metaphoric interpretations of the brewer as artisan, or one with dominion over the sea and other waters. although many modern craft breweries’ approach to beer labelling aims to be asexual, and inclusive, beer’s history as a male-dominated product runs deep in the way beers are branded and results in recurrent metaphors in branding. despite many contemporary breweries’ aims to make modern craft beer circles inclusive49 through their embrace of shared nostalgia, memes and references to pop culture in place as a means to distance beer imagery from its often-misogynistic past, gendered portrayals of figures on beer labels still emerge and while tendencies remain to perpetuate certain gendered stereotypes50, the embrace of abstract, naïve, camp and kitsch is illustrative of a continuing shift in representing audiences through consumption as a means of identity formation and identity performance. while depictions of mermen may re-enforce gender stereotypes, mermen allow breweries to flirt with portraying modern masculinities. the merman allows beer brands to establish themselves within beer’s male-dominant history, as well as embrace modern masculinity. the merman embodies several key features of craft beer culture: neolocalism, slow-food movements, fluidity/hybridity, and defiance of the mainstream. the ‘hipster merman’ for example conveys a class-based masculinity aimed at males in the craft beer consumer demographic. given the use of classical depictions of mermen and modern re-interpretations with kitsch and camp overtones on beer labels allows breweries to asserts a subtly different one, and consequently assert both hypermasculinity and hypomasculinity, as well as hard-, activeand soft-, passive masculinities. using a shared visual language of unicorns, ninjas, rainbows, skeletons, zombies, sideshow performers, and other examples of kitsch, craft breweries use such nonnormative imagery to convey themselves as “anti-establishment agitators” (banks, in naylor, 201: online) in many cases. in countries such as australia, liquor retailers frequently segregate beers into ‘domestic’ (indicating ‘normal’ local mass-produced beers), ‘international’ (imported mass-produced beers) and ‘craft’ (local and imported beer brewed on smaller scales) categories. such categorisation similarly allows craft beer to perpetuate itself as the non-normal ‘other’, and this divide is assisted visually through quirky label art that adds to identity formation of its consumers. given that all branding is effectively the mythologising and construction of identity, kuehn and parker (2018) suggest that “craft beer tells a comparatively more progressive and inclusive story of authenticity, diversity and local community”, but still one that primarily “persists as a male cultural form” (2018: online). depictions of mermen present new ways for breweries to represent maleness, where the merman manifests itself as a parodic figure of a historically male-dominant culture and illustrates a shift behind beer-related masculinity in contemporary craft-beer cultural movements. coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 129 acknowledgements thanks to philip hayward and sheila hallerton for their suggestions on the directions and themes of this article and for access to their research on related topics. bibliography arsel, z and thompson cj (2011), ‘demythologizing consumption practices: how consumers protect their field-dependent identity investments from devaluing marketplace myths’, journal of consumer research vol. 37, no. 5 (february 2011), 791–806 ballast point brewery (nd) ‘our artwork’: https://www.ballastpoint.com/our-artwork/ beck, hp (1973) 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libbey and co hayward, p (2018) ‘mermaids, mercultures and the aquapelagic imaginary’, shima v12 n2: 1–11 hayward, p & milner, l (2018) “shoreline revels: perversity, polyvalence and exhibitionism at coney island's mermaid parade”, in hayward, p (ed), scaled for success: the internationalisation of the mermaid, john libbey publishing ltd, herts, uk, 209–26. hayward, p & thorne, cw (2018) ‘i’s the merb’y: masculinity, mermen and contemporary newfoundland’, shima v12 n2: 208–30 hede, a-m & watne, t (2013) ‘leveraging the human side of the brand using a sense of place: case studies of craft breweries’, journal of marketing management volume 29, 2013 issue 1-2: anthropomorphic marketing, doi: 10.1080/0267257x.2012.762422 holtkamp, c, shelton, t, daly, g, colleen c, hiner, cc & hagelman rr (2016) ‘assessing neolocalism in microbreweries’, papers in applied geography, volume 2, issue 1. doi: 10.1080/23754931.2015.1114514 iijima hall, cc & crum, mj (1994) ‘women and “body-isms” in television beer commercials’, sex roles 31: 329. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01544592 jefferys, h (2015) a brief history of ipa: when ordinary beer wouldn’t survive the journey to india, a new pale ale was born, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/30/brief-history-of-ipa-india-paleale-empire-drinks jepsen, p (2015) ‘the origin of mermaids by means of folklore, legends & mythology’, mermaids of earth, online at: http://mermaidsofearth.com/on-the-origin-of-mermaids/ – accessed 10 january 2018 jilkén, o (2018) ‘“a phallus out of water”: the construction of mer-masculinity in modern-day illustrations,’ shima v12 n2: 195–207, doi: 10.21463/shima.12.2.16 kappele, a.e. (2015) a study of advertising: the role of gender representations on craft beer labels, ma thesis, university of missouri, columbia karl strauss (nd) ‘merry mermen iipa’: https://www.karlstrauss.com/beer/8-merrymermen-iiipa/ kuehn, km and parker, s (2018) one of the blokes: brewsters, branding & gender (in)visibility in new zealand’s craft beer industry, unpublished paper presented as part http://theconversation.com/craft-beer-is-becoming-the-wine-of-new-england-by-redefining-terroir-82232 http://theconversation.com/craft-beer-is-becoming-the-wine-of-new-england-by-redefining-terroir-82232 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01544592 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/30/brief-history-of-ipa-india-pale-ale-empire-drinks https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/30/brief-history-of-ipa-india-pale-ale-empire-drinks https://www.karlstrauss.com/beer/8-merry-mermen-iiipa/ https://www.karlstrauss.com/beer/8-merry-mermen-iiipa/ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 132 of victoria university, wellington’s film and media studies research seminar series, https://www.victoria.ac.nz/events/2018/05/one-of-the-blokes-brewsters,-branding-andgender-invisibility-in-new-zealands-craft-beer-industry megginson, t (2010) ‘a case of blondes’, the ethical adman: an industry look at social issues in advertising and media blog, online at: http://workthatmatters.blogspot.com/2010/05/case-of-blondes.html messner, ma and montez de oca, j (2005) ‘the male consumer as loser: beer and liquor ads in mega sports media events’, signs: journal of women in culture and society, 30:3, 1879-1909, https://doi.org/10.1086/427523 molyneaux, w (1869) burton-on-trent: its histories, its waters, and its breweries, london: fgs naylor, t (2017) ‘brew period: the craft beer labels that are works of art’, the guardian, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/03/brew-period-craft-beerlabels-works-of-art oh beautiful beer (nd): http://www.ohbeautifulbeer.com pour curator (2011) ‘a modest proposal: no more tarts, devil chicks, or mermaids’, the pour curator blog, online at: http://www.pourcurator.com/2011/06/modestproposal-no-more-tarts-devil.html pursuitofabbeyness (2018) https://pursuitofabbeyness.com/author/pursuitofabbeyness/ rose, c (2001) giants, monsters, and dragons: an encyclopedia of folklore, legend, and myth. w. w. norton & company. schnell, sm & reese, jf (2003) ‘microbreweries as tools of local identity’, journal of cultural geography, 21:1, 45-69, doi: 10.1080/08873630309478266 smith, j (2011) ‘hoppy days are here again’, the sydney morning herald, online at: https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/hoppy-days-are-here-again-20111008-1leax.html smithsonian libraries (2017) ‘beer on board in the age of sail’: https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2017/08/02/beer-board-age-sail/#.xw20fs9l1ca steele, m (2012) ipa: brewing techniques, recipes and the evolution of india pale ale. brewers publications: colorado. steward, m (2018) ‘misogynistic beer imagery: aesthetic, narratives, contexts’, pursuit of abbeyness blog, https://pursuitofabbeyness.com/2018/02/19/misogynistic-beerimagery-aesthetic-narratives-contexts/ surfrider foundation (nd) https://www.surfrider.org two chefs brewing (nd) https://untappd.com/twochefsbrewing https://www.victoria.ac.nz/events/2018/05/one-of-the-blokes-brewsters,-branding-and-gender-invisibility-in-new-zealands-craft-beer-industry https://www.victoria.ac.nz/events/2018/05/one-of-the-blokes-brewsters,-branding-and-gender-invisibility-in-new-zealands-craft-beer-industry http://workthatmatters.blogspot.com/2010/05/case-of-blondes.html https://doi.org/10.1086/427523 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/03/brew-period-craft-beer-labels-works-of-art https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/03/brew-period-craft-beer-labels-works-of-art http://www.ohbeautifulbeer.com/ http://www.pourcurator.com/2011/06/modest-proposal-no-more-tarts-devil.html http://www.pourcurator.com/2011/06/modest-proposal-no-more-tarts-devil.html https://pursuitofabbeyness.com/author/pursuitofabbeyness/ https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/hoppy-days-are-here-again-20111008-1leax.html https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2017/08/02/beer-board-age-sail/#.xw20fs9l1ca https://pursuitofabbeyness.com/2018/02/19/misogynistic-beer-imagery-aesthetic-narratives-contexts/ https://pursuitofabbeyness.com/2018/02/19/misogynistic-beer-imagery-aesthetic-narratives-contexts/ https://www.surfrider.org/ https://untappd.com/twochefsbrewing coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 133 united states’ brewers association (nd): https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/craft-brewer-defined/ vorel, j (2016) walking the line: sexuality in craft beer, online at: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/03/walking-the-line-sexuality-in-craftbeer.html watson, b (2018) ‘shifting demographics among craft drinkers’, brewers association, online at: https://www.brewersassociation.org/insights/shifting-demographics-amongcraft-drinkers/ bionote: alex mesker is associate lecturer in the department of media, music, communication, and cultural studies at macquarie university in sydney, australia. his research interests span music, technology, multimedia and popular culture. alex’s phd examined the changing nature of soundtracks in television cartoons of the 50s, 60s and 70s. he is a home-brewer and a recognised judge in the bjcp, and has a beard but no tattoos. endnotes 1 hayward also included a fourth, highly singular — and, thereby, aberrant — category, the young adult, attractive and heterosexual “outlier merman” who has a fleeting presence in the micro-budget short feature film eve and the merman (chev royton, 1965, usa). 2 alongside the rise in craft beer has been the rise in experimentation with traditional practices and ingredients in small-breweries and home-brewing circles. 3 such as supercritical co2 extraction of hops to create hop resins. 4 groups such as the beer judge certification program (bjcp) and campaign for real ale (camra) attempt to educate brewers and drinkers through the formal definition beer styles based on shared traits and brewing techniques. 5 while hipster maleness is conveyed through beards and tattoos, and hipster femaleness is also conveyed through tattoo culture and anachronism (verging on rockabilly). some depictions go hand-in-hand with wartime aesthetics of pin-up seductresses and appropriation from historical contexts. see steward (2018). 6 there is much research on gendered stereotypes and sexism in the brewing community (see kappele, 2015; dunn, 2017; kuehn and parker, 2018; and darwin, 2018), as well as case studies of gender representations in the beer branding (iijima hall and crum, 1994, kappele, 2015; bell, 2016; and vorel, 2016), and depictions of mermaid figures in wider alcohol branding warrants further examination. 7 see coronado brewing and siren for example. 8 see siren craft brew’s branding aesthetic, for example: http://www.sirencraftbrew.com/beers 9 see crooked fence’s ‘sirène mortelle’ (the ‘deadly mermaid’ as saboteur, depicting a mermaid cutting a diver’s air-line) or the label art for fish brewing’s ‘full blast summer ale’ (depicting a modern siren luring ships into the rocks through song) for example. 10 https://coronadobrewing.com/coronado-beer-series/core-series-2/ 11 themes of the sea emerge in the branding of many beers and breweries. while this study focuses on the merman, several recurrent themes relating to sea, place and local mythology were identified throughout this research. several beers are named after mythological sea creatures, including tangaroa (maori god of the sea), iku-turso (a malevolent sea monster in finnish mythology), thalassa (the primeval spirit of the sea in greek mythology), mac lir (a sea deity in irish mythology) and æegir (a sea jötunn from norse mythology) to name a few. pirates are similarly a staple (both within beer branding and alcohol branding beyond), with piratic terms, mythos, characters, ‘grog’ and ships drawn on for artistic fodder. 12 despite signs of a contemporary shift, craft beer culture struggles to distance itself from a pervasive “minority current of immaturity and misogyny” (vorel, 2016: online) associated with beer culture in general. 13 craft beer’s embrace of quirky art likely resonates within image-sharing social media circles (such as instagram and untappd). 14 see blakely (2017). https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/craft-brewer-defined/ https://www.brewersassociation.org/insights/shifting-demographics-among-craft-drinkers/ https://www.brewersassociation.org/insights/shifting-demographics-among-craft-drinkers/ coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 134 15 according to the beer judge certification program’s [bjcp] 2015 style guidelines. the bjcp is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to promote beer literacy and to “encourage knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the world's diverse beer … styles” (bjcp, 2015: online). 16 ‘export’ is an appellation that means was the beer was good enough to send overseas, and is frequently used denote beers with a slightly elevated abv for the style. 17 the improvement and maturation of the ipa at sea style is somewhat contradictory to contemporary consumption preferences, where breweries almost always recommend that this style of beer is enjoyed fresh, not cellared (as the fresh ‘hop’ character tends to fade and is commonly described as making the beer ‘muddy’). the practice of dry hopping in this style additionally tends to make the beer oxidise faster than other styles. 18 see smithsonian libraries (2017) and steele (2013). 19 as evidenced in the off-topic thread about alcohol branding with nautical themes — started in 2015, with over three thousand replies and is still actively contributed to — on the sails of glory game’s online discussion forum (boardgamegeek, nd). 20 given the emergence of the english india pale ale style goes back to the early nineteenth century, and common consensus is that the american ipa emerged in the mid 1970s. in contrast to the english india pale ale, american ipas are described as “decidedly hoppy and bitter, moderately strong [interpretations of] american pale ale, showcasing modern american or new world hop varieties. the balance is hop-forward, with a clean fermentation profile, dryish finish, and clean, supporting malt allowing a creative range of hop character to shine through” (bjcp, 2015: 37). 21 not only as icons for individual beer label branding, but also as brewery motif in the case of coronado brewing. 22 a long running brewery established in 1869 and presently a subsidiary of the scottish & newcastle/heineken following a number of takeovers in the late twentieth century. despite its present status as a macro brewery, the caledonian has a long history and lays claim to one of the last remaining direct-fired coppers still in use in britain. http://scottishbrewing.com/breweries/edinburghandlothians/caledonian.php 23 the ‘forth’ alludes to the river forth, a major waterway in scotland through which beer was historically transported. 24 such as the blue men of the minch (see beck, 1973: 242) or the brounger, both malevolent spirits that could capsize boats and drown sailors, and whose sightings were an omen indicative of storms at sea. orkney lore also has its own mythological therianthropic seal-human, the selkie. 25 personal communication with paul bailey from egg designs, the company behind the visual identity development for gage roads. 26 in the sense that lower abv ‘session strength’ beers are usually suited to beer consumption in the summer months. 27as described by the brewery’s general manager of operations, aaron heary in https://www.theshout.com.au/news/beer-cider-news/gage-roads-releases-the-convict/ 28 similar themes recur in several australian breweries, such as in the beer ranges of james squire and the rocks brewing company. 29 see artwork at: https://www.neptunebrewery.com/the-beers 30 see hayward and milner’s (2018) discussion of the parade’s evolution since its inception. 31 as described by creative director scott mires at https://coronadobrewing.com/announcing-brand-refresh/ 32 although this imagery verges on caricature, depictions of mermen as the maker or consumer of the beer (in contrast to comparative depictions of mermaids) reinforces existing gender stereotypes and perceptions in the beer industry (see kuehn). 33 frequently, stronger ipas are named imperial/double ipas (or iipas). ‘8 merry mermen iiipa’ is a triple ipa (indicating a strength over 10% abv). 34 similar to the bearded merman, ballast point released a small batch of ‘merman ipa’ (available only on tap at their san diego gastropub) for national ipa day several months later. the beer was a one-off brew and aside from the ‘merman’ name, no visual identity was given to the beer. 35 tongue-in-cheek erotic photography, or boudoir photography of men. 36 incidentally, one of the calendar’s promotional pictures is of a group of mermen drinking beer in a bar, see https://mymodernmet.com/merbys-mermen-charity-calendar-newfoundland-beard-moustache-club/ 37 see bear’s website (https://www.artisticphotographybytami.com/dudeoir) and facebook feed (https://www.facebook.com/pg/artistic-photography-by-tami190637041791/photos/?tab=album&album_id=10153576227421792) that show galleries of varozza engaging in ‘dudeoir’ photography. 38 although not recognised as a conventional beer style in the bjcp style guide (as its traits defy existing categorisations of styles) the ‘sour ipa’ is a hybrid style that is gaining momentum in craft beer circles. given coolabah, nr 27, 2019, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 135 that hops provide bitterness to counteract malt sweetness, ipa beers typically lean towards the bitter side. european sour ales in contrast, mostly “have low bitterness, with the sourness of the beer providing the balance that hop bitterness would otherwise contribute” (bjcp, 2015: online). 39 https://www.sirencraftbrew.com/about/our-story. the brewery calls their beers ‘sirens’, personifying them as “adventurous but drinkable, designed to be accessible to those lured into craft beer, yet flavourful enough for those seasoned beer fans to return to time and time again”. 40 see hayward (2018: 161) for discussion. 41 the tasting notes (written in norwegian) indicate that the beer is “a delicious and fresh beer with elegant acid. a nice fruity aroma that is balanced with delicious sourness. the perfect summer beer.” 42 see http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/380.html for discussion. 43 through an agile brewing approach of creating a continuously evolving series of one-off brews, a format that echoes the ‘release early, release often’ software development philosophy that promotes tight feedback between producer and consumer with the aim to better conform to user requirements. 44 the brewery’s taproom and bottle-shop is named ‘the dojo’ — effectively a training facility for growth in beer knowledge and experience, aimed at an audience that grew up watching martial arts films in the 1980s– 90s. a comprehensive collection of the brewery’s beers and artwork can be found at: https://pdubs.net/beers1 45 the artist behind many of the brewery’s recent beer designs. 46 see naylor (2017) for discussion. 47 one that would likely be classed as a specialty ipa. 48 curiously, some mer-iconography and sea-mythology inspired naming of beer appears arbitrarily selected, such as australian inland-brewery granite belt’s ‘storm king kolsch’ where the label art represents neither hybridity, coastal proximity, nor other historical or folkloric associations, see: https://www.granitebeltbrewery.com.au/product-page/storm-king-kolasch-24-x-330ml 49 in terms of supporting pro-social and progressive movements, accommodating varied ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations of consumers. 50 while it did not specifically set out to focus on gender portrayals in the craft beer industry more broadly, research for this article follows kuehn and parker’s findings that the reproduction of gendered tropes in beer art are prevalent and “reproduce and maintain craft beer as a culture of [white] middle-class maleness” (2018: online)/ http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/380.html coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 “a place of inexhaustible mysteries”1 the modern legendry of skull island in the king kong films and related media texts philip hayward university of technology, sydney prhshima@gmail.com copyright© 2021 philip hayward. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: the 1933 film king kong established its giant ape as an enduring cultural figure. it also introduced the public to a strange tropical island where prehistoric animals existed alongside a giant primate and a small human community sheltering behind a wall on a tiny peninsula. during the 20th century the island was essentially a sub-feature within a number of king kong-themed films and, indeed, was referred to under various names. in recent decades, this position has shifted. de vito’s 2004 illustrated novel, peter jackson’s 2005 remake of the original film and associated print and video texts, have significantly enhanced the island’s profile, establishing it definitively as ‘skull island’, and have provided contextual rationales for its geology, biology and society. these, in turn, spurred the production of related texts that have embroidered skull island into popular culture as an entity in its own right. most recently, the 2017 remake, kong: skull island, has offered a significant re-imagining that reinstates elements of texts that preceded and influenced the imagination of the original 1933 film. this article charts the shifts in representation of the island, the geo-cultural imaginaries played out in its representation and the concepts of islandness and island biogeography involved. keywords: skull island, king kong, islandness, exoticism, modernity introduction fictional islands have featured in european culture since antiquity. many of the earliest versions were edenic/paradise islands, such as tír na nóg, the celtic ‘land of the blessed,’ or the greek elysium, ‘the fortunate isles’, as celebrated by the greek poet hesiod around 700 bce. over the last three centuries, following the lead of swift’s gulliver’s travels (1726), the fictional islands depicted in western literature and, more recently, audiovisual media have been more varied and have often demonstrated grotesque or threatening types mailto:prhshima@gmail.com coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 of alterity. indeed, as deloughrey (2003) has identified, adventure narratives have tended to “migrate towards the aspects of epistemological inscrutability suggested in titles that employ terms like ‘mystery,’ ‘wild,’ ‘secret,’ ‘vanishing,’ ‘uncharted,’ ‘lost,’ and ‘floating’” (ibid: 23). while there have been many examples of such “epistemological inscrutability” in modern literature and cinema, few islands have attained the multitextual prominence of the isolated locale first introduced to the public in merian cooper and ernest schoedsack’s 1933 film king kong. reflecting on close to 90 years of media development, this article considers (what came to be known as) skull island as a fantastic biogeographical isolate rendered in various manners and at particular historical junctures as an implicit ‘other’ to the developed modern west. this article examines the textual ‘chains’ involved in the serial representation and elaboration of the island, its key aspects and the various rationales and ‘back-stories’ that have been provided for the island, its distinct geology, topography, fauna and society. the island’s exoticism has persisted despite the end of the modern ‘age of exploration’ that inspired the original film and has been refigured as either nostalgia (in remakes that retain the early 20th century setting of the original) or else in modernised, more rationalistic frameworks (in texts with contemporary settings). the reference to ‘legendry’ in the title is a dualistic one, reflecting the term’s principal meanings, as both something based on legend and as something so well-known as to have become legendary. these elements are present in, and developed by, the four film versions of the central story (1933, 1986, 2005 and 2017). in these texts the island is introduced as a rumoured place that lies off the charts of western mariners, of western consciousness and of western scientific rationality in general. multiple reiterations and refigurations of the island across a range of 20th and 21st century media texts have created what has been described as ‘media-lore’ around it (cf. russian laboratory of theoretical folkloristics, 2014; hayward, 2017), establishing it as a modern cultural entity that sits alongside earlier fabled islands, such as emain ablach or atlantis, or modern literary creations, such as mu and lemuria, in the corpus of imaginary entities that can be deployed in modern media practice and related fan and content generating communities. king kong and the origins of skull island during the 1800s and early 1900s a number of speculative fiction texts offered accounts of undiscovered areas of the planet inhabited by exotic creatures and cultures. these texts originated between the height of western explorations of the continental interiors of africa, asia, south america and the polar regions in the 1800s and the tail end of this enterprise around the turn of the century. several of these texts took their cue from john cleves symmes junior’s popularisation of ‘hollow earth’ theories.2 symmes promoted this concept in a number of pseudoscientific tracts published in the 1810s-1820s that were dramatised in a novel entitled symzonia: voyage of discovery (1820) attributed to an author named ‘adam seaborn’. (while the actual identity of the author is unknown there has been speculation that the book was either authored by symmes and/or an associate or else was a deliberate satire of symmes’ theories). perhaps the best-known fictional development of the concept is jules verne’s journey to the centre of the earth (1864). in 1912 british author arthur conan doyle made a notable contribution to the speculative fiction genre with his serialised novel the lost world (1912). while conan doyle retained notable elements of verne’s fiction, including the survival of dinosaurs to the present-day, coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 the location of his story was inspired by less tendentious source material than symmes’ theories and principally by the expeditionary work of his acquaintance, british explorer percy harrison fawcett. from 1906 to 1910 fawcett explored the area around the border of eastern brazilian state of matto grosso and western bolivia, encountering the high escarpments and elevated plateau currently included within the serra de ricardo franco national park. fawcett’s autobiography detailed conversations with conan doyle about the location and its influence on the author’s design of his own fictional ‘lost’ plateau (fawcett, 1953: 122). in the novel, the isolated locale, like verne’s underground caverns, has allowed species of dinosaur to survive to the present (and also features a tribe of primitive ‘ape-men’ in perpetual conflict with a local human tribe). doyle’s novel was adapted for the screen in 1925 in an eponymous, high-budget production directed by harry o. hoyt. aside from shifting the plateau to venezuela, the film introduces a novel element in having its lead protagonist, professor challenger, bring a live brontosaurus back to london, where it escapes and rampages around, collapsing london bridge before swimming off down the thames. american aviator and writer merian c. cooper developed the idea for king kong during the 1920s, when he worked as a researcher for the american geographical society, travelling to various parts of asia and north africa. during this period, he collaborated with ernest schoedsack on documentary film projects before working on the duo’s first fiction feature, the military drama the four feathers (1929). cooper has cited various inspirations for king kong. the general themes appear to have derived from two main sources. the first was his childhood fascination with explorer paul du chaillu’s accounts of his journeys through central africa in the 1850s, and of hunting a giant gorilla in the sierra del cristal mountains of equatorial guinea (cotta vaz, 2005: 15). the second was his interest in his friend william douglas burden’s 1926 expedition to komodo island, in eastern indonesia, and the film footage he shot during his visit, the live specimens of giant lizards he brought back to new york (see barnard, 2011), and the account of his adventures published in 1927. komodo was still a place of rumour and legend in the 1920s and the giant lizards reputed to live there could easily be imagined as prehistoric remnants. in the early 20th century, komodo, and the adjacent islands of rinca, gili motang and flores, which the lizards also inhabited, were relatively isolated from the outside world by their general position, at the eastern end of the indonesian archipelago (remote from the dutch colonial capital of batavia, present-day jakarta), and were fringed by coral reefs that made access difficult. western perception of the islands in early 20th century were partly correct in that while the giant specimens of varanus komodoensis that inhabit the region are not relic dinosaurs, they appear to be remnants of a lizard species that was common during the pliocene epoch (5.3 million to 2.5 million years ago). their size results from a biogeographical process known as speciation that results in animals confined in isolated locations becoming larger or smaller than continental/large island populations due to variously advantageous or disadvantageous local conditions).3 a series of letters between cooper and burden concerning the genesis of king kong in 1964 (reviewed by cotta vaz, 2005: 193-194) emphasised that komodo’s status as a “remote, hard to reach volcanic island” with “prehistoric” aspects and a “primitive” human population existing in precarious proximity with mega-fauna inspired cooper’s vision for king kong. indeed, before the final scenario of the king kong was fixed upon, cooper considered a series of dramatic possibilities, including filming sequences of gorillas and komodo dragons in their native environments and then intercutting images of them so as to approximate fight sequences on a “prehistoric island with prehistoric monsters” (cotta vaz, 2005: 195). coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 while neither conan doyle’s novel nor its 1925 screen adaptation are usually cited as conscious influences upon the development of king kong – and, indeed cooper has denied that he saw the film before working on his feature – the two had a direct relationship in that willis o’brien, who directed the stop-motion dinosaur combat sequences in the lost world, was employed to animate the giant ape and dinosaurs in king kong. indeed, resemblances between the two films were so marked that rko pictures bought the rights for the lost world from warner brothers in 1932 to cover themselves against potential litigation concerning plagiarism by conan doyle’s estate (cotta vaz, 2005: 231). in its final version, scripted by james creelman and ruth rose, king kong (1933) related the story of wildlife filmmaker, carl denham (played by robert armstrong in a role modelled on cooper himself), voyaging to a mysterious, uncharted island with a lead actress he has plucked from obscurity from the streets of manhattan (fay wray playing the part of ann darrow). the island is dramatically segmented by a wall that divides a settled area from a wilderness interior inhabited by a variety of dinosaurs and an enormous gorilla-like creature referred to by locals as ‘king’ kong. after various adventures kong is tranquilised, captured and returned to new york before being presented to the public as the ‘eighth wonder of the world.’ breaking his chains, kong escapes into manhattan and climbs to the top of the empire state building, where he is attacked and killed by a group of fighter planes. the sets representing king kong’s mysterious island were created in rko-pathe’s culver city studios in california (in part recycling sets for previous productions) and the locale was referred to in writer edgar wallace’s original screenplay as ‘vapour island’ (emphasising its volcanic aspects) (cotta vaz, 2005: 218, and see glashan n.d. for discussion). while cooper referred to the location as ‘skull island’ in interviews and public statements made from the 1940s to the 1960s – long after the film’s release – it is not referred to by that (or any other) name in the original film. the name ‘skull island’ appears to have derived from the shape of a rocky outcrop in the centre of the island, which is referred to by characters as skull mountain. indeed, delos lovelace’s eponymous 1932 novelisation of the screenplay refers to the film’s locale as ‘skull mountain island.’ the film provides an approximate location for the island when denham finally briefs his captain and mate on their final destination. when the ship is located at a position “due south 90 east,” which denham refers to as “way west of sumatra”, he instructs the captain to head south-west, with the ship appearing to reach that destination relatively soon after it is specified. figure 1 provides an approximate representation of the position of the island based on these cues. whether the position indicated was a fairly arbitrary one or not, it complements the island’s characterisation as remote by being approximately 800 kilometres off the coast of sumatra and 950 kilometres due south of the andaman islands. the position also places it close to the undersea ninety east ridge, which runs north-south from the bay of bengal to the sub-antarctic kerguelen islands. while the ridge is too deep to be marked by islands on its peaks, it provides an elevated delineation of the eastern and west indian ocean. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 figure 1 – google earth pin showing the approximate position of skull island indicated in the 1933 version of king kong in addition to discussion concerning the ship’s position, a scene on the bridge of the venture as it steams towards the eastern indian ocean reveals that denham is in possession of a basic map of the island (figure 2). dialogue reveals that he obtained the map three years previously (i.e. in 1930) from the captain of a norwegian barque who had encountered a canoe that had been swept out to sea from an unknown island. taking the only man left alive on the canoe onto his ship, the captain had “pieced together a description of the island and got a fairly good idea of where it lies” before the man expired. the map shown on screen, derived from this information, shows a narrow ship route through a coral reef leading to a roughly rectangular island with a village on a southern peninsula cut off from the island by a wall and with skull mountain appearing in the main area of the island, labelled as ‘jungle’. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12 figure 2. denham’s map of the island (from the 1933 version of king kong) as denham elaborates to the ship’s captain: [the] only possible landing place is through this reef, the rest of the shoreline is sheer precipice, hundreds of feet high – and across the base of that peninsula, cutting it off from the rest of the island is a wall… built so long ago that the people who live there have slipped back, forgotten the higher civilisation that built it. that wall is as strong today as it was centuries ago. the natives keep that wall in repair. they need it… there’s something on the other side of it, something they fear… expanding on his theme, he introduces the figure of ‘kong’, and provides the cryptic comment that kong is “neither beast nor man, something monstrous, all-powerful, still living, still holding that island in a grip of deadly fear.” as the venture slowly approaches the anticipated position of the island in thick fog, denham announces that they will be able to recognise the island because of the “mountain that looks like a skull.” they hear the island – or, rather, its human inhabitants, drumming – before they see it. when the fog clears, they find themselves close to shore, just off the small, low, walled-off peninsula from which the drumming sounds emanated, with the precipitous and domed skull mountain rising immediately beyond the wall (figure 3). 52 minutes of the film’s 104-minute running total occur on the island in a continuous sequence. initial and final sections are set in and around the village with the majority taking place in wetlands, in the jungle and on the slopes and peak of skull mountain. aside from the village, the island is represented as an untamed wilderness bristling with prehistoric creatures and dominated by the giant ape, who appears to be the island’s apex predator. between him and the village is a high stone wall and fortified gate. the main narrative element concerns the natives kidnapping of darrow, to offer as a sacrifice to kong; kong’s acceptance of her; then taking her to his mountain eyrie; and the ship’s crew’s successful attempt to rescue her and subdue kong in order to transport him back to new york. the islanders are represented as dark-skinned and fuzzy haired and the instruments and coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 weapons they are shown brandishing, their clothes and their face and body paint render them as a fairly arbitrary mash-up of african and melanesian elements. the only clue given to their cultural origins/identity is that the ship’s captain identifies their speech as sounding like nias islander speech (an austronesian tongue) through which he manages to conduct basic communication with them. figure 3. the western voyagers’ first glimpse of the island (1933 version of king kong) nias is the largest island in an archipelago that runs parallel to the west coast of sumatra (figure 1). without claiming that cooper or any of his collaborators attempted to present the culture of their fictional island as in any way authentic and/or credibly related to actual regional cultures; the film suggests some familiarity with actual regional cultures. the interior of nias contains ancient megalithic structures (bonatz, 2012) and a (now rapidly declining) number of small apes occur in its forested areas (although obviously not the african gorilla upon which kong is modelled). similarly, nias was one of the last islands of (what was then) the dutch east indies to be fully integrated into the colonial system, this not occurring until around 1914. indeed, writing in 1991 (following sustained fieldwork from 1979 to 1986), the authors of a slender volume on the traditional architecture of nias produced a characterisation that is evocative of cooper’s imagination of his fictional island: nias is not well-known. on the borders of the indonesian archipelago, this island has always remained on the fringe of the great currents of civilization, religion, trade and even interest. one of the most original and elaborate architectures in the world nevertheless developed there… [historically] it had its own dynamics [and] a sequence of transition where, faced with a logic of evolution to which it is strange, it must "rebalance" its culture to ensure survival. (viaro and ziegler, 2006: v) coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 several of the sets from king kong were also used in its lower-budget follow-up, son of kong (directed by schoedsack alone). the sequel saw the denham character returning to the mysterious island, discovering diamonds and kong’s massive son before what is referred to in the film as ‘kong’s island’ sinks into the sea during an earthquake. while no further sequels followed, the original film remained prominent in us popular culture, being re-released at cinemas in 1938, 1942 and 1952 and appearing on tv regularly during the 1950s (erb, 2009) and emerging as a recurrent popular cultural reference in the 1960s and 1970s.4 the film was also re-released in international territories in the 1950s and had a notable role in japan, where it was influential in spawning the emergence of the kaiju (monster) genre that essentially updated aspects of japanese folkloric creatures, considerably increasing their size and inserting into modern contexts. the genre was initiated by gojira (released as godzilla in the west), directed by honda ishirō in 1954, the story of a giant dinosaur that emerges from the sea around (the fictional) odo island and goes on to menace tokyo. cooper’s and ishirō’s creatures went on to meet each other in ishirō’s 1962 feature kingu kongu tai gojira (‘king kong versus godzilla’), which has kong originating from a polynesian-looking locale named faero island and engaging in a climactic battle with gojira. five years later, ishirō’s 1967 feature kingu kongu no gyakushū (‘king kong’s counter-attack’) had the creature associated with what was then referred to as mondo island (with that designation also occurring in the subsequent american-japanese anime series the king kong show [1968-69]). king kong remakes and the elaboration of skull island the first direct remake of king kong occurred in 1976 in a production directed by john guillermin for the dino laurentiis corporation. set in the present-day, the film modified the plot of the original by having its expeditionary ship funded by a company named petrox to ascertain whether a previously undiscovered island had oil deposits. setting out from surabaya, on the north coast of java, the film’s scenario shifted the ‘unnamed’ island’s position, (while the term skull island is not used in the film, it appears as the title of a composition on the accompanying soundtrack album: track 11 – ‘climb to skull island’). as indicated on a map shown to the crew, its location is south of the western tip of java and due south of christmas island (see figure 1). the mission was mounted to follow up on a mysterious low-angle photo of the location, supposedly taken in 1943 by a us navy ship, which showed a fog bank that had mysteriously persisted through to the present in the same place. a recent thermal image from a nasa satellite had revealed an island within the fog, exciting interest in its geology. as a stowaway, princeton palaeontologist jack prescott (played by jeff bridges), reveals there have been accounts of an island in the location, and of a fearsome beast on it, dating back to the early 1600s. picking up an aspirant actress (named dwan, played by jessica lange) from a life raft on the way, the expeditionary party pierce the fog and arrive on a deserted cove surrounded by high cliffs (figure 4) and follow a rugged, rocky valley up inland through apparently uninhabited terrain. the believability of island’s landscape sequences is enhanced by their being shot on an actual island, kauai in the hawaiian archipelago, with its kalalea peak serving as kong’s mountain. the name ‘kong’s mountain’ continues to be used by some tourism operators (see makana, 2009). the film’s plot has the expedition quickly shifting from testing for oil to rescuing dawn from kong’s clutches and tranquilising the giant ape to bring him back to new york for coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 petrox to use for promotional purposes. as in the original, kong dies atop an iconic new york skyscraper, in this case the world trade centre, where he is shot down by helicopter gunships. in many respects, the 1976 film simply replays key themes and scenarios from the original in a modern-day context, utilising hawaiian locations to represent skull island in a more convincing manner than the 1933 film. the other principal difference, the introduction of a petroleum company as the disruptive influence that leads kong to be captured, transported and killed, is a notable inflection but one that is not used to develop any environmental moral or critique (and, whatever the western agency involved, the outcome is the same). figure 4 – the expeditionary party’s first landing on the island from the 1986 version of king kong. guillermin’s follow-up feature king kong lives (1986) introduced a novel geographical element. after revealing that kong did not die from his injuries but has been kept on life support for a decade in the us, the film shows a mission setting out for borneo, following a hunch that kong’s island was once connected to it. once there, the team discovers a giant female ape (dubbed ‘lady kong’) that they bring back to the u.s. the two apes familiarise themselves with each other before king kong breaks them from their facility. pursued by troops, lady kong is recaptured and then sprung again by king kong, after which he is fatally wounded by the pursuing troops, expiring shortly after lady kong gives birth to his son. the mother is then returned to borneo with her offspring. while guillermin’s feature films failed to inspire a range of directly related texts in the 1990s, the late 1990s and early 2000s saw a major revival in the franchise in the form of animated material. the first, a 71-minute production presented the original kong story in a musical format, including a sequence on kong’s island. this was followed by an animated tv series and two related feature length productions made by bkn entertainment that freely associated the kong myth with other legends and mysteries. the first, kong: the animated series, was released in 2000 and featured a new kong, cloned from cells from the original, inhabiting skull island, which had been relocated from the north-eastern indian ocean to the so-called ‘bermuda triangle’ region of the north-western atlantic. the first of the two films, kong: king of atlantis (2005), mixed coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 up cultural references even further, cross-associating the legends of skull island and atlantis by having kong relocate to the latter to defend it from an evil sorceress. taking another tack, the second film, kong: return to the jungle (2007), was set on skull island again and saw him faced off against hunters attempting to create a jurassic park style themed attraction.5 despite their novelty, these revisions to the kong franchise had little impact on the overall franchise; indeed the next significant kong-themed text, the illustrated volume de vito’s kong: king of skull island, published in 2004 (after an initial version in 1997, and revised in 2005 and 2017), respectfully revisited its 1930s’ sources and was endorsed by cooper’s estate. the serially-developed literary-pictorial text was conceptualised and developed by illustrator joe de vito over an extended period and the published volumes comprised his illustrations alongside narratives developed by science fiction and fantasy author brad strickland from de vito’s initial treatments. de vito extensively researched the original film and its pre-production materials and based his text around delos lovelace’s 1932 novelisation, providing an historical back-story/prequel to the initial film and an update describing a visit to the island in 1957. the specification of skull island as the location of the narrative marked the beginning of that term coming into standard use to refer to the island and the beginning of a series of texts that focussed more on the island as a coherent and complex entity rather than just a colourful backdrop for kong’s adventures. one distinctive element of de vito’s volume is its revision of the shape of the island, retaining the walled south-western peninsula shown in the map from the 1933 film but rendering the island in a skull-like side profile that matches the shape of skull mountain and adds a group of fringing islands along the south and north-western coasts. de vito’s volume is presented in a number of sections. these include the journals written by vincent denham, the son of the filmmaker-protagonist of the first kong film, during an extended stay on the island in 1957 and an account of the island’s early history and of its population’s origins. in brief, the latter identifies the local population, the tagatu, as resulting from a merger of two mainland asian clans who fled their homeland and came to the island around 10,000 years ago, together with a number of large, gorilla-like apes with whom they harmoniously co-existed. establishing themselves on the island, the tagatu built a settlement and a high wall to protect them from the island’s substantial population of aggressive dinosaurs. over time the apes grew exponentially in size (again, a type of speciation) and protected the tagatu from aggressors. a cult later developed around a particular dinosaur that saw bridal sacrifices made (much like that later adopted to placate kong, the last, massive, feral descendant of the apes brought to the island). dispirited by adversity, the tagatu remained besieged until the events represented in cooper’s original film occurred. while the giant apes play a significant part in the narrative of island history, they are only one element, with the focus more on the tagatu and on the island as a complex, and often hostile, eco-system. the second remake of the film, directed by peter jackson for the new zealand-based wingnut films, appeared in the year after publication of de vito’s book. while the film closely adhered to cooper’s original, it also had distinct elements in common with de vito’s work. indeed, de vito deemed these to be so pronounced that he sued the film’s producers, warner bothers/legendary, for $3.5million for allegedly plagiarising his conceptualisation of skull island as a coherent, detailed world with a distinct history as pitched by him for a proposed television production.6 whatever the similarities between de vito’s book and jackson’s film, the cartography of skull island is rendered differently coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 in the latter. the map clasped by denham (played by jack black) when pitching a film project to its producers has far more jagged coastal contours than either of the film’s predecessors. in his pitch meeting he refers to the “uncharted island” as a place that was thought to exist only in myth, until now “a primitive world, never before seen by man… the ruins of an entire civilisation.” the island sequences in the film were shot around the wellington area of new zealand’s north island and the island’s wall appears as a high, jagged lava barrier that resembles a fossilised vertebral column stretched across the island. the sequences in which ann darrow (naomi watts) is captured and subsequently rescued occur in mountainous jungles. while the native villagers are not represented in the jumbled africanist form of the preceding films, having a more melanesian appearance, they are more terrifying – being described by one reviewer as “a twisted, emaciated, terrified people, hungry, paranoid, and shamanistic in their outlook” (langager, 2011: online). promotion for the film firmly identified kong’s homeland as ‘skull island’ and the term has become closely associated with the island locale of all kong films over the last fifteen years. the film was also complemented by various texts that both profiled skull island and, arguably, increased its prominence within the broader kong ‘universe’. the most notable of these was a glossy, hardcover book produced by jackson’s weta workshop entitled kong: a natural history of skull island in 2005 and a 17-minute pseudodocumentary drawing on it entitled skull island: a natural history (2006) which was included as a featurette on the special edition of the dvd released in 2006. these two texts, and the manner in which they build on and expand aspects of the original film, represent the most detailed representation of skull island to date and are significant works of speculative island fiction in their own right. kong: a natural history of skull island is a large format, copiously illustrated, ‘coffee table’ book that provides an overview of the landscape, environments and fauna of the island as imagined by jackson and the weta workshop team. jackson’s ‘foreword’ to the volume provides an account of the origins of the book in the following terms: the task of bringing skull island to life was the responsibility of the talented artists working at weta workshop and weta digital… a key part of the design process for any film is creating a believable world. if you are making king kong, this necessitates an indepth exploration of the landscape and habitat and animals and creatures of all kinds… (2005: 7) one of the more notable aspects of jackson’s comments is that few fantasy/science fiction film productions have involved the degree of “in-depth exploration” of landscapes and animals to create “believable” fictional worlds that the weta volume identifies. there is no suggestion, for instance, that the production of any prior kong film involved such detailed word-building, let alone the complexity of accounting for the nature of different local environments as the contexts and motivations for local speciation. indeed, in its careful and visually ornate vision and representation of an island where dinosaurs and humans co-exist, the film and weta’s publication has a closer similarity to the integrated vision that informed james gurney’s 1992 book dinotopia and the related print, tv series, video and video game products resulting from it. indeed, there are such substantial parallels between the set of kong texts discussed in this article and the dinotopia texts that the two can be considered as contextually and intertextually entangled.7 aside from the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs, the most obvious element in common is the coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 nature of their islands as remote, uncharted, tropical islands protected by constant storm systems and dangerous reefs and highly varied archaic fauna. it is notable that while the landscapes and environments represented by weta workshop’s skull island book match those shown in the film, the number of creatures represented exceed those featured on-screen (at least to my eye after several viewings). and, the book’s survey of distinct local fauna can be regarded as an expansion and consolidation of the onscreen sequences of skull island, rather than simply a descriptive adjunct to it. this aspect is also manifest in the book’s conceit of it being realised from research compiled by a series of further expeditions to skull island made in 1935 and 1936 subsequent to denham’s first trip to the island that led him to capture kong and take him to manhattan. significantly, later expeditions, involving scientists of various types, explored an island world in which kong was no longer present. one set of insights that the book sets out in its introduction (entitled ‘the legacy of the venture’) concerns the origins and physical nature of the island. supposedly drawing on geological research, the book characterises skull island as “once part of the vast and ancient supercontinent of gondwanaland in prehistoric times'' and goes on to relate that “what came to be skull island was a stretch near the coast of the great tethys sea, rich in life” (weta workshop, 2005: 20) until the ‘super-continent’ was fractured by the separation of the eurasian and indo-australian tectonic plates. left astride the “turbulent boundary” of the two, the fragment was islanded as: fissures and pressure spots created land and forced molten rock to the surface while, at the same time, great chunks of the island fell into the deep subduction trench that marked the plate edge. (ibid: 17) illustrating the processes described above, the book shows three outline maps of skull island over a thousand year period with its overall size – and, correspondingly, the size of micro-landscapes and environments within it – shrinking over a relatively short time period. while the diminution of the island invites comparison to those low-lying islands that have been shrunk by global warming, skull’s shrinkage has been caused by geomorphological rather than anthropocene factors. this aspect is fantastic, as is the characterisation that it subsided and disappeared completely in 1938. while islands can be suddenly created by volcanic eruptions, such as surtsey, which emerged off the south coast of iceland in 1963, and others, such as ferdinandea, off the south coast of sicily, has risen and fallen several times, the type of fragmentation and sinking attributed to skull island does not appear to have occurred in recorded human history. nevertheless, as the introduction colourfully describes, the island envisaged in the film and book was “a doomed oddity, a scab on the earth’s crust that was about to scratched off” with “all its wondrous secrets… lost to the waves, the island torn to pieces by the same irresistible geologic force that had preserved it for so many eons” (ibid: 15). the introduction also provides an overview of how life evolved on the island that conforms to the principles of island biogeography (mcarthur and wilson, 1967), describing how when the coast of gondwanaland fragmented: many prehistoric ancestors of the island’s modern inhabitants rode with it, guaranteeing their survival when catastrophe and ecological change wiped them out everywhere else in the world. others joined them later, rafting, swimming, or flying to the island sanctuary. land bridges came and went, bringing new fauna, each adding to the diversity of the coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 island. over the millennia the island eroded. as habitat was lost, life was concentrated into over-shrinking areas. competition became fierce. the island saw an evolutionary arms race erupt, forging a menagerie of nightmares. (ibid: 18) complementing this account, the documentary also provides the significant hypothesis that the island’s very active geology was a key factor in speciation, in that “thermal vents kept it tropical during ice ages and kept dinosaurs alive, allowing them to evolve into new species.” until the colourful phraseology of the final sentence (concerning an “arms race” and “nightmares”), the passage from the book’s introduction outlined above provides a fairly sober explanation for the arrival of species and the development of particular attributes in competitive contexts. but while diversification of singular species in response to the conditions of ecological niches in different parts of an isolated landmass are common – e.g. in the galapagos archipelago which inspired charles darwin to develop his theory of evolution – there is little evidence that large species either diversify and co-exist alongside other, similar (and/or competitive) species in small (let alone diminishing) habitat areas. indeed, research undertaken by lawrence, o’connor, haroutounian and swei (2018) suggests that while smaller species may exhibit such tendencies, it is not common for larger ones, which show greater diversity in larger areas. following the introduction, discussed above, the book surveys seven distinct segments of the island: 1) the crumbling coast and village (22-240) 2) the shrinking lowlands (42-80) 3) the winding swamps and waterways (81-122) 4) the steaming jungle (123-180) 5) the abyssal chasms (181-194) 6) the barren uplands (195-218) chapter 1 considers the islanders within the book’s overall project and provides an account of them as poverty-stricken and grimly surviving in a highly hostile environment and as of unknown ethnicity, not resembling any other regional populations (unlike the islanders of original film, who spoke language similar to that of nias islanders). it is left ambiguous as to what their relationship to the builders of the island’s monumental structures is, referring to the latter as “hollow reminders of the glory of an ancient and nameless culture” (weta workshop, 2005: 34). subsequent chapters discuss niche environments distributed across the island, and its coastal fragments, and of the distinctive creatures that have developed there. the final chapter addresses the fauna living around the peak of skull mountain, and of kong’s eyrie atop it, surmising that kong was the last survivor of a species of giant ape brought to the island “a few thousand years ago” for unknown reasons. the 17-minute pseudo-documentary program documentary skull island: a natural history (2006) – released as a late-stage promotion of jackson’s film – opens with a caption explaining its use of artists’ images (those featured in the book) “since film footage taken by the 1930s’ expeditions have degraded.” the program draws on and summarises various aspects of the book, featuring statements by various members of the feature film’s production team and a narration that provides colourful characterisations of skull island as “the most hellish place on earth… a complete geological and evolutionary anomaly – a coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 place of inexhaustible mysteries… this perversion of evolution” that add to its mystique as a vanished land. skull island’s status as a lost and sunken locale, within jackson’s version of the kong tale, was subject to reversal in the mid-2010s as the island was deployed for a fresh purpose. in 2016 the nbc universal entertainment company decided to add a skull island attraction to its ‘islands of adventure’ theme park in orlando, florida. the park opened in 1999 and presents visitors with the opportunity to visit a number of themed sites around a central lake. while some (such as ‘marvel superhero island’) are identified as islands, others have different spatial designations (such as ‘jurassic park’ and ‘toon lagoon’). the theme park opened with six themed areas, with a seventh being added in 2010 and an eighth, entitled ‘skull island: reign of kong,’ opening in 2016. the skull island area comprises a temple area that resembles the gate in jackson’s film in terms of scale and design together with a ride that takes customers through a jungle environment featuring large animatronic model dinosaurs and kong himself (see itm, 2016). while the space does not offer a coherent realisation of an island (with no apparent coastlines etc.) it represents a material expression of the locale featured in the kong films and was also promoted in a way that extended and modified the modern-day legend of the island. as part of a novel, ‘viral’ marketing campaign, of a type previously used for feature films (see janes, 2015, for discussion), nbc universal commissioned questus productions to create an online buzz about skull island – posited as an actual place rather than an attraction at orlando. questus approached this by establishing a website ostensibly for a (purported) new video series entitled myth explorer. lending a degree of credibility to the production, the series was hosted by and centred around its lead reporter erin ryder (who had previously appeared as an investigator in the syfy channel’s destination truth [20072010] and the national geographic channels’ chasing ufos [2012]). the myth explorer website hosted a number of blog posts and three videos supposedly charting ryder’s travel to and exploration of skull island (presented as an actual place). given that the questus site and video series was closely tied to weta workshop’s interpretation of the king kong story, in which the island sank due to seismic activity, a degree of invention was required. this was accomplished in the narrated introduction to the first program of myth explorer: the quest for kong, entitled ‘journey to skull island.’ referring to skull island as “a place thought no longer to exist” ryder notes that “reports from the 1940s claim that the island was destroyed and vanished from the face of the earth” before claiming that, “modern technology suggests something else.” the episode then shows ryder and a small crew approaching the shore of a stark, rocky island (using images similar to those in jackson’s film) in a dingy and then going ashore and exploring “on an island surrounded by constant storms and crazy magnetic anomalies and volcanic eruptions” and finding artefacts from mid-20th century expeditions in the process. having established its fiction, the final video explained that the series and website was a fictional means of promoting the new orlando attraction and inviting viewers to visit it. aside from the novelty of the campaign it served the purpose of resurrecting the island in the 2010s and offering the prospect of fresh exploration of it. skull island re-imagined coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 the most significant revision to the visions of skull island related above occurred in 2017 in the form of jordan vogt-roberts’ 2017 feature film kong: skull island. intentionally or not,8 the film re-imagines skull island in terms of the hollow earth theories promoted in the early 19th century by john cleves symmes junior and fictionalised in novels such as seaborn’s symzonia: voyage of discovery (1820) and verne’s journey to the centre of the earth (1864). the return of the hollow earth theory is all the more notable as the film is set in 1973, long after it had faded from any serious consideration. set at the tail-end of the vietnam war, the film’s scenario involves a military expeditionary force being sent to a previously unknown island that has just been detected by the us earth resources technology satellite (later known as landsat), first launched into orbit in 1972. a montage of newsreel footage during the title sequence introduces the post-war period as a new era of discovery and sets a context for the expedition. the detection of small, hitherto unknown, island surrounded by constant extreme storms attracts the attention of a mysterious government agency named monarch, supposedly established by president truman in 1946, which links the island to a legendary place referred to in legends as ‘skull island – the legendary place where god did not finish creation.’ one of monarch’s senior staff, bill randa (played by john goodman) is especially interested in the island as he is convinced that the hollow earth hypothesis is true, that there are portals to its subterranean levels from the surface and that the island may contain one. as he states in a briefing to his team, “this is a place where myth and science meet”. supporting the hollow earth aspect, warner brothers’ promotional website for the film included a link to a (fictional) ‘monarch terrasearch’ webpage that had top-secret files of encrypted data about the island that could be accessed by visitors obtaining various passcodes (see aguilar, 2017).9 in an unusual promotional tie-in with release of the film in march 2017 google earth (briefly) included a marker for location of the island in the eastern pacific,10 placing it just south of the equator, some 3,500 kilometres due west of the galapagos islands, represented by a red pin (rather than a map – figure 5, many people also contributed fictional comments about the island on its beautiful landscapes but rather troubling giant ape and other creatures). the shift from the north-eastern indian ocean to the central pacific emphasises the different nature of vogt-roberts’ island from its previous namesakes. however, the similarities are still marked. a giant ape resides there, along with a range of bizarre evolutionary throwbacks, including large reptilian bipeds referred to as ‘skullcrawlers’ and a small, indigenous population (named the iwi) that has managed to survive alongside the island’s fabulous menagerie. the island’s status as a portal is also significant as the locale is an interzone between the surface and hollow planetary realm, with highly variegated environments. as actress bree larson (who plays the role of an anti-war photo-journalist named mason weaver) states in the promo for the imax version of the film, “the island isn’t just a place that looks specifically like one thing… as you continue to travel through it, you see the variations.” coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 figure 5 – google earth pin of the position of skull island, march 2017 figure 6 – skull island, from kong: skull island (2017) the expedition’s motivation to test the hollow earth theory determines their initial interaction with the island as their helicopters drop seismic charges to aid their mapping activities. these also succeed in disturbing kong and prompt him to attack the helicopters in order to defend the island. much of the remainder of the film features combat scenes between giant creatures and with members of the expedition. deprived of the final new york sequences key to the previous versions of the film, the conflict between man (specifically gendered, as larson’s character is one of only two females in the film) and coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 beasts dominates the film, within an aesthetic heavily influenced by the visually and thematically dynamic vietnam war film apocalypse now (coppola, 1979) (kaye, 2017: online). the film ends with king kong injured but alive and with a diminished expeditionary force departing, having proved the hollow earth hypothesis but without having conquered the island’s creatures. conclusion at time of writing a partial follow-up to kong: skull island, entitled godzilla v kong, directed by adam wingard is due for release. the film takes as it premise that the subsurface spaces and tunnels revealed by the 1972 expedition to the (pacific) skull island are spread across the planet and are home to a host of other giant creatures (specifically kaiju such as mothra and godzilla) that pose a threat to the us and to world stability. the film’s focal conflict between kong and godzilla occurs in this context and further reconnects the latest version of king kong, and of its central island, to early 19th century pseudo-science and related fiction. as the discussions in this essay suggest, the re-invention of skull island in this context reconnects it to the speculative fictions that preceded and informed the original film. in this manner, the remote island of the original film, and jackson’s vision of it as a fragmented and doomed remnant of a larger island space, are innovative twists on a long-established pattern of fantasy islands (also given a contemporary inflection in gurney’s dinotopia franchise). in all the versions described above, the island is primeval and premodern – a striking ‘other’ to manhattan, cast as an icon of modernity in cooper and schoedsack’s, guillermin’s and jackson’s king kong films. the distortion of scales of creatures and juxtaposition of historical epochs on skull island also goes beyond the primeval/premodern. the island provides a chaotic space in which diverse elements battle each other and in which modern western humans are far less confident of their supremacy over nature (in all its forms) than in the developed and subdued world they come from. as such, the space of the island is not over-determined by narrative treatments or prescriptions of functionality. echoing deloughrey’s identification of “epistemological inscrutability” as a prominent aspect of modern, fictional islands (2003: 23), there’s a strong element of the island and its creatures as being ‘beyond belief,’ in terms of western rationality (in a manner that goes beyond the credibility of the reconstructed species of jurassic park, which rely on human ingenuity for their resurrection). in this regard, the island, its terrain and fauna instead, resemble those margins of medieval maps decorated with inventively monstrous creatures to illustrate the edge of (western) reason and rationality and the prospect of radical otherness awaiting those who go beyond the known world. on a planet whose surface has been known and normalised by comprehensive mapping systems such as google earth, there are no longer such spaces. skull island’s status as a modern legend, conceived before satellites comprehensively mapped and demystified the planet, has given it a particular status as a reference point for imaginations of bio-cultural ‘otherness’ that do not require the paraphernalia and precepts of science fiction to be called into being. as such, and with considerable irony, skull island is firmly ‘on the map’ of western culture. the incongruity of its prehistoric species and giant apes suggests it as a thoroughly irrational place that has appealed to a series of cultural producers and aficionados on account of the interpretative freedom its peculiarities offer. as the 2006 pseudo-documentary skull island: a natural history described it, it is “a coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 place of inexhaustible mysteries” and one likely to continue to be interpreted and modified in mainstream media and fan fiction. endnotes: 1. a description of the island provided by the unnamed narrator of the 2006 pseudodocumentary skull island: a natural history (discussed in section iii). 2. first proposed by 17th century british astronomer edmond halley – see kollerstrom (1992). 3. see hocknull, piper, van en bergh et.al (2009) for discussion of varanus komodoensis speciation. 4. in popular music, for instance a sequence in george dunning’s beatles-themed animation film yellow submarine (1968) features a kong-like, giant ape grabbing a woman from her bed. frank zappa also recorded an instrumental composition entitled king kong with the mothers of invention in 1967, and featured it his band’s live sets through to the 1980s, and abba recorded their (markedly inane) king kong song in 1974. 5. i refer to the jurassic park attractions first conceived in michael crichton’s eponymous novel and in an ongoing series of films, which commenced in 1990 with stephen spielberg’s eponymous production, set on the fictional island of isa nublar off the pacific coast of costa rica. 6. whatever the rights of the case, it appears to have either been dropped or settled out of court since the case faded from the public arena soon after it was publicised. see devito artworks llc v. legendry pictures llc (cullins, 2016). 7. there are also overlaps in that just as cooper had worked for the american geographical society early in his career, developing the concept of king kong, gurney, worked on assignments for national geographic magazine early in his, developing the concept of dinotopia. in a norman rockwell museum interview recorded in 2015 he also cited reading 1920s’ national geographic magazine accounts of ‘lost worlds’ discovered by explorers as inspirational. 8. i have not uncovered any reference to 19th century ‘hollow earth’ theories and/or fictional representations as being influential on vogt-roberts’ concept of the film. 9. this site is no longer operational but a promotional video for it remains online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ljawzoupnu – accessed 14th april 2020. 10. google earth had previously featured diagon alley, from the harry potter franchise, and lord of the rings’ middle earth on its service in 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ljawzoupnu coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 references: aguilar, m (2017) ‘kong: skull island launches viral monarch campaign,’ comicbook.com: https://comicbook.com/popculturenow/2016/11/12/kong-skull-islandlaunches-viral-monarch-campaign/ – accessed 15th april 2020 barnard, timothy p. (2011) ‘protecting the dragon: dutch attempts at limiting access to komodo lizards in the 1920s and 1930s’, indonesia n92: 97-123 bonatz, domink (2002) ‘megaliths on nias: the retention of identity’, indonesia and the malay world v30 n88: 253-276 burden, william douglas (1927) dragon lizards of komodo, new york: g.p. putnam & sons crichton, michael (1990) jurassic park, new york: alfred a. knopf cotta vaz, mark (2005) living dangerously: the adventures of meriam c. cooper, new york: villard cullins, ashley (2016) ‘legendary, warner bros. sued for allegedly stealing 'kong: skull island' story’, the hollywood reporter 28th april: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/legendary-warner-bros-sued-allegedly888503 – accessed 12th april 2020 delos, lovelace (1932) king kong, new york: grosset & dunlap deloughrey, elizabeth (2003) ‘”the litany of islands, the rosary of archipelagos”: caribbean and pacific archipelagraphy’, ariel: a review of international english literature v32 n1: 21-51 devito artworks llc v. legendary pictures llc (2016): https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=634d49b3-8724-4da4-9be84f360ae4e088 accessed 12th april 2020 de vito, joe (2004) kong: king of skull island, milwaukie: dh press doyle, arthur conan, [1912] (2019) the lost world, london: alma classics erb, cynthia marie (2009) tracking king kong: a hollywood icon in world culture (2nd edition), detroit: wayne state university press fawcett, percy harrison (1953) exploration fawcett, london: hutchinson glashan, roy (n.d.) king kong screenplay: http://freeread.com.au/@rglibrary/edgarwallace/plays/kingkong.html hayward, philip (2017) making a splash: mermaids (and mermen) in 20th and 21st century audiovisual media, eastleigh: john libbey & co. https://comicbook.com/popculturenow/2016/11/12/kong-skull-island-launches-viral-monarch-campaign/ https://comicbook.com/popculturenow/2016/11/12/kong-skull-island-launches-viral-monarch-campaign/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/legendary-warner-bros-sued-allegedly-888503 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/legendary-warner-bros-sued-allegedly-888503 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=634d49b3-8724-4da4-9be8-4f360ae4e088 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=634d49b3-8724-4da4-9be8-4f360ae4e088 http://freeread.com.au/@rglibrary/edgarwallace/plays/kingkong.html coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 hocknull, scott a., piper, philip p., van en bergh, gert d. et. al (2009) ‘dragon's paradise lost: palaeobiogeography, evolution and extinction of the largest-ever terrestrial lizards (varanidae)’, plos one 30th september: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0007241 janes s (2015) ‘viral marketing strategies in hollywood cinema’, in crisp v and gonring g.m (eds) besides the screen, london: palgrave macmillan kaye, d (2017) ‘kong: skull island director: “i wanted to see apocalypse now with king kong”’, den of geek 8th march 2017: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/kongskull-island-director-i-wanted-to-see-apocalypse-now-with-king-kong/ kollerstrom, n (1992) ‘the hollow world of edmond halley, journal for the history of astronomy v23 n3: 185-192 lawrence, a, o’connor, k, haroutounian, v and swei, a (2018) ‘patterns of diversity along a habitat size gradient in a biodiversity hotspot’, ecosphere 24th april: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.2183 – accessed 12th april 2020 langager, ross, (2011) the beauty and the horror: peter jackson’s king kong part 2, pop matters [online] https://www.popmatters.com/150938-the-beauty-and-the-horrorpeter-jacksons-king-kong-part-22495921313.html?mrfcachebuster=1584212706875&rebelltpage=2&rebelltitem=2 – accessed 20th may 2020 lovelace, delos (1932) king kong, new york: grosset and dunlap mcarthur, robert h. and wilson, e.o (1967) the theory of island biogeography, princeton: princeton university press makana charters and tours (2019) kalalea mountain – the world famous king kong peak: https://makanacharters.com/kalalea-mountain-king-kong-peak/ – accessed 6th april 2020 norman rockwell museum (2015) ‘dinotopia: the fantastical art of james gurney’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udczlglhit8 – accessed 14th april 2020 russian laboratory of theoretical folkloristics (2104) ‘conference “mechanisms of cultural memory: from folk-lore to media-lore”, ranepa website: http://www.ranepa.ru/eng/activities/item/604-cultural-memory.html – accessed 20th july 2019 seaborn, captain adam (1820) symzonia: a voyage of discovery, new york: seymour swift, jonathan (1726) gulliver’s travels into several remote nations of the world, archived online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/829 – accessed 20th july 2019 verne, jules [1864] (1996) journey to the center of the earth, herefordshire: wordsworth editions https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0007241 https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/kong-skull-island-director-i-wanted-to-see-apocalypse-now-with-king-kong/ https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/kong-skull-island-director-i-wanted-to-see-apocalypse-now-with-king-kong/ https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.2183 https://www.popmatters.com/150938-the-beauty-and-the-horror-peter-jacksons-king-kong-part-2-2495921313.html?mrfcachebuster=1584212706875&rebelltpage=2&rebelltitem=2 https://www.popmatters.com/150938-the-beauty-and-the-horror-peter-jacksons-king-kong-part-2-2495921313.html?mrfcachebuster=1584212706875&rebelltpage=2&rebelltitem=2 https://www.popmatters.com/150938-the-beauty-and-the-horror-peter-jacksons-king-kong-part-2-2495921313.html?mrfcachebuster=1584212706875&rebelltpage=2&rebelltitem=2 https://makanacharters.com/kalalea-mountain-king-kong-peak/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udczlglhit8 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/829 coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 viaro, a.m. and ziegler, a (2006) traditional architecture of nias island, gunungsitoli: yayasan pusaka nias weta workshop (2005) kong: a natural history of skull island, new york: pocket books/simon and schuster audio-visual material: apocalypse now (francis ford coppola, usa, 1976) chasing ufos (ping pong productions, usa, 2012) destination truth, (ping pong productions, usa, 2007-2014) godzilla (ishirō honda, japan, 2954) godzilla vs kong (adam wingard, usa, 2021) jurassic park (stephen spielberg, usa, 1990) king kong (meriam c. cooper and ernest schoedsack, 1933, usa) king kong (john guillermin, 1976, usa) king kong lives (john guillermin, 1986, usa) king kong (peter jackson, 2005, new zealand/usa) king kong: skull island (jordan vogt-roberts, 2017, usa) king kong versus godzilla (ishirō honda, 1962, japan) king kong counter attacks (ishirō honda, 1967, japan) kong: king of atlantis (patrick archibald, 2005, usa) kong: return to the jungle (stuart evans, 2007, usa) kong: the animated series (sean catherine derek and romain van leimt, 2001, canada/usa) myth explorer: the quest for kong (questus, 2016, usa) skull island: reign of kong grand opening ceremony at universal orlando (itm, inside the magic) (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgy8pxkwxty accessed 11th april 2020 son of kong (ernest schoedsack, 1933, usa) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgy8pxkwxty coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 skull island: a natural history (michael pellerin, 2006, new zealand) the four feathers, (meriam c. cooper and ernest schoedsack, 1929, usa) the king kong show ( arthur rankin jr. and jules bass 1966-1969 usa/japan) the lost world (harry o. hoyt, 1925, usa) philip hayward is an adjunct professor at university of technology and editor of shima: the international journal of research into island cultures. microsoft word 03_multilingual negotiations-nadia niaz.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 multilingual negotiations: the place and significance of translation in multilingual poetry nadia niaz university of melbourne nadia.niaz@unimelb.edu.au copyright©2021 nadia niaz. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: multilingual poetry, which weaves together multiple languages, necessarily straddles multiple cultural contexts. this raises the question of how poets who write multilingually negotiate and deploy their cultural knowledges, who they write for, and how their audiences receive them. using suresh canagarajah’s negotiation model to examine poets’ linguistic choices, including whether and when to provide translations, and mendietalombardo and cintron’s adaptation of the myers-scotton markedness model to consider audience and context, this paper will examine examples of contemporary bilingual and multilingual poetry published in australia and canada to identify the many conversations and negotiations that must take place between language-cultures as well as between multilingual poets and audiences for these poems to ‘work’. keywords: multilingual poetry, code-mixing, markedness multilingual poetry – that is, poetry that weaves together multiple languages such that each language is integral to the overall effect of the poem – necessarily straddles multiple cultural contexts. although the mixing of languages in poetry is not in itself new (forster, 1970), and although writers have always had complex relationships with the languages in which they write, there is at present an arguably more actively political element to code-mixing in poetry and to literary language mixing in general. historically, bilingualism or multilingualism has been the province of either the highly educated or the newly arrived, presumably impoverished and almost certainly disadvantaged, migrant or refugee, and literary language mixing has traditionally been the preserve of the former. but as doris sommer argues, in the coexistence of languages lies much opportunity, regardless of who happens to be wielding said languages (sommer, 2004). while the internet has not heralded the death of the book or the publishing industry after all, it has nonetheless had a profound impact on the writing, dissemination and growing popularity of poetry. multilingual poetry, always a somewhat niche occupation because of its codemixing, does particularly well in the automatically international and accessible environment of coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 the internet. the growing interest in questions of identity and belonging amongst minoritised communities, migrant and refugee populations, and those investigating their ancestry also provides fertile ground for the development of new multilingual writing that runs the gamut of explicitly political verse, as in lorna dee cervantes’s work (cervantes, 2005; cervantes, 1981) and more experimental but personal writing such as that of antoine cassar (cassar, 2008; cassar, 2009). this proliferation of multilingual verse raises the question of how poets who write multilingually negotiate and deploy their cultural knowledges in this mixed context, who they write for, and how their audiences – those they write ‘for’ as well as those they do not – receive them. the question of translation – whether, when and to what to degree materials such as glossaries, transliterations, full translations, and discursive explanations are provided – is one that can colour the conversations had both about the poetry and between the poet and audience. part i in the first part of this paper, i will draw on and discuss suresh canagarajah’s negotiation model and mendieta-lombardo and cintron’s adaptation of the myers-scotton markedness model to first establish multilingual poets’ choices as agentive, deliberate and rational. i will then examine examples of contemporary bilingual and multilingual poetry published in australia and canada to identify the many conversations and negotiations that must take place between language-cultures as well as between multilingual poets and audiences for these poems to ‘work’. in doing this, i hope to demonstrate that multilingual poetry grows out of a complex and sophisticated negotiation of context and culture and addresses multiple audiences in multiple ways. my aim, ultimately, is to equip readers to understand these poems not simply literally but in terms of the many complex conversations and negotiations that occur within them. a. suresh canagarajah argues that much of the discourse around multilingual writing is hampered by ‘monolingualist assumptions’ that ‘[prevent] us from fully understanding the resources multilinguals bring to their texts’ (canagarajah, 2006). he says that, in monolingual contexts, particularly anglophone ones, there is a tendency to see languages other than english as impediments to the acquisition and use of english, instead of parallel and equal cultural capital upon which the multilingual writer can (and should!) draw in their writing. this tendency causes monolingual readers to assume writerly idiosyncrasies as necessarily a product of the (assumed) ‘native’ language rather than evidence of craft and choice. the writer is even presumed to be unable to exert significant influence on english such that their writing necessarily always reflects the ingrained patterns of their ‘real’ language in ways that the writer cannot resist. this, he argues, is a mistake, and a particularly grave one because, by not understanding the writer as agentive relative to their context, we miss out on important aspects of the communication taking place between writer and reader. leonard forster, in his lectures on multilingualism in literature, says: since the romantics we have all been brought up to believe that each language has its mystery and its soul, and that these are very sacred things…i want to make the point that, if we put sentiment aside, there are very many people and very many situations for which different coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 languages are simply tools appropriate to certain definite purposes, analogous to the different stylistic levels within any one language. (forster, 1970, p. 7) forster is not arguing that there is no emotional component or factor in the linguistic choices made by writers, but rather, like canagarajah, that the multilingual writer makes informed, intentional decisions when they put pen to paper. this understanding of the writer as agentive becomes even more crucial when the text itself is multilingual. the degree and type of linguistic mixing must be considered as existing in conversation with a context that may not be our default anglophone one. indeed, the text itself can be a clue as to who the intended audience really is. carol myers-scotton’s markedness model, although developed to study different registers within languages (myers-scotton, 1998), can also be adapted to the examination of multilingual writing. briefly, myers-scotton posits that some linguistic registers are ‘unmarked’ or expected and some ‘marked’ or unexpected in any given context. switching from english to german in a monolingual anglophone context, for instance would be a marked choice, but so too would a switch from formal english to slang. except, of course, when it wouldn’t. if the context itself becomes bilingual or the expectation of formality is dropped, then neither of the above switches would be marked. so, we can argue that the context determines the markedness of a choice and that the multilingual writer, by choosing when and how to switch between their languages, is in constant conversation with their context. eva mendieta-lombardo and zaida a. cintron (1995) argue that markedness/unmarkedness is not simply something to be determined based on context but is a tool at the multilingual writer’s disposal. in deciding which language to use at precisely which moment in a poem (their models are spanish/english bilingual poems), the writer enters into a complex relationship with their audience. not only that, the ‘audience’ is not singular but divided by the writer into multiple in-groups and out-groups. their model ‘accounts for the speakers’ sociopsychological motivations when they engage in code switching’ (mendieta-lombardo & cintron, 1995, p. 566) arguing that their use of code-switching can be either a marked or unmarked choice, depending on the type of code-switching or mixing they employ. for instance, from their examples, a poem in which english is the primary or ‘carrier’ language and that employs highly culturally loaded words from another language is arguably addressing speakers of that language more so than speakers of english or more general speakers of the other language. specialised speakers of the other language become the ‘in-group’ and non-speakers are pushed out of the poem after a certain point. on the other hand, if the ‘other’ language uses words that are fairly familiar outside the language – a lot of food words would fit this category, but so would exclamations or phrases popularised in mainstream media – then they can be said to be addressing a broader audience, and even perhaps excluding their more specialised audience. the non-speaker out-group created in the first example now becomes part of the in-group and, depending on the type and variety of language used, the earlier in-group may even be pushed out or have it signalled to them that they are not really the target audience for this poem. translation is often left by the wayside in these discussions, but it is not insignificant to consider that the translatability of the text and the poet’s decision to provide translations in the first place also has a direct impact on who their work can reach and who they understand to be their intended audience. for example, sara suleri’s meatless days was one of the first modern, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 literary, english-language accounts of life in a young pakistan written by a pakistani woman and remains much beloved in pakistan as a result. however, in a scene in one of the early chapters of the book during which suleri and her friends go out for a snack, suleri pauses to describe what a gol guppa is (suleri, 1989, p. 39) it is a brief interlude, but its presence immediately makes it clear that suleri’s assumed audience is not pakistani at all. this is not wholly surprising if one considers that she was already teaching at yale university when the book was published and, although it was distributed in pakistan, its initial publication was in the united states. in contrast, pakistani author kamila shamsie’s salt and saffron (2000) – also published internationally, first in the uk and then in the us – is littered with transliterated urdu phrases with no translation, though there are contextual clues aplenty. in choosing not to explain herself, shamsie signals that her audience is one who can either already understand her or is astute enough to figure out what she is saying from the context. (this also suggests a generational shift in attitude towards the english language in pakistan, but further discussion of this is beyond the scope of this paper.) this is not to suggest that translation in itself is not useful or necessary. as edith grossman says, ‘[t]ranslation is crucial to our sense of ourselves as serious readers’ who are aware that there is knowledge and art to be found in languages beyond our immediate capacities (grossman, 2010). translation provides readers with a bridge into other languages and new ways of thinking about the world and is invaluable as such. however, álvarez and vidal remind us that it is not a neutral endeavour – the question of what gets translated into which language is political and bound up in questions of power as well as ‘the strategies used by this power in order to represent the other culture’ (álvarez & vidal, 1996). although álvarez and vidal were speaking in the context of more traditional translation, their argument that translation is ‘culture bound’ and ‘deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power’ (álvarez & vidal, 1996) is just as relevant to multilingual poets as to translators, but in different ways. while translators must negotiate the movement between one language and another, multilingual poets must inhabit both at once. the 19th century saw the rise of the western european belief that an individual could only belong to one nation and that each nation had to be represented by one language (kamusella, 2009). this belief is foundational to the now global conflation of language and national identity that makes multilingual writers something of an anomaly, despite the fact that many populations remain actively multilingual in their daily lives. it is also largely responsible for the inherently political space that multilingual writers must inhabit by dint of using their languages in tandem rather than separating them (sommer, 2004). as tariq rahman shows, speaking multiple languages does not depoliticise them, even if the speakers’ relationships with these languages is intimate (rahman, 2002). the agentive multilingual writer (canagarajah, 2006) then, is aware of what the act of translation does both for and to their work and it may make artistic, aesthetic, emotional or even ethical sense to pull up the drawbridge and not translate on occasion. part ii in the second part of this article, i will examine not only the choices the poets make within their poems, but also the editorial choices made in terms of the provision of translations and coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 transliterations with each poem, as well as the conversation each publication has with their poets and their audience regarding these choices. the poems i have chosen to examine closely in this section come from two multilingual publications: the polyglot published in canada, and the australian multilingual writing project (amwp), which is published in australia. both publications are quite young and showcase a growing stable of writers who mix their languages. the polyglot is the older publication and publishes mainly canadian writers in themed issues which are sold online as pdfs via its website. the amwp publishes exclusively australian writers and its issues are available free to read online. the amwp also provides downloadable audio files of the poets reading their work aloud. both publications have an open policy towards translations and transliterations, that is, the editors ask that translations be provided during the editorial process, but only publish additional information such as a glossary, transliteration, explanations or full translations when the writer requests it. this is because the aim of both publications is to present the relationship multilingual writers have with their languages and with their audiences in as authentic a manner as possible. to date, and to the best of my knowledge, these are the only two multilingual journals of creative writing in the world at present that are based in anglophone countries and publish work that showcases code-mixing specifically as a means of resisting a monolingualist literary paradigm. the first poem i will consider is ‘intersections at the palais royal’ by elena siemens from the first issue of the polyglot (2017). the poem begins: may 2016. moscow's behind, now in paris, my frequent point de transfert the sky's overcast, dark heavy clouds les parisiens wear black a set of pedestrian crossings at the palais royal like a stage for a precarious everyday drama or maybe instead a vaudeville, or a political farce with marionettes marching in their gilded uniforms, or a cirque du soleil performance? this part of the poem is written in a combination of english and french with english being the carrier language, but siemens is careful to use cognates so that the use of french poses no real impediment to the monolingual anglophone reader. a monolingual french reader, on the other hand, would struggle to make sense of more than a few words. it would be easy therefore to dismiss this poem as pseudo-multilingual because the use of french is almost unremarkable or to assume that the poet was using the veneer of multilingualism to add flavour to an otherwise monolingual piece of verse. the audience for this poem is quite comfortably monolingual, after all. however, i argue that this poet is having two different conversations with two different audiences in this poem. the poem is easy enough to read in english alone, but from the point of view of a bilingual french-english reader, it presents a few difficulties. the use of cognates, which may well have been deployed for the sake of inclusivity, presents a fairly fraught question to the bilingual reader/speaker: when one has two or more pronunciations for a word that are all contextually correct, blurring the context as siemens does makes the decision coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 regarding which to use difficult. reading this poem out loud – or even in my head – is frustrating because i am not actually sure how to pronounce ‘marionette’, ‘point’ and even ‘cirque du soleil’; all can be said comfortably in either english or french, but they are seldom presented to the reader simultaneously in both. this pushes the reader into a difficult, although not unfamiliar, space from which the poem’s description of repeated and sometimes disorienting geographical movement is exemplified in the somewhat disorienting shift between languages. still, this poem is gentle with its anglophone readers; when siemens shifts into russian in the very last stanza, rendered in cyrillic, she is careful to translate both instances in the poem itself. with in russian, a crossing/intersection is переход and the pasternak quote with which she ends the poem "жизнь прожить не поле перейти" – "to live life is not to cross a field" the anglophone reader is only momentarily baffled by the unfamiliar alphabet and reassured that the poem is still ‘for’ them. at the same time, by providing an embedded translation, siemens is also suggesting that the poem is not addressing russian-speakers at all. overall, the impression created is that of these languages existing in the same space at the same time for the writer – a kind of overlapping consciousness that is constantly aware of multiple realities at once. rashida murphy’s ‘sab ki diwali’, from issue 1 of the australian multilingual writing project (murphy, 2018), is similarly gentle with the reader. the poem is in english and romanised hindustani – a combined form of urdu and hindi from which both languages originate – and, like siemens’s work above, exemplifies a fluid, simultaneous kind of bilingualism, but one that is still fraught; murphy is a muslim woman writing a poem about a hindu festival in her country of origin and this is integral to understanding her linguistic and stylistic choices in this poem. although the title of the poem is in hindustani, the use of roman script rather than either devanagari (hindi) or nastaliq (urdu) suggests not just an openness to being read by english speakers but also both hindi and urdu readers, as these languages render the same words in scripts that are mutually unintelligible. that the title translates to ‘everyone’s diwali’ further communicates that murphy is calling upon a shared cultural identity that transcends religious differences. however, murphy also provides not only a glossary but also a brief note explaining the significance of diwali so, clearly, she is also writing for an english-speaking audience, and presumably non-indian one. the poem itself reads like the story of a family growing from festival to festival. murphy writes: my nephew was born during diwali every dhamaka of every phataka rumbled through his body like an earthquake, and he couldn’t sleep coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 like siemens, murphy moves back and forth between languages mid-sentence, code-switching as multilingual speakers are wont to do when the situation allows (gardner-chloros, 2009). unlike siemens, she cannot use cognates, but the brevity of her shifts and the use of the roman alphabet both act to smooth the transition. as i noted earlier, hindustani is both the precursor to and the combination of hindi and urdu. the main difference between the latter two is that, in their more formal registers, hindi borrows from sanskrit and urdu from persian, thus ending their mutual intelligibility, and that vernacular urdu pronunciation leans more towards persian (the use of the kh or /x/ sound is an example of this). this means that words such as ‘phataka’ can become shibboleths. the meaning of the word is clear enough across the languages, but the spelling, suggesting the pronunciation ‘fa-ta-ka’, marks it as more hindi than urdu (where the pronunciation would be ‘pa-ta-kha’). this is a miniscule difference, but when the languages in question have a fraught political history, it is telling. however, murphy complicates this reading in the next stanza: years later, another diwali another birth at dawn my mother rose from namaz to hear my daughter’s first cry what shall we name her, she asked meri jaano jigar, meri baade sabah? if the glossary and romanised hindustani are all one has to go on, this is simply more codemixing for aesthetic effect. however, ‘namaz’ is a specifically urdu and muslim term for prayer and the phrase that closes the stanza is poetic persianised urdu, both of which serve to identify the speaker and the grandmother firmly as muslim. the poem confirms this, continuing: before our children interrupted diwali our mother bought us payals and kangans and toe-rings in chaandi to appease a goddess she didn’t believe in where a hindu writer saying that diwali is for everyone may read as patronising or even glib given the tensions between hindus and muslims in india, a non-hindu claiming diwali in this nostalgic way points to a more genuinely communal moment in time. this is further underscored by the closing stanza: now, that girl born at diwali dawn wears chaandi and khadi and names her cat tulsi what was it like, she asks growing up where everyone celebrated everything? the memory of home and community that existed across religious divides is refreshed and revived in the final lines where the migrant child sports the trappings of her mother’s culture and asks for stories of the idealised homeland. the avoidance of italics – which are often standard when rendering non-english languages, particularly when they are written in different scripts – suggests that the writer makes no distinction between her relationship with the two coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 languages throughout the poem, but also reads as a powerful symbol of a child embracing her heritage. pierrette requier’s ‘irises’ (requier, 2017), a french-english bilingual poem also from the first issue of the polyglot, deploys language quite differently. the poem begins entirely in english, then switches completely into french, and then ends in english with only the briefest overlap between the languages. your grief— the mauve sound of delphinium petals falling like a second breath-beat beneath my heart— the dark ones bruise purple, the colour of your mother’s crooked love. and oh, your fetish— how i wish the bad boy had blossomed, au lieu de se baigner dans le bénitier du p’it gars chéri là où nous avions puisé à l’eau vive de nos corps où nous avions bu à l’ivresse de nos lèvres folles là où je t’ai supplié— va-t-en pas. reste. là où du doigt j’ai touché la plaie— oh christ crucifié. how i wish you had stolen back your fire your blue flame. you whose kisses were like irises. although the shift into french is perhaps a little sudden, the lines remain short and the change of language does not substantially alter the music of the poem. the poem is consistent with the earlier two in its avoidance of italics, making the transition between languages seamless. however, unlike in siemen’s work above, the french used is not the kind with which english coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 speakers can be assumed to be familiar, nor do the words chosen map readily onto english cognates. it is also distinctly canadian in its use of ‘p’it’ rather than ‘petit’ or even ‘p’tit’. unlike murphy, requier has provided no accompanying translation or glossary either. all of this means that the abrupt shift to french immediately shuts the door on anyone who does not speak the language. arguably, it does the same to monolingual french speakers who would not be able to read the english parts of the poem either, thus suggesting that the poem is only for people who have both languages, and specifically for those whose french is canadian. the choice of carrier language is also significant. as a bilingual speaker of languages that share an alphabet, requier could have chosen to begin the poem in french. that she does not suggests that english is the dominant language among her intended audience and its use becomes an invitation into the poem; however, monolingual speakers are only invited in so far – there is, at the heart of the poem, a space where they may not tread but that they must go around until they reach the english ending. shifting languages mid-sentence is ‘natural’ as noted above, but because she does not shift back, the monolingual speaker is left in the lurch. this placement of the french, then, becomes a space of resistance to the dominant linguistic and cultural paradigm, a space that is to be accessed only by those with whom requier shares both languages and who can follow her in her movement between them. towards the end of the poem, requier says ‘oh christ/crucifié’. without ‘crucifié’ immediately following it, it would be unclear which language ‘oh christ’ was in. it is a curious choice – is the writer throwing the english reader a bone or is she claiming this shared religio-cultural epithet as her own? in her poem ‘in गित’ (gati/motion), bree alexander (alexander, 2019) mixes hindi into english to describe a train journey taken in india. rather than transliterate as murphy does, alexander uses the devanagari script in her poem. this has the immediate effect of alienating anyone who does not read the script. but because the bulk of the poem is in english and because it serves as a meditation on being in motion while on a journey through the world, these unfamiliar shapes that rush past the reader in the poem seem an exemplification of the unfamiliar places and things that the poet encounters momentarily through the train windows. the gentle sway, mesmerising dance that will go on for days that drives me to meditate, into an altered state brings me into a शांत place with my 'ार for this compact space, this flow, this flux that will see me embrace my dreamscape release my clenched fists, my downward gaze let it all go, a state of calm, i surrender, let the गित take me notably, this poem (and the amwp’s publications in general) is accompanied by an audio recording of the poet reading the piece out loud. immediately, this starts to invite more people into the poem – as discussed above, the use of one script or another necessarily leaves out either urdu or hindi speakers, but remove the visual element and the poem is rendered accessible to both. further, alexander provides a glossary and a transliteration of each word, which opens up the poem even more. as a student of hindi rather than a native speaker, alexander is demonstrating how much she has learned and understood of the language, as well as a certain warmth towards it – the words she renders in hindi are for the most part about food offered as hospitality and care, words for herself as she learns to articulate herself in this language (lambey coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 log, paradesi), and words for her state of mind (sant, pyar) – but her audience, or in-group, is still clearly those who do not or cannot read or understand the language. paula abul too uses a non-english script in their poem, ‘горчивник’ (gorchivnik/bitternik) (abul, 2018), but complicates matters further by rendering not just russian in cyrillic but bengali as well. in their bio note published alongside the poem, abul says that they inherited their russian through their bengali father who studied in the ussr at one time, and that because of this, their understanding of the two languages is intertwined. this is exemplified in their rendering of bengali words such as ‘orna’ (scarf), ‘sorisa’ (mustard), ‘podda’ (distributary of the ganges) and the exclamation ‘alhamdulillah’ (praise god) in cyrillic alongside and in the middle of otherwise russian phrases. it should also be noted that the title is ‘made up’ as well – a combination of the word ‘bitter’ and the suffix ‘-nik’. the structure of the poem is somewhat similar to requier’s ‘irises’ in that it begins in english and then starts to incorporate more and more russian towards the centre, before returning to english, however the distribution of languages is a little less rigid in abul’s work. it’s my duty as a daughter to flatten you into something i can hold, tuck you into the top of my boot and call it growth. горе живое и ржавит тебя. … it seems to me now the most adult thing, to twist in the heat and call it pleasure. i think if openness had eyes they’d be fringed in fine gold petals, холуд dancing down her arms, gauzy орна flapping in the sticky жар. на его месте, у нас есть холод, российская верность, склизкие слова напиханные в шершaвыe чемоданы, a language that casts mustard in sorrow’s shadow. now i buy шориша oil labelled ‘for human consumption’ and think of a yellow so bright it seems lit with sin, a lurking vapour like sirens, capable of firing twelve rounds into your sinuses with a laugh. i stepped in shit by the river too, caked it deep in the grooves of my self-conscious boots and the crescent boats curling towards the sky rocked as my cries thundered across the подда. the poem uses bitter, pungent mustard oil as a central image. because mustard oil is very commonly used for cooking across south asia, and because it is particularly popular in bengal, it is immediately a signifier of roots, origin and heritage located in that part of the world. however, this only becomes clear if the reader recognises the word ‘sorisa’ in the accompanying audio file or if they happen to both read russian and understand bengali, as abul has chosen not to provide any sort of translation or transliteration of the poem. this is coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 significant because despite the linguistic acrobatics performed in this poem, this poem is arguably not a performance at all but a missive from a child to a father that just happens to have been printed where other people can see it. in echolalias, daniel heller-roazen discusses the ‘mother tongue’ which dante defines as that which ‘we acquire from those around us’ and which is imitated ‘without any rules’ (hellerroazen, 2008, p. 163). dante of course assumes that only one language is learned in this way, but in a more fluid world, it is possible for children to pick up a mix of languages simultaneously, as abul did, in such a way that which came ‘first’ is a moot point. indeed, it may even be that the mix of languages is the mother tongue, so that what reads as code-mixing is in fact an idiolect or ecolect in itself. this is not to say that these cannot or must not be translated – they can – but that the choice to not translate becomes more understandable when the poem is then addressed to a very specialised audience. these examples of the choices that multilingual poets make both in writing and choosing whether and how much to translate are by no means exhaustive, nor do they encompass all the different types and media of multilingual poetry in the world. my examples are necessarily bound to publications located in anglophone countries established on land appropriated from indigenous populations. this makes for a particular kind of cultural hostility towards multilingualism and the foreignness it is assumed to embody, and the work produced by multilingual poets exists against the backdrop of, if not in conversation with, this reality. in strangers to ourselves (1991) kristeva frames xenophobia as the fear of acknowledging what is foreign within all of us, arguing that the foreigner unsettles the idea of nationality and the nationalism that depends on it. because of the association of nation with language (kamusella, 2009), a multilingual individual is almost always perceived as ‘foreign’, particularly to a monolingual interlocutor, and is therefore likely to be treated with suspicion. the multilingual writer – particularly one who refuses complete translation – creates anxiety by holding on to their ‘foreignness’ rather than assimilating into the broader literary discourse. as for my second point about the appropriation of indigenous land, there is, even today, very little acknowledgment of the linguistic arm of the indigenous genocide upon which settler nations such as canada and australia were built. to take the australian example, according to the australian institute of aboriginal and torres strait islander studies (aiatsis), although 250 indigenous languages still survive in australia today, 90% of them are considered endangered (2021). this suppression of the original linguistic diversity present on this continent is an essential part of the establishment of australia as a largely monolingual, english-speaking nation. danica čerče argues that ‘white australia is still largely incapable of surpassing the stereotypical images of indigenous people as second-class citizens’ and ‘explicitly declares the superiority of all those who were born speaking modern european languages’ (čerče, 2020). but even within ‘european languages’ there is a hierarchy. australia is constructed as primarily – if not exclusively – anglophone. therefore, although the acceptance of multilingualism waxes and wanes in australia, the common factor in its acceptability is that one of the languages spoken always be english, as it – and no other language – is seen as essential to australian citizenship (luchtenberg, 2002). this supports hage’s assessment of ‘multiculturalism’ (implicit as it is in multilingualism as discussed earlier) as it is framed in australia as remaining mired in white supremacy, i.e., the ‘other’ must be framed and understood in the language of the dominant group – here anglo-australians – in order to be afforded ‘tolerance’ (hage, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 2000). indeed, the xenophobia directed at multilinguals living in monolingual societies, catalogued variously by isabelle de courtivron (2003), mary besemeres (2002), and mary zournazi (1998), among others, shows that this requirement placed on ‘othered’ individuals to remake themselves into acceptable citizens is not unique to australia at all. multilingualism, and particularly the kind of translation-resistant code-mixing that the multilingual poetry discussed here represents, is therefore unsettling to the notion of nationality because it claims for itself the right to remain illegible if it so chooses. the discomfort that the multilingual elicits in the monolingual, is, as kristeva says about the foreigner, the result of the monolingual being made to see their language as only one among many rather than ascendant. this anxiety around the foreign in settler societies like australia, then, is not simply a reaction to the alien, but arguably a reaction to the appropriating self as alien to the very country it claims. inevitably, multilingual poetry shares some characteristics across the board: multilingual poems incorporate two or more languages meaningfully, there is usually a carrier language that is determined as much by location and assumed audience as by the writer’s aesthetic, political and personal preference, and the poet chooses how accessible to make the poem and to whom based not only on the language used but on the provision of glosses, transliterations, explanatory notes, and complete translations. in doing this, they are making a statement about who they expect to have as an audience, who they allow only partial access and who they turn away from. in discussing this here, i hope to have provided a way of not only decoding the poetry itself but of understanding the larger conversations that multilingual writers are having with the world today. works cited abul, p., 2018. горчивник. the australian multilingual writing project, issue 1. aiatsis (australian institute of aboriginal and torres strait islander studies), 2021. living languages. [online] available at: https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/living-languages [accessed 10 january 2021]. alexander, b., 2019. in गित. the australian multilingual writing project, issue 2. álvarez, r. & vidal, m. c.-á., 1996. translating: a political act. in: r. álvarez & m. c. vidal, eds. translation, power, subversion. clevedon: multilingual matters, pp. 1-9. besemeres, m., 2002. translating one's self: language and selfhood in cross-cultural autobiography. oxford: peter lang. canagarajah, a. s., 2006. toward a writing pedagogy of shuttling between languages: learning from multilingual writers. college english, 68(6), pp. 589-604. cassar, a., 2008. muzajk: an exploration in multilingual verse. malta: edizzjoni skarta. cassar, a., 2009. merhba: a poem of hospitality. boston: united planet. čerče, d., 2020. dismantling of the dominant european discourse in the poetry of jeanine leane. gema online journal of language studies, 20(3), pp. 58-69. cervantes, l. d., 1981. poema para los californios muertos. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press. cervantes, l. d., 2005. drive: the first quartet. san antonio, texas: wings press. decoutrivron, i., 2003. lives in translation: bilingual writers on identity and creativity. new york: palgrave macmillan. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 forster, l., 1970. the poet's tongues: multilingualism in literature. cambridge: cambridge university press. gardner-chloros, p., 2009. code-switching. cambridge: cambridge university press. grossman, e., 2010. why translation matters. new haven: yale university press. hage, g., 2000. white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a mutlicultural society. new york: routledge. heller-roazen, d., 2008. echolalias: on the forgetting of language. new york: zone books. kamusella, t., 2009. the politics of language and nationalism in modern central europe. basingstoke [england]; new york: palgrave macmillan. kristeva, j., 1991. strangers to ourselves. new york: columbia university press. luchtenberg, s., 2002. bilingualism and bilingual education and their relationship to citizenship from a comparative german-australian perspective. intercultural education, 13(1), pp. 49-61. mendieta-lombardo, e. & cintron, z. a., 1995. marked and unmarked choices of code switching in bilingual poetry. hispania, 78(3), pp. 565-572. murphy, r., 2018. sab ki diwali. the australian multilingual writing project, issue 1. myers-scotton, c. (., 1998. codes and consequences: choosing linguistic varieties. s.l.:oxford university press. rahman, t., 2002. language, ideology and power: language-learning among the muslims of pakistan and north india. karachi: oxford university press. requier, p., 2017. irises. the polyglot, issue 1, p. 13. shamsie, k., 2000. salt and saffron. oxford: oxford university press. siemens, e., 2017. intersections at the palais royal. the polyglot, issue 1, pp. 24-27. sommer, d., 2004. bilingual aesthetics: a new sentimental education. durham: duke university press. suleri, s., 1989. meatless days. chicago: university of chicago press. zournazi, m., 1998. foreign dialogues: memories, translations, conversations. sydney: pluto press. nadia niaz received her phd in creative writing and cultural studies from the university of melbourne, where she is head tutor, creative writing. nadia’s research interests include multilingual creative and poetic expression, the practicalities and politics of translation, and language use among third culture kids and other globally mobile cohorts. in 2018 she founded the australian multilingual writing project, which provides a space for local multilingual creative writing. nadia writes and performs poetry that explores all aspects of identity, belonging, and language and her most recent work can be found in the polyglot, not very quiet, rabbit, and peril. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 early modern utopian islands: restoring a damaged garden. sotirios triantafyllos independent scholar sotri87@hotmail.com copyright© 2021 sotirios triantafyllos. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: interest in islands grew rapidly during the early modern period as many explorers, merchants, monarchs and political commentators perceived islands as earthly paradises or magical loci of extreme riches. this paper presents an alternative strand of the period's ‘islomania’, where the newly discovered islands were imagined as loci of wilderness: empty lands that human ingenuity and hard work could be ‘improved’ into a utopia. triumphal narratives of conquering nature were based on the newfound optimism inspired by fifteenth century humanism and the tenets of early modern natural philosophy. however, processes of ‘improvement’ cannot be thought of as apolitical or dislocated as they are often embedded in the colonialist narratives of the time. by examining a series of imaginary ‘utopian’ islands of the early modern period, including utopia, new atlantis, the isle of pines and the island of robinson crusoe, this paper dismantles binary conceptions of early modern mythical islands as paradise/hell, utopia/dystopia to a more nuanced understanding of how these writers utilised and depicted ‘utopia’ to reflect political, religious and social mores of the time. keywords: utopia, island, robinsonade, eden, crusoe, thomas more throughout history utopianism has been expressed as the desire for an ideal world in various forms and visions (sargent, 1993: 3). in the european utopian tradition one privileged spatiality served as locus, that of the island. the ancient egyptians left one of the oldest surviving descriptions of a paradisiacal island in the tale of the shipwrecked sailor (ratter, 2018: 63; carey, 1999: 1-8). dating from egypt’s middle kingdom (2000-1700 bce), the story tells of a sailor who, while travelling from the sinai peninsula back to egypt was shipwrecked on a red sea island filled with food and drink and inhabited by a talking serpent (parkinson, 1997: 89-101). this short text establishes the basic features of early utopian narratives: an island as locus and a miraculous natural environment of plenty with accompanying mystical elements. such elements were found repeatedly in classical and roman descriptions of paradise islands such as the fortunate islands or circe’s island in the odyssey (800-700 bce) (hulme and youngs, 2002: 2). but it was the judeo-christian belief in the garden of eden that established the idea of an earthly paradise that survived the fall and could be still found as part of this world. it became customary during the middle ages for eden to be perceived as an island or an inaccessible landlocked garden located in the eastern extremities of the world and as such, it mailto:sotri87@hotmail.com coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 was depicted in the mappae mundi of the period (gillis, 2003: 22-5). hence, this association of the islands with paradise was enriched during the middle ages due to the influence of christianity and the incorporation of a series of biblical traditions and hagiographic folk tales. a representative example of this island paradise trope is eighth-century hagiographic text, navigatio sancti brendani abbatis. this work narrates the travels of st brendan in the irish sea and the north atlantic. its plot revolves around a monastic quest to find an island paradise in the atlantic ocean. following the centuries-old conventions about paradisiacal island representation, the anonymous author describes it as adorned with rich flora, tamed fauna and trees that bore strange, delicious fruits. moreover, faithful to the medieval milieu of mixing fantasy and reality the voyage of st brendan echoes real locations filtered through religious imagery and the early christian anchoritic tradition, like the island of hell, whose volcanic environment is reminiscent of iceland (italiano, 2012: 8-14). nevertheless, geographical realism in the voyage is inconsequential; what is really important for the monastic environment that produced it was to incorporate the northwest atlantic archipelago in the medieval christianised geos and topos of the ecumene (mackley, 2008: 142-4; berque, 2004: 3857). similarly, the medieval legend of cockaigne depicts a place of eternal carnal satisfaction and idleness defined by its comestible physical environment and architecture (pleji, 2001: 245-7). this form of utopia proved extremely popular among the lower classes and was retold through drinking songs and folk tales for those who sought to escape from the harsh reality of their everyday existence to a blissful dream world (beauchamp, 1981: 345-62). ancient cultures had myths about nature and humanity’s gradual deterioration through humankind’s corruption, for example the hesiodic myth of the lost golden age (burton, 2016: 1-16). yet, the most influential tale of this kind is again found in genesis 3: 1-24, which narrates the fall and the resulting expulsion of adam and eve from the garden of eden. among their punishments for sinning against god was the loss of their immortality and innocence but also the end of their dominion over the garden. humanity had ‘to labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life’ (genesis 3:17). biblical explanation of humanity’s loss of dominion over nature influenced medieval perception of nature as a menacing and chaotic wilderness. a view that was summarised in dante’s description of nature as an immensa sylva, a ‘vast wilderness’ (freccero, 2003: 71; perfetti, 2000: 187). humanity stood helpless in front of this wilderness, which was replete with raw power. dante and his contemporaries voiced an ‘adversarial attitude towards nature’ (herlihy, 1980: 116). nevertheless, despite being deeply ingrained in medieval christian doctrine and the period’s cultural milieu, these negative attitudes towards nature could be revised, as happened during the high medieval period (1000-1300 ce). this was a period where large forest clearings and trade expansion led to more optimistic views of humanity’s potential to shape nature. nonetheless, this optimism was shaken by the ecological and demographic collapse of the fourteenth century that led to a revival of eschatological thinking and the negative view of nature as a menacing and irreparable wilderness (lafreniere, 2008: 98). it was not until the early modern (em) period that attitudes towards nature started to shift again and an optimistic outlook began to re-emerge (thomas, 1984: 15). influenced by the christian humanist desire to combine the christian call to tame the wilderness with genuine care for the benefit of the public weal together with the natural philosophers’ intent to understand nature (ibid: 16-20); this new attitude was summarised by francis bacon’s call in his sylva sylvarum to understand and tame nature (bacon, 1627). the effort to understand nature did not mean that views of far-away lands as full of miracles and with strange properties were eclipsed. in the age of exploration when european expansion and colonialism generated an unprecedented interest in the newly discovered lands and their people, images of edenic lands with sweet fruits and fertile soil became extremely popular. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 nevertheless, promoting the paradisiacal qualities of a far-away land to make it an attractive location for colonisation was not new. archaic greek myths concerning the fertility of magna grecia or greenland’s naming by eric the red are similar acts of promotion designed to attract settlers (morakis, 2011: 460-492; baldacchino, 2012: 55). hence, it is no surprise that the ‘island’ remained the dominant literary topos for any vision of a better world during the em period. moreover, this was a rational choice considering the island was a much more easily regulated space compared to any mainland one. as a spatial symbol and a dream, the ‘empty’ island could offer a fresh start to the european settlers, similar to the one that gonzalo dreams of establishing in shakespeare’s the tempest (1611). a society where ‘all things in common nature should produce without sweat or endeavour’ and where ‘treason, felony, sword, pike, knife, gun, or need for any engine’ had no place (shakespeare, 2008, 2.1: 22). the reality was quite different. unlike gonzalo’s unpopulated island the ‘new lands’ that the em explorers added to the atlases of the period were populated by cultures that the european colonisers were quick to destroy, enslave or dismiss, closer to prospero’s island and the fate of its true owner caliban. nevertheless, em utopia searched for an island that had not to be edenic but empty. an island on which a completely new society based on different values and ideals could be built at a distance from the old, corrupted world. from paradise to utopia: re-articulating the island as previously discussed, european utopian tradition had a typified space, the island. before the em period these were miraculous places that were untouched by the fall; lands that due to their perfection could not be improved further by humankind (freitag, 2013: 121). this changes during the em period due to the growing interest in the idea of ‘improvement’. this term entered general discourse from the early sixteenth century (slack, 2015: 1-8, 253), when european society began to believe that humanity possessed the ability to influence its environment and therefore its destiny. this new outlook also re-energised the locus of the island, transforming it from the static setting of paradise to a dynamic and malleable space suitable for experimentation. gonzalo’s utopia in the second act of the tempest encapsulates perfectly the em view of the island, as a suitable space for the most extreme type of experimentation in the pursuit of alleviating society’s ills. it was the same ‘emptiness’ and seemingly endless possibilities that more chose to utilise in order to articulate his vision of the best possible society in utopia (1516). the influence of european explorations on the creation of utopia is evident in the premise of the work itself which narrates an expedition starting in america under the leadership of raphael hythloday. hythloday serves as the narrator of the story where after a long, difficult journey the crew discover the island of utopia and its society. utopus, the founder of this state is described as a foreign general who destroyed the previous corrupt civilisation to build a better society upon its ruins. in addition, more accompanied the publication of his work with an alphabet of the utopian language and a map of the island, just as travellers and cosmographers did in their accounts of the new world in an effort to reinforce its plausibility and appearance as a real travel narrative (more, 2016: 9-11, 127). he went to great lengths to ensure that the ideal society he described would be perceived as a real topos, built by humans, visited by humans and inhabited by humans, and not as a spiritual, symbolic vision of a perfect world like st. augustine’s city of god or bartolomeo del bene’s later city of truth (1609) (see stimac, 2020). coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 more was equally cautious to not present his island of utopia as a piece of paradise that had survived the fall. he aimed to present a society that could serve as a tangible paradigm for imitation by his contemporaries and such an edenic space had no value for his vision. more’s understanding of nature was filtered through the lens of christianity; it was something corrupted and hostile. more was adamant about his island’s condition, it was neither fertile nor welcoming to human habitation. more named the main river of the island with the greek name anydros, which meant without water, and had hythloday commenting on the need to protect the houses in utopia from the strong winds (more, 2016: 47-9). a land with a dried-up river and sweeping winds is hardly edenic. still, this infertile and volatile land was appropriate for more’s aim, namely to present a society that solely by humankind’s effort could repair the garden of eden. hence, the core belief of utopia was that humanity had the power to improve itself and its surroundings. a belief that was among the basic tenets of christian humanism being espoused not only by more but also by other important humanists such as erasmus and giovanni pico della mirandola (parrish, 2010: 589-605). homo sapiens was a wonderful creature, second only to god according to pico, who had not just the ability and intellect to work this garden, restore and nourish it back to its prelapsarian state but the obligation to do it (pellegrini, 2002: 801-828). more, who had translated pico’s biography from latin into english, shared this belief (lehmberg, 1956: 61-74). more was less interested in the location of his island than in its topography, which can be seen in the distraction caused by a servant’s entrance when hythloday describes the exact location of the island of utopia, resulting in the directions being unheard (more, 2016: 27). hythloday proceeds to explain that utopia used to be known as abraxa until a foreign army led by utopus conquered it (ibid: 44). yet, contrary to every previous historical exemplar utopus, instead of ruling his subjects as a tyrant, decides to unify conquerors and conquered into a new people. this goal was destined to shape every aspect of utopia from its political and social system to its religion. in particular, utopus in wishing to avoid a similar fate to the one he had brought upon the abraxians, decided to separate his state’s lands from the rest of the continent by digging a fifteen mile-long channel. hence, more’s utopia was not simply an island but an artificial one. utopia’s shape resembled a crescent with an opening of eleven miles between its two horns creating a large, safe, sheltered bay. a series of forts and the small size of the entrance to the bay that was full of treacherous shallows and rocks meant the inland sea remained protected from any external incursion (more, 2016: 44-6). utopia’s artificial insularity had multiple purposes. aside from defence, the separation of utopia from its neighbours was essential for the implementation of the social and political reforms that utopus wished to enact. by separating his society, utopus reinforced its sense of uniqueness and allowed a new cultural paradigm to be developed free of external corrupting influences. although utopia’s geography was based on enclosure this does not necessarily equate to isolation; gaining entry to utopia was difficult but not impossible. merchants, travellers and explorers like hythloday could reach it and utopia itself maintained relationships with its neighbouring countries. in this way utopia reflects our understanding of islands as physically isolated but socially connected places (hay, 2006). furthermore, hythloday recounts how, by making all the people work equally on the project, utopus succeeded not only to open a channel that transformed abraxa into an island but also to construct a new civic identity for its citizens. hythloday underlines the fact that the conquered abraxans worked next to the soldiers of utopus as equals and this shared experience forged them into a new, unified people free from past identities and ready to follow a new path (more, 2016: 42)1. utopia’s humanmade geography, therefore, was a collective undertaking aimed at serving the community. it embodied and exemplified the principles of an equal society even in its topography, as a result, all the 54 cities of the island followed the same plan, had the same population, offered the same facilities and amenities and all were supplied equally by their surrounding countryside (pohl, 2006). coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 still, more’s main concern was to describe a land without any miraculous or extraordinary quality. this meant that his ideal society had to deal with a series of logistical issues, the most important of which was how to feed its population. there lies the heart of more’s vision and the reason for calling the em utopia’s project ‘recreating the garden’ in this article. the finitude of resources is the greatest issue that any small island society has to deal with, and this usually shapes its landscape, settlement pattern and economy (baldacchino, 2006). in utopia citizens rotate between the cities and countryside where they learn agricultural skills. as well as helping to feed the citizens more’s plan aimed for something broader, namely, to instil in utopia’s citizen a new habitus, a new set of habits, skills and dispositions (bourdieu, 1977) that could be utilised in cultivating and thus taming all of utopia’s nature (rebhorn, 1976: 140-155). the utopians were constantly reminded of this mission to transform the wilderness again into a garden and were honing their skills even when they dwelt in their cities by tending household and district gardens. utopians were encouraged to compete with each other for their garden’s beauty and yield (more, 2016: 46). therefore, more’s ideal society was neither a dream of constant gratification nor a piece of the lost eden. it was a society located on an island where everyone worked side by side and shared the land’s produce equally. every resource that utopia had available should be utilised, and the biblical mission to tame nature and restore the prelapsarian garden of eden was the only way to do that. hence, despite the symbolism that was invested with by christianity, the restoration of the garden was also a practical endeavour and an attempt to instil a degree of realism. ‘improvement’ and new atlantis new atlantis (written around 1623, published posthumously in 1627), was frances bacon’s version of utopia; conceived as a demonstration of the positive results that his method of philosophical inquiry would have for humanity. following the conventions of the genre, bacon introduces us to the island of bensalem, vaguely located in the pacific ocean and discovered when a spanish merchant ship was led there by a storm. to help us understand this society, bacon uses an anonymous spanish crewman as the narrator and audience surrogate in our journey to this strange land. his inquiries about the history and institutions of bensalem are answered initially by the governor of the house of strangers, the head of bensalem’s lazaretto. the governor informs us about the island’s origins and its seclusion from the rest of the world. in particular, we learn that the isle of bensalem is the last living repository of pre-cataclysmic knowledge. soon, another character joabin, a jewish merchant, takes the mantle of the newcomers’ guide by giving them a tour around renfusa, the island’s capital, while explaining the mores and rituals of its people. finally, we get to meet the last and most important of our guides to new atlantis, one of the fathers of the house of salomon. the governor characterises salomon’s house as the noblest foundation in the whole world (bacon and campanella, 2003: 18). the governor of the house of strangers describes its mission as being ‘dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of god’. but, the father of the house of salomon described its mission differently: to unlock ‘the secret motions of things; and enlarging the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ (ibid: 54). we learn that salomon’s house includes artificial mines, hills, caves, pools and wells, all designed specifically for conducting experiments. salomon’s house also erected facilities to house their mathematical instruments, high towers for the study and recreation of meteorological phenomena, and chambers suitable for experiments on new cures for diseases. in addition, the institution had two galleries, one of them housing statues of famous inventors and the other containing designs, coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 miniatures and examples of inventions. these buildings were accompanied by a park and some orchards. the father underlines that even these had practical purposes. the galleries were dedicated to inventors and inventions sought to inspire the members of the college to emulate the individuals honoured by them; while even the park and the enclosures were loci of experimentation where the rare flora and fauna of the island was dissected and studied (more, 2016: 38-46; wallace, 2003; cowan, 2011; peltonen, 1992). similar to more, bacon understood this world as corrupted and imperfect by the fall of nature, but while more advocated hard work, frugality and monastic inspired common ownership (séguy, 2014: 284-319), bacon was more concerned with using ‘applied natural philosophy’ to reconquer nature and then restore humankind’s dominion upon it (whitney, 1989: 371-390). bacon’s ideas are seen as a major inspiration for the em scientific revolution; in his novum organon, he appealed to humanity to regain its divinely bequeathed right over nature (bacon, 1855: 111). bacon’s choice to direct his works to the faithful was not a rhetorical device or an em convention, but an exemplification of his project’s deeply religious character. nothing was or should be wasteful in bacon’s society. all these experiments had one purpose: to make life easier for the citizens of bensalem, to satisfy their needs and to prolong their lives. the father’s haste to emphasise how every experiment and every scientific enquiry performed in the house’s premises has practical applications demonstrates how bensalemites – and, by inference, bacon – were not supporters of pursuing science for its own sake. similarly, more’s utopians shunned everything that had no practical application, including gold which, given its malleability, was deemed suitable only for chamber pots (more, 2016: 61-2). hence, even if new atlantis’s vision of a different socio-political paradigm was less radical than the communitarian one of utopia, it was still one of a society that had reached a level of unprecedented knowledge and understanding of nature that utilised it with the sole purpose of reinstating humankind’s mastery over it. the mission to ‘improve’ nature is at the heart of the em geographical utopia, a mission that was seen as essential in a wider effort to ‘improve’ humanity itself. however, ‘improvement’ is not a neutral term. colonialist and imperialist agendas have used processes of ‘improvement’ to erase indigenous and minority cultures through acts of violence in order to assert the desired hegemony, usually with a christian morality and a european language, often with long-lasting detrimental effects (see berquist soule, 2014). in more’s utopia, the concerns of surplus population meant the establishment of colonies on areas where plenty of fallow land could be found. utopians invited the indigenous population to join them; but if these people rejected this invitation by choosing to resist their assimilation, then the utopians waged war against them. for utopia, leaving land uncultivated was enough of a justification to wage war. this view aligns with their mission of restoring nature but also an indication of the influence on utopia by the era’s colonial ambitions that often regarded newly discovered lands, at least initially, as being tabulae rasae with vast natural resources, exotic inhabitants and fertile virgin lands waiting to be occupied and improved (evans, 2009: 35-7). the ruinous influence of the garden by the seventeenth century there was a different, more nuanced perception of newly discovered lands’ natural environment and potentialities. contesting the view that nature was simply a raw material waiting to be improved and utilised by a reformed humanity, these instead emphasised the corrupting influence that a paradisiacal environment could have on its inhabitants. one such example is henry neville’s island of pines (1668) that represents a unique critique of both the em utopian and colonial projects, while hammond’s (c1640) a paradox: proving the inhabitants of the island, called madagascar or st lawrence to be the happiest people in the world cast serious doubts on humanity’s coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 ability to improve nature. st lawrence dates this work to approximately 1640 when this name was used for madagascar. the author is thought to be hammond walter, a surgeon who spent four months on the island of madagascar working for the east india company (wilbur, 1945: 200). these two works unfold their critique by focusing on the primitivism of the people that inhabited their respective islands. in particular, they simultaneously replicated and subverted the attitude of utopians with the view that the introduction of advanced european techniques could transform them into actual utopias while at the same time they questioned the european’s ability to resist the corrupting influence that these lands could have on their inhabitants (stewart-harawira, 2005: 63; ashcroft, 2016: 33). this doubt, in both texts, is caused by the difference between the edenic environment of the islands and the primitivistic, and sometimes unruly, existence of their societies. on neville’s isle of the pines, a society is established by the survivors of a shipwreck. the five castaways are one man and four women (three of whom are european and one who is described as a ‘black slave’), who soon produce offspring that diverge into different tribes. this society is based upon an agricultural economy, which exploits the island’s untouched natural resources via the tools and techniques that the europeans possess. alternatively, in madagascar, the described society is an indigenous one. according to hammond, the indigenous people are slothful and sluggish, neither ploughing nor cultivating their land but rather living in a state of indolence, basking in the extreme fertility of their island, which happily provides everything they need, from nutritious exotic fruits to pasture for their herds (hammond, 1643: 2-8). hammond’s work is based on the view that skills and science, what collectively was called ‘art’ until the seventeenth century, cannot act as a substitute for nature. hence, every technological advance, such as geoponics, planting and transplanting, is inadequate when faced with the power of nature. this was a view that clearly denies the idea of remaking the garden through art, which was embodied by more’s and bacon’s utopias, and as a consequence questions the european colonisers’ ability to better utilise madagascar’s lands. while pines island society initially has access to tools salvaged from the shipwreck, and knowledge of european science and techniques, its society eventually fails. when the island is re-discovered by a dutch ship, its society has regressed. politically, it is in turmoil, with the descendants from the union of the man and the ‘black slave’ having rebelled against the other three tribes, which considered themselves superior. economically, it is in a similar dire position having failed to improve or maintain its agricultural implements. to the visiting dutch crewmen, the descendants of pines island seem closer to a primitive indigenous tribe than to advanced european settlers. as a result, the utopian character of isle of pines can be easily disputed: the initial picture of an edenic island soon transforms into an exercise and political critique on the perils of colonialism. satirical takes of utopia and the island topos like neville’s are not unique. thomas artus with his l'isle des hermaphrodites (1605) provided a much more jarring critique to the french monarchy and the corruption of the court camouflaged, not very successfully, by the utopian genre’s conventions such as the isle setting and the narrator traveller that returns home to inform us about this different society (arthus, 1996: 12-9; crawford, 2003: 513-42). however, the isle of pine’s pessimistic depiction of society has nudged various scholars to emphasise its dystopian quality, seeing it functioning solely as a critique of contemporary english society. nonetheless, the scope of neville’s criticism extends beyond the shores of england. the regressed european-in-origin society amazement of the knowledge and technology of its dutch visitors is a condemnation of notions of european racial superiority and dreams of a golden age revival, a devastating answer to the debate between nature versus nurture. hence both these works seem to express doubts not just about the core project of em utopianism, that of restoring the garden, but also on humanity’s ability to achieve that. something validated by hammond’s call to colonise madagascar that is free from any notion of improving the coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 island’s nature or utilising science to build a new society. a century of failed colonial enterprises may have taught something to these writers. hammond was an employee of the east india company and neville was a seasoned parliamentarian. both men knew the promises and the dangers that the exotic islands embodied for the settlers and geographic remoteness could be extremely difficult to overcome with the techniques and political paradigms of their era. this was expressed by neville through a condemnation of the folly of utopia and by hammond with an embracing of colonialism that was abandoning the hopes of building a better society for pure conquest and exploitation. robinsonades and ‘restoring the garden’ yet, these experiences and types of criticism were not popular enough to discredit the belief in nature’s improvement that had been established during the em era. as a result, fifty years after the publication of the isle of pines, daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe appeared in april 1719, and the book’s immediate success led the author to produce a sequel called the farther adventures of robinson crusoe, in august 1719. with this work, defoe created the ultimate tale of humanity’s heroic efforts to restore the garden. defoe’s hero is a man unable to fit in his own society or to meet the expectations of his family for a career in law, having only one wish: to become a sailor and travel (downie, 1983: 74-81; blaim, 2016: 8-16). thus, ‘by nature inclined’ to be a sailor and to create a fortune, crusoe is led by these obsessions on numerous adventures (defoe, 1798: 5-9). it should be noted that before crusoe found himself as a castaway on an island in the mouth of oronoque, he had established himself successfully in brazil as a plantation owner until, driven by his desire for (more) profit, he participates in a slave-trade expedition (ibid: 75, 146-173). however, the expedition ends in disaster with the ship being sunk by a storm and crusoe finding himself stranded on a desert island. the empty island is the perfect utopian/colonial void, but the spectacle of its untamed exotic nature is enough to make crusoe despair. with no supplies or weapons for hunting, crusoe is convinced that he will starve to death. after finding shelter in a bushy tree for the night, he resolves to decide how to die the next day. luckily, crusoe wakes the next day to find the hull of his former ship and its precious cargo washed ashore by the storm. his will to live is restored and with that his desire to appropriate all the island has to offer. crusoe salvages everything useful for his survival and to affirm his authority on the island’s nature, which is ‘barren… inhabited only by wild beasts’ (defoe, 1798: 31). a characteristic demonstration of the power that his tools gave him over the island’s nature is his decision to shoot a large bird. the bird proves inedible, but the terrified screams of the island’s fauna on hearing the ‘first gun… since the creation of the world’ are a symbolic indication of nature’s subjugation and even the end of this paradise’s innocence (defoe, 1798: 73). crusoe is alone. his loneliness, however, soon becomes a secondary aspect of his life, instead he focuses on conquering and transforming the island through disciplined and ritualised labour, to provide the amenities and way of life he had previously known. the recreation of a familiar and comfortable space in a hostile (usually island) environment (blaim, 2016: 84), has inspired such a volume of literary works that the genre has its own category: robinsonades. nevertheless, crusoe is a promethean figure, his actions on the island are divided between colonial and utopian desire, and indeed, on some level, he embodies the collapse of the borders between these two paradigms. his recreation of all the stages of human civilisation from initial cave-dwelling to the present reflects his dismantling of this pristine garden of eden and its substitution by a heavily altered settler utopia (benhayoun, 2006: 58-64). the limits of this individualistic utopia are revealed early on when crusoe coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 salvages all the coins that he can find from the ship but muses how they have no value on the deserted island. even if the island proves to have served repeatedly as a safe haven for pirates and to be visited by members of neighbouring tribes, its lands are uncultivated and thus unclaimed. hence, defoe’s hero re-energises a form of pre-political natural property when he explores the island and discovers a valley full of wild trees that, unattended, bear no fruit. he starts seeing himself as king and lord of the island, with ‘right of possession’ (defoe, 1798: 221). hence, after his rescue, when he establishes a colony there, becoming, in the end, a typical coloniser/founder, the island is recognised by all as his personal property. as such, robinsonades have been interpreted as being structured around a narrative of selfdiscovery and healing, and their protagonist's ordeal as a transformative experience (castro & muscat, 2020; 255-9). but, crusoe’s acts on the island and the justifications of his acts resists this interpretation. instead of being transformed, crusoe is supercharged. his thirst for accumulation becomes more insatiable than ever before, even if money loses its value due to the absence of society to barter with, everything must become useful and fruitful. it is easy to ignore this attitude as part of the survivalist plot of the robinsonades that highlight the ingenuity of their heroes, but recreating the lost amenities and comforts is the crux of his actions. his isolation leads him to withdraw to a different quixotic task, not to invent a new paradigm of social and political organisation but to plant there an already established one. crusoe dreams to be a king not a lawgiver. crusoe is the archetypal figure of emerging bourgeois individualism. despite suffering loneliness, he never wishes to found a new society, he just wishes to establish his authority upon his island and then to return to the world. this desire of his to appropriate everything without any communal objective underlines the main difference between em utopianism and colonialism: their opposing views on the issue of possession. of course, the subjugation of nature is at the core of em utopianism. however, crusoe’s attitude is very different from that seen in more’s or bacon’s works. with humanity regaining what it had lost as a result of the original sin, mastery over nature was the key to a restored garden of eden. more’s utopians could not stand the idea of barren and uncultivated land; they constantly toiled the fields, achieving self-sufficiency for their community. bacon’s bensalemites, through other means, sought to accomplish the same goal. crusoe probably worked harder than most, yet he never wished to satisfy anyone else's needs than his own (blaim, 2016: 176). his only desires were to survive and possess. it is in this limited vision where em utopianism and colonialism diverge. in crusoe’s actions, nature’s appropriation reached its apotheosis (hymer, 2011: 18-39). by shedding the concern for the public good, crusoe was able to perfect his strategy of improving and appropriating nature; but, by doing so, he corrupted the re-built garden once more. conclusion the early modern utopian works examined in this paper are representations of an era dominated by an optimism of what humans could achieve through their toil over nature and given the ideal space, such as an island separated from the corrupting influence of the outside world. these works did not seek to discover a secret garden of eden that had survived, hidden from humanity since the fall of humanity. instead, the protagonists in each of these stories sought to restore or remake the garden; either as a practical concern for humanity’s material condition or as a more metaphysical quest to return to a prelapsarian state of perfection. firstly, it was thought this could be achieved through straightforward cultivation then laterally through a process of ‘improvement’ based on the skills and scientific developments of humanity. yet the harsh realities of establishing a settlement on a distant coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 island proved that tending the land and a sense of moral superiority was not enough to create a perfect society. in fact, time spent on these islands exposed european colonisers as equally fallible to the sins they ascribed to indigenous populations: idleness, immorality and cruelty. furthermore, the process of ‘improvement’ itself is not self-evident but embedded in the politics and ambitions of colonialism. therefore, early modern utopias sought non-edenic environments to plant the hope of restoring an uncorrupted nature but their desire to improve nature failed to materialise anything more than the greed of accumulation exemplified by the robinsonade. endnotes 1. more not only used great britain as his inspiration for utopia’s island setting but he was also an experienced london administrator who knew the intricacies of a closed ecosystem. more was aware of the differences between britain and its continental neighbours. for example he worked on two versions of the unfinished history of king richard iii (1512-9), an english one aimed at domestic audiences and a latin for european audiences. in the latin version, more adds numerous explanations of the unique institutions and customs of england, such as the parliament, to help his audience understand the peculiarities of the land (logan, 2011: 172). this makes it apparent that he understood very well the uniqueness of a culture that had developed in an insular environment. as for london, the city where more was born and spent the majority of his life, its cultural distinctiveness from the rest of the country was not only well-known and understood but also frequently likened to that of an island (jütte, 2014: 20412). bibliography artus, t (1996) l’isle des hermaphrodites, genève: droz. ashcroft, b (2016) utopianism in postcolonial literatures, london: routledge. bacon, f (1627) sylva sylvarum or, a natural historie in ten centuries, london: printed by john haviland. bacon, f (1855) the novum organon; or, a true guide to the interpretation of nature, by francis bacon, lord verulam, a new translation by the rev. g.w. kitchin, england: the university press. bacon, f and campanella, t (2003) the new atlantis and the city of the sun: two classic utopias, new york: dover publications baldacchino, g (2006) managing the hinterland beyond: two ideal-type strategies of economic development for small island territories, asia pacific viewpoint, 47(1), 45-60. baldacchino, g (2012) ‘the lure of the island: a spatial analysis of power relations’, journal of marine and island cultures, 1(2): 55-62. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 beauchamp, g (1981) ‘the dream of cockaigne: some motives for the utopias of escape’, the centennial review, 25(4): 345-362. benhayoun, j.e (2006) narration, navigation, and colonialism, brussels: p.i.e-peter lang s.a berque, a (2004) ‘milieu et identité humaine//milieu and human identity’, annales de géographie 113(638): 385-399. berquist soule, e. (2014) the bishop’s utopia: envisioning improvement in colonial peru. philadelphia: philadelphia university press blaim, a (2016) robinson crusoe and his doubles: the english robinsonade of the eighteenth century, frankfurt: peter lang. bourdieu, p (1977) outline of a theory of practice, cambridge: cup. burton, d (2016) ‘utopian motifs in early greek concepts of the afterlife’, antichthon, 50: 1-16. castro de, v.b & muscat m (2020) ‘inverted crusoeism: deliberately marooning yourself on an island’, shima, 14(1): 252-268. carey, j (1999) the faber book of utopias, london: faber. cowan, j.l (2011) ‘francis baconʼs and the alterity of the new world’, literature and theology, 25(4): 407-421. crawford, k.b (2003) ‘love, sodomy, and scandal: controlling the sexual reputation of henry iii’, journal of the history of sexuality, 12(4): 513-542. defoe, d (1798) the life and most surprising adventures of robinson crusoe, a new edition complete in one volume, london: francis power & co. downie, j.a (1983) ‘defoe, imperialism, and the travel books reconsidered.’, the yearbook of english studies, 13: 74-81. evans, k (2009) ‘how temperance becomes "blood guiltie" in the faerie queene’, studies in english literature, 1500-1900, 49(1): 35-66. freccero, j (2003) ‘dante’s prologue scene’, in r. h. lansing (ed), dante: the critical complex, london: routledge: 63-87. freitag, b (2013) hy brasil: the metamorphosis of an island: from cartographic error to celtic elysium, amsterdam: rodopi. gillis, j.r (2003) ‘taking history offshore: atlantis islands in european minds, 1400-1800’, in r. edmond and v. smith (eds), islands in history and representation, london: routledge: 19-31 hay, p (2006). a phenomenology of islands. island studies journal, 1(1): 19-42. hammond, w (c1640) a paradox: proving the inhabitants of the island, called madagascar or st lawrence to be the happiest people in the world, london: nathaniel butter. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 herlihy, d (1980) ‘attitudes toward the environment in medieval society,’ in l.j. bilsky (ed), historical ecology: essays on environment and social change, washington, ny: kennikat, 100-116. hulme, p and youngs, t (2002) ‘introduction’, in p. hulme and t. youngs (eds), the cambridge companion to travel writing, cambridge: cup: 1-14. hymer, s (2011) robinson crusoe and the secret of primitive accumulation. (reprise)(essay), monthly review, 63(4): 18-39. italiano, f (2012) ‘translating geographies: the navigatio sancti brendani and its venetian translation’, translation studies, 5(1): 1-16. jütte, d (2014) ‘entering a city: on a lost early modern practice’, urban history, 41(2): 204-227. lafreniere, g. f (2008) the decline of nature: environmental history and the western worldview, london: academica press. lehmberg, s.e (1956) ‘sir thomas more's life of pico della mirandola’, studies in the renaissance, 3: 61-74. logan, g.m (2011) ‘more on tyranny: the history of king richard iii’, in g.m logan (ed) the cambridge companion to thomas more, cambridge: cup: 168-90. lucchitti, i m (2013) ‘the blasket islands and the literary imagination’, shima: the international journal of research into island cultures, 7 (1): 1-10. mackley, j s (2008) the legend of st. brendan: a comparative study of the latin and anglo-norman versions, leiden: boston. morakis, a (2011) ‘thucidides and the character of the greek colonisation in sicily’, the classical quarterly, 61(2): 460-492. more, t [1517] (2016) utopia, ed. g. m. logan, cambridge: cup. neville, h (1668) the isle of pines, frankfurt: outlook parkinson, r.b (1998) the tale of sinuhe and other ancient egyptian poems, 1940-1640 bc, oxford: oup. parrish, j m (2010) ‘education, erasmian humanism and more's utopia’, oxford review of education, 36(5): 589-605. pellegrini, a (2002) ‘liberià e dignità dell'uomo in giovanni pico della mirandola: con particolare riferimento alla “oratio de hominis dignitate”’, revista portuguesa de filosofia, 58(4): 801-828. peltonen, m (1992) ‘politics and science: francis bacon and the true greatness of states’, the historical journal, 35(2): 279–305. perfetti, s (2000) aristotle’s zoology and its renaissance commentators, 1501-1601, leuven: leuven university press. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 pleij, h (2001) dreaming of cockaigne: medieval fantasies of the perfect life, new york: columbia university press. pohl, n (2006) women, space, and utopia, 1600-1800, aldershot: ashgate. ratter, b.m.w (2018) geography of small islands: outposts of globalisation, cham: springer. rebhorn, w.a (1976) ‘thomas more's enclosed garden: utopia and renaissance humanism’, english literary renaissance, 6(2): 140-155. sargent, l.t (1994) ‘the three faces of utopianism revisited’, utopian studies, 5(1): 1-37. séguy, j (2014) ‘a sociology of imagined societies: monasticism and utopia’, in i. jonveaux, e. pace and s. palmisano (eds), annual review of the sociology of religion: sociology and monasticism, between innovation and tradition, vol. 5, leiden: brill: 284-319. shakespeare, w (2008) the complete works, london: rsc. slack, p (2014) the invention of improvement: information and material progress in seventeenthcentury england, oxford: oxford university press. stewart-harawira, m (2005) the new imperial order: indigenous responses to globalization, london: zed books. stimac, j (2020) “the city of truth”: a closer look at bartolomeo del bene’s civitas veri sive morum [online] available at: https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/del-bene-civitas-veri last accessed 20 march 2020 thomas, k (1984) man and the natural world: changing attitudes in england, 1500-1800, harmondsworth: penguin. wallace, a.f.c (1982) the social context of innovation: bureaucrats, families, and heroes in the early industrial revolution, as foreseen in bacon's new atlantis, princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. whitney, c (1989) ‘francis bacon's instauratio: dominion of and over humanity’, journal of the history of ideas, 50(3): 371-390. wilbur, m e (1945) the east india company and the british empire in the far east, new york: r.r. smith. sotirios triantafyllos holds a dphil in history from the university of oxford on the subject of early modern intellectual history. he has published articles in academic journals and websites on subjects such as early modern utopianism, cli-fi, biodystopia, and intellectual history. his book topos in utopia: the social and cultural conception of space in early modern utopias is due to be published in 2021. https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/del-bene-civitas-veri coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 71 weather as cinema: exploring fungal and weatherly creativity in film chris dymond chris.e.dymond@gmail.com queen mary university of london copyright© 2023 chris dymond. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: this article analyzes weather as enabler of, and able to make, cinematic art. i begin by exploring philosophies of weather and air, and then look at early films where meteorological phenomena receive acute attention alongside related media analyses. afterwards i analyze two artworks, by madge evers and anna scime. each was made by mushrooms sporifying on receptive media, respectively paper and analog film. this article includes original interviews with both artists. i identify fresh ways of understanding cinema but also weatherly and fungal creativity. analyzing such artworks, i also think about how artists can develop art practices able to galvanize instead of eviscerate futurity. consequently, i not only investigate more-thanhuman creativity, but explore how cinema can facilitate instead of block ecological healing. keywords: cinematic weather; experimental cinema; early cinema; meteorology; mycology. weather is an unhinged force comprising cinematic affinities. what do i mean by weather? i mean the condition of the atmosphere at any moment, including, for example, the power and direction of air currents, the temperature and ferocity of the sun’s luminescent heat, and the presence, absence, and intensity of rain. we verify weather’s agency via its ability to make physical things move, like fog or leaves. its elementary particles generally only coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 72 become appreciable when, gathered en masse, they precipitate the mobility of a tangible object. when we see things moving through, and in the wind, like mushrooms’ spores, we might investigate atmospheres as media of dispersal and exhibition, operating in manners comparable to analog film. we can stretch this observation further by investigating films whose processes of production and methods of projection rely on, even render perceptible, weather’s status as creator of art and screen of exhibition. and conversely, unlike its digital counterpart, analog film is uniquely receptive to meteorological energy, analogous, in some way, to a leaf. indeed, cinema photosynthesizes: ingesting light to excrete imagery as a surplus. physical stock also recalls the cyclical procedures of vegetal regeneration. frame after frame, each inscribed with minor morphological differences derived from local atmospheric disturbance, eventually building whole artworks. like plants, analog film offers a surface against which weather can apply materials and convey a writerly ability by signifying in a register legible to human animals. the identities of weather and cinema further align, both defined by mobility rendered in time. analog film is especially suited to meteorological expression; or: weather’s ability to make cinematic art. as anat pick and i proposed in ‘permacinema’, every living being and force “enjoys a cinematic power, that is, signifying whilst moving in time” (2022: 14). in an interview, filmmaker karel doing explained how motion is not only written on a filmstrip but also a snake slithering through sand is doing something very similar. as such cinema is only one of many possibilities. investigating the multiple ways in which movement can be inscribed is to my mind a valuable exercise. (dymond, 2022a) cinema has only two constituent ingredients, time and movement. light is unnecessary, its inclusion optional, depending on the materials used to produce imagery and the effects filmmakers hope to achieve. neither are cameras automatically requisite. equipment and techniques construed as essential are extraneous. i propose that cinematic events are simply ones where things transition from stasis to momentum and mobility becomes appreciable in development across time. this means that we can “enjoy the cinematic without the cinema” (dymond and pick, 14; emphasis original). the notion that more-thanhuman mobility only becomes cinematic after being modulated by the apparatus is attributable to the acculturated parochialism of human animals’ perspective. living beings’ significant mobility precedes cameras’ appearance, which, saying nothing of digitally rendered media, may only ingest events already underway. cinematic paraphernalia do not produce moving images ex nihilo. they ingest and represent beings’ ability to communicate meaning through motion. to better comprehend this contention, we can express a distinction between cinema (as an industry) and the cinematic (a power endemic to life, expressed whenever beings make meaning whilst moving in time), as introduced by pick and i (ibid.). our observation relies on a biosemiotic framework, specifically jakob von uexküll’s (1864-1944) umwelt theory, and early french filmmaker and critic jean epstein’s concept of ‘photogénie’, explored in depth below. biosemiotics investigates how living beings, from amoeba to human animals, make meaningful signs and interpret significant cues through biological and pre-linguistic registers. conversely, epstein was fascinated by cinematic specificity, which he found in cinema’s unique relationship to movement and time. between these two frameworks, we coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 73 can propose a view of life as inherently cinematic. that is, expressed by making meaning in movement and time. weather is decisively cinematic. weather throws spatially disparate things into accelerated and concerted motion, producing cinematic events. by events i mean art made with physical elements in environments without cameras’ aid or other technological modulations, which is not to say that space or time are uniformly experienced. “cinema is an industrial technology and an energy” owned by all life that may be seized, co-opted, and redirected, or acknowledged, respected, and partnered with (ibid.; emphasis in original). i am talking about the expressive power of all more-than-human life that is exercised regardless of our presence and demonstrated exquisitely by weather. faced with the possibility of cinematic enjoyments in cinema’s absence, we must interrogate cinema’s value. if we already exist with beings in the cinematic realm, why make cinema? cinema helps us acknowledge, celebrate, and collaborate with semiotic others. it is a cipher by which other languages can be translated and somewhat understood and a vector wherein we can co-produce art with others and emphatically comprehend their equitable, but distinct, subjectivities. cinema is especially helpful because our perspectival faculties are so limited, meaning that more-than-human expressivity regularly operates beyond our purview. in such cases, communication needs intervening media amenable to each party’s style of address and parameters of perception. for instance, plants, though also signifying via gesture, primarily communicate by exchanging and interpreting chemicals that are, to us, largely imperceptible. analog film is reactive to phytochemistry and, when animated during projection, can accurately convey vegetal gesticulation. following these observations, doing has pioneered the practice of ‘phytography’. as i explained in ‘new growth’ (2021), in phytography, phytochemistry and the plant body coalesce to produce imagery. many plants contain polyphenols, molecular packets aligned with those within popular photographic developing agents. when soaked to encourage the release of their chemicals and placed against a photographic surface, plants can develop photographic imagery. subsequently, if a plant’s body be placed against a photographic surface after being handled appropriate, an image of a plant’s body besides its phytochemical reactivity can form. (35) phytograms (phytography’s media products) can help us perceive important and hidden aspects of plants’ subjectivity in artworks made by plants (see figure 1). phytograms are art objects where we co-exist alongside plants without asymmetrically co-opting their creativity and sovereignty. rather anthropic artists twist their process to cultivate plants’ ability to self-represent, enacting, as pick said of veganism, “an approach which is also a kind of retreat” (2018: 128). but phytography also comprises extractivist dimensions. phytograms, although requiring plants’ extraction, are not inherently destructive. a key difference separating plants and mammals is plants’ regenerative excellency. by carefully harvesting plants, their flourishing might be charged, not diminished. if a plant’s leaf has withered beyond cure, removing that leaf can help the plant redistribute energy more efficiently. likewise, many mushrooms are designed by fungi to whet mammalian appetites, requesting intervention. doing harvests conscientiously, following indigenous protocols proposed by anishinabek scholar robin wall kimmerer (kimmerer, 2013; dymond 2022a), yet phytograms require analog film’s gelatin-based emulsion, itself produced as coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 74 a byproduct of routinized slaughter in other industries. the question of cinema’s justifiability is conceptually convoluted, aligned with cinema’s material entanglement with industries of corporeal and geological extraction. nevertheless, phytograms, rooted in restraint, gesture towards more ethically and environmentally sustainable forms of film practice. if weather enjoys the ability to make cinematic art with plants by encouraging them, for example, to move in the wind, and if we might make moving images with—not of—plants through phytography, i wonder: how might filmmakers make art with weather? tackling this question, i look to artists who subordinate their methods to mushrooms’ and weather’s styles of address and modes of expression. i explore weather’s skill to not only impact filmmaking processes or extant media but produce cinematic art before cameras’ arrival. to do so i analyze two artifacts made by mushrooms sporifying on paper and photochemical film. to reproduce, many mushrooms sporify, showering spores outwards from caps, which get to where they need to be by floating on streams of wind. spores’ journeys from mushrooms’ cap to earthly ground only occurs if air assents to mushrooms’ use of its nebulous body as an intervening medium. many mushrooms, like many plants, solicit air to achieve reproduction, interpreting, and even stimulating, atmospheric variables before sporifying. fungal life shares profound connections with weather, manifest in mushrooms’ reliance on atmospheric energies as media of dispersal, and fungi’s ability to actively modify weatherly patterns. emilie dressaire et al. (2016) revealed how many mushrooms’ bodies and growing locations, and the mechanisms of spores’ ejection, are tailored to solicit or precipitate air’s mobility. for example, by increasing evaporation rates, mushrooms can cool surrounding atmospheres. this produces pockets of denser air around mushrooms, generating air currents propelling spores beyond the forest floor, into stronger air flows. alternatively, consider the bird’s nest mushroom, recalling a nest-like cup holding white mushrooms resembling eggs. this mushroom’s morphology and growing locations maximize possibilities that raindrops will strike the cup, launching eggs and spores outwards. figure 1 phytogram coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 75 anthropic artists can make moving images with fungi by inviting mushrooms to make spore prints on receptive media. spore prints are inverted images of mushrooms’ undersides made over time, coalescing when anthropic, fungal, and weatherly agencies productively intersect, embodying the fecundity of shared existence. realizing mushrooms’ capacity to manipulate climactic rhythms by modifying or harnessing weatherly power helps us acknowledge spore prints made on analog film, paper, or the earth as co-productions where human animals, weather, and fungi play non-exceptional but equitably crucial parts. furthermore, spore prints operate across various environments and media, inviting a fluid form of gazing flowing between cinema screen and cinematic life without discretion. they are a category of technological artifact called by oron catts, chris salter, and ionat zurr “semi-living”: fugitive media prone to spontaneity and change (2022: 115). in this regard, they echo ‘biofilms’, cinematic media made when bacteria eat films’ gelatinbased emulsion (dymond, 2022b). the media i explore include mushrooms sporifying on synthetic scaffolds (film or paper) by allying with an intervening medium (air) that is itself a creative agent, the scenario requiring maintenance by human animals who assume the humble role of caretaker or steward. semi-living media are ethical conundrums. not only representing living beings or materials, they actually house them. this is especially true of spore prints, since mushrooms’ spores are both living matter and conditions of further life. the artists i analyze exude sensitivity to such questions. wielding paper and film as media of fungal dispersal, they make fruiting bodies of a different type. these artifacts thereby signpost artists’ ability to adapt practice and galvanize instead of eviscerate futurity. how can you ‘eviscerate’ futurity, or conversely galvanise it? quite simply, by reducing or increasing the possibility of a livable future on earth. we might galvanise futurity by partnering with other beings to produce landscapes of biological abundancy, amenable to sustaining various lifeways. alternatively, we might eviscerate futurity by destroying landscapes through largescale mining projects or pumping trash into landfills. by teaching us how to galvanise futurity, these artefacts let me analyze not only fungal and weatherly creativity, but less violent ways of making art with other beings on a damaged earth. breach china miéville’s novel the city and the city (2009) follows a murder investigation between besźel and ul qoma, two cities sharing one geographical space. inhabitants of either state must artfully unsee each other under threat of extreme punishment, monitored by the punitive force: breach. what permeates the ministerial borders are weather, morethan-human animals, and refuse, whose ownership is equally hazy. the scents of besźel and ul qomatown are a confusion. the instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful as rain (‘rain and woodsmoke live in both cities’, the proverb has it. in ul qoma they have the same saw, but one of the subjects is ‘fog’. you may occasionally also hear it of other weather conditions, or even rubbish, sewage, and, spoken by the daring, pigeons and wolves). (66) coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 76 miéville captures weather’s irreverent proclivity to blur edges and signify in excess of our control. yet, kin to gravity, weather also horizontalizes, a vector by which one may think beyond not only the arbitrary geopolitical cartography of space, but the division of species. air is predominantly visualized as a bag of inert chemicals. yet as luce irigaray, in the forgetting of air in martin heidegger (1999), asked: is not air the whole of our habitation as mortals? is there a dwelling more vast, more spacious, or even more generally peaceful than that of air? can man live elsewhere than in air? neither in earth, nor in fire, nor in water is any habitation possible for him. […] no other element is as light, as free, and as much in the fundamental mode of a permanent, available, there is. (8) “our being”, said eva horn in ‘air as medium’ (2018), is always “being in the air” (23), the “condition of possibility” (12) of biological and social life: “the air enables movement and perception (hearing, sight, and smell), as well as communication, travel, situatedness, and dislocation, inasmuch as it joins the members of societies and cultures in a common climate.” (9) not merely an inert container, air is the active and generous enabler of all action. it is our medium. to address air as human animals’ medium is to automatically address air as cinema’s medium, too. “the old idea that media are environments can be flipped”, wrote john durham peters in the marvelous clouds (2015): “environments are also media.” (3) media […] are containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible. […] “media,” understood as the means by which meaning is communicated, sit atop layers of even more fundamental media that have meaning but do not speak. […] media are ensembles of natural element and human craft. (2-3) as mentioned in the previous section, the cinema industry entirely relies on others to provide the thematic and material conditions by which it may operate. analog film requires, for example, the extraction of gelatin from creaturely bodies and rare minerals from the earth. beings and ecologies are then drawn on to produce thematic cues, facilitating stories’ progression. however, filmmakers generally produce artifacts in which more-than-human forces and beings are relegated to the background of human animals’ supposedly more significant lives. additionally, as dai vaughan explained (1999: 5), the ostensibly infinite replicability of digital technology allows the negation of meteorological intrusions. scenes may be filmed and re-filmed until weather is assimilated into narrative or erased. in cinema, not only creaturely but weatherly agency is regularly overlooked, co-opted, or removed completely. we might consequently approach cinema as an industrial and ideological enterprise through which the world is materially and thematically captured, ingested, and regurgitated as art objects: remade, as it were, in our image(s). conversely, could artists instead wield cinema as a vehicle by which meteorological artistry might be addressed as active in cinema, but also beyond it? photogénie coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 77 early films and film theories offer interesting case studies for approaching weather in film. many early artists and critics, concerned with cinema’s uniqueness, were pre-occupied with cinema’s relationship to movement and time. cameras and thoughts consistently coincided with scenes in which weatherly action, highly photogenic given its intensities of motion, was on display. we might even approach this period as a time in which weather’s cinematic significance had not yet been properly co-opted or defined. early practice and theory provide springboards for analysing how weather operates in, and exceeds, cinema. additionally, my proposals concerning cinema and the cinematic have precedents in early french critics’ and filmmakers’ germaine dulac and jean epstein’s joint approaches to cinema. dulac and epstein became active in the 1910s, when cinema was still widely conceived, as dudley andrew wrote, as a “vine around the great trunks of serious and popular culture.” (1976: 11) both sought to establish cinema as an art, beyond a fairground attraction or type of ‘filmed theatre’. they explored cinematic specificity through cinema’s startling, non-anthropocentric power. this was grounded in photoand cinematographic cameras’ mechanical constitution and cinema’s special relationship to movement and time. dulac, writing in 1932, argued for a “pure cinema” based on “purely visual elements” whose subject matter existed in certain scientific writings, those which discuss, for example, the formation of crystals, the trajectory of a bullet, the bursting of a bubble (a pure rhythm, and what a moving one! wonderful syntheses), the evolution of microbes, the expressiveness and lives of insects. (qtd. in sitney, 1987: 47) the ‘pure cinema’ debate, operating alongside terms like ‘avant-garde’ in a constellation of concepts concerning non-narrative cinema, had become, richard abel contended, the key discussion, at least in 1920s and ‘30s france. “so pervasive was the question that nearly every writer was forced to declare a position on it.” (1988: 329) pure cinema communicated meaning through form, not traditional dramaturgy. its subject matter, as tami williams wrote, was “movement and rhythm”, “‘la matiére-vie elle-meme’ (the material of life itself).” (2014, 153; emphasis in original) pure cinema exists “beyond the limits of the human, to everything that exists in nature, to the invisible, the imponderable, to abstract movement.” (dulac qtd. in sitney 47) “th[e] school of the ungraspable turned its attention to other dramas than those played by actors.” (ibid.) epstein also pursued this trajectory. if we wish to understand how an animal, a plant, or a stone can inspire respect, fear, and horror, those three most sacred sentiments, i think we must watch them on the screen, living their mysterious, silent lives, alien to human sensibility. the cinema thus grants to the most frozen appearances of things and beings the greatest gift in the face of death: life. and it confers this life in its highest guise: personality. (2012/1926a: 295) epstein was particularly moved by cinema’s ability to, as pick said in ‘vegan cinema’ (2018), “enhance objects’ impenetrability, rendering them solid, autonomous, more pronounced.” (126) through the cinema a revolver in a drawer, a broken bottle on the ground, an eye isolated by an iris are elevated to the status of characters in the coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 78 drama. being dramatic, they seem alive, as though involved in the evolution of an emotion. (epstein, 2012/1926a: 295) however, more-than-human beings do not lack impenetrability, magically conjured up ex nihilo. “every aspect of the world upon which the cinema confers life is elevated only if it possesses a personality of its own.” (296) by ‘personality’, i think, epstein meant ‘subjectivity’. we apply these words, roughly synonyms, to the diaphanous sparks setting beings apart, manifest in idiosyncratic movements, gestures, and behaviours. these semiotic locutions indicate internal worlds, alongside unique systems of thinking. epstein himself synthesized subjectivity and personality. [i]n the cinematographic apparatus […] images are taken from the perpetually moving spectacle of the world—a spectacle that is fragmented and quickly cut into slices by the shutter that unmasks the lens, at each rotation, for only a third or a quarter of the time that rotation takes. […] [c]inematographic frames, considered in themselves, are thus a creation of the camera apparatus, a very inexact interpretation of the continuous and mobile aspect of nature […]. in such an instance, a mechanism proves to be endowed with its own subjectivity, since it does represent things the way they are perceived by the human gaze, but only by the way it sees them, with its particular structure, which then constitutes a personality. (2014/1946, 13-14; emphasis added) for epstein, prior to the spectacle of cinema resides a more fundamental spectacle, coinciding with the rhythms of the earth. this we co-opt to produce cinema, appropriating an extant, pre-representational power. furthermore, living beings enjoy subjectivity. cinema does, too. joint ownership is verified when cinema contributes its own perspective, thickening living beings’ recalcitrance. epstein called this capacity ‘photogénie’. it was only via photogénie that cinema could distinguish itself from the other arts. writing in 1926, epstein said: “the cinema must seek to become, gradually and in the end uniquely, cinematic; to employ, in other words, only photogenic elements. photogénie is the purest expression of cinema.” (2012/1926a: 293) only certain aspects of others’ characters lent themselves to such analysis, others’ ‘photogenic’ aspects. during filming, these were not only revealed, but elevated, their “moral value increased by filmic reproduction.” (294). “i now specify”, epstein continued: “only mobile aspects of the world, of things and souls,” invite photogenic analyses (ibid.) “we can therefore say that the photogenic aspect of an object is a consequence of its variations in space-time.” (ibid.) no other art could relay beings’ photogenic aspects because no other art operated in their dimensions. beings’ photogenic aspects are meaningful signs, messages revealed through dynamic movements conveyed in time. “all life is covered and ordained with signs”, said epstein. “in order to grow and unite, rocks make beautifully steady gestures as if they were meeting beloved memories.” (2012/1926b: 289) weather, exemplary in its inability to ever stop moving in time, may be addressed as the origin and final target of cinematic attention, particularly susceptible to photogenic analyses. weather emerges as a cinematic force, sharing, with cinema, interrelated modes of expression, and dimensions of operation. in ‘cinema, meteorology and the erotics of weather’ (2018), emil leth meilvang moved towards similar conclusions yet in the other direction, blending weather and cinema via coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 79 the expression “cinema as weather, […] the radical end point” for any discussion of weather in cinema (emphasis original; 80). meilvang explained: seeing cinema itself as something resembling a weatherly phenomenon, somehow sharing the same motional substance and begging for a mutual kind of reception is […] a merging of filmic ontology and a thinking informed by the topos of the earth sciences. [this is] an ontology of film that is not made up of narrative or interpretive cues, but entirely of sensation, immersion, and movement. […] it is not only a way of broaching weather on film […], it is also a strong, ontological claim on cinema itself. […] it is also […] a move which turns the artwork into something prior to and different from the idea of art itself. (81) meilvang explored another facet of “cine-meteorology” (77), namely weather’s unhinged vitality, by analyzing louis lumière’s baby’s dinner (1895). in this single shot and static film, marguerite and auguste (respectively, louis’s sister-in-law and brother) eat with andrée, their child. the audience, bewitched by the trees moving behind marguerite and the quivering plant behind auguste, ignored the family’s gastronomic adventure, captivated instead by the uncanny agility of vegetal bodies stirred by the wind. the weatherly phenomena that merely seem to facilitate the blank, realist space in which the plot is inscribed with its characters, lines, and cues holds a sprawling vitality, a non-narrative abundance saturated with their own inversed form of significance […], signif[ying] but not in any allegorical, directly interpretive sense. rather, the weatherly cine-phenomenon is an end unto itself […]. cinematic weather can never be fully instrumentalised in narrative. (67-68) vaughan looked to another lumière film, boat leaving the port (1895). the film comprises one shot in which a boat carrying three men ventures from a harbor, past a jetty on which some women and children stand, and out to sea. the waves fall into half-dark as they move towards the frame’s bottom left, echoing a curtain disturbed by the wind. the onlookers’ clothes billow voluptuously, directionally and temporally aligned with the choppy waves. after cresting the jetty, the vessel escapes the boaters’ control, spinning in place. then the film ends, awkwardly in media res, bound by the young technology’s durational shortcomings. vaughan was struck by the sight of human animals at the mercy of weatherly rhythms. such an invasion of the spontaneous into the human arts, being unprecedented, must have assumed the character of a threat not only to the “performers” but to the whole idea of controlled, willed, obedient communication. and conversely, since the ideas of communication had in the past been inseparable from the assumption of willed control, this invasion must have seemed a veritable doubling-back of the world into its own imagery, a denial of the order of a coded system: an escape of the represented from the representational act. (6) weather is a real and conceptual “threat”. the specter of anthropic mortality dogs the film, active in the boaters’ struggles which, vitally, are never diegetically resolved. early viewers were enamored by such phenomena, too. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 80 what most impressed the early audiences were what would now be considered the incidentals of scenes: smoke from a forge, steam from a locomotive, brick dust from a demolished wall. george méliès, a guest at the [lumière’s] first paris performance [in 1895], made particular mention of the rustling of leaves in the background of le déjeuner de bébé [baby’s dinner]—a detail which […] would scarcely be remarked upon today. (4-5) for méliès, as vaughan wrote, the trees ‘rustled’. this suggests that they produced a sound. however, these films were silent. it was vegetal movement that startled, not vegetal noise, as siegfried kracauer pointed out, in theory of film (1960), whilst also quoting méliès in his statement concerning that to which cinema is uniquely equipped to render. “the cinema is conceivably animated by a desire to picture transient material life,” kracauer said: life at its most ephemeral. street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions are its very meat. significantly, the contemporaries of [auguste and louis] lumière praised [their] films—the first ever to be made— for showing ‘the ripple of the leaves stirred by the wind’. (ix; emphasis added) furthermore, the technological mobility of otherwise supposedly inert things gripped viewers’ attention, not motion in general. people were startled not so much by the phenomenon of the moving photograph […] as by the ability of this to portray spontaneities of which the theatre was not capable. the movements of photographed people were accepted without demur because they were perceived as performance, as simply a new mode of self-projection, but that the inanimate should participate in self-projection was astonishing. (vaughan 5) human animals’ performances were pedestrian, lacking weather’s charisma. this state, however, is provisional. vaughan said: when the boat is threatened by the waves, the men must apply their efforts to controlling it; and, by responding to the challenge of the spontaneous moment, they become integrated into its spontaneity. the unpredictable has not only emerged from the background to occupy the greater portion of the frame; it has also taken over the protagonists. man, no longer the mountebank selfpresenter, has become equal with the leaves and the brick dust—and as miraculous. (ibid.) or, as pick, in ‘“nothing now but kestrel’” (2017), analyzing baby’s dinner and boat leaving the port side-by-side, wrote: the operation of natural law on waves, leaves, and people alike reveals the mechanisms of the world as radically egalitarian. the woman who looks on intriguingly, perhaps anxiously, may or may not have discerned this earthly truth. for us, she, too, is incorporated into the natural scheme that the film shows. cinema […] makes this reality clear. (49) weather’s touch authorizes and makes explicit earthly things’ unity, their kinship partially determined by mutual exposure to atmospheric force. designed to render the mobility of spatially contiguous beings operative in time, cinema, ontologically kin to weather, is technologically keyed to relay this meteorological law. yet if meteorological coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 81 phenomena signify beyond cinema’s capacities to fully instrumentalize or contain weatherly semiosis, we must explore weather’s sovereign skill to operate cinematically in the absence of anthropogenic paraphernalia. neither weather in cinema nor cinema as weather, then, but, to fully invert meilvang whilst leveraging his coincidence with epstein: weather as cinema, a codification of not only weather’s ontological affinities with cinema, but weather’s creative ability to produce the conditions that cinema is uniquely equipped to capture, and without which it would fail to operate. understanding of this cine-meteorological zone may be garnered via cinematic artifacts made with mushrooms’ spores. these media lend themselves to such analyses because they are contact prints and because mushrooms share special relationships with weather via their reliance on atmospheric energies as media of dispersal. additionally, contact prints are art objects produced without cameras by placing materials on suitable surfaces and, in these instances, leaving them alone for some time. they inhabit a slippery territory wherein weather exists contiguously with cinema without being asymmetrically assimilated, facilitated by cameras’ absence. the mushrooms at the end of cinema i have drawn this subtitle and much of my inspiration from anna lowenhaupt tsing’s exquisite the mushroom at the end of the world (2015). tsing looks to tricholoma matsutake, a gourmet mushroom long treasured in japan. matsutake thrive in messy ecologies co-built by human and more-than-human forces. amidst accelerating climate catastrophe, matsutake provide lived examples of how we might change our behavior to help secure planetary futurity. like us, cinema will be rendered untenable by resource scarcity and environmental collapse. as pick writes in her talk ‘permacinema’ (2021), “not merely ocular, or even haptic, the cinema is peculiarly gastronomic, a medium that feeds on the world and thus finds itself implicated in the dynamics of extraction, consumption, and waste.” however, evers’s and scime’s artworks methodologically respect and thematically celebrate others’ sovereignty, showing us how cinema may yet continue. additionally, they provide limit cases of what cinema is, bringing us to the end of thinking cinematically. by the end of cinema i mean the real end of cinema as an industry. i also mean the end of cinema as we know it, precipitated by awareness of the idea that all life enjoys the power to make cinematic art, perhaps especially weather. these artifacts exhibit escape routes beyond cinema’s literal end, whilst—or, rather, by calling us to consider others’ cinematic power. what kind of imagery, then, do the mushrooms at the end of cinema co-build? madge evers makes spore prints on paper. evers generally produces one original, and some copies. these are ontologically unique. “the original is fragile, experimental, and possibly fugitive; i don’t know what it will be in ten years”, evers says. “originals are almost sculptural and more special than reproductions, although reproductions are lovely, too.” (personal interview, 2021) now, i address originals. neither technically painting, nor photonor cinematography, evers’s prints elude categorization and require an expanded concept of art. present vocabularies are lacking when deciphering evers’s prints, mainly because of how evers injects motion into singular, and thus purportedly static, images. playing with spores in time, evers makes images of motion that barely move, breaching boundaries with mushrooms. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 82 evers’s works are presupposed by humble reticence before weather and fungi. the processes of spore printing cannot be rushed, so there is a letting go that happens when my materials are assembled and the mushrooms are releasing their spores. i wait for 8, 12, or more hours. it is always exciting to lift the cap and see what happened while i was away. and humbling when nothing does. (evers) evers makes room for others by creatively withdrawing. evers’s spore prints appear when human animals retreat, but never to the point of absence. mycologists use spore prints to identify mushrooms. spores’ size, shape, dispersal, and color reveal mushrooms’ characteristics. generally, when mycologists make spore prints, mushrooms are covered by containers. chances that spores will fall exclusively downwards are multiplied, resulting in images that purportedly mirror their fungal referent. yet alienated from their milieu, atmospheric forces are held at bay. spore prints reliant on containment deny weatherly artistry and convey an ideal fungality. evers leaves fungi exposed, welcoming meteorological creativity. evers’s luminous herbarium (2019), pictured in figure 2, includes plants, specifically chervil, echinacea, and yarrow, besides bioluminescent jack o’lantern mushrooms. as air coiled around sporifying mushrooms, spores blew across the page, leaving halflit trails in their wake. an index of weather’s agency, spores’ mobility scans as hazy clouds flowing across the imagery and amidst inverted mushrooms, like curtains of moonlit rain, or rivers of smoke flowing figure 2 luminous hebbarium (2019) by madge evers coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 83 through fungal archipelagos. in the work, mobile air links disparate beings, registering as a synthesizing force and conduit of connection. plants and fungi may only reproduce and establish shared communities via intervening media provided by local atmospheres. ecologies exist only within atmospheres, elemental media of fungal and vegetal communication, nourishment, and propagation. we, too, are similarly reliant on atmospheric media, the absence of which would spell our immediate asphyxiation. spore prints are symptomatic of this dependency, as mushrooms’ occurrence and spores’ journey from gill to earth, paper, or film are facilitated by meteorological phenomena. in the luminous herbarium, atmospheric energy is depicted as the facilitator of earthly life, and methodologically facilitates the artwork’s production. the luminous herbarium is compostable. the vulnerability of evers’s spore prints is not a negative condition but an exciting chance of spontaneous genesis. if discarded underground, mushrooms may sprout from its surface. evers’s paper is a representational medium and medium of fungal growth. vitally, spores are not blocked the ability to decouple from the page. evers’s spore prints are inherently unstable. like actual spore prints, evers’s artworks are processual phenomena absented definitive terminus. originals are inherently cinematic, beholden to spontaneity and transiency. endlessly radiating spores, the luminous herbarium is interminably mobile. this motion, whether exercised or latent, transforms static images into moving ones. this is cinema slowed down and dilated to an almost unbearable maximum, where movement transpires over years, not seconds. a limit case of cinema, the luminous herbarium inhabits the confluence of mycological, cinematic, meteorological, and vegetal time. mushrooms’ spores, riding windblown air, sweep across paper, amassing depth against an ostensibly two-dimensional surface. working on paper and taking spores as its medium, weather makes cinematic art. producing a contact print on paper, it also makes a cinematic event coalescing before the arrival of camera or other cinematic paraphernalia. the luminous herbarium speaks to weather as artistic medium and medium of art, a springboard for thinking weather as cinema. how else might this be thought? anna scime makes spore prints on analog film. scime’s spore print film series (2010—) is twelve years old and still mushrooming. iterations gradually coagulate, a few a year. films include local mushrooms and appear alongside mushrooms’ seasons. like #16 (2016), it is made by scime and: bellas; chanterelles; shaggy manes; lions manes; and oysters. #16, seen in figure 3, is 3 minutes long and includes roughly 4000 frames. mushrooms were laid on rolls of film placed on tables, each a few feet long. at 40 frames per foot, this process required continual repetition. iterations achieved completion at different speeds, since neither mushroom species nor individual mushrooms uniformly sporify. scime’s method is painstakingly slow, subordinated to fungal rhythms. scime, like evers, withdraws, adapting practice to help fungi and weather display their creativity. [fig. 4] these methodological decisions produce abstract works, where frames’ sequential movement is not deceptively fluid but jarring. jittery imagery renders mushrooms visible but never fully amenable to analysis. made without a camera, viewpoints are fixed, hovering just above the strip. viewers’ proximity to mushrooms is close but never bridged. fungi are simultaneously present and recalcitrant, inhabiting distinct lifeworlds that overlap with ours but never entirely align. scime employs weather as a medium exceeding cinema. during projection, the film is looped “until it has nearly erased itself and only traces of the spore prints remain” (scime, personal interview, 2021). spores dislodge during projection, achieving contact with coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 84 viewers’ clothes and skin, even permeating exposed orifices. the film is a phenomenological event, something to be inhaled, ingested, and worn, and seen and heard. the projector is an audiovisual but also weather machine, devising its own climate by generating fluctuations of temperature and electricity, and modifying air’s local behaviors. weather is a visible and felt reality despite the auditorium’s obligate darkness. spores billow around the projector and twinkle in rogue rays of light. the film, looped until devoid of spores, gives way to change. the larger idea or story is revealed and kinetic forces disperse the spores during projection—at once accentuating and de-saturating the films’ colors, shapes and sounds. […] encountering the films in exhibition adds new layers of interaction and exchange. anyone present at a screening will get to see the spores coming off of the film as they float by the projector’s light beam (and machine’s light leaks) and into the air. (ibid.) atmospheric mobility is an itinerant conduit of creativity. spores do not disappear following severance from the strip. nor does #16 degrade. it indefinitely grows. the projector reveals not only a new way of seeing the films, but also creates new films as it slowly releases the spores while they play. so, first i produce one film by placing the mushrooms, then the projector makes another… and there is potential beyond. (ibid.) projection is not an end but a generative element of scime’s methodology. figure 3 anna scime's spore print film series (2010-) coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 85 after release, spores produce novel patterns against architectural surfaces and human animals’ bodies. these patterns constitute a gradually expanding spore print, facilitated by atmospheric media. viewers’ epidermis achieve ontological harmony with local masonry, both amenable to weather’s caress and spores’ habitation. scime recalls the views of a previous century, producing weatherly art born(e) by air. a multispecies exhibition ecology spontaneously erupts as air wreathes around human animals and spore laden stock without discretion, a newly perceptible vehicle of horizontalizing entanglement. scime highlights weatherly creativity besides its ability to breach the arbitrary division of world and screen. scime, too, makes spore prints without containers. meteorological phenomena make the film and engineer its later dilation, verifying weather’s double power to precede and exceed cinema. atmospheric media scours the strip only to project its content elsewhere. intermittently visible in the projector’s leaking light and radiant beam, spores appear lively whilst dancing in the wind. the physicality of weather’s usually nebulous body is rendered palpable by fungal material swirling within it, simultaneously medium of art and screen of exhibition. the auditorium’s local atmosphere becomes analogous to a film strip, as mushrooms’ spores are therein spatially re-arranged and made to move in time. weather exhibits its photobut also cinematographic identity, writing with spores in mobility, time, and light. still, neither work describes serene alternatives to dominant styles of expression. film used includes gelatin, and mushrooms are harvested to enable production. however, scime recycles old, gelatin-based stock, redirecting violent flows towards less violent ends. additionally, picking mushrooms can support fungal schemes. importantly, neither artist entirely fixes their work nor forces spores to adhere. thus both artifacts may function as media of fungal dispersal, not least because, in scime’s case, friction generated during projection accelerates spores’ removal from the strip. real life might proliferate from such media, in conceptual and material ways. their methods share a key commonality via their subordination to more-than-human others’ styles of life. a secondary element is that thematic issues communicated via audiovisual cues are corroborated processually, meaning that the usually disparate dimensions of method and style are rendered indivisible. they show us how to more sustainably work through cinema’s voracious appetite for earthly ecologies, and thematically explore others’ sovereignty. they teach us how to modify process in order to mitigate cinema’s tendency to, as pick says, feed on the world. weather as cinema in 1923, epstein traveled to sicily to record mount etna’s eruption, with a film crew and some muleteers. the film was not adequately preserved. luckily, ‘the cinema seen from etna’ (1926), first chapter of epstein’s eponymous book, survived the trip. for epstein, the volcanic event was a film, a cinematic event par excellence. equally impacted by meteorological phenomena, human animals were incorporated into this cinematic scenario, rendered equitable with every atmospheric element. newly mobile phenomena were rendered startlingly uncanny, illuminated by etna’s intermittently flashing vent. the volcano assumed the form of a huge camera. the materials of production the material of life itself. purportedly disparate elements were synthesized, achieving provisional equity coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 86 via a subsuming scenario. etna’s power not only exudes, but exceeds, cinema’s. “glorious volcano!”, epstein exulted: “i have never seen expressions comparable to yours.” (288) it is serendipitous that epstein’s recording perished. it would have described a diminutive version of a cinematic event primarily executed by meteoroand geological power. “what churches,” epstein waxed, “if only we knew how to construct them, could accommodate a spectacle like this, where life itself is revealed.” (289; emphasis added) “i don’t know if i can make myself understood about this,” epstein said, “but the figure with whom we were all occupied was the cinema.” (ibid.) on etna’s fetid slopes epstein found that towards which he was groping with words like photogénie, a pure cinema made of nothing but “movement and rhythm”, comprising only “la matiére-vie elle-meme’ (the material of life itself)” (williams, 2014: 153; emphasis in original). etna’s eruption evidenced an elementary artistry active and enjoyable without anthropogenic media, operative with smoke, ash, and fire. epstein’s text typifies a radically non-anthropocentric approach to analyzing audiovisual artifacts, where anthropogenic media are secondary to, and fed by, weather’s ability to itself make cinematic art. epstein did not think weather through cinema but cinema through weather, inverting analytical hierarchies and inviting us to contemplate cinema as an ancillary symptom of weatherly expression. in this regard, the title of epstein’s chapter and book is a giveaway. evers’s and scime’s prints, and scime’s projection scenario, co-exist on a continuum alongside etna’s eruption, made by weather writing with spores (instead of ash) in movement and time. imagining weather as an agglomeration of inert chemicals is a distinctly western inadequacy. alisi telengut is a canadian visual artist of mongolian origin. telengut’s grandparents lived nomadically on mongolian grasslands. her artworks are infused with their stories and knowledge. as i analyzed in ‘media of devotion’ (2022c), in tengri (2012), telengut exhibits a mongolian wind burial. here, corpses are transported on carts until spiritual powers make them fall. bodies are not buried and wherever they land becomes a simple tomb, nutritional gifts to the world. tengri begins with an ultramarine sky. within it motes of silver and gold pirouette, kaleidoscopes of spirits coalescing as a glittery orb. a human animal’s spirit lingers in a landscape below, eventually joining the joyous swirl. later, we see the spirit’s body on earth, then lifted onto a cart and carried away until it flies skyward, like its spirit, with the wind. according to indigenous mongolian knowledge, weather is capricious and recalcitrant. it overlaps with us but lives beyond our ambit, an excessive agency lacking possibility of total restraint. this view of weather is a key element of a cosmology based on learned sensitivity to human animals’ messy enmeshment in local ecologies full of sovereign beings enjoying unassimilable lives. indifferent and largely invisible, weather overflows with beauty. yet, as we are discovering with increasing awareness, it wields terrifying power. ecological crises are predominantly products of atmospheric damage. atmospheric turbulence is a scouring energy signifying planetary futures without us. yet weather conducts no violence, only dispassionate action some haphazard symptoms of which include human animals’ total mortality. still atmospheric affliction is largely experienced by the least culpable, quickened by western excess yet felt most keenly elsewhere. ecological crises are racialized and political. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 87 this does not negate the technical truth of meteorological objectivity. weather executes with the detached artisanship of butchery, at least according to charles baudelaire in the flowers of evil (1982)—a quotation, the existence and significance of which i discovered in pick’s creaturely poetics (2011): no rage, no rancor: i shall beat you as butchers fell an ox. (baudelaire 79) or does it? as pick showed, the butcher’s blow, and the ostensibly humane equipment of industrialized butchery, derive energy from a cultural anxiety over creaturely life, whose endlessly reiterated powerlessness scaffolds anthropic supremacy (2011: 131-150). weather is the reality of the non-violent ideal behind which the butcher erroneously claims absolution. weather is not just the “meat” (kracauer ix) on which cinema feeds and achieves specificity. conversely, it turns us, too, into meat, writing our inhumanity in atmospheric events of accelerating severity. weather reduces, a medium of hope. alex pheby’s novel mordew (2020) follows nathan treeves, a slum-child in the eponymous city. mordew is led by the master, who sustains his magic by feeding on the corpse of god. nathan enjoys a similar power that he barely controls, also acquired from god’s cadaver. nathan embodies our double ability to secure or burn futurity. his exertions turn his body literally translucent, a disappearing glass-boy. his hubris destroys himself and the world. only windblown water diverts from nathan’s inimical trajectory. where he stood, the earth crumbled under his feet and fires were set deep down where the roots of plants and trees had dried into tinder […]. the sea glistened with his light, and at least that seemed immune to him, rolling into shore below the cliff edge and away again as if he was nothing. (378) weather cares nothing of our self-assumed exceptionality. acknowledging meteorological agency leverages radical recalibrations. earthly life’s equity is verified by meteorological indifference. like us, cinema may obliterate or heal local and planetary ecologies. i have analyzed artifacts in which cinema’s largely latent, but evidently available, ability to enable life’s proliferation is explored. dependent on, and exemplary of, fungal and atmospheric artistry, they reinvigorate cinema’s designation as a medium: a bridge between worlds. under certain circumstances, cinema can adopt weather’s unbiased disposition and, in its analog form, lend itself to weather’s style of address. translatory media of revelatory encounters, these artworks hover between various forms of art and elude classification, enjoying, like weather, an elemental fluidity. they may be construed as speaking to weather as cinema: made by weather writing with mushrooms’ spores in mobility, time, and in #16, light. weather as cinema is not just a formalization of weather’s semioand cinematic proficiency. generally, artists capture then overcode weatherly power. yet prior to cinematography comes weatherly power. by addressing weather as cinema we flip directions of capture, calling cinema an outlet of meteorological creativity and denying our exceptionality for we, like cinema, are equally submissive to atmospheric authority, media for its expression. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 88 references abel, richard (1988), french film theory and criticism: a history/anthology, 19071939, volume i: 1907-1929 (princeton, new jersey: princeton university press). andrew, dudley (1976), the major film theories: an introduction (oxford: oxford university press). baudelaire, charles (1982), les fleurs du mal, trans. richard howard (boston: david r. godine). dressaire, emilie; yamada, lisa; song, boya; roper, marcus (2016), ‘mushrooms use convectively created airflows to disperse their spores’, pnas 113 (11). pp. 2833-2838. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509612113 durham peters, john (2015), the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media (chicago: university of chicago press). dymond, chris (2021), ‘new growth: to film like a plant’, ecocene: cappadocia journal of environmental humanities 2, no. 1 (june): 32-50. https://doi.org/10.46863/ecocene.20. —(2022a), ‘following plants: an interview with karel doing’, edge of frame: a blog about experimental animation. (forthcoming) —(2022b), ‘strip mining: bacteria on film’, antennae 58 (winter 2022). (forthcoming) —(2022c), ‘media of devotion: four films by alisi telengut’, millennium film journal 76 (fall): 64-67. dymond, chris and pick, anat (2022), ‘permacinema’, philosophies 7, 122, special issue: ‘thinking cinema—with plants’, ed. sarah cooper doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/ philosophies7060122 dulac, germaine (1932), ‘the essence of the cinema: the visual idea’, in the avantgarde film: a reader of theory and criticism, ed. p. adams sitney (new york: anthology film archives). pp. 37-48. epstein, jean (2012 [1926a]), ‘on certain characteristics of photogénie’, trans. tom milne, in jean epstein: critical essays and new translations, eds. sarah keller and jason n. paul (amsterdam: amsterdam university press). pp. 292-296. —(2012 [1926b]), ‘the cinema seen from etna’, trans. stuart liebman, in jean epstein: critical essays and new translations, eds. sarah keller and jason n. paul (amsterdam: amsterdam university press). pp. 287-291. —(2014 [1946]), the intelligence of a machine, trans. christophe wall-romana (minneapolis: university of minnesota press). [originally published l’intelligence d’une machine, in 1946]. evers, madge (2019), luminous herbarium, mushroom spores and plants on hahnemühle torchon paper. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509612113 https://doi.org/10.3390/%252520philosophies7060122 https://doi.org/10.3390/%252520philosophies7060122 coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 89 —(2021), personal interview, email, september 19. horn, eva (2018), ‘air as medium’, grey room 76 (fall 2018). pp. 6-25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00254 irigaray, luce (1999), the forgetting of air in martin heidegger, trans. mary beth mader (london: the athlone press). kimmerer, robin wall (2013), braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants (minneapolis: milkweed editions). kracauer, siegfried (1960), theory of film: the redemption of physical reality (new york: oxford university press). lumière, louis (1895), le repas de bébé. lumière, auguste and lumière, louis (1895), barque sortant du port. meilvang, emil leth (2018), ‘cinema, meteorology and the erotics of weather’, necsus: european journal of media studies 7 (spring 2018). pp. 67-85. doi: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3440 miéville, china (2009), the city and the city (london: pan books). oron catts, chris salter and ionat zurr (2022), ‘living and semi-living artefacts on display: the monster that therefore is a living epistemic thing’, in curating lively objects: exhibitions beyond disciplines, eds. lizzie muller and caroline seck landgill (london: routledge). pp. 115-131. pheby, alex (2020), mordew (norwich: galley beggar press). pick, anat (2011), creaturely poetics: animality and vulnerability in literature and film (new york: columbia university press). —(2017), ‘“nothing now but kestrel”: simone weil, iris murdoch and the cinema of letting be’, iris murdoch review (2017). pp. 41-49. —(2018), ‘vegan cinema’, in thinking veganism in literature and culture: towards a vegan theory, eds. emelia quinn and benjamin westwood (london: palgrave). pp. 125146. —(2021), ‘permacinema: vegetal ethics from lumière to rohmer’, online video recording, youtube, march 18 < https://youtu.be/pxfgr_sytoy> [accessed 20 june 2021]. scime, anna (2016), #16. —(2021), personal interview, email, november 16. telengut, alisi (2012), tengri. tsing, anna lowenhaupt (2015), the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (princeton: princeton university press). vaughan, dai (1999), ‘let there be lumière’, in for documentary: twelve essays (berkeley: university of california press). pp. 1-8. williams, tami (2014), germaine dulac: a cinema of sensations (champaign, illinois: university of illinois press). https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00254 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3440 https://youtu.be/pxfgr_sytoy coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 90 chris dymond is a phd student in film studies at queen mary university of london. his research is on plants, bacteria, and fungi in cinema. microsoft word 06_translating alienation-cristina savin.docx coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 73 translating alienation – between escapism and adventure cristina savin monash university cristina.savin@monash.edu copyright©2021 cristina savin. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. the poems translated have been selected from vasile baghiu’s debut poetry collection the taste of alienation. published in 1994, the collection represents the genesis of baghiu’s story of poetic chimerism that spans three decades and eight volumes of poems. but the first chimeric ideas materialised, quietly, six years before the taste of alienation saw the light of day, at the height of the totalitarian regime in his native romania. at the time, the poet was working as a nurse in a tuberculosis sanatorium, consumed by a sense of isolation in the depths of which he had a life-altering, liberating epiphany that shaped his identity and his understanding of the world. he realised that he could be someone else, that he could escape the personal, geographical and intellectual constraints imposed by the regime, and could virtually live a parallel life. and so poetic chimerism was born, as a means of evading ‘les maux de la société’, as a form of personal freedom made possible through imagination and the re-creation, in writing, of imaginary travels through space and time. when asked about the concept that he coined, poetic chimerism, baghiu portrays it not as a literary style, but as a way of life that he devised with the help of poetry.1 this way of life infuses his entire oeuvre – poetry and prose – because many aspects of his existence, including his irrepressible desire to travel and understand the world, are intimately connected with poetic chimerism. based on jules de gaultier’s philosophical system, the concept is a cross between bovarysme and literature that brings together four defining elements, all born out of a sense of despair: imaginary journey, transfiguration, disease and science.2 imaginary journey denotes a way of escaping the socio-political constraints and the cultural provincialism of the time, and led to the creation of himerus alter, an alter-ego, a universal, stateless citizen, who, unlike the poet, was able to travel without restraint through space and time. the presence of the second element, disease, is made possible by the poet’s work as a nurse and represents a reality devoid of the superficiality that marked the intellectual and literary landscape of the time. baghiu’s poems are imbued with an obsession for illness, in the same way the lungs of the patients he cared for, while he worked at the sanatorium, were 1 unless otherwise indicated, all unreferenced citations pertaining to vasile baghiu’s work are sourced directly from my correspondence with the author, including collaborative essay and personal communication; all translations are my own. 2 adapted from the manifestos of chimerism. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 74 infused with bacilli.3 as the poems translated attest, patients emerge as a true measure of lyricism.4 the third element of transfiguration is the symbolic space where new experiences are created, where the poet becomes someone else and poetry metamorphoses into an expression of estrangement. science, the fourth and final element, turns into poetic adventure and infuses the poetic space with quarks, dna, chemical elements, theorems and magnetic fields.5 this ground-breaking concept, detailed in baghiu’s four manifestos of chimerism (baghiu, 2011), and the accompanying collections of poetry, have been the inspiration for my collaboration with the poet, which resulted in two projects. the first is a study of the process of writing poetry, published in poetry in process (2019) that also includes a translated poem, ‘on the sideline’, from his arresting collection the manner (first published in 1998). the second is an essay, currently in development, that explores the intersection between poetic chimerism and the poet’s identity and its evolution through time. i opted for this collaborative approach between myself, the author and the text, and the reimagining of his poetic space, as my non-traditional approach to translation and the framework of thinking about the act of translation. having read the entire poetic oeuvre that baghiu has produced over the last three decades, i came to realise that the most pertinent way to approach my translation of the selected poems was to understand the philosophy behind alienation and escapism, to inhabit its poetic space and to reimagine it, anew, in translation. such approach was fashioned in a distinctive way, by travelling the uneasy road of chimerism through our concerted effort of composing the essay. the resultant translated poems became an activity rather than a product (wilson & gerber, 2012), an activity that culminated in the rebirth of baghiu’s verse and voice, one which reverberates through time, but in a different tongue. our collaborative essay paved the way for an in-depth understanding of alienation and escapism and helped elucidate various points in the source text, therefore informing many translation choices. my translation aims to capture and preserve the grim space of political, social and cultural constraints, in which poetic chimerism serves as the only alternative to counteract the loneliness, isolation, despair and, as the poet astutely put it, the ‘devastating obscurantism’ (the poem ‘the outsider’, 1994). i take peter bush’s view that ‘subjectivity is a key ingredient in the reinterpretation that infuses the writing of the translation, the choice of words and their rhythm’ (2013, p. 39). as such, certain translation choices were made to evoke a particular image, sound or rhythm in the source text, which i wanted to retain in the target text: i too heard, in horror, the screams of the indians running down the allegheny mountains, their arrows pierced me as well, the man at the frontier. cu groază am auzit şi eu ţipetele indienilor care coborau dinspre aleghani, săgeţile lor m-au atins şi pe mine, cel de la frontieră. 3 collaborative essay, 2020. 4 personal communication with the poet and study of poetry in process, 2019. 5 adapted from the manifestos of chimerism and personal communication with the poet, 2019. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 translating a poem, or indeed just a few lines, to paraphrase boase-beier, provide ‘for different levels of compensation and therefore present different possibilities of matching texts and realising their different potentials’ (2014, p. 12). as such, rendering m-au atins as touched me, which is quite literal, did not deliver the powerful image that accompanies the screams of the indians, so i opted for pierced. i felt that pierced encompasses both the sound of the screams and the image of the arrows reaching the man at the frontier. similarly, i translated coborau as running down, rather than the more literal descending, to capture the dramatic effect of the scene. just like a scientist conducting a chemistry experiment, i aim to sublimate the hidden meaning behind some of the words and find ways to render this meaning into the target language. i am constantly reminded that baghiu is a wordsmith and a magician, who skilfully breaks the rhythm and the flow of the verse to create striking images, while successfully preserving the inner harmony and the message of the poem. his verse is densely populated with fascinating stories and unusual protagonists. one such example resides in his spirited poem ‘the night bar’. i know, i will reflect upon the future that falls apart, and all the books are worthless if ulcers drill inside your body, as he used to say when he was younger and sporting a surrealist moustache à la salvador dali, who brags in la vie secrète…that he liked to wet the bed until the age of ten, that he saw colours in his mother’s uterus, in the warm, pleasant dampness of her uterus. our collaborative essay helped to unravel and grasp the meaning behind the poet’s life and work, and provided a fertile ground for my translation decisions and a fresh way to think about the act of translation. it is my hope that the reader will take the journey, alongside the poet and myself, into a world of science, disease, art and poetic adventure. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 vasile baghiu gustul înstrăinării (1994) – the taste of alienation străinul aparţin acestei lumi care mă împinge spre margini, care mă apără şi mă agresează deopotrivă, încercând să-mi reprim furia, şi indignarea, şi groaza în faţa obscurantismului devastator. în canare am adăugat vele pătrate niñei suple, la las palmas, şi l-am ascultat pe bartolome tores mărturisindu-şi crima de la a cărei pedeapsă cu moartea scăpase îmbarcându-se. am văzut cum rămâne în urmă mănăstirea rabida, ca un semn al lui dumnezeu, cu tristeţea matinală a acelei plecări înveninate de neîncredere. am văzut străzi imposibil de traversat, cu un şuvoi continuu de automobile trecând sub privirile mele resemnate. străin, contraste m-au rănit, şi am deplâns slăbiciunea care ne face să rămânem în urmă, care ne aruncă în vârtejul abandonului, deopotrivă la poalele acropolei, printre casele mici, suburbie universală, the outsider i belong to this world that pushes me to the edge, that protects and aggresses me alike, as i try to suppress my anger, indignation, and horror in the face of the devastating obscurantism. in the canary i adorned the graceful niña with square sails, at las palmas, and i listened to bartolomé de torres confess his crime while sailing away to escape the death row. i watched la rabida monastery fading in the distance, like a sign from god, with the sadness of that early morning departure poisoned by scepticism. i saw streets that could not be crossed, with an endless river of automobiles flowing before my heavy eyes. an outsider, antagonised by contrasts, i deplored the weakness that is holdings us back, that is pushing us into a vortex of desolation, at the foot of the acropolis, among those little houses, the global suburbia, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 77 şi la veliko târnovo, coborând pe lângă brutării din care, până-n trotuar, ieşea căldură, deopotrivă în europa bătrână şi în japonia bătrână, ca şi în america la fel de bătrână, întinerită de la columb cu bătrâneţea europei bătrâne, cu modernismul de care se face atâta caz. m-am strâns de frig în tunica de lână cu glugă şi-am ascultat clipocitul şi hula, privind picioarele noastre desculţe, întinşi pe puntea proaspăt spălată, şi-am respirat alizeul. acum nu mai sperăm ceva de la imaginea ferestrei ce dă în curtea interioară plină de lăzi, nu mai sperăm în temerara înaintare prin timp, împiedicându-ne pe scări de copiii care plâng mereu, veşnic părăsiţi, ai nimănui. încerc să înţeleg mizeria în care, fără să recunoaştem, stăpâniţi de-un orgoliu stupid, ne complacem abandonaţi. am văzut şi eu ceaţa şi pescăruşii, o balenă, pelicani, şi-un băţ cu incrustaţii, care ne-au înviorat. and at veliko tarnovo alike, strolling along bakeries, where the warmth of baked bread faded into the street, in the old europe and the old japan alike, and in america, just as old, rejuvenated by columbus with the decrepitude of the old europe, with all the fuss over modernism. i rugged up in my hooded wool coat and we listened to the rippling and the swell of the ocean, contemplating our bare feet, stretched on the freshly cleaned deck, and we breathed in the zephyr. we no longer yearn for something from the image of our window facing the courtyard filled with crates, we lost hope in the fearless progression through time, unwillingly tripping over the orphan, abandoned children, crying incessantly on the stairwell. i try to understand the misery in which we sink, without admitting it, defeated by our stupid arrogance. i, too, saw the fog and the seagulls, a whale, pelicans, and an adorned rod, that energised us. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 78 şi-n noaptea aceea cu lună am strigat de bucurie auzindu-l pe juan rodriguez: “lumbre! tierra!”. acest refugiu, neliniştea, ezitarea duioasă în faţa porţilor de fier, întrebându-te dacă se cuvine să suni, şi sunând totuşi, apăsat, de trei ori, aşteptând să vină valetul, care se ocupa şi de garaje. din nou am plâns, deşi ştiam că un bărbat plângând oferă totuşi o imagine degradantă. am trăit conform unei linii de la care am încercat din răsputeri să mă abat, dar mâine, mâine voi fi, sper, în afară de toate discuţiile. m-am minunat cu diaz del castillo de mărimea tăvilor de aur pe care ni le-au arătat aztecii, şi de mozaicurile de pene. străin, m-am regăsit în zile faste, pierzându-mă apoi pentru ani îndelungi într-o zbatere absurdă, pe care unii, amabili, o numeau rezistenţă. am văzut străzi pline de frunze and on that moonlit night i screamed with joy when i heard juan rodriguez: “lumbre! tierra!”. this refuge, the anxiety, the gentle hesitation outside the iron gates, wondering if you ought not to ring the bell, and yet you ring, urgently, three times, waiting for the valet who’s also in charge of the parking lot. i sobbed again, knowing that a sobbing grown man is a disgrace. i lived my life according to rules that i tried hard to break, but tomorrow, i hope, tomorrow i will be beyond reproach. with díaz del castillo i marvelled at the size of the gold trays and the mosaics with feathers the aztecs showed us. an outsider, i found myself again in auspicious days, losing myself for years to come in a senseless struggle, that some, politely, used to call resistance. i saw streets covered in leaves coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 79 şi străzi pe care maşini speciale le spală cu detergent, sărace străzi, ca unii oameni, precum această mulţime flămândă, străzi pe care te rătăceşti şi pe care îţi place să te plimbi, pe unde se-aude mereu sirena unei ambulanţe, veşnic rătăcit, cu gândurile încâlcite de reclame şi de toată agitaţia pe care nu o înţeleg. eu cred că auziţi şi voi în inimă acest sunet de clopot sub apă, dulceaţa unei amintiri ce fuge mereu, ca o veveriţă care ţi-a mâncat odată din palme, la sanatoriu, în parcul cu havuz. şi după toate astea destul de singur acum, cu amintirea teocaliilor fumegânde. e tonic felul ceremonios în care ţi se deschide uşa ce dă înspre luminile balului, învăţat cu femei pe care numai nostalgia le păstrează distinse, ca pe nişte regine aztece. eu cred că simţiţi şi voi înserarea din inimile voastre, dar nu pot să mă împotrivesc alunecării, agăţându-mă de rădăcini şi smocuri de iarbă, and streets cleaned with soap by sweeper trucks, impoverished streets, like some people, like these starving crowds, streets where you wander and enjoy taking a stroll, where the ambulance siren is always present, i am lost, my thoughts confused by ads and by this incomprehensible commotion. i think you can all hear this sound, in your hearts, the sound of a bell under water, the sweetness of a memory always running, like a squirrel that once ate out of your hand, at the sanatorium, in the garden with a fountain. and after all this i am rather alone, remembering the burning teocalli. it is refreshing how they open the door for you, ceremoniously, onto the lights of the grand reception, accustomed to women resembling aztec queens, nostalgic, distinguished. i think you all feel the nightfall in your hearts, but, against my will, i keep falling, trying to hold onto roots and clumps of grass, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 80 de pietre colţuroase care mă rănesc dureros, ca-ntr-un vis, ca-ntr-o carte al cărei autor e un cinic fără suflet şi fără milă. sunt unul dintre fericiţii supravieţuitori ai acelei “noche triste”, l-am văzut pe cortés plângând cu fruntea sprijinită de-un arbore, şi simt, când inspir mai adânc, un fel de sfârşeală care mă doboară pe trotuarul ud după ploaie, unde adunătura de gură-cască mă sâcâie, adunătura de femei care-mi dau palme, încercând un fel de reanimare brutală, într-un oraş necunoscut dintr-o ţară străină căreia nu-i cunosc limba. am fost martor când incasul a aruncat biblia oferită de părintele valverde, sub un cer senin pe care oricine, din oricare secol, a putut să-l contemple. de atunci parcă aievea se năruie un zid de care-odată ne-am lipit, înfriguraţi, ca de o sobă încălzită din sala de aşteptare a unei halte singuratice şi înconjurate de plopi argintii ce puteau fi văzuţi de departe. onto sharp rocks that hurt me deeply, as if in a dream, as if in a book whose author is a heartless, soulless pessimist. i am one of the fortunate survivors of that “noche triste”, i saw cortés cry his forehead against a tree, and as i breathe, some kind of fatigue knocks me onto the rain-soaked pavement where irritating crowds of bystanders surround me, crowds of women who slap me across the face, trying to resuscitate me, viciously, in a strange city in a foreign country, in a language i don’t understand. i witnessed the moment when the inca threw the bible that friar valverde offered, under a serene sky that anyone, from any time, could contemplate. ever since then it feels as if a wall is crumbling, a wall we once snuggled up to, shivering, as if against a warm fireplace in the waiting room of a lonely train halt surrounded by silvery poplars that could be seen from afar. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 81 toate lucrurile sunt răscolite şi răsturnate ca în urma unei brutale percheziţii, e şi închipuirea voastră pură, care vă menţine zâmbitori şi avizi de petreceri în care să uitaţi. dar mereu se găseşte cineva care aşteaptă, iar timpul e cinic, şi vapoarele somptuoase pleacă, lăsându-ne visători pe cheiul ud. am văzut străzi cu vopseaua marcajelor ştearsă de paşii mulţimii, mulţime ce pare-a se opri uneori, să asculte vreun semn, vreo limbă de clopot cu sunet ciudat, şi nou, cum auzi într-un oraş în care ajungi prima oară, la peks sau la ruse, sau chiar în recele şi cochetul lund, unde mă duce gândul, încercând să depăşesc o geografie familiară. am străbătut lumea asta a noastră şi nu e nimic bizar în atemporalitatea atitudinii mele, pentru că, într-un fel, toate aceste timpuri îmi aparţin, şi-aş putea să jur că am fost acolo şi acolo şi dincolo, şi-aş putea să depun mărturie pentru strigătul de durere al lui ferdinand de soto, pe malul mississippiului, everything is messed up and turned upside down as if following a brutal search, it is your unblemished imagination, too, that keeps you happy and hungry for parties that make you forget. but there is always someone waiting, and time is cruel, and the luxurious cruise ships depart, leaving us daydreaming on the wet pier. i saw roads with markings worn out by the footsteps of a crowd, a crowd that seems to be stopping sometimes, to listen to a sign, to the sound of a bell that is new and strange, when you hear it in a town where you arrive for the first time, like pecs, or ruse, or even the cold and elegant lund, where my imagination takes me, as i try to escape a familiar place. i travelled this world of ours and there is nothing strange in the timelessness of my attitude, because, in some ways, all those times belong to me, and i could swear i’ve travelled here and there and elsewhere, and i could bear witness to hernando de soto’s cry of pain, on the shore of the mississippi river , coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 82 înainte de moartea-i neîmpăcată. străin, m-am regăsit bolnav, cu atâtea datorii pe cap, cu insidioasa bârfă de prin colţuri călduţe, unde fierbe cafeaua de rigoare. ce lux şi boierie să scrii două versuri slăbănoage sub stele milenare! bucurie fugară a acestor bolnavi ce-au rămas la fumat prin closete în care mirosul tare al urinii te face să lăcrimezi. am bătut cuie în scândurile fortului québec, şi-am iernat acolo în pustietate, pe insula de pe fluviul james, unde acum zumzăie oraşul jamestown, în care citiţi voi ziarele prin parc, supraveghind copiii gălăgioşi. cu groază am auzit şi eu ţipetele indienilor care coborau dinspre aleghani, săgeţile lor m-au atins şi pe mine, cel de la frontieră. ce căutam atunci? nici azi nu-mi cunosc rostul pe străzile unui oraş de provincie din românia. aparţin acestei lumi policrome, obscurităţii senile, before his troubled death. an outsider, i found myself ailing, overwhelmed by debt, surrounded by insidious gossip oozing from cosy corners, where coffee was brewing. ah, the luxury and arrogance of composing two anaemic verses under the eternal stars! fleeting joy of those long-time sufferers still smoking in the toilets where the overpowering smell of urine burns my eyes. i drove nails into the wood boards of the québec fortress, and i spent the winter there, in the wilderness, on that island on james bay, that is now the vibrant jamestown, where you read newspapers in the park, minding the noisy children, i too heard, in horror, the screams of the indians running down the allegheny mountains, their arrows pierced me as well, the man at the frontier. what was i looking for back then? even today i cannot find my place on the streets of a provincial town in romania. i belong to this multicoloured world, to this decrepit mediocrity, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 83 acestei agitaţii care ne îndulceşte convalescenţa, prin diversitate, prin trecutul care ne poartă cu indiferenţa care ne consolează de moarte. to this commotion that makes our convalescence bearable through diversity, through the past that carries us with the apathy that gives us comfort in death. oroarea unei istorii sunt gândurile din altă vreme, amintirea autobuzului roşu care înconjura lacul leman, sau a camionetei care zbura pe şoseaua de unde zăream, printre vile, balaton-ul, venind dinspre nagykanitza. sunt iluzii legate de posibila mea însănătoşire, printre aceşti oameni, bărbaţi şi femei, care nu mai vor externarea, care şi-au refăcut aici, între ei, vieţile sentimentale, pline de dragoste, la care-au visat, cupluri înlănţuite în plimbarea de seara, fără grabă şi fără ţintă. sunt gânduri dintr-un adăpost cu plafonul atât de coborât încât trebuia să stăm întinşi, the horror of a past these are thoughts from a distant past, memories of the red bus going around lake leman, or the van rushing on the road from where i could see lake balaton, among the villas, travelling from nagykanizsa. these are illusions of my own possible recovery, among these people, men and women, who no longer wish to be discharged, who have rebuilt their sentimental lives here, with each other, falling in love, living their dreams, cuddling couples walking together at sundown, leisurely, aimlessly. these are thoughts from a shelter with the ceiling so low that we had to lie flat, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 84 ascultând bubuitul sinistru, oroarea unei istorii care ne-aruncă prin mormanele de gunoaie în care se îngraşă cârduri de ciori, slăbiţi şi timizi, că abia în grupuri mai mari reuşim să ne ţinem pe picioare, cu o febră continuă în ochii lucioşi, cu o speranţă vană. sunt gândurile confuze, ascuţite, isterice, prins în cămaşa de forţă, urlând, cu privirile înspre fereastra cu gratii, la care se-agită o creangă-nflorită (sau ninsă?), neştiind din colţul în care m-au aruncat, miop şi pierdut. listening to the ominous roar, the horror of a past that discards us onto piles of garbage devoured by voracious crows, we are so weak and timid, that we barely stand on our feet, but we lean against one another with fever burning our glassy eyes, with empty hope. these are the confused, sharp, hysterical thoughts, imprisoned in a straitjacket i keep screaming looking at the barred window, where a branch is fluttering heavy with flowers (or snow?), not knowing from the corner where i was discarded, short-sighted and defeated. bolnav şi trezit mereu de-un suspin bolnav şi trezit mereu de-un suspin pe care-l tot aud prin pereţii acestor camere de hotel, crezând că visez, îndepărtat şi înstrăinat ca o stafie, ailing and constantly awakened by a sigh ailing and constantly awakened by a sigh that i keep hearing through the walls of this hotel’s rooms, i believe i am dreaming, far away and estranged like a ghost, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 85 crezând că febra mă va urca la cer. mă ademeneşte un viitor cu imaginea lui de zgârie-nori plutitori, aud în piept un abia perceptibil tremur de corzi vocale ce-mi trădează emoţia, de alveole găurite şi sufocate în propria lor căldură, căldură umană după care tânjim când suntem singuri şi înrăiţi în răutate. când voi ajunge? caut un nume de stradă, un număr, oraşe prietenoase pe care-n veci nu le voi mai vedea, cu autobuzele lor silenţioase în care călătoresc oameni bine hrăniţi, cu ziare în mâini. mi-e greu să mă las condus de-acest val, inutil mă-mpotrivesc, împins, îmbrâncit, într-un colţ mai ferit, bolnav şi trezit mereu prin hoteluri, bolnav şi pierit, dat dispărut pe unde-am stat şi mă cunoşteau felurite persoane. i believe the fever will raise me to the sky. i am enticed by a future with its image of floating skyscrapers, deep in my chest i hear the faint whisper of vocal chords exposing my emotions, of alveoli perforated and stifled by their own warmth, the human warmth we crave when we’re lonely and bitter. will i arrive somewhere? i’m looking for a street, a number, friendly cities that i will never see again, with their quiet buses carrying healthy passengers, with newspapers in their hands. it’s difficult to let myself go, in vain i try to resist, shoved, pushed around, into a quiet corner, ailing and constantly awakened in some hotels, ailing and weak, reported missing in places i stayed, where people knew me. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 86 conversaţiuni cu doamna bovary e prea mult totul dacă ne smulge un zâmbet. nimic nu revendic, ne-am învăţat să nu cerem prea mult de la viaţă. cu un pahar în mână şi un loc între oaspeţi nu mai avem motive să plângem, nici tu nu mai plângi, cum am fost tentat să cred că lacrimile sunt o evaziune a temperamentului tău dificil. însă ni se arată din mersul autocarului cimitirul vechi pe care-l zărisem fragmentar printe casele colorate, când peisajul se schimbă, în timp ce răscolesc prin bagaje după un termos şi apare luna, în plină zi, ca un fragment decupat din norii cirus, şi asta deja îmi aminteşte de vremuri ciumate. însă mai bine ar fi să trecem văile şi munţii şi să ajungem la marea cea mare, unde ne aşteaptă o corabie neagră, sau un vapor cu zbaturi, ticsit de aventurieri, pe care-i vom vedea vomând, în larg, mai târziu, aplecându-se peste bara albă din marginea punţii. am crezut că viaţa va cânta cu mine pe unde voi rătăci şi a existat chiar o clipă de înfruntare la mijlocul podului suspendat conversations with madame bovary it’s all too much if it makes us smile. i reclaim nothing, we’ve learned not to ask for much in life. a glass in hand and sitting among guests we no longer have reasons to complain, you cry no more, as i was tempted to believe that tears were an excuse for your difficult character. but from the tour bus the old cemetery unfolded before our eyes and we caught a glimpse of it among the colourful houses, when the landscape changes, while i rummage around my luggage for a thermos and the moon rises, in the middle of the day, like a wispy thread trimmed out of cirrus clouds, and this already reminds me of plague-stricken times. but we’d better cross the valleys and the mountains to reach the everlasting sea, where a black ship or a paddle steamer waits for us, packed full of adventurers who will later vomit, out to sea, bending over the white handrail of the deck. i thought life will sing with me in my travels and there was even a moment of confrontation in the middle of the suspension bridge coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 87 unde m-a oprit unul pe care nu-l mai văzusem, care mi-a spus să mă ţin tare orice s-ar întâmpla, şi râul curgea, liber, sub picioarele noastre. eram în trecere, cum suntem de-o vreme peste tot unde mai sperăm să găsim urme de sănii, sânge sau câteva haine sfâşiate. au suferit şi alţii, poate mai mult. îi poţi vedea cum, ajunşi la casă pentru a plăti, se scotocesc prin buzunare şi renunţă la unele pachete. cu noi a fost aşa o hărţuială în glumă, care ne-a adus totuşi pe această plajă, aproape de hrubele unde vom aluneca odată cu viaţa, viaţa care, la new york, nu demult, era încrederea noastră nestrămutată în floarea din geam. eram în trecere, cum suntem de o vreme peste tot, unde mai sperăm să răzbească primăvara, ca o spumă sub care înteţim focul din câteva ramuri uscate, însă aş vrea mult să pot spune ceva care să te oprească din plâns, aici, înţelegi şi tu, nimeni nu ne va ocroti. voi povesti, voi povesti o poveste candidă cu o după amiază de decembrie sordidă cu un soare pieziş, where some man i had never seen before stopped me, and told me to be strong no matter what, and the river was flowing, unrestrained, beneath our feet. we were in passing, as we’ve been for a while where we still hope to find trails left by snow sleds, blood or some shreds of clothing. others have suffered, maybe even more. we can see them, at the checkout counter, fumbling through their pockets and leaving shopping behind. with us, there was some playful taunting, that brought us to this beach, close to the caves in which we will fall, where life takes us, our life in new york, not long ago, our unwavering faith in the flower by the window. we were in passing, as we’ve been for a while, longing for spring to prevail, like a spume under which we fuel the fire with a few dry branches, but i want to say something to distract you from crying, here, you understand, there is no one to protect us. i will tell a story, a candid story about a sordid december afternoon with glowing sun, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 88 ca în romanele în care mor tocmai personajele cu inimi de aur. ritmul şi viaţa ritmului în sânge, într-un ghetou în care am văzut un bărbat negru cu urechea lipită de difuzor, în timp ce luna se tot suia pe cer şi noi ne gândeam la ţărişoarele noastre, emigranţi în căutarea nu ştiu cărui fel de fericire, ea amintindu-mi că am fost bogaţi uneori, că în anumite zile vânam de plăcere, deşi eram trist din cauza rinichilor care mă făceau să merg atât de des la toaletă. mă întreb acum ce-aş fi făcut dacă aş fi trăit într-un versailles medieval lipsit de băi şi closete. cântam, fredonam un cântec, şi e adevărat că există momente când te faci de tot râsul. trist urmăream câinii aceia sprinteni, trist ascultam lătratul lor îndepărtat. am avut bani, aruncam cu ei în stânga şi-n dreapta, pentru că-ţi plăcea wimbledonul vara, în arena descoperită, unde, prin ochelari de soare, urmăream ghemul alb as in novels where the ones who die are the protagonists with hearts of gold. the pulse and the life of the pulse in blood, in a ghetto where i saw a black man with his ear glued to the radio, while the moon went up in the sky and we thought about our little countries, migrants searching for some kind of happiness, she reminded me that we were once rich, that some days we hunted for pleasure, although i was sad because my ailing kidneys forced me to go to the toilet often. i now wonder what i would have done had i lived in a medieval versailles, with no bathrooms and toilets. i was singing, humming, and it’s true that sometimes i made a complete fool of myself. sad, i watched those agile dogs, sad, i listened to them bark in the distance. we were rich, we squandered all our money, because you loved wimbledon, in summer, in the open court, where we followed the white tennis ball, with sunglasses on, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 89 până când simţeam atroce dureri în ceafă, da, răbdarea ta, care m-a uimit şi atunci şi multă vreme după aceea, n-avea nimic din neliniştea zilelor toride de pe întinsele plaje din miami, când în joacă strecurai nisip printe degete, când din senin te înăbuşea plânsul, când mă rugai să mergem, iar eu făceam o figuraţie ridicolă. înţelegeam, mă gândeam şi eu la viaţa care trecea, la racheta de tenis care de la o vreme aluneca şi loviturile nu mai aveau precizie, stârnind râsul, indignarea spectatorilor. dar poate şi ţărmul era pentru tine un semn, cu barul cosmopolit unde mi-ai mărturisit că ţi-e frică de singurătate, ca oricărui om, îţi spuneam, ca oricărei femei sensibile şi culte, iar dacă n-ai fi dorit să intri în frizerie nu m-ar fi purtat gândurile spre revistele de modă tipărite pe hârtie de lux, pentru că m-am întrebat adesea dacă nu există cineva care şterge urmele şi ne duce pierzaniei, cum înaintăm de-a lungul acestei plaje, until our necks ached, yes, your patience that surprised me then and a long time after, had nothing of the anxiety of those sweltering days on wide miami beaches, when sand ran playfully through your fingers, when you burst into tears, when you asked me to go, and i was behaving foolishly. i knew, i thought about life so fleeting, about the tennis racket that was slipping with hesitant strikes, making spectators laugh, feel resentful. but, for you, maybe the shore was a sign, with the cosmopolitan bar where you confessed you were afraid of being alone, like everyone else, i said, like every sensitive, learned woman, and if you didn’t want to walk into the barber shop i wouldn’t have mused about the fashion magazines printed on glossy paper, because i often asked myself if there is someone who removes the traces and delivers us to evil, as we walk along the beach, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 90 tu destul de mofluză, cu influenţe din lecturile iluştrilor poeţi americani, cu stilul lor de moţăială în balansoar. dacă aş recunoaşte improvizaţia aş fi mai sigur pe gesturi, nu bâlbâit ca în ziua înmormântării colegei noastre de la conservator, aş încerca să recuperez din strălucirea aristocratică pentru care unii găseau, amabili, comparaţii cu montale. cred totuşi că nimeni nu ne va face vreun rău, decât poate vreo întâmplare, ca atunci în irlanda ploioasă, când o surpare de pământ ne-a dus în timpul nopţii până la râu, cu tot cu baraca de scânduri în care dormeam. tu începuseşi să vorbeşti, pe urmă am râs mâncând mere care semănau cu genunchii tăi. nu găsisem un compliment mai ingenios şi am râs şi de asta, şi spre seară, la dublin, avenit ploaia care ne-a alungat în faţa unei vitrine cu păpuşi, de unde nu mai ştiam să mergem, decât spre gară, şi deodată te-a cotropit plânsul acolo, şi deodată, cum spuneam, s-a făcut seară, aceeaşi seară din gara milano, cu frig şi mâzgă noroioasă pe jos, and you are rather unimpressed, inspired by distinguished american poets, nodding off in rocking chairs. if i recognised spontaneity, i’d be more certain and wouldn’t stumble like i did on the day we buried our colleague from the conservatory, i would try to salvage something from the aristocratic glory that some compared, kindly, to the times of montale. i don’t think anyone will harm us, except perhaps in some incident, as that night in rainy ireland, when a landslide carried us all the way to the river, together with the wooden shack where we slept. you started to talk, then we laughed eating apples that resembled your knees. we couldn’t come up with an original compliment, so we laughed once more, and in the evening, in dublin, the rain came and chased us away from a window with dolls, we didn’t know where to go from there, except to the train station, and suddenly you were overwhelmed by tears, and, as i said, the night came, the same night in the milano train station, with freezing cold and mud, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 91 când, învelită în blănuri, spuneai cuvinte ciudate, un regret pe care tot încercai să mi-l mărturiseşti, o indignare faţă de un sud pe care nu-l mai iubeai, cu aceste relicve din viaţă în care am putea să ne găsim un refugiu, dar ai spus că nu moartea sau viaţa ne înăbuşă, ci această ploaie cu spume, peretele de stâncă abrupt, cu flori roşii pe care le-am crezut pete de sânge, această uşă încuiată, însemnările pe spaţiul alb din marginea paginii de unde şi acum tu mai crezi că începe moartea. when, wrapped in fur, you uttered strange words some regret you tried to confess, an outrage against a south you no longer loved, with these relics of life where we could find shelter, but you said that it’s not death or life that constrains us, but this torrential rain, the steep cliff, with red flowers that i mistook for blood spots, this locked door, the notes on the white margins of the page from where you still believe death begins. barul de noapte s-ar putea spune că trăiesc, dar mă tem să nu mor printre sticluţe şi flacoane, înecat în această melancolie atât de inutilă, pentru care ai motive să-ţi fie milă, de mine, care am fost atât de neghiob să vorbesc despre poezie tocmai aici, printre pahare şi scrumiere, the night bar some would say i exist, but i fear i’ll die among bottles and vials, drowning in this useless melancholy, and you have every reason to feel sorry for me – i’ve been foolish enough to talk about poetry right here, among glasses and ashtrays, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 92 spunând bunăoară că poezia e o formă de rezistenţă la imbecilitate, agresivitate, război, violenţă, uitând muribunzii abandonaţi unor perfuzii. credeam că poţi să te duci pur şi simplu acasă şi să citeşti, sau să trăieşti cum scrie acolo, uitând femeile plăpânde care suferă infinit, şi multe altele, mărunţişuri pe care nu-i bine să le pui la inimă, bolile care conferă vieţii o plenitudine voluptoasă, o plăcere aşa de a lenevi prin paturile spitalelor, nişte umbre pe un coridor răsunător, noaptea, când dacă se-aude tuse simţim în noi un fel de frustrare. e gol acest straniu timp, şi-această primăvară îmbătrânită de repetare ne poartă, căci suntem copiii ei inocenţi, şi-aceste vapoare-au trecut lăsând un fum abia perceptibil în aer, în dimineaţa asta, înainte de ziuă, când simt câinele din mine cum se răzvrăteşte. atunci i-am lăsat să bea vinul şi să iubească femeile care ardeau gazul şi ele pe scaunele astea înalte. unuia îi tremurau mâinile, dar tot nu se dădea înapoi de la chefuri. saying, for example, that poetry is a form of resistance against idiocy, aggressivity, war, violence, and forgetting the dying bodies chained to some drips. i thought you could simply go home to read, or to live, as the book says, forgetting the fragile women who suffer endlessly, and other things, little things we shouldn’t worry about, sickness that bestows upon life a voluptuous abundance, a kind of desire to idle on hospital beds, shadows on a reverberating corridor, at night, and we feel frustrated when we hear someone cough. there’s emptiness in these strange times, and this spring fading in the spiral of time keeps us going, we are its innocent children, and these ships have passed leaving a subtle smoke in the air, before this morning’s first light, when the dog inside me began to rebel. then i let them drink the wine and love the women who wasted time on those tall barstools. some man’s hands were shaking, but he still partied hard. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 93 ştiu, mă voi apleca asupra viitorului, care-i într-o râpă, şi toate cărţile nu fac două parale dacă te sfredeleşte ulcerul, cum spunea el când era mai tânăr şi purta o mustaţă şoricească a la salvador dali, care se laudă în la vie secrète… că i-a plăcut să urineze în pat până la zece ani, că a văzut în uter culorile, în uter, unde e o plăcută umezeală caldă. şi să mă aplec asupra viitorului, deci, dar spun şi vreau să mă credeţi că nu-i decât o fântână, părăsită şi asta. aşa este, dar mergem mai departe, ca în poveste. suferinţele nu au importanţă în acest vacarm, pentru că drumul a fost rătăcit demult, în nişte ani îndepărtaţi care ne-au dat iluzia încrederii, care ne-au adus acest vârtej înghiţitor de manuscrise, atunci, în vremea îndepărtată, când am consumat alcool cu speranţa că voi muri, când am vizitat în pădure un loc în care stăteam fugar într-o perioadă juvenilă a vieţii. nimeni nu s-ar clinti, să-i momeşti cu orice, nimeni. i know, i will reflect on the future that falls apart, and all the books are worthless if ulcers drill inside your body, as he used to say when he was younger and sporting a surrealist moustache à la salvador dali, who brags in la vie secrète…that he liked to wet the bed until the age of ten, that he saw colours in his mother’s uterus, in the warm, pleasant dampness of her uterus. and i reflect upon the future, thus, and mark my words, the future is nothing but a forsaken well. it’s true, yet we keep going, like in a story. suffering is not important in this turmoil, because we went astray a long time ago, in a distant past that gave us the illusion of confidence, brought to us this vortex devouring the manuscripts, back then, in that distant past, when i drank alcohol hoping to die, when i went back to my place of hiding in the forest as a fugitive in the spring of my youth. no one would budge, no one, even if you tried to tempt them. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 94 dacă ar ţipa acum cineva… am trecut prin acele locuri, am plâns, am traversat peisajele stranii, oraşele mari mi-au redat, abia perceptibil, un fel de maturitate glacială pe care-o pierdusem. lumina trece ca moartea, e un moment greu, chiar atunci, pe urmă gata, nu mai ştii, dar e important să-l depăşeşti. „doamne, dumnezeule! zicea (într-un timp devenise aşa, mistică), şi când te gândeşti că aşteptăm mereu momentul acela pe care nu-l vom mai putea povesti…” pe urmă a zis să mai luăm un rând, deşi ea se cherchelise bine. nopţile, nenumărate şi uitate acum, m-au apropiat de oameni, m-au făcut să consimt să beau cu ei, dar răul pe care-l simţeam dimineaţa mă înverşuna împotriva lor. poate, fiind mai cinic, suport amintiri care ar provoca plânsul oricui. sunt uşi care-mi vor fi interzise mereu. if someone would scream now… i went back to those places, i wept, i crossed the strange landscape, the big cities made me regain, faintly, a sort of calm maturity that i had lost. light passes through like death, a painful, short-lived moment, then it’s over, it’s forgotten, but still important to surpass it. “oh, my god! she said (having turned spiritual somehow), and to think that we’re all waiting for the moment that we won’t be able to recount…” then she shouted another round although already drunk. those countless, forgotten nights, brought me closer to people, and i agreed to drink with them, but the malaise next morning made me turn against them. because of my cynical nature, perhaps, i tolerate memories that would bring other people to tears. some doors will always be closed for me. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 95 măcar de-aş fi ales un drum neted, să visez în voie la ale mele, să nu fiu silit acum să zâmbesc de circumstanţă. văzusem eu ceva acolo, departe, o lumină care se tot aprindea şi se stingea, un fel de nori curgători, un fel de păsări cu aceleaşi mutre, numai că traversând din când în când. şi există şi obligaţia asta nesuferită de a reveni mereu de unde plecasem. n-am plâns, trăiam într-o continuă indiferenţă, primeam vizite şi aveam răbdare să ascult toate stupidităţile, amabil mereu, dispus, cum ar zice ea, ea, care-a-nceput să cânte de-acuma. dar chiar ai putea să revii, să începi o viaţă nouă undeva prin america, sau poate în australia cea ticsită de canguri, iată, a fost de ajuns o rază mai caldă, acum în mijlocul iernii, şi muştele rămase între geamuri s-au dezmorţit. revenim până la urmă şi spunem aşa nişte chestii care produc stupoare printre clienţi, i wish i chose a simple life, to dream at will, to not be forced to put on a fake smile. i saw something somewhere, in the distance, a flickering light bulb, some kind of flowing clouds, birds with same faces, but passing through. and then this unbearable obligation to always go back to the beginning. we didn’t cry, we lived in a permanent state of indifference, we saw people and we listened to inanities patiently, politely, willingly, she would say, singing her words. but you could come back to start a new life somewhere in america, or maybe in australia, so full of kangaroos, look, a warmer ray of sun was enough, now in the middle of winter, and the flies stuck between the windows sprang back to life. eventually we come back and utter words that leave people bewildered, but it’s worth telling coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 96 dar merită, fie şi numai pentru povestea miraculoasă c-am fost aici şi am făcut să zăngănească tacâmurile uşor, pentru puterea care ne-a învrednicit să privim în oglinzi şi pentru felul în care ea se-ndepărta smulgându-mi un zâmbet resemnat, în mijlocul harababurii, al violenţei care produce răvăşeală, mereu în colţuri liniştite, unde visezi să te retragi cu familia la bătrâneţe, când memoria va fi depozitat imagini aurite, aiurite. moartea aşteaptă oricât, dar sunt lucruri de care te desparţi greu, cu lacrimi, cu plânset, cu jale, cu istericale, te-nfunzi într-un sanatoriu tbc cu tot cu măreţul destin pe care-l vedeai în fântână. obiecte văd, un medalion, o pipă arsă, hârtii nesuferite, manuscripte, cripte de morminte, amintindu-mi cum zicea ea când era mai înfuriată pe traiul amărât din ţărişoara asta, că politicienii ar trebui să treacă în fiecare zi pe la morgă, să vadă pe viu cât de scurtă e viaţa the incredible story of our presence here and we made the silverware clink gently, for the power that made us look into mirrors as she walked away, stealing a resigned smile from my lips, in the middle of the chaos, the violence that turns everything upside down, in quiet corners, where you dream of a peaceful life, with your family, in your old age, when your brain would have captured golden, crazy images. death waits for as long as it takes, but there are things you find difficult to part with, and you cry, you weep, you grieve, you throw tantrums, you go into hiding in a sanatorium taking with you the reflection in the fountain of your grandiose fate. i see objects, a pendant, a burnt pipe, insufferable papers, manuscripts, crypts, reminding me of her words when she was upset about the hardship in our beloved little country, that politicians should visit the morgue each day, to see for themselves how short life is coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 97 şi cum se duc dracului toate. ştiu şi senzaţia de gol în stomac, urcând până la gât şi sugrumându-mă, am ştiut că voi ajunge aici. am trăit o tinereţe ca-n filmele complicate ale francezilor. dacă aş putea să plâng sincer poate suferinţa aceea mi-ar deschide ochii şi mie. mă gândesc la mama, la copilăria răvăşită prin fotografii din sertare. zilele acelea s-au dus în ceruri după ramses al ii-lea, şi după contesa walewska, şi după cortes. cred că e foarte plăcut să fii mort de demult, dar, sătul de cântece curajoase, ascult cum trece marfarul, cum trece sângele meu prin timpane, când am tensiune. oare nu erai tu aceea care venea şi-mi lăsa mici atenţii prin noptiere? n-am ştiut să fiu la înălţime, şi această dimineaţă mă prinde cu capul pe masă, capul, un cap clătinându-se la marginea brancardei… dar ce spun? eu stau mâhnit şi-ncerc să uit că am răbdat câte o boală sâcâitoare. la urma urmei aş putea să o iau razna and how quickly everything goes to hell. i know the feeling of emptiness, making its way up to the throat and choking me, i always knew one day this would happen. i lived my youth as if in a complicated french movie. if i could honestly cry maybe that suffering could make me see the truth. i think about mother, about my childhood, scattered in drawers full of photos. those days followed ramesses the great, countess walewska and cortés in the sky. i think it’s pleasant to be dead for a long time, but, fed up with heroic songs, i hear the freight train that sounds like blood pounding in my eardrums. were you the one leaving little presents on my nightstand? i didn’t know how to rise to the occasion, and this morning finds me with my head resting on the table, my head, a head bobbing on the edge of the stretcher… but what am i saying? i’m sad and i try to forget that i suffered some tiresome illness. in the end i could go mad coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 98 peste munţii şi peste câmpiile patriei. nu mai revin, e loc destul, creşte iarba, ce mai încoace şi-ncolo, e primăvară de-a binelea, şi e firesc să-mi zburde inima şi să mă lase în urmă, abia respirând, gâfâind. across the mountains and plains of my country. i don’t come back, this is my space, the grass is growing, it’s spring, the spring is truly here, and my frolicking heart leaves me behind, barely catching my breath, panting. farmacistele sanatoriului farmacistele îşi scoseseră masa şi condicile afară în parc, şi am mers acolo să vorbesc cu ele. se plângeau de izolare, de lipsa prietenilor, cum aşezau cu grijă indigourile între file, numărând pastile. vorbeau la telefonul pe care-l aduseseră din holul farmaciei, unde, când suna, trebuiau să tot alerge, clămpănindu-şi papucii pe care-i purtau în timpul serviciului. mă întrebau dacă mai scriu poezii the pharmacists at the sanatorium the pharmacists took the tables and registers outside, in the park, and there i went to talk to them. they were complaining of being isolated, without their friends, while carefully placing carbon paper between paper sheets, counting pills. they were talking on the phone they brought with them from the lobby, where they had to run to answer it, when it was ringing, clacking the slippers they were wearing at work. they asked me if i still wrote poetry coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 99 şi, zâmbind cu înţeles, dacă am vreo prietenă. tersele zornăiau de zaruri şi tusea răsuna prin ciripitul gureşelor păsări cărora le pria altitudinea aceea. and, smiling suggestively, if i had a girlfriend. the balconies were alive with the rattling sound of dice and the cough vibrated through the song of the chatty birds that thrived at that altitude. numai confuzia nesfârşită numai confuzia nesfârşită ne aducea mereu la un liman cu pescăruşi ţipători, care ne predispuneau la un fel de poezie vetustă, dar purtătoare a unui suflu de umanitate pe care-l pierdusem, înrăiţi şi irecuperabili, neîmblânziţi şi mofluzi, repezind cu brutalitate copiii ăştia care ne roagă mereu câte ceva, plângăcioşi. numai zilele astea cu soare uimit îmi încălzesc inima, aproape răpus, trântit la pământ şi morfolit, ştergându-mi cu mâneca paltonului sângele only the endless confusion only the endless confusion brought us always to a shore with loud gulls, that predisposed us towards some kind of primeval poem, yet carrying a breath of humanity that we once lost, bitter and without hope, fierce and aloof, snapping savagely at these whining children asking us for something. only those resplendent sun-filled days bring warmth into my heart, i am almost broken, knocked to the ground and trampled, wiping the blood from my nose with the sleeve coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 100 de la nas. numai învins şi purtat pe sus de iluzii călduţe, zâmbind prefăcut, pentru a evita compătimiri sau propuneri altruiste, care mai mult strică, aşa cum felurite avânturi filantropice doar cosmetizează faţadele sordide. numai scriind şi scriind şi citind am reuşit să-mi stric toată viaţa. constat cu stupoare cum, atât de blazaţi, mai recunoaştem mici semne şi subscriem acestui imbold ce porneşte sub întunecate-auspicii, ne resemnăm şi – chiar dacă răbufnim uneori – trăim într-un fel anemic, livid, gălbior, depăşiţi de vântul pistruiat al acestor grele timpuri. numai al morţii şi al bolilor, devotat, numai infiltrându-ne insidios în adăposturi în care ne petrecem jumătate din viaţă, moţăind şi conversând, retragem insulte atât de brutale, apăsătoare ca zăpada pe o cetină, of my overcoat. only defeated and carried away by tepid illusions, with a coy smile, to ward off compassion or altruistic offers that do more harm than good, as all sorts of philanthropic gestures do when they reveal their sordid facades. only by writing and writing and reading i managed to ruin my entire life. i realise, in amazement, that we, disenchanted, still recognise little signs and submit to this force born under dark auspices, we resign ourselves and – if we sometimes erupt angry words – we live an anaemic, pale, yellow life, overwhelmed by the freckled wind of these difficult times. only devoted to death and disease, only cunningly hiding in shelters where we spend half of our life, dozing and chatting, we abandon brutal insults, heavy like snow on pine needles, coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 101 un vis care se spulberă la prima adiere solară, sau la zvâcnirea în spaimă a vreunei cornute. nu pot să mă salvez, şi niciodată nu-mi voi putea opri un plâns ce mă inindă mereu, fără lacrimi, când trec printre voi, şi niciodată nu voi fi lămurit pentru restul de viaţă rămas de trăit. a dream shattered with the first breath of sun, or with the frightened jump of a horned animal. i cannot save myself, and i will never be able to suppress a sob that engulfs me, a tearless sob, as i walk among you, and i will never be enlightened for the rest of the days left to live. coolabah, nr 30, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 102 bibliography baghiu, v. (2011). gustul înstrăinării. colecția opera omnia. editura tipo. bassnet, s. & bush, p. (eds.). (2008). the translator as writer. bloomsbury publishing plc. boase-beier, j. & holman, m. (eds.). (2014). the practices of literary translation: constraints and creativity. routledge: london & new york. bullock, o. (2019). cristina savin on vasile baghiu’s poetic chimerism. poetry in process. retrieved from https://poetry-in-process.com/2019/11/23/cristina-savin-on-vasile-baghiuspoetic-chimerism/. bush, p. (2013). memory, war and translation. mercè rodoreda’s in diamond square. in b. nelson & b. maher (eds.), perspectives on literature and translation: creation, circulation, reception (pp. 31-46). taylor & francis group. wilson, r. & gerber, l. (eds.). (2012). creative constraints: translation and authorship. monash university publishing. cristina savin is a freelance translator based in melbourne, australia. she is the french-toenglish translator of marie lion and philosopher marcel gauchet. her translations from romanian have been published in cordite poetry review, the aalitra review, poetry in process and bordertown. cristina is an assistant editor at the aalitra review and is currently undertaking a phd in translation studies at monash university. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 91 mistification: the dreadful side of cloud computing vicente bicudo de castro deakin university v.bicudodecastro@deakin.edu.au heitor coelho universidade do estado do rio de janeiro heitorcoelho@gmail.com danilo bantim frambach universidade do estado do rio de janeiro dan.bantim@gmail.com copyright© 2023 vicente bicudo de castro, heitor coelho, danilo bantim frambach. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: we live in a world increasingly dominated by technology, and there are many technological advances that we frequently use about which we know very little. among them, one we know mostly through metaphor stands out: “cloudification”. metaphors play a central role in our understanding of the concepts and ideas that present themselves, revealing for the first time something that was already there. in this way, we propose the term mistification as a more accurate expression of the current technocratic/technological status quo for which the terms “cloud” and “cloudification” are used. the proposed term – a neologism – conveys elements of gothic horror which, we hope, precisely capture the current experience of endusers of the cloud. using new dark age (bridle, 2018) as a point of departure, we propose an analogy between end-users of the cloud with players in a gothic horror role-playing game, namely the ravenloft campaign setting of dungeons & dragons. similarly to players in a coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 92 gothic horror game, end-users remain ignorant and helpless against all too powerful technocratic/technological giants and their pursuits. this article adds elements belonging to a horror role-playing game campaign setting to a wider cross-disciplinary discussion regarding human-machine interaction. keywords: cloud computing; gothic horror; roleplaying game; mists of ravenloft introduction in this article, we propose the terms mist and mistification as an expression of the current technocratic/technological status quo for which the terms “cloud” and “cloudification” are used. there is an ontological necessity to address the term “cloud” and its derivations due to the inaccuracy of such a metaphor regarding the use of technology, as discussed in new dark age (bridle, 2018). therefore, we use bridle (2018) as a point of departure for elaborating our argument. after discussing the inaccuracies of the cloud metaphor in describing the phenomenon imprecisely termed as “cloudification”, we propose an entirely different interpretation of our society’s current technocratic/technological status quo, one that evokes elements of gothic horror. we characterize our new approach for depicting our current situation as mistification. the proposed term – a neologism – conveys elements of gothic horror which, we hope, precisely capture the current experience of end-users of the cloud. we develop our proposition with an analogy between end-users of the cloud and players in a gothic horror role-playing game, namely the ravenloft campaign setting of dungeons & dragons. the analogy suits the proposition because players in role-playing games interact in an abstract setting, just as end-users of the cloud. ravenloft is a campaign setting where mists have such a prominent role, with properties similar to cloud computing. the remainder of this article is structured as follows: a section explaining our new dark age, as developed by bridle (2018), followed by a section on the importance of metaphor to our comprehension of concepts and real-world ideas. a further section provides the foundation of the concept of "cloud", which is followed by a section presenting the mists of ravenloft, a setting for dungeons & dragons. a section about the metaphor of mistification is then provided, followed by the conclusion of the article. light and darkness coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 93 when explaining his usage of the expression “new dark age” in the book named after it, james bridle explains he does not employ it in its usual sense of “absence or occlusion of knowledge”, but in reference to “an apparent inability to see clearly what is in front of us, and to act meaningfully, with agency and justice, in the world – and, through acknowledging this darkness, to seek new ways of seeing by another light” (bridle, 2018, p. 12). the questions bridle engages with and their apparent paradoxes are familiar. indeed, how can it be that, in such a technologically advanced, interconnected world, with hoards of information and knowledge available at the mere touch of a button, literally at our fingertips, one could rightfully talk of a dark age? are we not surrounded by the bright light of knowledge? a blinding light, perhaps: and so we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. in fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. the abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and postfactual politics1. it is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world. (2018, p. 12) a compelling statement, though slightly incomplete or, perhaps, imprecise, and for at least two reasons. first, in this passage2 bridle mistakenly conflates knowledge and information, but what is abundant is the latter, not the former. since information does not, in itself, constitute knowledge, and never can do so unless we have learned to think with, through and about said information, the imprecision actually seems to work in favour of bridle’s argument: this “deluge of data”, as kevin p. murphy called it over a decade ago (when it was much less intense; murphy, 2012, p. 1), drowns us to such an extent and in such ways as to actually deprive us of the knowledge it promises, paradoxically rendering us more ignorant instead. what is required, then, is precisely the ability to meaningfully make use of data, connecting it and giving it meaning – “systemic literacy”, as bridle calls it. the second reason, however, works against said argument or, at least, exposes its insufficiency: the darkness of the dark age is neither simply the lack of the light of knowledge, nor simply the shadow cast by its excess, but also the result of an alienating social structure that has developed extremely sophisticated techniques, as well as the corresponding technology, to deliberately hinder common access to knowledge – what zuboff (2019) has termed the coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 94 “division of knowledge”, mirroring the classic sociological and economic division of labour. this structure has effectively isolated social groups and individuals, obfuscated the functioning of economic, bureaucratic, technological, and many other aspects of social phenomena, and torn public debate apart, subsequently shaping the public sphere into a set of distinct and dreadful realms (a topic to which we will soon return). for now, it must be said that, imprecisions aside, bridle’s assessment of the challenges ahead of us is still sound: “if we do not understand how complex technologies function, how systems of technologies interconnect, and how systems of systems interact, then we are powerless within them” (2018, p. 8). and, indeed, we must admit that, even though this lack of understanding is, as we see it, not the sole cause of powerlessness, it is a fundamental one. a complete and thorough understanding of all technology, however, is impossible, perhaps in any society, given technology’s innate social and collective character, but even more so in ours, due to the scale and complexity (not to mention frequent deliberate opacity) of the many systems with which contemporary life is intertwined. if we are to escape such powerlessness, becoming able to think critically about technologies and technological systems and taking part in their elaboration and use, it would therefore be pointless to try to follow this unachievable path of “functional” understanding; what is required is what bridle describes as “systemic literacy”. more than understanding, this “true literacy [...] goes beyond a system’s functional use to comprehend its context and consequences” (2018, p. 8). technological education alone is, therefore, not enough, just as… learning to plumb a sink is not enough to understand the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, ageing infrastructure, and social policy that define, shape and produce actual life support systems in society [...] you should be able to understand technological systems without having to learn to code at all, just as one should not need to be a plumber to take a shit, nor to live without fear that your plumbing system might be trying to kill you. (2018, pp. 8-9). if not coding and functional understanding, then, how is systemic literacy to be achieved? “what is needed”, says bridle, “is not new technology, but new metaphors” (2018, p. 9). about metaphor in his book, bridle rationalizes the very justifiable need for new metaphors with but a few considerations, followed by many critiques of current metaphors and suggestions for novel ones. we will take particular interest in one of these critiques, surely the most dominant in the coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 95 book, which is that of the cloud. we would also like to briefly complement bridle’s considerations of the importance of metaphors, which he argues are essential for developing systemic literacy, i.e., for anyone who wishes to comprehend our technologically intertwined, data deluged, knowledge saturated world. metaphors would, as bridle proposes, allow for some form of comprehension of the world even when (technical, functional) understanding is not possible, but also beyond it; only through metaphor could anyone, “plumber” or “non-plumber”, hope to make sense of “the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, ageing infrastructure”, etc. in his words, we “often struggle to conceive of and describe the scope and scale of new technologies, meaning that we have trouble even thinking them.” metaphors, then, could provide us with “a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought” (2018, p. 9). that is, however, hardly all that metaphors can and even must do. although bridle is proposing a more specific use for metaphors, we believe it might be fruitful for us to expand our view beyond such specificities. the discussion about rhetoric and metaphor (a resource privileged by rhetoric) is, after all, an old one, and there is much to learn from even a quick review of it. such arguments can be traced back at least to greek antiquity, having its greatest exponents in plato and aristotle. the platonic position is evident in the republic, a work in which the philosopher structures all his criticism of the poetic discourse and the artistic posture in general. paradoxically, plato uses poetic and imagery resources to confirm his own concepts, using images to serve as confirmation of them, in a surprising demonstration of the power of metaphors in providing insightful reflection. aristotle, however, inaugurates the idea that metaphor, far from being a simple ornament of speech, is, in itself, a form of knowledge – a fact recognized and very well illustrated by umberto eco: in poetics, he says that understanding good metaphors means “knowing how to discern the akin or the similar concept”. the verb he used was theorêin, which stands for discerning, investigating, comparing, judging. but aristotle returned more slowly to this cognitive function of metaphor in the rhetoric, in which he said that what arouses admiration is pleasant because it makes us discover an unsuspected analogy, that is, it “places before our eyes” (as he expressed it) something that we had never noticed, so we are led to say “see, that's right, and i didn't know” (2016, p. 364, authors’ free translation).3 thus, aristotle understood a quasi-scientific function for good metaphors – not because they “discover” something that was already there, but in making it appear there for the first time; in other words, for creating a way of looking at things, as a cognitive resource. the aristotelian view of metaphors lost its strength in modernity, however. with hobbes and locke, but especially with hegel, what we see instead is contempt for metaphor. the latter even argues coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 96 that when we try to translate the dynamism and complexity of concepts into images, though apparently, we may seem to be sharing ideas and being didactic, in fact, we are destroying the strength and potency of the concept.4 it was only in contemporaneity that metaphor regained its place in scientific and philosophical thought, salvaging aristotle’s words: “(...) the soul never thinks without an image” (2014, p. 1499). in this broad conception, we can, alongside derrida, go so far as to affirm that nothing happens without metaphor: what is going on with metaphor? well, everything: there is nothing that does not go on with metaphor and through metaphor. any statement concerning anything whatsoever that goes on, metaphor included, will have been produced not without metaphor. there will not have been a metaphorics consistent enough to dominate all its statements. and what gets along without metaphor? nothing, therefore, and one ought to say instead that metaphor gets along without anything else, here without me, at the very moment when it appears to be going on by way of me. (2007, p. 50) thus, we see that metaphor is not merely a device with one or other important uses, but rather the proper form of our thought and language; even though it is best known as that which establishes relationships between the previously instituted senses, images and representations, in order to better explain the former, i.e., as an analogy, as an example, as a figure of speech. all this movement makes the process of metaphorical construction a living one, which establishes, each time, the meanings of words. as ricoeur states: (...) technical language and poetic language constitute the two ends of a single scale. one end is occupied by univocal meanings anchored in definitions. at the other end, no meaning stabilizes outside the ‘movement among meanings’ (48)5. certainly, the work of good authors tends to give words fixed values of usage – which is, without doubt, the origin of the false belief that words have a meaning, that they possess their meaning. so too, the theory of usage did not overthrow, but finally strengthened, the preconception of the proper meaning of words. but, as opposed to the usage that fixes their meanings, the literary use of words consists precisely in restoring ‘the interplay of the interpretative possibilities of the whole utterance’ (55). this is why the meaning of words has to be ‘guessed’ (53) every time; one can never build upon an acquired stability. the experience of translation is parallel to this. it shows that the sentence is not a mosaic, but an organism. to translate is to invent an identical constellation, in which each word is influenced by all the others and, bit by bit, profits from its relation to the whole language. (2004, pp. 90-91, our emphasis added) coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 97 being alive, like an organism, a metaphor creates and recreates language itself, subverting rules, but, simultaneously, producing new meanings that were not present before. with this analysis of metaphor’s philosophical characterization, we can now turn our attention towards two important questions: how do metaphors work? and, moreover, what makes a metaphor inadequate? as we have seen, metaphors point to displacements of meaning. they are tropes, that is, figures of speech that allow one thing to be said instead of another. they are evident in poetic language, for example, when comparing what we feel when seeing the one to which we are in love to “butterflies in our stomach.” but in everyday conversations, they often go unnoticed. thus, when we say: “they are arriving at the foot of the mountain” we resort to displacements of meanings since feet, at first, refer to people. such expressions, sometimes, become the usual (if not inevitable) way of referring to something – as if they are demetaphorized by use. they are, therefore, called dead or sleeping metaphors. along with his argumentation theory, claïm perelman (1971, 1982) argues that metaphor and analogy are inseparable. according to his theory, metaphors are condensed analogies. the example he gives comes, once again, from aristotle: we say that an old person is in “the night of life", that is a condensed version of the analogy “old age is to live what night is to day". in other words, what the analogy explains is that the metaphor condenses in one expression, giving more impact to the idea. furthermore, metaphors establish relations of similarity, not equality of the terms. it is to say that they do not refer to concepts such as true or false but to the efficiency in communicating an idea. doing so, they often hide some aspects. for example, when we say that a soccer game is like chess – emphasizing the rational and logical in a coach’s strategy – we hide the human creativity and the players’ individual ability and geniality, which often decides the result of the game. however, metaphors show fragility. unlike demonstrative reason, metaphors do not require the interlocutor’s adoption of the idea, allowing them to work with it in unforeseen ways. for instance, faced with the consensus that light is positive, and dark is negative, one could say that an excess of light can blind in the same way as its complete absence. even though they have that “instability”, metaphors are, like we said, the proper form of our thought and language. in this way, we can argue that they are a fundamental part of our culture, which forms us as humans. in metaphors we live by (2003), george lakoff and mark johnson argue in that way, demonstrating the whole that metaphors have in our perception. in this way, the strength of some metaphors resides in the fact that their broad acceptance imposes, as well, a set of conclusions, ideas, concepts, and even other metaphors. metaphors such as these are named root metaphors by max black (1962), and conceptual metaphors by lakoff and johnson (2003), but we prefer the term fundamental metaphors. those three related terms refer to metaphors that pretend to enforce an ontology and a worldview. as said by perelman, all philosophical reasoning “develops by an argumentation that aims to have certain analogies and metaphors accepted as central elements in a world view” (1982, p. 125). in other words, instead coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 98 of starting from a metaphor that, in the end, must be eliminated, philosophical reasoning will try to offer the reasons that will justify the preference given, in the last analysis, to a certain metaphor to the detriment of another. in this context, we should talk about “metaphorical truth”, i.e., one that expresses reality more adequately. clouds are, in their own way, a fundamental metaphor for our present-day digital capitalism. and, as we will argue, the metaphor of the cloud shows a very physical and demanding structure built to store data as weightless and fluffy. that is a superficial understanding of the clouds, which, in a way, makes us not fear its hidden agenda, seeing it as a technology made only for our benefit6. nevertheless, this broader understanding of the importance of metaphor allows us to better weigh the importance of a metaphor that is so central to present-day digital capitalism, and to whose critique bridle has rightfully dedicated much consideration: that of the cloud. heavy clouds it is easy to understand why bridle turns his attention to the cloud, as it constitutes a perfect example of the darkening produced by our dark age. it is a metaphor so pervasive, so enmeshed in our daily lives, yet so little understood, that we barely even seem to realize it is a metaphor. the cloud has recreated the language of the internet and has done so in such a way that it has become nigh impossible to display the current technological status quo in anything but a benevolent light. today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numinous, something almost impossible to grasp. we connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. we pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. it is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. it is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. (bridle, 2018, p. 9) in a seeming testament to this, any superficial investigation of available definitions of cloud computing will almost exclusively produce answers both vague and benign. especially if we rely on tech companies themselves to do the answering. microsoft azure’s what is cloud computing? a beginner's guide (2022), for instance, wastes little time in mixing cloud computing with the internet itself: “cloud computing”, it tells us, “is the delivery of computing services – including servers, storage, databases, networking, coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 99 software, analytics, and intelligence – over the internet (‘the cloud’) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale”. techtarget’s definition is similarly wide: “cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet” (chai & bigelow, 2021). and, last but not least, amazon’s aws (2022), the world’s largest provider of cloud hosting services, offers us some blatantly need-to-know information for would-be customers that simultaneously binds the cloud to their product and its way of functioning: “cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of it resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing”. the problem may still remain when we move from introductory websites to introductory books, as evidenced by cloud computing for dummies’ definition of cloud computing, complete with a borderline advertising finale: cloud computing is a method of providing shared computing resources, including applications, computing, storage, networking, development, and deployment platforms as well as business processes. cloud computing makes computing resources easier to use by providing standardization and automation. (kirsch & hurwitz, 2020, p. 8) only when searching for definitions on works aimed at adept readers, we are reminded of cloud computing’s complexity and very objective materiality. the us national institute of standards and technology (nist) defines it as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services)”7 (mell & grance, 2011, p. 2). yet nist’s purposely arid definition does little to convey an adequate measure of the influence which cloud computing exerts on our lives and society as a whole. it is only when we resort to other authors who, as bridle, aim for a more critical approach to technology, that we will find language that conveys more adequately the scale of cloudification, describing it as: … a terraforming project, covering the globe in subterranean wires and switches and overhead satellite arrays, simultaneously centralizing and decentralizing computing and data storage and the social relations that depend on them (and vice versa). (bratton, 2015, p. 232) yet terraformation here is no metaphor: bratton means it quite literally, as he will often cite the “billions” of machines that compose the cloud and, more importantly, harshly describe the toils it demands of earth and its numerous consequences. and that is a big part of the reasons why the cloud is a bad metaphor, as bridle puts it: the cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. the cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapour and radio waves, where everything just works. it is a physical coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 100 infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. the cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. the cloud doesn’t just have a shadow; it has a footprint. absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialise, borrow books, and vote. thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. (bridle, 2018, p. 10)8 piercing the obfuscation of the cloud metaphor, it can be asserted that cloud computing is not merely a new and useful gimmick (mattern, 2016, starosielski, 2014), but represents a “paradigm shift from local to network-centric computing and network-centric content where distant data centres provide the computing and storage resources”, as well as how, in “this new paradigm”, “users relinquish control of their data and code to cloud service providers” (marinescu, 2018, p. 3). the “cloud” has pull: it attracts data, code and, ultimately, influence and power to itself; simultaneously, the cloud has length, extending itself as far as it can in order to appear and draw anything from anywhere. that which it attracts can then be rendered to become a part of the cloud: birthday pictures, a poem, medical registers, now cloud-hosted; an online purchase, a cash deposit, a professional meeting, now performed via cloud-based services – the list could go on indefinitely. this process of attracting, extending and rendering is what can be roughly termed “cloudification”. the cloud’s opacity is deliberate – and convenient to big tech, to say the least. there are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what’s inside the cloud. what evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else’s infrastructure. [...] the cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. (bridle, 2018, p. 10-11) in spite of this precise and insightful critique, bridle does not try to follow his own advice and offers a new metaphor to replace the “cloud”. on the contrary, he attempts to salvage it, in a way, to “turn the figure of the cloud over once more in order to produce a new metaphor” and, hopefully, to “supplant base computational thinking with cloudy thinking”. although an analysis of this endeavour might warrant worthy considerations, we would rather refrain from them and simply point out, instead, that the thing designated as “cloud computing” remains in want of the new metaphors whose urgency bridle so strongly emphasized – and, following that, to present our own attempt at offering one. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 101 the land of the mists the metaphor we seek to offer, however, unlike cloudification, is not inspired by an everyday meteorological phenomenon, taking its motives, instead, from a role-playing campaign setting and, through it, from gothic horror literature and art in general. it is to these origins that we must turn now, before returning to the metaphor proper. ravenloft is a gothic horror campaign setting for dungeons & dragons, a role-playing game. a role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters and actions taken succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules, such as dungeons & dragons, whose application is determined via collective arbitration, usually led by an arbiter/narrator designated as game or dungeon master (viz. mackay, 2017). a campaign setting, such as ravenloft, is a fictional world which serves as a setting for adventures in role-playing games. ravenloft has been an official campaign setting for multiple dungeons & dragons roleplaying material and adaptations (e.g., hickman and hickman, 1983, connors and miller, 1997, bicudo de castro, 2018, crawford et al., 2016)9 and the setting for novels (e.g., deweese, 1994, coulson, 1994, cunningham, 1994) and video games.10 ravenloft followed the path of other gothic horror games, such as the acclaimed call of cthulhu (petersen, 1981), in challenging the players in different ways from traditional fantasy adventures. throughout its history, the terms ravenloft, land of the mists, demiplane of dread, and domains of dread have been used interchangeably. the demiplane of dread consists of a collection of domains, brought together by a mysterious powerful force known only as the dark powers. the mists of ravenloft could appear and draw anything from anywhere in the universe (i.e., other dungeon & dragons campaign settings) into the demiplane of dread. although the exact nature of the dark powers is deliberately kept vague, it is evident they are drawn towards evil, as nesmith et al. (1994a) explain: the dark powers have some interest in the evil that beings do inside and outside the misty borders of ravenloft. acts of great evil and malice can result in transportation to the dark land. (…) there is a common perception that the dark powers tempt people into evil acts. nothing could be further from the truth. no one has ever been sought out by the dark powers and offered a great reward in exchange for the undertaking of an evil act. rather, the dark powers are always watching for evil done for evil's sake. they constantly probe time and space with their unimaginable senses. they seem to make no move to foster evil, but act only to reward or punish (depending upon one's point of view) those who have already begun to follow a path of darkness. (nesmith et al., 1994a, pp. 16-17) coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 102 it must be noted that, despite the association with evilness, the mists of ravenloft, as instruments of the dark powers, do not tempt people into evil acts; understanding the mists is conditional to understanding the dark powers: exactly what the mists are or how they function is unknown. (...) the truth will almost certainly remain unknown until such time as the true nature of the dark powers is revealed. (connors and miller, 1997) the main elements of gothic horror relevant to this analysis are ignorance and helplessness. whereas helplessness represents how the players generally confront creatures and situations far more powerful than any they might be reasonably expected to deal with, hence being powerless to completely obliterate such threats, the element of ignorance pertains to the lack of information available to players, as doubts enhance the feelings of weakness and vulnerability: no matter how much the players deduce or how many answers they uncover, they must always believe that other crucial tidbits exist that they do not know about. this may very well be untrue, but they should always feel that they are missing some important piece of the puzzle. (connors and miller, 1997) other elements present in gothic horror are isolation, alienation, and contrasts (connors and miller, 1997). isolation means players may have no hope of outside assistance; hence, they depend upon themselves and their own resources and often have no route of retreat (e.g., “they stand with their backs against the wall”). although alienation might resemble isolation; it means the players feel cut off from help even when surrounded by people (e.g., “discovering something that no one else will believe, cultural differences keep the players from interacting with the locals etc.”). contrasts enhance the differences perceived by the players, hence things that appear wholesome and happy by day become frightening and menacing at night, and evil seems even more disturbing when placed side by side with innocence. the dark powers and its mists provide a baseline for helplessness and ignorance in ravenloft because it is a power too great to be subdued and its nature is beyond comprehension. the dark powers never reveal themselves; hence the mists are drawn to the front stage in ravenloft as the instruments of the dark powers. deweese (1994) narrates the experience of entering the mists: he ran, but even that was silent and dreamlike, and he began to wonder: did this place have no end? had he escaped into the mists? or simply been trapped by them? (deweese, 1994, p. 132) entering the mists of ravenloft is like entering “in a bewildering, foggy dream world, where time and space seem twisted and tangled.” (nesmith et al., 1994a, p. 16). the experience of being captured by the mists varies: coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 103 larson paused, wondering how best to answer this. "i came from a land called cormyr," he said slowly. "how far it is from here, i do not know. as a scholar and bard, i travel much. one day while i was rowing a skiff, a strange mist covered the river." (cunningham, 1994, p. 58) one moment he was about to capture an important stronghold, slaughter its inhabitants, and plunder at his leisure. the conquest would enhance his rapidly growing political strength. but a peculiar fog separated hans, his three veteran fighters, and wilm from the rest of the army. and when the mist lifted, the five found themselves in this alien realm, barovia. (coulson, 1994, pp. 193-194) as noted above, often words such as strange, peculiar, dreamlike and bewildering are attributed to the mists, and people captured by the mists are reportedly trapped and disoriented in a foggy dream world where time and space seem twisted and tangled. mistification metaphors produce new meanings that, before, were not present there. following bridle’s (2018) claims that it is necessary to build new metaphors that help us to think about current technological concepts and the complex production of data, we propose the land of the mists is a suitable simulacrum of the cloudification phenomenon, therefore arguing mistification to be a more suitable metaphor for such phenomenon. the word mystification derives from mystery, a word originating from the greek word μῠστήρῐον (mustḗrion), whereas our proposed neologism mistification derives from mist, a word which shares the same root of the greek word ομίχλη (omíchli).11 using the term mystification would impose an already established message limited to mystery and secrecy, whereas the term mistification suggests a metaphor which draws elements from gothic horror and, more specifically, the land of the mists.12 the elements of gothic horror that are pervasive in the land of the mists, and the properties attributed to the mists of ravenloft themselves, capture the current experience of the end-users subject to cloudification. this argument is supported by juxtaposing the elements of gothic horror used in ravenloft and the properties of the mists of ravenloft (connors and miller, 1997, hollar and lilavivat, 2005) with bridle’s (2018) criticism of the cloud. as a gothic horror setting, ignorance and helplessness abound in the land of the mists. in a similar fashion, most end-users often do not understand “how complex technologies function, how systems of technologies interconnect, and how systems of systems interact”. as bridle coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 104 (2018) argues, such ignorance makes end-users helpless; to that, we add it also leaves them very often in a state of constant anxiety and paranoia. it is interesting to note bridle chooses to use the synonym powerlessness instead of helplessness for exploring the power relationship between end-users and technocrats; or, more specifically, how most end-users are not on top of this. end-users, much like the victims of the mists, though understanding little of the way it operates, manage to grasp that they are not on top, that someone else is calling the shots – someone whose identity and goals are not clear to them and who wields some sort of mysterious, nearly incomprehensible power – and this may leave them understandably scared. the land of the mists resembles the reality to which end-users of the cloud are subjected, and cloudification more specifically, at least in its currently established form, resembles the functioning of the mists of ravenloft (hollar and lilavivat, 2005, pp. 11-12) – in at least four aspects. firstly, the mists constantly shape and reshape borders, both on and offline, as the wars over internet territory reflect and condition the real world geographical disputes; being a decisive element of planetary-scale computation, mist, both distorts and reforms modern jurisdiction and political geography and produces new forms of these in its own image. it perforates and transcends some borders while introducing and re-thickening others at new scales and in greater quantity (bratton, 2015, p. 23). secondly, the mists can transport beings or lands from place to place within the internet, and it goes without saying that physical distance is now practically ephemeral within the digital world. thirdly, the mists can capture beings or lands from outside the internet; this happens as data can be (and often are) brought to the internet without consent (e.g., “doxing”, publishing private information about a particular individual on the internet; google street view, google maps, and google earth capturing all imagery of public spaces and making it available on the internet; and all the vast array of practices zuboff designates as “rendition”, cf. 2019, ch. 8 and 9). fourthly, the mists can distort time, which happens as internet neutrality becomes contested and different end-users experience the same content at different connection speeds.13 mistification entails a contemporary gothic representation that expresses anxieties associated with our time, viz. globalgothic (byron, 2013, smith and hughes, 2013, botting and spooner, 2015). the emergence of the globalgothic movement can be attributed to the changing perceptions of time and space, accelerated by the phenomenon of globalization as the collapse of borders and emergence of transnational and economic unions, as well as anxieties about how the impact of transnational capitalism and the workings of technology have challenged the stability of cultural, political, and national systems and structures (van elferen, 2013, curtis, 2015). there is a similarity between the mists of ravenloft and the globalgothic quasi-sentient attribution to capital: coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 105 in its ghostly form, capital moves outside of what we once might have considered a real world. its disembodied and spectral presence now signals something other than an invisible hand conferring or withholding wealth. the new monster operates autonomously, in an inhuman way, disconnected from any relation that might once have benefited humanity. (botting and edwards, 2013, p. 15) such anxieties and feelings of helplessness will not always stand out. indeed, users of the mists will often feel more empowered than diminished, and not without reason: mistified computation offers many convenient resources, such as safely storing files; remotely accessing music, video, text or games; or simultaneously working on a co-authored paper. but here again, the metaphor holds, as the dark powers have ever shown themselves perfectly willing to grant power to those who would accept their terms – even to those who do not even realize there were terms to be accepted in the first place (viz. nesmith et al., 1994b, connors and miller, 1997). reasons to feel anxious and helpless will abound, however, for those who look for them. be it the mundane fear of losing access to a favored book, song or movie, lost to the shifting wills of the mists of streaming services; be it that of losing being locked out of accounts and losing every data associated with it, under vague allegations of term violations (e.g. taylor, 2018), and being suddenly reminded of how that convenience, that power, never truly belonged to you; be it, even, the vague perception of the mists’ appetite, as it absorbs metadata about each thing and each relation of exchange, all translated by algorithmic militations of cognition, data semantics, manufacture, demand, and response optimization as it links these across continents, compressing and expanding economic rhythms and cycles. (bratton, 2015, p. 232) as the mists redefine borders both virtual and geographical, demanding more and more structure, energy and labour, extracting heavy tolls in natural resources and offering a generous contribution to climate change (monserrate, 2022), those of us who try to figure out the ways of mistification will likely wonder if we are not feeling as anxious and helpless as we should. conclusion in this article, we analysed the role of metaphor in our comprehension of concepts and ideas. as said by aristotle: “the soul never thinks without an image” (2014, p. 1499). the process of metaphorical construction is a living one, establishing language itself, but also creating and recreating meanings that, initially, were not there. so, inspired by this living process, we coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 106 propose the term mistification as a more accurate metaphor depicting the current technocratic/technological status quo associated with the cloudification phenomenon. this proposition is built on criticism from new dark age (bridle, 2018) and elements of gothic horror which are juxtaposed to the current experience of end-users of the cloud. the first step into understanding the conditions to which end-users and society are subject to is by acknowledging our situation. bridle (2018) understands the panacea begins not by developing a new technology, but by describing this relationship: what is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought. (bridle, 2018, p. 9) the proposed metaphor of mistification implies that technology end-users are experiencing a gothic horror reality. therefore, it urges society to question the power relationship between end-users and technocrats. although ravenloft is a campaign setting for a role-playing game, where players are subject to the whims of the dark powers and its instruments (i.e., the mists of ravenloft), similar to the current experience of end-users of the cloud. similar to players in a gothic horror game, end-users remain ignorant and helpless against all too powerful technocratic/technological giants and their pursuits. this article adds elements belonging to a horror role-playing game campaign setting to a wider cross-disciplinary discussion regarding human-machine interaction (viz. barclay, 2019). albeit the existence of powerful and mysterious entities being commonplace in gothic horror games (e.g., the dark powers, the red death, cthulhu, etc.), it is worth noting we are not examining the mythology-inspired chthulucene (haraway, 2016, hodges, 2022). further, we are aware that our article’s proposition is necessarily open-ended; 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(2013). ‘globalgoth?: unlocatedness in the musical home’, in g byron (ed.), globalgothic, manchester university press, manchester, uk, pp. 91-104, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mbfxg.12>. warren, k 2011, mistification, watkins publishing, london, uk. zuboff, s 2019, the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, public affairs, new york, us. vicente bicudo de castro is a senior lecturer at deakin business school who engages with business and interdisciplinary research. heitor coelho is an assistant professor at rio de janeiro’s state university (uerj) who engages with philosophy of education, political philosophy and technologies of education research. danilo bantim frambach is an assistant professor at rio de janeiro’s state university (uerj) who engages with philosophy of education, pop philosophy and technologies of education research. 1 our dark age, it would seem, repeats yet again (as farce?) that reversion of enlightenment into myth which adorno and horkheimer long ago pointed out (2002, esp. pp. 1-4). 2 and in a passage that preceded it: “the greatest carrier wave of progress for the last few centuries has been the central idea of the enlightenment itself: that more knowledge – more information – leads to better decisions” (bridle, 2018, p. 12). 3 in the original: nella poetica diceva che capire le buone metafore vuole dire “sapere scorgere il simile o il concetto affine”. il verbo che usava era theoreîn, che vale per scorgere, investigare, paragonare, giudicare. su http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mvk5r.5 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-closes-users-accounts-customers-fight-back-2018-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-closes-users-accounts-customers-fight-back-2018-4 http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mbfxg.12 coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 111 questa funzione conoscitiva della metafora aristotele tornava con maggiore ampiezza nella retorica dove diceva che è gradevole ciò che suscita ammirazione perché ci fa scoprire un’analogia insospettata, vale a dire ci “mette sotto gli occhi” (così si esprimeva) qualcosa che non avevamo mai notato, per cui si è portati a dire “guarda, è proprio così, eppure non lo sapevo”. 4 it is important to note that, even in modernity, there were authors who disagreed with this view. among them, george berkeley stands out. by refusing to blame our natural faculties for our failure to understand reality, berkeley paved the way for an explicit acceptance of the use of metaphors, analogies, and the like as essential to science (cf. berkeley, 2017, especially the seventh dialogue, section thirteen, p. 124). 5 the numbers in this passage refer to the work of i.a. richards, the philosophy of rhetoric. 6 this paper itself could be named as an example. using cloud computing, more specifically cloud storage and services, allowed this paper to be written by academics located in different countries over a much shorter timespan than it would have taken 20 or even 10 years ago when such technologies were not yet so widely available and accessible. 7 therefore, according to this definition, to which we will adhere going forward, cloud computing encompasses resources such as cloud storage, cloud hosting, cloud-based software etc. 8 bridle himself has dedicated significant effort to render this structure more visible through his uncanny artistic work, such as with “the nor” project <https://jamesbridle.com/works/the-nor>. 9 the campaign setting called masque of the red death (connors, 1994) is an adaptation of ravenloft to the victorian era, named after edgar allan poe’s homonymous short story. the campaign setting keeps the gothic horror elements of ravenloft and the dark powers replaced by an entity called the red death. however, the scenario lacks the mists, which are so prominent in ravenloft. 10 laudable examples are ravenloft: strahd's possession and ravenloft: stone prophet, both published by strategic simulations, inc. (ssi) in 1994 and 1995, respectively. 11 the origins of the words mystery and mist were checked using google's english dictionary, which is provided by oxford languages, the dictionary.com, and the english-language wiktionary. 12 it is worth noting the term mistification has been used previously in regarding as a power used to keep the horrors of reality hidden from the world (viz. warren, 2011), however, not associated with the mists of ravenloft and its properties. 13 although not directly related to cloud computing itself, another aspect of the land of mists that could adequately represent the internet’s – and most especially social media’s – functioning, has to do with isolation and alienation. the mists’ function of effectively barring movement and communication between distinct domains, shaped by the dark powers’ designs, is not unlike how algorithmic regulation (morozov, 2014) shapes social media’s filter bubbles (pariser, 2011) and echo chambers, with known and dreadful consequences for democratic practices. this claim, however, would require further investigations. https://jamesbridle.com/works/the-nor coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 on utopus’ uterus: the colonisation of the body and the birth of patriarchal utopia in thomas more’s utopia almudena machado jiménez university of jaén amachado@ujaen.es copyright© 2021 almudena machado jiménez. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: following european exploration of the atlantic, origin myths could now be projected onto a possible future and ‘undiscovered’ lands. often the island proved the most suitable design for these projections to ensure the ‘perfection’ of the community and avoidance of corruptive external influences. these novel conceptualisations envisaged new social constructs to explain human nature, however, they continued to be overtly patriarchal. gender essentialism and colonisation of the female body was an integral part of reproducing traditional utopian imaginings. thomas more’s utopia exemplifies this archetypal gendered conceptualisation of the ideal island society where female education serves to reinforce patriarchal structures and women are essentialised in terms of their fertility. this paper addresses the relationship between the geography of utopia and the insularity and confinement of women as dominated ‘matrixial entities’ which is further reinforced by utopian cartography. in this context, i assert that the process of colonisation and islanding unsettles the immutability of these patriarchal constructs and exposes the dystopian origins of utopia. keywords: patriarchy; utopia; colonisation; thomas more; insularity introduction: patrogenesis and the appropriation of the khôra beyond being a literary device, utopia is an impulse that moulds our reality (bloch, 1986). sargisson agrees, asserting that said impulse is “grounded in our capacity to fantasize beyond our experience, and in our ability to rearrange the world around us” (1996, p. 1). therefore, the utopian imagination goes beyond mere examination and seeks to transform the world in a way the individual understands. however, the predominant and most unfluctuating form of utopianism that has persisted is the patriarchal utopia; distinguished by its desire for perfection and immutability. the mechanism of patriarchal utopia to transform reality is based on the fallacy of dependent individuality (hernando, 2018), mailto:amachado@ujaen.es coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 whereby the fantasy represented in origin myths serves to explain the world under parameters that make the individual’s existence in the universe bearable and selfgoverning. in order to sustain this belief system, women’s relational bonds are exploited to guarantee men’s sense of belonging to the community, despite rejecting their dependence on women. hence, women’s relational roles have been concealed under certain mythical constructs to represent female identity as deprived of any form of individuality and not to compromise the fallacy of the individual’s discourse (ibid., p. 126). origin myths, particularly in the classic western tradition, conceive the world and human nature subject to patriarchal constraints. patrogenesis, for instance, is a recurrent mechanism in patriarchal utopias to understand the world through patriliny and deny any maternal power. these myths usually portray male pregnancy either physically, e.g. athena’s birth, or mentally, as in the case of the abrahamic god (aristarkhova, 2012). however, patriarchal utopias actually need female corporeality to embody such a fantasy and reproduce, both in biological terms and in a relational sense, a substantial image of the world. such mythical patriarchal constructs created to explain human nature permeate and reify patriarchal social mores at their time of writing and for future generations of readers. the planning of a patriarchal utopia as a delimited and organised space supports attempts to structure nature according to individual will in order to control it. it also seeks to attain perfection over the dynamism of nature’s cycle of life. in one of the earliest utopian texts, plato’s timeaus, he uses the term khôra1 to refer to the terrain onto which ideas are projected. it has also been interpreted as referring to the matrix, space or interval where events occur (see park, 2014; derrida, 1995). plato refers to the khôra as the maternal, “the nurse of all becoming” (plato, c. 360 b.c./1925, 49a). the word ‘matrix’ shares its root with ‘matter’ and ‘mother’ and as such ‘matrixial entities’ are generative spaces characterised by a paradoxical position between productivity and receptivity (aristarkhova, 2012, p. 11). specifically, aristarkhova defines the ‘matrix’ as hospitable, which makes it possible to engender whatever is put in place: “it is a term that indicates how we imagine what forms are and/or come to be” (ibid., p. 16). throughout this paper the term ‘matrixial entity’ is used to describe the space upon which utopia is projected. there is a link therefore, between the land and the ‘mother’ as both share a gestative power that could signal “an archaic, originary ‘feminine’ that may be reclaimable for feminism or for women, or an alternate, anti-hegemonic conception of ‘woman’” (bianchi, 2014, p. 106). in order to avoid any potential transgression of the utopian uniformity of patriarchal womanhood, wright (2004) and bianchi (2014) agree that plato erases any trace of femininity by making khôra as invisible and passive as possible. while plato opts to erase family relationships in his republic, more imbues utopia with the patriarchal family. it is my assertion that both means of planning utopia ultimately rely on biological essentialism that justifies female subservience and women’s codification as ‘breeders’ in a patriarchal utopia. further, the education systems in these fictional utopias serve to reinforce the patriarchal hegemony. specifically, the city-state of plato’s republic, kallipolis, provides genderless education to its citizens, but it is highly censored and transfigured so that it satisfies the philosopher-king’s ideal of humanity. the fortified kallipolis promises the preservation of this utopian project and the successful conquest of the woman/land, but its non-insular geographical space could coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 endanger its stability. alternatively, the islandness of utopia offers more the opportunity to physically separate his perfect society from the rest of humanity and thereby establish and sustain his patriarchal society. correcting nature’s defect: thomas more on female education with the advent of atlantic exploration, utopianism influenced a novel approach to geopolitics. europeans executed utopian projects in remote lands overseas where; [...] the mythical and the real became entwined and nurtured each other to give shape to the undying hope that new and better worlds existed, ideal places that were actually being marked both on fantastic and on accurate maps. (reis, 2006, p. 33) and yet, these utopian exercises were inevitably accompanied by the dystopian horrors of the aboriginal peoples already living in these invaded spaces. the brutality of colonisation for the sake of utopia would entail the eradication of indigenous voices both within the narratives and within the community (e.g. see adhikari, 2017, on the genocide of the aboriginal canary islanders). yet, renaissance utopian ideas of humanist thinking praised classical scholarship and human individuality, but also revisited the tenets of women as patriarchal utopia’s ‘matrixial entity’. thomas more was perhaps the most important humanist in england, particularly liberal in his views regarding education. in several letters, more insisted on providing women with the same knowledge as men, and he actively instilled his daughters with classical education in his household (ross, 2009). while ross considers whether more advances a proto-feminist view on female education, this paper considers the patriarchal imagery employed to depict such intellectual growth as utopian. more reiterates the importance of women learning “the principles of holy living” (more, to candide, p. 129) to invigorate and enable them to maintain interesting conversations with men. however, there is no reciprocity in the communication. wives are not allowed to become “reproachful sorrower[s]”, and they are expected to bring joy to their husband “if anxious grief depresses [them]” (ibid., p. 130). women’s matrixial entity provides the spatiality for utopia, although only after undergoing a reformation through education that delimits their fluid and ambiguous identity under the utopian vision of the individual: the female is shaped according not merely to the husband’s “tastes” but in fact according to his way of viewing the world, his principles, his way of behaving, […] the man in question selects as his wife a girl who is, from his perspective, virtually unformed (“rudem”) material and therefore able to be shaped by him into a form expressing his desire, that is to say, educated by him into the likeness of his ideal mulier economica. (cousins, 2009, p. 82) thus, education is seen as a double-edged sword. it provides women with the same knowledge as men have, which ross argues is “a subversive strategy for making the unusual seem acceptable and even praiseworthy” (2009, p. 7). conversely, aughterson maintains that this is a modern myth, inasmuch as the humanist mode of education only coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 intensified the existing gender split between public and private spaces: “the potentially radical agenda of educational humanism is appropriated to the conventional model of femininity” (1995, p. 162). the potential for female individuality is inhibited because women lack the power of social promotion and mobility outside the household, becoming ornamental, an extension of the man’s patrimony (ross, 2009, pp. 51–52). as capp (2003, p. 17) concludes, this patriarchal arrangement eventually forces female intellectuals to internalise their own inferiority despite the education received. the reformation of female identity through education finds a comparison in the cultivation of land; both entities in need of correction of their natural flaws: if it be true that the soil of woman’s brain be bad, and apter to bear bracken than corn, by which saying many keep women from study, i think, on the contrary, that a woman’s wit is on that account all the more diligently to be cultivated, that nature’s defect may be redressed by industry. (more, “letter”, p. 199; italics added) being the soil where the seeds of patriarchal thinking are planted, women become the space where utopian ideals are inseminated and germinated. the parallelism between the land and the body is rendered by a common colonisation process. nature is conquered and reimagined under new parameters. this colonisation of the female entity occurs in two stages: the demonisation of her nature and a purification process, in which her identity is reformed. it is at this stage of the colonisation that the oppressor’s ideology is instilled in her to ensure the colonisation of the mind, so that the colonised eventually “see the world and themselves in the same way as the colonisers do” (nyström, 2018, p. 32). the colonisation of matrixial entities results in what sargent refers to as flawed utopia, “because we are all flawed, utopia must be designed to allow us to correct those flaws, but that process itself produces a flawed utopia” (sargent, 2003, p. 225). utopia’s insularity and the geopolitics of patriarchal utopia more’s utopia (1516) served as a narrative experiment to display his personal utopian vision and laicise eternity (suvin, 2003, p. 190). this vision has provided inspiration for later utopian societies and the fictional map of utopia has since been used as a blueprint to build new realities (e.g. see kinane, 2016). and, although it is revolutionary in many aspects, it is clear that the conceptualisation of the utopian woman was subjugated to gendered hierarchical relations within the family and the city. such interdependence between these patriarchal structures recalls grosz’s notion of the social constitution of the body; the family influences the social geography of the city, while the elements of the city simultaneously shape our subjectivity and that of others, organizing our power relations and the distribution of public and private spaces (1998, pp. 47–48). it has been argued that more’s ideal community was based on values from christian morality and the structure of a happy patriarchal family (bammer, 1991, p. 18; ferns, 1999, p. 54; serras, 2002; theis, 2009, p. 2), characterised by the patria potestas (power of a father) and female modesty and muteness in the narrative.2 coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 utopia is imagined as a remote island in the south, as stated by hythlodaeus, the principal protagonist. the etymology of hythlodaeus is ambiguous and open to opposite interpretations. while hythlos clearly means “nonsense”, daios can refer to “cunning, expert” or “destructive, damaging” (wilson, 1992, p. 33). thus, the protagonist’s account may be interpreted as mere nonsense, or, on the contrary, as a logical possibility of sociability. as his name suggests, the narrative of utopia is delivered with irony and wit in many aspects, while also including several inconsistencies in its discourse. nonetheless, for more, “utopia is serious political theory, not just an imaginative and satiric treatment of the human condition” (grace, 2009, p. 179), so he certainly used this imaginary land as a space for moral and social criticism. by feminising the land, this utopian fantasy casts the world as “spatially spread for male exploration, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of massive imperial power” (mcclintock, 1995, p. 23). therefore, the land on which utopia is founded epitomises the ideal utopian woman as khôra, or matrixial entity, and the colonisation of ‘new’ land allegorically represents the violation of female nature by industry. in this context, burwell postulates that the allusion of woman as nature rests on the duality of motherhood and victimhood (1997, p. 77). this occurs at two geographic levels in utopia: firstly the transformation of abraxa into an island through the digging of a channel is representative of an act of violence, while the emphasis of tending to productive gardens is close to the generative qualities of motherhood. the lands unto which utopia is projected are often regarded as ‘empty’ even if there is a pre-existing population, “as the original occupants are lacking the rights to the land for one reason or another (they are not organised into nation states, they are not christians, they are not farmers)” (nyström, 2018, p. 38). on both sides of the equator, it is true, extending almost as far as the space covered by the orbit of the sun there lie vast empty wastelands, scorched with perpetual heat. the whole region is barren and ugly, rugged and uncultivated, inhabited by wild beasts and serpents and by people who are no less wild than the beasts and no less dangerous. (more, utopia, p. 13) this description of the land as virgin echoes the patriarchal representation of the virgin mother; a representation that requires passivity and threatens regression while seemingly invites sexual assertion and awaits impregnation (ferns, 1999, p. 45). similarly, mcclintock agrees that the gendered dispossession of the virgin body transforms it into an empty space “void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language and reason” (1995, p. 30). moreover, representing the land as virgin land justifies the “white man’s burden” master plot, also referred to as “development/industrial production”, because the intrusion of industry/man into nature is depicted as a “noble cause” to improve the life of its inhabitants (nyström, 2018, p. 39). this idea recalls the pygmalion trope of perfecting female nature: “the idea where ‘raw materials’ are transformed into ‘finished products’ is the linear production apparatus of modern industrial production” (ibid., p. 38). in the time after the violent conquest, the resulting state is formed by “glorious, powerful and naturalised institutions” (ibid., p. 40), creating homogeneity within the state. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 more’s utopian land presents a similar shift from the woman/mother to the virgin/mother under emerging patriarchal institutions. initially known as abraxa, the continental land was invaded by utopus, who separated the southernmost part by digging a channel to make an island, now known as utopia. this was done to ensure utopia’s possession and prevent corruption by its previous inhabitants: but utopus, who conquered the island and named it after himself (for before that time it had been called abraxa) and who brought its crude and rustic mob to a level of culture and humanity beyond almost all other mortals, after he won the victory at his first assault, had a channel cut fifteen miles wide at the point where the land adjoined the continent, and thus caused the sea to flow all around the land. (more, utopia, p. 53; italics added) the possession of utopia is the triumph of man’s industry over nature, and the imposition of individual utopian values on the terrain. this strategy gives total control to king utopus, whose decision to change the geographical space and the name of the land casts him as an almost god-like character. the origin of the word abraxa alludes to the gnostic divine entity “abraxas” or “abrasax”, whose most relevant quality is its magical and dynamic nature. abraxas is the deity of good and evil, of life and death (ziolkowski, 2007).3 abraxa is demonized along with its inhabitants; therefore, the reformation process is justified as utterly necessary. abraxa dies and, in bammer’s words, “king utopus symbolically births his own utopia by cutting off the umbilical cord that had joined it to the mainland” (1991, p. 13). a new virgin land is born, but only after utopus baptises it utopia. mcclintock remarks that the naming of the land entails a retrospective surrogate birthing ritual, for the land was already in existence and peopled (1995, p. 29). the baptism of the island as utopia recalls the roman tradition of patria potestas, naming daughters after their fathers to show the symbolic property and lineage of fatherhood. serras agrees with this idea in stating that: utopian women are once again defined according to the roles men attributed them throughout their lives […] that is, they get no identity of their own during the different stages of their lives, always depending on their fathers’ and especially on their husbands’ status (2002, p. 327). this female subordination through patria potestas is described throughout many passages of utopia, depicting husbands as the lawful head of the family (pp. 64–65), or as the intermediary between the temple and their wives and children during the festival: “before they go to the temple, both wives and children fall on their knees before their husbands and parents, and confess everything in which they have either erred or failed in their duty, and beg pardon for it” (more, utopia, p. 83). the continent, (re)born as an insular geographical setting, symbolises the patrogenesis and oblivion of the mother in patriarchal utopia; celebrating the symbolic power of the individual while concealing any relational bond. there is no form of interdependence between the land and the individual; utopia loses its agency and becomes the creation and possession of the self-proclaimed king utopus. the geographical change also imposes a form of conceptual insularity on the people that live there; for contamination from the outside corrupted world is scarcely possible. the architecture of the land shares coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 the pattern of other classic patriarchal utopias, as in andreae’s (1619) christianopolis or bacon’s (1626) new atlantis. in order to reinforce the insular boundaries of utopia, the narrative repeatedly describes the building of fortifications to secure the perimeter of the nation-state and ensure purity, stability and containment: the channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck […] on the other side of the island there are likewise many harbours; and the coast is so fortified, both by nature and art, that a small number of men can hinder the descent of a great army. […] the inhabitants have fortified the fountain-head of this river, which springs a little without the towns; that so, if they should happen to be besieged, the enemy might not be able to stop or divert the course of the water, nor poison it. […] the town is compassed with a high and thick wall, in which there are many towers and forts; there is also a broad and deep dry ditch, set thick with thorns, cast round three sides of the town. (more, utopia, pp. 32–35; italics added) amaurot, the capital city of utopia, is “designed to produce an economy of visibility that guarantees the virtue of the utopian citizens through the presence of a surveillant gaze” (burwell, 1997, p. 57), almost a precursor to bentham’s panopticon. burwell highlights how any attempt to disrupt such harmony is neutralised successfully, supporting the “politics of imperialism, exploitation and genocide” provided by insularity (ibid.). therefore, insularity is a key aspect of utopia to maintain internal social mores and reduce the influence of external corrupting forces. the necessity of such fortifications raises questions of the sustainability of utopia’s social structures. the vision of the island as the most strategic spatial form to create an ideal community is loaded with symbolic value. like god, utopus takes water and places it around immobile dry earth. the earth, traditionally referred to as a feminine symbol due to its generative and nurturing power (chevalier & gheerbrant, 1986; cirlot, 1992; jakubczak, 2001; ráez, 2015), is now an immobile piece of land that emerges anew after its baptism. despite water being conceived as feminine because of its fluidity and dynamism, the seas and oceans have also been linked with the primordial waters and imagined as a masculine godlike entity (chevalier & gheerbrant, 1986; cirlot, 1992, ráez, 2005) who controls the subconscious, as can be seen in neptune or poseidon. specifically, during the atlantic discoveries, the sea was considered the utopian passage (reis, 2006, p. 44). nevertheless, this utopian geography is highly sexualised, as the island “is literally mapped in male body fluids […], held captive under the technology of imperial form” (mcclintock, 1995, pp. 3–4). the resulting island is then imagined as the ideal locality in which to found a utopia: la isla es un mundo reducido, una imagen del cosmos completa y perfecta, porque presenta un valor sacro concentrado. la noción se une por ahí a la de templo y de santuario. la isla es simbólicamente un lugar de elección, de ciencia y de paz, en medio de la ignorancia y la agitación del mundo profano. [the island is a limited world, a complete and perfect image of the cosmos, coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 because it has a concentrated sacred value. this idea is connected to that of temple and sanctuary. the island is symbolically a place of choice, of science and of peace, in the midst of ignorance and the turmoil of the profane world.] (chevalier & gheerbrant, 1986, p. 596; translation is mine) the emphasis on taking the southern part of the continent abraxa as the island of utopia implies that the only part to properly fulfil the utopian vision is the lower part, the womb, inasmuch as its fertility makes it possible to reproduce patriarchal civilisation. this dismembering of the island from the rest of the continent allows a more feasible reeducation without the possibility of it being reached by contaminated ideas dissenting from those of the ruler. examining holbein’s drawings, shell interprets the mapping of utopia as a human brain and the ship the jaw of the skull: utopia is depicted as a head joined at the neck to a continental body by an isthmus (neck)—or separated from it by a canal […] the human skull, so considered, is both the ‘coastline’ of an insular nation-state and the ‘shell’ of an individual human brain. (2014, p. 101) the resemblance to a human brain allegorises utopia as a geographic projection of utopus’ imaginings. however, if these maps are contrasted with other classic interpretations of utopia (figure 1–figure 4) and the spatial organisation of the state, the island certainly alludes to the female sexual organ. the entrance to utopia through the harbour is situated to the south in most illustrations. however, all the maps show the estuary flanked by a fortress. only holbein’s illustrations resemble a human brain, and yet his map draws the gates of utopia in the southern part of the island, where a church guards the coastline (figure 2). the location of the island itself in the south and its passage at its most southern point suggest a parallelism with female corporeality and the woman’s womb. the estuary that joins the waters within utopia and the waters of the ocean are controlled and patrolled (by men), just as sexuality is regulated for utopian women. the interpretation of the map of utopia as a moon, “its figure is not unlike a crescent” (more, utopia, p. 32), reinforces the island’s association with the female womb, insofar as the mythological dimension of the moon is closely related to feminine goddesses and powers, but also with the notion of passivity. holbein’s 1516 map (figure 1) hints at a crescent shape, but in gueudeville’s illustrations (figure 4), the crescent shape resulting from utopus’ industry is evident. with amaurot, the capital city, at the centre of the island/uterus and connected to the entryway/vagina by the meandering river anyder, the colonisation process of the nation-state simulates the insemination of the geographic body by the philosopher king’s idea, whereby it perpetuates the female body as a passive form. as spivak (1994, p. 88) explains, the creation of a map makes it possible to imagine an alternative geopolitical history that sustains particular, in this case patriarchal, prejudices. the truth holds according to the rulers of the land, and judgment of what is good and what is evil is no longer ambiguous, for the dictates of nature are defined by new established parameters. utopus utilises the same techniques as the creators of religious utopias. as the judaeo-christian tradition made use of intellectual pregnancy to explain the world under parameters that legitimise patriarchal continuity (gen. 1: 9), the act of naming the land utopia enables utopus not only to colonize the land but also to conceptualise a new reality where he is the creator. utopus, like gods in religious utopias, takes what already coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 existed and re-creates it according to his will. and yet, in tracing its history back to the original act of rupture and violence, utopus’ nation is condemned to “the temporal paradox of utopia, which is that it both is, and cannot be, isolated from the contamination of the past” (attewell, 2014, p. 49). this violent transition eventually exposes the dystopian origins of society, demystifying the immutability of the state and offering a glimpse of the potential dissidence among its citizens. thus, the social and spatial insularity of utopia, as well as certain misogynistic practices (sargent, 1973, p. 304), turns this utopia into a dystopia (serras, 2002). figure 1. ambrosius holbein’s map of insulae utopiae figura, for the first edition of thomas more’s utopia, 1516. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 figure 2. ambrosius holbein’s map of utopiae insulae tabula with hythlodaeus pointing at the land, for the second edition of thomas more’s utopia, 1518. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 figure 3. abraham ortelius’ map of thomas more’s utopia, ca. 1595. figure 4. nicolas gueudeville’s illustrations for thomas more’s idée d’une république hereuse: ou l’utopie de thomas morus, 1730. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 historically men have a greater level of mobility than women and such differences entailed a specialisation of labour that required normative heterosexuality to grant men such individuality while women were relegated to the relational identity, where they come up against the absolute impossibility of conceiving themselves outside of these relationships (hernando, 2018, p. 77). the individuality of the explorers of utopia reached its height during the renaissance inasmuch as they were able to travel overseas. meanwhile, women remained companions of men, looking after their relational bonds on earth. as pohl asserts, “classical utopias […] either excluded women completely (robinsonades) or functionalized women as producers of future citizens and providers of sexual pleasure” (2007, p. 127). this often meant that the house/home was the sphere of women and isolating female identity inside the house ensures that this space is a “microcosmic utopia, a private ‘good place’ distinct from the outer social world” (cousins, 2009, p. 90). further, the physical limitations of women in the home rather than being mobile individuals means that women become islands within an island. as attewell suggests, “not only islands are insular in the more colloquial sense of seeming narrow, cut off, and isolated. […] islands become ‘islands’ […] only through a never-ending process of filtering, purging, and excising” (2014, p. 49). this underpins the narrative of patriarchal utopias that women cannot be explorers of the land, but rather the land itself. this form of spatiality is muted not only due to the lack of a narrative agent but also in the negation of space itself. utopia (“no-place”), anyder (“no-river”), and achora (“no-place”), for example, are landmarks whose existence is terminologically non-existent. similarly, the name amaurot alludes to an unknown and dark place. the ironical negation of these places also denies female spatiality within the land and consequently, women’s utopian agency. the agency that they may gain by means of education does not include free mobility as one of its advantages. consequently, women’s capacity to discover, assimilate and learn about the world around them is narrower and limited, which hinders their ability to attain the individuality promised to men and sentences them to geographic and intellectual insularity. alterity, either bodily or ideological, is overlooked, silenced and rectified, being represented on behalf of social stability and resulting in “a perfect world for men having as companions silent and industrious feminine ghosts” (serras, 2002, p. 330). female perfection in insular gardens sargent (2010) and rieder (2008) agree that up to the 20th century, utopianism was widely used as a tool to support colonialism and vice versa; that colonialism opened up new horizons for imagining new utopias, masking the original inhabitants’ displacement, enslavement and slaughter with dreams. once the isolation and alienation stage is reached, there is a process of re-education, whereby the land/woman is transformed to comply with utopia’s patriarchal standards. interestingly, the translation in herder’s edition of more’s utopia makes manifest this correlation between the utopian model of education and insularity: “the minds of the utopians, when fenced with a love for learning, are very ingenious in discovering all such arts as are necessary to carry it to perfection” (more, utopia, p. 60; italics added).4 the colonisation of the land makes it necessary to insert women as a relational figure, as the explorers/creators of utopia “have taken the socio-economic functions of women as mothers for granted” (theis, 2009, p. coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60 2). however, by organising the state of utopia following the trope of the family, more presents this gender hierarchy “as natural and inevitable, rather than as historically constructed and therefore subject to change” (mcclintock, 1995, p. 45). this trope is illustrative of more’s contemporary society, where patriarchy was so ingrained that, as capp notes, led people to view gender hierarchy as a universal principle of nature: “female subordination was something imbibed from infancy, not a concept to be scrutinized” (2003, p. 9) and motherhood seen as the raison d’être of the female corpus. this form of femininity is directly related to fertility and (re)production. in utopia the garden, nature tamed by industry, represents the site of fertility. the garden as a metaphor for woman echoes grosz’s interpretation of the city as a projection of bodies: “bodies are conceived in naturalistic terms, producing the city, the cause and motivation for their design and construction” (1994, p. 44). as such, the insularity of the garden within the domestic space in the back part of the house reaffirms pohl’s (2007) conception of women as merely fruitful and beautiful in classical utopia: they cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have both vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in them; and all is so well ordered and so finely kept that i never saw gardens anywhere that were both so fruitful and so beautiful as theirs. and this humour of ordering their gardens so well is not only kept up by the pleasure they find in it, but also by an emulation between the inhabitants of the several streets, who vie with each other. and there is, indeed, nothing belonging to the whole town that is both more useful and more pleasant. so that he who founded the town seems to have taken care of nothing more than of their gardens; for they say the whole scheme of the town was designed at first by utopus, but he left all that belonged to the ornament and improvement of it to be added by those that should come after him, that being too much for one man to bring to perfection (more, utopia, p. 36; italics added). the material abundance of the island simulates the richness of utopia’s education, but since these sources of power and knowledge are dependent and administered by (male) industry, any attempt by women to achieve individuality is revealed as illusory. the strategic ordering of elements in the garden and the island reflects the biopolitics of utopia, which follows a calculated organisation of the state as a macro-patriarchal family structure to ensure the economic welfare of all inhabitants: inhabitants are sent, by turns, from the cities to dwell in them; no country family has fewer than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. there is a master and a mistress set over every family, and over thirty families there is a magistrate (more, utopia, p. 33). the harmony of the garden at the domestic level and the island at the national level is achieved by a meticulous assembling of bodies and, particularly, the reformation of the female entity, one that, despite being offered a taste of the perks of (male) individuality, is deceived, for they are the ones responsible for maintaining the relational identity of the members of the island. however, women will only be highly regarded once their natural imperfection is corrected by patriarchal indoctrination: coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 husbands have power to correct their wives and parents to chastise their children, unless the fault is so great that a public punishment is thought necessary for striking terror into others (more, utopia, p. 64). these public punishments, and all public affairs in general, are regulated by paternal figures, for magistrates “affect rather to be called fathers, and, by being really so, they well deserve the name” (more, utopia, p. 65). power is associated with patriarchy, and vice versa; only by being patriarchal (a father) is one worthy of wielding power. all the different strategies used to recreate the utopian woman eventually entail the banishment of “all conflict and transgression by absorbing the will of the individual into the good of the collective” (burwell, 1997, p. 59). women in utopia are the khôra, or matrixial entities, of the patriarchal dream of king utopus. while they are constantly trained to gain individuality, they are confined to the domestic space as reproducers of an individual’s legacy and can only achieve ersatz individuality by having a public role as priestesses once they are no longer productive, i.e. they are widows and sterile: “keeping them in the periphery of humanistic civic principles goals constitutes a denial of their participation in the commonwealth as citizens” (serras, 2002, p. 328). they can never surpass the limits of their insular character, their decaying desexualised body acts as the geographical limit to their own potential individuality. femininity is understood as fenced spatiality, romanticised by the discourse of virtue. like the island, the utopian woman is paralysed and static. like the garden, her body is tamed and trained to be correctly beautiful and productive. as ferns observes, [...] the emphasis of the renaissance utopian narrative is on stasis rather than process, security rather than change. and while the nature of that security may be seen as distinctively maternal, it is in each case sustained by the imposition of an explicitly patriarchal order (1999, p. 64). conclusions: femininity as fenced spatiality this study outlines the correlations between colonial geopolitics and patriarchal biopolitics in more’s utopia. it can be argued that utopia is a patriarchal society where women are essentialized to ‘matrixial entities’, or spaces of (re)production. the creation of utopia is framed by male individualism and female relationality. like the land of utopia, and particularly the gardens, utopian women are contained; fenced in and around the home. education, while seemingly progressive, only serves to reify patriarchal social relations that see women in terms of their relationships with men and as inherently needing improvement. utopian cartography presents and reproduces the patriarchal imagery of male exploration of the female matrixial entity that has been given a name, ergo birth, by king utopus, and by extension, thomas more. the geographic island forcibly accommodates and reinforces the socio-political principles of patriarchal utopia, and in so doing, allegorises a reformation of women that grants them deceptive progress towards individualism while coolabah, nr 31, 2021, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians i transnacionals / observatory: australian and transnational studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 binding them to domesticity. if there is room for improvement for women within utopian imaginaries, the modern reader may not find it in the gardens of utopia. endnotes: 1. plato ultimately opts for the word khora, though hupedochē and ekmageion are also used. 2. kumar remarks how influential the life of christ and the communal order of the early church were for sixteenth and seventeenth utopias (1991, p. 64). this inspiration can be seen not only in more’s writing but also in later renaissance utopias like campanella’s the city of the sun (1602), bacon’s new atlantis (1626), and more evidently, andreae’s christianopolis (1619). these utopian manifestos also maintain a gender hierarchy based on patriliny, as well as the state of social happiness, by erasing overt non-conformism. manuel & manuel refer to them as pansophist utopias, as their imagery envisioned the possibility of attaining human salvation by joining “the two spiritual corps, the scientists and the ministers of religion, into a single body” (1979, p. 206). 3. abraxas is the supreme deity of the gnostic sects. the greek letters of the name abraxas make the number 365, which refers to the 365 days of the year, but also to the 365 gods it had under its command (melton, 2001, p. 5). collins (2008) describes it as a magical demon and cline adds that “abraxas was not accepted within normative judaism or christianity, therefore his invocation would fall under the category of idolatry, the worship of false gods” (2011, p. 150). the beheading of the land of abraxa in utopia also could signify a process of purification in which pagan or false gods are defeated. 4. the original quotation is “utopiensium itaque exercitata litteris ingenia mire ualent ad inuentiones artium, quae faciant aliquid ad commodae uitae compendia.” the word exercitata is the participle of the verb exercito, a variant form of exerceo, which means “make strong, keep at work, exercise, train”, but can also be used in a metaphorical sense to say “cultivate”, “exploit” and “harass” (simpson, 2000, pp. 226–227). this ambiguity has resulted in variations in its translation. while there are editions like logan & adams’ that opt for stimulated (2002, p. 76) or trained as in turner’s (1965, p. 101), other editions (armes, 1912; 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(2007). modes of faith: secular surrogates for lost religious belief. chicago: university of chicago press. almudena machado jiménez is a phd student at the university of jaén, where she works as a lecturer at the department of english philology. her research interests are gender studies, postcolonialism and utopian/dystopian studies, particularly the notion of normative womanhood in contemporary patriarchal utopia written by women authors. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 25 nessie and noctilucent clouds: a meteorological explanation for some loch ness monster sightings oliver d. smith independent researcher, uk oliveratlantis@gmail.com copyright© 2023 oliver d. smith. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. abstract: since the 1930s there have been over a thousand recorded sightings of monsters in loch ness, scotland. the consensus of experts is these reports of mysterious creatures (known in scottish highlands folklore as nessie) have mundane or prosaic explanations such as hoaxes, wakes, mirages, misidentifications of floating objects (e.g., natural debris, boats) and known native fauna (e.g., deer, otters, diving birds), opposed to extraordinary or unusual explanations such as exotic fauna, escaped animals from traveling circuses, relict plesiosaurs and unknown or elusive species (e.g., ‘long-necked’ pinniped, giant eel). after providing an overview of the different hypotheses and a history of the search for the loch ness monster – the author of this paper argues a rare meteorological phenomenon might explain some monster sightings in the loch during twilight hours between may and august – reflections of noctilucent clouds (nlcs). keywords: noctilucent clouds, loch ness monster, reflections, atmosphere, nlcs introduction eyewitness accounts of monsters in loch ness, scotland are traceable in literature as far back as the 1930s and continue to be documented, albeit infrequently.i the life of saint columba written in the late 7th century ce by adomnán describes an irish monk named columba having encountered a “water beast” (aquatilis bestia) in the river ness (borsje, 1994). although often mentioned in books on the putative loch ness monster (dinsdale, 1973: 25-30; witchell, 1989: 14), columba’s sighting should be excluded because the river ness is separated to loch ness by another lake, loch doufour (binns, 1984: 52-53).ii the sighting itself is not trustworthy; adomnan wrote his biography of abbot columba about a hundred years after he died (meaning it is far removed from a first-hand account) and the water beast anecdote appears in the context of miracles, which hardly lends credence to the story.iii while a few dozen loch ness monster mailto:oliveratlantis@gmail.com coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 26 reports are dated to the late 19th or beginning of the 20th century, they were not recorded until the 1930s and their reliability is doubtful,iv for example, an eyewitness came forward in 1934 and said he observed a monster in the loch more than 60 years earlier but could not remember the exact year (either 1871 or 1872) and was rather vague in his description (whyte, 1957: 27). in may 1933, the inverness courier published the first article on a monster sighting in loch ness (campbell, 1933).v scottish newspapers continued to print articles on subsequent reported sightings of large mysterious creatures in the loch and a year later there were at least 43 first-hand eyewitness reports (burton, 1961: 21) which prompted the book the loch ness monster and others to be published by rupert t. gould (a navy officer and investigator of seaserpents). descriptions of monsters in loch ness by eyewitnesses in 1933-1934 considerably varied but the national newspaper the scotsman in october 1933 published articles under the title “loch ness monster…” (stalker, 1933a, 1933b), a name quickly adopted by tabloids in england, as well as books (oudemans, 1934; gould, 1934); reports of monsters in loch ness, some with little in common were visualised as a single monster type, either one individual (gould, 1934: 121) or a small family (carruth, 1938: 14). the putative monster became known locally in the inverness area and scottish highlands folklore as ‘nessie’ (from niseag in scottish gaelic). in december 1933, the daily mail published a sensational headline, “monster of loch ness is not a legend but a fact” (binns, 1984: 28) based on some mud tracks found on a bank of the loch (purported to have been left by an elusive creature). however, these mud tracks were soon revealed to be a hoax.vi around the same time, photographs (of rather poor quality) began to circulate of what was said to be the monster. the earliest photo of the loch ness monster by a man named hugh gray in november 1933 is probably a swan (naish, 2017: 95-96), although this is not conclusive given its ambiguity.vii the infamous ‘surgeon’s photograph’ published in the daily mail (april 1934) is almost certainly a hoax; martin and boyd (1999) convincingly argue it was a toy submarine fitted with a fake head to look like a sea-serpent. repeated hoaxes resulted in national newspapers decreasing quantity of articles they published on the putative monster primarily because of embarrassment (bauer, 1986: 36-37) and public interest in the loch ness monster too waned; in the mid-to-late 1930s and 1940s sightings did not stop to be recorded but they were considerably less frequent than in 1933 and 1934. it has been argued monster reports were most frequent in 1934 because an expedition attracted more observers to the loch that single yearviii (mackal, 1976: 85) and in 1933, the felling of trees plus construction work on a road next to the loch somewhat improved visibility for observers who were driving. in 1951 there was a minor resurgence of public interest in nessie when lachlan stuart a forestry worker, took a photo of three humps in the loch close to urquhart castle. despite stuart’s photo was a hoax using bales of hale (witchell, 1989: 83) it took decades to prove this; the photo in the 1950s and 1960s was considered by some investigators to be the best piece of evidence for the putative monster. stuart’s photo was notably reproduced in constance whyte’s book more than a legend: the story of the loch ness monster (whyte, 1957). the idea of a surviving plesiosaur in loch ness predated whyte’s book (gould, 1934: 119-124), but it faced objections and difficulties she tried to resolve.ix in 1959, the zoologist maurice burton read whyte’s book and changed his mind from arguing the loch ness monster is an elusive giant eel, to a relict plesiosaur (tucker, 1960). however, less than two years later he became a lot more sceptical, arguing most monster sightings (90%) can be explained by gaspropelled rotting vegetation or natural debris rising from the loch bottom to water surface, as well as misidentified common objects and known animals (burton, 1961: 170). in 1961, the engineer turned nessie-hunter, tim dinsdale, published loch ness monster, arguably which remains to date the most popular book on the putative monster; the book went through four coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 27 editions (dinsdale, 1961, 1972, 1976, 1982). dinsdale himself thought he had captured the monster on film in 1960; however, photo stills in his book show nothing of the kind because they are unclear. campbell (1986a, 2002: 48) interprets dinsdale’s film to show a motor-powered dinghy and wake but this is disputed by others (bauer, 2002: 236). in 1962, the loch ness investigation bureau (lnib) was created; its founding members included whyte, ornithologist peter scott, and politician david james. lnib carried out photographic surveillance and used sonar technology for underwater searches but repeatedly failed to provide any reliable evidence for an unidentified creature in loch ness. in 1965, the biochemist and zoologist roy p. mackal was appointed scientific director of lnib. his approach to nessie was different than gould’s and dinsdale’s in the sense he attempted to explain how monsters with an average length of 20-feet could survive and thrive in loch ness. to avoid extinction there must be a minimum viable breeding population of ‘nessies’ (in their dozens or hundreds) not a single individual or small family (i.e., 2 or 3) as gould and dinsdale argued respectively.x mackal (1976: 201) described the concept of there being only one living individual monster (or very few) in the loch absurd and ignorant of population biology; lnib’s literature too stressed “what we are investigating is a breeding herd” (james, 1970). mackal’s credentials and scientific rigour brought respectability to the nessie hunter community that was previously lacking in the same way grover krantz did to the bigfoot community in the 1970s (regal, 2008). gould and dinsdale struggled to explain how food in loch ness could viably sustain a population of large unknown creatures. mackal (1976) ingeniously tried to solve this problem by arguing nessies could have fed on migrating salmon or eels (but his calculations were overestimations). in his book the monsters of loch ness, mackal estimated that 10% of documented monster sightings in loch ness were of an unidentified giant amphibian but 90% misidentifications of known local fauna (e.g., diving birds and swimming deer), boat wakes, floating logs as well as hoaxes (mackal, 1976: 200-201). the lnib disbanded in 1972 but its research was continued by the loch ness and morarxi project set up by naturalist adrian shine (shine, 2006: 17) which focused on studying the limnology of loch ness (shine, preferred to carry out scientific investigations at loch morar because its water is clearer). in 1972 and 1975, underwater photographs were published, allegedly showing the loch ness monster (rines et al., 1976). however, some were supposedly retouched; this altered the photos to the extent they bore little resemblance to original photographs (razdan and kielar, 1984-1985; naish, 2013). in the late 1970s, “nessie’s public respectability declined again” (bauer, 1986: 164). mackal by the 1980s seems to have lost interest in the putative monster.xii henry bauer, author of the enigma of loch ness continued where mackal left off. like mackal, bauer (who holds a phd) brought academic credibility to the nessie community, which was lacking; his book on nessie was published by a reputable university press (bauer, 1986). bauer has long argued in terms of population biology and ecology the loch can sustain a breeding population of large elusive creatures and to explain how nessies entered the loch he claims loch ness formerly was a saltwater fjord.xiii bauer has a personal belief in the putative monster but as a scientist he realises limitations of anecdotal eyewitness testimony and “vague photographs or transitory blips on a sonar” (bauer, 1986: 53). the same year bauer published his magnum opus on nessie, another book titled the loch ness monster: the evidence reached the opposite conclusion, “there is absolutely no reason why anyone should believe in the existence of lake monsters” (campbell, 1986b: 116). this is not the seminal sceptical publication on nessie; this honor goes to ronald binns’ book the loch ness mystery solved published in england in 1983 and reprinted in the us a year later (binns, 1984). over thirty years later, binns (2017: 13-14) commented his book “transformed conventional belief in monsters into wider scepticism”. this is probably not an overstatement. at the very least binns’ book put to rest the plesiosaur hypothesis. by the 1990s coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 28 eyewitness accounts of the loch ness monster dropped to single digits (and in 2009 only one monster sighting was recordedxiv). the british broadcast corporation in 2003 sponsored a team to search loch ness using sonar and satellite technology but results produced “no signs of any large animal living in the loch” (nickell, 2006: 23). the situation remains the same today and arguably the absence of evidence for so many years has become evidence of absence. books, articles, and documentaries nevertheless continue to be published on the loch ness monster.xv hypotheses of loch ness monster sightings paxton and shine (2016) have usefully compiled eighty hypotheses of the loch ness monster (there are many different explanations for reported sightings and photos). these can be divided for convenience into two categories: (1) mundane, or prosaic (common) and (2) extraordinary, or unusual. the former boring explanations include misidentifications and misperceptions by eyewitnesses of known fauna in the loch (swimming deer, diving birds, otters, fish etc), floating natural or artificial debris, wakes from motor-powered boats, hallucinations, mirages, optical illusions, and hoaxes. combined, these undoubtedly explain a very large percentage of monster reports.xvi dinsdale on one occasion thought he spotted a monster 300-yards from the shore of the loch, but when he checked with binoculars, realised the “monster” was a floating tree-trunk (binns, 1984: 110). eyewitnesses on the loch’s bank are seldom at close distance to what they report observing in the water, so it is not surprising misidentifications of ordinary animals and floating objects are often made.xvii shine (1993) tested perception accuracy of 36 eyewitnesses from 150 meters (approximately 500-feet) by asking them to describe or draw from memory a wooden post in the loch; roughly a third of the observers (31%) “retained impressions at some variance with the 45 cm straight-sided post”. a similar experiment in 2003 with a fencepost at a long distance resulted in some eyewitnesses drawing “monster-shaped heads” (nickell, 2006: 23). both these tests used motionless objects; had they used something moving it would have increased the misidentifications by eyewitnesses. the loch ness monster is usually described in eyewitness reports as non-stationary e.g., out of 170 eyewitness reports by lnib in 1973, 109 (64%) involved motion with an average speed of 7 mph (willums, 1976). there are other factorsxviii which can affect the reliability of eyewitness testimony, meaning accuracy of monster sightings (akins, 1977: 31-41; campbell, 2002: 12-13; loxton and prothero, 2013: 159164). observation conditions (for example weather) and duration of sightings are important. mackal (1976: 88) realized “most observations are brief” and some are glimpses lasting seconds; about a third of sightings recorded by the lnib in 1973, lasted less than one minute (willums, 1976). it goes without saying, not all eyewitnesses are honest.xix hoaxes of the putative monster in the loch have been documented since the 1930s and these continue to the present day; two notable hoaxes took place in 2003 and 2005 (nickell, 2006: 14-15). most eyewitnesses, however, are not involved in wilful deception but unintentionally misidentify or mistake what they reported seeing. this is not surprising when it is realised few observers have specialist knowledge of the loch’s fauna and are quite inexperienced. it is remarkable virtually no zoologists or marine biologists who travel to loch ness report ever seeing the loch ness monster.xx james (1968: 21) naively claimed status or credentials of monster eyewitnesses such as “monks, two doctors, a surgeon, a vet […] a youth hostel warden, a local landowner, three gamekeepers and the local water bailiff”, meant these observers could not have been mistaken about nessie’s identity but none of these professions equate to expertise in the loch’s fauna. there is no reason to think a veterinarian (who specialise in domestic pets and farm animals) will have a particularly good coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 29 knowledge of otters, waterfowl, etc. furthermore, the water bailiff at loch ness in the 1930s even mistook the monster for “a line of cormorants floating on the water” (gould, 1934: 113). in 1962, an expedition to loch ness reported 16 mistakes where eyewitnesses had confused mundane or prosaic phenomena for the monster: “8 were wake effects, 6 were birds, one was an otter and one salmon” (campbell, 2002: 10). natural debris such as floating logs can explain misperceptions of nessie and this is the most obvious prosaic explanation (gould, 1934: 106108; binns, 1984: 182). the surfacing wreckage of a german airship shot down during first world war over loch ness might have resulted in nessie misidentifications (ley, 1966: 236). misperceptions of known animals, floating debris and boat wakes have been recognized by many eyewitnesses themselves who realised their own misidentification errors (mackal, 1976: 83-84; bauer, 1986: 6-7; shine, 2006: 12-13; loxton and prothero, 2013: 160). wakes are “v”shaped wave-patterns moving objects in the water such as boats and waterfowl create; binns (1984: 183) notes “it can take up to twenty minutes for a wake to reach the shore, by which time the boat creating it has long passed out of sight”. arguably, the dullest of all explanations for eyewitness accounts of the loch ness monster are hallucinations, which result from mental illnesses, sleep deprivation or alcohol-induced psychosis; it has long been joked, “sea serpents are seen not far from scotch whisky distilleries” (wilkins, 1948: 15) . mackal (1976: 84-85) disregarded three eyewitnesses from his list of recorded sightings because they suffered from mental disorders, presumably causing them to hallucinate. shine was recently quoted as saying he estimates 70% of sightings are boat wakes, 20% mistaken known birds and 10% “everything else – logs and whatever” (teeman, 2020). bauer who is a believer in nessie as an unknown animal nevertheless agrees with foremost sceptics such as binns and shine, that “at loch ness the opportunities to be deceived are legion” (bauer, 1986: 56). similarly, cryptozoologist loren coleman has been quoted as saying “from a distance just about anything might look like a lake monster” (france, 2019: 173). a pictorial montage of these sources of deception in loch ness was created by shine (see fig. 1). there are other prosaic explanations.xxi otters undoubtedly explain some eyewitness accounts of nessie and lake cryptids in general (nickell, 2007) and so do mirages (lehn, 1979) which are by no means rare at loch ness. a mirage is an optical phenomenon in which refracted rays of light produce a displaced image of a distant object; figure 1 pictorial montage of various common objects, animals and phenomena which cause eyewitness misperceptions or misidentifications of nessie in loch ness (shine, 2006: 12-13). coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 30 mirages have been observed at the loch under certain atmospheric conditions (williams, 2015: 206) and have even tricked a few experienced observers (gould, 1934: 112; bauer, 1986: 6-7). the second category of hypotheses for the loch ness monster are extraordinary or unusual and include surviving plesiosaurs, unknown animal species and known but exotic animals (nonindigenous to scotland) who must have entered the loch from the north sea via river nessxxii). there are methods to falsify these ideas; the loch could be fully drained (law, 2011), or seined with a big net and if no elusive or exotic animals are found this would disprove their existence in the loch (pasquarello, 1984). both these methods are environmentally destructive but there’s a way to catalogue animals in the loch without causing habitat destruction or biodiversity loss. in 2019, scientists undertook an environmental dna study by taking water samples from the surface and depths of loch ness which produced evidence of 500 million individual organisms and 3000 species as living in the loch (gilchrist, 2019). the study identified animals including birds, deer, toads, eels, salmon, dogs, even humans. however, 20% of e-dna samples remain unidentified; bauer’s hypothesis the putative monster is an unknown animal is not falsified by the results (bauer, 2020: 103). the fact a small portion of the e-dna has not yet been identified does not necessarily mean there is an unknown species in the loch since the genomic database is incomplete for many different known animal species.xxiii in the near-future when more species have been dna sequenced – this will potentially falsify the loch ness monster as an unknown or elusive animal species. there will never be plesiosaur e-dna to match samples,xxiv but it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt there is no population of plesiosaurs living in the loch: even if we were to imagine that plesiosaurs had survived undetected somewhere in the oceans, it is unlikely they could have colonised loch ness. they were tropical animals, unsuited for the cold waters of the loch… plesiosaurs would also require more food than the loch can provide. (loxton and prothero, 2013: 158-159) bauer (2002) rejects the plesiosaur hypothesis, and today favours the giant sea-turtle hypothesis (bauer, 2020). coleman (2009) asserts cryptozoologists now reject the plesiosaur hypothesisxxv despite at the same time it is said “the most popular and persistent nessie identity is an evolved, modern-day plesiosaur” (shuker, 2016: 37). this discrepancy is explained by the fact the most popular image of nessie in literature still resembles a plesiosaur. do different unknown animal hypotheses fare any better than the plesiosaur hypothesis? aside from an elusive giant species of sea-turtle, suggestions include a giant eel (cohen, 1970: 112),xxvi ‘long-necked’ otter (burton, 1961: 165-170), seal (costello, 1975: 321) or giant amphibian (mackal, 1976: 216).xxvii there is no physical evidence for these creatures existing in loch ness and there are reasons to doubt their existence. any animal species requires a minimum viable population (mvp is a group of interbreeding individuals) and a food source to survive. in the 1970s, scientists estimated the mvp of nessies to be between 10 to 157, depending on its biomass (sheldon and kerr, 1972; scheider and wallis, 1973; sagan, 1976). if there are dozens of nessies, where are the bones? rines (2001) tried to solve this problem by claiming the population went extinct. however, if nessies formerly lived in loch ness, photographic evidence from the 20th century should be convincing; instead, photos without exception taken since 1934 (hugh gray’s photo) are either ambiguous, misidentifications, or verified hoaxes (nickell, 2006: 1521; naish, 2013; binns, 2017: 57-79). campbell (2002: 96) concludes the “photographic evidence [for nessie] is poor. of the twenty-one still photographs, it seems seven are hoaxes, five are of natural phenomena and six provide insufficient data for evaluation”. the absence of evidence since the 1930s for the existence of the loch ness monster is arguably now evidence of absence (garcia, 2020).xxviii coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 31 monster meteorology if the putative monster in loch ness is not an unknown animal species, is there no “mystery waiting to be unlocked”? (binns, 2019: 218). reported observations of nessie are many things, not a single phenomenon. however, not all eyewitness reports can be explained by mundane phenomena and in this sense “there is a real mystery at loch ness” (shine, 2006: 28), which remains unsolved. although most reports of the loch ness monster are misidentifications of prosaic phenomena, surveys of eyewitness accounts independently estimate 5-10% require an extraordinary or unusual explanation (burton, 1960; mackal, 1976: 200-201).xxix for example, bauer (2002: 234) mentions a report corroborated by different observers on opposite sides of the loch; it is quite unlikely these multiple eyewitnesses confused known fauna. burton (1960: 775, 1961: 157) struggled to explain a small number of sightings reported under 30-yards (90feet) as misperceptions of mundane floating objects or fauna: “there still remain a number of convincing accounts of a long neck and head seen at close quarters, at distances of about 30 yards”. if the unidentified and exotic animal hypotheses are ruled out, what explanation does this leave? some argue nessie is a paranormal entity (redfern, 2016), but this is unreasonable and books from this perspective are “typically crankish in their gullibility” (bauer, 1986: 96). in 1976, the meteorologist terence meaden plausibly suggested a small number of sightings of the putative monster in loch ness could stem from misperceptions of rare meteorological phenomena (this would explain a few eyewitness accounts difficult or impossible to explain by prosaic phenomena). meaden’s (1976a) interesting article was published in a scientific journal but has virtually gone unnoticed.xxx williams (2015: 258) describes meaden’s theory as follows: wind can incite water to behave in a monstrous fashion. the mini tornadoes known as dust devils have an aquatic counterpart, which can spring up, move across a stretch of water then collapse. ‘water devils’ can appear solid, especially when seaweed or floating debris are dragged up into the rotating column of water, and might explain reports of ‘sea serpents’ seen like rising like pillars out of the ocean. the editor of the journal of meteorology, writing to peter scott in 1978 believed that water devils could account for some monster sightings. (williams, 2015: 258) water devils or ‘steam devils’ (lyons and pease, 1972) are an unusual phenomenon, especially in scotland (they should not be confused with waterspoutsxxxi). in the 1980s, the water (or steam) devil hypothesis for the loch ness monster was supported by another meteorologist (rowe, 1987), who compiled reliable reports of miniature whirlwinds over the surface of loch ness. meaden realised water-devils explain not more than a dozen nessie sightings and encouraged meteorologists to seek different natural weather explanations, on the basis some “observations remain explained” (meaden, 1976a: 123). unfortunately, fanciful animal hypotheses continue to preponderate in nessie literature (cornes, 2019; gerhard, 2021) and meteorological theories do not get the attention they deserve.xxxii hitherto, no new meteorological hypothesis has been proposed – the author of this paper suggests reflections of luminous clouds on the loch explain three sightings of nessie seemingly not explainable by any mundane phenomena. two of these are listed by mackal (1976) and include an observation from the closest reported distance (15-yards). the third sighting of interest was made by tucker (1960). what likely rules out prosaic phenomena for this reported sighting is the fact denys w. tucker was an coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 32 expert and trained observer in fauna having worked at the natural history museum, london and in his own words was a “professional marine biologist of respectable experience” (williams, 2015: 155). tucker would not have confused a known animal species with nessie. binns (1984) in the loch ness mystery solved mentions tucker, but not his spectacular sighting presumably because he could not offer an explanation for it. tucker’s sighting is curiously even omitted by mackal (1976), but it is listed among monster reports compiled by ulrich magin; reproduced by bauer (1986). in the section of his book ‘atmospheric sources of deception’, campbell (2002) notes cloud shadows can explain common misperceptions of the loch ness monster. however, reflections or shadows on the loch of tropospheric clouds appear flat. eyewitnesses instead tend to describe a hump “said to look like an upturned boat” (bauer, 2002: 234), or multiple undulating humps, above the water. out of forty-three eyewitness reports recorded by burton (1961: 37), 39 (91%) describe one or more humps (see fig. 4).xxxiii shadows or reflections of tropospheric clouds are therefore a poor explanation for loch ness monster sightings and are dismissed by sceptics as a plausible explanation (nickell, 2006: 14). on the other hand, reflections of noctilucent clouds might explain some sightings of humps above the water surface (see figs. 2, 3). this is because brightness affects perception of depth cues and brighter objects are perceived to be closer than darker objects. noctilucent clouds (nlcs) are an extraordinary type of luminous cloud in the mesosphere and are only visible in the summer, during twilight. luminosity of nlcs is caused by reflection of the sun’s light on ice crystals and dust particles high up in atmosphere between morning and evening twilight (i.e., between dawn and sunrise and between sunset and dusk).xxxiv noctilucent clouds in the northern hemisphere, can only be viewed at latitudes between 50 and 70-degrees (nlc reports are usually between 55 and 65-degrees); loch ness is 57-degrees n. most reported loch ness monster sightings occur when noctilucent clouds are visible in the sky in the northern hemisphere between may and august (gadsden and parviainen, 2006: 8). as noted by mackal (1976: 85) based on data for 214 reports of the putative monster, “do the observations occur during any particular months during the year? yes, july and august”. willums (1976) based on 258 recorded reports (1962-1971), similarly found most sightings of the loch ness monster (77%) took place from may through august. how many sightings took place during twilight using mackal’s data? for 122 eyewitness reports when figure 2 reflection of noctilucent clouds on greenwater lake provincial park, saskatchewan, canada; photo taken by jeanine holowatuik in july 2020. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 33 time of day was mentioned – a handful occurred during twilight but only two stand out as explainable by nlcs. the two eyewitness accounts recorded by mackal (1976) of interest to the nlc hypothesis: • an observation of a brown single hump made in august 1961 (day is not mentioned) at 22:30 pm for quite short duration under calm surface conditions of the loch by two fishermen in a boat at 15-yards (45-feet) which remains the closest reported distance for a nessie sighting. both eyewitnesses reported seeing a “wide head” above surface of the water, but the head was “not set at right-angles to the neck” (holiday, 1968: 42). the eyewitnesses described the “wide head” (about 5 feet) as not having eyes, ears nor a nose and reported water disturbances because the monster had submerged/resurfaced. • an observation made on june 15, 1965, at 22:30 pm of a hump in the loch resembling an overturned boat for long duration (at least an hour) under calm surface conditions by two eyewitnesses; one a police sergeant. on opposite side of the loch, an independent eyewitness corroborated the sighting (bauer, 2002: 234). the latter eyewitness named frederick holiday followed the moving hump in the water along the bank of the loch. all three eyewitnesses claimed to have observed the loch ness monster from a long distance (one to two miles), but holiday used binoculars giving him a much better view. the latter eyewitness account described by holiday (1968) strongly suggests reflections on the loch of noctilucent clouds were observed.xxxv holiday describes an “illumination” over the loch (holiday, 1968: 103), mentions the monster was “yellowish-brown” in colour and was drifting but “gave no indication of being alive, the thing had a sort of latent strangeness about it” (holiday, 1968: 104). holiday (1968: 105) clarifies “there was no sign of a head, neck or tail – simply this large, mustard coloured mass”. noctilucent clouds are typically white or bluish white, but can be reddish (avaste et al. 1988), brownish and yellowish, even orange (ludlam, figure 3 reflections of noctilucent clouds over blyth pier, northumberland, england; photo taken by owen humphreys in june 2019 (simons, 2019) coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 34 1957: 343). willums (1976) calculated from 258 reported sightings of nessie, ~10% (25) are “brown or other [non-black] colours”, while burton (1961: 40) from 30 early reports of humps figure 4 the shape of monster humps (gould, 1934). figure 5 noctilucent clouds (in the shape of undulating humps) over paris, france; photo taken by bertrand kulik on 5th july 2020 at 11:10 pm. figure 6 noctilucent clouds in wave-like (so-called fluctus) shape over rabka-zdrój, poland; photo taken by radoslaw ziomber in july 2017. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 35 calculated 13% (4) were non-black. this means some eyewitness descriptions of the loch ness monster fall within the colour spectrum of noctilucent clouds. the shapes of nlcs are diverse (ludlam, 1957: 341-342) and can appear as undulating humps or waves (dalin et al. 2010, see figs. 5, 6). nlcs like all clouds are in motion.xxxvi this can easily explain holiday’s description of a drifting (non-stationary) monster hump. the other report (august 1961) is less probable to have been an nlc when compared to holiday’s observation, but there is a good chance what the fishermen observed was an nlc reflection (which was an unfamiliar phenomenon to them). both the anglers described the brown head of the monster as having no eyes, ears nor a nose which discards the possibility of a known animal; the “head” they supposedly observed was possibly a reflection considering its size (5-feet). most books and articles on nessie have little to say about this peculiar sighting; it is very difficult to explain and is often not mentioned. the third monster sighting of interest to the nlc hypothesis occurred on march 22, 1959, by denys w. tucker. he described his sighting as follows in an article published in new scientist: i, a professional marine zoologist of respectable experience, did see a large hump travelling across flat calm water between inchnacardoch and glendoe on 22 march 1959, and so quite unashamedly assert that it belonged to an unknown animal. (tucker, 1959) tucker later clarified the hump was surrounded by a foam or shiny substance: off inchnacardoch on the evening of 22 march 1959 i saw a triangle of foaming water following a hump towards the far shore, where it either sank or melted into the twilight under the opposite bank. boat it certainly was not, but i plodded around by fort august checking that there was nothing else on the water nor any boat drawn up on the beach. (tucker, 1989: 211) costello (1975: 90) in his book in search of lake monsters, mentions the same sighting: on march 22, 1959, tucker himself saw a large hump travelling across flat calm water between inschnacardoch and glendoe, achieving something gould, burton and whyte never did. he is convinced it was an unknown animal. tucker’s sighting did not occur during may through august when noctilucent clouds are visible in the northern hemisphere so his observation cannot be explained by a reflection of a natural luminous cloud phenomenon on the loch. gadsden and parviainen (2006: 27), however, point out that luminous clouds can be created artificially by rockets – exhaust particles can diffract sunlight into iridescent colours; a photo taken in 1988 of a cloud-trail from a launched rocket shows iridescence and reflection on a lake (see fig. 7). in 1957 the raf built a missile test site in the outer hebrides; rockets were launched the same year as tucker’s sighting. could tucker have seen a reflection on loch ness of a cloud-trail from a rocket? was the “foam” the reflected iridescence? tucker was certain he did not misidentify a boat or known animal and his strange observation at loch ness matched “nothing in his encyclopaedic knowledge of freshwater fish and their predators” (williams, 2015: 113). this leaves tucker’s sighting an unsolved mystery. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 36 conclusion as long as some eyewitness accounts of the loch ness monster remain difficult or impossible to explain by mundane or prosaic phenomena, “new ideas will be introduced which will explain away a few percent of the past observations” (meaden, 1976a: 123). a small number of nessie sightings can plausibly be explained by reflections on the loch of noctilucent clouds. the author of this paper calls on cryptozoologists or investigators of the loch ness monster who continue to believe nessie is an exotic (cornes, 2019) or unknown animal (bauer, 2020; gerhard, 2021), to abandon their hypotheses for extraordinary meteorological explanations (such as nlcs) to explain the few eyewitness accounts of nessie which are unexplainable by prosaic phenomena. i from january to october 2022, only six monster sightings were reported (the official loch ness monster sightings register) http://www.lochnesssightings.com/ [accessed 07/01/2023]. ii it is sometimes claimed there are eyewitness accounts of the loch ness monster in literature dating back centuries; however, binns (1984: 50-58) proves these are mistaken locations (i.e., in separate lochs) or the literary sources are spurious, e.g., keel (1970: 268) incorrectly claimed a newspaper in 1896 refers to a monster in loch ness, despite the actual article was published in 1897 and does not mention a loch (watson, 2016). prior to the 1930s, there were recorded traditions of water-horses or kelpies at loch ness (stewart, 1860: 121; mackinlay, 1893; 173174) but these have no relation to nessie, contrary to dubious attempts to link them (dinsdale, 1973; 19-24; costello, 1975: 164-165; watson, 2011); see binns (2017: 159-173) for rebuttal. iii thomas (1988) rationalises the “water beast” as a seal or walrus. iv nearly all these reports are second or third hand (bauer, 1986: 35-36). for this reason, they are at best hearsay; gould (1934: 30) dismissed these reports as rumors, “of no great value”. figure 7 artificial cloud-trail and iridescent reflection on a lake; photo taken in july 1988 (gadsden and parviainen, 2006). http://www.lochnesssightings.com/ coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 37 v in august 1930, the northern chronicle published an article on three fishermen who heard a noise in the loch they presumed was an unknown animal, but they did not observe it (loxton and prothero, 2013: 126-127). this early recorded oral report was not an eyewitness testimony. vi as noted by nickell (2006: 14), the tracks were proven to be made from a hippo’s hoof cast. vii it has oddly been claimed the photo contains the face of a child (akins, 1977: 77), yet another interpretation is of a “labrador dog swimming… with a stick in its mouth” (campbell, 2002: 26). burton (1961: 80) in contrast thought the photo is of mere driftwood. binns (2017: 61-62), instead maintains the photo is a hoax of “a small model photographed at close quarters”. these (and other) interpretations including naish’s, have been recently disputed by watson (2022). viii the expedition was organised by edward mountain who paid 20 men to patrol the stretch of the loch; 23 miles with cameras and binoculars for a month (mountain, 1934; binns, 1984: 37). ix namely how nessie found its way into the loch to begin with; the loch was frozen during the last ice age which ended approximately 10,000 years ago. bauer (1986: 162) credits whyte as the first “to contemplating the existence of a breeding population landlocked after the last ice age” and witchell (1989: 87) describes whyte’s book as a step towards “serious investigation”. x gould in his defense could though argue the loch contained only one monster because it was trapped, having entered from the river ness (with its breeding ground somewhere in the north sea). a 1970 tourist pamphlet on nessie discusses whether it was a native species or a visitor from the north sea via the river ness (carruth, 1970: 8-9). xi a separate loch, about seventy miles from loch ness. there have been a few dozen reports of large mysterious creatures in loch morar and its putative monster is named ‘morag’. xii in his book searching for hidden animals, mackal concluded: “to this day the real identity of the loch ness animals remains a mystery” (mackal, 1980: 236). mackal’s final publication on nessie (a conference paper) was published in the scottish naturalist (mackal, 1988). xiii campbell (2002: 98) notes “it has not yet been established loch ness was ever open to the sea”. shine in 1983 conducted a core sampling program to test whether the sea entered loch ness post-glacially, but the results showed no evidence of marine life in sediments of the loch. xiv official loch ness monster sightings register (2009). xv some recent notable books include the man who filmed nessie by angus dinsdale (2013), a monstrous commotion by gareth williams (2016) and decline and fall of the loch ness monster by ronald binns (2019). xvi many believers in nessie as an elusive animal species have conceded to sceptics most reports are malobservations of mundane phenomena; for example, clem skelton the field director of lnib estimated 80% to 90% of eyewitnesses, “who think they have seen the monster have really seen something else” (cohen, 1970: 96). witchell (1989: 57) estimated 80% to 85%. xvii mackal (1976) in his book appendix recorded distances for 144 sightings; 17 of these (12%) were from 50-yards (150-feet) or less; only one of these was from close as 15-yards (45-feet). xviii as noted by loxton and prothero (2013: 164), “psychologists emphasize that the plasticity of memory is a defining factor of all first-hand testimony”. eyewitnesses tend to recall details more accurately and provide vivid mental images shortly after an observation than over longer periods of time because of lapses in memory or forgetfulness. memories are prone to distortion and embellishment by post-event information which is known as the ‘misinformation effect’. xix mackal (1976: 202) has argued nessie hoaxers are rarely malicious but practical jokers. xx one of the very few zoologists who claimed to have seen the putative monster when visiting loch ness was denys w. tucker who favored the plesiosaur hypothesis (tucker, 1960). xxi shine (2006: 12) mentions “wind slicks, boats, seals, water birds and floating logs”. wind slicks are calmer patches of water, “dark from the shore, making it seem as though something coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 38 is under the water” (shine, 2017). for a near complete list, see paxton and shine (2016). seals are known to visit loch ness from moray firth via river ness, albeit infrequently, “once every two years” (williamson, 1988) and they could explain some monster sightings (binns, 2017: 82). burton’s (1961: 170) idiosyncratic theory gas-propelled rotting vegetation is the source of many nessie sightings is doubtful (holiday, 1968:49); shine (1993) notes research “has shown little gas production in deep loch ness sediments” but a geologist has argued seismic activity beneath the loch (releasing methane gas) causes disturbances on the surface (piccardi, 2001). xxii shine (1988, 2006: 27-28) entertains the possibility a few historical sightings of nessie could have been a sturgeon. he notes that one was caught by the canal entrance at loch ness in 1871. paxton and shine (2016) include a list of exotic species hypotheses or “animals outside their known ranges in space”. sharks have been suggested to explain nessie sightings, but the main difficulty with this explanation is most sharks cannot swim between salt and freshwater. eccentric suggestions e.g., elephants (jordan, 2006) and sea lions (cornes, 2019) are based on the idea these exotic animals had escaped from traveling circuses or zoos and entered the loch. xxiii another e-dna failed to identify 48% of samples from a new york subway largely because “our genetic libraries are still incomplete” (zhang, 2015); see also watson (2019a, 2019b). xxiv the oldest dna, technology can sequence is about one million years old, yet plesiosaurs went extinct ~65 million years ago based on palaeontological evidence (naish, 2017: 105). xxv notable proponents of the plesiosaur hypothesis in the late 20th century abandoned the theory or became sceptical e.g., denys tucker: “i might give my plesiosaur hypothesis a rating of 20 percent, thus admitting how far it falls at present” (tucker, 1989: 227). xxvi the giant eel hypothesis was proposed as early as the 1930s (gould, 1930: 128-129). there has been a renewed interest with the discovery of eel e-dna, “at pretty much every location sampled in loch ness” (gilchrist, 2019). a sceptical study of enormous sized eels in the loch has recently been published as a preprint (foxon, 2023). xxvii a list of unknown or elusive animal hypotheses for nessie can be found in paxton and shine (2016) under the sections “novel animals” and include giant eels, crabs, and long-necked seals. xxviii sometimes it is said a negative claim cannot be proven, but this depends precisely on the threshold of proof (hales, 2005; law, 2011). it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt (say with 99% probability) the putative monster in loch ness as an unidentified animal does not exist. this does not though mean beyond all doubt meaning with absolute certainty (100%). xxix mackal (1976: 200) wrote “90% can be identified as errors, mistakes, misinterpretations” and the appendix of his book lists 251 out of 3000 (8%) as not “waves, birds, logs, and other such known objects”. a more detailed analysis by a lnib member taking into consideration duration of observations, weather and surface conditions of the loch, distance of observers, plus reliability of eyewitnesses, reduces this list to barely 100 sightings (akins, 1977: 43). in other words, the number of eyewitness reports of nessie difficult or impossible to explain by prosaic phenomena is lower than what mackal estimated. it remains unclear where mackal got access to 3000 reports; as of august 2021, the official loch ness monster sightings register records only 1136 observations and in the 1980s, 400 to 600 reports were estimated (binns, 1984: 177; bauer, 1986: 10). perhaps this discrepancy can be explained by the fact many of the eyewitness reports mackal studied were second or third hand rather than first-hand eyewitness testimonies. xxx scott (1976b) was one of the few researchers to take an interest in the water devil hypothesis and agreed with meaden “it may well be the explanation of a number of loch ness sightings”. xxxi waterspouts stretch between the base of a cumulus or cumulonimbus cloud and water; water-devils in contrast tend to be much smaller whirlwinds over water, often under 100 meters above surface, although there are rare reports of water-devils reaching into low-lying cumulus clouds. coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 39 xxxii the few publications on monster meteorology include meaden (1976a, 1976b), rowe (1987) and botley (1934, 1980). botley’s (1934) article is aptly titled “meteorology and monsters”. xxxiii a long neck and head are mentioned less frequent in recorded monster sightings, under 25% (burton, 1961: 119). prosaic explanations include diving birds (with only head/neck showing), floating branches or swimming deer (campbell, 2002: 22-23). one underwater photo purported to be of a long-necked creature is “indistinct that only by a great leap of faith could one make an animal out of it” (ellis, 1995: 29). another underwater photo, known as the “gargoyle head” is most likely an inanimate object. it has been claimed the object in this photo is a carving from a viking longboat (halstead et al. 1976) although this idea has been criticised (scott, 1976a). while the longboat idea has been defended (halstead, 1982: 198) no archaeological evidence has substantiated it. naish (2017: 100) has pointed out that if the photo is rotated, “it looks like a few lumps of rotten wood”. a tree stump was found in the same place (campbell, 2002: 61). xxxiv noctilucent clouds are the highest type of cloud and form in the mesosphere from 80 to 85 km (50 miles), in the coldest part of the atmosphere. nlcs can be observed by the naked eye during nautical twilight and most of astronomical twilight meaning when the sun is between 6 and 16 degrees below the horizon, when the sky is dark enough to see luminosity but not night. nlcs are seldom observed during civil twilight because they would be too faint to see without a telescope, although there could be exceptions under rare conditions. noctilucent clouds are composed of ice particles and dust (probably left by micro-meteors); they can reflect rays of sunlight when the sun is below the horizon during twilight because of their high altitude in sky. xxxv the failure by holiday (1968) to recognise a meteorological phenomenon for his sighting left him proposing an unknown animal species. he later abandoned his original hypothesis but unwisely “sought to connect nessie with psychic phenomena and ufos” (bauer, 1986: 97). xxxvi the velocities of nlcs vary depending on atmospheric conditions, ludlam (1957: 345346) documents speeds of motion up to 100-200 meter per second but the lowest range is 13 m/s. avaste, o. a., gadsden, m., and grechko, g. m. 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(1976) “a computer analysis of loch ness data’ in mackal, r. p (1976) the monsters of loch ness (ed.), london: futura publications: 341-348. williamson, g. r (1988) “seals in loch ness”, sci. rep. whales res. inst. 39: 151-157. witchell, n. (1989) the loch ness story, london: corgi books [revised edition]. zhang, s. (2015). ‘half the dna on the nyc subway matches no known organism’, gizmodo, 5th february. oliver smith studied ba (hons) classical civilisation at the university of roehampton and ma classical studies at the open university. he later became interested in atmospheric optics and clouds, prompting him to join the cloud appreciation society. his interdisciplinary publications on ancient history, folklore, meteorology, ufos, and cryptozoology have appeared in a number of academic journals, non-scholarly magazines and newsletters including sunlite, http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.com/2016/08/john-keel-and-victorian-loch-ness.html http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.com/2019/09/loch-ness-edna-results-released.html http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.com/2019/10/looking-back-on-edna-results.html coolabah, nr 34, 2023, issn 1988-5946. online journal of the observatory: australian and transnational studies centre (ceat), university of barcelona 45 fate magazine, sino-platonic papers, athens journal of history, the robert graves review and shima. his most recent article is ‘the ariel school ufo: a dust devil?’ in which he proposes a meteorological explanation (a dust devil) for the ariel school ufo incident.